by Ian Ker
Chesterton was to recall the trip in his Autobiography. Here he ‘was wandering about in the wilderness in a car with a zealous little Zionist’, who ‘seemed at first almost monomaniac, of the sort who answers the statement, “It’s a fine day,” with the eager reply, “Oh, yes, the climate is perfect for our project”’. But Chesterton ‘came to sympathise with his romance; and when he said, “It’s a lovely land; I should like to put the Song of Solomon in my pocket and wander about,”’ Chesterton ‘knew that, Jew or Gentile, mad or sane, we two were of the same sort’.
The lovely land was a wilderness of terraced rock to the horizon, and really impressive; there was not a human being in sight but ourselves and the chauffeur, who was a black-browed giant…He was an excellent driver…He had gone ahead to clear some fallen stones and I remarked on this efficiency. The swarthy little professor beside me had taken a book from his pocket, but replied dispassionately, ‘Yes; I only know him slightly; between ourselves, I believe he is a murderer; but I made no indelicate enquiries.’ He then continued to read the Song of Solomon, and savoured those spices that rise when the south wind blows upon the garden. The hour was full of poetry; and not without irony.92
On 11 March the Chestertons went to a fancy dress ball (‘though not in fancy dress’): ‘Everyone there. “Jews, Turks, heretics and infidels!”’ exclaimed Frances with relish. All Jerusalem had turned out and ‘the dresses were very wonderful indeed’. They left at about midnight. Two days later they walked out to Bethany, about three miles outside Jerusalem on the road to Jericho. They did not have time actually to go into the ‘little town’, where ‘nothing really remains except the reputed tomb of Lazarus’.93
On 14 March they were taken to an Armenian church to witness a baptism. The child was laid down on cushions and undressed, ‘all of us assisting’. Frances was asked—why she does not say or speculate—‘to stand godmother and gladly consented’. The naked baby was handed to the priest, who ‘immersed him completely under the water three times’, and then anointed him on various parts of his body with oil. The child by this time was ‘crying lustily’. After being dressed, he was handed into Frances’s arms, while she held two lighted candles. She then followed the priest from the font to the altar, ‘where a chain and a little gold cross were bound round his head (signifying that he was now a Christian)’. ‘Then the priest touched his lips with the sacramental wafer and touched his nose with myrrh.’ They left the church in a procession, the godfather carrying the baby. At the entrance to his parents’ home, the baby was handed to his mother, ‘who was waiting for it, also holding the two candles’. The parents insisted that the Chestertons should stay for refreshments.94
On 15 March Frances walked by herself to the top of the Mount of Olives, not a long walk but ‘rather steep’: ‘I saw the little dome that covers the rock of the Ascension (with Our Lord’s footprint).’ Returning to the hotel, she found Chesterton’s Syrian typist waiting to take them to tea in his ‘pretty little home’. On 18 March Frances at last did something she had ‘always meant to do’ and walked all round Jerusalem, a walk of about three to four miles. Next day was a ‘day of adventure’. They hired a car and set off at 8.30 for Jericho, Jordan, and the Dead Sea, taking a picnic lunch with them. ‘It is impossible’, Frances wrote in her diary, ‘to describe the beauty of the scenery or the badness of the road’. In the intense heat, bumping continually on the road, they wound their way in and out of ‘the wildest and barest mountain scenery, though the flowers everywhere are perfectly marvellous’. Their car broke down ‘in the narrow ravine that leads directly on to the shore of the Dead Sea’. When it got going again, it bumped its way (there was no ‘real road’) ‘over sand hills and hollows until it reached the edge of the sea’. They saw ‘droves of goats and sheep with Arabs entirely naked’. They then drove ‘on an even worse road to Jericho’—that is, the Jericho of the Crusaders rather than the biblical Jericho that was ‘a little higher up’. ‘We found Elisha’s Font and there to the sound of running water in a plantation of palms…we ate our lunch.’ After lunch they drove to the Jordan, ‘a pretty little stream, very muddy fringed with tamarisk—not at all remarkable’. Returning to Jericho, they found the car had a puncture. After waiting at a hotel till it was repaired, they set of fback to Jerusalem at about four o’clock. Just outside Jerusalem they got another puncture. While they waited for it to be repaired, they sat on a wall overlooking the city and ‘had a wonderful sight of the sunset succeeded by night’: ‘The stars in Palestine are always extraordinarily beautiful and the city looked like a jewelled picture.’ They eventually reached their hotel ‘very tired and shaken’ at about seven o’clock.95
Next morning Frances was too tired to go out and stayed in her room till after lunch. The following day she still felt ‘rather seedy’ and stayed in the hotel all morning. After lunch they were taken by car to their ‘beloved Bethlehem again’. On 22 March they dined at the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem’s residence, signing their names in the visitors’ book on ‘the table where the final order for surrender of the city was written’, since the house had been the headquarters of the Turkish military governor during the war. Two days later Frances held a ‘very successful’ tea party: ‘Everyone seemed to turn up.’ On 26 March the Chestertons visited in the morning the Church of the Ecce Homo, meeting on the way Lady Allenby, who was ‘very nice to us both’. Next day they met Dr Weitzmann, ‘the famous Zionist’ at lunch. Later in the afternoon Chesterton lectured at the army headquarters. The following day was Palm Sunday, and they heard the Anglican bishop preach at Christ Church in the morning. After lunch they went to Benediction at the Ecce Homo Church, where they had a long talk with an English nun. On the 29th they were taken by Father Waggett to the Convent of the Holy Sepulchre, on the roof of which they were amazed to find a couple of camels.96
Next day they left Jerusalem at 5.30 in the morning. On reaching Ludd, they found there had been a train accident, and they were delayed for an hour and a half before going on to Kantara. However, they managed to catch the train to Cairo, from where they went on to Alexandria, where they arrived at 5.30 on the morning of the 31st. Next day they left by sea at three in the afternoon. They found Herbert Samuel was also on board the ship. On Easter Sunday, 4 April, they arrived at Brindisi at about seven in the morning. After breakfasting in their hotel, they went to Mass. After lunch they boarded a train for Bari, from where they went on to Rome, arriving there next morning. After lunch they bumped into Maisie Ward—it seemed ‘miraculous’. Next day they visited the Capitol, the Church of Ara Coeli, and the Forum. The following day there were visits to St Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel. After lunch they walked in the Pincio and saw Rome in the sunset. On the 8th they toured the Catacombs. Next day they walked to the Palazzo Venezia and climbed the steps to the Church of the Ara Coeli, visiting St John Lateran in the afternoon. On 10 April Frances went to the Vatican Museum in the morning, and after lunch they both visited the Palazzo Borghese and walked in its gardens—at which point Frances’s diary ends.97
While they were in Alexandria, Chesterton had written to Maurice Baring to say that there was something ‘important’ that he wanted ‘very much to discuss’ with him, ‘because of certain things that have been touched on between us in former times’. He went on to say that his ‘train of thought, which really was one of thought and not fugitive emotion, came to an explosion in the Church of the Ecce Homo in Jerusalem’. He was afraid that it might be ‘at least a month’ before they could meet, as the journey from Alexandria took a fortnight and they might have to stay in Paris to see a friend who was ill. He had to get to work ‘the moment’ they returned ‘to keep a contract’, but he hoped they could meet ‘by about then’.98
Chesterton would one day recall how it was in that church in Bari, where they went to Mass on that Easter Sunday, that ‘in front of a gilded and very gaudy little image’ of the Blessed Virgin Mary, he ‘finally saw what was nobler than my fate, the freest and the hardest o
f all my acts of freedom’ and ‘promised the thing that I would do, if I returned to my own land’. He explained the significance of the ugly little statue of the Virgin in terms of his own religious development, in which Mary had never been absent:
I mean that men need an image, single, coloured and clear in outline, an image to be called up instantly in the imagination, when what is Catholic is to be distinguished from what claims to be Christian or even what in one sense is Christian. Now I can scarcely remember a time when the image of Our Lady did not stand up in my mind quite definitely, at the mention or the thought of all these things. I was quite distant from these things, and then doubtful about these things; and then disputing with the world for them, and with myself against them; for that is the condition before conversion. But whether the figure was distant, or was dark and mysterious, or was a scandal to my contemporaries, or was a challenge to myself—I never doubted that this figure was the figure of Faith; that she embodied, as a complete human being still only human, all that this Thing had to say to humanity. The instant I remembered the Catholic Church, I remembered her; when I tried to forget the Catholic Church, I tried to forget her…99
It would take another two years before Chesterton at last entered the Roman Catholic Church.
The ‘notes’ that Chesterton made ‘on the spot’ during this visit to the Holy Land were published in the Daily Telegraph, with the exception of the last half of the last chapter on Zionism, which was not published because the newspaper took a different political line on the Jewish question. The resulting ‘uncomfortably large notebook’ was published as The New Jerusalem in November 1920.100 Chesterton, it seems, had a low opinion of his travel books because ‘he always tended to see such enormous significance in every detail’.101
The most interesting pages in the book are those on Islam and on Zionism. As Jerusalem is the city where three religions converge most obviously, it is not surprising that religion looms large in Chesterton’s ‘notes’. For Chesterton, Islam is the religion of the desert, with all the advantages and disadvantages that that entails. The ‘prophet’ Muhammad had certainly discovered ‘the obvious things’ in the ‘red circle of the desert, in the dark and secret place’, to say which was not merely to ‘sneer’, ‘for obvious things are very easily forgotten; and indeed every high civilisation decays by forgetting obvious things’. But what was true was that ‘in such a solitude men tend to take very simple ideas as if they were entirely new ideas. There is a love of concentration which comes from the lack of comparison.’ Because, therefore, ‘the man of the desert tends to simplify too much, and to take his first truth for the last truth’, Islam is ‘lacking in that humane complexity that comes from comparison’. This explains why there is ‘in the Moslem character…a deep and most dangerous potentiality of fanaticism’. Nevertheless, there is in ‘Moslem morality…a considerable deposit of common sense’ that ‘can be set over against a mountain of crimes’. But there is no contradiction between these two observations, since the ‘fanatic of the desert is dangerous precisely because he does take his faith as a fact’—that is, he takes it as ‘literally’ as though it were a thing like a palm tree. The Jew, on the other hand, ‘has far more moral imagination and sympathy with the subtler ideals of the soul’. But unfortunately, ‘with all their fine apprehensions, the Jews suffer from one heavy calamity; that of being a Chosen Race’. Chesterton thought it was ‘fatal’ when patriotism or religion depended on race, as when English people (before the First World War, at least) prided themselves on being Anglo-Saxons. Being proud in the abstract of one’s country or religion did not lead to this kind of ‘arrogance’, and ‘the more savage man of the desert’ was free of it.102
On the other hand, the Muslim attitude to women reflected ‘the philosophy of the desert’, since ‘chivalry is not an obvious idea. It is not as plain as a pike-staff or as a palm tree.’ A Muslim, says Chesterton, can pity weakness, but ‘reverence for weakness is to him simply meaningless’. The ignorance of chivalry is responsible according to Chesterton for what is to him a fatal flaw in Islam, its lack of a sense of humour: ‘Wherever there is chivalry there is courtesy; and wherever there is courtesy there is comedy. There is no comedy in the desert.’ The ‘very logical and consistent’ creed of Islam had another ‘quite logical and consistent element’: vandalism. In Christianity there is a ‘combination’ or ‘rather a complexity made up of two contrary enthusiasms; as when the Dark Ages copied out the pagan poems while denying the pagan legends; or when the popes of the Renascence imitated the Greek temples while denying the Greek gods’. But such a ‘high inconsistency is inconsistent with Islam’, which ‘takes everything literally, and does not know how to play with anything’. It was inconceivable that Mohammed should have restored ‘ancient Babylon as medievalism vaguely sought to restore ancient Rome’; for Islam ‘was content with the idea that it had a great truth; as indeed it had a colossal truth. It was so huge a truth that it was hard to see it was a half-truth.’ As ‘a reaction towards simplicity’, Islam was ‘a violent simplification, which turned out to be an over-simplification’. While it ‘had one thought, and that a most vital one; the greatness of God which levels all men’, it did not have ‘one thought to rub against another’ simply because it did not have another thought. Complex creeds, by contrast, ‘can breed thoughts’. Islamic philosophy suffered ‘from a lack of the vitality that comes from complexity, and of the complexity that comes from comparison’. The Christian philosophy of free will, by contrast, is complex, being the ‘sharp combination of liberty and limitation which we call choice’. Like modern liberal Christians, Muslims thought ‘they had a simpler and saner sort of Christianity’: ‘They thought it could be made universal merely by being made uninteresting.’ And this naturally led to the intolerance that results from preaching a ‘platitude’ rather than a ‘paradox’:
It was exactly because it seemed self-evident…that their simple creed was suited to everybody, that they wished…to impose it on everybody. It was because Islam was broad that Moslems were narrow. And because it was not a hard religion it was a heavy rule. Because it was without a self-correcting complexity, it allowed of…simple and masculine but mostly rather dangerous appetites…
Similarly, humanists like H. G. Wells sneered at a dogma like the co-eternity of the Son and held up as ‘a model of simplicity…that most mystical affirmation “God is Love”’—but the ‘subtle’ dogma is only a theological ‘explanation of the simple statement; and it would be quite possible even to make it a popular explanation, by saying that God could not love when there was nothing to be loved’. A dogma limits because it is a ‘definition’. But, far from being constricting, dogmas in religion are what Chesterton calls ‘creative limits’, as when he insists that the war against Germany was ‘the resistance of form to formlessness’ or ‘chaos’. Analogously, in the context of the walled city of Jerusalem Chesterton praises the absence of suburban sprawl—as opposed apparently to the kind of limited suburb he had no objection to—with its lack of a ‘boundary’, an ‘indefinite expansion’ that is ‘controlled neither by the soul of the city within, nor by the resistance of the lands round about’, thus destroying ‘at once the dignity of a town and the freedom of a countryside’. As for the Christians of Jerusalem, they taught the lesson of ‘constancy’, having survived more or less constant persecution through the centuries; but they ‘would never have survived at all if they had not survived their own death, even in the sense of dying daily’: ‘The ideal was out of date almost from the first day; that is why it is eternal; for whatever is dated is doomed.’ The Christian Crusades had succeeded in checking the advance of Islam, but it had not been ‘checked enough’. And, Chesterton claims, ‘three-quarters of the wars of the modern world’ were ‘due to the fact’ that it had not been ‘checked enough’: ‘The only thing to do with unconquerable things is to conquer them. That alone will cure them of invincibility…’. Religious wars, he thought, were at least ‘more rational’ tha
n other kinds of wars, for they were ‘the most philosophical sort of fighting’ in the ‘mere act of recognising the difference, as the deepest kind of difference’.103
Apart from Islam and its differences from Judaism and Christianity, the other even more interesting part of the book deals with the question of Zionism, an issue that inevitably raises the question of Chesterton’s alleged anti-Semitism. Indeed, Chesterton himself is quite open about it: he and his friends (meaning, ofcourse, the New Witness and Belloc and his brother) had been ‘for a long period rebuked and even reviled’ for so-called ‘Anti-Semitism’; but it was ‘always much more true to call it Zionism’. That is, the ‘substance’ of their ‘heresy was exceedingly simple. It consisted entirely in saying that Jews are Jews; and as a logical consequence that they are not Russians or Roumanians or Italians or Frenchmen or Englishmen.’ Because Jews were Jews, Chesterton and his fellow heretics thought that ‘in some fashion, and as far as possible, Jews should be represented by Jews and ruled by Jews’. If that was ‘Anti-Semitism’, then Chesterton was an ‘Anti-Semite’—but it ‘would seem more rational to call it Semitism’. Of this so-called Anti-Semitism he and his friends were ‘now less likely than ever to repent’. Zionism, which had been ‘dismissed as a fad’, was now ‘discussed everywhere as a fact; and one of the most menacing facts of the age’. The same people who had accused Chesterton of ‘Anti-Semitism’ had now ‘become far more Anti-Semitic’ than he was or ever had been. Those who had once thought it ‘an injustice’ even to refer to Jews as Jews were now ‘talking with real injustice about them’. Before the First World War, English people had been encouraged to believe that Germans were ‘a sort of Englishman because they were Teutons; but it was all the worse for us when we found out what Teutons really were’. Similarly, English people were told that ‘Jews were a sort of Englishman because they were British subjects. It is all the worse for us now we have to regard them, not subjectively as subjects, but objectively as objects; as objects of a fierce hatred among the Moslems…’.104 What had radically changed English attitudes to the Jews was the so-called Balfour Declaration, the letter sent on 2 November 1917 by A. J. Balfour, then the Foreign Secretary, to Lord Rothschild, a leading British Jew, for him to send on to the Zionist Federation. The letter announced the decision by the Cabinet two days earlier to favour the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, without prejudice to the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine, and at the same time without prejudice to the civil and political rights of Jews living in other countries. Naturally, the Declaration alarmed both Christians and Muslims living in Palestine, although it did not fully meet the Zionist demand that Palestine should be the Jewish national home.