(urth) Orwell on Chesterton

[Russell Wodell]

If I remember correctly, Anthony Burgess invented the "Chesterbelloc," a 
straw man which British anti-Catholic critics used to routinely abuse. [No, 
I'm wrong: the term was devised in 1908 by A.R. Orage, so Burgess must have 
been citing him.]

A congenital non-Christian myself, in Ursula LeGuin's phrase, I am not 
really bothered by the fact that many of my favourite authors are/were 
Catholic: Muriel Spark, Evelyn Waugh, David Lodge. Most, like Wolfe, 
renegade Catholics, whose thoughts are anything but orthodox. Indeed, I 
suspect Wolfe is if anything a heretic by Roman standards, and certainly he 
is no propagandist like, for example, the Anglican C.S. Lewis.

Spark made the most concise defense in her first novel "The Comforters": 
"The True Church was awful although, unfortunately, true." This is meant 
satirically, but....

Myself, I think Wolfe's prose style would have delighted Orwell

Russell


----- Original Message ----- 
From: <aqala at yahoo.com>
To: <urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2005 10:41 AM
Subject: (urth) Orwell on Chesterton


>I think some of this list's subscribers will benefit from reading George
> Orwell's opinion of G. K. Chesterton:
>
> -------------------quote-------------------
> ...political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent-though he was
> perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one-was G. K. Chesterton.
> Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who whose to suppress both
> his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman
> Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his
> entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing,
> under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as 'Great is Diana of
> the Ephesians.' Every book that he wrote, every scrap of dialogue, had to
> demonstrate beyond the possibility of mistake the superiority of the
> Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content
> to think of this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had
> to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power, which
> entailed an ignorant idealisation of the Latin countries, especially
> France.  Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it-as
> a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the MARSEILLAISE over
> glasses of red wine-had about as much relation to reality as CHU CHIN CHOW
> has to everyday life in Baghdad. And with this went not only an enormous
> overestimation of French military power (both before and after 1914-18 he
> maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but a silly
> and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war.  Chesterton's
> battle poems, such as Lepanto or The Ballad of Saint Barbara, make The
> Charge of the Light Brigade read like a pacifist tract: they are perhaps
> the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in our language. The
> interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually
> wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about
> Britain and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In
> home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and
> imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet
> when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his
> principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost
> mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from
> admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative government
> and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had struggled so hard at
> home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made Italy strong, and that
> settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say about
> imperialism and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by
> Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even
> to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his
> nationalistic [Nationalism as defined by GO and not the standard meaning]
> loyalties were involved.
>
> [From NOTES ON NATIONALISM (1945)]
> -------------------quote-------------------
>
>
>
> My own opinion of Chesterton is much shorter:
> A man so lacking in thought and intellect he converted to Catholicism when
> in his 40's.
>
>
>
>
>
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