| By Author | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Title | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Language |
|
Download this book: [ ASCII | HTML | PDF ] Look for this book on Amazon Tweet |
Title: Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Author: Ward, Maisie, 1889-1975
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Gilbert Keith Chesterton" ***
Transcriber's note
This electronic edition is intended to contain the complete,
unaltered text of the first published edition of _Gilbert
Keith Chesterton_ by Maisie Ward (New York: Sheed & Ward,
1943), with the following exceptions:
The index, and a few other references to page numbers that do
not exist in this edition, have been omitted.
Italics are represented by underscores at the beginning and
end, _like this_.
Footnotes* have been placed directly below the paragraph
referring to them and enclosed in brackets.
[* Like this.]
Any other deviations from the text of the first edition may be
regarded as defects and attributed to the transcriber.
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON
by
MAISIE WARD
CONTENTS
Introduction: Chiefly Concerning Sources
CHAPTER
I Background for Gilbert Keith Chesterton
II Childhood
III School Days
IV Art Schools and University College
V The Notebook
VI Towards a Career
VII Incipit Vita Nova
VIII To Frances
IX A Long Engagement
X Who is G.K.C.?
XI Married Life in London
XII Clearing the Ground for Orthodoxy
XIII Orthodoxy
XIV Bernard Shaw
XV From Battersea to Beaconsfield
XVI A Circle of Friends
XVII The Disillusioned Liberal
XVIII The Eye Witness
XIX Marconi
XX The Eve of the War (1911-1915)
XXI The War Years
XXII After the Armistice
XXIII Rome via Jerusalem
XXIV Completion
XXV The Reluctant Editor (1925-1930)
XXVI The Distributist League and Distributism
XXVII Silver Wedding
XXVIII Columbus
XXIX The Soft Answer
XXX Our Lady's Tumbler
XXXI The Living Voice
XXXII Last Days
Appendices:
Appendix A--An Earlier Chesterton
Appendix B--Prize Poem Written at St. Paul's
Appendix C--_The Chestertons_
Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
Chiefly Concerning Sources
THE MATERIAL FOR this book falls roughly into two parts: spoken and
written. Gilbert Chesterton was not an old man when he died and many
of his friends and contemporaries have told me incidents and recalled
sayings right back to his early boyhood. This part of the material
has been unusually rich and copious so that I could get a clearer
picture of the boy and the young man than is usually granted to the
biographer.
The book has been in the making for six years and in three countries.
Several times I hid it aside for some months so as to be able to get
a fresh view of it. I talked to all sorts of people, heard all sorts
of ideas, saw my subject from every side; I went to Paris to see one
old friend, to Indiana to see others, met for the first time in
lengthy talk Maurice Baring, H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw; went to
Kingsland to see Mr. Belloc; gathered Gilbert's boyhood friends of
the Junior Debating Club in London and visited "Father Brown" among
his Yorkshire moors.
Armed with a notebook, I tried to miss none who had known Gilbert
well, especially in his youth: E. C. Bentley, Lucian Oldershaw,
Lawrence Solomon, Edward Fordham. I had ten long letters from Annie
Firmin, my most valuable witness as to Gilbert's childhood. For
information on the next period of his life, I talked to Monsignor
O'Connor, to Hilaire Belloc, Maurice Baring, Charles Somers Cocks, F.
Y. Eccles and others, besides being now able to draw on my own
memories. Frances I had talked with on and off about their early
married years ever since I had first known them, but she was, alas,
too ill and consequently too emotionally unstrung during the last
months for me to ask her all the questions springing in my mind.
"Tell Maisie," she said to Dorothy Collins, "not to talk to me about
Gilbert. It makes me cry."
For the time at Beaconsfield, out of a host of friends the most
valuable were Dr. Pocock and Dr. Bakewell. Among priests, Monsignors
O'Connor and Ronald Knox, Fathers Vincent McNabb, O.P. and Ignatius
Rice, O.S.B. were especially intimate.
Dorothy Collins's evidence covers a period of ten years. That of H.
G. Wells and Bernard Shaw is reinforced by most valuable letters
which they have kindly allowed me to publish.
Then too Gilbert was so much of a public character and so popular
with his fellow journalists that stories of all kinds abound:
concerning him there is a kind of evidence, and very valuable it is,
that may be called a Boswell Collective. It is fitting that it should
be so. We cannot picture G.K. like the great lexicographer
accompanied constantly by one ardent and observant witness, pencil in
hand, ready to take notes over the teacups. (And by the way, in spite
of an acquaintance who regretted in this connection that G.K. was not
latterly more often seen in taverns, it was over the teacups, even
more than over the wine glasses, that Boswell made his notes. I have
seen Boswell's signature after wine--on the minutes of a meeting of
The Club--and he was in no condition then for the taking of notes.
Even the signature is almost illegible.) But it is fitting that
Gilbert, who loved all sorts of men so much, should be kept alive for
the future by all sorts of men. From the focussing of many views from
many angles this picture has been composed, but they are all views of
one man, and the picture will show, I think, a singular unity. When
Whistler, as Gilbert himself once said, painted a portrait he made
and destroyed many sketches--how many it did not matter, for all,
even of his failures, were fruitful--but it would have mattered
frightfully if each time he looked up he found a new subject sitting
placidly for his portrait. Gilbert was fond of asking in the _New
Witness_ of people who expressed admiration for Lloyd George: "Which
George do you mean?" for, chameleon-like, the politician has worn
many colours and the portrait painted in 1906 would have had to be
torn up in 1916. But gather the Chesterton portraits: read the files
when he first grew into fame: talk to Mr. Titterton who worked with
him on the _Daily News_ in 1906 and on _G.K.'s Weekly_ in 1936,
collect witnesses from his boyhood to his old age, from Dublin to
Vancouver: individuals who knew him, groups who are endeavoring to
work out his ideas: all will agree on the ideas and on the man as
making one pattern throughout, one developing but integrated mind and
personality.
Gathering the material for a biography bears some resemblance to
interrogating witnesses in a Court of Law. There are good witnesses
and bad: reliable and unreliable memories. I remember an old lady, a
friend of my mother's, who remarked with candour after my mother had
confided to her something of importance: "My dear, I must go and
write that down immediately before my imagination gets mixed with my
memory." One witness must be checked against another: there will be
discrepancies in detail but the main facts will in the end emerge.
Just now and again, however, a biographer, like a judge, meets a
totally unreliable witness.
One event in this biography has caused me more trouble than anything
else: the Marconi scandal and the trial of Cecil Chesterton for
criminal libel which grew out of it. As luck would have it, it was on
this that I had to interrogate my most unreliable witness. I had seen
no clear and unbiased account so I had to read the many pages of Blue
Book and Law Reports besides contemporary comment in various papers.
I have no legal training, but one point stuck out like a spike. Cecil
Chesterton had brought accusations against Godfrey Isaacs not only
concerning his own past career as a company promoter, but also
concerning his dealings with the government over the Marconi
contract, in connection with which he had also fiercely attacked
Rufus Isaacs, Herbert Samuel and other ministers of the Crown. But in
the witness box he accepted the word of the very ministers he had
been attacking, and declared that he no longer accused them of
corruption: which seemed to me a complete abandonment of his main
position.
Having drafted my chapter on Marconi, I asked Mrs. Cecil Chesterton
to read it, but more particularly to explain this point. She gave me
a long and detailed account of how Cecil had been intensely reluctant
to take this course, but violent pressure had been exerted on him by
his father and by Gilbert who were both in a state of panic over the
trial. Unlikely as this seemed, especially in Gilbert's case, the
account was so circumstantial, and from so near a connection, that I
felt almost obliged to accept it. What was my amazement a few months
later at receiving a letter in which she stated that after "a great
deal of close research work, re-reading of papers, etc." (in
connection with her own book _The Chestertons_) and after a talk with
Cecil's solicitors, she had become convinced that Cecil had acted as
he had because "the closest sleuthing had been unable to discover any
trace" of investments by Rufus Isaacs in English Marconis. "For this
reason Cecil took the course he did--not through family pressure.
That pressure, _I still feel_,* was exerted, though possibly not
until the trial was over."
[* Italics mine.]
It was, then, the lady's feelings and not facts that had been offered
to me as evidence, and it was the merest luck that my book had not
appeared before Cecil's solicitors had spoken.
The account given in Lord Birkenhead's _Famous Trials_ is the Speech
for the Prosecution. Mrs. Cecil Chesterton's chapter is an
impressionist sketch of the court scene by a friend of the defendant.
What was wanted was an impartial account, but I tried in vain to
write it. The chronology of events, the connection between the
Government Commission and the Libel Case, the connection between the
English and American Marconi companies--it was all too complex for
the lay mind, so I turned the chapter over to my husband who has had
a legal training and asked him to write it for me.
_The Chestertons_ is concerned with Gilbert and Frances as well as
with Cecil; and the confusion between memory and imagination--to say
nothing of reliance on feelings unsupported by facts--pervades the
book. It can only be called a Legend, so long growing in Mrs. Cecil's
mind that I am convinced that when she came to write her book she
firmly believed in it herself. The starting-point was so ardent a
dislike for Frances that every incident poured fuel on the flame and
was seen only by its light. When I saw her, the Legend was beginning
to shape. She told me various stories showing her dislike: facts
offered by me were either denied or twisted to fit into the pattern.
I do not propose to discuss here the details of a thoroughly
unreliable book. Most of them I think answer themselves in the course
of this biography. With one or two points I deal in Appendix C. But I
will set down here one further incident that serves to show just how
little help this particular witness could ever be.
For, like Cecil's solicitors, I spoilt one telling detail for her.
She told me with great enthusiasm that Cecil had said that Gilbert
was really in love not with Frances but with her sister Gertrude, and
that Gertrude's red hair accounted for the number of red-headed
heroines in his stories. I told her, however, on the word of their
brother-in-law, that Gertrude's hair was not red. Mr. Oldershaw in
fact seemed a good deal amused: he said that Gilbert never looked at
either of the other sisters, who were "not his sort," and had eyes
only for Frances. Mrs. Cecil however would not relinquish this dream
of red hair and another love. In her book she wishes "red-gold" hair
on to Annie Firmin, because in the _Autobiography_ Gilbert had
described her golden plaits. But unluckily for this new theory
Annie's hair was yellow,* which is quite a different colour. And
Annie, who is still alive, is also amused at the idea that Gilbert
had any thought of romance in her connection.
[* See G.K.'s letter to her daughter, p. 633 [Chapter XXXI].]
When Frances Chesterton gave me the letters and other documents, she
said: "I don't want the book to appear in a hurry: not for at least
five years. There will be lots of little books written about Gilbert;
let them all come out first. I want your book to be the final and
definitive Biography."
The first part of this injunction I have certainly obeyed, for it
will be just seven years after his death that this book appears. For
the second half, I can say only that I have done the best that in me
lies to obey it also. And I am very grateful to those who have
preceded me with books depicting one aspect or another of my subject.
I have tried to make use of them all as part of my material, and some
are "little" merely in the number of their pages. I am especially
grateful to Hilaire Belloc, Emile Cammaerts, Cyril Clemens and
"Father Brown" (who have allowed me to quote with great freedom). I
want to thank Mr. Seward Collins, Mr. Cyril Clemens and the
University of Notre Dame for the loan of books; Mrs. Bambridge for
the use of a letter from Kipling and a poem from _The Years Between_.
Even greater has been the kindness of those friends of my own and of
Gilbert Chesterton's who have read this book in manuscript and made
very valuable criticisms and suggestions: May Chesterton, Dorothy
Collins, Edward Connor, Ross Hoffman, Mrs. Robert Kidd, Arnold Lunn,
Mgr. Knox, Father Murtagh, Father Vincent McNabb, Lucian Oldershaw,
Beatrice Warde, Douglas Woodruff, Monsignor O'Connor.
Most of the criticisms were visibly right, while even those with
which I could not concur showed me the weak spot in my work that had
occasioned them. They have helped me to improve the book--I think I
may say enormously.
One suggestion I have not followed--that one name should be used
throughout: either Chesterton or Gilbert or G.K., but not all three.
I had begun with the idea of using "Chesterton" when speaking of him
as a public character and also when speaking of the days before I did
in fact call him "Gilbert." But this often left him and Cecil mixed
up: then too, though I seldom used "G.K." myself, other friends
writing to me of him often used it. I began to go through the
manuscript unifying--and then I noticed that in a single paragraph of
his _Bernard Shaw_ Gilbert uses "GBS," "Shaw," "Bernard Shaw," and
"Mr. Shaw." Here was a precedent indeed, and it seemed to me that it
was really the natural thing to do. After all we do talk of people
now by one name, now by another: it is a matter of slight importance
if of any, and I decided to let it go.
As to size, I am afraid the present book is a large one--although not
as large as Boswell's _Johnson_ or _Gone with the Wind_. But in this
matter I am unrepentant, for I have faith in Chesterton's own public.
The book is large because there is no other way of getting Chesterton
on to the canvas. It is a joke he would himself have enjoyed, but it
is also a serious statement. For a complete portrait of Chesterton,
even the most rigorous selection of material cannot be compressed
into a smaller space. I have first written at length and then cut and
cut.
At first I had intended to omit all matter already given in the
_Autobiography_. Then I realised that would never do. For some things
which are vital to a complete Biography of Chesterton are not only
told in the _Autobiography_ better than I could tell them, but are
recorded there and nowhere else. And this book is not merely a
supplement to the _Autobiography_. It is the Life of Chesterton.
The same problem arises with regard to the published books and I have
tried to solve it on the same line. There has rung in my mind Mr.
Belloc's saying: "A man is his mind." To tell the story of a man of
letters while avoiding quotation from or reference to his published
works is simply not to tell it. At Christopher Dawson's suggestion I
have re-read all the books _in the order in which they were written_,
thus trying to get the development of Gilbert's mind perfectly clear
to myself and to trace the influences that affected him at various
dates. For this reason I have analysed certain of the books and not
others--those which showed this mental development most clearly at
various stages, or those (too many alas) which are out of print and
hard to obtain. But whenever possible in illustrating his mental
history I have used unpublished material, so that even the most
ardent Chestertonian will find much that is new to him.
For the period of Gilbert's youth there are many exercise books,
mostly only half filled, containing sketches and caricatures, lists
of titles for short stories and chapters, unfinished short stories.
Several completed fairy stories and some of the best drawings were
published in _The Coloured Lands_. Others are hints later used in his
own novels: there is a fragment of _The Ball and the Cross_, a first
suggestion for _The Man Who Was Thursday_, a rather more developed
adumbration of _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_. This I think is later
than most of the notebooks; but, after the change in handwriting,
apparently deliberately and carefully made by Gilbert around the date
at which he left St. Paul's for the Slade School, it is almost
impossible to establish a date at all exactly for any one of these
notebooks. Notes made later when he had formed the habit of dictation
became difficult to read, not through bad handwriting, but because
words are abbreviated and letters omitted.
Some of the exercise books appear to have been begun, thrown aside
and used again later. There is among them one only of real
biographical importance, a book deliberately used for the development
of a philosophy of life, dated in two places, to which I devote a
chapter and which I refer to as _the_ Notebook. This book is as
important in studying Chesterton as the Pensées would be for a
student of Pascal. He is here already a master of phrase in a sense
which makes a comparison with Pascal especially apt. For he often
packs so much meaning into a brilliant sentence or two that I have
felt it worth while, in dealing especially with some of the less
remembered books, to pull out a few of these sentences for quotation
apart from their context.
Other important material was to be found in _G.K.'s Weekly_, in
articles in other periodicals, and in unpublished letters. With some
of the correspondences I have made considerable use of both sides,
and if anyone pedantically objects that that is unusual in a
biography I will adapt a phrase of Bernard Shaw's which you will find
in this book, and say, "Hang it all, be reasonable! If you had the
choice between reading me and reading Wells and Shaw, wouldn't you
choose Wells and Shaw."
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON
CHAPTER I
Background for Gilbert Keith Chesterton
IT IS USUAL to open a biography with some account of the subject's
ancestry. Chesterton, in his _Browning_, after some excellent foolery
about pedigree-hunting, makes the suggestion that middle-class
ancestry is far more varied and interesting than the ancestry of the
aristocrat:
The truth is that aristocrats exhibit less of the romance of
pedigree than any other people in the world. For since it is their
principle to marry only within their own class and mode of life,
there is no opportunity in their case for any of the more interesting
studies in heredity; they exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of
the lower animals. It is in the middle classes that we find the
poetry of genealogy; it is the suburban grocer standing at his shop
door whom some wild dash of Eastern or Celtic blood may drive
suddenly to a whole holiday or a crime.
This may provide fun for a guessing game but is not very useful to a
biographer. The Chesterton family, like many another, had had the ups
and downs in social position that accompany the ups and downs of
fortune. Upon all this Edward Chesterton, Gilbert's father, as head
of the family possessed many interesting documents. After his death,
Gilbert's mother left his papers undisturbed. But when she died
Gilbert threw away, without examination, most of the contents of his
father's study, including all family records. Thus I cannot offer any
sort of family tree. But it is possible to show the kind of family
and the social atmosphere into which Gilbert Chesterton was born.
Some of the relatives say that the family hailed from the village of
Chesterton--now merged into Cambridge, of which they were Lords of
the Manor, but Gilbert refused to take this seriously. In an
introduction to a book called _Life in Old Cambridge_, he wrote:
I have never been to Cambridge except as an admiring visitor; I have
never been to Chesterton at all, either from a sense of unworthiness
or from a faint superstitious feeling that I might be fulfilling a
prophecy in the countryside. Anyone with a sense of the savour of the
old English country rhymes and tales will share my vague alarm that
the steeple might crack or the market cross fall down, for a smaller
thing than the coincidence of a man named Chesterton going to
Chesterton.
At the time of the Regency, the head of the family was a friend of
the Prince's and (perhaps as a result of such company) dissipated his
fortunes in riotous living and incurred various terms of imprisonment
for debt. From his debtors' prisons he wrote letters, and sixty years
later Mr. Edward Chesterton used to read them to his family: as also
those of another interesting relative, Captain George Laval
Chesterton, prison reformer and friend of Mrs. Fry and of Charles
Dickens. A relative recalls the sentence: "I cried, Dickens cried, we
all cried," which makes one rather long for the rest of the letter.
George Laval Chesterton left two books, one a kind of autobiography,
the other a work on prison reform. It was a moment of enthusiasm for
reform, of optimism and of energy. Dickens was stirring the minds of
Englishmen to discover the evils in their land and rush to their
overthrow. Darwin was writing his _Origin of Species_, which in some
curious way increased the hopeful energy of his countrymen: they
seemed to feel it much more satisfying to have been once animal and
have become human than to be fallen gods who could again be made
divine. Anyhow, there were giants in those days and it was hope that
made them so.
When by an odd confusion the _Tribune_ described G. K. Chesterton as
having been born about the date that Captain Chesterton published his
books, he replied in a ballade which at once saluted and attacked:
I am not fond of anthropoids as such,
I never went to Mr. Darwin's school,
Old Tyndall's ether, that he liked so much
Leaves me, I fear, comparatively cool.
I cannot say my heart with hope is full
Because a donkey, by continual kicks,
Turns slowly into something like a mule--
I was not born in 1856.
Age of my fathers: truer at the touch
Than mine: Great age of Dickens, youth and yule:
Had your strong virtues stood without a crutch,
I might have deemed man had no need of rule,
But I was born when petty poets pule,
When madmen used your liberty to mix
Lucre and lust, bestial and beautiful,
I was not born in 1856.*
[* Quoted in _G. K. Chesterton: A criticism_. Aliston Rivers (1908)
pp. 243-244.]
Both _Autobiography_ and _Prison Life_ are worth reading.* They
breathe the "Great Gusto" seen by Gilbert in that era. He does not
quote them in his _Autobiography_, but, just mentioning Captain
Chesterton, dwells chiefly on his grandfather, who, while George
Laval Chesterton was fighting battles and reforming prisons, had
succeeded to the headship of a house agents' business in Kensington.
(For, the family fortunes having been dissipated, Gilbert's
great-grandfather had become first a coal merchant and then a house
agent.) A few of the letters between this ancestor and his son remain
and they are interesting, confirming Gilbert's description in the
_Autobiography_ of his grandfather's feeling that he himself was
something of a landmark in Kensington and that the family business
was honourable and important.
[* See Appendix A.]
The Chestertons, whatever the ups and downs of their past history,
were by now established in that English middle-class respectability
in which their son was to discover--or into which he was to bring--a
glow and thrill of adventurous romance. Edward Chesterton, Gilbert's
father, belonged to a serious family and a serious generation, which
took its work as a duty and its profession as a vocation. I wonder
what young house-agent today, just entering the family business,
would receive a letter from his father adjuring him to "become an
active steady and honourable man of business," speaking of "abilities
which only want to be judiciously brought out, of course assisted
with your earnest co-operation."
Gilbert's mother was Marie Grosjean, one of a family of twenty-three
children. The family had long been English, but came originally from
French Switzerland. Marie's mother was from an Aberdeen family of
Keiths, which gave Gilbert his second name and a dash of Scottish
blood which "appealed strongly to my affections and made a sort of
Scottish romance in my childhood." Marie's father, whom Gilbert never
saw, had been "one of the old Wesleyan lay-preachers and was thus
involved in public controversy, a characteristic which has descended
to his grandchild. He was also one of the leaders of the early
Teetotal movement, a characteristic which has not."*
[* _Autobiography_, pp. 11-12.]
When Edward became engaged to Marie Grosjean he complained that his
"dearest girl" would not believe that he had any work to do, but he
was in fact much occupied and increasingly responsible for the family
business.
There is a flavour of a world very remote from ours in the packet of
letters between the two and from their various parents, aunts and
sisters to one another during their engagement. Edward illuminates
poems "for a certaln dear good little child," sketches the "look out
from home" for her mother, hopes they did not appear uncivil in
wandering into the garden together at an aunt's house and leaving the
rest of the company for too long. He praises a friend of hers as
"intellectual and unaffected, two excellent things in woman,"
describes a clerk sent to France with business papers who "lost them
all, the careless dog, except the _Illustrated London News_."
A letter to Marie from her sister Harriette is amusing. She describes
her efforts at entertaining in the absence of her mother. The company
were "great swells" so that her brother "took all the covers of the
chairs himself and had the wine iced and we dined in full dress--it
was very awful--considering myself as hostess." Poor girl, it was a
series of misfortunes. "The dinner was three-quarters of an hour
late, the fish done to rags." She had hired three dozen wine-glasses
to be sure of enough, but they were "brought in in twos and threes at
a time and then a hiatus as if they were being washed which they were
not."
In the letters from parents and older relatives religious observances
are taken for granted and there is an obvious sincerity in the many
allusions to God's will and God's guidance of human life. No one
reading them could doubt that the description of a dying relative as
"ready for the summons" and to "going home" is a sincere one. Other
letters, notably Harriette's, do not lack a spice of malice in
speaking of those whose religion was unreal and affected--a
phenomenon that only appears in an age when real religion abounds.
Doubtless her generation was beginning to see Christianity with less
than the simplicity of their parents. They were hearing of Darwin and
Spencer, and the optimism which accompanied the idea of evolution was
turning religion into a vague glow which would, they felt, survive
the somewhat childish dogmas in which our rude ancestors had tried to
formulate it. But with an increased vagueness went also, with the
more liberal--and the Chestertons were essentially liberal both
politically and theologically--an increased tolerance. In several of
his letters, Edward Chesterton mentions the Catholic Church, and
certainly with no dislike. He went on one occasion to hear Manning
preach and much admired the sermon, although he notes too that he
found in it "no distinctively Roman Catholic doctrine." He belonged,
however, to an age that on the whole found the rest of life more
exciting and interesting than religion, an age that had kept the
Christian virtues and still believed that these virtues could stand
alone, without the support of the Christian creed.
The temptation to describe dresses has always to be sternly resisted
when dealing with any part of the Victorian era, so merely pausing to
note that it seems to have been a triumph on the part of Mrs.
Grosjean to have cut a _short_ skirt out of 8½ yards of material, I
reluctantly lay aside the letters at the time when Edward Chesterton
and Marie were married and had set about living happily ever after.
These two had no fear of life: they belonged to a generation which
cheerfully created a home and brought fresh life into being. In doing
it, they did a thousand other things, so that the home they made was
full of vital energies for the children who were to grow up in it.
Gilbert recollects his father as a man of a dozen hobbies, his study
as a place where these hobbies formed strata of exciting products,
awakening youthful covetousness in the matter of a new paint-box,
satisfying youthful imagination by the production of a toy-theatre.
His character, serene and humorous as his son describes him, is
reflected in his letters. Edward Chesterton did not use up his mental
powers in the family business. Taught by his father to be a good man
of business, he was in his private life a man of a thousand other
energies and ideas. "On the whole," says his son, "I am glad he was
never an artist. It might have stood in his way in becoming an
amateur. It might have spoilt his career; his private career. He
could never have made a vulgar success of all the thousand things be
did so successfully."
Here, Gilbert sees a marked distinction between that generation of
business men and the present in the use of leisure; he sees hobbies
as superior to sport. "The old-fashioned Englishman, like my father,
sold houses for his living but filled his own house with his life. A
hobby is not merely a holiday. . . . It is not merely exercising the
body instead of the mind, an excellent but now largely a recognised
thing. It is exercising the rest of the mind; now an almost neglected
thing." Edward Chesterton practised "water-colour painting and
modelling and photography and stained glass and fretwork and magic
lanterns and mediaeval illumination." And, moreover, "knew all his
English literature backwards."
It has become of late the fashion for any one who writes of his own
life to see himself against a dark background, to see his development
frustrated by some shadow of heredity or some horror of environment.
But Gilbert saw his life rather as the ancients saw it when _pietas_
was a duty because we had received so much from those who brought us
into being. This Englishman was grateful to his country, to his
parents, to his home for all that they had given him.
I regret that I have no gloomy and savage father to offer to the
public gaze as the true cause of all my tragic heritage; no pale-faced
and partially poisoned mother whose suicidal instincts have cursed
me with the temptations of the artistic temperament. I regret that
there was nothing in the range of our family much more racy than a
remote and mildly impecunious uncle; and that I cannot do my duty
as a true modern, by cursing everybody who made me whatever I
am. I am not clear about what that is; but I am pretty sure that
most of it is my own fault. And I am compelled to confess that I
look back to that landscape of my first days with a pleasure that
should doubtless be reserved for the Utopias of the Futurist.*
[* G. K. Chesterton. _Autobiography_, pp. 22-3.]
CHAPTER II
Childhood
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON was born on May 29, 1874 at a house in
Sheffield Terrace, Campden Hill, just below the great tower of the
Waterworks which so much impressed his childish imagination. Lower
down the hill was the Anglican Church of St. George, and here he was
baptised. When he was about five, the family moved to Warwick
Gardens. As old-fashioned London houses go, 11 Warwick Gardens is
small. On the ground floor, a back and front room were for the
Chestertons drawing-room and dining-room with a folding door between,
the only other sitting-room being a small study built out over the
garden. A long, narrow, green strip, which must have been a good deal
longer before a row of garages was built at the back, was Gilbert's
playground. His bedroom was a long room at the top of a not very high
house. For what is in most London houses the drawing-room floor is in
this house filled by two bedrooms and there is only one floor above it.
Cecil was five years younger than Gilbert, who welcomed his birth
with the remark, "Now I shall always have an audience," a prophecy
remembered by all parties because it proved so singularly false. As
soon as Cecil could speak, he began to argue and the brothers'
intercourse thenceforward consisted of unending discussion. They
always argued, they never quarrelled.
There was also a little sister Beatrice who died when Gilbert was
very young, so young that he remembered a fall she had from a
rocking-horse more clearly than he remembered her death, and in his
memory linked with the fall the sense of loss and sorrow that came
with the death.
It would be impossible to tell the story of his childhood one half
so well as he has told it himself. It is the best part of his
_Autobiography_. Indeed, it is one of the best childhoods in
literature. For Gilbert Chesterton most perfectly remembered the
exact truth, not only about what happened to a child, but about how
a child thought and felt. What is more, he sees childhood not as an
isolated fragment or an excursion into fairyland, but as his "real
life; the real beginnings of what should have been a more real life;
a lost experience in the land of the living."
I was subconsciously certain then, as I am consciously certain now,
that there was the white and solid road and the worthy beginning of
the life of man; and that it is man who afterwards darkens it with
dreams or goes astray from it in self-deception. It is only the grown
man who lives a life of make-believe and pretending; and it is he who
has his head in a cloud.*
[* _Autobiography_, p. 49.]
Here are the beginnings of the man's philosophy in the life and
experience of the child. He was living in a world of reality, and
that reality was beautiful, in the clear light of "an eternal
morning," which "had a sort of wonder in it, as if the world were as
new as myself." A child in this world, like God in the moment of
creation, looks upon it and sees that it is very good. It was not
that he was never unhappy as a child, and he had his share of bodily
pain. "I had a fair amount of toothache and especially earache." But
the child has his own philosophy and makes his own proportion, and
unhappiness and pain "are of a different texture or held on a
different tenure."
What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a
wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a
miraculous world. What gives me this shock is almost anything I
really recall; not the things I should think most worth recalling.
This is where it differs from the other great thrill of the past, all
that is connected with first love and the romantic passion; for that,
though equally poignant, comes always to a point; and is narrow like
a rapier piercing the heart, whereas the other was more like a
hundred windows opened on all sides of the head.*
[* _Autobiography_, pp. 31-32.]
These windows opening on all sides so much more swiftly for the
genius than for the rest of us, led to a result often to be noted in
the childhood of exceptional men: a combination of backwardness and
precocity. Gilbert Chesterton was in some ways a very backward child.
He did not talk much before three. He learnt to read only at eight.
He loved fairy tales; as a child he read them or had them read aloud
to him: as a big boy he wrote and illustrated a good many, some of
which are printed in _The Coloured Lands_. I have found several
fragments in praise of Hans Andersen written apparently in his
schooldays. In the chapter of _Orthodoxy_ called "The Ethics of
Elfland" he shows how the truth about goodness and happiness came to
him out of the old fairy tales and made the first basis for his
philosophy. And George Macdonald's story _The Princess and the
Goblin_ made, he says, "a difference to my whole existence, which
helped me to see things in a certain way from the start." It is the
story of a house where goblins were in the cellar and a kind of fairy
godmother in a hidden room upstairs. This story had made "all the
ordinary staircases and doors and windows into magical things." It
was the awakening of the sense of wonder and joy in the ordinary
things always to be his. Still more important was the realization
represented by the goblins below stairs, that "When the evil things
besieging us do appear, they do not appear outside but inside." In
life as in this story there is
. . . a house that is our home, that is rightly loved as our home,
but of which we hardly know the best or the worst, and must always
wait for the one and watch against the other. . . . Since I first
read that story some five alternative philosophies of the universe
have come to our colleges out of Germany, blowing through the world
like the east wind. But for me that castle is still standing in the
mountains, its light is not put out.*
[* Introduction to _George Macdonald and His Wife_.]
All this to Gilbert made the story the "most real, the most
realistic, in the exact sense of the phrase the most like life" of
any story he ever read--then or later! Another recurrent image in
books by the same author is that of a great white horse. And Gilbert
says, "To this day I can never see a big white horse in the street
without a sudden sense of indescribable things."*
[* Ibid.]
Of his playmates, "one of my first memories," he writes in the
_Autobiography_, "is playing in the garden under the care of a girl
with ropes of golden hair; to whom my mother afterwards called out
from the house, 'You are an angel'; which I was disposed to accept
without metaphor. She is now living in Vancouver as Mrs. Robert Kidd."
Mrs. Kidd, then Annie Firmin, was the daughter of a girlhood friend
of Mrs. Chesterton's. She called her "Aunt Marie." She and her
sister, Gilbert says in the _Autobiography_, "had more to do with
enlivening my early years than most." She has a vivid memory of
Sheffield Terrace where all three Chesterton children were born and
where the little sister, Beatrice, whom they called Birdie, died.
Gilbert, in those days, was called Diddie, his father then and later
was "Mr. Ed" to the family and intimate friends. Soon after Birdie's
death they moved to Warwick Gardens. Mrs. Kidd writes:
. . . the little boys were never allowed to see a funeral. If one
passed down Warwick Gardens, they were hustled from the nursery
window at once. Possibly this was because Gilbert had such a fear of
sickness or accident. If Cecil gave the slightest sign of choking at
dinner, Gilbert would throw down his spoon or fork and rush from the
room. I have seen him do it so many times. Cecil was fond of animals.
Gilbert wasn't. Cecil had a cat that he named Faustine, because he
wanted her to be abandoned and wicked--but Faustine turned out to be
a gentleman!
Gilbert's story-telling and verse-making began very early, but not, I
think, in great abundance; his drawing even earlier, and of this
there is a great deal. There is nothing very striking in the written
fragments that remain, but his drawings even at the age of five are
full of vigour. The faces and figures are always rudimentary human
beings, sometimes a good deal more, and they are taken through
lengthy adventures drawn on the backs of bits of wall paper, of
insurance forms, in little books sewn together, or sometimes on long
strips glued end to end by his father. These drawings can often be
dated exactly, for Edward Chesterton, who later kept collections of
press-cuttings and photographs of his son, had already begun to
collect his drawings, writing the date on the back of each. With the
earlier ones he may, one sometimes suspects, have helped a little,
but it soon becomes easy to distinguish between the two styles.
Edward Chesterton was the most perfect father that could have been
imagined to help in the opening of windows on every side. "My father
might have reminded people of Mr. Pickwick, except that he was always
bearded and never bald; he wore spectacles and had all the
Pickwickian evenness of temper and pleasure in the humours of
travel." He had, as his son further notes in the _Autobiography_, a
power of invention which "created for children the permanent
anticipation of what is profoundly called a 'surprise.'" The child
of today chooses his Christmas present in advance and decides between
Peter Pan and the Pantomime (when he does not get both). The
Chesterton children saw their first glimpses of fantasy through the
framework of a toy-theatre of which their father was carpenter,
scene-painter and scene-shifter, author and creator of actors and
actresses a few inches high. Gilbert's earliest recollection is of
one of these figures in a golden crown carrying a golden key, and his
father was all through his childhood a man with a golden key who
admitted him into a world of wonders.
I think Gilbert's father meant more to him than his mother, fond as
he was of her. Most of their friends seem to feel that Cecil was her
favorite son. "Neither was ever demonstrative," Annie Firmin says,
"I never saw either of them kiss his mother." But in some ways the
mother spoilt both boys. They had not the training that a strict
mother or an efficient nurse usually accomplishes with the most
refractory. Gilbert was never refractory, merely absent-minded; but
it is doubtful whether he was sent upstairs to wash his hands or
brush his hair, except in preparation for a visit or ceremonial
occasion ("not even then!" interpolates Annie). And it is perfectly
certain that he ought to have been so sent several times a day. No
one minded if he was late for meals; his father, too, was frequently
late and Frances during her engagement often saw his mother put the
dishes down in the fireplace to keep hot, and wait patiently--in
spite of Gilbert's description of her as "more swift, relentless and
generally radical in her instincts" than his father. Annie Firmin's
earlier memories fit this description better. Much as she loved her
"aunt," she writes:
Aunt Marie was a bit of a tyrant in her own family! I have been
many times at dinner, when there might be a joint, say, and a
chicken--and she would say positively to Mr. Ed, "Which will you
have, Edward?" Edward: "I think I'd like a bit of chicken!" Aunt M.
fiercely: "No, you won't, you'll have mutton!" That happened so
often. Sometimes Alice Grosjean, the youngest of Aunt M.'s family,
familiarly known as "Sloper," was there. When asked her preference
she would say, diffidently, "I think I'll take a little mutton!"
"Don't be a fool, Alice, you know you like chicken,"--and chicken
she got.
Visitors to the house in later years dwell on Mrs. Chesterton's
immense spirit of hospitality, the gargantuan meals, the eager desire
that guests should eat enormously, and the wittiness of her
conversation. Schoolboy contemporaries of Gilbert say that although
immensely kind, she alarmed them by a rather forbidding
appearance--"her clothes thrown on anyhow, and blackened and
protruding teeth which gave her a witchlike appearance. . . . The
house too was dusty and untidy." She called them always by their
surnames, both when they were little boys and after they grew up,
"Oldershaw, Bentley, Solomon."
"Not only," says Miss May Chesterton, "did Aunt Marie address
Gilbert's friends by their surnames, but frequently added darling to
them. I have heard her address Bentley when a young man thus;
'Bentley darling, come and sit over here,' to which invitation he
turned a completely deaf ear as he was perfectly content to remain
where he was!"
"Indiscriminately, she also addressed her maids waiting at table with
the same endearment."
A letter written when Gilbert was only six would seem to show that
Mrs. Chesterton had not yet become so reckless about her appearance,
and was still open to the appeal of millinery. ("She always was,"
says Annie.) The letter is from John Barker of High Street,
Kensington, and is headed in handwriting, "Drapery and Millinery
Establishment, Kensington High Street, September 21, 1880."
MADAM,
We are in receipt of instructions from Mr. Edward Chesterton to
wait upon you for the purpose of offering for your selection a Bonnet
of the latest Parisian taste, of which we have a large assortment
ready for your choice; or can, if preferred, make you one to order.
Our assistant will wait upon you at any time you may appoint,
unless you would prefer to pay a visit to our Millinery department
yourself.
Mr. Chesterton informs us that as soon as you have made your
selection he will hand us a cheque for the amount.
We are given to understand that Mr. Chesterton proposes this
transaction as a remembrance of the anniversary of what, he instructs
us to say, he regards as a happy and auspicious event. We have
accordingly entered it in our books in that aspect.
In conveying, as we are desired to do, Mr. Chesterton's best wishes
for your health and happiness for many future anniversaries, may we
very respectfully join to them our own, and add that during many
years to come we trust to be permitted to supply you with goods of
the best description for cash, on the principle of the lowest prices
consistent with excellence of quality and workmanship.
We have the honour to be Madam Your most obedient Servants
JOHN BARKER & Co.
The order entered in their books "under that aspect," the readiness
to provide millinery "for cash," convinces you (as G.K. himself says
of another story) that Dick Swiveller really did say, "When he who
adores thee has left but the name--in case of letters and parcels."
Dickens _must_ have dictated the letter to John Barker. After all, he
was only dead ten years.
"Aunt Marie used to say," adds Annie Firmin, "that Mr. Ed married her
for her beautiful hair, it was auburn, and very long and wavy. He
used to sit behind her in Church. She liked pretty clothes, but
lacked the vanity to buy them for herself. I have a little blue
hanging watch that he bought her one day--she always appreciated
little attentions."
The playmates of Gilbert's childhood are not described in the
_Autobiography_ except for Annie's "long ropes of golden hair." But
in one of the innumerable fragments written in his early twenties, he
describes a family of girls who had played with him when they were
very young together. It is headed, "Chapter I. A Contrast and a
Climax," and several other odd bits of verse and narrative introduce
the Vivian family as early and constant playmates.
One of the best ways of feeling a genuine friendly enthusiasm for
persons of the other sex, without gliding into anything with a
shorter name, is to know a whole family of them. The most
intellectual idolatry at one shrine is apt to lose its purely
intellectual character, but a genial polytheism is always bracing and
platonic. Besides, the Vivians lived in the same street or rather
"gardens" as ourselves, and were amusing as bringing one within sight
of what an old friend of mine, named Bentley, called with more than
his usual gloom and severity of expression, "the remote outpost of
Kensington Society."
For these reasons, and a great many much better ones, I was very
much elated to have the family, or at least the three eldest girls
who represent it to the neighbourhood, standing once more on the
well-rubbed lawn of our old garden, where some of my earliest
recollections were of subjecting them to treatment such as I
considered appropriate to my own well-established character of
robber, tying them to trees to the prejudice of their white frocks,
and otherwise misbehaving myself in the funny old days, before I went
to school and became a son of gentlemen only. I have never been able,
in fact I have never tried, to tell which of the three I really liked
best. And if the severer usefulness and domesticity of the eldest
girl, with her quiet art-colours, and broad, brave forehead as pale
as the white roses that clouded the garden, if these maturer
qualities in Nina demanded my respect more than the levity of the
others, I fear they did not prevent me feeling an almost equal tide
of affection towards the sleepy acumen and ingrained sense of humour
of Ida, the second girl and book-reader for the family: or Violet, a
veritably delightful child, with a temper as formless and erratic as
her tempest of red hair.
"What old memories this garden calls up," said Nina, who like many
essentially simple and direct people, had a strong dash of sentiment
and a strong penchant for being her own emotional pint-stoup on the
traditional subjects and occasions. "I remember so well coming here
in a new pink frock when I was a little girl. It wasn't so new when
I went away."
"I certainly must have been a brute," I replied. "But I have
endeavoured to make a lifetime atone for my early conduct." And
I fell to thinking how even Nina, miracle of diligence and
self-effacement, remembered a new pink frock across the abyss of
the years. . . . Walking with my old friends round the garden, I
found in every earth-plot and tree-root the arenas of an active
and adventurous life in early boyhood. . . .*
[* Unpublished fragment.]
Edward Chesterton was a Liberal politically and what has been called
a Liberal Christian religiously. When the family went to
church--which happened very seldom--it was to listen to the sermons
of Stopford Brooke. Some twenty years later, Cecil was to remark with
amusement that he had as a small boy heard every part of the teaching
now (1908) being set out by R. J. Campbell under the title, "The New
Religion." The Chesterton Liberalism entered into the view of history
given to their children, and it produced from Gilbert the only poem
of his childhood worth quoting. I cannot date it, but the very
immature handwriting and curious spelling mark it as early.
Probably most children have read, or at any rate up to my own
generation, had read, Aytoun's _Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers_, and
played at being Cavaliers as a result. But Gilbert could not play at
being a Cavalier. He had learned from his father to be a Roundhead,
as had every good Liberal of that day. What was to be done about it?
He took the _Lays_ and rewrote them in an excellent imitation of
Aytoun, but on the opposite side. In view of his own later
developments such a line as "Drive the trembling Papists backwards"
has an ironic humour. But one wonders what Aytoun himself would have
made of a small boy who took his rhythm and sometimes his very words,
turned his hero into a traitor ("false Montrose") and his traitor
Argyll into a hero! I have left the spelling untouched.
Sing of the Great Lord Archibald
Sing of his glorious name
Sing of his covenenting faith
And his evelasting fame.
One day he summoned all his men
To meet on Cruerchin's brow
Three thousand covenenting chiefs
Who no master would allow
Three thousand Knights
With clamores drawn
And targets tough and strong
Knights who for the right
Would ever fight
And never bear the wrong.
And he creid (his hand uplifted)
"Soldiers of Scotland hear my vow
Ere the morning shall have risen
I will lay the trators low
Or as ye march from the battle
Marching back in battle file
Ye shall there among the corpses
Find the body of Argyll.
Soldiers Soldiers onward onward
Onward soldiers follow me
Come, remember ye the crimes
Of the fiend of fell Dundee
Onward let us draw our clamores
Let us draw them on our foes
Now then I am threatened with
The fate of false Montrose.
Drive the trembling Papists backwards
Drive away the Tory's hord
Let them tell thier hous of villians
They have felt the Campbell's sword."
And the next morn he arose
And he girded on his sword
They asked him many questions
But he answered not a word.
And he summoned all his men
And he led them to the field
And We creid unto our master
That we'd die and never yield.
That same morn we drove right backwards
All the servants of the Pope
And Our Lord Archibald we saved
From a halter and a rope
Far and fast fled all the trators
Far and fast fled all the Graemes
Fled that cursed tribe who lately
Stained there honour and thier names.
CHAPTER III
School Days
CURIOUSLY ENOUGH Gilbert does not in the _Autobiography_ speak of any
school except St. Paul's. He went however first to Colet Court,
usually called at that time Bewsher's, from the name of the
Headmaster. Though it is not technically the preparatory school for
St. Paul's, large numbers of Paulines do pass through it. It stands
opposite St. Paul's in the Hammersmith Road and must have been felt
by Gilbert as one thing with his main school experience, for he
nowhere differentiates between the two.
St. Paul's School is an old city foundation which has had among its
scholars Milton and Marlborough, Pepys and Sir Philip Francis and a
host of other distinguished men. The editor of a correspondence
column wrote a good many years later in answer to an enquirer: "Yes,
Milton and G. K. Chesterton were both educated at St. Paul's school.
We fancy however that Milton had left before Chesterton entered the
school." In an early life of Sir Thomas More we learn of the keen
rivalry existing in his day between his own school of St. Anthony and
St. Paul's, of scholastic "disputations" between the two, put an end
to by Dean Colet because they led to brawling among the boys, when
the Paulines would call those of St. Anthony "pigs" and the pigs
would call the Paulines "pigeons"--from the pigeons of St. Paul's
Cathedral. Now, however, St. Anthony's is no more, and St. Paul's
School has long moved to the suburbs and lies about seven minutes'
walk along the Hammersmith Road from Warwick Gardens. Gilbert
Chesterton was twelve when he entered St. Paul's (in January 1887)
and he was placed in the second Form.
His early days at school were very solitary, his chief occupation
being to draw all over his books. He drew caricatures of his masters,
he drew scenes from Shakespeare, he drew prominent politicians. He
did not at first make many friends. In the _Autobiography_ he makes a
sharp distinction between being a child and being a boy, but it is a
distinction that could only be drawn by a man. And most men, I fancy,
would find it a little difficult to say at what moment the
transformation occurred. G.K. seems to put it at the beginning of
school life, but the fact that St. Paul's was a day-school meant that
the transition from home to school, usual in English public-school
education,* was never in his case completely made. No doubt he is
right in speaking in the _Autobiography_ of "the sort of prickly
protection like hair" that "grows over what was once the child," of
the fact that schoolboys in his time "could be blasted with the
horrible revelation of having a sister, or even a Christian name."
Nevertheless, he went home every evening to a father and mother and
small brother; he went to his friends' houses and knew their sisters;
school and home life met Daily instead of being sharply divided into
terms and holidays.
[* The terminology for English schools came into being largely before
the State concerned itself with education. A Private School is one
run by an individual or a group for private profit. A Public School
is not run for private profit; any profits there may be are put back
into the school. Mostly they are run by a Board of Governors and very
many of them hold the succession to the old monastic schools of
England (e.g., Charterhouse, Westminster, St. Paul's). They are
usually, though not necessarily, boarding schools, and the fees are
usually high. Elementary schools called Board Schools were paid for
out of local rates and run by elected School Boards. They were later
replaced by schools run by the County Councils.]
This fact was of immense significance in Gilbert's development. Years
later he noted as the chief defect of Oxford that it consisted almost
entirely of people educated at boarding-schools. For good, for evil,
or for both, a boy at a day-school is educated chiefly at home.
In the atmosphere of St. Paul's is found little echo of the dogma
of the Head Master of Christ's Hospital. "Boy! The school is your
father! Boy! The school is your mother." Nor, as far as we know has
any Pauline been known to desire the substitution of the august
abstraction for the guardianship of his own people. Friendships
formed in this school have a continual reference to home life, nor
can a boy possibly have a friend long without making the acquaintance
and feeling the influence of his parents and his surroundings. . . .
The boys' own amusements and institutions, the school sports, the
school clubs, the school magazine, are patronised by the masters, but
they are originated and managed by the boys. The play-hours of the
boys are left to their several pleasures, whether physical or
intellectual, nor have any foolish observations about the battle of
Waterloo being won on the cricket-field, or such rather unmeaning
oracles, yet succeeded in converting the boys' amusements into a
compulsory gymnastic lesson. The boys are, within reasonable limits,
free.*
[* MS. _History of J.D.C_. written about 1894.]
Gilbert calls the chapter on his school days, "How to be a Dunce,"
and although in mature life he was "on the side of his masters" and
grateful to them "that my persistent efforts not to learn Latin were
frustrated; and that I was not entirely successful even in escaping
the contamination of the language of Aristotle and Demosthenes," he
still contrasts childhood as a time when one "wants to know nearly
everything" with "the period of what is commonly called education;
that is, the period during which I was being instructed by somebody
I did not know about something I did not want to know."
The boy who sat next to him in class, Lawrence Solomon (later Senior
Tutor of University College, London), remembered him as sleepy and
indifferent in manner but able to master anything when he cared to
take the trouble--as he very seldom did. He was in a class with boys
almost all his juniors. Lucian Oldershaw, who later became his
brother-in-law, says of Gilbert's own description of his school life
that it was as near a pose as Gilbert ever managed to get. He wanted
desperately to be the ordinary schoolboy, but he never managed to
fulfil this ambition. Tall, untidy, incredibly clumsy and
absent-minded, he was marked out from his fellows both physically and
intellectually. When in the later part of his school life some sort
of physical exercises were made compulsory, the boys used to form
parties to watch his strange efforts on the trapeze or parallel bars.
In these early days, he was (he says of himself) "somewhat solitary,"
but not unhappy, and perfectly good-humoured about the tricks which
were inevitably played on a boy who always appeared to be half asleep.
"He sat at the back of the room," says Mr. Fordham, "and never
distinguished himself. We thought him the most curious thing that
ever was." His schoolfellows noted how he would stride along,
"apparently muttering poetry, breaking into inane laughter." The kind
of thing he was muttering we learn from a sentence in the
_Autobiography:_ "I was one day wandering about the streets in that
part of North Kensington, telling myself stories of feudal sallies
and sieges, in the manner of Walter Scott, and vaguely trying to
apply them to the wilderness of bricks and mortar around me."
"I can see him now," wrote Mr. Fordham, "very tall and lanky,
striding untidily along Kensington High Street, smiling and sometimes
scowling as he talked to himself, apparently oblivious of everything
he passed; but in reality a far closer observer than most, and one
who not only observed but remembered what he had seen." It was only
of himself that he was really oblivious.
Mr. Oldershaw remembers that on one occasion on a very cold day they
filled his pockets with snow in the playground. When class
reassembled, the snow began to melt and pools to appear on the floor.
A small boy raised his hand: "Please Sir, I think the laboratory sink
must be leaking again. The water is coming through and falling all
over Chesterton."
The laboratory sink was an old offender and the master must have been
short-sighted. "Chesterton," he said, "go up to Mr. ---- and ask him
with my compliments to see that the trouble with the sink is put
right immediately." Gilbert, with water still streaming from both
pockets, obediently went upstairs, gave the message and returned
without discovering what had happened.
The boys who played these jokes on him had at the same time an
extraordinary respect, both for his intellectual acquirements and for
his moral character. One boy, who rather prided himself in private
life on being a man about town, stopped him one day in the passage
and said solemnly, "Chesterton, I am an abandoned profligate." G.K.
replied, "I'm sorry to hear it." "We watched our talk," one of them
said to me, "when he was with us." His home and upbringing were felt
by some of his schoolfellows to have definitely a Puritan tinge about
them, although on the other hand the more Conservative elements
regarded them as politically dangerous. Mr. Oldershaw relates that
his own father, who was a Conservative in politics and had also
joined the Catholic Church, seriously warned him against the
Agnosticism and Republicanism of the Chesterton household. But even
at this age his schoolfellows recognised that he had begun the great
quest of his life. "We felt," said Oldershaw, "that he was looking
for God."
I suppose it was in part the keenness of the inner vision that
produced the effect of external sleepiness and made it possible to
pack Gilbert's pockets with snow; but it was also the fact that he
was observing very keenly the kind of thing that other people do not
bother to observe. I remember my mother telling me, when I first came
out, that she had almost ceased trying to draw people's characters
and imaginatively construct their home lives, because for the first
time in her life she was trying to notice how they were dressed. She
was not noticeably successful. Gilbert Chesterton never even tried to
see what everyone else saw. All the time he was seeing qualities in
his friends, ideas in literature and possibilities in life. And all
this world of imagination had, on his own theory, to be carefully
concealed from his masters. In the _Autobiography_ he describes
himself walking to school fervently reciting verses which he
afterwards repeated in class with a determined lack of expression and
woodenness of voice; but when he assumes that this is how all boys
behave, he surely attributes his own literary enthusiasms far too
widely. One would rather gather that he supposed the whole of St.
Paul's School to be in the conspiracy to conceal their love of
literature from their masters! Such of his own schoolboy papers as
can be found show an imagination rare enough at any age, and an
enthusiasm not commonly to be found among schoolboys. A very early
one, to judge by the handwriting, is on the advantages for an
historical character of having long hair, illustrated by the history
of Mary Queen of Scots and Charles the First. In the contrast he
draws between Mary and Elizabeth, appear qualities of historical
imagination that might well belong to a mature and experienced writer.
. . . As in the cause of the fleeting heartless Helen, the Trojan
War is stirred up, and great Ajax perishes, and the gentle Patroclus
is slain, and mighty Hector falls, and godlike Achilles is laid low,
and the dun plains of Hades are thickened with the shades of Kings,
so round this lovely giddy French princess, fall one by one the
haughty Dauphin, the princely Darnley, the accomplished Rizzio, the
terrible Bothwell, and when she dies, she dies as a martyr before the
weeping eyes of thousands, and is given a popular pity and regret
denied to her rival, with all her faults of violence and vanity, a
greater and a purer woman.
It must indeed have been a terrible scene, the execution of that
unhappy Queen, and it is a scene that has been described by too
many and too able writers for me to venture on a picture of it. But
the continually lamented death of Mary of Scotland seems to me
happy compared with the end of her greater and sterner rival. As I
think on the two, the vision of the black scaffold, the grim headsman,
the serene captive, and the weeping populace fades from me and is
replaced by a sadder vision: the vision of the dimly-lighted
state-bedroom of Whitehall. Elizabeth, haggard and wild-eyed has
flung herself prone upon the floor and refuses to take meat or drink,
but lies there, surrounded by ceremonious courtiers, but seeing with
that terrible insight that was her curse, that she was alone, that
their homage was a mockery, that they were waiting eagerly for her
death to crown their intrigues with her successor, that there was not
in the whole world a single being who cared for her: seeing all this,
and bearing it with the iron fortitude of her race, but underneath
that invincible silence the deep woman's nature crying out with a
bitter cry that she is loved no longer: thus gnawed by the fangs of a
dead vanity, haunted by the pale ghost of Essex, and helpless and
bitter of heart, the greatest of Englishwomen passed silently away.
Of a truth, there are prisons more gloomy than Fotheringay and deaths
more cruel than the axe. Is there no pity due to those who undergo
these?
It is surprising to read the series of form reports written on a boy
who at fifteen or sixteen could do work of this quality. Here are the
half-yearly reports made by his Form Masters from his first year in
the school at the age of thirteen to the time he left at the age of
eighteen.
_December 1887_. Too much for me: means well by me, I believe, but
has an inconceivable knack of forgetting at the shortest notice, is
consequently always in trouble, though some of his work is well done,
when he does remember to do it. He ought to be in a studio not at
school. Never troublesome, but for his lack of memory and absence of
mind.
_July 1888_. Wildly inaccurate about everything; never thinks for two
consecutive moments to judge by his work: plenty of ability, perhaps
in other directions than classics.
_December 1888_. Fair. Improving in neatness. Has a very fair stock
of general knowledge.
_July 1889_. A great blunderer with much intelligence.
_December 1889_. Means well. Would do better to give his time to
"Modern" subjects.
_July 1890_. Can get up any work, but originates nothing.
_December 1890_. Takes an interest in his English work, but otherwise
has not done well.
_July 1891_. He has a decided literary aptitude, but does not trouble
himself enough about school work.
_December 1891. Report missing_.
_July 1892_. Not on the same plane with the rest: composition quite
futile, but will translate well and appreciate what he reads. Not a
quick brain, but possessed by a slowly moving tortuous imagination.
Conduct always admirable.
What is much clearer from the mass of notebooks and odd sheets of
paper belonging to these years than from the _Autobiography_ is the
degree to which the two processes of resisting and absorbing
knowledge were going on simultaneously. At school he was, he says,
asleep but dreaming in his sleep; at home he was still learning
literature from his father, going to museums and picture galleries
for enjoyment, listening to political talk and engaging in arguments,
writing historical plays and acting them, and above all drawing.
To most of his early writing it is nearly impossible to affix a
date--with the exception of a "dramatic journal," kept by fits and
starts during the Christmas holidays when he was sixteen. G.K.
solemnly tells the reader of this diary to take warning by it, to
beware of prolixity, and it does in fact contain many more words to
many fewer ideas than any of his later writings. But it is useful in
giving the atmosphere of those years. Great part is in dialogue, the
author appearing throughout as Your Humble Servant, his young brother
Cecil as the Innocent Child.
The first scene is the rehearsal of a dramatic version of Scott's
_Woodstock_. This has been written by Your Humble Servant who is at
the same time engaged on a historic romance. At intervals in the
languid rehearsing, endless discussions take place: between Oldershaw
and G.K. on Thackeray, between Oldershaw, his father and G.K. on
Royal Supremacy in the Church of England. The boys, walking between
their two houses, "discuss Roman Catholicism, Supremacy, Papal v.
Protestant Persecutions. Your Humble Servant arrives at 11 Warwick
Gardens to meet Mr. Mawer Cowtan, Master Sidney Wells and Master
William Wells. Conversation about Frederick the Great, Voltaire and
Macaulay. Cheerful and enlivening discourse on Germs, Dr. Koch,
Consumption and Tuberculosis."
"Conservative" Oldershaw regards his friend as a "red hot raging
Republican" and it is interesting to note already faint
foreshadowings of Gilbert's future political views. His parents had
made him a Liberal but it seemed to him later, as he notes in the
_Autobiography_, that their generation was insufficiently alive to the
condition and sufferings of the poor. Open-eyed in so many matters,
they were not looking in that particular direction. And so it was
only very gradually that he himself began to look.
Your Humble Servant read Oldershaw Elizabeth Browning's "Cry of the
Children," which the former could scarcely trust himself to read, but
which the latter candidly avowed that he did not like. Part and
parcel of Oldershaw's optimism is a desire not to believe in pictures
of real misery, and a desire to find out compensating pleasures. I
think there was a good deal in what he said, but at the same time I
think that there is real misery, physical and mental, in the low and
criminal classes, and I don't believe in crying peace where there is
no peace.
Of his brother, Gilbert notes, "Innocent Child's fault is not a
servile reverence for his elder brother, whom he regards, I believe,
as a mild lunatic." And Oldershaw recalls his own detestation of
Cecil, who would insist on monopolising the conversation when
Gilbert's friends wanted to talk to him. "An ugly little boy creeping
about," Mr. Fordham calls him. "Cecil had no vanity," writes Mrs.
Kidd, "and thoroughly appreciated the fact that he was not beautiful;
when he was about 14 he said at dinner one day: 'I think I shall
marry X (a very plain cousin); between us we might produce the
missing link.' Aunt Marie was shocked!"
Many of the games arise from the skill in drawing of both Gilbert and
his father. A long history of two of the Masters drawn by Gilbert
shows them in the Salvation Army, as Christy Minstrels, as editors of
a new revolutionary paper, "La Guillotine," as besieged in their
office by a mob headed by Lord Salisbury, the Archbishop of
Canterbury and other Conservative leaders. Getting tired at last of
the adventures of these two mild scholars, Gilbert starts a series of
Shakespeare plays drawn in modern dress.
Shylock as an aged Hebrew vendor of dilapidated vesture, with a
tiara of hats, Antonio as an opulent and respectable city-merchant,
Bassanio as a fashionable swell and Gratiano as his loud and
disreputable "pal" with large checks and a billy-cock hat. Portia was
attired as a barrister in wig and gown and Nerissa as a clerk with a
green bag and a pen behind his ear. This being much appreciated, Your
Humble Servant questions what portion of the Bard of Avon he shall
next burlesque.
The little group seems certainly at this date to be living in a land
in which 'tis always afternoon. In one house or another tea-time
goes on until signs of dinner make their appearance. The boys only
move from one hospitable dining-room to another, or adjourn to their
own bedrooms where Gilbert piles book on book and reduces even neat
shelves to the same chaos that reigns in his own room.
The Christmas holidays to which the "dramatic journal" belongs came a
few months after the founding of the Junior Debating Club, which
became so central in Gilbert's life and which he treated with a
gravity, solemnity even, such as he never showed later for any cause,
a gravity untouched by humour. It was a group of about a dozen boys,
started with the idea that it should be a Shakespeare Club, but
immediately changed into a general discussion club. They met every
week at the home of one or other and after a hearty tea some member
read a paper which was then debated.
At the age of twenty, when he had left school two years, G.K. wrote a
solemn history of this institution in which the question of whether
it was right or wrong to insist on penny fines for rowdy behaviour is
canvassed with passionate feeling! One boy who was expelled asked to
be readmitted, saying, "I feel so lonely without it." Gilbert's
enthusiasm over this incident could be no greater had he been a
bishop welcoming the return of an apostate to the Christian fold. I
suppose it was partly because of his early solitary life at school,
partly because of the general trend of his thought, partly that at
this later date he was under the influence of Walt Whitman and cast
back upon his earlier years a sort of glow or haze of Whitman
idealism. Anyhow, the Junior Debating Club became to him a symbol of
the ideal friendship. They were Knights of the Round Table. They were
Jongleurs de Dieu. They were the Human Club through whom and in whom
he had made the grand discovery of Man. They were his youth
personified. The note is still struck in the letters of his
engagement period, and it was only forty years later, writing his
_Autobiography_, that he was able to picture with a certain humorous
detachment this group of boys who met to eat buns and criticise the
universe.
A year after their first meeting, the energy of Lucian Oldershaw
produced a magazine called _The Debater_. At first it was turned out
at home on a duplicator--the efficiency of the production being such
that the author of any given paper was able occasionally to recognise
a few words of his own contribution. Later it was printed and gives a
good record of the meetings and discussions. It shows the energy and
ardour of the debaters and also their serious view of themselves and
their efforts. At first they are described as Mr. C, Mr. F, etc.
Later the full name is given. Besides the weekly debates, they
started a Library, a Chess Club, a Naturalists' Society and a
Sketching Club, regular meetings of which are chronicled.
"The Chairman [G.K.C.] said a few words," runs a record, after some
months of existence, "stating his pride at the success of the Club,
and his belief in the good effect such a literary institution might
have as a protest against the lower and unworthy phases of school
life. His view having been vehemently corroborated, the meeting broke
up."
In one fairly typical month papers were read on "Three Comedies of
Shakespeare," "Pope," and "Herodotus," and when no paper was produced
there was a discussion on Capital Punishment. In another, the
subjects were "The Brontës," "Macaulay as an Essayist," "Frank
Buckland" (the naturalist) and "Tennyson." A pretty wide range of
reading was called for from schoolboys in addition to their ordinary
work, even though on one occasion the Secretary sternly notes that
the reading of the paper occupied only three and one-half minutes.
But they were not daunted by difficulties or afraid of bold attempts.
Mr. Digby d'Avigdor on one occasion "delivered a paper entitled 'The
Nineteenth Century: A Retrospect.' He gave a slight resumé of the
principal events, with appropriate tribute to the deceased great of
this century."
Mr. Bertram, reading a paper on Milton, "dealt critically with his
various poems, noting the effective style of 'L'Allegro,' giving the
story of the writing of 'Comus' and cursorily analysing 'Paradise
Lost,' and 'Paradise Regained.'"
"After discussing the adaptability of _Hamlet_ to the stage, Mr.
Maurice Solomon"--who may have been quite fifteen--"passed on to
review the chief points in the character of the Prince of Denmark,
concluding with a slight review of the other characters which he did
not think Shakespeare had given much attention to."
In a discussion on the new humorists, we find the Secretary "taking
grievous umbrage at certain unwarrantable attacks which he considered
Mr. Andrew Lang had lately made on these choice spirits." This
discussion arose from a paper by the Chairman on the new school of
poetry "in which, in spite of its good points, he condemned the
absence of the sentiment of the moral, which he held to be the really
stirring and popular element in literature."
Evidently some of his friends tended towards a youthful cynicism for
in a paper on Barrie's _Window in Thrums_ Gilbert apologises to "such
of you as are much bitten with the George Moore state of mind."
The book which describes the rusty emotions and toilsome lives of the
Thrums weavers will always remain a book that has given me something,
and the fact that mine is merely the popular view and that what I
feel in it can be equally felt by the majority of fellow-creatures,
this fact, such is my hardened and abandoned state, only makes me
like the book more. I have long found myself in that hopeless
minority that is engaged in protecting the majority of mankind from
the attacks of all men. . . .
In this sentiment we recognise the G.K. that is to be, but not when
we find him seconding Mr. Bentley in the motion that "a scientific
education is much more useful than a classic."
"Mr. M," reading a paper on Herodotus, "gave a minute account of the
life of the historian, dwelling much upon the doubt and controversy
surrounding his birth and several incidents of his history"; while
"Mr. F. read a paper on Newspapers, tracing their growth from the
Acta Diurna of the later Roman Empire to the hordes of papers of the
present day."
Perhaps best of all these efforts was that of Mr. L.D., who "after
describing the governments of England, France, Russia, Germany and
the United States, proceeded to give his opinion on their various
merits, first saying that he personally was a republican."
Of the boys that appear in _The Debater_, Robert Vernède was killed
in the Great War; Laurence Solomon at his death in 1940 was Senior
Tutor of University College, London; his brother Maurice who became
one of the Directors of the General Electric Company is now an
invalid. I read a year or so ago an interesting _Times_ obituary of
Mr. Bertram, who was Director of Civil Aviation in the Air Ministry;
Mr. Salter became a Principal in the Treasury, having practised as a
solicitor up to the War; Mr. Fordham, a barrister, was one of the
Legal Advisers to the Ministry of Labour and has now retired.
The two outstanding "debaters" in G.K.'s life were Lucian Oldershaw
who became his brother-in-law and will often reappear in these pages,
and Edmund Clerihew Bentley, his friend of friends. Closely united as
was the whole group, Lucian Oldershaw once told me that they were
frantically jealous of one another: "We would have done anything to
get the first place with Gilbert."
"But you know," I said "who had it."
"Yes," he replied, "our jealousy of Bentley was overwhelming."
Mr. Bentley became a journalist and was for long on the editorial
staff of the _Daily Telegraph_, but he is best known for his
detective stories--especially _Trent's Last Case_--and as the
inventor of a special form of rhyme, known from his second name as
the Clerihew. He wrote the first of these while still at school, and
the best were later published in a volume called _Biography for
Beginners_, which G.K. illustrated. Everyone has his favourite. My
own is:
Sir Christopher Wren
Said "I am going to dine with some men,
If anybody calls
Say I'm designing St. Paul's."
Or possibly:
The people of Spain think Cervantes
Equal to half-a-dozen Dantes,
An opinion resented most bitterly
By the people of Italy.
Bentley was essentially a holiday as well as term-time companion and
when they were not together a large correspondence between the two
boys gives some idea of how and where Gilbert spent his summer
holidays. They are very much schoolboy letters and not worth quoting
at full length, but it is interesting to compare both style and
content with the later letters. All the letters begin "Dear Bentley."
The first use of his Christian name only occurs after both had left
school.
Austria House
Pier Street
Ventnor, Isle of Wight
(undated, probably 1890)
Although you dropt some hints about Paris when you were last
in our humble abode, I presume that this letter, if addressed to your
usual habitation, will reach you at some period. Ventnor, where, as
you will perceive we are, is, I will not say built upon hills, but
emptied into the cracks and clefts of rocks so that the geography of
the town is curious and involved. . . .
My brother is intent upon "The Three Midshipmen" or "The Three
Admirals" or the three coal-scuttles or some other distinguished trio
by that interminable ass Kingston. I looked at it today and wondered
how I ever could have enjoyed his eternal slave schooners and African
stations. I would not give a page of "Mansfield Park" or a verse of
"In Memoriam" for all the endless fighting of blacks and boarding of
pirates through which the three hypocritical vagabonds ever went. I
am getting old. How old it will shortly be necessary for me to state
precisely, for, as you doubtless know there is going to be a
Census. . . .
I have been trying to knock into shape a story, such as we spoke
about the other day, about the first introduction of Tea, and I should
be glad of your assistance and suggestions. I think I shall lay the
scene in Holland where the merits of tea were first largely agitated,
and fill the scene with the traditional Dutch figures such as I sketch.
I find in Disraeli's "Curiosities of Literature" which I consulted
before coming away that a French writer wrote an elaborate treatise
to prove that tea merchants were always immoral members of society.
It would be rather curious to apply the theory to the present
day. . . .
11, Warwick Gardens,
Kensington.
(undated.)
I direct this letter to your ancient patrimonial estate unknowing
whether it will reach you or where it will reach you if it does;
whether you are shooting polar bears on the ice-fields of Spitzbergen
or cooking missionaries among the cannibals of the South Pacific.
But wherever you are I find some considerable relief in turning from
the lofty correspondence of the secretary (with no disparagement
of my much-esteemed friend, Oldershaw) to another friend
(ifelow-mecallimso as Mr. Verdant Greene said) who can discourse on
some other subjects besides the Society, and who will not devote the
whole of his correspondence to the questions of that excellent and
valuable body. The Society is a very good thing in its way (being
the President I naturally think so) but like other good things, you
may have too much of it, and I have had. . . .
As I said before, I don't know where you are disporting yourself,
beyond some hurried remark about Paris which you dropped in our
hurried interview in one of the "brilliant flashes of silence" between
those imbecile screams and yells and stamping, which even the
natural enthusiasm at the prospect of being "broken up" cannot
excuse.
6, The Quadrant,
North Berwick, Haddington,
Scotland.
(? 1891.)
You will probably guess that as far as personal taste and instincts
are concerned, I share all your antipathy to the noisy Plebian
excursionist. A visit to Ramsgate during the season and the vision of
the crowded, howling sands has left in me feelings which all my
Radicalism cannot allay. At the same time I think that the lower
orders are seen unfavorably when enjoying themselves. In labour and
trouble they are more dignified and less noisy. Your suggestion as to
a series of soliloquies is very flattering and has taken hold of me
to the extent of writing a similar ballad on Simon de Montfort. The
order in which they come is rather incongruous, particularly if I
include the list I have in mind for the future thus--Danton, William
III, Simon de Montfort, Rousseau, David and Russell. . . . I rejoice
to say that this is a sequestered spot into which Hi tiddly hi ti,
etc. and all the ills in its train have not penetrated.
In these last two letters there are sentences of a kind not to be
found anywhere else in Chesterton. The disparagement of Lucian
Oldershaw's excessive enthusiasm for the Junior Debating Club, the
solemn reprobation of the "imbecile screams and yells and stamping"
of the last day at school before the summer holidays, the antipathy
expressed for the rowdy enjoyments of the lower orders--these things
are not in the least like either the Chesterton that was to be or the
Chesterton that then was. But they are very much like Bentley. He was
two years younger than Chesterton, but far older than his years and
seemed indeed to the other boys (and perhaps to himself) like an
elderly gentleman smiling a remote amused smile at the enthusiasms of
the young. I get the strongest feeling that at this stage Chesterton
not only admired him--as he was to do all his life--but wanted to be
like him, to say the kind of thing he thought Bentley would say. This
phase did not last, as we shall see; it had gone by the time
Chesterton was at the Slade School.
6, The Quadrant,
North Berwick
Haddington, Scotland.
(undated, probably 1891.)
DEAR BENTLEY,
We have been here three days and my brother loudly murmurs that we
have not yet seen any of "the sights." For my part I abominate
sights, and all people who want to look at them. A great deal more
instruction, to say nothing of pleasure is to be got out of the
nearest haystack or hedgerow taken quietly, than in trotting over two
or three counties to see "the view" or "the site" or the
extraordinary cliff or the unusual tower or the unreasonable hill or
any other monstrosity deforming the face of Nature. Anybody can make
sights but nobody has yet succeeded in making scenery. (Excuse the
unaccountable pencil drawing in the middle which was drawn
unconsciously on the back of the unfinished letter.) . . .
9, South Terrace,
Littlehampton, Sussex.
(undated.)
. . . I agree with you in your admiration for Paradise Lost, but
consider it on the whole too light and childish a book for persons of
our age. It is all very well, as small children to read pretty
stories about Satan and Belial, when we have only just mastered our
"Oedipus" and our Herbert Spencer, but when we grow older we get to
like Captain Marryat and Mr. Kingston and when we are men we know
that Cinderella is much better than any of those babyish books. As
regards one question which you asked, I may remark that the children
of Israel [presumably the Solomons] have not gone unto Horeb, neither
unto Sittim, but unto the land that is called Shropshire they went,
and abode therein. And they came unto a city, even unto the city that
is called Shrewsbury, and there they builded themselves an home,
where they might abide. And their home was in the land that was
called Castle Street and their home was the 25th tabernacle in that
land. And they abode with certain of their own kin until their season
be over and gone. And lo! they spake unto me by letter, saying,
"Heard ye aught of him that is called Bentley? Is he in the house of
his fathers or has he come unto a strange land?" Here endeth the 2nd
Lesson.
Hotel de Lille & d'Albion,
223, Rue St. Honoré,
Paris.
(undated, probably 1892.)
. . . They showed us over the treasures of the Cathedral, among
which, as was explained by the guide, who spoke a little English, was
a cross given by Louis XIV to _"Meess"_ Lavallière. I thought that
concession to the British system of titles was indeed touching. I
also thought, when reflecting what the present was, and where it was
and then to whom it was given, that this showed pretty well what the
religion of the Bourbon regime was and why it has become impossible
since the Revolution.
Grand Hotel du Chemin de Fer,
Arromanches (Calvados)
(undated)
. . . Art is universal. This remark is not so irrelevant and Horace
Greeley-like as it may appear. I have just had a demonstration of its
truth on the coach coming down here. Two very nice little French boys
of cropped hair and restless movements were just in front of us and
my pater having discovered that the book they had with them was a
prize at a Paris school, some slight conversation arose. Not thinking
my French altogether equal to a prolonged interview, I took out a
scrap of paper and began, with a fine carelessness to draw a picture
of Napoleon I, hat, chin, attitude, all complete. This, of course,
was gazed at rapturously by these two young inheritors of France's
glory and it ended in my drawing them unlimited goblins to keep for
the remainder of the interview.
In May 1891, the Chairman of the J.D.C. attained the maturity of
seventeen.
The Secretary then rose and in a speech in which he extolled the
merits of the Chairman as a chairman, and mentioned the benefit which
the Junior Debating Club received on the day of which this was the
anniversary, viz., the natal day of Mr. Chesterton, proposed that a
vote wishing him many happy returns of the day and a long continuance
in the Chair of the Club should be passed. This was carried with
acclamations. The Chairman replied after restoring Order. . . .
Naturally this question of order among a crowd of boys loomed large.
At the beginning a number of rules were passed giving great powers to
the Chairman, "which that gentleman," he says of himself, "lenient by
temperament and republican by principles, certainly would never have
put in force. . . . It was seldom enough," he continues:
that a boy of fifteen* found himself in the position of the
Chairman, an attitude of command and responsibility over a body of
his friends and equals, and it was not to be expected that they would
easily take to the state of things. Nor was the Chairman himself,
like the Secretary, protected and armed by any personal aptitude for
practical proceedings. But solely by the certain degree of respect
entertained for his character and acquirements. This respect, sincere
and even excessive as it frequently was, contrasted somewhat
humorously with the common inattention to questions of order, nor
could anything be more noisy than the loyalty of Fordham and Langdon
Davies, with the exception of their interruptions. It may then fairly
be said that the troubles and discussions of the first months of the
Club's existence centred practically round the question of order, the
first of the great difficulties of this most difficult enterprise.
How boys who could scarcely be got to behave quietly under the
strictest schoolmasters could ever be brought to obey the rebuke of
their equal and schoolfellow: how a heterogeneous pack of average
schoolboys could organise themselves into a self-governing republic,
these were problems of real and stupendous difficulty. The fines of a
penny and of twopence, which were instituted at the first meeting,
were found hopelessly incompetent to cope with the bursts of
oblivious hilarity. Fordham in particular, whose constant breaches of
order threatened to exhaust even the extensive treasury of that
spoilt and opulent young gentleman, soon left calculation far behind,
nor can the story be better or more brightly told than by himself.
"Mr. F.," he wrote, "at one time, after considerable calculation
found that he was in debt to the extent of some 10 or 11 shillings;
but as he felt that by refusing to pay the sum he would be striking a
blow for the liberty of the subject, he manfully held out against
what he considered an unjust punishment for such diminutive
frivolities as he had indulged in." . . . At times incidents of a
disturbing and playful nature have roused the wrath of the Chairman
and Secretary to a pitch awful to behold. At one time Mr. H. (a
member who soon resigned) spent a considerable part of a meeting
under the table, till he found himself used as a public footstool and
a doormat combined. At another as Mr. Bentley was departing from the
scene of chaos a penny bun of the sticky order caressingly stung his
honoured cheek, sped upon its errand of mercy by the unerring aim of
Mr. F.**
[* He was, in fact, sixteen when the J.D.C. began.]
[** MS. _History of the J.D.C_.]
Mr. Fordham well remembers how G.K. one day took him
aside at the Oldershaws' house and told him that he really must
be less exuberant. This historic occasion was always alluded
to later as "the day on which the Chairman spoke seriously to
Mr. F."
After various resignations order was restored, and a little later two
of the chief recalcitrants asked to be received back into the Club.
"I feel so lonely without it," one of them had remarked; and G.K.
comments, "This has always appeared to the present writer one of the
most important speeches in the history of the Club. . . . The Junior
Debating Club had come through its moments of difficulty and was a
fact and an establishment."
Nor was the circulation of _The Debater_ long confined to members of
the Club and their own circle of friends and relatives. Some of the
boys had no doubt a regular allowance, but probably a small one.
Gilbert himself says in his diary that he had no income "except
errant sixpences." And printers' bills had to be paid. Moreover in
the first number the editor Lucian Oldershaw confessed frankly that
one reason for the paper's existence was "that the Society may not
degenerate into the position of a mutual admiration Society by
totally lacking the admiration of outsiders." The staff were able
immediately to note, "Any apprehensions we may have felt on the
morning of the publication of _The Debater_ were speedily dispelled,
when by nightfall we had disposed of all our copies." Of a later
issue the energetic editor sold sixty-five copies in the course of
the summer holidays. Masters, too, began to read it and at last a
copy was hid on the table of the High Master, Mr. Walker. Cecil
Chesterton describes the High Master as a gigantic man with a booming
voice. Some Paulines believed he had given Gilbert the first
inspiration for the personality of "Sunday" in _The Man Who Was
Thursday_. Another contemporary says that he was reputed to take no
interest in anything except examination successes, and that the boys
were amazed at the effect on him of reading _The Debater_. Reading in
the light of his future, one sees qualities in Gilbert's work not to
be found in that of the other contributors, but it is worth noting
that the J.D.C. members were in fact a quite unusually able group.
Almost every one of them took brilliant scholarships to Oxford or
Cambridge; the High Master had never boasted of so many scholarships
from one set of boys. And in reading _The Debater_ (an enjoyment I
wish others could share) one has to bear in mind the relative ages of
the contributors. It is, I think, striking that all these boys should
have recognised Gilbert's quality and accepted his leadership, for
they were all a year or so younger than he was and yet were in the
same form. They knew that this was only because G.K. would not bother
to do his school work; still, I think that at that age they showed
insight by knowing it.
Gilbert's work is to be found in every number of _The
Debater_--usually verse as well as prose. Both Fordham and Oldershaw
remember most vividly the effect of reading a fanciful essay on
Dragons in the first number. "The Dragon," it began, "is the most
cosmopolitan of impossibilities." And the boys, rolling the words on
their tongues, murmured to one another, "This is literature."
Except for a very occasional flash the one element not yet visible in
these _Debater_ essays is humour. This is curious, because some of
his most brilliant fooling belongs to the same period. In a
collection made after his death, _The Coloured Lands_ is an
illustrated jeu d'esprit of 1891, _Half Hours in Hades:_ "an
elementary handbook of demonology" which is as amusing a thing as he
ever wrote. The drawings he made for it show specimens of the
evolution of various types of devil into various types of humans: the
devils themselves are carefully classified--the common or garden
serpent (Tentator Hortensis), the red devil (Diabolus Mephistopheles)
the blue devil (Caeruleus Lugubrius) etc. Mr. J. Milton's "specimen"
is discussed and various methods of pursuing observations in
supernatural history which "possesses an interest which will remain
after health, youth and even life have departed."
There is nothing of this kind in _The Debater_. Besides the
historical soliloquies mentioned in the letter to Bentley, there are
poems in which he is beginning to feel after his religious
philosophy. One of these in a very early number shows considerable
power for a boy not yet seventeen.
ADVENIAT REGNUM TUUM
Not that the widespread wings of wrong brood o'er a moaning earth,
Not from the clinging curse of gold, the random lot of birth;
Not from the misery of the weak, the madness of the strong,
Goes upward from our lips the cry, "How long, oh Lord, how long?"
Not only from the huts of toil, the dens of sin and shame,
From lordly halls and peaceful homes the cry goes up the same;
Deep in the heart of every man, where'er his life be spent,
There is a noble weariness, a holy discontent.
Where'er to mortal eyes has come, in silence dark and lone,
Some glimmer of the far-off light the world has never known,
Some ghostly echoes from a dream of earth's triumphal song,
Then as the vision fades we cry, "How long, oh Lord, how long?"
Long ages, from the dawn of time, men's toiling march has wound
Towards the world they ever sought, the world they never found;
Still far before their toiling path the glimmering promise lay,
Still hovered round the struggling race, a dream by night and day.
Mid darkening care and clinging sin they sought their unknown home,
Yet ne'er the perfect glory came--Lord, will it ever come?
The weeding of earth's garden broad from all its growths of wrong,
When all man's soul shall be a prayer, and all his life a song.
Aye, though through many a starless night we guard the flaming oil,
Though we have watched a weary watch, and toiled a weary toil,
Though in the midnight wilderness, we wander still forlorn,
Yet bear we in our hearts the proof that God shall send the dawn.
Deep in the tablets of our hearts he writes that yearning still,
The longing that His hand hath wrought shall not his hand fulfil?
Though death shall close upon us all before that hour we see,
The goal of ages yet is there--the good time yet to be:
Therefore, tonight, from varied lips, in every house and home,
Goes up to God the common prayer, "Father, Thy Kingdom come."*
[* _The Debater_, Vol. I. March-April, 1891.]
Gilbert's prose work in _The Debater_ must have been little less
surprising to any master who had merely watched him slumbering at a
desk. His historical romance "The White Cockade" is immature and
unimportant. But essays on Spenser, Milton, Pope, Gray, Cowper,
Burns, Wordsworth, "Humour in Fiction," "Boys' Literature," Sir
Walter Scott, Browning, the English Dramatists, showed a range and a
quality of literary criticism alike surprising. Perhaps most
surprising, however, is the fact that all this does not seem to have
made clear to either masters or parents the true nature of Gilbert's
vocation. He suffered at this date from having too many talents. For
he still went on drawing and his drawings seemed to many the most
remarkable thing about him, and were certainly the thing he most
enjoyed doing.
Even now his school work had not brought him into the highest
form--called not the Sixth, as in most schools, but the Eighth: the
highest form he ever reached was 6B. But in the Summer term of 1892
he entered a competition for a prize poem, and won it. The subject
chosen was St. Francis Xavier. I give the poem in Appendix A. It is
not as notable as some other of his work at that time: what is
interesting is that in it this schoolboy expresses with some power a
view he was later to explode yet more powerfully. He might have
claimed for himself what he said of earlier writers--it is not true
that they did not see our modern difficulties: they saw through them.
Never before had this contest been won by any but an Eighth Form boy,
and almost immediately afterwards Gilbert was amazed to find a short
notice posted on the board: "G. K. Chesterton to rank with the
Eighth.--F. W. Walker, High Master."
The High Master at any rate had travelled far from the atmosphere of
the form reports when Mrs. Chesterton visited him in 1894 to ask his
advice about her son's future. For he said, "Six foot of genius.
Cherish him, Mrs. Chesterton, cherish him."
CHAPTER IV
Art Schools and University College
WHEN ALL GILBERT'S friends were at Oxford or Cambridge, he used to
say how glad he was that his own choice had been a different one. He
never sighed for Oxford. He never regretted his rather curious
experiences at an Art School--two Art Schools really, although he
only talks of one in the _Autobiography_, for he was for a short time
at a School of Art in St. John's Wood (Calderon's, Lawrence Solomon
thought), whence he passed to the Slade School. He was there from
1892 to 1895 and during part of that time he attended lectures on
English Literature at University College.
The chapter on the experiences of the next two years is called in the
_Autobiography_, "How to be a Lunatic," and there is no doubt that
these years were crucial and at times crucifying in Gilbert's life.
During a happily prolonged youth (he was now eighteen and a half) he
had developed very slowly, but normally. Surrounded by pleasant
friendships and home influences he had never really become aware of
evil. Now it broke upon him suddenly--probably to a degree
exaggerated by his strong imagination and distorted by the fact that
he was undergoing physical changes usually belonging to an earlier
age.
Towards the end of his school life Gilbert's voice had not yet
broken. His mother took him to a doctor to be overhauled and was told
that his brain was the largest and most sensitive the doctor had ever
seen. "A genius or an idiot" was his verdict on the probabilities.
Above all things she was told to avoid for him any sort of shock.
Physically, mentally, spiritually he was on a very large scale and
probably for that reason of a slow rate of development. The most
highly differentiated organisms are the slowest to mature, and
without question Gilbert did mature very late. He was now passing
through the stage described by Keats: "The imagination of a boy is
healthy and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is
a space of life between"--a period unhealthy or at least ill-focussed.
Intellectually Gilbert suffered at this time from an extreme
scepticism. As he expressed it he "felt as if everything might be a
dream" as if he had "projected the universe from within." The
agnostic doubts the existence of God. Gilbert at moments doubted the
existence of the agnostic.
Morally his temptations seem to have been in some strange psychic
region rather than merely physical. The whole period is best
summarised in a passage from the _Autobiography_, for looking back
after forty years Gilbert still saw it as deeply and darkly
significant: as both a mental and moral extreme of danger.
There is something truly menacing in the thought of how quickly I
could imagine the maddest, when I had never committed the mildest
crime . . . there was a time when I had reached that condition of
moral anarchy within, in which a man says, in the words of Wilde,
that "Atys with the blood-stained knife were better than the thing I
am." I have never indeed felt the faintest temptation to the
particular madness of Wilde, but I could at this time imagine the
worst and wildest disproportions and distortions of more normal
passion; the point is that the whole mood was overpowered and
oppressed with a sort of congestion of imagination. As Bunyan, in his
morbid period, described himself as prompted to utter blasphemies, I
had an overpowering impulse to record or draw horrible ideas and
images; lunging deeper and deeper as in a blind spiritual suicide.*
[* Pp. 88-9.]
Two of his intimate friends, finding at this time a notebook full of
these horrible drawings, asked one another, "Is Chesterton going mad?"
He dabbled too in spiritualism until he realised that he had reached
the verge of forbidden and dangerous ground:
I would not altogether rule out the suggestion of some that we were
playing with fire; or even with hell-fire. In the words that were
written for us there was nothing ostensibly degrading, but any amount
that was deceiving. I saw quite enough of the thing to be able to
testify with complete certainty, that something happens which is not
in the ordinary sense natural, or produced by the normal and
conscious human will. Whether it is produced by some subconscious but
still human force, or by some powers, good, bad, or indifferent,
which are external to humanity, I would not myself attempt to decide.
The only thing I will say with complete confidence, about that mystic
and invisible power, is that it tells lies. The lies may be larks or
they may be lures to the imperilled soul or they may be a thousand
other things; but whatever they are, they are not truths about the
other world; or for that matter about this world.*
[*_Autobiography_, p. 77.]
He told Father O'Connor some years later* that "he had used the
planchette freely at one time, but had to give it up on account of
headaches ensuing . . . 'after the headaches came a horrid feeling as
if one were trying to get over a bad spree, with what I can best
describe as a bad smell in the mind.'"
[*_Father Brown on Chesterton,_ p. 74.]
Idling at his work he fell in with other idlers and has left a vivid
description in a _Daily News_ article called, "The Diabolist," of one
of his fellow students.
. . . It was strange, perhaps, that I liked his dirty, drunken
society; it was stranger still, perhaps, that he liked my society.
For hours of the day he would talk with me about Milton or Gothic
architecture; for hours of the night he would go where I have no wish
to follow him, even in speculation. He was a man with a long,
ironical face, and close red hair; he was by class a gentleman, and
could walk like one, but preferred, for some reason, to walk like a
groom carrying two pails. He looked like a sort of super-jockey; as
if some archangel had gone on the Turf. And I shall never forget the
half-hour in which he and I argued about real things for the first
and last time.
. . . He had a horrible fairness of the intellect that made me
despair of his soul. A common, harmless atheist would have denied
that religion produced humility or humility a simple joy; but he
admitted both. He only said, "But shall I not find in evil a life of
its own? Granted that for every woman I ruin one of those red sparks
will go out; will not the expanding pleasure of ruin . . ."
"Do you see that fire?" I asked. "If we had a real fighting
democracy, some one would burn you in it; like the devil-worshipper
that you are."
"Perhaps," he said, in his tired, fair way. "Only what you call
evil I call good."
He went down the great steps alone, and I felt as if I wanted the
steps swept and cleaned. I followed later, and as I went to find my
hat in the low, dark passage where it hung, I suddenly heard his
voice again, but the words were inaudible. I stopped, startled; but
then I heard the voice of one of the vilest of his associates saying,
"Nobody can possibly know." And then I heard those two or three words
which I remember in every syllable and cannot forget. I heard the
Diabolist say, "I tell you I have done everything else. If I do that
I shan't know the difference between right and wrong." I rushed out
without daring to pause; and as I passed the fire I did not know
whether it was hell or the furious love of God.
I have since heard that he died; it may be said, I think, that he
committed suicide; though he did it with tools of pleasure, not with
tools of pain. God help him, I know the road he went; but I have
never known or even dared to think what was that place at which he
stopped and refrained.*
[* Quoted in _G. K. Chesterton: A Criticism_. Alston Rivers Ltd. 1908,
pp. 20-22.]
Revulsion from the atmosphere of evil took Gilbert to no new thing
but to a strengthening of old ties and a mystic renewal of them. The
J.D.C. was idealised into a mystical city of friends:
A LIST
I know a friend, very strong and good. He is the best friend in the
world,
I know another friend, subtle and sensitive. He is certainly the best
friend on earth.
I know another friend: very quiet and shrewd, there is no friend so
good as he.
I know another friend, who is enigmatical and reluctant, he is the
best of all.
I know yet another: who is polished and eager, he is far better
than the rest.
I know another, who is young and very quick, he is the most beloved
of all friends,
I know a lot more and they are all like that.
Amen.
THE COSMIC FACTORIES
What are little boys made of?
Bentley is made of hard wood with a knot in it, a complete set of
Browning and a strong spring;
Oldershaw of a box of Lucifer matches and a stylographic pen;
Lawrence of a barrister's wig: files of Punch and salt,
Maurice of watch-wheels, three riders and a clean collar.
Vernède is made of moonlight and tobacco,
Bertram is mostly a handsome black walking-stick.
Waldo is a nice cabbage, with a vanishing odour of cigarettes,
Salter is made of sand and fire and an university extension ticket.
But the strongest element in all can not be expressed; I think it
is a sort of star.*
[* From _The Notebook_.]
There are fragments of a Morality Play entitled "The Junior Debating
Club," of a modern novel in which everyone of the Debaters makes his
appearance, of a mediaeval story called "The Legend of Sir Edmund of
the Brotherhood of the Jongleurs de Dieu." Notes, fragments, letters,
all show an intense individual interest that covered the life of each
of his friends. If one of them is worried, he worries too; if one
rejoices, he rejoices exceedingly. They write to him about their
ideas and views, their relations with one another, their reactions in
the world of Oxford life, their love affairs. "I am in need of some
literary tonic or blood-letting," says Vernède, "which you alone can
supply."
"I only hope," writes Bertram, "you may be as much use in the world
in future as you have been in the past to your friends."
"Most of the absent Club," writes Salter separated from the others,
"lie together in my pocket at this moment." And Gilbert writes in
_The Notebook:_
AN IDYLL
Tea is made; the red fogs shut round the house but the gas burns.
I wish I had at this moment round the table
A company of fine people.
Two of them are at Oxford and one in Scotland and two at other
places.
But I wish they would all walk in now, for the tea is made.
Gilbert was devoted to them all. But as we have seen, Bentley's was
the supreme friendship of his youth. It was a friendship in foolery
as we are told by the dedication of _Greybeards at Play:_
He was through boyhood's storm and shower
My best my nearest friend,
We wore one hat, smoked one cigar
One standing at each end.
It was a deeply serious friendship as we are told in the dedication
of _The Man Who Was Thursday_. With Bentley alone he shared the
Doubts that drove us through the night as we two talked amain,
And day had broken on the streets ere it broke upon the brain.
Most young men write or at least begin novels of which they are
themselves the heroes. Gilbert wrote and illustrated a fairy story
about a boyish romance of Lucian Oldershaw's while two unfinished
novels have Bentley for hero. He is, too, in the mediaeval story, Sir
Edmund of the Brotherhood of the Jongleurs de Dieu. Gilbert sings,
like all young poets, of first love--but it is Bentley's not his own:
he was as much excited about a girl Bentley had fallen in love with
as if he had fallen in love with her himself. And where a London
street has a special significance one discovers it is because of a
memory of Bentley's. To Bentley then, with whom all was shared,
Gilbert wrote, when through friendship and the goodness of things he
had come out again into the daylight. The second thought that had
saved him had largely grown out of the first. The J.D.C. meant
friendship. Friendship meant the highest of all good things and all
good things called for gratitude. As he gave thanks he drew near to
God.
Dunedin Lodge
Forth Street
North Berwick.
(undated, but probably Long Vac., 1894.)
Your letter was most welcome: in which, however, it does not differ
widely from most of your letters. I read somewhere in some fatuous
Complete Letter-writer or something, that it is correct to imitate
the order of subjects, etc. observed by your correspondent. In
obedience to this rule of breeding I will hurriedly remark that my
holiday has been nice enough in itself; we walk about; lie on the
sand; go and swim in the sea when it generally rains; and the
combination gets in our mouths and we say the name of the Professor
in the "Water Babies." Inwardly speaking, I have had a funny time. A
meaningless fit of depression, taking the form of certain absurd
psychological worries came upon me, and instead of dismissing it and
talking to people, I had it out and went very far into the abysses,
indeed. The result was that I found that things when examined,
necessarily _spelt_ such a mystically satisfactory state of things,
that without getting back to earth, I saw lots that made me certain
it is all right. The vision is fading into common day now, and I am
glad. The frame of mind was the reverse of gloomy, but it would not
do for long. It is embarrassing, talking with God face to face, as a
man speaketh to his friend.
And in another letter:
A cosmos one day being rebuked by a pessimist replied, "How can you
who revile me consent to speak by my machinery? Permit me to reduce
you to nothingness and then we will discuss the matter." Moral. You
should not look a gift universe in the mouth.
Another powerful influence in the direction of mental health was the
discovery of Walt Whitman's poetry. "I shall never forget," Lucian
Oldershaw writes, "reading to him from the Canterbury Walt Whitman in
my bedroom at West Kensington. The séance lasted from two to three
hours, and we were intoxicated with the excitement of the discovery."
For some time now we shall find Gilbert dismissing belief in any
positive existence of evil and treating the universe on the Whitman
principle of jubilant and universal acceptance. He writes, too, in
the Whitman style. By far the most important of his notebooks is one
which, by amazing good fortune, can be dated, beginning in 1894 and
continuing for several years. In its attitude to man it is
Whitmanesque to a high degree, yet it is also most characteristically
Chestertonian. Whitman is content with a shouting, roaring optimism
about life and humanity. Chesterton had to find for it a
philosophical basis. Heartily as he disliked the literary pessimism
of the hour, he was not content simply to exchange one mood for
another. For whether he was conscious of it at the time or not, he
did later see Walt Whitman's outlook as a mood and not a philosophy.
It was a mood, however, that Chesterton himself never really lost,
solely because he did discover the philosophy needed to sustain it.
And thereby, even in this early Notebook, he goes far beyond Whitman.
Even so early he knew that a philosophy of man could not be a
philosophy of man only. He already _feels_ a presence in the universe:
It is evening
And into the room enters again a large indiscernable presence.
Is it a man or a woman?
Is it one long dead or yet to come?
That sits with me in the evening.
This again might have been only a mood--had he not found the
philosophy to sustain it too. It is remarkable how much of this
philosophy he had arrived at in The Notebook, before he had come to
know Catholics. Indeed the Notebook seems to me so important that it
needs a chapter to itself with abundant quotation.
Meanwhile, what was Gilbert doing about his work at University
College? Professor Fred Brown told Lawrence Solomon that when he was
at the Slade School he always seemed to be writing and while
listening to lectures he was always drawing. It is probably true
that, as Cecil Chesterton says, he shrank from the technical toils of
the artist as he never did later from those of authorship; and none
of the professors regarded him as a serious art student. They pointed
later to his illustrations of _Biography for Beginners_ as proof that
he never learnt to draw. Yet how many of the men who did learn
seriously could have drawn those sketches, full of crazy energy and
vitality? I know nothing about drawing, but anyone may know how
brilliant are the illustrations to _Greybeards at Play_ or _Biography
for Beginners_, and later to Mr. Belloc's novels. And anyone can see
the power of line with which he drew in his notebooks unfinished
suggestions of humanity or divinity. Anyone, too, can recognise a
portrait of a man, and faces full of character continue to adorn
G.K.'s exercise books. Of living models he affected chiefly
Gladstone, Balfour, and Joe Chamberlin. In hours of thought he made
drawings of Our Lord with a crown of thorns or nailed to a
cross--these suddenly appear in any of his books between fantastic
drawings or lecture notes. As the mind wandered and lingered the
fingers followed it, and as Gilbert listened to lectures, he would
even draw on the top of his own notes. He had always had facility and
that facility increased, so that in later years he often completed in
a couple of hours the illustrations to a novel of Belloc's. Nor were
these drawings merely illustrations of an already completed text, for
Mr. Belloc has told me that the characters were often half suggested
to him by his friend's drawings.
On one, at any rate, of his vacations, Gilbert went to Italy, and two
letters to Bentley show much of the way his thoughts were going:
Hotel New York
Florence.
(undated, probably 1894.)
DEAR BENTLEY,
I turn to write my second letter to you and my first to Grey
[Maurice Solomon], just after having a very interesting conversation
with an elderly American like Colonel Newcome, though much better
informed, with whom I compared notes on Botticelli, Ruskin, Carlyle,
Emerson and the world in general. I asked him what he thought of
Whitman. He answered frankly that in America they were "hardly up to
him." "We have one town, Boston," he said precisely, "that has got up
to Browning." He then added that there was one thing everyone in
America remembered: Whitman himself. The old gentleman quite kindled
on this topic, "Whitman was a real Man. A man who was so pure and
strong that we could not imagine him doing an unmanly thing anywhere."
It was odd words to hear at a table d'hôte, from your next door
neighbour: it made me quite excited over my salad.
You see that this humanitarianism in which we are entangled asserts
itself where, by all guidebook laws, it should not. When I take up my
pen to write to you, I am thinking more of a white-moustached old
Yankee at an hotel than about the things I have seen within the same
24 hours: the frescoes of Santa Croce, the illuminations of St.
Marco; the white marbles of the tower of Giotto; the very Madonnas of
Raphael, the very David of Michael Angelo. Throughout this tour, in
pursuance of our theory of travelling, we have avoided the guide: he
is the death-knell of individual liberty. Once only we broke through
our rule and that was in favour of an extremely intelligent, nay
impulsive young Italian in Santa Maria Novella, a church where we saw
some of the most interesting pieces of mediaeval painting I have ever
seen, interesting not so much from an artistic as from a moral and
historical point of view. Particularly noticeable was the great
fresco expressive of the grandest mediaeval conception of the
Communion of Saints, a figure of Christ surmounting a crowd of all
ages and stations, among whom were not only Dante, Petrarca, Giotto,
etc., etc., but Plato, Cicero, and best of all, Arius. I said to the
guide, in a tone of expostulation, "Heretico!" (a word of impromptu
manufacture). Whereupon he nodded, smiled and was positively radiant
with the latitudinarianism of the old Italian painter. It was
interesting for it was a fresh proof that even the early Church
united had a period of thought and tolerance before the dark ages
closed around it. There is one thing that I must tell you more of
when we meet, the tower of Giotto. It was built in a square of
Florence, near the Cathedral, by a self-made young painter and
architect who had kept sheep as a boy on the Tuscan hills. It is
still called "The Shepherd's Tower." What I want to tell you about is
the series of bas-reliefs, which Giotto traced on it, representing
the creation and progress of man, his discovery of navigation,
astronomy, law, music and so on. It is religious in the grandest
sense, but there is not a shred of doctrine (even the Fall is
omitted) about this history in stone. If Walt Whitman had been an
architect, he would have built such a tower, with such a story on it.
As I want to go out and have a good look at it before we start for
Venice tomorrow, I must cut this short. I hope you are enjoying
yourself as much as I am, and thinking about me half as much as I am
about you.
Your very sincere friend,
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON.
No one would have enjoyed more than Gilbert rereading this letter in
after years and noting the suggestion that the fifteenth century
belonged to the early church and preceded the Dark Ages. And I think,
too, that even in Giotto's Tower, he might later have discovered some
roots of doctrine.
Grand Hotel De Milan
(undated)
DEAR BENTLEY,
I write you a third letter before coming back, while Venice and
Verona are fresh in my mind. Of the former I can really only
discourse viva voce. Imagine a city, whose very slums are full of
palaces, whose every other house wall has a battered fresco, or a
gothic bas-relief; imagine a sky fretted with every kind of pinnacle
from the great dome of the Salute to the gothic spires of the Ducal
Palace and the downright arabesque orientalism of the minarets of St.
Mark's; and then imagine the whole flooded with a sea that seems only
intended to reflect sunsets, and you still have no idea of the place
I stopped in for more than 48 hours. Thence we went to Verona, where
Romeo and Juliet languished and Dante wrote most of "Hell." The
principal products (1) tombs: particularly those of the Scala, a very
good old family with an excellent taste in fratricide. Their three
tombs (one to each man I mean: one man, one grave) are really
glorious examples of three stages of Gothic: of which more when we
meet. (2) Balconies: with young ladies hanging over them; really
quite a preponderating feature. Whether this was done in obedience to
local associations and in expectation of a Romeo, I can't say. I can
only remark that if such was the object, the supply of Juliets seemed
very much in excess of the demand. (3) Roman remains: on which,
however, I did not pronounce a soliloquy beginning, "Wonderful
people . . ." which is the correct thing to do. Just as I get to this
I receive your letter and resolve to begin another sheet of paper. I
did read Rosebery's speech and was more than interested; I was
stirred. The old order (of parliamentary forms, peerages, Whiggism
and right honourable friends) has changed, yielding place to the new
(of industrialism, county council sanitation, education and the
Kingdom of Heaven at hand) and, whatever the Archbishop of
Canterbury may say, God fulfils himself in many ways, even by local
government. . . .
Several things in your letter require notice. First the accusation
levelled against me of being prejudiced against Professor Huxley, I
repel with indignation and scorn. You are not prejudiced against
cheese because you like oranges; and though the Professor is not
Isaiah or St. Francis or Whitman or Richard le Gallienne (to name
some of those whom I happen to affect) I should be the last person in
the world to say a word against an earnest, able, kind-hearted and
most refreshingly rational man: by far the best man of his type I
know. As to what you say on education generally, I am entirely with
you, but it will take a good interview to say how much. As for the
little Solomons, I am prepared to [be] fond of all of them, as I am
of all children, even the grubby little mendicants that run these
Italian streets. I am glad you and Grey have pottered. Potter again.
I have had such a nice letter from Lawrence. It makes me think it is
all going "to be the fair beginning of a time."
Had the months of art study only developed in Gilbert Chesterton his
power of drawing, they might still have been worthwhile. But they
gave him, too, a time to dream and to think which working for a
University degree would never have allowed. His views and his mind
were developing fast, and he was also developing a power to which we
owe some of his best work--depth of vision.
Most art criticism is the work of those who never could have been
artists--which is possibly why it tends to be so critical. Gilbert,
who could perhaps have been an artist, preferred to appreciate what
the artist was trying to say and to put into words what he read on
the canvas. Hence both in his _Watts_ and his _Blake_ we get what
some of us ask of an art critic--the enlargement of our own powers of
vision. This is what made Ruskin so great an art critic, a fact once
realised, today forgotten. He may have made a thousand mistakes, he
had a multitude of foolish prejudices, but he opened the eyes of a
whole generation to see and understand great art.
G.K. was to begin his published writings with poetry and art
criticism--in other words with vision. And this vision he partly owed
to the Slade School. Here is a letter (undated) to Bentley containing
a hint of what eight years later became a book on Watts:
On Saturday I saw two exhibitions of pictures. The first was the
Royal Academy, where I went with Salter. There was one picture there,
though the walls were decorated with frames very prettily. As to the
one picture, if you look at an Academy catalogue you will see
"Jonah": by G. F. Watts, and you will imagine a big silly picture of
a whale. But if you go to Burlington House you will see something
terrible. A spare, wild figure, clad in a strange sort of green with
his head flung so far back that his upper part is a miracle of
foreshortening, his hands thrust out, his face ghastly with ecstasy,
his dry lips yelling aloud, a figure of everlasting protest and
defiance. And as a background (perfect in harmony of colour) you have
the tracery of the Assyrian bas-reliefs, such as survive in wrecks in
the British Museum, a row of those processions of numberless captives
bowing before smiling Kings: a cruel sort of art. And the passionate
energy of that lonely screaming figure in front, makes you think of a
great many things besides Assyrians: among others of some words of
Renan: I quote from memory: "But the trace of Israel will be eternal.
She it was who alone among the tyrannies of antiquity, raised her
voice for the helpless, the oppressed, the forgotten."
But this only expresses a fraction of it. The only thing to do is
to come and look at this excited gentleman with bronze skin and hair
that approaches green, his eyes simply white with madness. And Jonah
said, "Yea, I do well to be angry: even unto death."
He had learnt to look at colour, to look at line, to describe
pictures. But far more important than this, he could now create in
the imagination gardens and sunsets and sheer colour, so as to give
to his novels and stories pictorial value, to his fantasies glow, and
to his poetry vision of the realities of things. In his very first
volume of Essays, _The Defendant_, were to be passages that could be
written only by one who had learnt to draw. For instance, in "A
Defence of Skeletons":
The actual sight of the little wood, with its grey and silver sea
of life is entirely a winter vision. So dim and delicate is the heart
of the winter woods, a kind of glittering gloaming, that a figure
stepping towards us in the chequered twilight seems as if he were
breaking through unfathomable depths of spiders' webs.
In the year 1895, in which G.K. left art for publishing, he came of
age "with a loud report." He writes to Bentley:
Being twenty-one years old is really rather good fun. It is one of
those occasions when you remember the existence of all sorts of
miscellaneous people. A cousin of mine, Alice Chesterton, daughter of
my Uncle Arthur, writes me a delightfully cordial letter from Berlin,
where she is a governess; and better still, my mother has received a
most amusing letter from an old nurse of mine, an exceptionally nice
and intelligent nurse, who writes on hearing that it is my
twenty-first birthday. Billy (an epithet is suppressed) gave me a
little notebook and a little photograph frame. The first thing I did
with the notebook was to make a note of his birthday. The first thing
I shall do with the frame will be to get Grey to give me a photograph
of him to put into it. Yes, it is not bad, being twenty-one, in a
world so full of kind people. . . .
I have just been out and got soaking and dripping wet; one of my
favourite dissipations. I never enjoy weather so much as when it is
driving, drenching, rattling, washing rain. As Mr. Meredith says in
the book you gave me, "Rain, O the glad refresher of the grain, and
welcome waterspouts of blessed rain." (It is in a poem called "Earth
and a Wedded Woman," which is fat.) Seldom have I enjoyed a walk so
much. My sister water was all there and most affectionate. Everything
I passed was lovely, a little boy pickabacking another little boy
home, two little girls taking shelter with a gigantic umbrella, the
gutters boiling like rivers and the hedges glittering with rain. And
when I came to our corner the shower was over, and there was a great
watery sunset right over No. 80, what Mr. Ruskin calls an "opening
into Eternity." Eternity is pink and gold. This may seem a very
strange rant, but it is one of my "specimen days." I suppose you
would really prefer me to write as I feel, and I am so constituted
that these Daily incidents get me that way. Yes, I like rain. It
means something, I am not sure what; something freshening, cleaning,
washing out, taking in hand, not caring-a-damn-what-you-think,
doing-its-duty, robust, noisy, moral, wet. It is the Baptism of the
Church of the Future.
Yesterday afternoon (Sunday) Lawrence and Maurice came here. We were
merely infants at play, had skipping races round the garden and
otherwise raced. ("Runner, run thy race," said Confucius, "and in the
running find strength and reward.") After that we tried talking about
Magnus, and came to some hopeful conclusions. Magnus is all right. As
for Lawrence and Grey, if there is anything righter than all right,
they are that. . . .
There is an expression in Meredith's book which struck me immensely:
"the largeness of the evening earth." The sensation that the Cosmos
has all its windows open is very characteristic of evening, just as
it is at this moment. I feel very good. Everything out of the window
looks very, very flat and yellow: I do not know how else to describe
it.
It is like the benediction at the end of the service.
CHAPTER V
The Notebook
I AM WRITING THIS chapter at a table facing Notre Dame de Paris in
front of a café filled with arguing French workmen--in the presence
of God and of Man; and I feel as if I understood the one hatred of
G.K.'s life: his loathing of pessimism. "Is a man proud of losing his
hearing, eyesight or sense of smell? What shall we say of him who
prides himself on beginning as an intellectual cripple and ending as
an intellectual corpse?"*
[* From _The Notebook_.]
SOME PROPHECIES
Woe unto them that keep a God like a silk hat, that believe not in
God, but in a God.
Woe unto them that are pompous for they will sooner or later be
ridiculous.
Woe unto them that are tired of everything, for everything will
certainly be tired of them.
Woe unto them that cast out everything, for out of everything they
will be cast out.
Woe unto them that cast out anything, for out of that thing they
will be cast out.
Woe unto the flippant, for they shall receive flippancy.
Woe unto them that are scornful for they shall receive scorn.
Woe unto him that considereth his hair foolishly, for his hair will
be made the type of him.
Woe unto him that is smart, for men will hold him smart always,
even when he is serious.*
[* Ibid.]
A pessimist is a man who has never lived, never suffered: "Show me a
person who has plenty of worries and troubles and I will show you a
person who, whatever he is, is not a pessimist."
This idea G.K. developed later in the _Dickens_, dealing with the
alleged over-optimism of Dickens--Dickens who if he had learnt to
whitewash the universe had learnt it in a blacking factory, Dickens
who had learnt through hardship and suffering to accept and love the
universe. But that he wrote later. The quotations given here come
from the Notebook begun in 1894 and used at intervals for the next
four or five years, in which Gilbert wrote down his philosophy step
by step as he came to discover it. The handwriting is the work of art
that he must have learnt and practised, so different is it from his
boyhood's scrawl. Each idea is set down as it comes into his mind.
There is no sequence. In this book and in _The Coloured Lands_ may be
seen the creation of the Chesterton view of life--and it all took
place in his early twenties. From the seed-thoughts here, _Orthodoxy_
and the rest were to grow--here they are only seeds but seeds
containing unmistakably the flower of the future:
They should not hear from me a word
Of selfishness or scorn
If only I could find the door
If only I were born.
He makes the Unborn Babe say this in his first volume of poems. And
in the Notebook we see how the babe coming into the world must keep
this promise by accepting life with its puzzles, its beauty, its
fleetingness: "Are we all dust? What a beautiful thing dust is
though." "This round earth may be a soap-bubble, but it must be
admitted that there are some pretty colours on it." "What is the good
of life, it is fleeting; what is the good of a cup of coffee, it is
fleeting. Ha Ha Ha."
The birthday present of birth, as he was later to call it in
_Orthodoxy_, involved not bare existence only but a wealth of other
gifts. "A grievance," he heads this thought:
Give me a little time,
I shall not be able to appreciate them all;
If you open so many doors
And give me so many presents, O Lord God.
He is almost overwhelmed with all that he has and with all that is,
but accepts it ardently in its completeness.
If the arms of a man could be a fiery circle embracing the round
world, I think I should be that man.
Yet in the face of all this splendour the pessimist dares to find
flaws:
The mountains praise thee, O Lord!
But what if a mountain said,
"I praise thee;
But put a pine-tree halfway up on the left
It would be much more effective, believe me."
It is time that the religion of prayer gave
place to the religion of praise.
If the mountains must praise God, if the religion of praise expresses
the truth of things, how much more does it express the truth of
humanity--or rather of men, for he saw humanity not as an abstraction
but as the sum of human and intensely individual beings:
Once I found a friend
"Dear me," I said "he was made for me."
But now I find more and more friends
Who seem to have been made for me
And more and yet more made for me,
Is it possible we were all made for each other
all over the world?
And on another page comes perhaps the most significant phrase in the
book: "I wonder whether there will ever come a time when I shall be
tired of any one person." Hence a fantastic thought of a way of
making the discovery of more people to know and to like:
THE HUMAN CIRCULATING LIBRARY NOTES
Get out a gentleman for a fortnight, then change him for a lady, or
your ticket. No person to be kept out after a fortnight, except with
the payment of a penny a day. Any person morally or physically
damaging a man will be held responsible. The library omnibus calls
once a week leaving two or three each visit. Man of the season--old
standard man.
Or better still:
My great ambition is to give a party at which everybody should meet
everybody else and like them very much.
AN INVITATION
Mr. Gilbert Chesterton
requests the pleasure
Of humanity's company
to tea on Dec. 25th 1896.
Humanity Esq., The Earth, Cosmos E.
G.K. liked everybody very much, and everything very much. He liked
even the things most of us dislike. He liked to get wet. He liked to
be tired. After that one short period of struggle he liked to call
himself "always perfectly happy." And therefore he wanted to say,
"Thank you."
You say grace before meals
All right.
But I say grace before the play and the opera,
And grace before the concert and pantomime,
And grace before I open a book,
And grace before sketching, painting,
Swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing;
And grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
Each day seemed a special gift; something that might not have been:
EVENING
Here dies another day
During which I have had eyes, ears, hands
And the great world round me;
And with tomorrow begins another.
Why am I allowed two?
THE PRAYER OF A MAN WALKING
I thank thee, O Lord, for the stones in the street
I thank thee for the hay-carts yonder and for the
houses built and half-built
That fly past me as I stride.
But most of all for the great wind in my nostrils
As if thine own nostrils were close.
THE PRAYER OF A MAN RESTING
The twilight closes round me
My head is bowed before the Universe
I thank thee, O Lord, for a child I knew seven years ago
And whom I have never seen since.
Praised be God for all sides of life, for friends, lovers, art,
literature, knowledge, humour, politics, and for the little red cloud
away there in the west--
For, if he was to be grateful, to whom did he owe gratitude? Here is
the chief question he asked and answered at this time. At school he
was looking for God, but at the age of 16 he was, he tells us in
_Orthodoxy_, an Agnostic in the sense of one who is not sure one way
or the other. Largely it was this need for gratitude for what seemed
personal gifts that brought him to belief in a personal God. Life was
personal, it was not a mere drift; it had will in it, it was more
like a story.
A story is the highest mark
For the world is a story and every part of it
And there is nothing that can touch the world or any part of it
That is not a story.
And again, with the heading, "A Social Situation."
We must certainly be in a novel;
What I like about this novelist is that he takes
such trouble about his minor characters.
The story shapes from man's birth and it is as he meets the other
characters that he finds he is in the right story.
A MAN BORN ON THE EARTH
Perhaps there has been some mistake
How does he know he has come to the right place?
But when he finds friends
He knows he has come to the right place.
You say it is a love affair
Hush: it is a new Garden of Eden
And a new progeny will people a new earth
God is always making these experiments.
Life is a story: who tells it? Life is a problem: who sets it?
The world is a problem, not a Theorem
And the word of the last Day will be Q.E.F.
God sets the problem, God tells the story, but can those know Him who
are characters in His story, who are working out His problem?
Have you ever known what it is to walk along a road in such a frame
of mind that you thought you might meet God at any turn of the path?
For this a man must be ready, against this he must never shut the
door.
There is one kind of infidelity blacker than all infidelities,
Worse than any blow of secularist, pessimist, atheist,
It is that of those persons
Who regard God as an old institution.
VOICES
The axe falls on the wood in thuds, "God, God."
The cry of the rook, "God," answers it
The crack of the fire on the hearth, the voice of the brook, say the
same name;
All things, dog, cat, fiddle, baby,
Wind, breaker, sea, thunderclap
Repeat in a thousand languages--
God.
Next in his thought comes a point where he hesitates as to the
meeting place between God and Man. How and where can these two
incommensurates find a meeting place? What is Incarnation? The
greatness and the littleness of Man obsessed Chesterton as it did
Pascal; it is the eternal riddle:
TWO STRANDS
Man is a spark flying upwards. God is everlasting.
Who are we, to whom this cup of human life has been given, to ask
for more? Let us love mercy and walk humbly. What is man, that thou
regardest him?
Man is a star unquenchable. God is in him incarnate.
His life is planned upon a scale colossal, of which he sees
glimpses. Let him dare all things, claim all things: he is the son
of Man, who shall come in the clouds of glory.
[I] saw these two strands mingling to make the religion of man.
"A scale colossal, of which he sees glimpses." This, I think, is the
first hint of the path that led Gilbert to full faith in Our Lord. In
places in these notes he regards Him certainly only as Man--but even
then as _The_ Man, the _Only_ Man in whom the colossal scale, the
immense possibilities, of human nature could be dreamed of as
fulfilled. Two notes on Marcus Aurelius are significant of the way
his mind was moving.
MARCUS AURELIUS
A large-minded, delicate-witted, strong man,
following the better thing like a thread between his hands.
Him we cannot fancy choosing the lower even by mistake; we cannot
think of him as wanting for a moment in any virtue, sincerity, mercy,
purity, self-respect, good manners.
Only one thing is wanting in him. He does not
command me to perform the impossible.
THE CARPENTER
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
Yes: he was soliloquising, not making something.
Do not the words of Jesus ring
Like nails knocked into a board
In his father's workshop?
On two consecutive pages are notes showing how his mind is wrestling
with the question, the answer to which would complete his philosophy:
XMAS DAY
Good news: but if you ask me what it is, I know not;
It is a track of feet in the snow,
It is a lantern showing a path,
It is a door set open.
THE GRACE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST
I live in an age of varied powers and knowledge,
Of steam, science, democracy, journalism, art:
But when my love rises like a sea,
I have to go back to an obscure tribe and a slain man
To formulate a blessing.
JULIAN
"Vicisti Galilæe," he said, and sank conquered
After wrestling with the most gigantic of powers,
A dead man.
THE CRUCIFIED
On a naked slope of a poor province
A Roman soldier stood staring at a gibbet,
Then he said, "Surely this was a righteous man,"
And a new chapter of history opened,
Having that for its motto.
PARABLES
There was a man who dwelt in the east centuries ago,
And now I cannot look at a sheep or a sparrow,
A lily or a cornfield, a raven or a sunset,
A vineyard or a mountain, without thinking of him;
If this be not to be divine, what is it?
Cecil Chesterton tells us Gilbert read the Gospels partly because he
was not forced to read them: I suppose this really means that he read
them with a mature mind which had not been dulled to their reception
by a childhood task of routine lessons. But I do not think at this
date it had occurred to him to question the assumption of the period:
that official Christianity, its priesthood especially, had travestied
the original intention of Christ. This idea is in the _Wild Knight_
volume (published in 1900) and more briefly in a suggestion in the
Notebook for a proposed drama:
Gabriel is hammering up a little theatre and the child looks at his
hands, and finds them torn with nails.
_Clergyman_. The Church should stand by the powers that be.
_Gabriel_. Yes? . . . That is a handsome crucifix you have there at
your chain.
That the clergy, that the Christian people, should have settled down
to an acceptance of a faulty established order, should not be alert
to all that Our Lord's life signified, was one of the problems. It
was, too, a matter of that cosmic loyalty which he analyses more
fully in _Orthodoxy_. Here he simply writes:
It is not a question of Theology, It is a question of whether,
placed as a sentinel of an unknown watch, you will whistle or not.
Sentinels do go to sleep and he was coming to feel that this want of
vigilance ran through the whole of humanity. In "White Wynd," a
sketch written at this time,* he adumbrates an idea to which he was
to return again in _Manalive_ especially, and in _Orthodoxy_--that we
can by custom so lose our sense of reality that the only way to enjoy
and be grateful for our possessions is to lose them for a while. The
shortest way home is to go round the world. In this story of "White
Wynd" he applies the parable only to each man's life and the world he
lives in. But in _Orthodoxy_ he applies it to the human race who have
lost revealed truth by getting so accustomed to it that they no
longer look at it. And already in the Notebook he is calling the
attention of a careless multitude to "that great Empire upon which
the sun never sets. I allude to the Universe."
[* It is published in _The Coloured Lands_.]
Most of the quotations about Our Lord come in the later part of the
book: in the earlier pages he dreams that "to this age it is given to
write the great new song, and to compile the new Bible, and to found
the new Church, and preach the new Religion." And in one rather
obscure passage he seems to hint at the thought that Christ might
come again to shape this new religion.
Going round the world, Gilbert was finding his way home; the explorer
was rediscovering his native country. He himself has given us all the
metaphors for what was happening now in his mind. Without a single
Catholic friend he had discovered this wealth of Catholic truth and
he was still travelling. "All this I felt," he later summed it up in
_Orthodoxy_, "and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. And
all this time I had not even thought of Catholic theology."
CHAPTER VI
Towards a Career
A CURIOUS LITTLE incident comes towards the end of
Gilbert's time at the Slade School. In a letter he wrote to
E. C. Bentley we see him, on the eve of his 21st birthday, being
invited to write for the _Academy_:
Mr. Cotton is a little bristly, bohemian man, as fidgetty as a
kitten, who runs round the table while he talks to you. When he
agrees with you he shuts his eyes tight and shakes his head. When he
means anything rather seriously he ends up with a loud nervous laugh.
He talks incessantly and is mad on the history of Oxford. I sent him
my review of Ruskin and he read it before me (Note. Hell) and
delivered himself with astonishing rapidity to the following effect:
"This is very good: you've got something to say: Oh, yes: this is
worth saying: I agree with you about Ruskin and about the Century:
this is good: you've no idea: if you saw some stuff: some reviews I
get: the fellows are practised but of all the damned fools: you've no
idea: they know the trade in a way: but such infernal asses: as send
things up: but this is very good: that sentence does run _nicely:_
but I like your point: make it a little longer and then send it in:
I've got another book for you to review: you know Robert Bridges? Oh
very good, very good: here it is: about two columns you know: by the
way: keep the Ruskin for yourself: you deserve that anyhow."
Here I got a word in: one of protest and thanks. But Mr. Cotton
insisted on my accepting the Ruskin. So I am really to serve Laban.
Laban proves on analysis to be of the consistency of brick. It is
such men as this that have made our Cosmos what it is. At one point
he said, literally dancing with glee: "Oh, the other day I stuck some
pins into Andrew Lang." I said, "Dear me, that must be a very good
game." It was something about an edition of Scott, but I was told
that Andrew "took" the painful operation "very well." We sat up
horribly late together talking about Browning, Afghans, Notes, the
Yellow Book, the French Revolution, William Morris, Norsemen and Mr.
Richard le Gallienne. "I don't despair for anyone," he said suddenly.
"Hang it all, that's what you mean by humanity." This appears to be a
rather good editor of the _Academy_. And my joy in having begun my
life is very great. "I am tired," I said to Mr. Brodribb, "of writing
only what I like." "Oh well," he said heartily, "you'll have no
reason to make that complaint in journalism."
But here is a mystery. Nowhere in the _Academy_ columns for 1895
or 1896 are to be seen the initials G.K.C., yet at that date all
the reviews are signed. Mr. Eccles, who was writing for it at
the time, told me that he had no recollection of G.K. among the
contributors--and later he came to know him well when both were
together on the _Speaker_. In any case, the idea of reviewing for no
reward except the book reviewed would scarcely appeal to a more
practical man than Gilbert as a hopeful beginning. Perhaps the
mystery is solved by the fact that soon after the date of this letter
Mr. Cotton got an appointment in India. To Mr. Eccles it appeared
somewhat ironical that the unpaid contributors to the _Academy_ were
circularised with a suggestion of contributions of money towards a
parting present for their late editor.
The actual beginning of G.K.'s journalism was in _The Bookman_; and
in the _Autobiography_ he insists that it was a matter of mere luck:
"these opportunities were merely things that happened to me." While
still at the Slade School, he was, as we have seen, attending English
lectures at University College. There he met a fellow-student, Ernest
Hodder Williams, of the family which controlled the publishing house
of Hodder & Stoughton. He gave Chesterton some books on art to review
for _The Bookman_, a monthly paper published by the firm. "I need not
say," G.K. comments, "that having entirely failed to learn how to
draw or paint, I tossed off easily enough some criticisms of the
weaker points of Rubens or the misdirected talents of Tintoretto. I
had discovered the easiest of all professions, which I have pursued
ever since." But neither in the art criticism he wrote for _The
Bookman_ nor in the poems he was to publish in _The Outlook_ and _The
Speaker_ was there a living. He left the Slade School and went to
work for a publisher.
Mr. Redway, in whose office Gilbert now found himself, was a
publisher largely of spiritualist literature. Gilbert has described
in his _Autobiography_ his rather curious experience of ghostly
authorship, but he relates nothing of his office experience, which is
described in another undated letter to Mr. Bentley:
I am writing this letter just when I like most to write one, late
at night, after a beastly lot of midnight oil over a contribution for
a _Slade Magazine_, intended as a public venture. I am sending them a
recast of that "Picture of Tuesday."
Like you, I am beastly busy, but there is something exciting about
it. If I must be busy (as I certainly must, being an approximately
honest man) I had much rather be busy in a varied, mixed up way, with
half a hundred things to attend to, than with one blank day of
monotonous "study" before me. To give you some idea of what I mean. I
have been engaged in 3 different tiring occupations and enjoyed them
all. (1) Redway says, "We've got too many MSS; read through them,
will you, and send back those that are too bad at once." I go slap
through a room full of MSS, criticising deuced conscientiously, with
the result that I post back some years of MSS to addresses, which I
should imagine, must be private asylums. But one feels worried,
somehow. . . .
(2) Redway says, "I'm going to give you entire charge of the press
department, sending copies to Reviews, etc." Consequence is, one has
to keep an elaborate book and make it tally with other elaborate
books, and one has to remember all the magazines that exist and what
sort of books they'd crack up. I used to think I hated
responsibility: I am positively getting to enjoy it. (3) There is
that confounded "Picture of Tuesday" which I have been scribbling at
the whole evening, and have at last got it presentable. This sounds
like mere amusement, but, now that I have tried other kinds of hurry
and bustle, I solemnly pledge myself to the opinion that there is no
work so tiring as writing, that is, not for fun, but for publication.
Other work has a repetition, a machinery, a reflex action about it
somewhere, but to be on the stretch inventing fillings, making them
out of nothing, making them as good as you can for a matter of four
hours leaves me more inclined to lie down and read Dickens than I
ever feel after nine hours ramp at Redway's. The worst of it is that
you always think the thing so bad too when you're in that state. I
can't imagine anything more idiotic than what I've just finished.
Well, enough of work and all its works. By all means come on Monday
evening, but don't be frightened if by any chance I'm not in till
about 6.30, as Monday is a busy day. Of course you'll stop to
dinner . . . what an idiotically long time 8 weeks is. . . .
This letter does not seem to bear out the suggestion in Cecil's book*
of Gilbert's probable uselessness to the publishers for whom he
worked. After all, literacy is more needful to most publishers than
automatic practicality, because it is so very much rarer. Probably
G.K. would have been absolutely invaluable had he been a little less
kind-hearted. His dislike of sending back a manuscript and making an
author unhappy would have been a bar to his utility as a reader. But
there are lots of other things to do besides rejecting manuscripts,
and two later letters show how capable Gilbert was felt to be in
doing most of them.
[* _G. K. Chesterton: A Criticism_, see p. 23.]
The exact date at which he left Redway's for the publishing firm of
Fisher Unwin (of 11 Paternoster Buildings) I cannot discover, but it
was fairly early and he was several years with Fisher Unwin, only
gradually beginning to move over into journalism.
"He did nothing for himself," says Lucian Oldershaw, "till we
[Bentley and Oldershaw] came down from Oxford and pushed him."
The following letters belong to 1898, being written to Frances when
they were already engaged, but I put them here as they give some
notion of the work he did for his employer.
. . . The book I have to deal with for Unwin is an exhaustive and I
am told interesting work on "Rome and the Empire" a kind of
realistic, modern account of the life of the ancient world. I have
got to fix it up, choose illustrations, introductions, notes, etc.,
and all because I am the only person who knows a little Latin and
precious little Roman history and no more archaeology than a blind
cat. It is entertaining, and just like our firm's casual way. The
work ought to be done by an authority on Roman antiquities. If I
hadn't been there they would have given it to the office boy.
However, I shall get through it all right: the more I see of the
publishing world, the more I come to the conclusion that I know next
to nothing, but that the vast mass of literary people know less. This
is sometimes called having "a public-school education."*
[* Extract from undated letter (postmarked, Aug. 11, 1898).]
* * *
I have a lot of work to do, as Unwin has given the production of an
important book entirely into my hands, as a kind of invisible editor.
It is complimentary, but very worrying, and will mean a lot of time
at the British Museum.*
[* Extract from undated letter (postmarked, Aug. 29, 1898).]
11 Paternoster Bldgs.
(Postmark, December 1898)
. . . For fear that you should really suppose that my observations
about being busy are the subterfuges of a habitual liar, I may give
you briefly some idea of the irons at present in the fire. As far as
I can make out there are at least seven things that I have undertaken
to do and everyone of them I ought to do before any of the others.
1st. There is the book about Ancient Rome which I have to do for
T.F.U.--arrange and get illustrations etc. This all comes of showing
off. It is a story with a moral (Greedy Gilbert: or Little Boys
Should be Seen and not Heard). A short time ago I had to read a
treatise by Dean Stubbs on "The Ideal Woman of the Poets" in which
the Dean remarked that "all the women admired by Horace were
wantons." This struck me as a downright slander, slight as is my
classical knowledge, and in my report I asked loftily what Dean
Stubbs made of those noble lines on the wife who hid her husband
from his foes.
_Splendide mendax et in omne virgo
Nobilis aevum_
One of the purest and stateliest tributes ever made to a woman.
(The lines might be roughly rendered "A magnificent liar and a noble
lady for all eternity"; but no translation can convey the
organ-voice of the verse, in which the two strong and lonely words
"noble" and "eternity" stand solitary for the last line.) In
consequence of my taking up the cudgels against a live Dean for the
manly moral sense of the dear old Epicurean, the office became
impressed with a vague idea that I know something about Latin
literature--whereas, as a matter of fact I have forgotten even the
line before the one I quoted. However, in the most confidential and
pathetic manner I was entrusted with doing with "Rome et l'Empire"
work which ought to be done by a scholar. . . .
2nd. Then there is Captain Webster. You ask (in gruff, rumbling
tones) "Who is Captain Webster?" I will tell you.
Captain Webster is a small man with a carefully waxed moustache and
a very Bond Street get up, living at the Grosvenor Hotel. Talking to
him you would say: he is an ass, but an agreeable ass, a humble,
transparent honourable ass. He is an innocent and idiotic butterfly.
The interesting finishing touch is that he has been to New Guinea for
four years or so, and had some of the most hideous and extravagant
adventures that could befall a modern man. His yacht was surrounded
by shoals of canoes full of myriads of cannibals of a race who file
their teeth to look like the teeth of dogs, and hang weights in their
ears till the ears hang like dogs' ears, on the shoulder. He held his
yacht at the point of the revolver and got away, leaving some of his
men dead on the shore. All night long he heard the horrible noise of
the banqueting gongs and saw the huge fires that told his friends
were being eaten. Now he lives in the Grosvenor Hotel. Captain
Webster finds the pen, not only mightier than the sword, but also
much more difficult. He has written his adventures and we are to
publish them and I am translating the honest captain into English
grammar, a thing which appals him much more than Papuan savages. This
means going through it carefully of course and rewriting many parts
of it, where relatives and dependent sentences have been lost past
recovery. I went to see him, and his childlike dependence on me was
quite pathetic. His general attitude was, "You see I'm such a damned
fool." And so he is. But when I compare him with the Balzacian
hauteur and the preposterous posing of many of our Fleet Street
decadent geniuses, I feel a movement of the blood which declares that
perhaps there are worse things than War. (Between ourselves, I have a
sneaking sympathy with fighting: I fought horribly at school. It is
well you should know my illogicalities.)
3rd. There is the selection of illustrations for the History of
China we are producing. I know no more of China than the Man in the
Moon (less, for he has seen it, at any rate), except what I got from
reading the book, but of course I shall make the most of what I do
know and airily talk of La-o-tsee and Wu-sank-Wei, criticise
Chung-tang and Fu-Tche, compare Tchieu Lung with his great successor,
whose name I have forgotten, and the Napoleonic vigour of Li with the
weak opportunism of Woo. Before I have done I hope people will be
looking behind for my pig-tail. The name I shall adopt will be
Tches-Ter-Ton.
4th. A MS to read translated from the Norwegian: a History of the
Kiss, Ceremonial, Amicable, Amatory, etc.--in the worst French
sentimental style. God alone knows how angry I am with the author of
that book. I am not sure that I shall not send up the brief report.
"A snivelling hound."
5th. The book for Nutt [_Greybeards at Play_], which has reached
its worst stage, that of polishing up for the eye of Nutt, instead of
merely rejoicing in the eye of God. Do you know this is the only one
of the lot about which I am at all worried. I do not feel as if
things like the Fish poem are really worth publishing. I know they
are better than many books that are published, but Heaven knows that
is not saying much. In support of some of my work I would fight to
the last. But with regard to this occasional verse I feel a humbug.
To publish a book of my nonsense verses seems to me exactly like
summoning the whole of the people of Kensington to see me smoke
cigarettes.
Macgregor told me that I should do much better in the business of
literature if I found the work more difficult. My facility, he said,
led me to undervalue my work. I wonder whether this is true, and
those silly rhymes are any good after all.
6th. The collection of more serious poems of which I spoke to you.
You shall have a hand in the selection of these when you get back.
7th. The Novel--which though I have put it aside for the present,
yet has become too much a part of me not to be constantly having
chapters written--or rather growing out of the others.
And all these things, with the exception of the last one, are
supposed to be really urgent, and to be done immediately. . . . Now I
hope I have sickened you forever of wanting to know the details of my
dull affairs. But I hope it may give you some notion of how hard it
really is to get time for writing just now. For you see they are none
of them even mechanical things: they all require some thinking about.
I am afraid . . . that if you really want to know what I do, you
must forgive me for seeming egoistic. That is the tragedy of the
literary person: his very existence is an assertion of his own mental
vanity: he must pretend to be conceited even if he isn't. . . .
Beginning to publish, beginning to write, and still developing
mentally at a frantic rate--this is a summary of the years 1895-8.
As the Notebook shows, Gilbert was reflecting deeply at this time on
the relations both between God and man and between man and his fellow
man. The realisation that their relations had gone very far wrong was
necessarily followed--for Gilbert's _mind_ was an immensely practical
one--by the question of what the proposed remedies were worth. He has
told us that he became a Socialist at this time only because it was
intolerable not to be a Socialist. The Socialists seemed the only
people who were looking at conditions as they were and finding them
unendurable. Christian Socialism seemed at first sight, for anyone
who admired Christ, to be the obvious form of Socialism, and, in a
fragment of this period, G.K. traces the resemblance of modern
collectivism to early Christianity.
The points in which Christian and Socialistic collectivism are at
one are simple and fundamental. As, however, we must proceed
carefully in this matter, we may state these points of resemblance
under three heads.
(1) Both rise from the deeps of an emotion, the emotion of compassion
for misfortune, as such. This is really a very important point.
Collectivism is not an intellectual fad, even if erroneous, but a
passionate protest and aspiration: it arises as a secret of the
heart, a dream of the injured feeling, long before it shapes itself
as a definite propaganda at all. The intellectual philosophies ally
themselves with success and preach competition, but the human heart
allies itself with misfortune and suggests communism.
(2) Both trace the evil state of society to "covetousness," the
competitive desire to accumulate riches. Thus, both in one case and
the other, the mere possession of wealth is in itself an offence
against moral order, the absence of it in itself a recommendation and
training for the higher life.
(3) Both propose to remedy the evil of competition by a system of
"bearing each other's burdens" in the literal sense, that is to say,
of levelling, silencing and reducing one's own chances, for the
chance of your weaker brethren. The desirability, they say, of a
great or clever man acquiring fame is small compared with the
desirability of a weak and broken man acquiring bread. The strong man
is a man, and should modify or adapt himself to the hopes of his
mates. He that would be first among you, let him be the servant of
all.
These are the three fountains of collectivist passion. I have not
considered it necessary to enter into elaborate proof of the presence
of these three in the Gospels. That the main trend of Jesus'
character was compassion for human ills, that he denounced not merely
covetousness but riches again and again, and with an almost impatient
emphasis, and that he insisted on his followers throwing up personal
aims and sharing funds and fortune entirely, these are plain matters
of evidence presented again and again, and, in fact, of common
admission.
Yet that uncanny thing in Gilbert which always forced him to see
facts, mutinied again at this point and produced another fragment in
which he has moved closer to Christianity and thereby further away
from modern Socialism. The world he lived in contained a certain
number of Christians who were, he found, highly doubtful about the
Christian impulse of Socialism. And most of his Socialist friends had
about them a tone of bitterness and an atmosphere of hopelessness
utterly unlike the tone and the atmosphere of Christianity. Just as
atheists were the first people to turn Gilbert from Atheism towards
dogmatic Christianity, so the Socialists were now turning him from
Socialism.
The next fragment is rather long, but it was never published and I
think it so important, as showing how his mind was moving, that it
cannot well be shortened. It is a document of capital importance for
the biography of Chesterton.
Now, for my own part, I cannot in the least agree with those who
see no difference between Christian and modern Socialism, nor do I
for a moment join in some Christian Socialists' denunciations of
those worthy middle-class people who cannot see the connection. For I
cannot help thinking that in a way these latter people are right. No
reasonable man can read the Sermon on the Mount and think that its
tone is not very different from that of most collectivist speculation
of the present day, and the Philistines feel this, though they cannot
distinctly express it. There is a difference between Christ's
Socialist program and that of our own time, a difference deep,
genuine and all important, and it is this which I wish to point out.
Let us take two types side by side, or rather the same type in the
two different atmospheres. Let us take the "rich young man" of the
Gospels and place beside him the rich young man of the present day,
on the threshold of Socialism. If we were to follow the difficulties,
theories, doubts, resolves, and conclusions of each of these
characters, we should find two very distinct threads of
self-examination running through the two lives. And the essence of
the difference was this: the modern Socialist is saying, "What will
society do?" while his prototype, as we read, said, "What shall I
do?" Properly considered, this latter sentence contains the whole
essence of the older Communism. The modern Socialist regards his
theory of regeneration as a duty which society owes to him, the early
Christian regarded it as a duty which he owed to society; the modern
Socialist is busy framing schemes for its fulfilment, the early
Christian was busy considering whether he would himself fulfil it
there and then; the ideal of modern Socialism is an elaborate Utopia
to which he hopes the world may be tending, the ideal of the early
Christian was an actual nucleus "living the new life" to whom he
might join himself if he liked. Hence the constant note running
through the whole gospel, of the importance, difficulty and
excitement of the "call," the individual and practical request made
by Christ to every rich man, "sell all thou hast and give to the
poor."
To us Socialism comes speculatively as a noble and optimistic
theory of what may [be] the crown of progress, to Peter and James and
John it came practically as a crisis of their own Daily life, a
stirring question of conduct and renunciation.
We do not therefore in the least agree with those who hold that
modern Socialism is an exact counterpart or fulfilment of the
socialism of Christianity. We find the difference important and
profound, despite the common ground of anti-selfish collectivism. The
modern Socialist regards Communism as a distant panacea for society,
the early Christian regarded it as an immediate and difficult
regeneration of himself: the modern Socialist reviles, or at any rate
reproaches, society for not adopting it, the early Christian
concentrated his thoughts on the problem of his own fitness and
unfitness to adopt it: to the modern Socialist it is a theory, to the
early Christian it was a call; modern Socialism says, "Elaborate a
broad, noble and workable system and submit it to the progressive
intellect of society." Early Christianity said, "Sell all thou hast
and give to the poor."
This distinction between the social and personal way of regarding
the change has two sides, a spiritual and a practical which we
propose to notice. The spiritual side of it, though of less direct
and revolutionary importance than the practical, has still a very
profound philosophic significance. To us it appears something
extraordinary that this Christian side of Socialism, the side of the
difficulty of the personal sacrifice, and the patience, cheerfulness,
and good temper necessary for the protracted personal surrender is so
constantly overlooked. The literary world is flooded with old men
seeing visions and young men dreaming dreams, with various stages of
anti-competitive enthusiasm, with economic apocalypses, elaborate
Utopias and mushroom destinies of mankind. And, as far as we have
seen, in all this whirlwind of theoretic excitement there is not a
word spoken of the intense practical difficulty of the summons to the
individual, the heavy, unrewarding cross borne by him who gives up
the world.
For it will not surely be denied that not only will Socialism be
impossible without some effort on the part of individuals, but that
Socialism if once established would be rapidly dissolved, or worse
still, diseased, if the individual members of the community did not
make a constant effort to do that which in the present state of human
nature must mean an effort, to live the higher life. Mere state
systems could not bring about and still less sustain a reign of
unselfishness, without a cheerful decision on the part of the members
to forget selfishness even in little things, and for that most
difficult and at the same time most important personal decision
Christ made provision and the modern theorists make no provision at
all. Some modern Socialists do indeed see that something more is
necessary for the golden age than fixed incomes and universal stores
tickets, and that the fountain heads of all real improvement are to
be found in human temper and character. Mr. William Morris, for
instance, in his "News from Nowhere" gives a beautiful picture of a
land ruled by Love, and rightly grounds the give-and-take camaraderie
of his ideal state upon an assumed improvement in human nature. But
he does not tell us how such an improvement is to be effected, and
Christ did. Of Christ's actual method in this matter I shall speak
afterwards when dealing with the practical aspect, my object just now
is to compare the spiritual and emotional effects of the call of
Christ, as compared to those of the vision of Mr. William Morris.
When we compare the spiritual attitudes of two thinkers, one of whom
is considering whether social history has been sufficiently a course
of improvement to warrant him in believing that it will culminate in
universal altruism, while the other is considering whether he loves
other people enough to walk down tomorrow to the market-place and
distribute everything but his staff and his scrip, it will not be
denied that the latter is likely to undergo certain deep and acute
emotional experiences, which will be quite unknown to the former. And
these emotional experiences are what we understand as the spiritual
aspect of the distinction. For three characteristics at least the
Galilean programme makes more provision; humility, activity,
cheerfulness, the real triad of Christian virtues.
Humility is a grand, a stirring thing, the exalting paradox of
Christianity, and the sad want of it in our own time is, we believe,
what really makes us think life dull, like a cynic, instead of
marvellous, like a child. With this, however, we have at present
nothing to do. What we have to do with is the unfortunate fact that
among no persons is it more wanting than among Socialists, Christian
and other. The isolated or scattered protest for a complete change in
social order, the continual harping on one string, the necessarily
jaundiced contemplation of a system already condemned, and above all,
the haunting pessimistic whisper of a possible hopelessness of
overcoming the giant forces of success, all these impart undeniably
to the modern Socialist a tone excessively imperious and bitter. Nor
can we reasonably blame the average money-getting public for their
impatience with the monotonous virulence of men who are constantly
reviling them for not living communistically, and who after all, are
not doing it themselves. Willingly do we allow that these latter
enthusiasts think it impossible in the present state of society to
practise their ideal, but this fact, while vindicating their
indisputable sincerity, throws an unfortunate vagueness and
inconclusiveness over their denunciations of other people in the same
position. Let us compare with this arrogant and angry tone among the
modern Utopians who can only dream "the life," the tone of the early
Christian who was busy living it. As far as we know, the early
Christians never regarded it as astonishing that the world as they
found it was competitive and unregenerate; they seem to have felt
that it could not in its pre-Christian ignorance have been anything
else, and their whole interest was bent on their own standard of
conduct and exhortation which was necessary to convert it. They felt
that it was by no merit of theirs that they had been enabled to enter
into the life before the Romans, but simply as a result of the fact
that Christ had appeared in Galilee and not in Rome. Lastly, they
never seem to have entertained a doubt that the message would itself
convert the world with a rapidity and ease which left no room for
severe condemnation of the heathen societies.
With regard to the second merit, that of activity, there can be
little doubt as to where it lies between the planner of the Utopia
and the convert of the brotherhood. The modern Socialist is a
visionary, but in this he is on the same ground as half the great men
of the world, and to some extent of the early Christian himself, who
rushed towards a personal ideal very difficult to sustain. The
visionary who yearns toward an ideal which is practically impossible
is not useless or mischievous, but often the opposite; but the person
who is often useless, and always mischievous, is the visionary who
dreams with the knowledge or the half-knowledge that his ideal is
impossible. The early Christian might be wrong in believing that by
entering the brotherhood men could in a few years become perfect even
as their Father in Heaven was perfect, but he believed it and acted
flatly and fearlessly on the belief: this is the type of the higher
visionary. But all the insidious dangers of the vision; the idleness,
the procrastination, the mere mental aestheticism, come in when the
vision is indulged, as half our Socialistic conceptions are, as a
mere humour or fairy-tale, with a consciousness, half-confessed, that
it is beyond practical politics, and that we need not be troubled
with its immediate fulfilment. The visionary who believes in his own
most frantic vision is always noble and useful. It is the visionary
who does not believe in his vision who is the dreamer, the idler, the
Utopian. This then is the second moral virtue of the older school, an
immense direct sincerity of action, a cleansing away, by the sweats
of hard work, of all those subtle and perilous instincts of mere
ethical castle-building which have been woven like the spells of an
enchantress, round so many of the strong men of our own time.
The third merit, which I have called cheerfulness, is really the
most important of all. We may perhaps put the comparison in this way.
It might strike many persons as strange that in a time on the whole
so optimistic in its intellectual beliefs as this is, in an age when
only a small minority disbelieve in social progress, and a large
majority believe in an ultimate social perfection, there should be
such a tired and blasé feeling among numbers of young men. This, we
think, is due, not to the want of an ultimate ideal, but to that of
any immediate way of making for it: not of something to hope but of
something to do. A human being is not satisfied and never will be
satisfied with being told that it is all right: what he wants is not
a prediction of what other people will be hundreds of years hence, to
make him cheerful, but a new and stirring test and task for himself,
which will assuredly make him cheerful. A knight is not contented
with the statement that his commander has hid his plans so as to
insure victory: what the knight wants is a sword. This demand for a
task is not mere bravado, it is an eternal and natural part of the
higher optimism, as deep-rooted as the foreshadowing of perfection.
I do not know whether Gilbert would yet have actually called himself
a Christian. He was certainly tending towards the more Christian
elements in his surroundings. It seems pretty clear from all he wrote
and said later that he did not hold that transformation to have been
fully effected until after his meeting with Frances, to whom he wrote
many years later:
Therefore I bring these rhymes to you
Who brought the Cross to me.
These papers are undated and are arranged in no sequence. It is
possible this last one was written after their first meeting. Certain
it is that in it he had begun feeling after a more Christian
arrangement of society than Socialism offered--and particularly after
an arrangement better suited to the nature of man. This thought of
man's nature as primary was to remain the basis of his social
thinking to the end of his life.
CHAPTER VII
Incipit Vita Nova
IN THE NOTEBOOK may be seen Gilbert's occasional thoughts
about his own future love story.
SUDDENLY IN THE MIDST
Suddenly in the midst of friends,
Of brothers known to me more and more,
And their secrets, histories, tastes, hero-worships,
Schemes, love-affairs, known to me
Suddenly I felt lonely.
Felt like a child in a field with no more games to play
Because I have not a lady
to whom to send my thought at that hour
that she might crown my peace.
MADONNA MIA
About her whom I have not yet met
I wonder what she is doing
Now, at this sunset hour,
Working perhaps, or playing, worrying or laughing,
Is she making tea, or singing a song, or writing,
or praying, or reading
Is she thoughtful, as I am thoughtful
Is she looking now out of the window
As I am looking out of the window?
But a few pages later comes the entry:
F.B.
You are a very stupid person.
I don't believe you have the least idea how nice you are.
F.B. was Frances, daughter of a diamond merchant some time dead. The
family was of French descent, the name de Blogue having been somewhat
unfortunately anglicised into Blogg. They had fallen from
considerable wealth into a degree of poverty that made it necessary
for the three daughters to earn a living. Frances was never strong
and Gilbert has told how utterly exhausted she was at the end of each
day's toil--"she worked very hard as secretary of an educational
society in London."* The family lived in Bedford Park, a suburb of
London that went in for artistic housing and a kind of garden-city
atmosphere long before this was at all general. Judging by their
photographs the three girls must all have been remarkably pretty, and
young men frequented the house in great numbers, among them Brimley
Johnson who was engaged to Gertrude, and Lucian Oldershaw who later
married Ethel. Some time in 1896, Oldershaw took Gilbert to call and
Gilbert, literally at first sight, fell in love with Frances.
[* _Autobiography_, p. 153.]
TO MY LADY
God made you very carefully
He set a star apart for it
He stained it green and gold with fields
And aureoled it with sunshine
He peopled it with kings, peoples, republics
And so made you, very carefully.
All nature is God's book, filled with his rough sketches for you.*
[* _The Notebook_.]
When almost forty years later Gilbert was writing his
_Autobiography_, Frances asked him to keep her out of it. The liking
they both had for keeping private life private made him call it "this
very Victorian narrative." Nevertheless he tells us something of the
early days of their acquaintance. Gilbert had mentioned the moon:
She told me in the most normal and unpretentious tone that she
hated the moon. I talked to the same lady several times afterwards;
and found that this was a perfectly honest statement of the fact. Her
attitude on this and other things might be called a prejudice; but it
could not possibly be called a fad, still less an affectation. She
really had an obstinate objection to all those natural forces that
seemed to be sterile or aimless; she disliked loud winds that seemed
to be going nowhere; she did not care much for the sea, a spectacle
of which I was very fond; and by the same instinct she was up against
the moon, which she said looked like an imbecile. On the other hand,
she had a sort of hungry appetite for all the fruitful things like
fields and gardens and anything connected with production; about
which she was quite practical. She practised gardening; in that
curious cockney culture she would have been quite ready to practise
farming; and on the same perverse principle, she actually practised a
religion. This was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to
the whole fussy culture in which she lived. Any number of people
proclaimed religions, chiefly oriental religions, analysed or argued
about them; but that anybody could regard religion as a practical
thing like gardening was something quite new to me and, to her
neighbours, new and incomprehensible. She had been, by an accident,
brought up in the school of an Anglo-Catholic convent; and to all
that agnostic or mystic world, practising a religion was much more
puzzling than professing it. She was a queer card. She wore a green
velvet dress barred with grey fur, which I should have called
artistic, but that she hated all the talk about art; and she had an
attractive face, which I should have called elvish, but that she
hated all the talk about elves. But what was arresting and almost
blood-curdling about her, in that social atmosphere, was not so much
that she hated it, as that she was entirely unaffected by it. She
never knew what was meant by being "under the influence" of Yeats or
Shaw or Tolstoy or anybody else. She was intelligent, with a great
love of literature, and especially of Stevenson. But if Stevenson had
walked into the room and explained his personal doubts about personal
immortality, she would have regretted that he should be wrong upon
the point; but would otherwise have been utterly unaffected. She was
not at all like Robespierre, except in a taste for neatness in dress;
and yet it is only in Mr. Belloc's book on Robespierre that I have
ever found any words that describe the unique quality that cut her
off from the current culture and saved her from it. "God had given
him in his mind a stone tabernacle in which certain great truths were
preserved imperishable."*
[* _Autobiography_, pp. 151-3.]
A letter to a friend, Mildred Wain, who was now engaged to Waldo
d'Avigdor, makes the future tolerably easy to foresee.
. . . My brother wishes me to thank you with ferocious gratitude
for the music, which he is enjoying tremendously. It reminds me
rather of what Miss Frances Blogg--but that is another story.
In your last letter you enquired whether I saw anything of the
Bloggs now. If you went and put that question to them there would be
a scene. Mrs. Blogg would probably fall among the fire-irons, Knollys
would foam in convulsions on the carpet, Ethel would scream and take
refuge on the mantelpiece and Gertrude faint and break off her
engagement. Frances would--but no intelligent person can affect an
interest in what she does.
Lawrence Solomon told me that Mrs. Edward Chesterton did not approve
of the rather arty-crafty atmosphere of Bedford Park--that earliest
of Garden Cities, so conventionally unconventional--where Frances
lived. She did not like her son's friendship with the Bloggs and she
had chosen for him a girl who she felt would make him an ideal wife:
"Very open air," Mr. Solomon said. "Not booky, but good at games and
practical." He was not sure whether Gilbert realised this, but
personally I believe that Gilbert realised everything.
"Of course you know," Annie Firmin wrote to me, "that Aunt Marie
never liked Frances? Or Bentley?" Annie was the girl chosen by
Gilbert's mother. She was very much a member of the family.
"Did Gilbert ever speak to you," she wrote to me recently, "of the
old Saturday night parties at Barnes, at the home of the
grandparents--every Saturday night the family, or as many of it as
could, used to go down to Barnes to supper, and the 'boys' and Tom
Gilbert, Alice Chesterton's husband, used to sing round the supper
table. Many a one I went to when I was staying at Warwick Gardens. We
used to go on a red Hammersmith bus, before the days of motor cars."
On a longer trip they stayed at Berck in Belgium, and Cecil had a
strange idea, apparently regarded by him as humorous, which measures
the family absence of a Christian sense at this date. "Cecil urged me
to sit at the foot of the big Crucifix in the village street and let
him photograph me as Mary Magdalen! I _didn't_, and I don't know how
he thought he'd get away with the modern clothing."
Whatever Gilbert's mother may have planned for them, neither she nor
Gilbert had any romantic feeling for each other. Indeed Cecil was
definitely her favourite and she believed him the favourite of both
parents also. "He had more heart," she says, "than the more brilliant
Gilbert." Anyhow, his heart was shown more openly to her.
"Cecil was not much given to versifying," she wrote in another
letter, "he sent me the enclosed when my son was born. I value it so
much." Headed "To Annie" the poem is a long one. It begins with the
"ancient comradeship, loyal and unbroken" in which they had "first
seen life together."
Shining nights, tumultuous days,
Joy swift caught in sudden ways,
All the laughter, love and praise,
All the joys of living
These we shared together dear,
Plot and jest and story,
This is hid, shut off, unknown,
Seeing that to you alone
Is the wondrous Kingdom shown
And the power and Glory!
Annie's thoughts, then, and Cecil's were not greatly on the elder
brother, who was pursuing his own romance with a heart that seems to
have been fairly adequate in its energies.
Most mothers have watched their sons through one or more experiences
of calf love: Gilbert indicates in the _Autobiography_--and I knew
it, too, from some jokes he and Frances used to make--that he had had
one or two fancies before the coming of Reality. He must then
convince his mother that Reality had come: he must overcome a
prejudice avowed by neither: he must call on the deeps of a mother's
feelings so effectively that it would never now be avowed, that it
might indeed be swept away.
And so, sitting at a table in a seaside lodging, as his mother sat in
the same room or moved about making cocoa for the family, Gilbert
tried to express what even for him was the inexpressible.
1 Rosebery Villas
Granville Road
Felixstowe.
MY DEAREST MOTHER,
You may possibly think this a somewhat eccentric proceeding. You
are sitting opposite and talking--about Mrs. Berline. But I take this
method of addressing you because it occurs to me that you might
possibly wish to turn the matter over in your mind before writing or
speaking to me about it.
I am going to tell you the whole of a situation in which I believe
I have acted rightly, though I am not absolutely certain, and to ask
for your advice on it. It was a somewhat complicated one, and I
repeat that I do not think I could rightly have acted otherwise, but
if I were the greatest fool in the three kingdoms and had made
nothing but a mess of it, there is one person I should always turn to
and trust. Mothers know more of their son's idiocies than other
people can, and this has been peculiarly true in your case. I have
always rejoiced at this, and not been ashamed of it: this has always
been true and always will be. These things are easier written than
said, but you know it is true, don't you?
I am inexpressibly anxious that you should give me credit for
having done my best, and for having constantly had in mind the way in
which you would be affected by the letter I am now writing. I do hope
you will be pleased.
Almost eight years ago, you made a remark--this may show you that
if we "jeer" at your remarks, we remember them. The remark applied to
the hypothetical young lady with whom I should fall in love and took
the form of saying "If she is good, I shan't mind who she is." I
don't know how many times I have said that over to myself in the last
two or three days in which I have decided on this letter.
Do not be frightened; or suppose that anything sensational or final
has occurred. I am not married, my dear mother, neither am I engaged.
You are called to the council of chiefs very early in its
deliberations. If you don't mind I will tell you, briefly, the whole
story.
You are, I think, the shrewdest person for seeing things whom I
ever knew: consequently I imagine that you do not think that I go
down to Bedford Park every Sunday for the sake of the scenery. I
should not wonder if you know nearly as much about the matter as I
can tell in a letter. Suffice it to say however briefly (for neither
of us care much for gushing: this letter is not on Mrs. Ratcliffe
lines) that the first half of my time of acquaintance with the Bloggs
was spent in enjoying a very intimate, but quite breezy and Platonic
friendship with Frances Blogg, reading, talking and enjoying life
together, having great sympathies on all subjects; and the second
half in making the thrilling, but painfully responsible discovery
that Platonism, on my side, had not the field by any means to itself.
That is how we stand now. No one knows, except her family and
yourself.
My dearest mother, I am sure you are at least not unsympathetic.
Indeed we love each other more than we shall either of us ever be
able to say. I have refrained from sentiment in this letter--for I
don't think you like it much. But love is a very different thing from
sentiment and you will never laugh at that. I will not say that you
are sure to like Frances, for all young men say that to their
mothers, quite naturally, and their mothers never believe them, also,
quite naturally. Besides, I am so confident, I should like you to
find her out for yourself. She is, in reality, very much the sort of
woman you like, what is called, I believe, "a Woman's Woman," very
humorous, inconsequent and sympathetic and defiled with no offensive
exuberance of good health.
I have nothing more to say, except that you and she have occupied
my mind for the last week to the exclusion of everything else, which
must account for my abstraction, and that in her letter she sent the
following message: "Please tell your mother soon. Tell her I am not
so silly as to expect her to think me good enough, but really I will
try to be."
An aspiration which, considered from my point of view, naturally
provokes a smile.
Here you give me a cup of cocoa. Thank you.
Believe me, my dearest mother,
Always your very affectionate son
GILBERT.
What exactly Gilbert meant by saying they were "not engaged" it is
hard to surmise, in view of Frances's message to her future
mother-in-law. Of his sensations when proposing Gilbert gives some
idea in the _Autobiography:_
It was fortunate, however, that our next most important meeting was
not under the sign of the moon but of the sun. She has often
affirmed, during our later acquaintance, that if the sun had not been
shining to her complete satisfaction on that day, the issue might
have been quite different. It happened in St. James's Park; where
they keep the ducks and the little bridge, which has been mentioned
in no less authoritative a work than Mr. Belloc's Essay on Bridges,
since I find myself quoting that author once more. I think he deals
in some detail, in his best topographical manner, with various
historic sites on the Continent; but later relapses into a larger
manner, somewhat thus: "The time has now come to talk at large about
Bridges. The longest bridge in the world is the Forth Bridge, and the
shortest bridge in the world is a plank over a ditch in the village
of Loudwater. The bridge that frightens you most is the Brooklyn
Bridge, and the bridge that frightens you least is the bridge in St.
James's Park." I admit that I crossed that bridge in undeserved
safety; and perhaps I was affected by my early romantic vision of the
bridge leading to the princess's tower. But I can assure my friend
the author that the bridge in St. James's Park can frighten you a
good deal.*
[* _Autobiography_, pp. 154-5.]
Now, with Frances promised to him, Gilbert could enjoy everything
properly, could execute, verbally at least, a wild fantasia. Among
the first of his friends to be written to was Mildred Wain, because,
as he says in a later letter, he felt towards her deep gratitude "for
forming a topic of conversation on my first visit to a family with
which I have since formed a dark and shameful connection."
DEAR MILDRED,
On rising this morning, I carefully washed my boots in hot water
and blacked my face. Then assuming my coat with graceful ease and
with the tails in front, I descended to breakfast, where I gaily
poured the coffee on the sardines and put my hat on the fire to boil.
These activities will give you some idea of my frame of mind. My
family, observing me leave the house by way of the chimney, and take
the fender with me under one arm, thought I must have something on my
mind. So I had.
My friend, I am engaged. I am only telling it at present to my real
friends: but there is no doubt about it. The next question that
arises is--whom am I engaged to? I have investigated this problem
with some care, and, as far as I can make out, the best authorities
point to Frances Blogg. There can I think be no reasonable doubt that
she is the lady. It is as well to have these minor matters clear in
one's mind.
I am very much too happy to write much; but I thought you might
remember my existence sufficiently to be interested in the incident.
Waldo has been of so much help to me in this and in everything, and
I am so much interested in you for his sake and your own, that I am
encouraged to hope our friendship may subsist. If ever I have done
anything rude or silly, it was quite inadvertent. I have always
wished to please you.
To Annie Firmin he wrote:
I can only think of the day, one of the earliest I can recall of my
life, when you came in and helped me to build a house with bricks. I
am building another one now, and it would not have been complete
without your going over it.
To others he wrote such sentences as he could put together in the
whirlwind of his happiness. For himself he stammered in a verse that
grew with the years into his great love poetry.
God made thee mightily, my love,
He stretched his hands out of his rest
And lit the star of east and west
Brooding o'er darkness like a dove.
God made thee mightily, my love.
God made thee patiently, my sweet,
Out of all stars he chose a star
He made it red with sunset bar
And green with greeting for thy feet.
God made thee mightily, my sweet.
CHAPTER VIII
To Frances
THIS CHAPTER CAN be written only by Gilbert himself. It might seem
that he had no words left for an emotion heightened beyond the love
of his friends and the joyous acceptance of existence. But in these
letters he shows the truth of his own theory, that to love each thing
separately strengthens the power of loving, to have tried to love
everyone is, as he tells Frances, no bad preparation for loving her.
The emotion of falling in love had both intensified his appreciation
of all things and cast for him a vivid light on past, present and
future, so that in the last of these letters he sketches his life
down to the moment when a new life begins.
". . . I am looking over the sea and endeavouring to reckon up the
estate I have to offer you. As far as I can make out my equipment for
starting on a journey to fairyland consists of the following items.
"1st. A Straw Hat. The oldest part of this admirable relic shows
traces of pure Norman work. The vandalism of Cromwell's soldiers has
left us little of the original hat-band.
"2nd. A Walking Stick, very knobby and heavy: admirably fitted to
break the head of any denizen of Suffolk who denies that you are the
noblest of ladies, but of no other manifest use.
"3rd. A copy of Walt Whitman's poems, once nearly given to Salter,
but quite forgotten. It has his name in it still with an affectionate
inscription from his sincere friend Gilbert Chesterton. I wonder if
he will ever have it.
"4th. A number of letters from a young lady, containing everything
good and generous and loyal and holy and wise that isn't in Walt
Whitman's poems.
"5th. An unwieldy sort of a pocket knife, the blades mostly having an
edge of a more varied and picturesque outline than is provided by the
prosaic cutter. The chief element however is a thing 'to take stones
out of a horse's hoof.' What a beautiful sensation of security it
gives one to reflect that if one should ever have money enough to buy
a horse and should happen to buy one and the horse should happen to
have a stone in his hoof--that one is ready; one stands prepared,
with a defiant smile!
"6th. Passing from the last miracle of practical foresight, we come
to a box of matches. Every now and then I strike one of these,
because fire is beautiful and burns your fingers. Some people think
this waste of matches: the same people who object to the building of
Cathedrals.
"7th. About three pounds in gold and silver, the remains of one of
Mr. Unwin's bursts of affection: those explosions of spontaneous love
for myself, which, such is the perfect order and harmony of his mind,
occur at startlingly exact intervals of time.
"8th. A book of Children's Rhymes, in manuscript, called the 'Weather
Book' about ¾ finished, and destined for Mr. Nutt.* I have been
working at it fairly steadily, which I think jolly creditable under
the circumstances. One can't put anything interesting in it. They'll
understand those things when they grow up.
[* _Greybeards at Play_.]
"9th. A tennis racket--nay, start not. It is a part of the new
régime, and the only new and neat-looking thing in the Museum. We'll
soon mellow it--like the straw hat. My brother and I are teaching
each other lawn tennis.
"10th. A soul, hitherto idle and omnivorous but now happy enough to
be ashamed of itself.
"11th. A body, equally idle and quite equally omnivorous, absorbing
tea, coffee, claret, sea-water and oxygen to its own perfect
satisfaction. It is happiest swimming, I think, the sea being about a
convenient size.
"12th. A Heart--mislaid somewhere. And that is about all the property
of which an inventory can be made at present. After all, my tastes
are stoically simple. A straw hat, a stick, a box of matches and some
of his own poetry. What more does man require? . . ."
". . . The City of Felixstowe, as seen by the local prophet from the
neighbouring mountain-peak, does not strike the eye as having
anything uncanny about it. At least I imagine that it requires rather
careful scrutiny before the eerie curl of a chimney pot, or the elfin
wink of a lonely lamp-post brings home to the startled soul that it
is really the City of a Fearful Folk. That the inhabitants are not
human in the ordinary sense is quite clear, yet it has only just
begun to dawn on me after staying a week in the Town of Unreason with
its monstrous landscape and grave, unmeaning customs. Do I seem to be
raving? Let me give my experiences.
"I am bound to admit that I do not think I am good at shopping. I
generally succeed in getting rid of money, but other observances,
such as bringing away the goods that I've paid for, and knowing what
I've bought, I often pass over as secondary. But to shop in a town of
ordinary tradesmen is one thing: to shop in a town of raving lunatics
is another. I set out one morning, happy and hopeful with the
intention of buying (a) a tennis racket (b) some tennis balls (c)
some tennis shoes (d) a ticket for a tennis ground. I went to the
shop pointed out by some villager (probably mad) and went in and said
I believed they kept tennis rackets. The young man smiled and
assented. I suggested that he might show me some. The young man
looked positively alarmed. 'Oh,' he said, 'We haven't got any--not
got any here.' I asked 'Where?' 'Oh, they're out you know. All
round,' he explained wildly, with a graphic gesture in the direction
of the sea and the sky. 'All out round. We've left them all round at
places.' To this day I don't know what he meant, but I merely asked
when they would quit these weird retreats. He said in an hour: in an
hour I called again. Were they in now? 'Well not in--not in, just
yet,' he said with a sort of feverish confidentialness, as if he
wasn't quite well. 'Are they still--all out at places?' I asked with
restrained humour. 'Oh no!' he said with a burst of reassuring pride.
'They are only out there--out behind, you know.' I hope my face
expressed my beaming comprehension of the spot alluded to.
Eventually, at a third visit, the rackets were produced. None of
them, I was told by my brother, were of any first-class maker, so
that was outside the question. The choice was between some good, neat
first-hand instruments which suited me, and some seedy-looking
second-hand objects with plain deal handles, which would have done at
a pinch. I thought that perhaps it would be better to get a
good-class racket in London and content myself for the present with
economising on one of these second-hand monuments of depression. So I
asked the price. '10/6' was the price of the second-hand article. I
thought this large for the tool, and wondered if the first-hand
rackets were much dearer. What price the first-hand? '7/6' said the
Creature, cheery as a bird. I did not faint. I am strong.
"I rejected the article which was dearer because it had been hallowed
by human possession, and accepted the cheap, new crude racket. Except
the newness there was no difference between them whatever. I then
asked the smiling Maniac for balls. He brought me a selection of
large red globes nearly as big as Dutch cheeses. I said, 'Are these
tennis-balls?' He said, 'Oh did you want tennis-balls?' I said
Yes--they often came in handy at tennis. The goblin was however quite
impervious to satire, and I left him endeavouring to draw my
attention to his wares in general, particularly to some zinc baths
which he seemed to think should form part of the equipment of a
tennis-player.
"Never before or since have I met a being of that order and degree of
creepiness. He was a nightmare of unmeaning idiocy. But some mention
ought to be made of the old man at the entrance to the tennis ground
who opened his mouth in parables on the subject of the fee for
playing there. He seemed to have been wound up to make only one
remark, 'It's sixpence.' Under these circumstances the attempt to
discover whether the sixpence covered a day's tennis or a week or
fifty years was rather baffling. At last I put down the sixpence.
This seemed to galvanise him into life. He looked at the clock, which
was indicating five past eleven and said, 'It's sixpence an hour--so
you'll be all right till two.' I fled screaming.
"Since then I have examined the town more carefully and feel the
presence of something nameless. There is a claw-curl in the sea-bent
trees, an eye-gleam in the dark flints in the wall that is not of
this world.
"When we set up a house, darling (honeysuckle porch, yew clipt hedge,
bees, poetry and eight shillings a week), I think you will have to do
the shopping. Particularly at Felixstowe. There was a great and
glorious man who said, 'Give us the luxuries of life and we will
dispense with the necessities.' That I think would be a splendid
motto to write (in letters of brown gold) over the porch of our
hypothetical home. There will be a sofa for you, for example, but no
chairs, for I prefer the floor. There will be a select store of
chocolate-creams (to make you do the Carp with) and the rest will be
bread and water. We will each retain a suit of evening dress for
great occasions, and at other times clothe ourselves in the skins of
wild beasts (how pretty you would look) which would fit your taste in
furs and be economical.
"I have sometimes thought it would be very fine to take an ordinary
house, a very poor, commonplace house in West Kensington, say, and
make it symbolic. Not artistic--Heaven--O Heaven forbid. My blood
boils when I think of the affronts put by knock-kneed pictorial
epicures on the strong, honest, ugly, patient shapes of necessary
things: the brave old bones of life. There are aesthetic pottering
prigs who can look on a saucepan without one tear of joy or sadness:
mongrel decadents that can see no dignity in the honourable scars of
a kettle. So they concentrate all their house decoration on coloured
windows that nobody looks out of, and vases of lilies that everybody
wishes out of the way. No: my idea (which is much cheaper) is to make
a house really allegoric: really explain its own essential meaning.
Mystical or ancient sayings should be inscribed on every object, the
more prosaic the object the better; and the more coarsely and rudely
the inscription was traced the better. 'Hast thou sent the Rain upon
the Earth?' should be inscribed on the Umbrella-stand: perhaps on the
Umbrella. 'Even the Hairs of your Head are all numbered' would give a
tremendous significance to one's hairbrushes: the words about 'living
water' would reveal the music and sanctity of the sink: while 'our
God is a consuming Fire' might be written over the kitchen-grate, to
assist the mystic musings of the cook--Shall we ever try that
experiment, dearest. Perhaps not, for no words would be golden enough
for the tools you had to touch: you would be beauty enough for one
house. . . ."
". . . By all means let us have bad things in our dwelling and make
them good things. I shall offer no objection to your having an
occasional dragon to dinner, or a penitent Griffin to sleep in the
spare bed. The image of you taking a Sunday school of little Devils
is pleasing. They will look up, first in savage wonder, then in vague
respect; they will see the most glorious and noble lady that ever
lived since their prince tempted Eve, with a halo of hair and great
heavenly eyes that seem to make the good at the heart of things
almost too terribly simple and naked for the sons of flesh: and as
they gaze, their tails will drop off, and their wings will sprout:
and they will become Angels in six lessons. . . .
"I cannot profess to offer any elaborate explanation of your mother's
disquiet but I admit it does not wholly surprise me. You see I happen
to know one factor in the case, and one only, of which you are wholly
ignorant. I know you . . . I know one thing which has made me feel
strange before your mother--I know the value of what I take away. I
feel (in a weird moment) like the Angel of Death.
"You say you want to talk to me about death: my views about death are
bright, brisk and entertaining. When Azrael takes a soul it may be to
other and brighter worlds: like those whither you and I go together.
The transformation called Death may be something as beautiful and
dazzling as the transformation called Love. It may make the dead man
'happy,' just as your mother knows that you are happy. But none the
less it is a transformation, and sad sometimes for those left behind.
A mother whose child is dying can hardly believe that in the
inscrutable Unknown there is anyone who can look to it as well as
she. And if a mother cannot trust her child easily to God Almighty,
shall I be so mean as to be angry because she cannot trust it easily
to me? I tell you I have stood before your mother and felt like a
thief. I know you are not going to part: neither physically,
mentally, morally nor spiritually. But she sees a new element in your
life, wholly from outside--is it not natural, given her temperament,
that you should find her perturbed? Oh, dearest, dearest Frances, let
us always be very gentle to older people. Indeed, darling, it is not
they who are the tyrants, but we. They may interrupt our building in
the scaffolding stages: we turn their house upside down when it is
their final home and rest. Your mother would certainly have worried
if you had been engaged to the Archangel Michael (who, indeed, is
bearing his disappointment very well): how much more when you are
engaged to an aimless, tactless, reckless, unbrushed, strange-hatted,
opinionated scarecrow who has suddenly walked into the vacant place.
I could have prophesied her unrest: wait and she will calm down all
right, dear. God comfort her: I dare not. . . ."
". . . Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born of comfortable but honest
parents on the top of Campden Hill, Kensington. He was christened at
St. George's Church which stands just under that more imposing
building, the Waterworks Tower. This place was chosen, apparently, in
order that the whole available water supply might be used in the
intrepid attempt to make him a member of Christ, a child of God and
an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven.
"Of the early years of this remarkable man few traces remain. One of
his earliest recorded observations was the simple exclamation, full
of heart-felt delight, 'Look at Baby. Funny Baby.' Here we see the
first hint of that ineffable conversational modesty, that shy social
self-effacement, which has ever hidden his light under a bushel. His
mother also recounts with apparent amusement an incident connected
with his imperious demand for his father's top-hat. 'Give me that
hat, please.' 'No, dear, you mustn't have that.' 'Give me that hat.'
'No, dear--' 'If you don't give it me, I'll say 'At.' An exquisite
selection in the matter of hats has indeed always been one of the
great man's hobbies.
"When he had drawn pictures on all the blinds and tablecloths and
towels and walls and windowpanes it was felt that he required a
larger sphere. Consequently he was sent to Mr. Bewsher who gave him
desks and copy-books and Latin grammars and atlases to draw pictures
on. He was far too innately conscientious not to use these materials
to draw on. To other uses, asserted by some to belong to these
objects, he paid little heed. The only really curious thing about his
school life was that he had a weird and quite involuntary habit of
getting French prizes. They were the only ones he ever got and he
never tried to get them. But though the thing was quite mysterious to
him, and though he made every effort to avoid it, it went on, being
evidently a part of some occult natural law.
"For the first half of his time at school he was very solitary and
futile. He never regretted the time, for it gave him two things,
complete mental self-sufficiency and a comprehension of the
psychology of outcasts.
"But one day, as he was roaming about a great naked building land
which he haunted in play hours, rather like an outlaw in the woods,
he met a curious agile youth with hair brushed up off his head.
Seeing each other, they promptly hit each other simultaneously and
had a fight. Next day they met again and fought again. These Homeric
conflicts went on for many days, till one morning in the crisis of
some insane grapple, the subject of this biography quoted, like a
war-chant, something out of Macaulay's _Lays_. The other started and
relaxed his hold. They gazed at each other. Then the foe quoted the
following line. In this land of savages they knew each other. For the
next two hours they talked books. They have talked books ever since.
The boy was Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The incident just narrated is
the true and real account of the first and deepest of our hero's male
connections. But another was to ensue, probably equally profound and
far more pregnant with awful and dazzling consequences. Bentley
always had a habit of trying to do things well: twelve years of the
other's friendship has not cured him of this. Being seized with a
peculiar desire to learn conjuring, he had made the acquaintance of
an eerie and supernatural young man, who instructed him in the Black
Art: a gaunt Mephistophelian sort of individual, who our subject half
thought was a changeling. Our subject has not quite got over the idea
yet, though for practical social purposes he calls him Lucian
Oldershaw. Our subject met Lucian Oldershaw. 'That night,' as
Shakespeare says, 'there was a star.'
"These three persons soon became known through the length and breadth
of St. Paul's School as the founders of a singular brotherhood. It
was called the J.D.C. No one, we believe, could ever have had better
friends than did the hero of this narrative. We wish that we could
bring before the reader the personality of all the Knights of that
eccentric round table. Most of them are known already to the reader.
Even the subject himself is possibly known to the reader. Bertram,
who seemed somehow to have been painted by Vandyck, a sombre and
stately young man, a blend of Cavalier and Puritan, with the physique
of a military father and the views of an ethical mother and a soul of
his own which for sheer simplicity is something staggering. Vernède
with an Oriental and inscrutable placidity varied every now and then
with dazzling agility and Meredithian humour. Waldo d'Avigdor who
masks with complete fashionable triviality a Hebraic immutability of
passion tried in a more ironical and bitter service than his Father
Jacob. Lawrence and Maurice Solomon, who show another side of the
same people, the love of home, the love of children, the meek and
malicious humour, the tranquil service of a law. Salter who shows how
beautiful and ridiculous a combination can be made of the most
elaborate mental cultivation and artistic sensibility and omniscience
with a receptiveness and a humility extraordinary in any man. These
were his friends. May he be forgiven for speaking of them at length
and with pride? Some day we hope the reader may know them all. He
knew these people; he knew their friends. He heard Mildred Wain say
'Blogg' and he thought it was a funny name. Had he been told that he
would ever pronounce it with the accents of tears and passion he
would have said, in his pride, that the name was not suitable for
that purpose. But there are _oukh eph' emin_ [Greek characters in
original]. . . .
"He went for a time to an Art School. There he met a great many
curious people. Many of the men were horrible blackguards: he was not
exactly that: so they naturally found each other interesting. He went
through some rather appalling discoveries about human life and the
final discovery was that there is no Devil--no, not even such a thing
as a bad man.
"One pleasant Saturday afternoon Lucian said to him, 'I am going to
take you to see the Bloggs.' 'The what?' said the unhappy man. 'The
Bloggs,' said the other, darkly. Naturally assuming that it was the
name of a public-house he reluctantly followed his friend. He came to
a small front-garden; if it was a public-house it was not a
businesslike one. They raised the latch--they rang the bell (if the
bell was not in the close time just then). No flower in the pots
winked. No brick grinned. No sign in Heaven or earth warned him. The
birds sang on in the trees. He went in.
"The first time he spent an evening at the Bloggs there was no one
there. That is to say there was a worn but fiery little lady in a
grey dress who didn't approve of 'catastrophic solutions of social
problems.' That, he understood, was Mrs. Blogg. There was a long,
blonde, smiling young person who seemed to think him quite off his
head and who was addressed as Ethel. There were two people whose
meaning and status he couldn't imagine, one of whom had a big nose
and the other hadn't. . . . Lastly, there was a Juno-like creature in
a tremendous hat who eyed him all the time half wildly, like a shying
horse, because he said he was quite happy. . . .
"But the second time he went there he was plumped down on a sofa
beside a being of whom he had a vague impression that brown hair grew
at intervals all down her like a caterpillar. Once in the course of
conversation she looked straight at him and he said to himself as
plainly as if he had read it in a book: 'If I had anything to do with
this girl I should go on my knees to her: if I spoke with her she
would never deceive me: if I depended on her she would never deny me:
if I loved her she would never play with me: if I trusted her she
would never go back on me: if I remembered her she would never forget
me. I may never see her again. Goodbye.' It was all said in a flash:
but it was all said. . . .
"Two years, as they say in the playbills, is supposed to elapse. And
here is the subject of this memoir sitting on a balcony above the
sea. The time, evening. He is thinking of the whole bewildering
record of which the foregoing is a brief outline: he sees how far he
has gone wrong and how idle and wasteful and wicked he has often
been: how miserably unfitted he is for what he is called upon to be.
Let him now declare it and hereafter for ever hold his peace.
"But there are four lamps of thanksgiving always before him. The
first is for his creation out of the same earth with such a woman as
you. The second is that he has not, with all his faults, 'gone after
strange women.' You cannot think how a man's self-restraint is
rewarded in this. The third is that he has tried to love everything
alive: a dim preparation for loving you. And the fourth is--but no
words can express that. Here ends my previous existence. Take it: it
led me to you."
CHAPTER IX
A Long Engagement
GILBERT SYMPATHIZED WITH his future mother-in-law's anxiety at
Frances's engagement to "a self-opinionated scarecrow," but I doubt
if it at all quickly occurred to him that the basis of that anxiety
was the fact that he was earning only twenty-five shillings a week!
Frances herself, Lucian Oldershaw, and the rest of his friends
believed he was a genius with a great future and this belief they
tried to communicate to Frances's family. But even if they succeeded,
faith in the future did not pay dividends in a present income on
which to set up house. A widow, considering her daughter's future,
might well feel a little anxiety. But one can see wheels within
wheels of family conclaves and matters to perplex the simple which
drew another letter from Gilbert to Frances:
. . . It is a mystic and refreshing thought that I shall never
understand Bloggs.
That is the truth of it . . . that this remarkable family
atmosphere . . . this temperament with its changing moods and its
everlasting will, its divine trust in one's soul and its tremulous
speculations as to one's "future," its sensitiveness like a tempered
sword, vibrating but never broken: its patience that can wait for
Eternity and its impatience that cannot wait for tea: its power of
bearing huge calamities, and its queer little moods that even those
calamities can never overshadow or wipe out: its brusqueness that
always pleases and its over-tactfulness that sometimes wounds: its
terrific intensity of feeling, that sometimes paralyses the outsider
with conversational responsibility: its untranslatable humour of
courage and poverty and its unfathomed epics of past tragedy and
triumph--all this glorious confusion of family traits, which, in no
exaggerative sense, make the Gentiles come to your light and the folk
of the nations to the brightness of your house--is a thing so utterly
outside my own temperament that I was formed by nature to admire and
not understand it. God made me very simply--as he made a tree or a
pig or an oyster: to perform certain functions. The best thing he
gave me was a perfect and unshakable trust in those I love. . . .
Gilbert's sympathy with his future mother-in-law may have been put
to some slight strain by an incident related by Lucian Oldershaw.
Mrs. Blogg begged him to talk to Gilbert about his personal
appearance--clothes and such matters--and to entreat him to make an
effort to improve it. One can imagine how much he must have disliked
the commission! Anyhow, he decided it would be better to do it away
from home and he suggested to Gilbert a trip to the seaside. Arrived
there he broached the subject. Gilbert, he says, was not the least
angry, but answered quite seriously that Frances loved him as he was
and that it would be absurd for him to try to alter. It was only out
of a later and deeper experience of women that he was able to write
"A man's friends like him but they leave him as he is. A man's wife
loves him and is always trying to change him."
A good many things happened in the course of this long engagement.
Frances and Gilbert were both young and long engagements were normal
at that period, when the idea of a wife continuing to earn after
marriage was unheard of. There were obvious disadvantages in the long
delay before marriage but also certain advantages. The two got to
know each other with a close intimacy: they were comrades as well as
lovers and carried both these relationships into married life. For
the biographer the advantage has been immense, since every separation
between the pair meant a batch of letters. The discerning will have
noted that there are in these letters considerable excisions: parts
Frances would not show even to the biographer. . But they are the
richest quarry from which to dig for the most important period of any
man's life; the period richest in mental development and the shaping
of character. It is, too, the only period of his adult life when
Gilbert wrote letters at all, unless they were absolutely unavoidable.
Even in a small family two members will tend to draw together more
closely than the rest, and this was so with Frances and her sister
Gertrude. They adored one another and Frances offered her to Gilbert
as a sister, with especially confident pride. He had never had a
sister since babyhood and he enjoyed it. The happiness of the
engagement was terribly broken into by the sudden death of Gertrude
in a street accident. Frances was absolutely shattered. The next
group of letters belongs to the months after Gertrude's death, when
Gilbert was still trying to be a publisher, but, urged on by Frances,
beginning also to be a writer. During part of this time she had gone
abroad for rest and recovery after the shock. Gilbert pictures her
reading his letters "under the shadow of an alien cathedral."
None of these letters are dated but most of them have kept their
postmarks.
11, Paternoster Buildings
(postmarked July 8, 1899)
. . . I am black but comely at this moment: because the cyclostyle
has blacked me. Fear not. I shall wash myself. But I think it my duty
to render an accurate account of my physical appearance every time I
write: and shall be glad of any advice and assistance. . . . I have
been reading Lewis Carroll's remains, mostly Logic, and have much
pleasure in enlivening you with the following hilarious query: "Can a
Hypothetical, whose protasis is false, be legitimate? Are two
Hypotheticals of the forms, _If A, then B_, and _If A then not B_
compatible?" I should think a Hypothetical could be, if it tried
hard. . . .
To return to the Cyclostyle. I like the Cyclostyle ink; it is so
inky. I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce
pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of
water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the
steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud. It is just the
same with people. When we call a man "manly" or a woman "womanly" we
touch the deepest philosophy.
I will not ask you to forgive this rambling levity. I, for one have
sworn, I do not hesitate to say it, by the sword of God that has
struck us, and before the beautiful face of the dead, that the first
joke that occurred to me I would make, the first nonsense poem I
thought of I would write, that I would begin again at once with a
heavy heart at times, as to other duties, to the duty of being
perfectly silly, perfectly extravagant, perfectly trivial, and as far
as possible, amusing. I have sworn that Gertrude should not feel,
wherever she is, that the comedy has gone out of our theatre. This, I
am well aware, will be misunderstood. But I have long grasped that
whatever we do we are misunderstood--small blame to other people; for,
we know ourselves, our best motives are things we could neither
explain nor defend. And I would rather hurt those who can shout than
her who is silent.
You might tell me what you feel about this: but I am myself
absolutely convinced that gaiety that is the bubble of love, does not
annoy me: the old round of stories, laughter, family ceremonies,
seems to me far less really inappropriate than a single moment of
forced silence or unmanly shame. . . .
I have always imagined Frances did not know of her mother's efforts
to tidy Gilbert, but very early in their engagement she began her own
abortive attempts to make him brush his hair, tie his tie straight
and avoid made-up ones, attend to the buttons on his coat, and all
the rest. It would seem that for a time at any rate he made some
efforts, but evidently simply regarded the whole thing as one huge
joke.
11 Warwick Gardens
(Postmarked July 9th, 1899)
. . . I am clean. I am wearing a frockcoat, which from a
superficial survey seems to have no end of buttons. It must be
admitted that I am wearing a bow-tie: but on careful research I find
that these were constantly worn by Vikings. A distinct allusion to
them is made in that fine fragment, the Tryggvhessa Saga, where the
poet says, in the short alliterative lines of Early Norse poetry:
Frockcoat Folding then
Hakon Hardrada
Bow-tie Buckled
Waited for war
(Brit. Mus. Mss. CCCLXIX lines 99981-99985)
I resume. My appearance, as I have suggested, is singularly
exemplary. My boots are placed, after the fastidious London fashion,
on the feet: the laces are done up, the watch is going, the hair is
brushed, the sleeve-links are inserted, for of such is the Kingdom of
Heaven. As for my straw hat, I put it on eighteen times
consecutively, taking a run and a jump to each try, till at last I
hit the right angle. I have not taken it off for three days and
nights lest I should disturb that exquisite pose. Ladies, princes,
queens, ecclesiastical processions go by in vain: I do not remove it.
That angle of the hat is something to mount guard over. As Swinburne
says--"Not twice on earth do the gods do this."
It is at present what is, I believe, called a lovely summer's
night. To say that it is hot would be as feeble a platitude as the
same remark would be in the small talk of Satan and Beelzebub.
If there were such a thing as _blue_-hot iron, it would describe
the sky tonight. I cannot help dreaming of some wild fairy-tale in
which the whole round cosmos should be a boiling pot, with the flames
of Purgatory under it, and that soon I shall have the satisfaction of
seeing such a thing as boiled mountains, boiled cities, and a boiled
moon and stars. A tremendous picture. Yet I am perfectly happy as
usual. After all, why should we object to be boiled? Potatoes, for
example, are better boiled than raw--why should we fear to be boiled
into new shapes in the cauldron? These things are an allegory.
. . . I am so glad to hear you say . . . that, in your own words "it
is good for us to be here"--where you are at present. The same remark,
if I remember right, was made on the mountain of the Transfiguration.
It has always been one of my unclerical sermons to myself, that that
remark which Peter made on seeing the vision of a single hour, ought
to be made by us all, in contemplating every panoramic change in the
long Vision we call life--other things superficially, but this always
in our depths. "It is good for us to be here--it is good for us to be
here," repeating itself eternally. And if, after many joys and
festivals and frivolities, it should be our fate to have to look on
while one of us is, in a most awful sense of the words, "transfigured
before our eyes": shining with the whiteness of death--at least, I
think, we cannot easily fancy ourselves wishing not to be at our
post. Not I, certainly. It was good for me to be there.
* * * *
11 Warwick Gardens
(postmarked July 11, 1899.)
. . . The novel, after which you so kindly enquire, is proceeding
headlong. It received another indirect stimulus today, when Mr.
Garnett insisted on taking me out to lunch, gave me a gorgeous repast
at a restaurant, succeeded in plucking the secret of my private
employment from my bosom, and made me promise to send him some
chapters of it. I certainly cannot complain of not being
sympathetically treated by the literary men I know. I wonder where
the jealous, spiteful, depreciating man of letters we read of in
books has got to. It's about time he turned up, I think. Excuse me
for talking about these trivialities. . . .
I have made a discovery: or I should say seen a vision. I saw it
between two cups of black coffee in a Gallic restaurant in Soho: but
I could not express it if I tried.
But this was one thing that it said--that all good things are one
thing. There is no conflict between the gravestone of Gertrude and a
comic-opera tune played by Mildred Wain. But there is everlasting
conflict between the gravestone of Gertrude and the obscene pomposity
of the hired mute: and there is everlasting conflict between the
comic-opera tune and any mean or vulgar words to which it may be set.
These, which man hath joined together, God shall most surely sunder.
That is what I am feeling . . . now every hour of the day. All good
things are one thing. Sunsets, schools of philosophy, babies,
constellations, cathedrals, operas, mountains, horses, poems--all
these are merely disguises. One thing is always walking among us in
fancy-dress, in the grey cloak of a church or the green cloak of a
meadow. He is always behind, His form makes the folds fall so
superbly. And that is what the savage old Hebrews, alone among the
nations, guessed, and why their rude tribal god has been erected on
the ruins of all polytheistic civilisations. For the Greeks and
Norsemen and Romans saw the superficial wars of nature and made the
sun one god, the sea another, the wind a third. They were not
thrilled, as some rude Israelite was, one night in the wastes, alone,
by the sudden blazing idea of all being the same God: an idea worthy
of a detective story.
11, Paternoster Buildings
(postmarked July 14, 1899.)
. . . costume slightly improved. The truth is that a mystical and
fantastic development has taken place. My clothes have rebelled
against me. Weary of scorn and neglect, they have all suddenly come
to life and they dress me by force every morning. My frockcoat leaps
upon me like a lion and hangs on, dragging me down. As I struggle my
boots trip me up--and the laces climb up my feet (never missing a
hole) like snakes or creepers. At the same moment the celebrated grey
tie springs at my throat like a wild cat.
I am told that the general effects produced by this remarkable
psychical development are superb. Really the clothes must know
best. Still it is awkward when a mackintosh pursues one down the
street. . . .
. . . There is nothing in God's earth that really expresses the
bottom of the nature of a man in love except Burns' songs. To the man
not in love they must seem inexplicably simple. When he says, "My
love is like the melody that's sweetly played in tune," it seems
almost a crude way of referring to music. But a man in love with a
woman feels a nerve move suddenly that Dante groped for and
Shakespeare hardly touched. What made me think of Burns, however, was
that one of his simple and sudden things, hitting the right nail so
that it rings, occurs in the song of "O a' the airts the wind can
blaw," where he merely says that there is nothing beautiful anywhere
but it makes him think of the woman. That is not really a mere
aesthetic fancy, a chain of sentimental association--it is an actual
instinctive elemental movement of the mind, performed automatically
and instantly. . . .
Felixstowe (undated)
. . . I have as you see, arrived here. I have done other daring
things, such as having my hair shampooed, as you commanded, and also
cut. The effect of this is so singularly horrible that I have found
further existence in London impossible. Public opinion is too strong
for me. . . . There are many other reasons I could give for being
pleased to come: such as that I have some time for writing the novel;
that I can make up stories I don't intend to write . . . that there
are phosphorescent colours on the sea and a box of cigarettes on the
mantelpiece.
Some fragments of what I felt [about Gertrude's death] have
struggled out in the form of some verses which I am writing out for
you. But for real strength (I don't like the word "comfort") for real
peace, no human words are much good except perhaps some of the
unfathomable, unintelligible, unconquerable epigrams of the Bible. I
remember when Bentley had a burning boyish admiration for Professor
Huxley, and when that scientist died some foolish friend asked him
quite flippantly in a letter what he felt about it. Bentley replied
with the chapter and verse reference to one of the Psalms, alone on a
postcard. The text was, "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the
death of one of his saints." The friend, I remember, thought it "a
curious remark about Huxley." It strikes me as a miraculous remark
about anybody. It is one of those magic sayings where every word hits
a chain of association, God knows how.
"Precious"--we could not say that Gertrude's death is happy or
providential or sweet or even perhaps good. But it is something.
"Beautiful" is a good word--but "precious" is the only right word.
It is this passionate sense of the _value_ of things: of the
richness of the cosmic treasure: the world where every star is a
diamond, every leaf an emerald, every drop of blood a ruby, it is
this sense of preciousness that is really awakened by the death of
His saints. Somehow we feel that even their death is a thing of
incalculable value and mysterious sweetness: it is awful, tragic,
desolating, desperately hard to bear--but still "precious." . . .
Forgive the verbosity of one whose trade it is to express the
inexpressible.
The verses he speaks of in this letter, Frances treasured greatly.
She showed them to me, in a book which opens with a very touching
prayer in her own writing. In a later chapter I quote the lines in
which Gilbert writes of his own tone-deafness, and of how he saw what
music meant as he watched his wife's face. Something of the same
effect is produced on me by these verses. Gilbert was not of course
tone-deaf to this tragedy, yet it was chiefly in its effect on
Frances that it affected him.
The sudden sorrow smote my love
That often falls twixt kiss and kiss
And looking forth awhile she said
Can no man tell me where she is.
And again
Stricken they sat: and through them moved
My own dear lady, pale and sweet.
This soul whose clearness makes afraid
Our souls: this wholly guiltless one--
No cobweb doubts--no passion smoke
Have veiled this mirror from Thy sun.
In letters to Frances he could enter so deeply into her grief as to
make it his own. But when he wrote verse and spoke as it were to
himself or to God, the reflected emotion was not enough. These verses
could never rank with his real poetry.
It was not possible in fact for a man so happily in love to dwell
lastingly on any sorrow. And I cannot avoid the feeling that, quite
apart from any theory, cheerfulness was constantly "breaking in." For
Gilbert was a very happy man. Across the top of one of his letters is
written: "You can always tell the real love from the slight by the
fact that the latter weakens at the moment of success; the former is
quadrupled."
The next of his letters is a mingling of the comic and the fantastic,
very special to G.K.C.
11, Paternoster Buildings
(postmarked Sept. 29, 1899.)
. . . I fear, as you say, that my letters do not contain many
practical details about myself: the letters are not very long to
begin with, as I think it better to write something every day
than a long letter when I have leisure: and when I have a little
time to think in, I always think of the Kosmos first and the Ego
afterwards. I admit, however, that you are not engaged to the
Kosmos: dear me! what a time the Kosmos would have! All its
Comets would have their hair brushed every morning. The Whirlwind
would be adjured not to walk about when it was talking. The
Oceans would be warmed with hot-water pipes. Not even the lowest
forms of life would escape the crusade of tidiness: you would
walk round and round the jellyfish, looking for a place to put in
shirt-links.
Under these circumstances, then, I cannot but regard it as
fortunate that you are only engaged to your obedient Microcosm: a
biped inheriting some of the traits of his mother, the Kosmos, its
untidiness, its largeness, its irritating imperfection and its
profound and hearty intention to go on existing as long as it
possibly can.
I can understand what you mean about wanting details about me, for
I want just the same about you. You need only tell me "I went down
the street to a pillar-box," I shall know that you did it in a
manner, blindingly, staggeringly, crazily beautiful. It is quite
true, as you say, that I am a person wearing _certain_ clothes with a
_certain_ kind of hair. I cannot get rid of the impression that there
is something scorchingly sarcastic about the underlining in this
passage. . . .
. . . as to what I do every day: it depends on which way you want
it narrated: what we all say it is, or what it really is.
What we all say happens every day is this: I wake up: dress myself,
eat bacon and bread and coffee for breakfast: walk up to High St.
Station, take a fourpenny ticket for Blackfriars, read the Chronicle
in the train, arrive at 11, Paternoster Buildings: read a MS called
"The Lepers" (light comedy reading) and another called "The
Preparation of Ryerson Embury"--you know the style--till 2 o'clock.
Go out to lunch, have--(but here perhaps it would be safer to become
vague), come back, work till six, take my hat and walking-stick and
come home: have dinner at home, write the Novel till 11, then write
to you and go to bed. That is what, we in our dreamy, deluded way,
really imagine is the thing that happens. What really happens (but
hist! are we observed?) is as follows.
Out of the starless night of the Uncreated, that was before the
stars, a soul begins to grope back to light. It gropes its way
through strange, half-lighted chambers of Dreams, where in a brown
and gold twilight, it sees many things that are dimly significant,
true stories twisted into new and amazing shapes, human beings whom
it knew long ago, sitting at the windows by dark sunsets, or talking
in dim meadows. But the awful invading Light grows stronger in the
dreams, till the soul in one last struggle, plunges into a body, as
into a house and wakes up within it. Then he rises and finds himself
in a wonderful vast world of white light and clear, frankly coloured
shapes, an inheritor of a million stars. On enquiry he is informed
that his name is Gilbert Keith Chesterton. This amuses him.
He goes through a number of extraordinary and fantastic rituals;
which the pompous elfland he has entered demands. The first is that
he shall get inside a house of clothing, a tower of wool and flax;
that he shall put on this foolish armour solemnly, one piece after
another and each in its right place. The things called sleevelinks he
attends to minutely. His hair he beats angrily with a bristly tool.
For this is the Law. Downstairs a more monstrous ceremony attends him.
He has to put things inside himself. He does so, being naturally
polite. Nor can it be denied that a weird satisfaction follows. He
takes a sword in his hand (for what may not befall him in so strange
a country!) and goes forth: he finds a hole in the wall, a little
cave wherein sits One who can give him the charm that rules the horse
of water and fire. He finds an opening and descends into the bowels
of the earth. Down, among the roots of the Eternal hills, he finds a
sunless temple wherein he prays. And in the centre of it he finds a
lighted temple in which he enters. Then there are noises as of an
earthquake and smoke and fire in the darkness: and when he opens the
door again he is in another temple, out of which he climbs into
another world, leagues and leagues away. And when he asks the meaning
of the vision, they talk gibberish and say, "It is a train."
So the day goes, full of eerie publishers and elfin clerks, till he
returns and again puts things inside him, and then sits down and
makes men in his own head and writes down all that they said and did.
And last of all comes the real life itself. For half-an-hour he
writes words upon a scrap of paper, words that are not picked and
chosen like those that he has used to parry the strange talk of the
folk all day, but words in which the soul's blood pours out, like the
body's blood from a wound. He writes secretly this mad diary, all his
passion and longing, all his queer religion, his dark and dreadful
gratitude to God, his idle allegories, the tales that tell themselves
in his head; the joy that comes on him sometimes (he cannot help it!)
at the sacred intoxication of existence: the million faults of
idleness and recklessness and the one virtue of the unconquered
adoration of goodness, that dark virtue that every man has, and hides
deeper than all his vices--he writes all this down as he is writing
it now. And he knows that if he sticks it down and puts a stamp on it
and drops it into the mouth of a little red goblin at the corner of
the street--he knows that all this wild soliloquy will be poured into
the soul of one wise and beautiful lady sitting far away beyond seas
and rivers and cities, under the shadow of an alien Cathedral. . . .
This is not all so irrelevant as you may think. It was this line of
feeling that taught me, an utter Rationalist as far as dogma goes,
the lesson of the entire Spirituality of things--an opinion that
nothing has ever shattered since. I can't express myself on the
point, nobody can. But it is _only_ the spirituality of things that
we are sure of. That the eyes in your face are eyes I do not know:
they may have other names and uses. I know that they are _good_ or
beautiful, or rather spiritual. I do not know on what principle the
Universe is run, I know or feel that it is _good_ or spiritual. I do
not know what Gertrude's death was--I know that it was beautiful, for
I saw it. We do not feel that it is so beautiful now--why? Because we
do not see it now. What we see now is her absence: but her Death is
not her absence, but her Presence somewhere else. That is what we
_knew_ was beautiful, as long as we could see it. Do not be
frightened, dearest, by the slow inevitable laws of human nature, we
shall climb back into the mountain of vision: we shall be able to use
the word, with the accent of Whitman. "Disembodied, triumphant, dead."
In the _Notebook_ he was writing:
There is a heart within a distant town
Who loves me more than treasure or renown
Think you it strange and wear it as a crown.
Is not the marvel here; that since the kiss
And dizzy glories of that blinding bliss
One grief has ever touched me after this.
We see Gilbert in the next two letters more concerned about a grand
dinner of the J.D.C. than about his future fame and fortune. In the
second he mentions almost casually that he is leaving Fisher Unwin.
From now on he was to live by his pen.
11 Warwick Gardens, W.
Tuesday Night. 3rd Oct. 1899.
. . . Nothing very astonishing has happened yet, though many
astonishing things will happen soon. The Final perfection of Humanity
I expect shortly. The _Speaker_ for this week--the first of the _New
Speaker_, is coming out soon, and may contain something of mine though
I cannot be quite sure. A rush of the Boers on Natal, strategically
quite possibly successful, is anticipated by politicians. The rising
of the sun tomorrow morning is predicted by astronomers. My father
again is engaged in the crucial correspondence with Fisher Unwin, at
least it has begun by T.F.U. stating his proposed terms--a rise of
5/--from October, another rise possible but undefined in January, 10
per cent royalty for the Paris book and expenses for a fortnight in
Paris. These, as I got my father to heartily agree, are vitiated to
the bone as terms by the absence of any assurance that I shall not
have to write "Paris," for which I am really paid nothing, _outside_
the hours of work for which I am paid 25/--. In short, the net result
would be that instead of gaining more liberty to rise in the literary
world, I should be selling the small liberty of rising that I have
now for five more shillings. This my father is declining and asking
for a better settlement. The diplomacy is worrying, yet I enjoy it: I
feel like Mr. Chamberlain on the eve of war. I would stop with T.F.U.
for £100 a year--but not for less. Which means, I think, that I shall
not stop at all.
But all these revolutions, literary, financial and political fade
into insignificance compared with the one really tremendous event of
this week. It will take place on Saturday next. The sun will stand
still upon Leicester Square and the Moon on the Valley of Wardour St.
For then will assemble the Grand Commemorative Meeting of the Junior
Debating Club. The Secretary, Mr. L.R.F. Oldershaw, will select a
restaurant, make arrangements and issue the proclamations, or, to use
the venerable old Club phrase "the writs." When this gorgeous
function is over, you must expect a colossal letter. Everyone of the
old Brotherhood, scattered over many cities and callings, has hailed
the invitation, and is coming, with the exception of Bentley, who
will send a sensational telegram from Paris. The fun is expected to
be fast and furious, the undercurrent of emotion (twelve years old)
is not likely to be much disguised. As I say, I will write you a
sumptuous description of it; it is somewhat your due, for the thing
is, and always will be, one of the main strands of my life. . . .
None can say what will occur. It is one of those occasions when
Englishmen are not much like the pictures of them in Continental
satires . . . there is more in this old affair of ours than possibly
meets the eye. It is a thing that has left its roots deep in the
hearts of twelve strangely different men. . . . And now that seven of
us have found the New Life that can only be found in Woman, it would
be mean indeed not to turn back and thank the old. . . .
11, Warwick Gardens, W.
. . . This is the colossal letter. I trust you will excuse me if
the paper is conceived on a similar scale of Babylonian immensity. I
cannot make out exactly whether I did or did not post a letter I
wrote to you on Saturday. If I did not, I apologise for missing the
day. If I did, you will know by this time one or two facts that may
interest you, the chief of which is that I am certainly leaving
Fisher Unwin, with much mutual courtesy and goodwill.
This fact may interest you, I repeat: at this moment I am not sure
whether it interests me. For my head, to say nothing of another
organ, is filled with the thundering cheers and songs of the dinner
on Saturday night. It was, I may say without hesitation, a breathless
success. Cholmeley, who must be experienced being both a
schoolmaster, a diner out and a clever man, told me he had never in
his life heard eleven better speeches. I quite agree with him, merely
adding his own. Everyone was amusing and what is much better,
singularly characteristic. Will you forgive me, dearest, if I reel
off to the only soul that can be trusted to enjoy my enjoyment, a
kind of report of the meeting? It will revivify my own memories. And
one thing at least that I said in my speech I thoroughly believed
in--"if there is any prayer I should be inclined to make it is that I
should forget nothing in my life."
The proceedings opened with dinner. The illustrated menus were wildly
appreciated: every person got all the rest to sign on the menu and
then took it away as a memento. Then the telegrams from Kruger,
Chamberlain, Dreyfus and George Meredith were read. Then I proposed
the toast of the Queen. I merely said that nothing could ever be
alleged against the Queen, except the fact that she is not a member
of the J.D.C. and that I thought it spoke well for the chivalry of
Englishmen that with this fact she had never been publicly taunted. I
said I knew that the virtues of Queen Victoria had become somewhat
platitudinous, but I thought it was a fortunate country in which the
virtues of its powerful ones are platitudes. The toast was then
drunk. . . .
After a pause and a little conversation, I called upon Lawrence
Solomon to propose the toast of "The School." He was very amusing
indeed. Most of his speech would not be very comprehensible to an
outsider for it largely consisted of an ingenious dove-tailing of the
sentences in the Latin and Greek Arnold. I shall never forget the
lucid and precise enunciation with which he delivered the idiotic
sentences in those works, more especially where he said, "such a
course would be more agreeable to Mr. Cholmeley and I would rather
gratify such a man as he than see the King of the Persians."
Cholmeley, amid roars of welcome, rose to respond. I think I must
have told you in a former letter that Cholmeley is a former
classmaster of ours, a former house-master of Bentley's, and one of
the nicest men at St. Paul's. We invited him as the only visitor. He
said a great deal that was very amusing, mostly a commentary on
Solomon's remarks about the Latin Arnold. One remark he made was that
he possessed one particular Latin Arnold, formerly the property of
the President, which he had withdrawn from him "with every expression
of contumely"--because it was drawn all over with devils. He made
some very sound remarks about the Club as an answer to the common
charge against St. Paul's School that it was aridly scholastic,
without spontaneous growth in culture or sentiment.
Then Fordham proposed "The Ladies." He was killing. Fordham is a
personality whom I think you do not know. He is one of the most
profoundly humourous men I ever knew, but his humour is more thickly
coated on him, so to speak, than Bentley or Oldershaw, i.e., it is
much more difficult to make him serious. He is one of the most
fascinating "typical Englishmen" I ever knew: strong, generous,
flippant on principle, rowdy by physical inspiration, successful,
popular, married--a man to discharge all the normal functions of life
well. But his most entertaining gift which he displayed truly
sumptuously on this occasion is a wonderful gift of burlesque and
stereotyped rhetoric. With melodramatic gestures he drew attention to
the torrents of the President's blood pouring "from the wound of the
tiny god." Amid sympathetic demonstration he protested against the
pathos of the toast, "the conquered on the field of battle toasting
the conquerors." As the only married member of the Club he ventured
to give us some advice on (A) Food, (B) Education, (C) Intercourse.
He sat down in a pure whirlwind of folly, without saying a word about
the feelings that were in all hearts, including his own, just then.
But I was delighted to find that marriage had not taken away an inch
of his incurable silliness.
Nothing could be a greater contrast than the few graceful and
dignified but very restrained words in which Bertram responded to
the toast. He is not a man who cares to make fun of women, however
genially.
Then came Langdon-Davies, whom I called upon to propose "The Club."
His was perhaps the most interesting case of all. When I knew
Langdon-Davies in the Junior Debating Club, he was one of the most
frivolous young men I ever knew. . . . But knowing that he was a good
speaker in a light style, and had been President of the Cambridge
Union, I put him down to propose the Club, thinking that we should
have enough serious speaking and would be well to err on the side of
entertainment.
Langdon-Davies got up and proceeded to deliver a speech that
made me jump. It was, I thought, the best speech of the evening:
but I am sure it was the most serious, the most sympathetic and a
long way the most frankly emotional.
He said that the Club was not now a club in the strict sense. It
was two things preeminently and everlastingly--a memory and an
influence. He spoke with a singular sort of subdued vividness of the
influence the Club had had on him in boyhood. He then turned to the
history of the Club. And here, my dearest lady, I am pained to have
to report that he launched suddenly and dramatically into a most
extraordinary, and apparently quite sincere eulogium upon myself and
the influence I had on my schoolfellows. I will not repeat his
words--I did not believe them, but they took me by surprise and shook
me somewhat. Mr. B. N. Langdon-Davies, I may remark, and yourself,
are the only persons who have ever employed the word "genius" in
connection with me. I trust it will not occur again.
I replied. My speech was a medley, but it appeared very successful.
I discussed largely the absence of any successor to the J.D.C. I
described how I watched the boys leaving school today--a solitary
figure, clad in the latest fashion, moodily pacing the Hammersmith
Road--and asked myself "where among these is the girlish gush of a
Bentley--the passionate volubility of a Vernède, the half-ethereal
shyness of a Fordham?!!" I admitted that we had had misfortunes, one
of us had a serious illness, another had had a very good story in the
Strand Magazine: but I thought that a debating club of 12 members
that had given three presidents to the University Unions, had not
done badly. The rest was sentimental. Then began a most extraordinary
game of battledore and shuttlecock. Vernède proposed the Secretary,
Mr. Oldershaw. Mr. Oldershaw, instead of replying properly, proposed
Mr. Bentley and the absent members. Waldo responded for these or
rather instead of responding proposed Mr. Maurice Solomon. Mr.
Maurice Solomon instead of responding proposed Mr. Salter. The latter
was the only one who had not spoken and on rising he explained his
reasons for refusing. He had not been in the same room with Mr.
Cholmeley, he said, since he had sat five years ago in the Lower
Fourth and Mr. Cholmeley had told him that he talked too much. He had
no desire on his first reappearance to create in Mr. Cholmeley's mind
the idea that he had been at it ever since.
After this we passed on to singing and nearly brought down the roof
of Pinoli's restaurant. Cholmeley, the awful being of whose classic
taste in Greek iambics I once stood in awe, sang with great feeling a
fragment of lyric literature of which the following was, as far as I
remember, the refrain:
"Singing Chooral-i-chooral-i-tiddity
Also--Chooral-i-chooral-i-tay
And chanting Chooral-i-chooral-i-dititty
Not forgetting--chooral-i-chooral-i-day--"
Vernède sang a Sussex pothouse chorus in an indolent and refined
way which was exquisitely incongruous: Waldo and Langdon-Davies also
sang. I recited an Ode which I had written for the occasion and
Lucian recited one of Bentley's poems that came out in an Oxford
magazine. Then we sang the Anthem* of the J.D.C., of which the words
are, "I am a Member--I'm a Member--Member of the J.D.C. I belong to
it forever--don't you wish that you were me."
[* It was sung to the tune of "Clementine."]
Then we paid the bill. Then we borrowed each other's arms and legs
in an inextricable tangle and sang "Auld Lang Syne." Then we broke up.
There now. Five mortal pages of writing and nothing about you in
it. How relieved you must be, wearied out with allusions to your hair
and your soul and your clothes and your eyes. And yet it has been
every word of it about you really. I like to make my past vivid to
you, especially this past, not only because it was on the whole, a
fine, healthy, foolish, manly, enthusiastic, idiotic past, with the
very soul of youth in it. Not only because I am a victim of the
prejudice, common I trust to all mankind, that no one ever had such
friends as I had. . . .
Readers of the _Autobiography_ will remember that many many years
later, at the celebration of Hilaire Belloc's sixtieth birthday, the
guests threw the ball to one another in just this same fashion.
Chesterton had by then so far forgotten this earlier occasion that he
spoke of the Belloc birthday party as the only dinner in his life at
which every diner made a speech.
Two more extracts from his letters must be given, showing the efforts
made by Frances to look after Gilbert, and his reactions. One of his
friends remarked that Gilbert's life was unique in that, never having
left home for a boarding school or University, he passed from the
care of his mother to the care of his wife. I think too that the
degree of his physical helplessness affected all who came near him
with the feeling that while he might lead them where he would
intellectually, it was their task to look after a body that would
otherwise be wholly neglected.
The old religionists used to talk about a man being "a fool for
Christ's sake"--certainly I have been a blithering fool for your
sake. I went to see the doctor, as you requested. He asked me what he
could do for me. I told him I hadn't the least idea, but people
thought my cold had been going on long enough. He said, "I've no
doubt it has." He then, to afford some relief to the idiotic futility
of the situation, wrote me a prescription, which I read on my way up
to business, weeping over the pathetic parts and laughing heartily at
the funny ones. I have since had some of it. It tastes pretty aimless.
I cannot remember for certain whether I mentioned in my letter that
I had had an invitation including yourself, from my Aunt Kate for
this Friday. As you do not refer to it, I expect I didn't--so I wrote
to her giving both our thanks and explaining the state of affairs.
"All is over," I said, "between that lady and myself. Do not name her
to me, lest the hideous word 'Woman' should blind me to the seraphic
word 'Aunt.' My life is a howling waste--but what matter? Ha! Ha!
Ha!" I cannot remember my exact words, of course. . . .
. . . I am a revolting object. My hair is a matted chaos spread all
over the floor, my beard is like a hard broom. My necktie is on the
wrong way up: my bootlaces trail half-way down Fleet St. Why not?
When one's attempts at reformation are "not much believed in" what
other course is open but a contemptuous relapse into liberty?
Your last letter makes me much happier. I put great faith in the
healing power of the great winds and the sun. "Nature," as Walt
Whitman says, "and her primal sanities." Mrs. S . . . , also, is a
primal sanity. It is not, I believe, considered complimentary, in a
common way, to approach an attractive lady and say pleasantly, "You
are thousands of years old." Or, "You seem to me as old as the
mountains." Therefore I do not say it. But I always feel that anyone
beautiful and strong is really old--for the really old things are not
decrepit: decrepit things are dying early. The Roman Empire was
decrepit. A sunrise cloud is old.
So I think there are some people, who even in their youth, seem to
have existed always: they bear the mark of the elemental things: the
things that recur; they are as old as springtime, as old as
daybreak--as old as Youth.
CHAPTER X
Who is G.K.C.?
THE BOER WAR--and the whole country enthusiastically behind it. The
Liberal Party as a whole went with the Conservatives. The leading
Fabians--Bernard Shaw, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb, Hubert Bland, Cecil
Chesterton and the "semi-detached Fabian" H. G. Wells--were likewise
for the war. Only a tiny minority remained in opposition, most of
whom were pacifists or cranks of one kind or another. To the sane
minority of this minority Gilbert found himself belonging. It is
something of a tribute to the national feeling at such a moment of
tension that (as an American has noted) "Chesterton was the one
British writer, utterly unknown before, who built up a great
reputation, and it was gained, not through nationalistic support, but
through determined and persistent opposition to British policy."*
[* _Chesterton_, by Cyril Clemens, p. 20.]
In his _Daily News_ column a correspondent later asked him to define
his position. Chesterton replied, "The unreasonable patriot is one
who sees the faults of his fatherland with an eye which is clearer
and more merciless than any eye of hatred, the eye of an irrational
and irrevocable love." His attitude sprang, he claimed, not from
defect but from excess of patriotism.
It is hard to imagine anything that would clarify better the ideas of
a strong mind than finding itself in opposition. This opposition
began at home, in argument with Cecil. Later the two brothers would
agree about most main issues, but now Cecil was a Tory democrat,
Gilbert a pro-Boer, and what was known as a little Englander. The tie
between the two brothers was very close. As the "Innocent Child"
developed into the combative companion, there is no doubt that he
proportionately affected Gilbert. All their friends talk of the
endless amicable arguments through which both grew. Conrad Noel
remembers parties at Warwick Gardens during the Boer War at which the
two brothers "would walk up and down like the two pistons of an
engine" to the disorganisation of the company and the dismay of their
parents. It was at this time that Frances, engaged to a deeply
devoted Gilbert, found even that devotion insufficient to pry him and
Cecil apart when an argument had got well under way.
"I must go home, Gilbert. I shall miss my train."
Usually he would have sprung to accompany her, but now she must miss
many trains before the brothers could be separated.
Frances told me that when they were at the seaside the landlady would
sometimes clear away breakfast, leaving the brothers arguing, come to
set lunch and later set dinner while still they argued. They had come
to the seaside but they never saw the sea.
Once Frances was staying with them at a house they had taken by the
sea. Her room was next to Cecil's and she could not sleep for the
noise of the discussion that went on hour after hour. About one in
the morning she rapped on the wall and said, "O Cecil, do send
Gilbert to bed." A brief silence followed, and then the remark, in a
rather abashed voice, "There's no one here." Cecil had been arguing
with himself. Gilbert too argued with himself for the stand he was
taking was a hard one. Mr. Belloc has told me that he felt Gilbert
suffered at any word against England, that his patriotism was
passionate. And now he had himself to say that he believed his
country to be in the wrong. To admit it to himself, to state it to
others.
This autumn of 1899 G.K. began to write for the _Speaker_. The weekly
of this title had long been in a languishing condition when it was
taken over by a group of young Liberals of very marked views. Hammond
became editor and Philip Comyns Carr sub-editor. Sir John Simon was
among the group for a short while, but he soon told one of them that
he feared close association with the _Speaker_ might injure his
career. F. Y. Eccles was in charge of the review department. He is
able to date the start of what was known as the "new" _Speaker_ with
great exactitude, for when the first number was going to press the
ultimatum had been sent to Kruger and the editors hesitated as to
whether they should take the risk of announcing that it was war in
South Africa. They decided against, but before their second number
appeared war had been declared.
My difficulty in getting a picture of the first meeting of Belloc and
Chesterton illustrates the problem of human testimony and the limits
of that problem. For I imagine a scripture critic, old style, would
end by concluding that the men never met at all.
F. Y. Eccles, E. C. Bentley and Lucian Oldershaw all claim to have
made the momentous introduction, Mr. Eccles adding that it took place
at the office of the _Speaker_, while Gilbert himself has described
the meeting twice: once in the street, once in a restaurant. Belloc
remembers the introduction as made in the year 1900 by Lucian
Oldershaw, who was living at the time with Hammond. Mr. Oldershaw
usually has the accuracy of the hero-worshipper and upon this matter
he adds several amusing details. For some time he had been trying to
get the group on the _Speaker_ to read Chesterton and had in vain
taken several articles to the office. Mr. Eccles declared the
handwriting was that of a Jew and he prejudiced Belloc, says
Oldershaw, against reading "anything written by my Jew friend."
But when at last they did meet, Belloc "opened the conversation by
saying in his most pontifical manner, 'Chesterton, you wr-r-ite very
well.'" Chesterton was then 26, Belloc four years older. It was at
the Mont Blanc, a restaurant in Gerrard St., Soho, and the meeting
was celebrated with a bottle of Moulin au Vent.
The first description given by Gilbert himself is at once earlier and
more vivid than the better known one in the _Autobiography_.
When I first met Belloc he remarked to the friend who introduced us
that he was in low spirits. His low spirits were and are much more
uproarious and enlivening than anybody else's high spirits. He talked
into the night, and left behind in it a glowing track of good things.
When I have said that I mean things that are good, and certainly not
merely _bons mots_, I have said all that can be said in the most
serious aspect about the man who has made the greatest fight for good
things of all the men of my time.
We met between a little Soho paper shop and a little Soho
restaurant; his arms and pockets were stuffed with French Nationalist
and French Atheist newspapers. He wore a straw hat shading his eyes,
which are like a sailor's, and emphasizing his Napoleonic chin. . . .
The little restaurant to which we went had already become a haunt
for three or four of us who held strong but unfashionable views about
the South African War, which was then in its earliest prestige. Most
of us were writing on the _Speaker_. . . .
. . . What he brought into our dream was this Roman appetite for
reality and for reason in action, and when he came into the door
there entered with him the smell of danger.*
[* Introduction to: _Hilaire Belloc: The Man and His Work_ by C. C.
Mandell and E. Shanks, 1916.]
"It was from that dingy little Soho café," Chesterton writes in the
_Autobiography_, "that there emerged the quadruped, the twiformed
monster Mr. Shaw has nicknamed the Chesterbelloc."
Listening to Belloc is intoxicating. I have heard many brilliant
talkers, but none to whom that word can so justly be applied. He goes
to your head, he takes you off your feet, he leaves you breathless,
he can convince you of anything. My mother and brother both counted
it as one of the great experiences of their lives to have dined with
Belloc in a small Paris Restaurant (Aux Vendanges de Bourgogne) and
then to have walked with him the streets of that glorious city while
he discoursed of its past. Imagination staggers before the picture of
a Belloc in his full youth and vigour in a group fitted to strike
from him his brightest fire at a moment big with issues for the
world's future.
In Chesterton's _Autobiography_ a chapter is devoted to the "Portrait
of A Friend," while Belloc in turn has said something of Chesterton
in obituary notices and also in a brief study of his position in
English literature. None of these documents give much notion of the
intellectual flame struck out by one mind against the other. It has
often been asked how much Belloc influenced Chesterton.
The best test of an influence in a writer's life is to compare what
he wrote before with what he wrote after he was first subjected to
it. It is easy to apply this test to Belloc's influence on G.K.C.
because of the mass we still have of his boyhood writings. In pure
literature, in philosophy and theology he remains untouched by the
faintest change. Pages from the Notebook could be woven into
_Orthodoxy_, essays from _The Debater_ introduced into _The Victorian
Age in Literature_, and it would look simply like buds and flowers on
the same bush. Belloc has characterized himself as ignorant of
English literature and says he learnt from Chesterton most of what he
knows of it, while there is no doubt Chesterton was by far the
greater philosopher.
With politics, sociology, and history (and the relation of religion
to all three) it is different. Belloc himself told me he thought the
chief thing he had done for Chesterton when they first met was to
open his eyes to reality--Chesterton had been unusually young for his
twenty-six years and unusually simple in regard to the political
scene. He was in fact the young man he himself was later to describe
as knowing all about politics and nothing about politicians. The four
years between the two men seemed greater than it was, partly because
of Belloc's more varied experience of life--French military training,
life at Oxford, wide travel and an early marriage.
Belloc, then, could teach Chesterton a certain realism about
politics--which meant a certain cynicism about politicians. Far more
valuable, however, was what Belloc had to give him in sociology. We
have seen that G.K. was already dissatisfied with Socialism before he
met Belloc; it may be that by his consideration of the nature of man
he would later have reached the positions so individually set out in
_What's Wrong with the World_--but this can only remain a theoretical
question. For Belloc did actually at this date answer the
sociological question that Chesterton at this date was putting:
answered it brilliantly and answered it truly. Every test that G.K.
could later apply--of profound human reality, of truth divinely
revealed--convinced him that the answer was true.
He had, he has told us, been a Socialist because it was so horrible
not to be one, but he now learned of the historical Christian
alternative--equally opposed to Socialism and to Capitalism--
well-distributed property. This had worked in the past, was still
working in many European countries, could be made to work again in
England. The present trend appeared to Belloc to be towards the
Servile State, and in the book with this title and a second book _The
Restoration of Property_ he later developed his sociology. After this
first meeting, two powerful and very different minds would
reciprocally influence one another. An admirer of both told me that
he thought Chesterton got the idea of small property from Belloc but
gave Belloc a fuller realization of the position of the family. One
difference between them is that Belloc writes sociology as a textbook
while Chesterton writes it as a human document. All the wealth of
imagination that Belloc pours into _The Path to Rome_ or _The Four
Men_ he sternly excludes from the Servile State. The poet, traveller,
essayist is one man, the sociologist another.
The third field of influence was history. Here Belloc did Chesterton
two great services--he restored the proportion of English history,
and he put England back into its context. Since the Reformation,
English history had been written with all the stress on the
Protestant period. Lingard had written earlier but had not been
popularized and certainly would not be used at St. Paul's School. And
even Lingard had laid little stress on the social effects of the
Reformation. Mr. Hammond's contemporary work on English social
history fitted into Belloc's more vivid if less documented
vision--none of this could be disregarded by later writers.
Belloc, too, restored that earlier England to the Christendom to
which it belonged. The England of Macaulay or of Green had, like Mr.
Mantalini's dowager, either no outline or a "demned outline" for it
was cut out of a larger map. And Chesterton was always seeking an
outline of history.
To get England back into the context of Christendom is a great thing:
just how great must depend upon how rightly Christendom is conceived.
One cannot always escape the feeling that Belloc conceives it too
narrowly. His famous phrase "The Faith is Europe and Europe is the
Faith" omits too much--the East out of which Christianity came; the
new worlds into which Europe has flowed. Belloc of course knows these
things and has often said them. It is rather a question of emphasis,
of how things loom in the mind when judgments have to be made. In
that sense he does tend to narrow the Faith to Europe: in exactly the
same sense he does tend to narrow Europe to France. Born in France of
a French father, educated in England, Belloc chose his mother's
nationality, chose to be English; but his Creator had chosen
differently, and there is not much a man can do in competition with
his Creator. I do not for a moment suggest that Belloc, having chosen
to be English, is conscious of anything but loyalty to the country of
his adoption. The thing lies far below the mind's conscious
movements. Belloc thinks of himself as an Englishman with a patriotic
duty to criticise his country, but his feelings are not really those
of an Englishman. Once at least he recognised this when he wrote the
verse:
England to me that never have malingered,
Nor spoken falsely, nor your flattery used,
_Nor even in my rightful garden lingered_--: *
What have you not refused?
[* Italics mine.]
And just as France was Belloc's rightful garden so England was
Chesterton's. When first they talked of the Church he told Belloc
that he wanted the example of "someone entirely English who should
none the less have come in." When criticising his country his voice
has the note of pain that only love can give. Belloc saw him as
intensely national "English of the English . . . a mirror of
England . . . he writes with an English accent."
It is of some interest that after meeting Belloc Gilbert added notes
to two early poems, each note reflecting a judgment of Belloc's--on
the Dreyfus case which Belloc saw as all French Catholics saw it: on
Anglo-American relations which Belloc saw as most Latin Europeans
would see it.
(1) The first was the poem entitled "To a Certain Nation"--addressed
to France in commentary on the Dreyfus case of 1899 which must be
briefly explained for those who are too young to remember the
excitement it caused. Captain Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French
army, had been found guilty of treachery and sent to Devil's Island.
All France was divided into two camps on the question of his guilt or
innocence. In general, Catholics and what we should call the Right
were all for his guilt; atheists, anti-clericals and believers in the
Republic were for his innocence. Passions were roused to fury on both
sides. English opinion was almost entirely for his innocence. I was a
small girl at the time and I remember that my brother and I amused
ourselves by crying _Vive Dreyfus_, on all possible and impossible
occasions, for the annoyance of our pious French governess. I
remember also that our parents were startled by the vehemence of the
French Catholic paper _La Croix_ from which our governess imbibed her
views. Ultimately the case was reopened, and Dreyfus, after years of
horror on Devil's Island, found not guilty and restored to his rank
in the army. But there are, I know, Catholic Frenchmen alive today
who refuse to believe in his innocence and hold that the whole thing
was a Jewish-Masonic plot that hampered the French espionage service
and nearly lost us the war of 1914.
In the first edition of _The Wild Knight_, written before the meeting
with Belloc, Gilbert, like any other English Liberal, had assumed
Dreyfus' innocence and in the poem "To a Certain Nation" had
reproached the France of the Revolution, the France he had loved, as
unworthy of herself.
. . . and we
Who knew thee once, we have a right to weep.
The Note in the second edition shows him as now undecided
about Dreyfus' guilt and concludes: "There may have been a fog
of injustice in the French courts; I know that there was a fog
of injustice in the English newspapers."
(2) In "An Alliance" Chesterton had gloried in "the blood of Hengist"
and hymned an Anglo-American alliance with the enthusiasm of a young
Republican who took for granted the links of language and of origin
that might draw together two great countries into something
significant:
In change, eclipse, and peril
Under the whole world's scorn,
By blood and death and darkness
The Saxon peace is sworn;
That all our fruit be gathered
And all our race take hands,
And the sea be a Saxon river
That runs through Saxon lands.
But in the Note to the second edition, he says:
In the matter of the "Anglo-American Alliance" I have come to see
that our hopes of brotherhood with America are the same in kind as
our hopes of brotherhood with any other of the great independent
nations of Christendom. And a very small study of history was
sufficient to show me that the American Nation, which is a hundred
years old, is at least fifty years older than the Anglo-Saxon race.*
[* Collected Poems, p. 318.]
The poem was of course only a boyish expression of a boyish dream;
like all dreams, like all boyhood dreams especially, it omitted too
much; yet it contained a thought that might well have borne rich
fruit in Gilbert's Catholic life.
My mother told me once that when after three years' study of Queen
Elizabeth's character she came to a different conclusion from Belloc,
she found it almost impossible to resist his power and hold on to her
own view. It must be realised that Chesterton actually preferred the
attitude of a disciple. A mutual friend has told me that Chesterton
listened to Belloc all the time and said very little himself. In
matters historical where he felt his own ignorance, Gilbert's
tendency was simply to make an act of faith in Belloc.
On nothing were the two men more healthily in accord than on the Boer
War. In an interesting study of Belloc, prefixed to a French
translation of _Contemporary England_, F. Y. Eccles explains how he
and most of the _Speaker_ group differed from the pacifist pro-Boers,
who hated the South African war because they hated all wars. The
young Liberals on the _Speaker_ were not pacifists. They hated the
war because they thought it would harm England--harm her morally--to
be fighting for an unjust cause, and even materially to be shedding
the blood of her sons and pouring out her wealth at the bidding of a
handful of alien financiers. Thus far Gilbert was among one group
with whom he was in fullest sympathy. But I think he went further.
Mr. Eccles told me that most of the _Speaker_ group had no sympathy
with the Boers. Gilbert had. He thought of them as human beings who
might well have been farmers of Sussex or of Kent, something of an
older civilization, resisting money power and imperialism and
perishing thereby.
Few, indeed, of the Liberal Party held Chesterton's ideal--an England
territorially small, spiritually great. The _Speaker_ was struggling
against odds: it was the voice of a tiny group. To Gilbert it seemed
that this mattered nothing so long as that little group held to their
great ideas, so long as the paper represented not merely a group or a
party but the Liberal Idea. In an unfinished letter to Hammond is to
be found this idea as he saw it and his dawning disappointment even
with the paper that most nearly stood for it:
I am just about to commit a serious impertinence. I believe however
that you will excuse it because it is about the paper and I know
there is not another paper dead or alive for which I would take the
trouble or run the risk of offence.
I am hearing on all sides the _Speaker_ complained of by the very
people who should be and would be (if they could) its enthusiastic
supporters and I cannot altogether deny the truth of their
objections, though I am glad to notice both in them and in myself the
fact that those objections are tacitly based on the assumption of the
_Speaker_ having an aim and standard higher than other papers. If the
_Speaker_ were a mere party rag like "Judy" or "The Times," it would be
only remarkable for moderation, but to us who have built hopes on it
as the pioneer of a younger and larger political spirit it is
difficult to be silent when we find it, as it seems to us, poisoned
with that spirit of ferocious triviality which is the spirit of
Birmingham eloquence, and with that evil instinct which has
disintegrated the Irish party, the instinct for hating the man who
differs from you slightly, more than the man who differs from you
altogether.
Of two successive numbers during the stress of the fight (a fight
in which we had first to unite our army and then to use it) a
considerable portion was devoted, first to sneering at "The Daily
News" and then to sneering at "The Westminster Gazette." . . .
There is a sentence in the Book of Proverbs which expresses the
whole of my politics. "For the liberal man deviseth liberal things
and by his liberality he shall stand." Now what I object to is
sneering at "The Westminster" as a supporter of Chamberlain when
everyone knows that it hardly lets a day pass without an ugly
caricature of him. What I object to in this is that it is talking
Brummagem--it is not "devising liberal things" but spiteful,
superficial, illiberal things. It is claptrap and temporary
deception of the "Patriotism before Politics" order. . . .
To all this you will say there is an obvious answer. The _Speaker_
is a party paper and does not profess to be otherwise. But here I am
sure we are mistaking our mission. What the _Speaker_ is (I hope and
believe) destined to do, is to renovate Liberalism, and though
Liberalism (like every other party) is often conducted by claptrap,
it has never been renovated by claptrap, but by great command of
temper and the persistent exposition of persuasive and unanswerable
truths. It is while we are in the desert that we have the vision: we
being a minority, must be all philosophers: we must think for both
parties in the State. It is no good our devoting ourselves to the
flowers of mob oratory with no mob to address them to. We must, like
the Free Traders, for instance, have discoveries, definite truths and
endless patience in explaining them. We must be more than a political
party or we shall cease to be one. Time and again in history victory
has come to a little party with big ideas: but can anyone conceive
anything with the mark of death more on its brow than a little party
with little ideas?*
[* Undated, handwritten letter in a notebook.]
Such Liberalism was not perhaps of this world. It certainly was not
of the Liberal Party!
Gilbert argued much with himself during these years. He had come out
of his time of trial with firm faith in God and in man. But his
philosophy was still in the making, and he made it largely out of the
material supplied by ordinary London suburban society and by the
rather less usual society of cranks and enthusiasts so plentiful at
the end of the nineteenth century. He has written in the
_Autobiography_ of the artistic and dilettante groups where everyone
discussed religion and no one practised it, of the Christian
Socialists and other societies into which he and Cecil found their
way, and of some of the friendships they formed. Among these one of
the closest was with Conrad Noel who wrote in answer to my request
for his recollections:
We met G.K.C. for the first time at the Stapleys' in Bloomsbury
Square, at a series of meetings of the Christo-Theosophic Society. He
was like a very big fish out of water; he was comparatively thin,
however, in those days, nearly forty years ago. We had been much
intrigued by the weekly contribution of an unknown writer to "The
Speaker" and "The Nation"--brilliant work, and my wife and I,
independently, came to the conclusion when we heard this young man
speak that it must be he. The style was unmistakable.
I thought of writing to him to congratulate him on his speech, but
before I could do so, I got a letter from him, saying that he was
coming to hear me in the same series in a week or so; it was thus we
first became acquainted, and the acquaintance ripened into a warm
friendship with us both. He and his brother Cecil were in and out of
our flat in Paddington Green, where I was assistant curate. He was
genial, bubbling over with jokes, at which he roared with laughter.
The question was becoming insistent: when would there be enough money
for Frances and Gilbert to get married?
In one letter Frances asks him what he thinks of Omar Khayyam. He
replies at great length, and concludes:
You see the result of asking me for an opinion. I have written it
very hurriedly: if I had paused I might make an essay of it.
(Commercial Pig!) Never mind, sweetheart, that Essay might be a
sauce-pan some day--or at any rate a cheap toast-rack.
Of his belief in God, in man, in goodness, as against the pessimist
outlook of the day, Gilbert, as we have seen, felt profound
certitude. That his outlook was one that held him back from many
fields of opportunity he was already partly conscious. A fragment of
a letter to Frances expresses this feeling.
. . . I find I cannot possibly come tonight as my Canadian uncle
keeps his last night in England in a sort of family party. And I
abide by my father's house--said our Lady of the Snows.
I have just had a note from Rex, asking me, with characteristic
precision, if I can produce a play in the style of Maeterlinck by
6.50 this afternoon, or words to that effect. The idea is full of
humour. He remarks, as a matter of fact that there is just a remote
chance of his getting the Stage Society to act my play of The Wild
Knight. This opens to me a vista of quite new ambition. Why only at
the Stage Society?--I see a visionary programme.
The Wild Knight . . . . . . . . . . . . Mr. Charles Hawtree
Captain Redfeather . . . . . . . . . . Mr. Penley
Olive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miss Katie Seymour
Priest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sir Henry Irving
Lord Orm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mr. Arthur Roberts
I am working and must get on with my work. I do not feel any
despondency about it because I know it is good and worth doing. It is
extraordinary how much more moral one is than one imagines. At school
I never minded getting into a row if it were _really_ not my fault.
Similarly, I have never cared a rap for rejections or criticisms,
since I had got a point of view to express which I was certain held
water. Some people think it holds water--on the brain. But I don't
mind. Bless them.
I am afraid, darling, that this doctrine of patience is hard on
you. But really it's a grand thing to think oneself right. It's what
this whole age is starving for. Something to suffer for and go mad
and miserable over--that is the only luxury of the mind. I wish I
were a convinced Pro-Boer and could stare down a howling mob. But I
_am_ right about the Cosmos, and Schopenhauer and Co. are wrong. . . .
Two interesting points in this letter are the remark about wishing to
be a convinced Pro-Boer--which he certainly became--and the
suggestion of a possible performance of _The Wild Knight_. Perhaps
the letter was written before he had finally taken his stand (it has
no dating postmark), or perhaps it merely means that his convictions
on the cosmos are more absolute than on the war. As to _The Wild
Knight:_ it was never acted and its publication was made possible
only by the generosity of Gilbert's father. For a volume of comic
verse, _Greybeards at Play_, which appeared earlier in the same year
(1900), he could find a publisher, but serious poetry has never been
easy to launch.
The letter that follows has a more immediate bearing on their
own future:
11, Warwick Gardens,
Good Friday. 1900.
. . . As you have tabulated your questions with such alarming
precision I must really endeavour to answer them categorically.
(1) How am I? I am in excellent health. I have an opaque cold in my
head, cough tempestuously and am very deaf. But these things I count
as mere specks showing up the general blaze of salubrity. I am
getting steadily better and I don't mind how slowly. As for my
spirits a cold never affects them: for I have plenty to do and think
about indoors. One or two little literary schemes--trifles
doubtless--claim my attention.
(2) Am I going away at Easter? The sarcastic might think it a
characteristic answer, but I can only reply that I had banished the
matter from my mind, a vague problem of the remote future until you
asked it: but since this is Easter and we are not gone away I suppose
we are not going away.
(3) I will meet you at Euston on Tuesday evening though hell itself
should gape and bid me stop at home.
(4) I am not sure whether a review on Crivelli's art is out this
week: I am going to look.
(5) Alas! I have not been to Nutt. There are good excuses, but they
are not the real ones. I will write to him now. Yes: Now.
(6) Does my hair want cutting? My hair seems pretty happy. You are
the only person who seems to have any fixed theory on this. For all I
know it may be at that fugitive perfection which has moved you to
enthusiasm. Three minutes after this perfection, I understand, a
horrible degeneration sets in: the hair becomes too long, the figure
disreputable and profligate: and the individual is unrecognised by
all his friends. It is he that wants cutting then, not his hair.
(7) As to shirt-links, studs and laces, I glitter from head to foot
with them.
(8) I have had a few skirmishes with Knollys but not the general
engagement. When this comes off, you shall have news from our
correspondent. (Knollys was Frances's brother.)
(9) I have got a really important job in reviewing--the Life of
Ruskin for the _Speaker_. As I have precisely 73 theories about Ruskin
it will be brilliant and condensed. I am also reviewing the Life of
the Kendals, a book on the Renascence and one on Correggio for "The
Bookman."
(10) How far is it to Babylon? Babylon I am firmly convinced is just
round the corner: if one could be only certain which corner. This
conviction is the salt of my life.
(11) Really and truly I see no reason why we should not be married
in April if not before. I have been making some money calculations
with the kind assistance of Rex, and as far as I can see we could
live in the country on quite a small amount of regular literary
work. . .
P.S. Forgot the last question.
(12) Oddly enough, I was writing a poem. Will send it to you.
Gilbert's engagement had given him the impetus to earn more but he
was always entirely unpractical. His salary at Fisher Unwin's had
been negligible and he was not making much yet by the journalism
which was now his only source of income. The repeated promise to
"write to Nutt" is very characteristic. For Nutt was the manager of
the solitary publisher who was at the moment prepared to put a book
of Gilbert's on the market at his own risk!
Although they did not manage to get married this year, by the end of
it he was becoming well known. The articles, in the _Speaker_
especially, were attracting attention and _Greybeards at Play_ had a
considerable success. This, the first of Gilbert's books to be
published, is a curiosity. It is made up of three incredibly witty
satirical poems--"The Oneness of the Philosopher with Nature," "The
Dangers Attending Altruism on the High Seas" and "The Disastrous
Spread of Aestheticism in All Classes." The illustrations drawn by
himself are as witty as the verses. By the beginning of 1901 his work
was being sought for by other Liberal periodicals and he was writing
regularly for the _Daily News_. The following letter to Frances bears
the postmark Feb. 8, 1901.
Somewhere in the Arabian Nights or some such place there is a story
of a man who was Emperor of the Indies for one day. I am rather in
the position of that person: for I am Editor of the _Speaker_ for one
day. Hammond is unwell and Hirst has gone to dine with John Morley,
so the latter asked me to see the paper through for this number.
Hence this notepaper and the great hurry and brevity which I fear
must characterise this letter.
There are a few minor amusing things, however, that I have a moment
to mention.
(1) The "Daily News" have sent me a huge mass of books to review,
which block up the front hall. A study of Swinburne--a book on
Kipling--the last Richard le Gallienne--all very interesting. See if
I don't do some whacking articles, all about the stars and the moon
and the creation of Adam and that sort of thing. I really think I
could work a revolution in Daily paper--writing by the introduction
of poetical prose.
(2) Among other books that I have to review came, all unsolicited,
a book by your old friend Schofield. Ha! Ha! Ha! It's about the
Formation of Character, or some of those low and beastly amusements.
I think of introducing parts of my Comic Opera of the P.N.E.U. into
the articles.
(3) Another rather funny thing is the way in which my name is being
spread about. Belloc declares that everyone says to him "Who
discovered Chesterton?" and that he always replies "The genius
Oldershaw." This may be a trifle Gallic, but Hammond has shown me
more than one letter from Cambridge dons and such people demanding
the identity of G.K.C. in a quite violent tone. They excuse
themselves by offensive phrases in which the word "brilliant" occurs,
but I shouldn't wonder if there was a thick stick somewhere at the
back of it.
Belloc, by the way, has revealed another side of his extraordinary
mind. He seems to have taken our marriage much to heart, for he talks
to me, no longer about French Jacobins and Mediaeval Saints, but
entirely about the cheapest flats and furniture, on which, as on the
others, he is a mine of information, assuring me paternally that
"it's the carpet that does you." I should think this fatherly tone
would amuse you.
Now I must leave off: for the pages have come up to be seen through
the press. . . .
_Greybeards at Play_ its author never took very seriously. It was not
included in his Collected Poems and he does not even mention it in
his _Autobiography_. He attached a great deal more importance to _The
Wild Knight and Other Poems_. It was a volume of some fifty poems,
many of which had already appeared in _The Outlook_ and _The
Speaker_. It was published late in 1900 and produced a crop of
enthusiastic reviews and more and more people began to ask one
another, "Who is G. K. Chesterton?"
One reviewer wrote: "If it were not for the haunting fear of losing a
humourist we should welcome the author of _The Wild Knight_ to a high
place among the poets." Another spoke of the "curious intensity" of
the volume. Among those who were less pleased was John Davidson, on
whom the book had been fathered by one reviewer, and who denied
responsibility for such "frantic rubbish," and also a "reverent"
reviewer who complained, "It is scattered all over with the name of
God."
To Frances, Gilbert wrote:
I have been taken to see Mrs. Meynell, poet and essayist, who is
enthusiastic about the Wild Knight and is lending it to all her
friends.
Last night I went to Mrs. Cox's Book Party. My costume was a great
success, everyone wrestled with it, only one person guessed it, and
the rest admitted that it was quite fair and simple. It consisted of
wearing on the lapel of my dress coat the following letters.
U.U.N.S.I.J. Perhaps you would like to work this out all by
yourself--But no, I will have mercy and not sacrifice. The book I
represented was "The Letters of Junius."
Mrs. Meynell never came to know Gilbert well and her daughter says in
the biography that her mother realised his "critical approval"
(admiration would be a better word) of her own work only by reading
his essays. But he once wrote an introduction for a book of hers and
her admiration of him would break out frequently in amusing
exclamations: "I hope the papers are nice to my Chesterton. He is
mine much more, really, than Belloc's."* "If I had been a man, and
large, I should have been Chesterton."**
[* _Alice Meynell_, p. 259.]
[** _Ibid._, p. 260.]
Brimley Johnson, who was to have been Gilbert's brother-in-law, sent
_The Wild Knight_ to Rudyard Kipling. His reply is amusing and also
touching, for Mr. Johnson was clearly pouring out, in interest in
Gilbert's career and in forwarding his marriage with Frances, the
affections that might merely have been frozen by Gertrude's death.
The Elms, Rottingdean,
Nov. 28th.
DEAR MR. JOHNSON,
Many thanks for _The Wild Knight_. Of course I knew some of the
poems before, notably _The Donkey_ which stuck in my mind at the
time I read it.
I agree with you that there is any amount of promise in the
work--and I think marriage will teach him a good deal too. It will be
curious to see how he'll develop in a few years. We all begin with
arrainging [sic] and elaborating all the Heavens and Hells and stars
and tragedies we can lay our poetic hands on--Later we see folk--just
common people under the heavens--
Meantime I wish him all the happiness that there can be and for
yourself such comfort as men say time brings after loss. It's apt to
be a weary while coming but one goes the right way to get it if one
interests oneself in the happiness of other folk. Even though the
sight of this happiness is like a knife turning in a wound.
Yours sincerely,
RUDYARD KIPLING.
P.S. Merely as a matter of loathsome detail, Chesterton has a bad
attack of "aureoles." They are spotted all over the book. I think
every one is bound in each book to employ unconsciously some pet word
but that was Rossetti's.
Likewise I notice "wan waste" and many "wans" and things that
"catch and cling." He is too good not to be jolted out of that. What
do you say to a severe course of Walt Whitman--or will marriage make
him see people?
Gilbert had already taken both prescriptions--Walt Whitman and "folk,
just common people under the heavens." (Many years later James Agate
wrote in _Thursdays and Fridays_: "Unlike some other serious thinkers,
Chesterton understood his fellow men; the woes of a jockey were as
familiar to him as the worries of a judge.") Perhaps some slight
echoes of Swinburne did remain in this collection. Many earlier poems
exist in the Swinburne manner, not of thought but of expression:
Gilbert left an absolute command that these should never be published.
All Englishmen were stricken by the death of Queen Victoria. Mr.
Somers Cocks, who had come to know Gilbert through his intimacy with
Belloc, remembers that he wept when he heard of it. The tears may
almost be heard in a letter to Frances.
Today the Queen was buried. I did not see the procession, first
because I had an appointment with Hammond (of which more anon) and
secondly because I think I felt the matter too genuinely. I like a
crowd when I am triumphant or excited: for a crowd is the only thing
that can cheer, as much as a cock is the only thing that can crow.
Can anything be more absurd than the idea of a man cheering alone in
his back bedroom? But I think that reverence is better expressed by
one man than a million. There is something unnatural and impossible,
even grotesque, in the idea of a vast crowd of human beings all
assuming an air of delicacy. All the same, my dear, this is a great
and serious hour and it is felt so completely by all England that I
cannot deny the enduring wish I have, quite apart from certain more
private sentiments, that the noblest Englishwoman I have ever known
was here with me to renew, as I do, private vows of a very real
character to do my best for this country of mine which I love with a
love passing the love of Jingoes. It is sometimes easy to give one's
country blood and easier to give her money. Sometimes the hardest
thing of all is to give her truth.
I am writing an article on the good friend who is dead: I hope
particularly that you will like it. The one I really like so far is
Belloc's in the "Speaker." I had, as I said, many things to say, but
owing to the hour and a certain fatigue and idiocy in myself, I have
only space for the most important.
Hammond sent for me today and asked me seriously if I would help
him in writing a book on Fox, sharing work, fame and profits. I told
him that I had no special talent for research: he replied that he had
no talent for literary form. I then said that I would be delighted to
give him such assistance as I honestly thought valuable enough for
him to split his profits for, that I thought I could give him such
assistance in the matter of picturesqueness and plan of idea, more
especially as Fox was a great hero of mine and the philosophy of his
life involves the whole philosophy of the Revolution and of the love
of mankind. We arranged that we would make a preliminary examination
of the Fox record and then decide. . . .*
[* This book was never written nor even, I think, begun.]
Three more letters, two to Frances, one to his mother, complete the
outline of this eventful period. He was now determined to get married
quickly. For the first time and entirely without rancour, he realised
the inevitable competition in the world of journalism. The struggle
for success meant men fighting one another. Other journalists were
fighting him; but truly enough, though with a rare dispassionateness,
he realised that this meant a need for Daily bread in others similar
to his own.
11, Warwick Gardens, W.
(postmark: Feb. 19, 1901)
. . . I hope that in your own beautiful kindness you will be
indulgent just at this time if I only write rough letters or
postcards. I am for the first time in my life, thoroughly _worried_,
and I find it a rather exciting and not entirely unpleasant
sensation. But everything depends just now, not only on my sticking
hard to work and doing a lot of my very best, but on my thinking
about it, keeping wide awake to the turn of the market, being ready
to do things not in half a week, but in half an hour; getting the
feelings and tendencies of other men and generally living in work. I
am going to see Lehmann tomorrow and many things may come of it. I
cannot express to you what it is to feel the grip of the great wheel
of real life on you for the first time. For the first time I know
what is meant by the word "enemies"--men who deliberately dislike you
and oppose your career--and the funny thing is that I don't dislike
them at all myself. Poor devils--very likely they want to be married
in June too.
I am a Socialist, but I love this fierce old world and am beginning
to find a beauty in making money (in moderation) as in making
statues. Always through my head one tune and words of Kipling set to
it.
"They passed one resolution, your sub-committee believe
You can lighten the curse of Adam when you've lightened the curse
of Eve.
And till we are built like angels, with hammer and chisel and pen
We'll work for ourselves and a woman, for ever and ever--Amen."
11, Warwick Gardens, W.
(postmark: March 4, 1901)
. . . I have delayed this letter in a scandalous manner because I
hoped I might have the arrangements with the _Daily News_ to tell
you; as that is again put off, I must tell you later. The following,
however, are grounds on which I believe everything will turn out
right this year. It is arithmetic. "The Speaker" has hitherto paid me
£70 a year, that is £6 a month. It has now raised it to £10 a month,
which makes £120 a year. Moreover they encourage me to write as much
as I like in the paper, so that assuming that I do something extra
(poem, note, leader) twice a month or every other number, which I can
easily do, that brings us to nearly £150 a year. So much for "The
Speaker." Now for the "Daily News," both certainties and
probabilities. Hammond (to whom you will favour me by being eternally
grateful) pushed me so strongly with Lehmann for the post of manager
of the literary page that it is most probable that I shall get
it. . . . If I do, Hammond thinks they couldn't give me less than
£200 a year. So that if this turns out right, we have £350, say,
without any aid from "Bookman," books, magazine articles or stories.
Let us however, put this chance entirely on one side and suppose
that they can give me nothing but regular work on the "Daily News." I
have just started a set of popular fighting articles on literature in
the "Daily News" called "The Wars of Literature." They will appear at
least twice a week, often three times. For each of these I am paid
about a guinea and a half. This makes about £3 a week which is £144 a
year. Thus with only the present certainties of "Speaker" and "Daily
News" we have £264 a year, or very likely (with extra "Speaker"
items) £288, close on £300. This again may be reinforced by all sorts
of miscellaneous work which I shall get now my name is getting known,
magazine articles, helping editors or publishers, reading Mss. and so
on. In all these calculations I have kept deliberately under the
figures, not over them: so that I don't think I have failed
altogether to bring my promise within reasonable distance of fact
already. Belloc suggested that I should write for the "Pilot" and as
he is on it, he will probably get me some work. Hammond has become
leader-writer on the "Echo" and will probably get me some reviewing
on that. And between ourselves, to turn with intense relief, from all
this egotism, Hammond and I have a little scheme on hand for getting
Oldershaw a kind of editorial place on the "Echo" where they want a
brisk but cultivated man of the world. I think we can bring it off:
it is a good place for an ambitious young man. It would give me more
happiness than I can say, while I am building my own house of peace,
to do something for the man who did so much in giving me my reason
for it.
For well Thou knowest, O God most wise
How good on earth was his gift to me
Shall this be a little thing in thine eyes
That is greater in mine than the whole great sea?
I am afraid . . . that this is a very dull letter. But you know
what I am. I can be practical, but only deliberately, by fixing my
mind on a thing. In this letter, I sum up my last month's thinking
about money resources. I haven't given a thought yet to the
application and distribution of them in rent, furniture, etc. When I
have done thinking about that you will get another dull letter. I can
keep ten poems and twenty theories in my head at once. But I can only
think of one practical thing at a time. The only conclusion of this
letter is that on any calculation whatever, we ought to have £300 a
year, and be on the road to four in a little while. With this before
you I daresay you (who are more practical than I) could speculate and
suggest a little as to the form of living and expenditure. . . .
Gilbert's mother perhaps needed more convincing. The letter to her
has no postmark but the £300 a year has grown to almost £500 and a
careful economy is promised.
Mrs. Barnes
The Orchards
Burley. Hants.
MY DEAREST MOTHER,
Thank you very much for your two letters. If you get back to
Kensington before me (I shall return on Thursday night: I find I work
here very well) would you mind sending on any letters. You might send
on the cheque: though that is not necessary.
There is a subject we have touched on once or twice that I want to
talk to you about, for I am very much worried in my mind as to
whether you will disapprove of a decision I have been coming to with
a very earnest belief that I am seeking to do the right thing. I have
just had information that my screw from "The Speaker" will be yet
further increased from £120 a year to £150, or, if I do the full
amount I can, £190 a year. I have also had a request from the "Daily
News" to do two columns a week regularly, which [is] rather over £100
a year, besides other book reviews. My other sources of income which
should bring the amount up to nearly £150 more, at any rate, I will
speak of in a moment.
There is something, as I say, that is distressing me a great deal.
I believe I said about a year ago that I hoped to get married in a
year, if I had money enough. I fancy you took it rather as a joke: I
was not so certain about it myself then. I have however been coming
very seriously to the conclusion that if I pull off one more
affair--a favourable arrangement with Reynolds' Newspaper, whose
editor wants to see me at the end of this week, I shall, unless you
disapprove, make a dash for it this year. When I mentioned the matter
a short time ago, you said (if I remember right) that you did not
think I ought to marry under £400 or £500 a year. I was moved to go
into the matter thoroughly then and there, but as it happened I knew
I had one or two bargains just coming of which would bring me nearer
to the standard you named, so I thought I would let it stand over
till I could actually quote them. Believe me, my dearest mother, I am
not considering this affair wildly or ignorantly: I have been doing
nothing but sums in my head for the last months. This is how matters
stand. The _Speaker_ editor says they will take as much as I like to
write. If I write my maximum I get £192 a year from them. From the
_Daily News_, even if I do not get the post on the staff which was half
promised me, I shall get at least £100 a year with a good deal over
for reviews outside "The Wars of Literature." That makes nearly £300.
With the Manchester Sunday Chronicle I have just made a bargain by
which I shall get £72 a year. This makes £370 a year altogether. The
matter now, I think, largely depends on Reynolds' Newspaper. If I do,
as is contemplated, weekly articles and thumbnail sketches, they
cannot give me less than £ 100 a year. This would bring the whole to
£470 a year, or within £30 of your standard. Of course I know quite
well that this is not like talking of an income from a business or a
certain investment. But we should live a long way within this income,
if we took a very cheap flat, even a workman's flat if necessary, had
a woman in to do the laborious Daily work and for the rest waited on
ourselves, as many people I know do in cheap flats. Moreover,
journalism has its ups as well as downs, and I, I can fairly say, am
on the upward wave. Without vanity and in a purely businesslike
spirit I may say that my work is talked about a great deal. It is at
least a remarkable fact that every one of the papers I write for (as
detailed above) came to me and asked me to do work for them: from the
_Daily News_ down to the Manchester Sunday Chronicle. I have, as I say,
what seems to me a sufficient income for a start. That I shall have
as good and better I am as certain as that I sit here. I know the
clockwork of these papers and among one set of them I might almost
say that I am becoming the fashion.
Do not, please, think that I am entertaining this idea without
realising that I shall have to start in a very serious and economical
spirit. I have worked it out and I am sure we could live well within
the above calculations and leave a good margin.
I make all these prosaic statements because I want you to
understand that I know the risks I think of running. But it is not
any practical question that is distressing me: on that I think I see
my way. But I am terribly worried for fear you should be angry or
sorry about all this. I am only kept in hope by the remembrance that
I had the same fear when I told you of my engagement and that you
dispelled it with a directness and generosity that I shall not
forget. I think, my dear Mother, that we have always understood each
other really. We are neither of us very demonstrative: we come of
some queer stock that can always say least when it means most. But I
do think you can trust me when I say that I think a thing really
right, and equally honestly admit that I can hardly explain why. To
explain why I know it is right would be to communicate the
incommunicable, and speak of delicate and sacred things in bald
words. The most I can say is that I know Frances like the back of my
hand and can tell without a word from her that she has never
recovered from a wound* and that there is only one kind of peace that
will heal it.
[* Gertrude's death.]
I have tried to explain myself in this letter: I can do it better
in a letter, somehow, but I do not think I have done it very
successfully. However, with you it does not matter and it never will
matter, how my thoughts come tumbling out. You at least have always
understood what I meant.
Always your loving son,
GILBERT.
CHAPTER XI
Married Life in London
_The suburbs are commonly referred to as prosaic. That is a matter of
taste. Personally I find them intoxicating_.
Introduction to _Literary London_.
THE WEDDING DAY drew near and the presents were pouring in.
"I feel like the young man in the Gospel," said Gilbert to Annie
Firmin, "sorrowful, because I have great possessions."
Conrad Noel married Gilbert and Frances at Kensington Parish Church
on June 28, 1901. As Gilbert knelt down the price ticket on the sole
of one of his new shoes became plainly visible. Annie caught Mrs.
Chesterton's eye and they began to laugh helplessly. Annie thinks,
too, that for once in their lives Gilbert and Cecil did not argue at
the Reception.
Lucian Oldershaw drove ahead to the station with the heavy luggage,
put it on the train and waited feverishly. That train went off (with
the luggage), then another, and at last the happy couple appeared.
Gilbert had felt it necessary to stop on the way "in order to drink a
glass of milk in one shop and to buy a revolver with cartridges in
another." The milk he drank because in childhood his mother used to
give him a glass in that shop. The revolver was for the defense of
his bride against possible dangers. They followed the luggage by a
slow train.
This love of weapons, his revolver, his favourite sword-stick,
remained with him all his life. It suggested the adventures that he
always bestowed on the heroes of his stories and would himself have
loved to experience. He noted in _Twelve Types_ Scott's love of armour
and of weapons for their own sakes--the texture, the power, the
beauty of a sword-hilt or a jewelled dagger. As a child would play
with these things Gilbert played with them, but they stood also in
his mind for freedom, adventure, personal responsibility, and much
else that the modern world had lost.
The honeymoon was spent on the Norfolk Broads. On the way they
stopped at Ipswich "and it was like meeting a friend in a fairy-tale
to find myself under the sign of the White Horse on the first day of
my honeymoon." Annie Firmin was staying in Warwick Gardens for the
wedding and afterwards. Gilbert's first letter, from the Norfolk
Broads, began "I have a wife, a piece of string, a pencil and a
knife: what more can any man want on a honeymoon."
Asked on his return what wallpapers he would prefer in the house they
had chosen, he asked for brown paper so that he could draw pictures
everywhere. He had by no means abandoned this old habit, and Annie
remembers an illness during which he asked for a long enough pencil
to draw on the ceiling. Their quaint little house in Edwardes Square,
Kensington, lent to them by Mr. Boore, an old friend of Frances, was
close to Warwick Gardens. "I remember the house well," wrote E. C.
Bentley later, "with its garden of old trees and its general air of
Georgian peace. I remember too the splendid flaming frescoes, done in
vivid crayons, of knights and heroes and divinities with which G.K.C.
embellished the outside wall at the back, beneath a sheltering
portico. I have often wondered whether the landlord charged for them
as dilapidations at the end of the tenancy."
They were only in Edwardes Square for a few months and then moved to
Overstrand Mansions, Battersea, where the rest of their London life
was spent. It was here I came to know them a few years later. As soon
as they could afford it they threw drawing-room and dining-room
together to make one big room. At one end hung an Engagement board
with what Father O'Connor has described as a _"loud_ inscription"--
LEST WE FORGET. Beside the engagements was pinned a poem by Hilaire
Belloc:
Frances and Gilbert have a little flat
At eighty pounds a year and cheap at that
Where Frances who is Gilbert's only wife
Leads an unhappy and complaining life:
while Gilbert who is Frances' only man
Puts up with it as gamely as he can.
The Bellocs chose life in the country much earlier than the
Chestertons, and an undated letter to Battersea threatens due
reprisals in an exclusion from their country home, if the Chestertons
are not prepared to receive him in town at a late hour.
Kings Land, Shipley, Horsham
It will annoy you a good deal to hear that I am in town tomorrow
Wednesday evening and that I shall appear at your Apartment at 10.45
or 10.30 at earliest. P.M.! You are only just returned. You are
hardly settled down. It is an intolerable nuisance. You heartily wish
I had not mentioned it.
Well, you see that [arrow pointing to "Telegrams, Coolham,
Sussex"], if you wire there before _One_ you can put me off, but if
you do I shall melt your keys, both the exterior one which forms the
body or form of the matter and the interior one which is the mystical
content thereof.
Also if you put me off I shall not have you down here ever to see
the _Oak Room_, the _Tapestry Room_, the _Green Room_ etc.
Yrs,
H.B.
Early in his Battersea life Gilbert received a note from Max
Beerbohm, the great humourist, introducing himself and suggesting a
luncheon together.
I am quite different from my writings (and so, I daresay, are you
from yours)--so that we should not necessarily fail to hit it off.
I, in the flesh, am modest, full of commonsense, very genial, and
rather dull.
What you are remains to be seen--or not to be seen--by me, according
to your decision.
Gilbert's decision was for the meeting and an instant liking grew
into a warm friendship. As in J.D.C. days Gilbert had written verse
about his friends, so now did he try to sum up an impression, perhaps
after some special talk:
And Max's queer crystalline sense
Lit, like a sea beneath a sea,
Shines through a shameless impudence
As shameless a humility.
Or Belloc somewhat rudely roared
But all above him when he spoke
The immortal battle trumpets broke
And Europe was a single sword.*
[* Unpublished fragment.]
Somewhere about this time must have occurred the incident
mentioned by George Bernard Shaw in a note which appeared
in the _Mark Twain Quarterly_ (Spring, 1937):
I cannot remember when I first met Chesterton. I was so much struck
by a review of Scott's _Ivanhoe_ which he wrote for the _Daily News_
in the course of his earliest notable job as feuilletonist to that
paper that I wrote to him asking who he was and where he came from,
as he was evidently a new star in literature. He was either too shy
or too lazy to answer. The next thing I remember is his lunching with
us on quite intimate terms, accompanied by Belloc.
The actual first meeting, forgotten by Shaw, is remembered by
Gilbert's brother-in-law, Lucian Oldershaw. He and Gilbert had gone
together to Paris where they visited Rodin, then making a bust of
Bernard Shaw. Mr. Oldershaw introduced Gilbert to G.B.S., who,
Rodin's secretary told them, had been endeavouring to explain at some
length the nature of the Salvation Army, leading up (one imagines) to
an account of Major Barbara. At the end of the explanation, Rodin's
secretary remarked--to a rather apologetic Shaw--"The Master says you
have not much French but you impose yourself."
"Shaw talked Gilbert down," Mr. Oldershaw complained. That the famous
man should talk more than the beginner is hardly surprising, but all
through Gilbert's life the complaint recurs on the lips of his
admirers, just as a similar complaint is made by Lockhart about Sir
Walter Scott. Chesterton, like Scott, abounded in cordial admiration
of other men and women and had a simple enjoyment in meeting them.
And Chesterton was one of the few great conversationalists--perhaps
the only one--who would really rather listen than talk.
In 1901 appeared his first book of collected essays, _The Defendant_.
The essays in it had already appeared in _The Speaker_. Like all his
later work it had the mixed reception of enthusiasts who saw what he
meant, and puzzled reviewers who took refuge in that blessed word
"paradox." "Paradox ought to be used," said one of these, "like
onions to season the salad. Mr. Chesterton's salad is all onions.
Paradox has been defined as 'truth standing on her head to attract
attention.' Mr. Chesterton makes truth cut her throat to attract
attention."
Without denying that his love of a joke led him into indefensible
puns and suchlike fooleries (though Mgr. Ronald Knox tells me he is
prepared to defend all of G.K.'s puns), I think nearly all his
paradoxes were either the startling expression of an entirely
neglected truth, or the startling re-emphasis of the neglected side
of a truth. Once, he said: "It is a paradox, but it is God, and not
I, who should have the credit of it." He proved his case a few years
later in the chapter of _Orthodoxy_ called "The Paradoxes of
Christianity." What it amounted to was roughly this: paradox must be
of the nature of things because of God's infinity and the limitations
of the world and of man's mind. To us limited beings God can express
His idea only in fragments. We can bring together apparent
contradictions in those fragments whereby a greater truth is
suggested. If we do this in a sudden or incongruous manner we startle
the unprepared and arouse the cry of paradox. But if we will not do
it we shall miss a great deal of truth.
Chesterton also saw many proverbs and old sayings as containing a
truth which the people who constantly repeated them had forgotten.
The world was asleep and must be awakened. The world had gone
placidly mad and must be violently restored to sanity. That the
methods he used annoyed some is undeniable, but he did force people
to think, even if they raged at him as the unaccustomed muscles came
into play.
"I believe," he said in a speech at this date, "in getting into
hot water. I think it keeps you clean." And he believed intensely
in keeping out of a narrow stream of merely literary life. To
those who exalted the poet above the journalist he gave this
answer:
The poet writing his name upon a score of little pages in the
silence of his study, may or may not have an intellectual right to
despise the journalist: but I greatly doubt whether he would not
morally be the better if he saw the great lights burning on through
darkness into dawn, and heard the roar of the printing wheels
weaving the destinies of another day. Here at least is a school of
labour and of some rough humility, the largest work ever published
anonymously since the great Christian cathedrals.*
[* "A Word for the Mere Journalist." _Darlington North Star:_
February 3, 1902.]
He plunged then into the life of Fleet Street and held it his
proudest boast to be a journalist. But he had his own way of being a
journalist:
On the whole, I think I owe my success (as the millionaires say) to
having listened respectfully and rather bashfully to the very best
advice, given by all the best journalists who had achieved the best
sort of success in journalism; and then going away and doing the
exact opposite. For what they all told me was that the secret of
success in journalism was to study the particular journal and write
what was suitable to it. And, partly by accident and ignorance and
partly through the real rabid certainties of youth, I cannot remember
that I ever wrote any article that was at all suitable to any
paper. . . . I wrote on a Nonconformist organ like the old _Daily
News_ and told them all about French cafés and Catholic cathedrals;
and they loved it, because they had never heard of them before. I
wrote on a robust Labour organ like the old _Clarion_ and defended
mediaeval theology and all the things their readers had never heard
of; and their readers did not mind me a bit.*
[* _Autobiography_, pp. 185-6.]
Mr. Titterton, who worked also on the _Daily News_ and came at this
time to know G.K. in the Pharos Club, says that at first he was
rather shy of the other men on the staff but after a dinner at which
he was asked to speak he came to know and like them and to be at home
in Fleet Street. He liked to work amid human contact and would write
his articles in a public-house or in the club or even in the street,
resting the paper against a wall.
Frank Swinnerton records* a description given him by Charles
Masterman of
how Chesterton used to sit writing his articles in a Fleet St.
café, sampling and mixing a terrible conjunction of drinks, while
many waiters hovered about him, partly in awe, and partly in case he
should leave the restaurant without paying for what he had had. One
day . . . the headwaiter approached Masterman. "Your friend," he
whispered, admiringly, "he very clever man. He sit and laugh. And
then he write. And then he laugh at what he write."
[* _Georgian Scene_, p. 94.]
He loved Fleet Street and did a good deal of drinking there. But not
only there. When (in the _Autobiography_) he writes of wine and song
it is not Fleet Street and its taverns that come back to his mind but
"the moonstruck banquets given by Mr. Maurice Baring," the garden in
Westminster where he fenced with real swords against one more
intoxicated than himself, songs shouted in Auberon Herbert's rooms
near Buckingham Palace.
After marriage Frances seems to have given up the struggle, so
ardently pursued during their engagement, to make him tidy. By a
stroke of genius she decided instead to make him picturesque. The
conventional frock-coat worn so unconventionally, the silk hat
crowning a mat of hair, disappeared, and a wide-brimmed slouch hat
and flowing cloak more appropriately garbed him. This was especially
good as he got fatter. He was a tall man, six foot two. As a boy he
had been thin, but now he was rapidly putting on weight. Neither he
nor Cecil played games (the tennis did not last!) but they used to go
for long walks, sometimes going off together for a couple of days at
a time. Gilbert still liked to do this with Frances, but the
sedentary Daily life and the consumption of a good deal of beer did
not help towards a graceful figure. By 1903 G.K. was called a fat
humourist and he was fast getting ready to be Dr. Johnson in various
pageants. By 1906--he was then thirty-two--he had become famous
enough to be one of the celebrities painted or photographed for
exhibitions; and Bernard Shaw described a photo of him by Coburn:
Chesterton is "our Quinbus Flestrin," the young Man Mountain, a
large abounding gigantically cherubic person who is not only large in
body and mind beyond all decency, but seems to be growing larger as
you look at him--"swellin' wisibly," as Tony Weller puts it. Mr.
Coburn has represented him as flowing off the plate in the very act
of being photographed and blurring his own outlines in the process.
Also he has caught the Chestertonian resemblance to Balzac and
unconsciously handled his subject as Rodin handled Balzac. You may
call the placing of the head on the plate wrong, the focussing wrong,
the exposure wrong if you like, but Chesterton is right and a right
impression of Chesterton is what Mr. Coburn was driving at.
The change in his appearance G.K. celebrated in a stanza of his
"Ballade of the Grotesque":
I was light as a penny to spend,
I was thin as an arrow to cleave,
I could stand on a fishing-rod's end
With composure, though on the _qui vive_;
But from Time, all a-flying to thieve,
The suns and the moons of the year,
A different shape I receive;
The shape is decidedly queer.
"London," said a recently arrived American, "is the most marvellously
fulfilling experience. I went to see Fleet Street this morning, and
met G. K. Chesterton face to face. Wrapped in a cloak and standing in
the doorway of a pie-shop, he was composing a poem reciting it aloud
as he wrote. The most striking thing about the incident was that no
one took the slightest notice."
I doubt if any writer, except Dickens, has so quickly become an
institution as Chesterton. Nor, of course, would his picturesqueness
in Fleet Street or his swift success as a journalist have
accomplished this but for the vast output of books on every
conceivable subject.
But before I come to the books written during those years at
Battersea, a word must be said of another element besides his
journalistic contacts that was linking G.K. with a wider world than
the solely literary. We have seen that even when his religion was at
its lowest point, in the difficult Art School days, he never lost it
entirely--"I hung on to religion by one thin thread of thanks." In
the years of the Notebook, he advanced very far in his pondering on
and acceptance of the great religious truths. But this did not as yet
mean attachment to a Church. Then he met Frances. "She actually
practised a religion. This was something utterly unaccountable both
to me and to the whole fussy culture in which she lived." Now that
they were married, Frances, as a convinced Anglo-Catholic, was
bringing more clergy and other Anglican friends into Gilbert's
circle. Moreover, he was lecturing all over England, and this brought
him into contact with all sorts of strange religious beliefs. "Amid
all this scattered thinking . . . I began to piece together fragments
of the old religious scheme; mainly by the various gaps that denoted
its disappearance. And the more I saw of real human nature, the more
I came to suspect that it was really rather bad for all these people
that it had disappeared."*
[* _Autobiography_, p. 177.]
In 1903-04 he had a tremendous battle (the detail of which will be
treated in the next chapter) in the _Clarion_ with Robert Blatchford.
In it he adumbrated many of the ideas that were later developed in
_Orthodoxy_. Of the arguments used by Blatchford and his atheist
friends, G.K. wrote that the effect on his own mind was: "Almost thou
persuadest me to be a Christian." In a diary kept by Frances
spasmodically during the years 1904-05, she notes that Gilbert has
been asked to preach as the first of a series of lay preachers in a
city church. She writes:
_March 16th_. One of the proudest days of my life. Gilbert preached
at St. Paul's, Covent Garden for the C.S.U. [Christian Social Union]
_Vox populi vox Dei_. A crammed church--he was very eloquent and
restrained. Sermons will be published afterwards.
Published they were: under the title, _Preachers from the Pew_.
_March 30th_. The second sermon: "The Citizen, the Gentleman and the
Savage." Even better than last week. "Where there is no vision the
people perisheth."
When it is remembered that the _Browning_, the _Watts_, _Twelve
Types_ and the _Napoleon of Notting Hill_ had all been published and
received with acclaim, it is touching that Frances should speak thus
of the "proudest day" of her life. That Gilbert should himself have
vision and show it to others remained her strongest aspiration. Not
thus felt all his admirers. The Blatchford controversy on matters
religious became more than many of them could bear.
A plaintive correspondent (says the _Daily News_), who seems to have
had enough of the eternal verities and the eternal other things,
sends us the following "lines written on reading Mr. G. K.
Chesterton's forty-seventh reply to a secularist opponent":
What ails our wondrous "G.K.C."
Who late, on youth's glad wings,
Flew fairylike, and gossip'd free
Of translunary things,
That thus, in dull didactic mood,
He quits the realms of dream,
And like some pulpit-preacher rude,
Drones on one dreary theme?
Stern Blatchford, _thou_ hast dashed the glee
Of our Omniscient Babe;
Thy name alone now murmurs he,
Or that of dark McCabe.
All vain his cloudy fancies swell,
His paradox all vain,
Obsessed by that malignant spell
Of Blatchford on the brain.
H.S.S.*
[* _Daily News_, 12 January, 1904.]
Mr. Noel has a livelier memory of Gilbert's religious and social
activities. On one occasion he went to the Battersea flat for a
meeting at which he was to speak and Gilbert take the chair, to
establish a local branch of the Christian Social Union. The two men
got into talk over their wine in the dining-room (then still a
separate room) and Frances came in much agitated. "Gilbert you must
dress. The people will be arriving any moment.
"Yes, yes, I'll go."
The argument was resumed and went on with animation. Frances came
back. "Gilbert, the drawing-room is half full and people are still
arriving." At last in despair she brought Gilbert's dress-clothes
into the dining-room and made him change there, still arguing. Next
he had to be urged into the drawing-room. Established at a small
table he began to draw comic bishops, quite oblivious of the fact
that he was to take the chair at the now assembled meeting. Finally
Frances managed to attract his attention, he leaped up overthrowing
the small table and scattering the comic bishops.
"Surely this story," said a friend to whom I told it, "proves what
some people said about Chesterton's affectation. He must have been
posing."
I do not think so, and those who knew Gilbert best believed him
incapable of posing. But he was perfectly capable of wilfulness and
of sulking like a schoolboy. It amused him to argue with Mr. Noel, it
did not amuse him at all to take the chair at a meeting. So, as he
was not allowed to go on arguing, he drew comic bishops.
There was, too, more than a touch of this wilfulness in the second
shock he administered to respectable Battersea later in the evening.
An earnest young lady asked the company for counsel as to the best
way of arranging her solitary maid's evening out. "I'm so afraid,"
ended the appeal, "of her going to the Red Lion."
"Best place she could go," said Gilbert. And occasionally he would
add example to precept, for society and Fleet Street were not the
only places for human intercourse. "At present," commented a
journalist, "he is cultivating the local politics of Battersea; in
secluded ale houses he drinks with the frequenters and learns their
opinions on municipal milk and on Mr. John Burns."
"Good friends and very gay companions," Gilbert calls the Christian
Social Union group of whom, beside Conrad Noel, were Charles
Masterman, Bishop Gore, Percy Dearmer, and above all Canon Scott
Holland. Known as "Scotty" and adored by many generations of young
men, he was "a man with a natural surge of laughter within him, so
that his broad mouth seemed always to be shut down on it in a grimace
of restraint."* Like Gilbert, he suffered from the effect of urging
his most serious views with apparent flippancy and fantastic
illustrations. In the course of a speech to a respectable Nottingham
audience he remarked, "I dare say several of you here have never been
in prison."
[* _Autobiography_, p. 169.]
"A ghastly stare," says Gilbert, describing this speech, "was fixed
on all the faces of the audience; and I have ever since seen it in my
own dreams; for it has constituted a considerable part of my own
problem."
Gilbert's verses, summarizing the meeting as it must have sounded to
a worthy Nottingham tradesman, are quoted in the _Autobiography_ and
completed in _Father Brown on Chesterton_. I have put them together
here for they show how merrily these men were working to change the
world.
The Christian Social Union here
Was very much annoyed;
It seems there is some duty
Which we never should avoid,
And so they sang a lot of hymns
To help the Unemployed.
Upon a platform at the end
The speakers were displayed
And Bishop Hoskins stood in front
And hit a bell and said
That Mr. Carter was to pray,
And Mr. Carter prayed.
Then Bishop Gore of Birmingham
He stood upon one leg
And said he would be happier
If beggars didn't beg,
And that if they pinched his palace
It would take him down a peg.
He said that Unemployment
Was a horror and a blight,
He said that charities produced
Servility and spite,
And stood upon the other leg
And said it wasn't right.
And then a man named Chesterton
Got up and played with water,
He seemed to say that principles
Were nice and led to slaughter
And how we always compromised
And how we didn't orter.
Then Canon Holland fired ahead
Like fifty cannons firing,
We tried to find out what he meant
With infinite enquiring,
But the way he made the windows jump
We couldn't help admiring.
I understood him to remark
(It seemed a little odd.)
That half a dozen of his friends
had never been in quod.
He said he was a Socialist himself,
And so was God.
He said the human soul should be
Ashamed of every sham,
He said a man should constantly
Ejaculate "I am"
When he had done, I went outside
And got into a tram.
Partly perhaps to console himself for the loss of his son's Daily
company, chiefly, I imagine, out of sheer pride and joy in his
success, Edward Chesterton started after the publication of _The Wild
Knight_ pasting all Gilbert's press-cuttings into volumes. Later I
learnt that it had long been Gilbert's weekly penance to read these
cuttings on Sunday afternoon at his father's house. Traces of his
passage are visible wherever a space admits of a caricature, and
occasionally, where it does not, the caricature is superimposed on
the text.
His growing fame may be seen by the growing size of these volumes and
the increased space given to each of his books. _Twelve Types_ in
1902 had a good press for a young man's work and was taken seriously
in some important papers, but its success was as nothing compared
with that of the _Browning_ a year later. The bulk of _Twelve Types_,
as of _The Defendant_, had appeared in periodicals, but never in his
life did Gilbert prepare a volume of his essays for the press without
improving, changing and unifying. It was never merely a collection,
always a book.
Still, the _Browning_ was another matter. It was a compliment for a
comparatively new author to be given the commission for the English
Men of Letters Series. Stephen Gwynn describes the experience of the
publishers:
On my advice the Macmillans had asked him to do Browning in the
"English Men of Letters," when he was still not quite arrived. Old
Mr. Craik, the Senior Partner, sent for me and I found him in white
fury, with Chesterton's proofs corrected in pencil; or rather not
corrected; there were still thirteen errors uncorrected on one page;
mostly in quotations from Browning. A selection from a Scotch ballad
had been quoted from memory and three of the four lines were wrong, I
wrote to Chesterton saying that the firm thought the book was going
to "disgrace" them. His reply was like the trumpeting of a crushed
elephant. But the book was a huge success.*
[* Quoted in _Chesterton_, by Cyril Clemens, p. 14.]
In fact, it created a sensation and established G.K. in the front
rank. Not all the reviewers liked it, and one angry writer in the
_Athenaeum_ pointed out that, not content with innumerable
inaccuracies about Browning's descent and the events of his life,
G.K. had even invented a line in "Mr. Sludge the Medium." But every
important paper had not only a review but a long review, and the vast
majority were enthusiastic. Chesterton claimed Browning as a poet not
for experts but for every man. His treatment of the Browning love
affair, of the poet's obscurity, of "The Ring and the Book," all
receive this same praise of an originality which casts a true and
revealing light for his readers. As with all his literary criticism,
the most famous critics admitted that he had opened fresh windows on
the subject for themselves.
This attack on his inaccuracy and admiration for his insight
constantly recurs with Chesterton's literary work. Readers noted that
in the _Ballad of the White Horse_ he made Alfred's left wing face
Guthrum's left wing. He was amused when it was pointed out, but never
bothered to alter it. His memory was prodigious. All his friends
testify to his knowing by heart pages of his favourite authors (and
these were not few). Ten years after his time with Fisher Unwin,
Frances told Father O'Connor that he remembered all the plots and
most of the characters of the "thousands" of novels he had read for
the firm. But he trusted his memory too much and never verified.
Indeed, when it was a question merely of verbal quotation he said it
was pedantic to bother, and when latterly Dorothy Collins looked up
his references he barely tolerated it.
Again while he constantly declared that he was no scholar, he said
things illuminating even to scholars. Thus, much later, when
Chesterton's _St. Thomas Aquinas_ appeared, the Master-General of the
Dominican Order, Père Gillet, O.P., lectured on and from it to large
meetings of Dominicans. Mr. Eccles told me that talking of Virgil,
G.K. said things immensely illuminating for experts on Latin poetry.
In a very different field, Mr. Oldershaw noted after their trip to
Paris that though he could set Gilbert right on many a detail yet his
generalisations were marvellous. He had, said Mr. Eccles, an
intuitive mind. He had, too, read more than was realised, partly
because his carelessness and contempt for scholarship misled. Where
the pedant would have referred and quoted and cross-referred, he went
dashing on, throwing out ideas from his abundance and caring little
if among his wealth were a few faults of fact or interpretation.
"Abundance" was a word much used of his work just now, and in the
field of literary criticism he was placed high, and had an
enthusiastic following. We may assume that the _Browning_ had
something to do with Sir Oliver Lodge's asking him in the next year
(1904) to become a candidate for the Chair of Literature at
Birmingham University. But he had no desire to be a professor.
Frances, in her diary, notes some of their widening contacts and
engagements. The mixture of shrewdness and simplicity in her comments
will be familiar to those who knew her intimately. Meeting her for
the first time I think the main impression was that of the "single
eye." She abounded in Gilbert's sense, as my mother commented after
an early meeting, and ministered to his genius. Yet she never lost an
individual, markedly feminine point of view, which helped him
greatly, as anyone can see who will read all he wrote on marriage. He
shows an insight almost uncanny in the section called, "The Mistake
About Women" in _What's Wrong with the World_. "Some people," he said
in a speech of 1905, "when married gain each other. Some only lose
themselves." The Chestertons gained each other. And by the sort of
paradox he loved, Frances did so by throwing the stream of her own
life unreservedly into the greater river of her husband's. She writes
in her Diary, for 1904:
Gilbert and I meet all sorts of queer, well-known, attractive,
unattractive people and I expect this book will be mostly about
them. . . .
Feb. 17th. We went together to Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Colvin's "At
home." It was rather jolly but too many clever people there to be
really nice. The clever people were Mr. Joseph Conrad, Mr. Henry
James, Mr. Laurence Binyon, Mr. Maurice Hewlett, and a great many
more. Mr. and Mrs. Colvin looked so happy.
Feb. 23rd. Gilbert went as Mr. Lane's guest to a dinner of the "Odd
Volumes" at the Imperial Restaurant. The other guest was Baden
Powell. He and Gilbert made speeches. . . .
March 8th. Gilbert was to speak on "Education" at a C.S.U. meeting
at Sion College, but a debate on the Chinese Labour in South Africa
was introduced instead and went excitingly. There is to be a big
meeting of the C.S.U. to protest. Though I suppose it's all no good
now. When the meeting was over we adjourned to a tea-shop and had
immense fun. Gilbert, Percy Dearmer and Conrad Noel walked together
down Fleet Street, and never was there a funnier sight. Gilbert's
costume consisted of a frock coat, huge felt hat and walking stick
brandished in the face of the passers-by, to their exceeding great
danger. Conrad was dressed in an old lounge suit of sober grey with a
clerical hat jauntily stuck on the back of his head (which led
someone to remark, "Are you here in the capacity of a private
gentleman, poor curate, or low-class actor?"). Mr. Dearmer was clad
in wonderful clerical garments of which he alone possesses the
pattern, which made him look like a Chaucer Canterbury Pilgrim or a
figure out of a Noah's ark. They swaggered down the roadway talking
energetically. At tea we talked of many things, the future of the
"Commonwealth" chiefly . . .
March 22nd. Meeting of Christian Theosophical Society at which
Gilbert lectured on "How Theosophy appears to a Christian." He was
very good. Herbert Burrows vigorously attacked him in debate
afterwards . . . _Napoleon of Notting Hill_ was published.
April 27th. The Bellocs and the Noels came here to dinner. Hilaire
in great form recited his own poetry with great enthusiasm the whole
evening . . .
May 9th. the Literary Fund Dinner. About the greatest treat I ever
had in my life. J. M. Barrie presided. He was so splendid and so
complimentary. Mrs. J. M. Barrie is very pretty, but the most
beautiful woman there was Mrs. Anthony Hope--copper coloured hair,
masses, with a wreath of gardenias--green eyes--and a long neck, very
beautiful figure. The speakers were Barrie, Lord Tennyson, Comyns
Carr, A. E. W. Mason, Mrs. Craigie (who acquitted herself
wonderfully) and Mrs. Flora Annie Steel. After the formal dinner was
a reception at which everyone was very friendly. It is wonderful the
way in which they all accept Gilbert, and one well-known man told me
he was the biggest man present. Anyhow there was the feeling of
brotherhood and fellowship in the wielding of "the lovely and
loathely pen" (J. M. Barrie's speech).
May 12th. Went to see Max Beerbohm's caricature of Gilbert at the
Carfax Gallery. "G.K.C.--humanist--kissing the World." It's more like
Thackeray, very funny though.
June 9th. A political "at home" at Mrs. Sidney Webb's--saw Winston
Churchill and Lloyd George. Politics and nothing but politics is dull
work though, and an intriguer's life must be a pretty poor affair.
Mrs. Sidney Webb looked very handsome and moved among her guests as
one to the manner born. I like Mrs. Leonard Courtenay who is always
kind to me. Charlie Masterman and I had a long talk on the iniquities
of the "Daily News" and goodness knows they are serious enough.
June 22nd. An "at home" at Mrs. ----'s proved rather a dull affair
save for a nice little conversation with Watts Dunton. His walrusy
appearance which makes the bottom of his face look fierce, is
counteracted by the kindness of his little eyes. He told us the inner
story of Whistler's "Peacock Room" which scarcely redounds to
Whistler's credit. The Duchess of Sutherland was there and many
notabilities. Between ourselves Mr. ---- is a good-hearted snob. His
wife nice, intelligent, but affected (I suppose unconsciously). I
don't really like the "precious people." They worry me.
June 30th. Graham Robertson's "at home" was exceedingly select. I
felt rather too uncultivated to talk much. Mr. Lane tucked his arm
into mine and requested to know the news which means, "tell me all
your husband is doing, or going to do, how much is he getting, who
will publish for him, has he sold his American rights, etc." Cobden's
three daughters looked out of place, so solid and sincere are they.
It was all too grand. No man ought to have so much wealth.
July 5th. Gilbert went today to see Swinburne--I think he found it
rather hard to reconcile the idea with the man, but he was
interested, though I could not gather much about the visit. He was
amused at the compliments which Watts Dunton and Swinburne pay to
each other unceasingly.
December 8th. George Alexander has an idea that he wants Gilbert to
write a play for him, and sent for him to come and see him. He was
apparently taken with the notion of a play on the Crusades, and
although there is at present no love incident in Gilbert's mind,
Alexander introduced and acted the supposed love scene with great
spirit. It may come off some day perhaps.
December 31st. H. Belloc's been very ill but is better, thank God.
1905
Feb. 1st. Gilbert, a guest at the "Eighty Club" dinner. Rhoda and I
went to after dinner speeches. G. W. E. Russell (Chair). Augustine
Birrell guest and Sir Henry Fowler. It amused me hugely. Russell so
imprudent and reckless, Birrell so prudent and incapable of giving
himself away, Sir Henry Fowler so commonplace and trite. He looked so
wicked. I thought of Mr. Haldane's story of Fowler's fur coat and his
single remark on examining it: "skunk."
Feb. 11th. Rather an interesting lunch at Mrs. J. R. Green's. Jack
Yeats and Mrs. Thursby were there. The atmosphere is too political
and I imagine Mrs. Green to be a bit of a wire-puller, though I
believe a nice woman.
Feb. 24th. Mr. Halliwell Sutcliffe came over. He is amusing and
nice. Very puzzled at Gilbert's conduct, which on this particular
occasion was peculiarly eccentric.
March 9th. I had an amusing lunch at the Hotel Cecil with Miss
Bisland (representative of McClure). Evidently thinks a lot of
Gilbert and wants his work for McClure. O ye gods and little fishes!
The diplomatic service ought to be all conducted by women. I offered
her Margaret's poems in exchange for a short interview with Meredith
which she wishes Gilbert to undertake.
March 14th. Gilbert dined at the Buxtons, met Asquith.
March 19th. Lienie is in town and we have been with her to call on
the Duchess of Sutherland. When I had got used to the splendour it
was jolly enough. Her Grace is a pretty, sweet woman who was very
nervous, but got better under the fire of Gilbert's chaff. She made
him write in her album which he did, a most ridiculous poem of which
he should be ashamed. It must be truly awful to live in the sort of
way the Duchess does and endeavour to keep sane.
May 20th. Words fail me when I try to recall the sensation aroused
by a J.D.C. dinner. It seems so odd to think of these men as boys, to
realize what their school life was and what a powerful element the
J.D.C. was in the lives of all. And there were husbands and wives,
and the tie so strong, and the long, long thoughts of schoolboys and
schoolgirls fell on us, as if the battle were still to come instead
of raging round us.
May 24th. We went together to see George Meredith. I suppose many
people have seen him in his little Surrey Cottage; Flint Cottage,
Boxhill. He has a wonderful face and a frail old body. He talks
without stopping except to drink ginger-beer. He told us many
stories, mostly about society scandals of some time back. I remember
he asked Gilbert, "Do you like babies?" and when Gilbert said, "Yes,"
he said "So do I, especially in the comet stage."
June 5th. Granville Barker came to see Gilbert, touching the
possibility of a play.
June 29th. A garden party at the Bishop's House, Kennington. The
Bishop told me that A. J. Balfour was very impressed with "Heretics."
Guild of St. Matthew Service and rowdy supper. Gilbert made an
excellent speech.
July 5th. Gilbert dined at the Asquiths; met Rosebery. I think he
hated it.
July 16th. Gilbert went to see Mrs. Grenfell at Taplow. He met
Balfour, Austen Chamberlain and George Wyndham. Had an amusing time,
no doubt. Says Balfour is most interesting to talk to but appears
bored. George Wyndham is delightful.
One felt always with both Frances and Gilbert that this society life
stayed on the surface--amusing, distracting, sometimes welcome,
sometimes boring--but never infringing the deeper reality of their
relationships with old friends, with their own families, with each
other. Frances wrote endless business and other letters for them
both: in just a handful, mainly to Father O'Connor, does she show her
deeper life of thought and feeling. Gilbert had little time now for
writing anything but books and articles. Never a very good
correspondent he had become an exceedingly bad one. Annie Firmin's
engagement to Robert Kidd produced one of the few letters that exist.
It is handwritten and undated.
A Restaurant somewhere.
MY DEAR ANNIE,
I have thought of you, I am quite certain, more often than I have
of any human being for a long time past--except my wife who recalls
herself continually to me by virtues, splendours, agreeable memories,
screams, pokers, brickbats and other things. And yet, though whenever
my mind was for an instant emptied of theology and journalism and
patriotism and such rot, it has been immediately filled with you, I
have never written you a line.
I am not going to explain this and for a good reason. It is a part
of the Mystery of the Male, and you will soon, even if you do not
already, get the hang of it, by the society of an individual who
while being unmistakably a much better man than I am, is nevertheless
male. I can only say that when men want a thing they act quite
differently to women. We put off everything we want to do, in the
ordinary way. If the Archangel Michael wrote me a complimentary
letter tomorrow (as perhaps he may) I should put it in my pocket,
saying, "How admirable a reply shall I write to that in a week or a
month or so." I put off writing to you because I wanted to write
something that had in it all that you have been, to me, to all of us.
And now instead I am scrawling this nonsense in a tavern after lunch.
My very dear old friend, I am of a sex that very seldom takes real
trouble, that forgets the little necessities of time, that is by
nature lazy. I never wanted really but one thing in my life and that
I got. Any person inspecting 60 Overstrand Mansions may see that
somewhat excitable thing--free of charge. In another person, whom
with maddening jealousy I suspect of being some inches taller than I
am, I believe I notice the same tendency towards monomania. He also,
being as I have so keenly pointed out, male, he also--I think has
only wanted one thing seriously in his life. He also has got it:
another male weakness which I recognize with sympathy.
All my reviewers call me frivolous. Do you think all this kind of
thing frivolous? Damn it all (excuse me) what can one be but
frivolous about serious things? Without frivolity they are simply too
tremendous. That you, who, with your hair down your back, played at
bricks with me in a house of which I have no memory except you and
the bricks, that you should be taken by someone of my miserable
sex--as you ought to be--what is one to say? I am not going to wish
you happiness, because I am quite placidly certain that your
happiness is inevitable. I know it because my wife is happy with me
and the wild, weird, extravagant, singular origin of this is a
certain enduring fact in my psychology which you will find paralleled
elsewhere.
God bless you, my dear girl.
Yours ever,
GILBERT CHESTERTON.
Married in 1903, Annie and her husband took another flat in
Overstrand Mansions.
"Gilbert never cared what he wore," she writes. "I remember one night
when my husband and I were living in the same block of flats he came
in to ask me to go and sit with Frances who wasn't very well, while
he went down to the House to dine with Hugh Law--Gilbert was very
correctly dressed except for the fact that he had on one boot and one
slipper! I pointed it out to him, and he said: 'Do you think it
matters?' I told him I was sure Frances would not like him to go out
like that--the only argument to affect him! When he was staying with
me here in Vancouver, Dorothy Collins had to give him the once-over
before he went lecturing--they had left Frances in Palos Verdes as
she wasn't well."
In 1904, were published a monograph on Watts, _The Napoleon of
Notting Hill_, and an important chapter in a composite book, _England
a Nation_.
The _Watts_ is among the results of Gilbert's art studies. Its
reviewers admired it somewhat in the degree of their admiration
for the painter. But for a young man at that date to have seen the
principles of art he lays down meant rare vision. The portrait-painter,
he says, is trying to express the reality of the man himself but
"he is not above taking hints from the book of life with its
quaint old woodcuts." G.K. makes us see all the painter could have
thought or imagined as he sets us before "Mammon" or "Jonah" or
"Hope" and bids us read their legend and note the texture and lines
of the painting. His distinction between the Irish mysticism of Yeats
and the English mysticism of Watts is especially valuable, and the
book, perhaps even more than the _Browning_ or the _Dickens_,
manifests Gilbert's insight into the mind of the last generation. The
depths and limitations of the Victorian outlook may be read in _G. F.
Watts_.
The story of the writing of _The Napoleon_ was told me in part by
Frances, while part appeared in an interview* given by Gilbert, in
which he called it his first important book:
[* Quoted in _Chesterton_, by Cyril Clemens, pp. 16-17.]
I was "broke"--only ten shillings in my pocket. Leaving my worried
wife, I went down Fleet Street, got a shave, and then ordered for
myself, at the Cheshire Cheese, an enormous luncheon of my favourite
dishes and a bottle of wine. It took my all, but I could then go to
my publishers fortified. I told them I wanted to write a book and
outlined the story of "Napoleon of Notting Hill." But I must have
twenty pounds, I said, before I begin.
"We will send it to you on Monday."
"If you want the book," I replied, "you will have to give it to me
today as I am disappearing to write it." They gave it.
Frances meanwhile sat at home thinking, as she told me, hard thoughts
of his disappearance with their only remaining coin. And then
dramatically he appeared with twenty golden sovereigns and poured
them into her lap. Referring to this incident later, Gilbert said,
"What a fool a man is, when he comes to the last ditch, not to spend
the last farthing to satisfy the inner man before he goes out to
fight a battle with wits." But it was his way to let the money
shortage become acute and then deal with it abruptly. Frank
Swinnerton relates that when, as a small boy, he was working for J.
M. Dent, Gilbert appeared after office hours with a Dickens preface
but refused to leave it because Swinnerton, the only soul left in the
place, could not give him the agreed remuneration.
The _Napoleon_ is the story of a war between the London suburbs, and
grew largely from his meditations on the Boer War. Besides being the
best of his fantastic stories, it contains the most picturesque
account of Chesterton's social philosophy that he ever gave. But it
certainly puzzled some of the critics. One American reviewer feels
that he might have understood the book if he "had an intimate
knowledge of the history of the various boroughs of London and of
their present-day characteristics." Others treat the story as a mere
joke, and many feel that it is a bad descent after the _Browning_.
"Too infernally clever for anything," says one.
Auberon Quin, King of England, chosen by lot (as are all kings and
all other officials by the date of this story, which is a romance of
the future), is one of the two heroes of this book. He is simply a
sense of humour incarnate. His little elfish face and figure was
recognised by old Paulines as suggested by a form master of their
youth; but by the entire reviewing world as Max Beerbohm. The
illustrations by Graham Robertson were held to be unmistakably Max.
Frances notes in her diary:
A delightful dinner party at the Lanes. . . . The talk was mostly
about _Napoleon_. Max took me in to dinner and was really nice. He is
a good fellow. His costume was extraordinary. Why should an evening
waistcoat have four large white pearl buttons and why should he look
that peculiar shape? He seems only pleased at the way he has been
identified with King Auberon. "All right, my dear chap," he said to
G., who was trying to apologize. "Mr. Lane and I settled it all at a
lunch." I think he was a little put out at finding no red carpet put
down for his royal feet and we had quite a discussion as to whether
he ought to precede me into the dining room. Graham Robertson was on
my left. He was jolly too, kept on producing wonderful rings and
stones out of his pockets. He said he wished he could go about
covered in the pieces of a chandelier. The other guests were lady
Seton, Mrs. W. K. Clifford, Mr. W. W. Howells and his daughter (too
Burne-Jonesy to be really attractive), Mr. Taylor (police
magistrate), and Mrs. Eichholz (Mrs. Lane's mother) who is more
beautiful than anything except a wee baby. In fact, she looks exactly
like one, so dainty and small. She can never at any time have been as
pretty as she is now.
Gilbert and Max and I drove to his house (Max's), where he basely
enticed us in. He gave me fearful preserved fruits which ruined my
dress--but he made himself very entertaining. Home 1.30.
Caring for nothing in the world but a joke, King Auberon decrees that
the dull and respectable London boroughs shall be given city guards
in resplendent armour, each borough to have its own coat of arms, its
city walls, tocsin, and the like. The idea is taken seriously by the
second hero, Adam Wayne of Notting Hill, an enthusiast utterly
lacking any sense of humour, who goes to war with the other boroughs
of London to protect a small street which they have designed to pull
down in the interests of commercial development. Pimlico, Kensington
and the rest attack Notting Hill. Men bleed and die in the contest
and by the magic of the sword the old ideas of local patriotism and
beauty in civic life return to England. The conventional politician,
Barker, who begins the story in a frock-coat and irreproachable silk
hat, ends it clad in purple and gold.
When Notting Hill, become imperial minded, goes down to destruction
in a sea of blood, Auberon Quin confesses to Wayne that this whole
story, so full of human tragedy and hopes and fears, had been merely
the outcome of a joke. To him all life was a joke, to Wayne an epic;
and this antagonism between the humorist and the fanatic has created
the whole wild story. Wayne has the last word:
"I know of something that will alter that antagonism, something
that is outside us, something that you and I have all our lives
perhaps taken too little account of. The equal and eternal human
being will alter that antagonism, for the human being sees no real
antagonism between laughter and respect, the human being, the common
man, whom mere geniuses like you and me can only worship like a god.
When dark and dreary days come, you and I are necessary, the pure
fanatic, the pure satirist. We have between us remedied a great
wrong. We have lifted the modern cities into that poetry which every
one who knows mankind knows to be immeasurably more common than the
commonplace. But in healthy people there is no war between us. We are
but the two lobes of the brain of a ploughman. Laughter and love are
everywhere. The cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are
full of blasphemous grotesques. The mother laughs continually at the
child, the lover laughs continually at the lover, the wife at the
husband, the friend at the friend. Auberon Quin, we have been too
long separated; let us go out together. You have a halberd and I a
sword, let us start our wanderings over the world. For we are its two
essentials. Come, it is already day."
In the blank white light Auberon hesitated a moment. Then he made
the formal salute with his halberd, and they went away together into
the unknown world.
This is very important to the understanding of Chesterton. With him,
profound gravity and exuberant fooling were always intermingled and
some of his deepest thoughts are conveyed by a pun. He always claimed
to be intensely serious while hating to be solemn and it was a
mixture apt to be misunderstood. If gravity and humour are the two
lobes of the average man's brain, the average man does not bring them
into play simultaneously to anything like the extent that Chesterton
did.
Auberon Quin and Adam Wayne are the most living individuals in any of
his novels--just because they are the two lobes of his brain
individualised. All his stories abound in adventure, are admirable in
their vivid descriptions of London or the countryside of France or
England seen in fantastic visions. They are living in the portrayal
of ideas by the road of argument. But the characters are chiefly
energies through whose lips Gilbert argues with Gilbert until some
conclusion shall be reached.
In 1905 came _The Club of Queer Trades_--least good of the
fantasia--and even admirers have begun to wonder if too many fields
are being tried; in 1906, _Dickens_ and _Heretics_.
It will remain a moot point whether the _Browning_ or the _Dickens_
is Chesterton's best work of literary criticism. The _Dickens_ is the
more popular, largely because Dickens is the more popular author.
Most Dickens idolators read anything about their idol if only for the
pleasure of the quotations. And no Dickens idolator could fail to
realise that here was one even more rapt in worship than himself.
After the publication of _Charles Dickens_, Chesterton undertook a
series of prefaces to the novels. In one of them he took the trouble
to answer one only of the criticisms the book had produced: the
comment that he was reading into the work of Dickens something that
Dickens did not mean.
Criticism does not exist to say about authors the things that they
knew themselves. It exists to say the things about them which they
did not know themselves. If a critic says that the _Iliad_ has a
pagan rather than a Christian pity, or that it is full of pictures
made by one epithet, of course he does not mean that Homer could have
said that. If Homer could have said that the critic would leave Homer
to say it. The function of criticism, if it has a legitimate function
at all, can only be one function--that of dealing with the
subconscious part of the author's mind which only the critic can
express, and not with the conscious part of the author's mind, which
the author himself can express. Either criticism is no good at all (a
very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an
author the very things that would have made him jump out of his
boots.*
[* Introduction to "Old Curiosity Shop." Reprinted in _Criticisms and
Appreciations of the Works of Charles Dickens_, 1933 ed. pp. 51-2.]
He attended not at all to the crop of comments on his inaccuracies.
One reviewer pointed out that Chesterton had said that every postcard
Dickens wrote was a work of art; but Dickens died on June 9th, 1870
and the first British postcard was issued on October 1st, 1870. "A
wonderful instance of Dickens's never-varying propensity to keep
ahead of his age." After all, what did such things matter? Bernard
Shaw, however, felt that they did. He wrote a letter from which I
think Gilbert got an important hint, utilized later in his
introduction to _David Copperfield:_
6th September, 1906.
DEAR G.K.C.
As I am a supersaturated Dickensite, I pounced on your book and
read it, as Wegg read Gibbon and other authors, right slap through.
In view of a second edition, let me hastily note for you one or two
matters. First and chiefly, a fantastic and colossal howler in the
best manner of Mrs. Nickleby and Flora Finching.
There is an association in your mind (well founded) between the
quarrel over Dickens's determination to explain his matrimonial
difficulty to the public, and the firm of Bradbury and Evans. There
is also an association (equally well founded) between B. & E. and
Punch. They were the publishers of Punch. But to gravely tell the XX
century that Dickens wanted to publish his explanation in Punch is
gas and gaiters carried to an incredible pitch of absurdity. The
facts are: B. & E. were the publishers of Household Words. They
objected to Dickens explaining in H.W. He insisted. They said that in
that case they must take H.W. out of his hands. Dickens, like a lion
threatened with ostracism by a louse in his tail, published his
explanation, which stands to this day, and informed his readers that
they were to ask in future, not for Household Words, but for All the
Year Round. Household Words, left Dickensless, gasped for a few weeks
and died. All the Year Round, in exactly the same format, flourished
and entered largely into the diet of my youth.
* * * * *
There is a curious contrast between Dickens's sentimental
indiscretions concerning his marriage and his sorrows and quarrels,
and his impenetrable reserve about himself as displayed in his
published correspondence. He writes to his family about waiters,
about hotels, about screeching tumblers of hot brandy and water, and
about the seasick man in the next berth, but never one really
intimate word, never a real confession of his soul. David Copperfield
is a failure as an autobiography because when he comes to deal with
the grown-up David, you find that he has not the slightest intention
of telling you the truth--or indeed anything--about himself. Even the
child David is more remarkable for the reserves than for the
revelations: he falls back on fiction at every turn. Clennam and Pip
are the real autobiographies.
I find that Dickens is at his greatest after the social awakening
which produced _Hard Times_. Little Dorrit is an enormous work. The
change is partly the disillusion produced by the unveiling of
capitalist civilization, but partly also Dickens's discovery of the
gulf between himself as a man of genius and the public. That he did
not realize this early is shown by the fact that he found out his
wife _before he married her_ as much too small for the job, and yet
plumbed the difference so inadequately that he married her thinking
he could go through with it. When the situation became intolerable,
he must have faced the fact that there was something more than
"incompatibilities" between him and the average man and woman. Little
Dorrit is written, like all the later books, frankly and somewhat
sadly, _de haut en bas_. In them Dickens recognizes that quite
everyday men are as grotesque as Bunsby. Sparkler, one of the most
extravagant of all his gargoyles, is an untouched photograph almost.
Wegg and Riderhood are sinister and terrifying because they are
simply real, which Squeers and Sikes are not. And please remark that
whilst Squeers and Sikes have their speeches written with anxious
verisimilitude (comparatively) Wegg says, "Man shrouds and grapple,
Mr. Venus, or she dies," and Riderhood describes Lightwood's sherry
(when retracting his confession) as, "I will not say a hocussed wine,
but a wine as was far from 'elthy for the mind." Dickens doesn't care
what he makes Wegg or Riderhood or Sparkler or Mr. F's aunt say,
because he knows them and has got them, and knows what matters and
what doesn't. Fledgeby, Lammle, Jerry Cruncher, Trabbs's boy, Wopsle,
etc. etc. are human beings as seen by a master. Swiveller and
Mantalini are human beings as seen by Trabbs's boy. Sometimes
Trabbs's boy has the happier touch. When I am told that young John
Chivery (whose epitaphs you ignore whilst quoting Mrs. Sapsea's)
would have gone barefoot through the prison against rules for little
Dorrit had it been paved with red hot ploughshares, I am not so
affected by his chivalry as by Swiveller's exclamation when he gets
the legacy--"For she (the Marchioness) shall walk in silk attire and
siller hae to spare." Edwin Drood is no good, in spite of the stone
throwing boy, Buzzard and Honeythunder. Dickens was a dead man before
he began it. Collins corrupted him with plots. And oh! the
Philistinism; the utter detachment from the great human heritage of
art and philosophy! Why not a sermon on that?
G.B.S.
Note in the Introduction to _David Copperfield_ what G.K. says as to
the break between the two halves of the book. He calls it an instance
of weariness in Dickens--a solitary instance. Is not Shaw's
explanation at once fascinating and probable?
Kate Perugini, the daughter of Dickens, wrote two letters of immense
enthusiasm about the book saying it was the best thing written about
her father since Forster's biography. But she shatters the theory put
forth by Chesterton that Dickens thrown into intimacy with a large
family of girls fell in love with them all and happened unluckily to
marry the wrong sister. At the time of the marriage her mother, the
eldest of the sisters, was only eighteen, Mary between fourteen and
fifteen "very young and childish in appearance," Georgina eight and
Helen three! Nothing could better illustrate the clash between
enthusiasm and despair that fills a Chestertonian while reading any
of his literary biographies. For so much is built on this theory
which the slightest investigation would have shown to be baseless.
_Heretics_ aroused animosity in many minds. Dealing with Browning or
Dickens a man may encounter literary prejudices or enthusiasms, but
there is not the intensity of feeling that he finds when he gets into
the field with his own contemporaries. Reviewers who had been
extending a friendly welcome to a beginner found that beginner
attacking landmarks in the world of letters, venturing to detest
Ibsen and to ask William Archer whether he hung up his stocking on
Ibsen's birthday, accusing Kipling of lack of patriotism. It is, said
one angrily, "unbecoming to spend most of his time criticising his
contemporaries." "His sense of mental perspective is an extremely
deficient one." "The manufacture of paradoxes is really one of the
simplest processes conceivable." "Mr. Chesterton's sententious
wisdom."
In fact it was like the scene in _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_ when
most people present were purple with anger but an intellectual few
were purple with laughter. And even now most of the reviewers seemed
not to understand where G.K. stood or what was his philosophy.
"Bernard Shaw," says one, "whom _as a disciple_* he naturally
exalts." This, after a series of books in which G.K. had exposed,
with perfect lucidity and a wealth of examples, a view of life
differing from Shaw's in almost every particular. One reviewer
clearly discerned the influence of Shaw in _The Napoleon of Notting
Hill_, "but without a trace of Shaw's wonderful humour and
perspicacity."
[* Italics mine.]
Belloc's approval was hearty. He wrote:
I am delighted with what I have read in the _Daily Mail_. Hit them
again. Hurt them. Continue to binge and accept my blessing. Give them
hell. It is the only book of yours I have read right through. Which
shows that I don't read anything. Which is true enough. This letter
is written in the style of Herbert Paul. Continue to bang them about.
You did wrong not to come to the South coast. Margate is a fraud.
What looks like sea in front of it is really a bank with hardly any
water over it. I stuck on it once in the year 1904 so I know all
about it. Moreover the harbour at Margate is not a real harbour.
Ramsgate round the corner has a real harbour on the true sea. In both
towns are citizens not averse to bribes. Do not fail to go out in a
boat on the last of the ebb as far as the Long Nose. There you will
see the astonishing phenomenon of the tide racing down the North
Foreland three hours before it has turned in the estuary of the
Thames, which you at Margate foolishly believe to be the sea. Item no
one in Margate can cook.
Gilbert was not really concerned in this book to bang his
contemporaries about so much as to study their mistakes and so
discover what was wrong with modern thought. Shaw, George Moore,
Ibsen, Wells, The Mildness of the Yellow Press, Omar and the Sacred
Vine, Rudyard Kipling, Smart novelists and the Smart Set, Joseph
McCabe and a Divine Frivolity--the collection was a heterogeneous
one. And in the introduction the author tells us he is not concerned
with any of these men as a brilliant artist or a vivid personality,
but "as a Heretic--that is to say a man whose view of things has the
hardihood to differ from mine . . . as a man whose philosophy is
quite solid, quite coherent and quite wrong. I revert to the
doctrinal methods of the thirteenth century, inspired by the general
hope of getting something done."
In _England a Nation_ and even more in the study of Kipling in this
book there is one touch of inconsistency which we shall meet with
again in his later work. He hated Imperialism yet he glorified
Napoleon; himself ardently patriotic he accused Kipling of lack of
patriotism on the ground that a man could not at once love England
and love the Empire. For there was a curious note in the
anti-Imperialism of the Chesterbelloc that has not always been
recognised. The ordinary anti-Imperialist holds that England has no
right to govern an Empire and that her leadership is bad for the
other dominions. But the Chesterbelloc view was that the Dominions
were inferior and unworthy of a European England. The phrase "suburbs
of England" (quoted in a later chapter) was typical. But Kipling was
thrilled by those suburbs and Chesterton, who had as a boy admired
Kipling, attacks him in _Heretics_ for lack of patriotism. _Puck of
Pook's Hill_ was not yet written, but like Kipling's poem on Sussex
it expressed a patriotism much akin to Gilbert's own. Remember the
man who returned from the South African veldt to be the Squire's
gardener--"Me that have done what I've done, Me that have seen what
I've seen"--that man, with eyes opened to a sense of his own tragedy,
was speaking for Chesterton's people of England who "have not spoken
yet." Yes, they have spoken through the mouth of English genius: as
Langland's Piers Plowman, as Dickens's Sam Weller, but not least as
Kipling's Tommy Atkins. It was a pity Chesterton was deaf to this
last voice. With a better understanding of Kipling he might in turn
have made Kipling understand what was needed to make England "Merrie
England" once again, have given him the philosophy that should make
his genius fruitful.
For the huge distinction between Chesterton and most of his
contemporaries lay not in the wish to get something done but in the
conviction that the right philosophy alone could produce fruitful
action. A parable in the Introduction shows the point at which his
thinking had arrived.
Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something,
let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull
down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is
approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of
the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value
of Light. If Light be in itself good." At this point he is somewhat
excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post,
the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about
congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as
things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled
the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some
because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness,
because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a
lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash
municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And
there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So,
gradually and inevitably, today, tomorrow, or the next day, there
comes back the conviction that the monk was Right after all, that all
depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have
discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.*
[* _Heretics_, pp. 22-3.]
Every year during this time at Battersea, the press books reveal an
increasing flood of engagements. Gilbert lectures for the New Reform
Club on "political watchwords," for the Midland Institute on "Modern
Journalism," for the Men's Meeting of the South London Central
Mission on "Brass Bands," for the London Association of Correctors of
the Press at the Trocadero, for the C.S.U. at Church Kirk,
Accrington, at the Men's Service in the Colchester Moot Hall. He
debates at the St. German's Literary Society, maintaining "that the
most justifiable wars are the religious wars"; opens the Anti-Puritan
League at the Shaftesbury Club, speaks for the Richmond and Kew
branch of the P.N.E.U. on "The Romantic Element in Morality," for the
Ilkley P.S.A., on "Christianity and Materialism," and so on without
end. All these are on a few pages of his father's collection,
interspersed with clippings recording articles in reviews
innumerable, introductions to books, interviews and controversies.
There was almost no element of choice in these engagements. G.K. was
intensely good-natured and hated saying No. He was the lion of the
moment and they all wanted him to roar for them. In spite of the
large heading, "Lest we forget," that met his eye daily in the
drawing-room, he did forget a great deal--in fact, friends say he
forgot any engagement made when Frances was not present to write it
down directly it was made. She had to do memory and all the practical
side of life for him. There might have been one slight chance of
making Gilbert responsible in these matters--that chance was given to
his parents and by them thrown away. How far it is even possible to
groom and train a genius is doubtful: anyhow no attempt was made.
Waited on hand and foot by his mother, never made to wash or brush
himself as a child, personally conducted to the tailor as he grew
older, given by his parents no money for which to feel responsible,
not made to keep hours--how could Frances take a man of twenty-seven,
and make him over again?
But there is, of course, a most genuine difficulty in all this, which
Gilbert once touched on when he denied the accusation of absence of
mind. It was, he claimed, presence of mind--on his thoughts--that
made him unaware of much else. And indeed no man can be using his
mind furiously in every direction at once. Anyone who has done even a
little creative work, anyone even who has lived with people who do
creative work, knows the sense of bewilderment with which the mind
comes out of the world of remoter but greater reality and tries to
adjust with that daily world in which meals are to be ordered,
letters answered, and engagements kept. What must this pain of
adjustment not have been to a mind almost continuously creative? For
I have never known anyone work such long hours with a mind at such
tension as Gilbert's.
There was no particular reason why he should have written his article
for the _Daily News_ as the reporter writes his--at top speed at a
late hour--but he usually did. The writing of it was left till the
last minute and, if at home, he would need Frances to get it off for
him before the deadline was reached. But he often wrote by preference
in Fleet Street--at the Cheshire Cheese or some little pub where
journalists gathered--and then he would hire a cab to take the
article a hundred yards or so to the _Daily News_ office.
The cab in those days was the hansom with its two huge wheels over
which one perilously ascended, while the driver sat above, only to be
communicated with by opening a sort of trap door in the roof. Gilbert
once said that the imaginative Englishman in Paris would spend his
days in a café, the imaginative Frenchman in London would spend his
driving in a hansom. In the _Napoleon_, the thought of the cab moves
him to write:
Poet whose cunning carved this amorous cell
Where twain may dwell.
E. V. Lucas, his daughter tells us, used to say that if one were
invited to drive with Gilbert in a hansom cab it would have to be two
cabs: but this is not strictly true. For in those days I drove with
Gilbert and Frances too in a hansom--he and I side by side, she on
his knee. We must have given to the populace the impression he says
any hansom would give on first view to an ancient Roman or a simple
barbarian--that the driver riding on high and flourishing his whip
was a conqueror carrying off his helpless victims.
Like the "buffers" at the Veneering election, he spent much of his
time "taking cabs and getting about"--or not even getting about in
them, but leaving them standing at the door for hours on end. Calling
on one publisher he placed in his hands a letter that gave excellent
reasons why he could not keep the engagement! The memory so admirable
in literary quotations was not merely unreliable for engagements but
even for such matters as street numbers and addresses. Edward
Macdonald, who worked with him later, on _G.K.'s Weekly_, relates how
some months after the paper had changed its address he failed one day
to turn up at a board meeting.
Finally he appeared with an explanation. On calling a taxi at
Marylebone he realized that he could not give the address, so he told
the driver to take him to Fleet Street. There as his memory still
refused to help, he stopped the taxi outside a tea-shop, left it
there while he was inside, and ordering a cup of tea began to turn
out all his pockets in the hope of finding a letter or a proof
bearing the address. Then as no clue could be found, he told the
driver to take him to a bookstall that stocked the paper. At the
first and second he drew blanks but at the third bought a copy of his
own paper and thus discovered the address.
I am not sure at what date he began to hate writing anything by hand.
My mother treasured two handwritten letters. I have none after a
friendship of close on thirty years. But I remember on his first
visit to my parents' home in Surrey his calling Frances that he might
dictate an article to her. His writing was pictorial and rather
elaborate. "He drew his signature rather than writing it," says
Edward Macdonald, who remembers him saying as he signed a cheque:
"'With many a curve my banks I fret.' I wonder if Tennyson fretted
his." At one of our earliest meetings I asked him to write in my
Autograph Book. It was at least five years before the _Ballad of the
White Horse_ appeared, but the lines may be found almost unchanged in
the ballad:
VERSES MADE UP IN A DREAM
(which you won't believe)
People, if you have any prayers
Say prayers for me.
And bury me underneath a stone
In the stones of Battersea.
Bury me underneath a stone,
With the sword that was my own;
To wait till the holy horn is blown
And all poor men are free.
The dream went on, he said, for pages and pages. And I think Frances
was anxious, for the mind must find rest in sleep.
The little flat at Battersea was a vortex of requests and
engagements, broken promises and promises fulfilled, author's ink and
printer's ink, speeches in prospect and speeches in memory, meetings
and social occasions. A sincere admirer wrote during this period of
his fears of too great a strain on his hero--and from 1904 to 1908
the only change was an increase of pressure:
I see that Chesterton has just issued a volume on the art of G. F.
Watts. His novel was published yesterday. Soon his monograph on
Kingsley should be ready. I believe he has a book on some modern
aspects of religious belief in the press. He is part-editor of the
illustrated Booklets on great authors issued by the Bookman. He is
contributing prefaces and introductions to odd volumes in several
series of reprints. He is a constant contributor to the _Daily News_
and the _Speaker_; he is conducting a public controversy with
Blatchford of the _Clarion_ on atheism and free-thinking; he is
constantly lecturing and debating and dining out; it is almost
impossible to open a paper that does not contain either an article or
review or poem or drawing of his, and his name is better known now to
compositors than Bernard Shaw.
Now, both physically and mentally Chesterton is a Hercules, and
from what I hear of his methods of work he is capable of a great
output without much physical strain; nevertheless, it is clear, I
think to anyone that at his present rate of production he must either
wear or tear. No man born can keep so many irons in the fire and not
himself come between the hammer and the anvil. It is a pitiable thing
to have a good man spend himself so recklessly; and I repeat once
more that if he and his friends have not the will or power to
restrain him, then there should be a conspiracy of editors and
publishers in his favour. Not often is a man like Chesterton born. He
should have his full chance. And that can only come by study and
meditation, and by slow, steady accumulation of knowledge and wisdom.*
[* Shan F. Bullock in the _Chicago Evening Post_, 9th April, 1906.]
In a volume made up of Introductions written at this time to
individual novels of Dickens, we find a passage that might well be
Gilbert's summary of his own life:
The calls upon him at this time were insistent and overwhelming;
this necessarily happens at a certain stage of a successful writer's
career. He was just successful enough to invite others and not
successful enough to reject them . . . there was almost too much work
for his imagination, and yet not quite enough work for his
housekeeping. . . . And it is a curious tribute to the quite curious
greatness of Dickens that in this period of youthful strain we do not
feel the strain but feel only the youth. His own amazing wish to
write equalled or outstripped even his readers' amazing wish to read.
Working too hard did not cure him of his abstract love of work.
Unreasonable publishers asked him to write ten novels at once; but he
wanted to write twenty novels at once.
Thus too with Gilbert. The first eight years of his married life saw
in swift succession the publication of ten books comprising literary
and art criticism and biography, poetry, fiction (or rather fantasy),
light essays and religious philosophy. All these were so full at once
of the profound seriousness of youth, and of the bubbling wine of its
high spirits, as to recall another thing Gilbert said: that Dickens
was "accused of superficiality by those who cannot grasp that there
is foam upon deep seas." That was the matter in dispute about
himself, and very furiously disputed it was during these years. Was
G.K. serious or merely posing, was he a great man or a mountebank,
was he clear or obscure, was he a genius or a charlatan? "Audacious
reconciliation," he pleaded--or rather asserted, for his tone could
seldom be called a plea, "is a mark not of frivolity but of extreme
seriousness."
A man who deals in harmonies, who only matches stars with angels,
or lambs with spring flowers, he indeed may be frivolous; for he is
taking one mood at a time, and perhaps forgetting each mood as it
passes. But a man who ventures to combine an angel and an octopus
must have some serious view of the universe. The man who should write
a dialogue between two early Christians might be a mere writer of
dialogues. But a man who should write a dialogue between an early
Christian and the Missing Link would have to be a philosopher. The
more widely different the types talked of, the more serious and
universal must be the philosophy which talks of them. The mark of the
light and thoughtless writer is the harmony of his subject matter;
the mark of the thoughtful writer is its apparent diversity. The most
flippant lyric poet might write a pretty poem about lambs; but it
requires something bolder and graver than a poet, it requires an
ecstatic prophet, to talk about the lion lylng down with the lamb.*
* G. K. Chesterton. _Criticisms and Appreciations of the World of
Charles Dickens_. Dent. 1933 pp. 68-9.
A man starting to write a thesis on Chesterton's sociology once
complained bitterly that almost none of his books were indexed, so
he had to submit to the disgusting necessity of reading them all
through, for some striking view on sociology might well be embedded
in a volume of art criticism or be the very centre of a fantastic
romance. Chesterton's was a philosophy universal and unified and it
was at this time growing fast and finding exceedingly varied
techniques of expression. But the whole of it was in a sense in each
of them--in each book, almost in each poem. As he himself says of the
universe of Charles Dickens, "there was something in it--there is in
all great creative writers--like the account in Genesis of the light
being created before the sun, moon and stars, the idea before the
machinery that made it manifest. Pickwick is in Dickens's career the
mere mass of light before the creation of sun or moon. It is the
splendid, shapeless substance of which all his stars are ultimately
made." And again, "He said what he had to say and yet not all he had
to say. Wild pictures, possible stories, tantalising and attractive
trains of thought, perspectives of adventure, crowded so continually
upon his mind that at the end there was a vast mass of them left
over, ideas that he literally had not the opportunity to develop,
tales that he literally had not the time to tell."
CHAPTER XII
Clearing the Ground for Orthodoxy
G. K. CHESTERTON: A CRITICISM (published anonymously in 1908) was a
challenge thrown to the world of letters, for it demanded the
recognition of Chesterton as a force to be reckoned with in the
modern world. As its title implied, the book was by no means a
tribute of sheer admiration and agreement. Gilbert was rebuked for
that love of a pun or an effective phrase that sometimes led him into
indefensible positions. It was hotly asked of him that he should
abandon his unjust attitude toward Ibsen. He was accused of calling
himself a Liberal and being in fact a Tory. But even in differing
from him the book showed him as of real importance, not least in the
sketch given of his life and of the influences that had contributed
to the formation of his mind. It did too another thing: it clarified
his philosophical position for the world at large. For some time now
many had been demanding such a clarification. When G.K. attacked the
Utopia of Wells and of Shaw, both Wells and Shaw had been urgent in
their demands that he should play fair by setting forth his own
Utopia. When he attacked the fundamental philosophy of G. S. Street,
Mr. Street retorted that it would be time for him to worry about his
philosophy when G.K.'s had been unfolded. (G.K.'s retort to this was
_Orthodoxy_!)
_G. K. Chesterton: a Criticism_--far the best book that has ever been
written about Chesterton--showed at last a mind that had really
grasped his philosophy and could even have outlined his Utopia.
Perhaps this was the less surprising as it ultimately turned out to
have been written by his brother Cecil.
I do not know at what stage Cecil revealed his authorship, but I
remember that at first Frances told me only that they suspected Cecil
because it was from the angle of his opinions that the book
criticised many of Gilbert's. However, I was at that date only an
acquaintance and the truth may still have been a family secret. At
any rate Cecil it was, and it is small wonder if after all those
years of arguing he understood something of the man with whom he had
been measuring forces. But he did better than that--for he explained
him to others without ever having resort to these arguments, which
after all were more or less private property. He explained G.K.'s
general philosophy from the _Napoleon_, his ideas of cosmic good from
_The Wild Knight_ and _The Man Who Was Thursday_, which had just been
published that same year, 1908.
In this last fantastic story the group of anarchists (distinguished
by being called after the days of the week) turn out, through a
series of incredible adventures to be, all save one, detectives in
disguise. The gigantic figure of Sunday before whom they all tremble
turns from the chief of the anarchists, chief of the destructive
forces, into--what? The sub-title, "A Nightmare," is needed, for
Sunday would seem to be some wild vision, seen in dreams, not merely
of forces of good, of sanity, of creation, but even of God Himself.
When, almost twenty years later, _The Man Who Was Thursday_ was
adapted for the stage,* Chesterton said in an interview:
[* By Ralph Neale and Mrs. Cecil Chesterton.]
In an ordinary detective tale the investigator discovers that some
amiable-looking fellow who subscribes to all the charities, and is
fond of animals, has murdered his grandmother, or is a trigamist. I
thought it would be fun to make the tearing away of menacing masks
reveal benevolence.
Associated with that merely fantastic notion was the one that there
is actually a lot of good to be discovered in unlikely places, and
that we who are fighting each other may be all fighting on the right
side. I think it is quite true that it is just as well we do not,
while the fight is on, know all about each other; the soul must be
solitary; or there would be no place for courage.
A rather amusing thing was said by Father Knox on this point. He
said that he should have regarded the book as entirely pantheist and
as preaching that there was good in everything if it had not been for
the introduction of the one real anarchist and pessimist. But he was
prepared to wager that if the book survives for a hundred years--which
it won't--they will say that the real anarchist was put in afterwards
by the priests.
But, though I was more foggy about ethical and theological matters
than I am now, I was quite clear on that issue; that there was a
final adversary, and that you might find a man resolutely turned away
from goodness.
People have asked me whom I mean by Sunday. Well, I think, on the
whole, and allowing for the fact that he is a person in a tale--I
think you can take him to stand for Nature as distinguished from God.
Huge, boisterous, full of vitality, dancing with a hundred legs,
bright with the glare of the sun, and at first sight, somewhat
regardless of us and our desires.
There is a phrase used at the end, spoken by Sunday: "Can ye drink
from the cup that I drink of?" which seems to mean that Sunday is
God. That is the only serious note in the book, the face of Sunday
changes, you tear off the mask of Nature and you find God.
Monsignor Knox* has called _The Man Who Was Thursday_ "an
extraordinary book, written as if the publisher had commissioned him
to write something rather like the Pilgrim's Progress in the style of
the Pickwick Papers"--which explains perhaps why some reviewers
called it irreverent. The very wildness of it conveys a sense of
thoughts seething and straining in an effort to express the
inexpressible. Later in his more definitely philosophical books G.K.
could say calmly much that here he splashes "on a ten leagued canvas
with brushes of comet's hair"--with all the violent directness of a
vision.
[* In the panegyric preached at Westminster Cathedral, June 27, 1936.]
Of that vision his brother began the interpretation in his
challenging book. Reactions were interesting, for even those who
wanted most ardently to say that Cecil's book should not have been
written found that it was necessary to say it loudly and to say it at
great length. Their very violence showed their sense of Chesterton as
a peril even when they abused anyone who felt him to be a portent. It
was not the kind of contempt that is really bestowed on the
contemptible.
The _Academy_ expended more than two columns saying;
We propose to deal with the quack and leave his sycophants and
lickspittles to themselves . . .
One skips him in his numerous corners of third and fourth rate
journals [e.g. _The Illustrated London News_, _The Bookman_, _Daily
News_!] and one avoids his books because they are always and
inevitably a bore.
Lancelot Bathurst had also dared to write of G.K. in his Daily life
as a journalist, so the article goes on:
Let us kneel with the Hon. Lancelot at his greasy burgundy-stained
shrine, what time the jingling hansom waits us with its rolling
occupant and his sword-stick and his revolver and his pockets stacked
with penny dreadfuls. . . .
The fact is we have in Mr. Chesterton the true product of the
deboshed hapenny press. . . . If the hapenny papers ceased to notice
him forthwith it seems to us more than probable that he would cease
at once to be of the highest importance in literary circles and the
Bishops and Members of Parliament who have honoured him with their
kind notice would be compelled to drop him. . . .
Most of the reviews were very different from this one, which is
certainly great fun (although some few other reviewers suggested
that Gilbert himself wrote the _Criticism_). I have wondered whether
the _Academy_ notices of his own books, all much like this, were
written by a personal enemy or merely by one of the "jolly people" as
he often called them who were maddened by his views.
For some years now Gilbert had been gathering in his mind the
material for _Orthodoxy_. Some of the ideas we have seen faintly
traced in the Notebook and _The Coloured Lands_, but they all grew to
maturity in the atmosphere of constant controversy. In a controversy
with the Rev. R. J. Campbell we see, for instance, his convictions
about the reality of sin shaping under our eyes. Discussing Modernism
in the _Nation_, he analyses the difference between the true
development of an idea and the mere changing from one idea to
another. Modernism claiming to be a development was actually an
abandonment of the Christian idea.
For the Catholic, this is among the most interesting of his
controversies. In the course of it he refers to "the earlier works of
Newman and the literature of the Oxford Movement" to support his view
of the Anglican position. I have already said that Chesterton read
far more than was usually supposed, because he read so quickly and
with so little parade of learning, and it has been too lightly
assumed that the statement in _Orthodoxy_ that he avoided works of
Christian Apologetic meant that he had not read any of the great
Christian writers of the past. True, he was not then or at any time
reading books of Apologetic. He must, however, have been reading
something more life-giving, as we learn from a single hint. Asked to
draw up a Scheme of Reading for 1908 in _G.K.'s Weekly_, he suggests
Butler's _Analogy_, Coleridge's _Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit_,
Newman's _Apologia_, St. Augustine's _Confessions_ and the _Summa_ of
St. Thomas Aquinas.
It was absurd, he said in this article, to suppose that the ancients
did not see our modern problems. The truth was that the great
ancients not only saw them, but saw through them. Butler had sketched
the "real line along which Christianity must ultimately be defended."
These great writers all remained modern, while the "New Theology"
takes one back to the time of crinolines. "I almost expect to see Mr.
R. J. Campbell in peg-top trousers, with very long side-whiskers."
In this controversy, although not yet a Catholic, he showed the gulf
between the Modernist theory of development and the Newman doctrine,
with a clarity greater than any Catholic writer of the time.
A man who is always going back and picking to pieces his own first
principles may be having an amusing time but he is not developing as
Newman understood development. Newman meant that if you wanted a tree
to grow you must plant it finally in some definite spot. It may be (I
do not know and I do not care) that Catholic Christianity is just now
passing through one of its numberless periods of undue repression and
silence. But I do know this, that when the great Powers break forth
again, the new epics and the new arts, they will break out on the
ancient and living tree. They cannot break out upon the little shrubs
that you are always pulling up by the roots to see if they are
growing.
Against R. J. Campbell he showed in a lecture on "Christianity and
Social Reform" how belief in sin as well as in goodness was more
favourable to social reform than was the rather woolly optimism that
refused to recognize evil. "The nigger-driver will be delighted to
hear that God is immanent in him. . . . The sweater that . . . he has
not in any way become divided from the supreme perfection of the
universe." If the New Theology would not lead to social reform, the
social Utopia to which the philosophy of Wells and of Shaw was
pointing seemed to Chesterton not a heaven on earth to be desired,
but a kind of final hell to be avoided, since it banished all freedom
and human responsibility. Arguing with them was again highly
fruitful, and two subjects he chose for speeches are suggestive--"The
Terror of Tendencies" and "Shall We Abolish the Inevitable?"
In the _New Age_ Shaw wrote about Belloc and Chesterton and so did
Wells, while Chesterton wrote about Wells and Shaw, till the
Philistines grew angry, called it self-advertisement and log-rolling
and urged that a Bill for the abolition of Shaw and Chesterton should
be introduced into Parliament. But G.K. had no need for advertisement
of himself or his ideas just then: he had a platform, he had an eager
audience. Every week he wrote in the _Illustrated London News_,
beginning in 1905 to do "Our Notebook" (this continued till his death
in 1936). He was still writing every Saturday in the _Daily News_.
Publishers were disputing for each of his books. Yet he rushed into
every religious controversy that was going on, because thereby he
could clarify and develop his ideas.
The most important of all these was the controversy with Blatchford,
Editor of the _Clarion_, who had written a rationalist Credo,
entitled _God and My Neighbour_. In 1903-4, he had the generosity and
the wisdom to throw open the _Clarion_ to the freest possible
discussion of his views. The Christian attack was made by a group of
which Chesterton was the outstanding figure, and was afterwards
gathered into a paper volume called _The Doubts of Democracy_.
One essay in this volume, written in 1903, is of primary importance
in any study of the sources of _Orthodoxy_, for it gives a brilliant
outline of one of the main contentions of the book and shows even
better than _Orthodoxy_ itself what he meant by saying that he had
first learnt Christianity from its opponents. It is clear that by now
he believed in the Divinity of Christ. The pamphlet itself has fallen
into oblivion and Chesterton's share of it was only three short
essays. I think it well to quote a good deal from the first of these,
because in it he has put in concentrated form and with different
illustrations what he developed five years later. There is nothing
more packed with thought in the whole of his writings than these
essays.
The first of all the difficulties that I have in controverting Mr.
Blatchford is simply this, that I shall be very largely going over
his own ground. My favourite text-book of theology is _God and My
Neighbour_, but I cannot repeat it in detail. If I gave each of my
reasons for being a Christian, a vast number of them would be Mr.
Blatchford's reasons for not being one.
For instance, Mr. Blatchford and his school point out that there
are many myths parallel to the Christian story; that there were Pagan
Christs, and Red Indian Incarnations, and Patagonian Crucifixions,
for all I know or care. But does not Mr. Blatchford see the other
side of the fact? If the Christian God really made the human race,
would not the human race tend to rumours and perversions of the
Christian God? If the centre of our life is a certain fact, would not
people far from the centre have a muddled version of that fact? If we
are so made that a Son of God must deliver us, is it odd that
Patagonians should dream of a Son of God?
The Blatchfordian position really amounts to this--that because a
certain thing has impressed millions of different people as likely or
necessary, therefore it cannot be true. And then this bashful being,
veiling his own talents, convicts the wretched G.K.C. of paradox . . .
The story of a Christ is very common in legend and literature. So
is the story of two lovers parted by Fate. So is the story of two
friends killing each other for a woman. But will it seriously be
maintained that, because these two stories are common as legends,
therefore no two friends were ever separated by love or no two lovers
by circumstances? It is tolerably plain, surely, that these two
stories are common because the situation is an intensely probable and
human one, because our nature is so built as to make them almost
inevitable . . .
Thus, in this first instance, when learned sceptics come to me and
say, "Are you aware that the Kaffirs have a sort of Incarnation?" I
should reply: "Speaking as an unlearned person, I don't know. But
speaking as a Christian, I should be very much astonished if they
hadn't."
Take a second instance. The Secularist says that Christianity has
been a gloomy and ascetic thing, and points to the procession of
austere or ferocious saints who have given up home and happiness and
macerated health and sex. But it never seems to occur to him that the
very oddity and completeness of these men's surrender make it look
very much as if there were really something actual and solid in the
thing for which they sold themselves. They gave up all pleasures for
one pleasure of spiritual ecstasy. They may have been mad; but it
looks as if there really were such a pleasure. They gave up all human
experiences for the sake of one superhuman experience. They may have
been wicked, but it looks as if there were such an experience.
It is perfectly tenable that this experience is as dangerous and
selfish a thing as drink. A man who goes ragged and homeless in order
to see visions may be as repellant and immoral as a man who goes
ragged and homeless in order to drink brandy. That is a quite
reasonable position. But what is manifestly not a reasonable
position, what would be, in fact, not far from being an insane
position, would be to say that the raggedness of the man, and the
stupefied degradation of the man, proved that there was no such thing
as brandy. That is precisely what the Secularist tries to say. He
tries to prove that there is no such thing as supernatural experience
by pointing at the people who have given up everything for it. He
tries to prove that there is no such thing by proving that there are
people who live on nothing else.
Again I may submissively ask: "Whose is the Paradox?" . . .
Take a third instance. The Secularist says that Christianity
produced tumult and cruelty. He seems to suppose that this proves it
to be bad. But it might prove it to be very good. For men commit
crimes not only for bad things, far more often for good things. For
no bad things can be desired quite so passionately and persistently
as good things can be desired, and only very exceptional men desire
very bad and unnatural things.
Most crime is committed because, owing to some peculiar
complication, very beautiful or necessary things are in some
danger . . .
. . . And when something is set before mankind that is not only
enormously valuable, but also quite new, the sudden vision, the
chance of winning it, the chance of losing it, drive them mad. It has
the same effect in the moral world that the finding of gold has in
the economic world. It upsets values, and creates a kind of cruel
rush.
We need not go far for instances quite apart from the instances of
religion. When the modern doctrines of brotherhood and liberality
were preached in France in the eighteenth century the time was ripe
for them, the educated classes everywhere had been growing towards
them, the world to a very considerable extent welcomed them. And yet
all that preparation and openness were unable to prevent the burst of
anger and agony which greets anything good. And if the slow and
polite preaching of rational fraternity in a rational age ended in
the massacres of September, what an _a fortiori_ is here! What would
be likely to be the effect of the sudden dropping into a dreadfully
evil century of a dreadfully perfect truth? What would happen if a
world baser than the world of Sade were confronted with a gospel
purer than the gospel of Rousseau?
The mere flinging of the polished pebble of Republican idealism
into the artificial lake of eighteenth century Europe produced a
splash that seemed to splash the heavens, and a storm that drowned
ten thousand men. What would happen if a star from heaven really fell
into the slimy and bloody pool of a hopeless and decaying humanity?
Men swept a city with the guillotine, a continent with a sabre,
because Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity were too precious to be
lost. How if Christianity was yet more maddening because it was yet
more precious?
But why should we labour the point when One who knew human nature
as it can really be learnt, from fishermen and women and natural
people, saw from his quiet village the track of this truth across
history, and, in saying that He came to bring not peace but a sword,
set up eternally His colossal realism against the eternal
sentimentality of the Secularist?
Thus, then, in the third instance, when the learned sceptic says:
"Christianity produced wars and persecutions," we shall reply:
"Naturally."
And, lastly, let me take an example which leads me on directly to
the general matter I wish to discuss for the remaining space of the
articles at my command. The Secularist constantly points out that the
Hebrew and Christian religions began as local things; that their god
was a tribal god; that they gave him material form, and attached him
to particular places.
This is an excellent example of one of the things that if I were
conducting a detailed campaign I should use as an argument for the
validity of Biblical experience. For if there really are some other
and higher beings than ourselves, and if they in some strange way, at
some emotional crisis, really revealed themselves to rude poets or
dreamers in very simple times, that these rude people should regard
the revelation as local, and connect it with the particular hill or
river where it happened, seems to me exactly what any reasonable
human being would expect. It has a far more credible look than if
they had talked cosmic philosophy from the beginning. If they had, I
should have suspected "priestcraft" and forgeries and third-century
Gnosticism.
If there be such a being as God, and He can speak to a child, and
if God spoke to a child in the garden, the child would, of course,
say that God lived in the garden. I should not think it any less
likely to be true for that. If the child said: "God is everywhere; an
impalpable essence pervading and supporting all constituents of the
Cosmos alike"--if, I say, the infant addressed me in the above terms,
I should think he was much more likely to have been with the
governess than with God.
So if Moses had said God was an Infinite Energy, I should be
certain he had seen nothing extraordinary. As he said He was a
Burning Bush, I think it very likely that he did see something
extraordinary. For whatever be the Divine Secret, and whether or no
it has (as all people have believed) sometimes broken bounds and
surged into our world, at least it lies on the side furthest away
from pedants and their definitions, and nearest to the silver souls
of quiet people, to the beauty of bushes, and the love of one's
native place.
Thus, then, in our last instance (out of hundreds that might be
taken), we conclude in the same way. When the learned sceptic says:
"The visions of the Old Testament were local, and rustic, and
grotesque," we shall answer: "Of course. They were genuine."
Thus, as I said at the beginning, I find myself, to start with,
face to face with the difficulty that to mention the reasons that I
have for believing in Christianity is, in very many cases, simply to
repeat those arguments which Mr. Blatchford, in some strange way,
seems to regard as arguments against it. His book is really rich and
powerful. He has undoubtedly set up these four great guns of which I
have spoken. I have nothing to say against the size and ammunition of
the guns. I only say that by some strange accident of arrangement he
has set up those four pieces of artillery pointing at himself. If I
were not so humane, I should say: "Gentlemen of the Secularist Guard,
fire first."
He goes on in the next essay to talk of the positive arguments for
Christianity, of "this religious philosophy which was, and will be
again, the study of the highest intellects and the foundation of the
strongest nations, but which our little civilisation has for a while
forgotten." Very briefly he then deals with Determinism and Freewill,
the need for the Supernatural and the question of the Fall. Dealing
with the Fall he uses one of his most brilliant illustrations. We
speak, he says, of a manly man, but not of a whaley whale. "If you
wanted to dissuade a man from drinking his tenth whisky, you would
slap him on the back and say, 'Be a man.' No one who wished to
dissuade a crocodile from eating his tenth explorer would slap it on
the back and say, 'be a crocodile.' For we have no notion of a
perfect crocodile; no allegory of a whale expelled from his Whaley
Eden."
Continuing the swift sketch of some elements of Christian theology,
Chesterton next deals with Miracles. While the development in
_Orthodoxy_ makes this section look very slight, there are passages
that make one realize the mental wealth of a man who could afford to
leave them behind and rush on. Blatchford had said that no English
judge would accept the evidence for the resurrection and G.K. answers
that possibly Christians have not all got "such an extravagant
reverence for English judges as is felt by Mr. Blatchford himself.
The experiences of the Founder of Christianity have perhaps left us
in a vague doubt of the infallibility of Courts of Law."
In reference to the many rationalists whose refusal to accept any
miracle is based on the fact that "Experience is against it," he
says: "There was a great Irish Rationalist of this school who when he
was told that a witness had seen him commit a murder said that he
could bring a hundred witnesses who had not seen him commit it."
The final essay on "The Eternal Heroism of the Slums" has two main
points. It begins with an acknowledgment of the crimes of Christians,
only pointing out that while Mr. Blatchford outlaws the Church for
this reason, he is prepared to invoke the State whose crimes are far
worse. But the most vigorous part of the essay is a furious attack on
determinism. Blatchford apparently held that bad surroundings
inevitably produced bad men. Chesterton had seen the heroism of the
poor in the most evil surroundings and was furious at "this
association of vice with poverty, the vilest and the oldest and the
dirtiest of all the stories that insolence has ever flung against the
poor." Men can and do lead heroic lives in the worst of circumstances
because there is in humanity a power of responsibility, there is
freewill. Blatchford, in the name of humanity, is attacking the
greatest of human attributes.
More numerous than can be counted, in all the wars and persecutions
of the world, men have looked out of their little grated windows and
said, "at least my thoughts are free." "No, No," says the face of Mr.
Blatchford, suddenly appearing at the window, "your thoughts are the
inevitable result of heredity and environment. Your thoughts are as
material as your dungeons. Your thoughts are as mechanical as the
guillotine." So pants this strange comforter, from cell to cell.
I suppose Mr. Blatchford would say that in his Utopia nobody would
be in prison. What do I care whether I am in prison or no, if I have
to drag chains everywhere. A man in his Utopia may have, for all I
know, free food, free meadows, his own estate, his own palace. What
does it matter? he may not have his own soul.
An architect once discoursed to me on the need of humility in face of
the material; the stone and marble of his building. Thus Chesterton
was humble before the reality he was seeking to interpret. Pride, he
once defined as "the falsification of fact by the introduction of
self." To learn, a man must "subtract himself from the study of any
solid and objective thing." This humility he had in a high degree and
also that rarer humility which saw his friends and his opponents
alike as his intellectual equals. "Almost anybody," Monsignor Knox
once said, "was an ordinary person compared with him." But this was
an idea that certainly never occurred to him.
The philosophy shaping into _Orthodoxy_ was stimulated by newspaper
controversy, and also by the talk in which Gilbert always delighted.
As I have noted he loved to listen and he was a little slow in
getting off the mark with his own contribution. Many years later an
American interviewer described him, when he did get going, as
answering questions in brief essays. Frank Swinnerton has admirably
described the manner of speech so well remembered by his friends:
His speech is prefaced and accompanied by a curious sort of
humming, such as one may hear when glee singers give each other the
note before starting to sing. He pronounces the word "I" (without
egotism) as if it were "Ayee," and drawls, not in the highly
gentlemanly manner which Americans believe to be the English accent,
and which many English call the Oxford accent, but in a manner
peculiar to himself, either attractive or the reverse according to
one's taste (to me attractive).*
[* _Georgian Scene_, p. 94.]
Even more attractive to most of us was his fashion of making us feel
that we had contributed something very worthwhile. He would take
something one had said and develop it till it shone and glowed, not
from its own worth but from what he had made of it. Almost anything
could thus become a starting point for a train of his best thought.
And the style disliked by some in his writings was so completely the
man himself that it was the same in conversation as in his books. He
would approach a topic from every side throwing light on those
contradictory elements that made a paradox. He himself had what he
attributes to St. Thomas--"that instantaneous presence of mind which
alone really deserves the name of wit." Asked once the traditional
question what single book he would choose if cast on a desert island,
he replied Thomas's _Guide to Practical Shipbuilding_.
In talk, as in his books, G.K. loved to play upon words, and
sometimes of course this was merely a matter of words and the puns
were bad ones. Once, for instance, after translating the French
phrase for playing truant as "he goes to the bushy school--or the
school among the bushes," he adds "not lightly to be confounded with
the Art School at Bushey." This is indefensible, but rare.
Christopher Morley has noted how "his play upon words often led to a
genuine play upon thoughts. . . . One of Chesterton's best
pleasantries was his remark on the so-called Emancipation of Women.
'Twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry _We will
not be dictated to:_ and proceeded to become stenographers.'" He
complained in a review of a novel "Every modern man is an atlas
carrying the world; and we are introduced to a new cosmos with every
new character. . . . Each man has to be introduced accompanied by his
cosmos, like a jealous wife or on the principle of 'love me love my
dogma.'"
Each of Chesterton's readers can think of a hundred instances of this
inspired fooling: many have been given in this book and many will yet
be given. But the thing went far deeper than fooling: it has been
compared by Mr. Belloc to the gospel parables as a method of teaching
and of illumination. "He made men see what they had not seen before.
He made them _know_. He was an architect of certitude, whenever he
practiced the art in which he excelled."
Belloc's analysis of this special element in Chesterton's style,
alike written and spoken, is of first rate importance to an
understanding of the man whose mind at this date was still rapidly
developing while his method of expression had become what it remained
to the end of his life.
His unique, his capital, genius for illustration by parallel, by
example, is his peculiar mark. The word "peculiar" is here the
operative word. . . . No one whatsoever that I can recall in the
whole course of English letters had his amazing--I would almost say
superhuman--capacity for parallelism.
Now parallelism is a gift or method of vast effect in the
conveyance of truth.
Parallelism consists in the illustration of some unperceived truth
by its exact consonance with the reflection of a truth already known
and perceived . . .
Whenever Chesterton begins a sentence with, "It is as though" (in
exploding a false bit of reasoning), you may expect a stroke of
parallelism as vivid as a lightning flash.
. . . Always, in whatever manner he launched the parallelism, he
produced the shock of illumination. He _taught_.
Parallelism was so native to his mind; it was so naturally a fruit
of his mental character that he had difficulty in understanding why
others did not use it with the same lavish facility as himself.
I can speak here with experience, for in these conversations with
him or listening to his conversation with others I was always
astonished at an ability in illustration which I not only have never
seen equalled, but cannot remember to have seen attempted. He never
sought such things; they poured out from him as easily as though they
were not the hard forged products of intense vision, but spontaneous
remarks.*
[* _On the Place of Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters_, pp. 36-41.]
To return to the Blatchford controversy: a final point of interest is
a psychological one. G.K. admits his difficulty in using in his
arguments the reverent solemnity of the Agnostic. He realizes that he
is thought flippant because he is amusing on a subject where he is
more certain than "of the existence of the moon. . . . Christianity
is itself so jolly a thing that it fills the possessor of it with a
certain silly exuberance, which sad and high-minded Rationalists
might reasonably mistake for mere buffoonery." But if this is his own
psychology he faces too the special difficulty of theirs--the main
and towering barrier that he wished but hardly hoped to surmount. He
was the first person, I think, to see that Free Thought was no longer
a young movement, but old and even fossilized. It had formed minds
which were now too set to be altered. It had its own dogmas and its
own most rigid orthodoxy. "You are armed to the teeth," he told the
readers of the _Clarion_, "and buttoned up to the chin with the great
agnostic Orthodoxy, perhaps the most placid and perfect of all the
orthodoxies of men. . . . I approach you with the reverence and the
courage due to a bench of bishops."
The _Clarion_ controversy was, as we have seen, in 1903 and
1904, when Chesterton was approaching thirty. Others of those
I have mentioned came later. But I don't think any or even all
of them fully explain the depth and richness of _Orthodoxy_.
CHAPTER XIII
Orthodoxy
_Philosophy is either eternal or it is not philosophy. . . . A cosmic
philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is
constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private
religion than he can possess a private sun and moon_.
_Introduction to the Book of Job_.
BECAUSE _Orthodoxy_ is supremely Chesterton's own history of his mind
more must be said of it than of his other published works. For "This
book is the life of a man. And a man is his mind." The Notebook shows
him thinking and feeling in his youth exactly on the lines that he
recalls--but they were only lines--in fact an outline. The richness
of life was needed, the richness of thought, to turn the outline into
the masterpiece. No man, not even Chesterton, could have written
_Orthodoxy_ at the age of twenty. It was sufficiently remarkable that
he should have written it at thirty-five: but only a man who had been
thinking along those lines at twenty and much earlier could have
written it at all. For the book is as he says "a sort of slovenly
autobiography." It is not so much an argument for Orthodoxy as the
story of how one man discovered Orthodoxy as the only answer to the
riddle of the universe.
In an interview, given shortly after its publication, Gilbert told of
a temptation that had once been his and which he had overcome almost
before he realized he had been tempted. That temptation was to become
a prophet like all the men in _Heretics_, by emphasizing one aspect of
truth and ignoring the others. To do this would, he knew, bring him a
great crowd of disciples. He had a vision--which constantly grew
wider and deeper--of the many-sided unity of Truth, but he saw that
all the prophets of the age, from Walt Whitman and Schopenhauer to
Wells and Shaw, had become so by taking one side of truth and making
it all of truth. It is so much easier to see and magnify a part than
laboriously to strive to embrace the whole:
. . . a sage feels too small for life,
And a fool too large for it.
Not that he condemned as fools the able men of his generation. For
Wells he had a great esteem, for Shaw a greater. Whitman he had in
his youth almost idolized. But increasingly he recognized even
Whitman as representing an idea that was too narrow because it was
only an aspect. There was not room in Whitman's philosophy for some
of the facts he had already discovered and he felt he had not yet
completed his journey. He must not, for the sake of being a prophet
and of having a following, sacrifice--I will not say a truth already
found, but a truth that might still be lurking somewhere. He could
not be the architect of his own intellectual universe any more than
he had been the creator of sun, moon and earth. "God and humanity
made it," he said of the philosophy he discovered, "and it made me."
He had begun in boyhood, as we have seen, by realizing that the world
as depicted in fairy tales was saner and more sensible than the world
as seen by the intellectuals of his own day. These men had lost the
sense of life's value. They spoke of the world as a vast place
governed by iron laws of necessity. Chesterton felt in it the
presence of will, while the mere thought of vastness was to him about
as cheerful a conception as that of a jail that should with its cold
empty passages cover half the county. "These expanders of the
universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite
corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that was
divine."
These people professed that the universe was one coherent thing;
but they were not fond of the universe. But I was frightfully fond of
the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often did
so; and it never seemed to mind. Actually and in truth I did feel
that these dim dogmas of vitality were better expressed by calling
the world small than by calling it large. For about infinity there
was a sort of carelessness which was the reverse of the fierce and
pious care which I felt touching the pricelessness and the peril of
life. They showed only a dreary waste; but I felt a sort of sacred
thrift. For economy is far more romantic than extravagance. To them
stars were an unending income of halfpence; but I felt about the
golden sun and the silver moon as a schoolboy feels if he has one
sovereign and one shilling.
These subconscious convictions are best hit off by the colour and
tone of certain tales. Thus I have said that stories of magic alone
can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of
eccentric privilege. I may express this other feeling of cosmic
cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood,
"Robinson Crusoe," which I read about this time, and which owes its
eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits,
nay, even the wild romance of prudence. Crusoe is a man on a small
rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing
in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The
greatest of poems is an inventory. . .
I really felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as if all the order and
number of things were the romantic remnant of Crusoe's ship. That
there are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there were
two guns and one axe. It was poignantly urgent that none should be
lost; but somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added. The
trees and the planets seemed like things saved from the wreck: and
when I saw the Matterhorn I was glad that it had not been overlooked
in the confusion. I felt economical about the stars as if they were
sapphires (they are called so in Milton's Eden): I hoarded the hills.
For the universe is a single jewel, and while it is a natural cant to
talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel it is
literally true. This cosmos is indeed without peer and without price:
for there cannot be another one.*
[* _Orthodoxy_, Chapter IV, pp. 112-5.]
A fragment of an essay on Hans Anderson that cannot be later than the
age of seventeen shows Gilbert trying to shape part of what he calls
here, "The Ethics of Elfland," but a large part was, as he says,
"subconscious." In this chapter he sums up the results of musings
about the universe begun so long ago--small wonder that he had seemed
to sleep over his lessons while he was seeing these visions and
dreaming these dreams which after every effort to tell them he still
knows remains half untold:
. . . the attempt to utter the unutterable things. These are my
ultimate attitudes towards life; the soils for the seeds of doctrine.
These in some dark way I thought before I could write, and felt
before I could think; that we may proceed more easily afterwards, I
will roughly recapitulate them now. I felt in my bones; first, that
this world does not explain itself. It may be a miracle with a
supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural
explanation. But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to
satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural explanations I
have heard. The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I came to feel
as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to
mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work of
art; whatever it meant it meant violently. Third, I thought this
purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as
dragons. Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of
humility and restraint: we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by
not drinking too much of them. We owed, also, an obedience to
whatever made us. And last, and strangest, there had come into my
mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a
remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man
had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods; he had saved them from
a wreck. All this I felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel
it. And all the time I had not even thought of Christian theology.*
[* Ibid., pp. 155-6.]
This theology came with the answers to all the tremendous questions
asked by life. Here the convert has one great advantage over the
Catholic brought up in the Faith. Most of us hear the answers before
we have asked the questions: hence intellectually we lack what G.K.
calls "the soils for the seeds of doctrine." It is nearly impossible
to understand an answer to a question you have not formulated. And
without the sense of urgency that an insistent question brings, many
people do not even try. All the years of his boyhood and early
manhood Chesterton was facing the fundamental questions and hammering
out his answers. At first he had no thought of Christianity as even a
possible answer. Growing up in a world called Christian, he fancied
it a philosophy that had been tried and found wanting. It was only as
he realized that the answers he was finding for himself always fitted
into, were always confirmed by, the Christian view of things that he
began to turn towards it. He sees a good deal of humour in the way he
strained his voice in a painfully juvenile attempt to utter his new
truths, only to find that they were not his and were not new, but
were part of an eternal philosophy.
In the chapter called "The Flag of the World" he tells of the moment
when he discovered the confirmation and reinforcing of his own
speculations by the Christian theology. The point at which this came
concerned his feelings about the men of his youth who labelled
themselves Optimist and Pessimist. Both, he felt, were wrong. It must
be possible at once to love and to hate the world, to love it more
than enough to get on with it, to hate it enough to get it on. And
the Church solved this difficulty by her doctrine of creation and of
Original Sin. "God had written not so much a poem, but rather a play;
a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left
to human actors and stage-managers who had since made a great mess of
it."
As to that mess the Christian could be as pessimist as he liked, as
to the original design he must be optimist, for it was his work to
restore it. "St. George could still fight the dragon . . . if he were
as big as the world he could yet be killed in the name of the world."
And then followed an experience impossible to describe. It was as
if I had been blundering about since my birth with two huge and
unmanageable machines, of different shapes and without apparent
connection--the world and the Christian tradition. I had found this
hole in the world: the fact that one must somehow find a way of
loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world
without being worldly. I found this projecting feature of Christian
theology, like a sort of hard spike, the dogmatic insistence that God
was personal, and had made a world separate from Himself. The spike
of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world--it had evidently
been meant to go there--and then the strange thing began to happen.
When once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one
after another, all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie
exactitude. I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery
falling into its place with a kind of click of relief. Having got one
part right, all the other parts were repeating that rectitude, as
clock after clock strikes noon. Instinct after instinct was answered
by doctrine after doctrine. Or, to vary the metaphor, I was like one
who had advanced into a hostile country to take one high fortress.
And when that fort had fallen the whole country surrendered and
turned solid behind me. The whole land was lit up, as it were, back
to the first fields of my childhood. All those blind fancies of
boyhood which in the fourth chapter I have tried in vain to trace on
the darkness, became suddenly transparent and sane. I was right when
I felt that I would almost rather say that grass was the wrong colour
than say that it must by necessity have been that colour: it might
verily have been any other. My sense that happiness hung on the crazy
thread of a condition did mean something when all was said: it meant
the whole doctrine of the Fall. Even those dim and shapeless monsters
of notions which I have not been able to describe, much less defend,
stepped quietly into their places like colossal caryatides of the
creed. The fancy that the cosmos was not vast and void, but small and
cosy, had a fulfilled significance now, for anything that is a work
of art must be small in the sight of the artist; to God the stars
might be only small and dear, like diamonds. And my haunting instinct
that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be
guarded, like the goods from Crusoe's ship--even that had been the
wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to
Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a
golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.*
[* _Orthodoxy_, Chapter V, pp. 142-4.]
In a chapter called "The Paradoxes of Christianity," the richness of
his mind is most manifest; and in that chapter can best be seen what
Mr. Belloc meant when he told me Chesterton's style reminded him of
St. Augustine's. Talking over with an old schoolfellow of his the
list of books he had, as we have seen, drawn up for _T.P.'s Weekly_,
I discovered deep doubt as to whether Gilbert would really have read
these books, as most of us understand reading, combined with a
conviction that he would have got out of them at a glance more than
most of us by prolonged study. I have certainly never known anyone
his equal at what the schoolboy calls "degutting" a book. He did not
seem to study an author, yet he certainly knew him.
But it remained that his own mind, reflecting and experiencing, made
of his own life his greatest storehouse, so that in all this book
there was, as my father pointed out in the _Dublin Review_ at the
time, an intensely original new light cast on the eternal philosophy
about which so much had already been written. The discovery specially
needed, perhaps, for his own age was that Christianity represented a
new balance that constituted a liberation. The ancient Greek or
Roman had aimed at equilibrium by enforcing moderation and getting
rid of extremes. Christianity "made moderation out of the still crash
of two impetuous emotions." It "got over the difficulty of combining
furious opposites by keeping them both, and keeping them both
furious." "The more I considered Christianity, the more I felt
that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of
that order was to give room for good things to run wild." Thus
inside Christianity the pacifist could become a monk, and the
warrior a Crusader, St. Francis could praise good more loudly
than Walt Whitman, and St. Jerome denounce evil more darkly than
Schopenhauer--but both emotions must be kept in their place. I
remember how George Wyndham laughed as he recited to us the paragraph
where this idea reached its climax.
And sometimes this pure gentleness and this pure fierceness met and
justified their juncture; the paradox of all the prophets was
fulfilled, and, in the soul of St. Louis, the lion lay down with the
lamb. But remember that this text is too lightly interpreted. It is
constantly assumed, especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that when
the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But that
is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. That is
simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the
lamb. The real problem is--can the lion lie down with the lamb and
still retain his royal ferocity? _That_ is the problem the Church
attempted; _that_ is the miracle she achieved.*
[* _Orthodoxy_, Chapter VI, pp. 178-9.]
All this applied not only to the release of the emotions, the
development of all the elements that go to make up humanity, but even
more to the truths of Revelation. A heresy always means lopping off a
part of the truth and, therefore, ultimately a loss of liberty.
Orthodoxy, in keeping the whole truth, safeguarded freedom and
prevented any one of the great and devouring ideas she was teaching
from swallowing any other truth. This was the justification of
councils, of definitions, even of persecutions and wars of religion:
that they had stood for the defence of reason as well as of faith.
They had stood to prevent the suicide of thought which must result if
the exciting but difficult balance were lost that had replaced the
classical moderation.
The Church could not afford to swerve a hair's breadth on some
things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the
irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and
some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep
the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers,
of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong
enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world. Remember
that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a
lion tamer. The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of
a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfilment of
prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see, need but a touch to
turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious. . . . A sentence
phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the
best statues in Europe. A slip in the definitions might stop all the
dances; might wither all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter
eggs. Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order
that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be
careful, if only that the world might be careless.
This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. 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 was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses,
seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude
having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The
Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet
it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one
idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so as
exactly to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge
bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make
Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid
an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox
Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the
orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to
have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been
easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the
bottomless pit of predestination. 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. To have fallen into any of
those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after
fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of
Christendom--that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple
to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one
at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from
Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and
tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure;
and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the
ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth
reeling but erect.*
[* _Orthodoxy_, Chapter VI, pp. 182-5.]
No quotation can adequately convey the wealth of thought in the book.
Yet amazingly, the _Times_ reviewer rebuked G.K. for substituting
emotion for intellect, partly on the strength of a sentence in the
chapter called "The Maniac." "The madman is the man who has lost
everything except his reason." The reviews, when one reads them as a
whole, exactly confirm what Wilfrid Ward said in the _Dublin Review:_
that whereas he had regarded _Orthodoxy_ as a triumphant vindication
of his own view that G.K. was a really profound thinker, he found to
his amazement that those who had thought him superficial, hailed it
as a proof of theirs.
Obviously with a man so much concerned with ultimates the place
accorded him in letters will depend upon whether one agrees or
disagrees with his conclusions. In a country that is not Catholic
this consideration must affect the standing of any Catholic thinker.
Thus Newman was considered by Carlyle to have "the brain of a
moderate sized rabbit," yet by others his is counted the greatest
mind of the century. Similarly Arnold Bennett could credit Chesterton
with only a second-class intellectual apparatus--because he was a
dogmatist. To this Chesterton replied (in _Fancies versus Facts_):
"In truth there are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas
and know it and those who accept dogmas and don't know it. My only
advantage over the gifted novelist lies in my belonging to the former
class." If one grasps the Catholic view of dogma the answer is
satisfying; if not the objector is left with his original
objection--as against Chesterton, as against Newman. And Chesterton
had the extra disadvantage of being a journalist famous for his jokes
now moving in Newman's unquestioned field of philosophy and theology.
It was in part the difficulty of convincing a man against his will.
These critics, as Wilfrid Ward pointed out, read superficially and
looked only at the fooling, the fantastic puns and comparisons,
ignoring the underlying deep seriousness and lines of thought that
made him, as it then seemed boldly, rank Chesterton with such writers
as Butler, Coleridge and Newman. Taking as his text the saying,
"Truth can understand error, but error cannot understand truth,"
Wilfrid Ward called his article, "Mr. Chesterton among the Prophets."
He showed especially the curious confusion made in such comments as
the one I have quoted from the _Times_, and made clearer what
Chesterton was really saying by a comparison with the "illative
sense" of Cardinal Newman. It is the usual difficulty of trying to
express a partly new idea. Newman had coined an expression, but it
did not express all he meant, still less all that Chesterton meant.
Yet it was difficult to use the word "reason" in this particular
discussion, without giving to it two different meanings. For in two
chapters, "The Maniac" and "The Suicide of Thought," Chesterton was
concerned to show that Authority was needed for the defence of reason
(in the larger sense) against its own power of self-destruction. Yet
the maniac commits this suicide by an excessive use of reason (in the
narrower sense). "He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by
charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more
logical for losing certain sane affections. . . . He is in the clean
and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful
point."
To Chesterton it seemed that most of the modern religions and
philosophies were like the argument by which a madman suffering from
persecution mania proves that he is in a world of enemies: it is
complete, it is unanswerable, yet it is false. The madman's mind
"moves in a perfect but narrow circle. . . . The insane explanation
is quite as complete as the sane one, only it is not so large. . . .
There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing
as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern
religions." Philosophies such as Materialism, Idealism, Monism, all
have in their explanations of the universe this quality of the
madman's argument of "covering everything and leaving everything
out." The Materialist, like the Madman is "unconscious of the alien
energies and the large indifference of the earth; he is not thinking
of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers
or first love or fear upon the sea. The earth is so very large and
the cosmos is so very small."
People sometimes say, "life is larger than logic," when they want to
dismiss logic, but that was not Chesterton's way. He wanted logic, he
needed logic, as part of the abundance of the mind's life, as part of
a much larger whole. What was the word--we are looking for it
still--for a use of the mind that included all these things; logic
and imagination, mysticism and ecstasy and poetry and joy; a use of
the mind that could embrace the universe and reach upwards to God
without losing its balance. The mind must work in time, yet it can
reach out into Eternity: it is conditioned by space but it can
glimpse infinity. The modern world had imprisoned the mind. Far more
than the body it needed great open spaces. And Chesterton, breaking
violently out of prison, looked around and saw how the Church had
given health to the mind by giving it space to move in and great
ideas to move among. Chesterton, the poet, saw too that man is a poet
and must therefore, "get his head into the heavens." He needs
mysticism and among Her great ideas, the Church gives him mysteries.
CHAPTER XIV
Bernard Shaw
_This chapter was read by G.B.S. His remarks are printed in
footnotes. [A facsimile of the] one page altered substantially by him
is [omitted in this plain-text electronic edition]_.
WHEN ANYONE IN the early years of the century made a list of the
English writers most in the public eye, such a list always included
the names of Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton. But a good many
people in writing down these names did so with unconcealed irritation
and I think it is important at this stage to see why.
These men were constantly arguing with each other; but the literary
public felt all the same that they represented something in common,
and the literary public was by no means sure that it liked that
something. It could not quite resist Bernard Shaw's plays; it loved
Chesterton whenever it could rebuke him affectionately for paradox
and levity. What that public succumbed to in these men was their art:
it was by no means so certain that it liked their meaning. And so the
literary public elected to say that Shaw and Chesterton were having a
cheap success by standing on their heads and declaring that black was
white. The audience watched a Shaw v. Chesterton debate as a sham
fight or a display of fireworks, as indeed it always partly was; for
each of them would have died rather than really hurt the other. But
Shaw and Chesterton were operating on their minds all the time. They
were allowed to sit in the stalls and applaud. But they were
themselves being challenged; and that spoilt their comfort.
Chesterton in his _Autobiography_ complains of the falsity of most of
the pictures of England during the Victorian era. The languishing,
fainting females, who were in fact far stronger-minded than their
grand-daughters today, the tyrannical pious fathers, the dull
conventional lives: it all rings false to anyone who grew up in an
average Victorian middle-class home and was happy enough there. There
was, however, one thing fundamentally wrong in such homes; and it was
on this fundamental sin that he agreed with Shaw in waging a
relentless war.
The middle classes of England were thoroughly and smugly satisfied
with social conditions that were intolerable for the great mass of
their fellow countrymen. They had erected between the classes
artificial barriers and now did not even look over the top of them. I
remember how when my mother started a settlement in South London the
head worker told us she often saw women groping in the dirt under the
fish barrows for the heads and tails of fishes to boil for their
children. The settlement began to give the children dinners of
dumplings or rice pudding and treacle, and many well-to-do friends
would give my mother a pound or so to help this work. But the
suggestion that government should intervene was Socialism: the idea
that here was a symptom of a widespread evil, was scouted utterly.
People might have learnt much from their own servants of how the rest
of humanity were living, but while, said Chesterton, they laughed at
the idea of the mediaeval baron whose vassals ate below the salt,
their own vassals ate and lived below the floor. At no time in the
Christian past had there been such a deep and wide cleavage in
humanity.
The first thing that G.K.C. and G.B.S., Wells too, and Belloc, were
all agreed upon was that the upper and middle classes of England must
be reminded, if need were by a series of earthquakes, that they were
living in an unreal world. They had forgotten the human race to which
they belonged. They, a tiny section, spoke of the mass of mankind as
"the poor" or "the lower orders" almost as they might speak of the
beasts of the forest, as beings of a different race. Chesterton had a
profound and noble respect for the poor: Shaw declared that they were
"useless, dangerous, and ought to be abolished." But for both men,
the handful of quarrelsome cliques called the literary world was far
too small, because it was so tiny a section of the human race.
Shaw and Chesterton had, in fact, discovered the social problem.
Today, whether people intend to do anything about it or not, it is
impossible to avoid knowing something about it. But at that date the
idea was general that all was as well as could be expected in an
imperfect world. The trades unionists were telling a different story,
but they could not hope to reach intellectually the classes they were
attacking. Here were men who could not be ignored, and I cannot but
think that it was sometimes the mere utterance of unwelcome truth in
brilliant speech that aroused the cry of "paradox."
I hear many people [wrote Chesterton], complain that Bernard Shaw
deliberately mystifies them. I cannot imagine what they mean; it
seems to me that he deliberately insults them. His language,
especially on moral questions, is generally as straight and solid as
that of a bargee and far less ornate and symbolic than that of a
hansom-cabman. The prosperous English Philistine complains that Mr.
Shaw is making a fool of him. Whereas Mr. Shaw is not in the least
making a fool of him; Mr. Shaw is, with laborious lucidity, calling
him a fool. G.B.S. calls a landlord a thief; and the landlord,
instead of denying or resenting it, says, "Ah, that fellow hides his
meaning so cleverly that one can never make out what he means, it is
all so fine-spun and fantastical." G.B.S. calls a statesman a liar to
his face, and the statesman cries in a kind of ecstasy, "Ah, what
quaint, intricate and half-tangled trains of thought! Ah, what
elusive and many-coloured mysteries of half-meaning!" I think it is
always quite plain what Mr. Shaw means, even when he is joking, and
it generally means that the people he is talking to ought to howl
aloud for their sins. But the average representative of them
undoubtedly treats the Shavian meaning as tricky and complex, when it
is really direct and offensive. He always accuses Shaw of pulling his
leg, at the exact moment when Shaw is pulling his nose.*
[* _George Bernard Shaw_, pp. 82-3.]
Chesterton was, however, in agreement with the ordinary citizen and
in disagreement with Shaw as to much of Shaw's essential teaching.
And here we touch a matter so involved that even today it is hard to
disentangle it completely. I suppose it will always be possible for
two observers to look at human beings acting, to hear them talking,
and to arrive at two entirely different interpretations of what they
mean. This is certainly the case with any very recent period, and
perhaps especially with our own recent history. We have within living
memory ended a period and begun an exceedingly different period, and
we tend to judge the former by the light--or the darkness--of the
latter. The Victorian age, even in its extreme old age, was still
tacitly assuming and legally enforcing as axioms the Christian moral
system, especially in regard to marriage and all sex questions, and
the sacred nature of property. To read many disquisitions on that
period today one would suppose that no one living really believed in
these things: that humbug explained the first and greed the second.
This is surely a false perspective. The age was an enormously
conventional one: these fundamental ideas had become fossilized and
meaningless for an increasing number of younger people. But when
Bernard Shaw called himself an atheist out of a kind of insane
generosity towards Bradlaugh (see his letter to G.K. later in this
chapter) or described all property as theft, it was a real moral
indignation that was roused in many minds. Real, but exceedingly
confused. It testified to the need of the ordinary man to live by a
creed that he need not question. Shaw and Chesterton were
philosophers, and philosophers love asking questions as well as
answering them. But the average man wants to live by his creed, not
question it, and the elder Victorians had still some kind of creed.
There were many who believed in God. There were others who believed
that the Christian moral system must remain, because it had commended
itself to man's nature as the highest and best and was the true fruit
of evolutionary progress. There were certainly some who were angry
because they thought chaos must follow any tampering with the
existing social order. But if you take the mass of those who tried to
laugh Bernard Shaw aside and grew angry when they could not do so,
you find at the root of the anger an intense dislike of having any
part of a system questioned which was to them unquestionable, which
they had erected into a creed. They thought Shaw's ideas dangerous
and wanted to keep them from the young. They did not want anyone to
ask how a civilisation had laid its principles open to this brilliant
and effective siege. They hated Shaw's questions before they began to
hate his answers. And that is probably why so many linked Chesterton
with Shaw--he gave different answers, but he was asking many of the
same questions. He questioned everything as Shaw did--only he pushed
his questions further: they were deeper and more searching. Shaw
would not accept the old Scriptural orthodoxy; G.K. refused to accept
the new Agnostic orthodoxy; neither man would accept the orthodoxy of
the scientists; both were prepared to attack what Butler had called
"the science ridden, art ridden, culture ridden, afternoon-tea ridden
cliffs of old England."
They attacked first by the mere process of asking questions; and the
world thus questioned grew uneasy and seemed to care curiously little
for the fact that the two questioners were answering their own
questions in an opposite fashion. Where Shaw said: "Give up
pretending you believe in God, for you don't," Chesterton said:
"Rediscover the reasons for believing or else our race is lost."
Where Shaw said: "Abolish private property which has produced this
ghastly poverty," Chesterton said: "Abolish ghastly poverty by
restoring property."
And the audience said: "these two men in strange paradoxes seem to us
to be saying the same thing, if indeed they are saying anything at
all." Chesterton wrote later of a young man whose aunt "had
disinherited him for Socialism because of a lecture he had delivered
against that economic theory"; and I well remember how often after my
own energetic attempts to explain why a Distributist was not a
Socialist, I was met with a weary, "Well, it's just the same." It was
just the same question; it was an entirely different answer, but the
audience, annoyed by the question, never seemed to listen to the
answer. One man was saying: "Sweep away the old beliefs of humanity
and start fresh"; the other was saying: "Rediscover your reasons for
these profound beliefs, make them once more effective, for they are
of the very nature of man."
Shaw and Chesterton were themselves deeply concerned about the
answers. Both sincere, both dealing with realities, they were
prepared to accept each other's sincerity and to fight the matter
out, if need were, endlessly. Being writers they conducted their
discussions in writing: being journalists they did so mainly in the
newspapers, to the delight or fury of other journalists. A jealous
few were enraged at what they called publicity hunting, but most
realised that it was not a private fight. Anyone might join in and a
good many did.
Belloc was in the fight as early as Chesterton, and of course, on the
same side. G.B.S. who had invented "The Chesterbelloc" declared that
Chesterton felt obliged to embrace the dogmas of Catholicism lest
Belloc's soul should be damned. H. G. Wells agreed in the main with
Shaw: both were Fabians and both were ready with a Fabian Utopia for
humanity, which Belloc and Chesterton felt would be little better
than a prison. Cecil Chesterton, coming in at an angle of his own,
wrote some effective articles. He was a Fabian--actually an official
Fabian--but his outlook already embraced many of the Chesterbelloc
human and genial ideals, although he still ridiculed their Utopia of
the peasant state, small ownership and all that came later to be
called Distributism. Like the _Clarion_, the _New Age_ (itself a
Socialist paper) saw the wisdom of giving a platform to both sides,
and in this paper appeared the best articles that the controversy
produced.
Meanwhile the private friendship between G.B.S. and G.K.C. was
growing apace. Very early on, Shaw had begun to urge G.K. to write a
play. G.K. was, perhaps, beginning to feel that newspaper controversy
did not give him space to say all he wanted about Shaw (or perhaps it
was merely that Messrs. Lane had persuaded him to promise them a book
on Shaw for a series they were producing!). Anyhow, in a letter of
1908, Shaw again urges the play and gives interesting information for
the book.
Ayot St. Lawrence, Welwyn, Herts.
1st March 1908.
MY DEAR G.K.C.
What about that play? It is no use trying to answer me in The New
Age: the real answer to my article is the play. I have tried fair
means: The New Age article was the inauguration of an assault below
the belt. I shall deliberately destroy your credit as an essayist, as
a journalist, as a critic, as a Liberal, as everything that offers
your laziness a refuge, until starvation and shame drive you to
serious dramatic parturition. I shall repeat my public challenge to
you; vaunt my superiority; insult your corpulence; torture Belloc; if
necessary, call on you and steal your wife's affections by
intellectual and athletic displays, until you contribute something to
the British drama. You are played out as an essayist: your ardor is
soddened, your intellectual substance crumbled, by the attempt to
keep up the work of your twenties in your thirties. Another five
years of this; and you will be the apologist of every infamy that
wears a Liberal or Catholic mask. You, too, will speak of the
portraits of Vecelli and the Assumption of Allegri, and declare that
Democracy refuses to lackey-label these honest citizens as Titian and
Correggio. Even that colossal fragment of your ruined honesty that
still stupendously dismisses Beethoven as "some rubbish about a
piano" will give way to remarks about "a graceful second subject in
the relative minor." Nothing can save you now except a rebirth as a
dramatist. I have done my turn; and I now call on you to take yours
and do a man's work.
It is my solemn belief that it was my Quintessence of Ibsenism that
rescued you and all your ungrateful generation from Materialism and
Rationalism.* You were all tired young atheists turning to Kipling
and Ruskinian Anglicanism whilst I, with the angel's wings beating in
my ears from Beethoven's 9th symphony (oh blasphemous Walker in
deafness), gave you in 1880 and 1881 two novels in which you had your
Rationalist-secularist hero immediately followed by my Beethovenian
hero. True, nobody read them; but was that my fault? They are read
now, it seems, mostly in pirated reprints, in spite of their
appalling puerility and classical perfection of style (you are right
as to my being a born pedant, like all great artists); and are at
least useful as documentary evidence that I was no more a materialist
when I wrote _Love Among the Artists_ at 24 than when I wrote
_Candida_ at 39.
[* Cecil avowed this as far as he was concerned. G.B.S.]
My appearances on the platform of the Hall of Science were three
in number. Once for a few minutes in a discussion, in opposition to
Bradlaugh, who was defending property against Socialism. Bradlaugh
died after that, though I do not claim to have killed him. The
Socialist League challenged him to debate with me at St. James's
Hall; but we could not or would not agree as to the proposition to be
debated, he insisting on my being bound by all the publications of
the Democratic Federation (to which I did not belong) and I refusing
to be bound by anything on earth or in heaven except the proposition
that Socialism would benefit the English people. And so the debate
never came off.
Now in those days they were throwing Bradlaugh out of the House of
Commons with bodily violence; and all one could do was to call
oneself an atheist all over the place, which I accordingly did. At
the first public meeting of the Shelley Society at University
College, addressed by Stopford Brooke, I made my then famous (among
100 people) declaration "I am a Socialist, an Atheist and a
Vegetarian" (ergo, a true Shelleyan) whereupon two ladies who had
been palpitating with enthusiasm for Shelley under the impression
that he was a devout Anglican, resigned on the spot.
My second Hall of Science appearance was after the last of the
Bradlaugh-Hyndman debates at St. James's Hall, where the two
champions never touched the ostensible subject of their
difference--the Eight Hours Day--at all, but simply talked Socialism
or Anti-Socialism with a hearty dislike and contempt for one another.
G. V. Foote was then in his prime as the successor of Bradlaugh; and
as neither the Secularists nor the Socialists were satisfied with the
result of the debate, it was renewed for two nights at the Hall of
Science between me and Foote. A verbatim report was published for
sixpence and is now a treasure of collectors. Having the last word on
the second night, I had to make a handsome wind-up; and the
Secularists were much pleased by my declaring that I was altogether
on Foote's side in his struggle with the established religion of the
country.
When Bradlaugh died, the Secularists wanted a new leader, because
B.'s enormous and magnetic personality left a void that nobody was
big enough to fill--it was really like the death of Napoleon in that
world. There was J. M. Robertson, Foote, and Charles Watts. But
Bradlaugh liked Foote as little as most autocrats like their
successors; and when he, before his death surrendered the gavel (the
hammer for thumping the table to secure order at a meeting) which was
the presidential sceptre of the National Secular Society, he did so
with an ill will which he did not attempt to conceal; and so though
Foote was the nearest size to Bradlaugh's shoes then available, he
succeeded him at the disadvantage of inheriting the distrust of the
old chief. J. M. Robertson you know: he was not a mob orator. Watts
was not sufficient: he had neither Foote's weight (being old) nor
Robertson's scholarship.
So whilst the survivors of Bradlaugh were trying to keep up the
Hall of Science and to establish a memorial library, etc. there, they
cast round for new blood. What more natural than that they should
think of me as a man not afraid to call himself an atheist and able
to hold his own on the platform? Accordingly, they invited me to
address them; and one memorable night I held forth on Progress in
Freethought. I was received with affectionate hope; and when the
chairman announced that I was giving my share of the gate to the
memorial library (I have never taken money for lecturing) the
enthusiasm was quite touching. The anti-climax was super-Shavian. I
proceeded to smash materialism, rationalism, and all the philosophy
of Tyndall, Helmholtz, Darwin and the rest of the 1860 people into
smithereens. I ridiculed and exposed every inference of science, and
justified every dogma of religion, especially showing that the
Trinity and the Immaculate Conception were the merest common sense.
That finished me up as a possible leader of the N.S.S. Robertson came
on the platform, white with honest Scotch Rationalist rage, and
denounced me with a fury of conviction that startled his own
followers. Never did I grace that platform again. I repeated the
address once to a branch of the N.S.S. on the south side of the
Thames--Kensington, I think--and was interrupted by yells of rage
from the veterans of the society. The Leicester Secularists, a pious
folk, rich and independent of the N.S.S., were kinder to me; but they
were no more real atheists than the congregation of St. Paul's is
made wholly of real Christians.
Foote is still bewildered about me, imagining that I am a pervert.
But anybody who reads my stuff from the beginning (a Shelleyan
beginning, as far as it could be labelled at all) will find implicit,
and sometimes explicit, the views which, in their more matured form,
will appear in that remarkable forthcoming masterpiece, "Shavianism:
a Religion."
By the way, I have omitted one more appearance at the Hall of
Science. At a four nights' debate on Socialism between Foote and Mrs.
Besant, I took the chair on one of the nights.
I take advantage of a snowy Sunday afternoon to scribble all this
down for you because you are in the same difficulty that beset me
formerly: namely, the absolute blank in the history of the immediate
past that confronts every man when he first takes to public life.
Written history stops several decades back; and the bridge of
personal recollection on which older men stand does not exist for the
recruit. Nothing is more natural than that you should reconstruct me
as the last of the Rationalists (his real name is Blatchford); and
nothing could be more erroneous. It would be much nearer the truth to
call me, in that world, the first of the mystics.
If you can imagine the result of trying to write your spiritual
history in complete ignorance of painting, you will get a notion of
trying to write mine in ignorance of music. Bradlaugh was a
tremendous platform heavyweight; but he had never in his life, as far
as I could make out, seen anything, heard anything or read anything
in the artistic sense. He was almost beyond belief incapable of
intercourse in private conversation. He could tell you his adventures
provided you didn't interrupt him (which you were mostly afraid to
do, as the man was a mesmeric terror); but as to exchanging ideas, or
expressing the universal part of his soul, you might as well have
been reading the letters of Charles Dickens to his family--those
tragic monuments of dumbness of soul and noisiness of pen. Lord help
you if you ever lose your gift of speech, G.K.C.! Don't forget that
the race is only struggling out of its dumbness, and that it is only
in moments of inspiration that we get out a sentence. All the rest is
padding.
Yours ever
G. BERNARD SHAW.
In the book on Shaw which appeared in August 1909, G.K. did as he had
done with his other literary studies: gave (inaccurately) only as
much biography as seemed absolutely necessary, and mainly discussed
ideas. He saw Shaw as an Irishman, yet lacking the roots of
nationality since he belonged to a mainly alien governing class. He
saw him as a Puritan yet without the religious basis of Puritanism.
And thirdly, he saw him as so swift a progressive as to be ahead of
his own thought and ready to slay it in the name of progress.
All these elements in Shaw made for strength but also created
limitations, "Shaw is like the Venus of Milo; all that there is of
him is admirable." Where he fails is in being unable to see and
embrace the full complexity of life. "His only paradox is to pull out
one thread or cord of truth longer and longer into waste and
fantastic places. He does not allow for that deeper sort of paradox
by which two opposite cords of truth become entangled in an
inextricable knot. Still less can he be made to realise that it is
often this knot which ties safely together the whole bundle of human
life . . . here lies the limitation of that lucid and compelling
mind; he cannot quite understand life, because he will not accept its
contradictions." Humanity is built of these contradictions, therefore
Shaw pities humanity more than he loves it. "It was his glory that he
pitied animals like men; it was his defect that he pitied men almost
too much like animals. Foulon said of the democracy, 'Let them eat
grass.' Shaw said, 'Let them eat greens.' He had more benevolence but
almost as much disdain."
As a vegetarian and a water drinker Shaw himself lacked, in
Chesterton's eyes, something of complete humanity. And in discussing
social problems he was more economist than man. "Shaw (one might
almost say) dislikes murder, not so much because it wastes the life
of the corpse as because it wastes the time of the murderer." This
lack of the full human touch is felt, even in the plays, because Shaw
cannot be irrational where humanity always is irrational. In
_Candida_ "It is completely and disastrously false to the whole
nature of falling in love to make the young Eugene complain of the
cruelty which makes Candida defile her fair hands with domestic
duties. No boy in love with a beautiful woman would ever feel
disgusted when she peeled potatoes or trimmed lamps. He would like
her to be domestic. He would simply feel that the potatoes had become
poetical and the lamps gained an extra light. This may be irrational;
but we are not talking of rationality, but of the psychology of first
love.* It may be very unfair to women that the toil and triviality of
potato-peeling should be seen through a glamour of romance; but the
glamour is quite as certain a fact as the potatoes. It may be a bad
thing in sociology that men should deify domesticity in girls as
something dainty and magical; but all men do. Personally I do not
think it a bad thing at all; but that is another argument."**
[* No two love affairs are the same. This sentence assumed that they
are all the same. To Eugene, the poet living in a world of
imagination and abhorring reality, Candida was what Dulcinea was to
Don Quixote. G.B.S.]
[** _George Bernard Shaw_, pp. 120-1.]
Yet Shaw's limitations are those of a great man and a genius. In an
age of narrow specialism he has "stood up for the fact that
philosophy is not the concern of those who pass through Divinity and
Greats, but of those who pass through birth and death." In an age
that has almost chosen death, "Shaw follows the banner of life; but
austerely, not joyously." Nowhere, in dealing with Shaw's philosophy,
does Chesterton note his debt to Butler. Shaw has himself mentioned
it, and no reader of Butler could miss it, especially in this matter
of the Life Force. It is the special paradox of our age, Chesterton
notes, that the life force should thus need assertion and can thus be
followed without joy.
To every man and woman, bird, beast, and flower, life is a
love-call to be eagerly followed. To Bernard Shaw it is merely a
military bugle to be obeyed. In short, he fails to feel that the
command of Nature (if one must use the anthropomorphic fable of
Nature instead of the philosophic term God) can be enjoyed as well as
obeyed. He paints life at its darkest and then tells the babe unborn
to take the leap in the dark. That is heroic; and to my instinct at
least Schopenhauer looks like a pigmy beside his pupil. But it is the
heroism of a morbid and almost asphyxiated age. It is awful to think
that this world which so many poets have praised has even for a time
been depicted as a man-trap into which we may just have the manhood
to jump. Think of all those ages through which men have talked of
having the courage to die. And then remember that we have actually
fallen to talking of having the courage to live.*
[* _George Bernard Shaw_. Week-End Library, p. 190.]
Here comes the great parting of the two men's thought. G.K. believed
in God and in joy. But he saw that Shaw had much of value for this
strange diseased world. His primary value was not merely (as some
said) that he woke it up. The literary world might not be awake to
the social evil, but it was painfully awake to the ills, real or
imaginary, inherent in human life.
We do not need waking up; rather we suffer from insomnia, with all
its results of fear and exaggeration and frightful waking dreams. The
modern mind is not a donkey which wants kicking to make it go on. The
modern mind is more like a motor-car on a lonely road which two
amateur motorists have been just clever enough to take to pieces but
are not quite clever enough to put together again.*
[Ibid., pp. 245-6.]
Shaw had not merely asked questions of the age: that would have been
worse than useless. What he had done was at moments to rise above his
own thoughts and give, through his characters, inspired answers: G.K.
instances _Candida_, with its revelation of the meaning of marriage
when the woman stays with the strong man because he is so weak and
needs her. And Shaw had brought back philosophy into drama--that is,
he had recreated the atmosphere, lost since Shakespeare,* in which
men were thinking, and might, therefore, find the answers that the
age needed. And here again we come back to the world which these men
were shaking and to the respective philosophies with which they
looked at it. It was a world of conventions and these conventions had
become empty of meaning. Throw them away, said Shaw and Wells; no,
said Chesterton; keep them and look for their meaning; Revolution
does not mean destruction: it means restoration.
[* Hard on Goethe and Ibsen, to say nothing of Mozart's Magic Flute
and Beethoven's 9th symphony. G.B.S.]
The same sort of discussion buzzed around this book as around the
controversies of which it might be called a prolongation. Shaw
himself reviewed it in an article in the _Nation_, in which he called
it, "the best work of literary art I have yet provoked. . . .
Everything about me which Mr. Chesterton had to divine he has divined
miraculously. But everything that he could have ascertained easily by
reading my own plain directions on the bottle, as it were, remains
for him a muddled and painful problem." From an interchange of
private letters it would seem that the move to Beaconsfield took
place later in this year than I had supposed. Bernard Shaw's letter
is probably not written many days after an undated one to him from
G.K.:
48, Overstrand Mansions,
Battersea Park. S.W.
DEAR BERNARD SHAW,
I trust our recent tournaments have not rendered it contrary to the
laws of romantic chivalry (which you reverence so much) for me to
introduce to you my friend Mr. Pepler, who is a very nice man indeed
though a social idealist, and who has, I believe, something of a
practical sort to ask of you. Please excuse abruptness in this letter
of introduction; we are moving into the country and every piece of
furniture I begin to write at is taken away and put into a van.
Always yours sincerely,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
10, Adelphi Terrace, W.C.
30th October 1909.
CHESTERTON.
SHAW SPEAKS.
ATTENTION!
I saw your man and consoled him spiritually; but that is not the
subject of this letter. I still think that you could write a useful
sort of play if you were started. When I was in Kerry last month I
had occasionally a few moments to spare; and it seemed to me quite
unendurable that you should be wasting your time writing books about
me. I liked the book very much, especially as it was so completely
free from my own influence, being evidently founded on a very hazy
recollection of a five-year-old perusal of Man and Superman; but a
lot of it was fearful nonsense. There was one good thing about the
scientific superstition which you came a little too late for. It
taught a man to respect facts. You have no conscience in this
respect; and your punishment is that you substitute such dull
inferences as my "narrow puritan home" for delightful and fantastic
realities which you might very easily have ascertained if you had
taken greater advantage of what is really the only thing to be said
in favour of Battersea; namely, that it is within easy reach of
Adelphi Terrace. However, I have no doubt that when Wilkins Micawber
junior grew up and became eminent in Australia, references were made
to his narrow puritan home; so I do not complain. If you had told the
truth, nobody would have believed it.
Now to business. When one breathes Irish air, one becomes a
practical man. In England I used to say what a pity it was you did
not write a play. In Ireland I sat down and began writing a scenario
for you. But before I could finish it I had come back to London; and
now it is all up with the scenario: in England I can do nothing but
talk. I therefore now send you the thing as far as I scribbled it;
and I leave you to invent what escapades you please for the hero, and
to devise some sensational means of getting him back to heaven again,
unless you prefer to end with the millennium in full swing.*
[* The scenario dealt with the return of St. Augustine to the England
he remembered converting.]
But experience has made me very doubtful of the efficacy of help as
the means of getting work out of the right sort of man. When I was
young I struck out one invaluable rule for myself, which was,
Whenever you meet an important man, contradict him. If possible,
insult him. But such a rule is one of the privileges of youth. I no
longer live by rules. Yet there is one way in which you may possibly
be insultable. It can be plausibly held that you are a venal ruffian,
pouring forth great quantities of immediately saleable stuff, but
altogether declining to lay up for yourself treasures in heaven. It
may be that you cannot afford to do otherwise. Therefore I am quite
ready to make a deal with you.
A full length play should contain about 18,000 words (mine
frequently contain two or three times that number). I do not know
what your price per thousand is. I used to be considered grossly
extortionate by Massingham and others for insisting on £3. 18,000
words at £3 per thousand is £54. I need make no extra allowance for
the republication in book form, because even if the play aborted as
far as the theatre is concerned, you could make a book of it all the
same. Let us assume that your work is worth twice as much as mine;
this would make £108. I have had two shockingly bad years of it
pecuniarily speaking, and am therefore in that phase of extravagance
which straitened means have always produced in me. Knock off 8% as a
sort of agent's commission to me for starting you on the job and
finding you a theme. This leaves £100. I will pay you £100 down on
your contracting to supply me within three months with a mechanically
possible, i.e., stageable drama dealing with the experiences of St.
Augustine after re-visiting England. The literary copyright to be
yours, except that you are not to prevent me making as many copies as
I may require for stage use. The stage right to be mine; but you are
to have the right to buy it back from me for £250 whenever you like.*
The play, if performed, to be announced as your work and not as a
collaboration. All rights which I may have in the scenario to go with
the stage right and literary copyright as prescribed as far as you
may make use of it. What do you say? There is a lot of spending in
£100.
[* I could not very well offer him £100 as a present. G.B.S.]
One condition more. If it should prove impossible to achieve a
performance otherwise than through the Stage Society (which does not
pay anything), a resort to that body is not to be deemed a breach of
the spirit of our agreement.
Do you think it would be possible to make Belloc write a comedy? If
he could only be induced to believe in some sort of God instead of in
that wretched little conspiracy against religion which the pious
Romans have locked up in the Vatican, one could get some drive into
him. As it is, he is wasting prodigious gifts in the service of King
Leopold and the Pope and other ghastly scarecrows. If he must have a
Pope, there is quite a possible one at Adelphi Terrace.
For the next few days I shall be at my country quarters, Ayot St.
Lawrence, Welwyn, Herts. I have a motor car which could carry me on
sufficient provocation as far as Beaconsfield; but I do not know how
much time you spend there and how much in Fleet Street. Are you only
a week-ender; or has your wise wife taken you properly in hand and
committed you to a pastoral life.
Yours ever,
G. BERNARD SHAW.
P.S. Remember that the play is to be practical (in the common
managerial sense) only in respect of its being mechanically
possible as a stage representation. It is to be neither a
likely-to-be-successful play nor a literary lark: it is to be
written for the good of all souls.
Among the reviewers of the book, our old friend, the _Academy_,
surprised me by hating Shaw so much more than Chesterton that the
latter came off quite lightly. There was a good deal of the usual
misunderstanding and lists were made of self-contradictions on the
author's part. Still in the main the press was sympathetic and even
enthusiastic. But when Shaw reviewed Chesterton on Shaw, more than
one paper waxed sarcastic on the point of royalties and remuneration
gained by these means. The funniest of the more critical comments on
the way these men wrote of one another was a suggestion made in the
_Bystander_ that Shaw and Chesterton were really the same person:
. . . Shaw, it is said, tired of socialism, weary of wearing
Jaegers, and broken down by teetotalism and vegetarianism, sought,
some years ago, an escape from them. His adoption, however, of these
attitudes had a decided commercial value, which he did not think it
advisable to prejudice by wholesale surrender. Therefore he, in order
to taste the forbidden joys of individualistic philosophy, meat, food
and strong drink, created "Chesterton." This mammoth myth, he
decided, should enjoy all the forms of fame which Shaw had to deny
himself. Outwardly, he should be Shaw's antithesis. He should be
beardless, large in girth, smiling of countenance, and he should be
licensed to sell paradoxes only in essay and novel form, all stage
and platform rights being reserved by Shaw. To enable the imposition
to be safely carried out, Shaw hit on the idea of residence close to
the tunnel which connects Adelphi with the Strand. Emerging from his
house plain, Jaeger-clad, bearded and saturnine Shaw, he entered the
tunnel, in a cleft in which was a cellar. Here he donned the
Chesterton properties, the immense padding of chest, and so on, the
Chesterton sombrero hat and cloak and pince-nez, and there he left
the Shaw beard and the Shaw clothes, the Shaw expression of
countenance, and all the Shaw theories. He emerged into the Strand
"G.K.C.," in whose identity he visited all the cafés, ate all the
meats, rode in all the cabs, and smiled on all the sinners. The day's
work done, the Chesterton manuscripts delivered, the proofs read, the
bargains driven, the giant figure returned to the tunnel, and once
again was back in Adelphi, the Shaw he was when he left it--back to
the Jaegers, the beard, the Socialism, the statistics, and the
sardonic letters to the _Times_.*
[* From _The Bystander_. 1 September, 1909.]
Bernard Shaw is a man of unusual generosity, but I think from his
letters he must also be quite a good man of business. G.K. was so
greatly the opposite that G.B.S. urged him again and again to do the
most ordinary things to protect the literary rights of himself and
others. Thus, in the only undated letter in the whole packet, he begs
Gilbert to back up the Authors' Society:
MY DEAR G.K.C.,
I am one of the unhappy slaves who, on the two big committees of
your Trade Union (the Society of Authors) drudge at the heartbreaking
work of defending our miserable profession against being devoured,
body and soul, by the publishers--themselves a pitiful gang of
literature-struck impostors who are crumpled up by the booksellers,
who, though small folk, are at least in contact with reality in the
shape of the book buyer. It is a ghastly and infuriating business,
because the authors _will_ go to lunch with their publishers and sell
them anything for £20 over the cigarettes, but it has to be done; and
I, with half a dozen others, have to do it.
Now I missed the last committee meeting (electioneering: I am here
doing two colossal meetings of miners every night for Keir Hardie);
but the harassed secretary writes that it was decided to take
proceedings in the case of a book of yours which you (oh Esau, Esau!)
sold to John--(John is a--well--no matter: when you take your turn on
the committee you will find him out) and that though the German
lawyer has had £7 and is going ahead (£7 worth of law in Germany
takes you to the House of Lords) everything is hung up because you
will not answer Thring's* letters. Thring, in desperation, appeals to
me, concluding with characteristic simplicity that we must be friends
because you have written a book about me. As the conclusion is
accidentally and improbably true, I now urge you to give him whatever
satisfaction he requires. I have no notion what it is, or what the
case is about; but at least answer his letters, however infuriating
they may be. Remember: you pay Thring only £500, for which you get
integrity, incorruptibility, implacability, and a disposition greatly
to find quarrel in a straw on your behalf (even with yourself) and
don't complain if you don't get £20,000 worth of tact into the
bargain. And your obligations to us wretched committee men are simply
incalculable. We get nothing but abuse and denigration: authors weep
with indignation when we put our foot on some blood-sucking,
widow-cheating, orphan starving scoundrel and ruthlessly force him to
keep to his mite of obligation under an agreement which would have
revolted Shylock: unless the best men, the Good Professionals, help
us, we are lost. We get nothing and spend our time like water for you.
[* Herbert Thring was the barrister employed by the Society of
Authors.]
All we ask you to do is to answer Thring and let us get along with
your work.
Look here: will you write to Thring.
_Please_ write to Thring.
I say: have you written to Thring yet?
G.B.S.
I doubt whether he had. Those chance sums he poured from time to time
into Frances' lap were usually not what they should have been, an
advance on a royalty. _Orthodoxy_ he sold outright for £100. No man
ever worked so hard to earn so little.
When later Gilbert employed Messrs. A. P. Watt as his literary agents
a letter to them (undated, of course, and written on the old
notepaper of his first Battersea flat) shows a mingling of gratitude
to his agents with entire absence of resentment towards his
publishers, which might be called essence of Chesterton:
The prices you have got me for books, compared with what I used
weakly to demand, seem to me to come out of fairyland. It seems to me
that there is a genuine business problem which creates a permanent
need for a literary agent. It consists in this--that our work, even
when it has become entirely a duty and a worry, still remains in some
vague way a pleasure. And how can we put a fair price on what is at
once a worry and a pleasure? Suppose someone comes to me and says, "I
offer you sixpence for your _History of the Gnostic Heresy_." Why,
after all, should I charge more than sixpence for a work it was so
exuberant to write? You, on the other hand, seeing it from the
outside, would say that it was worth--so and so. And you would get it.
Shaw continued his attempts to stimulate the reluctant playwright.
Two years after drafting the scenario, he writes:
10 Adelphi Terrace, W.C.
5th April 1912.
DEAR MRS. CHESTERTON,
I have promised to drive somebody to Beaconsfield on Sunday
morning; and I shall be in that district more or less for the rest of
the day. If you are spending Easter at Overroads, and have no
visitors who couldn't stand us, we should like to call on you at any
time that would be convenient.
The convenience of time depends on a design of my own which I wish
to impart to you first. I want to read a play to Gilbert. It began by
way of being a music-hall sketch; so it is not 3½ hours long as
usual: I can get through it in an hour and a half. I want to insult
and taunt and stimulate Gilbert with it. It is the sort of thing he
could write and ought to write: a religious harlequinade.* In fact,
he could do it better if a sufficient number of pins were stuck into
him. My proposal is that I read the play to him on Sunday (or at the
next convenient date), and that you fall into transports of
admiration of it; declare that you can never love a man who cannot
write things like that; and definitely announce that if Gilbert has
not finished a worthy successor to it before the end of the third
week next ensuing, you will go out like the lady in A Doll's House,
and live your own life--whatever that dark threat may mean.
[* Androcles and The Lion evidently. G.B.S.]
If you are at home, I count on your ready complicity; but the
difficulty is that you may have visitors; and if they are pious
Gilbert will be under a tacit obligation not to blaspheme, or let me
blaspheme, whilst they are beneath his roof (my play is about
Christian Martyrs, and perfectly awful in parts); and if they are
journalists, it will be necessary to administer an oath of secrecy. I
don't object to the oath; and nothing would please Gilbert more than
to make them drink blood from a skull: the difficulty is, they
wouldn't keep it. In short, they must be the right sort of people, of
whom the more the merrier.
Forgive this long rigmarole: it is only to put you in possession of
what _may_ happen if you approve, and your invitations and domestic
circumstances are propitious.
Yours sincerely,
G. BERNARD SHAW.
Chesterton at last did write _Magic_--but that belongs to another
chapter.
Like the demand for a play, the theme of finance recurs with great
frequency in Shaw's letters, and after _Magic_ appeared he wrote to
Frances telling her that "in Sweden, where the marriage laws are
comparatively enlightened, I believe you could obtain a divorce on
the ground that your husband threw away an important part of the
provision for your old age for twenty pieces of silver. . . . In
future, the moment he has finished a play and the question of
disposing of it arises, lock him up and bring the agreement to me.
Explanations would be thrown away on him."
CHAPTER XV
From Battersea to Beaconsfield
(1909-1911)
IN 1909, WITH _Orthodoxy_ well behind him, and _George Bernard Shaw_
just published, Gilbert and his wife left London for the small
country town that was to be their home for the rest of their lives.
It was an odd coincidence that they should leave Overstrand Mansions,
Battersea, and come to Overroads, Beaconsfield, for they did not name
their new home but found it ready christened.
It will be remembered that in one of the letters during the
engagement Gilbert had suggested a country home. The reason for the
choice of Beaconsfield he gives in the _Autobiography:_
After we were married, my wife and I lived for about a year in
Kensington, the place of my childhood; but I think we both knew that
it was not to be the real place for our abode. I remember that we
strolled out one day, for a sort of second honeymoon, and went upon a
journey into the void, a voyage deliberately objectless. I saw a
passing omnibus labelled "Hanwell" and, feeling this to be an
appropriate omen,* we boarded it and left it somewhere at a stray
station, which I entered and asked the man in the ticket-office where
the next train went to. He uttered the pedantic reply, "Where do you
want to go to?" And I uttered the profound and philosophical
rejoinder, "Wherever the next train goes to." It seemed that it went
to Slough; which may seem to be singular taste, even in a train.
However, we went to Slough, and from there set out walking with even
less notion of where we were going. And in that fashion we passed
through the large and quiet cross-roads of a sort of village, and
stayed at an inn called The White Hart. We asked the name of the
place and were told that it was called Beaconsfield (I mean of course
that it was called Beconsfield and not Beaconsfield), and we said to
each other, "This is the sort of place where some day we will make
our home."**
[* At Hanwell is London's most famous lunatic asylum.]
[** _Autobiography_, p. 219.]
They both wanted a home. They both deeply desired a family. The wish
is normal to both man and woman, normal in a happy marriage, and
theirs was unusually happy; it was almost abnormally keen in both
Frances and Gilbert. Few men have so greatly loved children. As a
schoolboy his letters are full of it--making friends with Scottish
children on the sands, with French children by the medium of
pictures. Later he was writing "In Defence of Baby Worship" and
welcoming with enthusiasm the arrival of his friends' children into
the world.
In the Notebook he had written:
Sunlight in a child's hair.
It is like the kiss of Christ upon all children.
I blessed the child: and hoped the blessing would go with him
And never leave him;
And turn first into a toy, and then into a game
And then into a friend,
And as he grew up, into friends
And then into a woman.
GRASS AND CHILDREN
Grass and children
There seems no end to them.
But if there were but one blade of grass
Men would see that it is fairer than lilies,
And if we saw the first child
We should worship it as the God come on earth.
ROUNDS
I find that most round things are nice,
Particularly Eternity and a baby.
Frances cared no less deeply both for Eternity and for babies and for
many years went on hoping for the family that would complete their
lives. At last it was decided to have an operation to enable her to
have children. Her doctor writes:
I well remember an incident which occurred during her convalescence
from that operation. I received a telephone call from the matron of
the Nursing Home in which Mrs. Chesterton was staying, suggesting
that I should come round and remonstrate with Mr. Chesterton. On my
arrival I found him sitting on the stairs, where he had been for two
hours, greatly incommoding passers up and down and deaf to all
requests to move on. It appeared that he had written a sonnet to his
wife on her recovery from the operation and was bringing it to give
her. He was not however satisfied with the last line, but was
determined to perfect it before entering her room to take tea with
her.
By the time they left London she must, I think, have given up the
hope she had so long cherished. Still if there could not be children
there might be perhaps something of a home. In the conditions of
their life, there was danger that any house of bricks and mortar
should be rather a headquarters than a home, and it was lucky that he
was able to feel she took home with her wherever they went--
Your face that is a wandering home
A flying home for me.
The years before them were to be filled with the vast activities that
not only took Gilbert to London and all over England incessantly, but
were to take him increasingly over Europe and America. Beaconsfield
gave a degree of quiet that made it possible, when they were able to
be at home, not to be swamped by engagements and to lead a life of
their own. Gilbert could go to London when he liked, but he need not
always be on tap, so to say, for all the world. Frances could have a
garden and indulge her hungry appetite for all that was fruitful.
G.K., later, under the title "The Homelessness of Jones"* showed his
love for a house rather than a flat, and they gave even to their
first little house "Overroads" the stamp of a real home.
[* A chapter in _What's Wrong with the World_.]
For a man and his wife to leave London for the country might seem to
be their own affair. Not so, however, with the Chestertons. After a
lapse of over thirty years I find the matter still a subject of
furious controversy and indeed passion. Frances, says one school of
opinion, committed a crime against the public good by removing
Gilbert from Fleet Street. No, says the other school, she had to move
him or he would have died of working too hard and drinking too much.
The suggestion, which I believe to be a fact, that Gilbert himself
wanted to move, is seldom entertained.
There is in all this the legitimate feeling of distress among any
group at losing its chief figure, its pride and joy. "I lost
Gilbert," Lucian Oldershaw once said, "first when I introduced him to
Belloc, next when he married Frances, and finally when he joined the
Catholic Church. . . . I rejoiced, though perhaps with a maternal
sadness, at all these fulfillments."
Cecil wanted his brother always on hand. Belloc was already in the
country--a far more remote country--but even he, coming up to London,
mourned to my mother, "she has taken my Chesterton from me." Talking
it over however after the lapse of years, he agreed that in all
probability the move was a wise one. What may be called the smaller
fry of Fleet Street are less reasonable. One cannot avoid the feeling
that in all this masculine life so sure of its manhood, there
lingered something of the "schwärmerei" of the Junior Debating Club
furiously desiring each to be first with Gilbert. And in his love of
Fleet Street he so identified himself with them all that they felt he
was one of them and did not recognise the horizons wider than theirs
that were opening before him.
My husband and I are experts in changing residences and we listened
with the amusement of experts to the talk of theorists. For it was so
constantly assumed that on one side of a choice is disaster, on the
other perfection. Actually perfection does not belong to this earthly
state: if you go to Rome, as Gilbert himself once said, you sacrifice
a rich suggestive life at Wimbledon. Newman writing of a far greater
and more irrevocable choice called his story _Loss and Gain_--but he
had no doubt that the gain outweighed the loss. There were in
Gilbert's adult life three other big decisions--decisions of the
scale that altered its course. The first was his marriage. The second
was his reception into the Church. The third was his continued
dedication to the paper that his brother and Belloc had founded. In
deciding to marry Frances he was acting against his mother's wishes,
to which he was extremely sensitive. His decision to become a
Catholic had to be made alone: he had the sympathy of his wife but
not her companionship. In the decision to edit the paper he had not
even fully her sympathy: she always felt his creative work to be so
much more important and to be imperilled by the overwork the paper
brought. Gilbert was a man slow in action but it would be exceedingly
difficult to find instances of his doing anything that he did not
want to do. The theorists about marriage are like the theorists about
moving house, if they do not know that decisions made by one party
alone are rare indeed and stick out like spikes in the life of a
normal and happy couple. Of the vast majority of decisions it is hard
to say who makes them. They make themselves: after endless talk: on
the tops of omnibuses going to Hanwell or elsewhere: out walking:
breakfasting--especially breakfasting in bed. They make
themselves--above all in the matter of a move--in fine weather:
during a holiday: on a hot London Sunday: when a flat is stuffy: when
the telephone rings all day: when a book is on the stocks.
Other writers have left London that they might create at leisure and
choose their own times for social intercourse. Why does no one say
their wives dragged them away? Simply, I think, that being less kind
and considerate than Gilbert, they do not mind telling their friends
that they are not always wanted. This Gilbert could not do. If people
said how they would miss him, how they hated his going, he would
murmur vague and friendly sounds, from which they deduced all they
wanted to deduce. Was it more weakness or strength, that tenderness
of heart that could never faintly suggest to his friends that they
would miss him more than he would miss them? "I never wanted but one
thing in my life," he had written to Annie Firmin. And that "one
thing" he was taking with him.
Anyhow, the move accomplished, he enjoyed defending it in every
detail, and did so especially in his _Daily News_ articles. The rush
to the country was not uncommon in the literary world of the moment,
and his journalist friends had urged the point that Beaconsfield was
not true country, was suburban, was being built over. His friends,
G.K. replied, were suffering from a weak-minded swing from one
extreme to the other. Men who had praised London as the only place to
live in were now vying with one another to live furthest from a
station, to have no chimneys visible on the most distant horizon, to
depend on tradesmen who only called once a week from cities so
distant that fresh-baked loaves grew stale before delivery. "Rival
ruralists would quarrel about which had the most completely
inconvenient postal service; and there were many jealous
heartburnings if one friend found out any uncomfortable situation
which the other friend had thoughtlessly overlooked."
Gilbert, on the contrary, noted soon after his arrival that
Beaconsfield was beginning to be built over and he noted it with
satisfaction. "Within a stone's throw of my house they are building
another house. I am glad they are building it and I am glad it is
within a stone's throw." He did not want a desert, he did not want a
large landed estate, he wanted what he had got--a house and a garden.
He adventurously explored that garden, finding a kitchen-garden that
had "somehow got attached" to the premises, and wondering why he
liked it; speaking to the gardener, "an enterprise of no little
valour," and asking him the name "of a strange dark red rose, at once
theatrical and sulky," which turned out to be called Victor Hugo;
"watching (with regret) a lot of little black pigs being turned out
of my garden."
Watching the neighbouring house grow up from its foundation he noted
in an article called, "The Wings of Stone," what was the reality of a
staircase. We pad them with carpets and rail them with banisters, yet
every "staircase is truly only an awful and naked ladder running up
into the infinite to a deadly height." (A correspondent pointed out
in a letter to the _Daily News_ that here he had touched a reality
keenly felt by primitive peoples. When Cetewayo, King of Zululand,
visited London, he would go upstairs only on hands and knees and that
with manifest terror.) The paddings of civilisation may be useful,
yet Gilbert held more valuable a realisation of the realities of
things. Vision is not fancy, but the sight of truth.
In the Notebook he had written
There are three things that make me think;
things beyond all poetry:
A yellow space or rift in evening sky:
A chimney or pinnacle high in the air;
And a path over a hill.
Chesterton had always the power of conveying in words a painter's
vision of some unforgettable scene with the poet's words for what the
artist not only sees but imagines. Such flashes became more frequent
as he looked through the doorway of his little house. Go through _The
Ball and the Cross_ with this in mind and you will see what I mean.
"The crimson seas of the sunset seemed to him like a bursting out of
some sacred blood, as if the heart of the world had broken." "There
is nothing more beautiful than thus to look as it were through the
archway of a house; as if the open sky were an interior chamber, and
the sun a secret lamp of the place." Best of all to illustrate this
special quality is a longer passage from the _Poet and the Lunatics_.
For the most part he was contented to see the green semicircles of
lawn repeat themselves like a pattern of green moons; for he was not
one to whom repetition was merely monotony. Only in looking over a
particular gate at a particular lawn, he became pleasantly conscious,
or half conscious, of a new note of colour in the greenness; a much
bluer green, which seemed to change to vivid blue, as the object at
which he was gazing moved sharply, turning a small head on a long
neck. It was a peacock. But he had thought of a thousand things
before he thought of the obvious thing. The burning blue of the
plumage on the neck had reminded him of blue fire, and blue fire had
reminded him of some dark fantasy about blue devils, before he had
fully realised even that it was a peacock he was staring at. And the
tail, that trailing tapestry of eyes, had led his wandering wits away
to those dark but divine monsters of the Apocalypse whose eyes were
multiplied like their wings, before he had remembered that a peacock,
even in a more practical sense, was an odd thing to see in so
ordinary a setting.
Yet always to Chesterton the beauty of nature was enhanced by the
work of men, and if in London men had swarmed too closely, it was not
to get away from them but to appreciate them more individually that
he chose the country. Yes, his literary friends would say: in the
real country that is true; the farmer, the labourer, even the village
barber and the village tradesmen are worth knowing, but not suburban
neighbours. Against such discrimination the whole democracy of
Chesterton stood in revolt. All men were valuable, all men were
interesting, the doctor as much as the barber, the clergyman as much
as the farmer. All men were children of God and citizens of the
world. If he had a choice in the matter it was discrimination against
the literary world itself with all the fads that tended to smother
its essential humanity. Nothing would have induced him to
discriminate against the suburban. In the last year of his life he
wrote in the _Autobiography:_ "I have lived in Beaconsfield from the
time when it was almost a village, to the time when, as the enemy
profanely says, it is a suburb."
For the author of _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_ this would hardly be
a conclusive argument against any place. We should, he once said,
"regard the important suburbs as ancient cities embedded in a sort of
boiling lava spouted up by that volcano, the speculative builder."
That "lava" itself he found interesting, but beneath or beside it a
little town like Beaconsfield had its share in the great sweep of
English history. Something of the "seven sunken Englands" could be
found in the Old Town which custom marked off pretty sharply from the
"New Town." Burke had lived in Beaconsfield and was buried there; and
Gilbert once suggested to Mr. Garvin that they should appear at a
local festival, respectively as Fox ("a part for which I have no
claim except in circumference") and Burke ("I admire Burke in many
things while disagreeing with him in nearly everything. But Mr.
Garvin strikes me as being rather like Burke").
At the barber's he was often seen sitting at the end of a line
patiently awaiting his turn, for he could never shave himself and it
was only years later that Dorothy Collins conceived and put into
execution the bold project of bringing the barber to the house.
Probably an article would be shaping while he waited and the barber's
conversation might put the finishing touches to it. There were in
fact two barbers, one of the old town, one of the new. "I once
planned," he says, "a massive and exhaustive sociological work, in
several volumes, which was to be called 'The Two Barbers of
Beaconsfield' and based entirely upon the talk of the two excellent
citizens to whom I went to get shaved. For those two shops do indeed
belong to two different civilisations."
Despite his love for London, Gilbert had always felt that life in a
country town held one point of special superiority--in it you
discovered the Community. In London you chose your friends--which
meant that you narrowed your life to people of one kind. He had noted
in the family itself a valuable widening:
The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into
a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we
have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us
and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a
surprise. Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt
from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being
born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world
which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without
us, into a world that we have not made.*
[* _Heretics_, pp. 191-2.]
Here in Beaconsfield the Chestertons grew into the community: the
clergyman, the doctor, the inn-keeper, the barber, the gardener. And
like the relatives who spring upon you at birth these worthy citizens
seemed to Gilbert potentials of vast excitement and varied interest.
Discussing an event of much later date--a meeting to decide whether a
crucifix might be erected as a local war memorial--he thus describes
the immense forces he found in that small place:
Those who debated the matter were a little group of the inhabitants
of a little country town; the rector and the doctor and the bank
manager and the respectable tradesmen of the place, with a few
hangers-on like myself, of the more disreputable professions of
journalism or the arts. But the powers that were present there in the
spirit came out of all the ages and all the battlefields of history;
Mahomet was there and the Iconoclasts, who came riding out of the
East to ruin the statues of Italy, and Calvin and Rousseau and the
Russian anarchs and all the older England that is buried under
Puritanism; and Henry the Third ordering the little images for
Westminster and Henry the Fifth, after Agincourt, on his knees before
the shrines of Paris. If one could really write that little story of
that little place, it would be the greatest of historical monographs.*
[* _Autobiography_, p. 244.]
A keen observer often added to the Beaconsfield community in those
days was Father (now Monsignor) John O'Connor, close friend of both
Gilbert and Frances and inspirer of "Father Brown" of detective fame.
They had first become friends in 1904 when they met at the house of a
friend in Keighley, Yorkshire, and walked back over the moors
together to visit Francis Steinthal at Ilkley. This Jew, of Frankfort
descent, was a great friend of the Chestertons and on their many
visits to him the friendship with Father O'Connor ripened. With both
Frances and Gilbert it was among the closest of their lives. Their
letters to him show it: the long talks, and companionable walks over
the moors, have an atmosphere of intimacy that is all the more
convincing because so little stressed in his book. Father O'Connor
has a pardonable pride in the idea that their talks suggested ideas
to Gilbert, he takes pleasure in his character of "Father Brown," but
he reveals the atmosphere of unique confidence and intimacy by the
very absence of all parade of it.
Both he and Gilbert have told the story of how the idea of the
detective priest first dawned. On their second meeting Father
O'Connor had startled, indeed almost shattered Gilbert, with certain
rather lurid knowledge of human depravity which he had acquired in
the course of his priestly experience. At the house to which they
were going, two Cambridge undergraduates spoke disparagingly of the
"cloistered" habits of the Catholic clergy, saying that to them it
seemed that to know and meet evil was a far better thing than the
innocence of such ignorance. To Gilbert, still under the shock of a
knowledge compared with which "these two Cambridge gentlemen knew
about as much of real evil as two babies in the same perambulator,"
the exquisite irony of this remark suggested a thought. Why not a
whole comedy of cross purposes based on the notion of a priest with a
knowledge of evil deeper than that of the criminal he is converting?
He carried out this idea in the story of "The Blue Cross," the first
Father Brown detective story. Father O'Connor's account adds the
details that he had himself once boasted of buying five sapphires for
five shillings, and that he always carried a large umbrella and many
brown paper parcels. At the Steinthal dining table, an artist friend
of the family made a sketch of Father O'Connor which later appeared
on the wrapper of _The Innocence of Father Brown_.
Beyond one or two touches of this sort the idea had been a suggestion
for a character, not a portrait, and in the _Autobiography_ and in
the _Dickens_ Gilbert has a good deal to say of interest to the
novelist about how such suggestions come and are used. He never
believed that Dickens drew a portrait, as it were, in the round.
Nature just gives hints to the creative artist. And it used to amuse
"Father Brown" to find that such touches of observation as noting
where an ash-tray had got hidden behind a book seemed to Gilbert
quasi miraculous. Left to himself he merely dropped ashes on the
floor from his cigar. "He did not smoke a pipe and cigarettes were
prone to set him on fire in one place or another."
A frequent visitor, Father O'Connor noted his fashion of work and
reading, and the abstracted way he often moved and spoke. "Call it
mooning, but he never mooned. He was always working out something in
his mind, and when he drifted from his study to the garden and was
seen making deadly passes with his sword-stick at the dahlias, we
knew that he had got to a dead end in his composition and was getting
his thoughts into order."
He played often, too, with a huge knife which he had for twenty-four
years. He took it abroad with him, took it to bed: Frances had to
retrieve it often from under his pillow in some hotel. Once at a
lecture in Dublin he drew it absent-mindedly to sharpen a pencil: as
it was seven and a half inches long shut, and fourteen open, the
amusement of the audience may be imagined. In origin it was, Father
O'Connor relates, a Texan or Mexican general utility implement. It
was with this knife that he won my daughter's heart many years later
when she, aged three, had not seen him for some time and had grown
shy of him. A little scared of his enormousness she stood far off. He
did not look in her direction but began to open and shut the vast
blade. Next she was on his knee. A little later we heard her remark,
"Uncle Gilbert, you make jokes just like my Daddy." And from him
came, "I do my best."
The prototype of Father Brown tells of the easy job in detection when
Gilbert had been reading a book:
He had just been reading a shilling pamphlet by Dr. Horton on the
Roman Menace or some such fearful wild fowl. I knew he had read it,
because no one else could when he had done. Most of his books, as and
when read, had gone through every indignity a book may suffer and
live. He turned it inside out, dog-eared it, pencilled it, sat on it,
took it to bed and rolled on it, and got up again and spilled tea on
it--if he were sufficiently interested. So Dr. Horton's pamphlet had
a refuted look when I saw it.
Father O'Connor was not the only friend who was added to the
Beaconsfield group with some frequency. It was easy enough to run
down from London or over from Welwyn (home of G.B.S.) or from Oxford
or Cambridge. It was most conveniently central. Gilbert's brethren of
the pen were especially apt to appear at all seasons and always found
friendly welcome. For he continued to call himself neither poet nor
philosopher but journalist. Father O'Connor had tried to persuade
him, as he neatly puts it, to "begin to print on handmade paper with
gilt edges." But Frances begged him to drop the idea: "You will not
change Gilbert, you will only fidget him. He is bent on being a jolly
journalist, to paint the town red, and he does not need style to do
that. All he wants is buckets and buckets of red paint."
Journalists coming down from London describe the "jolly" welcome,
beer poured, the sword-stick flourished, conversation flowing as
freely as the beer. It meant a pleasant afternoon and it meant good
copy. They visited him in the country, they observed him in town. One
interviewer returned with a photo which showed Chesterton "in a
somewhat négligé condition," the result as he admitted of reading W.
W. Jacobs "rolling about on the floor waving his legs in the air."
He was seen working a swan boat at the White City: "he collapsed it
and the placid lake became a raging sea." He was seen thinking and
even reading under the strangest weather conditions: one man saw him
under a gas lamp in the street in pouring rain with an open book in
his hand. Reading in Fleet Street one day Gilbert discovered suddenly
that the Lord Mayor's Show was passing. He began to reflect on the
Show so deeply that he forgot to look at it.
Overroads I remember as a little triangular house, much too small for
the sort of fun the Chestertons enjoyed. Frances bought a field
opposite to it and there built a studio. The night the studio was
opened Father O'Connor remembers a large party at which charades were
acted. He himself as Canon Cross-Keys gave away the word so that
"Belfry" was loudly shouted by the opposition group. The rival
company acting Torture got away with it successfully, especially,
complains our Yorkshire priest "as 'ure' was pronounced 'yaw' in the
best southern manner."
On that night, returning to the house, Father O'Connor offered his
arm to Gilbert who "refused it with a finality foreign to our
friendship." Father O'Connor went on ahead and Gilbert following in
the dark stumbled over a flowerpot and broke his arm. Perhaps because
his size made him self-consciously aware of awkwardness Gilbert hated
being helped. Father Ignatius Rice, another close friend, says the
only time he ever saw Gilbert annoyed was when he offered him an arm
going upstairs.
Gilbert and Frances would both visit Father O'Connor in his Yorkshire
Parish of Heckmondwike. One year they took rooms at Ilkley and he
remembers Gilbert adorning with huge frescoes the walls of the attic
and Frances sitting in the window singing, "O swallow, swallow flying
south" while Gilbert "did a blazon of some fantastic coat of arms."
The closeness of the intimacy is seen in a letter quoted by Father
O'Connor* in which Gilbert explained why Frances and he were unable
to come to Heckmondwike for a promised visit.
[* _Father Brown on Chesterton_, p. 123.]
(July 3rd, 1909)
I would not write this to anyone else, but you combine so unusually
in your own single personality the characters of (1) priest, (2)
human being, (3) man of the world, (4) man of the other world, (5)
man of science, (6) old friend, (7) new friend, not to mention
Irishman and picture dealer, that I don't mind suggesting the truth
to you. Frances has just come out of what looked bad enough to be an
illness, and is just going to plunge into one of her recurrent
problems of pain and depression. The two may be just a bit too much
for her and I want to be with her every night for a few days--there's
an Irish Bull for you!
One of the mysteries of Marriage (which must be a Sacrament and an
extraordinary one too) is that a man evidently useless like me can
yet become at certain instants indispensable. And the further oddity
(which I invite you to explain on mystical grounds) is that he never
feels so small as when he knows that he is necessary.
But sometimes she would send him off whether she was well or ill, and
on Father O'Connor would rest the heavy responsibility of getting him
on to his next destination or safe back home. He tells of one such
experience.
He was most dutiful and obedient to orders, but they had to be
written ones and backed by the spoken word. He brought his
dress-suit, oh! with what loving care, to Bradford on Sunday for
Sheffield for Monday, but a careful host found it under the bed in
Bradford just as his train left for Sheffield. Sent at once it was to
Beaconsfield, where it landed at 5 P.M. on Thursday, just allowing
him ten minutes to change and entrain for London.
Scene at Beaconsfield:
"What on earth have you done with your dress-suit, Gilbert?"
"I must have left it behind, darling, but I brought back the ties,
didn't I?"*
[* Ibid., p. 43.]
Another time he came back without his pyjamas. They had been lost
early in the journey. "Why didn't you buy some more?" his wife asked.
"I didn't know pyjamas were things you could buy," he said,
surprised. Probably if one were Gilbert one couldn't! Father O'Connor
arriving at Overroads without baggage found that Gilbert's pyjamas
went around him exactly twice.
Lecturing engagements had of course not come to an end with the move
although they had (mercifully) somewhat lessened. What increased with
the distance from London was the problem--never fully solved--of
getting Gilbert to the right place at the right time and in clothes
not too wildly wrong. When he lectured in Lancashire they stayed at
Crosby with Francis Blundell (my brother-in-law), and my sister
remembers Frances as incessantly looking through her bag for letters
and sending telegrams to confirm engagements that had come unstuck or
to refuse others that were in debate. The celebrated and now almost
legendary telegram from Gilbert to Frances told as from a hundred
different cities was really sent: "Am in Market Harborough. Where
ought I to be?"
Desperate, she wired, "Home," because, as she told me later, it was
easier to get him home and start him off again. That day's engagement
was lost past recall.
Charles Rowley of the Ancoats Brotherhood received a wire, reply
paid, from Snow Hill Station, Birmingham: "Am I coming to you tonight
or what?" Reply: "Not this Tuesday but next Wednesday."
So home he came again to Overroads.
The Chestertons made a host of friends in Beaconsfield but the
children always held pride of place. The doctor's little boy, running
along the top of the wall, looked down at Gilbert and remarked to his
delight, "I think you're an ogre." But when the nurse was heard
threatening punishment if he did not get down "that minute," the
child was told by the ogre, "This wall is meant for little boys to
run along." One child, asked after a party if Mr. Chesterton had been
very clever, said, "You should see him catch buns in his mouf."
What was unusual both with Gilbert and Frances was the fact that they
never allowed their disappointment in the matter of children to make
them sour or jealous of others who had the joy that they had not. All
through their lives they played with other people's children: they
chose on a train a compartment full of children: they planned
amusements, they gave presents to the children of their friends. Over
my son's bed hangs a silver crucifix chosen with loving care by
Frances after Gilbert had stood godfather to him. And he was one of
very many.
Gilbert was however a complete realist as to the ways and manners of
the species he so loved.
Playing with children [he wrote at this time] is a glorious thing:
but the journalist in question has never understood why it was
considered a soothing or idyllic one. It reminds him, not of watering
little budding flowers, but of wrestling for hours with gigantic
angels and devils. Moral problems of the most monstrous complexity
besiege him incessantly. He has to decide before the awful eyes of
innocence, whether, when a sister has knocked down a brother's
bricks, in revenge for the brother having taken two sweets out of his
turn, it is endurable that the brother should retaliate by scribbling
on the sister's picture-book, and whether such conduct does not
justify the sister in blowing out the brother's unlawfully lit match.
Just as he is solving this problem upon principles of the highest
morality, it occurs to him suddenly that he has not written his
Saturday article; and that there is only about an hour to do it in.
He wildly calls to somebody (probably the gardener) to telephone to
somewhere for a messenger; he barricades himself in another room and
tears his hair, wondering what on earth he shall write about. A
drumming of fists on the door outside and a cheerful bellowing
encourage and clarify his thoughts. . . . He sits down desperately;
the messenger rings at the bell; the children drum on the door; the
servants run up from time to time to say the messenger is getting
bored; and the pencil staggers along, making the world a present of
fifteen hundred unimportant words, and making Shakespeare a present
of a portion of Gray's _Elegy_; putting "fantastic roots wreathed
high" instead of "antique roots peep out."* Then the journalist sends
off his copy and turns his attention to the enigma of whether a
brother should commandeer a sister's necklace because the sister
pinched him at Littlehampton.
[* Chesterton had actually made this slip, and the present quotation
is from the article he wrote in apology.]
In the Notebook he had written:
NORTH BERWICK
On the sands I romped with children
Do you blame me that I did not improve myself
By bottling anemones?
But I say that these children will be men and women
And I say that the anemones will not be men and women
(Not just yet, at least, let us say).
And I say that the greatest men of the world might romp with
children
And that I should like to see Shakespeare romping with children
And Browning and Darwin romping with children
And Mr. Gladstone romping with children
And Professor Huxley romping with children
And all the Bishops romping with children;
And I say that if a man had climbed to the stars
And found the secrets of the angels,
The best thing and the most useful thing he could do
Would be to come back and romp with children.
M. V.
An almost elvish little girl with loose brown hair, doing
needlework. I have spoken to her once or twice.
I think I must get another book of the same size as this
to make notes about her.
From the Christmas party at Overroads all adults were excluded--no
nurses, no parents. The children would hang on Gilbert's neck in an
ecstasy of affection and he and Frances schemed out endless games for
them. Gilbert had started a toy theatre before he left London,
cutting out and painting figures and scenery, and devising plots for
plays. Two of the favourites were "St. George and the Dragon" and
"The Seven Champions of Christendom."
The atmosphere of Overroads is perhaps best conveyed through
Gilbert's theories concerning his toy theatre and the other
theatricals such as Charades sometimes played there. When it came to
the toy theatre set up to amuse the children, he frankly felt that he
was himself child No. 1 and got the most amusement out of it. He felt
too that the whole thing was good enough to be worth analysing in its
rules and its effects. And so he drew up a paper of rules and
suggestions for its use.
I will not say positively that a toy-theatre is the best of
theatres; though I have had more fun out of it than out of any other.
But I will say positively that the toy-theatre is the best of all
toys. It sometimes fails; but generally because people are mistaken
in the matter of what it is meant to do, and what it can or cannot be
expected to do; as if people should use a toy balloon as a football
or a skipping rope as a hammock. . . .
Now the first rule may seem rather contradictory; but it is quite
true and really quite simple. In a small theatre, because it is a
small theatre, you cannot deal with small things. Because it is a
small theatre it must only deal with large things. You can introduce
a dragon; but you cannot really introduce an earwig; it is too small
for a small theatre. And this is true not only of small creatures,
but of small actions, small gestures and small details of any
kind. . . . All your effects must be made to depend on things like
scenery and background. The sky and the clouds and the castles and
the mountains and so on must be the exciting things; along with other
things that move all of a piece, such as regiments and processions;
great and glorious things can be done with processions. . . . In a
real comedy the whole excitement may consist in the nervous curate
dropping his tea-cup; though I do not recommend this incident for the
drama of the drawing-room. But if he were nervous, let us say, about
a thunderstorm, the toy-theatre could hardly represent the
nervousness but it might manage the thunder-storm. It might be quite
sensational and yet entirely simple; for it would largely consist of
darkening the stage and making horrible noises behind the
scenes. . . .
The second and smaller rule, that really follows from this, is that
everything dramatic should depend not on a character's action, but
simply on his appearance. Shakespeare said of actors that they have
their exits and their entrances; but these actors ought really to
have nothing else except exits and entrances. The trick is to so
arrange the tale that the mere appearance of a person tells the
important truth about him. Thus, supposing the drama to be about St.
George let us say, the mere abrupt appearance of the dragon's head
(if of a proper ferocity) will be enough to explain that he intends
to eat people; and it will not be necessary for the dragon to explain
at length, with animated gestures and playful conversation, that his
nature is carnivorous and that he has not merely dropped in to tea.
There is some further discussion on colour effects ("I like very gay
and glaring colours, and I like to give them a good chance to
glare"). The paper concludes on a more serious note:
It is an old story, and for some a sad one, that in a sense these
childish toys are more to us than they can ever be to children. We
never know how much of our after imaginations began with such a
peep-show into paradise. I sometimes think that houses are
interesting because they are so like doll houses and I am sure the
best thing that can be said for many large theatres is that they may
remind us of little theatres. . . .
I do not look back, I look forward to this kind of puppet play; I
look forward to the day when I shall have time to play with it. Some
day when I am too lazy to write anything, or even to read anything, I
shall retire into this box of marvels; and I shall be found still
striving hopefully to get inside a toy-theatre.
Adults as well as children enjoyed this toy and it was often
described by interviewers. Like the sword-stick, the great cloak and
flapping hat, it was felt by some to be Gilbert's way of attracting
attention. But it was just one of Gilbert's ways of amusing himself.
A small nephew of Frances was living with them at the time and it was
funny to watch him fencing with his huge uncle who was obviously
enjoying himself rather the more of the two. On my first visit to
Overroads, I noticed how as we talked my host's pencil never ceased.
One evening I collected and kept an imposing red Indian and a
caricature of Chesterton himself in a wheelbarrow being carried off
to the bonfire. I came in too for one of the grown-up parties in
which guessing games were a feature. Lines from the poets were
illustrated and we had to guess them. At another party, Dr. Pocock
told me, G.K. did the Inns of Beaconsfield, of which the most
successful drawing was that of a sadly dilapidated dragon being
turned away from the inn door: "Dragon discovers with disgust that he
cannot put up at the George."
Sometimes these drawings were the prize of whoever guessed the line
of verse they illustrated, sometimes they were sold for a local
charity. The Babies' Convalescent Home was a favourite object and one
admirable picture (reproduced in _The Coloured Lands_) shows the
"Despair of King Herod at discovering children convalescing from the
Massacre." The two closest friendships of early Beaconsfield life
were with the rector, Mr. Comerline and his wife, who are now dead,
and Dr. and Mrs. Pocock. Dr. Pocock was the Chestertons' doctor as
well as their friend, and he tells me that his great difficulty in
treating Gilbert lay in his detachment from his own physical
circumstances. If there was anything wrong with him he usually didn't
notice it. "He was the most uncomplaining person. You had to hunt him
all over" to find out if anything was wrong.
This detachment from circumstances still extended to his appearance
and Frances one day begged Dr. Pocock to take him to a good tailor.
It was a huge success: he had never looked so well as he did now--for
a few weeks. And then the tailor said to Dr. Pocock, "Mr. Chesterton
has broken my heart. It took twice the material and twice the time to
make for him, but I _was_ proud of it." His tailor like his doctor
was apt to become a friend. Mrs. Pocock recalls how he would go to a
dinner of the tradesmen of Beaconsfield and come back intensely
interested and wanting to tell her all about it.
"You always went away," Dr. Pocock said, "chuckling over something,"
and he summed up the years of their friendship, saying, "You never
saw him without getting delight from his presence."
Sometimes he would grow abstracted in the train of his own thought,
and Father Ignatius Rice remembers an occasion when he was one of a
group discussing really bad lines of poetry. Gilbert broke into
something Frances was saying with the words, "That irritating person
Milton"--then, realising he had interrupted her, he broke off and
apologised profusely. When she had finished he went on "That
irritating person Milton--I can't find a single bad line in him."
Frances one day came in rather suddenly when Dr. Pocock was there,
and Gilbert exclaimed, "Oh you've broken it." She looked round
thinking she must have knocked something over. "No," he said, "it was
an idea." "It will come back," said Frances. "No," he said, "it got
broken." More usually he was indifferent to interruptions: sometimes
he welcomed them as grist for his mind's mill. Daily life went on
around him and often in his articles one can find traces of Frances's
daily activities as well as his own.
Attending him for his broken arm, Dr. Pocock told him at a certain
stage to write something--anything--to see if he could use a pen
again. After an instant's thought, Gilbert headed his paper with the
name of a prominent Jew and wrote:
I am fond of Jews
Jews are fond of money
Never mind of whose
I am fond of Jews
Oh, but when they lose
Damn it all, it's funny.
The name at the head (which wild horses would not drag from me) is
the key to this impromptu. It was really true that Gilbert was fond
of very many Jews. In his original group of J.D.C. friends, four Jews
had been included and with three of these his friendship continued
through life. Lawrence Solomon and his wife were among the
Beaconsfield neighbours and he saw them often. There was another kind
of Jew he very heartily disliked but he was at great pains to draw
this distinction himself.
Speaking at the Jewish West End Literary Society in 1911 he put the
question of what the real Jewish problem was. The Jews, he said, were
a race, born civilised. You never met a Jewish clod or yokel. They
represented one of the highest of civilised types. But while all
other races had local attachments, the Jews were universal and
scattered. They could not be expected to have patriotism for the
countries in which they made their homes: their patriotism could be
only for their race. In principle, he believed in the solution of
Zionism. And then the reporter in large letters made a headline: "Mr.
Chesterton said that speaking generally, as with most other
communities, 'THE POOR JEWS WERE NICE AND THE RICH WERE NASTY.'"
Many years later in Palestine he was to be driven around the country,
as he has described in _The New Jerusalem_, by one of these less
wealthy Jews who had sacrificed his career in England to his national
idealism. And later yet, after G.K.'s death, Rabbi Wise, a leader of
American Jewry, paid him tribute (in a letter to Cyril Clements dated
September 8, 1937):
Indeed I was a warm admirer of Gilbert Chesterton. Apart from his
delightful art and his genius in many directions, he was, as you
know, a great religionist. He as Catholic, I as Jew, could not have
seen eye to eye with each other, and he might have added
"particularly seeing that you are cross-eyed"; but I deeply respected
him. When Hitlerism came, he was one of the first to speak out with
all the directness and frankness of a great and unabashed spirit.
Blessing to his memory!
CHAPTER XVI
A Circle of Friends
IN THE LAST chapter, this chapter and to a considerable extent those
that follow, down to the break made by Gilbert's illness and the war
of 1914, it is unavoidable that the same years should be retraced to
cover a variety of aspects. For their home was for both Gilbert and
Frances the centre of a widening circle. Although I visited
Overroads, it seems to me, looking back, I saw them just then much
more frequently in London and elsewhere. Several times they stayed at
Lotus, our Surrey home. The first time it was a weekend of blazing
summer weather. Lady Blennerhassett was there--formerly Countess
Leyden and a favourite disciple of Döllinger. I remember she
delighted Gilbert by her comment on Modernism. "I must," she said,
"have the same religion as my washerwoman, and Father Tyrrell's is
not the religion for my washerwoman." We sat on the terrace in the
sunshine and Lady Blennerhassett asked suddenly whether the soles of
our boots were, like hers, without hole or blemish. We all looked
very odd as we stuck our feet out and tried to see the soles.
Gilbert, offered a wicker chair, preferred the grass because, he
said, there was grave danger he might unduly "modify" the chair.
After a meeting of the Westminster Dining Society (the predecessor of
the Wiseman), he wrote my mother an unnecessary apology:
DEAR MRS. WILFRID WARD--
I have wanted for some days past to write to you, but could not
make up my mind whether I was making my position worse or better. But
I do want to apologise to you for the way in which I threw out your
delightful Catholic Dining Society affair the other day. I behaved
badly, dined badly, debated badly and left badly; yet the explanation
is really simple. I was horribly worried, and I do not worry well;
when I am worried I am like a baby. My wife was that night just ill
enough to make a man nervous, a stupid man, and I had sworn to her
that I would fulfill some affairs that night on which she was keen.
As she is better now and only wants rest, I feel normal and realise
what a rotter I must have looked that night. As Belloc wrote in a
beautiful epitaph--
"He frequently would flush with fear when other people paled,
He Tried to Do his Duty . . . but how damnably he failed."
This is the epitaph of yours sincerely,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
My father and mother were hardly less excited than I at the discovery
of the greatest man of the age, for so we all felt him to be. Gilbert
later described my father as "strongly co-operative" with another's
mind, and this was perhaps his own chief characteristic in
conversation. The two men did not agree on politics, but on religion
their agreement was deep and constantly grew deeper as they
co-operated in exploring it. Our headquarters were in Surrey but when
we came up to London every spring my parents wanted to bring the
Chestertons into touch with all their friends. They tended to think
of their luncheon table as Chesterton "supported" by those most
worthy of the honour. One of the first was of course George Wyndham,
already a friend and admirer of Gilbert's. At this luncheon they
discussed the modern press, 18th Century lampoons, the ingredients of
a good English style, the lawfulness of Revolution, the causes of
Napoleon, Scripture criticism, Joan of Arc, public executions, how to
bring about reforms. It was absurd, G.K. said, to think that gaining
half a reform led to the other half. Supposing it was agreed that
every man ought to have a cow, but you say, "We can't manage that
just yet: give him half a cow." He doesn't care for it and he leaves
it about, and he never asks for the other half.
Talking of the Eastern and Western races Gilbert said it was curious
that while the Easterns were so logical and clear in their religion,
they were so unpractical in every-day life; the religion of the
Westerns is mystical and full of paradoxes. Yet they are far more
practical. "The Eastern says fate governs everything and he sits and
looks pretty; we believe in Free-will and Predestination and we
invent Babbage's Calculating Machine."
As the group grew into one another's thought the talk intensified and
we got from considering East and West to considering our own
countrymen. What makes a man essentially English? Dickens had it.
Johnson had it. "You couldn't," said G.K., "imagine a Scotch Johnson,
or an Irish Johnson, or a French or German Johnson."
George Wyndham told us, as we got on to the topic of patriotism, that
he had a fear he hardly liked to utter. As we urged him he said he
feared a big war might come and we might be defeated. Gilbert agreed
that he too had felt that fear. "But," he said, "if you were to say
that in the House or I to write it in a paper we should be denounced
as unpatriotic."
Small wonder the talk had time to range, for these scrappy notes are
all that remain of a meeting beginning about one o'clock and lasting
until five. At that hour two little old sisters, the Miss Blounts,
known in our family as "the little B's," happened to call on my
mother. I shall never forget their faces as they looked at the huge
man in the armchair, and the other guests all absorbed and animated,
and realised that they were interrupting a luncheon party. A swift
glance at the little old ladies, another at the clock, and the party
broke up, to remain my most cherished memory for months: until my
next visit to their home, when Gilbert and I arrived at the use of
each other's Christian names, an agreement that he insisted on
calling The Pact of Beaconsfield.
How deep he saw when in his "Defence of Hermits" he analysed a chief
joy of human intercourse:
. . . The best things that happen to us are those we get out of
what has already happened. If men were honest with themselves, they
would agree that actual social engagements, even with those they
love, often seem strangely brief, breathless, thwarted or
inconclusive. Mere society is a way of turning friends into
acquaintances. The real profit is not in meeting our friends, but in
having met them. Now when people merely plunge from crush to crush,
and from crowd to crowd, they never discover the positive joy of
life. They are like men always hungry, because their food never
digests; also, like those men, they are cross.*
[* _The Well and the Shallows_, pp. 104-5.]
There was time in the country for the food of social intercourse to
digest. I notice too that in the list of Gilbert's friends
quiet-voiced men stood high: Max Beerbohm, Jack Phillimore, Monsignor
O'Connor, Monsignor Knox, his own father, Maurice Baring: all these
represent a certain spaciousness and leisureliness which was what he
asked of friendship. Even if they were in a hurry, they never seemed
so.
Jack Phillimore both he and we saw on and off at this time but had
often to enjoy in anticipation or in retrospect. Professor, at one
time of Greek at another of Latin, at Glasgow University, he was the
kind of man Gilbert specially appreciated: he wrote of Phillimore
after his death something curiously like what he wrote of his own
father--"he was a supreme example of unadvertised greatness, and the
thing which is larger inside than outside." At Oxford Phillimore had
been known as "one of Belloc's lambs." He was very much one of the
group who were to run the _Eye-Witness_ and _New Witness_ but though
he always adored Belloc, no one who knew him in the fulness of his
powers could think of him as anyone's lamb. He was a quiet, humorous,
deeply intelligent man: a scholar of European repute, whose knowledge
of Mediaeval Latin verse equalled his Classical scholarship.
Gilbert's keen observation of his friends is never shown better than
in what he wrote of Phillimore:
Like a needle pricking a drum, his quietude seemed to kill all the
noise of our loud plutocracy and publicity. In all this he was
supremely the scholar, with not a little of the satirist.
And yet there was never any man alive who was so unlike a don. His
religion purged him of intellectual pride, and certainly of that
intellectual vanity which so often makes a sort of seething fuss
underneath the acid sociability of academic centres. He had none of
the tired omniscience which comes of intellectual breeding in and in.
He seemed to be not so much a professor as a practiser of learning.
He practised it quietly but heartily and humorously, exactly as if it
had been any other business. If he had been a sailor, like his father
the Admiral, he would have minded his own business with exactly the
same smile and imperceptible gesture. Indeed, he looked much more
like a sailor than a professor; his dark square face and clear eyes
and compact figure were of a type often seen among sailors; and in
whatever academic enclave he stood, he always seemed to have walked
in from outside, bringing with him some of the winds of the world and
some light from the ends of the earth.*
[* _G.K.'s Weekly_, Nov. 27, 1926.]
To return to my own notes. It is horribly characteristic that I wrote
them in an undated notebook, but I think that luncheon which lasted
so long must have been in 1911. The same year my father persuaded
both the Synthetic Society to elect Chesterton and Chesterton to
attend the Synthetic. Of his first meeting my father wrote to George
Wyndham:
Had you been at the Synthetic last night you would have witnessed a
memorable scene.
Place: Westminster Palace Hotel. Time: 9.40.
A. J. B. [Arthur Balfour, leader of the Conservative Party] is
speaking persuasively and in carefully modulated tones to an
attentive audience. Suddenly a crash as though the door were blown
open. A. J. B. brought to a halt. The whole company look round and in
rushes a figure exactly like the pictures of Mr. Wind when he blows
open the door and forces an entrance in the German child's story "Mr.
Wind and Madame Rain"--a figure enormous and distended, a kind of
walking mountain but with large rounded corners. It was G. K. C. who,
enveloped in a huge Inverness cape of light colour, thus made his
debut at the Synthetic. He rushed (not walked) to a chair, and was
dragged chair and all by Waggett and me as near as might be to the
table, where with a fresh crash he deposited his stick, and then his
hat. And there he sat, eager and attentive, forgetting all about his
stick and hat and coat, filling up the whole space at the bottom of
the table, drawing caricatures of the company on a sheet of foolscap,
a memorable figure, very welcome to me, but arousing the fury of the
conventional and the "dreary and well-informed" well represented by
Bailey Saunders who has been at me here half the morning trying to
convince me that he will ruin the society and ought never to have
been elected.
Some of the reactions of this new recruit have been touched on in his
_Autobiography:_
There I met old Haldane, yawning with all his Hegelian abysses, who
appeared to me as I must have appeared to a neighbour in a local
debating club when he dismissed metaphysical depths and pointed at me
saying: "There is that Leviathan whom Thou hast made to take his
sport therein." . . .
There also I met Balfour, obviously preferring any philosophers
with any philosophies to his loyal followers of the Tory Party.
Perhaps religion is not the opium of the people, but philosophy is
the opium of the politicians.
My father belonged to another group besides the Synthetic Society for
which it seemed to him that Gilbert was even more ideally fitted.
_The_ Club was founded by Dr. Johnson, the home of the best talk in
the land, where Garrick and Goldsmith were at times shouted down by
the great Lexicographer--a sign, said Chesterton, of his modesty and
his essential democracy: Johnson was too democratic to reign as king
of his company: he preferred to contend with them as an equal. The
old formula still in use had informed my father "you have had the
honour to be elected," but Wilfrid Ward felt that the election of the
modern Dr. Johnson would be an honour to The Club. To his intense
disgust he found that only George Wyndham could be relied upon for
whole-hearted support. What may be called the "social" element in the
Club had become too strong to welcome a man who boasted in all
directions of belonging to the Middle Classes and whose friends
merely urged the claim that he was one of the few today who could
talk as well as Johnson.
Gilbert met many politicians in other ways but only with one of them
did he feel a really close harmony. Of George Wyndham's opinions he
said in the _Autobiography_ that they were "of the same general
colour as my own," and he went on to stress the word "colour" as
significant of the whole man. To depict him in political cartoons as
"St. George" had not in it the sort of absurdity of the pictures of
the more frigid and philosophic Balfour as "Prince Arthur." George
really did suggest the ages of chivalry. "He had huge sympathy with
gypsies and tramps." There was about him "an inward generosity that
gave a gusto or relish to all he did."
The Chestertons' appreciation of George Wyndham was deepened for them
both by an affection, indeed almost a reverence, for "the deep
mysticism of his wife; a woman not to be forgotten by anyone who ever
knew her, and still less to be merely praised by anyone who
adequately appreciated her." For a period at any rate Gilbert and
Frances were much in contact with the extreme Anglo-Catholic group in
the Church of England. In the best of that group--and many of them
are very very good--there is a sense of taking part in a crusade to
restore Catholicism to the whole country. Canon Scott Holland led a
campaign for social justice and many of the same group mixed this
with devotion to Our Lady, belief in the Real Presence, and a
profound love of the Catholic past of England. George Wyndham's wife,
Lady Grosvenor, was one of this group and also her friend Father
Philip Waggett of the Cowley Fathers. Father Waggett, a member of the
Synthetic Society and intimate with my parents, became also intimate
with the Chestertons.
Ralph Adams Cram described his own meeting with Chesterton, arranged
by Father Waggett.
Father Waggett asked my wife and myself once when we were staying
in London, whom we would like best to meet--"anyone from the King
downward." We chose Chesterton who was a very particular friend of
Father Waggett. At that time we put on a dinner at the Buckingham
Palace Hotel (in those days the haunt of all the County families) and
in defiance of fate, had this dinner in the public dining room. We
had as guests Father Waggett, G. K. C. and Mrs. Chesterton. The
entrance into the dining room of the short processional created
something of a sensation amongst the aforesaid County families there
assembled. Father Waggett, thin, cropheaded monk in cassock and rope;
G. K. C., vast and practically globular; little Mrs. Chesterton, very
South Kensington in moss green velvet; my wife and myself.
The dinner was a riot. I have the clearest recollection of G. K. C.
seated ponderously at the table, drinking champagne by magnums,
continually feeding his face with food which, as he was constantly
employed in the most dazzling and epigrammatic conversation, was apt
to fall from his fork and rebound from his corporosity, until the
fragments disappeared under the table.
He and Father Waggett egged each other on to the most preposterous
amusements. Each would write a triolet for the other to illustrate.
They were both as clever with the pencil as with the pen, and they
covered the backs of menus with most astonishing literary and
artistic productions. I particularly remember G. K. C. suddenly
looking out of the dining room window towards Buckingham Palace and
announcing that he was now prepared "to write a disloyal triolet!"
This was during the reign of King Edward VII, and the result was
convincing. I have somewhere the whole collection of these literary
productions with their illustrations, but where they are I do not
know.*
[* _Chesterton_ by Cyril Clemens, pp. 36-37.]
On a second visit of the Chestertons to Lotus, George Wyndham was
there. He had told us of his habit of "shouting the Ballad of the
White Horse to submissive listeners" and we had hoped for the same
treat. But Gilbert got the book and kicked it under his chair defying
us to recover it. We had at that time a vast German cook--of a girth
almost equal to his own and possessed of unbounded curiosity in the
matter of our guests. Gilbert declared that as he sat peacefully in
the drawing room she approached him holding out a paper which he
supposed to be a laundry list, and then started back exclaiming that
she had thought him to be Mrs. Ward.
It was on this visit that he remarked to a lady who happened to be
the granddaughter of a Duke: "You and I who belong to the jolly old
upper Middle Classes." Had he been told about her ancestry he would,
I imagine, have felt that he had paid her an implied compliment by
not being aware of it. For into the world of the aristocracy he and
Frances had been received in London, and he viewed it with the same
calm humour and potential friendliness as he had for all the rest of
mankind. When Frances in her Diary pitied the Duchess of Sutherland
and felt that a single day of such a life as the Duchess lived would
drive her crazy, she was expressing Gilbert's taste as well as her
own for a certain simplicity of life. Social position neither excited
nor irritated him. He liked or disliked an aristocrat exactly as he
liked or disliked a postman. Gilbert and Cecil Chesterton really
were, as Conrad Noel said, personally unconcerned about class. They
had, however, a principle against the position of the English
aristocracy which will be better understood in the light of their
general social and historical outlook. What might be called the
social side of it was often expressed by G.K. when lecturing on
Dickens. Thus, speaking at Manchester for the Dickens centenary, he
was reported as saying:
The objection to aristocracy was quite simple. It was not that
aristocrats were all blackguards. It was that in an aristocratic
state, people sat in a huge darkened theatre and only the stage was
lighted. They saw five or six people walking about and they said,
"That man looks very heroic striding about with a sword." Plenty of
people outside in the street looked more heroic striding about with
an umbrella; but they did not see these things, all the lights being
turned out. That was the really philosophic objection to an
aristocratic society. It was not that the lord was a fool. He was
about as clever as one's own brother or cousin. It was because one's
attention was confined to a few people that one judged them as one
judged actors on the stage, forgetting everybody else.
Chesterton thought everybody should be remembered whether suburban,
proletarian, aristocrat or pauper. Shortly after the removal to
Beaconsfield he was summoned to give evidence before a Parliamentary
Commission on the question of censorship of the theatre. Keep it, he
said, to the surprise of many of his friends, but change the manner
of its exercise. Let it be no longer censorship by an expert but by a
jury--by twelve ordinary men. These will be the best judges of what
really makes for morality and sound sense. He had come to give
evidence, he said, not as a writer but as the representative of the
gallery, and he was concerned only with "the good and happiness of
the English people."
One bewildered Commissioner was understood to murmur that their terms
of reference were not quite so wide as that.
The chapter in the _Autobiography_ called "Friendships and Foolery"
ends suddenly with a reference to the war but, like the whole book,
it leaps wildly about. One point in it is interesting and links up
with the introduction to Titterton's _Drinking Songs_ that Gilbert
later wrote. To shout a chorus is natural to mankind and G.K. claims
that he had done it long before he heard of Community Singing. He
sang when out driving, or walking over the moors with Father
O'Connor; he sang in Fleet Street with Titterton and his journalist
friends; he sang the _Red Flag_ on Trade Union platforms and _England
Awake_ in Revolutionary groups. There was, he claims, a legend that
in Auberon Herbert's rooms not far from Buckingham Palace "we sang
Drake's Drum with such passionate patriotism that King Edward the
Seventh sent in a request for the noise to stop."
Yet it was all but impossible to teach Gilbert a tune, and Bernard
Shaw felt this (as we have seen) a real drawback to his friend's
understanding of his own life and career. Music was to Shaw what line
and color were to Chesterton; but to Chesterton singing was just
making a noise to show he felt happy. Once he wrote a poem called
"Music"--but only as one more flower in the wreath he was always
weaving for Frances--who was, says Monsignor Knox, the heroine of all
his novels.*
[* _The Listener_, June 19, 1941.]
Sounding brass and tinkling cymbal,
He that made me sealed my ears,
And the pomp of gorgeous noises,
Waves of triumph, waves of tears,
Thundered empty round and past me,
Shattered, lost for evermore,
Ancient gold of pride and passion,
Wrecked like treasure on a shore.
But I saw her cheek and forehead
Change, as at a spoken word,
And I saw her head uplifted
Like a lily to the Lord.
Nought is lost, but all transmuted,
Ears are sealed, yet eyes have seen;
Saw her smiles (0 soul be worthy!),
Saw her tears (0 heart be clean!)*
[* _Collected Poems_, p. 129.]
Against the background of all these activities the books went on
pouring out as fast from Overroads as they had from Overstrand. A
town full of friends forty minutes' journey from London was not
exactly the desert into which admirers had advised Gilbert to flee,
but he would never have been happy in a desert: he needed human
company. He also needed to produce. "Artistic paternity," he once
said, "is as wholesome as physical paternity." And certainly he never
ceased to bring forth the children of his mind. Within two years of
the move seven books were published:
The Ball and the Cross, February 1910,
What's Wrong with the World, June 1910,
Alarms and Discursions, November 1910,
Blake, November 1910,
Criticisms and Appreciations of Dickens, January 1911,
Innocence of Father Brown, August 1911,
Ballad of the White Horse, August 1911.
Of these books, _Alarms and Discursions_ and the Dickens criticisms
are collections and arrangements of already published essays.
Meanwhile other essays were being written to become in turn other
books at a later date.
The _Blake_ is a brilliant short study of art and mysticism. After
reading it you feel you understand Blake in quite a new way. And then
you wonder--is this illumination light on Blake or simply light on
Chesterton? It must never be forgotten that the writer was himself a
"spoilt" artist--which means a man with almost enough art in him to
have been in the ranks of men consecrated for life to art's service.
"Father Brown" had first made his appearance in magazines and these
detective stories became the most purely popular of Gilbert's books.
It was a new genre: detection in which the mind of a man means more
than his footprints or cigar ash, even to the detective. The one
reproduced in most anthologies--"The Invisible Man"--depends for its
solution on the fact that certain people are _morally_ invisible. To
the question "Has anyone been here" the answer "No" does not include
the milkman or the postman: thus the postman is the morally invisible
man who has committed the crime. A thread of this sort runs through
all the stories, but they are, like all his romances, full too of
escape and peril and wild adventure.
Life on several occasions imitated Gilbert's fancies. Thus the Azeff
revelations followed his fantastic idea in _The Man Who Was Thursday_
of the anarchists who turn out to be detectives in disguise. The
technique of Father Brown himself was imitated by a man in Detroit
who recovered a stolen car by putting himself imaginatively in the
thief's place and driving an exactly similar car around likely
corners till he came suddenly upon his own, left in a lonely road. He
wrote to tell Gilbert of this adventure.
From Chicago came an even odder example. "It is extremely difficult,"
wrote the _Tribune_, "to determine the proper relationship of the
Chiesa-Prudente-Di Cossato duels to Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton's book,
_The Ball and the Cross"_ . . .
The flight in search of a duelling ground; the pursuit by the
police; the friendly intervention of the anarchist wineshop-keeper,
Volpi; the offer of his backyard for fighting purposes; the
unfriendly intervention of the police; the friendly intervention of
the reporters; the renewed and insistently unfriendly intervention of
the police commissioner; the disgust of the duellists; the extreme
disgust of the anarchist; the renewed flight of the fighters,
seconds, physicians, reporters, and the anarchist over the back
fences--all these and other incidents are essentially Chestertonian.
The Di Cossato affair was carried off with fully as much spirit and
dash; with fully as many automobiles, seconds, physicians, reporters
and police, all scampering over the country roads until the artistic
deputy and the aged veteran of the war of 1859, outdistancing their
pursuers, could find opportunity in comparative peace to cut the
glorious gashes of satisfied honour in each other's faces.*
[* _Chicago Tribune_, 12 March 1910.]
Two months after this an interviewer from the _Daily News_ visited
Beaconsfield and splashed headlines in the paper to the effect that
the spirit of Chesterton was inspiring a fight between the
leaseholders in Edwardes Square and a firm which had bought up their
garden to erect a super-garage. Barricades were erected by day and
destroyed in the night: a wild-eyed beadle held the fort with a
garden roller, and said G.K. "the creatures of my Napoleon [of
Notting Hill] have entered into the bodies of the staid burghers of
Kensington."
In none of these cases was there any likelihood, as the _Chicago
Tribune_ noted, of the actors in life having read the books they were
spiritedly staging. "Ideas have a life of their own," the _Daily
News_ interviewer tentatively ventured, but he may have been puzzled
as G.K. "agreed heartily" in the words, "I am no dirty nominalist."
Chesterton kept the reviewers busy as well as the interviewers and in
all his stories they noted one curiosity: "If time and space--or any
circumstances--interfere with the cutting of his Gordian knots, he
commands time and space to make themselves scarce, and circumstances
to be no more heard of."
About time and space this is true in a unique degree. For him time
seems to have had no existence, or perhaps rather to have been like a
telescope elongating and shortening at will. As a young man, it may
be remembered, he gave in the course of one letter two quite
irreconcilable statements of the length of time since events in his
school days. He had indeed the same difficulty about time as about
money--he mentions in the _Autobiography_ that after his watch was
stolen during a pro-Boer demonstration he never bothered to possess
another. In his stories this oddity became more marked. In _The Ball
and the Cross_ he relates adventures performed in leaping on and off
an omnibus in such fashion that the bus must have covered several
miles of ground: and then we are suddenly told it had gone the few
score yards from the bottom of Ludgate Hill to the top. Still
stranger are the records in _The Man Who Was Thursday_ and _Manalive_
of the happenings of a single day, while in _The Return of Don
Quixote_ a new organisation of society is described as though many
years old and then suddenly announced as having been on foot some
weeks.
But to return for one moment to the more serious aspects of the work
of these years. While _What's Wrong with the World_ (discussed in
some detail in the next chapter) is the first sketch of his social
views--a kind of blueprint for a sane and human sort of world--the
other books with all their foolery hold a serious purpose. They
should be read as illustrations of the philosophy of _Orthodoxy_--
both the book he had written and the thing of which he had said "God
and humanity made it and it made me."
"This row of shapeless and ungainly monsters which I now set before
the reader," he says of his essays (in the "Introduction on
Gargoyles" in _Alarms and Discursions_), "does not consist of
separate idols cut out capriciously in lonely valleys or various
islands. These monsters are meant for the gargoyles of a definite
cathedral. I have to carve the gargoyles, because I can carve nothing
else; I leave to others the angels and the arches and the spires. But
I am very sure of the style of the architecture and of the
consecration of the church."
The story of _The Ball and the Cross_, already indicated to the
reader by the American-Italian duel which seemed like a parody of it,
has the double interest of its bearing on the world of Chesterton's
day and its glimpses at a stranger world to come. A young Highlander,
coming to London, sees in an atheist bookshop an insult to Our Lady.
He smashes the window and challenges the owner to a duel. Turnbull,
the atheist, is more than ready to fight; but the world, caring
nothing for religious opinions, regards anyone ready to fight for
them as a madman and is mainly concerned with keeping the peace.
Pursued by all the resources of modern civilisation, the two men
spend the rest of the book starting to fight, being interrupted and
arrested by the police, escaping, arguing and fighting again. They
end up in an asylum with a garden where again they talk endlessly and
where the power of Lucifer the prince of this world has enclosed
everyone who has been concerned in their wild flight, so that no
memory of it may live on the earth.
The two sides of Chesterton's brain are engaged in the duel of minds
in this book, and some of his best writing is in it, both in the
description of the wild rush across sea and land and in the
discussions between the two men. G.K.'s affection for the sincere
atheist is noteworthy and his hatred is reserved for the shuffler and
the compromiser. It was grand to have such a man as Turnbull to
convert--"one of those men in whom a continuous appetite and industry
of the intellect leave the emotions very simple and steady. His heart
was in the right place but he was quite content to leave it there.
His head was his hobby." This might be Chesterton himself--in fact,
it is Chesterton himself--and the climax belongs to a later world
than that of 1911. For pointing to the Ball bereft of the Cross, the
Highlander calls out: "It staggers, Turnbull. It cannot stand by
itself; you know it cannot. It has been the sorrow of your life.
Turnbull, this garden is not a dream, but an apocalyptic fulfillment.
This garden is the world gone mad."
About the time this book appeared Gilbert was asked by an Anglican
Society to lecture at Coventry. He said "What shall I lecture on?"
They answered "Anything from an elephant to an umbrella." "Very
well," he said, "I will lecture on an umbrella." He treated the
umbrella as a symbol of increasing artificiality. We wear hair to
protect the head, a hat to protect the hair, an umbrella to protect
the hat. Gilbert said once he was willing to start anywhere and
develop from anything the whole of his philosophy. In the Notebook
he had written:
BOOTLACES
Once I looked down at my bootlaces
Who gave me my bootlaces?
The bootmaker? Bah!
Who gave the bootmaker himself?
What did I ever do that I should be given bootlaces?
After the lecture on the umbrella two priests saw him at the railway
bookstall and asked him if the rumour was true that he was thinking
of joining the Church. He answered, "It's a matter that is giving me
a great deal of agony of mind, and I'd be very grateful if you would
pray for me."
The following year he broached the subject to Father O'Connor when
they were alone in a railway carriage. He said he had made up his
mind, but he wanted to wait for Frances "as she had led him into the
Anglican Church out of Unitarianism." Frances told Father O'Connor
when he came to Overroads later, at the beginning of Gilbert's
illness, that she "could not make head or tail" of some of her
husband's remarks, especially one about being buried at Kendal Green.
When Father O'Connor told her what had been on Gilbert's mind she was
half amused at the hints he had been dropping: she recognised his
reluctance to move without her, but I think she probably realised too
that even to himself his conviction seemed in those years at times
more absolute, at times less. We shall see in a later chapter his own
analysis of his very slow progress. Meanwhile in his books he was at
once deepening and widening his vision of the faith.
Fragments of verse used in _The Ballad of the White Horse_ had come
to Gilbert in his sleep; a great white horse had been the romance of
his childhood; the beginning of his honeymoon under the sign of the
White Horse at Ipswich had been "a trip to fairyland." But it is hard
to say when the motif of the White Horse, the verses ringing in his
head, and the ideas that make the poem, came together into what many
think the greatest work of his life.
In _Father Brown on Chesterton_ we are told of the long time the poem
took in the making. They talked of it on the Yorkshire moors in 1906
and Father O'Connor noted how Frances "cherished it. . . . I could
see she was more in love with it than with anything else he had in
hand." Father O'Connor also gives some interesting illustrations of
the way talk ministers to a work of genius. He had begun one day "by
saying lightly that none of us could become great men without leaning
on the little ones: could not well begin our day but for those who
started theirs first for our sake, lighting the fire and cooking the
breakfast." This was said just before the dressing bell rang and
between the bell and dinner Gilbert had written about nine verses
beginning with King Alfred's meditation:
And well may God with the serving folk
Cast in His dreadful lot
Is not He too a servant
And is not He forgot?
In 1907, Gilbert published in the _Albany Review_ a "Fragment from a
Ballad Epic of Alfred" which evoked the comment "Mr. Chesterton
certainly has in each eye a special Röntgen ray attachment."
He wrote _The White Horse_ guided by his favourite theory that to
realise history we should not delve into the details of research but
try only to see the big things--for it is those that we generally
overlook.
People talk about features of interest; but the features never make
up a face. . . . They will toil wearily off to the tiniest inscription
or darkest picture that is mentioned in a guide book as having some
reference to Alfred the Great or William the Conqueror; but they care
nothing for the sky that Alfred saw or the hills on which William
hunted.
In the King Alfred country especially can be found "the far-flung
Titanic figure of the Giant Albion whom Blake saw in visions,
spreading to our encircling seas."*
[* _G.K.'s Weekly_, Apr. 16, 1927.]
Gilbert wrote a sketch for the _Daily News_ about this time, telling
how an old woman in a donkey cart whom they had left far behind on
the road went driving triumphantly past when the car they were in
broke down. For this expedition, as so often later, he made full use
of the modern invention he derided. In an open touring car hired for
the occasion, Gilbert in Inverness cape and shapeless hat, Frances
beside him snugly wrapped up, they
Saw the smoke-hued hamlets quaint
With Westland King and Westland Saint,
And watched the western glory faint
Along the road to Frome.
The note struck in the dedication and recurring throughout the poem
is that of the Christian idea which had made England great and which
he had learnt from Frances:
Wherefore I bring these rhymes to you
Who brought the cross to me,
Since on you flaming without flaw
I saw the sign that Guthrum saw
When he let break his ships of awe
And laid peace on the sea.
In the poem Christian men, whether they be Saxon or Roman or Briton
or Celt, are banded together to fight the heathen Danes in defence of
the sacred things of faith, in defence of the human things of daily
life, in defence even of the old traditions of pagan England
. . . because it is only Christian men
guard even heathen things.
Gilbert constantly disclaimed the idea that he took trouble over
anything: "taking trouble has never been a weakness of mine": but in
what might be termed a large and loose way he really did take immense
trouble over what interested him. King Alfred is not an almost
mythical figure like King Arthur and an outline of his story with
legendary fringes can be traced in the Wessex country and confirmed
by literature. Gilbert wanted this general story: he did not want
antiquarian exactness of detail.
Into the mouths of Guthrum and of King Alfred, he put the expression
of the pagan and the Christian outlook. Nor did he hesitate to let
King Alfred prophesy at large concerning the days of G. K.
Chesterton. The poem is a ballad in the sense of the old ballads that
were stirring stories: it is also an expression of the threefold love
of Gilbert's life: his wife, his country and his Faith. And as in all
great poetry, there is a quality of eternity in this poem that has
made it serve as an expression of the eternal Spirit of man.
During the first world war many soldiers had it with them in the
trenches: "I want to tell you," the widow of a sailor wrote, "that a
copy of the Ballad of the White Horse went down into the Humber with
the R.38. My husband loved it as his own soul--never went anywhere
without it."
Almost thirty years have passed and today the poem still speaks.
Greeting Jacques Maritain on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday,
Dorothy Thompson quoted King Alfred's assertion of Christian freedom
against "the pagan nazi conquerors of his day." After Crete the
_Times_ had the shortest first leader in its history. Under the
heading _Sursum Corda_ was a brief statement of the disaster,
followed by the words of Our Lady to King Alfred:
I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?
The unbreakable strength of that apparently faint and tenuous thread
of faith appeared in the sequel. Many had the ballad in hand in those
dark days; many others wrote to the _Times_ asking the source of the
quotation. Months later when Winston Churchill spoke of "the end of
the beginning," the _Times_ returned to _The White Horse_ and gave
the opening of Alfred's speech at Ethandune:
"The high tide!" King Alfred cried.
"The high tide and the turn!"
CHAPTER XVII
The Disillusioned Liberal
_The English were not wrong in loving liberty. They were only wrong
in losing it_.
_G.K.'s Weekly_, June 1, 1933.
ONE MAIN DIFFICULTY in writing biography lies in the various strands
that run through every human life. It is as I have already said
impossible to keep a perfect chronological order with anyone whose
occupations and interests were so multifarious. In the present
chapter and the two that follow we shall consider the movement of
Chesterton's mind upon politics and sociology. This will involve
going back to the general election of 1906 and forward to the Marconi
Trial of 1913. For those who are interested in his poetry or his
humour or his philosophy or his theology but not at all in his
sociological and political outlook, I fear that these three chapters
may loom a little uninvitingly. If they are tempted to skip them
altogether, I shall not blame them; yet they will miss a great deal
that is vital to the understanding of his whole mind and the course
his life was to take. These are not the most entertaining chapters in
the book, but if we are really to know Chesterton the events they
cover must be considered most carefully.
As a boy Gilbert Chesterton spoke of politics as absorbing "for every
ardent intellect"; and during these years he was himself deeply
concerned with the politics of England. The ideal Liberalism sketched
in his letter to Hammond during the Boer War [Chapter X] had appeared
to him, if not perfectly realised, at least capable of realisation,
in the existing Liberal Party. The Tory Party was in power and all
its acts, to say nothing of its general ineptitude, appeared to
Liberals as positive arguments for their own party. At this date so
convinced a Tory as Lord Hugh Cecil could describe his own party as
"to mix metaphors, an eviscerated ruin."* Several letters and
postcards from Mr. Belloc announcing his own election as Liberal
member for South Salford show the high hope with which young
Liberalism was viewing the world in 1906:
[* In a letter to Wilfrid Ward.]
(undated)
I have, as you will have seen, pulled it off by 852. It is huge
fun. I am now out against all Vermin: Notably South African Jews. The
Devil is let loose: let all men beware. H. B.
(Written across top of letter)
Tomorrow Monday Meet the Manchester train arriving Euston 6.10 and
oblige your little friend HB _St. Hilary's Day_.
Don't fail to meet that train. Stamps are cheap! HB
I beg you. I implore you. _Meet that 6.10 train_.
HB
Stamps are a drug in the market.
852
Meet that train!
Stamps are _given away_ now in _Salford_.
From 1902, when the general election left the Conservatives still in
power, until 1906 the Liberal party had been, as Chesterton described
it, "in the desert." And the younger members of the party were deeply
concerned with hammering out a positive philosophy which might
inspire a true programme for their own party. A group of them wrote a
book called _England A Nation_ with the sub-title _Papers of A
Patriot's Club_. The Patriot's Club had no real existence, but I
imagine that Lucian Oldershaw who edited the book believed that its
publication might create the club. Belloc was not one of the
contributors, but Hugh Law wrote ably on Ireland, J. L. Hammond on
South Africa, and Conrad Noel, Henry Nevinson and C. F. G. Masterman
on other aspects of the political scene.
The whole book is on a fairly high level but Chesterton's essay was
the only one much noticed by reviewers. It was the introductory
chapter, far longer than any of the others, and gave the key to the
whole book. Entitled "The idea of Patriotism" it was, like _The
Napoleon of Notting Hill_, which it does much to illumine, a plea for
patriotism that was really for England and not for the British
Empire. Such a patriotism recognizes the limitations proper to
nationality and admits, nay admires, other patriotisms for other
nations. Thus, in Chesterton's eyes a true English patriot should
also be an ardent home ruler for Ireland since Ireland too was a
nation.
He stressed the danger that the nationhood of England should be
absorbed and lost in the Imperial idea. The claim that in an empire
the various races could learn much from one another he considered a
bit of special pleading on the part of Imperialists. England had
learned much from France and Germany but, although Ireland had much
to teach, we had not learned from Ireland. The real patriotism of the
Englishman had been dimmed both by the emphasis on the Imperial idea
and by the absence of roots in his own land. The governing classes
had destroyed those roots and had almost forgotten the existence of
the people. From the dregs and off-scourings of the population a vast
empire had been created, but the people of England were not allowed
to colonize England.
The Education Bill of 1902, brought in by the Conservatives and
giving financial support to Church schools, saw Gilbert in general
agreement with the Liberal attacks. He did not yet appreciate the
Catholic idea that education must be of one piece and he did not
think it fair that the country should support specifically Catholic
schools. Parents could give at home the religious instruction they
wanted their children to have. But with that fairness of mind which
made it so hard for him to be a party man he saw why the Liberal
"compromise" of simple Bible teaching for all in the State schools
could not be expected to satisfy Catholics. He wrote to the _Daily
News:_
The Bible compromise is certainly in favour of the Protestant view
of the Bible. The thing, properly stated, is as plain as the nose on
your face. Protestant Christianity believes that there is a Divine
record in a book; that everyone ought to have free access to that
book; that everyone who gets hold of it can save his soul by it,
whether he finds it in a library or picks it off a dustcart. Catholic
Christianity believes that there is a Divine army or league upon
earth called the Church; that all men should be induced to join it;
that any man who joins it can save his soul by it without ever
opening any of the old books of the Church at all. The Bible is only
one of the institutions of Catholicism, like its rites or its
priesthood; it thinks the Bible only efficient when taken as part of
the Church. . . . This being so, a child could see that if you have
the Bible taught alone, anyhow, by anybody, you do definitely decide
in favour of the first view of the Bible and against the second.
Discussing a few years later whether it was possible or satisfactory
to teach the Bible simply as Literature he put his finger on the
Catholic objection. "I should not mind," he said, "children being
told about Mohammed because I am not a Mohammedan. If I were a
Mohammedan I should very much want to know what they were told about
him."
While as for the unfortunate teacher: in case a child should ask if
the things in the Bible happened, "Either the teacher must answer him
insincerely and that is immorality, or he must answer him sincerely,
and that is sectarian education, or he must refuse to answer him at
all, and that is first of all bad manners and a sort of timid
tyranny . . ."
Chesterton's Liberalism received a further shock from the fact that
Liberals, in attacking the Bill, were attacking also the Catholic
faith and raising the cry of No Popery. In a correspondence with Dr.
Clifford he reminded him of how they had stood together against
popular fanaticism during the Boer War.
There are two cries always capable of raising the English in their
madness--one that the Union Jack is being pulled down, and one that
the Pope is being set up. And upon the man who raises one of them
responsibility will lie heavy till the last day. For when they are
raised, the best are mixed with the worst, every rational compromise
is dashed to pieces, every opponent is given credit for the worst
that the worst of his allies has by his worst enemy been said to
have said. That horror of darkness swept across us when the war
began. . . .
Beyond all question this is true--that if we choose to fight on the
"No Popery" cry, we may win. But I can imagine something of which I
should be prouder than of any victory--the memory that we had shown
our difference from Mr. Chamberlain simply and finally in this--that
to our hand had lain (as it once laid to his) an old, an effectual,
an infallible, and a filthy weapon, and that we let it lie.*
[* Letter to the _Daily News_, October 1902.]
Yet it was fairly easy to be a Liberal in opposition. At the
elections of 1902 (which the Liberals lost) and 1906 (which they won)
Chesterton canvassed for the Liberal party. Charles Masterman used to
tell a story of canvassing a street in his company. Both started at
the same end on opposite sides of the road. Masterman completed his
side and came back on the other to find Chesterton still earnestly
arguing at the first house. For he was passionately serious in his
belief that the Liberal Party stood for a real renewal, even
revolution, in the life of England. "At the present moment of
victory," says the report of a speech by Gilbert following the great
swing of the Liberal party into power in 1906, he called for "that
magnanimity towards the defeated that characterized all great
conquerors. It was important that all should develop--even the Tory."
It needed the experience of seeing the Liberal party in power to
shake his faith.
In the new House of Commons the Conservatives were in a minority:
against them were the two old parties--the Liberals and the Irish
members who were in general allied to them, and a small group forming
a new party known as Labour. The Labour Members who got into
Parliament in 1906 and 1909 were regarded by Conservatives as being a
kind of left-wing extension of the Liberal Party. Such a Liberal as
Chesterton saw them there with delight, and, although he would still
have called himself a Liberal, he at first hoped in the Labour men as
something more truly expressive of the people's wishes.
In an introduction to _From Workhouse to Westminster_, a life of Will
Crooks, Gilbert expressed a good deal of his own political
philosophy. As a democrat he believed in the ideal of direct
government by the people. But obviously this was only possible in a
world that was also his ideal--a world consisting of small and even
of very small states. The democrat's usual alternative,
representative government, was, Gilbert said, symbolic in character.
Just as religious symbolism "may for a time represent a real emotion
and then for a time cease to represent anything, so representative
government may for a time represent the people, and for a time cease
to represent anything."
Further, the very idea of representation itself involved two
perfectly distinct notions: a man throws a shadow or he throws a
stone. "In the first sense, it is supposed that the representative is
like the thing he represents. In the second case, it is only supposed
that the representative is useful to the thing he represents."
Workmen, like Conservatives, sent men to Parliament not to show what
they themselves were like, but to attack the other party in their
name. "The Labour Members as a class are not representatives but
missiles. . . . Working men are not at all like Mr. Keir Hardie. If
it comes to likeness, working men are more like the Duke of
Devonshire. But they throw Mr. Keir Hardie at the Duke of Devonshire,
knowing that he is so curiously shaped as to hurt anything at which
he is thrown."* In the same way Mr. Balfour was entirely unlike the
Tory squires who used him as a weapon. To this rule, that men do not
choose to be represented by their like, Chesterton took Will Crooks
as the one exception:
[* Introduction to _From Workhouse to Westminster_, p. XV.]
You have not yet seen the English people in politics. It has not
yet entered politics. Liberals do not represent it; Tories do not
represent it; Labour Members, on the whole, represent it rather less
than Tories or Liberals. When it enters politics it will bring with
it a trail of all the things that politicians detest; prejudices (as
against hospitals), superstitions (as about funerals), a thirst for
respectability passing that of the middle classes, a faith in the
family which will knock to pieces half the Socialism of Europe. If
ever that people enters politics it will sweep away most of our
revolutionists as mere pedants. It will be able to point only to one
figure, powerful, pathetic, humorous and very humble, who bore in any
way upon his face the sign and star of its authority.*
[* Ibid., p. XX.]
It was sad enough after this to see Will Crooks fathering one of
those very Bills for the interference with family life which
Chesterton most hated. But, indeed, the years that followed the 1906
election are a story of a steadily growing disillusionment with the
realities of representative government in England.
Chesterton wrote regularly for the _Daily News_ and was regarded as
one of their most valuable contributors. But when, following an
attack in the House of Commons on the Liberal leader Campbell-Bannerman
over the sale of peerages, he sent in an article on the subject, the
Editor A. G. Gardiner wrote (July 12, 1907):
I have left your article out tonight not because I do not entirely
agree with its point of view but because just at this moment it would
look like backing Lea's unmannerly attack on C. B. I am keeping the
article in type for a later occasion when the general question is not
complicated with a particularly offensive incident.
It was a test case, and it seemed to Chesterton not a question of
good manners, but of something far more fundamental. The assertion
had been made in the House of Commons that peerages were being sold,
and that the price of such sales was the chief support of the secret
party funds. But the _Daily News_ was a Liberal paper and this was an
attack on the Liberal party. Chesterton replied (July 11, 1907):
I am sure you know by this time that I never resent the exclusion
of my articles as such. I should always trust your literary judgment,
if it were a matter of literature only: and I daresay you have often
saved me from an indiscretion and your readers from a bore.
Unfortunately this matter of the party funds is not one of that sort.
My conscience does not often bother you, but just now the animal is
awake and roaring. Your paper has always championed the rights of
conscience, so mine naturally goes to you. If you disagreed with me,
it would be another matter. But since you agree with me (as I was
sure you would) it becomes simply a question of which is the more
important, politeness or political morality. I agree that Lea did go
to the point of being unmannerly. So did Plimsoll, so did Bradlaugh:
so did the Irish members. But surely it would be a very terrible
thing if anyone could say "The _Daily News_ suppressed all demand for
the Plimsoll line," or "The _Daily News_ did not join in asking for
Bradlaugh's political rights." I am sure that this is not your idea.
You think that this matter can be better raised later on. I am
convinced of its urgency. I am so passionately convinced of its
urgency that if you will not help me to raise it now, I must try some
other channel. They are going on Monday to raise a "breach of
privilege" (which is simply an aristocratic censorship of the Press)
in order to crush this question through the man who raised it: and to
crush it forever. I have said that I think Lea's questions violent
and needless. But they are not attacking his questions. They are
attacking his letter, which contains nothing that I do not think,
probably nothing that you do not think. Lea is to be humiliated and
broken because he said that titles are bought; as they are: because
he said that poor members are reminded of their dependence on the
party funds; as they are: because he said that all this was hypocrisy
of public life; as it is. . . .
One thing is quite certain. Unless some Liberal journalists speak
on Monday or Tuesday, the secret funds and the secret powers are
safe. These Parliamentary votes mark eras: they are meant to. And
that vote will not mark a defence of C. B. The letter had nothing to
do with C. B. It will mark the final decision that any repetition of
what Lea said in his letter is an insult to the House. That is, any
protest against bought titles will be an insult to the House. Any
protest against secret funds will be an insult to the House.
I would willingly burn my article if I were only sure you would
publish one yourself tomorrow on the same lines. But if not, here is
at least one thing you can do. An article, even signed, may perhaps
commit the paper too much. But your paper cannot be committed by
publishing a letter from me stating my opinions. It might publish a
letter from Joe Chamberlain, stating his opinions. I therefore send
you a short letter, pointing out the evil, and disassociating it as
far as possible from the indiscretions of Lea. I am sure you will
publish this, for it is the mere statement of a private opinion and
as I am not an M. P. I can say what I like about Parliament. You will
not mind my confessing to you my conviction and determination in this
matter. I do not think we could quarrel, even if we had to separate.
The letter was published, and was quoted in the House of Commons by
Lord Robert Cecil amid general applause. But it was twenty years
before a Bill was passed that forbade this particular unpleasantness.
While political corruption stirred Chesterton deeply, I think his
outlook was even more affected by the progressive Socialism of
Liberal legislation. He had honestly believed that the Liberal Party
stood, on the whole, for liberty. He found that it stood increasingly
for daily and hourly interference with the lives of the people. He
found too that the Liberal papers, which he held should have been
foremost in criticism of these measures, were as determined to uphold
measures brought in by a Liberal Government as they had been to
attack anything that the Tories brought forward.
It has been well said by Mr. Belloc that Chesterton could never write
as a party man. But to the ordinary party newspaper such an attitude
was utterly incomprehensible. I think that we can also see at this
point how alien his fundamental outlook was from that even of the
best members of his own Party. A great admirer said to me the other
day that it had taken her a long time to appreciate Chesterton's
sociology. "You see, I was brought up to think that it was quite
right for the poor to have their teeth brushed by officials." This is
undoubtedly the normal Socialistic outlook and the outlook most
abhorrent to Chesterton. "The philanthropist," he once said, "is not
a brother; he is a supercilious aunt."
The five years of Liberal Government had been disillusioning to many
others besides Belloc and the Chesterton brothers. Probably many men
in newspaper offices and elsewhere continued vaguely to support the
party to which their own paper belonged. But there were others who
were in those days going through a struggle between principles and
Party which became increasingly acute. Gilbert has described his own
feelings in a review of Galsworthy's play _Loyalties_, written
several years later during the first World War.
. . . The author of _Loyalty_ suffers one simple and amazing
delusion. He imagines that in those pre-war politics Liberalism was
on the side of Labour. On this point at least I can correct him from
the most concrete experience. In the newspaper office where his hero
lingered, wondering how much longer he could stand its Pacifism, I
was lingering and wondering how much longer I could stand its
complete and fundamental Capitalism, its invariable alliance with the
employer, its invariable hostility to the striker. No such scene as
that in which the Liberal editor paced the room raving about his
hopes of a revolution ever occurred in the Liberal newspaper office
that I knew; the least hint of a revolution would have caused quite
as much horror there as in the offices of the _Morning Post_. On
nothing was the Pacifist more pacifist than upon that point. No
workman so genuine as the workman who figures in _Loyalty_ ever
figured among such Liberals. The fact is that such Liberalism was in
no way whatever on the side of Labour; on the contrary, it was on the
side of the Labour Party. . . .
Both Chesterton and Belloc had begun to point out that a Free Press
had almost disappeared from England. The revenue of most of the
newspapers depended not on subscriptions but on advertisement.
Therefore nothing could be said in them which was displeasing to
their wealthy advertisers. Nor was this the worst of it. Very rich
men were often owners of half a dozen papers or more and dictated
their policy. An outstanding example was Alfred Harmsworth--Lord
Northcliffe--whose newspapers ranged from the _Times_ through the
_Daily Mail_ to _Answers_. Thus to every section of the English
people, Harmsworth was able to convey day by day such news as he
thought best together with his own outlook and philosophy of life
such as it was. Still worse, the _Times_ had not lost in the eyes of
Europe, to say nothing of America, that reputation it had held so
long of being _the_ official expression of English opinion. It was
still the _Jupiter_ of Trollope's day, the maker of ministries or
their undoing. In the days of a Free Press a paper held such a
position in virtue of the talents of its staff. Editors were then
powerful individuals and would brook little interference. But today
the editor was commonly only the mouthpiece of the owner.
It is surprising that Gilbert and the official Liberal Press so long
tolerated one another. The _Daily News_ and other papers owned by Mr.
Cadbury (of Cadbury's Cocoa) were often referred to as "the Cocoa
Press" and it happened that it was not in the end political
disagreement alone that brought the Chesterton-Cadbury alliance to an
end. In one of Gilbert's poems in praise of wine are the lines:
Cocoa is a cad and coward,
Cocoa is a vulgar beast.
In the _Autobiography_ he tells us that after he had published the
poem he felt he could write no longer for the _Daily News_. He went
from the _Daily News_ to the _Daily Herald_, to the Editor of which
he wrote that the _News_ "had come to stand for almost everything I
disagree with; and I thought I had better resign before the next
great measure of social reform made it illegal to go on strike." G.K.
was a considerable asset to any paper and had recently been referred
to by Shaw (in a debate with Belloc) as "a flourishing property of
Mr. Cadbury's."
Politically the break was bound to come, for even when _Dickens_ was
published Gilbert Chesterton had reached the stage of saying "as much
as ever I did, more than ever I did, I believe in Liberalism. But
there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals." At
this time too he infuriated an orthodox Liberal journalist by saying
of the party leaders "some of them are very nice old gentlemen, some
of them are very nasty old gentlemen, and some of them are old
without being gentlemen at all." An orthodox church journalist in a
periodical charmingly entitled _Church Bells_ got angrier yet. "A
certain Mr. G. K. Chesterton," he wrote, had, when speaking for the
C.S.U. in St. Paul's Chapter House, remarked "the best of his
Majesty's Ministers are agnostics, and the worst devil worshippers."
_Church Bells_ cries out: "We only mention this vulgar falsehood
because we regret that an association, with which the names of many
of our respected ecclesiastics are connected, should have allowed the
bad taste and want of all gentlemanly feeling displayed by the words
quoted, to have passed unchallenged." "Vulgar falsehood" is surely
charming.
But perhaps even deeper than his disillusionment with any Party was
his growing sense of the unreality of the political scene. He has
described it in the _Autobiography:_
I was finding it difficult to believe in politics; because the
reality seemed almost unreal, as compared with the reputation or the
report. I could give twenty instances to indicate what I mean, but
they would be no more than indications, because the doubt itself was
doubtful. I remember going to a great Liberal club, and walking about
in a large crowded room, somewhere at the end of which a bald
gentleman with a beard was reading something from a manuscript in a
low voice. It was hardly unreasonable that we did not listen to him,
because we could not in any case have heard; but I think a very large
number of us did not even see him . . . it is possible, though not
certain, that one or other of us asked carelessly what was supposed
to be happening in the other corner of the large hall. . . . Next
morning I saw across the front of my Liberal paper in gigantic
headlines the phrase: "Lord Spencer Unfurls the Banner." Under this
were other remarks, also in large letters, about how he had blown the
trumpet for Free Trade and how the blast would ring through England
and rally all the Free-Traders. It did appear, on careful
examination, that the inaudible remarks which the old gentleman had
read from the manuscript were concerned with economic arguments for
Free Trade; and very excellent arguments too, for all I know. But the
contrast between what that orator was to the people who heard him,
and what he was to the thousands of newspaper-readers who did not
hear him, was so huge a hiatus and disproportion that I do not think
I ever quite got over it. I knew henceforward what was meant, or what
might be meant, by a Scene in the House, or a Challenge from the
Platform, or any of those sensational events which take place in the
newspapers and nowhere else.*
[* Pp. 201-2.]
As in _Orthodoxy_ Chesterton had formulated his religious beliefs, so
in _What's Wrong with the World_ he laid the foundations of his
sociology. It will be remembered that, giving evidence before the
Commission on the Censorship, Chesterton declared himself to be
concerned only with the good and happiness of the English people.
Where he differed from nearly every other social reformer was that he
believed that they should themselves decide what was for their own
good and happiness.
"The body of ideas," says Monsignor Knox of Gilbert's sociology,
"which he labelled, rather carelessly, 'distributism' is a body of
ideas which still lasts, and I think will last, but it is not exactly
a doctrine, or a philosophy; it is simply Chesterton's reaction to
life."*
[* _The Listener_, June 19, 1941.]
It may be said that a man's philosophy is in the main a formulation
of his reaction to life. Anyhow life seems to be the operative
word--for it is the word that best conveys the richness of this first
book of Chesterton's sociology. All the wealth of life's joys, life's
experiences, is poured into his view of man and man's destiny.
Already developing manhood to its fullest potential he found in this
book a new form of expression. To quote Monsignor Knox again, "I call
that man intellectually great who is an artist in thought . . . I
call that man intellectually great who can work equally well in any
medium." The poet-philosopher worked surprisingly well in the medium
of sociology.
He had intended to call the book, "What's Wrong?" and it begins on
this note of interrogation. The chapter called "The Medical Mistake"
is a brilliant attack on the idea that we must begin social reform by
diagnosing the disease. "It is the whole definition and dignity of
man that in social matters we must actually find the cure before we
find the disease." The thing that is most terribly wrong with our
modern civilisation is that it has lost not only health but the clear
picture of health. The doctor called in to diagnose a bodily illness
does not say: we have had too much scarlet fever, let us try a little
measles for a change. But the sociological doctor does offer to the
dispossessed proletarian a cure which, says Chesterton, is only
another kind of disease. We cannot work towards a social ideal until
we are certain what that ideal should be. We must, therefore, begin
with principles and we are to find those principles in the nature of
man, largely through a study of his history. Man has had
historically--and man needs for his fulfilment--the family, the home
and the possession of property. The notion of property has, for the
modern age, been defiled by the corruptions of Capitalism; but modern
Capitalism is really a negation of property because it is a denial of
its limitations. He summarises this idea with one of his most
brilliant illustrations: "It is the negation of property that the
Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as
it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one
harem."
But property in its real meaning is almost the condition for the
survival of the family. It is its protection, it is the opportunity
of its development. God has the joy of unlimited creation--He can
make something out of nothing; but He has given to Man the joy of
limited creation--Man can make something out of anything. "Fruitful
strife with limitations," self-expression "with limits that are
strict and even small,"--all this belongs to the artist, but also to
the average man. "Property is merely the art of the democracy."
The family, protected by the possession of some degree of property,
will grow by its own laws. What are these laws? Clearly there are two
sets of problems, one concerned with life within the family, the
other with the relation of the family to the state. These two sets of
problems provide the subject-matter of the book. On both Chesterton
felt that there had been insufficient thinking. Thus he says of the
first: "There is no brain-work in the thing at all; no root query of
what sex is, of whether it alters this or that." And of the second:
"It is quite unfair to say that Socialists believe in the State but
do not believe in the Family. But it is true to say that Socialists
are especially engaged in strengthening and renewing the State; and
they are not especially engaged in strengthening and renewing the
Family. They are not doing anything to define the functions of
father, mother and child, as such--they have no firm instinctive
sense of one thing being in its nature private and another public."
It is precisely this kind of root-thinking that the book does. In the
free family there will be a division of the two sides of life,
between the man and the woman. The man must be, to a certain extent,
a specialist; he must do one thing well enough to earn the daily
bread. The woman is the universalist; she must do a hundred things
for the safeguarding and development of the home. The modern fad of
talking of the narrowness of domesticity especially provoked
Chesterton. "I cannot," he said
with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When
domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty
arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means
dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man
might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at
Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because
it is trifling, colourless and of small import to the soul, then as I
say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen
Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours
and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys,
boots, sheets, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain
area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can
understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how
it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other
people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell
one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the
same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a
woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not
because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her
task; I will never pity her for its smallness.*
[* _What's Wrong With the World_, chapter 3, "The Emancipation of
Domesticity."]
While he was writing these pages and after their appearance in print,
G.K. was constantly asked to debate the question of Women's Suffrage.
He was an anti-suffragist, partly because he was a democrat. The
suffrage agitation in England was conducted by a handful of women,
mainly of the upper classes; and it gave Cecil Chesterton immense
pleasure to head articles on the movement with the words, "Votes for
Ladies." G.K. too felt that the suffrage agitation was really doing
harm by dragging a red herring across the path of necessary social
reform. If the vast majority of women did not want votes it was
undemocratic to force votes upon them. Also, if rich men had
oppressed poor men all through the course of history, it was
exceedingly probable that rich women would also oppress poor women.
Both in _What's Wrong With the World_ and in debating on the subject,
Chesterton brushed aside as absurd and irrelevant the suggestion that
women were inferior to men and what was called the physical force
argument. But he did maintain that if the vote meant anything at all
(which it probably did not in the England he was living in), it meant
that side of life which belongs to masculinity and which the normal
woman dislikes and rather despises.
All we men had grown used to our wives and mothers, and
grandmothers, and great aunts all pouring a chorus of contempt upon
our hobbies of sport, drink and party politics. And now comes Miss
Pankhurst with tears in her eyes, owning that all the women were
wrong and all the men were right. . . . We told our wives that
Parliament had sat late on most essential business; but it never
crossed our minds that our wives would believe it. We said that
everyone must have a vote in the country; similarly our wives said
that no one must have a pipe in the drawing-room. In both cases the
idea was the same. "It does not matter much, but if you let those
things slide there is chaos." We said that Lord Huggins or Mr.
Buggins was absolutely necessary to the country. We knew quite well
that nothing is necessary to the country except that the men should
be men and the women women. We knew this; we thought the women knew
it even more clearly; and we thought the women would say it.
Suddenly, without warning, the women have begun to say all the
nonsense that we ourselves hardly believed when we said it. . . .*
[* From chapter VII, _The Modern Surrender_.]
All the agitated reformers who were running about and offering their
various nostrums were prepared to confess that something had gone
very wrong with modern civilisation. But they suggested that what was
wrong with the present generation of adults could be set right for
the coming generation by means of education. In the last part of the
book, "Education or the Mistake about the Child," he put the
unanswerable question: How are we to give what we have not got? "To
hear people talk one would think [education] was some sort of magic
chemistry, by which, out of a laborious hotch-potch of hygienic
meals, baths, breathing-exercises, fresh-air and freehand drawing, we
can produce something splendid by accident; we can create what we
cannot conceive." The social reformers who were talking about
education seem not to have seen very clearly what they meant by the
word. They argued about whether it meant putting ideas into the child
or drawing ideas out of the child. In any case, as Chesterton pointed
out, you must choose which kind of ideas you are going to put in or
even which kind you are going to draw out. "There is indeed in each
living creature a collection of forces and functions; but education
means producing these in particular shapes and training them for
particular purposes, or it means nothing at all."
But to decide what they were trying to produce was altogether too
much for the men who were directing education in our Board Schools.
The Public Schools of England were often the target of Chesterton's
attacks; but they had, he declared, one immense superiority over the
Board Schools. The men who directed them knew exactly what they
wanted and were on the whole successful in producing it. Those
responsible for the Board Schools seemed to have no idea excepting
that of feebly imitating the Public Schools. One disadvantage of this
was that, at its worst and at its best, the Public School idea could
only be applicable to a small governing class. The other disadvantage
was that whereas in the Public Schools the masters were working with
the parents and trying to give the boys the same general shape as
their homes would give them, the Board Schools were doing nothing of
the kind. The schoolmaster of the poor never worked with the parents;
often he ignored them; sometimes he positively worked against them.
Such education was, Chesterton held, the very reverse of that which
would prevail in a true democracy. "We have had enough education for
the people; we want education by the people."
Chesterton felt keenly that while the faddists were perfectly
prepared to take the children out of the hands of any parents who
happened to be poor, they had not really the courage of their own
convictions. They would expatiate upon methods; they could not define
their aims; they would take refuge in such meaningless terms as
progress or efficiency or success. They were not prepared to say what
they wanted to succeed in producing, towards what goal they were
progressing or what was the test of efficiency. And part of this
inability arose from their curious fear of the past. Most movements
of reform have looked to the past for great part of their
inspiration. To reform means to shape anew, and he pointed out that
every revolution involves the idea of a return. On this point, G.K.
attacked two popular sayings. One was "You can't put the clock back";
but, he said, you can and you do constantly. The clock is a piece of
mechanism which can be adjusted by the human finger. "There is
another proverb: 'As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it';
which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable,
please God, I will make it again."
It is easy to understand that this sort of philosophy should be out
of tune with the Socialist who looked with contempt on the wisdom of
his forefathers. It is less easy to understand why it was
unacceptable also to most of the Tories. One reviewer asked whether
Mr. Chesterton was the hoariest of Conservatives or the wildest of
Radicals. And with none of his books are the reviews so bewildered as
they are with this one. "The universe is ill-regulated," said the
_Liverpool Daily Post_, "according to the fancy of Mr. Chesterton;
but we are inclined to think that if the deity were to talk over
matters with him, he would soon come to see that a Chestertonian
cosmos would be no improvement on things as they are." On the other
hand, the _Toronto Globe_ remarks, "His boisterous optimism will not
admit that there is anything to sorrow over in this best of all
possible worlds." The _Observer_ suggested that Chesterton would find
no disciples because "his converts would never know from one week to
another what they had been converted to"; while the _Yorkshire Post_
felt that the chief disadvantage of the book was that "a shrewd
reader can pretty accurately anticipate Mr. Chesterton's point of
view on any subject whatsoever."
It seems almost incredible that so definite a line of thought, so
abundantly illustrated, should not have been clear to all his
readers. Some reviewers, one supposes, had not read the book; but
surely the _Daily Telegraph_ was deliberately refusing to face a
challenge when it wrote: "His whole book is an absurdity, but to be
absurd for three hundred pages on end is itself a work of genius."
That particular reviewer was shirking a serious issue. He was the
official Tory. But those whom I might call the unofficial Tories,
such men for instance as my own father, received much of this book
with delight and yet declined to take Chesterton's sociology
seriously. And I think it is worth trying to see why this was the
case.
In a letter to the _Clarion_, G.K. outlines his own position: "If you
want praise or blame for Socialists I have enormous quantities of
both. Roughly speaking (1) I praise them to infinity because they
want to smash modern society. (2) I blame them to infinity because of
what they want to put in its place. As the smashing must, I suppose,
come first, my practical sympathies are mainly with them."*
[* Letter to the _Clarion_, February 8, 1910.]
Such a confession of faith seemed shocking to the honest
old-fashioned Tory. And because it shocked him, he made the mistake
of calling it irresponsible. Chesterton frequently urged revolution
as the only possible means of changing an intolerable state of
things. But the word "revolution" suggested streets running with
blood. And, on the other hand, they had not the very faintest
conception of how intolerable the state of things was against which
Chesterton proposed to revolt. I think it must be said too that he
was a little hazy as to the exact nature of the revolution he
proposed. He certainly hoped to avoid the guillotine! And even when
urging the restoration of the common lands to the people of England,
he appended a note in which he talked of a land purchase scheme
similar to that which George Wyndham had introduced in Ireland. But
besides this tinge of vagueness in what he proposed, there was
another weakness in his presentment of his sociology which I think
was his chief weakness as a writer.
It would be hard to find anyone who got so much out of words,
proverbs, popular sayings. He wrung every ounce of meaning out of
them; he stood them on their heads; he turned them inside out. And
everything he said he illustrated with an extraordinary wealth of
fancy; but when you come to illustration by way of concrete facts
there is a curious change. In his sociology, he did the same thing
that his best critics blamed in his literary biographies. He would
take some one fact and appear to build upon it an enormous
superstructure and then, very often, it would turn out that the fact
itself was inaccurately set down; and the average reader, discovering
the inaccuracy, felt that the entire superstructure was on a rotten
foundation and had fallen with it to the ground. Yet the ordinary
reader was wrong. The "fact" had not been the foundation of his
thought, but only the thing that had started him thinking. If the
"fact" had not been there at all, his thinking would have been
neither more nor less valid. But most readers could not see the
distinction.
It is a little difficult to make the point clear; but anyone who has
read the _Browning_ and the _Dickens_ and then read the reviews of
them will recognise what I mean. It was universally acknowledged that
Chesterton might commit a hundred inaccuracies and yet get at the
heart of his subject in a way that the most painstaking biographer
and critic could not emulate. The more deeply one reads Dickens or
Browning, the more even one studies their lives, the more one is
confirmed as to the profound truth of the Chesterton estimate and the
genius of his insight. A superficial glance sees only the errors; a
deeper gaze discovers the truth. It is exactly the same with his
sociology. But here we are in a field where there is far more
prejudice. When Chesterton talked of State interference and used
again and again the same illustration--that of children whose hair
was forcibly cut short in a Board School--two questions were asked by
Socialists: Was this a solitary incident? Was it accurately reported?
When a pained doctor wrote to the papers saying the incident had been
merely one of a request to parents who had gladly complied for fear
their children should catch things from other and dirtier children,
it appeared as though G.K. had built far too much on this one point.
It was not the case. He was not building on the incident, he was
illustrating by the incident. But it must be admitted that he was
incredibly careless in investigating such incidents; and quite
indifferent as to his own accuracy. And this was foolish, for he
could have found in Police Court records, in the pages of _John Bull_
and later of the _Eye Witness_ itself, abundance of well verified
illustrations of his thesis.
In the same way, when he talked of the robbery of the people of
England by the great landlords, he did not take the slightest trouble
to prove his case to the many who knew nothing of the matter. It must
be remembered that the sociological side of English history was only
just beginning to be explored to any serious extent. In the _Village
Labourer_, Mr. and Mrs. Hammond point out to what an extent they had
had to depend on the Home Office papers and contemporary documents
for the mass of facts which this book and the _Town Labourer_ brought
for the first time to the knowledge of the general public. Chesterton
had worked with Hammond on the _Speaker_ for some years. Just as with
his book about Shaw so too with the background of his sociology he
could have gone round the corner and got the required information. He
knew the thing in general terms; he would not be bothered to make
that knowledge convincing to his readers. If to his genius for
expounding ideas had been added an awareness of the necessity of
marshalling and presenting facts, he must surely have convinced all
men of goodwill.
For in this matter the facts were there to marshal. It was less than
a hundred years since the last struggle of the English yeomen against
a wholesale robbery and confiscation that catastrophically altered
the whole shape of our country. And it seems to have left no trace in
the memory of the English poor. In _Northanger Abbey_, Jane Austen
describes Catherine Morland finding the traces of an imaginary crime.
But Chesterton comments that the crime she failed to discover was the
very real one that the owner of Northanger Abbey was not an Abbot.
The ordinary Englishman, however, thinks little of a crime that
consisted in robbing "a lot of lazy monks." That they had possessed
so much of the land of England merely seemed to make the act a more
desirable one: yet it was a confiscation, not so much of monks' land
as of the people's land administered by the monasteries.
What is even less realised is how much of the structure of the
mediaeval village remained after the Reformation and how widespread
was small ownership nearly to the end of the eighteenth century, when
Enclosures began estimated by the Hammonds at five million acres.
This land ceased in effect to be the common property of the poor and
became the private property of the rich. This business of the
Enclosures must be treated at some little length because it had the
same key position in Chesterton's sociological thinking as the
Marconi Case (shortly to be discussed) had in his political.
In every village of England had been small freeholders, copyholders
and cottagers, all of whom had varying degrees of possession in the
common lands which were administered by a manorial court of the
village. These common lands were not mere stretches of heath and
gorse but consisted partly of arable cultivated in strips with strict
rules of rotation, partly of grazing land and partly of wood and
heath. Most people in the village had a right to a strip of arable,
to cut firing of brushwood and turf, and rushes for thatch, and to
pasture one or more cows, their pigs and their geese. A village
cowherd looked after all the animals and brought them back at night.
Cobbett in his _Cottage Economy_ (to a new edition of which
Chesterton wrote a preface) reckoned that a cottager with a
quarter-acre of garden could well keep a cow on his own cabbages plus
commonland grazing, could fatten his own pig and have to buy very
little food for his family except grain and hops for home-baking and
brewing. He puts a cottager's earnings, working part-time for a
farmer, at about 10 sh. a week. This figure would vary, but the
possession of property in stock and common rights would tide over bad
times. A man with fire and food could be quasi-independent; and
indeed some of the larger farmers, witnessing before Enclosure
Enquiry Committees, complained of this very spirit of independence as
producing idleness and "sauciness."
The case for the Enclosures was that improved agricultural methods
could not be used in the open fields: more food was grown for
increasing town populations: much waste land ploughed: livestock
immeasurably improved. Only later was the cost counted when cheap
imported food for these same towns had slain English agriculture. The
"compensation" in small plots or sums of money could not for the
smaller commoners replace what they had lost--even when they
succeeded in getting it. Claims had to be made in writing--and few
cottagers could write. How difficult too to reduce to its money value
a claim for cutting turf or pasturing pigs and geese. A commissioner,
who had administered twenty Enclosure Acts, lamented to Arthur Young
that he had been the means of ruining two thousand poor people. But
the gulf was so great between rich and poor that all that the commons
had meant to the poor was not glimpsed by the rich. Arthur Young had
thought the benefits of common "perfectly contemptible," but by 1801
he was deeply repentant and trying in vain to arrest the movement he
had helped to start.
Before enclosure, the English cottager had had milk, butter and
cheese in plenty, home-grown pork and bacon, home-brewed beer and
home-baked bread, his own vegetables (although Cobbett scorned green
rubbish for human food and advised it to be fed to cattle only), his
own eggs and poultry. After enclosure, he could get no milk, for the
farmers would not sell it; no meat, for his wages could not buy it;
and he no longer had a pig to provide the fat bacon commended by
Cobbett. Working long hours he lived on bread, potatoes and tea, and
insufficient even of these. Lord Winchelsea, one of the very few
landowners who resisted the trend of the time, mentioned in the House
of Lords the discovery of four labourers, starved to death under a
hedge, and said this was a typical occurrence.
At the beginning of the Enclosure period the Industrial Revolution
was barely in its infancy. A large part of the spinning, weaving and
other manufactures was carried on in the cottages of men who had
gardens they could dig in and cows and pigs of their own. The
invention of power machines, the discovery of coal wherewith those
machines could be worked, led to the concentration of factories in
the huge cities. But it was the drift from the villages of
dispossessed men, together with the cheap child labour provided by
Poor Law Guardians, that made possible the starvation wages and the
tyranny of the factory system. And here the tyrants were largely of a
different class. There were some landowners who also had factories,
and more who possessed coal-mines, but many of the manufacturers had
themselves come from the class of the dispossessed.
Successful manufacturers made money--a great deal of money. Many of
the men's appeals gave the figures at which the goods were sold in
contrast with their rate of wages, and the contrast is startling. So,
as the towns grew, the masters left the smoke they were creating and
bought country places and became country gentlemen, preserved their
own game and judged their own tenants. And thus disappeared yet
another section of the ancient country folk. For the large landowners
would seldom sell and the land bought by the new men was mostly the
land of small farmers and yeomen. This was the age of new country
houses with a hundred rooms and vast offices that housed an army of
servants. "Labour was cheap," the descendants of those who built just
then will tell you, as they gaze disconsolate at their unwieldy
heritage. Old and new families alike built or rebuilt, added and
improved.
Cobbett rode rurally and angrily through the ruins of a better
England (described a century earlier by another horseman, Daniel
Defoe). Goldsmith mourned an early example in his "Deserted Village,"
but they are the only voices in an abundant literature. Jane Austen
is, indeed, the perfect example of what Chesterton always
realised--the ignorance that was almost innocence with which the
wealthy had done their work of destruction. He did not account them
as evil as they would seem by a mere summary of events. And what he
saw at the root of those events was in his eyes still present:
England was still possessed and still governed by a minority. The
Conservatives were "a minority that was rich," the liberals "a
minority that was mad." And those two minorities tended to join
together and rob and oppress the ordinary man, in the name of some
theory of progress and perfection.
Thus the Protestant Reformation had closed the monasteries, which
were the poor man's inns, in the name of a purer religion; the
economists had taken away his land and driven him into the factories
with a promise of future wealth and prosperity. These had been the
experts of their day. Now the new experts were telling him with equal
eagerness that hygienic flats and communal kitchens would bring about
for him the new Jerusalem. But never did the expert think of asking
Jones, the ordinary man, what he himself wanted. Jones just wanted
the "divinely ordinary things"--a house of his own and a family life.
And that was still denied him as is related in the chapter called
"The Homelessness of Jones."
In a debate in the Oxford Union, G.K. maintained that the House of
Lords was a menace to the State, because it failed precisely in what
was supposed to be its main function, that of conservation. It had
not saved, it had destroyed the Church lands and the common lands; it
was ready to pass any Bill that affected only the lower classes. "We
are all Socialists now," Sir William Harcourt had lately said, and
Chesterton saw that Socialism would mean merely further restriction
of liberty and continued coercion of the poor by the experts and the
rich. So, looking at the past, Chesterton desired a restoration which
he often called a Revolution. There were two forms of government that
might succeed--a real Monarchy, in which one ordinary man governed
many ordinary men--or a real democracy, in which many ordinary men
governed themselves. Aristocracy may have begun well in England when
it was an army protecting England: when the Duke was a Dux. Now it
was merely plutocracy and it had become "an army without an enemy
billeted on the people."
All this and more formed the background of Chesterton's mind. But
what he wrote was a comment on the scene, not a picture of it. He
wrote of the terrible irony whereby "the Commons were enclosing the
commons." He spoke of the English revolution of the eighteenth
century, "a revolution of the rich against the poor." He mourned with
Goldsmith the destruction of England's peasantry. He cried aloud like
Cobbett, for he too had discovered the murder of England his mother.
But his cry was unintelligible and his hopes of a resurrection
unmeaning to those who knew not what had been done to death.
CHAPTER XVIII
The Eye Witness
THE PUBLICATION OF _What's Wrong With the World_ brings us to 1910.
Gilbert had, as we have seen, originally intended to call the book
_What's Wrong?_ laying some emphasis on the note of interrogation. It
amused him to perplex the casual visitor by going off to his study
with the muttered remark: "I must get on with What's Wrong." The
change of name and the omission of the note of interrogation (both
changes the act of his publishers) represented a certain loss, for
indeed Gilbert was still asking himself what was wrong when he was
writing this book, although he was very certain what was right--his
ideals were really a clear picture of health. His doubts about the
achievement of those ideals in the present world and with his present
political allegiance were, as he suggests in the _Autobiography_,
vague but becoming more definite.
Did this mean that he ever looked hopefully towards the other big
division of the English political scene--the Tory or Conservative
party to which his brother had once declared he belonged without
knowing it? That would be a simpler story than what really happened
in his mind--and I confess that I am myself sufficiently vague and
doubtful about part of what the Chesterbelloc believed they were
discovering, to find it a little difficult to describe it clearly.
Cecil Chesterton and Belloc set down their views in a book called
_The Party System_. Gilbert made his clear in letters to the Liberal
Press.
The English party system had often enough been attacked for its
obvious defects and indeed the _New Witness's_ even livelier
contemporary _John Bull_ was shouting for its abolition. But Belloc
and Cecil Chesterton had their own line. Their general thesis was
that not only did the people of England not govern, Parliament did
not govern either. The Cabinet governed and it was chosen by the real
rulers of the party. For each party was run by an oligarchy, and run
roughly on the same lines. Lists were given of families whose
brothers-in-law and cousins (though not yet their sisters and their
aunts) found place in the Ministry of one or other political party.
Moreover, the governing families on both sides were in many cases
connected by birth or marriage and all belonged to the same social
set. But money too was useful: men could buy their way in. Each party
had a fund, and those who could contribute largely had of necessity
an influence on party policy. The existent Liberal Government had
brought to a totally new peak the art of swelling its fund by the
sale of titles: which in many instances meant the sale of hereditary
governing powers, since those higher titles which carry with them a
seat in the House of Lords were sold like the others, at a higher
rate naturally. For the rank and file member, a political career no
longer meant the chance for talents and courage to win recognition in
an open field. A man who believed that his first duty was to
represent his constituents stood no chance of advancement. Certainly
a private member could not introduce a bill as his own and get it
debated on its merits.
None of this was new, though the book did it rather exceptionally
well. What was new was the theory that the two party oligarchies were
secretly one, that the fights between the parties were little more
than sham fights. The ordinary party member was unaware of this
secret conspiracy between the leaders and would obey the call of the
party Whip and accept a sort of military discipline with the genuine
belief that the defeat of his party would mean disaster to his
country.
Belloc had discovered for himself the impotence of the private
member. He had, as we have seen, been elected to Parliament by South
Salford in 1906 as a Liberal. In Parliament he proposed a measure for
the publication of the names of subscribers to the Party Funds.
Naturally enough the proposal got nowhere. Also naturally enough the
Party Funds were not forthcoming to support him at the next election.
He fought and won the seat as an Independent. At the second election
of 1910 he declined to stand, having lucidly explained to the House
of Commons in a final speech that a seat there was of no value under
the existing system.
Thus Belloc's own experience, and a thousand other things, went to
prove the stranglehold the rulers of the party had on the party. But
did it prove, or did the book establish, the theory of a
behind-scenes conspiracy between the small groups who controlled each
of the great historical parties, which was the theme not only of _The
Party System_ but also of Belloc's brilliant political novels--
notably _Mr. Clutterbuck's Election_ and _Pongo and the Bull?_
Of the stranglehold there was no doubt and Gilbert soon found it too
much for his own allegiance to the Liberal Party or any other. At the
election of 1910, he addressed a Liberal meeting at Beaconsfield and
dealt vigorously with constant Tory questions and interjections from
the back of the hall. He obviously enjoyed the fight and a little
later he spoke for the "League of Young Liberals" and was
photographed standing at the back of their van. But although he went
to London to vote for John Burns in Battersea and would probably have
continued to vote Liberal or Labour, he showed at a Women's Suffrage
meeting in 1911 a growing scepticism about the value of the vote. He
was reported as saying, "If I voted for John Burns now, I should not
be voting for anything at all (laughter)."
It must have been irritating that this interpolation "laughter" was
liable to occur when Chesterton was most serious; he did not change
quickly but in the alteration of his outlook towards his party, his
growing doubt whether it stood for any real values, he was very
serious. In the years that followed the coming into power of
Liberalism there were a multitude of Acts described as of little
importance and passed into law after little or no discussion. At the
same time, private members complained that they could get no
attention for really urgent matters of social reform. The _Nation_,
as a party paper, defended the state of things and talked of official
business and of want of time. Their attitude was vigorously attacked
by Gilbert, whose first letter (Jan. 17, 1911) ended with this
paragraph:
Who ever dreamed of getting "perfect freedom and fulness of
discussion" except in heaven? The case urged against Cabinets is
that we have no freedom and no discussion, except that laid down
despotically by a few men on front benches. Your assurance that
Parliament is very busy is utterly vain. It is busy on things the
dictators direct. That small men and small questions get squeezed out
among big ones, that is a normal disaster. With us, on the contrary,
it is the big questions that get squeezed out. The Party was not
allowed really to attack the South African War, for fear it should
alienate Mr. Asquith. It was not allowed to object to Mr. Herbert
Gladstone (or is it Lord Gladstone? This blaze of democracy blinds
one) when he sought to abolish the Habeas Corpus Act, and leave the
poorer sort of pickpockets permanently at the caprice of their
jailers. Parliament is busy on the aristocratic fads; and mankind
must mark time with a million stamping feet, while Mr. Herbert Samuel
searches a gutter-boy for cigarettes. That is what you call the
congestion of Parliament.
The Editor of the _Nation_ was so rash as to append to this letter
the words, "We must be stupid for we have no idea what Mr. Chesterton
means." This was too good an opening to be lost. G.K. returned to the
charge and I feel that this correspondence is so important in various
ways that the next two letters should be given in full.
Sir,
In a note to my last week's letter you remark, "We must be stupid;
but we have no idea what Mr. Chesterton means." As an old friend I
can assure you that you are by no means stupid; some other
explanation of this unnatural darkness must be found; and I find it
in the effect of that official party phraseology which I attack, and
which I am by no means alone in attacking. If I had talked about
"true Imperialism," or "our loyalty to our gallant leader," you might
have thought you knew what I meant; because I meant nothing. But I do
mean something; and I do want you to understand what I mean. I will,
therefore, state it with total dullness, in separate paragraphs; and
I will number them.
(1) I say a democracy means a State where the citizens first desire
something and then get it. That is surely simple.
(2) I say that where this is deflected by the disadvantage of
representation, it means that the citizens desire a thing and tell
the representatives to get it. I trust I make myself clear.
(3) The representatives, in order to get it at all, must have some
control over detail; but the design must come from popular desire.
Have we got that down?
(4) You, I understand, hold that English M. P.s today do thus obey
the public in design, varying only in detail. That is a quite clear
contention.
(5) I say they don't. Tell me if I am getting too abstruse.
(6) I say our representatives accept designs and desires almost
entirely from the Cabinet class above them; and practically not at
all from the constituents below them. I say the people does not wield
a Parliament which wields a Cabinet. I say the Cabinet bullies a
timid Parliament which bullies a bewildered people. Is that plain?
(7) If you ask why the people endure and play this game, I say they
play it as they would play the official games of any despotism or
aristocracy. The average Englishman puts his cross on a ballot-paper
as he takes off his hat to the King--and would take it off if there
were no ballot-papers. There is no democracy in the business. Is that
definite?
(8) If you ask why we have thus lost democracy, I say from two
causes; (a) The omnipotence of an unelected body, the Cabinet; (b)
the party system, which turns all politics into a game like the Boat
Race. Is that all right?
(9) If you want examples I could give you scores. I say the people
did not cry out that all children whose parents lunch on cheese and
beer in an inn should be left out in the rain. I say the people did
not demand that a man's sentence should be settled by his jailers
instead of by his judges. I say these things came from a rich group,
not only without any evidence, but really without any pretence, that
they were popular. I say the people hardly heard of them at the
polls. But here I do not need to give examples, but merely to say
what I mean. Surely I have said it now.
Yours,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
January 26th, 1911.
_Editor's Note_.
Mr. Chesterton is precise enough now, but he is precisely wrong.
There are grains of truth in his premises, a bushel of exaggeration
in his conclusions. We have not "lost democracy"; the two instances
which he alleges, both of which we dislike, are too small to prove so
large a case.
To this G. K. replied:
Sir,
I want to thank you for printing my letters, and especially for
your last important comment, in which you say that the Crimes and
Children's Acts were bad, but are "too small" to support a charge of
undemocracy. And I want to ask you one last question, which is the
question.
Why do you think of these things as small? They are really
enormous. One alters the daily habits of millions of people; the
other destroys the public law of thousands of years. What can be more
fundamental than food, drink, and children? What can be more
catastrophic than putting us back in the primal anarchy, in which a
man was flung into a dungeon and left there "till he listened to
reason?" There has been no such overturn in European ethics since
Constantine proclaimed the cross.
Why do you think of these things as small? I will tell you.
Unconsciously, no doubt, but simply and solely because the Front
Benches did not announce them as big. They were not "first-class
measures"; they were not "full-dress debates." The governing class
got them through in the quick, quiet, secondary way in which they
pass things that the people positively detests; not in the pompous,
lengthy, oratorical way in which they present measures that the
people merely bets on, as it might on a new horse. A "first-class
measure" means, for instance, tinkering for months at some tottery
compromise about a Religious Education that doesn't exist. The reason
is simple. "Sound Church Teaching" and "Dogmatic Christianity" both
happen to be hobbies in the class from which Cabinets come. But going
to public-houses and going to prison are both habits with which that
class is, unfortunately, quite unfamiliar. It is ready, therefore, at
a stroke of the pen, to bring all folly into the taverns and all
injustice into the jails.
Yours,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
February 2nd, 1911.
It was not only in the _Nation_ that such letters as these appeared.
"We can't write in every paper at once," runs a letter in the _New
Age_. "We do our best." ("We" meant Gilbert, Cecil and Hilaire
Belloc.) And G.K. goes on to answer four questions which have been
put by a correspondent signing himself, "Political Journalist."
First, in whose eyes but ours has the Party System lost credit? I
say in nearly everybody's. If this were a free country, I could
mention offhand a score of men within a stone's throw; an innkeeper,
a doctor, a shopkeeper, a lawyer, a civil servant. As it is, I may
put it this way. In a large debating society I proposed to attack the
Party System, and for a long time I could not get an opposer. At
last, I got one. He defended the Party System on the ground that
people must be bamboozled more or less.
Second, he asks if the Party System does not govern the country to
the content of most citizens. I answer that Englishmen are happy
under the Party System solely and exactly as Romans were happy under
Nero. That is, not because government was good, but because Life is
good, even without good government. Nero's slaves enjoyed Italy, not
Nero. Modern Englishmen enjoy England but certainly not the British
Constitution. The legislation is detested, wherever it is even felt.
The other day a Cambridge don complained that, when out bicycling
with his boys, he had to leave them in the rain while he drank a
glass of cider. Count the whole series of human souls between a
costermonger and a Cambridge don, and you will see a nation in mutiny.
Third, "What substitute, etc., etc." Here again, the answer is
simple and indeed traditional. I suggest we should do what was always
suggested in the riddles and revolutions of the recent centuries. In
the seventeenth century phrase, I suggest that we should "call a free
Parliament!"
Fourth, "Is Democracy compatible with Parliamentary Government?"
God forbid. Is God compatible with Church Government? Why should He
be? It is the other things that have to be compatible with God. A
church can only be a humble effort to utter God. A Parliament can
only be a humble effort to express Man. But for all that, there is a
deal of commonsense left in the world, and people do know when
priests or politicians are honestly trying to express a mystery--and
when they are only taking advantage of an ambiguity.
G. K. CHESTERTON.
Encouraged by the excitement that had attended the publication of
_The Party System_ its authors decided to attempt a newspaper of
their own. This paper is still in existence but it has in the course
of its history appeared under four different titles. To avoid later
confusion I had better set these down at the outset.
The Eye Witness, June 1911-October 1912
The New Witness, November 1912-May 1923
G. K.'s Weekly, 1925-1936
The Weekly Review, 1936 till today
During the first year of its existence the _Eye Witness_ was edited
by Belloc. Cecil Chesterton took over the editorship after a short
interregnum during which he was assistant editor. Charles Granville
had financed it. When he went bankrupt the title was altered to _The
New Witness_. When Cecil joined the Army in 1916, G.K. became Editor.
In 1923 the paper died, but two years later rose again under the
title, _G.K.'s Weekly_. After Gilbert's own death Belloc took it back.
Today, as _The Weekly Review_, it is edited by Reginald Jebb, Belloc's
son-in-law. With all these changes of name, the continuity of the
paper is unmistakable. Its main aim may be roughly defined under two
headings. 1. To fight for the liberty of Englishmen against
increasing enslavement to a Plutocracy. 2. To expose and combat
corruption in public life.
The fight for Liberty appears in the letters quoted above in the form
of an attack on certain bills: Belloc unified and defined it with
real genius in the articles which became two of his most important
books: _The Servile State_ and _The Restoration of Property_. If
these two books be set beside Chesterton's _What's Wrong With the
World_ and _The Outline of Sanity_ the Chesterbelloc sociology stands
complete.
In his _Cobbett_, G.K. was later to emphasise the genius with which
Cobbett saw the England of today a hundred years before it was there
to be seen. Belloc in the same way saw both what was coming and the
way in which it was coming. Especially far-sighted was his attitude
to Lloyd George's Compulsory Health Insurance Act. It was the first
act of the kind in England and the scheme in outline was: every week
every employed person must have a stamp stuck on a card by his
employer, of which he paid slightly less and the employer slightly
more than half the cost. The money thus saved gave the insured person
free medical treatment and a certain weekly sum during the period of
illness. Agricultural labourers were omitted from the act and a
ferment raged on the question of domestic servants, who were
eventually included in its operation. It was practically acknowledged
that this was done to make the Act more workable financially. For
domestic servants were an especially healthy class and, moreover, in
most upper and middle-class households they were already attended by
the family doctor without cost to themselves.
The company in which the _Eye Witness_ found itself in opposing this
Act was indeed a case of "strange bedfellows." For the opposition was
led by the Conservatives (on the ground that the Act was Socialism).
Many a mistress and many a maid did I hear in those days in good
Conservative homes declaring they would rather go to prison than
"lick Lloyd George's stamps." Most Liberals, on the other hand,
regarded the Act as an example of enlightened legislation for the
benefit of the poor. The _Eye Witness_ saw in it the arrival of the
Servile State. Their main objections cut deep. As with compulsory
education, but in much more far-reaching fashion, this Act took away
the liberty and the personal responsibilities of the poor--and in
doing so put them into a category--forever ticketed and labelled,
separated from the other part of the nation. As people for whom
everything had to be done, they were increasingly at the mercy of
their employers, of Government Inspectors, of philanthropic
societies, increasingly slaves.
What was meant by the Servile State? It was, said Belloc, an
"arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the
families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labour
for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the
whole community with the mark of such labour." It was, quite simply,
the return of slavery as the condition of the poor: and the
Chesterbelloc did not think, then or ever, that any increase of
comfort or security was a sufficient good to be bought at the price
of liberty.
In a section of the paper called "Lex versus the Poor" the editor
made a point of collecting instances of oppression. A series of
articles attacked the Mentally Deficient Bill whereby poor parents
could have their children taken from them--those children who most
needed them and whom they often loved and clung to above the others,
and a Jewish contributor to the paper, Dr. Eder, pointed out in
admirable letters how divided was the medical profession itself on
what constituted mental deficiency and whether family life was not
far more likely to develop the mind than segregation with other
deficients in an Institution.
To the official harriers of the poor were added further inspectors
sent by such societies as the National Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children. Cruelty to children, as Gilbert often pointed
out, is a horrible thing, but very seldom proved of parents against
their own children. The word was stretched to cover anything that
these inspectors called neglect. Lately we have read of a case, and
many like it were reported in the _New Witness_, where failure to
wash children adequately was called cruelty. And what was the remedy?
To take away the father, the breadwinner, to prison. For insufficient
food and clothes to substitute destitution, for insufficient care to
remove the only one the children had to care for them at all: always
to break up the family.
Worst of all was the question of school attendance: While a child of
three was dying of starvation, the mother was at the Police Court
where she was fined for not sending an older child to school. As she
could not pay the fine her husband was sent to prison for a week. A
child died of consumption. The parents said at the inquest they had
not dared to keep her at home when she got sick, for fear of the
school inspector.
As he had in _What's Wrong With the World_ been fired by the thought
of the landless poor of England, so now these stories stirred Gilbert
deeply. He saw the philanthropists like the Pharisees, unheeding the
wisdom learned by the Wise Men at Bethlehem: saw them with their busy
pencils peering at the Mother's omissions while the vast crimes of
the State went unchallenged. He wrote a poem called "The Neglected
Child" and "dedicated in a glow of Christian Charity to a
philanthropic Society."
The Teachers in the temple
They did not lift their eyes
For the blazing star on Bethlehem
Or the Wise Men grown wise.
They heeded jot and tittle,
They heeded not a jot
The rending voice in Ramah
And the children that were not.
Or how the panic of the poor
Choked all the fields with flight,
Or how the red sword of the rich
Ran ravening through the night.
They made their notes; while naked
And monstrous and obscene
A tyrant bathed in all the blood
Of men that might have been.
But they did chide Our Lady
And tax her for this thing,
That she had lost Him for a time
And sought Him sorrowing.
To most of the _Eye Witness_ group the fight for freedom was so bound
up with the fight against corruption that all was but one fight. I
think that when they looked back they were too much inclined to see
the shadow of Lloyd George behind them as well as around them: that
in fact the Liberal Party of those years had brought with it a new
descent in political decency--a descent which would have startled
both Gladstone and the more cynical Disraeli. Of this more when we
come to Marconi. Meanwhile there was certainly a whole lot to fight
about and the group responsible for the _Witness_, not content with
the pen, formed a Society entitled "The League for Clean Government,"
with Mr. John Scurr as Secretary. This League specialised in
promoting the candidature of independent Members of Parliament for
such vacancies as occurred between general elections, and in
attacking Party "place men." Doubtless other elements were present at
some of these by-elections but the League boasted its success on
several occasions, notably in the three defeats sustained by C. F. G.
Masterman.
Charles Masterman had been with Gilbert and Cecil Chesterton a member
of the group of young Christian Socialists that drew its inspiration
in great part from Canon Scott Holland. He had gone further than most
of them in his practical sympathy and understanding for the
destitute. With a friend he had taken a workman's flat in the slums
and he had written a somewhat florid but very moving book recording
conditions experienced as well as observed. He was one of the Young
Liberals who entered Parliament full of ardour to fight the battles
of the poor. The sequel as they saw it may best be told by Belloc and
Cecil Chesterton themselves. In _The Party System_ they wrote:
. . . Mr. Masterman entered Parliament as a Liberal of independent
views. During his first two years in the House he distinguished
himself as a critic of the Liberal Ministry. He criticised their
Education Bill. He criticised with especial force the policy of Mr.
John Burns at the Local Government Board. His conduct attracted the
notice of the leaders of the party. He was offered office, accepted
it, and since then has been silent, except for an occasional
rhetorical exercise in defence of the Government. One fact will be
sufficient to emphasise the change. On March 13th, 1908, Mr.
Masterman voted for the Right to Work Bill of the Labour Party. In
May of the same year he accepted a place with a salary of £1200 a
year--it has since risen to £1500. On April 20th, 1909, he voted, at
the bidding of the Party Whips, against the same Bill which he had
voted for in the previous year. Yet this remarkable example of the
"peril of change"* does not apparently create any indignation or even
astonishment in the political world which Mr. Masterman adorns. On
the contrary, he seems to be generally regarded as a politician of
exceptionally high ideals. No better instance need be recorded of the
peculiar atmosphere it is the business of these pages to describe.
[* The title of one of Masterman's books was _In Peril of Change_.]
At the succeeding General Election, Masterman was not re-elected. And
he failed again in a couple of by-elections. In all these elections,
the League for Clean Government campaigned fiercely against him.
There was certainly in the feeling of Belloc and Cecil Chesterton
towards Masterman a great deal of the bitterness that moved Browning
to write, "Just for a handful of silver he left us," and I do not
think there is anything in the history of the paper that created so
strong a feeling against it in certain minds. There seemed something
peculiarly ungenerous in the continued attacks after a series of
defeats, in the insistence with which Masterman's name was dragged
in, always accompanied by sneers. Replying to a remonstrance to this
effect, Cecil Chesterton, then Editor of the _New Witness_, stated
that in his considered opinion it was a duty to make a successful
career impossible to any man convicted of selling his principles for
success.
I dwell on this matter of Masterman for two reasons. The first is
that it was one of the rare occasions on which Gilbert Chesterton
disagreed with his brother and Belloc. Gilbert was a very faithful
friend: it would be hard to find a broken friendship in his life. He
had moreover much of the power that aroused his enthusiasm in
Browning of going into the depths of a character and discovering the
virtue concealed there. And as with Browning his explanation took
account of elements that really existed but could find no place in a
more narrowly adverse view.
"Many of my own best friends," he wrote of Masterman, "entirely
misunderstood and underrated him. It is true that as he rose higher
in politics, the veil of the politician began to descend a little on
him also; but he became a politician from the noblest bitterness on
behalf of the poor; and what was blamed in him was the fault of much
more ignoble men. . . . But he was also an organiser and liked
governing; only his pessimism made him think that government had
always been bad, and was now no worse than usual. Therefore, to men
on fire for reform, he came to seem an obstacle and an official
apologist." After G.K. became Editor of the _New Witness_ the attacks
on Masterman ceased, but he did not differ from the two earlier
Editors in his views on the ethics of political action or the
principles of social reform.
The second reason for which the Masterman matter must be dwelt on is
because it affords the best illustration of one curious fact in
connection with the _Eye_ and _New Witness_ campaign. When the _Life
of Masterman_ recently appeared I seized it eagerly that I might read
an authoritative defence of his position. I searched the Index under
_Eye Witness, New Witness, Cecil Chesterton_ and _League for Clean
Government_. No one of them was mentioned. At last I discovered under
_Belloc_ and _Scurr_ a faint allusion to their activities at a
by-election in which Belloc was coupled with the Protestant Alliance
leader Kensit as part of a contemptible opposition, and the unnamed
League for Clean Government described as "those working with Mr.
Scurr"! Clearly where it is possible to use against something
powerful the weapon of ignoring it as though it were something
obscure, that weapon is itself a powerful one. Against the _New
Witness_ it was used perpetually.
A paper which included among its contributors Hilaire Belloc, G. K.
Chesterton, J. S. Phillimore, E. C. Bentley, Wells, Shaw, Katharine
Tynan, Desmond McCarthy, F. Y. Eccles, G. S. Street--to name only
those who come first to mind--obviously stood high. Cecil
Chesterton's own editorials, Hugh O'Donnell's picturesque series
_Twenty Years After_, the high level of the reviewing and (oddly
enough, considering the paper's outlook) the financial articles of
Raymond Radclyffe, were all outstanding. The sales (at sixpence) were
never enormous but the readers were on a high cultural level. The
correspondence pages are always interesting.
The _Eye Witness_ group, besides courage, had high spirits and they
had wit. "Capulet's" rhymes; the series of ballades written by
Baring, Bentley, Phillimore, Belloc and G.K.C.; "Mrs. Markham's
History" written by Belloc; there was little of this quality in the
other weeklies. Side by side with the serious attacks was a line of
satire and of sheer fooling. The silver deal in India was being
attacked in the editorials, while Mrs. Markham explained to Tommy how
good, kind Lord Swaythling, really a Samuel, had lent money to his
brother Mr. Montague (another Samuel) for the benefit of the poor
people of India. The next week Tommy and Rachel grew enthusiastic
about the kindness of Lord Swaythling in _borrowing_ money that
the Indian Government could not use. Mrs. Markham too made Rachel
take a pencil and write out a list of Samuels including the
Postmaster-General, now so busy over the Marconi Case. The next
lesson was about titles. Then came one about policemen, and finally
about company promoters and investments. How a promoter guesses there
is oil somewhere, how money is lent to dig for it ("But, Mamma! How
can money dig?"), how the Company promoter may find no oil, how if
they think he has cheated them the rich men who lent their money can
have him tried by twelve good men and true--(_Tommy:_ "How do they
know the men are good and true, Mamma?" _Mrs. M.:_ "They do this by
taking them in alphabetical order out of a list.").
Perhaps the combination of irony thinly veiling intensity of purpose,
with humour sometimes degenerating into wild fooling, damned them in
the eyes of many. But there was a more serious obstacle to the real
effectiveness they might otherwise have had. When it was unavoidable
to name the _New Witness_ its opponents referred to it as though to a
"rag." Why was this possible? Principally I think because of the
violence of its language. Most Parliamentary matters to which it made
reference were spoken of as instances of "foul" corruption or "dirty"
business. Transactions by Ministers were said to "stink," while the
Ministers themselves were described as carrying off or distributing
"swag" and "boodle." In Vol. II of the _Eye Witness_, for instance, we
find the "game of boodle," "dirty trick," "Keep your eye on the
Railway Bill: you are going to be fleeced," and "stunt" and "ramp"
_passim_. Mr. Lloyd George and Sir Rufus Isaacs are always called
"George" and "Isaacs." The General of the Salvation Army is
invariably "Old Booth," while in the headlines the word "Scandal"
constantly recurs. Even admirers were at times like Fox's followers
who
Groaned "What a passion he was in tonight!
Men in a passion must be in the wrong
And heavens how dangerous when they're built so strong."
Thus the great Whig amid immense applause
Scared off his clients and bawled down his cause,
Undid reform by lauding Revolution
Till cobblers cried "God save the Constitution."
CHAPTER XIX
Marconi
IN HIS _Autobiography_ Gilbert Chesterton has set down his belief
that the Marconi Scandal will be seen by historians as a landmark in
English history. To him personally the revelations produced by it
were a great shock and gave the death-blow to all that still lingered
of his belief in the Liberal Party. For the rest of his life it may
almost be called an obsession with him. In his eyes it was so great a
landmark that as others spoke of events as pre- or post-war, he
divided the political history of England into pre- and post-Marconi.
It meant as much for his political outlook as the Enclosures for his
social. It is necessary to know what happened in the Marconi Case if
we are to understand a most important element in Chesterton's mental
history.
The difficulty is to know what did happen. The main lines of a very
complicated bit of history have never, so far as I know, been
disentangled by anyone whose only interest was to disentangle them:
and the partisans have naturally tangled them more. I wrote a draft
chapter after reading the two thousand page report of the
Parliamentary Committee, the six hundred page report of Cecil
Chesterton's Trial, and masses of contemporary journalism. Then, in
the circumstances I have related in the Introduction, I called in my
husband's aid. The rest of this chapter is mainly his.
I. WHAT THE MINISTERS DID
The Imperial Conference of 1911 had approved the plan of a chain
of state-owned wireless stations to be erected throughout the
British Empire. The Post Office--Mr. Herbert Samuel being the
Postmaster-General--was instructed to put the matter in hand. After
consideration of competing systems, the Marconi was chosen. The
Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. of London--of which Mr. Godfrey Isaacs
was Managing Director--was asked to tender for the work. Its tender
was accepted on March 7, 1912. The main terms of the tender were as
follows:
The Company was to erect stations in various parts of the Empire at a
cost to the Government of £60,000 per station; these were then to be
operated by the Governments of the United Kingdom and the Dominions
and Colonies concerned; and the Marconi Company was to receive 10% of
the gross receipts. The Agreement was for 28 years, though the
Postmaster-General might terminate it at the end of eighteen years.
But there was one further clause (Clause 10) allowing for termination
_at any time_ if the Government should find it advantageous to use a
different system.
The acceptance of this tender was only the first stage. A contract
had to be drawn up, and nothing would be finalised till this contract
had been accepted by Parliament. In fact the contract was not
completed till July 19. On that day it was placed on the table of the
House of Commons.
For the understanding of the Marconi Case, the vital period is the
four months of 1912 between March 7, when the tender was accepted,
and July 19 when the contract was tabled. Let us concentrate upon
that four-month period. The Postmaster-General issued no statement
whatever on the matter but on March 8 the Company sent out a circular
to its shareholders telling them the good news--but making the news
look even better than it was by omitting all reference to Clause 10,
which entitled the Government to substitute some rival system at any
time it pleased. The Postmaster-General issued no correction because,
as he said later, he had not been aware of the omission.
Immediately after, Godfrey Isaacs left for America to consider the
affairs of the American Marconi Company, capitalised at $1,600,000,
of which he was a Director. More than half its shares were owned by
the English Company. On behalf of the English Company he bought up
the rights of the American Company's principal rival, and then sold
these rights (at a profit not stated but apparently very
considerable) to the American Company for $1,400,000. To handle all
this and allow for vast developments hoped for from this purchase and
from a very favourable agreement Godfrey Isaacs had negotiated with
Western Union, the American Company was to be re-organized as a
$10,000,000 Company--two million shares at $5 each. The American
Company--whose own repute in America was too low for any hope of
raising money on that scale from the American public--seems to have
agreed to the Godfrey Isaacs plan only on condition that the English
Company should guarantee the subscription; and Godfrey Isaacs made
himself personally responsible for placing 500,000 shares. (It should
be remembered that the pound was then worth just under five dollars:
a $5 share was worth £1.1.3, or £1 1/16 in English money.)
Godfrey Isaacs returned to England. On April 9 he lunched with his
brothers Harry and Rufus--Rufus being Attorney-General in the British
Government. He told them of the arrangements he had made--arrangements
which were not yet made known to the public--and of the new stock
about to be issued, and offered them 100,000 shares, out of the
500,000 for which he had made himself responsible, at the face value
of £1.1.3. Rufus refused--one reason for his refusal being that the
shares were not a good "buy," as the prospects of the Company did not
warrant so large a new issue of capital. Harry took 50,000.
We now come to the transactions which the public was later to lump
together rather crudely as "Ministers Gambling in Marconis."
A. On April 17--roughly a week after the luncheon--Rufus Isaacs
bought 10,000 of Harry's shares at £2. He made the point later that
buying from Godfrey would have been improper as Godfrey was director
of a company with which the Government was negotiating, but that it
was all right to buy from Harry who had bought from Godfrey. (Harry
having paid only £1.1.3 was willing to let Rufus have them for the
same price. But Rufus thought it only fair to pay the higher price.
This is all the more remarkable because only a week earlier he had
thought these same shares bad value at roughly half the price he was
now prepared to pay.) Of his 10,000 shares, Rufus immediately sold
1000 to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, and 1000
to the Master of Elibank, who was chief Whip of the Liberal Party
then in office. It is to be noted that no money passed at this time
in any of those transactions: Rufus did not pay Harry, Lloyd George
and Elibank did not pay Rufus.
Nor did the shares pass. Indeed the shares did not as yet exist, as
it was not till the next day, April 18, that the American Marconi
Company authorised the issue of the new capital. On the day after
that, April 19, the shares were put on the market at £3.5.0. That
same day they rose to £4. In the course of the day Rufus Isaacs sold
700 shares at an average price of £3.6.6, which on the face of it
looks like clearing £3000 more than he had paid for all his shares
and still having 3000 shares left. But he explained later that there
had been pooling arrangements between himself and his brother, and
himself and his two friends: so that the upshot of his day's
transactions was that he had sold 2856 of his own shares, and 357
each for Lloyd George and Elibank.* The triumvirate therefore still
had 6430 shares of which 1286 belonged to Lloyd George and Elibank.
[* Rufus' explanation boils down to this: he and Harry had arranged
that whatever either sold in the course of the day should be totalled
and divided in the proportion of their holdings. Rufus sold 7000
shares, Harry 10,850: a total of 17,850. Rufus had taken 1/5 of
Harry's 50,000 shares, so one-fifth of the shares sold were allotted
as his--i.e. 3570. Lloyd George and Elibank had each taken 1/10 of
Rufus', therefore each was considered to have sold 357.]
On April 20 these two sold a further 1000 of their 1286 shares at
£3.5/32.
B. On May 22 Lloyd George and Elibank bought 3000 more shares at
£2.5/32. As they were not due to deliver the shares previously sold
by them at £3.6.6 and £3.5/32 till June 20, this new purchase had
something of the look of a "bear" transaction.
C. In April and May the Master of Elibank bought 3000 shares for the
account of the Liberal Party, of whose funds he had charge.
These three transactions are all that the three politicians ever
admitted, and nothing more was ever proved against them. As we have
seen there was no documentary evidence of the principal transaction
(the one I have called A), except that Rufus sold 7000 shares on
April 19. In his acquiring of the shares, no broker was employed.
Rufus did not pay Harry for the shares until January 6, 1913, some
nine months later, when the enquiry was already on. There was no
evidence other than his own word that 10,000 was the number he had
agreed to take or £2 the price that he had agreed to pay, or that he
had bought from Harry and not from Godfrey, or that of the 7000
shares he had certainly sold at a huge profit on April 19 half were
sold for Harry. There was, indeed, no evidence that the shares were
not a gift.
Even on what they admitted, they had obviously acted improperly. The
contract with the English Marconi Company was not yet completed,
Parliament had not been informed of its terms, Parliament therefore
had yet to decide whether it would accept or reject it. Three members
of Parliament had committed two grave improprieties:
(1) They had purchased shares--directly or at one remove--from the
Managing Director of a Company seeking a contract from Parliament, in
circumstances that were practically equivalent to receiving a gift of
money from him. They received shares which the general public could
not have bought till two days later and then only at over 50% more
than the politicians paid.* (On this count, the fact that the shares
were American Marconis made no difference: the point is that they
were valuable shares sold to ministers at a special low price. This
need not have been bribery, but it is a fact that one way of bribing
a man is to buy something from him at more than it is worth, or sell
something to him at less than it is worth.)
[* H. T. Campbell of Bullett, Campbell & Grenfell, the English
Marconi Company's official brokers, gave evidence before the
Parliamentary Committee that it would have been impossible for the
general public to buy the shares before April 19. And as we have
seen, they opened on that day at £3.5.0.]
(2) They--and through the Chief Whip's action the whole Liberal
Party, though it did not know it--were financially interested in the
acceptance by Parliament of the contract. For though they had not
bought shares in the English Company (with which the contract was
being made) but with the American Company (which had no direct
interest in the contract), none the less it would have lowered the
value of the American shares if the British Parliament had rejected
the Marconi System and chosen some other in preference. I may say at
once that I feel no certainty that the transaction was a sinister
effort to bribe ministers. But had it been, exactly the right
ministers were chosen. They were the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who
has charge of the nation's purse; the Attorney-General, who advises
upon the legality of actions proposed; the Chief Whip, who takes the
Party forces into the voting lobby. It was this same Chief Whip, the
Master of Elibank, that had carried the sale of honours to a new
height in his devotion to the increase of his Party's funds.
II. THE PARLIAMENTARY ENQUIRY
On July 19, 1912, the contract was put on the table of the House of
Commons. In the ordinary course it would have come up for a vote some
time before the end of the Parliamentary Session. But criticism of
the contract was growing on the ground that it was too favourable to
the Marconi Company. And rumours were flying that members of the
Government had been gambling in Marconi shares (which, as we have
seen, they had, though not in English Marconis).
Even before the tabling of the contract, members of Parliament,
notably Major Archer-Shee, a Conservative, had been harrying Mr.
Herbert Samuel, the Postmaster-General. On July 20, and in weekly
articles following, it was attacked as a thoroughly bad contract by a
writer in the _Outlook_, Mr. W. R. Lawson. On August 1, a Labour
Member asked a question in the House about the rising price of
Marconis. The feeling that enquiry was needed was so strong that on
August 6, the last day but one of the session, the Prime Minister
(who knew something of his colleagues' purchase of Marconis but never
mentioned it) promised the House that the Marconi Agreement would not
be rushed through without full discussion. In spite of this Herbert
Samuel* and Elibank both tried hard to get the contract approved that
day or the next. When it was quite clear that Parliament would not
allow this, Herbert Samuel insisted on making a general statement on
the contract. He too knew of the Ministers' dealings in American
Marconis, but did not mention them. There was no debate or division.
The question of ratification or rejection was postponed till the
House should meet again in October.
[* The argument he put to Major Archer-Shee, M.P. was that the
stations were urgently needed for Imperial defence.]
On August 8, Cecil Chesterton's paper the _New Witness_ launched its
first attack on the whole deal (though without reference to
Ministerial gambling in Marconis) under the headline "The Marconi
Scandal":
Isaacs' brother is Chairman of the Marconi Company. It has
therefore been secretly arranged between Isaacs and Samuel that the
British people shall give the Marconi Company a very large sum of
money through the agency of the said Samuel, and for the benefit of
the said Isaacs. Incidentally, the monopoly that is about to be
granted to Isaacs No. 2, through the ardent charity of Isaacs No. 1
and his colleague the Postmaster-General, is a monopoly involving
antiquated methods, the refusal of competing tenders far cheaper and
far more efficient, and the saddling of this country with corruptly
purchased goods, which happen to be inferior goods.
The article went on to say that these "swindles" were apt to occur in
any country, but that England alone lacked the will to punish them:
"it is the lack of even a minimum standard of honour urging even
honest men to protest against such villainy that has brought us where
we are."
In September L. J. Maxse's _National Review_ had a criticism of the
contract by Major Archer-Shee, M.P., with editorial comment as well.
In the same month the _Morning Post_ and the _Spectator_ pressed for
further enquiry. The October number of the _National Review_
contained a searching criticism of the whole business and called
special attention to the Stock Exchange gamble in American Marconis.
A few days later--on October 11--the re-assembled House of Commons
held the promised debate. In the light of what we know, it is
fascinating to read how nobody told a lie exactly and the truth was
concealed all the same. Here is Sir Rufus Isaacs. He begins by
formulating the rumours against Mr. Herbert Samuel and Mr. Lloyd
George and himself. But he is careful to formulate them in such a way
that he can truthfully deny them. The rumours, he says, were that the
Ministers had dealt in the shares of a Company with which the
Government was negotiating a contract: "Never from the beginning . . .
have I had one single transaction with the shares of that Company."
Literally true, as you see. The contract was with the English
Company, the shares he had bought were in the American Company. He
made no allusion to that purchase.
Mr. Herbert Samuel--who is not accused of having purchased shares
himself but who knew of what his colleagues had done--treads the same
careful line: "I say that these stories that members of the Cabinet,
knowing the contract was in contemplation, and feeling that possibly
the price of shares might rise, themselves, directly or indirectly
bought any of those shares, or took any interest in this Company
through any other party whatever, have not one syllable of truth in
them. Neither I myself nor any of my colleagues have at any time held
one shilling's worth of shares in this Company, directly or
indirectly, or have derived one penny profit from the fluctuations in
their prices." However, he promised a Parliamentary Committee to
enquire into the whole affair.
Isaacs had denied any transactions with "that Company," Samuel with
"this Company." Neither had ventured to say "the English
Company"--for that would instantly have raised the question of the
American Company. It is an odd truth that has to be phrased so
delicately. Lloyd George, the first of the ministers to speak,
managed better. He flew into a rage with an interjector: "The hon.
member said something about the Government, and he has talked about
'rumours.' I want to know what these rumours are. If the hon.
gentleman has any charge to make against the Government as a whole,
or against individual members of it, I think it ought to be stated
openly. The reason why the Government wanted _a frank discussion
before going to Committee_* was because we wanted to bring here these
rumours, these sinister rumours, that have been passing from one foul
lip to another behind the backs of the House." He sat down, still in
a white heat, without having denied anything.
[* Italics mine.]
The Master of Elibank did not deny anything either. He was not there.
He was, indeed, no longer in the House of Commons. He had inherited
the title of Lord Murray of Elibank. He had left England in August
and did not return till the enquiry was over: nor did he send any
communication of any sort.
As we have seen, no literal lie was told. But Parliament and the
country assumed that the Ministers had denied any gambling in
Marconis of any sort. And the Ministers must have known that this was
what their denials had been taken to mean.*
[* Rufus Isaacs' son mentions a theory held by some (though he thinks
there are strong arguments against it) that Rufus' silence was due to
instructions from the Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith, who was not
anxious to have the connection of Lloyd George with the matter
disclosed, "fearing that his personal unpopularity would lead to such
an exacerbation of the attacks that the prestige of the whole
Government might be seriously impaired." (_Rufus Isaacs, First
Marquess of Reading_, pp. 248-9.)]
On October 29 the names were announced of the members appointed to
the promised Committee of Enquiry. As usual they represented the
various parties in proportion to their numbers in the House. The
Liberals were in office, supported by Irish Nationalists and Labour
Members: 9 members of the Committee (including the Chairman) were
from these parties; 6 were Conservatives. One might have expected
that the careful evasions in the House would have meant only a brief
respite for the Ministers who had been so economical of the truth.
They would appear before the Committee and then the whole thing would
emerge. But though the Committee was appointed at the end of October
and met three times most weeks thereafter, five months went by and no
Minister was called. The plain fact is that Mr. Samuel's department,
the Post Office, slanted the enquiry in a different direction right
at the start by putting in evidence a confidential Blue Book and
suggesting that Sir Alexander King, secretary to the Post Office, be
heard first.
On the question of the goodness or badness of the contract itself,
the Committee uncovered much that was interesting. It emerged that
the Poulsen System had offered to erect stations at a cost of about
£36,000 less per station than the Marconi, and that the Admiralty
itself had estimated a cost, if they were undertaking the work, about
the same as the Poulsen offer. But, by a confusion as to whether
their figure did or did not include freight charges, the Admiralty
estimate had been put down at £10,000 higher than it was! Nor was
this the only confusion. When Sir Alexander King spoke of
"concessions" made to the Government by the Marconi Company, he
admitted under cross-questioning that there was no written record of
these concessions. He spoke of various vitally important
conversations and was not able to produce a Minute. Letters referred
to were found to have been lost from the Post Office files.
Further, it appeared that while most rigid tests were to be required
of the other systems, the Marconi people had been constantly taken
almost on their own word alone. "Mr. Isaacs and Mr. Marconi both told
us," said Sir Alexander King at one point, when asked whether he had
had technical advice on a point of working.
"You will excuse me," said Mr. Harold Smith, "if for the moment I
ignore the opinion of Mr. Marconi and Mr. Isaacs. I ask you who was
the expert who gave you this information."
Then too as to the terms. The Government had proposed 3% on the gross
takings. Godfrey Isaacs had held out for 10%, and got it. Moreover,
the royalty was to be paid as long as a single Marconi patent was in
use at the stations. Considering that by the Patents Act the
Government had the legal right to take over _any_ invention while
paying reasonable compensation, the provision which gave so high a
royalty to the Marconi Company was severely criticised. Again the
right was given to the Marconi Company to advise on any fresh
invention that should be offered to the Post Office--which meant that
any invention made by their rivals was entirely at their mercy.
Naturally enough the question was pressed home whether the Post
Office had really sought the advice of its own technical experts. It
transpired that a technical sub-committee had been called once, and
had recommended a further investigation of the Poulsen System. The
report of this sub-committee had been shelved, and the members never
summoned for a second meeting.
Early in January 1913, the Parliamentary Committee (against the
advice of Herbert Samuel) asked for a special sub-committee of
experts to go into the merits of the various wireless systems and
report within three months at latest. It is not surprising that the
_New Witness_ commented on this as "a surrender of the most decided
type, for it proposes to do what Samuel himself clearly ought to have
done before he entered into the contract."
The report of this technical sub-committee showed that there had been
a good deal of exaggeration in the first attack by the _New Witness_
on the worth of the Marconi System. If one single system was to be
used, it was the only one capable of carrying out the Government's
requirements. But the sub-committee held that as wireless was in a
state of rapid development, it would be better not to be tied to any
one system. And they added that while the nature of the contract
itself was not within their terms of reference, they must not be held
to approve it.
From its examination of the contract, the Committee passed on to
examine journalists and others as to the rumours against Ministers.
And still the Ministers were not called.
On February 12, 1913, L. J. Maxse, Editor of _The National Review_,
was being examined by the Committee. Suddenly he put his finger on
the precise spot. Having expressed surprise at the non-appearance of
Ministers, he went on: "One might have conceived that they would have
appeared at its first sitting clamoring to state in the most
categorical and emphatic manner that neither directly nor indirectly,
in their own names or in other people's names, have they had any
transactions whatsoever, either in London, Dublin, New York,
Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris, or any other financial centre, in any
shares in any Marconi Company throughout the negotiations with the
Government. . . ."
"Any shares in any Marconi Company": the direct question was at last
put.
On February 14, just two days later, something very curious happened.
_Le Matin_, a Paris Daily paper, published a story to the effect that
Mr. Maxse had charged that Samuel, Rufus Isaacs and Godfrey Isaacs
had bought shares in the English Marconi Company at 50 francs (about
£2 in those days) before the negotiations with the Government were
started and had resold them at 200 francs (about £8) when the public
learnt that the contract was going through. It was an extraordinary
piece of clumsiness for any paper to have printed such a story:
certainly Mr. Maxse had made no such charge. It was an extraordinary
stroke of luck, if the Ministers wanted to tell their story in Court,
that they should have this kind of clumsy libel to deny. And it is at
least a coincidence that Rufus Isaacs happened, as his son tells us,
to be in Paris when _Le Matin_ printed the story. Samuel and Rufus
Isaacs announced that they would prosecute and that Sir Edward Carson
and F. E. Smith were their counsel. This decision to prosecute a not
very important French newspaper, while taking no such step against
papers in their own country, caused Gilbert Chesterton to write a
"song of Cosmopolitan Courage":*
[* _New Witness_, Vol. I, p. 655.]
I am so swift to seize affronts,
My spirit is so high,
Whoever has insulted me
Some foreigner must die.
I brought a libel action,
For the Times had called me "thief,"
Against a paper in Bordeaux,
A paper called _Le Juif_.
_The Nation_ called me "cannibal"
I could not let it pass--
I got a retractation
From a journal in Alsace.
And when _The Morning Post_ raked up
Some murders I'd devised,
A Polish organ of finance
At once apologised.
I know the charges varied much;
At times, I am afraid
_The Frankfurt Frank_ withdrew a charge
The _Outlook_ had not made.
And what the true injustice
Of the _Standard's_ words had been,
Was not correctly altered
In the _Young Turk's Magazine_.
I know it sounds confusing--
But as Mr. Lammle said,
The anger of a gentleman
Is boiling in my head.
The hearing of the case against _Le Matin_ came on March 19. As that
paper had withdrawn and apologised only three days after printing the
story, there was no actual necessity for statements by Rufus Isaacs
and Samuel. But they had decided to answer Maxse's question, to admit
the dealings in American Marconis which they had not mentioned to the
House of Commons: or rather to get their lawyer to tell the story and
then answer his questions on the matter in a Court case where there
could be no cross-examination because the Defendants were not
contesting the case. Sir Edward Carson mentioned the American
purchase at the end of a long speech and almost as an afterthought--
"really the matter is so removed from the charges made in the libel
that I only go into it at all . . . because of the position of the
Attorney-General and because he wishes in the fullest way to state
this deal, so that it may not be said that he keeps anything
whatsoever back." As _The Times_ remarked (9 June, 1913): "The fact
was stated casually, as though it had been a matter at once trifling
and irrelevant. Only persons of the most scrupulous honour, who
desired that nothing whatsoever should remain hid would, it was
suggested, have thought necessary to mention it at all."
The statement was not really as full as Carson's phrasing would seem
to suggest. The court was told that Rufus Isaacs had bought 10,000
shares--but not from whom he had bought them: that he had paid market
price, but not what the price was, nor that the shares were not on
the market: that he had sold 1000 shares each to Lloyd George and
Elibank, and had sold some on their behalf, but not that these two
had had further buyings and sellings on their own. It was stated for
Sir Rufus and reiterated by him that he had lost money on the
deal--the reason being that while he had gained on the shares sold,
the shares he still held had slumped. (It is difficult to see why
Rufus Isaacs and later Lloyd George made such a point of the loss on
their Marconi transactions. They can hardly have bought the shares in
order to lose money on them, and their initial sellings showed a very
large profit. Indeed Rufus Isaacs' loss depended on his having paid
his brother £2 for the shares, and again upon the 7000 shares he sold
on the opening day being only partly on his own behalf, and there is
only his own word for these two statements. If Rufus lost, he lost to
his brother, who had been willing to sell at cost price, with whom he
had a pooling arrangement, and who made an enormous profit. If Rufus
lost, the loss remained in the family.)
A week after the hearing of the _Matin_ case, Rufus Isaacs appeared
for the first time before the Parliamentary Committee, almost five
months after its formation. His problem was not so much to explain
his dealings in American Marconis, as to account for his silence in
the House of Commons. His one desire that day in Parliament, it
seems, had been to answer the "foul lies" being uttered against him,
which he was "quite unable to find any foundation for, quite unable
to trace the source of, quite unable to understand how they were
started": obviously his dealings in American Marconis could have no
possible bearing on these rumours, so he did not mention them: "I
confined my speech entirely . . . to dealing with the four specific
charges _which I formulated."_*
[* Italics mine.]
The Chairman, Sir Albert Spicer, suggested that one way to scotch the
rumours would have been to mention his investment in American
Marconis, "because both being Marconis you could easily understand
one might get confused with the other." This question always drove
Rufus Isaacs into a rage and indeed he met all difficult questions
with rages which to this day, across the gulf of thirty years, seem
simulated, and not convincingly.
Why had he not earlier asked the Committee to hear the story of the
American shares? "I took the view . . . that I had no right to claim
any preferential position . . . and it seemed to me that it might
almost savour of presumption if I had asked the Committee to take my
evidence or any Minister's evidence, out of the ordinary turn in
which the Committee desired it." All the same he had once written a
letter to the Committee asking to be heard but "on consideration did
not send it."
During his examination the element of strain between the two parties
on the Committee, which had been evident throughout the enquiry, was
very much intensified--Lord Robert Cecil and the Conservatives
courteously but tenaciously trying to get at the truth, the
Ministerialists determined to shield their man. There is a most
unpleasing contrast between the earlier bullying of the journalists
(who after all were not on trial) and the deference the majority now
showed to Ministers (who were).
Rufus Isaacs twisted and turned incredibly. But he did admit to Lord
Robert Cecil that he had obtained the shares before they were
available to the general public and at a price lower than that at
which they were afterwards introduced to them. He tried later to
modify this admission by saying that he had been told of dealings by
others before April 17, but he could give no details: and the
evidence of the Marconi Company's broker (quoted above) is decisive.
Two points of special interest emerged from his evidence. The first
was that he had not told the whole story in the _Matin_ case. He now
mentioned that Lloyd George and Elibank had sold a further 1000 of
the shares he held for them on the second day, July 20; and went on
to tell of the purchase of 3000 shares by the same pair, the
so-called "bear" transaction of May 22. The second was more
unpleasing still. He admitted that he had told the story of the
American Marconis privately to two friends _on the Committee_--
Messrs. Falconer and Booth--who had kept the matter to themselves and
had--or at least appeared to have--continually steered the Committee
away from this dangerous ground. Rufus Isaacs' son actually says that
his father "had informed Mr. Falconer and Mr. Handel Booth privately
of these transactions, in order that they might be forearmed when the
journalists came to give evidence."*
[* _Rufus Isaacs, First Marquess of Reading_, p. 256.]
On March 28 Lloyd George appeared before the Committee. Mrs. Charles
Masterman gives an account of Rufus Isaacs grooming Lloyd George for
the event:
There was a really very comic, though somewhat alarming, scene
between Rufus and George on the following Sunday. George had to give
evidence on the Monday--the following day--and Rufus discovered that
George was still in a perfect fog as to what his transaction really
had been, and began talking about "buying a bear." I have never seen
Rufus so nearly lose his temper, and George got extremely sulky,
while Rufus patiently reminded him what he had paid, what he still
owed, when he had paid it, who to, and what for. It was on that
occasion also that Charlie and Rufus tried to impress upon him with
all the force in their power to avoid technical terms and to stick as
closely as possible to the plainest and most ordinary language. _As
is well known, George made a great success of his evidence_.*
(Italics mine.)
[* _C. F. G. Masterman_, p. 255.]
I cannot imagine why she thought so. Hugh O'Donnell's description in
the _New Witness_ of Isaacs and Lloyd George as they appeared before
the Committee accords perfectly with the impression produced by a
reading of the evidence:
. . . While the simile of a panther at bay, anxious to escape, but
ready with tooth and claw, might be applied to Sir Rufus Isaacs,
something more like "a rat in a corner" might be suggested by the
restless, snapping, furious little figure which succeeded. Let us
compromise by saying that Mr. Lloyd George was singularly like a
spitting, angry cat, which had got, perhaps, out of serious danger
from her pursuers, but which caterwauled and spat and swore with
vigour and venomousness quite surprising in that diminutive bulk.
"Dastardly," "dishonourable," "disgraceful," "disreputable,"
"skulking," "cowardly!"
Asked why he had not mentioned his Marconi purchases in the House of
Commons, Lloyd George gave two answers: (1) "There was no time on a
Friday afternoon" (2) "I could not get up and take time when two
Ministers had already spoken." Why had he not asked to be heard
sooner by the Committee? He understood that Sir Rufus had expressed
the willingness of all the accused Ministers to be heard. Like Sir
Rufus, Lloyd George mentioned that he had lost money on his Marconi
transactions.
The obstruction within the Committee continued to the end. The
question had arisen whether Godfrey had had the right to sell the
shares at his own price or for his own profit. He had sold a
considerable number of shares to relations and friends at £1.1.3,
whereas shares were sold to the general public at £3.5.0. Others of
his shares he sold on the Stock Exchange at varying prices, all high.
But were the shares his? Or did they belong to the English Company?
If they were his he was entitled to sacrifice vast profits on some by
selling at cost to his relations, and to take solid profits on others
by selling at what he could get in the open market. But if he was
simply selling as an agent of the Company, he had no right to make so
fantastic a present of one lot of shares and was bound to hand over
to the Company profits made on the others.
He told the Committee that the 500,000 shares had been sold to him
outright but that he had passed on £46,000 of profits to the Company.
He said that a record of this sale of 500,000 shares to him would be
found in the minutes of the English Company. The books of the Company
were inspected and it was found that no such minute existed. Lord
Robert Cecil naturally wished to recall Godfrey Isaacs to explain the
discrepancy between his statements and the records. The usual 8 to 6
majority decided that there was no need to recall Godfrey. It looked
rather as if the shares Godfrey had sold to Harry and Harry to Rufus
at such favourable prices belonged to--and should have been sold for
the profit of--the Company.
On May 7 the Committee concluded its hearings and its members were
marshalling their ideas for the Report. But there was one fact for
them and the public still to learn. Early in June they were re-called
to hear about it. A London stockbroker had absconded: a trustee was
appointed to handle his affairs and it was discovered that the
fleeing stockbroker had acted for the still absent Elibank, had
indeed bought American Marconis for him--a total of 3000: and as it
later appeared, these had been bought for the funds of the Liberal
Party. The comment of _The Times_ (June 9, 1913) on "the totally
unnecessary difficulty which has been placed in the way of getting at
the truth" seems moderate enough.
III. THE TRIAL OF CECIL CHESTERTON
Meanwhile the _New Witness_ had not been neglecting its
self-appointed task of striking at every point that looked
vulnerable. On January 9, 1913, an article appeared attacking the
city record of Mr. Godfrey Isaacs and listing the bankrupt
companies--there were some twenty of them--of which he had been
promoter or director. Some more ardent spirit in the _New Witness_
office sent sandwichmen to parade up and down in front of Godfrey
Isaacs' own office bearing a placard announcing his "Ghastly
failures." Cecil Chesterton said later that he had not ordered this
to be done, but he refused to disclaim responsibility. The placard
was the last straw. Godfrey's solicitors wrote to Cecil saying that
Godfrey would prosecute unless Cecil promised to make no further
statement reflecting on his honour till both had given evidence
before the Parliamentary Committee. Cecil replied: "I am pleased to
hear that your client, Mr. Godfrey Isaacs, proposes to bring an
action against me." And in the _New Witness_ (February 27, 1913) he
wrote: "We are up against a very big thing. . . . You cannot have the
honour (and the fun) of attacking wealthy and powerfully entrenched
interests without the cost. We have counted the cost; we counted it
long ago. We think it good enough--much more than good enough."
The case came on at the Old Bailey on May 27. It is worth recalling
the exact position at this time. The Parliamentary Committee had
concluded its hearings three weeks earlier and was now preparing its
report. (Cecil Chesterton had not given evidence before it, for
though he had frequently demanded to be summoned, when at last the
summons came he excused himself on the plea of ill-health and the
further plea that he wished to reserve his evidence for his own
trial.) the _Matin_ case had been heard a couple of months earlier.
Everything that was ever to be known about ministerial dealings in
Marconis was by now known, except for Elibank's separate purchase on
behalf of the Party Funds, which was made public just at the end of
the trial.
Sir Edward Carson and F. E. Smith were again teamed, as in the
_Matin_ case. The charge was criminal libel. Cecil insisted on facing
the charge alone. His various contributors had joined in the attack
but Cecil would not give the names of the authors of unsigned
articles and took full responsibility as Editor. Carson's opening
speech for the Prosecution divided the six alleged libels under two
main heads: One set, said Carson, charged Godfrey Isaacs with being a
corrupt man who induced his corrupt brother to use his influence with
the corrupt Samuel to get a corrupt contract entered into. The
opening attack under this head has already been quoted. Later
attacks did not diminish in violence: "the swindle or rather
theft--impudent and barefaced as it is": "when Samuel was caught with
his hand in the till (or Isaacs if you prefer to put it that way)."
The second set charged that Godfrey Isaacs had had transactions with
various companies which, had the Attorney-General not been his
brother, would have got him prosecuted. There is the same violence
here: "This is not the first time in the Marconi affair that we find
these two gentlemen [Godfrey and Rufus] swindling": and again: "the
files at Somerset House of the Isaacs companies cry out for vengeance
on the man who created them, who manipulated them, who filled them
with his own creatures, who worked them solely for his own ends, and
who sought to get rid of some of them when they had served his
purpose by casting the expense of burial on to the public purse."
There is no need to describe the case in detail. On the charges
concerned with the contract and ministerial corruption, the same
witnesses (with the notable exception of Lloyd George) gave much the
same evidence as before the Parliamentary Committee. Very little that
was new emerged. The contract looked worse than ever after Cecil
Chesterton's Counsel, Ernest Wild, had examined witnesses, but Mr.
Justice Phillimore insisted that it had nothing to do with the case
"whether the contract was badly drawn or improvident."
But indeed all this discussion of the contract was given an air of
unreality by the extraordinary line the Chesterton Defence took. It
distinguished between the two sets of charges, offering to justify
the second (concerning Godfrey Isaacs' business record) but claiming
that the first set brought accusation of corruption not against
Godfrey but against Rufus and Herbert Samuel--who were not the
prosecutors. It was an impossible position to say that Ministers were
fraudulently giving a fraudulent contract to Godfrey Isaacs but that
this did not mean that he was in the fraud. Cecil showed up unhappily
under cross-examination on this matter, but from the point of view of
his whole campaign worse was to follow: for Cecil withdrew the
charges of corruption he had levelled at the Ministers!
Here are extracts from the relevant sections of the cross-examination
by Sir Edward Carson:
Carson: And do you now accuse him [Godfrey Isaacs] of any
abominable business--I mean in relation to obtaining the contract?
Cecil Chesterton: Yes, certainly; I now accuse Mr. Isaacs of very
abominable conduct between March 7 and July 19.
Carson: Do you accuse the Postmaster General of dishonesty or
corruption?
C. Chesterton: What I accused the Postmaster General of was of
having given a contract which was a byword for laxity and thereby
laying himself open reasonably to the suspicion that he was
conferring a favour on Mr. Godfrey Isaacs because he was the
Attorney-General's brother.
Carson: I must repeat my question, do you accuse the
Postmaster-General of anything dishonest or dishonourable?
C. Chesterton: After the Postmaster-General's denials on oath I
must leave the question; I will not accuse him of perjury.
Carson: And therefore you do not accuse him of anything dishonest
or dishonourable?
AFTER SOME FURTHER QUESTIONING
Judge: That is evasion. Do you or do you not accuse him?
C. Chesterton: I have said "No."
LATER
C. Chesterton: My idea at that time was that Sir Rufus Isaacs had
influenced Mr. Samuel to benefit Godfrey Isaacs.
Carson: You have not that opinion now?
C. Chesterton: Sir Rufus has denied it on oath and I accepted his
denial.
Cecil still insisted that though the Ministers had not been
corrupted, what had come to light about Godfrey's offer of American
Marconi shares to his brother showed that Godfrey had tried to
corrupt them. Godfrey could not have enjoyed the case very much.
There was much emphasis on his concealment of Clause 10 (allowing the
Government to terminate at any time): and Sir Alexander King,
secretary to the Post Office, admitted that Godfrey Isaacs had asked
that it be kept quiet: but this was not among the accusations Cecil
had levelled at him. In his summing up, Mr. Justice Phillimore
indicated the possibility that the shares Godfrey had so gaily sold
belonged not to himself but to the English Marconi Company--merely
adding that this question was not relevant to the present case.
Further the record of his company failures _was_ rather ghastly.
Here is a section of his cross-examination as to the companies he had
been connected with before the Marconi Company--remember that there
were twenty of them!
Wild: I am trying to discover a success.
Judge: It is not an imputation against a man that he has been a
failure.
Wild: Here are cases after cases of failure.
Isaacs: That is my misfortune.
Judge: You might as well cross-examine any speculative widow.
Wild: A speculative widow would not be concerned in the management.
* * *
Wild: Can you point to one success except Marconi in the whole of
your career?
Isaacs: In companies?
Wild: Yes.
Isaacs: A complete success, no; I should not call any one of them a
complete success, but I may say that each of them was an endeavour to
develop something new.
But Carson had made the point in his opening speech that though
Godfrey Isaacs had been connected with so many failures, he had not
been accused by the shareholders of anything dishonourable: in his
closing speech he pointed out that "not one single City man had been
brought forward to say that he had been deceived to the extent of one
sixpence by the representations of Mr. Isaacs." And indeed the
evidence called by the Defence in this present case, however
suspicious it may have made some of his actions appear, did not
establish beyond doubt any actual illegality.
The trial ended on June 9. The Judge summed up heavily against Cecil
Chesterton. The jury was out only forty minutes. The verdict was
"Guilty." Cecil Chesterton, says the _Times_, "smiled and waved his
hand to friends and relations who sat beside the dock." The Judge
preached him a solemn little homily and then imposed a fine of £100
and costs. The Chestertons and all who stood with them held that so
mild a fine instead of a prison sentence for one who had been found
guilty of criminal libel on so large a scale was in itself a moral
victory. "It is a great relief to us," ran the first Editorial in the
_New Witness_ after the conclusion of the trial, "to have our hands
free. We have long desired to re-state our whole case about the
Marconi disgrace, in view of the facts that are now before us and the
English people. . . . When we began our attack . . . we were striking
at something very powerful and very dangerous . . . we were striking
at it in the dark. The politicians saw to that. Our defence is that
if we had not ventured to strike in the dark, we and the people of
England should be in the dark still."
There can be no question of Cecil Chesterton's courage. But he may
have exaggerated a little in saying that if the _New Witness_ had not
struck in the dark the nation would still be in the dark: Parliament
had already refused to approve the contract without proper discussion
and the _Outlook_ was attacking vigorously, _before_ the first _New
Witness_ attack. And there are grave drawbacks to the making of
charges in the dark which later have to be withdrawn. Cecil's
withdrawal of his charges against the Ministers and his failure to
substantiate his charges against Godfrey's company record may have
done more to hinder than help the cause of clean government. But his
courage remains: and, if one has to choose, one prefers the
immoderate man who said more than he knew to the careful men who said
so much less. Gilbert giving evidence at the trial had said that he
envied his brother the dignity of his present position. And with the
Isaacs brothers in mind, one sees the point.
IV. AFTER THOUGHTS
Four days after the verdict against Cecil Chesterton, the
Parliamentary Committee produced its report. There had been a draft
report somewhat critical of the Marconi-buying Ministers by the
Chairman, Sir Albert Spicer; and another considerably more critical
by Lord Robert Cecil. Lord Robert's report said that Rufus Isaacs had
committed "grave impropriety in making an advantageous purchase of
shares . . . upon advice and information not yet fully available to
the public. . . . By doing so he placed himself, however unwittingly,
in a position in which his private interests or sense of obligation
might easily have been in conflict with his public duty. . . ." Of
his silence in the House, Lord Robert said: "We regard that reticence
as a grave error of judgment and as wanting in frankness and in
respect for the House of Commons."
Upon this Rufus Isaacs' son comments: "The vehemence of this language
was not calculated to commend the draft to the majority of the
Committee." Vehemence seems hardly the word; but at any rate the
Committee did not adopt either Lord Robert's report or Sir Albert
Spicer's.
By the usual party vote of 8 to 6, it adopted a report prepared by
Mr. Falconer (one of the two whom Rufus Isaacs had approached
privately) which simply took the line that the Ministers had acted in
good faith and refrained from criticising them.
Parliament debated the matter a few days later on a Conservative
motion: "That this House regrets the transactions of certain of its
Ministers in the shares of the Marconi Company of America, and the
want of frankness displayed by Ministers in their communications on
the subject to the House." Rufus Isaacs' son speaks of the certain
ruin of his father's career if "by some unpredictable misadventure"
the motion had been carried. It would indeed have had to be an
"unpredictable misadventure" for the voting was on the strictest
party lines: which means that the House did not express its real
opinion at all: the motion was defeated by 346 to 268. Lloyd George
and Rufus Isaacs expressed regret for any indiscretion there might
have been in their actions: Rufus explained that he would not have
bought the shares--"if I had thought that men could be so suspicious
of any action of mine." In the debate the Leader of the Opposition,
Arthur Balfour, somewhat disdainfully refused to make political
capital out of the business. Lloyd George and Isaacs were loudly
cheered by their own Party--though whether they were cheered for
having bought American Marconis or for having concealed the purchase
from the House there is now no means of discovering. At any rate
their careers were not damaged: the one went on to become Lord Chief
Justice of England and later Viceroy of India: the other became Prime
Minister during the war of 1914-1918.
One question arising from the episode is whether it meant what Cecil
Chesterton and Belloc thought it meant in the world of party
politics, or something entirely different. They seem throughout to
have assumed that their thesis of collusion between the Party Leaders
was proved by this scandal: it seems to me quite as easy to make the
case that it was _disproved_.
A Conservative first raises the matter by inconvenient questions in
the House. A group of young Conservatives pay the costs of Cecil
Chesterton's defence. When a Parliamentary Committee is appointed to
enquire into the alleged corruption, the story of every session
becomes one of a Conservative minority trying hard to ferret out the
truth and a ministerial majority determined to prevent their
succeeding. Finally the leading Conservative Commissioner, Lord
Robert Cecil, issues a restrained but most damning report which is,
as a matter of course, rejected by the Liberal majority.
A Conservative M.P. told me he thought the great mistake made was
that it had all been made "too much of a party question." Unless you
already disbelieved quite violently in the existence of the two
parties this would certainly be the effect upon you of reading the
report of the Commission Sessions, and all that can be set against it
is the fact that Mr. Balfour did, in the House of Commons, utter a
conventional form of words which, as has been said, really amounted
to a refusal to make political capital out of the affair.
I do not say, for I do not pretend to know, if this is the correct
interpretation: it is certainly the obvious one.
Douglas Jerrold in a brilliant article on Belloc,* treats his theory
of the Party System as a false one, and maintains that he mistook for
collusion that degree of co-operation that alone could enable a
country to be governed at all under a party system. A certain
continuity must be preserved if, in the old phrase, "The King's
Government is to be carried on"--but such continuity did not spell a
corrupt collusion. If at this distance of time such a view can be
held by a man of Mr. Jerrold's ability it could certainly be held at
the time by the majority--and it may be that the continual assumption
of an unproved fact got in the way in the fight against more obvious
evil.
[* "Hilaire Belloc and the Counter Revolution" in _For Hilaire
Belloc_.]
For bound up with this question is another: _The Eye Witness_ seemed
so near success and yet never quite succeeded. Might it have done so
had it been founded with a single eye to creative opportunity--to the
attack on the Servile State and the building of some small beginning
of an alternative? _G.K.'s Weekly_ was a slight improvement from that
point of view--for it did create the Distributist League; but both
papers, I think, had from their inception a divided purpose that made
failure almost inevitable.
The fight against corruption which had been placed equal with the
fight for property and liberty at the start of the _Eye Witness_ is a
noble aim. But, like the other, it is a life work. To do it a man
must have time to spend verifying rumours or exploding them,
following up clues, patiently waiting on events. I began to read the
files with an assumption of the accuracy of the claims of the _Eye_
and _New Witness_ as to its own achievement in all this, but when the
dates and facts in the Marconi case had been tabulated for me
chronologically I began to wonder. Again and again the editor stated
that _The New Witness_ had been first to unearth the Marconi matter.
But it hadn't. As we have seen, questions in the House and attacks in
other papers had _preceded_ their first mention of the subject.
So too the statement that the Marconi affair had proved how little
Englishmen cared about corruption seemed almost absurd when one read
not only the Conservative but also the Liberal comment of the time.
"Political corruption is the Achilles heel of Liberalism," said an
outstanding Liberal Editor; while Hugh O'Donnell in the _New Witness_
paraphrased the wail of the "Cadbury" papers:
'Tis the voice of the Cocoa
I hear it exclaim
O Geordie, dear Geordie
Don't do it again.
Just how scandalous _was_ the Marconi scandal? At this distance of
time it is difficult to arrive at any clear view. There are two main
problems--the contract and the purchase of American Marconis.
The contract seems very definitely to have been unduly favourable to
the Company; clauses were so badly drawn that they had to be
supplemented by letters which had no legal effect; documents were
lost, other tenders misinterpreted, other systems perhaps not fully
examined, the report of a sub-committee shelved, Godfrey Isaacs
allowed to issue a misleading report without correction from the Post
Office. It all may spell corruption: but it need not. No one familiar
with the workings of a Government department is likely to be
surprised at any amount of muddle and incompetence. Matters are
forgotten and then in the effort to make up for lost time important
steps are simply omitted. Officials are pig-headed and unreasonable.
And as to lost documents--
What of the ministers' dealings in shares? Godfrey may have been
using Rufus to purchase ministerial favour. If so, he could hardly
have done so on the comparatively small scale of the dealings known
to us. The few thousand involved could not have meant an enormous
amount to Rufus. He had, it is true, begun his career on the Stock
Exchange, found himself insolvent and been "hammered." But he had
gone on to make large sums at the Bar--up to thirty thousand pounds a
year; and his salary as Attorney-General was twenty thousand a year.
There may, of course, have been far heavier purchases than we know
about: the piece-by-piece emergence of what we do know gives us no
confidence that all the pieces ever emerged. We have only the word of
the two brothers for most of the story and one comes to feel that
their word has no great meaning. But, allowing for all that, it is
possible that Godfrey may have wanted Rufus to have the American
shares out of family affection; of the shares Godfrey personally
disposed of, a very large number went to relations and close
friends--mother, sisters, his wife's relations--who certainly could
not help to get his contract through Parliament. If this, the most
charitable interpretation, is also the true one, Rufus and his
political friends acted with considerable impropriety in snatching at
this opportunity of quick and easy money. The rest of the story is of
their efforts to prevent this impropriety being discovered. Had they
mentioned it openly in Parliament on October 11, the matter might
have ended there. But they lacked the nerve: the occasion passed: and
nothing remained, especially for Rufus, but evasion, shiftiness,
half-truth passing as whole truth, the farce of indignant virtue--a
performance which left him not a shred of dignity and ought to have
made it unthinkable that he should ever again be given public office.
The perfect word on the whole episode was uttered, not by either
Gilbert or Cecil Chesterton or by any of their friends, but by
Rudyard Kipling. The case had meant a great deal to him. On June 15,
a Conservative neighbour of Kipling wrote to Gilbert:
I cannot let the days pass without writing to congratulate you and
your brother on the result of the Isaacs Trial. . . . I do feel, as
many thousands of English people must feel, that the _New Witness_ is
fighting on the side of English Nationalism and that is our common
battle. My neighbour, Rudyard Kipling, has followed every phase of
the fight with interest of such a kind that it almost precluded his
thinking of anything else at all and when he gets hold of the _New
Witness_ (my copy) I never can get it back again. You see, however
much we have all disagreed--do disagree--we are all in the same boat
about a lot of things of the first rank. . . . We can't afford to
differ just now if we do agree--it's all too serious.
When Isaacs was appointed Viceroy of India, Kipling wrote the poem:
GEHAZI
Whence comest thou, Gehazi
So reverend to behold
In scarlet and in ermine
And chain of England's gold?
From following after Naaman
To tell him all is well;
Whereby my zeal has made me
A judge in Israel.
Well done, well done, Gehazi,
Stretch forth thy ready hand,
Thou barely 'scaped from Judgment,
Take oath to judge the land.
Unswayed by gift of money
Or privy bribe more base,
Or knowledge which is profit
In any market place.
Search out and probe, Gehazi,
As thou of all canst try
The truthful, well-weighed answer
That tells the blacker lie:
The loud, uneasy virtue,
The anger feigned at will,
To overbear a witness
And make the court keep still.
Take order now, Gehazi,
That no man talk aside
In secret with the judges
The while his case is tried,
Lest he should show them reason,
To keep the matter hid,
And subtly lead the questions
Away from what he did.
Thou mirror of uprightness,
What ails thee at thy vows,
What means the risen whiteness
Of skin between thy brows?
The boils that shine and burrow,
The sores that slough and bleed--
The leprosy of Naaman
On thee and all thy seed?
Stand up, stand up, Gehazi,
Draw close thy robe and go
Gehazi, judge in Israel.
A leper white as snow!
As the _Times_ leading article of June 19, 1913, put it: "A man is
not blamed for being splashed with mud. He is commiserated. But if he
has stepped into a puddle which he might easily have avoided, we say
that it is his own fault. If he protests that he did not know it was
a puddle, we say that he ought to know better; but if he says that it
was after all quite a clean puddle, then we judge him deficient in
the sense of cleanliness. And the British public like their public
men to have a very nice sense of cleanliness."
That, fundamentally, was what troubled Gilbert Chesterton then and
for the rest of his life. He was not himself an investigator of
political scandals--in that field he trusted his brother and Belloc,
and on this particular matter Cecil had certainly said more than he
knew and possibly more than was true. But it did not take an expert
to know that some of the men involved in the Marconi Case had no very
nice sense of cleanliness: and these men were going to be dominant in
the councils of England, and to represent England in the face of the
world, for a long time to come.
CHAPTER XX
The Eve of the War (1911-1915)
DURING THE EARLIER YEARS of the _New Witness_ Gilbert had nothing to
do with the editing, and his contributions to it were only part of
the continuing volume of his weekly journalism. It would be almost
impossible to trace all the articles in papers and magazines that
were never republished: the volumes of essays appearing year by year
probably contained the best among them. He was still in 1911 writing
for the _Daily News_ and every week until his death he continued to
do "Our Notebook" for the _Illustrated London News_. I have found an
unpublished ballade he wrote on the subject:
BALLADE OF A PERIODICAL
In icy circles by the Behring Strait,
In moony jungles where the tigers roar,
In tropic isles where civil servants wait,
And wonder what the deuce they're waiting for,
In lonely lighthouses beyond the Nore,
In English country houses crammed with Jews,
Men still will study, spell, perpend and pore
And read the Illustrated London News.
Our fathers read it at the earlier date
And twirled the funny whiskers that they wore
Ere little Levy got his first estate
Or Madame Patti got her first encore.
While yet the cannon of the Christian tore
The lords of Delhi in their golden shoes
Men asked for all the news from Singapore
And read the Illustrated London News.
But I, whose copy is extremely late
And ought to have been sent an hour before
I still sit here and trifle with my fate
And idly write another ballad more.
I know it is too late; and all is o'er,
And all my writings they will now refuse
I shall be sacked next Monday. So be sure
And read the Illustrated London News.
ENVOY
Prince, if in church the sermon seems a bore
Put up your feet upon the other pews,
Light a Fabrica de Tabagos Flor
And read the Illustrated London News.
Debating and lecturing went on, and an amusing letter from Bernard
Shaw shows the preparations for a Three Star Show--Shaw against
Chesterton with Belloc in the chair--in 1911. An exactly similar
debate years later was published in a slender volume entitled _Do We
Agree?_ On both occasions the crowd was enormous and many had to be
turned away. All three men were immensely popular figures and all
three were at their best debating in a hall of moderate size where
swift repartee could be followed by the whole audience.
Gilbert always shone on these occasions. The challenge of a debate
brought forth all his powers of wit and humour. His opponent
furnished material on which he could work. And how he enjoyed
himself! Frank Swinnerton once heard him laugh so much that he gave
himself hiccups for the rest of the evening. I heard him against Miss
Cicely Hamilton and against Mr. Selfridge and felt the only drawback
to be that the fight was so very unequal. The Selfridge debate in
particular was sheer cruelty, so utterly unaware was the business man
that he was being intellectually massacred by a man who regarded all
that Selfridge's stores stood for as the ruin of England.
Occasionally Mr. Selfridge looked bewildered when the audience rocked
with laughter at some phrase that clearly conveyed no meaning to him
at all. But so complete was his failure to understand what it was all
about that when the meeting was over he asked if Chesterton would not
write his name with a diamond on a window of his store already graced
with many great names. For once Chesterton was at a loss for words.
"Oh, how jolly!" he murmured feebly.
Very different was it when he debated with Bernard Shaw with Belloc
as third performer.
Ayot St. Lawrence, Welwyn, Herts.
27th Oct. 1911.
Don't be dismayed: this doesn't need a reply.
MY DEAR G.K.C.
With reference to this silly debate of ours, what you have to bear
in mind is this.
I am prepared to accept any conditions. If they seem unfair to me
from the front of the house, all the better for me; therefore do not
give me that advantage unless you wish to, or are--as you probably
are--as indifferent to the rules as I am.
The old Hyndman-Bradlaugh & Shaw-Foote debates (S-F. was a
two-nighter) were arranged thus. Each debater made 3 speeches: 1 of
30 minutes, 1 of 15 and 1 of 10. Strict time was kept (the audiences
were intensely jealous of the least departure from the rules); and
the chairman simply explained the conditions and called Time without
touching the subject of debate.
The advantages of this were, (a) that the opponent or the opener
could introduce fresh matter up to the end of his second speech, and
was tied up in that respect for the last 10 minutes only, and (b)
that the debate was one against one, and not one against two (and
with less time allowed for him at that), as it must have been had the
chairman dealt with the subject.
The disadvantages for us are that we both want Belloc to let
himself go (I simply thirst for the blood of his Servile State--I'll
Servile him); and nobody wants to tie you down to matter previously
introduced when you make your final reply. We shall all three talk
all over the shop--possibly never reaching the Socialism
department--and Belloc will not trouble himself about the rules of
public meeting and debate, even if there were any reason to suppose
that he is acquainted with them. (Do you recollect how Parnell and
Biggar floored the House in the palmy days of obstruction by meanly
getting up the subject of public order, which no one else suspected
the existence of?)
I therefore conclude that we had better make it to some extent a
clowns' cricket match, and go ahead as in the debates with Sanders &
Macdonald & Cicely Hamilton, which were all wrong technically. In a
really hostile debate it is better to be as strict as possible; but
as this is going to be a performance in which three Macs who are on
the friendliest terms in private will belabor each other recklessly
on wooden scalps and pillowed waistcoats and trouser seats, we need
not be particular.
Still, you had better know exactly what you are doing: hence this
wildly hurried scrawl.
Did you see my letter in Tuesday's _Times?_ Magnificent!
My love to Mrs. Chesterton, and my most distinguished consideration
to Winkle.* To hell with the Pope!
[* The Chestertons' dog who preceded Quoodle of the poem.]
Ever
G.B.S.
P.S. I told Sanders to explain to you that you would be entitled to
half the gate (or a third if Belloc shares) and that you were likely
to overlook this if you were not warned. I take it that you have
settled this somehow.
At the second of these debates Belloc opened the proceedings by
announcing to the audience "You are about to listen, I am about to
sneer." His only contribution to the debate was to recite a poem:
Our civilisation
Is built upon coal
Let us chant in rotation
Our civilisation
That lump of damnation
Without any soul
Our civilisation
Is built upon coal.
Bernard Shaw was on the friendliest terms with the others and admired
their genius but thought it ill directed. Belloc, he had told
Chesterton, was "wasting prodigious gifts" in the service of the Pope.
"I have not met G.K.C.: Shaw always calls him a man of colossal
genius" writes Lawrence of Arabia to a friend.
As a lecturer Chesterton's success was less certain than as a
debater. Many of his greatest admirers say they have heard him give
very poor lectures. He was often nervous and worried beforehand. "As
a lecture," wrote the _Yorkshire Weekly Post_ after a performance
in this year (1911), "it was a fiasco, but as an exhibition of
Chesterton it was pleasing." Although his writing appeared almost
effortless he did in fact take far more pains about it than he did in
preparing for a lecture. He seemed quite incapable of remembering the
time or place of appointment, or of getting there on time, if at all.
Stories are told of his non-appearance on various platforms. My
husband remembers a meeting in a London theatre at which Chesterton
had been billed as one of the speakers. The meeting, arranged by the
Knights of the Blessed Sacrament, was well under way before he
arrived, panting but unperturbed. His apology ran something like
this: "As knights you will understand my not being here at the
beginning, for the whole point of knighthood was that the knight
should arrive late but not too late. Had St. George not been late
there would have been no story. Had he been too late, there would
have been no princess."
Even more annoying was his habit of beginning his lecture by saying
he had not prepared it. Such a remark is not likely to please any
audience, least of all an audience that has paid for admission and
knows that the lecturer is receiving a large fee. But money, whether
he was receiving it or giving it away, meant nothing to him. He had
not a strong voice, and I have seen him, when a microphone was
provided, holding a paper of notes between himself and it. An ardent
admirer of his writing told me he made far too many jokes about his
size. Yet how pleasing they sometimes were: when his Chairman for
instance, after a long wait, said he had feared a traffic accident:
"Had I met a tram-car," Chesterton replied, "it would have been a
great, and if I may say so, an equal encounter."
He thought badly of his own lecturing and began once by saying: "I
might call myself a lecturer; but then again I fear some of you may
have attended my lectures."
Actually, in spite of the jokes, his thoughts were centred entirely
on his subject, not on himself. An anonymous Society Diarist quoted
by Cosmo Hamilton writes of an occasion when: "he was given, rather
foolishly, a little gold period chair and as he made his points it
slowly collapsed under him. He rose just in time and sinking into
another chair that someone put behind him began at the word he had
last spoken. No acting could have secured such an effect of complete
indifference. It was evident that he had barely noticed the incident."
Ellis Roberts completes the picture. He knew Gilbert already as a
brilliant talker and came to hear him from a platform:
"I remember the manner of his lecture. It seemed to be written on a
hundred pieces of variously shaped paper, written in ink and pencil
(of all colours) and in chalk. All the pages were in a splendid and
startling disorder and I remember being at first a little
disappointed. Then the papers were abandoned and G.K.C. talked."*
[* _Reading for Pleasure_, p. 96.]
At this time Bernard Shaw scored a victory over his friend. For
beside lecturing, journalism and the publication of three
considerable and two minor books, Chesterton between 1911 and the War
wrote the play that Shaw had been so insistently demanding. The books
were: _Manalive_ 1911, _A Miscellany of Men_ (Essays) 1912, _The
Victorian Age in Literature_ February 1913, _The Wisdom of Father
Brown_ 1914, _The Flying Inn_ 1914. The play was _Magic_ produced at
the Little Theatre in October 1913. One who admired it was George
Moore. He wrote to Forster Bovill (November 24, 1913):
I followed the comedy of _Magic_ from the first line to the last with
interest and appreciation, and I am not exaggerating when I say that
I think of all modern plays I like it the best. Mr. Chesterton wished
to express an idea and his construction and his dialogue are the best
that he could have chosen for the expression of that idea: therefore,
I look upon the play as practically perfect. The Prologue seems
unnecessary, likewise the magician's love for the young lady. That
she should love the magician is well enough, but it materialises him
a little too much if he returns that love. I would have preferred her
to love him more and he to love her less. But this spot, if it be a
spot, is a very small one on a spotless surface of excellence.
I hope I can rely upon you to tell Mr. Chesterton how much I
appreciated his Play as I should like him to know my artistic
sympathies.
"Artistic sympathies" is not ungenerous considering how Chesterton
had written of George Moore in _Heretics_.
It is rather comic that all the reviews hailing from Germany where
the play was very soon produced compare Chesterton with Shaw and many
of them say that he is the better playwright. "He means more to it,"
a Munich paper was translated as saying, "than the good old Shaw."
Chesterton's superiority can hardly be entertained in the matter of
technique. Actually what the critic meant was that he preferred the
ideas of Chesterton to the ideas of Shaw. Both men were chiefly
concerned with ideas. But while Shaw excelled chiefly in presenting
them through brilliant dialogue, G.K.'s deeper thoughts were conveyed
in another fashion. The Duke might almost, it is true, have been a
Shaw character, but the fun the audience got out of him was the least
thing they received. Chesterton once said that he suspected Shaw of
being the only man who had never written any poetry. Many of us
suspect that Chesterton never wrote anything else. This play is a
poem and the greatest character in it is atmosphere. Chesterton
believed in the love of God and man, he believed in the devil: love
conquers diabolical evil and the atmosphere of this struggle is felt
even in the written page and was felt more vividly in the theatre.
After a passage of many years those who saw it remember the moment
when the red lamp turned blue as a felt experience.
But as to popularity, in England at least, it would be absurd to
compare G.K. with G.B.S. The play's run was a brief one and it was
years before he attempted another.
Chesterton was fighting corruption, fighting the Servile State. Above
all things he was fighting sterility, fighting it in the name of
life--life with its richness, its variety, its sins and its virtues,
with its positively outrageous sanity. "Thank you for being alive,"
wrote an admirer to him.
_Manalive_ is above all things a hymn to life. It is the acid test of
a Chestertonian. Reviewers became wildly enthusiastic or bitterly
scornful. Borrowing from his own phrase about Pickwick I am inclined
to say that men not in love with life will not appreciate _Manalive_--
nor, I should imagine, heaven. The ideas that make up the book had
been long in his head. The story of White Wynd written while he was
at the Slade School tells one half of the story, an unpublished
fragment of the same period entitled "The Burden of Balham" the
other half. The Great Wind that blows Innocent Smith to Beacon House
is the wind of life and it blows through the whole story. Before an
improvised Court of Law Smith is tried on three charges:
housebreaking--but it was his own house that he broke into to renew
the vividness of ownership; bigamy--but it was his own wife with whom
he repeatedly eloped to renew the ecstasy of first love; murder with
a large and terrifying revolver--but he dealt life not death from its
barrel. For he used it only to threaten those who said they were
tired of life or that life was not worth living, and he forced them
through fear of death to hymn the praises of life.
The explanation given by Smith to Dr. Eames, the Master of
Brakespeare College, of his ideas and his purpose gives the note of
fooling and profundity filling the whole book.
"I want both my gifts to come virgin and violent, the death and the
life after death. I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the
Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him--only to bring him to
life. I begin to see a new meaning in being the skeleton at the
feast."
"You can scarcely be called a skeleton," said Dr. Eames smiling.
"That comes of being so much at the feast," answered the massive
youth. "No skeleton can keep his figure if he is always dining out.
But that is not quite what I meant: what I mean is that I caught a
kind of glimpse of the meaning of death and all that--the skull and
the crossbones, the _Memento Mori_. It isn't only meant to remind us
of a future life, but to remind us of a present life too. With our
weak spirits we should grow old in Eternity if we were not kept young
by death. Providence has to cut immortality into lengths for us, as
nurses cut the bread and butter into fingers."
_Manalive_ appeared in 1911. Next year came what is perhaps his
best-known single piece of writing, the _Battle of Lepanto_. In the
spring of 1912 he had taken part in a debate at Leeds, affirming that
all wars were religious wars. Father O'Connor supported him with a
magnificent description of the battle of Lepanto. Obviously it seized
Gilbert's mind powerfully, for while he was still staying with Father
O'Connor, he had begun to jot down lines and by October of that year
the poem was published. One might fill a book with the tributes it
has received from that day to this. Perhaps none pleased him more
than a note from John Buchan (June 21, 1915): "The other day in the
trenches we shouted your Lepanto."
_The Victorian Age in Literature_ made many of his admirers again
express the wish that he would stay in the field of pure literature.
His characterisations of some of the Victorian writers were sheer
delight.
Ruskin had a strong right hand that wrote of the great mediaeval
Minsters in tall harmonies and traceries as splendid as their own;
and also, so to speak, a weak and feverish left hand that was always
fidgeting and trying to take the pen away--and write an evangelical
tract about the immorality of foreigners . . . it is not quite unfair
to say of him that he seemed to want all parts of the Cathedral
except the altar.
Tennyson was a provincial Virgil . . . he tried to have the
universal balance of all the ideas at which the great Roman had
aimed: but he hadn't got hold of all the ideas to balance. Hence his
work was not a balance of truths, like the universe. It was a balance
of whims; like the British Constitution . . . he could not think up
to the height of his own towering style.
. . . while Emily Bronte was as unsociable as a storm at midnight
and while Charlotte Bronte was at best like that warmer and more
domestic thing a house on fire--they do connect themselves with the
calm of George Eliot, as the forerunners of many later developments
of the feminine advance. Many forerunners (if it comes to that) would
have felt rather ill if they had seen the things they foreran.
The best and most profound part of the book was however the working
out of certain generalisations--the effect on the literature of the
period of the Victorian compromise between religion and rationalism
("Macaulay, it is said, never talked about his religion: but Huxley
was always talking about the religion he hadn't got"): the break-up
of the compromise when Victorian Protestantism and Victorian
rationalism simultaneously destroyed one another; the uniqueness of
the nonsense-writing of the later Victorian period.
In one illuminating passage Chesterton defends what seems at first
sight merely his own habit of getting dates and events in their wrong
order.
The mind moves by instincts, associations, premonitions and not by
fixed dates, or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur
simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect.
Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated:
notions will be first defined long after they are dead . . . thus
Wordsworth shrank back into Toryism, as it were, from a Shelleyan
extreme of pantheism as yet disembodied. Thus Newman took down the
iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yet delivered, that was
coming from the club of Darwin. For this reason no one can understand
tradition or even history who has not some tenderness for anachronism.
This was not merely special pleading: it contains a profound truth.
Wilfrid Ward proved it of Newman in the biography that G.K. had
probably just been reading. Chesterton noted it himself in his book
on Cobbett who, as he said, saw what was not yet there. It is almost
the definition of genius. Already at this date Chesterton and Belloc
were fighting much that to the rest of us only became fully apparent
long afterwards.
"I think you would make a very good God," wrote E. V. Lucas to
Chesterton. There is indeed something divine in an almost ceaseless
outpouring of creative energy. But only God can create tirelessly and
Chesterton was at this time beginning to be tired. You can see it in
_The Flying Inn_. The book is still full of vitality and the lyrics
in it, later published separately under the title _Wine, Water and
Song_, are as good in that kind as any that he ever wrote. But
with all its vigour the book is a less joyful one than _Manalive_
and it is a much more angry one. _Manalive_ was a paean of joy to
life. _The Flying Inn_ is fighting for something necessary to its
fulness--freedom.
It must have been just while he was writing it that there were
threatenings of a case against him by Lever Brothers on account of a
lecture given at the City Temple on "The Snob as Socialist." In
answering a question he spoke of Port Sunlight as "corresponding to a
Slave Compound." Others besides Lever Brothers were shocked and some
clarification was certainly called for. Belloc and Chesterton meant
by Slavery not that the poor were being bullied or ill treated but
that they had lost their liberty. Gilbert went so far as to point out
how much there was to be said in defence of a Slave state. Under
Slavery the poor were usually fed, clothed and housed adequately.
Slaves had often been much more comfortable in the past than were
free men in the world of today. A model employer might by his
regulations greatly increase the comfort of his workers and yet
enslave them.
A letter from Bernard Shaw advising him to get up certain details
asks the question of whether the workman at Port Sunlight would
forfeit his benefits and savings should he leave. "If this is so,"
wrote Shaw, "then, though Lever may treat him as well as Pickwick
would no doubt have treated old Weller, if he had consented to take
charge of his savings, Lever is master of his employee's fate, and
captain of his employee's soul, which is slavery." He went on to
offer financial help in fighting the case. The "Christian Commonweal"
had reported Chesterton's speech and was also threatened with the
law. To the editor G. K. wrote:
Only a hasty line to elongate the telephone. I am sorry about this
business for one reason only; and that is that you should be even
indirectly mixed up in it. Lever can sue me till he bursts: I'm not
afraid of him. But it does seem a shame when I've often attacked you
(always in good faith and what was meant for good humour), and when
you've heaped coals of fire by printing my most provocative words,
that your chivalry should get you even bothered about it. I am truly
sorry and ask pardon--of you, but not of old Sun and Soapsuds, I can
tell you.
Another very hasty line about the way I shall, if necessary,
answer; about which I feel pretty confident. I should say it is
absurd to have libel actions about Controversies, instead of about
quarrels. It would mean every Capitalist being prosecuted for saying
that Socialism is robbery and every Socialist for saying property is
theft. By great luck, the example lies at the threshold of the
passage quoted. The worst I said of Port Sunlight was that it was a
slave-compound. Why, that was the very phrase about which half the
governing class argued with the other half a few years ago! Are all
who called the Chinese slaves to be sued by all who didn't? Am I
prosecuted for a terminology . . . enough, you know the rest. Go on
with the passage and you will see the luck continues. Abrupt, brief,
and perhaps abbreviated as my platform answer was, it really does
contain all the safeguards against imputing cruelty or human crime to
poor Lever. It defines slavery as the imposition of the master's
private morality; as in the matter of the pubs. It expressly suggests
it does not imply cruelty: for it goes out of its way to say that
such slaves may be better off under such slavery. So they were,
physically, both in Athens and Carolina. It then says that a merely
mystical thing, which I think is Christianity, makes me think this
slavery damnable, even if it is comfortable. I would defend all this,
as a lawful sociological comment, in any Court in civilisation.
I tell you my line of defence, to use discreetly and at your
discretion. If the other side are bent on fighting, I should reserve
the defence. If they seem open to reason, I should point out that it
is on our side.
His old schoolfellow Salter was also his solicitor and a letter to
Wells shows in part the advice Salter gave.
DEAR WELLS,
I am asked to make a suggestion to you that looks like, and indeed
is, infernal impudence: but which a further examination will rob of
most of its terrors. Let not these terrors be redoubled when I say
that the request comes from my solicitor. It is a great lark; I am
writing for him when he ought to be writing for me.
In the forthcoming case of Lever v. Chesterton & Another, the
Defendant Chesterton will conduct his own case; as his heart is not,
like that of the lady in the song, Another's. He wants to fight it
purely as a point of the liberty of letters and public speech; and to
show that the phrase "slavery" (wherein I am brought in question) is
current in the educated controversy about the tendency of Capitalism
today. The solicitor, rather to my surprise, approves this general
sociological line of defence; and says that I may be allowed one or
two witnesses of weight and sociological standing--not (of course) to
say my words are defensible, still less that my view is right--but
simply to say that the Servile State, and Servile terms in connection
with it, are known to them as parts of a current and quite
unmalicious controversy. He has suggested your name: and when I have
written this I have done my duty to him. You could not, by the laws
of evidence, be asked to mix yourself up with my remarks on Lever:
you could only be asked, if at all, whether there was or was not a
disinterested school of sociology holding that Capitalism is close to
Slavery--quite apart from anybody. Do you care to come and see the
fun?
Yours always,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
The suggested line was so successful that Wells's testimony was not
called for. The case was withdrawn. No apology was even asked from
Gilbert, whose solicitor tells me that Messrs. Lever "behaved very
reasonably when once it was made clear to them that Gilbert was not
a scurrilous person making a vulgar and slanderous attack upon their
business."
With H. G. Wells as with Shaw, Gilbert's relations were exceedingly
cordial, but with a cordiality occasionally threatened by explosions
from Wells. Gilbert's soft answer however invariably turned away
wrath and all was well again. "No one," Wells said to me, "ever had
enmity for him except some literary men who did not know him." They
met first, Wells thinks, at the Hubert Blands, and then Gilbert
stayed with Wells at Easton. There they played at the non-existent
game of Gype and invented elaborate rules for it. Cecil came too and
they played the War game Wells had invented. "Cecil," says Wells,
comparing him with Gilbert, "seemed condensed: not quite big enough
for a real Chesterton."
They built too a toy theatre at Easton and among other things
dramatized the minority report of the Poor Law Commission. The play
began by the Commissioners taking to pieces Bumble the Beadle,
putting him into a huge cauldron and stewing him. Then out from the
cauldron leaped a renewed rejuvenated Bumble several sizes larger
than when he went in.
In the early days of their acquaintance Wells remembers meeting the
whole Chesterton family in the street of a French town and inviting
them to lunch. His own youngest son, a small boy, had left the room
for a moment when Wells exclaimed: "Where's Frank? Good God, Gilbert,
you're sitting on him."
The anxious way in which Gilbert got up and turned apologetically
towards his own chair was unforgettable. An absent-minded man who in
a gesture of politeness once gave his seat to three ladies in a bus
might well be alarmed over the fate of a small boy found under him.
In his memoirs Wells relates another pleasing story of a
Chestertonian encounter:
I once saw [Henry] James quarrelling with his brother William
James, the psychologist. He had lost his calm; he was terribly
unnerved. He appealed to me, to me of all people, to adjudicate on
what was and what was not permissible in England. William was arguing
about it in an indisputably American accent, with an indecently naked
reasonableness. I had come to Rye with a car to fetch William James
and his daughter to my home at Sandgate. William had none of Henry's
passionate regard for the polish upon the surface of life and he was
immensely excited by the fact that in the little Rye inn, which had
its garden just over the high brick wall of the garden of Lamb House,
G. K. Chesterton was staying. William James had corresponded with our
vast contemporary and he sorely wanted to see him. So with a
scandalous directness he had put the gardener's ladder against that
ripe red wall and clambered up and peeped over!
Henry had caught him at it. It was the sort of thing that isn't
done. It was most emphatically the sort of thing that isn't
done. . . . Henry instructed the gardener to put away that ladder and
William was looking thoroughly naughty about it.
To Henry's manifest relief, I carried William off and in the road
just outside the town we ran against the Chestertons who had been for
a drive in Romney Marsh; Chesterton was heated and I think rather
swollen by the sunshine; he seemed to overhang his one-horse fly; he
descended slowly but firmly; he was moist and steamy but cordial; we
chatted in the road and William got his coveted impression.
The two must have suited each other a good deal better than
Chesterton and the more conventional brother. Of Henry's reactions
there was a comment from the other side of the Atlantic.
The _Louisville Post_ reported that Henry James, being asked on a
visit to his native country, "What do you think of Chesterton in
England?" replied "In England we do not think of Chesterton." The
_Post_ commented rather neatly "This 'we' of our compatriot must be
considered as either mythical or editorial--unless indeed it refers
to that small and exquisite circle which immediately surrounds and
envelopes him." In his _Autobiography_ Gilbert is appreciative but
amusing, describing Henry James's reactions to the arrival of Belloc
from a walking tour unbrushed, unwashed and unshaven. After reading
_Dickens_, William wrote from Cambridge, Mass.:
O, Chesterton, but you're a darling! I've just read your
Dickens--it's as good as Rabelais. Thanks!
Wells, asked to debate with Gilbert, wrote to Frances:
Spade House, Sandgate. (undated)
DEAR MRS. CHESTERTON
God forbid that I should seem a pig [here a small pig is drawn] and
indeed I am not and of all the joys in life nothing would delight me
more than a controversy with G.K.C., whom indeed I adore. [Here is
drawn a tiny Wells adoring a vast Chesterton.]
But--I have been recklessly promising all and everyone who asks me to
lecture or debate; "If ever I do so again it will be for you," and if
once I break the vow I took last year--
Also we are really quite in agreement. It's a mere difference in
fundamental theory which doesn't really matter a rap--except for
after dinner purposes.
Yours ever,
H. G. Wells.
Frances thought Wells was good for Gilbert, he tells me, because he
took him out walking, but when the two men were alone Gilbert would
say supplicatingly "We won't go for a walk today, will we?" "He
thought it terrifying," said Wells, "the way my wife tidied up."
Frances, too, tidied up, but cautiously. "She prevented G.K.," says
Wells, "from becoming too physically gross. He ought not to have been
allowed to use the word 'jolly' more than forty times a day."
He could not, Wells thought, have gone on living in a London which
was that of ordinary social life, whether Mayfair or Bloomsbury.
"Either the country or Dr. Johnson's London." And of the relation
seen by Chesterton between liberty and conviviality he said, "Every
time he lifted a glass of wine he lifted it against Cadbury."
In spite of growing restrictions as to sales and hours the Inn still
remained for Chesterton a symbol of freedom in a world increasingly
enslaved. It was pointed out to him how great a peril lay in drink,
how homes were broken up and families destroyed through drunkenness.
After the war began, a letter from one of his readers stressed a real
danger:
Now I do beg you, Mr. Chesterton, much as you love writing in
praise of drink, to give it a rest during the war. . . . You may have
the degradation of any number of silly boys to your account without
knowing it. . . .
I have written with a freedom--you will say perhaps rudeness--which
a casual meeting with you, and a great admiration for your work by no
means justifies, but which other things perhaps do. I beg you to
forgive me.
It seems to me that this charge he never quite answered. To claim
liberty is one thing, to hymn the glories of wine is quite another.
And when he was attacked for the latter he always defended the
former, saying that he did not deny the peril but that all freedom
meant peril--peril must be preferred to slavery. There were things in
which a man must be free to choose even if his choice be evil. This
was a part of Chesterton's whole philosophy about drink--a subject on
which he wrote constantly. It is interesting to note the stages of
its development in his mind.
The Chesterton family had not a Puritan tradition in the sense of
being teetotal. But Lucian Oldershaw tells me that in their boyhood
he always felt G.K. himself to be a bit of a Puritan and I have come
upon a boyish poem that seems to confirm this in the matter of wine.
THE TEA POT
Raised high on tripod, flashing bright, the Holy Silver Urn
Within whose inmost cavern dark, the secret waters burn
Before the temple's gateway the subject tea-cups bow
And pass it steaming with thy gift, thy brown autumnal glow.
Within thy silver fortress, the tea-leaf treasure piled
O'er which the fiery fountain pours its waters undefiled
Till the witch-water steals away the essence they enfold
And dashes from the yawning spout a torrent-arch of gold.
Then fill an honest cup my lads and quaff the draught amain
And lay the earthen goblet down, and fill it yet again
Nor heed the curses on the cup that rise from Folly's school
The sneering of the drunkard and the warning of the fool.
* * *
Leave to the Stuart's cavalier the revel's blood-red wine
To hiccup out a tyrant's health and swear his Right Divine
Mine, Cromwell's* cup to stir within, the spirit cool and sure
To face another Star Chamber, a second Marston Moor.
Leave to the genius-scorner, the sot's soul-slaying urns
That stained the fame of Addison, and wrecked the life of Burns
For Etty's hand his private Pot, that for no waiter waits**
For Cowper's lips his "Cup that cheers but not inebriates."
Goal of Infantine Hope, Unknown, mystic Felicity
Sangrael of childish quest much sought, aethereal "Real Tea"
Thy faintest tint of yellow on the milk and water pale
Like Midas' stain on Pactolus, gives joy that cannot fail.
[* Cromwell's teapot was among the first used in England.]
[** Etty, the artist made his own tea in all hotels in a private pot.]
Childhood's "May I have _real_ tea" had grown into the tea-table of
the Junior Debating Club, and Lucian Oldershaw remembers Gilbert as a
young man still lunching at tea shops. I found recently two versions
of a fragment of a story called "The Human Club," written when he was
at the Slade School. The second version opens:
A meal was spread on the table, for the members of the Human Club
were, as their name implies, human, however glorified and
transformed: the meal, however, consisted principally of tea and
coffee, for the Humans were total abstainers, not with the virulent
assertion of a negative formula, but as an enlightened ratification
of a profound social effort (hear, hear), not as the meaningless
idolatry (cheers) of an isolated nostrum (renewed cheers), but as a
chivalrous sacrifice for the triumph of a civic morality (prolonged
cheers and uproar).
The aims of the Human Club were many but among the more practical
and immediate was the entire perfection of everything.
"Perfection is impossible," said the host, Eric Peterson, bowing
his colossal proportions over the coffee-pot. He was in the habit of
showing these abrupt rifts of his train of thought, like gigantic
fragments of a frieze. But he said then quite simply, with no change
in his bleak blue eyes, "perfection is impossible, thank God. The
impossible is the eternal."
We are a long way from tea the "Oriental," cocoa the "vulgar
beast," and wine the true festivity of man that we find in _Wine,
Water and Song_. Chesterton had meanwhile discovered the
wine-drinking peasants of France and Italy: he had discovered what
were left of the old-fashioned inns of England where cider or beer
are drunk by the sort of Englishmen he had come to love best--the
poor. In his revolt against that dreary and pretentious element that
he most hated in the middle classes he had come to feel that the life
of the poor, as they themselves had shaped it when they were free
men, was the ideal. And that ideal included moderate drinking,
drinking to express joy in life and to increase it.
Already in _Heretics_ (1904) he had in the essay called "Omar and the
Sacred Vine" attacked the evil of pessimistic drinking. A man should
never drink because he is miserable, he will be wise to avoid drink
as a medicine for, health being a normal thing, he will tend in
search of it to drink too much. But no man expects pleasure all the
time, so if he drinks for pleasure the danger of excess is less.
The sound rule in the matter would appear to be like many other
rules--a paradox. Drink because you are happy, but never because you
are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you
will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when
you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing
peasants of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is
rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because
you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient
health of the world.*
[* _Heretics_. John Lane, chapter VII, p. 103.]
But the human will must be brought into action and the gifts of God
must be taken with the thanksgiving that is restraint. "We must thank
God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them." The
topic seemed to fascinate him; he returned to it again and again. In
one essay he described himself opening all the windows in a private
bar to get rid of the air of secrecy that he hated. Wine should be
taken, not secretly but
Frankly and in fellowship As men in inns do dine.
Cocktails he abominated--and in fact strong spirits were almost as
evil as wine and beer were good. In an essay "The Cowardice of
Cocktails"* he is especially scathing in his comment on those who
urge "that they give a man an appetite for his meals."
[* From _Sidelights on New London & Newer York,_ p. 45.]
This is unworthy of a generation that is always claiming to be
candid and courageous. In the second aspect, it is utterly unworthy
of a generation that claims to keep itself fit by tennis and golf and
all sorts of athletics. What are these athletes worth if, after all
their athletics, they cannot scratch up such a thing as a natural
appetite? Most of my own work is, I will not venture to say,
literary, but at least sedentary. I never do anything except walk
about and throw clubs and javelins in the garden. But I never require
anything to give me an appetite for a meal. I never yet needed a tot
of rum to help me to go over the top and face the mortal perils of
luncheon.
Quite rationally considered, there has been a decline and
degradation in these things. First came the old drinking days which
are always described as much more healthy. In those days men worked
or played, hunted or herded or ploughed or fished, or even, in their
rude way, wrote or spoke, if only expressing the simple minds of
Socrates or Shakespeare, and _then_ got reasonably drunk in the
evening when their work was done. We find the first step of the
degradation, when men do not drink when their work is done, but drink
in order to do their work. Workmen used to wait in queues outside the
factories of forty years ago, to drink nips of neat whisky to enable
them to face life in the progressive and scientific factory. But at
least it may be admitted that life in the factory was something that
it took some courage to face. These men felt they had to take an
anaesthetic before they could face pain. What are we to say of those
who have to take an anaesthetic before they can face pleasure? What
of those, who when faced with the terrors of mayonnaise eggs or
sardines, can only utter a faint cry for brandy? What of those who
have to be drugged, maddened, inspired and intoxicated to the point
of partaking of meals, like the Assassins to the point of committing
murders? If, as they say, the use of the drug means the increase of
the dose, where will it stop, and at what precise point of frenzy and
delusion will a healthy grown-up man be ready to rush headlong upon a
cutlet or make a dash for death or glory at a ham-sandwich? This is
obviously the most abject stage of all; worse than that of the man
who drinks for the sake of work, and much worse than that of the man
who drinks for the sake of play.
Wine, Chesterton maintained, should not be drunk as an aid to
creative production, yet one may find that increased power of
creation sometimes follows in its wake. And here of course was a
danger to a man who worked as hard as Chesterton. He sometimes spoke
of himself as "idle," but I think it would be hard to match either
his output or his hours of creative work. I remember one visit that I
paid to Beaconsfield when he was writing one of his major books. He
was in his study by 10 in the morning, emerged for lunch at 1 and went
back from about 2:30 to 4:30. After tea he worked again until a 7:30
dinner. His wife and I went to bed about 10:30 leaving him preparing
his material for the next day. Towards 1 A.M. a ponderous tread as he
passed my door on his way to bed woke me to a general impression of
an earthquake.
In a passage in _Magic_ G.K. makes his hero say, "I happen to have
what is called a strong head and I have never been really drunk." It
was true of himself, but in these years just before the Great War,
before his own severe illness, intimate friends have told me that
they had seen him unlike himself, that they felt he had come to
depend, "almost absent-mindedly" one said, on the stimulus of wine
for the sheer physical power to pour forth so much.
Besides overwork G.K. was in these years mentally oppressed by the
strain of the Marconi Case, and then almost overwhelmed by the horror
of the World War. A man very tender of heart, sensitive and intensely
imaginative, he could not react as calmly as Cecil himself did to
what both believed the probability of the latter's imprisonment. And
when that strain was removed there remained the stain on national
honour, the opening gulf into which he saw his country falling. To
him the Marconi Case was a heavier burden than the war. For, as he
saw it, in the Marconi Case the nation was wrong in enduring
corruption and in the war the nation was magnificently right in
resisting tyranny.
So Chesterton felt, yet the outbreak of the war with all its human
suffering to mind and body weighed heavily upon him too. He wrote
_The Barbarism of Berlin_ of which I will say something in the next
chapter--for it belongs to those writings of the war period the
series of which is so consistent that in his _Autobiography_ he was
able to claim that he had no sympathy "with the rather weak-minded
reaction that is going on round us. At the first outbreak of the War
I attended the conference of all the English men of letters, called
together to compose a reply to the manifesto of the German
professors. I at least among all those writers can say, 'What I have
written I have written.'"
Then his illness came upon him. Dr. Pocock, coming for a first visit,
found the bed partly broken under the weight of the patient who was
lying in a grotesquely awkward position, his hips higher than his
head.
"You must be horribly uncomfortable," he said.
"Why, now you mention it," said G.K., like a man receiving a new
idea, "I suppose I am."
The doctor ordered a water-bed, and almost the last words he heard
before the patient sank into coma were, "I wonder if this bally ship
will ever get to shore."
The illness lasted several months. We can follow its progress (and
his) in extracts from letters* written to Father O'Connor by Frances:
Nov. 25th, 1914. You must pray for him. He is seriously ill and I
have two nurses. It is mostly heart-trouble, but there are
complications. He is quite his normal self, as to head and brain, and
he even dictates and reads a great deal.
Dec. 29th, 1914. Gilbert had a bad relapse on Christmas Eve, and
now is being desperately ill. He is not often conscious, and is so
weak--I feel he might ask for you--if so I shall wire. Dr. is still
hopeful, but I feel in despair.
Jan. 3rd, 1915. If you came he would not know you, and this
condition may last some time. The brain is dormant, and must be kept
so. If he is sufficiently conscious at any moment to understand, I
will ask him to let you come--or will send on my own responsibility.
Pray for his soul and mine.
Jan. 7th, 1915. Gilbert seemed decidedly clearer yesterday, and
though not quite so well today the doctor says he has reason to hope
the mental trouble is working off. His heart is stronger, and he is
able to take plenty of nourishment. Under the circumstances therefore
I am hoping and praying he may soon be sufficiently himself to tell
us what he wants done. I am dreadfully unhappy at not knowing how he
would wish me to act. His parents would never forgive me if I acted
only on my own authority. I do pray to God He will restore him to
himself that we may know. I feel in His mercy He will, even if death
is the end of it--or the beginning shall I say?
Jan. 12th, 1915. He is really better I believe and by the mercy of
God I dare hope he is to be restored to us. Physically he is
stronger, and the brain is beginning to work normally, and soon I
trust we shall be able to ask him his wishes with regard to the
Church. I am so thankful to think that we can get at his desire.
In January 1915 Frances wrote to my mother: "Gilbert remains much the
same in a semi-conscious condition--sleeping a great deal. I feel
absolutely hopeless; it seems impossible it can go on like this. The
impossibility of reaching him is too terrible an experience and I
don't know how to go through with it. I pray for strength and you
must pray for me."
"Dearest Josephine," she wrote in a later undated letter, "Gilbert is
today a little better, after being practically at a standstill for
the past week. He asked for me today, which is a great advance, and
hugged me. I feel like Elijah (wasn't it?) and shall go in the
strength of that hug forty days. The recovery will be very slow, the
doctors tell me, and we have to prevent his using his brain at all."
In this letter she begged to see my mother, and I remember when they
met she told her that one day she had tried to test whether Gilbert
was conscious by asking him, "Who is looking after you?" "He answered
very gravely, 'God' and I felt so small," she said. Presently Frances
told my mother that Gilbert had talked to her about coming into the
Catholic Church. It was just at this time that she wrote to tell
Father O'Connor that Gilbert said to her "Did you think I was going
to die?" and followed this with the question, "Does Father O'Connor
know?" After her conversation with my mother Frances wrote to her:
March 21
I think I would rather you did not tell anyone just yet of what I
told you regarding my husband and the Catholic Church. Not that I
doubt for a moment that he meant it and knew what he was saying and
was relieved at saying it, but I don't want the world at large to be
able to say that he came to this decision, when he was weak and
unlike himself. He will ratify it no doubt when his complete manhood
is restored. I know it was not weakness that made him say it, but you
will understand my scruples. I know in God's good time he will make
his confession of faith--and if death comes near him again I shall
know how to act.
Thanks for all your sympathy. I _did_ enjoy seeing you.
On Easter Eve Frances wrote two letters, one to Father O'Connor, one
to my mother. To Father O'Connor she said:
All goes well here, though still very very slowly--G's mind is
gradually clearing, but it is still difficult to him to distinguish
between the real and the unreal. I am quite sure he will soon be able
to think and act for himself, but I dare not hurry matters at all. I
have told him I am writing to you often and he said, "That is
right--I'll see him soon. I want to talk to him." He wanders at
times, but the clear intervals are longer. He repeated the Creed last
night, this time in English.
To my mother:
I feel the enormous significance of the resurrection of the body
when I think of my dear husband, just consciously laying hold of life
again. Indeed, I will pray that your dear ones may be kept in safety.
God bless you for all your sympathy. I am so glad that Gilbert's
decision (for I am sure it was a decision) has made you so happy. I
dare not hurry anything, the least little excitement upsets him--last
night he said the Creed and asked me to read parts of Myers' "St.
Paul." He still wanders a good deal when tired but is certainly a
little stronger. Love and Easter blessings to you all.
We ourselves were passing then through the shadow of death. Almost as
Gilbert rose again to this life my father passed into life eternal.
One of the very few letters I possess in Gilbert's own handwriting
was also one of the first he wrote on recovery. It was to my mother:
I fear I have delayed writing to you, and partly with a vague
feeling that I might so find some way of saying what I feel on your
behalf and others'; and of course it has not come. Somewhat of what
the world and a wider circle of friends have lost I shall try to say
in the _Dublin Review_, by the kindness of Monsignor Barnes, who has
invited me to contribute to it; but of all I feel, and Frances feels,
and of the happy times we have had in your house, I despair of saying
anything at all.
I can only hope you and yours will be able to read between the
lines of what I write either here or there; and understand that the
simultaneous losses of a good friend and a fine intellect have a way
of stunning rather than helping the expression of either. I would say
I am glad he lived to see what I feel to be a rebirth of England, if
his mere presence in an older generation did not prove to me that
England never died.
This sense of the rebirth of England gave to Gilbert's restored life
a special quality of triumph that abode down to the end of the war.
CHAPTER XXI
The War Years
GILBERT WAS TAKING up life again and with it the old friendships and
the old debates, in the new atmosphere created by the war.
To Bernard Shaw he wrote:
June 12th, 1915
MY DEAR BERNARD SHAW,
I ought to have written to you a long time ago, to thank you for
your kind letter which I received when I had recovered and still more
for many other kindnesses that seem to have come from you during the
time before the recovery. I am not a vegetarian; and I am only in a
very comparative sense a skeleton. Indeed I am afraid you must
reconcile yourself to the dismal prospect of my being more or less
like what I was before; and any resumption of my ordinary habits must
necessarily include the habit of disagreeing with you. What and where
and when is "Uncommon Sense about the War?" How can I get hold of it?
I do not merely ask as one hungry for hostilities, but also as one
unusually hungry for good literature. "Il me faut des géants," as
Cyrano says; so I naturally wish to hear the last about you. You
probably know that I do not agree with you about the War; I do not
think it is going on of its own momentum; I think it is going on in
accordance with that logical paradox whereby the thing that is most
difficult to do is also the thing that must be done. If it were an
easy war to end it would have been a wicked war to begin. If a cat
has nine lives one must kill it nine times, saving your humanitarian
feelings, and always supposing it is a witch's cat and really draws
its powers from Hell. I have always thought that there was in Prussia
an evil will; I would not have made it a ground for going to war, but
I was quite sure of it long before there was any war at all. But I
suppose we shall some day have an opportunity of arguing about all
that. Meanwhile my thanks and good wishes are as sincere as my
opinions; and I do not think those are insincere.
Yours always sincerely,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
Bernard Shaw replied:
22nd June 1915
MY DEAR CHESTERTON
I am delighted to learn under your own hand that you have recovered
all your health and powers with an unimpaired figure. You have also
the gratification of knowing that you have carried out a theory of
mine that every man of genius has a critical illness at 40, Nature's
object being to make him go to bed for several months. Sometimes
Nature overdoes it: Schiller and Mozart died. Goethe survived, though
he very nearly followed Schiller into the shades. I did the thing
myself quite handsomely by spending eighteen months on crutches,
having two surgical operations, and breaking my arm. I distinctly
noticed that instead of my recuperation beginning when my breakdown
ended, it began before that. The ascending curve cut through the tail
of the descending one; and I was consummating my collapse and rising
for my next flight simultaneously.
It is perfectly useless for you to try to differ with me about the
war. NOBODY can differ with me about the war: you might as well
differ from the Almighty about the orbit of the sun. I have got the
war right; and to that complexion, you too must come at last, your
nature not being a fundamentally erroneous one.
At the same time, it is a great pity you were not born in Ireland.
You would have had the advantage of hearing the burning patriotism of
your native land expressing itself by saying exactly the same things
about England that English patriotism now says about Prussia, and of
recognizing that though they were entirely true, they were also a
very great nuisance, as they prevented people from building the
future by conscientious thought. Also, Cecil would have seen what the
Catholic Church is really like when the apostolic succession falls to
the farmer's son who is cleverer with school books than with
agricultural implements. In fact you would have learned a devil of a
lot of things for lack of which you often drive me to exclaim
"Gilbert, Gilbert, why persecutest thou me."
As to the evil will, of course there is an evil will in Prussia.
Prussia isn't Paradise. I have been fighting that evil will, in
myself and others, all my life. It is the will of the brave Barabbas,
and of the militant Nationalists who admired him and crucified the
pro-Gentile. But the Prussians must save their own souls. They also
have their Shaws and Chestertons and a divine spark in them for these
to work on. . . . What we have to do is to make ridiculous the cry of
"Vengeance is mine, saith Podsnap," and, whenever anyone tells an
Englishman a lie, to explain to the poor devil that it is a lie, and
that he must stop cheering it as a splendid speech. For an Englishman
never compares speeches either with facts or with previous speeches:
to him a speech is art for art's sake, the disciples of our favoured
politicians being really, if they only knew it, disciples of
Whistler. Also, and equally important, we have to bear in mind that
the English genius does not, like the German, lie in disciplined
idealism. The Englishman is an Anarchist and a grumbler: he has no
such word as Fatherland, and the idea which he supposes corresponds
to it is nothing but the swing of a roaring chorus to a patriotic
song. Also he is a muddler and a slacker, because tense and
continuous work means thought; and he is lazy and fat in the head.
But as long as he is himself, and grumbles, it does not matter. Given
a furious Opposition screaming for the disgrace of tyrannical and
corrupt ministers, and a press on the very verge of inviting Napoleon
to enter London in triumph and deliver a groaning land from the
intolerable burden of its native rulers' incapacity and rapacity and
obsolescence, and the departments will work as well as the enemy's
departments (perhaps better), and the government will have to keep
its wits at full pressure. But once let England try what she is
trying now: that is, to combine the devoted silence and obedience of
the German system with the slack and muddle of Coodle and Doodle, and
we are lost. Unless you keep up as hot a fire from your ink-bottle on
the Government as the soldier keeps up from the trenches you are
betraying that soldier. Of course they will call you a pro-German.
What of that? They call ME a pro-German. We also must stand fire. As
Peer Gynt said of hell, if the torture is only moral, it cannot be so
very bad.
I grieve to say that some fool has stolen my title, and issued a
two page pamphlet called Uncommon Sense about the War. So I shall
have to call mine More Common Sense About the War. It is not yet in
type: I haven't yet quite settled its destination. Any chance of
seeing you both if we drive over from Ayot to Beaconsfield some
Sunday or other afternoon.
Yours ever,
G.B.S.
Wells too was rejoicing over his recovery--
DEAR OLD G.K.C.,
I'm so delighted to get a letter from you again. As soon as I can I
will come to Beaconsfield and see you. I'm absurdly busy in bringing
together the Rulers of the country and the scientific people of whom
they are totally ignorant. Lloyd George has never heard of
Ramsey--and so on, and the hash and muddle and quackery on our
technical side is appalling. It all means boys' lives in Flanders and
horrible waste and suffering. Well, anyhow if we've got only obscure
and cramped and underpaid scientific men we have a bench of fine fat
bishops and no end of tremendous lawyers. One of the best ideas for
the Ypres position came from Robert Mond but the execution was too
difficult for our officers to attempt. So we've got a row of wounded
and mangled men that would reach from Beaconsfield to Great
Marlow--just to show we don't take stock in these damned scientific
people.
Yours ever,
H.G.
No one however mad could have called Gilbert a pro-German: it was
perhaps the only accusation the _New Witness_ escaped. But while he
largely agreed with Shaw's analysis of the Englishman as a natural
Anarchist and grumbler, while he believed in the voluntary principle
and disliked conscription, his general outlook was as different from
Shaw's as were the pamphlets they both wrote.
In a book addressed to a German professor G.K. frankly confessed the
real _Crimes of England_, for which she was now making reparation.
To any Englishman living in the native atmosphere the suggestion that
England had been preparing an aggression against Germany seemed more
than faintly ludicrous. We were not engaged in plotting in Europe--on
the contrary we were far too careless of Europe. And the funds of the
Liberal Party (which was in power) actually depended chiefly on
Quaker Millionaires who were noted pacifists and at whose bidding
national honour was jeopardised by our delay in declaring our support
of France. We were not prepared for war and probably only the shock
of the invasion of Belgium made certain our stand with France.
. . . It may seem an idle contradiction to say that our strength in
this war came from not being prepared. But there is a truth that
cannot be otherwise expressed. The strongest thing in sane anger is
surprise. If we had time to think we might have thought better--that
is worse. Everything that could be instinctive managed to be strong;
the instant fury of contempt with which the better spirit in our
rulers flung back the Prussian bribe; the instant solidarity of all
parties; above all, the brilliant instinct by which the Irish leader
cast into the scale of a free Europe the ancient sword of Ireland.*
[* _The Uses of Diversity_.]
Our crimes were in the past, not the present. The first had been when
we gave aid to Prussia against Austria, Austria which was "not a
nation" but "a kind of Empire, a Holy Roman Empire that never came,"
which "still retained something of the old Catholic comfort for the
soul." We had helped to put Prussia instead of Austria at the head of
the Germanies--Prussia which in the person of Frederick the Great
"hated everything German and everything good." Francophile as
Chesterton was, he yet had a certain tenderness for those old
Germanies which "preserved the good things that go with small
interests and strict boundaries, music, etiquette, a dreamy
philosophy and so on."
Our next crimes had been in calling Prussia to our aid against
Napoleon and in failing to assist Denmark against her. And by far our
worst had been the using of Prussian mercenaries with their ghastly
tradition of cruelty in Ireland in the '98.
There is in this little book one drawback from the historian's point
of view: its view of the past is so oddly selective. Doubtless it is
lawful to examine your own nation's conscience as you do your
own--and not your neighbour's. Yet history should be rather an
examination of facts than an examination of conscience. And
historically Richelieu's policies had had quite something to say in
the creation of Prussia; the conscript armies of the French
Revolution had first made Europe into an armed camp. It was an undue
simplification to insist exclusively on The Crimes of England.
But even while he did so Chesterton rejoiced that now at long last
England was on the right side, on the side of Europe and of sanity.
The _New Witness_ group had always seen the issue as their countrymen
were now suddenly beginning to see it. They had no sympathy with the
"liberal" thinking, made in Germany, that had in the name of biblical
and historical criticism been undermining the bases of Christianity.
Their love of logic and of clarity had made German philosophy
intolerable to them--it was wind, and it was fog. Finally their love
of France had always made them conceive of Europe as centering in
that country. For them there was one profound satisfaction even amid
the horrors of war: that the issues were so clear.
But were they as clear to the whole world? If not they must be made
so.
There were two main problems to be overcome in this matter, one of
which was less pronounced at the time than it became later--the
economic interpretation of history. Started by Karl Marx the idea that
all history can be interpreted solely by economic causes has come
since to have an extraordinary popularity even among those whose own
philosophy and sociology are most widely removed from Marx. It is a
view which Chesterton would always have dismissed with the contempt
it deserves. Both he and Belloc saw as the determining factor in
history, because it is the determining factor in human life, the free
will of man. This does not mean that they would deny that the
economic factor has often been powerful in conquering man's liberty,
or a motive in its exercise. But Chesterton regarded the present age
as a diseased one precisely because the money motive held so
disproportionate a place in it. He looked back to the past and saw
the world of today as almost unique in that respect. He looked
forward to the future and hoped for a release from it.
And as he looked back into the past he saw something in the history
of mankind far stronger than the economic motive--whether that mean
the strife for wealth or the mere struggle for subsistence. He saw
the all-pervading power of religion, which in bygone ages had
presided over man's activities and turned the exercise of that most
noble faculty free-will to the building of a civilization today
undreamed of.
But in 1914 it was easier to get away from the economic
interpretation of history than it was to overcome another difficulty
in the minds of those who had not the Chesterton vision of Europe,
and to whom it seemed that in a war between nations it was extremely
likely that all parties were more or less equally to blame.
"History," said Chesterton, "tends to be a façade of faded
picturesqueness for most of those who have not specially studied it:
a more or less monochrome background for the drama of their own day."
But the nature of that background and the vision of today's drama
will vary with the varying angle of historic vision.
There were two possible meanings for the statement that all nations
were to blame for the world war. All nations had gone away from God.
Motives of personal and national greed had ousted the old ideal of
Christendom. It might roughly be said that no nation was seriously
trying to seek the Kingdom of God and His Justice. International
Finance had become a shadow resting on all the earth, and it could
not have got this power if Governments had been governing solely for
the good of their peoples. "Bow down your heads before God," is the
invocation constantly used in the Missal during the penitential
season of Lent and the government of every nation needed this call to
repentance.
With this interpretation Chesterton would have agreed. All nations
were to blame for the predisposing causes that made a world-war
possible. But when we come to the question of actual responsibility
for making this particular war, the statement means something very
different and something with which Chesterton was prepared to join
issue. Against him those who disliked France or England, and saw the
history of those two countries as a history of Imperialism, were
saying: if Germany had not attacked France, France would have
attacked Germany; or: England would have been equally treacherous if
it had paid her--look at the Treaty of Limerick.
Chesterton kept imploring people simply to look at the facts. Germany
had in fact broken her word to France and attacked her. France had
not attacked Germany. Germany had invaded Belgium. England had not
invaded Holland "to seize a naval and commercial advantage; and
whether they say that we wished to do it in our greed or feared to do
it in our cowardice, the fact remains that we did not do it. Unless
this common-sense principle be kept in view, I cannot conceive how
any quarrel can possibly be judged. A contract may be made between
two persons solely for material advantage on each side: but the moral
advantage is still generally supposed to lie with the person who
keeps the contract."*
[* _The Barbarism of Berlin_, 15-16.]
The promise and the vow were fundamental to Chesterton's view of
human life. Discussing divorce he claims as essential to manhood the
right to bind oneself and to be taken at one's word. The marriage vow
was almost the only vow that remained out of the whole mediaeval
conception of chivalry and he could not endure to see it set at
nought. But even in the modern world there still remained some notion
of the sacredness of a solemn promise.
"It is plain that the promise, or extension of responsibility through
time, is what chiefly distinguishes us, I will not say from savages,
but from brutes and reptiles. This was noted by the shrewdness of the
Old Testament, when it summed up the dark, irresponsible enormity of
Leviathan in the words, 'Will he make a pact with thee?' . . . The
vow is to the man what the song is to the bird, or the bark to the
dog; his voice whereby he is known."* There were two chief marks
whereby it seemed to Chesterton that the Prussian invasion of Belgium
was fundamentally an attack on civilization. Contempt for a promise
was the first. He called it the war on the word.
[* Ibid., 32-33.]
The other mark of barbarism he called the refusal of reciprocity.
"The Prussians," he wrote, "had been told by their literary men that
everything depends upon Mood: and by their politicians that all
arrangements dissolve before 'necessity.'"* This was not merely a
contempt for the word but also an assumption that German necessity
was like no other necessity because the German "cannot get outside
the idea that he, because he is he and not you, is free to break the
law; and also to appeal to the law." Thus the Kaiser at once violated
the Hague Convention openly himself and wrote to the President of the
United States to complain that the Allies were violating it. "For
this principle of a quite unproved racial supremacy is the last and
worst of the refusals of reciprocity."**
[* Ibid., 37.]
[* Ibid., p. 60.]
If these two ideas were allowed to prevail they must destroy
civilization and so to Chesterton the war was a crusade and, to his
profound joy, was understood as such by the people of England. The
democratic spirit of our country "is rather unusually sluggish and
far below the surface. And the most genuine and purely popular
movement that we have had since the Chartists has been the enlistment
for this war." Chesterton loved the heroic humour of the trenches:
the cry of "Early Doors" from the boys rushing on death; the term
Blighty for England and congratulations on a severe wound as a "good
Blighty one"; the song under showers of bullets, "When It's Raining
Keep Your Umbrella Up." The English, he once said, had no religion
left except their sense of humour but I think he meant that they hung
out humour somewhat defiantly as a smoke-screen for other things.
Anyhow he doubted neither that the war was worth winning nor that it
could be won by our soldiers and sailors. And with the soldiers and
sailors stood the munition workers and the Trades Unions which had
sacrificed their cherished rights for the war period. If the only
danger to England was on the Home Front it was not, in his eyes, to
be found in the mass of the nation. Nor was he at first too
apprehensive of the actions of the Government. Asquith and Sir Edward
Grey might have been slow in declaring war but both were patriotic
Englishmen and with them stood with equal patriotism the mass of the
governing classes. If as has later been said the war had really been
brought about by English political and financial interests, it is
strange that Lord Desborough, head of the London house of J. P.
Morgan and a leading financier of England, should have lost his two
elder sons and the Prime Minister his eldest.
But the _New Witness_ did see two dangers at home which might
jeopardise the success of our armies in the field and bring about a
premature and dishonourable peace. These were international finance,
and the Press magnates.
Nothing so reminds me of how we were all feeling about the Daily
papers just then as finding this letter to E. C. Bentley (dated July
20, 1915):
I was delighted to hear from you though very sorry to hear you have
been bad. I mean physically bad; morally and intellectually you have
evidently been very good. Seriously, I think you have done something
to save this country; for the _Telegraph_ continues to be almost the
only paper that the crisis has sobered and not tipsified. I take it
in myself and know many others who do so. Part of the fun about
'Armsworth is that quite a lot of old ladies of both sexes go about
distinguishing elaborately between the _Daily Mail_ and the _Times_.*
It is a stagnant state of mind created in people who have never been
forced by revolution or other public peril to distinguish between the
things they are used to and the thoughts for which the things are
supposed to stand. If you printed the whole of Ally Sloper's Half
Holiday and called it the Athenaeum, they would read it with unmoved
faces. So long as St. Paul's Cathedral stood in the usual place they
would not mind if there was a Crescent on top of it instead of a
Cross. By the way, I see the Germans have actually done what I
described as a wild fancy in the Flying Inn; combined the Cross and
the Crescent in one ornamental symbol. . . .
[* Both these papers were then owned by the same man--Alfred
Harmsworth, who had become Lord Northcliffe.]
I am inclined to think that the attack upon Harmsworth which the _New
Witness_ developed attributed too much to purposed malice and did not
allow enough for the journalistic craving for news and for "scoops."
Probably some of the posters and articles to which they objected were
not the work of Lord Northcliffe but of some young journalist anxious
to sell his paper. Nevertheless the _New Witness_ attack was not only
largely justified but was also remarkably courageous. The staff of
the _New Witness_ were themselves journalists and men of letters. In
both capacities as powerful a newspaper owner as Lord Northcliffe
could damage them severely--and did. Never henceforward would any of
them be able to write in one of his numerous papers, never would one
of their books receive a favourable review. For Belloc did not
hesitate to call Lord Northcliffe a traitor for the way in which he
had attacked Kitchener, while Cecil amused himself by reviewing and
pointing out the illiteracy of that strange peer's own writing. Later
too when the Harmsworth papers were in full cry for the fall of
Asquith and the substitution of Lloyd George, the _New Witness_ took
a strong stand. They pointed out too the way in which censorship was
exercised against the smaller newspapers while the Northcliffe press
seemed immune. Here was the fundamental danger. Whatever the motive,
some of the attacks and articles printed were undoubtedly calculated,
in military language, to cause alarm and despondency. It was
appalling that in time of war this should be permitted; and, as they
saw it, permitted because the Harmsworth millions had been used to
secure a hold on certain politicians. To the _New Witness_ "George"
was simply Harmsworth's man.
Meanwhile at Easter, 1916, came the awful tragedy of the Irish
rising. Chesterton had fallen into the sleep of his long illness soon
after the splendid gesture in which Redmond had offered the sword of
Ireland to the allied cause. And there seems little doubt that in
making this offer Redmond had with him, for the last time, the people
of Ireland. Recruiting began well but that awful fate of stupidity
that seems to overtake every Englishman dealing with Ireland even now
was overwhelming the two countries. Sir Francis Vane, an Irish
officer in the British Army, described in a series of articles in the
_New Witness_ the blunders made in the recruiting campaign: such
things as prominent Protestant Unionists being brought to the fore,
national sentiment discouraged, waving of Union Jacks, appeals to
patriotism not for Ireland but for England.
Vane himself found his attempt at recruiting on national lines
unpopular with authority and in the midst of his successful effort
was recalled to England. Still, though recruiting slackened, the
cause of the Allies remained in Ireland the popular cause and the
Easter Rising was the work only of a handful of men. Its immediate
cause was the fact that although the Home Rule Bill had been passed
and was on the Statute Book its operation was again deferred. All
Irishmen saw this as a breach of faith yet the majority were not at
that time behind the rising. The severity of its repression turned
it almost overnight into a national cause and erected yet another
barrier against friendship between England and Ireland.
For this friendship Chesterton longed ardently and worked
passionately, nor did he believe the barriers insurmountable. He even
held that there was between the people of the two countries a natural
amity. "There is something common to all the Britons, which even
Acts of Union have not torn asunder. The nearest name for it is
insecurity, something fitting in men walking on cliffs and the verge
of things. Adventure, a lonely taste in liberty, a humour without
wit, perplex their critics and perplex themselves. Their souls are
fretted like their coasts."* The Irish and the English had suffered
oppression at the same hands--those of the rulers of England. If
Prussian soldiers had been used against Irish peasants, so too had
they been used against English Chartists. A typical Englishman,
William Cobbett, had suffered fine and long imprisonment because of
his protest against the flogging of an English soldier by a German
mercenary.
[* _A Short History of England_, p. 7.]
"Telling the truth about Ireland," wrote Chesterton, "is not very
pleasant to a patriotic Englishman; but it is very patriotic."* For
the lack of the essential patriotism of admitting past sin the rulers
of England were perpetuating an evil that many of them sincerely
desired to end. For this was a case where the right road could only
be found by retracing the steps of a long road of wrong.
[* _The Crimes of England_, p. 57.]
Before the end of the war G.K. visited Ireland and in the book that
he wrote after this visit may be found his best analysis of all this
matter. Ireland, he believed, was making a mistake in not throwing
herself into the cause of the defeat of Germany, not because she owed
anything to England but because of what Prussia was and of what
Europe meant. Ireland had been the friend of France and the enemy of
Prussia long before England had been either; she would do well to
hold to her ancient allegiance.
It was true that Ireland had been betrayed by the Liberal promise of
Home Rule--but the men who betrayed her were the Marconi men! Redmond
had made the great mistake of his career when from motives of
patriotism for Ireland he had helped the party hacks of the
Government Committee to whitewash these men, who had gone on to
betray Ireland as they were then betraying England. England too
needed Home Rule. England too needed deliverance from her "degenerate
and unworthy governing class."
There are a few pages in _Irish Impressions_--now out of print-which
find their place here in illustration of what he meant by his
championship of nationality:
A brilliant writer . . . once propounded to me his highly personal
and even perverse type of internationalism by saying, as a sort of
unanswerable challenge, "Wouldn't you rather be ruled by Goethe than
by Walter Long?" I replied that words could not express the wild love
and loyalty I should feel for Mr. Walter Long, if the only
alternative were Goethe. I could not have put my own national case in
a clearer or more compact form. I might occasionally feel inclined to
kill Mr. Long; but under the approaching shadow of Goethe, I should
feel more inclined to kill myself. That is the deathly element in
denationalisation; that it poisons life itself, the most real of all
realities. . . .
Some people felt it an affectation that the Irish should put up their
street signs in Gaelic but G.K. defended it. "It is well to remember
that these things, which we also walk past every day, are exactly the
sort of things that always have, in the nameless fashion, the
national note."
It is this sensation of stemming a stream, of ten thousand things
all pouring one way, labels, titles, monuments, metaphors, modes of
address, assumptions in controversy, that make an Englishman in
Ireland know that he is in a strange land. Nor is he merely
bewildered, as among a medley of strange things. On the contrary, if
he has any sense, he soon finds them united and simplified to a
single impression, as if he were talking to a strange person. He
cannot define it, because nobody can define a person, and nobody can
define a nation. He can only see it, smell it, hear it, handle it,
bump into it, fall over it, kill it, be killed for it, or be damned
for doing it wrong. He must be content with these mere hints of its
existence; but he cannot define it, because it is like a person, and
no book of logic will undertake to define Aunt Jane or Uncle William.
We can only say, with more or less mournful conviction, that if Aunt
Jane is not a person, there is no such thing as a person. And I say
with equal conviction that if Ireland is not a nation, there is no
such thing as a nation. . . .
* * * *
In September 1916 Cecil Chesterton bade farewell to the _New
Witness_. He was in the army as a private in the East in the East
Surreys, and G.K. took over the editorship.
I like Chesterton's paper, the _New Witness_ [wrote an American
journalist in the _New York Tribune_ (no, _not_ yet Herald-Tribune)],
since G.K.C. has taken it over. . . . Gilbert Chesterton seems to me
the best thing England has produced since Dickens. . . . I like the
things he believes in, and I hate sociological experts and
prohibitionists and Uhlan officers, which are the things he hates. I
feel in him that a very honest man is speaking. . . . I like his
impudence to Northcliffe. . . . As a journalist Chesterton gets only
about a quarter of himself into action. But even a quarter of
Chesterton is good measure. . . . He works very hard at his
journalism. That is why he doesn't do it as well as his careless
things, which give him fun. But for all that there is no other
editorial page in England or the United States written with the snap,
wit and honest humanity of his paragraphs. I hope he won't blunt
himself by overwork. It would be an international loss if that sane,
jolly mind is bent to routine. England has need of him.
The overwork and the high quality of it were alike undeniable, but
after the long repose of his illness G.K. seemed like a giant
refreshed and ready to run his course. Each week's _New Witness_ had
an Editorial, besides the paragraphs of which the _New York Tribune_
speaks (not all of these however written by himself), and a signed
article under the suggestive general heading "At the Sign of the
World's End." The difference between articles and a real book, and
the degree of work needed to turn the one into the other, may be seen
if the essays on Marriage in the paper be compared with _The
Superstition of Divorce_ for which they furnished material, and those
on Ireland with _Irish Impressions_. There were besides very many
articles in other papers English and American and he was also writing
his _History of England_.
If all Englishmen had kept the same unwavering gaze at reality as
Chesterton much of what he called "the rather feeble-minded reaction"
that followed the war might have been avoided and with it the advent
of Hitler. Particularly he opposed the tendency to call "Kaiserism"
what is now called "Hitlerism" and should always be called
Prussianism. While agreeing that care should be taken not to write of
German atrocities that could not be substantiated he insisted that
there was no ground for forgetting or ignoring the findings of the
American enquiry in Belgium which had established more than enough.
These horrors, the bombing of civilians, shelling of open towns and
sinking of passenger ships culminating with the Lusitania, were in
the main what brought America into the war. Here, as with England,
Chesterton did not admit as primary what has since been so
exclusively stressed--the economic motive. Here as with England he
took the volunteer army as one great proof of the will of a Nation.
And those of us who remember can testify that in America as in
England the will of the people was ahead of the decision of the
politicians.
On one point Chesterton's articles have a special interest: the
question of reprisals. When the Germans broke yet another of the
promises of the Hague Convention and initiated the use of poison gas
there was much discussion as to the ethics of reprisals and G.K. used
against reprisals two arguments one of which was a rare example of a
fallacy in his arguments. If a wasp stings you, he said, you do not
sting back. No, we might reply, but you squash it--you have as a man
an advantage over a wasp and so do not need to use its own weapons to
defeat it.
His other argument is far more powerful--is indeed overwhelming. If
you use, even as reprisals, unlawful weapons, it is harder to prove
you did not initiate them. And I remember well another feeling at the
time expressed by G.K. which was I believe that of the majority of
English people--if we use these things, if we accept the Prussian
gospel of "frightfulness" then spiritually we have lost the war.
Spiritually Prussia has conquered: as she has engulfed the old
Germanies and, first imposing her rule, then gained acceptance of her
ideas, so it may be with us. Ideas are everything and the barbarians
destroy more with ideas even than by material weapons, horrible as
these may be.
Inclined at first to hope for the fruits of democracy from the
Russian revolution Chesterton was soon being reproached by H. G.
Wells for "dirty" suspiciousness about the Bolshevik leaders and
their motives. But the collapse of Russia and the defeat of Rumania
alike only strengthened the necessity of the fight to a finish with
Prussia that became as the months passed the absorbing aim of the
_New Witness_. In the treaties respectively of Brest-Litovsk and
Bukarest Germany imposed upon these two countries incredibly harsh
terms.
Thus wrote the _New Witness_ after the Treaty of Bukarest:
We should like to ask the Pacifists and Semi-Pacifists, who are
fond of official documents, if they have read the White Paper dealing
with the plain facts about the peace with Roumania. If they have a
single word to say on the subject, we should be much interested to
hear what it is. It makes absolutely plain two facts, both of which
have a sort of frightful humour after all the humanitarian talk about
no annexations and no indemnities. The first is that the conquerors
have annexed in a direct and personal sense beyond what is commonly
meant by annexation; the second is that they have indemnified
themselves by an immediate coercion and extortion, which is generally
veiled by the forms of a recognised indemnity. In annexing some nine
thousand square miles, they have been particular to attach whole
forests to the hunting-grounds of Hungarian nobles and the timber
of Hungarian wood merchants; not merely annexing as a conqueror
annexes, but rather stealing as an individual steals. Further, the
fun growing fast and furious, they have taken country containing a
hundred and thirty thousand Roumanians, merely because it is
uninhabited land. For the second point, we often speak figuratively
of tyrants enslaving a country; but Teutons do literally enslave. All
the males of the occupied land, which happens to be two-thirds of
Roumania, are driven to work on pain of death or prison. All this is
clear and satisfactory enough; but the White Paper keeps the best to
the last. It is this sentence we would commend to our peaceful
friends: "The German delegates informed the Roumanian delegates, who
were appalled at being required to accept such conditions, that they
would appreciate their moderation when they knew those which would be
imposed on the Western Powers after the victory of the Central
Empires."
The reminder was needed. Far less than most people was Chesterton
subject to that weakness of the human spirit that brings weariness in
sustained effort and premature relaxation. Prussia had not, he said,
shown any evidence of repentance--merely of regret for lack of
success. The Kaiser said he had not wanted this war. No, said
Chesterton, he wanted a very different war. Chesterton might and did
say later that he himself had wanted a very different peace--the
destruction of Prussia, the reconstruction of the old German
states--but at present he wanted only to fight on until this became
possible.
I do not think he ever hated anybody--but he did hate Prussianism as
the "wickedness that hindered loving," and he had no liking for "the
patronizing pacifism of the gentleman [it was Romain Rolland] who
took a holiday in the Alps and said he was above the struggle; as if
there were any Alp from which the soul can look down on Calvary.
There is, indeed, one mountain among them that might be very
appropriate to so detached an observer--the mountain named after
Pilate, the man who washed his hands."*
[* _Uses of Diversity_, p. 40 (Fountain Library)]
His keen imagination could visualize the sufferings caused by war.
Vicariously he knew something of the life of the trenches, for Cecil
like many another C. Man* had managed to get to France. A delightful
article on Comradeship shows, what letters from soldiers confirm, how
perfectly at home was Private Chesterton among his fellows and how
much loved by them.
[* English soldiers are classed A, B, or C, according to their degree
of physical fitness, and Cecil was in Class C.]
I can understand a pagan, but not a Christian, who simply dismisses
the suffering of our soldiers as useless. He is like Dr. Hyde
scorning Father Damien or like those who cried at the foot of the
Cross: He saved others, Himself He cannot save. They saved others
these men, their suffering was that of the human race whose head is
Christ. With Him they bore, even if they knew it not, that mysterious
burden of humanity that makes some men question God's existence but
draws others into conscious membership of His mystical body. Many
were so drawn in those days and there seemed a new lifting up of the
Cross. The _New Witness_ does, I think, lack one note a little. They
were too busy hating Prussianism to give thought to the Christian
command to love Prussians, whose sufferings too were those of
humanity.
Into the opposite error there was no risk that they would fall. Never
for them would heroism be belittled in the name of the very horrors
it was encountering. In one article Belloc touched on this strange
perversion and reminded his readers that the power to ravage and
destroy was not really a new result of modern machinery. Attila and
his Huns had inflicted even greater devastation and had left a desert
behind them. Barbarism in its nature was destructive and we were
encountering barbarism. In so doing we were acting the part of
Christian men.
But the old fights still had to be waged on the home front: against
the money power and against what the _New Witness_ called Prussianism
at home. Unceasingly they battled for fair treatment for soldiers'
wives and children, for freedom from unmeaning and unnecessary
regulations, against the profiteering by big firms and the consequent
crushing of small. About two thousand small butchers' shops for
instance had to close at the very beginning of the war owing to a
cornering of supplies by the large firms. Against this and all the
ramifications of the meat "scandal" the _New Witness_ struggled,
publishing, they claimed, facts unpublished elsewhere and inspiring
questions in the House of Commons. Belloc's irony, Chesterton's wit,
point these articles and make them worth reading as literature; and
there is some of the old fooling. A further series on the Servile
State is attacked by Shaw who thinks that Belloc, since he is not a
Socialist, must be a follower of Herbert Spencer! G.K. accounts for
this by saying that Shaw had not read Belloc. "How do you know,"
retorts Shaw, "it is not Herbert Spencer I have not read? Suppose you
had your choice of not reading a book by Belloc and not reading one
by Spencer which would you choose? Hang it all, be reasonable."
The economic front was never abandoned and the paper continued to
attack all forms of Socialism including the recreation of Bumble by
Mrs. Sidney Webb, with all the regimentation of the poor "for their
own good" that Bumble represented. The inner secrets of the Fabian
Office are unfolded by Shaw in a letter to Gilbert (dated Aug. 6,
1917).
MY DEAR G.K.C.
If you want to expose a scandalous orgy in the _New Witness_, you
may depend on the following as being a correct account by an eye
witness.
You know that there is a body called The Fabian Research
Department, of which I have the hollow honour to be Perpetual Grand,
the real moving spirit being Mrs. Sidney Webb. A large number of
innocent young men and women are attracted to this body by promises
of employment by the said Mrs. S.W. in works of unlimited and
inspiring uplift, such as are unceasingly denounced, along with
Marconi and other matters, in your well-written organ.
Well, Mrs. Sidney Webb summoned all these young things to an
uplifting At Home at the Fabian office lately. They came in crowds
and sat at her feet whilst she prophesied unto them, with occasional
comic relief from the unfortunate Perpetual Grand. At the decent hour
of ten o'clock, she bade them good night and withdrew to her own
residence and to bed. For some accidental reason or other I lingered
until, as I thought, all the young things had gone home. I should
explain that I was in the two pair back. At last I started to go home
myself. As I descended the stairs I was stunned by the most infernal
din I have ever heard, even at the front, coming from the Fabian
Hall, which would otherwise be the back yard. On rushing to this
temple I found the young enthusiasts sprawling over tables, over
radiators, over everything except chairs, in a state of scandalous
abandonment, roaring at the tops of their voices and in a quite
unintelligible manner a string of presumably obscene songs,
accompanied on the piano with frantic gestures and astonishing
musical skill by a man whom I had always regarded as a respectable
Fabian Researcher, but who now turned out to be a Demon Pianist
out-Heroding (my secretary put in two rs, and explains that she was
thinking of Harrods) Svengali. A horribly sacrilegious character was
given to the proceedings by the fact that the tune they were singing
when I entered was Luther's hymn _Eine Feste Burg ist Unser Gott_. As
they went on (for I regret to say that my presence exercised no
restraint whatever) they sang their extraordinary and
incomprehensible litany to every tune, however august its
associations, which happened to fit it. These, if you please, are the
solemn and sour neophytes whose puritanical influence has kept you in
dread for so many years.
But I have not told you the worst. Before I fled from the building
I did at last discover what words it was they were singing. When it
first flashed on me, I really could not believe it. But at the end of
the next verse no doubt or error was possible. The young maenad
nearest me was concluding every strophe by shrieking that she didn't
care where the water went if it didn't get into the wine.* Now you
know.
[* The refrain of a poem in _The Flying Inn_.]
I have since ascertained that a breviary of this Black Mass can be
obtained at the Fabian Office, with notes of the numbers of the hymns
Ancient and Modern, and all the airs sacred and profane, to which
your poems have been set.
This letter needs no answer--indeed, admits of none. I leave you to
your reflections.
Ever
G.B.S.
"The Shaw Worm Turns on Wells" was a headline in the _New Witness_
over a vigorous and light-hearted attack. The others were apt to
score off Wells in these exchanges because he lost light-heartedness
and became irritable. Even with Gilbert he sometimes broke out,
although in a calmer moment he told Shaw that to get angry with
Chesterton was an impossibility. With Cecil Chesterton it was only
too easy to get angry at any rate as he appeared in the _New Witness_.
But I think when he heard Cecil was in France Wells must have
regretted one of the letters he wrote to Gilbert, just before the
change of editorship.
It was curious, the contrast between the genial personality so loved
by his friends and the waspishness so often shown by Cecil and his
staff in the columns of the paper. "His extraordinary personality,"
writes E. S. P. Haynes, "wonderfully penetrated the eccentricity of
his appearance. His features were slightly fantastic and his voice
was as loudly discordant as his laughter; but the real charm and
generosity of his character were so transparent that one never seemed
to be conscious of the physical medium."
Yet with all my sympathy for many of the _New Witness_ ideas my
nerves jangle when I read the volumes of Cecil's editorship, and I
think jangled nerves explain if they do not excuse this outburst by
Wells:
MY DEAR G.K.C.
Haven't I on the whole behaved decently to you? Haven't I always
shown a reasonable civility to you and your brother and Belloc?
Haven't I betrayed at times a certain affection for you? Very well,
then you will understand that I don't start out to pick a needless
quarrel with the _New Witness_ crowd. But this business of the
Hueffer book in the _New Witness_ makes me sick. Some disgusting
little greaser named ---- has been allowed to insult old F.M.H. in a
series of letters that make me ashamed of my species. Hueffer has
many faults no doubt but firstly he's poor, secondly he's notoriously
unhappy and in a most miserable position, thirdly he's a better
writer than any of your little crowd and fourthly, instead of
pleading his age and his fat and taking refuge from service in a
greasy obesity as your Brother has done, he is serving his country.
His book is a great book and ---- just lies about it--I guess he's a
dirty minded priest or some such unclean thing--when he says it is
the story of a stallion and so forth. The whole outbreak is so
envious, so base, so cat-in-the-gutter-spitting-at-the-passer-by,
that I will never let the _New Witness_ into the house again.
Regretfully yours,
H. G. WELLS.
Gilbert replied:
11 Warwick Gardens, Kensington W.
MY DEAR WELLS,
As you will see by the above address I have been away from home;
and must apologise for delay; I am returning almost at once, however.
Most certainly you have always been a good friend to me, and I have
always tried to express my pride in the fact. I know enough of your
good qualities in other ways to put down everything in your last
letter to an emotion of loyalty to another friend. Any quarrel
between us will not come from me; and I confess I am puzzled as to
why it should come from you, merely because somebody else who is not
I dislikes a book by somebody else who is not you, and says so in an
article for which neither of us is even remotely responsible. I very
often disagree with the criticisms of ----; I do not know anything
about the book or the circumstances of Hueffer. I cannot help being
entertained by your vision of ----, who is not a priest, but a poor
journalist, and I believe a Free-Thinker. But whoever he may be (and
I hardly think the problem worth a row between you and me) he has a
right to justice: and you must surely see that even if it were my
paper, I could not either tell a man to find a book good when he
found it bad, or sack him for a point of taste which has nothing in
the world to do with the principles of the paper. For the rest,
Haynes represents the _New Witness_ much more than a reviewer does,
being both on the board and the staff; and he has put your view in
the paper--I cannot help thinking with a more convincing logic. Don't
you sometimes find it convenient, even in my case, that your friends
are less touchy than you are?
By all means drop any paper you dislike, though if you do it for
every book review you think unfair, I fear your admirable range of
modern knowledge will be narrowed. Of the paper in question I will
merely say this. My brother and in some degree the few who have
worked with him have undertaken a task of public criticism for the
sake of which they stand in permanent danger of imprisonment and
personal ruin. We are incessantly reminded of this danger; and no one
has ever dared to suggest that we have any motive but the best. If
you should ever think it right to undertake such a venture, you will
find that the number of those who will commit their journalistic
fortunes to it is singularly small: and includes some who have more
courage and honesty than acquaintance with the hierarchy of art. It
is even likely that you will come to think the latter less important.
Yours, sans rancune,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
P.S. On re-reading your letter in order to be as fair as I am
trying to be, I observe you specially mention ----'s letters. You
will see, of course, that this does not make any difference; to stop
letters would be to stop Haynes' letter and others on your side; and
these could not be printed without permitting a rejoinder. I post
this from Beaconsfield, where anything further will find me.
It ended as all quarrels did that anyone started with Gilbert:
DEAR G.K.C.
Also I can't quarrel with you. But the Hueffer business aroused my
long dormant moral indignation and I let fly at the most sensitive
part of the _New Witness_ constellation, the only part about whose
soul I care. I hate these attacks on rather miserable exceptional
people like Hueffer and Masterman. I know these aren't perfect men
but their defects make quite sufficient hells for them without these
public peltings. I suppose I ought to have written to C.C. instead of
to you. One of these days I will go and have a heart to heart talk to
him. Only I always get so amiable when I meet a man. He, C.C., needs
it--I mean the talking to.
Yours ever
H.G.
Through the war's progress Wells appeared to Chesterton to be
expressing with a powerful and individual genius not his own
considered views but the reactions of public opinion. As Mr. Britling
he saw the war through, and even called it "a war to end war." As Mr.
Clissold he asked of what use it had all been. Chesterton speaks of
him as a "rather unstable genius," and the genius and instability
alike can be seen in his meteor appearances in the _New Witness_ and
in his books. Several of these he sent to Gilbert, who wrote (Sept.
12, 1917):
I have been trying for a long time, though perpetually baulked
with business and journalism, to write and thank you for sending me,
in so generous a manner, your ever interesting and delightful books;
especially as divisions touching the things we care most about, drive
me, every time I review them, to deal more in controversy and less in
compliment than I intend. The truth and the trouble, is that both of
us are only too conscious that there is a Great War going on all the
time on the purely mental plane; and I cannot help thinking your view
is often a heresy; and I know only too well that when you lead it, it
is likely to be a large heresy. I fear that being didactic means
being disproportionate; and that the temptation to attack something I
think I can correct leads to missing (in my writing, not in my
reading) a thousand fine things that I could never imitate. It is
lucky for me that you are not very often a book-reviewer, when I
bring out my own shapeless and amateurish books.
In the _Autobiography_ G.K. calls Wells a sportive but spiritual
child of Huxley. He delighted in his wit and swiftness of mind, but
he summarized in the same book the quality which runs through all his
work.
I have always thought that he re-acted too swiftly to everything;
possibly as a part of the swiftness of his natural genius. I have
never ceased to admire and sympathise; but I think he has always been
too much in a state of reaction. To use the name which would probably
annoy him most, I think he is a permanent reactionary. Whenever I met
him, he seemed to be coming from somewhere, rather than going
anywhere. . . . And he was so often nearly right, that his movements
irritated me like the sight of somebody's hat being perpetually
washed up by the sea and never touching the shore. But I think he
thought that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the
mind. Whereas I am incurably convinced that the object of opening the
mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
No change of mood in the public meant any change in the _New Witness_
group. In a powerful article in reply to an old friend who asked for
peace because the war was destroying freedom, Belloc told him that
freedom had gone long since for the mass of Englishmen. "How many,"
wrote G.K., "pacifists or semi-pacifists . . . resisted the detailed
destruction of all liberty for the populace _before the war?_ It is a
bitter choice between freedom and patriotism, but how many fought for
freedom before it gave them the chance of fighting against
Patriotism?"*
[* _New Witness_, May 31, 1917.]
Again and again they touched the spot on the question of trading with
the enemy. In this as in all their attacks they made one point of
enormous importance. Do not, they said, look for traitors and spies
among waiters and small traders--look up, not down. You will find
them in high places if you will dare to look. They dared.
And here came in once more what was commonly regarded as a strange
crank peculiar to the Chesterbelloc--their outlook towards Jews.
Usually those who referred to it spoke of a religious prejudice.
Again and again the _New Witness_, not always patiently but with
unvarying clarity, explained. They had no religious prejudice against
Jews, they had not even a racial prejudice against Jews (though this
I think was true only of some of the staff). Their only prejudice was
against the pretence that a Jew was an Englishman.
It was undeniable that there were (for example) Rothschilds in Paris,
London and Berlin, all related and conducting an international family
banking business. There were d'Erlangers in London and Paris
(pronounced in the French style) whose cousins were Erlangers
(pronounced in the German style) in Berlin. How, the _New Witness_
asked, could members of such families feel the same about the war as
an Englishman? They could not, to put it at its lowest, have the same
primary loyalty to England or to Germany either. Their primary
loyalty must be, indeed it ought to be, to their own race and kindred.
Yet this was surely an excessive simplification. We have only to
remember that lately a son of the d'Erlanger house died gallantly as
an English airman: we have only to remember the thousands of Jews who
fought in our ranks in this war and the last. Very many Jews _are_
patriotic for England and for America: many were patriotic for
Germany. This, no doubt, makes the problem more acute, but any
discussion is nonsense that omits this certain fact. There are Jews
patriotic first for the country they live in, the country that gave
them home and citizenship, of which often their wives and mothers are
descended; there are others who feel that Jewry is their _patria_.
This was the fact the _New Witness_ could never forget. A Jew might
not be specially pro-German in feeling, yet his actions might help
Germany by being pro-Jewish. International Jewish trading _was_
trading with the enemy and was to a very large extent continuing in
spite of assurances to the contrary. Moreover international finance
was getting nervous over the continuance of the war as a menace to
its own future: it wanted peace, a peace that should still leave it
in possession in this country--and in Germany. Gilbert Chesterton was
passionately determined to cast it out.
He was a Zionist. He wished for the Jewish people the peaceful
possession of a country of their own, but he demanded urgently that
they should no longer be allowed to govern his country. Marconi still
obsessed him, and the surrender of English politics to the money
power seemed to him to represent as great a danger for the future as
Prussianism. For a moment the two dangers were the one danger, and
against them was set the people of England.
It was at this moment that Chesterton published his epic of the
English people which he called a History. Frank Swinnerton has told*
how this book came to be written. Chatto & Windus (for whom
Swinnerton worked) had asked G.K. to write a history of England: he
refused "on the ground that he was no historian." Later he signed a
contract with the same publishers for a book of essays, then
discovered that he was already under contract to give this book to
another firm. He asked Chatto & Windus to cancel their contract and
offered to write something else for them. Swinnerton's account
continues:
[* _Georgian Scene_, p. 93.]
The publishers, concealing jubilation, sternly recalled their
original proposal for a short history of England. Shrieks and groans
were distinctly heard all the way from Beaconsfield, but the promise
was kept. The _Short History of England_ was what Chesterton must
have called a wild and awful success. It probably has been the most
generally read of all his books. But while the credit for it is his,
he must not be blamed for impudence in essaying history, when the
inspiration arose in another's head (not mine) and when in fact no
man ever went to the writing of a literary work with less confidence.
You can find no dates in this History and a minimum of facts, but you
can find vision. The history professors at London University said to
Lawrence Solomon that it was full of inaccuracies, yet "He's got
something we hadn't got." G.K. might well have borrowed from Newman
and called it an Essay in Aid of a History of England. He showed
"something of the great moral change which turned the Roman Empire
into Christendom, by which each great thing, to which it afterwards
gave birth, was baptised into a promise or at least into a hope of
permanence. It may be that each of its ideas was, as it were, mixed
with immortality."
The English people had been free and happy as a part of this great
thing, cultivating their own land, establishing by their Guilds a
social scheme based upon "pity and a craving for equality," building
cathedrals and worshipping God, with the "Holy Land much nearer to a
plain man's house than Westminster, and immeasurably nearer than
Runnymede." All life was made lovely by "this prodigious presence of
a religious transfiguration in common life" and only began to darken
with the successful "Rebellion of the Rich" under Henry VIII.
Probably too big a proportion is given by Chesterton to the great
crime that overshadowed for him the rest of English history. Yet he
does justice in brilliant phrasing to the Eighteenth Century Whigs:
still more to Chatham and Burke and to Dr. Johnson whom he so loved
and to whom he was often compared. But supremely he loved Nelson "who
dies with his stars on his bosom and his heart upon his sleeve." For
Nelson was the type and chief exemplar of the ordinary Englishman.
. . . the very hour of his death, the very name of his ship, are
touched with that epic completeness which critics call the long arm
of coincidence and prophets the hand of God. His very faults and
failures were heroic, not in a loose but in a classic sense; in that
he fell only like the legendary heroes, weakened by a woman, not
foiled by any foe among men. And he remains the incarnation of a
spirit in the English that is purely poetic; so poetic that it
fancies itself a thousand things, and sometimes even fancies itself
prosaic. At a recent date, in an age of reason, in a country already
calling itself dull and business-like, with top-hats and factory
chimneys already beginning to rise like towers of funereal
efficiency, this country clergyman's son moved to the last in a
luminous cloud, and acted a fairy tale. He shall remain as a lesson
to those who do not understand England, and a mystery to those who
think they do. In outward action he led his ships to victory and died
upon a foreign sea; but symbolically he established something
indescribable and intimate, something that sounds like a native
proverb; he was the man who burnt his ships, and who for ever set the
Thames on fire.
The _Ballad of the White Horse_ had been a poem about English legends
and origins. The _History_ too was called a poem by the reviewers.
And it was. It was a poem about Falstaff and Sam Weller and even the
Artful Dodger who in so many British colonies had turned into
Robinson Crusoe. His rulers had tried to educate him, they had tried
to Germanize him and to teach him "to embrace a Saxon because he was
the other half of an Anglo-Saxon." All English culture had been based
for a century and more on ardent admiration for German _Kultur_. And
then--
. . . the day came, and the ignorant fellow found he had other
things to learn. And he was quicker than his educated countrymen,
for he had nothing to unlearn.
He in whose honour all had been said and sung, stirred, and
stepped across the border of Belgium. Then were spread out before
men's eyes all the beauties of his culture and all the benefits of his
organization; then we beheld under a lifting daybreak what light
we had followed and after what image we had laboured to refashion
ourselves. Nor in any story of mankind has the irony of God chosen
the foolish things so catastrophically to confound the wise. For the
common crowd of poor and ignorant Englishmen, because they only
knew that they were Englishmen, burst through the filthy cobwebs
of four hundred years and stood where their fathers stood when they
knew that they were Christian men. The English poor, broken in
every revolt, bullied by every fashion, long despoiled of property,
and now being despoiled of liberty, entered history with a noise of
trumpets, and turned themselves in two years into one of the iron
armies of the world. And when the critic of politics and literature,
feeling that this war is after all heroic, looks around him to find the
hero, he can point to nothing but a mob.
CHAPTER XXII
After the Armistice
THE MONTHS THAT followed the signing of the Armistice were the
darkest in Gilbert Chesterton's life. Nothing but the immense natural
high spirits of the _New Witness_ group could have carried them
through the many years in which they cried their unheeded warnings to
England. But now as the war drew to an end a new note of optimism had
become audible. The Prussian menace was almost conquered. Our
soldiers would return and would bring with them the courage and
confidence of victors. They might overthrow the governing plutocracy
and build again an England of freedom and sanity. But one soldier did
not return--the one to whom this group looked for comradeship and
inspiration. On December 6, 1918, Cecil Chesterton died in hospital
in France.
"His courage was heroic, native, positive and equal," wrote Belloc,
"always at the highest potentiality of courage. . . ."
Gilbert wrote:
He lived long enough to march to the victory which was for him a
supreme vision of liberty and the light. The work which he put first
he did before he died. The work which he put second, but very near to
the other, he left for us to do. There are many of us who will
abandon many other things, and recognize no greater duty than to do
it.
This second work was the fight at home against corruption and for
freedom for the English people. It is impossible to remember Gilbert
Chesterton vividly and to write the word bitterness. It was rather
with a profound and burning indignation that he thought of his fellow
Englishmen who had fought and died--and then looked up and saw
"Marconi George" and "Marconi Isaacs," still rulers of the fate of
his country. Thus meditating he wrote an "Elegy in a Country
Churchyard."
The men that worked for England
They have their graves at home:
And bees and birds of England
About the cross can roam.
But they that fought for England,
Following a falling star,
Alas, alas for England
They have their graves afar.
And they that rule in England,
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas for England
They have no graves as yet.*
[* _Collected Poems_, p. 65.]
Strange irony of Cecil Chesterton's last weeks: his old enemy Godfrey
Isaacs brought an action for perjury against Sir Charles Hobhouse.
Both men's Counsel agreed and the judge stressed that perjury lay on
one side or the other. The case was given against Isaacs. He appealed
and his appeal was dismissed. Perjury had lain on one side or the
other!
Meanwhile news came that Rufus Isaacs, now Lord Reading, had gone
with Lloyd George to Paris to attend the Peace Conference. All that
this might mean: the peril to Poland: the danger of a Prussia kept at
the head of the Germanies for the sake of international finance: an
abasement of England before those countries that had not forgotten
Marconi: all this was vivid to Gilbert Chesterton. In the same number
of the _New Witness_ in which he mourned his brother (Dec. 13, 1918),
he wrote under "The Sign of the World's End" an Open Letter to Lord
Reading:
My Lord--I address to you a public letter as it is upon a public
question: it is unlikely that I should ever trouble you with any
private letter on any private question; and least of all on the
private question that now fills my mind. It would be impossible
altogether to ignore the irony that has in the last few days brought
to an end the great Marconi duel in which you and I in some sense
played the part of seconds; that personal part of the matter ended
when Cecil Chesterton found death in the trenches to which he had
freely gone; and Godfrey Isaacs found dismissal in those very Courts
to which he once successfully appealed. But believe me I do not write
on any personal matter; nor do I write, strangely enough perhaps,
with any personal acrimony. On the contrary, there is something in
these tragedies that almost unnaturally clarifies and enlarges the
mind; and I think I write partly because I may never feel so
magnanimous again. It would be irrational to ask you for sympathy;
but I am sincerely moved to offer it. You are far more unhappy; for
your brother is still alive.
If I turn my mind to you and your type of politics it is not wholly
and solely through that trick of abstraction by which in moments of
sorrow a man finds himself staring at a blot on the tablecloth or an
insect on the ground. I do, of course, realise, with that sort of
dull clarity, that you are in practise a blot on the English
landscape, and that the political men who made you are the creeping
things of the earth. But I am, in all sincerity, less in a mood to
mock at the sham virtues they parade than to try to imagine the more
real virtues which they successfully conceal. In your own case there
is the less difficulty, at least in one matter. I am very willing to
believe that it was the mutual dependence of the members of your
family that has necessitated the sacrifice of the dignity and
independence of my country; and that if it be decreed that the
English nation is to lose its public honour, it will be partly
because certain men of the tribe of Isaacs kept their own strange
private loyalty. I am willing to count this to you for a virtue as
your own code may interpret virtue; but the fact would alone be
enough to make me protest against any man professing your code and
administering our law. And it is upon this point of your public
position, and not upon any private feelings, that I address you today.
Not only is there no question of disliking any race, but there is
not here even a question of disliking any individual. It does not
raise the question of hating you; rather it would raise, in some
strange fashion, the question of loving you. Has it ever occurred to
you how much a good citizen would have to love you in order to
tolerate you? Have you ever considered how warm, indeed how wild,
must be our affection for the particular stray stock-broker who has
somehow turned into a Lord Chief Justice, to be strong enough to make
us accept him as Lord Chief Justice? It is not a question of how much
we dislike you, but of how much we like you; of whether we like you
more than England, more than Europe, more than Poland the pillar of
Europe, more than honour, more than freedom, more than facts. It is
not, in short, a question of how much we dislike you, but of how far
we can be expected to adore you, to die for you, to decay and
degenerate for you; for your sake to be despised, for your sake to be
despicable. Have you ever considered, in a moment of meditation, how
curiously valuable you would really have to be, that Englishmen
should in comparison be careless of all the things you have
corrupted, and indifferent to all the things that you may yet
destroy? Are we to lose the War which we have already won? That and
nothing else is involved in losing the full satisfaction of the
national claim of Poland. Is there any man who doubts that the Jewish
International is unsympathetic with that full national demand? And is
there any man who doubts that you will be sympathetic with the Jewish
International? No man who knows anything of the interior facts of
modern Europe has the faintest doubt on either point. No man doubts
when he knows, whether or no he cares. Do you seriously imagine that
those who know, that those who care, are so idolatrously infatuated
with Rufus Daniel Isaacs as to tolerate such risk, let alone such
ruin? Are we to set up as the standing representative of England a
man who is a standing joke against England? That and nothing else is
involved in setting up the chief Marconi Minister as our chief
Foreign Minister. It is precisely in those foreign countries with
which such a minister would have to deal, that his name would be, and
has been, a sort of pantomime proverb like Panama or the South Sea
Bubble. Foreigners were not threatened with fine and imprisonment for
calling a spade a spade and a speculation a speculation; foreigners
were not punished with a perfectly lawless law of libel for saying
about public men what those very men had afterwards to admit in
public. Foreigners were lookers-on who were really allowed to see
most of the game, when our public saw nothing of the game; and they
made not a little game of it. Are they henceforth to make game of
everything that is said and done in the name of England in the
affairs of Europe? Have you the serious impudence to call us
Anti-Semites because we are not so extravagantly fond of one
particular Jew as to endure this for him alone? No, my lord; the
beauties of your character shall not so blind us to all elements of
reason and self-preservation; we can still control our affections;
if we are fond of you, we are not quite so fond of you as that. If we
are anything but Anti-Semite, we are not Pro-Semite in that peculiar
and personal fashion; if we are lovers, we will not kill ourselves
for love. After weighing and valuing all your virtues, the qualities
of our own country take their due and proportional part in our
esteem. Because of you she shall not die.
We cannot tell in what fashion you yourself feel your strange
position, and how much you know it is a false position. I have
sometimes thought I saw in the faces of such men as you that you felt
the whole experience as unreal, a mere masquerade; as I myself might
feel it if, by some fantastic luck in the old fantastic civilisation
of China, I were raised from the Yellow Button to the Coral Button,
or from the Coral Button to the Peacock's Feather. Precisely because
these things would be grotesque, I might hardly feel them as
incongruous. Precisely because they meant nothing to me I might be
satisfied with them, I might enjoy them without any shame at my own
impudence as an alien, adventurer. Precisely because I could not feel
them as dignified, I should not know what I had degraded. My fancy may
be quite wrong; it is but one of many attempts I have made to imagine
and allow for an alien psychology in this matter; and if you, and
Jews far worthier than you, are wise they will not dismiss as
Anti-Semitism what may well prove the last serious attempt to
sympathise with Semitism. I allow for your position more than most
men allow for it; more, most assuredly, than most men will allow for
it in the darker days that yet may come. It is utterly false to
suggest that either I or a better man than I, whose work I now
inherit, desired this disaster for you and yours, I wish you no such
ghastly retribution. Daniel son of Isaac. Go in peace; but go.
Yours,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
In those last sentences the spirit of prophecy was upon Chesterton
after a truly dark and deep fashion. Yet even he did not guess that
the retribution he feared would fall, not upon that "tribe of Isaacs"
thus established in English government, but upon the unfortunate
Jewish people as a whole, from the German nation that Isaacs had gone
to Paris to protect. For there was no doubt in Chesterton's mind that
it was his work at the Peace Conference to strive for the survival of
Prussia, no matter how Europe and the rest of the Germanies suffered.
The _New Witness_ hated the Treaty of Versailles in its eventual form
as much as Hitler hates it, but for a very different reason.
All human judgments are limited and no doubt there was a mixture of
truth and error in Chesterton's view of the years that followed. But
in the universal reaction from the war-spirit to Pacifism the truths
he was urging received scant attention, his really amazing prophecies
fell on deaf ears. "He will almost certainly," Monsignor Knox has
said,* "be remembered as a prophet, in an age of false prophets." And
it is not insignificant that today it has become the fashion to say,
as he said twenty-five years ago and steadily reiterated, that the
peace of 1918 was only an armistice.
[* In the panegyric preached in Westminster Cathedral, June 27, 1936.]
Just before leaving England for the Front, Cecil had married Miss Ada
Jones, who had long worked with him on the paper, and who continued
to write both for it and later for _G.K.'s Weekly_, doing especially
the dramatic criticism under the pen-name of J. K. Prothero. Later on
she was to become famous for her exploit in spending a fortnight
investigating in the guise of a tramp the London of down-and-out
women. She wrote _In Darkest London_ and founded the Cecil Houses to
improve the very bad conditions she had discovered and in memory of
her husband. At this date Mrs. Cecil Chesterton visited Poland and
wrote a series of articles describing the Polish struggle for life
and freedom. Several Poles also contributed articles to the paper.
There was not I imagine on the staff one single writer with the kind
of ignorance that enabled Lloyd George to confess in Paris that he
did not know where Teschen was.
Here was the first tragedy of Versailles. The representatives of both
America and England were ignorant of the reality of Europe: Wilson
was (as Chesterton often said) a much better man than Lloyd George,
but he knew as little of the world which he had come to reconstruct.
He was, too, a political doctrinaire preferring "what was not there"
in the shape of a League of Nations to the real nations of Poland or
Italy. And with the American as with the Welshman international
finance stood beside the politicians and whispered in their ears. An
interesting article appeared in the _New Witness_ by an American who
said that no leading journal in his own country would print it any
more than any English one. He described the opposition of masses of
ordinary Americans to the League of Nations and how a Chicago banker,
who however had no international interests, had heartily agreed with
this opposition. But the same banker had written to him next day
eating his own words. In the interim he had met the other bankers.
This American correspondent held with the _New Witness_ that the
League of Nations was mainly a device of international finance so
framed as to enlist also the support of pacifist idealists who really
believed it would make for peace.
Only one thing, said the _New Witness_, would make for a stable
peace: remove Prussia from her position at the head of Germany: make
her regaining of it impossible. Make a strong Poland, and a strong
Italy, as well as a strong France. Later on they said they had
disapproved of the weakening of Austria, but though I do not doubt
that this is true in principle I cannot find much mention of Austria
in the paper: Poland, Italy and Ireland fill their columns--and the
freeing of England.
They claimed that theirs was in the main the policy of
Clemenceau--but both Chesterton and Belloc admitted that Clemenceau,
even if he desired a strong Poland as a barrier between Germany and
Russia, shared with his colleagues an equal responsibility in the
destruction of Austria which proved so fatal. He was too much a
freemason to desire many Catholic states. The interests of France
were not those of Italy, which certainly went to the wall and was
turned thereby from friend and ally into enemy. And the _New Witness_
summed up the fate of Ireland in the suggestion that Lloyd George had
said to Wilson: "If you won't look at Ireland, I won't look at
Mexico." Both Lloyd George and Wilson were too anti-Catholic to do
other than dislike (in Lloyd George's case _hate_ is the word)
Catholic Poland. It is certain that Lloyd George in particular worked
savagely against the Poland that should have been. A commission
appointed by the Peace Conference reported in favour of Poland owning
the port of Danzig and territory approximating to her age-long
historic boundaries and in particular including East Prussia in which
there was still a majority of Poles: Lloyd George sent back the
report for revision: they made it again on the same lines.
It was a strange anomaly that this man should have sat at the Council
Table representing a great country. In the past men had sat there who
not only knew much of Europe themselves but who had as their advisers
the Foreign office with all its experience and tradition. Belloc
pointed out in an article on Versailles that the English tradition
had been to hold a balance between conflicting extremes and thus to
bring about a peace that at least ensured stability for a long
period. But here was a man too ignorant to realize the dangers of his
own ignorance and therefore seek help from experience. This peace
would be, Belloc foretold, the parent of many wars. The Czechs got
much of what they wanted just as d'Annunzio got Fiume for Italy--by
seizing it. Poland waited for Versallles and enlisted her allies, yet
while the Peace Conference was actually in session Germans were
persecuting Poles in East Prussia so that many thousands of them fled
into Poland proper and thus diminished the Polish population of East
Prussia before any plebiscite could be taken there.
Lloyd George and Churchill sent a British expeditionary force to
Archangel to assist the "White" Russians but when the Bolsheviks
invaded Poland she was not supported. Nor did the Allies send her the
raw material they had promised, to rebuild her commercial life. Again
and again our papers reported pogroms in Poland. Yet close
investigation by writers for the _New Witness_ failed to discover any
pogroms in the cities in which they were reported as occurring.
Powerful are the words in which, in April 1919, Chesterton foretells
the future that will result if power and her historic port are
refused to Poland.
. . . We know that a flood threatens the West from the meeting of
two streams, the revenge of Germany and the anarchy of Russia; and we
know that the West has only one possible dyke against such a flood,
which is not the mere existence, but the might and majesty of Poland.
We know that without some such Christian and chivalric shield on that
side, we shall have half Europe and perhaps half Asia on our backs.
We know exactly what the Germans think about our nationalities in
the West, and exactly what the Bolshevists think about any
nationalities anywhere. We know that if the Poles have a port and a
powerful line of communication with the West, they will be eager to
help the West. We know that if they have no port they will have no
reason to help the West and no power to help anybody. We know that if
they lose their port it will not be by any act of English public
opinion or any public opinion, but by the most secret of all secret
diplomacy; that it will not even be given up by the English to the
Germans, but by German Jews to other German Jews. We know that such
international adventurers would still find themselves floating on the
top of any tide that drowned the nations, and that they do not care
what nations they drown. We know that out of the whole world the
Polish port is the one place that should have been held, and the one
place that is being surrendered.
In short, we know what everybody knows and scarcely anybody says.
There is one word to be added for those detached persons who see no
particular objection to England ceasing to be English, who do not
care about the national names of the West, which have been the
greatest words in the poetry of the world. So far as we know there is
only one ideal they do care about, and they will not get it. Whatever
else this betrayal means it does not mean peace. The Poles have
raised revolution after revolution, when three colossal Empires
prevented them from being a nation at all. It is not in the realm of
sanity to suppose that, if we make them half a nation, they will not
some day attempt to be a whole nation. But we shall come back to the
place where we started, after another cycle of terror and torment and
abominable butchery--and to a place where we might, in peace and
perfect safety, stand firm today.
"Not by any act of English public opinion" would Poland be weakened,
not by any act of English opinion Prussia strengthened or Ireland
oppressed. It was the horror of the situation that no act of English
public opinion seemed possible, for the organs of action were
stultified. When they _could_ act by fighting and by dying Englishmen
had done it grandly. Not all that they had done had, Chesterton
believed, been lost. Because of them the Cross once more had replaced
the crescent over the Holy City of Jerusalem, because of them Alsace
and Lorraine were French once more and Poland lived again. But their
sufferings and their death had not availed yet to save England.
And what is theirs, though banners blow on Warsaw risen again, Or
ancient laughter walks in gold through the vineyards of Lorraine,
Their dead are marked on English stones, their loves on English
trees, How little is the prize they win, how mean a coin for these--
How small a shrivelled laurel-leaf lies crumpled here and curled;
They died to save their country and they only saved the world.*
[* _Collected Poems_, pp. 79-80, "The English Graves."]
In the _New Witness_ he wrote (July 25, 1919):
On Peace Day I set up outside my house two torches, and twined them
with laurel; because I thought at least there was nothing pacifist
about laurel. But that night, after the bonfire and the fireworks had
faded, a wind grew and blew with gathering violence, blowing away the
rain. And in the morning I found one of the laurelled posts torn off
and lying at random on the rainy ground; while the other still stood
erect, green and glittering in the sun. I thought that the pagans
would certainly have called it an omen; and it was one that strangely
fitted my own sense of some great work half fulfilled and half
frustrated. And I thought vaguely of that man in Virgil, who prayed
that he might slay his foe and return to his country; and the gods
heard half the prayer, and the other half was scattered to the winds.
For I knew we were right to rejoice; since the tyrant was indeed
slain and his tyranny fallen for ever; but I know not when we shall
find our way back to our own land.
English soldiers in Ireland felt, as we all remember, a strong
sympathy with the Irish people: most of them, said the _New Witness_,
became Sinn Feiners. This was an exaggeration, but certainly their
opposition to acting as terrorists led to the employment in their
stead of the jail-birds known as Black and Tans.
And in England itself the feeling was stirring that grew stronger as
the years passed. The soldiers, who were the nation, had won the
victory, the politicians had thrown it away. A rushed election before
most of the men were demobilized had brought back the same old
politicians by turning, so G.K. put it, "collusion" into "coalition."
A Coalition Government had been in wartime "comprehensible and
defensible; precisely because it is not concerned with construction
or reconstruction but only with the warding off of destruction." A
peace-time coalition could do nothing but show up the absurdity of
the old party labels. For if these meant anything they meant that
their wearers wanted an entirely different kind of construction, at
which therefore they could not collaborate. How could a real Tory
co-operate in construction with a genuine Radical? It was the
culmination of unreality.
The idea that it succeeded (for the moment) because the country
really believed that Lloyd George had won the war seemed to
Chesterton the crowning absurdity. It succeeded because the party
machines combined to finance their candidates and offered them to a
rather dazed country whose men were still in great numbers under
arms. "There is naturally no dissentient when hardly anybody seems to
be sentient. Indifference is called unanimity."
How then could this indifference be thrown off: How could the
returning manhood of the nation be given a true democracy: was there
still hope? If there was, never had the _New Witness_ been more
needed than now. It had told the truth about political corruption,
today it had to fight it: "We are not divided now into those who know
and those who do not know. We are divided now into those who care and
those who do not care." Thus wrote Chesterton in an article about his
own continued editorship of the paper.
Politics would never have been my province, either in the highest
or the lowest sense. . . . I have hitherto known myself to be merely
a stop-gap; but my action, or rather inaction, as a stop-gap, has
come terribly to an end. That gap will never be filled now, till God
restores all the noble ruin that we name the world; and the wisest
know best that the gap will yawn as hopelessly in the history of
England as in the story of our private lives. I must now either
accept this duty entirely or abandon it entirely. I will not abandon
it; for every instinct and nerve of intelligence I have tells me that
this is a time when it must not be abandoned. I must accept a
comparison that must be a contrast, and a crushing contrast; but
though I can never be so good as my brother, I will see if I can be
better than myself.
The same attacks on financiers and others constantly reiterated might
well have put Gilbert in the dock where his brother had stood. But I
think the upshot of the case against Cecil had not been entirely
encouraging to the winners. Then too, G.K.'s immense popularity made
such an attack a still more doubtful move. Cecil had been less
well-known than Gilbert: but far better known than a Mr. Fraser and a
Mr. Beamish, a pair of cranks against whom Sir Alfred Mond brought a
libel action in 1919 for having--in a placard shown in a window in a
back street--called him a traitor and accused him of having traded
with the enemy.
In this case Sir Alfred Mond (of the Mond Nickel Company) giving
evidence: "said that he always disregarded charges made by
irresponsible persons. Charges had been made against him in the _New
Witness_ which was edited by Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. All the world
regarded Mr. Chesterton as 'irresponsible,' but he was certainly
amusing, and he (the witness) had read most of his books. He had once
procured with some difficulty a copy of the _New Witness."_ HIS
LORDSHIP--Did Mr. Chesterton charge the witness with being a traitor?
Mr. SMITH (Counsel for the defence)--Yes, in the _New Witness."_
"Irresponsible" was not quite the _mot juste_. The unfortunate Fraser
and Beamish were not of the metal to win that or any case in that or
any court. There was a kind of solemn buffoonery in choosing these
two as responsible opponents in preference to the irresponsible G.K.
Chesterton. At any rate damages of £5000 were given against
them--which gives some measure of the risk G.K. took in making
exactly the same attacks.
Gilbert had not so much natural buoyancy as Cecil: he got far less
fun out of making these attacks. Still less had he the recklessness
that made Cecil indifferent even to the charge of inaccuracy. That
charge was in fact the only one that Gilbert feared. Writing to a
contributor whose article he had held back in order to verify an
accusation made in it, Gilbert remarked that he had no fear of a
lawsuit when he was certain of his facts: he did not fear fine or
imprisonment:--he had one fear only, "I am afraid of being answered."
There was another thing he feared: hurting or distressing his
friends. This was especially a danger for one, so many of whose
friends were also his opponents in politics or religion: and who was
now editing a paper of so controversial a character. With H. G. Wells
he had a real bond of affection, and an interesting correspondence
with and about him illustrates all Gilbert's qualities; consideration
for his subordinates: for his friendships; concern for the integrity
of his paper: sense of responsibility to Cecil's memory.
During an editorial absence the assistant editor, Mr. Titterton, had
accepted a series of articles called "Big Little H. G. Wells" from
Edwin Pugh, which seemed to be turning into an attack on Wells
instead of an appreciation. Chesterton wrote to Mr. Titterton and
simultaneously to Wells himself--
DEAR WELLS,
The sudden demands of other duties, which I really could not see
how to avoid, has prevented my attending to the _New Witness_ lately:
and I have only just heard, on the telephone, that you have written a
letter to the paper touching an unfortunate difference between you
and Edwin Pugh. I don't yet know the contents of your letter but of
course I have told my _locum tenens_ that it is to be printed
whatever it is, this week or next. I am really exceedingly distressed
to have been out of the business at the time; but if you knew the
circumstances I think you would see the difficulty; and my editorial
absence has not been a holiday. As it is, I agreed to the general
idea of a study of your work by Pugh; and I confess it never even
crossed my mind that anybody would write such a thing except as a
tribute to your genius and the intellectual interest of the subject;
nor can I believe it now. It may strike you as so ironical as to be
incredible; but it is really one of those ironies that are also
facts, that I rather welcomed the idea of a criticism in the paper
(which so often differs from you) from a modernist and collectivist
standpoint more like your own. I should imagine Pugh would agree with
you more than I do, and not less. I will not prejudge the quarrel
till I understand more of it; but I now write at once to tell you
that I would not dream of tolerating anything meant to be a mere
personal attack on you, even if I resigned my post on the point; and
I had already written to the office to say so. But I do not believe
for a moment that Pugh means any such thing; I regarded him as a
strong Wellsian and even more of an admirer than myself; though he
might be so modern as to use a familiar and mixed method of
portraiture, which is too modern for my tastes, but which many use
besides he. For the moment I suggest a possible misunderstanding,
which he may well correct by a further explanation. I had said
something myself in my weekly article, demurring to a possible
undervaluing of you, long before I heard of your own letter. Even
when I am in closer touch with things, of course, many things appear
in the paper with which I wholly disagree; but the notion of a mere
campaign against you would always have seemed to me as abominable and
absurd as it does now; I do not believe any one can entertain it; and
certainly I do not. I am perfectly willing to do you anything that
can fairly be shown to be justice, whether it were explanation or
apology or anything else. This is all I can say without your letter
and Pugh's side of the case; but I feel I should say this at once.
Yours sincerely,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
P.S. I have arranged for your letter to appear in next week's
number; but I may have more light on Pugh's attitude by then.
To Titterton he wrote:
. . . I do hope this work will not turn into anything that looks
like a mere attack on Wells, especially in the rather realistic and
personal modern manner, which I am perhaps too Victorian myself to
care very much about. I do not merely feel this because I have
managed to keep Wells as a friend on the whole. I feel it much more
(and I know you are a man to understand such sentiments) because I
have a sort of sense of honour about him as an enemy, or at least a
potential enemy. We are so certain to collide in controversial
warfare, that I have a horror of his thinking I would attack him with
anything but fair controversial weapons. My feeling is so entirely
consistent with a faith in Pugh's motives, as well as an admiration
of his talents, that I honestly believe I could explain this to him
without offence. . . .
I am honestly in a very difficult position on the _New Witness_,
because it is physically impossible for me really to edit it, and
also do enough outside work to be able to edit it unpaid, as well as
having a little over to give it from time to time. What we should
have done without the loyalty and capacity of you and a few others I
can't imagine. I cannot oversee everything that goes into the
paper; . . . I cannot resign, without dropping as you truly said, the
work of a great man who is gone; and who, I feel, would wish me to
continue it. It is like what Stevenson said about marriage and its
duties: "There is no refuge for you; not even suicide." But I should
have to consider even resignation, if I felt that the acceptance of
Pugh's generosity really gave him the right to print something that I
really felt bound to disapprove. It may be that I am needlessly
alarmed over a slip or two of the pen, in vivid descriptions of a
very odd character, and that Pugh really admires his Big Little H. G.
as much as I thought he did at the beginning of the business. . . .
If the general impression on the reader's mind is of the Big Wells
and not the Little Wells, I think the doubt I mean would really be
met.
Somehow the letter to Titterton got into the hands of a Mr. Hennessy
who, after Gilbert's death, sent it to Wells.
Wells wrote, "Thank you very much for that letter of G.K.C.'s. It is
exactly like him. From first to last he and I were very close friends
and never for a moment did I consider him responsible for Pugh's
pathetic and silly little outbreak. I never knew anyone so steadily
true to form as G.K.C."
Besides the cleansing of public life two other things were seen as
vital by the _New Witness_, the restoration of well-distributed
property and the restoration of liberty. Under the heading
"Reconstruction of Property" Belloc set out a series of proposals,
highly practical and very far from what is usually called
revolutionary: that savings for instance made on a small scale should
be helped by a very high rate of interest; that the purchase by small
men of small parcels of land or businesses or houses should be freed
from legal charges while these should be made heavier for those who
purchased on a large scale thus encouraging small property and
checking huge accumulation. He pointed out how vast sums could be
found for such subsidies out of the money spent today on an education
which the poor detested for their children and which most of the
wealthy admitted to be an abject failure. Most of those, he noted,
who oppose Distributism do so on the ground that the proposals are
unpractical or revolutionary, which generally means that they have
not examined the proposals. His own were certainly practical and
would by many be called reactionary. But he admitted one
doubt--besides the overwhelming difficulty of turning the current of
modern Socialism--the doubt whether Englishmen from long disuse had
not lost the appetite for property.
Chesterton's own line of approach to the double problem was also
twofold. In a volume of Essays published near the end of the war and
called _The Utopia of Usurers_ he remarked: "That anarchic future
which the more timid Tories professed to fear has already fallen upon
us. We are ruled by ignorant people."
The old aristocracy of England, in his view, had made many mistakes
but certain things they had understood very well. The modern
governing class "cannot face a fact, or follow an argument, or feel
a tradition; but least of all can they, upon any persuasion read
through a plain impartial book, English or foreign, that is not
specially written to soothe their panic or to please their pride."
There had been reality in the claim of the old aristocracy to
understand matters not known to the people. They had read history;
they were familiar with other languages and other lands. They had a
great tradition of foreign diplomacy. Even the study of philosophy
and theology, today confined to a handful of experts, was not alien
to them. On all this had rested what right they had to govern. But
today "They rule them by the smiling terror of an ancient secret.
They smile and smile but they have forgotten the secret."
On the other hand the ordinary workman had the advantage over his
probably millionaire master by the necessity of knowing something. He
must be able to use his tools, he must know "enough arithmetic to
know when prices have risen." The hard business of living taught him
something. Give him a chance of more through property and liberty and
see what he will build on that foundation. The war had already shown
not only the courage of our men but their contrivance: their trench
newspapers, songs and jests: their initiative as sailors and as
airmen: at home the same thing was happening. Allotments had sprung
up everywhere and solved the problem of potato shortage. Men were
doing for themselves a rough kind of building. The inclination to get
away from the machine and do things oneself was on the increase.
Armistice and the men's return were heralded by outdoor tea-parties
with ropes stretched across the streets for safety. The outburst of
pageants was spontaneous and national. "It is time," said Chesterton,
"for an army of amateurs; for England is perishing of the
professionals." Vitality seemed to be flowing back into national
life, but Bureaucracy does not love vitality. Agitated Town Councils
met and stopped the tea-parties; fought against street markets
through which allotment holders could sell their produce cheaply; put
heavy rates on land reclaimed and buildings erected by hard work.
Town families living in single rooms had secured plots on building
estates and run up shacks for themselves and their families. They
were forbidden to live in these dwellings--only intended as
temporary, but far more healthy than living eight people to a room in
a slum. The _New Witness_ suspected that the real objection in the
eyes of Councillors was a lowering of the value of neighbouring plots
for wealthier purchasers.
Worst of all, the allotments were taken: fields sold for speculative
building, land dug in public parks taken away in the name of
"amenities." The little spark that could have been fanned into a
flame was crushed out.
An episode of a few years later best illustrates the spirit
Chesterton was fighting. In 1926 a threat arose to the traffic
monopoly from soldiers who put their war gratuities into the purchase
of omnibuses which they drove themselves. The London General Omnibus
Company decided to crush them and with the aid of a Government
Commission succeeded. Chesterton's paper followed the struggle with
passionate interest. Just as he believed that the small shop actually
served the public better than the large, so too he believed that
these owner-drivers would serve it better than the Combine. But if it
could have been proved that the Combine was more efficient Gilbert
would still have championed the Independents. It was better for the
Community that men should take responsibility and initiative for
themselves even if the work could be done more efficiently by wage
slaves. To his dismay he found that the Trade Unions did not dream of
applying this test and that they were aligned against the Pirates--as
the independent owners were usually called.
He had always been an ardent supporter of the Trade Unions. To him it
had seemed they were trying to do the work of the ancient Guilds
under far more difficult conditions. But after the war for the first
time a little note of doubt creeps into his voice when he is speaking
of them. They were still vocal for the rights of labour, but they had
begun to lay stress exclusively on the less important of those rights.
Writing of the loss of the allotments he suggested in one article
that the Trades Unions might well use some part of their funds in
purchasing land to be held in perpetuity by their members. But I doubt
if he much expected that they would do so. Many Trade Unionists were
working for the Bus Company and were more concerned about their
conditions of work than about the handful of drivers who were their
own masters. But the Unions had begun to stress almost solely the
question of hours and of wages; to fight for good conditions but no
longer for control or ownership: to demand security but to agree to
abandon many of their rights in return.
It was a chill fear and for long he resisted it, but in these
terrible years it had begun to shake him. Were the people of England
losing the appetite for freedom and for property? Were the Trades
Unions, from lack of leadership and confusion of thought, beginning
to accept the Servile State?
CHAPTER XXIII
Rome via Jerusalem
SHORTLY AFTER THE war Gilbert and Frances set out on their travels,
going in 1919 to Palestine, home through Italy early in 1920, and
starting out again the following year for a lecture tour in the
United States.
To his friendship with Maurice Baring Gilbert owed their being able
to make the first of these journeys as well as much else. The picture
entitled "Conversation Piece" of Chesterton, Belloc and Baring is
well known. Was it Chesterton himself who christened it "Baring,
Overbearing and Past Bearing?" Many elements united the three in a
close friendship: love of literature, love of Europe, a common view
of the philosophy of history and of life. Frances Chesterton often
said that of all her husband's friends she thought there was none he
loved better than Maurice Baring. They often wrote ballades
together--a French form which they, with Phillimore and others, had
re-popularised in English. A telegram from Gilbert refusing a
celebration runs like a refrain:
Prince, Yorkshire holds me now
By Yorkshire hams I'm fed
I can't assist your row
I send ballades instead.
These "Ballades Urbane" were a feature in the _New Witness_--but many
of those the three friends composed were strictly not for publication
but recited to friends behind closed doors. Gilbert's memory was
useful: he knew all his own and the others: Once Belloc forgot the
Envoi to one of his own ballades and Gilbert finished it for him.
Even to Maurice Baring, G.K. wrote less often than he intended and
one apologetic ballade carries the refrain:
I write no letters to the men I love.
I have always fancied that Maurice Baring gave Gilbert the idea for
his story _The Man Who Knew Too Much_. First in the diplomatic
service, then doing splendidly as an airman in the war, a member of
the great banking family, related to most of the aristocracy and
intimate with most of the rest, he is like the hero of the book in a
sort of detachment, a slight irony about a world that he has not
cared to conquer. Impossible for a mere acquaintance to say whether
he views that world with all the disillusionment of Chesterton's
hero--but anyhow such a suggestion from life is never more than a
hint for creative art. Another side is seen in the _Autobiography_--
in the stories of Maurice Baring plunging into the sea in evening
dress on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, and of the smashing
by Gilbert of a wine-glass that became in retrospect a priceless
goblet (which had "stood by Charlemagne's great chair and served St.
Peter at High Mass") and now inspired the refrain:
I like the sound of breaking glass.
A good deal of glass was broken by the stones of this group of men
whose own house was made of tolerably strong materials.
There is quite a bundle of Mr. Baring's letters to Gilbert, and, in
spite of the apologetic ballade, a fair number of answers. Two of
these last are written early in 1919, the second of which opens the
question of the Jerusalem visit:
May 23, 1919
MY DEAR MAURICE,
I am the Prince of unremembered towers destroyed before the birth
of Babylon; I am also the (writer) of unremembered letters, and to a
much greater extent the designer and imaginer of unwritten letters:
and I cannot remember whether I ever acknowledged properly your
communications about Claudel, especially your interesting remarks
about the comparative coolness of Henri de Regnier about him. It
struck me because I think it is part of something I have noticed
myself; a curious and almost premature conservatism in the older
generation of revolutionaries, particularly when they were pagan
revolutionaries. Not that I suppose de Regnier is particularly old or
in the stock sense a revolutionist; but I think you will know the
break between the generations to which I refer. I remember having
exactly the same experience the only time I ever talked to Swinburne.
I had regarded (and resisted) him in my boyhood as a sort of
Antichrist in purple, like Nero holding his lyre, and I found him
more like a very well-read Victorian old maid, almost entirely a
_laudator temporis acti_ disposed to say that none of the young men
would ever come up to Tennyson--which may be quite true for all I
know. I fancy it has something to do with the very fact that their
revolt was pagan, and being temporal was also temporary. When that
particular fashion in caps of liberty has gone out, they have nothing
to fall back on but the feeling which Swinburne himself puts into the
mouth of the pagan on the day when Constantine issued the
proclamation.
"But to me their new device is barren, the days are bare
Things long gone over suffice, and men forgotten that were."
I only tell you all this because you might find it amusing to keep
an eye on the _New Statesman_ as well as the _New Witness_, where
there is a small repetition of the same thing. Bernard Shaw has
written an article which is supposed to be about his view of me and
Socialism; but which may be said more truly to be about his blindness
to Hilary and his Servile State. It is quite startling to me to find
how wholly he misses Hilary's point; and how wildly he falls back on
a sort of elderly impatience with our juvenile paradox and
fantasticality. I shall answer him as abusively as my great personal
liking for him will allow and I think Hilary is going to do the same;
so if you ever see such papers, you might enjoy the fun.
Yours always,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
DEAR MAURICE,
Thank you ever so much for your interesting letter. I think you are
right every time about Gosse and Claudel; or rather about Claudel and
Gosse. For though I think Gosse a very valuable old Victorian in his
way, I do not think he is on the same scale as the things that have
lately been happening in the world; and Claudel is one of them. He
has happened like a great gun going off; and I think I saw a line of
his on the subject of such a discharge of artillery in the war. It
ran, "And that which goes forth is France; terrible as the Holy
Ghost." I doubt if Gosse has ever seen that France even in a flash
and a bang; I don't see how he could. Remember the religion in which
he grew up, by his own very graphic account of it; a man is not
entirely emancipated from such very positive Puritanism by anything
so negative as Agnosticism. Nothing but a religion can cast out a
religion. Being so sensitive on behalf of Renan is simply not
understanding the great historical passions about a heresiarch. It
means that famous intellectuals must not hate each other; because
they all belong to the Saville Club. Please do not think I mean
merely that Gosse is a snob; I think he is a jolly old gentleman and
a good critic of French poetry; but not of _Gesta Dei per Francos_.
Your points against him are quite logical; I suppose the controversy
will not be conducted in public, or I should feel inclined to join in
it. Anyhow, I wish it could be continued between us as a conversation
in private, for I have long wanted to talk to you about serious
things.
Meanwhile, as not wholly unconnected with the serious things, could
you possibly do me a great favour? It is very far from being the
first great favour you have done me; and I should fear that anyone
less magnanimous would fancy I only wrote to you about such things.
But the situation is this. An excellent offer has been made to me to
write a book about Jerusalem, not political but romantic and
religious, so to speak; I conceive it as mostly about pilgrimages and
crusades, in poetical prose, and working up to Allenby's great
entrance. The offer includes money to go to Jerusalem but cannot
include all the political or military permissions necessary to go
there. I have another motive for wanting to go there, which is much
stronger than the desire to write the book though I do think I could
do it in the right way and, what matters more, on the right side.
Frances is to come with me, and all the doctors in creation tell her
she can only get rid of her neuritis if she goes to some such place
and misses part of an English winter. I would do anything to bring it
off, for that reason alone. You are a man who knows everybody; do you
know anybody on Allenby's staff; or know anybody who knows anybody on
Allenby's staff; or know anybody who would know anybody who would
know anything about it? I am told that it cannot be done as yet in
the ordinary way by Cook's; and that the oracle must be worked in
some such fashion. If you should be so kind as to refer to any
worried soldier or official, I should like it understood that I am
not nosing about touching any diplomatic or military matter; France
in Syria, or any copy for the _New Witness_. I only want to write
semi-historical rhetoric on the spot. If you could possibly help in
this matter, I really think you would be helping things you yourself
care about; and one person, not myself, who deserves it. I will not
say it would be killing two birds with one stone, which might seem a
tragic metaphor; but bringing one bird at least to life; and allowing
the other bird, who is a goose, to go on a wild goose-chase.
Yours always,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
It was much needed change and refreshment for both Gilbert and
Frances. Her Diary shows a vivid enjoyment of all the scenes and
happenings: going into the Church of the Nativity with a door "so low
you can hardly get in--this done to prevent the cattle from straying
in"; seeing camels on the roof of a convent; standing godmother to an
Armenian carpenter's baby:
The officiator in a cape of white silk embroidered in gold and a
wonderful crown supposed to represent the temple. The godfather (a
young man) was in a red velvet gown. After a good many prayers and
much chanting the babe, beautifully dressed, was taken to the font
(which was in the side of the wall) and there were more prayers and
chanting. Then cushions were laid on the floor and the child
undressed, all of us assisting. At this point I was asked to stand
Godmother and gladly consented. The baby, by this time quite naked,
was handed to the priest who immersed him completely under the water
three times--giving him the name of Pedros (Peter). Before being
re-clothed he was anointed with oil--the forebead, eyes, nose, mouth,
ears, heart, hands and feet all being signed with the Cross. The
child was by this time crying lustily and it was some business to get
him dressed, especially as he was swaddled in bands very completely.
When ready he was handed to me and he lay stiff in my arms whilst I
held two large lighted candles. I followed the priest from the font
to the little altar, where a chain and a little gold cross were bound
round his head (signifying that he was now a Christian). Then the
priest touched his lips with the sacramental wafer, and touched his
nose with myrrh. After the Blessing, we left the church in a
procession, the godfather carrying the baby. At the threshold of the
house the priest took it and delivered it to the mother who sat
waiting for it, also holding the two candles. Again the priests
muttered a few prayers and blessed mother, child and godparents. The
father is an Armenian carpenter by trade--very nice people. Mother
very pretty. The parents insisted that we should stay for
refreshments and we were handed a very nice liquor in lovely little
glasses and a very beautiful sort of pastry. Afterwards cups of weak
tea and cakes.
The various rites and ceremonies in Jerusalem interested Frances
deeply but the Diary shows no awareness of the differences that
separated the various kinds of Christians. The Diary ends with the
return through Rome where she and I met, to the surprise of both of
us, in the street, while a friend travelling with them met my mother.
"Both meetings were miraculous," Frances comments. Since the letters
to my mother during Gilbert's illness in 1915 we had heard no more
about his spiritual pilgrimage. There was much eager talk at this
meeting but no opportunity occurred and certainly none was sought for
any confidences. As we waved goodbye after their departing train my
mother said thoughtfully: "Frances did rather play off Jerusalem
against Rome, didn't she?"
In fact, as we learned later, this visit to Jerusalem had been a
determining factor in Gilbert's conversion. Many people both in and
outside the Church had been wondering what had so long delayed him.
The mental progress from the vague Liberalism of the _Wild Knight_ to
the splendid edifice of _Orthodoxy_ had been a swift one. For the
book was written in 1908 and already several years earlier in
_Heretics_ and in his newspaper contests with Blatchford, Gilbert
Chesterton had shown his firm belief in the Godhead of Our Lord, in
Sacraments, in Priesthood and in the Authority of the Church. But it
was not yet the Catholic and Roman Church. There is a revealing
passage in the _Autobiography:_ "And then I happened to meet Lord
Hugh Cecil. I met him at the house of Wilfrid Ward, that great
clearing house of philosophies and theologies. . . . I listened to
Lord Hugh's very lucid statements of his position. . . . The
strongest impression I received was that he was a Protestant. I was
myself still a thousand miles from being a Catholic; but I think it
was the perfect and solid Protestantism of Lord Hugh that fully
revealed to me that I was no longer a Protestant."
The time that thousand miles took is a real problem--the years before
the illness during which he talked of joining the Church, the seven
further years before he joined it. Cecil Chesterton had been received
before the war--just at the beginning of the Marconi Case, in
fact--and the entire outlook of both brothers had seemed to make this
inevitable, not only theologically but sociologically and
historically. Alike in their outlook on Europe today or on the great
ages of the past, it was a Catholic civilisation based on Catholic
theology that seemed to them the only true one for a full and rich
human development.
I think in this matter a special quality and its defect could be seen
in Gilbert. For most people intensity of thought is much more
difficult than action. With him it was the opposite. He used his mind
unceasingly, his body as little as possible. I remember one day going
to see them when he had a sprained ankle and learning from Frances
how happy it made him because nobody could bother him to take
exercise. The whole of practical life he left to her. But joining the
Church was not only something to be thought about, it was something
really practical that had to be done, and here Frances could not help
him.
"He will need Frances," said Father O'Connor to my mother, "to take
him to church, to find his place in his prayer-book, to examine his
conscience for him when he goes to Confession. He will never take all
those hurdles unaided." Frances never lifted a finger to prevent
Gilbert from joining the Catholic Church. But obviously before she
was convinced herself she could not help him. The absence of help was
in this case a very positive hindrance.
I remember one day on a picnic Gilbert coming up to me with a very
disconsolate expression and asking where Frances was. I said, "I
don't know but I can easily find her. Do you want her?" He answered,
"I don't want her now but I may want her at any minute." Many men
depend upon their wives but very few men admit it so frankly. And if
he was unpractical to a point almost inconceivable, Frances herself
could be called practical only in comparison with him. The confused
mass of papers through which she had to hunt to find some important
document lingers in the memory.
Another element that made action lag behind conviction with
Chesterton was his perpetual state of overwork. Physically inactive,
his mind was never barren but issued in an immense output: several
books every year besides editing and articles: there were even two
years in which no fewer than six books were published. To focus his
attention on the deepest matters, it was vital to escape from the net
of work and worry.
Returning from Jerusalem, Gilbert wrote from Alexandria to Maurice
Baring:
MY DEAR MAURICE,
To quote a poet we agree in thinking ridiculously underrated by
recent fashions, my boat is on the shore and my bark is on the sea;
but before I go, Tom Moore (if I may so by a flight of fancy describe
you), I feel impelled to send you this hurried line to thank you, so
far as this atrocious hotel pen will allow me, for the wonderful time
I have had in Palestine, which is so largely owing to you. There is
also something even more important I want very much to discuss with
you; because of certain things that have been touched on between us
in former times. I will only say here that my train of thought, which
really was one of thought and not fugitive emotion, came to an
explosion in the Church of the Ecce Homo in Jerusalem; a church which
the guidebooks call new and the newspapers call Latin. I fear it may
be at least a month before we meet; for the journey takes a fortnight
and may be prolonged by a friend ill in Paris; and I must work the
moment I return to keep a contract. But if we could meet by about
then I could thank you better for many things.
Yours illegibly,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
The contract that had to be kept was in all probability the writing
of _The New Jerusalem_. It is a glorious book. Until I read them more
carefully I had always accepted G.K.'s own view that books of travel
were a weak spot in his multifarious output. He said of himself that
he always tended to see such enormous significance in every detail
that he might just as well describe railway signals near Beaconsfield
as the light of sunset over the Golden Horn. But _The New Jerusalem_
is no mere book of description. It is the book of a man seeing a
vision. To understand how this vision broke upon him we have first to
try to understand something jealously hidden by Gilbert
Chesterton--his own suffering. Even as a boy--in the days of the
toothache and still more torturing earache--he had written
Though pain be stark and bitter
And days in darkness creep
Not to that depth I sink me
That asks the world to weep.
So much did he acclaim himself enrolled under the banner of joy that
I think most people miss the companion picture to the favourite one
of the Happy Warrior. No warrior can fight untiringly through a long
lifetime without wounds, without temptations to abandon the struggle
and seek a less glorious peace. If in what are commonly called
practical matters Chesterton was weak, he was in this almost
superhumanly strong. His fame did not rest upon success in the field
of sociology and politics. He could have increased it by neglecting
the good of England for which he fought, and living in literature,
poetry and fantasy. Here all acclaimed him great, whereas most
tolerated or despised as a hobby or a weakness the work he was
pouring into the fight for England. In this time after the Armistice
it was by a naked effort of the will that he held his ground. The
loss of Cecil with his light-hearted courage, his energy and
buoyancy, was immeasurable. And I know--for we talked of it
together--that Frances had not the complete sympathy with Gilbert
over the paper that she had over his other work. It seemed to her too
great a drain on his time and energy: it made the writing of his
important books more difficult. She would not, she told me, try to
stop it as she knew how much he cared, but she would have rejoiced if
he had chosen to let it go.
And the fight that he had almost enjoyed in Cecil's company had
become a harder one, not merely because he was alone but because the
nature of the foe had changed. He was fighting now not individual
abuses but the mood of pessimism that had overtaken our civilisation.
In an article entitled _Is It Too Late?_ he defined this pessimism as
"a paralysis of the mind; an impotence intrinsically unworthy of a
free man." He stated powerfully the case of those who held that our
civilisation was dying and that it was too late to make any further
efforts:
The future belongs to those who can find a real answer to that real
case. . . . The omens and the auguries are against us. There is no
answer but one; that omens and auguries are heathen things; and that
we are not heathens. . . . We are not lost unless we lose
ourselves. . . . Great Alfred, in the darkness of the Ninth Century,
when the Danes were beating at the door, wrote down on his copy of
Boethius his denial of the doctrine of fate. We, who have been
brought up to see all the signs of the times pointing to improvement,
may live to see all the signs in heaven and earth pointing the other
way. If we go on it must be in another name than that of the Goddess
of Fortune.
It was that other Name, in which he had so long believed, that he
realised with the freshness of novelty on this journey to Jerusalem.
He made in the Holy City and in the fields of Palestine a new
discovery of Christ and of the Christian Thing. As he looked over the
Dead Sea and almost physically realised what evil meant, he heard the
voice of the divine Deliverer saying to the demons: "Go forth and
trouble him not any more." In the cave at Bethlehem he realised the
"little local infancy" whereby the creator of the world had chosen to
redeem the world. All through the book there are glimpses of what he
tells more fully in _The Everlasting Man_. Between the two books all
that he had seen and thought in Palestine lay in his mind, and grew
there, and fructified for our understanding. But he had seen it all
in that first vision.
Jerusalem first impressed Chesterton as a mediaeval city and from its
turrets he could readily picture Godfrey de Bouillon, Richard the
Lion-Hearted and Saint Louis of France. Through the Crusades he views
what was meant by Christendom and sets over against it at once the
greatness and the barrenness of Islam:
The Moslem had one thought, and that a most vital one; the
greatness of God which levels all men. But the Moslem had not one
thought to rub against another, because he really had not another. It
is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention,
or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire. The
Creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex;
they can breed thoughts.
Today we of Christendom have fallen below ourselves but yet we have
something left of the power to create whether it be a theology or a
civilisation. Talking to an old Arab in the desert, Chesterton heard
him say that in all these years of Turkish rule the Turks had never
given to the people a cup of cold water. And as the old man spoke he
heard the clank of pipes and he knew that it was the English soldiers
who were bringing water through the desert to Jerusalem.
A chapter on Zionism discusses with sympathy to both parties the
difficulties of the Jewish settlement in Palestine. In Palestine he
found his Jewish friend and co-worker on the _New Witness_, Dr. Eder,
who had gone there ardent in the cause of Zionism; and Chesterton
himself remained convinced that some system akin to Zionism was the
only possible solution of this enormous problem--possibly a system of
Jewish cantons in various countries. But he was equally convinced
that the English government was destroying the chances of success for
Zionism by sending Jews as governors in England's name to that or any
other Eastern country.
Even in this book there is struck at times a note of the doom he
feared was overhanging us. He heard "Islam crying from the turret and
Israel wailing from the wall," and yet he seemed too to hear a voice
from all the peoples of Jerusalem "bidding us weep not for them, who
have faith and clarity and a purpose, but weep for ourselves and for
our children." In his fighting articles he had asserted the supremacy
of the human will over fate: in this book he sees how that will must
be renewed, purified and made once more mighty by the same power that
built the ancient civilisation of Christendom.
Jerusalem gave to Chesterton the fuller realisation of two great
facts. First he saw that the supernatural was needed not only to
conquer the powers of evil but even to restore the good things that
should be natural to man. As he put it in the later book, "Nature may
not have the name of Isis; Isis may not be really looking for Osiris.
But it is true that Nature is really looking for something. Nature is
always looking for the supernatural." Yet man, even strengthened by
the supernatural, cannot suffice for the fight, without a leader who
is more than man. In the land of Christ's childhood, His teaching and
His suffering, there came to Gilbert Chesterton "a vision more vivid
than a man walking unveiled upon the mountains, seen of men and
seeing; a visible God."
All visions must fade into the light of common day, and the return
home meant the resumption of hard labour.
"For the moment," wrote Gilbert to Maurice Baring, "as Balzac said, I
am labouring like a miner in a landslide. Normally I would let it
slide. But if I did in this case I should break two or three really
important contracts, which I find I have returned from Jerusalem just
in time to save."
(A few years later when Sheed and Ward started, Gilbert wanted to
write a number of books for us to publish. His secretary found that
he had then thirty books contracted for with a variety of publishers!)
He had got home in April 1920: and a lecture tour was planned for the
United States at the beginning of the following year. The eight
months between saw the completion and publication of _The Uses of
Diversity_ (collected essays), _The New Jerusalem_ and _The
Superstition of Divorce_. And still went on the _New Witness_, the
_Illustrated London News_, articles, introductions, lectures,
conferences. Two letters to Maurice Baring clearly belong to these
months:
MY DEAR MAURICE,
I am so awfully distressed to hear you are unwell again; I do not
know whether I ought even to bother you with my sentiments; beyond my
sympathy; but if it is not too late, or too early, I will call on you
early next week; probably Monday, but I will let you know for certain
before then. I would have called on you long ago, let alone written,
but for this load of belated work which really seems to bury me day
after day. I never realised before that business can really block out
much bigger things. As you may possibly guess, I want to consider my
position about the biggest thing of all, whether I am to be inside it
or outside it. I used to think one could be an Anglo-Catholic and
really inside it; but if that was (to use an excellent phrase of your
own) only a Porch, I do not think I want a Porch, and certainly not a
Porch standing some way from the building. A Porch looks so silly,
standing all by itself in a field. Since then, unfortunately, there
have sprung up round it real ties and complications and difficulties;
difficulties that seemed almost duties. But I will not bother you
with all that now; and I particularly do not want you to bother
yourself, especially to answer this unless you want to. I know I have
your sympathy; and please God, I shall get things straight. Sometimes
one suspects the real obstacles have been the weaknesses one knows to
be wrong, and not the doubts that might be relatively right, or at
least rational. I suppose all this is a common story; and I hope so;
for wanting to be uncommon is really not one of my weaknesses. They
are worse, probably, but they are not that. There are other and in
the ordinary sense more cheerful things I would like to talk of;
things I think we could both do for causes we certainly agree about.
Meanwhile, thank you for everything; and be sure I think of you very
much.
Yours always,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
MY DEAR MAURICE,
This is the shortest, hastiest and worst written letter in the
world. It only tells you three things: (1) that I thank you a
thousand times for the book; (2) that I have to leave for America for
a month or two, earlier than I expected; But I am glad, for I shall
see something of Frances, without walls of work between us; and (3)
that I have pretty well made up my mind about the thing we talked
about. Fortunately, the thing we talked about can be found all over
the world.
Yours always,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
I will not write here of the American scene but will talk of it in a
later chapter along with the second tour Gilbert made in the States.
It seems best to complete now the story of his journey of the mind. A
reserved man tells more of himself indirectly than directly. Readers
of the _Autobiography_ complain that it is concerned with everything
in the world except G. K. Chesterton. You can certainly search its
pages in vain for any account of the process of his conversion: for
that you must look elsewhere: in the poems to Our lady, in _The
Catholic Church and Conversion_, in _The Well and the Shallows_, and
in the letters here to be quoted.
In _The Catholic Church and Conversion_ he sketches the three phases
through which most converts pass, all of which he had himself
experienced. He sums them up as "patronizing the Church, discovering
the Church, and running away from the Church." In the first phase a
man is taking trouble ("and taking trouble has certainly never been a
particular weakness of mine") to find out the fallacy in most
anti-Catholic ideas. In the second stage he is gradually discovering
the great ideas enshrined in the Church and hitherto hidden from him.
"It is these numberless glimpses of great ideas, that have been
hidden from the convert by the prejudices of his provincial culture,
that constitute the adventurous and varied second stage of the
conversion. It is, broadly speaking, the stage in which the man is
unconsciously trying to be converted. And the third stage is perhaps
the truest and most terrible. It is that in which the man is trying
not to be converted. He has come too near to the truth, and has
forgotten that truth is a magnet, with the powers of attraction and
repulsion."*
[* _The Catholic Church and Conversion_, p. 61.]
To a certain extent it is a fear which attaches to all sharp and
irrevocable decisions; it is suggested in all the old jokes about the
shakiness of the bridegroom at the wedding or the recruit who takes
the shilling and gets drunk partly to celebrate, but partly also to
forget it. But it is the fear of a fuller sacrament and a mightier
army. . . . *
[* Ibid., p. 65.]
The man has exactly the same sense of having committed or
compromised himself; or having been in a sense entrapped, even if he
is glad to be entrapped. But for a considerable time he is not so
much glad as simply terrified. It may be that this real psychological
experience has been misunderstood by stupider people and is
responsible for all that remains of the legend that Rome is a mere
trap. But that legend misses the whole point of the psychology. It is
not the Pope who has set the trap or the priests who have baited it.
The whole point of the position is that the trap is simply the truth.
The whole point is that the man himself has made his way towards the
trap of truth, and not the trap that has run after the man. All steps
except the last step he has taken eagerly on his own account, out of
interest in the truth; and even the last step, or the last stage,
only alarms him because it is so very true. If I may refer once more
to a personal experience, I may say that I for one was never less
troubled by doubts than in the last phase, when I was troubled by
fears. Before that final delay I had been detached and ready to
regard all sorts of doctrines with an open mind. Since that delay has
ended in decision, I have had all sorts of changes in mere mood; and
I think I sympathise with doubts and difficulties more than I did
before. But I had no doubts or difficulties just before. I had only
fears; fears of something that had the finality and simplicity of
suicide. But the more I thrust the thing into the back of my mind,
the more certain I grew of what Thing it was. And by a paradox that
does not frighten me now in the least, it may be that I shall never
again have such absolute assurance that the thing is true as I had
when I made my last effort to deny it.*
[* Ibid., pp. 62-3.]
The whole of Catholic theology can be justified, says Gilbert, if you
are allowed to start with those two ideas that the Church is
popularly supposed to oppose: Reason and Liberty. "To become a
Catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to learn how to think. It
is so in exactly the same sense in which to recover from palsy is not
to leave off moving but to learn how to move." The convert has learnt
long before his conversion that the Church will not force him to
abandon his will. "But he is not unreasonably dismayed at the extent
to which he may have to use his will." This was the crux for Gilbert.
"There is in the last second of time or hairbreadth of space, before
the iron leaps to the magnet, an abyss full of all the unfathomable
forces of the universe. The space between doing and not doing such a
thing is so tiny and so vast."
Father Maturin said after his conversion that for at least ten years
before it the question had never been out of his mind for ten waking
minutes. It was about ten years since Gilbert had first talked to
Father O'Connor of his intention to join the Church, but in his case
thought on the subject could not have been so continuous. Still he
had time for patronising, discovery, and running away, all in
leisurely fashion. External efforts to help him had been worse than
useless: as he indicates in _The Catholic Church and Conversion_,
they had always put him back.
"Gilbert could not be hustled," says Maurice Baring of his whole
habit of mind and body.
"You could fluster Gilbert but not hustle him," says Father O'Connor.
They were both too wise to try.
In two letters Gilbert said that the two people who helped him most
at this time were Maurice Baring and Father Ronald Knox, who had both
gone through the same experience themselves.
Besides the positive mental processes of recognition, repulsion and
attraction exercised by the Church, Gilbert was affected to some
extent both by affection for the Church of England and disappointment
with it. The profound joy of his early conversion to Christianity was
linked with Anglicanism and so too were many friendships and the
continued attachment to it of Frances. But what he said to Maurice
Baring about a Porch is representative. Like Father Maturin he felt
he owed so much to his Anglican friends: he hated to stress overmuch
the revulsion from Anglicanism in the process of conversion. But it
did at this date contribute to the converging arguments.
He wrote to Maurice Baring:
So many thanks for the sermons, which I will certainly return as
you suggest. I had the other day a trying experience, and I think a
hard case of casuistry; I am not sure that I was right; but also not
by any means sure I was wrong. Long ago, before my present crisis, I
had promised somebody to take part in what I took to be a small
debate on labour. Too late, by my own carelessness, I found to my
horror it had swelled into a huge Anglo-Catholic Congress at the
Albert Hall. I tried to get out of it, but I was held to my promise.
Then I reflected that I could only write (as I was already writing)
to my Anglo-Catholic friends on the basis that I was one of them now
in doubt about continuing such; and that their conference in some
sense served the same purpose as their letters. What affected me
most, however, was that by my own fault I had put them into a hole.
Otherwise, I would not just now speak from or for their platform,
just as I could not (as yet at any rate) speak from or for yours. So
I spoke very briefly, saying something of what I think about social
ethics. Whether or not my decision was right, my experience was
curious and suggestive, though tragic; for I felt it like a farewell.
There was no doubt about the enthusiasm of those thousands of
Anglo-Catholics. But there was also no doubt, unless I am much
mistaken, that many of them besides myself would be Roman Catholics
rather than accept things they are quite likely to be asked to
accept--for instance, by the Lambeth Conference. For though my own
distress, as in most cases I suppose, has much deeper grounds than
clerical decisions, yet if I cannot stay where I am, it will be a
sort of useful symbol that the English Church has done something
decisively Protestant or Pagan. I mean that to those to whom I cannot
give my spiritual biography, I can say that the insecurity I felt in
Anglicanism was typified in the Lambeth Conference. I am at least
sure that much turns on that Conference, if not for me, for large
numbers of those people at the Albert Hall. A young Anglo-Catholic
curate has just told me that the crowd there cheered all references
to the Pope, and laughed at every mention of the Archbishop of
Canterbury. It's a queer state of things. I am concerned most,
however, about somebody I value more than the Archbishop of
Canterbury; Frances, to whom I owe much of my own faith, and to whom
therefore (as far as I can see my way) I also owe every decent chance
for the controversial defence of her faith. If her side can convince
me, they have a right to do so; if not, I shall go hot and strong to
convince her. I put it clumsily, but there is a point in my mind.
Logically, therefore, I must await answers from Waggett and Gore as
well as Knox and McNabb; and talk the whole thing over with her, and
then act as I believe.
This is a dusty political sort of letter, with nothing in it but
what I think and nothing of what I feel. For that side of it, I can
only express myself by asking for your prayers.
The accident of his having to speak at this Congress, where he was
received with enormous enthusiasm, probably led to a fuller analysis
of this element in his thought. I put here a letter he wrote to
Maurice Baring soon after his conversion, because it sums up the
Anglican question as he finally saw it:
Feb. 14th, 1923
Please forgive me for the delay; but I have been caught in a
cataract of letters and work in connection with the new paper we are
trying to start; and am now dictating this under conditions that make
it impossible for it to resemble anything so personal and intimate as
the great unwritten epistle to which you refer. But I will note down
here very hurriedly and in a more impersonal way, some of the matters
that have affected me in relation to the great problem.
To begin with, I am shy of giving one of my deepest reasons because
it is hard to put it without offence, and I am sure it is the wrong
method to offend the wavering Anglo-Catholic. But I believe one of my
strongest motives was mixed up with the idea of honour. I feel there
is something mean about not making complete confession and
restitution after a historic error and slander. It is not the same
thing to withdraw the charges against Rome one by one, or restore the
traditions to Canterbury one by one. Suppose a young prig refuses to
live with his father or his friend or his wife, because wine is drunk
in the house or there are Greek statues in the hall. Suppose he goes
off on his own and develops broader ideas. On the day he drinks his
first glass of wine, I think it is essential to his honour that he
should go back to his father or his friend and say, "You are right
and I was wrong, and we will drink wine together." It is not
consonant with his honour that he should set up a house of his own
with wine and statues and every parallel particular, and still treat
the other as if he were in the wrong. That is mean because it is
making the best of both; it is combining the advantages of being
right with the advantages of having been wrong. Any analogy is
imperfect; but I think you see what I mean.
The larger version of this is that England has really got into so
wrong a state, with its plutocracy and neglected populace and
materialistic and Servile morality, that it must take a sharp turn
that will be a sensational turn. No _evolution_ into Catholicism will
have that moral effect. Christianity is the religion of repentance;
it stands against modern fatalism and pessimistic futurism mainly in
saying that a man can go back. If we do decidedly go back it will
show that religion is alive. For the rest, I do not say much about
the details of continuity and succession, because the truth is they
did not much affect me. What I see is that we cannot complain of
England suffering from being Protestant and at the same time claim
that she has always been Catholic. That there has always been a High
Church Party is true; that there has always been an Anglo-Catholic
Party may be true, but I am not so sure of it. But there is one
matter arising from that which I do think important. Even the High
Church Party, even the Anglo-Catholic Party only confronts a
particular heresy called Protestantism upon particular points. It
defends ritual rightly or even sacramentalism rightly, because these
are the things the Puritans attacked. If it is not the heresy of an
age, at least it is only the anti-heresy of an age. But since I have
been a Catholic, I have become conscious of being in a much vaster
arsenal, full of arms against countless other potential enemies. The
Church, as the Church and not merely as ordinary opinion, has
something to say to philosophies which the merely High Church has
never had occasion to think about. If the next movement is the very
reverse of Protestantism, the Church will have something to say about
it; or rather has already something to say about it. You might unite
all High Churchmen on the High Church quarrel, but what authority is
to unite them when the devil declares his next war on the world?
Another quality that impresses me is the power of being decisive
first and being proved right afterwards. This is exactly the quality
a supernatural power would have; and I know nothing else in modern
religion that has it. For instance, there was a time when I should
have thought psychical enquiry the most reasonable thing in the
world, and rather favourable to religion. I was afterwards convinced,
by experience and not merely faith, that spiritualism is a practical
poison. Don't people see that _when_ that is found in experience, a
prodigious prestige accrues to the authority which, long before the
experiment, did not pretend to enquire but simply said, "Drop it."
We feel that the authority did not discover; it knew. There are a
hundred other things of which that story is true, in my own
experience. But the High Churchman has a perfect right to be a
spiritualistic enquirer; only he has not a right to claim that his
authority knew beforehand the truth about spiritualistic enquiry.
Of course there are a hundred things more to say; indeed the
greatest argument for Catholicism is exactly what makes it so hard to
argue for it. It is the scale and multiplicity of the forms of truth
and help that it has to offer. And perhaps, after all, the only thing
that you and I can really say with profit is exactly what you
yourself suggested; that we are men who have talked to a good many
men about a good many things, and seen something of the world and the
philosophies of the world and that we have not the shadow of a doubt
about what was the wisest act of our lives.
This letter, as we have seen, was written afterwards. Meanwhile the
story of the last slow but by no means uncertain steps is best told
in a series of undated letters to Father Ronald Knox:
DEAR FATHER KNOX,
It is hard not to have a silly feeling that demons, in the form of
circumstances, get in the way of what concerns one most, and I have
been distracted with details for which I have to be responsible, in
connection with the _New Witness_, which is in a crisis about which
shareholders etc. have to be consulted. I can't let my brother's
paper, that stands for all he believed in, go without doing all I
can; and I am trying to get it started again, with Belloc to run it
if possible. But the matter of our meeting has got into every chink
of my thoughts, even the pauses of talk on practical things. I could
not explain myself at that meeting; and I want to try again now.
I could not explain what I mean about my wife without saying much
more. I see in principle it is not on the same level as the true
Church; for nothing can be on the same level as God. But it is on
quite a different level from social sentiments about friends and
family. I have been a rottenly irresponsible person till I began to
wear the iron ring of Catholic responsibilities. But I really have
felt a responsibility about her, more serious than affection, let
alone passion. First, because she gave me my first respect for
sacramental Christianity; second, because she is one of the good
who mysteriously suffer. . . . .
I have, however, a more practical reason for returning to this
point. So far as my own feelings go, I think I might rightly make
application to be instructed as soon as possible; but I should not
like to take so serious a step without reopening the matter with her,
which I could do by the end of a week. I have had no opportunity
before, because she has only just recovered from an illness, and is
going away for a few days. But at about the end of next week, say,
everything ought to be ready. Meanwhile I will write to you again, as
I ought to have done before, but this tangle of business ties me up
terribly just now. Perhaps you could tell me how I could arrange
matters with some priest or religious in London, whose convenience it
would suit if I came up once or twice a week, or whatever is
required; or give me the address of someone to write to, if that is
the correct way. There are priests at High Wycombe which is nearer;
but I imagine they are very busy parochial clergy.
I had meant to write to you about the convictions involved in a
more abstract way, but I fear I have filled my letter with one
personal point. But, as I say, I will write to you again about the
other matters; and as they are more intellectual and less emotional,
I hope I may be a little more coherent.
Yours very sincerely,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
P.S. This has been delayed even longer than I thought, for business
bothers of my own and the paper's, plus finishing a book and all my
journalism, are bewildering me terribly.
DEAR FATHER KNOX,
Please excuse this journalistic paper, but the letter-block seems
undiscoverable at this time of night. I ought to have written before;
but we have been in some family trouble; my father is very ill, and
as he is an old man, my feelings are with him and my mother in a way
more serious than anything except the matter of our correspondence.
Essentially, of course, it does not so much turn the current of my
thoughts as deepen it; to see a man so many million times better than
I am, in every way, and one to whom I owe everything, under such a
shadow makes me feel, on top of all my particular feelings, the
shadow that lies on us all. I can't tell you what I feel of course;
but I hope I may ask for your prayers for my people and for me. My
father is the very best man I ever knew of that generation that never
understood the new need of a spiritual authority; and lives almost
perfectly by the sort of religion men had when rationalism was
rational. I think he was always subconsciously prepared for the next
generation having less theology than he has; and is rather puzzled at
its having more. But I think he understood my brother's conversion
better than my mother did; she is more difficult, and of course I
cannot bother her just now. However, my trouble has a practical side,
for which I originally mentioned it. As this may bring me to London
more than I thought, it seems possible I might go there after all,
instead of Wycombe, if I knew to whom to go. Also I find I stupidly
destroyed your letter with the names of the priests at Wycombe to
whom you referred me. Would it bother you very much to send me the
names again, and any alternative London ones that occur to you; and I
will let you know my course of action then. Please forgive the
disorder of my writing--and feeling.
Yours sincerely,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
DEAR FATHER KNOX,
I was just settling down three days ago to write a full reply to
your last very kind letter, which I should have answered long before,
when I received the wire that called me instantly to town. My father
died on Monday; and since then I have been doing the little I can for
my mother; but even that little involves a great deal of
business--the least valuable sort of help. I will not attempt to tell
you now all that this involves in connection with my deeper feelings
and intentions; for I only send you this interim scribble as an
excuse for delaying the letter I had already begun; and which nothing
less than this catastrophe would have prevented me finishing. I hope
to finish it in a few days. I am not sure whether I shall then be
back in Beaconsfield; but if so it will be at a new address:
Top Meadow
Beaconsfield.
Yours in haste,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
DEAR FATHER KNOX,
I feel horribly guilty in not having written before, and I do most
earnestly hope you have not allowed my delay to interfere with any of
your own arrangements. I have had a serious and very moving talk with
my wife; and she is only too delighted at the idea of your visit in
itself; in fact she really wants to know you very much.
Unfortunately, it does not seem very workable at the time to which I
suppose you referred. I imagine it more or less corresponds to next
week; and we have only one spare bedroom yet, which is occupied by a
nurse who is giving my wife a treatment that seems to be doing her
good and which I don't want to stop if I can help it. I am sure you
will believe that my regret about this difficulty is really not the
conventional apology; though heaven knows all sorts of apologies are
due to you. Touching the other idea of Lady Lovat's most generous
invitation I am not so sure, as that again depends at the moment on
the treatment; but of course I shall let Lady Lovat know very soon in
any case; and make other arrangements, as you suggested. In our
conversation my wife was all that I hope you will some day know her
to be; she is incapable of wanting me to do anything but what I think
right; and admits the same possibility for herself: but it is much
more of a wrench for her, for she has been able to practise her
religion in complete good faith; which my own doubts have prevented
me from doing.
I will write again very soon.
Yours sincerely,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
P.S. I am ashamed to say this has been finished fully forty-eight
hours after I meant it to go, owing to executor business. Nobody so
unbusinesslike as I am ought to be busy.
DEAR FATHER KNOX,
This is only a wild and hasty line to show I have not forgotten,
and to ask you if it would be too late if I let you know in a day or
two, touching your generous suggestion about your vacation. I shall
know for certain, I think, at latest by the end of the week; but just
at the moment it depends on things still uncertain, about a nurse who
is staying here giving my wife a treatment of radiant heat--one would
hardly think needed in this weather; but it seems to be doing her
good, I am thankful to say. If this is pushing your great patience
too far, please do not hesitate to make other arrangements if you
wish to; and I shall no doubt be able to do the same. But I should
love to accept your suggestion if possible.
Yours sincerely,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
DEAR FATHER KNOX,
Just as I am emerging from the hurricane of business I mentioned to
you, I find myself under a promise a year old to go and lecture for a
week in Holland; and I write this almost stepping on to the boat. I
don't in the least want to go; but I suppose the great question is
there as elsewhere. Indeed, I hear it is something of a reconquered
territory; some say a third of this heroic Calvinist state is now
Catholic. I have no time to write properly; but the truth is that
even before so small a journey I have a queer and perhaps
superstitious feeling that I should like to repeat to you my
intention of following the example of the worthy Calvinists, please
God; so that you could even cite it if there were ever need in a good
cause. I will write to you again and more fully about the business of
instruction when I return, which should be in about ten days.
Yours always sincerely,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
DEAR FATHER KNOX,
I ought to have written long ago to tell you what I have done about
the most practical of business matters. I have again been torn in
pieces by the wars of the _New Witness_; but I have managed to have
another talk with my wife, after which I have written to our old
friend Father O'Connor and asked him to come here, as he probably
can, from what I hear. I doubt whether I can possibly put in words
why I feel sure this is the right thing, not so much for my sake as
for hers. We talk about misunderstandings; but I think it is possible
to understand too well for comfort; certainly too well for my powers
of psychological description. Frances is just at the point where Rome
acts both as the positive and the negative magnet; a touch would turn
her either way; almost (against her will) to hatred, but with the
right touch to a faith far beyond my reach. I know Father O'Connor's
would be the touch that does not startle, because she knows him and
is fond of him; and the only thing she asked of me was to send for
him. If he cannot come, of course I shall take other action and let
you know. I doubt if most people could make head or tail of this
hasty scrawl: but I think you will understand.
Yours sincerely,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
Father Knox wrote on July 17, 1922, "I'm awfully glad to hear that
you've sent for Father O'Connor and that you think he's likely to be
available. I must say that, in the story, Father Brown's powers of
neglecting his parish always seemed to me even more admirable than
Dr. Watson's powers of neglecting his practice; so I hope this trait
was drawn from the life."
Father O'Connor has described the two days before the reception: "On
Thursday morning, on one of our trips to the village, I told Mrs.
Chesterton: 'There is only one thing troubling Gilbert about the
great step--the effect it is going to have on you.' 'Oh! I shall be
infinitely relieved. You cannot imagine how it fidgets Gilbert to
have anything on his mind. The last three months have been
exceptionally trying. I should be only too glad to come with him, if
God in His mercy would show the way clear, but up to now He has not
made it clear enough to me to justify such a step.' So I was able to
reassure Gilbert that afternoon. We discussed at large such special
points as he wished, and then I told him to read through the Penny
Catechism to make sure there were no snags to a prosperous passage.
It was a sight for men and angels all the Friday to see him wandering
in and out of the house with his fingers in the leaves of the little
book, resting it on his forearm whilst he pondered with his head on
one side."
The ceremony took place in a kind of shed with corrugated iron roof
and wooden walls--a part of the Railway Hotel, for at this time
Beaconsfield had no Catholic Church. Father Ignatius Rice, O.S.B.,
another old and dear friend, came over from the Abbey at Douai, to
join Father O'Connor at breakfast at the Inn and they afterwards
walked up together to Top Meadow. What follows is from notes made by
my husband of a conversation with Father Rice. They found Gilbert in
an armchair reading the catechism "pulling faces and making noises as
he used to do when reading."
He got up and stuffed the catechism in his pocket. At lunch he
drank water and poured wine for everyone else. About three they set
out for the Church. Suddenly Father O'Connor asked G.K. if he had
brought the Ritual. G.K. plunged his hand in his pocket, pulled out a
threepenny shocker with complete absence of embarrassment, and went
on searching till at last he found the prayer book.
While G.K. was making his confession to Father O'Connor, Frances
and Father Rice went out of the chapel and sat on the yokels' bench
in the bar of the inn. She was weeping.
After the baptism the two priests came out and left Gilbert and
Frances inside. Father Rice went back for something he had forgotten
and he saw them coming down the aisle. She was still weeping, and
Gilbert had his arm round her comforting her. . . .
He wrote the sonnet on his conversion that day. He was in brilliant
form for the rest of the day, quoting poetry and jesting in the
highest spirits. . . .
He joined the Church "to restore his innocence." Sin was almost the
greatest reality to him. He became a Catholic because of the Church's
practical power of dealing with sin.
Immediately, he wrote to his mother and to Maurice Baring, who had
anxiously feared he had perhaps offended Gilbert, so long was it
since he had heard from him.
MY DEAREST MOTHER,
I write this (with the worst pen in South Bucks) to tell you
something before I write about it to anyone else; something about
which we shall probably be in the position of the two bosom friends
at Oxford, who "never differed except in opinion." You have always
been so wise in not judging people by their opinions, but rather the
opinions by the people. It is in one sense a long story by this time;
but I have come to the same conclusion that Cecil did about needs of
the modern world in religion and right dealing, and I am now a
Catholic in the same sense as he, having long claimed the name in its
Anglo-Catholic sense. I am not going to make a foolish fuss of
reassuring you about things I am sure you never doubted; these things
do not hurt any relations between people as fond of each other as we
are; any more than they ever made any difference to the love between
Cecil and ourselves. But there are two things I should like to tell
you, in case you do not realise them through some other impression. I
have thought about you, and all that I owe to you and my father, not
only in the way of affection, but of the ideals of honour and freedom
and charity and all other good things you always taught me: and I am
not conscious of the smallest break or difference in those ideals;
but only of a new and necessary way of fighting for them. I think, as
Cecil did, that the fight for the family and the free citizen and
everything decent must now be waged by [the] one fighting form of
Christianity. The other is that I have thought this out for myself
and not in a hurry of feeling. It is months since I saw my Catholic
friends and years since I talked to them about it. I believe it is
the truth. I must end now, you know with how much love; for the post
is going.
Always your loving son,
GILBERT.
DEAR MAURICE,
My abominable delay deserves every penalty conceivable, hanging,
burning and boiling in oil; but really not so inconceivable an idea
as that I should be offended with you at any time (let alone after
all you have done in this matter) however thoroughly you might be
justified in being offended with me. Really and truly my delay,
indefensible as it is, was due to a desire and hope of writing you a
letter quite different from all those I have had to write to other
people; a very long and intimate letter, trying to tell you all about
this wonderful business, in which you have helped me so much more
than anyone else. The only other person I meant to write to in the
same style is Father Knox; and his has been delayed in the same
topsy-turvy way. I am drowning in whirlpools of work and worry over
the _New Witness_ which nearly went bankrupt for good this week. But
worry does not worry so much as it did before . . . Unless it is
adding insult to injury, I shall send the long letter after all. This
I send off instantly on receipt of yours. Please forgive me; you see
I humiliate myself by using your stamped envelope.
Yours always,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
This sense that the Church was needed to fight for the world was
very strong in Gilbert when he hailed it to his mother as the "one
fighting form of Christianity." In the _New Witness_ he answered near
this time a newspaper suggestion that the Church ought to "move with
the times."
The Cities of the Plain might have remarked that the heavens above
them did not altogether fit in with their own high civilisation and
social habits. They would be right. Oddly enough, however, when
symmetry was eventually restored, it was not the heavens that had
been obliged to adapt themselves. . . .
The Church cannot move with the times; simply because the times are
not moving. The Church can only stick in the mud with the times, and
rot and stink with the times. In the economic and social world, as
such, there is no activity except that sort of automatic activity
that is called decay; the withering of the high Powers of freedom and
their decomposition into the aboriginal soil of slavery. In that way
the world stands much at the same stage as it did at the beginning of
the Dark Ages. And the Church has the same task as it had at the
beginning of the Dark Ages; to save all the light and liberty that
can be saved, to resist the downward drag of the world, and to wait
for better days. So much a real Church would certainly do; but a real
Church might be able to do more. It might make its Dark Ages
something more than a seed-time; it might make them the very reverse
of dark. It might present its more human ideal in such abrupt and
attractive a contrast to the inhuman trend of the time, as to inspire
men suddenly for one of the moral revolutions of history; so that men
now living shall not taste of death until they have seen justice
return.
We do not want, as the newspapers say, a Church that will move with
the world. We want a Church that will move the world. We want one
that will move it away from many of the things towards which it is
now moving; for instance, the Servile State. It is by that test that
history will really judge, of any Church, whether it is the real
Church or no.
CHAPTER XXIV
Completion
THERE IS ONE part of this story that has not been told with the rest:
Our Lady's share in Gilbert's conversion. The Chesterton family had
been quite without the strange Protestant prejudice that in the minds
of many Englishmen sets the Mother of God against God the Son. Our
lady was respected though of course not invoked. In a boyhood poem
Gilbert took the blasphemous lines of Swinburne's "Hymn to
Proserpine" and wrote a kind of parody in reverse turning the poem
into a hymn to Mary. He would, too, recite Swinburne's own lines
"deliberately directing them away from Swinburne's intention and
supposing them addressed to the new Christian Queen of life, rather
than to the fallen Pagan queen of death."
But I turn to her still; having seen she shall surely abide
in the end
Goddess and maiden and queen be near me now and befriend.
Nor was it only admiration for art that made him write--also in early
youth:
THE NATIVITY OF BOTTICELLI
Do you blame me that I sit hours before this picture?
But if I walked all over the world in this time
I should hardly see anything worth seeing that is not
in this picture.
Father O'Connor sees in _The Catholic Church and Conversion_ a hint
that Mr. Belloc had been of those who tried to hustle Gilbert in his
younger days. But on this profound reality of Mary's help they could
meet many years before Gilbert had finished the slow rumination of
mind and the painful effort of will that had held him so long. Here
is an early letter Belloc wrote to his friend:
Reform Club, Manchester.
11 Dec. 1907.
MY DEAR GILBERT,
I am a man afraid of impulse in boats, horses and all action though
driven to it. I have never written a letter such as I am writing now,
though I have desired to write some six or seven since I became a
grown man. In the matter we discussed at Oxford I have a word to say
which is easier to say on paper than by word of mouth, or rather,
more valuable. All intellectual process is doubtful, all
inconclusive, save pure deduction, which is a game if one's first
certitudes are hypothetical and immensely valuable if one's first
certitude is fixed, yet remains wholly dependent on that.
Now if we differed in all main points I would not write thus, but
there are one or two on which we agree. One is "Vere passus,
immolatus in cruce pro homine." Another is in a looking up to our
Dear Lady, the blessed Mother of God.
I recommend to you this, that you suggest to her a comprehension for
yourself, of what indeed is the permanent home of the soul. If it is
here you will see it, if it is there you will see it. She never fails
us. She has never failed me in any demand.
I have never written thus--as I say--and I beg you to see nothing
in it but what I say. There is no connection the reason can
seize--but so it is. If you say "I want this" as in your case to know
one way or the other--she will give it you: as she will give health
or necessary money or success in a pure love. She is our Blessed
Mother.
I have not used my judgment in this letter. I am inclined to
destroy it, but I shall send it. Don't answer it.
Yours ever
H. BELLOC.
At top of letter: "My point is If it is right She knows. If it is
not right She knows."
Gilbert believed it, and he knew that as he came to the Church he was
coming to Our Lady.
Now I can scarcely remember a time when the image of Our lady did
not stand up in my mind quite definitely, at the mention or the
thought of all these things. I was quite distant from these things,
and then doubtful about these things; and then disputing with the
world for them, and with myself against them; for that is the
condition before conversion. But whether the figure was distant, or
was dark and mysterious, or was a scandal to my contemporaries, or
was a challenge to myself--I never doubted that this figure was the
figure of the Faith; that she embodied, as a complete human being
still only human, all that this Thing had to say to humanity. The
instant I remembered the Catholic Church, I remembered her; when I
tried to forget the Catholic Church, I tried to forget her! When I
finally saw what was nobler than my fate, the freest and the hardest
of all my acts of freedom, it was in front of a gilded and very gaudy
little image of her in the port of Brindisi, that I promised the
thing that I would do, if I returned to my own land.*
[* _The Well and the Shallows_, pp. 176-7.]
In his _Chaucer_, G.K. quoted with considerable amusement a learned
critic who said it was "possible" that the poet had "passed through a
period of intense devotion, more especially towards the Virgin Mary."
"It is," he comments. "It does occur from time to time. I do not
quite understand why Chaucer must have 'passed through' this fit of
devotion; as if he had Mariolatry like the measles. Even an amateur
who has encountered this malady may be allowed to testify that it
does not usually visit its victim for a brief 'period'; it is
generally chronic and (in some sad cases I have known) quite
incurable."*
[* _Chaucer_, p. 121.]
_The Queen of Seven Swords_ is the great expression of Gilbert's
"chronic" love of Our Lady:
And men looked up at the woman made for the morning
When the stars were young,
For whom more rude than a beggar's rhyme in the gutter
These songs were sung.
"The Return of Eve" exemplified a favourite thought of his: when the
journalist keeps repeating that the life of religion does not lie in
dusty dogmas we should stop him with a great shout, for he is wrong
at the very start. It is from the seed of dogma and from that seed
alone that all the Powers of art and poetry and devotion spring. In
the days of his boyhood, when he thought of Our lady with a vague
and confused respect as _"The_ Madonna" he could not have written
"The Return of Eve." That flower came from the seed of the doctrine of
the Immaculate Conception.
Our lady is the Mother of God and our Mother: this doctrine blossomed
as he wrote:
I found One hidden in every home
A voice that sings about the house.
A nurse that scares the nightmares off
A mother nearer than a spouse
Whose picture once I saw; and there
Wild as of old and weird and sweet
In sevenfold splendour blazed the moon
Not on her brow; beneath her feet.
This poem, "The White Witch" has in it a mingling of the old
classical stories of his boyhood and the new light of Christian
reality. In _The Everlasting Man_ he saw the myths as hunger and the
Faith as bread. Men's hearts today were withered because they had
forgotten to eat their bread. The hunger of the pagans was a
healthier thing than the jaded sterility of the modern world. Our
Lady was ready to give that world the Bread of Life once more. And as
he meditated on the mystery of the Virgin Birth he saw God making
purity creative. She alone who overcame all heresies could overcome
the hideous heresy of birth prevention.
That Christ from this creative purity
Came forth your sterile appetites to scorn.
So: in her house Life without Lust was born,
So in your house Lust without Life shall die.
"Gaude, Virgo Maria, cunctas haereses sola interemisti." Was this
phrase from Our Lady's office ringing in Gilbert's mind as he sang of
the Seven Champions of Christendom disarmed and worsted in the fight,
going back to Our Lady to find that she had hidden their swords where
the gospels tell us she hid and pondered all things--in her heart?
From her wounded heart, Mary takes the seven swords to rearm the
saints who have to reconquer the earth.
Certainly he must often have thought of the Litany. So many verses
are based on it. Our Lord as a baby climbs the Ivory Tower of His
Mother's body and kisses the Mystic Rose of her lips:
A woman was His walking home
Foederis Arca Ora pro nobis.
And he thinks of the sun, moon and stars as trinkets for her to play
with:
With the great heart a woman has
And the love of little things.
For she is a woman: Regina Angelorum, Queen of Powers and Archangels,
she yet belongs to the human race.
Our lady went into a strange country,
Our lady, for she was ours
And had run on the little hills behind the houses
And pulled small flowers;
But she rose up and went into a strange country
With strange thrones and powers.
From a welter of comment and correspondence that followed his
conversion--challenging, scorning, rejoicing, welcoming, I select two
letters from the two closest of Gilbert's Catholic friends--Hilaire
Belloc and Maurice Baring.
i.VIII.22.
MY DEAR GILBERT,
I write to you, from these strange surroundings, the first line
upon the news you gave me. I must write to you again when I have
collected myself: for my reactions are abominably slow. I have,
however, something to say immediately: and that is why I write this
very evening, just after seeing Eleanor off at the Station. The thing
I have to say is this (I could not have said it before your step: I
can say so now. Before it would have been like a selected pleading.)
The Catholic Church is the exponent of Reality. It is true. Its
doctrines in matters large and small are statements of what is. This
it is which the ultimate act of the intelligence accepts. This it is
which the will deliberately confirms. And that is why Faith though an
act of the Will is Moral. If the Ordnance Map tells us that it is 11
miles to [a place] then, my mood of lassitude as I walk through the
rain at night making it feel like 30, I use the Will and say "No." My
intelligence has been convinced and I compel myself to use it against
my mood. It is 11 and though I feel in the depths of my being to have
gone 30 miles and more, I _know_ it is not yet 11 I have gone.
I am by all my nature of mind sceptical. . . . And as to the doubt
of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood: not a conclusion. My
conclusion--and that of all men who have ever once seen it--is the
Faith; Corporate, organised, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a
theory. It.
To you, who have the blessing of profound religious emotion, this
statement may seem too desiccate. It is indeed not enthusiastic. It
lacks meat.
It is my misfortune. In youth I had it: even till lately. Grief has
drawn the juices from it. I am alone and unfed, the more do I affirm
the Sanctity, the Unity, the Infallibility of the Catholic Church. By
my very isolation do I the more affirm it, as a man in a desert knows
that water is right for man: or as a wounded dog not able to walk,
yet knows the way home.
The Catholic Church is the natural home of the human spirit. The
odd perspective picture of life which looks like a meaningless puzzle
at first, seen from that one standpoint takes a complete order and
meaning, like the skull in the picture of the Ambassadors.
So much for my jejune contribution: not without value; because I
know you regard my intelligence--a perilous tool God gave me for his
own purposes; one bringing nothing to me.
But beyond this there will come in time, if I save my soul, the
flesh of these bones--which bones alone I can describe and teach. I
know--without feeling (an odd thing in such a connection) the reality
of Beatitude: which is the goal of Catholic Living.
In hac urbe lux solennis
Ver aeternum pax perennis
Et aeterna gaudia.
Yours,
H. B.
Maurice Baring wrote:
August 25: 1922.
MY DEAR GILBERT,
When I wrote to you the other day I was still cramped by the
possibility of the news not being true although I _knew_ it was true.
I felt it was true at once. Curiously enough I felt it had happened
before I saw the news in the newspaper at all. I felt that your ship
had arrived at its port. But the more I felt this, the more unwilling
I was to say anything before I heard the news from a source other
than the newspapers. I gave way to an excess, a foolish excess
perhaps of scruple. But you will, I think, understand this. In
writing to you the other day I expressed not a tenth part of what I
felt and feel and that baldly and inadequately. Nothing for years has
given me so much joy. I have hardly ever entered a church without
putting up a candle to Our Lady or to St. Joseph or St. Anthony for
you. And both this year and last year in Lent I made a Novena for
you. I know of many other people, better people far than I, who did
the same. Many Masses were said for you and prayers all over England
and Scotland in centres of Holiness. I will show you some day a
letter from some Nuns on the subject. A great friend of mine one of
the greatest saints I have known, Sister Mary Annunciation of the
Convent Orphanage, Upper Norwood, used always to pray for you. She,
alas, died last year.
Did I ever quote you a sentence of Bernard Holland on the subject
of Kenelm Henry Digby when the latter was received?
"Father Scott . . . who, at last, guided him through the narrow
door where one must bend one's head, into the internal space and
freedom of the eternal and universal Catholic Church." _Space_ and
_freedom:_ that was what I experienced on being received; that is
what I have been most conscious of ever since. It is the exact
opposite of what the ordinary Protestant conceives to be the case. To
him and not only to him but to the ordinary English agnostic the
convert to Catholicism is abandoning his will and his independence,
sometimes they think even his nationality; at the best they think he
is sheltering himself in a walled garden; at the worst they think he
has closed on himself an iron door: and shackled himself with foolish
chains and sold his birthright for a crown of tinsel.
And yet their own experience, the testimony of their eyes if they
would only use them, ought to suggest to them that they might perhaps
be mistaken.
It would be difficult for anyone to make out a case for the
UnEnglishness of Manning or indeed of any prominent English Catholic
whether a born Catholic or a convert.
It would be difficult for them to prove that Belloc was a writer
wanting in independence. It would be difficult for them to convince
any one that Father Vaughan and Lord Fitzalan were wearing foolscaps.
And anybody who has thought about history or looked on at politics
must have reflected that freedom resides where there is order and not
where there is license: or no-order.
It is true in politics; it is true in art. It is the basis of our
whole social life in England. Russia has just given us the most
startling of object lessons. The English with their passion for
Committees, their Club-rules and their well organised traffic are
daily realising the fact, however little they may recognise the
theory. Only the law can give us freedom, said Goethe talking of art.
"Und das Gesetz kann nur die Freiheit geben."
Well all I have to say, Gilbert, is what I think I have already
said to you, and what I have said not long ago in a printed book.
That I was received into the Church on the Eve of Candlemass 1909,
and it is perhaps the only act in my life, which I am quite certain I
have never regretted. Every day I live, the Church seems to me more
and more wonderful; the Sacraments more and more solemn and
sustaining; the voice of the Church, her liturgy, her rules, her
discipline, her ritual, her decisions in matters of Faith and Morals
more and more excellent and profoundly wise and true and right, and
her children stamped with something that those outside Her are
without. There I have found Truth and reality and everything outside
Her is to me compared with Her as dust and shadow. Once more God
bless you and Frances. Please give her my love. In my prayers for you
I have always added her name.
Yours,
MAURICE.
It was a bit of great good fortune, although at the time he did not
feel it so, that the death of the _New Witness_ in 1922 for lack of
funds, left Gilbert some months for uninterrupted creative thought
before _G.K.'s Weekly_ took its place. Lawrence Solomon, friend of
his boyhood and at this time a near neighbour, has told me not only
how happy his conversion had made Gilbert but also how it had seemed
to bring him increased strength of character. Worry, he had told
Maurice Baring, did not worry so much as of old because of a
fundamental peace. In this atmosphere were written two of his most
important books: _St. Francis of Assisi_ published 1923, _The
Everlasting Man_ published 1925.
In a poem he has expressed his sense of conversion as a new light
that had transfigured life: indeed of a new life given to him:
After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white,
I walked the ways and heard what all men said.
* * * * *
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.*
[* _Collected Poems_, p. 387, "The Convert."]
Both books shine with that light on the white road of man's
endeavour, thrill with that life. Gilbert felt now the clue to
history in his fingers and he used it increasingly. _The Everlasting
Man_ is the _Orthodoxy_ of his later life and one difficulty in
dealing with it adequately was expressed in a letter from William
Lyon Phelps thanking the author for "a magnificent work of genius and
never more needed than now. I took out my pencil to mark the most
important passages, but I quickly put my pencil in my pocket for I
found I had to mark every sentence." Reading the book for perhaps the
seventh time I can only say (I hope without irreverence) what G.K.
himself says happens to those who can read the words of the Gospels
"simply enough." They "will feel as if rocks had been rolled upon
them. Criticism is only words about words; and of what use are words
about such words as these."
"Rocks rolled upon them." Did he not feel crushed, overwhelmed at
times by his own thought on these immensities, or can the philosopher
carry his thoughts as lightly as Gilbert so often seemed to carry
his? I think not always. He must have needed superhuman strength to
conceive and give birth to this mighty book. The thoughts sketched in
_The New Jerusalem_ had grown to their full fruition in an atmosphere
of meditation. It would be much easier to give an outline of _The
Everlasting Man_ than of _Orthodoxy_, much harder to give an idea of
it. For _Orthodoxy_ consists of a hundred brilliant arguments while
_The Everlasting Man_ really is a vision of history supported by a
historical outline. Comparing his own effort with that of H. G.
Wells, Chesterton says, "I do not believe that the best way to
produce an outline of history is to rub out the lines." He is like
Wells however in not being a specialist but claiming "the right of
the amateur to do his best with the facts the specialists
provide"--only their specialists are different specialists and their
facts therefore largely different facts.
Chesterton, unlike most converts, wrote concerning his own conversion
the least interesting of his later books: but in _The Everlasting Man_
he is not at all concerned with his own spiritual wayfaring, he
merely wants to make everyone else look at what he has come to see at
the end of the way. The book is an attempt to get outside Man and
thus see him as the strange being he really is: to get outside
Christianity and see for the first time its uniqueness among the
religions of the world. Why are not all men aware of the uniqueness
of Man among the animals and the uniqueness of the Church among
religions? Because they do not really look at either. Familiarity has
dulled the edge of awareness. Men must be made to see them as though
for the first time; and it is the towering achievement of this book
that reading it we do so see them. "I desire to help the reader to
see Christendom from the outside in the sense of seeing it as a whole
against the background of other historic things; just as I desire him
to see humanity as a whole against the background of natural things.
And I say that in both cases when seen thus, they stand out from
their background like supernatural things." This being his desire, he
divides the book into two parts--"the first being the main adventure
of the human race in so far as it remained heathen; and the second a
summary of the real difference that was made by it becoming
Christian."
Notable as the first part is, it is only a preparation for the
second, which shows the Church not as one religion among many but as
the only religion, for it is the only Thing that binds into one both
Philosophy (or Thought) and Mythology (or Poetry), giving us a Logos
Who is also the Hero of the strangest story in the world. He asks the
man who talks of reading the Gospels really to read them as he might
read his daily paper and to feel the terrific shock of the words of
Christ to the Pharisees or the behaviour of Christ to the
money-changers: to look at the uniqueness of the Church that has died
so often but like Her Founder risen again from the dead.
Two untrue things, he felt, were constantly reiterated about the
gospel--one that the Church had overlaid and made difficult a plain
and simple story: the other that the hero of this story was merely
human and taught a morality suitable to his own age, inapplicable in
our more complicated society. To anyone who really read the gospels
the instant impression would be rather that they were full of dark
riddles which only historic Christianity has clarified. The Eunuchs
of the heavenly Kingdom would be an idea dark and terrible but for
the historic beauty of Catholic virginity. The ideal of man and woman
"in one flesh" inseparable and sanctified by a sacrament became clear
in the lives of the great married saints of Christendom. The apparent
idealisation of idleness above service in the story of Mary and
Martha was lit up by the sight of Catherine and Clare and Teresa
shining above the little home at Bethany. The meek inheriting the
earth became the basis of a new Social Order when the mystical monks
reclaimed the lands that the practical kings had lost.
Thus if the gospel was a riddle the Church was the answer to the
riddle because both were created by One Who Knew: Who saw the ages in
which His own creation was to find completion: Whose morality was not
one of another age but of another world.
Chesterton gathered history in his mind and saw together before the
Christmas Crib the shepherds who had found their shepherd, the
philosopher kings who "would stand for the same human ideal if their
names had really been Confucius or Pythagoras or Plato. They were
those who sought not tales but the truth of things; and since their
thirst for truth was itself a thirst for God, they also have had
their reward. But even in order to understand that reward, we must
understand that for philosophy as much as mythology, that reward was
the completion of the incomplete."*
[* _The Everlasting Man_, p. 211.]
G.K. too had needed the completion of incomplete human thought: he
too had followed the star from a far country. It had been a fancy of
his boyhood, caught from a fairytale, that evil lurked somewhere in a
hidden room of the human house and the human heart. He saw in the
history of the ancients a consciousness of the Fall, in the sadness
of their songs a sense of "the Presence of the Absence of God." But
at Bethlehem he saw the transformation that had come upon the whole
race of man with that little local infancy concealing the mighty
power of God who had put Himself under the feet of the world.
It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart
of his own house, which he had never suspected; and seen a light from
within. It is as if he found something at the back of his own heart
that betrayed him into good. It is not made of what the world would
call strong materials; or rather it is made of materials whose
strength is in that winged levity with which they brush us and pass.
It is all that is in us but a brief tenderness, that is there made
eternal; all that means no more than a momentary softening that is in
some strange fashion become a strengthening and a repose; it is the
broken speech and the lost word that are made positive and suspended
unbroken; as the strange kings fade into a far country and the
mountains resound no more with the feet of the shepherds; and only
the night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over something more
human than humanity.
[* Ibid., p. 223.]
It seems to me profoundly significant that Gilbert studied first in
the little Poor Man of Assisi what Christ could do in one man before
he came on to the study of what He had done in mankind as a whole, of
Who He was who had done it. For the man thus chosen embodied the
ideals that Gilbert had seen dimly in his boyhood--ideals that most
of us accept a little reluctantly from the Church, but which had
actually attracted him towards the Church. St. Francis "had found the
secret of life in being the servant and the secondary figure". . .
"he seems to have liked everybody, but especially those whom
everybody disliked him for liking." "By nature he was the sort of man
who has that vanity which is the opposite of pride, that vanity which
is very near to humility. He never despised his fellow creatures and
therefore he never despised the opinion of his fellow creatures,
including the admiration of his fellow creatures." "He was above all
things a great giver; and he cared chiefly for the best kind of
giving which is called thanksgiving. If another great man wrote a
grammar of assent, he may well be said to have written a grammar of
acceptance; a grammar of gratitude. He understood down to its very
depths the theory of thanks; and its depths are a bottomless abyss."
Here, in St. Francis, Gilbert saw the apotheosis of his old boyish
thought--that thanksgiving is a duty and a joy, that we should love
not "humanity" but each human. Things shadowed in the Notebook are in
_St. Francis_, for
the transition from the good man to the saint is a sort of
revolution; by which one for whom all things illustrate and
illuminate God becomes one for whom God illustrates and illuminates
all things. It is rather like the reversal whereby a lover might say
at first sight that a lady looked like a flower, and say afterwards
that all flowers reminded him of his lady. A saint and a poet
standing by the same flower might seem to say the same thing; but
indeed though they would both be telling the truth, they would be
telling different truths. For one the joy of life is a cause of
faith, for the other rather a result of faith.*
[* _St. Francis of Assisi_, p. 111.]
_The Everlasting Man_ and the _St. Francis_ seem to me the highest
expression of Gilbert's mysticism. I have hesitated to use the word
for it is not one to be used lightly but I can find no other. Like
most Catholics I have been wont to believe that to be a mystic a man
must first be an ascetic and Gilbert was not an ascetic in the
ordinary sense. But is there not for the thinker an asceticism of the
mind, very searching, very purifying? In his youth he had told
Bentley that creative writing was the hardest of hard labour. That
sense of the pressure of thought that made Newman call creative
writing "getting rid of pain by pain"; the profound depression that
often follows; the exhaustion that seems like a bottomless pit. St.
Theresa said the hardest penance was easier than mental prayer: was
not much of Gilbert's thought a contemplation?
Faith, thanksgiving, love, surely these far above bodily asceticism
can so clear a man's eyesight that he may fittingly be called a
mystic since he sees God everywhere. "The less a man thinks of
himself, the more he thinks of his good luck and of all the gifts of
God." Only a poet who was more than a poet could see so clearly of
what like St. Francis was.
When we say that a poet praises the whole creation, we commonly
mean only that he praises the whole cosmos. But this sort of poet
does really praise creation, in the sense of the act of creation. He
praises the passage or transition from nonentity to entity; there
falls here also the shadow of that archetypal image of the bridge,
which has given to the priest his archaic and mysterious name. The
mystic who passes through the moment when there is nothing but God
does in some sense behold the beginningless beginnings in which there
was really nothing else. He not only appreciates everything but the
nothing of which everything was made. In a fashion he endures and
answers even the earthquake irony of the Book of Job; in some sense
he is there when the foundations of the world are laid, with the
mornings stars singing together and the sons of God shouting for joy.*
[* _St. Francis of Assisi_, pp. 112-13.]
But there was in all those years another element besides the giving
of thanks and the joy of creation: an abiding grief for the sorrows
of the sons of men and especially those of his own land. In this mood
the _Cobbett_ was written.
Nine years separate the publication of _William Cobbett_ from that of
the _History of England_. Written at the time when Englishmen were
fighting so magnificently, that book had radiated G.K.'s own mood of
hope, but to read _Rural Rides_, to meditate on Cobbett's England,
and then turn to the England of the hour was not cheerful. For
Cobbett "did not draw precise diagrams of things as they were. He
only had frantic and fantastic nightmares of things as they are."*
And these nightmares haunted Cobbett's biographer.
[* _Cobbett_, p. 22.]
What he saw was not an Eden that cannot exist, but rather an
Inferno that can exist, and even that does exist. What he saw was the
perishing of the whole English power of self-support, the growth of
cities that drain and dry up the countryside, the growth of dense
dependent populations incapable of finding their own food, the
toppling triumph of machines over men, the sprawling omnipotence of
financiers over patriots, the herding of humanity in nomadic masses
whose very homes are homeless, the terrible necessity of peace and
the terrible probability of war, all the loading up of our little
island like a sinking ship; the wealth that may mean famine and the
culture that may mean despair; the bread of Midas and the sword of
Damocles. In a word, he saw what we see, but he saw it when it was
not there. And some cannot see it--even when it is there.*
[* Ibid., pp. 14, 15.]
Two men had written of the Reformation as the ultimate origin of
these evils at a time when it was still the fashion to treat it as
the dawn of all good. Lingard, himself a Catholic, had written
cautiously, with careful documentation and moderate tone. Cobbett, a
Protestant, had written hastily and furiously, but both men had drawn
in essentials the same picture. Chesterton suspected that Cobbett was
treated with contempt, Lingard with respect, largely because of the
difference in the tone of the two men. Lingard spoke restrainedly but
Cobbett's voice was raised in a loud cry:
He was simply a man who had discovered a crime: ancient like many
crimes; concealed like all crimes. He was as one who had found in a
dark wood the bones of his mother, and suddenly knew she had been
murdered. He knew now that England had been secretly slain. Some, he
would say, might think it a matter of mild regret to be expressed in
murmurs. But when he found a corpse he gave a shout; and if fools
laughed at anyone shouting, he would shout the more, till the world
should be shaken with that terrible cry in the night.
It is that ringing and arresting cry of "Murder!" wrung from him as
he stumbled over those bones of the dead England, that distinguishes
him from all his contemporaries.*
[* Ibid., pp. 176-77.]
Yet, for the Christian, hope remains: no murder can be the end.
"Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God
who knew the way out of the grave." This quotation is from the
chapter called "Five Deaths of the Faith" in _The Everlasting Man_.
Several times in the book Chesterton puts aside tempting lines of
thought with the remark that he intends to develop them later--in one
of the unwritten books that he always felt were so much better than
those he actually wrote. Would any human life have been long enough
to develop them all? Anyhow, even the whole of this life was not
available.
As I turn to the story of the weekly paper rising again from its
ashes I ask myself the question I have often asked: was it worth
while? I cannot answer the question. Something of his manhood seemed
to Gilbert bound up with this struggle, and it may be he would have
been a lesser man had he abandoned it. And yet at moments imagining
the poetry, the philosophy that might have been ours--another _White
Horse_, another _Everlasting Man_--I am tempted to wish that these
years had not thus been sacrificed to the paper which enshrined his
brother's memory.
CHAPTER XXV
The Reluctant Editor (1925-1930)
_I tell you naught for your comfort
Yea naught for your desire
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
Ballad of the White Horse_
COULD GILBERT HAVE divided his life between literary work, his home
at Top Meadow, and those other elements called in the _Autobiography_
"Friendship and Foolery," that life might well have been as he
himself called it "indefensibly fortunate and happy." But he could
not. Part of his philosophy of joy was that thanks must be given--for
sunsets, for dandelions, for beech trees, for home and friends. And
this thanks could only be the taking of his part in the fight. He
would never, he once said, have turned of his own accord to politics:
it is arguable that it would have been better if he never had. But
his brother had plunged into the fray with that very political paper
the _New Witness_ and his brother's death had left it in Gilbert's
hands. He felt the task to be a sacred legacy, and when the paper
died for lack of funds his one thought was how to start it again.
For many months he kept the office in being and paid salaries to a
skeleton staff, consisting of Mr. Gander, the deaf old manager, Miss
Dunham (now Mrs. Phillips) and an office boy. Mr. Titterton would
stroll in and play cricket with the office boy with a paper ball and
a walking-stick. Endless discussions were held as to how to re-start
the paper and whether under the old name or a new one. Bernard Shaw
had his own view. He wrote:
11 Feb.: 1923
MY DEAR CHESTERTON
Not presume to dictate (I have all Jingle's delicacy); but if
everybody else is advising you, why should not I?
_T.P.'s Weekly_ always had a weakly sound. But it established
itself sufficiently to make that form of title the trade mark of a
certain sort of paper. Hence _Jack O'London's Weekly_. It also set
the trade sheep running that way.
You have the precedents of Defoe and Cobbett for using your own
name; but _D.D.'s Weekly_ is unthinkable, and W.C.'s Weekly indecent.
Your initials are not euphonious: they recall that brainy song of my
boyhood, U-pi-dee.
Jee Kay see, kay see, kay see,
Jee Kay see, Jee Kay see.
Jee Kay see, Kay see, Kay see,
Jee Kay see Kay see.
Chesterton is a noble name; but Chesterton is Weakly spoils it.
Call it simply
CHESTERTON'S
That is how it will be asked for at the bookstalls. You may be
obliged to call later ventures _Chesterton's Daily_ or _Chesterton's
Annual_, but this one needs no impertinently superfluous definition:
_Chesterton's Perennial_ is amusing enough to be excusable; but a
joke repeated every week is no joke. A picture cover like that of
Punch might stand even that test if it were good enough; but where
are you to find your Doyle?
Week is a detestable snivelling word: nothing can redeem it, not
even the sermon on the Mount. Seven Days is better, But reminds one
of the police court as well as of the creation. Every Seven Days
would sound well. But _Chesterton's_ leaves no room for anything
else. I am more than usually sure that I am right.
Frances quite agrees with me. How would you like it if she were to
publish a magazine and call it Fanny's First Paper?
Ever
G.B.S.
If Gilbert answered this letter his answer has disappeared. He seems
to have asked permission to publish it--probably with a view to
collecting further opinions.
10 Adelphi Terrace, London, W.C.2.
February 16th 1923.
MY DEAR G.K.C.
Of course you may publish any letter of mine that you care to, at
your discretion.
. . . But not only will the publication of a letter from me not add
one to your circulation (nothing but a permanent feature will do
that), but it may lead you to disregard the advice I give to all the
people who start Labour papers (about two a week or so), which always
is, "Don't open with an article to say that your paper supplies a
want; don't blight your columns with 'messages'; don't bewilder your
readers with the family jokes of your clique; else there will be no
second number." Ponder this: it is sound.
Your main difficulty is that the class whose champion you have made
yourself reads either Lloyd's or nothing. To the rural proprietor,
no longer a peasant, art, including _belles lettres_, is immorality,
and people who idealize peasants, unpractical fools. Also the Roman
Catholic Church, embarrassed by recruits of your type and born
scoffers like Belloc, who cling to the Church because its desecration
would take all the salt out of blasphemy, will quietly put you on the
unofficial index. The Irish will not support an English journal
because it occasionally waves a Green flag far better than they can
wave it themselves. And the number of Jews who will buy you just to
see what you say about them is not large enough to keep you going.
Thus there is absolutely no public for your policy; and though there
is a select one for yourself one and indivisible, it is largely
composed of people to whom your oddly assorted antipathies and
pseudo-racial feuds are uncongenial. Besides, on these fancies of
yours you have by this time said all you have to say so many thousand
times over, that your most faithful admirers finally (and always
suddenly) discover they are fed up with the _New Witness_ and cannot
go on with it. This last danger becomes greater as you become older,
because when we are young we can tell ourselves a new story every
night between our prayers and our sleep; but later on we find
ourselves repeating the same story with intensifications and
improvements night after night until we are tired of it; and in the
end (which you have not yet reached) a story revived from the old
repertory has to last for months, and is more and more shaky as a
protection against thinking of business, or lying there a prey to
unwelcome reminiscences. And what happens to the story of the
imaginative child happens also to the sermon or the feuilleton of the
adult. It is inevitably happening to you.
That is the case against the success of CHESTERTON'S.
Your only chance finally is either to broaden your basis, or to
have no basis at all, like Dickens in "Household Words" and "All The
Year Round," and say, "Give me something with imagination in it, and
I can do without politics or theoretic sociology of any kind." This
is perhaps the only true catholicism in literature; but it will
hardly serve your turn; because all the articles and stories that
Dickens got are now mopped up by the popular press, which in his day
stuck to politics and news and nothing else. So I am afraid you will
have to stand for a policy, or at least a recognisable attitude,
unless you are prepared to write a detective story every week and
make Belloc write a satirical story as well.
You could broaden your basis if you had money enough to try the
experiment of giving ten poor but honest men in Beaconsfield and ten
more in London capital enough to start for themselves as independent
farmers and shopkeepers. The result would be to ruin 18 out of the
twenty, and possibly to ruin the lot. You would then learn from your
feelings what you would never learn from me, that what men need is
not property but honorable service. Confronted either with 20 men
ruined by your act, or 18 ruined and one Fascination Fledgby owning
half a street in London, and the other half a parish in Bucks, you
would--well, perhaps join the Fabian Society.
The pseudo race feuds you should drop, simply because you cannot
compete with the _Morning Post_, which gives the real thing in its
succulent savagery whilst you can give only a "wouldn't hurt a fly"
affectation of it. In religion too you are up against the fact that
an editor, like an emperor, must not belong to a sect. Wells is on
the right tack: my tack. See my prefaces to Androcles and Methuselah.
We want the real Catholic Church above the manufactured one. The
manufactured one is useful as the Salvation Army is useful, or the
formulas of the Church of Christ Scientist; but they do not strike on
the knowledge box of the modern intellectual; and it is on the modern
intellectual that you are depending. I am an Irishman, and know how
far the official Catholic Church can go. Your ideal Church does not
exist and never can exist within the official organization, in which
Father Dempsey will always be efficient and Father Keegan futile if
not actually silenced; and I know that an officially Catholic
Chesterton is an impossibility.
However, you must find out all this for yourself as I found it out
for myself. Mere controversy is waste of time; and faith is a curious
thing. I believe that you would not have become a professed official
Catholic if you did not believe that you believe in
transubstantiation; but I find it quite impossible to believe that
you believe in transubstantiation any more than, say, Dr. Saleeby
does. You will have to go to Confession next Easter; and I find the
spectacle--the box, your portly kneeling figure, the poor devil
inside wishing you had become a Fireworshipper instead of coming
there to shake his soul with a sense of his ridiculousness and
yours--all incredible, monstrous, comic, though of course I can put a
perfect literary complexion on it in a brace of shakes.
Now, however, I am becoming personal (how else can I be sincere?).
Besides I am going on too long and the lunch bell is ringing. So
forgive me, and don't bother to answer unless you cannot help it.
Ever,
G. BERNARD SHAW.
Meanwhile, Shaw as usual responded cordially to Gilbert's wish to
make him an early attraction in the paper--but also as usual urged
him towards the theatre:
10th Dec. 1924.
By all means send me a screed about Joan [of Arc] for the cockpit.
But I protest I have no views about her. I am only the first man
modest enough to know his place _auprès d'elle_ as a simple reporter
and old stage hand.
You should write plays instead of editing papers. Why not do George
Fox, who was released from the prisons in which Protestant England
was doing its best to murder him, by the Catholic Charles II? George
and Joan were as like as two peas in pluck and obstinacy.
G.B.S.
The specimen advance number was published before the end of 1924. In
the leading article G.K. gave his reasons for agreeing finally to use
his own name--although in the form attacked by Shaw. He had first
viewed the proposal with a "horror which has since softened into
loathing." He had looked for a title that should indicate the paper's
policy. But while that policy was in fact a support of human
normality: well-distributed property, freedom and the family--yet the
surrounding atmosphere was so abnormal that "any title defining our
doctrine makes it look doctrinaire." A name like _The Distributive
Review_ would suggest that a Distributist was like a Socialist, a
crank or a pedant with a new theory of human nature. "It is so old
that it has become new. At the same time I want a title that does
suggest that the paper is controversial and that this is the general
trend of its controversy. I want something that will be recognised as
a flag, however fantastic and ridiculous, that will be in some sense
a challenge, even if the challenge be received only with genial
derision. I do not want a colourless name; and the nearest I can get
to something like a symbol is merely to fly my own colours."
Although the paper was never exclusively Catholic, that flag was for
G.K. as it had been for Cecil of a very definite pattern and very
clear colours: religiously the paper stood for Catholic Christianity,
socially for the theory of small ownership, personal responsibility
and property. It was in strong opposition especially to Socialism and
even more to Communism. Bernard Shaw, Gilbert once said, wanted to
distribute money among the poor--"we want to distribute power."
During the last part of Cecil's editorship his wife had been
Assistant Editor of the _New Witness_ and she had so continued when
Gilbert first became Editor. But she was neither a Catholic nor a
Distributist. Religion seems not to have interested her, and her
political outlook was entirely different from Gilbert's. In _The
Chestertons_ she dismissed Distributism as "quite without first
principles" and "a pious hope and no more."* Obviously it was
impossible for Gilbert to start his new paper with an Assistant
Editor in entire disagreement with his views. I have sometimes
wondered whether his intense dislike of having to tell Mrs. Cecil
this was not almost as strong a factor in the delay as the money
problem.
[* I have learnt, as this book goes to press, that Mrs. Cecil became
a Catholic in 1941.]
There was no break in their relations: she went on writing for the
paper, doing chiefly the dramatic criticism. But it is clear from her
own account of the incident that she wholly misconstrued Gilbert's
attitude and did not realise how far she herself had drifted from
Cecil's views as well as from Gilbert's.
Shaw wrote again:
Reid's Palace Hotel
Funchal, Madeira.
16th January, 1925.
MY DEAR G.K.C.
The sample number has followed me out here. What a collector's
treasure!
Considering that I had Cecil's own assurance that my Quintessence
of Ibsenism rescued him from Rationalism, and that it was written in
1889 (I abandoned Rationalism consciously and explicitly in 1881) I
consider John Prothero's introduction of me to your readers as a
recently converted Materialist Rationalist to be a most unnatural
act; and it would serve her right if I never spoke to her again.
Rationalism is the bane of the Church. A Roman priest always wants
to argue with you. A Church of England parson flies in terror from an
argument, a fundamentally sensible course. George Fox simply knocked
arguers out with his "I have experimental knowledge of God." St.
Thomas Aquinas was like me: he knew the worthlessness of
ratiocination because he could do it so well, and yet despaired of
the Inspirationists in practical life because they did it so badly.
J.K.P. doesn't know her way about in this controversy; and I cannot
take up her challenge.
What makes me uneasy about the prospectus is that you drag in
anti-prohibition. You might as well have declared for Brighter London
at once, or said that the paper would be printed at the office of the
_Morning Advertiser_. You run the risk of the money coming from The
Trade. However, _non olet_. Only, remember the fate of all the
editors--Gardiner, Donald, Massingham, etc., etc.--who have written
without regard to their proprietors. The strength of your position is
that they can hardly carry on with your name in the title without
you. But they can kill the paper by stopping supplies if it does not
pay; and the chances are that it will not. I have never had a
farthing of interest on my shares in the New Statesman, and don't
expect I ever shall. Therefore keep your list of shareholders as
various and as uncommercial as you can: get Catholic money rather
than beer money.
As I am the real patentee of the Distributive State, and the D.S.
is Socialism; and as, furthermore, the Church must remain at least
neutral on Prohibition, as in the United States, where a Catholic
priest has just set a praiseworthy example of neutrality by bringing
about a record cop of bootleggers, and as the success of Prohibition
is so overwhelming that it is bound to become a commonplace of
civilization, you must regard it as at least possible that you will
some day make the paper Socialist and Dry (with a capital). Therefore
do not undertake to oppose anything: stand for what you propose to
advocate, whether as to property or drink or anything else, but don't
state your solutions as antitheses.
By the way, don't propose equal distribution of land. It is like
equal distribution of metal, rough on those who get the lead and
rather too jolly for those who get the gold. Your equal distribution
must come to equal distribution of the national income in terms of
money.
The £500 a year is absurd. Do you realize that it is £250 at
pre-war rates, and subject to heavy taxation: net £375--pre-war
182-10-0? You have sold yourself into slavery for ten years for
£3-10-2 a week. Are you quite mad? Make it at least £1500, plus
payment for copy.
Ever
G.B.S.
Of course it was not merely a question of inadequate payment for his
work: as time went on, a large part of the financial burden of the
paper had to be carried by him. Lord Howard de Walden helped
generously and so did Mr. Chivers. Other donations came in but mostly
very small ones. No proper accounts were kept: no watch on how the
money went. And from time to time Gilbert would pay off a printing
bill of £500 or so and go ahead hoping for better times. The money
aspect did not worry him, I think, at first. There was always more to
be made by a little extra effort: though a time was to come when
every extra effort wearied him cruelly. But there was one thing he
could not bear--quarrels on the Board or on the staff and above all
the suggestion that he should adjudicate.
"He was a bad judge of men," one of his staff told me. "He never
shirked an intellectual issue, but in a practical crisis he was
inclined to slide out."
"He could never," said another, "stand up to accusations from one man
against another."
The first start was made with the existing staff of three. Miss
Dunham was sub-editor and was usually left to see the paper through
the press. G.K. would come up once or twice a week and dictate his
own articles.
"You never knew when he was coming," she says, "but you always knew
when he was there by the smell of his cigar." He was practically a
chain smoker and he always used the same brand. He left drawings on
the blotter and everything else. He had no idea of time and when he
said, "I think I'll go out now," he might stay out an hour or so, or
he might not return at all. Lighting a cigar or cigarette he would
make a sign in the air with the match. He never omitted this ritual,
and Miss Dunham thinks it became like tapping the railings was to Dr.
Johnson.
"He used to come in and swing about on his little feet," she said.
And it is true that his feet like his voice seemed too small to
belong to the rest of him. Her great difficulty was that she could
not get him to read and select among the contributions: too often
this was left to her and she felt painfully inadequate to the task.
For the first year all the Notes of the Week were written by G.K.
Then he got Mr. Titterton as Assistant Editor: and after that, said
the Assistant Editor with simplicity, "You couldn't always tell good
Titterton from bad Chesterton." Everyone who worked at the office
adored G.K.: especially the "little" people, typists, secretaries,
office boys.
"He was so kind," Miss Dunham said. "He never got angry. He never
minded being interrupted. If his papers blew away he never got
impatient. His patience hurt one." She had never seen him angry.
That the paper was ever got out seems wonderful as the staff recall
those days. Yet I think that all the stories about Gilbert's
inefficiency as Editor have contributed towards an impression that I
shared myself until quite lately--that _G.K.'s Weekly_ was
immeasurably inferior to the _New Witness_. Going more carefully
through the files I have begun to question that impression.
The paper was produced under certain obvious disadvantages. Even
spending some days a week in London and telephoning freely it is not
easy to edit a paper from the country. Gilbert thought of himself as
a bad editor, and was not in fact a very good one. The contributions
he accepted were uneven in quality: both Leaders and Notes of the
Week when not written by him tended to be weak imitations of either
himself or Belloc--tinged at times with an air of omniscience
tolerable in Belloc but quite intolerable in his imitators. Just
occasionally the equally unedited Notes and Leader were in
contradiction of each other. Yet the paper remains an exceedingly
interesting one. Analysing my earlier and late impressions I
concluded that my earlier feeling of boredom sprang from the
inevitable effect of the _New Witness_ coming first and therefore
having been read first. It is a disadvantage of consistency that, as
Bernard Shaw remarked, you have said the same thing, you have told
the same story, so often as the years go by.
Taking a rest of a year and returning fresh to _G.K.'s Weekly_ I was
surprised at finding how much I enjoyed reading it and also at
finding that it had been of more practical use than I remembered to
the cause it served. The trend of the whole world is to make the
State powerful and the family powerless. It was something that in
these years _G.K.'s Weekly_ should have helped to smash two bills of
this nature-the Mental Deficiency and the Canal Children's Bills.
Both these aimed at taking children from their parents, the first in
the cause of health, the second of education. Against both Gilbert
wrote brilliantly and successfully.
_G.K.'s Weekly_ has much more G.K. in it and quite as much Belloc as
in the earlier years of the _New Witness_. Eric Gill, too, long a
friend of the Chestertons, became the chief contributor on art. In
1925 he spent a night at Top Meadow to discuss the policy of the
paper, especially with reference to industrialism and art. A little
later the Gills moved from Wales much nearer to Beaconsfield and the
two men met fairly often. Gill's letters are interesting. They are
mostly before the visit to Beaconsfield and probably led to it. He
begins by attacking Gilbert for "(1) supporting Orpenism as against
Byzantinism and (2) thinking that the art of painting _began_ with
Giotto, whereas Giotto was really much more the end."
In June 1925, G.K. was asking him to write about Epstein. Gill agreed
to do so but insisted that Chesterton and Belloc must not disagree
with him but "accept my doctrine as the doctrine of _G.K.'s Weekly_
in matters of art--just as I accept yours in other matters." "I don't
intend to write for you as an outsider (have I not put almost my last
quid into your blooming Company?--7% or not). . . . God forbid that
you should have an art critic who'll go round the picture shows for
you and write bilge about this painter and that--this 'art movement'
and that."
In the first state of effervescence the labour he delighted in quite
deadened the pain of the Editor's chair. Gilbert was prepared if
necessary to write the whole paper and to treat it as a variant on
the Toy Theatre or the Sword Stick:
It was said that the Chicago pork machine used every part of a pig
except the squeal. It might be said that the Fleet Street press
machine uses only the squeal. . . .
In short, nobody reading the newspapers could form the faintest
notion of how intelligent we newspaper people are. The whole machine
is made to chop up each mind into meaningless fragments and waste the
vast mass even of those. Such a thing as one complete human being
appearing in the press is almost unknown; and when an attempt is made
at it, it necessarily has a certain air of eccentric egotism. That is
a risk which I am obliged to run everywhere in this paper and
especially on this page. As I have said, the whole business of
actually putting a paper together is a new game for me to play, to
amuse my second childhood; and it combines some of the characters of
a jigsaw and a crossword puzzle. But at least I am called upon to do
a great many different sorts of things; and am not tied down to that
trivial specialism of the proletarian press.*
[* March 28, 1925.]
And again
This paper exists to insist on the rights of man; on possessions
that are of much more political importance than the principle of one
man one vote. I am in favour of one man one house, one man one field;
nay I have even advanced the paradox of one man one wife. But I am
almost tempted to add the more ideal fancy of one man one
magazine . . . to say that every citizen ought to have a weekly paper
of this sort to splash about in . . . this kind of scrap book to keep
him quiet.*
[* April 4, 1925.]
G.K. goes on to talk of an old idea of his: that a young journalist
should write one article for the _Church Times_ and another for the
_Pink 'Un_ and then put them into the wrong envelopes.
It is that sort of contrast and that sort of combination that I am
going to aim at in this paper . . . I cannot see why convictions
should look dull or why jokes should be insincere. I should like a
man to pick up this paper for amusement and find himself involved in
an argument. I should like him to pursue it purely for the sake of
argument and find himself pulled up short by a joke . . . I never can
see why a thing should not be both popular and serious; that is, in
the sense of being both popular and sincere.
For the paper had a most serious purpose. He acknowledged its defects
of bad printing (which the printers indignantly denied), bad
proof-reading, bad editing, and claimed "to raise against the banner
of advertisement the noble banner of apology." Because a creative
revolution was what he wanted, words and forms were hard to find. It
was easy to dress up stale ideas in a new dress but the terminology
for something outside the old hack party programmes had to be fresh
minted.
He proposed various changes after a few months' running and
introduced them thus:
We should be only too glad if for this week only our readers would
have the tact to retire and leave us alone. We are in a Hegelian
condition, a condition not so much of Being as of Becoming. And no
generous person should spy on an unfortunate fellow creature who is
going through the horrible and degrading experience of being a
Hegelian. It is even more embarrassing than being caught in the very
act of evolution, which every clear headed person would desire to
avoid.*
[* December 12, 1925.]
In this number he began _The Return of Don Quixote_ and also a sort
of scrapbook. He invited contributions dealing with every sort of
approach to Distributism and promised "more than one series of
constructive proposals and definite schemes of legislation. We do not
promise that all these schemes will exactly agree with each other or
that we shall agree with all of them. Some will be more conservative,
some more drastic than our own view." This article ends on an
ambitious note. Very varying schemes will be admitted, but the idea
of the paper will thereby be strengthened not destroyed--
For what we desire is not a paltry party programme but a
Renaissance.
It was not the first time he had demanded a revolution but, as the
depression hit our country and Big Business seemed less and less
capable of coping with it, the demand became more understandable and
the fight against Monopoly more urgent.
A thinking man should always attack the strongest thing in
his own time. For the strongest thing of the time is always
too strong. . . . The great outstanding fact and feature of
our time is Monopoly.*
[* April 25, 1925.]
I have already referred to a debate on Monopoly between Chesterton
and Mr. Gordon Selfridge, in which Selfridge, with the familiar
unreality of the millionaire, maintained that there was no such
thing. Anyone was free to open a store in rivalry of Selfridge's or
to start a paper that should eclipse the _Daily Mail!_ The only real
monopoly, he added gracefully, was that of a genius like Chesterton
whose work the ordinary man could not emulate. The graceful
compliment Chesterton answered by offering to share his last epigram
with Mr. Selfridge: but as to the main contention, what could he say?
It was at once too easy and absolutely impossible to answer such a
speech--or more truly such a speaker: only in a Country of the Blind
could he have won a hearing. But Chesterton persevered. Even in 1924
the shadow of large scale unemployment had begun. And at this
singularly inappropriate time came the Empire Exhibition at Wembley.
In the failure of its appeal Chesterton saw hope: for he believed
that from a frank facing of truth his country might yet conquer the
coming perils.
That was the real weakness of Wembley; that it so completely
mistook the English temperament as to appeal to a stale mood. It
appealed to a stale mood of success; when we need to appeal to a
new and more noble mood of failure, or at least of peril. The
English . . . no longer care to be told of an Empire on which the sun
never sets. Tell them the sun is setting, and they will fight though
the battle go against them to the going down of the sun: if they do
not stay it, like Joshua. . . .
We seriously propose that England should take her stand among the
unhappy nations; it is too dismal a fate to go on being one of the
happy ones. We must be as proud as Spain and Poland and Serbia;
nations made more dear to their lovers by their disasters. Our
disasters have begun; but they do not seem to have endeared us to
anybody in particular. Our sorrow has come; but we gain no extra
loyalty by it. The time has come to claim our crown of thorns; or at
least not to cover it any longer with such exceedingly faded flowers.*
[* March 21, 1925.]
Always Chesterton was haunted by the present war. He had seen the
Prussian peril conquered: he saw it rising again. Even before the
advent of Hitler he knew that the tribe which had stolen from Austria
and Denmark, had invaded France and crushed Poland was without
repentance, and he feared that again the stupidity (or the greed)
behind English and American policy was giving it another opportunity--
"Those sturdy Teutons," he wrote ironically, "from whom we were
descended up to the outbreak of the Great War, and from whom we are
now showing signs of being descended again."
The misfortune was that Englishmen had ceased to try to get free from
"a secret government; conducted by we know not whom, and achieving we
know not what. The real national life of our country is unconscious
of its own national policy. The right hand of the Englishman, that
holds the plough or the sword, knows not what his left hand doth with
the pen and the cheque-book. Man is man; and Mond is master of his
fate." For our government he apologised to France. He saw it as one
and the same fight--against a heathenish money power and heathen
Prussia. And the beating of the dark wings of enemy aeroplanes
sounded in his dreams. As early as 1925 he wrote a Christmas play of
St. George and the Dragon in which the Turkish Knight embodied his
vision of Prussia and St. George spoke prophetically for England.
SAINT GEORGE: I know that this is sure
Whatever man can do, man can endure,
Though you shall loose all laws of fight, and fashion
A torture chamber from a tilting yard,
Though iron hard as doom grow hot as passion,
Man shall be hotter, man shall be more hard,
And when an army in your hell fire faints,
You shall find martyrs who were never saints.
_(They wound each other and the doctor comes to the help of the
Turkish knight.)_
PRINCESS: Why should we patch this pirate up again?
Why should you always win and win in vain?
Bid him not cut the leg but cut the loss.
SAINT GEORGE: I will not fire upon my own red cross.
PRINCESS: If you lay there, would he let you escape?
SAINT GEORGE: I am his conqueror and not his ape.
DOCTOR: Be not so sure of conquering. He shall rise
On lighter feet, on feet that vault the skies.
Science shall make a mighty foot and new,
Light as the feather feet of Perseus flew,
Long as the seven leagued boots in tales gone by,
This shall bestride the sea and ride the sky.
Thus shall he fly, and beat above your nation
The clashing pinions of Apocalypse,
Ye shall be deep sea fish in pale prostration
Under the sky foam of his flying ships.
When terror above your cities, dropping doom,
Shall shut all England in a lampless tomb,
Your widows and your orphans now forlorn
Shall be no safer than the dead they mourn.
When all their lights grow dark, their lives grow gray,
What will those widows and those orphans say?
SAINT GEORGE: Saint George for Merrie England.
He saw the aeroplanes in vision and he saw courage and patriotism. I
think he must rejoice today that betrayal of the allied cause has not
been at the hands of an Englishman. He had said many hard things
about the English aristocracy and gentry: but these two virtues he
had always granted were theirs. And in his vision he saw hope:
England may soon be poor enough to be praised with an undivided
heart. We are not sure that the ruins of Wembley may not be the
restoration of Westminster. It is when a nation has recovered from
the illusion of owning everything that it discovers that it does
stand for something; and for that something it will fight with a
lucid and just tenacity which no mere megalomania can comprehend. We
are not so perverse as to wish to see England ruined that she may be
respected. But we do think she will be happy in having the sort of
respect that could remain even if she were ruined. Patriotic as the
English have always been, the patriotism of their educated class has
seldom had this peculiar sort of extra energy that is given by a
conscience completely at rest. If that were added, they might well
make such a stand as would astound the world. All their other
virtues, their humour and sporting spirit and freedom from the
morbidities and cruelties of fatigue, might enter into their full
heritage when joined to the integrity and intellectual dignity that
belong to self defence and self respect. We are far from sure that
the world has not yet to see our nation in its finest phase.
What may be in the womb of night we know not, nor what are those dim
outlines that show on the horizon.
"In truth" he wrote, "no man knows how near we are to death or to
dawn. I am not sure whether I am making this speech from a
scaffolding or a scaffold."
It is easy for the young to undertake hard things: they never know
how hard they are. And they are certain of success. The "lessons of
experience" signify to the young that other men have failed: their
own experience shall teach others the meaning of success. But to
begin again at fifty, with the special spring of youth gone and with
the sad lessons of one's own experience in the mind: this calls
indeed for a rare courage. Gilbert knew all the cost in time, energy,
money and reputation that he would have to pay--that he did pay. And
he stood increasingly alone. Cecil's had been the irreparable loss,
but others of the old circle were dropping out and their places were
not filled.
Jack Phillimore's death in 1926 was a heavy blow. To his memory
Gilbert dedicated _The Queen of Seven Swords_, published the year of
his death.
You go before me on all roads
On bridges broad enough to spread
Between the learned and the dunce
Between the living and the dead.
The gulf between the Socialist group and the Distributist had become
far more obvious than of yore: Shaw and Wells would still write for
G.K. but only because he was their friend. If F. Y. Eccles, if
Desmond McCarthy today contributed, it would too be chiefly from
affection for Gilbert. One article by Mr. McCarthy described the old
days when the original _Eye Witness_ was in being and he, Cecil and
Belloc sat around the table editing it and sticking triolets thrown
off in hot haste into those nasty little spaces left by articles that
did not quite fit, or supplying three or four articles and a Ballade
Urbane while the printers waited.
We have to print a triolet
When space is clamouring for matter
We try to put it off and yet
We have to print a triolet
It is with infinite regret
That we admit the silly patter
We have to print a triolet
When space is clamouring for matter.
Such joyous scrambles are proper to youth, and now none of them were
young.
All authors worthy of the name have found their platform and made
permanent engagements by middle life: professional men are absorbed
by work and life: they simply had not time to give as of yore to
build up this new-old venture. The names of Shaw and Wells continue
to appear among the contributors, often enough in religious debate.
Reading the files and visiting the two men to talk of Gilbert, I made
one discovery that is curious from whichever side you look at it. Two
able and indeed brilliant men betrayed not only an amazing degree of
ignorance concerning the tenets of Catholicism but also a bland
conviction that they knew them well. Wells in conversation based his
claim on the fact that he had long been intimately acquainted with an
ex-nun. Shaw I fancy felt he must know all about something that had
surrounded him in infancy--for, as the reader must have noticed, he
is much preoccupied by the thought of his Irish descent and education.
But what seems to me even stranger about the situation is the absence
on the Catholic side of any effort to explain to these men the
doctrines they misconstrued. When Wells, for instance, gave a crude
and inaccurate statement of the doctrine of the Fall, Belloc laughed
at him, Chesterton and Father McNabb both wrote long and picturesque
articles, illuminating to a believer but, as instruction to an
unbeliever, quite useless. A correspondence that seemed likely to
drag on forever ended abruptly with Wells asking about the Fall,
"Tell me, did it really happen?" to which Chesterton briefly replied,
"Yes."
I imagine he thought he and the other writers had said this several
times already, but in fact they had not. Perhaps they did not realise
where the beginning must be made in instructing otherwise instructed
men on the subject of Catholicism. It is all very interesting and
curious. But it largely explains why Bernard Shaw found it hard to
believe that Gilbert believed in Transubstantiation. Has any Catholic
ever explained the philosophic meaning of Transubstantiation to the
Great old Irish Man of English Letters? Even Gilbert was perhaps too
much inclined simply to play the fool in high-spirited fashion with
those who attacked the Faith in his paper or other papers. But then
how well he played it!
Here are some imaginary interviews on
. . . the recently discovered traces of an actual historical Flood:
a discovery which has shaken the Christian world to its foundations
by its apparent agreement with the Book of Genesis. . . .
The Dean of St. Paul's remarked: "I do not see that there is any
cause for alarm. Protestantism is still founded on an impregnable
rock: on that deep and strong foundation of disbelief in the Bible
which supports the spiritual and intellectual life of all true
Christians today. Even if dark doubts should arise, and it should
seem for the moment as if certain passages in the Scripture story
were true, we must not lose heart; the cloud will pass: and we have
still the priceless possession of the Open Bible, with all its
inexhaustible supply of errors and inconsistencies: a continual
source of interest to scholars and a permanent bulwark against
Rome. . . ."
Mr. H. G. Wells exclaimed: "I am interested in the Flood of the
future: not in any of these little local floods that may have taken
place in the past. I want a broader, larger, more complete and
coordinated sort of Flood: a Flood that will really cover the whole
ground. I want to get people to understand that in the future we
shall not divide water, in this petty way, into potty little ponds
and lakes and rivers: it will be one big satisfying thing, the same
everywhere. _Après moi le Déluge_. Belloc in his boorish boozy way
may question my knowledge of French; but I fancy that quotation will
settle him."*
[* March 30, 1929.]
On the favourite topic of modern advertisement, having read an essay
which said that good salesmanship made "everything in the garden
beautiful," Gilbert again thought of Genesis:
There was only one actor in that ancient drama who seems to have
had any real talent for salesmanship. He seems to have undertaken to
deliver the goods with exactly the right preliminaries of promises
and praise. He knew all about advertisement: we may say he knew all
about publicity, though not at the moment addressing a very large
public. He not only took up the slogan of Eat More Fruit, but he
distinctly declared that any customers purchasing his particular
brand of fruit would instantly become as gods. And as this is exactly
what is promised to the purchasers of every patent medicine, popular
tonic, saline draught or medicinal wine at the present day, there can
be no question that he was in advance of his age. It is extraordinary
that humanity, which began with the apple and ended with the patent
medicine, has not even yet become exactly like gods. It is still more
extraordinary (and probably the result of a malicious interpolation
by priests at a later date) that the record ends with some
extraordinary remarks to the effect that one thus pursuing the bright
career of Salesmanship is condemned to crawl on his stomach and eat a
great deal of dirt.*
[* March 23, 1929.]
The relation between Belloc and the paper, as between Belloc and
Gilbert himself, was a unique one. Not indeed its "onlie begetter,"
he was equally with Cecil begetter of the original paper and its
first editor. He was Gilbert's chief guide to the historical and
political scene of Europe. Both men shared, had fought all their
lives for, their ideas of Freedom, the Family, Restoration of
Property and all that is involved in Catholic Christianity. And
Belloc said repeatedly that he had no platform for the continuous
expression of these ideas. Such books as his _Cruise of the Nona_
found still as wide a public as had _The Path to Rome_ a quarter
century earlier, and in those books his philosophy may be read. But
he had, too, urgent commentaries on Foreign Affairs and Current
Politics--and for these _G.K.'s Weekly_ became his platform as
completely as the _New Witness_ had been in the past. To Gilbert this
appeared one chief value of his paper: in an article from which I
quote in the next chapter he gives it as one of the two reasons for
which he toiled to keep _G.K.'s Weekly_ in existence.
Week by week Belloc on Current or Foreign Affairs wrote of what was
happening and what would presently come of it. And who can say
reading those articles today that it would not have changed the
defeats of this war into victory at a far earlier date had our
statesmen read and heeded--the analysis for instance of the peril of
the aeroplane, of the threat to the Empire from Japan, the importance
of keeping Italy's friendship in the Mediterranean, the growing
strength of Germany and the awful risk we took in allowing her to
rearm, in failing to arm against her?
Whether he was right or, as many held, wildly wrong about what
underlay our failures of judgment, his views must be briefly traced
because of their effect on Gilbert and others. In the financial world
he saw England in the first years after the war dominated by the
International Banking Power, which made us as it were a local branch
of Wall Street. In his view it was the bankers both of America and
England who first insisted that Germany could not pay her reparations
and later made England repudiate her own war debts to America (though
she had, he showed, already paid in interest and principal more than
half of what had been lent). The banks did this because they had lent
commercially both to Germany and England sums whose safety meant more
to them than moneys merely owing to the nations--which would not
benefit the banks! England thus became subservient to the United
States and had to follow American financial policies. It was these
policies that led to the abandonment of the unwritten alliance with
France and especially to allowing Germany to rearm (helped by loans
from these same banks), to reoccupy the Rhineland and remilitarise
the Ruhr.
Next, in Belloc's view, came a worse stage yet in which the banks had
given place to Big Business which was increasingly controlling
Parliament. The plutocracy that had bit by bit eaten into our
aristocracy and gained ascendancy in the Govemment was not, like our
ancient aristocracy, trained for the business and was utterly
uninformed especially in foreign affairs. The one remaining hope, the
permanent officials, especially of the Foreign Office, were less and
less listened to; latterly he held too that even the Foreign Office
had lost its old sure touch. Hence a constant vacillation in our
policies which weakened England's position and made certain some
terrible disaster.
This fear is ever present in Belloc's articles and ever brooded on by
the Editor. He rallied his forces to urge, week after week, the
possible alternative to disaster--the recovery by the people of
England of power and freedom, the restoration of England to its place
in a restored Europe, freed from the German menace. Despite the
natural high spirits a certain gloom and more than a touch of
fierceness mark the work of these years. Summing up "the twenties"
of the century, Chesterton saw them as singularly bankrupt spiritually
and intellectually, and he foresaw from their sowing a miserable
harvest.
CHAPTER XXVI
The Distributist League and Distributism
_To say we must have Socialism or Capitalism is like saying we must
choose between all men going into monasteries and a few men having
harems. If I denied such a sexual alternative I should not need to
call myself a monogamist; I should be content to call myself a man_.
Advance number of _G.K.'s Weekly_, Nov. 1924
FROM _G.K.'s Weekly_ grew THE DISTRIBUTIST LEAGUE. Its start in 1926
was marked by intense enthusiasm, and its progress was recorded week
by week in the paper. The inaugural meeting took place in Essex Hall,
Essex Street, Strand, on September 17, 1926. G.K. summed up their aim
in the words: "Their simple idea was to restore possession." He added
that Francis Bacon had long ago said: "Property is like muck, it is
good only if it be spread." The following week the first committee
meeting took place. Chesterton was elected President; Captain Went,
Secretary, and Maurice Reckitt, Treasurer. It was planned to form a
branch in Birmingham. Alternative names were discussed: The Cobbett
Club, the Luddite League, the League of Small Property:
The Cow and Acres, however suitable as the name of a public house at
which we could assemble, is too limited as an economic statement. . . .
The League of the Little People (President, Mr. G. K. Chesterton)
may seem at first too suggestive of the fairies; but it has been
strongly supported among us:
And again: Suppose we call our movement, "The Lost Property
League" . . . the idea of the restoration of lost property is far
more essential to our whole conception than even the idea of liberty,
as now commonly understood. The Liberty and Property Defense League
implies that property is there to be defended. "The Lost Property
League" describes the exact state of the case.*
[* From an article called, "Name This Child" and another later
article.]
In October another meeting of the central branch was held in Essex
Hall to debate "Have We Lost Liberty?" The Croydon and Birmingham
branches were arranging meetings, G.K. conferred with the members of
the Manchester branch, and Glasgow announced that it was only
awaiting the christening to form a branch. Bath held its first public
meeting, with the Mayor in the chair, and the meeting had to overflow
into a very large hall.
It was decided to reduce the price of the paper to twopence--
Twopenny Trash* was the title of the leading article--in order to
give the League an opportunity of extending the paper's radius of
action as an organ of the League's principles. . . . _"Every reader
who has been buying one copy at sixpence, must take three copies at
twopence_ until his two surplus copies have secured two new
readers. . . . The League would have to make itself responsible for
the success of this experiment and save the paper which gave it
birth, or die of inanition, for it is certainly not yet strong
enough to leave its mother."**
[* This was the name given to Cobbett's _Weekly Register_ by his
enemies.]
[** _G.K.'s Weekly_, November 6, 1926.]
It is clear that Gilbert's hopes at this stage ran high. He had not
dreamed that the initial success of the League would be so great.
Recording a sensational increase in the sale of the paper, he wrote
on November 13, 1926: "It was when we faced defeat that we were
surprised by victory; and we are quite serious in believing that this
is part of a practical philosophy that may yet outlast the philosophy
of bluff."
Recording a meeting of the League: he wrote:
We find it difficult to express the effect the meeting had upon us.
We were astonished, we were overwhelmed. Had we anything to do with
the making of this ardent, eager, indefatigable creature? The answer
is, of course, that though we had something to do with the shaping of
the body, we had nothing to do with the birth of the soul. That was a
miracle, a miracle we had hoped for, and which yet, when it happened,
overwhelmed us. We have the happy feeling that we have helped to
shape something which will go far above and beyond us. . . . There
were well over 100 members present, many of them spoke, and nearly
all the others would have spoken if there had been time to hear them.
It was a great night.*
[* November 13, 1926.]
Father Vincent McNabb has said truly that there are no words for the
real things. Thus Distributism is not only a rather ugly word but
also a word holding less than half the content of the idea they were
aiming at. Belloc covered more of it in the title of his book: the
_Restoration of Property_, while perhaps a better name still was _The
Outline of Sanity_. This Chesterton had chosen for a series of
articles that became a book. He was asking for a return to the sanity
of field and workshop, of craftsman and peasant, from the insanity of
trusts and machinery, of unemployment, over-production and
starvation. "We are destroying food because we do not need it. We are
starving men because we do not need them."
After the first meeting of the League, the notes of the week recorded
that the printing order for the paper based on actual demand had
risen in two weeks from 4,650 to 7,000. "Of course we owe everything
to the League which in Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Croydon,
Chatham, Worthing, Chorley, Cambridge, Oxford, Bath and London has
made the newsagents aware of the paper." By November 27, the sales
had risen to over 8,000. Then was held the first formal meeting of
the central branch of the League, at which it was agreed: "that
members should make a habit of dealing at small shops." They should
avoid even small shops which sweat their employees, each branch
should prepare a list of small shops for the use of its members.
And that is only a beginning. We hope to enlist the support of the
small farmer and the small master craftsman. We hope, little by
little, to put the small producer in touch with the small retailer.
We hope in the end to establish within the state a community, almost
self-supporting, of men and women pledged to Distributism, and to a
large extent practising it. Less and less, then, will the juggling of
finance have power over us; for it does not matter what they call the
counters when you are exchanging hams for handkerchiefs, or pigs for
pianos.
The Cockpit is worth reading during the months that follow, for here
were voiced any criticisms that the readers had to make of the paper
and of the League--any criticism that the League had to make of
itself. There was plenty. Many leaguers and readers felt for instance
that the spirit of criticism of others was too fully developed in the
paper, so that when attempts were made to act on distributive
principles by people not in league with the League they were given
short shrift instead of meeting even modified encouragement. The
League was begged to spend more time clarifying its principles, less
time in criticism. But much more fundamental was the constantly
recurrent question: When is the League going to begin to do
something? To this the answer, given often by G.K. himself was that,
while the League hoped in time to create that community of which he
had written, its own work was only that of Propaganda--of a wider and
wider dissemination of the principles of Distributism. Their work,
they said, was to talk.
Outdoor propaganda started in Glasgow and came thence to London. In
October 1931 the Secretary said they must "convince men there is a
practical alternative to Capitalism and Socialism, _by showing them
how to set about achieving it."_ And in November he subscribed to
opinions voiced in the Cockpit for the last two years by saying that
the London Branch acted in the spirit of "a pleasant Friday evening
debating society, which regarded discussion as an end in itself." One
would imagine that all this meant a call to action, but the action
was merely the establishment of a Research Department and the start
of a new paper _The Distributist_ for the discussion of the League's
domestic business. The Research Secretary will explain his plans,
enroll volunteers and allot tasks, thus "equipping the League with
the information for lack of which it is as yet unable to agree on
practical measures." The effectiveness of its Propaganda would,
members were told, depend on its research.
"The pious appointment of investigators," wrote a Leader in _G.K.'s
Weekly_ in reference to a Government commission, "to report what is
already common knowledge is nothing less than a face-saving,
time-marking, shifty expedient." I don't think this article was one
of Gilbert's, but I do wonder whether as time went on he did not
recall his own old comparison between the early Christian and the
modern Socialist. For Distributists far more than Socialists should
have been vowed to action. There was a grave danger both of making
their propaganda ineffective by lack of example and of weakening
themselves as Distributists. Yet there were many difficulties in
their path, some of which may best be seen if we go back a little and
recall the way in which the Encyclical _Rerum Novarum_ was received
by Catholics at the end of the last century. Written in Europe where
the remains of the mediaeval social structure still lingered on far
more than in industrial England or America, it was taken by the more
conservative Catholics as a general confirmation of the established
order. I well remember people like my own father and Father Bernard
Vaughan quoting it in this sense. And if they tended to advert to
only one half of it, the more radical Catholics readily obliged by
appearing conscious solely of the other half and thus enabling
themselves to be dismissed as one-sided.
Unfortunately they were worse than one-sided: they were curiously
blind, with rare exceptions, to those true implications of the
document which spelt Distributism--for which the word had not then
been coined--or the _Restoration of Property_. _"The law, therefore,
should favour ownership and its policy should be to induce as many
people as possible to become owners._ Many excellent results will
follow from this; and first of all, property will certainly become
more equitably divided. For the effect of social change and
revolution has been to divide society into two widely different
castes. . . . _If workpeople can be encouraged to look forward to
obtaining a share in the land, the result will be that the the gulf
between vast wealth and deep poverty will be bridged over, and the
two orders will be brought nearer together."_* Yet the Pope's words
were treated almost as an acceptance of the existing conditions of
property by the more conservative, while the more radical simply
tried to evade them. The question of my youth undoubtedly was: how
far can a Catholic go on the road to Socialism?
[* _Rerum Novarum_ (translation in Husslein's _The Christian Social
Manifesto_). Italics mine.]
Distributism would seem today to have cut like a sword the knot of
this mental confusion, but it did not do so for many people. I
suppose the leading Distributist among the clergy was Father Vincent
McNabb and I have heard him called a Socialist a hundred times. And
even among those who had accepted the Distributist ideal and had now
had fifteen years of the _New Witness_ and _G.K.'s Weekly_ to
meditate upon--to say nothing of the Belloc and Chesterton
books--there was still a good deal of confusion of mind to be cleared
up. The Chesterbelloc had begun a mental revolution, but even the
mind cannot be turned upside down in a moment of time; and then there
is the will to be considered.
Gilbert often claimed that the Society he advocated was the norm,
that the modern world was abnormal, was insane. But to achieve the
normal in an abnormal world calls for high courage and a high degree
of energy. It is much easier to sit and drink beer while planning the
world that one wishes was there--the world of simplicity, hard work
and independence. And about the details of this new world there was
room for a variety of opinion. The Distributists soon began to argue
and even to quarrel--about the admission of machinery into the
Distributist state, about the nature of one another's Distributism
and what was necessary to constitute a Distributist. The effect on
Gilbert is interesting, for it showed his belief in the importance of
the League. He hoped, he said, that the quarrel would not "turn into
a dispute"--that it would remain a personal quarrel. "For impersonal
quarrel is schism." He urged again and again that the dogmas of their
creed should be defined.
Heaven forbid that we should ever be True Distributists: as a
substitute for being Distributists. It would be a dismal thing to
join the long and wavering procession of True Christians, True
Socialists, True Imperialists; who are now progressing drearily into
a featureless future; ready to change anything whatever except their
names. These people escape endlessly by refusing definition which
they call dogma. . . .
Practical politics are necessary, but they are in a sense narrow;
and by themselves they do tend to split the world up into small
sects. Only dogma is sufficiently universal to include us all.
Of the world surrounding him which refused definitions he said,
"because there is no image there is nothing except imaginaries."* But
I think there must have been some blushes on Distributists' cheeks as
they read his apology for some slight absence of mind. He explained
his own "ghastly ignorance" of the details of the dispute, "which is
bound up with the economic facts of the position," with the fact
especially of
[* October 12, 1929.]
my own highly inadequate rendering of the part of the Financier. I
am the thin and shadowy approximation to a Capitalist. . . . I could
only manage until very lately to keep this paper in existence at all,
by earning the money in the open market; and more especially in that
busy and happy market where corpses are sold in batches; I mean the
mart of Murder and Mystery, the booth of the Detective Story. Many a
squire has died in a dank, garden arbour, transfixed by a mysterious
dagger, many a millionaire has perished silently though surrounded by
a ring of private secretaries, in order that Mr. Belloc may have a
paper in which he is allowed to point out that a great Empire does
not default because it is growing richer. Many a shot has rung out in
the silent night, many a constable has hurled himself through a
crashing door, from under which there crawled a crimson stain, in
order that there might be a page somewhere for Mr. Kenrick's virile
and logical exposition of the principles of Distributism. Many an
imperial jewel has vanished from its golden setting, many a detective
crawled about on the carpet for clues, before some of those little
printers' bills could be settled which enabled the most distinguished
and intelligent of Distributists to denounce each other as
Capitalists and Communists, in the columns of the Cockpit and
elsewhere. This being my humble and even highly irrelevant
contribution to the common team-work, it is obvious that it could not
be done at the same time as a close following of the varying shades
of thought in the Distributist debates. And, this ignorance of mine,
though naturally very irritating to people better informed, has at
least the advantage of giving some genuineness to my impartiality. I
have never belonged distinctively to any of the different
Distributist groups. I have never had time.
As time went on however and the disputes continued, he wrote a series
of articles* which have in them that note so special to him, so
embarrassing to some of his admirers, of deep and genuine respect for
every person and every opinion. The small numbers of the
Distributists, the greatness of the work to be done by them, would
make any split in their ranks "a tremendous tragedy." The difficulty
in keeping any movement in being was that of holding together the
ardent pioneers and the rank and file.
[* September 10, 17, 24, October 1, 1932.]
Men who really have common convictions tend to break up. It is only
those who have no convictions who always hang together. . . . Roughly
the position is that there is a moderate body which regards
extremists as visionary; a more extreme body which regards moderates
as ineffective; and lastly a catastrophic simplification in the
social scene, which makes the simple enthusiast seem more fitted to
the simple disaster.
There were two approaches that should be made to these differences.
The first was to state the fundamental principles of Distributism.
The crux of the quarrel was the question of machinery. But even those
who held that machinery should be abolished in the Distributist State
held it, he claimed, not as a first principle, but as a deduction
from their first principles. Chesterton himself felt that machinery
should be limited but not abolished; the order of things had been
historically that men had been deprived of property and enslaved on
the land before the machine-slavery of industrialism had become
possible. The whole history of the machine might have been reversed
in a state of free men. If a machine were used on a farm employing
fifty men that would do the work of forty, it means forty men become
unemployed, "but it is only because they were employed that they are
unemployed. Now you and I, I hope to heaven, are not trying to
increase employment. It is almost the only thing that is as bad as
unemployment." In other words, he did not want men to be employees.
Men working for themselves, men their own employers, their own
employees--that was the objective of Distributism. A wide
distribution of property was its primary aim. And he did not want the
League to consist entirely of extremists lest it should be thought to
consist entirely of cranks, especially at a moment when "intelligent
people are beginning to like Distributism _because_ Distributism is
normal."
The other approach was heralded in the final article of the series
(October 1, 1932) by a reference to the excitement over the Buckfast
Benedictines who had just built their Abbey Church with their own
hands--an adventure
to which, if I understand it as completely as I share it, the
English blood will never be entirely cold. But about these new heroes
of architecture there is one note that is not new; that comes from a
very ancient tradition of psychology and morals. And that is that the
adventurer has a right to his adventure; and the amateur has a right
to his hobby; or rather to his love. But neither has any right to a
general judgment of coldness or contempt for those whose hobby is
human living; and whose chief adventures are at home. You will never
hear the builders of Buckfast shouting aloud, "Down with Downside;
for it was designed by a careful Gothic architect!" You will never
hear them say, "How contemptible are these Catholics who pray in
common churches; tawdry with waxwork imagery and Repository Art." Of
the great adventurers who advance out of the Christian past, in
search of Christian future, you could never say that the pioneers
despise the army.
What seemed to Chesterton the oddest feature in the opposition to his
idea of sanity was the apparent assumption that he was offering an
impossible ideal to a world that was already working quite well. With
bland disregard of the breakdown of their own system, the orthodox
economists were challenging him to establish the flawlessness of his.
They laughed at the Distributist desire if not to abolish at least to
limit machinery. They adjured him to be more practical. Chesterton
had replied in an earlier article:
There may be, and we ourselves believe there are, a certain number
of things that had better be always done by machinery. . . .
Machinery is now being used to produce numberless things that nobody
needs. Machinery is being used to produce more machinery, to be used
merely for the production of things that nobody needs. Machinery is
being used to produce very badly things that everybody wants produced
very well.
Machinery is being used for enormously expensive transport of
things that might just as well be used where they are. Machinery is
being used to take things thousands of miles in order to sell them
and bring them back again because they are not sold. Machinery is
being used to produce ornament that nobody ever looks at and
architecture that nobody wants to look at. Machinery is taking
suicides to Monte Carlo and coals to Newcastle, and all normal human
purpose and intelligence to Bedlam; and our critics gaze at it
reverently and ask us how we expect ever to be so practical as that.*
[* June 13, 1925.]
This desperate situation must be met by strengthening the home,
re-establishing the small workshop, re-creating the English
peasantry. But first the ground might have to be cleared.
One phrase used in his articles--the "catastrophic simplification of
the social scene"--reminds us once more how keenly aware Gilbert was
of something that had not yet happened, the present war with its
break-up of the social order. In the article, from which I have been
quoting, he compares the urgency of the hour to the period of the
French Revolution; in his _Outline of Sanity_ seven years earlier he
had stressed the Distributist ideal as the last chance to
do deliberately and well what nemesis will do wastefully and
without pity; whether we cannot build a bridge from these slippery
downward slopes to freer and firmer land beyond, without consenting
yet that our most noble nation must descend into that valley of
humiliation in which nations disappear from history.*
[* _Outline of Sanity_, p. 34.]
In this book which he had tried in vain, he tells us, to make "a
grammar of Distributism," he touches on the enormous changes that had
made such a grammar of far greater urgency. When _Rerum Novarum_ was
issued, or even eighteen years later when G.K. wrote _What's Wrong
With the World_, individualist competition had not yet given place to
the Trust, Combine or Merger. "The American Trust is not private
enterprise. It would be truer to call the Spanish Inquisition private
judgment." The decline of trade had hardly begun at the turn of the
Century, liberty was still fairly widespread. But today we had lost
liberty as well as property and were living under the worst features
of a Socialist State. "I am one of those who believe that the cure
for centralisation is decentralisation."
Both in the book and in the paper he urged constantly a double line
of escape towards the restoration of freedom, initiative, property
and the free family: the one line was the comparatively negative one
of winning such concessions from the State as would make action
possible, the other was personal action to be taken without any State
aid or even encouragement. The germ of recovery lay in human nature.
If you get poison out of a man's system "the time will come when he
himself will think he would like a little ordinary food. If things
even begin to be released they will begin to recover." To the
question did Chesterton believe Distributism would save England, he
answered, "No, I think Englishmen will save England, if they begin to
have half a chance. I am therefore in this sense hopeful. I believe
that the breakdown has been a breakdown of machinery and not of men."
A most difficult question to answer is the degree of the League's
success. Its stated aim was propaganda, the spreading of ideas.
"There is a danger that the tendency to regard talking as negligible
may invade our little movement . . . our main business is to talk."
One sees the point, of course; yet I cannot help feeling that it
would have been better if the majority of Leaguers had done some bit
of constructive work towards a Distributist world and sweated out of
their system the irritability that found vent in some of their
quarrels. After all the fight for freedom as far as it concerned
attacking government was carried on week by week by the small group
running the paper. "The main body of Distributists would have learnt
their own principles better by trying to act them, and been far more
effective in conveying them to others."
Some members saw the need of individual action. Father Vincent set
out in one number of the paper Fifteen Things that men could do for
themselves as a step to the practice of a Distributist philosophy.
Father Vincent, indeed, must be put beside Chesterton and Belloc as a
really great Distributist writer. Useful books were written too by
Mr. Heseltine and Mr. Blyton, who both also set to work to grow their
own food. Mr. Blyton is still writing and still growing food. A
workshop was started at Glasgow (probably the most active of the
Branches), Father Vincent came to a League meeting clad in home-spun
and home-woven garments, Mr. Blyton urged the example of what had
been done by the Society of Friends in creating real wealth in the
hands of the poor by their allotment schemes. (A weakness was
visible, I think, in the very different and contemptuous treatment of
Ford's effort to promote part-time farming among his workers during
the depression because it was made by Ford, who was certainly no
Distributist.)
But the most inspiring article in the paper in many a year was
written by a man who, having tried in vain to get his writings
printed, decided to start practising Distributism. He had pondered
long, he says, on how the Rank and File of the Movement who were
neither writers nor speakers should help, and the answer came to him
"Do it yourself." After a fascinating description of how he built
"the nucleus of a dwelling house against the time that a small plot
of land could be secured" he ends:
By responsible work a man can best realise the dignity of his human
personality. But most of us are caught in the net of industry and the
best way out would seem to be to create, that is to employ one's
leisure in conscious creative effort. This usually means the use of
hand as well as head, and the concentration on some familiar craft.
The aim also should be to acquire ownership in a small way; that is
to acquire the means of production. If we are not at all events
partly independent, how is it possible to urge on others the
principles of small ownership.
In saying this he spoke from experience, for he had found that before
he began his experiment his friends were exasperated by references to
the principles of Distributism, while the sight of the building in
progress began to convert them.
I have found many letters striking the note of gratitude to Gilbert
for his goodness and the inspiration he has given. One of these,
written by a sailor from H.M.S. _Hood_, is pure Distributism: "Your
articles are so interesting tho' so hard to understand. . . . Why not
come down a bit and educate the working class who are always in
trouble because they don't know what they want. You see, sir, your
use of words and phrases are so complicated, personally that's why
I'm so fascinated when I read them, but really us average Council
School educated people can't learn from you as we should . . . but
what I do understand helps me to live. . . ."
The sailor goes on to tell the story of his life: a workhouse child,
a farm boy: a seaman on a submarine who spent his "danger money" on a
bit of land in Cornwall, married now and with two boys. "What a thrill
of pleasure we have when we gaze over our land. . . . To be reared in
a workhouse and then to leave a freehold home and land to one's
children may not seem much to most people but still out of that my
sons can build again. . . . I feel you understand this letter, what
is in my heart, and I want to thank you very much for what you have
done for me."
Towards the end of September 1932 the League held a meeting to which
Gilbert came "as peacemaker." In the course of his speech he remarked
that he had often said harsh things of America in the days of her
prosperity but that in these days of adversity we might learn much
from that country. He instanced the saying he had heard from a
business man on his recent visit, "There's nothing for it but to go
back to the farm," and noted the fact that America still had this
large element of family farms as a basis for recovery. The suggestion
that Distributists wanted to turn everybody into peasants had been
another point answered in _The Outline_--"What we offer is
proportion. We wish to correct the proportions of the modern state."*
A considerable return to the family farm would greatly improve this
proportion.
[* _Outline of Sanity_, p. 56.]
But if he had spoken "harshly" of the United States it was nothing to
the way he had talked of the British Empire. Although at moments he
saw in imagination the romance of the fact that England had acquired
an Empire "absentmindedly" through Englishmen with the solitary
spirit of adventure and discovery, yet he had an unfortunate habit of
abusing the Dominions. They were the "suburbs" of England (a curious
phrase from the man who found suburbs "intoxicating"); we could not
learn from them as we could from Europe for they were inferior to us;
these and many other hard things he would throw out again and again
in his articles. One letter in the _Cockpit_ reproached him; from a
New Zealander of English descent it asked him whether he really meant
that those of his own race were so utterly indifferent to him;
whether he really preferred Bohemians and Norwegians to Britons. The
letter received no answer.
My husband and I used to wonder with secret smiles whether he was the
Australian from whom Gilbert derived the idea of that country as a
"raw and remote colony." Belloc also, in a letter extolling the
Faith, asked "what else would print civilised stuff in Australasia?"
Many years earlier Gilbert had written, in reviewing a book on the
Cottages of England, of the inconsistency of the English upper
classes who exalt the achievement of the national character in
creating the Empire and disparage it concerning the possibility of
re-creating the rural life of England. "Their creed contains two
great articles: first that the common Englishman can get on anywhere,
and second that the common Englishman cannot get on in England."
Surely Chesterton had this same inconsistency, as it were, in
reverse? The common Englishman was great in England, the common
Irishman was great in Ireland, the common Scot was a figure of
romance in Scotland, but when these common men created a new country
that new country became contemptible.
The Empire took a magnificent revenge, for it was in the "Suburbs of
England" that Distributism was first taken seriously and used as
practical politics. A far more effectively distributist paper than
_The Distributist_ appeared in Ceylon under the able editorship of
J. P. de Fonseka, in which action was recorded and the movements of
Government watched and sometimes affected from the Distributist
angle, and Catholic Social thinking formed on Distributist lines.
This paper has a considerable effect also in India. But of course the
main Distributist impact has been felt in the States, in Canada and
in Australia.
There is a double-edged difficulty in talking about the influence of
anyone on his times. On the one hand, as Mgr. Knox pointed out, all
our generation has grown up under Chesterton's influence so
completely that we do not even know when we are thinking Chesterton.
One sees unacknowledged (and unconscious) quotations from him in
books and articles, one hears them in speeches and sermons. On the
other hand into the making of a movement there flow so many streams
that it is possible to claim too much for a single influence however
powerful. An American Distributist said to me lately that the movement
set on foot by Chesterton had reached incredible proportions for one
generation. I think this is true but we have also to render thanks
(for example) to the suicide of the commercial-capitalist-combine
which created the void for our philosophy. That the Distributist
League has had much influence I doubt: in the United States the
Chesterton spirit is better represented by that admirable paper
_Free America_ than by the American Distributists--for _Free
America_ is offering us precisely what the League has for the most
part failed to offer--the laboratory test of the Distributist ideal.
Every number carries stories of men who have in part-time or
whole-time farming, in small shops, in backyard industries tried out
Distributism and can tell us how it has worked and _how to work it_.
Its editors Herbert Agar, Ralph Borsodi, Canon Ligutti and others,
all foremost in the Ruralist movement, acknowledge debt to Chesterton
and are carrying on the torch. Monsignor Ligutti's own work in the
field of part-time farming, his own periodical and the thoughts that
inspire the Catholic Rural Life Movement of America are among the
most important manifestations of that universal religious and rural
awakening for which Chesterton worked so hard and longed so ardently.
In Canada the Antigonish movement has shown a happy blending of
theory and practise. For the University itself has in its Extension
Movement and by its organ _The Maritime Co-operator_ provided the
theory, while up and down the country co-operative groups have built
their own houses and canneries, started their own co-operative stores
and savings banks, and made the Maritime Provinces a hopeful and
property-owning community of small farmers and fisher folk. Several
important books have grown out of this movement and at its basis lies
the insistence on adult education which shall make ordinary men
"Masters of their Destiny." Surely it is the authentic voice of
Chesterton when Dr. Tompkins says "Trust the little fellow" or Dr.
Coady declares "The people are great and powerful and can do
everything."
In Australia Distributism has given a fresh slant to both Labour and
Catholic leadership. The direct debt to Chesterton of the _Australian
Catholic Worker_ is immense, and while the paper also owes much to
_The Catholic Worker_ of America and to the Jocistes of France and
Belgium, we find too that in America, France, and Belgium, Chesterton
himself is studied more than any other Catholic Englishman. The
Campion Society founded in Melbourne in 1931, the Catholic Guild of
Social Studies in Adelaide, the Aquinas Society in Brisbane, the
Chesterton Club in Perth and the Campion Society in Sydney have all
based their thinking and their action on the Chesterbelloc
philosophy. These groups have closely analysed Belloc's _Servile
State_ and _Restoration of Property_ and have applied its principles
in their social action in a most interesting fashion. Thus they
opposed--and helped to defeat--a scheme for compulsory national
insurance chiefly on the ground that "the social services in a modern
State were the insurance premiums which Capitalism paid on its life
policy." With wages high enough to keep families in reasonable
comfort and save a little, with well distributed property, national
insurance would be rendered unnecessary. Yet on the other hand they
supported--and won--national "child endowment" because although
fundamentally only a palliative this at least strengthened the family
by supplementing wages and helping parents towards ownership and
property.
Most important however of all the Australian developments has been
the approval of the main Distributist ideal by the Australasian
Hierarchy as the aim of Catholic Social Action. This was especially
set out in their Statement on Social Justice, issued on occasion of
the first Social Justice Sunday in 1940.* The Hierarchy of New
Zealand joined with that of Australia in establishing this
celebration for the third Sunday after Easter. Indeed, the social
policy of Australian Catholicism has produced the slogan "Property
for the People," while the policy has been brought into action both
by many scattered individuals in that huge but thinly populated
country and in organised fashion by the Rural Life movements with
their own organs of expression.
[* Published by the Australian C.T.S.]
If it is difficult to estimate the impact of mind upon mind it
becomes bewilderingly impossible to weigh, in such a movement as
Distributism, the actual practical effects. Partly because, while
Distributism leads naturally to co-operation (an individual, says
Chesterton, is only the Latin word for an atom and to reduce society
to individuals is to smash it to atoms), still the movement is
essentially local, the groups usually small.
For my own part I have travelled a good deal, always with a primary
interest in social developments, and everywhere I have found
Chesterton or his derivatives. The numbers in America alone--both in
the States and Canada--who are trying out these ideas in big and
small communities is amazing. I did begin to make a list of vital
movements beginning with the Jocistes and the American Catholic
Worker, roving over the world and trying to estimate in each movement
I had met the proportion of Chesterton's influence, and again the
extent to which one movement is in debt to another--but I gave it up
in despair. One can only say that certainly there has been a great
stirring of the waters in every country: each has taken and has given
to the other: and most of those thus co-operating have been the
"little" men whom G.K. loved and in whom Dr. Tompkins tells us to
trust. To utter nobly the thoughts of that little man was, Chesterton
held, the highest aim that poet or prophet could set before him.
Distributism is that little man's philosophy. Chesterton gave it
large utterance.
And he could do it the more richly because--as he said many years ago
of the religious philosophy that was the basis of his social
outlook--"I did not make it. God and humanity made it and it made me."
Meanwhile he himself distributed royally. He gave help to the
Catholic Land Movement, to Cecil Houses, to all who asked him for
help. He educated several nieces and nephews of Frances and gave
money or lent it in considerable sums to old friends in difficulties.
If some event--perhaps Judgment Day--should call together all those
helped financially by Gilbert and Frances, I think they will be
surprised to meet one another and to discover what a lot of them
there are. They gave too to the Catholic Church at Beaconsfield,
which later became Gilbert's monument, and to which Top Meadow was
left after Frances's death. But even Top Meadow was distributed, a
small piece being cut off the garden and left to Dorothy Collins. And
I think even in a Distributist heaven it must add to Gilbert's
happiness to see the seventeen rabbits, the chickens and the
beehives--to say nothing of the huge quantities of vegetables
produced on this fragment of his property.
For this war like the last, with all its suffering, will, if the
Bureaucracy permit it, again energise the people of England into that
creative action which is the only soil for the seed of Distributism.
It began by distributing the people. And London was no place for a
Distributist movement. It is no chance that the growth of this
philosophy is among small groups and in the countryside. "On the
land," as Father Vincent often says, "you need not waste a moment of
time or a scrap of material." This is the fierce and pious thrift
that Gilbert saw in his youth as so poetical and in his age as a part
of the philosophy of Distributism.
CHAPTER XXVII
Silver Wedding
THE CONSIDERATION OF the Distributist League that flowed out of the
foundation of _G.K.'s Weekly_ in 1925 has carried us some years ahead
of our story. Back then to 1926 when Frances and Gilbert had been
married 25 years.
One of the things taught me long ago when I first visited them at
Beaconsfield was that it was properly to be called Beckonsfield: that
it was not named for Disraeli but that he, impertinently, had chosen
to be named for it. Gilbert often spelt it Bekonsfield to impress his
point. Both in theory and practice he had a lot of local patriotism
and a little of that special pride taken by all men in houses built
by themselves. But most of his pride went out to the fact that his
home was intensely English. He quoted a lover of Sussex who said
among the beech trees of Buckinghamshire, "This is really the most
English part of England." He felt it "no accident that has called
this particular stretch of England the home counties." Public life
was so ugly just now, the decay of patriotism under the corroding
influence of an evil and cowardly sort of pacifism was hateful to
him, but England still remained to re-vitalise the English when the
time should come. The oaks that had made our ships could still fill
us with "heroic memories; of Nelson dying under the low oaken beams
or Collingwood scattering the acorns that they might grow into
battleships." Yet if, he said, "I were choosing an entirely English
emblem, I should choose the beech-tree." Beaconsfield was, by one
theory, named from the beech forests that surrounded it, and while
the oaks suggested adventure and the British lion, the beeches
suggest rather the pigs that feed upon their mast and villages that
grow up in the hollows and slow curves of the hills.
"The return to the real England with real Englishmen would be a
return to the beech-woods, which still make this town like a home. At
least they did until recently. I shall probably be told tomorrow that
several beech forests have been removed to enable a motorist,
temporarily deaf and blind, to go from Birmingham to Brighton."
It is at Top Meadow, whither they moved in 1922, that I always see
Frances and Gilbert in a memory picture. They were to live there for
the rest of their lives, and life there was the quiet background for
all the vast mental activity and the journeying over England and
Ireland and Europe and America that marked the years that remained.
The house began simply as a huge room or studio built in the field
opposite Overroads. At one end was a stage which became the dining
room: at the other end a minute study for Gilbert. The roof was high
with great beams: at the study end was a musicians' gallery. A wide
open fireplace held two rushbottomed seats on one of which Frances
sat in winter. They were the only warm corners, but Gilbert did not
feel the cold and certainly could not have fitted into the inglenook.
Opposite the fire was a long low window looking into the prettiest
garden, where St. Francis stood guardian and preached perpetually to
the birds. A pool held water lilies; and the flowers that surrounded
the pool and the house were also cut and brought indoors in great
quantities. Frances loved to have them in glowing masses against the
background of books.
New shelves had to be added every year as the books accumulated. Big
as the room was, the wall space was not enough and one large bookcase
was built out from the wall near the fireplace into the middle of the
room, as in a public library. It looked well there and it screened
one from the bitterest blasts. For the place seemed full of air from
the four winds of heaven. The rest of the house was built on to this
room and looked tiny beside it. Kitchen and servants' quarters, two
fair-sized and one very small bedroom, a minute sitting room for
Frances where she kept her collection of tiny things--toys and
ornaments mostly less than an inch, many far smaller, that were the
delight of children. She had not, Gilbert remarked, allowed her taste
to guide her in choosing a husband.
A mixture of Gilbert's strong and weak qualities affected his
dealings with his dependents. I am not sure he felt certain that it
was quite right that he should have a gardener: anyhow, no man was
ever paid so highly and allowed to idle so completely as was the
gardener I remember there, an exceedingly able gardener when he chose
to work. To such trifles as the disappearance of coal or tools,
neither Gilbert nor Frances would dream of adverting. And they were
entirely at the mercy of a "hard case" story at all times. One man
used to call weekly to receive ten shillings--for what service no one
was able to form the faintest conception. Should he fail to appear
Gilbert mailed the money. He was found one day fighting another man
on the doorstep for daring to beg from Mr. Chesterton!
From a conventional point of view the maids were inconceivably
casual. Neither Gilbert nor Frances would have thought it right to
insist on caps or indeed on any sort of uniform. It is my impression
that I have been waited on at dinner by someone garbed in a skirt, a
sweater and a pair of bedroom slippers. And the parlor maid took for
granted her own presence beside Frances and Dorothy Collins as a
chief mourner at Gilbert's funeral.
According to Bernard Shaw, writing of Dickens, marriage between a
genius and an ordinary or normal woman could not succeed--the gap was
too wide. Dickens had thought he could go through with it, only
because he had not measured the gap. In this theory, as in so much
else, Gilbert stood violently opposed to Shaw. No doubt he must at
times have realised that there was an intellectual gap between
himself and the ordinary man or woman, but it was a thing utterly
unimportant. Character, love, sanity: these things mattered
infinitely more, and he more than once depicts the genius as
painfully climbing to reach the ordinary.
His views concerning the sexes were equally at variance with those
of Shaw and of most of the moderns. He was quite frankly the
old-fashioned man and Frances was the old-fashioned woman. They both
agreed that there is one side of life that belongs to man--the side
of endless cigars smoked over endless discussions about the universe.
Gilbert, in _What's Wrong With the World_, tells us that the voice in
which the working woman summons her husband from the tavern is the
same voice as that of the hostess who, leaving the men in the dining
room, tells her husband not to stay too long over the cigars.
Of this voice he entirely approved so long as it did not ask to stay
on in the dining room. He often said that the important thing for a
country was that the men should be manly, the women womanly: the
thing he hated was the modern hybrid: the woman who gate-crashes the
male side of life: no one, he had said in a letter of his engagement
time, "takes such a fierce pleasure as I do in things being
themselves." And both he and Frances found amusement in that "eternal
equality" which Gilbert saw in the sexes so long as they kept their
eternal separateness. If everything, he said, is trying to be red
some things are redder than others, but there is an eternal and
unalterable equality between red and green.
It so happens that in the matter of the wives of great men he had
something to say more than once. He longed to hear the point of view
of Mrs. Cobbett who "remains in the background of his life in a sort
of powerful silence." He combated Shaw's notion that the young poet
would repudiate domestic toils for his wife: rather he would idealise
them--though this, Gilbert admits, might at times be hard on the
wife. But the matter is best expressed in the love scene in one of
his later romances: _Tales of the Long Bow:_
That valley had a quality of repose with a stir of refreshment,
as if the west wind had been snared in it and tamed into a summer
air. . . .
"What would you say if I turned the world upside down and set my
foot upon the sun and the moon?"
"I should say," replied Joan Hardy, still smiling, "that you wanted
somebody to look after you."
He stared at her for a moment in an almost abstracted fashion as if
he had not fully understood; then he laughed quite suddenly and
uncontrollably, like a man who has seen something very close to him
that he knows he is a fool not to have seen before. So a man will
fall over something in a game of hiding-and-seeking, and get up
shaken with laughter.
"What a bump your mother earth gives you when you fall out of an
aeroplane," he said. "What a thing is horse-sense, and how much finer
really than the poetry of Pegasus! And when there is everything else
as well that makes the sky clean and the earth kind, beauty and
bravery and the lifting of the head--well, you are right enough,
Joan. Will you take care of me?"*
[* Pp. 89, 119.]
Frances was not especially interesting intellectually although she
had much more mind than Joan in the story, but above all she carried
with her a "quality of repose with a stir of refreshment."
"Will you take care of me?"
Neither of them probably had measured at first all that that care
would mean. Only bit by bit would the full degree of his physical
dependence, as we have seen it through the years, become clear to
her. The strenuous campaign in the matter of appearances begun during
the engagement might alter in direction but had rather to be
intensified in degree as he grew older. Shaving, bathing, even
dressing were daily problems to him. "Heat the water," an early
secretary at Overroads heard Frances saying to the cook, "Mr.
Chesterton is going to have a bath." And "O, need I," came in tones
of deepest depression from the study. The thought of that vast form
climbing into and out of the bathtub does make one realise how a
matter of easy everyday practice to the normal person became to him
almost a heroic venture. His tie, his boots, were equally a problem:
I remember his appearing once at breakfast in two ties and claiming,
when I noticed it, that it proved he paid too much, not too little,
attention to dress. Doctors, dentists, oculists were all needed at
times, but Gilbert would never discover the need or achieve
appointments or the keeping of them. Still more serious was the
question of how the two were to live and to do all the acts of
generosity that to them both seemed almost more necessary than their
own living. Hard as he worked, Dorothy Collins has told me that when
she came to them in this year (1926) they had almost nothing saved.
It may be remembered that Gilbert wrote to Frances during their
engagement that his only quality as a shopper was ability to get rid
of money and that he was not good at "such minor observances" as
bringing home what he had bought or even remembering what it was.
Through boyhood and into manhood his parents, as we have seen, had
never given him money to handle and he certainly never learnt to
handle it later in life. "He spent money like water," Belloc told me.
Realising his own incapacity he arranged fairly early to have Frances
look after their finances, bank the money and draw checks. "When we
set up a house, darling," he had said, "I think you will have to do
the shopping." All he handled was small sums by way of pocket
money--"very playfully regarded by both" Father O'Connor writes, for
he had often witnessed the joke that they made of it.
"What could she do," he continues, "when Gilbert went out with
£5.18.6 or words to that effect, and came back invariably without a
copper, not knowing where his money had gone?"
At a hotel in Warsaw the manager entreated him not to bring every
beggar in town around the door. He could never refuse a beggar and
the money not given away was probably dropped in the street or in a
shop. The solution they hit upon was that of accounts at the shops
and hotels or anything that could not simply be brought home by
Frances and placed by his side. Father O'Connor wrote to Dorothy
Collins of "the loving care with which Frances anticipated all his
wishes--never was the cigar box out of date--_you_ know this, and it
was so long before you came. And his toddle to the Railway Hotel for
port or a quart according to climatic conditions. . . . She devised
and built the studio for Gilbert to play at and play in. It used to
be crowded at receptions, as on the night when Gilbert broke his arm.
He had been toying with the tankard that evening, to the detriment of
social intercourse, but not much, I thought. We were all in good
fettle. The _Ballad of the White Horse_ was just going to the
printers. That was never penned in Fleet Street. Nor _The Everlasting
Man_. He wrote verbosely there in the office. At Beaconsfield he was
pulled together, braced."
The studio, become the house, almost certainly cost more than they
had planned--building always does--but the two great drains were the
benefactions and the paper. Frances signed, as a matter of course,
every check Gilbert wanted, but I imagine it was sometimes with a
little sigh that she wrote the checks for the endless telephones,
telegrams, printers' bills and other expenses that poured out to
support a paper which to her seemed chiefly a drain on Gilbert's
energies that could not but diminish his creative writing. In the six
years 1927-1933, he paid over £3000 into the paper. 1931-2 were the
worst years. In them the checks she had to sign totalled £1500.
The last sentences quoted from Father O'Connor touch on the
deepest--perhaps the only deep--problem for them both. For far the
hardest thing was the struggle against the real danger that he might
again drink too much, as he had before the illness that so nearly
killed him in 1915. This struggle was rendered especially hard by two
elements in her make-up: Frances wanted always to give Gilbert
exactly what _he_ wanted, and she hated to admit even to herself
anything that could be called a fault in him. She saw the overwork
that she was powerless to stop: she could not but be aware how great
it made the temptation. It was for her to remember the old illness,
to be vigilant without worrying him, to help him against himself.
After the long illness Dr. Pocock had advised total abstinence for
some years, largely because, as he told me, Gilbert, unless specially
warned, ate and drank absentmindedly anything that happened to be
there! He observed this prohibition faithfully until Dr. Pocock left
Beaconsfield in 1919. Dr. Bakewell, who succeeded him advised
moderation but only occasionally found it necessary to order total
abstention. It was the amount of liquid he feared rather than its
nature. When he forbade wine he did so because wine increased the
general tendency to absorb liquid. For Gilbert was always unslakeably
thirsty. Daily he drank several bottles of Vichy Water or Evian, also
of claret at what may be called the "open" seasons, and many cups of
tea and coffee. Spirits he practically never touched, nor such
heavier wines as port and sherry. But even two bottles of claret or
Burgundy, although usually appearing to brighten his intellect, might
well be a serious strain on the digestion of a man who overworked the
mind without exercising the body. "He loved to sip a glass of wine,"
Monsignor O'Connor writes, "and to stroll between sips in and out of
his study, brooding and jotting, and then the dictation was ready for
the morning."
Dorothy Collins once kept a record for a few weeks of the number of
words dictated of the book of the moment--usually thirteen to
fourteen thousand, about twenty-one hours weekly--exclusive of
journalism, editing and lecturing. The pressure was tremendous and
increasing, nor was it felt by Gilbert only. In a letter to Maurice
Baring at the time of his conversion he writes: "For deeper reasons
than I could ever explain, my mind has to turn especially on the
thought of my wife, whose life has been in many ways a very heroic
tragedy; and to whom I am so much in debt of honour that I cannot
bear to leave her, even psychologically, if it be possible by tact
and sympathy to take her with me."
Frances would indeed have been amazed to find herself cast for such a
part. Her life had held two tragic events--Gertrude's death and the
much sadder death of her brother, believed to have killed himself.
With her faith and her profound affections such an end had stabbed
deep. Yet certainly Frances did not view herself as other than happy:
in fact, I think she very seldom thought about herself at all. There
was something of heroism in this very self-forgetfulness. Frances
never had good health and for some years had suffered from arthritis
of the spine. Yet intimate as I was I knew this only after her death.
My husband was saying lately that had he been asked to choose
adjectives to describe Frances he would have chosen "cheerful" and
"well-balanced." Of all the people we have known we felt she was one
of the closest to the norm of sanity and mental health: quite an
achievement for a woman suffering from a really painful complaint.
Yet I think when Gilbert used the strong phrase "heroic tragedy" he
saw with his great insight that his frail wife, beside their heavy
cross of childlessness, beside the burden of her own physical and
spiritual sufferings, was carrying the weight of his achievement, and
that it was not a light one. Heroic was the right word but tragedy
the wrong, for this life given to her keeping ended on a note of
triumph.
The treatment of a situation of this kind can, of course, easily be
made unreal. In the sort of golden glow cast by the imagination on
Fleet Street with its taverns and its drinks, next morning's headache
is always omitted: but even the finer, deeper glow of the domestic
hearth has its ashy moments. No finite beings can conduct their lives
with complete absence of errors and regrets. In any human
relationship, however perfect, the people concerned sometimes bore or
annoy or even hurt one another. That is one of the main things that
sends Catholics week by week or month by month to the Confessional,
which brings for everyman something of the renewal and re-creation of
daily joy that the genius Gilbert saw when he wrote _Manalive_. In
this story the hero is always eloping with his own wife and marrying
her again. Flora Finching's "It was not ecstasy it was comfort" is a
common enough view of a reasonably successful marriage, but Gilbert
wanted to keep and did keep the flashes of ecstasy. When he wrote
_Manalive_ he had been married eleven years and he used a thought
that had inspired a poem to Frances while they were engaged. The
heroine in the story keeps changing her second name, but the name is
always a colour: in one town the hero runs away with her as Mary
Grey, in another as Mary Green. Thus as a girl Gilbert had seen
Frances in green and had understood why green trees and fields are
beautiful; had seen her in grey and had learnt a new love for grey
winter days, and the grey robes of palmers; and in blue--
Then saw I how the fashioner
Splashed reckless blue on sky and sea
And ere 'twas good enough for her
He tried it on eternity.
When they came back from Jerusalem Gilbert dedicated to Frances the
_Ballad of St. Barbara_ and we find him again at his old trick:
seeing as her throne the great stones of the mediaeval walls, seeing
nature as her background. With all apologies to the cynics I am
afraid that the judgment of the biographer upon all the evidence must
be that after twenty-five years Gilbert not only loved his wife
tenderly, but was still ardently in love with her!
A curious prayer of his youth was fulfilled as they celebrated this
year their silver wedding.
A wan new garment of young green,
Touched as you turned your soft brown hair;
And in me surged the strangest prayer
Ever in lover's heart hath been.
That I who saw your youth's bright page,
A rainbow change from robe to robe,
Might see you on this earthly globe,
Crowned with the silver crown of age.
Your dear hair powdered in strange guise,
Your dear face touched with colours pale,
And gazing through the mask and veil
The mirth of your immortal eyes.*
[* "The Last Masquerade," _Collected Poems_, pp. 348-9.]
Four years earlier Frances had aided Gilbert in making the decision
for which she was not yet herself ready, to do the act which he
called "the most difficult of all my acts of freedom." And indeed
much of that freedom of full manhood he owed to her.
Now after four years of waiting she was almost ready to join him. She
wrote to Father O'Connor:
June 20 [1926]
DEAR PADRE--
I want now, as soon as I can see a few days clear before me to
place myself under instruction to enter the Church. The whole
position is full of difficulties and I pray you Padre to tell me the
first step to take. I _don't_ want my instruction to be here. I don't
want to be the talk of Beaconsfield and for people to say I've only
followed Gilbert. It isn't true and I've had a hard fight not to let
my love for him lead me to the truth. I knew you would not accept me
for such motives. But I am very tired and very worried. Many things
are difficult for me. My health included which makes strenuous
attention a bit of a strain. I know you understand--Tell me what I
shall do.
Yours affecly
FRANCES CHESTERTON.
Between this letter and the next Gilbert and Frances celebrated
their silver wedding.
July 12
MY DEAR PADRE--
We have had such a week of alarums and excitements that I had not
even time to thank you for the spoons. They are just what I like and
incidentally just what I wanted. I feel so hopeless at getting out of
this net of responsibilities in which I am at present enmeshed and to
find time for instruction. I feel I have a lot to learn and I think
after all I had better go quietly to Father Walker* and talk to him.
Gilbert is writing to you himself. I know he thinks I have made
myself rather unhappy about things--and he is so involved with the
paper (I pray he gives it up) we have not been able to talk over
things sensibly. Please be very patient with me, because it is so
difficult to get clear. My nephew Peter is very ill and I have to
spend a lot of time with my poor sister.
[* The Parish Priest.]
Yrs gratefully
FRANCES CHESTERTON.
[Undated]
DEAR PADRE--
Many grateful thanks. Did you receive your copy of the "Incredulity
of Father Brown." It was put aside for you, but I do not know if it
was sent off or appropriated by somebody else. I have written to
Father Walker and after having seen him and had a talk I shall know
what I ought to do. It is only the mass of work, the paper, my poor
Peter and money worries that keep me on the edge from morning till
night. I feel the paper must go, it is too much for Gilbert (4 days
work always) and consequently too much for me who have to attend to
everything else. Trying to settle an income-tax dispute has nearly
brought me to tears.
You will understand how difficult it is to get time to think and
adjust my conclusions.
Yrs affect.
FRANCES CHESTERTON.
This group of letters is for Frances amazingly unreserved. I have
never known a happier Catholic than she was once the shivering on the
bank was over and the plunge had been taken. One would say she had
been in the Church all her life.
This was indeed a year of fulfillment: the year of the completion of
their home, for they surprisingly acquired a daughter! I sometimes
wondered why Frances and Gilbert had never adopted a child: they
lavished much love on nieces, nephews and godchildren, but this was
the only fulfillment to their longing until almost old age--and even
then their conscious act was merely that of engaging a secretary.
They had had many secretaries before, some of whom came with a quite
inadequate training. "They learnt on Gilbert," as a friend once put
it. It was difficult, too, for the secretaries, since neither Gilbert
nor Frances had any idea of hours or of the arrangement of work. It
was quite probable that Gilbert would suddenly want to dictate late
in the evening or again that Frances would ask the secretary of the
moment to run into the village for the fish in the middle of the
morning. Hence rather general discomfort. Gilbert dictated straight
to the typewriter, so shorthand was not needed. He went very slowly
with many pauses. But it is typical of this period that no carbons
were kept of letters sent, no files of letters received.
In 1926 came Dorothy Collins. Not only did she bring order out of
chaos, but she became first the very dear friend of both Frances and
Gilbert and finally all that their own daughter could have been. I
remember how Frances talked of her to me when she was hoping Dorothy
would become a Catholic (which she did some years later) and again
when she herself was left solitary by her husband's death, and how I
felt with inward thanksgiving that no child could mean more to her
mother. But long before this stage was reached came a great
lightening of the burden of living. No longer would Frances cry over
income tax returns, no longer would money worry her. Chauffeur as
well as secretary Dorothy drove them both to London for engagements
and through England and Europe on holidays or lecture tours. She went
with them to America and handled the business of their second tour
there. Now when friends rang up to make arrangements Frances or
Gilbert could say: "Would you ring again when Dorothy comes in. I'm
not quite sure. She keeps the engagement book." And while Dorothy
sternly warded off the undesirables, it worked out much better for
friends as no engagement book had been kept before with any
regularity. Now engagements were kept as well as an engagement book.
Frances would still deal with the clothing question, but Dorothy
handled it if she were unwell, and in every case delivered him
punctually and brought him home again. A few of the lectures and
debates of these years were: "Is Journalism Justifiable?", "An Aspect
of St. Francis of Assisi," "The Problem of Liberty," "Is the House of
Commons any Use," "What Poland Is," "Culture and the Coming Peril,"
"Progress and Old Books," "Americanization," "The Modern Novel," "If
I Were a Dictator."
The excitement of Catholics everywhere had been intense when Gilbert
came into the church: in England it was almost as great over Frances.
Her real wish to remain in the background, her dislike of publicity,
were seldom believed in by those who did not know her. I happened to
be present at a conversation between the proprietor and the editor of
a Catholic paper which had displayed a poster all over London
announcing her conversion. One of them had heard that she was annoyed
and for a moment both seemed a little dashed. Then said one: "Of
course she has to pretend not to like it"--and this was at once
accepted by the other: for both took for granted that such publicity
could in reality have given her nothing but pleasure.
It was difficult at first for either Frances or Gilbert to see the
wood for the trees in their new environment, and it was the greatest
good fortune that the year of Frances's reception was also that of
the new simplification following upon Dorothy's arrival. For the
preceding few years had resembled the hectic period of the lionising
of the young Chesterton of 1904. Requests poured in, for lectures,
for articles, for introductions to books. "Are there no other
Catholics to do things?" Frances asked me rather plaintively. Of
these years Monsignor Knox said later, "his health had begun to
decline, and he was overworked, partly through our fault."
A dip into the post bag brings up some letters from Father Martindale
to Gilbert and Frances passing on various requests, but also
realising the difficulty: "I sympathize with all desperately busy
men": "I have already protected him by advising small or fussy groups
not to invite him now and again." The solitary recollection I have of
any interest Gilbert showed in a review of his books is the remark he
made to my husband when Father Martindale had said of _The Queen of
Seven Swords_ "Francis Thompson is here outpassed." Gilbert repeated
the phrase and said eagerly: "He wouldn't say it unless he meant it,
would he?"
C.C.M., who has himself been caricatured talking on the radio, typing
and eating at the same time, as different from G.K.C. as possible in
his pale slimness and almost transparent appearance, was no less busy
over a thousand activities. It was interesting that he should ask
Gilbert's help, especially in that cementing of Catholics throughout
the Empire that has always so passionately preoccupied him. In the
War he had discovered in military hospitals the ordinary Englishman
and above all the ordinary Australian and New Zealander. To them and
to the Apostolate of the Sea he was to devote primarily all his later
life.
Writing therefore to counsel the Chestertons as to which Catholic
works should have precedence, we find him wanting an article for a
New Zealand paper "the only one of its sort in N.Z., and you may say
that it affects the _entire Catholic_ community of the two islands,"
an autographed book for "a hulking devotee of yours and a member of
the Australia rugger team, I think eight of them are Catholics." This
"would give enormous joy to him" and "would be known in no time
throughout Australia. Do try to."
From South Africa he wrote to Frances:
You will be surprised to get a letter from me from a nameless place
50 miles inland from the Nyanga mountains, which you will find
(variously spelt) westward from, say Beira on the African east coast.
This is the reason--
Recently a boy in a kraal here was found cutting pious pictures
from a newspaper that he had somehow got hold of (he was a good
little Catholic!). "Why are you cutting out that one?" "Because
_this_ is a Great Mukuru in the Catholic Church." (Mukuru is
Potentate and will serve from St. Joseph right along to the Pope, not
to mention the Little Flower. . . .) The Great Mukuru in this case
was yourself! So there!
I hope you will smile with pleasure, but not try to answer, as
please God I sail on the 31st and ought to be back in London in early
Sept., a good deal better, thank God.
Please remember me affectionately to Gilbert. This is the first
time a typemachine has clicked just here; its accompaniment, in an
otherwise dead silence, is a distant gurgling yodel, so to say--some
native feeling happy in the brilliantly hot sunlight, which, all the
same, cannot make the thin air hot. I sleep (when possible) under
furs, with the occasional insect dropping off the thatch over my head.
Later, planning a meeting for the Apostolate of the Sea at Queen's
Hall, he writes to Gilbert:
Similarly Fr. McNabb must be given his head and I have told him he
shall be given it. I hope to be purely practical and possibly a
little sentimental. . . . The Seaman is everywhere, yet, for us,
nowhere. He carries everywhere his child's heart, man's body, hungry
unfed soul, unique power of feeding his goodness into others. The
all-round (the world) man; the sea-limited man; the man whose life
is made up of storms and stars; the most secretive and the most
open-hearted man of any. . . . Now _I_ will do all the clumsy stuff.
_You_ pull it all up into the human-sublime divine-humble air.
He has no privacy, and is more lonely than anyone. He has Water, and
God; and MUST find Christ walking over the waves towards him. And no
ghost.
Father Vincent McNabb who was to be "given his head" at this meeting
was not a new friend of Catholic days but a very old one. A friendly
critic of my manuscript asks whether he, even more than Belloc or
Chesterton, does not merit the title of the Father of Distributism.
At least he brings into the movement something none other could
bring. He bases his social philosophy closely on the gospels--of
which his knowledge is almost unique--and his articles bear such
titles as "The Economics of Bethlehem" or "Big Scale Agriculture and
the Gospels." Hatred of machinery has combined with love of poverty
to sunder him from a typewriter, and these articles are all
handwritten in most exquisite and legible script. His letters have
always come in old envelopes turned inside out; he walks whenever
possible and wears a shabby white habit and broken boots. Both
Frances and Gilbert loved him dearly and their rare meetings were red
letter days for both. Besides the link of Distributism the two men
were united in caring deeply for the reawakened interest in St.
Thomas and his philosophy.
The Benedictine, as well as the Dominican, outlook and history
especially appealed to Gilbert, and the friendship with Father
Ignatius Rice, which had begun almost with the century, grew
steadily. He assisted, as we have seen, at Gilbert's reception into
the Church: and whenever they met after that Gilbert would remind
him, "We were together on the great day."
High Wycombe was the Chesterton's parish until, largely by their
help, a church could be built at Beaconsfield. At first this church
was served by Father Walker, parish priest of High Wycombe. It was he
who had prepared Gilbert for his First Communion and he has sent me
some of his recollections:
It certainly did not take long to prepare him for he evidently knew
as much as I could tell him. Nevertheless, he said I was to treat him
as I would any child whom I was teaching. This, knowing the man whom
I was instructing, for I had at the time carefully waded through his
Orthodoxy twice, was, indeed, an undertaking of magnitude. However, I
went through the catechism (he was importunate that I should use it
as he said all the children made use of it), very meticulously
explaining all the details, to which he lent a most vigilant and
unswerving attention. For instance, he wanted me to explain the
reason of the drop of water being put into the wine at the preparing
of the chalice for the Holy Sacrifice.
Father Walker describes Gilbert opening a bazaar and spending
lavishly at every stall, afterwards being photographed in his
company. Father Walker himself weighed 245 lbs., and the caption was
"Giants in the Faith." On his departure, Gilbert presided at the
farewell meeting and made a speech which, says Father Walker, "gave
me no end of delight." Father (now Monsignor) Smith became the first
rector of Beaconsfield as a separate parish. The Chestertons loved
the little church there which later became Gilbert's memorial and to
which, among other things, they gave a very beautiful statue of Our
Lady. But when it had first been dedicated there had been for both
Frances and Gilbert a deep disappointment. Curiously enough, neither
of them had any devotion to the Little Flower who was chosen as
Patron: they had hoped for a dedication to the English Martyrs. Later
Gilbert used to tell Dorothy, who loved St. Thérèse, that he could
not care for her, "with all apologies to you, Dorothy."
He did not go often to Confession, Dorothy says, but when he did go
you could hear him all over the church. Getting up in the morning was
always a fearful effort to him, and starting for early Mass he would
say to her, "what but religion would bring us to such an evil pass!"
Meanwhile the books went on. In 1926 appeared _The Outline of Sanity,
The Catholic Church and Conversion_, chiefly concerned with his own
mental history, _The Incredulity of Father Brown_ and _The Queen of
Seven Swords_. In 1927 for the first time his scattered poems were
brought into the volume of _Collected Poems_.
St. Augustine asks whether we can praise God before we know Him:
Gilbert answered that question when by praise and thanksgiving he
came as a boy to the discovery of God, beginning by a passionate
desire to thank someone for the Universe. There is much praise in the
Collected Poems. There is the note of hope in an almost hopeless
fight in _The Ballad of the White Horse_. There are lovely poems to
his wife. Since Browning none has understood the Sacrament of
Marriage as well as Gilbert Chesterton.
In 1927 there also appeared, beside a couple of pamphlets:
The Return of Don Quixote
Robert Louis Stevenson
The Secret of Father Brown
The Judgment of Dr. Johnson
_Robert Louis Stevenson_ took Gilbert back to his boyhood and is by
general agreement among the best of his literary studies. But the
best thing he ever said apropos of Stevenson came not in this book
but in his attack on the "science" of eugenics:
Keats died young; but he had more pleasure in a minute than a
Eugenist gets in a month. Stevenson had lung trouble; and it may, for
all I know, have been perceptible to the Eugenic eye even a
generation before. But who would perform that illegal operation: the
stopping of Stevenson? Intercepting a letter bursting with good news,
confiscating a hamper full of presents and prizes, pouring torrents
of intoxicating wine into the sea, all this is a faint approximation
for the Eugenic inaction of the ancestors of Stevenson. This,
however, is not the essential point; with Stevenson it is not merely
a case of the pleasure we get, but of the pleasure he got. If he had
died without writing a line, he would have had more red-hot joy than
is given to most men. Shall I say of him, to whom I owe so much, let
the day perish wherein he was born? Shall I pray that the stars of
the twilight thereof be dark and it be not numbered among the days of
the year, because it shut not up the days of his mother's womb? I
respectfully decline; like Job, I will put my hand upon my mouth.*
[* _Eugenics and Other Evils,_ p. 57.]
When the _Stevenson_ itself appeared, Sir Edmund Gosse wrote:
I have just finished reading the book in which you smite the
detractors of R.L.S. hip and thigh. I cannot express without a sort
of hyperbole the sentiments which you have awakened; of joy, of
satisfaction, of relief, of malicious and vindictive pleasure. We are
avenged at last. . . .
It is and always since his death has been impossible for me to
write anything which went below the surface of R.L.S. I loved him,
and still love him, too tenderly to analyse him. But you, who have
the privilege of not being dazzled by having known him, have taken
the task into your strong competent hands. You could not have done it
better.
The latest survivor, the only survivor, of his little early circle
of intimate friends thanks you from the bottom of his heart.
_Don Quixote_ is a fantasia about the future: in which the study of
heraldry leads to the discovery of England and the centuries of her
happiness and of her faith. Increasingly Gilbert saw the only future
for his country in a re-marriage between those divorced three hundred
years ago: England and the Catholic Church. _Don Quixote_ is among
the less good of his books, but like all the works of these years it
is saturated with Catholicism. I wondered whether I felt more
admiration or amazement when a man once asked us to publish a book on
Chesterton saying, "I am an atheist myself but that doesn't matter,
as I don't deal with his religion."
As a young man Gilbert had wanted to marry the religion of Dr.
Johnson to the Republicanism of Wilkes and in his Catholic faith of
today he saw simply the rounding out and the completing of the
religion of Dr. Johnson. _The Judgment of Dr. Johnson_, his play
about that great man was, like _Magic_, an immense succès d'estime
but not a stage success: it was brilliantly acted and appreciatively
criticised but could not win a public. Bernard Shaw was still
constantly urging Gilbert towards the drama. Belloc too believed he
could write a successful play and he and Anstey (author of _Vice
Versa_) suggested the dramatising of a Belloc story. But neither the
scenario they jointly sketched for Belloc's _Emerald_ nor another
made by Gilbert alone for his own _Flying Inn_ ever reached the stage.
I remember going with the Chestertons to a pre-view of a Father Brown
picture. Two of the stories had been cleverly combined, the cast was
first rate, including Una O'Connor and Walter Connolly, and I came
out feeling convinced that Father Brown would become another Charlie
Chan. The stories would adapt so well, abounding as they do in scenes
impossible for the stage but perfectly easy for the screen--high
walls, windows, ladders, flying harlequins. But the first picture
failed (possibly because it was too short) and no more were made. The
drama remained the one field in which he had no success.
Shaw's name for Gilbert and Belloc--the Chesterbelloc--had come by
the public to be used for the novels in which they collaborated.
Belloc wrote the story, Chesterton drew the pictures, and the
resulting product was known as the Chesterbelloc. A number of letters
from Mr. Belloc beg Gilbert to do the drawings early in order to help
the story. "I have already written a number of _situations_ which you
might care to sketch. I append a list. Your _drawing_ makes all the
difference to my _thinking:_ I see the people in action more
clearly." And again, "I can't write till I have the inspiration of
your pencil. For the comedy in me is ailing."
Belloc would come over to Beaconsfield for a day or a night and the
two men retire into Gilbert's minute study whence hoots of laughter
would be heard. At the end of a couple of hours they would emerge
with the drawings for a book complete, indeed several more than were
needed.
Father Rice asked Gilbert once what he was writing and he replied,
"My publishers have demanded a fresh batch of corpses." The little
detective-priest ("I am very fond," said one reader to Chesterton,
"of that officious little loafer") became a feature in crime
anthologies, and when Anthony Berkeley in 1929 wanted to found the
Detective Club he wrote that it "would be quite incomplete without
the creator of Father Brown."
Gilbert soon became President. "Needless to say," writes Dorothy
Sayers, "he read his part of the initiation ceremony with tremendous
effect and enormous gusto."
In an article Gilbert wrote about the Club, he called it "a very
small and quiet conspiracy, to which I am proud to belong." Meeting
in various restaurants its members would "discuss various plots and
schemes of crime." Some results of these discussions may be seen in
the Initiation ceremonies which he made public in the article
"thereby setting a good example to the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan, the
Illuminati . . . and all the other secret societies which now conduct
the greater part of public life, in the age of Publicity and Public
Opinion."
_The Ruler shall say to the Candidate:_
M.N. is it your firm desire to become a Member of the Detection
Club?
_Then the Candidate shall answer in a loud voice:_
That is my desire.
_Ruler:_
Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the
crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to
bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine
Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery,
Coincidence or Act of God?
_Candidate:_
I do.
_Ruler:_
Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader?
_Candidate:_
I do.
_Ruler:_
Do you promise to observe a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs,
Conspiracies, Death-Rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism, Trap-Doors, Chinamen,
Super-Criminals and Lunatics; and utterly and for ever to forswear
Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science?
_Candidate:_
I do.
_Ruler:_
Will you honour the King's English?
_Candidate:_
I will.
_Then the Ruler shall ask:_
M.N. Is there anything you hold sacred?
_Then the Candidate having named a Thing which he holds of peculiar
sanctity, the Ruler shall ask:_
M.N. Do you swear by (_Here the Ruler shall name the Thing which
the Candidate has declared to be his Peculiar Sanctity_) to observe
faithfully all these promises which you have made, so long as you are
a member of the Club?
_But, if the Candidate is not able to name a Thing which he holds
sacred, then the Ruler shall propose the Oath in this manner
following:_
M.N. Do you, as you hope to increase your Sales, swear to observe
faithfully all these promises which you have made, so long as you are
a member of the Club?
A book called _The Floating Admiral_ was brought out by the Club.
Chesterton wrote the introduction and each member produced one
chapter. Reading it without inside knowledge I conceived that the
idea was for each to clear up the problems created by his predecessor
and create fresh ones for his successor. Gilbert tells of the subtler
joke underlying the story:
Perhaps the most characteristic thing that the Detection Club ever
did was to publish a detective story, which was quite a good
detective story, but the best things in which could not possibly be
understood by anybody except the gang of criminals that had produced
it. It was called _The Floating Admiral_, and was written somewhat
uproariously in the manner of one of those "paper games" in which
each writer in turn continues a story of which he knows neither head
nor tail. It turned out remarkably readable, but the joke of it will
never be discovered by the ordinary reader; for the truth is that
almost every chapter thus contributed by an amateur detective is a
satire on the personal peculiarities of the last amateur detective.
This, it will be sternly said, is not the way to become a
best-seller. It is a matter of taste; but to my mind there is always
a curious tingle of obscure excitement, in the works of this kind
which have remained here and there in literary history; the sort of
book that it is even more enjoyable to write than to read.
_The Floating Admiral_ was a fair success financially. "We hired a
sort of garret," writes Monsignor Knox "with the proceeds, as Club
Rooms; and on the night after we all received our keys the premises
were burglariously entered; why or by whom is still a mystery, but it
was a good joke that it should happen to the Detective Club."
Lord Peter and Father Brown and Monsieur Poirot--how were the mighty
fallen!
There is a custom in both English and Scottish universities of
electing a Lord Rector with the accompaniment of much undergraduate
"ragging" of the choicest kind. The candidates usually each represent
a political party but personal popularity has much to say in their
success. At the Scottish universities the contests are particularly
spirited, and his keen sense of fun made Gilbert ready to accept
frequent invitations to stand. At Glasgow in 1925 Austen Chamberlain
got 1242, votes, Chesterton 968 and Sidney Webb 285. "What swamped
you," wrote Jack Phillimore, always critical of the gentler sex, "was
the women, whose simple snobbery cannot get past the top hat and
frock coat and Right Honourable . . . Boyle was never kidnapped:
others were removed into the mountains."
The last sentence might have been lifted from Sir Walter: it refers
to a pleasing habit among Scots undergraduates of kidnapping the
supporters of their opponents and keeping them safely concealed till
after the election.
Whether or not it was through their simple snobbery, as Professor
Phillimore said, it was certainly the women's vote that swamped him:
of the 374 votes by which Austen Chamberlain beat Chesterton, the men
only accounted for 20, the women for 354. But it must have been some
profounder passion that caused one of England's leading women
novelists to write to the Secretary of the Glasgow University Liberal
Club:
I fail to see why you should desire to embarrass Liberalism at one
of its least happy moments by associating it with that village idiot
on a large scale who is responsible for the muddled economics and
disagreeable fantastics of "G.K.'s Weekly."
This was the outlook of that official Liberalism which had long made
it so difficult for Gilbert to go on calling himself a Liberal. The
Servile State was in full swing and official Liberalism asked nothing
better than to be allowed to operate it. Whether Belloc and Cecil
Chesterton had been right or wrong at an earlier date in seeing the
political parties in collusion it is certain that by now an utter
bankruptcy in statesmanship had reduced them all to saying the same
things while they did nothing. Ten years later, on the day of the
last General election of his life, Gilbert wrote:
The Liberal has formed the opinion that Peace is decidedly
preferable to its alternative of War; and that this should be
achieved through support of the League of Nations interfering with
the ambitions of other nations. The Ministerialist, on the other
hand, holds that we should, if possible, employ a machinery called
the League of Nations; with the object of securing Peace, to which he
is much attached. The Ministerialist demands that strong action
should be taken to reduce Unemployment; but the Liberal does not
scruple to retort that Unemployment is an evil, against which strong
action must be taken. The Liberal thinks that we ought to revive our
Trade, thus thwarting and throwing himself across the path of the
National Tory, who still insists that our Trade should be revived.
Thus the two frowning cohorts confront each other; and I hear the
noise of battle even as I write.
In June 1928 he was invited to stand for Edinburgh University. He
replied:
I do hope you will forgive me if there has been any delay in
acknowledging your exceedingly flattering communication; I have been
away from home and moving about a good deal; and have only just
returned from London. Certainly there is nothing which I should feel
as so great an honour, or one so exciting or so undeserved, as to
receive even the invitation to stand for such a position in the great
University that has already been so generous to me. If you really
think it would be of any service to your cause, I can hardly refuse
such a compliment. Of course you understand that it is only in a
rather independent sense, though as I think in the right sense, that
I shall always call myself a Liberal; indeed, I find it difficult to
imagine any real sort of Liberal who is not really an independent
Liberal. I am quite certain I am not a Tory or a Socialist.
He was defeated at this election by Winston Churchill who got 864
votes to 593 for G.K. and 332 for Mrs. Sidney Webb. He was again
defeated at Aberdeen in 1933, coming second to Major Elliott, the
other candidates being C. M. Grieve and Aldous Huxley. At one stage
of the contest the _Daily Express_ writes: "The Huxley supporters are
smarting under the surprise attack made by the Chestertonians at the
Huxley concert at the week-end and are preparing reprisals."
The following letter is G.K.'s reply to the first proposal from the
Aberdeen students:
25th October, 1933
I can at least assure you that the delay in acknowledging properly
the most flattering compliment which you have paid me was not due to
any notion of neglecting it. It was due to the practical necessity at
the moment of discovering and deciding on a fact which may, for all I
know, save you the trouble of further consideration of the matter;
and it is for this reason that I mention the practical difficulty
first. I now find that I shall almost certainly be obliged to be out
of England (and Scotland) for about three or four months, or
conceivably a little more, beginning about the middle of January. I
do not know what preliminary formalities would be demanded of me as a
candidate, or when the demand for them would arise. But I was so
strongly impressed with the honour you have paid me that I thought it
my duty to find out the facts on this particular point, so that you
might act on it in any way you think right. In any case, if the delay
thus involved has placed you in any difficulty, I need not say that I
shall fully understand your finding the project unworkable; and I
shall be quite content to remember the compliment of the request.
There is another consideration which would help the practical side
of the case; and for that I fear I must make the practical enquiries
of you, as people understanding the circumstances. You do not mention
the Party you represent; and though I am, like most of us, long past
attaching a horrid sanctity to the name, I hope you will forgive that
much curiosity in a poor bewildered journalist, who has been
exhibited in many lights and cross-lights. I was put up as a
candidate at Glasgow as a Liberal, which is really quite true; but I
think I managed in my election pamphlet to give my own definition of
Liberalism. I have also more recently, on a public platform in
Glasgow, supported my friend Mr. Compton Mackenzie when he stood as a
Scottish Nationalist. Both these positions I am quite prepared to
defend; but in the latter, you might naturally prefer a Nationalist
candidate who was not only a quarter of a Scotsman. I may remark that
as the quarter is called Keith, and comes from Aberdeen, I am rather
thrilled at the name of Marischal College.
There is one other point I think it only right to mention, for your
sake as much as my own. You know the local conditions. Do you think
it likely that we should be left with one and a half votes, looking a
little ridiculous, because the miserable quarter of a Scot happens to
have the same religion as Bruce and Maxy Stuart? I only ask for
information; which you alone could supply. But it may be that the
considerations I have already mentioned have disposed of the matter.
Believe me, my gratitude is none the less.
Gilbert said of my father that he showed an embarrassing respect for
younger men. Surely Gilbert's own tone of respect must here have
embarrassed even undergraduates. The uncertainty of success or
failure only troubled him as it might affect his supporters. The
sporting element in the contest appealed to his undying boyishness.
Perhaps this chapter may find its best conclusion in the vivid
memories written down in answer to my request of one of Gilbert's
younger friends--Douglas Woodruff--who came to know him in the year
of that Silver Wedding which meant so much that I have chosen it for
the title of a chapter covering much of Chesterton's Catholic life.
Chesterton devotes a long passage in the _Autobiography_ to the
dinner given at the old Adelphi Terrace Hotel to Belloc on his
sixtieth birthday, in July 1930. I remember very well the high old
fashioned car the Chestertons used to hire in Beaconsfield, for I
accompanied him with particular instructions to deliver him safely
and on time, as was very necessary for he was in the Chair. We might
have lost him, for we went first to the Times Office where I was then
working, as I had proofs to correct before disappearing for the rest
of the evening, and he was seized with the idea that it would be very
good fun for him to enter Printing House Square and have it announced
that it was Mr. Chesterton come to write the leaders, having brought
the thunder with him under his cloak. Quite early on the drive up he
began speculating about who would be at the party, and when he had
suggested various figures who were certainly not going to be there he
said with a mixture of regret and acceptance, "There is always such a
_sundering_ quality about Belloc's quarrels." When he rose to propose
the toast he said at once that if he or anybody else in the room was
remembered at all in the future it would be because they had been
associated with the guest of the evening. He meant that. The evening
stood out in his memory because it was so unlike the ordinary sort of
dinners he knew where he was a principal figure. It delighted him
that without any programme or premeditation all the thirty diners in
turn made speeches, in the main parody speeches. It was, in short, a
party and not a performance.
In the decade when I had the good fortune to know Topmeadow he was
still paying the price of a literary fame which he had sought in
youth because it meant success in his calling and an income, but
which became a barrier he was always meeting and breaking through.
Many literary men genuinely enough prefer company in which they are
on just the same footing as everyone else to company in which they
are little Kings, but Chesterton was exceptional in liking to live in
the fullest equality of intercourse not only with all sorts of men
but with the lesser practitioners of his own calling. He sought the
affection and not the admiration of his fellow men, or, more
precisely, he sought neither: what he sought was to do things like
discovering the truth in their company. No man more naturally
distinguished between a man and his views, or found easier the
theological injunction to hate the sin but love the sinner. One of
the few occasions on which I recall him as rather hurt was just after
he had met Stanley Baldwin, at Taplow, and had not been welcomed as a
fellow Englishman sharing immense things like the love of the English
country or English letters, but with a cold correctitude from a
politician who seemed chiefly conscious he was meeting in G.K. a man
who week by week sought to bring political life into hatred, ridicule
and contempt.
He was not made by nature for the kind of journalistic tradition
which Belloc and Cecil Chesterton established and his loyal affection
for them made him adopt. I recall him expounding to the lawyers of
the Thomas More Society the absurdity of the legal definition of
libel, arguing that of its nature free discussion meant arousing at
any rate ridicule and contempt if not hatred against men and measures
of which you disapproved. It was ridicule that he preferred to
arouse. The lawyers were quite unconvinced, as they generally are
when laymen have any complaints about the law, and they soon realized
that to Chesterton the whole idea of involving the law because of
arguments and discussions and invective was hitting below the belt.
He could be seen at his happiest in the Mock Trials which were held
every summer for the last ten years of his life at the London School
of Economics, for the King Edward VII Hospital Fund. He was relied
upon year after year to prosecute. One year it was leading actors and
actresses, another year sculptors and architects, another year
politicians, another Headmasters. He entered completely into the
spirit of an entertainment which combined two of his abiding
interests, public debate and private theatricals. That was a setting
in which he could completely exemplify his favourite recipe for the
modern world, that it should be approached in a spirit of
intellectual ferocity and personal amiability. But what marked his
own contributions to these affairs was the intellectual "ferocity,"
in the weight and content of his criticism. Most of the eminent men
who consented to take part came to play a game for the sake of the
Hospitals, and because they rarely unbent like that in public they
were wholly facetious and trivial. To Chesterton there was no
difficulty or incongruity in combining the fun of acting with the
fun of genuine intellectual discussion. When he prosecuted the
Headmasters of leading public schools for Destroying Freedom of
Thought I came down in a lift with them afterwards and found they
were volubly nettled at the drastic and serious case he had made
inside the stage setting of burlesque, and seemed to think he had not
been playing the game when he wrapped up so much meaning in his
speech and examinations. This had never entered his head; it had come
perfectly naturally to him to make wholly real and material points
even in a mock trial and with a wealth of fun. But he liked being one
of a troupe on a stage very much more than being a lonely and eminent
figure on a platform, because to him the great attraction of
discussion was that it should be a joint quest, a mental walk with an
object in view, but also with an eye for everything that might and
would turn up on the way.
He laughed his high laugh--like Charlemagne his voice was unequal
to his physical scale--at his own jokes because they came to him as
part of the joint findings of the quest, something he had seen and
collected and brought for the pot. When he made jokes about his size
as he so commonly did at the outset of a speech, it was to get rid of
the elevation of the platform, and to get on to easy equal terms with
the audience; "I am not a cat burglar," he began to the Union at
Oxford, and had won them. The radio suited him so excellently,
precisely because it is a personal sitting down man to man
relationship that the successful broadcaster must establish; that was
the relationship inside which he naturally thought. His difficulty
was that while he had not the faintest desire to be "a Literary Man,"
and still less a Prophet, the kind of truth he divined was, in fact,
on the scale of the prophets. It seemed to me that over the last
decade of his life he found himself more and more in the dilemma that
in the life of his mind he was living with ideas, the fruit of a
contemplative preoccupation with the Incarnation and the Sacraments,
which he shrank from talking about, from a natural humility and a
clear and grateful understanding of the Catholic tradition of
reverence and reticence.
England is full enough of men to whom the distinction between the
platform and the pulpit is very unreal; they have a moral message and
they do not much mind where they give it. But Chesterton, unlike most
public men who deal in general ideas, did not come to the idea of
public speaking through the Protestant tradition but through the
secular tradition, the freethinker's debate, the political and not
the religious side of Hyde Park oratory, where men in knots shout one
another down, not where some lonely longhaired prophet declaims
conversion. After he became a Catholic he sought to set himself
frontiers, the apologetic territory suitable for a layman like
himself. But he found himself more and more preoccupied with a
territory further inland, penetrating all the time to the deeper
meaning of the creed he had embraced. He could look back and see how
most of his early books had seized upon some essential part of
Catholic doctrine. . . . He had written what he had seen at the time,
but he did not stop looking because he had written, and then he
always continued to see more, the great contemplative.
He looked out on the universe from a very solid tower of
observation because in all but the deepest sense of the word he
always had a home. His lasting significance is his pilgrimage, but
the spiritual journey was lived out in a warmly rich setting. When he
wrote of "the home" he was not dealing with a notion but with a
surrounding reality, one on which he had opened his eyes as a baby
and which he enjoyed without a break to the end. Frances Chesterton
is among the great wives of our literary history. When he said "I can
never have enough nothing to do," it was the remark of a man with a
house he was generally in, a house full of things.
He loved to produce cigars and wine, but tea also remained an
important fixed part of the day, in the Victorian tradition, and when
he was told by the doctor he had better drink nothing, he had many
alternatives, like detective stories read over tea and buns, which
other lovers of wine would perhaps have found no consolation. Other
men are secret drinkers, he would confide, I am a secret teetotaller.
The first time I had tea with him, in Artillery Mansions in 1926, I
was much struck that he brought three detective stories to the
teatable. I imagine he always had time for _Jack Redskin on the
Trail_, or whatever it might be because he had the gift, to an extent
I have never seen elsewhere, of opening a book and as it were pouring
the contents down in one draught like a champion German beer drinker.
He once seized from my shelves in Lincoln's Inn, Wyndham Lewis's
_Apes of God_ saying it was a book he had not seen and wanted to see.
It is a folio and I suggested he should take it away. But he opened
it and stood reading it and here and there, not a process which could
be called dipping, but a kind of sucking out of the printed contents,
as though he were a vacuum cleaner and you could see the lines of
type leaving the pages and being absorbed. When he put it down it was
to discuss the thesis and illustrations of the book as a man fully
possessed of its whole standpoint. Once he made one of his common
confusions and forgot he was addressing the Wiseman Dining Society on
the Oxford Movement. In the train from Beaconsfield he said how nice
it was that he had not got to speak. Frances Chesterton told him not
to be silly, he knew he was speaking on the Oxford Movement. He was
visibly disconcerted at the start, for many grave seniors had
assembled to hear him; but all went well in the discussion as soon as
he was attacked for something he had said about Newman's views. You
cannot catch me out about Newman, he said, with joy of battle, and he
produced then and there a most detailed account of just where in
Newman's writings the points in question were developed. Yet he was
curiously content to read what happened to come his way and to rely
upon his friends for references and facts, remembering what they
might tell him, but not ordering the books which would have greatly
strengthened him in the sort of newspaper arguments in which he was
so often employed. He had a large collection of books at Topmeadow,
but they gave the impression that they had assembled themselves.
Masses of them were adventure stories, many were presentation copies
from writers. You felt that they had got into the house knowing that
it was a hospitable one, if not built for books, and that they would
probably be allowed to stay. But he had a study which would barely
home him, and the library room he did eventually build was only
finished as he died.
I think nothing is more superficial or belittling to him than the
idea that while he might have liked the real country he could not
like Beaconsfield, as it developed into a dormitory town while he
lived there. His sympathies were far too wide. He liked to tell how
he had had to complain of the noise made by an adjoining Cinema
Company. His secretary had said Mr. Chesterton finds he cannot write;
and the Cinema people replied we are well aware of that.
He liked to think of Mr. Garvin near by, "not that I see him very
much," he said, "but I like to think that that great factory is
steaming away night and day." He had great satisfaction when a friend
and I, driving away in the evening, knocked down a white wooden post
outside the house in starting the car. He held that he had witnessed
just how many a grand old local custom must have originated, in men
covering up their mistakes by saying they were fulfilling a ritual
which had fallen into neglect. You must say you did it on purpose, he
said, say it was a rite too long omitted and it will soon be kept up
every year and men will forget its origin, and it will be known as
the Bump of Beaconsfield. When a friend of his brought him a
two-bladed African spear, he said, as he threw it about the lawn,
that it was sad to think how many lawns there were in Beaconsfield
and how few weapons were ever thrown on any of them, although all men
enjoyed, or would enjoy spear throwing more, he believed, than they
enjoyed clock golf. He at any rate was a genuinely free man, who did
what it amused and pleased him to do, and did not think he had to
choose between the forms of activity or rest currently pursued by his
neighbours. Much of the serene atmosphere of his home came from that
quiet resolute practice of the liberty of a free mind.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Columbus
_He wished to discover America. His gay and thoughtless friends, who
could not understand him, pointed out that America had already been
discovered, I think they said by Christopher Columbus, some time ago,
and that there were big cities of Anglo-Saxon People there already,
New York and Boston and so on. But the Admiral explained to them,
kindly enough, that this had nothing to do with it. They might have
discovered America, but he had not_.
From _A Fragment_, in _The Coloured Lands_.
IN THE CHAPTER of his _Autobiography_ entitled "The Incomplete
Traveller" Chesterton has said "after all, the strangest country I
ever visited was England." It was of the very essence of his
philosophy that each one of us has to make again the discoveries of
our ancestors if we are to be travellers and not trippers. "The
traveller sees what he sees; the tripper sees what he has come to
see." Thus Chesterton tried to discover each country that he visited
and he records that the nearer countries are sometimes harder to
discover than the more remote. For Poland is more akin to England
than is France: Ireland more mysterious than Italy.
France, Ireland and supremely Palestine brought their contribution to
that mental and spiritual development traced in earlier chapters. On
Ireland, Rome, Jerusalem and the United States he wrote books. It may
really be said that on the States he wrote two books, for in the
volume of essays _Sidelights on New London and Newer York_ which
followed his second visit he showed a much greater understanding than
in _What I Saw in America_. His first visit took place in 1921-22,
his second in 1930.
On the first trip Frances kept clippings of almost all their
interviews. Gilbert himself said that, while the headlines in
American newspapers became obscure in their violent efforts to
startle, what was written underneath the headlines was usually good
journalism and the press cuttings of this tour bear out his remark.
Interviewers report accurately and with a good deal of humour.
Sketches of G.K.'s personal appearance abound, and if occasionally
they contradict one another in detail they yet contrive to convey a
vivid and fairly truthful impression of the "leonine" head, the bulky
form, the gestures and mannerisms. That a man of letters and lecturer
should choose to wear proudly not one of these titles but that of
journalist, was pleasing and flattering to the brotherhood. The
atmosphere of the tour is best conveyed by rather copious quotation.
A crowd of journalists met him at the boat. One of them writes of
. . . his voluminous figure, quite imposing when he stands up,
though not so abundantly Johnsonian as his pictures lead one to
expect. He has cascades of grey hair above a pinkly beaming face, a
rather straggly blond mustache, and eyes that seem frequently to be
taking up infinity in a serious way.
His falsetto laugh, prominent teeth and general aspect are rather
Rooseveltian. . . .
Mr. Chesterton, who is accompanied by Mrs. Chesterton, and who will
deliver a lecture soon in Boston on the Ignorance of the Educated,
said he did not expect to go further west than Chicago, since "having
seen both Jerusalem and Chicago, I think I shall have touched on the
extremes of civilization."
In the event he visited Omaha and Oklahoma City and went south as far
as Nashville, Tennessee.
Possibly Frances had thought she would pass unnoticed but in fact,
besides constant photographs of the pair, the lynx eye of the
interviewer was upon her as much as upon him. On arrival at New York:
He shook hands with some half-dozen Customs officials who welcomed
him to the city on their own behalf. The impression given by Mr.
Chesterton as he moved majestically along the pier or on the ship was
one of huge bulk. To the ordinary sized people on the pier he seemed
to blot out the liner and the river. Mrs. Chesterton was busy with
the baggage.
"My wife understands these things," he said with a sweep of his
stick. "I don't." . . .
In order to get the two figures into the same picture one of the
newspaper photographers requested Mr. Chesterton to sit in a big
armchair while his wife stood beside him. When they were settled in
the required pose he exclaimed: "I say I don't like this; people will
think that I am a German."
Another newspaper remarks: "He was accompanied by his wife, who
looked very small beside him. She attended to the baggage
examination, opening trunks and bags while her husband delivered a
short essay on the equality of men and women in England since the
war." This reporter was perhaps not without irony: but if it actually
happened like that, G.K. must have seen the joke too for he has a
similar situation in the first scene of his play "The Judgement of
Dr. Johnson." The same reporter adds that Chesterton speaks in
essays, so that his interviewers "received a brief essay instead of a
direct reply to a leading question."
We next come upon them in their New York hotel:
I found, with Mrs. Chesterton at the Biltmore, this big, gentle,
leonine man of letters six feet of him and 200 odd lbs. There is a
delightful story of how an American, driving with him through London,
remarked "Everyone seems to know you, Mr. Chesterton."
"Yes," mournfully responded the gargantuan author, "and if they
don't they ask."
He really doesn't look anything like as fat as his caricatures make
him, however, and he has a head big enough to go with his massive
tallness. His eyes are brilliant English blue behind the big rimmed
eyeglasses: his wavy hair, steel grey; his heavy mustache, bright
yellow. Physically he is the crackling electric spark of the
heaven-home-and-mother party, the only man who can give the cleverest
radical debaters a Roland for their Oliver.
In subsequent interviews G.K.'s height grew to six foot three and his
weight to 300 lbs. (which was surely closer to the mark); his
mannerisms were greatly remarked.
Mr. Chesterton speaks clearly, in a rather high-pitched voice. He
accompanies his remarks with many nervous little gestures. His hands,
at times, stray into his pockets. He leans over the reading desk as
if he would like to get down into the audience and make it a sort of
heart-to-heart talk.
Mr. Chesterton's right hand spent a restless and rather disturbing
evening. It would start from the reading desk at which he stood and
fall to the points of that vast waistcoat which inspired the
description of him as "a fellow of infinite vest." It would wander
aimlessly a moment about his--stomach is a word that is taboo among
the polite English--equator, and then shift swiftly to the rear until
the thumb found the hip pocket. There the hand would rest a moment,
to return again to the reading desk and to describe once more the
quarter circle. Once in a while it would twist a ring upon the left
hand, once in a while it would be clasped behind the broad back, but
only for a moment. To the hip pocket and back again was its
sentry-go, and it was a faithful soldier.
Several interviewers remark on the unexpected calibre of his voice.
He himself spoke of it as "the mouse that came forth from the
mountain."
One would never suspect him of being our leading American
best-seller. His accent, mannerisms, and dress are pro-Piccadilly and
he likes his Oolong with a lump of sugar. He thinks with his cigar, a
black London cheeroot.
He, Gilbert K. Chesterton, was sipping a cup of tea, expertly
brewed by Mrs. Chesterton when a reporter yesterday entered his room
at the Blackstone [in Chicago]. Before he submitted to interrogation
he lighted the cigar.
"My muse," he explained. "A Parnassian pleasure. Tobacco smoke is
the Ichor of mental life. Some men write with a pencil, others with a
typewriter, I write with my cigar." . . .
Throughout the interview he was profoundly concerned not with the
subjects under discussion, but with the black cheeroot. Seven times
it went out. Seven times he relighted it. The eighth time he tossed
it away.
When asked which of his works he considered the greatest, he said: "I
don't consider any of my works in the least great." . . .
"Slang," he said, "is too sacred and precious to be used
promiscuously. Its use should be led up to reverently for it
expresses what the King's English could not."
"Seeing and hearing a man like Gilbert Keith Chesterton," said a
Detroit newspaper, "makes a meal for the imagination that no reading
of books by him or about him can accomplish."
He spoke Sunday in Orchestra Hall on the Ignorance of the Educated;
it grows more difficult as his tour progresses, he admits, and the
Lecture, he insists, grows worse. His thesis is that "the besetting
evil of all educated people is that they tend to substitute theories
for things." The uneducated man never makes this mistake. He states
the simple fact that he sees a German drinking beer: he does not say
"there is a Teuton consuming alcohol."
At Toronto the Chairman--a professor of English--thought that there
must have been an error in the title as printed, and announced that
Mr. Chesterton would speak on The Ignorance of the _Un_educated.
Another Detroit newspaper quotes from the lecture:
There is a deeper side to such fallacies. The whole catastrophe of
the Great War may be traced to the racial theory. If people had
looked at peoples as nations in place of races the intolerable
ambition of Prussia might have been stopped before it attained the
captaincy of the South German States.
The only other lecture subjects mentioned are "Shall We Abolish the
Inevitable" and "The Perils of Health." There are innumerable
caricatures. One by Cosmo Hamilton is accompanied with a story of how
he once debated with Chesterton. The subject was: "There is no law in
England." G.K. made so overwhelming a case that Hamilton decided the
only way of making reply possible was to twist the subject making it
"there are no laws in England" and "go off at 1000 tangents like a
worried terrier."
To hear Chesterton's howl of joy when he twigged how I had slipped
out, to see him double himself up in an agony of laughter at my
personal insults, to watch the effect of his sportsmanship on a
shocked audience who were won to mirth by his intense and
pea-hen-like quarks of joy was a sight and a sound for the gods.
Probably Chesterton has forgotten this incident but I haven't and
never will, and I carried away from that room a respect and
admiration for this tomboy among dictionaries, this philosophical
Peter Pan, this humorous Dr. Johnson, this kindly and gallant cherub,
this profound student and wise master which has grown steadily ever
since.
In the _Daily Sketch_, Hamilton later described G.K. speaking in this
debate:
During the whole inspired course of his brilliant reasoning, he
caught the little rivulets which ran down his face, and just as they
were about to drop from the first of his several chins flicked them
generously among the disconcerted people who sat actually at his
feet. From time to time, too, unaware of this, he grasped deep into
his pockets and rattled coins and keys, going from point to point,
from proof to proof, until the Constitution of England was quite
devoid of Law and out from under his waistcoat bulged a line of shirt.
It was monstrous, gigantic, amazing, deadly, delicious. Nothing
like it has ever been done before or will ever be seen, heard and
felt like it again.
A clever caricature depicts Dickens in one corner, his arms full of
bricks, hammers and jagged objects, labelled "American Notes." The
rest of the picture is an immense drawing of a smiling Chesterton,
his arms full of roses, labelled "Kind Words for America." He is
pointing at Dickens and saying: "America must have changed a great
deal since then."
Not only Gilbert but also Frances was constantly interviewed. "I tell
them," one interviewer quotes her as saying, "that I didn't know I
was the wife of a great man till I came to America. It never bothered
me before."
This, coming from one of those English wives, so popularly
portrayed as representing the acme of submission, was delightful. A
slight, slim little figure, looking slighter and slimmer in the wake
of her overshadowing husband, with an outward appearance of
unsurpassed mildness and meekness which her conversation readily
dispelled, the wife of this delightful Englishman of letters
presented a very intimate Chestertonian paradox.
Frances kept a Diary of which almost the first entry is "So far my
feelings towards this country are entirely hostile, but it would be
unfair to judge too soon. We have refused all invitations; it's the
only thing to do." This idea they must have abandoned, for one paper
after Gilbert's death describes him as an immense success socially
but "a big bland failure" as a lecturer. As the tour proceeds the
entries in the Diary become more favorable but unlike her letters
from Poland--where what she liked best was anything really
Polish--the Diary shows Frances as singling out for approval those
things approximately English--e.g., houses where she stayed in Boston
and Philadelphia. She hated hustle, heat and crowds, and the Diary is
full of remarks about her exhaustion.
G.K. commented in one interview on the different conception of a Club
in England and in America. While groups of men entertained him,
Women's Clubs were entertaining his wife. But an English Club "is
really a promoter of unsociability. . . . And while the English woman
in her Club does not, perhaps, stare into vacancy with the same
fervour, fixity and ferocity as the English man, still there is
something of the sort, you know." After a lecture in Philadelphia a
lady asked him, "Mr. Chesterton, what makes women talk so much?"
Heaving himself out of his chair, he answered only "God, Madam."
Two further caricatures were an impression drawn by Will Coyne for
the New York _Evening Post_ of Chesterton as Porthos of the Pen, and
another, drawn for the New York _Herald_ by Stewart Davis, of
Chesterton supplying "Paradoxygen to the World." This was accompanied
by a poem called Paradoxygen, by Edward Anthony:
O Gilbert I know there are many who like
Your talks on the darkness of light,
The shortness of length and the weakness of strength
And the one on the lowness of height.
My neighbour keeps telling me "How I adore
His legality of the illicit
And I've also a liking intense for his striking
Obscurity of the explicit."
But I am unmoved. What's the reason? 0, well,
The same I intend to expound
Some evening next week, when I'm going to speak
On the shallowness of the profound.
"Everyone who goes to America for a short time," said G.K., "is
expected to write a book; and nearly everybody does." In accordance
with this convention he wrote _What I Saw in America_. He did see a
great deal. The same imagination that had found the mediaeval aspect
of Jerusalem saw many elements missed not only by the ordinary
tourist but by the people themselves who live nearest to them. Thus
he keenly appreciated the traditional elements in Philadelphia,
Boston and Baltimore:
In coming into some of these more stable cities of the States I
felt something quite sincerely of that historic emotion which is
satisfied in the eternal cities of the Mediterranean. I felt in
America what many Americans suppose can only be felt in Europe. I
have seldom had that sentiment stirred more simply and directly than
when I saw from afar off, above that vast grey labyrinth of
Philadelphia, great Penn upon his pinnacle like the graven figure of
a god who had fashioned a new world; and remembered that his body lay
buried in a field at the turning of a lane, a league from my own door.
In Baltimore the Catholic history appealed to him yet more strongly,
and, invited to visit Cardinal Gibbons, he felt himself touching "the
end of a living chain." In Boston, "much more beautiful than its
name," he companioned again with the Autocrat and recalled how in his
own youth English and American literature seemed to be one thing.
Indeed he was there reminded even "of English things that have
largely vanished from England." Washington he saw both as a beautiful
city and an idea--"a sort of paradise of impersonal politics without
personal commerce." And in Nashville, Tennessee it was "with a sort
of intensity of feeling" that he found himself "before a dim and
faded picture; and from the dark canvas looked forth the face of
Andrew Jackson, watchful like a white eagle."
The things Chesterton chose for description all have relevance to the
main thesis of the book which has often been missed and which emerges
most clearly in the first and the last chapters. He insists always
that he writes as a foreigner--and indeed repeats frequently that it
is by keeping our own distinct nationality that Englishmen and
Americans will best understand and like one another--but he writes
also as a man not unconscious of history. Thus writing, the older
cities represent to him one trend in the States and New York another.
I am sorry to say that he does not appreciate New York as he ought,
because of his dislike of cosmopolitanism. Its beauty he sees as
breath-taking: not solid and abiding but a kind of fairyland. The
lights on Broadway evoked from him the exclamation "What a glorious
garden of wonders this would be for anyone who was lucky enough to be
unable to read," and he imagines a simple peasant who fancies that
they must be announcing in letters of fire: "Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity," and must be put up on occasion of some great national
feast, whereas they are but advertising signs put up to make money.
The Skyline seemed to him most lovely: "vertical lines that suggest a
sort of rush upwards, as of great cataracts topsy turvy--the strong
daylight finds everywhere the broken edges of things and the sort of
hues we see in newly turned earth or the white sections of
trees. . . ." He feels the intense "imaginative pleasure of those
dizzy turrets and dancing fires." But he ends with the note that
really spoilt New York for him: "If those nightmare buildings were
really all built for nothing, how noble they would be."
Advertisement, Big Business, Monopoly might have invaded the old
traditionary cities of America as they had those of England, but New
York existed (he felt) as a new and startling expression of them.
They shrieked in every light and from every sky-scraper. The whole
question of America was: would the older simpler really great
historical tradition win, or would it be defeated by the new and
towering evil? He has an interesting chapter on the countryside,
finding hope in the considerable extension of small ownership among
the farmers and in the houses built from the growing material that
wood is, but he is again depressed at the reflection that the culture
of the countryside is not its own but imported from the
towns--therefore itself largely commercialised.
Roaming over the world in search of his examples Chesterton sees the
ideal of the early republicans as dead in the republics of today, and
nowhere more dead than in America. It would be useless, he feels, to
invoke Jefferson or Lincoln in the modern world against the tyranny
of wage-slavery or in favour of racial justice because "the bridge of
brotherhood had broken down in the modern mind."
Jefferson the Deist "said the sight of slavery in his country made
him tremble, remembering that God is just," but the modern who has
lost these absolute standards has "grown dizzy with degree and
relativity." Hence came the same terrible peril in both England and
America: that in the eyes of the new plutocracy the idea of manhood
has gone. "There were different sorts of apes; but there was no doubt
that we were the superior sort."
Only in one direction did he see real hope. The new dreams of the
18th century had gone, but the ancient dogmas of the Catholic Church
remained. Catholics might forget brotherhood, like their fellows, but
"the Catholic type of Christianity had rivetted itself irrevocably to
the manhood of all men." "The church would always continue to ordain
negroes and canonise beggars and labourers." "Where its faith was
fixed by creeds and councils it could not save itself even by
surrender. . . . THERE IS NO BASIS FOR DEMOCRACY EXCEPT IN A DOGMA
ABOUT THE DIVINE ORIGIN OF MAN."
I have put that final sentence in capitals for it is the climax both
of Gilbert's thinking about America and of one of the most important
trains of thought that brought him to the home of liberty secured for
the human race by dogma--that is to say by revealed truth. He went
home to be received into the Catholic Church as I have earlier
related.
_What I Saw in America_ is of special importance in relation to later
discussions in _G.K.'s Weekly_. While the journalists seemed
convinced on his first visit that he had nothing but roses to throw,
and compared him favorably to Dickens, a collection of quotations
could be made from _G.K.'s Weekly_ of a quite opposite kind, yet I do
not think he ever attacks America as much as he attacks England. He
was himself much amused at finding he was expected to be either "For
America" or "Against America," both of which attitudes appeared to
him absurd. In that sense he was neither for nor against his own
country. He liked Americans, he disliked certain trends in America:
because he loved England he disliked the same trends even more in
England. Certain things in modern civilisation which he hated he did
regard as primarily American. American comfort to him seemed acute
discomfort. He thought every American lives in an "airless furnace in
the middle of which he sits and eats lumps of ice."
He had a great hatred of intelligence tests which he called the
"palpable balderdash of irresponsible Yankee boomsters. . . . It is
really one of the maladies of American democracy to be swept by these
prairie fires of pseudo-scientifc fads, and throw itself into
Eugenics or Anthropometric inquiry with the buoyancy of babies." He
believed that there was more democracy in America than in England.
But he hated what he called the "glare of American Advertisement." He
spoke of a "common thief like the American Millionaire" but he
certainly did not exclude the English Millionaire from the same
indictment. His whole view of advertisement reaches a peak in an
article* entitled "If You Have Smiles."
[* _G.K.'s Weekly_, December 10, 1927.]
We read the other day an absolutely solemn and almost tender piece
of advice, in a leading American magazine, about the preservation of
Beauty and Health. It was intended quite seriously. . . . After
describing in most complicated detail how the young woman of today
(well known to be enamored of all that is natural and free) is to
strap up her head and face every night, as if it had to be bandaged
after an accident, it proceeds to say with the most refined American
accent: "With the face thus fixed in smile formation: . . ." but we
have a difficulty about taking this serious advice of American Beauty
Business even so seriously as to meditate on its social menace. The
prospect of such a world of idiots ought to depress us, but . . . no,
it is no good. Our faces are fixed in smile formation when we think
of that American.
He repeated often how much he liked the inhabitants of Main Street
(grievously wronged by Sinclair Lewis).
American ideals are not nearly so nice as American realities. We
lament not so much what Babbitt is as what he is trying to be. What
he is is a simple and kindly man . . . what he's trying to be is the
abomination of desolation; the Man who made Salesmanship an Art; the
Man Who Would Not Stay Down; the Man Who Got the Million Dollar Post
After Taking Our Correspondence Course; the Man Who Learned Social
Charm in Six Lessons.*
[* Jan. 14, 1928.]
At the time of the depreciation of the franc Belloc's articles in
_G.K.'s Weekly_, echoed in the Leaders, pointed to finance,
especially American finance, as the criminal that was forcing down
the French currency. An American correspondent in the paper attacked
these attacks on the ground that they were inspired by British
Imperialism! Chesterton felt it a little hard to be at this date
confused with Kipling. He replied that his correspondent committed
"the blunder of an extravagant and excessive admiration for England."
He speaks of
that tremendous procession that passed through Paris, literally an
army of cripples. It was a march of all those walking units, those
living fragments of humanity that had been left by the long stand of
five years upon the French frontiers; a devastated area that passed
endlessly like a river . . . they illustrate the main fact that
France was in the center of that far-flung fighting line of
civilization; that it was upon her that the barbarian quarrel
concentrated; and that is an historical fact which the foolish vanity
of many Englishmen, as well as of many Americans, is perpetually
tempted to deny. Our critic is therefore quite beside the mark if he
imagines that I am trying to score off his country out of a cheap
jealousy on behalf of my own. My jealousy is for justice and for a
large historical understanding of this great passage in history. My
own country won glory enough in that and other fields to make it
quite unnecessary for any sane Englishman to shut his eyes to Europe
in order to brag about England. . . . I have not the faintest doubt
what Thomas Jefferson would have said, if he had been told that a few
financial oligarchs who happen to live in New York, were beating down
the French wealth; and had then seen pass before him that awful
panorama of the wrecks of the French Republican Army; heart-shaking,
like a resurrection of the dead. . . . I do not admit, therefore,
that in supporting the French peasants and soldiers against the money
dealers and wire-pullers of the town, I am attacking America or even
merely defending France.*
[* _G.K.'s Weekly_, Sept. 1, 1926.]
On November 6 and 13, 1926 he writes two articles on "The Yankee and
the Chinaman," in which he contrasts the philosophic spirit with the
so-called scientific. Like Bishop Barnes in England wanting to
analyse the Consecrated Host, Edison was reported in America as
having said that he would find out if there was a soul by some
scientific test:
Any philosophic Chinaman would know what to think of a man who
said, "I have got a new gun that will shoot a hole through your
memory of last Monday," or "I have got a saw sharp enough to cut up
the cube root of 666," or "I will boil your affection for Aunt Susan
until it is quite liquid."
In 1927 Gilbert, Frances and Dorothy spent a month in Poland where
immense enthusiasm was shown for the man who had consistently
proclaimed Poland's greatness and its true place in Europe.
Invited by the Government, "all the hospitality I received," he says,
"was far too much alive to remind me of anything official." One of
the multitude of unwritten books of which G.K. dreamed was a book
about Poland. The Poles and the English were, he felt, alike in many
things but the Englishman had never been given the opportunity to
understand the Pole. We knew nothing of their history and did not
understand the resurrection we had helped to bring about. "The
nonsense talked in the newspapers when they discuss what they call
the Polish Corridor" was only possible from want of realisation of
what Poland had been before she was rent in three by Prussia, Austria
and Russia. Thus too we did not realise "the self-evident fact that
the Poles always have a choice of evils." Pilsudski told him that _of
the two_ he preferred Germany to Russia, while Dmowski voiced the
more general opinion in telling him that _of the two_ he preferred
Russia to Germany. For the moment at any rate tortured Poland was
herself and incredibly happy. Revival in this agricultural country
had been amazingly swift. Peasant proprietors abounded and lived well
on twelve acres or so, while even labourers possessed plots of land
and a cow or two.
"The P.E.N. Club Dinner," Frances wrote in a letter to her mother,
"was, I fancy, considered by the Poles a huge success. If numbers
indicate anything, it certainly was. I found it a little embarrassing
to have to eat hot kidneys and mushrooms standing about with hundreds
of guests, and this was only the preliminary to a long dinner that
followed and refreshments that apparently continued until two o'clock
in the morning. The speeches were really perfectly marvellous and
delivered in English quite colloquial and very witty and showing a
detailed knowledge of Gilbert's works which no Englishman of my
acquaintance possesses. Gilbert made an excellent, in fact, a very
eloquent speech in reply, which drew forth thunders of applause."
Their hosts drove the Chestertons all over the country and showed
them home life on the little farms, home industries and
arts--brightly woven garments and pottery for use, not for
exhibition--and the great historic scenes of Poland's history. With
the scene he remembered most vividly, Gilbert's musings on Poland
conclude: they were visiting a young nobleman who excused the
devastation of his own home by Bolshevik soldiers in the heat of
battle but added, "There is only one thing I really resent."
. . . He led us out into a long avenue lined with poplars; and at
the end of it was a statue of the Blessed Virgin; with the head and
the hands shot off. But the hands had been lifted; and it is a
strange thing that the very mutilation seemed to give more meaning to
the attitude of intercession; asking mercy for the merciless race of
men.*
[* _Autobiography_, p. 330.]
Karel Capek who had long wanted Chesterton to visit Prague wrote
mournfully, "You wrote me that it would be difficult for you to come
to Prague this spring. But it was in the newspapers that you were
last month in Warsaw; why in Heaven's sake did you not come to Prague
on this occasion? What a pity for us! Now we are waiting for a
compensation." Two earlier letters had shown him eager for
contributions from Chesterton for a leading review. Another
delightful letter is dated December 24th (no year given):
MY DEAR MR. CHESTERTON,
It is just Christmas Eve; my friends presented me with some of your
books, and I cannot omit to thank you for the consolation and trust I
found there as already so many times. Be blessed, Mr. Chesterton.
I wrote you twice without getting any answer; but it is Christian
to insist, and so I write you again. Please, would you be so kind to
tell me, if it shall be possible for you to come next year to Prague?
Our PEN club is anxious to invite you as our guest of honour. If you
would like to come next spring, I beg you to be my guest. You are
fond of old things: Prague is one. You shall find here so many people
who cherish you. I like you myself as no other writer; it's for yours
sake that being in London I went to habit in Notting-Hill and it is
for yours sake that I liked it. I cannot believe that I should not
meet you again. Please, come to Prague.
I wish you a happy New Year, Mr. Chesterton. You must be happy,
making your readers happier. You are so good.
Yours sincerely,
KAREL CAPEK.
He never, alas, got to Prague, or to many another country that wanted
him. There are letters asking him to lecture in Australia, to lecture
again in U.S.A., in South America "to make them aware of English
thought and literature." "The Argentine Intelligencia," says Philip
Guedalla, "is acutely aware of your writings. Local professors
terrified me by asking me on various occasions to explain the precise
position which you occupied in our Catholic youth. . . . A visit from
you would mean a very great deal to British intellectual prestige in
these parts."
No Catholic Englishman was anything like so widely known in Europe.
Books have been written about him in many languages and his works
translated into French, German, Dutch, Czech, Russian, Polish,
Spanish and Italian. A letter from Russia asks for his photograph for
_The Magazine of International Literature_ as a writer whose works
are well known in the Soviet Union. The Kulturbund in Vienna sends an
emissary inviting him there also and, like Prague, the Vienna P.E.N.
Club wants him.
"You have a distressing habit," Maude Royden once wrote, "of being
the only person one really wants to hear on certain subjects."
A visit to Rome in 1929 produced _The Resurrection of Rome_. Despite
brilliant passages the book is disappointing. It bears no comparison
with _The New Jerusalem_ and gives an impression of being thrown
together hastily before the ideas had been thought through to their
ultimate conclusions. Perhaps Rome was too big even for Chesterton.
He never loved the Renaissance as he did the Middle Ages, but he saw
it not as primarily pagan but as one more example of the immense
vitality of a Catholicism which had had so many rebirths that it had
buried its own past deeper than the past of paganism. He loved the
fountains that threw their water everywhere and he felt about Rome
that the greatest monuments might be removed and yet the city's
personality would remain. For Rome is greater than her monuments. He
wanted to argue with those who cared for Pagan Rome alone and who
spent their time despising the "oratory in stone" of the Papal city
and gazing only on the Forum. "And it never once occurs to them to
remember that the old Romans were Italians, or to ask what a Forum
was for."
He was, as usual, constantly invited to lecture--at the English
College, the Scots College, the American College, the Beda. At the
Holy Child Convent he spoke to a crowded audience on "Thomas More and
Humanism." Father Cuthbert, O.S.F.C., thanking him, remarked on the
mental resemblance between More and Chesterton, saying that he could
quite well imagine them sitting together making jokes, some of them
very good and some of them very bad. "Chesterton and More," says
Father Vincent McNabb, "were both cockneys." Gilbert's classical
insight also seemed to him like the great Chancellor's; "Erasmus says
that though More didn't know much Greek, he knew what the words ought
to mean."
He interviewed Mussolini and found that Mussolini was interviewing
him, so that he talked at some length of Distributism and his own
social ideal. Mussolini knew at least some of Gilbert's books. He
told Cyril Clemens that he had keenly enjoyed _The Man Who Was
Thursday_. He promised at the end of this interview that he would go
away and think over what Chesterton had said, and it might have been
better for the world had he kept that promise. For what had been said
was an outline of the one possible alternative to the growing tyranny
of governments.
From his anxiety to be fair to Fascism, Gilbert was often accused of
being in favour of it, but, both in this book and in several
articles, having given the case for it he went on to give the case
against it--a much stronger case than that usually given by its
opponents. The case for Fascism lay in the breakdown of true
democracy and the reign of the tyranny of wealth in the democratic
countries. Chesterton would, he said, have been on the side of the
Partito Popolare as against the Fascism that succeeded it; in England
and America he would "have infinitely preferred that the purgation of
our plutocratic politics should have been achieved by Radicals and
Republicans. It was they who did not prefer it." It was not that
Fascism was not open to attack but "that Liberalism has unfortunately
lost the right to attack it."
Those of us who were in Italy at that time will remember the truth of
his description of the vitality and happiness that seemed to glow
among the people. _Giovinezza, bellezza_, heard everywhere, had then
no hollow sound at the heart of it. Italy was radiant with hope.
In Mussolini himself Gilbert saluted a belief in "the civic necessity
of Virtue," in the "ideal that public life should be public," in
human dignity, in respect for women as mothers, in piety and the
honour due to the dead. Yet, summing up the man and the movement, he
saw it as primarily the sort of riot that is provoked by the evils of
an evil government, only "in the Italy of the twentieth century the
rioters have become the rulers." For although Mussolini had in many
ways made his rule popular, although in his concessions to modern
ideas and inventions he was "rather breathlessly progressive," yet in
the true sense of the word Mussolini was a Reactionary. A Reactionary
is one who merely reacts against something, or permits "that
something to make [him] do something against it. . . . A Reactionary
is one in whom weariness itself has become a form of energy. Even
when he is right there is always a danger that what was really good
in the previous society may be destroyed by what is good in the new
one."
Mussolini's reaction was against the Liberalism in which as an idea
Chesterton still believed, it was a reaction from democracy to
authority. And his weakness, the fundamental weakness of Fascism was
that "it appeals to an appetite for authority, without very clearly
giving the authority for the appetite. . . . When I try to put the
case for it in philosophical terms, there is some doubt about the
ultimates of the philosophy." It seemed to Chesterton that there were
only two possible fixed and orderly constitutions, hereditary
Monarchy or Majority Rule. The demand of the Fascists to hold power
as an intelligent and active minority was in fact to invite other
intelligent and active minorities to dispute that rule; and then only
by tyranny could anarchy be prevented.
"Fascism," he said in summary, "has brought back order into the
State; but this will not be lasting unless it has brought back order
into the mind."
The two things in the Roman visit that remain most prominent in
Dorothy's memory are Gilbert's loss of a medal of Our Lady that he
always wore and his audience with the Holy Father. The loss of the
medal seemed to distress him out of all normal proportion. He had the
elevator boy looking for it on hands and knees and gave him a huge
reward for finding it. Gilbert has left no record of his Papal
audience. But, says Dorothy, it excited him so greatly that he did no
work for two days before the event or two days after.
Their second visit to America in 1930-31 was far better enjoyed by
Gilbert, and also I think by Frances until she got ill, because on it
they came much closer to the real people of the country, especially
during the period when he was lecturing at the University of Notre
Dame, Indiana. They lived at a little house in South Bend and he
lectured every night, alternating a course on Victorian Literature
with one on the great figures of Victorian history. There were 36
lectures all told, and the average attendance at each lecture was 500.
At Notre Dame and the Sister College of St. Mary's, I felt the best
way to get the atmosphere of this visit would be to get together for
a talk the people who remembered Gilbert: they would stimulate one
another's memories. I invoked the aid of Sister Madeleva and she
suggested the two Fathers Leo Ward, Professors Engels and O'Grady,
and, best of all Johnnie Mangan the chauffeur. Johnnie is a great
institution at Notre Dame. He remembered driving my father nearly
thirty years ago and he had specially vivid memories of the
Chesterton period. We all sat in a circle in Sister Madeleva's
sitting room. I give here the notes I took.
Johnnie Mangan: "It was the hardest job getting him into the car,
harder getting him out. He'd walk on the porch and all the children
came. He'd talk to the children on the road. Money meant nothing to
him: the lady would give me the money saying himself would leave it
in the shop if the barber wasn't honest enough to give change.
"He enjoyed everything: when they dedicated the stadium he stayed
till the very end. Father O'Donnell introduced him to all the naval
officers and he was the last off the ground. He enjoyed talking to
all the naval officers. He loved cheer-leading."
Mr. O'Grady: "He spent one evening in Professor Phillips' room
after the lecture from 9 to 2.30 A.M. His host was deaf, G.K. learnt
later, and he made another date when he found his host had missed
most of the fun."
Mr. Engels: "He would sit around consuming home-made ale by the
quart; said the head of the philosophy faculty made the best brew in
the college. Enjoyed little drives round the countryside. The faculty
were a little shy of inviting him."
"In a lecture he got an immense laugh by calling Queen Elizabeth an
'old crock.' He then laughed above all the rest."
Mr. Engels noticed mannerisms: "The constant shifting of his great
bulk around," "rotating while he was talking," "flipping his
eyeglasses," "lumbering on to the stage, going through all his
pockets, finally finding a piece of dirty yellow paper and talking
from it as if most laboriously gathered and learned notes. But the
paper was only for show. Father Burke saw him get out of the cab, he
got on to the stair landing and then saw G.K.'s yellow paper on the
ground. He had delivered his whole course with hardly a single
note--occasionally looked through material for a quarter of an hour
or so before speaking." All thought him a great entertainer as well
as an informing talker. "No one enjoyed himself more than he did."
Trying to get him for an informal gathering they mentioned they had
some Canadian Ales--quite something in Prohibition days.
G.K.: "The ales have it."
Johnnie: "He'd chat all the time he was driving."
Father Leo L. Ward: "The problem of getting G.K. to and fro in a
coupe was only solved by backing him in."
They remembered G.K. "in Charley's big chair, his hands barely
touching over his great expanse."
They recalled that on receiving his honorary degree he said the last
time he received one at Edinburgh they tapped him with John Knox's
hat. He did not expect anything so drastic here: perhaps they might
tap him with Tom Heflin's sombrero.* When he had been invited to Notre
Dame he was not certain where it was but with a name like that, even
if it were in the mountains of the moon, he should feel at home. "If
I ever meet anybody who suggests there's something Calvinistic or
Puritanical in Catholicism I shall ask, 'Have you ever heard of
the University of Notre Dame?'"
[* Tom Heflin was the fiercely anti-Catholic Senator from Alabama.]
Johnnie: "He'd do anything she'd say, or Miss Collins. They
certainly had that man by the neck, but they took wonderful care of
him."
Mr. O'Grady: "It was a very intelligent arrangement. And did they
tidy him."
Johnnie: "Very much so. It was their business every evening."
Sister Madeleva: "Did he walk on the campus and see the students?"
Johnnie: "He didn't walk much only to Charlie Phillips' rooms. He
didn't mind being a little late but his lady and Miss Collins loaded
him into the car to get him there on time.
"The woman they lodged with used to swear like a trooper. But she
(the landlady) cried like a kid when he left. And he and the lady
seemed lonesome at leaving her.
"In his spare time at the house he would be drawing some fancy
stuff."
"What did he talk to you about?"
Johnnie: "He'd just talk about the country, he'd admire the streams
and things like that. I took him to the Virgin Forest and I could
hardly get him back. He even got out to notice the trees. He spent
almost an hour. The women raved at me and said I must get him back at
a certain time. He'd ask me the names of the trees. He loved rivers
and would ask me about the fish. At one time Father O'Donnell thought
he should drive to Chicago or some big town but he didn't care for
towns, said they all looked alike to him, so after that we always
went to the country."
Someone asked, "Did he ever get grouchy?"
Johnnie: "He always had a smile. Was always calling kids over to
talk to him. He'd touch one with his stick to make him look round and
play with him, and then he'd laugh himself sick playing with them.
The kids were always around him. The ones of four or five years,
those were the ones he'd notice the most. He liked to ask them things
and then if they gave a good answer he could get a good laugh at it."
Mr. O'Grady: "I know he enjoyed himself here. I met him in Ottawa
afterwards. He was autographing a book, the pen was recalcitrant and
he shook it over the rug, 'Dear me, I'm always cluttering up people's
rugs.' His cousin in Ottawa had him completely surrounded by ash
trays but the cigar had ash almost half length and it was falling
everywhere."
Father Ward: "Father Miltner one evening in pleasant fall weather
found G.K. on the porch. The campus was empty. He got a grunt in
return to his greeting, tried three or four times, almost no answer.
G.K. looked glum.
"'Well, you're not very gay this evening.'
"'One should be given the luxury of a little private grouch once in
a while.'"
To Johnnie--"Did he take the lecture business seriously?"
"No. He just wanted five minutes on the porch when he would talk to
no one but the kids."
Mr. O'Grady: "He said once, 'What I like about notes is that when
once you begin you can completely disregard them.' He stood for the
first lecture but mostly he sat. He enjoyed a joke so much, and they
enjoyed his enjoyment."
Mr. Engels: "For the first lecture he stood--part of him stood
behind a little rostrum, after that he sat at a big table."
Father Leo R. Ward was at Oxford when he debated "That the Law is a
Hass" and was amazed at the way the undergraduates adored him. "His
opponent begged them not to vote for G.K. at this critical moment in
the world's history. They cheered G.K. but voted against him to make
the other fellow feel good."
Sister Madeleva: "What did he do for recreation?"
Johnnie: "He did a lot of--sketching I guess you'd call it--and
he'd read the papers."
Sister Madeleva: "Did he like the campus?"
Johnnie: "Very much."
"Did he ever go down to the Grotto?"
Johnnie: "He seen it but he never got out of the car."
"Was it hard for him to walk?"
Johnnie: "No, he could walk kinda fast, but it was so hard for him
to get in or out of the car."
"Where did he go to church?"
Johnnie: "He came here to Notre Dame. He was close to 400 lbs. but
he'd never give it away. He'd break an ordinary scale, I guess. I
brought him under the main building, he got stuck in the door of the
car. Father O'Donnell tried to help. Mr. Chesterton said it reminded
him of an old Irishwoman: 'Why don't you get out sideways?' 'I have
no sideways.'"
To the debate with Darrow, Frances Taylor Patterson had gone a little
uneasy lest Chesterton's arguments "might seem somewhat literary in
comparison with the trained scientific mind and rapier tongue of the
famous trial lawyer." She found however that both trained mind and
rapier tongue were the property of G.K.C.
I have never heard Mr. Darrow alone, but taken relatively, when
that relativity is to Chesterton, he appears positively muddle headed.
As Chesterton summed it up, he felt as if Darrow had been arguing
all afternoon with his fundamentalist aunt, and simply kept sparring
with a dummy of his own mental making. When something went wrong with
the microphone, Darrow sat back until it could be fixed. Whereupon
G.K.C. jumped up and carried on in his natural voice, "Science you
see is not infallible!" . . . Chesterton had the audience with him
from the start, and when it was over, everyone just sat there, not
wishing to leave. They were loath to let the light die!*
[* _Chesterton_ by Cyril Clemens, pp. 67-68.]
As in England, so also in the States, Gilbert's debating was held to
be far better than his straight lecturing. He never missed the
opportunity for a quick repartee and yet when he scored the audience
felt that he did so with utter kindness. At a debate with Dr. Horace
T. Bridges of the Ethical Cultural Society on "Is Psychology a
Curse?" Bishop Craig Stewart who presided, describes how:
In his closing remarks Chesterton devastatingly sideswiped his
opponent and wound up the occasion in a storm of laughter and
applause, "It is clear that I have won the debate, and we are all
prepared to acknowledge that psychology is a curse. Let us, however,
be magnanimous. Let us allow at least one person in this unhappy
world to practice this cursed psychology, and I should like to
nominate Dr. Bridges."
The Bishop on another occasion introduced Gilbert at a luncheon in
Chicago by quoting Oliver Herford's lines:
When plain folks such as you and I
See the sun sinking in the sky,
We think it is the setting sun:
But Mr. Gilbert Chesterton
Is not so easily misled;
He calmly stands upon his head,
And upside down obtains a new
And Chestertonian point of view.
Observing thus how from his nose
The sun creeps closer to his toes
He cries in wonder and delight
How fine the sunrise is tonight!
The fact that nearly all the headlines he chose sounded like
paradoxes, the fact that they did not themselves agree with him, had
on Chesterton's opponents and on some members of his audience one
curious effect. Dr. Bridges when asked his opinion of his late
sparring partner, after paying warm tribute to his brilliance as a
critic, his humour and his great personal charm, discovered in his
"subconscious" (Is Psychology a Curse?) "a certain intellectual
recklessness that made him indifferent to truth and reality . . .
fundamentally--perhaps I should say subconsciously--he was a
thorough-going skeptic and acted upon the principle that, since we
cannot really be positive about anything we had better believe what
it pleases us to believe."
So too at the British University of Aberystwyth when Chesterton spoke
on "Liberty," taking first historically the fights of Barons against
despots, yeomen against barons, factory hands against owners, and
then giving as a modern instance the fight of the pedestrian to keep
the liberty of the highway, we are told that "the Senior History
Lecturer and some others were of the opinion that the whole thesis of
the address was a gigantic leg-pull."
Chesterton must have seen again the fixed stare on the faces of the
Nottingham tradesmen thirty years earlier on the famous occasion when
he himself "got up and played with water." But that earlier audience
had the intellectual advantage over the university professors that
they
Tried to find out what he meant
With infinite inquiring.
Gilbert often said that his comic illustrations ought not to have
prevented this. But it was really more his inability to resist making
himself into a figure of fun. He was funny and the jokes were funny
but they did prevent his really being given by all the position given
him by so many, of the modern Dr. Johnson.
It is possible, though not easy, to imagine Johnson dragged from the
station to his hotel by forty undergraduates of Aberystwyth while
members of the O.T.C. secured a footing on the carriage armed with a
battle axe (borrowed from the Arts Department), hoes, rakes, spades,
etc.--their officers having refused them the privilege of bearing
arms on the occasion.
But it is scarcely possible to imagine the Doctor called upon for a
speech standing on the steps of the hotel and saying, "You need never
be ashamed of the athletic prowess of this College. The Pyramids, we
are told, were built by slave labour. But the slaves were not
expected to haul the pyramids in one piece!"*
[* _Chesterton_ by Cyril Clemens, p. 50.]
In San Francisco I saw many people who had met Gilbert including a
journalist who took him to a "bootleg joint"--which is Western for a
Speakeasy. There he asked for "some specialty of the house" and was
offered a Mule.
"Six of these babies will put you on your ear," remarked the
bartender.
"What did he say about my ear?" Gilbert queried.
He downed three of the potent mixture, in spite of his theory against
cocktails and his host remarked his continued poise with admiration
while the bartender commented "He can take it," another slang
expression that appeared to be new to Gilbert. He told his host, Mr.
Williams, that he delighted in meeting such folk as bartenders and
all the simpler people whom he saw too seldom. This suggested an
idea--would he come out to a school across the bay which could not
afford his fees, because it educated the daughters of poorer
Catholics. He agreed at once and not only talked to them brilliantly
for three quarters of an hour, but also wrote for the children about
50 autographs.
But of course, he had forgotten something--an engagement to attend a
big social function. A huge car arrived at the school complete with
chauffeur and several agitated ladies. "Mr. Chesterton, you have
broken an important engagement." "I have filled an important
engagement," he answered, "lecturing to the daughters of the poor."
If it were possible for Gilbert to be better loved anywhere than in
England that anywhere was certainly America. From coast to coast I
have met his devotees. I have come across only one expression of the
opposite feeling--and that from a man who seems (from his opening
sentence) to have been unable to stay away from the lectures he so
detested:
I heard Chesterton some six or seven times in this country. His
physical make-up repelled me. He looked like a big eater and
animalism is repugnant to most of us. His appearance was against him.
Not one of his lectures seemed to me worth the price of admission
and some of them were so bad that they seemed contemptuous morsels
flung at audiences for whom he adjudged anything good enough.
One of his lectures, at the Academy Brooklyn, was a great
disappointment. And he charged $1,000 for it. It was not worth $10
and Chesterton knew it. After the lecture, he remarked to a friend of
mine, "I think that was the worst lecture I ever gave." He may have
been right. Certainly it was the worst I ever heard him give. But he
took the thousand and a bonus of $200 for the extra large crowd in
attendance. No: I did not like Chesterton.
What of the money? With his American agent Chesterton had a quite
usual arrangement: he received half the fees paid. The agent made
engagements, paid travelling expenses and received for this the other
half. Out of the half Chesterton received, he paid a further ten per
cent to the London agent who had introduced him to the American
agent; he also had to pay the expenses of his wife and his secretary
and further gave a large present to his secretary for her trouble on
the tour: the rest went chiefly into _G.K.'s Weekly_. I doubt if he
could have told anyone at what figure the original fee stood for any
lecture.
One of the Basilian Fathers, then a novice, remembers Gilbert's
appearance in Toronto. The subject of this lecture was "Culture and
the Coming Peril." The Coming Peril, he explained, was not Bolshevism
(because Bolshevism had now been tried--"The best way to destroy a
Utopia is to establish it. The net result of Bolshevism is that the
modern world will not imitate it"). Nor by Coming Peril did he mean
another great war (the next great war, he added, "would happen when
Germany tried to monkey about with the frontiers of Poland"). The
Coming Peril was the intellectual, educational, psychological,
artistic overproduction which, equally with economic overproduction,
threatened the well-being of contemporary civilisation. People were
inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of
vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure,
thought, or creation from within themselves.
At question period he was asked:
"Why is Dean Inge gloomy?"
"Because of the advance of the Catholic Church. Next question please."
"How tall are you and what do you weigh?"
"I am six feet two inches, but my weight has never been accurately
calculated."
"Is George Bernard Shaw a coming peril?"
"Heavens, no. He is a disappearing pleasure."
For an apparently haphazard collection of essays _Sidelights on New
London and Newer York_, published on his return to England from the
second visit, has a surprising unity. Blitzed in London and out of
print in New York it is now hard to obtain, which is a pity as it is
full of good things. Discussing the fashions of today Chesterton
attempts "to remove these things from the test of time and subject
them to the test of truth," and this rule of an eternal test is the
one he tried to apply in all his comments. Obviously nothing human is
perfect--and this includes the human judgment, even Chesterton's
judgment. Talking of the past or of the present, of England or
America, he may often have been wrong and he would certainly have
been the last man to claim infallibility for his judgments. His
weakness as a critic was perhaps a tendency to get his proportions
wrong--to make too much of some things he saw or experienced, to
little of others. His qualities were intellectual curiosity and
personal amiability together with the measuring rod of an eternal
standard.
This second visit to America only deepened in Gilbert's mind many of
the impressions made by the first. Yet the atmosphere of the book is
curiously different from that of _What I Saw in America_. Living in
the country even a few months had so greatly deepened his
understanding. He still preferred the Quakers to the Puritans, "The
essential of the Puritan mood is the misdirection of moral anger." He
still felt that as a whole the United States had started with "a
great political idea, but a small spiritual idea": that it needed a
"return to the vision" in politics and sociology. It was the fashion
today to laugh at the wish for "great open spaces," yet the "real
sociological object in going to America was to find those open
spaces. It was not to find more engineers and electric batteries and
mechanical gadgets in the home. These may have been the result of
America: they were not the causes of America." Asked why he admired
America yet hated Americanisation, he replied:
I should have thought that I had earned some right to apply this
obvious distinction to any foreign country, since I have consistently
applied it to my own country. If the egoism is excusable, I am myself
an Englishman (which some identify with an egoist) and I have done my
best to praise and glorify a number of English things: English inns,
English roads, English jokes and jokers; even to the point of
praising the roads for being crooked or the humour for being Cockney;
but I have invariably written, ever since I have written at all,
against the cult of British Imperialism.
And when that perilous power and opportunity, which is given by
wealth and worldly success, largely passed from the British Empire to
the United States, I have applied exactly the same principle to the
United States. I think that Imperialism is none the less Imperialism
because it is spread by economic pressure or snobbish fashion rather
than by conquest; indeed I have much more respect for the Empire that
is spread by fighting than for the Empire that is spread by finance.*
[* _Sidelights on New London & Newer York_, p. 178.]
He felt that the real causes for admiration, the real greatness of
America, could be found partly through facing its incompleteness and
defects, partly through contemplating the character of the greatest
and most typical of Americans, Abraham Lincoln.
Whilst I was in America, I often lingered in small towns and
wayside places; and in a curious and almost creepy fashion the great
presence of Abraham Lincoln continually grew upon me. I think it is
necessary to linger a little in America, and especially in what many
would call the most uninteresting or unpleasing parts of America,
before this strong sense of a strange kind of greatness can grow upon
the soul. . . . The externals of the Middle West affect an Englishman
as ugly, and yet ugliness is not exactly the point. There are things
in England that are quite as ugly or even uglier. Rows of red brick
villas in the suburbs of a town in the Midlands are, one would
suppose, as hideous as human half-wittedness could invent or endure.
But they are different. They are complete; they are, in their way,
compact; rounded and finished with an effect that may be prim or
smug, but is not raw. The surroundings of them are neat, if it be in
a niggling fashion. But American ugliness is not complete even as
ugliness. It is broken off short; it is ragged at the edges; even its
worthy objects have around them a sort of halo of refuse. Somebody
said of the rugged and sardonic Dr. Temple, once Archbishop of
Canterbury: "There are no polished corners in our Temple."
. . . there are no polished corners even in the great American
cities, which are full of fine and stately classical buildings, not
unworthy to be compared to temples. Nobody seems to mind the
juxtaposition of unsightly things and important things. There is some
deep difference of feeling about the need for completeness and
harmony, and there is the same thing in the political and ethical
life of the great Western nation. It was out of this landscape that
the great President came, and one might almost trace a fanciful
shadow of his figure in the thin trees and the stiff wooden pillars.
A man of any imagination might look down these strange streets, with
their frame-houses filled with the latest conveniences and surrounded
with the latest litter, till he could see approaching down the long
perspective that long ungainly figure, with the preposterous
stove-pipe hat and the rustic umbrella and deep melancholy eyes, the
humour and the hard patience and the heart that fed upon hope
deferred.
That is admiring Abraham Lincoln, and that is admiring America.*
[* Ibid., pp. 168-170.]
Among the "stately and classical buildings" were those making up the
University of Notre Dame where he had been lecturing and which turned
his musings in a direction they were ever inclined to take. Founded
by a group of Frenchmen a century ago with a capital of four hundred
dollars in a small log building on a clearing of ten acres, the
University today numbers forty-five buildings on a seventeen hundred
acre campus. The gold dome of the Church visible from miles away, the
interesting combination of the extraordinary fame of its football
team with a keen spiritual life, especially fascinated Gilbert. He
wrote a poem dedicated to the University and called "The Arena." In
it he pictures first the golden image on "the gilded house of Nero"
that stood for all the horrors of the Pagan Amphitheatre. Then comes
in contrast another image:
I have seen, where a strange country
Opened its secret plains about me,
One great golden dome stand lonely with its golden image, one
Seen afar, in strange fulfilment,
Through the sunlit Indian summer
That Apocalyptic portent that has clothed her with the Sun.
The boys shout "Notre Dame" as they watch the fortunes of the fray
and Chesterton sees Our Lady presiding fittingly even over a football
contest.
And I saw them shock the whirlwind
Of the world of dust and dazzle:
And thrice they stamped, a thunderclap; and thrice the sand-wheel
swirled;
And thrice they cried like thunder
On Our Lady of the Victories,
The Mother of the Master of the Masterers of the World.
He recurs to a favourite thought that the Mother of Sorrows is the
cause of human joy:
Queen of Death and deadly weeping
Those about to live salute thee,
Youth untroubled; youth untortured; hateless war and harmless mirth
And the New Lord's larger largesse
Holier bread and happier circus,
Since the Queen of Sevenfold Sorrow has brought joy upon the earth.
No wonder that, as Johnnie Mangan said, you could not drag him away
from the game, if the game meant also a meditation. The "holier
bread" came perhaps to his mind from the fact that the average of
Daily Communion is unusually high at Notre Dame.
When he desired for Americans a return to their great political
vision he desired also an opening of the eyes to that greater
spiritual vision which was to him the supreme opportunity of the
human spirit. E. S. P. Haynes in _Fritto Misto_, comments on the
absence of any reference to universities in _What I Saw in America_.
Nor have I anywhere found any discussion by Chesterton of the
intellectual quality of Catholic education--any comparison with the
secular teaching--either in England or in America. But that the
problems of these two countries and of all the world could be solved
only by what that golden Dome housed he cried with no uncertain
voice. Death is in the world around, Resurrection in the Church of
the God who died and rose again.
Queen of Death and Life undying
Those about to live salute thee.
CHAPTER XXIX
The Soft Answer
_I have only one virtue that I know of
I could really forgive unto seventy times seven_.
The Notebook
ONE OF THE commonest of biographers' problems is the question of
quarrels and broken friendships. At the distance of time separating a
life from its record some of these look so empty of meaning as to
imperil any reputation--yet they happened, and when they were
happening they probably appeared full of significance. Other quarrels
involve issues of importance in which the biographer cannot take
wholeheartedly the side of his hero. Thus my own father, writing
_his_ father's life, had to pronounce judgment on Newman's side in
the issues that divided them, yet later, writing Newman's biography,
he had to admit the faults of temper that at least weakened the
Cardinal's case. For only so could he tell an entirely truthful story.
In Chesterton's life there is no such problem. Attacks on public
characters in his paper, attacks on abuses and ideas, absorbed all
his pugnacity. Fellow writers, rival journalists, friends, furnished
often enough material for a quarrel; but Chesterton would never take
it up. He excelled in the soft answer--not that answer which seeming
soft subtly provokes to wrath, but the genuine article. Belloc said
of him that he possessed "the two virtues of humility and
charity"--those most royal of all Christian virtues. In the heat of
argument he retained a fairness of mind that saw his opponent's case
and would never turn an argument into a quarrel. And most people both
liked him and felt that he liked them. While he was having his great
controversy with Blatchford back in 1906, it is clear from letters
between them that the two men remained on the friendliest terms.
Edward Macdonald writes of his experiences of Chesterton when he was
working with him on the paper.
He loved all the jokes about his size. He was the first to see the
point and to roar with laughter when Douglas Woodruff introduced him
to a meeting as "Mr. Chesterton who has just been looking round in
America. . . ."
He came into the office once on Press Day and saw the disordered
pile of papers and proofs on my desk. The place was certainly in an
awful mess. I wanted to show him a particular letter and shoved my
hand into the middle of one pile and was lucky enough to put my hand
right on the right document. G.K.C. complimented me on a filing
system that demanded a keen memory and then remarked enviously "I
wish they'd let me have a desk like that at home."
When Thomas Derrick drew his famous cartoon of G.K.C. milking a cow
he hesitated to give it to me for fear that G.K.C. would be offended.
I wanted to print it in a special number and telephoned to
Beaconsfield.
"Mr. Chesterton, I have here a cartoon of Derrick and would like to
put it in the special number. But as you are the subject of the
cartoon Derrick is afraid you may not like it."
"I would rather it were not printed," he replied. "I never liked
the idea of my name being used in the title of the paper and don't
want well-intentioned but embarrassing personalities. Of course, if
it were highly satirical, insulting and otherwise unflattering I'd
gladly have it on the front-page."
I assured him that it was anything but flattering and on the
front-page it went. It was used as the frontispiece of G.K.'s
Miscellany.
Many of the obituary writers said that he hated the cinema. In fact
he told me once that he had long wished to write a new translation of
Cyrano and would like to try his hand at a film scenario of the play.
His fingers had itched in the first place to retranslate the duel
scene in order to restore the strength of the ballade in English.
When he saw the film version of a Father Brown story I asked him what
he thought of it. He had liked the film as a film and the acting. He
added as an afterthought, "It gave me an idea for a new Father Brown
story."
A short-hand note was taken of the famous debate with Bernard Shaw.
It was decided to devote four pages of _G.K.'s Weekly_ to a report
which I tried to compile by avoiding the third person and
concentrating on significant quotations. But whereas Shaw put his
points in a few words from which elaboration could be cut, G.K.C.'s
argument was so closely knit that it was difficult to leave out
passages without spoiling the effect. He walked into the room as my
pencil went through a fairly long extract from Shaw's speech.
"And whose words are you so gaily murdering?" he asked.
"Shaw's, Mr. Chesterton."
"Very well. Now put them all back and murder mine. I refuse to deny
Shaw a full opportunity to state his case in my paper."
As a result Shaw's speech took up a great part of the space
allotted and G.K.C. was inadequately reported.
He was always careful if he had reviewed a book in the paper
criticising its ideas to take an immediate opportunity to show the
author his warm personal friendliness. Middleton Murry, sending him a
book of his own, criticised G.K. as "Perverse" for thinking communism
and capitalism alike.
Your clean idea [of liberty and property] delights me, I believe,
quite as much as it does you. But it is a vision and a dream, in this
capitalistic world. . . . The communist is the man who has made up
his mind to "go through with" the grim business of Capitalism to the
bitter end because he knows there is no going back. He makes a choice
between following a dream which he _knows_ is only a dream, and
following a hope which he knows his own devotion may help to make
real. Communism is the faith which a man wins through blank and utter
despair. . . .
For my own part, if it were possible, I would rather see the world
converted to Christianity than to communism. But the world has had
its chance of becoming Christian; it will not get it again. . . .
The wrath to come--that is what communism is. And we can flee from
it only by repentance. And repentance itself means communism. That is
the fact as I see it. I hope, and sometimes dream, that we shall have
the communism of repentance, and not the communism of wrath here in
England.
Chesterton replied (May 19, 1932):
Thank you so very much for your most interesting and generous
letter, which reached me indirectly and was delayed; also for your
most interesting and generous book, which I immediately sat down and
read at a sitting; which in its turn so stimulated me that I
immediately wrote a rapid and rather curt reply for my own little
rag. I fear you will find the reply more controversial than I meant
it to be; for your book is so packed with challenges that I could not
but make my very short article a thing packed with mere repartees.
But I do hope you will understand how warm a sympathy I have with
very much of what you say and with all the motives with which you say
it. Needless to say, I agree with every word you say against
Capitalism; but I particularly want to congratulate you on what you
say about parasitic Parliamentary Labour. I thought that chapter was
quite triumphant.
As for the rest, it is true that it has not shaken me in my
conviction that the Catholic Church is larger than you or me, than
your moods or mine; and the heroic but destructive mood in which you
write is a very good example. You say that Christ set the example of
a self-annihilation which seems to me almost nihihist; but I will
never deny that Catholics have saluted that mood as the Imitation of
Christ. Lately a friend of mine, young, virile, handsome, happily
circumstanced, walked straight off and buried himself in a monastery;
never, so to speak, to reappear on earth. Why did he do it?
Psychologically, I cannot imagine. Not, certainly, from fear of hell
or wish to be "rewarded" by heaven. As an instructed Catholic, he
knew as well as I do that he could save his soul by normal living. I
can only suppose that there is something in what you say; that Christ
and others do accept a violent reversal of all normal things. But why
do you say that Christ did it and has left no Christians who do it?
Our Church has stood in the derision of four hundred years, because
there were still Christians who did it. And they did it to
themselves, as Christ did; you will not misunderstand me if I say
that this is different from throwing out a violent theory for other
people to follow.
Now for the application. Some of these monks, less cloistered, are
to my knowledge, helping the English people to get back to the
ownership of their own land; renewing agriculture as they did in the
Dark Ages. Why do you say there is no chance for this normal property
and liberty? You can only mean to say of our scheme exactly what you
yourself admit about the Communist scheme. That it requires awful and
almost inhuman sacrifices; that we must turn the mind upside-down;
that we must alter the whole psychology of modern Englishmen. We must
do that to make them Communists. Why is it an answer to say we must
do that to make them Distributists? I could point out many ways in
which our ideal is nearer and more native to men; but I will not
prolong this debate. I should be very sorry that you should think it
is only a debate. I only ask you to believe that we sympathise where
we do not agree; but on this we do not agree.
Mr. Murry wrote later of Gilbert: "I liked the man immensely and he
was a very honourable opponent of mine, much the most honourable I
ever encountered."*
[* Mark Twain Quarterly, Chesterton Memorial No.]
_G.K.'s Weekly_ was of course Gilbert's own platform, so perhaps
his care to apologise and his great magnanimity are more remarkable
in incidents outside its columns. T. S. Eliot had his platform--he
edited the _Criterion_. Chesterton on being reproached by him for a
hasty article not only apologised but dedicated a book to Mr. Eliot.
He had written confusing him with another critic who disapproved of
alliteration and had also misquoted a stanza of his poetry. Mr. Eliot
had written:
I should like you to know that it was apparently your "sympathetic
reviewer," not I, who made the remark about alliteration; to which it
seems he added a more general criticism of mine: so that _snob_ is
not the right corrective. Some of your comments seem to be based on a
belief that I object to alliteration.
And may I add, as a humble versifier, that I _prefer_ my verse to
be quoted correctly, if at all.
Chesterton replied:
I am so very sorry if my nonsense in the _Mercury_ had any general
air of hostility, to say nothing of any incidental injustices of
which I was quite unaware. I meant it to be quite amiable; like the
tremulous badinage of the Oldest Inhabitant in the bar parlour, when
he has been guyed by the brighter lads of the village. I cannot
imagine that I ever said anything about you or any particular person
being a snob; for it was quite out of my thoughts and too serious for
the whole affair. I certainly did have the impression, from the way
the reviewer put it, that you disapproved of my alliteration; I also
added that you would be quite right if you did. I certainly did quote
you from memory, and even quote from a quotation; I also mentioned
that I was doing so casual a thing. Of course, on the strictest
principles, all quotations should be verified; and I should certainly
have done so if I had in any way resented anything you said, or been
myself writing in a spirit of resentment. If you think a letter to
the _Mercury_ clearing up these points would be fairer to everybody,
of course I should be delighted to write one.
This attitude of the "oldest inhabitant" was the Chestertonian
fashion of accepting the youthful demand for something new. When a
young writer in _Colosseum_ alluded to him as out of date he took it
with the utmost placidity. "Good," he said to Edward Macdonald. "I
like to see people refusing to accept the opinions of others before
they've examined them themselves. They're perfectly entitled to say
that I'm not a literary lion but a Landseer lion." Mr. Eliot's answer
was a request to Gilbert to write in the _Criterion_ and an
explanation that he had felt in a false position since he rather
liked alliteration than otherwise.
Thus too when Chesterton had answered a newspaper report of a speech
made by C. E. M. Joad, the latter complained that it was a criticism
"not of anything that I think, but of a garbled newspaper caricature
of a few of the things I think, taken out of their context and
falsified."
He added that he had not said science would destroy religion but that
at its present rate of decline the _Church of England_ would become a
dead letter in a hundred and fifty years. Next, that science "has no
bearing upon the spiritual truths of religion," but
has been presented, at any rate by the Church of England, in a
texture of obsolete ideas about the nature of the physical universe
and the behaviour of physical things which science has shown to be
untrue.
Finally that religion is vital but it is in Mysticism that the core
of religion lies for me, and mystical experience, as I understand it,
does not want organizing.
I may be wrong in all this, but I hope that this explanation, such
as it is, will lead you to think that I am not such an arrogant fool
as your article suggests.
Chesterton replied (May 4, 1930):
I hope you will forgive my delay in thanking you for your very
valuable and reasonable letter; but I have been away from home; and
for various reasons my correspondence has accumulated very heavily. I
am extremely glad to remember that, even before receiving your
letter, I was careful to say in my article that my quarrel was not
personally with you, but with the newspapers which had used what you
said as a part of a stupid stunt against organised religion. I am
even more glad to learn that they had misused your name and used what
you did not say. I ought to have known, by this time, that they are
quite capable of it; and I entirely agree that the correction you
make in the report makes all the difference in the world. I do not
think I ever meant or said that you were an arrogant fool or anything
like it; but most certainly it is one thing to say that religion will
die in a century (as the report stated) and quite another to say that
the Church of England will experience a certain rate of decline,
whether the prediction be true or no. I shall certainly take some
opportunity to correct my statement prominently in the _Illustrated
London News_; I hope I should do so in any case; but in this case it
supports my main actual contention; that there is in the press a very
vulgar and unscrupulous attack on the historic Christian Church.
The four points you raise are so interesting that I feel I ought to
touch on them; though you will forgive me if I do so rather rapidly.
With the first I have already dealt; and in that matter I can only
apologise, both for myself and my unfortunate profession; and
touching the second I do not suppose we should greatly disagree; I
merely used it as one example of the futility of fatalistic
prophecies such as the one attributed by the newspapers to you. But a
thorough debate between us, if there were time for it, touching the
third and fourth points, might possibly remove our differences, but
would certainly reveal them.
In the third paragraph you say something that has been said many
times, and doubtless means something; but I can say quite honestly
that I have never been quite certain of what it means. Naturally I
hold no brief for the Church of England as such; indeed I am inclined
to congratulate you on having found any one positive set of "ideas,"
obsolete or not, which that Church is solidly agreed in "presenting."
But I have been a member of that Church myself, and in justice to it,
I must say that neither then nor now did I see clearly what are these
things "about the nature of the physical universe, which science has
shown to be untrue." I was not required as an Anglican, any more than
as a Catholic, to believe that God had two hands and ten fingers to
mould Adam from clay; but even if I had been, it would be rather
difficult to define the scientific discovery that makes it
impossible. I should like to see the defined Christian dogma written
down and the final scientific discovery written against it. I have
never seen this yet. What I have seen is that even the greatest
scientific dogmas are not final. We have just this moment agreed that
the ideas of the physical universe, which are really and truly
"obsolete," are the very ideas taught by physicists thirty years ago.
What I think you mean is that science has shown _miracles_ to be
untrue. But miracles are not ideas about the nature of the physical
universe. They are ideas about the nature of a power capable of
breaking through the nature of the physical universe. And science has
not shown that to be untrue, for anybody who can think.
Lastly, you say that it is indeed necessary that Religion should
exist, but that its essence is Mysticism; and this does not need to
be organised. I should answer that nothing on earth needs to be
organised so much as Mysticism. You say that man tends naturally to
religion; he does indeed; often in the form of human sacrifice or the
temples of Sodom. Almost all extreme evil of that kind is mystical.
The only way of keeping it healthy is to have some rules, some
responsibilities, some definitions of dogma and moral function. That
at least, as you yourself put it, is what I think; and I hope you
will not blame me for saying so. But as to what I said, in that
particular article, it was quite clearly written upon wrong
information and it will give me great pleasure to do my best to
publish the fact.
In any such argument Gilbert was never, in the words of the Gospel,
"willing to justify himself." He only wanted to justify certain
ideas, and the thought of having misrepresented anyone else was
distressing to him.
Even the hardened controversialist Coulton wrote in the course of one
of their arguments:
If I speak very plainly of your historical methods, it is not that
I do not fully respect your conversion. I have more sympathy with
your Catholicity than (partly no doubt by my own fault) you may be
inclined to think; I believe you to have made a sacrifice of the sort
that is never altogether vain; it is therefore part of my faith that
you are near to that which I also am trying to approach; and, if this
belief does little or nothing to colour my criticisms in this
particular discussion, that is because I believe true Catholicism,
like true Protestantism, can only gain by the explosion of historical
falsehoods, if indeed they be false, with the least possible delay.
If (on the other hand) they are truths then you may be trusted to
make out the best possible case for them, and my words will recoil
upon myself.
The dispute was about Puritanism and Catholicism. It was republished
as a pamphlet. It is the only case I have found in which Chesterton
wrote several versions of one letter (to the _Cambridge Review_). In
its final form he omitted one illuminating illustration. Coulton had
maintained that the mediaevals condemned dancing as much as the
Puritans and had dug up various mouldy theologians who classed it as
a mortal sin. Father Lopez retorted by a quotation from St. Thomas
saying it was quite right to dance at weddings and on such like
occasions, provided the dancing was of a decent kind.
Chesterton comments:
We have already travelled very far from the first vision of Mr.
Coulton, of Dark Ages full of one monotonous wail over the mortal sin
of dancing. To class it seriously as a mortal sin is to class it with
adultery or theft or murder. It is interesting to imagine St. Thomas
and the moderate moralists saying: "You may murder at weddings; you
may commit adultery to celebrate your release from prison; you may
steal if you do not do it with immodest gestures," and so on. The
calm tone of St. Thomas about the whole thing is alone evidence of a
social atmosphere different from that described.
The rest of his analysis of Coulton's method of dealing with a
historical document and distorting it is in the published version. A
valuable part of Chesterton's line is also interesting as a comment
on his own historical work. The expert he says is so occupied with
detail that he overlooks the broad facts that anyone could see. On
this point the review of Coulton's Mediaeval History in the _Church
Times_ is illuminating. The reviewer noted that in the index under
the word "Church" occurred such notes as: "soldiers sleeping in,"
"horses stabled in," and other allusions to extraordinary happenings.
But nowhere, he said, could he find any mention of the normal use of
a church--that men prayed in it.
With H. G. Wells several interchanges of letters have shown in
earlier chapters how the soft answer turned aside a wrath easily
aroused, but also easily dissipated. Another exchange of letters only
three years before Gilbert's death must be given. The third letter is
undated and I am not sure if it belongs here or refers to another of
Gilbert's reviews of a book of Wells.
47 Chiltern Court, N.W.I. Dec. 10, 1933
DEAR OLD G.K.C.
An _Illustrated London News_ Xmas cutting comes like the season's
greetings. If after all my Atheology turns out wrong and your
Theology right I feel I shall always be able to pass into Heaven (if
I want to) as a friend of G.K.C.'s. Bless you.
My warmest good wishes to you and Mrs. G.K.C.
H.G.
MY DEAR H.G.,
I do hope my secretary let you know that at the moment when I got
your most welcome note I was temporarily laid out in bed and able to
appreciate it, but not to acknowledge it. As to the fine point of
theology you raise--I am content to answer (with the subtle and
exquisite irony of the Yanks) I should worry. If I turn out to be
right, you will triumph, not by being a friend of mine, but by being
a friend of Man, by having done a thousand things for men like me in
every way from imagination to criticism. The thought of the vast
variety of that work, and how it ranges from towering visions to tiny
pricks of humour, overwhelmed me suddenly in retrospect: and I felt
we had none of us ever said enough. Also your words, apart from their
generosity, please me as the first words I have heard for a long time
of the old Agnosticism of my boyhood when my brother Cecil and my
friend Bentley almost worshipped old Huxley like a god. I think I
have nothing to complain of except the fact that the other side often
forget that we began as free-thinkers as much as they did: and there
was no earthly power but thinking to drive us on the way we went.
Thanking you again a thousand times for your letter . . . and
everything else.
Yours always
G. K. CHESTERTON.
MY DEAR CHESTERTON:
You write wonderful praise and it leaves me all aquiver. My warmest
thanks for it. But indeed that wonderful fairness of mind is very
largely a kind of funk in me--I know the creature from the
inside--funk and something worse, a kind of deep, complex cunning.
Well anyhow you take the superficial merit with infinite charity--and
it has inflated me and just for a time I am an air balloon over the
heads of my fellow creatures.
Yours ever
H. G. WELLS.
Gilbert loved to praise his fellows in the field of letters even when
their philosophy differed from his own. In the obituaries in _G.K.'s
Weekly_ this is especially noticeable. Of two men of letters who died
in 1928, he wrote with respect and admiration although with a mind
divided between pure literary appreciation and those principles
whereby he instinctively measured all things. Of Sir Edmund Gosse he
wrote "The men from whom we would consent to learn are dying." G.K.
felt he could never himself appreciate without judging, but he could
learn from Gosse a uniquely "sensitive impartiality." With him "there
passes away a great and delicate spirit which might in some sense be
called the spirit of the eighteenth century; which might indeed be
very rightly called the spirit of reason and civilisation."*
[* May 26th, 1928.]
"These are the things we hoped would stay and they are going," he
quoted from Swinburne, and of him and of Hardy, who died in 1928, and
in whom he saluted "an honourable dignity and simplicity" he felt
that though they had stated something false about the universe--that
all the good things are fugitive and only the bad things
unchanged--yet ". . . something rather like it might be a half truth
about the world. I mean about the modern world. . . ." These poets
lamented the passing of roses and sunbeams, but in the modern world
it is rather as if, in some inverted witchcraft the rose tree
withered and faded from sight, and the rose leaves remained hovering
in empty air. It is as if there could be sunbeams when there was no
more sun. It is not only the better but the bigger and stronger part
of a thing that is sacrificed to the small and secondary part. The
real evil in the change that has been passing over Society is the
fact that it has sapped foundations and, worse still, has not shaken
the palaces and spires. It is as if there was a disease in the world
that only devours the bones. We have not weakened the gilded parody
of marriage, we have only weakened the marriage: . . . we have not
abolished the House of Lords because it was not democratic. We have
merely preserved the aristocracy, on condition that it shall not be
aristocratic. . . . We have not yet even disestablished the Church;
but there is a very pressing proposal that we should turn out of it
the only people who really believe it is the Church. . . . There is
now in the minds of nearly all Capitalists a sort of corrupt
communism. . . . the Bank remains, The Fund remains, The Foreign
Financier remains, Parliamentary Procedure remains, Jix remains.
These are the things we hoped would go; but they are staying.
Sixteen years earlier Chesterton had in _The Victorian Age in
Literature_ characterised Hardy's novels as "the village atheist
brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot." Yet Cyril Clemens
has told me that Hardy recited to him some of Chesterton's poetry,
and I think this obituary links with that fact in showing that a
profound difference in their philosophy of life did not prevent a
mutual appreciation and even admiration.
Gilbert Chesterton entered the last years of his life having made no
enemies in the exceedingly sensitive literary world to which he
primarily belonged. Whether he had made any in the world of politics
I do not know, but he certainly felt no enmities. He said once it was
impossible to hate anything except an idea, and to him I think it
was. Against one politician who died in 1930 he had many years ago
launched his strongest bit of ironical writing--Lord Birkenhead, then
F. E. Smith, who had spoken of the Welsh Disestablishment Bill as
having "shocked the conscience of every Christian community in
Europe."--The last lines of Chesterton's mordant answer ran
For your legal cause or civil
You fight well and get your fee;
For your God or dream or devil
You will answer, not to me.
Talk about the pews and steeples
And the cash that goes therewith:
But the souls of Christian peoples . . .
Chuck it, Smith.
Later, Smith had stood with Sir Edward Carson against Cecil
Chesterton at the old Bailey. Now he was dead and many who had feared
him in his lifetime were blackening his memory with subtle sneers and
innuendo. Gilbert refused to join in this and he wrote in his paper:
"In him we were confronted by and fought, not a set of principles but
a man. . . . Lord Birkenhead was a great fighter! with one more pagan
virtue--pride--he would have been a great pagan."
Lord Balfour died in the same year. With him neither the paper nor
its editor had fought personally, but upon almost all his policies
had stood in opposition. Yet few better appreciations of him appeared
than the article entitled by Chesterton "A Man of Distinction."
The English squire was an unconscious aristocrat; the Scotch laird
was a conscious aristocrat; and Lord Balfour with all his social
grace and graciousness, was conscious and even self-conscious. But
this was only another way of saying that he had a mind which mirrored
everything, including himself; and that, whatever else he did, he did
not act blindly or in the dark. He was sometimes quite wrong; but his
errors were purely patriotic; both in the narrow sense of nationalism
and in the larger sense of loyalty and disinterestedness.
He instances Balfour's policies in Ireland and Egypt and continues:
In some ways he seems to me to have been too good a Stoic to be
entirely a good Christian; or rather (to put it more correctly) to
feel, like the rest of us, that he was a bad Christian. . . . There
was much more in him of the Scotch Puritan than of the English
Cavalier.
It is supremely characteristic of the present Parliamentary
atmosphere that everybody accused Lord Balfour of incomprehensible
compromise and vagueness, because he was completely logical and
absolutely clear. Clarity does look like a cloud of confusion to
people whose minds live in confusion twice confounded. . . .
. . . people said his distinctions were fine distinctions; and so
they were; very fine indeed. A fine distinction is like a fine
painting or a fine poem or anything else fine; a triumph of the human
mind . . . the great power of distinction; by which a man becomes in
the true sense distinguished.*
[* March 29, 1930.]
The distinction Mr. Swinnerton draws* between Belloc and Chesterton
may be a little too absolute, but substantially it is right. "One
reason for the love of Chesterton was that while he fought he sang
lays of chivalry and in spite of all his seriousness warred against
wickedness rather than a fleshly opponent, while Belloc sang only
after the battle and warred against men as well as ideas."
[* _Georgian Scene_, p. 88.]
Did the tendency to find good in his opponents, did Chesterton's
universal charity deaden, as Belloc believes, the effect of his
writing?
He wounded none, but thus also he failed to provide weapons
wherewith one may wound and kill folly. Now without wounding and
killing, there is no battle; and thus, in this life, no victory;
but also no peril to the soul through hatred.*
[* _The Place of Chesterton in English Letters_, p. 81.]
In various controversies during the final years of _G.K.'s Weekly_
the very opposite opinion is expressed. Hoffman Nickerson writes of
the "subversive" nature of Chesterton's work, of his giving weapons
to Communism and doing his bit towards starting "a very nasty class
war" in America. Mr. Nickerson was allowed to develop this theme in
a series of articles in Chesterton's own paper. Correspondents too
complained often enough in the paper of its attacks on vested
interests and on other schools of thought than its own.
In the course of a controversy with Mr. Penty, in which I think G.K.
most distinctly misunderstood his opponent but in which both men kept
the friendliest tone, Penty says that Chesterton treats as a drive
much that he himself would call a drift: that the mind is more
in fault than the will of mankind in getting the world into its
present mess. With this diagnosis Chesterton certainly agreed for
the greater part of mankind. He spoke often of a "madness in the
modern mind." Psychology meant "the mind studying itself instead of
studying the truth" and it was part of what had destroyed the mind.
"Advertisements often tell us to Watch this Blank Space. I confess I
do watch that blank space, the modern mind, not so much for what will
appear in it, as for what has already disappeared from it."
Thus too when the Rev. Dick Shepherd remarrying a divorced
woman--i.e., encouraging her to take again the solemn vow she had
already broken--said that he heard the voice of Christ: "Go in
peace," it was not for impiety that Chesterton condemned him. He
wrote with restraint "There is scarcely a shade of difference left
between meaning well and meaning nothing."
Was Penty still right in thinking he saw a drive where he ought to
see a drift and Nickerson in thinking he was dangerously subversive
in his attitude to the rich? And anyhow what about Belloc?
I incline to think that the truth was that while G.K. could never
hate an individual he could hate a group. If he suddenly remembered
an individual in that group he hastily excepted him from the group in
order to leave the objects of his hatred entirely impersonal. Thus he
hated politicians but found real difficulty in hating a politician.
He hated what he called the plutocracy, but no individual rich man. I
do think however that while believing firmly in original sin he was
somewhat inclined to see it as operative more especially in the
well-to-do classes. His championship of the poor was in no way
impersonal. His burning love and pity went out to every beggar. He
tended to love all men but the poor he loved with an undivided heart,
and when he thought of them his thoughts grew harsh towards the rich
who were collectively their oppressors.
I doubt if he allowed enough for the degree of stupidity required to
amass a fortune. He would have agreed that love of money narrowed the
mind: I doubt if he fully grasped that only a mind already narrow can
love money so exclusively as to pursue it successfully. And I am
pretty sure he did not allow enough for the fact that rich like poor
are caught today in the machinery they have created. He saw the
bewildered, confused labourer who has lost his liberty: he failed to
see the politician also bewildered, the millionaire also confused,
afraid to let go for fear he might be submerged. And yet at moments
he did see it. He wrote in the paper a short series of articles on
men of the nineteenth century who had created the confusion of today;
on Malthus, Adam Smith and Darwin. Far from its being true that
supernatural religion had first been destroyed and morality lost in
consequence, it had been the Christian morality that was first
destroyed in the mind. G.K. summarised Adam Smith's teachings as:
"God so made the world that He could achieve the good if men were
sufficiently greedy for the goods." Thus the man of today "whenever
he is tempted to be selfish half remembers Smith and self-interest.
Whenever he would harden his heart against a beggar, he half
remembers Malthus and a book about population; whenever he has
scruples about crushing a rival he half remembers Darwin and his
scruples become unscientific." Because none of these theories were in
their own day seen as heresies and denounced as heresies they have
lived on vaguely to poison the atmosphere and the mind of today.
English Conservatives had been shocked when Chesterton began: Mr.
Nickerson was shocked when he was ending: because he demanded a
revolution. Surely, Mr. Nickerson said, if he looked at Communism
closely he would prefer Capitalism. He not only would, he constantly
said he did. But he wanted a Revolution from both: he preferred that
it should not be "nasty" for what he wanted was the Christian
Revolution. Like all revolutions however it must begin in the mind
and he felt less and less hopeful as he watched that blank space.
But I do not believe that Chesterton failed because he had not at his
command the weapon of hatred. Here Belloc surely makes the same
mistake that Swift (whom he instances) made and for the same reason.
The Frenchman and the Irishman understand the rapier of biting satire
as does not the Englishman: for direct abuse of anyone, no matter how
richly merited, nearly always puts the Englishman on the side of the
man who is being abused. What happened to Swift's Gulliver--that most
fierce attack upon the human race? The English people drew its sting
and turned it into a nursery book that has delighted their children
ever since. There are more ways than one of winning a battle: you can
win the man instead of the argument and Chesterton won many men. Or
you can take a weapon that once belonged chiefly to the enemy but
which Chesterton wrested from him; a very useful weapon: the laugh.
Orthodoxy, doctrinal and moral, was a lawful object of amusement to
Voltaire and his followers but now the laugh has passed to the other
side and Chesterton was (with Belloc himself) the first to seize this
powerful weapon. Thus when Bishop Barnes of Birmingham said that St.
Francis was dirty and probably had fleas many Catholics were furious
and spoke in solemn wrath. Chesterton wrote the simple verse
_A Broad-minded Bishop Rebukes the Verminous Saint Francis_
If Brother Francis pardoned Brother Flea
There still seems need of such strange charity
Seeing he is, for all his gay goodwill
Bitten by funny little creatures still.
I shall never forget going to hear Chesterton debate on Birth Control
with some Advanced Woman or other. Outside the hall were numbers of
her satellites offering their literature. I was just about to say
something unpleasant to one of them when a verse flashed into my mind:
If I had been a Heathen,
I'd have crowned Neaera's curls,
And filled my life with love affairs,
My house with dancing girls!
But Higgins is a Heathen
And to lecture-rooms is forced
Where his aunts who are not married
Demand to be divorced.
The rebuke died on my lips: why get angry with the poor old aunts of
Higgins demanding the destruction of their unconceived and
inconceivable babies?
Swinburne had mocked at Christian virtue but the Dolores of
Chesterton replied to him:
I am sorry old dear if I hurt you,
No doubt it is all very nice,
With the lilies and languors of virtue
And the raptures and roses of vice.
But the notion impels me to anger
That vice is all rapture for me,
And if you think virtue is languor
Just try it and see.
But in fact G.K. did not merely use laughter as a weapon: he was
often simply amused--and did not conceal it. He told Desmond Gleeson
that he remembered reading Renan's Christ "while I was standing in
the queue waiting to see 'Charley's Aunt.' But it is obvious which is
the better farce for 'Charley's Aunt' is still running." No wonder
that Eileen Duggan when she pictured him as a modern St. George saw
him "shouting gleefully 'Bring on your dragons.'" Even dragons may be
bothered by the unexpected. And it may well be that when the rapier
of anger has been blunted against the armour of some accustomed
fighter he will be driven off the field by gales of Chestertonian
laughter.
CHAPTER XXX
Our Lady's Tumbler
_I hate to be influenced. I like to be commanded or to be free. In
both of these my own soul can take a clear and conscious part: for
when I am free it must be for something that I really like, and not
something that I am persuaded to pretend to like: and when I am
commanded, it must be by something I know, like the Ten Commandments.
But the thing called Pressure, of which the polite name is
Persuasion, I always feel to be a hidden enemy. It is all a part of
that worship of formlessness, and flowing tendencies, which is really
the drift of cosmos back into chaos. I remember how I suddenly
recoiled in youth from the influence of Matthew Arnold (who said many
things very well worth saying) when he told me that God was "a stream
of tendency." Since then I have hated tendencies: and liked to know
where I was going and go there--or refuse_.
_G.K.'s Weekly_, Aug. 18, 1928.
IN 1932, WHEN Gilbert had been in the Church just ten years and
Frances six, my husband and I met them at the Eucharistic Congress in
Dublin. They were staying at the Vice-Regal Lodge and were very happy
in that gathering of the Catholic world brought about by the
Congress. It was this thought of the potential of the faith for a
unity the League of Nations could not achieve--only dogma is strong
enough to unite mankind--that gave its title to the book _Christendom
in Dublin_.
In the crowd that thronged to that great gathering he saw Democracy.
Its orderliness was more than a mere organisation: it was
Self-determination of the People. "A whole mob, what many would call
a whole rabble, was doing exactly what it wanted; and what it wanted
was to be Christian." The mind of that crowd was stretched over the
centuries as the faint sound of St. Patrick's bell that had been
silent so many centuries was heard in Phoenix Park at the
Consecration of the Mass: it was stretched over the earth as the
people of the earth gathered into one place which had become for the
time Rome or the Christian Centre.
During the Congress an Eastern priest accosted G.K. with praise of
his writings. His own mind full of the great ideas of Christendom and
the Faith, he felt a huge disproportion in the allusion to himself.
And when later the priest asked to be photographed at his side it
flashed through G.K.'s mind that he had heard in the East that an
idiot was supposed to bring luck. This sort of humorous yet sincere
intellectual humility startles us in the same kind of way as does the
spiritual humility of the saints. We have to accept it in the same
kind of way--without in the least understanding it, but simply
because we cannot fail to see it.
But the world could fail even to see it. It could and did fail in
imagining a mind so absorbed in the contemplation of Infinite
Greatness that its own pin-point littleness became an axiom: rather
it seemed an affectation--none the less an affectation and much the
less pardonable because the laughter was directed against others as
well as against himself.
There is an old mediaeval story of a tumbler who, converted and
become a monk, found himself inapt at the offices of Choir and
Scriptorium so he went before a statue of Our Lady and there played
all his tricks. Quite exhausted at last he looked up at the statue
and said, "Lady, this is a choice performance." There is more than a
touch of Our Lady's tumbler in Gilbert. He knew he could give in his
own fashion a choice performance, but meeting a priest come from a
far land where he had reconciled a hitherto schismatic group with the
great body of the Catholic Church, who could forgive sins and offer
the Holy Sacrifice, he truly felt "something disproportionate in
finding one's own trivial trade, or tricks of the trade, amid the
far-reaching revelations of such a trysting-place of all the tribes
of men."*
[* _Christendom in Dublin_, p. 35.]
His awe and reverence for priests was, says Father Rice, enormous.
"He would carefully weigh their opinion however fatuous." His comment
on the bad statues and fripperies which so many Catholics find a
trial was: "It shows the wisdom of the Church. The whole thing is so
terrific that if people did not have these let-downs they would go
mad."
Yet it may have been a fear of excess of this special let-down that
made him reluctant to go to Lourdes. Lisieux he never liked but he
was, Dorothy says, fascinated by Lourdes when she persuaded him to
go. He went several times to the torch-light procession and he said
as he had said in Dublin, "This is the only real League of Nations."
The thing he liked best in Dublin was the spontaneous outburst of
little altars and amateur decorations in the poorest quarters of the
city. The story he loved to tell was that of the old woman who said
when on the last day the clouds looked threatening: "Well, if it
rains now He will have brought it on Himself."
The year of the Congress two other books were published: _Sidelights
on New London and Newer York_, already discussed, and _Chaucer_. The
books contrast agreeably: one throwing the ideal against the real of
his own day, the other evoking his ideal from the past. The _Chaucer_
was much criticised--chiefly because he was not a Chaucer scholar. As
a matter of fact the notion of his writing this book did not
originate with Chesterton but with Richard de la Mare who had
projected a series of essays called "The Poets on the Poets." This
developed, still at his suggestion, into a literary biography of
Chaucer. But in any event G.K. had all his life combatted the notion
that only a scholar should write on such themes. He stood resolutely
for the rights of the amateur: yet I think the scholar might well
start off with some exasperation on reading that if Chaucer had been
called the Father of English poetry, so had "an obscure Anglo-Saxon
like Caedmon," whose writing was "not in that sense poetry and not in
any sense English." It is a curious example of one of the faults
Chesterton himself most hated--overlooking something because it was
too big: something too that he had realised in an earlier work--for
Caedmon spoke the language of Alfred the Great.
In a brilliant garnering of the fruits of her scholarship--_Word
Hoard_--Margaret Williams has quoted Chesterton's Alfred as a
stirring expression of the significance of the spiritual conquest of
England by Christianity. In the same book she shows how superficial
is the view which believes that the English language was a creation
of the Norman Conquest. The struggle, she says "between the English
and French tongues lasted for some three hundred years, until the two
finally blended into a unified language, basically Teutonic, richly
romantic. The English spirit emerged predominant by a moral victory
over its conqueror. . . ."*
[* _Word Hoard_ by Margaret Williams, p. 4.]
No one would wish that Chesterton should have ignored the immense
debt owed by our language to the French tributary that so enriched
its main stream, but it seems strange that in his hospitable mind, in
which Alfred's England held so large a place, he should not have
found room for an appreciation of the Saxon structure of Chaucer and
for all that makes him unmistakably one in a line of which Caedmon
was the first great poet. In this book, only his debt to France is
stressed, because England is to be thought of as part of Europe--and
the part she is a part of is apparently France!
Yet what excellent things there are in the book:
The great poet exists to show the small man how great he is. . . .
The great poet is alone strong enough to measure that broken
strength we call the weakness of man.
The real vice of the Victorians was that they regarded history as a
story that ended well because it ended with the Victorians. They
turned all human records into one three-volume novel; and were quite
sure that they themselves were the third volume.
He quotes Troilus and Cressida on "The Christian majesty of the
mystery of marriage":
Any man who really understands it does not see a Greek King sitting
on an ivory throne, nor a feudal lord sitting on a faldstool but God
in a primordial garden, granting the most gigantic of the joys of the
children of men.
When we talk of wild poetry, we sometimes forget the parallel of
wild flowers. They exist to show that a thing may be more modest and
delicate for being wild.
Romance was a strange by-product of Religion; all the more because
Religion, through some of its representatives may have regretted
having produced it. . . . Even the Church, as imperfectly represented
on its human side, contrived to inspire even what it had denounced,
and transformed even what it had abandoned.
The best chapter is the last: The Moral of the Story--and that moral
is: "That no man should desert that [Catholic] civilisation. It can
cure itself but those who leave it cannot cure it. Not Nestorius, nor
Mahomet, nor Calvin, nor Lenin have cured, nor will cure the real
evils of Christendom; for the severed hand does not heal the whole
body."
Healing must come from a recovery of the norm, of the balance, of the
equilibrium that mediaeval philosophy and culture were always
seeking. "The meaning of Aquinas is that mediaevalism was always
seeking a centre of gravity. The meaning of Chaucer is that, when
found, it was always a centre of gaiety. . . ."
The name of Aquinas thus introduced on almost the last page of this
book shows Chesterton's mind already busy on the next and perhaps
most important book of his life: _St. Thomas Aquinas_.
"Great news this," wrote Shaw to Frances, "about the Divine Doctor. I
have been preaching for years that intellect is a passion that will
finally become the most ecstatic of all the passions; and I have
cherished Thomas as a most praiseworthy creature for being my
forerunner on this point."
When we were told that Gilbert was writing a book on St. Thomas and
that we might have the American rights, my husband felt a faint
quiver of apprehension. Was Chesterton for once undertaking a task
beyond his knowledge? Such masses of research had recently been done
on St. Thomas by experts of such high standing and he could not
possibly have read it all. Nor should we have been entirely reassured
had we heard what Dorothy Collins told us later concerning the
writing of it.
He began by rapidly dictating to Dorothy about half the book. So far
he had consulted no authorities but at this stage he said to her:
"I want you to go to London and get me some books."
"What books?" asked Dorothy.
"I don't know," said G.K.
She wrote therefore to Father O'Connor and from him got a list of
classic and more recent books on St. Thomas. G.K. "flipped them
rapidly through," which is, says Dorothy, the only way she ever saw
him read, and then dictated to her the rest of his own book without
referring to them again. There are no marks on any of them except a
little sketch of St. Thomas which was drawn in the margin opposite a
description of the affair, which G.K. so vividly dramatises, of Siger
of Brabant.
Had we known all this we should have been asking ourselves even more
definitely: What will the experts say? Of the verdict of the greatest
of them we were not long left in doubt. Etienne Gilson, who has given
two of the most famous of philosophical lecture series--the Gifford
Lectures at Aberdeen and the William James Lectures at Harvard--had
begun his admiration for Chesterton with _Greybeards at Play_ and had
thought _Orthodoxy_ "the best piece of apologetic the century had
produced." When _St. Thomas_ appeared he said to a friend of mine
"Chesterton makes one despair. I have been studying St. Thomas all my
life and I could never have written such a book." After Gilbert's
death, asked to give an appreciation, he returned to the same topic--
I consider it as being without possible comparison the best book
ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for
such an achievement. Everybody will no doubt admit that it is a
"clever" book, but the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty
years in studying St. Thomas Aquinas, and who, perhaps, have
themselves published two or three volumes on the subject, cannot fail
to perceive that the so-called "wit" of Chesterton has put their
scholarship to shame. He has guessed all that which they had tried to
demonstrate, and he has said all that which they were more or less
clumsily attempting to express in academic formulas. Chesterton was
one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed; he was deep because he
was right; and he could not help being right; but he could not either
help being modest and charitable, so he left it to those who could
understand him to know that he was right, and deep; to the others, he
apologized for being right, and he made up for being deep by being
witty. That is all they can see of him.*
[* _Chesterton_, by Cyril Clemens, pp. 150-151.]
In joining the Church Chesterton had found like all converts, from
St. Paul to Cardinal Newman, that he had come into the land of
liberty and especially of intellectual liberty. "Conversion," he
said, "calls on a man to stretch his mind, as a man awakening from
sleep may stretch his arms and legs."*
[* _Well and Shallows_, p. 130.]
I suppose one of the reasons why the surrounding world finds it hard
to receive this statement from a convert is that he has only to look
around him to see so many Catholics wrapped in slumbers as placid as
the next man's. To this very real difficulty, and to all its
implications, Chesterton unfortunately seldom adverted. To the
scandal wrought by evil Catholics, historical or contemporary, he was
not blind--he summarised one element in the Reformation conflict:
Bad men who had no right to their right reason
Good men who had good reason to be wrong.
But I wish that with his rare insight into minds he had analysed us
average Catholics. He might have startled us awake by explaining to
non-Catholics _how_ those who know such Truths and feed upon such
Food can yet appear so dull and lifeless. Anyhow, whether the fault
lie in part with us or entirely with the world at large, certain it
is that in that world a convert is always expected to justify not
merely his beliefs but his sincerity in continuing to hold them. I
wonder if the Pharisees said of St. Paul that they were sure he
really wanted to return to his old allegiance as some said it of
Newman, or spoke as Arnold Bennett did when he accused Chesterton of
being Modernist in his secret thoughts? Were St. Paul's epistles an
Apologia pro Vita Sua?
An Apologia does not of course mean an apology but a justification,
and the ground on which justification was sometimes demanded amused
Gilbert rather than annoying him. Playing the Parlour Game which
consists of guessing at what point in an article on hydraulics,
elegiacs or neo-Platonism Dean Inge will burst into his daily attack
on the Church, he wrote:
The Dean of St. Paul's got to business, in a paragraph in the
second half of his article, in which he unveiled to his readers all
the horrors of a quotation from Newman; a very shocking and shameful
passage in which the degraded apostate says that he is happy in his
religion, and in being surrounded by the things of his religion; that
he likes to have objects that have been blessed by the holy and
beloved, that there is a sense of being protected by prayers,
sacramentals and so on; and that happiness of this sort satisfies the
soul. The Dean, having given us this one ghastly glimpse of the
Cardinal's spiritual condition, drops the curtain with a groan and
says it is Paganism. How different from the Christian orthodoxy of
Plotinus!*
[* _The Thing_, pp. 156-7.]
This playful, not to say frivolous, tone was fresh cause of annoyance
to those who were apt to be annoyed. It is easier to understand their
objection than the opposite one: that he became dull and prosy after
he joined the Church (or alternatively after he left Fleet Street for
Beaconsfield). The only real difficulty about his later work arises
from the riot of his high spirits. In his own style I must say there
are moments when even I want to read the Riot Act. And those who
admire him less feel this more keenly. Bad puns, they say, wild and
sometimes ill-mannered jokes are perhaps pardonable in youth but in
middle age they are inexcusable. The complainants against _The Thing_
are in substance the complainants against _Orthodoxy_ grown more
vehement with the passage of years.
The idea had been adumbrated of calling one of his books: _Joking
Apart_ and only rejected because of the fear that if he said he was
_not_ joking everyone would be quite certain that he was. This
greatly amused G.K. and he began the book (it actually appeared as
_The Well and the Shallows_) with "An Apology for Buffoons." After
defending the human instinct of punning he remarked that "many
moderns suffer from the disease of the suppressed pun." They are
actuated even in their thinking by merely verbal association.
I for one greatly prefer the sort of frivolity that is thrown to
the surface like froth to the sort of frivolity that festers under
the surface like slime. To pelt an enemy with a foolish pun or two
will never do him any grave injustice; the firework is obviously a
firework and not a deadly fire. It may be playing to the gallery, but
even the gallery knows it is only playing.*
[* _Well and Shallows_, pp. 11-12.]
Such playing was a necessity if the gallery, i.e. all the people,
were to be made to listen; if the things you were thinking about were
important to them as well as to yourself: if the ideas were more
important than the dignity or reputation of the person who uttered
them. In this book Gilbert sketched briefly one side of his reason
for feeling these ideas of paramount importance for everybody. "My
Six Conversions" concerned reasons given him by the world that would
have made him become a Catholic if he were not one already.
He had been brought up to treasure liberty and in his boyhood the
world had seemed freer than the Church. Today in a world of Fascism,
Communism and Bureaucracy the Church alone offered a reasoned
liberty. He had been brought up to reverence certain ideals of
purity: today they were laughed at everywhere but in the Church. The
"sure conclusions" of Science that had stood foursquare in his
boyhood had become like a dissolving view. Liberalism had abdicated
when the people of Spain freely chose the Church and English Liberals
defended the forcing upon them of a minority rule. "There are no
Fascists; there are no Socialists; there are no Liberals; there are
no Parliamentarians. There is the one supremely inspiring and
irritating institution in the world and there are its enemies." Above
all, he felt increasingly, as time went on that those who left the
Faith did not get Freedom but merely Fashion; that there was
something ironic in the name the atheists chose when they called
themselves Secularists. By definition they had tied themselves to the
fashion of this world that passeth away.
These six conversions then were what the world would have forced upon
him: the Church as an alternative to a continually worsening
civilisation. While he hated the Utopias of the Futurists and while
he accepted the Christian view of life as a probation he felt too
that life today was abnormally degraded and unhappy.
There is a sense in which men may be made normally happy; but there
is another sense in which we may truly say, without undue paradox,
that what they want is to get back to their normal unhappiness. At
present they are suffering from an utterly abnormal unhappiness. They
have got all the tragic elements essential to the human lot to
contend with; time and death and bereavement and unrequited affection
and dissatisfaction with themselves. But they have not got the
elements of consolation and encouragement that ought normally to
renew their hopes or restore their self-respect. They have not got
vision or conviction, or the mastery of their work, or the loyalty of
their household, or any form of human dignity. Even the latest
Utopians, the last lingering representatives of that fated and
unfortunate race, do not really promise the modern man that he shall
do anything, or own anything, or in any effectual fashion be
anything. They only promise that, if he keeps his eyes open, he will
see something; he will see the Universal Trust or the World State or
Lord Melchett coming in the clouds in glory. But the modern man
cannot even keep his eyes open. He is too weary with toil and a long
succession of unsuccessful Utopias. He has fallen asleep.*
[* _G.K.'s Weekly_, October 20, 1928.]
Chesterton demanded urgently that the worldlings who had failed to
make the world workable should abdicate. "The organic thing called
religion has in fact the organs that take hold on life. It can feed
where the fastidious doubter finds no food; it can reproduce where
the solitary sceptic boasts of being barren." In short, in religion
alone was Darwin justified, for Catholicism was the "spiritual
Survival of the Fittest."*
[* _Well and Shallows_, p. 82.]
If these Six Conversions are read without the balancing of something
deeper they have the superficial look that belongs of necessity to
Apologetics. Some essays in _The Well and the Shallows_, most of _The
Thing, Christendom in Dublin_, and above all, _The Queen of Seven
Swords_ give us that deeper quieter thinking when the mind is
meditating upon the great mysteries of the faith.
Only very occasionally is it possible to glimpse beneath Gilbert's
reserve, but such glimpses are illuminating. Father Walker, who
prepared him for his First Communion, writes, "It was one of the most
happy duties I had ever to perform. . . . That he was perfectly well
aware of the immensity of the Real Presence on the morning of his
First Communion, can be gathered from the fact that he was covered
with perspiration when he actually received Our Lord. When I was
congratulating him he said, 'I have spent the happiest hour of my
life.'"
Yet he went but seldom to Holy Communion, and an unfinished letter to
Father Walker gives the reason. "The trouble with me is that I am
much too frightened of that tremendous Reality on the altar. I have
not grown up with it and it is too much for me. I think I am morbid;
but I want to be told so by authority."
And in _Christendom in Dublin_, he says: "The word Eucharist is but a
verbal symbol, we might say a vague verbal mask, for something so
tremendous that the assertion and the denial of it have alike seemed
a blasphemy; a blasphemy that has shaken the world with the
earthquake of two thousand years."
I have heard it said that in these later years Gilbert's writing
became obscure, and I think it is partly true. Only partly, for the
old clarity is still there except when he is dealing with matters
almost too deep for human speech. He wrote in _The Thing:_
A thinking man can think himself deeper and deeper into Catholicism
. . . the great mysteries like the Blessed Trinity or the Blessed
Sacrament are the starting-point for trains of thought . . .
stimulating, subtle and even individual. . . . To accept the Logos as
a truth is to be in the atmosphere of the absolute, not only with St.
John the Evangelist, but with Plato and all the great mystics of the
world. . . . To exalt the Mass is to enter into a magnificent world
of metaphysical ideas, illuminating all the relations of matter and
mind, of flesh and spirit, of the most impersonal abstractions as
well as the most personal affections. . . . Even what are called the
fine doctrinal distinctions are not dull. They are like the finest
operations of surgery; separating nerve from nerve but giving life.
It is easy enough to flatten out everything around for miles with
dynamite if our only object is to give death. But just as the
physiologist is dealing with living tissues so the theologian is
dealing with living ideas; and if he draws a line between them it is
naturally a very fine line.
If there appears a contradiction in the picture of Chesterton the
philosopher pondering on the Logos and Chesterton the child offering
trinkets to Our Lady, we may remember the Eternal Wisdom "playing in
the world, playing before God always" whose delight is to be with the
children of men.
CHAPTER XXXI
The Living Voice
CHESTERTON SPOKE ONCE of the keen joy for the intellect of
discovering the causes of things, but he was not greatly interested
in science. He would have said that although the physical sciences
did represent an advance in the grasp of truth it was, in the words
of Browning, only the "very superficial truth." He desired a
knowledge of causes that did not dwell simply on what was secondary
but led back to the First and Final Cause. To the mediaeval thinker,
science was fascinating as Philosophy's little sister: it was to
Philosophy what Nature was to man. Nature had been to St. Francis a
little lovely, dancing sister. Science had been to St. Thomas the
handmaid of philosophy. The modern world thought these proportions
fantastic. Huxley used Nature as a word for God. Physical Science had
ousted Philosophy.
An American friend lately told me of a girl who, asked if she
believed in God replied, "Sure, I believe in God, but I'm not nuts
about Him." Gilbert was not "nuts" about Science: therefore in a
world that saw nothing else to be "nuts" about he was called its
enemy. And as with other things taken more solemnly by most moderns
he preferred to get fun out of the inventions of the age.
He wrote in a fairly early number of _G.K.'s Weekly:_
ESKIMO SONG
. . . So that the audience in Chicago will have the advantage of
hearing Eskimos singing. (Or words to that effect.)
--_Wireless Programme_.
Oh who would not want such a wonderful thing
As the pleasure of hearing the Eskimos sing?
I wish I had Eskimos out on the lawn,
Or perched on the window to wake me at dawn:
With Eskimos singing in every tree
Oh that would be glory, be glory for me!
Oh list to the song that the Eskimos sing,
When the penguin would be if he could on the wing,
Would soar to the sun if he could, like the lark,
But for most of the time it is totally dark.
Or hark to the bacchanal songs that resound
When they're making a night of it half the year round,
And carousing for months till the morning is pale,
Go home with the milk of the walrus and whale.
Oh list to the sweet serenades that are hers,
Who expensively gowned in most elegant furs,
Leans forth from the lattice delighted to know
That her heart is like ice and her hand is like snow.
* * * * *
God bless all the dear little people who roam
And hail in the icebergs the hills of their home;
For I might not object to be listening in
If I hadn't to hear the whole programme begin.
And the President preach international peace,
And Parricide show an alarming increase,
And a Justice at Bootle excuse the police,
And how to clean trousers when spotted with grease,
And a pianist biting his wife from caprice,
And an eminent Baptist's arrival at Nice,
And a banker's regrettably painless decease,
And the new quarantine for the plucking of geese,
And a mad millionaire's unobtrusive release,
And a marquis divorced by a usurer's niece--
If all of these items could suddenly cease
And leave me with one satisfactory thing
I really _should_ like to hear Eskimos sing.
This was hardly the expression of an attitude to science, but he did
have such an attitude. Life was to him a story told by God: the
people in it the characters in that story. But since the story was
told by God it was, quite literally, a magic story, a fairy story, a
story full of wonders created by a divine will. As a child a toy
telephone rigged up by his father from the house to the end of the
garden had breathed that magic quality more than the Transatlantic
Cable could reveal it in later life. It did not need mechanical
inventions to make him see life as marvellous. His over-ruling
interest was not in mechanics but in Will: the will of God had
created the laws of nature and could supersede them: the will of Man
could discover these laws and harness them to its purposes. Gold is
where you find it and the value of science depends on the will of
man: a position which may not sound so absurd in the light of the
harnessing of science to the purposes of destruction. When discussing
machines "we sometimes tend," said Chesterton in _Sidelights_, "to
overlook the quiet and even bashful presence of the machine gun."
There was an impishness in Gilbert, especially in his youth, that
encouraged the idea of his enmity to science. Where he saw a long
white beard he felt like tweaking it: an enquiring nose simply asked
to be pulled. It was only in (comparatively) sober age that he
bothered in _The Everlasting Man_ to explain "I am not at issue in
this book with sincere and genuine scholars, but with a vast and
vague public opinion which has been prematurely spread from certain
imperfect investigations."* That "vast and vague public opinion"
certainly suspected him of irreverence even towards sincere and
genuine scholars. Yet it was by his use of the most marvelous of
modern inventions that he won in the end the widest hearing among
that public that he had ever known.
[* _The Everlasting Man_, p. 67.]
It is not so many years ago that we donned earphones in a doubtful
hope of being able to hear something over the radio. It is the less
surprising that it was only in the last few years of his life that
Gilbert became first interested in the invention and presently one of
the broadcasters most in request by the B.B.C. He felt about the
radio as he did about most modern inventions: that they were splendid
opportunities that were not being taken--or else were being taken to
the harm of humanity by the wrong people. What was the use of
"calling all countries" if you had nothing to say to them.
"What much modern science fails to realise," he wrote, "is that there
is little use in knowing without thinking."
And again, writing about the amazing discoveries of the day: "Nobody
is taking the smallest trouble to consider who in the future will be
in command of the electricity and capable of giving us the shocks.
With all the shouting about the new marvels, hardly anybody utters a
word or even a whisper about how they are to be prevented from
turning into the old abuses. . . . People sometimes wonder why we not
infrequently refer to the old scandal covered by the word Marconi. It
is precisely because all these things are really covered by that
word. There could not be a shorter statement of the contradiction
than in men howling that word as a discovery and hushing it up as a
story."*
[* _G.K.'s Weekly_, Aug. 15, 1925.]
For the thing that really frightened him about the radio was its
possibilities as a new instrument of tyranny. The British
Broadcasting Company holds in England a monopoly and is to a
considerable extent under Government control. It is possible to
forbid advertising programmes because the costs are met by a tax of
10 sh. a year levied on the possession of a radio set.
In an article called "The Unseen Catastrophe" (January 28,
1928) Gilbert wrote:
Suppose you had told some of the old Whigs, let alone Liberals,
that there was an entirely new type of printing press, eclipsing all
others; and that as this was to be given to the King, all printing
would henceforth be government printing. They would be roaring like
rebels, or even regicides, yet that is exactly what we have done with
the whole new invention of wireless. Suppose it were proposed that
the king's officers should search all private houses to make sure
there were no printing presses, they would be ready for a new
revolution. Yet that is exactly what is proposed for the protection
of the government monopoly of broadcasting. . . . There is really no
protection against propaganda . . . being entirely in the hands of
the government; except indeed, the incredible empty-headedness of
those who govern. . . . On that sort of thing at least, we are all
Socialists now. It is wicked to nationalize mines or railroads; but
we lose no time in nationalizing tongues and talk . . . we might once
have used, and we shall now never use, the twentieth century science
against the nineteenth century hypocrisy. It was prevented by a
swift, sweeping and intolerant State monopoly; a monster suddenly
swallowing all rivals, alternatives, discussions, or delays, with one
snap of its gigantic jaws. That is what I mean by saying, "We cannot
see the monsters that overcome us." But I suppose that even Jonah,
when once he was swallowed, could not see the whale.
In the autumn of 1932 Gilbert was first asked to undertake a series
of radio talks for the B.B.C. Every one seems agreed that he was an
extraordinary success. Letters from Broadcasting House are full of
such remarks as: "You do it admirably," "quite superb at the
microphone." In one his work is called "unique." Radio was now added
to all his other activities during the four years he still had to
live. Dorothy kept a diary in which she noted in one year the giving
of as many as forty lectures, and entered reminders of engagements of
the most varying kinds all over England: from the King's Garden Party
to the Aylesbury Education Committee and the Oxford Union: to
Scotland for Rectorial Campaigns: dinners at the Inner Temple and the
Philosophical Society: Detection Club dinners and Mock Trials, at one
of which he was Defendant on the charge of "perversely preferring the
past to the present."
Besides the books discussed in the last chapter, the Dickens'
_Introductions_ and the _Collected Poems_ were republished in 1933.
Other books were planned, including one on Shakespeare.
That same year Gilbert's mother died. During her last illness Frances
was torn between London and Beaconsfield, for her own mother was
dying in a Nursing Home at Beaconsfield, her mother-in-law at Warwick
Gardens. Once I drove with her between the two and she told me how
she suffered at the difficulty of giving help to two dying Agnostics.
She told me on that drive how she knew her mother-in-law had not
liked her but had lately made her very happy by saying she realised
now that she had been the right wife for Gilbert. To a cousin, Nora
Grosjean, Frances spoke too of how she and Mrs. Edward had drawn
together in those last days and she added, "No mother ever thinks any
woman good enough for her son." Nora Grosjean also reports, "Aunt
Marie said to me more than once, 'I always respect Frances--she kept
Gilbert out of debt.'"
Warwick Gardens had been their home so long that vast accumulations
of papers had piled up there. "Mister Ed." too had been in a sort
keeper of the family archives. Gilbert glanced at the mass and, as I
mentioned at the beginning of this book, told the dustman to carry it
off. Half had already gone when Dorothy Collins arrived and saved the
remainder. She piled it into her car and drove back to Beaconsfield,
Gilbert keeping up a running commentary all the way on "the hoarding
habits of women."
The money that came to Gilbert and Frances after Mrs. Edward's death
made it possible for them to plan legacies not only for friends and
relatives but also for the Catholic Church in Beaconsfield with which
they had increasingly identified their lives and their interests.
Their special dream was that Top Meadow itself should be a
convent--best of all a school--and in this hope they bequeathed it to
the Church.
A year later another family event, this time a joyful one, took
Gilbert back to his youth; Mollie Kidd, daughter of Annie Firmin,
became engaged to be married. She was a rather special young cousin
to Gilbert both because of the old affection for her mother and
because she had played hostess to him in Canada when her mother was
ill. He wrote
Postmark. Aug. 28, 1934
MY DEAR MOLLIE,
I am afraid that chronologically, or by the clock, I am relatively
late in sending you my most warm congratulations--and yet I do assure
you that I write as one still thrilled and almost throbbing with good
news. It would take pages to tell you all I feel about it: beginning
with my first memory of your mother, when she was astonishingly like
you, except that she had yellow plaits of hair down her back. I do
not absolutely insist that you should now imitate her in this: but
you would not be far wrong if you imitate her in anything. And so
on--till we come to the superb rhetorical passage about You and the
right fulfilment of Youth. It would take pages: and that is why the
pages are never written. We bad correspondents, we vile non-writers
of letters, have a sort of secret excuse, that no one will ever
listen to till the Day of Judgment, when all infinite patience will
have to listen to so much. It is often because we think so much about
our friends that we do not write to them--the letters would be too
long. Especially in the case of wretched writing men like me, who
feel in their spare time that writing is loathsome and thinking about
their friends pleasant. In the course of turning out about ten
articles, on Hitler, on Humanism, on determinism, on Distributism, on
Dollfuss and Darwin and the Devil knows what, there really are
thoughts about real people that cross my mind suddenly and make me
really happy in a real way: and one of them is the news of your
engagement. Please believe, dear Mollie, that I am writing the truth,
though I am a journalist: and give my congratulations to everyone
involved.
Yours with love,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
And in that year came two bits of public recognition of rather
different kinds. He was elected to the Athenaeum Club under Rule
II--Honoris causa; and he and Belloc were given by the Pope the title
of Knight Commander of St. Gregory with Star. During these years the
paper had gone steadily on "at some considerable inconvenience"
because, he said, he still felt it had a part to play. At home and
abroad the scene had been steadily darkening. In July 1930, three
years before Hitler came to the Chancellorship, we find the following
among the notes of the Week:
When we are told that the ancient Marshal Hindenburg is now
Dictator of Germany we suspect a note of exaggeration . . .
Hindenburg never was the dictator of anything and never will be. He
is, however the man who keeps the seat warm for a Dictator to come.
Hindenburg has led us back to Frederick the Great. . . .
Hindenburg has now given rein to the extreme Nationalists, with the
delivered provinces to support him in the flush of patriotism. And
the extreme Nationalists have only one policy: to reconstitute the
unjust frontiers of Germany, which Europe fought to amend.
In 1931 had come the Customs Union between Germany and Austria, the
obvious impotence of the League of Nations to restrain Japan, the
"National" Government and falling sterling in England. Less than two
years later Hitler was Chancellor of Germany, and in 1934 came the
murder of Dollfuss. Chesterton wrote of the tragedy whereby the name
Germany was taken from Austria and given to Prussia. With Dollfuss
fell all that was left of the Holy Roman Empire: the barbarians had
invaded the center of our civilisation and like the Turks besieging
Vienna had struck at its heart. He regarded Hitler merely as the tool
of Prussianism. The new Paganism was the logical outcome of the old
Prussianism: it was too the apotheosis of tyranny. "In the Pagan
State, in antiquity or modernity, you cannot appeal from Tyranny to
God; because the Tyranny is the God."
Belloc solemnly warned our country that we were making inevitable
"the death in great pain of innumerable young Englishmen now
boys. . . . It may be in two years or in five or in ten the blow will
fall." (November 8, 1934.)
Yet even this seemed less terrible to Chesterton than the state of
mind then prevailing: the mood--nay the fever--of pacifism that
demanded the isolation of England from Europe's peril. He called it
"Mafficking for peace": a sort of Imperialism that forgot that the
Atlantic is wider than the Straits of Dover and allowed Lord
Beaverbrook to regard England as a part of Canada. "Englishmen who
have felt that fever will one day look back on it with shame." "This
most noble and generous nation," he wrote with a note of agony,
"which lost its religion in the seventeenth century has lost its
morals in the twentieth."
The League of Nations had, G. K. held, been thought at first to be a
kind of Pentecost but had in reality "come together to rebuild the
Tower of Babel." And this because it had no common basis in religion.
"Humanitarianism does not unite humanity. For even one isolated man
is half divine." But today man had despaired of man. "Hope for the
superman is another name for despair of man."
Reading a recent commentary in a review, I suddenly saw that politics
and economics were not what mattered most in the paper. The
commentary in question was to the effect that _G.K.'s Weekly_ was
inferior to the _New Witness_ because G.K. had "only" general
principles and ideas and no detailed inside knowledge of how the
world of finance and politics was going. Looking again through the
articles I had marked as most characteristically his, I saw that they
were not only chiefly about ideas and principles but also that they
were mostly pure poetry. Chesterton was, I believe, greatest and most
permanently effective when he was moved, not by a passing irritation
with the things that pass, but by the great emotions evoked by the
Eternal, emotions which in Eternity alone will find full fruition.
There are in the paper articles in which, appearing to speak out of
his own knowledge, he is merely repeating information given him by
Belloc. And it was quite out of Chesterton's character to write with
certainty about what he did not know with certainty. Hence this
writing is his weakest. But the paper has, too, some of his strongest
work and his mind as he drew to the end of life lingered on thoughts
that had haunted him in its beginning.
Before the Boer War had introduced me to politics, or worse still
to politicians [he wrote in a Christmas article in 1934], I had some
vague and groping ideas of my own about a general view or vision of
existence. It was a long time before I had anything worth calling a
religion; what I had was not even sufficiently coherent to be called
a philosophy. But it was, in a sense, a view of life; I had it in the
beginning; and I am more and more coming back to it in the end. . . .
my original and almost mystical conviction of the miracle of all
existence and the essential excitement of all experience.*
[* December 6, 1934.]
This he felt must be the profound philosophy by which Distributism
should succeed and whereby he tested the modern world and found it
wanting--
something of which Christmas is the best traditional symbol. It was
then no more than a notion about the point at which extremes meet,
and the most common thing becomes a cosmic and mystical thing. I did
not want so much to alter the place and use of things as to weight
them with a new dimension; to deepen them by going down to the
potential nothing; to lift them to infinity by measuring from zero.
The most logical form of this is in thanks to a Creator; but at
every stage I felt that such praises could never rise too high;
because they could not even reach the height of our own thanks for
unthinkable existence, or horror of more unthinkable non-existence.
And the commonest things, as much as the most complex, could thus
leap up like fountains of praise. . . .
We shall need a sort of Distributist psychology, as well as a
Distributist philosophy. That is partly why I am not content with
plausible solutions about credit or corporative rule. We need a new
(or old) theory and practice of pleasure. The vulgar school of panem
et circenses only gives people circuses; it does not even tell them
how to enjoy circuses. But we have not merely to tell them how to
enjoy circuses. We have to tell them how to enjoy enjoyment.*
[* December 13, 1934.]
In attacking a special abuse, Chesterton was most successful when he
took the thought to a deeper depth. The following Christmas (1935) he
wrote:
We live in a terrible time, of war and rumour of war. . . .
International idealism in its effort to hold the world together . . .
is admittedly weakened and often disappointed. I should say simply
that it does not go deep enough. . . . If we really wish to make
vivid the horrors of destruction and mere disciplined murder we must
see them more simply as attacks on the hearth and the human family;
and feel about Hitler as men felt about Herod.
The modern world tended to gild pure gold and then try to scrape the
gilt off the gingerbread, to paint the lily and then complain of its
gaudiness. Thus it had vulgarised Christmas and now demanded the
abolition of Christmas because it was vulgar. It was the truth he had
emphasised years ago in contrast with Shaw: the world had spoilt the
ideas but it was the Christian ideas the world needed, if only in
order to recover the human ideas. He went on--
If we want to talk about poverty, we must talk about it as the
hunger of a human being. . . . We must say first of the beggar, not
that there is insufficient housing accommodation, but that he has not
where to lay his head . . . we must talk of the human family in
language as plain and practical and positive as that in which mystics
used to talk of the Holy Family. We must learn again to use the naked
words that describe a natural thing. . . . Then we shall draw on the
driving force of many thousand years, and call up a real
humanitarianism out of the depths of humanity.
I should like to collect all the essays and poems on Christmas; he
wrote several every year, yet each is different, each goes to the
heart of his thought. As Christopher Morley says: "One of the simple
greatnesses of G.K.C. shows in this, that we think of him
instinctively toward Christmas time."* Some men, it may be, are best
moved to reform by hate, but Chesterton was best moved by love and
nowhere does that love shine more clearly than in all he wrote about
Christmas. It will be for this philosophy, this charity, this poetry
that men will turn over the pages of _G.K.'s Weekly_ a century hence
if the world still lasts. It is for us who are his followers to see
that they are truly creative. Destruction of evil is a great work but
if it leaves only a vacuum, nature abhors that vacuum. Creation is
what matters for the future and Chesterton's writing is creative.
[* _Mark Twain Quarterly_, Spring, 1937.]
So too with the radio. In this new medium his mind was alert to
present his new-old ideas, his fundamental philosophy of life after
some fresh fashion. A letter from Broadcasting House (Nov. 2, 1932)
after his first talk records the delight of all who heard it:
The building rings with your praises! I knew I was not alone in my
delight over your first talk. I think even you in your modesty will
find some pleasure in hearing what widespread interest there is in
what you are doing. You bring us something very rare to the
microphone. I am most anxious that you should be with us till after
Christmas. You will have a vast public by Christmas and it is good
that they should hear you. Would you undertake six further
fortnightly talks from January 16th onwards?
He was asked to submit a manuscript but promised he should not be
kept to the letter of it. "We should like you to make variations as
these occur to you as you speak at the microphone. Only so can the
talk have a real show of spontaneity about it." "You will forgive
me," one official writes, "if I insist on speaking to you personally.
That is how I think of our relations." G.K. was unique and they told
him so.
A lot of reading was necessary for these talks--each one dealing with
from four to ten books--and also a principle of selection. The
principle Gilbert chose for one series was historical: "Literature
lives by history. Otherwise it exists: like trigonometry." In the
fifth talk of the Autumn series of 1934, he gives a general idea of
what he has been attempting.
This is the hardest job I have had in all these wireless talks; and
I confront you in a spirit of hatred because of the toils I have
endured on your behalf; but, after all, what are my sufferings
compared to yours? Incredible as it may seem to anybody who has heard
these talks, they had originally a certain consistent plan. I dealt
first with heroic and half-legendary stories, touched upon medieval
chivalry, then on the party-heroes of Elizabethan or Puritan times;
then on the eighteenth century and then the nineteenth. In this
address I had meant to face the twentieth century; but I find it
almost faceless, largely featureless; and, anyhow, very bewildering.
I had meant to take books typical of the twentieth century as a book
on Steele is typical of the eighteenth or a book on Rossetti of the
nineteenth. And I have collected a number of most interesting
twentieth century books, claiming to declare a twentieth-century
philosophy; they really have a common quality; but I rather hesitate
to define it. Suppose I said that the main mark of the twentieth
century in ethics as in economics, is bankruptcy. I fear you might
think I was a little hostile in my criticism. Suppose I said that all
these books are marked by a brilliant futility. You might almost
fancy that I was not entirely friendly to them. You would be
mistaken. All of them are good; some of them are very good indeed.
But the question does recur; what is the good of being good in that
way? . . .
Mr. Geoffrey West's curious "Post War Credo" has one Commandment.
He does say, he does shout, we might say, he does yell, that there
must be No War . . . but he cannot impose his view because authority
has gone; and he cannot prove his view; because reason has gone. So
again it all comes back to taste. And I have enjoyed the banquet of
these excellent books; but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
The peculiar half-official half-private direction of Broadcasting
House is based on a theory of strict impartiality towards all
opinions and an attempt simply to give the public the programmes that
the public wants. Whether it is possible to maintain such a position
is another question: that this is the theory there is no doubt--and
one result is an abiding uncertainty of mind in most of the officials.
Broadcasting House hangs suspended in the air of public opinion and
that fickle breath leaves them in no security as to any of their
artists. The resulting sensitiveness became soothed as the months
passed on and they got as near to trusting Chesterton as they ever
come with any one. True, letters came attacking him, but far more
enthusiastically approving of him. And the attacks he answered often
by private letters that turned the critic into a friend.
Some of his suggestions were not acceptable. He was warned off a
proposed humorous talk about Dean Inge and Bishop Barnes in a series
called "Speeches that never happened"--("Subject too serious," "avoid
religion"). But he was later asked to talk in a series on Freedom as
a Catholic and also to debate with Bertrand Russell on "Who should
bring up our children." In this debate he was especially brilliant,
says Maurice Baring; and another friend wrote "I have just been
listening not without joy to your putting it across Mr. Bertrand
Russell. . . .
"_Afterthought:_ What a Mincer! It struck me very much, having read
much of his writing with interest. It just shows that the spoken word
still has something that the written one can't convey. Is there a
Mincing Mind, of which a mincing voice is the outward and visible
warning?"
It was interesting that the last few years of Gilbert's life should
have furnished this unique opportunity of contact through the spoken
word between him and the English people. His voice on the radio had
none of the defects that marred it in a hall: his material was far
better arranged, his delivery perfect. He seemed to be there beside
the listener, talking in amity and exchanging confidences. The
morning after his death Edward Macdonald passed a barber's shop off
Chancery Lane. The man was lathering a customer's face but
recognising Mr. Macdonald, left the customer and ran out brush in
hand.
"I just want to say I was sorry to hear the news," he said. "He was a
grand man."
Mr. Macdonald asked him if he knew Chesterton well.
"Never read a word he wrote," the barber answered. "But I always
listened to him on the wireless. He seemed to be sitting beside me in
the room."
"That man," Edward Macdonald comments, "emphasised what I still
think: that G.K.C. in another year or so would have become the
dominating voice from Broadcasting House."
In 1934 Gilbert had jaundice and on his recovery he started with
Frances and Dorothy on one of those trips that were his greatest
pleasure. They went to Rome--it was Holy Year--and thence to Sicily,
intending to go on to Palestine. At Syracuse, however, Gilbert became
really ill with inflammation of the nerves of the neck and shoulders.
They stayed five weeks in Syracuse, gave up the trip to Palestine and
returned home by Malta. Gilbert and Frances were to have dined at
Admiralty House but he was too unwell to dine out and only came up
one afternoon. Lady Fisher remembers going to see them at the Osborne
Hotel. Gilbert was sitting on a rickety basket chair, obviously in
pain and talking a good deal in order to hide it. She sympathised
with him for the cold weather, his obvious physical misery, and the
discomfort of his chair.
"You must never sympathise with me," Gilbert answered, "for I can
always turn every chair into a story."
The next year they motored in France and Italy and Gilbert records in
the _Autobiography_ an experience in a French café when he felt a
rare thrill--not in talking on the radio but in listening--on a day
that "was dateless, even for my dateless life; for I had forgotten
time and had no notion of anything anywhere, when in a small French
town I strolled into a café noisy with French talk. Wireless songs
wailed unnoted; which is not surprising, for French talk is much
better than wireless. And then, unaccountably, I heard a voice
speaking in English; and a voice I had heard before. For I heard the
words, '. . . wherever you are, my dear people, whether in this
country or beyond the sea,' and I remembered Monarchy and an ancient
cry; for it was the King; and that is how I kept the Jubilee."
After he got home I remember how delightedly Gilbert quoted the
captions on two banners hung in the heart of the London slums. One
read, "Down with Capitalism--God Save the King." The other read,
"Lousy but loyal." He knew that it was true and it served to increase
the passionate quality of his pity. Patient he could be for himself,
but the lot of the poor aroused in him a terrible anger--and in a
broadcast on Liberty he gave that anger vent. For worse than the
presence of lice in our slums was the absence of liberty. He would
gladly, he said, have spoken merely as an Englishman but he had been
asked to speak as a Catholic, and therefore, "I am going to point out
that Catholicism created English liberty; that the freedom has
remained exactly in so far as the faith has remained; and that where
it is true that all our Faith has gone, all our freedom is going. If
I do this, I cannot ask most of you to agree with me; if I did
anything else, I could not ask any of you to respect me."
Other speakers in the series had dwelt on the liberty secured to
Englishmen by our Parliamentary and Juridical system, both, he noted
of Catholic origin. But in his eyes even that liberty was being
imperilled today where it was not lost, while the most important
freedom of all--freedom to handle oneself and one's daily life--had
disappeared for the mass of the people. The liberty so widely praised
that followed the Reformation
has been a limited liberty because it was only a literary
liberty. . . . You always talked about verbal liberty; you hardly
ever talked about vital liberty . . . the faddist was free to preach
his fads; but the free man was no longer free to protect his
freedom. . . . Monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, responsible forms of
rule, have collapsed under plutocracy, which is irresponsible rule.
And this has come upon us because we departed from the old morality
in three essential points. First, we supported notions against normal
customs. Second, we made the State top-heavy with a new and secretive
tyranny of wealth. And third, we forgot that there is no faith in
freedom without faith in free will. A servile fatalism dogs the creed
of materialism; because nothing, as Dante said, less than the
generosity of God could give to Man, after all ordinary orderly
gifts, the noblest of all things, which is Liberty.
The thoughts that had thronged and pressed on him for half a century
found final expression in these broadcasts. Most of all in two talks:
one given only three months before his death in a series entitled
"The Spice of Life," the other two years earlier in one called "Seven
Days Hard." He was haunted by the ingratitude of humanity. As in his
boyhood, he saw the wonder of the world that God has given to the
children of men and he saw them unconscious of that wonder. What did
a week mean for most of them? Seven dull days. What did it really
mean? "What has really happened during the last seven days and
nights? Seven times we have been dissolved into darkness as we shall
be dissolved into dust; our very selves, so far as we know, have been
wiped out of the world of living things; and seven times we have been
raised alive like Lazarus, and found all our limbs and senses
unaltered, with the coming of the day."
Seven days of human life, the meaning of the phrase, "the spice of
life," both brought the same recurring motif that "a great many
people are at this moment paying rather too much attention to the
spice of life, and rather too little attention to life." Not in any
"distraction from life is the secret we are all seeking, the secret
of enjoying life. I am perfectly certain that all our world will end
in despair unless there is some way of making the mind itself, the
ordinary thoughts we have at ordinary times, more healthy and more
happy than they seem to be just now, to judge by most modern novels
and poems. . . ." A week had never been for Chesterton just seven
days hard, although he had worked hard enough. He had enjoyed the
spice of life, he had liked Beer and Skittles and the distractions of
life and its high points of achievement.
But it is much more important to remember that I have been
intensely and imaginatively happy in the queerest because the
quietest places. I have been filled with life from within in a cold
waiting-room, in a deserted railway junction. I have been completely
alive sitting on an iron seat under an ugly lamp-post at a third rate
watering place. In short, I have experienced the mere excitement of
existence in places that would commonly be called as dull as
ditchwater. And, by the way, is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with
microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.
The younger generation were despairing of life in the face of life's
manifold gifts. Chesterton as a youth had revolted against the
pessimism of his elders, now he revolted as an old man against a
young generation corroded by a yet more poisonous pessimism. "The
Hollow Men" T. S. Eliot had called a poem and in it came the lines
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Forgive me if I say in my old world fashion, that I'm damned if I
ever felt like that . . . I knew that the world was perishable and
would end, but I did not think it would end with a whimper, but, if
anything, with a trump of doom . . . I will even be so indecently
frivolous as to burst into song, and say to the young pessimists:
Some sneer; some snigger; some simper;
In the youth where we laughed, and sang.
And they may end with a whimper
But we will end with a bang.
His last message for this generation was the sound of a trumpet
calling us to resurrection. A dead world must find life again, must
go back to the meaning of the book of Genesis at which it had learnt
to sneer: must realise a week once more with--"the grandeur of that
conception, by which a week has become a wonderful and mystical thing
in which Man imitates God in his labour and in his rest."
Through his call sounds a note of most solemn warning.
Unless we can bring men back to enjoying the daily life which
moderns call a dull life, our whole civilisation will be in ruins in
about fifteen years. Whenever anybody proposes anything really
practical, to solve the economic evil today, the answer always is
that the solution would not work, because the modern town populations
would think life dull. That is because they are entirely unacquainted
with life. They know nothing but distractions from life; dreams which
may be found in the cinema; that is, brief oblivions of life. . . .
Unless we can make daybreak and Daily bread and the creative secrets
of labour interesting in themselves, there will fall on all our
civilisation a fatigue which is the one disease from which
civilisations do not recover. So died the great Pagan civilisation;
of bread and circuses and forgetfulness of the household gods.*
[* _The Listener_, January 31, 1934.]
This splendid world that God has given us, and the furniture of it as
the writer of Genesis saw it in his vision, has in it the material of
happiness in labour and in the true end of labour. "For the true end
of all creation is completion; and the true end of all completion is
contemplation."
CHAPTER XXXII
Last Days
DOROTHY TOLD ME one day in 1935 that Gilbert had written the
beginning of an autobiography some years before but had laid it
aside. She had, she said, a superstitious feeling about urging him to
get on with it--as though the survey of his life and the end of his
life would somehow be tied together. I urged her to get over this
feeling because of all the book would mean to the world. After this
talk she got out the manuscript and laid it on Gilbert's desk. He
read what he had written and immediately set about dictating the rest
of the book.
Early in 1936 he told a group of friends that the book was finished.
One of them said "Nunc dimittis" and Edward Macdonald, who was
present, commented: "The words were chilling, though he seemed to be
in fairly good health. But certainly he was tired. . . ."
The book showed no sign of fatigue. High-spirited and intensely
amusing, it seemed to promise many more--for into almost old age he
had carried the imagination and energy in which as a very young man
we saw his resemblance to the youthful Dickens.
Reviewing his life with the thread of thanksgiving that had been his
clue throughout, he looked back on it as "indefensibly happy" and it
was in truth a rich and full human existence. Yet Father Vincent, who
knew him intimately, speaks of him in these last years as heartbroken
by public events, as suffering with the pains of creation. "He was
crucified to his thought. Like St. Thomas he was never away from his
thought. A fellow friar had to care for Thomas, to feed him 'sicut
nutrix' because of his absorption in his thought." Thus Father
Vincent saw Frances cherishing Gilbert both mind and body.
A friend, protesting vehemently against the phrase "crucified to his
thought" says, "It was his life-long beatitude to observe and ponder
and conclude."
Of his own so-called paradoxes Gilbert was wont to maintain that it
was God not he, who made them, and here we have surely one of the
paradoxes of human life. Intense vitality, joy in living, vigor of
creative thought bring to their owners immense happiness _and_ acute
suffering.
Is it not a part of the most fundamental of all antinomies--the
greatness and the littleness of man? Created for eternity and
prisoned in time, we have no perfect joy in this world, and the
reaching upward and outward of the mind is at once the keenest joy
and the fiercest pain--rather as we talk of growing pains. Only
Gilbert loved to grow so much that he would not think of the pain.
"You must never pity me," he said to Lady Fisher, and all through his
life he was saying and meaning "You must never pity me."
But while he was writing the _Autobiography_ and giving thanks for
his life, its last months were shadowed by trials especially heavy
for a man of his imagination and temperament. For now more than ever
his thought was not allowed to concentrate on those realities where
the joy of contemplation overpowers the pain of growth.
He loved Italy--even more than France he says in one letter--yet he
could not but condemn the invasion of Abyssinia. The shadow of the
Spanish war loomed on the horizon and behind it a darker shadow. In
his political thinking Chesterton was haunted by the present war.
Then too, while public controversy did not trouble him at all, he
hated any breach of the peace within the ranks of his own small army.
The fights among the staff of the paper about Distributism had been
as nothing compared with those about Abyssiania. There are leading
articles taking one line and letters in the Cockpit in violent
opposition. Maurice Reckitt writes in _As it Happened:_
In the last autumn of his life I wrote to him privately in distress
at the line which the _Weekly_ was taking on Abyssinia, and saying
that I felt that I ought to leave the board, as I was so much out of
sympathy with this. I received this reply, from which I have deleted
only some personal references:
"Top Meadow, Beaconsfield 19th September 1935.
"MY DEAR MR. MAURICE RECKITT,
"I do hope you will forgive me for the delay in answering your most
important letter, involving as it does tragic dooms of separation
which I hope need not be fulfilled. . . . I should like to ask you to
defer your decision at least until you have seen the next week's
number of the paper, in which I expand further the argument I have
used in the current number and bring it, I think, rather nearer to
your natural and justifiable point of view. Between ourselves, and
without prejudice to anybody, I do think myself that there ought to
have been a more definite condemnation of the attack on Abyssinia.
The whole thing happened while I was having a holiday. . . .
"Very shortly, the mortal danger, to me, is the rehabilitation of
Capitalism, in spite of the slump, which will certainly take the form
of a hypocritical patriotism and glorification of England, at the
expense of Italy or anybody else. For the moment I only want you to
understand that this is the mountainous peril that towers in my own
mind.
"Yours always,
"G. K. CHESTERTON."
Three months later in _G.K.'s Weekly_ he wrote about the whole matter
in an article in which he treated the question as largely one of
proportion. Not enough was being said in England of her own or the
League's position about Japan's attack on China: too much (in
proportion) about Italy in Abyssinia. "If the League of Nations
really were an impartial judicial authority; and if (what is about as
probable) I were one of the judges; and if the Abyssinian Case were
brought before me, I should decide instantly against Italy. I have
again and again in this place stated in the strongest words the
particular case against Italy." He was against Italy in Abyssinia as
he had been against England in South Africa. But "I should not be
bound to rejoice at the Prussians riding into Paris because it might
prevent the British riding into Pretoria."
"Tragic dooms of separation" on public issues were not the only
trouble with _G.K.'s Weekly:_ the staff were also engaged in violent
personal quarrels about which Gilbert was asked to take sides--was
even bitterly reproached by one for supposedly favouring another. It
would be hard today to say what it was all about, but two of the
contestants have told me since that had they had the least notion how
ill he was getting they would have died rather than so distress him.
For it was a real and a very deep distress.
It may be remembered that Miss Dunham noted how Gilbert used to make
a mysterious sign in the air as he lit his cigar. That sign, says
Dorothy, was the sign of the cross. Long ago he had written of human
life as something not grey and drab but shot through with strong and
even violent colours that took the pattern of the Cross. He saw the
Cross signed by God on the trees as their branches spread to right
and left: he saw it signed by man as he shaped a paling or a door
post. The habit grew upon him of making it constantly: in the air
with his match, as he lit his cigar, over a cup of coffee. As he
entered a room he would make on the door the sign of our Redemption.
No, we must never pity him even when his life was pressed upon by
that sign which stands for joy through pain.
Those nearest to him grew anxious quite early in 1936. He was
overtired and working with the weary insistence that over-fatigue can
bring. The remedy so often successful of a trip to the continent was
tried. They went to Lourdes and Lisieux and he seemed better and sang
a good deal in his tuneless voice as Dorothy drove them through the
lanes of France. From Lisieux he wrote a pencilled letter, long and
almost illegible "under the shadow of the shrine"--trying to
reconcile the disputants with himself and with one another.
The summer was cold and bleak and the tour was all too short. Home
again his mind seemed not to grip as well as usual and he began to
fall asleep during his long hours of work. The doctor was called and
thought very seriously of the state of his heart--that heart which
many years ago another doctor had called too small for his enormous
frame. The thought of a Chesterton whose heart was too small presents
a paradox in his own best manner.
To Edward Macdonald who had missed a message that he was too ill to
be visited, Gilbert talked in his old fashion and promised a poem he
had just thought of for the paper--on St. Martin of Tours. "The point
is that he was a true Distributist. He gave _half_ his cloak to the
beggar."
Soon after this he fell into a sort of reverie from which awaking he
said:
"The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and
every one must choose his side."
Frances and he had both thought his recovery in 1916 was a miracle.
"I did not dare," said Frances, "to pray for another miracle."
Monsignor Smith anointed him and then Father Vincent arrived in
response to a message from Frances which he thought meant she wanted
him to see Gilbert for the last time. Taken to the sick room he sang
over the dying man the Salve Regina. This hymn to Our Lady is sung in
the Dominican Order over every dying friar and it was surely fitting
for the biographer of St. Thomas and the ardent suppliant of Our Lady:
"Salve Regina, mater misericordiae, vita dulcedo et spes nostra
salve. . . . Et Jesum benedictum fructum ventris tui nobis post hoc
exsilium ostende. . . ."
Gilbert's pen lay on the table beside his bed and Father Vincent
picked it up and kissed it.
It was June 14, 1936, the Sunday within the Octave of Corpus Christi,
the same Feast as his reception into the Church fourteen years
earlier. The Introit for that day's Mass was printed on his Memorial
card, so that, as Father Ignatius Rice noted with a smile, even his
Memorial card had a joke about his size:
The Lord became my protector and he brought me forth into a large
place. He saved me because he was well pleased with me. I will love
thee O Lord my strength. The Lord is my firmament and my refuge and
my deliverer.
To these words from the Mass, Frances added Walter de la Mare's
tribute:
Knight of the Holy Ghost, he goes his way
Wisdom his motley, Truth his loving jest;
The mills of Satan keep his lance in play,
Pity and innocence his heart at rest.
The day of the funeral was one of blazing sunshine. "One of your
days," Gilbert would have said to Frances. Grey days were his, when
nature's colours he said were brightest against her more sombre
background, sunny days were hers for she loved a blue blazing sky.
The little church near the railway was filled to overflowing by his
friends from London, from all over England, from France even and from
America. All Beaconsfield wanted to honour him, so the funeral
procession instead of taking the direct route passed through the old
town where he had so often sat in the barber's shop and chatted with
his fellow citizens. At Top Meadow we gathered to talk. Frances a few
of us saw for a little while in her own room. With that utter
self-forgetfulness that was hers she said to her sister-in-law, "It
was so much worse for you. You had Cecil for such a short time."
Later Mgr. Knox preached in Westminster Cathedral to a crowd far
vaster. Both Frances and Cardinal Hinsley received telegrams from
Cardinal Pacelli (now Pope Pius XII). To Cardinal Hinsley he cabled
"Holy Father deeply grieved death Mr. Gilbert Keith Chesterton
devoted son Holy Church gifted Defender of the Catholic Faith. His
Holiness offers paternal sympathy people of England assures prayers
dear departed, bestows Apostolic Benediction." This telegram was read
to the vast crowd in the Cathedral and found an echo in the hearts of
his fellow countrymen.
Hugh Kingsmill wrote to Cyril Clemens: "My friend Hesketh Pearson was
staying with me when I read of Chesterton's death. I told him of it
through the bathroom door, and he sent up a hollow groan which must
have echoed that morning all over England." It was with reason that
the Pope offered his sympathy not to Catholics alone, but to all the
people of England. To the policeman who said at the funeral, "We'd
all have been here if we could have got off duty. He was a grand
man." To the man at the _Times_ office who broke in on the
announcement of his death, "Good God. That isn't _our_ Chesterton, is
it?" To the barber who had to leave his customer unshaved that he
might talk to Edward Macdonald. To all of us, his friends, on whom
the loss lay almost unbearably heavy. To those for whom his presence
would have pierced and lightened even the dark shadow of the war. To
all the people of England.
Once more a Pope had bestowed upon an Englishman the title Defender
of the Faith. The first man to receive it had been Henry VIII and the
words are still engraved on the coins of England. The secular press
would not print the telegram in full because it bestowed upon a
subject a royal title.
After Gilbert's death Frances tried to take up life again. She
visited her cousins in Germany, a university professor and his
English wife, who were undergoing the persecution of the Swastika.
She was deeply moved by their suffering and the peril they stood in.
Home again she surrounded herself more than ever with children,
taking a Catechism class and encouraging her small scholars to come
to Top Meadow where her garden also helped her towards a difficult
peace and serenity, rendered harder by the struggle with ill health.
Soon we began to realise that the physical weakness, which all her
courage could not overcome, was more than merely her old malady.
"What did Frances die of?" Bernard Shaw wrote to me. "Was it of
widowhood?"
In fact it was a most painful cancer heroically endured. She was
cared for by Dorothy and presently by the nuns of the Bon Secours.
Her friends visited her as they were allowed. Father Vincent McNabb,
after a talk of almost an hour, noted how never once did she speak of
herself or of her suffering.
Her concerns were for Dorothy, for the Church, and for Gilbert's
memory; Eric Gill's monument, the biography, the permanence of his
own writing. She survived him little more than two years. Near the
end, from the face of a dying woman shrunken with pain, we still
could see those "great heavenly eyes that seem to make the truth at
the heart of things almost too terribly simple and naked for the sons
of flesh."*
[* Letter from Gilbert, see [Chapter VIII].]
APPENDIX A
AN EARLIER CHESTERTON
BOTH THE _Autobiography_ and _Prison Life_ of George Laval Chesterton
are worth reading. There is conscious humour: we feel it might be our
own Chesterton when we hear the Captain describing himself as
"laughing immoderately" because he had made a fool of himself and
others were laughing at him. There is unconscious humour, especially
in the astonishing style, full of such phrases as "I was the most
obnoxious to peril," or "something not far removed from impunity
stalked abroad."
Captain Chesterton started life as a soldier. During the Peninsular
War his regiment was stationed at Cartagena. "It was a subject of
deep mortification to most of us to be thus supinely occupied in this
lone garrison, thereby being debarred from the Peninsular medal, and
hence a widespread disaffection on that most tender subject which no
reasoning has been equal to dispel." However, later he saw a good
deal of active service, being in the War of 1812, in the course of
which the battle of Bladensburg was fought and Washington fell to the
British arms. "The astonished slaves," he says, describing the
advance on Washington, "rested from their work in the fields
contiguous; and the awe-struck peasants and yeomen of this portion of
America beheld with perturbation the tremendous preparations to
devastate their blooming country."
To the smaller professional armies of that day peace was a
misfortune, and in his quaint style Captain Chesterton describes the
demonstrations of joy on the part of himself and his fellow officers
at the escape of Napoleon from Elba, foreseeing, as he frankly
observes, "a scope for further adventure and hope of personal
advancement." This hope was short-lived and we next see him fighting
in the British Legion of a rebel South American army against Spain.
The general mismanagement of this expedition, and the fact that the
Republicans killed all their prisoners "was a death blow to all my
past enthusiasm in the Republican cause." Many British officers
"participating with me in the detestation for cold-blooded butchery,
conspired from that moment to elude this detested service. . . . Mark
ye who delight in transcendant Liberalism . . . the cruel exigencies
of such a warfare."
In his acceptance of "transcendant Liberalism," yet his determination
to see truly what passed before his eyes and when needful to change
his standpoint, this earlier Chesterton was much like the later. He
had not the genius of Gilbert, he could not see so far, but he shared
his refusal to be blinded by custom, theory or even patriotism. In
his accounts of army life he had commented fearlessly on the cruelty
of the punishments and described his fellow officers as made ill by
seeing a private receive five hundred lashes. He had noted corruption
in the "Train Service" which "was consequently divested of its
genuine claim to honour." Fêted by the planters of Jamaica, he had
yet spoken with horror of their slave ownership.
Now he was appointed governor of a prison in England and here began
the great work of his life in a frontal attack on the corruptions he
discovered. The yardsmen did a secret traffic in all the goods
forbidden in the prison, there were caches of tobacco, spirits and
such things under the pavements, the weaker prisoners were robbed by
the stronger. The women's and men's quarters were so arranged that by
connivance of the jailors frequent meetings took place. On one of
these occasions Captain Chesterton himself appeared:
My hands were seized with tender empressement, and I was addressed
as "my love," "My darling," "my dear creature:" and all the
conventional endearments of the pavé were showered upon me. I had to
struggle for enlargement, and beat a hasty retreat, quite confounded
by my initiation into "prison discipline." And the consternation
occasioned by this discovery became perfectly electric.*
[* _Revelations of Prison Life_, pp. 84-85.]
Attempts to bribe him were followed by attempts to kill him, but he
stood firm. Mrs. Fry invoked his aid to improve the home conditions
to which the prisoners had to return. Chesterton turned to Dickens
and to Dickens's friend, Miss Coutts, in defiance of a narrow-minded
magistrate
who perversely insisted (as was by cynical interpretation literally
too true) that Miss Coutts had no right to confer with prisoners
within those walls, nor was it "to be tolerated that Mr. Charles
Dickens should walk into the prison whenever he pleased."*
[* Ibid., p. 186.]
From Cold Bath Fields the reforms begun by Captain Chesterton and
warmly seconded by Dickens spread to other prisons, "Although (he
declares) I consented to forego pecuniary advantage, I cling the more
tenaciously to the credit of my past exertions; when, beset with
fraud, ferocity, and moral pollution, I achieved a triumph fraught
with civilizing influences."*
[* Ibid., p. v.]
APPENDIX B
Prize Poem Written at St. Paul's
This is the only version I have been able to find. Across the top is
written in another hand: "This is not exactly the same as given in
the prize poem." The difference is probably slight.
ST. FRANCIS XAVIER
The Apostle of the Indies
He left his dust, by all the myriad tread
Of yon dense millions trampled to the strand,
Or 'neath some cross forgotten lays his head
Where dark seas whiten on a lonely land:
He left his work, what all his life had planned,
A waning flame to flicker and to fall,
Mid the huge myths his toil could scarce withstand,
And the light died in temple and in hall,
And the old twilight sank and settled over all.
He left his name, a murmur in the East,
That dies to silence amid older creeds,
With which he strove in vain: the fiery priest
Of faiths less fitted to their ruder needs:
As some lone pilgrim, with his staff and beads,
Mid forest-brutes whom ignorance makes tame,
He dwelt, and sowed an Eastern Church's seeds
He reigned a teacher and a priest of fame:
He died and dying left a murmur and a name.
He died: and she, the Church that bade him go,
Yon dim Enchantress with her mystic claim,
Has ringed his forehead with her aureole-glow,
And monkish myths, and all the whispered fame
Of miracle, has clung about his name:
So Rome has said: but we, what answer we
Who in grim Indian gods and rites of shame
O'er all the East the teacher's failure see,
His eastern church a dream, his toil a vanity.
This then we say: as Time's dark face at last
Moveth its lips of thunder to decree
The doom that grew through all the murmuring past
To be the canon of the times to be:
No child of truth or priest of progress he
Yet not the less a hero of his wars
Striving to quench the light he could not see,
And God, who knoweth all that makes and mars,
Judges his soul unseen which throbs among the stars.
God only knows, man failing in his choice,
How far apparent failure may succeed,
God only knows what echo of His voice
Lives in the cant of many a fallen creed,
God only gives the labourer his meed
For all the lingering influence widely spread
Broad branching into many a word and deed
When dim oblivion veils the fountain-head;
So lives and lingers on the spirit of the dead.
This then we say: let all things further rest
And this brave life, with many thousands more
Be gathered up in the eternal's breast
In that dim past his Love is bending o'er
Healing all shattered hopes and failure sore:
Since he had bravely looked on death and pain
For what he chose to worship and adore
Cast boldly down his life for loss or gain
In the eternal lottery: not to be in vain.
APPENDIX C
The Chestertons
The composition of _The Chestertons_ is not without interest for the
student of legendary literature. By a curious paradox the book had to
be strikingly untrue to be accepted as true, since the jokes about
sisters-in-law are legion, so that mere commonplace shafts of what is
called "feminine spite" would have gained little credence. Yet on the
other hand, Mrs. Cecil Chesterton was able (to quote _The Mikado_) to
get from her husband a good deal of "corroborative detail designed to
give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."
Of these details some are true, some false, all arranged to support
the main untruth of Frances and Gilbert's relation to one another.
The thesis of the book is that Gilbert was an unhappy and frustrated
man (a) because Frances shrank from consummating their marriage, and
(b) because she dragged him away from his London life and friends to
bury him in a middle class suburb.
I confess that I am Victorian enough heartily to dislike writing this
appendix. Yet it is necessary, for many who read _The Chestertons_
have supposed that a story told by so near a connection must be true.
The ground was laid for the introduction of the Legend by the tale of
the Red Haired Phantom, if I may describe it in the terms of a ghost
story. That ghost was easy to lay (see Introduction). Next comes the
odd account of Gilbert and Frances' honeymoon and of the years that
followed. It is of course possible that the first night of their
marriage was not happy--especially in the Victorian days of reticence
which left wife and even possibly husband unprepared for life
together: (though this did not normally prevent a happy marriage and
a pack of children afterwards). But I find it impossible to imagine
Cecil Chesterton, like the bridesmaid on the honeymoon, receiving and
passing on such a story as that of Gilbert "quivering with
self-reproach" so that after the first night he "dared not even
contemplate a repetition. . . . Gilbert, young and vital, was
condemned to a pseudo-monastic life, in which he lived with a woman
but never enjoyed one." (p. 282)
There is a psychological reason for thinking this story especially
improbable and a physical reason for dismissing it as actually
impossible.
A white horse had from his childhood been for Gilbert the supreme
sign of romance, and he had chosen to spend the first night of his
honeymoon at the White Horse Inn. From his honeymoon he wrote home
that he had "a wife, a piece of string, a pencil and a knife. What
more can any man want?" Ten years later he wrote _The Ballad of the
White Horse_ and dedicated it to Frances, saying,
"O go you onward, where you are
Shall honour and laughter be.
Past purpled forest and pearled foam,
God's winged pavilion free to roam,
Your face, that is a wandering home,
A flying home for me."
And over thirty years later he wrote again of beginning his honeymoon
under the shadow of the White Horse, and compared it to a trip to
fairyland.
Can any human being read the record of this recurrent motif and
reconcile it with Mrs. Cecil's picture?
Let me refer again to _The Ballad of The White Horse_. Is it
conceivable that any man should write after ten years of frustration
and unhappiness:
Up through an empty house of stars
Being what heart you are,
Up the inhuman steeps of space
As on a staircase go in grace
Carrying the firelight on your face
Beyond the loneliest star.
This is not the way a man writes to a neurotic cold-hearted woman who
has made a hermit of him!
Mrs. Cecil was of course never in the intimacy of the family. She
only married Cecil in 1917--by which date Gilbert and Frances had
been married sixteen years--and before that she was merely an
acquaintance. But Frances's intimates could have told her how absurd
her story was, for by a rare good fortune the operation Frances
underwent to enable her to bear children is itself evidence one could
hardly have hoped for in a matter which civilized people are not much
given to discussing. Frances talked of the operation to Monsignor
O'Connor, to Dorothy Collins and to Annie Firmin, and I have quoted
the doctor's letter about it (see above, [Chapter XV]). It was an
abiding tragedy for both husband and wife that it was unsuccessful.
Frances would have shrunk from no suffering in her passionate wish
for a child.
There is another curiosity in the Legend: Gilbert, despite this
story, was apparently perfectly happy in London during the _first
eight years of marriage:_ it was only after the removal to
Beaconsfield and in almost middle life that he began to be
"frustrated."
Poor Frances: what a picture of her had been proposed for posterity:
so powerful she could waft Gilbert away from London and from his
friends, could force him to make her his banker and reduce him to a
"bounty" strictly limited to half-a-crown, yet so powerless that "she
had to sign" the cheques for _G.K.'s Weekly_, much as she hated it.
Her poetry (described as "quite charming") is spoken of as appearing
in "little Parish Magazines"--the only papers she cared to read owing
to her implacable hatred for Fleet Street. It is hard to picture
Frances with an implacable hatred for anything, and it will be
remembered that she actually begged Father O'Connor to leave Gilbert
to be "a jolly journalist." The periodicals in which her poems
appeared were _The Observer_, _The Sunday Times_, _The Daily Chronicle,_
the _Westminster Gazette_ and _The New Witness_. Personally I have
never much admired Frances's verse, but a professional journalist
might have been quite pleased at "making" all these papers. Not one
poem ever appeared in a Parish Magazine so far as either Dorothy or I
have been able to ascertain. The point is not a very important one
but the sneer is symptomatic.
A curious magic pervades _The Chestertons:_ succulent sausages appear
in the kitchen at Overstrand Mansions, and flowing torrents of beer,
so that Gilbert can steal away from an unsympathetic wife to consume
them with his Fleet Street friends. A studio materialises in a meadow
at Beaconsfield. Can we imagine Gilbert cooking or even ordering
sausages, getting beer to the flat, designing or discovering the
studio? Anyone thinking about what really happened would realise that
Frances ordered the beer and sausages, Frances built the studio. But
that is not the sort of thought we are to think about Frances.
About her we are told: that she always wore the wrong colors: that
she gave Gilbert insufficient and indigestible food: that she did not
know what work meant: that Mrs. Belloc thought Gilbert ought to beat
her: that she kept the journalists away when Gilbert was dying (in
point of fact both telephone and door bell were so near the sick room
that the use of both had to be avoided): that she did not give her
guests enough to eat at his funeral: that she actually sought the
quiet of her own room instead of staying downstairs to receive
condolences when her husband's coffin had just been lowered into the
grave.
With all this spate of detail, we are not told that Frances left
£1000 to Mrs. Cecil plus £500 for her Cecil Houses.
Even if I could have ignored the attack on Frances, I should be
obliged as his biographer to deal with the attack on Gilbert--more
subtly but no less certainly made. The story of the marriage affects
Gilbert as much as Frances, and the book culminates in the final
assertion that his drinking killed him. Here are the comments (sent
to me by Dorothy) of the doctor who attended Gilbert and Frances from
1919 until they died:
"Today Dr. Bakewell came in and answered the questions about the book
which we asked him.
"(1) He says that the idea that G.K. was better when drinking in Fleet
Street because the stimulus of conversation would eat up effects of
the alcohol is absolute nonsense. It would have just as bad an effect
under any conditions. Dr. Bakewell said that G.K. was his patient for
nearly twenty years and during that time he never treated him for
alcoholism or saw any trace of it, though in an absentminded way he
was always liable to drink too much of anything if it were
there--even water.
"Without the 'understanding, loving, tactful care' of Frances he would
have died twenty years before. Certainly if he had racketted around
Fleet Street any longer.
"Dr. Bakewell said Gilbert was 'perfectly happy in Beaconsfield and
not in any way frustrated. There was no frustration of any kind and
no longing for London life or friends.' He was very intimate with
Gilbert and would have known if there had been.
"(2) The doctor says that Gilbert died of a failing heart owing to
fatty degeneration, leading to dropsy.
"(3) Frances had arthritis of the spine. (Not curvature as stated by
Mrs. Cecil.)
"The doctor said that he put him on the water wagon several times and
when this was done Gilbert observed the rule most meticulously. Dr.
Bakewell said that he did not do it very often because he did not
consider that drink was in any way affecting Gilbert's health during
the greater part of the time he knew him."
In a later conversation he added that when he did forbid alcohol at
certain periods it was simply to make liquid less attractive, as too
much of even water was bad for Gilbert.
The statement made by Mrs. Cecil that drinking in London was not so
serious because the talk and excitement among friends would carry off
the effects, is thought by doctors almost comic. Dr. Bakewell denies
it absolutely: Dr. Pocock who, it will be remembered, attended
Gilbert during his illness of 1914-15 says, "Absolute nonsense: would
probably have been worse in London." He adds also, "I cannot
understand why such an attack was made upon G.K. From my personal
observation he owed a very great deal to Mrs. G.K. who greatly helped
his restoration to health."
One can get one's pen'orth of fun out of the chapter on the Exile of
Beaconsfield when one remembers the true story of those years: Rome,
Jerusalem, U.S.A., Poland, France, Spain, Malta, lectures all over
England, lively contests for the Lord Rectorship of three
universities, London again and again--for editing, mock trials,
debates and Distributist Beanos--and frequently in furnished flats
which Frances would take for the winter months. One can only suppose
that Mrs. Cecil was so little intimate with them that she did not
realise all this.
And then Beaconsfield itself--parties in the Studio; people down from
London, visitors from Poland, France, America, Italy, Holland and
other countries; the Eric Gills, the Bernard Shaws, the Garvins, the
Emile Cammaerts and others living in the neighborhood; the guest room
always occupied by some intimate. Meanwhile the books poured out of
the little study. Mrs. Cecil thinks Gilbert hardly ever again wrote a
masterpiece after leaving Battersea, yet in support of this idea she
lists as masterpieces _The Ball and the Cross_ (written at
Beaconsfield), _Lepanto_ (written at Beaconsfield), _Magic_ (written
at Beaconsfield), _Stevenson_ (written at Beaconsfield) and _The
Ballad of the White Horse_(mainly written at Beaconsfield). Of all
the books she mentions in this connection only three were written in
London! And she admits that the world at large did not share her view
of the sterilizing effect of Beaconsfield, for she writes, "Meanwhile
his fame grew wider, his sales greater. In exile he ruled a literary
world."*
[* P. 83.]
Gilbert left to Mrs. Cecil Chesterton sums equal to those later left
to her by Frances--£1000 for herself and £500 for Cecil Houses.
The ingratitude that omitted all mention of these benefactions struck
the imagination of several of the Chesterton family as the worst
feature in the book. But to Gilbert and Frances the giving of money
even in their own lifetime was a slight matter. They had given
something far greater.
Why is the memory of Cecil Chesterton alive today? Because of his
brother's labors. Why is it possible for Mrs. Cecil to declare that
he was the greater editor, to imply that he was the greater man?
Because Gilbert kept saying so. Never has such devotion been shown by
one brother to the memory of another: never has the greater man
exalted the lesser to such a pedestal.
We are told in _The Chestertons_ that Frances sacrificed both Gilbert
and herself on the altar of her family. Truly there was much
self-sacrifice in the lives of both to family, friends and causes.
They did not feel it as self-sacrifice to enrich the lives of others
even at cost to themselves.
But the heaviest cost they paid lay in the years of a toil that was
literally killing Gilbert while Frances watched him growing old too
soon and straining his heart with work crushingly heavy: and if there
was a single altar for that supreme sacrifice it was no other than
the altar of Cecil's memory.
Acknowledgments
I am exceedingly grateful to the following publishers for permission
to quote from these books:
DODD, MEAD & CO.:
_The Man Who Was Thursday; Orthodoxy; The Napoleon of Notting Hill;
Heretics; George Bernard Shaw; The Ball and the Cross; The Poet and
the Lunatic; Alarms and Discursions; The Ballad of the White Horse;
What's Wrong with the World; Manalive; Sidelights on New London and
Newer York; The Uses of Diversity; The History of England; Irish
Impressions; Collected Poems; The Queen of Seven Swords; The
Everlasting Man; Cobbett; Outline of Sanity; Tales of the Long Bow;
What I Saw in America; The Thing; The Defendant; The Barbarism of
Berlin: or The Appetite of Tyranny; Eugenics and Other Evils;
Collected Poems; G. K. Chesterton, a Criticism_ (by Cecil Chesterton).
DOUBLEDAY DORAN:
_St. Francis of Assisi; The Years Between_.
E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC.:
_Criticisms and Appreciations of the Works of Charles Dickens_.
FARRAR & RINEHART:
_Chaucer_.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY:
_Robert Browning; The Catholic Church and Conversion_.
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS:
_The Victorian Age in Literature_.
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS:
_Rufus Isaacs, First Marquess of Reading_.
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME:
_The Arena_.
"Gehazi," by Rudyard Kipling, from _The Years Between_, copyright
1914, 1919 by Rudyard Kipling, is reprinted by permission of Mrs.
Bambridge and Doubleday Doran and Co., Inc., of New York, and The
Macmillan Company, of Canada, publishers.
Bibliography
In this list I have given dates of earliest publication. In some
cases publication in England preceded that in the United States.
1900. _Greybeards at Play_. R. B. Johnson. Reprinted 1930.
_The Wild Knight and Other Poems_. Included in _Collected
Poems_.
1901. _The Defendant_.
1902. _G. F. Watts_.
_Twelve Types_.
1903. _Robert Browning_.
1904. _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_.
1905. _The Club of Queer Trades_.
_Heretics_.
1906. _Charles Dickens_.
1907. _The Man Who Was Thursday_.
1908. _Orthodoxy_.
_All Things Considered_.
1909. _George Bernard Shaw_.
_The Ball and the Cross_.
_Tremendous Trifles_.
_Defence of Nonsense_.
1910. _What's Wrong with the World?_
_William Blake_.
_Alarms and Discursions_.
_Five Types_.
1911. _The Innocence of Father Brown_.
_Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens_.
_The Ballad of the White Horse_.
1912. _Manalive_.
_A Miscellany of Men_.
_Simplicity of Tolstoy_.
_The Victorian Age in Literature_.
1913. _Magic_. A Play.
1914. _The Wisdom of Father Brown_.
_The Flying Inn_.
_The Barbarism of Berlin_.
1915. _Poems_.
_Wine, Water, and Song_. Reprint of poems from _The Flying
Inn_.
_The Crimes of England_.
_Letters to an Old Garibaldian_.
1916. _A Shilling for My Thoughts_.
1917. _A Short History of England_.
_Utopia of Usurers_.
1919. _Irish Impressions_.
1920. _The Uses of Diversity_.
_The New Jerusalem_.
_The Superstition of Divorce_.
1922. _Eugenics and Other Evils_.
_The Man who Knew Too Much_.
_What I Saw in America_.
_The Ballad of St. Barbara_. In _Collected Poems_.
1923. _Fancies versus Fads_.
_St. Francis of Assisi_.
1924. _The End of The Roman Road_. Preface by St. John Adcock.
1925. _The Everlasting Man_.
_Tales of the Long Bow_.
_William Cobbett_.
_The Superstitions of the Sceptic_.
1926. _The Incredulity of Father Brown_.
_The Outline of Sanity_.
_A Gleaming Cohort_.
_The Queen of Seven Swords_. Poems. Not included in _Collected
Poems_.
_The Catholic Church and Conversion_.
_Culture and the Coming Peril_. University of London
Publication.
_Social Reform and Birth Control_. Pamphlet--Simpkin Kent &
Co., League of National Life.
1927. _Collected Poems_.
_The Return of Don Quixote_.
_Robert Louis Stevenson_.
_The Secret of Father Brown_.
_The Judgment of Dr. Johnson_. A Play.
_Gloria in Profundis_. Short Poem.
1928. _Generally Speaking_.
_Essays of To-day and Yesterday Series_.
_Short Stories of To-day and Yesterday Series_. Reprinted from
other volumes.
_The Sword of Wood_. Short Story. Edition de Luxe, Signed.
Reprinted in Everyman Edition.
1929. _The Poet and the Lunatics_.
_Omnibus Volume--Father Brown Stories_.
_Ubi Ecclesia_. Short Poem.
_The Thing_. Catholic Essays.
_G.K.C. as M.C_. Collection of Introductions.
_The Turkey and the Turk_. Christmas Play. Ill. by Thomas
Derrick.
1930. _The Grave of Arthur_. Short Poem. Ariel Poem Series.
_Come to Think of It_. Essays. Edited by E. V. Lucas.
_The Resurrection of Rome_.
1931. _All is Grist_. Essays edited by E. V. Lucas.
1932. _Chaucer_. A Study.
_Sidelights on New London and Newer York_. Essays.
_Christendom in Dublin_. Essays on Eucharistic Congress,
Dublin.
1933. _All I Survey_. Essays. Edited by E. V. Lucas.
_St. Thomas Aquinas_.
_Collected Poems_. Republished
_Collected Prefaces to Charles Dickens's Works_. Reprinted.
_Methuen's Library of Humour_. 1 vol.
1934. _Avowals and Denials_. Essays.
1935. _The Scandal of Father Brown_.
_George Bernard Shaw_. New edition with additional chapter.
The Later Phases.
_The Well and the Shadows_.
1936. _As I Was Saying_. Essays. Edited by E. V. Lucas.
POSTHUMOUS PUBLICATIONS
1936. _Autobiography_.
1937. _The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond_.
1938. _The Colored Lands_.
1940. _The End of the Armistice_.
PREFACES TO OTHER AUTHORS' BOOKS
1902. Carlyle, _Past and Present_.
_Nonsense Rhymes_, by W. C. Monkhouse.
_R.L.S._, in Bookman Booklets.
_Tolstoy_, in Bookman Booklets.
1903. _Boswell. Life of Johnson Extracts_.
1904. 0. W. Holmes, _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_. Red Letter
Library.
Carlyle, _Sartor Resartus_. National Library.
Bunyan, _Pilgrim's Progress_. National Library.
1905. Maxim Gorky, _Creatures That Once Were Men_.
1906. _Dickens_ in Everyman Library. Prefaces to all volumes.
_Matthew Arnold_. Everyman Library.
_Elsie Lang_. Literary London.
_Characteristics of R.L.S_. Little Books for Bookmen.
_Tennyson as an Intellectual Force_. Little Books for Bookmen.
1907. _The Book of Job_.
George Haw, _From Workhouse to Westminster: Will Crooks_.
1908. Ruskin, _Poems_. Muses Library.
W. W. Crotch, _The Cottage Homes of England_.
1909. Darrell Figgis. _A Vision of Life_.
Margaret Arndt, _Meadows of Play_.
1910. _Thackeray, Selection_. Masters of Literature Series.
_Eyes of Youth, Anthology_.
1911. _Johnson, Extracts_. Ed. Alice Meynell.
Thackeray, _The Book of Snobs_. Red Letter Library.
1912. _Famous Paintings, Reproduced in Colour_.
A. V. Baverstock, _English Agricultural Labourer_.
_Aesop's Fables_. Translated by Vernon Jones.
1913. Dickens, _The Christmas Carol_. Waverley Dickens.
1915. _Bohemia's Claim for Freedom_. London, Czech Committee.
1916. C. C. Mendell and E. Shanks, _Hilaire Belloc_.
Cobbett, _Cottage Economy_.
Harewranath Maitra, _Hinduism_.
1917. S. Nordentoft, _Practical Pacifism and Its Adversaries_.
1918. Sybil Bristowe, _Provocations_.
William Dyson, _Australia at War_.
Leonard Merrick, _House of Lynch_.
1919. Cecil Chesterton, _History of the U. S. A_.
Bernard Capes, _The Skeleton Key_.
1920. M. E. Jones, _Life in Old Cambridge_.
1921. Vivienne Dayrell, _Little Wings_.
H. M. Bateman, _A Book of Drawings_.
1922. Jane Austen, _Love and Friendship_.
1923. Irene Hernaman, _Child Mediums_.
0. R. Vassall Phillips, _The Mustard Tree_.
1924. 0. F. Dudley, _Will Men Be Like Gods_.
Greville Macdonald, _George Macdonald and His Wife_.
_Catholic Who's Who_.
P. M. Wright, _Purple Hours_.
1925. Fulton Sheen, _God and Intelligence_.
Alexander Arnoux, _Abishag_. Trans. Joyce Davis.
1926. A. H. Godwin, _Gilbert and Sullivan_.
Johnson, _Rasselas_.
_Catholic Who's Who_.
L. G. Sieveking, _Bats in the Belfry_.
_The Man Who Was Thursday_, Dramatized Version.
W. S. Masterman, _The Wrong Letter_.
_Royal Society of Literature, Essays_, Vol. vi.
1927. E. Turner, _Grandmamma's Book of Rhymes_.
G. C. Heseltine, _The Change_. Essays on the Land.
H. Massis, _Defence of the West_.
_Forster's Life of Dickens_. Everyman Library.
1928. Mary Webb, _The Golden Arrow_.
1929. H. Ghéon, _The Secret of the Cure D'ars_, trans. F. Sheed.
W. R. Titterton, _Drinking Songs_.
1930. Miss C. Noran, _Book on Spanish History_.
_King Lear_. De Luxe Edition. Illustrated Yunge.
Introduction to _Vanity Fair_, Thackeray. Limited Edition
Club, New York.
1931. _Giotto's Frescoes at Assisi Reproduced_.
John Gibbons, _Through Unknown Portugal_.
F. Goetel, _The Messenger of the Snow_.
Francis Thompson, _The Hound of Heaven_.
A. A. Thomas, _The Burns We Love_.
J. P. de Fonseka, _Serendipitry_.
Daniel O'Grady, _Cosmology_.
1932. Gleeson, _Essays_.
_Essays of the Year_, Argonaut Press.
_Six Centuries of English Literature_, Vol. vi. Meredith to
Rupert Brooke.
Mrs. Homewood, _Reminiscences_.
_Penn Country Book_.
1933. _Life of Sydney Smith_. Hesketh Pearson.
_Tale of Two Cities_.
1934. _Peregrine Pickle_. First Edition Club, U. S. A.
Pamphlet on _Nazi Germany_ for Friends of Europe publication,
edited by Lord Tyrrell.
_G.K.'s Miscellany_.
1935. Fr. Dowsell, _The Betrayal: A Passion Play_.
Fr. Vincent McNabb, _Book of Essays_.
_Detective Stories_. Collection from Hutchinson.
1936. F. A. MacNutt, _A Papal Chamberlain_.
1935. Letterpress to _Stations of the Cross_, by F. Brangwyn.
I doubt whether the list of introductions is complete but Dorothy
Collins has done her best to make it so. Of the books and essays
about Chesterton there is no end. Those I have used in writing this
book are
_Father Brown on Chesterton_, Monsignor O'Connor.
_G. K. Chesterton, a Criticism_, Cecil Chesterton.
_The Place of Chesterton in English Literature_, Hilaire Belloc.
_The Laughing Prophet_, Emile Cammaerts.
_G. K. Chesterton_, Cyril Clemens.
For the chapters on Sociology I have consulted the invaluable series
on the English Labourer by the Hammonds, C. S. Orpen's _Open Fields_,
Trevelyan's _Social History of England_, Cobbett's _Rural Rides and
Cottage Economy_ and Haas' _English Labourer_.
For the Marconi Chapter I have used the Reports of the Parliamentary
Commission and of the trial of Cecil Chesterton, C. F. G. Masterman's
_Life_ and that of Lord Reading, and contemporary press accounts.
Throughout I have made use of the files of _The Eyewitness, The New
Witness_ and _G.K.'s Weekly_.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Gilbert Keith Chesterton" ***
Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.