by Ian Ker
The first thing that needed to be said, in Chesterton’s view, was that there was an armistice and not peace between Germany and the allies. He himself had favoured fighting in the First World War because of ‘a fountain of poison’ in northern Europe, the Prussian ‘heresy’ of ‘Pride’, ‘something alien to Europe, which Europe cannot digest and did not destroy’. This ‘unnatural thing’ had been allowed to ‘grow stronger and stronger in Europe throughout the nineteenth century’, in fact, ‘to grow so enormously strong that it took the strength of four nations to inflict on it a belated and badly-managed defeat’. Unfortunately, however, the victors did not realize that they had been fighting not against a ‘nation’ but against ‘a notion that was a nightmare’. Perhaps the pacifists were right: these ‘perverted Pagans’ could only be converted not conquered—like ‘the barbarian chiefs of the Dark Ages’. It was this ‘unconverted and unconquered … force’ that was alien to Christendom that now was again threatening war.47
The present so-called peace reminded Chesterton of ‘that great social occasion when Pilate and Herod shook hands’, having previously ‘hardly been on speaking terms’. Just as Christian history began with ‘this happy reconciliation’, so modern history began with ‘that strange friendship which ended in a quarrel’ between Frederick the Great of Prussia and the French Voltaire, that ‘spiritual marriage’ in the ‘mid-winter of eighteenth-century scepticism’ that had ‘brought forth the modern world’. It was a ‘monstrous and evil’ birth since ‘true friendship and love are not evil’. And it had created not ‘one united thing, but two conflicting things, which between them were to shake the world to pieces’: ‘From Voltaire the Latins were to learn a raging scepticism. From Frederick the Teutons were to learn a raging pride.’ Both Frederick and Voltaire were ‘cosmopolitans’ who were ‘not in any sense patriots’, and as cosmopolitans they did not care for the cosmos as patriots care for their country. Both men embraced ‘the cold humanitarianism’ of the age, although Voltaire was ‘the more really humane’. But ‘even at his best’, he ‘really began that modern mood that has blighted all the humanitarianism he honestly supported’: ‘He started the horrible habit of helping human beings only through pitying them and never through respecting them. Through him the oppression of the poor became a sort of cruelty to animals; and the loss of all that mystical sense that to wrong the image of God is to insult the ambassador of a King.’ Still, Voltaire ‘had a heart’, whereas Frederick was ‘most heartless when he was most humane’. At any rate, ‘these two great sceptics’ were agreed that ‘there is no God, or no God who is concerned with men any more than with mites in cheese’. It was on this common basis that they agreed but also that they disagreed: Voltaire argued that ‘the sneers of a sceptic’ could produce revolution, whereas Frederick held that ‘this same sneering scepticism can be used as easily to resist reform, let alone Revolution; that scepticism can be the basis of support for the most tyrannical of thrones, for the bare brute domination of a master over his slaves’. It was this ‘cold cosmopolitan’, with his ‘atheist irresponsibility’, who had ‘heated seven times a hell of narrow national and tribal fury, which at this moment menaces mankind with a war that may be the end of the world’. But the Voltairean ‘intellectual unrest of the Latins’, as well as ‘the very unintellectual unrest of the Teutons’, was also contributing to ‘the instability of international relations’: ‘The spiritual zero of Christendom was at that freezing instant when those two dry thin hatchet-faced men looked in each other’s hollow eyes, and saw the sneer that was as eternal as the smile of a skull.’48
In Chesterton’s view, ‘the stupidest thing done’ not simply in 1933 but ‘in the last two or three centuries, was the acceptance by the Germans of the Dictatorship of Hitler—to say nothing of Goering’. Unlike Mussolini, Hitler had not risen to power ‘by enunciating a certain theory of the State’ but by ‘appealing to racial pride’. It was indeed ‘staggering’ that ‘a whole huge people should base its whole historical tradition on something that is not so much a legend as a lie’. The ‘Teutonic Theory’ was the invention of ‘professors and imposed by schoolmasters’. The ‘strange staleness’ of this ‘racial religion’ stank with ‘the odours of decay, and of something dug up when it was dead and buried’. It was the ‘sudden reappearance of all that was bad and barbarous and stupid and ignorant in Carlyle, without a touch of what was really quaint and humorous in him. The real Carlyle, who was a Scotchman and therefore understood a joke, has been entirely replaced by the theoretical Carlyle, who was a Prussian and not allowed to see a joke.’ This ‘theory of a Teutonic root of all the real greatness of Europe’ ignored ‘the part really played, not by the Germanic chaos, but by the Roman order and the Catholic faith, in the making of anything civilised or half-civilised, including Germany’. Chesterton had no love for British imperialism, but he had even less for Prussian imperialism: ‘I entirely agree that an English officer may be an insolent noodle, with a narrow contempt for everybody else and a class-arrogance that cries to God for vengeance. But he does not elbow ladies into the gutter.’ The Nazi murder of Dolfuss was ‘quite simply a movement to barbarise Austria; to unbaptise Austria’. For Vienna was ‘a place of culture and tradition, like Paris and like Rome’: ‘The thought that any Germans anywhere could have condescended to common courtesy, to humanity, nay (more horrible still) to humility, filled the half-heathen Teutons of the north with that sort of furious and hungry hatred, with which the inferior always regards the superior.’49
Chesterton taunted the Nazis with the paradox that ‘Hitlerism is almost entirely of Jewish origin’. For the idea of ‘a Chosen Race’ was a Jewish idea, a ‘mystical idea, which came through Protestantism’:
When the Reformation had rent away the more Nordic sort of German from the old idea of human fellowship in a Faith open to all, they obviously needed some other idea that would at least look equally large and towering and transcendental. They began to get it through the passionate devotion of historical Protestants to the Old Testament. … By concentrating on the ancient story of the Covenant with Israel, and losing the counterweight of the idea of the universal Church of Christendom, they grew more and more into the mood of seeing their religion as a mystical religion of Race.
This was ‘the great Prussian illusion of pride, for which thousands of Jews have recently been rabbled or ruined or driven from their homes’. And this ‘wild worship of Race’ was ‘far worse’ than the kind of nationalism that had no respect for other nations’ nationality. There were ‘two peculiar perils inherent in the cult of Race’: the first danger was that ‘this cult … tends more than any other to the nourishment of Pride’, and the second was ‘something which can almost be more spiritually perilous than pride: something that such visionaries call The Infinite; and those who have to deal with it call The Indefinite’. The first ‘more obvious’ danger of ‘the curse of race religion’ was that it made ‘each separate man the sacred image which he worships’, for it was ‘a creed in which every man is his own incarnate god’. The second less obvious danger was that ‘the essence of Nazi Nationalism’ was ‘to preserve the purity of a race in a continent where all races are impure’: ‘but if you merely follow race wanderings, you follow one tribe through a complexity of tribes, which you will always be trying to simplify … You will find German populations in the heart of Lorraine and may at any time find them in the heart of Lincolnshire.’50
Some wondered how Chesterton had picked up ‘the strange fancy that Hitler and his colleagues are as warlike as they say they are’. His prophetic reply was: if Hitler moved ‘one inch towards infringing on the present ancient frontiers of the Polish realm’, then he would know that he had been right. The infamous pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was a ‘vital or very deadly fact; that the Nazi is ready to dally with Communists’. In particular, both the Nazis and the Communists would be in agreement about Poland, for ‘in hatred of the Christian civilisation they are truly internatio
nal’. Indeed, Poland was the only country in Eastern Europe that Western Europe could rely on as a bulwark against Communism, ‘a power to be permanently counted on for the protection of the old culture of Christendom’. But unfortunately this crucial fact was ignored in England, where there was ‘a pretty large amount of Pacifism’ in reaction to the First World War: ‘They are always talking about the old men who blundered into war; have the young men done anything to avoid blundering into war?’ These pacifists, who would no doubt ‘succeed in dragging us all into war’, were an exact ‘fit’ with the Nazis: ‘they are the active and passive mood of the same verb.’ ‘Their common ground is that neither has any real idea of courage; neither has any notion of chivalry in war … They are in fact the ancient complex of the bully and the coward …’. The appeasement not only of Germany but of Japan meant that ‘anybody may be a land-grabber when he feels hungry for more land’, that ‘the teeming Teutonic populations must find an outlet; and must pillage Europe as the Japs will pillage Asia’. As for the totally ineffectual League of Nations, ‘impotent of action’, it had ‘devoted itself principally … to the intensive development of a pacifist propaganda campaign’. After the First World War, ‘at a critical period of the history of Western civilization the direction of its destinies fell into the hands’ of President Wilson, ‘an American college professor, of excellent intention, but entirely devoid of human sympathy’, and Lloyd George,
a Welsh demagogue. The one was concerned to devise a paper scheme for the orderly regulation of international relations, a scheme perfect in its parts, and eminently suitable for the government of angel-races and dream-people; the other showed a fine, careless disregard for what was done, so long as it was productive of noise and notoriety and the front-page ‘splash’. Between them they concentrated and established in a club-house at Geneva all the richest of the world’s resources of amorphous idealism, a tribunal by constitution without authority and by composition without dignity.
It was true that war was, ‘in the main, a dirty, mean, inglorious business’, but it was ‘not the direst calamity that can befall a people. There is one worse state, at least: the state of slavery.’ A ‘diseased and half-witted fallacy’ had arisen, according to which ‘the horror of the suffering contradicts the heroism of the sufferers. We are not to admire heroes because they endured horrors which only heroes could endure. We are not to honour martyrs; because martyrdom hurts very much; which was the only reason for anybody honouring martyrs at all.’51
Christendom was now confronted with ‘exactly the same problem which confronted it in its first days’—namely, the pride of paganism. Most of the Christian virtues had also been heathen virtues: the Christian claim was only that ‘Christianity could alone really inspire a heathen to observe the heathen virtues’. But ‘the whole point of the mightiest revolution in the story of Man’ was that upon ‘one point and one point only’ there really was ‘a moral revolution that broke the back of human history. And that was upon the point of Humility.’ The ‘stupendous truth that man does not know anything, until he can not only know himself but ignore himself’, was ‘the greatest psychological discovery that man has made, since man has sought to know himself’. For pride, ‘which is the falsification of fact, by the introduction of self, is the enduring blunder of mankind. Christianity would be justified if it had done nothing but begin by detecting that blunder.’ It might seem hopeless for Christian humility to set itself against the pagan pride that was threatening to engulf the world in war; but Christianity refused to acknowledge that there were ‘any lost causes’: ‘It is this splendour of the hopeless hope; sometimes called the forlorn hope, which has made the peculiar chivalry of Christendom, which has given to us alone the true idea of romance: for the real romance was a combination of fidelity to the quest as a task, with perpetual and enormous inequality to the task.’52
There are several references to the threat to world peace in Avowals and Denials, another collection of his columns in the Illustrated London News that Chesterton published in November 1934. His warning could hardly have been more explicit: ‘ever since Herr Hitler began to turn the beer-garden into a bear-garden, there has been an increasing impression on sensitive and intelligent minds that something very dangerous has occurred. A particular sort of civilization has turned back towards barbarism.’ What was ‘really disquieting about this new note of narrow nationalism or tribalism in the north’ was that there was ‘something shrill and wild about it’, the characteristic note of the ‘destructive crises of history’. The ‘racial mass’ of the ‘tribes’ who were called Germans had been recently ‘solidified by a staggering sense of triumph, and a hypnotic faith, that it is all one people’. Chesterton noted the ambivalence of Hitler: on the one hand, he seemed genuinely concerned about the family, but, on the other hand, he favoured the ‘barbaric’ science of eugenics, which was nothing but ‘a violent assault’ on the family. However, Chesterton was clear that the danger to peace came not only from Germany. He was as clear then, as he had been in the days when he wrote for the Daily News and horrified his Liberal friends by saying so, that ‘there were two forces in the world threatening its peace, because of their history, their philosophy and their externality to the ethics of Christendom; and they were Prussia and Japan’. The doctrines of Prussian Protestantism had ‘long been dissolving in the acids of … scepticism; in the laboratories of the Prussian professors’: ‘And the more they evaporated and left a void, the more the void was filled up with new and boiling elements; with tribalism, with militarism, with imperialism and (in short) with that very narrow type of patriotism that we call Prussianism.’ Indeed, all this ‘new and naked nationalism had come to many modern men as a substitute for their dead religion’. American Puritans, for example, had ‘lost their religion and retained their morality’: ‘The severe theological credo was replaced by a severe social veto …. America tolerated Prohibition, not because America was Puritan, but because America had been Puritan.’ Why, an original Puritan like Oliver Cromwell had actually himself been a brewer!53
Chesterton’s early denunciations of Hitler and the Nazis were acclaimed by one ‘warm admirer’ in the United States, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, a leading Zionist who led resistance in America to the Nazi persecution of Jews and who was instrumental in the formation of the World Jewish Congress, which was formed to create a broad representative body to fight Nazism. ‘When Hitlerism came,’ Rabbi Wise declared, ‘he [Chesterton] was one of the first to speak out with all the directness and frankness of a great and unabashed spirit.’54
5
In March 1935 G.K.’s Weekly celebrated its tenth anniversary. Chesterton asked Shaw to contribute to a special issue of his ‘own funny paper’ celebrating the occasion:
I remember you told me I was selling myself into slavery for ten years; and enquired if I was quite mad. Would you care to congratulate me in print on my escape from slavery; I do not venture to say my restoration to sanity … I shall be vastly pleased if you would write even a few words such as could go on a telegram; or even refuse to write in words which would certainly be equally invigorating.55
Shaw obliged, sending a contribution that was ‘much more than you bargained for; but you can (a) run it through half a dozen numbers as a serial, (b) invite Wells, Russell and Belloc to discuss it and publish the whole darned symposium … or (c) send it back to me with imprecations …’.56 Among writers asked to contribute to the anniversary issue was Walter de la Mare, to whom Chesterton wrote asking him for ‘any odd scrap of verse, or even curse (in the way of criticism of us)’ for his ‘little rag of a paper … on which I and a few other fanatics wear themselves more or less to rags’. The payment was ‘next to nothing, and for most of us nothing’.57
On 9 April 1935 the Chestertons, accompanied by Dorothy Collins, ‘who’, in Chesterton’s words, ‘acted as secretary, courier, chauffeuse, guide, philosopher and above all friend’,58 set off for a holiday in France and Spain.59 They left Beaconsfield in po
uring rain and arrived in Dover in the evening. Next day Dorothy took the car ferry, while the Chestertons took a later passenger ferry. They met on the quay in Calais. They arrived in Amiens on the evening of the 10th. Next day they left for Rouen, where they had lunch before going on to Chartres, where they stayed till the afternoon of the following day. After spending the night in Blois, they drove on to Brive. Next day was Palm Sunday, and they spent another night in Brive, before driving on to Rocamadour, where they had lunch. They spent the night at Montaubon, where the hotel was decayed and there were rats. After lunching in Toulouse, they drove via Carcassonne, where they spent the night, and Narbonne, arriving in Perpignon in time for lunch.
They drove through lovely mountainous scenery to the Spanish frontier. But Dorothy’s Rover car was not going well, owing to dirt in the carburettor. As soon as they reached Gerona, they took it straight to a garage, where they spent two hours with a large audience watching. On the 20th they left Gerona for Barcelona, where they got very lost. After lunch they drove to Tarragona, where they attended Pontifical High Mass in the cathedral on Easter Sunday. They arrived in Sitges from Barcelona on the 24th. The roads to Montserrat, which they visited on the 27th, were bad, although the mountain scenery was lovely, and they got rather lost. They stayed in Sitges, where Chesterton and Dorothy Collins caught up with work, until the morning of 3 May, when they left for Narbonne, lunching at Gerona on the way.