by Ian Ker
It was a dogmatic religion of ‘solid fact’ that had turned all this crowd of incongruous people into one company’: ‘A religion of moods would never have brought them together at the tavern, far less sent them trotting laboriously to the tomb.’ It was ‘an objective religion, worshipped as an object by the whole people’. But when religion becomes a wholly subjective thing, then the Miller, ‘with his appetite for more vulgar noises’, would refuse to go to Canterbury and insist on Ramsgate as his destination, while the Merchant would absolutely refuse ‘to ride beyond Chatham, because all his interests are limited to the progressive industry of that wealthy and dirty town’. But that is not the worst.
Darker days will come, when the Prioress, not content with pitying mice, will withdraw to a Vegetarian Hostel… while the now aged Knight, swearing that the Service is going to the dogs, and that these damned pacifists haven’t a damned patriotic instinct left, shall devote himself furiously to the fortifications of Dover. As their counterparts stand to-day, it is easier to imagine the Wife of Bath wanting to go sunbathing at Margate, or the Clerk instantly returning, with refined disgust, to Oxford, than to imagine either of them wanting to toil on together to a particular tomb in Canterbury.171
A month after the publication of Chaucer another collection of Chesterton’s articles appeared, collected from a number of papers and periodicals. Sidelights on New London and Newer York and Other Essays is chiefly of interest for what it has to say about America and Americans. Chesterton begins the part of the book entitled ‘Newer York’ with a paradox: ‘There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong…. They have been deliberately and dogmatically taught to be conceited. They have been systematically educated in a theory of enthusiasm, which degrades it into mere egotism.’ For he did not think they were ‘naturally boomsters or business bullies’, but that they were the victims of an ‘egotistic heresy’ that had taught them against all their Christian instincts that boasting is better than courtesy and pride better than humility’. In Chesterton’s view: What has happened to America is that a number of people who were meant to be heroic and fighting farmers, at once peasants and pioneers, have been swept by the pestilence of a particular fad or false doctrine; the ideal which has and deserves the detestable title of Making Good.’ By ‘one mean twist of words’ they had contrived to combine the notion of making money with the entirely opposite notion of being good’. They had indeed ‘made good’, as could be seen in the bumptious and purse-proud swagger of some Yankee globe-trotters in Europe’—not that they were any different from their English Victorian predecessors when England had the same mercantile supremacy and the same materialistic mood’. Americans not only had to be boasters but also optimists,—because they live in a world that can easily go wrong’: ‘Hence we find that in America, the home of… colossal commerce and combination, practically all their strange sects agree about this strange philosophy of Optimism. Everybody is educated in a sort of permanent ethic of unmeaning hopefulness … ‘. Indeed, Chesterton thought that, likeable as Americans were, their cheerfulness’ was the most dismal thing about them’, enslaved as they were by the horrible slavery of smiling’. But ultimately England was to blame, having exported both industrialism and Puritanism to America. In fact, ‘pure Puritanism’ had long expired in America, but there remained ‘the only practical product of Puritanism’, which might be called, in the more general sense, Prohibitionism’. This Puritan mood’ was essentially the misdirection of moral anger’ into righteous indignation about the wrong thing’, such as the vice of beer drinking’. However, since most Americans’ were born drunk’, they required
a little wine or beer to sober them. They have a sort of permanent intoxication from within; a sort of invisible champagne which needs to be weighted and soothed and supplemented by something corresponding to the glass of port with which the English were accustomed to conclude and settle their dinner. Americans do not need drink to inspire them to do anything; though they do sometimes … need a little for the deeper and more delicate purpose of teaching them how to do nothing.
Still, Chesterton did find in these American Puritans an ‘unconscious Christianity’ in their ‘curious careering energy’, which contained a sort of simplicity’, a touch of innocence; the absence of the paralysis of pride’. Any Englishman arriving in America felt ‘a certain kind of fresh air, from which a certain kind of smell has departed, and the thing that has vanished is snobbishness’. Instead, he now instantly’ felt ‘equality and fraternity’. Americans were democrats’ and felt equal’, having that sort of self-respect which is no respecter of persons’. Unfortunately, although America had a great political idea … it had a small religious idea’. This ‘individualism in religion’ explained why Americans were not proper republicans in the sense of every man having ‘a direct relation to the realm or commonweal, more direct than he has to any masters or patrons in private life’: in America the individual made good in trade, because it was originally the individual making good in goodness; that is, in salvation of the soul’.172
15
The Last Years
1
IN June 1932 the Chestertons went to Dublin for the 31st International Eucharistic Congress, where they stayed at the Viceroy’s Lodge. Maisie Ward and her husband Frank Sheed were also in Dublin for the Congress, which lasted from 21 to 26 June. Maisie Ward remembered Chesterton being regaled with praise of his writings by an Eastern-rite Catholic priest, who asked to be photographed with him. Shocked by what seemed to him the immense smallness of himself compared with the events he was witnessing, Chesterton consoled himself by reflecting that he had heard in the East that an idiot was supposed to bring luck. Maisie Ward recalled that his favourite story was of the old woman who said on the last day when rain threatened: ‘Well, if it rains now He will have brought it on Himself.’1
Chesterton wrote some articles for the English Catholic weekly newspaper the Universe and one for the Jesuit periodical Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, which were subsequently published in book form in November as Christendom in Dublin, giving his impressions of the Congress. What most impressed him was the faith of the people, especially the poor. The festivities of this celebration of the Eucharist were not more or less confined to ‘festive highways’ as one would expect: ‘Instead of the main stream of colour flowing down the main streets of commerce, and overflowing into the crooked and neglected slums, it was exactly the other way; it was the slums that were the springs. There were the furnaces of colour; there were the fountains of light …’. Then, too, in the countryside one could find ‘a last lonely homestead, seemingly a hundred miles from anywhere; and flying the papal Flag’. To this ‘wayside home’ the flag was ‘so homely … that they hung it out like so much washing’. It seemed almost like an ‘enchanted castle’: ‘There was something unearthly, as of a place on which the ends of the earth were come, about that low neglected roof and that remote blazonry of Rome.’ And as the ‘great flag began to flap and crackle in the freshening evening wind … those who had been toiling on the little farm, those whose fathers had been hunted like vermin, those whose religion should have been burnt out like witchcraft, came back slowly through the twilight; walking like lords on their own land …’. It gave an Englishman ‘a glimpse of another history and a new slant or angle upon Europe’.2
As he gazed at the faith of the Irish, Chesterton reflected that Lenin had said that religion was the opium of the people; but he had got it the wrong way round. Irreligion was the opium of the people: ‘Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world. But, above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world.’ Opium could make people ‘contented’: ‘But if you are to have anything like divine discontent, then it really must be divine.’ For the abolition of God meant that ‘the Government becomes the God’. The truth was that ‘all those whose theories are merely human soon
forget their humanity’.3
In the copy of Christendom in Dublin that he gave Dorothy Collins, Chesterton wrote an inscription that celebrated the fact that she had recently become a Catholic: now they were united not only by ‘friendship’ but by the ‘Truth’ which ‘has made us free’.4 Dorothy had been received into the Church and conditionally baptized (with the Chestertons as her godparents) on 8 October 1932 by Monsignor Charles Smith, who had become the first parish priest of Beaconsfield, which was no longer part of the parish of High Wycombe, the previous year. She was 38 years old.5 Fortunately, the Chestertons had only had to endure the impossible Father Fitzgerald for a few more months on their return from America. A relieved Frances wrote to Father O’Connor on 21 August 1931: ‘You will rejoice to hear that our Parish Priest M. [Monsignor] Smith has taken up residence and seems delightful.’6
In August Chesterton received a letter from the BBC inviting him to contribute to ‘our commentaries upon current literature’. He would, he was told, ‘be a tremendous success at the microphone’. The idea was that he would broadcast fortnightly beginning in October ‘for a trial period of six months’.7 Chesterton accepted the invitation but asked for a three-month trial period, and stipulated that the talks would be of a general nature rather than detailed reviews of the books he was sent. It was agreed that the talks would start in the second half of October. The BBC was sorry but it could not offer a fee comparable to ‘journalistic rates’, but suggested that their fees were ‘not unreasonable’ when compared with those paid by weekly and monthly periodicals.8 The talks eventually began on 31 October.9 Chesterton was told he did not have to stick rigidly to the text he was asked to submit beforehand, as he was encouraged to be spontaneous. Each talk reviewed anything from four to ten books. The BBC was delighted by the talks: Chesterton had brought ‘something very rare to the microphone’, and he would have ‘a vast public by Christmas’.10 He agreed to give ‘another series of book talks’ the following autumn.11
But in spite of his success as a practitioner of the new medium, ‘he was always very nervous beforehand’, Dorothy Collins remembered, ‘and he would not undertake the series without a promise that his wife or I or both of us should sit in the studio with him’. However, ‘after an agonised glance at us he would begin, and immediately be oblivious to all his surroundings as he read, and improvised his text as he went along’. The advantage of having his wife and secretary sitting there in the studio with him—‘a privilege which was quite out of order’—was that he was able to talk ‘direct to us, which gave his talks the intimate character which the public so much enjoyed’. Even the most diehard opponents of the new medium began to acquire wireless sets in order just to listen to Chesterton.12 In January 1934 it was arranged that he would contribute to a new series of talks, ‘personal, informal, and, as far as possible, humorous commentaries on the events of the past week’.13 Dorothy Collins years later thought his last broadcast was in March 1936, when he gave a talk entitled ‘We will End with a Bang’ in a series called ‘The Spice of Life’14 on the theme ‘what you really like doing in life’;15 but in fact there was one more talk broadcast at the end of the month, ‘What the Middle Ages Meant to Europe’.16
The year 1933 saw the deaths of Chesterton’s mother in February and Frances’s mother in August.17 Marie Chesterton was still living in Warwick Gardens, but Mrs Blogg was now in a nursing home in Beaconsfield. Maisie Ward remembered driving Frances to visit the two old ladies and her saying how difficult she found it helping two agnostics facing death. During the drive Frances confided in her that she knew her mother-in-law had not liked her, but that lately she had made her very happy by telling her that she realized now that she had been the right wife for her son. A cousin of Marie Chesterton told Maisie Ward that Frances had also told her that mother-in-law and daughter-in-law had come closer together at the end and that Frances was not unaware that no mother ever thought any woman was good enough for her son. However, the older Mrs Chesterton had always acknowledged to the cousin that she respected Frances for keeping her son out of debt. The house in Warwick Gardens contained the nearest thing to a family archive; but, taking one look at the mass of papers, Chesterton consigned them to the dustbin.18 Dorothy Collins managed to save the last of four loads that had not already gone to the rubbish dump,19 and brought it in her car to Beaconsfield, while Chesterton grumbled about ‘the hoarding habits of women’.20 However, when they arrived back at Top Meadow, Frances was ‘no more pleased’ at the sight of the rescued papers, the house being already overcrowded with books and papers.21 The money that Chesterton inherited on the death of his mother enabled him and Frances to plan legacies not only for relatives but also for friends and the church in Beaconsfield. Top Meadow itself was to be left to the diocese of Northampton in the hope that it might become a convent school.22
In March 1933 Chesterton published another collection of his columns from the Illustrated London News, called All I Survey: A Book of Essays. A sense of history is a prominent feature of the articles. There is the usual complaint that the contemporary age was ‘the only period in all history when people were proud of being modern’: ‘We are the only men in all history who fell back upon bragging about the mere fact that to-day is not yesterday.’ In the Middle Ages people were not conscious of ‘being medieval’; whereas Chesterton’s contemporaries automatically assumed that to call something ‘a relic of medievalism’ was to throw ‘mud’ at it—although people might hesitate to blow up Westminster Abbey or to burn ‘all existing copies of Dante’s Divine Comedy and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’ as ‘relics of medievalism’. Why, the very journalists, for whom ‘medieval only means old, and old only means bad’, themselves worked for ‘a relic of medievalism’—namely, the printing press. The slightest knowledge of history showed the ignorance of assuming that war is always bad when wars were essential to ‘preserve civilization’—at that very time Hitler seemed intent upon ‘setting all Christendom aflame by a raid on Poland’. As for rebellions, they were usually rebellions ‘against rebels’ rather than ‘reactionaries’: ‘Those who were, in fact, doomed to dethronement in the future were generally the futurists of the past.’ Historical theories, like the ‘Teutonic Theory’, under whose ‘gigantic shadow’ Chesterton himself had grown up, affected ‘the truthfulness of historians, and more often in the direction of falsehood than of truth’. And he had noticed with amusement how these theories ‘pursue each other, and how the last almost always devours and destroys the last but one’. The inevitability of history was one of the ‘Victorian conventions’, that ‘all was for the best, or at any rate that all was as it had to be’; but for Chesterton ‘all the past’ was ‘alive with alternatives, and nobody can show, nobody has really attempted to show, that they were not real alternatives’. Ignorance of the past meant ignorance of the present: ‘History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.’ The mind of the so-called progressive thinker ‘remains fixed, in a posture that is called progressive. It never looks back, even for remembrance; it never looks the other way, even for experiment; it never looks at the other side, even for a paradox; it never winks the other eye. It simply knows all there is; and there does not seem much to know.’23
The usual social questions concern Chesterton. He saw most modern ‘educational and philanthropic reform’ as simply ‘kidnapping on a large scale’: ‘That is, it has shown an increasing disregard for the privacy of the private citizen, considered as a parent. I have called it a revolution; and at bottom it is really a Bolshevist revolution. For what could be more purely and perfectly Communist than to say that you regard other people’s children as if they were your own?’ In this ‘supremely … educational age’, in which ‘earnest philosophers are really doubting whether it is right to teach anybody anything’, this meant that ‘the government’s right to teach everybody’s children is for the first time established’, while ‘the father’s right to
teach his own children is for the first time denied’. Indeed, in ‘respectable circles’, the family was now ‘never mentioned’. On the other hand, the modern woman had ceased to be ‘a Communist in the home’, which was ‘the only truly and legitimately Communist institution’—‘“With all my worldly goods I thee endow” is the only satisfactory Bolshevist proclamation that has ever been made about property’—and had become ‘a proletarian in the shop’. Because ‘the sanctity and pride of private property’ had been ‘enormously exaggerated’ in the early nineteenth century, there had been ‘a race for wealth’ that had paradoxically resulted in property becoming ‘much less private’, as the modern capitalist had become ‘more of a communist’ in no longer having ‘a horror of centralization’. When Belloc and Chesterton had said that they ‘really did believe that private property should be private’, they were ‘mildly chaffed’, as though they were ‘seeking solitude like hermits, or hoarding halfpence like misers’. Politically, Chesterton had considered himself a Liberal—only to discover that ‘Liberals never did really believe in popular government, any more than in anything else that was popular, such as public-houses or the Dublin sweepstake’.24