A second factor that may explain the relative neglect which has befallen him was shrewdly identified by Evelyn Waugh in a rather ambivalent critical assessment:
Chesterton was a lovable and much loved man, abounding in charity and humility. But humility is not a virtue propitious to the artist. It is often pride, emulation, avarice, malice — all the odious qualities which drive a man to complete, elaborate, refine, destroy, renew his work, until he has made something that gratifies his pride, and envy and greed. And in doing so, he enriches the world more than the generous and the good, though he may lose his own soul in the process. That is the paradox of artistic achievement.
Indeed, Chesterton never attached much importance to his own writing. In this respect, he was the exact opposite of a “man of letters”—and this is one of the most endearing and admirable aspects of his personality. Generally speaking, literary people are exceedingly self-centred and vain — on the whole they are not a very attractive breed — but Chesterton did not belong to that species. For all his formidable wit, he had no urge to shine; among brilliant conversationalists, he was the strange exception: a man who truly enjoyed listening to others. He could say truthfully, “I have never taken my books seriously; but I take my opinions quite seriously.” This is a very important distinction. His brother, who knew him intimately, grasped it welclass="underline" “He is merely a man expressing his opinions because he enjoys expressing them. But he would express them as readily, and as well, to a man he met on a bus.”
Unlike most literary men, he never endeavoured to husband carefully his ideas and intellectual resources, or to manage his career, or to plan his moves and design publishing strategies. He simply could not care less.
He wrote with the reckless generosity of genius. Mozart, who enjoyed (or suffered from?) a similar facility and composed with the same effortless flow, once said, “I write music like a cow pisses.”
Chesterton’s fecundity was prodigious. His secretary described how, on some occasions, he would produce two articles at the same time: he dictated one, while simultaneously writing another.
Did he write too much? It would be imprudent to discard lightly the enormous bulk of his journalistic output, for the problem is that, again, with lavish carelessness, he scattered gems everywhere, and many of these are to be found among trifling and whimsical little essays.
He had spent his secondary-school years mostly sleeping and dreaming — to the perplexity and despair of his teachers. He never entered any university; he merely attended an art school in desultory fashion. But he managed to accumulate an immense culture — literary, historical and philosophical — solely through his extensive reading. (Again, the approach of the amateur.)
Once, a woman told him with naïve admiration that he seemed to know a great many things. He replied, “Madam, I know nothing: I am a journalist.”
All his life, Chesterton claimed no other title for himself but that of journalist. He gloried in being a journalist, he relished the atmosphere and romance of Fleet Street. As a perceptive critic observed, “He was a journalist because he was a democrat. Newspapers were what the ordinary people (the man on the bus!) like to read. There could therefore be no higher privilege than to write for the newspapers — whatever he might think of their proprietors.”
And he had all the qualities of a superb journalist: intelligence, clarity, liveliness, speed, brevity and wit. But these are the very qualities that always damn a writer in the eyes of pretentious critics and pompous mediocrities. To impress the fools, you must be obscure. (“What I understand at once never seems true to me,” confessed a female admirer to a modern French novelist). And for these people, it is inconceivable that anything expressed with imagination and humour could also have an earnest purpose. How could you possibly say something important if you are not self-important? Chesterton constantly battled against this prejudice. He explained:
My critics think that I am not serious but only funny, because they think that “funny” is the opposite of “serious.” But “funny” is the opposite of “not funny” and of nothing else. Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or in short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or in German. The two qualities of fun and seriousness have nothing whatever to do with each other… If you say that two sheep added to two sheep make four sheep, your audience will accept it patiently — like sheep. But if you say it of two monkeys, or two kangaroos, or two sea-green griffins, people will refuse to believe that two and two make four. They seem to believe that you must have made up the arithmetic, just as you have made up the illustration of the arithmetic. They cannot believe that anything decorated with an incidental joke can be sensible. Perhaps it explains why so many successful men are so dull — or why so many dull men are successful.
* * *
I have talked for much too long already, and yet I have barely skimmed the surface of this huge topic. But I now realise that I could have given it another title: Chesterton: The Man Who Was In Love With Daylight. He said, “If there is one thing of which I have always been certain since my boyhood and grow more certain as I advance in age, it is that nothing is poetical, if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us, if the normal man does not amaze.”
Most people tend to think of Chesterton as a “Catholic writer,” but they do not seem to realise that his conversion occurred fairly late in life (in 1922—only fourteen years before his death; a number of his major works were written long before he actually joined the Church). But when he finally made the move, he said that he became a Catholic in order to get rid of his sins.
But there was, I think, another motivation, equally powerfuclass="underline" gratitude. He once said that if he were to go to hell upon his death, he would still thank God for this life on earth. From the very beginning, the urge to thank his creator is what impelled him to write.
In Chesterton’s experience, the mere fact of being is so miraculous in itself that no subsequent misfortune could ever exempt a man from feeling a sort of cosmic thankfulness. I wish to end here with a short prose poem which he jotted down in a notebook of his agnostic youth; it shows that this overwhelming sense of wonder and gratitude actually predated by many years his religious conversion:
EVENING
Here dies another day
During which I have had eyes, ears, hands