G.K. Chesterton.

G. K. Chesterton

by Michael Ffinch(Harper & Row, 384 pp, $18.95)

THIS MAKES THE Chesterton revivalofficial: a most favorable volume, with the weight and authority of a standard biography, coming from a mainline publisher like Harper & Row. The past decade has already seen several books on different aspects of Chesterton's thought, two biographies, the appearance of a quarterly (The Chesterton Review), and the commenced reprinting of his collected works. Chestertonians will receive this addition to the stack with pleasure. While it makes no major alterations in the general view one gets from Chesterton's own autobiography and Maisie Ward's 1945 biography, it does fill out the picture, especially of the younger GKC and of the family background, by the use of newly discovered letters and notebooks.

An old-style Liberal, Chesterton wasborn during "the beginning of the rapid growth of Empire in Queen Victoria's reign' and died at the time of the consolidation of National Socialism in Germany. According to Ffinch, Chesterton would have considered the aim of the two movements to have been much the same: "a self-interested expansionism seeking to deprive others of their rights, property, and land.' Chesterton "was above all things a great champion of Liberty,' and Ffinch sees this as the motive force behind his move from the Liberal Unitarianism of his childhood toward Catholicism: As Chesterton came to realize that "it was only by loving and serving God through His Church that perfect freedom may be found, so it was inevitable that in the cause of Liberty, he also became a defender of the Faith.'

The book offers delightful samplesof GKC's paradox and parallelism, which, as his comrade-in-arms, Hilaire Belloc, noted, "made men see what they had not seen before.' What better description of our present-day social and political enthusiasms could we find than Chesterton's suggestion that "The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad . . . because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone'? Also delightfully appropriate is his observation that "For some inconceivable cause a "broad' or "liberal' clergyman always means a man who wishes at least to diminish the number of miracles; it never means a man who wishes to increase that number.'

Ffinch's account of the Chestertons'travels, often difficult for GKC's frail wife, Frances, are fascinating, especially the tours of the United States, Palestine, and Poland. Chesterton's love for Poland was constant, for she was, like Ireland, "at once intensely loved and intensely hated' for her great popular devotion to Catholicism. In contrast to Alzina Stone Dale's recent study of Chesterton, An Outline of Sanity--in which Chesterton's conversion to Catholicism is seen essentially as an afterthought to his emergence as a champion of Christian orthodoxy twenty years before--Ffinch constructs his volume in a way that suggests that joining the Church was a natural and inevitable, if belated, feature of Chesterton's development. No doubt if Chesterton had died--as he almost did in 1915--before his conversion to Catholicism he still would rank high among the champions of "orthodoxy.' But as it is, The Everlasting Man, The Thing, and St. Thomas Aquinas make it impossible not to label him a Catholic writer.

His travels to the Holy Land giverise to a discussion of the inescapable, awkward question of his attitude toward Jews. He was not a racist or even a religious anti-Semite, and he accepted the Zionist premise that the Jews are a distinct people or nation. Because of that, he held, their position in other nations should be formally that of "guests.' He feared that the failure of both Jews and non-Jews to accept that view was going to result in a horrendous catastrophe. Such a catastrophe of course did come about, but to hold that the legal distinction of Jews from others in modern nations could have avoided the Holocaust is totally unrealistic.

American conservatives--even thosewho agree with Chesterton on nearly every other point--will mostly find Chesterton's economic ideas confused, and confusing. For instance, G. K.'s Weekly sympathized with the general strike of 1926. In 1912 Chesterton began to write regularly for the socialist Daily Herald. He had lost his column in the Liberal Daily News because of his poetic criticism of its patron, the teetotaling chocolate magnate, George Cadbury:

Cocoa is a cad and coward,

Cocoa is a vulgar beast,

Cocoa is a crawling, cringing,

Lying, loathsome swine and clown.

However, much earlier in his career hehad forsaken the lure of socialism, especially as he came under the influence of Hilaire Belloc, who, in The Servile State, very precisely pinpointed the enemy of liberty in the collusion of capitalists and the state.

Chesterton enthusiasts will be annoyedat Ffinch's acceptance of Ada Jones's (Mrs. Cecil Chesterton's) claim that GKC's marriage was unconsummated as a consequence of Frances's revulsion at his over-aggressive and awkward "assault' on their marriage night. The fact that Frances later underwent (unsuccessful) surgery to facilitate pregnancy ought to contradict Ada's claim, which was in part based on hostility toward her sister-in-law.

Unlike some who have written onChesterton, Ffinch does not seek to separate Chesterton from Belloc; indeed, he acknowledges Chesterton's indebtedness to Belloc, although noting that he lacked the "acerbity' or "bite' that gave such power to Belloc's writing. But that lack also spared him the enemies that Belloc made.

Especially touching is the account atthe end of the book of the search for Belloc after GKC's funeral. "He was eventually tracked down to the Railway Hotel, leaning against the door weeping, a pint pot untasted in his hand.'