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."*