by Ian Ker
The real established religion of England was not the Church of England (to which disestablishment would do a good deal of good’) but science, which really does use the secular arm’:
And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen—that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the Government will really help it to persecute its heretics.
But this persecution is ‘a new sort of persecution’, for the old kind of persecutor violently enforced his creed, because it was unchangeable’, whereas the new scientific persecutor persecuted on behalf of a ‘hypothesis’, which he boasts that he will always abandon’. There was another difference: ‘The old persecutor was trying to teach the citizen, with fire and sword. The new persecutor is trying to learn from the citizen, with scalpel and germ-injector.’ Eugenics was ‘the first religion to be experimental instead of doctrinal. All other established Churches have been based on somebody having found the truth. This is the first Church that was ever based on not having found it.’ This was an Established Church of Doubt—instead of Faith’. There was no science of eugenics all, but the eugenists promised that if people gave themselves up to be vivisected they [would] very probably have one some day’.106
In Chesterton’s view, eugenics was the natural consequence of a capitalism that thought that a margin of men out of work was good for his business’, since
the same inequality and insecurity that makes cheap labour may make bad labour, and at last no labour at all. It was as if a man who wanted something from an enemy, should at last reduce the enemy to come knocking at his door in the despair of winter, should keep him waiting in the snow to sharpen the bargain; and then come out to find the man dead upon the doorstep.
As a result of ‘the keeping of the worker half in and half out of work…the degraded class was really degenerating’. For the problem was that, although it was right and proper enough to use a man as a tool’ and therefore ‘quite reasonable and respectable, of course, to fling away a man like a tool’, there was a snag in the ‘comparison’: ‘If you pick up a hammer, you do not find a whole family of nails clinging to it. If you fling away a chisel by the roadside, it does not litter and leave a lot of little chisels.’ For, although ‘the meanest of tools’, man had a ‘strange privilege which God had given him, doubtless by mistake’. Swift could hardly have bettered the savagery of Chesterton’s satire: The time came at last when the rather reckless breeding in the abyss below ceased to be a supply, and began to be something like a wastage; ceased to be something like keeping foxhounds, and began alarmingly to resemble a necessity of shooting foxes.’ And so the capitalist’s ‘ideas began, first darkly and unconsciously, but now more and more clearly, to drift’ towards the preferred solution: He could alter the marriage in the house in such a way as to promise himself the largest possible number of the kind of children he did want, with the smallest number of the kind he did not.’107
As a true liberal, Chesterton deplored the loss of liberty, if nothing else, that eugenics represented. But it was not the only infringement on liberty by the state. Legislation against the consumption of alcohol was no longer based on the danger to others of drunkenness but on health: now it was said that ‘the government must safeguard the health of the community’, and, if alcohol was now to be regarded as ‘poison’, then nicotine might soon be so classified. But in that case the government might as well ‘control all the habits of the citizens, and among the rest their habits in the matter of sex’. If ‘personal health’ was to be ‘a public concern’, then the ‘most private acts’ were ‘more public’ than the ‘most public acts’. And so the English people who did not have ‘equality’ like the French or ‘a great religion’ like the Irish were now losing their ‘life’, which was their liberty. But with whom had England gone to war so recently?
England went to war with the Superman in his native home. She went to war with that very land of scientific culture from which the very ideal of a Superman had come.…She gave battle to the birthplace of nine-tenths of the professors who were the prophets of the new hope of humanity…. The very name of Nietzsche, who had held up this hope of something superhuman to humanity, was laughed at for all the world as if he had been touched with lunacy.
But the English who had once been led to believe that Germany was the model State’ could be deceived again—‘though all the millions who died to destroy Prussianism stood up and testified against it’.108
6
After he had become a Catholic, Chesterton was to write that in his ‘experience the convert commonly passes through three stages or states of mind’. In the first stage, the future convert ‘imagines himself to be entirely detached’ and anxious ‘to be fair to the Church of Rome’. The second stage was when the convert ‘begins to be conscious not only of the falsehood’ of the charges levelled at the Church but of its ‘truth, and is enormously excited to find that there is far more of it than he would ever have expected’. This process of ‘discovering the Catholic Church’ was ‘perhaps the most pleasant and straightforward part of the business’. It was ‘like discovering a new continent full of strange flowers and fantastic animals…at once wild and hospitable’. But the third stage, when the convert ‘is trying not to be converted’, was ‘the most terrible’. For the convert had ‘come too near to the truth’ and had ‘forgotten that truth is a magnet, with the powers of attraction and repulsion’. Or, to change the metaphor, the convert was now threatened with ‘the tragic and menacing grandeur of a great love affair’. ‘I may say,’ Chesterton confessed, ‘that I for one was never less troubled by doubts than in the last phase, when I was troubled by fears.’ And he doubted that he would ever ‘again have such absolute assurance’ of the truth of Catholicism than when he made his ‘last effort to deny it’.109
The two people, according to Chesterton, who helped him most in this last stage were Maurice Baring and Father Ronald Knox, who had travelled the same road themselves.110 Knox had admired Chesterton since he was a schoolboy, and they ‘had met several times on public occasions and had written to, and of, one another with enthusiasm’, but they were not personal friends.111 It seems that Chesterton asked to meet Knox, whose account of his conversion in A Spiritual Aenead had been published in 1918. In the first of a series of undated letters to Knox (whose letters have not survived), the first three of which were written from Overroads before the move to Top Meadow in the summer of 1922, Chesterton said that their meeting had ‘got into every chink of [his] thoughts, even the pauses of talk on practical things’. But in the meantime, he had been ‘distracted’ by the financial problems of the New Witness, which was in ‘a crisis about which shareholders etc. have to be consulted’. ‘I can’t let my brother’s paper,’ he explained, ‘that stands for all he believed in, go without doing all I can; and I am trying to get it started again, with Belloc to run it if possible.’ At their meeting he had not been able to ‘explain’ himself properly to Knox, and he wanted to try again: ‘I could not explain what I mean about my wife without saying much more. I see in principle it is not on the same level as the true Church; for nothing can be on the same level as God. But it is on quite a different level from social sentiments about friends and family.’ He felt a ‘responsibility’ about Frances, ‘more serious than affection, let alone passion’. First, she had given him his ‘first respect for sacramental Christianity’, and, second, ‘she is one of the good who mysteriously suffer; and I am partly to blame and have never been good enough for her’. So far as his own ‘feelings’ were concerned, he thought that he ‘might rightly make application to be instructed as soon as possible’; but he did not want ‘to take so serious a step without reopening the matter’ with Frances, which he ‘could do by the end of the week
’: ‘I have had no opportunity before, because she has only just recovered from an illness, and is going away for a few days.’ He wanted Knox to tell him how he could ‘arrange matters with some priest or religious in London’ who might be able to see him ‘once or twice a week, or whatever is required’, or else to give him ‘the address of someone to write to, if that is the correct way’. There were priests in High Wycombe, the nearest large town, but he imagined they were ‘very busy parochial clergy’. Chesterton concluded the letter by saying that he had meant to write about ‘the convictions involved in a more abstract way’, but he was afraid that he had filled his letter ‘with one personal point’. When he wrote again after talking with Frances he would write ‘about the other matters’—‘and as they are more intellectual and less emotional, I hope I may be a little more coherent’.112
In May 1922 Chesterton’s father, Mr Ed, died. According to Keith’ Chesterton, in the autumn of 1921 Mr Ed had ‘developed an obstinate cold, and though there was nothing sinister or alarming in his symptoms, the condition increased his nervous apprehensions and he decided to go to bed’. At first, his hypochondria only kept him in bed till tea-time, when he would get up ‘and grow quite cheerful over buttered toast and cress sandwiches; but as the days shortened he left his bed less frequently’. Recommended by the doctor to leave London for ‘a change of air’, he refused to move, claiming he did not have the energy. That winter ‘his periods of inertia grew more frequent, and he would sometimes remain silent for quite a long time’. But when he felt better he would tell fairy tales to the devoted maid’s little boy. The family were accustomed to his dread of illness and did not take his condition very seriously; he would surely be on his feet again in the warmer weather of spring. But gradually he spent longer and longer in bed till the time came when he seemed to lose the energy to get up. His mental powers began to fail and he drifted into lassitude and inertia’.113
Before his father died, Chesterton had written to Knox to apologize for not having written before. By now his father was ‘very ill’, but his anxiety did ‘not so much turn the current of [his] thoughts as deepen it’. Chesterton was, of course, thinking of his conversion to Catholicism: to see a man so many million times better than I am, in every way, and one to whom I owe everything, under such a shadow makes me feel, on top of all my particular feelings, that shadow that lies on us all.’ His father was ‘the very best man’ that he ‘ever knew of that generation, that never understood the new need of a spiritual authority’, living ‘almost perfectly by the sort of religion men had when rationalism was rational’. ‘I think’, added Chesterton, ‘he was always subconsciously prepared for the next generation having less theology than he has; and is rather puzzled at its having more. But I think he understood my brother’s conversion better than my mother did; she is more difficult, and of course I cannot bother her just now.’ However, his ‘family trouble’ had a ‘practical’ consequence so far as his reception into the Church was concerned:
As this may bring me to London more than I thought, it seems possible I might go there after all, instead of Wycombe, if I knew to whom to go. Also I find I stupidly destroyed your letter with the names of the priests at Wycombe to whom you referred me. Would it bother you very much to send me the names again, and any alternative London ones that occur to you; and I will let you know my course of action then.
Just when he was ‘settling down’ to write ‘a full reply’ to Knox’s reply, Chesterton received a telegram calling him urgently to London, apparently because his father was not expected to live rather than that he had actually died. Since his father’s death, he now wrote, he had ‘been doing the little’ he could for his mother—‘but even that little involves a great deal of business—the least valuable sort of help’. He would not now attempt to tell Knox ‘all that this involves in connection with [his] deeper feelings and intentions’, but was sending ‘this interim scribble as an excuse for delaying the letter [he] had already begun; and which nothing less than this catastrophe would have prevented [him] from finishing’. He hoped to ‘finish it in a few days’. He was not sure whether he would by then have returned to Beaconsfield, but if he had he would be at a new address: Top Meadow.114 In the meantime he had heard again from Maurice Baring, who wrote to send his condolences. Baring said that he had ‘lately felt strangely near’ to Chesterton, and had ‘had (quite wrongly perhaps) the impression’ that his ‘buffetings were over’ and that his ‘ship was in calm waters, well in sight of the harbour’.115
It was from his new home, Top Meadow, that Chesterton next wrote to Knox, apologizing for ‘the disreputable haste of [his] letter’: ‘my normal chaos is increased by moving into a new house, which is still like a waste-paper basket.’ He had
meant to make some attempt to finish the fuller reply I had actually begun to the very kind letter you sent me, I am ashamed to think how long ago, before my recent trouble; and though the trail and tangle of those troubles will still, I fear, make this very inadequate, there were two things in your letter I feel I ought to acknowledge even so late.
First, he could not say how ‘pleased and honoured’ he felt ‘even by the suggestion’ that Knox might ‘possibly’ give him the necessary instruction for reception into the Church: ‘It is something that I should value more vividly and personally than I can possibly express.’ But, as this ‘was so long ago, before so many delays and interruptions’, he was afraid that Knox’s ‘margin of Sundays in London must now be very much narrowed’. But he thought that ‘there must be still a Sunday or two left on [his] list’, and with his ‘permission’ he proposed to come to London next Sunday if there was a possibility of seeing him then. He imagined that a meeting could be arranged through Maurice Baring, for example, unless Knox would prefer to make his own ‘arrangements’. They could then discuss the ‘possibility’ of Knox instructing him or ‘finally make some arrangement about another one’. In any event, he would welcome the chance of another talk with Knox if it was not inconvenient. Second, he wanted to assure Knox that there was no need for him to apologize for what he had said about ‘private troubles’ disqualifying a person from appearing on ‘public platforms’, ‘for it is exactly what I am feeling most intensely myself’.
I am in a state now when I feel a monstrous charlatan, as if I wore a mask and were stuffed with cushions, whenever I see anything about the public G.K.C.; it hurts me; for though the views I express are real, the image is horribly unreal compared with the real person who needs help just now. I have as much vanity as anybody about these superficial successes while they are going on; but I never feel for a moment that they affect the reality of whether I am utterly rotten or not; so that any public comments on my religious position seem like a wind on the other side of the world; as if they are about somebody else—as indeed they are. I am not troubled about a great fat man who appears on platforms and in caricatures, even when he enjoys controversies on what I believe to be the right side. I am concerned about what has become of a little boy whose father showed him a toy theatre, and a schoolboy whom nobody ever heard of, with his brooding on doubts and dirt and daydreams of crude conscientiousness so inconsistent as to [be] near to hypocrisy; and all the morbid life of the lonely mind of a living person with whom I have lived. It is that story, that so often came near to ending badly, that I want to end well. Forgive this scrawl; I think you will understand me.
He ended the latter by saying that he was going to London next day, when he would ‘try to fix something up with Maurice [Baring] or somebody’.116
In the end, it seems that Knox suggested that he should come and see Chesterton in Beaconsfield. This, unfortunately, was not possible, Chesterton replied:
I feel horribly guilty in not having written before, and I do most earnestly hope you have not allowed my delay to interfere with any of your own arrangements. I have had a serious and very moving talk with my wife; and she is only too delighted at the idea of your visit in itself; in fact she really wants to know y
ou very much.
The problem was that as yet they had only one spare room at Top Meadow, which was currently occupied by a nurse who was giving Frances ‘a treatment that seems to be doing her good’ and that he did not want to stop if he could help it.
In our conversation my wife was all that I hope you will some day know her to be; she is incapable of wanting me to do anything but what I think right; and admits the same possibility for herself: but it is much more of a wrench for her, for she has been able to practise her religion in complete good faith; which my own doubts have prevented me from doing.
He was ashamed, he added in a postscript, that he had failed to post the letter for two days ‘owing to executor business. Nobody so unbusinesslike as I am ought to be busy.’ Knox apparently wrote back to say that he could visit Chesterton during the summer vacation (he was teaching at St Edmund’s College, Ware). But again there was the problem of the resident nurse who was giving Frances ‘a treatment of radiant heat’ for her arthritic spine (which ‘one would hardly think needed in this weather’), although he hoped to be able to give Knox a definite answer ‘in a day or two’ and ‘should love to accept’ his ‘generous suggestion’ if at all possible. In the next undated letter that survives from Chesterton, he writes (‘almost stepping on to the boat’) of having ‘to go and lecture for a week in Holland’, having only just emerged from a ‘hurricane of business’, no doubt to do with the ailing New Witness. However, he promises to write again ‘more fully about the business of instruction’ on his return in about ten days’ time. On returning from Holland, it seems he changed his mind, writing to Knox that he ought to have told him ‘long ago’ what he had ‘done about the most practical of business matters’. His excuse for not writing was the usual one: ‘I have again been torn in pieces by the wars of the New Witness.’ Nevertheless, he had ‘managed to have another talk’ with Frances, after which he had written to ‘our old friend Father O’Connor and asked him to come here, as he probably can’ from what Chesterton had heard. He felt ‘sure’ that he had made the right decision: