by Ian Ker
The next month in November William Cobbett was published. As a critical study, it has some of the brilliance of Charles Dickens; and indeed there were, as Chesterton conceived the two writers, two important features in common—an exuberance of exaggeration and an affinity to the Middle Ages, albeit unconscious on the novelist’s part. Chesterton begins by deploring the fact that Cobbett was praised for his style but not for his ideas, for praising ‘an extravagant and impossible England in exact and excellent English’. Until recently there seemed to be no chance of reviving ‘the things that Cobbett wished to revive....such as liberty, England, the family, the honour of the yeoman, and so forth’. Cobbett’s ‘bad language that is always good’ had always been admired, but not its sentiments, and certainly it was those ‘violent passages’ that particularly brought out ‘not only the best capacities of Cobbett but also the best capacities of English’. For the English language excelled in ‘certain angular consonants and abrupt terminations that [made] it extraordinarily effective for the expression of the fighting spirit and a fierce contempt’. The Victorians thought Cobbett was ‘a crank whose theories had been thrashed out long ago and found to be quite empty and fallacious. He had been preserved only for his style; and even that was rude and old-fashioned, especially in the quaint Saxon archaism of calling a spade a spade.’ But Cobbett’s ideas were now coming into their own:
What he saw was the perishing of the whole English power of self-support, the growth of cities that drain and dry up the countryside, the growth of dense dependent populations incapable of finding their own food, the toppling triumph of machines over men, the sprawling omnipotence of financiers over patriots, the herding of humanity in nomadic masses whose very homes are homeless…
He saw the contemporary scene—‘but he saw it when it was not there. And some cannot see it—even when it is there.’ The paradox of Cobbett was that he loved the past, and he alone really lived in the future’. He may have been wrong in his time, but ‘he is right now’. He had ‘frantic and fantastic nightmares of things’ as they now were. The paradox was that in his time he seemed like a survival and a relic of times gone by’—and yet ‘he alone was in any living touch with the times that were to come’. All the then reformers and revolutionaries were ‘talking hopefully of the future’, but actually ‘were without exception living in the past’, since their ‘ideal democracy’ was ‘what democracy would have been in a simpler age than their own’. They were ‘thinking of an ancient agricultural society merely changing from inequality to equality’, and had ‘no notion’ that the commercial interest ‘would grow strong enough to swallow all the rest’. It was Cobbett alone who knew that ‘there…lay the peril and oppression of the times to come’.76
It was not Carlyle but Cobbett who was the real radical. Carlyle had merely wanted to turn ‘capitalism into a sort of feudalism’, calling the capitalist by the ‘romantic name’ of ‘captain of industry’; whereas Cobbett would have called him by ‘a shockingly realistic name’. Carlyle had been set against the Utilitarian Mill ‘as a sort of official opposition’ and permitted ‘to grumble like a choleric old major much respected in the club. Cobbett has been entirely removed, like the enfant terrible, kicking and screaming, lest he should say something dreadful in the drawing-room.’ Carlyle was merely ‘the skeleton’ at the capitalist feast; Cobbett was ‘the skeleton in the cupboard’. Unlike most modern reformers and philanthropists, Cobbett was not merely concerned with what is called the welfare of the workers’: ‘He was very much concerned for their dignity, their good name, their honour, and even their glory....His whole life was a resistance to the degradation of the poor…’. He watched peasants being ‘rooted out like weeds instead of being rooted like trees’ by landlords, who refused ‘to grant the long leases that gave a status to a yeomanry’, with ‘the old sort of squire’, ‘the national gentry’, being driven out by ‘Stockbrokers and Jews and jobbers from the town’. Cobbett, therefore, turned to ‘the natural saviours of the green countryside from this yellow fever of finance’, the leaders of the Tory party, with ‘his great scheme for saving English agriculture’: ‘It is long before even a hint leads him to look, at first with doubt and at last with horror, at the significant and sinister smile faintly present on all those unanswering faces.’ For the truth was that these Tories were ‘in much closer touch with the stockbrokers than with the farmers’. And what Cobbett discovered was that the Whigs and Tories ‘only offered two slightly different reasons for not giving’ him ‘what he wanted’. For the idea that one party stood for ‘aristocracy and the land’ and the other for democracy and machinery’ was ‘meaningless’. It was because Cobbett, ‘by nature a traditionalist and…by tradition a Tory’, was ‘a reluctant rebel’ that he was ‘a furious rebel’. He had as yet no ‘creed’, but he had an ‘instinct’ that ‘seemed to him a natural part of that natural order’ in which he had believed but which now ‘condemned him as a felon’, ‘creating a Jacobin out of the best anti-Jacobin of the age’. He was the one man who ‘could have made an English Revolution’. And yet he was a natural Tory who ‘liked old customs’, ‘believed in the traditions of the past and the instincts of the people’, and even, like Dr Johnson, had a ‘surly sympathy for the Catholic tradition’. His view of Henry VIII’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, was that ‘the very thought that such a being had walked the earth on two legs was enough to make the reeling brain doubt the existence of God; but that peace and faith flowed back again into the soul when we remember that he was burned alive’. Yet for Chesterton there was nothing inhuman in such a hatred: ‘There is a volume and a violence of humanity in such hatred; a hatred straight from the heart like a knock-out blow straight from the shoulder. It is a blast from a furnace. And it is only in such a furnace seven times heated that men suffer for an idea.’ With Johnson, again, he shared ‘the most genial and humane of all forms of hatred; their passionate and personal hatred of people they had never seen’. But Cobbett could just as passionately hate places too that he had never seen. His later writings are full of allusion to ‘Old Sarum…the outstanding, not to say outrageous example of the anomalies of the unreformed representative system; a place that had practically ceased to exist without ceasing to send representatives to make laws for England’. For Cobbett alone was Old Sarum a place; and because it happened to be a high and hilly place, it stood up in his imagination with the monstrosity of a mountain. He called it the Accursed Hill.’ And, because Cobbett imagined Old Sarum as an actual place, there was ‘more mysticism precisely because there was more materialism’ in his hatred. And Chesterton dares to say that there was ‘almost in such a combination a sort of sacrament of hate’. Chesterton, too, delights in the Dickensian exuberance of Cobbett’s anger. When he emerged from prison, it was ‘in a towering rage’:
a passion that towered above towns and villages like a water-spout, or a cyclone visible from ten counties and crossing England like the stride of the storm. The most terrible of human tongues was loosened and went through the country like a wandering bell, of incessant anger and alarum; till men must have wondered why, when it was in their power, they had not cut it out.77
Cobbett’s Catholic sympathies were consistent with his being a natural ritualist, for ‘ritual that goes beyond words like an embrace or a blow, was that part of Cobbett’s character which was always reaching backwards to the medieval England that has never lost the name of Merry England’: He was a man born out of due time, and forced to live and suffer in a world of mechanical traffic going to Manchester; when he ought to have ridden with Chaucer to Canterbury.’ Now Cobbett, who not only ‘could see before he could read’ but also ‘could believe his eyes’, could see what he saw in the English countryside, unlike most modern people who ‘can read before they can see’, and consequently ‘see what they expect to see’, as what they read ‘has a sort of magical power over their eyes’, laying a spell over their eyes’.
He saw a colossal contrast; the contrast between a
village that was hardly a hamlet and a village church that was almost a cathedral. It was the biggest and baldest of all the facts; and yet it was the fact that nobody else saw. The others did not see it because they had been educated not to see it; because they had been educated to see the opposite.
But Cobbett really did have the ‘unearthly detachment’ of being able to see what was in front of his eyes. And what he saw everywhere rising in the midst of a ‘little cluster or huddle of low houses’ was ‘something of which the spire or tower may be seen for miles’. This spire or tower was an experiment in engineering more extraordinary than the Eiffel Tower. For the first Gothic arch was really a thing more original than the first flying-ship.’ This ‘whole plan’ of the ‘uplifted labyrinth’, from ‘the highest symbol of God tortured in stone and in silence, to the last wild gargoyle flung out into the sky as a devil cast forth with a gesture’, showed ‘the mastery of an ordered mind’. It was, of course, the parish church, very old and ‘built in the days of darkness and savage superstition’. The ‘picturesque cottages’ were ‘all of a much later date’, belonging as they did ‘to the ages of progress and enlightenment’. But the extraordinary thing was that only Cobbett could see this ‘mountain among molehills’ for what it was: ‘He saw the size. He tells us again and again that he has found a village of which the whole present population could be put into the porch of the village church, leaving the whole vast and varied interior as empty and useless as Stonehenge.’ But there was ‘another very big building at some distance from the village which bulked very much larger in the minds of the villagers. Indeed, it might be said that they lived in the material shadow of the church and the moral shadow of the country house.’ Now, the squire’s house was not, contrary to popular belief, a Norman castle or a Tudor manor-house. And Cobbett saw it was not. It was in fact more ‘like a large public building from a large city exiled in the provinces’. It did not even ‘look like a private house at all’. It was usually Georgian or earlier in style, built in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. In other words, it was the ‘creation of a rationalistic age’, and belonged ‘as much to the Age of Reason as the books of Voltaire’. Such ornamentation as it had was ‘of a curious cold exuberance of heathen nymphs and hollow temples’. Because it stood for the age of the sceptics, its gods were ‘not only dead’ but had ‘never been alive’. Its gardens were ‘full of shrines without idols or idols without idolaters’. The house as often as not had a very curious name: it was called ‘so-and-so Abbey’. If it were called a cathedral or a church, the preposterous profanity’ would be obvious. It would be as though some rich man ‘had gone to live in the parish church; had breakfasted on the altar, or cleaned his teeth in the font’. Nobody but Cobbett could see the profanity. But Cobbett could see, simply by using his eyes, that ‘there had once been a larger religious life which was also a popular life. Somehow or other its memorials had been taken over by a new race of men, who had become great lords in the land, and had been able to disdain alike the people and the religion.’ Cobbett, in short, was ‘simply a man who had discovered a crime; ancient like many crimes; concealed like all crimes. He was as one who had found in a dark wood the bones of his mother, and suddenly knew she had been murdered.’ He had discovered that ‘England had been secretly slain’.78
Now Cobbett was not simply a historian who used his eyes: ‘he treated this question of the past as a question of the present.’ But, because it is ‘possible to speak much too plainly to be understood’, the world ‘could not understand’ him, for he ‘was not obscure enough’. People found it much easier ‘to listen to the merely romantic praise of the past as uttered by Scott than to the realistic praise of the past as uttered by Cobbett’. People could see Melrose Abbey more clearly ‘by moonlight than their own parish church by daylight’. The world was certainly indebted to Scott who ‘opened those high dykes of mud that cut men off from the rivers of popular romantic tradition, and irrigated the dry garden of the Age of Reason’. But Scott was ‘fashionable’ because he assured people that ‘medievalism was only a romance’; whereas Cobbett ‘was far less fashionable when he urged it as a reality’. Scott was ‘merely sentimental’ about the Stuarts: ‘he was singing “Will ye no’ come back again?” to people who would have been a horrible nuisance to him if they had come back again.’ But Cobbett was not in the least ‘sentimental about Mary Tudor; he did solidly believe that with her the good times went; and he did really want them to return’. Cobbett’s revisionary history ‘really was a revelation’: he let the cat out of the bag’ and ‘it was rather a wild cat when it came out of his bag’. He could certainly be called ‘a reactionary’, but he was nevertheless ‘a realist’; he could be accused of ‘merely regretting the good old times’, ‘the romance of… fair and market’—but he was ‘really concerned with the business of the market, and not merely with the fun of the fair’. He did not look back at medieval society ‘as an old-world pageant, in the manner of Ruskin or William Morris’: he saw it ‘as an economic question as strictly as Ricardo or John Stuart Mill’. He ‘did not start with theories but with things; with the things he saw’. In his pragmatism he was entirely English: ‘In so far as he had an imaginative concept of himself…it was the concept of not being imaginative.’ In actual fact, he was ‘so imaginative that he imagined himself to be a merely plain man’. But, far from being merely ‘practical’ and ‘prosaic’ as he imagined himself to be, he was actually a visionary because he could see what no one else could see. Indeed, he was not really what people mean by ‘a practical man’ at all, since he had ‘no power of illusion at all’. There was another paradox: although Cobbett was uneducated in the ordinary sense, he was in fact ‘too well educated for his contemporaries’, for he lived ‘in a world which believed that it was broadening…[which] believed itself to be growing modern and many-sided; and he alone saw that it was growing monomaniac and mean’.79
Chesterton concludes his biographical study by pointing out the political paradox of Cobbett—that Tories thought he was a Radical and Radicals thought he was a Tory. But this paradox certainly did not mean that Cobbett was ‘a moderate’—nobody could ever call him that.
The contrary was true and that explained the paradox. Cobbett was ‘an extremist all round. He was more Tory than most Tories, and more Radical than most Radicals.’ He could be called a fanatic, but he was certainly not ‘narrow’: ‘With all his fanaticism, he was really looking at things from too many points of view at once to be understood by those who wore the blinkers of a party or even a theory.’ Although, superficially, he seemed ignorant and violent, ‘his spirit was like one that had lived before and after. He was there before they were all born, in the crowded medieval churches. He was there after they were all dead, in the crowded congresses of the Trades Unions.’ It was impossible for his contemporaries to understand him; he thought what he stood for was ‘simple’, but it was bewildering’ to them. This was the paradox of Cobbett: ‘that in a sense he quarrelled with everybody because he reconciled everything’. It was because ‘so many things were unified’ in him that so many were ‘divided’ from him. The tragedy in Chesterton’s eyes was that ‘the mean and meagre philosophies of his day’ could never have sustained Cobbett: The cause he felt within him was too mighty and multiform to have been fed with anything less than the Faith.’80
13
Distributism and Apologetics
1
AFTER Chesterton’s secretary, Freda Spencer, had left, it proved difficult to find a replacement. One day a neighbour called Mrs Walpole offered herself as a joke, but the offer was taken seriously, with the upshot that Frances asked her if she would take on the job as her husband would like to work with her: ‘He likes someone in sympathy with his ideas.’ Mrs Walpole was apparently a young widow—probably, like so many young women then, a war widow—with one child at home, Felicity, who had already made friends with Frances, and who was at school for part of the day. Mrs Walpole agreed, but stipulated that she
needed a couple of weeks to learn how to type. Because Chesterton had no regular hours for dictating, he would often walk round to Mrs Walpole’s house at about 9 p.m. to ask if she had eaten, and if so whether she would come and take dictation: ‘Absent thee from felicity awhile.’ She would accompany him back to Overroads, and he would then dictate till midnight or later. Frances would sometimes call down from upstairs, ‘When are you going to let that poor girl go home?’ However, it seems the peculiar hours suited Mrs Walpole. She remembered how Chesterton would drink a lot of tea in bed in the morning from an enormous pint-sized cup, while he read the papers, not going downstairs till around 10.30 or 11, after which he had ‘brunch’ and dictation would begin again. Chesterton enjoyed teasing her by pretending to stop ‘at the exciting moment’ in a detective story. There was still the same last-minute panic over getting the weekly article for the Illustrated London News to London in time—the hasty bicycle ride to the station and the tip to the guard on the train. Apart from that weekly irritation, Mrs Walpole found Chesterton ‘very easy to manage’, as she put it, ‘if you knew how and didn’t let him know you were managing him’. She herself as a widow worried what would become of Felicity if anything happened to her. Chesterton agreed to be Felicity’s guardian in the event of her mother’s death, and both and he and Frances were always ready to listen sympathetically to the mother’s various problems. She remembered how Chesterton would make a point of dictating a story that would take her mind off her difficulties if he noticed she was worried, as he did instinctively. When Mrs Walpole took over as secretary, Chesterton was still weak from his near-fatal illness: Sometimes he looked so tired, he’d shut his eyes and look as if he could hardly get his ideas out.’ An impending visit from Freda Spencer, who was afraid that it would be embarrassing for the Chestertons to have to entertain her in the midst of a wartime scarcity of food, provoked Lines to a Friend Apprehensive of a Shortage of Food in Beaconsfield’, which began: