Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes

"The Divine Vulgarity of the Christian Religion"

“The DivineVulgarity of the Christian Religion” Several years ago, at a book sale somewhere here in Washington , I bought for a nominal price, to wit, fifty cents, the Doubleday Dolphin Edition (no date) of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table. This famous collection of chatter, humor, and reflection was written between  and  by the famous American physician and author. I have never really gotten into this book, but I have looked at it and read some of it a number of times. John Peterson had, in the meantime, called my attention to the Methuen collection G.K.C. as M.C.: Being a Collection of Thirty-Seven Introductions. The other day I was looking again at this book, which I had found in the Lauinger Library here on campus. I noticed that Chesterton had written an Introduction to this famous Holmes book for the  British edition (Red Letter Library, Messrs. Blackie & Son, Ltd.) of The Autocrat at the BreakfastTable. In  Chesterton’s career was just beginning. It would be four years before Orthodoxy was published. Holmes, of course, who lived from  to , had comments on all sorts of things, from Cicero’s essay De Senectute to “My Last Walk with the Schoolmistress,” on which he finally proposed to the young lady in these charming words: It was on the Common that we were walking.The mall, or boulevard of our [Boston] Common, you know, has various branches leading from it in different directions. One of these runs down from opposite Joy Street southward across the whole length of the Common to Boylston Street.We called it the long path, and were fond of it. At last I got to the question,—Will you take the long path with me?—Certainly,—said the schoolmistress,—with much pleasure.— 185 Think,—I said,—before you answer; if you take the long path with me now, I shall interpret it that we are to part no more!—The schoolmistress stepped back with a sudden movement, as if an arrow had struck her. One of the long granite blocks used as seats was hard by,—the one you may still see close by the Gingko-tree.—Pray, sit down,—I said.—No, no, she answered, softly,—I will walk the long path with you! —The old gentleman who sits opposite met us walking, arm in arm about the middle of the long path, and said, very charmingly,— “Good morning, my dears!” Such a passage, I am sure, the very philosophic and very romantic young Chesterton must have loved reading. In his essay on Holmes, Chesterton maintained that Holmes was the most “aristocratic” of all the American writers. Indeed, Chesterton felt that Holmes would be more at home in the South than in New England. In American literature, indeed, he may be said to be, not by actual birth or politics, but by spirit, the one literary voice of the South. He bears far more resemblance to the superb kingless aristocracy that hurled itself on the guns at Gettysburg or died round Stonewall Jackson, than to Hawthorne, who was a Puritan mystic, or Lowell, who was a Puritan pamphleteer, or Whitman, who was a Puritan suddenly converted to Christianity.1 Needless to say, the very theological acumen that could speak so amusingly, yes so paradoxically, of “converting” a Puritan to Christianity reveals much about the mind of Chesterton in formation in  or , when he must have written this Introduction . Recalling a good deal of the discussion of the “gentleman” and his place in political and social life that we associate with Plato and Aristotle, Chesterton saw Holmes not as a democrat but as precisely a “gentleman,” with a breakfast table at which all things might be discussed in a most genteel manner. He was pre186 “The DivineVulgarity of the Christian Religion” cisely an “autocrat,” a self-ruler, not a democrat, a point with theological implications as I shall point out later in this essay. But Chesterton was initially concerned in his comments with the fact that Holmes was both a physician and a writer.“A good doctor is by the nature of things a man who needs only the capricious gift of style to make him an amusing author. For a doctor is almost the only man who combines a very great degree of inevitable research and theoretic knowledge with a very great degree of opportunism.”2 The point Chesterton...