If you’ve read much G.K. Chesterton, you’ve probably realized that some of his stories are better starting places than others. Father Brown, generally speaking, is a much gentler introduction to his style and philosophy than Manalive or The Man Who Was Thursday. In my case, I read Napoleon of Notting Hill first, neither the easiest nor the hardest start, and I loved it. I also recommended my mother start with Manalive, and that just left her kind of bewildered (understandably so). Why is this? While Chesterton’s work is worth a lot of thought and investigation, the essential struggle of encountering his more difficult stories, aside from their occasionally funhouse mirror allegory (which is less than universal), comes from the strangeness of two quintessential elements: how he writes characters (and the resulting plots) and the central concern of his outlook on life, the exigent demand for both sincerity and joy in the mundane.

If you’ve read both modern stories and their predecessors, you know that eras often have very different expectations of how stories are written. A story by Sir Walter Scott and one by Tim Powers will vary massively not just in what happens but in how it happens, how it is communicated, and what details are considered worth integrating. This fact shouldn’t be surprising to us, but just try writing in Scott’s style when you’re used to a more modern toolset. It’s a different mindset. As C.S. Lewis pointed out in another area,¹ each era has its proclivities, and often they are invisible to us until another era forces us to confront them. Each era has its own expectation of how a story will be told; the Bible communicates stories in a vastly different way than any modern novel, with an economy of detail most moderns would find actually detrimental but which the original authors (and God, more importantly) deemed ideal.

Why do I go into this? Because if each era has a different style, Chesterton could be an era all on his own. Chesterton’s characters aren’t written in the modern, cleave-to-realism style. Neither are they written in Scott’s version of realism or in The Silmarillion’s ‘every elf a legend’ style.² Chesterton’s characters are often implausible, wild and unconstrained, men who behave outrageously, even to the point that in-story they are considered insane. Innocent Smith (Manalive) literally circumnavigates the globe in order to enjoy his home life (we’ll get back to the other part of this later). Basil Grant (The Club of Queer Trades) loses his post as a respected British judge by singing a nonsense song on the bench and finds nothing particularly unbelievable about an English gentleman living in a tree. These characters aren’t impossible, but they are, strictly speaking, not what people consider realistic.

On the one hand, this speaks to a false definition of realism. Modernity says ‘realistic’ and means ‘grimy.’ GRR Martin’s ‘every Medieval atrocity ever, but in the space of a year’ take on fantasy is called realistic, and we call Tolkien unrealistic because he never addresses Aragorn’s tax policy. Besides being a misunderstanding of history,³ it’s a gross misuse of ‘realistic’. Men are sinners, capable of horrors we don’t easily sleep on the thought of, capable of sleeping peacefully after a long day of killing women and children en masse. That man is a sinner, though, does not in this world obliterate the image of God within him. Man has nobility, tarnished and incapable of salvation but real nonetheless. The real world isn’t all sunshine and roses, but it’s also not a slipshod assembly of blood and grime where virtue’s only reward is the triumph of vice (though at times this seems the case). Grime is often realistic, but there’s more to life than grime: the world has beauty as well as ugliness.

On the other hand, Chesterton’s characters are genuinely outrageous, beyond the bounds of normality and then some. We expect our main characters to be a little beyond the norm, yes, and we appreciate the antics of comic side characters, but still Chesterton’s character smack of unreality, of being too big for the world. And they are, in a sense.

To understand Chesterton’s character, it helps to consider Chesterton’s other artistic ability: his penchant for caricature. Chesterton was hardly a great artist, but he was an avid creator of caricatures, portraits of people designed not to portray their physical measurements but their moral and social character. A caricature gives a man a large belly not for the mere reason of portraying his fatness accurately but in order to communicate his jolliness or his laziness or his affection for the dinner table. In The Poet and the Lunatics, Gabriel Gale, the protagonist, is himself a caricaturist. Gale, “fell to employing a talent for drawing… along with another talent…. His portraits were not in the ordinary sense caricatures, but they were portraits of souls” (ch. 8).

Chesterton’s characters, then, are in a sense caricatures, souls denuded of obscurity so that the world may see them. His characters are almost archetypes, though too individual for that. They are too large for life, painted in colors more saturated than they should be, so that their blacks are blacker than night, their blues deeper than sapphires, their reds like the apotheosis of a child’s red-painted fire engine, intensely sincere. Innocent Smith (Manalive) may not fit in our world- too eccentric, too enthusiastic, too lacking in social deceit-, but he is not meant to. Innocent Smith enters the drab mundanity of the world and drags it forcefully towards his own riotous serenity, demands that that drab mundanity throw off its shackles (though not its dust- that is part of its mundanity) and display a beauty more vibrant than the brightest flower of the jungle. Chesterton writes men who are implausibly sincere in their joy because he really believes that men should be sincere in their joy, and because sincere joy in the mundane is not normal, these men too are not normal, swell too big for the world and too bright for it, forge paths (plots) too vibrant for reality.

As I’ve already started to discuss, the other half of Chesterton’s oddity is his passion for sincere joy in the mundane. Tolkien discusses this idea of Tolkien’s briefly in On Fairy Stories, referring to Chesterton’s idea of seeing the mundane through new eyes and thereby discovering its beauty, dubbed Mooreeffoc (‘coffee room’ seen from the inside of the shop window). This passion is the premise of Manalive, the explanation for the apparent madness of the eponymous character. Chesterton held that man should not just look for beauty and joy in the exceptional, the wild, the extraordinary. No, Chesterton called for men to look with fresh eyes at their own homes, their own wives, their own villages, to look at these and find in them extraordinary joy, beauty new every morning. For Chesterton, a man should be a grocer just as he would be a knight.⁴

Chesterton despised the artificial and mechanistic culture he saw growing up in his time. He saw how custom had replaced morality, how men valued efficiency in progress above human virtues like compassion and family, how science’s distorted reflection had become the new god of society, and he rejected it. In The Ball and the Cross, he writes of two men who realize, when they endeavor to put their lives on the line for what they believe, that they almost alone in England are truly sincere. One may be a Jacobin-admiring atheist, the other a Jacobite Roman Catholic, but they are united in actually believing what they say. Yet they live in a society which finds that very sincerity so unique as to make them a national spectacle.⁵ This theme carries through Chesterton’s protagonists in general: they are intensely sincere in their beliefs. Patrick Dalroy (The Flying Inn)⁶ strikes forth for the ancient tradition of the English inn with a passion even unto death. Dalroy declares as much in one of the several songs Chesterton wrote for the story: “There is good news yet to hear, and fine things to be seen / Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.”⁷

This emphasis on sincerity and joy in the mundane integrates naturally with his brighter-than-life characters. They are brighter than life because they are truly sincere in their pursuits, because they deny the façade of custom and relish the joy of the mundane. This is not to say Chesterton was incapable of writing mundane characters who have the drabness appropriate to a more familiar realism. The narrator of The Club of Queer Trades is one such, the straight man to the insanity of the club’s members, of Basil Grant, the ex-judge (not so ex, as it turns out).⁸ Chesterton is offering a worldview, however, as all authors do,⁹ and that worldview is one which preaches that man should take ecstatic joy not in another man’s wife but in his own, not in another man’s life but in his own, not in another man’s home but in his own. God did not make a drab world, to Chesterton’s eyes, and so we must not dare to make it drab by shutting our eyes.

For all I’ve been discussing the difficulties of reading Chesterton,¹⁰ I consider him one of my favorite authors, just a notch below Tolkien, alongside writers as skilled as C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers. Chesterton wrote prolifically, with a whole flotilla of short stories to accompany his novels and a veritable navy of nonfiction. He wrote with skill I hope someday to match, weaving tales of men and women in a world bright in its mundanity, not despite it. Don’t be repelled by the obstacles I’ve outlined. Reading Chesterton is well worth it. Don’t start with Manalive or The Man Who Was Thursday, though. Try some of the Father Brown stories, if you enjoy mystery fiction (sometimes murder, sometimes not). Read The Club of Queer Trades if you want to read something longer but also want to read short stories. Try The Flying Inn if you want a full novel. Regardless, go read Chesterton. Ignore him whenever he gets onto the Puritans, but read him nevertheless. His nonfiction, while I haven’t really addressed it directly, bears all the marks of the worldview he proffered in his stories, and it’s written with all his skill, making it truly enjoyable to read.¹¹ Finally, if you’re an author, study him. If nothing else, learn from his undeniable facility with shaping sentences and ideas into understandable, eminently memorable forms.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – “The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.” ~ C.S. Lewis (From his introduction to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation; find a longer excerpt here)

2 – To paraphrase dreadfully, Tolkien wrote, I forget where, that elves differed from humanity in that elves are mythology, and humans are history. Thus, the great elves of the Silmarillion are sinners and saints, but they are sinners and saints built larger than life, their virtues grand and their vices the same. Even when they are petty (looking at you, Maeglin), they are petty on a breathtaking scale and with monumental- I use this word deliberately- vigor. I’ll probably have to write an article on this someday, when I get back around to re-reading The History of Middle Earth, Vol. 1-12.

3 – Here’s an article series on the topic by a historian; I believe Part III is the specific source.

4 – This position should show the remarkable irony of Chesterton’s disdain for the Calvinist tradition. This idea of the nobility of the mundane in life is one championed by the Reformed tradition against all comers, so that those who now hold it can generally find their intellectual heritage traces back to Calvin or at least to Luther, who began without finishing the realization. Of course, Chesterton and Calvinism is a topic all its own, wrought with irony; he bought into the mischaracterization of the Puritans as dour, fatalist killjoys, making his scant references to them painfully inaccurate and ironic, as if any tradition held to his ‘sincerity in joy,’ it would be the Puritans.

5 – While it can be debated if Chesterton truly knew Christ, given his fall into Roman Catholicism, this book is interesting in that it was written while he was still an agnostic, prior to joining the Anglican church.

6 – While a strict comparison is hard to make, I do not flinch from calling this the funniest book I have ever read. My sister did not perceive the humor, however, so caveat lector.

7 – You can read the poem in question, The Rolling English Road, here, out of context. It may prove helpful to understanding the second half of this article. Also note that ‘Kensal Green’ is a cemetery.

8 – Read the story to get the joke.

9 – Read this article for a discussion of the integral role of worldview in story.

10 – I didn’t even get into how Chesterton’s skill with words on the micro-scale (puns, wordplay, and sentence construction) makes him so eminently quotable. Some authors are more stylistically suited to quotes, and Chesterton is possibly the epitome of this quality (Lewis is another very quotable author).

11 – If you want to be boring, Orthodoxy is his most famous book and well worth the read. Despite its name, it’s far from systematic theology, and if you take a while to read it, it will be because it makes you think, not because of the style, which is, as typical of Chesterton, energetic, witty, and thoroughly enjoyable.