Secondly, I said that Chesterton is not merely a poet — I said he is “a poet who dances with a hundred legs.” The phrase is actually borrowed from Chesterton himself. He used it in an interview to describe the most extraordinary character he ever created: Sunday, the enigmatic giant with two faces — huge, boisterous, elusive, who pulls all the strings in his sublime metaphysical fable, The Man Who Was Thursday. He wrote the book when he was barely thirty, but strangely enough, twenty years later, he himself in physical appearance came to look like Sunday, as various friends and visitors were to remark. (See, for instance, a letter which Valery Larbaud wrote to Paul Claudel, reporting on a visit he had made to Beaconsfield — or again, Bernard Shaw’s affectionate description of his old sparring partner and friend as “A man-mountain, not only large in body and mind beyond all decency, but [who] seems to be growing larger as you look at him.”)
But the practical problem for us is this: how do you sketch the portrait of a man who dances with a hundred legs? How do you keep his image in focus? This is an impossible task — and therefore don’t blame me if you find that my talk is hopelessly rambling. But in the end this may not greatly matter, for I shall draw many quotes from Chesterton’s writing, and these quotes alone should provide you with enough incentive to turn back to his works — what more could I wish for?
* * *
When I was invited here, I confess I felt very hesitant at first at the idea of addressing a Chesterton Society on the subject of Chesterton. I have no particular expertise on this topic. The great edition of Chesterton’s Collected Works which is now being published in the United States will count some fifty volumes: half of them have already appeared, and of this half, my own reading has barely covered one fifth (though I am pursuing my exploration with endless delight). As you see, I am a hopeless amateur. Yet, from a Chestertonian point of view, this very lack of qualifications should constitute the best qualification. Chesterton always attached special value to this notion of the amateur, as opposed to the professional. In his Autobiography, he composed a loving portrait of his father, whose occupation was in real estate (in fact, the old firm is still active today, and when walking in the streets of London — or Sydney, or Perth — you can still see the name of Chesterton posted on houses for sale) but who at home, for the delight of his children, cultivated a wide range of talents and hobbies: drawing, painting, photography, magic lanterns, stained glass:
There had been some talk of his studying art professionally in his youth; but the family business was obviously safer, and his life followed the lines of a certain contented and ungrasping prudence. He never dreamed of ever turning any of his plastic talents to any mercenary account, or of using them for anything but his own private pleasure and ours. The old-fashioned Englishman, like my father, sold houses for his living but filled his own house with his life. To us (children) he appeared to be indeed The Man with the Golden Key, the magician opening the gates of goblin castles… but all this time he was known to the world, and even to the next door neighbours, as a very reliable and capable, though rather unambitious businessman. It was a very good lesson in what is also the last lesson in life: that in everything that matters, the inside is much larger than the outside. On the whole, I am glad that he was never a professional artist. It might have stood in his way of becoming an amateur. It might have spoilt his career — his private career. He could never have made a vulgar success of all the thousands of things he did so successfully.
The superiority of the amateur over the professional is an important and provocative notion — all the more provocative because it is not commonly held in Western culture, where a more general view usually considers that only the professional can be serious, whereas the amateur’s approach is necessarily tainted with frivolity (we shall see what Chesterton had to say on the subject of seriousness versus frivolity). For me, Chesterton’s position on this question has a particular appeal, since it precisely coincides with a basic tenet of Chinese classical aesthetics — a field that has occupied my interest for many years. This principle should in fact have a deep and universal relevance. Think of it: you can, and should, be fully professional insomuch as you happen to be a real estate agent, a solicitor, a grave-digger, an accountant, a dentist, etc. — but you could hardly call yourself a professional poet, for instance. If, on a passport or an immigration form, you were to write under “Occupation” the words “Human being” or “Living,” the bureaucrat behind his counter would probably wonder if you were in your right mind.
None of the activities that really matter can be pursued in a merely professional capacity; for instance, the emergence of the professional politician marks the decline of democracy, since in a true democracy politics should be the privilege and duty of every citizen. When love becomes professional, it is prostitution. You need to provide evidence of professional training even to obtain the modest position of street-sweeper or dog-catcher, but no one questions your competence when you wish to become a husband or a wife, a father or a mother — and yet these are full-time occupations of supreme importance, which actually require talents bordering on genius.
Besides his description of his father, Chesterton made many other statements in praise of the amateur. These are justly famous and some have virtually become proverbs. For instance, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” Or again, “Just as a bad man is nevertheless a man, so a bad poet is nevertheless a poet.”
He further developed the contrast between the amateur and the professional into a comparison between the universalist and the specialist, and he applied this particular insight to an issue that was always of great concern to him: the condition of women. Thus he made the point that the man must be, to a certain extent, a specialist — out of necessity, he finds himself confined in a narrow professional pursuit, since he must do one thing well enough to earn the daily bread — whereas the woman is the true universalist: she must do a hundred things for the safe-guarding and management of the home. The modern fad of denouncing the narrowness of domesticity provoked Chesterton’s anger: “When domesticity is called drudgery all the difficulty arises from a double meaning of the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge building the cathedral of Amiens, or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar.” And then Chesterton goes on to survey the range of tasks within the household that require in turn, or simultaneously, the talents and initiative of a statesman, a diplomat, an economist, an educationist, a philosopher, and he concludes:
I can understand how all this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. A woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task, I will never pity her for its smallness.