by Ian Ker
There is in the world, they would tell us, a powerful and persecuting superstition, intoxicated with the impious idea of having a monopoly of divine truth, and therefore cruelly crushing and exterminating everything else as error. It burns thinkers for thinking, discoverers for discovering, philosophers and theologians who differ by a hair’s breadth from its dogmas; it will tolerate no tiny change or shadow of variety even among its friends and followers; it sweeps the whole world with one encyclical cyclone of uniformity; it would destroy nations and empires for a word, so wedded is it to its fixed idea that its own word is the Word of God. When it is thus sweeping the world, it comes to a remote and rather barbarous region somewhere on the borders of Russia; where it stops suddenly; smiles broadly; and tells the people there that they can have the strangest heresies they like…. ‘By all means worship Baphomet and Beelzebub; say the Lord’s Prayer backwards; continue to drink the blood of infants—nay, even,’ and here her voice falters, till she rallies with an effort of generous resolution, ‘yes, even, if you really must, grow a beard’.
Why ‘these particular Eastern Europeans should be regarded with so much favour, or why a number of long hairs on the chin should be regarded with so much disfavour’, was ‘presumably a question on which this intolerant spiritual tyranny’ would ‘suffer no question to be asked’. But what the report in the paper did indicate was that something that had been ‘left for dead’ and dismissed with ‘confident contempt’ had ‘rather incredibly come to life’ and aroused an ‘irritated’, ‘rather restless curiosity’. This curiosity Chesterton encountered on another occasion when he heard ‘a lady of educated and even elegant pretensions … mention a certain small West Country town’, adding ‘with a sort of hiss that it contained “a nest of Roman Catholics”. This apparently referred to a family [presumably the Nicholls of Lyme Regis] with which I happen to be acquainted. The lady then said, her voice changing to a deep note of doom, “God alone knows what is said and done behind those closed doors.”’ Chesterton did not know ‘why a Catholic’s doors should be any more closed than anybody else’s doors; the habit is not unusual in persons of all philosophical beliefs when retiring for the night; and on other occasions depends on the weather and the individual taste.’ He supposed the explanation was that there lingered ‘the stale savour of a sort of sensational romance about us; as if we were all foreign counts and conspirators’: ‘The world still pays us this wild and imaginative compliment of imagining that we are much less ordinary than we really are.’ And since Catholic crimes were ‘not plotted in public’, it stood to reason that ‘they must be plotted in private’. It was obviously ‘unreasonable’ to expect their fellow countrymen ‘to suggest anything so fanciful’ as that they were ‘not plotted anywhere’. Chesterton dreaded to think what would be said if Catholics really did have secret societies like the Freemasons and the Ku Klux Klan. But it was interesting that it was those very people who ‘accused us of mummery and mystery who surrounded all their secularising activities with far more fantastic mysteries and mummeries’. The ‘mystic materialism’ of Catholicism displeased a Protestant like Dean Inge—but could he not see that ‘the Incarnation is as much a part of that idea as the Mass; and that the Mass is as much a part of that idea as the Incarnation’. Chesterton simply could not understand ‘why a man should accept a Creator who was a carpenter, and then worry about holy water … why he should accept the first and most stupendous part of the story of Heaven on Earth, and then furiously deny a few small but obvious deductions from it …’. This hostility to the sacramental was rooted in a ‘horror of matter’. People like Dean Inge wanted worship to be ‘wholly spiritual, or even wholly intellectual’ out of ‘a disgust at the idea of spiritual things having a body and a solid form’. The Dean shrank from the sacramental because he could not ‘bear to think how natural is the craving for the supernatural’. It was nothing else but a Manichean ‘horror of matter’. That was really why the Dean was opposed to the sacramental—‘not because ‘science could forbid men to believe in something which science does not profess to investigate’.139
Elsewhere Chesterton imagined the Dean’s response to the news of ‘the recently discovered traces of an actual historical Flood: a discovery which has shaken the Christian world to its foundations by its apparent agreement with the Book of Genesis’. ‘I do not see’, the Dean declared,
that there is any cause for alarm. Protestantism is still founded on an impregnable rock: on that deep and strong foundation of disbelief in the Bible which supports the spiritual and intellectual life of all true Christians today. Even if dark doubts should arise, and it should seem for the moment as if certain passages in the Scripture story were true, we must not lose heart; the cloud will pass: and we have still the priceless possession of the Open Bible, with all its inexhaustible supply or errors and inconsistencies: a continual source of interest to scholars and a permanent bulwark against Rome …
H. G. Wells was imagined as simply exclaiming: ‘I am interested in the Flood of the future: not in any of these little local floods that may have taken place in the past.’140
The Catholic Church was reproached for its ‘superstitions’ and ‘the deadness of [its] tradition’, but the modern world itself had ‘reached a curious condition of ritual or routine’ and was ‘living entirely on the life of tradition’. When it was right about something, it was ‘right by prejudice’ or ‘instinct’, whereas the Catholic Church was ‘right by principle’. Thus the modern world continued ‘to entertain a healthy prejudice against Cannibalism’ and the ‘next step’ in its ‘ethical evolution’ seemed as yet far distant’: ‘But the notion that there is not very much difference between the bodies of men and animals—that is not by any means far distant, but exceedingly near.’ Catholicism was ‘the most rational of all religions’, ‘even, in a sense, the most rationalistic of all religions’. Unfortunately, though, there was ‘a very urgent need for a verbal paraphrase of many of the fundamental doctrines, simply because people have ceased to understand them as they were traditionally stated’. Chesterton is thinking of English Catholicism when he says that these doctrines ‘need to be stated afresh, and not left in language that is intrinsically correct but practically misleading’. There was one example Chesterton felt very strongly about and wished that ‘somebody with better authority’ would ‘announce in a voice of thunder or with a salute of big guns, the vital and very much needed truth that “dulcis” is not the Latin for “sweet”’. The word ‘sweet’ in English had been ‘rendered hopelessly sticky by the accident of the word “sweets”’. Besides, the word suggested ‘something much more intense and even pungent in sweetness like … concentrated sugar’. The problem was that ‘English Catholicism, having in the great calamity of our history gone into exile in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (at the very moment when our modern language was being finally made), naturally had to seek for its own finest enthusiasms in foreign languages’. Chesterton’s wish has never been granted: for example, in one of the most popular Catholic prayers, the ‘Salve Regina’, the Virgin Mary is addressed in the English version as ‘our sweetness’ and ‘O sweet Virgin Mary’. His own dire verdict was that ‘this incongruous and inaccurate repetition of the word “sweet” has kept more Englishmen out of the Catholic Church than all the poison of the Borgias or all the poisonous lies of the people who have written about them’. And it was this ‘muddle about words’ that ‘terribly perpetuated’ the ‘old slander’ of ‘a slimy sentimentalism’ of which English Catholics were accused.141
The so-called slavery of the mind of Catholics consisted merely in ‘thinking a certain authority reliable; which is entirely reasonable’. Real ‘slavery of the mind’ consisted in the inability to ‘think of certain things at all’, not to be able to state another point of view—or even one’s own, to assume ‘certain things, in the sense of not even imagining the opposite things’. It was this that was both intellectual and ‘imaginative bondage’. Conversion to Catholicis
m, Chesterton had found, was ‘the beginning of an active, fruitful, progressive and even adventurous life of the intellect’. The ‘great mysteries’ were ‘starting-points for trains of thought far more stimulating [and] subtle’ than the ‘sceptical scratching’ of the Modernists. The Catholic Mass opened up ‘a magnificent world of metaphysical ideas, illuminating all the relations of matter and mind, of flesh and spirit …’. It was the dogmas of Catholicism that were ‘living … inspiring … intellectually interesting’. Far from being ‘dull’. the Catholic dogmas were ‘living ideas’.142
14
Rome and America Again
I
THE Chestertons and Dorothy Collins were in Rome when The Thing was published in October 1929. They spent three months there staying in the Hotel Hassler overlooking the Spanish Steps. Here in a first floor room Chesterton wrote The Resurrection of Rome, which would be published the following year.1 He warned the reader at the beginning of the book that he was ‘a bad reporter because everything seems…worth reporting’, and he never found ‘anything dull’. Indeed, it seemed ‘hardly worth while to travel’ when everywhere the world seemed to him ‘so amusing’. The result was that he lacked ‘proportion’. And he proved his point by proceeding to ‘mention first the first thing’ he ‘really noticed’ in Rome, which perhaps nobody else had ever noticed and which probably most people would not think ‘worth noticing’. It was not something a guidebook or even a book of ‘impressions’ of Rome would mention. Nevertheless, it was ‘an event’ in Chesterton’s life—‘in that inner, infantile and fanciful life which begins with seeing the first Punch and Judy...’. Soon after his arrival he had walked across the road from his hotel, ‘filled with no particular aspiration beyond a strong appetite for lunch; and just round the corner of the small street opposite I found a whole huge gateway carved like the face of a gigantic goblin with open jaws’.
It was rather like the Mouth of Hell in the mediaeval pictures and plays. The worthy householder, who lived behind this pleasing facade, had presumably grown accustomed to popping in and out of the monster in the most prim and respectable way. Whenever he went into his house he was devoured by a giant like the princesses in the fairy-tales. Whenever he came out of his house he was vomited forth by a hideous leviathan …2
In view of the letters from all over the world inviting Chesterton to lecture, the English College, the Scots College, the North American College, the Beda College, and the Holy Child convent were fortunate to hear him speak.3 At the dinner that preceded the lecture at the North American College, the Rector instructed the Italian waiter to keep Chesterton’s plate full, presumably on the assumption that their huge guest had a huge appetite, whereas Chesterton was usually so busy talking that little eating actually took place. After some time had passed the Rector felt his cassock pulled and ‘heard an agitated whisper, “It is now five times I fill him, do I go on?”’ Given the leisurely pace of Italian meals, it is quite possible that Chesterton’s plate was filled up five times without his ever noticing, absorbed in conversation as he would have been.4 That peculiarly English meal, afternoon tea, as strange to Chesterton’s American host as to the Italian waiter, was presumably made available for English visitors at the Hotel Hassler, as one day the Chestertons invited three small children to join them for tea. When their parents came to collect them, they found Chesterton ‘tilted back in a chair, with a large white towel tucked under his collar, being lathered and shaved with a pretended razor by the four-year old visitor’.5
At an audience with Mussolini, Chesterton found himself doing most of the talking, being interviewed rather than interviewing. Taken into a large room, he saw at the other end ‘a small table . . . from which an alert, square-shouldered man in black got up very rapidly and walked equally rapidly right across the room, till we met not far from the door’. Mussolini shook hands with him and asked in French if he ‘minded talking in that language’. Chesterton replied that he spoke ‘badly’ but would do his best. He found there was a lot of ‘fun’ in the dictator, who ‘laughed readily’. The ‘very first thing’ he did was to ‘dump’ Chesterton in a chair and ask about the disestablishment of the Church of England! He put to Chesterton ‘a rapid succession of questions covering a wide field’, but mostly about England rather than Italy.6 He wanted Chesterton to explain the Church of England to him, a phenomenon the Englishman ‘felt quite unable to make clear to a logical Latin mind’.7 He astonished Chesterton by asking him about ‘the debate on the Revised Prayer-Book’. Something Chesterton said about imperialism ‘seemed to arrest his attention sharply and he said, “Ah, that is very interesting. Do you think it possible to give a different turn to the development of England?”’ Chesterton replied ‘in increasingly halting French’ that it was ‘very difficult, or perhaps nearly impossible’, but that he hoped that England would be ‘more self-supporting and less dependent on the ends of the earth’, for ‘such dependence had become very perilous’. Before he knew where he was, he was holding forth to Mussolini about his ‘own fad of Distributism’; at which he became so embarrassed and excited that his ‘French went all to pieces’. God only knew in what language he expressed himself in this last part of the conversation, ‘or to what wild barbaric tongue, older than Babel, its gasps and nasal noises might be supposed to belong’. Thinking that Mussolini probably thought he was mad, he rose as though to bow himself out. ‘He rose also and said, with what was probably irony but was none the less most polished courtesy, “Well, I will go and reflect on what you have told me.”’ It was, Chesterton thought, this ‘self-possession’ that made the Italians ‘a nation of gentlemen’. As they parted, Chesterton asked to be forgiven for his bad French, at which Mussolini laughed and told him that he, Chesterton, spoke French like he, Mussolini, spoke English. Chesterton realized that as an interviewer he had failed miserably, having, for instance, ‘nothing to report about the great Fascist’s views on Fascism’.8 Perhaps the dictator had been as reticent about his views as he was about his command of English, since a friend of Dorothy Collins, who had been teaching him for some months, told her that ‘he was so intelligent that he was reading and appreciating Bernard Shaw’s play The Apple Cart within a few months of instruction’.9
Chesterton saw Pope Pius XI three times while he was in Rome. The first time was at a private audience, when the rector of one of the colleges offered to introduce him—‘and I have seldom been more grateful for human companionship’. Chesterton had felt nervous on meeting Mussolini, chiefly because Il Duce spoke French much better than he did. But it was ‘altogether inadequate’ to say that he felt nervous on meeting the Pope: in his presence he found he could not speak English—‘or talk at all’. The Pope had come suddenly out of his study, ‘a sturdy figure in a cape, with a square face and spectacles’, and began speaking to Chesterton about his writings, ‘saying some very generous things about a sketch I wrote of St Francis of Assisi’. The Pope asked him if he wrote ‘a great deal’, and Chesterton ‘answered in fragmentary French phrases that it was only too true, or words to that effect’. His accompanying ‘clerical dignitary nobly struck in’ in his support by saying it was his ‘modesty’, whereas in fact his ‘head was in a whirl and it might have been anything’. The Pope then ‘made a motion’ and they all knelt—and, listening to the words of blessing that followed, Chesterton ‘understood for the first time something that was once meant by the ceremonial use of the plural’: ‘in a flash I saw the sense of something that had always seemed to me a senseless custom of kings.’ As the Pope began the blessing with ‘a new strong voice, that was hardly even like his own’, Chesterton ‘knew that something stood there infinitely greater than an individual… that it was indeed “We”; We, Peter and Gregory and Hildebrand and all the dynasty that does not die’. As they left the Vatican, he said to ‘the clerical dignitary, “That frightened me more than anything I have known in my life.” The clerical dignitary laughed heartily.’ When one of the party discovered the loss of an umbrella, so
meone else remarked that this pope of the foreign missions would ‘certainly give it to the niggers’. And Chesterton realized that the Pope’s ‘enthusiasm for the missions’ was ‘in fact a very strong antagonism to the contempt for the aboriginal races and a gigantic faith in the fraternity of all tribes in the light of the Faith’. When later Chesterton met a ‘distinguished Scandinavian’ who said ‘with shining eyes as one who beholds a vision, “We may yet have a black Pope,”’ he responded in ‘a spirit of disgraceful compromise’ that he ‘should be delighted to see a black Cardinal’: ‘Then I remembered the great King who came to Bethlehem, heavy with purple and crimson and with a face like night; and I was ashamed.’ The second time Chesterton saw the Pope was at the beatification of the English martyrs on 15 December, when he heard ‘the very long list of those English heroes, who resisted the despotic destruction of the national religion’ read out. The third time was when the Pope celebrated Benediction to conclude the process of beatification.10 According to Dorothy Collins, Chesterton was so excited by meeting the Pope that he could not work for two days after. She also remembered vividly how distressed he was when he lost a medal of the Blessed Virgin Mary that he always wore. The lift boy who eventually found it was richly rewarded for his pains.11
On their way home to England the Chestertons and Dorothy Collins visited Max Beerbohm and his wife in a villa overlooking the bay of Rapallo. They saw a fresco Beerbohm had drawn over the dining-room door depicting a number of his friends going in to a meal led by Chesterton. They also met Ezra Pound and his wife, who were living in Rapallo. Pound was full of a financial scheme that was to save the world, a scheme, he told Dorothy, that had the active support of Beerbohm. On being told of this, Beerbohm commented: ‘Am I? One has only to smile, look pleasant and avoid an argument, to be accused of supporting something one knows nothing about.’12