Remembering the “Forgotten” Chesterton

His 150th birthday is fast approaching, so you can look forward to numerous posts on a man who did much toward forming my Weltanschauung.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

No, G.K. Chesterton is not forgotten. Indeed, reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated. He is alive and well and being discovered by new generations of readers in many different countries.

The British journalist, Simon Heffer, has been a voice of sanity and common sense for many years. He supported Brexit and has written sympathetically and well on the United Kingdom Independence Party and its leader Nigel Farage. Even more perceptively, he has written about the sinister connections between internationalist institutions, such as the European Union, and the globalist elites who finance and direct organizations, such as the World Economic Forum and the Bilderberg Group. In addition to his commendable journalism, Mr. Heffer has also written acclaimed biographies of Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Vaughan Williams and, most courageously, of the much-maligned British politician, Enoch Powell. It was a surprise, therefore, to see this usually sensible and erudite commentator write dismissively about the legacy of the great English writer, G.K. Chesterton.

The nature of the attack on Chesterton in Mr. Heffer’s weekly column in the UK’s Sunday Telegraph was encapsulated succinctly in the provocative question which serves as the column’s headline: “Father Brown novelist, careless critic, bigot: does anyone still read G.K. Chesterton?” The tone being set, Mr. Heffer then sets about undermining Chesterton’s reputation. He begins by dismissing Chesterton’s literary criticism for its “carelessness”, a claim which has an element of justification about it. Chesterton was a journalist by inclination who wrote everything in haste. One doesn’t read Chesterton for his fastidiousness but for the pyrotechnic brilliance and spontaneity of his insights. “Not facts first,” Chesterton proclaimed. “Truth first.” Such an approach might irritate us, especially if we prefer niceties to necessities, but it doesn’t negate the penetrative knack that Chesterton had for getting to the heart of an author’s philosophy or the heart of his work. No less a critic than T.S. Eliot praised Chesterton’s book on Dickens, finding the reading of it a delight and declaring that there was no better critic of Dickens than Chesterton.

Mr. Heffer then discusses Chesterton’s fiction with perfunctory glibness. His brief mention of the novels, The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who was Thursday, illustrates his ignorance of their deeper themes, a fact that is confirmed when he writes that Chesterton’s early novels “have a fantastic charm but lack profundity”. Such a claim beggars belief. The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a defence of localism against the centralist tendencies of big government and imperialism. It serves as a parable of the very struggle between sovereign nations and the forces of globalism on which Mr. Heffer has himself written so eloquently. The Man Who was Thursday is not, as Mr. Heffer claims, on the theme of “anti-authoritarianism”, at least not primarily. It is about the mystery of meaning at the core of the cosmos. The novel’s protagonists are not merely detectives seeking to solve a crime, they are philosophers seeking to solve the riddle of life and the problem of pain.

The Ball and the Cross centres on the crucial difference between arguing and quarrelling as the two central characters, a devout Catholic and a dogmatic atheist, come to understand that they have more in common with each other as authentic seekers after objective truth than they have with all the other characters whom they meet. As they encounter the indifference to truth of the various representatives of sundry (post)modern relativist and nihilist philosophies, and experience the hostility that they arouse as truth-seekers, they form a friendship based on mutual respect for the integrity of the other’s perspective. Manalive explores the profoundest metaphysics in its exploration of the connection between humility, gratitude, wonder, contemplation and the dilation of the mind and soul that is contemplation’s fruit. One can say many things about Chesterton’s novels, and there are certainly things to criticize, but to claim, as Mr. Heffer does, that they “lack profundity” is to demonstrate a misreading of the works that misses their point.

Mr. Heffer is similarly dismissive of Chesterton’s verse, declaring that, “as a poet, Chesterton has hardly survived”. This can only be said to be true in the broadest sense that poetry itself has hardly survived in the age of illiteracy in which we find ourselves. Yet, insofar as poets and poetry have survived, Chesterton and his poetry are amongst the survivors. No self-respecting anthology of twentieth century verse could omit his most celebrated verse, such as “Lepanto”, “The Donkey” and “The Rolling English Road”, and no really discerning anthologist would omit lesser-known gems, such as “The Fish”, “The Skeleton”, “The Secret People” and “The Strange Music”, the last of which is simply sublime.

For all his woeful and wayward misreading of Chesterton’s work, Mr. Heffer saves his most venomous attack on Chesterton until the sting in the tail with which he ends his diatribe. Chesterton, we are told, was an “anti-Semite” and was guilty of “bigotry”. Perhaps Mr. Heffer is basing his judgmentalism on these words, written in the Illustrated Sunday Herald on February 8, 1920:

The part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by those international and for the most part atheistical Jews … is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from Jewish leaders…. The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in [Hungary and Germany, especially Bavaria]….

Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing. The fact that in many cases Jewish interests and places of worship are excepted by the Bolsheviks from their universal hostility has attended more and more to associate the Jewish race in Russia with the villainies which are now being perpetrated.

Are these the words of an anti-Semite guilty of bigotry? We’ll let Mr. Heffer be the judge. He will, however, be judging Churchill, not Chesterton, because these words were written by Winston Churchill. Like Churchill, Chesterton was sometimes critical of the Jews and, on occasion, he expressed such criticism in less than charitable ways. This is reprehensible but a writer’s life and work should not be judged on the basis of his worst moments but on the entirety and integrity of his legacy. This was the view of Rabbi Wise, a leading and respected figure in the American Jewish community, who wrote the following tribute to Chesterton:

Indeed I was a warm admirer of Gilbert Chesterton. Apart from his delightful art and his genius in many directions, he was, as you know, a great religionist. He as Catholic, I as Jew, could not have seen eye to eye with each other, and he might have added “particularly seeing that you are cross-eyed”; but I deeply respected him. When Hitlerism came, he was one of the first to speak out with all the directness and frankness of a great and unabashed spirit. Blessing to his memory!

Rabbi Wise’s magnanimity should be a model for us all. If we are to avoid the worst excesses of the cancel culture, we need to be more forgiving of our neighbours. We should not merely refuse to cast the first stone but should seek to dissuade others from casting them. We should avoid accusing others of “racism”, “fascism”, “anti-Semitism” or “bigotry”. Considering Mr. Heffer’s authorship of the biography of Enoch Powell, a man who was demonized following his famous or infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, we might have hoped for the same balanced magnanimity that Rabbi Wise exemplified.

Mr. Heffer concluded his column with the suggestion that Chesterton, on the 150th anniversary of his birth, was no longer read, hardly remembered and basically irrelevant: “more so than many figures of the past, he seems a stranger to our shores”. This may or may not be true of England, the land of Chesterton’s birth, but it’s not true of the United States. The annual Chesterton Conference is one of the largest literary conferences in the world. Dozens of Chesterton’s books are currently in print, which wasn’t the case several decades ago. He is widely read in other languages, especially in the Portuguese and Spanish-speaking worlds. The present author’s own biography of Chesterton has just been republished in a new 150th anniversary Spanish language edition, which is apparently selling very well. No, Mr. Heffer, Chesterton is not forgotten. Indeed, reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated. He is alive and well and being discovered by new generations of readers in many different countries. If it is true, as Mr. Heffer believes and claims, that Chesterton is a stranger to the shores of the land of his birth, it says more about the death of England than it does about the death of Chesterton. With this in mind, let’s hope for England’s recovery as we raise a festive glass in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Chesterton’s birth and offer a toast in thanksgiving for the life and living legacy of Gilbert Keith Chesterton.

The featured image is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.