XXVII. Silver Wedding…

XXVII. Silver Wedding

THE CONSIDERATION OF the Distributist League that flowed out of the foundation of G.K.'s Weekly in 1925 has carried us some years ahead of our story. Back then to 1926 when Frances and Gilbert had been married 25 years.

One of the things taught me long ago when I first visited them at Beaconsfield was that it was properly to be called Beckonsfield: that it was not named for Disraeli but that he, impertinently, had chosen to be named for it. Gilbert often spelt it Bekonsfield to impress his point. Both in theory and practice he had a lot of local patriotism and a little of that special pride taken by all men in houses built by themselves. But most of his pride went out to the fact that his home was intensely English. He quoted a lover of Sussex who said among the beech trees of Buckinghamshire, "This is really the most English part of England." He felt it "no accident that has called this particular stretch of England the home counties." Public life was so ugly just now, the decay of patriotism under the corroding influence of an evil and cowardly sort of pacifism was hateful to him, but England still remained to re-vitalise the English when the time should come. The oaks that had made our ships could still fill us with "heroic memories; of Nelson dying under the low oaken beams or Collingwood scattering the acorns that they might grow into battleships." Yet if, he said, "I were choosing an entirely English emblem, I should choose the beech-tree." Beaconsfield was, by one theory, named from the beech forests that surrounded it, and while the oaks suggested adventure and the British lion, the beeches suggest rather the pigs that feed upon their mast and villages that grow up in the hollows and slow curves of the hills.

"The return to the real England with real Englishmen would be a return to the beech-woods, which still make this town like a home. At least they did until recently. I shall probably be told tomorrow that several beech forests have been removed to enable a motorist, temporarily deaf and blind, to go from Birmingham to Brighton."

It is at Top Meadow, whither they moved in 1922, that I always see Frances and Gilbert in a memory picture. They were to live there for the rest of their lives, and life there was the quiet background for all the vast mental activity and the journeying over England and Ireland and Europe and America that marked the years that remained.

The house began simply as a huge room or studio built in the field opposite Overroads. At one end was a stage which became the dining room: at the other end a minute study for Gilbert. The roof was high with great beams: at the study end was a musicians' gallery. A wide open fireplace held two rushbottomed seats on one of which Frances sat in winter. They were the only warm corners, but Gilbert did not feel the cold and certainly could not have fitted into the inglenook. Opposite the fire was a long low window looking into the prettiest garden, where St. Francis stood guardian and preached perpetually to the birds. A pool held water lilies; and the flowers that surrounded the pool and the house were also cut and brought indoors in great quantities. Frances loved to have them in glowing masses against the background of books.

New shelves had to be added every year as the books accumulated. Big as the room was, the wall space was not enough and one large bookcase was built out from the wall near the fireplace into the middle of the room, as in a public library. It looked well there and it screened one from the bitterest blasts. For the place seemed full of air from the four winds of heaven. The rest of the house was built on to this room and looked tiny beside it. Kitchen and servants' quarters, two fair-sized and one very small bedroom, a minute sitting room for Frances where she kept her collection of tiny things--toys and ornaments mostly less than an inch, many far smaller, that were the delight of children. She had not, Gilbert remarked, allowed her taste to guide her in choosing a husband.

A mixture of Gilbert's strong and weak qualities affected his dealings with his dependents. I am not sure he felt certain that it was quite right that he should have a gardener: anyhow, no man was ever paid so highly and allowed to idle so completely as was the gardener I remember there, an exceedingly able gardener when he chose to work. To such trifles as the disappearance of coal or tools, neither Gilbert nor Frances would dream of adverting. And they were entirely at the mercy of a "hard case" story at all times. One man used to call weekly to receive ten shillings--for what service no one was able to form the faintest conception. Should he fail to appear Gilbert mailed the money. He was found one day fighting another man on the doorstep for daring to beg from Mr. Chesterton!

From a conventional point of view the maids were inconceivably casual. Neither Gilbert nor Frances would have thought it right to insist on caps or indeed on any sort of uniform. It is my impression that I have been waited on at dinner by someone garbed in a skirt, a sweater and a pair of bedroom slippers. And the parlor maid took for granted her own presence beside Frances and Dorothy Collins as a chief mourner at Gilbert's funeral.

According to Bernard Shaw, writing of Dickens, marriage between a genius and an ordinary or normal woman could not succeed--the gap was too wide. Dickens had thought he could go through with it, only because he had not measured the gap. In this theory, as in so much else, Gilbert stood violently opposed to Shaw. No doubt he must at times have realised that there was an intellectual gap between himself and the ordinary man or woman, but it was a thing utterly unimportant. Character, love, sanity: these things mattered infinitely more, and he more than once depicts the genius as painfully climbing to reach the ordinary.

His views concerning the sexes were equally at variance with those of Shaw and of most of the moderns. He was quite frankly the old-fashioned man and Frances was the old-fashioned woman. They both agreed that there is one side of life that belongs to man--the side of endless cigars smoked over endless discussions about the universe. Gilbert, in What's Wrong With the World, tells us that the voice in which the working woman summons her husband from the tavern is the same voice as that of the hostess who, leaving the men in the dining room, tells her husband not to stay too long over the cigars.

Of this voice he entirely approved so long as it did not ask to stay on in the dining room. He often said that the important thing for a country was that the men should be manly, the women womanly: the thing he hated was the modern hybrid: the woman who gate-crashes the male side of life: no one, he had said in a letter of his engagement time, "takes such a fierce pleasure as I do in things being themselves." And both he and Frances found amusement in that "eternal equality" which Gilbert saw in the sexes so long as they kept their eternal separateness. If everything, he said, is trying to be red some things are redder than others, but there is an eternal and unalterable equality between red and green.

It so happens that in the matter of the wives of great men he had something to say more than once. He longed to hear the point of view of Mrs. Cobbett who "remains in the background of his life in a sort of powerful silence." He combated Shaw's notion that the young poet would repudiate domestic toils for his wife: rather he would idealise them--though this, Gilbert admits, might at times be hard on the wife. But the matter is best expressed in the love scene in one of his later romances: Tales of the Long Bow:

That valley had a quality of repose with a stir of refreshment, as if the west wind had been snared in it and tamed into a summer air. . . .

"What would you say if I turned the world upside down and set my foot upon the sun and the moon?"

"I should say," replied Joan Hardy, still smiling, "that you wanted somebody to look after you."

He stared at her for a moment in an almost abstracted fashion as if he had not fully understood; then he laughed quite suddenly and uncontrollably, like a man who has seen something very close to him that he knows he is a fool not to have seen before. So a man will fall over something in a game of hiding-and-seeking, and get up shaken with laughter.

"What a bump your mother earth gives you when you fall out of an aeroplane," he said. "What a thing is horse-sense, and how much finer really than the poetry of Pegasus! And when there is everything else as well that makes the sky clean and the earth kind, beauty and bravery and the lifting of the head--well, you are right enough, Joan. Will you take care of me?"*

[* Pp. 89, 119.]

Frances was not especially interesting intellectually although she had much more mind than Joan in the story, but above all she carried with her a "quality of repose with a stir of refreshment."

"Will you take care of me?"

Neither of them probably had measured at first all that that care would mean. Only bit by bit would the full degree of his physical dependence, as we have seen it through the years, become clear to her. The strenuous campaign in the matter of appearances begun during the engagement might alter in direction but had rather to be intensified in degree as he grew older. Shaving, bathing, even dressing were daily problems to him. "Heat the water," an early secretary at Overroads heard Frances saying to the cook, "Mr. Chesterton is going to have a bath." And "O, need I," came in tones of deepest depression from the study. The thought of that vast form climbing into and out of the bathtub does make one realise how a matter of easy everyday practice to the normal person became to him almost a heroic venture. His tie, his boots, were equally a problem: I remember his appearing once at breakfast in two ties and claiming, when I noticed it, that it proved he paid too much, not too little, attention to dress. Doctors, dentists, oculists were all needed at times, but Gilbert would never discover the need or achieve appointments or the keeping of them. Still more serious was the question of how the two were to live and to do all the acts of generosity that to them both seemed almost more necessary than their own living. Hard as he worked, Dorothy Collins has told me that when she came to them in this year (1926) they had almost nothing saved.

It may be remembered that Gilbert wrote to Frances during their engagement that his only quality as a shopper was ability to get rid of money and that he was not good at "such minor observances" as bringing home what he had bought or even remembering what it was. Through boyhood and into manhood his parents, as we have seen, had never given him money to handle and he certainly never learnt to handle it later in life. "He spent money like water," Belloc told me. Realising his own incapacity he arranged fairly early to have Frances look after their finances, bank the money and draw checks. "When we set up a house, darling," he had said, "I think you will have to do the shopping." All he handled was small sums by way of pocket money--"very playfully regarded by both" Father O'Connor writes, for he had often witnessed the joke that they made of it.

"What could she do," he continues, "when Gilbert went out with £5.18.6 or words to that effect, and came back invariably without a copper, not knowing where his money had gone?"

At a hotel in Warsaw the manager entreated him not to bring every beggar in town around the door. He could never refuse a beggar and the money not given away was probably dropped in the street or in a shop. The solution they hit upon was that of accounts at the shops and hotels or anything that could not simply be brought home by Frances and placed by his side. Father O'Connor wrote to Dorothy Collins of "the loving care with which Frances anticipated all his wishes--never was the cigar box out of date--you know this, and it was so long before you came. And his toddle to the Railway Hotel for port or a quart according to climatic conditions. . . . She devised and built the studio for Gilbert to play at and play in. It used to be crowded at receptions, as on the night when Gilbert broke his arm. He had been toying with the tankard that evening, to the detriment of social intercourse, but not much, I thought. We were all in good fettle. The Ballad of the White Horse was just going to the printers. That was never penned in Fleet Street. Nor The Everlasting Man. He wrote verbosely there in the office. At Beaconsfield he was pulled together, braced."

The studio, become the house, almost certainly cost more than they had planned--building always does--but the two great drains were the benefactions and the paper. Frances signed, as a matter of course, every check Gilbert wanted, but I imagine it was sometimes with a little sigh that she wrote the checks for the endless telephones, telegrams, printers' bills and other expenses that poured out to support a paper which to her seemed chiefly a drain on Gilbert's energies that could not but diminish his creative writing. In the six years 1927-1933, he paid over £3000 into the paper. 1931-2 were the worst years. In them the checks she had to sign totalled £1500.

The last sentences quoted from Father O'Connor touch on the deepest--perhaps the only deep--problem for them both. For far the hardest thing was the struggle against the real danger that he might again drink too much, as he had before the illness that so nearly killed him in 1915. This struggle was rendered especially hard by two elements in her make-up: Frances wanted always to give Gilbert exactly what he wanted, and she hated to admit even to herself anything that could be called a fault in him. She saw the overwork that she was powerless to stop: she could not but be aware how great it made the temptation. It was for her to remember the old illness, to be vigilant without worrying him, to help him against himself.

After the long illness Dr. Pocock had advised total abstinence for some years, largely because, as he told me, Gilbert, unless specially warned, ate and drank absentmindedly anything that happened to be there! He observed this prohibition faithfully until Dr. Pocock left Beaconsfield in 1919. Dr. Bakewell, who succeeded him advised moderation but only occasionally found it necessary to order total abstention. It was the amount of liquid he feared rather than its nature. When he forbade wine he did so because wine increased the general tendency to absorb liquid. For Gilbert was always unslakeably thirsty. Daily he drank several bottles of Vichy Water or Evian, also of claret at what may be called the "open" seasons, and many cups of tea and coffee. Spirits he practically never touched, nor such heavier wines as port and sherry. But even two bottles of claret or Burgundy, although usually appearing to brighten his intellect, might well be a serious strain on the digestion of a man who overworked the mind without exercising the body. "He loved to sip a glass of wine," Monsignor O'Connor writes, "and to stroll between sips in and out of his study, brooding and jotting, and then the dictation was ready for the morning."

Dorothy Collins once kept a record for a few weeks of the number of words dictated of the book of the moment--usually thirteen to fourteen thousand, about twenty-one hours weekly--exclusive of journalism, editing and lecturing. The pressure was tremendous and increasing, nor was it felt by Gilbert only. In a letter to Maurice Baring at the time of his conversion he writes: "For deeper reasons than I could ever explain, my mind has to turn especially on the thought of my wife, whose life has been in many ways a very heroic tragedy; and to whom I am so much in debt of honour that I cannot bear to leave her, even psychologically, if it be possible by tact and sympathy to take her with me."

Frances would indeed have been amazed to find herself cast for such a part. Her life had held two tragic events--Gertrude's death and the much sadder death of her brother, believed to have killed himself. With her faith and her profound affections such an end had stabbed deep. Yet certainly Frances did not view herself as other than happy: in fact, I think she very seldom thought about herself at all. There was something of heroism in this very self-forgetfulness. Frances never had good health and for some years had suffered from arthritis of the spine. Yet intimate as I was I knew this only after her death. My husband was saying lately that had he been asked to choose adjectives to describe Frances he would have chosen "cheerful" and "well-balanced." Of all the people we have known we felt she was one of the closest to the norm of sanity and mental health: quite an achievement for a woman suffering from a really painful complaint.

Yet I think when Gilbert used the strong phrase "heroic tragedy" he saw with his great insight that his frail wife, beside their heavy cross of childlessness, beside the burden of her own physical and spiritual sufferings, was carrying the weight of his achievement, and that it was not a light one. Heroic was the right word but tragedy the wrong, for this life given to her keeping ended on a note of triumph.

The treatment of a situation of this kind can, of course, easily be made unreal. In the sort of golden glow cast by the imagination on Fleet Street with its taverns and its drinks, next morning's headache is always omitted: but even the finer, deeper glow of the domestic hearth has its ashy moments. No finite beings can conduct their lives with complete absence of errors and regrets. In any human relationship, however perfect, the people concerned sometimes bore or annoy or even hurt one another. That is one of the main things that sends Catholics week by week or month by month to the Confessional, which brings for everyman something of the renewal and re-creation of daily joy that the genius Gilbert saw when he wrote Manalive. In this story the hero is always eloping with his own wife and marrying her again. Flora Finching's "It was not ecstasy it was comfort" is a common enough view of a reasonably successful marriage, but Gilbert wanted to keep and did keep the flashes of ecstasy. When he wrote Manalive he had been married eleven years and he used a thought that had inspired a poem to Frances while they were engaged. The heroine in the story keeps changing her second name, but the name is always a colour: in one town the hero runs away with her as Mary Grey, in another as Mary Green. Thus as a girl Gilbert had seen Frances in green and had understood why green trees and fields are beautiful; had seen her in grey and had learnt a new love for grey winter days, and the grey robes of palmers; and in blue--

Then saw I how the fashioner Splashed reckless blue on sky and sea And ere 'twas good enough for her He tried it on eternity.

When they came back from Jerusalem Gilbert dedicated to Frances the Ballad of St. Barbara and we find him again at his old trick: seeing as her throne the great stones of the mediaeval walls, seeing nature as her background. With all apologies to the cynics I am afraid that the judgment of the biographer upon all the evidence must be that after twenty-five years Gilbert not only loved his wife tenderly, but was still ardently in love with her!

A curious prayer of his youth was fulfilled as they celebrated this year their silver wedding.

A wan new garment of young green, Touched as you turned your soft brown hair; And in me surged the strangest prayer Ever in lover's heart hath been.

That I who saw your youth's bright page, A rainbow change from robe to robe, Might see you on this earthly globe, Crowned with the silver crown of age.

Your dear hair powdered in strange guise, Your dear face touched with colours pale, And gazing through the mask and veil The mirth of your immortal eyes.*

[* "The Last Masquerade," Collected Poems, pp. 348-9.]

Four years earlier Frances had aided Gilbert in making the decision for which she was not yet herself ready, to do the act which he called "the most difficult of all my acts of freedom." And indeed much of that freedom of full manhood he owed to her.

Now after four years of waiting she was almost ready to join him. She wrote to Father O'Connor:

June 20 [1926]

DEAR PADRE--

I want now, as soon as I can see a few days clear before me to place myself under instruction to enter the Church. The whole position is full of difficulties and I pray you Padre to tell me the first step to take. I don't want my instruction to be here. I don't want to be the talk of Beaconsfield and for people to say I've only followed Gilbert. It isn't true and I've had a hard fight not to let my love for him lead me to the truth. I knew you would not accept me for such motives. But I am very tired and very worried. Many things are difficult for me. My health included which makes strenuous attention a bit of a strain. I know you understand--Tell me what I shall do.

Yours affecly

FRANCES CHESTERTON.

Between this letter and the next Gilbert and Frances celebrated their silver wedding.

July 12

MY DEAR PADRE--

We have had such a week of alarums and excitements that I had not even time to thank you for the spoons. They are just what I like and incidentally just what I wanted. I feel so hopeless at getting out of this net of responsibilities in which I am at present enmeshed and to find time for instruction. I feel I have a lot to learn and I think after all I had better go quietly to Father Walker* and talk to him. Gilbert is writing to you himself. I know he thinks I have made myself rather unhappy about things--and he is so involved with the paper (I pray he gives it up) we have not been able to talk over things sensibly. Please be very patient with me, because it is so difficult to get clear. My nephew Peter is very ill and I have to spend a lot of time with my poor sister.

[* The Parish Priest.]

Yrs gratefully

FRANCES CHESTERTON.

[Undated]

DEAR PADRE--

Many grateful thanks. Did you receive your copy of the "Incredulity of Father Brown." It was put aside for you, but I do not know if it was sent off or appropriated by somebody else. I have written to Father Walker and after having seen him and had a talk I shall know what I ought to do. It is only the mass of work, the paper, my poor Peter and money worries that keep me on the edge from morning till night. I feel the paper must go, it is too much for Gilbert (4 days work always) and consequently too much for me who have to attend to everything else. Trying to settle an income-tax dispute has nearly brought me to tears.

You will understand how difficult it is to get time to think and adjust my conclusions.

Yrs affect.

FRANCES CHESTERTON.

This group of letters is for Frances amazingly unreserved. I have never known a happier Catholic than she was once the shivering on the bank was over and the plunge had been taken. One would say she had been in the Church all her life.

This was indeed a year of fulfillment: the year of the completion of their home, for they surprisingly acquired a daughter! I sometimes wondered why Frances and Gilbert had never adopted a child: they lavished much love on nieces, nephews and godchildren, but this was the only fulfillment to their longing until almost old age--and even then their conscious act was merely that of engaging a secretary. They had had many secretaries before, some of whom came with a quite inadequate training. "They learnt on Gilbert," as a friend once put it. It was difficult, too, for the secretaries, since neither Gilbert nor Frances had any idea of hours or of the arrangement of work. It was quite probable that Gilbert would suddenly want to dictate late in the evening or again that Frances would ask the secretary of the moment to run into the village for the fish in the middle of the morning. Hence rather general discomfort. Gilbert dictated straight to the typewriter, so shorthand was not needed. He went very slowly with many pauses. But it is typical of this period that no carbons were kept of letters sent, no files of letters received.

In 1926 came Dorothy Collins. Not only did she bring order out of chaos, but she became first the very dear friend of both Frances and Gilbert and finally all that their own daughter could have been. I remember how Frances talked of her to me when she was hoping Dorothy would become a Catholic (which she did some years later) and again when she herself was left solitary by her husband's death, and how I felt with inward thanksgiving that no child could mean more to her mother. But long before this stage was reached came a great lightening of the burden of living. No longer would Frances cry over income tax returns, no longer would money worry her. Chauffeur as well as secretary Dorothy drove them both to London for engagements and through England and Europe on holidays or lecture tours. She went with them to America and handled the business of their second tour there. Now when friends rang up to make arrangements Frances or Gilbert could say: "Would you ring again when Dorothy comes in. I'm not quite sure. She keeps the engagement book." And while Dorothy sternly warded off the undesirables, it worked out much better for friends as no engagement book had been kept before with any regularity. Now engagements were kept as well as an engagement book. Frances would still deal with the clothing question, but Dorothy handled it if she were unwell, and in every case delivered him punctually and brought him home again. A few of the lectures and debates of these years were: "Is Journalism Justifiable?", "An Aspect of St. Francis of Assisi," "The Problem of Liberty," "Is the House of Commons any Use," "What Poland Is," "Culture and the Coming Peril," "Progress and Old Books," "Americanization," "The Modern Novel," "If I Were a Dictator."

The excitement of Catholics everywhere had been intense when Gilbert came into the church: in England it was almost as great over Frances. Her real wish to remain in the background, her dislike of publicity, were seldom believed in by those who did not know her. I happened to be present at a conversation between the proprietor and the editor of a Catholic paper which had displayed a poster all over London announcing her conversion. One of them had heard that she was annoyed and for a moment both seemed a little dashed. Then said one: "Of course she has to pretend not to like it"--and this was at once accepted by the other: for both took for granted that such publicity could in reality have given her nothing but pleasure.

It was difficult at first for either Frances or Gilbert to see the wood for the trees in their new environment, and it was the greatest good fortune that the year of Frances's reception was also that of the new simplification following upon Dorothy's arrival. For the preceding few years had resembled the hectic period of the lionising of the young Chesterton of 1904. Requests poured in, for lectures, for articles, for introductions to books. "Are there no other Catholics to do things?" Frances asked me rather plaintively. Of these years Monsignor Knox said later, "his health had begun to decline, and he was overworked, partly through our fault."

A dip into the post bag brings up some letters from Father Martindale to Gilbert and Frances passing on various requests, but also realising the difficulty: "I sympathize with all desperately busy men": "I have already protected him by advising small or fussy groups not to invite him now and again." The solitary recollection I have of any interest Gilbert showed in a review of his books is the remark he made to my husband when Father Martindale had said of The Queen of Seven Swords "Francis Thompson is here outpassed." Gilbert repeated the phrase and said eagerly: "He wouldn't say it unless he meant it, would he?"

C.C.M., who has himself been caricatured talking on the radio, typing and eating at the same time, as different from G.K.C. as possible in his pale slimness and almost transparent appearance, was no less busy over a thousand activities. It was interesting that he should ask Gilbert's help, especially in that cementing of Catholics throughout the Empire that has always so passionately preoccupied him. In the War he had discovered in military hospitals the ordinary Englishman and above all the ordinary Australian and New Zealander. To them and to the Apostolate of the Sea he was to devote primarily all his later life.

Writing therefore to counsel the Chestertons as to which Catholic works should have precedence, we find him wanting an article for a New Zealand paper "the only one of its sort in N.Z., and you may say that it affects the entire Catholic community of the two islands," an autographed book for "a hulking devotee of yours and a member of the Australia rugger team, I think eight of them are Catholics." This "would give enormous joy to him" and "would be known in no time throughout Australia. Do try to."

From South Africa he wrote to Frances:

You will be surprised to get a letter from me from a nameless place 50 miles inland from the Nyanga mountains, which you will find (variously spelt) westward from, say Beira on the African east coast. This is the reason--

Recently a boy in a kraal here was found cutting pious pictures from a newspaper that he had somehow got hold of (he was a good little Catholic!). "Why are you cutting out that one?" "Because this is a Great Mukuru in the Catholic Church." (Mukuru is Potentate and will serve from St. Joseph right along to the Pope, not to mention the Little Flower. . . .) The Great Mukuru in this case was yourself! So there!

I hope you will smile with pleasure, but not try to answer, as please God I sail on the 31st and ought to be back in London in early Sept., a good deal better, thank God.

Please remember me affectionately to Gilbert. This is the first time a typemachine has clicked just here; its accompaniment, in an otherwise dead silence, is a distant gurgling yodel, so to say--some native feeling happy in the brilliantly hot sunlight, which, all the same, cannot make the thin air hot. I sleep (when possible) under furs, with the occasional insect dropping off the thatch over my head.

Later, planning a meeting for the Apostolate of the Sea at Queen's Hall, he writes to Gilbert:

Similarly Fr. McNabb must be given his head and I have told him he shall be given it. I hope to be purely practical and possibly a little sentimental. . . . The Seaman is everywhere, yet, for us, nowhere. He carries everywhere his child's heart, man's body, hungry unfed soul, unique power of feeding his goodness into others. The all-round (the world) man; the sea-limited man; the man whose life is made up of storms and stars; the most secretive and the most open-hearted man of any. . . . Now I will do all the clumsy stuff. You pull it all up into the human-sublime divine-humble air.

He has no privacy, and is more lonely than anyone. He has Water, and God; and MUST find Christ walking over the waves towards him. And no ghost.

Father Vincent McNabb who was to be "given his head" at this meeting was not a new friend of Catholic days but a very old one. A friendly critic of my manuscript asks whether he, even more than Belloc or Chesterton, does not merit the title of the Father of Distributism. At least he brings into the movement something none other could bring. He bases his social philosophy closely on the gospels--of which his knowledge is almost unique--and his articles bear such titles as "The Economics of Bethlehem" or "Big Scale Agriculture and the Gospels." Hatred of machinery has combined with love of poverty to sunder him from a typewriter, and these articles are all handwritten in most exquisite and legible script. His letters have always come in old envelopes turned inside out; he walks whenever possible and wears a shabby white habit and broken boots. Both Frances and Gilbert loved him dearly and their rare meetings were red letter days for both. Besides the link of Distributism the two men were united in caring deeply for the reawakened interest in St. Thomas and his philosophy.

The Benedictine, as well as the Dominican, outlook and history especially appealed to Gilbert, and the friendship with Father Ignatius Rice, which had begun almost with the century, grew steadily. He assisted, as we have seen, at Gilbert's reception into the Church: and whenever they met after that Gilbert would remind him, "We were together on the great day."

High Wycombe was the Chesterton's parish until, largely by their help, a church could be built at Beaconsfield. At first this church was served by Father Walker, parish priest of High Wycombe. It was he who had prepared Gilbert for his First Communion and he has sent me some of his recollections:

It certainly did not take long to prepare him for he evidently knew as much as I could tell him. Nevertheless, he said I was to treat him as I would any child whom I was teaching. This, knowing the man whom I was instructing, for I had at the time carefully waded through his Orthodoxy twice, was, indeed, an undertaking of magnitude. However, I went through the catechism (he was importunate that I should use it as he said all the children made use of it), very meticulously explaining all the details, to which he lent a most vigilant and unswerving attention. For instance, he wanted me to explain the reason of the drop of water being put into the wine at the preparing of the chalice for the Holy Sacrifice.

Father Walker describes Gilbert opening a bazaar and spending lavishly at every stall, afterwards being photographed in his company. Father Walker himself weighed 245 lbs., and the caption was "Giants in the Faith." On his departure, Gilbert presided at the farewell meeting and made a speech which, says Father Walker, "gave me no end of delight." Father (now Monsignor) Smith became the first rector of Beaconsfield as a separate parish. The Chestertons loved the little church there which later became Gilbert's memorial and to which, among other things, they gave a very beautiful statue of Our Lady. But when it had first been dedicated there had been for both Frances and Gilbert a deep disappointment. Curiously enough, neither of them had any devotion to the Little Flower who was chosen as Patron: they had hoped for a dedication to the English Martyrs. Later Gilbert used to tell Dorothy, who loved St. Thérèse, that he could not care for her, "with all apologies to you, Dorothy."

He did not go often to Confession, Dorothy says, but when he did go you could hear him all over the church. Getting up in the morning was always a fearful effort to him, and starting for early Mass he would say to her, "what but religion would bring us to such an evil pass!"

Meanwhile the books went on. In 1926 appeared The Outline of Sanity, The Catholic Church and Conversion, chiefly concerned with his own mental history, The Incredulity of Father Brown and The Queen of Seven Swords. In 1927 for the first time his scattered poems were brought into the volume of Collected Poems.

St. Augustine asks whether we can praise God before we know Him: Gilbert answered that question when by praise and thanksgiving he came as a boy to the discovery of God, beginning by a passionate desire to thank someone for the Universe. There is much praise in the Collected Poems. There is the note of hope in an almost hopeless fight in The Ballad of the White Horse. There are lovely poems to his wife. Since Browning none has understood the Sacrament of Marriage as well as Gilbert Chesterton.

In 1927 there also appeared, beside a couple of pamphlets:

The Return of Don Quixote Robert Louis Stevenson The Secret of Father Brown The Judgment of Dr. Johnson

Robert Louis Stevenson took Gilbert back to his boyhood and is by general agreement among the best of his literary studies. But the best thing he ever said apropos of Stevenson came not in this book but in his attack on the "science" of eugenics:

Keats died young; but he had more pleasure in a minute than a Eugenist gets in a month. Stevenson had lung trouble; and it may, for all I know, have been perceptible to the Eugenic eye even a generation before. But who would perform that illegal operation: the stopping of Stevenson? Intercepting a letter bursting with good news, confiscating a hamper full of presents and prizes, pouring torrents of intoxicating wine into the sea, all this is a faint approximation for the Eugenic inaction of the ancestors of Stevenson. This, however, is not the essential point; with Stevenson it is not merely a case of the pleasure we get, but of the pleasure he got. If he had died without writing a line, he would have had more red-hot joy than is given to most men. Shall I say of him, to whom I owe so much, let the day perish wherein he was born? Shall I pray that the stars of the twilight thereof be dark and it be not numbered among the days of the year, because it shut not up the days of his mother's womb? I respectfully decline; like Job, I will put my hand upon my mouth.*

[* Eugenics and Other Evils, p. 57.]

When the Stevenson itself appeared, Sir Edmund Gosse wrote:

I have just finished reading the book in which you smite the detractors of R.L.S. hip and thigh. I cannot express without a sort of hyperbole the sentiments which you have awakened; of joy, of satisfaction, of relief, of malicious and vindictive pleasure. We are avenged at last. . . .

It is and always since his death has been impossible for me to write anything which went below the surface of R.L.S. I loved him, and still love him, too tenderly to analyse him. But you, who have the privilege of not being dazzled by having known him, have taken the task into your strong competent hands. You could not have done it better.

The latest survivor, the only survivor, of his little early circle of intimate friends thanks you from the bottom of his heart.

Don Quixote is a fantasia about the future: in which the study of heraldry leads to the discovery of England and the centuries of her happiness and of her faith. Increasingly Gilbert saw the only future for his country in a re-marriage between those divorced three hundred years ago: England and the Catholic Church. Don Quixote is among the less good of his books, but like all the works of these years it is saturated with Catholicism. I wondered whether I felt more admiration or amazement when a man once asked us to publish a book on Chesterton saying, "I am an atheist myself but that doesn't matter, as I don't deal with his religion."

As a young man Gilbert had wanted to marry the religion of Dr. Johnson to the Republicanism of Wilkes and in his Catholic faith of today he saw simply the rounding out and the completing of the religion of Dr. Johnson. The Judgment of Dr. Johnson, his play about that great man was, like Magic, an immense succès d'estime but not a stage success: it was brilliantly acted and appreciatively criticised but could not win a public. Bernard Shaw was still constantly urging Gilbert towards the drama. Belloc too believed he could write a successful play and he and Anstey (author of Vice Versa) suggested the dramatising of a Belloc story. But neither the scenario they jointly sketched for Belloc's Emerald nor another made by Gilbert alone for his own Flying Inn ever reached the stage.

I remember going with the Chestertons to a pre-view of a Father Brown picture. Two of the stories had been cleverly combined, the cast was first rate, including Una O'Connor and Walter Connolly, and I came out feeling convinced that Father Brown would become another Charlie Chan. The stories would adapt so well, abounding as they do in scenes impossible for the stage but perfectly easy for the screen--high walls, windows, ladders, flying harlequins. But the first picture failed (possibly because it was too short) and no more were made. The drama remained the one field in which he had no success.

Shaw's name for Gilbert and Belloc--the Chesterbelloc--had come by the public to be used for the novels in which they collaborated. Belloc wrote the story, Chesterton drew the pictures, and the resulting product was known as the Chesterbelloc. A number of letters from Mr. Belloc beg Gilbert to do the drawings early in order to help the story. "I have already written a number of situations which you might care to sketch. I append a list. Your drawing makes all the difference to my thinking: I see the people in action more clearly." And again, "I can't write till I have the inspiration of your pencil. For the comedy in me is ailing."

Belloc would come over to Beaconsfield for a day or a night and the two men retire into Gilbert's minute study whence hoots of laughter would be heard. At the end of a couple of hours they would emerge with the drawings for a book complete, indeed several more than were needed.

Father Rice asked Gilbert once what he was writing and he replied, "My publishers have demanded a fresh batch of corpses." The little detective-priest ("I am very fond," said one reader to Chesterton, "of that officious little loafer") became a feature in crime anthologies, and when Anthony Berkeley in 1929 wanted to found the Detective Club he wrote that it "would be quite incomplete without the creator of Father Brown."

Gilbert soon became President. "Needless to say," writes Dorothy Sayers, "he read his part of the initiation ceremony with tremendous effect and enormous gusto."

In an article Gilbert wrote about the Club, he called it "a very small and quiet conspiracy, to which I am proud to belong." Meeting in various restaurants its members would "discuss various plots and schemes of crime." Some results of these discussions may be seen in the Initiation ceremonies which he made public in the article "thereby setting a good example to the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan, the Illuminati . . . and all the other secret societies which now conduct the greater part of public life, in the age of Publicity and Public Opinion."

The Ruler shall say to the Candidate:

M.N. is it your firm desire to become a Member of the Detection Club?

Then the Candidate shall answer in a loud voice:

That is my desire.

Ruler:

Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or Act of God?

Candidate:

I do.

Ruler:

Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader?

Candidate:

I do.

Ruler:

Do you promise to observe a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs, Conspiracies, Death-Rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism, Trap-Doors, Chinamen, Super-Criminals and Lunatics; and utterly and for ever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science?

Candidate:

I do.

Ruler:

Will you honour the King's English?

Candidate:

I will.

Then the Ruler shall ask:

M.N. Is there anything you hold sacred?

Then the Candidate having named a Thing which he holds of peculiar sanctity, the Ruler shall ask:

M.N. Do you swear by (Here the Ruler shall name the Thing which the Candidate has declared to be his Peculiar Sanctity) to observe faithfully all these promises which you have made, so long as you are a member of the Club?

But, if the Candidate is not able to name a Thing which he holds sacred, then the Ruler shall propose the Oath in this manner following:

M.N. Do you, as you hope to increase your Sales, swear to observe faithfully all these promises which you have made, so long as you are a member of the Club?

A book called The Floating Admiral was brought out by the Club. Chesterton wrote the introduction and each member produced one chapter. Reading it without inside knowledge I conceived that the idea was for each to clear up the problems created by his predecessor and create fresh ones for his successor. Gilbert tells of the subtler joke underlying the story:

Perhaps the most characteristic thing that the Detection Club ever did was to publish a detective story, which was quite a good detective story, but the best things in which could not possibly be understood by anybody except the gang of criminals that had produced it. It was called The Floating Admiral, and was written somewhat uproariously in the manner of one of those "paper games" in which each writer in turn continues a story of which he knows neither head nor tail. It turned out remarkably readable, but the joke of it will never be discovered by the ordinary reader; for the truth is that almost every chapter thus contributed by an amateur detective is a satire on the personal peculiarities of the last amateur detective. This, it will be sternly said, is not the way to become a best-seller. It is a matter of taste; but to my mind there is always a curious tingle of obscure excitement, in the works of this kind which have remained here and there in literary history; the sort of book that it is even more enjoyable to write than to read.

The Floating Admiral was a fair success financially. "We hired a sort of garret," writes Monsignor Knox "with the proceeds, as Club Rooms; and on the night after we all received our keys the premises were burglariously entered; why or by whom is still a mystery, but it was a good joke that it should happen to the Detective Club."

Lord Peter and Father Brown and Monsieur Poirot--how were the mighty fallen!

There is a custom in both English and Scottish universities of electing a Lord Rector with the accompaniment of much undergraduate "ragging" of the choicest kind. The candidates usually each represent a political party but personal popularity has much to say in their success. At the Scottish universities the contests are particularly spirited, and his keen sense of fun made Gilbert ready to accept frequent invitations to stand. At Glasgow in 1925 Austen Chamberlain got 1242, votes, Chesterton 968 and Sidney Webb 285. "What swamped you," wrote Jack Phillimore, always critical of the gentler sex, "was the women, whose simple snobbery cannot get past the top hat and frock coat and Right Honourable . . . Boyle was never kidnapped: others were removed into the mountains."

The last sentence might have been lifted from Sir Walter: it refers to a pleasing habit among Scots undergraduates of kidnapping the supporters of their opponents and keeping them safely concealed till after the election.

Whether or not it was through their simple snobbery, as Professor Phillimore said, it was certainly the women's vote that swamped him: of the 374 votes by which Austen Chamberlain beat Chesterton, the men only accounted for 20, the women for 354. But it must have been some profounder passion that caused one of England's leading women novelists to write to the Secretary of the Glasgow University Liberal Club:

I fail to see why you should desire to embarrass Liberalism at one of its least happy moments by associating it with that village idiot on a large scale who is responsible for the muddled economics and disagreeable fantastics of "G.K.'s Weekly."

This was the outlook of that official Liberalism which had long made it so difficult for Gilbert to go on calling himself a Liberal. The Servile State was in full swing and official Liberalism asked nothing better than to be allowed to operate it. Whether Belloc and Cecil Chesterton had been right or wrong at an earlier date in seeing the political parties in collusion it is certain that by now an utter bankruptcy in statesmanship had reduced them all to saying the same things while they did nothing. Ten years later, on the day of the last General election of his life, Gilbert wrote:

The Liberal has formed the opinion that Peace is decidedly preferable to its alternative of War; and that this should be achieved through support of the League of Nations interfering with the ambitions of other nations. The Ministerialist, on the other hand, holds that we should, if possible, employ a machinery called the League of Nations; with the object of securing Peace, to which he is much attached. The Ministerialist demands that strong action should be taken to reduce Unemployment; but the Liberal does not scruple to retort that Unemployment is an evil, against which strong action must be taken. The Liberal thinks that we ought to revive our Trade, thus thwarting and throwing himself across the path of the National Tory, who still insists that our Trade should be revived. Thus the two frowning cohorts confront each other; and I hear the noise of battle even as I write.

In June 1928 he was invited to stand for Edinburgh University. He replied:

I do hope you will forgive me if there has been any delay in acknowledging your exceedingly flattering communication; I have been away from home and moving about a good deal; and have only just returned from London. Certainly there is nothing which I should feel as so great an honour, or one so exciting or so undeserved, as to receive even the invitation to stand for such a position in the great University that has already been so generous to me. If you really think it would be of any service to your cause, I can hardly refuse such a compliment. Of course you understand that it is only in a rather independent sense, though as I think in the right sense, that I shall always call myself a Liberal; indeed, I find it difficult to imagine any real sort of Liberal who is not really an independent Liberal. I am quite certain I am not a Tory or a Socialist.

He was defeated at this election by Winston Churchill who got 864 votes to 593 for G.K. and 332 for Mrs. Sidney Webb. He was again defeated at Aberdeen in 1933, coming second to Major Elliott, the other candidates being C. M. Grieve and Aldous Huxley. At one stage of the contest the Daily Express writes: "The Huxley supporters are smarting under the surprise attack made by the Chestertonians at the Huxley concert at the week-end and are preparing reprisals."

The following letter is G.K.'s reply to the first proposal from the Aberdeen students:

25th October, 1933

I can at least assure you that the delay in acknowledging properly the most flattering compliment which you have paid me was not due to any notion of neglecting it. It was due to the practical necessity at the moment of discovering and deciding on a fact which may, for all I know, save you the trouble of further consideration of the matter; and it is for this reason that I mention the practical difficulty first. I now find that I shall almost certainly be obliged to be out of England (and Scotland) for about three or four months, or conceivably a little more, beginning about the middle of January. I do not know what preliminary formalities would be demanded of me as a candidate, or when the demand for them would arise. But I was so strongly impressed with the honour you have paid me that I thought it my duty to find out the facts on this particular point, so that you might act on it in any way you think right. In any case, if the delay thus involved has placed you in any difficulty, I need not say that I shall fully understand your finding the project unworkable; and I shall be quite content to remember the compliment of the request.

There is another consideration which would help the practical side of the case; and for that I fear I must make the practical enquiries of you, as people understanding the circumstances. You do not mention the Party you represent; and though I am, like most of us, long past attaching a horrid sanctity to the name, I hope you will forgive that much curiosity in a poor bewildered journalist, who has been exhibited in many lights and cross-lights. I was put up as a candidate at Glasgow as a Liberal, which is really quite true; but I think I managed in my election pamphlet to give my own definition of Liberalism. I have also more recently, on a public platform in Glasgow, supported my friend Mr. Compton Mackenzie when he stood as a Scottish Nationalist. Both these positions I am quite prepared to defend; but in the latter, you might naturally prefer a Nationalist candidate who was not only a quarter of a Scotsman. I may remark that as the quarter is called Keith, and comes from Aberdeen, I am rather thrilled at the name of Marischal College.

There is one other point I think it only right to mention, for your sake as much as my own. You know the local conditions. Do you think it likely that we should be left with one and a half votes, looking a little ridiculous, because the miserable quarter of a Scot happens to have the same religion as Bruce and Maxy Stuart? I only ask for information; which you alone could supply. But it may be that the considerations I have already mentioned have disposed of the matter. Believe me, my gratitude is none the less.

Gilbert said of my father that he showed an embarrassing respect for younger men. Surely Gilbert's own tone of respect must here have embarrassed even undergraduates. The uncertainty of success or failure only troubled him as it might affect his supporters. The sporting element in the contest appealed to his undying boyishness.

Perhaps this chapter may find its best conclusion in the vivid memories written down in answer to my request of one of Gilbert's younger friends--Douglas Woodruff--who came to know him in the year of that Silver Wedding which meant so much that I have chosen it for the title of a chapter covering much of Chesterton's Catholic life.

Chesterton devotes a long passage in the Autobiography to the dinner given at the old Adelphi Terrace Hotel to Belloc on his sixtieth birthday, in July 1930. I remember very well the high old fashioned car the Chestertons used to hire in Beaconsfield, for I accompanied him with particular instructions to deliver him safely and on time, as was very necessary for he was in the Chair. We might have lost him, for we went first to the Times Office where I was then working, as I had proofs to correct before disappearing for the rest of the evening, and he was seized with the idea that it would be very good fun for him to enter Printing House Square and have it announced that it was Mr. Chesterton come to write the leaders, having brought the thunder with him under his cloak. Quite early on the drive up he began speculating about who would be at the party, and when he had suggested various figures who were certainly not going to be there he said with a mixture of regret and acceptance, "There is always such a sundering quality about Belloc's quarrels." When he rose to propose the toast he said at once that if he or anybody else in the room was remembered at all in the future it would be because they had been associated with the guest of the evening. He meant that. The evening stood out in his memory because it was so unlike the ordinary sort of dinners he knew where he was a principal figure. It delighted him that without any programme or premeditation all the thirty diners in turn made speeches, in the main parody speeches. It was, in short, a party and not a performance.

In the decade when I had the good fortune to know Topmeadow he was still paying the price of a literary fame which he had sought in youth because it meant success in his calling and an income, but which became a barrier he was always meeting and breaking through. Many literary men genuinely enough prefer company in which they are on just the same footing as everyone else to company in which they are little Kings, but Chesterton was exceptional in liking to live in the fullest equality of intercourse not only with all sorts of men but with the lesser practitioners of his own calling. He sought the affection and not the admiration of his fellow men, or, more precisely, he sought neither: what he sought was to do things like discovering the truth in their company. No man more naturally distinguished between a man and his views, or found easier the theological injunction to hate the sin but love the sinner. One of the few occasions on which I recall him as rather hurt was just after he had met Stanley Baldwin, at Taplow, and had not been welcomed as a fellow Englishman sharing immense things like the love of the English country or English letters, but with a cold correctitude from a politician who seemed chiefly conscious he was meeting in G.K. a man who week by week sought to bring political life into hatred, ridicule and contempt.

He was not made by nature for the kind of journalistic tradition which Belloc and Cecil Chesterton established and his loyal affection for them made him adopt. I recall him expounding to the lawyers of the Thomas More Society the absurdity of the legal definition of libel, arguing that of its nature free discussion meant arousing at any rate ridicule and contempt if not hatred against men and measures of which you disapproved. It was ridicule that he preferred to arouse. The lawyers were quite unconvinced, as they generally are when laymen have any complaints about the law, and they soon realized that to Chesterton the whole idea of involving the law because of arguments and discussions and invective was hitting below the belt.

He could be seen at his happiest in the Mock Trials which were held every summer for the last ten years of his life at the London School of Economics, for the King Edward VII Hospital Fund. He was relied upon year after year to prosecute. One year it was leading actors and actresses, another year sculptors and architects, another year politicians, another Headmasters. He entered completely into the spirit of an entertainment which combined two of his abiding interests, public debate and private theatricals. That was a setting in which he could completely exemplify his favourite recipe for the modern world, that it should be approached in a spirit of intellectual ferocity and personal amiability. But what marked his own contributions to these affairs was the intellectual "ferocity," in the weight and content of his criticism. Most of the eminent men who consented to take part came to play a game for the sake of the Hospitals, and because they rarely unbent like that in public they were wholly facetious and trivial. To Chesterton there was no difficulty or incongruity in combining the fun of acting with the fun of genuine intellectual discussion. When he prosecuted the Headmasters of leading public schools for Destroying Freedom of Thought I came down in a lift with them afterwards and found they were volubly nettled at the drastic and serious case he had made inside the stage setting of burlesque, and seemed to think he had not been playing the game when he wrapped up so much meaning in his speech and examinations. This had never entered his head; it had come perfectly naturally to him to make wholly real and material points even in a mock trial and with a wealth of fun. But he liked being one of a troupe on a stage very much more than being a lonely and eminent figure on a platform, because to him the great attraction of discussion was that it should be a joint quest, a mental walk with an object in view, but also with an eye for everything that might and would turn up on the way.

He laughed his high laugh--like Charlemagne his voice was unequal to his physical scale--at his own jokes because they came to him as part of the joint findings of the quest, something he had seen and collected and brought for the pot. When he made jokes about his size as he so commonly did at the outset of a speech, it was to get rid of the elevation of the platform, and to get on to easy equal terms with the audience; "I am not a cat burglar," he began to the Union at Oxford, and had won them. The radio suited him so excellently, precisely because it is a personal sitting down man to man relationship that the successful broadcaster must establish; that was the relationship inside which he naturally thought. His difficulty was that while he had not the faintest desire to be "a Literary Man," and still less a Prophet, the kind of truth he divined was, in fact, on the scale of the prophets. It seemed to me that over the last decade of his life he found himself more and more in the dilemma that in the life of his mind he was living with ideas, the fruit of a contemplative preoccupation with the Incarnation and the Sacraments, which he shrank from talking about, from a natural humility and a clear and grateful understanding of the Catholic tradition of reverence and reticence.

England is full enough of men to whom the distinction between the platform and the pulpit is very unreal; they have a moral message and they do not much mind where they give it. But Chesterton, unlike most public men who deal in general ideas, did not come to the idea of public speaking through the Protestant tradition but through the secular tradition, the freethinker's debate, the political and not the religious side of Hyde Park oratory, where men in knots shout one another down, not where some lonely longhaired prophet declaims conversion. After he became a Catholic he sought to set himself frontiers, the apologetic territory suitable for a layman like himself. But he found himself more and more preoccupied with a territory further inland, penetrating all the time to the deeper meaning of the creed he had embraced. He could look back and see how most of his early books had seized upon some essential part of Catholic doctrine. . . . He had written what he had seen at the time, but he did not stop looking because he had written, and then he always continued to see more, the great contemplative.

He looked out on the universe from a very solid tower of observation because in all but the deepest sense of the word he always had a home. His lasting significance is his pilgrimage, but the spiritual journey was lived out in a warmly rich setting. When he wrote of "the home" he was not dealing with a notion but with a surrounding reality, one on which he had opened his eyes as a baby and which he enjoyed without a break to the end. Frances Chesterton is among the great wives of our literary history. When he said "I can never have enough nothing to do," it was the remark of a man with a house he was generally in, a house full of things.

He loved to produce cigars and wine, but tea also remained an important fixed part of the day, in the Victorian tradition, and when he was told by the doctor he had better drink nothing, he had many alternatives, like detective stories read over tea and buns, which other lovers of wine would perhaps have found no consolation. Other men are secret drinkers, he would confide, I am a secret teetotaller. The first time I had tea with him, in Artillery Mansions in 1926, I was much struck that he brought three detective stories to the teatable. I imagine he always had time for Jack Redskin on the Trail, or whatever it might be because he had the gift, to an extent I have never seen elsewhere, of opening a book and as it were pouring the contents down in one draught like a champion German beer drinker. He once seized from my shelves in Lincoln's Inn, Wyndham Lewis's Apes of God saying it was a book he had not seen and wanted to see. It is a folio and I suggested he should take it away. But he opened it and stood reading it and here and there, not a process which could be called dipping, but a kind of sucking out of the printed contents, as though he were a vacuum cleaner and you could see the lines of type leaving the pages and being absorbed. When he put it down it was to discuss the thesis and illustrations of the book as a man fully possessed of its whole standpoint. Once he made one of his common confusions and forgot he was addressing the Wiseman Dining Society on the Oxford Movement. In the train from Beaconsfield he said how nice it was that he had not got to speak. Frances Chesterton told him not to be silly, he knew he was speaking on the Oxford Movement. He was visibly disconcerted at the start, for many grave seniors had assembled to hear him; but all went well in the discussion as soon as he was attacked for something he had said about Newman's views. You cannot catch me out about Newman, he said, with joy of battle, and he produced then and there a most detailed account of just where in Newman's writings the points in question were developed. Yet he was curiously content to read what happened to come his way and to rely upon his friends for references and facts, remembering what they might tell him, but not ordering the books which would have greatly strengthened him in the sort of newspaper arguments in which he was so often employed. He had a large collection of books at Topmeadow, but they gave the impression that they had assembled themselves. Masses of them were adventure stories, many were presentation copies from writers. You felt that they had got into the house knowing that it was a hospitable one, if not built for books, and that they would probably be allowed to stay. But he had a study which would barely home him, and the library room he did eventually build was only finished as he died.

I think nothing is more superficial or belittling to him than the idea that while he might have liked the real country he could not like Beaconsfield, as it developed into a dormitory town while he lived there. His sympathies were far too wide. He liked to tell how he had had to complain of the noise made by an adjoining Cinema Company. His secretary had said Mr. Chesterton finds he cannot write; and the Cinema people replied we are well aware of that.

He liked to think of Mr. Garvin near by, "not that I see him very much," he said, "but I like to think that that great factory is steaming away night and day." He had great satisfaction when a friend and I, driving away in the evening, knocked down a white wooden post outside the house in starting the car. He held that he had witnessed just how many a grand old local custom must have originated, in men covering up their mistakes by saying they were fulfilling a ritual which had fallen into neglect. You must say you did it on purpose, he said, say it was a rite too long omitted and it will soon be kept up every year and men will forget its origin, and it will be known as the Bump of Beaconsfield. When a friend of his brought him a two-bladed African spear, he said, as he threw it about the lawn, that it was sad to think how many lawns there were in Beaconsfield and how few weapons were ever thrown on any of them, although all men enjoyed, or would enjoy spear throwing more, he believed, than they enjoyed clock golf. He at any rate was a genuinely free man, who did what it amused and pleased him to do, and did not think he had to choose between the forms of activity or rest currently pursued by his neighbours. Much of the serene atmosphere of his home came from that quiet resolute practice of the liberty of a free mind.

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XXVIII. Columbus

He wished to discover America. His gay and thoughtless friends, who could not understand him, pointed out that America had already been discovered, I think they said by Christopher Columbus, some time ago, and that there were big cities of Anglo-Saxon People there already, New York and Boston and so on. But the Admiral explained to them, kindly enough, that this had nothing to do with it. They might have discovered America, but he had not.

From A Fragment, in The Coloured Lands.

IN THE CHAPTER of his Autobiography entitled "The Incomplete Traveller" Chesterton has said "after all, the strangest country I ever visited was England." It was of the very essence of his philosophy that each one of us has to make again the discoveries of our ancestors if we are to be travellers and not trippers. "The traveller sees what he sees; the tripper sees what he has come to see." Thus Chesterton tried to discover each country that he visited and he records that the nearer countries are sometimes harder to discover than the more remote. For Poland is more akin to England than is France: Ireland more mysterious than Italy.

France, Ireland and supremely Palestine brought their contribution to that mental and spiritual development traced in earlier chapters. On Ireland, Rome, Jerusalem and the United States he wrote books. It may really be said that on the States he wrote two books, for in the volume of essays Sidelights on New London and Newer York which followed his second visit he showed a much greater understanding than in What I Saw in America. His first visit took place in 1921-22, his second in 1930.

On the first trip Frances kept clippings of almost all their interviews. Gilbert himself said that, while the headlines in American newspapers became obscure in their violent efforts to startle, what was written underneath the headlines was usually good journalism and the press cuttings of this tour bear out his remark. Interviewers report accurately and with a good deal of humour. Sketches of G.K.'s personal appearance abound, and if occasionally they contradict one another in detail they yet contrive to convey a vivid and fairly truthful impression of the "leonine" head, the bulky form, the gestures and mannerisms. That a man of letters and lecturer should choose to wear proudly not one of these titles but that of journalist, was pleasing and flattering to the brotherhood. The atmosphere of the tour is best conveyed by rather copious quotation. A crowd of journalists met him at the boat. One of them writes of

. . . his voluminous figure, quite imposing when he stands up, though not so abundantly Johnsonian as his pictures lead one to expect. He has cascades of grey hair above a pinkly beaming face, a rather straggly blond mustache, and eyes that seem frequently to be taking up infinity in a serious way.

His falsetto laugh, prominent teeth and general aspect are rather Rooseveltian. . . .

Mr. Chesterton, who is accompanied by Mrs. Chesterton, and who will deliver a lecture soon in Boston on the Ignorance of the Educated, said he did not expect to go further west than Chicago, since "having seen both Jerusalem and Chicago, I think I shall have touched on the extremes of civilization."

In the event he visited Omaha and Oklahoma City and went south as far as Nashville, Tennessee.

Possibly Frances had thought she would pass unnoticed but in fact, besides constant photographs of the pair, the lynx eye of the interviewer was upon her as much as upon him. On arrival at New York:

He shook hands with some half-dozen Customs officials who welcomed him to the city on their own behalf. The impression given by Mr. Chesterton as he moved majestically along the pier or on the ship was one of huge bulk. To the ordinary sized people on the pier he seemed to blot out the liner and the river. Mrs. Chesterton was busy with the baggage.

"My wife understands these things," he said with a sweep of his stick. "I don't." . . .

In order to get the two figures into the same picture one of the newspaper photographers requested Mr. Chesterton to sit in a big armchair while his wife stood beside him. When they were settled in the required pose he exclaimed: "I say I don't like this; people will think that I am a German."

Another newspaper remarks: "He was accompanied by his wife, who looked very small beside him. She attended to the baggage examination, opening trunks and bags while her husband delivered a short essay on the equality of men and women in England since the war." This reporter was perhaps not without irony: but if it actually happened like that, G.K. must have seen the joke too for he has a similar situation in the first scene of his play "The Judgement of Dr. Johnson." The same reporter adds that Chesterton speaks in essays, so that his interviewers "received a brief essay instead of a direct reply to a leading question."

We next come upon them in their New York hotel:

I found, with Mrs. Chesterton at the Biltmore, this big, gentle, leonine man of letters six feet of him and 200 odd lbs. There is a delightful story of how an American, driving with him through London, remarked "Everyone seems to know you, Mr. Chesterton."

"Yes," mournfully responded the gargantuan author, "and if they don't they ask."

He really doesn't look anything like as fat as his caricatures make him, however, and he has a head big enough to go with his massive tallness. His eyes are brilliant English blue behind the big rimmed eyeglasses: his wavy hair, steel grey; his heavy mustache, bright yellow. Physically he is the crackling electric spark of the heaven-home-and-mother party, the only man who can give the cleverest radical debaters a Roland for their Oliver.

In subsequent interviews G.K.'s height grew to six foot three and his weight to 300 lbs. (which was surely closer to the mark); his mannerisms were greatly remarked.

Mr. Chesterton speaks clearly, in a rather high-pitched voice. He accompanies his remarks with many nervous little gestures. His hands, at times, stray into his pockets. He leans over the reading desk as if he would like to get down into the audience and make it a sort of heart-to-heart talk.

Mr. Chesterton's right hand spent a restless and rather disturbing evening. It would start from the reading desk at which he stood and fall to the points of that vast waistcoat which inspired the description of him as "a fellow of infinite vest." It would wander aimlessly a moment about his--stomach is a word that is taboo among the polite English--equator, and then shift swiftly to the rear until the thumb found the hip pocket. There the hand would rest a moment, to return again to the reading desk and to describe once more the quarter circle. Once in a while it would twist a ring upon the left hand, once in a while it would be clasped behind the broad back, but only for a moment. To the hip pocket and back again was its sentry-go, and it was a faithful soldier.

Several interviewers remark on the unexpected calibre of his voice. He himself spoke of it as "the mouse that came forth from the mountain."

One would never suspect him of being our leading American best-seller. His accent, mannerisms, and dress are pro-Piccadilly and he likes his Oolong with a lump of sugar. He thinks with his cigar, a black London cheeroot.

He, Gilbert K. Chesterton, was sipping a cup of tea, expertly brewed by Mrs. Chesterton when a reporter yesterday entered his room at the Blackstone [in Chicago]. Before he submitted to interrogation he lighted the cigar.

"My muse," he explained. "A Parnassian pleasure. Tobacco smoke is the Ichor of mental life. Some men write with a pencil, others with a typewriter, I write with my cigar." . . .

Throughout the interview he was profoundly concerned not with the subjects under discussion, but with the black cheeroot. Seven times it went out. Seven times he relighted it. The eighth time he tossed it away.

When asked which of his works he considered the greatest, he said: "I don't consider any of my works in the least great." . . .

"Slang," he said, "is too sacred and precious to be used promiscuously. Its use should be led up to reverently for it expresses what the King's English could not."

"Seeing and hearing a man like Gilbert Keith Chesterton," said a Detroit newspaper, "makes a meal for the imagination that no reading of books by him or about him can accomplish."

He spoke Sunday in Orchestra Hall on the Ignorance of the Educated; it grows more difficult as his tour progresses, he admits, and the Lecture, he insists, grows worse. His thesis is that "the besetting evil of all educated people is that they tend to substitute theories for things." The uneducated man never makes this mistake. He states the simple fact that he sees a German drinking beer: he does not say "there is a Teuton consuming alcohol."

At Toronto the Chairman--a professor of English--thought that there must have been an error in the title as printed, and announced that Mr. Chesterton would speak on The Ignorance of the _Un_educated. Another Detroit newspaper quotes from the lecture:

There is a deeper side to such fallacies. The whole catastrophe of the Great War may be traced to the racial theory. If people had looked at peoples as nations in place of races the intolerable ambition of Prussia might have been stopped before it attained the captaincy of the South German States.

The only other lecture subjects mentioned are "Shall We Abolish the Inevitable" and "The Perils of Health." There are innumerable caricatures. One by Cosmo Hamilton is accompanied with a story of how he once debated with Chesterton. The subject was: "There is no law in England." G.K. made so overwhelming a case that Hamilton decided the only way of making reply possible was to twist the subject making it "there are no laws in England" and "go off at 1000 tangents like a worried terrier."

To hear Chesterton's howl of joy when he twigged how I had slipped out, to see him double himself up in an agony of laughter at my personal insults, to watch the effect of his sportsmanship on a shocked audience who were won to mirth by his intense and pea-hen-like quarks of joy was a sight and a sound for the gods.

Probably Chesterton has forgotten this incident but I haven't and never will, and I carried away from that room a respect and admiration for this tomboy among dictionaries, this philosophical Peter Pan, this humorous Dr. Johnson, this kindly and gallant cherub, this profound student and wise master which has grown steadily ever since.

In the Daily Sketch, Hamilton later described G.K. speaking in this debate:

During the whole inspired course of his brilliant reasoning, he caught the little rivulets which ran down his face, and just as they were about to drop from the first of his several chins flicked them generously among the disconcerted people who sat actually at his feet. From time to time, too, unaware of this, he grasped deep into his pockets and rattled coins and keys, going from point to point, from proof to proof, until the Constitution of England was quite devoid of Law and out from under his waistcoat bulged a line of shirt.

It was monstrous, gigantic, amazing, deadly, delicious. Nothing like it has ever been done before or will ever be seen, heard and felt like it again.

A clever caricature depicts Dickens in one corner, his arms full of bricks, hammers and jagged objects, labelled "American Notes." The rest of the picture is an immense drawing of a smiling Chesterton, his arms full of roses, labelled "Kind Words for America." He is pointing at Dickens and saying: "America must have changed a great deal since then."

Not only Gilbert but also Frances was constantly interviewed. "I tell them," one interviewer quotes her as saying, "that I didn't know I was the wife of a great man till I came to America. It never bothered me before."

This, coming from one of those English wives, so popularly portrayed as representing the acme of submission, was delightful. A slight, slim little figure, looking slighter and slimmer in the wake of her overshadowing husband, with an outward appearance of unsurpassed mildness and meekness which her conversation readily dispelled, the wife of this delightful Englishman of letters presented a very intimate Chestertonian paradox.

Frances kept a Diary of which almost the first entry is "So far my feelings towards this country are entirely hostile, but it would be unfair to judge too soon. We have refused all invitations; it's the only thing to do." This idea they must have abandoned, for one paper after Gilbert's death describes him as an immense success socially but "a big bland failure" as a lecturer. As the tour proceeds the entries in the Diary become more favorable but unlike her letters from Poland--where what she liked best was anything really Polish--the Diary shows Frances as singling out for approval those things approximately English--e.g., houses where she stayed in Boston and Philadelphia. She hated hustle, heat and crowds, and the Diary is full of remarks about her exhaustion.

G.K. commented in one interview on the different conception of a Club in England and in America. While groups of men entertained him, Women's Clubs were entertaining his wife. But an English Club "is really a promoter of unsociability. . . . And while the English woman in her Club does not, perhaps, stare into vacancy with the same fervour, fixity and ferocity as the English man, still there is something of the sort, you know." After a lecture in Philadelphia a lady asked him, "Mr. Chesterton, what makes women talk so much?" Heaving himself out of his chair, he answered only "God, Madam."

Two further caricatures were an impression drawn by Will Coyne for the New York Evening Post of Chesterton as Porthos of the Pen, and another, drawn for the New York Herald by Stewart Davis, of Chesterton supplying "Paradoxygen to the World." This was accompanied by a poem called Paradoxygen, by Edward Anthony:

O Gilbert I know there are many who like Your talks on the darkness of light, The shortness of length and the weakness of strength And the one on the lowness of height.

My neighbour keeps telling me "How I adore His legality of the illicit And I've also a liking intense for his striking Obscurity of the explicit."

But I am unmoved. What's the reason? 0, well, The same I intend to expound Some evening next week, when I'm going to speak On the shallowness of the profound.

"Everyone who goes to America for a short time," said G.K., "is expected to write a book; and nearly everybody does." In accordance with this convention he wrote What I Saw in America. He did see a great deal. The same imagination that had found the mediaeval aspect of Jerusalem saw many elements missed not only by the ordinary tourist but by the people themselves who live nearest to them. Thus he keenly appreciated the traditional elements in Philadelphia, Boston and Baltimore:

In coming into some of these more stable cities of the States I felt something quite sincerely of that historic emotion which is satisfied in the eternal cities of the Mediterranean. I felt in America what many Americans suppose can only be felt in Europe. I have seldom had that sentiment stirred more simply and directly than when I saw from afar off, above that vast grey labyrinth of Philadelphia, great Penn upon his pinnacle like the graven figure of a god who had fashioned a new world; and remembered that his body lay buried in a field at the turning of a lane, a league from my own door.

In Baltimore the Catholic history appealed to him yet more strongly, and, invited to visit Cardinal Gibbons, he felt himself touching "the end of a living chain." In Boston, "much more beautiful than its name," he companioned again with the Autocrat and recalled how in his own youth English and American literature seemed to be one thing. Indeed he was there reminded even "of English things that have largely vanished from England." Washington he saw both as a beautiful city and an idea--"a sort of paradise of impersonal politics without personal commerce." And in Nashville, Tennessee it was "with a sort of intensity of feeling" that he found himself "before a dim and faded picture; and from the dark canvas looked forth the face of Andrew Jackson, watchful like a white eagle."

The things Chesterton chose for description all have relevance to the main thesis of the book which has often been missed and which emerges most clearly in the first and the last chapters. He insists always that he writes as a foreigner--and indeed repeats frequently that it is by keeping our own distinct nationality that Englishmen and Americans will best understand and like one another--but he writes also as a man not unconscious of history. Thus writing, the older cities represent to him one trend in the States and New York another. I am sorry to say that he does not appreciate New York as he ought, because of his dislike of cosmopolitanism. Its beauty he sees as breath-taking: not solid and abiding but a kind of fairyland. The lights on Broadway evoked from him the exclamation "What a glorious garden of wonders this would be for anyone who was lucky enough to be unable to read," and he imagines a simple peasant who fancies that they must be announcing in letters of fire: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," and must be put up on occasion of some great national feast, whereas they are but advertising signs put up to make money.

The Skyline seemed to him most lovely: "vertical lines that suggest a sort of rush upwards, as of great cataracts topsy turvy--the strong daylight finds everywhere the broken edges of things and the sort of hues we see in newly turned earth or the white sections of trees. . . ." He feels the intense "imaginative pleasure of those dizzy turrets and dancing fires." But he ends with the note that really spoilt New York for him: "If those nightmare buildings were really all built for nothing, how noble they would be."

Advertisement, Big Business, Monopoly might have invaded the old traditionary cities of America as they had those of England, but New York existed (he felt) as a new and startling expression of them. They shrieked in every light and from every sky-scraper. The whole question of America was: would the older simpler really great historical tradition win, or would it be defeated by the new and towering evil? He has an interesting chapter on the countryside, finding hope in the considerable extension of small ownership among the farmers and in the houses built from the growing material that wood is, but he is again depressed at the reflection that the culture of the countryside is not its own but imported from the towns--therefore itself largely commercialised.

Roaming over the world in search of his examples Chesterton sees the ideal of the early republicans as dead in the republics of today, and nowhere more dead than in America. It would be useless, he feels, to invoke Jefferson or Lincoln in the modern world against the tyranny of wage-slavery or in favour of racial justice because "the bridge of brotherhood had broken down in the modern mind."

Jefferson the Deist "said the sight of slavery in his country made him tremble, remembering that God is just," but the modern who has lost these absolute standards has "grown dizzy with degree and relativity." Hence came the same terrible peril in both England and America: that in the eyes of the new plutocracy the idea of manhood has gone. "There were different sorts of apes; but there was no doubt that we were the superior sort."

Only in one direction did he see real hope. The new dreams of the 18th century had gone, but the ancient dogmas of the Catholic Church remained. Catholics might forget brotherhood, like their fellows, but "the Catholic type of Christianity had rivetted itself irrevocably to the manhood of all men." "The church would always continue to ordain negroes and canonise beggars and labourers." "Where its faith was fixed by creeds and councils it could not save itself even by surrender. . . . THERE IS NO BASIS FOR DEMOCRACY EXCEPT IN A DOGMA ABOUT THE DIVINE ORIGIN OF MAN."

I have put that final sentence in capitals for it is the climax both of Gilbert's thinking about America and of one of the most important trains of thought that brought him to the home of liberty secured for the human race by dogma--that is to say by revealed truth. He went home to be received into the Catholic Church as I have earlier related.

What I Saw in America is of special importance in relation to later discussions in G.K.'s Weekly. While the journalists seemed convinced on his first visit that he had nothing but roses to throw, and compared him favorably to Dickens, a collection of quotations could be made from G.K.'s Weekly of a quite opposite kind, yet I do not think he ever attacks America as much as he attacks England. He was himself much amused at finding he was expected to be either "For America" or "Against America," both of which attitudes appeared to him absurd. In that sense he was neither for nor against his own country. He liked Americans, he disliked certain trends in America: because he loved England he disliked the same trends even more in England. Certain things in modern civilisation which he hated he did regard as primarily American. American comfort to him seemed acute discomfort. He thought every American lives in an "airless furnace in the middle of which he sits and eats lumps of ice."

He had a great hatred of intelligence tests which he called the "palpable balderdash of irresponsible Yankee boomsters. . . . It is really one of the maladies of American democracy to be swept by these prairie fires of pseudo-scientifc fads, and throw itself into Eugenics or Anthropometric inquiry with the buoyancy of babies." He believed that there was more democracy in America than in England. But he hated what he called the "glare of American Advertisement." He spoke of a "common thief like the American Millionaire" but he certainly did not exclude the English Millionaire from the same indictment. His whole view of advertisement reaches a peak in an article* entitled "If You Have Smiles."

[* G.K.'s Weekly, December 10, 1927.]

We read the other day an absolutely solemn and almost tender piece of advice, in a leading American magazine, about the preservation of Beauty and Health. It was intended quite seriously. . . . After describing in most complicated detail how the young woman of today (well known to be enamored of all that is natural and free) is to strap up her head and face every night, as if it had to be bandaged after an accident, it proceeds to say with the most refined American accent: "With the face thus fixed in smile formation: . . ." but we have a difficulty about taking this serious advice of American Beauty Business even so seriously as to meditate on its social menace. The prospect of such a world of idiots ought to depress us, but . . . no, it is no good. Our faces are fixed in smile formation when we think of that American.

He repeated often how much he liked the inhabitants of Main Street (grievously wronged by Sinclair Lewis).

American ideals are not nearly so nice as American realities. We lament not so much what Babbitt is as what he is trying to be. What he is is a simple and kindly man . . . what he's trying to be is the abomination of desolation; the Man who made Salesmanship an Art; the Man Who Would Not Stay Down; the Man Who Got the Million Dollar Post After Taking Our Correspondence Course; the Man Who Learned Social Charm in Six Lessons.*

[* Jan. 14, 1928.]

At the time of the depreciation of the franc Belloc's articles in G.K.'s Weekly, echoed in the Leaders, pointed to finance, especially American finance, as the criminal that was forcing down the French currency. An American correspondent in the paper attacked these attacks on the ground that they were inspired by British Imperialism! Chesterton felt it a little hard to be at this date confused with Kipling. He replied that his correspondent committed "the blunder of an extravagant and excessive admiration for England." He speaks of

that tremendous procession that passed through Paris, literally an army of cripples. It was a march of all those walking units, those living fragments of humanity that had been left by the long stand of five years upon the French frontiers; a devastated area that passed endlessly like a river . . . they illustrate the main fact that France was in the center of that far-flung fighting line of civilization; that it was upon her that the barbarian quarrel concentrated; and that is an historical fact which the foolish vanity of many Englishmen, as well as of many Americans, is perpetually tempted to deny. Our critic is therefore quite beside the mark if he imagines that I am trying to score off his country out of a cheap jealousy on behalf of my own. My jealousy is for justice and for a large historical understanding of this great passage in history. My own country won glory enough in that and other fields to make it quite unnecessary for any sane Englishman to shut his eyes to Europe in order to brag about England. . . . I have not the faintest doubt what Thomas Jefferson would have said, if he had been told that a few financial oligarchs who happen to live in New York, were beating down the French wealth; and had then seen pass before him that awful panorama of the wrecks of the French Republican Army; heart-shaking, like a resurrection of the dead. . . . I do not admit, therefore, that in supporting the French peasants and soldiers against the money dealers and wire-pullers of the town, I am attacking America or even merely defending France.*

[* G.K.'s Weekly, Sept. 1, 1926.]

On November 6 and 13, 1926 he writes two articles on "The Yankee and the Chinaman," in which he contrasts the philosophic spirit with the so-called scientific. Like Bishop Barnes in England wanting to analyse the Consecrated Host, Edison was reported in America as having said that he would find out if there was a soul by some scientific test:

Any philosophic Chinaman would know what to think of a man who said, "I have got a new gun that will shoot a hole through your memory of last Monday," or "I have got a saw sharp enough to cut up the cube root of 666," or "I will boil your affection for Aunt Susan until it is quite liquid."

In 1927 Gilbert, Frances and Dorothy spent a month in Poland where immense enthusiasm was shown for the man who had consistently proclaimed Poland's greatness and its true place in Europe.

Invited by the Government, "all the hospitality I received," he says, "was far too much alive to remind me of anything official." One of the multitude of unwritten books of which G.K. dreamed was a book about Poland. The Poles and the English were, he felt, alike in many things but the Englishman had never been given the opportunity to understand the Pole. We knew nothing of their history and did not understand the resurrection we had helped to bring about. "The nonsense talked in the newspapers when they discuss what they call the Polish Corridor" was only possible from want of realisation of what Poland had been before she was rent in three by Prussia, Austria and Russia. Thus too we did not realise "the self-evident fact that the Poles always have a choice of evils." Pilsudski told him that of the two he preferred Germany to Russia, while Dmowski voiced the more general opinion in telling him that of the two he preferred Russia to Germany. For the moment at any rate tortured Poland was herself and incredibly happy. Revival in this agricultural country had been amazingly swift. Peasant proprietors abounded and lived well on twelve acres or so, while even labourers possessed plots of land and a cow or two.

"The P.E.N. Club Dinner," Frances wrote in a letter to her mother, "was, I fancy, considered by the Poles a huge success. If numbers indicate anything, it certainly was. I found it a little embarrassing to have to eat hot kidneys and mushrooms standing about with hundreds of guests, and this was only the preliminary to a long dinner that followed and refreshments that apparently continued until two o'clock in the morning. The speeches were really perfectly marvellous and delivered in English quite colloquial and very witty and showing a detailed knowledge of Gilbert's works which no Englishman of my acquaintance possesses. Gilbert made an excellent, in fact, a very eloquent speech in reply, which drew forth thunders of applause."

Their hosts drove the Chestertons all over the country and showed them home life on the little farms, home industries and arts--brightly woven garments and pottery for use, not for exhibition--and the great historic scenes of Poland's history. With the scene he remembered most vividly, Gilbert's musings on Poland conclude: they were visiting a young nobleman who excused the devastation of his own home by Bolshevik soldiers in the heat of battle but added, "There is only one thing I really resent."

. . . He led us out into a long avenue lined with poplars; and at the end of it was a statue of the Blessed Virgin; with the head and the hands shot off. But the hands had been lifted; and it is a strange thing that the very mutilation seemed to give more meaning to the attitude of intercession; asking mercy for the merciless race of men.*

[* Autobiography, p. 330.]

Karel Capek who had long wanted Chesterton to visit Prague wrote mournfully, "You wrote me that it would be difficult for you to come to Prague this spring. But it was in the newspapers that you were last month in Warsaw; why in Heaven's sake did you not come to Prague on this occasion? What a pity for us! Now we are waiting for a compensation." Two earlier letters had shown him eager for contributions from Chesterton for a leading review. Another delightful letter is dated December 24th (no year given):

MY DEAR MR. CHESTERTON,

It is just Christmas Eve; my friends presented me with some of your books, and I cannot omit to thank you for the consolation and trust I found there as already so many times. Be blessed, Mr. Chesterton.

I wrote you twice without getting any answer; but it is Christian to insist, and so I write you again. Please, would you be so kind to tell me, if it shall be possible for you to come next year to Prague? Our PEN club is anxious to invite you as our guest of honour. If you would like to come next spring, I beg you to be my guest. You are fond of old things: Prague is one. You shall find here so many people who cherish you. I like you myself as no other writer; it's for yours sake that being in London I went to habit in Notting-Hill and it is for yours sake that I liked it. I cannot believe that I should not meet you again. Please, come to Prague.

I wish you a happy New Year, Mr. Chesterton. You must be happy, making your readers happier. You are so good.

Yours sincerely,

KAREL CAPEK.

He never, alas, got to Prague, or to many another country that wanted him. There are letters asking him to lecture in Australia, to lecture again in U.S.A., in South America "to make them aware of English thought and literature." "The Argentine Intelligencia," says Philip Guedalla, "is acutely aware of your writings. Local professors terrified me by asking me on various occasions to explain the precise position which you occupied in our Catholic youth. . . . A visit from you would mean a very great deal to British intellectual prestige in these parts."

No Catholic Englishman was anything like so widely known in Europe. Books have been written about him in many languages and his works translated into French, German, Dutch, Czech, Russian, Polish, Spanish and Italian. A letter from Russia asks for his photograph for The Magazine of International Literature as a writer whose works are well known in the Soviet Union. The Kulturbund in Vienna sends an emissary inviting him there also and, like Prague, the Vienna P.E.N. Club wants him.

"You have a distressing habit," Maude Royden once wrote, "of being the only person one really wants to hear on certain subjects."

A visit to Rome in 1929 produced The Resurrection of Rome. Despite brilliant passages the book is disappointing. It bears no comparison with The New Jerusalem and gives an impression of being thrown together hastily before the ideas had been thought through to their ultimate conclusions. Perhaps Rome was too big even for Chesterton.

He never loved the Renaissance as he did the Middle Ages, but he saw it not as primarily pagan but as one more example of the immense vitality of a Catholicism which had had so many rebirths that it had buried its own past deeper than the past of paganism. He loved the fountains that threw their water everywhere and he felt about Rome that the greatest monuments might be removed and yet the city's personality would remain. For Rome is greater than her monuments. He wanted to argue with those who cared for Pagan Rome alone and who spent their time despising the "oratory in stone" of the Papal city and gazing only on the Forum. "And it never once occurs to them to remember that the old Romans were Italians, or to ask what a Forum was for."

He was, as usual, constantly invited to lecture--at the English College, the Scots College, the American College, the Beda. At the Holy Child Convent he spoke to a crowded audience on "Thomas More and Humanism." Father Cuthbert, O.S.F.C., thanking him, remarked on the mental resemblance between More and Chesterton, saying that he could quite well imagine them sitting together making jokes, some of them very good and some of them very bad. "Chesterton and More," says Father Vincent McNabb, "were both cockneys." Gilbert's classical insight also seemed to him like the great Chancellor's; "Erasmus says that though More didn't know much Greek, he knew what the words ought to mean."

He interviewed Mussolini and found that Mussolini was interviewing him, so that he talked at some length of Distributism and his own social ideal. Mussolini knew at least some of Gilbert's books. He told Cyril Clemens that he had keenly enjoyed The Man Who Was Thursday. He promised at the end of this interview that he would go away and think over what Chesterton had said, and it might have been better for the world had he kept that promise. For what had been said was an outline of the one possible alternative to the growing tyranny of governments.

From his anxiety to be fair to Fascism, Gilbert was often accused of being in favour of it, but, both in this book and in several articles, having given the case for it he went on to give the case against it--a much stronger case than that usually given by its opponents. The case for Fascism lay in the breakdown of true democracy and the reign of the tyranny of wealth in the democratic countries. Chesterton would, he said, have been on the side of the Partito Popolare as against the Fascism that succeeded it; in England and America he would "have infinitely preferred that the purgation of our plutocratic politics should have been achieved by Radicals and Republicans. It was they who did not prefer it." It was not that Fascism was not open to attack but "that Liberalism has unfortunately lost the right to attack it."

Those of us who were in Italy at that time will remember the truth of his description of the vitality and happiness that seemed to glow among the people. Giovinezza, bellezza, heard everywhere, had then no hollow sound at the heart of it. Italy was radiant with hope.

In Mussolini himself Gilbert saluted a belief in "the civic necessity of Virtue," in the "ideal that public life should be public," in human dignity, in respect for women as mothers, in piety and the honour due to the dead. Yet, summing up the man and the movement, he saw it as primarily the sort of riot that is provoked by the evils of an evil government, only "in the Italy of the twentieth century the rioters have become the rulers." For although Mussolini had in many ways made his rule popular, although in his concessions to modern ideas and inventions he was "rather breathlessly progressive," yet in the true sense of the word Mussolini was a Reactionary. A Reactionary is one who merely reacts against something, or permits "that something to make [him] do something against it. . . . A Reactionary is one in whom weariness itself has become a form of energy. Even when he is right there is always a danger that what was really good in the previous society may be destroyed by what is good in the new one."

Mussolini's reaction was against the Liberalism in which as an idea Chesterton still believed, it was a reaction from democracy to authority. And his weakness, the fundamental weakness of Fascism was that "it appeals to an appetite for authority, without very clearly giving the authority for the appetite. . . . When I try to put the case for it in philosophical terms, there is some doubt about the ultimates of the philosophy." It seemed to Chesterton that there were only two possible fixed and orderly constitutions, hereditary Monarchy or Majority Rule. The demand of the Fascists to hold power as an intelligent and active minority was in fact to invite other intelligent and active minorities to dispute that rule; and then only by tyranny could anarchy be prevented.

"Fascism," he said in summary, "has brought back order into the State; but this will not be lasting unless it has brought back order into the mind."

The two things in the Roman visit that remain most prominent in Dorothy's memory are Gilbert's loss of a medal of Our Lady that he always wore and his audience with the Holy Father. The loss of the medal seemed to distress him out of all normal proportion. He had the elevator boy looking for it on hands and knees and gave him a huge reward for finding it. Gilbert has left no record of his Papal audience. But, says Dorothy, it excited him so greatly that he did no work for two days before the event or two days after.

Their second visit to America in 1930-31 was far better enjoyed by Gilbert, and also I think by Frances until she got ill, because on it they came much closer to the real people of the country, especially during the period when he was lecturing at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. They lived at a little house in South Bend and he lectured every night, alternating a course on Victorian Literature with one on the great figures of Victorian history. There were 36 lectures all told, and the average attendance at each lecture was 500.

At Notre Dame and the Sister College of St. Mary's, I felt the best way to get the atmosphere of this visit would be to get together for a talk the people who remembered Gilbert: they would stimulate one another's memories. I invoked the aid of Sister Madeleva and she suggested the two Fathers Leo Ward, Professors Engels and O'Grady, and, best of all Johnnie Mangan the chauffeur. Johnnie is a great institution at Notre Dame. He remembered driving my father nearly thirty years ago and he had specially vivid memories of the Chesterton period. We all sat in a circle in Sister Madeleva's sitting room. I give here the notes I took.

Johnnie Mangan: "It was the hardest job getting him into the car, harder getting him out. He'd walk on the porch and all the children came. He'd talk to the children on the road. Money meant nothing to him: the lady would give me the money saying himself would leave it in the shop if the barber wasn't honest enough to give change.

"He enjoyed everything: when they dedicated the stadium he stayed till the very end. Father O'Donnell introduced him to all the naval officers and he was the last off the ground. He enjoyed talking to all the naval officers. He loved cheer-leading."

Mr. O'Grady: "He spent one evening in Professor Phillips' room after the lecture from 9 to 2.30 A.M. His host was deaf, G.K. learnt later, and he made another date when he found his host had missed most of the fun."

Mr. Engels: "He would sit around consuming home-made ale by the quart; said the head of the philosophy faculty made the best brew in the college. Enjoyed little drives round the countryside. The faculty were a little shy of inviting him."

"In a lecture he got an immense laugh by calling Queen Elizabeth an 'old crock.' He then laughed above all the rest."

Mr. Engels noticed mannerisms: "The constant shifting of his great bulk around," "rotating while he was talking," "flipping his eyeglasses," "lumbering on to the stage, going through all his pockets, finally finding a piece of dirty yellow paper and talking from it as if most laboriously gathered and learned notes. But the paper was only for show. Father Burke saw him get out of the cab, he got on to the stair landing and then saw G.K.'s yellow paper on the ground. He had delivered his whole course with hardly a single note--occasionally looked through material for a quarter of an hour or so before speaking." All thought him a great entertainer as well as an informing talker. "No one enjoyed himself more than he did." Trying to get him for an informal gathering they mentioned they had some Canadian Ales--quite something in Prohibition days.

G.K.: "The ales have it."

Johnnie: "He'd chat all the time he was driving."

Father Leo L. Ward: "The problem of getting G.K. to and fro in a coupe was only solved by backing him in."

They remembered G.K. "in Charley's big chair, his hands barely touching over his great expanse."

They recalled that on receiving his honorary degree he said the last time he received one at Edinburgh they tapped him with John Knox's hat. He did not expect anything so drastic here: perhaps they might tap him with Tom Heflin's sombrero.* When he had been invited to Notre Dame he was not certain where it was but with a name like that, even if it were in the mountains of the moon, he should feel at home. "If I ever meet anybody who suggests there's something Calvinistic or Puritanical in Catholicism I shall ask, 'Have you ever heard of the University of Notre Dame?'"

[* Tom Heflin was the fiercely anti-Catholic Senator from Alabama.]

Johnnie: "He'd do anything she'd say, or Miss Collins. They certainly had that man by the neck, but they took wonderful care of him."

Mr. O'Grady: "It was a very intelligent arrangement. And did they tidy him."

Johnnie: "Very much so. It was their business every evening."

Sister Madeleva: "Did he walk on the campus and see the students?"

Johnnie: "He didn't walk much only to Charlie Phillips' rooms. He didn't mind being a little late but his lady and Miss Collins loaded him into the car to get him there on time.

"The woman they lodged with used to swear like a trooper. But she (the landlady) cried like a kid when he left. And he and the lady seemed lonesome at leaving her.

"In his spare time at the house he would be drawing some fancy stuff."

"What did he talk to you about?"

Johnnie: "He'd just talk about the country, he'd admire the streams and things like that. I took him to the Virgin Forest and I could hardly get him back. He even got out to notice the trees. He spent almost an hour. The women raved at me and said I must get him back at a certain time. He'd ask me the names of the trees. He loved rivers and would ask me about the fish. At one time Father O'Donnell thought he should drive to Chicago or some big town but he didn't care for towns, said they all looked alike to him, so after that we always went to the country."

Someone asked, "Did he ever get grouchy?"

Johnnie: "He always had a smile. Was always calling kids over to talk to him. He'd touch one with his stick to make him look round and play with him, and then he'd laugh himself sick playing with them. The kids were always around him. The ones of four or five years, those were the ones he'd notice the most. He liked to ask them things and then if they gave a good answer he could get a good laugh at it."

Mr. O'Grady: "I know he enjoyed himself here. I met him in Ottawa afterwards. He was autographing a book, the pen was recalcitrant and he shook it over the rug, 'Dear me, I'm always cluttering up people's rugs.' His cousin in Ottawa had him completely surrounded by ash trays but the cigar had ash almost half length and it was falling everywhere."

Father Ward: "Father Miltner one evening in pleasant fall weather found G.K. on the porch. The campus was empty. He got a grunt in return to his greeting, tried three or four times, almost no answer. G.K. looked glum.

"'Well, you're not very gay this evening.'

"'One should be given the luxury of a little private grouch once in a while.'"

To Johnnie--"Did he take the lecture business seriously?"

"No. He just wanted five minutes on the porch when he would talk to no one but the kids."

Mr. O'Grady: "He said once, 'What I like about notes is that when once you begin you can completely disregard them.' He stood for the first lecture but mostly he sat. He enjoyed a joke so much, and they enjoyed his enjoyment."

Mr. Engels: "For the first lecture he stood--part of him stood behind a little rostrum, after that he sat at a big table."

Father Leo R. Ward was at Oxford when he debated "That the Law is a Hass" and was amazed at the way the undergraduates adored him. "His opponent begged them not to vote for G.K. at this critical moment in the world's history. They cheered G.K. but voted against him to make the other fellow feel good."

Sister Madeleva: "What did he do for recreation?"

Johnnie: "He did a lot of--sketching I guess you'd call it--and he'd read the papers."

Sister Madeleva: "Did he like the campus?"

Johnnie: "Very much."

"Did he ever go down to the Grotto?"

Johnnie: "He seen it but he never got out of the car."

"Was it hard for him to walk?"

Johnnie: "No, he could walk kinda fast, but it was so hard for him to get in or out of the car."

"Where did he go to church?"

Johnnie: "He came here to Notre Dame. He was close to 400 lbs. but he'd never give it away. He'd break an ordinary scale, I guess. I brought him under the main building, he got stuck in the door of the car. Father O'Donnell tried to help. Mr. Chesterton said it reminded him of an old Irishwoman: 'Why don't you get out sideways?' 'I have no sideways.'"

To the debate with Darrow, Frances Taylor Patterson had gone a little uneasy lest Chesterton's arguments "might seem somewhat literary in comparison with the trained scientific mind and rapier tongue of the famous trial lawyer." She found however that both trained mind and rapier tongue were the property of G.K.C.

I have never heard Mr. Darrow alone, but taken relatively, when that relativity is to Chesterton, he appears positively muddle headed.

As Chesterton summed it up, he felt as if Darrow had been arguing all afternoon with his fundamentalist aunt, and simply kept sparring with a dummy of his own mental making. When something went wrong with the microphone, Darrow sat back until it could be fixed. Whereupon G.K.C. jumped up and carried on in his natural voice, "Science you see is not infallible!" . . . Chesterton had the audience with him from the start, and when it was over, everyone just sat there, not wishing to leave. They were loath to let the light die!*

[* Chesterton by Cyril Clemens, pp. 67-68.]

As in England, so also in the States, Gilbert's debating was held to be far better than his straight lecturing. He never missed the opportunity for a quick repartee and yet when he scored the audience felt that he did so with utter kindness. At a debate with Dr. Horace T. Bridges of the Ethical Cultural Society on "Is Psychology a Curse?" Bishop Craig Stewart who presided, describes how:

In his closing remarks Chesterton devastatingly sideswiped his opponent and wound up the occasion in a storm of laughter and applause, "It is clear that I have won the debate, and we are all prepared to acknowledge that psychology is a curse. Let us, however, be magnanimous. Let us allow at least one person in this unhappy world to practice this cursed psychology, and I should like to nominate Dr. Bridges."

The Bishop on another occasion introduced Gilbert at a luncheon in Chicago by quoting Oliver Herford's lines:

When plain folks such as you and I See the sun sinking in the sky, We think it is the setting sun: But Mr. Gilbert Chesterton Is not so easily misled; He calmly stands upon his head, And upside down obtains a new And Chestertonian point of view. Observing thus how from his nose The sun creeps closer to his toes He cries in wonder and delight How fine the sunrise is tonight!

The fact that nearly all the headlines he chose sounded like paradoxes, the fact that they did not themselves agree with him, had on Chesterton's opponents and on some members of his audience one curious effect. Dr. Bridges when asked his opinion of his late sparring partner, after paying warm tribute to his brilliance as a critic, his humour and his great personal charm, discovered in his "subconscious" (Is Psychology a Curse?) "a certain intellectual recklessness that made him indifferent to truth and reality . . . fundamentally--perhaps I should say subconsciously--he was a thorough-going skeptic and acted upon the principle that, since we cannot really be positive about anything we had better believe what it pleases us to believe."

So too at the British University of Aberystwyth when Chesterton spoke on "Liberty," taking first historically the fights of Barons against despots, yeomen against barons, factory hands against owners, and then giving as a modern instance the fight of the pedestrian to keep the liberty of the highway, we are told that "the Senior History Lecturer and some others were of the opinion that the whole thesis of the address was a gigantic leg-pull."

Chesterton must have seen again the fixed stare on the faces of the Nottingham tradesmen thirty years earlier on the famous occasion when he himself "got up and played with water." But that earlier audience had the intellectual advantage over the university professors that they

Tried to find out what he meant With infinite inquiring.

Gilbert often said that his comic illustrations ought not to have prevented this. But it was really more his inability to resist making himself into a figure of fun. He was funny and the jokes were funny but they did prevent his really being given by all the position given him by so many, of the modern Dr. Johnson.

It is possible, though not easy, to imagine Johnson dragged from the station to his hotel by forty undergraduates of Aberystwyth while members of the O.T.C. secured a footing on the carriage armed with a battle axe (borrowed from the Arts Department), hoes, rakes, spades, etc.--their officers having refused them the privilege of bearing arms on the occasion.

But it is scarcely possible to imagine the Doctor called upon for a speech standing on the steps of the hotel and saying, "You need never be ashamed of the athletic prowess of this College. The Pyramids, we are told, were built by slave labour. But the slaves were not expected to haul the pyramids in one piece!"*

[* Chesterton by Cyril Clemens, p. 50.]

In San Francisco I saw many people who had met Gilbert including a journalist who took him to a "bootleg joint"--which is Western for a Speakeasy. There he asked for "some specialty of the house" and was offered a Mule.

"Six of these babies will put you on your ear," remarked the bartender.

"What did he say about my ear?" Gilbert queried.

He downed three of the potent mixture, in spite of his theory against cocktails and his host remarked his continued poise with admiration while the bartender commented "He can take it," another slang expression that appeared to be new to Gilbert. He told his host, Mr. Williams, that he delighted in meeting such folk as bartenders and all the simpler people whom he saw too seldom. This suggested an idea--would he come out to a school across the bay which could not afford his fees, because it educated the daughters of poorer Catholics. He agreed at once and not only talked to them brilliantly for three quarters of an hour, but also wrote for the children about 50 autographs.

But of course, he had forgotten something--an engagement to attend a big social function. A huge car arrived at the school complete with chauffeur and several agitated ladies. "Mr. Chesterton, you have broken an important engagement." "I have filled an important engagement," he answered, "lecturing to the daughters of the poor."

If it were possible for Gilbert to be better loved anywhere than in England that anywhere was certainly America. From coast to coast I have met his devotees. I have come across only one expression of the opposite feeling--and that from a man who seems (from his opening sentence) to have been unable to stay away from the lectures he so detested:

I heard Chesterton some six or seven times in this country. His physical make-up repelled me. He looked like a big eater and animalism is repugnant to most of us. His appearance was against him.

Not one of his lectures seemed to me worth the price of admission and some of them were so bad that they seemed contemptuous morsels flung at audiences for whom he adjudged anything good enough.

One of his lectures, at the Academy Brooklyn, was a great disappointment. And he charged $1,000 for it. It was not worth $10 and Chesterton knew it. After the lecture, he remarked to a friend of mine, "I think that was the worst lecture I ever gave." He may have been right. Certainly it was the worst I ever heard him give. But he took the thousand and a bonus of $200 for the extra large crowd in attendance. No: I did not like Chesterton.

What of the money? With his American agent Chesterton had a quite usual arrangement: he received half the fees paid. The agent made engagements, paid travelling expenses and received for this the other half. Out of the half Chesterton received, he paid a further ten per cent to the London agent who had introduced him to the American agent; he also had to pay the expenses of his wife and his secretary and further gave a large present to his secretary for her trouble on the tour: the rest went chiefly into G.K.'s Weekly. I doubt if he could have told anyone at what figure the original fee stood for any lecture.

One of the Basilian Fathers, then a novice, remembers Gilbert's appearance in Toronto. The subject of this lecture was "Culture and the Coming Peril." The Coming Peril, he explained, was not Bolshevism (because Bolshevism had now been tried--"The best way to destroy a Utopia is to establish it. The net result of Bolshevism is that the modern world will not imitate it"). Nor by Coming Peril did he mean another great war (the next great war, he added, "would happen when Germany tried to monkey about with the frontiers of Poland"). The Coming Peril was the intellectual, educational, psychological, artistic overproduction which, equally with economic overproduction, threatened the well-being of contemporary civilisation. People were inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves.

At question period he was asked:

"Why is Dean Inge gloomy?"

"Because of the advance of the Catholic Church. Next question please."

"How tall are you and what do you weigh?"

"I am six feet two inches, but my weight has never been accurately calculated."

"Is George Bernard Shaw a coming peril?"

"Heavens, no. He is a disappearing pleasure."

For an apparently haphazard collection of essays Sidelights on New London and Newer York, published on his return to England from the second visit, has a surprising unity. Blitzed in London and out of print in New York it is now hard to obtain, which is a pity as it is full of good things. Discussing the fashions of today Chesterton attempts "to remove these things from the test of time and subject them to the test of truth," and this rule of an eternal test is the one he tried to apply in all his comments. Obviously nothing human is perfect--and this includes the human judgment, even Chesterton's judgment. Talking of the past or of the present, of England or America, he may often have been wrong and he would certainly have been the last man to claim infallibility for his judgments. His weakness as a critic was perhaps a tendency to get his proportions wrong--to make too much of some things he saw or experienced, to little of others. His qualities were intellectual curiosity and personal amiability together with the measuring rod of an eternal standard.

This second visit to America only deepened in Gilbert's mind many of the impressions made by the first. Yet the atmosphere of the book is curiously different from that of What I Saw in America. Living in the country even a few months had so greatly deepened his understanding. He still preferred the Quakers to the Puritans, "The essential of the Puritan mood is the misdirection of moral anger." He still felt that as a whole the United States had started with "a great political idea, but a small spiritual idea": that it needed a "return to the vision" in politics and sociology. It was the fashion today to laugh at the wish for "great open spaces," yet the "real sociological object in going to America was to find those open spaces. It was not to find more engineers and electric batteries and mechanical gadgets in the home. These may have been the result of America: they were not the causes of America." Asked why he admired America yet hated Americanisation, he replied:

I should have thought that I had earned some right to apply this obvious distinction to any foreign country, since I have consistently applied it to my own country. If the egoism is excusable, I am myself an Englishman (which some identify with an egoist) and I have done my best to praise and glorify a number of English things: English inns, English roads, English jokes and jokers; even to the point of praising the roads for being crooked or the humour for being Cockney; but I have invariably written, ever since I have written at all, against the cult of British Imperialism.

And when that perilous power and opportunity, which is given by wealth and worldly success, largely passed from the British Empire to the United States, I have applied exactly the same principle to the United States. I think that Imperialism is none the less Imperialism because it is spread by economic pressure or snobbish fashion rather than by conquest; indeed I have much more respect for the Empire that is spread by fighting than for the Empire that is spread by finance.*

[* Sidelights on New London & Newer York, p. 178.]

He felt that the real causes for admiration, the real greatness of America, could be found partly through facing its incompleteness and defects, partly through contemplating the character of the greatest and most typical of Americans, Abraham Lincoln.

Whilst I was in America, I often lingered in small towns and wayside places; and in a curious and almost creepy fashion the great presence of Abraham Lincoln continually grew upon me. I think it is necessary to linger a little in America, and especially in what many would call the most uninteresting or unpleasing parts of America, before this strong sense of a strange kind of greatness can grow upon the soul. . . . The externals of the Middle West affect an Englishman as ugly, and yet ugliness is not exactly the point. There are things in England that are quite as ugly or even uglier. Rows of red brick villas in the suburbs of a town in the Midlands are, one would suppose, as hideous as human half-wittedness could invent or endure. But they are different. They are complete; they are, in their way, compact; rounded and finished with an effect that may be prim or smug, but is not raw. The surroundings of them are neat, if it be in a niggling fashion. But American ugliness is not complete even as ugliness. It is broken off short; it is ragged at the edges; even its worthy objects have around them a sort of halo of refuse. Somebody said of the rugged and sardonic Dr. Temple, once Archbishop of Canterbury: "There are no polished corners in our Temple."

. . . there are no polished corners even in the great American cities, which are full of fine and stately classical buildings, not unworthy to be compared to temples. Nobody seems to mind the juxtaposition of unsightly things and important things. There is some deep difference of feeling about the need for completeness and harmony, and there is the same thing in the political and ethical life of the great Western nation. It was out of this landscape that the great President came, and one might almost trace a fanciful shadow of his figure in the thin trees and the stiff wooden pillars. A man of any imagination might look down these strange streets, with their frame-houses filled with the latest conveniences and surrounded with the latest litter, till he could see approaching down the long perspective that long ungainly figure, with the preposterous stove-pipe hat and the rustic umbrella and deep melancholy eyes, the humour and the hard patience and the heart that fed upon hope deferred.

That is admiring Abraham Lincoln, and that is admiring America.*

[* Ibid., pp. 168-170.]

Among the "stately and classical buildings" were those making up the University of Notre Dame where he had been lecturing and which turned his musings in a direction they were ever inclined to take. Founded by a group of Frenchmen a century ago with a capital of four hundred dollars in a small log building on a clearing of ten acres, the University today numbers forty-five buildings on a seventeen hundred acre campus. The gold dome of the Church visible from miles away, the interesting combination of the extraordinary fame of its football team with a keen spiritual life, especially fascinated Gilbert. He wrote a poem dedicated to the University and called "The Arena." In it he pictures first the golden image on "the gilded house of Nero" that stood for all the horrors of the Pagan Amphitheatre. Then comes in contrast another image:

I have seen, where a strange country Opened its secret plains about me, One great golden dome stand lonely with its golden image, one Seen afar, in strange fulfilment, Through the sunlit Indian summer That Apocalyptic portent that has clothed her with the Sun.

The boys shout "Notre Dame" as they watch the fortunes of the fray and Chesterton sees Our Lady presiding fittingly even over a football contest.

And I saw them shock the whirlwind Of the world of dust and dazzle: And thrice they stamped, a thunderclap; and thrice the sand-wheel swirled; And thrice they cried like thunder On Our Lady of the Victories, The Mother of the Master of the Masterers of the World.

He recurs to a favourite thought that the Mother of Sorrows is the cause of human joy:

Queen of Death and deadly weeping Those about to live salute thee, Youth untroubled; youth untortured; hateless war and harmless mirth And the New Lord's larger largesse Holier bread and happier circus, Since the Queen of Sevenfold Sorrow has brought joy upon the earth.

No wonder that, as Johnnie Mangan said, you could not drag him away from the game, if the game meant also a meditation. The "holier bread" came perhaps to his mind from the fact that the average of Daily Communion is unusually high at Notre Dame.

When he desired for Americans a return to their great political vision he desired also an opening of the eyes to that greater spiritual vision which was to him the supreme opportunity of the human spirit. E. S. P. Haynes in Fritto Misto, comments on the absence of any reference to universities in What I Saw in America. Nor have I anywhere found any discussion by Chesterton of the intellectual quality of Catholic education--any comparison with the secular teaching--either in England or in America. But that the problems of these two countries and of all the world could be solved only by what that golden Dome housed he cried with no uncertain voice. Death is in the world around, Resurrection in the Church of the God who died and rose again.

Queen of Death and Life undying Those about to live salute thee.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XXIX. The Soft Answer

_I have only one virtue that I know of I could really forgive unto seventy times seven_.

The Notebook

ONE OF THE commonest of biographers' problems is the question of quarrels and broken friendships. At the distance of time separating a life from its record some of these look so empty of meaning as to imperil any reputation--yet they happened, and when they were happening they probably appeared full of significance. Other quarrels involve issues of importance in which the biographer cannot take wholeheartedly the side of his hero. Thus my own father, writing his father's life, had to pronounce judgment on Newman's side in the issues that divided them, yet later, writing Newman's biography, he had to admit the faults of temper that at least weakened the Cardinal's case. For only so could he tell an entirely truthful story.

In Chesterton's life there is no such problem. Attacks on public characters in his paper, attacks on abuses and ideas, absorbed all his pugnacity. Fellow writers, rival journalists, friends, furnished often enough material for a quarrel; but Chesterton would never take it up. He excelled in the soft answer--not that answer which seeming soft subtly provokes to wrath, but the genuine article. Belloc said of him that he possessed "the two virtues of humility and charity"--those most royal of all Christian virtues. In the heat of argument he retained a fairness of mind that saw his opponent's case and would never turn an argument into a quarrel. And most people both liked him and felt that he liked them. While he was having his great controversy with Blatchford back in 1906, it is clear from letters between them that the two men remained on the friendliest terms.

Edward Macdonald writes of his experiences of Chesterton when he was working with him on the paper.

He loved all the jokes about his size. He was the first to see the point and to roar with laughter when Douglas Woodruff introduced him to a meeting as "Mr. Chesterton who has just been looking round in America. . . ."

He came into the office once on Press Day and saw the disordered pile of papers and proofs on my desk. The place was certainly in an awful mess. I wanted to show him a particular letter and shoved my hand into the middle of one pile and was lucky enough to put my hand right on the right document. G.K.C. complimented me on a filing system that demanded a keen memory and then remarked enviously "I wish they'd let me have a desk like that at home."

When Thomas Derrick drew his famous cartoon of G.K.C. milking a cow he hesitated to give it to me for fear that G.K.C. would be offended. I wanted to print it in a special number and telephoned to Beaconsfield.

"Mr. Chesterton, I have here a cartoon of Derrick and would like to put it in the special number. But as you are the subject of the cartoon Derrick is afraid you may not like it."

"I would rather it were not printed," he replied. "I never liked the idea of my name being used in the title of the paper and don't want well-intentioned but embarrassing personalities. Of course, if it were highly satirical, insulting and otherwise unflattering I'd gladly have it on the front-page."

I assured him that it was anything but flattering and on the front-page it went. It was used as the frontispiece of G.K.'s Miscellany.

Many of the obituary writers said that he hated the cinema. In fact he told me once that he had long wished to write a new translation of Cyrano and would like to try his hand at a film scenario of the play. His fingers had itched in the first place to retranslate the duel scene in order to restore the strength of the ballade in English. When he saw the film version of a Father Brown story I asked him what he thought of it. He had liked the film as a film and the acting. He added as an afterthought, "It gave me an idea for a new Father Brown story."

A short-hand note was taken of the famous debate with Bernard Shaw. It was decided to devote four pages of G.K.'s Weekly to a report which I tried to compile by avoiding the third person and concentrating on significant quotations. But whereas Shaw put his points in a few words from which elaboration could be cut, G.K.C.'s argument was so closely knit that it was difficult to leave out passages without spoiling the effect. He walked into the room as my pencil went through a fairly long extract from Shaw's speech.

"And whose words are you so gaily murdering?" he asked.

"Shaw's, Mr. Chesterton."

"Very well. Now put them all back and murder mine. I refuse to deny Shaw a full opportunity to state his case in my paper."

As a result Shaw's speech took up a great part of the space allotted and G.K.C. was inadequately reported.

He was always careful if he had reviewed a book in the paper criticising its ideas to take an immediate opportunity to show the author his warm personal friendliness. Middleton Murry, sending him a book of his own, criticised G.K. as "Perverse" for thinking communism and capitalism alike.

Your clean idea [of liberty and property] delights me, I believe, quite as much as it does you. But it is a vision and a dream, in this capitalistic world. . . . The communist is the man who has made up his mind to "go through with" the grim business of Capitalism to the bitter end because he knows there is no going back. He makes a choice between following a dream which he knows is only a dream, and following a hope which he knows his own devotion may help to make real. Communism is the faith which a man wins through blank and utter despair. . . .

For my own part, if it were possible, I would rather see the world converted to Christianity than to communism. But the world has had its chance of becoming Christian; it will not get it again. . . .

The wrath to come--that is what communism is. And we can flee from it only by repentance. And repentance itself means communism. That is the fact as I see it. I hope, and sometimes dream, that we shall have the communism of repentance, and not the communism of wrath here in England.

Chesterton replied (May 19, 1932):

Thank you so very much for your most interesting and generous letter, which reached me indirectly and was delayed; also for your most interesting and generous book, which I immediately sat down and read at a sitting; which in its turn so stimulated me that I immediately wrote a rapid and rather curt reply for my own little rag. I fear you will find the reply more controversial than I meant it to be; for your book is so packed with challenges that I could not but make my very short article a thing packed with mere repartees. But I do hope you will understand how warm a sympathy I have with very much of what you say and with all the motives with which you say it. Needless to say, I agree with every word you say against Capitalism; but I particularly want to congratulate you on what you say about parasitic Parliamentary Labour. I thought that chapter was quite triumphant.

As for the rest, it is true that it has not shaken me in my conviction that the Catholic Church is larger than you or me, than your moods or mine; and the heroic but destructive mood in which you write is a very good example. You say that Christ set the example of a self-annihilation which seems to me almost nihihist; but I will never deny that Catholics have saluted that mood as the Imitation of Christ. Lately a friend of mine, young, virile, handsome, happily circumstanced, walked straight off and buried himself in a monastery; never, so to speak, to reappear on earth. Why did he do it? Psychologically, I cannot imagine. Not, certainly, from fear of hell or wish to be "rewarded" by heaven. As an instructed Catholic, he knew as well as I do that he could save his soul by normal living. I can only suppose that there is something in what you say; that Christ and others do accept a violent reversal of all normal things. But why do you say that Christ did it and has left no Christians who do it? Our Church has stood in the derision of four hundred years, because there were still Christians who did it. And they did it to themselves, as Christ did; you will not misunderstand me if I say that this is different from throwing out a violent theory for other people to follow.

Now for the application. Some of these monks, less cloistered, are to my knowledge, helping the English people to get back to the ownership of their own land; renewing agriculture as they did in the Dark Ages. Why do you say there is no chance for this normal property and liberty? You can only mean to say of our scheme exactly what you yourself admit about the Communist scheme. That it requires awful and almost inhuman sacrifices; that we must turn the mind upside-down; that we must alter the whole psychology of modern Englishmen. We must do that to make them Communists. Why is it an answer to say we must do that to make them Distributists? I could point out many ways in which our ideal is nearer and more native to men; but I will not prolong this debate. I should be very sorry that you should think it is only a debate. I only ask you to believe that we sympathise where we do not agree; but on this we do not agree.

Mr. Murry wrote later of Gilbert: "I liked the man immensely and he was a very honourable opponent of mine, much the most honourable I ever encountered."*

[* Mark Twain Quarterly, Chesterton Memorial No.]

G.K.'s Weekly was of course Gilbert's own platform, so perhaps his care to apologise and his great magnanimity are more remarkable in incidents outside its columns. T. S. Eliot had his platform--he edited the Criterion. Chesterton on being reproached by him for a hasty article not only apologised but dedicated a book to Mr. Eliot. He had written confusing him with another critic who disapproved of alliteration and had also misquoted a stanza of his poetry. Mr. Eliot had written:

I should like you to know that it was apparently your "sympathetic reviewer," not I, who made the remark about alliteration; to which it seems he added a more general criticism of mine: so that snob is not the right corrective. Some of your comments seem to be based on a belief that I object to alliteration.

And may I add, as a humble versifier, that I prefer my verse to be quoted correctly, if at all.

Chesterton replied:

I am so very sorry if my nonsense in the Mercury had any general air of hostility, to say nothing of any incidental injustices of which I was quite unaware. I meant it to be quite amiable; like the tremulous badinage of the Oldest Inhabitant in the bar parlour, when he has been guyed by the brighter lads of the village. I cannot imagine that I ever said anything about you or any particular person being a snob; for it was quite out of my thoughts and too serious for the whole affair. I certainly did have the impression, from the way the reviewer put it, that you disapproved of my alliteration; I also added that you would be quite right if you did. I certainly did quote you from memory, and even quote from a quotation; I also mentioned that I was doing so casual a thing. Of course, on the strictest principles, all quotations should be verified; and I should certainly have done so if I had in any way resented anything you said, or been myself writing in a spirit of resentment. If you think a letter to the Mercury clearing up these points would be fairer to everybody, of course I should be delighted to write one.

This attitude of the "oldest inhabitant" was the Chestertonian fashion of accepting the youthful demand for something new. When a young writer in Colosseum alluded to him as out of date he took it with the utmost placidity. "Good," he said to Edward Macdonald. "I like to see people refusing to accept the opinions of others before they've examined them themselves. They're perfectly entitled to say that I'm not a literary lion but a Landseer lion." Mr. Eliot's answer was a request to Gilbert to write in the Criterion and an explanation that he had felt in a false position since he rather liked alliteration than otherwise.

Thus too when Chesterton had answered a newspaper report of a speech made by C. E. M. Joad, the latter complained that it was a criticism "not of anything that I think, but of a garbled newspaper caricature of a few of the things I think, taken out of their context and falsified."

He added that he had not said science would destroy religion but that at its present rate of decline the Church of England would become a dead letter in a hundred and fifty years. Next, that science "has no bearing upon the spiritual truths of religion," but

has been presented, at any rate by the Church of England, in a texture of obsolete ideas about the nature of the physical universe and the behaviour of physical things which science has shown to be untrue.

Finally that religion is vital but it is in Mysticism that the core of religion lies for me, and mystical experience, as I understand it, does not want organizing.

I may be wrong in all this, but I hope that this explanation, such as it is, will lead you to think that I am not such an arrogant fool as your article suggests.

Chesterton replied (May 4, 1930):

I hope you will forgive my delay in thanking you for your very valuable and reasonable letter; but I have been away from home; and for various reasons my correspondence has accumulated very heavily. I am extremely glad to remember that, even before receiving your letter, I was careful to say in my article that my quarrel was not personally with you, but with the newspapers which had used what you said as a part of a stupid stunt against organised religion. I am even more glad to learn that they had misused your name and used what you did not say. I ought to have known, by this time, that they are quite capable of it; and I entirely agree that the correction you make in the report makes all the difference in the world. I do not think I ever meant or said that you were an arrogant fool or anything like it; but most certainly it is one thing to say that religion will die in a century (as the report stated) and quite another to say that the Church of England will experience a certain rate of decline, whether the prediction be true or no. I shall certainly take some opportunity to correct my statement prominently in the Illustrated London News; I hope I should do so in any case; but in this case it supports my main actual contention; that there is in the press a very vulgar and unscrupulous attack on the historic Christian Church.

The four points you raise are so interesting that I feel I ought to touch on them; though you will forgive me if I do so rather rapidly. With the first I have already dealt; and in that matter I can only apologise, both for myself and my unfortunate profession; and touching the second I do not suppose we should greatly disagree; I merely used it as one example of the futility of fatalistic prophecies such as the one attributed by the newspapers to you. But a thorough debate between us, if there were time for it, touching the third and fourth points, might possibly remove our differences, but would certainly reveal them.

In the third paragraph you say something that has been said many times, and doubtless means something; but I can say quite honestly that I have never been quite certain of what it means. Naturally I hold no brief for the Church of England as such; indeed I am inclined to congratulate you on having found any one positive set of "ideas," obsolete or not, which that Church is solidly agreed in "presenting." But I have been a member of that Church myself, and in justice to it, I must say that neither then nor now did I see clearly what are these things "about the nature of the physical universe, which science has shown to be untrue." I was not required as an Anglican, any more than as a Catholic, to believe that God had two hands and ten fingers to mould Adam from clay; but even if I had been, it would be rather difficult to define the scientific discovery that makes it impossible. I should like to see the defined Christian dogma written down and the final scientific discovery written against it. I have never seen this yet. What I have seen is that even the greatest scientific dogmas are not final. We have just this moment agreed that the ideas of the physical universe, which are really and truly "obsolete," are the very ideas taught by physicists thirty years ago. What I think you mean is that science has shown miracles to be untrue. But miracles are not ideas about the nature of the physical universe. They are ideas about the nature of a power capable of breaking through the nature of the physical universe. And science has not shown that to be untrue, for anybody who can think.

Lastly, you say that it is indeed necessary that Religion should exist, but that its essence is Mysticism; and this does not need to be organised. I should answer that nothing on earth needs to be organised so much as Mysticism. You say that man tends naturally to religion; he does indeed; often in the form of human sacrifice or the temples of Sodom. Almost all extreme evil of that kind is mystical. The only way of keeping it healthy is to have some rules, some responsibilities, some definitions of dogma and moral function. That at least, as you yourself put it, is what I think; and I hope you will not blame me for saying so. But as to what I said, in that particular article, it was quite clearly written upon wrong information and it will give me great pleasure to do my best to publish the fact.

In any such argument Gilbert was never, in the words of the Gospel, "willing to justify himself." He only wanted to justify certain ideas, and the thought of having misrepresented anyone else was distressing to him.

Even the hardened controversialist Coulton wrote in the course of one of their arguments:

If I speak very plainly of your historical methods, it is not that I do not fully respect your conversion. I have more sympathy with your Catholicity than (partly no doubt by my own fault) you may be inclined to think; I believe you to have made a sacrifice of the sort that is never altogether vain; it is therefore part of my faith that you are near to that which I also am trying to approach; and, if this belief does little or nothing to colour my criticisms in this particular discussion, that is because I believe true Catholicism, like true Protestantism, can only gain by the explosion of historical falsehoods, if indeed they be false, with the least possible delay. If (on the other hand) they are truths then you may be trusted to make out the best possible case for them, and my words will recoil upon myself.

The dispute was about Puritanism and Catholicism. It was republished as a pamphlet. It is the only case I have found in which Chesterton wrote several versions of one letter (to the Cambridge Review). In its final form he omitted one illuminating illustration. Coulton had maintained that the mediaevals condemned dancing as much as the Puritans and had dug up various mouldy theologians who classed it as a mortal sin. Father Lopez retorted by a quotation from St. Thomas saying it was quite right to dance at weddings and on such like occasions, provided the dancing was of a decent kind.

Chesterton comments:

We have already travelled very far from the first vision of Mr. Coulton, of Dark Ages full of one monotonous wail over the mortal sin of dancing. To class it seriously as a mortal sin is to class it with adultery or theft or murder. It is interesting to imagine St. Thomas and the moderate moralists saying: "You may murder at weddings; you may commit adultery to celebrate your release from prison; you may steal if you do not do it with immodest gestures," and so on. The calm tone of St. Thomas about the whole thing is alone evidence of a social atmosphere different from that described.

The rest of his analysis of Coulton's method of dealing with a historical document and distorting it is in the published version. A valuable part of Chesterton's line is also interesting as a comment on his own historical work. The expert he says is so occupied with detail that he overlooks the broad facts that anyone could see. On this point the review of Coulton's Mediaeval History in the Church Times is illuminating. The reviewer noted that in the index under the word "Church" occurred such notes as: "soldiers sleeping in," "horses stabled in," and other allusions to extraordinary happenings. But nowhere, he said, could he find any mention of the normal use of a church--that men prayed in it.

With H. G. Wells several interchanges of letters have shown in earlier chapters how the soft answer turned aside a wrath easily aroused, but also easily dissipated. Another exchange of letters only three years before Gilbert's death must be given. The third letter is undated and I am not sure if it belongs here or refers to another of Gilbert's reviews of a book of Wells.

47 Chiltern Court, N.W.I. Dec. 10, 1933

DEAR OLD G.K.C.

An Illustrated London News Xmas cutting comes like the season's greetings. If after all my Atheology turns out wrong and your Theology right I feel I shall always be able to pass into Heaven (if I want to) as a friend of G.K.C.'s. Bless you.

My warmest good wishes to you and Mrs. G.K.C.

H.G.

MY DEAR H.G.,

I do hope my secretary let you know that at the moment when I got your most welcome note I was temporarily laid out in bed and able to appreciate it, but not to acknowledge it. As to the fine point of theology you raise--I am content to answer (with the subtle and exquisite irony of the Yanks) I should worry. If I turn out to be right, you will triumph, not by being a friend of mine, but by being a friend of Man, by having done a thousand things for men like me in every way from imagination to criticism. The thought of the vast variety of that work, and how it ranges from towering visions to tiny pricks of humour, overwhelmed me suddenly in retrospect: and I felt we had none of us ever said enough. Also your words, apart from their generosity, please me as the first words I have heard for a long time of the old Agnosticism of my boyhood when my brother Cecil and my friend Bentley almost worshipped old Huxley like a god. I think I have nothing to complain of except the fact that the other side often forget that we began as free-thinkers as much as they did: and there was no earthly power but thinking to drive us on the way we went. Thanking you again a thousand times for your letter . . . and everything else.

Yours always

G. K. CHESTERTON.

MY DEAR CHESTERTON:

You write wonderful praise and it leaves me all aquiver. My warmest thanks for it. But indeed that wonderful fairness of mind is very largely a kind of funk in me--I know the creature from the inside--funk and something worse, a kind of deep, complex cunning. Well anyhow you take the superficial merit with infinite charity--and it has inflated me and just for a time I am an air balloon over the heads of my fellow creatures.

Yours ever

H. G. WELLS.

Gilbert loved to praise his fellows in the field of letters even when their philosophy differed from his own. In the obituaries in G.K.'s Weekly this is especially noticeable. Of two men of letters who died in 1928, he wrote with respect and admiration although with a mind divided between pure literary appreciation and those principles whereby he instinctively measured all things. Of Sir Edmund Gosse he wrote "The men from whom we would consent to learn are dying." G.K. felt he could never himself appreciate without judging, but he could learn from Gosse a uniquely "sensitive impartiality." With him "there passes away a great and delicate spirit which might in some sense be called the spirit of the eighteenth century; which might indeed be very rightly called the spirit of reason and civilisation."*

[* May 26th, 1928.]

"These are the things we hoped would stay and they are going," he quoted from Swinburne, and of him and of Hardy, who died in 1928, and in whom he saluted "an honourable dignity and simplicity" he felt that though they had stated something false about the universe--that all the good things are fugitive and only the bad things unchanged--yet ". . . something rather like it might be a half truth about the world. I mean about the modern world. . . ." These poets lamented the passing of roses and sunbeams, but in the modern world

it is rather as if, in some inverted witchcraft the rose tree withered and faded from sight, and the rose leaves remained hovering in empty air. It is as if there could be sunbeams when there was no more sun. It is not only the better but the bigger and stronger part of a thing that is sacrificed to the small and secondary part. The real evil in the change that has been passing over Society is the fact that it has sapped foundations and, worse still, has not shaken the palaces and spires. It is as if there was a disease in the world that only devours the bones. We have not weakened the gilded parody of marriage, we have only weakened the marriage: . . . we have not abolished the House of Lords because it was not democratic. We have merely preserved the aristocracy, on condition that it shall not be aristocratic. . . . We have not yet even disestablished the Church; but there is a very pressing proposal that we should turn out of it the only people who really believe it is the Church. . . . There is now in the minds of nearly all Capitalists a sort of corrupt communism. . . . the Bank remains, The Fund remains, The Foreign Financier remains, Parliamentary Procedure remains, Jix remains. These are the things we hoped would go; but they are staying.

Sixteen years earlier Chesterton had in The Victorian Age in Literature characterised Hardy's novels as "the village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot." Yet Cyril Clemens has told me that Hardy recited to him some of Chesterton's poetry, and I think this obituary links with that fact in showing that a profound difference in their philosophy of life did not prevent a mutual appreciation and even admiration.

Gilbert Chesterton entered the last years of his life having made no enemies in the exceedingly sensitive literary world to which he primarily belonged. Whether he had made any in the world of politics I do not know, but he certainly felt no enmities. He said once it was impossible to hate anything except an idea, and to him I think it was. Against one politician who died in 1930 he had many years ago launched his strongest bit of ironical writing--Lord Birkenhead, then F. E. Smith, who had spoken of the Welsh Disestablishment Bill as having "shocked the conscience of every Christian community in Europe."--The last lines of Chesterton's mordant answer ran

For your legal cause or civil You fight well and get your fee; For your God or dream or devil You will answer, not to me. Talk about the pews and steeples And the cash that goes therewith: But the souls of Christian peoples . . . Chuck it, Smith.

Later, Smith had stood with Sir Edward Carson against Cecil Chesterton at the old Bailey. Now he was dead and many who had feared him in his lifetime were blackening his memory with subtle sneers and innuendo. Gilbert refused to join in this and he wrote in his paper: "In him we were confronted by and fought, not a set of principles but a man. . . . Lord Birkenhead was a great fighter! with one more pagan virtue--pride--he would have been a great pagan."

Lord Balfour died in the same year. With him neither the paper nor its editor had fought personally, but upon almost all his policies had stood in opposition. Yet few better appreciations of him appeared than the article entitled by Chesterton "A Man of Distinction."

The English squire was an unconscious aristocrat; the Scotch laird was a conscious aristocrat; and Lord Balfour with all his social grace and graciousness, was conscious and even self-conscious. But this was only another way of saying that he had a mind which mirrored everything, including himself; and that, whatever else he did, he did not act blindly or in the dark. He was sometimes quite wrong; but his errors were purely patriotic; both in the narrow sense of nationalism and in the larger sense of loyalty and disinterestedness.

He instances Balfour's policies in Ireland and Egypt and continues:

In some ways he seems to me to have been too good a Stoic to be entirely a good Christian; or rather (to put it more correctly) to feel, like the rest of us, that he was a bad Christian. . . . There was much more in him of the Scotch Puritan than of the English Cavalier.

It is supremely characteristic of the present Parliamentary atmosphere that everybody accused Lord Balfour of incomprehensible compromise and vagueness, because he was completely logical and absolutely clear. Clarity does look like a cloud of confusion to people whose minds live in confusion twice confounded. . . .

. . . people said his distinctions were fine distinctions; and so they were; very fine indeed. A fine distinction is like a fine painting or a fine poem or anything else fine; a triumph of the human mind . . . the great power of distinction; by which a man becomes in the true sense distinguished.*

[* March 29, 1930.]

The distinction Mr. Swinnerton draws* between Belloc and Chesterton may be a little too absolute, but substantially it is right. "One reason for the love of Chesterton was that while he fought he sang lays of chivalry and in spite of all his seriousness warred against wickedness rather than a fleshly opponent, while Belloc sang only after the battle and warred against men as well as ideas."

[* Georgian Scene, p. 88.]

Did the tendency to find good in his opponents, did Chesterton's universal charity deaden, as Belloc believes, the effect of his writing?

He wounded none, but thus also he failed to provide weapons wherewith one may wound and kill folly. Now without wounding and killing, there is no battle; and thus, in this life, no victory; but also no peril to the soul through hatred.*

[* The Place of Chesterton in English Letters, p. 81.]

In various controversies during the final years of G.K.'s Weekly the very opposite opinion is expressed. Hoffman Nickerson writes of the "subversive" nature of Chesterton's work, of his giving weapons to Communism and doing his bit towards starting "a very nasty class war" in America. Mr. Nickerson was allowed to develop this theme in a series of articles in Chesterton's own paper. Correspondents too complained often enough in the paper of its attacks on vested interests and on other schools of thought than its own.

In the course of a controversy with Mr. Penty, in which I think G.K. most distinctly misunderstood his opponent but in which both men kept the friendliest tone, Penty says that Chesterton treats as a drive much that he himself would call a drift: that the mind is more in fault than the will of mankind in getting the world into its present mess. With this diagnosis Chesterton certainly agreed for the greater part of mankind. He spoke often of a "madness in the modern mind." Psychology meant "the mind studying itself instead of studying the truth" and it was part of what had destroyed the mind. "Advertisements often tell us to Watch this Blank Space. I confess I do watch that blank space, the modern mind, not so much for what will appear in it, as for what has already disappeared from it."

Thus too when the Rev. Dick Shepherd remarrying a divorced woman--i.e., encouraging her to take again the solemn vow she had already broken--said that he heard the voice of Christ: "Go in peace," it was not for impiety that Chesterton condemned him. He wrote with restraint "There is scarcely a shade of difference left between meaning well and meaning nothing."

Was Penty still right in thinking he saw a drive where he ought to see a drift and Nickerson in thinking he was dangerously subversive in his attitude to the rich? And anyhow what about Belloc?

I incline to think that the truth was that while G.K. could never hate an individual he could hate a group. If he suddenly remembered an individual in that group he hastily excepted him from the group in order to leave the objects of his hatred entirely impersonal. Thus he hated politicians but found real difficulty in hating a politician. He hated what he called the plutocracy, but no individual rich man. I do think however that while believing firmly in original sin he was somewhat inclined to see it as operative more especially in the well-to-do classes. His championship of the poor was in no way impersonal. His burning love and pity went out to every beggar. He tended to love all men but the poor he loved with an undivided heart, and when he thought of them his thoughts grew harsh towards the rich who were collectively their oppressors.

I doubt if he allowed enough for the degree of stupidity required to amass a fortune. He would have agreed that love of money narrowed the mind: I doubt if he fully grasped that only a mind already narrow can love money so exclusively as to pursue it successfully. And I am pretty sure he did not allow enough for the fact that rich like poor are caught today in the machinery they have created. He saw the bewildered, confused labourer who has lost his liberty: he failed to see the politician also bewildered, the millionaire also confused, afraid to let go for fear he might be submerged. And yet at moments he did see it. He wrote in the paper a short series of articles on men of the nineteenth century who had created the confusion of today; on Malthus, Adam Smith and Darwin. Far from its being true that supernatural religion had first been destroyed and morality lost in consequence, it had been the Christian morality that was first destroyed in the mind. G.K. summarised Adam Smith's teachings as: "God so made the world that He could achieve the good if men were sufficiently greedy for the goods." Thus the man of today "whenever he is tempted to be selfish half remembers Smith and self-interest. Whenever he would harden his heart against a beggar, he half remembers Malthus and a book about population; whenever he has scruples about crushing a rival he half remembers Darwin and his scruples become unscientific." Because none of these theories were in their own day seen as heresies and denounced as heresies they have lived on vaguely to poison the atmosphere and the mind of today.

English Conservatives had been shocked when Chesterton began: Mr. Nickerson was shocked when he was ending: because he demanded a revolution. Surely, Mr. Nickerson said, if he looked at Communism closely he would prefer Capitalism. He not only would, he constantly said he did. But he wanted a Revolution from both: he preferred that it should not be "nasty" for what he wanted was the Christian Revolution. Like all revolutions however it must begin in the mind and he felt less and less hopeful as he watched that blank space.

But I do not believe that Chesterton failed because he had not at his command the weapon of hatred. Here Belloc surely makes the same mistake that Swift (whom he instances) made and for the same reason. The Frenchman and the Irishman understand the rapier of biting satire as does not the Englishman: for direct abuse of anyone, no matter how richly merited, nearly always puts the Englishman on the side of the man who is being abused. What happened to Swift's Gulliver--that most fierce attack upon the human race? The English people drew its sting and turned it into a nursery book that has delighted their children ever since. There are more ways than one of winning a battle: you can win the man instead of the argument and Chesterton won many men. Or you can take a weapon that once belonged chiefly to the enemy but which Chesterton wrested from him; a very useful weapon: the laugh.

Orthodoxy, doctrinal and moral, was a lawful object of amusement to Voltaire and his followers but now the laugh has passed to the other side and Chesterton was (with Belloc himself) the first to seize this powerful weapon. Thus when Bishop Barnes of Birmingham said that St. Francis was dirty and probably had fleas many Catholics were furious and spoke in solemn wrath. Chesterton wrote the simple verse

A Broad-minded Bishop Rebukes the Verminous Saint Francis

If Brother Francis pardoned Brother Flea There still seems need of such strange charity Seeing he is, for all his gay goodwill Bitten by funny little creatures still.

I shall never forget going to hear Chesterton debate on Birth Control with some Advanced Woman or other. Outside the hall were numbers of her satellites offering their literature. I was just about to say something unpleasant to one of them when a verse flashed into my mind:

If I had been a Heathen, I'd have crowned Neaera's curls, And filled my life with love affairs, My house with dancing girls! But Higgins is a Heathen And to lecture-rooms is forced Where his aunts who are not married Demand to be divorced.

The rebuke died on my lips: why get angry with the poor old aunts of Higgins demanding the destruction of their unconceived and inconceivable babies?

Swinburne had mocked at Christian virtue but the Dolores of Chesterton replied to him:

I am sorry old dear if I hurt you, No doubt it is all very nice, With the lilies and languors of virtue And the raptures and roses of vice. But the notion impels me to anger That vice is all rapture for me, And if you think virtue is languor Just try it and see.

But in fact G.K. did not merely use laughter as a weapon: he was often simply amused--and did not conceal it. He told Desmond Gleeson that he remembered reading Renan's Christ "while I was standing in the queue waiting to see 'Charley's Aunt.' But it is obvious which is the better farce for 'Charley's Aunt' is still running." No wonder that Eileen Duggan when she pictured him as a modern St. George saw him "shouting gleefully 'Bring on your dragons.'" Even dragons may be bothered by the unexpected. And it may well be that when the rapier of anger has been blunted against the armour of some accustomed fighter he will be driven off the field by gales of Chestertonian laughter.

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XXX. Our Lady's Tumbler

I hate to be influenced. I like to be commanded or to be free. In both of these my own soul can take a clear and conscious part: for when I am free it must be for something that I really like, and not something that I am persuaded to pretend to like: and when I am commanded, it must be by something I know, like the Ten Commandments. But the thing called Pressure, of which the polite name is Persuasion, I always feel to be a hidden enemy. It is all a part of that worship of formlessness, and flowing tendencies, which is really the drift of cosmos back into chaos. I remember how I suddenly recoiled in youth from the influence of Matthew Arnold (who said many things very well worth saying) when he told me that God was "a stream of tendency." Since then I have hated tendencies: and liked to know where I was going and go there--or refuse.

G.K.'s Weekly, Aug. 18, 1928.

IN 1932, WHEN Gilbert had been in the Church just ten years and Frances six, my husband and I met them at the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. They were staying at the Vice-Regal Lodge and were very happy in that gathering of the Catholic world brought about by the Congress. It was this thought of the potential of the faith for a unity the League of Nations could not achieve--only dogma is strong enough to unite mankind--that gave its title to the book Christendom in Dublin.

In the crowd that thronged to that great gathering he saw Democracy. Its orderliness was more than a mere organisation: it was Self-determination of the People. "A whole mob, what many would call a whole rabble, was doing exactly what it wanted; and what it wanted was to be Christian." The mind of that crowd was stretched over the centuries as the faint sound of St. Patrick's bell that had been silent so many centuries was heard in Phoenix Park at the Consecration of the Mass: it was stretched over the earth as the people of the earth gathered into one place which had become for the time Rome or the Christian Centre.

During the Congress an Eastern priest accosted G.K. with praise of his writings. His own mind full of the great ideas of Christendom and the Faith, he felt a huge disproportion in the allusion to himself. And when later the priest asked to be photographed at his side it flashed through G.K.'s mind that he had heard in the East that an idiot was supposed to bring luck. This sort of humorous yet sincere intellectual humility startles us in the same kind of way as does the spiritual humility of the saints. We have to accept it in the same kind of way--without in the least understanding it, but simply because we cannot fail to see it.

But the world could fail even to see it. It could and did fail in imagining a mind so absorbed in the contemplation of Infinite Greatness that its own pin-point littleness became an axiom: rather it seemed an affectation--none the less an affectation and much the less pardonable because the laughter was directed against others as well as against himself.

There is an old mediaeval story of a tumbler who, converted and become a monk, found himself inapt at the offices of Choir and Scriptorium so he went before a statue of Our Lady and there played all his tricks. Quite exhausted at last he looked up at the statue and said, "Lady, this is a choice performance." There is more than a touch of Our Lady's tumbler in Gilbert. He knew he could give in his own fashion a choice performance, but meeting a priest come from a far land where he had reconciled a hitherto schismatic group with the great body of the Catholic Church, who could forgive sins and offer the Holy Sacrifice, he truly felt "something disproportionate in finding one's own trivial trade, or tricks of the trade, amid the far-reaching revelations of such a trysting-place of all the tribes of men."*

[* Christendom in Dublin, p. 35.]

His awe and reverence for priests was, says Father Rice, enormous. "He would carefully weigh their opinion however fatuous." His comment on the bad statues and fripperies which so many Catholics find a trial was: "It shows the wisdom of the Church. The whole thing is so terrific that if people did not have these let-downs they would go mad."

Yet it may have been a fear of excess of this special let-down that made him reluctant to go to Lourdes. Lisieux he never liked but he was, Dorothy says, fascinated by Lourdes when she persuaded him to go. He went several times to the torch-light procession and he said as he had said in Dublin, "This is the only real League of Nations."

The thing he liked best in Dublin was the spontaneous outburst of little altars and amateur decorations in the poorest quarters of the city. The story he loved to tell was that of the old woman who said when on the last day the clouds looked threatening: "Well, if it rains now He will have brought it on Himself."

The year of the Congress two other books were published: Sidelights on New London and Newer York, already discussed, and Chaucer. The books contrast agreeably: one throwing the ideal against the real of his own day, the other evoking his ideal from the past. The Chaucer was much criticised--chiefly because he was not a Chaucer scholar. As a matter of fact the notion of his writing this book did not originate with Chesterton but with Richard de la Mare who had projected a series of essays called "The Poets on the Poets." This developed, still at his suggestion, into a literary biography of Chaucer. But in any event G.K. had all his life combatted the notion that only a scholar should write on such themes. He stood resolutely for the rights of the amateur: yet I think the scholar might well start off with some exasperation on reading that if Chaucer had been called the Father of English poetry, so had "an obscure Anglo-Saxon like Caedmon," whose writing was "not in that sense poetry and not in any sense English." It is a curious example of one of the faults Chesterton himself most hated--overlooking something because it was too big: something too that he had realised in an earlier work--for Caedmon spoke the language of Alfred the Great.

In a brilliant garnering of the fruits of her scholarship--Word Hoard--Margaret Williams has quoted Chesterton's Alfred as a stirring expression of the significance of the spiritual conquest of England by Christianity. In the same book she shows how superficial is the view which believes that the English language was a creation of the Norman Conquest. The struggle, she says "between the English and French tongues lasted for some three hundred years, until the two finally blended into a unified language, basically Teutonic, richly romantic. The English spirit emerged predominant by a moral victory over its conqueror. . . ."*

[* Word Hoard by Margaret Williams, p. 4.]

No one would wish that Chesterton should have ignored the immense debt owed by our language to the French tributary that so enriched its main stream, but it seems strange that in his hospitable mind, in which Alfred's England held so large a place, he should not have found room for an appreciation of the Saxon structure of Chaucer and for all that makes him unmistakably one in a line of which Caedmon was the first great poet. In this book, only his debt to France is stressed, because England is to be thought of as part of Europe--and the part she is a part of is apparently France!

Yet what excellent things there are in the book:

The great poet exists to show the small man how great he is. . . .

The great poet is alone strong enough to measure that broken strength we call the weakness of man.

The real vice of the Victorians was that they regarded history as a story that ended well because it ended with the Victorians. They turned all human records into one three-volume novel; and were quite sure that they themselves were the third volume.

He quotes Troilus and Cressida on "The Christian majesty of the mystery of marriage":

Any man who really understands it does not see a Greek King sitting on an ivory throne, nor a feudal lord sitting on a faldstool but God in a primordial garden, granting the most gigantic of the joys of the children of men.

When we talk of wild poetry, we sometimes forget the parallel of wild flowers. They exist to show that a thing may be more modest and delicate for being wild.

Romance was a strange by-product of Religion; all the more because Religion, through some of its representatives may have regretted having produced it. . . . Even the Church, as imperfectly represented on its human side, contrived to inspire even what it had denounced, and transformed even what it had abandoned.

The best chapter is the last: The Moral of the Story--and that moral is: "That no man should desert that [Catholic] civilisation. It can cure itself but those who leave it cannot cure it. Not Nestorius, nor Mahomet, nor Calvin, nor Lenin have cured, nor will cure the real evils of Christendom; for the severed hand does not heal the whole body."

Healing must come from a recovery of the norm, of the balance, of the equilibrium that mediaeval philosophy and culture were always seeking. "The meaning of Aquinas is that mediaevalism was always seeking a centre of gravity. The meaning of Chaucer is that, when found, it was always a centre of gaiety. . . ."

The name of Aquinas thus introduced on almost the last page of this book shows Chesterton's mind already busy on the next and perhaps most important book of his life: St. Thomas Aquinas.

"Great news this," wrote Shaw to Frances, "about the Divine Doctor. I have been preaching for years that intellect is a passion that will finally become the most ecstatic of all the passions; and I have cherished Thomas as a most praiseworthy creature for being my forerunner on this point."

When we were told that Gilbert was writing a book on St. Thomas and that we might have the American rights, my husband felt a faint quiver of apprehension. Was Chesterton for once undertaking a task beyond his knowledge? Such masses of research had recently been done on St. Thomas by experts of such high standing and he could not possibly have read it all. Nor should we have been entirely reassured had we heard what Dorothy Collins told us later concerning the writing of it.

He began by rapidly dictating to Dorothy about half the book. So far he had consulted no authorities but at this stage he said to her:

"I want you to go to London and get me some books."

"What books?" asked Dorothy.

"I don't know," said G.K.

She wrote therefore to Father O'Connor and from him got a list of classic and more recent books on St. Thomas. G.K. "flipped them rapidly through," which is, says Dorothy, the only way she ever saw him read, and then dictated to her the rest of his own book without referring to them again. There are no marks on any of them except a little sketch of St. Thomas which was drawn in the margin opposite a description of the affair, which G.K. so vividly dramatises, of Siger of Brabant.

Had we known all this we should have been asking ourselves even more definitely: What will the experts say? Of the verdict of the greatest of them we were not long left in doubt. Etienne Gilson, who has given two of the most famous of philosophical lecture series--the Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen and the William James Lectures at Harvard--had begun his admiration for Chesterton with Greybeards at Play and had thought Orthodoxy "the best piece of apologetic the century had produced." When St. Thomas appeared he said to a friend of mine "Chesterton makes one despair. I have been studying St. Thomas all my life and I could never have written such a book." After Gilbert's death, asked to give an appreciation, he returned to the same topic--

I consider it as being without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for such an achievement. Everybody will no doubt admit that it is a "clever" book, but the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty years in studying St. Thomas Aquinas, and who, perhaps, have themselves published two or three volumes on the subject, cannot fail to perceive that the so-called "wit" of Chesterton has put their scholarship to shame. He has guessed all that which they had tried to demonstrate, and he has said all that which they were more or less clumsily attempting to express in academic formulas. Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed; he was deep because he was right; and he could not help being right; but he could not either help being modest and charitable, so he left it to those who could understand him to know that he was right, and deep; to the others, he apologized for being right, and he made up for being deep by being witty. That is all they can see of him.*

[* Chesterton, by Cyril Clemens, pp. 150-151.]

In joining the Church Chesterton had found like all converts, from St. Paul to Cardinal Newman, that he had come into the land of liberty and especially of intellectual liberty. "Conversion," he said, "calls on a man to stretch his mind, as a man awakening from sleep may stretch his arms and legs."*

[* Well and Shallows, p. 130.]

I suppose one of the reasons why the surrounding world finds it hard to receive this statement from a convert is that he has only to look around him to see so many Catholics wrapped in slumbers as placid as the next man's. To this very real difficulty, and to all its implications, Chesterton unfortunately seldom adverted. To the scandal wrought by evil Catholics, historical or contemporary, he was not blind--he summarised one element in the Reformation conflict:

Bad men who had no right to their right reason Good men who had good reason to be wrong.

But I wish that with his rare insight into minds he had analysed us average Catholics. He might have startled us awake by explaining to non-Catholics how those who know such Truths and feed upon such Food can yet appear so dull and lifeless. Anyhow, whether the fault lie in part with us or entirely with the world at large, certain it is that in that world a convert is always expected to justify not merely his beliefs but his sincerity in continuing to hold them. I wonder if the Pharisees said of St. Paul that they were sure he really wanted to return to his old allegiance as some said it of Newman, or spoke as Arnold Bennett did when he accused Chesterton of being Modernist in his secret thoughts? Were St. Paul's epistles an Apologia pro Vita Sua?

An Apologia does not of course mean an apology but a justification, and the ground on which justification was sometimes demanded amused Gilbert rather than annoying him. Playing the Parlour Game which consists of guessing at what point in an article on hydraulics, elegiacs or neo-Platonism Dean Inge will burst into his daily attack on the Church, he wrote:

The Dean of St. Paul's got to business, in a paragraph in the second half of his article, in which he unveiled to his readers all the horrors of a quotation from Newman; a very shocking and shameful passage in which the degraded apostate says that he is happy in his religion, and in being surrounded by the things of his religion; that he likes to have objects that have been blessed by the holy and beloved, that there is a sense of being protected by prayers, sacramentals and so on; and that happiness of this sort satisfies the soul. The Dean, having given us this one ghastly glimpse of the Cardinal's spiritual condition, drops the curtain with a groan and says it is Paganism. How different from the Christian orthodoxy of Plotinus!*

[* The Thing, pp. 156-7.]

This playful, not to say frivolous, tone was fresh cause of annoyance to those who were apt to be annoyed. It is easier to understand their objection than the opposite one: that he became dull and prosy after he joined the Church (or alternatively after he left Fleet Street for Beaconsfield). The only real difficulty about his later work arises from the riot of his high spirits. In his own style I must say there are moments when even I want to read the Riot Act. And those who admire him less feel this more keenly. Bad puns, they say, wild and sometimes ill-mannered jokes are perhaps pardonable in youth but in middle age they are inexcusable. The complainants against The Thing are in substance the complainants against Orthodoxy grown more vehement with the passage of years.

The idea had been adumbrated of calling one of his books: Joking Apart and only rejected because of the fear that if he said he was not joking everyone would be quite certain that he was. This greatly amused G.K. and he began the book (it actually appeared as The Well and the Shallows) with "An Apology for Buffoons." After defending the human instinct of punning he remarked that "many moderns suffer from the disease of the suppressed pun." They are actuated even in their thinking by merely verbal association.

I for one greatly prefer the sort of frivolity that is thrown to the surface like froth to the sort of frivolity that festers under the surface like slime. To pelt an enemy with a foolish pun or two will never do him any grave injustice; the firework is obviously a firework and not a deadly fire. It may be playing to the gallery, but even the gallery knows it is only playing.*

[* Well and Shallows, pp. 11-12.]

Such playing was a necessity if the gallery, i.e. all the people, were to be made to listen; if the things you were thinking about were important to them as well as to yourself: if the ideas were more important than the dignity or reputation of the person who uttered them. In this book Gilbert sketched briefly one side of his reason for feeling these ideas of paramount importance for everybody. "My Six Conversions" concerned reasons given him by the world that would have made him become a Catholic if he were not one already.

He had been brought up to treasure liberty and in his boyhood the world had seemed freer than the Church. Today in a world of Fascism, Communism and Bureaucracy the Church alone offered a reasoned liberty. He had been brought up to reverence certain ideals of purity: today they were laughed at everywhere but in the Church. The "sure conclusions" of Science that had stood foursquare in his boyhood had become like a dissolving view. Liberalism had abdicated when the people of Spain freely chose the Church and English Liberals defended the forcing upon them of a minority rule. "There are no Fascists; there are no Socialists; there are no Liberals; there are no Parliamentarians. There is the one supremely inspiring and irritating institution in the world and there are its enemies." Above all, he felt increasingly, as time went on that those who left the Faith did not get Freedom but merely Fashion; that there was something ironic in the name the atheists chose when they called themselves Secularists. By definition they had tied themselves to the fashion of this world that passeth away.

These six conversions then were what the world would have forced upon him: the Church as an alternative to a continually worsening civilisation. While he hated the Utopias of the Futurists and while he accepted the Christian view of life as a probation he felt too that life today was abnormally degraded and unhappy.

There is a sense in which men may be made normally happy; but there is another sense in which we may truly say, without undue paradox, that what they want is to get back to their normal unhappiness. At present they are suffering from an utterly abnormal unhappiness. They have got all the tragic elements essential to the human lot to contend with; time and death and bereavement and unrequited affection and dissatisfaction with themselves. But they have not got the elements of consolation and encouragement that ought normally to renew their hopes or restore their self-respect. They have not got vision or conviction, or the mastery of their work, or the loyalty of their household, or any form of human dignity. Even the latest Utopians, the last lingering representatives of that fated and unfortunate race, do not really promise the modern man that he shall do anything, or own anything, or in any effectual fashion be anything. They only promise that, if he keeps his eyes open, he will see something; he will see the Universal Trust or the World State or Lord Melchett coming in the clouds in glory. But the modern man cannot even keep his eyes open. He is too weary with toil and a long succession of unsuccessful Utopias. He has fallen asleep.*

[* G.K.'s Weekly, October 20, 1928.]

Chesterton demanded urgently that the worldlings who had failed to make the world workable should abdicate. "The organic thing called religion has in fact the organs that take hold on life. It can feed where the fastidious doubter finds no food; it can reproduce where the solitary sceptic boasts of being barren." In short, in religion alone was Darwin justified, for Catholicism was the "spiritual Survival of the Fittest."*

[* Well and Shallows, p. 82.]

If these Six Conversions are read without the balancing of something deeper they have the superficial look that belongs of necessity to Apologetics. Some essays in The Well and the Shallows, most of The Thing, Christendom in Dublin, and above all, The Queen of Seven Swords give us that deeper quieter thinking when the mind is meditating upon the great mysteries of the faith.

Only very occasionally is it possible to glimpse beneath Gilbert's reserve, but such glimpses are illuminating. Father Walker, who prepared him for his First Communion, writes, "It was one of the most happy duties I had ever to perform. . . . That he was perfectly well aware of the immensity of the Real Presence on the morning of his First Communion, can be gathered from the fact that he was covered with perspiration when he actually received Our Lord. When I was congratulating him he said, 'I have spent the happiest hour of my life.'"

Yet he went but seldom to Holy Communion, and an unfinished letter to Father Walker gives the reason. "The trouble with me is that I am much too frightened of that tremendous Reality on the altar. I have not grown up with it and it is too much for me. I think I am morbid; but I want to be told so by authority."

And in Christendom in Dublin, he says: "The word Eucharist is but a verbal symbol, we might say a vague verbal mask, for something so tremendous that the assertion and the denial of it have alike seemed a blasphemy; a blasphemy that has shaken the world with the earthquake of two thousand years."

I have heard it said that in these later years Gilbert's writing became obscure, and I think it is partly true. Only partly, for the old clarity is still there except when he is dealing with matters almost too deep for human speech. He wrote in The Thing:

A thinking man can think himself deeper and deeper into Catholicism . . . the great mysteries like the Blessed Trinity or the Blessed Sacrament are the starting-point for trains of thought . . . stimulating, subtle and even individual. . . . To accept the Logos as a truth is to be in the atmosphere of the absolute, not only with St. John the Evangelist, but with Plato and all the great mystics of the world. . . . To exalt the Mass is to enter into a magnificent world of metaphysical ideas, illuminating all the relations of matter and mind, of flesh and spirit, of the most impersonal abstractions as well as the most personal affections. . . . Even what are called the fine doctrinal distinctions are not dull. They are like the finest operations of surgery; separating nerve from nerve but giving life. It is easy enough to flatten out everything around for miles with dynamite if our only object is to give death. But just as the physiologist is dealing with living tissues so the theologian is dealing with living ideas; and if he draws a line between them it is naturally a very fine line.

If there appears a contradiction in the picture of Chesterton the philosopher pondering on the Logos and Chesterton the child offering trinkets to Our Lady, we may remember the Eternal Wisdom "playing in the world, playing before God always" whose delight is to be with the children of men.

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