G.K. Chesterton is an early 20th century journalist and writer. He was a Catholic with a newspaper column that he ran for thirty years, and – he’s also very annoying. Back in March I wrote a piece about Elden Ring where I talked about how quotable he is. He’s known for a very particular style – he likes to take sentences and balance them around some counterpoint or opposition. On Dickens, he writes “He did not always manage to make his characters men, but he always managed, at the least, to make them gods.” That’s a counterpoint that inverts some of your expectations. Normally we think of gods as being above humans – Chesterton inverts that hierarchy to make a comment on well-rounded characters. Dickens can’t always write realistic people, but he consistently writes gods, these divine, archetypal figures who “live statically, in a perpetual summer of being themselves.” This sort of grammatical construction gives Chesterton his reputation as the so-called ‘prince of paradox’. He’s always inverting sentences or setting up measured oppositions. The work of Dickens is optimistic, he says: “it may have been full of inhuman institutions, but it was full of humanitarian people.” On art and realism, he inverts the common concept that art is made up and nature is real: “Although people talk of the restraints of fact and the freedom of fiction, the case for most artistic purposes is quite the other way. Nature is as free as air: art is forced to look probable.” It’s an effective rhetorical technique, and it does make you stop and look at things a little more closely, but also, if you read enough of his work in quick succession, it becomes overpowering. It’s like mint – it’s a garnish that shouldn’t make up the whole meal. In places, you start to wonder if it’s offered as substitute for actual argument, or in place of logical connection – whether it’s essentially a bit of linguistic fireworks to mask the fact that a comment doesn’t otherwise make sense.

This issue is sometimes better illustrated by his weekly newspaper column, rather than his books – the brief pieces I think show up the issue more clearly. In the edition of the Illustrated London News published 14 August 1926, Chesterton has a column about George Bernard Shaw’s birthday where the inversions are piled up to excess:

“People are distracted with something much worse than disagreement; with an assumption of agreement – which does not exist. They do the precise contrary of what is called agreeing to differ. They differ in their version of how they agree. It is not a conflict of controversial things. It is a conflict of self-evident things; only the same things are not self-evident to the same people.”

It feels like being stuffed. It’s not pure flourish – there is a comprehensible thread through the whole thing – but it’s very clearly written by this chortling mustachioed dumbass. It’s annoying. When I first started reading Chesterton in university, I came across this comment – and I’ve not been able to find it again – that he wrote too quickly to write well. Between his dozens of books, his hundreds of essays and thousands of columns, the argument goes, he was moving too fast. He wrote too much for any of it to be good. He didn’t take his time with anything. I don’t think it’s completely true, but the critique is supported by these sorts of superficial pyrotechnics. In the Illustrated News column, he quips “If I say a thing is black and you say it is white, the question can at least be put down in black and white.” Is he actually saying anything, or is he just trying to sound clever?

A factor working against Chesterton is his very specific sense of vocabulary. He has this whole system of terms and ideas, and he’ll make reference to it as if it’s obvious and self-evident. Some of the time it’s obviously nonsense. In The Victorian Age in Literature, for instance, he writes “The novel of the nineteenth century was female; as fully as the novel of the eighteenth century was male.” What? What does that mean? At best he’s trading on stereotypes rooted in the restrictive gender roles of Victorian England; at worst he’s talking rubbish, inventing and ascribing characteristics to imagined elemental male and female forms. The modern novel is “peculiarly feminine”, he says, because it deals with “the play of personalities in private” – something he describes as “the woman’s province”. What does that mean? Do men not have private lives? Do men not have personalities at home? Even in male-dominated spheres in the Victorian era, like politics, surely decisions were shaped by how those men interacted with each other in private. So what’s he talking about? In a sense, you almost can’t assess his claims about the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until you’ve unpacked his entire theory of gender. You have to understand all of him before you can evaluate any of him.

We’ve talked about this type of issue before, with writers like Thomas Carlyle – a bunch of these historical writers use terms that may have had currency in their day, but which aren’t really coherent. Carlyle talks about ‘pagan religion’ as if it’s a cohesive category with shared characteristics, instead of just a catch-all term for any non-Christian or non-Abrahamic religion. Chesterton talks about how the modern novel is peculiarly feminine, drawing on weird gender stereotypes that probably don’t hold up to inspection. It’s the same sort of problem. With Chesterton, though, the issue goes a few layers deeper. Take his book on William Blake – at first it opens with those sweeping statements, treating general categories as having absolute characteristics. The Irish are logical, the English are illogical. Shopkeepers make the best poets. It’s all the same sort of nonsense. But he goes on to make close, specific reference to different movements and ideas. He’s clearly a well-read guy. He talks confidently about supernaturalism in the eighteenth century: “Blake is particularly the heir. Its coarse embodiment is Cagliostro. Its noble embodiment is Swedenborg.” That type of comment is harder to evaluate if you’re not particularly familiar with the range of characters involved in eighteenth-century supernaturalism. He’s talking about the key figures within a particular category rather than attributing characteristics based on ethnicity. He’s still making claims about the underlying, essential nature, but the argument is historical rather than existential. He’s not saying ‘girls are like this and boys are like that’ – he’s saying look, when you look at the spread of supernaturalism in the eighteenth century, these certain figures exemplified particular aspects. The function is the same – he’s still trying to characterise a particular group – but his evidence is different.

Alongside these efforts of characterisation, Chesterton also spends a lot of time asserting particular definitions. In a passage on mysticism, he says that mysticism is (or should be) about making things clear: “No true mystic ever loved darkness rather than light. No pure mystic ever loved mere mystery.” He relies on words like ‘pure’ and ‘true’ to suggest that mysticism is this single point or unified concept, only varying through strength of expression. It’s a very Thomas Aquinas type of idea – rather than there being multiple types of mysticism, it’s one thing sometimes expressed imperfectly. He’s decided what mysticism means – assigned it a single and proper meaning – and then anything that varies from his definition is a lesser or impure version of his ideal. Elsewhere, he declares that “like every great mystic [Blake] was also a great rationalist.” Are all great mystics also great rationalists? Well, Chesterton has decided they are. That’s part of his definition – and any mystics who aren’t great rationalists are actually therefore just bad at mysticism. There’s not a range or spectrum of mystics: there’s one mysticism expressed with varying degrees of perfection.

The problem with G.K. Chesterton is this rigid system of definitions and categories. Everything has a place and a specific order. It’s confident, but you also have to wonder whether it’s prescriptive – whether it’s not, in the final analysis, primarily a sort of gloss on how he would like the world to be. Are we reading scholarship or the glib summary of an opinion columnist, paid and trained to skate over the issues? I’m not suggesting he’s inconsistent – I think he does have a fairly sophisticated set of values. That’s also where I disagree with the idea that he wrote too fast to be good. What we see with Chesterton is the expression of a set of values across a wide range of topics. As he turns his gaze across the literary and cultural landscape, he looks always with the same vision. I think that’s part of why he’s so fast – he’s only ever writing what he sees. And sometimes he has genuinely insightful things to say. Near the end of his book on Blake, he writes “Blake’s philosophy, in brief, was primarily the assertion that the ideal is more actual than the real.” That’s correct. He has a fascinating read on Impressionism as too fixated on appearances:

“Impressionism is scepticism … it puts what one notices above what one knows. It means the monstrous heresy that seeing is believing. A white cow at one particular instant of the evening light may be gold on one side and violet on the other. The whole point of Impressionism is to say that she really is a gold and violet cow. The whole point of Impressionism is to say that there is no white cow at all.”

He’s not a hack writer, he’s just difficult to filter. It’s hard picking through what’s worthwhile and what’s frivolous or silly. When he writes about Blake that “you have to understand Blake’s doctrine before you can understand two lines of his poetry”, he might as well have been talking about himself.