by Ian Ker
On 19 May 1917 John Buchan wrote Chesterton ‘a line of warmest congratulation on your perfectly admirable article on Kitchener, which you have written for the War Office and my department’. In February Lloyd George had appointed Buchan head of a new Department of Information. In June of the previous year Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, had been sent on a diplomatic mission to Russia, but his ship had been sunk by a German mine off the Orkneys. The lengthy obituary, published as a pamphlet, which Chesterton had been commissioned to write, ‘could not’ Buchan thought, ‘be better, and will do a great deal of good in Russia’.20
Kitchener, as the conqueror of the Mahdi, was a public hero. But Chesterton began with the paradox that the man who was ‘destined…to be the greatest enemy of Mahomedanism…was quite exceptionally a friend of Mahomedans’. With his ‘knowledge of Arabic, and still more his knowledge of Arabs’, he combined ‘detailed experience and almost eccentric sympathy’ with them. Chesterton follows this with another paradox, a devastating and fascinating analysis of the perpetual threat of Islam, a passage that is worth quoting in full, given the rise of modern Islamic fundamentalism.
There is in Islam a paradox which is perhaps a permanent menace. The great creed born in the desert creates a kind of ecstasy out of the very emptiness of its own land, and even, one may say, out of the emptiness of its own theology. It affirms, with no little sublimity, something that is not merely the singleness but rather the solitude of God. There is the same extreme simplification in the solitary figure of the Prophet; and yet this isolation perpetually reacts into its own opposite. A void is made in the heart of Islam which has to be filled up again and again by a mere repetition of the revolution that founded it. There are no sacraments; the only thing that can happen is a sort of apocalypse, as unique as the end of the world; so the apocalypse can only be repeated and the world end again and again. There are no priests; and yet this equality can only breed a multitude of lawless prophets almost as numerous as priests. The very dogma that there is only one Mahomet produces an endless procession of Mahomets.
Chesterton thought there was ‘something truly historic’ about Kitchener’s ‘work with the Fellaheen, or native race of Egypt’, with whose aid he had crushed the Mahdi: ‘For centuries they had lain as level as the slime of the Nile, and all the conquerors…had passed over them like a pavement’. The story of the Battle of Omfurman began with ‘a terrible triviality…the new noise heard just before daybreak, revealing the nearness of the enemy: the dreadful drum of Islam, calling for prayer to an awful God—a God not to be worshipped by the changing…notes of harp or organ, but only by the drum that maddens by mere repetition’. But Kitchener was to find there was something more terrible than the Mahdi, and he ‘became the mouthpiece of the national horror at the German fashion of fighting, which he declared to have left a stain upon the whole profession of arms’, at the same time dramatically saluting ‘across the long stretch of years the comparative chivalry and nobility of his dead enemies of the Soudan’ and announcing that ‘in the heart of Europe, in learned academies and ordered government offices, there had appeared a lunacy so cruel and unclean that the maddest dervish dead in the desert had a right to disdain it where he lay’. A symbol of imperialism, Kitchener had been ‘the supreme figure of that strange and sprawling England which lies beyond England; which carries the habits of English clubs and hotels into the solitudes of the Nile or up the passes of the Himalayas, and is infinitely ignorant of things infinitely nearer home’, Cairo being ‘nearer than Calais’. But Kitchener had ‘passed through Imperialism and reached patriotism’, opening ‘again the ancient gate of Calais’ and leading ‘in a new and noble fashion the return of England to Europe’. Finally, he had died while ‘seeking what for us his countrymen’ had ‘long been a dark continent’:
The glory of a great people, long hidden from the English by accidents and by lies, lay before him at his journey’s end. That journey was never ended.…In that waste of seas beyond the last northern isles where his ship went down one might fancy his spirit standing, a figure frustrated yet prophetic and pointing to the East, whence are the light of the world and the reunion of Christian men.21
Three days before leaving for the front in June 1917, Cecil Chesterton arrived after midnight at ‘Keith’s’ flat and demanded she immediately fulfil her promise. It was agreed that they would first get married at what was then her ‘church’, the Registry Office, and then at Cecil’s church, Corpus Christi, Maiden Lane. Just before ‘Keith’ and Cecil took their marriage vows at the altar, Cecil warned his prospective wife, ‘they’ll sprinkle you with Holy Water and you’ll say my beastly religion has spoilt your hat. But don’t worry, I’ll buy you a new one!’ Cecil’s parents, brother, and sister-in-law were present at both ceremonies. So excited was Cecil to be married at last, that he invited the whole congregation after the church service to lunch at the Cheshire Cheese, to the dismay of the management who had been expecting only a few guests and whose famous lark pudding ran out. A number of speeches were made, by, among others, Belloc, Conrad Noel, Sir Thomas Beecham, the conductor and wealthy supporter of the New Witness, and of course Cecil’s brother.22
In August Shaw offered Chesterton the opportunity ‘to expose a scandalous orgy in the New Witness’, based on an account by an eyewitness, Shaw himself. The shocking scene, in which Chesterton had featured, that Shaw had witnessed took place at ‘an uplifting At Home’ at the Fabian Office of ‘The Fabian Research Department’, of which the ‘moving spirit’ was Mrs Sidney Webb. A ‘large number of young innocent men and women’ had been ‘attracted to this body by promises of employment by the said Mrs S. W. in works of unlimited and inspiring uplift, such as are unceasingly denounced, along with Marconi and other matters, in your well written organ’. Having summoned ‘all these young things’, Mrs Webb ‘prophesied unto them’, as they sat in crowds at her feet, until the prophetess herself withdrew at ‘the decent hour often o’clock’. Thinking that ‘all the young things had gone home’, Shaw himself was about to leave when he was ‘stunned by the most infernal din…coming from the Fabian Hall’.
On rushing to this temple I found the young enthusiasts sprawling over tables, over radiators, over everything except chairs, in a state of scandalous abandonment, roaring at the tops of their voices and in a quite unintelligible manner a string of presumably obscene songs, accompanied on the piano with frantic gestures…by a man whom I had always regarded as a respectable Fabian Researcher… A horribly sacrilegious character was given to the proceedings by the fact that the tune they were singing when I entered was Luther’s hymn Eine Feste Burg is Unser Gott. As they went on (for I regret to say that my presence exercised no restraint whatever) they sang their extraordinary and incomprehensible litany to every tune, however august its associations, which happened to fit it. These, if you please, are the solemn and sour neophytes whose puritanical influence has kept you in dread for so many years.
But I have not told you the worst. Before I fled from the building I did at last discover what words it was they were singing. When it first flashed on me, I really could not believe it. But at the end of the next verse no doubt or error was possible. The young maenad nearest me was concluding every strophe by shrieking that she didnt [sic] care where the water went if it didnt [sic] get into the wine. Now you know.
Shaw concluded: ‘This letter needs no answer—indeed, admits of none. I leave you to your reflections.’23 ‘But I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine’ is the refrain that ends each stanza of one of Chesterton’s most famous nonsense poems, originally published in The Flying Inn and reprinted in Wine, Water and Song under the title ‘Wine and Water’, which begins with the delightful stanza:
Old Noah he had an ostrich farm and fowls on the largest scale,
He ate his egg with a ladle in a egg-cup big as a pail,
And the soup he took was Elephant Soup and the fish he took was Whale,
But the
y all were small to the cellar he took when he set out to sail,
And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,
‘I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.’24
In October Chesterton published A Short History of England. He had been asked to write a history by the publishers Chatto & Windus, but had refused on the ground that he was no historian. However, later he had signed a contract for a book of essays, only to discover that he was already contracted to give this book to another publisher. On asking Chatto & Windus to cancel the contract on the condition that he would do another book for them, he was reminded to his dismay of their original proposal for a short history of England.25
Chesterton begins his history by stressing that Britain was originally a province of the Roman Empire. Far from its origins being Germanic, as it had become the fashion to believe, at least before the First World War with Germany, the truth was that it had been ‘directly Roman for fully four hundred years’. The ‘important thing’ about both France and England was not ‘that they have Roman remains. They are Roman remains’. Before the war, English life had been ‘overshadowed by Germany’. Social reforms like Lloyd George’s National Insurance Act had been ‘modelled upon Germany’. Religion, too, had been affected: ‘German metaphysics had thinned our theology.…’ So much had German history ‘simply annexed English history…that it was almost counted the duty of any patriotic Englishman to be proud of being a German’. It was partly ‘the genius of Carlyle’ and ‘the culture of Matthew Arnold’ that were responsible, partly British foreign policy that persisted, even in the face of German aggression against its European neighbours, in the traditional belief that, ever since the victory over Napoleon at Waterloo, Germany was Britain’s natural ally.26
Inevitably, Chesterton’s enthusiasm for the Middle Ages takes up commensurate space in his short history. He enjoys the paradox that the very word ‘monk’ ‘means solitude and came to mean community—one might call it sociality’. Far from rejecting this world, the monasteries ‘kept the world’s diary, faced the plagues of all flesh, taught the first technical arts, preserved the pagan literature, and above all, by a perpetual patchwork of charity, kept the poor from the most distant sight of their modern despair’. In addition, the abbots and abbesses were elected, thus introducing ‘representative government’. But medieval society anyway had ‘a self-government’ that was ‘self-made’ through the guild system, of which the ‘attenuated and threatened’ modern trade unions were but ‘a ghost’. Medieval chivalry, on the other hand, was ‘an attempt to bring the justice and even the logic of the Catholic creed into a military system which already existed’. The Middle Ages were supposed to be backward, but Chesterton wondered if ‘it is a self-evident step in progress that their holidays were derived from saints, while ours are dictated by bankers’. Characteristically, he resorts to the use of grotesque examples to make our imaginations grasp the revolutionary concept of the Catholic saint:
The notion of an eminence merely moral, consistent with complete stupidity or unsuccess, is a revolutionary image grown unfamiliar by its very familiarity, and needing, as do so many things of this older society, some almost preposterous modern parallel to give its original freshness and point. If we entered a foreign town and found a pillar like the Nelson Column, we should be surprised to learn that the hero on the top of it had been famous for his politeness and hilarity during a chronic toothache. If a procession came down the street with a brass band and a hero on a white horse, we should think it odd to be told that he had been very patient with a half-witted maiden aunt.
The medieval ‘craving for equality’ found expression not only in the guilds but also in the idea of ‘communal land for peasants’. The capitalists were the Jews, and ‘the real unfairness’ of their position was that Christian kings, nobles, and even popes and bishops, ‘used… the money that could only be accumulated in such mountains by a usury they inconsistently denounced as unchristian; and then, when worse times came, gave up the Jew to the fury of the poor whom that useful usury had ruined’. The Jew might well feel oppressed, but unfortunately the Christian equally felt the Jew to be the oppressor—‘and that mutual charge of tyranny is the Semitic trouble in all times’.27
As for Islam, Chesterton saw it as ‘following’ Christianity ‘like its gigantic shadow’, having arisen in the same Eastern lands as Christianity about six hundred years afterwards. Its ‘highest motive was a hatred of idols, and in its view Incarnation itself was an idolatry. The two things it persecuted were the idea of God being made flesh and of His being afterwards made wood or stone.’ ‘In this sense,’ then, ‘Islam was something like a Christian heresy’: ‘The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation…’. But there is one peculiarly Chestertonian objection to Islam: ‘It was an element in this sublime and yet sinister simplicity of Islam that it knew no boundaries. Its very home was homeless. For it was born in a sandy waste among nomads, and it went everywhere because it came from nowhere.’ The contrast between Islam and Christianity was entirely in the latter’s favour: ‘The mystery of locality, with all its hold on the human heart, was as much present in the most ethereal things of Christendom as it was absent from the most practical things of Islam.’28
Christmas was the one major survivor from pre-Reformation Catholic England, although only its ‘remains’, which had to be ‘rescued from the Puritans’ and later ‘eventually to be rescued again by Dickens from the Utilitarians, and may yet have to be rescued by somebody from the vegetarians and teetotallers’. But there remained vestiges of Catholicism in the Church of England, whether one called the phenomenon ‘the Catholic continuity of Anglicanism or merely the slow extirpation of Catholicism’. This ambiguity meant that the Church of England remained a most unusual institution, for the continuing debate about the Church of England was not what it ‘ought to do’ or whether it ‘ought to alter’, but rather ‘about what that institution actually is’.29
At the Reformation, Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries led to the enrichment not of the King but of the rich, ‘and especially of the new rich’. The destruction of ‘the institutions of the poor’ involved not only the monasteries but also the guilds. It was Chesterton’s hero Cobbett who saw ‘the Reformation as the root of both squirearchy and industrialism’. For Chesterton, the real threat always came not from the king but from the nobles, for ‘one of the virtues of a despot is distance’: ‘It is “the little tyrant of the fields” that poisons human life…. even a bad king is a good king, for his oppression weakens the nobility and relieves the pressure on the populace.’ Despotism can be justified as ‘democratic’: ‘As a rule its cruelty to the strong is kindness to the weak.’ It puts ‘a limit to the ambitions of the rich’. It was significant that ‘England was never so little of a democracy as during the short time when she was a republic’. The Americans forced the war of independence not simply because they wished to be separate from the mother country but because they wished to be free: ‘She was not thinking of her wrongs as a colony, but already of her rights as a republic.’ But the one thing England was not prepared to grant to the colonists was ‘equality’, not equality with England but ‘even with each other’. It was impossible for the rulers of England even to conceive of ‘a country not governed by gentlemen’. As for Burke, he would have been as ‘appalled’ by American democracy as he was by French democracy. The very idea of the equality of men ‘seemed startling and indecent to a society whose whole romance and religion now consisted of the importance of a gentleman’. Nevertheless in England ‘the typical aristocrat was the typical upstart’, whose family was ‘founded on stealing’ and whose ‘family was stealing still’: ‘Parliament was passing bill after bill for the enclosure, by the great landlords, of such of the common lands as had survived out of the great communal system of the Middle Ages. It is much more than a pun, it is the prime political irony of our history, that the Commons
were destroying the commons. If the Commons are no longer the commons, so too ‘the Public Schools were once undoubtedly public’. But, in spite of the lack of equality and democracy, in spite of the enrichment of the rich and the impoverishment of the poor, England had, Chesterton thought, not lost its sense of humour: ‘An illogical laughter survives everything in the English soul.’
That sort of liberty, that sort of humanity, and it is no mean sort, did indeed survive all the drift and downward eddy of an evil economic system, as well as the dragooning of a reactionary epoch and the drearier menace of materialistic social science, as embodied in the new Puritans, who have purified themselves even of religion. Under this long process, the worst that can be said is that the English humourist has been slowly driven downwards in the social scale. Falstaff was a knight, Sam Weller was a gentleman’s servant, and some of our recent restrictions seem designed to drive Sam Weller to the status of the Artful Dodger.