by Ian Ker
When Frances finally met Mrs Ward, she told her how one day she had tried to test whether Gilbert was conscious by asking him, Who is looking after you?” He answered very gravely, “God,” and I felt so small.’ She also revealed to Josephine Ward that her husband had talked to her before his illness about becoming a Catholic. But on 21 March after their meeting she wrote to Mrs Ward, saying:
I think I would rather you did not tell anyone just yet of what I told you regarding my husband and the Catholic Church. Not that I doubt for a moment that he meant it and knew what he was saying and was relieved at saying it, but I don’t want the world at large to be able to say that he came to this decision when he was weak and unlike himself.
He will ratify it no doubt when his complete manhood is restored. I know it was not weakness that made him say it, but you will understand my scruples. I know in God’s good time he will make his confession of faith—and if death comes near him again I shall know how to act.
On Easter Eve she wrote again to confirm that she was ‘sure it was a decision’.83
The last of Chesterton’s weekly columns for the Illustrated London News had appeared in the issue of 21 November 1914. And it was not until 22 May 1915 that another article appeared, by which time he had recovered from his long and serious illness. On 12 June he wrote to apologize to Shaw for not having written earlier to thank him for the kind letter’ he had sent on Chesterton’s recovery. But he had other apologies to make: I am not a vegetarian; and I am only in a very comparative sense a skeleton.’ However, it was not only his eating habits and size that he feared had not changed: Indeed I am afraid you must reconcile yourself to the dismal prospect of my being more or less like what I was before: and any resumption of my ordinary habits must necessarily include the habit of disagreeing with you.’ (As he was to put it in his Autobiography, ‘like one resuming the normal routine of his life, I started again to answer Mr Bernard Shaw’.84) He was particularly anxious for information about Shaw’s latest publication about the war, a sequel to his notorious Common Sense about the War: ‘What and where and when is Uncommon Sense about the War? How can I get hold of it? I do not merely ask as one hungry for hostilities, but as one unusually hungry for good literature.’ Shaw probably’ knew that Chesterton did not agree with him about the war: I do not think it is going on of its own momentum; I think it is going on in accordance with that logical paradox whereby the thing that is most difficult to do is also the thing that must be done.’ He had ‘always thought that there was in Prussia an evil will’, although he would not have made it a ground for going to war’.85 Shaw had written to Frances on 5 May to say that, presuming Chesterton was now quite well’, he pictured him a tall attenuated figure … and a confirmed vegetarian’. He himself was ‘working at Uncommon Sense about the War. Compared with it, my poor old Common Sense will seem like a stale article…’. He needed her husband’s
help… over this war job. The war is going on by its own horrible momentum because the imbeciles who could not prevent the Junkers from beginning it are equally unable to make them stop it; and there is absolutely nothing but mischief in it now that we have shown the Prussians that we can be just as formidable ruffians as they.86
Shaw replied ten days later to Chesterton’s letter, saying that he was delighted to learn under your own hand that you have recovered all your health and powers with an unimpaired figure’. He informed Chesterton:
It is perfectly useless for you to try to differ with me about the war. NOBODY can differ with me about the war; you might as well differ from the Almighty about the orbit of the sun. I have got the war right; and to that complexion, you too, must come at last, your nature not being a fundamentally erroneous one.
It was a pity that he and his brother had not been born in Ireland, where, he, Chesterton, would have heard Irish patriots saying exactly the same thing’ about England that English patriots were now saying about Prussia, and where Cecil would have seen what the Catholic church is really like when the apostolic succession falls to the farmer’s son who is cleverer with schoolbooks than with agricultural implements’. And as for the ‘evil will’ of Prussia, he, Shaw, had been ‘fighting that evil will, in myself and others, all my life’. Finally, he was sorry to say that some fool has stolen my title, and issued a two page pamphlet called Uncommon Sense about the War. So I shall have to call mine More Uncommon Sense about the War. It is not yet in type: I havent [sic] quite settled its destination.’87
Apart from correcting the proofs of Chesterton’s new volume of poetry, which was published in April 1915, while he was still ill, Frances had also had to deal with all the letters from well-wishers, to help with which she enlisted the services of a young lady in the neighbourhood called Freda Spencer. When Frances herself had been a secretary in London, she knew neither shorthand nor typing. And this amateur tradition had been carried on. True, Mrs Saxon Mills had typed The Napoleon of Notting Hill, but Chesterton’s first regular secretary, Nellie Allport, was also ignorant of both shorthand and typing, taking down Chesterton’s dictation in longhand; she remained with him till the move to Beaconsfield. The next secretary was a Mrs Meredith, a friend of the Solomons, who lived very close to Overroads. She had at first protested that she did not know how to spell and that only the Post Office could read her handwriting. Chesterton’s reply was: ‘You seem to be the very person for me. I used to be able to spell very well when I was at St Paul’s.’ Punctuation was dictated by Chesterton, who was very fond of the semi-colon, which he used a great deal where other writers would have used a comma. According to Mrs Meredith, the most astonishing thing about Chesterton was that he was able to compose two articles on completely different subjects simultaneously, writing the one while he dictated the other, although the rate of dictation was not rapid. This practice apparently stopped after his illness. The weekly crisis was on a Thursday, when his article was due for the Illustrated London News. Frances would remind the secretary, who would remind Chesterton, who would procrastinate saying, We’ll do it presently, but I don’t think it would matter if my worthless words didn’t appear this week.’ By the time the article was finished, the last post had gone, which meant that the secretary had to bicycle hastily to the station and entrust it with a tip to the guard on the train, which would then have to be met at London. The agitation caused to the whole household affected even the dog; it was as though Chesterton did it on purpose every Thursday. Mrs Meredith would often stay for meals, when she remembered Chesterton talking constantly, sometimes even reciting whole chapters of Dickens by heart. He would ask Frances after a first helping whether he should have any more. He disliked jelly because he did not, as he put it, like a food that’s afraid of me’. Totally absent-minded as he was, oblivious of what he was eating or drinking, of time and of his physical surroundings, he was nevertheless always courteous and humorous. Once Mrs Meredith was very upset about spilling the ink all over a manuscript, but Chesterton immediately reassured her that it was entirely his own fault for leaving the manuscript where he had, worthless in any case as it was. Frances she remembered as utterly devoted to Chesterton and anxious to keep herself in the background. She suffered from constant poor health and tended to worry. Not having children upset her more than Chesterton, because he could bury himself in his work.88
Mrs Meredith remained with them up until the war, leaving just before Chesterton was taken ill. Freda Spencer, her successor, remembered how he would dictate slowly, drawing his sword-stick and fencing with the cushions as he walked up and down. Every week he would place a box of caramels on her typewriter on his return from having his hair cut. Poems would accompany the gift, or a picture of a stout, smirking gentleman with moustaches called Juan Alvarez who was depicted on the lid of one of Chesterton’s cigar boxes. Señor Alvarez was supposed to be greatly enamoured of the cold cruel Freda, to whom he addressed these lines:
Look, girl, upon the pallid wreck you made;
Demon, behold your work; let conscience hiss.
Ye have reduced a substance to a shade
A fairly solid gentleman to this.
Other neighbours, too, would inspire wonderful nonsense verse. We are not amused’ headed these verses on a fictitious Mrs Baines:
Puck and the woodland elves shall weep with me
For that lost joke I made in Ledborough Lane,
The joke that Mrs Baines declined to see
Although I made it very loud and plain.
I made the joke again and yet again,
I analysed it, parsed it and explained:
I did my very best to entertain,
But Mrs Baines would not be entertained.
When Freda was asked to become a school secretary to replace a lady who had left for war duties, she asked Chesterton for a reference. She was, he told her, quite welcome’ to use his name in any way that might be useful.
The only serious objection to your forging it is that it does not at present represent any considerable balance at the bank. I am ready to sign any testimonial to your character, capacity, courtesy, beauty, health, humour, sanity and even appetite. Essays on each of these qualities in yourself should be set as themes to your young pupils.89
In retrospect, Freda summed up what she saw as his great merit and his great fault. On the one hand, she marvelled at the amount of time and effort he could expend on giving pleasure and amusement to entirely unimportant people’, endowing ‘the trivialities of life’ with ‘a richness and importance which was essentially Christian’ and enlivening the daily routine with so much fun and laughter’. On the other hand, what she thought ‘spoilt him and made life very difficult for those who had to do with him, was his utter abhorrence of anything approaching discipline, restraint, or order’. This placed a great strain on Frances, who had to cope with all the practicalities of life. The nearest she ever saw him get to anger was if he detected her in any attempt to bring order and discipline into his or indeed anyone else’s life’.90 So, on the one side, there was the immense good nature, the humility, the humour. And, on the other side, a curious, unusual kind of self-indulgent selfishness that went back to his childhood and the permissive parents who had spoiled him and his brother.
10
War and Travel
1
ON recovering from his long and potentially fatal illness, Chesterton returned to his propaganda work. His experience of the various government departments that commissioned propaganda literature threw light on ‘the mystery and inconsistency of man’, who was revealed as being ‘capable of great virtues but not small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper’. He was ‘astounded…at the small and spinsterish vanities and jealousies that seemed to divide those Departments’. He ‘could understand a man being a coward and running away from a German’; but what he could not imagine was any Englishman behaving ‘as if it were not a fight between an Englishman and a German, but a fight between a Foreign Office clerk and a War Office clerk’: ‘I daresay every one of those Government officials would have died for England without any fuss at all. But he could not have it suggested that some two-penny leaflet should pass through another little cell in the huge hive of Whitehall, without making a most frightful fuss.’ However, bureaucratic rivalry had its positive side. Charles Masterman ‘crowed aloud with glee’ that ‘his enemies were complaining that no British propaganda was being pushed in Spain or Sweden’, for that ‘meant that propaganda like mine was being absorbed without people even knowing it was propaganda’. Chesterton’s own ‘bellicose’ The Barbarism of Berlin had actually appeared in ‘a quiet Spanish philosophical study’ on the concept of barbarism! Masterman’s enemies ‘would have published it with a Union Jack cover and a picture of the British Lion, so that hardly one Spaniard would read it, and no Spaniard would believe it’. Masterman’s ‘dark humour’ delighted in ‘this attack on his success as an intellectual smuggler’. And his ‘rather subtle individuality’ showed its superiority to ‘his political surroundings’, into which ‘he suffered himself to sink too deeply’ by allowing himself ‘to be used as a Party hack by Party leaders who were in every way his inferiors’.1 This gentle rebuke contrasts with the vitriolic attacks, of which Chesterton disapproved, of Cecil Chesterton and Belloc on Masterman for betraying his political principles by accepting office in a Liberal government of which he had previously been a critic.2
The Crimes of England was published in November 1915. Chesterton was ‘rather proud’ of it:
For I was vividly convinced of the folly of England merely playing the Pharisee in this moment of intense moral reality. I therefore wrote a book actually making a list of the real sins of the British Empire in modern history; and then pointing out that in every one of them, not only was the German Empire far worse, but the worst tendencies of Britain had actually been borrowed from Germany.
But he admitted that the title was ‘liable to misunderstanding’, and he thought that ‘in some places the book was banned like a pacifist pamphlet’.3
In his dedication to an imaginary German Professor Whirlwind, Chesterton provides him with a list of English crimes, all involving either the failure to resist Prussian aggression in Europe or the abject imitation of ‘soulless’ Prussian practices: ‘Whoever we may have wronged, we have never wronged Germany. Again and again we have dragged her from under the just vengeance of her enemies…’. England had used German mercenaries to suppress the Irish—and to say that ‘the German mercenary was worse than the Orangeman’ was to ‘say as much as human mouth can utter’. Chesterton advises his readers that he speaks of England’s rather than Britain’s crimes because it was not Scotland or Ireland that was responsible for them but England, whose ‘populace lacked a religion…with its inevitable result of plutocracy and class contempt’. Fortunately, there was another kind of democratic, liberal England, the England of the common people, of the ruled rather than the rulers, represented above all by William Cobbett, who ‘ventured to plead against certain extraordinary cruelties being inflicted on Englishmen whose hands were tied, by the whips of German superiors’, for ‘Teutonic mercenaries did not confine themselves solely to torturing Irishman. They were equally ready to torture Englishmen: for mercenaries are mostly unprejudiced.’ The Teutonic mind did not accept the democratic concept of the citizen, whose individual human nature shall be constantly and creatively active in altering the State’, an idea the Germans rightly regard as ‘dangerously revolutionary’:
Every Citizen is a revolution. That is, he destroys, devours and adapts his environment to the extent of his own thought and conscience. This is what separates the human social effort from the non-human; the bee creates the honey-comb, but he does not criticise it. The German ruler really does feed and train the German as carefully as a gardener waters a flower. But if the flower suddenly began to water the gardener, he would be much surprised.
To compensate for ‘the iron framework of the fixed State’, the German is allowed ‘the Irresponsibility of Thought’, whereby ‘anything can be said although, or rather because, nothing can be done’. The resulting multitude of ‘mad theories’, however, all depend on the one assumption that ‘all important events of history are biological’. The great advantage of this ‘theory of all history as a search for food’ is that it makes the masses content with having food and physic, but not freedom’. By 1914 England, too, had become ‘the Servile State’, having, for example, adopted in 1911 the German system of compulsory insurance, thanks to the Prussian prestige in “social reform”’ ‘, at the instigation of Lloyd George, ‘who had studied its operations in Germany’. And, of course, Cobbett was by now little more than a name’, ‘criticised to be underrated and not to be understood’, while his enemy, the “efficient” foreigner’, was taken as ‘a model for men’. Cobbett was ‘medieval’ and stood for merry England—but I do not think that even Prussians ever boasted about “Merry Prussia”’. On the contrary, the Prussians prided themselves on their dehumanised seriousness’ and ear
nestness’, on their refusal ‘to be superficial’, which is why they ‘cannot really be deep’. For instance, they took art too seriously: they forgot that ‘Shakespeare was a man; that he had moods, that he made mistakes, and, above all, that he knew his art was an art and not an attribute of deity’. Again, Prussia ‘hated romance’, which, like chivalry, ‘filled the Prussian with a cold fury’. In England, on the other hand, the spirit of Cobbett who had ‘sought to break’ the ‘bloody whip of a German bully…when it was wielded over the men of England’, lived on in the masses—‘the gallantry was in the gutter’. And it was these common people, the masses themselves, whose ‘hate of injustice’ was now rolling back the empire of blood and iron…towards the darkness of the northern forests’.4
German Zeppelin air raids had begun over London on 31 May 1915. But, although Chesterton regularly went to London, it seems it was a long time before he experienced one for himself. On that occasion, according to anecdote, he and Belloc went on talking without realizing what was happening: I am not sure at what stage we did eventually realise it; but I am quite sure we went on talking. I cannot see quite what else there was to do.’ He remembered the occasion very well, not only because it was his first air raid but because of one of the guests at the house he was visiting, a uniformed Russian who had been brought along by Maurice Baring. The said Russian ‘talked French in a flowing monologue that suavely swept us all before it; and the things he said had a certain quality characteristic of his nation; a quality which many have tried to define, but which may best be simplified by saying that his nation appears to possess every human talent except common sense’. The ‘practical proposal’ of this aristocratic officer in ‘one of the crack regiments of the Czar’ was that ‘poets alone should be allowed to rule the world. He was himself, as he gravely observed, a poet.’ At some point during the Russian’s monologue, after he had been so courteous and complimentary as to select me, as being also a poet, to be the absolute and autocratic governor of England’ and after he had ‘waved…away’ Chesterton’s doubts (‘literary men can never quarrel’), the poet who had been selected to rule England ‘began to be conscious of noises without (as they say in the stage directions) and then of the thrilling reverberations and the thunder of the war in heaven’.