by Ian Ker
were so afraid of Papists; why a priest in somebody’s house was a peril or an Irish servant the beginning of a pestilence. I asked them why they could not simply disagree with Papists and say so … They seemed at once pleased and shocked with my daring, as if I had undertaken to convert a burglar or tame a mad dog. Perhaps their alarm was really wiser than my bravado. Anyhow I had not then the most shadowy notion that the burglar would convert me.
A ‘more plausible’ objection was that, if Popish priests were ‘not sensual’, they were ‘always sly’. The Jesuits in particular were notorious for their verbal equivocations—but the ‘only difference’ between them and ordinary Protestants was that they ‘had been worried enough about the matter to try to make rules and limitations saving as much verbal veracity as possible; whereas the happy Protestants were not worried about it at all, but told lies from morning to night as merrily and innocently as the birds sing in the trees’. There was no avoiding casuistry, but the ‘lawful casuistry’ of the Jesuits was preferable to the ‘utterly lawless casuistry ‘of the world.67
The ‘liberal modern attack upon the Church’ was quite different from ‘the old doctrinal attack’ of the Reformation. The modern ‘no Popery’ cry of Protestants included the most contradictory complaints—but ‘who are we that we should set narrow dogmatic limits to the various ways in which various temperaments may desire to blame’ the Church of Rome?
Why should we allow a cold difficulty of the logician, technically called a contradiction in terms, to stand between us and the warm and broadening human brotherhood of all who are full of sincere and unaffected dislike of their neighbours? Religion is of the heart, not of the head; and as long as all our hearts are full of a hatred for everything that our fathers loved, we can go on flatly contradicting each other for ever about what there is to be hated.
Similarly, the real difficulties faced by converts to Catholicism were ‘almost the direct contrary of those which were alleged by the more ancient Protestants’. The modern convert, for example, had ‘forgotten all about the old nonsense of the cunning lies of the confessional, in his lively and legitimate alarm of the truthfulness of the confessional’. In fact, the convert will discover ‘what gigantic generosity, and even geniality, can be locked up in a box … It is a satisfaction, and almost a joke, that it is only in a dark corner and a cramped space that any man can discover that mountain of magnanimity.’ Far from pestering priests proselytizing, the prospective convert will find the ‘apparent inaction of the priest’ to be ‘something like the statuesque stillness of the angler; and such an attitude is not unnatural in the functions of a fisher of men’. It is not ‘the Protestant picture of Catholicism’ that ever deters the convert, but ‘the Catholic picture of Catholicism’ that he may receive from ‘the militant layman’, ‘the ecclesiastical layman’ who ‘is much more ecclesiastical than is good for his health, and certainly much more ecclesiastical than the ecclesiastics’.68
If, Chesterton claimed, the Catholic Church is not the true Church of Christ, then it ‘probably is Antichrist’. Certainly, it ‘really is like Antichrist in the sense that it is as unique as Christ’. The ‘principle of life’ in the various Protestant churches ‘consists of what remained in them of Catholic Christendom; and to Catholic Christendom they have always returned to be recharged with vitality’, whether it was through the Romantic movement’s rediscovery of medievalism, or through ‘the instinctive reaction of old-fashioned people’ like Johnson or Scott or Cobbett ‘wishing to save old elements that had originally been Catholic’, or through the Pre-Raphaelites or ‘the opening of continental art and culture by Matthew Arnold and Morris and Ruskin’. Protestants were simply ‘Catholics gone wrong’, who had ‘exaggerated’ a Catholic dogma ‘into an error; and then generally reacted against and rejected as an error, bringing the individual in question a few steps back again on the homeward road’. The ‘mark’ of the heretic was ‘wildly’ to ‘question’ any Catholic dogma apart from ‘his own favourite Catholic dogma’, which ‘he never dreams of questioning’. Christian Scientists, for example, were ‘simply people with one idea, which they have never learnt to balance and combine with all the other ideas’—whereas ‘the Catholic Church is used to living with ideas and walks among all those very dangerous beasts with the poise and the lifted head of a lion-tamer’. And so the convert will ‘find nearly everything somewhere’ in the Church. Far from the convert finding ‘peace’ in the Church ‘in the sense of mental inaction’, to ‘become a Catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to learn how to think’, having ‘for the first time a startingpoint for straight and strenuous thinking’. So-called free thought was not really ‘free thought’ but ‘freedom from thought … free thoughtlessness’. Outsiders ‘see, or think they see, the convert entering with bowed head a sort of small temple which they are convinced is fitted up inside like a prison, if not a torture-chamber’. In fact, the convert feels they have gone out ‘into the broad daylight’, living as they now are ‘in a world with two orders, the supernatural and the natural’, ‘a larger world’ from which they feel no ‘temptation to crawl back into a smaller one’. If Chesterton were to leave the Church, it would not be for one of the ‘sects which only express one idea at a time, because that idea happens to be fashionable for the moment’, but for paganism, which is ‘better than pantheism, for paganism is free to imagine divinities, while pantheism is forced to pretend, in a priggish way, that all things are equally divine’. Before Christianity, paganism was ‘the largest thing in the world’, but Christianity was ‘larger; and everything else has been comparatively small’. As for Catholicism, it was ‘too large’ for him, and he had ‘not yet explored its beautiful or terrible truths’.69
Having argued that Catholicism has ‘all the freshness of a new religion’, Chesterton now claims that its perennial newness is due to its ‘antiquity’: ‘it has all the richness of an old religion; it has especially all the reserves of an old religion … for purposes of renovation and youth.’ Thanks to its age, the Catholic Church ‘has an accumulated armoury and treasury to choose from; it can pick and choose among the centuries and brings one age to the rescue of another’. Unlike the new religions, which ‘are only suited to … new conditions’, ‘the Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age’. The ‘most damning defect’ of new religions like Socialism or Spiritualism is that they ‘are suited to the new world’, being ‘produced by contemporary causes that can be clearly pointed out’. But a religion ‘that binds men to their morality when it is not identical with their mood’ would be ‘right where we are wrong’. Thus Catholicism ‘teaches us more by the words we reject than by the words we receive’, and the convert is ‘profoundly affected by the fact that, even when he did not see the reason, he lived to see that it was reasonable’. In spite of his own earliest Distributist instincts, Chesterton himself had in his youth been persuaded that the only escape from ‘Capitalist captivity’ was through ‘Collectivism’, that the ‘only escape from our dark and filthy cells of industrial slavery’ was through ‘melting all our private latchkeys into one gigantic latchkey as large as a battering ram. We did not really like giving up our little private keys or local attachments or love of our own possessions; but we were quite convinced that social justice must be done somehow and could only be done socialistically.’ But about the same time Pope Leo XIII taught in his encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) that ownership of property should be as widespread as possible. However, ‘nobody in our really well-informed world took much notice’ of the teaching of ‘the poor old gentleman’ who represented ‘the dregs of a dead religion, essentially a superstition’. In fact, the real ‘superstition is the fashion of this world that passes away’. In the same way, Chesterton’s earliest feeling was one of ‘repugnance’ for Spiritualism, but again there was a time when he was persuaded that ‘it was the only way into the promised land’, in this case ‘of a future life’. Once again, the
Catholic Church was ‘right when I was wrong’.70
In February Social Reform versus Birth Control, an abstract of two articles Chesterton had written for Lansbury’s Labour Weekly in December 1926 and January 1927, was published as a six-page pamphlet for The League of National Life. Far from birth control being a progressive social reform, Chesterton argued, it was scarcely ‘a provision for our descendants to say that the destruction of our descendants will render it unnecessary to provide them with anything’. Nor did ‘Birth-Controllers’ like the anti-Catholic Dean of St Paul’s, W. R. Inge, ‘say that the fashionable throng at Ascot wants thinning, or that it is desirable to decimate the people dining at the Ritz or the Savoy’. No, the ‘gloomy Dean’ was ‘not gloomy about there being too many Dukes; and naturally not about there being too many Deans’, as this progressive reform was directed at the masses not the rich. Besides, the issue was not birth control, which more or less everybody practised in the sense of exercising ‘some control over the conditions of birth’: ‘the normal and real birth control is called self control.’ What the capitalist press called ‘birth control’ was ‘not control at all’, but rather ‘the idea that people should be, in one respect, completely and utterly uncontrolled’ in order that they might ‘filch the pleasure belonging to a natural process while violently and unnaturally thwarting the process itself’. It was intended apparently to help the woman who preferred ‘the right to be a wage-slave’ outside her home to ‘companionship with the man she has herself freely accepted’. Since this meant that other women should have to look after their children while they were out at work, Chesterton wondered about a ‘world in which women cannot manage their own children but can manage each other’s’.71
5
On Sunday 6 February 1927, Bishop Cary Elwes blessed the new half-built church in Beaconsfield, following the last Mass to be celebrated in the Railway Station Hotel ‘shed’. The Bishop then preached at a sung Mass, before being entertained to lunch by the Chestertons. In the afternoon there was a reception at the Railway Hotel attended by the Chestertons, who presented a statue of the Virgin to the new church.72 They had hoped that the church would be named after the English Martyrs,73 but the recent canonization of St Térèse of Lisieux, ‘the little flower’, meant that the church would almost inevitably bear her name, ‘St Teresa of the Child Jesus’. But the Chestertons’ wish would be granted after their deaths, when, following the canonization of the two most famous English martyrs, the names St John Fisher and St Thomas More were added to that of St Teresa on the completion of the church in 1939. Shortly after the blessing of the church in 1927, Chesterton signed a petition to the bishop for a resident priest in Beaconsfield.74
On Tuesday April 1927 the Chestertons, accompanied by Dorothy Collins, left Liverpool Street Station, where a member of the Polish Embassy saw them off, on a train bound for Harwich.75 Next day they were in Berlin, which they left the following day on a train for Warsaw, where they arrived at 8.30 in the evening. Dorothy had been worried about the expense of their taking her with them, and was relieved when Frances said to her, as the train left Liverpool Street: ‘I can’t tell you how glad I am you are coming.’ A couple of weeks later Dorothy noted with satisfaction how well she was getting on with them. In fact, the visit would be important for cementing the bond between her and her employers. Although she would become very much part of the family, up to this point Dorothy had not been resident at Top Meadow but had lived in her own flat nearby.76
Chesterton had been ‘honoured by an invitation from the Government; but all the hospitality I received was far too much alive to remind me of anything official’.77 He had been invited to see for himself what had been accomplished in the decade since Poland had won its freedom in 1917.78 He was enormously popular in Poland because of his outspoken defence of its national sovereignty, which was constantly under threat from neighbouring Austria, Germany, and Russia. There were hundreds of people to greet the English visitors at the railway station, including the president of the local P.E.N. Club. The Club had been asked by the government to make the necessary arrangements for the visit. In his Illustrated London News column in the issue of 2 July 1927, Chesterton described their reception at Warsaw railway station, a reception that he thought was redolent of a ‘particular sort of romance’, even a ‘particular sort of swagger’ that made people either love or hate Poland:
Within ten minutes of my stepping from the train on to Polish territory I had heard two phrases—phrases which struck the precise note which thus inspires one-half of the world and infuriates the other half. We were received by a sort of escort of Polish cavalry, and one of the officers made a speech in French—a very fine speech in very good French. In the course of it he used the first of these two typical expressions: ‘I will not say [you are] the chief friend of Poland. God is the chief friend of Poland.’ And he afterwards said, in a more playful and conversational moment: ‘After all, there are only two trades for a man—a poet and a soldier of cavalry.’ He said it humorously, and with the delicate implication, ‘You are a poet and I am a soldier of cavalry. So there we are!’ I said that, allowing for the difficulty of anybody having anything to eat if this were literally true, I entirely accepted the sentiment, and heartily agreed with it.79
Apparently, unknown to Chesterton, the officer in question was a notorious drunkard and womanizer who had simply pushed himself forward with some other cavalry officers, ignoring the reception committee of the P.E.N. Club; but nobody dared to stop him because he was the favourite of Marshall Pilsudski, the hero of the struggle for independence and virtual dictator of the country since a military coup the previous year. According to the student who acted as Chesterton’s interpreter, the offending officer gave quite a witty speech, ‘welcoming Chesterton, not as a famous writer, not even as a friend of Poland, but as a born cavalry officer who had just missed his profession. Chesterton was very amused and laughed his head off, but the representatives of the P.E.N. Club were understandably not amused.’80 They were then taken with a cavalry escort to the hotel where they were to stay. The Chestertons had a suite of rooms, including a large sitting room, bedroom, dressing room, and bathroom. Dorothy Collins had to make do with a single room opposite. The hotel manager soon had to beg Chesterton not to give money to beggars, as they were besieging the entrance to the hotel.81
The next day the P.E.N. Club entertained them to an enormous and lengthy lunch at the hotel, at which Chesterton made a speech. In the afternoon they were shown round the city; and in the evening went to a play at the National Theatre, which Frances told her friends in Beacons-field ‘we both enjoyed very much … and though we could not understand a single word, the acting was good enough to make a lot of it quite comprehensible’.82 The following day there was another tour of the city followed by dinner at the British Embassy. On Sunday they were driven by a young Polish barrister in heavy rain over appalling roads covered with mud at about 45 miles an hour, at what seemed like breakneck speed to Dorothy Collins, to Lowicz, about forty miles from Warsaw. On the way they stopped at a village church full of peasants wearing brightly coloured traditional costumes. After that Chesterton must have been even more delighted to visit an agricultural school where young peasants studied for a year, having been democratically selected by the votes of the village commune. At Borowo they enjoyed at three o’clock a typical Polish dinner, including the national dish of ‘bigos’, a stew consisting of cabbage, sausages, and meat, at the estate of Wladyslaw Grabski, who had twice been prime minister. After a huge meal, followed by coffee and cakes, and then about an hour later by Russian tea and lemon and yet more cakes, they visited the spotless home of a small peasant farmer.
On Monday Chesterton had an audience with the Polish President; and in the evening there was a dinner at the P.E.N. Club. It was, Frances wrote home, ‘a little embarrassing to have to eat hot kidneys and mushrooms standing about with hundreds of guests, and this was only the preliminary to a long dinner that followed and refreshme
nts that apparently continued until two o’clock in the morning’. The speeches were delivered in ‘quite colloquial and very witty’ English. They showed ‘a detailed knowledge’ of her husband’s works ‘which no Englishman of my acquaintance possesses’. Chesterton’s speech in reply ‘drew forth thunders of applause’. The Chestertons and Dorothy Collins left half an hour after midnight.83 Next day, Tuesday 3 May, was Polish Independence Day, and the Chestertons and Dorothy Collins watched a military parade. Later they attended a reception at the royal palace given by the Polish President, at which Chesterton had quite a long conversation with Marshal Pilsudski. The following day they had lunch at the British Embassy.
After dinner that evening Chesterton and Dorothy Collins (Frances was too tired to go) were taken to a wine cellar—or, in the words of Chesterton, ‘a sort of underground tavern’84—dating from the beginning of the seventeenth century. Pieces of bread and butter with cheese and slices of ham were passed around on huge silver trays, washed down by Tokay and a wine made from honey. Most of the members of the P.E.N. Club were there, as well as other visitors. Peasant songs were sung round the piano, as well as Polish army songs commemorating the various uprisings against foreign rule. At the end they sang a song wishing Chesterton a hundred years of life. It was now half an hour past midnight, but before leaving Chesterton and Dorothy were taken down to the storage cellars where they were shown by candlelight 400-year-old bottles of Tokay covered with black fungus.
On Thursday 5 May the Chestertons lunched with the foreign minister; and in the evening Chesterton gave a lecture to the P.E.N. Club that reduced many of the Poles present to tears; Dorothy had never heard a more inspiring talk. After the lecture, there was an informal supper with members of the P.E.N. Club, the British consul, and others. Next day Chesterton lunched with some Catholic students. In the afternoon Dorothy Collins went for a walk with the same ‘nice’ young barrister who had driven them at breakneck speed to Lowicz on their first Sunday in the country, and who had taken a great fancy to Dorothy.85 That evening Chesterton had an audience with ‘the great’ Marshal Pilsudski. This ‘grand and rather grim old soldier of fortune practically told’ Chesterton that ‘of the two, he preferred Germany to Russia’. Faced with the ‘choice of evils’, ‘his rival Dmowski’ had ‘clearly decided that, of the two, he preferred Russia to Germany’. Chesterton had already met Roman Dmowski, the leader of the Polish National Democratic Party, in England when he heard him taunted for his well-known anti-Semitism—‘After all, your religion came from the Jews’—to which Dmowski had rejoined: ‘My religion came from Jesus Christ, who was murdered by the Jews.’86