The Newman of a New Age
Maynard, Theodore
THE NEWMAN OF A NEW AGE By THEODORE MAYNARD THE EVERLASTING MAN is a book so profound that many reviews upon it could be published together in these columns without exhausting the subject....
...Mr...
...There are too many keys to mythology, as there are too many cryptograms in Shakespeare...
...Is there anything to put after that but a full stop...
...In his treatment of these matters Mr...
...Is there anything to say to that, except that we know as little what we say...
...And reaching that crowning dramatic incident Mr...
...But, as Mr...
...and He said to that nameless ruffian—"This night shalt thou be with Me in Paradise...
...The challenge of those critics who advise us to read the Gospel narrative without prejudice is accepted in these pages...
...He taught, but only casually: He did not primarily come into the world to teach men, but to die for men...
...The task has been attempted by many men of real genius and eloquence as well as by only too many vulgar sentimentalists and self-conscious rhetoricians...
...Chesterton says in this connection— The true origin of all myths has been discovered much too often...
...I must confess that many times Mr...
...Or is anyone prepared to answer adequately that farewell gesture to all flesh which created for His Mother a new son...
...everything is the golden bough of sacrifice...
...Certainly it is not for us to blame anyone who should find the first wild whisper merely impious and insane...
...To Socrates death was an annoying interruption of a conversation...
...Illustrations of preposterous absurdity, as in his vision of a professor, centuries hence, brooding over the interwined A's carved in the magic grotto by 'Arry and 'Arriet and drawing his learned deductions, alternate with pieces of beautiful writing—such as that which deals with the cave man's pictures...
...If my comments give the impression of a somewhat scrappy postscript to Sir Bertram Windle's able discussion of Mr...
...The world has yet to discover how great a man Chesterton is...
...Is there any need to repeat and spin out the story of how the tragedy trailed up the Via Dolorosa and how they threw Him in haphazard with two thieves in one of the ordinary batches of execution...
...What is the use of word-painting about the dark garden filled suddenly with torchlight and furious faces...
...but Mr...
...Just before the murder he prayed for all the murderous race of men, saying—"They know not what they do...
...Delicate dilettantism has inevitably degenerated into so abysmal a vulgarity...
...But if he guesses where all men are obliged to guess, his hints are so sane and simple that they must carry conviction to all except those who prefer complexity merely because it is more complex...
...Chesterton brought the heart into my mouth or moved me to tears...
...I think that I am not alone in believing that this latest of converts to the Faith will come to be regarded as holding much the same relation to this age that Newman held to the nineteenth century...
...All day I sat in your temple teaching, and you took Me not...
...Two witnesses, however, may perhaps establish more firmly than could one the fact of the importance of this book...
...In the two chapters called The Riddles of the Gospel, and The Strangest Story in the World, a light breaks that is too terrible and beautiful to be mirrored in anything but the superbly restrained and yet thrilling eloquence to which the author rises...
...The two that actually appear may be taken as samples of the twenty that might have appeared...
...As the High Priest asked what further need he had of witnesses, we might well ask what further need we have of words...
...Arnold Bennett, wearying no doubt of platitude and yet (having nothing else to say) giving out platitude in a new disguise, has recently announced with a patronage that even he must see to be ludicrous that he is not prepared to deny the ethics of Christ to be, upon the whole, the highest moral code the world has yet known...
...There is much more in The Everlasting Man than Sir Bertram Windle or I have been able to touch upon...
...It is his purpose to show that the story of the creature called man is unintelligible without the story of the Man called Christ—and that that man's story is unintelligible without an understanding of the fact that he was also God...
...Anthropologists and mythologists and students @f comparative religion merely tie themselves into ingenious knots when they fail to grasp the clew that can explain all myths by one myth which is not a myth at all...
...Can anything be added to the massive and gathered restraint of that irony...
...But magnificent as is the first half of The Everlasting Man, in its brilliance and clarity and uproarious humor and its pungent common sense, it is in the second half of the book, in which the figure of Our Lord appears, that Mr...
...Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for Me but weep for yourselves and for your children...
...and of what use are words about such words as these...
...like a great wave lifted to the sky and refusing to fall...
...It will not be retold here . . . Criticism is only words about words...
...Chesterton's genius catches fire...
...everything is everything...
...It has long been the fashion to admire the carpenter's Son as a teacher...
...everything is seed-time and harvest...
...Here the unfailing humor and humanity of Mr...
...everything is totemistic...
...Chesterton instead of his book...
...and Jesus looked upon Peter, and Peter went out and wept bitterly...
...and how in all that horror and howling wilderness of desertion one voice spoke in homage, a startling voice from the very last place where it was looked for, the gibbet of the criminal...
...It were better to rend our robes with a great cry against blasphemy, like Caiaphas in the judgment . . . rather than to stand stupidly debating the fine shades of pantheism in the presence of so catastrophic a claim...
...With what a crash of scandal would come upon the reader studying the Gospels with a really open mind — The first whisper of a certain suggestion about a certain man...
...Chesterton on prehistory, I admit that the method chosen lacks the artistic unity of a single long essay...
...everything is the sun and moon...
...To say that is to suggest the name of Mr...
...everything is ghosts and grave-offerings...
...Chesterton points out, Christ is not merely one of the moral teachers...
...Chesterton reaches the greatest moment in his great book in the following quotation— Every attempt to amplify that story has diminished it...
...Chesterton wisely avoids any controversy that might blur the outline he wishes to draw...
...Chesterton has never been more brilliant...
...The tale has been retold with patronizing pathos by elegant sceptics and with fluent enthusiasm by boisterous best sellers...
...Has anyone any further remarks to offer...
...Are you come out with swords and staves as against a robber...
...There is more of the wisdom that is one with surprise in any simple person, full of the sensitiveness of simplicity, who should expect the grass to wither and the birds to drop dead out of the air, when a strolling carpenter's apprentice said calmly and almost carelessly, like one looking over his shoulder: "Before Abraham was, I am...
...The limits of space—even the generous space allowed here—are far too narrow...
...Peter in a panic repudiated him: "and immediately the cock crew...
...Everything is phallic...
...and with flashes of illuminating insight, as when he shows how the witness to God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, has shone even in the blackness of man's most barbaric night...
...Chesterton have been his guides...
...to Christ death was the climax and the goal...
...And my last word must be given to Mr...
...The Everlasting Man is an outline of history...
...Wells...
...And if the Christ who is found as the result of such a reading is, in His enigmatic silences, His sudden sarcasm and His obscure wrath, other than the Christ presented to us in popular piety, He is seen to be infinitely further removed from the figure admired by sentimental humanitarians...
Vol. 3 • December 1925 • No. 4
