by Ian Ker
‘Talk about love… till the world is sick of the word. But don’t you talk about Christianity. Don’t you dare to say one word, white or black, about it. Christianity is, as far as you are concerned, a horrible mystery. Keep clear of it, keep silent upon it, as you would upon an abomination. It is a thing that has made men slay and torture each other; and you will never know why.’
But hearing the word ‘Love’ pronounced with the ‘intonation’ of a Tolstoyan idealist rekindles the determination of MacIan, whose friendship with the like-minded Turnbull—who agrees, unlike the modern world, that ‘God is essentially important’—has been growing apace, to fight the duel: ‘Give up vows and dogmas, and fixed things, and you may grow like That.’61 As Chesterton put it, with one of his most brilliant paradoxes, many years later in one of his Illustrated London News columns, people who boast that they live by ‘the spirit of Christianity’ rather than by its dogmas in fact keep ‘some of the words and terminology, words like Peace and Righteousness and Love; but they make these words stand for an atmosphere utterly alien to Christendom; they keep the letter and lose the spirit’.62
Father O’Connor bought a copy of the novel in London and took it to Beaconsfield to be inscribed by the author. Chesterton arrived ten minutes late for lunch, having written a lengthy inscription in verse, that begins:
This is a book I do not like,
Take it away to Heckmondwike,
A lurid exile, lost and sad
To punish it for being bad.
You need not take it from the shelf
(I tried to read it once myself:
The speeches jerk, the chapters sprawl,
The story makes no sense at all)
Hide it your Yorkshire moors among
Where no man speaks the English tongue.
But the verses end on a more hopeful note:
Take then this book I do not like—
It may improve in Heckmondwike.63
About the time the novel appeared, Chesterton had given a lecture at Coventry when he was seen by a couple of Roman Catholic priests at the station bookstall, who asked him if the rumour was true that he was thinking of joining the Church. He replied that it was a question that was giving him ‘a great deal of agony of mind’, and he asked the priests to pray for him. Father O’Connor remembered how in the late spring, he thought, of 1912, after he and Chesterton had taken part in a debate in Leeds, as they were travelling in the train to Ilkley, Chesterton suddenly interrupted him by saying out of the blue that he had made up his mind to become a Roman Catholic, but he was waiting for Frances to make the same decision, as it was she who had brought him to Christianity. He explained: ‘Because I think I have known intimately by now all the best kinds of Anglicanism, and I find them only a pale imitation.’ In fact, this conversation must have taken place in 1911 prior to the publication of Chesterton’s ballad ‘Lepanto’, as, according to O’Connor, it was what he said on this occasion about the significance of the Battle of Lepanto that gave Chesterton the idea of writing the poem.64 When Chesterton fell seriously ill in 1914, and O’Connor came to visit him, he was able to explain to Frances the mysterious hints her husband seemed to be dropping, of which she ‘could not make head or tail’, by telling her of the conversation that had taken place in the train.65
In March 1910 the Daily Star newspaper published a photograph of Chesterton with the headline, ‘Mr Gilbert K. Chesterton to be a parish constable.’ When interviewed by the paper, Chesterton did not know that his name had been put forward for what was only an honorary post, and thought there must have been a mistake: ‘It would be a good thing for the criminal,’ he joked. Other newspapers carried the story, one with a cartoon depicting Chesterton as a helmeted and truncheon-wielding constable, while another speculated that the constable would enjoy arresting Shaw for speeding through Beaconsfield. A newspaper in Montreal also picked up the story: ‘The Police Station at Beaconsfield would become the thinking centre of the Empire. The lock-up system would probably be put aside in favour of a new system of street conversation. If Mr Chesterton should lock up an offender he would probably try to convince him that he was really being set at liberty.’66
In June 1910 Chesterton published What’s Wrong with the World.67 It went through six editions within two months.68 His central argument is that to change the world does not mean ignoring the past and looking only at the future, and assuming that the past cannot be restored. On the contrary, he argues, all revolutions are really restorations, which is one reason why he is ‘doubtful about the modern habit of fixing eyes on the future’—namely, because ‘all the men in history who have really done anything with the future have had their eyes fixed on the past’. To see ‘fate and futurity as clear and inevitable’ is to be turned to stone—like the Calvinists with their ‘perfect creed of predestination’ or modern eugenists, who, however, make ‘amusing’ rather than ‘dignified’ statues unlike the Calvinists. Chesterton ridicules the so-called courage of those who attack tradition: ‘There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother.’ In fact, the ‘only true freethinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be.’ In particular, he has no time for ‘the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can’.” The trouble with modern thinkers is that they are reactionaries, ‘for their thought is always a reaction from what went before’. They are ‘always coming from a place, not going to it’. What Chesterton is attacking is
the huge heresy of Precedent. It is the view that because we have got into a mess we must grow messier to suit it; that because we have taken a wrong turn some time ago we must go forward and not backwards; that because we have lost our way we must lose our map also; and because we have missed our ideal, we must forget it.
An obvious example is the Christian ideal, which ‘has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.’ It is not that people have ‘got tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of’. Another ideal that has not been found wanting but has not been properly tried is that of democracy, which ‘has in a strict and practical sense been a dream unfulfilled’. But then ‘the world is full of these unfulfilled ideas, these uncompleted temples’. And Chesterton concludes: ‘History does not consist of completed and crumbling ruins; rather it consists of half-built villas abandoned by a bankrupt-builder. This world is more like an unfinished suburb than a deserted cemetery.’ 69
There is the recurring insistence on the human need for limitation. The ‘joy of God’ is ‘unlimited creation’, but
the special joy of man is limited creation, the combination of creation with limits. Man’s pleasure, therefore, is to possess conditions, but also to be partly possessed by them; to be half-controlled by the flute he plays or by the field he digs. The excitement is to get the utmost out of given conditions; the conditions will stretch, but not indefinitely.
Thus, for instance, the pleasure of owning property depends on the property being limited, for a property-owner ‘cannot see the shape of his own land unless he sees the edges of his neighbour’s. It is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem.’ So-called free love is a contradiction in terms: ‘a man cannot be a free lover; he is either a traitor or a tied man.’ There have to be limitations to sexual love in view of ‘the earthquake consequences that Nature has attached to sex’. Any kind of pleasure must have limitations attached to it, since ‘in everything worth having… there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived, so that the pleasure may revive and endure’. The last
of the examples Chesterton gives is surprising and may well have autobiographical significance: ‘The joy of battle comes after the first fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore of learning him; the glow of the sea-bather comes after the icy shock of the sea bath; and the success of the marriage comes after the failure of the honeymoon.’ The limitation of vows, laws, and contracts are all ‘ways of surviving with success this breaking point, this instant of potential surrender’. Limitation indeed comes with life itself, for we are limited by our bodies: ‘Each human soul has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation. Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.’ Then again there is no such thing as limitless intellectual freedom: ‘There are two things, and two things only, for the human mind, a dogma and a prejudice.’ In other words, every thought depends on some conviction, whether it be a dogma or a prejudice. The idea, then, that one can have a dogma-less education is absurd: ‘Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It is education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.’ Chesterton thought the real object of education was to restore that Wordsworthian sense of wonder at the world with which we are born (‘when we see things for the first time we feel instantly that they are creative fictions; we feel the finger of God’):
There was a time when you and I and all of us were all very close to God; so that even now the colour of a pebble (or a paint), the smell of a flower (or a firework), comes to our hearts with a kind of authority and certainty; as if they were fragments of a muddled message, or features of a forgotten face. To pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of life is the only real aim of education…70
The common man with his ordinary desires and pleasures is, as usual, a priority for Chesterton. He warns that, just as his ‘personal land has been silently stolen ever since the sixteenth century’, so now his ‘personal liberty is being stolen’, ‘piece by piece, and quite silently’. There is a marvellously indignant, satirical passage in which Chesterton charts his descent from owning his own house and a strip of land to his confinement to the workhouse:
[He] has always desired the divinely ordinary things; he has married for love, he has chosen or built a small house that fits like a coat… And just as he is moving in, something goes wrong. Some tyranny, personal or political, suddenly debars him from the home; and he has to take his meals in the front garden. A passing philosopher (who is also, by a mere coincidence, the man who turned him out) pauses, and leaning elegantly on the railings, explains to him that he is now living that bold life upon the bounty of nature which will be the life of the sublime future. He finds life in the front garden more bold than bountiful, and has to move into mean lodgings in the next spring. The philosopher (who turned him out), happening to call at these lodgings, with the probable intention of raising the rent, stops to explain to him that he is now in the real life of mercantile endeavour; the economic struggle between him and the landlady is the only thing out of which, in the sublime future, the wealth of nations can come. He is defeated in the economic struggle, and goes to the workhouse. The philosopher who turned him out (happening at that very moment to be inspecting the workhouse) assures him that he is now at last in that golden republic which is the goal of mankind; he is in an equal, scientific, Socialist commonwealth, owned by the State and ruled by public officers; in fact, the commonwealth of the sublime future.
Secular Calvinism like that of the Socialist Shaw led, Chesterton thought, to ‘a singular depression about what one can do with the populace’—that is, the masses—for the Calvinist sees them as predestined from eternity and ‘merely filling up [their] time until the crack of doom’. Far from being ‘intensely thrilling and precious’, their life is seen as ‘automatic and uninteresting’, for, while Shaw and his followers ‘admit it is a superstition that a man is judged after death, they stick to their central doctrine, that he is judged before he is born’. This explains their ‘strange disembodied gaiety about what may be done with posterity’ through their ‘sociology and eugenics and the rest of it’.71
Finally, the rise of the suffragette movement leads Chesterton to some conservative but radical thoughts on women. On the one hand, he defines the absolutely crucial difference between men and women as the fact that women not men give birth:
Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous sex superiority, that even the male child is born closer to his mother than to his father. No one, staring at that frightful female privilege, can quite believe in the equality of the sexes. Here and there we read of a girl brought up like a tom-boy; but every boy is brought up like a tame girl. The flesh and spirit of femininity surround him from the first like the four walls of a house; and even the… most brutal man has been womanized by being born. Man that is born of a woman has short days and full of misery; but nobody can picture the obscenity and bestial tragedy that would belong to such a monster as man that was born of a man.
Then again, Chesterton argues, a woman at home is at an advantage over a man at work, because she is not limited to ‘one trade’ but may cultivate ‘twenty hobbies’:
Women were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary, they were kept at home in order to keep them broad. The world outside the home was one mass of narrowness, a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse of monomaniacs. It was only by partly limiting and protecting the woman that she was enabled to play at five or six professions…
The manifold variety of tasks the wife and mother is called upon to perform ‘might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it’. The feminist, on the other hand, he defines as ‘one who dislikes the chief feminine characteristics’. And one of these characteristics, Chesterton considers, is to ‘regard a vote as unwomanly’.72
On 18 June 1910, the same month as the publication of What’s Wrong with the World, ten thousand women marched from the Embankment to the Albert Hall, demonstrating for a vote for women and carrying a banner inscribed ‘From Prison to Citizenship’. Chesterton’s reaction is famous: ‘Ten thousand women marched through the streets of London saying: “We will not be dictated to,” and then went off to become stenographers.’ Four years earlier he had admitted in an interview that the question of women’s suffrage was the one question on which he was undecided: if the majority of women wanted the vote, then he thought they should have it, in spite of his reservation that women should not want to be like men.73
In November 1910 Chesterton published another collection of his Daily News articles called Alarms and Discussions, as well as another volume for the Popular Library of Art on William Blake. In one of these Daily News columns, he addresses that favourite topic of contemporary intellectuals, the growth of population and the urbanization of England. Contrary to the received wisdom, he argued that there was ‘not the slightest objection, in itself, to England being built over… any more than there is to its being (as it is already) built over by birds, or by squirrels, or by spiders’. There was, of course, an objection to overpopulation—‘If whenever I tried to walk down the road I found the whole thoroughfare one crawling carpet of spiders, closely interlocked, I should feel a distress verging on distaste.’ But Chesterton explicitly rejects the intellectuals’ aversion for the masses: ‘It is not humanity that disgusts us in the huge cities; it is inhumanity. It is not that there are human beings; but that they are not treated as such.… It is not the presence of people that makes London appalling. It is merely the absence of the people.’ He then rejoices in that very phenomenon of suburbia that so distressed the intellectuals:
Therefore, I dance with joy to think that my part of England is being built over, so long as it is being built over in a human way at human intervals and in a human proportion. So long, in short, as I am not myself built over… I do not want the nearest human house to be too distant to see; that is my objection to the wilderness. But neither do I want the nearest human house to be too close to see; that is my objection to the modern
city.
The landscape of the countryside itself anyway was created by human beings: ‘It is not only nonsense, but blasphemy, to say that man has spoilt the country. Man has created the country; it was his business, as the image of God.’ Chesterton also tackles head-on another pet prejudice of the intellectuals, mass tourism: ‘Why does the idea of a char-à-banc full of tourists going to see the birthplace of Nelson or the death-scene of Simon de Montford strike a strange chill to the soul?’ Contempt for the masses always aroused his strongest indignation:
If there is one thing more dwarfish and pitiful than irreverence for the past, it is irreverence for the present, for the passionate and many-coloured procession of life, which includes the char-à-banc among its many chariots and triumphal cars. I know nothing so vulgar as that contempt for vulgarity which sneers at the clerks on a Bank Holiday or the Cockneys on Margate sands.
Far from ‘commonplace crowds’ and ‘antiquities’ not going together, Chesterton argues the opposite is true: ‘For the truth is that it has been almost entirely the antiquities that have normally interested the populace; and it has been almost entirely the populace who have systematically preserved the antiquities.’ Besides, antiquities like cathedrals ‘were meant, not for people more cultured and self-conscious than modern tourists, but for people much rougher and more casual’. Contrary to the advice of Ruskin, the ‘true way of reviving the magic of our great minsters and historic sepulchres’ was ‘not to be more careful’ of them but ‘to be more careless of them’. There was another consideration, naturally of no interest to ‘modern artistic cathedral-lovers’, the fact that the people went originally to cathedrals to pray: ‘these two elements of sanctity and democracy have been socially connected and allied throughout history.’ In one essay in the book Chesterton explicitly castigates those he calls ‘Intellectuals’ as ‘a blight and desolation’, who like to dismiss the masses’ ‘strange preferences’ as ‘prejudices and superstitions’, and who despise their ‘slang and rude dialect’. A country girl who saw the sea for the first time and likened it to cauliflowers may not have been talking about it in the ‘appreciative’, that is ‘bookish’, way of intellectuals, but she was talking ‘pure literature’. The ‘appreciative’ way of looking at the sea was to stress its boundlessness and ‘infinity’, but the simile of the cauliflower conveyed ‘the opposite impression, the impression of boundary and of barrier’: ‘So far from being vague and vanishing, the sea is the one hard straight line in Nature. It is the one plain limit; the only thing that God has made that really looks like a wall.… the one straight line; the limit of the intellect; the dark and ultimate dogma of the world.’74