Literary Giants Literary Catholics

by Joseph Pearce

  I believe we are in danger of a similar, stultifying use of the word “Fascist”. There was recently a petition sent to English writers . . . asking them to subscribe themselves, categorically, as supporters of the Republican Party in Spain, or as “Fascists”. When rioters are imprisoned it is described as a “Fascist sentence”; the Means Test is Fascist; colonisation is Fascist; military discipline is Fascist; patriotism is Fascist; Catholicism is Fascist; Buchmanism is Fascist; the ancient Japanese cult of their Emperor is Fascist; the Galla tribes’ ancient detestation of theirs is Fascist; fox-hunting is Fascist. . . . Is it too late to call for order?

  This reductio ad absurdum of labeling everyone and everything either “bolshie” or “Fascist” was finding tragicomic expression in Spain itself even as Waugh wrote. As the war began to swing in Franco’s favor, the Communists and the anarchists in the Republican forces began to turn their guns on each other, each accusing the other of being “Fascist”. In such circumstances it was “too late to call for order” because order itself was deemed “Fascist”. Interestingly, the socialist subeditors at the New Statesman headed Waugh’s letter “Fascist”, evidently as a juvenile gibe intended to annoy their hostile correspondent. They were only reinforcing his point.

  The allegation that Chesterton was a Fascist in this too-imprecise definition of the word is the hardest to defend him against. It is too intangible to touch, too airy to grasp, too vacant to engage. It is the enthronement of meaninglessness by the assassination of meaning. The triumph of the trite. Alas, on this level, and this level alone, we must admit defeat and confess that Chesterton is indeed a “Fascist”. The only consolation is the knowledge that so is everyone else.

  Apart from the above-mentioned definitions, there is also what could be called the generally accepted definition of Fascism. This is the definition popularized brilliantly by George Orwell in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell cut through the cant of what has been called “that damn-fool dichotomy of Left and Right”, deliberately refraining from specifying whether the totalitarian regimes he was describing were “Fascist” or “Communist”. The point was that, to all intents and purposes, it didn’t matter. Regardless of the theory that gave them theoretical justification, they were the perpetrators of injustice. Certainly, there are deliberate parallels in Animal Farm to Stalin’s machiavellianism and Trotsky’s murder, but the story is just as applicable to Hitler’s machiavellianism and the killing of Ernst Rohm and Gregor Strasser in the Night of the Long Knives. Meanwhile, the image of Big Brother, omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient, in Nineteen Eighty-Four has impressed itself upon the public imagination to such a degree that the most powerful dictators—Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao—are synthesized in the name of Big Brother. This, then, is the public perception of totalitarianism, the practically and generally accepted definition of Fascism, and indeed of Communism, that most people have today.

  Of course, as neither of Orwell’s books had been written at the time of Chesterton’s death, the general perceptions of Fascism then were different from those of today. To Chesterton and his contemporaries, Fascism was defined by one or other of the three definitions already discussed. Nonetheless, because allegations of Chesterton’s Fascism continue today, it is necessary to address the current practically accepted definition of the word.

  Big-Brother Fascism involves an increase of state power and state control over everyday life; it believes in the right of government to exercise control over the private property of individuals; it believes in strong central government at the expense of local or regional authority; it promotes intolerance of its opponents, whether on the grounds of race, creed or politics; it is characterized by a xenophobic chauvinism and a contempt for foreigners; it is militarist and often has imperialist aspirations. On each of these components, Chesterton is anti-Fascist according to the modern conception of the word. For the sake of anyone who does not know Chesterton’s work, one or two brief examples may be given.

  On numerous occasions, Chesterton attacked the creeping encroachment of the state into the lives of ordinary people, and particularly into the family, which was to Chesterton the bastion of freedom in any civilized society. More specifically, he was an outspoken opponent of Prohibition in the United States, partly because it was undesirable in itself but also because it was state interference in the civil liberties of individuals. The creed of distributism, distilled by Belloc from the social teaching of the Catholic Church as expounded by Pope Leo XIII, was a central tenet of Chesterton’s socioeconomic thinking. He believed in the sanctity, in the restoration and the preservation of small, widely distributed private property. These views were the antithesis of economic centralism, whether by state-run nationalized industries or by privately owned monopolies. He was the defender of small property from both big business and Big Brother, an early exponent of the creed of “Small is Beautiful” as espoused in the 1970s by E. F. Shumacher.

  His views on devolved power, liberated from central government, infused The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which is, in its own way, as much a call for freedom from Big Brother as is Nineteen Eighty-Four. Chesterton’s novel was set in 1984; perhaps Orwell chose that year as a tribute to Chesterton’s earlier work. I prefer this to the more prosaic suggestion that Orwell simply reversed the numbers of the year in which it was written, 1948.

  Chesterton cannot be accused of intolerance of his opponents. Almost unique among writers, he spent a lifetime arguing with everyone but quarreling with no one, a man with no enemies although he had numerous opponents. Chesterton is an icon of tolerance in an intolerant world. He was a Little Englander who loved his country without denigrating anyone else’s country, with one exception: that of Germany in its expansionism and militarism under both the kaiser and the führer. Throughout his life, he never accepted the right of one country to impose itself upon another, an anti-imperialist stance that dates to the days of the Boer War (1899-1902).

  In short, Chesterton stands acquitted of the charge of Fascism in the generally accepted definition of the word even more than in the other senses. Far from being a Fascist, he seems to be the quintessential anti-Fascist. By a bizarre Chestertonian paradox, he is often accused of Fascism by means of the stereotypes, smears, superficiality and prejudice that one normally associates with Fascism itself.

  A postscript may be appropriate. Speaking as one who was once attracted to Fascism, I can testify that Chesterton more than anyone rescued me from the intolerant world into which I had strayed. Reading his words, I was gradually awakened, as if from a bad dream, into the world of wisdom and innocence that Chesterton inhabited. I have more reason than most to be thankful for the fact that Chesterton was not a Fascist.

  I met at a recent meeting of the Chesterton Society in Sussex a clergyman who had been a member of both the Communist Party and the International Marxist Group. Earlier we would have despised each other, but now we were united by love for Christ . . . and for Chesterton. If, as Chesterton believed, faith alone is not enough but must be accompanied by good works, it is clear for all who have eyes to see, that both Chesterton’s faith and his good works continue to work wonderfully and efficaciously across the generations.

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  G. K. CHESTERTON

  Champion of Orthodoxy

  CHESTERTON’S REPUTATION as one of the key figures in Christian literature during the twentieth century is linked inextricably with the concept of “orthodoxy”. His book of that title, published in 1908, was, according to Wilfrid Ward, a major milestone in the development of Christian thought.

  Wilfrid Ward was certainly not alone in his flattering praise of Chesterton’s book. The book’s influence on the intellectual development of a whole generation was summed up by Dorothy L. Sayers. She had first read Orthodoxy as a schoolgirl when her faith had been threatened by adolescent doubt. In later years she confessed that its “invigorating vision” had inspired her to look at Christianity anew and that if she hadn’t read
Chesterton’s book, she might, in her schooldays, have given up Christianity altogether. “To the young people of my generation,” Sayers wrote in 1952, “G.K.C. was a kind of Christian liberator.”

  In stressing firm and fixed foundations for the concept and teachings of Christianity, Chesterton had turned “orthodoxy” into a battle cry—a rapier-sharp reply to the heresies of the age. His approach would be very influential on C. S. Lewis, and there are obvious and unmistakable parallels between Chesterton’s populist approach to “orthodoxy” and Lewis‘ “mere Christianity”.

  There is also a clear similarity between Chesterton’s approach to orthodoxy and that of T. S. Eliot. In Notes towards the Definition of Culture, Eliot captured the spirit of the Christian literary revival, of which he and Chesterton were part, in his

  last appeal . . . to the men of letters of Europe, who have a special responsibility for the preservation and transmission of our common culture. . . . We can at least try to save something of the goods of which we are the common trustees; the legacy of Greece, Rome and Israel, and the legacy of Europe throughout 2,000 years. In a world which has seen such material devastation as ours, these spiritual possessions are also in imminent peril.

  For Eliot, and for Chesterton, this inheritance was not merely something old-fashioned that could be shrugged off and discarded in favor of new fads. It was a sacred tradition, the custodian of eternal verities that spoke with inexorable authority to every new and passing generation. The beauty of great literature resided in its being an expression of a common culture, which was itself the fruit of the preservation of learning, the pursuit of truth and the attainment of wisdom. The highest function of art, therefore, was to express the highest common factors of human life and not the lowest common denominators—life’s loves and not its lusts. This was the mindset at the very core of the literary revival of which Chesterton was part.

  In the wake of the publication of Orthodoxy, Chesterton was no longer tolerated as a young and precocious writer but was considered provocative and a threat to the agnostic status quo. Chesterton was acutely aware of this change in attitude:

  Very nearly everybody . . . began by taking it for granted that my faith in the Christian creed was a pose or a paradox. The more cynical supposed that it was only a stunt. The more generous and loyal warmly maintained that it was only a joke. It was not until long afterwards that the full horror of the truth burst upon them; the disgraceful truth that I really thought the thing was true.

  . . . Critics were almost entirely complimentary to what they were pleased to call my brilliant paradoxes; until they discovered that I really meant what I said.

  It says something about the scintillating cynicism of our age that, in the eyes of his contemporaries, Chesterton’s greatest sin was his sincerity. This thought was certainly in Chesterton’s mind in the months following the publication of Orthodoxy and was one of the principal inspirations behind his novel The Ball and the Cross, published in February 1910. “The theme in Mr. Chesterton’s new novel”, wrote a reviewer in the Pall Mall Gazette, “is largely the same that he treated in Orthodoxy. . . The story is concerned with the effort of the two honest men to fight a duel on the most vital problem in the world, the truth of Christianity.”

  Although the truth of Christianity may have been the object of The Ball and the Cross, its subjects were two men—one a Catholic, the other an atheist—whose sincerity scandalized their cynical contemporaries. There is little doubt that Chesterton had intended the novel as a light-hearted, entertaining response to those who had criticized his defense of Christianity in Orthodoxy. It was also a thinly disguised parable on his relationship with George Bernard Shaw, one of the literary figures discussed by Chesterton in his earlier book Heretics. Like the two adversaries in The Ball and the Cross, Chesterton and Shaw disagreed passionately on most of the issues of the day but remained good friends. Their relationship was a living embodiment of the command to “love thine enemy”.

  If Chesterton’s Orthodoxy had been born out of debates with “heretics” such as Shaw, his other great work of Christian apologetics, The Everlasting Man, would be born out of a protracted and bad-tempered debate between Hilaire Belloc and H. G. Wells. Initially, Belloc had objected to the tacitly anti-Christian stance of Well’s Outline of History, which had given less space to Christ than to the Persians’ campaign against the Greeks. Yet Belloc’s principal objection was the materialistic determinism that formed the foundation of Wells’ History, and this prompted him to write a series of articles exposing Wells’ errors.

  Chesterton’s own contribution to the debate was The Everlasting Man, intended as a refutation of Wells’ case, but written in a wholly different tone from that of the bombastic bellicosity that characterized Belloc’s articles. In essence, The Everlasting Man was Chesterton’s own attempt at an “outline of history”.

  Perhaps the importance of The Everlasting Man, as with the importance of Orthodoxy, is best judged by its impact on others.

  Ronald Knox was “firmly of the opinion that posterity will regard The Everlasting Man as the best of his books”, a view echoed by Evelyn Waugh, who wrote that Chesterton was “primarily the author of The Everlasting Man”, which he described as “a great, popular book, one of the few really great popular books of the century; the triumphant assertion that a popular book can be both great and popular.”

  Perhaps the literary figure who was affected most profoundly by The Everlasting Man was C. S. Lewis. Although Lewis was already an admirer of Chesterton when The Everlasting Man was published in 1925, he could not accept Chesterton’s Christianity. “Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together,” Lewis wrote, “bating, of course, his Christianity. . . . Then I read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense.”

  Lewis, of course, would go on to become arguably the most influential Christian apologist of the twentieth century, with the possible exception of Chesterton himself. The fact that Lewis owed his own conversion to Christianity in large part to Chesterton is a living testament to the latter’s enduring importance.

  Yet the importance of Chesterton to the subsequent development of the Christian literary revival goes much deeper. He influenced the conversion of Evelyn Waugh and inspired, at least in part, the original conception of Brideshead Revisited. He indirectly influenced the conversion of Graham Greene, who converted following discussions with his future wife—who had previously converted through the avid reading of Chesterton’s books. Chesterton had nurtured to full recovery the ailing faith of both Ronald Knox and Dorothy L. Sayers during periods of adolescent doubt. This, in itself, would constitute a laudable testament to Chesterton’s importance. Yet even this tells only a tiny part of the story, the tip of the evangelical iceberg. How many others, less well known, have had their faith either restored or germinated by Chesterton’s genius and his genial expositions of orthodoxy?

  Dr. Barbara Reynolds, friend and biographer of Dorothy L. Sayers, has described the interchange and interplay of ideas between Christian writers as a network of minds energizing each other. In this network of minds, few have done more “energizing” than Gilbert Keith Chesterton.

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  HILAIRE BELLOC IN A NUTSHELL

  HILAIRE BELLOC WAS BORN at La Celle Saint Cloud, twelve miles outside Paris, on 27 July 1870. His birth coincided with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, and his parents were forced to evacuate the family home a few weeks later. They fled to Paris to escape the advancing Prussian army, and as the Prussians prepared to lay siege to the French capital, the Bellocs managed to catch the last train to Dieppe, on the Normandy coast, from whence they sailed to the safety of England.

  Belloc was educated in the benevolent shadow of the aging Cardinal Newman at the Oratory School in Birmingham and at Balliol College in Oxford. As an undergraduate, his considerable presence and oratorical prowess gain
ed him a degree of preeminence among his peers that culminated in his election to the presidency of the Oxford Union. In June 1895 he crowned his exceptionally brilliant career at Oxford with a first-class honors degree in history.

  Even before going to Oxford, the young Belloc had commenced his wanderlustful perambulations, tramping through his beloved France and traveling across the United States. The latter was undertaken in an endeavor to persuade Elodie Hogan, a young Irish American girl whom he had met in London, to marry him. Having traveled the breadth of the United States, he arrived in California to be informed that his beloved was intent on trying her vocation with the Sisters of Charity. Returning broken-hearted and empty-handed to Europe, he enlisted for national service in the French army.

  Belloc never lost touch with his apparently lost love in America, and in the summer of 1896, he returned to California, marrying Elodie at Saint John the Baptist Church in Napa on 15 June of that year. The newlyweds returned to England, where they would be blessed with five children before Elodie’s tragic death in 1914.

  The commencement of Belloc’s married life coincided with the commencement of his literary career. In 1896 his first two books were published, Verses and Sonnets and The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts. The latter became an instant popular success, prompting more of the same, including More Beasts (for Worse Children) in 1897 and Cautionary Tales for Children ten years later. Although these books for children (of all ages) are indubitably charming and enduringly funny, it is perhaps unfortunate that, for many, Belloc is remembered primarily for these relatively trivial sorties into children’s literature rather than for the vast body of work, transcending several genres, that represents his true and lasting legacy.