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Page 27 text:
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LOYOLA COLLEGE REVIEW Gilbert Keith Chesterton N a famous preface to a definitely poor play, Vic- tor Hugo outlined his conception of a new drama that was to be as large as life. The old ) classical distinction be- tween tragedy and com- edy was to be effaced; the sublime and the ridiculous were to be set side by side, and their juxtaposition was to result in a species of compressed reality, if not beauty, which was termed the grotesque. He had caught an idea from Chateaubriand, and prominent in the array of arguments for his theory was the contention that a catholic unity in difference, a manifold complexity, should mark the native art of Christian civilisation. In the execution of this lan Hugo never rose above fine melo- bon One reason of his failure was that he thought to produce Christian art without being a Christian. Now Mr. Chesterton is not a dramatist; but without reducing him to a formula, or making the ‘‘grotesque’’ the source of his inspiration or the key to his mind, it is possible to use this conception to indicate many dominant fcatures and important aspects. Happily, if only analogically, it characterizes his wis- dom, his thought, his imagination and his style. He advocates standing on one's head to see things properly, and this not by way of a casua we but on so many occasions and in such varied forms, that topsyturvydom might be exalted into a metaphorical definition of his philosophy of life. ‘Moor Eeffoc’’ (read it backwards) is to him “the masterpiece of the good realistic principle—the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact. To a confusion of fantasy and fact, he adds a confusion of wisdom and folly. ‘‘Simply by going on being absurd a thing can become god-like; there is but one step from the ridicu- lous to the sublime.” Such imaginative flights into the theories of knowledge and conduct might lead anywhere; but here imagination is but the dress of an understanding that seems akin to in- tuitive vision. When Mr. Chesterton urges that the way to be great is to be a great fool, he is reminiscent of St. Paul. When to find the true value of things he would turn them upside down, he re- calls Aristotle's doctrine of the mean and the advice that comes asa corollary: to avoid the extremes one had best journey in the opposite direction to the rest of men. It is to criticism that he confines his original mind. Despite a full recog- nition of the unequivocal pronounce- ments of С. K.'s Weekly, distributism is not the outburst of a theorist with a vision of Utopia; it proceeds from a desire to emphasize directly and per- sistently an aspect of human nature that both capitalism and communism overlook. It is doing on a large scale what he does incidentally when he flourishes his brief for beer, pillories the millionaire who elaborately leads the simple life, ridicules the fatuous lady who indulges some charlatan by experimenting on the proletariat. It is not that his criticism is negative. A negative attitude would be agony to him; it is the invention of a ee age and runs counter to the straight- forward simplicity of his mind. He exposes fallacy and inconsistency with exultation because he loves mental т}
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Page 28 text:
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LOYOLA COLLEGE REVIEW ee honesty and loathes sham. He attacks Fancies and Fads” because he knows the elemental claims of human nature. He has raised these principles to the domain of politics ani in their light he has studied religion. Hugo argued from Christianity to the “‘grotesque’’; Ches- terton found in Christianity the supreme complement to the “‘grotesque’’ he had already recognised in life. More than critical acumen, it was a grasp of the conditions of healthy living that brought him to the Church. His ideal would seem the old ideal of the uni- versal man—the man who lives and thinks, who finds nothing so small that it fails to give him pleasure, who finds nothing so great that he may not think about it either to question or to adore. It may be because he did not attend a university, that Chesterton has not spent his life merely reading and in- vestigating. Modern education with its pompous curricula has over-empha- sized the measurable part of cultural development to the neglect of purely intellectual training. The methods of physical inquiry have invaded letters in the name of scholarship to make letters not a preparation for life but a lifelong pastime. Of these tendencies, Chesterton is free. He runs against the modern worship of science and scholar- ship to be the champion of plain think- ing. He vindicates the plain man’s right to think, not that he may think with the poetical scientists but that he may think for himself. He has ex- tensive learning but his learning is subordinate to, is marshalled and even snubbed by an intellect that knows its rights. When he speaks it is not with a mandate from science, such as so many popularizers arrogate; it is with an appeal to the lore of human experience and to the first principles latent in daily life. Great mental clarity and a remark- able aptitude for pertinent illustration are demanded of a man who would attack high-sounding theory with elu- sive common sense. It is so easy to argue from a system with all its pre- sumptions and implications, so hard to settle a question with scarcely any premises but the perennial truisms. The modern itch for originality makes the work at once imperative and difficult. Private judgment has come to mean the intellectual's right to say what ће pleases and the average man’s choice of what may chance to please him best. With a happy combination of circum- stances, a generous allotment of luck and an imposing tome of pseudo- science to his credit, any clever person may command the enthusiastic support of vast numbers of men. Karl Marx had German materialism, the industrial re- volution, reasonable publicity, a wild theory of value and an outrageous con- ception of history. That originator of a great experiment on civilisation is not an unique example of noble senti- ment and addled thought uniting to bring forth a monstrosity. Democracy is faced with the alternative of teach- ing thought or meeting its decline and fall. Chesterton would undertake this task. To gratify the insistence upon novelty, he has evolved a style of be- wildering brilliance and prestidigital word-play. ; His imagination is bent on charging things with significance. In his own phrase, he turns ''patterns into pic- tures, sees in the squares of a chess- board the romance of chivalry, in the decorative scheme of a wall-paper the man who designed and even perhaps liked it. Swift once meditated on a broom-stick; Chesterton seems always at it. And when the broom-stick fails to suggest in some striking way the evil of capitalism, a weak point in evolution or an absurdity of the agnos- tics, then he will turn to fable and legend, see witches riding besoms across a dad November sky and reflect on the wisdom of old wives' tales and nursery rhymes. There is a perplexing side to the vigour and vividness of his imagery is.
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