G. K. Chesterton - A Criticism by Cecil Chesterton

Author:Cecil Chesterton [Chesterton, Cecil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographie
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
Published: 2017-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

And they are against us every one,

lines which might almost be the motto of

" The Enemy of the People."

It is true that Ibsen must naturally appear to Mr. Chesterton in his later phases as too much of an optimist, as trusting the naked human will too completely, as neglecting — so G. K. C. would probably put it — the doctrine of Original Sin.

But all this applies much more strongly to Whitman, of whom Mr. Chesterton always speaks with an admiration amounting almost to devotion, than to Ibsen, of whom he never speaks without a curious note of resentment.

As to Mr. Chesterton's specific criticisms of Ibsen in the essay on " The Negative Spirit " in " Heretics," they are almost childish enough to have been written by Dr. Max Nordau. Ibsen is accused of " a negative spirit," " a vagueness and a changing attitude towards what is really wisdom and virtue," because " falsehood works ruin in ' The Pillars of Society,' but truth works equal ruin in ' The Wild Duck.' " As well might Shakespeare be accused of " vagueness and a changing attitude" because feminine influence is a destructive force in " Macbeth " and a beneficent force in " The Merchant of Venice." Dickens might be reproached in the same way because avarice works the moral ruin of Gradgrind, while profusion works the moral ruin of Harold Skimpole. In his " Dickens " Mr. Chesterton himself quotes this latter case, and quotes it as an example of his hero's honesty. Why should the same thing which in Dickens is a sign of " a kind of uncontrollable honesty " be a sign of " the negative spirit " in Ibsen?

As for the complaint that Ibsen cannot tell us " how virtue and happiness are brought about," of course he cannot! Nobody can. Mr. Chesterton would presumably say that they are brought about by the grace of God; and Ibsen, in different phraseology, would probably have given much the same answer. It is much easier to point out that it is generally desirable to avoid rape and murder than to give people a recipe for becoming saints and heroes. But, though Ibsen could not give a prescription warranted to produce heroism, he could do something else. He could do what Shakespeare could not do, what Dickens could not do, what Thackeray could not do, what no one, save perhaps Bunyan, has done since the intellectualism of the Renaissance destroyed the heroic tradition of Europe — he could draw a hero.

And to draw a hero is to make men believe again in the heroic. And to make them believe in the heroic is to make them love it.

In a recent article Mr. Chesterton ventured the suggestion that Mr. Bernard Shaw had never read Shakespeare's " Julius Caesar." With equal diffidence I venture the suggestion that Mr. Chesterton has never read Ibsen — never, at any rate, read him fairly and with an open-minded desire to get at his meaning.

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