by Ian Ker
On 18 August 1931 Chesterton returned to the subject of George Bernard Shaw, recalling in G.K.’s Weekly: ‘Wherever I wandered in the United States people leapt out upon me from holes and hedges with the question pointed like a gun: “How is Bernard Shaw?”’ Unlike Chesterton, Shaw refused to go to America, and Chesterton thought that was ‘rather a good thing’ for Shaw, if not America. After all, ‘the awful truth’ was ‘how large a part’ of America shared his ideas, which, ‘when seen on so large a scale’, seemed ‘very common, not to say vulgar’. What in aristocratic England seemed ‘like the rather distinguished oddities of a sage’ seemed in democratic America to be nothing but ‘the dull prejudices of a society’: ‘Total abstinence in a man like Shaw is an almost elegant eccentricity; but there is nothing elegant about Prohibition, and it is not an eccentricity but a convention. Shaw would find thousands of Americans to take quite seriously his prejudice against tea or tobacco; but their seriousness would only serve to make him absurd.’ Shaw would be ‘horrified if he knew how much of America follows his fads; for these things when they really begin to exist, are not fads but fanaticism’.161
In 1934 Chesterton would give the readers of the New York Herald Tribune the benefit of his ‘Second Thoughts on Shaw’; the article was added as a final chapter called ‘The Later Phases’ to the 1935 and subsequent editions of his book on Shaw. The trouble with Shaw, he explained, was that ‘the first things that counted with [him] were negative and anarchic things; where for most men the first things at least are positive’. Shaw lacked ‘piety’—that is, not religion but ‘the cult of the land, the cult of the dead, the cult of that most living memory by which the dead are alive, the permanence of all that has made us …’. Shaw had ‘started with the Prejudices of Progress’ that were ‘so much more cramping than the prejudices of memory, because memory is mixed of a thousand things’: ‘The past is infinitely varied; and if we would not draw from one old inspiration, we can draw from another. But the future is always atrociously simple. We can only predict along lines of mathematical fate …’. One form of piety, patriotism, simply bewildered Shaw, who had assumed it was outmoded, having ‘a less direct vision of the Future for having no direct tradition of the Past’. As for Shaw’s evolutionism, it was ‘rooted in a despair about Man. That is what is picturesquely symbolised by a rather vague and evasive enthusiasm about the Superman.’ The Shavian evolutionist really did ‘want to cast the whole body of man into Chaos… into the melting-pot, and boil it to nothing, that a new and superior something may at last emerge’. Christianity, on the other hand, ‘was ‘the one and only philosophy that has refused to despair of Man’.162
All is Grist was published in October 1931. Travelling in America had led Chesterton to reflect on the nature of travel. The trouble with travel books, he thought, was that their authors had travelled too much in the country they were describing, as a result of which they tended ‘to forget its strangeness’, so that ‘the real monument of landscape … was something stranger and more striking’ than the travel book suggested. Mere sightseeing was certainly not the way to see a country: ‘No man will ever forget the sights he really saw when he was not a sightseer.’ The pilgrim, for instance, ‘does not feel, as the tourist does often quite naturally feel, that he has had his tour interrupted by something that does not happen to interest him.’ Unfortunately, the traveller to the monument had been replaced by the sightseer in the museum:
When the traveller saw the statue of the hero, he did not see written on the pedestal: ‘This way to the Collection of Tropical Fungi’, in which he possibly felt no interest at all. When the pilgrim found his way to the shrine, he did not find that the priest was eagerly waving him on to a glass case filled with the specimens of the local earthworms.
But the museum was not ‘meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe’: ‘It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self-education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal. It is meant for the mere Sightseer, the man who must see all the sights’. However, Chesterton was sure that this kind of ‘cold and compulsory culture’ would never be ‘popular’: ‘It is not a product of popular imagination, but of what is called popular education …’163
Other familiar Chestertonian themes are touched on in these essays. Ritual, far from being something artificial, was perfectly natural and normal:
The old ceremonial gestures of the human body are necessary to the health of the human soul … a man actually can think with his muscles; he can pray with his muscles; he can love with his muscles and lament with his muscles. All religion that is without that gesture, all Puritan or purely Intellectualist religion that rages at ritual, is raging at human nature.
In ‘On the Thrills of Boredom’, Chesterton recalled from his childhood ‘the continuous excitement of long days in which nothing happened; and an indescribable sense of fullness in large and empty rooms’. He still felt
a very strong and positive pleasure in being stranded in queer quiet places, in neglected corners where nothing happens and anything may happen; in unfashionable hotels, in empty waiting rooms, or in watering-places out of the season. It seems as if we needed such places, and sufficient solitude in them, to let certain nameless suggestions soak into us and make a richer soil of the subconsciousness.
But in order ‘to get the fun out of’ solitude and stagnation’ it was necessary ‘to be rather young and strong’—just as the monastic ‘career’ required ‘very great vigour and vivacity’. As for childhood itself, Chesterton insists, first, that far from the child’s imagination being ‘a sort of dream’, he remembers it ‘rather as a man dreaming might remember the world where he was awake’. Secondly, he denies that children ‘have suffered under a tyranny of moral tales’. And, thirdly, he claims that, far from ‘the first dreams of life’ being a ‘mere longing for larger and larger horizons’, the child is ‘positively in love with limits’, enjoying the ‘game of self-limitation … one of the secret pleasures of life’, using ‘his imagination to invent imaginary limits’ like the ‘moral duty to step on alternate paving-stones’. For the ‘charm’ of a story like that of Robinson Crusoe lay ‘not in the fact that he could find his way to a remote island, but in the fact that he could not find any way of getting away from it’. The faults of historians are another favourite subject: ‘historians seldom see the simple things, or even the obvious things, because they are too simple and obvious’, while they are ‘paid to tell lies’, being ‘academic officials of a certain academic system’ and lacking the ‘disinterestedness or detachment’ of popular traditions which are much more reliable.164
On Christmas Day 1931 Chesterton made his first radio broadcast on the BBC. It was to listeners in the United States and lasted a quarter of an hour. Chesterton explained that he had been asked to speak about Dickens and Christmas—or, as he would prefer to say, on Christmas and Dickens. He wondered why he had been asked. Perhaps the BBC did not know him very well, perhaps they had ‘a grudge’ against him. Why should he work on Christmas Day, and why should his listeners be made to suffer? ‘Like everything connected with the mystery of suffering, it is profoundly mysterious.’ Maybe as he spoke ‘the mystery will grow darker and deeper’. But the question as to why the BBC wanted a talk on this subject was much easier to answer. The answer was that no other day had ‘been able to do what Christmas does; and there is no writer… who has been able to do what Dickens did’. The old pagans ‘could make things … could make festivals and festive days’, whereas the modern pagans who ‘are merely atheists … worship nothing, and therefore create nothing’. Dickens was the only writer who ‘exaggerates happiness’, who ‘talked about Christmas as if it was Christmas; as if it was even more Christmas than it is’. Even the most ‘horrible’ villains in Dickens ‘make you happy’. No other writer had ‘discovered Dickens’s secret of getting joy out of these things’. Dickens ‘exaggerated, in the sense of making thin
gs more laughable than they were; more enjoyable than they were’. Just as there was ‘nothing in history so living as that little life that began in the cave at Bethlehem and now visibly lives for ever’, so there was ‘nothing in all literature so utterly alive’ as Dickens.165
Frances Chesterton had sent a Christmas letter and a ‘little carol’ to Father O’Donnell at Notre Dame. They had ‘felt quite sad’, she said, on reading about the defeat of the University football team in the New York Times, but they did not imagine that he was ‘unduly depressed’. Her husband had been very busy working on a book on Chaucer, which he had just completed and she hoped it would meet with his approval. She hoped that he would be coming to the Eucharistic Congress in Ireland, as it would be ‘very delightful to meet’. On 22 January 1932 O’Donnell wrote to thank her for her Christmas letter and ‘lovely poem’. He, too, hoped they could meet if by any chance he went to the Eucharistic Congress or came to England that year. Nothing in her letter, he said, had pleased him more than her ‘remark about the football season’:
It shows how truly you became one of us, really understanding how that sport fits into the academic and spiritual life of Notre Dame. I often recall with amused satisfaction the inquiry which you made upon your arrival in South Bend. It was the day of our encounter with Southern Methodist University. All three of you seemed to feel that somehow the honor of the Church was at stake, and almost the first question you asked was how the match came out.
He was very interested by her reference to her husband’s forthcoming book on the Catholic Chaucer—‘He belongs to us and we should be proud of him.’166
Chesterton’s Chaucer appeared in April, the last of his critical studies. The book was not his idea but that of the son of Walter de la Mare, Richard, who originally wanted Chesterton to contribute to a collection of essays to be called ‘Poets on Poets’, but who subsequently encouraged him to write a full-length literary biography.167 The best pages in the book are on the humour of Chaucer and his affinity to Dickens. Matthew Arnold had famously accused Chaucer of lacking ‘high seriousness’; but not only did Chaucer in Chesterton’s view display high seriousness in Arnold’s sense, but also in another sense altogether, because ‘there are other things that can be high as well as high seriousness’. For example, he teases Arnold, ‘there can be such things as high spirits’—and ‘these also can be spiritual’. For, even if one only thinks of Chaucer as a comic poet, nevertheless there can be ‘grandeur in a joke’. And Chesterton claims that Chaucer displays ‘laughter in the grand style’—unlike Arnold, who, ‘for all his merits, did not laugh but only smiled—not to say smirked’—and that he is a ‘great’ poet not least because he was ‘a great … humorist’. Around everything Chaucer wrote there was ‘a sort of penumbra of playfulness … a halo of humour’. For humour, being ‘a very Christian thing’, is a very sacred thing. It is also a characteristic of Catholics (‘A frivolous Puritan was not a Puritan at all’), whose external ‘frivolity’ is completely compatible with an internal faith, ‘puzzling’ as this is to those who do not realize that it is ‘the Catholic philosophy’ that satisfies the true philosopher who in Chesterton’s philosophy must be ‘a laughing philosopher’. Pace Arnold, Chesterton insists that ‘the comic’ can sometimes seem ‘almost more tremendous than the tragic’. He admits that, compared with ‘the fun of Dickens’, there was ‘certainly something shrewd, sensible and solid about the humour of Chaucer’—nevertheless ‘a frontier’ had been ‘crossed, and there is already in Chaucer an element of irrational humour, which is not the same as the old rational humour’ that had been a form of satire’. For, while Chaucer can sound satirical in the old sense, ‘he already inhabits a world of comicality that is not a world of controversy’: ‘He makes fun of people, in the exact sense of getting fun out of them for himself… he is already on the road to the Dickensian lunatic-asylum of laughter; because he is valuing his fools and knaves and almost wishing (as it were) to preserve them in spirits—in high spirits.’ Like Dickens, no one has suffered fools more gladly; getting any amount of gladness or gaiety out of his private observations of their folly’. So for Chesterton Chaucer was a true trustee’ of the great national heritage of humour’, that great national contribution to the culture of Christendom’, comparable to the Spanish sense of honour or the French sense of right reason’. It was more than ‘wit’, ‘more even than humour’: ‘It is not merely a critical quality; in a sense it is even a creative quality; a sort of crooked creation that is called the fantastic or the topsy-turvy’, ‘full of wild images … upheld by an invisible power and lifted without support upon the wings of laughter; by a power more unanswerable and more irresponsible than pure beauty’. And it is this ‘cry of pure folly’ that ‘can be heard, perhaps for the first time in human history’, in the ‘Father of English Poetry’: ‘He had somehow got into his head and into his note-book a certain national quality, centuries before the nation attempted to understand or describe its own quality.’ The English humour first found in Chaucer can be ‘compared to art for art’s sake’ but is more accurately described as adventure for adventure’s sake’.168
If, as in Dickens, the comical in Chaucer, far from lacking in high seriousness, is felt to be as serious as the tragic—so too he shares in Dickens’s (and Chesterton’s) relish for the ordinary. Like the greatest poets, he had not ‘bothered to invent a small philosophy’, having inherited a large philosophy’, which invariably is shared by very great men … with very ordinary men’. The great poet ‘only professes to express the thought that everybody has always had’, simply helping ordinary men to realize how great are the emotions which they, in a smaller way, have already experienced’, showing the small man how great he is’. Like any great poet, Chaucer breathes … gratitude, or the theory of thanks’, grateful for ‘actuality… existence … the fact that things truly are’, for the fundamental fact of being, as against not being’. Although Chesterton sees this primary wonder at the very existence of the world’ as belonging to all great writers, he claims that Chaucer possessed a certain appetite for things as they actually are, and because they actually are’, ‘a gusto’ or zest’ that a modern and rather wearier’ culture associates with childhood. It included an impulsive movement to applaud what he does not approve. It is as if their impudence gave him so much pleasure, that he could not withhold a sort of affection based on gratitude.’169
Chaucer’s love of the ordinary is a part of what Chesterton calls his spiritual sanity’, his balanced … habit of mind’, a ‘cheerfulness or sanity’ that came from his Catholic theology, which aimed at a certain equilibrium, achieved by giving so much weight to one thing and so much less or more to another’, which did not narrow but ‘broadened his mind’. For Catholicism was not ‘a single idea’, ‘a simple creed’ like Calvinism—‘Nothing could be simpler than saying that men go to Hell because God made them on purpose to send them to Hell’—but a complicated creed’. It was not a ‘theology shrivelled to a single thought; its very thunders of indignation all on one note; or the whole great Christian philosophy hardened into one harsh doctrine’. Because Chesterton saw Catholicism as the key that unlocked the meaning of this world, it had to be complex and complicated, which is why here as elsewhere he vigorously condemns the speciously attractive demand ‘to simplify Catholicism’:
That notion, in its essence a very negative notion, has never wrought anything but ill to Christendom; and is always returning with a plausibility and a false simplicity to tempt and to betray Christians. Mahomet, centuries before, had tried to create a simplified Christianity, and had created a world of fatalism and stagnation. Calvin, centuries afterwards, tried to create a simplified Christianity, and created a world of pessimism and devil-worship.
By contrast, in Catholicism there was a perpetual and centripetal tendency towards the discovery of a just balance of all these ideas. All those who broke away were centrifugal and not centripetal; they went away into deserts to develop a solitary doctrine.
But medieval philosophy and culture … was always seeking equilibrium,’ the Church being ‘the balance of many movements and moods’. It was this ‘tradition of a Church which had condemned heresies on the right hand and the left; and always claimed to stand for the truth as a whole and not for concentration on a part’ that Chaucer inherited. Indeed, he was the living embodiment’ of that tradition: for he was full of ‘common sense’ in the literal sense of the original Latin phrase communis sentential, which meant the opposite of common sense in the modern sense of an individual’s private judgment’. And this communal sense did not ‘believe that the truth was to be found by going to extremes’.170
It was this communis sententia that made possible Chaucer’s greatest work, The Canterbury Tales. For without it there could have been no pilgrimage to Canterbury in the first place, or at least no pilgrimage that cut across social barriers and was not that of a ‘narrow clique’. For it is not a broad religion’ but a religion of dogmas … that creates a broader brotherhood and brings men of all kinds together’. It is a religion that embraces both the masses and the intellectuals, as Chesterton explains in a wryly ironic passage:
All men share in a fact, if they believe it to be a fact. Only a few men commonly share a feeling, when it is only a feeling. If there is a deep and delicate and intangible feeling, detached from all statements, but reaching to a wordless worship of beauty, wafted in a sweet savour from the woods of Kent or the spires of Canterbury, then we may be tolerably certain that the Miller will not have it. The Miller can only become the Pilgrim, if he recognizes that God is in the heavens as he recognizes that the sun is in the sky. If he does recognize it, he can share the dogma just as he can share the day-light. But he cannot be expected to share all the shades of fine intellectual mysticism that might exist in the mind of the Prioress or the Parson. I can understand that argument being turned in an anti-democratic as well as an anti-dogmatic direction; but anyhow the individualistic mystics must either do without the mysticism or without the Miller. To some refined persons the loss of the latter would be no very insupportable laceration of the feelings. But I am not a refined person and I am not merely thinking about feelings. I am even so antiquated as to be thinking about rights; about the rights of men, which are extended even to millers. Among those rights is a certain rough working respect and consideration, which is at the basis of comradeship. And I say that if the comradeship is to include the Miller at all, it must be based on the recognition of something as really true, and not merely as ideally beautiful.