by Ian Ker
There are other familiar themes in the essays. The medieval ‘idea of a sense of humour defying and dominating hell’ is praised because ‘terror must be fundamentally frivolous’. And the hell of the ego is especially defied by humour, which ‘is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game’. It is because joking is ‘undignified’ that ‘it is so good for one’s soul’.75 ‘Hilarity,’, he wrote elsewhere, ‘involves humility’, and being undignified is ‘the essence of all real happiness’. There is, he insisted, ‘an alliance between religion and real fun’; whereas Socialist like pagan utopias ‘have all one horrible fault. They are all dignified.’ For religion ‘is much nearer to riotous happiness than it is to the detached and temperate types of happiness in which gentlemen and philosophers find their peace’. Without religion, humour is impossible anyway since it involves humility: ‘No man has ever laughed at anything till he has laughed at himself.’76 Chesterton delighted in the thought that the soul might be ‘rapt out of the body in an agony of sorrow, or a trance of ecstasy; but it might also be rapt out of the body in a paroxysm of laughter’: ‘Laughter has something in it in common with the ancient winds of faith and inspiration; it unfreezes pride and unwinds secrecy; it makes men forget themselves in the presence of something greater than themselves…’77 For ‘laughter… is an elemental agony, shaking the jester himself…’.78 Religion itself required laughter: ‘you can be a great deal too solemn about Christianity to be a good Christian … you must have mirth. If you do not have mirth you will certainly have madness.’ 79 You will also have pride, to which humour is ‘the chief antidote’.80
Chesterton’s love for that unloved thing, the English weather, is celebrated in one article in Alarms and Discussions. Writing in the midst of a terrible English summer, he provokes his readers by declaring:
But for my part I will praise the English climate till I die—even if I die of the English climate. There is no weather as good as English weather. Nay, in a real sense there is no weather at all anywhere but in England…. Only in our own romantic country do you have the strictly romantic thing called Weather; beautiful and changing as a woman. The great English landscape painters… have this salient characteristic: that the Weather is not the atmosphere of their pictures; it is the subject of their pictures. They paint portraits of the Weather. The Weather sat to Constable. The Weather posed for Turner…
The English weather is notoriously variable, but it was this very variability that Chesterton enjoyed so much—like the variability of women which he considered one of their virtues: ‘It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem.’ Even the dreaded greyness of the English sky was not uniform, as it seems to its native observers, but full of exciting variability: ‘One day may be grey like steel, and another grey like dove’s plumage. One may seem grey like the deathly frost, and another grey like the smoke of substantial kitchens.’ As a descriptive writer who was also an artist, Chesterton was particularly interested in depicting colours, especially the constantly varying colours of the English sky, and that was a reason why he liked the colour grey: ‘rich colours actually look more luminous on a grey sky, because they are seen against a sombre background and seem to be burning with a lustre of their own.’ Then, again, the colour that people referred to as ‘colourless’ had this advantage: ‘that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of existence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation and promise. Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour… So we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself…’81
In another article about Beaconsfield being ‘built over’, Chesterton returned to the subject of the building that was going up around him in Beaconsfield, but this time it gave him an opportunity to celebrate ‘domesticity’, ‘one of the wildest adventures’. The idea was obviously related to the view of woman’s primary role as being primarily that of housewife, which he had expressed in What’s Wrong with the World. The sight of the ‘open staircases’ of a half-built house indicates why domesticity is far from being ‘tame’: ‘every such staircase is truly only an awful and naked ladder running up into the Infinite to a deadly height.’ Householder, tiler, and roof-mender alike are each ‘a sort of domestic mountaineer’, climbing to ‘a point from which mere idle falling will kill a man; and life is always worth living while men feel they may die’. Again, we encounter the Chestertonian philosophy of wonder as we are made to see the awful implications of a staircase: ‘How sublime and, indeed, almost dizzy is the thought of these veiled ladders on which we all live, like climbing monkeys!’ Back from his walk of inspection of the ‘skeleton’ of the half-built house, Chesterton climbs the staircase in his own house: ‘I climbed the stairs stubbornly, planting each foot with savage care, as if ascending a glacier. When I got to a landing I was wildly relieved, and waved my hat.… Believe me, it is only one of the wild and wonderful things that one can learn by stopping at home.82
William Blake, published in November 1910, was a companion volume to Chesterton’s earlier volume in the Popular Library of Art on Watts. His philosophy of limitation, which he was also later to apply to his discussion of Stevenson’s fiction, is here invoked for appreciating Blake, who ‘was a fanatic on the subject of the firm line’, and would no more have tolerated Impressionism, which Chesterton equates with ‘scepticism’, than Chesterton did. This ‘decision of tint and outline’ belonged, ‘not only to Blake’s pictures, but even to his poetry’. And when one calls Blake a mystic, insists Chesterton, one is not saying he is ‘mysterious’, for a mere ‘verbal accident has confused the mystical with the mysterious’. Far from being ‘vague’, the mystic ‘does not bring doubts or riddles: the doubts and riddles exist already’. After all, ‘the ‘mystery of life’ was ‘the plainest part of it’. The mystic, therefore, was not someone ‘who makes mysteries’ but someone ‘who destroys them’. The ‘explanation’ offered by the mystic may be true or false, but it was ‘always comprehensible’: even though it was not ‘always comprehended’, there was always something to ‘be comprehended’ and ‘even when [the mystic] was himself hard to be understood, it was never through himself not understanding: it was never because he was vague or mystified or groping, that he was unintelligible’. There was ‘one element always to be remarked in the true mystic, however disputed his symbolism’, and that was ‘its brightness of colour and clearness of shape’. For, continues Chesterton, ‘the highest dogma of the spiritual is to affirm the material’.83 It was a point he had already made in one of the essays in Alarms and Discussions, when he maintained that true religion was always sacramental:
it is always trying to make men feel truths as facts; always trying to make abstract things as plain and solid as concrete things; always trying to make men, not merely admit the truth, but see, smell, handle, hear, and devour the truth. All great spiritual scriptures are full of the invitation not to test, but to taste; not to examine, but to eat. Their phrases are full of living water and heavenly bread, mysterious manna and dreadful wine. Worldliness, and the polite society of the world, has despised this instinct of eating; but religion has never despised it.84
And so for Blake, God ‘was not more and more vague and diaphanous as one came near to Him’, but ‘was more and more solid as one came near’. And the closer one came to God, the more it was clear that God was a ‘person’, a ‘fact’, and not the ‘impersonal God of the Pantheists’: ‘God is merely light to the merely unenlightened. God is a man to the enlightened.’ Indeed, for Blake, God was ‘more solid than humanity’, ‘the ideal… not only more beautiful but more actual than the real’. Chesterton summarizes Blake’s philosophy as ‘primarily the assertion that the ideal is more actual than the real’. Blake set imagination against nature, which, unlike imagination, ‘had no outline’. For imagination did not mean for Blake ‘something sh
adowy or fantastic, but rather something clear-cut, definite, and unalterable’—that is, ‘images; the eternal images of things’.85
Unfortunately, Blake was also a spiritualist in the most ‘vulgar’ sense. The difference between mysticism and spiritualism was the ‘difference between having a real religion and having a mere curiosity about psychic marvels’. The spiritualist who invokes supernatural beings does so ‘only because they are supernatural’, not because they are necessarily ‘good or wise or helpful’. Spiritualism was like spirits—it provided ‘excitement’ but not ‘satisfaction’. Nor was Blake’s mysticism always admirable—it could become ‘separated from the people’, thanks to ‘the element of oligarchy and fastidiousness in the mystics and masonries of that epoch’. Christian mysticism, on the other hand, was of its essence democratic: ‘The Christian mysteries are so far democratic that nobody understands them at all.’ Chesterton distinguishes between Christian and oriental mysticism. The latter aspires to ‘an insane simplicity’, to perfection by ‘simplification’ and the eradication of individuality. Against ‘all this emasculate mysticism’, which holds that, ‘as a man climbs higher and higher, God becomes to him more and more formless, ethereal, and even thin’, Blake ‘rears his colossal figure and his earthquake voice’, passionately reiterating ‘that the more we know of higher things the more palpable and incarnate we shall find them; that the form filling the heavens is the likeness of the appearance of a man’. This is the fundamental difference between Christian and Eastern mysticism: ‘the idea that personality is the glory of the universe and not its shame.’ There was, however, a third kind of mysticism, a ‘healthier heathen mysticism, which did not shrink from the shapes of things or the emphatic colours of existence’. This ‘solid and joyful occultism’ was to be found ‘at its boldest and most brilliant’ in Blake. Chesterton himself, however, was convinced that ultimately there were only the two alternatives, ‘utter pessimistic scepticism’ or ‘the Catholic creed’.86
8
Father Brown and the Marconi Scandal
1
THE most important review of Orthodoxy had been that of Wilfrid Ward, the son of W. G. Ward, the enfant terrible of the Oxford Movement and subsequently the Ultramontane critic of Newman. The younger Ward, however, was to publish, four years after the publication of Orthodoxy, a deeply sympathetic intellectual biography of Newman, in which he did his best to distance his hero from the Catholic Modernists who liked to claim him as their forebear.1 In his review, Ward appreciated Chesterton as the successor of Newman as an apologist for Christianity, noting the similarity with Newman’s own account of reasoning in the Grammar of Assent. Classing Chesterton with such thinkers as Burke, Butler, and Coleridge, he wrote: ‘His pages are marked by the freshness and often by the insight of genius.’2 Chesterton for his part was grateful for Ward’s ‘most sympathetic critique… at a time when many of his world must have thought it a piece of rowdy paradox. He laid down the excellent critical test; that the critics could not understand what he liked, but he could understand what they disliked. “Truth can understand error; but error cannot understand Truth.” ‘3
Chesterton had as a result become a regular guest at the Wards’ London and country houses. One hot summer weekend at Lotus, the Wards’ home in Surrey, Chesterton was delighted to hear the comment of an aristocratic lady, who had been a disciple of the German historian Döllinger, who was excommunicated after the First Vatican Council for refusing to accept the definition of papal infallibility, that she had to have the same religion as her washerwoman and that the Modernist Father Tyrrell’s religion was not the religion of her washerwoman. That was a crucial test for Chesterton, too: a religion that was not the religion of the common man was not a real religion. On this occasion, Chesterton was offered a wicker chair as they sat in the sunshine on the terrace, but he opted for the grass since otherwise ‘there was grave danger he might unduly “modify” the chair’. The Wards, like their daughter Maisie Ward, Chesterton’s first biographer, regarded Chesterton as ‘the greatest man of the age’.4 For his part, Chesterton admired Wilfrid Ward’s life of Newman, considering that he had ‘achieved something quite other and stronger than self-effacement… He was anything but merely receptive… he could … be strongly co-operative with another’s mind. His intellectual qualities could be invisible because they were active, when they were the very virile virtues of a biographer which are those of a friend.’5
When the Wards were in their house in London they liked to invite their friends to meet the great Chesterton at lunch. At one of the first of these lunch parties, at which Chesterton’s favourite, albeit Conservative, politician George Wyndham, himself a great admirer of Chesterton, was present, Maisie Ward remembered Chesterton ridiculing partial social reforms: to gain only half a reform was like gaining half a cow—and what use was half a cow to anyone? He commented on the paradox that, while Christianity was ‘mystical and full of paradoxes’, the West was much more practical than the East, which was ‘so logical and clear’ in its religion. When the question arose as to the nature of Englishness, Chesterton’s two examples of the archetypal Englishman were, unsurprisingly, Johnson and Dickens.6
That lunch was probably in 1911, the year when Chesterton was elected through Ward’s ‘kindness’ to the Synthetic Society, ‘which was justly proud of its continuity with the Society in which the great Huxley could debate with the equally great Ward’. Chesterton was surprised by how few ‘literary men’ there were in a society ‘devoted to philosophy; except Wilfrid Ward himself, who was an excellent editor and expositor’. There was a loud noise heralding the late arrival of Chesterton at his first meeting—‘a figure enormous and extended, a kind of walking mountain but with large rounded corners’. Depositing his coat and stick ‘with a fresh crash’, ‘he sat, eager and attentive… filling up the whole space at the bottom of the table, drawing caricatures of the company on a sheet of foolscap, a memorable figure,’ Ward reported to Wyndham, ‘very welcome to me, but arousing the fury of the conventional and the “dreary and well-informed”’, who were convinced that he would ‘ruin the society and ought never to have been elected’. Ward thought Chesterton would be an even more suitable member of ‘The Club’ that Dr Johnson had founded; but here he met with less success, having only Wyndham’s enthusiastic support. The fact that Chesterton rivalled its founder in his conversation failed to ensure his election to a club that had unfortunately become socially exclusive.7
There was an obvious bond between Wyndham and the Chestertons on account of their Anglo-Catholicism, but Wyndham’s deeply spiritual wife, Lady Grosvenor, also greatly impressed them. ‘She always showed a most moving curiosity about where I had picked up this passion for what is called Mariolatry in this Protestant land; and I could assure her with truth, though without any complete explanation, that I had had it in some form from boyhood.’ According to Maisie Ward, the Chestertons at this time were ‘much in contact with the extreme Anglo-Catholic group in the Church of England’ and became friendly with Lady Grosvenor’s friend, Father Philip Waggett of the Cowley Fathers, who may have become Chesterton’s confessor.8 On the Chestertons’ second visit to Lotus, after The Ballad of the White Horse had been published, Wyndham told the company of ‘his habit of “shouting” the ballad “to submissive listeners”’. The company ‘hoped for the same treat. But Gilbert got the book and kicked it under his chair defying us to recover it.’ On this occasion he remarked to the granddaughter of a duke: ‘You and I… belong to the jolly old upper Middle Classes.’ No doubt, he thought he was paying the aristocratic lady a compliment. But apart from being proud of belonging to the middle class, class distinctions meant nothing to Chesterton.9
It was also at the Wards’ house, ‘that great clearing-house of philosophies and theologies’, that Chesterton first met the Conservative politician Lord Hugh Cecil. The meeting affected Chesterton both politically and religiously. His realization of how much he had in common with Wyndham had already made him
sceptical about the party system, but when he saw how little Cecil had in common with Wyndham his scepticism was confirmed. And, secondly, it was Cecil’s ‘perfect and solid Protestantism’ that ‘fully revealed to me that I was no longer a Protestant’. Cecil, thought Chesterton, was probably the only ‘real Protestant’ left, which was why he startled the world he lived in every now and again by ‘a stark and upstanding defence of the common Christian theology and ethics, in which all Protestants once believed. For the Protestant world in England today is a very curious and subtle thing’: ‘while it is naturally a little disturbed by a Protestant accepting Catholicism … [it] is far more terribly disturbed by any Protestant who still preserves Protestantism.’10