4 - Biography
Summary
What is wanted in modern biography is something as simple as the single line that marks the sweeping curve or the sharp corner in a weather-chart; or that yet more simple line that runs round the nose or chin in a caricature. (WC 57)
It has been said that Chesterton's biographies are really always about himself. That is unfair; though there is something buried within the aspersion which touches an important truth. He saw most clearly those virtues in other people that were his virtues; he could also be blind to those virtues he did not share, or believed to be vices. There are occasions where his judgement amounts to bigotry, such as when he figures Thomas Hardy as ‘a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot’ (CW 15:483). For the most part, however, his anamorphic estimation of those qualities he did or did not share with a subject renders these qualities with an instructive clarity. Because they are exaggerated, we see them more truly. Hyperbole is in him a kind of hypostasis. Consider the grandiose panoptic with which he closes his book on Bernard Shaw:
I know it is all very strange. From the height of eight hundred years ago, or of eight hundred years hence, our age must look incredibly odd. We call the twelfth century ascetic. We call our own time hedonist and full of praise and pleasure. But in the ascetic age the love of life was evident and enormous, so that it had to be restrained. In an hedonist age pleasure has always sunk low, so that it has to be encouraged. How high the sea of human happiness rose in the Middle Ages, we now only know by the colossal walls that they built to keep it in bounds. How low human happiness sank in the twentieth century our children will only know by these extraordinary modern books, which tell people that it is a duty to be cheerful and that life is not so bad after all. Humanity never produces optimists till it has ceased to produce happy men. It is strange to be obliged to impose a holiday like a fast, and to drive men to a banquet with spears.
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- Information
- G.K. Chesterton , pp. 69 - 85Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012