There are some authors who find a niche and fill it. They figure out what works, hone their skills on that, and never progress beyond it. Danielle Steele comes to mind. There have been good authors who have done this - even great authors. Thackeray. Larry McMurtry. Graham Greene. Alfred Duggan. Talbot Mundy. Even Charles Dickens could, with a certain blushing hesitancy, be "accused" of this sort of tight focus, for all his considerable and broad majesty.
But then, there are others. We remember Bernini for his sculptures; we remember Caravaggio for his paintings. And they were unspeakably good. But there are also the likes of Michelangelo or Gustave Dore, who could quite reasonably be celebrated for their contributions to any number of fields. They didn't just stick to one topic or style.
I was speaking of authors, though. Yes, the Other Kind are quite a different bunch, and we can easily count Chesterton among them. They are the universalists, though not (always) in the unfortunate religious sense. They see all things, and find them interesting. They want to examine them. They want to connect them. Most of all, though, they want to have fun with and craft beauty from the strange, conflicting confluences of this curious world of ours. They want synthesis, but not the forced synthesis of the totalitarian approach, wherein history is hammered into something that pretends to be old to support something that is manifestly new.
This universalist approach takes many shapes, some concerned with subject matter, others concerned with form. We can think of the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche, who was a composer of not inconsiderable talent before he was an infamous pundit, and whose philosophy of "accepting all the paths" (as Chesterton described it in
Orthodoxy) was, in its very universalism, his undoing. We can think of Nietzsche's forebearer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was an accomplished poet as well as a prose stylist, and whose orations on all subjects were much sought-after. He wrote about subjects as diverse as Michel de Montaigne and the concept of Circles; of Moses and of self-reliance. He wrote about them exceedingly well, and with disastrous misconception, but he wrote about them.
Now, I may not have established a very enticing pedigree, here, but it does get better. Chesterton, as we have seen, could be considered the smiling patron saint of such broadness. It's not just anyone who can produce reams of essays, hundreds of poems, a good number of novels, stage plays, works of art criticism, theology, economics, philosophy, biography, and a million other topics.
And he was a cartoonist of a skill (and sensibility) very much similar to that of William Heath Robinson.
What is this man who can see the entire world? Is he Emerson's anthropomorphic eye? Jeremy Bentham's panopticon? Borges' Aleph? None of these are sufficient. Emerson's eye is selfish; Bentham's panopticon built on deceit; Borges' Aleph a strange anomaly in a basement in Buenos Aires. What Chesterton
was, even before he was, was a Catholic, with all that the name implies. Noted Catholic commentator Mark Shea once said in an interview that everything, in general terms, is "good." If something exists, it's a safe bet that it exists at God's discretion; and, should God choose to permit something, it is also a safe bet that God sees some value in it. God is not typically known for impotence, after all. The sentiment is similar to that which can be found in Alexander Pope's excellent poem, "An Essay on Man," in which this claim is made:
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.
Which is all very much in keeping with the notion that, as Chesterton again would say, there are no uninteresting subjects, only uninterested people.
So, what is the point of all this? Believe it or not, this lengthy preamble is leading up to nothing more astounding than me recommending a couple of books. Blake spoke of seeing the world in a grain of sand, and the principle here is similar; these are books in which one might see the world. Not everyone can "do" this sort of book well, I regret to say. Oxford Don and Dawkins friend A.C. Grayling keeps trying, again and again, with no special or lasting success. Harold Bloom, one of the last of the old guard literary theorists, seems to put out nothing but such books, but there's a sort of tired petulance to them that disappoints rather than impresses. Books of his that would be magisterial if done in a more pleasant spirit (
The Western Canon;
Genius;
Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?) are instead more often tiresome. It's a real shame, too, because Bloom, like Christopher Hitchens, clearly isn't
dumb. It's just that, also like Hitchens, there's just something wrong in there, somewhere, and it puts it all off kilter.
But there are plenty - plenty! - of positive contributions to check out. For example:
