Chesterton's new style in apologetics.

I never read a line of Christian apologetics. I read as little as I can of them now (Chesterton, Orthodoxy 288).

This aside in G. K. Chesterton's account of the intellectual reasons for his conversion to Christianity is intriguing. He makes it clear that he began to be won over to religious faith by reading the works of notable freethinkers. It was T. H Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Charles Bradlaugh who sowed in his mind "the first wild doubts of doubt" and started his journey "back to orthodox theology" (Chesterton, Orthodoxy 288). It is worth pausing over his dismissal of apologetics, if only to ask which Christian writers he meant and why he found them unhelpful. Clearly, he was not referring to classics of spirituality or outstanding intellectual defenses of religious belief. Among these, he delved deeply. In the same year as he dismissed "apologetics" in Orthodoxy, he was asked to draw up a reading list for T. P.'s Weekly. He suggested Bishop Butler's Analogy, St. Augustine's Confessions, Coleridge's Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, John Henry Newman's Apologia, and the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas (Ward 138). The choice is interesting. Chesterton was clearly building up an understanding of Christianity in which the journey of the yearning individual, an Augustine or a Newman, reached fulfillment within a traditional, orthodox framework of belief. Choosing the Summa of Aquinas suggests a wish to supplement personal religious intimations with a structure of faith, consistent with reason at its most rigorous; to ground it on universally understood and applicable intellectual foundations. Butler's Analogy demolishes the contrast that Deist thinkers, such as John Toland (1670-1722) and Matthew Tindal (1657-1733) offered between a natural religion, free from ambiguity, and the dark perplexities of Christianity. Nature is not a realm of light but one of obscurity and unexplained mysteries. Why, then, should we be surprised at analogous difficulties in religion? The figure of Sunday in The Man Who Was Thursday reflects an understanding of Nature and Nature's God informed by insights Butler would have confirmed. Chesterton clearly wished to give the readers of T. P.'s Weekly a book which would fortify them against simplified, over-optimistic religious choices like that of the Deists with whom Butler contended or the currently fashionable views of the Rev. R. J. Campbell (1867-1956), pastor of the City Temple in London and a leading theological "modernizer." Chesterton felt that this popular preacher's "New Theology" sought to minimize the realities of sin and evil. Chesterton's choice of Coleridge's Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, less well known than other texts he recommended, suggests that he was aware of other pitfalls to be avoided.

Coleridge attacks narrow readings of Scripture for which he coined the term "Bibliolatry." This literalism neglected the inspired spirituality of the Bible as a whole and sought to bring "together into logical dependency detached sentences from books composed at a distance of centuries from each other, under different dispensations, and for different objects" (Coleridge 59). An insistence that every word of the Bible was produced by writers divinely informed as well as divinely inspired produced absurdities. For example, bibliolaters failed to see that the Book of Job was a dialogue and treated the "insufferable half-truths" of Job's comforters as of equal value with Job's own "pathetic appeals and close and powerful reasoning" (Coleridge 54). Still active in Chesterton's time and not extinct in our own, bibliolatry involved a sterile confrontation with an equally literal-minded atheism, like that of James Turnbull in The Ball and the Cross.

In 1908, Chesterton had been engaged in a coherent and well-directed study of theological works. What, then, were the "Christian apologetics" of which he was so dismissive and what were his reasons for setting them aside? It may seem likely that Chesterton was referring to the Modernist theologians of the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century. He certainly made it clear that he saw nothing of value in the theological Modernism of heterodox Catholics like Alfred Loisy (1857-1940) and George Tyrell (1861-1909) or in that of their Protestant equivalents such as the Rev. R. J. Campbell. For Chesterton there was an unbridgeable gap between the theory of development Newman propounded and what the theological Modernists understood by the term: "A man who is always going back and picking to pieces his own first principles may be having an amusing time but he is not developing, as Newman understood development. Newman meant that if you wanted a tree to grow you must plant it finally in some definite spot" (Ward 138).

However, Chesterton's distaste for the edifying or apologetic literature many of his contemporaries produced extended further than a rejection of Modernist theologians, Catholic or Protestant. After all, most of Edwardian religious writing was not distinctively Modernist. Other issues must have been involved. Anyone interested in Chesterton would, naturally, wish to discover what they were and what influence they had on the way he wrote. Any distinctive style reflects, firstly, the writer's temperament and intellectual allegiances. But, it is also important to be aware of the oppositional factors at work in forming a particular way of writing. There can be no doubt that authors have deliberately written against a prevailing style or tone. However one rated Carlyle's prose, for example, it would be negligent to discuss his work without seeing it as a conscious reaction against the balanced sentences and elegant constructions educated writing of his time had inherited from the eighteenth century. Carlyle's abrupt violence, sardonic humour, Germanisms, and sudden changes of tone and register reflected the world as he saw it, but also demonstrated his contempt for prose he thought bland, shallow, and heartless. The nuances, musicality, and verbal elaborations full of half-tones or quiet suggestion which characterize Pater's style are only fully understandable if we see them as a conscious reaction to the combative, declaratory manner many writers of his time had borrowed from Thomas Babington Macaulay.

What was Chesterton reacting against? The answer may lie among the "spiritual best sellers" of the Edwardian age. Some knowledge of them may give a clearer picture of Chesterton's originality and achievement. Forgotten now, but enormously popular between 1900 and 1914, A. C. Benson's moralizings and The Roadmender (1901) by "Michael Fairless" (Margaret Fairless Barber) offer useful clues to the tastes and expectations of readers who sought to be consoled, uplifted, and enabled better to understand or endure their lives at the time when Chesterton was producing his articles in The Daily News. Such writings show what Chesterton's style and tone were intended to challenge; the kind of discourse that needed to be displaced if spiritual topics were to recover an intellectual, moral, and social vitality which threatened to evaporate from them. The fact that a mass readership liked the kind of writing Chesterton sought to supersede was, for him, no argument to retain it. If that was what the public preferred, then they needed to be reeducated.

How conscious was Chesterton of a wish to change the tone and style of religious writing? In the years before 1914, he certainly recorded his impatience with the unfocussed moral uplift and high-minded vacuity of much "serious prose":

Perpetual talk about righteousness and unselfishness, about things that should elevate and things that cannot but degrade, about social purity and true Christian manhood, all poured out with fatal fluency and with very little reference to the real facts of anybody's soul or salary (Maycock 94).

Such comments link stylistic with moral and intellectual failure. It was such writers' unwillingness to be specific about economic, social or spiritual facts which led them to produce pages of pretentious vacuity:

The statesmanlike pronouncements, the wide outlooks and well-considered conclusions, all the consciousness of the solemnity of the responsibility ... all the realization of the reality of the tendency (Maycock 94).

Bad prose was more than technical incompetence. In the high-class weeklies it was a way of concealing, or a failure to grasp the issues. Bad enough when politics or social problems were discussed, such high-minded trifling was worse when religion was being handled. Chesterton saw the need for, and tried to introduce, a new style of writing in this crucial field.

The types of spiritual discourse that already occupied the field enjoyed a high prestige. Among the most notable of these were the voluminous works of A. C. Benson. Eldest surviving son of E. W. Benson (1839-1896), Archbishop of Canterbury, A. C. Benson (1862-1925) was one of the most popular and highly regarded writers of the Edwardian period. Now largely forgotten, his works of biography, family reminiscences, criticism and, above all, religious reflections, achieved an enormous readership. Considering the multitude of his readers, Benson

confessed to feeling touched by their devotion: clerks, tradesmen, doctors, teachers, with their wives and daughters; lower middleclass professional families and educated working-class (Newsome 274).

As he recognized, aspirational readers delighted in the "donnish and aristocratic" flavor of his essays, the aroma "picked up in episcopal palaces and county society and at Eton and Cambridge." Devouring his work, they believed they had "really found the charm of culture" (Newsome 274). However, in other moods, Benson was irritated that his books of moralizing should have appealed to the "unctuous and sentimental middle-class" and that he had captured "a second-rate and uncultivated public" (Newsome 170). At times, he was embarrassed by "the intolerable demands made upon him" by his female admirers ("persecuted by these d--d women" [Newsome 322]). However, he did not include in these strictures Madame de Nottbeck, a member of the Astor family, who made him a gift of 40,000 [pounds sterling] (a very large sum at the time) as a recompense for the spiritual comfort his writings had given her. (Benson gave the money to found scholarships at Magdalene College.)

Benson's popularity as a guide, philosopher, and friend was demonstrated by the enormous sales of the books+ the avalanche of fan mail he received, and the huge audiences that attended any public lecture he chose to give. Such acclaim testified to the need many people, at the time, had for help in facing, or in making sense of their lives. It also shows that Benson had found a formula which, even if it lacks appeal now, succeeded well with multitudes of his contemporaries.

It is worth looking at this formula in greater detail, both for what it shows about Edwardian reader expectation m the field of spiritual literature and for how it demonstrates the consciously revolutionary nature of Chesterton's style. We understand what he did and why he did it by looking at such contextual material. Published in 1905, Benson's The Upton Letters are supposed to be written by the master at a public school to a friend he has known since they were both at Eton. "Herbert" has been forced by ill health to retire to Madeira and "T. B." writes to cheer and console him. In the course of the correspondence, he develops his philosophy of life. The religious teaching of The Upton Letters places a special value on detachment, passivity, and withdrawal. "T. B." congratulates his friend on his retreat abroad as an invalid: "You will be able to view things with a certain detachment and that is a real advantage" (Benson, Upton Letters 1). Rather than trying to understand life, we should let it flow over us: "There is no strength like the abasement of weakness, no power like a childlike confidence" (178). Why struggle to find a meaning when we "are in stronger hands than our own" and we can be confident that "the most daunting and humiliating things have a purifying effect." "Tragic sorrows" are "gifts from the very hand of the Father to purify a noble soul from the dross that was mingled with it" (8). In a future life, we will look back on our "dreary sufferings" with the "tender and wistful air" with which we now regard our "childish griefs" (179). Apart from noting their glibness, a reader (at least now) would be struck by the way in which Benson's moralizings continually associate religion with world-weariness. Spirituality is synonymous with a sweetly melancholy mood in which the observer broods on the triviality of human life and looks forward, with rather more than resignation, to the coming of death. In the meantime, one can (and should) seclude oneself as much as possible: "What I hope more and more to do is to withdraw myself from material aims and desires; not to aim at success, or dignity of office or parade of place" (179). Offered promotion, he declines it from "an indescribable reluctance to undertake the task, a consciousness of not being equal to it, a strong sense that I was intended for other things" (64).

If such a feeling were the result of humility, it would incur no blame. What may disturb readers of The Upton Letters is a sense that "T. B.'s" wish to involve himself as little as possible in the world may have other motives, with which we are expected to identify and sympathize. He makes it clear that he finds those with whom his work brings him into contact: boys, colleagues and parents, tiresome and sadly vulgar. The well-mannered products of comfortable homes, his pupils are "so nice, so gentlemanly, so easy to get on with," and yet "so dull, so unimaginative, so narrow-minded" (29). None of them have any serious interest "in books, in art or music" (29). Although planning to holiday in "ancient historical places, full of grave and beautiful associations" (31), his colleagues care only for golf and bridge. One of them plans to spend his time reading books to improve his skill in both pursuits. How much better if he had taken Thomas-a-Kempis' The Imitation of Christ and Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living away with him! Worst of all are the parents "T. B." has to entertain. Having one of them to stay ("the strain was awful" [87]), he encounters a complacent Philistine who "thinks art, religion, poetry, music, all stuff" (87) and believes "money and consideration, the only two things worth having" (87). These shared confidences invite readers to join, or to recognize that they are already members of an elite of the spiritually superior. From encounters with shallow futile people, it is better to turn away, to form a quiet and sedate routine: "We settle down by comfortable firesides; we pile the tables with beloved books; friends come and go; we acquire habits; we find out our real tastes" (95).

Although Benson recommends, as an ideal, a life of comfortable semiretirement, with ample time for reading and visits to picturesque historical sites, he is well aware that "we have no abiding city" (94). We "must find something to hold on to" (94). Religion is a constant theme in his writing. No doubt, in a society more deferential than our own, his work had a social cachet. Some readers must have liked receiving the apparently heart-felt and at times poignant confidences of the Master of Magdalene College who was also a son of the Archbishop of Canterbury. However, his popularity had an even more obvious cause in the lucid simplicity of his style and the comforting, undemanding version of Christianity he presented. The medium and the message proceeded from a cognate impulse and were inseparably connected.

"Overlaid with definition, with false motive, with sophistry, with pedantry" (Benson, Upton Letters 95), Christianity consists essentially of "a faith in God and a faith in Love" (95). If we only "endeavour not to sin against love, not to nourish hate or strife ... not to reject tenderness, we are then in the way" (95). For Benson, suffering is not a mystery but "an educative process" (Benson, College Window 150). The whole idea of sacrifice belongs to "the old dispensation" and is an "unworthy survival." Rather, the essence of worship is "a hopeful, generous and trustful attitude of soul" (151).

Such a simple faith is most appropriately recommended in a style of the utmost clarity. For Benson, to be graceful and easily absorbed should be the writer's highest aim and one which he himself certainly achieved. He aspired to the "perfection of lucid writing" which "seems to resemble a crystal stream." Transparent prose flowing "limpidly and deliciously" blended aesthetic with moral delight: "What a vision of unimagined peace, of cool refreshment, of gentle tranquility it all gives" (92).

After the experiences of the twentieth century, readers will see why a style, once so popular, no longer seems adequate. It is not that Benson's moralizings are insincere. There is no evidence of this. In spite of private misgivings about his admirers, he responded with care to the innumerable letters they sent, seeking consolation and advice. It is easy to sympathize with Benson's praise of a quiet, calm, reclusive life when one remembers that his own was blighted by long periods of illness caused by a manic-depressive psychosis.

The problem with his writing lies in the very qualities of style he sought for and obtained. Most readers would agree that simplicity, the attunement of form to content, is a prime virtue in writing. However, there is a simplicity which oversimplifies, a lucid grace which denies the complexity of the world in which Christianity must operate and ignores the profundity of the faith itself. "T. B." in The Upton Letters rejects the difficult in writing. (Henry James reduces him to "admiring mystification" while George Meredith makes a novel "into an obstacle race" when it "ought to be like a walk" [111]). Yet, life may mystify us and experience is not "like a walk." Like his philosophy, Benson's style cannot express the nature of the problematic, tormented world in which many people live. Benson has nothing specific to say about the moral, political, or religious issues of the tumultuous Edwardian world. For him, religion is a polite sentiment which seeks the shade and finds its best expression in a life of cultivated ease. As one of his biographers remarked, his religious message was "at root ... a determinist philosophy, exhorting people to stop worrying needlessly about matters over which they had no control" (Newsome 166) and, instead, to grasp that "the virtue to cultivate--in a word--is serenity" (Newsome 167).

Not all of Benson's contemporaries admired his work. Indeed, some anticipated complaints a modem reader might make. A reviewer in The Times, for instance, spoke of the "complacent fluency" of his "highly scented" prose and pictured Benson "writing day and night with both hands, with an ineffable air of detachment and repose" (Newsome 169). There is other evidence than a journalist's gibe that, for some, Benson fell short. Max Beerbohm's parody of his writing in A Christmas Garland (1912) is interesting, for several reasons. Highly cultivated and intelligent, Beerbohm was neither a believer in nor hostile to religion. As such, he suggests the effect that Benson the apologist might produce on those approaching him without preconceptions.

Beerbohm represents Benson taking pleasure "in the sure and seemly progression of the months" (Beerbohm 22) and using it to correct "moods in which he said to himself 'H-ng it! I will not do this' or 'b-th-r! I shall not do that!" The pattern of the seasons induces "a more stable equilibrium, a deeper tranquillity" (23). After falling "into one of those quiet dozes" which were "so seemly a consummation of his thought," he chooses from his bookshelves "some old book that he knew and loved, or maybe some quite new book by that writer whose works were most dear to him because in them he seemed to know precisely what the author would say next, and because he found in the fine-spun repetitions a singular repose" (26-27). What Benson's admirers saw as a serene wisdom, Beerbohm regarded as a somewhat vapid and somnolent suavity.

THERE are enough similarities between A. C. Benson and another highly popular Edwardian religious writer to suggest the existence of a tone readers recognized as appropriate and to which they responded warmly. Completed on her deathbed, The Roadmender by Barber/"Michael Fairless" captured the hearts of thousands before the First World War. Given the poignant circumstances in which it was written, and its obvious sincerity, it is a work that it would be in poor taste to mock. However, it is fair to note that it shares with Benson's work a wish to simplify Christianity, removing it from the tumult of the world and denying it any capacity to offer intellectual challenges to the reader. "Michael Fairless," like Benson, views life from a distance, with gentle melancholy. She shares with him a special valuing of introspection as the preferred means of grasping whatever truth can be obtained. The "roadmender" is an educated man in reduced circumstances forced to earn his living by breaking stones to repair the public highway. He accepts his poverty joyfully: "All these gifts are mine as I sit by the winding white road and serve the footsteps of my fellows. There is no room in my life for avarice or anxiety ... I lack nothing and have nothing over; and when the winter of life comes I shall join the company of weary old men who sit on the sunny side of the workhouse wall and wait for the tender mercies of God" (Fairlss 3-4). Far from being hard, his labour is delightful: "There is a real physical joy in the rise and swing of the arm" (4) that leads to "the luxurious ache of tired but not weary limbs" (4). (Nothing one reads or hears suggests the Edwardian working-class life was as idyllic as the roadmender's.) In his times of rest, he looks on "the sea and its impenetrable fathoms" (9) until this induces trance-like states in which he becomes abstracted from the life around him and feels he is in touch with spiritual realities:

 As I watch the restless, ineffective waves, I think of the measure
 less reflective depths of the still and silent Sea of Glass ... and
 of the Voice as the voice of many waters when the multitude of one
 mind rends heaven with alleluia and I lie so still that I almost
 feel the kiss of White Peace on my mouth. (9)

Examples such as those of A. C. Benson and "Michael Fairless" suggest one important reason at least why Chesterton developed a way of writing about religious subjects different from styles which had been widely approved. Rather than a disengagement which prided itself on the degree to which it had escaped the mundane actualities of life, he presented Christianity as active, energetic, and responding to the multi-faceted world it encountered. Instead of a dominant and somewhat monotonous note of melancholy, he offered a variety of tone and register, surprising his readers, forcing them to think about all kinds of things and to see them in fresh ways.

Readers whose expectations had been formed by A. C. Benson, "Michael Fairless" and the like, and who encountered the essays collected as Tremendous Trifles (1909) must have been struck by the way in which Chesterton jettisoned the approved "beautiful" manner of writing about religious issues. Cadenced prose and quiet sadness were not, in his view, necessary or helpful ways to rouse interest in Christianity. Instead, many of the articles in Tremendous Trifles recount startling encounters or episodes which force the narrator, suddenly, to rethink an intellectual position and change the way in which he perceives life or himself. Spiritual realities will not allow themselves to be moulded into plangent paragraphs but break into Chesterton's mind with little regard for his previous train of thought or his dignity. Chesterton's sacrifice of the expected stateliness is deliberate, reflecting his belief that the (supposed) need for elevated utterance stifled spiritual insight. This had a way of coming without forewarning in situations far from the conventionally uplifting.

For Chesterton, religious meaning often flashes on the mind in a physical accident or an unexpected human encounter. It needs no special setting but may be met drawing with chalks on brown paper in the Sussex Downs ("A Piece of Chalk"), arguing with a cabman over a fare ("The Extraordinary Cabman"), reflecting on the results of a sprained ankle ("The Advantage of having One Leg"), being involved in a collision in the Strand ("An Accident"), or spending the afternoon with a boring Dickens enthusiast ("The Dickensian"). Instead of a reflective figure, at a distance from daily life, we have someone involved in a busy existence which is full of surprises. With little time for dwelling on his reveries, he must respond quickly to stimuli which challenge him morally and intellectually. Chesterton's stance as a Christian apologist seems a calculated reaction to a feeling some readers might have, that writers like A. C. Benson need to get out more.

The essays in Tremendous Trifles have two purposes. Firstly, Chesterton wishes to challenge the tyranny of habitual perception; to awaken the sense, so often deadened, of the multitudinous and thrilling beauty of what our senses, intellect, and imagination have to offer us. This awakening involves an alteration of scale, a revaluing of objects, events, and experiences considered trivial. By showing us so much, in places where we least expect it, Chesterton recalls us to gratitude. The world-weariness other writers had adopted as a mark of their spirituality is, in fact, plain bad manners. It assumes that we deserve what we have to enjoy or, even, that it falls far short of our entitlement. Such an attitude ignores the fact that the Creation was a voluntary act, the gift of a world and of our own life.

The title of Chesterton's essay "A Piece of Chalk" is probably intended to recall T. H. Huxley's "On a Piece of Chalk" (1868) in which the great scientist took his readers into the earth's crust, exploring its successive stages, to discover the origin of chalk. Huxley offers a world in which the wonder of creation has been replaced by that of evolution. Instead of a vision of geological strata, Chesterton recounts a seemingly trifling incident but one replete with deeper meanings. On holiday in the Sussex Downs, he goes for a walk with six brightly colored chalks to make sketches on brown paper. His landlady finds his request for paper puzzling. A bit later, the discovery that he has no white chalk leads him to reflect on the role of white in drawing and the analogous significance, in life, of innocence and goodness.

"A Piece of Chalk" opens energetically. The morning is "splendid ... all blue and silver (Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles 1)," and the narrator is ready to enjoy his holiday. The manner he cultivates dispels any notion of spiritual airs and graces. He has the normal human enjoyment of lounging around when he can ("I reluctantly tore myself from the task of doing nothing in particular" (1)). He combines a little quiet comedy at the inability of the "square and sensible" (1) woman who owns the cottage where he stays to understand his need for brown paper on which to draw with self-mockery at his own requirements, which he expresses with aesthetic preciosity: "I then tried to explain the rather delicate logical shade, that I not only liked brown paper, but liked the quality of brownness in paper, just as I liked the quality of brownness in October woods, or in beer, or in the peat-streams of the North" (2). It is a tone which Chesterton mastered and often employed. He follows a flow of eloquence with a disarming aside, as here: "All this I said (in an off-hand way, to the old woman)" (2). Such changes of tone do not undermine the serious point Chesterton has just made. Rather, it disarms readers by showing them that they have to deal with someone aware of his audience; who know that those rhapsodies in which he indulges, and in which he may seriously believe, may not necessarily convince others. Chesterton presents his thought as a conversation with the reader, through little movements of comic exaggeration and self-deprecating gestures. It is very different from the relentlessly high-minded claim to authority implicit in other prose of the time.

CHESTERTON'S style achieves a difficult feat in offering challenging arguments in a manner which engages rather than threatens. Fumbling, as we all do, with the objects in his pocket, he pauses to reflect on "how primeval and poetic" (2) they are. The "pocket knife," for example, is "the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword." Such a momentary realization is a reminder of what some intellectuals of the time disputed, the coherence and connection of human history, the unbreakable links of a cultural inheritance. As others do, he finds a walk over the Downs something of an effort ("I crawled across the colossal contours" [3]). Some readers might sympathize with the suggestion that he is out of condition. In his slow progress, he has time to reflect that the Downs' combination of softness and strength expresses "the best quality of England." Such a joining together "declares in the teeth of our timid and cruel theories that the mighty are merciful" (3).

Throughout the essay, Chesterton shows one his most notable characteristics, a capacity to think simultaneously on several levels. At the same time, he registers an aesthetic satisfaction with a particular landscape, a moral awareness of what he sees as its connection with particular English virtues, and a religious sense of the fight relation between strength and gentleness. For him, meaning leaps out from every point of the daily round of work or leisure, rather than requiring any special mood or setting.

Startling in its vehemence, after his earlier tone of good-natured ease, Chesterton's demand that we should not "for heaven's sake imagine" that he "was going to sketch from Nature" (3) insists on the primacy of the spiritual. Instead of Nature, he is going to draw "devils and seraphim, and blind old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of night" (3). These are "better worth drawing than Nature." Also they are much easier to draw. They are "better" because they move on a deeper level of the mind and "easier" because they express its innate response to experience. The "sacred and monstrous" (4) symbols which breed within the deepest thoughts have a power beyond the details of the physical scene. It is typical of Chesterton's mode of presenting his ideas that, at the beginning of a serious passage on the primacy of the spiritual over the physical he should remark that he "drew the soul of a cow" and that it "had seven horns" and "was all purple and silver." On one level, this is a disarming, self-deprecating joke. We are being addressed by a playful, whimsical man drawing fantasy figures with chalk on brown paper, not by some superior soul displaying his sensitivity. At the same time, like so many of Chesterton's light asides, it fixes a serious point more firmly in the mind by the use of an odd image. After all, perhaps the deeper reality of cows is far stranger than we have been used to thinking.

What follows (4-5) is a sophisticated and original passage connecting the awareness of a spiritual reality below the surface of physical things to play and creativity. Poets before Wordsworth "were supposed not to care very much about Nature because they did not describe it much" (4). In fact, with them imagination worked in a different way; one which was more integrated with and transformative of what it experienced and more capable of drawing out its spiritual reality: "The inspiration went in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo" (5).

The main effect (and one may infer the main purpose) of "A Piece of Chalk" is to counteract a tone of weariness and acquiescence adopted widely in moral discourses of the time. Benson and other writers came perilously close to sounding as if they recommended virtue because they lacked energy for anything else. Chesterton wished to break any connection between goodness and spiritlessness. White is not "a blank and colourless thing, negative and non-committal" (6) and "the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour" (5). Chesterton's linking of a vivid visual sensation known to anyone who has ever handled paint with a moral truth is typical of his stylistic techniques. Economically he embodies truths in simple, even homely, terms, which convince, and seem obvious. Yet, it is he, not we, who have thought of them. The proposition that for "religious morality" white is a color, for example, does duty for a page or more analyzing the difference between a religious and a secular basis for morality. The latter is plausible enough, in its own terms. It is sensible, from the point of view of personal advantage, to be restrained, well conducted, and temperate. No doubt a society motivated by such considerations (if it could be achieved) would be an orderly one. However, there is all the difference in the world between this spirit, which Bunyan showed incarnated in Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and true goodness. With a customarily concrete phrase, Chesterton insists that "virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like a pain or a particular smell" (5).

UNLIKE other writers of the time who sought to edify, Chesterton lives in a world where physical sensation links to a constant mental alertness. An argument with his landlady over brown paper or a walk on the Downs stimulates a flow of intellectual propositions or philosophical asides. There is no time for abstracted meditation. Even if there was any desire for melancholy, there is no opportunity for it in the process of sensation and thought. Unlike others who wrote on religion then, Chesterton knows how effective a variation of tone and register can be. Moving from comic lightness to unnaffected seriousness, juxtaposing an aphorism full of thought with amusing self-deprecation, he engages the reader in the best kind of conversation. Departing from the manner that readers of much religious prose had come to expect involved a different conception of the writer's dignity. Chesterton substitutes enthusiasm for elevation, talking of mercy or chastity vigorously and naturally rather than in hushed tones. Always he breaks the link between seriousness and exaggerated solemnity. Rather than elusive nuances, he prefers to deal in fine distinctions, refusing to connect subtlety with vagueness. He does not acknowledge the prestige, widely accorded at the time, to thought so beautiful that it escapes adequate expression. Instead, he insists on sharply defined edges, whether in physical sensations or in ideas. White (and goodness) are not blank, colorless, negative, and non-committal; but, then, neither is anything else in Chesterton's vision.

The essay ends with a discovery that the chalk that Chesterton needs for his "absurd little pictures" (6) is all around him. If one compares the way in which this point is made with the widely practiced edifying style of the time it is easy to see how and why Chesterton is effective. A contemporary might have said, "Everywhere in unlooked for places and humble lives, we find traces of that innate goodness which, however much we may overlook it, has never entirely departed from this Vale of Tears." Instead, Chesterton roars with laughter "so that the cows stared at (him) and called a committee" (7). Relying on the crucial link that he has already made between the positive nature of white and that of goodness, he is able to assert that pictures without white "would be as pointless as the world would be if there were no good people in it" (6). The word "pointless" is striking. What Chesterton feels at the idea of a world without goodness is not melancholy but irritation. It would be merely futile, like painting without being able to use white. When he realizes that he is "sitting on an immense warehouse of white chalk" (7) he invokes a feeling of grasping a fact so immense that the mind has ignored it. We do not see how much goodness there is because it is the foundation on which we, and everything else, rests: "Southern England is not only a grand peninsular, and a tradition and a civilisation; it is something even more admirable. It is a piece of chalk" (7).

"The Extraordinary Cabman" recounts another apparently trivial episode. After a hearty lunch with his companions, Chesterton takes a cab from Leicester Square to the House of Commons to drop a friend off and then takes the same cab a few hundred yards further on to an office in Victoria Street. The driver of the cab tries to overcharge him, insisting, with circumstantial detail, that he has taken a much longer journey than in fact he has--from Euston rather than from Leicester Square. Chesterton refuses and the man apologizes for his lapse of memory. The essay raises an issue of paramount importance to Chesterton and, he believes, to society as a whole; the necessity of a grasp upon objective truth.

Interestingly, in "The Extraordinary Cabman" Chesterton makes philosophical discussion and the assertion of an intellectual principle precede the episode which enforces it. The essay is not a reflection on experience but a demonstration of how urgently necessary it is to act, in an emergency, on those principles we may announce at leisure. "Metaphysics is the only thoroughly emotional thing" (24) because theoretical questions of being and knowing involved the most practical as well as the profoundest issues. At any point, and in the most radical ways, metaphysical choices change our lives.

Chesterton saw the ease with which elevated discourse, in an attempt to sound impressive, lost touch with those physical facts in which moral generalizations must be rooted. He opens "The Extraordinary Cabman" by associating a discussion, over a meal with friends, of "the most ultimate and terrible ideas" (23), with the appetite for food and drink. We need to argue, to get at the truth, as much as we need to eat, and it is enjoyable as well as essential to satisfy both appetites. Connecting food with truth, or goodness with chalk, forces us to convert intellectual abstractions into concrete form. One effect of this conversion is to dispose of the false analogies to which some intellectuals are prone. One of Chesterton's lunch companions, for example, differs from him on the subject of broadmindedness: "My friend said he opened his intellect as the sun opens the fans of a palm-tree, opening for opening's sake, opening infinitely forever" (24). An aspiration that the mind may be like a plant might sound more spiritual, but Chesterton dismisses it in favor of an analogy which, since we are human beings and not plants, must be unanswerably true: "I opened my intellect as I opened my mouth, in order to shut it again on something solid" (24). The connection of thought with basic appetites is typical. Frequently, Chesterton challenges an English assumption, common in his day and still not entirely dispelled, that there was some connection between being religious and being well bred; that truly spiritual people were rather genteel. (Benson was certainly far from unique in writing on this assumption.) Speaking later of the beginning of a reaction against materialism current in his youth, manifested in, though not confined to, Spiritualism, Christian Science, and Theosophy, he noticed how its adherents patiently waited for others to rise to their own spiritual plane, but "never seemed to hope that they might evolve and reach the plane where their honest green-grocer already stood." Unlike those of his friend, Chesterton's images are comic and somewhat earthy. "Furiously brandishing an empty bottle" (23) (implying that he has dined well), he attacks the view that we can be certain of nothing. If so, then the term "certainty" itself is meaningless: "What is this certainty it is impossible to entertain ... Similarly, if I have never experienced such a thing as green I cannot even say that my nose is not green" (23).

Chesterton recounts a trivial episode which opens a chasm. After he has taken the cab from the House of Commons to Victoria Street and offered the man more than his fare, the driver refuses to take the money, insisting, with circumstantial detail, that he has just brought Chesterton from Euston. If, by some unlikely possibility, A. C. Benson or "Michael Fairless" had referred to such an incident, it would have been with weary resignation as an instance of the materialism prevalent among the masses. Instead, considering the issues it involves, Chesterton is alarmed. The driver does not show the "surly doubt and general disposition to try it on which is not unknown among normal cabmen" (25). Instead, he looks at the proferred fare "with a dull and infantile astonishment, clearly quite genuine" (25). The incident shows how little is needed to unsettle the mind and to how great an extent our grip on everyday reality is an act of faith. Curiously pertinent to a post-Modernist climate, the essay touches on that fundamental scepticism about the continuity of personality and the reality of our perception of the external world with which some recent philosophers have made us familiar. These were questions which troubled Chesterton deeply in his youth. Now, again, "for one second the old nightmare of the sceptic put its finger on my nerve. What was certainty? Was anybody certain of anything?" (26) With a prophetic accuracy, Chesterton recognized that the terms of religious debate had altered. The real enemies of Christianity were not the morally upright atheists or agnostics of Chesterton's childhood, the Bradlaughs and T. H. Huxleys, or their later equivalents with whom he crossed swords; the Robert Blatchfords or Joseph McCabes. Far more dangerous, because so insidious, was that intellectual and moral relativism, whose beginnings he perceived and which, in our own time, has come to permeate much of our cultural discourse. Chesterton perceived the consequences of what has become a common assumption in writing on politics and society, on moral questions and in literary theory. Radical scepticism, posing new questions, represented a disintegrating force without precedent. "The dull rut of sceptics," the earnest unbelievers of the Edwardian age, were still "asking whether we possess a future life" (26). The "exciting question for real scepticism is whether we possess a past life" (26). For Chesterton, faith is not some optional extra, something on the margins of normal and reliable life, dallied with in reverie. It is the absolutely essential ground of daily existence: "What is a minute ago, rationalistically considered, except a tradition and a dream" (26). Even if we do not call it by that name, a religious belief in objective certainty is essential if life is to mean anything or continue in any form we could recognize. Belief in ascertainable and definite truth, in free will, and in permanent moral values ("the fixed character of virtue" [27]) are the only alternatives to a collapse of the individual mind and of society as a whole. Confronted by the cabman's determined and momentarily convincing account, Chesterton feels that "the foundations of the earth were moved" (27). He repels the (possibly sincere) falsehood because he does "not choose to be a lunatic" (27). Later, only half-jokingly, he suggests that the cabman was a tempter. In spite of his honest face, "there was something unearthly and demoniac about him when seen from behind" (27).

"The Extraordinary Cabman" is an excellent example of Chesterton's stylistic procedures. He draws the profoundest meaning from a sudden, unexpected episode, rather than from a privileged mode of reflection. The "sanities and certainties" (27) of our lives cannot be taken for granted nor can we assume that life would go on much as it has, if they were eroded. Above all, Chesterton's writing differs from that of several other Edwardian apologists because it is far more intellectually exciting: directing itself, even in the casual records of daily journalism, towards what is most important. Much of the excitement to be found in his work stems from his constant fertility of mind. Nothing around him is uninteresting, meaningless, or even merely conventional. Everything suggests a thought, political, social, aesthetic, moral, or religious, which he expresses as clearly and forcefully as possible. But, the excitement with which his writing is charged has another cause. As "The Extraordinary Cabman" suggests, Chesterton feels a sense of urgency about many of the issues he raises. Essential values are being undermined in ways in which many of his contemporaries do not envisage. Part of his irritation with Christian apologists of the day may have arisen from what he saw as their failure to realize how crucial was the situation and how dangerous were the issues it involved. While they continued to live on the moral and religious capital of the past, attenuating or sentimentalizing the spiritual teachings they had inherited and failing to state them in compelling ways, forces were gathering to attack the positions they neglected to guard. Rather than what they offered, defective both in manner and in matter, they should have presented Christianity as "the kind of truth a man can feel intelligent curiosity about--moral truth, truth that is disputed, truth that is in action and really affecting things" (Chesterton, Illustrated 257).

Works Cited

Beerbohm, Max. A Christmas Garland. 1912. London: Heinemann, 1922.

Benson, Arthur Christopher. From a College Window. 1906. Dodo P, 2007.

--. The Upton Letters. 1905. Dodo P, 2007.

Chesterton, G. K. Illustrated London News. 23 January 1909. The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton. Vol. XXVII. Ed. David Dooley. San Francisco: Ignatius P, 1986.

Chesterton, G. K. Orthodoxy. 1908. The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton. Ed. David Dooley. San Francisco: Ignatius P, 1986.

Chesterton, G. K. Tremendous Trifles. 1909. London: Methuen, 1925.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit. 1853.3rd ed. London: A. & C. Black, 1956.

Fairless, Michael. The Roadmender. 1902. London: Wildwood House Ltd, 1981.

Maycock, A. L. The Man who was Orthodox. London: Denis Robson, 1963.

Newsome, David. On the Edge of Paradise: A. C. Benson: The Diarist. London: John Murray, 1980.

Ward, Maisie. Gilbert Keith Chesterton. 1944. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958.

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Title Annotation:	writer G.K. Chesterton
Author:	Coates, John
Publication:	Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature
Article Type:	Essay
Geographic Code:	4EUUK
Date:	Jun 22, 2009
Words:	7665
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