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For a writer notable for his love of paradox, it is fitting that his "single most quoted line" cannot actually be found in his works. It surfaces in various forms, but recently I've seen it cited more than once as follows: "When a Man stops believing in God he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes in anything." Now, I found this expression so pregnant and interesting, I'm almost disappointed that it is not authentic. To be sure, according to the website of the American Chesterton Society, its origin is most likely a sentence from Cammaerts' biography, between two sentences from Father Brown, a figure in popular detective novels by this author.

I've been drawn to have a look at Chesterton by this quotation, but also because the British poet A. G. Stewart has long recommended that GKC is worth reading. So, I searched out some details of his biography. He was born in London in 1874, went to the Slade School where he studied art, and then became a prolific magazine writer. Chesterton wrote a hundred books, among them novels, poetry, history, religious and political polemics, etc. My local public library furnished a copy of his Collected Poems, and in one of the few good secondhand bookstores left in Kansas City, I happened across an old but intact copy of his Autobiography, published in the year of his death, 1936.

For a writer one might rightly consider antiquated because of his politically reactionary views and his unflinching, unrepentant Catholicism, Chesterton appears to be going through a kind of revival nowadays. Dale Ahlquist, president and co-founder of the American Chesterton Society, and author of a biography, claims he was "the best writer of the twentieth century." While this might be laid to partisan enthusiasm, we should also note that GKC's Collected Works are being published by the conservative Ignatius Press of California, in an edition to be more than thirty volumes.

I should mention in recent GKC sightings, this short quotation of verse:
     For the Great Gaels of Ireland
     Are the men that God made mad,
     For all their wars are merry
     And all their songs are sad.
One has to admit the concision and insight at play here. I was instantly reminded of a passage in John Fiske's essay "A Harvest of Irish Folk-lore": "In most of the Fenian stories the fighting is brisk and incessant. It is quite a Donnybrook fair. Everybody kills everybody else, and then some toothless old woman comes along and rubs a magic salve on them, when, all in a minute, up they pop and go at it again" (from Miscellaneous Writings, vol. 10-discarded from the same public library where I found GKC's poems).

Thus stimulated, I read through most of the poems, and more or less in one sitting on a chilly night, read the Autobiography. Chesterton is one of that now extinct species, the Man of Letters, garrulous, witty, irritating, and absolutely readable. While his theological views exasperate me, I get the sense that he was a good fellow to have a beer with in a pub. Indeed, the pub became for him a sort of benign but endangered institution of English society. As with most such books, he recounts his rather pleasant childhood, as the son of a prosperous Kensington family prominent in real estate. There are details of school chums, many of whom went off to universities, as he did not. However, at the Slade School he got a good education as a graphic artist, then went into journalism. Fleet Street was then in its glory days; a fellow could make a living by writing columns and reviews, and again-those pubs, filled with rollicking good humor, and the simple pleasures of conversation among literate friends. He was middle class, and knew it, and did not ever really rise above his origins. While he got to know various eminent persons on the edge of the upper classes, he did not grovel before them. He also came to idealize the peasantry, the sturdy yeomanry who lived on beer and roast beef, though we know from Hardy's Tess and her people that the usual fare of the rural poor was much less grand than this.

Chesterton recognized that this old world was profoundly undermined by the rise of modern industrialism, enclosures of land, and the fatal combination of liberalism, socialism and skepticism. He hated it, and with his friend Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) founded something called Distributism, of which more in a moment. But it is GKC's criticism of modernism in all its forms that concerns us first. Of course, in the heady atmosphere of fin-de-siecle England, he got to know all the species of liberals and radicals flourishing then. He often lectured for small societies in obscure provincial taverns and meeting rooms. Of one such group, an Ethical Society, he writes: "The truth of the matter is, I imagine, that these particular people never did believe or disbelieve in anything. They liked to go and hear stimulating lecturers; and they had a vague preference, almost impossible to reduce to any definable thesis, for those lecturers who were supposed to be in some way heterodox and unconventional. And having since had longer and larger opportunities of watching the general drift of such people, and having seen the dark-eyed doubter and the patriarchal Jew in more and more motley and incongruous assemblies, I have come to the conclusion that there never were any large schools of thought, so separate and static as I innocently imagined in my youth. I have been granted, as it were, a sort of general view or vision of all that field of negation and groping and curiosity. And I saw pretty much what it all really meant. There was no Theistic Church; there was no Theosophical Brotherhood; there were no Ethical Societies; there were no New Religions. But I saw Israel scattered on the hills as sheep that have not a shepherd; and I saw a large number of the sheep run about bleating eagerly in whatever neighborhood it was supposed that a shepherd might be found."

What Chesterton is engaging here is the unanchored quality of modern intellectual life. He continues: "Amid all this scattered thinking, sometimes not unfairly called scatter-brained thinking, I began to piece together the fragments of the old religious scheme; mainly by the various gaps that denoted its disappearance. And the more I saw of human nature, the more I came to suspect that it was really rather bad for all these people that it had disappeared. Many of them held, and still hold, very noble and necessary truths in the social and secular area. But even these it seemed to me they held less firmly than they might have done, if there had been anything like a fundamental principle of morals and metaphysics to support them." Summing up, he continues: "Men who naturally accepted the moral equality of mankind yet did so, in a manner, shrinkingly, under the gigantic shadow of the Superman of Nietzsche and Shaw. Their hearts were in the right place; but their heads were emphatically in the wrong place, being generally poked or plunged into vast volumes of materialism and skepticism, crabbed, barren, servile and without any light of liberty or of hope."

Anyone who has experienced the life of our contemporary Freethought, Humanist, and Liberal organizations will have to acknowledge the parallel with what Chesterton saw around him in his day. They continuously bewail their inability to influence the course of society or politics. While I could never join GKC in any sort of return to Mother Church, it seems to me quite true that these intellectuals, whether liberal or radical, are ineffectual, unfocused, and indeed too often "without any light of liberty or hope."

"It was not," he writes, "that I began by believing in supernormal things. It was that the unbelievers began by disbelieving even in normal things. It was the secularists who drove me to theological ethics, by themselves destroying any sane or rational possibility of secular ethics. I might myself have been a secularist, so long as it meant that I could be merely responsible to secular society. It was the Determinist who told me, at the top of his voice, that I could not be responsible at all. And as I rather like being treated as a responsible being, and not as a lunatic let out for the day, I began to look around for some spiritual asylum that was not merely a lunatic asylum." Consider again that sentence: "It was that the unbelievers began by disbelieving even in normal things." What a prophetic indictment of Post-Modernism, written decades before most of its present-day practitioners were even born!

Of the confident, bloodless hymns of the radicals, he writes: "One weakness of these popular war-songs was that they were not war-songs. They never gave the faintest hint of how anybody could ever make war on anything. They were always waiting for the Dawn; without the least anticipation that they might be shot at dawn, or the least intelligent preparation for shooting anybody else at dawn." Chillingly, he then writes: "I am no Fascist; but the March on Rome gave them the surprise they needed." His disclaimer does not convince; he is clearly delighted that the liberal intellectuals went as they did, up against the wall.

Chesterton then produces a fascinating explication of a poem by Belloc, entitled "The Rebel," which he claims, "involves the real character of a battle . . . It is the only revolutionary poem I ever read, that suggested that there was any plan for making any attack." He gives as evidence the following excerpt:
     And press them inward from the plains
     And drive them clamouring down the lanes,
     And gallop and harry and have them down,
     And carry the gates and hold the town.
Now I haven't located Belloc's poem, but this short analysis certainly makes me want to find it. Our "progressive" poets might benefit from doing so as well. My point is that Chesterton may be a Reactionary, but his critique of the modern liberal/radical poetry intelligentsia remains worth attending to.

Another valuable aspect of GKC is his sense of humor about himself and his associates. For instance, he much admired Conrad Noel, a Bohemian parson who "took great pleasure in appearing in correct clerical clothes, surmounted with a sort of hairy or furry cap, making him look like an aesthetic rat-catcher." Recalling a telling episode, he writes: "I remember one occasion when I was walking away from some meeting with him and with Dr. Percy Dearmer, then chiefly famous as an authority on the history of ritual and of vestments. Dr. Dearmer was in the habit of walking about in a cassock and biretta which he had carefully reconstructed as being of exactly the right pattern for an Anglican or Anglo-Catholic priest; and he was humorously grieved when its strictly traditional and national character was misunderstood by the little boys in the street. Someone would call out, 'No Popery,' or 'To hell with the Pope,' or some other sentiment of larger and more liberal religion. And Percy Dearmer would sternly stop them and say, 'Are you aware that this is the precise costume in which Latimer went to the stake?'"

Chesterton is given to flights of fancy that turn out to have a serious point: "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. Then, if the articles were accepted and reasonably intelligent, all the sporting men would go about saying to each other, 'Great mistake to suppose there isn't a good case for us; really brainy fellows say so'; and all the clergymen would go about saying to each other, 'Rattling good writing on some of our religious newspapers, very witty fellow.' This is perhaps a little faint and fantastic as a theory; but it is the only theory upon which I can explain my own undeserved survival in the journalistic squabble of the old Fleet Street." But there is some proof of his theory: "I wrote on a Nonconformist organ like the old Daily News and told them all about French cafés and Catholic cathedrals; and they loved it, because they had never heard of them before. I wrote on a robust Labour organ like the old Clarion and defended medieval theology and all the things their readers had never heard of; and their readers did not mind me a bit. What is really the matter, with almost every paper, is that it is much too full of things suitable to the paper. But in these latter days of the solidification of journalism, like everything else, into trusts and monopolies, there seems to be even less likelihood of anyone repeating my rare and reckless and unscrupulous manoeuvre." What he wants to survive is this whimsical spirit, the sense of real curiosity on the part of the reading public. Who has not noticed how similar almost to the point of being identical and repetitive, writing at various progressive websites is at this point in Cyberculture? No one wants to really be challenged, they only want to be reassured.

Chesterton's aside on "trusts and monopolies" brings me to his own positive political and social views, summarized under the rubric of Distributism. This seems to be an attempt to resuscitate the Old England of rural and farm life. Everyone, he and Belloc argued, should have some property. What Belloc called "The Servile State" meant that even modest and productive land was stripped away from the people, leaving them abject and defenseless before the Government. While Orwell obviously shared their concerns amounting to revulsion, about the modern State, he argued that "going back" to some Golden Age was impossible. Belloc, he said, "could conceive nothing between slavery and a return to small-ownership, which is obviously not going to happen and in fact cannot happen. There is [little] question now of averting a collectivist society. The only question is whether it is to be founded on willing cooperation or on the machine-gun" (from a 1940 review essay, "Notes on the Way"). In this same essay, Orwell dismisses any return to God: "Religious belief, in the form in which we had known it, had to be abandoned. By the nineteenth century it was already in essence a lie, a semi-conscious device for keeping the rich rich and the poor poor."

Chesterton's notion of society included a bitter and pungent attack on extreme wealth. His task was, he said, "one of helping certain friends and reformers to fix the terrible truth called Responsibility, not on tramps or drunkards, but on the rulers of the State and the richest men in the Empire. I was trying to put a chain and collar of Responsibility, not on the Underdog, but on the Top-dog." He acerbically noted that many of the prominent Fabian Socialists were enthusiasts for the Empire.

As for his poetry, I find its quality various. There are long faux-medieval narratives, almost unreadable, but there are also witty parodies and bitter satires, including of "Americanization" which he detested. There are several curiously disturbing nightmare fantasy poems, and one notes that he also was productive in fantasy as well as detective fiction. I'll conclude with one example of a poem which seems to me both typical and strong:

     BY A REACTIONARY
     Smoke rolls in stinking, suffocating wrack
     On Shakespeare's land, turning the green one black;
     The crowds that once to harvest home would come
     Hope for no harvest and possess no home,
     While poor tramps that liked a little ale,
     In natural procession pass to gaol;
     Because the world must, like the tramp, move on,
     There does not seem much else that can be done.
     As Lord Vangelt said in the House of Peers:
     "None of us want Reaction." (Tory cheers).

     So doubtful doctors punch and prod and prick
     A man thought dead; and when there's not a kick
     Left in the corpse, no twitch or faint contraction,
     The doctors say: "See . . . there is no Reaction."

Bear in mind this was the England of the Great Depression, of deep poverty, dislocation and misery. With Prohibition-style attitudes again popular, scapegoating of the poor everywhere, and mass amnesia amounting to the death of the Body Politic, it is also the condition we find ourselves in today.

[Note: for a long and insightful critique of Chesterton and his views see Patrick Wright, "Last orders," in The Guardian, April 9, 2005-available at their internet archive.]