XXII. After the Armistice…

XXII. After the Armistice

THE MONTHS THAT followed the signing of the Armistice were the darkest in Gilbert Chesterton's life. Nothing but the immense natural high spirits of the New Witness group could have carried them through the many years in which they cried their unheeded warnings to England. But now as the war drew to an end a new note of optimism had become audible. The Prussian menace was almost conquered. Our soldiers would return and would bring with them the courage and confidence of victors. They might overthrow the governing plutocracy and build again an England of freedom and sanity. But one soldier did not return--the one to whom this group looked for comradeship and inspiration. On December 6, 1918, Cecil Chesterton died in hospital in France.

"His courage was heroic, native, positive and equal," wrote Belloc, "always at the highest potentiality of courage. . . ."

Gilbert wrote:

He lived long enough to march to the victory which was for him a supreme vision of liberty and the light. The work which he put first he did before he died. The work which he put second, but very near to the other, he left for us to do. There are many of us who will abandon many other things, and recognize no greater duty than to do it.

This second work was the fight at home against corruption and for freedom for the English people. It is impossible to remember Gilbert Chesterton vividly and to write the word bitterness. It was rather with a profound and burning indignation that he thought of his fellow Englishmen who had fought and died--and then looked up and saw "Marconi George" and "Marconi Isaacs," still rulers of the fate of his country. Thus meditating he wrote an "Elegy in a Country Churchyard."

The men that worked for England They have their graves at home: And bees and birds of England About the cross can roam.

But they that fought for England, Following a falling star, Alas, alas for England They have their graves afar.

And they that rule in England, In stately conclave met, Alas, alas for England They have no graves as yet.*

[* Collected Poems, p. 65.]

Strange irony of Cecil Chesterton's last weeks: his old enemy Godfrey Isaacs brought an action for perjury against Sir Charles Hobhouse. Both men's Counsel agreed and the judge stressed that perjury lay on one side or the other. The case was given against Isaacs. He appealed and his appeal was dismissed. Perjury had lain on one side or the other!

Meanwhile news came that Rufus Isaacs, now Lord Reading, had gone with Lloyd George to Paris to attend the Peace Conference. All that this might mean: the peril to Poland: the danger of a Prussia kept at the head of the Germanies for the sake of international finance: an abasement of England before those countries that had not forgotten Marconi: all this was vivid to Gilbert Chesterton. In the same number of the New Witness in which he mourned his brother (Dec. 13, 1918), he wrote under "The Sign of the World's End" an Open Letter to Lord Reading:

My Lord--I address to you a public letter as it is upon a public question: it is unlikely that I should ever trouble you with any private letter on any private question; and least of all on the private question that now fills my mind. It would be impossible altogether to ignore the irony that has in the last few days brought to an end the great Marconi duel in which you and I in some sense played the part of seconds; that personal part of the matter ended when Cecil Chesterton found death in the trenches to which he had freely gone; and Godfrey Isaacs found dismissal in those very Courts to which he once successfully appealed. But believe me I do not write on any personal matter; nor do I write, strangely enough perhaps, with any personal acrimony. On the contrary, there is something in these tragedies that almost unnaturally clarifies and enlarges the mind; and I think I write partly because I may never feel so magnanimous again. It would be irrational to ask you for sympathy; but I am sincerely moved to offer it. You are far more unhappy; for your brother is still alive.

If I turn my mind to you and your type of politics it is not wholly and solely through that trick of abstraction by which in moments of sorrow a man finds himself staring at a blot on the tablecloth or an insect on the ground. I do, of course, realise, with that sort of dull clarity, that you are in practise a blot on the English landscape, and that the political men who made you are the creeping things of the earth. But I am, in all sincerity, less in a mood to mock at the sham virtues they parade than to try to imagine the more real virtues which they successfully conceal. In your own case there is the less difficulty, at least in one matter. I am very willing to believe that it was the mutual dependence of the members of your family that has necessitated the sacrifice of the dignity and independence of my country; and that if it be decreed that the English nation is to lose its public honour, it will be partly because certain men of the tribe of Isaacs kept their own strange private loyalty. I am willing to count this to you for a virtue as your own code may interpret virtue; but the fact would alone be enough to make me protest against any man professing your code and administering our law. And it is upon this point of your public position, and not upon any private feelings, that I address you today.

Not only is there no question of disliking any race, but there is not here even a question of disliking any individual. It does not raise the question of hating you; rather it would raise, in some strange fashion, the question of loving you. Has it ever occurred to you how much a good citizen would have to love you in order to tolerate you? Have you ever considered how warm, indeed how wild, must be our affection for the particular stray stock-broker who has somehow turned into a Lord Chief Justice, to be strong enough to make us accept him as Lord Chief Justice? It is not a question of how much we dislike you, but of how much we like you; of whether we like you more than England, more than Europe, more than Poland the pillar of Europe, more than honour, more than freedom, more than facts. It is not, in short, a question of how much we dislike you, but of how far we can be expected to adore you, to die for you, to decay and degenerate for you; for your sake to be despised, for your sake to be despicable. Have you ever considered, in a moment of meditation, how curiously valuable you would really have to be, that Englishmen should in comparison be careless of all the things you have corrupted, and indifferent to all the things that you may yet destroy? Are we to lose the War which we have already won? That and nothing else is involved in losing the full satisfaction of the national claim of Poland. Is there any man who doubts that the Jewish International is unsympathetic with that full national demand? And is there any man who doubts that you will be sympathetic with the Jewish International? No man who knows anything of the interior facts of modern Europe has the faintest doubt on either point. No man doubts when he knows, whether or no he cares. Do you seriously imagine that those who know, that those who care, are so idolatrously infatuated with Rufus Daniel Isaacs as to tolerate such risk, let alone such ruin? Are we to set up as the standing representative of England a man who is a standing joke against England? That and nothing else is involved in setting up the chief Marconi Minister as our chief Foreign Minister. It is precisely in those foreign countries with which such a minister would have to deal, that his name would be, and has been, a sort of pantomime proverb like Panama or the South Sea Bubble. Foreigners were not threatened with fine and imprisonment for calling a spade a spade and a speculation a speculation; foreigners were not punished with a perfectly lawless law of libel for saying about public men what those very men had afterwards to admit in public. Foreigners were lookers-on who were really allowed to see most of the game, when our public saw nothing of the game; and they made not a little game of it. Are they henceforth to make game of everything that is said and done in the name of England in the affairs of Europe? Have you the serious impudence to call us Anti-Semites because we are not so extravagantly fond of one particular Jew as to endure this for him alone? No, my lord; the beauties of your character shall not so blind us to all elements of reason and self-preservation; we can still control our affections; if we are fond of you, we are not quite so fond of you as that. If we are anything but Anti-Semite, we are not Pro-Semite in that peculiar and personal fashion; if we are lovers, we will not kill ourselves for love. After weighing and valuing all your virtues, the qualities of our own country take their due and proportional part in our esteem. Because of you she shall not die.

We cannot tell in what fashion you yourself feel your strange position, and how much you know it is a false position. I have sometimes thought I saw in the faces of such men as you that you felt the whole experience as unreal, a mere masquerade; as I myself might feel it if, by some fantastic luck in the old fantastic civilisation of China, I were raised from the Yellow Button to the Coral Button, or from the Coral Button to the Peacock's Feather. Precisely because these things would be grotesque, I might hardly feel them as incongruous. Precisely because they meant nothing to me I might be satisfied with them, I might enjoy them without any shame at my own impudence as an alien, adventurer. Precisely because I could not feel them as dignified, I should not know what I had degraded. My fancy may be quite wrong; it is but one of many attempts I have made to imagine and allow for an alien psychology in this matter; and if you, and Jews far worthier than you, are wise they will not dismiss as Anti-Semitism what may well prove the last serious attempt to sympathise with Semitism. I allow for your position more than most men allow for it; more, most assuredly, than most men will allow for it in the darker days that yet may come. It is utterly false to suggest that either I or a better man than I, whose work I now inherit, desired this disaster for you and yours, I wish you no such ghastly retribution. Daniel son of Isaac. Go in peace; but go.

Yours,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

In those last sentences the spirit of prophecy was upon Chesterton after a truly dark and deep fashion. Yet even he did not guess that the retribution he feared would fall, not upon that "tribe of Isaacs" thus established in English government, but upon the unfortunate Jewish people as a whole, from the German nation that Isaacs had gone to Paris to protect. For there was no doubt in Chesterton's mind that it was his work at the Peace Conference to strive for the survival of Prussia, no matter how Europe and the rest of the Germanies suffered. The New Witness hated the Treaty of Versailles in its eventual form as much as Hitler hates it, but for a very different reason.

All human judgments are limited and no doubt there was a mixture of truth and error in Chesterton's view of the years that followed. But in the universal reaction from the war-spirit to Pacifism the truths he was urging received scant attention, his really amazing prophecies fell on deaf ears. "He will almost certainly," Monsignor Knox has said,* "be remembered as a prophet, in an age of false prophets." And it is not insignificant that today it has become the fashion to say, as he said twenty-five years ago and steadily reiterated, that the peace of 1918 was only an armistice.

[* In the panegyric preached in Westminster Cathedral, June 27, 1936.]

Just before leaving England for the Front, Cecil had married Miss Ada Jones, who had long worked with him on the paper, and who continued to write both for it and later for G.K.'s Weekly, doing especially the dramatic criticism under the pen-name of J. K. Prothero. Later on she was to become famous for her exploit in spending a fortnight investigating in the guise of a tramp the London of down-and-out women. She wrote In Darkest London and founded the Cecil Houses to improve the very bad conditions she had discovered and in memory of her husband. At this date Mrs. Cecil Chesterton visited Poland and wrote a series of articles describing the Polish struggle for life and freedom. Several Poles also contributed articles to the paper. There was not I imagine on the staff one single writer with the kind of ignorance that enabled Lloyd George to confess in Paris that he did not know where Teschen was.

Here was the first tragedy of Versailles. The representatives of both America and England were ignorant of the reality of Europe: Wilson was (as Chesterton often said) a much better man than Lloyd George, but he knew as little of the world which he had come to reconstruct. He was, too, a political doctrinaire preferring "what was not there" in the shape of a League of Nations to the real nations of Poland or Italy. And with the American as with the Welshman international finance stood beside the politicians and whispered in their ears. An interesting article appeared in the New Witness by an American who said that no leading journal in his own country would print it any more than any English one. He described the opposition of masses of ordinary Americans to the League of Nations and how a Chicago banker, who however had no international interests, had heartily agreed with this opposition. But the same banker had written to him next day eating his own words. In the interim he had met the other bankers. This American correspondent held with the New Witness that the League of Nations was mainly a device of international finance so framed as to enlist also the support of pacifist idealists who really believed it would make for peace.

Only one thing, said the New Witness, would make for a stable peace: remove Prussia from her position at the head of Germany: make her regaining of it impossible. Make a strong Poland, and a strong Italy, as well as a strong France. Later on they said they had disapproved of the weakening of Austria, but though I do not doubt that this is true in principle I cannot find much mention of Austria in the paper: Poland, Italy and Ireland fill their columns--and the freeing of England.

They claimed that theirs was in the main the policy of Clemenceau--but both Chesterton and Belloc admitted that Clemenceau, even if he desired a strong Poland as a barrier between Germany and Russia, shared with his colleagues an equal responsibility in the destruction of Austria which proved so fatal. He was too much a freemason to desire many Catholic states. The interests of France were not those of Italy, which certainly went to the wall and was turned thereby from friend and ally into enemy. And the New Witness summed up the fate of Ireland in the suggestion that Lloyd George had said to Wilson: "If you won't look at Ireland, I won't look at Mexico." Both Lloyd George and Wilson were too anti-Catholic to do other than dislike (in Lloyd George's case hate is the word) Catholic Poland. It is certain that Lloyd George in particular worked savagely against the Poland that should have been. A commission appointed by the Peace Conference reported in favour of Poland owning the port of Danzig and territory approximating to her age-long historic boundaries and in particular including East Prussia in which there was still a majority of Poles: Lloyd George sent back the report for revision: they made it again on the same lines.

It was a strange anomaly that this man should have sat at the Council Table representing a great country. In the past men had sat there who not only knew much of Europe themselves but who had as their advisers the Foreign office with all its experience and tradition. Belloc pointed out in an article on Versailles that the English tradition had been to hold a balance between conflicting extremes and thus to bring about a peace that at least ensured stability for a long period. But here was a man too ignorant to realize the dangers of his own ignorance and therefore seek help from experience. This peace would be, Belloc foretold, the parent of many wars. The Czechs got much of what they wanted just as d'Annunzio got Fiume for Italy--by seizing it. Poland waited for Versallles and enlisted her allies, yet while the Peace Conference was actually in session Germans were persecuting Poles in East Prussia so that many thousands of them fled into Poland proper and thus diminished the Polish population of East Prussia before any plebiscite could be taken there.

Lloyd George and Churchill sent a British expeditionary force to Archangel to assist the "White" Russians but when the Bolsheviks invaded Poland she was not supported. Nor did the Allies send her the raw material they had promised, to rebuild her commercial life. Again and again our papers reported pogroms in Poland. Yet close investigation by writers for the New Witness failed to discover any pogroms in the cities in which they were reported as occurring.

Powerful are the words in which, in April 1919, Chesterton foretells the future that will result if power and her historic port are refused to Poland.

. . . We know that a flood threatens the West from the meeting of two streams, the revenge of Germany and the anarchy of Russia; and we know that the West has only one possible dyke against such a flood, which is not the mere existence, but the might and majesty of Poland. We know that without some such Christian and chivalric shield on that side, we shall have half Europe and perhaps half Asia on our backs.

We know exactly what the Germans think about our nationalities in the West, and exactly what the Bolshevists think about any nationalities anywhere. We know that if the Poles have a port and a powerful line of communication with the West, they will be eager to help the West. We know that if they have no port they will have no reason to help the West and no power to help anybody. We know that if they lose their port it will not be by any act of English public opinion or any public opinion, but by the most secret of all secret diplomacy; that it will not even be given up by the English to the Germans, but by German Jews to other German Jews. We know that such international adventurers would still find themselves floating on the top of any tide that drowned the nations, and that they do not care what nations they drown. We know that out of the whole world the Polish port is the one place that should have been held, and the one place that is being surrendered.

In short, we know what everybody knows and scarcely anybody says.

There is one word to be added for those detached persons who see no particular objection to England ceasing to be English, who do not care about the national names of the West, which have been the greatest words in the poetry of the world. So far as we know there is only one ideal they do care about, and they will not get it. Whatever else this betrayal means it does not mean peace. The Poles have raised revolution after revolution, when three colossal Empires prevented them from being a nation at all. It is not in the realm of sanity to suppose that, if we make them half a nation, they will not some day attempt to be a whole nation. But we shall come back to the place where we started, after another cycle of terror and torment and abominable butchery--and to a place where we might, in peace and perfect safety, stand firm today.

"Not by any act of English public opinion" would Poland be weakened, not by any act of English opinion Prussia strengthened or Ireland oppressed. It was the horror of the situation that no act of English public opinion seemed possible, for the organs of action were stultified. When they could act by fighting and by dying Englishmen had done it grandly. Not all that they had done had, Chesterton believed, been lost. Because of them the Cross once more had replaced the crescent over the Holy City of Jerusalem, because of them Alsace and Lorraine were French once more and Poland lived again. But their sufferings and their death had not availed yet to save England.

And what is theirs, though banners blow on Warsaw risen again, Or ancient laughter walks in gold through the vineyards of Lorraine, Their dead are marked on English stones, their loves on English trees, How little is the prize they win, how mean a coin for these-- How small a shrivelled laurel-leaf lies crumpled here and curled; They died to save their country and they only saved the world.*

[* Collected Poems, pp. 79-80, "The English Graves."]

In the New Witness he wrote (July 25, 1919):

On Peace Day I set up outside my house two torches, and twined them with laurel; because I thought at least there was nothing pacifist about laurel. But that night, after the bonfire and the fireworks had faded, a wind grew and blew with gathering violence, blowing away the rain. And in the morning I found one of the laurelled posts torn off and lying at random on the rainy ground; while the other still stood erect, green and glittering in the sun. I thought that the pagans would certainly have called it an omen; and it was one that strangely fitted my own sense of some great work half fulfilled and half frustrated. And I thought vaguely of that man in Virgil, who prayed that he might slay his foe and return to his country; and the gods heard half the prayer, and the other half was scattered to the winds. For I knew we were right to rejoice; since the tyrant was indeed slain and his tyranny fallen for ever; but I know not when we shall find our way back to our own land.

English soldiers in Ireland felt, as we all remember, a strong sympathy with the Irish people: most of them, said the New Witness, became Sinn Feiners. This was an exaggeration, but certainly their opposition to acting as terrorists led to the employment in their stead of the jail-birds known as Black and Tans.

And in England itself the feeling was stirring that grew stronger as the years passed. The soldiers, who were the nation, had won the victory, the politicians had thrown it away. A rushed election before most of the men were demobilized had brought back the same old politicians by turning, so G.K. put it, "collusion" into "coalition." A Coalition Government had been in wartime "comprehensible and defensible; precisely because it is not concerned with construction or reconstruction but only with the warding off of destruction." A peace-time coalition could do nothing but show up the absurdity of the old party labels. For if these meant anything they meant that their wearers wanted an entirely different kind of construction, at which therefore they could not collaborate. How could a real Tory co-operate in construction with a genuine Radical? It was the culmination of unreality.

The idea that it succeeded (for the moment) because the country really believed that Lloyd George had won the war seemed to Chesterton the crowning absurdity. It succeeded because the party machines combined to finance their candidates and offered them to a rather dazed country whose men were still in great numbers under arms. "There is naturally no dissentient when hardly anybody seems to be sentient. Indifference is called unanimity."

How then could this indifference be thrown off: How could the returning manhood of the nation be given a true democracy: was there still hope? If there was, never had the New Witness been more needed than now. It had told the truth about political corruption, today it had to fight it: "We are not divided now into those who know and those who do not know. We are divided now into those who care and those who do not care." Thus wrote Chesterton in an article about his own continued editorship of the paper.

Politics would never have been my province, either in the highest or the lowest sense. . . . I have hitherto known myself to be merely a stop-gap; but my action, or rather inaction, as a stop-gap, has come terribly to an end. That gap will never be filled now, till God restores all the noble ruin that we name the world; and the wisest know best that the gap will yawn as hopelessly in the history of England as in the story of our private lives. I must now either accept this duty entirely or abandon it entirely. I will not abandon it; for every instinct and nerve of intelligence I have tells me that this is a time when it must not be abandoned. I must accept a comparison that must be a contrast, and a crushing contrast; but though I can never be so good as my brother, I will see if I can be better than myself.

The same attacks on financiers and others constantly reiterated might well have put Gilbert in the dock where his brother had stood. But I think the upshot of the case against Cecil had not been entirely encouraging to the winners. Then too, G.K.'s immense popularity made such an attack a still more doubtful move. Cecil had been less well-known than Gilbert: but far better known than a Mr. Fraser and a Mr. Beamish, a pair of cranks against whom Sir Alfred Mond brought a libel action in 1919 for having--in a placard shown in a window in a back street--called him a traitor and accused him of having traded with the enemy.

In this case Sir Alfred Mond (of the Mond Nickel Company) giving evidence: "said that he always disregarded charges made by irresponsible persons. Charges had been made against him in the New Witness which was edited by Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. All the world regarded Mr. Chesterton as 'irresponsible,' but he was certainly amusing, and he (the witness) had read most of his books. He had once procured with some difficulty a copy of the New Witness." HIS LORDSHIP--Did Mr. Chesterton charge the witness with being a traitor? Mr. SMITH (Counsel for the defence)--Yes, in the New Witness."

"Irresponsible" was not quite the mot juste. The unfortunate Fraser and Beamish were not of the metal to win that or any case in that or any court. There was a kind of solemn buffoonery in choosing these two as responsible opponents in preference to the irresponsible G.K. Chesterton. At any rate damages of £5000 were given against them--which gives some measure of the risk G.K. took in making exactly the same attacks.

Gilbert had not so much natural buoyancy as Cecil: he got far less fun out of making these attacks. Still less had he the recklessness that made Cecil indifferent even to the charge of inaccuracy. That charge was in fact the only one that Gilbert feared. Writing to a contributor whose article he had held back in order to verify an accusation made in it, Gilbert remarked that he had no fear of a lawsuit when he was certain of his facts: he did not fear fine or imprisonment:--he had one fear only, "I am afraid of being answered."

There was another thing he feared: hurting or distressing his friends. This was especially a danger for one, so many of whose friends were also his opponents in politics or religion: and who was now editing a paper of so controversial a character. With H. G. Wells he had a real bond of affection, and an interesting correspondence with and about him illustrates all Gilbert's qualities; consideration for his subordinates: for his friendships; concern for the integrity of his paper: sense of responsibility to Cecil's memory.

During an editorial absence the assistant editor, Mr. Titterton, had accepted a series of articles called "Big Little H. G. Wells" from Edwin Pugh, which seemed to be turning into an attack on Wells instead of an appreciation. Chesterton wrote to Mr. Titterton and simultaneously to Wells himself--

DEAR WELLS,

The sudden demands of other duties, which I really could not see how to avoid, has prevented my attending to the New Witness lately: and I have only just heard, on the telephone, that you have written a letter to the paper touching an unfortunate difference between you and Edwin Pugh. I don't yet know the contents of your letter but of course I have told my locum tenens that it is to be printed whatever it is, this week or next. I am really exceedingly distressed to have been out of the business at the time; but if you knew the circumstances I think you would see the difficulty; and my editorial absence has not been a holiday. As it is, I agreed to the general idea of a study of your work by Pugh; and I confess it never even crossed my mind that anybody would write such a thing except as a tribute to your genius and the intellectual interest of the subject; nor can I believe it now. It may strike you as so ironical as to be incredible; but it is really one of those ironies that are also facts, that I rather welcomed the idea of a criticism in the paper (which so often differs from you) from a modernist and collectivist standpoint more like your own. I should imagine Pugh would agree with you more than I do, and not less. I will not prejudge the quarrel till I understand more of it; but I now write at once to tell you that I would not dream of tolerating anything meant to be a mere personal attack on you, even if I resigned my post on the point; and I had already written to the office to say so. But I do not believe for a moment that Pugh means any such thing; I regarded him as a strong Wellsian and even more of an admirer than myself; though he might be so modern as to use a familiar and mixed method of portraiture, which is too modern for my tastes, but which many use besides he. For the moment I suggest a possible misunderstanding, which he may well correct by a further explanation. I had said something myself in my weekly article, demurring to a possible undervaluing of you, long before I heard of your own letter. Even when I am in closer touch with things, of course, many things appear in the paper with which I wholly disagree; but the notion of a mere campaign against you would always have seemed to me as abominable and absurd as it does now; I do not believe any one can entertain it; and certainly I do not. I am perfectly willing to do you anything that can fairly be shown to be justice, whether it were explanation or apology or anything else. This is all I can say without your letter and Pugh's side of the case; but I feel I should say this at once.

Yours sincerely,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

P.S. I have arranged for your letter to appear in next week's number; but I may have more light on Pugh's attitude by then.

To Titterton he wrote:

. . . I do hope this work will not turn into anything that looks like a mere attack on Wells, especially in the rather realistic and personal modern manner, which I am perhaps too Victorian myself to care very much about. I do not merely feel this because I have managed to keep Wells as a friend on the whole. I feel it much more (and I know you are a man to understand such sentiments) because I have a sort of sense of honour about him as an enemy, or at least a potential enemy. We are so certain to collide in controversial warfare, that I have a horror of his thinking I would attack him with anything but fair controversial weapons. My feeling is so entirely consistent with a faith in Pugh's motives, as well as an admiration of his talents, that I honestly believe I could explain this to him without offence. . . .

I am honestly in a very difficult position on the New Witness, because it is physically impossible for me really to edit it, and also do enough outside work to be able to edit it unpaid, as well as having a little over to give it from time to time. What we should have done without the loyalty and capacity of you and a few others I can't imagine. I cannot oversee everything that goes into the paper; . . . I cannot resign, without dropping as you truly said, the work of a great man who is gone; and who, I feel, would wish me to continue it. It is like what Stevenson said about marriage and its duties: "There is no refuge for you; not even suicide." But I should have to consider even resignation, if I felt that the acceptance of Pugh's generosity really gave him the right to print something that I really felt bound to disapprove. It may be that I am needlessly alarmed over a slip or two of the pen, in vivid descriptions of a very odd character, and that Pugh really admires his Big Little H. G. as much as I thought he did at the beginning of the business. . . . If the general impression on the reader's mind is of the Big Wells and not the Little Wells, I think the doubt I mean would really be met.

Somehow the letter to Titterton got into the hands of a Mr. Hennessy who, after Gilbert's death, sent it to Wells.

Wells wrote, "Thank you very much for that letter of G.K.C.'s. It is exactly like him. From first to last he and I were very close friends and never for a moment did I consider him responsible for Pugh's pathetic and silly little outbreak. I never knew anyone so steadily true to form as G.K.C."

Besides the cleansing of public life two other things were seen as vital by the New Witness, the restoration of well-distributed property and the restoration of liberty. Under the heading "Reconstruction of Property" Belloc set out a series of proposals, highly practical and very far from what is usually called revolutionary: that savings for instance made on a small scale should be helped by a very high rate of interest; that the purchase by small men of small parcels of land or businesses or houses should be freed from legal charges while these should be made heavier for those who purchased on a large scale thus encouraging small property and checking huge accumulation. He pointed out how vast sums could be found for such subsidies out of the money spent today on an education which the poor detested for their children and which most of the wealthy admitted to be an abject failure. Most of those, he noted, who oppose Distributism do so on the ground that the proposals are unpractical or revolutionary, which generally means that they have not examined the proposals. His own were certainly practical and would by many be called reactionary. But he admitted one doubt--besides the overwhelming difficulty of turning the current of modern Socialism--the doubt whether Englishmen from long disuse had not lost the appetite for property.

Chesterton's own line of approach to the double problem was also twofold. In a volume of Essays published near the end of the war and called The Utopia of Usurers he remarked: "That anarchic future which the more timid Tories professed to fear has already fallen upon us. We are ruled by ignorant people."

The old aristocracy of England, in his view, had made many mistakes but certain things they had understood very well. The modern governing class "cannot face a fact, or follow an argument, or feel a tradition; but least of all can they, upon any persuasion read through a plain impartial book, English or foreign, that is not specially written to soothe their panic or to please their pride." There had been reality in the claim of the old aristocracy to understand matters not known to the people. They had read history; they were familiar with other languages and other lands. They had a great tradition of foreign diplomacy. Even the study of philosophy and theology, today confined to a handful of experts, was not alien to them. On all this had rested what right they had to govern. But today "They rule them by the smiling terror of an ancient secret. They smile and smile but they have forgotten the secret."

On the other hand the ordinary workman had the advantage over his probably millionaire master by the necessity of knowing something. He must be able to use his tools, he must know "enough arithmetic to know when prices have risen." The hard business of living taught him something. Give him a chance of more through property and liberty and see what he will build on that foundation. The war had already shown not only the courage of our men but their contrivance: their trench newspapers, songs and jests: their initiative as sailors and as airmen: at home the same thing was happening. Allotments had sprung up everywhere and solved the problem of potato shortage. Men were doing for themselves a rough kind of building. The inclination to get away from the machine and do things oneself was on the increase.

Armistice and the men's return were heralded by outdoor tea-parties with ropes stretched across the streets for safety. The outburst of pageants was spontaneous and national. "It is time," said Chesterton, "for an army of amateurs; for England is perishing of the professionals." Vitality seemed to be flowing back into national life, but Bureaucracy does not love vitality. Agitated Town Councils met and stopped the tea-parties; fought against street markets through which allotment holders could sell their produce cheaply; put heavy rates on land reclaimed and buildings erected by hard work. Town families living in single rooms had secured plots on building estates and run up shacks for themselves and their families. They were forbidden to live in these dwellings--only intended as temporary, but far more healthy than living eight people to a room in a slum. The New Witness suspected that the real objection in the eyes of Councillors was a lowering of the value of neighbouring plots for wealthier purchasers.

Worst of all, the allotments were taken: fields sold for speculative building, land dug in public parks taken away in the name of "amenities." The little spark that could have been fanned into a flame was crushed out.

An episode of a few years later best illustrates the spirit Chesterton was fighting. In 1926 a threat arose to the traffic monopoly from soldiers who put their war gratuities into the purchase of omnibuses which they drove themselves. The London General Omnibus Company decided to crush them and with the aid of a Government Commission succeeded. Chesterton's paper followed the struggle with passionate interest. Just as he believed that the small shop actually served the public better than the large, so too he believed that these owner-drivers would serve it better than the Combine. But if it could have been proved that the Combine was more efficient Gilbert would still have championed the Independents. It was better for the Community that men should take responsibility and initiative for themselves even if the work could be done more efficiently by wage slaves. To his dismay he found that the Trade Unions did not dream of applying this test and that they were aligned against the Pirates--as the independent owners were usually called.

He had always been an ardent supporter of the Trade Unions. To him it had seemed they were trying to do the work of the ancient Guilds under far more difficult conditions. But after the war for the first time a little note of doubt creeps into his voice when he is speaking of them. They were still vocal for the rights of labour, but they had begun to lay stress exclusively on the less important of those rights.

Writing of the loss of the allotments he suggested in one article that the Trades Unions might well use some part of their funds in purchasing land to be held in perpetuity by their members. But I doubt if he much expected that they would do so. Many Trade Unionists were working for the Bus Company and were more concerned about their conditions of work than about the handful of drivers who were their own masters. But the Unions had begun to stress almost solely the question of hours and of wages; to fight for good conditions but no longer for control or ownership: to demand security but to agree to abandon many of their rights in return.

It was a chill fear and for long he resisted it, but in these terrible years it had begun to shake him. Were the people of England losing the appetite for freedom and for property? Were the Trades Unions, from lack of leadership and confusion of thought, beginning to accept the Servile State?

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XXIII. Rome via Jerusalem

SHORTLY AFTER THE war Gilbert and Frances set out on their travels, going in 1919 to Palestine, home through Italy early in 1920, and starting out again the following year for a lecture tour in the United States.

To his friendship with Maurice Baring Gilbert owed their being able to make the first of these journeys as well as much else. The picture entitled "Conversation Piece" of Chesterton, Belloc and Baring is well known. Was it Chesterton himself who christened it "Baring, Overbearing and Past Bearing?" Many elements united the three in a close friendship: love of literature, love of Europe, a common view of the philosophy of history and of life. Frances Chesterton often said that of all her husband's friends she thought there was none he loved better than Maurice Baring. They often wrote ballades together--a French form which they, with Phillimore and others, had re-popularised in English. A telegram from Gilbert refusing a celebration runs like a refrain:

Prince, Yorkshire holds me now By Yorkshire hams I'm fed I can't assist your row I send ballades instead.

These "Ballades Urbane" were a feature in the New Witness--but many of those the three friends composed were strictly not for publication but recited to friends behind closed doors. Gilbert's memory was useful: he knew all his own and the others: Once Belloc forgot the Envoi to one of his own ballades and Gilbert finished it for him. Even to Maurice Baring, G.K. wrote less often than he intended and one apologetic ballade carries the refrain:

I write no letters to the men I love.

I have always fancied that Maurice Baring gave Gilbert the idea for his story The Man Who Knew Too Much. First in the diplomatic service, then doing splendidly as an airman in the war, a member of the great banking family, related to most of the aristocracy and intimate with most of the rest, he is like the hero of the book in a sort of detachment, a slight irony about a world that he has not cared to conquer. Impossible for a mere acquaintance to say whether he views that world with all the disillusionment of Chesterton's hero--but anyhow such a suggestion from life is never more than a hint for creative art. Another side is seen in the Autobiography-- in the stories of Maurice Baring plunging into the sea in evening dress on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, and of the smashing by Gilbert of a wine-glass that became in retrospect a priceless goblet (which had "stood by Charlemagne's great chair and served St. Peter at High Mass") and now inspired the refrain:

I like the sound of breaking glass.

A good deal of glass was broken by the stones of this group of men whose own house was made of tolerably strong materials.

There is quite a bundle of Mr. Baring's letters to Gilbert, and, in spite of the apologetic ballade, a fair number of answers. Two of these last are written early in 1919, the second of which opens the question of the Jerusalem visit:

May 23, 1919

MY DEAR MAURICE,

I am the Prince of unremembered towers destroyed before the birth of Babylon; I am also the (writer) of unremembered letters, and to a much greater extent the designer and imaginer of unwritten letters: and I cannot remember whether I ever acknowledged properly your communications about Claudel, especially your interesting remarks about the comparative coolness of Henri de Regnier about him. It struck me because I think it is part of something I have noticed myself; a curious and almost premature conservatism in the older generation of revolutionaries, particularly when they were pagan revolutionaries. Not that I suppose de Regnier is particularly old or in the stock sense a revolutionist; but I think you will know the break between the generations to which I refer. I remember having exactly the same experience the only time I ever talked to Swinburne. I had regarded (and resisted) him in my boyhood as a sort of Antichrist in purple, like Nero holding his lyre, and I found him more like a very well-read Victorian old maid, almost entirely a laudator temporis acti disposed to say that none of the young men would ever come up to Tennyson--which may be quite true for all I know. I fancy it has something to do with the very fact that their revolt was pagan, and being temporal was also temporary. When that particular fashion in caps of liberty has gone out, they have nothing to fall back on but the feeling which Swinburne himself puts into the mouth of the pagan on the day when Constantine issued the proclamation.

"But to me their new device is barren, the days are bare Things long gone over suffice, and men forgotten that were."

I only tell you all this because you might find it amusing to keep an eye on the New Statesman as well as the New Witness, where there is a small repetition of the same thing. Bernard Shaw has written an article which is supposed to be about his view of me and Socialism; but which may be said more truly to be about his blindness to Hilary and his Servile State. It is quite startling to me to find how wholly he misses Hilary's point; and how wildly he falls back on a sort of elderly impatience with our juvenile paradox and fantasticality. I shall answer him as abusively as my great personal liking for him will allow and I think Hilary is going to do the same; so if you ever see such papers, you might enjoy the fun.

Yours always,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

DEAR MAURICE,

Thank you ever so much for your interesting letter. I think you are right every time about Gosse and Claudel; or rather about Claudel and Gosse. For though I think Gosse a very valuable old Victorian in his way, I do not think he is on the same scale as the things that have lately been happening in the world; and Claudel is one of them. He has happened like a great gun going off; and I think I saw a line of his on the subject of such a discharge of artillery in the war. It ran, "And that which goes forth is France; terrible as the Holy Ghost." I doubt if Gosse has ever seen that France even in a flash and a bang; I don't see how he could. Remember the religion in which he grew up, by his own very graphic account of it; a man is not entirely emancipated from such very positive Puritanism by anything so negative as Agnosticism. Nothing but a religion can cast out a religion. Being so sensitive on behalf of Renan is simply not understanding the great historical passions about a heresiarch. It means that famous intellectuals must not hate each other; because they all belong to the Saville Club. Please do not think I mean merely that Gosse is a snob; I think he is a jolly old gentleman and a good critic of French poetry; but not of Gesta Dei per Francos. Your points against him are quite logical; I suppose the controversy will not be conducted in public, or I should feel inclined to join in it. Anyhow, I wish it could be continued between us as a conversation in private, for I have long wanted to talk to you about serious things.

Meanwhile, as not wholly unconnected with the serious things, could you possibly do me a great favour? It is very far from being the first great favour you have done me; and I should fear that anyone less magnanimous would fancy I only wrote to you about such things. But the situation is this. An excellent offer has been made to me to write a book about Jerusalem, not political but romantic and religious, so to speak; I conceive it as mostly about pilgrimages and crusades, in poetical prose, and working up to Allenby's great entrance. The offer includes money to go to Jerusalem but cannot include all the political or military permissions necessary to go there. I have another motive for wanting to go there, which is much stronger than the desire to write the book though I do think I could do it in the right way and, what matters more, on the right side. Frances is to come with me, and all the doctors in creation tell her she can only get rid of her neuritis if she goes to some such place and misses part of an English winter. I would do anything to bring it off, for that reason alone. You are a man who knows everybody; do you know anybody on Allenby's staff; or know anybody who knows anybody on Allenby's staff; or know anybody who would know anybody who would know anything about it? I am told that it cannot be done as yet in the ordinary way by Cook's; and that the oracle must be worked in some such fashion. If you should be so kind as to refer to any worried soldier or official, I should like it understood that I am not nosing about touching any diplomatic or military matter; France in Syria, or any copy for the New Witness. I only want to write semi-historical rhetoric on the spot. If you could possibly help in this matter, I really think you would be helping things you yourself care about; and one person, not myself, who deserves it. I will not say it would be killing two birds with one stone, which might seem a tragic metaphor; but bringing one bird at least to life; and allowing the other bird, who is a goose, to go on a wild goose-chase.

Yours always,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

It was much needed change and refreshment for both Gilbert and Frances. Her Diary shows a vivid enjoyment of all the scenes and happenings: going into the Church of the Nativity with a door "so low you can hardly get in--this done to prevent the cattle from straying in"; seeing camels on the roof of a convent; standing godmother to an Armenian carpenter's baby:

The officiator in a cape of white silk embroidered in gold and a wonderful crown supposed to represent the temple. The godfather (a young man) was in a red velvet gown. After a good many prayers and much chanting the babe, beautifully dressed, was taken to the font (which was in the side of the wall) and there were more prayers and chanting. Then cushions were laid on the floor and the child undressed, all of us assisting. At this point I was asked to stand Godmother and gladly consented. The baby, by this time quite naked, was handed to the priest who immersed him completely under the water three times--giving him the name of Pedros (Peter). Before being re-clothed he was anointed with oil--the forebead, eyes, nose, mouth, ears, heart, hands and feet all being signed with the Cross. The child was by this time crying lustily and it was some business to get him dressed, especially as he was swaddled in bands very completely. When ready he was handed to me and he lay stiff in my arms whilst I held two large lighted candles. I followed the priest from the font to the little altar, where a chain and a little gold cross were bound round his head (signifying that he was now a Christian). Then the priest touched his lips with the sacramental wafer, and touched his nose with myrrh. After the Blessing, we left the church in a procession, the godfather carrying the baby. At the threshold of the house the priest took it and delivered it to the mother who sat waiting for it, also holding the two candles. Again the priests muttered a few prayers and blessed mother, child and godparents. The father is an Armenian carpenter by trade--very nice people. Mother very pretty. The parents insisted that we should stay for refreshments and we were handed a very nice liquor in lovely little glasses and a very beautiful sort of pastry. Afterwards cups of weak tea and cakes.

The various rites and ceremonies in Jerusalem interested Frances deeply but the Diary shows no awareness of the differences that separated the various kinds of Christians. The Diary ends with the return through Rome where she and I met, to the surprise of both of us, in the street, while a friend travelling with them met my mother. "Both meetings were miraculous," Frances comments. Since the letters to my mother during Gilbert's illness in 1915 we had heard no more about his spiritual pilgrimage. There was much eager talk at this meeting but no opportunity occurred and certainly none was sought for any confidences. As we waved goodbye after their departing train my mother said thoughtfully: "Frances did rather play off Jerusalem against Rome, didn't she?"

In fact, as we learned later, this visit to Jerusalem had been a determining factor in Gilbert's conversion. Many people both in and outside the Church had been wondering what had so long delayed him. The mental progress from the vague Liberalism of the Wild Knight to the splendid edifice of Orthodoxy had been a swift one. For the book was written in 1908 and already several years earlier in Heretics and in his newspaper contests with Blatchford, Gilbert Chesterton had shown his firm belief in the Godhead of Our Lord, in Sacraments, in Priesthood and in the Authority of the Church. But it was not yet the Catholic and Roman Church. There is a revealing passage in the Autobiography: "And then I happened to meet Lord Hugh Cecil. I met him at the house of Wilfrid Ward, that great clearing house of philosophies and theologies. . . . I listened to Lord Hugh's very lucid statements of his position. . . . The strongest impression I received was that he was a Protestant. I was myself still a thousand miles from being a Catholic; but I think it was the perfect and solid Protestantism of Lord Hugh that fully revealed to me that I was no longer a Protestant."

The time that thousand miles took is a real problem--the years before the illness during which he talked of joining the Church, the seven further years before he joined it. Cecil Chesterton had been received before the war--just at the beginning of the Marconi Case, in fact--and the entire outlook of both brothers had seemed to make this inevitable, not only theologically but sociologically and historically. Alike in their outlook on Europe today or on the great ages of the past, it was a Catholic civilisation based on Catholic theology that seemed to them the only true one for a full and rich human development.

I think in this matter a special quality and its defect could be seen in Gilbert. For most people intensity of thought is much more difficult than action. With him it was the opposite. He used his mind unceasingly, his body as little as possible. I remember one day going to see them when he had a sprained ankle and learning from Frances how happy it made him because nobody could bother him to take exercise. The whole of practical life he left to her. But joining the Church was not only something to be thought about, it was something really practical that had to be done, and here Frances could not help him.

"He will need Frances," said Father O'Connor to my mother, "to take him to church, to find his place in his prayer-book, to examine his conscience for him when he goes to Confession. He will never take all those hurdles unaided." Frances never lifted a finger to prevent Gilbert from joining the Catholic Church. But obviously before she was convinced herself she could not help him. The absence of help was in this case a very positive hindrance.

I remember one day on a picnic Gilbert coming up to me with a very disconsolate expression and asking where Frances was. I said, "I don't know but I can easily find her. Do you want her?" He answered, "I don't want her now but I may want her at any minute." Many men depend upon their wives but very few men admit it so frankly. And if he was unpractical to a point almost inconceivable, Frances herself could be called practical only in comparison with him. The confused mass of papers through which she had to hunt to find some important document lingers in the memory.

Another element that made action lag behind conviction with Chesterton was his perpetual state of overwork. Physically inactive, his mind was never barren but issued in an immense output: several books every year besides editing and articles: there were even two years in which no fewer than six books were published. To focus his attention on the deepest matters, it was vital to escape from the net of work and worry.

Returning from Jerusalem, Gilbert wrote from Alexandria to Maurice Baring:

MY DEAR MAURICE,

To quote a poet we agree in thinking ridiculously underrated by recent fashions, my boat is on the shore and my bark is on the sea; but before I go, Tom Moore (if I may so by a flight of fancy describe you), I feel impelled to send you this hurried line to thank you, so far as this atrocious hotel pen will allow me, for the wonderful time I have had in Palestine, which is so largely owing to you. There is also something even more important I want very much to discuss with you; because of certain things that have been touched on between us in former times. I will only say here that my train of thought, which really was one of thought and not fugitive emotion, came to an explosion in the Church of the Ecce Homo in Jerusalem; a church which the guidebooks call new and the newspapers call Latin. I fear it may be at least a month before we meet; for the journey takes a fortnight and may be prolonged by a friend ill in Paris; and I must work the moment I return to keep a contract. But if we could meet by about then I could thank you better for many things.

Yours illegibly,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

The contract that had to be kept was in all probability the writing of The New Jerusalem. It is a glorious book. Until I read them more carefully I had always accepted G.K.'s own view that books of travel were a weak spot in his multifarious output. He said of himself that he always tended to see such enormous significance in every detail that he might just as well describe railway signals near Beaconsfield as the light of sunset over the Golden Horn. But The New Jerusalem is no mere book of description. It is the book of a man seeing a vision. To understand how this vision broke upon him we have first to try to understand something jealously hidden by Gilbert Chesterton--his own suffering. Even as a boy--in the days of the toothache and still more torturing earache--he had written

Though pain be stark and bitter And days in darkness creep Not to that depth I sink me That asks the world to weep.

So much did he acclaim himself enrolled under the banner of joy that I think most people miss the companion picture to the favourite one of the Happy Warrior. No warrior can fight untiringly through a long lifetime without wounds, without temptations to abandon the struggle and seek a less glorious peace. If in what are commonly called practical matters Chesterton was weak, he was in this almost superhumanly strong. His fame did not rest upon success in the field of sociology and politics. He could have increased it by neglecting the good of England for which he fought, and living in literature, poetry and fantasy. Here all acclaimed him great, whereas most tolerated or despised as a hobby or a weakness the work he was pouring into the fight for England. In this time after the Armistice it was by a naked effort of the will that he held his ground. The loss of Cecil with his light-hearted courage, his energy and buoyancy, was immeasurable. And I know--for we talked of it together--that Frances had not the complete sympathy with Gilbert over the paper that she had over his other work. It seemed to her too great a drain on his time and energy: it made the writing of his important books more difficult. She would not, she told me, try to stop it as she knew how much he cared, but she would have rejoiced if he had chosen to let it go.

And the fight that he had almost enjoyed in Cecil's company had become a harder one, not merely because he was alone but because the nature of the foe had changed. He was fighting now not individual abuses but the mood of pessimism that had overtaken our civilisation. In an article entitled Is It Too Late? he defined this pessimism as "a paralysis of the mind; an impotence intrinsically unworthy of a free man." He stated powerfully the case of those who held that our civilisation was dying and that it was too late to make any further efforts:

The future belongs to those who can find a real answer to that real case. . . . The omens and the auguries are against us. There is no answer but one; that omens and auguries are heathen things; and that we are not heathens. . . . We are not lost unless we lose ourselves. . . . Great Alfred, in the darkness of the Ninth Century, when the Danes were beating at the door, wrote down on his copy of Boethius his denial of the doctrine of fate. We, who have been brought up to see all the signs of the times pointing to improvement, may live to see all the signs in heaven and earth pointing the other way. If we go on it must be in another name than that of the Goddess of Fortune.

It was that other Name, in which he had so long believed, that he realised with the freshness of novelty on this journey to Jerusalem. He made in the Holy City and in the fields of Palestine a new discovery of Christ and of the Christian Thing. As he looked over the Dead Sea and almost physically realised what evil meant, he heard the voice of the divine Deliverer saying to the demons: "Go forth and trouble him not any more." In the cave at Bethlehem he realised the "little local infancy" whereby the creator of the world had chosen to redeem the world. All through the book there are glimpses of what he tells more fully in The Everlasting Man. Between the two books all that he had seen and thought in Palestine lay in his mind, and grew there, and fructified for our understanding. But he had seen it all in that first vision.

Jerusalem first impressed Chesterton as a mediaeval city and from its turrets he could readily picture Godfrey de Bouillon, Richard the Lion-Hearted and Saint Louis of France. Through the Crusades he views what was meant by Christendom and sets over against it at once the greatness and the barrenness of Islam:

The Moslem had one thought, and that a most vital one; the greatness of God which levels all men. But the Moslem had not one thought to rub against another, because he really had not another. It is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention, or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire. The Creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex; they can breed thoughts.

Today we of Christendom have fallen below ourselves but yet we have something left of the power to create whether it be a theology or a civilisation. Talking to an old Arab in the desert, Chesterton heard him say that in all these years of Turkish rule the Turks had never given to the people a cup of cold water. And as the old man spoke he heard the clank of pipes and he knew that it was the English soldiers who were bringing water through the desert to Jerusalem.

A chapter on Zionism discusses with sympathy to both parties the difficulties of the Jewish settlement in Palestine. In Palestine he found his Jewish friend and co-worker on the New Witness, Dr. Eder, who had gone there ardent in the cause of Zionism; and Chesterton himself remained convinced that some system akin to Zionism was the only possible solution of this enormous problem--possibly a system of Jewish cantons in various countries. But he was equally convinced that the English government was destroying the chances of success for Zionism by sending Jews as governors in England's name to that or any other Eastern country.

Even in this book there is struck at times a note of the doom he feared was overhanging us. He heard "Islam crying from the turret and Israel wailing from the wall," and yet he seemed too to hear a voice from all the peoples of Jerusalem "bidding us weep not for them, who have faith and clarity and a purpose, but weep for ourselves and for our children." In his fighting articles he had asserted the supremacy of the human will over fate: in this book he sees how that will must be renewed, purified and made once more mighty by the same power that built the ancient civilisation of Christendom.

Jerusalem gave to Chesterton the fuller realisation of two great facts. First he saw that the supernatural was needed not only to conquer the powers of evil but even to restore the good things that should be natural to man. As he put it in the later book, "Nature may not have the name of Isis; Isis may not be really looking for Osiris. But it is true that Nature is really looking for something. Nature is always looking for the supernatural." Yet man, even strengthened by the supernatural, cannot suffice for the fight, without a leader who is more than man. In the land of Christ's childhood, His teaching and His suffering, there came to Gilbert Chesterton "a vision more vivid than a man walking unveiled upon the mountains, seen of men and seeing; a visible God."

All visions must fade into the light of common day, and the return home meant the resumption of hard labour.

"For the moment," wrote Gilbert to Maurice Baring, "as Balzac said, I am labouring like a miner in a landslide. Normally I would let it slide. But if I did in this case I should break two or three really important contracts, which I find I have returned from Jerusalem just in time to save."

(A few years later when Sheed and Ward started, Gilbert wanted to write a number of books for us to publish. His secretary found that he had then thirty books contracted for with a variety of publishers!)

He had got home in April 1920: and a lecture tour was planned for the United States at the beginning of the following year. The eight months between saw the completion and publication of The Uses of Diversity (collected essays), The New Jerusalem and The Superstition of Divorce. And still went on the New Witness, the Illustrated London News, articles, introductions, lectures, conferences. Two letters to Maurice Baring clearly belong to these months:

MY DEAR MAURICE,

I am so awfully distressed to hear you are unwell again; I do not know whether I ought even to bother you with my sentiments; beyond my sympathy; but if it is not too late, or too early, I will call on you early next week; probably Monday, but I will let you know for certain before then. I would have called on you long ago, let alone written, but for this load of belated work which really seems to bury me day after day. I never realised before that business can really block out much bigger things. As you may possibly guess, I want to consider my position about the biggest thing of all, whether I am to be inside it or outside it. I used to think one could be an Anglo-Catholic and really inside it; but if that was (to use an excellent phrase of your own) only a Porch, I do not think I want a Porch, and certainly not a Porch standing some way from the building. A Porch looks so silly, standing all by itself in a field. Since then, unfortunately, there have sprung up round it real ties and complications and difficulties; difficulties that seemed almost duties. But I will not bother you with all that now; and I particularly do not want you to bother yourself, especially to answer this unless you want to. I know I have your sympathy; and please God, I shall get things straight. Sometimes one suspects the real obstacles have been the weaknesses one knows to be wrong, and not the doubts that might be relatively right, or at least rational. I suppose all this is a common story; and I hope so; for wanting to be uncommon is really not one of my weaknesses. They are worse, probably, but they are not that. There are other and in the ordinary sense more cheerful things I would like to talk of; things I think we could both do for causes we certainly agree about. Meanwhile, thank you for everything; and be sure I think of you very much.

Yours always,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

MY DEAR MAURICE,

This is the shortest, hastiest and worst written letter in the world. It only tells you three things: (1) that I thank you a thousand times for the book; (2) that I have to leave for America for a month or two, earlier than I expected; But I am glad, for I shall see something of Frances, without walls of work between us; and (3) that I have pretty well made up my mind about the thing we talked about. Fortunately, the thing we talked about can be found all over the world.

Yours always,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

I will not write here of the American scene but will talk of it in a later chapter along with the second tour Gilbert made in the States. It seems best to complete now the story of his journey of the mind. A reserved man tells more of himself indirectly than directly. Readers of the Autobiography complain that it is concerned with everything in the world except G. K. Chesterton. You can certainly search its pages in vain for any account of the process of his conversion: for that you must look elsewhere: in the poems to Our lady, in The Catholic Church and Conversion, in The Well and the Shallows, and in the letters here to be quoted.

In The Catholic Church and Conversion he sketches the three phases through which most converts pass, all of which he had himself experienced. He sums them up as "patronizing the Church, discovering the Church, and running away from the Church." In the first phase a man is taking trouble ("and taking trouble has certainly never been a particular weakness of mine") to find out the fallacy in most anti-Catholic ideas. In the second stage he is gradually discovering the great ideas enshrined in the Church and hitherto hidden from him. "It is these numberless glimpses of great ideas, that have been hidden from the convert by the prejudices of his provincial culture, that constitute the adventurous and varied second stage of the conversion. It is, broadly speaking, the stage in which the man is unconsciously trying to be converted. And the third stage is perhaps the truest and most terrible. It is that in which the man is trying not to be converted. He has come too near to the truth, and has forgotten that truth is a magnet, with the powers of attraction and repulsion."*

[* The Catholic Church and Conversion, p. 61.]

To a certain extent it is a fear which attaches to all sharp and irrevocable decisions; it is suggested in all the old jokes about the shakiness of the bridegroom at the wedding or the recruit who takes the shilling and gets drunk partly to celebrate, but partly also to forget it. But it is the fear of a fuller sacrament and a mightier army. . . . *

[* Ibid., p. 65.]

The man has exactly the same sense of having committed or compromised himself; or having been in a sense entrapped, even if he is glad to be entrapped. But for a considerable time he is not so much glad as simply terrified. It may be that this real psychological experience has been misunderstood by stupider people and is responsible for all that remains of the legend that Rome is a mere trap. But that legend misses the whole point of the psychology. It is not the Pope who has set the trap or the priests who have baited it. The whole point of the position is that the trap is simply the truth. The whole point is that the man himself has made his way towards the trap of truth, and not the trap that has run after the man. All steps except the last step he has taken eagerly on his own account, out of interest in the truth; and even the last step, or the last stage, only alarms him because it is so very true. If I may refer once more to a personal experience, I may say that I for one was never less troubled by doubts than in the last phase, when I was troubled by fears. Before that final delay I had been detached and ready to regard all sorts of doctrines with an open mind. Since that delay has ended in decision, I have had all sorts of changes in mere mood; and I think I sympathise with doubts and difficulties more than I did before. But I had no doubts or difficulties just before. I had only fears; fears of something that had the finality and simplicity of suicide. But the more I thrust the thing into the back of my mind, the more certain I grew of what Thing it was. And by a paradox that does not frighten me now in the least, it may be that I shall never again have such absolute assurance that the thing is true as I had when I made my last effort to deny it.*

[* Ibid., pp. 62-3.]

The whole of Catholic theology can be justified, says Gilbert, if you are allowed to start with those two ideas that the Church is popularly supposed to oppose: Reason and Liberty. "To become a Catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to learn how to think. It is so in exactly the same sense in which to recover from palsy is not to leave off moving but to learn how to move." The convert has learnt long before his conversion that the Church will not force him to abandon his will. "But he is not unreasonably dismayed at the extent to which he may have to use his will." This was the crux for Gilbert. "There is in the last second of time or hairbreadth of space, before the iron leaps to the magnet, an abyss full of all the unfathomable forces of the universe. The space between doing and not doing such a thing is so tiny and so vast."

Father Maturin said after his conversion that for at least ten years before it the question had never been out of his mind for ten waking minutes. It was about ten years since Gilbert had first talked to Father O'Connor of his intention to join the Church, but in his case thought on the subject could not have been so continuous. Still he had time for patronising, discovery, and running away, all in leisurely fashion. External efforts to help him had been worse than useless: as he indicates in The Catholic Church and Conversion, they had always put him back.

"Gilbert could not be hustled," says Maurice Baring of his whole habit of mind and body.

"You could fluster Gilbert but not hustle him," says Father O'Connor.

They were both too wise to try.

In two letters Gilbert said that the two people who helped him most at this time were Maurice Baring and Father Ronald Knox, who had both gone through the same experience themselves.

Besides the positive mental processes of recognition, repulsion and attraction exercised by the Church, Gilbert was affected to some extent both by affection for the Church of England and disappointment with it. The profound joy of his early conversion to Christianity was linked with Anglicanism and so too were many friendships and the continued attachment to it of Frances. But what he said to Maurice Baring about a Porch is representative. Like Father Maturin he felt he owed so much to his Anglican friends: he hated to stress overmuch the revulsion from Anglicanism in the process of conversion. But it did at this date contribute to the converging arguments.

He wrote to Maurice Baring:

So many thanks for the sermons, which I will certainly return as you suggest. I had the other day a trying experience, and I think a hard case of casuistry; I am not sure that I was right; but also not by any means sure I was wrong. Long ago, before my present crisis, I had promised somebody to take part in what I took to be a small debate on labour. Too late, by my own carelessness, I found to my horror it had swelled into a huge Anglo-Catholic Congress at the Albert Hall. I tried to get out of it, but I was held to my promise. Then I reflected that I could only write (as I was already writing) to my Anglo-Catholic friends on the basis that I was one of them now in doubt about continuing such; and that their conference in some sense served the same purpose as their letters. What affected me most, however, was that by my own fault I had put them into a hole. Otherwise, I would not just now speak from or for their platform, just as I could not (as yet at any rate) speak from or for yours. So I spoke very briefly, saying something of what I think about social ethics. Whether or not my decision was right, my experience was curious and suggestive, though tragic; for I felt it like a farewell. There was no doubt about the enthusiasm of those thousands of Anglo-Catholics. But there was also no doubt, unless I am much mistaken, that many of them besides myself would be Roman Catholics rather than accept things they are quite likely to be asked to accept--for instance, by the Lambeth Conference. For though my own distress, as in most cases I suppose, has much deeper grounds than clerical decisions, yet if I cannot stay where I am, it will be a sort of useful symbol that the English Church has done something decisively Protestant or Pagan. I mean that to those to whom I cannot give my spiritual biography, I can say that the insecurity I felt in Anglicanism was typified in the Lambeth Conference. I am at least sure that much turns on that Conference, if not for me, for large numbers of those people at the Albert Hall. A young Anglo-Catholic curate has just told me that the crowd there cheered all references to the Pope, and laughed at every mention of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It's a queer state of things. I am concerned most, however, about somebody I value more than the Archbishop of Canterbury; Frances, to whom I owe much of my own faith, and to whom therefore (as far as I can see my way) I also owe every decent chance for the controversial defence of her faith. If her side can convince me, they have a right to do so; if not, I shall go hot and strong to convince her. I put it clumsily, but there is a point in my mind. Logically, therefore, I must await answers from Waggett and Gore as well as Knox and McNabb; and talk the whole thing over with her, and then act as I believe.

This is a dusty political sort of letter, with nothing in it but what I think and nothing of what I feel. For that side of it, I can only express myself by asking for your prayers.

The accident of his having to speak at this Congress, where he was received with enormous enthusiasm, probably led to a fuller analysis of this element in his thought. I put here a letter he wrote to Maurice Baring soon after his conversion, because it sums up the Anglican question as he finally saw it:

Feb. 14th, 1923

Please forgive me for the delay; but I have been caught in a cataract of letters and work in connection with the new paper we are trying to start; and am now dictating this under conditions that make it impossible for it to resemble anything so personal and intimate as the great unwritten epistle to which you refer. But I will note down here very hurriedly and in a more impersonal way, some of the matters that have affected me in relation to the great problem.

To begin with, I am shy of giving one of my deepest reasons because it is hard to put it without offence, and I am sure it is the wrong method to offend the wavering Anglo-Catholic. But I believe one of my strongest motives was mixed up with the idea of honour. I feel there is something mean about not making complete confession and restitution after a historic error and slander. It is not the same thing to withdraw the charges against Rome one by one, or restore the traditions to Canterbury one by one. Suppose a young prig refuses to live with his father or his friend or his wife, because wine is drunk in the house or there are Greek statues in the hall. Suppose he goes off on his own and develops broader ideas. On the day he drinks his first glass of wine, I think it is essential to his honour that he should go back to his father or his friend and say, "You are right and I was wrong, and we will drink wine together." It is not consonant with his honour that he should set up a house of his own with wine and statues and every parallel particular, and still treat the other as if he were in the wrong. That is mean because it is making the best of both; it is combining the advantages of being right with the advantages of having been wrong. Any analogy is imperfect; but I think you see what I mean.

The larger version of this is that England has really got into so wrong a state, with its plutocracy and neglected populace and materialistic and Servile morality, that it must take a sharp turn that will be a sensational turn. No evolution into Catholicism will have that moral effect. Christianity is the religion of repentance; it stands against modern fatalism and pessimistic futurism mainly in saying that a man can go back. If we do decidedly go back it will show that religion is alive. For the rest, I do not say much about the details of continuity and succession, because the truth is they did not much affect me. What I see is that we cannot complain of England suffering from being Protestant and at the same time claim that she has always been Catholic. That there has always been a High Church Party is true; that there has always been an Anglo-Catholic Party may be true, but I am not so sure of it. But there is one matter arising from that which I do think important. Even the High Church Party, even the Anglo-Catholic Party only confronts a particular heresy called Protestantism upon particular points. It defends ritual rightly or even sacramentalism rightly, because these are the things the Puritans attacked. If it is not the heresy of an age, at least it is only the anti-heresy of an age. But since I have been a Catholic, I have become conscious of being in a much vaster arsenal, full of arms against countless other potential enemies. The Church, as the Church and not merely as ordinary opinion, has something to say to philosophies which the merely High Church has never had occasion to think about. If the next movement is the very reverse of Protestantism, the Church will have something to say about it; or rather has already something to say about it. You might unite all High Churchmen on the High Church quarrel, but what authority is to unite them when the devil declares his next war on the world?

Another quality that impresses me is the power of being decisive first and being proved right afterwards. This is exactly the quality a supernatural power would have; and I know nothing else in modern religion that has it. For instance, there was a time when I should have thought psychical enquiry the most reasonable thing in the world, and rather favourable to religion. I was afterwards convinced, by experience and not merely faith, that spiritualism is a practical poison. Don't people see that when that is found in experience, a prodigious prestige accrues to the authority which, long before the experiment, did not pretend to enquire but simply said, "Drop it." We feel that the authority did not discover; it knew. There are a hundred other things of which that story is true, in my own experience. But the High Churchman has a perfect right to be a spiritualistic enquirer; only he has not a right to claim that his authority knew beforehand the truth about spiritualistic enquiry.

Of course there are a hundred things more to say; indeed the greatest argument for Catholicism is exactly what makes it so hard to argue for it. It is the scale and multiplicity of the forms of truth and help that it has to offer. And perhaps, after all, the only thing that you and I can really say with profit is exactly what you yourself suggested; that we are men who have talked to a good many men about a good many things, and seen something of the world and the philosophies of the world and that we have not the shadow of a doubt about what was the wisest act of our lives.

This letter, as we have seen, was written afterwards. Meanwhile the story of the last slow but by no means uncertain steps is best told in a series of undated letters to Father Ronald Knox:

DEAR FATHER KNOX,

It is hard not to have a silly feeling that demons, in the form of circumstances, get in the way of what concerns one most, and I have been distracted with details for which I have to be responsible, in connection with the New Witness, which is in a crisis about which shareholders etc. have to be consulted. I can't let my brother's paper, that stands for all he believed in, go without doing all I can; and I am trying to get it started again, with Belloc to run it if possible. But the matter of our meeting has got into every chink of my thoughts, even the pauses of talk on practical things. I could not explain myself at that meeting; and I want to try again now.

I could not explain what I mean about my wife without saying much more. I see in principle it is not on the same level as the true Church; for nothing can be on the same level as God. But it is on quite a different level from social sentiments about friends and family. I have been a rottenly irresponsible person till I began to wear the iron ring of Catholic responsibilities. But I really have felt a responsibility about her, more serious than affection, let alone passion. First, because she gave me my first respect for sacramental Christianity; second, because she is one of the good who mysteriously suffer. . . . .

I have, however, a more practical reason for returning to this point. So far as my own feelings go, I think I might rightly make application to be instructed as soon as possible; but I should not like to take so serious a step without reopening the matter with her, which I could do by the end of a week. I have had no opportunity before, because she has only just recovered from an illness, and is going away for a few days. But at about the end of next week, say, everything ought to be ready. Meanwhile I will write to you again, as I ought to have done before, but this tangle of business ties me up terribly just now. Perhaps you could tell me how I could arrange matters with some priest or religious in London, whose convenience it would suit if I came up once or twice a week, or whatever is required; or give me the address of someone to write to, if that is the correct way. There are priests at High Wycombe which is nearer; but I imagine they are very busy parochial clergy.

I had meant to write to you about the convictions involved in a more abstract way, but I fear I have filled my letter with one personal point. But, as I say, I will write to you again about the other matters; and as they are more intellectual and less emotional, I hope I may be a little more coherent.

Yours very sincerely,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

P.S. This has been delayed even longer than I thought, for business bothers of my own and the paper's, plus finishing a book and all my journalism, are bewildering me terribly.

DEAR FATHER KNOX,

Please excuse this journalistic paper, but the letter-block seems undiscoverable at this time of night. I ought to have written before; but we have been in some family trouble; my father is very ill, and as he is an old man, my feelings are with him and my mother in a way more serious than anything except the matter of our correspondence. Essentially, of course, it does not so much turn the current of my thoughts as deepen it; to see a man so many million times better than I am, in every way, and one to whom I owe everything, under such a shadow makes me feel, on top of all my particular feelings, the shadow that lies on us all. I can't tell you what I feel of course; but I hope I may ask for your prayers for my people and for me. My father is the very best man I ever knew of that generation that never understood the new need of a spiritual authority; and lives almost perfectly by the sort of religion men had when rationalism was rational. I think he was always subconsciously prepared for the next generation having less theology than he has; and is rather puzzled at its having more. But I think he understood my brother's conversion better than my mother did; she is more difficult, and of course I cannot bother her just now. However, my trouble has a practical side, for which I originally mentioned it. As this may bring me to London more than I thought, it seems possible I might go there after all, instead of Wycombe, if I knew to whom to go. Also I find I stupidly destroyed your letter with the names of the priests at Wycombe to whom you referred me. Would it bother you very much to send me the names again, and any alternative London ones that occur to you; and I will let you know my course of action then. Please forgive the disorder of my writing--and feeling.

Yours sincerely,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

DEAR FATHER KNOX,

I was just settling down three days ago to write a full reply to your last very kind letter, which I should have answered long before, when I received the wire that called me instantly to town. My father died on Monday; and since then I have been doing the little I can for my mother; but even that little involves a great deal of business--the least valuable sort of help. I will not attempt to tell you now all that this involves in connection with my deeper feelings and intentions; for I only send you this interim scribble as an excuse for delaying the letter I had already begun; and which nothing less than this catastrophe would have prevented me finishing. I hope to finish it in a few days. I am not sure whether I shall then be back in Beaconsfield; but if so it will be at a new address:

Top Meadow Beaconsfield.

Yours in haste,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

DEAR FATHER KNOX,

I feel horribly guilty in not having written before, and I do most earnestly hope you have not allowed my delay to interfere with any of your own arrangements. I have had a serious and very moving talk with my wife; and she is only too delighted at the idea of your visit in itself; in fact she really wants to know you very much. Unfortunately, it does not seem very workable at the time to which I suppose you referred. I imagine it more or less corresponds to next week; and we have only one spare bedroom yet, which is occupied by a nurse who is giving my wife a treatment that seems to be doing her good and which I don't want to stop if I can help it. I am sure you will believe that my regret about this difficulty is really not the conventional apology; though heaven knows all sorts of apologies are due to you. Touching the other idea of Lady Lovat's most generous invitation I am not so sure, as that again depends at the moment on the treatment; but of course I shall let Lady Lovat know very soon in any case; and make other arrangements, as you suggested. In our conversation my wife was all that I hope you will some day know her to be; she is incapable of wanting me to do anything but what I think right; and admits the same possibility for herself: but it is much more of a wrench for her, for she has been able to practise her religion in complete good faith; which my own doubts have prevented me from doing.

I will write again very soon.

Yours sincerely,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

P.S. I am ashamed to say this has been finished fully forty-eight hours after I meant it to go, owing to executor business. Nobody so unbusinesslike as I am ought to be busy.

DEAR FATHER KNOX,

This is only a wild and hasty line to show I have not forgotten, and to ask you if it would be too late if I let you know in a day or two, touching your generous suggestion about your vacation. I shall know for certain, I think, at latest by the end of the week; but just at the moment it depends on things still uncertain, about a nurse who is staying here giving my wife a treatment of radiant heat--one would hardly think needed in this weather; but it seems to be doing her good, I am thankful to say. If this is pushing your great patience too far, please do not hesitate to make other arrangements if you wish to; and I shall no doubt be able to do the same. But I should love to accept your suggestion if possible.

Yours sincerely,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

DEAR FATHER KNOX,

Just as I am emerging from the hurricane of business I mentioned to you, I find myself under a promise a year old to go and lecture for a week in Holland; and I write this almost stepping on to the boat. I don't in the least want to go; but I suppose the great question is there as elsewhere. Indeed, I hear it is something of a reconquered territory; some say a third of this heroic Calvinist state is now Catholic. I have no time to write properly; but the truth is that even before so small a journey I have a queer and perhaps superstitious feeling that I should like to repeat to you my intention of following the example of the worthy Calvinists, please God; so that you could even cite it if there were ever need in a good cause. I will write to you again and more fully about the business of instruction when I return, which should be in about ten days.

Yours always sincerely,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

DEAR FATHER KNOX,

I ought to have written long ago to tell you what I have done about the most practical of business matters. I have again been torn in pieces by the wars of the New Witness; but I have managed to have another talk with my wife, after which I have written to our old friend Father O'Connor and asked him to come here, as he probably can, from what I hear. I doubt whether I can possibly put in words why I feel sure this is the right thing, not so much for my sake as for hers. We talk about misunderstandings; but I think it is possible to understand too well for comfort; certainly too well for my powers of psychological description. Frances is just at the point where Rome acts both as the positive and the negative magnet; a touch would turn her either way; almost (against her will) to hatred, but with the right touch to a faith far beyond my reach. I know Father O'Connor's would be the touch that does not startle, because she knows him and is fond of him; and the only thing she asked of me was to send for him. If he cannot come, of course I shall take other action and let you know. I doubt if most people could make head or tail of this hasty scrawl: but I think you will understand.

Yours sincerely,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

Father Knox wrote on July 17, 1922, "I'm awfully glad to hear that you've sent for Father O'Connor and that you think he's likely to be available. I must say that, in the story, Father Brown's powers of neglecting his parish always seemed to me even more admirable than Dr. Watson's powers of neglecting his practice; so I hope this trait was drawn from the life."

Father O'Connor has described the two days before the reception: "On Thursday morning, on one of our trips to the village, I told Mrs. Chesterton: 'There is only one thing troubling Gilbert about the great step--the effect it is going to have on you.' 'Oh! I shall be infinitely relieved. You cannot imagine how it fidgets Gilbert to have anything on his mind. The last three months have been exceptionally trying. I should be only too glad to come with him, if God in His mercy would show the way clear, but up to now He has not made it clear enough to me to justify such a step.' So I was able to reassure Gilbert that afternoon. We discussed at large such special points as he wished, and then I told him to read through the Penny Catechism to make sure there were no snags to a prosperous passage. It was a sight for men and angels all the Friday to see him wandering in and out of the house with his fingers in the leaves of the little book, resting it on his forearm whilst he pondered with his head on one side."

The ceremony took place in a kind of shed with corrugated iron roof and wooden walls--a part of the Railway Hotel, for at this time Beaconsfield had no Catholic Church. Father Ignatius Rice, O.S.B., another old and dear friend, came over from the Abbey at Douai, to join Father O'Connor at breakfast at the Inn and they afterwards walked up together to Top Meadow. What follows is from notes made by my husband of a conversation with Father Rice. They found Gilbert in an armchair reading the catechism "pulling faces and making noises as he used to do when reading."

He got up and stuffed the catechism in his pocket. At lunch he drank water and poured wine for everyone else. About three they set out for the Church. Suddenly Father O'Connor asked G.K. if he had brought the Ritual. G.K. plunged his hand in his pocket, pulled out a threepenny shocker with complete absence of embarrassment, and went on searching till at last he found the prayer book.

While G.K. was making his confession to Father O'Connor, Frances and Father Rice went out of the chapel and sat on the yokels' bench in the bar of the inn. She was weeping.

After the baptism the two priests came out and left Gilbert and Frances inside. Father Rice went back for something he had forgotten and he saw them coming down the aisle. She was still weeping, and Gilbert had his arm round her comforting her. . . .

He wrote the sonnet on his conversion that day. He was in brilliant form for the rest of the day, quoting poetry and jesting in the highest spirits. . . .

He joined the Church "to restore his innocence." Sin was almost the greatest reality to him. He became a Catholic because of the Church's practical power of dealing with sin.

Immediately, he wrote to his mother and to Maurice Baring, who had anxiously feared he had perhaps offended Gilbert, so long was it since he had heard from him.

MY DEAREST MOTHER,

I write this (with the worst pen in South Bucks) to tell you something before I write about it to anyone else; something about which we shall probably be in the position of the two bosom friends at Oxford, who "never differed except in opinion." You have always been so wise in not judging people by their opinions, but rather the opinions by the people. It is in one sense a long story by this time; but I have come to the same conclusion that Cecil did about needs of the modern world in religion and right dealing, and I am now a Catholic in the same sense as he, having long claimed the name in its Anglo-Catholic sense. I am not going to make a foolish fuss of reassuring you about things I am sure you never doubted; these things do not hurt any relations between people as fond of each other as we are; any more than they ever made any difference to the love between Cecil and ourselves. But there are two things I should like to tell you, in case you do not realise them through some other impression. I have thought about you, and all that I owe to you and my father, not only in the way of affection, but of the ideals of honour and freedom and charity and all other good things you always taught me: and I am not conscious of the smallest break or difference in those ideals; but only of a new and necessary way of fighting for them. I think, as Cecil did, that the fight for the family and the free citizen and everything decent must now be waged by [the] one fighting form of Christianity. The other is that I have thought this out for myself and not in a hurry of feeling. It is months since I saw my Catholic friends and years since I talked to them about it. I believe it is the truth. I must end now, you know with how much love; for the post is going.

Always your loving son,

GILBERT.

DEAR MAURICE,

My abominable delay deserves every penalty conceivable, hanging, burning and boiling in oil; but really not so inconceivable an idea as that I should be offended with you at any time (let alone after all you have done in this matter) however thoroughly you might be justified in being offended with me. Really and truly my delay, indefensible as it is, was due to a desire and hope of writing you a letter quite different from all those I have had to write to other people; a very long and intimate letter, trying to tell you all about this wonderful business, in which you have helped me so much more than anyone else. The only other person I meant to write to in the same style is Father Knox; and his has been delayed in the same topsy-turvy way. I am drowning in whirlpools of work and worry over the New Witness which nearly went bankrupt for good this week. But worry does not worry so much as it did before . . . Unless it is adding insult to injury, I shall send the long letter after all. This I send off instantly on receipt of yours. Please forgive me; you see I humiliate myself by using your stamped envelope.

Yours always,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

This sense that the Church was needed to fight for the world was very strong in Gilbert when he hailed it to his mother as the "one fighting form of Christianity." In the New Witness he answered near this time a newspaper suggestion that the Church ought to "move with the times."

The Cities of the Plain might have remarked that the heavens above them did not altogether fit in with their own high civilisation and social habits. They would be right. Oddly enough, however, when symmetry was eventually restored, it was not the heavens that had been obliged to adapt themselves. . . .

The Church cannot move with the times; simply because the times are not moving. The Church can only stick in the mud with the times, and rot and stink with the times. In the economic and social world, as such, there is no activity except that sort of automatic activity that is called decay; the withering of the high Powers of freedom and their decomposition into the aboriginal soil of slavery. In that way the world stands much at the same stage as it did at the beginning of the Dark Ages. And the Church has the same task as it had at the beginning of the Dark Ages; to save all the light and liberty that can be saved, to resist the downward drag of the world, and to wait for better days. So much a real Church would certainly do; but a real Church might be able to do more. It might make its Dark Ages something more than a seed-time; it might make them the very reverse of dark. It might present its more human ideal in such abrupt and attractive a contrast to the inhuman trend of the time, as to inspire men suddenly for one of the moral revolutions of history; so that men now living shall not taste of death until they have seen justice return.

We do not want, as the newspapers say, a Church that will move with the world. We want a Church that will move the world. We want one that will move it away from many of the things towards which it is now moving; for instance, the Servile State. It is by that test that history will really judge, of any Church, whether it is the real Church or no.

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XXIV. Completion

THERE IS ONE part of this story that has not been told with the rest: Our Lady's share in Gilbert's conversion. The Chesterton family had been quite without the strange Protestant prejudice that in the minds of many Englishmen sets the Mother of God against God the Son. Our lady was respected though of course not invoked. In a boyhood poem Gilbert took the blasphemous lines of Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine" and wrote a kind of parody in reverse turning the poem into a hymn to Mary. He would, too, recite Swinburne's own lines "deliberately directing them away from Swinburne's intention and supposing them addressed to the new Christian Queen of life, rather than to the fallen Pagan queen of death."

But I turn to her still; having seen she shall surely abide in the end Goddess and maiden and queen be near me now and befriend.

Nor was it only admiration for art that made him write--also in early youth:

THE NATIVITY OF BOTTICELLI

Do you blame me that I sit hours before this picture? But if I walked all over the world in this time I should hardly see anything worth seeing that is not in this picture.

Father O'Connor sees in The Catholic Church and Conversion a hint that Mr. Belloc had been of those who tried to hustle Gilbert in his younger days. But on this profound reality of Mary's help they could meet many years before Gilbert had finished the slow rumination of mind and the painful effort of will that had held him so long. Here is an early letter Belloc wrote to his friend:

Reform Club, Manchester. 11 Dec. 1907.

MY DEAR GILBERT,

I am a man afraid of impulse in boats, horses and all action though driven to it. I have never written a letter such as I am writing now, though I have desired to write some six or seven since I became a grown man. In the matter we discussed at Oxford I have a word to say which is easier to say on paper than by word of mouth, or rather, more valuable. All intellectual process is doubtful, all inconclusive, save pure deduction, which is a game if one's first certitudes are hypothetical and immensely valuable if one's first certitude is fixed, yet remains wholly dependent on that.

Now if we differed in all main points I would not write thus, but there are one or two on which we agree. One is "Vere passus, immolatus in cruce pro homine." Another is in a looking up to our Dear Lady, the blessed Mother of God.

I recommend to you this, that you suggest to her a comprehension for yourself, of what indeed is the permanent home of the soul. If it is here you will see it, if it is there you will see it. She never fails us. She has never failed me in any demand.

I have never written thus--as I say--and I beg you to see nothing in it but what I say. There is no connection the reason can seize--but so it is. If you say "I want this" as in your case to know one way or the other--she will give it you: as she will give health or necessary money or success in a pure love. She is our Blessed Mother.

I have not used my judgment in this letter. I am inclined to destroy it, but I shall send it. Don't answer it.

Yours ever

H. BELLOC.

At top of letter: "My point is If it is right She knows. If it is not right She knows."

Gilbert believed it, and he knew that as he came to the Church he was coming to Our Lady.

Now I can scarcely remember a time when the image of Our lady did not stand up in my mind quite definitely, at the mention or the thought of all these things. I was quite distant from these things, and then doubtful about these things; and then disputing with the world for them, and with myself against them; for that is the condition before conversion. But whether the figure was distant, or was dark and mysterious, or was a scandal to my contemporaries, or was a challenge to myself--I never doubted that this figure was the figure of the Faith; that she embodied, as a complete human being still only human, all that this Thing had to say to humanity. The instant I remembered the Catholic Church, I remembered her; when I tried to forget the Catholic Church, I tried to forget her! When I finally saw what was nobler than my fate, the freest and the hardest of all my acts of freedom, it was in front of a gilded and very gaudy little image of her in the port of Brindisi, that I promised the thing that I would do, if I returned to my own land.*

[* The Well and the Shallows, pp. 176-7.]

In his Chaucer, G.K. quoted with considerable amusement a learned critic who said it was "possible" that the poet had "passed through a period of intense devotion, more especially towards the Virgin Mary." "It is," he comments. "It does occur from time to time. I do not quite understand why Chaucer must have 'passed through' this fit of devotion; as if he had Mariolatry like the measles. Even an amateur who has encountered this malady may be allowed to testify that it does not usually visit its victim for a brief 'period'; it is generally chronic and (in some sad cases I have known) quite incurable."*

[* Chaucer, p. 121.]

The Queen of Seven Swords is the great expression of Gilbert's "chronic" love of Our Lady:

And men looked up at the woman made for the morning When the stars were young, For whom more rude than a beggar's rhyme in the gutter These songs were sung.

"The Return of Eve" exemplified a favourite thought of his: when the journalist keeps repeating that the life of religion does not lie in dusty dogmas we should stop him with a great shout, for he is wrong at the very start. It is from the seed of dogma and from that seed alone that all the Powers of art and poetry and devotion spring. In the days of his boyhood, when he thought of Our lady with a vague and confused respect as "The Madonna" he could not have written "The Return of Eve." That flower came from the seed of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.

Our lady is the Mother of God and our Mother: this doctrine blossomed as he wrote:

I found One hidden in every home A voice that sings about the house. A nurse that scares the nightmares off A mother nearer than a spouse

Whose picture once I saw; and there Wild as of old and weird and sweet In sevenfold splendour blazed the moon Not on her brow; beneath her feet.

This poem, "The White Witch" has in it a mingling of the old classical stories of his boyhood and the new light of Christian reality. In The Everlasting Man he saw the myths as hunger and the Faith as bread. Men's hearts today were withered because they had forgotten to eat their bread. The hunger of the pagans was a healthier thing than the jaded sterility of the modern world. Our Lady was ready to give that world the Bread of Life once more. And as he meditated on the mystery of the Virgin Birth he saw God making purity creative. She alone who overcame all heresies could overcome the hideous heresy of birth prevention.

That Christ from this creative purity Came forth your sterile appetites to scorn. So: in her house Life without Lust was born, So in your house Lust without Life shall die.

"Gaude, Virgo Maria, cunctas haereses sola interemisti." Was this phrase from Our Lady's office ringing in Gilbert's mind as he sang of the Seven Champions of Christendom disarmed and worsted in the fight, going back to Our Lady to find that she had hidden their swords where the gospels tell us she hid and pondered all things--in her heart? From her wounded heart, Mary takes the seven swords to rearm the saints who have to reconquer the earth.

Certainly he must often have thought of the Litany. So many verses are based on it. Our Lord as a baby climbs the Ivory Tower of His Mother's body and kisses the Mystic Rose of her lips:

A woman was His walking home Foederis Arca Ora pro nobis.

And he thinks of the sun, moon and stars as trinkets for her to play with:

With the great heart a woman has And the love of little things.

For she is a woman: Regina Angelorum, Queen of Powers and Archangels, she yet belongs to the human race.

Our lady went into a strange country, Our lady, for she was ours And had run on the little hills behind the houses And pulled small flowers; But she rose up and went into a strange country With strange thrones and powers.

From a welter of comment and correspondence that followed his conversion--challenging, scorning, rejoicing, welcoming, I select two letters from the two closest of Gilbert's Catholic friends--Hilaire Belloc and Maurice Baring.

i.VIII.22.

MY DEAR GILBERT,

I write to you, from these strange surroundings, the first line upon the news you gave me. I must write to you again when I have collected myself: for my reactions are abominably slow. I have, however, something to say immediately: and that is why I write this very evening, just after seeing Eleanor off at the Station. The thing I have to say is this (I could not have said it before your step: I can say so now. Before it would have been like a selected pleading.) The Catholic Church is the exponent of Reality. It is true. Its doctrines in matters large and small are statements of what is. This it is which the ultimate act of the intelligence accepts. This it is which the will deliberately confirms. And that is why Faith though an act of the Will is Moral. If the Ordnance Map tells us that it is 11 miles to [a place] then, my mood of lassitude as I walk through the rain at night making it feel like 30, I use the Will and say "No." My intelligence has been convinced and I compel myself to use it against my mood. It is 11 and though I feel in the depths of my being to have gone 30 miles and more, I know it is not yet 11 I have gone.

I am by all my nature of mind sceptical. . . . And as to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood: not a conclusion. My conclusion--and that of all men who have ever once seen it--is the Faith; Corporate, organised, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.

To you, who have the blessing of profound religious emotion, this statement may seem too desiccate. It is indeed not enthusiastic. It lacks meat.

It is my misfortune. In youth I had it: even till lately. Grief has drawn the juices from it. I am alone and unfed, the more do I affirm the Sanctity, the Unity, the Infallibility of the Catholic Church. By my very isolation do I the more affirm it, as a man in a desert knows that water is right for man: or as a wounded dog not able to walk, yet knows the way home.

The Catholic Church is the natural home of the human spirit. The odd perspective picture of life which looks like a meaningless puzzle at first, seen from that one standpoint takes a complete order and meaning, like the skull in the picture of the Ambassadors.

So much for my jejune contribution: not without value; because I know you regard my intelligence--a perilous tool God gave me for his own purposes; one bringing nothing to me.

But beyond this there will come in time, if I save my soul, the flesh of these bones--which bones alone I can describe and teach. I know--without feeling (an odd thing in such a connection) the reality of Beatitude: which is the goal of Catholic Living.

In hac urbe lux solennis Ver aeternum pax perennis Et aeterna gaudia.

Yours,

H. B.

Maurice Baring wrote:

August 25: 1922.

MY DEAR GILBERT,

When I wrote to you the other day I was still cramped by the possibility of the news not being true although I knew it was true. I felt it was true at once. Curiously enough I felt it had happened before I saw the news in the newspaper at all. I felt that your ship had arrived at its port. But the more I felt this, the more unwilling I was to say anything before I heard the news from a source other than the newspapers. I gave way to an excess, a foolish excess perhaps of scruple. But you will, I think, understand this. In writing to you the other day I expressed not a tenth part of what I felt and feel and that baldly and inadequately. Nothing for years has given me so much joy. I have hardly ever entered a church without putting up a candle to Our Lady or to St. Joseph or St. Anthony for you. And both this year and last year in Lent I made a Novena for you. I know of many other people, better people far than I, who did the same. Many Masses were said for you and prayers all over England and Scotland in centres of Holiness. I will show you some day a letter from some Nuns on the subject. A great friend of mine one of the greatest saints I have known, Sister Mary Annunciation of the Convent Orphanage, Upper Norwood, used always to pray for you. She, alas, died last year.

Did I ever quote you a sentence of Bernard Holland on the subject of Kenelm Henry Digby when the latter was received?

"Father Scott . . . who, at last, guided him through the narrow door where one must bend one's head, into the internal space and freedom of the eternal and universal Catholic Church." Space and freedom: that was what I experienced on being received; that is what I have been most conscious of ever since. It is the exact opposite of what the ordinary Protestant conceives to be the case. To him and not only to him but to the ordinary English agnostic the convert to Catholicism is abandoning his will and his independence, sometimes they think even his nationality; at the best they think he is sheltering himself in a walled garden; at the worst they think he has closed on himself an iron door: and shackled himself with foolish chains and sold his birthright for a crown of tinsel.

And yet their own experience, the testimony of their eyes if they would only use them, ought to suggest to them that they might perhaps be mistaken.

It would be difficult for anyone to make out a case for the UnEnglishness of Manning or indeed of any prominent English Catholic whether a born Catholic or a convert.

It would be difficult for them to prove that Belloc was a writer wanting in independence. It would be difficult for them to convince any one that Father Vaughan and Lord Fitzalan were wearing foolscaps.

And anybody who has thought about history or looked on at politics must have reflected that freedom resides where there is order and not where there is license: or no-order.

It is true in politics; it is true in art. It is the basis of our whole social life in England. Russia has just given us the most startling of object lessons. The English with their passion for Committees, their Club-rules and their well organised traffic are daily realising the fact, however little they may recognise the theory. Only the law can give us freedom, said Goethe talking of art. "Und das Gesetz kann nur die Freiheit geben."

Well all I have to say, Gilbert, is what I think I have already said to you, and what I have said not long ago in a printed book. That I was received into the Church on the Eve of Candlemass 1909, and it is perhaps the only act in my life, which I am quite certain I have never regretted. Every day I live, the Church seems to me more and more wonderful; the Sacraments more and more solemn and sustaining; the voice of the Church, her liturgy, her rules, her discipline, her ritual, her decisions in matters of Faith and Morals more and more excellent and profoundly wise and true and right, and her children stamped with something that those outside Her are without. There I have found Truth and reality and everything outside Her is to me compared with Her as dust and shadow. Once more God bless you and Frances. Please give her my love. In my prayers for you I have always added her name.

Yours,

MAURICE.

It was a bit of great good fortune, although at the time he did not feel it so, that the death of the New Witness in 1922 for lack of funds, left Gilbert some months for uninterrupted creative thought before G.K.'s Weekly took its place. Lawrence Solomon, friend of his boyhood and at this time a near neighbour, has told me not only how happy his conversion had made Gilbert but also how it had seemed to bring him increased strength of character. Worry, he had told Maurice Baring, did not worry so much as of old because of a fundamental peace. In this atmosphere were written two of his most important books: St. Francis of Assisi published 1923, The Everlasting Man published 1925.

In a poem he has expressed his sense of conversion as a new light that had transfigured life: indeed of a new life given to him:

After one moment when I bowed my head And the whole world turned over and came upright, And I came out where the old road shone white, I walked the ways and heard what all men said.

* * * * *

They rattle reason out through many a sieve That stores the sand and lets the gold go free: And all these things are less than dust to me Because my name is Lazarus and I live.*

[* Collected Poems, p. 387, "The Convert."]

Both books shine with that light on the white road of man's endeavour, thrill with that life. Gilbert felt now the clue to history in his fingers and he used it increasingly. The Everlasting Man is the Orthodoxy of his later life and one difficulty in dealing with it adequately was expressed in a letter from William Lyon Phelps thanking the author for "a magnificent work of genius and never more needed than now. I took out my pencil to mark the most important passages, but I quickly put my pencil in my pocket for I found I had to mark every sentence." Reading the book for perhaps the seventh time I can only say (I hope without irreverence) what G.K. himself says happens to those who can read the words of the Gospels "simply enough." They "will feel as if rocks had been rolled upon them. Criticism is only words about words; and of what use are words about such words as these."

"Rocks rolled upon them." Did he not feel crushed, overwhelmed at times by his own thought on these immensities, or can the philosopher carry his thoughts as lightly as Gilbert so often seemed to carry his? I think not always. He must have needed superhuman strength to conceive and give birth to this mighty book. The thoughts sketched in The New Jerusalem had grown to their full fruition in an atmosphere of meditation. It would be much easier to give an outline of The Everlasting Man than of Orthodoxy, much harder to give an idea of it. For Orthodoxy consists of a hundred brilliant arguments while The Everlasting Man really is a vision of history supported by a historical outline. Comparing his own effort with that of H. G. Wells, Chesterton says, "I do not believe that the best way to produce an outline of history is to rub out the lines." He is like Wells however in not being a specialist but claiming "the right of the amateur to do his best with the facts the specialists provide"--only their specialists are different specialists and their facts therefore largely different facts.

Chesterton, unlike most converts, wrote concerning his own conversion the least interesting of his later books: but in The Everlasting Man he is not at all concerned with his own spiritual wayfaring, he merely wants to make everyone else look at what he has come to see at the end of the way. The book is an attempt to get outside Man and thus see him as the strange being he really is: to get outside Christianity and see for the first time its uniqueness among the religions of the world. Why are not all men aware of the uniqueness of Man among the animals and the uniqueness of the Church among religions? Because they do not really look at either. Familiarity has dulled the edge of awareness. Men must be made to see them as though for the first time; and it is the towering achievement of this book that reading it we do so see them. "I desire to help the reader to see Christendom from the outside in the sense of seeing it as a whole against the background of other historic things; just as I desire him to see humanity as a whole against the background of natural things. And I say that in both cases when seen thus, they stand out from their background like supernatural things." This being his desire, he divides the book into two parts--"the first being the main adventure of the human race in so far as it remained heathen; and the second a summary of the real difference that was made by it becoming Christian."

Notable as the first part is, it is only a preparation for the second, which shows the Church not as one religion among many but as the only religion, for it is the only Thing that binds into one both Philosophy (or Thought) and Mythology (or Poetry), giving us a Logos Who is also the Hero of the strangest story in the world. He asks the man who talks of reading the Gospels really to read them as he might read his daily paper and to feel the terrific shock of the words of Christ to the Pharisees or the behaviour of Christ to the money-changers: to look at the uniqueness of the Church that has died so often but like Her Founder risen again from the dead.

Two untrue things, he felt, were constantly reiterated about the gospel--one that the Church had overlaid and made difficult a plain and simple story: the other that the hero of this story was merely human and taught a morality suitable to his own age, inapplicable in our more complicated society. To anyone who really read the gospels the instant impression would be rather that they were full of dark riddles which only historic Christianity has clarified. The Eunuchs of the heavenly Kingdom would be an idea dark and terrible but for the historic beauty of Catholic virginity. The ideal of man and woman "in one flesh" inseparable and sanctified by a sacrament became clear in the lives of the great married saints of Christendom. The apparent idealisation of idleness above service in the story of Mary and Martha was lit up by the sight of Catherine and Clare and Teresa shining above the little home at Bethany. The meek inheriting the earth became the basis of a new Social Order when the mystical monks reclaimed the lands that the practical kings had lost.

Thus if the gospel was a riddle the Church was the answer to the riddle because both were created by One Who Knew: Who saw the ages in which His own creation was to find completion: Whose morality was not one of another age but of another world.

Chesterton gathered history in his mind and saw together before the Christmas Crib the shepherds who had found their shepherd, the philosopher kings who "would stand for the same human ideal if their names had really been Confucius or Pythagoras or Plato. They were those who sought not tales but the truth of things; and since their thirst for truth was itself a thirst for God, they also have had their reward. But even in order to understand that reward, we must understand that for philosophy as much as mythology, that reward was the completion of the incomplete."*

[* The Everlasting Man, p. 211.]

G.K. too had needed the completion of incomplete human thought: he too had followed the star from a far country. It had been a fancy of his boyhood, caught from a fairytale, that evil lurked somewhere in a hidden room of the human house and the human heart. He saw in the history of the ancients a consciousness of the Fall, in the sadness of their songs a sense of "the Presence of the Absence of God." But at Bethlehem he saw the transformation that had come upon the whole race of man with that little local infancy concealing the mighty power of God who had put Himself under the feet of the world.

It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart of his own house, which he had never suspected; and seen a light from within. It is as if he found something at the back of his own heart that betrayed him into good. It is not made of what the world would call strong materials; or rather it is made of materials whose strength is in that winged levity with which they brush us and pass. It is all that is in us but a brief tenderness, that is there made eternal; all that means no more than a momentary softening that is in some strange fashion become a strengthening and a repose; it is the broken speech and the lost word that are made positive and suspended unbroken; as the strange kings fade into a far country and the mountains resound no more with the feet of the shepherds; and only the night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over something more human than humanity.

[* Ibid., p. 223.]

It seems to me profoundly significant that Gilbert studied first in the little Poor Man of Assisi what Christ could do in one man before he came on to the study of what He had done in mankind as a whole, of Who He was who had done it. For the man thus chosen embodied the ideals that Gilbert had seen dimly in his boyhood--ideals that most of us accept a little reluctantly from the Church, but which had actually attracted him towards the Church. St. Francis "had found the secret of life in being the servant and the secondary figure". . . "he seems to have liked everybody, but especially those whom everybody disliked him for liking." "By nature he was the sort of man who has that vanity which is the opposite of pride, that vanity which is very near to humility. He never despised his fellow creatures and therefore he never despised the opinion of his fellow creatures, including the admiration of his fellow creatures." "He was above all things a great giver; and he cared chiefly for the best kind of giving which is called thanksgiving. If another great man wrote a grammar of assent, he may well be said to have written a grammar of acceptance; a grammar of gratitude. He understood down to its very depths the theory of thanks; and its depths are a bottomless abyss."

Here, in St. Francis, Gilbert saw the apotheosis of his old boyish thought--that thanksgiving is a duty and a joy, that we should love not "humanity" but each human. Things shadowed in the Notebook are in St. Francis, for

the transition from the good man to the saint is a sort of revolution; by which one for whom all things illustrate and illuminate God becomes one for whom God illustrates and illuminates all things. It is rather like the reversal whereby a lover might say at first sight that a lady looked like a flower, and say afterwards that all flowers reminded him of his lady. A saint and a poet standing by the same flower might seem to say the same thing; but indeed though they would both be telling the truth, they would be telling different truths. For one the joy of life is a cause of faith, for the other rather a result of faith.*

[* St. Francis of Assisi, p. 111.]

The Everlasting Man and the St. Francis seem to me the highest expression of Gilbert's mysticism. I have hesitated to use the word for it is not one to be used lightly but I can find no other. Like most Catholics I have been wont to believe that to be a mystic a man must first be an ascetic and Gilbert was not an ascetic in the ordinary sense. But is there not for the thinker an asceticism of the mind, very searching, very purifying? In his youth he had told Bentley that creative writing was the hardest of hard labour. That sense of the pressure of thought that made Newman call creative writing "getting rid of pain by pain"; the profound depression that often follows; the exhaustion that seems like a bottomless pit. St. Theresa said the hardest penance was easier than mental prayer: was not much of Gilbert's thought a contemplation?

Faith, thanksgiving, love, surely these far above bodily asceticism can so clear a man's eyesight that he may fittingly be called a mystic since he sees God everywhere. "The less a man thinks of himself, the more he thinks of his good luck and of all the gifts of God." Only a poet who was more than a poet could see so clearly of what like St. Francis was.

When we say that a poet praises the whole creation, we commonly mean only that he praises the whole cosmos. But this sort of poet does really praise creation, in the sense of the act of creation. He praises the passage or transition from nonentity to entity; there falls here also the shadow of that archetypal image of the bridge, which has given to the priest his archaic and mysterious name. The mystic who passes through the moment when there is nothing but God does in some sense behold the beginningless beginnings in which there was really nothing else. He not only appreciates everything but the nothing of which everything was made. In a fashion he endures and answers even the earthquake irony of the Book of Job; in some sense he is there when the foundations of the world are laid, with the mornings stars singing together and the sons of God shouting for joy.*

[* St. Francis of Assisi, pp. 112-13.]

But there was in all those years another element besides the giving of thanks and the joy of creation: an abiding grief for the sorrows of the sons of men and especially those of his own land. In this mood the Cobbett was written.

Nine years separate the publication of William Cobbett from that of the History of England. Written at the time when Englishmen were fighting so magnificently, that book had radiated G.K.'s own mood of hope, but to read Rural Rides, to meditate on Cobbett's England, and then turn to the England of the hour was not cheerful. For Cobbett "did not draw precise diagrams of things as they were. He only had frantic and fantastic nightmares of things as they are."* And these nightmares haunted Cobbett's biographer.

[* Cobbett, p. 22.]

What he saw was not an Eden that cannot exist, but rather an Inferno that can exist, and even that does exist. What he saw was the perishing of the whole English power of self-support, the growth of cities that drain and dry up the countryside, the growth of dense dependent populations incapable of finding their own food, the toppling triumph of machines over men, the sprawling omnipotence of financiers over patriots, the herding of humanity in nomadic masses whose very homes are homeless, the terrible necessity of peace and the terrible probability of war, all the loading up of our little island like a sinking ship; the wealth that may mean famine and the culture that may mean despair; the bread of Midas and the sword of Damocles. In a word, he saw what we see, but he saw it when it was not there. And some cannot see it--even when it is there.*

[* Ibid., pp. 14, 15.]

Two men had written of the Reformation as the ultimate origin of these evils at a time when it was still the fashion to treat it as the dawn of all good. Lingard, himself a Catholic, had written cautiously, with careful documentation and moderate tone. Cobbett, a Protestant, had written hastily and furiously, but both men had drawn in essentials the same picture. Chesterton suspected that Cobbett was treated with contempt, Lingard with respect, largely because of the difference in the tone of the two men. Lingard spoke restrainedly but Cobbett's voice was raised in a loud cry:

He was simply a man who had discovered a crime: ancient like many crimes; concealed like all crimes. He was as one who had found in a dark wood the bones of his mother, and suddenly knew she had been murdered. He knew now that England had been secretly slain. Some, he would say, might think it a matter of mild regret to be expressed in murmurs. But when he found a corpse he gave a shout; and if fools laughed at anyone shouting, he would shout the more, till the world should be shaken with that terrible cry in the night.

It is that ringing and arresting cry of "Murder!" wrung from him as he stumbled over those bones of the dead England, that distinguishes him from all his contemporaries.*

[* Ibid., pp. 176-77.]

Yet, for the Christian, hope remains: no murder can be the end. "Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave." This quotation is from the chapter called "Five Deaths of the Faith" in The Everlasting Man. Several times in the book Chesterton puts aside tempting lines of thought with the remark that he intends to develop them later--in one of the unwritten books that he always felt were so much better than those he actually wrote. Would any human life have been long enough to develop them all? Anyhow, even the whole of this life was not available.

As I turn to the story of the weekly paper rising again from its ashes I ask myself the question I have often asked: was it worth while? I cannot answer the question. Something of his manhood seemed to Gilbert bound up with this struggle, and it may be he would have been a lesser man had he abandoned it. And yet at moments imagining the poetry, the philosophy that might have been ours--another White Horse, another Everlasting Man--I am tempted to wish that these years had not thus been sacrificed to the paper which enshrined his brother's memory.

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XXV. The Reluctant Editor (1925-1930)

_I tell you naught for your comfort Yea naught for your desire Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.

Ballad of the White Horse_

COULD GILBERT HAVE divided his life between literary work, his home at Top Meadow, and those other elements called in the Autobiography "Friendship and Foolery," that life might well have been as he himself called it "indefensibly fortunate and happy." But he could not. Part of his philosophy of joy was that thanks must be given--for sunsets, for dandelions, for beech trees, for home and friends. And this thanks could only be the taking of his part in the fight. He would never, he once said, have turned of his own accord to politics: it is arguable that it would have been better if he never had. But his brother had plunged into the fray with that very political paper the New Witness and his brother's death had left it in Gilbert's hands. He felt the task to be a sacred legacy, and when the paper died for lack of funds his one thought was how to start it again.

For many months he kept the office in being and paid salaries to a skeleton staff, consisting of Mr. Gander, the deaf old manager, Miss Dunham (now Mrs. Phillips) and an office boy. Mr. Titterton would stroll in and play cricket with the office boy with a paper ball and a walking-stick. Endless discussions were held as to how to re-start the paper and whether under the old name or a new one. Bernard Shaw had his own view. He wrote:

11 Feb.: 1923

MY DEAR CHESTERTON

Not presume to dictate (I have all Jingle's delicacy); but if everybody else is advising you, why should not I?

T.P.'s Weekly always had a weakly sound. But it established itself sufficiently to make that form of title the trade mark of a certain sort of paper. Hence Jack O'London's Weekly. It also set the trade sheep running that way.

You have the precedents of Defoe and Cobbett for using your own name; but D.D.'s Weekly is unthinkable, and W.C.'s Weekly indecent. Your initials are not euphonious: they recall that brainy song of my boyhood, U-pi-dee.

Jee Kay see, kay see, kay see, Jee Kay see, Jee Kay see. Jee Kay see, Kay see, Kay see, Jee Kay see Kay see.

Chesterton is a noble name; but Chesterton is Weakly spoils it. Call it simply

CHESTERTON'S

That is how it will be asked for at the bookstalls. You may be obliged to call later ventures Chesterton's Daily or Chesterton's Annual, but this one needs no impertinently superfluous definition: Chesterton's Perennial is amusing enough to be excusable; but a joke repeated every week is no joke. A picture cover like that of Punch might stand even that test if it were good enough; but where are you to find your Doyle?

Week is a detestable snivelling word: nothing can redeem it, not even the sermon on the Mount. Seven Days is better, But reminds one of the police court as well as of the creation. Every Seven Days would sound well. But Chesterton's leaves no room for anything else. I am more than usually sure that I am right.

Frances quite agrees with me. How would you like it if she were to publish a magazine and call it Fanny's First Paper?

Ever

G.B.S.

If Gilbert answered this letter his answer has disappeared. He seems to have asked permission to publish it--probably with a view to collecting further opinions.

10 Adelphi Terrace, London, W.C.2. February 16th 1923.

MY DEAR G.K.C.

Of course you may publish any letter of mine that you care to, at your discretion.

. . . But not only will the publication of a letter from me not add one to your circulation (nothing but a permanent feature will do that), but it may lead you to disregard the advice I give to all the people who start Labour papers (about two a week or so), which always is, "Don't open with an article to say that your paper supplies a want; don't blight your columns with 'messages'; don't bewilder your readers with the family jokes of your clique; else there will be no second number." Ponder this: it is sound.

Your main difficulty is that the class whose champion you have made yourself reads either Lloyd's or nothing. To the rural proprietor, no longer a peasant, art, including belles lettres, is immorality, and people who idealize peasants, unpractical fools. Also the Roman Catholic Church, embarrassed by recruits of your type and born scoffers like Belloc, who cling to the Church because its desecration would take all the salt out of blasphemy, will quietly put you on the unofficial index. The Irish will not support an English journal because it occasionally waves a Green flag far better than they can wave it themselves. And the number of Jews who will buy you just to see what you say about them is not large enough to keep you going. Thus there is absolutely no public for your policy; and though there is a select one for yourself one and indivisible, it is largely composed of people to whom your oddly assorted antipathies and pseudo-racial feuds are uncongenial. Besides, on these fancies of yours you have by this time said all you have to say so many thousand times over, that your most faithful admirers finally (and always suddenly) discover they are fed up with the New Witness and cannot go on with it. This last danger becomes greater as you become older, because when we are young we can tell ourselves a new story every night between our prayers and our sleep; but later on we find ourselves repeating the same story with intensifications and improvements night after night until we are tired of it; and in the end (which you have not yet reached) a story revived from the old repertory has to last for months, and is more and more shaky as a protection against thinking of business, or lying there a prey to unwelcome reminiscences. And what happens to the story of the imaginative child happens also to the sermon or the feuilleton of the adult. It is inevitably happening to you.

That is the case against the success of CHESTERTON'S.

Your only chance finally is either to broaden your basis, or to have no basis at all, like Dickens in "Household Words" and "All The Year Round," and say, "Give me something with imagination in it, and I can do without politics or theoretic sociology of any kind." This is perhaps the only true catholicism in literature; but it will hardly serve your turn; because all the articles and stories that Dickens got are now mopped up by the popular press, which in his day stuck to politics and news and nothing else. So I am afraid you will have to stand for a policy, or at least a recognisable attitude, unless you are prepared to write a detective story every week and make Belloc write a satirical story as well.

You could broaden your basis if you had money enough to try the experiment of giving ten poor but honest men in Beaconsfield and ten more in London capital enough to start for themselves as independent farmers and shopkeepers. The result would be to ruin 18 out of the twenty, and possibly to ruin the lot. You would then learn from your feelings what you would never learn from me, that what men need is not property but honorable service. Confronted either with 20 men ruined by your act, or 18 ruined and one Fascination Fledgby owning half a street in London, and the other half a parish in Bucks, you would--well, perhaps join the Fabian Society.

The pseudo race feuds you should drop, simply because you cannot compete with the Morning Post, which gives the real thing in its succulent savagery whilst you can give only a "wouldn't hurt a fly" affectation of it. In religion too you are up against the fact that an editor, like an emperor, must not belong to a sect. Wells is on the right tack: my tack. See my prefaces to Androcles and Methuselah. We want the real Catholic Church above the manufactured one. The manufactured one is useful as the Salvation Army is useful, or the formulas of the Church of Christ Scientist; but they do not strike on the knowledge box of the modern intellectual; and it is on the modern intellectual that you are depending. I am an Irishman, and know how far the official Catholic Church can go. Your ideal Church does not exist and never can exist within the official organization, in which Father Dempsey will always be efficient and Father Keegan futile if not actually silenced; and I know that an officially Catholic Chesterton is an impossibility.

However, you must find out all this for yourself as I found it out for myself. Mere controversy is waste of time; and faith is a curious thing. I believe that you would not have become a professed official Catholic if you did not believe that you believe in transubstantiation; but I find it quite impossible to believe that you believe in transubstantiation any more than, say, Dr. Saleeby does. You will have to go to Confession next Easter; and I find the spectacle--the box, your portly kneeling figure, the poor devil inside wishing you had become a Fireworshipper instead of coming there to shake his soul with a sense of his ridiculousness and yours--all incredible, monstrous, comic, though of course I can put a perfect literary complexion on it in a brace of shakes.

Now, however, I am becoming personal (how else can I be sincere?). Besides I am going on too long and the lunch bell is ringing. So forgive me, and don't bother to answer unless you cannot help it.

Ever,

G. BERNARD SHAW.

Meanwhile, Shaw as usual responded cordially to Gilbert's wish to make him an early attraction in the paper--but also as usual urged him towards the theatre:

10th Dec. 1924.

By all means send me a screed about Joan [of Arc] for the cockpit. But I protest I have no views about her. I am only the first man modest enough to know his place auprès d'elle as a simple reporter and old stage hand.

You should write plays instead of editing papers. Why not do George Fox, who was released from the prisons in which Protestant England was doing its best to murder him, by the Catholic Charles II? George and Joan were as like as two peas in pluck and obstinacy.

G.B.S.

The specimen advance number was published before the end of 1924. In the leading article G.K. gave his reasons for agreeing finally to use his own name--although in the form attacked by Shaw. He had first viewed the proposal with a "horror which has since softened into loathing." He had looked for a title that should indicate the paper's policy. But while that policy was in fact a support of human normality: well-distributed property, freedom and the family--yet the surrounding atmosphere was so abnormal that "any title defining our doctrine makes it look doctrinaire." A name like The Distributive Review would suggest that a Distributist was like a Socialist, a crank or a pedant with a new theory of human nature. "It is so old that it has become new. At the same time I want a title that does suggest that the paper is controversial and that this is the general trend of its controversy. I want something that will be recognised as a flag, however fantastic and ridiculous, that will be in some sense a challenge, even if the challenge be received only with genial derision. I do not want a colourless name; and the nearest I can get to something like a symbol is merely to fly my own colours."

Although the paper was never exclusively Catholic, that flag was for G.K. as it had been for Cecil of a very definite pattern and very clear colours: religiously the paper stood for Catholic Christianity, socially for the theory of small ownership, personal responsibility and property. It was in strong opposition especially to Socialism and even more to Communism. Bernard Shaw, Gilbert once said, wanted to distribute money among the poor--"we want to distribute power."

During the last part of Cecil's editorship his wife had been Assistant Editor of the New Witness and she had so continued when Gilbert first became Editor. But she was neither a Catholic nor a Distributist. Religion seems not to have interested her, and her political outlook was entirely different from Gilbert's. In The Chestertons she dismissed Distributism as "quite without first principles" and "a pious hope and no more."* Obviously it was impossible for Gilbert to start his new paper with an Assistant Editor in entire disagreement with his views. I have sometimes wondered whether his intense dislike of having to tell Mrs. Cecil this was not almost as strong a factor in the delay as the money problem.

[* I have learnt, as this book goes to press, that Mrs. Cecil became a Catholic in 1941.]

There was no break in their relations: she went on writing for the paper, doing chiefly the dramatic criticism. But it is clear from her own account of the incident that she wholly misconstrued Gilbert's attitude and did not realise how far she herself had drifted from Cecil's views as well as from Gilbert's.

Shaw wrote again:

Reid's Palace Hotel Funchal, Madeira. 16th January, 1925.

MY DEAR G.K.C.

The sample number has followed me out here. What a collector's treasure!

Considering that I had Cecil's own assurance that my Quintessence of Ibsenism rescued him from Rationalism, and that it was written in 1889 (I abandoned Rationalism consciously and explicitly in 1881) I consider John Prothero's introduction of me to your readers as a recently converted Materialist Rationalist to be a most unnatural act; and it would serve her right if I never spoke to her again.

Rationalism is the bane of the Church. A Roman priest always wants to argue with you. A Church of England parson flies in terror from an argument, a fundamentally sensible course. George Fox simply knocked arguers out with his "I have experimental knowledge of God." St. Thomas Aquinas was like me: he knew the worthlessness of ratiocination because he could do it so well, and yet despaired of the Inspirationists in practical life because they did it so badly.

J.K.P. doesn't know her way about in this controversy; and I cannot take up her challenge.

What makes me uneasy about the prospectus is that you drag in anti-prohibition. You might as well have declared for Brighter London at once, or said that the paper would be printed at the office of the Morning Advertiser. You run the risk of the money coming from The Trade. However, non olet. Only, remember the fate of all the editors--Gardiner, Donald, Massingham, etc., etc.--who have written without regard to their proprietors. The strength of your position is that they can hardly carry on with your name in the title without you. But they can kill the paper by stopping supplies if it does not pay; and the chances are that it will not. I have never had a farthing of interest on my shares in the New Statesman, and don't expect I ever shall. Therefore keep your list of shareholders as various and as uncommercial as you can: get Catholic money rather than beer money.

As I am the real patentee of the Distributive State, and the D.S. is Socialism; and as, furthermore, the Church must remain at least neutral on Prohibition, as in the United States, where a Catholic priest has just set a praiseworthy example of neutrality by bringing about a record cop of bootleggers, and as the success of Prohibition is so overwhelming that it is bound to become a commonplace of civilization, you must regard it as at least possible that you will some day make the paper Socialist and Dry (with a capital). Therefore do not undertake to oppose anything: stand for what you propose to advocate, whether as to property or drink or anything else, but don't state your solutions as antitheses.

By the way, don't propose equal distribution of land. It is like equal distribution of metal, rough on those who get the lead and rather too jolly for those who get the gold. Your equal distribution must come to equal distribution of the national income in terms of money.

The £500 a year is absurd. Do you realize that it is £250 at pre-war rates, and subject to heavy taxation: net £375--pre-war 182-10-0? You have sold yourself into slavery for ten years for £3-10-2 a week. Are you quite mad? Make it at least £1500, plus payment for copy.

Ever

G.B.S.

Of course it was not merely a question of inadequate payment for his work: as time went on, a large part of the financial burden of the paper had to be carried by him. Lord Howard de Walden helped generously and so did Mr. Chivers. Other donations came in but mostly very small ones. No proper accounts were kept: no watch on how the money went. And from time to time Gilbert would pay off a printing bill of £500 or so and go ahead hoping for better times. The money aspect did not worry him, I think, at first. There was always more to be made by a little extra effort: though a time was to come when every extra effort wearied him cruelly. But there was one thing he could not bear--quarrels on the Board or on the staff and above all the suggestion that he should adjudicate.

"He was a bad judge of men," one of his staff told me. "He never shirked an intellectual issue, but in a practical crisis he was inclined to slide out."

"He could never," said another, "stand up to accusations from one man against another."

The first start was made with the existing staff of three. Miss Dunham was sub-editor and was usually left to see the paper through the press. G.K. would come up once or twice a week and dictate his own articles.

"You never knew when he was coming," she says, "but you always knew when he was there by the smell of his cigar." He was practically a chain smoker and he always used the same brand. He left drawings on the blotter and everything else. He had no idea of time and when he said, "I think I'll go out now," he might stay out an hour or so, or he might not return at all. Lighting a cigar or cigarette he would make a sign in the air with the match. He never omitted this ritual, and Miss Dunham thinks it became like tapping the railings was to Dr. Johnson.

"He used to come in and swing about on his little feet," she said. And it is true that his feet like his voice seemed too small to belong to the rest of him. Her great difficulty was that she could not get him to read and select among the contributions: too often this was left to her and she felt painfully inadequate to the task.

For the first year all the Notes of the Week were written by G.K. Then he got Mr. Titterton as Assistant Editor: and after that, said the Assistant Editor with simplicity, "You couldn't always tell good Titterton from bad Chesterton." Everyone who worked at the office adored G.K.: especially the "little" people, typists, secretaries, office boys.

"He was so kind," Miss Dunham said. "He never got angry. He never minded being interrupted. If his papers blew away he never got impatient. His patience hurt one." She had never seen him angry.

That the paper was ever got out seems wonderful as the staff recall those days. Yet I think that all the stories about Gilbert's inefficiency as Editor have contributed towards an impression that I shared myself until quite lately--that G.K.'s Weekly was immeasurably inferior to the New Witness. Going more carefully through the files I have begun to question that impression.

The paper was produced under certain obvious disadvantages. Even spending some days a week in London and telephoning freely it is not easy to edit a paper from the country. Gilbert thought of himself as a bad editor, and was not in fact a very good one. The contributions he accepted were uneven in quality: both Leaders and Notes of the Week when not written by him tended to be weak imitations of either himself or Belloc--tinged at times with an air of omniscience tolerable in Belloc but quite intolerable in his imitators. Just occasionally the equally unedited Notes and Leader were in contradiction of each other. Yet the paper remains an exceedingly interesting one. Analysing my earlier and late impressions I concluded that my earlier feeling of boredom sprang from the inevitable effect of the New Witness coming first and therefore having been read first. It is a disadvantage of consistency that, as Bernard Shaw remarked, you have said the same thing, you have told the same story, so often as the years go by.

Taking a rest of a year and returning fresh to G.K.'s Weekly I was surprised at finding how much I enjoyed reading it and also at finding that it had been of more practical use than I remembered to the cause it served. The trend of the whole world is to make the State powerful and the family powerless. It was something that in these years G.K.'s Weekly should have helped to smash two bills of this nature-the Mental Deficiency and the Canal Children's Bills. Both these aimed at taking children from their parents, the first in the cause of health, the second of education. Against both Gilbert wrote brilliantly and successfully.

G.K.'s Weekly has much more G.K. in it and quite as much Belloc as in the earlier years of the New Witness. Eric Gill, too, long a friend of the Chestertons, became the chief contributor on art. In 1925 he spent a night at Top Meadow to discuss the policy of the paper, especially with reference to industrialism and art. A little later the Gills moved from Wales much nearer to Beaconsfield and the two men met fairly often. Gill's letters are interesting. They are mostly before the visit to Beaconsfield and probably led to it. He begins by attacking Gilbert for "(1) supporting Orpenism as against Byzantinism and (2) thinking that the art of painting began with Giotto, whereas Giotto was really much more the end."

In June 1925, G.K. was asking him to write about Epstein. Gill agreed to do so but insisted that Chesterton and Belloc must not disagree with him but "accept my doctrine as the doctrine of G.K.'s Weekly in matters of art--just as I accept yours in other matters." "I don't intend to write for you as an outsider (have I not put almost my last quid into your blooming Company?--7% or not). . . . God forbid that you should have an art critic who'll go round the picture shows for you and write bilge about this painter and that--this 'art movement' and that."

In the first state of effervescence the labour he delighted in quite deadened the pain of the Editor's chair. Gilbert was prepared if necessary to write the whole paper and to treat it as a variant on the Toy Theatre or the Sword Stick:

It was said that the Chicago pork machine used every part of a pig except the squeal. It might be said that the Fleet Street press machine uses only the squeal. . . .

In short, nobody reading the newspapers could form the faintest notion of how intelligent we newspaper people are. The whole machine is made to chop up each mind into meaningless fragments and waste the vast mass even of those. Such a thing as one complete human being appearing in the press is almost unknown; and when an attempt is made at it, it necessarily has a certain air of eccentric egotism. That is a risk which I am obliged to run everywhere in this paper and especially on this page. As I have said, the whole business of actually putting a paper together is a new game for me to play, to amuse my second childhood; and it combines some of the characters of a jigsaw and a crossword puzzle. But at least I am called upon to do a great many different sorts of things; and am not tied down to that trivial specialism of the proletarian press.*

[* March 28, 1925.]

And again

This paper exists to insist on the rights of man; on possessions that are of much more political importance than the principle of one man one vote. I am in favour of one man one house, one man one field; nay I have even advanced the paradox of one man one wife. But I am almost tempted to add the more ideal fancy of one man one magazine . . . to say that every citizen ought to have a weekly paper of this sort to splash about in . . . this kind of scrap book to keep him quiet.*

[* April 4, 1925.]

G.K. goes on to talk of an old idea of his: that a young journalist should write one article for the Church Times and another for the Pink 'Un and then put them into the wrong envelopes.

It is that sort of contrast and that sort of combination that I am going to aim at in this paper . . . I cannot see why convictions should look dull or why jokes should be insincere. I should like a man to pick up this paper for amusement and find himself involved in an argument. I should like him to pursue it purely for the sake of argument and find himself pulled up short by a joke . . . I never can see why a thing should not be both popular and serious; that is, in the sense of being both popular and sincere.

For the paper had a most serious purpose. He acknowledged its defects of bad printing (which the printers indignantly denied), bad proof-reading, bad editing, and claimed "to raise against the banner of advertisement the noble banner of apology." Because a creative revolution was what he wanted, words and forms were hard to find. It was easy to dress up stale ideas in a new dress but the terminology for something outside the old hack party programmes had to be fresh minted.

He proposed various changes after a few months' running and introduced them thus:

We should be only too glad if for this week only our readers would have the tact to retire and leave us alone. We are in a Hegelian condition, a condition not so much of Being as of Becoming. And no generous person should spy on an unfortunate fellow creature who is going through the horrible and degrading experience of being a Hegelian. It is even more embarrassing than being caught in the very act of evolution, which every clear headed person would desire to avoid.*

[* December 12, 1925.]

In this number he began The Return of Don Quixote and also a sort of scrapbook. He invited contributions dealing with every sort of approach to Distributism and promised "more than one series of constructive proposals and definite schemes of legislation. We do not promise that all these schemes will exactly agree with each other or that we shall agree with all of them. Some will be more conservative, some more drastic than our own view." This article ends on an ambitious note. Very varying schemes will be admitted, but the idea of the paper will thereby be strengthened not destroyed--

For what we desire is not a paltry party programme but a Renaissance.

It was not the first time he had demanded a revolution but, as the depression hit our country and Big Business seemed less and less capable of coping with it, the demand became more understandable and the fight against Monopoly more urgent.

A thinking man should always attack the strongest thing in his own time. For the strongest thing of the time is always too strong. . . . The great outstanding fact and feature of our time is Monopoly.*

[* April 25, 1925.]

I have already referred to a debate on Monopoly between Chesterton and Mr. Gordon Selfridge, in which Selfridge, with the familiar unreality of the millionaire, maintained that there was no such thing. Anyone was free to open a store in rivalry of Selfridge's or to start a paper that should eclipse the Daily Mail! The only real monopoly, he added gracefully, was that of a genius like Chesterton whose work the ordinary man could not emulate. The graceful compliment Chesterton answered by offering to share his last epigram with Mr. Selfridge: but as to the main contention, what could he say? It was at once too easy and absolutely impossible to answer such a speech--or more truly such a speaker: only in a Country of the Blind could he have won a hearing. But Chesterton persevered. Even in 1924 the shadow of large scale unemployment had begun. And at this singularly inappropriate time came the Empire Exhibition at Wembley. In the failure of its appeal Chesterton saw hope: for he believed that from a frank facing of truth his country might yet conquer the coming perils.

That was the real weakness of Wembley; that it so completely mistook the English temperament as to appeal to a stale mood. It appealed to a stale mood of success; when we need to appeal to a new and more noble mood of failure, or at least of peril. The English . . . no longer care to be told of an Empire on which the sun never sets. Tell them the sun is setting, and they will fight though the battle go against them to the going down of the sun: if they do not stay it, like Joshua. . . .

We seriously propose that England should take her stand among the unhappy nations; it is too dismal a fate to go on being one of the happy ones. We must be as proud as Spain and Poland and Serbia; nations made more dear to their lovers by their disasters. Our disasters have begun; but they do not seem to have endeared us to anybody in particular. Our sorrow has come; but we gain no extra loyalty by it. The time has come to claim our crown of thorns; or at least not to cover it any longer with such exceedingly faded flowers.*

[* March 21, 1925.]

Always Chesterton was haunted by the present war. He had seen the Prussian peril conquered: he saw it rising again. Even before the advent of Hitler he knew that the tribe which had stolen from Austria and Denmark, had invaded France and crushed Poland was without repentance, and he feared that again the stupidity (or the greed) behind English and American policy was giving it another opportunity-- "Those sturdy Teutons," he wrote ironically, "from whom we were descended up to the outbreak of the Great War, and from whom we are now showing signs of being descended again."

The misfortune was that Englishmen had ceased to try to get free from "a secret government; conducted by we know not whom, and achieving we know not what. The real national life of our country is unconscious of its own national policy. The right hand of the Englishman, that holds the plough or the sword, knows not what his left hand doth with the pen and the cheque-book. Man is man; and Mond is master of his fate." For our government he apologised to France. He saw it as one and the same fight--against a heathenish money power and heathen Prussia. And the beating of the dark wings of enemy aeroplanes sounded in his dreams. As early as 1925 he wrote a Christmas play of St. George and the Dragon in which the Turkish Knight embodied his vision of Prussia and St. George spoke prophetically for England.

SAINT GEORGE: I know that this is sure Whatever man can do, man can endure, Though you shall loose all laws of fight, and fashion A torture chamber from a tilting yard, Though iron hard as doom grow hot as passion, Man shall be hotter, man shall be more hard, And when an army in your hell fire faints, You shall find martyrs who were never saints.

(They wound each other and the doctor comes to the help of the Turkish knight.)

PRINCESS: Why should we patch this pirate up again? Why should you always win and win in vain? Bid him not cut the leg but cut the loss.

SAINT GEORGE: I will not fire upon my own red cross.

PRINCESS: If you lay there, would he let you escape?

SAINT GEORGE: I am his conqueror and not his ape.

DOCTOR: Be not so sure of conquering. He shall rise On lighter feet, on feet that vault the skies. Science shall make a mighty foot and new, Light as the feather feet of Perseus flew, Long as the seven leagued boots in tales gone by, This shall bestride the sea and ride the sky. Thus shall he fly, and beat above your nation The clashing pinions of Apocalypse, Ye shall be deep sea fish in pale prostration Under the sky foam of his flying ships.

When terror above your cities, dropping doom, Shall shut all England in a lampless tomb, Your widows and your orphans now forlorn Shall be no safer than the dead they mourn. When all their lights grow dark, their lives grow gray, What will those widows and those orphans say?

SAINT GEORGE: Saint George for Merrie England.

He saw the aeroplanes in vision and he saw courage and patriotism. I think he must rejoice today that betrayal of the allied cause has not been at the hands of an Englishman. He had said many hard things about the English aristocracy and gentry: but these two virtues he had always granted were theirs. And in his vision he saw hope:

England may soon be poor enough to be praised with an undivided heart. We are not sure that the ruins of Wembley may not be the restoration of Westminster. It is when a nation has recovered from the illusion of owning everything that it discovers that it does stand for something; and for that something it will fight with a lucid and just tenacity which no mere megalomania can comprehend. We are not so perverse as to wish to see England ruined that she may be respected. But we do think she will be happy in having the sort of respect that could remain even if she were ruined. Patriotic as the English have always been, the patriotism of their educated class has seldom had this peculiar sort of extra energy that is given by a conscience completely at rest. If that were added, they might well make such a stand as would astound the world. All their other virtues, their humour and sporting spirit and freedom from the morbidities and cruelties of fatigue, might enter into their full heritage when joined to the integrity and intellectual dignity that belong to self defence and self respect. We are far from sure that the world has not yet to see our nation in its finest phase.

What may be in the womb of night we know not, nor what are those dim outlines that show on the horizon.

"In truth" he wrote, "no man knows how near we are to death or to dawn. I am not sure whether I am making this speech from a scaffolding or a scaffold."

It is easy for the young to undertake hard things: they never know how hard they are. And they are certain of success. The "lessons of experience" signify to the young that other men have failed: their own experience shall teach others the meaning of success. But to begin again at fifty, with the special spring of youth gone and with the sad lessons of one's own experience in the mind: this calls indeed for a rare courage. Gilbert knew all the cost in time, energy, money and reputation that he would have to pay--that he did pay. And he stood increasingly alone. Cecil's had been the irreparable loss, but others of the old circle were dropping out and their places were not filled.

Jack Phillimore's death in 1926 was a heavy blow. To his memory Gilbert dedicated The Queen of Seven Swords, published the year of his death.

You go before me on all roads On bridges broad enough to spread Between the learned and the dunce Between the living and the dead.

The gulf between the Socialist group and the Distributist had become far more obvious than of yore: Shaw and Wells would still write for G.K. but only because he was their friend. If F. Y. Eccles, if Desmond McCarthy today contributed, it would too be chiefly from affection for Gilbert. One article by Mr. McCarthy described the old days when the original Eye Witness was in being and he, Cecil and Belloc sat around the table editing it and sticking triolets thrown off in hot haste into those nasty little spaces left by articles that did not quite fit, or supplying three or four articles and a Ballade Urbane while the printers waited.

We have to print a triolet When space is clamouring for matter We try to put it off and yet We have to print a triolet It is with infinite regret That we admit the silly patter We have to print a triolet When space is clamouring for matter.

Such joyous scrambles are proper to youth, and now none of them were young.

All authors worthy of the name have found their platform and made permanent engagements by middle life: professional men are absorbed by work and life: they simply had not time to give as of yore to build up this new-old venture. The names of Shaw and Wells continue to appear among the contributors, often enough in religious debate. Reading the files and visiting the two men to talk of Gilbert, I made one discovery that is curious from whichever side you look at it. Two able and indeed brilliant men betrayed not only an amazing degree of ignorance concerning the tenets of Catholicism but also a bland conviction that they knew them well. Wells in conversation based his claim on the fact that he had long been intimately acquainted with an ex-nun. Shaw I fancy felt he must know all about something that had surrounded him in infancy--for, as the reader must have noticed, he is much preoccupied by the thought of his Irish descent and education.

But what seems to me even stranger about the situation is the absence on the Catholic side of any effort to explain to these men the doctrines they misconstrued. When Wells, for instance, gave a crude and inaccurate statement of the doctrine of the Fall, Belloc laughed at him, Chesterton and Father McNabb both wrote long and picturesque articles, illuminating to a believer but, as instruction to an unbeliever, quite useless. A correspondence that seemed likely to drag on forever ended abruptly with Wells asking about the Fall, "Tell me, did it really happen?" to which Chesterton briefly replied, "Yes."

I imagine he thought he and the other writers had said this several times already, but in fact they had not. Perhaps they did not realise where the beginning must be made in instructing otherwise instructed men on the subject of Catholicism. It is all very interesting and curious. But it largely explains why Bernard Shaw found it hard to believe that Gilbert believed in Transubstantiation. Has any Catholic ever explained the philosophic meaning of Transubstantiation to the Great old Irish Man of English Letters? Even Gilbert was perhaps too much inclined simply to play the fool in high-spirited fashion with those who attacked the Faith in his paper or other papers. But then how well he played it!

Here are some imaginary interviews on

. . . the recently discovered traces of an actual historical Flood: a discovery which has shaken the Christian world to its foundations by its apparent agreement with the Book of Genesis. . . .

The Dean of St. Paul's remarked: "I do not see that there is any cause for alarm. Protestantism is still founded on an impregnable rock: on that deep and strong foundation of disbelief in the Bible which supports the spiritual and intellectual life of all true Christians today. Even if dark doubts should arise, and it should seem for the moment as if certain passages in the Scripture story were true, we must not lose heart; the cloud will pass: and we have still the priceless possession of the Open Bible, with all its inexhaustible supply of errors and inconsistencies: a continual source of interest to scholars and a permanent bulwark against Rome. . . ."

Mr. H. G. Wells exclaimed: "I am interested in the Flood of the future: not in any of these little local floods that may have taken place in the past. I want a broader, larger, more complete and coordinated sort of Flood: a Flood that will really cover the whole ground. I want to get people to understand that in the future we shall not divide water, in this petty way, into potty little ponds and lakes and rivers: it will be one big satisfying thing, the same everywhere. Après moi le Déluge. Belloc in his boorish boozy way may question my knowledge of French; but I fancy that quotation will settle him."*

[* March 30, 1929.]

On the favourite topic of modern advertisement, having read an essay which said that good salesmanship made "everything in the garden beautiful," Gilbert again thought of Genesis:

There was only one actor in that ancient drama who seems to have had any real talent for salesmanship. He seems to have undertaken to deliver the goods with exactly the right preliminaries of promises and praise. He knew all about advertisement: we may say he knew all about publicity, though not at the moment addressing a very large public. He not only took up the slogan of Eat More Fruit, but he distinctly declared that any customers purchasing his particular brand of fruit would instantly become as gods. And as this is exactly what is promised to the purchasers of every patent medicine, popular tonic, saline draught or medicinal wine at the present day, there can be no question that he was in advance of his age. It is extraordinary that humanity, which began with the apple and ended with the patent medicine, has not even yet become exactly like gods. It is still more extraordinary (and probably the result of a malicious interpolation by priests at a later date) that the record ends with some extraordinary remarks to the effect that one thus pursuing the bright career of Salesmanship is condemned to crawl on his stomach and eat a great deal of dirt.*

[* March 23, 1929.]

The relation between Belloc and the paper, as between Belloc and Gilbert himself, was a unique one. Not indeed its "onlie begetter," he was equally with Cecil begetter of the original paper and its first editor. He was Gilbert's chief guide to the historical and political scene of Europe. Both men shared, had fought all their lives for, their ideas of Freedom, the Family, Restoration of Property and all that is involved in Catholic Christianity. And Belloc said repeatedly that he had no platform for the continuous expression of these ideas. Such books as his Cruise of the Nona found still as wide a public as had The Path to Rome a quarter century earlier, and in those books his philosophy may be read. But he had, too, urgent commentaries on Foreign Affairs and Current Politics--and for these G.K.'s Weekly became his platform as completely as the New Witness had been in the past. To Gilbert this appeared one chief value of his paper: in an article from which I quote in the next chapter he gives it as one of the two reasons for which he toiled to keep G.K.'s Weekly in existence.

Week by week Belloc on Current or Foreign Affairs wrote of what was happening and what would presently come of it. And who can say reading those articles today that it would not have changed the defeats of this war into victory at a far earlier date had our statesmen read and heeded--the analysis for instance of the peril of the aeroplane, of the threat to the Empire from Japan, the importance of keeping Italy's friendship in the Mediterranean, the growing strength of Germany and the awful risk we took in allowing her to rearm, in failing to arm against her?

Whether he was right or, as many held, wildly wrong about what underlay our failures of judgment, his views must be briefly traced because of their effect on Gilbert and others. In the financial world he saw England in the first years after the war dominated by the International Banking Power, which made us as it were a local branch of Wall Street. In his view it was the bankers both of America and England who first insisted that Germany could not pay her reparations and later made England repudiate her own war debts to America (though she had, he showed, already paid in interest and principal more than half of what had been lent). The banks did this because they had lent commercially both to Germany and England sums whose safety meant more to them than moneys merely owing to the nations--which would not benefit the banks! England thus became subservient to the United States and had to follow American financial policies. It was these policies that led to the abandonment of the unwritten alliance with France and especially to allowing Germany to rearm (helped by loans from these same banks), to reoccupy the Rhineland and remilitarise the Ruhr.

Next, in Belloc's view, came a worse stage yet in which the banks had given place to Big Business which was increasingly controlling Parliament. The plutocracy that had bit by bit eaten into our aristocracy and gained ascendancy in the Govemment was not, like our ancient aristocracy, trained for the business and was utterly uninformed especially in foreign affairs. The one remaining hope, the permanent officials, especially of the Foreign Office, were less and less listened to; latterly he held too that even the Foreign Office had lost its old sure touch. Hence a constant vacillation in our policies which weakened England's position and made certain some terrible disaster.

This fear is ever present in Belloc's articles and ever brooded on by the Editor. He rallied his forces to urge, week after week, the possible alternative to disaster--the recovery by the people of England of power and freedom, the restoration of England to its place in a restored Europe, freed from the German menace. Despite the natural high spirits a certain gloom and more than a touch of fierceness mark the work of these years. Summing up "the twenties" of the century, Chesterton saw them as singularly bankrupt spiritually and intellectually, and he foresaw from their sowing a miserable harvest.

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XXVI. The Distributist League and Distributism

To say we must have Socialism or Capitalism is like saying we must choose between all men going into monasteries and a few men having harems. If I denied such a sexual alternative I should not need to call myself a monogamist; I should be content to call myself a man.

Advance number of G.K.'s Weekly, Nov. 1924

FROM G.K.'s Weekly grew THE DISTRIBUTIST LEAGUE. Its start in 1926 was marked by intense enthusiasm, and its progress was recorded week by week in the paper. The inaugural meeting took place in Essex Hall, Essex Street, Strand, on September 17, 1926. G.K. summed up their aim in the words: "Their simple idea was to restore possession." He added that Francis Bacon had long ago said: "Property is like muck, it is good only if it be spread." The following week the first committee meeting took place. Chesterton was elected President; Captain Went, Secretary, and Maurice Reckitt, Treasurer. It was planned to form a branch in Birmingham. Alternative names were discussed: The Cobbett Club, the Luddite League, the League of Small Property:

The Cow and Acres, however suitable as the name of a public house at which we could assemble, is too limited as an economic statement. . . .

The League of the Little People (President, Mr. G. K. Chesterton) may seem at first too suggestive of the fairies; but it has been strongly supported among us:

And again: Suppose we call our movement, "The Lost Property League" . . . the idea of the restoration of lost property is far more essential to our whole conception than even the idea of liberty, as now commonly understood. The Liberty and Property Defense League implies that property is there to be defended. "The Lost Property League" describes the exact state of the case.*

[* From an article called, "Name This Child" and another later article.]

In October another meeting of the central branch was held in Essex Hall to debate "Have We Lost Liberty?" The Croydon and Birmingham branches were arranging meetings, G.K. conferred with the members of the Manchester branch, and Glasgow announced that it was only awaiting the christening to form a branch. Bath held its first public meeting, with the Mayor in the chair, and the meeting had to overflow into a very large hall.

It was decided to reduce the price of the paper to twopence-- Twopenny Trash* was the title of the leading article--in order to give the League an opportunity of extending the paper's radius of action as an organ of the League's principles. . . . "Every reader who has been buying one copy at sixpence, must take three copies at twopence until his two surplus copies have secured two new readers. . . . The League would have to make itself responsible for the success of this experiment and save the paper which gave it birth, or die of inanition, for it is certainly not yet strong enough to leave its mother."**

[* This was the name given to Cobbett's Weekly Register by his enemies.]

[** G.K.'s Weekly, November 6, 1926.]

It is clear that Gilbert's hopes at this stage ran high. He had not dreamed that the initial success of the League would be so great. Recording a sensational increase in the sale of the paper, he wrote on November 13, 1926: "It was when we faced defeat that we were surprised by victory; and we are quite serious in believing that this is part of a practical philosophy that may yet outlast the philosophy of bluff."

Recording a meeting of the League: he wrote:

We find it difficult to express the effect the meeting had upon us. We were astonished, we were overwhelmed. Had we anything to do with the making of this ardent, eager, indefatigable creature? The answer is, of course, that though we had something to do with the shaping of the body, we had nothing to do with the birth of the soul. That was a miracle, a miracle we had hoped for, and which yet, when it happened, overwhelmed us. We have the happy feeling that we have helped to shape something which will go far above and beyond us. . . . There were well over 100 members present, many of them spoke, and nearly all the others would have spoken if there had been time to hear them. It was a great night.*

[* November 13, 1926.]

Father Vincent McNabb has said truly that there are no words for the real things. Thus Distributism is not only a rather ugly word but also a word holding less than half the content of the idea they were aiming at. Belloc covered more of it in the title of his book: the Restoration of Property, while perhaps a better name still was The Outline of Sanity. This Chesterton had chosen for a series of articles that became a book. He was asking for a return to the sanity of field and workshop, of craftsman and peasant, from the insanity of trusts and machinery, of unemployment, over-production and starvation. "We are destroying food because we do not need it. We are starving men because we do not need them."

After the first meeting of the League, the notes of the week recorded that the printing order for the paper based on actual demand had risen in two weeks from 4,650 to 7,000. "Of course we owe everything to the League which in Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Croydon, Chatham, Worthing, Chorley, Cambridge, Oxford, Bath and London has made the newsagents aware of the paper." By November 27, the sales had risen to over 8,000. Then was held the first formal meeting of the central branch of the League, at which it was agreed: "that members should make a habit of dealing at small shops." They should avoid even small shops which sweat their employees, each branch should prepare a list of small shops for the use of its members.

And that is only a beginning. We hope to enlist the support of the small farmer and the small master craftsman. We hope, little by little, to put the small producer in touch with the small retailer. We hope in the end to establish within the state a community, almost self-supporting, of men and women pledged to Distributism, and to a large extent practising it. Less and less, then, will the juggling of finance have power over us; for it does not matter what they call the counters when you are exchanging hams for handkerchiefs, or pigs for pianos.

The Cockpit is worth reading during the months that follow, for here were voiced any criticisms that the readers had to make of the paper and of the League--any criticism that the League had to make of itself. There was plenty. Many leaguers and readers felt for instance that the spirit of criticism of others was too fully developed in the paper, so that when attempts were made to act on distributive principles by people not in league with the League they were given short shrift instead of meeting even modified encouragement. The League was begged to spend more time clarifying its principles, less time in criticism. But much more fundamental was the constantly recurrent question: When is the League going to begin to do something? To this the answer, given often by G.K. himself was that, while the League hoped in time to create that community of which he had written, its own work was only that of Propaganda--of a wider and wider dissemination of the principles of Distributism. Their work, they said, was to talk.

Outdoor propaganda started in Glasgow and came thence to London. In October 1931 the Secretary said they must "convince men there is a practical alternative to Capitalism and Socialism, by showing them how to set about achieving it." And in November he subscribed to opinions voiced in the Cockpit for the last two years by saying that the London Branch acted in the spirit of "a pleasant Friday evening debating society, which regarded discussion as an end in itself." One would imagine that all this meant a call to action, but the action was merely the establishment of a Research Department and the start of a new paper The Distributist for the discussion of the League's domestic business. The Research Secretary will explain his plans, enroll volunteers and allot tasks, thus "equipping the League with the information for lack of which it is as yet unable to agree on practical measures." The effectiveness of its Propaganda would, members were told, depend on its research.

"The pious appointment of investigators," wrote a Leader in G.K.'s Weekly in reference to a Government commission, "to report what is already common knowledge is nothing less than a face-saving, time-marking, shifty expedient." I don't think this article was one of Gilbert's, but I do wonder whether as time went on he did not recall his own old comparison between the early Christian and the modern Socialist. For Distributists far more than Socialists should have been vowed to action. There was a grave danger both of making their propaganda ineffective by lack of example and of weakening themselves as Distributists. Yet there were many difficulties in their path, some of which may best be seen if we go back a little and recall the way in which the Encyclical Rerum Novarum was received by Catholics at the end of the last century. Written in Europe where the remains of the mediaeval social structure still lingered on far more than in industrial England or America, it was taken by the more conservative Catholics as a general confirmation of the established order. I well remember people like my own father and Father Bernard Vaughan quoting it in this sense. And if they tended to advert to only one half of it, the more radical Catholics readily obliged by appearing conscious solely of the other half and thus enabling themselves to be dismissed as one-sided.

Unfortunately they were worse than one-sided: they were curiously blind, with rare exceptions, to those true implications of the document which spelt Distributism--for which the word had not then been coined--or the Restoration of Property. "The law, therefore, should favour ownership and its policy should be to induce as many people as possible to become owners. Many excellent results will follow from this; and first of all, property will certainly become more equitably divided. For the effect of social change and revolution has been to divide society into two widely different castes. . . . If workpeople can be encouraged to look forward to obtaining a share in the land, the result will be that the the gulf between vast wealth and deep poverty will be bridged over, and the two orders will be brought nearer together."* Yet the Pope's words were treated almost as an acceptance of the existing conditions of property by the more conservative, while the more radical simply tried to evade them. The question of my youth undoubtedly was: how far can a Catholic go on the road to Socialism?

[* Rerum Novarum (translation in Husslein's The Christian Social Manifesto). Italics mine.]

Distributism would seem today to have cut like a sword the knot of this mental confusion, but it did not do so for many people. I suppose the leading Distributist among the clergy was Father Vincent McNabb and I have heard him called a Socialist a hundred times. And even among those who had accepted the Distributist ideal and had now had fifteen years of the New Witness and G.K.'s Weekly to meditate upon--to say nothing of the Belloc and Chesterton books--there was still a good deal of confusion of mind to be cleared up. The Chesterbelloc had begun a mental revolution, but even the mind cannot be turned upside down in a moment of time; and then there is the will to be considered.

Gilbert often claimed that the Society he advocated was the norm, that the modern world was abnormal, was insane. But to achieve the normal in an abnormal world calls for high courage and a high degree of energy. It is much easier to sit and drink beer while planning the world that one wishes was there--the world of simplicity, hard work and independence. And about the details of this new world there was room for a variety of opinion. The Distributists soon began to argue and even to quarrel--about the admission of machinery into the Distributist state, about the nature of one another's Distributism and what was necessary to constitute a Distributist. The effect on Gilbert is interesting, for it showed his belief in the importance of the League. He hoped, he said, that the quarrel would not "turn into a dispute"--that it would remain a personal quarrel. "For impersonal quarrel is schism." He urged again and again that the dogmas of their creed should be defined.

Heaven forbid that we should ever be True Distributists: as a substitute for being Distributists. It would be a dismal thing to join the long and wavering procession of True Christians, True Socialists, True Imperialists; who are now progressing drearily into a featureless future; ready to change anything whatever except their names. These people escape endlessly by refusing definition which they call dogma. . . .

Practical politics are necessary, but they are in a sense narrow; and by themselves they do tend to split the world up into small sects. Only dogma is sufficiently universal to include us all.

Of the world surrounding him which refused definitions he said, "because there is no image there is nothing except imaginaries."* But I think there must have been some blushes on Distributists' cheeks as they read his apology for some slight absence of mind. He explained his own "ghastly ignorance" of the details of the dispute, "which is bound up with the economic facts of the position," with the fact especially of

[* October 12, 1929.]

my own highly inadequate rendering of the part of the Financier. I am the thin and shadowy approximation to a Capitalist. . . . I could only manage until very lately to keep this paper in existence at all, by earning the money in the open market; and more especially in that busy and happy market where corpses are sold in batches; I mean the mart of Murder and Mystery, the booth of the Detective Story. Many a squire has died in a dank, garden arbour, transfixed by a mysterious dagger, many a millionaire has perished silently though surrounded by a ring of private secretaries, in order that Mr. Belloc may have a paper in which he is allowed to point out that a great Empire does not default because it is growing richer. Many a shot has rung out in the silent night, many a constable has hurled himself through a crashing door, from under which there crawled a crimson stain, in order that there might be a page somewhere for Mr. Kenrick's virile and logical exposition of the principles of Distributism. Many an imperial jewel has vanished from its golden setting, many a detective crawled about on the carpet for clues, before some of those little printers' bills could be settled which enabled the most distinguished and intelligent of Distributists to denounce each other as Capitalists and Communists, in the columns of the Cockpit and elsewhere. This being my humble and even highly irrelevant contribution to the common team-work, it is obvious that it could not be done at the same time as a close following of the varying shades of thought in the Distributist debates. And, this ignorance of mine, though naturally very irritating to people better informed, has at least the advantage of giving some genuineness to my impartiality. I have never belonged distinctively to any of the different Distributist groups. I have never had time.

As time went on however and the disputes continued, he wrote a series of articles* which have in them that note so special to him, so embarrassing to some of his admirers, of deep and genuine respect for every person and every opinion. The small numbers of the Distributists, the greatness of the work to be done by them, would make any split in their ranks "a tremendous tragedy." The difficulty in keeping any movement in being was that of holding together the ardent pioneers and the rank and file.

[* September 10, 17, 24, October 1, 1932.]

Men who really have common convictions tend to break up. It is only those who have no convictions who always hang together. . . . Roughly the position is that there is a moderate body which regards extremists as visionary; a more extreme body which regards moderates as ineffective; and lastly a catastrophic simplification in the social scene, which makes the simple enthusiast seem more fitted to the simple disaster.

There were two approaches that should be made to these differences. The first was to state the fundamental principles of Distributism. The crux of the quarrel was the question of machinery. But even those who held that machinery should be abolished in the Distributist State held it, he claimed, not as a first principle, but as a deduction from their first principles. Chesterton himself felt that machinery should be limited but not abolished; the order of things had been historically that men had been deprived of property and enslaved on the land before the machine-slavery of industrialism had become possible. The whole history of the machine might have been reversed in a state of free men. If a machine were used on a farm employing fifty men that would do the work of forty, it means forty men become unemployed, "but it is only because they were employed that they are unemployed. Now you and I, I hope to heaven, are not trying to increase employment. It is almost the only thing that is as bad as unemployment." In other words, he did not want men to be employees. Men working for themselves, men their own employers, their own employees--that was the objective of Distributism. A wide distribution of property was its primary aim. And he did not want the League to consist entirely of extremists lest it should be thought to consist entirely of cranks, especially at a moment when "intelligent people are beginning to like Distributism because Distributism is normal."

The other approach was heralded in the final article of the series (October 1, 1932) by a reference to the excitement over the Buckfast Benedictines who had just built their Abbey Church with their own hands--an adventure

to which, if I understand it as completely as I share it, the English blood will never be entirely cold. But about these new heroes of architecture there is one note that is not new; that comes from a very ancient tradition of psychology and morals. And that is that the adventurer has a right to his adventure; and the amateur has a right to his hobby; or rather to his love. But neither has any right to a general judgment of coldness or contempt for those whose hobby is human living; and whose chief adventures are at home. You will never hear the builders of Buckfast shouting aloud, "Down with Downside; for it was designed by a careful Gothic architect!" You will never hear them say, "How contemptible are these Catholics who pray in common churches; tawdry with waxwork imagery and Repository Art." Of the great adventurers who advance out of the Christian past, in search of Christian future, you could never say that the pioneers despise the army.

What seemed to Chesterton the oddest feature in the opposition to his idea of sanity was the apparent assumption that he was offering an impossible ideal to a world that was already working quite well. With bland disregard of the breakdown of their own system, the orthodox economists were challenging him to establish the flawlessness of his. They laughed at the Distributist desire if not to abolish at least to limit machinery. They adjured him to be more practical. Chesterton had replied in an earlier article:

There may be, and we ourselves believe there are, a certain number of things that had better be always done by machinery. . . . Machinery is now being used to produce numberless things that nobody needs. Machinery is being used to produce more machinery, to be used merely for the production of things that nobody needs. Machinery is being used to produce very badly things that everybody wants produced very well.

Machinery is being used for enormously expensive transport of things that might just as well be used where they are. Machinery is being used to take things thousands of miles in order to sell them and bring them back again because they are not sold. Machinery is being used to produce ornament that nobody ever looks at and architecture that nobody wants to look at. Machinery is taking suicides to Monte Carlo and coals to Newcastle, and all normal human purpose and intelligence to Bedlam; and our critics gaze at it reverently and ask us how we expect ever to be so practical as that.*

[* June 13, 1925.]

This desperate situation must be met by strengthening the home, re-establishing the small workshop, re-creating the English peasantry. But first the ground might have to be cleared.

One phrase used in his articles--the "catastrophic simplification of the social scene"--reminds us once more how keenly aware Gilbert was of something that had not yet happened, the present war with its break-up of the social order. In the article, from which I have been quoting, he compares the urgency of the hour to the period of the French Revolution; in his Outline of Sanity seven years earlier he had stressed the Distributist ideal as the last chance to

do deliberately and well what nemesis will do wastefully and without pity; whether we cannot build a bridge from these slippery downward slopes to freer and firmer land beyond, without consenting yet that our most noble nation must descend into that valley of humiliation in which nations disappear from history.*

[* Outline of Sanity, p. 34.]

In this book which he had tried in vain, he tells us, to make "a grammar of Distributism," he touches on the enormous changes that had made such a grammar of far greater urgency. When Rerum Novarum was issued, or even eighteen years later when G.K. wrote What's Wrong With the World, individualist competition had not yet given place to the Trust, Combine or Merger. "The American Trust is not private enterprise. It would be truer to call the Spanish Inquisition private judgment." The decline of trade had hardly begun at the turn of the Century, liberty was still fairly widespread. But today we had lost liberty as well as property and were living under the worst features of a Socialist State. "I am one of those who believe that the cure for centralisation is decentralisation."

Both in the book and in the paper he urged constantly a double line of escape towards the restoration of freedom, initiative, property and the free family: the one line was the comparatively negative one of winning such concessions from the State as would make action possible, the other was personal action to be taken without any State aid or even encouragement. The germ of recovery lay in human nature. If you get poison out of a man's system "the time will come when he himself will think he would like a little ordinary food. If things even begin to be released they will begin to recover." To the question did Chesterton believe Distributism would save England, he answered, "No, I think Englishmen will save England, if they begin to have half a chance. I am therefore in this sense hopeful. I believe that the breakdown has been a breakdown of machinery and not of men."

A most difficult question to answer is the degree of the League's success. Its stated aim was propaganda, the spreading of ideas. "There is a danger that the tendency to regard talking as negligible may invade our little movement . . . our main business is to talk." One sees the point, of course; yet I cannot help feeling that it would have been better if the majority of Leaguers had done some bit of constructive work towards a Distributist world and sweated out of their system the irritability that found vent in some of their quarrels. After all the fight for freedom as far as it concerned attacking government was carried on week by week by the small group running the paper. "The main body of Distributists would have learnt their own principles better by trying to act them, and been far more effective in conveying them to others."

Some members saw the need of individual action. Father Vincent set out in one number of the paper Fifteen Things that men could do for themselves as a step to the practice of a Distributist philosophy. Father Vincent, indeed, must be put beside Chesterton and Belloc as a really great Distributist writer. Useful books were written too by Mr. Heseltine and Mr. Blyton, who both also set to work to grow their own food. Mr. Blyton is still writing and still growing food. A workshop was started at Glasgow (probably the most active of the Branches), Father Vincent came to a League meeting clad in home-spun and home-woven garments, Mr. Blyton urged the example of what had been done by the Society of Friends in creating real wealth in the hands of the poor by their allotment schemes. (A weakness was visible, I think, in the very different and contemptuous treatment of Ford's effort to promote part-time farming among his workers during the depression because it was made by Ford, who was certainly no Distributist.)

But the most inspiring article in the paper in many a year was written by a man who, having tried in vain to get his writings printed, decided to start practising Distributism. He had pondered long, he says, on how the Rank and File of the Movement who were neither writers nor speakers should help, and the answer came to him "Do it yourself." After a fascinating description of how he built "the nucleus of a dwelling house against the time that a small plot of land could be secured" he ends:

By responsible work a man can best realise the dignity of his human personality. But most of us are caught in the net of industry and the best way out would seem to be to create, that is to employ one's leisure in conscious creative effort. This usually means the use of hand as well as head, and the concentration on some familiar craft. The aim also should be to acquire ownership in a small way; that is to acquire the means of production. If we are not at all events partly independent, how is it possible to urge on others the principles of small ownership.

In saying this he spoke from experience, for he had found that before he began his experiment his friends were exasperated by references to the principles of Distributism, while the sight of the building in progress began to convert them.

I have found many letters striking the note of gratitude to Gilbert for his goodness and the inspiration he has given. One of these, written by a sailor from H.M.S. Hood, is pure Distributism: "Your articles are so interesting tho' so hard to understand. . . . Why not come down a bit and educate the working class who are always in trouble because they don't know what they want. You see, sir, your use of words and phrases are so complicated, personally that's why I'm so fascinated when I read them, but really us average Council School educated people can't learn from you as we should . . . but what I do understand helps me to live. . . ."

The sailor goes on to tell the story of his life: a workhouse child, a farm boy: a seaman on a submarine who spent his "danger money" on a bit of land in Cornwall, married now and with two boys. "What a thrill of pleasure we have when we gaze over our land. . . . To be reared in a workhouse and then to leave a freehold home and land to one's children may not seem much to most people but still out of that my sons can build again. . . . I feel you understand this letter, what is in my heart, and I want to thank you very much for what you have done for me."

Towards the end of September 1932 the League held a meeting to which Gilbert came "as peacemaker." In the course of his speech he remarked that he had often said harsh things of America in the days of her prosperity but that in these days of adversity we might learn much from that country. He instanced the saying he had heard from a business man on his recent visit, "There's nothing for it but to go back to the farm," and noted the fact that America still had this large element of family farms as a basis for recovery. The suggestion that Distributists wanted to turn everybody into peasants had been another point answered in The Outline--"What we offer is proportion. We wish to correct the proportions of the modern state."* A considerable return to the family farm would greatly improve this proportion.

[* Outline of Sanity, p. 56.]

But if he had spoken "harshly" of the United States it was nothing to the way he had talked of the British Empire. Although at moments he saw in imagination the romance of the fact that England had acquired an Empire "absentmindedly" through Englishmen with the solitary spirit of adventure and discovery, yet he had an unfortunate habit of abusing the Dominions. They were the "suburbs" of England (a curious phrase from the man who found suburbs "intoxicating"); we could not learn from them as we could from Europe for they were inferior to us; these and many other hard things he would throw out again and again in his articles. One letter in the Cockpit reproached him; from a New Zealander of English descent it asked him whether he really meant that those of his own race were so utterly indifferent to him; whether he really preferred Bohemians and Norwegians to Britons. The letter received no answer.

My husband and I used to wonder with secret smiles whether he was the Australian from whom Gilbert derived the idea of that country as a "raw and remote colony." Belloc also, in a letter extolling the Faith, asked "what else would print civilised stuff in Australasia?" Many years earlier Gilbert had written, in reviewing a book on the Cottages of England, of the inconsistency of the English upper classes who exalt the achievement of the national character in creating the Empire and disparage it concerning the possibility of re-creating the rural life of England. "Their creed contains two great articles: first that the common Englishman can get on anywhere, and second that the common Englishman cannot get on in England." Surely Chesterton had this same inconsistency, as it were, in reverse? The common Englishman was great in England, the common Irishman was great in Ireland, the common Scot was a figure of romance in Scotland, but when these common men created a new country that new country became contemptible.

The Empire took a magnificent revenge, for it was in the "Suburbs of England" that Distributism was first taken seriously and used as practical politics. A far more effectively distributist paper than The Distributist appeared in Ceylon under the able editorship of J. P. de Fonseka, in which action was recorded and the movements of Government watched and sometimes affected from the Distributist angle, and Catholic Social thinking formed on Distributist lines. This paper has a considerable effect also in India. But of course the main Distributist impact has been felt in the States, in Canada and in Australia.

There is a double-edged difficulty in talking about the influence of anyone on his times. On the one hand, as Mgr. Knox pointed out, all our generation has grown up under Chesterton's influence so completely that we do not even know when we are thinking Chesterton. One sees unacknowledged (and unconscious) quotations from him in books and articles, one hears them in speeches and sermons. On the other hand into the making of a movement there flow so many streams that it is possible to claim too much for a single influence however powerful. An American Distributist said to me lately that the movement set on foot by Chesterton had reached incredible proportions for one generation. I think this is true but we have also to render thanks (for example) to the suicide of the commercial-capitalist-combine which created the void for our philosophy. That the Distributist League has had much influence I doubt: in the United States the Chesterton spirit is better represented by that admirable paper Free America than by the American Distributists--for Free America is offering us precisely what the League has for the most part failed to offer--the laboratory test of the Distributist ideal. Every number carries stories of men who have in part-time or whole-time farming, in small shops, in backyard industries tried out Distributism and can tell us how it has worked and how to work it. Its editors Herbert Agar, Ralph Borsodi, Canon Ligutti and others, all foremost in the Ruralist movement, acknowledge debt to Chesterton and are carrying on the torch. Monsignor Ligutti's own work in the field of part-time farming, his own periodical and the thoughts that inspire the Catholic Rural Life Movement of America are among the most important manifestations of that universal religious and rural awakening for which Chesterton worked so hard and longed so ardently.

In Canada the Antigonish movement has shown a happy blending of theory and practise. For the University itself has in its Extension Movement and by its organ The Maritime Co-operator provided the theory, while up and down the country co-operative groups have built their own houses and canneries, started their own co-operative stores and savings banks, and made the Maritime Provinces a hopeful and property-owning community of small farmers and fisher folk. Several important books have grown out of this movement and at its basis lies the insistence on adult education which shall make ordinary men "Masters of their Destiny." Surely it is the authentic voice of Chesterton when Dr. Tompkins says "Trust the little fellow" or Dr. Coady declares "The people are great and powerful and can do everything."

In Australia Distributism has given a fresh slant to both Labour and Catholic leadership. The direct debt to Chesterton of the Australian Catholic Worker is immense, and while the paper also owes much to The Catholic Worker of America and to the Jocistes of France and Belgium, we find too that in America, France, and Belgium, Chesterton himself is studied more than any other Catholic Englishman. The Campion Society founded in Melbourne in 1931, the Catholic Guild of Social Studies in Adelaide, the Aquinas Society in Brisbane, the Chesterton Club in Perth and the Campion Society in Sydney have all based their thinking and their action on the Chesterbelloc philosophy. These groups have closely analysed Belloc's Servile State and Restoration of Property and have applied its principles in their social action in a most interesting fashion. Thus they opposed--and helped to defeat--a scheme for compulsory national insurance chiefly on the ground that "the social services in a modern State were the insurance premiums which Capitalism paid on its life policy." With wages high enough to keep families in reasonable comfort and save a little, with well distributed property, national insurance would be rendered unnecessary. Yet on the other hand they supported--and won--national "child endowment" because although fundamentally only a palliative this at least strengthened the family by supplementing wages and helping parents towards ownership and property.

Most important however of all the Australian developments has been the approval of the main Distributist ideal by the Australasian Hierarchy as the aim of Catholic Social Action. This was especially set out in their Statement on Social Justice, issued on occasion of the first Social Justice Sunday in 1940.* The Hierarchy of New Zealand joined with that of Australia in establishing this celebration for the third Sunday after Easter. Indeed, the social policy of Australian Catholicism has produced the slogan "Property for the People," while the policy has been brought into action both by many scattered individuals in that huge but thinly populated country and in organised fashion by the Rural Life movements with their own organs of expression.

[* Published by the Australian C.T.S.]

If it is difficult to estimate the impact of mind upon mind it becomes bewilderingly impossible to weigh, in such a movement as Distributism, the actual practical effects. Partly because, while Distributism leads naturally to co-operation (an individual, says Chesterton, is only the Latin word for an atom and to reduce society to individuals is to smash it to atoms), still the movement is essentially local, the groups usually small.

For my own part I have travelled a good deal, always with a primary interest in social developments, and everywhere I have found Chesterton or his derivatives. The numbers in America alone--both in the States and Canada--who are trying out these ideas in big and small communities is amazing. I did begin to make a list of vital movements beginning with the Jocistes and the American Catholic Worker, roving over the world and trying to estimate in each movement I had met the proportion of Chesterton's influence, and again the extent to which one movement is in debt to another--but I gave it up in despair. One can only say that certainly there has been a great stirring of the waters in every country: each has taken and has given to the other: and most of those thus co-operating have been the "little" men whom G.K. loved and in whom Dr. Tompkins tells us to trust. To utter nobly the thoughts of that little man was, Chesterton held, the highest aim that poet or prophet could set before him. Distributism is that little man's philosophy. Chesterton gave it large utterance.

And he could do it the more richly because--as he said many years ago of the religious philosophy that was the basis of his social outlook--"I did not make it. God and humanity made it and it made me."

Meanwhile he himself distributed royally. He gave help to the Catholic Land Movement, to Cecil Houses, to all who asked him for help. He educated several nieces and nephews of Frances and gave money or lent it in considerable sums to old friends in difficulties. If some event--perhaps Judgment Day--should call together all those helped financially by Gilbert and Frances, I think they will be surprised to meet one another and to discover what a lot of them there are. They gave too to the Catholic Church at Beaconsfield, which later became Gilbert's monument, and to which Top Meadow was left after Frances's death. But even Top Meadow was distributed, a small piece being cut off the garden and left to Dorothy Collins. And I think even in a Distributist heaven it must add to Gilbert's happiness to see the seventeen rabbits, the chickens and the beehives--to say nothing of the huge quantities of vegetables produced on this fragment of his property.

For this war like the last, with all its suffering, will, if the Bureaucracy permit it, again energise the people of England into that creative action which is the only soil for the seed of Distributism. It began by distributing the people. And London was no place for a Distributist movement. It is no chance that the growth of this philosophy is among small groups and in the countryside. "On the land," as Father Vincent often says, "you need not waste a moment of time or a scrap of material." This is the fierce and pious thrift that Gilbert saw in his youth as so poetical and in his age as a part of the philosophy of Distributism.

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