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Introduction In the last few years we have seen several new introductions to G.K. Chesterton, and if God is good to us, we will continue to see more. This has happened for two reasons. First, since Chesterton was neglected and forgotten by an entire generation, it has been necessary to re-introduce him to a new generation. Second, one introduction is not enough. Every introduction is going to leave something out. Chesterton is too big. And it is because he is so big that he needs an introduction. His enormous literary output is intimidating. No one knows where to begin reading him. The more introductions the better. The more doorways to Chesterton, the more inviting it will be for readers to rush to the original texts. Ironically, Chesterton has been a victim of one of his own paradoxes. He said that anything can be ignored as long as it is big enough. It has been easy—and some would argue, necessary—to ignore the writings of Gilbert Keith Chesterton because they are too cumbersome to categorize. He is one of the few writers who fully deserves an entire section to himself at the bookstore. I know of at least two bookstores that have made the wise decision to do just that. In the meantime, the rest of the reading public, along with the rest of the world, wanders in darkness. Chesterton is discovered by them only by accident since the official institutions, whose supposed function it is is to pass the wisdom of one generation to the next, have actively failed to teach Chesterton. But when bumbling souls such as myself somehow manage to discover this astonishing writer, whether by an off-hand recommendation, or by stumbling across a quotation, or by dizzily following an unexpected path, something remarkable happens. They find, as I did, that they suddenly can’t get enough of him. They recognize the truth of his insights about everything, from fancies to facts, from aesthetics to economics, from the criminal mind to the Catholic faith. He dazzles with his wordplay, he dances on a tightrope, he satisfies with his conclusions. And yet they want more. More.
Fortunately for those of us who cannot get enough Chesterton, he provided what seems to be a bottomless well of words. But it is safe to say that we would not have the privilege of drinking deeply from that well were it not for the efforts of one man in particular. During those decades of neglect, as Chesterton slowly faded from the curriculum and from the libraries and from the books in print, there was one man labouring, seemingly all alone, to preserve Chesterton’s legacy. He was tracking down not only the scattered journalism and obscure publications containing Chesterton material, but supplementary sources as well. He served as an endless resource of information for the occasional student and scholar from the far corners of the earth who wanted to come to England and study Chesterton. And he even picked up the fallen pen from Chesterton’s hand and fought the very same battles Chesterton fought for social justice, for self-government and self-sufficiency, for the rights of families, for the hidden fountains of the home, and for the sacred foundations of the Faith. It was this good and gentle knight, Aidan Mackey, a veteran of the RAF, a schoolmaster, a bookseller, and a father of seven daughters, who was the torchbearer for Chesterton in the dark ages of the 1960’s and 70’s, when the mindless fashions that Chesterton warned about swept nearly the entire world into a confused mess of materialism and relativism. The world owes Chesterton a debt of thanks. It owes a similar debt to Aidan Mackey. One of Aidan’s greatest services to Chesterton scholarship is to correct misinformation and misunderstandings that have arisen as the result of bad biographies, repeated rumours, and ugly insinuations. In addition to having the facts at hand, Aidan knew people who knew G.K. Chesterton, who knew first hand that what has been written about Chesterton has often been unreliable. People are always trying to dig up dirt on Chesterton. But to Aidan has fallen the thankless task of disappointing these thrillseekers. He once said to me, “Chesterton failed in his duty to Fleet Street by not being a philanderer.” He was not any of the things that certain naysayers would wish him to be. He was not a Socialist. He was not a careless clown. And he was not an anti-Semite. He has been accused of all of these things, because the simple labels are
convenient ways to continue to ignore him. His potent arguments in defence of Distributism can be ignored if he is a Socialist, because that would explain away his criticisms of Capitalism. His reasoned arguments in defence of tradition and marriage and babies and beauty can all be ignored if Chesterton is simply a careless clown who is neither accurate with facts nor serious with his suggestions. And his dynamic arguments in defence of the Catholic faith can be ignored if Chesterton is anti-Semitic because that would leave him with no credibility whatsoever in today’s public arena. These simple one-word lies to dismiss Chesterton have been tossed about so that Chesterton will continue to be ignored by another generation. But the shocking truth about him is being uncovered after all. Even big things cannot be ignored forever. The shocking truth is that Gilbert Keith Chesterton was a happily married man who was kind and good and deeply faithful to his friends and even to his enemies. He was a deep and prophetic thinker who combined his incredible intellect with joy and laughter. He disarmed his opponents with both his wit and his charity. He needs to be rediscovered because we need to learn from him how to speak the truth in love. The wisdom is nothing without the charity. The charity is barren without the wisdom. Dale Ahlquist President American Chesterton Society
The cover of the first edition of G.K. Chesterton’s first play, Greybeards at Play. The cover was designed by the author himself, and appeared in 1900.
G. K. Chesterton
q A Biographical Note G.K. Chesterton was born in1874 into the family of the wellknown Estate Agents, Chesterton & Company in Kensington, London. In view of his future role of defender of small family businesses, it seems ironic that the firm is today a very large international affair, which would not at all meet with his approval. The Chesterton household was not, as is often assumed, a religious one. There was some vague attachment to Unitarianism, but church-going was not the norm, although Gilbert was baptised in St George’s Anglican church, in Camden Hill. It was, therefore, natural that when he later began to seek answers to his questions about the meaning of life, he first went not to the churches but to the Ethical and Debating Societies which then abounded. Despite this, he was from the first instinctively religious, and among his childhood drawings, many of which have survived, are two of great interest. One shows a monk, complete with tonsure and Bible, carrying a crucifix aloft as he is pursued by armed men. In the background a figure kneels before another crucifix, seemingly a wayside shrine. The other drawing is of Christ crucified, surrounded by ministering angels. What is striking in both is the depiction of the crucifix, for at that time only Catholics were likely to show Christ on the cross rather than the cross alone. It would seem that very early in life, for both were drawn when he was only seven years old, Chesterton had somehow come into contact with Catholicism, probably at secondhand through his reading. At odds with that attitude is a poem writ
ten a couple of years later, heavily influenced by Laytoun’s Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers. One verse, retaining the young G.K.C.’s spelling, runs Drive the trembling Papists backwards Drive away the Tory’s hord Let them tell thier hous of villains They have felt the Campbell’s sword.
He was, clearly, reading voraciously from the start, and throughout his life retained an astonishingly accurate memory for things he had read many years earlier. His formal education began in 1881 at Colet Court Preparatory School, then in January 1887 he transferred to St. Paul’s which was then, as now, one of our great public schools. It was at that time situated in Hammersmith but is now in Barnes, south of the river Thames. He later enrolled at the Slade School of Art, at University College, London. His first public appearance in print was in 1892 whilst still at school, when The Speaker published his poem, The Song of Labour. In 1900 he published a book of comic verse, Greybeards at Play, and one of serious verse, The Wild Knight, and from that time the flow of his immense output hardly ceased. In 1901, he married Frances, whose French surname, de Blogue, had been anglicised to Blogg, and after several years in London they made their permanent home in the little Buckinghamshire town of Beaconsfield, near Windsor. The only major sadness in their union was that Frances, despite undergoing an operation, was unable to bear children, but their love for the young caused them to fill their home and lives with the children of friends, and very many of them have testified to the warmth and joy of their household. In 1914, soon after the outbreak of war, G.K.C. fell desperately ill and lay for three months in a coma. In 1916 he took over editorship of The New Witness, the weekly journal, founded by his brother Cecil, who was then in the trenches. In 1918, Cecil died in a field hospital, and Gilbert carried on the paper for the rest of his life, reluctantly allowing it to be re-named G.K.’s Weekly. The journal was a great drain on his energies and finances, and many of the
Father Brown detective stories were written to fund it. Some people have deplored this burden, saying that without it he could have written many more books, such as the studies he planned of Shakespeare, Napoleon and Savonarola. This seems to me to be a mistaken view, because the paper was central to his thinking and provided a platform from which some of his best work issued. He cared nothing for fame either in his time or in the future. He was a propagandist; an agitator standing in the market-place and reaching out to the ordinary men and women he so unaffectedly loved. To ask him to change course and reign as a purely literary celebrity would amount to asking him not to be Gilbert Keith Chesterton. In the first years of the twentieth century he moved from his early agnosticism to Christianity and in 1922 entered the Roman Catholic Church, but had for years been so close to it that many supposed him to be already within its portals. In fact he had described himself as one standing in the church porch, showing others the way in. In the later part of his life, the 1920’s and 1930’s, as well as producing some of his finest and most mature work, he travelled widely and visited Poland, Palestine, Spain, Canada, and twice made lecture tours of the United States. In the 1930’s he made a number of radio broadcasts and was an immediate success. A letter from a B.B.C. official said, “The building rings with your praises! .... you bring something very rare to the microphone.... you will have a vast public by Christmas…” Only a couple of the broadcasts still survive, but they demonstrate his impressive ability to merge profundity with wit and entertainment. He died in Beaconsfield in June 1936, and his grave there is marked by a headstone carved by Eric Gill. He loved the town, and its people so loved him that his funeral procession was re-routed by the police so that the crowd could pay him their final respects. To many people it may seem a little odd that a writer who thought of himself as being merely a journalist, and who died in the 1930’s, should now be the subject of a strong worldwide revival. The truth is that G.K. Chesterton was one of the deepest and most
lucid thinkers that England has ever produced. His thought and writing are full of vivid illumination and profound common sense, cutting through the jargon and cant of the day and throwing light into hitherto dark places, so that the reader constantly thinks, “Of course, how obvious! Why hadn’t I thought of that before?” It was this extraordinary capacity for illumination which made his influence so deep and wide-ranging. A striking example occurred when, in an article in the Illustrated London News in October 1910, he remarked that the principal weakness of the then burgeoning Indian Nationalism was that “ . . . it seems to be not very Indian and not very national. It is all about Herbert Spencer and Heaven knows what. When all is said there is a . . . distinction between a people asking for its own ancient life and a people asking for
Gilbert Chesterton in front of the microphone at the BBC, bringing sanity and solutions to the oppressed peoples of the world
things that have been wholly invented by somebody else. Suppose an Indian said: ‘I heartily wish India had always been free from white men and all their works. Every system has its sins and we prefer our own. There would have been dynastic wars: but I prefer dying in battle to dying in hospital. There would have been despotism; but I prefer one king whom I hardly ever see to a hundred kings regulating my diet and my children. . . .’ Suppose an Indian said that, I should call him an Indian Nationalist, or, at least, an authentic Indian, and I think it would be very hard to answer him. But the Indian Nationalist whose works I have read simply say, with ever-increasing excitability, ‘Give me a ballot-box; provide me with a Ministerial dispatch-box. Hand me over the Lord Chancellor’s wig. I have a heaven-born claim to introduce a Budget. My soul is starved if I am excluded from the editorship of the Daily Mail,’ or words to that effect. Now this, I think, is not so difficult to answer. . . . The right of a people to express itself, to be itself in arts and action, seems to me a genuine right. If there is such a thing in India, it has a right to be Indian. But Herbert Spencer is not Indian; ‘Sociology’ is not Indian: all this pedantic clatter about culture and science is not Indian. I often wish it were not English either. But this is our first abstract difficulty, that we cannot feel certain that the Indian Nationalist is national.”
This penetrating analysis so impressed Mohandas Gandhi, the future ruler of India, that he immediately translated the article into Gujarati and used it as the basis of his own writing and of his future campaigns. It is, therefore, a fact that this piece of “journalism” helped to shape the course of Indian history, as so many of G.K.C.’s writings have influenced other thinkers. Of Chesterton’s little, quickly-written book on the philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, the great Thomist scholar, Etienne Gilson, wrote: “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 . . . The few readers who have spent twenty or thirty years studying Aquinas and who have, perhaps, published two or three volumes on the subject cannot fail to perceive that the socalled wit of Chesterton has put them all to shame. He has guessed all that which they tried to demonstrate, and he has said all that they were more or less clumsily trying to express in academic formulas. Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers who ever lived . . .”
Dorothy L. Sayers, an important apologist for traditional Christianity, wrote in a private letter that she had been a typical sullen teenage agnostic until she started to read Chesterton. Many years later, in an introduction to G.K.C.’s last play, The Surprise, she commented that to young people Chesterton “was a kind of Christian liberator. . . . It was stimulating to be told that Christianity was not a dull thing, but a gay thing, not a stick-in-the-mud thing but an adventurous thing, not an unintelligent thing but a wise thing, and indeed a shrewd thing—for while it was frequently admitted to be as harmless as the dove, it had almost ceased to be credited with the wisdom of the serpent. Above all, it was refreshing to see Christian polemic conducted with offensive rather than defensive weapons.”
Fritz Schumacher, founder-philosopher of the new conservationist and decentralist movement, acknowledged his debt to the inspiration of Chesterton’s thought and the social philosophy of Distributism. Indeed, his famous book, Small is Beautiful, grew from an essay which he originally named Chestertonian Economics. C.S. Lewis paid high tribute to G.K.C.’s study of Chaucer, and of The Everlasting Man he wrote that it gave him for the first time the outline of Christianity set out in a form that made rational sense to him, and that it was one of the major steps on his journey from Atheism to Christianity. He relates, in Surprised by Joy, the closest he got to an autobiography, how he first discovered G.K.C. while in a military hospital in France in 1918: 10
“It was here that I first read a volume of Chesterton’s essays. I had never heard of him and had no idea what he stood for, nor can I quite understand why he made such an immediate conquest of me. It might have been expected that my pessimism, my atheism, and my hatred of sentiment would have made him to me the least congenial of all authors. . . . I did not need to accept what Chesterton said in order to enjoy it. His humour was of the kind I like best—not ‘jokes’ embedded in the page like currants in a cake, still less (what I cannot endure) a general tone of flippancy and jocularity, but is rather (as Aristotle would say) the ‘bloom’ on dialectic itself. The sword glitters not because the swordsman set out to make it glitter but because he is fighting for his life and therefore moving it very quickly. For the critics who think Chesterton is frivolous or ‘paradoxical’ I have to work hard to feel even pity. Sympathy is out of the question. Moreover, strange as it may seem, I liked him for his goodness. . . . In reading Chesterton, as in reading [George] MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”
This was far from being the only tribute paid to Chesterton by Lewis, who was always magnanimous in his acknowledgement of the influence of other writers. In The Spectator in 1946, he commented on G.K.C.’s epic poem, The Ballad of the White Horse, “Does not the central theme of the Ballad—the highly paradoxical message which Alfred received from the Virgin—embody the feeling, and the only possible feeling, with which in any age almost defeated men take up such arms as are left them and win? . . . Hence in those quaking days just after the fall of France, a young friend of mine (just about to enter the R.A.F.) and I found ourselves quoting to one another stanza after stanza of the Ballad. There was nothing else to say.” But the most important tribute paid by that great man came in between those two. In 1925 he read G.K.C.’s The Everlasting Man, which had been published in September of that year, and its 11
effect was tremendous: “For the first time [I] saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense. Somehow I contrived to be not too badly shaken. You will remember that I already thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive ‘apart from his Christianity.’ Now, I verily believe, I thought—I didn’t of course say, words would have revealed the nonsense—that Christianity was very sensible “apart from its Christianity.”
And so Lewis became one more important thinker to respond to Chesterton’s Christian influence. How did Chesterton come to impress so greatly these major scholars in fields which he entered humbly, as a self-confessed amateur? The answer, I believe, is to be found chiefly in two characteristics of his mind and work. Firstly, a penetrating insight, uncluttered by preconceived ideas, which took him unerringly to the heart of the subject, which was followed by an exposition so lucid and free from pomposity or jargon that the reader immediately sees the rightness of the judgement or comment and, indeed, accepts it as mere common sense which he should have discovered earlier for himself. A good example of this is to be found in Orthodoxy, when he disposes of the popular misconception of a lunatic as someone who has lost his reason: “Everyone who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgement. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. . . .Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason.
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The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense, satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or, if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity, for the world denied Christ’s . . . We may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a local completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. If you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.”
Then Chesterton goes on to advocate an appeal from the tiny, though complete, cosmos of monomania to the largeness and sense of proportion and humility and humour of the actual world. That approach to the tragedy and problem of insanity, and the response which Chesterton goes on to suggest, have actually been used successfully by some psychiatrists since then. Once it has been pointed out to us we can all see the truth and wisdom of what he says about the wild exaggeration of a closed circle of logic and its treatment, and many of his readers somehow feel that, given a little more time, they themselves would have arrived at the conclusion to which they have been so entertainingly led. But the fact remains that we did not do so until he brought his clear vision to bear on it. 13
When Chesterton, in the first years of the twentieth century, entered the world of literature and controversy, his impact was immediate and tremendous, for no one had previously, with boundless energy and good humour, challenged the then accepted “wisdom” of the time. In The Defendant, a book of early essays, he defends those simple and homely things which are belittled by pseudo-intellectuals, such as Penny Dreadfuls, slang, detective stories, patriotism, and baby-worship. In it he writes of coming, in his imagination, across “whole valleys filled with loose rocks and boulders, so big as to be like mountains broken loose,” and he fancies that there had occurred there the stoning of some prehistoric prophet, who had spoken terrible and unforgivable things, and he speculates on what they might have been: “In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation—it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise One in the primer of minor poetry. It was not, assuredly, for such babyish solemnities that our imaginary prophet was stoned in the morning of the world. . . .we shall feel it is more probable that he was stoned for saying that the grass was green and that the birds sang in spring; for the mission of all prophets from the beginning has been not so much the pointing out of heavens or hells as primarily pointing out the earth. Religion has had to provide the longest and strangest telescope—the telescope through which we could see the star upon which we dwelt. For the mind and eyes of the average man, this world is as lost as Eden and as sunk as Atlantis. This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forget the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city. It is strange that many truly spiritual men, such as General Gordon, have actually spent some hours speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.”
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And he goes on to explain why we and our world stand in need of a defendant: “The two absolutely basic words, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are not . . . used properly. Things that are bad are not called good by any people who experience them; but things that are good are called bad by the universal verdict of humanity.
Let me explain a little: certain things are bad as far as they go, such as pain, and not even a lunatic calls a toothache good in itself; but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty is called a bad knife, which it certainly is not. It is only not so good as other knives to which men have grown accustomed. A knife is never bad except upon such rare occasions as that in which it is neatly and scientifically planted in the middle of one’s back. The coarsest and bluntest knife which ever broke a pencil into pieces instead of sharpening it, is a good thing in so far as it is a knife. It would have appeared a miracle in the Stone Age.
Now it has appeared to me unfair that humanity should be engaged perpetually in calling all those things bad which have been good enough to make other things better. . . . I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity and found treasure in all of them . . . humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea. Therefore I have imagined that the main business of a man, however humble, is defence. I have conceived that a defendant is chiefly required when worldlings despise the world—that a counsel for the defence would not have been out of place on that terrible day when the sun was darkened over Calvary, and Man was rejected of men.”
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A characteristic which makes Chesterton personally attractive to many people is his magnanimity, his intellectual and spiritual generosity even towards those whose views he strongly opposed. He had no enemies. A very good test of this generosity of spirit is to contrast his attitude in his novel The Ball and the Cross with that of George Bernard Shaw in his anti-Christian tract, The Black Girl in Search of God. In the latter, Shaw has his heroine, an unlettered black girl, curious about Christianity, asking one representative of the faith after another for answers to her questions. Each minister in turn is portrayed as being a fool, a rogue, an ignoramus or a charlatan, and God is time after time sneered at as a bearded old man “who wore a ridiculous white nightshirt.” Shaw, although never a profound thinker, did write some good and intelligent stuff, but this piece is shallow and cheaply vindictive. Chesterton’s novel has a very, very different flavour. It tells of Evan McIan, a naive, somewhat humourless and gauche young Catholic man from the Scottish highlands who comes to London. There he chances upon a fiery Atheist, Turnbull, who edits a small journal in which he has insulted the Mother of Christ. McIan smashes the window, bursts into the editorial office, and challenges Turnbull to a duel. The Atheist eagerly accepts. The smashed window, however, has attracted public attention, and both men are hauled up before the magistrate. The young Catholic risks a prison sentence by refusing to be bound over, but Turnbull intervenes, saying to the magistrate: “(this man) says he will challenge me to a duel . . . but it takes two to make a duel, Your Worship. You need not trouble to bind him over. . . .I bind myself over to keep the peace.” And so they are both released. Outside the courtroom, McIan berates the Atheist for his cowardice, but Turnbull retorts that it is not only Christians who are prepared to suffer for their beliefs: “Why, you moonstruck scarecrow of superstition, do you think your dirty saints are the only people who can die? Haven’t you hung Atheists, and burned them, and boiled them, and did they ever deny their faith? Do you
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think I don’t want to fight? . . . You damned fool, you said things that might have got us locked up for a year . . . I got you out to fight, if you want to. Now, fight if you dare.”
McIan then makes a long and pompous oath, that “nothing shall be in my head till our swords clash together. I swear it by the God you have denied, by that Blessed Lady you have blasphemed . . . I swear it by the Holy Island where my fathers are. . . .” When he, at last, finished, the Atheist drew up his head; “And I,” he said, “give my word.” And throughout the tale the Atheist is as much a hero and a man to be admired and respected as is the Christian. Another essential characteristic of Chesterton is that he had one of the chief marks of the truly wise, as distinct from the merely clever, in that his thoughts were never circumscribed by contemporary intellectual fashions and limitations. In What’s Wrong With the World (1910), Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), The Outline of Sanity (1926), and in many other books and articles, he advanced ideas and perceptive re-statements of older philosophies for which he was, at that time, ridiculed. Defenders of both Capitalism and monolithic State control derided his fierce defence of the family, and the small owner and tradesmen, and his attacks on commercialism in farming, as being a foolish and unrealistic yearning for a return to medievalism. Today we know better. We have seen and suffered the results of unbridled commercialism and of the domination by the State and its agents on our economic, social and personal lives. Few thinking people now doubt that the powers of the State on the one hand and the greed of monstrous, supranational commercial monopolies on the other are evils which must be resisted, and that a large measure of genuine independence must, as a matter of urgency, be restored to the small farmer, trader, craftsman and, above all, to the family. The essence of the contemporary “Green Movement” is all to be found implicit in Chesterton’s writings of sixty and seventy years ago. Again, he was one of the very few who foresaw the revolution in Russia many years before it took place: 17
“A country like Russia has far more inherent capacity for producing revolution than any country of the type of England or America”
—and that was written in 1905 (in an introduction to Maxim Gorky’s Creatures That Once Were Men). Then, in 1919, he made a comment which must at that time have seemed wildly improbable or meaningless to most of his readers, writing in the weekly article he contributed to the Illustrated London News that he expected Communism to tend not to revolutionary democracy, but to the establishment of an enormous bureaucracy. In 1991, when Communism in Russia had started to break up, but before its final collapse I was visited by two Russian ladies who were publishers and who had been on the editorial staff of the State Publishing House. They told me two things of very great interest. The first was a description of the Samizdat (“self-publishing”) system of secretly passing writings forbidden by the State. By it a person who came into possession of a news item from a foreign or illegal journal, or a hymn, or a quotation from a banned author etc., would make perhaps two or three copies and smuggle them to trusted friends. Those recipients would read, then copy afresh and pass the material on again, destroying the copy they had been given, to lessen the danger of it being traced back. The brave souls who did this were risking long sentences in the slave-camps, or even their lives. Few writers, I was told, did more to keep alive the faith and hopes of the Russian people than did Gilbert Keith Chesterton, passages of his works being most eagerly sought after. The second matter was that the bureaucracy was so universal that it swamped even the most innocent and normal activities. Someone wishing, say, to travel even within their own country, or to alter their own house, had to apply to their local Party office for permission. It would almost never be given at that stage. If, after questioning, the request seemed harmless, a chit would be issued giving permission to apply to another office, where the same rigmarole 18
would take place. This could happen many times before, eventually, some official would feel reassured that because the application had survived so far, it could now be authorised. Once more Chesterton had seen with precision to what condition a course of action would lead, but I have never heard that any other commentator publicly predicted the establishment of that massive bureaucracy. Pages could readily be filled with examples of G.K.C.’s prescience. Here are a few which are likely to startle the reader with their relevance to our own time: “A school in which there is no punishment except expulsion will be a school in which it will be very difficult to keep proper discipline.” (1917, Utopia of Usurers). “The next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality, and especially on sexual morality. And it is coming not from a few Socialists. The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow but much more in Manhattan—but most of what was in Broadway is already in Piccadilly. (G.K.’s Weekly, June 19th 1926). “What modern institution has a future for it? What modern institution may have swollen to six times its present size in the social heat and growth of the future? The one natural expansion which I think will expand is the institution we call the Prison.” (1917, Utopia of Usurers). “The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage.” (1920, The Superstition of Divorce). “This is the way the whole world is going: you will soon find your cities so thick with chemical vapours that air will have to be pumped into them from the country outside.” (A story, Paradise of Human Fishes, in G.K.’s Weekly, 1925). “We can see no possible reason for supposing that English trade will ever regain its nineteenth-century predominance.” (1926, The Outline of Sanity). “Most of the feminists would probably agree with me that womanhood is under shameful tyranny in the shops and mills. But I want to destroy the tyranny. They want to destroy the womanhood. That is the only difference.” (1910, What’s Wrong With the World). “Comforts that were rare among our forefathers are now multiplied in factories and handed out wholesale; and, indeed, nobody
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nowadays, so long as he is content to go without air, space, quiet, decency, and good manners, need be without anything whatever that he wants, or at least a reasonably cheap imitation of it.” (1933, article in Commonweal). “It has been left to the very latest Modernists to proclaim an erotic religion which at once exalts lust and forbids fertility.” (G.K.’s Weekly, November, 1933). “We are already drifting horribly near to a new war, which will probably start on the Polish border.” (article in the Illustrated London News, September 1932).
As with his astonishing accuracy as to what lay ahead, so was his analysis of what was actually happening then, clearer and more trenchant than those of most contemporary critics. On monopolistic Capitalism, the evil twin of Communism, he had this to say: “It cannot be too often repeated that what destroyed the family in the modern world was Capitalism. No doubt it might have been Communism, if Communism ever had a chance. . . .But . . . what has broken up households, and encouraged divorces, and treated the old domestic virtues with more and more open contempt, is the epoch and power of Capitalism. It is Capitalism that has forced a moral feud and a commercial competition between the sexes that has destroyed the influence of the parent in favour of the influence of the employer . . . and, above all, that has encouraged, for commercial reasons, a parade of publicity and garish novelty, which is in its nature the death of all that was called dignity and modesty by our mothers and fathers.”
When he wrote that in G.K.’s Weekly in 1934 he had not seen how commercial interests were going to launch their attack on the family by advertising and propaganda aimed directly at children, by-passing the duties and authority of parents. But we have lived to see it in all its vicious cynicism in pursuit of profit. I am tempted to spend much time on this theme, for it is a subject I believe to be of major importance, but I will limit myself 20
to one illustration of what I mean. It displays, I think, two things; the first is that what we actually get from an abandonment of the moral law in favour of unchecked competition is not personal freedom, but a form of subjugation. The second is that in this instance, as in so many aspects of the social order of today, there is any amount of cleverness. But it is cleverness without depth, cleverness without wisdom, and cleverness without morality. The following passage is taken from an article headed “Designer Children” in the Sunday Times several years ago. The title itself seems to me to be of some significance, for ‘designer’ now, apparently, means designed or manufactured, as in designer jeans and other clothing. These people are indeed eager to re-design our children, for to turn them into sales-fodder, to see them (as, indeed, they have long seen adults) as being merely units of consumption, is the way in which profit is gained. “Every child from birth to fourteen is the target of a multibillion pound a year industry, the fastest growing and most competitive segment of British fashion . . . it amounts to a revolution in the business of dressing children. . . . Retailing agents take ‘poppet power’ very seriously. There is real money to be made out of any child of any background under the age of fourteen. The biggest pressure to buy comes from the children themselves. Sophisticated images from toys, television, films and records are transforming them into discriminating buyers.”
(Yes, the moron who wrote that article did actually use the word ‘discriminating’). Does not G.K.C.’s phrase about the parade for commercial gain, of publicity and garish novelty uncannily presage the assault on our children by television and other high-pressure advertising? This, surely, must be one of the first evils from which we must rescue our children if family life is to survive. It was because the attack on the family was already under way in Chesterton’s time, and because he saw far more clearly than did most of his contemporaries where it would lead, that he devot21
ed so great a part of his energies to defending the ordinary home. With the knowledge and experience which we now have, it becomes increasingly implausible to attempt to dismiss Chesterton and his ideas as being fanciful or unrealistic. H. G. Wells, who was among those who claimed that G.K.C.’s thought was out-moded and irrelevant, visualised mankind as still evolving towards a scientifically regulated roseate future in the Leisure State, freed from the burdens and restraints of religion, morality, and laborious work. Chesterton, of course, saw clearly and instinctively to what bleak end this rootless Scientism must inevitably come, and in 1926, in The Outline of Sanity, he wrote: “I observe that the social prophets are still offering the homeless something much higher and purer than a home, and promising a supernormal superiority to people who are not allowed to be normal. I am quite content to dream of the old drudgery of democracy, by which as much as possible of human life should be given to every human being; while the brilliant author of The First Men on the Moon will doubtless soon be deriding us in a romance called The Last Men on the Earth.”
Yet again G.K.C. was right on target. Some years later that book, though not actually titled The Last Men on Earth, did appear. Poor Wells had been forced to see that his dream of a Promised Land had turned hopelessly sour, and the title of his last book expressed his despair and his realisation of failure. But even then he could not face the fact that where he had been so very wrong, other and more profound minds had been right. He could not bring himself to take responsibility for his own errors of judgement: the blame must be laid at the door of mankind as a whole, so he called that last, pathetic work, which G.K.C. had prophesied, not My Mind . . . , but Mind at the End of its Tether. In it he declared that “the end of everything that we call life is at hand and cannot be evaded.” Chesterton, we know, fell neither into Wells’ first error of presumption of an ordered progress into some splendid but vague future, nor into his final error of despair, 22
for he knew that Presumption and Despair are two major heresies, not only against religion but against humanity and against life itself. In the same way, when many of our leaders and publicists were flirting with Nazism and Communism, Chesterton saw exactly how evil were both these philosophies, and he attacked them ceaselessly. When he died, one of the spokesmen for American Jewry, Rabbi Stephen Wise, paid him this tribute: “I was a warm admirer of Gilbert Chesterton . . . He as a Catholic, I as a Jew, could not see eye to eye . . . but I deeply respected him. When Hitlerism came, he was one of the first to speak out, with all the directness and frankness of a great unabashed spirit. Blessing to his memory!”
This is quoted at greater length in Maisie Ward’s biography. It is deplorable that it is still sometimes necessary to deal with the empty old charge that G.K.C. was anti-Jewish. He was not. Of course, in those more open days when differences could be discussed without incurring the wrath of the Politically Correct (the initials of which could more accurately stand for Political Coercion), things were said and written which embarrass us today. If you wish to test the matter, turn up the pages of what were then our most staid and respectable newspapers, The Morning Post, The Observer, and The Times, which constantly, and particularly during the time of the Russian Revolution, used violently anti-Jewish language daily. The abuse was entirely indiscriminate, it being assumed that the mere fact of being Jewish was to prove a man a liar, a criminal, and a revolutionary of the most despicable kind—a creature barely human. Several points are, to me, worth stressing. The first being that nothing that G.K.C. or Belloc ever wrote anywhere, at any time, came within a thousand miles of the vicious and mindless scurrility of those major organs. The second is that if you take anything Gilbert or Belloc wrote about Jewish financiers etc and substituted the word “German” for the word “Jew,” no one would bat an eyelid. Only Jewish people are to be held exempt from any criticism at all. 23
As a matter of honesty it should be stressed that this attitude comes much more from gentile “liberals” than from Jews themselves. I used those quotation marks because few people are so illiberal as those who describe themselves as being liberal. For some reason the argument that a man has Jewish friends is often derided as being irrelevant, but I have never understood upon what rational basis. It is, surely, obvious that if a man numbers more Jews among his close friends than have comparable figures of the time, then he cannot be guilty of hating Jews as Jews. In G.K.’s very close set at St Paul’s School were two sets of Jewish twins, Lawrence and Maurice Solomon, and Waldo and Digby d’Avigdor. That, in itself, is of little significance because attitudes can change and become warped in adulthood, but what is of undeniable significance is that in adult life, both the Solomon brothers moved their homes and families to Beaconsfield, and their friendship with Gilbert was very much a factor in this. The d’Avigdors went to live in Canada, but Waldo and Gilbert kept up a warm correspondence for many years, and had a reunion during G.K.’s visit to Canada. A few years ago, one of their descendants sent me photocopies of a very small part of the correspondence, including an early letter from Warwick Gardens days, in which Gilbert and Waldo d’Avigdor wrote alternate sentences. When Frances worked, as secretary, in the early days of their marriage, for the P.N.E.U. (Parents’ National Educational Union, which Gilbert termed “The Parents’ National, Highly Rational Educational Union”) she made friends with a Jewish lady by the name of Mrs. Dorothy Steinthal. Thereafter, Gilbert and Mr. Francis Steinthal became close friends. When the Steinthals later moved to Ilkley, West Yorkshire, the Chestertons visited and stayed at their home on a number of occasions. It was during one such visit that Gilbert was introduced to Father John O’Connor, a meeting that had important repercussions. In his Autobiography G.K.C. recorded that: “I mentioned to the priest in conversation that I proposed to support in print a certain proposal, it matters not what,
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in connection with some rather sordid social question of vice and crime. On this particular point he thought that I was in error, or rather in ignorance; as indeed I was. And, merely as a necessary duty and to prevent me falling into a mare’s nest, he told me certain facts he knew about perverted practices which I certainly shall not set down or discuss here. I have confessed on an earlier page that in my own youth I had imagined for myself any amount of iniquity; and it was a curious experience to find that this quiet and pleasant celibate had plumbed those abysses far deeper than I . . . When we returned to the house we found that it was full of visitors, and fell into special conversation with two hearty and healthy young Cambridge undergraduates . . . and when the priest had left the room, the two young men broke out into generous expressions of admiration . . . Then there fell a curious and reflective silence, at the end of which one of the undergraduates suddenly burst out, ‘All the same, I don’t believe his sort of life is the right one. It’s all very well to like religious music and so on when you’re shut up in a sort of cloister and don’t know anything about the real evil in the world. But I don’t believe that’s the right ideal. I believe in a fellow coming right out into the world, and facing the evil that’s in it, and knowing something about the dangers and all that. It’s a very beautiful thing to be innocent and ignorant; but I think it’s a much finer thing not to be afraid of knowledge.’”
To me, still almost shivering with the appalling practical facts of which the priest had warned me, this comment came with such a crushing and colossal irony, that I nearly burst into a loud harsh laugh in the drawing-room. For I knew perfectly well that, as regards all the solid Satanism which the priest knew and warred against all his life, these two Cambridge gentlemen (luckily for them) knew as much of real evil as two babies in the same perambulator.”
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It was the sudden awareness of the combination, in the priesthood, of knowing the world as it is, with all its mixture of goodness and nastiness, yet at the same time being firmly rooted in the world and the life for which mankind was created, that gave G.K. the idea of a detective who would be bumbling and seemingly incompetent in practical matters, but with a spiritual insight into mens’ souls which enabled him to solve mysteries. So Father O’Connor sowed the seed which led to the Father Brown stories and also to Chesterton’s eventual conversion to Catholicism. This, incidentally, echoed a period in Chesterton’s early life as he sought answers to the questions of existence and purpose. In his Autobiography he wrote: “Having myself been trained, first on the farce about the curate, and then on the scepticism about the priest, I was quite ready to believe that a dying superstition was represented by such feeble persons. As a fact, I found that they were very often by far the ablest and most forcible persons. In debate after debate I found the same thing happen, . . . It was the farcical curate, the feeble-minded clergyman, who got up and applied to the wandering discussion at least some sort of test of some sort of truth; who showed all the advantages of having been tolerably trained in some sort of system of thinking. Dreadful doubts began to be sown in my mind. . . .It seemed that the despised curates were rather more intelligent than anyone else; that they, alone in that world of intellectualism, were trying to use their intellects. (In the chapter The Crime of Orthodoxy)
This note on Chesterton, Catholicism and Fr. O’Connor is merely an aside, of course. The fact remains that these two men only met through the good offices of the Steinthals. It demonstrates that G.K. was always open to people of intelligence and good will, and it proves, too, that his so-called “anti-Semitism” has been very much overplayed. Not terribly easy to brush all that aside, is it? A prominent Jewish writer and publicist, Joseph Leftwich, wrote a letter to the Sunday Times (August 18th, 1957) in defence of 26
G.K.C. and Belloc against wild accusations which had been made against them. He wrote: “ . . . I knew the Chestertons and Belloc, and they were certainly not ‘Fascists.’”
When Hitler persecuted Jews, G.K. Chesterton (Cecil had died in 1918 . . . fighting the ‘Fascist’ precursor, Kaiser Wilhelm) protested, “In our early days Hilaire Belloc and myself were accused of being uncompromising anti-Semites. Today, although I still think there is a Jewish problem, I am appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities. They have absolutely no reason or logic behind them. It is quite obviously the expedient of a man driven to seeking a scapegoat, and has found with relief the most famous scapegoat in European history, the Jewish people. I am quite ready to believe now that Belloc and I will die defending the last Jew in Europe.”
In 1920 Humbert Wolfe, a young Jewish writer, poet and critic wrote a long poem attacking what he saw as Chesterton’s “anti-Semitism.” Although misplaced, his indignation was genuine and honourable: Jew-baiting still! Two thousand years are run And still, it seems, good Master Chesterton, Nothing’s abated of the old offence. Changing its shape, it never changes tense.
But shortly afterwards Wolfe came to know—and revere— G.K.C. (I have seen some of the correspondence), because he was able to judge the man himself rather than see him through the eyes of his opponents. The dramatic reversal of Wolfe’s view is best shown by the lament he wrote on learning of the death of Chesterton. The first of the five stanzas reads: Now let the trumpets of the sunlight spatter the routed thunder rolling with the drums,
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and let the enemies of darkness scatter, Let the great gate swing open. A hero comes.
and the final one: He does not need to knock against the gate, whose every action like a prayer ascended, and beat upon the panels. Trumpet, wait a hushed instant! We loved him. It is ended.
So where is the case for the prosecution? In tatters, I submit. G.K.C. did indeed attack Jews, but not for being Jews, but only as individuals, for what they did or for what he genuinely thought they had done. A sort of case may be made by quoting a string of such attacks from the pages of G.K.’s Weekly, but only if the far more fierce attacks on non-Jews—politicians, capitalists, enemies of the family etc.—are ignored. Chesterton’s role was not that of an attacker, but of a defender. As he himself expressed it in another context, “The soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” What Chesterton unaffectedly loved was the home and the family, the lives, work and pleasures of ordinary folk. In opposition to those twin evils, both of which lead to massive centralisation of property and power in the hands of a few people, Capitalism and Communism, Chesterton and other far-sighted people offered the solution of Distributism, the aims of which G.K.C. summarised in one of his pamphlets: The League for the Preservation of Liberty by the Wider Distribution of Property is the only society of its kind. Yet it presents a social idea which nine men out of ten would in normal circumstances regard as normal. It offers a criticism and correction of our abnormal capitalist and proletarian society which differs from all those current in politics and the Press, not in degree, but in direction. Distributism is not merely a moderate form of Socialism; it is not merely a humane sort of capitalism. Its two primary principles may be stated thus:
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1. That the only way to preserve liberty is to preserve property so that the individual and the family may in some degree be independent of oppressive systems, whether unofficial or official.
2. That the only way to preserve property is to distribute it much more among citizens so that all, or approximately all, may understand and defend it. This can only be done by breaking up the plutocratic concentrations of our time. It has become clear that, for whatever reason, the commercial and industrial progress which began by professing individualism has ended with the complete swamping of the individual. The concentration of capital in large heaps controlled by little groups has become equally obvious to those who defend it and those who deplore it. But even those who deplore it seldom try to reverse it. This problem of centralised wealth has produced a great many interesting things. It has produced proposals that what is thus centralised should be used for good instead of evil: that what is centralised should be simplified, or that it should be centralised even more in a new national centre. But it has not until now produced the perfectly simple proposal that what is over-centralised should be decentralised. It has not until now produced a single political party or political programme based on the idea that if property is in too few hands it ought to be passed into many more hands. This truism has been left for us to defend, and we have been obliged to defend it like a paradox.
Another important characteristic of Chesterton is his deep humility combined with a meticulous regard for truth. He took the things in which he believed very seriously, but not his own work or standing, which he constantly under-valued or even mocked. For instance when, in his splendid epic poem, The Ballad of the White Horse, he made the right flank of King Alfred’s army face the right flank of the Danish enemy, he never bothered to correct the error 29
in later editions because he saw no reason to suppose that his verse would live and be many times reprinted. His great book, The Everlasting Man, names opponents who are now long forgotten. Had it been suggested to him that these names should be omitted as being meaningless to future readers, he would certainly have replied that if those people were to be forgotten, then so would he and his books. The idea that he was an intellectual giant among men simply never occurred to him. Again, he so belittled his own powers that even those who knew him could be deceived. On several occasions, I asked Dorothy Collins, his secretary, who was as a daughter to Gilbert and Frances Chesterton, with which languages Gilbert had some familiarity. Each time I was assured that he had no knowledge whatsoever of any tongue other than English, other than a very few words of schoolboy French. Yet a reading of his Chaucer and other of his works clearly displays very sensitive knowledge of French and acquaintanceship with Latin. In fact, he translated a sonnet from the French of Joachim du Bellay so marvellously that Mr. George Steiner, editor of The Penguin Book of Modern Verse Translation, included it in that volume, and paid it this high tribute: “At its best the peculiar synthesis of conflict and complicity between a poem and its translation into another poem creates the impression of a ‘third language,’ of a medium of communicative energy which somehow reconciles both languages in a tongue deeper, more comprehensive than either. In the no-man’s land between du Bellay’s Heureux qui comme Ulysse, and Chesterton’s English sonnet, so nearly exhaustive of the original, we seem to hear ‘encore immortelle parole.’ Mallarme’s expression for the notion of a universal, immediate tongue from which English and French had broken off.”
I have since discovered that G.K.C. was awarded the Sixth Form (‘A’ Group) Prize for French at St. Paul’s School in 1891. (That volume is now among the holdings of the G.K. Chesterton Institute, in Oxford). Then, as now, St. Paul’s was in the top rank of English schools, and to have been the recipient of this award most 30
certainly proves that he was brilliant at both written and oral French. Chesterton’s self-depreciation was such that although you may accept almost anything he says as being true, this trust should not be extended to what he says of himself. It is clear that G.K. Chesterton has not yet been accorded the recognition and the place in English thought and letters that is his due. Some of the factors which militated against the full recognition of him by the ‘Establishment’ of his day were his enormous output (some 150 books and pamphlets): the astonishing diversity of his work, which covered essays, history, religious studies and controversy, plays, literary and social studies and hundreds of poems: the fact that he was an active, campaigning Catholic at a time when Catholics were expected to sing in a low key and, perhaps, most of all because he refused to adopt a solemn tone simply because he was dealing with serious issues. Even his most profound books sparkle with wit and humour. When he was rebuked for this by one critic, he retorted: “Mr. McCabe thinks I am not serious, but only funny, because (he) thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing else. . . . Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or in short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or German. . . .The two qualities of fun and seriousness have nothing whatever to do with each other, they are no more comparable than black and triangular. Mr. Bernard Shaw is funny and sincere. Mr. George Robey is funny and not sincere. Mr. McCabe is sincere and not funny. The average Cabinet Minister is not sincere and not funny.”
It was only when he was moved to the most passionate protest that Chesterton’s bubbling humour gave way to a high eloquence which verged upon the poetic. Near the end of What’s Wrong with the World, he comments on sociologists and doctors in certain London boroughs who had decreed that the hair of little girls in poor districts should be cropped to avoid or cure infestation by lice: 31
“A little while ago, certain doctors and other persons permitted by modern law to dictate to their shabbier fellow-citizens, sent out an order that all little girls should have their hair cut short. I mean of course, all little girls whose parents are poor. Many very unhealthy habits are common among rich little girls, but it will be long before any doctors interfere forcibly with them. Now, the case for this particular interference was this, that the poor are pressed down from above into such stinking and suffocating underworlds of squalor, that poor people must not be allowed to have hair, because in their case it must mean lice in the hair. Therefore, the doctors propose to abolish the hair. It never seems to have occurred to them to abolish the lice. Yet it could be done . . . the disease is more likely to be found in the hair of poor people than of the rich . . . because the poor children are forced (against all the instincts of the highly domesticated working classes) to crowd together in close rooms under a wildly inefficient system of public instruction; and because in one out of forty children there may be an offence, and why? Because the poor man is so ground down by the great rents of the great ground landlords that his wife often has to work as well as he. Therefore one in forty of them is dirty . . . the working man must allow his little girl’s hair, first to be neglected from poverty, next to be poisoned by promiscuity, and lastly to be abolished by hygiene. He, perhaps, was proud of his little girl’s hair. But he does not count. It never seems to strike these people that the lesson of lice in the slums, is the wrongness of slums, not the wrongness of hair. In truth it is only by eternal institutions like hair that we can test the passing institutions like empires. If a door is so built as to knock a man’s head off when he enters it, it is built wrong . . . we must begin all over again, and begin at the other end. I begin with a little girl’s hair. That, I know, is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the pride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is one of those adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every age and race. If other things are
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against it, other things must go down. If landlords and laws and science are against it, landlords and laws and sciences must go down. With the red hair of one sheurchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilisation. Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home: because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have a usurious landlord; because there should not be a usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property. . . .That little urchin with the red-gold hair (whom I have just watched toddling past my house), she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered: her hair should not be cut short like a convict’s. No, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. The winds of the world shall be tempered to that lamb unshorn. All crowns that cannot fit her head shall be broken: all raiment and building that does not harmonise with her glory shall waste away. Her mother may bid her bind her hair, for that is a natural authority: but the Emperor of the Planet shall not bid her to cut it off. She is the human and sacred image: all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down; and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.”
The marvellously lyrical quality of that piece of writing does not in the least detract from its permanent value as hard and practical social criticism. Chesterton saw so clearly, and was so penetrating in comment and judgement because he held a central and unassailable philosophy of life based on a warm and unaffected love of ordinary people as the children of God. That last phrase is of the essence, for he knew that the Brotherhood of Man is a sterile and meaningless concept unless it stems from recognition of the Fatherhood of God. If we wish to see Chesterton whole, we must see that his philosophy came from, and was quite inseparable from, his Catholi33
cism. Although he did not enter the Church until 1922, there was never any need to alter a word of Heretics, Orthodoxy or any of his earlier works. The issue had been decided in his own mind many years before he took the actual step. In a lecture on The Future of Religion given at Cambridge University in 1911, he said that he was “more than ever inclined to think, though he has not yet been admitted, that possibly the claims of the Greek and Anglican Churches were less near the truth than those of the Roman Church.” Elsewhere in a simple but brilliant and penetrating aphorism he wrote that “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and not tried.” I recommend that the reader test this when next in the company of friends who assume that Christianity has been discredited and is a dying superstition. You will find that they will expect you to have some familiarity with the anti-Christian writings of Marx, H.G. Wells, that old humbug Bertrand Russell, and more recent critics who bang out the same old tunes on the same old drum. But then ask them two questions in return. The first is to enquire how much familiarity they themselves actually have with those writers. Having made the effort myself, I can say with some confidence that the number of people who have ploughed the whole way through the turgid pompous prose and borrowed thought of Das Kapital must be fairly small. The second question is to ask them to name a couple of books they have read which put the case for Christianity. In most cases you will be met by glazed eyes and dropped jaws, for it has never been suggested to them that they have a moral and intellectual duty to study their opponents’ case, or at least discover what it is, before sneering at it. Then, those of our present-day clergy and teachers who are more anxious to be politically fashionable than to be Christian, need to reminded of Chesterton’s blunt comment: “We do not want a Church that will move with the world. We want a Church that will move the world.” Where one makes a start on reading Chesterton is not of great importance. Orthodoxy, which has led so many people to the 34
realisation that the Apostles’ Creed furnishes the most reasonable and satisfying basis for ordinary living: his novel, The Ball and the Cross (with its running struggle between its twin heroes, Catholic and atheist); the books of essays, the illuminating studies of Dickens, Cobbett, Chaucer or Browning, The Everlasting Man, (to my mind his greatest book): his autobiography, which gives one of literature’s most perceptive recollections of childhood, The Catholic Church and Conversion, (particularly the 1960 paperback edition, published by Burns & Oates, to which two quite superb essays have been added); or that treasure-chest of hitherto-buried wisdom, P.J. Kavanagh’s The Bodley Head Chesterton—any will serve as a starting point. I recall a friend who, having been summoned to jury service, complained that he knew nothing of the law and that such matters should be left to professional lawyers. So I gave him Chesterton’s 1905 essay, The Twelve Men (to be found in the volume Tremendous Trifles). All became clear to him and he declared that no one should ever be allowed to sit on a jury without having read that essay in which G.K.C. brilliantly and wittily makes his point: “Now if this world of ours were really what is called reasonable, I do not know that there would be any fault to find with this. But the true result of all experience and the true foundation of all religion is this. That the four or five things which it is most practically essential that a man should know, are all of them what people call paradoxes. That is to say that though we should all find them in life to be mere plain truths, yet we cannot easily state them in words without being guilty of seeming verbal contradictions. One of them, for instance, is the unimpeachable platitude that the man who finds most pleasure for himself is often the man who least hunts for it. Another is the paradox of courage; the fact that the way to avoid death is not to have too much aversion to it. Whoever is careless enough of his bones to climb some hopeless cliff above the tide may save his bones. . . .Whoever will lose his life, the same shall save it; an entirely practical and prosaic statement.
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Now, one of these four or five paradoxes which should be taught to every infant prattling at his mother’s knee is the following: that the more a man looks at a thing, the less he can see it, and the more a man learns a thing the less he knows it. The Fabian argument of the expert, that the man who is trained is the man who should be trusted would be absolutely unanswerable if it were really true that a man who studied a thing and practised it every day went on seeing more and more of its significance. But he does not. He goes on seeing less and less of its significance. In the same way, alas! we all go on every day, unless we are continually goading ourselves into gratitude and humility, seeing less and less of the significance of the sky or the stones. Now it is a terrible business to mark a man out for the vengeance of men. But it is a thing to which a man can grow accustomed, as he can to other terrible things. . . .And the horrible thing about all legal officials, even the best, about all judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policemen, is not that they are wicked . . . not that they are stupid . . . , it is simply that they have got used to it. Strictly they do not see the prisoner in the dock; all they see is the usual man in the usual place. They do not see the awful court of judgement; they only see their own workshop. Therefore, the instinct of Christian wisdom has most wisely declared that into their judgements there shall upon every occasion be infused fresh blood and fresh thoughts from the streets. . . . Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is too important to be trusted to trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or a solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men
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standing around. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.”
The important thing is that, after a long period of neglect by critics and academics, (although ordinary people never stopped reading him), Chesterton is, at last, being recognised as a major, vitally important, thinker and guide. As Allan Massie, writing in The Times said of The Bodley Head Chesterton: “Mr. Kavanagh has . . . restored the writer Chesterton to his proper station by presenting a substantial body of
work so cunningly and cogently assembled that no one can henceforth pretend that Chesterton was a flashy miniaturist or a whimsical eccentric or a delightful humorist not to be taken seriously. He has got the ‘character’ out of the way in order to allow us to delight in the strenuous intellect, humane judgement, and noble sense.” We live in disturbed and, largely, unhappy times. I am neither diffident nor apologetic in saying that one major factor in our task of finding a path back to social and religious stability and sanity may well depend upon how attentively we are prepared to listen to the wisdom of G.K. Chesterton.
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Books Available from
IHS Press The Outline of Sanity, by G.K. Chesterton 184pp, 6”x9”, ISBN 0-9714894-0-8 Item No. GKC001 $14.95
Utopia of Usurers, by G.K. Chesterton 136pp. 5½”x8½”, ISBN 0-9714894-3-2 Item No. GKC002 $11.95
Irish Impressions, by G.K. Chesterton 152pp, 5½”x8½”, ISBN 0-9714894-5-9 Item No. GKC003 $12.95
Twelve Types, by G.K. Chesterton 96pp, 5½”x8½”, ISBN 0-9714894-8-3 Item No. GKC004 $8.95
A Miscellany of Men, by G.K. Chesterton 184pp, 5½”x8½”, ISBN 0-9718286-1-X Item No. GKC005 $13.95
Order direct today: by phone, fax, mail, e-mail, online. s/h: $3.50 per book; $1.50 ea. add’l. book. Check, m.o., VISA, MC.
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The Free Press, by Hilaire Belloc 96pp, 5½”x8½”, ISBN 0-9714894-1-6 Item No. HB001 $8.95
An Essay on the Restoration of Property, by Hilaire Belloc 104pp, 5½”x8½”, ISBN 0-9714894-4-0 Item No. HB002 $8.95
Charles I, by Hilaire Belloc 288pp, 6”x9”, ISBN 0-9718286-3-6 Item No. HB003 $16.95
Charles II: the Last Rally, by Hilaire Belloc 224pp, 6”x9”, ISBN 0-9718286-4-4 Item No. HB004 $15.95
Economics for Helen, by Hilaire Belloc 160pp, 5½”x8½”, ISBN 1-932528-03-2 Item No. HB006 $12.95
Richelieu, by Hilaire Belloc 272pp, 6”x9”, ISBN 0-9718286-8-7 Item No. HB005 $16.95
The Party System, by Hilaire Belloc 160pp, 6”x9”, ISBN 1-932528-11-3 Item No. HB006 $12.95
A few recommended
Chesterton Societies from around the world The G.K. Chesterton Institute for Faith and Culture Attention: Stratford Caldecott, 6A, King Street, Oxford, OX2 6DF, England Email:
[email protected] “Chesterton in the Chilterns” Attention: Martin Thompson, 570A, Dunstable Road, Luton, LU4 8RT, England Email:
[email protected] The American Chesterton Society Attention: Dale Ahlquist, 4117, Pebblebrook Circle, Minneapolis, MN 55437, USA Tel: 952-831-3096 Email:
[email protected] Website: www.chesterton.org The G.K. Chesterton Review & Institute for Faith and Culture Attention: Fr. Ian Boyd, C.S.B., Seton Hall University 400 South Orange Avenue South Orange, NJ 07079, USA Tel: 973-275-2431 Email:
[email protected] Website: academic.shu.edu/chesterton/index.htm The Toronto (Canada) Chesterton Society Attention: Hugh Ranalli Tel: 416-604-7232 Email:
[email protected] The Australian Chesterton Society Attention: Anthony Evans Email:
[email protected] 
