 Chapter 20, 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 Dick Bourgeois Doyle. Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward. Chapter 20, The Eve of the War. 1911-1915. Part 1. During the earlier years of The New Witness, Gilbert had nothing to do with the editing and his contributions to it were only part of the continuing volume of his weekly journalism. It would be almost impossible to trace all the articles and papers and magazines that were never published. The volumes of essays appearing year by year probably contained the best among them. He was still, in 1911, writing for the daily news, and every week until his death he continued to do our notebook for the illustrated London news. I have found an unpublished ballad he wrote on the subject. Ballad of a periodical. In icy circles by the Bering Strait, in moony jungles where the tigers roar, in tropic aisles where civil servants wait, and wonder what the deuce they're waiting for. In lonely lighthouses beyond the North, in English country houses jammed with Jews, men will still study, spell, prepend and pour, and read the illustrated London news. Our father's read it at the earlier date, and twirled the funny whiskers that they wore. Air Little Levy got his first estate, or Madame Patty got her first encore. While yet the canon of the Christian tour, the Lords of Delhi, in their golden shoes, men asked for all the news from Singapore, and read the illustrated London news. But I, whose copy is extremely late, and not to have been sent an hour before, I still sit here in trifle with my fate, and idly write another ballad more. I know it is too late, and all is o'er, and all my writings they will now refuse. I shall be sacked next Monday, so be sure. And read the illustrated London news. Envoy Prince, if in church the sermon seems abhor, put up your feet upon the other pews. Light of Fabrica de Tobago's floor, and read the illustrated London news. Debating and lecturing went on, and an amusing letter from Bernard Shaw shows the preparations for a three star show. Shaw against Chesterton, with Bellick in the chair, in 1911. An exactly similar debate years later was published in a slender volume entitled Do We Agree? On both occasions the crowd was enormous, and many had to be turned away. All three men were immensely popular figures, and all three were at their best debating, in a hall of moderate size, where swift repartee could be followed by the whole audience. Gilbert always shone on these occasions. The challenge of a debate brought forth all his powers of wit and humor. His opponent furnished material on which he could work, and how he enjoyed himself. Frank Swinerton once heard him laugh so much that he gave himself hiccups for the rest of the evening. I heard him against Miss Cicely Hamilton, and against Mr. Selfridge, and felt the only drawback to be that the fight was so very unequal. The Selfridge debate in particular was sheer cruelty. So utterly unaware was the businessman that he was being intellectually massacred by a man who regarded all that Selfridge's stores stood for as the ruin of England. Occasionally Mr. Selfridge looked bewildered when the audience rocked with laughter at some phrase that clearly conveyed no meaning to him at all. But so complete was his failure to understand what it was all about that when the meeting was over, he asked if Chesterton would not write his name with a diamond on a window of his store already graced with so many great names. For once Chesterton was at a loss for words. Oh, how jolly he murmured feebly. Very different was it when he debated with Bernard Shaw with Bellick as third performer. Ayut, St. Lawrence, Weldon Hertz, 27th October, 1911. Don't be dismayed, this doesn't need a reply. My dear GKC, with reference to this silly debate of ours, what you have to bear in mind is this. I am prepared to accept any conditions. If they seem unfair to me from the front of the house, all the better for me. Therefore do not give me the advantage unless you wish to or are, as you probably are, as indifferent to the rules as I am. The old Heimann-Bradla and Shaw-Foot debates, SF was a two-nighter, were arranged thus. Each debater made three speeches, one thirty minutes, one of fifteen, and one of ten. Strict time was kept, the audiences were intensely jealous of the least departure from the rules. And the chairman simply explained the conditions and called time without touching the subject of the debate. The advantages of this were, A, that the opponent or the opener could introduce fresh matter up to the end of his second speech and was tied up in that respect for the last ten minutes only, and B, that the debate was one against one, and not one against two, and with less time allowed for him than that. And it must have been held that the chairman dealt with the debate. The disadvantages for us are that we both want Bellick to let himself go. I simply thirst for the blood of his servile state. I'll servile him. And nobody wants to tie you down to matter previously introduced when you make your final reply. We shall all three talk all over the shop, possibly never reaching the socialism department, and Bellick will not trouble himself about the rules of public meeting and debate, even if there were any reason to suppose that he is acquainted with them. Do you recollect how Parnell and Bigger floored the house in the palmy days of obstruction by meanly getting up the subject of public order, which no one else suspected the existence of? I therefore conclude that we had better make it to some extent a clown's cricket match and go ahead as in the debates with Sanders and McDonald and Sicily Hamilton, which were all wrong technically. In a really hostile debate it is better to be as strict as possible, but as this is going to be a performance in which three Macs, who are on the friendliest terms in private, will be laboring each other recklessly on wooden scalps and pillowed waistcoats and trouser seats, we need not be particular. Still, you better know exactly what you are doing, hence this wildly hurried scrawl. Did you see my letter in Tuesday's Times? Magnificent. My love to Mrs. Chesterton and my distinguished consideration to Winkle, to hell with the Pope. Winkleton was the Chesterton's dog who preceded Coodle of the poem. Ever? GBS. P.S. I told Sanders to explain to you that you would be entitled to half the gate or a third if Bellock shares, and that you were likely to overlook this if you were not warned. I take it that you have settled this somehow. At the second of these debates, Bellock opened the proceedings by announcing to the audience, you are about to listen, I am about to sneer. His only contribution to the debate was to recite a poem. Our civilization is built upon coal. Let us chant and rotation our civilization that lump of damnation without any soul. Our civilization is built upon coal. Bernard Shaw was on the friendliest terms with the others and admired their genius, but thought it ill-directed. Bellock, he had told Chesterton, was wasting prodigious gifts in the service of the Pope. I have not met GKC. Shaw always calls him a man of colossal genius, writes Lawrence of Arabia to a friend. As a lecturer, Chesterton's success was less certain than as a debater. Many of his greatest admirers say they have heard him give very poor lectures. He was often nervous and worried beforehand. As a lecturer, wrote the Yorkshire Weekly Post after a performance in this year, 1911, it was a fiasco, but as an exhibition of Chesterton, it was pleasing. Although his writing appeared almost effortless, he did in fact take far more pains about it than he did in preparing for a lecture. He seemed quite incapable of remembering the time or place of an appointment, or of getting there on time, if at all. Stories are told of his non-appearance and various platforms. My husband remembers a meeting in a London theatre at which Chesterton had been billed as one of the speakers. The meeting, arranged by the Knights of the Blessed Sacrament, was well underway before he arrived, panting but unperturbed. His apology ran something like this. As knights you will understand my not being here at the beginning. For the whole point of knighthood was that the knight should arrive late, but not too late. Had St. George not been late, there would have been no story. Had he been too late, there would have been no princess. Even more annoying was his habit of beginning his lecture by saying he had not prepared it. Such a remark is not likely to please any audience, least of all an audience that is paid for admission and knows that the lecturer is receiving a large fee. But money, whether he was receiving it or giving it away, meant nothing to him. He had not a strong voice, and I have seen him when a microphone was provided holding a paper of notes between himself and it. An ardent admirer of his writing told me he had made far too many jokes about his size, yet how pleasing they sometimes were. When his chairman, for instance, after a long wait, said he had feared a traffic accident, I had met a tram car chested and replied, it would have been a great, and if I may so, an equal encounter. He thought badly of his own lecturing and began once by saying I might call myself a lecturer, but then again I fear some of you may have attended my lectures. Actually, in spite of the jokes, his thoughts were centered entirely on his subject, not on himself. An anonymous society diarist quoted by Cosmo Hamilton writes of an occasion when he was given rather foolishly a little gold period chair, and as he made his points, it slowly collapsed under him. He rose just in time in sinking into another chair that someone had put behind him began at the word he had last spoken. No acting could have secured such an effect of complete indifference. It was evident that he had barely noticed the incident. Ellis Roberts completes the picture. He knew Gilbert already as a brilliant talker and came to hear him from a platform. I remember the manner of his lecture. It seemed to be written on a hundred pieces of variously shaped paper written in ink and pencil of all colors and in chalk. All the pages were in a splendid and startling disorder. And I remember being at first a little disappointed. Then the papers were abandoned and G.K.C. talked. From Reading for Pleasure, page 96. At this time Bernard Shaw scored a victory over his friend. For beside lecturing, journalism and the publication of three considerable and two minor books, Chesterton between 1911 and the war wrote the play that Shaw had been so insistently demanding. The books were Man Alive 1911, A Miscellany of Men Essays 1912, The Victorian Age in Literature, February 1913, The Wisdom of Father Brown 1914, The Flying in 1914. The play was magic. Produced at the Little Theater in October 1913. One who admired it was George Moore. He wrote to Forster Bovell, November 24th, 1913. I followed the comedy of magic from the first time to the last with interest and appreciation. And I'm not exaggerating when I say I think of all modern plays, I like it the best. Mr. Chesterton wished to express an idea and his construction and his dialogue are the best that he could have chosen for the expression of that idea. Therefore I look upon the play as practically perfect. The prologue seems unnecessary. Likewise, the magicians love for the young lady that she should love the magician is well enough, but it materializes him a little too much. If he returns that love, I would have preferred her to love him more and he to love her less. But this spot, if it is to be a spot, is a very small one on a spotless surface of excellence. I hope I can rely upon you to tell Mr. Chesterton how much I appreciated his play as I should like him to know my artistic sympathies. Artistic sympathies is not ungenerous considering how Chesterton had written of George Moore in heretics. It is rather comic that all the reviews hailing from Germany where the play was very soon produced compare Chesterton with Shaw and many of them say that he is the better playwright. He means more to it. A Munich paper was translated as saying then the good old Shaw. Chesterton's superiority can hardly be entertained in the matter of technique. Actually, what the critic meant was that he preferred the ideas of Chesterton to the ideas of Shaw. Both men were chiefly concerned with ideas, but while Shaw excelled chiefly in presenting them through brilliant dialogue, GK's deeper thoughts were conveyed in another fashion. The duke might almost, it is true, have been a Shaw character. But the fun the audience got out of him was the least thing they received. Chesterton once said that he suspected Shaw of being the only man who had never written any poetry. Many of us suspect that Chesterton never wrote anything else. This play is a poem, and the greatest character in it is atmosphere. Chesterton believed in the love of God and man. He believed in the devil. Love conquers diabolical evil and the atmosphere of this struggle is felt even in the written page and was felt more vividly in the theater. After a passage of many years, those who saw it remembered the moment when the red lamp turned blue as a felt experience. But as to popularity, in England at least, it would be absurd to compare GK with GBS. The play's run was a brief one, and it was years before he attempted another. Chesterton was fighting corruption, fighting this servile state. Above all things, he was fighting sterility, fighting it in the name of life. Life with its richness, its variety, its sins and its virtues with its positively outrageous sanity. Thank you for being alive, wrote an admirer to him. Man alive is above all things a hymn to life. It is the acid test of a Chestertonian. Reviewers became wildly enthusiastic or bitterly scornful. Borrowing from his own phrase about Pickwick, I'm inclined to say that men not in love with life will not appreciate man alive, nor I should imagine heaven. The ideas that make up the book had been long in his head. The story of White Wind, written while he was at the Slade School, tells one half of the story. An unpublished fragment of the same period entitled The Burden of Balam, the other half. The great wind that blows Innocence Smith to Beacon House is the wind of life, and it blows through the whole story. Before an improvised court of law, Smith has tried on three charges. Homebreaking, but it was his own house that he broke into to renew the vividness of ownership. Bigamy, but it was his own wife with whom he repeatedly eloped to renew the ecstasy of first love. Murder with a large and terrifying revolver, but he dealt life not death from its barrel. For he used it only to threaten those who he said they were tired of life and that life was not worth living, and he forced them through fear of death to hymn the praises of life. The explanation given by Smith to Dr. Eames, the master of Breakspear College, of his ideas and his purpose, gives the note of fooling and profundity filling the whole book. I want both my gifts to become virgin and violent, the death and the life after death. I'm going to hold a pistol to the head of the modern man, but I shall not use it to kill him, only to bring him to life. I begin to see a new meaning in being the skeleton at the feast. You can scarcely be called a skeleton, said Dr. Eames smiling. That comes of being so much at the feast, answered the mass of youth. No skeleton can keep his figure if he is always dining out, but that is not quite what I meant. What I meant is that I caught a kind of glimpse of the meaning of death and all that, the skull and the crossbones, the memento mori. It isn't only meant to remind us of a future life, but to remind us of a present life too. With our weak spirits, we should grow old in eternity if we were not kept young by death. Providence has to cut immortality into lengths for us as nurses cut the bread and butter into fingers. Ben Alive appeared in 1911. Next year came what is perhaps his best known single piece of writing, the Battle of Lepanto. In the spring of 1912, he had taken part in a debate at Leeds, affirming that all wars were religious wars. Father O'Connor supported him with a magnificent description of the Battle of Lepanto. Obviously, it seized Gilbert's mind powerfully. For while he was still staying with Father O'Connor, he had begun to jot down lines, and by October of that year, the poem was published. One might fill a book with attributes it has received from that day to this. Perhaps none pleased him more than the note from John Buckin, June 21st, 1915. The other day in the trenches, we shouted your Lepanto. The Victorian age in literature made many of his admirers again express the wish that he would stay in the field of pure literature. His characterizations of some of the Victorian writers were sheer delight. Ruskin had a strong right hand that wrote of the great medieval ministers in tall harmonies and traceries as splendid as their own. And also, so to speak, a weak and feverish left hand that was always fidgeting and trying to take the pen away and write an evangelical tract about the immorality of foreigners. It is not quite unfair to say of him that he seemed to want all parts of the cathedral except the altar. Tennyson was a provincial Virgil. He tried to have the universal balance of all the ideas at which the great Roman had aimed, but he hadn't got hold of all the ideas to balance. Hence, his work was not a balance of truths like the universe. It was a balance of whims, like the British Constitution. He could not think up to the height of his own towering style. Charlie Bronte was as unsociable as a storm at midnight and while Charlotte Bronte was at best like the warmer and more domestic thing, a house on fire, they do connect themselves with the calm of George Eliot as the forerunners of many leader developments of feminine advance. Many forerunners, if it comes to that, would have felt rather ill if they had seen the things they forran. The best and most profound part of the book was, however, the working out of certain generalizations, the effect on the literature of the period of the Victorian compromise between religion and rationalism. Macaulay had said, never talked about his religion, but Huxley was always talking about the religion he hadn't got. The breakup of the compromise between Victorian Protestantism and Victorian rationalism simultaneously destroyed one another. The weakness of the nonsense writing of the later Victorian period. In one illuminating passage, Chester didn't defend what seems at first sight merely his own habit of getting dates and events in the wrong order. The mind moves by instincts, associations, premonitions, and not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously or the cause actually be found after the effect. The argument was not resisted before they have been properly promulgated. Notions will be first defined long after they are dead. Thus words were shrank back into Toryism, as it were, from a Shellian extreme of pantheism as yet disembodied. Thus Newman took down the iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yet delivered that was coming from the club of Darwin. For this reason, no one can understand tradition or even history who has written it. This was not merely special pleading. It contains a profound truth. Wilford Ward proved it of Newman in the biography that G.K. had probably just been reading. Chester didn't noted it himself in his book on Cobbett who, as he said, saw what was not yet there. It is almost the definition of genius. Already at this date, Chester didn't about like we're fighting much that to the rest of us only became fully enlightened. I think you would make a very good God, wrote E.V. Lucas to Chesterton. There's indeed something divine in an almost ceaseless outpouring of creative energy, but only God can create tirelessly and Chesterton was at this time beginning to be tired. You can see it in The Flying Inn. The book is still full of vitality and the lyrics in it, later published separately under the title Wine, Water and Song, are as fine as any that he ever wrote. But with all its vigor, the book is still a less joyful one than Man Alive and it is a much more angry one. Man Alive was a pay-in of joy to life. The Flying Inn is fighting for something necessary to its fullness, freedom. It must have been just while he was writing it that there were threatenings of a case against him by Lever Brothers on account of a lecture at the city temple on the snob as a socialist. In answering a question, he spoke of port-sunlight as corresponding to a slave compound. Others besides Lever Brothers were shocked and some clarification was certainly called for. Valek and Chesterton meant by slavery, not that the poor were being bullied or ill-treated, but that they had lost their liberty. Gilbert went so far as to point out how much there was in defense of a slave state. Under slavery, the poor were usually fed, clothed and housed adequately. Slaves had often been much more comfortable in the past than were free men in the world today. A model employer might by his regulations greatly increase the comfort of his workers and yet enslave them. A letter from Bernard Shaw advising him to get up certain details asks the question of whether the workman at Port Sunlight would forfeit his benefits and savings should he leave. If this is so, wrote Shaw, then though Lever may treat him, as well as Pickwick would no doubt have treated old Weller, if he had consented to take charge of his savings, Lever is a master of his employee's fate and captain of his employee's soul, which is slavery. He went on to offer financial help in fighting the case. The Christian Commonwealth had reported gesture in speech and was also threatened with the law. To the editor, G.K. wrote, Only a hasty line to elongate the telephone. I am sorry about this business for one reason only, and that is that you should be even indirectly mixed up in it. Lever consumed me till he bursts. I'm not afraid of him, but it does seem a shame when I've often attacked you, always in good faith and what was meant for good humor, and when you've heaped coals of fire by printing the most provocative words that your chivalry should get you even bothered about it. I am truly sorry and ask pardon of you, but not of old son and soap suds, I can tell you. Another very hasty line about the way I shall, if necessary, answer, about which I feel pretty confident. I should say it is absurd to have libel actions about controversies instead of about quarrels. I would mean every capitalist being prosecuted for saying that socialism is robbery, and every socialist for saying property is theft. By great luck the example lies at the threshold of the passage quoted. The worst I said of Port Sunlight was that it was a slave compound. Why? That was the very phrase about which half of the governing class argued with the other half a few years ago. Are all who call the Chinese to be sued by all who didn't? Am I prosecuted for a terminology? Enough, you know the rest. Go on with the passage and you will see the luck continues. A brief and perhaps abbreviated as my platform answer was, it really does contain all the safeguards against imputing cruelty or human crime to poor lever. It defines slavery as the imposition of the master's private morality as in the matter of the pubs. It expressly suggests it does not imply cruelty, for it goes out of its way to say that such slaves may be better off under such slavery. So they were physically, both in Athens and Carolina. It then says that a merely mystical thing, which I think is Christianity, makes me think this slavery damnable, even if it is comfortable. I would defend all this awful sociological comment in any court in civilization. I tell you my line of defense to use discreetly and at your discretion. If the other side are bent on fighting, I should reserve the defense. If they seem open to reason, I should point out that it is on our side. His old school fellow Salter was also his solicitor and a letter to Wells shows in part the advice Salter gave. Dear Wells, I am asked to make a suggestion to you that looks like, and indeed is, infernal impudence, about which a further examination will rob of most of its terrors. Let not these terrors be redoubted, when I say that the request comes from my solicitor. It is a great lark. I am writing for him when he ought to be writing for me. In the forthcoming case, Lever versus Chesterton and another, the defendant Chesterton will conduct his own case, and his heart is not, like that of the lady in the song and others. He wants to fight it purely as a point of the liberty of letters and public speech, and to show that the phrase slavery, where I am brought in question, is current in the educated controversy about the tendency of capitalism today. The solicitor, rather to my surprise, approves this general sociological line of defense, and says that I may be allowed one or two witnesses of my logical standing, not, of course, to say my words are defensible, still less that my view is right, but simply to say that the servile state and the servile terms in connection with it are known to them as parts of a current and quite unmalicious controversy. He has suggested your name, and when I have written this, I have done my duty to him. You could not, by the laws of evidence, be asked to mix yourself up with my remarks on Lever. You could only be asked, if at all, whether there was or was not a disinterested school of sociology holding that capitalism is close to slavery, quite apart from anybody. Do you care to come and see the fun? Yours always, G.K. Chesterton. The suggested line was so successful that Wells' testimony was not called for. The case was withdrawn. No apology was even asked from Gilbert, whose solicitor tells me that Messer's Lever was very reasonably, when once it was made clear to them that Gilbert was not a scurrilous person making a vulgar and slanderous attack upon their business. End of Chapter 20 Part 1 Chapter 20 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 Dick Bourgeois Doyle Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward Chapter 20 The Eve of the War 1911-1915 Part 2 With H.G. Wells, as with shop, Gilbert's relations were exceedingly cordial, but with a cordiality occasionally threatened by explosions from Wells, Gilbert's soft answer, however, invariably turned away wrath and all was well again. No one, Wells said to me, ever had enmity for him except some literary men who did not know him. They met first, Wells thinks, at the Hubert Blans, and then Gilbert stayed with Wells at Easton. There, they played at the non-existent game of Gipe and invented elaborate rules for it. Cecil came too and they played the war game Wells had invented. Cecil says Wells, comparing him with Gilbert, seemed condensed, not quite big enough for a real Chesterton. They built too, a toy theater at Easton and among other things dramatized the minority report of the Poor Law Commission. The play began by the commissioners taken to pieces bumble the beetle putting him into a large cauldron and stewing him. Then out from the cauldron leaped a renewed, rejuvenated bumble, several sizes larger than when he went in. In the early days of their acquaintance Wells remembers meeting the whole Chesterton family in the street of a French town and inviting them to lunch. His own youngest son, a small boy, had left the room for a moment when Wells exclaimed, where's Frank? Good God Gilbert, you're sitting on him. The anxious way in which Gilbert got up and turned apologetically toward his own chair was unforgettable. An absent minded man, who, in a gesture of politeness, once gave three ladies in a bus, might well be alarmed over the fate of a small boy found under him. In his memoirs, Wells relates another pleasing story of a Chestertonian encounter. I once saw Henry James quarreling with his brother William James, the psychologist. He had lost his calm. He was terribly unnerved. He appealed to me, to me of all people, to adjudicate what was and what was not permissible in England. William was arguing about it in an indisputably American accent with an indecently naked reasonableness. I had come to Rye with a car to fetch William James and his daughter to my home at Sandgate. William had none of Henry's passionate regard for the polish upon the surface of life, and he was immensely excited by the fact that in the little Rye Inn, which had its garden just over the high brick wall of some house, G.K. Chesterton was staying. William James had corresponded with our vast contemporary, and he certainly wanted to see him. So with a scandalous directness, he had put the gardener's ladder against that ripe red wall and clambered up and peeped over. Henry caught him at it. It was a sort of thing that isn't done. It was most emphatically the sort of thing that isn't done. Henry instructed the gardener to put away the ladder and William was looking thoroughly naughty about it. To Henry's manifest relief, I carried William off and in the road just outside the town, we ran against the Chesterton's, who had been for a drive in Romney Marsh. Chesterton was heated, and I think rather swollen by the sunshine. He seemed to overhang his one horsefly, and he descended slowly but firmly. He was moist and steamy but cordial. We chatted in the road and William got his coveted gift. The two must have suited each other a good deal, better than Chesterton and the whole conventional brother. Of Henry's reactions, there was a comment from the other side of the Atlantic. The Louisville Post reported that Henry James being asked on a visit to his native country, what do you think of Chesterton in England? Replied, in England, what do we not think of Chesterton? The post commented rather neatly, this, we, of our compatriot considered as either mythical or editorial, unless indeed it refers to that small, exquisite circle which immediately surrounds and envelops him. In his autobiography, Gilbert is appreciative but amusing, describing Henry James' reactions to the arrival of Belloq from a walking tour unbrushed, unwashed, and unshaven. After reading Dickens, William wrote from Cambridge, oh Chesterton, but you're a darling. I've just read your Dickens. OK, thanks. Welles asked to debate with Gilbert, wrote to Francis, Spadehouse, Sandgate, undated. Dear Mrs. Chesterton, God forbid that I should seem a pig. Here, a small pig is drawn, and indeed I am not, and of all the joys in life, nothing would delight me more than a controversy with GKC, who indeed I adore. Here is drawn a tiny Welles adoring a vast Chesterton, but I have been recklessly promising all and everyone who asks me to lecture or debate if ever I do so again, it will be for you, and if once I break the vow I took last year. Also, we are really quite in agreement. It's a mere difference in fundamental theory, which doesn't really matter a wrap, except for after dinner purposes. Yours ever, H.G. Wells. Francis thought Welles was good for Gilbert, he tells me, because he took him out walking, and when the two men were alone, Gilbert would say supplicatingly, we won't go for a walk today, will we? He thought it terrifying, said Welles, the way my life tidied up. Francis too tidied up, but cautiously. She prevented GKC as Welles from becoming too physically gross. He ought not to have been allowed to use the word Jolly more than 40 times a day. He could not, Welles thought, have gone on living in a London which was that of ordinary social life, whether Mayfair or Bloomsbury. Either the country or Dr. Johnson's London, and of the relations seen by Chesterton between liberty and conviviality, he said, every time he lifted a glass of wine, he lifted it against Cadbury. With growing restrictions as to sales and hours, the inn still remained for Chesterton a symbol of freedom in a world increasingly enslaved. It was pointed out to him how great apparel lay in drink, how homes were broken up, and families destroyed through drunkenness. After the war began, a letter from one of his readers stressed a real danger. Now I do beg you, Mr. Chesterton, much as you love writing and praise of drink you may have the degradation of any number of silly boys to your account without knowing it. I've written with a freedom, you will say perhaps rudeness, which a casual meeting with you and a great admiration for your work by no means justifies, but which other things perhaps do I beg you to forgive me. It seems to me that this charge he never quite answered. To claim liberty is one thing, to him the glories of justice. And when he was attacked for the latter, he always defended the former, saying that he did not deny the peril, but that all freedom meant peril. Peril must be preferred to slavery. There were things in which a man must be free to choose, even if his choice be evil. There was this part of Chesterton's whole philosophy about drink, a subject on which he wrote constantly. It is interesting to note that he had not a Puritan tradition in the sense of being teetotal, but Lucian Oldershaw tells me that in their boyhood he always felt G.K. himself to be a bit of a Puritan, and they have come upon a boyish poem that seems to confirm this in the matter of wine. The teapot raised high on tripod flashing bright the holy silver urn. Within whose inmost cavern dark the secret waters burn. Before the temple's gateway the subject teacups bow, and pass it steaming with thy gift, thy brown autumnal glow. Within thy tiny fortress the tea-leaf treasure piled, or which the fiery fountain pours its waters undefiled. Till the witch-water steals away the essence they unfold, and dashes from the yawning spout a torrent arch of gold. Then fill an honest cup my lads, and quaff the draught amane, and lay the earthen goblet down, and fill it yet again. Nor heed the curses on the cup that rise from folly school the sneering of the drunkard in the warning of the fool. To leave the steward's cavalier, the revel's blood-red wine, to hiccup out a tyrant's health and swear his right divine. Mine, Cromwell's cup to stir within, the spirit cool and sure, to face another star chamber, a second Marston Moore. Leave to the genius scornor, the sought soul slaying urns that stained the fame of Addison and wrecked the life of Burns. For Eddie's hand, his private pot, that four no-waiter waits, for Culper's lips his cup that cheers, but not inebriates. Goal of infantine hope, unknown mystic felicity, sangrail of childish quest, much sought, ethereal real tea, thy faintest tint of yellow on the milk and water pail, like mitis stain on pactuolis, gives joy that cannot fail. The reference to Cromwell's teapot was that it was among the first used in England. Eddie, the artist, made his own tea in all hotels in a private pot. Childhoods May I Have Real Tea had grown into a tea table of the junior debating club and Lucian Oldershaw remembers Gilbert as a young man still lunching at tea shops. I found recently two versions of a fragment of a story called The Human Club, written when he was at the Slade School. The second version opens, a meal was spread on the table for the members of the human club, were, as their name implies human. However, glorified and transformed, the meal, however, consisted principally of tea and coffee. For the humans were total abstainers, not with the virulent assertion of a negative formula, but as an enlightened gratification of a profound social effort. Here, here, not as the meaningless idolatry, cheers, of an isolated nostrum, renewed cheers, but as a chivalrous sacrifice for the triumph of a civic morality, prolonged cheers and uproar. The aims of the Human Club were many, but among the more practical and immediate was the entire perfection of everything. Perfection is impossible, said the host Eric Peterson, bowing his colossal proportions over the coffee pot. He was in the habit of showing these abrupt riffs of his train of thought, like gigantic fragments of a freeze. But he said then quite simply, with no change in his bleak blue eyes, perfection is impossible, thank God. The impossible is the eternal. We are a long way from tea, the Oriental Coco, the vulgar beast, and wine, the true festivity of man, that we find in wine, water, and song. Chester then had meanwhile discovered the wine-drinking peasants of France and Italy, and he had discovered what were left of the old-fashioned inns of England, where cider or beer are drunk, but sort of Englishman, he had come to love best, the poor. In his revolt against that dreary and pretentious element that he most hated in the middle classes, he had come to feel that the life of the poor, as they themselves had shaped it, when they were free men, was the ideal. And that ideal included moderate drinking, drinking to express joy in life and to increase it. Already in heretics, 1904, he had in the essay called Omar and the Sacred Vine, attack the evil of pessimistic drinking. I managed to never drink because he is miserable. He will be wise to avoid drink as a medicine for health being a normal thing, he will tend in search of it to drink too much, but no man expects pleasure all the time, so if he drinks for pleasure, the danger of excess is less. The sound rule in the matter would appear to be like many other rules, a paradox. Drink because you are happy, but never because you're miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the gray-faced gin drinker in the slum. But drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasants of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking and the ancient health of the world. From Heretics, John Lane, chapter 7, page 103. But the human will must be brought into action and the gifts of God must be taken with the Thanksgiving that is restraint. We must thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them. The topic seemed to fascinate him and he returned to it again and again. In one essay he described himself opening all the windows in a private bar to get rid of the air of secrecy that he hated. Wine should be taken, not secretly, but frankly and in fellowship, as men in Inns do dine. Cocktails he abominated and in fact strong spirits were almost as evil as wine and beer were good. In an essay, The Cowardice of Cocktails, he is especially scathing in his comment on those who urge that they give a man an appetite for his meals. From Sidelights on New London and Newer York, page 45. This is unworthy of a generation that is always claiming to be candid and courageous. In the second aspect, it is utterly unworthy of a generation that claims to keep itself fit by tennis and golf and all sorts of athletics. What are these athletics worth if, after all, their athletics they cannot scratch up such a thing as a natural appetite. Most of my work is, I will not venture to say literary, but at least sedentary. I never do anything except walk about and throw clubs and javelins in the garden. But I never require anything to give me an appetite for a meal. I never yet needed a tot of rum to help me go over the top and face the mortal perils of luncheon. Quite rationally considered, there has been a decline in degradation in these things. First came the old drinking days which are always described as much more healthy. In those days, they were either hurt or played, hunted or herded, or plowed or fished, or even, in their rude way, wrote or spoke, if only expressing the simple minds of Socrates or Shakespeare, and then got reasonably drunk in the evening when their work was done. We find the first step of the degradation when men do not drink when their work is done, but drink in order to do their work. Workmen used to have a sense of neat whiskey to enable them to face life in the progressive and scientific factory. But at least it may be admitted that life in the factory was something that it took some courage to face. These men felt they had to take an anesthetic before they could face pain. What are we to say of those who have to take an anesthetic before they can face pleasure? What of those who, when faced with the terrors of mayonnaise, eggs and crying for brandy? What of those who have to be drugged, maddened, inspired, and intoxicated at the point of partaking of meals, like the assassins to the point of committing murders? If, as they say, the use of the drug means the increase of the dose, where will it stop? And at what precise point of frenzy and delusion will a healthy grown-up man be ready to rush headlong upon a cutlet or make a dash for death or glory at a ham sandwich? This is obviously the most abject stage of all. Worse than that of the man who drinks for the sake of work, and much worse than that of the man who drinks for the sake of play. Wine Chesterton maintained should not be drunk as an aid to creative production, yet one may find that increased power of creation sometimes follows in its wake. And here, of course, was a danger to a man who worked as hard as Chesterton. He sometimes spoke of himself as idle, but I think it would be hard to match either his output or his hours of creative work. I remember one visit that I paid to Beaconsfield when he was writing one of his major books. It was in his study by ten in the morning, emerged at lunch at one, and went back from about two thirty to four thirty. After tea, he worked again until seven thirty dinner. His wife and I went to bed at about ten thirty leaving him preparing his material for the next day. Towards one time, a ponderous tread as he passed my door on his way to bed woke me to a general impression of an earthquake. In a passage in magic, GK makes his hero say, I happen to have what is called a strong head, and I have never been really drunk. It was true of himself, but in these years, just before the Great War, before his own severalness, intimate friends have told me they had seen him unlike himself. They felt he had come to depend almost absentmindedly, one said, on the stimulus of wine for the sheer physical power to pour forth so much. Besides overwork GK was in these days mentally oppressed by the strain of the Marconi case, and then almost overwhelmed by the horror of the World War. Man very tender of heart, sensitive and intensely imaginative he could not react as calmly as Cecil himself did to what both believed the probability of the latter's imprisonment. And when that strain was removed, there remained the stain on national honour, the opening gulf into which he saw his country falling. To him the Marconi case was a heavier burden than the war, for as he saw it, in the Marconi case the nation was wrong in enduring corruption, and in the war the nation was magnificently right in resisting tyranny. So Chester didn't felt yet the outbreak of the war with all its human suffering to mind and body weighed heavily upon him too. He wrote The Barbarism of Berlin, of which I will say something in the next chapter, for it belongs to those writings of the war period, the series of which is so consistent that in his autobiography he was able to claim that he had no sympathy with the rather weak minded reaction that is going on around us. At the first outbreak of World War I attended the conference of all the English men of letters, called together to compose a reply to the manifesto of the German professors. I at least among all those writers can say, what I have written I have written. Then his illness came upon him. Dr. Polcock coming for a first visit found the bed partly broken under the weight of the patient who was lying in a grotesquely awkward position, his hips higher than his head. You must be horribly uncomfortable, he said. Why now you mention it said GK, like a man receiving a new idea? I suppose I am. The doctor ordered a water bed and almost the last words he heard before the patient sank into a coma were I wonder if this valley ship will ever get to shore. The illness lasted several months. We can follow its progress and his and extracts from letters written to Father O'Connor by Francis. November 25th, 1914 you must pray for him. He is seriously ill and I have two nurses. It is mostly heart trouble, but there are complications. He is quite his normal self as a head and brain and he even dictates and reads a great deal. December 29th, 1914 Gilbert had a bad relapse on Christmas Eve and now is being desperately ill. He is not often conscious and is so weak I feel he might ask for you. If so I shall wire. Doctor is still hopeful but I feel in despair. January 3rd, 1915 if you came he would not know you and this condition may last some time. The brain is dormant and must be kept so. If he is sufficiently conscious at any moment to understand I will ask him to let you come or we'll send on my own responsibility. Pray for his soul and mine. January 7th, 1915 Gilbert seemed decidedly clearer yesterday and though not quite so well today the doctor says he has reason to hope the mental trouble is working off. His heart is stronger and he is able to take plenty of nourishment. Under the circumstances therefore I am hoping and praying he may soon be sufficiently himself to tell us what he wants done. I am dreadfully unhappy at not knowing how he would wish me to act. His parents would never forgive me if I acted only on my own authority. I do pray to God he will restore him to himself that we may know. I feel in his mercy he will even if death is the end of it or the beginning shall I say. January 12th, 1915 he is really better I believe and by the mercy of God I dare hope he is to be restored to us. Physically he is stronger and the brain is beginning to work normally and soon I trust we shall be able to ask him his wishes with regard to the church. I am so thankful to think that we might get his desire. In January 1915 Francis wrote to my mother Gilbert remains much the same in a semi-conscious condition sleeping a great deal. I feel absolutely hopeless it seems impossible it can go on like this the impossibility of reaching him is too terrible an experience and I don't know how to go through with it I pray for strength and you must pray for me. There is Josephine she wrote in a later undated letter. Gilbert is today a little better after being practically at a standstill for the past week he asked for me today which is a great advance and hugged me I feel like Elijah wasn't it and shall go in the strength of that hug 40 days the recovery will be very slow the doctors tell me and we have to prevent his using his brain at all. In this letter she begged to see my mother and I remember when they met she told her that one day she had tried to test whether Gilbert was asking him who was looking after you he answered very gravely God and I felt so small she said presently Francis told my mother that Gilbert had talked to her about coming into the Catholic Church it was just at this time that she wrote to tell Father O'Connor that Gilbert said to her did you think I was going to die and follow this with a question does Father O'Connor know after a conversation with my mother Francis wrote to her March 31st I think I would rather you did not tell anyone just yet of what I told you regarding my husband in the Catholic Church not that I doubt for a moment that he meant it and knew what he was saying and was relieved at saying it but I don't want the world at large to be able to say that he came to this decision when he was weak and unlike himself he will ratify it no doubt when his complete manhood is restored I know it was not weakness that made him say it but you will understand my scruples I know in God's good time he will make his confession of faith and if death comes near him again I shall know how to act thanks for all your sympathy I did enjoy seeing you on Easter Eve Francis wrote two letters one to Father O'Connor and one to my mother to Father O'Connor she said all goes well here though still very very slowly G's mind is gradually clearing but it is still difficult to him I am quite sure he will soon be able to think and act for himself but I dare not hurry matters at all I've told him I am writing to you often and he said that is right I'll see him soon I want to talk to him he wanders at times but the clear intervals are longer he repeated the creed last night this time in English to my mother I feel the enormous significance of the resurrection of the body when I think of my dear husband I am consciously laying hold of life again indeed I will pray that your dear ones may be kept in safety God bless you for all your sympathy I am so glad that Gilbert's decision for I am sure it was a decision has made you so happy I dare not hurry anything the least little excitement upsets him last night he said the creed and asked me to read parts of Myers St. Paul he still wanders a good deal when tired but is certainly a little stronger love and Easter blessings to you all we ourselves were passing then through the shadow of death almost as Gilbert rose again to this life my father passed into life eternal one of the very few letters I possessed in Gilbert's own handwriting was also one of the first he wrote on recovery it was to my mother I fear I have delayed writing to you and partly with a vague feeling that I might so find some way of saying what I feel on your behalf and others and of course it has not come somewhat of what the world in a wider circle of friends have lost I shall try to say in the Dublin review by the kindness of most senior Barnes who has invited me to contribute to it but of all I feel and Francis feels in the happy times we have had in your house I despair of saying anything at all I can only hope you and yours will be able to read between the lines of what I write either here or there and understand that the simultaneous losses of a good friend and a fine intellect have a way of stunning rather than helping the expression of either I would say I am glad he lived to see what I feel to be a rebirth of England if his mere presence in an older generation did not prove to me that England never died this sense of the rebirth of England gave Gilbert's restored life a special quality of triumph that abode down to the end of the war end of chapter 20 chapter 21 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 Dick Bourgeois Doyle Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward chapter 21 part 1 the war years Gilbert was taking up life again and with it the old friendships and the old debates in the new atmosphere created by the war to Bernard Shaw he wrote June 12th 1915 my dear Bernard Shaw I ought to have written to you a long time ago to thank you for your kind letter which I received when I had recovered and still more for many other kindnesses that seem to have come from you during the time before my recovery I am not a vegetarian and I am only in a very comparative sense a skeleton indeed I am afraid you must reconcile yourself to the dismal prospect of my being more or less like what I was before and any resumption of my ordinary habits must necessarily include the habit of disagreeing with you what and where and when is uncommon sense about the war how can I get hold of it I do not merely ask as one hungry for hostilities but also as one unusually hungry for good literature il me faut des géants as Cyrano says so I naturally wish to hear the last about you you probably know that I do not agree with you about the war I do not think it is going on on its own momentum I think it is going on in accordance with that logical paradox whereby the thing that is most difficult to do is also the thing that must be done if it were an easy war to end it would have been a wicked war to begin if a cat has nine lives one must kill it nine times saving your humanitarian feelings and always supposing it is a witch's cat and really draws its powers from hell I have always thought that there was in Prussia an evil will I would not have made it a ground for going to war but I was quite sure of it long before there was any war at all but I suppose we shall someday have the opportunity of arguing about all that meanwhile my thanks and good wishes are as sincere as my opinions and I do not think those insincere yours always sincerely G.K. Chesterton Bernard Shaw replied 22nd June 1915 my dear Chesterton I am delighted to learn under your own hand that you have recovered all your health and powers with an unimpaired figure you have also the gratification of knowing that you have carried out a theory of mind that every man of genius has a critical illness at 40 nature's object being to make him go to bed for several months sometimes nature overdoes it Shiller and Mozart died Goetze survived though he very nearly followed Shiller into the shades I did the thing myself quite handsomely by spending 18 months on crutches having two surgical operations and breaking my arm I distinctly noticed that instead of my recuperation beginning when my breakdown ended it began before that the ascending curve cut through the tail of the descending one and I was consummating my collapse and rising for the next flight simultaneously it is perfectly useless for you to try to differ with me about the war nobody can differ with me about the war you might as well differ from the almighty about the orbit of the sun I have got the war right and to that complexion you too must come at last your nature not being a fundamentally erroneous one at the same time it is a great pity you were not born in Ireland you would have had the advantage of hearing the burning patriotism of your native land expressing itself by saying exactly the same things about England that English patriotism now says about Prussia and of recognizing that though they were entirely true they were also a very great nuisance as they prevented people from building the future by conscious thought also Cecil would have seen with the Catholic churches really like when the apostolic succession falls to the farmer's son who is cleverer with school books than with agricultural implements in fact you would have learned a devil of a lot of things for lack of which you often drive me to exclaim Gilbert Gilbert why a persecutist thou me? as to the evil will of course there is an evil will in Prussia Prussia is in paradise I have been fighting that evil will in myself and others all my life it is the will of the brave Barabbas and of the militant nationalists who admired him and crucified the pro- Gentile but the Prussians must save their own souls they also have their shahs and chestertons and a divine spark in them for these to work on what we have to do is to make ridiculous the cry of vengeance is mine Seth Podsnap and whenever anyone tells an Englishman a lie to explain to the poor devil that it is a lie and that he must stop cheering it as a splendid speech for an Englishman never compares speeches either with facts or with previous speeches to him a speech is art for art's sake the disciples are our favored politicians being really if they only knew it disciples of Whistler also and equally important we have to bear in mind that the English genius does not like the German lie in disciplined idealism the Englishman is an anarchist and a grumbler he has no such word as fatherland and the idea which he supposes corresponds to it is nothing but the swing of a roaring chorus to a patriotic song also he is a muddler and a slacker because tense and continuous work means thought and he is lazy and fat in the head but as long as he is himself in grumbles it does not matter given a furious opposition screaming for the disgrace of tyrannical and corrupt ministers and a press on the very verge of inviting Napoleon to enter London and triumph and deliver a groaning land from the intolerable burden of its native rulers incapacity and obsolescence the departments will work as well as the enemy's departments perhaps better and the government will have to keep its wits at full pressure but once let England try what she is trying now that is to combine the devoted silence and obedience of the German system with the slack and muddle of cootle and doodle and we are lost unless you keep up as hot of fire from your ink bottle on the government as the soldier keeps up from the trenches you are betraying that soldier of course they will call you pro-German what of that? they call me pro-German we also must stand fire as Pierre Guint said of hell if the torture is only moral it cannot be so very bad I grieve to say that some fool has stolen my title and issued a two page pamphlet called uncommon sense about the war so I shall have to call mine more common sense about the war it is not yet in type it has settled its destination any chance of seeing you both if we drive over from Ayotte to Beaconsfield some Sunday or other afternoon yours ever, GBS Wells too is rejoicing over his recovery dear old GKC I am so delighted to get a letter from you again as soon as I can I will come to Beaconsfield and see you I am absurdly busy in bringing together the rulers of the country and the scientific people of whom they are totally ignorant and the courage has never heard of Ramsey and so on and the hash and muddle and quackery on our technical side is appalling it all means boys' lives in Flanders and horrible waste and suffering well anyhow if we've got only obscure and cramped and underpaid scientific men we have a bench of fine fat bishops and no end of tremendous lawyers one of the best ideas for the Ypres position came from Robert Mond but the execution was too difficult for our officers to attempt so we've got a row of wounded and mangled men that could reach from Beaconsfield to great Marlowe just to show we don't take stock in these damn scientific people yours ever, HG no one however mad could have called Gilbert a pro-German it was perhaps the only accusation the new witness escaped but while he largely agreed with Shaw's analysis of the English man as a natural anarchist and grumbler while he believed in the voluntary principle and dislike conscription his general outlook was as different from Shaw's as were the pamphlets they both wrote in a book addressed to a German professor GK frankly confessed the real crimes of England from which she was now making reparation to any Englishman living in the native atmosphere the suggestion that England had been preparing an aggression against Germany seemed more than faintly ludicrous we were not engaged in plotting in Europe on the contrary we were far too careless of Europe and the funds of the liberal party which was in power actually depended chiefly on Quaker millionaires who were noted pacifists and at whose bidding national honour was jeopardized by our delay in declaring our support of France we were not prepared for war and probably only the shock of the invasion of Belgium was certain our stand with France it may seem an idle contradiction to say that our strength in this war came from not being prepared but there is a truth that cannot be otherwise expressed the strongest thing insane anger is surprise if we had time to think we might have thought better that is worse everything that could be instinctive managed to be strong the instant fury of contempt with which the better spirit in our rulers and bribe the instant solidarity of all parties and above all the brilliant instinct by which the Irish leader cast into the scale of a free Europe the ancient sword of Ireland from the uses of diversity our crimes were in the past not the present the first had been when we gave aid to Prussia against Austria Austria which was not a nation but a kind of empire a holy Roman empire that never came which still retained something Catholic comfort for the soul we had helped to put Prussia instead of Austria at the head of the Germanies Prussia, which in the person of Frederick the Great hated everything German and everything good Frankfurt, as Chesterton was he yet had a certain tenderness for those old Germanies which preserved the good things that go with small interests and strict boundaries music, etiquette, a dreamy philosophy and so on all of these crimes had been calling Prussia to our aid against Napoleon and in failing to assist Denmark against her and by far our worst had been the using of Prussian mercenaries with their ghastly tradition of cruelty in Ireland in the 98 there is in this little book one drawback from the historian's point of view its view of the past is so oddly selective doubtless it is lawful to examine traditions as you do your own and not your neighbors yet history should be rather an examination of facts than an examination of conscious and historically Richelieu's policies had had quite something to say in the creation of Prussia the conscript armies of the French Revolution had first made Europe into an armed camp it was an undue simplification to insist exclusively on the crimes of England but even while he did so he rejoiced that now at long last England was on the right side on the side of Europe and of sanity the new witness group had always seen the issue as their countrymen were now suddenly beginning to see it they had no sympathy with the liberal thinking made in Germany that had in the name of biblical and historical criticism been undermining the basis of Christianity their love of logic and of clarity had made German philosophy intolerable to them it was wind and it was fog finally their love of France had always made them conceive of Europe as centering in that country for them there was one profound satisfaction even amid the horrors of war that the issues were so clear but were they as clear to the whole world if not they must be made so there were two main problems to be overcome in this matter one of which was less pronounced at the time than it became later the economic interpretation of history started by Karl Marx the idea that all history can be interpreted solely by economic causes has come since to have an extraordinary popularity even among those whose own philosophy and sociology are most widely removed from Marx it is a view which Chesterton would always have dismissed with the contempt it deserves both he and Bellock saw as the determining factor in history because it is the determining factor in human life the free will of man this does not mean that they would deny that the economic factor has often been powerful in conquering man's liberty or a motive in its exercise but Chesterton regarded the present age as a diseased one precisely because the money motive held so disproportionate a place in it he looked back to the past and saw the world of today as almost unique in that respect he looked forward to the future and hoped for a release from it as he looked back into the past he saw something in the history of mankind far stronger than the economic motive whether that mean the strife for wealth or the mere struggle for subsistence he saw the all-pervading power of religion which in bygone ages had presided over man's activities and turned the exercise of that most noble faculty free will to the building of a civilization today undreamed of but in 1914 it was easier to get away from the economic interpretation of history than it was to overcome another difficulty in the minds of those who had not the Chesterton vision of Europe and to whom it seemed that in a war between nations it was extremely likely that all parties were more or less equally to blame history said Chesterton tends to be a facade of faded picturesqueness for most of those who have not specially studied it a more or less monochrome background for the drama of their own day but the nature of that background and the vision of today's drama will vary with the varying angle of historic vision there were two possible meanings for the statement that all nations were to blame for the world war all nations had gone away from God motives of personal and national greed had ousted the old ideal of Christendom it might roughly be said that no nation was seriously trying to seek the kingdom of God and its justice international finance had become a shadow resting on all the earth and it could not have got this power if governments had been governing solely for the good of their peoples bow down your heads before God is the invocation constantly used in the missile during the penitential season of Lent and the government of every nation needed this call to repentance with this interpretation Chesterton would have agreed all nations were to blame for the predisposing causes that made a world war possible but when we come to the question of actual responsibility for making this particular war the statement means something very different and something with which Chesterton was prepared to join issue against him those who disliked France or England and saw the history of those two countries as a history of imperialism were saying if Germany had not attacked France France would have attacked Germany or England would have been equally treacherous if it had paid her look at the Treaty of Limerick Chesterton kept imploring people simply to look at the facts Germany had in fact broken her word to France and attacked her France had not attacked Germany Belgium England had not invaded Holland to seize a naval and commercial advantage and whether they say that they wish to do it in our greed or feared to do it in our cowardice the fact remains that we did not do it unless this common sense principle be kept in view I cannot conceive of how any quarrel can possibly be judged a contract may be made between two persons solely for material advantage on each side but the moral advantage is still generally supposed to lie with the person who keeps the contract from barbarism of Berlin pages 15 and 16 the promise and the vow were fundamental to Chesterton's view of human life discussing divorce he claims as essential to manhood the right to bind oneself and to be taken at one's word the marriage vow was almost the only vow that remained out of the whole medieval conception of chivalry and he could not endure to see it set at naught but even in the modern world there still remains some notion of the sacredness of a solemn promise it is plain that the promise or extension of responsibility through time is what chiefly distinguishes us I will not say from savages but from brutes and reptiles this was noted by the shrewdness of the Old Testament when it summed up the dark irresponsible enormity of Leviathan in the words will he make a pact with thee the vow is to the man what the song is to the bird or the bark to the dog his voice whereby he is known there were two chief marks whereby it seemed to Chesterton that the Prussian invasion of Belgium was fundamentally an attack on civilization contempt for a promise was the first he called it the war on the word also from the barbarism of Berlin which is 32 and 33 the other mark of barbarism he called the refusal of reciprocity the Prussians he wrote had been told by their literary man that everything depends upon mood and by their politicians that all arrangements dissolve before necessity this was not merely a contempt for the word but also an assumption that German necessity was like no other necessity because the German cannot get outside the idea that he because he is he and not you is free to break the law and also to appeal to the law thus the Kaiser at once violated the Hague Convention openly himself and wrote to the president of the United States to complain that the allies were violating it for this principle of a quite unproved racial supremacy is the last and worst of the refusals of reciprocity also from the barbarism of Berlin page 37 and page 60 if these two ideas were allowed to prevail they must destroy civilization and so to Chesterton the war was a crusade and to his profound joy was understood as such by the people of England the democratic spirit of our country is rather unusually sluggish and far below the surface and the most genuine and purely popular movement that we have had since the Chartists has been the enlistment for this war Chesterton loved the heroic humor of the trenches the cry of early doors from the boys rushing on death the term blighty for England and congratulations on a severe wound as a good blighty one the song under showers of bullets when it's raining keep your umbrella up the English he once said had no religion left except their sense of humor but I think he meant that they hung out defiantly as a smokescreen for other things anyhow he doubted neither that the war was worth winning nor that it could be won by our soldiers and sailors and with the soldiers and sailors stood the munition workers and the trades unions which had sacrificed their cherished rights for the war period if the only danger to England was on the home front it was not in his eyes to be found in the mass of the nation nor was he at first too apprehensive of the actions of the government Asquith and Sir Edward Gray might have been slow in declaring war but both were patriotic Englishmen and with them stood with equal patriotism the mass of the governing classes if as has later been said the war had really been brought about by English political and financial interests it's strange that Lord Desmoral the head of the London House of J.P. Morgan and a leading financier of England should have lost his two elder sons minister his eldest but the new witness did see two dangers at home which might jeopardize the success of our armies in the field and bring about a premature and dishonorable peace these were international finance and the press magnets nothing so reminds me of how we were all feeling about the daily papers just then as finding this letter to E.C. Bentley dated July 20th 1915 I was delighted to hear from you though very sorry to hear you have been bad I mean physically bad morally and intellectually you have evidently been very good seriously I think you have done something to save this country for the telegraph continues to be almost the only paper that the crisis has sobered and not tipsy-fied I take it in myself and know many others who do so part of the fun about Armsworth is that quite a lot of old ladies of both sexes go about distinguishing elaborately between the daily mail and the names it is a stagnant state of mind created in people who have never been forced by revolution or other public peril to distinguish between the things they are used to and the thoughts for which the things are supposed to stand if you printed the whole of alley slopeers half holiday and called it the Atheneum they would read it with unmoved faces so long as St. Paul's Cathedral stood in the usual place they would not mind if there was a crescent on top of it instead of a cross by the way I see the Germans have actually done what I described as a wild fancy in the flying in combined the cross and the crescent in one ornamental symbol both these papers the daily mail and the times were then owned by the same man Alfred Armsworth who had become Lord Northcliff I'm inclined to think that the attack on Armsworth which the new witness developed attributed too much to purposed malice and did not allow enough for the journalistic craving for news and for scoops probably some of the posters and articles to which they objected were not the work of Lord Northcliff but of some young journalist anxious to sell his paper nevertheless the new witness attack was not only largely justified but was also remarkably courageous the staff of the new witness were themselves journalists and men of letters in both capacities as powerful a newspaper owner as Lord Northcliff could damage them severely and did never hence forward would any of them be able to write in one of his numerous papers never would one of their books receive a favorable review for bellic did not hesitate to call Lord Northcliff a traitor for the way in which he had attacked Kitchener while Cecil amused himself by reviewing and pointing out the illiteracy of that strange peers own writing later too when Armsworth's papers were in full cry for the fall of Asquith and the substitution of Lloyd George the new witness took a strong stand they pointed out too the way in which censorship was exercised against the smaller newspapers while the Northcliff press seemed immune here was the fundamental danger whatever the motive some of the attacks and articles printed were undoubtedly calculated in military language to cause harm and despondency it was appalling that in the time of war this should be permitted and as they saw it permitted because the Armsworth millions have been used to secure a hold on certain politicians to the new witness George was simply Armsworth's man meanwhile at Easter 1916 came the awful tragedy of the Irish rising just didn't have fallen into the sleep of his long illness soon after the splendid gesture in which Redmond had offered the sword to the Allied cause and there seems little doubt that in making this offer Redmond had with him for the last time the people of Ireland recruiting began well about that awful fate of stupidity that seems to overtake every Englishman dealing with Ireland even now was overwhelming the two countries Sir Francis Vain an Irish officer in the British Army described in a series of articles in the new witness the blenders made in the recruiting campaign as prominent Protestant Unionists being brought to the fore national sentiment discouraged waving of Union jacks appeals to patriotism not for Ireland but for England Vain himself found his attempt at recruiting on national lines unpopular and with authority in the midst of his successful effort was recalled to England still though recruiting slackened the cause of the Allies remained in Ireland the popular cause of the rising was the work only of a handful of men its immediate cause was the fact that although the home rule bill had been passed and was on the statute book its operation was again deferred all Irishman saw this as a breach of faith yet the majority were not at that time behind the rising the severity of its repression turned out almost overnight into a national cause and erected yet another barrier against friendship between England for this friendship Chesterton longed ardently and worked passionately nor did he believe the barriers insurmountable even held that there was between the people of the two countries a natural enmity there is something common to all the Britons which even acts of Union have not torn asunder the nearest name for it is insecurity something fitting in men walking on cliffs and the verge of things adventure a lonely taste in liberty a humor without wit perplexed their critics and perplexed themselves their souls are fretted like their coasts the Irish and the English had suffered oppression at the same hands those of the rulers of England if Prussian soldiers have been used against Irish peasants so too had they been used against English Chartists a typical Englishman William Cobbett had suffered fine and long imprisonment his protest against the flogging of an English soldier by a German mercenary a short history of England page 7 telling the truth about Ireland wrote Chesterton is not very pleasant to a patriotic Englishman but it is very patriotic for the lack of the essential patriotism of admitting past sin the rulers of England were perpetuating an evil that many of them sincerely desired to end for this was a case where the right road could only be drawn by retracing the steps of a long road of wrong the crimes of England page 57 before the end of the war GK visited Ireland and in the book that he wrote after this visit may be found his best analysis of all this matter Ireland he believed was making a mistake in not throwing herself into the cause of the defeat of Germany not because she owed anything to England but because of what Prussia was and of what Europe meant Ireland had been the friend of France and the enemy of Prussia long before England had been either she would do well to hold to her ancient allegiance it was true that Ireland had been betrayed by the liberal promise of home rule but the men who betrayed her were the Marconi men had made the great mistake of his career when for motives of patriotism for Ireland he had helped the party hacks of the government committee to whitewash these men went on to betray Ireland as they were then betraying England England too needed home rule England too needed deliverance from her degenerate and unworthy governing class there are a few pages in Irish impressions now out of print which find their place here in illustration of what he meant by his championship of nationality a brilliant writer once propounded to me his highly personal and even perverse type of internationalism by saying as a sort of unanswerable challenge wouldn't you rather be ruled by Goethe than by Walter Long I replied that words could not express the wild love and loyalty I should feel for Mr. Walter Long if the only alternative were Goethe I could not have put my own national case in a clear and more compact form I might occasionally feel inclined to kill Mr. Long but under the approaching shadow of Goethe I should feel more inclined to kill myself that is the deathly element of denationalization that it poisons life itself the most real of all realities some people felt it in effectation that the Irish should put up their street signs in Gaelic but GK defended it it's well to remember that these things which we also walk past every day are exactly the sort of things that always have in the nameless fashion of national note it is this sensation of stemming a stream of ten thousand things all pouring one way labels, titles, monuments, metaphors modes of address assumptions and controversy that make an Englishman in Ireland know that he is in a strange land nor is he merely bewildered as among a medley of strange things on the contrary if he has any sense he soon finds them united with a single impression as if he were talking to a strange person he cannot define it because nobody can define a person and nobody can define a nation he can only see it, smell it hear it, handle it, bump into it fall over it, kill it, be killed for it or be damned for doing it wrong he must be content with these mere hints of its existence but he cannot define it because it is like a person and no book of logic will undertake by Uncle William we can only say with more or less mournful conviction that if Aunt Jane is not a person there is no such thing as a person and I say with equal conviction that if Ireland is not a nation there is no such thing as a nation End of chapter 21 Part 1