Anti-Modernist

The first use of good literature,” wrote G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), “is that it prevents a man from being merely modern.” When Chesterton said that he doubtless had in mind some of his own favorite authors—resolute originals like Dickens, Browning, Whitman, and Stevenson, who had little in common with the decadents fashionable in his youth, or with the modernists who succeeded them. Yet he might just as well have been describing his own work, for anti-modernity characterizes nearly everything Chesterton wrote from his paean to the local and the small and the limited in The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) to his celebration of holy reason in St. Thomas Aquinas (1933).

Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC, 1874-1908

William Oddie (Author)

Oxford University Press, USA

416 pages

$74.00

Of course, one of the paradoxes of Chesterton’s work is that its distrust of modernity is what continues to make it modern. T.S. Eliot recognized this when he observed: “Even if Chesterton’s social and economic ideas appear to be totally without effect, even if they should be demonstrated to be wrong—which would perhaps only mean that men have not had the goodwill to carry them out—they were the ideas for his time that were fundamentally Christian and Catholic. He did more … than any man of his time&hellip to maintain the existence of the important minority in the modern world.”

In his brilliant study Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC 1874-1908, William Oddie revisits Chesterton’s formative years to show how his critique of the modern culminated in Orthodoxy (1908), one of his finest books, in which he set out his distinctly Christian vision, celebrating God over nihilism, joy over despair, the common man over Superman, wonder over sophistry. Taking it as a given that, “We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome,” Chesterton saw in the Christian tradition a means of acquiring that view by discovering the “romance of orthodoxy.” “It is always easy to be a modernist,” he wrote, “as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion … set along the historic path of Christendom … would indeed have been simple … But to have avoided them all has been a whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostate, the wild truth reeling but erect.” If Orthodoxy is Chesterton’s conversion story, Oddie’s book is its illuminating exegesis.

Apropos Chesterton’s happy childhood, E. C. Bentley wrote: “family affection … was the cradle of that immense benevolence that lived in him.” Chesterton was the son of an estate agent and his wife, whom Maisie Ward describes as an untidy but kind woman whose “blackened and protruding teeth … gave her a witchlike appearance.” Both parents shared and encouraged their son’s literary and artistic interests. He was equally fortunate in his wife, Frances Blogg, a devout Anglo-Catholic, who not only familiarized him with doctrinal Christianity but helped him negotiate the puzzles of daily living. She also saved him from the clutches of Fleet Street’s pubs. For years the Cheshire Cheese and Cock Tavern had been his home away from home.

After attending University College and the Slade School, Chesterton abandoned art for journalism and all his life prided himself on keeping the pot boiling. On this score, Oddie is right to argue—with his principal reader, Ian Ker, Newman’s biographer—that the greatest paradox of Chesterton’s career may be that this tremendously funny journalist was also the author of such first-rate reads as Charles Dickens (1906), The Victorian Age in Literature (1913), and The Thing (1929), which, together with his autobiography and his superb works of Christian apology, rank him with the best serious writers of the 19th century, including Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, and Newman.

Although indissolubly linked with Catholicism, Chesterton remains a fuzzy figure. Too little is known about the formation of his mind before he converted and about the ways in which he came to prize what he called the “rock of reality” by contrasting it with what Nietzsche and Schopenhauer had to offer. He could see the smash of their philosophies, he said, “as clearly as an inevitable railway smash from a balloon.” Oddie is the first biographer to pay these matters the scholarly attention they deserve.

Whether familiar or unfamiliar with Chesterton, readers will benefit from Oddie’s insightful researches. The battle between reason and rationalism still rages; and no one measures the stakes of that fight more compellingly than GKC. “To understand the development of his ideas in the context of his own age,” Oddie shows, “is not only to begin to understand why Chesterton came to write as he did; it is also to deepen our understanding of what it is to live in the modern world.”

Edward Short reviews for The Weekly Standard and The Salisbury Review and is finishing a book about John Henry Newman and his contemporaries.