Orwell on Chesterton

aqala at yahoo.com · 11 Jan 2005, 10:41 · from 2005-January.txt.gz

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From: aqala at yahoo.com (aqala at yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Jan 11 10:41:58 2005
Subject: (urth) Orwell on Chesterton
Message-ID: <20050111184153.99593.qmail at web53510.mail.yahoo.com>

I think some of this list’s subscribers will benefit from reading George
Orwell’s opinion of G. K. Chesterton:

-------------------quote-------------------
...political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent—though he was
perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one—was G. K. Chesterton.
Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who whose to suppress both
his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman
Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his
entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing,
under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as ‘Great is Diana of
the Ephesians.’ Every book that he wrote, every scrap of dialogue, had to
demonstrate beyond the possibility of mistake the superiority of the
Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content
to think of this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had
to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power, which
entailed an ignorant idealisation of the Latin countries, especially
France.  Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it—as
a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the MARSEILLAISE over
glasses of red wine—had about as much relation to reality as CHU CHIN CHOW
has to everyday life in Baghdad. And with this went not only an enormous
overestimation of French military power (both before and after 1914-18 he
maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but a silly
and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war.  Chesterton’s
battle poems, such as Lepanto or The Ballad of Saint Barbara, make The
Charge of the Light Brigade read like a pacifist tract: they are perhaps
the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in our language. The
interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually
wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about
Britain and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In
home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and
imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet
when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his
principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost
mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from
admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative government
and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had struggled so hard at
home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made Italy strong, and that
settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say about
imperialism and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by
Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even
to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his
nationalistic [Nationalism as defined by GO and not the standard meaning]
loyalties were involved.

[From NOTES ON NATIONALISM (1945)]
-------------------quote-------------------



My own opinion of Chesterton is much shorter: 
A man so lacking in thought and intellect he converted to Catholicism when
in his 40's. 




		
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