High Calling Magazine
The official publication of The Francis Asbury Society

G.K. Chesterton's "Great Conversation":
The Art of Biography in an Inhuman Age

BY DR. DANIEL H. STRAIT
 

Daniel Strait is an Editor of the Review and Associate Professor of English at Asbury College, in Wilmore, Kentucky, where he has been selected recently as a Lilly Scholar.  Dr. Strait will concentrate his research efforts on two Chesterton projects:  one exploring Chesterton and biography and another focusing on the influence of Chesterton on writers such as C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield and Dorothy Sayers.

In The Wilfrid Wards and the Transition, Maisie Ward explores the life of her father, Wilfrid Ward, a Catholic writer and biographer best known for his magnum opus, the biography on Cardinal Newman.  Wilfrid Ward wrote three other important studies about the Catholic revival in the mid-to-late nineteenth-century England:  William George Ward and the Oxford Movement, a two-volume study of the religious and literacy life of his father, and a life of Cardinal Wiseman.  "For the serious reader," says Maisie Ward about her father's works, "such books as the two W. G. Ward biographies and the Wiseman were a revelation of Catholicism not only as a polity but as a life."¹

In the emerging Modernist crisis in the Catholic Church, Wilfrid Ward felt that biography was the narrative form most suitable for exploring the Christian life as a vocation, viz., God's calling the individual believer into the unity of his family, the Church.  Maisie Ward concludes that writing religious biography enabled Wilfrid Ward to make a "legitimate appeal to an experience derived from objective fact to which every saint bears witness."² Ward believed that the whole history of the Catholic Church was, in a real sense, a history of biography, a chronicle of human life, shaped by religious experience – in short, a testament to divine revelation.

Chesterton had much to say about Ward's biographical work.  In fact, Chesterton's comments on Ward reveal many of Chesterton's own ideas about the nature of biography.  Biography, for Chesterton, was fundamentally a creative task, akin to but not identical with the task of a novelist or portrait painter.  Like other artists, a biographer, as Chesterton says of Ward, has to deal "with life and the springs of life."³  He adds, "There is nothing so authentically creative as the divine act of making another man out of the very substance of oneself.   Few of us have vitality enough to live the life of another."⁴  This is a definition of friendship, of course.  It rests on the certainty that God created individual persons for reciprocal relationships, which presupposes self-transcendence, not egoism, as an essential feature of the traditional Christian view of human personhood:  one fully knows himself only in relation to another.

Along these lines, Chesterton offers his most penetrating insight into Ward's life, which again strikes to the very heart of his own view of biography:

He (Ward) was anything but merely receptive; he could be decidedly combative, but he could also and above all be strongly cooperative with another's mind. His intellectual qualities could be invisible because they were active, when they were the very virile virtues of a biographer which are those of a friend.⁵

Maisie Ward reiterates Chesterton's idea in her own writing, contending that her father's ability to be "strongly co-operative with another's mind" helped him to play a key role in the founding of the Synthetic Society, a lineal descendant of the old Metaphysical Society, whose membership included, among others, Tennyson, Ruskin, and T. H. Huxley.⁶  Wilfrid Ward's primary objective was for the Synthetic Society to introduce members to other members, to G. K. Chesterton for instance; his second was to introduce members "to themselves."⁷

This paradox of introducing other people "to themselves" deserves attention.  Ward certainly hoped that members of the Synthetic Society, in their encounters with other members, would discover themselves as whole persons.  The same paradox forms the centre of Chesterton's biographical writing, in which biography becomes a form of friendship, a narrative means to introduce his biographical subjects "to themselves."  This idea strikingly challenges the contemporary notion of the autonomous individual whose identity is based on self alone.  The semantic and cultural story of the modern self – "the first individual" – begins as early as the seventeenth century.⁸  Yet history witnesses to the fact that individual human freedom is not the same thing as rigid personal autonomy.  Saints, martyrs, prophets may have "stood out against the almost unanimous obloquy of their communities in order to deliver God's message," as Charles Taylor has written, but "it goes on being true of such heroes that they define themselves not just genetically but as they are today, in conversation with others."⁹  Part of being properly oriented to the good, says Taylor, is locating one's life and the lives of others in narrative form, as a "quest."¹⁰  Biography was for Chesterton essentially a means of entering into conversation with others.  In that Chesterton enjoyed a "great conversation," he related to the good in the lives of his biographical subjects and so brought that good out in narrative form for his readers.

Biography thus enabled Chesterton to explore human life as a "quest," an "unfolding of the action of the will as it adheres to or thwarts the Divine purpose," to quote Josephine Ward, Wilfrid's wife.¹¹  Chesterton affirmed the traditional Catholic understanding of selfhood:  human persons, before the Fall, were created to be "in friendship" with the Creator and in harmony with the creation and other persons, in a state to be surpassed only by the glory of the new creation in Christ.¹²  It is true that personal being, as John Crosby notes, "is fully itself only in God."¹³  But as human persons, Crosby adds, "we are ordered one to another, and mediate ourselves to each other, remembering that we do not first become intact, thriving persons and only subsequently turn to others, but rather gain ourselves in and through relation with others."¹⁴ This idea finds perfect expression in Christ's own words:  "Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it"  (Matt. 10:39), a divine truth that cuts two ways:  first in one's surrendered life to God; second in one's reciprocal life with another.

Framed in these Aristotelian-Christian terms, Chesterton's biographical writing is indeed an act of friendship, of introducing biographical subjects not just to Edwardian audiences, but also "to themselves."  The paradox also derives in part from Chesterton's belief, expressed first in his biography of Chaucer (1932), and, most notably, later in his Autobiography:  all men and women have at the "back of their brains"  far more religious truth than they usually realize, "a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment."  Writing biography was for Chesterton a narrative means to "dig for this sunrise of wonder" in order really to "see" his biographical subjects in the effulgence of human sympathy and understanding.¹⁵

As a form of friendship, Chesterton's biographies seek to understand not just the details of a particular human life but also the essence of that life, its quiddity.  In Robert Louis Stevenson (1927), Chesterton admits, "I am especially interested in a certain story, which was indeed the story of his (Stevenson's) life, but not exactly the story of his biography.  It was an internal and spiritual story."¹⁶  Some scholars have been critical of such statements, of Chesterton's dominant "presence" in his biographies, of his sometimes sloppy handling of the details of the lives of his biographical subjects – the indexing of dates, specific events, and background circumstances – in favor of, as in Stevenson's case, "the story of his biography."  While such criticism has a point, it is ultimately unwarranted.  It tends to overlook a vital aspect of Chesterton's biographical work, namely his ability to reveal the deeper identities of his biographical subjects as human persons sub specie aeternitatis.  If Chesterton was careless in the process, it was a "divine carelessness," to use Sheridan Gilley's phrase.¹⁷

Chesterton's ability to see beyond biographical details further enabled him to draw out the true natures of his biographical subjects.  His desire to "save" rather that "condemn" their theses was a vital part of his work, both as a journalist and as a public intellectual in Edwardian England,¹⁸ who celebrated human persons in an age increasingly threatened by the forces of the inhuman:  technology as modern superstition, the egoism of modernity, psuedo-science, unchecked progress, the abuses of capitalism, evolutionary fantasy, historicism, racism and eugenics.¹⁹  In confronting such forces and in exposing them as the threat they were to human sanctity and community, Chesterton demonstrated his real virtues as a biographer, which are "those of a friend":  to see beyond the fullness of biographical data, beyond a simple recital of the facts of a particular life, to the deeper human identity of that life.  He does just this in his life of Robert Browning (1903):

To Browning, probably the beginning and end of all optimism, was to be found in the faces in the street.  To him they were all masks of a deity, the heads of a hundred-headed Indian god of nature.  Each one of them wore some expression, some blend of eternal joy and eternal sorrow, not to be found in any other countenance.  The sense of the absolute sanctity of human difference was the deepest of all his senses.²⁰

In this passage, Chesterton's language conveys what Denis Donoghue describes as biography's hidden power, "an unassertive humanism, which quietly but illuminatingly carries a vocabulary of selfhood, identity, personality, individuality." ²¹  Chesterton's biographies insist on this human uniqueness in deep recognition of the overall way of being of a particular life.  Good biography does not mistake the mere facts of a life for the actual life itself:  "A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory," says the poet Keats, "and very few eyes can see the mystery of his life – a life like the scriptures – figurative."²²

Chesterton had little use for mere fact if it hid a human face.  He wanted rather to illuminate the life of a biographical subject in an effort to awaken the imaginations of his readers to the mystery of that life and the sacred drama of which it was vitally a part.  His flashes of biographical illumination, however, can sometimes be unfair.  The spotlight follows his actors even when they are off stage, as in his calling Shaw a Puritan, for example.  Yet Chesterton's vice springs from the same source as his virtue, his capacity for friendship.  He celebrated in his biographical work what he thought Edwardian culture often failed to realize:  that human life manifests a certain delightful strangeness, a mystery beyond simple telling, a poetic quality, themes he develops in Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man.

In his biography of the Victorian painter G. F. Watts (1904), Chesterton uncovers what he perceives to be Watts's deeper identity.  Amid the welter of biographical facts about Watts' life as an artist, Chesterton unearths an old Catholic pattern, one which, at least for Chesterton, initiates a kind of incarnational reading, whereby in following the written words on the page he actually traces the outlines of a human back, the predominant symbol in Watts' painting, which Chesterton interprets as God's mysterious presence in the lives of Hebrew people:

But this mystery of the human back has again its other side in the strange impression produced on those behind:  to walk behind anyone along a lane is a thing that, properly speaking, touches the oldest nerve of awe.  Watts has realized this as no one in art or letters has realized it in the whole history of the world:  it has made him great.  There is one possible exception to his monopoly of this magnificent craze.  Two thousand years before, in the dark scriptures of a nomad people, it had been said that their prophet saw the immense Creator of all things, but only saw Him from behind.  I do not know whether even Watts would dare to paint that.    But it reads like one of his pictures, like the most terrific of all his pictures, which he has kept veiled.²³

With the eye of a fellow painter, Chesterton presents Watts' identity as an artist but also as a man moving in a world of meaning, a world which is a sacrament and a mystery.  The curious, daunting image of the human back persists in Chesterton's writing, specifically in his detective-thriller The Man Who Was Thursday, in the picture of Sunday from behind, who looked bigger and terribly in scale, to the point that the other figures "seemed quite suddenly to dwindle."²⁴

Biography as friendship – as a form of deep recognition – made it possible for Chesterton to get around in front of his subjects, even if it meant, paradoxically, that his subjects became more mysterious, even at times larger than life, as in Chesterton's portrait of Charles Dickens.  In the biography (1906), Chesterton penned a notable critical remark:  "Dickens was to make men feel that this dull middle-class was actually a kind of elf-land."²⁵  But what often escapes critical attention is that Chesterton draws out Dicken's deepest convictions,  by identifying the essence of Dicken's life and art:  significant life experience is made up of human things – not of masks but faces in the street, not of social stratification but the poor, not of economic crisis but workhouses and dirty factories, not of psychological dislocation but loneliness  and despair.  "I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life," says Chesterton in Orthodoxy, "which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts."²⁶

Dickens faced problems in his age similar to those Chesterton confronted in his own, in Edwardian England, a modern culture made weary from unbelief.  To address this spiritual crisis, however, Chesterton turned to biography, even to a biography of his good friend and contemporary Bernard Shaw (1909), which traces such cultural weariness to the loss of traditional Christian beliefs:

If we will look at the actual words Redemption and Resurrection and Salvation and the Image of God, we shall see them quite simply staring us in the face, all that I have said here.  It was religion that refused to despair of Man; it is scientific progress and evolution that are already despairing of him.  And it is not the Superman but very truly and actually the Son of Man, Who comes in clouds of glory to judge the world.²⁷

The crisis in belief in Edwardian culture gave rise to cruel and distorted parodies of traditional Christian faith, such as a gospel of progress, an obsession with sham mysticism and occultism, and cheap entertainment as an elixir for pathological boredom – false imitations all, that destroy and denude rather than affirm the sacredness of human personhood.  These problems formed the substance of much of the thirty-year conversation Chesterton and Shaw enjoyed.  Still largely overlooked, however, is Chesterton's desire, particularly in the Shaw biography, to introduce Shaw "to himself", to convince him of his deeper identity.  Chesterton's delightful public debates with Shaw reinforce the same point.

In Chesterton's biography of William Blake, published a year after his book on Shaw, Chesterton further describes the climate of the Edwardian cultural crisis.  In the context of Blake's life, while offering an extended meditation on the difference between good and bad mysticism, Chesterton alerts his reader to the fact that certain Romantic tendencies transmuted into a modern "mysticism", which was spiritualized, vague, abstract, and unreliable, i.e., it was inhuman.  With characteristic generosity, Chesterton counters this view by describing, in the language of Blake's poetic lexicon, a proper mysticism, one that relates more discernably to the moral and spiritual orders of a God-ordained, sacramental world:

No pure mystic ever loved mere mystery.  The mystic does not bring doubts or riddles:  the doubts and riddles exist already.  We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out.  The mystery of life is the plainest part of it…. Every stone or flower is a hieroglyphic of which we have lost the key; with every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.  The mystic is one who offers an explanation which may be true or false, but which is always comprehensible.²⁸

Chesterton's biography of Blake becomes an instrument of Chesterton's moral and religious vision, a kind of touchstone for "great conversation."  This approach to biography seems to downplay "facts" in favor of "values" and hence to deviate radically from the thesis that biography should be a form of modern objective reporting.²⁹  As with his biography of Stevenson, however, Chesterton intended to do more than merely report biographical facts.  He wanted rather to tell the story of Blake's life, even if it meant that this story was not Blake's biography.  Does this make Chesterton a hagiographer, a modern biographer, or something else entirely?

However he is to be classified as a biographer, one thing is certain:  biography offered Chesterton the best means of telling the story of a particular person in an age increasingly dominated by forms of the inhuman.  The Edwardian Age in England, as Thomas C. Peters has written, saw "a rise in new ideas – various theories, catchwords, slogans, and creeds – which both formed and were formed by the prevailing forces of capitalist industrial growth."³⁰  Trends such as these posed a particular threat to a sane human economy, one predicated on human relationships, rather than on abstract or speculative economics.  In his biography of William Cobbett (1925), perhaps the best example of Chesterton's capacity to reveal the deeper identities of his biographical subjects, Chesterton draws out Cobbett's deepest convictions and expresses them in his own sacramental language:

He [Cobbett] would have been as ready as any merchant or trader to face the fact that man, as God made him, must make money.  But he had a vivid sense that the money must be as solid and honest as the corn and fruit for which it stood, that it must be closely in touch with the realities that it represented; and he waged a furious war on all those indirect and sometimes imaginary processes of debts and shares and promises and percentages which make the world of wealth today at the worst unreal and at the best unseen.

His whole life was a resistance to the degradation of the poor; to their degradation in the literal sense of the loss of a step, of a standing, of a status.  There lay on his mind, like a nightmare of machinery crushing and crunching millions of bones, all the detailed destruction of the private property and domestic traditions of destitute families; all the selling up and breaking up of furniture, all the pawning of heirlooms and keepsakes; all that is meant by the awful sacrifice of the wedding-ring.³¹

By the time Chesterton was writing his biography of Cobbett in 1925, nearly a century after his famous Rural Rides (1830), Cobbett's gravest concern about the economic and social unsettling of English culture had already come to fruition:  the loss of traditional human communities rooted in the land. 

Only one of Chesterton's biographies tells the life of a person who was actually his friend and contemporary: his biography of Bernard Shaw.  The rest of Chesterton's biographical subjects – Browning, Dickens, Stevenson, Blake, Cobbett, Chaucer, Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Francis of Assisi – only speak to him, however emphatically, from the past.  They were for him part of what he called the "democracy of the dead."³²  Yet Taylor says, "Our 'conversation' with the absent and dead is, of course, mediated by the works of oral and written culture, by sayings, sacred writings, works of thought, poetry, and works of art in general.  These are originally conceived as figuring in a conversation."³³  Chesterton's "great conversation" describes his desire to enter into the lives of these historical figures and bring to fruition something of their own "dream of full presence,"  to use Taylor's words in a slightly modified sense.  This desire is the key to understanding Msgr. Ronald Knox's poem about Chesterton, Death of a Biographer.   Knox's poem captures the idea that, in a real way, Chesterton's biographical subjects "needed him" to introduce them to themselves, as one devoted friend needs another to understand himself.

_____

¹  Maisie Ward, The Wilfrid Wards and the Transition vol. 1 (New York:  Sheed and Ward, 1934), p 257.

²  Maisie Ward, The Wilfrid Wards and the Transition vol. 2 (New York:  Sheed and Ward, 1937), p. 195.

³ Ward, Transition vol. 1, p. 239

⁴. Ibid.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Ward, Transition vol. 1, p. 354.

⁷ Ward, Transition vol. 1 p. 374.

⁸ Edward A. Tayler, "The First Individual," in Soundings of Things Done:  Essays in Early Modern Literature in Honor of S. K. Heninger, Jr., Peter E. Medine and Josephy Wittreich, edd. (Newark, [DE]: University of Delaware Press, 1997), pp. 251-59.

⁹ Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self:  The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1989), p.37

¹⁰ Taylor, p. 52.

¹¹ Ward, Transition vol. 1, p 233.

¹² Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 374.

¹³ John F. Crosby, The Selfhood of the Human Person (Washington [DC]:  The Catholic University of America, 1996), p 297.

¹⁴ Crosby, p 297.

¹⁵ G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (London: Burns Oats, 1937), pp. 94-95.

¹⁶ G. K. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson (London:  Sheed and Ward, 1955). p. 21.

¹⁷ Sheridan Gilley, "Chesterton's Politics", The Chesterton Review 21 (1995) p. 29.

¹⁸ Ward, Transition vol. 1, p. 374.  Maisie Ward quotes from a letter from Father Tyrrell, a controversial figure in the Modernist crisis in the Catholic Church, the following passage in the "spirit" of St. Ignatius:  "Every good Christian should wish rather to save his neighbor's thesis than to condemn it."

¹⁹ Cf. John Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull:  Hull University Press, 1984).

²⁰ G.K. Chesterton, Robert Browning (London: Macmillan, 1916), p. 186-87.

²¹ Dennis Donoghue, "The Man Who Suffers, the Mind That Creates." The New York Times Book Review, 11 March 1984, p. 33.

²² John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, vol 2, Hyder Edward Rollins, ed. (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 67.

²³ G.K. Chesterton, G. F. Watts.

²⁴ G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, (New York:  Penguin, 1986), p. 55.

²⁵ G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (New York: Schocken, 1965), p. 69

²⁶ G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Doubleday, 1990), p.50.

²⁷ G.K. Chesterton, Bernard Shaw (London: John Lane, 1935), p. 296

²⁸ G. K. Chesterton, William Blake (London: Duckworth, n.d.), p. 132

²⁹ Lionel Basney, "Narrative and Judgment in the Life of Savage" Biography 14.2 (Spring 1991), p. 154.

³⁰ Thomas C. Peters, Battling for the Modern Mind (St. Louis, MO:  Concordia, 1994), p 37.

³¹ G.K. Chesterton, William Cobbet (London:  House of Stratus, 2000), p. 15.

³² Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 48.

³³ Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 526

Article reprinted with permission from The Chesterton Review.

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