G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  Next day they left for Aix-en-Provence, lunching en route at Montpellier, where they spent a couple of nights before leaving for Mentone on the 6th, where they also spent two nights. They then crossed into Italy and drove through beautiful scenery to Santa Margharita. They arrived in Rapallo on the 9th. Next day Ezra Pound and his wife came to tea, and they dined with the Beerbohms in the evening. Two days later they were in Portofino, going on to Pisa in the afternoon. On the 13th they left for Florence, where Chesterton lectured next day at the Palazzo Vecchio on ‘English Literature and the Latin Tradition’. Three days later they left for Como, where they spent three nights. From there they drove to Airolo, where the car was put on the train. Passing through the St Gotthard tunnel, they reached Lucerne in the evening. On the 21st they left for Langes, lunching in Basle on the way. Next day they left for Rheims, where they spent the night before going on to Calais, where they caught the boat next morning. They arrived home at Top Meadow in time for a late supper. They had travelled altogether over 3,000 miles.

  In his Autobiography, Chesterton boasted that he was a traveller rather than a tourist, a distinction he felt he owed to his father, who had first taken him to France as a boy: ‘The traveller sees what he sees; the tripper sees what he has come to see.’ He was glad that he had first seen France when he was young: ‘For if an Englishman has understood a Frenchman, he has understood the most foreign of foreigners.’ It was paradoxical that the two countries closest to England, Ireland and France, were the two countries ‘we never understand’. Chesterton did not think that the Spanish were ‘in a difficult sense different’ from the English,

  but only that a stupid Puritanism had forbidden the English to show the hearty and healthy emotions the Spanish are allowed to show. The most manifest emotion, as it struck me, was the pride of fathers in their little boys. I have seen a little boy run the whole length of the tree-lined avenues in the great streets, in order to leap into the arms of a ragged workman, who hugged him with more than maternal ecstasy.

  The workman had the good fortune not to have been to a public school, where he would have acquired that ‘paralysis’ of a Puritanism that ‘stiffens into Stoicism when it loses religion’. As for sights in Spain that he saw: ‘Yes, thank you I visited Toledo; it is glorious, but I remember it best by a more glorious peasant woman who poured out wine by the gallon and talked all the time.’ Outside Barcelona he had encountered the proprietor of a cafe who was ‘an authentic American gangster, who had actually written a book of confessions about his own organised robbing and racketeering’.

  Modest, like all great men, about the ability he had shown in making big business out of burglary and highway robbery, he was very proud of his literary experiment, and especially of his book; but, like some other literary men, he was dissatisfied with his publishers. He said he had rushed across just in time to find that they had stolen nearly all his royalties. ‘It was a shame,’ I said sympathetically, ‘why it was simply robbery.’ ‘I’ll say it was,’ he said with an indignant blow on the table. ‘It was just plain robbery.’60

  Dorothy Collins well recalled in her old age that arrival in the centre of Barcelona at midday on Saturday, 20 April 1935, when they got lost. The traffic was heavy, and Dorothy did not understand the traffic lights, which were unknown in England then. They also had no idea where they wanted to go—‘characteristically’ and in accordance with Chesterton’s idea of a holiday.

  With traffic to the right and to left of us, police whistles blowing, lights flashing, G.K. sat in the back of the car, quite oblivious, reading a detective story. Having driven into a back street, I got out and went on foot to find Cook’s office, our letters and an hotel. As we sat over a very late lunch, I said, ‘You weren’t much help to me in my hour of need!’ ‘Ah, my dear Dorothy,’ he said, ‘You don’t realize how much more helpful I was than I should have been if I had been shouting directions from the back seat.’

  But otherwise Dorothy thought the Chestertons were ‘wonderful passengers’—although Chesterton did once ‘remark rather plaintively, “Frances, I wish you wouldn’t keep telling Dorothy to admire the view when we are hanging over precipices.’ She had driven them through the south of France and over the Alps—‘like Napoleon (or like Hannibal accompanied by an elephant)’, as Chesterton put it.61

  In June Chesterton contributed to a series of talks on the BBC, which were also relayed to American listeners, on the question of freedom. He knew, he said, that millions of his hearers would expect him, as a Catholic, to be ‘a little doubtful or apologetic’ on such a subject. On the contrary, he wanted ‘to point out that Catholicism created English liberty; that the freedom has remained exactly in so far as the Faith has remained …’. The jury system, the House of Commons, common law, ‘were all of Catholic origin’: ‘They laid the foundations of the fundamental conception of Liber et Legalis Homo; the Free and Lawful Man.’ But now this concept was being lost:

  If I steal an umbrella, knowing that the penalty is a week or a month, I am a free man even in prison. I have entered prison freely. But if you call it ‘curative’ I am not free anywhere. I am in prison till certain total strangers choose to say I am cured of my inordinate appetite for umbrellas. I am not only not at liberty, but I am not under law.

  Protestant countries were less free than Catholic countries—‘even those that have fallen under the dictatorships that openly deny freedom’. Certainly, he hated Hitler’s regime, and most Catholics were even more doubtful about Mussolini than he was. But at least an Italian was allowed ‘a little freedom in his ordinary affairs’, and would be ‘amazed’ to find that ‘there were no peasants and that next to nobody in a London street owned his little shop’.

  If Mussolini were to forbid all lotteries, as we forbid the Irish Sweepstake, the Italians would think Mussolini was mad; not metaphorically, but materially, medically mad. For more than ten years the great modern American democracy declared that drinking wine was wicked; that the wine which Christ made out of water is a poison … The English Parliament, being famous for compromise, has decided that wine is not a poison at five minutes to three, but becomes a poison at five minutes past three.

  The truth was that the freedom that was supposed to have been achieved by the Reformation was a ‘limited freedom, because it was only a literary liberty’: ‘The Protestant world concentrated entirely on liberty of opinion; it forgot everything else …’. It had sacrificed the ‘common rights and needs’ of ‘the common people, the general mass of men’ to ‘the special need of a few people to air their opinions. You have committed a crime for which you still suffer, even at this very moment. You have left liberty to nobody except to people like me.’ But, while freedom of expression was guaranteed, ‘about five millionaires own all the organs of expression’.62

  There was some truth in Chesterton’s argument, but by 1935 there must have been many Italians, not to say Germans, who would have preferred to live even in a Prohibitionist America than under their totalitarian government. But in a country where it was an accepted dogma that the Protestant Reformation had freed it from clerical tyranny, Chesterton’s provocative talk had some point. The outrage it caused was quite predictable, and for weeks letters poured in attacking Chesterton in the Listener. But some outraged listeners wrote personally to Chesterton. One incensed Protestant provoked an unusually passionate response from him.

  When you say that penitents pay for absolution, or that money can annul any marriage, it is merely as if you said that Margate is in Scotland, or that elephants lay eggs. It does not happen to be the fact, as you would discover if you investigated the facts. But when you suggest that there hangs on the fringe of the Catholic Church a vast horde of outcasts, criminals, prostitutes, etc.—you refer to a real fact; and a very interesting and remarkable fact it is. They cannot get the Church’s Sacraments or solid assurances, except by changing their whole way of life; but they do actually love the faith they cannot live by … which would be a fascinating psychologi
cal problem to anyone whose mind was free to consider it fairly. If you explain it by supposing that the Church, though bound to refuse them Absolution where there is no Amendment, keeps in touch with them and treats their human dignity rather more sympathetically than does the world, Puritan or Pagan—that also probably refers to a real fact. It is one of the facts that convince me most strongly that Catholicism is what it claims to be. After two thousand years of compromises and concordats with every sort of social system, the Catholic Church has never yet become quite respectable. He still eats and drinks with publicans and sinners.63

  To a lady who wondered whether Catholics were ‘allowed to use their intelligence on questions of doctrine’, or whether they had to swallow them ‘whole’, Chesterton replied:

  If you mean swallow them without thinking about them, Catholics think about them much more than anybody else does in the muddled modern world; but they think about them logically; and recognise what things go together or must be given up together. If I accept the doctrine that twice one are two, do I swallow whole the doctrine that twice thirty-two is sixty-four? I suppose I do … But … I think it is sixty-four and not sixty-five because I cannot think anything else. Not because the Senior Wrangler at Cambridge tells me I must think so. It is precisely because most non-Catholics now do not think, that they can hold a chaos of contrary notions at once as that Jesus was good and humble; but falsely boasted of being God; or that God became Man to guide men till the end of time; and then died without giving them a hint of how they were to discover His decision in the first quarrel that might arise; or, alternatively, that he was not God, but only a Galilean peasant, but we are bound to submit to His most startling paradoxes about peace, but not to His plainest words about marriage. Thinking means thinking connectedly. If I thought the Catholic creed untrue, I should cease to be a Catholic. But as the more I think about it, the truer I think it is, the dilemma does not arise; there is no connection in my mind between thinking about it and doubting it.

  He concluded the letter by insisting that Catholicism ‘makes us respect or desire freedom’ precisely because it believes in free will.64

  Foremost, naturally, among the correspondents in the Listener was his old adversary, the Cambridge historian and professional controversialist G. G. Coulton. In a letter of 28 August to the Listener, Coulton demanded to know how Chesterton could possibly claim there was more freedom in a Catholic than a Protestant country, when Catholics were notoriously subject to the Index and forbidden to worship with Protestants. Responding in a letter of 11 September, Chesterton admitted that there had been ‘repressions’ in the course of Catholic history, ‘but never with that special note of Utopian finality, marking Prohibition’. As for the Index, it permitted ‘more freedom than modern plutocracy’. In his next letter in the next week’s issue, Coulton challenged Chesterton to an ‘exchange of open letters’ on the subject of freedom with a view to a book, the royalties of which could go to the unemployed. In his reply of 2 October in the Listener, Chesterton ignored the challenge but compared the Index, which allowed of ‘exceptions’, with ‘the fanaticism’ of Prohibition, which did not, as he knew from personal experience, since his wife had nearly died in Tennessee because it was impossible to obtain the champagne prescribed by the doctor. In the following issue, Coulton pointed out that the Index was still in force, while Prohibition had ended. He repeated the challenge he had issued in his previous letter. In the Listener of 23 October, Chesterton pointed out in his turn that Prohibition had affected the whole American ‘populace’, whereas the Index affected only the ‘professors’: ‘If such popular sympathies shame me, I accept the shame.’ In ‘an old organised tradition of truth’, he claimed, there was ‘limited limitation and some liberty’ as opposed to ‘unlimited limitations and no liberty’. In response to Coulton’s challenge, he suggested that he, Coulton, should publish the correspondence ‘at his own expense’. The following week Coulton replied that he would publish not only the correspondence but also Chesterton’s original broadcast talk. As regards the Index, English Roman Catholics might be able to take a relaxed view of it, but in Italy this ban on ‘free reading’ was far more onerous than the restrictions on drinking and betting in England. To this sally, Chesterton retorted on 15 November that the newspaper monopolies prevented free reading in England. Coulton’s response in the next issue was that there was free competition in England and therefore there was a free press as it was open to anyone to start a newspaper. To this the obvious answer was that you had to be an exceedingly rich person to start a newspaper, Chesterton wrote on 15 November. Finally, on 4 December Chesterton proposed that next year he and Coulton should collaborate in a book that would begin with ‘a full explanation’ of the thesis of his broadcast talk, to which Coulton would respond at similar length, followed by ‘shorter rejoinders’. But he insisted on his own ‘full explanation coming first’. In the following week’s issue, Coulton accepted Chesterton’s proposal, while for his part reminding Chesterton that he, Chesterton, had already agreed that the correspondence in the Listener should be published together with the text of Chesterton’s talk as a ‘fitting introduction’.

  Meanwhile in September the Catholic publishing house Sheed & Ward, founded by Maisie Ward and her husband Frank Sheed, had published another collection of Chesterton’s articles, The Well and the Shallows, originally published in a variety of places: the Catholic Herald, the Daily Mail, the Fortnightly Review, G.K.’s Weekly, the London Mercury, the Universe, and Liverpool Cathedral: Souvenir Programme. The book begins with an introductory note, in which Chesterton apologised to T. S. Eliot for ‘some errors that occurred’ in the opening article. Since writing it, he had ‘come to appreciate much more warmly [his] admirable work’. He, Chesterton, had confused Eliot with another critic who had accused Chesterton of using too much alliteration.65 Eliot had written privately on 2 July 1928 to Chesterton to point out the error, and also to complain about his poetry being misquoted: ‘And may I add, as a humble versifier, that I prefer my verse to be quoted correctly, if at all.’ Chesterton had replied that he certainly had had the impression from what the other critic had said that Eliot disapproved of his alliteration. But he agreed that, ‘on the strictest principles, all quotations should be verified; and I should certainly have done so if I had in any way resented anything you said, or been myself writing in a spirit of resentment’. He had offered to write a letter of correction to the Mercury, where the offending article had appeared.66 Eliot had answered that the matter was too trivial and that a letter was unnecessary. Far from being snobbish about alliteration, as Eliot thought Chesterton had implied, he was rather fond of it himself. He also recognized that Chesterton had acknowledged he was quoting from memory. The last time he, Eliot, had done so in print, a reader had written in to say that he had made a dozen mistakes in familiar passages from Shakespeare. He hoped that Chesterton would see his way to write for the Criterion (of which Eliot was the editor).67 Later that year in October, Eliot had written again urging Chesterton to contribute an article to the Criterion on humanism as a substitute for religion.68 Chesterton ended the introductory note to The Well and the Shallows with this tribute: ‘It would be adding impudence to injury to dedicate a book to an author merely on the claim of having misquoted him; but I should be proud to dedicate this book to T. S. Eliot, and the return of true logic and a luminous tradition to the world.’69

  Given the Catholic nature of four out of the seven original places of publication, it is not surprising that religion is the principal subject of the essays that comprise the book. At least six times during the previous few years Chesterton says he would have converted to the Catholic Church—but for the fact that he had been restrained from that rash step by the fortunate accident’ that he was one already. It was generally expected that the convert would suffer some sort of reaction, ending in disappointment and perhaps desertion’. The most that would be conceded was that the convert had found peace by the surrender of reason’. But
in Chesterton’s experience the opposite was true: ‘The strongest sort of confirmation often comes to the convert after he has received enough to establish conviction.’ It was not the Catholic Church but the Protestant Churches that were obsolete, or rather fossils’—that is to say, not dead’ or decayed’ or ‘antiquated’ but fossilized: ‘The whole point of a fossil is that it is the form of an animal or organism, from which all its own animal or organic substance has entirely disappeared; but which has kept its shape, because it has been filled up by some totally different substance by some process of distillation or secretion …’. (As Chesterton had remarked pithily in Orthodoxy: ‘Let beliefs fade fast and frequently, if you wish institutions to remain the same.’70) The Churches of the Reformation were clearly dying: ‘But in a much deeper sense, they have long been dead.’ Indeed, they had really died almost as soon as they were born’. For ‘the incredible clumsiness of the Reformers’ had miserably failed, in spite of all that was deservedly unpopular’ about the Catholic Church, which they had ‘swept out of their way’, to set up something that would at least look a little more popular’:

  They waged an insane war against everything in the old faith that is most normal and sympathetic to human nature; such as prayers for the dead or the gracious image of a Mother of Men. They hardened and fixed themselves upon fads which anybody could see would pass like fashions … Calvin was logical, but used his logic for a scheme which humanity manifestly would not long find endurable.