In essay number three I learned more about G. K. Chesterton than about what Les Quinze is. The essay is supposed to be about a troop of entertainers, I guess. It’s really about Chesterton trying to show that he’s a good fit for high society. He knows how Moliere wore his hair, and he seems to think that the animals of the Ark were ‘fantastic.’ I say ‘seems’ because his writing is cloudy enough on this point, maybe, to shield him from a just charge of heresy. Whenever he touches on a biblical character or theme, he seems to be off the mark. So he doesn’t deserve to be given a pass. Jesus Christ is the lion ‘who will not hurt virgins,’ he says. That is an odd way to assert the falsehood that Jesus must always be as gentle as a lamb, not to mention what a failed attempt at eloquence the statement is. This essay teems with oddities. A microbe, for example, is said to be of ‘small stature’ and has a ‘shy and retiring disposition.’ This attempt at wit, by the standard I go by, is pretty witless. More perfect knowledge of Mark Twain’s method might have helped. Since this essay was published in the London News in 1931, I suppose that it was written very shortly before this time, which was just a handful of years before the author died. So I guess that this essay represents Chesterton’s mature thought. If this is what his writing is like in maturity, what need is there to read him from any other year?
In the fourth essay, so little is communicated that there is next to nothing to say about it. No target is aimed at; therefore nothing is hit. It is so loosely an introduction to Cervantes that it is not even about him. Its title is, The True Romance. Chesterton might be trying to tell us about a romance in this essay; it is impossible to say. This much can be said for sure: he is trying, in this essay, to be romantic himself: to be ‘Emersonian.’ Like Emerson does, Chesterton loads his essay up with characters and places as if an essay that means nothing will mean something by virtue of containing a large collection of words that must be capitalized. Europe, Asia, Africa, Southern nations, Northern nations, Eastern borders, an Eastern sea, Greek islands, Greek headland, the Mediterranean, and Gascony are all squished into the space of four small pages with Moorish walls and windows, Henty, Cellini, Casanova, Cervantes, Harry Harkaway, the Battle of Trafalgar, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, the Turk, the Pope, Papal galleys, the Prince, the King, Solomon, Xerxes, the battle of Lepanto, and Marguerite de Valois. No one can possibly know what all of this together means except that Chesterton must be a well read snob. Even if some of these places, persons, or events are in the writings of Cervantes somewhere, maybe in Don Quixote, it is extremely pathetic that no thread connecting these many things can be discerned in the essay.
The fifth and final essay that I read is, The Divine Parody of Don Quixote. Here again we are beclouded by Emersonian pretence. But we learn some more about Chesterton’s unbiblical beliefs. His world is one in which ‘truths contradict each other,’ a world in which each one of us may be right. This is not the belief of a fictional character, merely; it is Chesterton’s belief as well. He doesn’t hide it. Maybe he’s not ashamed of it. It is because of writers like G. K. Chesterton that relative truth is now such a widespread belief. The ‘elemental assumption that human nature is good’ is also Chesterton’s assumption; and it is that of the World, not the Bible and the Church. When he asserts that literature should not judge men, he means that men should not judge men. No wonder that he got along so well with progressive socialists like George Bernard Shaw. He had no doctrine of human depravity, no doctrine of divine judgment, and probably no doctrine of creation. As a nominal Anglican, he was an infidel; then he became a Roman Catholic, which, because of what Roman Catholicism is, was not much of an improvement if it even was one. Regardless of what religion he professed, he did not respect the Bible any more than a Muslim respects a dog.
