A Celtic Twilight in Little England: G.K. Chesterton and W.B. Yeats

Abstract

G.K. Chesterton's 1936 Autobiography affectionately re-creates his first meetings with W.B. Yeats, whose critical thought Chesterton parsed in his 1905 book Heretics. Chesterton was dubious about Yeats's occultism, but attracted by the Irish Revival's linking of cultural reawakening with small-scale economic independence. His criticism of Yeats's linking of nationalism and mysticism anticipates Benedict Anderson's seminal theorising of nationalism. P.J. Mathews's Revival locates texts in the context of separatist agitation against Joseph Chamberlain's Boer War. Chesterton's 1904 novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill can be read as a parallel text, explicitly rebutting Chamberlain's imperialist philosophy, but also repurposing elements of Yeats's critique of Matthew Arnold's Celt/Teuton cultural binaries for application to English classes. Declan Kiberd's idea that Wilde exposed England as deeply colonised by the British Empire usefully situates Notting Hill's anti-imperialism. Chesterton grants the English populace the Hellenistic spontaneity of consciousness Arnold denied them, and sets forth a vision of English nationalism that even contains a critique of Anderson's “official nationalism”. Notting Hill's politico-cultural revolution, led by Wayne, a poet-warrior, and Turnbull, a visionary shop-keeper, defeats the forces of imperialist politics, plutocratic economics, and empiricist philistinism, and acts as an English parallel in its concerns to Yeats's decolonising process.

Keywords::

• G.K. Chesterton
• W.B. Yeats
• Irish Revival
• The Napoleon of Notting Hill
• Joseph Chamberlain
• Benedict Anderson

Notes

^1.Yeats, Essays, 104.

^2.Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 269.

^3.Derus, “Chesterton and Yeats,” 213.

^4.Ker, G.K. Chesterton, 401–2.

^5.Chesterton, Autobiography, 124.

^6.Ibid.

^7.Ibid., 125.

^8.Ibid.

^9.Ibid., 127.

^10.Ibid., 128.

^11.Ibid., 129.

^12.Yeats, Essays, 204.

^13. Ker, G.K. Chesterton, 33–4. Chesterton wrote a 1907 Daily News article “The Diabolist” about a fellow art student at the Slade in the early 1890s who lamented Chesterton's drift to orthodoxy and instead advocated pursuing evil as a good. Chesterton emphasised the incident in his 1936 Autobiography as a touchstone for his rejection of the Slade's fin-de-siècle zeitgeist (of Decadents, Impressionism, Nietzsche and the relativistic ethos that linked them all) for Christianity.

^14.Decker, “Crowley, Aleister.” The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, was a semi-secret society led by Samuel Liddell Mathers which claimed to transmit an ancient form of cabalism; including arcane techniques for evoking guardian angels. Yeats strongly objected to Crowley's admission, protesting that Crowley was clearly insane.

^15.Hammond, Gladstone, 468.

^16.Chesterton, Heretics, 171.

^17.Ibid., 173.

^18.Anderson, Imagined Communities, 5.

^19.Ibid., 149, emphasis in the original.

^20.Chesterton, Heretics, 171.

^21.Ibid., 174–5.

^22.Stapleton, Christianity, Patriotism & Nationhood, 23.

^23.Ibid., 85, 95–7, 118–20.

^24.Chesterton, Heretics, 176.

^25.Ibid., 177.

^26.Oddie, Romance of Orthodoxy, 211.

^27. Chesterton, Autobiography, 112–13.

^28.Chesterton, Napoleon of Notting Hill, 72–3. All further citations given in the text.

^29. W.B. Yeats to Susan Mary Yeats, November 1, 1899, Letters, 462.

^30.Mathews, Revival, 75.

^31. W.B. Yeats to Maud Gonne, c. December 15, 1899, Letters, 477.

^32.Chesterton, Autobiography, 114.

^33. Mathews, Revival, 70.

^34.Ibid.

^35.W.B. Yeats to Michael Davitt, November 2, 1899, Letters, 464–5.

^36.Jay, Chamberlain, 41.

^37.Ibid., 65.

^38.Ibid., 85.

^39.Ibid., 92.

^40.Oddie, Romance of Orthodoxy, 307.

^41.Jay, Chamberlain, 93.

^42.Ibid., 187.

^43.Marsh, “Chamberlain, Joseph.”

^44.Brown and Noel, “Laurier, Sir (Henri Charles) Wilfrid.”

^45.Matthew, Gladstone, 197.

^46.Jay, Chamberlain, 326.

^47. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7.

^48.Ibid., 141–3.

^49.Jay, Chamberlain, 326.

^50.Anderson, Imagined Communities, 83–92.

^51.Clark, G.K. Chesterton, 46–7.

^52.Mathews, Revival, 59.

^53.Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 44.

^54.Chesterton, Heretics, 176–7.

^55.Ibid., 9–14.

^56.Orwell, Why I Write, 14.

^57.Ibid., 34.

^58.Synge, Collected Works, 307.

^59.Mathews, Revival, 61.

^60.Chesterton, Autobiography, 135.

^61.Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 47.

^62.Yeats, Autobiographies, 424.

^63.Yeats, Poems, 392.

^64.Chesterton, Autobiography, 125.

^65.Ibid., 115.

^66.Mathews, Revival, 2.