Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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One of the more sickening events of the last few days was Candidate Kerry shouting to a mindlessly cheering audience: "I am John Kerry, and I am - reporting - for - DUTY!!" Forget that there are doubts about his supposed heroic record; forget that this Vietnam vet, who is now using his record as an officer to promote himself as a super-patriot to match Bush, started his career as the leader of Vietnam Veterans against the War - which does not show consistency; at least, it is consistent with the personality of a man who insists on publicly taking Communion at the hands of Catholic priests while voting in favour of every single position that the Church has rejected. He manages to be a patriot and a pacifist just as he manages to be a Catholic and an abortion supporter. Bill Clinton, compared to him, was a model of rectitude and straight talking.

The thing is - DON'T get me going about Bush. It is an abominable choice. A couple of years ago, we all laughed - though with an edge in our voice - when the French electorate had to make the choice "Don't vote for the Fascist, vote for the crook". But it seems to me that this is the choice that our political system is increasingly throwing at us: candidates who are both hypocritical and incompetent, often with similar platforms, and, when they are not, with platforms - at least one, and probably both - which are an outrage to ordinary human decency. If not a matter of the Fascist and the crook, the coming American election is a choice between "the corrupt, short-sighted oilman surrounded by some of the lamest ministerial choices in history" vs. "the abortion-promoting hypocrite and liar."

It is not just that the system promotes inflated mediocrities and hypocrites; it positively squashes personality and honesty. Both major parties had better candidates. Howard Dean left the impression that he acted out of principle - however misguided - more than expedience, and McCain actually looks like someone who has a notion as to what integrity and decency mean. They both were chewed up and spat out in favour of candidates whose inadequacy must be clear to everyone. And it is the same story in Italy (Prodi vs. Berlu-scummy), Britain (Bliar vs. Coward), and, of course, France. And those are only the countries I know about.

Today's piece of writing is an essay about one of my heroes, Gilbert K.Chesterton, with a follow-up.

GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON

It's only the truth that Chesterton was a man of astonishing breadth and abilities, brilliant to the point of genius in half a dozen fields. He tackled no genre without leaving a mark; detective writers love him as a detective writer, poets as a poet, journalists as a journalist, fantasy novelists as a fantasy novelist, literary critics as a literary critic, humourists as a humourist, historians (myself) as a historian; but for his humility, he might have been a major philosopher, and one extraordinarily brilliant philosopher, the Hungarian Aurel Kolnai, was more influenced by him than by any other contemporary. And through Kolnai one may trace an indirect influence on Sir Karl Popper himself, the philosopher of the century.

His keen intelligence went hand in hand with good humour and a fondness for the absurd to produce one of the most sparkling wits of our time; but though many people know of "Chestertonian paradoxes", nothing could be more unfair than his reputation for them. Take the epigram from Orthodoxy (1908): "the mad man is not the man who has lost his reason. The mad man is the man who has lost everything except his reason." Taken out of context, this sounds wilful, almost perverse; but it is in fact a pill or tablet version of a sharp factual analysis. "The last thing that can be said of a lunatic is that his actions are causeless. If any human acts may be loosely called causeless they are the minor acts of a healthy man: whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands... the madman.. sees too much cause in everything. [He] would read a conspiratorial significance in those empty activities. He would think that the lopping of the grass was an attack on private property. He would think that the kicking of the heels was a signal to an accomplice... Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze... in many ways, his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgement. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience... the mad man is not the man who has lost his reason. The mad man is the man who has lost everything except his reason."

And he goes on: "The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable... If we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite so infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large... There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions... if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument..."

"If we could express our deepest feelings of protest and appeal against this obsession, I suppose we should say something like this: 'Oh, I admit you have your case and have it by heart, and that many things do fit into other things as you say. I admit your explanation explains a great deal; but what a great deal it leaves out! Are there no other stories in the world except yours; and are all men busy with your business? Suppose we grant the details; perhaps when the man in the street did not seem to see you it was only his cunning, perhaps when the policeman asked you your name it was only because he knew it already. But how much happier you would be if only you knew these people cared nothing about you! How much larger your life would be if your self were so much smaller in it ...It must be remembered that the most purely practical science does take this view of mental evil; it does not seek to argue with it like a heresy, but simply to snap it like a spell. Neither modern science nor ancient religion believe in completely free thought..." So much and more (I only quoted the highlights) does Chesterton compress into two sentences; and it is because of the force and curiosity of analysis behind them that they come across as paradoxical.

Still, we must not be misled by the spell of Chesterton's mind, of his obvious compassion (his depiction of the suffering madman is a masterpiece of human sympathy) and of the excellence of his prose, into failing to notice something else typically Chestertonian: unwarranted generalization. Chesterton gives a superb analysis of one particular kind of mental breakdown, and within its limits he is certainly right and strikingly acute; but when he claims to be describing all important types of lunacy, he is plainly mistaken. There are plenty of mental illnesses that lead, not to a morbid sharpening, but to a complete collapse of the rational faculty (the various types of dementia, for instance).

We can see how Chesterton made his one leap of reasoning too many: rushing ahead on the tide of his own genius, shedding light on a neglected truth of human experience, he gave it an unwarranted universal significance. But his error is not relevant unless he constructed a system on it. No critic should give it more weight than that; and the only positive, the certainly central, part of Chesterton's argument, is his description of insane logic, which, within its limits, is unanswerable.

He does, however, do this sort of thing far too often for coincidence; and it is an interesting (and surely related) fact, that many Father Brown stories, including some of the finest, suffer from some extraordinary flaw in construction. Why, in The Sins of Prince Saradine, does nobody tell the murderer, after he committed his murder, a certain fundamental fact? Never at any point between arrest and execution? Why does it not come out at his trial? The thing is plainly incredible. (If you have read the story, you will know what I mean.) And yet nobody who ever read the story will forget it.

This flaw means that his analysis tends to be sharp on the object at hand, but weak on generalities. In The Red Moon of Meru, a Hindu holy man lays false claim to a miracle, even though the miracle is a theft, because it is a manifestation of sacred power. Chesterton is quite right: that is what many a high-minded yogin, especially from Shaiva or Shakta sects, will do, and it explains what to a Western mind must seem an incomprehensible mixture of charlatanry and high-mindedness in Indian religion. But when he goes on to say that the characteristics of religions are such that the best members of one will be coarse and the worst members of another will be sensitive, he oversimplifies. The question ought to be: "coarse in what?", "sensitive in what?"; human behaviour, and the cultural (religious) influences on it, is too complex and cussed a thing to be so easily summed up. And the absurd thing is that he would probably be the first to say so. The very question, "coarse in what? sensitive in what?", has a typically Chestertonian ring.

It is important to note that the beautiful passage on madness was his reaction to a silly and still widespread cliché, that a man who believes in himself must do well. Chesterton quite rightly pointed out that people who believe in themselves in any meaningful fashion are usually found in psychiatric wards, and went on to both analyze and generalize upon madness. Now the fact is that (in the standard if imprecise meaning of the expression "believe in himself") no man this century had more confidence in his talents than Chesterton, and no man had more right to. He turned his hand to any kind of writing without hesitation, and his confidence, as I said, was usually justified. Yet nobody pierced the egotism (or, in language he would appreciate, the sin of pride) of our age, more neatly. The man who attacked the notion of "believing in himself" as insane was the man who, to a question sent by The Times to several leading writers - "What is, in your opinion, wrong with the world today?" - answered briefly and to the point: "Dear Sir; I am. Yours, etc."

Wherever therefore you find Chesterton pontificating, asserting, generalizing, you have to bear in mind that he did not "believe in himself". He had no attachment to his ideas just because they were his; he was not egotistical enough for that. He found the things themselves enormously important - or else he would not have written about them - but not his own part in them. It is incredible but true that he found his comic poems, among the most brilliant in the English language, unimportant: he tossed them off and forgot about them. One suspects that this may have been to some extent his attitude to all his work. It's quite possible that the bad flaws in logic that mar the brilliance of his arguments are there because he did not think his work important enough to revise.

He also worked at an incredible rate; a journalist by training, he reacted in writing to anything he heard or read, and knew how to write a coherent piece with a beginning, a middle and an end at a moment's notice. His verse masterpiece Lepanto was completed as the postman was waiting for it (did collecting postmen make house calls in those days?) The result of this constant outpouring is that he always expressed whatever he found in himself at the time. This not only helps account for this steady trickle of basic errors, but of something worse: unthinking, petty prejudice, left in with no consideration for the audience or the work.

The best-known is his stupid habit of Jewish jokes. They belong with ancient music-hall turns about greedy Israelite financiers and are really not very funny of their kind; odd, in so funny a man. It's as though every now and then he felt he had to insert a little bit about rich Jews. Resulting, it seems, from nothing better than a boyhood detestation of Disraeli, they are as irritating as they are unnecessary: daft quips about "the law of Moses" in such a fine poem as The song of Quoodle and nasty sneers at "a cringing Jew" in the marvellous complaint for the English common people, The secret people, bring us to a screeching halt and hurt the writing. If only for the sake of the work, Chesterton would have done well to drop them. And while the matter of the view of Jews in his time would take us too long to discuss, it must be said that he was not stating common views either. There were two famous contemporary quatrains -

THE CHOSEN PEOPLE A REPLY
How odd But not so odd
Of God As those who choose
To choose A Jewish God
The Jews. Yet spurn the Jews.
(W.N.Ewer) (Cecil Browne)

- of which the second did nothing more than compress and turn to wit the standard Catholic view, taught by St. Thomas Aquinas, who forbade persecution of Jews, because they had been the recipients of the first revelation. And yet Chesterton admired and understood St.Thomas. On the whole, I must say he deserved the biting satire of Humbert Wolfe:

AN EPITAPH
Here lies Mr. Chesterton
Who to Heaven might have gone,
But didn't, when he heard the news
That the place was run by Jews.

- which goes back to the central point, the point that Chesterton wilfully ignored: that our and his God is a Jewish God, and our and his Saviour is a Jewish Saviour.

And yet we must not rate this above its proper value. What did Chesterton say, after all? That Jews should be disenfranchised? Or driven from the country? or deprived of civil rights? The answer is: none of the above. He just had a fairly absurd itch that he, from time to time, would rub.

A malignant ghost haunts Chesterton's memory to remind us where this sort of stupid talk leads: his cousin Arthur. There were two brothers and a cousin Gilbert, Cecil and Arthur; Cecil, who was brilliant, died at the very end of World War One after several years in the trenches; Gilbert, the genius, died in 1936 (he had been declared unfit during the war because of a weak heart); and, by an evil chance, Arthur, the least balanced of the three, lived on for three decades. As long as Gilbert lived, Arthur had published little, and that little unobjectionable, mostly criticism; but after his death, he became seized of a demon of publication, and turned to overt Fascism. His first clearly Fascist book title in the British Library catalogue is dated 1938; after that, the flood.

I do not want to be unfair to Arthur, and it has to be said that he was a very unusual type of Fascist: a man of the highest integrity, he quarrelled with every other British Fascist leader on matters concerned with personal and public honesty, his wife of forty years was a Fabian Socialist, many of his personal friends were liberals, socialists and even one orthodox Jew. That a man of such attitudes could regard himself, to the end of his life, as a Fascist, can only be explained by some sort of personal neurosis or trauma; there is something beyond naivety, more like a wilful refusal to face obvious facts, about the fact that, when he volunteered to defend his country in 1940 (he had publicly disavowed and attacked Hitler in March 1939 after the seizure of Prague and Bohemia-Moravia), he was surprised and indignant to find that he was being treated as a suspicious character. In fact, his biographer David Baker strongly suggests that his neurotic cling to Fascist beliefs had to do with traumatic experiences in the First World War. But the fact remains that, however sympathetic and principled Arthur K. Chesterton may have been, he objectively worked to spread and defend the evil of Fascism.

The grim shadow of Arthur (whom some ignorant or ill-intentioned wretch recently tried to resurrect in the Evening Standard's letters page) can't be neglected when discussing Chesterton's attitudes to race; he can come across like a deforming mirror of Gilbert's worst. Yet Gilbert wasn't Arthur, and it would be simple-minded to condemn him for what Arthur did when he and Cecil were already dead. All it proves is that there are tendencies in his work - his populism, his stupid prejudices, his hankering for a different kind of politics - that could turn to Fascism; but he himself never walked that path. He was never even close to racism in his private life. No Jewish or black person ever had anything to complain about him as a person. He was suspicious of colonialism and compared the Indian colonial police to the Russian Okhrana (Arthur, by contrast, was a propagandist for the Empire just as colonial empires were becoming anachronistic). He performed no public or private act by which any Jewish, Asian or African person might be damaged or injured in their rights; he was a good deal harder on Tories than he ever was on Jews, yet I can't imagine him being rude to one even to the extent that Samuel Johnson was rude to Whigs. He was, in fact, as incapable of hating as a dog is of flying.

Only once does he seem really touched with something fundamental and vicious. The worst Father Brown story by far, The God of the Gongs, tells of a murder attributed at first to the Mafia and then brought home to a Voodoo cult; but the description does no justice to the sense of menace roused by Africans in the story, which ends with Father Brown looking in grave concern at a group of black musicians - potential murderers, obviously. You can read it all in The Wisdom of Father Brown (which, in turn, is the worst of the Father Brown books); but steel yourselves to be shocked.

Yet the story is not really about blacks at all: it is meant as an attack on prejudices against, 1) Italians, and, 2) Catholics. Its one live point is its exposure of hysterical and ignorant anti-Italian press prejudice; believe me, that goes home. But it is a kind of advocacy my people and I can do without. Apart from anything else, it's quite true that Italy is comparatively violent; the Mafia does exist and is a remarkably ruthless and murderous organization. It is a bad service to us to pretend otherwise, even by implication; what about the memory of all the brave people, police and civilians, who fought it, and who died? And Chesterton knew the facts as well as the next man. He had done Italy far more justice in his earlier The sins of Prince Saradine, where a corrupt Sicilian nobleman faces the revenge of a man whose father he has murdered to steal his wife; a story which might have happened, and I'm sure did in fact happen, in turn-of-the-century Sicily. But when he wrote The god of the gongs he was ready to see anti-Italian and anti-Catholic bigotry in any talk of Mafia violence. His liking for Mussolini was partly the result of this prejudice; he mistook that jumped-up thug and coward for a "brilliant Italian", and that was enough.

Chesterton grew up a Liberal and a Unitarian, and his incredibly slow conversion to Catholicism was to his mind the logical result of this; curiously enough, I would say that his wild love for Italy, with attendant errors, came not from Catholicism (though they met in the end) but from his Whig heritage. Tories and Socialists both preferred Germany, home of healthful authoritarianism to the former and of the world's largest Social Democrat party to the latter. But Liberals held an ancient affection for Italy; Palmerston and Gladstone had done everything in their power save war to help our unification, and had been gratified to see national liberation and liberal revolution going hand in hand, flattering every Liberal preconception there was - the unresolved contradictions were not to bear fruit till later. Italy, in turn (beautifully represented by that wonderful enthusiast Professor Pesca, in Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White) admired Britain for its modernity and freedom, and found her friendship a useful counterweight to the latent hostility of both France and Austria. This is where GKC came from, and it is worth noting that two notable English contemporaries with nothing in common except Whig origins, were briefly under similar delusions: Winston Churchill was quite complimentary about Mussolini early on, and Agatha Christie, who idol-worshipped the left-Liberal leader Lloyd George as a young woman, wrote a short story in 1924 in which Hercule Poirot saves Mussolini from a blackmailer. (By 1927, though, she saw Italy, along with Germany and Russia, as a potential enemy. Of course, in the meantime, the Matteotti murder and the destruction of Parliament had taken place.)

To put it in his own style, if he had to have a prejudice, he'd rather it was an unpopular one. When he was wrong-headed and downright stupid, he was wrong-headed against the tide. When all Britain took the side of the unhappy Captain Dreyfus, Chesterton smelled cant - and he wasn't wrong. Most public opinion, as usual, had taken up the Dreyfusard cause without a clear idea of the facts. GKC was struck by the fact that his friend Hilaire Belloc had been able to study all the facts and still be convinced of Dreyfus' guilt, though to the rest of us this only casts a grave shadow on Belloc (whom C.S.Lewis described as always a disastrous influence on Chesterton's intellectual side). And to be fair, he did not, unlike Belloc, come out against Dreyfus; he only professed doubts as loud as they were unjustified.

We do him no honour if we pass these things over. Chesterton did frequently write bad Jewish jokes; he was the author of The God of the Gongs; and, while never an authoritarian, he not only had that silly fascination with Mussolini, but also a lifelong pash for the father of all tyrants, Napoleon. These things need looking at.

The twenties were a time of turmoil. The Russian Civil War cost ten million dead (as much as the whole First World War!) and scattered a diaspora of terrified refugees with ghastly stories everwhere from Tokyo to Hollywood. Socialism was on the rise, and Socialism was not always or everywhere easy to tell apart from Russian Communism; Socialist parties were rather new and raw, with little habit of government, and bore the experience of a working class that felt excluded from liberal institutions. Everyone who wasn't Socialist was terrified their rise would herald a tyranny like Lenin's, and everyone who was tended to be fascinated, even if critical, by success on such a scale. Success always corrupts intellectual standards, because it seems proof of value; and so it was that someone like Rosa Luxemburg, who had clearly seen the faults of Lenin and his lot, threw her life away - and it was a valuable life - in a mad attempt to imitate them.

(Oddly enough, it was Cecil Chesterton who wrote one of the best correctives to the fascination of success, and one of the finest analyses of the relationship of might and right, that I have ever read (although his English style was surprisingly bad and needed some corrections): "There is [a pacifist] truism ...which seems to me as completely the reverse of the truth as any historical generalization could be. I mean the tag about war never settling anything. It would, I think, be much nearer the truth to say that nothing is ever finally and fruitfully settled until [it has been fought for]. This truth must not, of course, be confused with the Prussian heresy (or what used to be the Prussian heresy until Prussia found herself confronted with defeat) that success in arms is the test of right and wrong. Often injustice defeats justice in arms, and then, as in...1870, the tragedy... is less in the immediate material consequences than in the remoter spiritual effects, the prestige acquired by the victor's false philosophy... the imitation of his vicious institutions, the worship of his evil gods. There are other cases where good and evil elements were to be found in both [sides].. and then, generally, just as it is difficult to disentangle the good from the evil in the original cause, so it is difficult to disentangle them in the effect - especially in the ultimate moral effect. The American Civil War was, I think, such a case. I think the dissolution of the Union would have been a tragedy, I feel the full force of Lincoln's argument that if the greatest experiment in free democracy the world has seen had not shown itself capable of maintaining national unity and authority, democracy everywhere would have [lost] prestige. On the Slavery question I hold views that are fast becoming old-fashioned [this was written in 1918]; I agree with Lincoln that, if Slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. And yet, against the maintenance of the Union and the abolition of Negro Slavery, must... be set certain definite evils which have spread and rooted themselves in the Republic because, in the main, the less chivalrous and, I should say - though the expression will startle most Americans - the less civilised side won." How's that for a nuanced analysis? He wrote this from the trenches, where he was shortly to die.)

Historically, liberalism and democracy were still new, the last wave of a long process; in the lives of ordinary people, however, they were old hat, the system of their comfortable "bourgeois" fathers, conservative, boring, corrupt, dowdy, disorderly and undignified. In Germany, France and Italy, the two-party system of the English-speaking countries has never taken root, and no parliament ever elected had a stable majority. The mess and "cattle-trading" (Kuh-Handel, Mercato delle vacche) of parliamentary life made an awful impression; when the great playwright Pirandello was asked about his hard-line Fascist views, all he had to say was what a "revolting object" (schifezza) the old Parliament had been. Fascism, on the other hand, had a great sense of style (as David Bowie so perceptively said); thousands of young men in resplendent uniforms, parading smartly in step, their labari held high and their gold eagles shining on their fez hats, have an aesthetic grace that a bunch of fat old men in a closed room would find it hard to match.

Chesterton was quite sensitive to the wrongs of parliamentary politics. Like the Dickens of his great essay, "he regarded the House of Commons as a sort of venerable joke"; especially in the twenties and thirties, when democracy in Britain was seizing up in the grip of an arthritic, self-satisfied, dithering Tory leadership (dear me, how things have changed!) His description is accurate and deadly: "...an oligarchy is not men; it is a few men forming a group small enough to be insolent and large enough to be irresponsible... aristocrats can always throw the responsibility on each other; and yet create a common and corporate society from which is shut out the very vision of the rest of the world." (The Thing, 1929, page 245) Recognize anyone you know? And being the kind who does not accept the inevitability of bad conditions, he tried to build an idea of democracy to oppose these odious facts: plebiscitary, less committee-based, with a leadership less hidebound and incestuous, resting on popular approval, communicating directly with the people. His sympathy for Napoleon and Mussolini had also to do with this.

But for Fascism, as distinct from Mussolini, he had no brief. He listed it about 1928 (The Thing, page 200), as one of the evils of the age, along with Bolshevism, Prussian reaction and "Parliamentary corruption". The loathing felt for him by genuine Fascists and sympathizers like Dean Inge and Ezra Pound was no accident. Even more than his trenchant criticism of "Nordic man" and assorted tosh, they resented his wit, his irony, his refusal to take them seriously. The humourless Pound distinguished himself by an intemperate and truly Fascistic attack - I recognize the style - that described the great Catholic as "like vile scum on a pond"; which, of course, is bound to have bounced off that Falstaffian hide like a bullet off Superman's chest.

Chesterton was an older man, already twenty-five when Queen Victoria died. He spent his youth as a Liberal in the years of exile between Gladstone's last ministry and the 1906 elections: opposition was not a dismal surprise to him. He was never tempted to throw out the baby with the bathwater, to make the flaws of democracy a reason to reject it altogether. And while the hard right hated him, the left always had time for him and never lost hope of him. His jovial sparring with G.B.Shaw (what wouldn't you have given to be present at one of their public debates?) was a fixture of London life for decades, and many of his political articles made delicious reading for any Labour supporter. The new democracy he hoped for may have been impossible (it certainly never seems to have existed anywhere), but he meant it as democracy: he may have had a rose-tinted view of some tyrants, but he never stood for tyranny.

It is in this dramatic context that Chesterton's stupid Jewish jokes, and his worse than stupid, but single, Father Brown story, must be set. His daft feeling about Jews, too unsystematic to be called anti-semitism, was in the end only a froth on the surface of his writings, influenced, it is said, by that man Belloc. The truth is that these things were distant and unreal to him. If he took a swipe to Hebraism, it was because he rarely met a Jew. If he took a swipe to Negroes, it was because there weren't that many around him. I am utterly convinced, having lived with the man's mind for years, that if he had found himself in modern Britain, dealing with modern problems, he would have been implacably opposed to any breath of racial discrimination. Article after article would have flowed from his relentless pen. The police, the right-wing press, the judiciary, the army, social workers, would have got it in the neck in turn, in memorable prose; their cant, their hypocrisies, their pretence of concern and conscience, would have been exposed with devastating clarity. One of his hymns (A Hymn for the Church militant) says:

From all that terror teaches, From lies of tongue and pen,
From all the easy speeches, That comfort cruel men,
From sale and profanation Of honour and the sword,
From Hell and from damnation, Deliver us, good Lord!

That phrase "the easy speeches That comfort cruel men", I find memorable; it describes so perfectly four-fifths of what passes for political or moral debate. All his life, certainly all his literary career, can be described as a long struggle to deliver us from them. Even that first line, "From all that terror teaches", is not so alien to his experience; the Fleet Street in which he worked was already a place of mercenary hacks living in terror of dim, arrogant publishers with cretinous agendas to push. "All that terror teaches" was not unknown to someone who had worked in a newspaper owned by Cadbury, the chocolate millionaire. But unlike most of his friends in the trade (several poems describe his affection for friends in the Street of Shame), Chesterton didn't put up with it all his life: he bid his farewell in a manner worthy of Pope, in a poem supposedly meant to praise honest water and wine over other beverages:

...Tea, although an Oriental, Is a gentleman at least;
Cocoa is a cad and a coward, Cocoa is a vulgar beast!
Cocoa is a dull, disloyal, Lying, crawling cad and clown,
And may very well be grateful, To the fool that takes him down!

And not to make the point any less clear, he called it The song of right and wrong. Surely no journalist ever took his leave of a bad master so memorably, and it says something about Cadbury that I never, even about the detested Tory governments of the twenties and thirties, heard Chesterton use such language again.

On the bigotries that really came close to him, with which he had to live every day - against Catholics, against "dagoes", against the Irish, against working people - he was forthright and dazzlingly brilliant; against the self-praise of the "Nordic" Imperial Briton, of the robust commonsensical John Bull and his close cousin the Teuton, he wrote some of his most immortal pages. His opposition to that popular pseudo-scientific cliché of his time, Germanic/Nordic/Teutonic Man (on which all modern racism rests), was lifelong. His attacks on it over a period of thirty years (which began in the early years of the first decade of the twentieth century, when Hitler was still in junior school), despite their wit, form a terrible and true prophecy: from the beginning, he had seen the mischievous nature of this North-European self-praise. And when the time came, he wrote a paragraph that for pregnancy, dignity, and prophetic insight, has few parallels in literature:

"The world will not forget the weird psychological effect of the Prime Minister of Prussia [Goering] shouting at a prisoner supposed to be receiving a fair trial, 'you wait till I get you outside', like a very low-class schoolboy threatening what he would do out of school. That sort of thing simply does not happen among civilized people; even when they are very wicked people. How anybody can see such lunacy dancing in high places, in the broad daylight of political responsibility, and have any further doubt about the sort of danger that threatens the world, is more than I can understand."

The sort of danger that threatens the world: Chesterton not only had no delusions about the Nazis, but had seen what was coming, not only to central Europe, but to everyone. Not many people wrote like that in 1934. An appeaser? Sure, just as much as Winston Churchill. And when Aurel Kolnai wrote his unsurpassed dissection of the Nazi hatred of Jews (The meaning of Anti-Judaism, in The War against the West, 1938, pages 492-512), he prefaced it with four quotations from pre-Nazi and Nazi ideologues - H.S.Chamberlain, Rosenberg, Schemann and Hitler - set against two ringing stanzas from The ballad of the battle of Gibeon, a poem by... G.K.Chesterton. Set against this, what price Arthur's Fascism?

GKC's patriotism seems today the most outdated and unattractive of his views, redolent of the creepy nastiness of Euro-skepticism and worse things yet (Arthur wrote a fierce anti-Common Market tract in 1955); but listen to it in action, as he discusses some live items of politics!

"...I for one have always been a defender of the cult of patriotism; and nothing that I say here has any connection with what is commonly called pacifism. I think that our friends and brethren [Chesterton lost his brother in World War One] fell ten years ago in a just war against the hard heathenism of the North; I think the Prussianism they defeated was frozen with the pride of Hell; and as for these dead, I think it is well with them; and perhpas better than with us, who live to see how evil Peace can be."

"But really... what are we to say to those who... pit patriotism or pagan citizenship against the Church on that issue? They conscript by violence boys of eighteen, they applaud volunteers of sixteen for saying they are eighteen, they throw them by thousands into a huge furnace and torture-chamber, of which their imaginations can have conceived nothing and from which their honour forbids them to escape; they keep them in those horrors year after year without any knowledge even of the possibility of victory; and kill them like flies by the million before they have begun to live."

This is prose to frame and hold up to remind ourselves how good the art of words can be; it is stupendous writing, writing one would take and use as one's model, did one not know how far above one's potential it was. Speak out loud that last clause which I put in italics, and tell me that it is not music, not Shakespearean poetry in prose. But above all, it is the absolute truth, without the narrowness and surrender to unreason that a one-sided treatment inevitably unleashes. A pacifist would merely say that war is madness, and leave it undiscussed why human beings would ever consider such madness; which tags all views that accept any war as unreason, and puts them (so far as pacifists are concerned) beyond the bounds of serious discourse. But Chesterton sees both sides: the war had to be fought to preserve Europe and perhaps the world from something even worse; but the war was a horror, and his magnificent paragraph gives the moral dimension of it (with no complacent lingering on detail) with a force that no pacifist writing can exceed.

This essay does not begin to do GKC justice; not by a long chalk. To catch the whole of a man whose collected works would fill several shelves - I myself haven't read even many of the most famous novels - calls not for an essay, but for a multi-volume work. My purpose was, first, to give a vague idea of his greatness; and, second, to account for his most troublesome flaws, the ones most offensive to a contemporary sensibility.

As for his Catholicism, even if it needed defending, nobody could do it better than himself. When someone wrote: "We all know that [Chesterton] is Modernist enough in his own thoughts", he answered:

"I know that writer did not mean me any harm: but I am much more interested in trying to understand what he did mean. And the truth is, I think that there is hidden in this curious and cryptic phrase the secret of the whole modern controversy about Catholicism. What the man really meant was this: ‘Even poor old Chesterton must think; he can't have actually left off thinking altogether; there must be some form of cerebral function going forward to fill the empty hours of his misdirected and wasted life; and it is obvious that if a man begins to think, he can only think more or less in the direction of Modernism.’ The Modernists do really think that...

"[This sort of person must understand] that a thinking man can think himself deeper and deeper into Catholicism, and not deeper and deeper into difficulties about Catholicism... that conversion is the beginning of an active fruitful, progressive and even adventurous life of the intellect.... We have got to explain somehow that the great mysteries like the Blessed Trinity and the Blessed Sacrament are the starting points for trains of thought far more stimulating, subtle and even individual, compared to which all that sceptical scratching is as thin as a nasty piece of scandalmongering in a New England village"(The Thing, 1929, pp.211-212).

I wish I had time to quote more, but I really must make an end, or this issue will go on for ever; as indeed, in the matter of GKC, I could. We must stop - just where he would have wished to start.

It is a pity he died three years before the Second World War; he was just the poet for such a high and awful occasion as the summer of 1940, when one island stood between mankind and night. The point was not lost on those who outlived him. I quote a Chestertonian scholar: "Since his death, perhaps the noblest tribute paid to him was the leading article in The Times of 13 June 1941, when the meeting in St. James' Palace of the representatives of nine European states occupied by the Nazis was reported in two hundred words, followed by the two verses of Mary's message to Alfred." (Stephen Medcalf, introduction to Poems for All Occasions.) The two verses are the same from which Bishop Trevor Huddleston drew the title of his story of war against apartheid:

I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet,
And the sea rises higher.

Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, Faith without a hope?

And a great English poem, written at the fall of France by a very different poet, returns to Chestertonian morality as inevitably as the needle turns to the North. The second line is pure GKC:

THE SPARROW'S SKULL

The kingdoms fall in sequence, like the waves on the shore;
All save divine and desperate hopes go down, they are no more;
Solitary is our place, the castle in the sea;
And I muse on those I have loved, and on those who have loved me.

I gather all these loves, and keep them all warm
While above our heads blows the bitter storm;
The blessed natural loves, of life-supporting flame,
And those whose name is Wonder, that have no other name.

The skull is in my hand, the minute cup of bone,
And I remember her, the tame, the loving one
Who came in at the window, and seemed to have a mind
More towards sorrowful man than those of her own kind.

She came for a long time, but at length she grew old;
And on her death-day she came, so feeble and so bold;
And all the day, as if knowing what they day would bring,
She waited by the window with her head beneath her wing.

And I will keep the skull, for in the hollow here
Lodged the minute brain that had outgrown a fear;
Transcended an old terror, and found a new love,
And entered a strange life, a life it was not of.

Even so, dread God! Even so, my Lord!
The fire is at my feet, and at my breast the sword,
And I must gather up my soul and clap my wings and flee
Into the heart of terror, to find myself in Thee!
(Ruth Pitter; written in June 1940)

But even more magnificent is King Alfred's reply to the pagan conquerors:

That upon you is fallen the shadow,
And not upon the Name;
That though we scatter and though we fly
And you hang over us like the sky,
You are more tired of victory,
Than we are tired of shame.

That though you hunt the Christian men
Like a hare on the hillside
The hare has still more heart to run
Than you have heart to ride.

..........................................

Therefore your end is on you,
Is on you and your kings;
Not for a fire on Ely fen,
Not that your gods are nine or ten,
But because it is only Christian men
Guard even heathen things.

For our God has blessed creation
Calling it good. I know
What spirit with whom you blindly band
Hath blessed destruction with his hand;
Yet by God's death the stars shall stand
And the small apples grow.
(from The ballad of the white horse)

Here is the follow-up. G.K.CHESTERTON AND THE JEWS

Since I wrote my previous article about the greatest English writer after Dickens, a couple of facts have made me reconsider some of its views. In particular, I would say that I had not clearly understood what the point of the celebrated "anti-Semitism" of Chesterton and his circle really was, and what its relationship to European social history.

The first item (for which I could kick myself, because I knew the facts but failed to make the connection) was a note on the attitude of Chesterton's contemporary and ideological opponent Rudyard Kipling. As everyone knows, Kipling (who was not English but Indian, and referred to England in his private correspondence as a "foreign country") was strongly imperialistic. The role of Jews in his world-picture became a serious issue during and after the Boer War (1899-1902), in which he was deeply involved. This was at once an imperialistic war, fought to extend the rule of English law and English values, and a capitalistic war fought in the interests of the gold-mining "Randlords", whose enormous wealth had been a huge part of British involvement in South Africa. (Despite the exploded Marxist categories which still dominate popular historical writing, capitalist and imperialist were anything but synonymous or parallel terms; in fact, through most of the last two hundred years the interests of the capitalist millionaire and those of the imperialist politician have stood in stark contrast.)

Now, with the exception of the English parson's son Cecil Rhodes, all the most prominent of these people - Barney Barnato, Otto Beit and so on - were Jewish; and not only Jewish, but first-generation Yiddish immigrants from Eastern Europe, unassimilated, unfamiliar, unEnglish. These overdriven refugees from the Pale of Settlement, with their broken English and intense ambition, simply did not fit into any of the familiar nineteenth-century categories. Since the rise of German romanticism in the age of Napoleon, the whole century had been dedicated to the discovery of the Nation as an entity, as a political unit, as a culture. Great art, especially in music, had been made out of it: each country had one or more nationalist Great Composers - Chopin, Liszt, Mussorgsky, Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, Berwald, Sibelius, Nielsen, Grieg, Albeniz, De Falla, Martinu, Dvorak, Smetana, Janacek; even, in the great centres, Berlioz, Wagner and Verdi. In the minds of late nineteenth-century intellectuals - and I mean any kind, reactionary and liberal, socialist and anarchist - the ethnic group was a reality as solid and as unquestioned as postage stamps, banknotes and paved roads.

Pale slight wisps of questioning about the role of Jews had sometimes arisen in Western minds ever since, a century before, most Western countries, from Britain to France to Germany to the new state of Italy, had emancipated their small and ancient Jewish minorities. But the whole matter had not become a Question, in the sense in which there was an Italian and later a Turkish Question, until railways were punched through the great Eastern marches beyond Berlin and Vienna, and opened the world to the confined but enormous masses of East European Jews.

The role of Jewish entrepreneurs in the Rand mines was the most notable but not the only aspect of this completely new phenomenon: bold, not infrequently dishonest Jewish immigrants in the slums of Vienna and Berlin were also making fortunes in this period, as they were later to do in New York. Jewish working-class entrepreneurs seemed to rise faster than other immigrants (though the impression was probably due to the fact that they were more distinctive than Scandinavian, Italian or Slav contemporaries). But the South African fortunes were by far the largest, and made a group of Jews, for the first time, a political power of worldwide consequence, part of the decision-making process of the British imperial superpower. The word of a Beit or a Barnato had weight from Moscow to San Francisco, though in fact the one Randlord with definite political goals was the arch-English (and not very sane) Cecil Rhodes.

Jewish immigration was impossible to categorize in orthodox nineteenth-century terms. The success in the British Empire of an Irishman, a Scot, or even a German or a Russian, asked no particular questions: both Kipling and Chesterton could look on him as simply a citizen of one of those nations, with the cultural and emotional background appropriate to them, on loan to the British Empire. In the case of Ireland and the other Celtic lands, they were virtually honorary parts of England. But a Jew, what was a Jew? What country did he belong to? Indubitably he belonged to a particular culture; but he had none of the sense of country that is a fundamental part of national identity in Kipling, Chesterton and every single other turn-of-the-century intellectual. He abandons his East European home (which at any rate is not "his", but Polish, Hungarian, Roumanian, or Russian) gladly and with no regret, and settles down to live and profit in any other. The role of such a stateless people in so national an enterprise as an imperial war was a conundrum that eighteen-nineties minds were not equipped to solve.

The Boer War was no joke. Before it was over, 450,000 soldiers from every part of the Empire - not excluding Canada and Australia - had suffered and fought at the ends of the earth, and Britain's good name had taken a fearful battering because of the inhuman methods by which she broke the Afrikaner resistance. Kipling and Chesterton took radically opposite stances: Kipling, who was on the spot, had no opinion of Afrikaners, and hated their methods of "treacherous" guerrilla warfare described in his short story A Sahib's War. As far as he was concerned, the sooner some sense was knocked into their heads, at whatever price, the better. Chesterton felt that the whole war dishonoured Britain. "A sleepy people, without priests or kings/ Dreamt, it is said, to drive us to the sea/ O let us drive ourselves! For it is free/ And smells of honour and of English things".

Where opinions were so sharply divided, the role of Jewish capitalists was bound to come into question. This is one of the rare cases in world history in which a largely Jewish capitalist class really was part of a political issue, and not just a made-up scapegoat; though a scapegoat it most certainly was, since the war had been willed and ordered not by Beit or Barnato, who could easily have got along with Boer administration so long as they were allowed to make their money, but by the wild-eyed imperialism of the Englishman Rhodes and the aggressive diplomacy of the half-German bureaucrat Milner. But neither Kipling nor Chesterton understood this. Kipling, an out-and-out racist who had unconsciously absorbed Indian caste attitudes in his views on race and blood, was driven by his imperialism to give a doubtful and unhappy consent to the Jewish role in Imperial policy (the matter is analyzed in Sarah Wintle's preface to the Penguin edition of Puck of Pook's Hill); Chesterton, a lifelong opponent of race theories, asked instead, "why should English lives be lost, and the good name of England be dragged through a cruel and disgraceful war, for the sake of the wealth of a few gold-mine owners most of whom aren't even English?" Both were wrong, of course, but their position is understandable.

Chesterton’s outbursts about Jews did not have the troubled and shamefaced quality of Kipling's fictional depictions, because while the Indian author knew perfectly well that he was breaking his own racist code with respect to them, Chesterton had no such guilt feeling. He wasn't violating his code. He knew he was advocating no violence or deprivation of rights, and indeed it is hard to tell what he was advocating, except unfunny jokes at the expense of Jewish financiers. One airy proposal he tossed off in the twenties (which I will discuss in a minute) has drawn comparisons with the Nuremberg Laws, which is ridiculous: when Nazism came to power, Chesterton opposed it impacably. He declared himself willing to die fighting for "the last Jew in Europe" against Hitlerite horrors, while insisting that there was such a thing as a Jewish spirit which was, in his view, incompatible with Western European ideas.

The fact is that the great Yiddish immigration was the first instance of what has since become a characteristic of the new world: what is called multi-racialism, multi-culturalism, or simply diversity. (That GKC titled one of his collection of essays The Uses of Diversity is no more than a coincidence, but a pleasing one.) The expansion of world transports was bringing to the centres of the West a series of progressively more culturally and racially distant waves of immigrants. It had been hard enough for Britain and the United States to cope with Catholic immigration (Irish, Italian, Hispanic, German, Polish); Chinese and Japanese immigrants they flatly refused, and a series of laws in the first three decades of the century made it impossible for East Asians to enter America, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. But the Jews, white, speaking a German dialect, owning part of the same sacred scriptures, connected with the old-established and respectable minorities that had produced Spinoza, Mendelssohn and the house of Rothschild, were not in the same category. Yet their habits, their songs, their dress, their festivities, seemed more related to the East than to anything European and comfortable. They felt and sounded alien.

The nationalist conception of the world was showing cracks; indeed, as we know, it was the Jewish question and its horrendous results in Germany that led to its complete breakdown. We cannot, today, speak about nations in the way our grandparents did; we would be ashamed to; and vicious immigration laws of the old kind, even where political villains try to introduce them, must be brought in by stealth, as something they themselves know to be odious and dishonourable. Racial politics have become fundamentally unacceptable, and this, I believe, cannot be reversed. When I hear talk of the rise of the far right in France and elsewhere - and make no mistake: Fascists are the enemy, no more to be accepted or compromised with than the Mafia; you must fight them wherever you meet them - I have to point out that the historical situation is now quite different from what it was at the beginning of the century. Something has changed in our whole culture. Before 1933, racial politics could root themselves in a view of the nation that was the common patrimony of everybody, except for a few internationalists in conscious rebellion against common attitudes. Today, the opposite is the case. Even the vulgarity and baseness of today's nationalists tell their own story: they have no heights to aspire to. You can only be a nationalist or a Fascist today if you are in complete rebellion against the intellect; which was by no means the case in the twenties.

Now what was GKC's basic attitude? And I don't just mean his immediate and justified hostility to Nazism: that was the result of many factors, of which loathing for street violence and brutality was only one. What did Chesterton feel should be the proper place of Jews in the commonwealth?

Well, the first point is that he was firmly against assimilation. His object of distaste was Jews who disguised their names and origins, took English identities and imitated local manners. Dorothy L.Sayers - a personal friend, in spite of being the closest thing to a great Tory writer this century - quotes him as saying that a nice Jew is one whose name is not Montagu or McDonald, but Nathan Abrahams (The Stolen Stomach, in Lord Peter views the body), while his brother Cecil mocked Jewish financiers who got themselves invited to fox hunts. The proposal I mentioned, that has been compared to the Nuremberg Laws, was simply this: that the Jews should adopt and keep a mode of dress peculiar to themselves. He said he had no exception to a Jew becoming Lord Chief Justice of England, but that he should do so in Jewish dress. And the first thing to be noticed is that something of the kind is actually taking place among certain ethnic minorities that prize their mode of dress: so that we now have Sikh Judges in this country who sit in judgement with turban and ceremonial knife.

The proposal, of course, is absurd on several grounds, the first being that there is no such thing as Jewish dress. The Italian Jews of Rome and Venice dressed very differently from the Yiddish Jews that we think of, under the influence of Fiddler on the roof, as typical European Jews; and the Jews of Morocco, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Ethiopia, India, China, Central Asia and the Caucasus, will no doubt have their own quite different habits and dress. Besides, Western habits and an Anglified name do not mean that a Jew has given up his religious identity - as the never-to-be-forgotten example of Jack Kirby makes clear.

But we don't understand what Chesterton really meant unless we become aware of a set of ideas which had seized hold of his imagination - though rather as ideals than as genuine practical proposals - in his later years, to do with his growing admiration for the Middle Ages. One of these was a poetic and imaginative defence of the Sumptuary Laws, the set of medieval laws that prescribed different dress for different orders of society. Chesterton was not so much proposing to bring them back as lamenting that the principle had been lost: "I for one should be the last to wish to see such things... restraining the liberty of the citizen. [...] I should rejoice in being free alike of the medieval rules about dress and the modern rules about drink. Yet I doubt if there is any free-minded and imaginative man, looking at the modern world, who has not sometimes wished that there were some way of ordering the externals of life, so as to make them appropriate; and, above all, so as to make them expressive. The garments and attributes of the Canterbury Pilgrims are expressive... it may be very luxurious of the young Squire to have flowers embroidered all over his coat; and Chaucer is obviously chaffing him, to some extent, upon his foppishness. But... the flowers do express the Squire. When such flowers were dotted all over the flowered waistcoat of a fat stockbroker in 1860, who read The Times and talked about the danger of Puseyites in the protestant Church of England, the flowers did not express anything at all. They did not make us think that the stockbroker was like a flower; or even, in Chaucer's phrase, that he was like a meadow". (Chaucer, 1932, pp.64-65)

And he goes on: "it is not that we dislike colours, but that we should rather like a language of colours; not that we dislike designs, but that we should like them to appear by design, and not by accident. I confess, though I am as fond of the colour of life as another, I have sometimes had a weird complex of thoughts on seeing a dull dumpy woman with an expressionless face, approaching me in a hat or coat of flaming crimson like a tremendous Turner sunset. I feel inclined to ask her, as if she were at a masquerade ball, what she is meant to be. Perhaps I do her a wrong. Perhaps she glows within with so glorious a charity, that she has a right to robe herself as the Rose of the World. Perhaps she has merely brooded on burning wrongs till she is ready to set fire to London and burn it to ashes. That would be quite a reasonable explanation. But short of that, I have a sort of Sumptuary feeling that it is a waste of red; a waste of blood and fire; a waste of the most glorious colour God has given to our eyes. Now when those red robes are hung on a Cardinal... a soldier or a judge, they do have this extra glow or intensity of having a meaning."

This tells us two things: first, that Chesterton's desire that Jews should dress in a distinctive Jewish dress is only part of a more general desire that dress should mean something; second, that this is not a practical proposal in any serious sense. He starts his discussion of "Sumptuary" feelings with an outright denial of any desire to offend against individual liberty by bringing back Sumptuary Laws. The whole passage is a piece of poetic imagination and insight, beautiful, thoughtful, but significant only in a negative sense. He does not propose dress restriction as he did propose practical measures such as the sale of cheap housing to working-class families; he only asks us to think about dress. And we might add that, since the sixties, the idea has acquired a curious practicality, with sections of the people - especially but not exclusively the young - being clearly distinguished by dress: Goths, hippies, "men in suits", etc. And one of the groups most prominent are, exactly, immigrant minorities - with head-scarves, turbans, dreadlocks and big, toppling red-gold-green knitted headwear; long shirts, embroidered pork-pie hats, kippochs, shalwar-kameez and sarees. If we are really lucky, we might happen to see a huge, handsome West African man walking down the street in flowing linen clothes like a black Roman senator; Chesterton would have been delighted, and insisted that the man should refuse to turn up for work in a dull Western suit.

If there is any factual propositive content in Chesterton's idea, in short, it is that Jews should live, if they so wish, in a Christian country, subject to the same laws and limitations as the rest of us, but encouraged to wear and indeed to flaunt the signs of a separate identity and culture. This is actually taking place, with a larger palette than even Chesterton could imagine, as we speak. The parallel with the Nuremberg Laws is particularly wrong in that the only dress law that the Nazi regulations enforced was the wearing of a big, visible Star of David. They did not demand special dress: they only demanded that the Jew should be clearly identified. The difference is obvious. Any African or Asian will wear his/her national dress with pride and pleasure; most of them are beautiful to look at, anyway. But no member of any minority or group will accept to wear a tag that says kick me, I'm a Jew/Sikh/Hindu/West African/Rastafarian and so on. I'm sorry I have to spell this out, but national and ethnic identity is such a sensitive subject that it is as well not to leave the least space for misunderstanding.

Other than this encouragement to display, indeed to revel in, a distinct identity, Chesterton has no positive or negative suggestion that I know of. He has said he had no objection to a Jewish Chief Justice of England, so long as he is Jewish and not what he regarded as a mock Englishman. There is a tentative tone that suggests to me that he saw it as a question without an answer. He was not the man to drive anybody out of England, or prevent them from following an honest career or profession; had he been asked whether he would have wanted, for instance, an all-white, all-Christian judiciary, he would probably have laughed out loud. At the same time, the presence of not recognizably national elements in the country troubled him; it was, as I said earlier, an itch he scratched from time to time.

And yet this is not only significant in itself, but symptomatic of Chesterton's constant prophetic quality - what Neil Gaiman (of all people!) meant when he called him the only poet in our (the twentieth) century who knew what was going on. He had, immediately and with an infinitely sharper eye than Joyce or D.H.Lawrence or the Bloomsbury group, identified a problem - the ethnic problem - that was to grow in importance as time went on, till it currently dominates the national and international stage. And we cannot say that we have really gone beyond the compromise that he proposed, however tentatively, however fancifully, in the matter of the Jews: allow, indeed encourage, the minority group to foster its identity in dress and other matters, and, at the same time, keep all careers and aspects of society open to its members - up to the seat of the Chief Justice of the country: that is, up to the highest offices in the land. And I doubt we can really do better or different than this.