by Ian Ker
It is hideous how systematic and mentally mean I am becoming under the influence of a certain mercenary intention. Once I would pour out notions like Niagara and care as little where they went as that cataract cares for its foam: now I solemnly and with feelings of unutterable disgrace, make a note of any workable fancy I think of. I cultivate ideas like so many cursed cabbages.
At the end of October he told Frances that he was developing into a sort of art critic, under the persistent delusion which possesses the Editor of The Bookman’, and that his ‘first experiment in art criticism’ should probably be appearing in a few days’ time.59 In fact, the Velasquez and Poussin review article appeared not in the November issue but in the December one; unfortunately it was unattributed, although Hodder Williams had written to say that he thought Chesterton would like his name to appear in an issue with an apparently extended print run of 30,000.60
Although the matter was of crucial importance to both of them, as Chesterton could not marry on what he was earning at present—it was inconceivable then that somebody of Frances’s social position would continue working after her marriage—Chesterton light-heartedly proceeded to dismiss these ‘revolutions, literary, financial and political’, as insignificant ‘compared with the one really tremendous event of the week’ that was about to take place. ‘The sun will stand still upon Leicester Square and the Moon on the Valley of Wardour St’, he announced. ‘For then will assemble the Grand Commemorative Meeting of the Junior Debating Club.’ The Club was and always would be ‘one of the main strands of my life’, and it had ‘left its roots deep in the hearts of twelve strangely different men’. In his next letter containing the promised account of the meeting, Chesterton began by informing Frances that he was ‘certainly leaving Fisher Unwin, with much mutual courtesy and good will’. There followed a detailed lengthy account of the dinner, for which illustrated menus had been provided. Chesterton himself had proposed the toast, saying merely that ‘nothing could be alleged against the Queen, except the fact that she is not a member of the J.D.C. and that I thought it spoke well for the chivalry of Englishmen that with this fact she had never been publicly taunted’. The dinner ended with them singing the anthem of the J.D.C.: ‘I’m a Member—I’m a Member—Member of the J.D.C. I belong to it for ever—don’t you wish that you were me.’61 When in the next year, 1900, the Junior Debating Club threw open its annual dinner to ladies, Chesterton drew a menu for each guest: Frances’s menu offered ‘Crocodile de Nile Rôti Dhabea’ and ‘Poisson extraordinaire à la société naturaliste P.N.E.U. [the Parents’ National Educational Union, her employer]’, accompanied by a drawing of a pair of hands, one of which was brushing an unkempt head (clearly of her financé) and the other turning the pages of a book.62
4
The Speaker, which was a radical weekly, was bought in the autumn of 1899 by a group of young Liberals who had been together at Oxford and who included Chesterton’s friends Bentley and Oldershaw. The first number appeared just before the outbreak of the Boer War in October 1899. These young radicals were united in their opposition to the war, not because they were pacifists but because they were implacably opposed to the imperialism that was so fashionable then: ‘for most men about this time Imperialism, or at least patriotism, was a substitute for religion. Men believed in the British Empire precisely because they had nothing else to believe in. Those beacon-fires of an imperial insularity shot a momentary gleam over the dark landscape of the Shropshire Lad …’. In his Autobiography Chesterton tells us that, as a patriot opposed to pacifism, he had been a ‘reluctant’ imperialist if ‘colonial adventure … was the only way of protecting my country’, just as he had been a ‘reluctant’ Socialist if ‘collective organisation … was the only way of protecting my poorer fellow-citizens’. It was when he was in this uncomfortable position that events in South Africa ‘not only woke me from my dreams like a thunder-clap, but like a lightening-flash revealed me to myself’. Public opinion was far more favourable to the Boer War than it was later to the First World War, which Chesterton considered much more important and a ‘much more just’ cause. But he ‘suddenly realised’ that he ‘hated it [the Boer War]’, that he ‘hated the whole thing’ as he ‘had never hated anything before’. He hated what others liked about it: that it was such a ‘cheerful’ war with ‘its vile assurance of victory’. The assumption that the defeat of the Boers was inevitable, ‘an almost automatic process like the operation of a natural law’, was repugnant to him: ‘I have always hated that sort of heathen notion of a natural law.’ What was perhaps even more repulsive to him was the hypocrisy of the British claim to be fighting, like the Boers, for their own countrymen, ‘the commercial citizens of Johannesburg, who were commonly called the Outlanders’. For these people did not look or sound very British, as was demonstrated when Chesterton and a friend called for three cheers for some of these Outlanders with foreign names (Jews like ‘Beit’ and ‘Eckstein’, as well as ‘Albu’, presumably a black African) in the midst of an imperialist demonstration. When the ‘Jingo mob’ realized it was being laughed at, a fight broke out. Chesterton found himself engaged ‘in a pugilistic encounter with an Imperialist clerk, whose pugilism was no more scientific than my own. While this encounter … was proceeding, another Imperialist must have abstracted my watch; the last I ever troubled to possess. He at any rate believed in the policy of Annexation.’ Unlike most of his compatriots who were on the side of the Boers because they were pacifists, Chesterton was pro-Boer because he thought the Boers were fully entitled to take up arms against ‘a more cosmopolitan empire at the command of very cosmopolitan financiers’, which was threatening their farming communities.63 Chesterton, of course, was not interested in the fact that some of the ‘Outsiders’ or uitlanders had indeed been oppressed by the Boers and were subjects of the British Empire; he was not interested in the British Empire or even in Britain—only in England. Nor did he take account of the fanaticism of Kruger, the Boer leader, who looked to Germany for military support against the British. As for the native Africans, who had lost their land to the Boers, they too did not come into Chesterton’s calculations.64 His own view of Africa (as described in one of his notebooks) as the ‘Dark Continent’, where ‘step by step civilization has driven that darkness into the interior’, was quite unexceptional for the time.65
To the young Oxford Liberals who had acquired the Speaker Chesterton had ‘a permanent gratitude’, for it was they who made possible for him his ‘first connected series of articles’, his ‘first regular job in support of a regular cause’. As well as ‘many pugnacious political articles’, he also contributed ‘a series of casual essays afterwards republished as The Defendant.66 These were his ‘A Defence of …’ articles, which first made his name as a journalist.67 It was, of course, his old friends Bentley and Oldershaw who had encouraged him to write for the magazine: ‘He did nothing for himself till we came down from Oxford and pushed him,’ recalled Oldershaw.68 Ironically, his hope that a book review by him would appear in the first number of the new Speaker was disappointed when Francis Yvon Eccles, who was ‘largely the literary adviser’, rejected his article, as well as several subsequent articles that Oldershaw had passed on to him, because ‘the handwriting was that of a Jew’.69 It was not until April of the next year that book reviews and articles by Chesterton began to appear, the first being a review of a life of Ruskin, which appeared on 28 April 1900.70 It has been suggested that Oldershaw failed to inform Eccles that Chesterton was not in fact Jewish because he did not wish to ‘dignify’ Eccles’s anti-Semitic prejudice; after all, a third of the membership of the Junior Debating Club had been Jewish.71 But Eccles’s words, as reported by Oldershaw, do not necessarily mean that Eccles was seriously contending that Chesterton was Jewish; his name alone made it extremely unlikely, to say the least. Eccles rather was simply saying that Chesterton’s handwriting was like that of a Jew; what he was no doubt really objecting to was Chesterton’s highly ornate, Gothic script writing and
his flowery signature, which he drew rather than wrote72 and which Eccles probably disliked as being too artistic, Jews being famously artistic. Given that handwriting and signatures are generally seen as indicative of character, editors and publishers before the advent of the typewriter must have often been prejudiced in favour of or against an author because of their handwriting. Bentley and Oldershaw were both very anxious to launch their admired friend on a literary career, and it is not credible to suppose that Oldershaw did not inform Eccles of Chesterton’s impeccable Gentile origins, if there had really been any such idea in Eccles’s mind.
Eccles had belonged with Belloc to the Republican Club at Oxford, a club that ‘never consisted of more than four members, and generally of less’. A third member was John Swinnerton Phillimore, the son of an admiral, who would become Professor of Latin at Glasgow University. The Chesterton family firm was ‘agent for the large Phillimore Estate’ owned by the admiral and his brother Lord Justice Phillimore, who would one day sit in judgment of Cecil Chesterton and hear the evidence of his brother. Eccles and Phillimore had been Belloc’s ‘most intimate friends’ at Oxford. Eccles, who would become a ‘distinguished French scholar’, looked much more like a Frenchman than Belloc, with his French surname, who looked much more like an Englishman, indeed ‘exactly like what all English farmers ought to look like; and was, as it were, a better portrait of Cobbett than Cobbett was’. Chesterton recalled in his Autobiography ‘drinking a pot of beer with a publican’ in Sussex where Belloc lived and mentioning his friend’s name: ‘and the publican, who obviously had never heard of books or such bosh, merely said, “Farms a bit, doesn’t he?” and I thought how hugely flattered Belloc would be’. As for Phillimore, with his naval background, he looked ‘very much more like a sailor than a don’. This was just as well, as you needed ‘some of the qualities of the quarter-deck’ in order to ‘conduct classes amid the racial and religious chaos of Glasgow, full of wild Highlanders and wild Irish, and young fanatical Communists and old fanatical Calvinists’. On one occasion he had been known to call for silence with the words, ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen! I have not yet ceased casting my pearls’—‘the gratifying irony’ of which appeal seems ‘to have been instantly grasped’. Chesterton himself notes the irony that republicans like Belloc and Eccles ‘ended as strong Monarchists’: ‘But there is a thin difference between good despotism and good democracy; both imply equality, with authority; whether the authority be impersonal or personal. What both detest is oligarchy; even in its more human form of aristocracy, let alone its present repulsive form of plutocracy.’ For Chesterton ‘the most democratic thing’ next to ‘a genuine republic’ was ‘hereditary despotism’ because it was ‘the ordinary man enthroned’; while ‘an irrational oligarchy’ such as the House of Lords, the members of which ‘owed their power to accident’, was preferable to a rational oligarchy of talent.73 After he had become a Roman Catholic, Chesterton made exactly the same point about the papacy and the episcopate:
It is not the people who would be the heirs of a dethroned Pope; it is some synod or bench of bishops. It is not an alternative between monarchy and democracy, but an alternative between monarchy and oligarchy. And, being myself one of the democratic idealists, I have not the faintest hesitation in my choice between the two latter forms of privilege. A monarch is a man; but an oligarchy is not men; it is a few men forming a group small enough to be insolent and large enough to be irresponsible.74
Chesterton came to think that Belloc was an English traditionalist and a French revolutionist. England had not got ‘a decent revolutionary song’ to its name, for the trouble with its ‘popular war songs’ was that ‘they were not war-songs. They never gave the faintest hint of how anybody could ever make war on anything. They were always waiting for the Dawn; without the least anticipation that they might be shot at dawn, or the least intelligent preparation for shooting anybody else at dawn.’ For, Chesterton discovered, ‘the Socialist idea of war was exactly like the Imperialist idea of war’, as both Socialists and Imperialists ‘always assumed that they would win the war’. But then Belloc wrote his poem ‘The Rebel’, ‘a very violent and bitter poem’ and ‘the only revolutionary poem I ever read, that suggested that there was any plan for making an attack’.75
It seems to have been Oldershaw who arranged for Chesterton to meet Belloc. Eccles, Bentley, and Oldershaw all claimed to have made the introduction; but both Chesterton and Belloc remembered that it was Oldershaw who was responsible for the meeting, ‘at the end of 1900’, according to Belloc,76 but ‘soon after’ his reunion with his friends who came down from Oxford in 1899, according to Chesterton, which might indicate an earlier date in the summer of 1899 but for the fact that Belloc announced that he was familiar with Chesterton’s writings, which would hardly have been possible before 1900, when Chesterton began writing for the Speaker. A summer date is suggested by the fact that Belloc was wearing a straw hat to shade his eyes. Although, according to Oldershaw, Eccles had also tried to prejudice Belloc against reading anything by Chesterton, when they met Belloc began the conversation by announcing, ‘Chesterton, you wr-r-ite very well.’77 Belloc was four years older and already an established writer, having made his mark in the late 1890s. According to Chesterton’s own recollection some fifteen or sixteen years after the event, they met ‘between a little Soho paper shop and a little Soho restaurant; Belloc’s arms and pockets were stuffed with French Nationalist and French Atheist newspapers. He wore a straw hat shading his eyes, which are like a sailor’s, and emphasizing his Napoleonic chin …’. The ‘little’ restaurant was Mont Blanc in Gerrard Street, which ‘had already become a haunt for three or four of us who held strong but unfashionable views about the South African War’. What Belloc, who was no less opposed to the war, added ‘was this Roman appetite for reality and for reason in action, and when he came into the door there entered with him the smell of danger’. According to Belloc, ‘he was in low spirits’; but it struck Chesterton that his ‘low spirits were and are much more uproarious and enlivening than anybody else’s high spirits. He talked into the night, and left behind in it a glowing track of good things.’78 Belloc himself apparently thought that the chief effect he had on Chesterton was indeed his ‘appetite for reality’, particularly with regard to politics: unlike the younger man, who remarkably for someone of his class had never even left the family home, Belloc had been a boarder at the Oratory School in Birmingham while Newman was still alive, had done military service in France (being half-French), had been at Oxford, and had worked his way across America to California to bring back an American bride.79 In his account of their first meeting in the Autobiography, Chesterton recalled not only ‘the peculiar length and strength’ of Belloc’s chin, but also his ‘high-shouldered way of wearing a coat so that it looked like a heavy overcoat, and instantly reminded me of the pictures of Napoleon’. As he talked, in particular of whether KingJohn was the best English king, ‘he every now and then volleyed out very provocative parentheses on the subject of religion’.
He said that an important Californian lawyer was coming to England to call on his family, and had put up a great candle to St Christopher praying that he might be able to make the voyage. He declared that he, Belloc, was going to put up an even bigger candle in the hope that the visitor would not make the voyage. ‘People say what’s the good of doing that?’ he observed explosively. ‘I don’t know what good it does. I know it’s a thing that’s done. Then they say it can’t do any good—and there you have a Dogma at once.’ All this amused me very much, but I was already conscious of a curious undercurrent of sympathy with him …
Chesterton ends his account of this first meeting with Belloc by joking that it was ‘from that dingy little Soho café, as from a cave of witchcraft, that there emerged the quadruped, the twiformed monster Mr [George Bernard] Shaw has nicknamed the Chesterbelloc’.80
In an unfinished letter to J. L. Hammond, the editor of the Speaker, presumably written when Chesterton was
an established contributor, he revealed his political realism or his idealism or naivety, depending on how one looks at it. His complaint was that the magazine was too much of ‘a mere Party rag’, albeit a moderate one, whereas he and others had ‘built hopes on it as the pioneer of a younger and larger political spirit’. What he wanted and hoped the Speaker would do was ‘to renovate Liberalism’ by ‘the persistent exposition of persuasive and unanswerable truths’.81 In the years to come he was to learn a great deal about practical politics and politicians not only from Belloc but from his own experience.
At last on Good Friday 1900 Chesterton was able to write excitedly to Frances: ‘I have got a really important job in reviewing—the Life of Ruskin for the Speaker. As I have precisely 73 theories about Ruskin it will be brilliant and condensed. I am also reviewing the Life of the Kendals, a book on the Renascence and one on Correggio for the Bookman.’ ‘Really and truly,’ he continued, ‘I see no reason why we should not be married in April if not before…. I have been making some money calculations … and as far as I can see we could live in the country on quite a small amount of regular literary work …’.82 The Ruskin review duly appeared in the Speaker on 28 April, and the Bookman reviews (in collaboration with Hodder Williams) in June, July, and August. His first poem in the new Speaker appeared on 18 August83 (although he had already published six poems in the old Speaker). Articles, as opposed to book reviews, appeared both in the Speaker and in the Bookman in December.
The Boer War was the main issue in the ‘khaki’ election campaign of 1900, which lasted from 25 September to 24 October, so-called because that was the colour of the new uniform for the British army that was adopted for the war. Chesterton had his first taste of the realities of politics when he and Oldershaw went down to Frome in Somerset to support the Liberal candidate, who was against the war. Chesterton wandered around the town inveighing against the war to whoever would listen to him. He also designed a poster attacking the Tory poster, which showed the Conservative leaders in front of the Union Jack. Chesterton’s poster showed them pulling at the flag till it split, with the inscription below: ‘Leave the flag alone; it wasn’t made for you to hide behind.’ In the evenings he would visit the pub where the local Conservative Party had its unofficial headquarters and hold forth and argue with anyone he could. Even the Tory canvassers would leave their canvassing to come and listen to him, much to the annoyance of the party officials. Meanwhile Oldershaw was busy working on a special edition of the Beacon, a radical magazine; the issue was continually held up thanks to new suggestions from Chesterton—with the result that it came out the day after the actual poll! However, their candidate won with an increased majority.84 Chesterton had made his first attempt at election canvassing with the ‘extraordinary delusion that the object of canvassing is conversion. The object of canvassing is counting’ those ‘likely to vote for the party candidate, or not to vote at all’. He was disillusioned in another way too: ‘a curious and obscure feeling began to grow’ in his mind; and when this ‘cold and creeping suggestion of the unconscious … ultimately rose to the surface and shaped itself, long afterwards in other campaigns, into a half-articulate question, I think the question was, “Why is the candidate nearly always the worst duffer on his own platform?”’ Invariably the parliamentary candidate ‘could not speak at all’, but ‘repeated exactly the same dull formula’ at every meeting. Later experience of politics taught Chesterton what he did not understand then—namely, that ‘what runs modern politics is money’, and to be a candidate you had to have money.85