"I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that . . .""We are all subject to correction, but as far as we know . . .""In this necessarily imperfect world . . .""So far as one is able to judge . . .""Appearances are notoriously deceptive, but . . .""Human experience is necessarily limited to . . .""We can never be really sure . . .""Pilate asked, 'What is truth?' Ah, my brethren, what indeed?""The best minds of the country have failed to come to an agreement on this question; one can only surmise . . .""Art is long and life is short. Art to-day is even longer than it used to be."
"I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that . . ."
"We are all subject to correction, but as far as we know . . ."
"In this necessarily imperfect world . . ."
"So far as one is able to judge . . ."
"Appearances are notoriously deceptive, but . . ."
"Human experience is necessarily limited to . . ."
"We can never be really sure . . ."
"Pilate asked, 'What is truth?' Ah, my brethren, what indeed?"
"The best minds of the country have failed to come to an agreement on this question; one can only surmise . . ."
"Art is long and life is short. Art to-day is even longer than it used to be."
Now the politician, to do him justice, has retained the courage of his convictions to a greater extent than the orthodox believer in God. Men are still prepared to make Home Rule the occasion of bloodshed, or to spend the midnight hours denouncing apparent politicalheresies. But whereas the politician, like the orthodox believer once pronounced apologetics, they now merely utter apologies. To-day, equipped as never before with the heavy artillery of argument in the shape of Higher Criticism, research, blue-books, statistics, cheap publications, free libraries, accessible information, public lectures, and goodness only knows what else, the fighting forces of the spiritual and temporal decencies lie drowsing as in a club-room, placarded "Religion and politics must not be discussed here."
All this, with the exception of the political references, is a summary of Chesterton's claim that a return to orthodoxy is desirable and necessary. It will be found at length inHereticsand in the first chapters ofOrthodoxy, and sprinkled throughout all his writings of a later date than 1906 or so. He protests on more than one occasion against Mr. Shaw's epigram, which seems to him to contain the essence of all that is wrong to-day, "The golden rule is that there is no golden rule." Chesterton insists that there is a golden rule, that it is a very old one, and that it is known to a great many people, most of whom belong to the working classes.
In his argument that, on the whole, the masses are (or were) right about religion, andthat the intellectuals are wrong, Chesterton is undoubtedly at his most bellicose and his sincerest. His is the pugnacity that prefers to pull down another's banner rather than to raise his own. His "defences" inThe Defendant, and the six hundred odd cases made out by him in the columns of The Daily News are largely and obviously inspired by the wish, metaphorically speaking, to punch somebody's head. The fact that he is not a mere bully appears in the appeal to common decency which Chesterton would be incapable of omitting from an article. Nevertheless he prefers attack to defence. In war, the offensive is infinitely more costly than the defensive. But in controversy this is reversed. The opener of a debate is in a much more difficult position than his opponent. The latter need only criticize the former's case; he is not compelled to disclose his own defences. Chesterton used to have a grand time hoisting people on their own petards, and letting forth strings of epigrams at the expense of those from whom he differed, and only incidentally revealing his own position. Then, as he tells us in the preface toOrthodoxy, when he had published the saltatory series of indictments entitledHeretics, a number of his critics said, in effect, "Please, Mr. Chesterton, what arewe to believe?" Mr. G. S. Street, in particular, begged for enlightenment. G.K.C. joyously accepted the invitation, and wroteOrthodoxy, his most brilliant book.
There are few works in the English language the brilliancy of which is so sustained.Orthodoxyis a rapid torrent of epigrammatically expressed arguments. Chesterton's method in writing it is that of the digger wasp. This intelligent creature carries on the survival of the fittest controversy by paralyzing its opponent first, and then proceeding to lay the eggs from which future fitness will proceed in the unresisting but still living body. Chesterton begins by paralyzing his reader, by savagely attacking all the beliefs which the latter, if he be a modern and a sceptic, probably regards as first principles. Tolerance is dismissed, as we have just seen, as a mere excuse for not caring. Reason, that awful French goddess, is shown to be another apology. Nietzsche and various other authors to whom some of us have bent the knee are slaughtered without misery. Then Chesterton proceeds to the argument, the reader being by this time receptive enough to swallow a camel, on the sole condition that G.K.C. has previously slightly treacled the animal.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to assertthat at this point Chesterton pretends to begin his argument. As a matter of strict fact he only describes his adventures in Fairyland, which is all the earth. He tells us of his profound astonishment at the consistent recurrence of apples on apple trees, and at the general jolliness of the earth. He describes, very beautifully, some of the sensations of childhood making the all-embracing discovery that things are what they seem, and the even more joyful feeling of pretending that they are not, or that they will cease to be at any moment. A young kitten will watch a large cushion, which to it is a very considerable portion of the universe, flying at it without indicating any very appreciable surprise. A child, in the same way, would not be surprised if his house suddenly developed wings and flew away. Chesterton cultivated this attitude of always expecting to be surprised by the most natural things in the world, until it became an obsession, and a part of his journalistic equipment. In a sense Chesterton is the everlasting boy, the Undergraduate Who Would Not Grow Up. There must be few normally imaginative town-bred children to whom the pointed upright area-railings do not appear an unsearchable armoury of spears or as walls of protective flames, temporarily frozenblack so that people should be able to enter and leave their house. Every child knows that the old Norse story of a sleeping Brunnhilde encircled by flames is true; to him or her, there is a Brunnhilde in every street, and the child knows that there it always has a chance of being the chosen Siegfried. But because this view of life is so much cosier than that of the grown-ups, Chesterton clings to his childhood's neat little universe and weeps pathetically when anybody mentions Herbert Spencer, and makes faces when he hears the word Newton. He insists on a fair dole of surprises. "Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys and sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs?"
Now this fairyland business is frankly overdone. Chesterton conceives of God, having carried the Creation as far as this world, sitting down to look at the new universe in a sort of ecstasy. "And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold it was very good." He enjoyed His new toy immensely, and as He sent the earth spinning round the sun, His pleasure increased. So He said "Do it again" every time the sun had completed its course, and laughed prodigiously, and behaved like ahappy child. And so He has gone on to this day saying "Do it again" to the sun and the moon and the stars, to the animal creation, and the trees, and every living thing. So Chesterton pictures God, giving His name to what others, including Christians, call natural law, or the laws of God, or the laws of gravitation, conservation of energy, and so on, but always laws. For which reason, one is compelled to assume that in his opinion God is now [1915] saying to Himself, "There's another bloody war, do it again, sun," and gurgling with delight. It is dangerous to wander in fairyland, as Chesterton has himself demonstrated, "one might meet a fairy." It is not safe to try to look God in the face. A prophet in Israel saw the glory of Jehovah, and though He was but the God of a small nation, the prophet's face shone, and, so great was the vitality he absorbed from the great Source that he "was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated." That is the reverent Hebrew manner of conveying the glory of God. But Chesterton, cheerfully playing toss halfpenny among the fairies, sees an idiot child, and calls it God.
Fortunately for the argument, Chesterton has no more to say about his excursion inFairyland after his return. He goes on to talk about the substitutes which people have invented for Christianity. The Inner Light theory has vitriol sprayed upon it. Marcus Aurelius, it is explained, acted according to the Inner Light. "He gets up early in the morning, just as our own aristocrats leading the Simple Life get up early in the morning; because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games in the amphitheatre or giving the English people back their land." The present writer does not profess any ability to handle philosophic problems philosophically; it seems to him, however, that if Chesterton had been writing a few years later, he would have attempted to extinguish the latest form of the Inner Light, that "intuition" which has been so much associated with M. Bergson's teachings.
The Inner Light is finally polished off as follows:
Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Any one who knows anybody knows how it would work; anybody who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones should worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. . . . Christianity came into theworld firstly in order to assert with violence that a man has not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain.
Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Any one who knows anybody knows how it would work; anybody who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones should worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. . . . Christianity came into theworld firstly in order to assert with violence that a man has not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain.
Continuing his spiritual autobiography, Chesterton describes his gradual emergence from the wonted agnosticism of sixteen through the mediumship of agnostic literature. Once again that remark of Bacon's showed itself to be true, "A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." A man may read Huxley and Bradlaugh, who knew their minds, and call himself an agnostic. But when it comes to reading their followers, there's another story to tell. What especially struck Chesterton was the wholesale self-contradictoriness of the literature of agnosticism. One man would say that Christianity was so harmful that extermination was the least that could be desired for it, and another would insist that it had reached a harmless and doddering old age. A writer would assert that Christianity was a religion of wrath and blood, and would point to the Inquisition, and to the religious wars which have at one time or another swept over the civilized world. But by the time the reader's blood was up, he would come across some virile atheist's proclamationof the feeble, mattoid character of the religion in question, as illustrated by its quietist saints, the Quakers, the Tolstoyans, and non-resisters in general. When he had cooled down, he would run into a denunciation of the asceticism of Christianity, the monastic system, hair-shirts, and so on. Then he would come across a sweeping condemnation of its sensual luxuriousness, its bejewelled chalices, its pompous rituals, the extravagance of its archbishops, and the like. Christianity "was abused for being too plain and for being too coloured." And then the sudden obvious truth burst upon Chesterton, What if Christianity was the happy mean?
Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad—in various ways. I tested this idea by asking myself whether there was about any of the accusers anything morbid that might explain the accusation. I was startled to find that this key fitted a lock. For instance, it was certainly odd that the modern world charged Christianity at once with bodily austerity and with artistic pomp. But then it was also odd, very odd, that the modern world itself combined extreme bodily luxury with an extreme absence of artistic pomp. The modern man thought Becket's robes too rich and his meals too poor. But then the modern man was really exceptional in history. No man before ever ate such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes. The modern man found the church too simple exactly wheremodern life is too complex; he found the church too gorgeous exactly where modern life is too dingy. The man who disliked the plain fasts and feasts was mad onentrées. The man who disliked vestments wore a pair of preposterous trousers. And surely if there was any insanity involved in the matter at all it was in the trousers, not in the simply falling robe. If there was any insanity at all, it was in the extravagantentrées, not in the bread and wine.
Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad—in various ways. I tested this idea by asking myself whether there was about any of the accusers anything morbid that might explain the accusation. I was startled to find that this key fitted a lock. For instance, it was certainly odd that the modern world charged Christianity at once with bodily austerity and with artistic pomp. But then it was also odd, very odd, that the modern world itself combined extreme bodily luxury with an extreme absence of artistic pomp. The modern man thought Becket's robes too rich and his meals too poor. But then the modern man was really exceptional in history. No man before ever ate such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes. The modern man found the church too simple exactly wheremodern life is too complex; he found the church too gorgeous exactly where modern life is too dingy. The man who disliked the plain fasts and feasts was mad onentrées. The man who disliked vestments wore a pair of preposterous trousers. And surely if there was any insanity involved in the matter at all it was in the trousers, not in the simply falling robe. If there was any insanity at all, it was in the extravagantentrées, not in the bread and wine.
Nevertheless, Christianity was centrifugal rather than centripetal; it was not a mere average, but a centre of gravity; not a compromise, but a conflict. Christ was not half-God and half-man, like Hercules, but "perfect God and perfect man." Man was not only the highest, but also the lowest. "The Church was positive on both points. One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul."
At this point agreement with Mr. Chesterton becomes difficult. Christianity, he tells us, comes in with a flaming sword and performs neat acts of bisection. It separates the sinner from the sin, and tells us to love the former and hate the latter. He also tells us that no pagan would have thought of this. Leaving aside the question whether or not Plato was a Christian, it may be pointed out that whereas Chesterton condemns Tolstoyanism whenever he recognizes it, he here proclaims Tolstoy'sdoctrine. On the whole, however, the mild perverseness of the chapter onThe Paradoxes of Christianityleaves its major implications safe. It does not matter greatly whether we prefer to regard Christianity as a centre of gravity, or a point of balance. We need only pause to note Chesterton personifies this dualism.The Napoleon of Notting Hillis the arrangement of little bits of iron—the inhabitants of London, in this case—around the two poles of a fantastic magnet, of which one is Adam Wayne, the fanatic, and the other, Auberon Quin, the humorist. InThe Ball and the Crossthe diagram is repeated. James Turnbull, the atheist, and Evan MacIan, the believer, are the two poles. We speak in a loose sort of way of opposite poles when we wish to express separation. But, in point of fact, they symbolize connection far more exactly. They are absolutely interdependent. The whole essence of a North and a South Pole is that we, knowing where one is, should be able to say where the other is. Nobody has ever suggested a universe in which the North Pole wandered about at large. This is the idea which Chesterton seems to have captured and introduced into his definition of Christianity.
Democracy, to Chesterton, is the theorythat one man is as good as another; Christianity, he finds, is the virtual sanctification by supernatural authority of democracy. He points out the incompatibility of political democracy, for example, with the determinism to which Mr. Blatchford's logical atheism has brought him. If man is the creature of his heredity and his environment, as Mr. Blatchford asserts, and if a slum-bred heredity and a slum environment do not make for high intelligence, then obviously it is against the best interests of the State to allow the slum inhabitant to vote. On the other hand, it is entirely to the best interests of the State to entrust its affairs to the aristocracy, whose breeding and environment gives it an enormous amount of intelligence. Christianity, by proclaiming that every man's body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, insists both upon the necessity of abolishing the slums and of honouring the slum-dwellers as sharers with the rest of humanity in a common sonship. This is the case for Socialism, it may be pointed out parenthetically, and Chesterton has let it slip past him. He insists that orthodoxy is the best conceivable guardian of liberty, for the somewhat far-fetched reason that no believer in miracles would have such "a deep and sincere faith in the incurable routineof the cosmos" as to cling to the theory that men should not have the liberty to work changes. If a man believed in the freedom of God, in fact, he would have to believe in the freedom of man. The obvious answer to which is that he generally doesn't. Christianity made for eternal vigilance, Chesterton maintains, whereas Buddhism kept its eye on the Inner Light—which means, in fact, kept it shut. In proof, or at least in confirmation of this, he points to the statues of Christian saints and of the Buddha. The former keep their eyes open wide, the latter keep their eyes firmly closed. Vigilance, however, does not always make for liberty—the vigilance of the Inquisition, for example. Leaving out of account this and other monstrous exceptions, we might say spiritual liberty, perhaps, but not political liberty, not, at any rate, since the days of Macchiavelli, and the divorce of Church and State.
By insisting specially on the immanence of God we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference—Tibet. By insisting specially on the transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, religious indignation—Christendom. Insisting that God is inside man, man is always inside himself. By insisting that God transcends man, man has transcended himself.
By insisting specially on the immanence of God we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference—Tibet. By insisting specially on the transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, religious indignation—Christendom. Insisting that God is inside man, man is always inside himself. By insisting that God transcends man, man has transcended himself.
In concluding the book, Chesterton joyously refutes a few anti-Christian arguments by means of his extraordinary knack of seeing the large and obvious, and therefore generally overlooked things. He believes in Christianity because he is a rationalist, and the evidence in its favour has convinced him. The arguments with which he deals are these. That men are much like beasts, and probably related to them. Answer: yes, but men are also quite wonderfully unlike them in many important respects. That primeval religion arose in ignorance and fear. Answer: we know nothing about prehistoric man, because he was prehistoric, therefore we cannot say where he got his religion from. But "the whole human race has a tradition of the Fall." And so on: the argument that Christ was a poor sheepish and ineffectual professor of a quiet life is answered by the flaming energy of His earthly mission; the suggestion that Christianity belongs to the Dark Ages is countered by the historical fact that it "was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark." It was the path that led from Roman to modern civilization, and we are here because of it. And the book ends with a peroration that might be likened to a torrent, were it not for the fact thattorrents are generally narrow and shallow. It is a most remarkable exhibition of energy, a case from which flippancies and irrelevancies have been removed, and where the central conviction advances irresistibly. Elsewhere in the book Chesterton had been inconsequent, darting from point to point, lunging at an opponent one moment, formulating a theory in the next, and producing an effect which, if judged by sample, would be considered bizarre and undirected. The book contains a few perversities, of course. The author attempts to rebut the idea "that priests have blighted societies with bitterness and gloom," by pointing out that in one or two priest-ridden countries wine and song and dance abound. Yes, but if people are jollier in France and Spain and Italy than in savage Africa, it is due not to the priests so much as to the climate which makes wine cheap and an open-air life possible. No amount of priests would be able to set the inhabitants of the Belgian Congo dancing around a maypole singing the while glad songs handed down by their fathers. No amount of priests would be able to make the festive Eskimo bask in the sun and sing in chorus when there wasn't any sun and it was altogether too cold to open their mouths wide in the open air. In fact thepriests are not the cause of the blight where it exists, just as they are not the cause of the jolliness, when there is any. ButOrthodoxyis Chesterton's sincerest book. It is perhaps the only one of the whole lot in the course of which he would not be justified in repeating a remark which begins one of theTremendous Trifles, "Every now and then I have introduced into my essays an element of truth."
Twice upon a time there was a Samuel Butler who wrote exhilaratingly and died and left the paradoxical contents of his notebooks to be published by posterity. The first (i.e. of Hudibras, not of Erewhon) had many lively things to say on the question of orthodoxy, being the forerunner of G.K.C. And I am greatly tempted to treat Samuel Butler as an ancestor to be described at length. Chesterton might well have said, "It is a dangerous thing to be too inquisitive, and search too narrowly into a true Religion, for 50,000 Bethshemites were destroyed only for looking into the Ark of the Covenant, and ten times as many have been ruined for looking too curiously into that Booke in which that Story is recorded"—in fact inMagiche very nearly did say the same thing. He would have liked (as who would not?) to have been the author of the saying that "Repentant Teares are the waters upon whichthe Spirit of God moves," or that "There is no better Argument to prove that the Scriptures were written by Divine Inspiration, than that excellent saying of our Savior, If any man will go to Law with thee for thy cloke, give him thy Coate also." He might well have written dozens of those puns and aphorisms of Butler which an unkind fate has omitted from the things we read, and even from the things we quote. But Butler provides an answer to Chesterton, for he was an intelligent anticipator who foresaw exactly what would happen when orthodoxy, which is to say the injunction to shout with the larger crowd, should be proclaimed as the easiest way out of religious difficulties. Before a reader has finally made up his mind onOrthodoxy(and it is highly desirable that he should do so), let him consider two little texts:
"They that profess Religion and believe it consists in frequenting of Sermons, do, as if they should say They have a great desire to serve God, but would faine be perswaded to it. Why should any man suppose that he pleases God by patiently hearing an Ignorant fellow render Religion ridiculous?""He [a Catholic] prefers his Church merely for the Antiquity of it, and cares not howsound or rotten it be, so it be but old. He takes a liking to it as some do to old Cheese, only for the blue Rottenness of it. If he had lived in the primitive Times he had never been aChristian; for the Antiquity of thePaganandJewishReligion would have had the same Power over him against theChristian, as the oldRomanhas against the modern Reformation."
"They that profess Religion and believe it consists in frequenting of Sermons, do, as if they should say They have a great desire to serve God, but would faine be perswaded to it. Why should any man suppose that he pleases God by patiently hearing an Ignorant fellow render Religion ridiculous?"
"He [a Catholic] prefers his Church merely for the Antiquity of it, and cares not howsound or rotten it be, so it be but old. He takes a liking to it as some do to old Cheese, only for the blue Rottenness of it. If he had lived in the primitive Times he had never been aChristian; for the Antiquity of thePaganandJewishReligion would have had the same Power over him against theChristian, as the oldRomanhas against the modern Reformation."
Here we leave Samuel Butler. The majority stands the largest chance of being right through the sheer operation of the law of averages. But somehow one does not easily imagine a mob passing through the gate that is narrow and the way that is narrow. One prefers to think of men going up in ones and twos, perhaps even in loneliness, and rejoicing at the strange miracle of judgment that all their friends should be assembled at the journey's end.
But the final criticism of Chesterton'sOrthodoxyis that it is not orthodox. He claims that he is "concerned only to discuss . . . the central Christian theology (sufficiently summarized in the Apostles' Creed)" and, "When the word 'orthodoxy' is used here it means the Apostles' Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself Christian until a very short time ago and the general historic conductof those who held such a creed." In other words he counts as orthodox Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Orthodox Russians, Nonconformists, Lutherans, Calvinists, and all manner of queer fish, possibly Joanna Southcott, Mrs. Annie Besant, and Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy. He might even, by stretching a point or two (which is surely permissible by the rules of their game), rope in the New Theologians. Now this may be evidence of extraordinary catholicity, but not of orthodoxy. Chesterton stands by and applauds the Homoousians scalping the Homoiousians, but he is apparently willing to leave the Anglican and the Roman Catholic on the same plane of orthodoxy, which is absurd. We cannot all be right, even the Duke inMagicwould not be mad enough to assert that. And the average Christian would absolutely refuse his adherence to a statement of orthodoxy that left the matter of supreme spiritual authority an open question.
In the fifteenth century practically every Englishman would have declared with some emphasis that it lay in the Pope of Rome. In the twentieth century practically every Englishman would declare with equal emphasis that it did not. This change of opinion was accompanied by considerable ill-feeling on both sides, and was, as it were, illuminated byburning martyrs. The men of both parties burned in both an active and a passive sense. Those charming Tudor sisters, Bloody Mary (as the Anglicans call her) and Bloody Bess (as the Roman Catholics affectionately name her) left a large smudge upon accepted ideas of orthodoxy; charred human flesh was a principal constituent of it. The mark remains, the differences are far greater, but, to Chesterton, both Anglican and Roman Catholic are "orthodox." Of such is the illimitable orthodoxy of an ethical society, or of a body of Theosophists who "recognize the essential unity of all creeds and religions"—the liars! Chesterton tells us that Messrs. Shaw, Kipling, Wells, Ibsen and others are heretics, because of their doctrines. But he gives us no idea whether the Pope of Rome, who sells indulgences, is a heretic. And as the Pope is likely to outlive Messrs. Shaw, etc., by perhaps a thousand years, it is possible that Chesterton has been attacking the ephemeral heresies, while leaving the major ones untouched. In effect, Chesterton tells us no more than that we should shout with the largest crowd. But the largest crowd prefers, just now, not to do anything so clamorous.
The most curious feature about the present position of Christianity is the energy withwhich its opponents combine to keep it going. While Mr. Robert Blatchford continues to argue that man's will is not free, and Sir Oliver Lodge continues to maintain that it is, the Doctrine of the Resurrection is safe; it is not even attacked. But the net result of all those peculiar modern things called "movements" is a state of immobility like a nicely balanced tug-of-war. Perhaps a Rugby scrum would make a better comparison.
The great and grave changes in our political civilization all belong to the early nineteenth century, not to the later. They belong to the black-and-white epoch, when men believed fixedly in Toryism, in Protestantism, in Calvinism, in Reform, and not infrequently in Revolution. And whatever each man believed in, he hammered at steadily, without scepticism: and there was a time when the Established Church might have fallen, and the House of Lords nearly fell. It was because Radicals were wise enough to be constant and consistent; it was because Radicals were wise enough to be conservative. . . . Let beliefs fade fast and frequently if you wish institutions to remain the same. The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself. The net result of all our political suggestions, Collectivism, Tolstoyanism, Neo-Feudalism, Communism, Anarchy, Scientific Bureaucracy—the plain fruit of them all is that Monarchy and the House of Lords will remain. The net result of all the new religions will be that the Church of Englandwill not (for heaven knows how long) be disestablished. It was Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Cunninghame Graham, Bernard Shaw, and Auberon Herbert, who between them, with bowed, gigantic backs, bore up the throne of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The great and grave changes in our political civilization all belong to the early nineteenth century, not to the later. They belong to the black-and-white epoch, when men believed fixedly in Toryism, in Protestantism, in Calvinism, in Reform, and not infrequently in Revolution. And whatever each man believed in, he hammered at steadily, without scepticism: and there was a time when the Established Church might have fallen, and the House of Lords nearly fell. It was because Radicals were wise enough to be constant and consistent; it was because Radicals were wise enough to be conservative. . . . Let beliefs fade fast and frequently if you wish institutions to remain the same. The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself. The net result of all our political suggestions, Collectivism, Tolstoyanism, Neo-Feudalism, Communism, Anarchy, Scientific Bureaucracy—the plain fruit of them all is that Monarchy and the House of Lords will remain. The net result of all the new religions will be that the Church of Englandwill not (for heaven knows how long) be disestablished. It was Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Cunninghame Graham, Bernard Shaw, and Auberon Herbert, who between them, with bowed, gigantic backs, bore up the throne of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
It is on these grounds that we must believe that, even as the Church survives, and prevails, in order to get a hearing when the atheist and the New Theologian have finished shouting themselves hoarse at each other, so must political creeds be in conformity with the doctrines of the Church. Such is the foundation of democracy, according to Chesterton. Will anybody revise his political views on this basis? Probably not. Every Christian believes that his political opinions are thoroughly Christian, and so entire is the disrepute into which atheism has fallen as a philosophy of life, that a great many atheists likewise protest the entire Christianity of their politics. We are all democrats to-day, in one sense or another; each of us more loosely than his neighbour. It is strange that by the criterion of almost every living man who springs to the mind as a representative democrat, Chesterton is the most undemocratic of us all. This, however, needs a separate chapter of explanation.
Somewhereat the back of all Chesterton's political and religious ideas lies an ideal country, a Utopia which actually existed. Its name is the Middle Ages. If some unemployed Higher Critic chose to undertake the appalling task of reading steadily through all the works of G.K.C., copying out those passages in which there was any reference to the Middle Ages, the result would be a description of a land flowing with milk and honey. The inhabitants would be large, strong Christian men, and red-haired, womanly women. Their children would be unschooled, save by the Church. They would all live in houses of their own, on lands belonging to them. Their faith would be one. They would speak Latin as a sort of Esperanto, and drink enormous quantities of good beer. The Church—but I have found the passage relating to the Church:
Religion, the immortal maiden, has been a maid-of-all-work as well as a servant of mankind. Sheprovided men at once with the theoretic laws of an unalterable cosmos; and also with the practical rules of the rapid and thrilling game of morality. She taught logic to the student and taught fairy tales to the children; it was her business to confront the nameless gods whose fear is on all flesh, and also to see that the streets were spotted with silver and scarlet, that there was a day for wearing ribbons or an hour for ringing bells.
Religion, the immortal maiden, has been a maid-of-all-work as well as a servant of mankind. Sheprovided men at once with the theoretic laws of an unalterable cosmos; and also with the practical rules of the rapid and thrilling game of morality. She taught logic to the student and taught fairy tales to the children; it was her business to confront the nameless gods whose fear is on all flesh, and also to see that the streets were spotted with silver and scarlet, that there was a day for wearing ribbons or an hour for ringing bells.
The inhabitants of this happy realm would be instinctively democratic, and no woman would demand a vote there. They would have that exalted notion of patriotism that works outwards from the village pump to the universe at large. They would understand all humanity because they understood themselves. They would understand themselves because they would have no newspapers to widen their interests and so make them shallower.
InMagic, as we have seen, Chesterton's mouthpiece, the Conjuror, gave us to understand that it was better to believe in Apollo than merely to disbelieve in God. The Chestertonian Middle Ages are like Apollo; they did not exist, but they make an admirable myth. For Chesterton, in common with the rest of us, flourishes on myths like the green bay; we, however, happen not to know, in most cases, when our myths have a foundation.Mankind demands myths—and it has them. Some day a History of the World's Myths will be compiled. It will show humanity climbing perilous peaks in pursuit of somebody's misinterpretations of somebody else's books, or fighting bloodily because somebody asserted or denied that a nation was the chosen one, or invading new continents, physical or metaphysical, because of legendary gold to be found therein, or in fact committing all its follies under the inspiration of myths—as in fact it has done. The Middle Ages are to Chesterton what King Alfred was to the Chartists and early Radicals. They believed that in his days England was actually governed on Chartist principles. So it happens that two Radical papers of the early part of last century actually called themselves The Alfred, and that Major Cartwright spent a considerable amount of energy in inducing the Greeks to substitute pikes for bayonets in their struggles against the Turks, on the grounds that the pike was used in Alfred's England.
So there we have Chesterton believing devoutly that that servile state, stricken with plague, and afflicted with death in all its forms, is the dreamland of the saints. His political principles, roughly speaking, are England was decent once—let us apply the same recipe tothe England of to-day. His suggestions, therefore, are rather negative than positive. He would dam the flood of modern legislative tendencies because it is taking England farther away from his Middle Ages. But he will not say "do this" about anything, because in the Middle Ages they made few laws, not having, in point of fact, the power to enforce those offences against moral and economic law which then took the place of legislation.
It is impossible to say to what extent Chesterton has surrendered himself to this myth; whether he has come to accept it because he liked it, or in order to please his friend, Mr. Hilaire Belloc, from whom G.K.C. never differs politically. Once they stood side by side and debated against Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells, arguing from Socialism to beer, and thence to religion.
In January, 1908, Chesterton accepted the invitation of the Editor of The New Age to explain why he did not call himself a Socialist, in spite of his claim to possess "not only a faith in democracy, but a great tenderness for revolution." The explanation is complicated, to say the least. In the first place Chesterton does not want people to share, they should give and take. In the second place, as a democrat (which nobody else is) he has a vastrespect (which nobody else has) for the working classes. And
one thing I should affirm as certain, the whole smell and sentiment and general ideal of Socialism they detest and disdain. No part of the community is so specially fixed in those forms and feelings which are opposite to the tone of most Socialists; the privacy of homes, the control of one's own children, the minding of one's own business. I look out of my back windows over the black stretch of Battersea, and I believe I could make up a sort of creed, a catalogue of maxims, which I am certain are believed, and believed strongly, by the overwhelming mass of men and women as far as the eye can reach. For instance, that an Englishman's house is his castle, and that awful proprieties ought to regulate admission to it; that marriage is a real bond, making jealousy and marital revenge at the least highly pardonable; that vegetarianism and all pitting of animal against human rights is a silly fad; that on the other hand to save money to give yourself a fine funeral is not a silly fad, but a symbol of ancestral self-respect; that when giving treats to friends or children, one should give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them; that there is nothing illogical in being furious because Tommy has been coldly caned by a schoolmistress and then throwing saucepans at him yourself. All these things they believe; they are the only people who do believe them; and they are absolutely and eternally right. They are the ancient sanities of humanity; the ten commandments of man.
A week later, Mr. H. G. Wells, who at that time had not yet broken away from organized Socialism, but was actually a member of the Executive Committee of the Fabian Society, wrote a reply to the case against Socialism which had been stated by Chesterton, and, a week earlier, by Mr. Hilaire Belloc. He attempted to get Chesterton to look facts in the face. He pointed out that as things are "I do not see how Belloc and Chesterton can stand for anything but a strong State as against those wild monsters of property, the strong, big, private owners." Suppose that Chesterton isn't a Socialist, is he more on the side of the Socialists or on that of the Free Trade Liberal capitalists and landlords? "It isn't an adequate reply to say [of Socialism] that nobody stood treat there, and that the simple, generous people like to beat their own wives and children on occasion in a loving and intimate manner, and that they won't endure the spirit of Sidney Webb."
A fortnight later, Chesterton replied. But, though many have engaged with him in controversy, I doubt if anybody has ever pinned him down to a fact or an argument. On this occasion, G.K.C. politely refused even to refer to the vital point of the case of Mr. H. G. Wells. On the other hand he wrote a veryjolly article about beer and "tavern hospitality." The argument marked time for two weeks more, when Mr. Belloc once again entered the lists. The essence of his contribution is "I premise that man, in order to be normally happy, tolerably happy, must own." Collectivism will not let him own. The trouble about the present state of society is that people do not own enough. The remedy proposed will be worse than the disease. Then Mr. Bernard Shaw had a look in.
In the course of his lengthy article he gave "the Chesterbelloc"—"a very amusing pantomime elephant"—several shrewd digs in the ribs. It claimed, according to G.B.S., to be the Zeitgeist. "To which we reply, bluntly, but conclusively, 'Gammon!'" The rest was mostly amiable personalities. Mr. Shaw owned up to musical cravings, compared with which the Chesterbelloc tendency to consume alcohol was as nothing. He also jeered very pleasantly at Mr. Belloc's power to cause a stampede of Chesterton's political and religious ideas. "For Belloc's sake Chesterton says he believes literally in the Bible story of the Resurrection. For Belloc's sake he says he is not a Socialist. On a recent occasion I tried to drive him to swallow the Miracle of St. Januarius for Belloc's sake; but at that he stuck. He pleaded hisbelief in the Resurrection story. He pointed out very justly that I believe in lots of things just as miraculous as the Miracle of St. Januarius; but when I remorselessly pressed the fact that he did not believe that the blood of St. Januarius reliquefies miraculously every year, the Credo stuck in his throat like Amen in Macbeth's. He had got down at last to his irreducible minimum of dogmatic incredulity, and could not, even with the mouth of the bottomless pit yawning before Belloc, utter the saving lie."
By this time the discussion was definitely off Socialism. Chesterton produced another article,The Last of the Rationalists, in reply to Mr. Shaw, from which one gathered what one had been previously suspected that "you [namely Mr. Shaw, but in practice both the opposition controversialists] have confined yourselves to charming essays on our two charming personalities." And there they stopped.
The year following this bout of personalities saw the publication of a remarkably brilliant book by Chesterton,George Bernard Shaw, in which, one might have expected, the case against the political creed represented by G.B.S. might have been carried a trifle farther. Instead of which it was not carried anythinglike so far. Chesterton jeered at Mr. Shaw's vegetarianism, denied his democracy, but decided that on the whole he was a good republican, "in the literal and Latin sense; he cares more for the Public Thing than for any private thing." He ends the chapter entitled "The Progressive" by saying the kindest things he ever said about any body of Socialists.
I have in my time had my fling at the Fabian Society, at the pedantry of schemes, the arrogance of experts; nor do I regret it now. But when I remember that other world against which it reared its bourgeois banner of cleanliness and common sense, I will not end this chapter without doing it decent honour. Give me the drain pipes of the Fabians rather than the panpipes of the later poets; the drain pipes have a nicer smell.
I have in my time had my fling at the Fabian Society, at the pedantry of schemes, the arrogance of experts; nor do I regret it now. But when I remember that other world against which it reared its bourgeois banner of cleanliness and common sense, I will not end this chapter without doing it decent honour. Give me the drain pipes of the Fabians rather than the panpipes of the later poets; the drain pipes have a nicer smell.
The reader may have grasped by this time the fact that Chesterton's objections to Socialism were based rather on his dislike of what the working man calls "mucking people about" than on any economic grounds. He made himself the sworn enemy of any Bill before Parliament which contained any proposals to appoint inspectors. He took the line that the sacredness of the home diminishes visibly with the entrance of the gas collector, and disappears down the kitchen sink with the arrival of the school attendance officer. In those of hiswritings which I have not seen I have no doubt there are pleadings for the retention of the cesspool, because it is the last moat left to the Englishman's house, which is his castle. It is difficult to believe in the complete sincerity of such an attitude. The inspector is the chief enemy of the bad landlord and employer, he is a fruit of democracy. In the early days of the factory system, when mercilessly long hours were worked by children and women, when legislation had failed to ameliorate the conditions of employment, because the employers were also the magistrates, and would not enforce laws against themselves, the great Reform Bill agitation, which so nearly caused a revolution in this country, came to an end, having in 1832 achieved a partial success. But the new House of Commons did not at once realize how partial it was, and at first it regarded the interests of working men with something of the intensity of the Liberal Government of 1906, which had not yet come to appreciate the new and portentous Labour Party at its true worth. So in 1833 inspectors were appointed for the first time. This very brief excursion into history is sufficient justification for refusing to take seriously those who would have us believe that inspectors are necessarily the enemies of the human race.Chesterton's theory that middle-class Socialists are people who want to do things to the poor in the direction of regimenting them finds an easy refutation. When, in 1910, the whole of England fell down before the eloquence of Mr. Lloyd George, and consented to the Insurance Bill, the one body of people who stood out and fought that Bill was that middle-class Socialist body, the Fabian Society. It is sometimes desirable, for purposes of controversy, to incarnate a theory or objection. Chesterton lumped together all his views on the alleged intentions of the Socialists to interfere in the natural and legitimate happinesses of the working class, and called this curious composite Mr. Sidney Webb. So through many volumes Mr. Webb's name is continually bobbing up, like an irrepressible Aunt Sally, and having to be thwacked into a temporary disappearance. But this is only done for literary effect. To heave a brick at a man is both simpler and more amusing than to arraign a system or a creed. A reader enjoys the feeling that his author is a clever dog who is making it devilishly uncomfortable for his opponents. His appreciation would be considerably less if the opponent in question was a mere theory. In point of fact, Chesterton is probably a warm admirer of Mr. and Mrs.Sidney Webb. When they founded (in 1909) their National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution, designed to educate the British public in the ideas of what has been called Webbism, especially those contained in the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission, one of the first to join was G. K. Chesterton.
The word Socialism covers a multitude of Socialists, some of whom are not. The political faith of a man, therefore, must not be judged upon his attitude towards Socialism, if we have anything more definite to go upon. Chesterton overflows, so to speak, with predilections, such as beer (in a political sense, of course), opposition to the Jingo, on the one hand, and to middle-class faddery, such as vegetarianism, on the other, and so on. Anybody might indulge in most of his views, in fact, without incurring severe moral reprobation. But there is an exception which, unfortunately, links Chesterton pretty firmly with the sweater, and other undesirable lords of creation. He is an anti-suffragist.
In a little essay Chesterton once wrote on Tolstoy, he argued that the thing that has driven men mad was logic, from the beginning of time, whereas the thing that has kept them sane was mysticism. Tolstoy, lacking mysticism, was at the mercy of his pitiless logic,which led him to condemn things which are entirely natural and human. This attitude, one feels (and it is only to be arrived at by feeling), is absolutely right. We all start off with certain scarce expressible feelings that certain things are fundamentally decent and permissible, and that others are the reverse, just as we do not take our idea of blackness and whiteness from a text-book. If anybody proposed that all Scotsmen should be compelled to eat sago with every meal, the idea, although novel to most of us, would be instantly dismissed, even, it is probable, by those with sago interests, because it would be contrary to our instinct of what is decent. In fact, we all believe in natural rights, or at any rate we claim the enjoyment of some. Now natural rights have no logical basis. The late Professor D. G. Ritchie very brilliantly examined the theory of natural rights, and by means of much subtle dissection and argument found that there were no natural rights; law was the only basis of privilege. It is quite easy to be convinced by the author's delightful dialectic, but the conviction is apt to vanish suddenly in the presence of a dog being ill-treated.
Now on a basis of common decency—the basis of all democratic political thought—thecase for woman suffrage is irresistible. It is not decent that the sweated woman worker should be denied what, in the opinion of many competent judges, might be the instrument of her salvation. It is not decent that women should share a disqualification with lunatics, criminals, children, and no others of their own race. It is not decent that the sex which knows most about babies should have no opportunity to influence directly legislation dealing with babies. It is not decent that a large, important and necessary section of humanity, with highly gregarious instincts, should not be allowed to exercise the only gregarious function which concerns the whole nation at once.
These propositions are fundamental; if a man or woman cannot accept them, then he is at heart an "anti," even if he has constructed for himself a quantity of reasons, religious, ethical, economic, political or what not, why women should be allowed to vote. Every suffrage argument is, or can be, based on decencies, not on emotion or statistics.
Chesterton bases his case on decencies, but they are not the decencies that matter. InWhat's Wrong with the Worldhe insists on the indecency of allowing women to cease to be amateurs within the home, or of allowing them to earn a living in a factory or office, or ofallowing them to share in the responsibility for taking the lives of condemned murderers, or of allowing them to exercise the coercion which is government, which is a sort of pyramid, with a gallows on top, the ultimate resort of coercive power. And in these alleged indecencies (the word is not altogether my own) lies Chesterton's whole case against allowing any woman to vote. Into these propositions his whole case, as expressed inWhat's Wrong with the World, is faithfully condensed.
Well now, are these indecencies sincere or simulated? First, as regards the amateur, Chesterton's case is that the amateur is necessary, in order to counteract the influences of the specialist. Man is nowadays the specialist. He is confined to making such things as the thousandth part of a motor-car or producing the ten-thousandth part of a daily newspaper. By being a specialist he is made narrow. Woman, with the whole home on her hands, has a multiplicity of tasks. She is the amateur, and as such she is free. If she is put into politics or industry she becomes a specialist, and as such becomes a slave. This is a pretty piece of reasoning, but it is absolutely hollow. There are few women who do not gladly resign part at least of their sovereignty, if they have the chance, to a maid-servant (who may be,and, in fact, usually is an amateur, but is not free to try daring experiments) or to such blatant specialists as cooks and nursemaids. Nobody is the least bit shocked by the existence of specialist women. Indeed, it is a solemn fact, that were it not for them Chesterton would be unable to procure a single article of clothing. He would be driven to the fig-leaf, and would stand a good chance of not getting even so much, now that so many gardeners are women. We are terribly dependent upon the specialist woman. That is why the amateur within the home is beginning to wonder whether, on the whole, manisso very much dependent upon her. She comes to rely more and more upon the specialist women to help her feed, clothe, and nurse her husband. She has so much done for her that she comes to understand the remainder left to her far better. She becomes a specialist herself, and feels kindly towards other specialists. Then she demands a vote and meets Chesterton, who tells her to go and mind the baby and be as free as she likes with the domestic apparatus for making pastry, when her baby is in point of fact being brought up by other women at a Montessori school to be much more intelligent and much more of a specialist than she herself is ever likely to be, and when she knows thather dyspeptic husband has an absolute loathing for the amateurishness that expresses itself in dough.
Then there is the alleged wrongness of permitting women to work in factories and offices. We are all probably prepared to admit that we have been shocked at the commercial employment of women. But it has probably occurred to few of us that the shock was due simply to their commercial employment. It was due to their low wages and to the beastliness of their employers. When they drew decent wages and their employers were decent men we were not the least bit hurt. But when an employer made use of the amateurishness of young girls to underpay them, and then make deductions from their wages on various trivial pretexts, and put them to work in overcrowded factories and offices, then we all felt acutely that an indecency was being committed. The obvious democratic remedy is the duckpond, but in our great cities none remain. So one is sorrowfully brought round to the slower but surer expedient of attacking and destroying the amateurishness of women at the point where it is dangerous to them. Amateurishness has encircled women in the past like the seven rivers of Hades. Every now and again a daring excursion was made inorder that the wisdom of those imprisoned within should be added to our store. A good deal of aboriginal amateurishness has been evaporating as the woman doctor has been taking the place of the time-honoured amateur dispenser of brimstone and treacle, and even horrider things. And will Chesterton maintain that it were better for us all if certain women had remained amateurs and had not studied and specialized so that, in time of need, they were enabled to tend the sick and wounded at home, in Flanders and in France, and wherever the powers of evil had been at work?
Lastly, is it decent that women should share the awful responsibility which is attached to the ultimate control of the State, when the State is compelled to use the gallows? If women vote, they are responsible for whatever blood is shed by the State. Yes, but, Mr. Chesterton, aren't they just as responsible for it in any case? Don't women help to pay the hangman's wages with every ounce of tea or of sweets they buy? If capital punishment is obscene, then we can do without it, and a woman's vote will not make her a sharer in the evil. If capital punishment is morally stimulating to the nation at large, there is no reason why women should not be allowed to share in the stimulation. Now what hasbecome of Chesterton's decencies? It is indeed saddening that a man who never misses an opportunity to proclaim himself a democrat should take his stand on this matter beside Lord Curzon, and in opposition to the instinctively and essentially democratic views proclaimed by such men as Messrs. H. W. Nevinson and Philip Snowden.
In an article in The Illustrated London News on June 1st, 1912, Chesterton showed whose side he was on with unusual distinctness. The subject of the article was Earnestness; the moral, that it was a bad quality, the property of Socialists and Anti-Socialists, and Suffragists, and that apathy was best of all. It concluded: