by Ian Ker
There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Chesterton’s support for Zionism, which, he pointed out, was ‘on the face of it, perfectly reasonable’: ‘It is the theory that any abnormal qualities in the Jew are due to the abnormal position of the Jews. They are traders rather than producers because they have no land of their own from which to produce, and they are cosmopolitans rather than patriots because they have no country of their own for which to be patriotic.’ Since Chesterton’s alleged anti-Semitism consisted precisely of his objections to these ‘abnormal qualities’, for which Jews were not responsible, to object to them was not to blame the Jews themselves: ‘The Zionists therefore are maintaining a perfectly reasonable proposition, both about the charge of usury and the charge of treason, if they claim that both could be cured by the return to a national soil as promised in Zionism.’ Given that it is
our whole complaint against the Jew that he does not till the soil or toil with the spade; it is very hard on him to refuse him if he really says, ‘Give me a soil and I will till it; give me a spade and I will use it.’ It is our whole reason for distrusting him that he cannot really love any of the lands in which he wanders; it seems rather indefensible to be deaf to him if he really says, ‘Give me a land and I will love it.’
Consequently, Chesterton favoured not only a home for the Jews in Palestine, but if possible an ‘extension of the definition of Zionism’ that would ‘overcome…the difficulty of resettling a sufficient number of so large a race on so small a land’: namely, by giving Jews who did not live in the national homeland ‘a special position best described as a privilege; some sort of self-governing enclave with special laws and exemptions’.105 The obvious objection to this ‘extension’ of Zionism is that this would simply create the kind of ghetto that had facilitated the persecution of Jews; but this cannot be said to have been Chesterton’s intention, which sounds perfectly sincere even if quite impractical—or worse.
What, then, in conclusion is to be said about the charge of anti-Semitism against Chesterton? The first and most obvious thing to be said is that Chesterton was innocent of what we normally mean today by anti-Semitism—that is, racial anti-Semitism, such as that of the Nazis. No one had more contempt for racial theories. He had rejected anti-Semitism and embraced Zionism at an early age, writing when he was about 19: ‘No Christian ought to be an Anti-Semite. But every Christian ought to be a Zionist.’106 What it is true to say, and what Chesterton would have said, is that he was anti-Jewish just as he was anti-Prussian, but only in the sense that he associated Jews with capitalism and international finance, just as he associated Prussia with barbarism and military aggression. Like the average Englishman of the time, he could also be said to be anti-Jewish in seeing Jews as foreigners in a largely homogeneous society, with, in the case of rich Jews, international family ties that transcended national loyalties. In that sense, he was anti-Jewish, just as many Europeans today can be said to be anti-Muslim because they see a disinclination among Muslim immigrants to integrate and an adherence to Islam that is potentially at variance with patriotism. And, if we wince at the frequent references to ‘usurers’, knowing to whom Chesterton is referring, we should remind ourselves that he excoriated Prussians even more. There was a difference, however: the Jews were not responsible for the invidious position that they found themselves in, whereas Chesterton never makes any such excuses for the Prussians—except insofar as it was not their fault that they ‘were not converted to Christianity at all until quite close to the Reformation. The poor creatures hardly had time to become Catholics before they were told to become Protestants.’107 If Chesterton was anti-Jewish, he was anti-Jewish in exactly the same kind of way that many Europeans are anti-American today, or that Irish Americans are or used to be anti-British, or that British people were anti-German and anti-Japanese after the Second World War. Of course, to hold unfavourable views of a nation is not to condemn all the individuals in it or to preclude the possibility of having friends among them. But whereas, Chesterton himself complained, people were ‘allowed to express…general impressions’ about the Irish or the Scots or Yorkshiremen—this latitude was not permitted in the case of the Jews: ‘There (for some reason I have never understood), the whole natural tendency has been to stop; and anybody who says anything whatever about Jews as Jews is supposed to wish to burn them at the stake.’108 However, when Chesterton said that he did not understand this exception, he was being somewhat disingenuous: as he must have known very well, there was a perfectly good reason—namely, that the Jews had a very long history of being persecuted and treated as scapegoats. At any rate, Chesterton ignored the ban on expressing general impressions. That there was to be a ‘final solution’ proposed in Nazi Germany to the Jewish ‘problem’ was still some years ahead, and Chesterton cannot be judged in the light of the Holocaust. He was certainly well aware that general impressions are general impressions and nothing more. He himself drew clear distinctions between Jews. Speaking to the Jewish West End Literary Society in 1911, he had told the audience that the Jewish people were a highly civilized race—but the problem was that they had no country. They were bound, therefore, to be more loyal to their race than to the particular country they lived in. Because he thought they ought to have their own country, he was an unabashed Zionist. In the report of the lecture, Chesterton was quoted as saying that the Jews were no different from other people in having rich Jews who were ‘nasty’ and poor Jews who were ‘nice’.109 In a letter of the same year, he wrote: ‘Jews (being landless) unnaturally alternate between too much power and too little…the Jew millionaire is too safe and the Jew pedlar too harassed…I don’t mind how fiercely you fight for the pedlar.’110
Can anything, then, be said against Chesterton? Two things, I think, can be said. First, although the Holocaust lay in the future, the truth was that there had been more or less constant persecution in Europe of the Jews—and we have already noted the youthful Chesterton’s disgust at the Russian pogroms—which should have made Chesterton more cautious in what he said about the Jews. On the other hand, whatever one’s judgement on Belloc and Cecil Chesterton, in G. K. Chesterton’s case there is the mitigating circumstance that his beloved brother had died in a patriotic war soon after being found guilty in a libel case brought by a Jewish businessman who had effectively corrupted politicians in the Marconi scandal, politicians who had then got off practically scot free, one of whom, who was one of the Jews involved, was actually presiding over English justice as lord chief justice. There is also the extenuating fact that international finance, in which Jews were very prominent, had played a not inconsiderable part in leaving Germany only partially weakened by the Treaty of Versailles. When, then, Chesterton demands that any Jew who wishes to occupy a political or social position—and the office of lord chief justice is given as an example—‘must be dressed like an Arab’ to make it clear that he is a foreigner living in a foreign country,111 we need to bear those factors in mind. However, we may well think that Chesterton has gone far too far, and indeed far further than he could really have countenanced had he thought calmly about his integrated Jewish friends at St Paul’s and in Beaconsfield, who would have had no desire whatever to wear Arab dress, as Chesterton would have known very well. Still, the wounds left by the Marconi scandal and his brother’s death had still not healed, and the outrage at the result of the Paris Peace Conference was fresh in his mind, so some excuse may be made for Chesterton, although it is a pity that, when he came to collect the Daily Telegraph articles in book form, he did not excise this passage.
Second, although England was a very homogeneous society at the time, in which xenophobia was so widespread that the very word ‘foreigner’ (constantly used of Jews, even in public) conjured up unpleasant associations, the Jews were not the only large foreign community. Mass Irish immigration since the middle of the nineteenth century had produced ghetto communities not all that dissimilar to those of the Jews, with their own schools in which a religion that was perceived a
s almost as foreign by the average Protestant Englishman was taught. At military parades Roman Catholics and Jews were called to fall out when religious services took place, as though they were people who fell into the same category. No doubt Chesterton would have said that the Irish were our close neighbours living in the same British Isles, who spoke English and were Christian, whom it was much easier to assimilate. Still, the Roman Catholic Church was as international as Jewry, and it might be asked how far English Catholics in a church led by Italian popes could be assumed to be loyal to their country, especially if they were Irish by birth or descended from Irishmen. It might well seem an anomaly and a discomforting one.112 One can understand Chesterton’s desire for a homogeneous England, quite distinct from the other countries that make up Britain, a nation he did not believe in; and one can imagine what his reaction would have been to a multicultural England. But it might well look as though he was discriminating against the Jews—which he was, of course, because of their perceived cosmopolitanism and involvement in international finance, something that could not be said of Irish Catholics. In Chesterton’s own words, ‘the Catholic internationalism, which bids men respect their national governments, is considerably less dangerous than the financial internationalism which may make a man betray his country…’.113
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A month before the publication of The New Jerusalem in October 1920, Chesterton had published another collection of his articles, selected from the Illustrated London News and the New Witness, called The Uses of Diversity. The book begins with an essay ‘On Seriousness’, which Chesterton calls ‘irreligious’ or characteristic of ‘all false religions’. To take ‘everything seriously’, he argues, is to make ‘an idol of everything’. Man is the only animal that is not ‘serious’, and ‘the unhealthy love of animals is serious’. The right way to view animals is ‘the comic view’, which is ‘naturally affectionate’: only thus can ‘a morbid idolatry be avoided’. Both ‘cruelty to animals and worship of animals…come from taking animals too seriously’. The failure to take humour seriously, on the other hand, is for Chesterton extremely serious: ‘Nothing has been so senselessly underrated as wit, even when it seems to be the mere wit of words. It is dismissed as merely verbal; but, in fact, it is more solemn writing that is merely verbal, or rather merely verbose. A joke is always a thought; it is grave and formal writing that can be quite literally thoughtless.’ But it is not the masses who are guilty of solemn thoughtlessness, for ‘the poor live on laughter as on a fairy-tale’: they can be ‘more scientifically studied’ in the funny stories of the humorous short story writer W. W. Jacobs than in the serious sociological writings of Beatrice and Sidney Webb. For Chesterton, comedy was at least as important as tragedy in speaking of the human condition, and there was no reason why comedy and tragedy should not be found together. It was the ‘daring mixture’ of tragedy and comedy in Shakespeare’s plays that sharply distinguished them from Greek tragedy or French classical drama—a distinction that clearly made Shakespeare in Chesterton’s eyes a greater and more truly serious dramatist. The same mixture was to be found in the medieval miracle play, which was ‘far bolder in its burlesque’ and was more ‘democratic’ in its ‘satire’. By the nineteenth century this ‘weakening of democratic satire’ had grown to such an extent that there was ‘a tendency to find all fun in the ignorant or criminal classes; in dialect or the dropping of aitches’. But the First World War had thankfully revived the medieval democracy of satire—the miracle play had reappeared in the spectacle of the mocking of the triumphalist German Kaiser: ‘We have seen a real King Herod claiming the thunders of the throne of God, and answered by the thunder not merely of human wrath but of primitive human laughter. He has done murder by proclamations, and he has been answered by caricatures.’ Inevitably, Chesterton reverts to his beloved Christmas in his celebration of the seriousness of humour in these essays, insisting that ‘the fun of Christmas is founded on the seriousness of Christmas; and to pull away the latter support even from under a Christmas clown is to let him down through a trap-door’. Christmas, again inevitably, means Dickens: ‘It is exactly because Christmas is not only a feast of children, but in some sense a feast of fools, that Dickens is in touch with its mystery.’114
The common and the ordinary as always are celebrated by Chesterton. It is, he asserts, ‘the mark of the truly great man: that he sees the common man afar off, and worships him’. The difference between ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ men is that the ‘extraordinary men’ know they are ‘ordinary men’. The great and important things in life happen not on the public but the private stage: ‘For the drama of the home is really very dramatic. The household is the lighted stage, on which the actors appeal literally to the gods. It is in private life that things happen.’ The same was true of detective stories, for, while ‘the great detective story deals with small things… the small or silly detective story generally deals with great things’. Compared to medieval life, modern life, ‘with its vastness, its energy, its elaboration, its wealth’, was ‘insignificant’ because nobody ‘knows what we mean; we do not know ourselves’—whereas the medievals ‘had a much stronger idea of crowding all possible significance into things’. Linked to Chesterton’s ideal of the commonplace and the ordinary is his idea of the immense significance of limitation: ‘it is the frame that creates the picture’, such ‘limitations’ being ‘vital to man’. Compared to the God of Pantheism, the God of Christianity is limited, but it is by virtue of that limitation that the Christian God is free: ‘For [Christians], God is not bound down and limited by being merely everything; He is also at liberty to be something.’115
Popular scientism was a regular butt of Chesterton, for whom its poet par excellence was Tennyson: ‘No one did more to encourage the colossal blunder that the survival of the fittest means the survival of the best.’ The problem with the so-called Missing Link is simply that ‘he is missing’. Popular science made him into ‘a lawgiver’, although he was at the same time being hunted ‘like a criminal’: ‘They built on the foundation of him before he was found.’ Turning to popular religion, on the other hand, Chesterton had no doubt that there was such a thing as spiritual healing; but his objection to Christian Science was that ‘the popular religious sense of mankind has always flowed in the opposite direction’. That is, ‘it has flowed from spirit to flesh, and not from flesh to spirit.’ The trouble with Christian Science was that it claimed to be ‘purely spiritual’, but ‘being purely spiritual’ was paradoxically ‘opposed to the very essence of religion. All religions…have always had one enemy, which is the purely spiritual. Faith-healing has existed from the beginning of the world; but faith-healing without a material act or sacrament—never.’ This religious materialism, this ‘union of flesh and spirit’, Chesterton believed to be the hallmark of authentic religion, which never disowns ‘sacraments’. An essential difference between religion and science is that, while the ‘truths’ of the former are ‘unprovable’, the ‘facts’ of the latter are ‘unproved’. The modern tolerance of ‘“respecting” this or that person’s religion’, which involves not caring ‘about the creed itself, from which a person’s customs, good or bad, will necessarily flow’, is in fact more disrespectful to that religion than the old religious intolerance, for ‘the way to respect a religion is to treat it as a religion: to ask what are its tenets and what are its consequences’. When Chesterton criticizes the failure to recognize ‘two facts—first, that men act from ideas; and second, that it might, therefore, be as well to discover which ideas’—one thinks, for example, of the incomprehension of secular liberalism in the face of Islamic fundamentalism.116
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America and Conversion
1
THE Chestertons returned home in April 1920. The appointment in June of Herbert Samuel as High Commissioner in Palestine explained why they had encountered him out there. The appointment of a Jew angered Chesterton for two reasons: he thought it was obviously self-contradictory,
first that a Jewish High Commissioner should have been appointed, ‘the whole point of the experiment being that the Jews were to develop as a separate entity’; and, second, that a Jewish High Commissioner should have been entrusted with the task of ensuring that the non-Jewish inhabitants were treated fairly. The New Witness, nevertheless, continued to support the Zionist cause. But by August the paper was in a serious financial state, and Chesterton was forced to appeal to its readers for money. By Christmas just over £1,000 had been raised, but half had been given by Chesterton himself and his mother had donated £100. In fact, twice that amount was needed to secure the paper’s future, but the money raised at least meant that some outstanding debts could be paid, and the rest enabled the paper to continue for the time being.1 Chesterton’s contributions included some delightful parodies of Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Yeats and Whitman, which appeared in the issue of 10 December 1920, with the note that they ‘were originally written for the Beaconsfield Convalescent Home and were on sale at a Bazaar to raise much-needed funds’. Chesterton had been asked to impersonate Old King Cole at the bazaar, at which he had run a tobacco stall. The parodies were later republished in The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton, published in 1927, under the title ‘Variations of an Air: Composed on Having to Appear in a Pageant as Old King Cole’.2