Gilbert K. Chesterton and His Poetry
Gilbert K. Chesterton is an essayist, a novelist, a dramatist, a debater and a poet. But many people—his brother, Cecil Chesterton, did for instance—believe that he is first of all a poet. And certainly it is in his poetry that his characteristic style is most easily recognized and defined.
Mr. Chesterton and the late Henry James are not very often thought of as intellectual or spiritual brothers. And yet there is a startlingly obvious resemblance between these two writers. Both are stylists; both have thoroughly mastered certain peculiar methods of speech, and both are, it must be confessed, hampered by their undeviating loyalty to these methods.
This is not the place to analyze the style of Mr. James. It is sufficient to recall to the reader’s mind the fact that the author of “The Golden Bowl” was not concerned so much with the presentation of extraordinary ideas as with the extraordinary presentation of ordinary ideas. And the extraordinariness of his presentation consisted in its thoroughness; he was not content to suggest the thing or to show one aspect of it; he was able, and seemed to feel a certain moral obligation, to present every aspect of the thing, to give all its dimensions, characteristics, origins and possibilities. His method may roughly be indicated by saying that it is the opposite of impressionism.
Gilbert K. Chesterton’s method, which is more readily observed and defined in his poetry than in his prose, also consists chiefly of the extraordinary presentation of ordinary ideas. But he does not attempt to give every aspect and shading of an idea. Rather he attempts to present that aspect of an idea which, while true, is sufficiently unusual to surprise the reader; the theory being that the attention attracted by the unusualness will be held by the truth.
This method is admirably suited to the uses of fiction, as “The Ball and the Cross” and “The Man Who Was Thursday” show. It is effective in debate, and in controversial essays on matters ethical and political, as is shown by the writings of Mr. Chesterton himself and of that school of popular apologetics which he may be said to have founded. In poetry it is sometimes almost magically effective, and sometimes grotesquely inappropriate. The perfect, and most lamentable, example of the use of this method is to be found in a poem called “E. C. B.” These initials evidently are those of Chesterton’s friend, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, the writer of detective stories.
In this serious and, for the most part, beautiful poem, Mr. Chesterton tells us that because of the virtue of one man he finds something to love in every man. Bentley is a man, he says, therefore, for Bentley’s sake no man is to be hated. For the sake of Bentley’s humanity, Chesterton says that he loves everyone, the murderer, the hypocrite, even—and this is the great climax—himself.
I should say, this was to be his great climax. But the method seizes him, and keeps him from saying anything so strongly simple as “I love myself.” Instead, he says:
I love the man I saw but now
Hanging head downwards in the well.
This is, as I said, the Chestertonian method at its worst. Here you find the poet absolutely at the mercy of his method, made to say a simple thing in a complicated manner. But this is, it is only fair to say, an early poem, and not fairly representative of Chesterton as a poet. For it is pleasant to see that, unlike Henry James, Chesterton has been steadily mastering his style, mastering it so thoroughly that he can lay it aside when it is inappropriate. He lays it aside, for instance, in some of the passionate and most effective chapters of “The Crimes of England.” And he lays it aside in such of his writings as best deserve the name of poetry.
Like every poet however original, Chesterton has “played the sedulous ape to many masters.” In his stirring ballads of warfare, such as “The Battle of Gibson” and “Lepanto” I find echoes of the last of the great ballad makers, Macaulay, whom Francis Thompson himself did not disdain to imitate. In his political controversial poems I find strong suggestions of a poet whose point of view Chesterton is far from sharing—Rudyard Kipling. I find also a curious suggestion of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Mrs. Browning was Evangelical where Chesterton is Catholic in thought, and she had a fatal knack of taking the wrong point of view in political matters—Italian affairs, for example. But she was genuinely a democrat and genuinely religious, and it is strange to see how often she and Chesterton think alike. There is even a similarity of phraseology, as when Chesterton writes:
The Christ Child lay on Mary’s lap.
His hair was like a crown.
And all the flowers looked up to Him,
And all the stars looked down.
whereas many years before Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her poem “The Doves” had written of a palm tree:
The tropic flowers looked up to it,
The tropic stars looked down.
Walt Whitman and Gilbert K. Chesterton seem a strange combination. But Chesterton himself has acknowledged that he found in “Leaves of Grass” a great and wholesome inspiration. This seems strange to us, for the American Whitmanite or Whitmaniac is a pale long-haired creature of many ‘isms, directly the opposite of a robust Christian like Chesterton. But in the eighteen-nineties when “science announced nonentity and art admired decay” Walt Whitman’s “barbaric yawp sounding over the roofs of the world” seemed a healthy sound. So in his dedication to “The Man Who Was Thursday,” Chesterton writes:
Not all unhelped we held the fort, our tiny flags unfurled;
Some giants laboured in that crowd to lift it from the world.
I find again the book we found, I feel the hour that flings
Far out of fish-shaped Paumanok some cry of cleaner things;
And the Green Carnation withered, as in forest fires that pass,
Roared in the wind of all the world ten million leaves of grass;
Or sane and sweet and sudden as a bird sings in the rain—
Truth out of Tusitala, spoke and pleasure out of pain.
Yea, cool and clear and sudden as a bird sings in the grey,
Dunedin to Samoa spoke, and darkness unto day.
But we were young; we lived to see God break the bitter charms,
God and the good Republic come riding back in arms:
We have seen the city of Mansoul, even as it rocked, relieved—
Blessed are they who did not see, but being blind, believed.
For some reason, it is difficult to think of Chesterton in love. We can readily think of him fighting or praying, but to think of him making love requires an effort of the imagination. Yet he is happily married, and while his love poems are few, they are noble in thought and beautiful in expression. One of the most personal and characteristic of them is that to which he gives the name “Confessional.”