As I was saying: a Chesterton reader.

As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader,

THE GREATNESS of the greatest English literature is that it is not merely or mainly English, but that it is the aqueduct over and through which passes the living water of the humane and Godly tradition. One of the greatest of English writers, G. K. Chesterton, wrote: "The problem of an enduring ethic and culture consists in finding an arrangement of the pieces by which they remain related, as do the stones arranged in an arch. And I know only one scheme that has thus proved its solidity, bestriding lands and ages with its gigantic arches, and carrying everywhere the high river of baptism upon an aqueduct of Rome.'

But this romanita, this catholicism, is not "sectarian,' though it is religious in origin and nature. The universality of Aristotle and Aquinas is also that of Johnson and Newman, of Maritain, Eliot, and Lewis, and, perhaps pre-eminently in our century, of Chesterton himself. He became a Roman Catholic only at the age of 48, in 1922. Yet it was clear from very early on that he was catholic, that he was orthodox, that he was, in the words of C. S. Lewis, one of his greatest disciples, a "mere Christian.' Of orthodoxy he wrote in his book of that name in 1908 that "God and humanity made it and it made me.'

As English a figure as Chesterton is, he was always a "little Englander,' a patriot who hated British imperialism and loved other countries too, not least when they were small and embattled, like the Boer Republic and Ireland and Poland. Never a nationalist, he nevertheless believed, like Solzhenitsyn today, that the particularity of peoples and nation-states has some place in the providential economy of God. He particularly hated bullies and bullying, whether by plutocrats or nations or ideas ("I do not like inevitable triumphs'), and the gallery of his foes honors him: materialism, scientism, social Darwinism, statism, aestheticism, plutocracy (rule by "the richest and most successful rascals'), imperialism, German militarism, Communism; and a deeply and steadily pondered view of life enabled him to see the connections between these heresies. Hannah Arendt has credited him with being one of the few men in pre-1914 Europe to see through both the fraud of middle-brow progressivism and imperialism and the fecklessness of post-Victorian high-brow scientism, aestheticism, and decadence. "Earnest freethinkers need not worry themselves,' he wrote in 1905, "about the persecutions of the past. Before the liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.' And we did.

In the aftermath of World War I many a chastened or hung-over modern began "shoring fragments against our ruin,' while Chesterton continued to see steadily and see whole; no fragment he, but a part of the continent, a piece of the main, combining with unique and profound power the moral earnestness and gravity of the great Victorians, into whose world he had been born in 1874 and about whom he wrote a great book, with a metaphysical wit and levity reminiscent of St. Francis, the jongleurs de Dieu, and St. Thomas More. He answered an irritated critic of his "grave levity' in this way: "Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because Mr. McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious [whereas] funny is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing else.' Chesterton had what he attributed to Dickens, "a certain gigantic conviviality and cordiality.' Of Dickens Chesterton also wrote something else true of himself: "He saw that there was a secret thing, called humanity, to which both extreme socialism and extreme individualism were profoundly and inexpressibly indifferent, and that this permanent and presiding humanity was the thing he happened to understand.'

Chesterton wrote his great book and prefaces on Dickens just after the turn of the century, at the low point of the novelist's critical reputation, and insisted on his pre-eminent greatness among the English writers of the nineteenth century. One of the finest literary scholars of our day, Steven Marcus, insists that Chesterton's judgment has been "verified' and that "it was his rate good privilege to have made this judgment, alone, at such an early date.' Chesterton's literary criticism, writes a major modern poet and critic, "abounds in . . . observations which, once they have been made, seem so obviously true that one cannot understand why one had not seen them for oneself.' This is W. H. Auden speaking, but to his verdict we could easily add the testimony of a host of other eminent modern writers and thinkers, including Graham Greene (who thinks The Ballad of the White Horse a greater poem than The Waste Land).

Chesterton's universality explains his appeal across national and linguistic lines, as well as across specialist categories. I have seen Italian students reading the Father Brown stories in Italian; a framed Chesterton poem hangs in a Polish cathedral. Volumes of Chesterton are much in demand on the black market behind the Iron Curtain, along with those of Solzhenitsyn, Orwell, and Berdyaev.

Chesterton faced and wrestled with the terrible solipsism of Emerson, Nietzsche, and the aesthetes, and he faced and struggled against the opposing error, scientific materialism, without succumbing to either; thus he stands as perhaps the only major modern writer to preserve the sanity of an "undissociated sensibility.' Of the "pluralization' and "relativization' of the modern world he wrote: "And the typically modern men are mainly proud of having thus torn up the original unity of the religious idea. Ethics for ethics' sake and art for art's sake are like the tatters of what was once the seamless robe. They have parted his garments among them, and for his vesture they have cast lots.'

As an introduction to one of the greatest and sanest of all writers, Robert Knille's collection, As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader, is exemplary, drawing judiciously from the vast body of Chesterton's work--essays, poems, stories, novels, and nonfiction works of great power and insight such as Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis of Assisi, and Charles Dickens. Knille does not reprint the fine essay "On Reading' (from The Common Man), which, with the "Epilogue' of C. S. Lewis's Experiment in Criticism, provides the finest short defense of the literary enterprise that I have ever read; but other great essays such as "On Man: Heir of All the Ages,' "The Revival of Philosophy,' and "If I Had Only One Sermon to Preach' are included, as well as a wealth of excerpts. No one has done more to help transmit the great canon of English literature than has Chesterton, and yet he has himself not much benefited from inclusion in it; his work doesn't fit easily into the sequences of literary period, thought, and fashion, nor into genre study. Is he a historian, a philosopher, a theologian, an apologist, a poet (the last truly popular poet in the English language, according to Samuel Hynes), a literary critic, a journalist, an essayist, a moralist, or perhaps the "fabulous griffin' that he said he was sometimes treated as being?

The truth is that he was all of these, and more. He was a very great man with a very great soul and voice and an enormous frame: "mens magna in corpore magno.' To adapt the fine words of the Australian poet McAuley, Chesterton "scorned to darken and contract/The landscape of the heart/ By individual, arbitrary,/And self-expressive art'; his speech and writing were "ordered wholly/By an intellectual love' and he "elucidated the carnal maze/With clear light from above.' Walter de la Mare's elegy memorably catches him in that light, the light of the glory that it was his duty and delight always to reflect:

Knight of the Holy Ghost, he goes his way,

Wisdom his motley, truth his loving jest.

The mills of Satan keep his lance in play.

Pity and innocence his heart at rest.