G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  Then there is that favourite Chestertonian subject of free will. Medieval Catholicism believed in free will, whereas seventeenth-century Calvinism and nineteenth-century science ‘darkened this liberty with a sense of doom’, with the result that modern society has ‘lost the idea of repentance’ and criminals are now seen as ‘a separate and incurable kind of people’—quite unlike the criminals of the Father Brown stories, who share original sin with Father Brown, a sinner like them. Indeed, the Catholic Church ‘can best be defined as an enormous private detective, correcting that official detective—the State’, for the Church ‘is the only thing that has ever attempted by system to pursue and discover crimes, not in order to avenge, but in order to forgive them’, being ‘the only institution that ever attempted to create a machinery of pardon’. Medieval Catholics believed that ‘Man was free, not because there was no God, but because it needed a God to set him free. By authority he was free.… The mediaeval Christian insisted that God gave man a charter.’ Chesterton contrasts his beloved medieval Gothic architecture with oriental art: ‘Over all the exquisite ornament of Arabia and India there is the presence of something stiff and heartless, of something tortured and silent.… It is like the vision of a sneering sage, who sees the whole universe as a pattern.’ Gothic architecture, by contrast, is characterized by its ‘gaiety’: ‘They put into a Miserere seat the very scenes that we put into a music-hall song: comic domestic scenes similar to the spilling of the beer and the hanging out of the washing.’ And, far from being stiff and silent, Gothic architecture ‘is alive, and… on the march. It is the Church Militant; it is the only fighting architecture.’93

  Chestertonian political and social themes are also aired. No one should be deceived into thinking that elections equal democracy: ‘We shall have real Democracy, when… the ordinary man will decide not only how he will vote, but what he is going to vote about.’ Liberty in England was actually decreasing, Chesterton thought: ‘Never before has it been so easy to slip small Bills through Parliament for the purpose of locking people up.’ The satire of the absurd is powerfully enlisted in Chesterton’s battle on behalf of the dispossessed and landless poor. Forced to be a tramp, the poor man has to sleep in the open: ‘That retreat was perceived; and that retreat was cut off. A landless man in England can be punished for sleeping under a hedge in Surrey or on a seat on the Embankment. His sin is described (with a hideous sense of fun) as that of having no visible means of subsistence.’ Just as Capitalist employers produce unemployment (‘the very pivot upon which the whole process turns’), so the ‘practical effect of having landlords is not having tenants’. The lack of tenants only worsened the rural situation, where the smallholding peasant was not a familiar figure as in France: ‘there is no such thing as an English peasant,’ Chesterton complained. Unlike France, too, England did not have ‘the great gift of a revolution’, which made Frenchmen ‘free in the past as well as free in the future’, for if you have ‘cleared everything away’ you can ‘put back everything’. The English, on the other hand, ‘who have preserved everything… cannot restore anything’, for they ‘have all the ages on top of them, and can only lie groaning under that imposing tower, without being able to take a brick out of it’, so that it would be very difficult for them to decide to have a republic, whereas the French can always get rid of their republic if they want to. But Chesterton certainly did not have in mind a Marxist revolution based on its ‘materialist theory of history’, according to which ‘all the important things in history are rooted in an economic motive’; in other words, history is the ‘science of the search for food’. This would certainly be true of the cow, which is why ‘the cow has no history’. But saying that human actions are based on economic considerations is like saying that human actions ‘have depended on having two legs’. Chesterton, however, has no more time for British imperialism, which paradoxically borrows such ideas as it has from ‘the brown and black people to whom it seeks to extend them’, such as that of despotism and ‘inevitable fate’.94

  Other miscellaneous Chesterton topics appear in this selection of Daily News columns. An important distinction between animals and human beings, humbling to the latter, is that man ‘is the only naked animal… He has to go outside himself for everything that he wants.’ Lacking a ‘hide or ‘hair’ to keep himself warm, he had to discover fire; similarly, having ‘taken leave of his senses’ as a result of the Fall, this ‘need of his has lit in his dark brain the dreadful star called religion’. The limitation that consists in defining an idea in definite words is a good test of the idea: ‘If the idea does not seek to be the word, the chances are that it is an evil idea. If the word is not made flesh it is a bad word.’ For what is good always tends to the limitation of incarnation:

  But, on the other hand, those refined thinkers who worship the Devil… always insist upon the shapelessness, the wordlessness, the unutterable character of the abomination.… It was the Christians who gave the Devil a grotesque and energetic outline, with sharp horns and spiked tail. It was the saints who drew Satan as comic and even lively. The Satanists never drew him at all.

  Anyone who has a clear rather than confused idea ‘will always try to explain that idea’. Critics who are unable ‘to translate beauty into words’ and claim that ‘it is untranslatable—that is, unutterable, indefinable, indescribable, impalpable, ineffable, and all the rest of it’, give themselves away: ‘They can explain nothing because they have found nothing; and they have found nothing because there is nothing to be found.’ Unlike other contemporary intellectuals, Chesterton did not despise tourists per se; but he did think there were vulgar tourists, those, for instance, who ‘admire Italian art while despising Italian religion’: ‘If you admire what Italians did without admiring Italians—you are a cheap tripper.’ And he has an amusing and penetrating image for such tourism: ‘One has no right to visit a Christian society like a diver visiting the deep-sea fishes—fed along a lengthy tube by another atmosphere, and seeing the sights without breathing the air.’ It was a mystery to Chesterton, or so he claimed, why the rain that is such a prominent part of the English weather and that, as we have seen, he liked so much, should inspire in the modern English middle classes such a ‘mysterious dislike’, when they were ‘quite fanatically fond of washing; and… often enthusiastic for teetotalism’. Besides, in a society where Socialism was so fashionable, rain could be commended as ‘a thoroughly Socialistic institution’, being ‘a public and communal’ shower and better than a private shower, especially ‘because somebody else pulls the string’. Finally, there is the favourite Chesterton point that religious differences do not prove that no one religion can be right: ‘Diversity does show that most of the views must be wrong. It does not by the faintest logic show that they must all be wrong.’95

  In December, in an article in Everyman called ‘A Salute to the Last Socialist’, Chesterton returned to the fray with Shaw, poking fun at Shaw’s argument that a peasant state must evolve into a capitalist state. Chesterton claimed he had ‘two true affections—one for truth, and the other for Mr Shaw. I follow truth with reluctance.’ He imagined Shaw going every year to a village in France ‘to see how the evolution of Capitalism is getting on’.

  I picture him every year peering eagerly along the dreary French road for the first factory chimney; and then, with a sudden sinking of the heart, seeing only the dreary French poplar. I conceive him crouching with his hand to his ear, or, perhaps, even his ear to the ground, to hear the far-off sound of the factory ‘hooter’ which makes men so happy in Belfast; and then bursting into tears as he hears only the confounded old cattle-call that tells him that free men are still alive.96

  5

  It is necessary now to go back to 1911 when a chain of events began that would lead up to the so-called Marconi scandal, a scandal that was profoundly to affect Chesterton.97 It had been decided that year to build state-owned wireless stations throughout the British Empire. The project had been entrusted to the Post Offi
ce under Herbert Samuel, the Postmaster General in the Liberal government. The Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, under its managing director Godfrey Isaacs, had its tender for the first six stations accepted on 7 March 1912. A contract to this effect was to be put before the House of Commons for its approval on 19 July, which contained a clause to the effect that royalties would cease to be paid to Marconi if its patents ceased to be used. Nothing had been said publicly by the Postmaster General, but on 8 March, the day after its tender was accepted, the Marconi company informed its shareholders, but failed to tell them about the conditional clause—without the knowledge of the Postmaster General, he later claimed. In the same month shares in English Marconi soared in price, reaching a peak in April, after which they rapidly fell in value. Rumours began to spread. In the House of Commons it was alleged that Marconi had been especially favoured at the expense of the national interest. It was noted that the Postmaster General seemed anxious to prevent any discussion of the contract. And, inevitably, it was also noted that the Postmaster General was a Jew, as was Godfrey Isaacs, the managing director of Marconi, who was the brother of Sir Rufus Isaacs, the Attorney General. In the City it was rumoured that ministers had used their inside knowledge to gamble in Marconi shares.

  In the meantime, Godfrey Isaacs had left for America, where he bought the assets of the principal rival (by now in liquidation) of the American Marconi Company on behalf of the English company that owned more than half of American Marconi’s shares, which he then sold at considerable profit to the American company, of which he was a director. American Marconi, whose shares were at a discount, agreed to make an issue of 1,200,000 $5 shares, on condition that Godfrey Isaacs made himself personally responsible for selling 500,000 and English Marconi the rest. Returning to England, Godfrey Isaacs met his brothers Harry and Rufus, the latter being the Attorney General, for lunch on 9 April, when he told them about the forthcoming issue of shares, of which he offered them 100,000. Rufus Isaacs rejected the offer, he was to say later, although he was assured that American Marconi held no shares in the English company, because he did not think it ethical for him as a government minister to buy shares in a company with which the government was in negotiation. Harry Isaacs, on the other hand, bought 50,000, $5 then being worth just over a pound. On 17 April, however, Rufus Isaacs bought 10,000 of Harry Isaacs’s shares for £2 each, nearly twice the price of the same shares he had refused to buy a week earlier. His argument would be that, while it was wrong to buy from the managing director of the company, it was all right to buy from Harry Isaacs, but that it was only fair to pay him a higher price than he had paid for them. Of these 10,000 shares Rufus Isaacs proceeded to sell 1,000 to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, and another 1,000 to the Liberal Chief Whip. On 18 April the American Marconi Company announced the new issue of shares, and the next day the shares were put on the market at the price of £3 5s. The same day the shares rose in value to £4. In the course of the day Rufus Isaacs sold 7,000 shares at an average price of £3 10s. This meant he had made a profit of £3,000, with 1,000 shares still unsold, which he sold at £2 13s. Rufus Isaacs later explained that some of the shares belonged to Lloyd George and the Chief Whip, who sold another 1,000 of their shares on 20 April for slightly over £3. On 22 May they bought a further 3,000 shares at just over £2. And in April and May the Chief Whip bought another 3,000 shares for the Liberal Party.

  Apart from their public dealings on the stock market, the only evidence for the private transactions of the Isaacs brothers and the two Liberal politicians was their own word. Nevertheless it was clearly a flagrant instance of insider trader dealing. But it was worse than that. Ministers in the government had been offered shares at a special price in a company that had close links with the company with which the government had drawn up a contract that was awaiting parliamentary approval. It could look like a clear case of bribery. Moreover, the governing Liberal Party as a whole now had a financial interest in Parliament’s approval of the contract, since a rejection of the contract with the English company would certainly lower the value of the American company’s shares. What made it look even more sinister was the nature of the portfolios held by the three ministers involved, one in charge of the country’s finances, another the government’s legal adviser, and the third responsible for ensuring that Liberal members of parliament voted for the government.

  Criticism of the proposed contract as being too favourable to the Marconi Company began to grow, as well as rumours that government ministers had been buying shares in it (in fact, of course, in the American Marconi Company). Questions were asked in the House of Commons. The Postmaster General and the government Chief Whip tried—in vain—to get the contract approved before the session ended. On 6 August, two days before the House was adjourned for the summer vacation, the Prime Minister promised a full discussion of the proposed contract with Marconi. He did not mention that he was not unaware that ministers had been buying Marconi shares. In fact, he had been briefed by Herbert Samuel, who had been informed by Rufus Isaacs, when rumours began to spread in June. Asquith thought that his ministers ‘could not have done a more foolish thing’. He was to tell King George V in April of the next year that their conduct had been ‘lamentable’ and was ‘difficult to defend’, and that they had offered their resignations, which he had refused, as acceptance would have meant the fall of the government.98

  On 20 July and in later successive weekly articles the contract was attacked in the Outlook. Significantly, the Isaacs brothers and Herbert Samuel were described as being of ‘the same nationality’, in line with the commonly accepted notion then that Jews were foreigners. On 8 August the Eye-Witness published a news story headed ‘The Marconi Scandal’, which did not mention ministers buying shares but attacked the way a monopoly was being given to Godfrey Isaacs by Herbert Samuel, with the help of Rufus Isaacs, that involved rejecting other cheaper and more efficient tenders. Rufus Isaacs advised Samuel not to sue, since the paper, which had only a small circulation, was notorious for its personal abuse of politicians. In fact, the Eye-Witness had a number of distinguished contributors and an influential if small readership. Failure to sue only increased the rumours. In September the National Review joined in the criticism, while the Morning Post and the Spectator pressed for an inquiry. The October issue of the National Review returned to the subject, drawing particular attention to the stock-exchange gamble in American Marconi shares. Later, the New Witness would boast of having publicized the Marconi scandal, but in truth it had been anticipated by the Outlook, and other sections of the press had been by no means silent.

  On 11 October the House of Commons held the promised debate. Three of the chief speakers against the government were Liberals. Both Liberal and Conservative speakers dismissed any idea of corruption. Rufus Isaacs truthfully denied the rumours that he and his colleagues had bought shares in ‘that company’ with which the government proposed to enter into a contract. He could hardly have specified the English Marconi Company, as that would have raised the question of the American company. Herbert Samuel, who knew of the dealings in the American company but did not mention them either, also truthfully denied the rumours, and gave details of the various government departments that had been involved in the decision to give the tender to Marconi. In fact, there was a German company that could have competed with Marconi, but the government had ruled out any foreign company. Samuel, too, avoided referring to the Marconi Company as the English company. Lloyd George also angrily denied the rumours. The Liberal Chief Whip did not speak; he was now in the House of Lords.

  On 29 October the members of the House’s committee of inquiry were announced. The Liberal members, supported by Irish Nationalists and Labour members, outnumbered the Conservative members. For five months no ministers were called to give evidence, but much emerged in the meantime about the contract with Marconi. It transpired that another company had submitted a lower tender, the same cost as the Admiralty estimate. It was admitted th
at the government had made concessions to the Marconi Company, but no minutes of these conversations were available; similarly, relevant letters were found to have gone missing from the Post Office files. It turned out that Marconi had not had to undergo the same rigorous scrutiny as other companies tendering. The terms of the contract were no less unsatisfactory. Marconi had originally been offered a 3 per cent share of the gross profits, but successfully held out for 10 per cent. This was to be paid as long as any Marconi patent was being used in the wireless stations, although the Patents Act gave the government the right to take over patents after paying reasonable compensation. The Marconi Company was also, incredibly, given the right to advise the Post Office on any new inventions offered to the Post Office by their rivals! Had the Post Office consulted its own technical staff? It seemed that a technical subcommittee had advised investigating the main rival tender, but its report was shelved and the subcommittee had not met again. Early in January 1913 the committee of inquiry, against the wishes of the Postmaster General, called for a subcommittee of technical experts to advise on the various existing wireless systems and to report within three months. The New Witness commented that this was precisely what the Postmaster General ought to have done in the first place before entering into a contract with Marconi. The subcommittee acknowledged that, if one single wireless system was to be used, then Marconi was the best one for the government’s purposes. But at the same time its view was that the technology was in such a constant process of development that it would be better for the government not to be tied to any particular system.