One Good Book Leads to Another: Chesterton on the Victorians

Our local Chesterton Society is reading Joseph Pearce's biography of Chesterton, Wisdom and Innocence. Next month we're going to conclude our discussion of a chapter  in which Pearce introduces us to one of Chesterton's works of literary criticism, The Victorian Age in Literature.

Dale Ahlquist of the American Chesterton Society offers some background for the book, which is out of print:

In 1913 the Home University Library published Chesterton’s The Victorian Age in Literature. But the editors emphatically declared that the book was not being offered as “an authoritative history of Victorian Literature” but only as Chesterton’s “personal views” on the subject. Apparently someone with personal views cannot write an authoritative history. In other words, an author cannot be an authority.

In spite of this handicap, the book was hugely successful, with multiple reprintings. One reviewer, however, while admiring the book, still expressed his irritation at “Chesterton’s obsession with religion.” (Again, authors should not have opinions, though critics may.) The reviewer’s irritation enabled him to miss the whole point of the book: that we cannot understand the Victorian writers without reference to their traditions and creeds – especially the traditions and creeds that they have rejected. Chesterton says religion “was the key of this age as of every other.” . . .

We cannot really understand the Victorian era unless we go back to the breakup of Catholic society. The multiple heresies that pulverized Catholicism were not merely religious but cultural and political and artistic. The old order was never replaced with a new order, but only with continued reactions against the old order. Chesterton says the later Protestant-types kept the Protestantism but did away with the Christianity. The Victorian Age began under the godless philosophy of Utilitarianism; it ended in the god-defying philosophy of Decadence, where men engaged in vile behavior not because they did not know it was wrong but because they did know it was wrong. “The decadents utterly lost the light and reason of their existence.” . . .

When I began reading the on-line edition of Chesterton's study I was happy to see his mention of St. John Henry Newman as a writer:

A mere conviction that Catholic thought is the clearest as well as the best disciplined, will not make a man a writer like Newman. But without that conviction Newman would not be a writer like Newman; and probably not a writer at all. It is useless for the æsthete (or any other anarchist) to urge the isolated individuality of the artist, apart from his attitude to his age. His attitude to his age is his individuality: men are never individual when alone.

And in the first paragraph of the first chapter Chesterton cites Newman again:

Now in trying to describe how the Victorian writers stood to each other, we must recur to the very real difficulty noted at the beginning: the difficulty of keeping the moral order parallel with the chronological order. For the mind moves by instincts, associations, premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated: notions will be first defined long after they are dead. It is no good getting the almanac to look up moonshine; and most literature in this sense is moonshine. Thus Wordsworth shrank back into Toryism, as it were, from a Shelleyan extreme of pantheism as yet disembodied. Thus Newman took down the iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yet delivered, that was coming from the club of Darwin. For this reason no one can understand tradition, or even history, who has not some tenderness for anachronism.

Chesterton identifies the Oxford Movement as one of the three great trends of Victorian thought along with Utilitarianism and Romantic Protestantism, and he summarizes his view of Newman's leadership of the Oxford Movement and his Catholic career after he left it thus:

But the greater part of all this happened before what is properly our period; and in that period Newman, and perhaps Newman alone, is the expression and summary of the whole school. It was certainly in the Victorian Age, and after his passage to Rome, that Newman claimed his complete right to be in any book on modern English literature. This is no place for estimating his theology: but one point about it does clearly emerge. Whatever else is right, the theory that Newman went over to Rome to find peace and an end of argument, is quite unquestionably wrong. He had far more quarrels after he had gone over to Rome. But, though he had far more quarrels, he had far fewer compromises: and he was of that temper which is tortured more by compromise than by quarrel. He was a man at once of abnormal energy and abnormal sensibility: nobody without that combination could have written the Apologia.  In this sense his Apologia is a triumph far beyond the ephemeral charge on which it was founded; in this sense he does indeed (to use his own expression) vanquish not his accuser but his judges. Many men would shrink from recording all their cold fits and hesitations and prolonged inconsistencies: I am sure it was the breath of life to Newman to confess them, now that he had done with them for ever. His Lectures on the Present Position of English Catholics, practically preached against a raging mob, rise not only higher but happier, as his instant unpopularity increases. There is something grander than humour, there is fun, in the very first lecture about the British Constitution as explained to a meeting of Russians. But always his triumphs are the triumphs of a highly sensitive man: a man must feel insults before he can so insultingly and splendidly avenge them. He is a naked man, who carries a naked sword. The quality of his literary style is so successful that it succeeds in escaping definition. The quality of his logic is that of a long but passionate patience, which waits until he has fixed all corners of an iron trap. But the quality of his moral comment on the age remains what I have said: a protest of the rationality of religion as against the increasing irrationality of mere Victorian comfort and compromise. So far as the present purpose is concerned, his protest died with him: he left few imitators and (it may easily be conceived) no successful imitators. The suggestion of him lingers on in the exquisite Elizabethan perversity of Coventry Patmore; and has later flamed out from the shy volcano of Francis Thompson. Otherwise (as we shall see in the parallel case of Ruskin's Socialism) he has no followers in his own age: but very many in ours.

More of Chesterton's appraisal of Newman's style may be found here (also highlighting Newman's Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England).

At our last meeting, we ended our discussions in the midst of chapter 12, "Brothers in Arms" as Chesterton has confessed to Father O'Connor (the model for Father Brown) in the spring of 1912 that he wants to become a Catholic but is waiting for his wife Frances. Pearce's description of Chesterton's The Victorian Age in Literature will be part of our reading next month as we finish up chapter 12 and move along to chapters 13 through 15. In the meantime, I'm reading Chesterton's evaluations of the Brontes, Thackeray, Dickens, Meredith, Browning, Barrett Browning, et al.