by Ian Ker
He wondered whether Belloc could, for example, give her ‘some dramatic criticism’ to do: ‘That would rule out all political intervention; and of course you would have the ordinary right to oversee or end the experiment; but it would make it rather easier for me to make the whole negotiation successful.’54
In the next, handwritten (and therefore undated) letter, he tells Belloc he has succeeded:
The obstacle has removed herself with a gesture of considerable generosity; I feel under an obligation to her for the tone she takes. Hence, you will understand me, I should like to provide for her contributing something, preferably dramatic criticism; not because she stipulates for it, but rather because she does not. She is a curious and in some ways a very fine character; but she is not the sub-editor for the NW.55
Towards the end of July ‘Keith’ had received a letter from Chesterton asking when she was returning from Poland, where she had been a special correspondent for the Daily Express. In her account of what happened when she arrived back in England, she draws a veil over what transpired between her and her brother-in-law. She simply recounts that she ‘launched out on a new enterprise’ by starting ‘the Eastern European News Service’, and resumed writing dramatic criticism and other articles for the New Witness, while Titterton continued as assistant editor.56 Chesterton, too, continued as editor. Editing a paper was not Belloc’s line any more than it was Chesterton’s: his editorship of the Eye-Witness had not lasted long, nor would he last long after Chesterton’s death as editor of G.K.’s Weekly, when he took over in the same sort of spirit of loyalty as Chesterton had done when his brother died. But if nothing came of Chesterton’s attempt to make Belloc editor of the New Witness, the episode certainly throws light on his feelings about his ‘curious’ sister-in-law.
On 9 June 1919 Shaw wrote to Chesterton to say that he had been asked to review Irish Impressions for the first number of a new periodical, the Irish Statesman, and wondered whether the book would be out in time for him to do so. ‘I might of course construct it imaginatively, and give quotations expressive of your amazement at the incredible reality of the race you had idealized and championed so generously; but on the whole I should prefer to have the real book.’57 Frances replied that the book was ‘almost finished’ and Chesterton hoped to let Shaw have a duplicate copy in a day or two.58 But next day Shaw wrote to say that it was ‘too late’ as a printers’ strike had meant that the ‘first number had to be sent in long ago so as to leave time for setting it up by hand’.59 Posterity may be entitled to bear those striking printers a grudge for preventing Shaw from reviewing Chesterton on his native land.
During that summer of 1919 the New Witness again aroused H. G. Wells’s wrath, but this time over a series of biographical articles by Edwin Pugh, the novelist, short-story writer, and critic, called ‘Big Little H. G. Wells’ and published between 4 July and 15 August. It was announced that the articles were due to be published in book form early in the autumn (the book never appeared). On hearing that Wells had written a letter to the paper,60 Chesterton hastily wrote to say that the ‘sudden demands of other duties’ had recently prevented him from ‘attending to the New Witness’, but that he had directed the acting editor (Titterton, the assistant editor, who had accepted the articles) to publish the letter, whatever its contents. It was true that he had ‘agreed to the general idea of a study’ of Wells’s work by Pugh; indeed he had ‘rather welcomed the idea of a criticism in the paper (which so often differs from you) from a modernist and collectivist standpoint more like your own. I should imagine Pugh would agree with you more than I do, and not less.’61 Chesterton had good reason for saying what he did: as recently as in May Pugh had praised a preface by Wells to a book as a ‘very fine piece of literary criticism’, and even more recently in June his ‘most wonderfully penetrating introduction’ to another book.62
Chesterton also wrote to E. S. P. Haynes to say that he was glad that Wells had turned to him for advice, ‘for I can think of nobody so likely to deal fairly with him and everybody else in such a case’. Wells had written ‘a very temperate and reasonable letter’ to him, and he had replied in substantially the same terms as he had written to Pugh. Had he personally been in charge of the paper at the time, he would ‘certainly’ not have published all that Pugh had written, and he hoped that Pugh would be willing to express ‘regret’. However, the truth was that it was Wells himself who was ‘largely responsible’ for encouraging this rather ‘coarse and familliar [sic] style of modern portraiture’. Indeed, Wells had written things about Chesterton himself that ‘I could easily quarrel over, if I had been so quarrelsome’. And he had written ‘things about my brother far more unpardonable than anything Pugh could say’, ‘practically’ accusing him ‘of a sort of drunken shirking of military service; though it is fair to say that he withdrew it when Cecil disproved it by going to the front’. At any rate, nothing would ‘induce’ him to allow Titterton, ‘a man I most warmly respect and value…to suffer even rudeness, if I can help it’.63 A few days later, he wrote again to say that he had a feeling that ‘such writing often stretches the wrong thing; and that conversation is much better…it is like the difference between shooting at a man with a gun and playing on him with a hose’. He hoped to see Haynes next day when he would be in London—but ‘I shall not play on you for long’.64
At the same time Chesterton wrote to Titterton to say that he ought to have written to Pugh to thank him for his ‘most interesting sketch’, which Titterton had been ‘good enough’ to arrange. He was especially ‘glad of his kind offer’, because he thought ‘nobody could more ably and sincerely appreciate’ Wells ‘in a paper where he has been so often criticized’. However, he hoped that ‘this work will not turn into anything like a mere attack on Wells, especially in the rather realistic and personal modern manner’.
I do not merely feel this because I have managed to keep Wells as a friend on the whole. I feel it much more…because I have a sort of sense of honor [sic] about him as an enemy, or at least a potential enemy. We are so certain to collide in controversial warfare, that I have a horror of his thinking I would attack him with anything but fair controversial weapons....
I am honestly in a very difficult position on the New Witness, because it is physically impossible for me really to edit it, and also do enough outside work to be able to edit it unpaid, as well as having a little over to give it from time to time…. I cannot oversee everything that goes into the paper… I cannot.… resign, without dropping as you truly said, the work of a great man who is gone; and who, I feel, would wish me to continue it.65
Many years later, after Chesterton had died, Wells wrote apropos of this letter: ‘From first to last he and I were very close friends and never for a moment did I consider him responsible for Pugh’s pathetic and silly little outburst. I never knew anyone so steadily true to form as G.K.C.’66
Ever conciliatory, Chesterton also wrote to soothe Pugh in case he misunderstood a comment in the New Witness by its editor ‘touching a possible misunderstanding of some of your phrases about Wells’. The truth was that he disliked what he called ‘the unconventional method of biography’, although he was sure that, in the case of Pugh, it was ‘derived from the truth that the smallness of men ultimately reveals their greatness’. Still, in Chesterton’s view, it was ‘always misunderstood and generally refers to things that were really misunderstandings’. Nevertheless, Wells had ‘less right than most to resent the more modern method; for he has applied it constantly both to others and to himself’. Even so, Chesterton could not ‘allow a series of mere personal attacks on him’, not that he thought that that was Pugh’s intention. And he had written to Wells to assure him that Pugh’s ‘purpose was not mere hostility, but merely artistic sincerity’: ‘Wells is too much my opponent to be so treated as my enemy.’67
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Chesterton ‘s other than editorial responsibilities had included travelling. He had already visited Ireland in the autumn of 1918 at th
e invitation of Yeats, who wanted both Chesterton and Shaw to give lectures as part of a series at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Another reason for the visit was to help recruit Irishmen for the British army. Writing on 1 October 1918, Yeats had promised his ‘old Bedford Park acquaintance’ that he would be able to debate with Larkinite socialists and ‘might start a movement’.68 Chesterton’s lecture was on ‘Poetry and Property’, the theme of which was that poetry witnessed to ‘a certain dignity in man’s sense of private possessions’. Subsequently, at the Dublin Arts Club he spent ‘a most exhilarating evening’ in ‘further talk about poetry and property’ with Yeats, who asked him ‘to open a debate at the Abbey Theatre defending property on its more political side’. His opponent was a fellow Englishman, Thomas Johnson, ‘one of the ablest leaders of Liberty Hall, the famous stronghold of Labour politics in Dublin…and deservedly popular with the proletarian Irish’. Chesterton ‘s argument in the debate was ‘confined to the particular value of small property as a weapon of militant democracy, and was based on the idea that the citizen resisting injustice could find no substitute for private property’. He ‘caused some amusement by cutting a pencil’ in the course of the debate ‘with a very large knife that had been given to him by Father O’Connor. Chesterton himself was greatly amused by an exchange he had with Johnson, who ‘had said something about the waste of property on guns, and who interrupted my remark that there would never be a good revolution without guns, by humorously calling out, “Treason.” As I told him afterwards, few scenes would be more artistic than that of an Englishman, sent over to recruit for the British army, being collared and given up to justice (or injustice) by a Pacifist from Liberty Hall.’69 At a dinner in Chesterton’s honour, when a toast to the king’s health was proposed, Yeats was so angered at the embarrassment caused to Irish nationalists who were present that he refused to stand up.70 Nearly twenty years later, Yeats, asked for his memories of Chesterton, claimed that, as far as he could remember, he had met Chesterton (‘a kindly and generous man of whom I constantly heard from friends’) only a couple of times socially and had read very little of his work.71
In the weeks leading up to the Armistice, Chesterton wrote a series of articles for the New Witness giving his impressions of Ireland. A revised and enlarged version of them appeared in book form in November 1919. When Chesterton first saw the Emerald Isle, his first impression was not of its greenness but of its brownness. Although he knew there was a British garrison in Dublin, he had not realized how conspicuous it would be: ‘I had no notion that it had been considered necessary to occupy the country in such force or with so much parade of force.’ His first thought was how useful all those soldiers would have been during ‘those awful days which led up to the end of the war, and seemed more like the end of the world’. It was madness to waste troops in Ireland in order to enforce ‘Irish conscription’. And when he saw the devastation wrought by British troops during the Easter Rising, he felt ‘bitterly distressed that such a cannonade had ever been aimed at the Irish; but even more distressed that it had not been aimed at the Germans’.72
Chesterton begins Irish Impressions with his usual insistence on the importance of wonder, a sense that needed to be awakened not only for ‘things superficially familiar’, but also for ‘things superficially fresh’. But wonder does not come easily, because it depends on ‘some subordination of the self to a glory existing beyond it, and even in spite of it’. He had often battled against
the stale trick of taking things for granted: all the more because it is not even taking them for granted. It is taking them without gratitude; that is, emphatically as not granted. Even one’s own front door, released by one’s own latchkey, should not only open inward on things familiar, but outward on things unknown. Even one’s own domestic fireside should be wild as well as domesticated…
After all, ‘all the most dramatic things happen at home, from being born to being dead’. And so an English visitor to Ireland should look at the people ‘simply and steadily, as he would look at the natives of an entirely new nation with a new name’. He would find a peasantry that did not exist in England, and discover that these peasant proprietors were successful ‘because they were on a small scale… It was because they were too poor to have servants that they grew rich in spite of strikers.’ This unexpected fact was ‘the flattest possible contradiction of all that is said in England, both by Collectivists and Capitalists, about the efficiency of the great organisation’. These Irish ‘small men were still working, because they were not machines’. England might ‘be moving towards a condition which some call Socialism and I call Slavery; but whatever it is, Ireland is speeding farther and farther from it’. The legislation by Liberal governments in England, such as Lloyd George’s National Insurance Act, was for Chesterton nothing but Socialism and ‘at the expense of the independence of the family, especially of the poor family’. In Ireland, on the contrary, ‘the fortress of the family… is the key-fortress of the whole strategy of the island’. And Irish Catholics ‘may almost be said to admit an experience in the Holy Family’:
Their historical experience, alas, has made it seem to them not unnatural that the Holy Family should be a homeless family. They also have found that there was no room for them at the inn, or anywhere but in the jail; they also have dragged their new-born babes out of their cradles, and trailed in despair along the road to Egypt, or at least along the road to exile. They also have heard, in the dark and the distance behind them, the noise of the horsemen of Herod.73
The religious problem of Ireland is, insists Chesterton, ‘a religious question; and it will not have an irrelevant answer’ by dismissing ‘spiritual questions in favour of what are called social questions’. There were such things as ‘universal wars of religion, not concerned with what one nation will do, but with what all nations shall be’. For ‘nearly everything in history has a religious root, and especially nearly everything in Irish history’. One thing, however, Irish Catholics and Protestants did have in common, both being ‘theological’, was that they were likely to be ‘logical’: ‘The Irish are as logical as the English are illogical’, Chesterton remarked elsewhere.74 Nevertheless, there was a creedal ‘chasm’, well summed up in ‘the Protestant generally saying, “I am a good Protestant”, while the Catholic always says, “I am a bad Catholic.”’ The reason for this was simple: ‘The essence of Calvinism was certainty about salvation; the essence of Catholicism is uncertainty about salvation.’ The Catholic tradition was that ‘the highest form of faith was doubt. It was the doubt of a man about his soul.’ Because of its Calvinism, Protestant Belfast and Berlin were ‘on the same side in the deepest of all the spiritual issues involved in the war. And that is the simple issue of whether pride is a sin, and therefore a weakness.’ Chesterton was astonished to hear ‘worthy and kindly merchants’ say ‘there was no poverty in Belfast’; in response to which he had ‘remarked mildly that the people must have a singular taste in dress. I was gravely assured that they had indeed a most singular taste in dress. I was left with the general impression that wearing shirts or trousers decorated with large holes at irregular intervals was a pardonable form of foppery or fashionable extravagance.’ Kindly the merchants might seem to be, but, in Chesterton’s view: ‘What cuts this spirit off from Christian common sense is the fact that the delusion, like most insane delusions, is merely egotistical. It is simply the pleasure of thinking extravagantly well of oneself.’ And, Chesterton adds with a pointed reference to the Puritanism of Protestant Belfast, ‘unlimited indulgence in that pleasure is far more weakening than any indulgence in drink or dissipation’. If Protestant Belfast was spiritually linked with Berlin, Catholicism, being ‘the most fundamental fact in Ireland, is itself a permanent communication with the Continent’. As for Protestant England, its ‘ascendancy’ became ‘intellectually impossible…on the day when Newman published the first pages of the Apologia and Protestantism was no longer ‘self-evidently superior’.75
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After the war, it was proposed that Beaconsfield, like other towns and villages, should erect a war memorial to its dead. A committee was set up consisting of the town’s rector, the doctor, the bank manager and ‘the respectable trades-men of the place; with a few hangers-on’ like Chesterton ‘of the more disreputable professions of journalism or the arts’. The initial proposal was that a cross should be erected at the town’s crossroads. Underlying the committee’s discussions was the question of ‘the great war of religion which has never ceased to divide mankind, especially since that sign was set up among them’. It was, Chesterton thought, characteristic of the tolerance of the modern age that, while everybody was supposed to be free to discuss religion, in practice it was practically impossible to do so. The working-class inhabitants of Old Beaconsfield displayed ‘an immense intellectual superiority’ in openly saying they liked the idea of a cross ‘because it was Christian’, or alternatively disliking it ‘because it was Popish’. Their social and intellectual betters, however, were ‘ashamed to talk No-Popery’, and instead advocated various other monuments, in particular a club intended especially for ex-servicemen, where ‘they could have refreshment (that is where the Drink Question came in)’ and ‘possibly even share the Club on equal terms with their wives and women-folk (that is where the Wrongs of Women came in)’. The advocates of the club called themselves inevitably ‘the Practical Party’, and denounced the advocates of the cross as ‘dreamers and mystical visionaries’. These practical citizens inevitably ended up with the most impractical scheme for which there was not ‘the remotest chance of collecting subscriptions’: ‘Meanwhile, the vision of the mere visionaries could be realised easily for a few hundred pounds. Chesterton himself observed that, admirable as a club, for example, was, it was not a war memorial, quoting Jane Austen’s Mr Bingley in Pride and Prejudice, who, when asked by his sister ‘whether it would not be much more rational if conversation at a ball took the place of dancing’, answered, “Much more rational, but not half so like a ball.”’ The local doctor, ‘a sceptic of rather a schoolboy sort’, voiced the opinion that traffic would collide with a cross in the dark and expressed the hope that a light would be put on it; whereupon Frances, ‘who was then an ardent Anglo-Catholic, observed with an appearance of dreamy rapture, “Oh, yes! How beautiful! A lamp continually burning before the Cross.” Which was not exactly what the man of science had proposed; but it could not have been more warmly seconded.’ A referendum showed there was a narrow majority in favour of the club, but the club advocated by this ‘practical majority’ was never built. The cross, on the other hand, was erected by the town’s rector, who privately raised the necessary money. Meanwhile the local chief landlord ‘casually’ announced that ex-servicemen were free to use a hall that belonged to him for the purpose of a club. This outcome showed how, in spite of democratic elections and referendums, England was still an ‘aristocratic’ society.76