Gilbert Keith Chesterton Part 9

_Chapter Seven_

THE PLAYWRIGHT

Nearly eight years ago all literary and dramatic London focused its eyes on a theatre that was known as the Little Theatre. On the night of November 7th the critics might have been seen making their way along John Street with just the faintest suspicion of mirth in their eyes.

The reason was that the most eccentric genius of the day had written a play, and it was to be produced that night, and had the name of MAGIC, a t.i.tle that might indicate something that turned princes into wolves, or transported people on carpets to distant lands, or might be more simply a play that dealt with Magic in the sense that there really was such a thing.

The play was a success--I could see that it would be at the moment Mr.

Bernard Shaw so forgot himself as to be interested in something he had not himself written. The Press was charmed with the play and went so far as to say, with a gross burlesque of Chesterton, that it was 'real phantasy and had soul.' Chesterton by his one produced play had earned the right to call himself a dramatic author, who could make the public s.h.i.+ver and think at the same time, an unusual combination.

I rather fancy that Magic is a theological argument, disguised in the form of a play, that relies for its effects on clever conversation, the moving of pictures, and a mysterious person who may have been a conjurer and may have also been a magician.

When I say that the play is really a theological one, I do not mean to say that it has anything to do with the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Validity of the Anglican Orders, or even the truth of the Virgin Birth; rather it is about an indefinable 'something' that is so simple that it is misunderstood by every one.

The play turns upon five people who are thrown together in a room that has a nasty habit of becoming ghostly at times.

The five people are a doctor who is a scientist, who does not believe in anything not material being scientific; a vicar who is a typical clergyman, who thoroughly believes in supernatural things until they are proved, when he becomes an agnostic; a young American who is a cad and a fool; a girl who believes in fairies and goes to Holy Communion, which is the one thing that depicts she has a certain amount of sense; a duke who ends every sentence with a quotation from Tennyson to Bernard Shaw.

These five people are influenced by a Pied Piper kind of fellow who calls himself a conjurer, and is rather too clever for the company.

Apparently the conjurer has been strolling about the garden when he meets Patricia, who thinks he can produce fairies. In due course the conjurer comes into the room, where he has encounters with the various occupants, who don't believe in his tricks; the conjurer is unlucky enough to meet the young American cad Morris Carleon, who is really quite rude to the conjurer and discovers (so he thinks) all the tricks except one in which the conjurer turns the red lamp at the doctor's gate blue. This so worries Morris that he goes up to his room with a chance of going mad.

The others beseech the conjurer to explain the trick; he does so, and says it is done by magic, which is the whole point of the play, that we are left to wonder whether it was by magic or by a natural phenomenon.

The conjurer gets the better of the parson, the Rev. Cyril Smith, who believes in a model public house and the Old Testament, and takes a good stipend for pretending to believe in the supernatural.

The result of the whole matter is magic, by which we presume the trick may have been done.

The play is in some ways a difficult one: we are left wondering whether or not Chesterton believes in magic; if he does, then the conjurer need not have been so upset that he had gained so much power of a psychic nature; if he does not, then the conjurer was a clever fraud or a brilliant hypnotist.

One thing is quite certain, Chesterton brings out the weaknesses of the dialectic of the parson and doctor in a remarkable way; he makes us realise that there are some things we really know nothing about; if lamps turn blue suddenly it may quite well be a 'Something' that may be magic and might be G.o.d or Satan; anyhow, it cannot be explained by an American young man; it is of the things that the clergy profess to believe in and very often do not.

It is, I think, undoubtedly a problem play, and I doubt very much if Chesterton knows what was the agency that did the trick, but I rather think that 'Magic' is a great play, not because of the situations, but rather because the more the play is studied the more difficult is it to say exactly what is the lesson of it.

Magic is called a phantastic comedy; it might well be called a phantastic tragedy.

_Chapter Eight_

THE NOVELIST

There is perhaps no word in the English language which is more elastic than the word novel as applied to what is commonly known as fiction. The word novel is used to describe stories that are as far apart as the Poles. Thus it is used to describe a cla.s.sic by Thackeray or d.i.c.kens, or a clever love tale by Miss Dell, or a brilliantly outspoken s.e.x tale by Miss Elinor Glyn, or a romance by Miss Corelli, or a tale of adventure by Joseph Conrad, or a very modern type of a.n.a.lytical novel by very modern writers who are a little bit young and a big bit old.

I do not think that it is an exaggeration to say that Chesterton as a novelist carries the art yet a step farther and has added elasticity to the word. It would, I think, be probably untrue to say that Chesterton is a popular novelist; he is much too unlike one to be so. That he is read by a wide public is not the same thing; he has not the following of the millions that Charles Garvice had, for the millions who understood him might find Chesterton difficult. Really Chesterton is read by a select number of people who would claim to be intellectual; very up-to-date clergymen rave about his catholicity, high-brow ladies of smart clubs delight in his knave whimsicalities, but the girl in the suburban train to Wimbledon pa.s.ses by on the other side.

One of the characteristic features of Chesterton's novels is his clever selection of t.i.tles that are by their very nature fit to designate his original works. If in journalism nine-tenths of the importance of an article depends upon its t.i.tle, it is equally true that the t.i.tle of a novel is of the same import. Either a t.i.tle should give some indication of the nature of the book, or it should be of the kind that makes us want to read it; this is the case with regard to the Chesterton novels, their designations are so phantastic that our curiosity is aroused. Thus 'The Man who was Thursday' gives no possible explanation of what it is about, but it does suggest that it is interesting to know about a man who was Thursday; 'The Flying Inn' may be a forecast of prohibition or it may be a romance of the time when inns shall fly to the ends of the earth; 'The Napoleon of Notting Hill' leads us to suppose that perhaps there was a hidden history of that part of London, that Notting Hill can boast of a past that makes it worthy of having been a station on the first London tube.

It is unsafe to prophesy any limit to the versatility of Chesterton, but it is improbable that he could write an ordinary novel; the reason is, I fancy, that he cannot write of the ordinary emotions with the ease that he can construct grotesque situations. This is why I have said that, as a novelist, Chesterton is not popular in the sense that he is read by the ma.s.ses (that word that the Church always uses to indicate those who form the bulk of the community). As a novelist, Chesterton stands apart, not because he is better than contemporary writers of fiction, but because his books are unlike those of any one else.

I have taken Chesterton's most famous novels and have written a short survey of their character. They are not always easy to understand--sometimes they seem to indicate alternative points of view; they teem with pungent wit and shrewd observations, they are without doubt phantastic, they are in the true sense clever.

'THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL'

At the time of the publication of this book the critics with astounding frankness admitted that, while this was a fine book, they had difficulty in deciphering what it meant. One, now a well-known Fleet Street editor, went farther, and said that possibly the author himself did not know what he meant--a situation in which quite a number of authors have found themselves, especially when they read the reviews of their books.

'The Napoleon of Notting Hill' is not an easy book to understand: it may be a satire, it may be a serious book, it may be a prophecy, it may be a joke, it may even be a novel! I think that it is a little bit of a joke, in a degree serious--something of a satire, possibly a prophecy.

The main thing about the book is that a king is so unwise as to make a joke, and an obscure poet is more unwise in taking this Royal joke seriously. Many who have laughed at monarchical wit have found that their heads had an alarming trick of falling on Tower Hill.

In 'The Napoleon of Notting Hill' we are living a hundred years on, and we are to believe that London hasn't much changed; a certain respectable gentleman has been made a king for no special reason--a very good way of having a versatile monarchy and a selection of kings.

Not far off in the kingdom of Notting Hill there resides a poet who has written poems that no one reads. He is a romantic youth, and loves Notting Hill with the love of a Roman for Rome or of a Jew for Whitechapel. The new king, by way of a joke, suggests that it would be quite a good idea to take the various parts of London and restore them to a mediaeval dignity; thus 'Clapham should have a city guard, Wimbledon a city wall, Surbiton tolling a bell to raise its citizens.'

It so happens that the obscure poet, Adam Wayne, has always seen in Notting Hill a glory that her citizens cannot see; he determines to make the grocers and barbers of that neighbourhood realise their rich inheritance. The new king, for some reason, desires to possess Pump Street in Notting Hill, and this gives the poet's dream a chance to mature; and he gets together a huge army, with himself as Lord High Provost of Notting Hill. There are some frightful battles in the adjacent states of Kensington and Bayswater, and, after varying fortunes, the Notting Hill Army is defeated, the Napoleon becomes again the poet of Notting Hill, while his citizens have developed from grocers to romanticists, from barbers to fanatics.

That there might be in the future a Napoleon of Notting Hill is highly improbable, that London will ever return to the pomp and heraldry of the Middle Ages is not at all likely; but that in a hundred years Notting Hill will be different is quite possible. If it is not likely that there will be fights between Bayswater and Notting Hill, there may at least be battles in the air unthought of; it may well be that its citizens in times of peace will take a half-day trip, not to Kew Gardens or to Hampton Court, but to Bombay and Cape Town.

'Ma.n.a.lIVE'

One of the strangest complications that man has to face is the criminal mind. It is so complex that no society has ever understood it; very often it has not taken the trouble to try. No method of punishment has stamped out the criminal; no reformers, however ardent, have freed the world from those who live by violence, kill by violence, and are themselves killed by violence. If crime is a disease, then to treat criminals as wrongdoers is absurd. If every murderer is insane, then hanging is nonsense; if a murderer is sane, then sanity is capable of being more revolting than insanity.

'Ma.n.a.live' may, perhaps, be called a philosophy of the motive for crime; it may be a pseudo philosophy--at least it is an entertaining one--which cannot be said about all serious attempts at moulding the universe into a tiresome system, that is uprooted generally by the next thinker. The book opens with a very strong gale that ends with the arrival at a boarding house of a man who can stand on his head and has the name of Innocent Smith. He is somewhat like the person in the 'Pa.s.sing of the Third Floor Back,' in that he revolutionizes the household, who cannot determine whether he is a lunatic or not; anyhow, he falls in love with the girl of the house. Unfortunately, rumour--a nasty, ill-natured thing--has it that Smith is a criminal. Evidence is collected, and a Grand Jury inquire into the charges, which include Bigamy, Murder, Polygamy, Burglary. It looks as if Smith is in for a very uncomfortable time, and the wedding bells are a long way from ringing.

The second part of the book is concerned with these charges and the conduct and motives of Smith. But Chesterton is a clever barrister, and shows that the motives behind the 'crimes' are not only within the law, but are extremely useful and throw a new light on criminology.

The crime of murder of which Smith is accused is one that he is supposed to have perpetrated in his college days. It was nothing less than firing at the Warden. The reason was not at all that Smith wanted to murder the Warden, but, rather, to discover if his theory of 'the elimination of life being desirable' was a sincere one. It was not. As soon as the Professor thought he might attain the desired bliss of death, he desired more than anything that he might live. The fact, then, that Smith pointed a pistol at his Warden was perfectly justifiable; it had the eminently good principle of wis.h.i.+ng to test a theory.

If Smith was a bigamist he was so with his own wife, only that he happened to like to live with her in various places; if he was a burglar, he was perfectly justified, because he merely robbed his own house--in fact, he does not wish to steal, because he can covet his own goods. Chesterton, on these grounds, acquits the prisoner.

At the end of the book another or the same great gale springs up, and Smith, accompanied by Mary of the boarding-house, disappears. Clever as Chesterton's explanations of the crimes are, we shall not probably shoot at the Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge in order to demonstrate to him how desirable life really is; we shall not burgle our own sitting-room for the mere excitement of it; we shall not flit with our wife from Peckham to Marylebone, from Singapore to Bagdad, to imagine that we are bigamists or polygamists; rather, we shall sit at home and sigh that all crimes cannot be as easily settled as those Chesterton propounds and shows are not crimes at all.

'THE BALL AND THE CROSS'

It is usually a.s.sumed that a theological argument is a dull and prosy affair that has as its perpetrators either Professors of Theology or Professors of Rationalism. It is, of course, true that many Professors of Theology are dull, but they do not usually argue about theology at all. Professors of Rationalism are equally dull and are seldom happy when not engaged on the hopeless task of trying to understand G.o.d when they know nothing about Man and little about Satan.

'The Ball and the Cross' is a theological novel. It is, without any doubt, the most brilliant of Chesterton's novels; it is an argument between a Christian a.s.s and a very decent atheist. Atheists, if they are sincere, are on the way to becoming good Christians; Christians, if they are insincere, are on the way to becoming atheists.