 Chapter 16 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Dick Bourgeois Doyle. Gilbert Keith Chesterton. By Maisie Ward. Chapter 16. A Circle of Friends. In the last chapter, this chapter and to a considerable extent those that follow, down to the break made by Gilbert's illness and the War of 1914, it is unavoidable that the same years should be retraced to cover a variety of aspects. For their home was, for both Gilbert and Francis, the center of a widening circle. Although I visited overroads, it seems to me, looking back, I saw them just then, much more frequently in London and elsewhere. Several times they stayed at Lotus, our Surrey home. The first time, it was a weekend of blazing summer weather. Lady Blenner Hassett was there, formerly Countess Layden and a favorite disciple of Dollinger. I remember she delighted Gilbert by her comment on modernism. I must, she said, have the same religion as my washerwoman, and Father Terrells is not the religion for my washerwoman. We sat on the terrace in the sunshine and Lady Blenner Hassett asked suddenly whether the soles of our boots were, like hers, without hole or blemish. We all look very odd as we stuck out our feet and tried to see the soles. Gilbert offered a wicked chair, preferred the grass, because he said there was grave danger he might unduly modify the chair. After a meeting of the Westminster Dining Society, the predecessor of the Wisemen, he wrote my mother an unnecessary apology. Dear Mrs. Wilfred Ward, I have wanted for some days past to write to you, but could not make up my mind whether I was making my position worse or better. But I do want to apologize to you for the way in which I threw out your delightful Catholic Dining Society affair the other day. I behaved badly, dined badly, debated badly, and left badly. Yet the explanation is really simple. I was horribly worried, and I do not worry well. When I am worried, I am like a baby. My wife was that night just ill enough to make a man nervous, a stupid man, and I had sworn to her that I would fulfill some affairs that night on which she was keen. As she is better now and only wants to rest, I feel normal and realize what a rotter I must have looked that night. As Bellock wrote in a beautiful epitaph, he frequently would flush with fear when other people paled. He tried to do his duty, but how damnitably he failed. This is the epitaph of yours sincerely, G.K. Chesterton. My father and mother were hardly less excited than I at the discovery of the greatest man of the age for so we all felt him to be. Gilbert later described my father as strongly cooperative with another's mind, and this was perhaps his own chief characteristic in conversation. The two men did not agree on politics, but on religion their agreement was deep and constantly grew deeper as they cooperated in exploring it. Our headquarters were in Surrey, but when we came up to London every spring my parents wanted to bring the Chestertons in touch with all their friends. They tended to think of their luncheon table as Chesterton supported by those most worthy of the honor. One of the first was, of course, George Wyndham, already a friend and admirers of Gilbert's. At this luncheon they discussed the modern press, 18th century lampoons, the ingredients of a good English style, the lawfulness of revolution, the causes of Napoleon, scripture criticism, Joan of Arc, public executions, how to bring about reforms. It was absurd, G.K. said, to think that gaining half a reform led to the other half. Supposing it was agreed that every man ought to have a cow, but you say, we can't manage that just yet, give him half a cow. He doesn't care for it, and he leaves it about, and he never asks for the other half. Talking of the eastern and western races, Gilbert said it was curious that while the easterns were so logical and clear in their religion, they were so unpractical in everyday life. The religion of the westerns is mystical and full of paradoxes, yet they are far more practical. The eastern says, fate governs everything, and he sits and looks pretty. We believe in free will and predestination, and we invent Babbage's calculating machine. As the group grew into one another's slot, the talk intensified, and we got from considering east and west to considering our own countrymen. What makes a man essentially English? Dickens had it, Johnson had it. You couldn't say G.K. Imagine a Scotch Johnson or an Irish Johnson or a French or a German Johnson. George Wyndham told us, as we got onto the topic of patriotism, that he had a fear he hardly liked to utter. And as we urged him, he said he feared a big war might come, and we might be defeated. Gilbert agreed that he too had felt that fear, but he said, if you were to say that in the House, or I to write it in a paper, we should be denounced as unpatriotic. Small wonder the talk had time to range, for these scrappy notes are all that remain of a meeting beginning about one o'clock and lasting until five. At that hour, two little old sisters, the Miss Bluntz, known to our family as the Little Bees, happened to call in mother. I shall never forget their faces as they looked at the huge man in the armchair, and the other guests all absorbed and animated, and realized that they were interrupting a luncheon party. A swift glance at the little old ladies, another at the clock, and the party broke up, to remain my most cherished memory for months, until my next visit to their home. Gilbert and I arrived at the use of each other's Christian names, an agreement that he insisted on calling the Pact of Beaconsfield. How deep he saw when, in his defense of hermits, he analyzed the chief joy of human intercourse. The best things that happened to us are those we get out of what has already happened. If men were honest with themselves, they would agree that actual social engagements, even with those they love, often seem strangely brief, breathless, thwarted and inconclusive. Mirror society is a way of turning friends into acquaintances. The real prophet is not in meeting our friends, but in having met them. Now, when people merely plunge from crush to crush and from crowd to crowd, they never discover the positive joy of life. They are like men always hungry, because their food never digests. Also, like those men, they are cross. The Well in the Shadows pages 104 to 105. There was time in the country for the food of social intercourse to digest. I noticed too that in the list of Gilbert's friends, quiet-voiced men stood high. Max Bierbaum, Jack Fillimore, Monsignor O'Connor, Monsignor Knox, his own father, Morris Bering. All these represent a certain spaciousness and leisureliness, which was what he asked for of friendship. Even if they were in a hurry, they never seemed so. Jack Fillimore, both he and we, saw on and off at this time, but had often to enjoy in anticipation or in retrospect. Professor, at one time of Greek, at another of Latin, at Glasgow University, he was the kind of man Gilbert specially appreciated. He wrote of Fillimore after his death something curiously like what he wrote of his own father. He was a supreme example of unadvertised greatness, and the thing which is larger inside than outside. At Oxford, Fillimore had been known as one of Bellock's lambs. He was very much one of the group who were to run the eyewitness and the new witness, but though he always adored Bellock, no one who knew him in the fullness of his powers could think of him as anyone's lamb. He was a quiet, humorous, deeply intelligent man, a scholar of European repute, whose knowledge of medieval Latin verse equaled his classical scholarship. Gilbert's keen observation of his friends has never shown better than in what he wrote of Fillimore. Like a needle pricking a drum, his quietude seemed to kill all the noise of our loud botocracy and publicity. In all this, he was supremely the scholar, with not a little of the satirist. And yet there was never any man alive who was so unlike a dawn. His religion purged him of intellectual pride and certainly of that intellectual vanity which so often makes a sort of seething fuss underneath the acid sociability of academic centers. He had none of the tired omniscience which comes of intellectual breeding in and in. He seemed to be not so much a professor as a practicer of learning. He practiced it quietly but heartily and humorously, exactly as if it had been any other business. If he had been a sailor like his father the Admiral, he would have minded his own business with exactly the same smile and imperceptible gesture. Indeed, he looked much more like a sailor than a professor. His dark square face and clear eyes and compact figure were of a type often seen among sailors. And in whatever academic enclave he stood, he always seemed to have walked in from outside, bringing with him some of the winds of the world and some light from the ends of the earth. GK's Weekly, November 27, 1926 To return to my own notes, it is horribly characteristic that I wrote them in an undated notebook. But I think that luncheon which lasted so long must have been in 1911. The same year my father persuaded both the Synthetic Society to elect Chesterton and Chesterton to attend the Synthetic. Of his first meeting, my father wrote to George Wyndham, Had you been at the Synthetic last night, you would have witnessed a memorable scene. Place Westminster Palace Hotel, time 940 AGB, Arthur Balfour, leader of the Conservative Party, is speaking persuasively and carefully modulated tones to an attentive audience. Suddenly a crash is though the door were blown open. AGB brought to a halt. The whole company looked ground and in Russia's a figure exactly like the pictures of Mr. Wynd, when he blows open the door and forces an entrance in the German child's story, Mr. Wynd and Madame Rain. A figure enormous and distended, a kind of walking mountain with large rounded corners. It was GKC, who enveloped in a huge Inverness Cape of light color, thus made his debut at the Synthetic. He rushed, not walked to a chair, and was dragged chair and all by Wagat and me as near as might be to the table, where with a fresh crash he deposited his stick and then his hat. And there he sat, eager and attentive, forgetting all about his stick and hat and coat, filling up the whole space at the bottom of the table, drawing caricatures of the company on a sheet of fool's cap. A memorable figure, very welcome to me, but arousing the fury of the conventional and the terrarian well informed, well represented by Bailey Saunders, who has been at me here half the morning, trying to convince me that he will ruin the society and not never to have been elected. Some of the reactions to this new recruit have been touched on in his autobiography. There I met old Haldane, yawning with all his haiglian abysses who appeared to me as I must have appeared to a neighbor in a local debating club, when he dismissed metaphysical depths and pointed at me saying, There is that Leviathan, whom thou hast made to take his sport therein. There also I met Balfour, obviously preferring any philosophers with any philosophies to his loyal followers of the Tory party. Perhaps religion is not the opium of the people, but philosophy is the opium of the politicians. My father belonged to another group besides the synthetic society for which it seemed to him that Gilbert was even more ideally fitted. The club was founded by Dr. Johnson, the home of the best talk in the land, where Garrick and Goldsmith were at a time shouted down by the great lexicographer, a sign said Chesterton of his modesty and his essential democracy. Johnson was too democratic to reign as king of his company, he preferred to contend with them as an equal. The old formula still in use hadn't formed my father. You have had the honor to be elected, but Wilford Ward felt the election of the modern Dr. Johnson would be an honor to the club. To his intense disgust, he found that only George Wyndham could be relied upon for wholehearted support. What may be called the social element in the club had become too strong to welcome a man who boasted in all directions of belonging to the middle classes and whose friends merely urged the claim that he was one of the few today who could talk as well as Johnson. Gilbert met many politicians in other ways, but only with one of them did he feel a real close harmony. In George Wyndham's opinions he said in the autobiography that they were of the same general color as my own and he went on to stress that the word color is significant of the whole man. To depict him in political cartoons as St. George had not in it the sort of absurdity of the pictures of the more frigid and philosophic balfour as Prince Arthur. George really did suggest the ages of chivalry. He had huge sympathy with gypsies and tramps. There was about him an inward generosity that gave a gusto or relish to all he did. The Chesterton's appreciation of George Wyndham was deepened for them both by an affection indeed almost a reverence for the deep mysticism of his wife, a woman not to be forgotten by anyone who ever knew her and still less to be merely praised by anyone who adequately appreciated her. For a period at any rate Gilbert and Francis were much in contact with the extreme Anglo-Catholic group in the Church of England. In the best of that group and many of them were very very good there is a sense of taking part in a crusade to restore Catholicism to the whole country. Canon Scott Holland led a campaign for social justice and many of the same group mixed this with devotion to Our Lady belief in the real presence and a profound love of the Catholic past of England. George Wyndham's wife Lady Groverner was one of this group and also her friend Father Philip Wagat of the Cowley Fathers. Father Wagat, a member of the Synthetic Society and an intimate with my parents became also intimate with the Chestertons. Ralph Adams Cram described his own meeting with Chesterton arranged by Father Wagat. Father Wagat asked my wife and myself once when we were staying in London whom we would like best to meet anyone from the King downward we chose Chesterton who was a very particular friend of Father Wagat. At that time we put on a dinner at the Buckingham Palace Hotel in those days the haunt of all the County families and in defiance of fate had this dinner in the public dining room. We had his guests Father Wagat, GKC and Mrs. Chesterton. The entrance into the dining room of the short processional created something of a sensation amongst the four said County families there assembled. Father Wagat, thin, crop headed monk in cassock and robe, GKC, vast and practically globular, little Mrs. Chesterton very south Kensington in Moss Green velvet my wife and myself. The dinner was a riot. I have the clearest recollection of GKC seated ponderously at the table drinking champagne by magnums continually feeding his face with food which as he was constantly employed in the most dazzling and epigrammatic conversation was apt to fall from his fork and rebound from his corporeosity until the fragments disappeared under the table. He and Father Wagat egged each other on to the most preposterous amusements. Each would write a trielet for the other to illustrate. They were both as clever with the pencil as with the pen and they covered the backs of the menus with the most astonishing literary and artistic productions. I particularly remember GKC suddenly looking out the dining room window towards Buckingham Palace and announcing that he was now prepared to write a disloyal trielet. This was during the reign of King Edward VII and the result was convincing. I have somewhere the whole collection of these literary productions with their illustrations but where they are I do not know. Chesterton by Cyril Clemens pages 36 to 37. On a second visit of the Chesterton's to Lotus George Wyndham was there. He had told us of his habit of shouting the ballad of the white horse to submissive listeners and we had hope for the same treat. But Gilbert got the book and kicked it under his chair defying us to recover it. We had at the time a vast German cook of a girth almost equal to his own and possessed an unbounded curiosity in the matter of our guests. Gilbert declared that as he sat peacefully in the drawing room she approached him holding out a paper which he supposed to be a laundry list and then started back exclaiming that she had not him to be Mrs. Ward. It was on this visit that he remarked to a lady who happened to be the granddaughter of a Duke you and I who belong to the jolly old upper middle classes. Had he been told about her ancestry he would I imagine have felt that he had paid her an implied compliment by not being aware of it. For into the world of the aristocracy he and Francis had been received in London and he viewed it with the same calm humor as he had for all the rest of mankind. When Francis in her diary pitted the Duchess of Sutherland and felt that a single day of such a life as the Duchess lived would drive her crazy she was expressing Gilbert's taste as well as her own for a certain simplicity of life. Social position neither excited nor irritated him he liked or disliked an aristocrat exactly as he liked or disliked a postman. Gilbert and Cecil Chesterton really were as Conrad Noel said personally unconcerned about class. They had however a principal against the position of the English aristocracy which will be better understood in the light of their general social and historical outlook. What might be called the social side of it was often expressed by G.K. when lecturing on Dickens. Thus speaking at Manchester for the Dickens Centenary he was reported as saying quite simple. It was not that aristocrats were all black guards it was that in an aristocratic state people sat in a huge darken theater and only the stage was lighted. They saw five or six people walking about and they said that man looks very heroic striding a boat with a sword. Plenty of people outside in the street looked more heroic striding a boat with an umbrella but they did not see these things all the lights out. That was the really philosophic objection to an aristocratic society. It was not that the lord was a fool he was about as clever as one's own brother or cousin. It was because one's intention was confined to a few people that one judged them as one judged actors on the stage forgetting everybody else. Chesterton thought everybody should be remembered whether suburban, proletarian, aristocrat, or popper. Shortly after the removal to Beaconsfield he was summoned to give evidence before a parliamentary commission on the question of censorship of the theater. Keep it he said to the surprise of many of his friends but changed the manner of its exercise. Let it no longer be censorship by an expert but by a jury by twelve ordinary men. These will be the best judges of what really makes for morality and sound sense. He had come to give evidence he said not as a writer but as a gallery and he was concerned only with the good and happiness of the English people. One bewildered commissioner was understood to murmur that their terms of reference were not quite so wide as that. The chapter in the autobiography entitled Friends and Foolery ends suddenly with a reference to the war but like the whole book it leaps wildly about. One point in it is interesting and links up with the introduction Gilbert later wrote. To show the chorus is natural to mankind and G.K. claims that he had done it long before he heard of community singing. He sang without driving or walking over the moors with Father O'Connor. He sang in Fleet Street with Titterton and his journalist friends and he sang the red flag on trade union platforms in England Awake in revolutionary groups. There was he claims a legend that in Oberon Herbert's rooms we sang Drake's drum with such passionate patriotism that King Edward VII sent in a request for the noise to stop. Yet it was all but impossible to teach Gilbert a tune and Bernard Shaw felt this as we have seen a real drawback to his friend's understanding of his own life and career. Music was to Shaw what line and color were to Chesterton but to Chesterton singing was just making a noise to show he felt happy. Once he sang music but only as one more flower in the wreath he was always weaving for Francis who was says Monsignor Knox the heroine of all his novels. The listener June 1941. Sounding brass and tinkling simple he that made me sealed my ears and the pomp of gorgeous noises waves of triumph waves of tears. Thunder'd empty round and past me shattered lost forever more ancient gold of pride and passion wrecked like treasure on a shore but I saw her cheek and forehead changes at a spoken word and I saw her head uplifted like a lily to the Lord. Not his lost but all transmuted ears are sealed yet eyes have seen saw her smiles oh soul be worthy saw her tears oh heart be clean. Collected poems page 129. Against the background of all these activities the books went on pouring out as fast from over roads as they had from over strand. A town full of friends 40 minutes journey from London was not exactly the desert into which admirers had advised Gilbert to flee but he would never have been happy in a desert he needed human company he also needed to produce. Artistic paternity he once is as wholesome as physical paternity and certainly he never ceased to bring forth the children of his mind within two years of the move seven books were published The Ball on the Cross, February 1910 What's Wrong with the World, June 1910 Alarms and Discursions, November 1910 Blake, November 1910 Criticisms and Appreciations of Dickens, January 1911 Innocence of Father Brown, August 1911 Ballad of the White Horse, August 1911 Of these books, Alarms and Discursions and the Dickens Criticisms are collections and arrangements of already published essays Meanwhile, other essays were being written to become in turn other books at a later date The Blake is a brilliant short study of art and mysticism After reading it you feel you understand Blake in quite a new way and then you wonder if there's any variation light on Blake or simply light on Chesterton You must never be forgotten that the writer was himself a spoiled artist, which means a man with almost enough art in him to have been in the ranks of men consecrated for life to art service Father Brown had first made his appearance in magazines and these detective stories became the most purely popular of Gilbert's books. It was a new genre Detection in which the mind of a man means footprints or cigar ash, even to the detective The one reproduced in most anthologies The Invisible Man depends for its solution on the fact that certain people are morally invisible To the question, has anyone been here? The answer No, does not include the milkman or the postman Thus, the postman is the morally invisible man who has committed the crime. A thread of this sort runs through all the stories like all of his romances full to of escape and peril and wild adventure. Life on several occasions imitated Gilbert's fancies. Thus the Assef revelations followed his fantastic idea in The Man Who Was Thursday of the Anarchists who turn out to be detectives in disguise. The technique of Father Brown himself was imitated by a man in Detroit who recovered a stolen car by putting himself imaginatively in Thief's place and driving an exactly similar car around likely corners till he came suddenly upon his own, left in a lonely road. He wrote to tell Gilbert of this adventure. From Chicago came an even odder example. It is extremely difficult to determine the proper relationship of the Chiesa Prudente di Cassato duels in Mr. Gilbert Chesterton's book, The Ball and the Cross The flight in search of a dueling ground, the pursuit by the police the friendly intervention of the anarchist wine shopkeeper Volpe, the offer of his backyard for fighting purposes, the unfriendly intervention of the police the friendly intervention of the reporters, the renewed and insistently unfriendly intervention of the police commissioner the disgust of the dualists, the extreme disgust of the anarchist, the renewed flight of the fighters seconds, physicians, reporters and the anarchist over the back fences, all these and other incidents are essentially Chestertonian. The di Cassato affair was carried off with fully as much spirit and dash, with fully as many automobiles seconds, physicians, reporters and police all scampering over the country roads until the artistic deputy and the aged veteran of the war of 1859 out distancing their pursuers could find opportunity and comparative peace to cut the glorious gashes of satisfied honor in each other's spaces Chicago Tribune 12th of March 1910, two months after this an interviewer from the Daily News visited Beaconsfield and splashed headlines in the paper to the effect that the spirit of Chesterton was inspiring a fight between the leaseholders in Edward Square and a firm which had brought up their garden to erect a super garage barricades were erected by day and destroyed in the night a wild eyed beetle held the fort with a garden roller and said GK the creatures of my Napoleon of Notting Hill have entered into the bodies of the staid burgers of Kensington in none of these cases was there any likelihood as the Chicago Tribune noted of the actors in life having read the books they were spiritedly staging ideas have a life of their own the Daily News interviewer tentatively ventured but he may have been puzzled as GK agreed heartily in the words I am no dirty nominalist Chesterton kept the reviewers busy as well as the interviewers and in all his stories they noted one curiosity if time and space or any circumstances interfere with the cutting of his Gordian knots he commands time and space to make themselves scarce and circumstances to be no more heard of about time and space this is true in a unique degree for him time seems to have had no existence or perhaps rather to have been like a telescope elongating and shortening at will as a young man it may be remembered he gave in the course of one letter to quite irreconcilable statements of the length of time since events in his school days he had indeed the same difficulty about time as about money he mentions in the autobiography that after his watch was stolen during a pro-bure demonstration he never bothered to possess another in his stories this oddity became more marked in the ball in the cross he relates adventures performed in leaping on and off an omnibus in such a fashion that the bus must have covered several miles of ground and then we are suddenly told it had gone a few score yards from the bottom of Ludgate Hill to the top still stranger are the records in the man who was Thursday and man alive of the happenings of a single day while in the return of Don Quixote a new organization of societies described as though many years old and then suddenly announced as having been on foot some weeks but to return for one moment to the more serious aspects of the work of these years while what's wrong with the world discussed in some detail in the next chapter is the first sketch of his social views a kind of blueprint for a sane and humane sort of world the other books with all their titles a serious purpose they should be read as illustrations of the philosophy of orthodoxy both the book he had written and the thing of which he had said God and humanity made it and it made me this row of shapeless and ungainly monsters which I now set before the reader he says of his essays in the introduction on gargoyles in alarms and discursions does not consist of separate idols cut out capriciously lonely valleys or various lands these monsters are met for the gargoyles of a definite cathedral I have to carve the gargoyles because I can carve nothing else I'll leave to others the angels and the arches and the spires but I am very sure of the style of the architecture and the consecration of the church the story of the ball and the cross already indicated to the reader by the American Italian dual which seemed like a parody of it has the double interest of its bearing on the world of chesterton's day and its glimpses at a stranger world to come a young Highlander coming to London sees in an atheist book shop an insult to our lady he smashes the window and challenges the owner to a duel turnball the atheist is more than ready to fight but the world carrying nothing for religious opinions regards anyone ready to fight for them as a madman and is mainly concerned with keeping the peace pursued by all the resources of modern civilization the two men spend the rest of the books starting to fight being interrupted and arrested by the police escaping and arguing and fighting again they end up in an asylum with a garden where again they talk endlessly and where the power of Lucifer the prince of this world has enclosed everyone who has been concerned in their wild flight so that no memory of it may live on the earth the two sides of chesterton's brain are engaged in the dual of minds in this book and some of his best writing is in it both in the description of the wild rush across sea and land and in the discussions between the two men GK's affection for the sincere atheist is noteworthy and his hatred is reserved for the shuffler and the compromiser it was grand to have such a man as turnbull to convert one of those men in whom a continuous appetite for the industry of the intellect leave the emotions very simple and steady his heart was in the right place but he was quite content to leave it there his head was his hobby this might be chesterton himself in fact it is chesterton himself and the climax belongs to a later world than that of 1911 for pointing to the ball bereft of the cross the Highlander calls out it staggers turnbull it cannot stand by itself it has been the sorrow of your life turnbull this garden is not a dream but an apocalyptic fulfillment this garden is the world gone mad about the time this book appeared Gilbert was asked by an Anglican society to lecture at Coventry he said, what shall I lecture on? they answered, anything from an elephant to an umbrella very well he said, I will lecture on an umbrella he treated the umbrella as a symbol of increasing artificiality we wear hair to protect the head a hat to protect the hair an umbrella to protect the hat Gilbert said, once he was willing to start anywhere and develop from anything the whole of his philosophy in the notebook he had written bootlaces once I looked down at my bootlaces who gave me my bootlaces? the bootmaker? bah who gave the bootmaker himself what did I ever do that I should be given bootlaces after the lecture on the umbrella he went to priest Sam at the railway bookstore and asked him if the rumor was true that he was thinking of joining the church he answered, it's a matter that is giving me a great deal of agony of mind and I'd be very grateful if you would pray for me the following year he broached the subject to Father O'Connor when they were alone in a railway carriage he said he had made up his mind but he wanted to wait for Francis as she had led him into the Anglican church out of Unitarianism Francis told Father O'Connor at the beginning of Gilbert's illness that she could not make hit or tail of some of her husband's remarks especially one about being buried at Kendall Green when Father O'Connor told her what had been on Gilbert's mind she was half amused at the hints he had been dropping she recognized his reluctance to move without her but I think she probably realized too that even to himself his conviction in those years at times more absolute at times less we shall see in the later chapter his own analysis of his very slow progress meanwhile in his books he was at once deepening and widening his vision of the faith fragments of verse used in the ballad of the white horse had come to Gilbert in his sleep a great white horse had been the romance of his childhood the beginning of his honeymoon under the sign of the white horse at Ipswich had been a trip to fairyland but it's hard to say when the motif of the white horse the verses ringing in his head and the ideas that make the poem came together in what many think the greatest work of his life we were told of the long time the poem took in the making they talked of it on the Yorkshire Moors in 1906 and Father O'Connor noted how Francis cherished it I could see she was more in love with it than anything else he had in hand Father O'Connor also gives some interesting illustrations of the way to talk ministers to a work of genius he had begun one day by saying lightly that none of us could become great men without learning on the little ones could not well begin our day day, but for those who started theirs first for our sake, lighting the fire and cooking the breakfast. This was said just before the dressing bell rang, and between the bell and dinner, Gilbert had written about nine verses beginning with King Alfred's meditation. I'm well, my God, with the serving folk cast in his dreadful lot. Is not he too a servant? And is not he forgot? In 1907, Gilbert published in the Albany Review a fragment from a ballad epic of Alfred, which evoked the comment, Mr. Chesterton certainly has in each eye a special Rotkin Ray attachment. He wrote the White Horse guided by his favorite theory, that to realize history, we should not delve into the details of research, but try only to see the big things, for it is those that we generally overlook. People talk about features of interest, but the features never make up a face. They will toil wearily off to the tiniest inscription or darkest picture that is mentioned in a guidebook, as having some reference to Alfred the Great or William the Conqueror. But they care nothing for the sky that Alfred saw or the hills on which William hunted. In the King Alfred country, especially can be found, the far flung titanic figure of the giant Albion, whom Blake saw in visions, spreading to our encircling seas. GK's Weekly, April 16, 1927 Gilbert wrote a sketch for the Daily News about this time, telling how an old woman in a donkey cart, whom they had left far behind on the road, went driving triumphantly past when a car they were in broke down. For this expedition, as so often later, he made full use of the modern invention he derided. In an open touring car, hired for the occasion, Gilbert, an Inverness cape and shapeless hat, Francis beside him snugly wrapped up. They saw the small cued Hamlet's quaint with Westland King and Westland Saint and watched the Western glory faint along the road to Frome. The note struck in the dedication and recurring throughout the poem is that of the Christian idea which had made England great and which he had learnt from Francis. Wherefore I bring these rhymes to you who brought the cross to me, since on you flaming without flaw, I saw the sign that Guntherham saw, when he let break his ships of awe and laid peace on the sea. In the poem, Christian men, whether they be Saxon or Roman or Briton or Kelt, are banded together to fight the heathen Danes in defense of the sacred things of faith, in defense of the human things of daily life, in defense even of the old traditions of pagan England, because it is only Christian men guard even heathen things. Gilbert constantly disclaimed the idea that he took trouble over anything. Taking trouble has never been a weakness of mine, but in what might be termed a large and loose way, he really did take immense trouble over what interested him. King Alfred is not an almost mythical figure like King Arthur, and an outline of his story with legendary fringes can be traced in the Wessex country and confirmed by literature. Gilbert wanted this general story. He did not want antiquarian exactness of detail. In the mouths of Guntherham, and of King Alfred, he put the expression of the pagan and the Christian outlook, nor did he hesitate to let King Alfred prophesy at large concerning the days of G.K. Chesterton. The poem is a ballad in the sense of the old ballads that were stirring stories. It is also an expression of the threefold love of Gilbert's life, his wife, his country and his faith. And as in all great poetry, there is a quality of eternity in this poem that has made it serve as an expression of the eternal spirit of man. During the First World War, many soldiers had it with him in the trenches. I want to tell you, the widow of a sailor wrote that a copy of the ballad of the White Horse went down into the Humber with the R-38. My husband loved it as his own soul, never went anywhere without it. Almost 30 years have passed and today the poem still speaks. During Jacques-Maritain on the occasion of his 60th birthday, Dorothy Thompson quoted King Alfred's assertion of Christian freedom against the pagan Nazi conquerors of his day. After Crete, the times had the shortest first leader in its history. Under the heading, Sursum Corda, was a brief statement of the disaster followed by the words of Our Lady to King Alfred. I tell you not for your comfort, yea not for your desire, save that the sky grows darker yet and the sea rises higher. Night shall be thrice night over you and heaven an iron cope. Do you have joy without a cause, yea faith without a hope. The unbreakable strength of that apparently faint and tenuous thread of faith appeared in the sequel. Many had the ballad in hand in those dark days. Many others wrote to the times asking the source of the quotation. Once later, when Winston Churchill spoke of the end of the beginning, the times returned to the White Horse and gave the opening of Alfred's speech at Effendoon. The High Tide King Alfred cried, the High Tide, and the turn. End of Chapter 16. Chapter 17. Part 1 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Bouchernar. Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward. Chapter 17. The Disillusioned Liberal. The English were not wrong in loving liberty. They were only wrong in losing it, GK's Weekly, June 1, 1933. One main difficulty in writing biography lies in the various strands that run through every human life. It is, as I have already said, impossible to keep a perfect chronological order with anyone whose occupations and interests were so multifarious. In the present chapter, and the two that follow, we shall consider the movement of Chesterton's mind upon politics and sociology. This will involve going back to the general election of 1906 and forward to the Marconi trial of 1913. For those who are interested in his poetry or his humor or his philosophy or his theology, but not at all in his sociological and political outlook, I fear that these three chapters may loom a little uninvitingly. If they are tempted to skip them altogether, I shall not blame them, yet they will miss a great deal that is vital to the understanding of his whole mind and the course his life was to take. These are not the most entertaining chapters in the book, but if we are really to know Chesterton, the events they cover must be considered most carefully. As a boy, Gilbert Chesterton spoke of politics as absorbing, quote, for every ardent intellect, and during these years he was himself deeply concerned with the politics of England. The ideal liberalism sketched in his letter to Hammond during the Boer War in Chapter had appeared to him, if not perfectly realized, at least capable of realization, in the existing liberal party. The Tory party was in power, and all its acts, to say nothing of its general ineptitude, appeared to liberals as positive arguments for their own party. At this date, so convinced a Tory as Lord Hugh Cecil could describe his own party as, quote, to mix metaphors and eviscerated ruin. Liberal letters and postcards from Mr. Bellock announcing his own election as liberal member for South Salford show the high hope with which young liberalism was viewing the world in 1906. Undated. I have, as you will have seen, pulled it off by 852. It is huge fun. I am now out against all vermin, notably South African Jews. The devil is let loose, let all men beware, H.B. Even across top of letter, tomorrow, Monday, meet the Manchester train arriving used in 610, and oblige your little friend, H.B., St. Hillary's Day. Don't fail to meet that train. Stamps are cheap, H.B. I beg you, I implore you, meet that 610 train, H.B. Stamps are a drug in the market, 852. Meet that train. Stamps are given away now in Salford. From 1902, when the general election left the Conservatives still in power, until 1906 the Liberal Party had been, as Chesterton described it, quote, in the desert. And the younger members of the party were deeply concerned with hammering out a positive philosophy which might inspire a true program for their own party. A group of them wrote a book called, England a Nation, with the subtitle, Papers of a Patriots' Club. The Patriots' Club had no real existence, but I imagine that Lucien Oldershaw, who edited the book, believed that its publication might create the club. Belach was not one of the contributors, but Hugh Law wrote ably on Ireland, J.L. Hammond on South Africa, and Conrad Knoll, Henry Nevenson, and C.F.G. Masterman on other aspects of the political scene. The whole book is on a fairly high level, but Chesterton's essay was the only one much noticed by reviewers. It was the introductory chapter, far longer than any of the others, and gave the key to the whole book. Entitled, The Idea of Patriotism, it was, like Napoleon of Notting Hill, which it does much to illumine, a plea for patriotism that really was for England and not for the British Empire. Such a patriotism recognizes the limitations proper to nationality, and admits, nay admires, other patriotisms for other nations. Thus, in Chesterton's eyes, a true English patriot should also be an ardent home roller for Ireland, since Ireland too was a nation. He stressed the danger that the nationhood of England should be absorbed and lost in the imperial idea. The claim that in an empire the various races could learn much from one another, he considered a bit of a special pleading on the part of imperialists. England had learned much from France and Germany, but, although Ireland had much to teach, we had not learned from Ireland. The real patriotism of the Englishmen had been dimmed both by the emphasis on the imperial idea and by the absence of roots in his own land. The governing classes had destroyed those roots, and had almost forgotten the existence of the people. From the dregs and off-scourings of the population, a vast empire had been created, but the people of England were not allowed to colonize England. The Education Bill of 1902, brought in by the Conservatives and giving financial support to church schools, saw Gilbert in general agreement with the Liberal Attacks. He did not yet appreciate the Catholic idea that education must be of one piece, and he did not think it fair that the country should support specifically Catholic schools. Parents could give at home the religious instruction they wanted their children to have, but with that fairness of mine which made it so hard for him to be a party man, he saw why the liberal compromise of simple Bible teaching for all in the state schools could not be expected to satisfy Catholics. He wrote to the Daily News, The Bible compromise is certainly in favor of the Protestant view of the Bible. The thing, properly stated, is as plain as the nose on your face. Protestant Christianity believes that there is a divine record in a book, that everyone ought to have free access to that book, that everyone who gets hold of it can save his soul by it, whether he finds it in a library or picks it off a dust cart. Catholic Christianity believes that there is divine army or league upon earth called the church, that all men should be induced to join it, that any man who joins it can save his soul by it without ever opening any of the old books of the church at all. The Bible is only one of the institutions of Catholicism, like its rites or its priesthood. It thinks the Bible only efficient when taken as part of the church. This being so, a child could see that if you have the Bible taught alone, anyhow, by anybody, you do definitely decide in favor of the first view of the Bible and against the second. Discussing a few years later whether it was possible or satisfactory to teach the Bible simply as literature, he put his finger on the Catholic objection. Quote, I should not mind, he said, children being told about Mohammed, because I am not a Mohammedan. If I were a Mohammedan, I should very much want to know what they were told about him. While as for the unfortunate teacher, in case a child should ask if the things in the Bible happened, quote, either the teacher must answer him insincerely, and that is immorality, or he must answer him sincerely, and that is a sectarian education, or he must refuse to answer him at all, and that is the first of all bad manners and a sort of timid tyranny. Chesterton's liberalism received further shock from the fact that liberals, in attacking the bill, were attacking also the Catholic faith and raising the cry of no popery. In a correspondence with Dr. Clifford, he reminded him of how they had stood together against popular fanaticism during the Boer War, quote. There are two cries always capable of raising the English in their madness, one that the Union Jack is being pulled down, and one that the Pope is being set up, and upon the man who raises one of them, responsibility will lie heavy till the last day. For when they are raised, the best are mixed with the worst. Every rational compromise is dashed to pieces. Every opponent is given credit for the worst that the worst of his allies has by his worst enemy been said to have said. That horror of darkness swept across us when the war began. Beyond all question, this is true, that if we choose to fight on the no-popery cry, we may win, but I can imagine something of which I should be prouder than of any victory, the memory that we had shown our difference from Mr. Chamberlain simply and finally in this, that to our hand had lain, as it once laid to his, an old, unaffectual, uninfallible and a filthy weapon, and that we let it lie. Yet it was fairly easy to be a liberal in opposition. At the elections of 1902, which the Liberals lost, and 1906, which they won, Chesterton canvassed for the Liberal Party. Charles Masterman used to tell a story of canvassing a street in his company. Both started at the same end on opposite sides of the road. Masterman completed his side and came back on the other to find Chesterton still earnestly arguing at the First House, for he was passionately serious in his belief that the Liberal Party stood for a real renewal, even revolution, in the life of England. Quote, at the present moment of victory, says the report of a speech by Gilbert following the great swing of the Liberal Party into power in 1906, he called for, quote, that magnanimity towards the defeated that characterized all great conquerors. It was important that all should develop, even the Tory. It needed the experience of seeing the Liberal Party in power to shake his faith. In the new House of Commons, the Conservatives were in a minority. Against them were the two old parties, the Liberals and the Irish members, who were in general allied to them, in the small group forming a new party known as Labour. The Labour members, who got into Parliament in 1906 and 1909, were regarded by Conservatives as being a kind of left wing extension of the Liberal Party. Such a Liberal as Chesterton saw them there with the light, and although he would still have called himself a Liberal, he had first hoped in the Labour men as something more truly expressive of the people's wishes. In an introduction to, from Workhouse to Westminster, a life of Will Crookes, Gilbert expressed a good deal of his own political philosophy. As a Democrat, he believed in the ideal of direct government by the people. But obviously this was only possible in a world that was also his ideal, a world consisting of small and even of very small states. The Democrat's usual alternative, representative government, was, Gilbert said, symbolic in character. Just as religious symbolism, quote, may for a time represent a real emotion, and then for a time cease to represent anything, so representative government may for a time represent the people, and for a time cease to represent anything. Further, the very idea of representation itself involved two perfectly distinct notions. A man throws a shadow, or he throws a stone. Quote, in the first sense, it is supposed that the representative is like the thing he represents, and in the second case, it is only supposed that the representative is useful to the thing he represents. Workmen, like Conservatives, sent men to Parliament not to show what they themselves were like, but to attack the other party in their name. Quote, the Labour members as a class are not representatives, but missiles. Working men are not all like Mr. Keir Hardy. If it comes to likeness, working men are more like the Duke of Devonshire. But they throw Mr. Keir Hardy at the Duke of Devonshire, knowing that he is so curiously shaped as to hurt anything in which he is thrown. In the same way, Mr. Balfour was entirely unlike the Tory squires who used him as a weapon. To this rule, that men do not choose to be represented by their like, Chesterton took Will Crookes as one exception. Quote, you have not seen the English people in politics. It has not yet entered politics. Liberals do not represent it. Tories do not represent it. Labour members on the whole represent it rather less than Tories or Liberals. When it enters politics, it will bring with it a trail of all things the politicians detest. Prejudices as against hospitals. Superstitions as about funerals. A thirst for respectability passing that of the middle classes. A faith in the family which will knock to pieces half the socialism of Europe. If ever that people enter politics, it will sweep away most of our revolutionists as mere pedants. It will be able to point only to one figure, powerful, pathetic, humorous, and very humble, who bore in any way upon his face the sign and star of its authority. It was sad enough after this to see Will Crookes fathering one of those very bills for the interference with family life which Chesterton most hated. But indeed, the years that followed the 1906 election are a story of steadily growing disillusionment with the realities of representative government in England. Chesterton wrote regularly for the daily news, and was regarded as one of their most valuable contributors. But when, following an attack in the House of Commons on the liberal leader Campbell Bannerman over the sale of peerages, he sent in an article on the subject. The editor, A.G. Gardner, wrote July 12th, 1907, quote, I have left your article out tonight, not because I do not entirely agree with its point of view, but because just at this moment it would look like backing Lee's unmanorly attack on CB. I am keeping the article in tight for a later occasion when the general question is not complicated with a particularly offensive incident. It was a test case, and it seemed to Chesterton not a question of good manners, but of something far more fundamental. The assertion had been made in the House of Commons that peerages were being sold and that the price of such sales was the chief support of the secret party funds, but the daily news was a liberal paper, and this was an attack on the liberal party. Chesterton replied, July 11th, 1907, quote, I am sure you know by this time that I never resent the exclusion of my articles as such, and I should always trust your literary judgment if it were a matter of literature only, and I dare say you have often saved me from an indiscretion and your readers from a bore. Unfortunately this matter of the party funds is not one of that sort. My conscience does not often bother you, but just now the animal is awake and roaring. Your paper has always championed the rights of conscience, so my naturally goes to you. If you disagreed with me, it would be another matter, but since you agree with me, as I was sure you would, it becomes simply a question of which is the more important, politeness or political morality. I agree that Lee did go to the point of being unmanorly. So did Plimsal, so did Bradlow, so did the Irish members, but surely it would be a very terrible thing if anyone could say, the Daily News suppressed all demands for the Plimsal line, or the Daily News did not join in asking for Bradlow's political rights. I am sure this is not your idea. You think that this matter can be better raised later on. I am convinced of its urgency. I am so passionately convinced of its urgency that if you will not help me to raise it now, I must try some other channel. They are going on Monday to raise a breach of privilege, which is simply an aristocratic censorship of the press, in order to crush this question through the man who raised it, and to crush it forever. I have said that I think Lee's questions violent and needless, but they are not attacking his questions, they are attacking his letter, which contains nothing that I do not think, probably nothing that you do not think. Lee is to be humiliated and broken because he said that titles are bought, as they are, because he said that poor members are reminded of their dependence on the party funds, as they are, because he said that all this was hypocrisy of public life, as it is. One thing is quite certain, unless some liberal journalists speak on Monday or Tuesday, the secret funds and the secret powers are safe. These parliamentary votes mark eras they are meant to, and that vote will not mark a defense of CB. The letter had nothing to do with CB. It will mark the final decision that any repetition of what Lee said in his letter is an insult to the House. That is, any protest against bought titles will be an insult to the House. Any protest against secret funds will be an insult to the House. I would willingly burn my article if I were only sure you would publish one yourself tomorrow on the same lines. But if not, here is at least one thing you can do. An article, even signed, may perhaps commit the paper too much, but your paper cannot be committed by publishing a letter from me stating my opinions. It might publish a letter from Joe Chamberlain stating his opinions. I therefore send you a short letter pointing out the evil and disassociating it as far as possible from the indiscretions of Lee. I am sure you will publish this, for it is the mere statement of a private opinion, and as I am not an MP, I can say what I like about Parliament. You will not mind my confessing to you my conviction and determination in this matter. I do not think we could quarrel even if we had to separate. The letter was published and was quoted in the House of Commons by Lord Robert Cecil amid general applause, but it was twenty years before a bill was passed that forbade this particular unpleasantness. While political corruption stirred Chesterton deeply, I think his outlook was even more affected by the progressive socialism of liberal legislation. He had honestly believed that the Liberal Party stood on the whole for liberty. He found that it stood increasingly for daily and hourly interferences with the lives of the people. He found too that the liberal papers, which he held should have been foremost in criticism of these measures, were as determined to uphold measures brought in by a liberal government as they had been to attack that the Tories brought forward. It had been well said by Mr. Beloff that Chesterton could never write as a party man, but to the ordinary party newspaper, such an attitude was utterly incomprehensible. I think that we can see also at this point how alien his fundamental outlook was from that even of the best members of his own party. A great admirer said to me the other day that had taken her a long time to appreciate Chesterton's sociology. Quote, You see, I was brought up to think that it was quite right for the poor to have their teeth brushed by officials. This is undoubtedly the normal socialistic outlook and the outlook most abhorrent to Chesterton. The philanthropist, he once said, is not a brother, he is a supercilius ant. The five years of liberal government had been disillusioning to many others besides Beloff and the Chesterton brothers. Probably many men in newspaper offices and elsewhere continued vaguely to support the party to which their own paper belonged. But there were others who were in those days going through a struggle between principles and party which became increasingly acute. Gilbert has described his own feelings in a review of Gaulsworthy's play Loyalties, written several years later during the First World War. Quote, The author of Loyalty offers one simple and amazing delusion. He imagines that in those pre-war politics liberalism was on the side of labor. On this point at least I can correct him from the most concrete experience. In newspaper office where his hero lingered, wondering how much longer he could stand its pacifism, I was lingering in wondering how much longer I could stand its complete and fundamental capitalism, its invariable alliance with the employer, its invariable hostility to the striker. No such scene as that in which the liberal editor paced the room raving about his hopes of a revolution ever occurred in the liberal newspaper office that I knew. The least hint of a revolution would have caused quite as much horror there as in the offices of the morning post. On nothing was the pacifist more pacifist than upon that point. No workman so genuine as the workman who figures in loyalty ever figured among such liberals. The fact is that such liberalism was in no way whatever on the side of labor. On the contrary, it was on the side of the labor party. Both Chesterton and Belock had begun to point out that a free press had almost disappeared from England. The revenue of most of the newspapers depended not on subscriptions but on advertisement. Therefore nothing could be said in them which was displeasing to their wealthy advertisers. Nor was this the worst of it. Very rich men were often owners of half a dozen papers or more and dictated their policy. An outstanding example was Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliff, whose newspapers ranged from the Times to the Daily Mail to Answers. Thus, to every section of the English people, Harmsworth was able to convey day by day such news as he thought best together with his own outlook and philosophy of life such as it was. Still worse, the Times had not lost in the eyes of Europe to say nothing of America, that reputation it had held so long of being the official expression of English opinion. It was still the Jupiter of Trollope's day, the maker of ministries or their undoing. In the days of a free press, a paper held such a position in virtue of the talents of its staff. Editors were then powerful individuals and would brook little interference, but today the editor was commonly only the mouthpiece of the owner. It is surprising that Gilbert and the official liberal press so long tolerated one another. The Daily News and other papers owned by Mr. Cadbury of Cadbury's Coco were often referred to as the Coco Press and it happened that it was not in the end political disagreement alone that brought the Chesterton-Cadbury alliance to an end. In one of Gilbert's poems in praise of wine are the lines, Coco is a cad and cowered, Coco is a vulgar beast. In the autobiography, he tells us that after he had published the poem, he felt he could no longer write for the Daily News. He went from the Daily News to the Daily Herald, to the editor of which he wrote that the news quote had come to stand for almost everything I disagree with and I thought I had better resigned before the next great measure of social reform made it illegal to go on strike. GK was a considerable asset to any paper and had recently been referred to by Shaw in a debate with Bellock as quote a flourishing property of Mr. Cadbury's. Politically the break was bound to come, for even when Dickens was published, Gilbert Chesterton had reached the stage of saying quote, as much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in liberalism, but there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in liberals. At this time too, he infuriated an orthodox liberal journalist by saying of the party leaders quote, some of them are very nice old gentlemen, some of them are very nasty old gentlemen, and some of them are old without being gentlemen at all. An orthodox church journalist and a periodical charmingly entitled church bells got angrier yet, quote a certain Mr. GK Chesterton, he wrote, had when speaking for the CSU in St. Paul's chapterhouse remarked that best of his Majesty's ministers are agnostics and the worst devil worshipers. Church bell cries out, we only mention this vulgar falsehood because we regret that an association with which the names of many of our respective ecclesiastics are connected should have allowed the bad taste and want of all gentlemanly feeling displayed by the words quoted to have passed unchallenged. Vulgar falsehood is surely charming, but perhaps even deeper than his disillusionment with any party was his growing sense of the unreality of the political scene. He has described it in the autobiography quote, I was finding it difficult to believe in politics because the reality seemed almost unreal as compared with the reputation or the report. I could give 20 instances to indicate what I mean, but they would be no more than indications because the doubt itself was doubtful. I remember going to a great liberal club and walking about in a large crowded room somewhere at the end of which a bald gentleman with a beard was reading something from a manuscript in a low voice. It was hardly unreasonable that we did not listen to him because we could not in any case have heard, but I think a very large number of us did not even see him. It is possible, though not certain, that one or other of us asked carelessly what was supposed to be happening in the other corner of the large hall. Next morning I saw across the front of my liberal paper in gigantic headlines the phrase, Lord Spencer unfurls the banner. Under this were other remarks, also in large letters, about how he had flown the trumpet for free trade and how the blast would ring through England and rally all the free traders. It did appear on careful examination that the inaudible remarks which the old gentleman had read from the manuscript were concerned with the economic arguments for free trade and very excellent arguments too for all I know, but the contrast between what the orator was to the people who heard him and what he was to the thousands of newspaper readers who did not hear him was so huge a hiatus and disproportion that I do not think I ever quite got over it. I knew hence forward what was meant or what might be meant by a scene in the house or a challenge from the platform or any of those sensational events which take place in the newspapers and nowhere else. As an orthodoxy Chesterton had formulated his religious beliefs so in what's wrong with the world he laid the foundations of his sociology. It will be remembered that giving evidence before the commission on the censorship Chesterton declared himself to be concerned only with the good and happiness of the English people. Where he differed from nearly every other social reformer was that he believed that they should themselves decide what was for their own good and happiness. Quote the body of ideas says Monsignor Knox of Gilbert sociology which he labeled rather carelessly distributism is a body of ideas which still lasts and I think will last but it is not exactly a doctrine or a philosophy it is simply Chesterton's reaction to life. End of chapter 17 part 1 Recording by Buchernar Chapter 17 part 2 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Buchernar Gilbert Keith Chesterton By Maisie Ward Chapter 17 The Disillusioned Liberal It may be said that a man's philosophy is in the main a formulation of his reaction to life. Anyhow life seems to be the operative word for it is the word that best conveys the richness of this first book of Chesterton's sociology. All the wealth of life's joys life's experiences is poured into his view of man and man's destiny. Already developing manhood to its fullest potential he found in this book a new form of expression. To quote Monsignor Knox again I call that man intellectually great who was an artist in thought I call that man intellectually great who can work equally well in any medium. The poet philosopher worked surprisingly well in the medium of sociology. He had intended to call the book What's Wrong and it begins on this note of interrogation. The chapter called The Medical Mistake is a brilliant attack on the idea that we must begin social reform by diagnosing the disease. Quote It is the whole definition and dignity of man that in social matters we must actually find the cure before we find the disease. The thing that is most terribly wrong with our modern civilization is that it has lost not only health but the clear picture of health. The doctor called in to diagnose a bodily illness does not say we have had too much scarlet fever let us try a little measles for a change. But the sociological doctor does offer to the dispossessed proletarian a cure which says Chesterton is only another kind of disease. We cannot work towards a social ideal until we are certain what that ideal should be. We must therefore begin with principles and we are to find those principles in the nature of man largely through a study of his history. Man has had historically and man needs for his fulfillment the family the home and the possession of property. The notion of property has for the modern age been defiled by the corruptions of capitalism but modern capitalism is really a negation of property because it is a denial of its limitations. He summarizes this idea with one of his most brilliant illustrations quote it is the negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate just as it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem. But property in its real meaning is almost the condition for the survival of the family it is its protection it is the opportunity of its development. God has the joy of unlimited creation he can make something out of nothing but he has given to man the joy of limited creation man can make something out of anything quote fruitful strife with limitations self-expression with limits that are strict and even small. All this belongs to the artist but also to the average man quote property is merely the art of the democracy the family protected by the possession of some degree of property will grow by its own laws what are these laws clearly there are two sets of problems one concerned with life within the family the other with a relation of the family to the state these two sets of problems provide the subject matter of the book on both Chesterton felt that there had been insufficient thinking thus he says of the first quote there is no brain work in the thing at all no root query of what sex is of whether it alters this or that end of the second quote it is quite unfair to say that socialists believe in the state but do not believe in the family but it is true to say the socialists are especially engaged in strengthening and renewing the state and they are not especially engaged in strengthening and renewing the family they are not doing anything to define the functions of father mother and child as such they have no firm instinctive sense of one thing being in its nature private and another public it is precisely this kind of root thinking that the book does in the free family there will be a division of the two sides of life between the man and the woman the man must be to a certain extent a specialist he must do one thing well enough to earn the daily bread the woman is the universalist she must do a hundred things for the safeguarding and development of the home the modern bad of talking of the narrowness of domesticity especially provoked chesterton quote I cannot he said with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean when domesticity for instance is called drudgery all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word if drudgery only means dreadfully hard work I admit the woman judges in the home as a man might judge at the cathedral of omn or drudge behind a gun at trafalgar but if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling colorless and of small import to the soul then as I say I give it up I do not know what the words mean to be queen elizabeth within a definite area deciding sales banquets labors and holidays to be widely within a certain area providing toys boots sheets cakes and books to be Aristotle within a certain area teaching morals manners theology and hygiene I can understand how this might exhaust the mind but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it how can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the rule of three and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe how can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone no a woman's function is laborious but because it is gigantic not because it is minute I will pity mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task but I will never pity her for its smallness while he was writing these pages and after their parents in print G.K. was constantly asked to debate the question of woman's suffrage he was an anti-suffragist partly because he was a democrat the suffrage agitation in England was conducted by a handful of women mainly of the upper classes and it gave Cecil Chesterton immense pleasure to head articles on the movement with the words vote for ladies G.K. too felt that the suffrage agitation was really doing harm by dragging a red herring across the path of necessary social reform if the vast majority of women did not want votes it was undemocratic to force votes upon them also if rich men had oppressed poor men all through the course of history it was exceedingly probable that rich women would oppress poor women but in what's wrong with the world and in debating on the subject Chesterton brushed aside as absurd and irrelevant the suggestion that women weren't inferior to men and what was called the physical force argument but he did maintain that if the vote meant anything at all which it probably did not in the England he was living in it meant that side of life which belongs to masculinity and which the normal woman dislikes and rather despises all we men had grown used to our wives and mothers and grandmothers and great aunts all pouring a chorus of contempt upon our hobbies of sport drink and party politics and now comes Miss Pankhurst with tears in her eyes owning that all the women were wrong and all the men were right we told our wives that parliament had sat late on most essential business but it never crossed our minds that our wives would believe it we said that everyone must have a vote in the country similarly our wives said that no one must have a pipe in the drawing room in both cases the idea was the same quote it does not matter much but if you let those things slide there's chaos we said that Lord Huggins or Mr. Buggins was absolutely necessary to the country we knew quite well that nothing is necessary to the country except that the men should be men and the women women we knew this we thought the women knew it even more clearly and we thought the women would say it suddenly without warning the women have begun to say all the nonsense that we ourselves hardly believed when we said it all the agitated performers who were running about and offering their various nostrums were prepared to confess that something had gone very wrong with modern civilization but they suggested that what was wrong with the present generation of adults could be set right for the coming generation by means of education in the last part of the book education or the mistake about the child he put the unanswerable question how are we to give what we have not got quote to hear people talk one would think education was some sort of magic chemistry by which out of a laborious hodgepodge of hygienic meals baths breathing exercises fresh air and freehand drawing we can produce something splendid by accident we can create what we cannot conceive the social reformers who were talking about education seem not to have seen very clearly what they meant by the word they argued about whether it meant putting ideas into the child or drawing ideas out of the child in any case as chesterton pointed out you must choose which kind of ideas you are going to put in or even which kind you are going to draw out quote there is indeed in each living creature a collection of forces and functions but education means producing these in particular shapes and training them for particular purposes or it means nothing at all but to decide what they were trying to produce was altogether too much for the men who were directing education in our board schools the public schools of england were often the target of chesterton's attacks but they had he declared one immense superiority over the board schools the men who directed them knew exactly what they wanted and were on the whole successful in producing it those responsible for the board schools seemed to have no idea accepting that of feebly imitating the public schools one disadvantage of this was that at its worst and at its best the public school idea could only be applicable to a small governing class the other disadvantage was that whereas in the public schools the masters were working with the parents and trying to give the boys the same general shape as their homes would give them the board schools were doing nothing of the kind the school master of the poor never worked with the parents often he ignored them sometimes he positively worked against them such education was chesterton held the very reverse of that which would prevail in a true democracy quote we have had enough education for the people we want education by the people chesterton felt keenly that while the fatists were perfectly prepared to take the children out of the hands of any parents who happened to be poor they had not really the courage of their own convictions they would expatiate upon methods they could not define their aims they would take refuge in such meaningless terms as progress or efficiency or success they were not prepared to say what they wanted to succeed in producing towards what goal they were progressing or what was the test of efficiency and part of this inability arose from their curious fear of the past most movements of reform have looked to the past for the great part of their inspiration to reform means to shape anew and he pointed out that every revolution involves the idea of a return on this point cheeky attacked two popular sayings one was you can't put the clock back but he said you can and you do constantly the clock is a piece of mechanism which can be adjusted by the human finger quote there is another proverb as you have made your bed so you must lie in it which again is simply a lie if i have made my bed uncomfortable please god i will make it again it is easy to understand that this sort of philosophy should be out of tune with the socialist who looked with contempt on the wisdom of his forefathers it is less easy to understand why it was unacceptable also to most of the tories one reviewer asked whether mr. chesterton was the horriest of conservatives or the wildest of radicals and with none of his books are the reviews so bewildered as they are with this one quote the universe is ill regulated said the liverpool daily post according to the fancy of mr chesterton but we are inclined to think that if the deity were to talk over matters with him he would soon come to see that a chestertonian cosmos would be no improvement on things as they are on the other hand the toronto globe remarks quote his boisterous optimism will not admit that there is anything to sorrow over and the best of all possible worlds the observer suggested that chesterton would find no disciples because quote his converts would never know from one week to another what they had been converted to while the yorkshire post felt that the chief disadvantage of the book was that quote a shrewd reader can pretty accurately anticipate mr chesterton's point of view on any subject whatsoever it seems almost incredible that so definite a line of thought so abundantly illustrated should not have been clear to all his readers some reviewers one supposes had not read the book but surely the daily telegraph was deliberately refusing to face a challenge when it wrote quote his whole book is an absurdity but to be absurd for 300 pages on end is itself a work of genius that particular reviewer was shirking a serious issue he was the official tory but those whom i might call the unofficial tories such men for instance as my own father received much of this book with delight and yet declined to take chesterton's sociology seriously and i think it is worth trying to see why this was the case in a letter to the clarion gk outlines his own position quote if you want praise or blame for socialists i have enormous quantities of both roughly speaking one i praise them to infinity because they want to smash modern society two i blame them to infinity because of what they want to put in its place as the smashing must i suppose come first my practical sympathies are mainly with them such a confession of faith seemed shocking to the honest old fashion tory and because it shocked him he made the mistake of calling it irresponsible chesterton frequently urged revolution as the only possible means of changing an intolerable state of things but the word revolution suggested streets running with blood and on the other hand they had not the very faintest conception of how intolerable the state of things was against which chesterton proposed to revolt i think it must be said too that he was a little hazy as to the exact nature of the revolution he proposed he certainly hoped to avoid the guillotine and even when urging the restoration of the common lands to the people of england he appended a note in which he talked of a land purchase scheme similar to that which george windham had introduced in ireland but besides this tinge of vagueness in what he proposed there was another weakness in his presentment of the sociology which i think was his chief weakness as a writer it would be hard to find anyone who got so much out of words proverbs popular sayings he rung every ounce of meaning out of them he stood them on their heads he turned them inside out and everything he said he illustrated with the extraordinary wealth of fancy but when you come to illustration by way of concrete facts there is a curious change in his sociology he did the same thing that his best critics blamed in his literary biographies he would take some one fact and appear to build upon it an enormous superstructure and then very often it would turn out that the fact itself was inaccurately set down and the average reader discovering the inaccuracy felt that the entire superstructure was on a rotten foundation and had fallen with it to the ground yet the ordinary reader was wrong the fact had not been the foundation of his thought but only the thing that had started him thinking if the fact had not been there at all his thinking would have been neither more nor less valid but most readers could not see the distinction it is a little difficult to make the point clear but anyone who has read browning and the dickens and then read the reviews of them will recognize what i mean it was universally acknowledged that chesterton might commit a hundred inaccuracies and yet get at the heart of his subject in a way that most painstaking biographer and critic could not emulate the more deeply one reads dickens or browning the more one studies their lives the more one is confirmed as to the profound truth of the chesterton estimate and the genius of his insight a superficial glance sees only the errors a deeper gaze discovers the truth it is exactly the same with his sociology but here we are in a field where there is far more prejudice when chesterton talked of state interference and used again and again the same illustration that of children whose hair was forcibly cut short in a board school two questions were asked by socialists was this a solitary incident was it accurately reported when a pain doctor wrote to the papers saying the incident had been merely one of a request to parents who had gladly complied for fear their children should catch things from other and dirtier children it appeared as though gk had built far too much on this one point it was not the case he was not building on the incident he was illustrating by the incident but it must be admitted that he was incredibly careless in investigating such incidents and quite indifferent as to his own accuracy and this was foolish for he could have found in police court records and the pages of john bull and later of the eyewitness itself abundance of well verified illustrations of his thesis in the same way when he talked of the robbery of the people of england by the great landlords he did not take this lightest trouble to prove his case to the many who knew nothing of the matter it must be remembered that the sociological side of english history was only just beginning to be explored to any serious extent in the village laborer mr and mrs hamann point out to what an extent they had to depend on the home office papers and contemporary documents for the massive facts which this book and the town laborer brought for the first time to the knowledge of the general public chesterton had worked with hamant and the speaker for some years just as with his book about shaw so too with the background of his sociology he could have got around the corner and got the required information he knew the thing in general terms he would not be bothered to make the knowledge convincing to his readers if to his genius for expounding ideas had been added an awareness of the necessity of marshaling and presenting facts he must surely have convinced all men of goodwill for in this matter the facts were there to marshal it was less than a hundred years since the last struggle of the english yeoman against a wholesale robbery and confiscation that catastrophically altered the whole shape of our country and it seems to have left no trace in the memory of the english poor in north anger abbey jane austin describes catherine morland finding the traces of an imaginary crime but chesterton comments that the crime she failed to discover was the very real one that the owner of north anger abbey was not unabit the ordinary englishman however thinks little of a crime that consisted in robbing a lot of lazy monks that they had possessed so much of the land of england merely seemed to make the act a more desirable one yet it was a confiscation not so much of the monk's lands as of the people's land administered by the monasteries what is even less realized is how much of the structure of the medieval village remained after the reformation and how widespread with small ownership nearly to the end of the 18th century when enclosures began estimated by the hamans at five million acres this land ceased in effect to be the common property of the poor and became the private property of the rich this business of the enclosures must be treated at some little length because it had the same key position in chesterton sociological thinking as the marconi case shortly to be discussed had in his political in every village of england had been small free holders copy holders and cottagers all of whom had varying degrees of possession in the common lands which were administered by a menorial court of the village these common lands were not mere stretches of heath and gorse but consisted partly of arable cultivated in strips with strict rules of rotation partly of grazing land and partly of wooden heath most people in the village had a right to a strip of arable to cut firing of brushwood and turf and rushes for thatch and to pasture one or more cows their pigs and their geese a village cowherd looked after all the animals and brought them back at night cobbett and his cottage economy to a new addition of which chesterton wrote a preface reckoned that a cottager with a quarter acre of garden could well keep a cow on his own cabbages plus common land grazing could fatten his own pig and have to buy very little food for his family except grains and hops for home baking and brewing he puts a cottageers earnings working part time for a farmer at about 10 chilling a week this figure would vary but the possession of property in stock and common rights would tide over bad times a man with fire and wood could be quasi independent and indeed some of the larger farmers witnessing before enclosure inquiry committees complained of this very spirit of independence as producing idleness and sauciness the case for the enclosures was that improved agricultural methods could not be used in the open fields more food was grown for increasing town populations much wasteland plowed livestock immeasurably improved only later was the cost counted when cheap imported food for the same towns had slain english agriculture the compensation in small plots or sums of money could not for the smaller commoners replaced what they had lost even when they had succeeded in getting it claims had to be made in writing and few cottagers could write how difficult to to reduce to its money value a claim for cutting term or pasturing pigs and geese a commissioner who had administered 20 enclosure acts lamented to arthur young that he had been the means of ruining 2000 poor people but the gulf was so great between rich and poor that all the commons had meant to the poor was not glimpsed by the rich arthur young had thought the benefits of common perfectly contemptible but by 1801 he was deeply repentant and trying in vain to arrest the movement he had helped to start before enclosure the english cottager had had milk butter and cheese and plenty homegrown pork and bacon home brewed beer and home baked bread his own vegetables although cobbitt's corn green rubbish for human food and advised it to be fed to cattle only his own eggs and poultry after enclosure he could get no milk for the farmers would not sell it no meat for his wages could not buy it and he no longer had a pig to provide the fat bacon commended by cobbitt working long hours he lived on bread potatoes and tea and insufficient even to these lord winch lc one of the very few landowners who resisted the trend of the time mentioned in the house of lords the discovery of four laborers starved to death under a hedge and said this was a typical occurrence at the beginning of the enclosure period the industrial revolution was barely in its infancy a large part of the spinning weaving and other manufacturers was carried on in the cottages of men who had gardens they could dig in and cows and pigs of their own the invention of power machines the discovery of coal where with those machines could be worked led to the concentration of factories in the huge cities but it was the drift from the villages of dispossessed men together with the cheap child labor provided by poor law guardians that made possible the starvation wages and the tyranny of the factory system and here the tyrants were largely of a different class there were some landowners who also had factories and more who possessed coal mines but many of the manufacturers had themselves come from the class of the dispossessed successful manufacturers made money a great deal of money many of the men's appeals gave the figures at which the goods were sold in contrast with their rate of wages and the contrast is startling so as the towns grew the masters left the smoke they were creating and bought country places and became country gentlemen preserved their own game and judged their own tenants and thus disappeared yet another section of the ancient country folk for the large landowners would seldom sell and the land bought by the new men was mostly the land of small farmers and yeoman this was the age of new country houses with a hundred rooms and a vast offices that housed an army of servants labor was cheap the descendants of those who built just then will tell you as they gazed as consulate at their unwieldy heritage old and new families alike built or rebuilt added and improved cobbett rode rorally and angrily through the ruins of a better england described a century earlier by another horseman daniel defoe goldsmith mourned an early example in his deserted village but they are the only voices and an abundant literature jane austin is indeed the perfect example of what chesterton always realized the ignorance that was almost innocence with which the wealthy had done their work of destruction he did not account them as evil as they would seem by a mere summary of events and what he saw at the root of those events was in his eyes still present england was still possessed and still governed by a minority the conservatives were quote a minority that was rich the liberals quote a minority that was mad and those two minorities tended to join together and rob and oppress the ordinary man in the name of some theory of progress and perfection thus the protestant reformation had closed the monasteries which were the poor man's ends in the name of a pure religion the economists had taken away his land and driven him into the factories with a promise of future wealth and prosperity these had been the experts of their day now the new experts were telling him with equal eagerness that hygienic flats and communal kitchens would bring about for him the new Jerusalem but never did the expert think of asking jones the ordinary man what he himself wanted jones just wanted the quote divinely ordinary things a house of his own and a family life and that was still denied him as is related in the chapter called the homelessness of jones in a debate in the oxford union gk maintained that the house of lords was a menace to the state because it failed precisely in what was supposed to be its main function that of conservation it had not saved it had destroyed the church lands and the common lands and was ready to pass any bill that affected only the lower classes quote we're all socialists now sir william harcourt had lately said and chesterton saw the socialism would mean merely further restriction of liberty and continue coercion of the poor by the experts on the rich so looking at the past chesterton desired a restoration which he often called a revolution there were two forms of government that might succeed a real monarchy in which one ordinary man governed many ordinary men or a real democracy in which many ordinary men governed themselves aristocracy may have begun well in england when it was an army protecting england when the duke was a dux now is merely a plutocracy and it had become a quote an army without an enemy billeted on the people all this and more formed the background of chesterton's mind but what he wrote was a comment on the scene not a picture of it he wrote of the terrible irony whereby quote the commons were enclosing the commons he spoke of the english revolution of the 18th century quote a revolution of the rich against the poor he mourned with goldsmith the destruction of england's peasantry he cried aloud like cobbitt for he too had discovered the murder of england his mother but his cry was unintelligible and his hopes of a resurrection unmeaning to those who knew not what had been done to death end of chapter 17 recording by bukernar