by Ian Ker
Apart from his tendency to be late, even sometimes not to arrive at all, Chesterton’s worst fault as a lecturer was to begin by telling his audience, which had paid to hear him, that he had not prepared his lecture. This was not literally true: what was true was that he had not prepared it as much as he might have, and that he would have put more effort into it had it been a newspaper article. Sometimes he would begin by saying that he had left his notes in the cab; this would raise a laugh, and enable him to get off the subject he was supposed to be lecturing on—not that possession of his notes ever deterred him from straying from his topic. What he was good at was the cut-and-thrust of debate and the opportunity for repartee in the question time that followed the lecture. Asked once what he would do if he were prime minister, he responded, ‘If I were Prime Minister I should resign.’ On another occasion, a questioner enquired whether he had considered what the Reformation had done for Germany. The answer was terse: ‘It did for Germany.’ Some people could be irritated by his constant references to his weight, which, like his sense that he was not properly prepared for a lecture, indicated a certain self-consciousness. But it gave him the opportunity for some good jokes. When his late arrival was once politely greeted by the fear that he had been involved in a traffic accident, he replied: ‘Had I met a tramcar, it would have been a great, and if I may say so, an equal encounter.’ During the First World War he was once angrily asked, ‘Mr Chesterton, why aren’t you out at the front?’ Quick as a flash he replied: ‘Go round to the side, Madam, and you’ll see that I am.’ Once at a Distributist meeting he was told that he seemed to be enjoying himself: ‘I always enjoy myself more than others, there’s such a lot of me that’s having a good time.’ But he could startle as well as amuse. Debating once in Dublin, he took out the large Texan knife he always carried in his pocket with a view to sharpening his pencil—to the dismay of his opponent but to the delight of his audience, who roared their encouragement—‘Have at him!’ He never lectured from a text, but would come armed with notes on scraps of paper (if he had not left them behind in the cab), which he was likely to dispense with altogether as he got into his stride.74
At the end of October 1911, Shaw had written to Chesterton about a proposed debate between them. A reassuring note was struck before the letter began: ‘Dont [sic] be dismayed: this doesnt [sic] need a reply.’ Shaw did not think there was any need to have any strict rules for the debate, involving as it did three friends, Chesterton, himself, and Belloc in the chair—who ‘we both want… to let himself go’ and who anyway would not bother about rules of procedure even if he knew what they were. Shaw ended with: ‘My love to Mrs Chesterton, and my most distinguished consideration to Winkle. To hell with the Pope!’75 Delighted with the friendly tone of Chesterton’s Cambridge lecture, Shaw now invited him to lunch to make arrangements for the debate.76
The debate took place at the Memorial Hall in London on 30 November. Shaw began by defining Socialism as the equal division of wealth. In reply, Chesterton said that he was a democrat, as Shaw certainly was not, and that he believed in the absolute right of personal property as opposed to state ownership. Shaw replied that he wanted property to be equally distributed in the form of money so that everyone could have some. Chesterton in turn responded that what he objected to in Shaw’s Socialism was that it was remarkably like the Capitalism it sought to replace: the only difference was that the state would now dole out the wages instead of the employer. What was required in place of Capitalism was the largest possible distribution of property. Shaw objected that, as a Socialist, he believed in the equal distribution of property. But this was, of course, somewhat disingenuous, as Chesterton pointed out, since Socialism had always been understood to mean state ownership of the means of production.77 Chesterton could not fail to be popular with an audience, whereas Shaw commanded admiration but not affection. The Cavalier Chesterton and the Puritan Shaw were certainly two sharply contrasting figures:
Chesterton’s rolling good nature was obvious in his bulky swaying presence, the immense range of illustration he gave his simple ideas, his spirit of enjoyment and comic inventiveness. Shaw was less simple, more incisive, his emphatic eyebrows like two supplementary moustaches, an assured and wiry figure standing with arms folded who could speak with a force thrilling to all who heard it.78
That November was an important month in the domestic life of the Chestertons.79 The event that had led to Frances entering into negotiations to buy the field behind Overroads, where first a studio would be built and then their new home, Top Meadow, was a summer mini-picnic that Chesterton had suggested: ‘I want to read you something.’ As Frances and Mildred Wain, who was staying with them, lay on rugs eating gooseberries, Chesterton read aloud to them one of the first Father Brown stories. Suddenly breaking off from reading, he looked across at the field opposite and said that he would like to build a house on it. Frances replied that there was no reason why he should not when he had the money. Chesterton then added that he would like to build the house round a particular tree.80 Since the first of the Father Brown stories had been written only at the time of the move to Beaconsfield in the autumn of 1909, this conversation could have taken place in the summer of either 1910 or 1911. But, given that the first Father Brown story was published in July 1910 and given that Chesterton clearly wanted to give his wife and guest a surprise, as well as presumably to test their reaction, the exchange must have occurred earlier in that summer of 1910.
In the event the threat of a laundry being built on the field opposite was decisive.81 And in 1912 the Chestertons had a studio built on the field that they had bought, where Chesterton could lay on his beloved toy-theatre productions and puppet shows for children, and where parties could also be held for their older friends, at which Chesterton could enjoy dressing up and acting in the charades he so loved.82 Although the Chestertons were saved from the laundry, they were liable to be disturbed by noise from some local film studios, in connection with which Chesterton enjoyed telling a joke about how he had sent ‘several ineffectual letters of protest’, but ‘eventually asked his secretary to call upon the manager of the studios’: ‘Upon doing so, that lady made a strong protest saying emphatically, “The position is becoming impossible…Mr Chesterton can’t write,” to which the manager replied, “We were well aware of that.”’83
Chesterton was also a keen participant in local amateur drama. A neighbour called Margaret Halford, who had retired from the London stage to get married, was the leading light of Beaconsfield theatricals. One year she played Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Chesterton as Theseus. Like Lawrence Solomon, who had been a member of the Junior Debating Club at St Paul’s and was also now living in Beaconsfield, Mrs Halford was Jewish. Hearing that Chesterton was anti-Semitic, she had been wary of meeting him, although she had long been an admirer of his writings. They first met at the studio at an event to raise money for the local children’s convalescent home. She had felt ‘a certain constraint. But it was impossible to maintain this feeling. The benevolence and love in the air were unmistakable, and irresistible.’ Together they helped to found a dramatic society called the Players Club, of which Chesterton became the president, with Margaret Halford producing as well as acting.84
4
In February 1912 Chesterton published another novel, Manalive. The hero, Innocent Smith, is a man who really is a man alive, which is why society regards him as either mad or bad. Chesterton had begun work on the book while he was still at University College, London,85 and it is the most autobiographical of the novels he published. As a student at Cambridge, Smith had encountered the nihilism of Chesterton’s diabolist. His reaction was to flourish
a loaded firearm in the very face of a distinguished don… driving him to climb out of the window and cling to a waterspout. He had done it solely because the poor don had professed in theory a preference for non-existence. For this very unacademic type of argument he had been sent down. Vomiting as he was with revulsion, from the pe
ssimism that had quailed under his pistol, he made himself a kind of fanatic of the joy of life.
Not so silly as to embrace a naive optimism about life (‘men flee from the embrace of a great optimist as from the embrace of a bear’), Smith nevertheless solemnly revels in existence, as Chesterton puts it: ‘His eccentricities sprang from a static fact of faith, in itself mystical, and even childlike and Christian.’ For his ‘creed of wonder was Christian by this absolute test; that he felt it continually slipping from himself as much as from others’. He had to make extraordinary efforts ‘to keep alive the mere conviction that he was alive’: ‘Sometimes he would, of a sudden, treat his wife with a kind of paralysed politeness, like a young stranger struck with love at first sight. Sometimes he would extend this poetic fear to the very furniture; would seem to apologize to the chair he sat on, and climb the staircase as cautiously as a cragsman, to renew in himself the sense of their skeleton of reality.’ Laughter is the favourite Chestertonian weapon in the ceaseless battle: ‘He lashed his soul with laughter to prevent it falling asleep.’ Professing the paradox that ‘going right round the world is the shortest way to where you are already’, Smith is confronted with the sensible objection: ‘Is it not even shorter to stop where you are?’
‘No, no, no!’ he cried emphatically. ‘That way is very long and very weary. At the end of the world, at the back of the dawn, I shall find the wife I really married and the house that is really mine. And that house will have a greener lamp-post and a redder pillar-box. Do you,’ he asked with a sudden intensity; ‘do you never want to rush out of your house in order to find it?’
Like Chesterton himself, Innocent Smith is ‘so young that climbing garden trees and playing silly practical jokes are still to him what they once were for all of us’. Happy in his innocence, Smith has ‘the trick… of coveting his own goods’ rather than his neighbour’s, of enjoying ‘a hundred honeymoons’ just because ‘he loves one wife’. Smith’s secret is that ‘he had distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.’86
Chesterton’s own voice is often heard in the novel. There is the inevitable idea of limitation expressed in the form of an arresting and revealing paradox:
The truth is that when people are in exceptionally high spirits, really wild with freedom and invention, they always must, and they always do, create institutions. When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but while they are gay and vigorous they invariably make rules. This, which is true of all the churches and republics of history, is also true of the most trivial parlour game or the most unsophisticated meadow romp. We are never free until some institution frees us, and liberty cannot exist till it is declared by authority.
The revolutionary is a reactionary because he is interested in the past and not the future, like modern intellectuals such as Nietzsche and Shaw: ‘That is revolution—going right round. Every revolution … is a return.’ As for evolutionary theories, ‘All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing—and he won’t be missed either.’87
On 12 April 1912 Chesterton told a mass meeting at Church House that the trouble with England was that it had not had a civil war for so long. Looking out at his audience, though, he thought that one would be possible that night. The meeting had been organized by the Church Socialist League, with Conrad Noel presiding, during a miners’ strike. A procession then headed for Lambeth Palace to present a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Chesterton’s well-known hymn ‘O God of Earth and Altar’ was sung on this occasion (it had already been published in 1905 in The Christian Commonwealth88): ‘O God of earth and altar, j Bow down and hear our cry, j Our earthly rulers falter, j Our people drift and die…’.89
On 30 May 1912 Chesterton published his best-known satirical poem, ‘Antichrist, or the Reunion of Christendom: An Ode’, in the Eye-Witness. On 13 May F. E. Smith, the future Earl of Birkenhead, a Conservative backbencher on the Unionist wing of the party, had denounced in the House of Commons the bill for the disestablishment of the Anglican Church of Wales—a bill that the Liberal government had promised Lloyd George and their Welsh Nonconformist supporters—as a bill ‘which has shocked the conscience of every Christian community in Europe’. Smith must have regretted this incautious moment of pompous bombast when Chesterton used his ridiculous outburst as an epigraph to his crushing verses.
Are they clinging to their crosses,
F. E. Smith,
Where the Breton boat-fleet tosses,
Are they, Smith?
Do they, fasting, trembling, bleeding,
Wait the news from this our city?
Groaning ‘That’s the Second Reading!’
Hissing ‘There is still Committee!’
If the voice of Cecil falters,
If McKenna’s point has pith,
Do they tremble for their altars?
Do they, Smith?
Russian peasants round their pope
Huddled, Smith,
Hear about it all, I hope,
Don’t they, Smith?
In the mountain hamlets clothing
Peaks beyond Caucasian pales,
Where Establishment means nothing
And they never heard of Wales,
Do they read it all in Hansard
With a crib to read it with—
‘Welsh tithes: Dr Clifford answered.’
Really, Smith?
In the lands where Christians were,
F. E. Smith,
In the little lands laid bare,
Smith, O Smith!
Where the Turkish bands are busy,
And the Tory name is blessed
Since they haled the Cross of Dizzy
On the banners from the West!
Men don’t think it half so bad if
Islam burns their kin and kith,
Since a curate lives in Cardiff
Saved by Smith.
It would greatly, I must own,
Soothe me, Smith!
If you left this theme alone,
Holy Smith!
For your legal cause or civil
You fight well and get your fee;
For your God or dream or devil
You will answer, not to me.
Talk about the pews and steeples
And the Cash that goes therewith!
But the soul of Christian peoples…
Chuck it, Smith!90
F. E. Smith would hardly have been human if he did not derive some satisfaction as a counsel for the prosecution in the trial the following year of the brother of the poet who had tormented him with some of the most deflating satirical verse in the English language.
In October Chesterton published another selection of his Daily News columns, A Miscellany of Men. In one of these he put forward a new argument for the importance of limitation in the form of a creed or dogma: ‘an intellectual formula is the only thing that can create a communication that does not depend on mere blood, class, or capricious sympathy.’ Without this ‘liberty of dogma, you have the tyranny of taste’. Once an ‘original intellectual formula’ is rejected, ‘not only does the individual become narrow, but he spreads narrowness across the world like a cloud; he causes narrowness to increase and multiply like a weed’. Thus Socialism means state ownership of the means of production, but, if people who call themselves Socialists refuse to be ‘bound by what they call a narrow dogma’ and Socialism is taken to mean ‘far, far more than this’, then without the limitation of this ‘narrow economic formula’ Socialism can mean anything. Again, Puritanism was once a creed that united Puritans, but, now that the unifying ‘bond of doctrine’ has been broken, Puritans have to be identified by ‘certain social habits, certain common notions, both permissive and prohibitive, in connection with particular social pleasures’. When people pride themselves on ‘having got beyond creeds’, they end up with a paralysing ‘incapacity to get beyond catchwords’. For the truth is that people must ‘agree on a principle’ so that ‘
they may differ on everything else’. Chesterton was prophetic about the rise of an intolerant ‘political correctness’ in a secular society inevitably ‘bigoted’ because of its lack of ‘a root religion’. Limitation also implies separation, which is what distinguishes Eastern pantheism from Christian ‘mysticism’, which is not ‘an ecstasy of unity’ but one of ‘creation, that is of separation’. The Eastern saint wants ‘to be swallowed up’, whereas a Christian saint like St George is very anxious not to be swallowed and absorbed into ‘the darkness of a dragon’s stomach’.91
Another religious theme is the significance of ritual, the ‘essence’ of which is a ‘profound paradox’: ‘the concealment of the personality combined with the exaggeration of the person. The man performing a rite seeks to be at once invisible and conspicuous. It is part of that divine madness which all creatures wonder at in Man, that he alone parades this pomp of obliteration and anonymity.’ The Protestant critics of Catholic ritual are right to call it ‘Mummery’, for that is what it is: ‘it is the noble conception of making Man something other and more than himself when he stands at the limit of human beings.’92