Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 1114
If he wants to know what the Marconi Scandal has saved us from, I can tell him. It has saved us from Socialism. My God! what Socialism, and run by what sort of Socialists! My God! what an escape! If we had transferred the simplest national systems to the State (as we wanted to do in our youth) it is to these men that we should have transferred them.
There never was an example of more muddled thinking. Let us apply it to something definite, to that harmless, necessary article of diet, milk, to be precise, cow’s milk. To-day milk is made expensive by a multiplicity of men who have interests in keeping milk expensive. There are too many milkmen’s wages to be paid, too many milk-carts to be built, too many shop-rents paid, and too much apparatus bought, simply because we have not yet had the intelligence to let any municipality or county run its own milk-service and so avoid all manner of duplication. Chesterton’s answer to this is: “I used to think so, but what about Lord Murray, Mr. Lloyd George, and Mr. Godfrey Isaacs?” It would be as relevant to say, “What about Dr. Crippen, Jack Sheppard, and Ananias,” or, “But what about Mr. Bernard Shaw, the Grand Duke Nicolas, and my brother?” The week later Chesterton addresses the Labour Party in these words:
Comrades (I mean gentlemen), there is only one real result of anything you have done. You have justified the vulgar slander of the suburban Conservatives that men from below are men who merely want to rise. It is a lie. No one knows so well as you that it was a lie: you who drove out Grayson and deserted Lansbury. Before you went into Parliament to represent the working classes, the working classes were feared. Since you have represented the working classes, they are not even respected. Just when there was a hope of Democracy, you have revived the notion that the demagogue was only the sycophant. Just when there had begun to be an English people to represent, you have been paid to misrepresent them. Get out of our path. Take your money; go.
Regarding which passage there is only to be said that it is grossly unjust both to the Labour Party and to the working classes. It was followed up in subsequent numbers by violent attacks on woman suffrage and the economic independence of women; a proceeding quite commendably amusing in a paper with a patron saint surnamed Pankhurst. A promise to say no more about Votes for Women was followed by several more spirited references to it, from the same point of view. After which Chesterton cooled off and wrote about detective stories, telephones, and worked himself down into an all-round fizzle of disgust at things as they are, to illustrate which “I will not run into a paroxysm of citations again,” as Milton said in the course of his Epistle in two books on Reformation in England.
The most unpleasant feature of The Daily Herald articles is the assumption of superiority over the British working man, expressing itself in the patronizing tone. The British working man, as Chesterton sees him, is a very different person from what he is. If the Middle Ages had been the peculiar period Chesterton appears to believe it was, then his working man would be merely a trifling anachronism of five centuries or so. But he is not even that. Five centuries would be but a trifle compared with the difference between him and his real self. Chesterton’s attitude towards the working man must resemble that of a certain chivalrous knight towards the distressed damsel he thought he had rescued. He observed, “Well, little one, aren’t you going to show me any gratitude?” And the lady replied, “I wasn’t playing Andromeda, fathead, I was looking for blackberries. Run away and play.”
The attitude of the middle-class suburbanite towards the working man and his wife is not exactly graceful, but the former at any rate does not pretend to love the latter, and to find all decency of feeling and righteousness of behaviour in them. Chesterton both pretends to reverence the working classes, and exhibits a profound contempt for them. He is never happier than when he is telling the working classes that they are wrong. He delights in attacking the Labour Party in order to have the supreme satisfaction of demonstrating that working men are their own worst enemies.
At the beginning of August, 1914, the Great War broke out, and everything seemed changed. No man now living will be able to say definitely what effects the war will have upon literature, but one thing is certain: nothing will remain the same. We have already learned to view each other with different eyes. For better or for worse, old animosities and party cleavages have given way to unforeseen combinations. To assert that we have all grown better would be untrue. But it might reasonably be argued that the innate generousness of the British people has been vitiated by its childlike trust in its journalists, and the men who own them. When Mr. Bernard Shaw wrote a brilliant defence of the British case for intervention in the war, his mild denigration of some of the defects of the English nation, a few trivial inaccuracies, and his perverse bellicosity of style made him the object of the attentions of a horde of panic-stricken heresy-hunters. Those of us who had not the fortune to escape the Press by service abroad, especially those of us who derived our living from it, came to loathe its misrepresentation of the English people. There seemed no end to the nauseous vomits of undigested facts and dishonourable prejudices that came pouring out in daily streams. Then we came to realize, as never before, the value of such men as Chesterton. Christianity and the common decencies fare badly at the hands of the bishops of to-day, and the journalists threw them over as soon as the war began. But, unfortunately for us all, G. K.C. fell seriously ill in the early period of the war, and was in a critical state for many months. But not before he had published a magnificent recantation — for it is no less — of all those bitternesses which, in their sum, had very nearly caused him to hate the British. It is a poem, Blessed are the Peacemakers.
Of old with a divided heart
I saw my people’s pride expand,
Since a man’s soul is born apart
By mother earth and fatherland.
I knew, through many a tangled tale,
Glory and truth not one but two:
King, Constable and Amirail
Took me like trumpets: but I knew
A blacker thing than blood’s own dye
Weighed down great Hawkins on the sea;
And Nelson turned his blindest eye
On Naples and on liberty.
Therefore to you my thanks, O throne,
O thousandfold and frozen folk,
For whose cold frenzies all your own
The Battle of the Rivers broke;
Who have no faith a man could mourn,
Nor freedom any man desires;
But in a new clean light of scorn
Close up my quarrel with my sires;
Who bring my English heart to me,
Who mend me like a broken toy;
Till I can see you fight and flee,
And laugh as if I were a boy.
When we read this poem, with its proclamation of a faith restored, Chesterton’s temporary absence from the field of letters appears even more lamentable. For even before his breakdown he had given other signs of a resurrection. Between the overworked descriptions of The Flying Inn and the little book The Barbarism of Berlin which closely followed it, there is a fine difference of style, as if in the interval Chesterton had taken a tonic. Thus there is a jolly passage in which, describing German barbarism, he refers to the different ways of treating women.
The two extremes of the treatment of women might be represented by what are called the respectable classes in America and in France. In America they choose the risk of comradeship; in France the compensation of courtesy. In America it is practically possible for any young gentleman to take any young lady for what he calls (I deeply regret to say) a joy-ride; but at least the man goes with the woman as much as the woman with the man. In France the young woman is protected like a nun while she is unmarried; but when she is a mother she is really a holy woman; and when she is a grandmother she is a holy terror. By both extremes the woman gets something back out of life. France and America aim alike at equality — America by similarity; France by dissimilarity. But North Germany does actually aim at inequality. The woman stands up, with no more irritation than a butler; the man sits down, with no more embarrassment than a guest.
And so on. It runs very easily; we recognize the old touch; the epigrams are not worked to death; and the chains of argument are not mere strings of damped brilliancies. And before 1914 had come to its end, in another pamphlet, Letters to an Old Garibaldian, the same style, the same freshness of thought, and the same resurgent strength were once again in evidence. Then illness overcame.
Of all futures, the future of literature and its professors is the least predictable. We have all, so to speak, turned a corner since August, 1914, but we have not all turned the same way. Chesterton would seem to have felt the great change early in the war. Soon he will break his silence, and we shall know whether we have amongst us a giant with strength renewed or a querulous Nonconformist Crusader, agreeing with no man, while claiming to speak for every man. Early in the course of this study a distinction was drawn between Christians and Crusaders. Chesterton has been throughout his career essentially a Crusader. He set out to put wrongs to rights in the same spirit; in much the same spirit, too, he incidentally chivvied about the Jews he met in his path, just as the Crusaders had done. He fought for the Holy Sepulchre, and gained it. Like the Crusaders, he professed orthodoxy, and, like them, fell between several “orthodoxies.” He shared their visions and their faith, so far as they had any. But one thing is true of all Crusaders, they are not necessarily Christians. And there is that about Chesterton which sometimes makes me wonder whether, after all, he is not “a child of the French Revolution” in a sense he himself does not suspect. He has cursed the barren fig-tree of modern religious movements. But there comes a suspicion that he denies too much; that from between those supple sentences and those too plausible arguments one may catch a glimpse of the features of a mocking spirit. Chesterton has given us the keenest enjoyment, and he has provoked thought, even in the silly atheist. We all owe him gratitude, but no two readers of his works are likely to agree as to the causes of their gratitude. That, in itself, is a tribute. Wherefore let it be understood that in writing this study I have been speaking entirely for myself, and if any man think me misguided, inappreciative, hypercritical, frivolous, or anything else, why, he is welcome.
MR. G. K. CHESTERTON’S POINT OF VIEW by John Kelman
LECTURE IX
There is on record the case of a man who, after some fourteen years of robust health, spent a week in bed. His illness was apparently due to a violent cold, but he confessed, on medical cross-examination, that the real and underlying cause was the steady reading of Mr. Chesterton’s books for several days on end.
No one will accuse Mr. Chesterton of being an unhealthy writer. On the contrary, he is among the most wholesome writers now alive. He is irresistibly exhilarating, and he inspires his readers with a constant inclination to rise up and shout. Perhaps his danger lies in that very fact, and in the exhaustion of the nerves which such sustained exhilaration is apt to produce. But besides this, he, like so many of our contemporaries, has written such a bewildering quantity of literature on such an amazing variety of subjects, that it is no wonder if sometimes the reader follows panting, through the giddy mazes of the dance. He is the sworn enemy of specialisation, as he explains in his remarkable essay on “The Twelve Men.” The subject of the essay is the British jury, and its thesis is that when our civilisation “wants a library to be catalogued, or a solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.” For the judging of a criminal or the propagation of the gospel, it is necessary to procure inexpert people — people who come to their task with a virgin eye, and see not what the expert (who has lost his freshness) sees, but the human facts of the case. So Mr. Chesterton insists upon not being a specialist, takes the world for his parish, and wanders over it at will.
This being so, it is obvious that he cannot possibly remember all that he has said, and must necessarily abound in inconsistencies and even contradictions. Yet that is by no means always unconscious, but is due in many instances to the very complex quality and subtle habit of his mind. Were he by any chance to read this statement he would deny it fiercely, but we would repeat it with perfect calmness, knowing that he would probably have denied any other statement we might have made upon the subject. His subtlety is partly due to the extraordinary rapidity with which his mind leaps from one subject to another, partly to the fact that he is so full of ideas that many of his essays (like Mr. Bernard Shaw’s plays) find it next to impossible to get themselves begun. He is so full of matter that he never seems to be able to say what he wants to say, until he has said a dozen other things first.
The present lecture is mainly concerned with his central position, as that is expounded in Heretics and Orthodoxy. Our task is not to criticise, nor even to any considerable extent to characterise his views, but to state them as accurately as we can. It is a remarkable phenomenon of our time that all our literary men are bent on giving us such elaborate and solemnising confessions of their faith. It is an age notorious for its aversion to dogma, and yet here we have Mr. Huxley, Mr. Le Gallienne, Mr. Shaw, Mr. Wells (to mention only a few of many), who in this creedless age proclaim in the market-place, each his own private and brand-new creed.
Yet Mr. Chesterton has perhaps a special right to such a proclamation. He believes in creeds vehemently. And, besides, the spiritual biography of a man whose mental development has been so independent and so interesting as his, must be well worth knowing. Amid the many weird theologies of our time we have met with nothing so startling, so arresting, and so suggestive since Mr. Mallock published his New Republic and his Contemporary Superstitions. There is something common to the two points of view. To some, they come as emancipating and most welcome reinforcements, relieving the beleaguered citadel of faith. But others, who differ widely from them both, may yet find in them so much to stimulate thought and to rehabilitate strongholds held precariously, as to awaken both appreciation and gratitude.
Mr. Chesterton’s political opinions do not concern us here. It is a curious fact, of which innumerable illustrations may be found in past and present writers, that political radicalism so often goes along with conservative theology, and vice versa. Mr. Chesterton is no exception to the rule. His orthodoxy in matters of faith we shall find to be altogether above suspicion. His radicalism in politics is never long silent. He openly proclaims himself at war with Carlyle’s favourite dogma, “The tools to him who can use them.” “The worst form of slavery,” he tells us, “is that which is called Cæsarism, or the choice of some bold or brilliant man as despot because he is suitable. For that means that men choose a representative, not because he represents them but because he does not.” And if it be answered that the worst form of cruelty to a nation or to an individual is that abuse of the principle of equality which is for ever putting incompetent people into false positions, he has his reply ready: “The one specially and peculiarly un-Christian idea is the idea of Carlyle — the idea that the man should rule who feels that he can rule. Whatever else is Christian, this is heathen.”
But this, and much else of its kind, although he works it into his general scheme of thinking, is not in any sense an essential part of that scheme. Our subject is his place in the conflict between the paganism and the idealism of the times, and it is a sufficiently large one. But before we come to that, we must consider another matter, which we shall find to be intimately connected with it.
That other matter is his habit of paradox, which is familiar to all his readers. It is a habit of style, but before it became that it was necessarily first a habit of mind, deeply ingrained. He disclaims it so often that we cannot but feel that he protesteth too much. He acknowledges it, and explains that “paradox simply means a certain defiant joy which belongs to belief.” Whether the explanation is or is not perfectly intelligible, it must occur to every one that a writer who finds it necessary to give so remarkable an explanation can hardly be justified in his astonishment when people of merely average intelligence confess themselves puzzled. His aversion to Walter Pater — almost the only writer whom he appears consistently to treat with disrespect — is largely due to Pater’s laborious simplicity of style. But it was a greater than either Walter Pater or Mr. Chesterton who first pointed out that the language which appealed to the understanding of the common man was also that which expressed the highest culture. Mr. Chesterton’s habit of paradox will always obscure his meanings for the common man. He has a vast amount to tell him, but much of it he will never understand.
