 Chapter 28, 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 28, Part 1, Columbus. He wished to discover America. His gay and thoughtless friends who could not understand him pointed out that America had already been discovered. I think they said by Christopher Columbus some time ago, and that there were big cities of Anglo-Saxon people there already, New York and Boston and so on. But the admiral explained to them kindly enough that this had nothing to do with it. They might have discovered America, but he had not. From a fragment in the colored lands. In the chapter of his autobiography, the incomplete traveler Chesterton has said, after all the strangest country I ever visited was England. It was of the very essence of his philosophy that each one of us has to make again the discoveries of our ancestors if we are to be travelers and not trippers. The traveler sees what he sees. The tripper sees what he has come to see. Thus Chesterton tried to discover each country that he had visited and he records that the nearer countries are sometimes harder to discover than the more remote. For Poland is more akin to England than is France. Ireland, more a mystery than Italy. France, Ireland and supremely Palestine brought their contribution to that mental and spiritual development traced in earlier chapters. On Ireland, Rome, Jerusalem and the United States, he wrote books. It may really be said that on the States he wrote two books, for in the volume of essays, Sidelights on New London and New York, which followed his second visit, he showed a much greater understanding than in what I saw in America. His first visit took place in 1921, 22, his second in 1930. On the first trip, Francis kept clippings of almost all their interviews. Gilbert himself said that while the headlines in American newspapers became obscure in their violent efforts to startle, what was written underneath the headlines was usually good journalism, and the press cuttings of this tour bear out his remark. Interviewers report accurately and with a good deal of humor. Sketches of GK's personal appearance abound, and if occasionally they contradict one another in detail, they yet contrive to convey a vivid and fairly truthful impression of the Leonine head, the bulky form, the gestures and mannerisms. The demand of letters and lecturer should choose to wear proudly not one of these titles, but that of journalist was pleasing and flattering to the brotherhood. The atmosphere of the tour is best conveyed by rather copious quotation. A crowd of journalists met him at the boat. One of them writes of his voluminous figure, quite imposing when he stands up, though not so abundantly Johnsonian as his pictures lead one to expect. He has cascades of gray hair above a painfully beaming face, and a rather straggly blonde mustache, eyes that seem frequently to be taking up infinity in a serious way. His falsetto laugh, prominent teeth and general aspect are rather rows of Veltean. Chesterton, who accompanied Mrs. Chesterton and who will deliver a lecture soon in Boston on the ignorance of the educated, said he did not expect to go further west than Chicago. Since having seen both Jerusalem and Chicago, I think I shall have touched on the extremes of civilization. In the event, he visited Omaha in Oklahoma City and went south as far as Nashville, Tennessee. Possibly, Francis had thought she would pass unnoticed, but in fact, besides constant photographs of the pair, the link's eye of the interviewer was upon her as much as upon him. On arrival in New York, he shook hands with some half dozen customs officials who welcomed into the city on their own behalf. The impression given by Mr. Chesterton as he moved majestically along the pier or on the ship was one of huge bulk. To the ordinary-sized people on the pier, he seemed to blot out the liner in the river. Mrs. Chesterton was busy with the baggage. My wife understands these things, he said, with a sweep of a stick. I don't. In order to get the two figures into the same picture, one of the newspaper photographers requested Mr. Chesterton to sit in a big armchair while his wife stood beside him. When they were settled in the required pose, she exclaimed, I say, I don't like this. People will think I am a German. Another newspaper remarks, he was accompanied by his wife who looked very small beside him. She attended to the baggage examination, opening trunks and bags while her husband delivered a short essay on the equality of men and women in England since the war. This reporter was perhaps not without irony, but if you actually happened to like that, G.K. must have seen the joke too, where he has a similar situation in the first scene of his play, The Judgement of Dr. Johnson. The same reporter adds that Chesterton speaks in essays so that his interviewers received a brief essay instead of a direct reply to a leading question. We next come upon them in their New York hotel. I found, with Mrs. Chesterton at the Biltmore, this big gentle Leonine man of letters, six feet of them and 200 odd pounds. There is a delightful story of how an American, driving with him through London, remarked, everyone seems to know you, Mr. Chesterton. Yes, mournfully responded the gargantuan author, and if they don't, they ask. He really doesn't look anything as fat as his caricatures make him. However, he has a head big enough to go with his mass of tallness. His eyes are brilliant English blue behind the big rimmed eyeglasses, his wavy hairs, steel gray, his heavy mustache, bright yellow. Physically, he is the crackling electric spark of the heaven, home, and mother party. The only man who can give the cleverest radical debaters a Roland for their Oliver. In subsequent interviews, GK's height grew to six foot three and his weight to 300 pounds, which was surely closer to the mark. His mannerisms were greatly remarked. Mr. Chesterton speaks clearly in a rather high-pitched voice. He accompanies his remarks with many nervous little gestures. His hands at times stray into his pockets. He leans over the reading desk as if he would like to get down into the audience and make it a sort of heart-to-heart talk. Mr. Chesterton's right hand spent a restless and rather disturbing evening. It would start from the reading desk at which he stood and fall to the points of that vast waistcoat, which inspired the description of him as a fellow of infinite vest. It would wander aimlessly a moment about his stomach, as a word that is taboo among the polite English, his equator, and then shift swiftly to the rear until the thumb found the hip pocket. There, the hand would rest a moment to return again to the reading desk and to describe once more the quarter circle. Once in a while, it would twist a ring upon the left hand. Once in a while, it would be clasped behind the broad back, but only for a moment. To the hip pocket and back again was its sentry go, and it was a faithful soldier. Several interviewers remarked on the unexpected caliber of his voice. He himself spoke of it as the most that came forth from the mountain. One would never suspect him of being our leading American bestseller. His accent, mannerisms, and dress are pro piccadilly, and he likes his Oolong with a lump of sugar. He thinks with his cigar, a black London churru. He, Gilbert K. Chesterton, was sipping a cup of tea expertly brewed by Mrs. Chesterton when a reporter yesterday entered his room at the Blackstone in Chicago. Before he submitted to interrogation, he lighted the cigar. My muse, he explained, a Parnassian pleasure. Tobacco smoke is the icor of mental life. Some men write with a pencil, others with a typewriter. I write with my cigar. Throughout the interview, he was profoundly concerned not with the subjects under discussion, but with the black churrut. Seven times went out. Seven times he relighted it. The eighth time he tossed it away. When asked which of his works he considered the greatest, he said, I don't consider any of my works in the least great. Slaying, he said, is too sacred and precious to be used promiscuously. Its use should be led up to reverently, for it expresses what the king's English could not. Seeing and hearing a man like Gilbert Keith Chesterton, said a Detroit newspaper, makes a meal for the imagination that no reading of books by him or about him can accomplish. He spoke Sunday in Orchestra Hall on the ignorance of the educated. It grows more difficult as his tour progresses, he admits, and the lecture he insists grows worse. His thesis is that the besetting evil of all educated people is that they tend to substitute theories for things. The uneducated man never makes this mistake. He states the simple fact that he sees a German drinking beer. He does not say, there is a tuton consuming alcohol. At Toronto, the chairman, a professor of English, thought that there must have been an error in the title as printed and announced that Mr. Chesterton would speak on the ignorance of the uneducated. Another Detroit newspaper quotes from the lecture, there is a deeper side to such fallacies. The whole catastrophe of the great war may be traced to the racial theory. If people had looked at peoples as nations in places of races, the intolerable ambition of Prussia might have been stopped before it attained the captaincy of the South German states. The only other lecture subjects mentioned are, shall we abolish the inevitable and the perils of health? There are innumerable caricatures. One by Cosmo Hamilton is accompanied with a story of how he once debated with Chesterton. The subject was, there is no law in England. GK made so overwhelming a case that Hamilton decided the only way of making reply possible was to twist the subject, making it, there are no laws in England and go off in 1,000 tangents like a worried terrier. Here Chesterton's howl of joy when he twigged how I had slipped out to see him double himself up in an agony of laughter at my personal insults, to watch the effect of his sportsmanship on a shocked audience who were won to myth by his intense and peahen-like quirks of joy was a sight and a sound for the gods. Probably Chesterton has forgotten this incident, but I haven't and never will. And it carried away from the room a respect and admiration for this tomboy among dictionaries, this philosophical Peter Pan, this humorous Dr. Johnson, this kindly and gallant cherub, this profound student and wise master which has grown steadily ever since. In the daily sketch, Hamilton later described GK speaking in this debate. During the whole inspired course of his brilliant reasoning, he caught the little rivulets which ran down his face and just as they were about to drop from the first of his several chins, flicked them generously among the disconcerted people who sat actually at his feet. From time to time too, unaware of this, he grasped deep into his pockets and rattled coins and keys, going from point to point, from proof to proof, until the Constitution of England was quite devoid of law and out from under his waistcoat bulged a line of a shirt. It was monstrous, gigantic, amazing, deadly, delicious. Nothing like it has ever been done before or will ever be seen, heard and felt like it again. A clever caricature depicts Dickens in one corner, his arms full of bricks, hammers and jagged objects labeled American notes. The rest of the picture is an immense drawing of a smiling Chesterton, his arms full of roses labeled kind words for America. He is pointing at Dickens and saying, America must have changed a great deal since then. Not only Gilbert, but also Francis was constantly interviewed. I tell them one interview quotes her as saying that I didn't know I was the wife of a great man till I came to America. Never bothered me before. This coming from one of those English wives so popularly portrayed as representing the acme of submission was delightful. A slight slim little figure, looking slider and slimmer in the wake of her overshadowing husband and an outward appearance of unsurpassed mildness and meekness which her conversation readily dispelled. The wife of this delightful Englishman of letters presented a very intimate Chestertonian paradox. Francis kept a diary of which almost the first entry is, so far my feelings towards this country are entirely hostile, but it would be unfair to judge too soon. We have refused all invitations. It's the only thing to do. This idea they must have abandoned. For one paper after Gilbert's death describes him as an immense success socially, but a big bland failure as a lecturer. As the tour proceeds, the entries in the diary become more favorable, but unlike her letters from Poland where what she liked best was anything really Polish, the diary shows Francis as singling out for approval those things approximately English. For example, houses where she stayed in Boston in Philadelphia. She hated the hustle heat and crowds and the diary is full of remarks about her exhaustion. GK commented in one interview on the different conception of a club in England and in America while groups of men entertained him. Women's clubs were entertaining his wife, but an English club is really a promoter of unsociability. And while the English woman in her club does not perhaps stare into vacancy with the same fervor, as fixity and ferocity as the English man, still there's something of the sort, you know. After a lecture in Philadelphia, a lady asked him, Mr. Chesterton, what makes women talk so much? Heaving himself at his chair, he answered only, God, madam. Two further caricatures were an oppression drawn by Will Coyne for the New York Evening Post of Chesterton as porthos of the pen and another drawn for the New York Herald by Stuart Davis of Chesterton, supplying Paradoxigen to the world. This was accompanied by a poem called Paradoxigen by Edward Anthony. Oh, Gilbert, I know there are many who like your talks on the darkness of light, the shortness of length and the weakness of strength and the one on the lowness of height. My neighbor keeps telling me how I adore his legality of the illicit. And I also have a liking intense for his striking obscurity of the explicit. But I am moved, what's the reason oh well? The same I intend to expound, some evening next week when I'm going to speak on the shallowness of the profound. Everyone who goes to America for a short time said, GK is expected to write a book and nearly everybody does. In accordance with this convention, he wrote what I saw in America. He did see a great deal. The same imagination that I found in the medieval aspect of Jerusalem saw many elements missed out, not only by the ordinary tourist, but by people themselves who live nearest to them. Thus he keenly appreciated the traditional elements in Philadelphia, Boston and Baltimore. In coming into some of these more stable cities of the States, I felt something quite sincerely of that historic emotion which is satisfied in the eternal cities of the Mediterranean. I felt in America what many Americans suppose can only be felt in Europe. I have seldom had that sentiment stirred more simply and directly than when I saw from afar off above the vast gray labyrinth of Philadelphia, great pen upon his pinnacle, like the graven figure of God who had fashioned a new world. And remembered that his body lay buried in a field at the turning of the lane, a league from my own door. In Baltimore, the Catholic history appealed to him yet more strongly and invited to visit Cardinal Gibbons. He felt himself touching the end of a living chain. In Boston, much more beautiful than its name, he accompanied again with the autocrat and recalled how in his own youth, English and American literature seemed to be one thing. Indeed, he was there reminded even of English things that have largely vanished from England. Washington, he saw both as a beautiful city and an idea, a sort of paradise of impersonal politics without personal commerce. And in Nashville, Tennessee, it was with a sort of intensity of feeling that he found himself before a dim and faded picture. And from the dark canvas, looked forth the face of Andrew Jackson, watchful like a white eagle. The things Chesteredin chose for description all have relevance to the main thesis of the book, which has often been missed and which emerges most clearly in the first and last chapters. He insists always that he writes as a foreigner and indeed repeats frequently that it is by keeping his own distinct nationality that Englishmen and Americans will best understand and like one another. But he writes also as a man not unconscious of history. Thus writing, the older cities represent to him one trend in the States and New York another. I'm sorry to say that he does not appreciate New York as he ought because of his dislike of cosmopolitanism. It's beauty he sees as breathtaking, not solid and abiding, but a kind of fairyland. The lights on Broadway evoked from him the exclamation that what a glorious garden of wonders this would be for anyone who was lucky enough to be unable to read. And he imagines a simple peasant who fancies that he must be announcing in letters of fire, liberty, equality, fraternity. It must be put up on occasion of some great national feast, whereas there are but advertising signs put up to make money. The skyline seemed to him mostly lovely. Vertical lines that suggest a sort of rush upwards as of great cataracts topsy-turvy. The strong daylight finds everywhere the broken edges of things and the sort of hues we see in newly turned earth or the white sections of trees. It feels the intense imaginative pleasure of those dizzy turrets in dancing fires, but he ends with a note that really spoiled New York for him. If those nightmare buildings were really all built for nothing, how noble they would be. Advertisement, big business monopoly might have invaded the old, traditionary cities of America as they had those of England, but New York existed, he felt, as a new and startling expression of them. They shrieked in every light and from every skyscraper. The whole question of America was would the older, simpler, really great historical tradition win or would it be defeated by the new and towering evil? He has an interesting chapter on the countryside finding hope in the considerable extension of small ownership among the farmers and in the houses built from the growing material that wood is, but he is again depressed at the reflection that the culture of the countryside is not its own but imported from the towns, therefore itself largely commercialized. Roaming over the world in search of his examples, Chesterton sees the ideal of the early Republicans as dead in the republics of today and nowhere more dead than in America. It would be useless, he feels, to invoke Jefferson or Lincoln in the modern world against the tyranny of wage slavery or in favor of racial justice because the bridge of brotherhood had broken down in the modern mind. Jefferson, the daest, said the site of slavery in his country made him tremble remembering that God is just, but the modern who has lost these absolute standards has grown dizzy with degree and relativity. Hence came the same terrible peril in both England and America that in the eyes of the new plutocracy, the idea of manhood has gone. There were different sorts of apes but there was no doubt that we were the superior sort. Only in one direction did you see any real hope. The new dreams of the 18th century had gone but the ancient dogmas of the Catholic church remained. Catholics might forget brotherhood like their fellows but the Catholic type of Christianity had riveted itself irrevocably to the manhood of all men. The church would always continue to ordain negros and canonized beggars and laborers. Where its faith was fixed by creeds and councils, it could not save itself even by surrender. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man. I've put that final sentence in capitals for it is the climax both of Gilbert's thinking about America and of one of the most important trains of thought that brought him to the home of liberty secured for the human race by dogma. That is to say by revealed truth. He went home to be received into the Catholic church as I have earlier related. What I saw in America is of special importance in relation to later discussions in GK's weekly. While the journalist seemed convinced on his first visit that he had nothing but roses to throw and compared him favorably to Dickens, a collection of quotations could be made from GK's weekly of a quite opposite kind. Yet I do not think he ever attacks America as much as he attacks England. He was himself much amused at finding he was expected to be either for America or against America, both of which attitudes appeared to him absurd. In that sense, he was neither for nor against his own country. He liked Americans. He disliked certain trends in America. Because he loved England, he disliked the same trends even more in England. Certain things in modern civilization which he hated, he did not regard as primarily American. American comfort to him seemed acute discomfort. He thought every American lives in an airless furnace in the middle of which he sits and eats lumps of ice. He had a great hatred of intelligence tests, which he called the palpable balderdash of irresponsible Yankee boomsters. It is really one of the maladies of American democracy to be swept by these prairie fires of pseudoscientific fads and throw itself into eugenics or anthropometric inquiry with the buoyancy of babies. He believed that there was more democracy in America than in England, but he hated what he called the glare of American advertisement. He spoke of a common thief like the American millionaire, but he certainly did not exclude the English millionaire from the same indictment. His whole view of advertisement reaches a peak in an article entitled If You Have Smiles, GK's Weekly, December 10th, 1927. We read the other day an absolutely solemn and almost tender piece of advice in the leading American magazine about the preservation of beauty and health. It was intended quite seriously. After describing in most complicated detail how the young woman of today, well known to be enamored of all that is natural and free, is to strap up her head and face every night as if it had to be bandaged after an accident. It proceeds to say, with most refined American accent, with the face thus fixed in smile formation. But we have difficulty about taking this serious advice of American beauty business even so seriously as to meditate on its social menace. The prospect of such a world of idiots ought to depress us, but no, it is no good. Our faces are fixed in smile formation when we think of that American. He repeated often how much he liked the inhabitants of Main Street, grievously wronged by St. Clair Lewis. American ideals are not nearly so nice as American realities. We'll lament not so much what Babbit is as what he is trying to be. What he is is a simple and kindly man. What he's trying to be is the abomination of desolation, the man who made salesmanship and art, the man who would not stay down, the man who got the million dollar post after taking our correspondence course, the man who learned social charm in six lessons, January 14th, 1928. At the time of the depreciation of the Frank, Bellach's articles in GK's weekly Echoed in the Leaders pointed to finance, especially American finance, as the criminal that was forcing down the French currency. The American correspondent in the paper attacked these attacks on the ground that they were inspired by British imperialism. Chesterton felt a little hard to be at this day confused with Kipling. He replied that his correspondent committed the blunder of an extravagant and excessive admiration for England. He speaks of that tremendous procession that passed through Paris, literally an army of cripples. It was a march of all those walking units, those living fragments of humanity that have been left by the long stand of five years upon the French frontiers. A devastated area that passed endlessly like a river. They illustrate the main fact that France was in the center of that far flung fighting line of civilization, that it was upon her that the barbarian coral concentrated and that it is a historical fact, which the foolish vanity of many Englishmen as well as of many Americans is perpetually tempted to deny. Our critic is therefore quite beside the mark if he imagines that I am trying to score off his country out of a cheap jealousy on behalf of my own. My jealousy is for justice and for a large historical understanding of this great passage in history. My own country won glory enough in that and other fields to make it quite unnecessary for any sane Englishman to shut his eyes to Europe in order to brag about England. I have not the faintest doubt what Thomas Jefferson would have said if he had been told that a few financial oligarchs who happened to live in New York were beating down the French wealth and had then seen past before him that awful panorama of the wrecks of the French Republican army, heart shaking like a resurrection of the dead. I do not admit therefore that in supporting the French peasants and soldiers against the money dealers and wire pullers of the town, I am attacking America or even merely defending France. GK's weekly, September 1st, 1926. On November 6th and 13th, 1926, he writes two articles on the Yankee and the Chinaman in which he contrasts the philosophic spirit with the so-called scientific. Like Bishop Barnes in England wanting to analyze the consecrated host, Edison was reported in America as having said that he would find out if there was a soul by some scientific test. Any philosophic Chinaman would know what to think of a man who said, I have got a new gun that will shoot a hole through your memory of last Monday or I have a saw sharp enough to cut up the cube root of 666 or I will boil your affection for Aunt Susan until it is quite liquid. In 1927, Gilbert Francis and Dorothy spent a month in Poland where immense enthusiasm was shown for the man who had consistently proclaimed Poland's greatness and its true place in Europe. Invited by the government, all the hostility I received, he says, was far too much alive to remind me of anything official. One of the multitude of unwritten books of which GK dreamed was a book about Poland. The Poles in the English were, he felt alike in many things, but the Englishmen had never been given the opportunity to understand the Pole. We knew nothing of their history and did not understand the resurrection we had helped to bring about. The nonsense talked in the newspapers when they discussed what they called the Polish Corridor was only possible from want of realization of what Poland had been before she was rent in three by Prussia, Austria and Russia. Thus too, we did not realize the self-evident fact that the Poles always have a choice of evils. Pilsacki told him that of the two he preferred Germany to Russia. While Damalski voiced the more general opinion in telling him that of the two he preferred Russia to Germany. For the moment, in any rate, tortured Poland was herself and incredibly happy. Revival in this agricultural country had been amazingly swift. Peasant proprietors abounded and lived well in 12 acres or so while even laborers possessed plots of land and a coward too. The Pen Club dinner Francis wrote in a letter to her mother was I fancy considered by the Poles a huge success. If numbers indicate anything, it certainly was. I found it a little embarrassing to have to eat hot kidneys and mushrooms standing about with hundreds of guests and this was only the preliminary to a long dinner that followed in refreshments that apparently continued until two o'clock in the morning. The speeches were really perfectly marvelous and delivered in English quite colloquial and very witty in showing a detailed knowledge of Gilbert's works which no Englishman of my acquaintance possesses. Gilbert made an excellent, in fact, a very eloquent speech and reply which drew forth thunders of applause. Their hosts drove the Chesterton's all over the country and showed them home life on the little farms, home industries and arts, brightly woven garments and pottery for use, not for exhibition and the great historic scenes of Poland's history. With the scene he remembered most vividly, Gilbert's musings on Poland conclude. They were visiting a young nobleman who excused the devastation of his home by Bolshevik soldiers in the heat of battle but added, there is only one thing I really resent. He led us out to a long avenue lined with poplars and at the end of it was a statue of the Blessed Virgin with the head and the hands shot off. But the hands had been lifted and it is a strange thing that the very mutilation seemed to give more meaning to the attitude of intercession, asking mercy for the merciless race of men. Autobiography page 330. Carl Capuch who had long wanted Chesterton to visit Prague wrote mournfully. You wrote me that it would be difficult for you to come to Prague this spring but it was in the newspapers that you were last month in Warsaw. Why in heaven's sake did you not come to Prague on this occasion? What a pity for us. Now we are waiting for a compensation. Two earlier letters had shown him eager for contributions from Chesterton for a leading review. Another delightful letter is dated December 24th, no year given. My dear Mr. Chesterton, it is just Christmas Eve. My friends presented me with some of your books and I cannot omit to thank you for the consolation and trust I found there as already so many times. Be blessed, Mr. Chesterton. I wrote you twice without getting an answer but it is Christian to insist and so I write you again. Please, would you be so kind to tell me if it shall be possible for you to come next year to Prague? Our pen club is anxious to invite you as our guest of honor. If you would like to come next spring, I beg you to be my guest. You are fond of old things. Prague is one. You shall find here so many people who cherish you and I like myself as no other writer. It's for your sake that being in London I went to Habit in Notting Hill and it is for your sake that I liked it. I cannot believe that I should not meet you again. Please come to Prague. I wish you a happy new year, Mr. Chesterton. You must be happy making your readers happier. You are so good. You're sincerely Carl Capet. He never alas got to Prague or to many other countries that wanted him. There are letters asking him to lecture in Australia to lecture again in the USA in South America to make them aware of English thought and literature. The Argentine intelligentsia says, Philip Cadala is acutely aware of your writings. Local professors terrified me by asking me on various occasions to explain the precise position which you occupied in our Catholic youth. A visit from you would mean a great deal to British intellectual prestige in these parts. End of chapter 28, part one. Chapter 28, part two 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 28, part two, Columbus. No Catholic Englishman was anything like so widely known in Europe. Books have been written about him in many languages and his works translated into French, German, Dutch, Czech, Russian, Polish, Spanish, and Italian. A letter from Russia asks for his photograph for the magazine of international literature as a writer whose works are well known in the Soviet Union. The Galterbund in Vienna sends an emissary, inviting him there also, and like Prague, the Vienna Pen Club wants him. You have a distressing habit, Maude Reuden once wrote of being the only person one really wants to hear on certain subjects. A visit to Rome in 1929 produced the resurrection of Rome. Despite brilliant passages, the book is disappointing. It bears no comparison with the new Jerusalem and gives an impression of being thrown together hastily before the ideas have been thought through to their ultimate conclusions. Perhaps Rome was too big, even for Chesterton. He never loved the Renaissance as he did the Middle Ages, but he saw it not as primarily pagan, but as one more example of the immense vitality of a Catholicism which had had so many rebirths that it had buried its own past deeper than the past of paganism. He loved the fountains that threw their water everywhere, and he felt about Rome that the greatest monuments might be removed and yet the city's personality would remain, for Rome is greater than her monuments. He wanted to argue with those who cared for pagan Rome alone and who spent their time despising the oratorian stone of the papal city and gazing only on the forum, and never once occurs to them to remember that the old Romans were Italians or to ask what a forum was for. He was, as usual, constantly invited to lecture at the English College, the Scots College, the American College, the Beta. At the Holy Child Convent, he spoke to a crowded audience on Thomas Moore and Humanism. Father Cuffbert, OSFC, thanking him, remarked on the mental resemblance between Moore and Chesterton, saying that he could quite well imagine them sitting together making jokes. Some of them very good, and some of them very bad. Chesterton and Moore, says Father Vincent McNabb, were both cockneys. Gilbert's classical insight also seemed to him like the great chancellors. Erasmus says that though Moore did not know much Greek, he knew what the words ought to mean. He interviewed Mussolini and found that Mussolini was interviewing him so that he talked at some length of distributism and his own social ideal. Mussolini knew at least some of Gilbert's books. He told Cyril Clemens that he had keenly enjoyed the man who was Thursday. He promised at the end of this interview that he would go away and think over what Chesterton had said. And it might have been better for the world had he kept that promise. For what had been said was an outline of the one possible alternative to the growing tyranny of governments. From his anxiety to be fair to fascism, Gilbert was often accused of being in favor of it. But both in this book and in several articles, having given the case for it, he went on to give the case against it. A much stronger case than that usually given by its opponents. The case for fascism lay in the breakdown of true democracy in the reign of the tyranny of wealth in the democratic countries. Chesterton would, he said, have been on the side of the partito popularity as against the fascism that succeeded. In England and America, he would have infinitely preferred that the purgation of our plutocratic politics should have been achieved by radicals and Republicans. It was they who did not prefer it. It was not that fascism was not open to attack, but that liberalism has unfortunately lost the right to attack it. Those of us who were in Italy at that time will remember the truth of his description of the vitality and happiness that seemed to glow among the people. Giovinica Belelezza, heard everywhere, had then no hollow sound at the heart of it. Italy was radiant with hope. In Mussolini himself, Gilbert saluted a belief in the civic necessity of virtue, in the ideal that public life should be public and human dignity and respect for women as mothers and piety and the honor due to the dead. Yet summing up the man and the movement, he saw it as primarily the sort of riot that is provoked by the evils of an evil government. Only in the Italy of the 20th century, the rioters have become the rulers. For although Mussolini had in many ways made his rule popular, although in his concessions to modern ideas and inventions he was rather breathlessly progressive, yet in the true sense of the word, Mussolini was a reactionary. A reactionary is one who merely reacts against something or permits that something to make him do something against it. A reactionary is one whom weariness itself has become a form of energy. Even when he is right, there is always a danger that what was really good in the previous society may be destroyed by what is good in the new one. Mussolini's reaction was against the liberalism in which, as an idea, Chesterton still believed. It was a reaction from democracy to authority, and its weakness, the fundamental weakness of fascism, was that it appeals to an appetite for authority, without very clearly giving the authority for the appetite. When I try to put the case for it in philosophical terms, there is some doubt about the ultimates of the philosophy. It seemed to Chesterton that there were only two possible fixed and orderly constitutions, hereditary monarchy or majority rule. The demand of the fascists to hold power as an intelligent and active minority was, in fact, to invite other intelligent and active minorities to dispute that rule, and then, only by tyranny, could anarchy be prevented. Fascism, he said in summary, has brought back order into the state, but this will not be lasting unless it has brought back order into the mind. The two things in the Roman visit that remain most prominent in Dorothy's memory are Gilbert's loss of a medal of Our Lady, that he had always wore in his audience with the Holy Father. The loss of the medal seemed to distress him out of all normal proportion. He had the elevator boy looking forward on his hands and knees and gave him a huge reward for finding it. Gilbert has left no record of his papal audience, but says Dorothy had excited him so greatly that he did no work for two days before the event or two days after. Their second visit to America, 1930, 1931, was far better enjoyed by Gilbert and also, I think, by Francis until she got ill. Because on it, they came closer to the real people of the country, especially during the period when he was lecturing at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. They lived at a little house in South Bend and he lectured every night, alternating a course on Victorian literature with one on the great figures of Victorian history. There were 36 lectures all told. The average attendance at each was 500. At Notre Dame and the Sister College of St. Mary's, I felt the best way to get the atmosphere of this visit would be to get together for a talk, the people who remembered Gilbert. They would stimulate one another's memories. I invoked the aid of Sister Matalaeva and she suggested the two fathers, Leo Ward, Professor Engels and O'Grady, and best of all, Johnny Mangan, the chauffeur. Johnny is a great institution at Notre Dame. He remembered driving my father nearly 30 years ago and he had specially vivid memories of the Chesterton period. We all sat in a circle in Sister Matalaeva's sitting room. I give here the notes I took. Johnny Mangan, it was the hardest job getting him into the car. I heard getting him out. He'd walk on the porch and all the children came. He talked to the children on the road. Money meant nothing to him. The lady would give me the money saying himself would leave it in the shop if the barber wasn't honest enough to give change. He enjoyed everything. When they dedicated the stadium, he stayed till the very end. Father O'Donnell introduced him to all the naval officers and he was the last off the ground. He enjoyed talking to all the naval officers. He loved cheerleading. Mr. O'Grady. He spent one evening in Professor Phillips room after the lecture from nine to 2.30 a.m. His host was deaf. GK learned later and he made another date when he found his host had missed most of the fun. Mr. Angles. He would sit around consuming homemade ale by the court. Said the head of the philosophy faculty made the best brew in the college. Enjoyed little drives around the countryside and the faculty were a little shy of inviting him. In a lecture, he got in an immense laugh by calling Queen Elizabeth an old crock. He then laughed above all the rest. Mr. Angles noticed mannerisms. The constant shifting of his great bulk around, rotating while he was talking, flipping his eyeglasses, lumbering onto the stage going through all his pockets. Finally finding a piece of dirty yellow paper and talking from it as if most laboriously gathered and learned notes, but the paper was only for show. Father Burke saw him get out of the cab. He got onto the stair landing and then saw GK's yellow paper on the ground. He had delivered his whole course with hardly a single note. Occasionally looked through material for a quarter of an hour or so before speaking. All thought him a great entertainer as well as an informing talker. No one enjoyed himself more than he did. Trying to get him for an informal gathering, they mentioned they had some Canadian ales, quite something in prohibition days. GK, the ales have it. Johnny, he'd chat all the time he was driving. Father Leo L. Ward. The problem of getting GK to and fro in a coop was only solved by backing him in. They remembered GK and Charlie's big chairs, hands barely touching over his great expanse. They recalled that on receiving his honorary doctorate, he said the last time he received one at Edinburgh, they tapped him with John Knox's hat. He did not expect anything so drastic here. Perhaps they might tap him with Tom Heflin's sombrero. Tom Heflin was the fiercely anti-Catholic senator from Alabama. When he had been invited to Notre Dame, he was not certain where it was, but with a name like that, even if we're in the mountains of the moon, he should feel at home. If I ever meet anybody who suggests there's something Calvinistic or Puritanical in Catholicism, I shall ask, have you ever heard of the University of Notre Dame? Johnny, he'd do anything she said or Miss Collins. They certainly had that man by the neck, but they took wonderful care of him. Mr. O'Grady, it was a very intelligent arrangement and did they tie to him? Johnny, very much so. It was their business every evening. Sister Mataleva, did he walk on the campus and see the students? Johnny, he didn't walk much only to Charlie Phillips rooms. He didn't mind being a little late, but his lady and Miss Collins loaded him into the car to get him there on time. The woman they lodged with used to swear like a trooper, but she, the landlady, cried like a kid when they left. And he and the lady seemed lonesome after leaving her. In his spare time at the house, he would be drawing some fancy stuff. What did he talk about? Johnny, he'd just talk about the country, he'd admire the streams and things like that. I took him to the Virgin Forest and I could hardly get him back. He even got out to notice the trees. He spent almost an hour. The women raved at me and said, I must get him back at a certain time. He'd asked me the names of the trees. He loved rivers and would ask me about the fish. At one time, Father O'Donnell thought he should drive to Chicago or some big town, but he didn't care for towns. Said they all looked alike to him, so after that, we always went to the country. Someone asked, did he ever get grouchy? Johnny, he always had a smile, was always calling the kids over to talk to him. He'd touch one with his stick to make him look round and play with him. And then he'd laugh himself, sick, playing with him. The kids were always around him, the ones of four or five years. Those were the ones he'd noticed the most. He liked to ask them things and then if they gave a good answer, he could get a good laugh at it. Mr. O'Grady, I know he enjoyed himself here. I met him in Ottawa afterwards. He was autographing a book. The pen was recalcitrant and he shook it over the rug. Dear me, I'm always cluttering up people's rugs. His cousin in Ottawa had him completely surrounded by ash trays, but the cigar had ash almost half length and it was falling everywhere. Father Ward. Father Miltner one evening in pleasant fall weather found GK on the porch. The campus was empty. He got a grunt in return to his greeting, tried three or four times, almost no answer. GK looked glum. Well, you're not very gay this evening. One should be given the luxury of a little private grouch once in a while. To Johnny, did he take the lecture business seriously? No, he just wanted five minutes on the porch when he would talk to no one but the kids. Mr. O'Grady, he said once, right like about notes, is that when once you begin, you can completely disregard them. He stood for the first lecture, but mostly he sat. He enjoyed a joke so much and they enjoyed his enjoyment. Mr. Angles, for the first lecture he stood, part of him stood behind the little rostrum. After that, he sat in a big table. Father Leo R. Ward was at Oxford when he debated that the law is a has and was amazed at the way the undergraduates adored him. His opponent begged them not to vote for GK at this critical moment in the world's history. They cheered GK but voted against him to make the other fellow feel good. Sister Matalava, what did he do for recreation? Johnny, he did a lot of sketching, I guess you'd call it and he'd read the papers. Sister Matalava, did he like the campus? Johnny, very much. Did he ever go down to the grotto? Johnny, he's seen it but he never got out of the car. Where did he go to church? Johnny, he came here to nutter dam. He was close to 400 pounds but he'd never give it away. He'd break an ordinary scale, I guess. I brought him under the main building. He got stuck in the door of the car. Father O'Donnell tried to help. Mr. Chesterton said it reminded him of an old Irish woman. Why don't you get out sideways? I have no sideways. To the debate with Darrell, Francis Taylor Patterson had gone a little uneasy lest Chesterton's arguments might seem somewhat literary in comparison with the trained scientific mind and rapier tongue of the famous trial lawyer. She found, however, that both trained mind and rapier tongue were the property of GKC. I have never heard Mr. Darrell alone but taken relatively, when that relativity is to Chesterton, he appears positively muddleheaded. As Chesterton summed it up, he felt as if Darrell had been arguing all afternoon with his fundamentalist aunt and simply kept sparring with the dummy of his own mental making. When something went wrong with the microphone, Darrell sat back until it could be fixed whereupon GKC jumped up and carried on in his natural voice. Science you see is not infallible. Chesterton had the audience with him from the start and when it was over, everyone just sat there not wishing to leave. They were loathed to let the light die. From Chesterton by Cyril Clemens, pages 67 to 68. As in England, so also in the States, Gilbert's debating was held to be far better than his straight lecturing. He never missed the opportunity for a quick rape RT and yet when he scored the audience felt that he did so with other kindness. At a debate with Dr. Horace T. Bridges of the Ethical Cultural Society on Is Psychology a Curse, Bishop Craig Stewart who presided describes how in his closing remarks, Chesterton devastatingly sideswiped his opponent and wound up the occasion in a storm of laughter and applause. It is clear that I have won the debate and we are all prepared to acknowledge that psychology is a curse. Let us however be magnanimous. Let us allow at least one person in this unhappy world to practice this cursed psychology and I should like to nominate Dr. Bridges. The bishop on another occasion introduced Gilbert at luncheon in Chicago by quoting Oliver Hurford's lines. When plain folks such as you and I see the sun sinking in the sky, we think it is the setting sun but Mr. Gilbert Chesterton is not so easily misled. He calmly stands upon his head and upside down obtains a new and Chestertonian point of view observing thus how from his nose the sun creeps closer to his toes. He cries and wonder and delight how fine the sunrise is tonight. The fact that nearly all the headlines he chose sounded like paradoxes, the fact that they did not themselves agree with him, had on Chesterton's opponents and on some members of his audience one curious effect. Dr. Bridges, when asked his opinion of the late sparring partner after paying a warm tribute to his brilliance as a critic, his humor and his great personal charm, discovered in his subconscious is psychology a curse, a certain intellectual recklessness that made him indifferent to truth and reality. Fundamentally, perhaps I should say subconsciously, he was a thoroughgoing skeptic and acted upon the principle that since we cannot really be positive about anything, we had better believe what it pleases us to believe. So too at the British University of Aberystwyth when Chesterton spoke on liberty, taking first historically the fights of barons against despots, yeoman against barons, factory hands against owners, and then giving as a modern instance the fight of the pedestrian to keep the liberty of the highway. We are told that the senior history lecturer and some others were of the opinion that the whole thesis of the address was a gigantic leg pole. Chesterton must have seen again the fixed stare on the faces of the Nottingham tradesman 30 years earlier on the famous occasion when he himself got up and played with water. But that earlier audience had the intellectual advantage over the university professors that they tried to find out what he meant with infinite inquiry. Gilbert often said that his comic illustrations ought not to have prevented this, but it was really more his inability to resist making himself into a figure of fun. He was funny and the jokes were funny, but they did prevent his really being given all the position given him by so many of the modern Dr. Johnson. As possible, though not easy, to imagine Johnson dragged from the station to his hotel by 40 undergraduates of Aberystwyth while members of the OTC secured a footing on the carriage armed with a battle axe borrowed from the arts department, hoes, rakes, spades, et cetera, their officers having refused them the privilege of bearing arms on the occasion. But it is scarcely possible to imagine the doctor called upon for a speech standing on the steps of the hotel and saying, you need never be ashamed of the athletic prowess of this college. The pyramids, we are told were built by slave labor, but the slaves were not expected to haul the pyramids in one piece. Chesterton by Cyril Clemens, page 50. In San Francisco, I saw many people who had met Gilbert, including a journalist who took him to a bootleg joint which is western for a speakeasy. There, he asked for some specialty of the house and was offered a mule. Six of these babies will put you on your ear, remarked the bartender. What did he say about my ear Gilbert queried? He downed three of the potent mixture in spite of his theory against cocktails and his host remarked his continued poise with admiration while the bartender commented, he can take it, another slang expression that appeared to be new to Gilbert. He told his host, Mr. Williams, that he delighted in meeting such folk as bartenders and all the simpler people whom he saw to seldom. This suggested an idea. Would he come out to a school across the bay which could not afford his fees because it educated the daughters of poor Catholics? He agreed at once and not only talked to them brilliantly for three quarters of an hour, but also wrote for the children about 50 autographs. But of course, he had forgotten something, an engagement to attend a big social function. A huge car arrived at the school complete with chauffeur and several agitated ladies. Mr. Chesterton, you have broken an important engagement. I have filled an important engagement. He answered, lecturing to the daughters of the poor. If it were possible for Gilbert to be better loved anywhere than in England, that anywhere was certainly America. From coast to coast, I have met his devotees. I have come across only one expression of the opposite feeling, and that from a man who seems, from his opening sentence, to have been unable to stay away from the lectures he so detested. I heard Chesterton some six or seven times in this country, his physical makeup repelled me. He looked like a big eater and animalism is repugnant to most of us. His appearance was against him. Not one of his lectures seemed to me worth the price of admission. And some of them were so bad that they seemed contemptuous morsels flung at audiences for whom he had judged anything good enough. One of his lectures at the Academy, Brooklyn, was a great disappointment. And he charged $1,000 for it. It was not worth $10 and Chesterton knew it. After the lecture, he remarked to a friend of mine, I think that was the worst lecture I ever gave. He may have been right. Certainly it was the worst I have ever heard him give. But he took the thousand and a bonus of $200 for the extra large crowd in attendance. No, I did not like Chesterton. What of the money? With his American agent, Chesterton had a quite unusual arrangement. He received half the fees paid. The agent made engagements, paid traveling expenses and received for this the other half. Out of the half Chesterton received, he paid a further 10% to the London agent who had introduced him to the American agent. And he also had to pay the expenses of his wife and his secretary and further gave a large present to his secretary for trouble on the tour. The rest went chiefly to GK's weekly. I doubt if he could have told anyone at what figure the original fee stood for any lecture. One of the Brazilian fathers, then a novice, remembers Gilbert's appearance in Toronto. The subject of this lecture was culture and the coming peril. The coming peril, he explained, was not Bolshevism because Bolshevism had now been tried. The best way to destroy a utopia is to establish it. The net result of Bolshevism is that the modern world will not imitate it. Nor by a coming peril did he mean another great war. The next great war, he added, would happen when Germany tried to monkey a boat with the frontiers of Poland. The coming peril was the intellectual, educational, psychological, artistic overproduction, which equally with economic overproduction threatened the well-being of contemporary civilization. People were inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralyzed by the flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought or creation from within themselves. At question period, he was asked, why is Dean Inge gloomy because of the advance of the Catholic Church? Next question, please. How tall are you and what do you weigh? I am six feet two inches, but my weight has never been accurately calculated. Is George Bernard Shaw a coming peril? Heavens know he is a disappearing pleasure. For an apparently haphazard collection of essays, Side Lights on New London and New York, published on his return to England from the second visit, has a surprising unity. Blitzed in London and out of print in New York, it is now hard to obtain, which is a pity as it is full of good things. Discussing the fashions of today, Chesterton attempts to remove these things from the test of time and subject them to the test of truth. And this rule of an eternal test is the one he tried to apply in all his comments. Obviously nothing human is perfect and this includes the human judgment, even Chesterton's judgment. Talking of the past or of the present of England or America, he may often have been wrong and he would certainly have been the last man to claim infallibility for his judgments. His weakness as a critic was perhaps a tendency to get his proportions wrong, to make too much of some things he saw or experienced too little of others. His qualities were intellectual curiosity and personal amiability, together with the measuring rod of an eternal standard. This second visit to America only deepened in Gilbert's mind many of the impressions made by the first, yet the atmosphere of the book is curiously different from that of what I saw in America. Living in the country even a few months has so greatly deepened his understanding. He still preferred the Quakers to the Puritans. The essential of the Puritan mood is the misdirection of moral anger. He still felt that as a whole, the United States had started with a great political idea but a small spiritual idea, that it needed a return to the vision in politics and sociology. It was the fashion today to laugh at the wish for great open spaces, yet the real sociological object in going to America was to find those open spaces. It was not to find more engineers and electric batteries and mechanical gadgets in the home. These may have been the result of America. They were not the causes of America. Asked why he admired America, yet hated Americanization, he replied. I should have thought that I had earned some right to apply this obvious distinction to any foreign country since I have consistently applied it to my own country. If egoism is excusable, I am myself an Englishman, which some identify with an egoist. And I have done my best to praise and glorify a number of English things, English ends, English roads, English jokes and jokers, even to the point of praising the roads for being crooked or the humor for being cockney. But I have invariably written, ever since I have written at all against the cult of British imperialism. And with that perilous power and opportunity, which is given by wealth and worldly success, largely passed from the British empire to the United States, I have applied exactly the same principle to the United States. I think imperialism is none the less imperialism because it is spread by economic pressure or snobbish fashion rather than by conquest. Indeed, I have much more respect for the empire that is spread by fighting than the empire that is spread by finance. Sidelights on New London and New York, page 178. He felt that the real causes for admiration, the real greatness of America could be found partly through facing its incompleteness and defects, partly through contemplating the character of the greatest and most typical of Americans, Abraham Lincoln. Whilst I was in America, I often lingered in small towns and wayside places and in a curious and almost creepy fashion that great presence of Abraham Lincoln continually grew upon me. I think it is necessary to linger a little in America and especially in what many would call the most uninteresting or unpleasing parts of America before this strong sense of a strange kind of greatness can grow upon the soul. The externals of the Middle West affect an Englishman as ugly and yet ugliness is not exactly the point. There are things in England that are quite as ugly or even uglier. Rows of red brick villas in the suburbs of a town in the Midlands are, one would suppose, as hideous as human half-wittedness could invent or endure. But they are different. They are complete. They are in their way compact, rounded and finished with an effect that may be prim and smug, but is not raw. The surroundings of them are neat, if it be in a niggling fashion. But American ugliness is not complete, even as ugliness. It is broken off short. It is ragged at the edges. Even its worthy objects have around them a sort of halo of refuse. Somebody said of the rugged and sardanic Dr. Temple once archbishop of Canterbury, there are no polished corners in our temple. There are no polished corners even in the great American cities, which are full of fine and stately classical buildings, not unworthy to be compared to temples. Nobody seems to mind the juxtaposition of unsightly things and important things. There's some deep difference of feeling about the need for completeness and harmony, and there's the same thing in the political and ethical life of the great Western nation. It was out of this landscape that the great president came, and one might almost trace a fanciful shadow of his figure in the thin trees and stiff wooden pillars. A man of any imagination might look down these strange streets with their framehouses filled with the latest conveniences and surrounded with the latest litter, till he could see approaching down the long perspective that long, ungainly figure with the preposterous stovepipe hat and the rustic umbrella and deep melancholy eyes, the humor and the hard patience and the heart that fed upon hope deferred. Sidelights on New London and New York, page 168 to 170. Among the stately and classical buildings were those making up the University of Notre Dame, where he had been lecturing and which turned his musings in a direction they were ever inclined to take. Founded by a group of Frenchmen a century ago with a capital of $400 and a small log building on a clearing of 10 acres, the university today numbers 45 buildings on a 1700 acre campus. The gold dome of the church visible from miles away, the interesting combination of the extraordinary fame of its football team with a keen spiritual life, especially fascinated Gilbert. He wrote a poem dedicated to the university and called The Arena. In it, he pictures first the golden image of the gilded house of Nero that stood for all the horrors of the pagan amphitheater. Then comes in contrast another image. I have seen where a strange country opened its secret plains about me. One great golden dome stand, lonely with its golden image one, seen afar in strange fulfillment, through the sunlit Indian summer, that apocalyptic portent that has clothed through with the sun. The boys showed Notre Dame as they watched the fortunes of the fray and chestered and seized our lady, presiding fittingly, even over a football contest. And I saw them shock the whirlwind of the world of dust and dazzle and thrice they stamped a thunder clap and thrice the sand wheel swirled and thrice they cried like thunder on our lady of the victories, the mother of the master, of the masterers of the world. He recurs to a favorite thought that the mother of sorrows is the cause of human joy. Queen of death and deadly weeping, those about to live salutely, youth untroubled, youth untortured, hateless war and harmless mirth. And the new lords, larger largesse, holier bread and happier circus, since the queen of sevenfold sorrow has brought joy upon the earth. No wonder this, Johnny Mangan said, you could not drag him away from the game if the game meant also a meditation. The holier bread came perhaps to his mind from the fact that the average of daily communion is unusually high at Notre Dame. When he desired for Americans a return to their great political vision, he also desired an opening of the eyes to that greater spiritual vision, which was to him the supreme opportunity of the human spirit. ESP Haines in Frito Misto comments on the absence of any reference to universities in what I saw in America. Nor have I anywhere found any discussion by Chesterton of the intellectual quality of Catholic education, any comparison with the secular teaching, either in England or in America. But that the problems of these two countries and of all the world could be solved only by what that golden dome housed, he cried with no uncertain voice. Death is in the world around, resurrection in the church of the God who died and rose again. Queen of death and life undying, those abode to live salutely. End of chapter 28. Chapter 29 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. Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward. Chapter 29. The Soft Answer. I have only one virtue that I know of I could really forgive until 70 times seven. The Notebook. One of the commonest of biographers problems is the question of quarrels and broken friendships. At the distance of time separating a life from its record, some of these look so empty of meaning as to imperil any reputation, yet they happened. And when they were happening, they probably appeared full of significance. Other quarrels involve issues of importance in which the biographer cannot take wholeheartedly the side of his hero. Thus my own father, writing his father's life, had to pronounce judgment on Newman's side and the issues that divided them. Yet later, writing Newman's biography, he had to admit the false of temper that at least weakened the Cardinal's case. For only so could he tell an entirely truthful story. In Chesterton's life, there is no such problem. Attacks on public characters in his paper, attacks on abuses and ideas, absorbed all his pugnacity. Fellow writers, rival journalists, friends furnished often enough material for a quarrel, but Chesterton would never take it up. He excelled in the soft answer, not that answer which seeming soft subtlety provokes to wrath, but the genuine article. Belex said of him that he possessed the two virtues of humility and charity, those the most royal of all Christian virtues. In the heat of argument, he retained a fairness of mind that saw his opponent's case and would never turn an argument into a quarrel. And most people both liked him and felt that he liked them. While he was having his great controversy with Blatchford back in 1906, it is clear from letters between them that the two men remained on the friendliest terms. Edward McDonald writes of his experiences of Chesterton when he was working with him on the paper. He loved all the jokes about his size. He was the first to see the point and to roar with laughter when Douglas Woodruff introduced him to a meeting as Mr. Chesterton, who has just been looking round in America. He came into the office once on press day and saw the disordered pile of papers and proofs on my desk. The place was certainly in an awful mess. I wanted to show him a particular letter and shoved my hand into the middle of one pile and was lucky enough to put my hand right on the right document. GKC complimented me on a filing system that demanded a keen memory and then remarked inviously, I wish they'd let me have a desk like that at home. When Derek Thomas drew his famous cartoon of GKC milking a cow, he hesitated to give it to me for fear that GKC would be offended. I wanted to print it in a special number and telephoned to Beaconsville. Mr. Chesterton, I have a cartoon of Derek and would like to put it in the special number. But as you are the subject of the cartoon, Derek is afraid you might not like it. I would rather it were not printed, he replied. I never liked the idea of my name being used in the title of the paper and don't want well-intentioned but embarrassing personalities. Of course, if it were highly satirical, insulting, and otherwise unflattering, I'd gladly have it on the front page. I assured him that it was anything but flattering and on the front page it went. It was used as the frontest piece of GK's miscellany. Many of the obituary writers said that he hated the cinema. In fact, he told me once that he had long wished to write a new translation of Cyrano and would like to try his hand at a film scenario of the play. His fingers had itched in the first place to re-translate the dual scene in order to restore the strength of the blod in English. When he saw the film version of a Father Brown story, I asked him what he thought of it. He had liked the film as a film and the acting. He added as an afterthought, it gave me an idea for a new Father Brown story. A shorthand note was taken of the famous debate with Bernard Shaw. It was decided to devote four pages of GK's weekly to a report which I tried to compile by avoiding the third person and concentrating on significant quotations. But whereas Shaw put his points in a few words from which elaboration could be cut, GK sees argument was so closely knit that it was difficult to leave out passages without spoiling the effect. He walked into the room as my pencil went through a fairly long extract from Shaw's speech. And whose words are you so gaily murdering? He asked, Shaw's Mr. Chesterton, very well. Now put them all back and murder mine. I refused to deny Shaw a full opportunity to state his case in my paper. As a result, Shaw's speech took up a great part of the space allotted and GKC was inadequately reported. He was always careful if he had reviewed a book in the paper criticizing its ideas to take an opportunity to show the author his warm personal friendliness. Middleton Murray, sending him a book of his own, criticized GK as perverse for thinking communism and capitalism alike. Your clean idea of liberty and property delights me, I believe, quite as much as it does you. But it is a vision and a dream in this capitalistic world. The communist is the man who has made up his mind to go through with the grim business of capitalism to the bitter end because he knows there is no going back. He makes a choice between following a dream which he knows is only a dream and following a hope which he knows his own devotion may help to make real. Communism is the faith which a man wins through blank and utter despair for my own part, if it were possible. I would rather see the world converted to Christianity than to communism but the world has had its chance of becoming Christian. It will not get it again. The wrath to come, that is what communism is and we can flee from it only by repentance. And repentance itself means communism. That is the fact as I see it. I hope and sometimes dream that we shall have the communism of repentance and not the communism of wrath here in England. Chesterton replied, May 19, 1932. Thank you so much for your most interesting and generous letter which reached me indirectly and was delayed. Also for your most interesting and generous book which I immediately sat down and read at a sitting which in its turn so stimulated me that I immediately wrote a rapid and rather curt reply for my own little rag. I fear you will find the reply more controversial than I meant it to be. For your book is so packed with challenges that I could not but make my very short article a thing packed with mere repartees. But I do hope you will understand how warm a sympathy I have with very much of what you say and with all the motives with which you say it. Needless to say, I agree with every word you say against capitalism but I particularly want to congratulate you on what you say about parasitic parliamentary labor. I thought that chapter was quite triumphant. As for the rest, it is true that it has not shaken me in my conviction that the Catholic Church is larger than you or me than your moods or mine and the heroic but destructive mood in which you write is a very good example. You say that Christ set the example of a self-annihilation which seems to me almost nihilist but I will never deny that Catholics have saluted that mood as the imitation of Christ. Lately, a friend of mine, young, virile, handsome, happily circumstanced, walked straight off and buried himself in a monastery, never so to speak, to reappear on earth. Why did he do it? Psychologically, I cannot imagine. Not certainly from fear of hell or wish to be rewarded by heaven. As an instructed Catholic, he knew as well as I do that he could save his soul by normal living. I can only suppose that there is something in what you say that Christ and others do accept a violent reversal of all normal things. But why do you say that Christ did it and has left no Christians who do it? Our church has stood in the derision of 400 years because there were still Christians who did it and they did it to themselves as Christ did. You will not misunderstand me if I say that this is different from throwing out a violent theory for other people to follow. Now for the application. Some of these monks, less cloistered, are to my knowledge helping the English people to get back to the ownership of their land, renewing agriculture as they did in the Dark Ages. Why do you say there is no chance for this normal property and liberty? You can only mean to say of our scheme exactly what you yourself admit about the communist scheme, that it requires awful and almost inhumane sacrifices, that we must turn the mind upside down, that we must alter the whole psychology of modern Englishmen. We must do that to make them communists. Why is it an answer to say we must do that to make them distributists? I could point out many ways in which our ideal is nearer and more native to men, but I will not prolong this debate. I should be very sorry that you should think it is only a debate. I only ask you to believe that we sympathize where we do not agree, but on this we do not agree. Mr. Murray wrote later of Gilbert, I like the man immensely and he was a very honorable opponent of mine, much the most honorable I have ever encountered. GK's weekly was of course Gilbert's own platform, so perhaps his care to apologize and his great magnanimity are more remarkable in incidents outside his columns. T.S. Eliot had his platform. He edited the criterion. Chesterton on being reproached by him for a hasty article, not only apologized, but dedicated a book to Mr. Eliot. He had written confusing him with another critic who disapproved of alliteration and had also misquoted a stanza of his poetry. Mr. Eliot had written, I should like you to know that it was apparently your sympathetic reviewer, not I, who made the remark about alliteration, to which it seems he added a more general criticism of mine, so that snob is not the right corrective. Some of your comments seem to be based on a belief that I object to alliteration and may I add as a humble versifier that I prefer my verse to be quoted correctly, if at all. Chesterton replied, I am so very sorry if my nonsense in the mercury had any general air of hostility. To say nothing of any incidental injustices of which I was quite unaware, I meant it to be quite amiable, like the tremulous bandinage of the oldest inhabitant in the bar parlor when he has been guided by the brighter lads of the village. I cannot imagine that I ever said anything about you or any particular person being a snob, for it was quite out of my thoughts and too serious for the whole affair. I certainly did have the impression from the way the reviewer put it, that you disapprove of my alliteration. I also added that you would be quite right if you did. I certainly did quote you from memory and even quote from a quotation. I also mentioned that I was doing so casual a thing. Of course, on the strictest principles, all quotations should be verified and I should certainly have done so if I had in any way resented anything you said or been myself writing in a spirit of resentment. If you think a letter to the Mercury clearing up these points would be fair to everybody, of course I should be delighted to write one. This attitude of the oldest inhabitant was the Chestertonian fashion of accepting the youthful demand for something new. When a young writer in Coliseum alluded to him as out of date, he took it with the utmost placidity. Good, he said to Edward McDonald, I like to see people refusing to accept the opinions of others before they've examined them themselves. They're perfectly entitled to say that I'm not a literary lion, but a lansier lion. Mr. Eliot's answer was a request to Gilbert to write in the criterion and an explanation that he had felt in a false position since he rather liked alliteration than otherwise. Thus too, when Chesterton had answered a newspaper report of a speech made by C.E.M. Jode, the latter complained that it was a criticism not of anything that I think, but of a garbled newspaper caricature of a few of the things I think taken out of their context and falsified. He added that he had not said science would destroy religion, but that its present rate of decline the Church of England would become a dead letter in 150 years. Next, that science has no bearing upon the spiritual truths of religion, but has been presented at any rate by the Church of England in a texture of obsolete ideas about the nature of the physical universe and the behavior of physical things, which science has shown to be untrue. Finally, that religion is vital, but it is in mysticism that the core of religion lies for me, and mystical experience, as I understand it, does not want organizing. I may be wrong in all this, but I hope that this explanation, such as it is, will lead you to think that I am not such an arrogant fool as your article suggests. Chesterton replied May 4, 1930, I hope you will forgive my delay in thanking you for your very valuable and reasonable letter, but I have been away from home, and for various reasons, my correspondence has accumulated very heavily. I am extremely glad to remember that. Even before receiving your letter, I was careful to say in my article that my quarrel was not personally with you, but with the newspapers, which had used what you said as a part of a stupid stunt against organized religion. I'm even more glad to learn that they had misused your name and used what you did not say. I ought to have known by this time that they are quite capable of it, and I entirely agree with the correction you make in the report makes all the difference in the world. I do not think I ever meant or said that you were an arrogant fool or anything like it, but most certainly it is one thing to say that religion will die in a century, as the report stated, and quite another to say that the Church of England will experience a certain rate of decline, whether the prediction be true or no. I shall certainly take some opportunity to correct my statement prominently in the illustrated London news. I hope I should do so in any case, but in this case it supports my main actual contention, that there is in the press a very vulgar and unscrupulous attack on the historic Christian church. The four points you raise are so interesting that I feel I ought to touch on them, though you will forgive me if I do so rather rapidly. With the first I have already dealt, and in that matter I can only apologize, both for myself and my unfortunate profession. And touching the second I do not suppose we should greatly disagree, I merely used it as one example of the futility of the fatalistic prophecies, such as the one attributed by the newspapers to you. But a thorough debate between us, if there were time for it, touching the third and fourth points might possibly remove our differences, but would certainly reveal them. In the third paragraph, you say something that has been said many times and doubtless means something, but I can say quite honestly that I have never been quite certain of what it means. Naturally, I hold no brief for the Church of England as such. Indeed, I am inclined to congratulate you on having found any one positive set of ideas, obsolete or not, which that church is solidly agreed and presenting. But I have been a member of that church myself, and in justice to it, I might say that neither then nor now that I see clearly what are these things about the nature of the physical universe which science has shown to be untrue. I was not required as an Anglican any more than as a Catholic to believe that God had two hands and 10 fingers to mold Adam from clay. But even if I had been, it would be rather difficult to define the scientific discovery that makes it impossible. I should like to see the defined Christian dogma written down and the final scientific discovery written against it. I have never seen this yet. What I have seen is that even the greatest scientific dogmas are not final. We have just this moment agreed that the ideas of the physical universe which are really and truly obsolete are the very ideas taught by physicists 30 years ago. What I think you mean is that science has shown miracles to be untrue. But miracles are not ideas about the nature of the physical universe. They are ideas about the nature of a power capable of breaking through the nature of the physical universe. And science has not shown that to be untrue for anybody who can think. Lastly, you say that it is indeed necessary that religion should exist but that its essence is mysticism. And this does not need to be organized. I should answer that nothing on earth needs to be organized so much as mysticism. You say that man tends naturally to religion. He does indeed, often in the form of human sacrifice or the temples of Sodom. Almost all extreme evil of that kind is mystical. The only way of keeping it healthy is to have some rules, some responsibilities, some definitions of dogma and moral function. That at least, as you yourself put it, is what I think. And I hope you will not blame me for saying so. But as to what I said in that particular article, it was quite clearly written upon wrong information and it will give me great pleasure to do my best to publish the fact. In any such argument, Gilbert was never in the words of the gospel willing to justify himself. He only wanted to justify certain ideas and the thought of having misrepresented anyone else was distressing to him. Even the hardened controversialist Colton wrote in the course of one of their arguments, if I speak very plainly of your historical methods, it is not that I do not fully respect your conversion. I have more sympathy with your Catholicity than partly no doubt by my own fault, you may be inclined to think. I believe you too have made a sacrifice of the sort that is never altogether vain. It is therefore part of my faith that you are near to that, which I also am trying to approach. And if this belief does little or nothing to color my criticisms in this particular discussion, that is because I believe true Catholicism, like true Protestantism, can only gain by explosion of historical falsehoods. If indeed they be false with the least possible delay, if, on the other hand, they are truths, then you may be trusted to make out the best possible case for them. And my words will recoil upon myself. The dispute was about Puritanism and Catholicism. It was republished as a pamphlet. It is the only case I have found in which Chesterton wrote several versions of one letter to the Cambridge Review. In its final form, he amended one illuminating illustration. Colton had maintained that the medieval's condemned dancing as much as the Puritans and had dug up various multi-theologians who clashed it as a mortal sin. Father Lopez retorted by a quotation from St. Thomas, saying it was quite right to dance at weddings and on such like occasions, provided the dancing was of a decent kind. Chesterton comments, we have already traveled very far from the first vision of Mr. Colton, of dark ages full of one monotonous wail over the mortal sin of dancing. To class it seriously as a mortal sin is to class it with adultery or theft or murder. It is interesting to imagine St. Thomas and the moderate moralist saying, you may murder at weddings, you may commit adultery to celebrate your release from prison, you may steal if you do not do it with immodest gestures and so on. The calm tone of St. Thomas about the whole thing is about evidence of a social atmosphere different from that described. The rest of his analysis of Colton's method of dealing with a historical document and distorting it is in the published version. A valuable part of Chesterton's line is also interesting as a comment on his own historical work. The expert he says is so occupied with detail that he overlooks the broad facts that anyone could see. On this point of review of Colton's medieval history in the church times is illuminating. The reviewer noted that in the index under the word church occurred such notes as soldier sleeping in, horses stabled in, and other allusions to extraordinary happenings. But nowhere he said, could he find any mention of the normal use of a church that men prayed in it. With H.G. Wells several interchanges of letters have shown in earlier chapters how the soft answer turned aside a wrath easily aroused, but also easily dissipated. Another exchange of letters only three years before Gilbert's death must be given. The third letter is undated and I am not sure if it belongs here or refers to another of Gilbert's reviews of a book of Wells. 47 Shilter Court, N.W.I., December 10th, 1933. Dear old G.K.C., an illustrated London news ex-mis-cutting comes like the season's greetings. If after all my atheology turns out wrong and your theology right, I feel I shall always be able to pass into heaven if I want to, as a friend of G.K.C.'s. Bless you. My warmest good wishes to you and Mrs. G.K.C. H.G. My dear H.G., I do hope my secretary let you know that at the moment when I got your most welcome note, I was temporarily laid out in bed and able to appreciate it, but not to acknowledge it. As to the fine point of theology you raise, I am content to answer with the subtle and exquisite irony of the yanks. I should worry. If I turn out to be right, you will triumph, not by being a friend of mine, but by being a friend of man, by having done a thousand things for men like me in every way from imagination to criticism. The thought of the vast variety of that work and how it ranges from towering visions to tiny pricks of humor overwhelmed me suddenly in retrospect, and I felt we had none of us ever said enough. Also your words, apart from their generosity, please me as the first words I have heard for a long time of the old agnosticism of my boyhood when my brother Cecil and my friend Bentley almost worshiped old Huxley like a god. I think I have nothing to complain of, except the fact that the other side often forget that we began as free thinkers as much as they did, and there was no earthly power but thinking to drive us on the way we went, thanking you again a thousand times for your letter and everything else. Yours always, G.K. Chesterton. My dear Chesterton, you write wonderful praise and it leaves me all a quiver. My warmest thanks for it, but indeed that wonderful fairness of mind is very largely a kind of funk in me. I know the creature from the inside, funk and something worse, a kind of deep, complex cunning. Well, anyhow you take the superficial merit with infinite charity, and it has inflated me and just for a time, I am an air balloon over the heads of my fellow creatures. Yours always, H.G. Wells. Gilbert loved to praise his fellows in the field of letters even when their philosophy differed from his own. In the obituaries in G.K.'s weekly, this is especially noticeable. Of two men of letters who died in 1928, he wrote with respect and admiration, although with a mind divided between pure literary appreciation and those principles whereby he instinctively measured all things. Of Sir Edmund Goss, he wrote, the men from whom we would consent to learn are dying. G.K. felt he could never himself appreciate without judging, but he could learn from Goss a uniquely sensitive impartiality. With him there passes away a great and delicate spirit which might in some sense be called the spirit of the 18th century, which might indeed be very rightly called the spirit of reason and civilization. May 26, 1928. These are the things we hoped would stay and they are going, he quoted from Swinburne. And of him and of Hardy, he died in 1928, and in whom he saluted an honorable dignity and simplicity, he felt, that though they had stated something false about the universe, that all the good things are fugitive and only the bad things unchanged. Yet, something rather like it might be half-truth about the world. I mean about the modern world. These poets lamented the passing of roses and sunbeams, but in the modern world, it is rather as if, and some inverted witchcraft, the rose tree withered and faded from sight, and the rose leaves remained hovering in empty air. It is as if there could be sunbeams when there was no more sun. It is not only the better, but the bigger and stronger part of a thing that is sacrificed to the small and secondary. The real evil in the exchange that has been passing over society is the fact that it has sapped foundations and, worse still, has not shaken the palaces and spires. It is as if there was a disease in the world that only devours the bones. We have not weakened the gilded parody of marriage. We have only weakened the marriage. We have not abolished the house of lords because it was not democratic. We have merely preserved the aristocracy on condition that it shall not be aristocratic. We have not yet even disestablished the church, but there is a very pressing proposal that we should turn out of it the only people who really believe it is the church. There is now in the minds of nearly all capitalist, a sort of corrupt communism. The bank remains, the fund remains. The foreign financier remains. Parliamentary procedure remains. Jix remains. These are the things we hoped would go, but they are staying. 16 years earlier, Chesterton had in the Victorian age in literature characterized Hardy's novels as the village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot. Yet Cyril Clemens has told me that Hardy recited to him some of Chesterton's poetry. And I think this obituary links with that fact in showing that a profound difference in their philosophy of life did not prevent a mutual appreciation and even admiration. Gilbert Chesterton entered the last years of his life having made no enemies in the exceedingly sensitive literary world to which he primarily belonged. Whether he had made any in the world of politics, I do not know, but he certainly felt no enmities. He said once it was impossible to hate anything except an idea. And to him, I think it was. Against one politician who died in 1930, he had many years ago launched his strongest bit of ironical writing. Lord Birkenhead, then Effie Smith, who had spoken of the Welch disestablishment bill as having shocked the conscious of every Christian community in Europe. The last lines of Chesterton's mordant answer ran, for your legal cause or civil, you fight well and get your fee, for your God or dream or devil, you will answer not to me. Talk about the pews and steeples and the cash that goes therewith, but the souls of Christian peoples, chuck it, Smith. Later, Smith had stood with Sir Edward Carson against Cecil Chesterton at the Old Bailey. Now he was dead and many who had feared him in his lifetime were blackening his memory with subtle sneers and innuendo. Gilbert refused to join in this and he wrote in his paper, in him we were confronted by and fought, not a set of principles, but a man. Lord Birkenhead was a great fighter with one more pagan virtue, pride. He would have been a great pagan. Lord Balfour died in the same year. With him, neither the paper nor its editor had fought personally, but upon almost all his policies had stood in opposition. Yet few better appreciations of him appeared in the article entitled by Chesterton, A Man of Distinction. The English Squire was an unconscious aristocrat. The Scotch Laird was a conscious aristocrat and Lord Balfour with all his social grace and graciousness with conscious and even self-conscious. But this was only another way of saying that he had a mind which mirrored everything, including himself and that whatever else he did, he did not act blindly or in the dark. He was sometimes quite wrong, but his heirs were purely patriotic, both in the narrow sense of nationalism and in the larger sense of loyalty and disinterestedness. He instances Balfour's policies in Ireland and Egypt and continues, in some ways he seems to me to have been too good a stoic to be entirely a good Christian or rather to put it more correctly, to feel like the rest of us that he was a bad Christian. There was much more in him of the Scotch Puritan than of the English Cavalier. It is supremely characteristic of the present parliamentary atmosphere that everybody accused Lord Balfour of incomprehensible compromise and vagueness because he was completely logical and absolutely clear. Clarity does look like a cloud of confusion to people whose minds live in confusion twice confounded. People said his distinctions were fine distinctions and so they were, very fine indeed. A fine distinction like a fine painting or a fine poem or anything else fine. A triumph of the human mind. The great power of distinction by which a man becomes in the true sense distinguished. March 29, 1930. The distinction Mr. Swinerton draws between Bellock and Chesterton may be a little too absolute, but substantially it is right. One reason for the love of Chesterton was that while he fought, he sang lays of chivalry and in spite of all his seriousness, warred against wickedness rather than a fleshly opponent while Bellock sang only after the battle and warred against men as well as ideas. Georgian scene, page 88. Did the tendency to find good in his opponents? Did Chesterton's universal charity deaden as Bellock believes the effect of his writing? He wounded none, but thus also he failed to provide weapons wherewith one may wound and kill folly. Now without wounding and killing, there is no battle and thus in this life no victory, but also no peril to the soul through hatred. The Place of Chesterton in English Letters, page 81. In various controversies during the final years of GK's weekly, very opposite opinion is expressed. Hoffman Nickerson writes about the subversive nature of Chesterton's work of giving weapons to communism and doing his bit towards starting a very nasty class war in America. Mr. Nickerson was also to develop this theme in a series of articles in Chesterton's own paper. Correspondents, too, complained often enough in the paper of its attacks on vested interest and on other schools of thought than its own. In the course of a controversy with Mr. Pinty, in which I think GK most distinctly misunderstood his opponent, but in which both men kept the friendliest tone, Pinty says that Chesterton treats as a drive much that he himself would call a drift, that the mind is more unfault than the will of mankind in getting the world into its present mess. With this diagnosis, Chesterton certainly agreed for the greater part of mankind. He spoke often of a madness in the modern mind. Psychology meant the mind studying itself instead of studying the truth, and it was part of what had destroyed the mind. Advertisements often tell us to watch this blank space. I confess I do not watch that blank space, the modern mind, not so much for what will appear in it as for what has already disappeared from it. Thus too, when the Reverend Dick Shepherd remarrying a divorced woman, i.e., encouraging her to take again the solemn vow she had already broken, said that he heard the voice of Christ. Go in peace. It was not for impiety that Chesterton condemned him. He wrote with restraint, there is scarcely a shade of difference left between meaning well and meaning nothing. Was Pinty still right in thinking he saw a drive where he ought to see a drift, and Nickerson in thinking he was dangerously subversive in his attitude to the rich? And anyhow, what about Belak? I inclined to think that the truth was that while G.K. could never hate an individual, he could hate a group. If he suddenly remembered an individual in that group, he hastily expected him from the group in order to leave the objects of his hatred entirely impersonal. Thus he hated politicians, but found real difficulty in hating a politician. He hated what he called the plutocracy, but no individual rich man. I do not think, however, that while believing firmly in original sin, he was somewhat inclined to see it as operative more especially in the well-to-do classes. His championship of the poor was in no way impersonal. His burning love and pity went out to every beggar. He tended to love all men, but the poor he loved with an undivided heart. And when he thought of them, his thoughts grew harsh towards the rich who were collectively their oppressors. I doubt if he allowed enough for a degree of stupidity required to amass a fortune. He would have agreed that love of money narrowed the mind. I doubt if he fully grasped that only a mind already narrow can love money so exclusively as to pursue it successfully. And I am pretty sure he did not allow enough for the fact that rich, like poor, are caught today in the machinery they have created. He saw the bewildered, confused laborer who has lost his liberty. He failed to see the politician also bewildered. The millionaire also confused, afraid to let go for fear he might be submerged. And yet at moments he did see it. He wrote in the paper a short series of articles on men in the 19th century who had created the confusion of today on Moffis, Adam Smith, and Darwin. Far from it's being true that supernatural religion had first been destroyed and morality lost in consequence, it had been the Christian morality that was first destroyed in the mind. GK surmised Adam Smith's teachings as, God so made the world that he could achieve the good if men were sufficiently greedy for the goods. Thus the man of today, whenever he is tempted to be selfish, half remember Smith and self-interest. Whenever he would harden his heart against a beggar, he half remembers Moffis and a book about population. Whenever he has scruples about crushing a rival, he half remembers Darwin and his scruples become unscientific. Because none of these theories were in their own day seen as heresies and denounced as heresies, they have lived on vaguely to poison the atmosphere and the mind of today. English conservatives had been shocked when Chesterton began. Mr. Nickerson was shocked when he was ending because he demanded a revolution. Surely Mr. Nickerson said, if he looked at communism closely, he would prefer capitalism. He not only would, he constantly said he did, but he wanted a revolution from both. He preferred that it should not be nasty for what he wanted was the Christian revolution. Like all revolutions however, they must begin in the mind and he felt less and less hopeful as he watched the blank space. But I do not believe that Chesterton failed because he had not at his command the weapon of hatred. Here, Balak surely makes the same mistake that Swift, whom he instances, made and for the same reason. The Frenchman and the Irishman understand the rapier of biting satire as does not the Englishman. For direct abuse of anyone, no matter how richly merited, nearly always puts the Englishman on the side of the man who is being abused. What happened to Swift's Gulliver that most fierce attack upon the human race? The English people drew its sting and turned it into a nursery book that had delighted their children ever since. There are more ways than one of winning a battle. You can win the man instead of the argument and Chesterton won many men or you can take a weapon that once belonged chiefly to the enemy but which Chesterton rested from him, a very useful weapon, the laugh. Orthodoxy, doctrinal and moral, was a lawful object of amusement to Voltaire and his followers, but now the laugh has passed to the other side and Chesterton was, with Balak himself, the first to seize this powerful weapon. Thus, when Bishop Barnes of Birmingham said that St. Francis was dirty and probably had fleas, many Catholics were furious and spoke in solemn wrath. Chesterton wrote the simple verse, a broad-minded Bishop rebukes the vermin as St. Francis. If brother Francis pardoned brother Flea, there still seems need of such strange charity, seeing he is for all his gay goodwill, bitten by funny little creatures still. I shall never forget going to hear Chesterton debate on birth control with some advanced woman or other. Outside the hall were numbers of her satellites offering their literature. I was just about to say something unpleasant to one of them when a verse flashed into my mind. If I had been a heathen, I'd have crowned nearest curls and filled my life with love affairs, my house with dancing girls. But Higgins is a heathen and to lecture rooms is forced, where his aunts who are not married demand to be divorced. The rebuked died on my lips. Why get angry with the poor old aunts of Higgins demanding the destruction of their unconceived and inconceivable babies? Swinbert had mocked at Christian virtue, but the Dolores of Chesterton replied to him, I am sorry, old dear, if I hurt you. No doubt it is all very nice with the lilies and langers of virtue and the raptures of roses of vice. But the notion impels me to anger that vice is all rapture for me. And if you think virtue is linger, just try it and see. But in fact, GK did not merely use laughter as a weapon. He was often simply amused and did not conceal it. He told Desmond Gleason that he remembered reading Renan's Christ while I was standing in the queue waiting to see Charlie's aunt. But it is obvious which is the better farce for Charlie's aunt is still running. No wonder that Eileen Dugan when she pictured him as a modern Saint George saw him shouting gleefully, bring on your dragons. Even dragons may be bothered by the unexpected. And it may well be that when the rapier of anger has been blunted against the armor of some accustomed fighter, he will be driven off the fields by gales of Chestertonian laughter. End of chapter 29.