G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  You will have to go to Confession next Easter; and I find the spectacle—the box, your portly kneeling figure, the poor devil inside wishing you had become a Fireworshipper instead of coming there to shake his soul with a sense of his ridiculousness and yours—all incredible, comic, though of course I can put a perfect literary complexion on it in a brace of shakes.

  However, now he was becoming ‘personal’—but how else could he be ‘sincere’? Besides, he was going on too long and ‘the lunch bell [was] ringing’. Chesterton should not bother to answer’ unless he could not ‘help it’.16

  In his weekly column in the New Witness of 20 April, Chesterton mentioned that it had been suggested to him that the new paper should be called the Distributist Weekly: ‘The difficulty is that the word distributism is itself a necessary evil to describe a necessary good.’ There was another objection: distributism was not the only cause for which the new paper would stand, and it was impossible to find a name that would cover all that the paper would be for and against. But associating the paper with Chesterton’s name would give the ordinary reader a pretty good idea of what the paper stood for. He himself personally would prefer Shaw’s suggestion that the paper be called Chesterton’s’, as that would remind people of his brother and that the New Witness was his paper. But he had to think of what would be good for the paper not for himself, and he knew that the name of the new paper should make it clear that, while he had only been the caretaker editor of the New Witness, the new paper was his paper, in a sense in which the New Witness never had been, even in operation, let alone in origin’. But he had to be the real and responsible editor’ of the new paper. And his initials would make it clear that readers could expect not the dullness’ of pompous platitudes’ but the fun’, even ‘buffoonery’, of that ‘pantomime elephant’, ‘the Chesterbelloc’. Readers would know that he would ‘make a fight of it’, but that he would be funny at the same time. After he had referred to his brother as ‘the fighter’ who had been the real worker’ where the New Witness was concerned, Chesterton’s implication seems clear enough: that he intends his paper to be a different kind of paper, one marked by humour above all—not the quality that readers would have first associated with the combative Cecil.17 ‘Keith’ understood perfectly correctly why she was not to be assistant editor of her brother-in-law’s new paper.

  The editorial in the last but one issue of the New Witness of 27 April looked back on the achievements of the paper and looked forward to what still had to be done:

  We set out to state certain truths about public life that were hidden from the public; especially in the matter of political corruption and the abuses of plutocracy. Our first duty was to get them accepted as truths; but certainly our second duty is to prevent them being accepted as truisms; that is, to prevent them being accepted as necessary evils. We were not content until people agreed that politics are corrupt; but we are even less content with an agreement that they must be corrupt.

  That week Chesterton’s column ‘At the Sign of the World’s End’ took the form of an open letter to Belloc, a tribute to the author of The Servile State and, with Cecil Chesterton, the co-founder of the paper: ‘You were the father and founder of this mission; we were the converts but you were the missionary.’18 The editorial of the last issue of 4 May had this consolation: That we have at least lived long enough to deprive so many famous persons of so many festive hours is alone enough to surround our ending with a certain serene and radiant satisfaction.’ The correspondence column consisted of tributes to the paper, including one from H. G. Wells:

  I love G.K.C. and I hate the Catholicism of Belloc and Rome so that I sit by your bedside, the Phoenix death-bed from which G.K.C.’s Weekly is to be born, with very mingled feelings…. You’ve been a decent wrong-headed old paper, full of good writing. If Catholicism is still to run about the world giving tongue, it can have no better spokesman than G.K.C. But I grudge Catholicism, G.K.C.19

  2

  September 1923 saw the publication of Fancies versus Fads, a collection of articles from the New Witness, as well as from the Illustrated London News and the London Mercury. Chesterton’s volumes of collected articles show very clearly that, prolific as he was, his journalism inevitably is by no means so prolific in ideas and themes. And Fancies versus Fads is no exception. One familiar object of attack is what we should today call the nanny state’, which was born in the first part of the twentieth century and whose relentless expansion into the twenty-first century would not have surprised Chesterton in the least:

  There must be a ceaseless and almost mechanical multiplication of things forbidden. The resolution to cure all the ills that flesh is heir to, combined with the guesswork about all possible evils that flesh and nerve and brain-cell may be heir to—these two things conducted simultaneously must inevitably spread a sort of panic of prohibition. Scientific imagination and social reform between them will quite logically and almost legitimately have made us slaves.

  Chesterton accurately prophesies a society terrorized by ‘health and safety’ regulations, a society that ‘has descended to the indescribably mental degradation of trying to abolish the abuse of things by abolishing the things themselves; which is as if it were to abolish ponds or abolish trees’ for fear of what might happen to children tempted to explore them: ‘Perhaps it will have a try at that before long. Thus we have all heard of savages who try a tomahawk for murder, or burn a wooden club for the damage it has done to society. To such intellectual levels may the world return.’ The ‘nanny state’ was particularly worried about people drinking ‘fermented liquor’ as though it were ‘an artifice and a luxury; something odd like the strange self-indulgences praised by the decadent poets’—whereas actually it was ‘one of the habits that are…man’s second nature; if indeed they are not his first nature’.20

  However, there were more sinister infringements of liberty practised by the prohibiting state. There was a new penal theory that said that the state ‘may punish people, but not blame them’. But this was nothing more than a return to ‘the test of the heathen world, that of considering service to the state and not justice to the individual’. In other words, people might be punished ‘for the happiness of the community’ rather than because they deserved to be. The idea now was not that the punishment should ‘fit the crime’ but that it should ‘fit the community’. And, as in the old heathen world, the people who would suffer were ‘chiefly’ the ‘subordinate and submerged classes of society’. The same classes were also threatened by the prohibition of strikes, as though they were offences like ‘breaking a window or hitting a policeman on the nose’—whereas strikers were ‘not doing something’ for they were ‘doing nothing’.21

  Marriage and the family are, as usual, defended as bulwarks against the ‘Servile State’, which has ‘always been rather embarrassed by the institution of marriage’. For marriage, Chesterton insists, is an institution like any other, set up deliberately to have certain functions and limitations’ and not merely as ‘an individual experience’. As for the family, it ‘is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.’ It blocks ‘the way to a mere social assimilation and regimentation’.22 In ‘The Secret Society of Mankind’, Chesterton draws our attention to three other even more basic facts about life. The first is ‘not… merely… the truth that all men will die, but…the truth that all men know it’. The second is: ‘We do know of any man whatever what we do not know of any other thing whatever, that his death is what we call a tragedy.’ And the third fact is just as obvious—but only Chesterton would remark upon it: the ‘colossal fact, dwarfing all human differentiations …that man is the only creature who does laugh’.23

  A month after the publication of Fancies versus Fads, Chesterton published St Francis of Assisi. He had long been fascinated by the saint, whose name he had taken as a confirmation name. To the last but one issue of the Debater, which came out before Christmas 1892, he had cont
ributed a poem called simply ‘St Francis of Assisi’, which expressed ‘most powerfully’ of all his poems in the Debater his antipathy towards religious dogma.24 A year later, in his letter to Lucian Oldershaw expressing his enthusiasm for Robert Blatchford’s Merrie England, he had written about ‘a curious idea’ he had had of a tea party consisting of about six people, including Jesus Christ, Walt Whitman—and St Francis.25 In a letter from Milan in 1894 to E. C. Bentley, he had listed Francis, along with Whitman, among those whom ‘I happen to affect’.26 In an article in the Speaker in 1900 he had spoken of the ‘fascinating inconsistency’ that, while St Francis ‘expressed in loftier and bolder language than any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears’ and ‘he was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of men’, nevertheless he embraced a life of ‘extreme asceticism’.27 In Orthodoxy, he had written, ‘St Francis, in praising all good, could be a more shouting optimist than Walt Whitman’.28 Now, in his book on the saint, he wrote:

  The figure in the brown habit stands above the hearth in the room where I write, and alone among many such images, at no stage of my pilgrimage has he ever seemed to me to be a stranger…. His figure stands on a sort of bridge connecting my boyhood with my conversion to many other things…29

  The feature of St Francis that most obviously appealed to Chesterton was his ‘Praise’ of creation, which Chesterton insists was in no way to be identified with ‘nature-worship or pantheistic optimism’. Francis’s ‘great gratitude’ for existence was not just a feeling or sentiment: it was ‘the very rock of reality’, besides which ‘all facts’ were ‘fancies’. This was ‘the fundamental fact which we cover up, as with curtains, with the illusion of ordinary life’: ‘He who has seen the whole world hanging on a hair of the mercy of God has seen the truth; we might almost say the cold truth.’ All good things ‘look better when they look like gifts’—even if it did ‘seem a paradox to say that a man may be transported with joy to discover that he is in debt’. Being ‘above all things a great giver’, Francis ‘cared chiefly for the best kind of giving which is called thanksgiving’: ‘If another great man wrote a grammar of assent’—Chesterton is referring to Newman’s book by that title—‘he may well be said to have written a grammar of acceptance; a grammar of gratitude. He understood down to its very depths the theory of thanks; and its depths are a bottomless abyss. He knew that the praise of God stands on its strongest ground when it stands on nothing.’ And this, paradoxically, was the key to understanding how the joyful Francis could also be the severest of ascetics: ‘It is the highest and holiest of the paradoxes that the man who really knows he cannot pay his debt will be for ever paying it. He will be for ever giving back what he cannot give back, and cannot be expected to give back.’ Most people were ‘not generous enough to be ascetics’. ‘The whole point’, explains Chesterton, ‘about St Francis of Assisi is that he certainly was ascetic and he certainly was not gloomy’. His asceticism was not in the least bit ‘negative…it was not…a stoical simplicity of life. It was not self-denial merely in the sense of self-control. It was as positive as a passion; it had all the air of being as positive as a pleasure. He devoured fasting as a man devours food.’30

  For all his thanksgiving for creation, Francis, insists Chesterton, ‘was not a lover of nature. Properly understood, a lover of nature was precisely what he was not.’ Chesterton explains the paradox as he sees it: ‘The phrase implies accepting the material universe as a vague environment, a sort of sentimental pantheism.’ In the literature of the Romantic period, one could easily

  imagine that a hermit in the ruins of a chapel (preferably by moonlight) might find peace and a mild pleasure in the harmony of solemn forests and silent stars, while he pondered over some scroll or illuminated volume, about the liturgical nature of which the author was a little vague. In short, the hermit might love nature as a background.

  But for St Francis,

  nothing was ever in the background.…He saw everything as dramatic, distinct from its setting, not all of a piece like a picture but in action like a play. A bird went by him like an arrow; something with a story and a purpose, though it was a purpose of life and not a purpose of death. A bush could stop him like a brigand; and indeed he was as ready to welcome the brigand as the bush.31

  If Francis was not ‘a lover of nature’, he was most certainly not a worshipper of nature. The ancient Greeks, ‘the great guides and pioneers of pagan antiquity, started out with the idea of something splendidly obvious and direct; the idea that if man walked straight ahead on the high road of reason and nature, he would come to no harm; especially if he was, as the Greek was, eminently enlightened and intelligent’. But by setting out to be ‘natural…the most unnatural thing in the world was the very first thing they did’, for ‘people who worship health cannot remain healthy’. And the reason, Chesterton argues, is that the ancient Greeks did not know ‘the glad good news’ announced by Christianity—‘the news of original sin’. The problem with the ancient Greeks and Romans was that they lacked anything ‘in the way of mysticism, except that concerned with the mystery of the nameless forces of nature, such as sex and growth and death’. In particular, by ‘treating sex as only one innocent thing…every other innocent natural thing became soaked and sodden with sex. For sex cannot be admitted to a mere equality among elementary emotions or experiences like eating and sleeping. The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant.’ As for the modern idea that sex is ‘free like any other sense’ and that the body is ‘beautiful like any flower or tree’, it was ‘either a description of the Garden of Eden or a piece of thoroughly bad psychology, of which the world grew weary two thousand years ago’. It was no good the ancient Greeks talking about ‘a natural religion full of stars and flowers; there was not a flower or even a star that had not been stained’. Only by abolishing ‘nature-worship’ could human beings ‘return to nature’. And ‘the whole philosophy of St Francis revolved round the idea of a new supernatural light on natural things, which meant the ultimate recovery not the ultimate refusal of natural things’. The idea that he was ‘a mere romantic forerunner of the Renaissance and a revival of natural pleasures for their own sake’ was a complete misrepresentation:

  ‘The whole point of him was that the secret of recovering the natural pleasures lay in regarding them in the light of a supernatural pleasure.’32

  Secular admirers of St Francis like Matthew Arnold thought of religion as a philosophy, but philosophy is ‘an impersonal thing’, and

  man will not roll in the snow for a stream of tendency by which all things fulfil the law of their being. He will not go without food in the name of something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness. He will do things like this, or pretty nearly like this, under quite a different impulse. He will do these things when he is in love.

  And Francis was in love: ‘He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a lover of men…’. But a ‘lover of men’ is almost the opposite of ‘a philanthropist’, since a ‘lover of men’ like Francis does not ‘love humanity but men’, just as ‘he did not love Christianity but Christ’. For Francis, Christianity was not ‘a thing like a theory but a thing like a love-affair’. The trouble with his secular admirers was that they could not ‘believe that a heavenly love can be as real as an earthly love’, that ‘divine love is a reality’ just as ‘romantic love is a reality’. Again, his love for his fellow human beings was entirely democratic: