Chesterton Born Today 150 Years Ago. It Seems Like Just Yesterday!
Chesterton Born Today 150 Years Ago. It Seems Like Just Yesterday!
There is no one like Chesterton. And it is his 150th birthday (born this day in 1874). That seems astounding, he was and is so resolutely contemporary. As one poem begins “Science announced nonentity, art admired decay…” And later, “They twisted even decent sin into shapes not to be named.”
He pioneered the detective story with his Father Brown series, about a priest who solves crimes by insight into philosophy and morality. He created epic poems of British history (“Ballad of the White Horse Inn”) that I have spent an indecent amount of my adulthood walking around quoting to myself:
“There was no English armor left, nor any English thing,
When Alfred came to Athelny to be an English king.”
About the great King Alfred driving the norsemen from Britain (“But for his earth most pitiful, this little land I know:/ If what is forever is, or if our hearts will break will bliss,/Seeing the stranger go…”)
He devoted his life to Christian apologetics, and no cause ever had a more faithful, able, and eloquent son.
His time saw terrorists, too, the bomb-throwing anarchists. I first met Chesterton through his philosophical thriller, “The Man Who Was Thursday.”
In “The Battle of Lepanto,” he created a triumphal epic of Christiandom’s decisive, heroic defeat of Islam at sea, seemingly (then) forever ending Islam’s threat to Europe—and freeing hundreds of despairing, hopeless Christian galley slaves that Turkish armies had taken on raid into Europe (always repelled by the undefeatable Polish Knights).
Oh, it goes one and on—and so do I, driving, on the treadmill… (“The last knight of Europe took his weapons from the wall/The last troubador to whom the bird had sung/Winging to the south when all the world was young…”
My fantasy is that that is my epitaph: “The last troubador to whom the bird had sung.” But the case is open and shut; I have not earned it. Not another word about it.
The poem below is Chesteron not on an epic canvas (except to the extent that he always was), but strolling through history with matchless wit and rhetoric, talking about our daily struggles, but also our souls, our destiny, and kidding us brilliantly until the easy intimacy (“the decent inn of death”) and the joke (“by way of Kensal Green” that drops us off in Heaven). Of an evening, the reeling, rolling English drunkard gets miles off the road to his destination, but even sober in the last hour takes a preposterous winding path to Paradise by way of Kensal Green:
The Rolling English Road
By Gilbert Keith (G.K.) Chesterton
Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.
I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,
The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.
His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run
Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?
The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,
But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch.
God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear
The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.
My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,
Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,
And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.
Source: The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton (1927)
There is no one like Chesterton. And it is his 150th birthday (born this day in 1874). That seems astounding, he was and is so resolutely contemporary. As one poem begins “Science announced nonentity, art admired decay…” And later, “They twisted even decent sin into shapes not to be named.”
He pioneered the detective story with his Father Brown series, about a priest who solves crimes by insight into philosophy and morality. He created epic poems of British history (“Ballad of the White Horse Inn”) that I have spent an indecent amount of my adulthood walking around quoting to myself:
“There was no English armor left, nor any English thing,
When Alfred came to Athelny to be an English king.”
About the great King Alfred driving the norsemen from Britain (“But for his earth most pitiful, this little land I know:/ If what is forever is, or if our hearts will break will bliss,/Seeing the stranger go…”)
He devoted his life to Christian apologetics, and no cause ever had a more faithful, able, and eloquent son.
His time saw terrorists, too, the bomb-throwing anarchists. I first met Chesterton through his philosophical thriller, “The Man Who Was Thursday.”
In “The Battle of Lepanto,” he created a triumphal epic of Christiandom’s decisive, heroic defeat of Islam at sea, seemingly (then) forever ending Islam’s threat to Europe—and freeing hundreds of despairing, hopeless Christian galley slaves that Turkish armies had taken on raid into Europe (always repelled by the undefeatable Polish Knights).
Oh, it goes one and on—and so do I, driving, on the treadmill… (“The last knight of Europe took his weapons from the wall/The last troubador to whom the bird had sung/Winging to the south when all the world was young…”
My fantasy is that that is my epitaph: “The last troubador to whom the bird had sung.” But the case is open and shut; I have not earned it. Not another word about it.
The poem below is Chesteron not on an epic canvas (except to the extent that he always was), but strolling through history with matchless wit and rhetoric, talking about our daily struggles, but also our souls, our destiny, and kidding us brilliantly until the easy intimacy (“the decent inn of death”) and the joke (“by way of Kensal Green” that drops us off in Heaven). Of an evening, the reeling, rolling English drunkard gets miles off the road to his destination, but even sober in the last hour takes a preposterous winding path to Paradise by way of Kensal Green:
The Rolling English Road
By Gilbert Keith (G.K.) Chesterton
Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.
I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,
The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.
His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run
Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?
The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,
But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch.
God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear
The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.
My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,
Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,
And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.
Source: The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton (1927)
At the end of this life, this trial?
And wonder whether more to come
When all our counting years are done