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Unit 32: G.K. Chesterton-On Lying In Bed ...

private property should be divided into smallest possible freeholds and then distributed throughout Notes
society..
In 1922 Chesterton was converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, and thereafter he
wrote several theologically oriented works, including lives of Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas.
He received honorary degrees from Edinburgh, Dublin, and Notre Dame universities. Chesterton
died on June 14, 1936, at his home in Beaconsfield. The above biography is copyrighted. Do not
republish it without permission.

32.1 Critical Appreciation-On Lying in Bed

There is on record the case of a man who, after some fourteen years of robust health, spent a week
in bed. His illness was apparently due to a violent cold, but he confessed, on medical cross-
examination, that the real and underlying cause was the steady reading of Mr. Chesterton’s books
for several days on end.
No one will accuse Mr. Chesterton of being an unhealthy writer. On the contrary, he is among the
most wholesome writers now alive. He is irresistibly exhilarating, and he inspires his readers with
a constant inclination to rise up and shout. Perhaps his danger lies in that very fact, and in the
exhaustion of the nerves which such sustained exhilaration is apt to produce. But besides this, he,
like so many of our contemporaries, has written such a bewildering quantity of literature on such
an amazing variety of subjects, that it is no wonder if sometimes the reader follows panting,
through the giddy mazes of the dance. He is the sworn enemy of specialisation, as he explains in
his remarkable essay on “The Twelve Men.” The subject of the essay is the British jury, and its
thesis is that when our civilisation “wants a library to be catalogued, or a solar system discovered,
or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is
really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if
I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.” For the judging of a criminal or the propagation
of the gospel, it is necessary to procure inexpert people—people who come to their task with a
virgin eye, and see not what the expert (who has lost his freshness) sees, but the human facts of the
case. So Mr. Chesterton insists upon not being a specialist, takes the world for his parish, and
wanders over it at will.
This being so, it is obvious that he cannot possibly remember all that he has said, and must
necessarily abound in inconsistencies and even contradictions. Yet that is by no means always
unconscious, but is due in many instances to the very complex quality and subtle habit of his
mind. Were he by any chance to read this statement he would deny it fiercely, but we would
repeat it with perfect calmness, knowing that he would probably have denied any other statement
we might have made upon the subject. His subtlety is partly due to the extraordinary rapidity
with which his mind leaps from one subject to another, partly to the fact that he is so full of ideas
that many of his essays (like Mr. Bernard Shaw’s plays) find it next to impossible to get themselves
begun. He is so full of matter that he never seems to be able to say what he wants to say, until he
has said a dozen other things first.
The present lecture is mainly concerned with his central position, as that is expounded in Heretics
and Orthodoxy. Our task is not to criticise, nor even to any considerable extent to characterise his
views, but to state them as accurately as we can. It is a remarkable phenomenon of our time that
all our literary men are bent on giving us such elaborate and solemnising confessions of their
faith. It is an age notorious for its aversion to dogma, and yet here we have Mr. Huxley, Mr. Le
Gallienne, Mr. Shaw, Mr. Wells (to mention only a few of many), who in this creedless age
proclaim in the market-place, each his own private and brand-new creed.
Yet Mr. Chesterton has perhaps a special right to such a proclamation. He believes in creeds
vehemently. And, besides, the spiritual biography of a man whose mental development has been
so independent and so interesting as his, must be well worth knowing. Amid the many weird
theologies of our time we have met with nothing so startling, so arresting, and so suggestive since
Mr. Mallock published his New Republic and his Contemporary Superstitions. There is something
common to the two points of view. To some, they come as emancipating and most welcome

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