Chesterton on the times

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about Chesterton but the slump is at an end. This week I finally started reading through the much-anthologized essays of Chesterton’s first nonfiction book, 1902’s The Defendant. This passage, from his introduction, struck me as particularly relevant, and naturally appealed to my eternal cry of O tempora! O mores!

“For in our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation—it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I. in the primer of minor poetry.”

Somehow, in describing 1902 he had described 2020. Pride ourselves on our Progress as we might, we really haven’t gotten far from the heresies of the Edwardian age—heresies Chesterton already regarded as tired. If only he could have known how much further we could go on them, how much deeper we could dig these blasphemies, profanities, and curses. The heresies remain, but they have lost their youthful vigor and descended into an angry and impotent senescence.

As I said, this appeals to my disdain for the present, a disdain born of and only deepening my natural pessimism. But of course, as is clear from the passage above, Chesterton will have none of that either:

The pessimist is commonly spoken of as the man in revolt. He is not. Firstly, because it requires some cheerfulness to continue in revolt, and secondly, because pessimism appeals to the weaker side of everybody, and the pessimist, therefore, drives as roaring a trade as the publican.

Which is manifestly true. Mea culpa.

But the truth in his essays is only part of the reason to return again and again to Chesterton. The other is his unconquerable good cheer, visible even or perhaps especially in his criticism and the most obvious evidence of his greatest virtue: charity. “Love” in a watered down modern word.

“[T]hings must be loved first and improved afterwards.”

So being clear about the failings of the present is easy enough, which is why it’s common. But the thing that will save the world—or at least improve the tiny corner of it entrusted to us—is charity. As Chesterton concludes in his “Defence of a New Edition”: “These essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be loved first and improved afterwards.”

I’m reading The Defendant in an inexpensive edition from Dover that includes a preface by the president of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, though the entire collection is also available free online. You can read it at Project Gutenberg here.