Hi Gregory,
I like your assessment here: "Chesterton is a writer with a great many flaws, and I can easily understand why some might dislike him. However, I find I can put up with those flaws for his clarity, his insights and his wit."
What bugged me here in Chesterton was specific: his claim that poets don't go mad and scientists do. I take your point about Smart, Clare and the confessionals, and there's no reason Chesterton would have known Hoelderlin or Nerval, but I suspect he was led to this position for much the reason Christopher Hitchens was led to the positions he would adopt - a taste for saying the opposite of received wisdom, for contrarianism, and a desire to push an agenda thereby. All well and good, one might say, but I find it dishonest. I am therefore glad you reminded me of Auden's liking for him - an honest writer. The late Eliot would have reason to reconcile with Chesterton beyond simple logic, to my mind. It seems to me that the phenomena factored not so much in Chesterton's paradox as the storyline he favored.
As to Chesterton's writing in general, I have no opinion and shouldn't have suggested I did, when I quoted the early Eliot. My starting point was a rather vehement objection to his specific paradox, and that's where I end up. But my progress is dialectical, thanks to your remarks: I'll retract any judgment of the writer as a whole, and bow to Eliot's change of heart and Auden's good opinion and your own.
Oh - as a once-serious chess player, I will happily agree that committed chess players are often weird. Maybe even weirder than poets.
Cheers,
John
|