G. K. Chesterton:A Biography
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Frances wrote to tell O’Connor that she had written to Father Walker, but had not yet seen him. In the meantime, she was kept ‘on edge’ by anxiety about her nephew, the paper, and ‘money worries’ (which, of course, was a reference to the large sums of money that Chesterton was continuing to inject into G.K.’s Weekly). Her husband, she told O’Connor, was spending four days a week on the paper, which meant that she had ‘to attend to everything else’—‘Trying to settle an income-tax dispute has nearly brought me to tears.’43 In a subsequent undated letter she reported that she was now receiving instruction and was soon to be received—‘You will understand how dreadfully I hate the idea of publicity in such a matter …’. She assured O’Connor that Chesterton wanted to write a book on Savonarola as the priest had suggested, ‘but it is getting increasingly difficult for him to find a moment for his real work. I feel in despair sometimes. He is wanted at every hour, by everybody, for every purpose and the worry of the paper and the financial loss is no easy burden to carry …’.44 On 25 October she writes again, hoping that O’Connor might be present at her reception. She complains again that Chesterton is spending four days a week on G. K.’s Weekly without pay: ‘We can’t go on much longer.’45
In the end, Frances was conditionally baptized and received into the Catholic Church on All Saints’ day, 1 November 1926, at St Augustine’s, High Wycombe, by Father Walker; she was then confirmed on the third Sunday of the month at Westminster Cathedral, having made her first Holy Communion earlier in the morning at St Augustine’s.46 According to her husband, ‘when asked who converted her to Catholicism,’ she always answered, ‘the devil’.47 Maisie Ward said that she had ‘never known a happier Catholic’ than Frances, ‘once the shivering on the bank was over and the plunge had been taken. One would say she had been in the Church all her life.’48 To Father O’Connor she wrote two days before Christmas: ‘I am very happy—though the wrench was rather terrible—it was hard to part with so many memories and traditions.’49
3
According to W. R. Titterton, it was his idea to found the Distributist League, as a way of saving G. K.’s Weekly.50 But according to Captain H. S. D. Went, who was the first secretary of the League, it was he who suggested forming the League, in order to enable Distributists to keep in touch with each other, if, as seemed probable, G. K.’s Weekly failed.51 On 17 September 1926 the Distributist League was founded at an inaugural meeting in Essex Hall, Essex Street, off the Strand. Its aim was to ‘restore possession’, and Chesterton quoted Francis Bacon’s saying, ‘Property is like muck, it is good only if it be spread.’52 It believed, said Chesterton, that
a man felt happier, more dignified, and more like the image of God, when the hat he is wearing is his own hat … There might be people who preferred to have their hats leased out to them every week, or wear their neighbours’ hats in rotation to express the idea of comradeship, or possibly to crowd under one very large hat to represent an even larger cosmic conception; but most of them felt that something was added to the dignity of men when they put on their own hats.
He made it clear that the League would not be putting up parliamentary candidates but would support candidates sympathetic to the aims of the League. Thanks to generous financial assistance G.K.’s Weekly could continue ‘a little longer’, but he would close it down ‘if it involved economic injustice to anybody’.53 At the first committee meeting the following week Chesterton was elected president. Other possible names for the League were discussed. Chesterton thought that ‘The Cow and Acres, however suitable as the name of a public house at which we could assemble’, was ‘too limited as an economic statement’. Another suggestion, which came from Titterton54 and which received strong support, was ‘The League of the Little People’—but, with Chesterton as president, that seemed ‘at first too suggestive of the fairies’. Chesterton himself favoured ‘The Lost Property League’.55
Branches of the League were soon formed in Bath, Birmingham, Cambridge, Chatham, Chorley, Croydon, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Oxford, and Worthing.56 To enable G.K.’s Weekly to be the voice of the League to as wide a public as possible, it was announced in the editorial of the issue of 6 November, entitled ‘Twopenny Trash’ (the name given to Cobbett’s Weekly Register by his enemies), that the price of the paper would be reduced to twopence. Readers who had previously paid sixpence for the paper were asked to buy three copies and give two away free to potential subscribers: ‘The League would have to make itself responsible for the success of this experiment and save the paper which gave it birth, or die of inanition, for it is certainly not yet strong enough to leave its mother.’ According to Titterton, it was again his idea to reduce both the price and the size of the paper as a last desperate measure, when it was still losing money even after the founding of the League.57
A delighted Chesterton reported in the next issue of 13 November that sales had soared. There had also been another meeting of the League, attended by over a hundred members, many of whom spoke, as would almost all those present had time permitted: ‘We were astonished, we were overwhelmed. Had we anything to do with the making of this ardent, eager, indefatigable creature?’ The answer was that, ‘though we had something to do with the shaping of the body, we had nothing to do with the birth of the soul. That was a miracle, a miracle we had hoped for, and which yet, when it happened, overwhelmed us.’ Meanwhile, the circulation of G.K.’s Weekly nearly doubled to over 8,000 as the local branches of the League brought the existence of the paper to the notice of newsagents. At a meeting of the central London branch it was agreed that members should try to patronize only small shops that treated their employees fairly. It was hoped soon to encourage small farmers and craftsmen to deal with the small retailers. In this way a community of self-supporting people practising Distributism might be formed. In the coming months the recurring question that would be asked in the ‘Cockpit’ column in G.K.’s Weekly was—when was the League going to do something practical? Chesterton’s answer was always that the League’s purpose was not action but the propagating of Distributist ideas and principles. But he was opposed to any rigidity as to the means of attaining their ideals. It would be understandable if Chesterton came to regret his idea of having a column open to controversy in his paper, for it certainly encouraged the members of the League to argue and criticize. The main argument would be about whether modern machinery should be allowed in a Distributist society, but this raised the more fundamental question as to what actually constituted Distributism. Chesterton himself thought that machinery should be limited but not abolished: the English people had lost their land and property before the arrival of industrial machinery. Anyway, he argued, those who advocated abolition were not stating a first principle but arguing from first principles, and it was these principles that needed above all to be defined: true, definition meant dogma, but there was nothing wrong in that, as shared dogma united people.58 He could at least claim impartiality as the various Distributist factions argued with each other, since he had no time to follow closely all the details of the disputes, irritating as his ignorance might be to those better informed. For the truth was that he was too busy helping to finance G.K.’s Weekly, albeit he was only ‘the thin and shadowy approximation to a Capitalist’, by earning money ‘in the open market; and more especially in that busy and happy market where corpses are sold in batches; I mean the mart of Murder and Mystery, the booth of the Detective Story’.59 Unfortunately, not even Chesterton’s good-natured humour could take the sting out of the disputes among his Distributist followers. And there was a danger, he feared, that the movement might become identified with cranks and extremists, alienating ordinary people who were beginning to see that nothing could be more normal than the wide distribution of property.60
November saw the publication in the United States (a month later in Britain) of The Outline of Sanity, which consisted of much-revised articles from G.K.’s Weekly that had appeared in the weekly column ‘Straws in the Wind’, the equ
ivalent of his ‘At the Sign of the World’s End’ column in the New Witness, together with a good deal of extra material. His purpose, he states at the beginning, is to ‘sketch … certain aspects of the institution of Private Property, now so completely forgotten amid the journalistic jubilations over Private Enterprise’, a neglect and a jubilation that are the ‘measure of the moral tone of the times. A pickpocket is obviously a champion of private enterprise. But it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that a pickpocket is a champion of private property.’ Communism was successful only in reforming ‘the pickpocket by forbidding pockets’. Its opposite was not private enterprise, which nobody dreamed of practising, but capitalism, with its ‘big commercial combinations, often more imperial, more impersonal, more international than many a communist commonwealth—things that are at least collective if not collectivist’. And monopoly, which was ‘neither private nor enterprising’, was not private enterprise. As for Socialists, they would put capital into ‘the hands of even fewer people’—namely, politicians. And it was ridiculous for Socialists to complain about the Communists’ suppression of ‘political opposition’, since a Socialist government, too, would provide ‘everything; and it is absurd to ask a Government to provide an opposition’: ‘Opposition and rebellion depend on property and liberty. They can only be tolerated where other rights have been allowed to strike root, besides the central right of the ruler.’ Capitalism was a consequence not of private property but rather of its absence. England had become a Capitalist country ‘because it had long been an oligarchical country’ that lacked ‘a widely scattered ownership’. But capitalism was self-contradictory, because it dealt with the masses ‘in two opposite ways at once. When most men are wage-earners, it is more and more difficult for most men to be customers. For the capitalist is always trying to cut down what his servant demands, and in doing so is cutting down what his customer can spend.’ But the wage-earner who is ‘a tenant and servant of the [Socialist] State’ enjoys exactly the same kind of ‘centralized, impersonal, and monotonous’ ‘unification and regimentation’.61
Distributists, on the contrary, did not hold that ‘all land should be held in the same way; or that all property should be owned on the same conditions’. Instead, they believed that the central government needed ‘lesser powers to balance and check it, and that these must be of many kinds: some individual, some communal, some official, and so on’. They were not proposing that everyone should become peasants, only that the state should have ‘the general character of a peasant state; that the land was largely held in that fashion and the law generally directed in that spirit; that any other institutions stood up as recognizable exceptions, as landmarks on that high tableland of equality’. Such a society would ‘not necessarily exclude every modern machine any more than we should exclude every medieval monastery’. The existence of a peasant class or class of small proprietors would mean not only ‘the end of what is called the class war; in so far as its theory divides all men into employers and employed’—but also an understanding as to ‘why the machine must not exist save as the servant of the man’. Moreover, it would mean that ‘a traditional class’ or ‘a conservative class’ would exist for the first time for many centuries in England. Such a class, unlike the commercial class that by its very nature seeks novelty and the aristocracy that ‘goes by fashion rather than by tradition’, understood that one ‘can destroy machinery’ if ‘machinery is hostile to happiness’. After all, ‘many glorious possibilities’ are given up, ‘in our stern and strenuous and self-sacrificing preference for having a tolerable time. Happiness, in a sense, is a hard taskmaster. It tells us not to get entangled with many things that are much more superficially attractive than machinery.’ Progress in invention was not inevitable: the rack and the thumbscrew, for instance, had been left in a relatively ‘rudimentary state’, and many ‘a talented torturer’ had been ‘left in obscurity by the moral prejudices of modern society’: ‘Our own strong sentimental bias against torture represses his noble rage and freezes the genial current of his soul. But we reconcile ourselves to this; though it be undoubtedly the loss of a whole science …’. But some modern machinery was liberating: the invention of the motor car signalled the return of the ‘free and solitary traveller’ after the ‘combination and concentration’ of the ‘collective’ railway.62
Ultimately, Chesterton believed that Distributism was based on a Christian view of ‘the nature of man’, of ‘Man standing on two legs and requiring two boots … his own boots’. Instead of the modern ‘doubt about Man’, Christianity ‘believed that ordinary men were clothed with powers and privileges’, including ‘the right of property’. But ‘the new philosophy utterly distrusts a man’, and if there is ‘a very rare sort of man’ who has such rights, then ‘he has the right to rule others even more than himself’. A ‘profound scepticism about the common man’ was ‘the common point in the most contradictory elements of modern thought’. That was why the common man was not to be given ‘a house, or a wife, or a child, or a dog or a cow, or a piece of land, because these things really do give him power’.63
4
November 1926 also saw the first publication in the United States of The Catholic Church and Conversion (it was published a couple of months later in England), part of a series edited by Belloc, all the volumes being entitled The Catholic Church and … The previous year Chesterton had contributed a brief chapter to Twelve Modern Apostles and their Creeds, entitled ‘Why I am a Catholic’, which began with the assertion that there were ten thousand reasons, ‘all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true’. The Catholic Church simply was ‘catholic’—‘not only larger than me, but larger than anything in the world … indeed larger than the world’. It was the only ‘corporate mind in the world’ that was ‘on the watch to prevent minds from going wrong’. The Church, ‘looking out in all directions at once’, was ‘not merely armed against the heresies of the past or even of the present, but equally against those of the future, that may be the exact opposite of those of the present’. She carried ‘a sort of map of the mind which looks like the map of a maze, but which is in fact a guide to the maze’. Uniquely, she constituted ‘one continuous intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years’. The resulting map marked clearly ‘all the blind alleys and bad roads’.64
The Catholic Church and Conversion begins with the paradox that, while Catholicism used to be regarded as an old religion, it now seemed to be a positively new religion, as the children of Protestant parents were ‘breaking away’ from the ‘more or less Christian compromise (regarded as normal in the nineteenth century)’—one becoming a Communist, another a Catholic. Conversion to Catholicism was seen as ‘a form of revolt’. No parent feared their children would become Calvinists or Lutherans: these were ‘old religions’, if not ‘dead religions’; not ‘new religions’ like Roman Catholicism, which was ‘the only old religion that is … new’. What it was now to the Protestant parent it had been to the pagan parent: ‘a nuisance and a new and dangerous thing’. The ‘old creed’, on the other hand, of a typical Protestant body was held merely on ‘tradition and nothing else’ and had ‘ceased to function as a fresh and stimulating idea’. In the past, it was the Catholic Church that had ‘defended tradition in a time which stupidly denied and despised tradition’. Now it was emerging as ‘the only champion of reason’.65
Coming from a background that was ‘if not agnostic at least pantheistic or unitarian’, Chesterton himself had never imbibed the usual Protestant prejudices against Popery. He had ‘had all the difficulties that a heathen would have had in becoming a Catholic in the fourth century’, but ‘very few of the difficulties that a Protestant had, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth’. Even if he had not inherited ‘a fully civilised faith’, neither had he inherited ‘a barbarian feud’: ‘The people I was born amongst wished to be just to Catholics if they did not always understand them …’. Brought up among liberal Unitarians
, he had never imbibed the usual Protestant patriotism of British imperialists who ‘assumed that they were the salt of the earth, and especially that they were the salt of the sea’, and who thought that ‘the Church first rose in the middle of the British Empire, and not of the Roman Empire’. Before his conversion, he had called himself an Anglican in the sense of being an Anglo-Catholic. But, again, he was not one of those patriotic High Anglicans ‘who are concerned first and last to save the Church of England … by calling it Catholic, or making it Catholic, or believing that it is Catholic’. For whereas ‘that’ was what they wanted to save, Chesterton was intent on ‘finding the Catholic Church’.66
As for specific Protestant objections to Rome, in the world in which he grew up, ‘Protestants, who had just proved that Rome did not believe the Bible, were excitedly discovering that they did not believe the Bible themselves’. His own family and friends ‘were more concerned with the opening of the book of Darwin than the book of Daniel; and most of them regarded the Hebrew Scriptures as if they were Hittite sculptures’. He had never been able to understand ‘the everlasting cry’ of the Protestants ‘that Catholic traditions are condemned by the Bible’, when it had ‘always belonged’ to the Catholics ‘and been a part of their hocus-pocus, if it was hocus-pocus’. As for the alleged wickedness of the Catholic priest, it seemed odd to Chesterton that such an evil man should ‘encumber himself with special and elaborate promises to be good’: ‘There are many more lucrative walks of life in which a person with such shining talents for vice and villainy might have made a brighter use of his gifts.’ Nor could he understand why Protestants