A Critic at Large

July 7 & 14, 2008 Issue

The Back of the World

The troubling genius of G. K. Chesterton.
By Adam Gopnik
June 30, 2008

Chesterton is the great critic of homogenization, but his

localism had an ugly side.
This year is the hundredth anniversary of G. K. Chesterton’s
“The Man Who Was Thursday,” and it has come out in at least
two new editions on the occasion. “The Man Who Was
Thursday” is one of the hidden hinges of twentieth-century
writing, the place where, before our eyes, the nonsense-
fantastical tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear pivots and
becomes the nightmare-fantastical tradition of Kafka and
Borges. It is also, along with Chesterton’s “The Napoleon of
Notting Hill,” the nearest thing that this masterly writer wrote
to a masterpiece.
Chesterton is an easy writer to love—a brilliant sentence-
maker, a humorist, a journalist of endless appetite and
invention. His aphorisms alone are worth the price of
admission, better than any but Wilde’s. Even his standard-issue
zingers are first-class—“Americans are the people who describe
their use of alcohol and tobacco as vices”; “There is more
simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the
man who eats grape-nuts on principle”; “ ‘My country, right or
wrong,’ is a thing that no true patriot would think of saying. . . .
It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober’ ”—while the
deeper ones are genuine Catholic koans, pregnant and
profound: “Blasphemy depends on belief, and is fading with it.
If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to
think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.” Or: “The function of
the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much
as to make settled things strange.” Or: “A key has no logic to
its shape. Its logic is: it turns the lock.”
But he is a difficult writer to defend. Those of us who are
used to pressing his writing on friends have the hard job of
protecting him from his detractors, who think he was a nasty
anti-Semite and medievalizing reactionary, and the still harder
one of protecting him from his admirers, who pretend that he
was not. His Catholic devotees are legion and fanatic—the small
Ignatius Press has taken on the heroic job of publishing
everything he wrote in a uniform edition, and is already up to
the thirty-fifth volume—but not always helpful to his non-cult
reputation, especially when they insist on treating his gassy
Church apologetics as though they were as interesting as his
funny and suggestively mystical Christian allegories. He has a
loving following among liberal Catholics, like Garry Wills and
Wilfrid Sheed, and even nonbelievers, like Martin Gardner. But
his most strenuous advocates are mainly conservative
preVatican II types who are indignant about his neglect without
stopping to reflect how much their own uncritical enthusiasm
may have contributed to it.
Chesterton is one of that company of writers whom we call
Edwardian (though they stretch back to the last years of
Victoria), a golden generation that emerged in the eighteen-
nineties with personas seeming as fully formed as the silent
comedians of the Mack Sennett studio, complete with style,
costume, and gesture. Writing in London at a time when
hundreds of morning newspapers and as many magazines
competed for copy, and where mass literacy had created a
mass audience without yet entirely removing respect for
intellect, they made themselves as much as they made their
sentences. We see them as we read them: Shaw all crinkled,
beaming rationality, Kipling beetle-browed, bespectacled
imperial intensity. Chesterton embodied the hearty side of
mysticism, cape thrown across his shoulders, broad-brimmed
hat on his head and sword-stick at his side, a hungry Catholic
Pantagruel in London. (The last generation of writers who had
anything like the same signature presence were the Americans
who first encountered television, in the fifties—Mailer and
Capote and Vidal—and for the same reason: they lent prestige
to a new mass medium that hadn’t yet learned how easily it
could get along without them.)
Chesterton’s autobiography, begun in the late twenties and
published just after his death, in 1936, tells his early story
more or less accurately. Born into a conventional and
unreligious family in suburban London in 1874, he had an
extraordinary sensitivity to the secret life of things. In a
chapter titled “The Man with the Golden Key,” perfect in its
delicate unwinding of the tension between truth and play in a
child’s life, he explains that the transforming event of his early
life was watching puppet shows in a toy theatre that his father
had made for him. (The man with the golden key was a prince
whose purpose he can no longer recall in a play whose plot he
can no longer remember; but the purposefulness and romance
of the figure stay with him.) Chesterton’s point is that childhood
is not a time of illusion but a time when illusion and fact exist
(as they should) at the same level of consciousness, when the
story and the world are equally numinous:

If this were a ruthless realistic modern story, I should of

course give a most heart-rending account of how my spirit
was broken with disappointment, on discovering that the
prince was only a painted figure. But this is not a ruthless
realistic modern story. On the contrary, it is a true story.
And the truth is that I do not remember that I was in any
way deceived or in any way undeceived. The whole point is
that I did like the toy theatre even when I knew it was a toy
theatre. I did like the cardboard figures, even when I found
they were of cardboard. The white light of wonder that
shone on the whole business was not any sort of trick. . . . It
seems to me that when I came out of the house and stood
on the hill of houses, where the roads sank steeply towards
Holland Park, and terraces of new red houses could look out
across a vast hollow and see far away the sparkle of the
Crystal Palace (and seeing it was juvenile sport in those
parts), I was subconsciously certain then, as I am
consciously certain now, that there was the white and solid
road and the worthy beginning of the life of man; and that it
is man who afterwards darkens it with dreams or goes
astray from it in self-deception. It is only the grown man
who lives a life of makebelieve and pretending; and it is he
who has his head in a cloud.
 The other epiphany concerned limits, localism. “All my life I
have loved edges; and the boundary line that brings one thing
sharply against another,” he writes. “All my life I have loved
frames and limits; and I will maintain that the largest
wilderness looks larger seen through a window. To the grief of
all grave dramatic critics, I will still assert that the perfect
drama must strive to rise to the higher ecstasy of the
peepshow.” The two central insights of his work are here. First,
the quarrel between storytelling, fiction, and reality is misdrawn
as a series of illusions that we outgrow, or myths that we deny,
when it is a sequence of stories that we inhabit. The second is
not that small is beautiful but that the beautiful is always small,
that we cannot have a clear picture in white light of
abstractions, but only of a row of houses at a certain time of
day, and that we go wrong when we extend our loyalties to
things much larger than a puppet theatre. (And this, in turn, is
fine, because the puppet theatre contains the world.)

This vision, not yet specifically religious, though determinedly

antimaterialist, helped launch Chesterton into the world that he
went out to conquer. After a failed attempt at art school and a
flirtation with politics, he began, at the turn of the century,
writing pop journalism. He was an immediate hit. (He wrote a
regular column for the Illustrated London News for more than a
quarter century.) He was a big man: six feet four, and
constantly expanding outward, from too much food and ale.
Bernard Shaw liked to refer to Chesterton and his close friend
the Catholic poet and philosopher Hilaire Belloc as if they were
a single right-wing Carrollian monster, the Chesterbelloc.
(Appearance is the great sorter-out of literary fame; it is hard
to become an iconic writer without first looking like an icon.)
A certain kind of fatuous materialist progressivism was
ascendant—the progressivism of Shaw and Wells and Beatrice
and Sidney Webb, which envisaged a future of unending
technological advance. The illusions of faith would be dispelled
in an empire of slow-chewed spinach, rational spelling, and
workers’ reading circles. Against this, the young Chesterton’s
themes, the superiority of the local and the primacy of the
imaginary, were irresistible. As he recognized, the papers
wanted what they always want: the passionate assertion of the
opposing point, the unexpected view in clown makeup, the
contrarian as comedian. And that he gave, understanding
perfectly the role he was to play. He could appeal to heaven,
but he never put on airs. Discussing the “mystery” of his Fleet
Street success, he wrote, “I have a notion that the real advice I
could give to a young journalist, now that I am myself an old
journalist, is simply this: to write an article for the Sporting
Times and another for the Church Times, and put them into the
wrong envelopes.”
What he had to say came pouring out in essays, poems, and
books. (His first book, called “Robert Browning,” had, as he
knew, things to say about almost every subject under the sun
save the poet. A later book on Dickens, though a little less
absent-minded, is really about “The Pickwick Papers” and bits
of “Martin Chuzzlewit” and “Nicholas Nickleby.”) He wrote an
essay nearly every week, perhaps the best and most
characteristic of them, “On Running After One’s Hat,” making
the case for the romance of everyday existence:

Most of the inconveniences that make men swear or

women cry are really sentimental or imaginative
inconveniences—things altogether of the mind. For instance,
we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to
hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you
ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a
railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be
inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder
and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him the red
light and the green light on the signal are like a new sun and
a new moon. Because to him when the wooden arm of the
signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown
 down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking
tournament of trains. I myself am of little boys’ habit in this
matter. They also serve who only stand and wait for the two
fifteen.

Chesterton’s mysticism always resolves in the close at hand:

in a signal light at Paddington station, not in a sunrise over a
beach in Tahiti. With a comic touch, he goes on to make a
serious point, elevating stories over situations:

A friend of mine was particularly afflicted in this way.

Every day his drawer was jammed, and every day in
consequence it was something else that rhymes to it. But I
pointed out to him that this sense of wrong was really
subjective and relative; it rested entirely upon the
assumption that the drawer could, should, and would come
out easily. “But if,” I said, “you picture to yourself that you
are pulling against some powerful and oppressive enemy,
the struggle will become merely exciting and not
exasperating. Imagine that you are tugging up a lifeboat out
of the sea. Imagine that you are roping up a fellow-creature
out of an Alpine crevass. Imagine even that you are a boy
again and engaged in a tug-of-war between French and
English.”. . . I have no doubt that every day of his life he
hangs on to the handle of that drawer with a flushed face
and eyes bright with battle, uttering encouraging shouts to
himself, and seeming to hear all round him the roar of an
applauding ring. . . . An adventure is only an inconvenience
rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure
wrongly considered.


Chesterton liked to pair himself, congenially, with Shaw, as

his opposite, and he was right to do so, for they were the two
most perceptive critics of capitalism in their decade. The chief
bourgeois vices are hypocrisy and homogenization. Mercantile
capitalist societies profess values that their own appetites
destroy; calls for public morality come from the same people
who use prostitutes. Meanwhile, the workings of capital turn
the local artisan into a maker of mass-produced objects and
every high street into an identical strip mall. Shaw is the great
critic of the hypocrisy of bourgeois society—its inconsistencies
and absurdities, the way it robs the poor and then demands
that they be “deserving.” Chesterton is the great critic of its
homogenization, the levelling of difference in the pursuit of
cash. He is the grandfather of Slow Food, of local eating, of real
ale, the first strong mind that saw something evil in the
levelling of little pleasures.

The idea for Chesterton’s first novel, “The Napoleon of

Notting Hill,” published in 1904, is an illustration of the
principle: Chesterton imagines a future London where medieval
clan identity has reasserted itself, so that Notting Hill proudly
distinguishes itself from Kensington, and the good yeomen of
Chelsea guard their traditions against the interlopers from
Battersea. The joy of the book lies in the marriage of
Chesterton’s love of feudal romance with his love of the density
and mystery of the modern city. And London does bring out his
strongest and most eloquent emotions: “A city is, properly
speaking, more poetic even than a countryside, for while nature
is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious
ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or
may not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the
street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate
symbol—a message from some man, as much as if it were a
telegram or a post card.” Chesterton’s preference for the small
state made him a vehement and, for the time, courageous anti-
imperialist. His was one of the leading voices against the Boer
War. “The two great movements during my youth and early
manhood were Imperialism and Socialism,” he recalled. “Both
believed in unification and centralization on a large scale.
Neither could have seen any meaning in my own fancy for
having things on a smaller and smaller scale.”

“The Napoleon of Notting Hill,” after establishing its

beautiful conceit, fritters away some of its energy in frantic
plot-turning. Four years later, in “The Man Who Was Thursday,”
his other principle, the necessity of the imagination, got fully
dramatized. The novel tells the story, in a mood deliberately
feverish and overlit—snowstorms over St. Paul’s and prismatic
sunsets in the suburbs—of a young poet, Syme, who becomes a
policeman in order to pursue an international circle of
anarchists who have embarked on a nihilistic war against
civilization. The anarchists’ leaders, following Poe’s principle of
the purloined letter—that no one notices the obvious—meet
openly on a balcony overlooking Leicester Square. Each has
taken as a code name a day of the week. Syme, after
infiltrating the group, becomes Thursday; its chief is the
dreadful Sunday. Syme discovers that the group is plotting a
bombing in Paris, and sets off to stop it. As he races through
England and across the Channel, he discovers that the entire
circle of anarchists is really made up of undercover policemen,
including the sinister-seraphic Sunday, who is, somewhat
mystically, both the ultimate anarchist and the leading cop—the
two faces of the deity, as Chesterton seems to have imagined
him then.
At times wonderfully funny, at times frightening, the book is
filled with what we would now call existential panic, rendered
not in an intuitive, dreamlike way, as in Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”
or “The Hunting of the Snark,” but made to disturb through the
invocation of a world almost but not quite like our own. It is a
Surrealist atmosphere, in the sense that the awful and the
extraordinary don’t intrude on the normal but rise from the
normal—are the normal in another dimension. (Here Kafka and
Borges are implicit; Chesterton must have influenced both.) In
“The Man Who Was Thursday,” he recaptures a childhood sense
of what it feels like to be frightened by a nothing that is still a
something, and by the sense that ordinary things hold
intimations of another world, that the crack in the teacup opens
a lane to the land of the dead so easily that the dead are
already in the living room, pouring out of the broken porcelain.
The book is also stippled with small epigrammatic moments, as
when Syme comes upon an anarchist poet, Gregory, standing
by a street lamp (“whose gleam gilded the leaves of the tree
that bent out over the fence behind him”) on a silent, starlit
street:

“I was waiting for you,” said Gregory. “Might I have a

moment’s conversation?”
“Certainly. About what?” asked Syme in a sort of weak
wonder.
Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and
then at the tree.
“About this and this,” he cried; “about order and anarchy.
There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and
barren; and there is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself
—there is anarchy, splendid in green and gold.”
“All the same,” replied Syme patiently, “just at present
you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder
when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.”

The really startling thing in the book is Chesterton’s

imagining of the anarchists as philosopher-demons. It’s easy to
forget just how scary anarchists could seem at the beginning of
the twentieth century. In the previous quarter century, they
had killed a French President, an American President, and the
Russian Tsar, and had bombed the Royal Greenwich
Observatory, near London. (The same score now—Sarkozy,
Bush, Putin, and the London Eye—and we’d all be under martial
law.) “Anarchism,” for Chesterton, has the same resonance that
“terrorism” has for English writers like Amis and Hitchens
exactly a century later: it represents a kind of vengeful, all-
devouring nihilism that is assumed to be pervasive and—this is
the crucial thing—profoundly seductive, sweeping through
whole classes, of intellectuals, or immigrants, or, especially,
immigrant intellectuals. Chesterton’s portrait of Syme could be
a portrait of the “awakened” post-9/11 liberal: “He did not
regard anarchists, as most of us do, as a handful of morbid
men, combining ignorance with intellectualism. He regarded
them as a huge and pitiless peril, like a Chinese invasion. He
poured perpetually into newspapers and their wastepaper
baskets a torrent of tales, verses and violent articles, warning
men of this deluge of barbaric denial. . . . There was no
anarchist with a bomb in his pocket so savage and solitary as
he.”
Chesterton thinks the anarchist’s hatred of bourgeois
materialism is so obviously attractive, comes so near to the
divine, that it is the truest evil. Only an act of strong will can
resist it. Where the ordinary liberal scoffs at the idea that
apocalyptic terror represents a real threat to his society, the
awakened humanist, like Syme the poet-policeman or
Chesterton himself, believes that everyone else has missed the
reality, by refusing to accept how plausible and alluring the
argument for destruction is. To anyone “awakened” in this way,
people who hold the alternative normal view—that there is
nothing much to be frightened of—are literally insane. They
cannot see what is in front of their noses even as it blows up
their cities. The nightmarish intensity of “The Man Who Was
Thursday” derives from this conviction. Only cops and criminals
are really alive.
Yet Chesterton still had his wits about him, and recognizes,
at the end of his book, that the demon-terrorists are largely a
projection of the policeman’s mind. Or is it, perhaps, that the
anarchists, who are really policemen, secretly wish to be
anarchists? This double vision, where the appetite for romantic
violence is imagined as the flip side of the desire for absolute
order, gives the book its permanence. It ends with a powerful
and strange image of reality itself as two-sided:

“Listen to me,” cried Syme with extraordinary emphasis.

“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we
have only known the back of the world. We see everything
from behind and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the
back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud.
Cannot you see that everything is stopping and hiding a
face? If we could only get round in front—”

Given that longing, it was as obvious that Chesterton was

headed to Rome as it was that Wilde was headed to Reading
jail. If you want a solution, at once authoritarian and poetic, to
the threat of moral anarchism, then Catholicism, which built
Chartres and inspired Dante, looks a lot better than Scotland
Yard. If you want stability allied to imagination, Catholicism has
everything else beat. Although Chesterton did not officially
convert until 1922, well after the war, his drift toward what he
called “Orthodoxy” was apparent in the years just after the
publication of “The Man Who Was Thursday.”
And right around here is where the Jew-hating comes in. A
reader with a casual interest in Chesterton’s life may have a
reassuring sense, from his fans and friendly biographers, that
his antiSemitism really isn’t all that bad: that there’s not much
of it; that a lot of it came from loyalty to his younger brother
Cecil, a polemical journalist in the pre-war years, and to his
anti-Dreyfusard friend Belloc; that he had flushed it out of his
system by the mid-twenties; and, anyway, that it was part of
the time he lived in, a time when pretty much everyone, from
Kipling to T. S. Eliot, mistrusted Jews—when even the philo-
Semites (give them a home!) were really anti-Semites (get
them out of here!).
 Unfortunately, a little reading shows that there’s a lot of it,
that it comes all the time, and that the more Chesterton tries to
justify it the worse it gets. The ugliness really began in 1912,
when he joined his brother in a crusade against the corruption
of the Liberal Government, using a scandal that involved Rufus
Isaacs, a Cabinet minister, and his brother Godfrey, a
businessman. The affair, then called the Marconi Scandal (it
had to do with what would now be called insider trading in a
wireless-telegraph company), implicated non-Jews, too—David
Lloyd George, for one—but the nasty heart of the accusations
was directed by the Chestertons against the Isaacs brothers,
who were not only corrupt but alien. Eventually, Godfrey Isaacs
sued Cecil Chesterton, successfully, for libel.
This campaign—and, perhaps, the courtroom loss as well—
set off something horrible in the older brother, and, after Cecil
died, in 1918, in the war, Chesterton’s hatreds became ugly
and obsessive. There had been mild Jew-bashing in his work
before, based on the ethnic generalities that everyone engaged
in—the Jews are all alike in his stories, but then the French and
the Italians are all alike, too. From then on, however,
Chesterton hammers relentlessly at the idea that there is “a
Jewish problem,” the problem being that Jews are foreigners,
innately alien to the nations into which they’ve insinuated
themselves. Writing in 1920, he tells us that Jews are regarded,
by the Arabs in Palestine, as “parasites that feed on a
community by a thousand methods of financial intrigue and
economic exploitation.” Chesterton then adds that this charge
may not be entirely true but needs to be addressed by the Jews
—as though they were compelled to consider themselves
permanently on trial by their persecutors. Later in the decade,
writing about a journey to America, he says, in defense of
Henry Ford, “No extravagance of hatred merely following
on experience of Jews can properly be called a prejudice. . . .
These people of the plains have found the Jewish problem
exactly as they might have struck oil; because it is there, and
not even because they were looking for it.”
 It’s a deeply racial, not merely religious, bigotry; it’s not the
Jews’ cupidity or their class role—it’s them. In his
autobiography, Chesterton tries to defend himself by explaining
what it is that makes people naturally mistrust Jews. All
schoolboys recognized Jews as Jews, he says, and when they
did so “what they saw was not Semites or Schismatics or
capitalists or revolutionists, but foreigners, only foreigners that
were not called foreigners.” Even a seemingly assimilated Jew,
in Chesterton’s world, remains a foreigner. No one born a Jew
can become a good Englishman: if England had sunk into the
Atlantic, he says, Disraeli would have run off to America. The
more he tries to excuse himself, the worse it gets. In his
autobiography, he writes of how he appreciates that “one of the
great Jewish virtues is gratitude,” and explains that he knows
this because as a kid at school “I was criticized in early days for
quixotry and priggishness in protecting Jews; and I remember
once extricating a strange swarthy little creature with a hooked
nose from being bullied, or rather being teased.”
The insistence that Chesterton’s anti-Semitism needs to be
understood “in the context of his time” defines the problem,
because his time—from the end of the Great War to the mid-
thirties—was the time that led to the extermination of the
European Jews. In that context, his jocose stuff is even more
sinister than his serious stuff. He claims that he can tolerate
Jews in England, but only if they are compelled to wear “Arab”
clothing, to show that they are an alien nation. Hitler made a
simpler demand for Jewish dress, but the idea was the same.
Of course, there were, tragically and ironically, points of contact
between Chesterton and Zionism. He went to Jerusalem in
1920 and reported back on what he found among the nascent
Zionists, whom he liked: he wanted them out of Europe and so
did they; he wanted Jews to be turned from rootless
cosmopolitans into rooted yeomen, and so did they.
Chesterton wasn’t a fascist, and he certainly wasn’t in favor
of genocide, but that is about the best that can be said for him
—and is surely less of a moral accomplishment than his
admirers would like. He did speak out, toward the end of his
life, against the persecution in Nazi Germany, writing that he
was “appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities,” that “they have
absolutely no reason or logic behind them,” that “I am quite
ready to believe now that Belloc and I will die defending the
last Jew in Europe.” Yet he insisted, “I still think there is a
Jewish problem,” and he denounced Hitler in the context of a
wacky argument that Nazism is really a form of “Prussianism,”
which is really a form of Judaism; that is, a belief in a chosen,
specially exalted people. (For what it’s worth, although he
mistrusts Judaism, he detests Islam; Judaism is merely pre-
Christian but Islam is a kind of parody Christianity. All the
favorite historical arguments for Jesus—that he had to be either
crazy or right, and he doesn’t seem crazy; that he changed the
world with a suddenness not plausible in an ordinary human;
that the scale of the edifice he inspired is proof of divine
inspiration—apply just as well to Muhammad, and they can’t
both be the guy.)
The trouble for those of us who love Chesterton’s writing is
that the anti-Semitism is not incidental: it rises from the logic
of his poetic position. The anti-Semitism is easy to excise from
his arguments when it’s explicit. It’s harder to excise the spirit
that leads to it—the suspicion of the alien, the extreme
localism, the favoring of national instinct over rational
argument, the distaste for “parasitic” middlemen, and the
preference for the simple organ-grinding music of the folk.

His defenders insist that, whatever harm he did to himself

and his reputation by his prejudices, the often long, always
didactic, and specifically Catholic books to which he devoted
himself after his conversion more than make up for it, since
they are both profound and genuinely universal, insisting on a
pan-national commonality in the true faith. I have had these
books—“The Everlasting Man,” a study of Jesus and
Christianity; his life of St. Francis; his defense of Thomas
Aquinas—pressed on me by Catholic friends with something like
the same enthusiasm with which I have proselytized for the
pre-Catholic Chesterton. It is hard for a nonbeliever to evaluate
this kind of writing, which, despite its evangelical exhortations,
is really written to comfort and encourage the already
convinced. We choose a religion, when we do, not for the
tenets of a creed but for the totality of a circumstance, for a
tone and a practice and an encompassing condition: “It feels
like home” (or “like my father’s puppet theatre”) is about the
truest thing that the convert can say about his new faith. As
Chesterton would have been the first to admit, nobody has to
argue so strenuously for what he actually believes. Nobody gets
up on a soapbox and shouts about the comfort of his sofa and
chairs. He just invites other people to sit in them.
In these books, Chesterton becomes a Pangloss of the
parish; anything Roman is right. It is hard to credit that even a
convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis’s
intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas’s pedantic religiosity, as
Chesterton seems to. His writing suffers from conversion
sickness. Converts tend to see the faith they were raised in as
an exasperatingly makeshift and jury-rigged system: Anglican
converts to Catholicism are relieved not to have to defend
Henry VIII’s divorces; Jewish converts to Christianity are
relieved to get out from under the weight of all those strange
Levitical laws on animal hooves. The newly adopted faith, they
imagine, is a shining, perfectly balanced system, an intricately
worked clock where the cosmos turns to tell the time and the
cuckoo comes out singing every Sunday. An outsider sees the
Church as a dreamy compound of incense and impossibility,
and, overglamorizing its pretensions, underrates its
adaptability. A Frenchman or an Italian, even a devout one, can
see the Catholic Church as a normally bureaucratic human
institution, the way patriotic Americans see the post office,
recognizing the frailty and even the occasional psychosis of its
employees without doubting its necessity or its ability to deliver
the message. Chesterton writing about the Church is like
someone who has just made his first trip to the post office.
Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write
an address on a label, and they will send it anywhere, literally
anywhere you like, across a continent and an ocean, in any
weather! The fact that the post office attracts timeservers, or
has produced an occasional gun massacre, is only proof of the
mystical enthusiasm that the post office alone provides!
Glorifying the postman beyond what the postman can bear is
what you do only if you’re new to mail.
The books became narrower as they got bigger. The problem
of how you reconcile a love of the particular with a set of
universal values seemed easy; the Catholic Church was large
enough to provide a universal code and ritual for life with
plenty of room for variation among lives within it. The trouble is
that Catholic universalism is not so convincing to those whose
idea of local variation involves a variation on the Catholic ritual,
or wanting some other ritual, or wanting no ritual at all.
Chesterton’s vision has no room in it for tolerance, except as a
likable personal whim or an idiosyncratic national trait. (That he
was personally tolerant, on this basis, no one can doubt.) The
history of persecution, of Albigensians and Inquisitions, is
constantly defended in the inevitable “though it can only be
regretted/still it must always be remembered” manner.
The wonderful spirit of early Chesterton—who is equally
religious but not so neatly dogmatic—got channelled into the
Father Brown detective stories, which he wrote for money and
from increasingly flagging inspiration, and into the torrent of
weekly journalism, which he kept up right until his death. The
later essays are often as brilliant as those of the early nineteen-
hundreds. Chesterton on the virtues of the newly invented
cartoon, on the absurdities of Prohibition in America, on social
manners within New York skyscrapers is still wonderful.
(Musing on how an American always takes off his hat in an
elevator, he writes that the very word “elevator” “expresses a
great deal of his vague but idealistic religion,” and he goes on,
“Perhaps a brief religious service will be held in the elevator as
it ascends; in a few well-chosen words touching the Utmost for
the Highest. . . . The tall building is itself artistically akin to the
tall story. The very word skyscraper is an admirable example of
an American lie.”) But often one has the sense of a man
chained to a paradox assembly line in a prose factory. Too
much journalism does drain a writer; turns his tics into tocks,
dully marking the time until the next check.
And then he seemed very dated very soon. There are two
great tectonic shifts in English writing. One occurs in the early
eighteenth century, when Addison and Steele begin The
Spectator and the stop-and-start Elizabethan-Stuart prose
becomes the smooth, Latinate, elegantly wrought ironic style
that dominated English writing for two centuries. Gibbon made
it sly and ornate; Johnson gave it sinew and muscle; Dickens
mocked it at elaborate comic length. But the style—formal
address, long windups, balance sought for and achieved—was
still a sort of default, the voice in which leader pages more or
less wrote themselves.
The second big shift occurred just after the First World War,
when, under American and Irish pressure, and thanks to the
French (Flaubert doing his work through early Joyce and
Hemingway), a new form of aerodynamic prose came into
being. The new style could be as limpid as Waugh or as blunt
as Orwell or as funny as White and Benchley, but it dethroned
the old orotundity as surely as Addison had killed off the old
asymmetry. Chestertonian mannerisms—beginning sentences
with “I wish to conclude” or “I should say, therefore” or
“Moreover,” using the first person plural un-self-consciously
(“What we have to ask ourselves . . .”), making sure that every
sentence was crafted like a sword and loaded like a cannon—
appeared to have come from some other universe. Writers like
Shaw and Chesterton depended on a kind of comic and
complicit hyperbole: every statement is an overstatement, and
understood as such by readers. The new style prized
understatement, to be filled in by the reader. What had seemed
charming and obviously theatrical twenty years before now
could sound like puff and noise. Human nature didn’t change in
1910, but English writing did. (For Virginia Woolf, they were the
same thing.) The few writers of the nineties who were still
writing a couple of decades later were as dazed as the last
dinosaurs, post-comet. They didn’t know what had hit them,
and went on roaring anyway.
In the late twenties, many people lost their bearings, and
Chesterton began to drift farther right than he had before.
Though he never fully embraced Mussolini, he was in spirit as
good a Falangist as you could find: he dreamed of an anti-
capitalist agricultural state overseen by the Catholic Church and
governed by a military for whom medieval ideas of honor still
resonated, a place where Jews would not be persecuted or
killed, certainly, but hived off and always marked as foreigners.
All anti-utopians cherish a secret utopia, an Eden of their own,
and his, ironically, was achieved: his ideal order was ascendant
over the whole Iberian Peninsula for half a century. And a bleak
place it was, too, with a fearful ruling class running a frightened
population in an atmosphere of poverty-stricken uniformity and
terrified stasis—a lot more like the actual medieval condition
than like the Victorian fantasy. (Just as William Morris’s or
Ruskin’s medieval guilds were the leisure activities of a
Victorian moneyed and altruistic class projected backward in
time, Chesterton’s medieval London was really a nostalgic
vision of late-Victorian London suburbs, small craftsmen
gathered around the village green.)
He died, at the age of sixty-two, in his beloved country town
of Beaconsfield (Disraeli had previously been its most illustrious
resident), worse for wear after decades of non-stop writing,
editing, and lecture-touring. His coffin was too big to be carried
down the stairs, and had to be taken through a window. But
even in his final years the sinuosity of his mind and the beauty
of his line remained strong. (Besides, if obviously great writers
were allowed onto the reading list only when they conform to
the current consensus of liberal good will—voices of tolerance
and liberal democracy—we would probably be down to George
Eliot.)
 Chesterton’s conundrums of imagination and fact retain their
grip on us, because they remind us that we know two things.
We know that we have our experience of a limited world,
Surbiton or Notting Hill or Telegraph Hill. We also know that
this experience doesn’t feel limited, that it includes far more—
all of myth and religion and meaning, as the children’s puppet
theatre does. The desire for mystery and romance can’t be
argued out of importance, but it can’t be willed into existence,
either. It is a mistake to believe that the man with the golden
key is “only” a puppet when he acts out a story that alters the
inside of your head; it is also a mistake to cover your eyes and
wish away the strings.
We can take the belief in that puppet to be a delusion, as
the rationalists did. Or we can take it to be an intimation, as
Chesterton did, of the existence of another world, in which the
things that we sense as shadows will become real, and we will
see ourselves as puppets that have come alive in the hand of
God. Or we can believe that the credit we give the puppet show
is the credit it deserves, that the wonder of it cannot be
explained, up or down, but only experienced; that the side we
see is the side there is to look at, and that the white radiance
of wonder shines from inside, which is where the light is. ♦

Published in the print edition of the July 7 & 14, 2008, issue.

Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The

New Yorker since 1986. He is the author of, most recently, “A
Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism.”