Of all the many good things I could think of to say about The Company They Keep, Diana Glyer's magisterial study of the Oxford writer's group The Inklings, the best would be that it made me want to put down Glyer and pick up Tolkien. The best criticism directs the reader away from the critique and toward the critiqued.
I can say the same thing about Ralph Wood's Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God. Wood, University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University, offers a book of literary criticism that actually brings the reader closer to the subject. His writing illuminates both the writer and the writing in ways that invites new readers in and old readers back. I finished Chesterton with my paperback copy of The Man Who Was Thursday at my elbow so that I could begin it as soon as I read Wood's last page.
Not that Wood indulges in hagiography. He takes Chesterton to task for his simplistic rejection of the theory of evolution, his jingoistic support of the First World War, and other errors. None of this, however, is done with glee, nor does Wood make it his main theme. In his "Tale of a Tub," Jonathan Swift sarcastically scoffs at critics who point out a work's flaws "with the Caution of a Man that walks thro' Edenborough Streets in a Morning, who is indeed as careful as he can, to watch diligently, and spy out the Filth in his Way, not that he is curious to observe the Colour and Complexion of the Ordure, or take its Dimensions, much less to be paddling in, or tasting it: but only with a Design to come out as cleanly as he may." Wood is this kind of "failed" critic: If he warns us of what he sees as GKC's weaknesses, it is to help the reader "come out as cleanly as he may."
Wood deals in turn with a selection of Chesterton's works: Orthodoxy, Christendom in Dublin, Lepanto, The New Jerusalem, The Flying Inn, the Ball and the Cross, The Ballad of the White Horse, and The Man Who Was Thursday. He unpacks each book with skill and enthusiasm. His voice reveals his relish of Chesterton, and his notes and bibliography reveal the depth of his scholarship. (Another similarity between Glyer and Wood: Both write incredibly readable and valuable notes. I urge the reader not to skip them! I could wish that Wood's publisher, Baylor Press, had seen fit to use footnotes instead of endnotes. The constant turning back and forth becomes tedious; I repeat, however, that it is well worth the effort.) I hasten to add that this is not a set of discrete essays, though a reader wishing to approach a given book or poem could not do better than to read the chapter that lays it under examination. Wood has written a homogenous book, one that, in peering into Chesterton's thought in a given work or passage, does not lose sight of the whole man and his complete, and very consistent, thought.
We need - or at least I need - this kind of help with the Great Paradoxist. In dealing with The Man Who Was Thursday Wood quotes the famous lines from Walt Whitman:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
He quotes it as an idea equally applicable to Chesterton (who admired Whitman) and makes a good case. I, however, seem to see the contrast more than the comparison, and hear GKC say,
Do I repeat myself?
Very well, then, I repeat myself.
(I am large, I contain consistency.)
Chesterton was a large man, both physically and intellectually. A story tells that when a woman berated him for preaching up the Great War while not himself being at the Western Front, he replied, "Madam, if you will step around to the other side of me, you will see that I am!" I have the same experience of Chesterton the writer. He seems to embrace the entirety of any issue and occasionally, when I believe he has chosen only one side of an argument and ignored the other, I turn the next page and find that he is on that side as well. But Wood masterfully demonstrates that what can appear as inconsistency is in fact comprehensiveness. Chesterton, while never afraid to take a stand, is too large a man to entrench himself in a simplistic reading that ignores the complexities of the debate.
Ralph Wood has given us a very good and very necessary book on one of the great minds of the twentieth century. That his was a Christian mind is perhaps not, as C. S. Lewis learned, incidental. As Chesterton's prophecies of a new barbarism come true all around us, it is more important than ever for Christians to hear and heed his words. Chesterton provides a vital aid in that task.
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