Literary Giants Literary Catholics by Joseph Pearce

was read a story by his parents about a man who gave up all his possessions, even the clothes he was wearing on his back, to follow Christ in holy poverty. From the moment the wide-eyed Gilbert first heard the story of Saint Francis, he knew he had found a friend. As such, long before he had submitted to the reason of Rome, Chesterton had succumbed to the romance of Assisi.
    Perhaps inevitably, childlike wonder was followed by adolescent doubt. As Chesterton groped toward manhood during the early 1890s, he succumbed temporarily to the beguiling power of the Decadents. Under the charismatic and iconoclastic seduction of Oscar Wilde, the world of Chesterton’s youth seemed under the mad and maddening influence of those who preferred the shadows of sin and cynicism to the light of virtue and verity. Romance itself had donned the mask of darkness. It was in this gloom-laden atmosphere that the young Chesterton wrote a poem on Saint Francis of Assisi, published in November 1892. The questions it asks were a quest for answers in a world of doubt.
         Is there not a question rises from his word of “brother, sister”,
              Cometh from that lonely dreamer that today we shrink to find?
         Shall the lives that moved our brethren leave us at the gates of darkness,
              What were heaven if ought we cherished shall be wholly left behind?
         Is it God’s bright house we dwell in, or a vault of dark confusion. . .?
    This poem, dedicated to the “lonely dreamer” of Assisi, illuminates the darkness of Chesterton’s adolescence. The young poet, seeking to make sense of the conflicting visions of reality vying for his allegiance, was beginning to perceive that the Decadents had cast out Brother Sun so that they could worship Sister Moon. Within three years of the publication of this poem, Wildean Decadence had decayed in the squalor of the police courts. Wilde himself would repent and would be received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed. In his conversion, he was merely following many of the other Decadents, both in England and France, who, having dipped their toes in the antechambers of hell, had decided, prudently, that it wasn’t somewhere they wished to spend eternity. Baudelaire, Verlaine, Huysmans, Beardsley, Johnson and Dowson had all followed the “Decadent path to Christ”, repenting of their sin and embracing the loving forgiveness to be found in Mother Church. Paradoxically, the path to Christ was always to be found in the implicit Christian morality of much of the art of the Decadents, particularly, and most memorably, in Wilde’s masterpiece, The Picture of Dorian Gray .
    Chesterton’s own response, and riposte, to the Decadence of the 1890s can be found in his novel The Man Who Was Thursday . Whereas the Decadents—taking their own perverse inspiration from the dark romanticism of Byron, Shelley and Keats—had stripped the masks off “reality” and discovered darkness, Chesterton stripped the masks off “reality” (from the “anarchists” in his novel) and discovered light. By the dawn of the new century, Chesterton had emerged from the subreal dream of Decadence into the real awakening of a Christian perception of the cosmos. In this journey from darkness to light, he had as his constant ally and companion the “lonely dreamer” of Assisi. On 1 December 1900, the day after Wilde had died a Catholic in Paris, Chesterton, not yet a Catholic, was singing the praises of Saint Francis in an article published in The Speaker .
To most people . . . there is a fascinating inconsistency in the position of Saint Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears. He called his monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to take pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it fell from his finger: he was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of men. Yet this