Gilbert: The Man Who was G. K. Chesterton

by Michael Coren

  The prosecution was carried out by F.E. Smith and Sir Edward Carson, the brilliant Irish Protestant lawyer who had successfully prosecuted Oscar Wilde; if he had been able to defeat the genius Wilde in open court, he would have little trouble with Cecil Chesterton. So it turned out. In the dock Cecil was slow and hesitant, seemingly out of his depth and frightened. The judge was not on his side from the very beginning, but even so his defence was a poor one. He withdrew all charges of corruption against the government ministers early on in the trial, and took back the accusation that Sir Herbert Samuel was either dishonest or dishonourable. He remained firm on the issue of Godfrey Isaacs’s double-dealing. The family were beginning to panic, fearing that a prison sentence would be the verdict. The jury found him guilty, but the judge thought a £100 fine and a stern lecture would be sufficient punishment. Ridiculously egotistical to the last, Cecil and his companions perceived this as a victory, believing the light sentence to be a partial success; it is more likely that all present considered the defendant and the case too petty to merit a more harsh decision. There was cheering from the supporters of the New Witness, quiet satisfaction from Isaacs, and general apathy from the public.

  Cecil celebrated his self-imagined triumph by being received into the Roman Catholic Church, without giving any serious explanation to friends or family. His life was not changed to any remarkable degree by the trial, he continued to imagine what he wanted, to believe what he wanted, and to print what he wanted. Gilbert, by far the more sensitive of the two brothers, was shocked by the events. He loved his brother dearly, was shattered by the insults and defeat which he had suffered in court, and was frightened for his future.

  Cecil died in 1918 in a military hospital in Boulogne; a German bullet did not end his life, but sickness caused by the strains of army life, and twelve-mile marches in pouring rain. Pretence was maintained until the last, with the tributes to him in the New Witness cloaked in a cryptic language which left readers unsure as to the reasons for his death: “died in France of the effects of the last days of the fighting,” wrote Gilbert. The death of his brother broke Gilbert, and opened up the flood-gates of any anger and hatred which existed in him. Cecil was dead, the Isaacs brothers were still alive. It was all too much to tolerate.

  On 13th December 1918 in the New Witness he wrote an “Open Letter” to Lord Reading, previously Rufus Isaacs. For those who allege that Gilbert was an anti-Semite, and that opinion still holds sway, this communication of vitriol is evidence indeed

  My Lord — I address to you a public letter as it is upon a public question: it is unlikely that I should ever trouble you with any private question; and least of all on the private question that now fills my mind. It would be impossible altogether to ignore the irony that has in the last few days brought to an end the great Marconi duel in which you and I in some sense played the part of seconds; that personal part of the matter ended when Cecil Chesterton found death in the trenches to which he had freely gone; and Godfrey Isaacs found dismissal in those very Courts to which he once successfully appealed. But believe me I do not write on any personal matter; nor do I write, strangely enough perhaps, with any personal acrimony. On the contrary, there is something in these tragedies that almost unnaturally clarifies and enlarges the mind; and I think I write partly because I may never feel so magnanimous again. It would be irrational to ask you for sympathy; but I am sincerely moved to offer it. You are far more unhappy; for your brother is still alive.

  Are we to lose the War in which we have already won? That and nothing else is involved in losing full satisfaction of the national claim in Poland. [Lord Reading was a delegate to the Versailles Peace Conference, in which the question of Poland would be discussed.] Is there any man who doubts that the Jewish International is unsympathetic with that full national demand? And is there any man who doubts that you will be sympathetic with the Jewish International? No man who knows anything of the interior facts of modern Europe has the faintest doubt on either point. No man doubts when he knows, whether or not he cares. Do you seriously imagine that those who know, that those who care, are so idolatrously infatuated with Rufus Daniel Isaacs as to tolerate such risk, let alone such ruin? Are we to set up as the standing representative of England a man who is a standing joke against England? That and nothing else is involved in setting up the chief Marconi Minister as our chief Foreign Minister. It is precisely in those foreign countries with which such a minister would have to deal, that his name would be, and has been, a sort of pantomime proverb like Panama or the South Sea Bubble.

  Foreigners were not threatened with fine and imprisonment for calling a spade a spade and a speculation a speculation; foreigners were not punished with a perfectly lawless law of libel for saying about public men what those very men had afterwards to admit in public. Foreigners were lookers-on who were really allowed to see most of the game, when our public saw nothing of the game; and they made not a little game of it. Are they henceforth to make game of everything that is said and done in the name of England in the affairs of Europe? Have you the serious impudence to call us Anti-Semites because we are not so extravagantly fond of one particular Jew as to endure this for him alone. No, my lord; the beauties of your character shall not so blind us to all elements of reason and self-preservation; we can still control our affections; if we are anything but Anti-Semite, we are not Pro-Semite in that peculiar and personal fashion; if we are lovers, we will not kill ourselves for love. After weighing and valuing all your virtues, the qualities of our own country take their due and proportional part in our esteem. Because of you she shall not die.

  My fancy may be quite wrong; it is but one of many attempts I have made to imagine and allow for an alien psychology in this matter; and if you, and Jews far worthier than you, are wise they will not dismiss as Anti-Semitism what may well prove the last serious attempt to sympathise with Semitism. I allow for your position more than most men allow for it in the darker days that yet may come. It is utterly false to suggest that either I or a better man than I, whose work I now inherit, desired this disaster for you and yours, I wish you no such ghastly retribution. Daniel, son of Isaac, Go in peace; but go.

  This makes for distasteful reading, especially in the light of the holocaust which was to follow. There is no excuse, no justification for Jew-baiting and anti-Semitism, and the dark side of Gilbert’s character certainly held pockets of racism which cannot be lightly ignored. How much bigotry existed, and to what depths that feeling sunk, is a matter capable of question. For all of his hurtful, rash statements there was never a contentment with attacking people because of their race. Gilbert stung others when he was angry, and when he was following friends. He was a creation of his time and of his environment, and that meant he was exposed to anti-Semitism from an early age.

  Gilbert’s friend, E.C. Bentley, had written in the classic detective thriller Trent’s Last Case, “In Paris a well-known banker walked quietly out of the Bourse and fell dead upon the broad steps among the raving crowd of Jews, a phial crushed in his hand. In Frankfurt one leapt from the Cathedral top … Men stabbed and shot themselves.” Bentley was painting a portrait of closely connected, sinister world finance, and his views were far from untypical. John Buchan’s hero would lament the international conspiracy of the Jews and wonder what to do about it, thriller stories of the Edwardian years and the 1920s would invariably include a villain whose “origin was somewhere inside a Polish or Russian ghetto.” English literature had not always been so disposed. Charles Dickens had an understanding, an empathy, for Jewish experience and suffering which left a mark on his readers. George Eliot and her Daniel Deronda is equally profound in its treatment of a Jewish character. This was the period of Disraeli, when the Jewish population of the country was small and often prosperous. These immigrants who had come to Britain as early as the seventeenth century, were mostly Sephardi (Eastern origin) and could be as easily ignored as they could be liked.

  Between 1884 and 1905 over 250,000 Jews came to
Britain. They were the victims of a series of pogroms in Poland and the Ukraine, during which government-inspired mobs would murder, rape and destroy. These were not simple riots, but horribly violent tirades. The number of Jews who were slaughtered during this period is outrageous, large enough to classify the appalling time as a mini-holocaust. The police and the army would intervene only after the damage was done, and if the Jews organised themselves for self-defence they would be arrested or executed. The people who left everything behind and came to London, Leeds, Manchester and Glasgow were mostly peasants, speaking a mixture of Russian, Yiddish, Polish and Ukrainian. They had different ways, different manners. They were frightened and proud, anxious and willing to work every hour they could to build a new life. Such large numbers could no longer be forgotten, they were now an issue. So it was that when Gilbert was a young man tens of thousands of Ashkenazi (European) Jews were living just a few miles from his home.

  As a boy he had Jewish friends, and many in the Junior Debating Club were Jewish. St Paul’s was, and is, a school which attracts Jewish boys. He maintained friendships with those he had met at school throughout his life, and though the defence that “some of my best friends are Jewish” is trite and absurd, Gilbert’s relationships with these men were sincerely warm and reciprocated. They would not have continued to hold him in such high esteem if his real attitudes had been acrimonious. Of his school-day relationships with Jewish boys he wrote

  Oddly enough, I lived to have later on the name of an Anti-Semite; whereas from my first days at school I very largely had the name of a Pro-Semite. I made many friends among the Jews, and some of these I have retained as lifelong friends; nor have our relations ever been disturbed by differences upon the political or social problem. I am glad that I began at this end; but I have not really ended any differently from the way in which I began … I held by instinct then, as I hold by knowledge now, that the right way is to be interested in Jews as Jews; and then to bring into greater prominence the very much neglected Jewish virtues, which are the complement and sometimes even the cause of what the world feels to be Jewish faults.

  After a description of his protection of a “strange swarthy little creature with a hooked nose” at school he continued with

  I am not at all ashamed of having asked Aryans to have more patience with Jews or for asking Anglo-Saxons to have more patience with Jew-baiters. The whole problem of the two entangled cultures and traditions is much too deep and difficult, on both sides, to be decided upon impatiently. But I have very little patience with those who will not solve the problem, on the ground that there is no problem to solve. I cannot explain the Jews; but I certainly will not explain them away. Nor have the Jews a worse enemy than the sort of Jew sceptic who sometimes tries to explain himself away. I have seen a whole book full of alternative theories of the particular historic cause of such a delusion about a difference; that it came from mediaeval priests or was burnt into us by the Inquisition; that it was tribal theory arising out of Teutonism; that it was revolutionary envy of the few Jews who happened to be the big bankers of Capitalism; that it was Capitalist resistance to the few Jews who happened to be the chief founders of Communism. All these separate theories are false in separate ways; as in forgetting that mediaeval heresy-hunts spared Jews more and not less than Christians; or that Capitalism and Communism are so very nearly the same thing, in ethical essence, that it would not be strange if they did take leaders from the same ethnological elements …

  I do not believe that a crowd on a race-course is poisoned by mediaeval theology; or the navvies in a Mile End pub misled by the ethnology of Gobineau or Max Fuller; nor do I believe that a mob of little boys fresh from the cricket field or tuckshop were troubled about Marxian economics or international finance. Yet all these people recognise Jews as Jews when they see them; and the schoolboys recognised them, not with any great hostility except in patches, but with the integration of instinct. What they saw was not Semites or Schismatics or capitalists or revolutionists, but foreigners; this did not prevent friendship and affection, especially in my own case; but then it never has prevented it in the case of ordinary foreigners …

  As in most of Gilbert’s writing about Jewish people, there are elements of deep understanding and sound common sense, and a ripple of gutter bigotry; he seemed to be at heart a friend of the Jews, sympathetic to their plight — but something insisted on dragging him towards prejudice. That something came in several forms: his brother Cecil, Maurice Baring, but most of all Hilaire Belloc. Belloc was an expert at playing the elder man, giving advice and hearing secular confession. “There is great psychological value in a strong affirmation” he once said, and it was exactly that which he used in his friendship with Gilbert. For his part, Gilbert would later convert to the Catholic Church for, amongst other reasons, the sake of “Authority;” the quality which Belloc possessed with such panache and confidence. Belloc found hatred an easy emotion to indulge in, and Jews ranked highly on his list of opponents. His book The Jews, while impressive in some of its predictions and warnings, saw the Jews as natural plotters, a strange people who could not and would not assimilate, and who would change their names so as to disguise their identity; hence easing their way into gentile society. He would blithely employ the word “Yid” in public, revelling in its shock value. He took great satisfaction in his rhyme

  At the end of Piccadilly is a place

  Of Habitation for the Jewish race.

  Awaiting their regained Jerusalem.

  These little huts, they say, suffice for them.

  Here Rothschild lives, chief of the tribe abhorr’d

  Who tried to put to death our Blessed Lord.

  But, on the third day, as the Gospel shows,

  Cheating their machinations, He arose;

  In Whose commemoration, now and then,

  We persecute these curly-headed men.

  Belloc was an anti-Semite. Was Gilbert? No. The case for the prosecution first. He teased, hurt, could be insulting. In his poems, there are references to Jews and anti-Jewish feelings to be found

  I am fond of Jews

  Jews are fond of money

  Never mind of whose.

  I am fond of Jews

  Oh, but when they lose

  Damn it all, it’s funny.

  And, in the same spirit, and causing the same offence

  Oh I knew a Dr Gluck

  And his nose it had a hook

  And his attitudes were anything but Aryan.

  So I gave him all the pork

  That I had upon a fork

  Because I am myself a vegetarian.

  The level of paranoia amongst the Chesterton brothers and Belloc was staggering; it was based entirely upon fear. Gilbert was terrified that he would encounter a Jew, and not know it. They must identify themselves as Jews, Hebrews, Semites; otherwise, matters would go worse for them. If a Jewish caricature approached Gilbert he would be satisfied, even welcoming. If the Jewish individual was very English in his manners and dress, a threat was perceived. When interviewed by the Jewish Chronicle in April 1911 he attempted to explain his position

  Oh, yes, I know they call themselves, for instance, in this country, Englishmen, and they are patriotic and loyal, and hold land and give liberally to English institutions, subsidise party funds, become peers and members of Parliament, entertain, hunt and shoot, and all the rest of it. Still the Jew is not an Englishman, because his nationality is not English. They are something different and in many ways very much better. Still, being better, they cannot be the same. They are allied, and rightly and justifiably, to their own people of their own race who are not English even in point of citizenship — Jews in Germany, Russia, France, everywhere.

  He did not realise, did not want to understand, that when European wars took place French Jews battled against and killed German Jews, in the war to come English Jews would die in trenches, killed by some of the thousands of Jews who won so many medals and so much praise in the ranks of the Ge
rman army. He rejected any advice about Russian Jewish war heroes, any historical facts about Jews in Nelson’s navy and Wolfe’s army at Quebec. But then the image of the Jewish warrior was something else which Gilbert — far too obese and unfit to be accepted in the 1914 war — refused to come to terms with

  Our patch of glory ended; we never heard guns again.

  But the squire stuck in the saddle; he was foolish, as if in pain

  He leaned on a staggering lawyer, he clutched a cringing Jew,

  He was stricken; it may be, after all, he was stricken at Waterloo …

  In his A Short History of England the subject of Edward I and the Jews was given a weighty treatment, surprising in a book which intended to cover the entire course of English history in some 240 pages

  The Jews in the middle ages were as powerful as they were unpopular. They were the capitalists of the age, the men with wealth banked ready for use. It is very tenable that in this way they were useful; it is certain that in this way they were used. The ill-usage was not indeed that suggested at random in romances, which mostly revolve on the one idea that their teeth were pulled out. Those who know this as a story about King John generally do not know the rather important fact that it was a story against King John. It is probably doubtful; it was only insisted on as exceptional; and it was, by that very insistence, obviously regarded as disreputable. But the real unfairness of the Jews’ position was deeper and more distressing to a sensitive and highly civilised people. They might reasonably say that Christian kings and nobles, and even Christian popes and bishops, used for Christian purposes (such as the crusades and cathedrals) the money that could only be accumulated in such mountains by a usury they inconsistently denounced as un-Christian; and then, when worse times came, gave up the Jew to the fury of the poor, whom that useful usury had ruined. That was the real case for the Jew; and no doubt he really felt himself oppressed.