by Dale Alquist
Chesterton’s second book of essays, Twelve Types, (1903) has actually been
misshelved with books about printing. But the “types” here are
people, not print. They are literary and historical figures, ranging from
Charlotte Bronte, William Morris, and Sir Walter Scott to Byron, Pope, Charles
II, Carlyle, Tolstoy, and Savonarola.The dozen essays, first written for the
Daily News and the Speaker, were originally book reviews of now forgotten books
about these famous figures. Chesterton simply used the guise of a book review to
share his own perspective about these “types”, and to launch into
larger topics such as satire, simplicity, Puritanism, Paganism, property,
religion, reason, imagination and art. In other words, all the things Chesterton
would always write about. Chesterton always wrote about an incredible variety of
subjects, yet always managed write about the same thing. It is one of the reasons
why, when people ask what Chesterton book they should read first, two answers
must be given. One is: any of them. The whole is present in each of its parts.
However, the other answer is: none of them. There isn’t a best first book
to read by Chesterton. It is always better to have read one of his other books
before whatever one you happen to read first. Each of the books is augmented by
the other
books. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
“The Grand Book of Chesterton” is surely a house of mirrors. Not that
each page reflects the other, but that each page offers us a reflection of the
same eternal light.
In his essay on Alexander Pope, Chesterton speaks of how pervasive is the concept
of paradox, which should let us know why we can expect to find it everywhere,
especially in the Chesterton books that still await us: “An element of
paradox runs through the whole of existence itself. It begins in the realm of
ultimate physics and metaphysics, in the two facts that we cannot imagine a space
that is infinite, and that we cannot imagine a space that is finite.”
Though written 20 years before he became Catholic, this collection includes an
essay on St. Francis of Assisi, which not only foreshadows the book he would
later write on this subject, but reveals his keen insight into things that one
would think Chesterton had no right to know anything about: asceticism and
monasticism.
In 1903, Chesterton has just burst onto the scene, and the contemporary reviewers
of Twelve Types book were impressed and refreshed by his wit, his confidence
(“Assurance doubly sure”), his assertiveness, his
“breathless” rhetoric, his “intense intelligence,”
especially demonstrated by his ability to compress complicated ideas to clear,
clean prose. But they seemed surprised that his essays did not reveal a writer
who was merely “essaying” but was actually fighting for the truth.
Imagine.
In 1908, these twelve essays were re-issued in a book called Varied Types, which
includes nine additional essays about such figures as Bret Harte, Alfred the
Great, Tennyson, Ruskin, Queen Victoria and others.
In 1908, these twelve essays were re-issued in a book called Varied Types, which
includes nine additional essays about such figures as Bret Harte, Alfred the
Great, Tennyson, Ruskin, Queen Victoria and others.
The essay on Bret Harte is the outstanding one here, showing Chesterton’s
appreciation for the American frontier (“a nation of foreigners”),
for parody (which “might be defined as the worshipper’s
half-holiday”), and of course, for Bret Harte (“a really great
parodist” in the Dickens mode).