by Ian Ker
Next day, the 28th, they were in Toledo, where Chesterton lectured on ‘The Age of Unreason’. The following day they were back in New York, where they stayed for three weeks as there were a few more lectures to be given if only to compensate Lee Keedick for the cancellation of the lectures in the South and to enable Chesterton, who was ‘very behind’ with his journalism, to catch up.146 However, on Good Friday Dorothy Collins went on strike and insisted on the day off. ‘G.K. has developed a writing craze and wants to be at it morning, noon and night,’ she wrote to her mother.147 On the Wednesday of Holy Week Frances had written from the St Moritz Hotel to thank Father O’Donnell for some chocolates and cigars he had sent them.148 On 15 April they were back again in New Jersey, where Chesterton gave another lecture at the College of St Elizabeth entitled ‘Dickens at the Present Time’.
Two days later their ship sailed from New York. What with all Frances’s medical expenses, on top of the agent’s fees and taxes, the trip had not been ‘very remunerative in the end’.149 On arriving at Southampton, Dorothy Collins sent Father O’Donnell a postcard, postmarked 24 April, depicting ‘the altar for Mass’ on the White Star liner ‘Majestic’. They had had ‘a splendid crossing’ on what claimed to be the world’s largest liner, but she had ‘left America with regrets’.150
In his Autobiography Chesterton calculated that he had been guilty of ‘inflicting no less than ninety-nine lectures on people who never did me any harm’. In retrospect, the American ‘adventure, which was very enjoyable’, broke up ‘like a dream into isolated incidents’. There was the ‘aged Negro porter, with a face like a walnut, whom I discouraged from brushing my hat, and who rebuked me saying, “Ho, young man. Yo’s losing yo dignity before yo time. Yo’ve got to look nice for de girls.”’151 The ‘porter’ was, Dorothy Collins recalled in her old age, a ‘fatherly old Negro car-attendant’ who reproved Chesterton in these words: ‘Ho, ho, young man, you’se getting old afore yer time. You must keep yerself nice for the gals.’ Chesterton’s ‘day was made’.152 But some handwritten notes, which she must have made for a talk not long after the event, give a little more detail. ‘Even on the short journeys’, she explained, the
coloured porters who are most fatherly… like to brush you up, polish yr. shoes and see that that you are a credit to them when you leave the train. One of these porters … descended on Mr Chesterton with his brush and polish. Mr C gave him a tip and said no no. I’m all right.
But on being admonished that he must keep himself ‘smart for the gals’, ‘Mrs C. drily remarked that she wished he wd.’153 Then, too, Chesterton remembered, there was the ‘grave messenger’ who came to Chesterton in a Los Angeles hotel, ‘from a leading film magnate, wishing to arrange for my being photographed with the Twenty-Four Bathing-Beauties; Leviathan among the Nereids; an offer which was declined amid general surprise’. Or there was the memory of an ‘agonising effort to be fair to the subtleties of the evolutionary controversy’ in a lecture at Notre Dame, ‘of which no record remained except that one student wrote in the middle of his blank notebook, “Darwin did a lot of harm.”’ The student may have been right, ‘but it was something of a simplification of my reasons for being agnostic about the agnostic deductions’ drawn by evolutionists.154
4
While Chesterton was in America, he published two new books, both on 2 October 1930, The Resurrection of Rome and Come to Think of it…A Book of Essays. The two main topics of The Resurrection of Rome are Catholicism and the papacy and Italian Fascism. Chesterton returns to his favourite theme of the foolishness of sneering at ‘minute disputes about doctrine’. It was like sneering at ‘minute disputes about medicine’: ‘It is the fact that many a man would be dead to-day, if his doctors had not debated fine shades about doctoring. It is also the fact that European civilization would be dead to-day, if its doctors of divinity had not debated fine points about doctrine.’ Unlike ‘the great international treaties, which are generally made the pivotal dates of history’ and which are founded on compromises, the great councils of the Church, ‘those vast and yet subtle collaborations for thrashing out a thousand thoughts to find the true thought of the Church’, which were ‘far more practical and important’, were founded on ‘subtle distinctions’. Thus, when ‘certain metaphysical disputations about Fate and Freedom’ had been decided, ‘it was decided whether Austria should be like Arabia; or whether travelling in Spain should be the same as travelling in Morocco’. The same ‘subtle distinctions’ were also made by the papacy: ‘It was the Pope alone, for all practical purposes, who stood out upon the fine distinction between imagery and idolatry. It was the Pope alone, therefore, who prevented the whole artistic area of Europe, and even the whole map of the modern world, from being as flat and featureless as a Turkey carpet.’ It was because the Pope had ‘stood firm in Rome’ that ‘the great David stands gigantic over Florence and the little Della Robbias have crept like scraps of sky and cloud into the palace of Perugia and the cells of Assisi’. St Peter’s was ‘built to assert rather the firmness and authority and even audacity’ of the popes rather than ‘their softness or simplicity or sympathy as holy men’. As in the case of the Iconaclasts, the same thing had ‘happened again and again’: ‘in the awful silence after some shattering question, one voice has spoken and one signal has saved the world.’ This was ‘not the place where we come nearest to the charity and burning tenderness of the Heart of Christ; we can come far nearer on the gaunt and arid rocks of Assisi’. Nor was this the place ‘specially designed to express that element of twilight and reverent doubt, the spirit which at once accepts the mystery and gives up the riddle. This is far better conveyed in many grey vistas of the Gothic, following in their very tracery the … uncertain skies of the north.’ Nor were the popes ‘here laid prostrate with folded hands, in the more pious mediaeval manner, because religious art … is not thinking of them as men now peacefully dead, but as men who on this or that occasion were terribly alive’. No, St Peter’s ‘is the particular place where is to be asserted… the certitude of a certain person or persons that they do in deadly fact possess a special warrant …’. It stands for ‘the intolerant and intolerable notion that something is really true; true in every aspect and from every angle; true from the four quarters of the sky…’. As well as its authority, Chesterton emphasizes the papacy’s power of renewal, as when it ‘attempted the paradox of a new orientation away from the orient’, when it turned its ‘back upon the sun; upon the sunrise and all the light and learning that was associated with the sunny lands; now in the possession of some mad Manichaean aristocracy’, and when the Pope ‘appealed to the uncivilized against the overcivilized’, even appealing ‘to the unconverted against the relapsed’, and ‘began to make a new Roman Empire’ in the West. Again, the Counter-Reformation was another example of this ‘energy of resurrection’. And it seemed to Chesterton ‘something strangely right’ about the loss of the Temporal Power of the papacy, about the fact that the popes now claimed ‘the smallest possible political power with the largest possible pontifical power’: ‘I think there is something both subtle and magnificent in the idea of claiming a foothold, but only a foothold, for the foot of St Peter.’ It fitted in perfectly with Chesterton’s belief in ‘the value of little states and local liberties, and the necessity of a general moral philosophy big enough to defend such little things’. It gave him a ‘thrill’ to ‘accept the largest of all the religions’ but ‘to salute it also as the smallest of the small nationalities’.155
Chesterton also, albeit with reservations, was delighted by the renewal, or literally resurrection, of political Rome—by ‘the same almost spectral revivification’ whereby ‘modern madness and treason and anarchy’ had ‘brought forth … ancient Romans’:
I have seen men climbing the steep stones of the Capitol carrying the eagles and the libellum that were carried before Marius and Pompey, and it did not look like a fancy-dress ball. I have seen a forest of human hands lifted in a salute that is three t
housand years older than all the military salutes of modern armies; and it seemed a natural gesture and not a masquerade.
Here was the recovery of ‘an ancient human passion forgotten for many centuries; the passion of order’. Certainly, Mussolini, like the Irish republican Michael Collins, had done ‘a number of things that nobody would think of defending except on the ultimate theory of national self-defence; that is, the theory that society was in dissolution and the fatherland at the point of death’. But Italy had recovered ‘a thing sometimes known in the ancient world, but very nearly unknown in the whole of the modern world’—that is, ‘a government, which is not merely a governing Class’. Such a government might well be tyrannical, but ‘it was not necessarily the same as the tyranny of the richest class’, to which it ‘often made itself quite unpleasant’. True, Mussolini was no ‘ideal republican’, but at least he had ‘reverted to the original ideal that public life should be public’. Nor were the Italians subject to ‘that network of nonsensical regulations and restrictions, about eating and drinking and buying and selling’ by which those living in a so-called democracy like England were enslaved: ‘Prohibition would seem insane slavery in Rome.’ The truth was that Mussolini did ‘openly what enlightened, liberal and democratic governments’ did ‘secretly’, which, unlike Mussolini, were ‘acting against their principles’. And Chesterton ‘personally’ preferred ‘to live in a world of reality’, where freedom of speech was openly prohibited rather than secretly prevented, where the choice of candidates for parliament was openly rather than secretly limited. The criticism of Fascism was that it appealed to ‘an appetite for authority, without very clearly giving the authority for the appetite’: it had ‘brought order into the State’, but this would not be ‘lasting’ unless it also ‘brought back order into the Mind’. Mussolini talked of ‘the mistake of ruling by the Majority; and the superiority of an intense and intelligent minority’, but the problem was that, while ‘after all there is only one majority… there are a great many minorities’. In this sense Fascism invited rebels ‘in principle’, since any minority could ‘claim the same superiority to Fascism which Fascism claimed to Communism’. Mussolini himself had reacted ‘too much against the Liberalism of the nineteenth century’, for what was wrong with Liberalism was not Liberalism but ‘Liberals who were not even true to Liberalism’. In conclusion, Chesterton assured his readers that he was ‘very far from being what is usually understood as a British Fascist’—but he did understand that ‘the whole political and financial world… has been goading Fascism into revolt for the last fifty years’.156
Come to Think of it consisted of essays mostly republished from the Illustrated London News and selected by J. P. de Fonseka, who, Chesterton noted in the introduction, had reminded him that it was ‘exactly twenty-five years ago’ that he had begun writing the ‘Note-Book’ for the magazine. More or less familiar themes reappear. The ‘simple’ Whig idea of history as progress Chesterton had accepted as a boy, but he now believed in history as ‘change’ and in ‘the necessity of novelty’: ‘it is sometimes hygienic to have a change, even when it is not an improvement.’ He noted the conservatism of the young who had not experienced change like their elders and ‘did not really believe that the fashion of this world could pass away’. But each age was blinded by its own preconceptions: ‘What is interesting about each generation of men is the things they never thought of.’ The danger of basing legislation on the basis of the hard case is satirized in the example of the seasick lady who unsuccessfully begs the steward to throw her over board, and happily so, for ‘she lived afterwards to a happy and serene old age; and I think she was glad he had not carried out her instructions …’. The argument from ‘hard cases’ that would be used in a later age to justify the relaxation of laws against abortion and euthanasia was already familiar to Chesterton. The rare habit of thinking—‘We might almost call it the habit of secret thinking, a dark consolation like that of secret drinking’—is defined in terms of limitation: ‘real thinking… means knowing exactly where to draw the line …’. Fortunately for sceptics, ‘who are praised as daring and audacious’, it is not their practice to ‘carry a destructive idea through to its logical consequences’. Evolutionists, on the other hand, like to wrap up their ‘tautological’ truisms ‘in clouds of mythology’, with their talk of nature, ‘a mythical being’, selecting certain individuals for survival, when all they mean is that ‘some individuals do emerge when other individuals are extinguished’, or in other words that ‘the successful succeed’. Preachers are only ‘tolerable’ insofar as they expound ‘creed and dogma’, a ‘system of thought’ that ‘can be explained by any reasonably thinking man’: ‘To tell the priest to throw away theology and impress us with his personality, is exactly like telling the doctor to throw away physiology and merely hypnotize us with his glittering eye.’ Heretics like to ‘introduce their… heresies under new and carefully complimentary names’, ‘these respectable disguises’ being ‘adopted by those who are always railing against respectability’. For example, in looking round one’s ‘social circle’ one can easily spy ‘some chatty person or energetic social character whose disappearance, without undue fuss or farewell, would be a bright event for us all’, a disappearance that might be justified by calling it ‘Social Subtraction’ or ‘Life-Control’ or ‘Free Death’. For ‘the very first thing’ to do is to ‘find some artificial term that shall sound relatively decent’ when one ‘wishes to wage a social war against what all normal people have regarded as a social decency’. The later employment of the euphemisms euthanasia and gay for suicide and homosexual would not have surprised Chesterton in the least. Finally, no book of Chesterton would really be complete without the gospel of wonder and thanksgiving: ‘men need thrills to produce thanks, and have to be surprised into surprise. It is the whole aim of religion, of imagination, of poetry and the arts, to awaken that sense of something saved from nothing.’157
5
The American lecture tour for a man of Chesterton’s age and health had been gruelling enough without the weekly chore of his articles for the London Illustrated News and G.K.’s Weekly. Not surprisingly, no books appeared in 1931, apart from another collection of his Illustrated London News columns, entitled All is Grist: A Book of Essays. On returning home, the exhausted Chesterton was forced to curtail his lecturing—or at least Dorothy Collins forced him to. Even a request from Father Ronald Knox to speak to the Newman Society at Oxford, where Knox was now Catholic chaplain, was refused. On 1 July Knox wrote: ‘Now it seems your secretary refuses to let you lecture for the next few months, because you’ve got so bored with it in America.’ It was ‘maddening’, Knox complained, that ‘after five years of being told you wouldn’t come because you were lecturing so much, to be told now that you won’t come because you’re lecturing so little. I shall begin to believe you have a down on me, or Newman, or something.’158 Later, Knox admitted that by now Chesterton’s health was beginning to decline, ‘and he was overworked, partly through our fault’—that is, because of the constant requests from Catholics for articles and talks.159
Chesterton was also involved in the local life of Beaconsfield. In July he was asked by the honorary secretary of the local branch of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England to attend a meeting to oppose the proposed widening of the road in the neighbouring village of Jordans, which in the seventeenth century had become a Quaker centre, with one of the oldest Quaker meeting houses in the country, in the cemetery of which William Penn is buried. What should ‘remain sacred in such a place’, Chesterton replied, ‘that has contrived to remain a place’, and has not been turned into a totally different sort of place’ but remained ‘a shrine of pilgrimage which does still to some extent exist for pilgrims, and not only for touts and trippers’, was ‘the place; the approach, the surroundings, the background; not detached and dead objects that might be put in a museum’. ‘The effect of Stonehenge is the effect of Salisbury Plain. If you wire in Sto
nehenge like a beast at the Zoo, you are really making it into a fetish, and idolatrously worshipping the mere stones; instead of seeing the large vision of the beginnings of Britain.’ But, whereas Stonehenge represented ‘a dead religion’, ‘the other is historic in the living sense that its history is not ended, for no one knows what may come at last of that revival of a purer mysticism in spite of the storms of Puritanism; of the beginnings of a Reformation of the Reformation, and of the greatness of William Penn.’160