Review by Rob Spence
Belles-Lettres is a term you rarely hear nowadays, but once upon a time, it was quite common, as a description for those literary items that defied categorisation. University departments of Belles-Lettres existed, in France at any rate, and there was at least one journal of that name. I recall editions of books such as Swift’s Tale of a Tub or Lamb’s Essays of Elia in the old Everyman’s Library series being classified under “Essays and Belles Lettres.” So it’s a welcome development to find that this useful term has been revived under the Michael Walmer imprint. The Walmer Belles-Lettres series includes some neglected gems, such as Oscar Wilde’s Letters to the Sphinx, the sphinx in question being Ada Leverson, recently reviewed here, and Kenneth Grahame’s Pagan Papers, in which the author of The Wind in the Willows muses philosophically on country life.
The latest volume in the series comprises a collection of G.K. Chesterton’s essays originally published in the journal The Speaker. This is almost juvenilia: it’s Chesterton’s first published prose work, published in 1901, when he was in his mid-twenties, but already the trademark wit and contrariness are to the fore. These essays take the form, as the title implies, of “defences” of a wide range of things and ideas: some of them abstract concepts such as humility, others very specific objects, such as planets. To each he brings a light-hearted, yet original and intelligent focus, which invariably makes the reader consider the subject rather differently than hitherto.
His object in these whimsical pieces is to defend things which have been called bad despite being good. He expounds his method in an entertaining introduction:
“Let me explain a little: Certain things are bad so far as they go, such as pain, and no one, not even a lunatic, calls a tooth-ache good in itself; but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty is called a bad knife, which it certainly is not. It is only not so good as other knives to which men have grown accustomed. A knife is never bad except on such rare occasions as that in which it is neatly and scientifically planted in the middle of one’s back. The coarsest and bluntest knife which ever broke a pencil into pieces instead of sharpening it is a good thing in so far as it is a knife. It would have appeared a miracle in the Stone Age. What we call a bad knife is a good knife not good enough for us; what we call a bad hat is a good hat not good enough for us; what we call bad cookery is good cookery not good enough for us; what we call a bad civilization is a good civilization not good enough for us. We choose to call the great mass of the history of mankind bad, not because it is bad, but because we are better. This is palpably an unfair principle. Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic continent does not make ivory black.”
This allows him to range from patriotism to heraldry, from farce to “ugly things” and to defend both “penny dreadfuls” and the detective story at which he was to become a leading practitioner in later years with the Father Brown stories. A couple of examples will suffice to give a flavour of the young Chesterton’s idiosyncratic take on the early twentieth century world. In his “Defence of Skeletons” he begins by noting the general distaste for the appearance of trees in winter, whose bare branches he compares to a skeleton, another underlying structure which inspires distaste. But why?:
“The importance of the human skeleton is very great, and the horror with which it is commonly regarded is somewhat mysterious. Without claiming for the human skeleton a wholly conventional beauty, we may assert that he is certainly not uglier than a bull-dog, whose popularity never wanes, and that he has a vastly more cheerful and ingratiating expression. But just as man is mysteriously ashamed of the skeletons of the trees in winter, so he is mysteriously ashamed of the skeleton of himself in death. It is a singular thing altogether, this horror of the architecture of things. One would think it would be most unwise in a man to be afraid of a skeleton, since Nature has set curious and quite insuperable obstacles to his running away from it.”
In his “Defence of Detective Stories” he embarks on a positively lyrical description of London, the archetypal setting for the detective story of the time. It’s a fine example of both his penetrating insight, and also his whimsical imagination:
“This realization of the poetry of London is not a small thing. A city is, properly speaking, more poetic even than a countryside, for while Nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol—a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card. The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick has as human a hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon; every slate on the roof is as educational a document as if it were a slate covered with addition and subtraction sums. Anything which tends, even under the fantastic form of the minutiae of Sherlock Holmes, to assert this romance of detail in civilization, to emphasize this unfathomably human character in flints and tiles, is a good thing.”
Chesterton went on, of course, to become a significant figure in British cultural life, but his work has been neglected in recent years. Michael Shallcross’s pioneering book GK Chesterton and Literary Modernism ought to have kick-started more academic interest. Maybe the availability of books such as this one will encourage a resurgence of engagement with this multi-faceted and entertaining writer.
Rob Spence’s home on the web is at robspence.org.uk His Substack on Folio Books is at https://rob611.substack.com
G.K. Chesterton, The Defendant (Michael Walmer, 2025) ISBN 9781763565654, 172pp., paperback.
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