Eminentoes / The Everlasting Bore
Brookhiser, Richard
feasibility studies for, and in the establishment and staffing of, new enterprises (in which the state may choose to become a financial partner), and in social and industrial research, over...
...And so on, through three delicious stanzas...
...A real live antagonist concentrates his attention...
...Chesterton's books on the church can descend to the chatter of an Edwardian debating society...
...Tierno Galv~n, the urbane Marxist mayor of Madrid, expressed to me his conviction that in Spain all political wings are compressing on a center...
...Do Catholics drink too much...
...I t ' s good, front-page stuff...
...In fact, any other belief leads to tyranny and chaos...
...It is only by a long and elaborate process of literary effort that you have made them prosaic...
...The Man Who Was Thursday has to be one of the worst books Chesterton wrote...
...All these things were given to you poetical...
...A little...
...In all Lewis's works, whatever the form--the tales of Narnia or Perelandra, The Four Loves or The Screwtape Letters--one insistent injunction appears: You must choose the Christian life...
...F. E. Smith, the Tory politician, wandered in front of the gun sights with the suggestion that a bill to disestablish the Church of Wales "shocked the conscience" of Christian Europe...
...Sometimes the carefully stacked symmetries and paradoxes blaze, like a well-made fire...
...I t is rash to take a bead on Gilbert K. Chesterton...
...When his opposite numbers are not contemporaries, as in Heretics, but thinkers, or entire philosophies, of the past, the results (for instance, the sections on paganism in The Everlasting Man) are worth volumes of cultural history...
...Chesterton is like Mark Twain's description of an Englishman trying to tell a joke--nodding, winking, nudging in the ribs, enveloping the punch line in a cloud of self-congratulation...
...Chesterton might have thought so...
...They seem almost to have been chosen by lot...
...The idea is simple: The members of an anarchist conspiracy turn out, one after the other, to be detectives in disguise, while the leader, who recruited them all, turns out to be God, or someone very like Him...
...we have to be made to believe it...
...by themselves...
...It may be, as W.H...
...He had fame, honor, and love in his lifetime...
...In a later generation, he might have called it The Power of Papal Thinking...
...He has to be one of the fairest fighters who ever stepped in a ring...
...Chesterton knows where he wants our emotions to go, but they don't budge an inch...
...Lewis addresses you...
...Ideologically speaking, no more bureaucratic centralizing of the energies of the society can be imagined, and nowhere is the incompatibility of such activism by government with individual freedom recognized...
...By a happy chance, the things he liked b e s t - - Shakespeare, Dickens--are also the best things...
...Chesterton emphasizes over and over the nightmarish quality of his eventsma sure sign of trouble...
...Chesterton's sympathy is everywhere supported by a strong, comprehensive view of the world...
...But whatever he read at all carefully, he read from the inside...
...We don't want to be told that something is a nightmare...
...Lovecraft is more definite and direct...
...The mental and stylistic mannerisms fall away, or lose their power to irritate...
...There is not a character that comes alive, not an incident that moves, not a description that successfully describes...
...The word "pillar-box" is unpoetical...
...it is the place to which friends and lovers commit their messages, conscious that when they have done so they are sacred, and not to be touched, not only by Kipling...
...Chesterton fails worst not in these mundane affairs, but in those works he would have considered most important --his explications of Christianity and Catholicism (the two are interchangeable with him...
...In an essay comparing John Bunyan and William Langland, author of the medieval poem Piers Plowman, Chesterton decides-surprise!--that Catholics write better books, and praises Langland for all his own shortcomings...
...Many pundits besides Chesterton know when an idea is internally consistent, or when iambic pentameter flows musically...
...His most famous book along this line (or any of his many lines) is probably The Man Who Was Thursday...
...the prose only comes in with what it is called...
...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 When there is a job to be done (Chesterton was, after all, a working journalist) he settles to it...
...Do they, Smith...
...Laboriously, the first sentence creaks up to the summit of some point...
...I f the voice of Cecil falters, If McKenna's point has pith, Do they tremble for their altars...
...It is precisely because of priests that the stout peasants of France and Ireland are not dominated by squires or millionaires...
...The tawdry rhetoric accompanies tawdry thought...
...And when BeUoc is pouring, stand back--there is not an ice cube, or a lime twist, to soften the brew...
...it is a place where men, in an agony of vigilance, light blood-red and sea-green fires to keep other men from death...
...Hissing "There is still Committee...
...But the thing "pillar-box" is not unpoetical...
...Not that he suffers...
...It is a provoking idea...
...I have only skimmed Chesterton's politics, and the historical work he wrote to buttress it...
...He can only shout and wave at us, like a traffic cop...
...Chesterton's characteristic argument is that faith in his faith will have good consequences a, b, and c; or that it will not have bad consequences x, y, and z. Is belief in God absurd...
...He went to Italy only eight years into the Fascist regime...
...Is there a sectarian explanation of this contrast between the public and the personal--a difference of focus between Catholicism and its Protestant offspring...
...He reports on God...
...Many an early pilgrim to Stalin, Mao, Castro (and Hitler) should have Richard Brookhiser is Senior Editor at National Review...
...for to be entirely romantic a thing must be irrevocable...
...Groaning "That's the Second Reading...
...The problem is undoubtedly the prose...
...Unfortunately the story which is meant to carry it is dreadful...
...It staggers under the rhetoric of the pedagogue...
...He is worth comparing, in this respect, with the other great popular Christian writer of the twentieth century, C. S. Lewis...
...That is the plain, genuine description of what it is...
...feasibility studies for, and in the establishment and staffing of, new enterprises (in which the state may choose to become a financial partner), and in social and industrial research, over which, First of all, [there must be] a superior organism on the government level, for the planification or co-ordination of scientific and technical national policy, which defines global and estimated necessities, distributes resources to different areas, co-ordinates research institutes and controls their production, promulgates the exploitations of the results of the national effort and organizes the transference of technology with other nations, especially with those of Europe and Latin America...
...He left a body o f work as vast as--well, as his body: dozens of books, most of them out of print, dozens more articles and essays, moldering unretrieved in the pages of extinct London newspapers...
...there is frequently no other apparent principle of selection...
...Catholics/Christians build better nations, sing better songs, and in every way lead happier, sturdier, and more wholesome lives...
...His view of the world rested on his religion...
...Chesterton charts the world...
...others, but even (religious touch...
...People regularly ignore, or attend to, the Christian message because of incidentals and effects...
...The matter with the AP is Fraga Iribarne, one can conclude...
...But his faith in fact finds better expression in his nonreligious books...
...his books on fiis fellow Edwardians-Heretics, or the appreciation of Shaw--rise to the sublime...
...Many fine, fine people are working their hearts out for the AP...
...Poor Bunyan--all he managed was to deposit Christian inside the Heavenly City...
...Nor do I think it fair to cite, to Chesterton's discredit, his ambivalent reaction to Mussolini...
...Hard to deny...
...The style of Chesterton's Christian polemics is ~oetter...
...You could swear Chesterton had been paid by the word...
...So what should we read Chesterton for...
...There is here a terrible afflatus...
...What he was voicing is his conviction that the Marxist prescription has won the day...
...The first reason, it seems to me, is his knack for controversy...
...Is the social life of Catholic countries too much run by priests...
...But Langland gives us a fine speech on the State of England...
...But the thing signal-box is not unpoetical...
...But after the misapprehensions have been swept away, what do we do then...
...It's sad...
...Occasionally Chesterton turned, not to an adversary or an artist, but to a saint...
...These labored sentences are marshaled into paragraphs even more labored than the sentences themselves...
...but even when it is tremendous, we can hear it rumbling a mile away...
...He has them still, and deserves them...
...The cumulative effect of stretches of Orthodoxy, and longer stretches of The Everlasting Man, is intensely tiring, like being force-fed unchewable candy...
...been as modest as Chesterton was about Benito...
...The punch line may be good...
...In his books on Thomas Aquinas or Francis of Assisi, the circle closes...
...It is modeled on the old song about the Duke of York: THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 29 The grand old Duke of York, He had ten thousand men...
...because He allowed Himself to be tortured to death so that you could have the choice...
...it is by far the worst I have read...
...I t ' s a wonder Smith didn't assume an alias...
...Not reading likely' to appeal to Pepe the Mechanic or Paco the Clerk, moreover...
...Do they, fasting, tramping, bleeding, Wait the news from this our city...
...Chesterton addresses a classroom, or a rally...
...As sexy propaganda for the A lianza Popular, its "white paper" is a flop...
...Lewis repeats, with all the modes at his command--bedtime stories, science fiction, academic essays, demonic correspondence--the same message...
...Not even the most washed-in-the-blood Chesterton fan can have read them all...
...When the target is contemptible, the results can be hilarious...
...there is a terrible hubris...
...And what words...
...The only critic who surpasses, or matches, him in this is Samuel Johnson...
...Instead of touting Christianity's effects, he shows them in the mind of one subject, and the heart of another...
...But it is a pity, when so many of his pages are so well done, that he should continue to be admired for what is weak and shoddy...
...What is evident, however, is that under its present leader there's not a chance of this coming about...
...laboriously, the second clanks down the other side...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 31...
...The purpose of the charade, the para-deity explains at the end, is to put the police in the position of rebels and criminals--to allow the defenders of order to feel "the courage of the dynamiter...
...Posting a letter and getting married are among the few things left that are entirely romantic...
...Oh, wow...
...I f there is anything worthwhile in his enemies, he will distinguish it, retrieve it, burnish it lovingly...
...Beer is good...
...because harmonies you cannot conceive or horrors you could not bear wait upon your decision...
...Chesterton fired off a little ode entitled "Antichrist...
...Mostly they collapse in cold, dismal heaps...
...Lewis grasps your lapel...
...It is the only game in town...
...Few know as well how men live, by bread, or otherwise: The word "signal box" is unpoetical...
...Auden observed in a rather catty forward to a volume of Chestertoniana, that there were things he simply didn't notice...
...But Fraga is no more than a symbolization of the intellectual flaw which resides in the philosophical acceptance by the rightwing of a programmatic statist solution to all that ails mankind...
...There were moments, the first, and only, time I read it, so vague and confusing that I literally could not figure out what was supposed to be going on...
...I have always figured that, whenever I want to sample Distributism--that curious threepronged attack on capitalism, the state, and the post-medieval world--I can get it neat in The Servile State, by Chesterton's friend and political mentor, Hilaire Belloc...
...The power of sympathy helped make him an acute literary critic as well...
...He marched them up the hill, And he marched them down again...
...This, from an essay on Rudvard Are they clinging to their crosses, F. E. Smith, Where the Breton boat-fleet tosses, Are they, Smith...
...These sorts of arguments are not frivolous...
...Chesterton bellows a hundred instances in the same tone of voice...
...Given the current fashion for distinguishing stages in I1 Duce's degradation, Chesterton's puzzled first impression may not now seem so cockeyed...
...Every sentence comes bundled in a neat pair...
...From a reading of the party's literature, an American conservative would say that an electoral victory of Alianza Popular would be other than a nightmare only by comparison with a worse alternative...
...But Chesterton's great talent in controversy is salvaging...
...Because the God who created shrews and continents, the Periodic Table and the Magellanic Clouds, designed it for your fulfillment (and you for its...
...Chesterton won't say...
Vol. 17 • February 1984 • No. 2
