Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes

Belloc on Chesterton

Belloc on Chesterton Frank Petta, on reading of my brother-in-law’s troubles in finding Belloc’s little book on Chesterton, was kind enough to send me a copy of the obituary—it is entitled simply “Gilbert Keith Chesterton”—that Belloc published in The Saturday Review of Literature for July , . Belloc had written evidently a number of things on Chesterton just after he died, but I had not known of this particular essay. On receiving it, I read it but put it aside. I chanced to come across it the other day, looking for something else. I re-read it. And I read it a second time, and a third. I suddenly was struck by the profundity of this essay of Belloc, of how he saw the essence of Chesterton. Belloc began the essay by analyzing why the English aristocracy and press never acknowledged Chesterton’s greatness. Even though Chesterton was “the most English of Englishmen,” he stood on the Catholic side of culture. Belloc thought Chesterton ’s fame would increase, so that Belloc’s children and grandchildren would have a better chance to understand Chesterton than his own generation had. However, Belloc himself knew Chesterton. “I knew him I think as well as any man ever knew another.”This friendship was based on long acquaintance—“close on forty years”—but it was especially based on the quality of its intellectual exchange. Belloc wrote, “So thoroughly did my mind jump with his, so fully did his answer meet the question my own soul was always asking, that his conclusions, the things he found and communicated, his solutions of the great riddles, his stamp of certitude, were soon part of myself.”1 The great riddles of life were asked, answers were forged.This sense of actual answers to riddles, as Chesterton 169 showed in Orthodoxy, is especially characteristic of Christian friendship. Not just the questioning that is perhaps more Platonic , but the realization that answers are there when the proper questions are asked.The nobility of the human condition is not merely that it can ask questions, but that it can know when its questions are answered. Belloc observed, furthermore, that they both came of the same “stock.” Belloc’s mother was English.“My mother derived directly from that English middle class of yeomen and liberal stock which in literature and the arts, in law and even in arms, in merchant enterprise, and, most of all, in metaphysical and religious speculation, has determined the character of England from the moment of the Puritan triumph three hundred years ago.”2 Chesterton’s family was in the real estate business in London. Both Belloc’s mother and Chesterton came into the Church from “sheer power of brain.” Belloc acknowledged that he had grown in his appreciation of what Chesterton stood for. Belloc next remarked something that puzzled me, something I always thought he denied. I had to look it up. On his “path” from Toul to Rome, Belloc in  or perhaps in , remarked in a passage I have often cited, with considerable consolation, I admit, that “it is a good thing not to have to return to the Faith.” Here in the Chesterton obituary, we find Belloc reflecting: I myself have gone through a pilgrimage of approach, to a beginning at least of understanding in the matter [of faith]; but it was never my good fortune to bear witness by the crossing of a frontier: a public act. Such good fortune was his [Chesterton’s]. I was born within the walls of the City of God: he saw it, approached it, knew it, and entered . I know not which is for the run of men the better fate, but his was certainly of our two fates the better.3 I suppose these two things can be reconciled.Yet I cannot help but think that Chesterton himself would have been surprised at 170 Belloc on Chesterton Belloc here. Chesterton would have thought that Belloc was right in The Path to Rome and wrong in the obituary. Chesterton the convert would have agreed that it was indeed “a good thing not to have to return to the Faith.” Belloc, to be sure, was comparing a person returning to the faith after having lost it to a person who, never having had it, subsequently finds it. Belloc suggested that, for most men, it may be better to have been born in the...