G-K CHESTERTON
A CRITIC AL STUDY- BY
JULIUS WEST
G. K. CHESTERTON
UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME:
W. B. YEATS
BY FORREST REID
J. M. SYNGE
BY P. P. HOWE
HENRY JAMES
BY FORD MADOX HUEFFER
HENRIK IBSEN
BY R. ELLIS ROBERTS
THOMAS HARDY
BY LASCELLES ABEHCROMBIE
BERNARD SHAW
BY P. P. HOWE
WALTER PATER
BY EDWARD THOMAS
WALT WHITMAN
BY BASIL DE SELINCOURI
SAMUEL BUTLER
BY GILBERT CANNAN
A. C. SWINBURNE
BY EDWARD THOMAS
GEORGE GISS1NG
BY FRANK SWINNERTON
R. L. STEVENSON
BY FRANK SWINNERTON
RUDYARD KIPLING
BY CYRIL FALLS
WILLIAM MORRIS
BY JOHN DRINKWATER
ROBERT BRIDGES
BY F. E. BRETT YOUNG
FYODOR DOSTOIEVSKY
BY J. MlDDLETON MURRY
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
BY UNA TAYLOR
G. K. CHESTERTON
A CRITICAL STUDY
BY
JULIUS WEST
LONDON
MARTIN SECKER
NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET
ADELPHI
MCMXV
I HAVE to express my gratitude to Messrs. Burns and Gates,
Messrs. Methuen and Co., and Mr. Martin Seeker for their
kind permission to quote from works by Mr. G. K. Chesterton
published by them. I have also to express my qualified
thanks to Mr. John Lane for his conditional permission to
quote from books by the same author published by him.
My thanks are further due, for a similar reason, to Mr.
Chesterton himself.
TO
J. C. SQUIRE
CONTENTS
CHARTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY 11
II. THE ROMANCER 23
III. THE MAKER OF MAGIC 59
IV. THE CRITIC OF LARGE THINGS 76
V. THE HUMORIST AND THE POET 91
VI. THE RELIGION OF A DEBATER 109
VII. THE POLITICIAN WHO COULD NOT
TELL THE TIME 136
VIII. A DECADENT OF SORTS 163
BIBLIOGRAPHY 185
INTRODUCTORY
THE habit, to which we are so much addicted,
of writing books about other people who have
written books, will probably be a source of
intense discomfort to its practitioners in the
twenty-first century. Like the rest of their
kind, they will pin their ambition to the pos
sibility of indulging in epigram at the expense
of their contemporaries. In order to lead up
to the achievement of this desire they will
have to work in the nineteenth century and
the twentieth. Between the two they will
find an obstacle of some terror. The eighteen
nineties will lie in their path, blocking the
way like an unhealthy moat, which some
myopes might almost mistake for an aquarium.
All manner of queer fish may be discerned in
these unclear waters.
To drop the metaphor, our historians will
find themselves confronted by a startling
change. The great Victorians write no longer,
but are succeeded by eccentrics. There is
11
G. K. CHESTERTON
Kipling, undoubtedly the most gifted of them
all, but not everybody s darling for all that.
There is that prolific trio of best-sellers,
Mrs. Humphry Ward, Miss Marie Corelli, and
Mr. Hall Caine. There is Oscar Wilde, who
has a vast reputation on the Continent, but
never succeeded in convincing the British that
he was much more than a compromise between
a joke and a smell. There is the whole Yellow
Book team, who never succeeded in convincing
anybody. The economic basis of authorship
had been shaken by the abolition of the three-
volume novel. The intellectual basis had been
lulled to sleep by that hotchpotch of conven
tion and largeness that we call the Victorian
Era. Literature began to be an effort to ex
press the inexpressible, resulting in outraged
grammar and many dots. . . .
English literature at the end of the last
century stood in sore need of some of the
elementary virtues. If obviousness and sim
plicity are liable to be overdone, they are not
so deadly in their after-effects as the bizarre
and the extravagant. The literary movement
of the eighteen nineties was like a strong
stimulant given to a patient dying of old age.
Its results were energetic, but the energy was
convulsive. We should laugh if we saw a man
apparently dancing in mid-air until we noticed
12
INTRODUCTORY
the rope about his neck. It is impossible to
account for the success of the Yellow Book
school and its congeners save on the assump
tion that the rope was, generally speaking,
invisible.
In this Year of Grace, 1915, we are still too
close to the eighteen nineties, still too liable
to be influenced by their ways, to be able to
speak for posterity and to pronounce the final
judgment upon those evil years. It is possible
that the critics of the twenty-first century, as
they turn over the musty pages of the Yellow
Book, will ejaculate with feeling : " Good God,
what a dull time these people must have had !
On the whole it is probable that this will be
their verdict. They will detect the dullness
behind the mechanical brilliancy of Oscar
Wilde, and recognize the strange hues of the
whole ^Esthetic Movement as the garments of
men who could not, or would not see. There
is really no rational alternative before our
critics of the next century ; if the men of the
eighteen nineties, and the queer things they
gave us, were not the products of an intense
boredom, if, in strict point of fact, Wilde,
Beardsley, Davidson, Hankin, Dowson, and
Lionel Johnson were men who rollicked in the
warm sunshine of the late Victorian period,
then the suicide, drunkenness and vice with
13
G. K. CHESTERTON
which they were afflicted is surely the strangest
phenomenon in the history of human nature.
To many people, those years actually were
dull.
The years from 1885 to 1898 were like the hours of
afternoon in a rich house with large rooms ; the
hours before teatime. They believed in nothing
except good manners ; and the essence of good
manners is to conceal a yawn. A yawn may be
denned as a silent yell.
So says Chesterton, yawning prodigiously.
One may even go farther, and declare that
in those dark days a yawn was the true sign
of intelligence. It is no mere coincidence that
the two cleverest literary debutants of that
last decade, Mr. Max Beerbohm and the sub
ject of this essay, both stepped on the stage
making a pretty exhibition of boredom. When
the first of these published, in 1896, being
then twenty-four years old, his Works of Max
Beerbohm he murmured in the preface, I
shall write no more. Already I begin to feel
myself a trifle outmoded. . . . Younger men,
with months of activity before them . . . have
pressed forward . . . Cedo junioribus"
So too, when Chesterton produced his first
book, four years later, he called it Greybeards
at Play : Literature and Art for Old Gentlemen,
and the dedication contained this verse :
14
INTRODUCTORY
Now we are old and wise and grey,
And shaky at the knees ;
Now is the true time to delight
In picture books like these.
The joke would have been pointless in any
other age. In 1900, directed against the
crapulous exoticism of contemporary litera
ture, it was an antidote, childhood was being
used as a medicine against an assumed attack
of second childhood. The attack began with
nonsense rhymes and pictures. It was a com
plete success from the very first. There is this
important difference between the writer of
nonsense verses and their illustrator ; the
former must let himself go as much as he can,
the latter must hold himself in. In Greybeards
at Play, Chesterton took the bit between his
teeth, and bolted faster than Edward Lear had
ever done. The antitheses of such verses as
the following are irresistible :
For me, as Mr. Wordsworth says,
The duties shine like stars ;
I formed my uncle s character,
Decreasing his cigars.
Or
The Shopmen, when their souls were still,
Declined to open shops
And cooks recorded frames of mind,
In sad and subtle chops.
The drawings which accompanied these gems,
it may be added, were such as the verses
15
G. K. CHESTERTON
deserved. They exhibit a joyous inconsistency,
the disproportion which is the essence of
parody combined with the accuracy which is
the sine qua non of satire.
About a month after Chesterton had pro
duced his statement of his extreme senility
(the actual words of the affidavit are
I am, I think I have remarked, [he had not],
Terrifically old.)
he published another little book, The Wild
Knight and Other Poems, as evidence of his
youth. For some years past he had occasion
ally written more or less topical verses which
appeared in The Outlook and the defunct
Speaker. Greybeards at Play was, after all,
merely an elaborate sneer at the boredom of
a decade ; the second book was a more definite
attack upon some points of its creeds and an
assertion of the principles which mattered
most.
There is one sin : to call a green leaf grey,
Whereat the sun in heaven shuddereth.
There is one blasphemy : for death to pray,
For God alone knoweth the praise of death.
Or again (The World s Lover)
I stood and spoke a blasphemy
" Behold the summer leaves are green."
It was a defence of reality, crying for ven
geance upon the realists. The word realism
16
INTRODUCTORY
had come to be the trade-mark of Zola and
his followers, especially of Mr. George Moore,
who made a sacrifice of nine obvious, clean
and unsinkable aspects of life so as to concen
trate upon the submersible tenth. Chesterton
came out with his defence of the common man,
of the streets
Where shift in strange democracy
The million masks of God,
the grass, and all the little things of life,
things in general, for our subject, alone
among modern poets, is not afraid to use the
word. If on one occasion he can merely
. . . feel vaguely thankful to the vast
Stupidity of things,
on another he will speak of
The whole divine democracy of things,
a line which is a challenge to the unbeliever,
a statement of a political creed which is the
outgrowth of a religious faith.
The same year Chesterton formally stepped
into the ranks of journalism and joined the
staff of The Daily News. He had scribbled
poems since he had been a boy at St. Paul s
School. In the years following he had watched
other people working at the Slade, while he
had gone on scribbling. Then he had begun
to do little odd jobs of art criticism and
B 17
G. K. CHESTERTON
reviewing for The Bookman and put in occa
sional appearances in the statelier columns of
The Speaker. Then came the Boer War, which
made G. K. Chesterton lose his temper but
find his soul. In 1900 The Daily News passed
into new hands the hands of G.K.C. s friends.
And until 1913, when the causes he had come
to uphold were just diametrically opposed to
the causes the victorious Liberal Party had
adopted, every Saturday morning s issue of
that paper contained an article by him, while
often enough there appeared signed reviews
and poems. The situation was absurd enough.
The Daily News was the organ of Noncon
formists, and G.K.C. preached orthodoxy to
them. It advocated temperance, and G.K.C.
advocated beer. At first this was sufficiently
amusing, and nobody minded much. But
before Chesterton severed his connection with
the paper, its readers had come to expect a
weekly article that almost invariably con
tained an attack upon one of their pet beliefs,
and often enough had to be corrected by a
leader on the same page. But the Chesterton
of 1900 was a spokesman of the Liberalism of
his day, independent, net the intractable
monster who scoffed, a few years later, at all
the parties in the State.
At this point one is reminded of Watts-Dun-
18
INTRODUCTORY
ton s definition of the two kinds of humour in
The Renascence of Wonder : " While in the
case of relative humour that which amuses the
humorist is the incongruity of some departure
from the laws of convention, in the case of
absolute humour it is the incongruity of some
departure from the normal as fixed by nature
herself." We have our doubts as to the
general application of this definition : but it
applies so well to Chesterton that it might
almost have come off his study walls. What
made a series of more than six hundred articles
by him acceptable to The Daily News was just
the skilful handling of " the laws of conven
tion," and the normal as fixed by nature
herself." On the theory enunciated by Watts-
Dunton, everything except the perfect average
is absolutely funny, and the perfect average,
of course, is generally an incommensurable
quantity. Chesterton carefully made it his
business to present the eccentricity I use the
word in its literal sense of most things, and
the humour followed in accordance with the
above definition. The method was simple.
Chesterton invented some grotesque situation,
some hypothesis which was glaringly absurd.
He then placed it in an abrupt juxtaposition
with the normal, instead of working from the
normal to the actual, in the usual manner.
19
G. K. CHESTERTON
Just as the reader was beginning to protest
against the reversal of his accustomed values,
G.K.C. would strip the grotesque of a few
inessentials, and, lo ! a parable. A few strokes
of irony and wit, an epigram or two infallibly
placed where it would distract attention from
a weak point in the argument, and the thing
was complete. By such means Chesterton
developed the use of a veritable Excalibur of
controversy, a tool of great might in political
journalism. These methods, pursued a few
years longer, taught him a craftsmanship he
could employ for purely romantic ends. How
he employed it, and the opinions which he
sought to uphold by its means will be the
subjects of the following chapters. Chesterton
sallied forth like a Crusader against the politi
cal and literary Turks who had unjustly come
into possession of a part of the heritage of a
Christian people. We must not forget that
the leading characteristic of a Crusader is his
power of invigorating, which he applies im
partially to virtues and to vices. There is a
great difference between a Crusader and a
Christian, which is not commonly realized.
The latter attempts to show his love for his
enemy by abolishing his unchristianness, the
former by abolishing him altogether. Although
the two methods are apt to give curiously
20
INTRODUCTORY
similar results, the distinction between a
Crusader and a Christian is radical and will be
considered in greater detail in the course of
this study. This study does not profess to be
biographical, and only the essential facts of
Chesterton s life need be given here. These
are, that he was born in London in 1873, is the
son of a West London estate agent who is also
an artist and a children s poet in a small but
charming way, is married and has children.
Perhaps it is more necessary to record the fact
that he is greatly read by the youth of his
day, that he comes in for much amused toler
ance, that, generally speaking, he is not recog
nized as a great or courageous thinker, even
by those people who understand his views
well enough to dissent from them entirely, and
that he is regarded less as a stylist, than as the
owner of a trick of style. These are the false
beliefs that I seek to combat. The last may
be disposed of summarily. When an author s
style is completely sincere, and completely
part of him, it has this characteristic ; it is
almost impossible to imitate. Nobody has
ever successfully parodied Shakespeare, for
example ; there are not even any good paro
dies of Mr. Shaw. And Chesterton remains
unparodied ; even Mr. Max Beerbohm s effort
in A Christmas Garland rings false. His style
21
G. K. CHESTERTON
is individual. He has not " played the sedulous
ape."
But, on the other hand, it is not proposed
to acquit Chesterton of all the charges brought
against him. The average human being is
partly a prig and partly a saint ; and some
times men are so glad to get rid of a prig that
they are ready to call him a saint Simon
Sty lit es, for example. And it is not suggested
that the author of the remark, " There are
only three things that women do not under
stand. They are Liberty, Equality, Frater
nity," is not a prig, for a demonstration that
he is a complete gentleman would obviously
leave other matters of importance incon
veniently crowded out. We are confronted
with a figure of some significance in these
times. He represents what has been called
in other spheres than his " the anti-intellec-
tualist reaction." We must answer the ques
tions ; to what extent does he represent mere
unqualified reaction ? What are his qualifi
cations as a craftsman ? What, after all, has
he done ?
And we begin with his romances.
22
II
THE ROMANCER
IN spite of Chesterton s liberal production of
books, it is not altogether simple to classify
them into " periods," in the manner beloved
of the critic, nor even to sort them out accord
ing to subjects. G.K.C. can (and generally
does) inscribe an Essay on the Nature of
Religion into his novels, together with other
confusing ingredients to such an extent that
most readers would consider it pure pedantry
on the part of anybody to insist that a Ches-
tertonian romance need differ appreciably from
a Chestertonian essay, poem, or criticism. That
a book by G.K.C. should describe itself as a
novel means little more than that its original
purchasing price was four shillings and six
pence. It might also contain passages of love,
hate, and other human emotions, but then again,
it might not. But one thing it would contain,
and that is war. G.K.C. would be pugnacious,
even when there was nothing to fight. His
characters would wage their wars, even when
23
G. K. CHESTERTON
the bone of contention mattered as little as
the handle of an old toothbrush. That, we
should say, is the first factor in the formula
of the Chestertonian romance and all the rest
are the inventor s secret. Imprimis, a body
of men and an idea, and the rest must follow,
if only the idea be big enough for a man to
fight about, or if need be, even to make him
self ridiculous about.
In The Napoleon of Notting Hill we have this
view of romance stated in a manner entirely
typical of its author. King Auberon and the
Provost of Notting Hill, Adam Wayne, are
speaking. The latter says :
" I know of a magic wand, but it is a wand that
only one or two may rightly use, and only seldom.
It is a fairy wand of great fear, stronger than those
who use it often frightful, often wicked to use. But
whatever is touched with it is never again wholly
common ; whatever is touched with it takes a magic
from outside the world. If I touch, with this fairy
wand, the railways and the roads of Notting Hill,
men will love them, and be afraid of them for ever."
" What the devil are you talking about ? " asked
the King.
" It has made mean landscapes magnificent, and
hovels outlast cathedrals," went on the madman.
" Why should it not make lamp-posts fairer than
Greek lamps, and an omnibus-ride like a painted
ship ? The touch of it is the finger of a strange
perfection."
24
THE ROMANCER
" What is your wand ? cried the King, im
patiently.
" There it is," said Wayne ; and pointed to the
floor, where his sword lay flat and shining.
If all the dragons of old romance were looked
upon the fiction of our day, the result, one
would imagine, would be something like that
of a Chestertonian novel. But the dragons
are dead and converted into poor fossil ich-
thyosauruses, incapable of biting the timidest
damsel or the most corpulent knight that ever
came out of the Stock Exchange. That is the
tragedy of G.K.C. s ideas, but it is also his
opportunity. " Man is a creature who lives
not upon bread alone, but principally by
catch- words," says Stevenson. Give me my
dragons," says G.K.C. in effect, " and I will
give you your catch- words. You may have
them in any one of a hundred different ways.
I will drop them on you when you least expect
them, and their disguises will outrange all
those known to Scotland Yard and to Drury
Lane combined. You may have catastrophes
and comets and camels, if you will, but you
will certainly have your catch- words."
The first of Chesterton s novels, in order of
their publication, is The Napoleon of Notting
Hill (1904). This is extravagance itself;
fiction in the sense only that the events never
25
G. K. CHESTERTON
happened and never could have happened.
The scene is placed in London, the time, about
A.D. 1984. " This ere progress, it keeps on
goin on," somebody remarks in one of the
novels of Mr. H. G. Wells. But it never goes
on as the prophets said it would, and conse
quently England in those days does not greatly
differ from the England of to-day. There have
been changes, of course. Kings are now chosen
in alphabetical rotation, and the choice falls
upon a civil servant, Auberon Quin by name.
Now Quin has a sense of humour, of absolute
humour, as the Watts-Dunton definition already
cited would have it called. He has two bosom
friends who are also civil servants and whose
humour is of the official variety, and whose
outlook upon life is that of a Times leader.
Quin s first official act is the publication of a
proclamation ordering every London borough
to build itself city walls, with gates to be closed
at sunset, and to become possessed of Provosts
in mediaeval attire, with guards of halberdiers.
From his throne he attends to some of the
picturesque details of the scheme, and enjoys
the joke in silence. But after a few years of
this a young man named Adam Wayne be
comes Provost of Notting Hill, and to him his
borough, and more especially the little street
in which he has spent his life, are things of
26
THE ROMANCER
immense importance. Rather than allow that
street to make way for a new thoroughfare,
Wayne rallies his halberdiers to the defence
of their borough. The Provosts of North
Kensington and South Kensington, of West
Kensington and Bayswater, rally their guards
too, and attack Notting Hill, purposing to
clear Wayne out of the way and to break down
the offending street. Wayne is surrounded at
night but converts defeat into victory by
seizing the offices of a Gas Company and turn
ing off the street lights. The next day he is
besieged in his own street. By a sudden sortie
he and his army escape to Campden Hill.
Here a great battle rages for many hours, while
one of the opposing Provosts gathers a large
army for a final attack. At last Wayne and
the remnants of his men are hopelessly out
numbered, but once more he turns defeat into
victory. He threatens, unless the opposing
forces instantly surrender, to open the great
reservoir and flood the whole of Notting Hill.
The allied generals surrender, and the Empire
of Notting Hill comes into being. Twenty
years later the spirit of Adam Wayne has gone
beyond his own city walls. London is a wild
romance, a mass of cities filled with citizens
of great pride. But the Empire, which has
been the Nazareth of the new idea, has waxed
27
G. K. CHESTERTON
fat and kicked. In righteous anger the other
boroughs attack it, and win, because their
cause is just. King Auberon, a recruit in
Wayne s army, falls with his leader in the
great battle of Kensington Gardens. But they
recover in the morning.
It was all a joke," says the King in apology.
" No," says Wayne ; " we are two lobes of the same
brain . . . you, the humorist ... I, the fanatic.
. . . You have a halberd and I have a sword, let us
start our wanderings over the world. For we are its
two essentials."
So ends the story.
Consider the preposterous elements of the
book. A London with blue horse- buses.
Bloodthirsty battles chiefly fought with hal
berds. A King who acts as a war correspon
dent and parodies G. W. Stevens. It is pre
posterous because it is romantic and we are
not used to romance. But to Chaucer let us
say it would have appeared preposterous
because he could not have realized the initial
premises. Before such a book the average
reader is helpless. His scale of values is
knocked out of working order by the very first
page, almost by the very first sentence.
(" The human race, to which so many of my
readers belong, has been playing at children s
games from the beginning, and will probably
28
THE ROMANCER
do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the
few people who grow up.") The absence of a
love affair will deprive him of the only " human
interest he can be really sure of. The Ches-
tertonian idiom, above all, will soon lead him
to expect nothing, because he can never get
any idea of what he is to receive, and will
bring him to a proper submissiveness. The
later stages are simple. The reader will wonder
why it never before occurred to him that area-
railings are very like spears, and that a distant
tramcar may at night distinctly resemble a
dragon. He may travel far, once his imagina
tion has been started on these lines. When
romantic possibilities have once shed a glow
on the offices of the Gas Light and Coke Com
pany and on the erections of the Metropolitan
Water Board, the rest of life may well seem
filled with wonder and wild desires.
Chesterton may be held to have invented a
new species of detective story the sort that
has no crime, no criminal, and a detective
whose processes are transcendental. The Club
of Queer Trades is the first batch of such stories.
The Man who was Thursday is another specimen
of some length. More recently, Chesterton has
repeated the type in some of the Father Brown
stories. In The Club of Queer Trades, the trans
cendental detective is Basil Grant, to describe
29
G. K. CHESTERTON
whom with accuracy is difficult, because of
his author s inconsistencies. Basil Grant, for
instance, is " a man who scarcely stirred out
of his attic," yet it would appear elsewhere
that he walked abroad often enough. The
essentials of this unprecedented detective are,
however, sufficiently tangible. He had been a
K.C. and a judge. He had left the Bench
because it annoyed him, and because he held
the very human but not legitimate belief that
some criminals would be better off with a trip
to the seaside than with a sentence of imprison
ment. After his retirement from public life
he stuck to his old trade as the judge of a
Voluntary Criminal Court. " My criminals
were tried for the faults which really make
social life impossible. They were tried before
me for selfishness, or for an impossible vanity,
or for scandal-mongering, or for stinginess to
guests or dependents." It is regrettable that
Chesterton does not grant us a glimpse of this
fascinating tribunal at work. However, it is
Grant s job, on the strength of which he becomes
the president and founder of the C.Q.T. Club
of Queer Trades. Among the members of this
Club are a gentleman who runs an Adventure
and Romance Agency for supplying thrills to
the bourgeois, two Professional Detainers, and
an Agent for Arboreal Villas, who lets off a
30
THE ROMANCER
variety of birds nest. The way in which these
people go about their curious tasks invariably
suggests a crime to Rupert Grant, Basil s
amateur detective brother, whereupon Basil
has to intervene to put matters right. The
author does not appear to have been struck
by the inconsistency of setting Basil to work
to ferret out the doings of his fellow club-
members. The book is, in fact, full of joyous
inconsistencies. The Agent for Arboreal Villas
is clearly unqualified for the membership of
the Club. Professor Chadd has no business
there either. He is elected on the strength of
having invented a language expressed by
dancing, but it appears that he is really an
employee in the Asiatic MSS. Department
of the British Museum. Things are extremely
absurd in The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old
Lady. At the instigation of Rupert, who has
heard sighs of pain coming out of a South
Kensington basement, Basil, Rupert, and the
man who tells the story, break into the house
and violently assault those whom they meet.
Basil sprang up with dancing eyes, and with three
blows like battering-rams knocked the footman into
a cocked hat. Then he sprang on top of Burrows,
with one antimacassar in his hand and another in his
teeth, and bound him hand and foot almost before he
knew clearly that his head had struck the floor. Then
Basil sprang at Greenwood . . . etc. etc.
31
G. K. CHESTERTON
There is a good deal more like this. Having
taken the citadel and captured the defenders
(as Csesar might say), Basil and company reach
the sighing lady of the basement. But she
refuses to be released. Whereupon Basil
explains his own queer trade, and that the
lady is voluntarily undergoing a sentence for
backbiting. No explanation is vouchsafed of
the strange behaviour of Basil Grant in attack
ing men who, as he knew, were doing nothing
they should not. Presumably it was due to
a Chestertonian theory that there should be
at least one good physical fight in each book.
It will be seen that The Club of Queer Trades
tends to curl up somewhat (quite literally, in
the sense that the end comes almost where the
beginning ought to be) when it receives heavy
and serious treatment. I should therefore
explain that this serious treatment has been
given under protest, and that its primary
intention has been to deal with those well-
meaning critics who believe that Chesterton
can write fiction, in the ordinary sense of the
word. His own excellent definition of ficti
tious narrative (in The Victorian Age in Litera
ture) is that essentially " the story is told . . .
for the sake of some study of the difference
between human beings." This alone is enough
to exculpate him of the charge of writing
32
THE ROMANCER
novels. The Chestertonian short story is also
in its way unique. If we applied the methods
of the Higher Criticism to the story just
described, we might base all manner of odd
theories upon the defeat (inter olios) of
Burrows, a big and burly youth, by Basil
Grant, aged sixty at the very least, and armed
with antimacassars. But there is no necessity.
If Chesterton invents a fantastic world, full of
V
fantastic people who speak Chestertonese,
then he is quite entitled to waive any trifling
conventions which hinder the liberty of his
subjects. As already pointed out, such is his
humour. The only disadvantage, as some
body once complained of the Arabian Nights,
is that one is apt to lose one s interest in a
hero who is liable at any moment to turn into
a camel. None of Chesterton s heroes do, as a
matter of fact, become camels, but I would
nevertheless strongly advise any young woman
about to marry one of them to take out an
insurance policy against unforeseen trans
formations.
Although it appears that a few reviewers
went to the length of reading the whole of
The Man who was Thursday (1908), it is obvious
by their subsequent guesswork that they did
not notice the second part of the title, which
is, very simply, A Nightmare. The story takes
c 33
G. K. CHESTERTON
its name from the Supreme Council of Anar
chists, which has seven members, named after
the days of the week. Sunday is the Chairman.
The others, one after the other, turn out to be
detectives. Syme, the nearest approach to the
what might be called the hero, is a poet whom
mysterious hands thrust into an Anarchists
meeting, at which he is elected to fill the
vacancy caused by the death of last Thursday.
A little earlier other mysterious hands had
taken him into a dark room in Scotland Yard
where the voice of an unseen man had told him
that henceforth he was a member of the anti-
anarchist corps, a new body which was to
deal with the new anarchists not the com
paratively harmless people who threw bombs,
but the intellectual anarchist. We say that
the most dangerous criminal now is the en
tirely lawless modern philosopher," somebody
explains to him. The bewildered Syme walks
straight into further bewilderments, as, one
after the other, the week-days of the committee
are revealed. But who is Sunday ? Chesterton
makes no reply. It was he who in a darkened
room of Scotland Yard had enrolled the
detectives. He is the Nightmare of the story.
The first few chapters are perfectly straight
forward, and lifelike to the extent of describing
personal details in a somewhat exceptional
34
THE ROMANCER
manner for Chesterton. But, gradually, wilder
and wilder things begin to happen until, at
last, Syme wakes up.
The trouble about The Man who was Thurs
day is not its incomprehensibility, but its
author s gradual decline of interest in the
book as it lengthened out. It begins excel
lently. There is real humour and a good deal
of it in the earlier stages of Syme. And there
are passages like this one on the " lawless
modern philosopher
55
Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are
essentially moral men ; my heart goes out to them.
. . . Thieves respect property. They merely wish
the property to become their property that they may
more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike
property as property ; they wish to destroy the very
idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect
marriage, or they would not go through the highly
ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy.
But philosophers despise marriage as marriage.
But his amiable flow of paradox soon runs out.
The end of the book is just a wild whirl, a
nightmare with a touch of the cinematograph.
People chase one another, in one instance they
quite literally chase themselves. And the end
ing has all the effect of a damaged film that
cannot be stopped, on the large blank spaces
of which some idiot has been drawing absurd
35
G. K. CHESTERTON
pictures which appear on the screen, to the
confusion of the story. One remembers the
immense and dominating figure of Sunday,
only because the description of him reads very
much like a description of Chesterton himself.
But if the person is recognizable, the person
ality remains deliberately incomprehensible.
He is just an outline in space, who rode down
Albany Street on an elephant abducted from
the Zoological Gardens, and who spoke sadly
to his guests when they had run their last race
against him.
Until recent years the word mysticism was
sufficiently true to its derivation to imply
mystery, the relation of God to man. But
since the cheaper sort of journalist seized hold
of the unhappy word, its demoralization has
been complete. It now indicates, generally
speaking, an intellectual defect which ex
presses itself in a literary quality one can only
call woolliness. There is a genuine mysticism,
expressed in Blake s lines :
To see the world in a grain of sand
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
And there is a spurious mysticism, meaning
less rubbish of which Rossetti s Sister Helen
36
THE ROMANCER
is a specimen. What could be more idiotic
than the verse :
" He has made a sign and called Halloo !
Sister Helen,
And he says that he would speak with you."
"Oh tell him I fear the frozen dew,
Little brother."
(0 Mother, Mary Mother,
Why laughs she thus between Hell and Heaven ?)
The trouble about the latter variety is its
extreme simplicity. Anybody with the gift of
being able to make lines scan and rhyme can
produce similar effects in a similar way. Hence
the enormous temptation exercised by this
form of mysticism gone wrong. There is a
naughty little story of a little girl, relating to
her mother the mishaps of the family coal
merchant, as seen from the dining-room win
dow. He slipped on a piece of orange-peel,
the child had explained. " And what happened
then ? " Why, mummy, he sat down on the
pavement and talked about God." Chesterton
(and he is not alone in this respect) behaves
exactly like this coal-heaver. When he is at
a loss, he talks about God. In each case one
is given to suspect that the invocation is due
to a temporarily overworked imagination.
This leads us to The Ball and the Cross (1906).
In The Man who was Thursday, when the
37
G. K. CHESTERTON
author had tired of his story, he brought in
the universe at large. But its successor is
dominated by God, and discussions on him by
beings celestial, terrestrial, and merely infernal.
And yet The Ball and the Cross is in many
respects Chesterton s greatest novel. The first
few chapters are things of joy. There is much
said in them about religion, but it is all sincere
and bracing. The first chapter consists, in
the main, of a dialogue on religion, between
Professor Lucifer, the inventor and the driver
of an eccentric airship, and Father Michael, a
theologian acquired by the Professor in Western
Bulgaria. As the airship dives into the ball
and the cross of Saint Paul s Cathedral, its
passengers naturally find themselves taking a
deep interest in the cross, considered as symbol
and anchor. Lucifer plumps for the ball, the
symbol of all that is rational and united. The
cross
" is the conflict of two hostile lines, of irreconcilable
direction. . . . The very shape of it is a contradiction
in terms." Michael replies, " But we like contra
dictions in terms. Man is a contradiction in terms ;
he is a beast whose superiority to other beasts consists
in having fallen."
Defeated on points, Lucifer leaves the Father
clinging literally to the cross and flies away.
Michael meets a policeman on the upper gallery
38
THE ROMANCER
and is conducted downwards. The scene
changes to Ludgate Circus, but Michael is no
longer in the centre of it. A Scot named Turn-
bull keeps a shop here, apparently in the
endeavour to counterbalance the influence of
St. Paul s across the way. He is an atheist,
selling atheist literature, editing an atheist
paper. Another Scot arrives, young Evan
Maclan, straight from the Highlands. Unlike
the habitual Londoner, Maclan takes the little
shop seriously. In its window he sees a copy
of The Atheist, the leading article of which
contains an insult to the Virgin Mary. Maclan
thereupon puts his stick through the window.
Turnbull comes out, there is a scuffle, and
both are arrested and taken before a Dicken-
sian magistrate. The sketch of Mr. Cumber
land Vane is very pleasing : it is clear that the
author knew what he was copying. Lord
Melbourne is alleged to have said, " No one
has more respect for the Christian religion
than I have ; but really, when it comes to in
truding it into private life ..." Mr. Vane
felt much the same way when he heard
Mac Ian s simple explanation: He is my
enemy. He is the enemy of God." He said,
It is most undesirable that things of that
sort should be spoken about a in public,
and in an ordinary Court of Justice. Religion
39
G. K. CHESTERTON
is a too personal a matter to be mentioned
in such a place." However, Maclan is fined.
After which he and Turnbull, as men of honour,
buy themselves swords and proceed to fight
the matter out. With interruptions due to
argument and the police, the fight lasts several
weeks. Turnbull and Maclan fight in the back
garden of the man from whom they bought
the swords, 1 until the police intervene. They
escape the police and gain the Northern
Heights of London, and fight once more, with
a madness renewed and stimulated by the
peace-making efforts of a stray and silly
Tolstoy an. Then the police come again, and
are once more outdistanced. This time mortal
combat is postponed on account of the san-
guinolence of a casual lunatic who worshipped
blood to such a nauseating extent that the
duellists deferred operations in order to chase
him into a pond. Then follows an intermin
able dialogue, paradoxical, thoroughly Shavian,
while the only two men in England to whom
God literally is a matter of life and death find
that they begin to regard the slaughter of one
by the other as an unpleasant duty. Again
1 Chesterton jeers at this man s " Scottish " ancestry because his
surname was Gordon and he was obviously a Jew. The author is
probably unaware that there are large numbers of Jews bearing
that name in Russia. If he had made his Jew call himself
Macpherson, the case would have been different.
40
THE ROMANCER
they fight and are separated. They are motored
by a lady to the Hampshire coast, and there
they fight on the sands until the rising tide
cuts them off. An empty boat turns up to
rescue them from drowning ; in it they reach
one of the Channel Islands. Again they fight,
and again the police come. They escape from
them, but remain on the island in disguise,
and make themselves an opportunity to pick
a quarrel and so fight a duel upon a matter
in keeping with local prejudice. But Turn-
bull has fallen in love. His irritatingly
calm and beautiful devotee argues with him
on religion until he is driven to cast off his
disguise. Then the police are on his tracks
again. A lunatic lends Turnbull and Maclan
his yacht and so the chase continues. But by
this time Chesterton is getting just a trifle
bored. He realizes that no matter how many
adventures his heroes get into, or how many
paradoxes they fling down each other s throats,
the end of the story, the final inevitable end
which alone makes a series of rapid adventures
worth while, is not even on the horizon. An
element of that spurious mysticism already
described invades the book. It begins to be
clear that Chesterton is trying to drag in a
moral somehow, if need be, by the hair of its
head. The two yacht ers spend two weeks of
41
G. K. CHESTERTON
geographical perplexity and come to a desert
island. They land, but think it wiser, on the
whole, to postpone fighting until they have
finished the champagne and cigars with which
their vessel is liberally stored. This takes a
week. Just as they are about to begin the
definitive duel they discover that they are not
upon a desert island at all, they are near
Margate. And the police are there, too. So
once more they are chased. They land in a
large garden in front of an old gentleman who
assures them that he is God. He turns out to
be a lunatic, and the place an asylum. There
follows a characteristic piece of that abuse of
science for which Chesterton has never at
tempted to suggest a substitute. Maclan and
Turnbull find themselves prisoners, unable to
get out. Then they dream dreams. Each sees
himself in an aeroplane flying over Fleet Street
and Ludgate Hill, where a battle is raging.
But the woolly element is very pronounced by
this time, and we can make neither head nor
tail of these dreams and the conversations
which accompany them. The duellists are
imprisoned for a month in horrible cells. They
find their way into the garden, and are told
that all England is now in the hands of the
alienists, by a new Act of Parliament : this
has been the only possible manner of putting
42
THE ROMANCER
a stop to the revolution started by Maclan
and Turnbull. These two find all the persons
they had met with during their odyssey,
packed away in the asylum, which is a won
derful place worked by petroleum machinery.
But the matter-of-fact grocer from the Channel
Island, regarding the whole affair as an in
fringement of the Rights of Man, sets the
petroleum alight. Michael, the celestial being
who had appeared in the first chapter and
disappeared at the end of it, is dragged out
of a cell in an imbecile condition. Lucifer
comes down in his airship to collect the doctors,
whose bodies he drops out, a little later on.
The buildings vanish in the flames, the keepers
bolt, the inmates talk about their souls.
Maclan is reunited to the lady of the Channel
Island, and the story ends.
When a stone has been tossed into a pond,
the ripples gradually and symmetrically grow
smaller. A Chesterton novel is like an adven
turous voyage of discovery, which begins on
smooth water and is made with the object of
finding the causes of the ripples. As ripple
succeeds ripple or chapter follows chapter-
so we have to keep a tighter hold on such
tangible things as are within our reach. Finally
we reach the centre of the excitement and are
either sucked into a whirlpool, or hit on the
43
G. K. CHESTERTON
head with a stone. When we recover conscious
ness we feebly remember we have had a thrill
ing journey and that we had started out with
a misapprehension of the quality of Chester-
tonian fiction. A man whose memory is
normal should be able to give an accurate
synopsis of a novel six months after he has
read it. But I should be greatly surprised if
any reader of The Ball and the Cross could tell
exactly what it was all about, within a month
or two of reading it. The discontinuity of it
makes one difficulty ; the substitution of
paradox for incident makes another. Yet it
is difficult to avoid the conviction that this
novel will survive its day and the generation
that begot it. If it was Chesterton s endeavour
(as one is bound to suspect) to show that the
triumph of atheism would lead to the triumph
of a callous and inhuman body of scientists,
then he has failed miserably. But if he was
attempting to prove that the uncertainties of
religion were trivial things when compared
with the uncertainties of atheism, then the
verdict must be reversed. The dialogues on
religion contained in The Ball and the Cross
are alone enough and more than enough to
place it among the few books on religion which
could be safely placed in the hands of an
atheist or an agnostic with an intelligence.
44
THE ROMANCER
If we consider Manalive (1912) now we shall
be departing from strict chronological order,
as it was preceded by The Innocence of Father
Brown. It will, however, be more satisfactory
to take the two Father Brown books together.
In the first of these and Manalive, a change
can be distinctly felt. It is not a simple
weakening of the power of employing instru
ments, such as befell Ibsen when, after writing
The Lady from the Sea, he could no longer keep
his symbols and his characters apart. It is a
more subtle change, a combination of several
small changes, which cannot be studied fairly
in relation only to one side of Chesterton s
work. In the last chapter an attempt will be
made to analyze these, for the present I can
only indicate some of the fallings-off noticeable
in Manalive, and leave it at that. Chesterton s
previous romances were not constructed, the
reader may have gathered, with that minute
attention to detail which makes some modern
novels read like the report of a newly promoted
detective. But a man may do such things and
yet be considered spotless. Shakespeare, after
all, went astray on several points of history
and geography. The authors of the Old
Testament talked about "the hare that cheweth
the cud." And, if any reader should fail to
see the application of these instances to
45
G. K. CHESTERTON
modern fiction, I can only recommend him to
read Vanity Fair and find out how many
children had the Rev. Bute Crawley, and what
were their names. No, the trouble with
Manalive is not in its casual, happy-go-lucky
construction. It is rather in a certain lack of
ease, a tendency to exaggerate effects, a con
tinual stirring up of inconsiderable points.
But let us come to the story.
There is a boarding-house situated on one
of the summits of the Northern Heights. A
great wind happens, and a large man, quite
literally, blows in. His name is Innocent
Smith and he is naturally considered insane.
But he is really almost excessively sane. His
presence makes life at the house a sort of
holiday for the inmates, male and female.
Smith is about to run for a special licence in
order to marry one of the women in the house,
and the other boarders have just paired off
when a telegram posted by one of the ladies
in a misapprehension brings two lunacy experts
around in a cab. Smith adds to the excite
ment of the moment by putting a couple of
bullets through a doctor s hat.
Now Smith is what somebody calls " an
allegorical practical joker." But Chesterton
gives a better description of him than
that.
46
THE ROMANCER
He s comic just because he s so startlingly common
place. Don t you know what it is to be in all one
family circle, with aunts and uncles, when a school
boy comes home for the holidays ? That bag there
on the cab is only a schoolboy s hamper. This tree
here in the garden is only the sort of tree that any
schoolboy would have climbed. Yes, that s the sort
of thing that has haunted us all about him, the thing
we could never fit a word to. Whether he is my old
schoolfellow or no, at least he is all my old school
fellows. He is the endless bun-eating, ball-throwing
animal that we have all been.
Innocent has an idea about every few
minutes, but so far as the book is concerned
we need mention only one of them. That one
is local autonomy for Beacon House. This
may be recommended as a game to be played
en famille. Establish a High Court, call in a
legal member, and get a constitution. The
rest will be very hilarious. The legal member
of the Beacon House menage is an Irish ex-
barrister, one Michael Moon, who plans as
follows :
The High Court of Beacon, he declared, was a
splendid example of our free and sensible constitu
tion. It had been founded by King John in defiance
of Magna Carta, and now held absolute power over
windmills, wine and spirit licences, ladies travelling
in Turkey, revision of sentences for dog-stealing and
parricide, as well as anything whatever that hap
pened in the town of Market Bosworth. The whole
47
G. K. CHESTERTON
hundred and nine seneschals of the High Court of
Beacon met about once in every four centuries ; but
in the intervals (as Mr. Moon explained) the whole
powers of the institution were vested in Mrs. Duke
[the landlady]. Tossed about among the rest of the
company, however, the High Court did not retain its
historical and legal seriousness, but was used some
what unscrupulously in a riot of domestic detail. If
somebody spilt the Worcester Sauce on the table
cloth, he was quite sure it was a rite without which
the sittings and findings of the Court would be
invalid ; and if somebody wanted a window to
remain shut, he \vould suddenly remember that none
but the third son of the lord of the manor of Penge
had the right to open it. They even went the length
of making arrests and conducting criminal inquiries.
Before this tribunal Innocent Smith is
brought. One alienist is an American, who is
quite prepared to acknowledge its jurisdiction,
being by reason of his nationality not easily
daunted by mere constitutional queerness.
The other doctor, being the prosecutor and a
boarder, has no choice in the matter. The
doctors, it should be added, have brought with
them a mass of documentary evidence, incrimi
nating Smith.
How the defence has time to collect this
evidence is not explained, but this is just one
of the all-important details which do not
matter in the Chestertonian plane. Smith is
48
THE ROMANCER
tried for attempted murder. The prosecution
fails because the evidence shows Smith to be
a first-class shot, who has on occasion fired life
into people by frightening them. Then he is
tried for burglary on the basis of a clergyman s
letter from which it is gathered that Smith
tried one night to induce him and another
cleric to enter a house burglariously in the
dark. This charge breaks down because a
letter is produced from the other clergyman
who did actually accompany Smith over house
tops and down through trap-doors into his own
house ! Smith, it is explained, is in the habit
of keeping himself awake to the romance and
wonder of everyday existence by such courses.
From the second letter, however, it appears
that there is a Mrs. Smith, so the next charge
is one of desertion and attempted bigamy. A
series of documents is produced, from persons
in France, Russia, China, and California re
counting conversations with Smith, a man
with a garden-rake, who left his house so that
he might find it, and at the end leapt over the
hedge into the garden where Mrs. Smith was
having tea. In the words of the servant " he
looked round at the garden and said, very loud
and strong : Oh, what a lovely place you ve
got, just as if he d never seen it before/ After
which the court proceeds to try Smith on
D 49
G. K. CHESTERTON
a polygamy charge. Documentary evidence
shows that Smith has at one time or another
married a Miss Green, a Miss Brown, a Miss
Black, just as he is now about to marry a Miss
Gray, Moon points out that these are all the
same lady. Innocent Smith has merely broken
the conventions, he has religiously kept the
commandments. He has burgled his own
house, and married his own wife. He has been
perfectly innocent, and therefore he has been
perfectly merry. Innocent is acquitted, and
the book ends.
In the course of Manalive, somebody says,
" Going right round the world is the shortest
way to where you are already." These are the
words of an overworked epigrammatist, and
upon them hangs the whole story. If Manalive
is amusing, it is because Chesterton has a style
which could make even a debilitated paradox
of great length seem amusing. The book has
a few gorgeous passages. Among the docu
ments read at the trial of Innocent Smith, for
example, is a statement made by a Trans-
Siberian station-master, which is a perfectly
exquisite burlesque at the expense of the
Russian intelligentsia. The whole series of
documents, in fact, are delightful bits of self-
expression on the part of a very varied team
of selves. While Chesterton is able to turn out
50
THE ROMANCER
such things we must be content to take the
page, and not the story, as his unit of work.
Manalive, by the way, is the first of the
author s stories in which women are repre
sented as talking to one another. Chesterton
seems extraordinarily shy with his feminine
characters. He is a little afraid of woman.
The average woman is a despot, the average
man is a serf." 1 Mrs. Innocent Smith s view
of men is in keeping with this peculiar notion.
4 At certain curious times they re just fit to
take care of us, and they re never fit to take
care of themselves." Smith is the Chester-
tonian Parsifal, just as Prince Muishkin is
Dostoievsky s.
The transcendental type of detective, first
sketched out in The Club of Queer Trades, is
developed more fully in the two Father Brown
books. In the little Roman priest who has
such a wonderful instinct for placing the
diseased spots in people s souls, we have
Chesterton s completest and most human crea
tion. Yet, with all their cleverness, and in
spite of the fact that from internal evidence it
is almost blatantly obvious that the author
enjoyed writing these stories, they bear marks
which put the books on a lower plane than
either The Napoleon of Notting Hill or The Ball
1 All Things Considered, p. 106.
51
G. K. CHESTERTON
and the Cross. In the latter book Chesterton
spoke of " the mere healthy and heathen horror
of the unclean ; the mere inhuman hatred of
the inhuman state of madness." His own
critical work had been a long protest against
the introduction of artificial horrors, a plea for
sanity and the exercise of sanity. But in The
Innocence of Father Brown these principles,
almost the fundamental ones of literary decency,
were put on the shelf. Chesterton s criminals
are lunatics, perhaps it is his belief that crime
and insanity are inseparable. But even if this
last supposition is correct, its approval would
not necessarily license the introduction of some
of the characters. There is Israel Gow, who
suffers from a peculiar mania which drives him
to collect gold from places seemly and un
seemly, even to the point of digging up a
corpse in order to extract the gold filling from
its teeth. There is the insane French Chief of
Police, who commits a murder and attempts
to disguise the body, and the nature of the
crime, by substituting the head of a guillotined
criminal for that of the victim. In another
story we have the picture of a cheerful teeto
taller who suffers from drink and suicidal
mania. There is also a doctor who kills a mad
poet, and a mad priest who drops a hammer
from the top of his church-tower upon his
52
THE ROMANCER
brother. Another story is about the loathsome
treachery of an English general. It is, of course,
difficult to write about crime without touching
on features which revolt the squeamish reader,
but it can be done, and it has been done, as in
the Sherlock Holmes stories. There are sub
jects about which one instinctively feels it is
not good to know too much. Sex, for example,
is one of them. Strindberg, Weininger, Mau
passant, Jules de Goncourt, knew too much
about sex, and they all went mad, although it
is usual to disguise the fact in the less familiar
terms of medical science. Madness itself is
another such subject. There are writers who
dwell on madness because they cannot help
themselves Strindberg, Edgar Allan Poe,
Gogol, and many others but they scarcely
produce the same nauseating sensation as the
sudden introduction of the note of insanity
into a hitherto normal setting. The harnessing
of the horror into which the discovery of in
sanity reacts is a favourite device of the feeble
craftsman, but it is illegitimate. It is abso
lutely opposed to those elementary canons of
good taste which decree that we may not jest
at the expense of certain things, either because
they are too sacred or not sacred enough. The
opposite of a decadent author is not neces
sarily a writer who attacks decadents. Many
53
G. K. CHESTERTON
decadents have attacked themselves, by com
mitting suicide, for example. The opposite of
a decadent author is one to whom decadent
ideas and imagery are alien, which is a very
different thing. For example, the whole story
The Wrong Shape is filled with decadent ideas ;
one is sure that Baudelaire would have en
tirely approved of it. It includes a decadent
poet, living in wildly Oriental surroundings,
attended by a Hindoo servant. Even the air
of the place is decadent ; Father Brown on
entering the house learns instinctively from it
that a crime is to be committed.
Considered purely as detective stories, these
cannot be granted a very good mark. There
is scarcely a story that has not a serious flaw
in it. A man Flambeau, of whom more later
-gains admittance to a small and select dinner
party and almost succeeds in stealing the silver,
by the device of turning up and pretending to
be a guest when among the waiters, and a
waiter when among the guests. But it is not
explained what he did during the first two
courses of that dinner, when he obviously had
to be either a waiter or a guest, and could not
keep up both parts, as when the guests were
arriving. Another man, a " Priest of Apollo,"
is worshipping the sun on the top of a sky-
scraping " block of offices in Westminster, while
54
THE ROMANCER
a woman falls down a lift-shaft and is killed.
Father Brown immediately concludes that the
priest is guilty of the murder because, had he
been unprepared, he would have started and
looked round at the scream and the crash of
the victim falling. But a man absorbed in
prayer on, let us say, a tenth floor, is, in point
of fact, quite unlikely to hear a crash in the
basement, or a scream even nearer to him.
But the most astonishing thing about The Eye
of Apollo is the staging. In order to provide
the essentials, Mr. Chesterton has to place " the
heiress of a crest and half a county, as well as
great wealth," who is blind, in a typist s
office ! The collocation is somewhat too singu
lar. One might go right through the Father
Brown stories in this manner. But, if the
reader wishes to draw the maximum of enjoy
ment out of them, he will do nothing of the
sort. He will believe, as fervently as Alfred
de Vigny, that L Idee C est Tout, and lay down
all petty regard for detail at the feet of Father
Brown. This little Roman cleric has listened
to so many confessions (he calls himself " a man
who does next to nothing but hear men s real
sins," but this seems to be excessive, even for
a Roman Catholic) that he is really well
acquainted with the human soul. He is also
extremely observant. And his greatest friend
55
G. K. CHESTERTON
is Flambeau, whom he once brings to judg
ment, twice hinders in crime, and thence
forward accompanies on detective expeditions.
The Innocence of Father Brown had a sequel,
The Wisdom of Father Brown, distinctly less
effective, as sequels always are, than the pre
decessor. But the underlying ideas are the
same. In the first place there is a deep detes
tation of " Science (whatever that is) and
the maintenance of the theory incarnate in
Father Brown, that he who can read the human
soul knows all things. The detestation of
science (of which, one gathers, Chesterton
knows nothing) is carried to the same absurd
length as in The Ball and the Cross. In the
very first story, Father Brown calls on a
criminologist ostensibly in order to consult
him, actually in order to show the unfortunate
man, who had retired from business fourteen
years ago, what an extraordinary fool he was.
The Father Brown of these stories moon
faced little man is a peculiar creation. No
other author would have taken the trouble to
excogitate him, and then treat him so badly.
As a detective he never gets a fair chance. He
is always on the spot when a murder is due to
be committed, generally speaking he is there
before time. When an absconding banker
commits suicide under peculiar circumstances
56
THE ROMANCER
in Italian mountains, when a French publicist
advertises himself by fighting duels with him
self (very nearly), when a murder is committed
in the dressing-room corridor of a theatre,
when a miser and blackmailer kills himself,
when a lunatic admiral attempts murder and
then commits suicide, when amid much in
coherence a Voodoo murder takes place, when
somebody tries to kill a colonel by playing on
his superstitions (and by other methods), and
when a gentleman commits suicide from envy,
Father Brown is always there. One might
almost interpret the Father Brown stories by
suggesting that their author had written them
in order to illustrate the sudden impetus given
to murder and suicide by the appearance of
a Roman priest.
Here we may suspend our reviews of Ches-
tertonian romance. There remains yet The
Flying Inn, which shall be duly considered
along with the other debris of its author. In
summing up, it may be said of Chesterton that
at his best he invented new possibilities of
romance and a new and hearty laugh. It may
be said of the decadents of the eighteen
nineties, that if their motto wasn t " Let s all
go bad," it should have been. So one may
say of Chesterton that if he has not selected
Let s all go mad " as a text, he should have
57
G. K. CHESTERTON
done. Madness, in the Chestertonian, what
ever it is in the pathological sense, is a defiance
of convention, a loosening of visible bonds in
order to show the strength of the invisible
ones ; perhaps, as savages are said to regard
lunatics with great respect, holding them to be
nearer the Deity than most, so Chesterton
believes of his own madmen. Innocent Smith,
of course, the simple fool, the blithering idiot,
is a truly wise man.
58
Ill
THE MAKER OF MAGIC
CHESTERTON S only play, Magic., was written
at the suggestion of Mr. Kenelm Foss and
produced by him in November, 1913, at the
Little Theatre, where it enjoyed a run of more
than one hundred performances. This charm
ing thing does not make one wish that Ches
terton was an habitual playwright, for one feels
that Magic was a sort of tank into which its
author s dramatic talents had been draining
for many years although, in actual fact,
Chesterton allowed newspaper interviewers to
learn that the play had been written in a very
short space of time. His religious ideas were
expressed in Magic with great neatness. Most
perhaps of all his works this is a quotable
production.
Patricia Carleon, a niece of the Duke, her
guardian, is in the habit of wandering about
his grounds seeing fairies. On the night when
her brother Morris is expected to return from
America she is having a solitary moonlight
59
G. K. CHESTERTON
stroll when she sees a Stranger, " a cloaked
figure with a pointed hood," which last almost
covers his face. She naturally asks him what
he is doing there. He replies, mapping out the
ground with his staff :
I have a hat, but not to wear ;
I have a sword, but not to slay ;
And ever in my bag I bear
A pack of cards, but not to play.
This, he tells her, is the language of fairies. He
tells her that fairies are not small things, but
quite the reverse. After a few sentences have
been spoken the prologue comes to an end,
and the curtain rises upon the scene of the
play, the drawing-room of the Duke. Here is
seated the Rev. Cyril Smith, a young clergy
man, an honest man and not an ass." To
him enters the Duke s Secretary, to tell him
the Duke is engaged at the moment, but will
be down shortly. He is followed by Dr. Grim-
thorpe, an elderly agnostic, the red lamp of
whose house can be seen through the open
French windows. Smith is erecting a model
public-house in the village, and has come to
ask the Duke for a contribution towards the
cost. Grimthorpe is getting up a league for
opposing the erection of the new public-house,
and has also come to the Duke for help. They
discover the nature of each other s errand.
60
THE MAKER OF MAGIC
Smith s case is, " How can the Church have a
right to make men fast if she does not allow
them to feast ? " ; Grimthorpe s, that alcohol
is not a food. The Duke s Secretary enters
and gives Smith a cheque for 50, then he
gives the Doctor another also for 50. This
is the first glimpse we have of the Duke s
eccentricity, an excessive impartiality based
on the theory that everybody " does a great
deal of good in his own way," and on sheer
absence of mind an absence which sometimes
is absolutely literal. The Doctor explains in
confidence to the Clergyman that there is some
thing wrong about the family of Patricia and
Morris, who are of Irish origin. . . ." They saw
fairies and things of that sort."
SMITH. And I suppose, to the medical mind, seeing
fairies means much the same as seeing snakes ?
DOCTOR. [With a sour smile.] Well, they saw
them in Ireland. I suppose it s quite correct to see
fairies in Ireland. It s like gambling at Monte Carlo.
It s quite respectable. But I do draw the line at their
seeing fairies in England. I do object to their bring
ing their ghosts and goblins and witches into the poor
Duke s own back garden and within a yard of my
own red lamp. It shows a lack of tact.
Patricia, moreover, wanders about the park
and the woods in the evenings. " Damp
evenings for choice. She calls it the Celtic
61
G. K. CHESTERTON
twilight. I ve no use for the Celtic twilight
myself. It has a tendency to get on the chest."
The Duke, annoyed by this love of fairies, has
blundered, in his usual way, on an absurd com
promise between the real and the ideal. A
conjuror is to come that very night. When
explanations have gone so far, the Duke at
last makes his entry. The stage directions tell
us that " in the present state of the peerage
it is necessary to explain that the Duke,
though an ass, is a gentleman." His thoughts
are the most casual on earth. He is always
being reminded of something or somebody
which has nothing to do with the case. As for
instance, " I saw the place you re putting up
. . . Mr. Smith. Very good work. Very good
work, indeed. Art for the people, eh ? I par
ticularly liked that woodwork over the west
door I m glad to see you re using the new
sort of graining . . . why, it all reminds one
of the French Revolution." After one or two
dissociations of this sort, the expected Morris
Carleon enters through the French window ;
he is rather young and excitable, and America
has overlaid the original Irishman. Morris
immediately asks for Patricia and is told that
she is wandering in the garden. The Duke
lets out that she sees fairies ; Morris raves a
bit about his sister being allowed out alone
62
THE MAKER OF MAGIC
with anything in the nature of a man, when
Patricia herself enters. She is in a slightly
exalted state ; she has just seen her fairy, him
of the pointed hood. Morris, of course, is
furious, not to say suspicious.
DOCTOR. [Putting his hand on MORRIS S shoulder.]
Come, you must allow a little more for poetry. We
can t all feed on nothing but petrol.
DUKE. Quite right, quite right. And being Irish,
don t you know, Celtic, as old Buffle used to* say,
charming songs, you know, about the Irish girl who
has a plaid shawl and a Banshee. [Sighs pro
foundly.] Poor old Gladstone ! [Silence.]
SMITH. [Speaking to DOCTOR.] I thought you
yourself considered the family superstition bad for
the health ?
DOCTOR. I consider a family superstition is better
for the health than a family quarrel.
A figure is seen to stand in front of the red
lamp, blotting it out for a moment. Patricia
calls to it, and the cloaked Stranger with the
pointed hood enters. Morris at once calls him
a fraud.
SMITH. [Quickly.] Pardon me, I do not fancy
that we know that . . .
MORRIS. I didn t know you parsons stuck up for
any fables but your own.
SMITH. I stick up for the thing every man has a
right to. Perhaps the only thing every man has a
right to.
63
G. K. CHESTERTON
MORRIS. And what is that ?
SMITH. The benefit of the doubt.
Morris returns to the attack. The Stranger
throws off his hood and reveals himself to the
Duke. He is the Conjuror, ready for the even
ing s performance. All laugh at this denoue
ment, except Patricia, between whom and the
Conjuror this bit of dialogue ensues :
STRANGER. [Very sadly.] I am very sorry I am
not a wizard.
PATRICIA. I wish you were a thief instead.
STRANGER. Have I committed a worse crime than
thieving ?
PATRICIA. You have committed the cruellest
crime, I think, that there is.
STRANGER. And what is the cruellest crime ?
PATRICIA. Stealing a child s toy.
STRANGER. And what have I stolen ?
PATRICIA. A fairy tale.
And the curtain falls upon the First Act.
An hour later the room is being prepared
for the performance. The Conjuror is setting
out his tricks, and the Duke is entangling him
and the Secretary in his peculiar conversation.
The following is characteristic :
THE SECRETARY. . . . The only other thing at all
urgent is the Militant Vegetarians.
DUKE. Ah ! The Militant Vegetarians ! You ve
64
THE MAKER OF MAGIC
heard of them, I m sure. Won t obey the law [to the
CONJUROR] so long as the Government serves out meat.
CONJUROR. Let them be comforted. There are a
good many people who don t get much meat.
DUKE. Well, well, I m bound to say they re very
enthusiastic. Advanced, too oh, certainly advanced.
Like Joan of Arc.
[Short silence, in which the CONJUROR stares at him.]
CONJUROR. Was Joan of Arc a Vegetarian ?
DUKE. Oh, well, it s a very high ideal, after all.
The Sacredness of Life, you know the Sacredness of
Life. [Shakes his head.] But they carry it too far.
They killed a policeman down in Kent.
This conversation goes on for some time,
while nothing in particular happens, except
that the audience feels very happy. The Duke
asks the Conjuror several questions, receiving
thoroughly Chestertonian answers. [" Are you
interested in modern progress ? " Yes. We
are interested in all tricks done by illusion."]
At last the Conjuror is left alone. Patricia
enters. He attempts to excuse himself for the
theft of the fairy tale. He has had a trouble
some life, and has never enjoyed " a holiday
in Fairyland." So, when he, with his hood up,
because of the slight rain, was surprised by
Patricia, as he was rehearsing his patter, and
taken for a fairy, he played up to her. Patricia
is inclined to forgive him, but the conversation
is interrupted by the entrance of Morris, in a
E 65
G. K. CHESTERTON
mood to be offensive. He examines the ap
paratus, proclaims the way it is worked, and
after a while breaks out into a frenzy of free
thought, asking the universe in general and
the Conjuror in particular for " that old
apparatus that turned rods into snakes." The
Clergyman and the Doctor enter, and the con
versation turns on religion, and then goes back
to the tricks. Morris is still extremely quarrel
some, and for the second time has to be quieted
down. The Conjuror is dignified, but cutting.
The whole scene has been, so far, a discussion
on Do Miracles Happen ? Smith makes out
a case in the affirmative, arguing from the
false to the true. Suppose, as Morris claims,
the " modern conjuring tricks are simply the
old miracles when they have once been found
out. . . . When we speak of things being
sham, we generally mean that they are imita
tions of things that are genuine." Morris gets
more and more excited, and continues to in
sult the Conjuror. At last he shouts ..." You ll
no more raise your Saints and Prophets from
the dead than you ll raise the Duke s great
grandfather to dance on that wall." At which
the Reynolds portrait in question sways slightly
from side to side. Morris turns furiously to the
Conjuror, accusing him of trickery. A chair
falls over, for no apparent cause, still further
66
THE MAKER OF MAGIC
exciting the youth. At last he blurts out a
challenge. The Doctor s red lamp is the lamp
of science. No power on earth could change
its colour. And the red light turns blue, for
a minute. Morris, absolutely puzzled, comes
literally to his wits end, and rushes out,
followed shortly afterwards by his sister and
the Doctor. The youth is put to bed, and left
in the care of Patricia, while the Doctor and
the Clergyman return to their argument. Smith
makes out a strong case for belief, for simple
faith, a case which sounds strangely, coming
from the lips of a clergyman of the Church
of England.
DOCTOR. Weren t there as many who believed
passionately in Apollo ?
SMITH. And what harm came of believing in
Apollo ? And what a mass of harm may have come
of not believing in Apollo ? Does it never strike you
that doubt can be a madness, as well be faith ? That
asking questions may be a disease, as well as pro
claiming doctrines ? You talk of religious mania !
Is there no such thing as irreligious mania ? Is there
no such thing in the house at this moment ?
DOCTOR. Then you think no one should question
at all ?
SMITH. [With passion, pointing to the next room.]
I think that is what comes of questioning ! Why can t
you leave the universe alone and let it mean what it
Irkes ? Why shouldn t the thunder be Jupiter ?
67
G. K. CHESTERTON
More men have made themselves silly by wondering
what the devil it was if it wasn t Jupiter.
DOCTOR. [Looking at him.] Do you believe in your
own religion ?
SMITH. [Returning the look equally steadily.] Sup
pose I don t : I should still be a fool to question it.
The child who doubts about Santa Claus has in
somnia. The child who believes has a good night s
rest.
DOCTOR. You are a Pragmatist.
SMITH. That is what the lawyers call vulgar abuse.
But I do appeal to practice. Here is a family over
which you tell me a mental calamity hovers. Here is
the boy who questions everything and a girl who
can believe anything. Upon whom has the curse
fallen ?
At this point the curtain was made to fall
on the Second Act. The Third and last Act
takes place in the same room a few hours later.
The Conjuror has packed his bag, and is going.
The Doctor has been sitting up with the
patient. Morris is in a more or less delirious
state, and is continually asking how the trick
was done. The Doctor believes that the ex
planation would satisfy the patient and would
probably help him to turn the corner. But the
Conjuror will not provide an explanation. He
has many reasons, the most practical of which
is that he would not be believed. The Duke
comes in and tries to make a business matter
68
THE MAKER OF MAGIC
of the secret, even to the extent of paying
2000 for it. Suddenly the Conjuror changes
his mind. He will tell them how the trick was
done, it was all very simple. "It is the sim
plest thing in the world. That is why you will
not laugh. ... I did it by magic." The
Doctor and the Duke are dumbfounded. Smith
intervenes ; he cannot accept the explanation.
The Conjuror lets himself go, now he is voicing
Chesterton s views. The clergyman who merely
believes in belief, as Smith does, will not do.
He must believe in a fact, which is far more
difficult.
CONJUROR. I say these things are supernatural.
I say this is done by a spirit. The doctor does not
believe me. He is an agnostic ; and he knows every
thing. The Duke does not believe me ; he cannot
believe anything so plain as a miracle. But what the
devil are you for, if you don t believe in a miracle ?
What does your coat mean if it doesn t mean that
there is such a thing as the supernatural ? What
does your cursed collar mean if it doesn t mean that
there is such a thing as a spirit ? [Exasperated.] Why
the devil do you dress up like that if you don t
believe in it ? [With violence.] Or perhaps you don t
believe in devils ?
SMITH. I believe . . . [After a pause.] I wish I
could believe.
CONJUROR. Yes. I wish I could disbelieve.
Here Patricia enters. She wants to speak
69
G. K. CHESTERTON
to the Conjuror, with whom she is left alone.
A little love scene takes place : rather the
result o two slightly sentimental and rather
tired persons of different sexes being left alone
than anything else. But they return to
realities, with an effort. Patricia, too, wants
to know how the trick was done, in order to
tell her brother. He tells her, but she is of
the world which cannot believe in devils, even
although it may manage to accept fairies as
an inevitable adjunct to landscape scenery by
moonlight. In order to convince her the Con
juror tells her how he fell, how after dabbling
in spiritualism he found he had lost control
over himself. But he had resisted the temp
tation to make the devils his servants, until
the impudence of Morris had made him lose
his temper. Then he goes out into the garden
to see if he can find some explanation to give
Morris. The Duke, Smith, the Doctor, and
the Secretary drift into the room, which is now
tenanted by something impalpable but hor
rible. The Conjuror returns and clears the air
with an exorcism. He has invented an ex
planation, which he goes out to give to Morris.
Patricia announces that her brother immedi
ately took a turn for the better. The Conjuror
refuses to repeat the explanation he gave
Morris, because if he did, " Half an hour after
70
THE MAKER OF MAGIC
I have left this house you will all be saying
how it was done." He turns to go.
PATRICIA. Our fairy tale has come to an end in the
only way a fairy tale can come to an end. The only
way a fairy tale can leave off being a fairy tale.
CONJUROR. I don t understand you.
PATRICIA. It has come true.
And the curtain falls for the last time.
No doubt Magic owed a great deal of its
success to the admirable production of Mr.
Kenelm Foss and the excellence of the cast.
Miss Grace Croft was surely the true Patricia.
Of the Duke of Mr. Fred Lewis it is difficult
to speak in terms other than superlative.
Those of my readers who have suffered the
misfortune of not having seen him, may gain
some idea of his execution of the part from the
illustrations to Mr. Belloc s novels. The Duke
was an extraordinarily good likeness of the
Duke of Battersea, as portrayed by Chesterton,
with rather more than a touch of Mr. Asquith
superadded. Mr. Fred Lewis, it may be stated,
gagged freely, introducing topical lines until
the play became a revue in little but without
injustice to the original. Several of those who
saw Magic came for a third, a fourth, even a
tenth time.
The Editor of The Dublin Review had the
happy idea of asking Chesterton to review
71
G. K. CHESTERTON
Magic. The result is too long to quote in full,
but it makes two important points which may
be extracted.
I will glide mercifully over the more glaring errors,
which the critics have overlooked as that no Irish
man could become so complete a cad merely by going
to America that no young lady would walk about in
the rain so soon before it was necessary to dress for
dinner that no young man, however American,
could run round a Duke s grounds in the time between
one bad epigram and another that Dukes never
allow the middle classes to encroach on their gardens
so as to permit a doctor s lamp to be seen there that
no sister, however eccentric, could conduct a slightly
frivolous love-scene with a brother going mad in the
next room that the Secretary disappears half-way
through the play without explaining himself ; and
the conjuror disappears at the end, with almost equal
dignity. . . .
By the exercise of that knowledge of all human
hearts which descends on any man (however un
worthy) the moment he is a dramatic critic, I per
ceive that the author of Magic originally wrote it as
a short story. It is a bad play, because it was a good
short story. In a short story of mystery, as in a
Sherlock Holmes story, the author and the hero (or
villain) keep the reader out of the secret. . . . But the
drama is built on that grander secrecy which was
called the Greek irony. In the drama, the audience
must know the truth when the actors do not know it.
That is where the drama is truly democratic : not
because the audience shouts, but because it knows
and is silent. Now I do quite seriously think it is a
72
THE MAKER OF MAGIC
weakness in a play like Magic that the audience is not
in the central secret from the start. Mr. G. S. Street
put the point with his usual unerring simplicity by
saying that he could not help feeling disappointed
with the Conjuror because he had hoped he would
turn into the Devil.
A few additions may easily be made to the
first batch of criticisms. Patricia s welcome
to her brother is not what a long-lost brother
might expect. There is really no satisfactory
reason for the Doctor s continued presence.
Patricia and Morris can only be half Irish by
blood, unless it is possible to become Irish by
residence. Why should the Conjuror rehearse
his patter out in the wet ? Surely the Duke s
house would contain a spare room ? Where
did the Conjuror go, at the end of the Third
Act, in the small hours of the morning ? And
so on.
But these are little things that do not matter
in an allegory. For in Magic " things are not
what they seem." The Duke is a modern man.
He is also the world, the flesh, and the devil.
He has no opinions, no positive religion, no
brain. He believes in his own tolerance, which
is merely his fatuousness. He follows the line
of least resistance, and makes a virtue of it.
He sits on the fence, but he will never come
off. The Clergyman is the church of to-day,
73
G. K. CHESTERTON
preaching the supernatural, but unwilling to
recognize its existence at close quarters. As
somebody says somewhere in The Wisdom of
Father Brown, " If a miracle happened in your
office, you d have to hush it up, now so many
bishops are atheists." The Doctor is a less
typical figure. He is the inconsistencies of
science, kindly but with little joy of life, and
extremely Chestertonian, which is to say un
scientific. Morris is the younger generation,
obsessed with business and getting on, and
intellectually incapable of facing a religious
fact. Patricia is the Chestertonian good woman,
too essentially domestic to be ever fundamen
tally disturbed. The Conjuror, if not the Devil,
is at any rate that inexplicable element in all
life which most people do not see.
Nevertheless there is a flaw in Magic which
really is serious. If I were to see, let us say,
a sheet of newspaper flying down the road
against the wind, and a friend of mine, who
happened to be a gifted liar, told me that he
was directing the paper by means of spirits,
I should still be justified in believing that
another explanation could be possible. I
should say, " My dear friend, your explanation
is romantic ; I believe in spirits but I do not
believe in you. I prefer to think that there
is an air-current going the wrong way." That
74
THE MAKER OF MAGIC
is the matter with the Conjuror s explanation.
Why should the Clergyman or the Doctor-
professional sceptics, both of them, which is
to say seekers after truth take the word of
a professional deceiver as necessarily true ?
There are two works which the critic of
Chesterton must take into special considera
tion. They are Magic and Orthodoxy ; and it
may be said that the former is a dramatized
version of the latter. The two together are
a great work, striking at the very roots of
disbelief. In a sense Chesterton pays the
atheist a very high compliment. He does what
the atheist is generally too lazy to do for him
self ; he takes his substitute for religion and
systematizes it into something like a philosophy.
Then he examines it as a whole. And he finds
that atheism is dogma in its extremist form,
that it embodies a multitude of superstitions,
and that it is actually continually adding to
their number. Such are the reasons of the
greatness of Magic. The play, one feels, must
remain unique, for the prolegomenon cannot
be rewritten while the philosophy is unchanged.
And Chesterton has deliberately chosen the
word orthodox to apply to himself, and he has
not limited its meaning.
75
IV
THE
CRITIC OF LARGE THINGS
THE heroes of Chesterton s romances have an
adipose diathesis, as a reviewer has been heard
to remark. In plain English they tend towards
largeness. Flambeau, Sunday, and Innocent
Smith are big men. Chesterton, as we have
seen, pays little attention to his women char
acters, but whenever it comes to pass that he
must introduce a heroine, he colours her as
emphatically as the nature of things will
admit. Which is to say that the Chestertonian
heroine always has red hair.
These things are symptomatic of their author.
He loves robustness. If he cannot produce it,
he can at any rate affect it, or attack its enemies.
This worship of the robust is the fundamental
fact of all Chesterton s work. For example, as
a critic of letters he confines himself almost
exclusively to the big men. When Mr. Bernard
Shaw a few years ago committed what Ches
terton imagined was an attack upon Shake-
76
CRITIC OF LARGE THINGS
speare, he almost instinctively rushed to the
defence in the columns of The Daily News.
When Chesterton wrote a little book on The
Victorian Age in Literature he showed no
interest in the smaller people. The book, it
may be urged in his excuse, was a little one,
but we feel that even if it was not, Chesterton
would have done much the same thing. Among
the writers he omitted to mention, even by
name, are Sir Edwin Arnold, Harrison Ains-
worth, Walter Bagehot, R. Blackmore, A. H.
Clough, E. A. Freeman, S. R. Gardiner, George
Gissing, J. R. Green, T. H. Green, Henry
Hallam, Jean Ingelow, Benjamin Jowett, W.
E. H. Lecky, Thomas Love Peacock, W. M.
Praed, and Mrs. Humphry Ward. The criti
cism which feeds upon research and comparison,
which considers a new date or the emendation
of a mispunctuated line of verse, worthy of
effort, knows not Chesterton. He is the student
of the big men. He has written books about
Dickens, Browning, and Shaw, of whom only
one common quality can be noted, which is
that they are each the subjects of at least
twenty other books. To write about the things
which have already yielded such a huge crop
of criticism savours at first of a lack of imagin
ation. The truth is quite otherwise. Any
body, so to speak, can produce a book about
77
G. K. CHESTERTON
Alexander Pope because the ore is at the dis
posal of every miner. But that larger mine
called Dickens has been diligently worked by
two generations of authors, and it would appear
that a new one must either plagiarize or labour
extremely in order to come upon fresh seams.
But Chesterton s taste for bigness has come to
his service in criticism. It has given him a
power of seeing the large, obvious things which
the critic of small things misses. He has the
thinking in millions trick of the statistician
transposed to literary ends.
Or as a poet. The robustness is omni
present, and takes several forms. A grandilo
quence that sways uneasily between rodomon
tade and mere verbiage, a rotundity of diction,
a choice of subjects which can only be described
as sanguinolent, the use of the bludgeon where
others would prefer a rapier.
Or as a simple user of words. Chesterton
has a preference for the big words : awful,
enormous, tremendous, and so on. A word
which occurs very often indeed is mystic : it
suggests that the noun it qualifies is laden with
undisclosable attributes, and that romance is
hidden here.
Now all these things add up, as it were, to
a tendency to say a thing as emphatically as
possible. Emphasis of statement from a
78
CRITIC OF LARGE THINGS
humorist gifted with the use of words results
sometimes in epigram, sometimes in fun, in all
things except the dull things (except when the
dullness is due to an unhappy succession of
scintillations which have misfired). For these
reasons Chesterton is regarded as entirely
frivolous by persons without a sense of
humour. He is, in point of fact, extremely
serious, on those frequent occasions when he
is making out a case. As he himself points out,
to be serious is not the opposite of to be funny.
The opposite of to be funny is not to be funny.
A man may be perfectly serious in a funny way.
Now it has befallen Chesterton on more than
one occasion to have to cross swords with one
of the few true atheists, Mr. Joseph MacCabe,
the author of a huge number of books, mostly
attacking Christianity, and as devoid of humour
as an egg-shell is of hair. The differences and
the resemblances between Chesterton and Mr.
MacCabe might well be the occasion of a
parable. Chesterton has written some of the
liveliest books about Christianity, Mr. MacCabe
has written some of the dullest. Chesterton
has written the most amusing book about
Mr. Bernard Shaw ; Mr. MacCabe has written
the dullest. Chesterton and Mr. MacCabe have
a habit of sparring at one another, but up to
the present I have not noticed either make any
79
G. K. CHESTERTON
palpable hits. It is all rather like the Party
System, as Mr. Hilaire Belloc depicts it. The
two antagonists do not understand each other
in the least. But, to a certain degree, Mr.
MacCabe s confusion is the fault of Chesterton
and not of his own lack of humour. When
Chesterton says, " I also mean every word I
say," he is saying something he does not mean.
He is sometimes funny, but not serious, like
Mr. George Robey. He is sometimes irritating,
but not serious, like a circus clown. And he
sometimes appears to be critical, but is not
serious, like the young lady from Walworth
in front of a Bond Street shop-window, regret
ting that she could not possibly buy the
crockery and glass displayed because the
monogram isn t on right. Chesterton s readers
have perhaps spoiled him. He has pleaded,
so to speak, for the inalienable and mystic
right of every man to be a blithering idiot in
all seriousness. So seriously, in fact, that when
he exercised this inalienable and mystic right,
the only man not in the secret was G. K.
Chesterton.
There are few tasks so ungrateful as the
criticism of a critic s criticisms, unless it be
the job of criticizing the criticisms of a critic s
critics. The first is part of the task of him
who would write a book in which all Chester-
80
CRITIC OF LARGE THINGS
ton s works are duly and fitly considered ; and
the second will not be wholly escaped by him.
Concerned as we are, however, with the ideas
of one who was far more interested in putting
the world to rights than with guiding men and
women around literary edifices, there is no
need for us to give any very detailed study to
Chesterton s critical work. Bacon said " dis
tilled books are like common distilled waters,
flashy things." A second distillation, perhaps
even a third, suggests a Euclidean flatness.
The sheer management of a point of view,
however, is always instructive. We have seen
an author use his exceptional powers of criti
cism upon society in general, and ideas at
large. How is he able to deal with ideas and
inventions stated in a more definite and par
ticular manner ? The latter task is the more
difficult of the two. We all know perfectly
well, to take an analogous illustration, how
to deal with the Prussian militarist class, the
4 Junker caste," and so on. But we differ
hopelessly on the treatment to be meted out
to the National Service League.
The outstanding feature of Chesterton s
critical work is that it has no outstanding
features which differentiate it from his other
writings. He is always the journalist, writing
for the day only. This leads him to treat all
F 81
G. K. CHESTERTON
his subjects with special reference to his own
day. Sometimes, as in the essay on Byron in
Twelve Types, his own day is so much under
discussion that poor Byron is left out in the
cold to warm himself before a feebly nickering
epigram. In writing of Dickens, Chesterton
says that he " can be criticized as a contem
porary of Bernard Shaw or Anatole France or
C. F. G. Masterman . . . his name comes to
the tongue when we are talking of Christian
Socialists or Mr. Roosevelt or County Council
Steamboats or Guilds of Play." And Chester
ton does criticize Dickens as the contemporary
of all these phenomena. In point of fact,
to G.K.C. everybody is either a contemporary
or a Victorian, and " I also was born a Vic
torian." Little Dorrit sets him talking about
Gissing, Hard Times suggests Herbert Spencer,
American Notes leads to the mention of Maxim
Gorky, and elsewhere Mr. George Moore and
Mr. William Le Queux are brought in. If
Chesterton happened to be writing about
Dickens at a time when there was a certain
amount of feeling about on the subject of rich
Jews on the Rand, then the rich Jews on the
Rand would appear in print forthwith, whether
or not Dickens had ever depicted a rich Jew
or the Rand, or the two in conjunction.
Chesterton s first critical work of importance
82
CRITIC OF LARGE THINGS
was Robert Browning in the " English Men of
Letters Series." It might be imagined that
the austere editorship of Lord Morley might
have a de journalizing effect upon the style
of the author. Far otherwise. The t s are
crossed and the i s are dotted, so to speak,
more carefully in Robert Browning than in
works less fastidiously edited, but that is all.
The book contains references to Gladstone
and Home Rule, Parnell, Pigott, and Rud-
yard Kipling, Cyrano de Bergerac, W. E.
Henley, and the Tivoli. But of Browning s
literary ancestors and predecessors there is
little mention.
It is conventional to shed tears of ink over
the journalistic touch, on the ground that it
must inevitably shorten the life of whatever
book bears its marks. If there is anything in
this condemnation, then Chesterton is doomed
to forgetfulness, and his critical works will be
the first to slip into oblivion, such being the
nature of critical works in general. But if
this condemnation holds true, it includes also
Macaulay, R. L. Stevenson, Matthew Arnold,
and how many others ! The journalistic touch,
when it is good, means the preservation of a
work. And Chesterton has that most essential
part of a critic s mental equipment what we
call in an inadequately descriptive manner,
83
G. K. CHESTERTON
insight. He was no mean critic, whatever the
tricks he played, who could pen these judg
ments :
The dominant passion of the artistic Celt, such as
Mr. W. B. Yeats or Sir Edward Burne- Jones, lies in
the word " escape " ; escape into a land where
oranges grow on plum trees and men can sow what
they like and reap what they enjoy. (G. F. Watts.)
The supreme and most practical value of poetry
is this, that in poetry, as in music, a note is struck
which expresses beyond the power of rational state
ment a condition of mind, and all actions arise from
a condition of mind. (Robert Browning.)
This essential comedy of Johnson s character is one
which has never, oddly enough, been put upon the
stage. There was in his nature one of the unconscious
and even agreeable contradictions loved by the true
comedian. ... I mean a strenuous and sincere
belief in convention, combined with a huge natural
inaptitude for observing it. (Samuel Johnson.)
Rossetti could, for once in a way, write poetry
about a real woman and call her " Jenny." One has a
disturbed suspicion that Morris would have called her
" Jehanne." (The Victorian Age in Literature.)
These are a few samples collected at random,
but they alone are almost sufficient to enthrone
Chesterton among the critics. He has a won
derful intuitive gift of feeling for the right
metaphor, for the material object that best
symbolizes an impression. But one thing he
84
CRITIC OF LARGE THINGS
lacks. Put him among authors whose view
of the universe is opposed to his own, and
Chesterton instantly adopts an insecticide atti
tude. The wit of Wilde moves him not, but
his morals stir him profoundly ; Mr. Thomas
Hardy is " a sort of village atheist brooding
and blaspheming over the village idiot." Only
occasionally has he a good word to say for the
technique of an author whose views he dis
likes. His critical work very largely consists
of an attempt to describe his subjects views
of the universe, and bring them into relation
with his own. His two books on Charles
Dickens are little more than such an attempt.
When, a few years ago, Mr. Edwin Pugh, who
had also been studying the " aspects of
Dickens, came to the conclusion that the
novelist was a Socialist, Chesterton waxed
exceeding wrath and gave the offending book
a severe wigging in The Daily News.
He loves a good fighter, however, and to
such he is always just. There are few philoso
phies so radically opposed to the whole spirit
of Chesterton s beliefs as that of John Stuart
Mill. On religion, economic doctrine, and
woman suffrage, Mill held views that are
offensive to G.K.C. But Mill is nevertheless
invariably treated by him with a respect which
approximates to reverence. The principal
85
G. K. CHESTERTON
case in point, however, is Mr. Bernard Shaw,
who holds all Mill s beliefs, and waves them
about even more defiantly. G.K.C. s admira
tion in this case led him to write a whole book
about G.B.S. in addition to innumerable
articles and references. The book has the
following characteristic introduction :
Most people either say that they agree with
Bernard Shaw or that they do not understand him.
I am the only person who understands him, and I do
not agree with him.
Chesterton, of course, could not possibly
agree with such an avowed and utter Puritan
as Mr. Shaw. The Puritan has to be a revolu
tionary, which means a man who pushes for
ward the hand of the clock. Chesterton, as
near as may be, is a Catholic Tory, who is a
man who pushes back the hand of the clock.
Superficially, the two make the clock show the
same hour, but actually, one puts it on to a.m.,
the other back to p.m. Between the two is all
the difference that is between darkness and
day.
Chesterton s point of view is distinctly like
Samuel Johnson s in more respects than one.
Both critics made great play with dogmatic
assertions based on the literature that was
before their time, at the expense of the litera
ture that was to come after. In the book on
86
CRITIC OF LARGE THINGS
Shaw, Chesterton strikes a blow at all inno
vators, although he aims only at the obvious
failures.
The truth is that all feeble spirits naturally live in
the future, because it is featureless ; it is a soft job ;
you can make it what you like. The next age is blank,
and I can paint it freely with my favourite colour.
It requires real courage to face the past, because the
past is full of facts which cannot be got over ; of
men certainly wiser than we and of things done which
we cannot do. I know I cannot write a poem as good
as Lycidas. But it is always easy to say that the
particular sort of poetry I can write will be the poetry
of the future.
Sentiments such as these have made many
young experimentalists feel that Chesterton is
a traitor to his youth and generation. Nobody
will ever have the detachment necessary to
appreciate futurist poetry until it is very
much a thing of the past, because the near past
is so much with us, and it is part of us, which
the future is not. But fidelity to the good
things of the past does not exonerate us
from the task of looking for the germs of
the good things of the future. The young
poet of to-day sits at the feet of Sir
Henry Newbolt, whose critical appreciation
is undaunted by mere dread of new things,
while to the same youth and to his friends it
has simply never occurred, often enough, to
87
G. K. CHESTERTON
think of Chesterton as a critic. It cannot be
too strongly urged that an undue admiration
of the distant past has sat like an incubus
upon the chest of European literature, and
Shakespeare s greatness is not in spite of his
small Latin and less Greek," which probably
contributed to it indirectly. Had Shakespeare
been a classical scholar, he would almost cer
tainly have modelled his plays on Seneca or
Aeschylus, and the results would have been
devastating. Addison s Cato, Johnson s Irene,
and the dramas of Racine and Corneille are
among the abysmal dullnesses mankind owes
to its excessive estimation of the past. Men
have always been too ready to forget that we
inherit our ancestors bad points as well as
their good ones. Ancestor-worship has de
prived the Chinese of the capacity to create,
it has seriously affected Chesterton s power to
criticize. Chesterton s own generation has
seen both the victory and the downfall of
form in the novels of Mr. Galsworthy and
Mr. H. G. Wells. It has witnessed fascinating
experiments in stagecraft, some of which have
assuredly succeeded. It has listened to new
poets and wandered in enchanted worlds where
no Victorians trod. A critic in sympathy with
these efforts at reform would have written the
last-quoted passage something like this :
88
CRITIC OF LARGE THINGS
" The truth is that all feeble spirits natur
ally live in the past, because it has no boun
daries ; it is a soft job ; you can find in it
what you like. The past ages are rank, and I
can daub myself freely with whatever colours
I extract. It requires no courage to face the
past, because the past is full of facts which
neutralize one another ; of men certainly no
wiser than we, and of things done which we
could not want to do. I know I cannot write
a poem as good as Lycidas. But I also know
that Milton could not write a poem as good as
The Hound of Heaven or M Andrew s Hymn.
And it is always easy to say that the particular
kind of poetry I can write has been the poetry
of some period of the past."
But Chesterton didn t; quite the reverse.
So that one comes to the sorrowful conclu
sion that Chesterton is at his best, as a critic,
when he is writing introductions, because then
he has to leave the past alone. When he is
writing an introduction to one of the works
of a great Victorian (Dickens always excepted)
he makes his subject stand out like a solitary
giant, not necessarily because he is one, but
on account of the largeness of the contours,
the rough shaping, and the deliberate con
trasts. He has written prefaces without num
ber, and the British Museum has not a complete
89
G. K. CHESTERTON
set of the books introduced by him. The
Fables of JEsop, the Book of Job, Matthew
Arnold s Critical Essays, a book of children s
poems by Margaret Arndt, BoswelFs Johnson,
a novel by Gorky, selections from Thackeray,
a life of Mr. Will Crooks, and an anthology by
young poets are but a few of the books he has
explained.
The last thing to be said on Chesterton as
a critic is by way of illustration. For a series
of books on artists, he wrote two, on William
Blake and G. F. Watts. The first is all about
mysticism, and so is the second. They are
for the layman, not for the artist. They could
be read with interest and joy by the colour
blind. And, incidentally, they are extremely
good criticism. Therein is the triumph of
Chesterton. Give him a subject which he can
relate with his own view of the universe, and
space wherein to accomplish this feat, and he
will succeed in presenting his readers with a
vividly outlined portrait, tinted, of course,
with his own personality, but indisputably
true to life, and ornamented with fascinating
little gargoyles. But put him among the
bourgeoisie of literature and he will sulk like
an angry child.
90
V
THE
HUMORIST AND THE POET
\
THERE are innumerable books or let us say
twenty on Mr. Bernard Shaw. They deal
with him as a sociologist, a dramatist, or what
not, but never as a humorist. There is a
mass of books on Oscar Wilde, and they deal
with everything concerned with him, except
his humour. The great humorists as such-
go unsung to their graves. That is because
there is nothing so obvious as a joke, and
nothing so difficult to explain. It requires a
psychologist, like William James, or a phil
osopher, like Bergson, to explain what a joke
is, and then most of us cannot understand the
explanation. A joke especially another man s
joke is a thing to be handled delicately and
reverently, for once the bloom is off, the joke
mysteriously shrivels and vanishes. Trans
lators are the sworn enemies of jokes ; the
exigencies of their deplorable trade cause them
to maul the poor little things about while they
91
G. K. CHESTERTON
are putting them into new clothes, and the
result is death, or at the least an appearance
of vacuous senescence. But jokes are only the
crystallization of humour ; it exists also in
less tangible forms, such as style and all that
collection of effects vaguely lumped together
and called " atmosphere." Chesterton s pecu
liar "atmosphere" rises like a sweet exhala
tion from the very ink he sheds. And it is
frankly indefinable, as all genuine style is. The
insincere stylists can be reduced to a formula,
because they work from a formula ; Pater may
be brought down to an arrangement of adjec
tives and commas, Doctor Johnson to a suc
cession of rhythms, carefully pruned of excres
cences, and so on, but the stylist who writes
as God made him defies such analysis. Meredith
and Shaw and Chesterton will remain mysteries
even unto the latest research student of the
Universities of Jena and Chicago. Patient
students (something of the sort is already being
done) will count up the number of nouns and
verbs and commas in The Napoleon of Notting
Hill and will express the result in such a form
as this
Chesterton (G. ^^ + v^21og e bn-
sm
But they will fail to touch the essential Ches-
92
HUMORIST AND POET
terton, because one of the beauties of this
form of analysis is that when the formula has
been obtained, nobody is any the wiser as to
the manner of its use. We know that James
Smith is composed of beef and beer and bread,
because all evidence goes to show that these are
the only things he ever absorbs, but nobody
has ever suggested that a synthesis of food
stuffs will ever give us James Smith.
Now the difficulty of dealing with the
humour of Chesterton is that, in doing so, one
is compelled to handle it, to its detriment.
If in the chapter on his Romances any reader
thought he detected the voice and the style of
Chesterton, he is grievously mistaken. He
only saw the scaffolding, which bears the same
relation to the finished product as the skeleton
bears to the human body.
Consider these things :
If you throw one bomb you are only a murderer ;
but if you keep on persistently throwing bombs, you
are in awful danger of at last becoming a prig.
If we all floated in the air like bubbles, free to drift
anywhere at any instant, the practical result would be
that no one would have the courage to begin a con
versation.
If the public schools stuck up a notice it ought to
be inscribed, " For the Fathers of Gentlemen only."
In two generations they can do the trick.
93
G. K. CHESTERTON
Now these propositions are not merely
snippets from a system of philosophy, pre
sented after the manner of the admirers of
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. These are quota
tions which display a quite exceptional power
of surprising people. The anticlimaxes of the
first two passages, the bold dip into the future
at the expense of the past in the third are
more than instances of mere verbal felicity.
They indicate a writer capable of the humour
which feeds upon daily life, and is therefore
thoroughly democratic and healthy. For there
are two sorts of humour ; that which feeds upon
its possessor, Oscar Wilde is the supreme ex
ample of this type of humorist, and that which
draws its inspiration from its surroundings,
of which the great exemplar is Dickens, and
Chesterton is his follower. The first exhausts
itself sooner or later, because it feeds on its
own blood, the second is- inexhaustible. This
theory may be opposed on the ground that
humour is both internal and external in its
origin. The supporters of this claim are
invited to take a holiday in bed, or elsewhere
away from the madding crowd, and then see
how humorous they can be.
Humour has an unfortunate tendency to
stale. The joke of yesteryear already shows
frays upon its sleeves. The wit of the early
94
HUMORIST AND POET
volumes of Punch is in the last stages of
decrepitude. Watch an actor struggling to
conceal from his audience the fact that he is
repeating one of Shakespeare s puns. We
tolerate the humour of Congreve, not because
it is thoroughly amusing, but because it has
survived better than most. Humorous verse
stands a slightly better chance of evoking
smiles in its old age. There is always its un
alterable verbal neatness ; tradition, too, lin
gers more lovingly around fair shapes, and a
poem is a better instance of form than a para
graph. Mankind may grow blase, if it will,
but as a poet of the comic, Chesterton will
live long years. Take for example that last
and worst of his novels The Flying Inn. Into
this he has pitched with a fascinating reckless
ness a quantity of poems, garnered from The
New Witness and worthy of the immortality
which is granted the few really good comic
poems. There is the poem of Noah, with that
stimulating line with which each stanza ends.
The last one goes :
But Noah he sinned, and we have sinned ; on tipsy feet
we trod,
Till a great big black teetotaller was sent to us for a rod,
And you can t get wine at a P.S.A., or Chapel, or Eistedd
fod ;
For the Curse of Water has come again because of the
wrath of God.
95
G. K. CHESTERTON
And water is on the Bishop s board, and the Higher
Thinker s shrine,
But I don t care where the water goes if it doesn t get
into the wine.
There is a lunatic song against grocers, who
are accused of nonconformity, and an equally
lunatic song in several instalments on being
a vegetarian :
I am silent in the Club,
I am silent in the pub,
I am silent on a bally peak in Darien ;
For I stuff away for life
Shoving peas in with a knife,
Because I am at heart a vegetarian.
There is a joyous thing about a millionaire
who lived the simple life, and a new version of
" St. George for Merry England." Tea, cocoa,
and soda-water are the subjects of another
poem. The verses about Roundabout are very
happy :
Some say that when Sir Lancelot
Went forth to find the Grail,
Grey Merlin wrinkled up the roads,
For hope that he should fail ;
All roads led back to Lyonnesse
And Camelot in the Vale,
I cannot yield assent to this
Extravagant hypothesis,
The plain shrewd Briton will dismiss
Such rumours (Daily Mail).
96
HUMORIST AND POET
But in the streets of Roundabout
Are no such factions found,
Or theories to expound about
Or roll upon the ground about,
In the happy town of Roundabout,
That makes the world go round.
And there are lots more like this.
Then there are the Ballades Urbane which
appeared in the early volumes of The Eye-
Witness. They have refrains with the true
human note. Such as " But will you lend me
two-and-six ?
ENVOI
Prince, I will not be knighted ! No !
Put up your sword and stow your tricks !
Offering the Garter is no go
BUT WILL YOU LEND ME TWO-AND-SIX ?
In prose Chesterton is seldom the mere jester;
he will always have a moral or two, at the
very least, at his fingers ends, or to be quite
exact, at the end of his article. He is never
quite irresponsible. He seldom laughs at a
man who is not a reformer.
Or let us take another set of illustrations,
this time in prose. (Once more I protest that
I shall not take the reader through all the
works of Chesterton.) I mean the articles
Our Note Book " which he contributed to
The Illustrated London News. They are of a
G 97
G. K. CHESTERTON
familiar type ; a series of paragraphs on some
topical subject, with little spaces between
them in order to encourage the weary reader.
Chesterton wrote this class of article supremely
well. He would seize on something apparently
trivial, and exalt it into a symptom. When he
had given the disease a name, he went for the
quack doctors who professed to remedy it.
He goes to Letchworth, in which abode of
middle-class faddery he finds a teetotal public-
house, pretending to look like the real thing,
and calling itself "The Skittles Inn." He
immediately raises the question, Can we dis
sociate beer from skittles ? Then he widens
out his thesis.
Our life to-day is marked by perpetual attempts
to revive old-fashioned things while omitting the
human soul in them that made them more than
fashions.
And he concludes :
I welcome a return to the rudeness of old times ;
when Luther attacked Henry VIII for being fat ;
and when Milton and his Dutch opponent devoted
pages of their controversy to the discussion of which
of them was the uglier. . . . The new controversial
ists . . . call a man a physical degenerate, instead of
calling him an ugly fellow. They say that red hair
is the mark of the Celtic stock, instead of calling him
" Carrots."
98
HUMORIST AND POET
Of this class of fun Chesterton is an easy
master. It makes him a fearsome contro
versialist on the platform or in his favourite
lists, the columns of a newspaper. But he
uses his strength a little tyrannously. He is
an adept at begging the question. The lost
art called ignoratio elenchi has been privately
rediscovered by him, to the surprise of many
excellent and honest debaters, who have never
succeeded in scoring the most obvious points
in the face of Chesterton s power of emitting
a string of epigrams and pretending it is a
chain of argument. The case, in whatever
form it is put, is always fresh and vigorous.
Another epigrammatist, Oscar Wilde, in com
parison with him may be said to have used
the midnight oil so liberally in the prepara
tion of his witticisms, that one might almost
detect the fishy odour. But as with his prose
so with his verses ; Chesterton s productions
are so fresh that they seem to spring from his
vitality rather than his intellect. They are
generally a trifle ragged and unpolished as if,
like all their author s productions, they were
strangers to revision. And vitality demands
boisterous movement, more even than coher
ence. Sometimes the boisterousness is ap
parently unsupported by the sense of the
words.
99
G. K. CHESTERTON
So you have gained the golden crowns and grasped the
golden weather,
The kingdoms and the hemispheres that all men buy
and sell,
But I will lash the leaping drum and swing the flaring
feather,
For the light of seven heavens that are lost to me like
hell.
Here the stanza actually goes with such a
swing that the reader will in all probability
not notice that the lines have no particular
meaning.
On the other hand, Chesterton s poetry has
exuberant moments of sheer delight. In one
of his essays he is lamenting the songlessness
of modern life and suggests one or two chanties.
Here they are :
Chorus of Bank Clerks :
Up, my lads, and lift the ledgers, sleep and ease are o er.
Hear the Stars of Morning shouting : " Two and Two
are Four."
Though the creeds and realms are reeling, though the
sophists roar,
Though we weep and pawn our watches, Two and Two
are Four.
Chorus of Bank Clerks when there is a run on
the bank :
There s a run upon the Bank
Stand away !
For the Manager s a crank and the Secretary drank, and
the Upper Tooting Bank
Turns to bay !
100
HUMORIST AND POET
Stand close : there is a run
On the Bank.
Of our ship, our royal one, let the ringing legend run,
that she fired with every gun
Ere she sank.
The Post Office Hymn would begin as follows :
O er London our letters are shaken like snow,
Our wires o er the world like the thunderbolts go.
The news that may marry a maiden in Sark,
Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park.
Chorus (with a swing of joy and energy) :
Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park.
The joke becomes simply immense when we
picture the actual singing of the songs.
But that is not the only class of humour of
which Chesterton is capable. He can cut as
well as hack. It is to be doubted whether any
politician was ever addressed in lines more
sarcastic than those of Antichrist., an ode to
Mr. F. E. Smith. This gentleman, speaking
on the Welsh Disestablishment Bill, remarked
that it has shocked the conscience of every
Christian community in Europe." It begins :
Are they clinging to their crosses,
F. E. Smith.
Where the Breton boat-fleet tosses,
Are they, Smith ?
Do they, fasting, tramping, bleeding,
Wait the news from this our city ?
Groaning " That s the Second Reading ! "
Hissing " There is still Committee ! "
101
G. K. CHESTERTON
If the voice of Cecil falters,
If McKenna s point has pith,
Do they tremble for their altars ?
Do they, Smith ?
Then in Russia, among the peasants,
Where Establishment means nothing
And they never heard of Wales,
Do they read it all in Hansard
With a crib to read it with
" Welsh Tithes : Dr. Clifford answered."
Really, Smith ?
The final verse is :
It would greatly, I must own,
Soothe me, Smith,
If you left this theme alone,
Holy Smith !
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 1
The wilting sarcasm of this poem is a feature
which puts it with a few others apart from the
bulk of Chesterton s poems. Even as bellicosity
and orthodoxy are two of the brightest threads
which run through the whole texture of his
work, so Poems of Pugnacity (as Ella Wheeler
Wilcox would say) and religious verses consti
tute the largest part of the poetic works of
102
HUMORIST AND POET
G.K.C. His first book of verses after Grey
beards at Play The Wild Knight contained a
bloodthirsty poem about the Battle of Gibeon,
written with strict adhesion to the spirit of the
Old Testament. It might have been penned
by a survivor, glutted with blood and duly
grateful to the God of his race for the solar and
lunar eccentricities which made possible the
extermination of the five kings of the Amorites.
In 1911 came The Ballad of the White Horse,
which is all about Alfred, according to the
popular traditions embodied in the elementary
history books, and, in particular, the Battle
of Ethandune. How Chesterton revels in that
Homeric slaughter ! The words blood and
bloody punctuate the largest poem of G.K.C.
to the virtual obliteration in our memory of
the fine imagery, the occasional tendernesses,
and the blustering aggressiveness of some of
the metaphors and similes. Not many men
would have the nerve, let alone the skill, to
write :
And in the last eclipse the sea
Shall stand up like a tower,
Above all moons made dark and riven,
Hold up its foaming head in heaven,
And laugh, knowing its hour.
But, at the same time, this poem contains very
touching and beautiful lines. The Ballad of
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G. K. CHESTERTON
the White Horse is an epic of the struggle
between Christian and Pagan. One of the
essentials of an epic is that its men should be
decent men, if they cannot be heroes. The
Iliad would have been impossible if it had
occurred to Homer to introduce the Govern
ment contractors to the belligerent powers.
All the point would have gone out of Orlando
Furioso if it had been the case that the madness
of Orlando was the delirium tremens of an
habitual drunkard. Chesterton recognizing
this truth makes the pagans of the White
Horse behave like gentlemen. There is a
beautiful little song put into the mouth of one
of them, which is in its way a perfect expres
sion of the inadequacy of false gods.
There is always a thing forgotten
When all the world goes well ;
A thing forgotten, as long ago
When the gods forgot the mistletoe,
And soundless as an arrow of snow
The arrow of anguish fell.
The thing on the blind side of the heart,
On the wrong side of the door,
The green plant groweth, menacing
Almighty lovers in the spring ;
There is always a forgotten thing,
And love is not secure.
The sorrow behind these lines is more mov-
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HUMORIST AND POET
ing, because more sincere, than the lines of
that over-quoted verse of Swinburne s :
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods there be
That no life lives for ever,
That dead men rise up never,
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
This is insincere, because a pagan (as Swin
burne was) could have committed suicide had
he really felt these things. Swinburne, like
most modern pagans, really hated priestcraft
when he thought he was hating God. Ches
terton s note is truer. He knows that the
pagan has all the good things of life but one,
and that only an exceptionally nice pagan
knows he lacks that much.
And so one might go on mining the White
Horse, for it contains most things, as a good
epic should. Two short stanzas, however,
should be quoted, whatever else is omitted,
for the sake of their essential Christianity,
their claim that a man may make a fool of
himself for Christ s sake, whatever the bishops
have to say about it.
The men of the East may spell the stars,
And times and triumphs mark,
But the men signed of the Cross of Christ
Go gaily in the dark.
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G. K. CHESTERTON
The men of the East may search the scrolls
For sure fates and fame,
But the men that drink the blood of God
Go singing to their shame.
In his last volume of Poems (1915) Chester
ton presents us with a varied collection of
works, written at any time during the last
twelve or so years. The pugnacious element
is present in Lepanto, through the staccato
syllables of which we hear drum-taps and men
cheering. There is a temptation to treat
Lepanto, and indeed most of Chesterton s
poems, with special reference to their tech
nique, but we must resist this temptation, with
tears if need be, and with prayer, for to give
way to it would be to commit a form of vivi
section. G.K.C. is not a text, praise be, and
whether he lives or dies, long may he be spared
the hands of an editor or interpreter who is
also an irrepressible authority on anapaests
and suchlike things. He is a poet, and a con
siderable poet, not because of his strict atten
tion to the rules of prosody, but because he
cannot help himself, and the rules in question
are for the persons who can, the poets by
deliberate intention, the writers who polish
unceasingly. Chesterton has more impulse
than finish, but he has natural gifts of rhythm
and the effective use of words which more or
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HUMORIST AND POET
less (according to the reader s taste) compen
sate for his refusal or his incapacity to take
pains.
Finally there are the religious poems. From
these we can best judge the reality of Chester
ton s poetic impulse, for here, knowing that
affectation would be almost indecent, he has
expressed what he had to express with a care
denied to most of his other works. In one of
his essays, G.K.C. exults in that matchless
phrase of Vaughan, " high humility." He has
both adopted and adapted this quality, and
the results are wonderful. In The Wise Men
occurs this stanza :
The Child that was ere worlds begun
(. . . We need bu* walk a little way,
We need but see a latch undone . . .)
The Child that played with moon and sun
Is playing with a little hay,
The superb antithesis leaves one struggling
against that involuntary little gasp which is
a reader s first tribute to a fine thought. He
could be a great hymn writer, if he would.
One of his poems, in fact, has found its way
into The English Hymnal, where it competes
(if one may use the word of a sacred song)
with Recessional for the favour of congrega
tions. If we take a glance at a few of the finest
hymns, we shall find that they share certain
107
G. K. CHESTERTON
obvious qualities : bold imagery, the vocabu
lary of conflict, an attitude of humility that
is very nearly also one of great pride, and
certain tricks of style. And when we look
through Chesterton s poems generally, we shall
find that these are exactly the qualities they
possess.
108
VI
THE
RELIGION OF A DEBATER
IN his book on William Blake, Chesterton says
that he is " personally quite convinced that if
every human being lived a thousand years,
every human being would end up either in
utter pessimistic scepticism or in the Catholic
creed." In course of time, in fact, everybody
would have to decide whether they preferred
to be an intellectualist or a mystic. A debauch
of intellectualism, lasting perhaps nine hun
dred and fifty years, is a truly terrible thing
to contemplate. Perhaps it is safest to assert
that if our lives were considerably lengthened,
there would be more mystics and more mad
men.
To Chesterton modern thought is merely
the polite description of a noisy crowd of
persons proclaiming that something or other
is wrong. Mr. Bernard Shaw denounces meat
and has been understood to denounce marriage.
Ibsen is said to have anathematized almost
109
G. K. CHESTERTON
everything (by those who have not read his
works). Mr. MacCabe and Mr. Blatchford
think that, on the whole, there is no God, and
Tolstoy told us that nearly everything we did,
and quite all we wanted to do, was opposed
to the spirit of Christ s teaching. Auberon
Herbert disapproved of law, and John David
son disapproved of life. Herbert Spencer
objected to government, Passive Resisters to
State education, and various educational re
formers to education of any description. There
are people who would abolish our spelling, our
clothing, our food and, most emphatically,
our drink. Mr. H. G. Wells adds the finishing
touch to this volume of denials, by blandly
suggesting in an appendix to his Modern
Utopia, headed "Scepticism of the Instrument,"
that our senses are so liable to err, that we can
never be really sure of anything at all. This
spirit of denial is extraordinarily infectious.
A man begins to suspect what he calls the
" supernatural." He joins an ethical society,
and before he knows where he is, he is a vege
tarian. The rebellious moderns have a curious
tendency to flock together in self-defence, even
when they have nothing in common. The
mere aggregation of denials rather attracts
the slovenly and the unattached. The lack
of positive dogma expressed by such a coalition
110
RELIGION OF A DEBATER
encourages the sceptic and the uneducated,
who do not realize that the deliberate suppres
sion of dogma is itself a dogma of extreme
arrogance. We trust too much to the label,
nowadays, and the brief descriptions we attach
to ourselves have a gradually increasing con
notation. In politics for example, the con
servative creed, which originally contained
the single article that aristocracy, wealth and
government should be in the same few hands,
now also implies adhesion to the economic
doctrine of protection, and the political doc
trine that unitary government is preferable to
federal. The liberal creed, based principally
upon opposition to the conservative, and to a
lesser degree upon disrespect for the Estab
lished Church, has been enlarged concurrently
with the latter. The average liberal or con
servative now feels himself in honour bound
to assert or to deny political dogmas out of
sheer loyalty to his party. This does not make
for sanity. The only political creed in which
a man may reasonably expect to remain sane
is Socialism, which is catholic and not the
least dependent upon other beliefs. Apart
from the inconsiderable number of Socialists,
the average politician follows in the footsteps
of those gentlemen already mentioned. He is
not allowed to believe, so he contents himself
111
G. K. CHESTERTON
with a denial of the other side s promises. As
sertion is infinitely more brain-wearing than
denial.
Side by side with the increase in those who
deny is a growth in the numbers of those who
come to regard apathy, suspended judgment,
or a lack of interest in a religious matter as a
state of positive belief. There are agnostics
quite literally all over the place. Belief peters
down into acceptance, acceptance becomes a
probability, a probability declines into a reason
able doubt, and a reasonable doubt drifts into
" it is highly conjectural and indeed extremely
unlikely," or something of that sort. Tolerance
was once an instrument for ensuring that truth
should not be suppressed ; it is now an excuse
for refusing to bother. There is, in fact, a
growing disrespect for truth. A great many
men went to the stake years ago rather than
admit the possibility that they were wrong ;
they protested, so far as human endurance
allowed them to protest, that they were
orthodox and that their persecutors, and not
they, were the heretics. To-day a bunch of
Cambridge men calls itself "The Heretics"
and imagines it has found a clever title. At
the same time there is an apparent decline in
the power to believe. The average politician
(the principal type of twentieth-century propa-
112
RELIGION OF A DEBATER
gandist) hardly ever makes a speech which
does not contain one at least of the following
phrases :
4 I may be mistaken, but it seems to me
that . . ."
We are all subject to correction, but as
far as we know ."
In this necessarily imperfect world ..."
4 So far as one is able to judge ..."
4 Appearances are notoriously deceptive,
but . . ."
Human experience is necessarily limited
to "
LU ...
We can never be really sure ..."
" Pilate asked, What is truth ? Ah, my
brethren, what indeed ? "
The best minds of the country have failed
to come to an agreement on this question;
one can only surmise . . ."
4 Art is long and life is short. Art to-day
is even longer than it used to be."
Now the politician, to do him justice, has
retained the courage of his convictions to a
greater extent than the orthodox believer in
God. Men are still prepared to make Home
Rule the occasion of bloodshed, or to spend
the midnight hours denouncing apparent politi-
H 113
G. K. CHESTERTON
cal heresies. But whereas the politician, like
the orthodox believer once pronounced apolo
getics, they now merely utter apologies. To
day, equipped as never before with the heavy
artillery of argument in the shape of Higher
Criticism, research, blue-books, statistics, cheap
publications, free libraries, accessible informa
tion, public lectures, and goodness only knows
what else, the fighting forces of the spiritual
and temporal decencies lie drowsing as in a
club-room, placarded " Religion and politics
must not be discussed here."
All this, with the exception of the political
references, is a summary of Chesterton s claim
that a return to orthodoxy is desirable and
necessary. It will be found at length in Heretics
and in the first chapters of Orthodoxy, and
sprinkled throughout all his writings of a later
date than 1906 or so. He protests on more
than one occasion against Mr. Shaw s epigram,
which seems to him to contain the essence of
all that is wrong to-day, " The golden rule
is that there is no golden rule." Chesterton
insists that there is a golden rule, that it is a
very old one, and that it is known to a great
many people, most of whom belong to the
working classes.
In his argument that, on the whole, the
masses are (or were) right about religion, and
114
RELIGION OF A DEBATER
that the intellectuals are wrong, Chesterton is
undoubtedly at his most bellicose and his
sincerest. His is the pugnacity that prefers to
pull down another s banner rather than to
raise his own. His " defences " in The Defen
dant, and the six hundred odd cases made out
by him in the columns of The Daily News are
largely and obviously inspired by the wish,
metaphorically speaking, to punch somebody s
head. The fact that he is not a mere bully
appears in the appeal to common decency
which Chesterton would be incapable of omit
ting from an article. Nevertheless he prefers
attack to defence. In war, the offensive is
infinitely more costly than the defensive.
But in controversy this is reversed. The
opener of a debate is in a much more difficult
position than his opponent. The latter need
only criticize the former s case ; he is not
compelled to disclose his own defences. Ches
terton used to have a grand time hoisting
people on their own petards, and letting forth
strings of epigrams at the expense of those
from whom he differed, and only incidentally
revealing his own position. Then, as he tells
us in the preface to Orthodoxy, when he had
published the saltatory series of indictments
entitled Heretics, a number of his critics said,
in effect, " Please, Mr. Chesterton, what are
115
G. K. CHESTERTON
we to believe ? " Mr. G. S. Street, in particu
lar, begged for enlightenment. G.K.C. joy
ously accepted the invitation, and wrote Ortho
doxy, his most brilliant book.
There are few works in the English language
the brilliancy of which is so sustained. Ortho
doxy is a rapid torrent of epigrammatically
expressed arguments. Chesterton s method
in writing it is that of the digger wasp. This
intelligent creature carries on the survival of
the fittest controversy by paralyzing its oppo
nent first, and then proceeding to lay the
eggs from which future fitness will proceed in
the unresisting but still living body. Chester
ton begins by paralyzing his reader, by
savagely attacking all the beliefs which the
latter, if he be a modern and a sceptic, prob
ably regards as first principles. Tolerance is
dismissed, as we have just seen, as a mere
excuse for not caring. Reason, that awful
French goddess, is shown to be another
apology. Nietzsche and various other authors
to whom some of us have bent the knee are
slaughtered without misery. Then Chesterton
proceeds to the argument, the reader being by
this time receptive enough to swallow a
camel, on the sole condition that G.K.C. has
previously slightly treacled the animal.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to assert
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RELIGION OF A DEBATER
that at this point Chesterton pretends to
begin his argument. As a matter of strict fact
he only describes his adventures in Fairyland,
which is all the earth. He tells us of his
profound astonishment at the consistent re
currence of apples on apple trees, and at the
general jolliness of the earth. He describes,
very beautifully, some of the sensations of
childhood making the all-embracing discovery
that things are what they seem, and the even
more joyful feeling of pretending that they are
not, or that they will cease to be at any
moment. A young kitten will watch a large
cushion, which to it is a very considerable
portion of the universe, flying at it without
indicating any very appreciable surprise. A
child, in the same way, would not be surprised
if his house suddenly developed wings and
flew away. Chesterton cultivated this attitude
of always expecting to be surprised by the
most natural things in the world, until it
became an obsession, and a part of his journal
istic equipment. In a sense Chesterton is the
everlasting boy, the Undergraduate Who
Would Not Grow Up. There must be few
normally imaginative town-bred children to
whom the pointed upright area-railings do not
appear an unsearchable armoury of spears or
as walls of protective flames, temporarily frozen
117
G. K. CHESTERTON
black so that people should be able to enter
and leave their house. Every child knows that
the old Norse story of a sleeping Brunnhilde
encircled by flames is true ; to him or her,
there is a Brunnhilde in every street, and the
child knows that there it always has a chance
of being the chosen Siegfried. But because
this view of life is so much cosier than that of
the grown-ups, Chesterton clings to his child
hood s neat little universe and weeps patheti
cally when anybody mentions Herbert Spencer,
and makes faces when he hears the word
Newton. He insists on a fair dole of surprises.
" Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts
in their stockings gifts of toys and sweets.
Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when
he put in my stockings the gift of two miracu
lous legs ?
Now this fairyland business is frankly over
done. Chesterton conceives of God, having
carried the Creation as far as this world, sitting
down to look at the new universe in a sort of
ecstasy. " And God saw every thing that he
had made, and, behold it was very good." He
enjoyed His new toy immensely, and as He
sent the earth, spinning round the sun, His
pleasure increased. So He said " Do it again
every time the sun had completed its course,
and laughed prodigiously, and behaved like a
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RELIGION OF A DEBATER
happy child. And so He has gone on to this
day saying " Do it again to the sun and the
moon and the stars, to the animal creation,
and the trees, and every living thing. So
Chesterton pictures God, giving His name to
what others, including Christians, call natural
law, or the laws of God, or the laws of gravita
tion, conservation of energy, and so on, but
always laws. For which reason, one is com
pelled to assume that in his opinion God
is now [1915] saying to Himself, " There s
another bloody war, do it again, sun," and
gurgling with delight. It is dangerous to
wander in fairyland, as Chesterton has him
self demonstrated, " one might meet a fairy."
It is not safe to try to look God in the face.
A prophet in Israel saw the glory of Jehovah,
and though He was but the God of a small
nation, the prophet s face shone, and, so great
was the vitality he absorbed from the great
Source that he was an hundred and twenty
years old when he died : his eye was not dim,
nor his natural force abated." That is the
reverent Hebrew manner of conveying the
glory of God. But Chesterton, cheerfully
playing toss halfpenny among the fairies, sees
an idiot child, and calls it God.
Fortunately for the argument, Chesterton
has no more to say about his excursion in
119
G. K. CHESTERTON
Fairyland after his return. He goes on to
talk about the substitutes which people have
invented for Christianity. The Inner Light
theory has vitriol sprayed upon it. Marcus
Aurelius, it is explained, acted according to
the Inner Light. " He gets up early in the
morning, just as our own aristocrats leading
the Simple Life get up early in the morning ;
because such altruism is much easier than
stopping the games in the amphitheatre or
giving the English people back their land."
The present writer does not profess any
ability to handle philosophic problems philo
sophically ; it seems to him, however, that
if Chesterton had been writing a few years
later, he would have attempted to extinguish
the latest form of the Inner Light, that
intuition which has been so much asso
ciated with M. Bergson s teachings.
The Inner Light is finally polished off as
follows :
Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst
is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all
horrible religions the most horrible is the worship
of the god within. Any one who knows anybody
knows how it would work ; anybody who knows any
one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it
does work. That Jones should worship the god
within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones
shall worship Jones. . . . Christianity came into the
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RELIGION OF A DEBATER
world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man
has not only to look inwards, but to look outwards,
to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine
company and a divine captain.
Continuing his spiritual autobiography,
Chesterton describes his gradual emergence
from the wonted agnosticism of sixteen through
the mediumship of agnostic literature. Once
again that remark of Bacon s showed itself
to be true, " A little philosophy inclineth
man s mind to atheism, but depth in philo
sophy bringeth men s minds about to religion."
A man may read Huxley and Bradlaugh, who
knew their minds, and call himself an agnostic.
But when it comes to reading their followers,
there s another story to tell. What especially
struck Chesterton was the wholesale self-
contradictoriness of the literature of agnos
ticism. One man would say that Christianity
was so harmful that extermination was the
least that could be desired for it, and another
would insist that it had reached a harmless
and doddering old age. A writer would assert
that Christianity was a religion of wrath and
blood, and would point to the Inquisition, and
to the religious wars which have at one time
or another swept over the civilized world.
But by the time the reader s blood was up, he
would come across some virile atheist s pro-
121
G. K. CHESTERTON
clamation of the feeble, mattoid character of
the religion in question, as illustrated by its
quietist saints, the Quakers, the Tolstoyans,
and non-resisters in general. When he had
cooled down, he would run into a denunciation
of the asceticism of Christianity, the monastic
system, hair-shirts, and so on. Then he would
come across a sweeping condemnation of its
sensual luxuriousness, its bejewelled chalices,
its pompous rituals, the extravagance of its
archbishops, and the like. Christianity " was
abused for being too plain and for being too
coloured." And then the sudden obvious truth
burst upon Chesterton, What if Christianity
was the happy mean ?
Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane
and all its critics that are mad in various ways.
I tested this idea by asking myself whether there
was about any of the accusers anything morbid that
might explain the accusation. I was startled to find
that this key fitted a lock. For instance, it was
certainly odd that the modern world charged Christi
anity at once with bodily austerity and with artistic
pomp. But then it was also odd, very odd, that the
modern world itself combined extreme bodily luxury
with an extreme absence of artistic pomp. The modern
man thought Becket s robes too rich and his meals
too poor. But then the modern man was really
exceptional in history. No man before ever ate such
elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes. The modern
man found the church too simple exactly where
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RELIGION OF A DEBATER
modern life is too complex ; he found the church too
gorgeous exactly where modern life is too dingy. The
man who disliked the plain fasts and feasts was mad
on entrees. The man who disliked vestments wore
a pair of preposterous trousers. And surely if there
was any insanity involved in the matter at all it was
in the trousers, not in the simply falling robe. If
there was any insanity at all, it was in the extravagant
entrees, not in the bread and wine.
Nevertheless, Christianity was centrifugal
rather than centripetal ; it was not a mere
average, but a centre of gravity; not a com
promise, but a conflict. Christ was not half-
God and half-man, like Hercules, but " perfect
God and perfect man." Man was not only
the highest, but also the lowest. " The
Church was positive on both points. One can
hardly think too little of one s self. One can
hardly think too much of one s soul."
At this point agreement with Mr. Chesterton
becomes difficult. Christianity, he tells us,
comes in with a flaming sword and performs
neat acts of bisection. It separates the sinner
from the sin, and tells us to love the former
and hate the latter. He also tells us that no
pagan would have thought of this. Leaving
aside the question whether or not Plato was
a Christian, it may be pointed out that whereas
Chesterton condemns Tolstoyanism whenever
he recognizes it, he here proclaims Tolstoy s
123
G. K. CHESTERTON
doctrine. On the whole, however, the mild
perverseness of the chapter on The Paradoxes
of Christianity leaves its major implications
safe. It does not matter greatly whether we
prefer to regard Christianity as a centre of
gravity, or a point of balance. We need only
pause to note Chesterton personifies this
dualism. The Napoleon of Notting Hill is the
arrangement of little bits of iron the inhabi
tants of London, in this case around the two
poles of a fantastic magnet, of which one is
Adam Wayne, the fanatic, and the other,
Auberon Quin, the humorist. In The Ball and
the Cross the diagram is repeated. James
Turnbull, the atheist, and Evan Maclan, the
believer, are the two poles. We speak in a
loose sort of way of opposite poles when we
wish to express separation. But, in point of
fact, they symbolize connection far more
exactly. They are absolutely interdependent.
The whole essence of a North and a South Pole
is that we, knowing where one is, should be
able to say where the other is. Nobody has
ever suggested a universe in which the North
Pole wandered about at large. This is the
idea which Chesterton seems to have captured
and introduced into his definition of Chris
tianity.
Democracy, to Chesterton, is the theory
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RELIGION OF A DEBATER
that one man is as good as another ; Chris
tianity, he finds, is the virtual sanctification
by supernatural authority of democracy. He
points out the incompatibility of political
democracy, for example, with the determinism
to which Mr. Blatchford s logical atheism has
brought him. If man is the creature of his
heredity and his environment, as Mr. Blatch-
ford asserts, and if a slum-bred heredity and
a slum environment do not make for high
intelligence, then obviously it is against the
best interests of the State to allow the slum
inhabitant to vote. On the other hand, it is
entirely to the best interests of the State to
entrust its affairs to the aristocracy, whose
breeding and environment gives it an enor
mous amount of intelligence. Christianity, by
proclaiming that every man s body is the
temple of the Holy Ghost, insists both upon
the necessity of abolishing the slums and of
honouring the slum-dwellers as sharers with
the rest of humanity in a common sonship.
This is the case for Socialism, it may be pointed
out parenthetically, and Chesterton has let it
slip past him. He insists that orthodoxy is
the best conceivable guardian of liberty, for
the somewhat far-fetched reason that no
believer in miracles would have such a
deep and sincere faith in the incurable routine
125
G. K. CHESTERTON
of the cosmos " as to cling to the theory that
men should not have the liberty to work
changes. If a man believed in the freedom of
God, in fact, he would have to believe in the
freedom of man. The obvious answer to
which is that he generally doesn t. Christianity
made for eternal vigilance, Chesterton main
tains, whereas Buddhism kept its eye on the
Inner Light which means, in fact, kept it
shut. In proof, or at least in confirmation of
this, he points to the statues of Christian
saints and of the Buddha. The former keep
their eyes open wide, the latter keep their
eyes firmly closed. Vigilance, however, does
not always make for liberty the vigilance
of the Inquisition, for example. Leaving out
of account this and other monstrous excep
tions, we might say spiritual liberty, perhaps,
but not political liberty, not, at any rate, since
the days of Macchiavelli, and the divorce of
Church and State.
By insisting specially on the immanence of God
we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social
indifference Tibet. By insisting specially on the
transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity, moral
and political adventure, religious indignation Chris
tendom. Insisting that God is inside man, man
is always inside himself. By insisting that God
transcends man, man has transcended himself.
126
RELIGION OF A DEBATER
In concluding the book, Chesterton joyously
refutes a few anti-Christian arguments by
means of his extraordinary knack of seeing
the large and obvious, and therefore generally
overlooked things. He believes in Christianity
because he is a rationalist, and the evidence
in its favour has convinced him. The argu
ments with which he deals are these. That
men are much like beasts, and probably
related to them. Answer : yes, but men
are also quite wonderfully unlike them in
many important respects. That primeval
religion arose in ignorance and fear. Answer :
we know nothing about prehistoric man,
because he was prehistoric, therefore we can
not say where he got his religion from. But
" the whole human race has a tradition of the
Fall." And so on : the argument that Christ
was a poor sheepish and ineffectual professor
of a quiet life is answered by the naming
energy of His earthly mission ; the suggestion
that Christianity belongs to the Dark Ages
is countered by the historical fact that it
was the one path across the Dark Ages
that was not dark." It was the path that
led from Roman to modern civilization, and
we are here because of it. And the book
ends with a peroration that might be likened
to a torrent, were it not for the fact that
127
G. K. CHESTERTON
torrents are generally narrow and shallow.
It is a most remarkable exhibition of energy,
a case from which flippancies and irrelevancies
have been removed, and where the central
conviction advances irresistibly. Elsewhere
in the book Chesterton had been inconsequent,
darting from point to point, lunging at an
opponent one moment, formulating a theory
in the next, and producing an effect which, if
judged by sample, would be considered bizarre
and undirected. The book contains a few
perversities, of course. The author attempts
to rebut the idea " that priests have blighted
societies with bitterness and gloom," by point
ing out that in one or two priest-ridden
countries wine and song and dance abound.
Yes, but if people are jollier in France and
Spain and Italy than in savage Africa, it is
due not to the priests so much as to the
climate which makes wine cheap and an
open-air life possible. No amount of priests
would be able to set the inhabitants of the
Belgian Congo dancing around a maypole
singing the while glad songs handed down by
their fathers. No amount of priests would be
able to make the festive Eskimo bask in the
sun and sing in chorus when there wasn t any
sun and it was altogether too cold to open
their mouths wide in the open air. In fact the
128
RELIGION OF A DEBATER
priests are not the cause of the blight where
it exists, just as they are not the cause of the
jolliness, when there is any. But Orthodoxy is
Chesterton s sincerest book. It is perhaps the
only one of the whole lot in the course of which
he would not be justified in repeating a remark
which begins one of the Tremendous Trifles,
Every now and then I have introduced into
my essays an element of truth."
Twice upon a time there was a Samuel
Butler who wrote exhilaratingly and died and
left the paradoxical contents of his notebooks
to be published by posterity. The first (i.e. of
Hudibras, not of Erewhon) had many lively
things to say on the question of orthodoxy,
being the forerunner of G.K.C. And I am
greatly tempted to treat Samuel Butler as an
ancestor to be described at length. Chesterton
might well have said, " It is a dangerous thing
to be too inquisitive, and search too narrowly
into a true Religion, for 50,000 Bethshemites
were destroyed only for looking into the Ark
of the Covenant, and ten times as many have
been ruined for looking too curiously into that
Booke in which that Story is recorded -in fact
in Magic he very nearly did say the same thing.
He would have liked (as who would not ?) to
have been the author of the saying that
Repentant Teares are the waters upon which
I 129
G. K. CHESTERTON
the Spirit of God moves," or that " There is
no better Argument to prove that the Scriptures
were written by Divine Inspiration, than that
excellent saying of our Savior, If any man
will go to Law with thee for thy cloke, give
him thy Coate also." He might well have
written dozens of those puns and aphorisms of
Butler which an unkind fate has omitted from
the things we read, and even from the things
we quote. But Butler provides an answer to
Chesterton, for he was an intelligent anticipa
tor who foresaw exactly what would happen
when orthodoxy, which is to say the injunc
tion to shout with the larger crowd, should be
proclaimed as the easiest way out of religious
difficulties. Before a reader has finally made
up his mind on Orthodoxy (and it is highly
desirable that he should do so), let him con
sider two little texts :
" They that profess Religion and believe it
consists in frequenting of Sermons, do, as if
they should say They have a great desire to
serve God, but would faine be perswaded to it.
Why should any man suppose that he pleases
God by patiently hearing an Ignorant fellow
render Religion ridiculous ?
" He [a Catholic] prefers his Church merely
for the Antiquity of it, and cares not how
130
RELIGION OF A DEBATER
sound or rotten it be, so it be but old. He takes
a liking to it as some do to old Cheese, only for
the blue Rottenness of it. If he had lived in
the primitive Times he had never been a
Christian ; for the Antiquity of the Pagan
and Jewish Religion would have had the same
Power over him against the Christian, as the
old Roman has against the modern Reforma
tion."
Here we leave Samuel Butler. The majority
stands the largest chance of being right through
the sheer operation of the law of averages.
But somehow one does not easily imagine
a mob passing through the gate that is narrow
and the way that is narrow. One prefers to
think of men going up in ones and twos, perhaps
even in loneliness, and rejoicing at the strange
miracle of judgment that all their friends
should be assembled at the journey s end.
But the final criticism of Chesterton s Ortho
doxy is that it is not orthodox. He claims
that he is " concerned only to discuss . . . the
central Christian theology (sufficiently sum
marized in the Apostles Creed)" and, "When
the word orthodoxy is used here it means
the Apostles Creed, as understood by every
body calling himself Christian until a very
short time ago and the general historic con-
131
G. K. CHESTERTON
duct of those who held such a creed." In other
words he counts as orthodox Anglicans, Roman
Catholics, Orthodox Russians, Nonconformists,
Lutherans, Calvinists, and all manner of queer
fish, possibly Joanna Southcott, Mrs. Annie
Besant, and Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy. He might
even, by stretching a point or two (which is
surely permissible by the rules of their game),
rope in the New Theologians. Now this may
be evidence of extraordinary catholicity, but
not of orthodoxy. Chesterton stands by and
applauds the Homoousians scalping the Homoi-
ousians, but he is apparently willing to leave
the Anglican and the Roman Catholic on the
same plane of orthodoxy, which is absurd. We
cannot all be right, even the Duke in Magic
would not be mad enough to assert that. And
the average Christian would absolutely refuse
his adherence to a statement of orthodoxy that
left the matter of supreme spiritual authority
an open question.
In the fifteenth century practically every
Englishman would have declared with some
emphasis that it lay in the Pope of Rome. In
the twentieth century practically every Eng
lishman would declare with equal emphasis
that it did not. This change of opinion was
accompanied by considerable ill-feeling on
both sides, and was, as it were, illuminated by
132
RELIGION OF A DEBATER
burning martyrs. The men of both parties
burned in both an active and a passive sense.
Those charming Tudor sisters, Bloody Mary
(as the Anglicans call her) and Bloody Bess
(as the Roman Catholics affectionately name
her) left a large smudge upon accepted ideas
of orthodoxy ; charred human flesh was a
principal constituent of it. The mark remains,
the differences are far greater, but, to Chester
ton, both Anglican and Roman Catholic are
4 orthodox." Of such is the illimitable ortho
doxy of an ethical society, or of a body of
Theosophists who " recognize the essential
unity of all creeds and religions -the liars !
Chesterton tells us that Messrs. Shaw, Kipling,
Wells, Ibsen and others are heretics, because
of their doctrines. But he gives us no idea
whether the Pope of Rome, who sells indul
gences, is a heretic. And as the Pope is likely
to outlive Messrs. Shaw, etc., by perhaps a
thousand years, it is possible that Chesterton
has been attacking the ephemeral heresies,
while leaving the major ones untouched. In
effect, Chesterton tells us no more than that
we should shout with the largest crowd. But
the largest crowd prefers, just now, not to do
anything so clamorous.
The most curious feature about the present
position of Christianity is the energy with
133
G. K. CHESTERTON
which its opponents combine to keep it going.
While Mr. Robert Blatchford continues to
argue that man s will is not free, and Sir Oliver
Lodge continues to maintain that it is, the
Doctrine of the Resurrection is safe ; it is not
even attacked. But the net result of all those
peculiar modern things called " movements
is a state of immobility like a nicely balanced
tug-of-war. Perhaps a Rugby scrum would
make a better comparison.
The great and grave changes in our political
civilization all belong to the early nineteenth century,
not to the later. They belong to the black-and-
white epoch, when men believed fixedly in Toryism,
in Protestantism, in Calvinism, in Reform, and not
infrequently in Revolution. And whatever each man
believed in, he hammered at steadily, without
scepticism : and there was a time when the Estab
lished Church might have fallen, and the House of
Lords nearly fell. It was because Radicals were
wise enough to be constant and consistent ; it was
because Radicals were wise enough to be conservative.
. . . Let beliefs fade fast and frequently if you wish
institutions to remain the same. The more the life of
the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of
matter will be left to itself. The net result of all our
political suggestions, Collectivism, Tolstoyanism, Neo-
Feudalism, Communism, Anarchy, Scientific Bureau
cracy the plain fruit of them all is that Monarchy and
the House of Lords will remain. The net result of all
the new religions will be that the Church of England
134
RELIGION OF A DEBATER
will not (for heaven knows how long) be disestablished.
It was Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Cunninghame
Graham, Bernard Shaw, and Auberon Herbert, who
between them, with bowed, gigantic backs, bore up
the throne of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
It is on these grounds that we must believe
that, even as the Church survives, and pre
vails, in order to get a hearing when the atheist
and the New Theologian have finished shout
ing themselves hoarse at each other, so must
political creeds be in conformity with the
doctrines of the Church. Such is the founda
tion of democracy, according to Chesterton.
Will anybody revise his political views on this
basis ? Probably not. Every Christian be
lieves that his political opinions are thoroughly
Christian, and so entire is the disrepute into
which atheism has fallen as a philosophy of
life, that a great many atheists likewise protest
the entire Christianity of their politics. We
are all democrats to-day, in one sense or
another ; each of us more loosely than his
neighbour. It is strange that by the criterion
of almost every living man who springs to the
mind as a representative democrat, Chesterton
is the most undemocratic of us all. This,
however, needs a separate chapter of explana
tion.
135
VII
THE POLITICIAN WHO
COULD NOT TELL THE TIME
SOMEWHERE at the back of all Chesterton s
political and religious ideas lies an ideal
country, a Utopia which actually existed.
Its name is the Middle Ages. If some unem
ployed Higher Critic chose to undertake the
appalling task of reading steadily through all
the works of G.K.C., copying out those pas
sages in which there was any reference to the
Middle Ages, the result would be a description
of a land flowing with milk and honey. The
inhabitants would be large, strong Christian
men, and red-haired, womanly women. Their
children would be unschooled, save by the
Church. They would all live in houses of their
own, on lands belonging to them. Their faith
would be one. They would speak Latin as a
sort of Esperanto, and drink enormous quan
tities of good beer. The Church but I have
found the passage relating to the Church :
Religion, the immortal maiden, has been a maid-of-
all-work as well as a servant of mankind. She
136
THE POLITICIAN
provided men at once with the theoretic laws of an
unalterable cosmos ; and also with the practical rules
of the rapid and thrilling game of morality. She
taught logic to the student and taught fairy tales to
the children ; it was her business to confront the
nameless gods whose fear is on all flesh, and also to
see that the streets were spotted with silver and
scarlet, that there was a day for wearing ribbons or an
hour for ringing bells.
MI
The inhabitants of this happy realm would
be instinctively democratic, and no woman
would demand a vote there. They would have
that exalted notion of patriotism that works
outwards from the village pump to the universe
at large. They would understand all humanity
because they understood themselves. They
would understand themselves because they
would have no newspapers to widen their
interests and so make them shallower.
In Magic, as we have seen, Chesterton s
mouthpiece, the Conjuror, gave us to under
stand that it was better to believe in Apollo
than merely to disbelieve in God. The Ches-
tertonian Middle Ages are like Apollo ; they
did not exist, but they make an admirable
myth. For Chesterton, in common with the
rest of us, nourishes on myths like the green
bay ; we, however, happen not to know, in
most cases, when our myths have a foundation.
137
G. K. CHESTERTON
Mankind demands myths and it has them.
Some day a History of the World s Myths will
be compiled. It will show humanity climbing
perilous peaks in pursuit of somebody s mis
interpretations of somebody else s books, or
fighting bloodily because somebody asserted
or denied that a nation was the chosen one,
or invading new continents, physical or meta
physical, because of legendary gold to be
found therein, or in fact committing all its
follies under the inspiration of myths as in
fact it has done. The Middle Ages are to
Chesterton what King Alfred was to the
Chartists and early Radicals. They believed
that in his days England was actually governed
on Chartist principles. So it happens that two
Radical papers of the early part of last century
actually called themselves The Alfred, and that
Major Cart wright spent a considerable amount
of energy in inducing the Greeks to substitute
pikes for bayonets in their struggles against
the Turks, on the grounds that the pike was
used in Alfred s England.
So there we have Chesterton believing de
voutly that that servile state, stricken with
plague, and afflicted with death in all its forms,
is the dreamland of the saints. His political
principles, roughly speaking, are England was
decent once let us apply the same recipe to
138
THE POLITICIAN
the England of to-day. His suggestions, there
fore, are rather negative than positive. He
would dam the flood of modern legislative ten
dencies because it is taking England farther
away from his Middle Ages. But he will not
say " do this " about anything, because in the
Middle Ages they made few laws, not having,
in point of fact, the power to enforce those
offences against moral and economic law which
then took the place of legislation.
It is impossible to say to what extent
Chesterton has surrendered himself to this
myth ; whether he has come to accept it
because he liked it, or in order to please his
friend, Mr. Hilaire Belloc, from whom G.K.C.
never differs politically. Once they stood side
by side and debated against Mr. Shaw and
Mr. Wells, arguing from Socialism to beer, and
thence to religion.
In January, 1908, Chesterton accepted the
invitation of the Editor of The New Age to
explain why he did not call himself a Socialist,
in spite of his claim to possess " not only a
faith in democracy, but a great tenderness for
revolution." The explanation is complicated,
to say the least. In the first place Chesterton
does not want people to share, they should
give and take. In the second place, as a
democrat (which nobody else is) he has a vast
139
G. K. CHESTERTON
respect (which nobody else has) for the work
ing classes. And
one thing I should affirm as certain, the whole smell
and sentiment and general ideal of Socialism they
detest and disdain. No part of the community is so
specially fixed in those forms and feelings which are
opposite to the tone of most Socialists ; the privacy
of homes, the control of one s own children, the
minding of one s own business. I look out of my
back windows over the black stretch of Battersea,
and I believe I could make up a sort of creed, a cata
logue of maxims, which I am certain are believed,
and believed strongly, by the overwhelming mass of
men and women as far as the eye can reach. For
instance, that an Englishman s house is his castle,
and that awful proprieties ought to regulate admis
sion to it ; that marriage is a real bond, making
jealousy and marital revenge at the least highly
pardonable ; that vegetarianism and all pitting of
animal against human rights is a silly fad ; that on
the other hand to save money to give yourself a fine
funeral is not a silly fad, but a symbol of ancestral
self-respect ; that when giving treats to friends or
children, one should give them what they like,
emphatically not what is good for them ; that there
is nothing illogical in being furious because Tommy
has been coldly caned by a schoolmistress and then
throwing saucepans at him yourself. All these things
they believe ; they are the only people who do believe
them ; and they are absolutely and eternally right.
They are the ancient sanities of humanity ; the ten
commandments of man.
140
THE POLITICIAN
A week later, Mr. H. G. Wells, who at that
time had not yet broken away from organized
Socialism, but was actually a member of the
Executive Committee of the Fabian Society,
wrote a reply to the case against Socialism
which had been stated by Chesterton, and, a
week earlier, by Mr. Hilaire Belloc. He
attempted to get Chesterton to look facts in
the face. He pointed out that as things are
" I do not see how Belloc and Chesterton can
stand for anything but a strong State as
against those wild monsters of property, the
strong, big, private owners." Suppose that
Chesterton isn t a Socialist, is he more on the
side of the Socialists or on that of the Free
Trade Liberal capitalists and landlords ? "It
isn t an adequate reply to say [of Socialism]
that nobody stood treat there, and that the
simple, generous people like to beat their own
wives and children on occasion in a loving and
intimate manner, and that they won t endure
the spirit of Sidney Webb."
A fortnight later, Chesterton replied. But,
though many have engaged with him in con
troversy, I doubt if anybody has ever pinned
him down to a fact or an argument. On this
occasion, G.K.C. politely refused even to refer
to the vital point of the case of Mr. H. G.
Wells. On the other hand he wrote a very
141
G. K. CHESTERTON
jolly article about beer and " tavern hospi
tality." The argument marked time for two
weeks more, when Mr. Belloc once again
entered the lists. The essence of his contri
bution is " I premise that man, in order to be
normally happy, tolerably happy, must own."
Collectivism will not let him own. The trouble
about the present state of society is that people
do not own enough. The remedy proposed
will be worse than the disease. Then Mr.
Bernard Shaw had a look in.
In the course of his lengthy article he gave
" the Chesterbelloc -"a very amusing pan
tomime elephant -several shrewd digs in the
ribs. It claimed, according to G.B.S., to be
the Zeitgeist. " To which we reply, bluntly,
but conclusively, Gammon ! The rest was
mostly amiable personalities. Mr. Shaw owned
up to musical cravings, compared with which
the Chesterbelloc tendency to consume alcohol
was as nothing. He also jeered very pleasantly
at Mr. Belloc s power to cause a stampede of
Chesterton s political and religious ideas. " For
Belloc s sake Chesterton says he believes liter
ally in the Bible story of the Resurrection.
For Belloc s sake he says he is not a Socialist.
On a recent occasion I tried to drive him to
swallow the Miracle of St. Januarius for Belloc s
sake ; but at that he stuck. He pleaded his
142
THE POLITICIAN
belief in the Resurrection story. He pointed
out very justly that I believe in lots of things
just as miraculous as the Miracle of St. Janu-
arius ; but when I remorselessly pressed the
fact that he did not believe that the blood of
St. Januarius reliquefies miraculously every
year, the Credo stuck in his throat like Amen
in Macbeth s. He had got down at last to his
irreducible minimum of dogmatic incredulity,
and could not, even with the mouth of the
bottomless pit yawning before Belloc, utter
the saving lie."
By this time the discussion was definitely
off Socialism. Chesterton produced another
article, The Last of the Rationalists, in reply
to Mr. Shaw, from which one gathered what
one had been previously suspected that " you
[namely Mr. Shaw, but in practice both the
opposition controversialists] have confined
yourselves to charming essays on our two
charming personalities." And there they
stopped.
The year following this bout of personalities
saw the publication of a remarkably brilliant
book by Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, in
which, one might have expected, the case
against the political creed represented by
G.B.S. might have been carried a trifle farther.
Instead of which it was not carried anything
143
G. K. CHESTERTON
like so far. Chesterton jeered at Mr. Shaw s
vegetarianism, denied his democracy, but de
cided that on the whole he was a good repub
lican, " in the literal and Latin sense ; he cares
more for the Public Thing than for any private
thing." He ends the chapter entitled " The
Progressive by saying the kindest things he
ever said about any body of Socialists.
I have in my time had my fling at the Fabian
Society, at the pedantry of schemes, the arrogance
of experts ; nor do I regret it now. But when I
remember that other world against which it reared
its bourgeois banner of cleanliness and common sense,
I will not end this chapter without doing it decent
honour. Give me the drain pipes of the Fabians
rather than the panpipes of the later poets ; the
drain pipes have a nicer smell.
The reader may have grasped by this time
the fact that Chesterton s objections to Socialism
were based rather on his dislike of what the
working man calls " mucking people about
than on any economic grounds. He made
himself the sworn enemy of any Bill before
Parliament which contained any proposals to
appoint inspectors. He took the line that the
sacredness of the home diminishes visibly with
the entrance of the gas collector, and disappears
down the kitchen sink with the arrival of the
school attendance officer. In those of his
144
THE POLITICIAN
writings which I have not seen I have no doubt
there are pleadings for the retention of the
cesspool, because it is the last moat left to the
Englishman s house, which is his castle. It is
difficult to believe in the complete sincerity
of such an attitude. The inspector is the chief
enemy of the bad landlord and employer, he
is a fruit of democracy. In the early days of
the factory system, when mercilessly long
hours were worked by children and women,
when legislation had failed to ameliorate the
conditions of employment, because the em
ployers were also the magistrates, and would
not enforce laws against themselves, the great
Reform Bill agitation, which so nearly caused
a revolution in this country, came to an end,
having in 1832 achieved a partial success. But
the new House of Commons did not at once
realize how partial it was, and at first it
regarded the interests of working men with
something of the intensity of the Liberal
Government of 1906, which had not yet come
to appreciate the new and portentous Labour
Party at its true worth. So in 1833 inspectors
were appointed for the first time. This very
brief excursion into history is sufficient justi
fication for refusing to take seriously those
who would have us believe that inspectors are
necessarily the enemies of the human race.
K 145
G. K. CHESTERTON
Chesterton s theory that middle-class Socialists
are people who want to do things to the poor
in the direction of regimenting them finds an
easy refutation. When, in 1910, the whole of
England fell down before the eloquence of
Mr. Lloyd George, and consented to the Insur
ance Bill, the one body of people who stood out
and fought that Bill was that middle-class
Socialist body, the Fabian Society. It is
sometimes desirable, for purposes of contro
versy, to incarnate a theory or objection.
Chesterton lumped together all his views on
the alleged intentions of the Socialists to inter
fere in the natural and legitimate happinesses of
the working class, and called this curious com
posite Mr. Sidney Webb. So through many
volumes Mr. Webb s name is continually
bobbing up, like an irrepressible Aunt Sally,
and having to be thwacked into a temporary
disappearance. But this is only done for
literary effect. To heave a brick at a man is
both simpler and more amusing than to arraign
a system or a creed. A reader enjoys the
feeling that his author is a clever dog who is
making it devilishly uncomfortable for his
opponents. His appreciation would be con
siderably less if the opponent in question was
a mere theory. In point of fact, Chesterton is
probably a warm admirer of Mr. and Mrs.
146
THE POLITICIAN
Sidney Webb. When they founded (in 1909)
their National Committee for the Prevention
of Destitution, designed to educate the British
public in the ideas of what has been called
Webbism, especially those contained in the
Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission,
one of the first to join was G. K. Chesterton.
The word Socialism covers a multitude of
Socialists, some of whom are not. The political
faith of a man, therefore, must not be judged
upon his attitude towards Socialism, if we
have anything more definite to go upon. Ches
terton overflows, so to speak, with predilec
tions, such as beer (in a political sense, of
course), opposition to the Jingo, on the one
hand, and to middle-class faddery, such as
vegetarianism, on the other, and so on. Any
body might indulge in most of his views, in
fact, without incurring severe moral reproba
tion. But there is an exception which, un
fortunately, links Chesterton pretty firmly
with the sweater, and other undesirable lords
of creation. He is an anti-suffragist.
In a little essay Chesterton nee wrote on
Tolstoy, he argued that the thing that has
driven men mad was logic, from the beginning
of time, whereas the thing that has kept them
sane was mysticism. Tolstoy, lacking mysti
cism, was at the mercy of his pitiless logic,
147
G. K. CHESTERTON
which led him to condemn things which are
entirely natural and human. This attitude,
one feels (and it is only to be arrived at by
feeling), is absolutely right. We all start off
with certain scarce expressible feelings that
certain things are fundamentally decent and
permissible, and that others are the reverse,
just as we do not take our idea of blackness
and whiteness from a text-book. If anybody
proposed that all Scotsmen should be com
pelled to eat sago with every meal, the idea,
although novel to most of us, would be in
stantly dismissed, even, it is probable, by
those with sago interests, because it would be
contrary to our instinct of what is decent.
In fact, we all believe in natural rights, or at
any rate we claim the enjoyment of some.
Now natural rights have no logical basis. The
late Professor D. G. Ritchie very brilliantly
examined the theory of natural rights, and by
means of much subtle dissection and argument
found that there were no natural rights ; law
was the only basis of privilege. It is quite
easy to be convinced by the author s delightful
dialectic, but the conviction is apt to vanish
suddenly in the presence of a dog being ill-
treated.
Now on a basis of common decency the
basis of all democratic political thought the
148
THE POLITICIAN
case for woman suffrage is irresistible. It is
not decent that the sweated woman worker
should be denied what, in the opinion of many
competent judges, might be the instrument of
her salvation. It is not decent that women
should share a disqualification with lunatics,
criminals, children, and no others of their own
race. It is not decent that the sex which knows
most about babies should have no opportunity
to influence directly legislation dealing with
babies. It is not decent that a large, important
and necessary section of humanity, with highly
gregarious instincts, should not be allowed to
exercise the only gregarious function which
concerns the whole nation at once.
These propositions are fundamental ; if a
man or woman cannot accept them, then he is
at heart an " anti," even if he has constructed
for himself a quantity of reasons, religious,
ethical, economic, political or what not, why
women should be allowed to vote. Every
suffrage argument is, or can be, based on
decencies, not on emotion or statistics.
Chesterton, bases his case on decencies, but
they are not the decencies that matter. In
What s Wrong with the World he insists on the
indecency of allowing women to cease to be
amateurs within the home, or of allowing them
to earn a living in a factory or office, or of
149
G. K. CHESTERTON
allowing them to share in the responsibility
for taking the lives of condemned murderers,
or of allowing them to exercise the coercion
which is government, which is a sort of pyra
mid, with a gallows on top, the ultimate resort
of coercive power. And in these alleged in
decencies (the word is not altogether my own)
lies Chesterton s whole case against allowing
any woman to vote. Into these propositions
his whole case, as expressed in What s Wrong
with the World, is faithfully condensed.
Well now, are these indecencies sincere or
simulated ? First, as regards the amateur.
Chesterton s case is that the amateur is neces
sary, in order to counteract the influences of
the specialist. Man is nowadays the specialist.
He is confined to making such things as the
thousandth part of a motor-car or producing
the ten-thousandth part of a daily newspaper.
By being a specialist he is made narrow.
Woman, with the whole home on her hands,
has a multiplicity of tasks. She is the amateur,
and as such she is free. If she is put into
politics or industry she becomes a specialist,
and as such becomes a slave. This is a pretty
piece of reasoning, but it is absolutely hollow.
There are few women who do not gladly resign
part at least of their sovereignty, if they have
the chance, to a maid-servant (who may be,
150
THE POLITICIAN
and, in fact, usually is an amateur, but is not
free to try daring experiments) or to such
blatant specialists as cooks and nursemaids.
Nobody is the least bit shocked by the exist
ence of specialist women. Indeed, it is a
solemn fact, that were it not for them Chester
ton would be unable to procure a single article
of clothing. He would be driven to the fig-
leaf, and would stand a good chance of not
getting even so much, now that so many gar
deners are women. We are terribly dependent
upon the specialist woman. That is why the
amateur within the home is beginning to
wonder whether, on the whole, man is so very
much dependent upon her. She comes to rely
more and more upon the specialist women to
help her feed, clothe, and nurse her husband.
She has so much done for her that she comes
to understand the remainder left to her far
better. She becomes a specialist herself, and
feels kindly towards other specialists. Then
she demands a vote and meets Chesterton,
who tells her to go and mind the baby and be
as free as she likes with the domestic apparatus
for making pastry, when her baby is in point
of fact being brought up by other women at a
Montessori school to be much more intelligent
and much more of a specialist than she herself
is ever likely to be, and when she knows that
151
G. K. CHESTERTON
her dyspeptic husband has an absolute loath
ing for the amateurishness that expresses itself
in dough.
Then there is the alleged wrongness of per
mitting women to work in factories and offices.
We are all probably prepared to admit that
we have been shocked at the commercial em
ployment of women. But it has probably
occurred to few of us that the shock was due
simply to their commercial employment. It
was due to their low wages and to the beastli
ness of their employers. When they drew
decent wages and their employers were decent
men we were not the least bit hurt. But when
an employer made use of the amateurishness
of young girls to underpay them, and then
make deductions from their wages on various
trivial pretexts, and put them to work in over
crowded factories and offices, then we all felt
acutely that an indecency was being com
mitted. The obvious democratic remedy is
the duckpond, but in our great cities none
remain. So one is sorrowfully brought round
to the slower but surer expedient of attacking
and destroying the amateurishness of women
at the point where it is dangerous to them.
Amateurishness has encircled women in the
past like the seven rivers of Hades. Every
now and again a daring excursion was made in
152
THE POLITICIAN
order that the wisdom of those imprisoned
within should be added to our store. A good
deal of aboriginal amateurishness has been
evaporating as the woman doctor has been
taking the place of the time-honoured amateur
dispenser of brimstone and treacle, and even
horrider things. And will Chesterton maintain
that it were better for us all if certain women
had remained amateurs and had not studied
and specialized so that, in time of need, they
were enabled to tend the sick and wounded at
home, in Flanders and in France, and wherever
the powers of evil had been at work ?
Lastly, is it decent that women should share
the awful responsibility which is attached to
the ultimate control of the State, when the
State is compelled to use the gallows ? If
women vote, they are responsible for whatever
blood is shed by the State. Yes, but, Mr.
Chesterton, aren t they just as responsible for
it in any case ? Don t women help to pay the
hangman s w^ages with every ounce of tea or
of sweets they buy ? If capital punishment
is obscene, then we can do without it, and a
woman s vote will not make her a sharer in
the evil. If capital punishment is morally
stimulating to the nation at large, there is no
reason why women should not be allowed to
share in the stimulation. Now what has
153
G. K. CHESTERTON
become of Chesterton s decencies ? It is
indeed saddening that a man who never misses
an opportunity to proclaim himself a demo
crat should take his stand on this matter
beside Lord Curzon, and in opposition to the
instinctively and essentially democratic views
proclaimed by such men as Messrs. H. W.
Nevinson and Philip Snowden.
In an article in The Illustrated London News
on June 1st, 1912, Chesterton showed whose
side he was on with unusual distinctness. The
subject of the article was Earnestness ; the
moral, that it was a bad quality, the property
of Socialists and Anti-Socialists, and Suffragists,
and that apathy was best of all. It concluded :
Neither Socialists nor Suffragists will smash our
politics, I fear. The worst they can do is to put a
little more of the poison of earnestness into the
strong, unconscious sanity of our race, and disturb
that deep and just indifference on which all things
rest ; the quiet of the mother or the carelessness of
the child.
In remarkably similar words, the late Pro
curator of the Holy Synod of the Russian
Church, C. P. Pobedonostsev, condemned de
mocracy in his book, The Reflexions of a
Russian Statesman, and praised vis inertice for
its preservative effects. But the Russian had
more consistency ; he did not merely condemn
154
THE POLITICIAN
votes for women, but also votes for men ; and
not only votes, but education, the jury system,
the freedom of the Press, religious freedom,
and many other things.
Putting aside the question of woman suf
frage, Chesterton s views on democracy may
be further illustrated by reference to the pro
ceedings of the Joint Select Committee of the
House of Lords and the House of Commons,
1909, on Stage Plays (Censorship). He may
speak for himself here.
Mr. G. K. Chesterton is called in, and
examined.
Question 614<I(Chairman). I understand that you
appear here to give evidence on behalf of the average
man ?
G.K.C. Yes, that is so. I represent the audience,
in fact. I am neither a dramatist nor a dramatic
critic. I do not quite know why I am here, but if
anybody wants to know my views on the subject they
are these : I am for the censorship, but I am against
the present Censor. I am very strongly for the
censorship, and I am very strongly against the present
Censor. The whole question I think turns on the
old democratic objection to despotism. I am an old-
fashioned person and I retain the old democratic
objection to despotism. I would trust 12 ordinary
men, but I cannot trust one ordinary man.
6142. You prefer the jury to the judge ? Yes,
exactly ; that is the very point. It seems to me
that if you have one ordinary man judging, it is not
155
G. K. CHESTERTON
his ordinariness that appears, but it is his extra-
ordinariness that appears. Take anybody you like
George III for instance. I suppose that George III
was a pretty ordinary man in one sense. People
called him Farmer George. He was very like a large
number of other people, but when he was alone in
his position things appeared in him that were not
ordinary that he was a German, and that he was
mad, and various other facts. Therefore, my primary
principle
6143. He gloried in the name of Briton ? I know
he did. That is what showed him to be so thoroughly
German.
LORD NEWTON. He spelt it wrongly.
WITNESS. Therefore, speaking broadly, I would
not take George Ill s opinion, but I would take the
opinion of 12 George Ill s on any question.
The taking of the " evidence took several
hours, but it never yielded anything more
than this : The local jury is a better judge of
what is right and proper than a single Censor.
Juries may differ in their judgments ; but
why not ? Is it not desirable that Hampstead
and Highgate should each have an opportunity
of finding out independently what they like ?
May they not compete in taste one against
the other ?
This introduction of the question of dramatic
censorship invites a slight digression. Chester
ton has a decided regard for a dramatic censor-
156
THE POLITICIAN
ship. A book need not be censored, because it
need not be finished by its reader, but it may
be difficult to get out of a theatre in the course
of a performance. And there are performances
of plays, written by " irresponsible modern
philosophers," which, to Chesterton, seem to
deserve suppression. A suggestive French
farce may be a dirty joke, but it is at least a
joke ; but a play which raises the question Is
marriage a failure ? and answers it in the
affirmative, is a pernicious philosophy. The
answer to this last contention is that, in point
of strict fact, modern philosophers do not
regard happy marriages as failures, and opinion
is divided on the others, which are generally
the subjects of their plays. But there is no
doubt that a jury is better qualified than a
single Censor. A French jury decided that
Madame Bovary was not immoral. An English
jury decided that a certain book by Zola was
immoral and sent the publisher to prison.
Another English jury, for all practical pur
poses, decided that Dorian Gray was not
immoral, and so on. The verdicts may be
accepted. Twelve men, picked from an
alphabetical list, may not be judges of art,
but they will not debase morality.
Chesterton s personal contribution to the
political thought of his day lies in his criticism
157
G. K. CHESTERTON
of the humaneness of legislative proposals. A
thing that is human is commonly a very
different matter from a thing that is merely
humanitarian. G.K.C. is hotly human and
almost bitterly anti-humanitarian.
The difference between the two is illustrated
by the institution of the gallows, which is
human, but not humanitarian. In its essen
tials it consists of a rope and a branch, which
is precisely the apparatus that an angry man
might employ in order to rid himself of his
captured enemy. Herbert Spencer, seeking
in his old age for means whereby to increase
the happiness of mankind, invented a humani
tarian apparatus for the infliction of capital
punishment. It consisted of a glorified round
about, on which the victim was laid for his
last journey. As it revolved, the blood-pres
sure on his head gradually increased (or
decreased, I forget which) until he fell asleep
and died painlessly. This is humanitarianism.
The process is safe and sure (so long as the
machine did not stop suddenly), highly efficient,
bloodless and painless. But just because it is
so humanitarian it offends one a great deal
more than the old-fashioned gallows. The
only circumstance which can justify violence
is anger. The only circumstance which can
justify the taking of human life is anger. And
158
THE POLITICIAN
anger may be expressed by a rope or a knife-
edge, but not by a roundabout or any other
morbid invention of a cold-blooded philosopher
such as the electric chair, or the lethal chamber.
In the same way, if flogging is to continue as
a punishment, it must be inflicted by a man
and not by a machine.
Now this distinction (made without preju
dice as to Chesterton s views on capital or
corporal punishment) holds good through his
whole criticism of modern legislation. He
believes that it is better that a man and his
family should starve in their own slum, than
that they should be moulded, by a cumbersome
apparatus of laws and officials and inspectors,
into a tame, mildly prosperous and mildly
healthy group of individuals, whose opinions,
occupations and homes should be provided for
them. On these lines he attacks whatever in
his opinion will tend to put men into a position
where their souls will be less their own. He
believes that the man who has been costered
by the Government into a mediocre state of
life will be less of a man than one who has been
left unbothered by officials, and has had to
shift for himself.
Very largely, therefore, Chesterton s political
faith is an up-to-date variety of the tenets of
the Self-Help School, which was own brother
159
G. K. CHESTERTON
to the Manchester School. And here we come
to a curious contradiction, the first of a series.
For Chesterton loathes the Manchester School.
The contradiction comes of an inveterate
nominalism. To G.K.C. all good politics are
summed up in the words Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity. But nobody, not even a French
man, can explain what they mean. Chesterton
used to believe that they mean Liberalism,
being led astray by the sound of the first word,
but he soon realized his error. Let a man say
" I believe in Liberty and only the vague
ness of the statement preserves it from the
funniness of a Higher Thinker s affirmation,
" I believe in Beauty." A man has to feel
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, for they are not
in the nature of facts. And one suspects
horribly that what Chesterton really feels is
merely the masculine liberty, equality and
fraternity of the public-house, where men meet
together but never do anything. For Chester
ton has not yet asked us to do anything, he
only requests Parliament to refrain. He sup
ports no political programme. He is opposed
to Party Government, which is government
by the Government. He is in favour of Home
Rule, it may be inferred ; and of making things
nasty for the Jews, it may be supposed. But
he does not poach on the leader-writers pre-
160
THE POLITICIAN
serves, and his political programme is left
hazy. His opposition to Liberal proposals
brings him near the Tories. If the Liberals
continue in power for a few years longer, and
Home Rule drops out of the things opposed
by Tories, the latter may well find Chesterton
among their doubtful assets. He will probably
continue to call himself a Liberal and a " child
of the French Revolution," but that will be
only his fun. For the interesting abortions to
which the French Revolution gave birth
well, they are quite another story.
Chesterton is a warm supporter of the
queerly mixed proposals that are known as
the " rights of small nationalities," and the
smaller the nationality, the more warmly he
supports (so he would have us believe) its
demand for self-government. Big fleas have
little fleas, alas, and that is the difficulty he
does not confront. For Home Rule carried to
its final sub-division is simply home rule ; the
independence of homes. Political Home Rule
is only assented to on general principles ;
apparently on the ground that on the day
when an Englishman s home really does be
come his castle he will not, so to speak, mind
much whether he is an Englishman or an
Irishman.
And here we may bid farewell to the poli-
L 161
G. K. CHESTERTON
tician who is Chesterton. His politics are like
his perverse definitions of the meaning of such
words as progress and reform. He is like a
child who plays about with the hands of a
clock, and makes the surprising discovery that
some clocks may be made to tell a time that
does not exist with the small hand at twelve
and the large at six, for example. Also that if
a clock goes fast, it comes to register an hour
behind the true time, and the other way round.
And so Chesterton goes on playing with the
times, until at last a horrid suspicion grips us.
What if he cannot tell the time himself ?
162
VIII
A DECADENT OF SORTS
AN idea, if treated gently, may be brought up
to perform many useful tasks. It is, however,
apt to pine in solitude, and should be allowed
to enjoy the company of others of its own
kind. It is much easier to overwork an idea
than a man, and of the two, the wearied idea
presents an infinitely more pathetic appearance.
Those of us who, for our sins, have to review
the novels of other people, are accustomed to
the saddening spectacle of a poor little idea,
beautiful and fresh in its youth, come wearily
to its tombstone on page 300 (where or where
abouts novels end), trailing after it an immense
load of stiff and heavy puppets, taken down
from the common property-cupboards of the
nation s fiction, and not even dusted for the
occasion. Manalive, as we have seen, suffered
from its devotion to one single idea, but the
poor little thing was kept going to the bitter
end by the flow of humorous encouragement
given it by the author. The later works of
163
G. K. CHESTERTON
Chesterton, however, are symbolized by a
performing flea, dragging behind it a little
cartload of passengers. But it sometimes
happens that the humour of Manalive is not
there, that one weary idea has to support an
intolerable deal of prose.
In An Essay on Two Cities^ there is a long
passage illustrating the adventures of a man
who tried to find people in London by the
names of the places. He might go into Buck
ingham Palace in search of the Duke of Buck
ingham, into Marlborough House in quest of
the Duke of Marlborough. He might even
look for the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo.
I wonder that no one has written a wild romance
about the adventures of such an alien, seeking the
great English aristocrats, and only guided by the
names ; looking for the Duke of Bedford in the town
of that name, seeking for some trace of the Duke
of Norfolk in Norfolk. He might sail for Wellington
in New Zealand to find the ancient seat of the Welling
tons. The last scene might show him trying to learn
Welsh in order to converse with the Prince of Wales.
Here is an idea that is distinctly amusing when
made to fill one short paragraph, and might
be deadly tedious if extended into a wild
romance. Perhaps the best way of summariz
ing the peculiar decadence into which Ches-
1 All Things Considered.
164
A DECADENT OF SORTS
terton seemed at one time to be falling is by
the statement that up to the present he has
not found time to write the book, but has done
others like it. And yet the decadence has
never showed signs of that fin de siecle rustiness
that marked the decadent movement (if it was
really a movement and not just an obsession)
of the generation that preceded Chesterton.
He cursed it in the dedication to Mr. E. C.
Bentley of The Man who was Thursday, and
he remained true to the point of view expressed
in that curse for ever afterwards.
A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the
weather,
Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul, when we were boys
together.
Science announced nonentity, and art admired decay ;
The world was old and ended : but you and I were gay.
Round us in antic order their crippled vices came
Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its
shame.
Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom,
Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a
plume.
Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung ;
The world was very old indeed when you and I were
young.
They twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named :
Men were ashamed of honour ; but we were not ashamed.
The Chestertonian decadence was not even
an all-round falling-off. If anybody were to
165
G. K. CHESTERTON
make the statement that in the year nineteen-
hundred-and-something Chesterton produced
his worst work it would be open to anybody
else to declare, with equal truth, that in the
same year Chesterton produced his best work.
And the year in which these extremes met
would be either 1913 or 1914, the years of
Father Brown and The Flying Inn on one hand,
and of Father Brown and some of the songs of
The Flying Inn on the other. It was not a
technical decline, but the period of certain
intellectual wearinesses, when Chesterton s
mental resilience failed him for a time, and
he welcomed with too much enthusiasm the
nasty ideas from which no man is wholly free.
The main feature indeed of this period of
decadence is the brandishing about of a whole
mass of antipathies. A man is perfectly en
titled to hate what he will, but it is generally
assumed that the hater has some ideas on the
subject of the reform of the hatee. But Ches
terton is as devoid of suggestions as a goat is
of modesty. A man may have a violent ob
jection against women earning their own
livings, and yet be regarded as a reasonable
being if he has any alternative proposals for the
well-being of the unendowed and temporarily
or permanently unmarriageable woman, with
no relatives able to support her and there
166
A DECADENT OF SORTS
are two or three millions of such women in the
United Kingdom. But a mere " You shouldn t "
is neither here nor there.
Take this verse. It was written two or
three years ago and is from a poem entitled
To a Turk.
With us too rage against the rood
Your devils and your swine ;
A colder scorn of womanhood,
A baser fear of wine,
And lust without the harem,
And Doom without the God,
Go. It is not this rabble
Sayeth to you " Ichabod."
A previous stanza talks about the creedless
chapel." Here is a whole mass of prejudices
collected into a large splutter at the expense
of England. If the verse means anything at
all, it means that the English are nearer the
beasts than the Turks.
Another of Chesterton s intellectual aber
rations is his anti-Semitism. He continually
denied in the columns of The Daily Herald that
he was an anti-Semite, but his references to the
Jews are innumerable and always on the same
side. If one admits what appears to be Ches
terton s contention that Judaism is largely
just an exclusive form of contemporary atheism,
then one is entitled to ask, Why is a wicked
Gentile atheist merely an atheist, while a
167
G. K. CHESTERTON
Jewish atheist remains a Jew ? Surely the
morals of both are on the same level, and the
atheism, and not the race, is the offensive
feature. The Jews have their sinners and their
saints, including the greatest Saint of all.
They and they only, amongst all mankind,
Received the transcript of the eternal mind ;
Were trusted with His own engraven laws,
And constituted guardians of His cause :
Their s were the prophets, their s the priestly call,
And their s, by birth, the Saviour of us all.
Even if Chesterton cannot work himself up
to Cowper s enthusiasm (and few of us can),
he cannot deny that the race he is continually
blackguarding was preparing his religion, and
discovering the way to health at a time when
his own Gentile ancestors were probably per
forming human sacrifices and eating worms.
Unquestionably what is the matter with the
modern Jew, especially of the educated classes,
is that he refuses to be impressed by the Chris
tian Church. But the Christian Church cannot
fairly be said to have made herself attractive
in the past ; her methods of Inquisition, for
example. . . .
It is difficult to write apathetically on this
extreme instance of a great writer s intolerance.
One single example will suffice. A year or
two ago, a Jew called Beilis was put on his trial
168
A DECADENT OF SORTS
(after an imprisonment of nearly three years)
for the murder of a small Christian boy named
Yushinsky, in order that his blood might
be used for ritual purposes. Yushinsky,
who was found dead under peculiar circum
stances, was probably a Jew himself, but
that does not affect the point at issue. Mr.
Arthur Henderson, M.P., tried to arouse an
agitation in order to secure the freedom of
Beilis, because it was perfectly evident from
the behaviour of certain parties that the
prisoner s conviction would be the signal for
the outbreak of a series of massacres of the
Jews, and because a case which had taken
nearly three years to prepare was obviously
a very thin case. Chesterton wrote a ribald
article in The Daily Herald on Mr. Henderson s
attempt at intervention, saying in effect, How
do you know that Beilis isn t guilty ? Now it
is impossible to hold the belief that Beilis
might be guilty and at the same time disbelieve
that the Jews are capable of committing
human sacrifice. When a leading Russian
critic named Rosanov, also an anti-Semite,
issued a pamphlet proclaiming that the Jews
did, in fact, commit this loathsome crime, he
was ignominiously ejected from a prominent
Russian literary society. The comparison
should appeal to Chesterton.
169
G. K. CHESTERTON
The nadir of these antipathies is reached in
The Flying Inn, a novel published a few months
before the Great War broke out, and before
we all made the discovery that, hold what
prejudices we will, we are all immensely
dependent on one another. In this book we
are given a picture of England of the future,
conquered by the Turk. As a concession to
Islam, all intoxicating drink is prohibited in
England. It is amusing to note that a few
months after the publication of this silly
prognostication, the greatest Empire in Chris
tendom prohibited drink within its frontiers
in order to conquer the Turk and his Allies.
A Patrick Dalroy, an Irishman (with red hair),
and of course a giant, has been performing
Homeric feats against the conquering Turks.
A Lord Ivywood, an abstraction bloodless to
the point of albinism, is at the head of affairs
in England. The Jews dominate everything.
Dalroy and Humphrey Pump, an evicted inn
keeper, discovering that drinks may still be
sold where an inn -sign may be found, start
journeying around England loaded only with
the sign-board of " The Green Man," a large
cheese, and a keg of rum. They are, in fact, a
peripatetic public-house, and the only demo
cratic institution of its kind left in England.
Every other chapter the new innkeepers run
170
A DECADENT OF SORTS
into Ivywood and his hangers-on. As the
story wriggles its inconsequent length, the
author curses through the mouths of his
heroes. He anathematizes teetotallers, brewers,
vegetarians, temperance drinks, model villages,
aesthetic poets, Oriental art, Parliament, poli
ticians, Jews, Turks, and infidels in general,
futurist painting, and other things. In the
end, Dalroy and Pump lead a vast insurrection,
and thousands of dumb, long-suffering English
men attack Ivywood in his Hall, and so free
their country from the Turk.
Only the songs already described in Chapter
V preserve this book from extreme dullness.
Technically it is poor. The action is as scat
tered as the parts of a futurist picture. A
whole chapter is devoted to a picture of a
newspaper editor at work, inventing the phrase
ology of indefmiteness. Epigrams are few and
are very much overworked. Once a catch
word is sprung, it is run to death. The Turk
who by means of silly puns attempts to prove
that Islamic civilization is better than European,
never ceases in his efforts. The heartlessness
of Ivywood is continuous, and ends in insanity.
Parts of The Flying Inn convey the impres
sion that Chesterton was tired of his own style
and his own manner of controversy, and had
taken to parodying himself. The arguments
171
G. K. CHESTERTON
of the already-mentioned Turk, for example,
might well pass for a really good parody of the
theological dispute in the first chapter of The
Ball and the Cross. There, it may be remem
bered, two men (more or less) discussed the
symbolism of balls and crosses. In The Flying
Inn people discuss the symbolism of crescents
and crosses, and the Turk, Misysra Ammon,
explains, " When the English see an English
youth, they cry out He is crescent ! But
when they see an English aged man, they cry
out He is cross ! On these lines a great
deal of The Flying Inn is written.
We now come to Chesterton s political
decadence, traceable, like many features in his
history, to Mr. Hilaire Belloc. The friendship
between G.K.C. and the ex-Liberal M.P. for
Rochdale bore a number of interesting fruits.
There were the amusing illustrations to The
Great Enquiry, an amusing skit on the Tariff
Reform League, to Emmanuel Burden and
The Green Overcoat. But curious artificialities
sprang into existence, like so many funguses,
under the lengthening shadow of Mr. Belloc.
To him is due the far-fetchedness of some of
Chesterton s pleading in support of the miracu
lous element in religion. To him also is due
the growing antipathy against the Liberal
Party and the party system in general.
172
A DECADENT OF SORTS
Up to the end of January, 1913, Chesterton
had continued his connection with The Daily
News. On January 28th there took place, at
the Queen s Hall, London, a debate between
Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Hilaire Belloc.
The latter moved " That if we do not re
establish the institution of property, we shall
re-establish the institution of slavery ; there
is no third course." The debate was an ex
tremely poor affair, as neither combatant dealt,
except parenthetically, with his opponent s
points. In the course of it Mr. Shaw, to illus
trate an argument, referred to Chesterton as
" a flourishing property of Mr. Cadbury," a
remark which G.K.C. appears to have taken
to heart. His quarrel with official Liberalism
was at the moment more bitter than ever
before. Mr. Belloc had taken a very decided
stand on the Marconi affair, and Mr. Cecil
Chesterton, G.K.C. s brother, was sturdily sup
porting him. The Daily News, on the other
hand, was of course vigorously defending the
Government. Chesterton suddenly severed
his long connection with The Daily News and
came over to The Daily Herald. This paper,
which is now defunct, except in a weekly
edition, was the organ of Syndicalism and
rebellion in general. In a letter to the editor
of The Herald, Chesterton explained with
173
G. K. CHESTERTON
pathetic irony that The Daily News " had come
to stand for almost everything I disagree with ;
and I thought I had better resign before the
next great measure of social reform made it
illegal to go on strike."
A week or so later, Chesterton started his
series of Saturday articles in The Daily Herald.
His first few efforts show that he made a
determined attempt to get down to the intel
lectual level of the Syndicalist. But anybody
who sits down to read through these articles
will notice that before many weeks had passed
Chesterton was beginning to feel a certain dis
comfort in the company he was keeping. He
writes to say that he likes writing for The
Daily Herald because it is the most revolu
tionary paper he knows, " even though I do
not agree with all the revolutions it advocates,"
and goes on to state that, personally, he likes
most of the people he meets. Having thus,
as it were, cleared his conscience in advance,
Chesterton let himself go. He attacked the
Government for its alleged nepotism, dis
honesty, and corruption. He ended one such
article with, ; There is nothing but a trumpet
at midnight, calling for volunteers." The New
Statesman then published an article, "Trum
pets and How to Blow Them," suggesting,
among other things, that there was little use
174
A DECADENT OF SORTS
in being merely destructive. It is typical of
what I have called the decadence of Chesterton
that he borrowed another writer s most offen
sive description of a lady prominently con
nected with The New Statesman in order to
quote it with glee by way of answer to this
article. The Syndicalist hates the Socialist
for his catholicity. The Socialist wishes to
see the world a comfortable place, the Syndica
list merely wishes to work in a comfortable
factory. Chesterton seized the opportunity,
being mildly rebuked by a Socialist paper, to
declare that the Fabians " are constructing a
man-trap." A little later on he writes, with
reference to a controversialist s request, that
he should explain why, after all, he was not
a Socialist :
If he wants to know what the Marconi Scandal has
saved us from, I can tell him. It has saved us from
Socialism. My God ! what Socialism, and run by
what sort of Socialists ! My God ! what an escape !
If we had transferred the simplest national systems
to the State (as we wanted to do in our youth) it is
to these men that we should have transferred them.
There never was an example of more muddled
thinking. Let us apply it to something
definite, to that harmless, necessary article of
diet, milk, to be precise, cow s milk. To-day
milk is made expensive by a multiplicity of
175
G. K. CHESTERTON
men who have interests in keeping milk expen
sive. There are too many milkmen s wages
to be paid, too many milk-carts to be built,
too many shop-rents paid, and too much
apparatus bought, simply because we have
not yet had the intelligence to let any munici
pality or county run its own milk-service and
so avoid all manner of duplication. Chester
ton s answer to this is : "I used to think so,
but what about Lord Murray, Mr. Lloyd
George, and Mr. Godfrey Isaacs ? It would
be as relevant to say, What about Dr.
Crippen, Jack Sheppard, and Ananias," or,
" But what about Mr. Bernard Shaw, the
Grand Duke Nicolas, and my brother ? The
week later Chesterton addresses the Labour
Party in these words :
Comrades (I mean gentlemen), there is only one
real result of anything you have done. You have
justified the vulgar slander of the suburban Con
servatives that men from below are men who merely
want to rise. It is a lie. No one knows so well as
you that it was a lie : you who drove out Grayson
and deserted Lansbury. Before you went into
Parliament to represent the working classes, the
working classes were feared. Since you have repre
sented the working classes, they are not even respected.
Just when there was a hope of Democracy, you have
revived the notion that the demagogue was only the
sycophant. Just when there had begun to be an
176
A DECADENT OF SORTS
English people to represent, you have been paid to
misrepresent them. Get out of our path. Take your
money ; go.
Regarding which passage there is only to be
said that it is grossly unjust both to the Labour
Party and to the working classes. It was
followed up in subsequent numbers by violent
attacks on woman suffrage and the economic
independence of women; a proceeding quite
commendably amusing in a paper with a
patron saint surnamed Pankhurst. A promise
to say no more about Votes for Women was
followed by several more spirited references
to it, from the same point of view. After which
Chesterton cooled off and wrote about detec
tive stories, telephones, and worked himself
down into an all-round fizzle of disgust at
things as they are, to illustrate which " I will
not run into a paroxysm of citations again,"
as Milton said in the course of his Epistle in
two books on Reformation in England.
The most unpleasant feature of The Daily
Herald articles is the assumption of superiority
over the British working man, expressing
itself in the patronizing tone. The British
working man, as Chesterton sees him, is a very
different person from what he is. If the Middle
Ages had been the peculiar period Chesterton
appears to believe it was, then his working
M 177
G. K. CHESTERTON
man would be merely a trifling anachronism
of five centuries or so. But he is not even that.
Five centuries would be but a trifle compared
with the difference between him and his real
self. Chesterton s attitude towards the work
ing man must resemble that of a certain
chivalrous knight towards the distressed dam
sel he thought he had rescued. He observed,
44 Well, little one, aren t you going to show me
any gratitude ? And the lady replied, 44 1
wasn t playing Andromeda, fathead, I was
looking for blackberries. Run away and play."
The attitude of the middle-class suburbanite
towards the working man and his wife is not
exactly graceful, but the former at any rate
does not pretend to love the latter, and to find
all decency of feeling and righteousness of
behaviour in them. Chesterton both pretends
to reverence the working classes, and exhibits
a profound contempt for them. He is never
happier than when he is telling the working
classes that they are wrong. He delights in
attacking the Labour Party in order to have
the supreme satisfaction of demonstrating that
working men are their own worst enemies.
At the beginning of August, 1914, the Great
War broke out, and everything seemed changed.
No man now living will be able to say definitely
what effects the war will have upon literature,
178
A DECADENT OF SORTS
but one thing is certain : nothing will remain
the same. We have already learned to view
each other with different eyes. For better or
for worse, old animosities and party cleavages
have given way to unforeseen combinations.
To assert that we have all grown better would
be untrue. But it might reasonably be argued
that the innate generousness of the British
people has been vitiated by its childlike trust
in its journalists, and the men who own them.
When Mr. Bernard Shaw wrote a brilliant
defence of the British case for intervention in
the war, his mild denigration of some of the
defects of the English nation, a few trivial
inaccuracies, and his perverse bellicosity of
style made him the object of the attentions of
a horde of panic-stricken heresy-hunters. Those
of us who had not the fortune to escape the
Press by service abroad, especially those of us
who derived our living from it, came to loathe
its misrepresentation of the English people.
There seemed no end to the nauseous vomits
of undigested facts and dishonourable preju
dices that came pouring out in daily streams.
Then we came to realize, as never before, the
value of such men as Chesterton. Christianity
and the common decencies fare badly at the
hands of the bishops of to-day, and the
journalists threw them over as soon as the
179
G. K. CHESTERTON
war began. But, unfortunately for us all,
G.K.C. fell seriously ill in the early period of
the war, and was in a critical state for many
months. But not before he had published a
magnificent recantation for it is no less of
all those bitternesses which, in their sum, had
very nearly caused him to hate the British.
It is a poem, Blessed are the Peacemakers.
Of old with a divided heart
I saw my people s pride expand,
Since a man s soul is born apart
By mother earth and fatherland.
I knew, through many a tangled tale,
Glory and truth not one but two :
King, Constable and Amirail
Took me like trumpets : but I knew
A blacker thing than blood s own dye
Weighed down great Hawkins on the sea ;
And Nelson turned his blindest eye
On Naples and on liberty.
Therefore to you my thanks, O throne,
O thousandfold and frozen folk,
For whose cold frenzies all your own
The Battle of the Rivers broke ;
Who have no faith a man could mourn,
Nor freedom any man desires ;
But in a new clean light of scorn
Close up my quarrel with my sires ;
Who bring my English heart to me,
Who mend me like a broken toy ;
Till I can see you fight and flee,
And laugh as if I were a boy.
180
A DECADENT OF SORTS
When we read this poem, with its proclama
tion of a faith restored, Chesterton s temporary
absence from the field of letters appears even
more lamentable. For even before his break
down he had given other signs of a resurrection.
Between the overworked descriptions of The
Flying Inn and the little book The Barbarism
of Berlin which closely followed it, there is a fine
difference of style, as if in the interval Chester
ton had taken a tonic. Thus there is a jolly pas
sage in which, describing German barbarism, he
refers to the different ways of treating women.
The two extremes of the treatment of women
might be represented by what are called the respect
able classes in America and in France, In America
they choose the risk of comradeship ; in France the
compensation of courtesy. In America it is practi
cally possible for any young gentleman to take any
young lady for what he calls (I deeply regret to say)
a joy-ride ; but at least the man goes with the woman
as much as the woman with the man. In France the
young woman is protected like a nun while she is
unmarried ; but when she is a mother she is really a
holy woman ; and when she is a grandmother she is
a holy terror. By both extremes the woman gets
something back out of life. France and America aim
alike at equality America by similarity ; France
by dissimilarity. But North Germany does actually
aim at inequality. The woman stands up, with no
more irritation than a butler ; the man sits down,
with no more embarrassment than a guest.
181
G. K. CHESTERTON
And so on. It runs very easily ; we recognize
the old touch ; the epigrams are not worked
to death ; and the chains of argument are not
mere strings of damped brilliancies. And before
1914 had come to its end, in another pamphlet,
Letters to an Old Garibaldian, the same style,
the same freshness of thought, and the same
resurgent strength were once again in evidence.
Then illness overcame.
Of all futures, the future of literature and
its professors is the least predictable. We have
all, so to speak, turned a corner since August,
1914, but we have not all turned the same way.
Chesterton would seem to have felt the great
change early in the war. Soon he will break
his silence, and we shall know whether we have
amongst us a giant with strength renewed or
a querulous Nonconformist Crusader, agreeing
with no man, while claiming to speak for
every man. Early in the course of this study
a distinction was drawn between Christians
and Crusaders. Chesterton has been through
out his career essentially a Crusader. He set
out to put wrongs to rights in the same spirit ;
in much the same spirit, too, he incidentally
chivvied about the Jews he met in his path,
just as the Crusaders had done. He fought for
the Holy Sepulchre, and gained it. Like the
182
A DECADENT OF SORTS
Crusaders, he professed orthodoxy, and, like
them, fell between several " orthodoxies."
He shared their visions and their faith, so far
as they had any. But one thing is true of all
Crusaders, they are not necessarily Christians.
And there is that about Chesterton which
sometimes makes me wonder whether, after
all, he is not " a child of the French Revolu
tion " in a sense he himself does not suspect.
He has cursed the barren fig-tree of modern
religious movements. But there comes a sus
picion that he denies too much ; that from
between those supple sentences and those too
plausible arguments one may catch a glimpse
of the features of a mocking spirit. Chesterton
has given us the keenest enjoyment, and he
has provoked thought, even in the silly atheist.
We all owe him gratitude, but no two readers
of his works are likely to agree as to the causes
of their gratitude. That, in itself, is a tribute.
Wherefore let it be understood that in writing
this study I have been speaking entirely for
myself, and if any man think me misguided,
inappreciative, hypercritical, frivolous, or any
thing else, why, he is welcome.
183
BIBLIOGRAPHY (To JULY, 1915)
WORKS
1900. Greybeards at Play. Brimley Johnson.
Cheaper edition, 1902.
The Wild Knight. Grant Richards. Second
edition, Brimley Johnson, 1905. Enlarged
edition, Dent, 1914.
1901. The Defendant. Brimley Johnson. Second
enlarged edition, 1902. Cheap edition,
in Dent s Wayfarer s Library, 1914.
1902. Twelve Types. A. L. Humphreys. Partly
reprinted as Five Types, 1910, same
publisher. Cheap edition, 1911.
G. F. Watts. Duckworth. In Popular Library
of Art. Reissued at higher price, 1914.
1903. Robert Browning. In English Men of Letters
Series. Macmillan.
1904. The Patriotic Idea. In England a Nation.
Edited by Lucien Oldershaw. Brimley
Johnson.
The Napoleon of Notting Hill. John Lane.
With 7 full-page illustrations by W. Graham
Robertson and a Map of the Seat of War.
185
G. K. CHESTERTON
1905. The Club of Queer Trades. Harper. Cheap
edition, Hodder and Stoughton, 1912.
Heretics. John Lane.
1906. Charles Dickens. Methuen. Cheaper edition,
1907. Popular edition, 1913.
1908. The Man who was Thursday. Arrowsmith.
All Things Considered. Methuen.
Orthodoxy. John Lane.
1909. Tremendous Trifles. Methuen.
1910. Alarms and Discursions. Methuen.
Five Types. A. L. Humphreys. Reprinted
from Twelve Types, 1905.
What s Wrong, with the World? Cassell.
Cheap edition, 1912.
William Blake. Duckworth. In Popular
Library of Art.
George Bernard Shaw. John Lane. Cheap
edition, 1914.
The Ball and the Cross. Wells Gardner, Darton.
1911. The Ballad of the White Horse. Methuen.
Appreciations of Dickens. Dent. Reprinted
prefaces from Everyman Series edition of
Dickens.
The Innocence of Father Brown. Cassell.
1912. Simplicity and Tolstoy. A. L. Humphreys.
Another edition, H. Siegle. In Watteau
Series, 1913.
A Miscellany of Men. Methuen.
Manalive. Nelson.
186
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1913. Magic. Martin Seeker.
The Victorian Age in Literature. Williams
and Norgate. In Home University Library.
1914. The Wisdom of Father Brown. Cassell.
The Flying Inn. Methuen. (The Songs of
the Simple Life appeared originally in The
New Witness.)
The Wild Knight. Dent. Enlarged edition,
first published 1900.
The Barbarism of Berlin. Cassell.
Letters to an Old Garibaldian. Methuen.
1915. Poems. Burns and Gates.
And articles on Tolstoy, Stevenson, Tennyson,
and Dickens in a series of booklets pub
lished by The Bookman, 1902-1904.
PREFACES TO THE FOLLOWING BOOKS
1902. Past and Present. By Thomas Carlyle. In
World s Classics. Grant Richards.
1903. Life of Johnson. Extracts from Bos well.
Isbister.
1904. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. By
O. W. Holmes. Red Letter Library.
Blackie.
Sartor Resartus. By Thomas Carlyle. Cas-
sell s National Library.
The Pilgrim s Progress. By John Bunyan.
Cassell s National Library.
187
G. K. CHESTERTON
1905. Creatures That Once Were Men. By Maxim
Gorky. Rivers.
1906 etc. Works of Dickens. In Everyman Library.
Dent.
1906. Essays. By Matthew Arnold. In the Every
man Library. Dent.
Literary London. By Elsie M. Lang. Werner
Laurie.
1907. The Book of Job. (Wellwood Books.)
From Workhouse to Westminster ; the Life
Story of Will Crooks, M.P. By George
Haw. Cassell. Cheaper edition, 1908.
1908. Poems. By John Ruskin. Muses Library.
Routledge.
The Cottage Homes of England. By W. W.
Crotch. Industrial Publishing Co.
1909. A Vision of Life. By Darrell Figgis. Lane.
Meadows of Play. By Margaret Arndt. Elkin
Mathews.
1910. Selections from Thackeray. Bell.
Eyes of Youth. An Anthology. Herbert and
Daniel.
1911. Samuel Johnson. Extracts from, selected by
Alice Meynell. Herbert and Daniel.
The Book of Snobs. By W. M. Thackeray.
Red Letter Library. Blackie.
188
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1912. Famous Paintings Reproduced in Colour.
Cassell.
The English Agricultural Labourer. By A. H.
Baverstock. The Vineyard Press.
Fables. By ^sop. Translated by V. S.
Vernon Jones. Illustrated by Arthur Rack-
ham. Heinemann.
1913. The Christmas Carol. In the Waverley
Dickens.
1915. Bohemia s Claim for Freedom. The London
Czech Committee.
ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE FOLLOWING BOOKS BY
OTHER WRITERS
1901. Nonsense Rhymes. By W. C. Monkhouse.
Brimley Johnson. Cheaper edition, 1902.
1903. The Great Enquiry. By H. B. (Hilaire Belloc).
Duckworth.
1904. Emmanuel Burden. By Hilaire Belloc.
Methuen.
1905. Biography for Beginners. By E. Clerihew.
Cheaper edition, Werner Laurie, 1908.
Cheap edition, 1910.
1912. The Green Overcoat. By Hilaire Belloc.
Arrowsmith.
189
G. K. CHESTERTON
CONTRIBUTIONS TO PERIODICALS
Bookman. From 1898 onwards, passim.
The Speaker (afterwards The Nation). From 1898
onwards.
The Daily News. Weekly article, 1900-1913. Also
occasional poems and reviews.
The Daily Herald. Weekly article, 1913-1914.
The Illustrated London News. 1905-1914 ; 1915-
The Eye-Witness (afterwards The New Witness).
Poems and articles, 1911 onwards.
Also correspondence columns of The Tribune (1906-
1908), The Clarion, and the London Press in
general.
The Oxford and Cambridge Review (afterwards The
British Review). Articles 1911, etc.
The Dublin Review. Occasional articles.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO OFFICIAL PUBLICATIONS
Evidence before the Joint Select Committee of the
House of Lords and the House of Commons on
Stage Plays (Censorship), included in the Minutes
of Evidence, 1909.
190
BIBLIOGRAPHY
SPEECHES
1908. The Press. Speech at Pan-Anglican Congress.
Proceedings published by The Times.
1910. What to do with the Backward Races. Speech
at the Nationalities and Subject Races
Conference, London. Proceedings published
by P. S. King.
1914. Do Miracles Happen? Report of a Discussion
at the Little Theatre in January, 1914.
Published as a pamphlet by The Christian
Commonwealth Co.
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JAMES, HENRY
THE TURN OF THE SCREW. THE ASPERN PAPERS.
THE LESSON OF THE MASTER. DAISY MILLER.
THE DEATH OF THE LION. TRi COXON FUND.
6
GLASSES.
THE PUPIL.
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JAMES, HENRY (continued)
THE REVERBERATOR.
THE ALTAR OF THS DEAD.
THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE.
THE FIGURE IN THE CARPET.
Each F cap 8vo.
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THE SALAMANDER.
MAKING MONEY.
LAMONT, L. M.
A CORONAL : AN ANTHOLOGY. F cap Svo. zs.6d.net.
LEWISOHN, L.
THE MODERN DRAMA
LLUELLYN, RICHARD
THE IMPERFECT BRANCH.
LOW, IVY
THE QUESTING BEAST.
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CASUALS OF THE SEA.
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HIEROGLYPHICS.
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LETTERS FROM GREECE.
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SABATINI, RAFAEL
THE SEA-HAWK. Crown Svo. 6s.
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10
PART TWO : CLASSIFIED ff>
Seekers
INDEX OF TITLES
General Literature
ART OF BALLET, THE. By Mark E. Perugini.
ART OF SILHOUETTE, THE. By Desmond Coke.
BATTLE OF THE BOYNE, THE. By D. C. Boulger.
BEHIND THE RANGES. By F. G. Afialo.
BIRDS IN THE CALENDAR. By F. G. Aflalo.
CAMILLE DESMOULINS. By Violet Methley.
CARRIAGES AND COACHES. By Ralph Straus.
CHRISTMAS CARD, A. By Filson Young.
CUMBERLAND LITTERS, THE. By Clementina Black.
DRAMATIC PORTRAITS. By P. P. Howe.
FEMININE INFLUENCE ON THE POETS. By E. Thomas.
GRAHAME OF CLAVERHOUSE. By Michael Barrington.
HIEROGLYPHICS. By Arthur Machen.
HISTORY OF THE HARLEQUINADE, THE. By M. Sand.
LEADERS OF THE PEOPLE. By Joseph Clayton.
LETTERS FROM GREECE. By John Mavrogordato.
LINLEYS OF BATH, THE. By Clementina Black.
MAHOMET. By G. M. Draycott.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT. By G. R. Stirling Taylor.
NEW LEAVES. By Filson Young.
PEOPLE AND QUESTIONS. By G. S. Street.
PERSONALITY IN LITERATURE. By R. A. Scott-James.
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE GREAT WAR. By Stirling Taylor.
REAL CAPTAIN CLEVELAND, THE. By Allan Fea.
REGILDING THE CRESCENT. By F. G. Aflalo.
ii
Martin
SefkeSs
Catalogue
ROBERT KETT. By Joseph Clayton.
SOCIAL HISTORY OF SMOKING, THE. By G. L, Apperson.
SOME ECCENTRICS AND A WOMAN. By Lewis Melville.
SPECULATIVE DIALOGUES. By Lascelles Abercrombie.
STUPOR MUNDI. By Lionel Allshorn.
TENTH MUSE, THE. By Edward Thomas.
THOSE UNITED STATES. By Arnold Bennett.
VIE DE BOHEME. By Orlo Williams.
WILDE MYTH, THE. By Lord Alfred Douglas.
WINDMILLS. By Gilbert Cannan.
Verse
COLLECTED POEMS OF J. E. FLECKER.
COLLECTED POEMS OF F. M. HUEFFER.
CARMINA VARIA. By C. Kennett Burrow.
CORONAL, A. A New Anthology. By L. M. Lamont.
GOLDEN JOURNEY TO SAMARKAND, THE. By J. E.
Flecker. (See Collected Poems.)
KENSINGTON RHYMES. By Compton Mackenzie.
Drama
DRAMATIC WORKS OF ST. JOHN HANKIN. 3 vols.
DRAMATIC WORKS OF GERHART HAUPTMANN. 6 vols.
CASSANDRA IN TROY. By John Mavrogordato.
MAGIC. By G. K. Chesterton.
MODERN DRAMA, THE. By L. Lewisohn.
PEER GYNT. Translated by R. Ellis Roberts.
REPERTORY THEATRE, THE. By P. P. Howe.
THOMPSON. By St. John Hankin and G. Calderon.
12
Travel
Catalogue
AUSTRALASIAN WANDER YEAR, AN. By H. M. Faughan.
EGYPTIAN ESTHETICS. By Rene Francis.
FOUNTAINS IN THE SAND. By Norman Douglas.
NOOKS AND CORNERS OF OLD ENGLAND. By Allan Tea.
OLD CALABRIA. By Norman Douglas.
OLD ENGLISH HOUSES. By Allan Fea.
PERFUMES OF ARABY. By Harold Jacob.
Martin Seeker s Series of
Critical Studies
ROBERT BRIDGES. By F. E. Brett Toung.
SAMUEL BUTLER. By Gilbert Cannan.
G. K. CHESTERTON. By Julius West.
FEODOR DOSTOEVSKY. By J. Middleton Murry.
GEORGE GISSING. By Frank Swinnerton.
THOMAS HARDY. By Lascelles Abercrombie.
HENRIK IBSEN. By R. Ellis Roberts.
HENRY JAMES. By Ford Madox Hueffer.
RUDYARD KIPLING. By Cyril Falls.
MAURICE MAETERLINCK. By Una Taylor.
GEORGE MEREDITH. By Orlo Williams.
WILLIAM MORRIS. By John Drinkwater.
WALTER PATER. By Edward Thomas.
D. G. ROSSETTI. By John Drinkwater.
BERNARD SHAW. By P. P. Howe.
R. L. STEVENSON. By Frank Swinnerton.
A. C. SWINBURNE. By Edward Thomas.
J. M. SYNGE. By P. P. Howe.
LEO TOLSTOI. By R. Ellis Roberts.
WALT WHITMAN. By Basil de Selincourt.
W. B. YEATS. By Forrest Reid.
13
Martin
Seeker s
Catalogue
The Art and Craft of Letters
BALLAD/THE. By Frank Sidgwick.
COMEDY. By John Palmer.
CRITICISM. By P. P. Howe.
EPIC, THE. By Lascelles Abercrombie
ESSAY, THE. By Orlo Williams.
HISTORY. By R. H. Gretton.
LYRIC, THE. By John Drinkwater.
PARODY. By Christopher Stone.
PUNCTUATION. By Filson Young.
SATIRE. By Gilbert Cannan.
SHORT STORY, THE. By Barry Pain.
Fiction
ALTAR OF THE DEAD, THE. By Henry James.
ASPERN PAPERS, THE. By Henry James.
BANKRUPT, THE. By Horace Horsndl.
BANNER OF THE BULL, THE. By Rafael Sabatini.
BATTLES OF LIFE. By Austin Philips.
BEAST IN THE JUNGLE, THE. By Henry James.
BREAKING-POINT. By Michael Artzibashef.
BURNT HOUSE, THE. By Christopher Stone.
CARNIVAL. By Compton Mackenzie.
CASUALS OF THE SEA. By William McFee.
COLLECTED TALES : Vol. I. By Barry Pain.
COLLECTED TALES : Vol. II. By Barry Pain.
COLUMBINE. By Viola Meynell.
COMMON CHORD, THE. By Phyllis Bottome.
COXON FUND, THE. By Henry James. Martin
CREATED LEGEND, THE. By Feodor Sologub. Seeker s
DAISY MILLER. By Henry James. Catalogue
DARK TOWER, THE. By E. Brett Young.
DEATH OF THE LION, THE. By Henry James.
DEBIT ACCOUNT, THE. By Oliver Onions.
DEEP SEA. By F. Brett Young.
DUCHESS OF WREXE, THE. By Hugh Walpole.
FIGURE IN THE CARPET, THE. By Henry James.
FOOL S TRAGEDY, THE. By A. Scott Craven.
FORTITUDE. By Hugh Walpole.
GLASSES. By Henry James.
GOLIGHTLYS, THE. By Laurence North.
GUY AND PAULINE. By Compton Mackenzie.
IMPATIENT GRISELDA. By Laurence North.
IMPERFECT BRANCH, THE. By Richard Lluettyn.
IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE EVIDENCE. By 0. Onions.
IRON AGE, THE. By F. Brett Young.
KING S MEN, THE. By John Palmer.
L.S.D. By Bohun Lynch.
LESSON OF THE MASTER, THE. By Henry James.
LITTLE DEMON, THE. By Feodor Sologub.
LOT BARROW. By Viola MeynelL
MARRIAGE OF QUIXOTE, THE. By Donald Armstrong.
MAKING MONEY. By Owen Johnson.
MELEAGER. By H. M. Faugh an.
MILLIONAIRE, THE. By Michael Artzibashef.
MODERN LOVERS. By Viola MeynelL
NARCISSUS. By Viola MeynelL
OLD MOLE. By Gilbert Cannan.
OLD HOUSE, THE. By Feodor Sologub.
ONE KIND AND ANOTHER. By Barry Pain.
IS
Martin
Seeker s
Catalogue
OUTWARD APPEARANCE, THE. By Stanley V. Makower.
PASSIONATE ELOPEMENT, THE. By Compton Mackenzie.
PETER PARAGON. By John Palmer.
PUPIL, THE. By Henry James.
QUESTING BEAST, THE. By Ivy Low.
RECORD OF A SILENT LIFE, THE. By Anna Preston.
REVERBERATOR, THE. By Henry James.
ROUND THE CORNER. By Gilbert Cannan.
SALAMANDER, THE. By Owen Johnson.
SANINE. By Michael Artzibashef.
SEA HAWK, THE. By Rafael Sabatini.
SECURITY. By Ivor Brown.
SINISTER STREET. I. By Com-pton Mackenzie.
SINISTER STREET. II. By Com-pton Mackenzie.
STORY OF LOUIE, THE. By Oliver Onions.
TALES OF THE REVOLUTION. By M. Artzibashef.
TELLING THE TRUTH. By William Hewlett.
TRUE DIMENSION, THE. By Warrington Dawson.
TURN OF THE SCREW, THE. By Henry James.
UNCLE S ADVICE. By William Hewlett.
UNDERGROWTH. By F. fc? E. Brett Young.
UNDERMAN, THE. By Joseph Clayton.
UNOFFICIAL. By Bohun Lynch.
WIDDERSHINS. By Oliver Onions.
YEARS OF PLENTY. By Ivor Brown.
YOUNG EARNEST. By Gilbert Cannan.
BALLANTYNE PRESS : LONDON AND EDINBURGH
