G. K. Chesterton, snobbery, modernism and Great Expectations

G. K. Chesterton was a novelist, poet, essayist and "prince of paradox" writing in the first decades of the twentieth century. He's a favourite writer of mine. He stands in a fascinating relationship to the Modernists. Here he is on modernism's obsession with 'making it new':

The real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness. It is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by some mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is especially up to date or particularly 'in the know'. [...] The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion (All Things Considered).
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People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It is easy to be a madman; it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. (Orthodoxy).

Nevertheless, his own work, especially his fiction, is in some respects wonderfully experimental and strange. His ideas about heresy and orthodoxy are also very interesting to read alongside Milton's views on these subjects.

I've just read his essay on Great Expectations, which I'd recommend. You can view the whole text at Project Gutenberg, here. In the meantime, here is a little taste:

In this book for the first time the hero disappears. The hero had descended to Dickens by a long line which begins with the gods [...] but Great Expectations may be called [...] a novel without a hero. [...] I mean that it is a novel which aims chiefly at showing that the hero is unheroic.

Chesterton goes on to accept that this "must appear of course to overstate the case"- Pip is delightful, charming. But nevertheless, for Chesterton:

Most of Pip's actions are meant to show that he is not heroic. [...] The study of Pip is meant to indicate that with all his virtues Pip was a snob. [...] When he deals with Pip he sets out not to show his strength like the strength of Hercules, but to show his weakness [...]
All his books might be called Great Expectations. But the only book to which he gave the name of Great Expectations was the only book in which the expectation was never realised.

I might post a little more from Chesterton at a later date. He is excellent on the significance of Trabb's boy.