LECTURE IX

MR. G.K.  CHESTERTON’S POINT OF VIEW

There is on record the case of a man who, after some fourteen years of robust health, spent a week in bed.  His illness was apparently due to a violent cold, but he confessed, on medical cross-examination, that the real and underlying cause was the steady reading of Mr. Chesterton’s books for several days on end.

No one will accuse Mr. Chesterton of being an unhealthy writer.  On the contrary, he is among the most wholesome writers now alive.  He is irresistibly exhilarating, and he inspires his readers with a constant inclination to rise up and shout.  Perhaps his danger lies in that very fact, and in the exhaustion of the nerves which such sustained exhilaration is apt to produce.  But besides this, he, like so many of our contemporaries, has written such a bewildering quantity of literature on such an amazing variety of subjects, that it is no wonder if sometimes the reader follows panting, through the giddy mazes of the dance.  He is the sworn enemy of specialisation, as he explains in his remarkable essay on “The Twelve Men.”  The subject of the essay is the British jury, and its thesis is that when our civilisation “wants a library to be catalogued, or a solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists.  But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round.  The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.”  For the judging of a criminal or the propagation of the gospel, it is necessary to procure inexpert people—­people who come to their task with a virgin eye, and see not what the expert (who has lost his freshness) sees, but the human facts of the case.  So Mr. Chesterton insists upon not being a specialist, takes the world for his parish, and wanders over it at will.

This being so, it is obvious that he cannot possibly remember all that he has said, and must necessarily abound in inconsistencies and even contradictions.  Yet that is by no means always unconscious, but is due in many instances to the very complex quality and subtle habit of his mind.  Were he by any chance to read this statement he would deny it fiercely, but we would repeat it with perfect calmness, knowing that he would probably have denied any other statement we might have made upon the subject.  His subtlety is partly due to the extraordinary rapidity with which his mind leaps from one subject to another, partly to the fact that he is so full of ideas that many of his essays (like Mr. Bernard Shaw’s plays) find it next to impossible to get themselves begun.  He is so full of matter that he never seems to be able to say what he wants to say, until he has said a dozen other things first.