by Ian Ker
American democracy was also threatened by capitalism, which resulted in the ‘unnatural… combination of political equality with extreme economic inequality in practice’. For ‘the democratic ideal’ of America was in conflict with ‘another tendency, an industrial progress which is of all things on earth the most undemocratic’. Industrialism, of course, was not unique to America, but it was ‘alone in emphasising the ideal’ that was at odds with industrialism. In addition, America had (unlike England) a ‘counterweight’ to industrial urban capitalism in the shape of ‘a free agriculture, a vast field of free farms dotted with small freeholders’. Unfortunately, however, the ‘culture’ of these Puritan smallholders of the Mid West came from the city (‘the Puritan tradition was originally a tradition of the town’), which meant that they were not a ‘true peasantry’ in that they did not ‘produce their own spiritual food, in the same sense as their own material food’, and they did not ‘create other kinds of culture beside the kind called agriculture’. There was no ‘peasant play’ in Oklahoma, only the cinema: ‘And the objection to the cinema is not so much that it goes to Oklahoma as that it does not come from Oklahoma.’ But it certainly was not for the English, who had allowed their land ‘to be stolen by squires and then vulgarised by sham squires, to sneer at such colonists as crude and prosaic’: ‘They at least have really kept something of the simplicity, and, therefore, the dignity of democracy…’. Still, it was unfortunate that their ‘culture, and to some great extent their creed, do come along the railroads from the great modern urban centres…’. Chesterton concludes with a paradox that must have given him some pleasure: ‘It is that influence that alone prevents the Middle West from progressing towards the Middle Ages.’96
Chesterton noticed what other English visitors still notice when they visit America: ‘the cold passion’ for ‘piling up ice’, the fallacy of supposing that Americans speak ‘the same’ language, the wooden houses that looked ‘almost as fantastic to an English eye as if they had all been made of cardboard’, the fact that America exports its worst rather than its best (‘the best things do not travel’), the skies ‘so clear’ as to make it seem that ‘clouds were English products like primroses’, England being blessed with ‘the noble thing called weather; most other countries having to be content with climate’. But, above all, Chesterton was struck by the sheer ‘restlessness’ of life, particularly in New York, ‘a place of unrest’ loved by its admirers for ‘the romance of its restlessness’. Paradoxically, Chesterton thought that the unpunctuality he had noticed at his lectures ‘had the same origin as the hustling’, since Americans were ‘impulsive’ with ‘an impulse to stay as well as an impulse to go’, being possessed by ‘the romance of business’, which really was ‘like a love-affair’ in that it involved ‘not only rushing but lingering’. It was customary for the English to condemn America as ‘materialist’ because of its ‘worship of success’—but ‘this very worship, like any worship’, was mystical rather than materialistic. For Americans worshipped ‘success in the abstract, as a sort of ideal vision’, and to say that they ‘worship’ the dollar is ‘a compliment’ to their ‘fine spirituality’, for they adore the dollar as ‘an idol’, ‘an image of success and not of enjoyment’. That this ‘romance’ of success was ‘also a religion’ was shown by the fact that there was ‘a queer sort of morality attached to it’: ‘America does vaguely feel a man making good as something analogous to a man being good or a man doing good.’ Doing business really was a ‘romance’, for it was not ‘reality’, since half the financial operations involved dealt with ‘things that do not even exist’, ‘all finance’ being ‘in that sense… a fairy-tale’. Success involved work, and Americans had ‘a very real respect for work’, for ‘the dignity of labour’, not being enchanted with the English ideal of the gentleman of leisure—although there was ‘a good side to the Englishman’s daydream of leisure, and one which the American spirit tends to miss’, the concept of the ‘holiday’ and even more that of the ‘hobby’. The restlessness of Americans could also be seen in their idea that ‘enthusiasm’ was ‘itself… meritorious’, ‘the excitement itself… dignified’. They were ‘proud’ not only of their ‘energy’ but of their ‘excitement’. They admired people for being ‘impressionable’, for being ‘excited’. They were ‘not ashamed of curiosity’, which they felt to be ‘consistent with… dignity, because dignity is consistent with vivacity’. That they were like children, ‘in the very best sense of childhood’, the ‘most childlike thing about a child’ being ‘his curiosity…and his power of wonder at the world’, was a great compliment coming from Chesterton. The moodiness of the English was a ‘mystery’ to Americans, since in America there were ‘no moods’ but ‘only one mood’, whether it was called ‘hustle or uplift’. The ‘ups and downs of the English temperament’ were a mystery to a ‘people living on such a lofty but level tableland’. Such ‘subtlety’ of mood was simply swept away by American ‘sociability’.97
5
On their return to England in April 1921, the Chestertons had practical problems that had to be faced. The lease on Overroads would expire in the summer of next year and could not be renewed.98 Fortunately, the American lecture tour had brought in sufficient funds to proceed with building a house in Top Meadow around the studio that had already been built. The tree in the meadow that Chesterton had said he would like to build a house round was cut down and used for the newel of the staircase.99
They gladly resumed life in their beloved Beaconsfield. On 14 July Chesterton played Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while his Jewish friend Margaret Halford played Puck, in aid of a new engine for the local fire brigade and an extension to the Church of England school.100 But the religious problem remained on his mind. On Christmas Day 1921, the last Christmas they spent at Overroads, he wrote to Maurice Baring to say that he had ‘been troubled for some time about a particular problem in connection with the great subject (which has hardly left my mind for an hour) and I hope the decision I have come to does not sound abrupt and incoherent in this hasty note’. He would very much like to see Baring, but he would also like to see ‘some priest of your acquaintance, about what is involved in a certain case’. He did not ‘particularly’ want the priest to be a friend of his: although he knew ‘they would consider principles and not friendship’, he did not want ‘to burden their friendship’ till it was ‘necessary’. If Baring would let him know after the feast of the Epiphany on 6 January ‘(to preserve the twelve days of Xmas)’, he would arrange an appointment at Baring’s at the priest’s convenience.101 What became of this request is not known.
His doubts about Anglicanism had hardly been dispelled by news of a church congress in Birmingham in October 1921, at which a Lord Dawson pronounced that artificial contraception was not inconsistent with Christian morality, in spite of the recent Lambeth Conference’s condemnation of it in 1920. The way was being paved for the reversal of this teaching at the next Lambeth Conference in 1930. In an editorial of 21 October in the New Witness Chesterton commented on the press’s agreement that the Church of England must ‘move with the times’ or with the ‘world’: ‘We do not want, as the newspapers say, a Church that will move with the world. We want a Church that will move the world.’ He did not mind people who simply rejected Christian morals nearly so much as so-called Christians who ‘brazenly’ betrayed Christianity.
In Eugenics and Other Evils, published in February 1922, Chesterton condemned the view that ‘the spread of destitution will never be stopped until we have educated the lower classes in the methods by which the upper classes prevent procreation’. Certainly, there were ‘unwanted children; but unwanted by whom?’ Not by the parents, Chesterton suggested, but by the employers who did not want to pay the parents properly. At the beginning of the book, Chesterton explained to his readers that, while ‘most of the conclusions, especially towards the end, were conceived with reference to recent events, the actual bulk of preliminary notes about the scien
ce of Eugenics were written before the war’:
It was a time when this theme was the topic of the hour; when eugenic babies (not visibly very distinguishable from other babies) sprawled all over the illustrated papers; when the evolutionary fancy of Nietzche was the new cry among the intellectuals; and when…Shaw and others were considering the idea that to breed a man like a cart-horse was the true way to attain that higher civilization, of intellectual magnanimity and sympathetic insight, which may be found in cart-horses.
But the craze for eugenics, Chesterton considered, was simply part of ‘a modern craze for scientific of ficialism and strict social organization’, in other words for Prussianism. Once ‘the older culture of Christendom’ had prevailed against Prussia in the war, he had assumed the notes he had made had become ‘irrelevant’. But, to his astonishment, he found that ‘the ruling classes in England [were] still proceeding on the assumption that Prussia [was] a pattern for the whole world’.102
To cry out before one is hurt seemed to Chesterton to be the ‘wisest thing’: ‘It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt.’ History showed that ‘most tyrannies’ succeeded ‘because men moved too late’: ‘It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists. It is no answer to say, with a distant optimism, that the scheme is only in the air. A blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air.’ Evils like eugenics had throughout history triumphed through ‘a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin’. In the case of eugenics there was ‘a cloud of skirmishers, of harmless and confused modern sceptics, who ought to be cleared off or calmed down before we come to debate with the real doctors of the heresy’: ‘When we have answered the immediate protestation of all these good, shouting, shortsighted people, we can begin to do justice to those intelligences that are really behind the idea.’ These harmless skirmishers could be divided into ‘five sects; whom I will call the Euphemists, the Casuists, the Autocrats, the Precedenters, and the Endeavourers’. Most of them were ‘Euphemists’, who were startled by ‘short words’ and soothed by ‘long words’, and who were ‘utterly incapable of translating the one into the other’, ‘however obviously’ they meant ‘the same thing’.
Say to them ‘The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generations does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females’; say this to them and they sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them ‘Murder your mother,’ and they sit up quite suddenly.…Say to them, ‘It is not improbable that a period may arrive when the narrow if once useful distinction between the anthropoid homo and the other animals, which has been modified on so many moral points, may be modified even also in regard to the important question of the extension of human diet’; say this to them, and beauty born of murmuring sound will pass into their faces. But say to them, in a simple, manly, hearty way ‘Let’s eat a man!’ and their surprise is quite surprising.
Then there were the ‘casuists’, who would respond to the complaint, ‘I dislike this spread of Cannibalism in the West End restaurants,’ ‘Well, after all Queen Eleanor when she sucked blood from her husband’s arm was a cannibal.’ For the ‘Autocrats’, ‘every modern reform will “work” all right, because they will be there to see.’ As for the ‘Precedenters’, they were mostly ‘solemn’ Parliamentarians who would say, for instance, that they ‘could not understand the clamour against the Feeble-Minded Bill as it only extended the “principles” of the old Lunacy Laws’—to which the only answer was, ‘Quite so. It only extends the “principles” of the Lunacy Laws to persons without a trace of lunacy.’ Finally, there were the ‘Endeavourers’, the ‘weakest’ of all these ‘helpless’ skirmishers, the ‘prize specimen’ of whom was an MP ‘who defended the same Bill as “an honest attempt” to deal with a great evil: as if one had a right to dragoon and enslave one’s fellow citizens as a kind of chemical experiment; in a state of reverent agnosticism about what would come of it’. But there remained ‘a class of controversialists so hopeless and futile’ that Chesterton could not find a name for them: they were the kind of people who would say: ‘You object to all State interference; I am in favour of State interference. You are an Individualist; I, on the other hand,” etc.’ Apart from these controversialists’, there was an enormous mass’ of rather thoughtless people, whose rooted sentiment is that any deep change in our society must be in some way infinitely distant’, ‘a thing that, good or bad, will have to fit itself to their great-great-great-grandchild, who may be very different and may like it; and who in any case is rather a distant relative’.103
In fact, what Chesterton considered to be the first eugenics law, the Mental Deficiency Act, which he called ‘the Feeble-Minded Bill’, had already been passed in 1913 ‘with the applause of both parties’ by the House of Commons.
It is, and quite simply and literally, a Bill for incarcerating as madmen those whom no doctor will consent to call mad. It is enough if some doctor or other may happen to call them weak-minded. Since there is scarcely any human being to whom this term has not been conversationally applied by his own friends and relatives on some occasion or another (unless his friends and relatives have been lamentably lacking in spirit), it can be clearly seen that this law, like the early Christian Church (to which, however, it presents points of dissimilarity), is a net drawing in all kinds.
It was ‘openly said’ that the purpose of the bill was ‘to prevent any person whom these propagandists do not happen to think intelligent from having any wife or children. Every tramp who is sulky, every labourer who is shy, every rustic who is eccentric, can quite easily be brought under such conditions as were designed for homicidal maniacs.’ The state had suddenly and quietly gone mad’, not so much because it admitted the abnormal as because it could not recover the normal’. And anarchy’ was that condition in which a loss of self-control’ prevented any return to the normal’. As always for Chesterton, it was the lack of rational limits’ that was to blame. This limitless anarchy could be seen in the vague extension of punishments like imprisonment’. In the past, the state would torture a man by stretching him on the rack—but not by stretching the rack out’. When the practice was to burn so-called witches, no one suggested that the practice should be extended to other supposedly unsocial characters such as ‘backbiting’ women. The definition of crime was becoming ‘more and more indefinite’, so that, for example, cruelty to children had come to cover almost every negligence that can occur in a needy household’. The modern age was unique in its highly-paid’ experts’ inability to offer some kind of logical account’ for their actions:
The lowest sophist in the Greek schools would remember enough of Socrates to force the Eugenist to tell him (at least) whether Midias was segregated because he was curable or because he was incurable. The meanest Thomist of the mediaeval monasteries would have the sense to see that you cannot discuss a madman when you have not discussed a man. The most owlish Calvinist commentator in the seventeenth century would ask the Eugenist to reconcile such Bible texts as derided fools with the other Bible texts that praised them. The dullest shopkeeper in Paris in 1790 would have asked what were the Rights of Man, if they did not include the rights of the lover, the husband, and the father.104
Without any idea of the exception actually proving the rule, the eugenist regards the heredity of everyone as ‘doubtful’, in which case the eugenist’s judgement itself is the result of a doubtful heredity’. Eugenists wanted doctors ‘to meddle with the public definition of madness’ and ‘to enforce a new conception of sanity’. A eugenist would say that a consumptive like Keats should never have been allowed to come into this world and to endure the suffering of consumption, but happiness unlike consumption was not a calculable matter’: Keats died young; but he had more pleasure in a minute than a Eugenist gets in a month.’ Atheists noticeably avoided language that implied
people have souls, preferring to speak of the outbreak’ rather than the waging’ of war, of international solidarity’ rather than sympathy’ (as though nations were physically stuck together like dates in a grocer’s shop’), of the relations of the sexes’ rather than love’ or lust’ (‘as if a man and a woman were two wooden objects standing in a certain angle and attitude to each other, like a table and a chair’). Similarly, eugenists were as passive in their statements as they are active in their experiments. Their sentences always enter tail first, and have no subject, like animals without heads.’ When she wanted to disembowel, Lady Macbeth demanded a dagger, whereas the eugenist preferred to say more indirectly, ‘in such cases the bowels should, etc.’. In most cases, when the eugenist announced that something should’ be done, the lost subject’ governing the eugenist’s verb was the eugenist himself. In any case, if Chesterton were a eugenist, he would not personally elect’ to waste [his] time locking up the feeble-minded’: The people I should lock up would be the strong-minded.’ He had noticed when he was at school that ‘the kind of boy who likes teasing halfwits was not the sort that stood up to bullies’. The eugenists seemed to be ‘actually proud of the dimness of their definitions and the incompleteness of their plans’. They were ‘ready to reproduce the secrecies and cruelties of the Inquisition’, but they certainly could not be accused of offending with any of that close and complicated thought, that arid and exact logic which narrowed the minds of the Middle Ages; they have discovered how to combine the hardening of the heart with a sympathetic softening of the head’. The eugenists thought that there could be experts on health and sanity, but the truth was that there could only be experts on disease and insanity because experts can only arise out of exceptional things’. If prosecuted for trespass, one could consult a solicitor on what constituted trespass; but, if the solicitor wanted to map out’ one’s country walks, then that solicitor would solicit in vain’. The eugenist argued that a young man about to be married should be obliged to produce his health-book as he does his bank-book’, but health was not calculable like money.105