Yours always
You write wonderful praise and it leaves me all aquiver. My warmest thanks for it. But indeed that wonderful fairness of mind is very largely a kind of funk in me—I know the creature from the inside—funk and something worse, a kind of deep, complex cunning. Well anyhow you take the superficial merit with infinite charity—and it has inflated me and just for a time I am an air balloon over the heads of my fellow creatures.
Yours ever
Gilbert loved to praise his fellows in the field of letters even when their philosophy differed from his own. In the obituaries inG.K.'s Weeklythis is especially noticeable. Of two men of letters who died in 1928, he wrote with respect and admiration although with a mind divided between pure literary appreciation and those principles whereby he instinctively measured all things. Of Sir Edmund Gosse he wrote "The men from whom we would consent to learn are dying." G.K. felt he could never himself appreciate without judging, but he could learn from Gosse a uniquely "sensitive impartiality." With him "there passes away a great and delicate spirit which might in some sense be called the spirit of the eighteenth century; which might indeed be very rightly called the spirit of reason and civilisation."*
[* May 26th, 1928.]
"These are the things we hoped would stay and they are going," he quoted from Swinburne, and of him and of Hardy, who died in 1928, and in whom he saluted "an honourable dignity and simplicity" he felt that though they had stated something false about the universe—that all the good things are fugitive and only the bad things unchanged—yet ". . . something rather like it might be a half truth about the world. I mean about the modern world. . . ." These poets lamented the passing of roses and sunbeams, but in the modern world
it is rather as if, in some inverted witchcraft the rose tree withered and faded from sight, and the rose leaves remained hovering in empty air. It is as if there could be sunbeams when there was no more sun. It is not only the better but the bigger and stronger part of a thing that is sacrificed to the small and secondary part. The real evil in the change that has been passing over Society is the fact that it has sapped foundations and, worse still, has not shaken the palaces and spires. It is as if there was a disease in the world that only devours the bones. We have not weakened the gilded parody of marriage, we have only weakened the marriage: . . . we have not abolished the House of Lords because it was not democratic. We have merely preserved the aristocracy, on condition that it shall not be aristocratic. . . . We have not yet even disestablished the Church; but there is a very pressing proposal that we should turn out of it the only people who really believe it is the Church. . . . There is now in the minds of nearly all Capitalists a sort of corrupt communism. . . . the Bank remains, The Fund remains, The Foreign Financier remains, Parliamentary Procedure remains, Jix remains. These are the things we hoped would go; but they are staying.
Sixteen years earlier Chesterton had inThe Victorian Age in Literaturecharacterised Hardy's novels as "the village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot." Yet Cyril Clemens has told me that Hardy recited to him some of Chesterton's poetry, and I think this obituary links with that fact in showing that a profound difference in their philosophy of life did not prevent a mutual appreciation and even admiration.
Gilbert Chesterton entered the last years of his life having made no enemies in the exceedingly sensitive literary world to which he primarily belonged. Whether he had made any in the world of politics I do not know, but he certainly felt no enmities. He said once it was impossible to hate anything except an idea, and to him I think it was. Against one politician who died in 1930 he had many years ago launched his strongest bit of ironical writing—Lord Birkenhead, then F. E. Smith, who had spoken of the Welsh Disestablishment Bill as having "shocked the conscience of every Christian community in Europe."—The last lines of Chesterton's mordant answer ran
For your legal cause or civilYou fight well and get your fee;For your God or dream or devilYou will answer, not to me.Talk about the pews and steeplesAnd the cash that goes therewith:But the souls of Christian peoples . . .Chuck it, Smith.
Later, Smith had stood with Sir Edward Carson against Cecil Chesterton at the old Bailey. Now he was dead and many who had feared him in his lifetime were blackening his memory with subtle sneers and innuendo. Gilbert refused to join in this and he wrote in his paper: "In him we were confronted by and fought, not a set of principles but a man. . . . Lord Birkenhead was a great fighter! with one more pagan virtue—pride—he would have been a great pagan."
Lord Balfour died in the same year. With him neither the paper nor its editor had fought personally, but upon almost all his policies had stood in opposition. Yet few better appreciations of him appeared than the article entitled by Chesterton "A Man of Distinction."
The English squire was an unconscious aristocrat; the Scotch laird was a conscious aristocrat; and Lord Balfour with all his social grace and graciousness, was conscious and even self-conscious. But this was only another way of saying that he had a mind which mirrored everything, including himself; and that, whatever else he did, he did not act blindly or in the dark. He was sometimes quite wrong; but his errors were purely patriotic; both in the narrow sense of nationalism and in the larger sense of loyalty and disinterestedness.
He instances Balfour's policies in Ireland and Egypt and continues:
In some ways he seems to me to have been too good a Stoic to be entirely a good Christian; or rather (to put it more correctly) to feel, like the rest of us, that he was a bad Christian. . . . There was much more in him of the Scotch Puritan than of the English Cavalier.
It is supremely characteristic of the present Parliamentary atmosphere that everybody accused Lord Balfour of incomprehensible compromise and vagueness, because he was completely logical and absolutely clear. Clarity does look like a cloud of confusion to people whose minds live in confusion twice confounded. . . .
. . . people said his distinctions were fine distinctions; and so they were; very fine indeed. A fine distinction is like a fine painting or a fine poem or anything else fine; a triumph of the human mind . . . the great power of distinction; by which a man becomes in the true sense distinguished.*
[* March 29, 1930.]
The distinction Mr. Swinnerton draws* between Belloc and Chesterton may be a little too absolute, but substantially it is right. "One reason for the love of Chesterton was that while he fought he sang lays of chivalry and in spite of all his seriousness warred against wickedness rather than a fleshly opponent, while Belloc sang only after the battle and warred against men as well as ideas."
[*Georgian Scene, p. 88.]
Did the tendency to find good in his opponents, did Chesterton's universal charity deaden, as Belloc believes, the effect of his writing?
He wounded none, but thus also he failed to provide weapons wherewith one may wound and kill folly. Now without wounding and killing, there is no battle; and thus, in this life, no victory; but also no peril to the soul through hatred.*
[*The Place of Chesterton in English Letters, p. 81.]
In various controversies during the final years ofG.K.'s Weeklythe very opposite opinion is expressed. Hoffman Nickerson writes of the "subversive" nature of Chesterton's work, of his giving weapons to Communism and doing his bit towards starting "a very nasty class war" in America. Mr. Nickerson was allowed to develop this theme in a series of articles in Chesterton's own paper. Correspondents too complained often enough in the paper of its attacks on vested interests and on other schools of thought than its own.
In the course of a controversy with Mr. Penty, in which I think G.K. most distinctly misunderstood his opponent but in which both men kept the friendliest tone, Penty says that Chesterton treats as a drive much that he himself would call a drift: that the mind is more in fault than the will of mankind in getting the world into its present mess. With this diagnosis Chesterton certainly agreed for the greater part of mankind. He spoke often of a "madness in the modern mind." Psychology meant "the mind studying itself instead of studying the truth" and it was part of what had destroyed the mind. "Advertisements often tell us to Watch this Blank Space. I confess I do watch that blank space, the modern mind, not so much for what will appear in it, as for what has already disappeared from it."
Thus too when the Rev. Dick Shepherd remarrying a divorced woman—i.e., encouraging her to take again the solemn vow she had already broken—said that he heard the voice of Christ: "Go in peace," it was not for impiety that Chesterton condemned him. He wrote with restraint "There is scarcely a shade of difference left between meaning well and meaning nothing."
Was Penty still right in thinking he saw a drive where he ought to see a drift and Nickerson in thinking he was dangerously subversive in his attitude to the rich? And anyhow what about Belloc?
I incline to think that the truth was that while G.K. could never hate an individual he could hate a group. If he suddenly remembered an individual in that group he hastily excepted him from the group in order to leave the objects of his hatred entirely impersonal. Thus he hated politicians but found real difficulty in hating a politician. He hated what he called the plutocracy, but no individual rich man. I do think however that while believing firmly in original sin he was somewhat inclined to see it as operative more especially in the well-to-do classes. His championship of the poor was in no way impersonal. His burning love and pity went out to every beggar. He tended to love all men but the poor he loved with an undivided heart, and when he thought of them his thoughts grew harsh towards the rich who were collectively their oppressors.
I doubt if he allowed enough for the degree of stupidity required to amass a fortune. He would have agreed that love of money narrowed the mind: I doubt if he fully grasped that only a mind already narrow can love money so exclusively as to pursue it successfully. And I am pretty sure he did not allow enough for the fact that rich like poor are caught today in the machinery they have created. He saw the bewildered, confused labourer who has lost his liberty: he failed to see the politician also bewildered, the millionaire also confused, afraid to let go for fear he might be submerged. And yet at moments he did see it. He wrote in the paper a short series of articles on men of the nineteenth century who had created the confusion of today; on Malthus, Adam Smith and Darwin. Far from its being true that supernatural religion had first been destroyed and morality lost in consequence, it had been the Christian morality that was first destroyed in the mind. G.K. summarised Adam Smith's teachings as: "God so made the world that He could achieve the good if men were sufficiently greedy for the goods." Thus the man of today "whenever he is tempted to be selfish half remembers Smith and self-interest. Whenever he would harden his heart against a beggar, he half remembers Malthus and a book about population; whenever he has scruples about crushing a rival he half remembers Darwin and his scruples become unscientific." Because none of these theories were in their own day seen as heresies and denounced as heresies they have lived on vaguely to poison the atmosphere and the mind of today.
English Conservatives had been shocked when Chesterton began: Mr. Nickerson was shocked when he was ending: because he demanded a revolution. Surely, Mr. Nickerson said, if he looked at Communism closely he would prefer Capitalism. He not only would, he constantly said he did. But he wanted a Revolution from both: he preferred that it should not be "nasty" for what he wanted was the Christian Revolution. Like all revolutions however it must begin in the mind and he felt less and less hopeful as he watched that blank space.
But I do not believe that Chesterton failed because he had not at his command the weapon of hatred. Here Belloc surely makes the same mistake that Swift (whom he instances) made and for the same reason. The Frenchman and the Irishman understand the rapier of biting satire as does not the Englishman: for direct abuse of anyone, no matter how richly merited, nearly always puts the Englishman on the side of the man who is being abused. What happened to Swift's Gulliver—that most fierce attack upon the human race? The English people drew its sting and turned it into a nursery book that has delighted their children ever since. There are more ways than one of winning a battle: you can win the man instead of the argument and Chesterton won many men. Or you can take a weapon that once belonged chiefly to the enemy but which Chesterton wrested from him; a very useful weapon: the laugh.
Orthodoxy, doctrinal and moral, was a lawful object of amusement to Voltaire and his followers but now the laugh has passed to the other side and Chesterton was (with Belloc himself) the first to seize this powerful weapon. Thus when Bishop Barnes of Birmingham said that St. Francis was dirty and probably had fleas many Catholics were furious and spoke in solemn wrath. Chesterton wrote the simple verse
A Broad-minded Bishop Rebukes the Verminous Saint Francis
If Brother Francis pardoned Brother FleaThere still seems need of such strange charitySeeing he is, for all his gay goodwillBitten by funny little creatures still.
I shall never forget going to hear Chesterton debate on Birth Control with some Advanced Woman or other. Outside the hall were numbers of her satellites offering their literature. I was just about to say something unpleasant to one of them when a verse flashed into my mind:
If I had been a Heathen,I'd have crowned Neaera's curls,And filled my life with love affairs,My house with dancing girls!But Higgins is a HeathenAnd to lecture-rooms is forcedWhere his aunts who are not marriedDemand to be divorced.
The rebuke died on my lips: why get angry with the poor old aunts of Higgins demanding the destruction of their unconceived and inconceivable babies?
Swinburne had mocked at Christian virtue but the Dolores ofChesterton replied to him:
I am sorry old dear if I hurt you,No doubt it is all very nice,With the lilies and languors of virtueAnd the raptures and roses of vice.But the notion impels me to angerThat vice is all rapture for me,And if you think virtue is languorJust try it and see.
But in fact G.K. did not merely use laughter as a weapon: he was often simply amused—and did not conceal it. He told Desmond Gleeson that he remembered reading Renan's Christ "while I was standing in the queue waiting to see 'Charley's Aunt.' But it is obvious which is the better farce for 'Charley's Aunt' is still running." No wonder that Eileen Duggan when she pictured him as a modern St. George saw him "shouting gleefully 'Bring on your dragons.'" Even dragons may be bothered by the unexpected. And it may well be that when the rapier of anger has been blunted against the armour of some accustomed fighter he will be driven off the field by gales of Chestertonian laughter.
Our Lady's Tumbler
I hate to be influenced. I like to be commanded or to be free. In both of these my own soul can take a clear and conscious part: for when I am free it must be for something that I really like, and not something that I am persuaded to pretend to like: and when I am commanded, it must be by something I know, like the Ten Commandments. But the thing called Pressure, of which the polite name is Persuasion, I always feel to be a hidden enemy. It is all a part of that worship of formlessness, and flowing tendencies, which is really the drift of cosmos back into chaos. I remember how I suddenly recoiled in youth from the influence of Matthew Arnold (who said many things very well worth saying) when he told me that God was "a stream of tendency." Since then I have hated tendencies: and liked to know where I was going and go there—or refuse.
G.K.'s Weekly, Aug. 18, 1928.
IN 1932, WHEN Gilbert had been in the Church just ten years and Frances six, my husband and I met them at the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. They were staying at the Vice-Regal Lodge and were very happy in that gathering of the Catholic world brought about by the Congress. It was this thought of the potential of the faith for a unity the League of Nations could not achieve—only dogma is strong enough to unite mankind—that gave its title to the bookChristendom in Dublin.
In the crowd that thronged to that great gathering he saw Democracy. Its orderliness was more than a mere organisation: it was Self-determination of the People. "A whole mob, what many would call a whole rabble, was doing exactly what it wanted; and what it wanted was to be Christian." The mind of that crowd was stretched over the centuries as the faint sound of St. Patrick's bell that had been silent so many centuries was heard in Phoenix Park at the Consecration of the Mass: it was stretched over the earth as the people of the earth gathered into one place which had become for the time Rome or the Christian Centre.
During the Congress an Eastern priest accosted G.K. with praise of his writings. His own mind full of the great ideas of Christendom and the Faith, he felt a huge disproportion in the allusion to himself. And when later the priest asked to be photographed at his side it flashed through G.K.'s mind that he had heard in the East that an idiot was supposed to bring luck. This sort of humorous yet sincere intellectual humility startles us in the same kind of way as does the spiritual humility of the saints. We have to accept it in the same kind of way—without in the least understanding it, but simply because we cannot fail to see it.
But the world could fail even to see it. It could and did fail in imagining a mind so absorbed in the contemplation of Infinite Greatness that its own pin-point littleness became an axiom: rather it seemed an affectation—none the less an affectation and much the less pardonable because the laughter was directed against others as well as against himself.
There is an old mediaeval story of a tumbler who, converted and become a monk, found himself inapt at the offices of Choir and Scriptorium so he went before a statue of Our Lady and there played all his tricks. Quite exhausted at last he looked up at the statue and said, "Lady, this is a choice performance." There is more than a touch of Our Lady's tumbler in Gilbert. He knew he could give in his own fashion a choice performance, but meeting a priest come from a far land where he had reconciled a hitherto schismatic group with the great body of the Catholic Church, who could forgive sins and offer the Holy Sacrifice, he truly felt "something disproportionate in finding one's own trivial trade, or tricks of the trade, amid the far-reaching revelations of such a trysting-place of all the tribes of men."*
[*Christendom in Dublin, p. 35.]
His awe and reverence for priests was, says Father Rice, enormous. "He would carefully weigh their opinion however fatuous." His comment on the bad statues and fripperies which so many Catholics find a trial was: "It shows the wisdom of the Church. The whole thing is so terrific that if people did not have these let-downs they would go mad."
Yet it may have been a fear of excess of this special let-down that made him reluctant to go to Lourdes. Lisieux he never liked but he was, Dorothy says, fascinated by Lourdes when she persuaded him to go. He went several times to the torch-light procession and he said as he had said in Dublin, "This is the only real League of Nations."
The thing he liked best in Dublin was the spontaneous outburst of little altars and amateur decorations in the poorest quarters of the city. The story he loved to tell was that of the old woman who said when on the last day the clouds looked threatening: "Well, if it rains now He will have brought it on Himself."
The year of the Congress two other books were published:Sidelights on New London and Newer York, already discussed, andChaucer. The books contrast agreeably: one throwing the ideal against the real of his own day, the other evoking his ideal from the past. TheChaucerwas much criticised—chiefly because he was not a Chaucer scholar. As a matter of fact the notion of his writing this book did not originate with Chesterton but with Richard de la Mare who had projected a series of essays called "The Poets on the Poets." This developed, still at his suggestion, into a literary biography of Chaucer. But in any event G.K. had all his life combatted the notion that only a scholar should write on such themes. He stood resolutely for the rights of the amateur: yet I think the scholar might well start off with some exasperation on reading that if Chaucer had been called the Father of English poetry, so had "an obscure Anglo-Saxon like Caedmon," whose writing was "not in that sense poetry and not in any sense English." It is a curious example of one of the faults Chesterton himself most hated—overlooking something because it was too big: something too that he had realised in an earlier work—for Caedmon spoke the language of Alfred the Great.
In a brilliant garnering of the fruits of her scholarship—Word Hoard—Margaret Williams has quoted Chesterton's Alfred as a stirring expression of the significance of the spiritual conquest of England by Christianity. In the same book she shows how superficial is the view which believes that the English language was a creation of the Norman Conquest. The struggle, she says "between the English and French tongues lasted for some three hundred years, until the two finally blended into a unified language, basically Teutonic, richly romantic. The English spirit emerged predominant by a moral victory over its conqueror. . . ."*
[*Word Hoardby Margaret Williams, p. 4.]
No one would wish that Chesterton should have ignored the immense debt owed by our language to the French tributary that so enriched its main stream, but it seems strange that in his hospitable mind, in which Alfred's England held so large a place, he should not have found room for an appreciation of the Saxon structure of Chaucer and for all that makes him unmistakably one in a line of which Caedmon was the first great poet. In this book, only his debt to France is stressed, because England is to be thought of as part of Europe—and the part she is a part of is apparently France!
Yet what excellent things there are in the book:
The great poet exists to show the small man how great he is. . . .
The great poet is alone strong enough to measure that broken strength we call the weakness of man.
The real vice of the Victorians was that they regarded history as a story that ended well because it ended with the Victorians. They turned all human records into one three-volume novel; and were quite sure that they themselves were the third volume.
He quotes Troilus and Cressida on "The Christian majesty of the mystery of marriage":
Any man who really understands it does not see a Greek King sitting on an ivory throne, nor a feudal lord sitting on a faldstool but God in a primordial garden, granting the most gigantic of the joys of the children of men.
When we talk of wild poetry, we sometimes forget the parallel of wild flowers. They exist to show that a thing may be more modest and delicate for being wild.
Romance was a strange by-product of Religion; all the more because Religion, through some of its representatives may have regretted having produced it. . . . Even the Church, as imperfectly represented on its human side, contrived to inspire even what it had denounced, and transformed even what it had abandoned.
The best chapter is the last: The Moral of the Story—and that moral is: "That no man should desert that [Catholic] civilisation. It can cure itself but those who leave it cannot cure it. Not Nestorius, nor Mahomet, nor Calvin, nor Lenin have cured, nor will cure the real evils of Christendom; for the severed hand does not heal the whole body."
Healing must come from a recovery of the norm, of the balance, of the equilibrium that mediaeval philosophy and culture were always seeking. "The meaning of Aquinas is that mediaevalism was always seeking a centre of gravity. The meaning of Chaucer is that, when found, it was always a centre of gaiety. . . ."
The name of Aquinas thus introduced on almost the last page of this book shows Chesterton's mind already busy on the next and perhaps most important book of his life:St. Thomas Aquinas.
"Great news this," wrote Shaw to Frances, "about the Divine Doctor. I have been preaching for years that intellect is a passion that will finally become the most ecstatic of all the passions; and I have cherished Thomas as a most praiseworthy creature for being my forerunner on this point."
When we were told that Gilbert was writing a book on St. Thomas and that we might have the American rights, my husband felt a faint quiver of apprehension. Was Chesterton for once undertaking a task beyond his knowledge? Such masses of research had recently been done on St. Thomas by experts of such high standing and he could not possibly have read it all. Nor should we have been entirely reassured had we heard what Dorothy Collins told us later concerning the writing of it.
He began by rapidly dictating to Dorothy about half the book. So far he had consulted no authorities but at this stage he said to her:
"I want you to go to London and get me some books."
"What books?" asked Dorothy.
"I don't know," said G.K.
She wrote therefore to Father O'Connor and from him got a list of classic and more recent books on St. Thomas. G.K. "flipped them rapidly through," which is, says Dorothy, the only way she ever saw him read, and then dictated to her the rest of his own book without referring to them again. There are no marks on any of them except a little sketch of St. Thomas which was drawn in the margin opposite a description of the affair, which G.K. so vividly dramatises, of Siger of Brabant.
Had we known all this we should have been asking ourselves even more definitely: What will the experts say? Of the verdict of the greatest of them we were not long left in doubt. Etienne Gilson, who has given two of the most famous of philosophical lecture series—the Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen and the William James Lectures at Harvard—had begun his admiration for Chesterton withGreybeards at Playand had thoughtOrthodoxy"the best piece of apologetic the century had produced." WhenSt. Thomasappeared he said to a friend of mine "Chesterton makes one despair. I have been studying St. Thomas all my life and I could never have written such a book." After Gilbert's death, asked to give an appreciation, he returned to the same topic—
I consider it as being without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for such an achievement. Everybody will no doubt admit that it is a "clever" book, but the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty years in studying St. Thomas Aquinas, and who, perhaps, have themselves published two or three volumes on the subject, cannot fail to perceive that the so-called "wit" of Chesterton has put their scholarship to shame. He has guessed all that which they had tried to demonstrate, and he has said all that which they were more or less clumsily attempting to express in academic formulas. Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed; he was deep because he was right; and he could not help being right; but he could not either help being modest and charitable, so he left it to those who could understand him to know that he was right, and deep; to the others, he apologized for being right, and he made up for being deep by being witty. That is all they can see of him.*
[*Chesterton, by Cyril Clemens, pp. 150-151.]
In joining the Church Chesterton had found like all converts, from St. Paul to Cardinal Newman, that he had come into the land of liberty and especially of intellectual liberty. "Conversion," he said, "calls on a man to stretch his mind, as a man awakening from sleep may stretch his arms and legs."*
[*Well and Shallows, p. 130.]
I suppose one of the reasons why the surrounding world finds it hard to receive this statement from a convert is that he has only to look around him to see so many Catholics wrapped in slumbers as placid as the next man's. To this very real difficulty, and to all its implications, Chesterton unfortunately seldom adverted. To the scandal wrought by evil Catholics, historical or contemporary, he was not blind—he summarised one element in the Reformation conflict:
Bad men who had no right to their right reasonGood men who had good reason to be wrong.
But I wish that with his rare insight into minds he had analysed us average Catholics. He might have startled us awake by explaining to non-Catholicshowthose who know such Truths and feed upon such Food can yet appear so dull and lifeless. Anyhow, whether the fault lie in part with us or entirely with the world at large, certain it is that in that world a convert is always expected to justify not merely his beliefs but his sincerity in continuing to hold them. I wonder if the Pharisees said of St. Paul that they were sure he really wanted to return to his old allegiance as some said it of Newman, or spoke as Arnold Bennett did when he accused Chesterton of being Modernist in his secret thoughts? Were St. Paul's epistles an Apologia pro Vita Sua?
An Apologia does not of course mean an apology but a justification, and the ground on which justification was sometimes demanded amused Gilbert rather than annoying him. Playing the Parlour Game which consists of guessing at what point in an article on hydraulics, elegiacs or neo-Platonism Dean Inge will burst into his daily attack on the Church, he wrote:
The Dean of St. Paul's got to business, in a paragraph in the second half of his article, in which he unveiled to his readers all the horrors of a quotation from Newman; a very shocking and shameful passage in which the degraded apostate says that he is happy in his religion, and in being surrounded by the things of his religion; that he likes to have objects that have been blessed by the holy and beloved, that there is a sense of being protected by prayers, sacramentals and so on; and that happiness of this sort satisfies the soul. The Dean, having given us this one ghastly glimpse of the Cardinal's spiritual condition, drops the curtain with a groan and says it is Paganism. How different from the Christian orthodoxy of Plotinus!*
[*The Thing, pp. 156-7.]
This playful, not to say frivolous, tone was fresh cause of annoyance to those who were apt to be annoyed. It is easier to understand their objection than the opposite one: that he became dull and prosy after he joined the Church (or alternatively after he left Fleet Street for Beaconsfield). The only real difficulty about his later work arises from the riot of his high spirits. In his own style I must say there are moments when even I want to read the Riot Act. And those who admire him less feel this more keenly. Bad puns, they say, wild and sometimes ill-mannered jokes are perhaps pardonable in youth but in middle age they are inexcusable. The complainants againstThe Thingare in substance the complainants againstOrthodoxygrown more vehement with the passage of years.
The idea had been adumbrated of calling one of his books:Joking Apartand only rejected because of the fear that if he said he wasnotjoking everyone would be quite certain that he was. This greatly amused G.K. and he began the book (it actually appeared asThe Well and the Shallows) with "An Apology for Buffoons." After defending the human instinct of punning he remarked that "many moderns suffer from the disease of the suppressed pun." They are actuated even in their thinking by merely verbal association.
I for one greatly prefer the sort of frivolity that is thrown to the surface like froth to the sort of frivolity that festers under the surface like slime. To pelt an enemy with a foolish pun or two will never do him any grave injustice; the firework is obviously a firework and not a deadly fire. It may be playing to the gallery, but even the gallery knows it is only playing.*
[*Well and Shallows, pp. 11-12.]
Such playing was a necessity if the gallery, i.e. all the people, were to be made to listen; if the things you were thinking about were important to them as well as to yourself: if the ideas were more important than the dignity or reputation of the person who uttered them. In this book Gilbert sketched briefly one side of his reason for feeling these ideas of paramount importance for everybody. "My Six Conversions" concerned reasons given him by the world that would have made him become a Catholic if he were not one already.
He had been brought up to treasure liberty and in his boyhood the world had seemed freer than the Church. Today in a world of Fascism, Communism and Bureaucracy the Church alone offered a reasoned liberty. He had been brought up to reverence certain ideals of purity: today they were laughed at everywhere but in the Church. The "sure conclusions" of Science that had stood foursquare in his boyhood had become like a dissolving view. Liberalism had abdicated when the people of Spain freely chose the Church and English Liberals defended the forcing upon them of a minority rule. "There are no Fascists; there are no Socialists; there are no Liberals; there are no Parliamentarians. There is the one supremely inspiring and irritating institution in the world and there are its enemies." Above all, he felt increasingly, as time went on that those who left the Faith did not get Freedom but merely Fashion; that there was something ironic in the name the atheists chose when they called themselves Secularists. By definition they had tied themselves to the fashion of this world that passeth away.
These six conversions then were what the world would have forced upon him: the Church as an alternative to a continually worsening civilisation. While he hated the Utopias of the Futurists and while he accepted the Christian view of life as a probation he felt too that life today was abnormally degraded and unhappy.
There is a sense in which men may be made normally happy; but there is another sense in which we may truly say, without undue paradox, that what they want is to get back to their normal unhappiness. At present they are suffering from an utterly abnormal unhappiness. They have got all the tragic elements essential to the human lot to contend with; time and death and bereavement and unrequited affection and dissatisfaction with themselves. But they have not got the elements of consolation and encouragement that ought normally to renew their hopes or restore their self-respect. They have not got vision or conviction, or the mastery of their work, or the loyalty of their household, or any form of human dignity. Even the latest Utopians, the last lingering representatives of that fated and unfortunate race, do not really promise the modern man that he shall do anything, or own anything, or in any effectual fashion be anything. They only promise that, if he keeps his eyes open, he will see something; he will see the Universal Trust or the World State or Lord Melchett coming in the clouds in glory. But the modern man cannot even keep his eyes open. He is too weary with toil and a long succession of unsuccessful Utopias. He has fallen asleep.*
[*G.K.'s Weekly, October 20, 1928.]
Chesterton demanded urgently that the worldlings who had failed to make the world workable should abdicate. "The organic thing called religion has in fact the organs that take hold on life. It can feed where the fastidious doubter finds no food; it can reproduce where the solitary sceptic boasts of being barren." In short, in religion alone was Darwin justified, for Catholicism was the "spiritual Survival of the Fittest."*
[*Well and Shallows, p. 82.]
If these Six Conversions are read without the balancing of something deeper they have the superficial look that belongs of necessity to Apologetics. Some essays inThe Well and the Shallows, most ofThe Thing, Christendom in Dublin, and above all,The Queen of Seven Swordsgive us that deeper quieter thinking when the mind is meditating upon the great mysteries of the faith.
Only very occasionally is it possible to glimpse beneath Gilbert's reserve, but such glimpses are illuminating. Father Walker, who prepared him for his First Communion, writes, "It was one of the most happy duties I had ever to perform. . . . That he was perfectly well aware of the immensity of the Real Presence on the morning of his First Communion, can be gathered from the fact that he was covered with perspiration when he actually received Our Lord. When I was congratulating him he said, 'I have spent the happiest hour of my life.'"
Yet he went but seldom to Holy Communion, and an unfinished letter to Father Walker gives the reason. "The trouble with me is that I am much too frightened of that tremendous Reality on the altar. I have not grown up with it and it is too much for me. I think I am morbid; but I want to be told so by authority."
And inChristendom in Dublin, he says: "The word Eucharist is but a verbal symbol, we might say a vague verbal mask, for something so tremendous that the assertion and the denial of it have alike seemed a blasphemy; a blasphemy that has shaken the world with the earthquake of two thousand years."
I have heard it said that in these later years Gilbert's writing became obscure, and I think it is partly true. Only partly, for the old clarity is still there except when he is dealing with matters almost too deep for human speech. He wrote inThe Thing:
A thinking man can think himself deeper and deeper into Catholicism . . . the great mysteries like the Blessed Trinity or the Blessed Sacrament are the starting-point for trains of thought . . . stimulating, subtle and even individual. . . . To accept the Logos as a truth is to be in the atmosphere of the absolute, not only with St. John the Evangelist, but with Plato and all the great mystics of the world. . . . To exalt the Mass is to enter into a magnificent world of metaphysical ideas, illuminating all the relations of matter and mind, of flesh and spirit, of the most impersonal abstractions as well as the most personal affections. . . . Even what are called the fine doctrinal distinctions are not dull. They are like the finest operations of surgery; separating nerve from nerve but giving life. It is easy enough to flatten out everything around for miles with dynamite if our only object is to give death. But just as the physiologist is dealing with living tissues so the theologian is dealing with living ideas; and if he draws a line between them it is naturally a very fine line.
If there appears a contradiction in the picture of Chesterton the philosopher pondering on the Logos and Chesterton the child offering trinkets to Our Lady, we may remember the Eternal Wisdom "playing in the world, playing before God always" whose delight is to be with the children of men.
The Living Voice
CHESTERTON SPOKE ONCE of the keen joy for the intellect of discovering the causes of things, but he was not greatly interested in science. He would have said that although the physical sciences did represent an advance in the grasp of truth it was, in the words of Browning, only the "very superficial truth." He desired a knowledge of causes that did not dwell simply on what was secondary but led back to the First and Final Cause. To the mediaeval thinker, science was fascinating as Philosophy's little sister: it was to Philosophy what Nature was to man. Nature had been to St. Francis a little lovely, dancing sister. Science had been to St. Thomas the handmaid of philosophy. The modern world thought these proportions fantastic. Huxley used Nature as a word for God. Physical Science had ousted Philosophy.
An American friend lately told me of a girl who, asked if she believed in God replied, "Sure, I believe in God, but I'm not nuts about Him." Gilbert was not "nuts" about Science: therefore in a world that saw nothing else to be "nuts" about he was called its enemy. And as with other things taken more solemnly by most moderns he preferred to get fun out of the inventions of the age.
He wrote in a fairly early number ofG.K.'s Weekly:
. . . So that the audience in Chicago will have the advantage of hearing Eskimos singing. (Or words to that effect.)
—Wireless Programme.
Oh who would not want such a wonderful thingAs the pleasure of hearing the Eskimos sing?I wish I had Eskimos out on the lawn,Or perched on the window to wake me at dawn:With Eskimos singing in every treeOh that would be glory, be glory for me!
Oh list to the song that the Eskimos sing,When the penguin would be if he could on the wing,Would soar to the sun if he could, like the lark,But for most of the time it is totally dark.
Or hark to the bacchanal songs that resoundWhen they're making a night of it half the year round,And carousing for months till the morning is pale,Go home with the milk of the walrus and whale.
Oh list to the sweet serenades that are hers,Who expensively gowned in most elegant furs,Leans forth from the lattice delighted to knowThat her heart is like ice and her hand is like snow.
* * * * *
God bless all the dear little people who roamAnd hail in the icebergs the hills of their home;For I might not object to be listening inIf I hadn't to hear the whole programme begin.And the President preach international peace,And Parricide show an alarming increase,And a Justice at Bootle excuse the police,And how to clean trousers when spotted with grease,And a pianist biting his wife from caprice,And an eminent Baptist's arrival at Nice,And a banker's regrettably painless decease,And the new quarantine for the plucking of geese,And a mad millionaire's unobtrusive release,And a marquis divorced by a usurer's niece—If all of these items could suddenly ceaseAnd leave me with one satisfactory thingI reallyshouldlike to hear Eskimos sing.
This was hardly the expression of an attitude to science, but he did have such an attitude. Life was to him a story told by God: the people in it the characters in that story. But since the story was told by God it was, quite literally, a magic story, a fairy story, a story full of wonders created by a divine will. As a child a toy telephone rigged up by his father from the house to the end of the garden had breathed that magic quality more than the Transatlantic Cable could reveal it in later life. It did not need mechanical inventions to make him see life as marvellous. His over-ruling interest was not in mechanics but in Will: the will of God had created the laws of nature and could supersede them: the will of Man could discover these laws and harness them to its purposes. Gold is where you find it and the value of science depends on the will of man: a position which may not sound so absurd in the light of the harnessing of science to the purposes of destruction. When discussing machines "we sometimes tend," said Chesterton inSidelights, "to overlook the quiet and even bashful presence of the machine gun."
There was an impishness in Gilbert, especially in his youth, that encouraged the idea of his enmity to science. Where he saw a long white beard he felt like tweaking it: an enquiring nose simply asked to be pulled. It was only in (comparatively) sober age that he bothered inThe Everlasting Manto explain "I am not at issue in this book with sincere and genuine scholars, but with a vast and vague public opinion which has been prematurely spread from certain imperfect investigations."* That "vast and vague public opinion" certainly suspected him of irreverence even towards sincere and genuine scholars. Yet it was by his use of the most marvelous of modern inventions that he won in the end the widest hearing among that public that he had ever known.
[*The Everlasting Man, p. 67.]
It is not so many years ago that we donned earphones in a doubtful hope of being able to hear something over the radio. It is the less surprising that it was only in the last few years of his life that Gilbert became first interested in the invention and presently one of the broadcasters most in request by the B.B.C. He felt about the radio as he did about most modern inventions: that they were splendid opportunities that were not being taken—or else were being taken to the harm of humanity by the wrong people. What was the use of "calling all countries" if you had nothing to say to them.
"What much modern science fails to realise," he wrote, "is that there is little use in knowing without thinking."
And again, writing about the amazing discoveries of the day: "Nobody is taking the smallest trouble to consider who in the future will be in command of the electricity and capable of giving us the shocks. With all the shouting about the new marvels, hardly anybody utters a word or even a whisper about how they are to be prevented from turning into the old abuses. . . . People sometimes wonder why we not infrequently refer to the old scandal covered by the word Marconi. It is precisely because all these things are really covered by that word. There could not be a shorter statement of the contradiction than in men howling that word as a discovery and hushing it up as a story."*
[*G.K.'s Weekly, Aug. 15, 1925.]
For the thing that really frightened him about the radio was its possibilities as a new instrument of tyranny. The British Broadcasting Company holds in England a monopoly and is to a considerable extent under Government control. It is possible to forbid advertising programmes because the costs are met by a tax of 10 sh. a year levied on the possession of a radio set.
In an article called "The Unseen Catastrophe" (January 28, 1928) Gilbert wrote:
Suppose you had told some of the old Whigs, let alone Liberals, that there was an entirely new type of printing press, eclipsing all others; and that as this was to be given to the King, all printing would henceforth be government printing. They would be roaring like rebels, or even regicides, yet that is exactly what we have done with the whole new invention of wireless. Suppose it were proposed that the king's officers should search all private houses to make sure there were no printing presses, they would be ready for a new revolution. Yet that is exactly what is proposed for the protection of the government monopoly of broadcasting. . . . There is really no protection against propaganda . . . being entirely in the hands of the government; except indeed, the incredible empty-headedness of those who govern. . . . On that sort of thing at least, we are all Socialists now. It is wicked to nationalize mines or railroads; but we lose no time in nationalizing tongues and talk . . . we might once have used, and we shall now never use, the twentieth century science against the nineteenth century hypocrisy. It was prevented by a swift, sweeping and intolerant State monopoly; a monster suddenly swallowing all rivals, alternatives, discussions, or delays, with one snap of its gigantic jaws. That is what I mean by saying, "We cannot see the monsters that overcome us." But I suppose that even Jonah, when once he was swallowed, could not see the whale.
In the autumn of 1932 Gilbert was first asked to undertake a series of radio talks for the B.B.C. Every one seems agreed that he was an extraordinary success. Letters from Broadcasting House are full of such remarks as: "You do it admirably," "quite superb at the microphone." In one his work is called "unique." Radio was now added to all his other activities during the four years he still had to live. Dorothy kept a diary in which she noted in one year the giving of as many as forty lectures, and entered reminders of engagements of the most varying kinds all over England: from the King's Garden Party to the Aylesbury Education Committee and the Oxford Union: to Scotland for Rectorial Campaigns: dinners at the Inner Temple and the Philosophical Society: Detection Club dinners and Mock Trials, at one of which he was Defendant on the charge of "perversely preferring the past to the present."
Besides the books discussed in the last chapter, the Dickens'Introductionsand theCollected Poemswere republished in 1933. Other books were planned, including one on Shakespeare.
That same year Gilbert's mother died. During her last illness Frances was torn between London and Beaconsfield, for her own mother was dying in a Nursing Home at Beaconsfield, her mother-in-law at Warwick Gardens. Once I drove with her between the two and she told me how she suffered at the difficulty of giving help to two dying Agnostics. She told me on that drive how she knew her mother-in-law had not liked her but had lately made her very happy by saying she realised now that she had been the right wife for Gilbert. To a cousin, Nora Grosjean, Frances spoke too of how she and Mrs. Edward had drawn together in those last days and she added, "No mother ever thinks any woman good enough for her son." Nora Grosjean also reports, "Aunt Marie said to me more than once, 'I always respect Frances—she kept Gilbert out of debt.'"
Warwick Gardens had been their home so long that vast accumulations of papers had piled up there. "Mister Ed." too had been in a sort keeper of the family archives. Gilbert glanced at the mass and, as I mentioned at the beginning of this book, told the dustman to carry it off. Half had already gone when Dorothy Collins arrived and saved the remainder. She piled it into her car and drove back to Beaconsfield, Gilbert keeping up a running commentary all the way on "the hoarding habits of women."
The money that came to Gilbert and Frances after Mrs. Edward's death made it possible for them to plan legacies not only for friends and relatives but also for the Catholic Church in Beaconsfield with which they had increasingly identified their lives and their interests. Their special dream was that Top Meadow itself should be a convent—best of all a school—and in this hope they bequeathed it to the Church.
A year later another family event, this time a joyful one, took Gilbert back to his youth; Mollie Kidd, daughter of Annie Firmin, became engaged to be married. She was a rather special young cousin to Gilbert both because of the old affection for her mother and because she had played hostess to him in Canada when her mother was ill. He wrote
Postmark. Aug. 28, 1934
I am afraid that chronologically, or by the clock, I am relatively late in sending you my most warm congratulations—and yet I do assure you that I write as one still thrilled and almost throbbing with good news. It would take pages to tell you all I feel about it: beginning with my first memory of your mother, when she was astonishingly like you, except that she had yellow plaits of hair down her back. I do not absolutely insist that you should now imitate her in this: but you would not be far wrong if you imitate her in anything. And so on—till we come to the superb rhetorical passage about You and the right fulfilment of Youth. It would take pages: and that is why the pages are never written. We bad correspondents, we vile non-writers of letters, have a sort of secret excuse, that no one will ever listen to till the Day of Judgment, when all infinite patience will have to listen to so much. It is often because we think so much about our friends that we do not write to them—the letters would be too long. Especially in the case of wretched writing men like me, who feel in their spare time that writing is loathsome and thinking about their friends pleasant. In the course of turning out about ten articles, on Hitler, on Humanism, on determinism, on Distributism, on Dollfuss and Darwin and the Devil knows what, there really are thoughts about real people that cross my mind suddenly and make me really happy in a real way: and one of them is the news of your engagement. Please believe, dear Mollie, that I am writing the truth, though I am a journalist: and give my congratulations to everyone involved.
Yours with love,
And in that year came two bits of public recognition of rather different kinds. He was elected to the Athenaeum Club under Rule II—Honoris causa; and he and Belloc were given by the Pope the title of Knight Commander of St. Gregory with Star. During these years the paper had gone steadily on "at some considerable inconvenience" because, he said, he still felt it had a part to play. At home and abroad the scene had been steadily darkening. In July 1930, three years before Hitler came to the Chancellorship, we find the following among the notes of the Week:
When we are told that the ancient Marshal Hindenburg is nowDictator of Germany we suspect a note of exaggeration . . .Hindenburg never was the dictator of anything and never will be. Heis, however the man who keeps the seat warm for a Dictator to come.Hindenburg has led us back to Frederick the Great. . . .
Hindenburg has now given rein to the extreme Nationalists, with the delivered provinces to support him in the flush of patriotism. And the extreme Nationalists have only one policy: to reconstitute the unjust frontiers of Germany, which Europe fought to amend.
In 1931 had come the Customs Union between Germany and Austria, the obvious impotence of the League of Nations to restrain Japan, the "National" Government and falling sterling in England. Less than two years later Hitler was Chancellor of Germany, and in 1934 came the murder of Dollfuss. Chesterton wrote of the tragedy whereby the name Germany was taken from Austria and given to Prussia. With Dollfuss fell all that was left of the Holy Roman Empire: the barbarians had invaded the center of our civilisation and like the Turks besieging Vienna had struck at its heart. He regarded Hitler merely as the tool of Prussianism. The new Paganism was the logical outcome of the old Prussianism: it was too the apotheosis of tyranny. "In the Pagan State, in antiquity or modernity, you cannot appeal from Tyranny to God; because the Tyranny is the God."
Belloc solemnly warned our country that we were making inevitable "the death in great pain of innumerable young Englishmen now boys. . . . It may be in two years or in five or in ten the blow will fall." (November 8, 1934.)
Yet even this seemed less terrible to Chesterton than the state of mind then prevailing: the mood—nay the fever—of pacifism that demanded the isolation of England from Europe's peril. He called it "Mafficking for peace": a sort of Imperialism that forgot that the Atlantic is wider than the Straits of Dover and allowed Lord Beaverbrook to regard England as a part of Canada. "Englishmen who have felt that fever will one day look back on it with shame." "This most noble and generous nation," he wrote with a note of agony, "which lost its religion in the seventeenth century has lost its morals in the twentieth."
The League of Nations had, G. K. held, been thought at first to be a kind of Pentecost but had in reality "come together to rebuild the Tower of Babel." And this because it had no common basis in religion. "Humanitarianism does not unite humanity. For even one isolated man is half divine." But today man had despaired of man. "Hope for the superman is another name for despair of man."
Reading a recent commentary in a review, I suddenly saw that politics and economics were not what mattered most in the paper. The commentary in question was to the effect thatG.K.'s Weeklywas inferior to theNew Witnessbecause G.K. had "only" general principles and ideas and no detailed inside knowledge of how the world of finance and politics was going. Looking again through the articles I had marked as most characteristically his, I saw that they were not only chiefly about ideas and principles but also that they were mostly pure poetry. Chesterton was, I believe, greatest and most permanently effective when he was moved, not by a passing irritation with the things that pass, but by the great emotions evoked by the Eternal, emotions which in Eternity alone will find full fruition.
There are in the paper articles in which, appearing to speak out of his own knowledge, he is merely repeating information given him by Belloc. And it was quite out of Chesterton's character to write with certainty about what he did not know with certainty. Hence this writing is his weakest. But the paper has, too, some of his strongest work and his mind as he drew to the end of life lingered on thoughts that had haunted him in its beginning.
Before the Boer War had introduced me to politics, or worse still to politicians [he wrote in a Christmas article in 1934], I had some vague and groping ideas of my own about a general view or vision of existence. It was a long time before I had anything worth calling a religion; what I had was not even sufficiently coherent to be called a philosophy. But it was, in a sense, a view of life; I had it in the beginning; and I am more and more coming back to it in the end. . . . my original and almost mystical conviction of the miracle of all existence and the essential excitement of all experience.*
[* December 6, 1934.]
This he felt must be the profound philosophy by which Distributism should succeed and whereby he tested the modern world and found it wanting—
something of which Christmas is the best traditional symbol. It was then no more than a notion about the point at which extremes meet, and the most common thing becomes a cosmic and mystical thing. I did not want so much to alter the place and use of things as to weight them with a new dimension; to deepen them by going down to the potential nothing; to lift them to infinity by measuring from zero.
The most logical form of this is in thanks to a Creator; but at every stage I felt that such praises could never rise too high; because they could not even reach the height of our own thanks for unthinkable existence, or horror of more unthinkable non-existence. And the commonest things, as much as the most complex, could thus leap up like fountains of praise. . . .
We shall need a sort of Distributist psychology, as well as a Distributist philosophy. That is partly why I am not content with plausible solutions about credit or corporative rule. We need a new (or old) theory and practice of pleasure. The vulgar school of panem et circenses only gives people circuses; it does not even tell them how to enjoy circuses. But we have not merely to tell them how to enjoy circuses. We have to tell them how to enjoy enjoyment.*
[* December 13, 1934.]
In attacking a special abuse, Chesterton was most successful when he took the thought to a deeper depth. The following Christmas (1935) he wrote:
We live in a terrible time, of war and rumour of war. . . . International idealism in its effort to hold the world together . . . is admittedly weakened and often disappointed. I should say simply that it does not go deep enough. . . . If we really wish to make vivid the horrors of destruction and mere disciplined murder we must see them more simply as attacks on the hearth and the human family; and feel about Hitler as men felt about Herod.
The modern world tended to gild pure gold and then try to scrape the gilt off the gingerbread, to paint the lily and then complain of its gaudiness. Thus it had vulgarised Christmas and now demanded the abolition of Christmas because it was vulgar. It was the truth he had emphasised years ago in contrast with Shaw: the world had spoilt the ideas but it was the Christian ideas the world needed, if only in order to recover the human ideas. He went on—
If we want to talk about poverty, we must talk about it as the hunger of a human being. . . . We must say first of the beggar, not that there is insufficient housing accommodation, but that he has not where to lay his head . . . we must talk of the human family in language as plain and practical and positive as that in which mystics used to talk of the Holy Family. We must learn again to use the naked words that describe a natural thing. . . . Then we shall draw on the driving force of many thousand years, and call up a real humanitarianism out of the depths of humanity.
I should like to collect all the essays and poems on Christmas; he wrote several every year, yet each is different, each goes to the heart of his thought. As Christopher Morley says: "One of the simple greatnesses of G.K.C. shows in this, that we think of him instinctively toward Christmas time."* Some men, it may be, are best moved to reform by hate, but Chesterton was best moved by love and nowhere does that love shine more clearly than in all he wrote about Christmas. It will be for this philosophy, this charity, this poetry that men will turn over the pages ofG.K.'s Weeklya century hence if the world still lasts. It is for us who are his followers to see that they are truly creative. Destruction of evil is a great work but if it leaves only a vacuum, nature abhors that vacuum. Creation is what matters for the future and Chesterton's writing is creative.
[*Mark Twain Quarterly, Spring, 1937.]
So too with the radio. In this new medium his mind was alert to present his new-old ideas, his fundamental philosophy of life after some fresh fashion. A letter from Broadcasting House (Nov. 2, 1932) after his first talk records the delight of all who heard it:
The building rings with your praises! I knew I was not alone in my delight over your first talk. I think even you in your modesty will find some pleasure in hearing what widespread interest there is in what you are doing. You bring us something very rare to the microphone. I am most anxious that you should be with us till after Christmas. You will have a vast public by Christmas and it is good that they should hear you. Would you undertake six further fortnightly talks from January 16th onwards?
He was asked to submit a manuscript but promised he should not be kept to the letter of it. "We should like you to make variations as these occur to you as you speak at the microphone. Only so can the talk have a real show of spontaneity about it." "You will forgive me," one official writes, "if I insist on speaking to you personally. That is how I think of our relations." G.K. was unique and they told him so.
A lot of reading was necessary for these talks—each one dealing with from four to ten books—and also a principle of selection. The principle Gilbert chose for one series was historical: "Literature lives by history. Otherwise it exists: like trigonometry." In the fifth talk of the Autumn series of 1934, he gives a general idea of what he has been attempting.
This is the hardest job I have had in all these wireless talks; and I confront you in a spirit of hatred because of the toils I have endured on your behalf; but, after all, what are my sufferings compared to yours? Incredible as it may seem to anybody who has heard these talks, they had originally a certain consistent plan. I dealt first with heroic and half-legendary stories, touched upon medieval chivalry, then on the party-heroes of Elizabethan or Puritan times; then on the eighteenth century and then the nineteenth. In this address I had meant to face the twentieth century; but I find it almost faceless, largely featureless; and, anyhow, very bewildering. I had meant to take books typical of the twentieth century as a book on Steele is typical of the eighteenth or a book on Rossetti of the nineteenth. And I have collected a number of most interesting twentieth century books, claiming to declare a twentieth-century philosophy; they really have a common quality; but I rather hesitate to define it. Suppose I said that the main mark of the twentieth century in ethics as in economics, is bankruptcy. I fear you might think I was a little hostile in my criticism. Suppose I said that all these books are marked by a brilliant futility. You might almost fancy that I was not entirely friendly to them. You would be mistaken. All of them are good; some of them are very good indeed. But the question does recur; what is the good of being good in that way? . . .
Mr. Geoffrey West's curious "Post War Credo" has one Commandment. He does say, he does shout, we might say, he does yell, that there must be No War . . . but he cannot impose his view because authority has gone; and he cannot prove his view; because reason has gone. So again it all comes back to taste. And I have enjoyed the banquet of these excellent books; but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
The peculiar half-official half-private direction of Broadcasting House is based on a theory of strict impartiality towards all opinions and an attempt simply to give the public the programmes that the public wants. Whether it is possible to maintain such a position is another question: that this is the theory there is no doubt—and one result is an abiding uncertainty of mind in most of the officials.
Broadcasting House hangs suspended in the air of public opinion and that fickle breath leaves them in no security as to any of their artists. The resulting sensitiveness became soothed as the months passed on and they got as near to trusting Chesterton as they ever come with any one. True, letters came attacking him, but far more enthusiastically approving of him. And the attacks he answered often by private letters that turned the critic into a friend.
Some of his suggestions were not acceptable. He was warned off a proposed humorous talk about Dean Inge and Bishop Barnes in a series called "Speeches that never happened"—("Subject too serious," "avoid religion"). But he was later asked to talk in a series on Freedom as a Catholic and also to debate with Bertrand Russell on "Who should bring up our children." In this debate he was especially brilliant, says Maurice Baring; and another friend wrote "I have just been listening not without joy to your putting it across Mr. Bertrand Russell. . . .
"Afterthought:What a Mincer! It struck me very much, having read much of his writing with interest. It just shows that the spoken word still has something that the written one can't convey. Is there a Mincing Mind, of which a mincing voice is the outward and visible warning?"
It was interesting that the last few years of Gilbert's life should have furnished this unique opportunity of contact through the spoken word between him and the English people. His voice on the radio had none of the defects that marred it in a hall: his material was far better arranged, his delivery perfect. He seemed to be there beside the listener, talking in amity and exchanging confidences. The morning after his death Edward Macdonald passed a barber's shop off Chancery Lane. The man was lathering a customer's face but recognising Mr. Macdonald, left the customer and ran out brush in hand.
"I just want to say I was sorry to hear the news," he said. "He was a grand man."
Mr. Macdonald asked him if he knew Chesterton well.
"Never read a word he wrote," the barber answered. "But I always listened to him on the wireless. He seemed to be sitting beside me in the room."