Literary Giants Literary Catholics by Joseph Pearce Read Free Book Online

today and gone tomorrow; even tomorrow.”
    Elsewhere Chesterton would describe tradition as the proxy of the dead and the enfranchisement of the unborn, and he also seems to have seen it as a weapon wielded by the Church Militant in her centuries-long war against heresy. The latter vision was never brought more vibrantly to life, quite literally, than in a memorable essay on Gothic architecture.
The truth about Gothic is, first, that it is alive, and second, that it is on the march. It is the Church Militant; it is the only fighting architecture. All its spires are spears at rest; and all its stones are stones asleep in a catapult. . . . I could hear the arches clash like swords as they crossed each other. The mighty and numberless columns seemed to go swinging by like the huge feet of imperial elephants. The graven foliage wreathed and blew like banners going into battle; the silence was deafening with all the mingling noises of a military march; the great bell shook down, as the organ shook up its thunder. The thirsty-throated gargoyles shouted like trumpets from all the roofs and pinnacles as they passed; and from the lectern in the core of the cathedral the eagle of the awful evangelist clashed his wings of brass.
    Chesterton’s militant approach to the authentic tradition of the Church found expression in many aspects of his work. It surfaced in some of his finest verse, particularly in “Lepanto” and “The Secret People”, in which the influence of his friend Hilaire Belloc is obvious. The Ballad of the White Horse captured the imagination of a whole generation and influenced some of the century’s greatest writers. John Galsworthy, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were among its admirers, although Tolkien later became more critical of its undoubted flaws. It was also one of Graham Greene’s favorite poems. In an interview published in the Observer on 12 March 1978, Greene called Chesterton “another underestimated poet”. To illustrate the point, he cited the Ballad : “Put The Ballad of the White Horse against The Waste Land . If I had to lose one of them, I’m not sure that . . . well, anyhow, let’s just say I re-read The Ballad more often!”
    Neither does Chesterton’s literary reputation rest solely on his poetry. On the contrary, his genius resides primarily in his prolific versatility. His many works of literary criticism were much admired, by T. S. Eliot among others, as were his biographies of Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Thomas Aquinas, but perhaps he deserves to be remembered above all for his handful of novels. As with his verse, these sometimes suffer from a slapdash approach, a carefree and careless disregard for structural discipline, but what they lack in technical tuning they gain in sparkling spontaneity. His first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill , addressed one of the central political and cultural issues of the century, the belief that “small is beautiful”. This was summed up by Adam Wayne, a character in the novel, with the proclamation that a place, however small, “which is large enough for the rich to covet . . . is large enough for the poor to defend”.
    Chesterton’s second novel, The Man Who Was Thursday , was published in 1908. It is arguably the best, and is certainly the most perplexing, of his works of fiction. On a superficial level the plot is literally a plot, in the sense of the Gunpowder Plot, revolving around a group of anarchists apparently intent on destruction. On this level, the book’s subtitle, “A Nightmare”, seems singularly appropriate. As a dreamer has difficulty unraveling the meaning of his dreams—if, indeed, his dreams have any meaning at all—Chesterton seems to have difficulty unraveling the meaning of his nightmare. On the deepest level, however, the novel explodes with the brilliance of paradoxical pyrotechnics, a fantasy of fireworks that illuminate the darkness with the deepest truths about God and his Creation.