by Ian Ker
The specimen issue was sent out to prospective subscribers accompanied by a printed letter, dated November 1924, and prospectus. In the letter Chesterton professed himself to be ‘ready to devote’ himself to the paper and ‘the principles maintained in the paper’ as ‘the primary and practical work’ of his life. The coming years, he declared, would be ‘emphatically a field for an alternative to Socialism’ and he believed that their ‘time’ had come. Politics could not simply be negatively opposed to a Socialism that had failed. The rest of the press, however, was ‘antediluvian’ and ‘out of touch with reality’. As editor, he would act on the assumption that ‘politics are corrupt’, politicians ‘unpopular’, parliaments ‘everywhere menaced by a serious reaction’, and that the country was ‘in very deadly peril’. According to the prospectus, Chesterton had undertaken to be editor for at least ten years. A ‘special feature’ of the paper would be ‘an arena of debate’. Accompanying the prospectus was a form for applying for shares in the company.45
The sample number was sent to Shaw, who had agreed to write for the new paper, while urging Chesterton, ‘You should write plays instead of editing papers. Why not do George Fox, who was released from the prison in which Protestant England was trying to murder him by the Catholic Charles II?’46 Nor was this the last time that Shaw tried to get Chesterton to write another play. Three years after the publication of The Judgement of Dr Johnson in 1927 and two years before its first production, he wrote to Frances to say that a new play was needed for the Malvern Festival, but that he did not see how he could possibly find time to write it: ‘A chance for Gilbert… He leaves everything to me nowadays.’47
On 16 January 1925 Shaw wrote to Chesterton from the famous Reid’s Hotel in Madeira to say that the sample number had been forwarded to him: ‘What a collector’s treasure!’ But he was ‘uneasy about the prospectus’ where ‘you drag in anti-Prohibition’. Chesterton, he thought, risked being financially dependent on the alcohol trade, which would threaten his editorial independence. But then the paper could hardly carry on without him, since his name was in the title. Nevertheless, the trade could withdraw its money if the paper, as was most likely, did not pay. He recommended that Chesterton should keep his ‘list of shareholders as various and as uncommercial’ as he could: ‘get Catholic money rather than beer money.’ There was a further consideration. Since he, Shaw, held the patent for Distributism that was really Socialism, and since ‘the Church must remain at least neutral on Prohibition’, and since Prohibition was ‘bound to become a commonplace of civilization’, Chesterton must realize that it was ‘at least possible’ that one day Chesterton would ‘make the paper Socialist and Dry (with a capital)’. Shaw got in another dig at Chesterton’s Distributism: ‘By the way, don’t propose equal distribution of land. It is like equal distribution of metal, rough on those who get the lead and rather too jolly for those who get the gold.’ Instead, Chesterton should advocate ‘equal distribution of the national income in terms of money’, in other words Socialism, as opposed to the Distributism of Belloc and Chesterton, that is, the distribution of property. Finally, Shaw threw up his hands in horror at the proposed salary Chesterton would draw as editor: ‘The £500 a year is absurd…. You have sold yourself into slavery for ten years for £3–10–2 a week. Are you quite mad? Make it at least £1,500, plus payment for copy.’48 Shaw would have been even more horrified if he had known that, far from merely receiving miserly remuneration, Chesterton would himself have to inject periodically large amounts of cash to keep the paper going.
On 21 March 1925 the first number of G.K’s Weekly appeared. There may have been some small consolation for Chesterton in the fact that in the end it was not called in full G.K.C.’s Weekly; but nevertheless it was, Titterton recalled, ‘a martyrdom’ for him to see even his first two initials at the top of every page of every issue. His face also appeared on the cover of the first few issues, until he insisted: ‘It’s not a nice face; let’s drop it.’49 Edward Macdonald, on the other hand, who succeeded Titterton as assistant editor, remembered the occasion when the artist Thomas Derrick drew his famous cartoon of Chesterton milking a cow—like a good Distributist living off the land—but hesitated whether to give it to Macdonald for publication for fear that Chesterton would be offended. Macdonald, wishing to print it in a special number, telephoned Chesterton in Beacons-field, who assured him that, if the cartoon was ‘highly satirical, insulting and otherwise unflattering’, he would be delighted to have it printed on the front page.50 The circulation was about 5,000. To the first issue Belloc contributed a short story and Walter de la Mare part of one. Chesterton had asked De la Mare to ‘assist in what amounts to a conspiracy to suggest that I have something to do with real literature’ by giving ‘a creative touch’ to the paper’s ‘critical and I fear often controversial pages’.51
The paper was Catholic (although not exclusively) in religion, as it was Distributist in politics, just as the New Witness had been; in that sense it was certainly a continuation of Cecil’s paper. But it was also funny in a Chestertonian way. On 11 April, for example, Chesterton brilliantly satirized the ‘no popery’ agitation of the authoritarian, ultra-Protestant Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, who was to lead successfully the opposition in parliament in 1927 to a revised version of the Book of Common Prayer. The Home Secretary was reported as having told a crowd in the Albert Hall: ‘We want no priestly interference, we ask for no purgatory and we will submit to no compulsory confessional.’ Chesterton confessed that the ‘last clause of this declaration’ was in particular ‘a great relief to our minds. No longer shall we see a policeman seizing a man in the street by the scruff of the neck and dragging him to the nearest confessional-box. No longer will our love of liberty be outraged by the sinister bulk of Black Maria taking its daily gang of compulsory penitents to Westminster Cathedral.’ Apparently, ‘auricular confession’ was no longer to be ‘a part of the British Constitution’: it was to be voluntary not compulsory—in other words, Chesterton remarked sarcastically, just like state education or national insurance or military service. But what particularly interested Chesterton was ‘the very remarkable phrase “We ask for no purgatory”’, which seemed to imply that ‘when Sir William reaches the gates of another world, St Peter or some well-trained angel will say to him in a slightly lowered voice, in the manner of a well-trained butler, “Would you be requiring a purgatory?”’Apparently, it did not occur to Sir William Joynson-Hicks that ‘Purgatory may exist whether he likes it or not’.
If it be true, however incredible it may seem, that the powers ruling the universe think that a politician or a lawyer can reach the point of death, without being in that perfect ecstasy of purity that can see God and live—why then there may be cosmic conditions corresponding to that paradox, and there is an end of it. It may be obvious to us that the politician is already utterly sinless, at one with the saints.
It may be self-evident to us that the lawyer is already utterly selfless, filled only with God and forgetful of the very meaning of gain. But if the cosmic power holds that there are still some strange finishing touches, beyond our fancy, to put to his perfection, then certainly there will be some cosmic provision for that mysterious completion of the seemingly complete. The stars are not clean in His sight and His angels He chargeth with folly; and if He should decide that even in a Home Secretary there is room for improvement, we can but admit that omniscience can heal the defect that we cannot even see.52
It was not the precarious financial state of the paper that bothered Chesterton nearly so much as dissension among members of the paper’s board or staff, and even more the demand that he should adjudicate. Confronting intellectual challenges was never a problem; it was personal confrontation that Chesterton hated. To begin with, there was only the skeleton staff of three, consisting of the office manager, the subeditor, Miss Dunham or Bunny, and an office boy, who had been on the New Witness, whose salaries had been paid by Chesterton personally during the inte
rregnum. Chesterton would come up from Beaconsfield once or twice a week to dictate his articles. According to Miss Dunham, it was impossible to predict when he would come. But she always knew when he was there by the smell of his cigar. Whenever he lighted a cigar or cigarette, he would make a sign in the air with a match, a ritual that particularly impressed itself on Miss Dunham—although she apparently did not realize that Chesterton was making the sign of the cross.53 She was also very aware of his tiny feet, which seemed so inadequate for the task of moving such a large body. Because Chesterton hated having to select the contributions that would go into the paper, the job was often left to her, to her dismay. She never saw him angry or even impatient, and he was particularly loved by the unimportant members of staff, such as typists and office boys. He left evidence of his presence all over the office in the shape of doodled drawings. He had no sense of time, and, if he said he would go out, he might stay another hour or he might go out and not come back.54
After a few weeks, Titterton, the former temporary assistant editor of the New Witness, was summoned to the office at 20 Essex Street, off the Strand. Chesterton looked delightedly surprised to see him, with the same look of surprise as when he used suddenly to appear at the office in the days of the New Witness with ‘the air… of having strayed in by mistake, of being about to apologize for it, and of then finding to his glad surprise that it’s his own office’. Chesterton explained that he and Miss Dunham had been trying to run the paper between them—‘but there was a screw missing somewhere. The screw may not be actually missing, but loose, probably in [his] own head.’ Perhaps, if there was a screw missing, it was the screw that the paper should pay Titterton to return to the office as assistant editor. As Chesterton explained to Titterton that he had written not only the leader but also three articles for the next issue, Titterton realized that there was indeed ‘a screw loose somewhere’. It was nothing but ‘sheer murder’ that Chesterton should have been carrying such a load (he was in effect writing half the paper), as well as writing books and his weekly column for the Illustrated London News. Still, Titterton was delighted that Chesterton was now much more involved than when he was editing the New Witness, coming to the office more often and, even more important, also to the printers in Clerkenwell Close, where the proofs had to be read. How Chesterton ever managed to penetrate that hidden spot was a mystery to Titterton, but he was ‘sure that each attempt to do so was an unexpected voyage of discovery’. More often than not, before examining the proofs, he would ask Miss Dunham if she would mind him dictating a poem to her that had come into his mind en route. In that small crowded office where only sideways motion was possible—and Chesterton ‘had no sideways’—the sight of the great man walking a pace forward and a pace back, his hands behind his back, while dictating some serious or comic verses, remained vividly in Titterton’s memory. He noticed how Chesterton’s manner had changed since he had known him as editor of the New Witness: he seemed to be more determined and serious. It was clear that he was fighting for a cause and his weapon was G.K.’s Weekly.55
In June 1925 Chesterton published Tales of the Long Bow, a collection of stories that he had already published in the Storyteller. The first story begins by announcing the author’s intention in writing the stories: ‘These tales concern the doing of things recognized as impossible to do; impossible to believe; and, as the weary reader may well cry aloud, impossible to read about.’ In short, they were ‘tall stories’, which are highly unlikely to weary readers any longer as they are highly unlikely to attract any readers any longer. But there are some good satirical moments, as in the court-room scene where the chief magistrate is ‘the celebrated hygienist, Sir Horace Hunter, O.B.E., M.D.’, to whom was ‘largely due the logical extension of the existing precautions against infection from the pig; though he was fully supported by his fellow magistrates, one being Mr Rosenbaum Low, millionaire…and the other the young Socialist, Mr Amyas Minns, famous for his exposition of Shaw on the Simple Life…’. His two fellow magistrates ‘concurred in the argument of Sir Horace, that just as all the difficulties and doubtful cases raised by the practice of moderate drinking had been simplified by the solution of Prohibition, so the various quarrels and evasions about swine-fever were best met by a straightforward and simple regulation against swine’. In a previous story we have been told that judges are ‘progressive like Dr Hunter, and ally themselves on principle with the progressive forces of the age, especially those they are likely to meet out at dinner’.56
4
H. G. Wells’s best-selling The Outline of History had been published in serial paperback form in 1919 and then as a hardback in 1920. Wells’s ‘outline’ was quite simple: through the centuries man had evolved from a primitive animal form to the civilized man of the twentieth century who would finally establish world peace and prosperity. The book was a best-seller—although its view of history was certainly rather remarkable, given its publication only one year after the end of the horrors of the First World War and ten years before the Great Depression began with the Wall Street crash of 1929, only to be followed ten years later by the Second World War. Wells had naturally been dismissive of Christianity, attacking the Roman Catholic Church in particular. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, published in September 1925, was at least in part a response to Wells.
Chesterton begins The Everlasting Man, one of the two or three greatest of his half-dozen or so major works, by pointing out that in a post-Christian age it is very difficult to see Christianity for what it is: post-Christians ‘still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith’. They are in a state of ‘reaction’: ‘They cannot be Christians and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians.’ They are not ‘far enough away not to hate’ Christianity, nor are they ‘near enough to love it’. And so, ‘while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian’. But the ‘worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic…’. The ‘anti-clericalism’ of post-Christians ‘has become an atmosphere, an atmosphere of negation and hostility from which they cannot escape. Compared with that, it would be better to see the whole thing as something belonging to another continent, or to another planet.’ It is only when one is ‘impartial’ that one can ‘know why people are partial to it’. And Chesterton ‘seriously’ recommends ‘those in whom a mere reaction has thus become an obsession’ to imagine the Apostles as if they were pagans, ‘to try to do as much justice to Christian saints as if they were Pagan sages’. Living in a country full of churches, post-Christians need ‘to walk past a church as if it were a pagoda’ rather than ‘to stand permanently in the porch, impotent either to go inside…or to go outside and forget’. Chesterton is quite candid about his apologetic method: to ‘invoke…the imagination that can see what is there’. For Christianity makes very serious claims that it would be absurd to dismiss with contempt. Consequently, ‘when its fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must try to recover the candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt realism and objectivity of innocence’. If that is not possible, then ‘we must try at least to shake off the cloud of mere custom and see the thing as new, if only by seeing it as unnatural. Things that may well be familiar so long as familiarity breeds affection had much better become unfamiliar when familiarity breeds contempt.’ The ‘heavy bias of fatigue’ made it ‘almost impossible to make the facts vivid, because the facts are familiar’. If, for example, one has lost ‘the sane vision’ of who man is, then one ‘can only get it back by something very like a mad vision; that is, by seeing man as a strange animal and realising how strange an animal he is’. In short, ‘it is exactly when we do regard man as an animal that we know he is not an animal’. Only then can we recover our sense of ‘wonder’ at the nature of man. And so, Chesterton’s avowed purpose is ‘to strike wherever possible this note of what is new and strange, and for that reason the st
yle even on so serious a subject may sometimes be deliberately grotesque and fanciful’. For his aim is ‘to help the reader to see Christendom from the outside in the sense of seeing it as a whole, against the background of other historic things; just as I desire him to see humanity as a whole against the background of natural things’. When both Christianity and humanity are ‘seen thus, they stand out from their background like supernatural things’.57
After this introduction, Chesterton does indeed begin with man himself, about whom the ‘simplest truth…is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth’. He is not like other animals, he is ‘unique’: