spread as widely as possible, the central plank of a programme known as
Distributism. He moved from the Anglican to the Catholic Church in 1922.
Chesterton was a tireless critic of imperialism, oflaissez-fairecapitalism, and of the
millionaire as role-model. He ridiculed teetotal beverages, vegetarianism, vitamins,
gimmicks – and eugenics – and maintained that each mechanical advance, the
motor car for example, brought a new problem. He later saw literary modernism,
and Bloomsbury, as pretentious. Chesterton can seem intoxicated with the exuber-
ance of his own verbosity, to employ a phrase once used by Winston Churchill, who
was born in the same year as G. K. C. and was equally liberal with his eloquence.
T. S. Eliot found Chesterton’s style ‘exasperating to the last degree of endurance’. The
lean Eliot never met the bouncing Chesterton, but the obituary he wrote in 1936
shows a changed attitude: ‘it is not I think for any piece of writing in particular that
Chesterton is of importance, but for the place that he occupied, the position that he
represented, during the better part of a generation’. Chesterton stood for a more
Christian society.
The green baize of Edwardian England on which Chesterton gambolled so gladly,
has faded, though its confidently decent assumptions can seem enviable. Chesterton,
however, was no innocent, writing in 1906 that ‘earnest Freethinkers need not worry
themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is
dead or triumphant, we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world
has never seen.’
Our perspective on Edwardian England has damaged the reputation of worth-
while writers. The name of Arnold Bennett, for example, was until recently known
to university students of the novel only because Virginia Woolf had censured his
method of representation as too material and external. Pre-war assumptions were to
go up in smoke, including the idea that material advances would improve behaviour.
The change in perspective made by the war of 1914–18 must be among the reasons
why the rejoicing Chesterton can still enjoy less literary favour than the snide Lytton
Strachey.
Joseph Conrad
Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski(1857–1924) was the son and grandson of
Polish landowners who dedicated their lives to resisting Russian rule of Poland. His
mother died in exile in northern Russia when he was 7, his father when he was 11;
at 17 he went to sea, joining a French ship at Marseilles. There was gun-running to
Spain,and an attempt at suicide. He spent ten years going around the world in the
Merchant Navy, becoming a master mariner and a British subject. An impression of
him waiting for a ship in Mauritius survives, elegant among the rough captains. He
began to write, in English, in 1890, and at 39 married a 24-year-old English woman.
His Under Western Eyesand The Secret Agentvirtually invent a new genre, later
practised very much more lightly by Grahame Greene.
In 1893 a young product of Harrow, Oxford and the Bar wrote home from the
fast sailing clipper, the Torrens, sailing to Adelaide:
The first mate is a Pole called Conrad and is a capital chap, though queer to look at; he is
a man of travel and experience in many parts of the world, and has a fund of yarns on
which I draw freely. He has been right up the Congo and all around Malacca and Borneo
and other out of the way parts, to say nothing of a little smuggling in the days of his
youth ....FICTION 331Joseph Conrad(1857–1924)
Selected novels: Almayer’s
Folly(1895), Lord Jim
(1900), Youth, Heart of
Darkness(1902), Nostromo
(1904), The Secret Agent
(1907), Under Western Eyes
(1911), The Shadow Line
(1917).