by Ian Ker
The heart of humanity, especially of European humanity, is certainly much more satisfied by the strange hints and symbols that gather round the Trinitarian idea, the image of a council at which mercy pleads as well as justice, the conception of a sort of liberty and variety existing even in the inmost chamber of the world. For Western religion has always felt keenly the idea ‘it is not well for man to be alone’.
The doctrine that ‘bewilders the intellect utterly quiets the heart’. Very different is the religion of Islam: ‘out of the desert, from the dry places and the dreadful suns, come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real Unitarians who with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world. For it is not well for God to be alone.’ Or again, on the question of salvation, it is considered liberal to believe that salvation is ‘inevitable’—but ‘it is not specially favourable to activity or progress’. For the Buddhist, ‘existence … must end up in a certain way. But to a Christian existence is a story, which may end up in any way.’ That is why, Chesterton enjoys adding, it is very like the despised ‘popular fiction’ of the masses—and if ‘you say that popular fiction is vulgar and tawdry, you only say what the dreary and well-informed say about the images in the Catholic churches’.52 Indeed, life is actually ‘very like a serial story in a magazine: life ends with the promise (or menace) “to be continued in our next”’. For, ‘with a noble vulgarity, life imitates the serial and leaves off at the exciting moment. For death is distinctly an exciting moment.’ Life is an ‘exciting’ story ‘because it has in it so strong an element of will, of what theology calls free will’—which is why ‘Christendom has excelled in the narrative romance’. As for the liberal ‘attempts to diminish or explain away the divinity of Christ’, what is certain is that the alleged divinity is ‘terribly revolutionary’. And here paradox rises to an extraordinary theological intensity and penetration, a paradox to which he would only dare to allude briefly in The Everlasting Man:
That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have His back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point—and does not break…. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, ‘Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.’ No: but the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God.
Chesterton boasts that there has never been ‘another god who has himself been in revolt’; and atheists will never find another god ‘who has ever uttered their desolation’, for there is ‘only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist’.53
The reason why Chesterton believes in orthodox Christianity is the same reason why an unbeliever does not believe; and it is the same reason, as Chesterton knew, that Newman gives. In both cases, the evidence lies ‘in an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts’ that ‘converge’. But are the unbeliever’s ‘facts’ true in fact? Above all, the stereotyped idea of Jesus Christ does not in the least resemble the man Chesterton encounters in the Gospels, as he explains in a passage that startles the reader’s imagination into seeing a figure he has long looked at, or thought he looked at, only to see for the first time:
Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god—and always like a god.
Christ had even a literary style of his own, not to be found, I think, elsewhere; it consists of an almost furious use of the a fortiori. His ‘how much more’ is piled one upon another like castle upon castle in the clouds. The diction … used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea. Morally, it is equally terrific; he called himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them. That he used even wilder words on the side of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also, if anything, rather increases the violence. We cannot even explain it by calling such a being insane; for insanity is usually along one consistent channel. The maniac is generally a monomaniac. Here we must remember the difficult definition of Christianity already given; Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may blaze beside each other. The one explanation of the Gospel language that does explain it, is that it is the survey of one who from some supernatural height beholds some more startling synthesis.54
Among the many converging facts that convince Chesterton of the truth of orthodox Christianity is the existence of miracles. Yet
an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have doctrine against them.
And the democratic Chesterton who believes in the common man rather than the Superman adds: ‘The open, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder.’ Similarly, if a peasant’s story about a ghost is dismissed, it is dismissed ‘either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism—the abstract impossibility of miracles.’ Another reason Chesterton has for believing in Christianity is that ‘the Christian Church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me tomorrow.’ The Christ who dies on the cross still teaches:
Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be like to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture tomorrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast.
When Chesterton gives the ideal of virginity as an example of the Church teaching him something he knows nothing about, it is hard not to believe that this living Christian Church was already for Chesterton the Roman Catholic Church. At any rate, this living Christian Church ‘has revealed itself as truth-telling thing. All other philosophies say the things that plainly seem to be true; only this philosophy has again and again said the thing that does not seem to be true, but is true. Alone of all creeds it is convincing where it is not attractive …’. One such unattractive doctrine is the doctrine of original sin: indeed, it is the ‘primary paradox of Christianity… that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality’. And this doctrine ‘has one special application to the ultimate idea of joy’. For
it has to be part of the Chestertonian philosophy of wonder that ‘it is not native to man’ to be ‘sad’: ‘Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.’ But the unbeliever cannot experience joy at a universe without meaning or purpose, but only pleasure in transient things. And Chesterton ends this chapter and the book with a passage as startling to the imagination as that at the end of the previous chapter, as a Christ we had never before seen we now see for the first time.
Joy… is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.55
5
The rumour had been that the Chestertons were intending to live on the Yorkshire moors, a reasonable guess in view of their fondness for the area and the fact that they would be close to their friends the Steinthals and Father O’Connor. When Chesterton eventually revealed their destination to his brother, it seemed something of an anti-climax. ‘Frances wants to go to Beaconsfield,’ Cecil reported to ‘Keith’, according to her account. “‘Why—Beaconsfield?” I asked, and Fleet Street echoed the query.’ ‘It was, and is,’ ‘Keith’ commented scornfully, ‘a clean, bright place, inhabited by the wives and families of City men—solicitors, stockbrokers and the like, who return for bed and breakfast every evening and enjoy full board on Sundays.’ It was, the ultimate insult, a suburban ‘dormitory, but little more’. It was certainly not a place for intellectuals, being hardly ‘a centre of mental activity or creative idea’. The proper countryside with proper peasants would have been far more acceptable:
‘Now,’ said Cecil, ‘if Frances had taken Gilbert to a village it would have been quite different. Labourers, ploughmen and poachers have a grip on fundamentals—food and marriage, God and the land; all the things that really matter. They can think, you know, and argue. How Gilbert would enjoy sitting in a jolly local, talking to the country folk and drinking country ale.’
Keith’ thought that the local pub and ale were not Frances’s scene—even if less hateful than Fleet Street, which she hated ‘with an ice-cold detachment, unmitigated by her husband’s meteoric journalistic success or the unstinted praise which applauded his work, or even the considerable income he made by it’. Until the tragic death of Frances’s brother, Chesterton had succeeded in shelving the issue of their leaving London:
He would dwell on how in ripe old age they would retire to an oak-timbered cottage on a wold or a weald—descriptively delightful but geographically vague—and once … they took the train to Buckinghamshire in search of such a paradise. Frances had buns and tea, Gilbert consumed bread and cheese and ale in a jolly old inn, which he always swore they found at Beaconsfield.
‘Keith’ and Cecil ‘one irresponsible Saturday’ looked for that inn, which they never found, although they searched the roads with their neat suburban villas many times and passed along the last remnants of the fine old village High Street, flanked by an extremely up-to-date hotel’. Nevertheless Frances, Keith’ scornfully remarked, was apparently taken by ‘the vision’, and began to look for a house there.56
Chesterton’s own recollection was that, while they were living in Kensington immediately after they were married, one day they strolled out … for a sort of second honeymoon, and went upon a journey into the void, a voyage deliberately objectless’.
I saw a passing omnibus labelled Hanwell’ and, feeling this to be an appropriate omen, we boarded it and left it somewhere at a stray station, which I entered and asked the man in the ticket-office where the next train went to. He uttered the pedantic reply, Where do you want to go to?’ And I uttered the profound and philosophical rejoinder, Wherever the next train goes to.’ It seemed that it went to Slough; which may seem to be singular taste, even in a train. However, we went to Slough, and from there set out walking with even less notion of where were going. And in that fashion we passed through the large and quiet cross-roads of a sort of village, and stayed at an inn called The White Hart. We asked the name of the place and were told that it was called Beaconsfield (I mean of course that it was called Beconsfield and not Beaconsfield), and we said to each other, ‘This is the sort of place where some day we will make our home.’57
The White Heart still stands in old Beaconsfield, the original village, and the original sixteenth-century inn has become a hotel. The Chestertons were married in 1901, and ‘Keith’ and Cecil obviously had no reason to visit Beaconsfield before hearing the news of the impending move in 1909, and indeed may not have made the visit till well after the move; by then the inn that Chesterton talked of may have become the ‘up-to-date hotel’ which ‘Keith’ refers to. But even if it was already a hotel when the Chestertons visited it, Chesterton was justified in referring to the old inn that still stood there.
7
Shaw and Beaconsfield
1
IN April 1905 Chesterton had replied, in his weekly column in the Daily News on three consecutive Saturdays, to an attack by George Bernard Shaw on Shakespeare for writing for popular appeal and for money. It was the beginning of an argument mostly about politics and religion that lasted for a number of years, which they conducted not only in print but in live debates and eventually in the new medium of the wireless. It was also the beginning of a friendship between the two sharply contrasting opponents, the thin, vegetarian, teetotal Shaw and the fat, carnivorous, bibulous Chesterton.
Chesterton’s first article on 15 April was headed ‘The Great Shawkspear Mystery’. The problem with Shaw, Chesterton pronounced, was that he was too ‘serious to enjoy Shakespeare’, indeed ‘too serious properly to enjoy life’. Both Shakespeare and life were ‘illogical where he is logical, chaotic where he is orderly, mystical where he is clear’. Apart from failing the Chestertonian test of ‘sanity’ by being over serious and over logical and unmystical, Shaw also did not understand ‘exuberance, an outrageous excess of words, a violent physical pleasure in mere vocabulary, an animal spirit in intellectual things’. The inevitable connection with Dickens is made—but, to a modern writer like Shaw, Shakespeare is even more incomprehensible, for Renaissance writers ‘were sometimes so exuberant and exultant in their mere joy of existence that their mirth is not even obvious… These giants are shaken with a mysterious laughter. They seem torn by the agony of jokes as incommunicable as the wisdom of the gods.’ It was ‘this almost animal joy of self-expression’ that Shaw fatally lacked. Shaw could ‘give a living and startling photograph of the prose of our existence’ because he lacked ‘an ear for its poetry’. He had ‘plenty of common sense’, which was ‘one half of human sanity’—but he was without the other half, ‘he has no common nonsense’.1
A week later Chesterton answered Shaw’s complaint that Shakespeare wrote ‘romantic nonsense’ because he found it ‘paid’. In fact, Shakespeare wrote romantic plays because he ‘enjoyed the same romance as the ordinary man, just as he enjoyed the same beer’. Shakespeare’s tastes were tho
se of the common man because he was ‘an ordinary man’ as well as ‘an extraordinary man’—whereas Shaw might be ‘as extraordinary a man as Shakespeare; but he is only an extraordinary man’. Shakespeare, like his heroes, was both. In his third column on the subject a week later, Chesterton rejected Shaw’s criticism of Shakespeare’s alleged pessimism. On the contrary, Shakespeare had ‘an atmosphere or spirit’ that was common before the advent of the Puritans, that of ‘the comic supernatural’. The modern world had ‘sad mysticism’ but not ‘farcical mysticism’—it had no conception of ‘any energies in the universe being actually merrier than we’.2
More than two years later on 7 December 1907, Hilaire Belloc published an article called ‘Thoughts about Modern Thought’ in the New Age, a radical Socialist journal edited by A. R. Orage. This was followed on 4 January 1908 by Chesterton’s article ‘Why I am not a Socialist’. He fully recognized the situation Socialism sought to remedy: ‘To say that I do not like the present state of wealth and poverty is merely to say I am not a devil in human form. No one but Satan or Beelzebub could like the present state of wealth and poverty.’ However, what he objected to in the typical socialist Utopia was that it made sharing rather than giving and receiving ‘the highest or most human of altruistic pleasures’. For what Socialists proposed was less significant than ‘the spirit in which it is proposed’: ‘When a great revolution is made, it is seldom the fulfilment of its own exact formula; but it is almost always in the image of its own impulse and feeling for life.’ In the event of a Socialist revolution, its ‘practical proposal’ might not be fulfilled, but its ‘ideal vision’ certainly would be. But where Chesterton differed not only from Socialists but also from anarchists, Conservatives, and Liberals was in his strong belief in ‘the mass of the common people’: ‘Caught in the trap of a terrible industrial machinery, harried by a shameful economic cruelty, surrounded with an ugliness and desolation never endured before among men, stunted by a stupid and provincial religion, or by a more stupid and more provincial irreligion, the poor are still by far the sanest, jolliest, and most reliable part of the community…‘. And what was certain, Chesterton declared, was that they hated and despised ‘the whole smell and sentiment and general ideal of Socialism’. Those things to which they were most attached, such as ‘the privacy of homes, the control of one’s own children, the minding of one’s own business’, were ‘opposite to the tone of most Socialists’. They had no desire for the kind of Socialism that ‘a handful of decorative artists and Oxford dons and journalists and Countesses on the Spree’ wished to impose on them. Not that Chesterton had any truck with capitalism: ‘It is the negation of property that the Duke of Westminster should own whole streets and squares of London; just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all living women in one great harem.’ And he ended by declaring that he was neither a Socialist nor a Tory because he had ‘not lost faith in democracy’.