G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  However, I went through the catechism (he was importunate that I should use it as he said all the children made use of it), very meticulously explained all the details, to which he lent a most vigilant and unswerving attention. For instance, he wanted me to explain the reason of the drop of water being put into the wine at the preparing of the chalice for the Holy Sacrifice.

  So ‘aware’ was Chesterton ‘of the immensity of the Real Presence on the morning of his First Communion…that he was covered with perspiration when he actually received Our Lord. When I was congratulating him he said, “I have spent the happiest hour of my life.”’138 But, at least to begin with, he found it difficult going to Holy Communion, his ‘best happiness’: he was ‘too much frightened of that tremendous reality on the altar. I have not grown up with it and it is too much for me.’ That he was ‘morbid’ he did not doubt—but he needed ‘to be told so by authority’.139 It was not only the Eucharist but even priests themselves who inspired ‘awe and reverence’ in him: ‘He would carefully weigh their opinions however fatuous,’ Dom Ignatius Rice remembered.140 A 12-year old boy who used to serve Mass in the tin shed at the Station Hotel in Beaconsfield was ‘always impressed at the wrapt attention with which he listened to the rather poor sermons. He obviously saw much more in them than the rest of the congregation.’141

  The last chapter of Chesterton’s Autobiography is entitled ‘The God with the Golden Key’. The point of the title is revealed at the end of the chapter, when he recalls ‘the figure of a man who crosses a bridge and carries a key; as I saw him when I first looked into fairyland through the window of my father’s peep-show’. Now he ‘starts up again before me, standing sharp and clear in shape as of old’ and ‘I know that he who is called Pontifex, the Builder of the Bridge, is called also the Claviger, the Bearer of the Key; and that such keys were given him to bind and loose when he was a poor fisher in a far province, beside a small and almost secret sea’. He had already explained that, when asked why he had become a Catholic, his ‘first essential answer’, even though it was ‘partly an elliptical answer’, was: ‘“To get rid of my sins.” For there is no other religious system that does really profess to get rid of people’s sins.’142 Presumably by italicizing the word ‘really’, Chesterton (who was forgetting the Orthodox Church) was referring to the Anglican Church, where sacramental confession was practised by a party within it but not by the Church in general, which, he presumably meant, could not therefore be said ‘really’ to ‘profess to get rid of people’s sins’. (There is in fact evidence to suggest that Chesterton himself may have received the sacrament while still an Anglican, not unnaturally, since he professed to be an Anglo-Catholic.143) He proceeds to explain that the Roman Catholic Church believes that ‘sin confessed and adequately repented is actually abolished’—he forgets to add when absolved’—‘and that the sinner does really begin again as if he had never sinned’. This doctrine brought ‘sharply’ back to him ‘those visions or fancies’ with which he had dealt in his chapter on childhood. There he had spoken of that strange daylight, which was something more than the light of common day, that still seems in my memory to shine on those steep roads down from Campden Hill, from which one could see the Crystal Palace from afar’. Similarly,

  when a Catholic comes from Confession, he does truly, by definition, step out again into that dawn of his own beginning and look with new eyes across the world to a Crystal Palace that is really of crystal. He believes that in that dim corner, and in that brief ritual, God has really remade him in His own image. He is now a new experiment of the Creator. He is as much a new experiment as he was when he was really only five years old. He stands, as I said, in the white light at the worthy beginning of the life of a man. The accumulations of time can no longer terrify. He may be grey and gouty; but he is only five minutes old.144

  Catholic doctrines seemed to Chesterton to ‘link up’ the whole of his life, ‘as no other doctrines could do; and especially to settle simultaneously the two problems of [his] childish happiness and [his] boyish brooding’. In particular, they affected what he hoped it was not ‘pompous’ to call ‘the chief idea’ of his life—namely, ‘the idea of taking things with gratitude, and not taking things for granted’. The sacrament of confession gave ‘a new life’, but the ‘gift’ was ‘given at a price’—that is, ‘facing the reality about oneself’. He had first seen ‘the two sides of this single truth stated together’ when he had read in the Penny Catechism: ‘The two sins against Hope are presumption and despair.’ From the first, he had had ‘an almost violently vivid sense’ of the danger of both presumption and despair. The ‘aim of life’ was ‘appreciation’, and this depended on having ‘humility’ and feeling unworthy’. Both despair and presumption, on the other hand, were inspired by ‘pride’. The intellectuals who thought one had a ‘right’ to things, he had noticed, also believed there was ‘no such thing as right and wrong’. But to be ‘thankful’ meant being ‘thankful’ to somebody. And the only person one could be grateful to for existence was God. It seemed to Chesterton that Catholic theology alone had ‘not only thought, but thought of everything’. Other philosophies and religions were happy with ‘one idea’, ‘to follow a truth…and apply it to everything’. Catholicism was in Chesterton’s experience the only ‘creed that could not be satisfied with a truth, but only with the Truth, which is made of a million…truths and yet is one’. Had he, like Shaw, made up his ‘own philosophy out of [his] own precious fragment of truth’, merely because he had found it out for himself, he would ‘soon have found that truth distorting itself into a falsehood’. His sense of wonder ‘would, if unbalanced by other truths, have become…very unbalanced indeed’. The one idea of ‘transcendental contentment’ could easily have led him into solipsism and ‘political Quietism’.145

  As he comes to the end of his Autobiography, Chesterton sees himself as ‘finishing a story’ that was ‘very much of a mystery-story’: he was ‘answering at the end only the questions’ he had ‘asked at the beginning’. Since childhood he had had ‘a certain romance of receptiveness’: he had never been ‘bored’: ‘Existence is still a strange thing to me; and as a stranger I give it welcome.’ Now he found himself ‘ratified’ in his ‘realisation of the miracle of being alive … in a definite dogmatic sense’. However, his ‘rude and primitive religion of gratitude’ had not saved him from ingratitude, the sin that was ‘perhaps most horrible’ to him. But precisely because ‘the evil’ had been ‘mainly of the imagination, it could only be pierced by that conception of confession which is the end of mere solitude and secrecy’. He had found the only religion that ‘dared to go down’ with him ‘into the depths’ of himself. His early ‘morbidities’ had been ‘mental as well as moral’ and had ‘sounded the most appalling depths of fundamental scepticism and solipsism’. And ‘there again’ he had found that ‘the Church had gone before [him] and established her adamantine foundations; that she had affirmed the actuality of external things’. Again, his ‘instinct’ had been ‘to defend liberty in small nations and poor families; that is, to defend the rights of man as including the rights of property; especially the property of the poor’. But he had not really understood what he ‘meant by Liberty’ until ‘he heard it called by the new name of Human Dignity’: ‘It was a new name to me; though it was part of a creed nearly two thousand years old’—the one key which can unlock all doors’.146

  The change in Chesterton that conversion had brought was noticeable to at least one observer. His old Jewish school friend Lawrence Solomon, now a neighbour in Beaconsfield, noticed ‘not only how happy his conversion had made [him] but also how it seemed to bring him increased strength of character’.147

  Between October 1922 and April 1923 Chesterton wrote a series of brief apologetic articles under the general title Where All Roads Lead in the Dominican review Blackfriars, which were published a month later in the American periodical the Catholic World.148 There were, he insisted, always only two ‘fundamental r
easons’ for converting to Catholicism: because it was true and because it offered ‘liberation from…sins’. What had changed since the nineteenth century was ‘the challenge of the Church’. Up until then, the convert to the Catholic Church had to justify his conversion: ‘Today a man is really expected to give reasons for not joining it.’ At least subconsciously, he thought this was true for many people, who were ‘conscious non-Catholics’. Certainly, that was the experience of Chesterton himself, who had never felt called upon to give reasons for not joining the Orthodox or the Quakers or Islam. It was not that these conscious non-Catholics’ did not have ‘real objections’; on the contrary, they felt obliged ‘to object’, ‘to kick and struggle’. This ‘consciousness of the challenge of the Church’ was ‘connected with something else’, which had been ‘the strongest of all the purely intellectual forces’ that had ‘dragged’ Chesterton ‘towards the truth’—and that was the ‘singular nature’ of ‘the survival of the faith’, for this ‘old religion’ was a religion that refused ‘to grow old’. It was this ‘aggressiveness of Catholicism’ that had put ‘intellectuals on the defensive’. Personally, Chesterton could not ‘understand how this unearthly freshness in something so old’ could ‘possibly be explained, except on the supposition that it [was] indeed unearthly’. History showed that it was not ‘orthodoxy’ that had ‘grown old slowly’ but heresy that had ‘grown old quickly’. The Reformation had grown ‘old amazingly quickly’, whereas ‘the Counter-Reformation … was full of the fire and even of the impatience of youth’. The Church had had ‘any number of opportunities of dying, and even of being respectfully interred. But the younger generation always began once again to knock at the door; and never louder than when it was knocking at the lid of the coffin, in which it had been prematurely buried.’ It was the Church that ‘preserved the only seed and secret of novelty’. Whenever Catholicism was ‘driven out as an old thing’, it always returned ‘as a new thing’. It was not just ‘a survival’, like any ‘very old thing’ that managed to ‘survive’. The Church was characterized not by ‘endurance’ but by ‘recovery’. It was to the ‘complexity’ of its doctrines, ‘of which religious reformers have so constantly complained’, that it owed ‘its victory over modern minds’, owing ‘its most recent revivals to the very fact that it is the one creed that is still not ashamed of being complicated’. It was ‘the simple religions’ that were ‘sterile’ and that became ‘very rapidly stale’. A simple religion that simply said that God was Love could only elicit ‘a rather feeble’ response, such as ‘Oh’ or ‘Well, well’. It was not ‘complex’ enough to be ‘living’. It was ‘too simple to be true’. But a complex religion like Catholicism had ‘innumerable aspects’ and was ‘rich’ in always having ‘a number of ideas in reserve’. New Catholic ‘movements’ generally emphasized ‘some Catholic idea that was only neglected in the sense that it was not till then specially needed’; but, when it was needed, ‘nothing else’ could meet the need. The Church’s ‘power of resurrection’ depended on ‘this possession of reserves’, and in order to have this power it was necessary to possess ‘the whole’ of Catholicism and not just ‘parts’ of it, like Anglo-Catholics who ‘took their pick in the fields of Christendom’, but without possessing the fields, especially ‘the fallow fields’: ‘They could not have all the riches, because they could not have all the reserves of the religion.’ Chesterton himself in his youth had made for himself, in an age of pessimism, ‘a sort of rudimentary philosophy… founded on the first principle that it is, after all, a precious and wonderful privilege to exist at all’. But this ‘optimism of wonder’ was only a ‘half-truth’ that needed to be taken into ‘the culture of the Catholic Church’, where it could be ‘balanced by other truths’—where this optimism, which was ‘an incomplete philosophy’, would not degenerate into ‘an orgy of anarchy or a stagnation of slavery’. The Penny Catechism’s condemnation of the two sins against hope’ ‘seemed exactly to sum up and define … something that I had been trying to realize and express through all my struggles with the sects and schools of my youth’, for the ‘heresies that have attacked human happiness in my time, have all been variations either of presumption or despair; which, in the controversies of modern culture, are called optimism and pessimism’.149

  Chesterton had been drawn out of ‘ordinary Protestantism’ by the Virgin Mary ‘being beautiful’, while he had been drawn out of Anglicanism by the Church. In other words, he was drawn by ‘the positive attractions’ of what he had ‘not yet got’ rather than by ‘negative disparagements’ of what he had ‘managed to get already’. The Anglo-Catholicism he had left behind could easily be called ‘a piece of English half-conscious hypocrisy’ insofar as it complained about the Protestantism of England, while at the same time ‘arguing that she had remained Catholic’. And it was true that there were Anglo-Catholics who talked ‘as if Catholicism had never been betrayed and oppressed’ and who could be unfavourably contrasted with St Peter who ‘denied his Lord; but at least… never denied that he had denied Him’.150

  The Church was accused of being too stiff and stationary’. And it was true that she could not ‘change quite so fast as the charges against her’ did: ‘She is sometimes caught napping and still disproving what was said about her on Monday, to the neglect of the completely contrary thing that is said about her on Tuesday.’ She did ‘sometimes live pathetically in the past, to the extent of innocently supposing that the modern thinker’ would ‘think to-day what he thought yesterday’: ‘Modern thought does outstrip her, in the sense that it disappears, of itself, before she has done disproving it. She is slow and belated, in the sense that she studies heresy more seriously than the heresiarch does.’ Indeed, ‘Catholicism was ignorant; it did not even know that Protestantism was dead’. The very things that the Church had had to defend were being ‘reintroduced by the modern world, and always in a lower form’: ‘The Puritans rejected art and symbolism, and the decadents brought them back again, with all the old appeal to sense and an additional appeal to sensuality.…Protestant moralists abolished the confessional and the psychoanalysts have re-established the confessional, with every one of its alleged dangers and not one of its admitted safeguards.…’151

  12

  The Everlasting Man

  1

  IN November 1922 Chesterton published The Man who Knew too Much. The detective stories that make up the book had been originally published in Cassell’s Magazine and the Storyteller. The detective in most of the stories, ‘the man who knew too much’, is Horne Fisher, who is related to everyone who counts in the political establishment. He also physically resembles Maurice Baring, whom Chesterton had described as ‘a man who knows everybody’ when applying to him for help over the trip to Palestine: ‘He was a tall, fair man, cadaverous and a little lackadaisical, with heavy eyelids and a high-bridge nose.’1 But there the resemblance ended. As a kind of political counterpart to Father Brown,2 who understands the criminal because he too is a sinner, Horne Fisher ‘knew too much’ about the world of party politics in England as Chesterton, his brother, and Belloc saw it—politics in which inevitably cosmopolitan Jewish finance makes a number of sinister appearances. But there again the resemblance ends, as the Horne Fisher stories cannot be compared in quality with the Father Brown stories. Nevertheless, Chesterton chose one of the stories, ‘The Five of Swords’, which did not feature Horne Fisher, as his contribution to My Best Story: An Anthology of Stories Chosen by their own Authors (1929), and the story also appeared in the Oxford World Classics anthology Crime and Detection (1930).

  On 14 February 1923 Chesterton wrote to the partial model for Horne Fisher at some length about the reasons that finally persuaded him that he must leave the Church of England and join the Church of Rome. He begins with one of his ‘deepest reasons’, which he was afraid would give ‘offence’ to Anglo-Catholics—‘and I am sure it is the wrong method to offend the wavering Anglo-Catholic’. But he did think that one of his ‘strongest mo
tives was mixed up with the idea of honour’: ‘I feel there is something mean about not making complete confession and restitution after a historic error and slander. It is not the same thing to withdraw the charges against Rome one by one, or restore the traditions to Canterbury one by one.’ He offered an ‘imperfect’ analogy for the Anglo-Catholic who did just that.

  Suppose a young prig refuses to live with his father or his friend or his wife, because wine is drunk in the house or there are Greek statues in the hall. Suppose he goes off on his own and develops broader ideas. On the day he drinks his first glass of wine, I think it is essential to his honour that he should go back to his father or his friend and say, ‘You were right and I was wrong, and we will drink wine together.’ It is not consonant with his honour that he should set up a house of his own with wine and statues and every parallel particular, and still treat the other as if he were in the wrong. This is mean because it is making the best of both; it is combining the advantages of being right with the advantages of having been wrong.