Chesterton

The publishers claim for Chesterton: Man and Mask that it is a book of which Chesterton would have approved. There is certainly nothing in it—except perhaps the disparagement of Belloc—likely to cause positive offense, but it has two features which might have displeased its subject. First, its genesis. It is the thesis for a doctorate. The writing of theses has become a very prominent part in the American educational process, not only by aspiring doctors but, it seems, at high schools. Research is no longer confined to recondite subjects and foreign texts; popular modern work is investigated with equal zeal and greater ease. The fashion bears hard on contemporary writers, particularly if they are Catholics, for there are not a great number of modern Catholic writers in English and it is natural for Catholic teachers to direct their pupils towards them. Even the dimmest are beset by importunate adolescents: “I have chosen you for English. Please tell me what first influenced you to write.” Chesterton did not live to suffer from the craze but he is a writer of the modern world to this extent, that it is a grave reproach to suppose that his work needs elucidation. A writer who cannot make his meaning clear to his own generation and their immediate successors is a bad writer. Chesterton, of all men of our times, wrote especially for the common man, repeating in clear language his simple, valuable messages.

A second cause which Chesterton might have for complaint, is Mr. Wills’ literary style. It is not uniformly bad. Indeed, again and again he shows himself capable of constructing a grammatical, even an elegant, sentence. But not always—and the jargon of the lecture room keeps slipping in—”existential,” “dialectic,” “normative,” “experiential,” “complementarity”—in a way which would have set the teeth on edge in the head of the old journalist.

The publishers claim for Chesterton: Man and Mask that it is a book of which Chesterton would have approved. There is certainly nothing in it—except perhaps the disparagement of Belloc—likely to cause positive offense, but it has two features which might have displeased its subject. First, its genesis. It is the thesis for a doctorate. The writing of theses has become a very prominent part in the American educational process, not only by aspiring doctors but, it seems, at high schools. Research is no longer confined to recondite subjects and foreign texts; popular modern work is investigated with equal zeal and greater ease. The fashion bears hard on contemporary writers, particularly if they are Catholics, for there are not a great number of modern Catholic writers in English and it is natural for Catholic teachers to direct their pupils towards them. Even the dimmest are beset by importunate adolescents: “I have chosen you for English. Please tell me what first influenced you to write.” Chesterton did not live to suffer from the craze but he is a writer of the modern world to this extent, that it is a grave reproach to suppose that his work needs elucidation. A writer who cannot make his meaning clear to his own generation and their immediate successors is a bad writer. Chesterton, of all men of our times, wrote especially for the common man, repeating in clear language his simple, valuable messages.

A second cause which Chesterton might have for complaint, is Mr. Wills’ literary style. It is not uniformly bad. Indeed, again and again he shows himself capable of constructing a grammatical, even an elegant, sentence. But not always—and the jargon of the lecture room keeps slipping in—”existential,” “dialectic,” “normative,” “experiential,” “complementarity”—in a way which would have set the teeth on edge in the head of the old journalist.