by Ian Ker
Then his dubious eye roamed again to the white lettering on the glass front of the public-house. The young woman’s eyes followed his, and rested there also, but in pure puzzledom.
‘No,’ said Father Brown, answering her thoughts. ‘It doesn’t say “Sela”, like the thing in the Psalms; I read it like that myself when I was wool-gathering just now; it says “Ales”.’40
There is a further similarity with, or influence of, Dickens, the author of the unfinished detective novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood: ‘The quality of Chesterton’s work at its best, in the Father Brown stories, is comparable to that of Edwin Drood… full of suspense, sensation, genuine clues, red herrings, “atmosphere”, real mystery and spurious mystery.’41
Like Dickens, moreover, especially in Hard Times, Chesterton does not hesitate to introduce social criticism into his stories. The fact that his protagonist, Father Brown, is himself on the fringe of society as a Roman Catholic priest rather than a clergyman of the Established Church helps to encourage the reader to look critically at the English class system. As a religious nonconformist, Father Brown sees things that an outsider would not notice or pay any attention to. In ‘The Blast of the Book’, for instance, Professor Openshaw ‘was rather surprised to find Father Brown talking to the waiter… apparently about the waiter’s most private affairs’, for, although ‘he himself dined there about five times a week’, he ‘was conscious that he had never thought of talking to the man’. Here, too, the priestly dimension is also relevant in Father Brown’s pastoral concern, which gives him an intimate access to people that the ordinary detective would not have. At the end of the story, Father Brown explains the disappearance of Openshaw’s clerk: ‘because you had never looked at him in your life… You never found out even what a stranger strolling into your office could find out, in five minutes’ chat…’.42
Chesterton’s social criticism extends beyond the class system. Capitalism is satirized in ‘The Queer Feet’, where the existence of the ridiculous select club of The twelve True Fishermen’ is accounted for by the fact that in a plutocracy tradesmen become cunning enough to be more fastidious than their customers. They positively create difficulties so that their wealthy and weary clients may spend money and diplomacy in overcoming them.’ In this case the owner of the hotel, where the club meets, made nearly a million out of it, by making it difficult to get into’. The waiter, who comes to tell the members of the club that their silver fish service has disappeared, cannot bring himself to do so:
A genuine historic aristocrat would have thrown things at the waiter, beginning with empty bottles, and very probably ending with money. A genuine democrat would have asked him, with a comrade-like clearness of speech, what the devil he was doing. But these modern plutocrats could not bear a poor man near to them, either as a slave or as a friend.43
But a Socialist society is no more welcome, where, for example, chimney sweeps may get properly paid, but, as Father Brown puts it, where you are not allowed to own your own soot’.44
As a graphic artist himself, Chesterton puts his visual imagination to good effect, 45 for a mystery story requires that the writer evoke the right scene and atmosphere if the necessary element of suspense is to be created.46 He is particularly good at describing light and sky. In ‘The Dagger with Wings’, for example, the picture he paints produces the appropriate frisson:
The rolling country round the little town was sealed and bound with frost, and the sky was as clear and cold as steel, except in the north-east, where clouds and lurid haloes were beginning to climb up the sky. It was against these darker and more sinister colours that the house on the hill gleamed with a row of pale pillars… 47
Chesterton is especially interested in the colours of dawn and dusk,48 as another instance from The Green Man’ shows, where the briefest of pictures produces the required shudder at the beginning of the story:
The last of the sunset lay in long bars of copper and gold above the last dark strip of sea that seemed rather black than blue. But blacker still against this gleam in the west, there passed in sharp outline, like figures in a shadow pantomime, two men with three-cornered cocked hats and swords… 49
In the Father Brown stories, then, Chesterton makes his own very distinctive and original contribution to the genre of the detective story. They are not among his major writings, and they can hardly be called his ‘masterpiece’ compared with his great non-fictional prose works, let alone ‘a major classic of English literature’.50 Nevertheless, as highly readable short stories—and in general they are much more readable than the novels—they will no doubt continue to be the most popular of his writings.
3
Chesterton came to think that his travels at the beginning of the century, when he was engaged in political canvassing, over the southern countryside, that enormous area of noble hills and valleys which had seen so many vaster struggles in the past, reaching back to that aboriginal struggle of the Pagans and the Christians which is the genesis of all our history’, had implanted in his imagination the seeds of his longest and most ambitious poem:
such primitive things were probably already working their way to the surface of my own mind; things that I afterwards attempted to throw into very inadequate but at least more elemental and universal literary form. For I remember the faint and hazy inspiration that troubled me one evening on the road, as I looked beyond the little hamlet, patched so incongruously with a few election posters, and saw hung upon the hills, as if it were hung upon the heavens, remote as a pale cloud and archaic as a gigantic hieroglyph; the White Horse.51
In one of the essays in Alarms and Discursions, Chesterton mentioned how he had hired a car to go and visit in very rapid succession the battle-places and hiding-places of Alfred the Great’.52
Back in March of 1904, when Chesterton and Father O’Connor had walked over the moor from Keighley to Ilkley, Frances told the priest after lunch that Chesterton had already written a good deal of an Epic of Alfred’, which was to become The Ballad of the White Horse. O’Connor could see that she cherished it very carefully’ and that she was more in love with it than with anything else he had in hand’.53 However, Frances was later to say that Chesterton wrote the whole thing in a fortnight; that she gathered the sheets as he threw them on the floor; and that when they went through them all there was scarcely a correction to be made’.54 Frances must have been referring to a final draft of a poem that was already more or less written. Some stanzas had already been published in January 1911 in A Chesterton Calendar, which included unpublished as well as published writings; others from an early draft had been published in the Albany magazine in 1907. Father O’Connor remembered some stanzas being written just before dinner one evening in Yorkshire.55
Chesterton chose the Vale of the White Horse in Berkshire for the scene of King Alfred’s victorious battle of Ethandane, both because of the importance of the symbol of a white horse for him and also because the huge white horse etched out on the side of the Berkshire valley is prehistoric, and therefore symbolizes, as it were, an eternal England; in fact, the battle took place at Edington, near Froude in Somerset, about thirty miles to the west.56 The theme of the poem, published in August 1911, is the Christian king’s heroic resistance to the pagan Danish invaders. It is not only Christian civilization but civilization itself that is threatened by the barbarian invaders. For ‘The White Horse of the White Horse Vale’ itself, ‘cut of the grass’, which ‘knew England | When there was none to know’, has been ‘left to darken and fail’ by the Danish invaders, ‘because it is only Christian men | Guard even heathen things’. But Alfred warns his Christian followers that, ‘If ye would have the horse of old, | Scour ye the horse anew.’57 Conservation for Chesterton meant the opposite of conservatism:
All conservatism goes upon the assumption that if you leave a thing alone, you leave a thing as it is. But you do not. If you leave a thing to itself, you are leaving it to wild and violent changes… if you want a white horse, you must no
t leave it white… you must continually be painting it white… if you want your old white horse, you must have a new white horse.58
Not dissimilarly, the battle for Christian civilization is never won. Even after repulsing the Danes, Alfred knows that the threat of pagan barbarism is always there: I have a vision, and I know | The heathen shall return.’ But Alfred knew that victory would come through Christian humility. When, disguised as a beggar, he was offered a cake by a peasant woman if he would watch the fire, and then famously let the cake fall into the fire, the woman struck him across the face with the burnt cake. Instead of returning the blow, the king laughed the giant laughter of Christian men’ that is the antidote to pride. His Christian humility (‘For I am the first king known of Heaven | That has been struck by a slave’) he knows will conquer pagan pride: ‘This blow that I return not | Ten times will I return | On kings and earls of all degree…’.59
The Ballad, which many soldiers had with them in the trenches during the First World War, reached the height of its popular fame when The Times quoted from it at two pivotal points in the Second World War. First, the lines beginning I tell you naught for your comfort…’ were quoted at the end of The Times’s briefest ever first leader on the disastrous fall of Crete in May 1941; and then in November 1942 after the first British victory of the war at El Alamein, when Winston Churchill announced ‘the end of the beginning’, The Times quoted the lines’ “The high tide!” King Alfred cried. | “The high tide and the turn!”’60 In retrospect, critical opinion is not likely to differ from T. S. Eliot’s assessment in his obituary of Chesterton, in which he noted that the obituaries in the press ‘seem to me to have exaggerated Chesterton’s achievements in some obvious respects, and to have ignored his achievements in some more important ones’. Thinking presumably particularly of The Ballad of the White Horse and ‘Lepanto’, Eliot referred to Chesterton’s poetry as ‘first-rate journalistic balladry’. Eliot did not ‘suppose that he took it more seriously than it deserved’. On the other hand, Eliot considered that Chesterton had ‘reached a high imaginative level with The Napoleon of Notting Hill and higher with The Man who was Thursday, romances in which he turned the Stevensonian fantasy to more serious purposes’.61 Chesterton would not have been too pleased with this slighting reference to Stevenson, and he may have thought more of his poetry than Eliot suggests, but he would certainly have been gratified by the obituary’s high praise of his Charles Dickens.
The furore engendered by their book The Party System emboldened Belloc and Cecil Chesterton to found their own weekly magazine in June 1911, the Eye-Witness, with the backing of a rich friend. For the first year it was edited by Belloc. When he grew weary of editing the paper, he handed it over to Cecil Chesterton. After nearly six months its financial backer went bankrupt. Cecil secured financial backing from his father and renamed the paper the New Witness. He proposed that ‘Keith’ Jones, who supposed he was about to make his usual vain proposal of marriage, should be assistant editor, and she gladly accepted. His brother contributed first an occasional and eventually a weekly article. The paper had two aims: to fight for the individual’s freedom and liberty and to fight against corruption in public life. The Eye-Witness consequently opposed Lloyd George’s national insurance act of 1911 on the ground that it took away the liberty and personal responsibility of the poor. The welfare dependency that was to be the eventual unforeseen result of the welfare state shows that the paper had a point. G. K. Chesterton’s role in the paper was at first restricted to an occasional book review and some ballades, some of which he wrote in conjunction with Belloc, Bentley, and Maurice Baring, who was a member of the Baring banking family. Baring had supported Belloc’s forerunner to the Eye-Witness, the North Street Gazette—named after the street Baring lived in, where it was printed—which folded after only one issue in 1908. Baring, who was to write some highly successful novels depicting the high society of the time, was a linguist whose knowledge of Russia, where he had been the Morning Post’s correspondent, led to the publication in 1910 of Landmarks in Russian Literature; he is also credited with having introduced Chekhov to the West. He had been received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1909, having been impressed by a Mass he had been taken to in Paris when he was a diplomat attached to the embassy there. The well-known picture by Sir James Gunn, Conversation Piece, which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London, depicts Chesterton, Baring, and Belloc reputedly writing a ballade. On 21 September 1911 Chesterton’s ‘A Ballade of Suicide’, one of the best of his nonsense poems, was published in the Eye-Witness.62
The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall.
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours—on the wall—
Are drawing a long breath to shout ‘hurray!’
The strangest whim has seized me… After all
I think I will not hang myself today.63
In the issue of 12 October Chesterton published ‘Lepanto’, a much shorter historical ballad than The Ballad of the White Horse but on the same theme, the preservation of Christian civilization. Just as Chesterton is more successful in the restricted form of the short story as opposed to the novel, so the considerably more concentrated ‘Lepanto’ is a more dramatic and exciting ballad than the lengthy White Horse epic, which tends to drag and frequently lapses into obscurity. With its insistent refrain (and variations on) ‘Don John of Austria is going to the war’, the ballad must have been much easier to recite in the trenches of the First World War than The Ballad of the White Horse. On 21 June 1915 Chesterton was to receive a gratifying note from John Buchan saying: ‘The other day in the trenches we shouted your Lepanto.’64 According to Father O’Connor, Chesterton got the idea of writing ‘Lepanto’ from the conversation in the train already referred to,65 when they were on their way back to Ilkley from Leeds, where they had both been taking part in a debate at which Chesterton had spoken in favour of the motion that all wars are religious wars. O’Connor had told the story of how Philip II of Spain had been assembling his Armada to invade England, and could therefore spare only two ships for the Christian fleet under Don Juan of Austria that had been assembled to confront the menace of the Ottoman Empire. In the event, the outnumbered fleet of Don Juan won a decisive victory over the fleet of Ali Pasha in 1571. O’Connor had told of how the Pope spent the day in prayer, and of ‘his vision of the crisis of the action at three in the afternoon, with his vision of the victory about the time of the Angelus’. The story could hardly help but appeal to Chesterton, and O’Connor claimed that the poem was published on 7 October, the anniversary of Lepanto, although it was actually five days later.66
On 29 May 1911 Shaw had addressed a Cambridge university debating society called the ‘Heretics’ at the Victoria Assembly Rooms in Cambridge on ‘The Religion of the Future’. Invited to respond by the same society, Chesterton agreed to speak on ‘The Future of Religion’. It had become a popular practice to invite the two famous speakers separately to address the same subject. Thus, for instance, in August Chesterton had been invited to speak on the subject of cremation in response to a lecture by Shaw praising the practice as opposed to the alleged superstition of burial. Chesterton’s answer was that Christian burial was ‘a humane and religious’ recognition that ‘the flesh is a sacred thing’ that does not cease to be sacred when life has left it. But, if modern pagans wanted to cremate, let them at least cremate in style like the pagans of old:67
If I had been a Heathen,
I’d have piled my pyre on high
And in a great red whirlwind
Gone roaring to the sky.
But Higgins is a heathen,
And a richer man than I;
And they put him in an oven,
Just as if he were a pie.68
There was an audience of between 800 and 900 for Chesterton’s November Cambridge lecture at the Gui
ldhall, with few empty seats.69 As usual, Chesterton was late in arriving, explaining that he had asked his cab-driver to go slowly so that he might enjoy the sights of Cambridge and also prepare what he was going to say.70 He had been sent the pamphlet containing Shaw’s lecture, and the hurriedly scribbled notes in it suggest that the lecture may well indeed have been prepared in the cab. Inside the pamphlet Chesterton wrote: ‘It has taken about 1800 years to build up my religion. It will not take 18 minutes to destroy Mr Shaw’s. 71 According to the report in the Cambridge Daily News, Chesterton began by dismissing the complaint that Shaw had been blasphemous: one could only be blasphemous in a Christian country, which England was not. That was why it oppressed the poor, undermined marriage, and revived pagan practices such as slavery by banning strikes and infanticide by encouraging eugenics. Because Nietzsche was ‘entirely off his head’ he ‘had that peculiar lucidity that belonged to the insane’ and saw that God had died in the middle of the eighteenth century. ‘That was perfectly true, only the Christian God was used to dying and rising from the dead.’ Shaw had argued that ‘we must have a God because we must believe in a purpose in the Universe’. But to say that we must help a God to exist who does not yet exist was like five orphaned children saying they must create a mother who did not exist—‘there was a certain slip in the logic of the observation’. For there was ‘no such thing as trying to exist’, since one had to exist in order to try. As for the Christian religion, it was founded on the two principles of reason and liberty. Finally, if, he, Chesterton, had to choose between Shaw’s religion and old-fashioned atheism, he would choose the latter. During question time, it was put to the speaker that one can know only things for which one has scientific proof. But did not the questioner know that he existed? asked Chesterton. No, he only had an intuition. ‘Cherish it,’ replied Chesterton to laughter. On the subject of hell, ‘as he could not speak from personal experience, he regarded it as a thing to be avoided.’ He admitted that the Roman Catholic Church was possibly nearer the truth than the Orthodox and Anglican Churches. He had always believed in the possibility of miracles, even before he was a Christian, as he had never been able to see ‘why spirit should not alter matter’. Asked about the excommunication of the Modernist Jesuit Father George Tyrrell, Chesterton replied that he would expect to be asked to resign from the National Liberal Club if he denied Liberal principles.72 The question and answer session lasted, very unusually, for more than an hour.73