G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  On the Saturday they suffered a sleepless night journey to Poznan; the train was very noisy and their compartment was just over an axle. They attended a crowded Sunday midday Mass in Poznan. This part of Poland had been under German occupation and was therefore much more formal than the free and easy atmosphere of Warsaw, which had been under Russian occupation. On the Monday they had lunch with the provincial governor. Dorothy Collins was impressed (and ashamed) by how practically all the educated Poles they met could speak English (in addition to French and German), as well as knowing more about English literature and history than most English people did. Indeed, she had never met foreigners who were so English in their attitudes and even appearance, being, for example, like the English very fond of sport. They exemplified the old adage that imitation is the highest form of flattery, so intense apparently was their admiration of England. Next day the English visitors travelled into the country for lunch with a famous surgeon, whose mother was English. They had met several such Anglo-Polish families. Not surprisingly, the Poles did not mix much with Germans or Russians, from whom they were entirely different, in spite of or because of the fact that their country had been divided for 300 years between Austria, Germany, and Russia. But the long occupation had not stopped them from preserving their national culture and language. On Wednesday they visited Dmowski, who had visited them a few years before at Top Meadow, at his country house outside Poznan. They left Poznan next morning by train (they preferred to travel by day if possible, if only so that they could see as much of the country as possible), and arrived at Cracow in the evening of Thursday 12 May.

  Next day they explored Cracow. Wawel Castle they found had been terribly damaged by Austrian troops who had occupied it for a century, but was in the process of being restored. In the evening they went to a play at the national theatre about the destiny of Poland; it had been specially put on for Chesterton, and before the performance began a speech was made from the stage about all that he had done for Poland, causing the audience to rise in his honour. On the Saturday they had tea with the Rector of the University, after which Chesterton gave a lecture. In the evening there was a dinner with the provincial governor. On Sunday they had tea with Catholic students, and Chesterton gave a speech that was interpreted sentence by sentence. On Monday they travelled to Zakopane; on the way back they encountered a car accident and took a man to hospital.

  They then left Cracow on the night train for Lwow, where they arrived next morning. At their hotel they were waited on by bare-footed peasant women dressed in their national costume.87 Next day they went to a tea party given by the American wife of one of the professors at the University; since she taught a number of the students English, Dorothy Collins hoped that the students did not think her accent was English! On Thursday the general commanding Lwow arranged for one of his soldiers to drive them into the countryside, where they passed through villages where everybody turned out to watch them and where they saw women washing clothes in the river by beating them on stones. They also saw a church belonging to the Uniate or Eastern rite Catholic Church, which was strong in the Eastern part of the country that bordered on Orthodox Russia. They returned to Warsaw on the Saturday. On Sunday they attended Mass in Chopin’s church, and in the evening Chesterton gave a lecture to a Catholic study circle on Catholicism in England. They met Joseph Conrad’s niece, who was a member of the P.E.N. Club and who lent them some books in English, including three of her uncle’s, just when they were despairing of finding any books in English.88 A few years later, Frances received a letter from Conrad’s widow to say that her husband, who had died in 1924, had ‘always’ been a ‘great admirer’ of Chesterton and that it had been ‘of no little regret’ to him that he had not known Chesterton personally.89

  On Monday 23 May they took the late night train to Wilno, where they arrived the next morning. Dorothy Collins had to share her compartment with a Russian woman; on the question of whether she should take the lower or upper berth Chesterton had advised: ‘What you have to consider is whether you prefer to be stabbed through the front or the back.’ Dorothy opted for the back and took the upper berth: ‘My companion turned out to be charming …’.90 It was bitterly cold. Above the archway entrance to the town, which seemed the most devoutly Catholic town of all the towns they had visited, was a Marian chapel, where daily Mass was celebrated. Since one side of the chapel was open to the road, passers-by kneeled during the Mass and nobody, including Jews, passed through the arch without taking their hat off. No wheeled vehicles were allowed through the arch, and the English visitors were deeply impressed by the sight of people kneeling in the narrow little street regardless of the weather. Chesterton was to recall how the voice of the lady who was driving them changed as they stopped outside the archway. As they passed through the archway she said ‘in the same colourless tone: “You take off your hat here.”’

  And then I saw the open street. It was filled with a vast crowd, all facing me; and all on their knees on the ground…. I faced round, and saw in the centre of the arch great windows standing open, unsealing a chamber full of gold and colours; there was a picture behind; but parts of the whole picture were moving like a puppet-show, stirring strange double memories like a dream of the bridge in the puppet-show of my childhood; and then I realised that from those shifting groups there shone and sounded the ancient magnificence of the Mass.91

  On Wednesday they visited the cathedral, where they saw an old priest with St Vitus’s Dance; in the evening there was a meeting of the local P.E.N. Club, at which there were speeches and songs.

  On Thursday they went out into the countryside, where they visited the home of Count Tyszkiewicz, who had been educated in England at Downside. Chesterton remembered the visit vividly in his Autobiography. Tyszkiewicz was

  a young count whose huge and costly palace of a country house … had been burned and wrecked and left in ruins by the retreat of the Red Army … Looking at such a mountain of shattered marbles and black and blasted tapestries, one of our party said, ‘It must be a terrible thing for you to see your old family home destroyed like this.’ But the young man, who was very young in all his gestures, shrugged his shoulders and laughed, at the same time looking a little sad. ‘Oh, I do not blame them for that,’ he said. ‘I have been a soldier myself, and in the same campaign; and I know the temptations. I know what a fellow feels, dropping with fatigue and freezing with cold, when he asks himself what some other fellow’s armchairs and curtains can matter, if he can only have fuel for the night. On the one side or the other, we were all soldiers; and it is a hard and horrible life. I don’t at all resent what they did here. There is only one thing that I really resent. I will show it to you.

  And he led us out into a long avenue lined with poplars; and at the end of it was a statue of the Blessed Virgin; with the head and the hands shot off. But the hands had been lifted; and it is a strange thing that the very mutilation seemed to give more meaning to the attitude of intercession; asking mercy for the merciless race of men.92

  They had lunch overlooking a lake with the Count’s aunt and tea with another aunt. Their mansions, too, like those of almost every landed family in Poland, had been practically destroyed, first by the Germans and then by the Russian Communists, who were much worse than the Germans, and not only because they desecrated sacred images like those of the Virgin, which were so common by the roadside as well on people’s property. Those families who had escaped with their lives considered themselves lucky and had terrible tales to tell of the consequences of resisting Communist propaganda—men hung upside down on trees and slowly burned to death, women shot with their children bound to them by barbed wire.

  The day’s expedition included a visit to a village where there was a settlement of 400 Karaim Jews, an ancient Jewish sect 2,000 years old, who did not accept the Talmud and were only to be found there and in the Crimea and in Egypt. They visited their synagogue, where a rabbi dressed in a yellow cloak or cope and a black and white velvet hat wa
s taking a service, at which a blessing was asked for the visitors, who were mentioned by name. On the Friday they visited the Jewish ghetto in Wilno and were told of the legend that the Jews killed a Christian child ‘once a year to get the blood for mixing their cake’. The Italian-looking town reminded Dorothy Collins of Florence, apart from the domed Russian Orthodox churches. There was a crowd at the station that night when they took the train back to Warsaw, where they arrived early next morning.

  On Tuesday 31 May their memorable visit to Poland came to an end when they left Warsaw at 8.30 in the evening. There was again a large crowd to see them off. Twelve hours later they arrived in Berlin. They left Berlin next morning, bound as they thought for Cologne, but found that they were sitting in the wrong part of the train and ended up at Aachen. Next day they took an afternoon train to Bruges, where they visited the famous beguinage after Mass on Sunday. After a week in Belgium, which included a visit to Antwerp, they returned to England at the beginning of the second week of June. A month later, on 7 July, Chesterton addressed a crowded Essex Hall in the Strand on the subject of Poland. The Polish ambassador chaired the meeting, Cardinal Bourne, the Archbishop of Westminster, was on the platform, and Belloc moved the vote of thanks. Chesterton spoke with great passion about Poland as a historic nation that had continued to exist as a nation even while under foreign domination before regaining its freedom.93

  6

  The Return of Don Quixote had been published in book form on 6 May 1927, having been serialized in G.K.’s Weekly from 12 December 1925 to 11 November 1926, the remainder of the novel being summarized in the issue of 20 November after serialization stopped because of the reduction in the size of the paper. The novel, which is a considerable revision of the original serial instalments, reflects Chesterton’s conversion to Catholicism. Seawood Abbey, the home of the industrial magnate Lord Seawood, has ‘a curse’ on it precisely because it has ‘a blessing’ on it. His daughter Rosamund learns the bitter truth: ‘The curse is in the name of the house.’ Rosamund fails to understand: ‘You’ve seen it at the top of your note-paper a thousand times and taken it for granted; and you have never seen that that is the falsehood. It doesn’t matter whether your father’s position is false or not; it doesn’t matter whether it’s old or new.’ It is not the usual class question of the aristocratic as opposed to the nouveau riche family; there is something much more important than that: ‘This place doesn’t belong to the old families any more than the new families. It belongs to God.’ At the end of the novel, Seawood Abbey ‘has become an Abbey’ after the death of Lord Seawood and the conversion of his mistress to Catholicism. But the return of monks will also mean the return of marriage: ‘Whenever monks come back, marriages will come back.’ And monks really do mean the Middle Ages and not merely romantic medievalism: ‘if we want the flower of chivalry, we must go right away back to the root of chivalry. We must go back if we find it in a thorny place people call theology.’ The trouble with romantic medievalists was that they ‘never began at the beginning’, ‘never went back to the Thing itself. The Thing that produced everything else …’. Romantic medievalists never conceived of romance in the urban landscape; but Chesterton knew that one could perfectly well imagine oneself to be ‘a fairy prince’ and one’s ‘clumsy walking-stick … a sword’ as one ventured not into ‘forests and valleys but into the labyrinth of commonplace and cockney towns’. Here, too, was possible that ‘astonishment’ of wonder that was ‘lost in Eden and will return with the Beatific Vision, an astonishment so strong that it will last for ever’. The politics of the novel are those of G.K.’s Weekly. Strikes do not mean ‘unrest’ in the language of the capitalist press but ‘a great deal of rest’, for ‘striking simply means resting’. As for trade unions, the capitalist press had ensured that ‘that huge historical change had happened … behind a curtain; and the curtain was literally a sheet of paper; a sheet of newspaper’. The politicians’ refusal to rearm in the dangerous international situation arose from their ‘mixing up their Utopia that never comes with their old Victorian security that’s already gone’.94

  In June another volume of Collected Poems was published, consisting of poems first published in the New Witness and G.K.’s Weekly and now published for the first time in book form, as well as all the earlier volumes of poetry, with two exceptions, one being, astonishingly, Greybeards at Play. A further volume would be published in 1933, with certain additions, alterations, and omissions.

  On 28 June Chesterton gave a lecture called ‘Culture and the Coming Peril’ at University College, London, as the seventh in a series of centenary lectures. In the chair was the Provost, Sir Gregory Foster, who referred, as we have seen, in his introduction to Chesterton’s time at the College.95 Chesterton’s theme was that the threat to culture came from ‘a certain familiarity with things that are the materials of Culture, and, at the same time, an insensibility to them’. As an example of what he called ‘standardisation by a low standard’, Chesterton cited the modern advertising of capitalism (‘the rich asking for more money’96) in which a huge space on a wall would be filled with ‘trivialities’. The result was ‘the gradual debasing of the artistic sense and the imagination’.97 In an article in G.K.’s Weekly the following year, Chesterton offered an unpromising scriptural anticipation of modern advertising: the ‘salesmanship’ of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden:

  he seems to have undertaken to deliver the goods with exactly the right preliminaries of promise and praise. He knew all about advertisement: we may say he knew all about publicity, though not at the moment addressing a very large public. He not only took up the slogan of Eat More Fruit, but he distinctly declared that any customers purchasing his particular brand of fruit would instantly become as gods.

  The ancient account ended with ‘some extraordinary remarks’ (‘probably the result of a malicious interpolation by priests at a later date’) ‘to the effect that one thus pursuing the bright career of Salesmanship is condemned to crawl on his stomach and eat a great deal of dirt’.98

  In June Chesterton was again invited to stand for the rectorship of a Scottish university. In his reply to the invitation from Edinburgh University, he warned that he was only a Liberal ‘in a rather independent sense’—he found it ‘difficult to imagine any real sort of Liberal who is not really an independent Liberal’—but he was ‘quite certain’ that he was not a Tory or a Socialist. He was defeated in the election by Winston Churchill, who received 864 votes to his 593, with Mrs Sidney Webb in third place with 332 votes.99

  That summer of 1927 Dorothy Collins drove the Chestertons down to the West Country for a holiday. The trip was to include two days at Lyme Regis in Dorset, a stay that in the event lengthened to two weeks and that was to be repeated in the following summers.100 In the high street that runs down to the sea they came across two little girls gazing longingly at a toy in a shop window, their noses pressed to the glass. On calculating their financial resources, the girls turned sadly away from the glass. Chesterton thought of offering to supplement their insufficient resources, but it was felt that their mother might not like it. Meanwhile the two little girls had recognized their huge potential benefactor, and ran home to tell their elder sister, Clare, that they had seen the writer she admired so much and whom she had just been reading when her sisters burst in. The three sisters promptly rushed to the Three Cups Hotel, where they assumed Chesterton was staying, telling their mother that they were going to ask him to tea. On entering the hotel they saw Chesterton sitting in the lounge, but their courage failed them, and, instead of going up to him, they went to the desk pretending that they were enquiring about rooms for friends. On being shown round, they told the hotel that their friends were ‘rather fussy’ but they would let the hotel know their requirements. Although—or perhaps because—Chesterton rose with his usual gallantry to women, however tender in years, to open the hotel door for them as they left, they failed to pluck up enough courage to speak to him. But on returning home, Clare summ
oned up enough courage to send him a note, informing him that he was the reincarnation of Shakespeare but assuring him that they were not tourists or autograph-hunters—and begging him to come to tea. Back again at the hotel, they delivered the note at reception and waited for an answer. On reading the note, Chesterton wondered hopefully if these were the same girls whom they had seen in the high street and more recently in the hotel. When they saw Chesterton’s legs descending the stairs, they thought they looked ‘like the front quarters of a particularly large and friendly elephant’. Chesterton enquired: ‘Am I really the ghost of Shakespeare? And may we come to tea?’ A few days later, when they had become firm friends, Chesterton asked Clare ‘casually, without the flicker of a wink, “By the way, those friends of yours who wanted rooms … did they—er—find anything suitable?”’ Clare replied no less ‘blandly, “As a matter of fact, they didn’t … I believe they went elsewhere.”’ ‘A pity,’ murmured Chesterton, ‘a great pity …’ Clare was again at The Three Cups Hotel when this conversation took place in the lounge. All of a sudden an American journalist burst into the room and bowed to Chesterton: ‘Mr G. K. Chesterton, I believe!’ Turning to Clare and practically kissing her hand, he added, ‘And Mrs G. K. Chesterton!’ After the journalist had disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared, Chesterton apologized to Clare: ‘My dear, please forgive my extreme dilatoriness in waiting to be thrust upon you. I really should have proposed first.’ She responded, ‘Don’t mention it, Mr Chesterton, I accepted you years ago.’101