by Ian Ker
And so ‘some such trampled tradition and dark memory of Merry England’ had survived. The English people had managed to retain ‘the laughter that had become almost the religion of the race’: ‘And men might know of what nation Shakespeare was, who broke into puns and practical jokes in the darkest passion of his tragedies, if they had only heard those boys in France and Flanders who called out “Early doors!” themselves in a theatrical memory, as they went so early in their youth to break down the doors of death.’ (‘Early doors’, now an obsolete expression, was used of anyone who arrived long before they were expected, in this case by the German enemy.) Who were these ‘boys’? For the most part, ‘the English poor, broken in every revolt, long despoiled of property, and now being despoiled of liberty’, who now ‘entered history with a noise of trumpets, and turned themselves in two years into one of the iron armies of the world’.30
The year 1917 also saw the publication in New York of Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays, which comprised nine articles under the general title of Utopia of Usurers as well as seventeen other articles originally published in the Daily Herald in 1913 and 1914. The ‘first and fundamental fact of our time’ for Chesterton is that ‘the capitalists of our community are becoming quite openly the kings of it’. This was not surprising, given that the English ‘system has been aristocratic: in the special sense of there being only a few actors on the stage’. And Chesterton blames ‘the absence of something one may call the democratic imagination’. This helped also partly to explain English intellectuals’ contempt for the masses. For the English ‘find it easy to realise an individual, but very hard to realise that the great masses consist of individuals’. Now the capitalist had ‘managed to create’ ‘a certain hazy association…between the idea of bigness and the idea of practicality’. There had resulted ‘this queer idolatry of the enormous and elaborate’, the assumption that ‘anything so complicated must go like clockwork’. Every serious religion or philosophy of life, Chesterton thought, must have ‘some trace of the doctrine of the equality of men’, but capitalism ‘really depends on some religion of inequality’. This means that the capitalist is always ready to make exceptions in his favour and cannot accept any hard and fast limitations: ‘The religion of the Servile State must have no dogmas or definitions. It cannot afford to have any definitions. For definitions are very dreadful things: they do the two things that most men, especially comfortable men, cannot endure. They fight; and they fight fair.’ Definitions and dogmas impose limitations, but there can be no limitations for the capitalist: ‘Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else.’ Islam is even-handed in its ban on alcohol, but the capitalist will make a distinction between the gin that the poor drink and the champagne that he drinks; Catholicism condemns usury, but the capitalist distinguishes ‘more delicately between two kinds of usury; the kind he finds useful and the kind he does not find useful’. To improve the conditions of the workers would increase their output, but that would be expensive for the capitalist—so ‘there one day came into his mind a new and curious idea—one of the most strange, simple, and horrible ideas that have ever risen from the deep pit of original sin’. There would be one way ‘to have some physical improvement without any moral, political, or social improvement. It might be possible to keep a supply of strong and healthy slaves without coddling them with decent conditions.’ ‘That is what’, Chesterton concludes, ‘Eugenics means; and that is all that it means’. Another means of control for the capitalist is through imprisonment, which could ‘become an almost universal experience’. Prison conditions might be made ‘more humane only in order to contain more of humanity’. It would no longer be ‘a question of whether the law has been broken by a crime; but, now, solely a question of whether the situation could be mended by an imprisonment’. Another strategy for the capitalist would be to ‘make the Servile State look rather like Socialism’. Such a ‘Plutocracy, pretending to be a Bureaucracy’, might be successfully achieved: after all, ‘the rich man to-day does not only rule by using private property; he also rules by treating public property as if it were private property’. And Chesterton cannot avoid the temptation of referring to the Marconi scandal, pointing out that Lloyd George’s salaries as a Member of Parliament and Minister were nothing to what ‘he might at any time get… by speculating on State secrets that are necessarily known to him’.31
The ‘poison’ of the ‘Servile State’ for Chesterton is ‘very largely a Prussian poison’, for ‘Prussia is capitalism’ and ‘her Servile State is complete, while ours is incomplete’. All the legislation of the Prussian Servile State is ‘designed… to protect a man from himself’. This will include ‘restraining’ as opposed to ‘punishing’ a man. There is a very important distinction: ‘The moral difference is that a man can be punished for a crime because he is born a citizen; while he can be constrained because he is born a slave.’ Punishment assumes that ‘the extent of the evil is known, and that a certain amount of expiation goes with it’, whereas ‘medical restraint…may go on as long as the authorities choose to think (or say) that it ought to go on’. In the case of punishment ‘the past… is supposed to have been investigated’, whereas ‘restraint refers to the future, which his doctors, keepers, and wardens have yet to investigate’. In the ‘Servile State’ the ‘appetite for liberty’ was disappearing. The ‘philanthropic’ capitalist employer liked to enquire whether ‘a woman who has given up all she loved to death and the fatherland has or has not shown some weakness in her seeking for self-comfort’. In his turn, Chesterton wanted to record some ‘simple truths’. First,
beer, which is largely drunk in public-houses, is not a spirit or a grog or a cocktail or a drug. It is the common English liquid for quenching the thirst…To tell a poor woman that she must not have any until half the day is over is…like telling a dog or a child that he must not have water.
Secondly, the ‘public-house is not a secret rendezvous of bad characters. It is the open and obvious place for a certain purpose.’ Not least, thirdly, is this true of the poor, who ‘live in houses where they cannot, without great preparation, offer hospitality’, and who, fourthly, live in a climate that ‘does not favour conducting long conversations with one’s oldest friends on an iron bench in the park’. Fifthly, ‘half-past eleven a.m. is not early in the day for a woman who gets up before six’. And, sixthly, ‘the bodies and minds of these women belong to God and to themselves’.32
Apart from the restraints imposed upon the poor, there were the lies and misrepresentations. One thing, Chesterton thought, that was very much needed was ‘A Working-Man’s History of England’, which would demolish the current version of English history, which held that the country had ‘emerged slowly from a semi-barbarism in which all the power and wealth were in the hands of Kings and a few nobles; that the King’s power was broken first and then in due time that of the nobles, that this piece-meal improvement was brought about by one class after another waking up to a sense of citizenship…until we practically became a democracy…’. Such was the official, accepted view—‘and there is not one word of truth in it from beginning to end’. Apart from the fact that power and wealth were ‘very much more popularly distributed in the Middle Ages than they are now’, the gradual extension of the franchise was granted ‘solely for the convenience of the aristocrats’: ‘The Great Reform Bill was passed in order to seal an alliance between the landed aristocrats and the rich manufacturers of the north,’ as well as in order ‘to prevent the English populace getting any political power in the general excitement after the French revolution’. As for ‘Disraeli’s further extension of the suffrage’, this was ‘effected by a politician who saw an opportunity to dish the Whigs, and guessed that certain orthodoxies in the more prosperous artisan might yet give him a balance against the commercial Radicals’. While all this political manoeuvring was going on, ‘the solid and real thing that was going on was the steady despoiling of the poor of all power or wealth, until they find t
hemselves to-day upon the threshold of slavery’. There was also the same kind of misinformation and misunderstanding about the so-called popular press: ‘The point about the Press is that it is not what it is called. It is not the “popular Press”. It is not the Public Press. It is not an organ of public opinion. It is a conspiracy of a very few millionaires…’. Again, there was ‘the notion that the Press is flashy or trivial because it is popular. In other words, an attempt is made to discredit democracy by representing journalism as the natural literature of democracy’. In fact, it was the natural literature of the millionaire proprietors who ‘are silly and vulgar’.33
3
On 22 March 1918 Chesterton published in the New Witness the first of five articles on the subject of divorce, about which there was much controversy at the time in the press. In January 1920 he republished the articles in a book called The Superstition of Divorce; he had found it ‘very difficult to recast even in order to expand’, and had ‘therefore decided to reprint the original articles as they stood, save for a few introductory words; and then, at the risk of repetition, to add a few further chapters, explaining more fully any conceptions that may seem to have been too crudely assumed or dismissed’.34 The original five articles form the first third of the book.
Chesterton begins with the obvious point that it makes no sense to talk about divorce without first talking about marriage: people say they want divorce—but do they want marriage? As an illustration he takes his own fondness for the limitation yet liberation of windows: ‘there is nothing I feel to be so beautiful and wonderful as a window. All casements are magical casements, whether they open on the foam or the front-garden; they lie close to the ultimate mystery and paradox of limitation and liberty.’ For a window, which is defined by the limits of its frame, offers the freedom of access to the outside world. But, if a house were made up entirely of windows there would be no walls and therefore no windows. Even more basically, if one wants windows, one has first to want a house. There is therefore no point in wanting divorce if one does not first want marriage. Now marriage, Chesterton insists, is as natural as the ‘brotherhood of men’; neither is founded simply on certain texts in the Bible—although there are these texts and although it may come about that only Christians will affirm either. For upon the attraction between men and women depends ‘the renewal of the race itself’. Chesterton defines marriage as a promise or rather a vow. And it is a limitation, since it is a promise or vow ‘to bind oneself. For the vow is a tryst with oneself.’ Being of all vows ‘the vow made most freely’, one would expect it to be ‘the vow kept most firmly’. And the loyalty it should inspire should be stronger than, for example, patriotism, since one does not choose one’s country, whereas marriage is ‘a voluntary loyalty’. But the advocates of divorce ‘hold that vow or violation, loyalty or disloyalty, can all be disposed of by a mysterious and magic rite, performed first in a law-court and then in a church or a registry office’. This was the rankest ‘superstition’, ‘sheer barbarous credulity’. The Christian Middle Ages were ‘the age of vows’, pagan antiquity ‘the age of status’, and a ‘sceptical modernity has been the age of contracts; or rather has tried to be, and has failed’. A slave was a slave in antiquity ‘merely by status’, whereas a medieval serf took a vow. Similarly, medieval tradesmen in a guild took ‘something like the vow of knighthood’, having made ‘the free choice of a fixed estate’. This was ‘the vital revolt and innovation of vows, as compared with castes or slavery’. It was ‘the personal pledge, feudal or civic or monastic’, which ‘was the way in which the world did escape from the system of slavery’—and ‘the modern breakdown of mere contract leaves it still doubtful if there be any other way of escaping it in the future’. The idea or ideal of the vow is ‘to combine the fixity that goes with finality with the self-respect that only goes with freedom’; it was the only way history had found of ‘combining… stability with any sort of freedom’. It was Henry VIII who destroyed the ‘civilisation of vows’ when he ‘broke his own vow of marriage’. He also destroyed the monasteries ‘that had been built by vows’. What had begun with ‘divorce for a king’ had ended in ‘divorces for a whole kingdom’. Of course, vows like any valuable cause asked people ‘to suffer abnegations’. The fallacy, Chesterton thought, that lay behind the desire for divorce was the ‘fallacy of being universal’, a ‘bottomless ambition’, an ‘unnatural hunger’ for ‘the impossible, that is the universal’, the desire ‘to try every situation’, an inability to ‘refuse any’ and therefore to ‘resolve on any’. What, on the contrary, was ‘vitally needed’ in every area of modern life was ‘choice; a creative power in the will as well as in the mind’. In short, the need was for that very Chestertonian power of ‘self-limitation’.35
But marriage was also threatened by the capitalist state, which was ‘at war with the family’, because, while it believed in ‘collectivism for itself’, it believed in ‘individualism for its enemies’:
If there be any bond, if there be any brotherhood, if there be any class loyalty or domestic discipline, by which the poor can help the poor, these emancipators will certainly strive to loosen that bond or lift that discipline in the most liberal fashion. If there be any brotherhood, these individualists will redistribute it in the form of individuals; or in other words smash it to atoms.
And the reason why the ‘Servile State’ wished to destroy marriage was because without ‘the family we are helpless before the State’. It was true that Socialism attacked the family ‘in theory’, but it was ‘far more certain that Capitalism attacks it in practice’. Capitalists recognized ‘the vow as the vital antithesis to servile status; the alternative and therefore the antagonist. Marriage makes a small state within the state, which resists…regimentation.’ What the Capitalist state feared ‘in the most literal sense’ was ‘home rule’. Not surprisingly, it was precisely those societies that ‘have been conservative about the family who have been revolutionary about the state’. The truth is that ‘that social pressure from below which we call freedom is vital to the health of the State; and this it is which cannot be fully exercised by individuals, but only by groups and traditions’, among which there was only one ‘which all human beings have a spontaneous and omnipresent inspiration to build for themselves; and this…is the family’. But, because marriage is ‘an ideal and an institution making for popular freedom’, it ‘has to be paid for in vigilance and pain’.36
The ‘tremendous’ consequence of marriage, this ‘institution that puzzles intellectuals so much’, is, of course, children—who ‘are, generally speaking, younger than their parents’, a fact that is ‘perceptible even to intellectuals’. For children mean ‘the renewal of the race itself’. And it is only common sense that ‘the only people who either can or will give individual care, to each of the individual children, are their individual parents’. But common sense has been cast out of the modern ‘academy of fads and fashions conducted on the lines of a luxurious madhouse’. Thus the archetypal story of the marriage at Cana had met with disapproval from that ‘school of prigs who disapprove of wine; and there may now be a school of prigs who disapprove of the wedding’. The contrast between the attempts to liberalize the laws on divorce and euthanasia and the curtailment of other freedoms was striking. Socialists, Tories and Liberals alike were united in their efforts ‘to destroy the independence of Englishmen’: ‘As all these doors were successfully shut in our faces along the chilly and cheerless corridor of progress…the doors of death and divorce alone stood open, or rather opened wider and wider.’ What was ‘the meaning of this mysterious immunity, this special permit for adultery’? Why was a man constrained by
Labour Exchanges, Insurance cards, Welfare Work, and a hundred forms of police inspection and supervision…allowed to go to look for a new wife? He is more and more compelled to recognise a Moslem code about liquor; why is it made easy for him to escape from his old Christian code about sex?…Why must he love as he pleases; when he may not even live
as he pleases?
The new proposals for divorce suffered from ‘the modern and morbid weaknesses of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal’, of allowing ‘the exception…to alter the rule’. The man who was unhappily married and had got himself ‘into a hole’ was ‘allowed to burrow in it like a rabbit and undermine a whole countryside’. It was said, ‘with a monotonous metaphor, that we cannot put the clock back’. But what if the clock had stopped? For there was nothing ‘so hopeless as clockwork when it stops. A machine cannot mend itself; it requires a man to mend it; and the future lies with those who can make living laws for men and not merely dead laws for machinery.’37 In hindsight, Chesterton can be seen to have been over-optimistic. What, of course, he was witnessing was the gradual de-Christianization and secularization of the country, whereby restrictions imposed by Christianity were being relaxed and replaced, as though by compensation, by new secular restrictions.
4
On 11 April 1918 the inaugural meeting of the New Witness League was held in London at Essex Hall, at which Chesterton announced the objectives of the League. There were five: to prosecute the war to a victorious conclusion, to fight against political corruption, to restore civil liberties curtailed by Parliament in the interests of the war effort, to support small nations, and to build up an organization to publicize the League’s objectives and to expose political corruption. Chesterton was elected president. There were debates and talks at subsequent meetings.38