by Ian Ker
He recalls the particular example he had used against Blatchford—an example that itself exemplifies his self-confessed inability to avoid humour even on such issues that ‘strike direct at the heart of this our human life’. ‘Logically,’ he had pointed out to Blatchford, ‘it would stop a man in the act of saying “Thank you” to somebody for passing the mustard. For how could he be praised for passing the mustard, if he could not be blamed for not passing the mustard?’ The reason Blatchford wanted to deny free will, Chesterton thought, was because of his ‘undiluted compassion’ for the ‘underdog’, who was to be forgiven because nothing was his fault. But this did not stop Blatchford from ‘demanding justice, punishment, vengeance almost without pardon, upon … strong tyrants who had trampled on the weak… So do paper sophistries go up in a great fire.’4
In his first Commonwealth article, where he contrasts the ‘Calvinism’ of Blatchford with ‘the free will of Catholicism’ that he is defending, Chesterton is clearly writing as an Anglo-Catholic for Anglo-Catholic readers. In a later article he cites the specifically Roman Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation to show how science and religion cannot come into conflict, for the doctrine ‘does not make any assertions at all about any material things’. Moreover, science advances by testing hypotheses, but sceptics like Blatchford, ‘by refusing to experience faith… have refused to test it’. They claim to be ‘impartial’, but the experts in any subject are ‘obviously partial’ because they have a view, unlike the ignorant who are indeed impartial.5 Later in the controversy, Chesterton again corrects Blatchford on a point of science, when he points out that to say, for example, that ‘it is a law of nature’ that pumpkins should remain pumpkins’ only really means that no pumpkin has ever been known to change into anything else, not that there is actually ‘a law of nature’ that one can point to. The expression is simply a metaphor taken from human laws, just as the Christian idea that pumpkins always remain pumpkins because that is the will of a heavenly father is also a metaphor drawn from the idea of an earthly father. Far from being a ‘law of nature’, it was ‘extraordinary that a pumpkin is always a pumpkin’. Once one understood that it was extraordinary and not determined by some law one had ‘begun philosophy’.6
Finally, in December, Blatchford threw down the gauntlet to Chesterton, demanding to know if he was a Christian, what he meant by the word Christianity, what he himself believed, and why. Chesterton replied that he was a Christian because he believed Christ was the son of God in a unique transcendental sense. He had already in a letter to the Clarion defined a Christian as someone who believes in the Trinity. And he believed in the Christian creed, because it seemed to him that life was ‘logical and workable with these beliefs, and illogical and unworkable without them’. That Christmas in an article in the Daily News he made it clear that the feast only made sense in the light of the doctrine of the Incarnation.7
At the end of the article of 4 December in which Blatchford posed his four questions to Chesterton, he invited proponents of Christianity to put their case in the pages of the Clarion without any editorial interference, against whom he would produce writers to put the opposite case; both sides would be given equal space. The pro-Christian articles began to appear in January 1904 and ended in August, when a selection was published in a book entitled The Religious Doubts of Democracy. The book included three articles by Chesterton, the last of which was divided into two in the book. In the first Chesterton introduces a most unusual argument in favour of Christianity, but one that was very characteristic and would always play an important part in his religious apologetics. His own flippancy in talking about serious matters is held against him, but he cannot help himself: ‘Christianity is itself so jolly a thing that it fills the possessor of it with a certain silly exuberance, which sad and high-minded Rationalists might reasonably mistake for mere buffoonery and blasphemy; just as their prototypes, the sad and high-minded Stoics of old Rome, did mistake the Christian joyousness for buffoonery and blasphemy.’ This contract is reflected ‘in the cold Pagan architecture and the grinning gargoyles of Christendom, in the preposterous motley of the Middle Ages and the dingy dress of this rationalist century’. Indeed, Chesterton claims: ‘Nowhere in history has there ever been any popular brightness and gaiety without religion’. It is clear that he is equating Christianity, not to say religion itself, with a Catholic form of Christianity, since Chesterton would scarcely have claimed that laughter and brightness were characteristic of Puritanism or Islam. Asceticism, on the other hand, is characteristic of Catholicism with its ‘austere or ferocious saints who have given up home and happiness and macerated health and sex’. But why should they have done so unless ‘there were really something actual and solid in the thing for which they sold themselves’? Surely, the only explanation can be: ‘They gave up all pleasures for one pleasure of spiritual ecstasy’. In the same sort of way, Chesterton wickedly suggests, a man may go ‘ragged and homeless in order to drink brandy’. Both examples suggested the existence of some ‘terrible consolation and a lonely joy’ that made such sacrifices worthwhile. Chesterton enjoys turning Blatchford’s arguments against Christianity on their head. The existence of pagan myths resembling Christianity is only what one would expect: if Christianity is true, ‘would not the human race tend to rumours and perversions of the Christian God?’ Again, the crimes committed in the name of Christians do not necessarily tell against Christianity but rather the opposite: ‘For men commit crimes not only for bad things, far more often for good things. For no bad things can be desired quite so passionately and persistently as good things can be desired …’. Again, the particularity of a historical religion like Christianity tells for rather than against it: ‘if Moses had said God was an Infinity Energy, I should be certain he had seen nothing extraordinary. As he said he was a Burning Bush, I think it very likely that he did see something extraordinary.’8
The importance of paradox is central to Chesterton’s argument. ‘Christianity’, he argues, ‘which is a very mystical religion, has nevertheless been the religion of the most practical section of mankind. It has far more paradoxes than the Eastern philosophies, but it also builds far better roads’. The God of Islam is free from contradictions, whereas the Trinitarian God seems a contradiction in terms. The doctrine of free will is held to be contradictory by a determinist like Blatchford because if man is created by God then man can act only as God created him to act; but then so is determinism, which denies free will in theory and yet assumes it exists in practice. The difference is that, unlike the determinist, the Christian ‘puts the contradiction into his philosophy’. And yet paradoxically the ‘mystery by its darkness enlightens all things’. On the other hand, the determinist ‘makes the matter of the will logical and lucid: and in the light of that lucidity all things are darkened’. Chesterton insists that it is not a choice between ‘mysticism and rationality’ but between ‘mysticism and madness. For mysticism, and mysticism alone, has kept men sane from the beginning of the world. All the straight roads of logic lead to some Bedlam …’. Christianity as a religion of mystery ‘accepts the contradictions’ of this world and can therefore ‘laugh and walk easily through the world’. But, if we accept pantheism, for example, we end up by either embracing all that is ‘natural’ or by rejecting nature as simply evil. Christianity by contrast neither worships nor rejects nature but sees it as the creation of God: ‘He made Nature but He was a Man.’ Or again, paradoxically, far from the Christian doctrine of the Fall and original sin being a depressing bar to progress, ‘without the doctrine of the Fall all idea of progress is unmeaning’. Chesterton’s satire at the expense of Blatchford’s anti-Christianity, ‘the most placid and perfect of all… orthodoxies’, is humorous but not sarcastic: ‘If you wanted to dissuade a man from drinking his tenth whisky you would slap him on the back and say, “Be a man”. No one who wished to dissuade a crocodile from eating his tenth explorer would slap it on the back and say, “Be a crocodile”. For we have no notion of
a perfect crocodile …’. But Chesterton can be very sharp indeed when it comes to the defence of the poor, who, according to Blatchford, are ‘determined’ by their poverty: ‘I will not deign even to answer Mr Blatchford when he asks “how” a man born in filth and sin can live a noble life. I know so many who are doing it, within a stone’s throw of my own house in Battersea …’. Because the existence of the spiritual world ‘is a part of the common sense of all mankind’, Chesterton concludes his articles in defence of Christianity by wickedly imagining what would happen if Blatchford’s philosophy were ever to prevail:
Man, the machine, will stand up … and cry aloud, ‘Was there not once a thing, a church, that taught us we were free in our souls? Did it not surround itself with tortures and dungeons in order to force men to believe that their souls were free? If there was, let it return, tortures, dungeons and all. Put me in those dungeons, rack me with those tortures, if by that means I may possibly believe it again.9
If it was necessary to have the Inquisition to preserve the idea of free will and therefore human responsibility and to escape from the materialistic determinism of Blatchford, then so be it. The defence of free will was certainly Chesterton’s main contention in his controversy with Blatchford. As he says in the Autobiography, he was engaged not in ‘abstract theological’ questions (‘I was not yet so far gone in orthodoxy as to be so theological as all that’) but in ‘defending’ what seemed to him ‘a plain matter of ordinary human morals’—namely, the concept of free will and responsibility. Indeed, it was ‘common sense’ that was most disturbed by this kind of scepticism, which strikes ‘direct at the heart of this our human life’.10 Nevertheless, Chesterton’s articles and letters against Blatchford are also a defence of Christianity, and Catholic Christianity in particular.
2
Chesterton’s childhood friend Annie Firmin, whom his mother had hoped he would marry, was also now living in a flat at Overstrand Mansions. She had got married the previous year in 1903. Her engagement elicited an all too rare letter from Chesterton, undated as usual and written from a restaurant. He claimed that he had often thought of her, although he had never written her a line. This failure he explained as ‘part of the Mystery of the Male, and you will soon, even if you do not already, get the hang of it, by the society of an individual who while being unmistakably a much better man than I am, is nevertheless male’. Humorously, if disingenuously, he argued that men put off doing what they want to do so as they can do it as well as possible: ‘I put off writing to you because I wanted to write something that had in it all that you have been, to me, to all of us. And now instead I am scrawling this nonsense in a tavern after lunch.’ The male sex, he continued, ‘very seldom takes real trouble’, ‘forgets the little necessities of time’, and ‘is by nature lazy’. He himself had ‘never wanted really but one thing in my life and that I got’. And now he observed ‘the same tendency’ in another person who, also being male, ‘also … has only wanted one thing seriously in his life. He also has got it: another male weakness which I recognise with sympathy’. His affection for Annie as an old family friend and his love for Frances are enhanced not diminished by the humour. It is the same point that he had made to Frances in his letters to her during their courtship and that he was to make so often in his writings: the comic is not the opposite of the serious. ‘All my reviewers call me frivolous… Damn it all (excuse me), what can one be but frivolous about serious things.’ Why? Because seriousness cannot cope with really serious things: ‘without frivolity they are simply too tremendous’. He ended by saying that he was not going to wish her happiness because he was ‘placidly certain’ that her happiness was ‘inevitable’: ‘I know it because my wife is happy with me and the wild, weird, extravagant, singular origin of this is a certain enduring fact in my psychology which you will find paralleled elsewhere.’ After she had married and come to live at Overstrand Mansions, Annie recalled an evening when Chesterton came round to their flat on his way to dinner at the House of Commons with a shoe on one foot and a slipper on the other. Did it matter? Chesterton asked, when it was pointed out to him. ‘I told him I was sure Frances would not like him to go out like that—the only argument to affect him!’11
Frances Chesterton’s diary for 1904, which she began on 18 January and continued until 16 July 1905, shows how her husband’s success as a critic and journalist had opened the doors of society to them, and not only literary society. She begins the diary by noting that she has no intention of writings the ‘memoirs’ that her husband had suggested she should write when she was feeling ‘flat or tired’—‘the very moments when other people’s memoirs are impossible to read and one’s own impossible to write’. However, she did ‘mean to (weather permitting, for everything in my mental world depends on that) note down any small matters of interest to myself, try and recall occasional conversations, mention people I meet … remembering always that on no account is this book to be made use of in print…’. And now that she had enjoyed ‘two fine days after weeks of grey depression’, she felt ‘energy in commencing this labour of Hercules’. Unlike her husband, who enjoyed rain and grey skies, Frances felt a new person ‘because the sun is shining’, which made her feel ‘warm with the thought of all I have, warmer with the thought of all I am going to have and warmest of all with the thought that Love thought well to include me in his list of favoured persons’.12 Reading between the lines, it seems clear that the husband, who was so totally dependent on his wife for the practical side of life, had suggested that Frances should write her memoirs to distract her from her depression and that the depressive wife depended on his love for the emotional side of life.13 The first entry for 18 January records ‘an amusing lunch at Max Beerbohm’s’. On 1 February they dined at the Fisher Unwins, Chesterton’s old employer. The entry for 17 February is revealing about Frances’s refusal to be impressed by famous people, which Chesterton had noted with approval in his days of courtship: of an ‘at home’ at the house of Sir Sydney Colvin and his wife, she writes: ‘It was rather jolly but too many clever people there’, who included Joseph Conrad and Henry James, ‘to be really nice’. A few days later Chesterton was the guest of the publisher John Lane at a literary dinner at which he and Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scouts, were the speakers. On 5 March the Chestertons gave ‘a little dinner party on our own account’; one of the guests was Laurence Housman the writer and dramatist, and brother of Chesterton’s old teacher at University College, A. E. Housman. A week later they went to a ‘grand dinner party’, where the guests included the Liberal politicians Charles Masterman and Herbert Samuel, the latter of whom would loom large in Chesterton’s life when the Marconi scandal broke.14
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March 1904 saw the publication of a new book that marked a return to the art criticism with which Chesterton had begun his career as a journalist. G. F. Watts was published by Duckworth in their ‘Popular Library of Art’ series. The painter’s wife wrote ‘a charming note’ to say that her husband was ‘really pleased with the little book’.15 With one important exception, most of the book’s interest lies not in what Chesterton has to say about Watts but in what he has to say by way of general observation. He begins the book by remarking on the extraordinary way in which ‘a period can suddenly become unintelligible’. He is thinking, of course, of the Victorian period that had only ended so recently and yet already seemed a world away. Born in that era himself, Chesterton was to become its great champion and interpreter. He sees Watts as an example of the Victorians’ ‘attitude of devouring and concentrated interest in things which were by their own system, impossible or unknowable’. Agnostic in religion, they nevertheless were far from indifferent. When they ceased to believe in creeds, they did not, like Chesterton’s contemporaries, fall back upon materialism, but ‘fell in love with abstractions and became enamoured of great and desolate words’. They continued to believe in and preach ‘an eternal message and destiny’ with total certainty of its truth. Because they were
‘ingrainedly ethical’, the idea of art for art’s sake was as meaningless to them as the idea of religion for religion’s sake.16
Inevitably, Chesterton finds paradox in Watts: the paradox of a ‘union of small self-esteem with a vast ambition’. It was in fact ‘the great paradox of the Gospel’—although ‘meek’, he, Watts, claimed to ‘inherit the earth’. Watts also, according to Chesterton, shared his, Chesterton’s, fundamental philosophy—that ‘illimitable worship and wonder directed towards the fact of existence’, the optimism that believes not that ‘this is the best of all possible worlds’ but that it is ‘the best of all possible things that a world should be possible’. It was this sense of wonder, this optimism that had led Chesterton, if not Watts, to Christianity. But Watts’s Victorian seriousness, his inability not to take morality seriously, did mean that he was ‘dogmatic as all sane men are dogmatic’—he ‘draws the line somewhere, as all men, including anarchists, draw it somewhere’. However, the necessity of dogma in the sense of drawing a line, of defining, did not mean for Chesterton that the ‘meaning’ of a work of art could be defined in words. This in itself presupposed ‘the perfection of language’, which he thought lay ‘at the root of rationalism’, the idea that one can express plainly in words one’s meaning when ‘language is not a scientific thing at all, but wholly an artistic thing’.17 It is noticeable that, apart from the favourable references to Christianity, Chesterton himself does not hesitate to use the language of sacramental Catholicism when he says that a ‘Carlylean’ like Watts thought that ‘the great man’ or ‘hero’ was ‘a man more human than humanity itself’ and in ‘worshipping him you were worshipping humanity in a sacrament’.18