Survey: 1925–1935

Abstract

All his life Chesterton felt that he was surrounded by a humanist world. From the early excerpt on Christian Socialism in Maisie Ward’s biography, to the extensive essay ‘Is Humanism a Religion?’ in 1929, he indicates a serious concern with the dangers of human authority. The absolute human creativity implicit for him in the art and philosophy of the nineties split into the twin evils of the aesthetes with their hedonism and pessimism and the didactic rationalists with their Nietzschean superman. These ideas were constantly about during his youth, all insisting on a solipsist view and potential insanity. However, by 1925 the problem they posed did not exist for him personally. In the 1925 foreword to the dramatised version of The Man Who Was Thursday he notes:

I can remember the time when pessimism was dogmatic, when it was even orthodox. The people who had read Schopenhauer regarded themselves as having found out everything and found that it was nothing. Their system was a system and therefore has a character of surrounding the mind. It therefore really resembled a nightmare, in the sense of being imprisoned … of being none the less captive because it was rather in a lunatic asylum than a reasonable hell or place of punishment. (4)

He continues by saying that the world in 1925 is different; it may even be breaking up, but the destruction may let in some fresh air.