by Ian Ker
It was not only the financial problems of G.K.’s Weekly that Chesterton had to contend with: there were also the fights among the various Distributist factions. At the annual meeting of the League in October 1928, Chesterton complained: I can never understand how people I like so much can possibly dislike each other.’ There were roughly two kinds of dispute: those about the nature of true Distributism and those about G.K.’s Weekly—although as the years went by the main dispute became the question whether one could be a true Distributist without also being a Catholic.128
His brother had been an active and professional editor, but Chesterton’s editorial competence was limited to writing (or rather dictating) editorials: he lacked ‘the capacity to preside over a paper, to pilot it through a crisis, “put it to bed” or do any of those ordinary things done by ordinary editors’. It was his name that had been useful to the New Witness. By the end of the war that paper was feeling the absence of an active editor on the spot, and subscriptions were falling. Another problem was that the Eye-Witness and its successor were primarily investigative papers that aimed to uncover corruption, without any very positive policy. G.K.’s Weekly, on the other hand, was intended to put forward Distributism as a positive political alternative to Capitalism and Socialism. And it was important personally for Chesterton to have his own paper where he could air his views, since he no longer had any access to the press, apart from his column in the Illustrated London News, which had to steer clear largely of politics and religion. But the fact that there had been a delay in launching the new paper, even after sufficient funds had been secured and a certain amount of publicity had greeted the new venture, including an interview with Chesterton in the Observer, was characteristic of both Chesterton brothers’ lack of business sense. Cecil’s attitude had been that the manager not the editor was responsible for the business side of the paper. But, since the war the economic conditions had worsened, so it was even more difficult to keep a paper going that had an editor so uninterested in the business side and a management that was as incompetent as that of the New Witness. The London or Central branch of the Distributist League used to meet at a tavern called ‘The Devereux’, only a few yards from the offices of G.K.’s Weekly. Its members were naturally therefore very alive to the paper’s problems and decided that certain actions should be taken to ensure its survival. Expenses should be cut and the direction and management of the paper reorganized. When they heard about the proposed reorganization and retrenchment, the current office staff were outraged at this interference by alleged amateurs, who in fact included experienced if younger journalists, such as Edward MacDonald, who would succeed Titterton as assistant editor. Titterton, who had been mischievously misinformed that the plan was that he was to be dismissed and that a committee should run the paper, was furious. In fact, the idea was that the only way to ensure the paper was managed in a businesslike way was for a committee to have full control—a committee that Titterton would chair in the absence of the editor. There followed a public meeting at ‘The Devereux’ at which Chesterton took the chair. Expecting Chesterton to take his side, Titterton was confounded when he took the side of the young reformers. When the committee was formed, it was discovered that there was a large financial deficit, which the manager had concealed, no doubt for fear the paper would close before he could get new advertisers and make good the deficit. As Titterton had predicted, the committee eventually melted away, but, as he came generously to recognize, it had fulfilled its purpose by appointing Edward Macdonald as assistant editor, ‘a man born for the job’, who greatly improved the paper: ‘read in England by most of the people who count; and abroad … quoted as an authority.’ The paper still had to be run on a shoestring, but at least its existence was no longer threatened, and such subsidies as had to come from Chesterton were affordable.129
In May Chesterton received a letter from Sigrid Undset, the Norwegian Catholic novelist, who had converted four years earlier and become a lay Dominican. She wrote from the Wilton Hotel in Victoria:
I take the liberty to beg an interview with you, as the dominican [sic] fathers of Oslo want me to call on you. I am a Catholic from Norway, over here principally to see something of the work the English catholics [sic] do and see if I can learn something that might come in usefully for our work at home.130
The letter was acknowledged with the promise that Chesterton would write later. It seems they must have met and kept in touch, for there survives a very brief note of thanks, ‘with thanks from yours truly Sigrid Undset’, which the Norwegian sent from her home in Lillehammer, dated 25 November 1931.131 Her greatest work, Kristin Lavransdatter (1920–2), had been published a few years before she first wrote to Chesterton in 1928, the year in which later in December she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
On 9 July 1928 Chesterton chaired a meeting in the Railway Hotel in Beaconsfield, at which a presentation was made to Father Walker, who was leaving the parish. A year previously Chesterton had been on the organizing committee for the celebration of the parish priest’s silver jubilee. In his speech Chesterton thanked Father Walker for his help in problems connected with his own ‘most disreputable profession’ by means of ‘a coherent and sane philosophy’.132 There would not be a resident parish priest in Beaconsfield until 1931, when Monsignor Charles Smith, an ex-army chaplain, arrived and a presbytery was built.133 Three years later Chesterton would present Monsignor Smith on his silver jubilee with a cheque and an illuminated address composed by himself; the parish priest was doubly honoured, as Ronald Knox came to preach.134
In October Chesterton published a selection of his Illustrated London News columns, Generally Speaking: A Book of Essays. In a piece on the detective story he lays down the excellent principle: ‘The whole point of a sensational story is that the secret should be simple. The whole story exists for the moment of surprise; and it should be a moment. It should not be something that it takes twenty minutes to explain, and twenty-four hours to learn by heart, for fear of forgetting it.’ Otherwise, more or less familiar themes reappear. Everyone cannot help but be a dogmatist, and there are two kinds: ‘the conscious dogmatists and the unconscious dogmatists’. But the latter are ‘by far the most dogmatic’. Asia had ‘borrowed all the wrong things from Europe’, such as ‘the costume … of the industrial nineteenth century in the big towns’, and Europe also ‘very largely … all the wrong things from Asia’, such as its ‘despair’. The ‘dangerous lack of an intensive national feeling’ in imperialist England had led to ‘a much too supine surrender to other feelings’, especially from America. Predicting the future had to involve ‘a sort of fatalism’, as it was impossible to ‘foresee the free part of human action’. We can see what people ‘freely chose to do’ in the past, whereas it was impossible to foresee what people in the future would choose to do, only what ‘they must do’. It was impossible to ‘predict new things, because … we can only calculate them logically from old things’ by projecting ‘its lines further into the future’. There were ‘three ways of writing history’. There was the ‘old Victorian way’, which was ‘picturesque and largely false’; there was the later academic way, which assumed one could continue to write false history so long as one avoided being ‘picturesque’ on the ground that a lie that was ‘dull’ would sound as if it was ‘true’; and there was a third way, which was ‘to use the picturesque (which is a perfectly natural instinct of man for what is memorable), but to make it a symbol of truth and not a symbol of falsehood’. It was ‘natural to man to be artificial’ in the sense of wearing clothes, for example, unlike the animals who did not need them—but then man had ‘everywhere founded his superiorities on his inferiorities’.135
The beginning of 1929 saw another controversy with G. G. Coulton, who attacked an article by Chesterton in which he had argued that Catholicism encouraged humility. On 3 January the Daily Telegraph published a letter from Chesterton, in which he ‘regretted’ that, for all his scholarship and literary gifts, Coulton ha
d ‘seen fit to neglect the nature of the thing we call thought. When in his wanderings he meets anything resembling a thought he calls it a merry paradox.’ Since Coulton was a medieval scholar, this was especially unfortunate, as the thing the medievals were most good at was thinking, and therefore the critic of their thought should possess ‘an appetite for abstract thought and a certain freedom from provincial prejudices’. If the Catholic acceptance of Church authority was considered ‘abject’, then surely this suggested humility rather than arrogance and pride. As for persecution of heretics in the Middle Ages, this again did not indicate pride but belief in the truth of Catholicism. Again, if Catholic pomp and ritual were ‘childish’, then Catholics must be humble rather than proud. In reply to Coulton’s complaint that Chesterton had not dealt with his charges against Catholicism, Chesterton rejoined in a letter in the issue of 9 January that these charges were ‘irrelevant’ to the question of humility. Coulton called for a collaborative work of controversy: ‘But what shall we call it? “Stray Thoughts by G. G. Coulton, While not Listening to a Sermon on Pride”; or “Pride, by G. K. Chesterton, with Notes on Other Subjects by Dr G. G. Coulton, of St John’s College, Cambridge”?’ Anyway Chesterton’s original article was not for the benefit of Coulton, who still believed in the virtue of humility, but for a new generation ‘who think the Victorian respectability of Mr Coulton much more dead and buried than the religion of St Thomas’.
In July Chesterton brought out another collection of short stories that had already been published in Nash’s Magazine and the Story Teller. The poet in The Poet and the Lunatics, Gabriel Gale, stands out as a figure of Chestertonian sanity in a mad world. It is Gale who grasps the principle of limitation, that, for example, ‘being oneself … is itself limitation. We are limited by our brains and bodies; and if we break out, we cease to be ourselves …’. But, in fact, ‘illimitable liberty is itself a limit. It is like the circle, which is at once an eternity and a prison.’ It is Gale who sees ‘a small thing’ as ‘a large thing’, for it is only by ‘looking at some little thing’ that he ‘can ever learn anything’. According to his philosophy of wonder, ‘the main object of a man’s life was to see a thing as if he had never seen it before’. And human happiness consists in seeing life as ‘a gift or present’, a ‘surprise’, surprise implying that ‘a thing came from outside ourselves; and gratitude that it comes from someone other than ourselves’. And it is these ‘limits’ that ‘are the lines of the very plan of human pleasure’. For him as for Chesterton, ‘everything has a halo … which makes it sacred’. In practical life, it is not practical but ‘unpractical’ people who are needed, who can ‘see the part that theories play in practical life’, for ‘most men are what their theories make them’. To deny that ‘there are any mysteries’, to be merely ‘rational’, leads to madness. Materialists who ‘are at least near enough to heaven to accept the earth and not imagine they made it’ are infinitely preferable to Idealists, with their ‘dreadful doubts … deadly and damnable doubts’, who doubt ‘matter and the minds of others and everything except [their] own ego’. Finally, Gale, like Father Brown, who can empathize with criminals because he too is a sinner, has ‘a sympathy with lunatics—including literary men’ because he too ‘has a streak … of the moonshine that leads such men astray’.136
In October a collection of articles first published in various magazines and papers appeared entitled The Thing (in America it would be published under the title The Thing: Why I am a Catholic). As in The Everlasting Man, Chesterton emphasizes what he calls the ‘balance’ of Catholicism. Before and after the Reformation the ‘revolts’ against the Church ‘told the same strange story’:
Every great heretic … always exhibited three remarkable characteristics in combination. First, he picked out some mystical idea from the Church’s bundle or balance of mystical ideas. Second, he used that one mystical idea against all the other mystical ideas. Third (and most singular), he seems generally to have had no notion that his own favourite mystical idea was a mystical idea, at least in the sense of a mysterious or dubious or dogmatic idea.
The most obvious example was the Bible. To the impartial observer it had to be the ‘strangest’ thing in the world that ‘men rushing in to wreck a temple, overturning the altar and driving out the priest, found there certain sacred volumes … and (instead of throwing them on the fire with the rest) began to use them as infallible oracles rebuking all the other arrangements’. Calvinists had seized on ‘the Catholic idea of the absolute knowledge and power of God’, Wesleyan Evangelicals in reaction ‘seized on the very Catholic idea that mankind has a sense of sin; and they wandered about offering everybody release from his mysterious burden of sin’. Then they in turn were ‘quite surprised when the result of Rousseau and the revolutionary optimism began to express itself in men claiming a purely human happiness and dignity’—but the latter had simply ‘taken out of the old Catholic tradition … the idea that there is a spiritual dignity in man as man, and a universal duty to love men as men’. In each case, out of the Catholic ‘sanity and … balance’ of ‘a mind surviving a hundred moods’, one idea was extracted as though it were ‘absolutely self-evident’ and ‘nobody could ever destroy that, though in the name of it they destroyed everything else’. The new liberal version of Christianity had also seized upon one idea, that the ‘message of Christ was perfectly “simple”: that the cure of everything is Love’, and that for some strange reason Christ had been ‘killed … for making this remark’, while, ever since his death, ‘horrid people called priests’ had been obsessed with useless dogmas. This was like objecting to a science of medicine when nothing ‘could be simpler than the beautiful gift of Health’.137
It was striking that this new religion, which wanted ‘a religion without dogma’, believed that, while ‘it is wrong to be dogmatic, it is essential to be dogmatically Protestant’. This in fact meant that it was essential to be anti-Catholic, for Protestants had not only ‘lost faith’ in Protestantism but had ‘mostly forgotten what it was’. The average Englishman, who assumed one is saved by leading a good life, would be very surprised to hear that ‘for three hundred years, the faith in faith alone was the badge of a Protestant, the faith in good works the rather shameful badge of a disreputable Papist’. He would be immediately on the side of Catholicism against Calvinism in preferring ‘a God who has made all men for joy, and desires to save them all, to a God who deliberately made some for involuntary sin and immortal misery’. Not only would he not share, but he would not understand, ‘the unnatural aversion of the Puritans to all art and beauty in relation to religion’. Wherever ‘the Reformation actually put Rome in the dock, Rome has since been acquitted by the jury of the whole world’. As for the real corruptions in the Church prior to the Reformation, none of them was in fact ‘reformed’ by the Reformation but ‘made worse’. For example,
it was an abominable abuse that the corruption of the monasteries sometimes permitted a rich noble to play the patron and even play at being the Abbot, or draw on the revenues supposed to belong to a brotherhood of poverty and charity. But all that the Reformation did was to allow the same rich noble to take over all the revenue, to seize the whole house and turn it into a palace or a pig-sty, and utterly stamp out the last legend of the poor brotherhood.
Meanwhile, in the modern world Catholic practices were being ‘copied … often caricatured’: ‘Psycho-analysis is the Confessional without the safeguards of the Confessional; Communism is the Franciscan movement without the moderating balance of the Church; and American sects, having howled for three centuries at the Popish theatricality and mere appeal to the senses, now “brighten” their services by super-theatrical films and rays of rose-red light falling on the head of the minister.’ Protestantism really meant little more than a protest against Rome, and, since the ‘charges’ kept changing, it was ‘only in continuity because it is still against Rome’: ‘In other words, the legend that Rome is wrong anyhow, is still a living thing, tho
ugh all the features of the monster are now entirely altered in the caricature.’ But what sort of a ‘tradition’ was this that told ‘a different story every day or every decade … What sort of holy cause is it to inherit from our ancestors, that we should go on hating something and being consistent only in hatred …?’ Chesterton himself had been ‘brought up a sort of Universalist and Unitarian; at the feet of that admirable man, Stopford Brooke’. But it was hardly Protestantism ‘save in a very negative sense’. The Universalist believed in heaven but not in hell, but he recognized that there must be ‘a progress after death, at once punishment and enlightenment’, in other words purgatory, in flat contradiction to the old Protestant belief in hell but denial of purgatory, on which Protestantism ‘had waged ceaseless war’. What Chesterton, however, discovered to his astonishment was that, although the liberal Christianity of Stopford Brooke rejected ‘the Protestant faith’, it was ‘eager to go on with the Protestant feud’. And this seemed to him ‘like a rather ugly breach of honour. To find out that you have been slandering somebody about something, to refuse to apologize, and to make up another more plausible story against him, so that you can carry on the spirit of the slander, seemed to [him] at the start a rather poor way of behaving.’ Why were these liberal Christians ‘so very illiberal’ about the Church of Rome? The ‘only logical answer’, which ‘every fact of life’ had confirmed, was that it was so ‘hated, as nothing else is hated, simply because it is, in the exact sense of the popular phrase, like nothing on earth’.138
Chesterton’s satire of Protestant anti-Popery, especially its sheer ignorance of Catholicism, recalls the brilliance of Newman’s own satire on Protestant anti-Popery in his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics, a work, as we have seen, that Chesterton greatly admired. Delighted to find in a well-informed paper a report that Rome tolerated ‘strange heresies and even bearded and wedded clergy’ among Russian-rite Uniate Catholics, he exclaims: ‘Only a wild unreason … could thus make even the joints and hinges of that rickety statement rattle and creak with laughter.’