by Ian Ker
In her distress, Frances Chesterton turned to Father O’Connor. She wrote on 25 August:
I have to write in great trouble. My dear brother was found drowned at Seaford a few days ago.
It is a terrible shock to us all—we were so happy about him. He seemed to have quite recovered from his terrible illness. But he sought death himself and I pray that God has given him the peace of heart and mind which we who loved him so could never give.
She was going the next day to see the Catholic priest at Newhaven about the funeral, for Knollys was a convert to Catholicism. Although the newspaper report of the inquest did not mention this, Frances had apparently discovered that her brother had been to Mass on the morning of Sunday 16 August before seemingly killing himself in the evening.21 To Father O’Connor’s letter of condolence, Frances replied: ‘Thank you for your comforting words. You will remember my brother in your prayers at Mass—I know.’22 Three years before O’Connor had told her that he had often said Mass not only for Knollys but for her and her husband.23 And she had thanked him for writing to Knollys: ‘please don’t be put off by any rebuff and encourage him when you can.’24
So desperate was Frances that it seems she tried to find solace briefly in spiritualism, attending a couple of séances in the hope of making contact with her beloved brother,25 much to the disapproval of her husband, who wrote a poem called ‘The Crystal’ in which he deplored his wife ‘Staring for spirits in a lump of glass’, a poem he naturally chose never to publish.26
As is the way with tragedies, good did come out of it for both husband and wife. According to ‘Keith’ Chesterton, Frances had already been agitating to leave London. And one evening after dinner at a famous London restaurant, suddenly after midnight Chesterton announced to his brother and ‘Keith’, ‘Frances wants to leave London’. The idea seemed ‘fantastic’, as though it had been suggested that Dr Johnson should move to the Cotswolds. Chesterton and London seemed as inseparable. His parents, who were Londoners through and through, were horrified. The truth, according to ‘Keith’, was that Frances could not bear Fleet Street. It was not just the irregularity of a journalist’s life that upset her; it was the ‘whole atmosphere’ that was ‘alien to her. The bars and wine shops, the desultory meetings, queer associates, the perpetual, never-ending talk …’. Anyway she was not interested in newspapers and disliked the press tout court. But apart from all that and her husband’s late nights when Frances would be alone in the flat, the truth was that her husband’s life in Fleet Street affected her directly in a way that would not have appealed to many wives. As ‘Keith’ recounts in her memoir of the family, Chesterton’s Fleet Street associates would also socialize in the flat at Overstrand Mansions, where late in the evening they would resort to the small kitchen ‘where mounds of sausages were eaten and pints of beer consumed and the talk grew better and better’. Yet this was not a Fleet Street tavern but Frances’s home, and perhaps to her the talk did not grow ‘better and better’. As a great procrastinator, her husband might have been able to shelve the issue indefinitely. But then came the suicide of Knollys: ‘She insisted that they must leave London permanently, and fearful of the effect of a refusal on her state of mind, and because he loved her with a great and unfailing devotion, he consented…’.27
What ‘Keith’ did not know—for she would surely have been quick to pounce on any weakness in Frances—was that Chesterton was worried about more than the shock Frances had suffered from her brother’s suicide. Suicide was worse than the accidental death of Gertrude: there was bound to be guilt that his family had failed Knollys. Any sister would have felt the same. However, much more serious for her husband was the fear that she too might conceivably take the same path, given her own depressive nature, of which her husband was well aware. Certainly she had good reason to be depressed: not only was there her brother’s suicide, but there was also the inability to have a baby. Then, too, she suffered a good deal of pain from rheumatism of the spine, which had long afflicted her.28
2
On 10 September 1908, fifteen days before the publication of Orthodoxy, a collection of Chesterton’s essays in the Illustrated London News, called All Things Considered, together with an introductory essay, appeared. Many years later the author dedicated a different kind of collection to the writer, editor, and publisher E. V. Lucas, who had himself earlier published a couple of selected volumes of Chesterton’s writings. In his dedication, Chesterton thanked him for his ‘friendly advice’, which had often helped him bring ‘something like order into the chaos of my articles, and especially in the most thankless task of all, in providing such a nameless anarchy with a name’. He had Lucas to thank for the ‘excellent’ title All Things Considered, ‘probably the only really witty words in the book’, as well as for making ‘the extravagant demand’ for A Shilling for my Thoughts, another selection Lucas had made a few years later. These titles (which were ‘better’ than his essays), Chesterton had written earlier to Lucas, would suggest to any future biographer or bibliographer, ‘if they find any trace of me at all’, that, from such ‘fragments left by this now forgotten writer’, there was ‘reason to believe that he was not without certain fugitive mental gifts’ (even though it was now ‘difficult to understand the cause even of such publicity as he obtained in his own day’). In the later dedication, he confessed to Lucas: ‘Somehow I always feel a fool… when I consider myself in a literary light … except when I am arguing with people. Then it is always they who are indefensible’. But he did claim some credit in the matter of titles for his own collection of articles called Tremendous Trifles—though even that was ‘only too magniloquent and… a mournful example of that taste for alliteration which is one of my worst vices’.29
The introductory essay to All Things Considered begins with one of those Chestertonian paradoxes that are likely to irritate the reader: ‘It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous’. But humour, of course, is a very serious theme in Chesterton’s writings, even if, without rather more explanation, the paradox here seems merely flippantly clever. Humour is an important reason why Chesterton thought the ‘hilarious’ masses superior to the solemn intellectuals: ‘When once you have got hold of a vulgar joke, you may be certain that you have got hold of a subtle and spiritual idea,’ for to see the joke is to see ‘something deep’, which can be expressed only ‘by something silly and emphatic’. Thus silly jokes about people sitting on their hats ‘refer to the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy’. The ‘vulgar comic papers’ so despised by the intellectuals ‘are so subtle and true that they are even prophetic’. And it seemed obvious to Chesterton that ‘the literature which the people studies’ was much more informative sociologically than the sociological ‘literature which studies the people’. Even the ‘best of the intellectuals of to-day thought that the masses regarded the woman as ‘the chattel of her lord, like his bath or his bed’. But in the ‘comic literature’ of ‘the mass of the democracy’ it is the lord who ‘hides under the bed to escape from the wrath of his chattel’. The ‘higher culture’, which was ‘worse even than philanthropy’, was totally without ‘democratic sympathy’. And it did not understand that ‘the more serious is the discussion the more grotesque should be its terms’, for if ‘a thing is universal it is full of comic things’. And it was ‘the test of a good philosophy whether you can defend it grotesquely. It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.’ We have to ‘defend grotesquely what we believe seriously’, since ‘all grotesqueness is itself related to seriousness’: ‘The fall of roofs and high buildings is taken seriously. It is only when a man tumbles down that we laugh. Why do we laugh? Because it is a grave religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.’ After all, man occupies an ‘extraordinary position’ in the world and ‘is an exception, whatever else he is’. Man is an animal, but he is not simply an animal; he is spiritual, but he is n
ot simply spiritual: ‘His body has got too much mixed up with his soul, as we see in the supreme instance of sex’. The same is true of alcohol: when man wants an alcoholic drink, it does not necessarily mean that he wants alcohol: ‘The real case against drunkenness is not that it calls up the beast, but that it calls up the Devil’. Animals do not drink, but then neither do they get drunk, and ‘in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene’.30
The masses in Chesterton’s view are superior to the intellectuals in common sense as well as humour: ‘If there is one class of men whom history has proved especially and supremely capable of going quite wrong in all directions, it is the class of highly intellectual men. I would always prefer to go by the bulk of humanity; that is why I am a democrat’. Again, it is the despised masses that have won England its wars: ‘The Battle of Waterloo was won by the stubbornness of the commonsoldier—that is to say, it was won by the man who had never been to Eton’, ‘won on the village green’ not on the playing fields of Eton. Chesterton is in no doubt that it is the dread of the masses that is responsible for the fact that ‘this is the first time, perhaps, in the whole history of the world in which things can be praised because they are unpopular’. Artists in the past ‘did not declare themselves great artists, because they were unsuccessful: that is the peculiarity of our own time, which has a positive bias against the populace’. Modern intellectuals were ‘mystagogues’, ‘a new sort’ of ‘aristocracy’.31
Several favourite topics of Chesterton crop up in these selected essays. Most prominent is the question of drink, already touched upon. The temperance movement, which was to achieve victory in the United States with Prohibition, is a pet target. It is, Chesterton declares, a form of ‘religious persecution’, since it is an attempt to coerce one’s fellow citizens in accordance with one’s own ‘religion or philosophy’ rather than the ‘religion of the democracy’. It is particularly directed against the masses, as prohibitionists ‘systematically act on an ethical assumption entirely unfamiliar to the mass of the people’. They were attempting ‘to force upon them a Mohamedan morality which they actively deny’. Temperance reform was also against civilization, which ‘merely means the full authority of the human spirit over all externals’, as opposed to barbarism, which ‘means the worship of those externals in their crude and unconquered state’. For temperance reform called ‘the problem of human intemperance the Problem of Drink’, which was ‘an inverted form of fetish worship; it is no sillier to say that a bottle is a god than to say that a bottle is a devil’. It was also an example of another barbarian trait of the times, ‘the disposition to talk about material substances instead of about ideas’. At least it was preferable to speak of drink to alcohol, which was, ‘to judge by the sound of it, an Arabic word, like “algebra” and “Alhambra”, those two other unpleasant things’. The real answer to the ‘Drink Problem’ was not to drive drink underground but to give it on the contrary a high profile. If a public house were a really public place like a post office or railway station, through which
all types of people passed … for all types of refreshment, you would have the same safeguard against a man behaving in a disgusting way in a tavern that you have at present against his behaving in a disgusting way in a post-office: simply the presence of his ordinary sensible neighbours. In such a place the kind of lunatic who wants to drink an unlimited number of whiskies would be treated with the same severity with which the post office authorities would treat an amiable lunatic who had an appetite for licking an unlimited number of stamps.
If drinking were thus made ‘open and official we might be taking one step towards making it careless’. And in such a matter, ‘to be careless is to be sane: for neither drunkards nor Moslems can be careless about drink’.32
Other familiar Chestertonian themes are only briefly touched on in this volume. It was ‘incomprehensible’ how ‘any thinker can calmly call himself a modernist; he might as well call himself a Thursdayite’. The English ‘boast’ of their ‘anomalies’ and ‘illogicality’, and of their consequent practicality, is very dangerous, for anomalies and lack of logic in fact ‘do a great deal of harm’ and ‘accustom the mind to the idea of unreason and untruth’. To resist injustice, for instance, requires thinking it ‘absurd’, in other words contrary to reason, not merely ‘unpleasant’. It is optimists not pessimists who are the ‘practical reformers’, because they look at a wrong ‘with a startled indignation’, whereas the pessimists see ‘only a repetition of the infamy of existence’. The purpose of education is to ‘to restore simplicity’, ‘to unlearn things’, in order that people may ‘see things as they are’, a view that is clearly connected with the philosophy of wonder. Nationalism is good if only because it enables one to be ‘international’ as opposed to ‘cosmopolitan’. England and Scotland are nations, but ‘What is Britain? Where is Britain? There is no such place’. England has an aristocracy in place of a religion—’The nobility are to the English poor… the poetry of life’—and also in place of a government, since, as a political anomaly, there is a ‘contradictory constitution’, which the aristocracy is relied upon to interpret with ‘good humour”. Science cannot disprove religion: ‘How could physical science prove that man is not depraved? You do not cut a man open to find his sins. You do not boil him until he gives forth the unmistakable green fumes of depravity. How could physical science find any traces of a moral fall?’ How could a scientist ‘expect to find a fossil Eve with a fossil apple inside her?’ How could a scientist ‘suppose that the ages would have spared for him a complete skeleton of Adam attached to a slightly faded fig-leaf?’ The central idea in fairy tales is that ‘peace and happiness can only exist on some condition’, that ‘all happiness hangs on one thin veto; all positive joy depends on one negative’. This idea is ‘the core of ethics’, and also of Judaeo-Christianity: ‘A man and woman are put in a garden on condition that they do not eat one fruit: they eat it, and lose their joy in all the fruits of the earth.’33
3
In the chapter of the Autobiography called ‘The Crime of Orthodoxy’, Chesterton reminds his readers that he had been ‘brought up among people who were Unitarians and Universalists’, such as the Revd Stopford Brooke, at whose feet he had sat. These were people who thought that, ‘because God was in His heaven, all must be right with the world; with this world or with the next’. But there was an opposite agnostic or atheist tendency ‘in what was called the emancipation of faith from the creeds and dogmas of the past’, which held that ‘it was very doubtful if there was any God in any heaven, and that it was so certain to the scientific eye that all is not right with the world, that it would be nearer the truth to say that all is wrong with the world’. The first progressive tendency ‘led into the glorious fairyland of George Macdonald, the other led into the stark and hollowed hills of Thomas Hardy’. The first insisted that ‘God must be supremely perfect if He exists; the other that, if He exists, He must be grossly imperfect’. Now what was odd was that these two schools of thought, the one blithely optimistic and the other darkly pessimistic, were ‘practically in combination’, although they were ‘logically in contradiction’. For a long time Chesterton could not understand why they seemed to be ‘in the same camp’, until he realized that they were ‘only connected by the convention of unconventionality’.34