The gift of wonder : the many sides of G.K. Chesterton 9780970891105, 0970891105

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The sCift of Wonder

The Many Sides of(.K. Chesterton F dited by Dale Ablquist

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2023 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/ison_9780970891105

The Gift of Wonder The Many Sides of G.K. Chesterton

Edited by Dale Ahlquist

American Chesterton Society/JC Graphics Minneapolis, MN Castro Valley, CA

Cover Art by John C. Tibbetts Cover Design by Julian Ahlquist

© 2001 American Chesterton Society 4117 Pebblebrook Circle Minneapolis, MN 55437 ISBN 0-9708911-0-5 Library of Congress catalogue number 2001130602 Printed in the United States of America

Contents Introduction by Dale Ahlquist Aidan Mackey

Chesterton and the Moral Imagination

Dale Ahlquist

The Critic’s Critic

Sara and Michael Bowen

Chesterton and the Law

David Beresford

Chesterton and Science:

Why More is Better Ekaterina Volokhonskaia

A Russian Perspective of Chesterton

Carl Hasler

Chesterton and Nietzsche: At the Crossroads of Modern Philosophy

John Tibbetts

Miracles of Rare Device: Chesterton’s Miracle Crimes

Thomas Martin

“Man is a Misshapen Monster”

Frances Farrell

Chesterton’s St. Francis of Assisi

David Andrews

The Cultures of Agri-culture

Peter Floriani

“Dr. Chesterton, Ontology! Stat!”

James Reidy

The Four Bellocs

Contributors

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Introduction Throw a thousand ordinary men from the Middle West together anywhere, and they will spontaneously enroll themselves in a society, possibly a secret society, possibly a secret society dealing death and destruction, but certainly a society springing up spontaneously out of the democracy. G.K. Chesterton Illustrated London News, November

17, 1923

Each year since 1981 a group of ordinary men and women from the American Midwest have met in “a society springing up spontaneously out of democracy” to celebrate the writings and ideas of G.K. Chesterton. And while the society never intended to be a secret one, it could just as well have been one, since it never quite solved the problem that most people had never heard of it. And though the society has dealt very little death and destruction, there have been recurring cases of decapitation as members have more than once laughed their heads off. The Midwest Chesterton Society, which sponsored these gatherings in the early years, gave birth to the American Chesterton Society, which continues to host the annual conference. At each conference an incredible variety of papers is presented, papers on philosophy and theology, on art and science, on politics and economics, on literature and literary criticism, and of course, on murder and other interesting pastimes. What these papers all have in common is G.K. Chesterton. And Chesterton is the reason why these conferences have almost nothing in common with any conference of any other kind. At a Chesterton conference, a professor can give a talk and find himself fielding challenges put to him by a housewife, a shipping clerk, and a retired advertising executive. A farmer can be seen debating a point with a priest, a librarian drinking wine with a banker, and a pediatrician discussing Dante with a political activist. At one recent conference two lawyers gave talks on English literature, and two English professors gave talks on politics and economics. A foreign scholar said the Chesterton conference destroyed her impression that Americans were dull and unlettered and narrow minded. It also destroyed her impression of academic conferences. Similarly, a philosophy professor who let himself get conned into attending one year,

afterwards wrote to me:

I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed the conference, and how much | learned in a short time — mainly regarding my woeful ignorance about GKC and how important he truly is!! I am accustomed to conferences where the papers are tired and boring, and most excitement is found anywhere but at the conference and with those who attend. I can say in all good conscience that my experience last weekend was totally unlike my past “professional” experiences! I have always thought that good philosophy was therapeutic — GKC and the participants were not just good but excellent therapy. I hope and expect to see you next year. And, as a matter of fact, he’s been back ever since. What he discovered, to his

joy and relief, is that philosophy is far too important to be left to philosophers and theology too important to be left to theologians. These things belong to everybody because they include all the things that are important to everybody. There was no modern writer who understood this better than Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936). Amazingly prolific, Chesterton was a man of letters who was not an academic. Although he authored profound and unique books on history, philosophy and literary criticism and produced volumes of exquisite poetry, he considered himself just a journalist and a man of the people. The majority of his thousands of newspaper columns dealt with the defense of personal liberty and the promotion of social justice. He was just as comfortable at a public debate against Bertrand Russell or George Bernard Shaw as he was sitting in a pub, drinking beer, smoking cigars and talking politics all night long. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than reading detective stories. There were no scandals in his life, no intrigue, no dirt. He

was happily married and publicly adored. Chesterton’s life and literary accomplishments provide a pretty good argument that a college education maybe isn’t so important. Those in the academy have never quite known what to do with Chesterton. They can’t figure out if he belongs in the English department or the Theology department. Or Medieval Studies. Since he cannot be assigned neatly to any category, they have found that the most convenient thing to do with Chesterton has been to ignore him. The other problem is that he represents too cumbersome an exception to everything else in the 20th century: the despair in philosophy, the decadence in art, the joylessness in literature, and the myopia in politics. He offered a possible alternative to the total trust that has been placed in science and technology. And against a rising tide of relativism and skepticism, he provided a clear and well-reasoned defense of Christianity in general and Catholicism in specific. But while it is possible to find Chesterton quoted to prove a point, it is all but impossible to see him studied as a whole.

However, not only does Chesterton deserve to be studied, he should be required reading on the first day of class in every classroom, no matter what the subject. It is Chesterton more than anyone who provides the right frame of mind for any student opening the door on any subject. His message is this: What you are about to see you might have missed. What you are about to experience is a gift wrapped up just for you. Unwrap it carefully. It is a treasure. And like the best gifts, the best thing about it is that it is a surprise. It is not what you think it is. Without such a perspective of wonder and gratitude, you really cannot learn anything. “The world will never starve for want for wonders,” he says, “only for want of wonder.” In everything, there is a mystery calling to you to try to solve it. Chesterton wrote about everything. There was no subject he did not touch. Which is what makes him so exceptional and so enjoyable and so astounding. And which is why we will never run out of material for Chesterton conferences. Nothing is irrelevant. As Chesterton said, “There is no such thing as a different subject.” The papers collected here were presented at the 19th Annual Chesterton Conference, June 15-17, 2000, at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. Here you will find that same variety referred to above,

papers ranging from the scholarly and analytical, to the social and political, to the reflective and inspirational. While you will find these presentations to be, in most cases, first-rate, you will no doubt discover the one exception.

Some people cheat when they write papers on Chesterton: they think they can just string a bunch of his quotations together and put a title on the results. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, except that they pretend to take credit for it when it was Chesterton who did all the work. Also, whenever Chesterton is discussed at any length, someone manages to bring up Hilaire Belloc, who was Chesterton’s long time personal friend and literary companion. Belloc was a great writer and debater in his own right, with an amazing breadth of knowledge, clearly-articulated ideas, and razor sharp wit. We have included here one paper devoted to Belloc — well, to Four Bellocs. We have done this for two reasons. First, to introduce

him to new readers who may not be familiar with him, and secondly, to throw a bone to the Bellocians out there who are always grumbling that Chesterton gets all the attention while their guy gets ignored. This is the last time we help you. Put on your own conference. We should also note that since the conference, but before this book

was published, two of the papers included here managed to find their way into print elsewhere. A version of “Miracles of Rare Device” by John Tibbetts appeared in Sherlock Holmes Meets Father Brown and His Creator, edited by Pasquale Accardo, John Peterson, and Geir Hasnes (Shelburne, Ontario: The

Battered Silicon Dispatch Box 2000). And a version of Tom Martin’s “Man is a Misshapen Monster” appeared in Vital Speeches of the Day, January, 2000. Oi Oe a a 9

There are two other papers that must be mentioned. First, the one by Aidan Mackey, who was the keynote speaker at the conference. Aidan was one of the most important torchbearers for Chesterton throughout the Western dark ages when so much of Chesterton’s writing was out of print and difficult to obtain. Aidan has done invaluable work in locating and preserving uncollected Chesterton material and passing on his priceless knowledge to a new generation of Chesterton scholars. His paper actually has nothing to do with that. I just thought I’d mention it anyway. And then there is the paper by Ekaterina Volokhonskaia. Not only was its presentation a highlight of the conference, the presenter herself was a highlight. Katya came all the way from St. Petersburg, Russia. She delighted everyone not only with her personal charm but with her perceptive insights into Chesterton and her accounts of how her family and friends translated and distributed Chesterton texts illegally and at great personal risk under the Soviet regime. Her journey to the conference was also quite amazing. She took a train to Moscow; another train to Vov, Ukraine; hitchhiked to the Ukrainian

border; took a bus into Hungary; hitchhiked to Nyradhaza, Hungary; took a train to the Austrian border and crossed the border on foot; a train to Vienna; a plane to Chicago; and a plane to St. Paul, Minnesota. From St. Peter to St. Paul. Her talk was a revelation. It was a marvel to see what a universal writer Chesterton is. But like other revelations, it served to confirm in a spectacular way something we already had every reason to believe was true. Dale Ahlquist President American Chesterton Society

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Aidan Mackey

Chesterton and the Moral Imagination The title of this paper should actually be, “The Moral Imagination in

Chesterton, C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald: Then and Now,” but the

printer ran out of ink. Whilst research would of imagination, convinced that

doing some reading and thinking in preparing this paper be too grandiose a name - and thinking about the importance I was alarmed to find myself becoming increasingly we are now actually living in the Golden Age of the creative

imagination; I was resentful and reluctant, but I have been forced to the

conviction that the twentieth century, which some of you will be old enough to recall, produced a richness of invention never before surpassed. Now, I sense you may be rather doubtful about that claim, but please, before dismissing it, consider the matter a little more closely. Ask yourselves, which other age could have produced television’s socalled “documentaries,” or Public Opinion Polls, party political manifestos,

newspaper leading articles, weather forecasts,

governmental pledges. . . or

my Income Tax return? I would, however, hesitate to claim that all these

things necessarily belong to the realm of the Moral Imagination. I came gradually to realize that we have not, in fact, lost our fairy tales, we have merely transferred them from the remote past into the future, and we do not now start our tales of the world of make-believe with the words “Once upon a time. . .,” but with “When we are elected... “

Now, these opening remarks may, I realize, seem to be merely frivolous, and perhaps even cheap, but they do, I think, help establish one serious point. I believe that it is both true and important to say that our society has not lost its imagination or its creative powers, what it has, to a

large extent, lost is the morality which should nourish and underpin those faculties. The imagination is a vital, powerful part of our very being. It plays an absolutely central role in the formation of our characters. And the problem before us is that a good deal of modern imaginative fiction upon which most people today, both children and adult, are fed, is threadbare, mechanical, and

lacking in moral and spiritual nourishment; it can hardly be otherwise for it seeks to portray life and the universe whilst ignoring the fount of life and the maker of the universe. In most of our magazines, radio and television programs, God and the spiritual life are marginalized as being optional extras to “real” life, and purely subjective, so that they make no impact, and the content is left almost entirely humanistic and materialistic in outlook. When, for instance, the clergy appear, if they are presented in a favorable light they are shown as taking the attitude, “Let’s forget all this dogma nonsense, and icp

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get on with real Christianity,” by which, of course, is meant acting as a mere Social Worker and caring only for the body and secular emotions. You will notice that I have used the word ‘modern’ not in its chronological sense, but to denote a school of writing and thought. There is, thank God, a good deal of admirable contemporary fiction by writers who are part of an old and high tradition, who understand that we have no worth or purpose other than our privileged status as the well-loved children of

Almighty God. Chesterton, as he did with so very many points which needed succinct expression, put it strikingly in his 1906 book on Charles Dickens:

For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value in any of them is that they bear the image of the King. And in ‘The Diary of an Old Soul’ George MacDonald showed his unfailing awareness of being in both God’s physical world and in His hand: Nothing is alien in Thy world immenseNo look of sky or earth or man or beast: “In the great hand of God I stand, and thence”

Look out on life, his endless holy feast. To try to feel is but to court despair, To dig for a sun within a garden-fence: Who does Thy will, O God, he lives upon thy air. This acceptance of the omnipresence of God in our lives, in our imaginative and daily life is shared by all the thinkers who are increasingly associated with Chesterton, but none show it, I think, more clearly and more consistently than did George MacDonald, with his insistence that there is no

liberty outside the service of the Lord, because that service is the purpose of our existence, and robbed of our awareness of that purpose we become as ants or, as we are now seen by our Masters, as units of a Godless society, whose

function is to consume and to be in permanent debt to the usurers. In Chesterton we find this awareness again and again; nowhere is it better seen and expressed than in his great tribute to MacDonald - the introduction he contributed to the biography written by MacDonald’s son, Greville:

I...can really testify to a book that has made a difference to my whole existence, which helped me to see things in a certain way from the start; a vision of things which even so real a revolution as a change of religious allegiance has substantially only crowned and confirmed. Of all the stories I have read, including even all the novels of the same novelist, it remains the most real, the most realistic, in the exact sense —— SSSSSSSSSSSsSSSSsSsss—S—S—SsSs—

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of the phrase, the most like life. It is called “The Princess and the Goblin”...by George MacDonald... When I say it is like life, what I mean is this. It describes a little princess living in castle in the mountains which is perpetually undermined, so to speak, by subterranean demons who sometimes come up through the cellars. The Princess climbs up the castle stairways to the nursery or to the other rooms; but now and again the stairs do not lead to the usual landings, but to a new room she has never seen before, and cannot

generally find again. Here a good great-grandmother, who is a sort of fairy godmother, is perpetually spinning and speaking words of understanding and encouragement. When I read it as a child, I felt

that the whole thing was happening inside a real human house, not essentially unlike the house I was living in, which also had staircases and rooms and cellars. This is where the fairy tale differed from many other fairy tales; above all this is where the philosophy differed from many other philosophies. I have always felt a certain insufficiency about the ideal of Progress, even of the best sort, which is a Pilgrim’s Progress...And though like every other sane person, I value and revere the ordinary fairy tale of the miller’s third son who set out to seek his fortune (a form which MacDonald himself followed in the sequel called “The Princess and Curdie,”) the very suggestion of traveling to a faroff fairyland, which is the soul of it, prevents it from achieving this particular purpose of making all the ordinary staircases and windows and doors into magical things...there is something not only imaginative but intimately true about the idea of the goblins being below the house and capable of besieging it from the cellars. When the evil things besieging us do appear, they do not appear outside but inside. This same awareness is of course seen in “The Ethics of Elfland,” a

chapter from Orthodoxy so remarkable that it was included some years ago in a collection, Great Essays in Science (1957). Here Chesterton explains one of the great principles of the philosophy of tales of wonder:

Any one can see it who will simply read Grimm’s Fairy Tales...1 will call it the Doctrine of Conditional Joy... The note of the fairy utterance always is, “You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire IF you do not say the word ‘cow,’ or, “You may live happily with the King’s daughter IF you do not show her an onion.” The vision always hangs upon a veto. All the dizzy and colossal things conceded depend upon one small thing withheld...In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened Ec

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and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten, and cities perish. A flower is plucked, and human lives are forfeited. An apple is eaten, and the

hope of Heaven is gone.

It seems to me that this is a great and simple truth, but one forgotten or rejected by many today; that liberty depends upon limitations and cannot properly exist without them. If we are free, as I am told is still possible in some remote places, to walk the streets in safety, it is only because limits to what we may and may not do have been imposed and accepted. When we have a situation when so many people will not accept society’s code of acceptable conduct, or - as today - when society itself is too effete and rootless to hold a moral code, we have anarchy and mindless violence and, not an

increase of liberty, but its erosion and collapse. One instance of such limitations is that, in crowded England, where

we are more conscious of territorial boundaries and privileges than are people in more spacious countries, we are highly concerned to know precisely where our land and sovereignty begin and end. My own garden (you would describe it as a ‘yard’) is tiny - not more than SO feet long, but it is enclosed by a most solid brick wall — in which I rejoice. The very fact that it is there gives me liberty to do as I wish within it. And if most adults, left to their natural

instincts, need and accept such physical, social, and moral boundaries, then how much more do children depend on them. It is for this reason that, in education, by which I mean both schooling and the far more important education which is carried on in the home, the abandonment of strong structure and content and discipline in favor of a ‘play-way’ approach has been disastrous, as we in Britain and in the United States and Canada are at last beginning to realize. Since the 1960’s it has been our habit to change, every few years, our system of examinations in schools and colleges. Various specious reasons are always advanced, but the truth is that the change is most often made simply to prevent or at least make difficult any comparison between standards now, and those of ten, twenty-

five or fifty years ago. Children, as do all humans, need and flourish in an environment which has a firm structure within the boundaries of which they may safely

grow and enjoy their liberty.

The first examples in life are, of course, the play-pen which by its very limit on travel gives safety and freedom to the child and peace of mind to its parents; then the fire-guard which must often, I think, seem to a child an unreasonable thwarting of its freedom, “I can see those lovely little flames dancing up and down, it is very cruel of Mummy to put that horrid thing there to stop me from picking those pretty flames up and playing with them.” One of life’s chief frustrations for people like me, who lurk upon the outer fringes of literature, is that we say or write something and like to think that we have expressed the point well; and we then come across Dr. Johnson, a 16

or Chesterton or C.S. Lewis dealing with the same point. These men have a great deal to answer for (how can a poet now write about the nightingale without either imitating Keats or self-consciously avoiding so doing?). It was after preparing this paper that I re-discovered a wonderful passage of Chesterton’s in Orthodoxy: We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some small island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff's edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. [The children] did not fall over, but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island...and their song had ceased.

The truth is that our new “libertarian” values have NOT given us freedom and a fuller and more independent life. Instead we have been taken over by slavemasters who despise us. Our function in life and society, as the new unhappy lords see it, is to be a source of labor and profit. I have to resist the temptation to spend much time on this, for it is a subject on which, as family man and as teacher I feel very strongly indeed, so I will limit myself to one illustration of what I mean. It displays, I think, two things. The first is what we actually get from an abandonment of morality in imagination and creativity is not freedom, but the slavery of materialism. The second is that in this instance, as in so many aspects of present-day society, there is any amount of cleverness, any amount of imagination. But it is cleverness without depth and without wisdom, and imagination without morality. The following quotation came from an article headed “Designer Children” in The Sunday Times. The title itself seems to me to be of some significance, for “Designer” now means, apparently, “Designed” or manufactured, as in designer jeans. These people are indeed happy to redesign our children, for that is the way in which money is made, by turning them, too, into sales-fodder. Listen to this: ...every child from birth to fourteen is the target of a [multi-] billion-

pound a year industry, the fastest growing and most competitive segment of British fashion. . . it amounts to a revolution in the business of dressing children. . . Retailing agents take ‘poppet power’ very seriously. There is real money to be made out of any child of any background under the age of fourteen. The biggest pressure to buy comes from the children themselves. Sophisticated images from toys, television, films and records are transforming them into discriminating [yes, the moron who wrote the article did use the word ‘discriminating’] consumers. i

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Am I wrong in saying that the children who are the targets of that merciless commercialism are every bit as much victims as are those children who have suffered at the hands of other criminals? Are our advertisers innocent of the

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charge that they are, under a deodorized name, simply confidence-tricksters? And again, the name itself is of some interest. Is it without significance that we have moved from the old name of “confidence trickster,” first to the neutral “con-man,” and have now, with a sort of admiration, elevated him to

the status of con-artist? If that targeting of the young is not, in the long term, cruelty to children, I cannot think what is. Many other examples of the deliberate corruption of the young will be familiar to you. Do they not go a long way toward justifying my assertion that we have lost not the imagination, not the power of invention, but the awareness of morality? Let me return to the cleaner air of George MacDonald. The concept of the moral imagination, and of being in this material world but ever conscious of being the loved children of God was never very far from his mind or pen. In “A Dish of Orts” he raises the matter several times: There is a yet higher and more sustained influence exercised by nature, and that takes effect when she puts a man into that mood or condition in which thoughts come of themselves. That is perhaps the best thing that can be done for us, the best at least that Nature can

do. It is certainly higher than mere intellectual teaching... If the world proceeded from the imagination of God, and man proceeded from the love of God, it is easy to believe that that which proceeded from the imagination of God should rouse the best thoughts in the mind of a being who proceeded from the love of God. This I think is the relationship between man and the world. A little later he defends the right, fruitful and legitimate use of the moral

imagination against those Christians who tended to regard any fiction, and the life of the imagination as being at best suspect, and at worst as being the work of the devil: Seek not that your sons and daughters should not see visions, should

not dream dreams; seek that they should see true visions, that they should dream noble dreams. Such out-going of the imagination is at

one with aspiration, and will do more to elevate what is low and vile than will all possible inculcations of morality. In a fine little book, The Renaissance of Wonder in Children’s Literature, Marion Lochhead reminds us: “George MacDonald’s supreme and unique gift was his ability to blend holiness with magic. Morality had long been present Ce

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indeed over-emphasised, in children’s literature. It was thrust upon the young. However, the essence of goodness, which is true holiness, and the joy which is part of sanctity, had been unknown.” Goodness and joy, always together, hand in hand, both mentioned in that short passage, run bubbling and sparkling throughout the writing of Lewis, MacDonald, and Chesterton and form a great deal of the attraction of

their books. Educators and critics today are utterly wrong when they say that children dislike moral tales. Children love the didactic, and the triumph of goodness over nastiness. It is a major blunder as well as a sin that our system of schooling does not attempt to teach or nourish the quality of goodness (that, of course, would involve the ghastly crime of making what are called for some inscrutable reason, value judgments, as though there exists some

other kind). Instead of goodness our schools teach conformity, political correctness and other sterile whims of the day. Again from George MacDonald. He is here insisting that we have no choice in the matter, that do what we will to suppress it, the imagination will blossom and bear fruit. Where we do have a choice is in whether the imagination shall be nurtured so that it produces sweet and wholesome fruit, or that which is sour and worthless: [Even] if the whole power of pedantry should rise against her, the imagination will yet work; and if not for good, then for evil; if not for truth then for falsehood; if not for life, then for death; the evil

alternative becoming the more likely from the unnatural treatment she [the imagination] has received from those who ought to have fostered her. The power that might have gone forth in conceiving the noblest forms of action, in realizing the lives of the true-hearted, the

self-forgetting, will go forth in building airy castles of vain ambition, of boundless riches, of unearned admiration. The imagination that might be devising how to make the home blessed, or to help the poor neighbour, will be absorbed in the invention of the new dress or, worse, in devising the means of procuring it. For if [the imagination] be not occupied with the beautiful, she will be occupied with the [merely] pleasant; that which goes not out to worship will stay at home to be sensual. Cultivate the mere intellect as you may, it will never reduce the passions: the imagination, seeking the ideal in everything, will elevate them to their true and noble service. Two comments

are here, I think, called for. One of the strongest

characteristics of the group of thinkers with whom we are chiefly concerned is that although Chesterton died in 1936, C.S. Lewis in 1963, and George MacDonald as long ago as 1908, each of them retains the capacity to startle us into saying, “Surely that couldn’t have been written all those years ago.”

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When he wrote those lines about being “absorbed in the invention of the new dress or, worse, in the procuring of it... that which goes not out to worship will stay at home to be sensual” is it possible that MacDonald did not have in mind the poor, cheated children (and, alas, adults) who are being harangued by the conditioners that the ultimate good lies in the getting of the latest fashion in dress, the latest fad in breakfast foods, the latest gimmick

in toys? Fifty years after MacDonald wrote that, here is C.S. Lewis on the same theme:

In the older systems both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives for producing him were prescribed by the TAO [the universal force which produces harmony in nature, and

works in accordance with the spirit of the universe] - a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject and from which they claimed no liberty to depart. They did not cut men to some pattern they had chosen. They handed on what they had received: they initiated the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which over-arched him and them alike. It was but old birds teaching young birds to fly. This will be changed...Judgments of value are to be produced in the pupil as part of the conditioning. Whatever TAO there is, will be the product, not the motive, of education... The ultimate springs of human action are no longer, for them, something given...it is the function of the Conditioners to control, not to obey them. They know how to produce conscience and [they] decide what kind of conscience they will produce. They themselves are outside, above. . .Yes, the Conditioners will act. All motives. . . other than their felt emotional weight at a given moment have failed them. Everything except the sic volo, sic jubeo (“that I have willed it is sufficient reason”) has been explained away . . .When all that says “it is good” has been debunked, what says “I want” remains. . .

...and Lewis ends this final chapter of The Abolition of Man with a thought on the viewing of people as specimens, or units, or preparations, and how it “begins to affect our language.” Once we killed bad men. Now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration and diligence has become dynamism, and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are ‘potential officer

material.’ Most wonderful of all, the virtues of thrift and temperance, and even of ordinary intelligence, are [seen as] sales-resistance.

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Often in their writing, Chesterton, Lewis, and MacDonald use the

word “noble.” How often do you hear that word nowadays? It has joined that group of lost words; words which, if used at all, are used facetiously or as a sneer from one who is superior to such concepts: “wholesome,” “patriotism,” “chivalry,” “honor,” “virtue.” None of them fit in with our status as units of

consumption, do they? “Goodness” itself is thought to be something to do with the sell-by date on a packet of imitation food. When I was in my early adolescence I was moved by reading Chaucer’s Prologue to his Canterbury Tales, a nicely illustrated copy of which I had bought for a few pence from a second-hand book shop. Chaucer begins, as you will know, by describing the pilgrims, and of the Knight-at-arms he says:

A knight there was, and that a worthy man That from the time that he first began To riden out, he loved chivalry Truth, and honour, courage, and courtesie.

And evermore he had a sovereign prize, And though that he were worthy, he was wise, And of his port as meek as any maid. He never yet ne villainy (had) said

In all his life unto no manner wight. . . ... He was a very parfait, gentil knight. Those lines have lived with me since that far-off day. It does seem to me that among the good things, the right things which some of our young people have to a considerable extent been robbed of, are a true sense of personal

honor, (a very different thing from the now constantly marketed “selfesteem” rubbish) and the capacity to be magnanimous to opponents in argument. These, also, are qualities which cannot breathe the air of rampant commercialism and secularism. When I think of the unrelenting pressures on young people today, pressures which my generation never suffered because advertisers and other drug-pushers do not pursue people who have nothing to spend, I marvel not that so many, but that so few, thank God, of the young of today have gone seriously to the bad. Those qualities of personal honor and of magnanimity are to be found in the Christian writers I have mentioned. I start with C.S. Lewis. Some critics and biographers, (I am thinking particularly of the man who used to be A.N. Wilson), in all their speculative innuendoes and dirt-seeking about his early relationship with Mrs. Moore, seem quite unable to assimilate one simple fact. C.S. Lewis had made a pact with a comrade-in-arms, who was later killed in

action, that either would care for the parent of the other should only one survive.

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Whether in this he had acted wisely or not, whether impetuously and

foolishly or not was of no importance. His word had been given, and that was that. To many modern critics such a situation is beyond comprehension. One of my favorite books is The Personal Heresy in which Lewis and Professor E.M.W. Tillyard engage in disputation, for it is a superb example of vigorous and hard-hitting debate carried on by both parties, with courtesy, intellectual honesty and great magnanimity toward an opponent. Lewis starts one of his letters to Tillyard, “A friend of mine once described himself as being ‘hungry for rational opposition.’ The words seemed to me to hit off very happily the state of a man who has published doctrines which he knows to be controversial, and yet finds no one to voice the general disagreement that he looked for. It was with just such a hunger that I sat down to read your formidable rejoinder to my essay on The Personal Heresy. In such matters to find an opponent is almost to find a friend...” And he ends the same letter with, “I have not been able, in the heat of argument, to

express as Clearly or as continuously as I could have wished, my sense that I an engaged with ‘an older and a better soldier.’ But I have little fear that you will misunderstand me...even where you think me too pert you will not suspect me of malice. If you honour me with a reply it will be in kind; and then, God defend the right! Iam, my dear Sir, with the greatest respect, Your obedient servant, C.S. Lewis.”

That is magnanimity. As I need not tell you, Chesterton, too, had those qualities in full measure, both in life and in all his writing. It is instructive, I suggest, to

compare his novel The Ball and the Cross with Shaw’s Adventures of the Black Girl in Search of God. In the latter, Shaw has his heroine, an unlettered black

girl who is seeking the meaning of life, ask one representative of Christianity after another for answers to her questions. Each Christian in turn is portrayed as being a fool, a rogue, an ignoramus, or a charlatan. Shaw did write some fine and intelligent stuff, but this is shallow and cheap. Chesterton’s novel, The Ball and the Cross tells the story of a naive, somewhat humorless and gauche young Catholic man from the Scottish highlands who comes to London. There he finds a fiery little Atheist, Turnbull, who edits a small journal in which he has insulted the Mother of

Christ. Mclan, the highlander, smashes the editorial window, bursts into the office and challenges Turnbull to a duel, which the Atheist eagerly accepts. The smashed window, however, attracts public attention, and the police haul both men before the magistrate. The young Catholic risks prison

by refusing to be bound over to keep the peace, but the Atheist, Turnbull, intervenes, saying to the magistrate: “(this man) says he will challenge me to

a duel...but it takes two to make a duel, your worship. You need not trouble to bind him over...I bind myself over to keep the peace...” and so they are both released.

ep

Outside the court room, Mclan berates the Atheist for his cowardice,

but Turnbull retorts that it is not only Christians and their saints who are prepared to die for their beliefs: ‘Why, you moonstruck scarecrow of superstition, do you think your dirty saints are the only people who can die? Haven't you hung atheists, and burned them, and boiled them, and did they

ever deny their faith? Do you think we don’t want to fight?. . . You damned fool, you said things that might have got us locked up for a year, and shadowed by the coppers for half a decade...I got you out to fight, if you want to. Now, fight if you dare.”

Mclan then makes a long, solemn and rather pompous oath, that “nothing shall be in my heart or in my head till our swords clash together. I swear it by the God you have denied, by that Blessed Lady you have blasphemed; I swear it by the seven swords in her heart. I swear it by the Holy Island where my fathers are, by the honour of my mother, by the secret of my people, and by the chalice of the Blood of God.” The Atheist draws up his head. “And I,” he says, "Give my word.” And throughout the tale, the Atheist is as much a hero and a man to be admired and respected as is the Christian. That is magnanimity. And magnanimity is one of the great virtues which our society largely lacks and which must be recovered. I want to close this rambling discourse with a little about the Chesterton societies around the world and their purposes, bearing in mind two statements. The first being by T.S. Eliot in his obituary of Chesterton: ... itis not, I think, for any piece of writing in particular that Chesterton is of importance, but for the place that he occupied, the position that he represented... behind the Johnsonian fancy-dress, so reassuring to the British public, he concealed the most serious and revolutionary designs, concealing them by exposure, as his anarchist conspirators chose to hold their meetings on a balcony in Leicester square... Even if Chesterton’s social and economic ideas appear to be without effect... they were THE ideas for his time which were fundamentally Christian and Catholic. He did more than any man of his time... to maintain the existence of the important minority in the

modern world. The second is from Chesterton himself, in his preface to Dickens’ Old Curiosity

Shop:

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Nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is redeemed from utter triviality, surpassing that of noughts and crosses, by the fact that it describes not the world around us or the things on the retina of the eye... but some condition to which the human soul

can come. I have the joy and privilege of being surrounded, in my own home and at Plater College, by a great richness of memorabilia, documents and artifacts of G.K. Chesterton, from which I and others get constant pleasure. Yet if it were to be nothing more than a museum, pandering to an old man’s nostalgia, it would be, though still legitimately enjoyable, of little greater importance than would be a collection of pottery or postage stamps. The Chesterton Societies around the world are not merely literary societies — though I defend the right of anyone who so wishes, to join for that aspect of GKC — we must, I believe, try to pass on some of the goodness, the sanity, and the awareness of God that we have gained from Chesterton. Outside, there is at least one generation which has been cheated and deprived, deprived of the knowledge and use of our beautiful language; of the ability to follow and employ rational thought; deprived of the nourishment of good literature; of fixed moral standards and of a sense of personal integrity. But above all of the knowledge of the love of God for each of his creatures. What, then, matters above all else is not the pleasure and benefit we

get from GKC, but what we are able and willing to carry away to influence others, and especially the young. I am not so foolish as to think that these impoverished people are

waiting hungrily for what we are able to tell and show them. Hungry they certainly are, but many do not realize that they are, and many more do not know what would appease their hunger. Just think of the empty things after which they are taught to chase. The best way of acknowledging and repaying our debt to Gilbert Keith Chesterton must, surely, be to help others to benefit from his thought, and that of these other Christian thinkers.

I end with two quotations. The first is the sentence following the passage from T.S. Eliot. “[G.K. Chesterton] leaves behind a permanent claim

upon our loyalty, to see that the work he did in his lifetime is continued in ours.”

And, finally, slightly paraphrased, from Chesterton himself in the essay, “The Case for the Ephemeral” from All Things Considered: “In the end it will not matter to us whether we wrote well or ill; whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will matter to us greatly (whether or not we fought, and) on which side we fought.” With all respect, I put it to you that the duty is one which we shirk at

our peril.

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Dale Ahlquist

The Critic’s Critic What is the function of the critic? G.K. Chesterton says that it would be a very defensible position to argue that the critic has no function whatsoever. “Critics,” he says, “are much madder than poets. Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him into extravagant

tatters. Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else. And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.”! The critics “discredit supernatural stories that have some foundations simply by telling natural stories that have no foundation.” ” “The Higher Critics are wholly deficient in the highest of all forms of criticism; which is self-criticism.’

But, in spite of the fact that the critics have made a very good case against themselves, nearly proving that they have no purpose whatsoever, Chesterton does offer a defense on their behalf. He does tell us what kind of critics we should have, if we must have critics.

He says the critic should be. . . like God. Now, of course, that’s good advice for anybody. Architects should be like God. And so should bricklayers. And bus drivers. This is not an endorsement of megalomania or assuming absolute power or some other narrow understanding of what it means to be God-like. It means simply that we should all be holy. We should all embody truth and goodness and love. And mercy. But when Chesterton says the critic should be like God, he says specifically that the critic should be like God, as God is described by George MacDonald:

“easy to please, and hard to satisfy.”* A critic should be able to

look at a creative work and see what is good in it, before seeing what is lacking in it. Most modern critics are just the opposite. They are hard to please, and easy to satisfy. When I say they are hard to please, I mean that their negative spirit is their leading character trait, and they berate the simple pleasures that are common to us all. And when I say they are easy to satisfy, I mean they substitute catchwords for actual thinking, they quickly give in to precise fashions and imprecise ideas, and they are ultimately content with pretty thin stuff. A critic should be like God. I would like us to consider this idea a little more fully. And I would like us to use Chesterton as our guide. I think Chesterton shows us at least five ways in which the critic should be like God, or perhaps five ways in which being like God would make one a good critic.

1. To be like God is first of all to be creative — as an artist is creative. But the flip-side of creation is appreciation. The Creator was able to appreciate eo Di,

creation. Creation was able to appreciate creation. The critic must begin with appreciation. He must be able to find the language of praise that was present at the first creation, when the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy. 2. To be like God is to be a giver of light. To bring light into the darkness.

To

see what no one else sees, and then, to make them see it. Thus, the critic

must find the deeper meaning in things and be able to convey that meaning. 3. To be like God is to be true. Seeing what nobody else sees does not mean seeing what is not there. Except in the case of the Emperor’s New Clothes, when seeing what is not there means explaining it to everyone else who claims that it is there. A critic must be honest, and must not be a liar or the

promoter of lies.

4, To be like God is to be sympathetic. An outsider cannot truly be sympathetic. To be truly sympathetic means to become an insider, as God himself became. In other words, to be like God is to be like Christ.

To be

purely “objective” is to remain an outsider, and to never really know and understand and see and feel what is on the inside.

Thus, the best art critic is

someone who is an artist himself. The best literary critic is a writer, a writer of something other than just criticism. A critic of philosophy should be something of a philosopher himself. And my wife would like me to add that the best dance critic should be someone who actually knows how to dance. Sympathy does not only mean weeping with those who weep, but

rejoicing with those who rejoice, which means truly laughing with those who laugh. Laughter is something we long for. Criticism has lost its laughter, art and literature have lost their laughter, and the whole modern world has lost

its laughter. The reason we have all lost our laughter is because we have lost our morality. When we no longer know right from wrong, when we no longer see our Own incongruities, we cannot laugh. Which brings us to the fifth point.

5. To be like God is to be a Judge. Now before we associate this with the Last Judgment and the unpleasant business of separating the goats from the sheep, we should associate being a judge with justice. We long for fairness as we long

for laughter. Justice is an act of love. It affirms and protects what is right, it

does not merely condemn

what is wrong. However, it does still condemn

what is wrong. But the most important thing about a critic’s judgment or justice is that a critic should be a champion and a rescuer of the lowly and

the downtrodden and the forgotten, one who restores them to their rightful place.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.

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If we look at Chesterton’s writing about critics and criticism, I think

we will see these five points, but none of the points is pure and stands alone. With Chesterton, everything is connected to everything else, every truth spills over into another truth, or better yet, is drawn from the same greater truth. But before we turn to his writings there is one more point to make: G.K. Chesterton is himself a great artist, and his critics have generally failed to recognize his greatness. But he is also a great critic. He is, I dare say, like God — in the George MacDonald description: easy to please and hard to satisfy. He embraces all that is wonderful about creativity and artistry. But he does not praise the new simply because it is new or attack the old because it is not new. He explains why great art has endured, indeed, he shows why great art is always new, why permanent philosophies are permanent. He exhibits the virtue of self-control when it comes to new art and ideas that have rushed upon the scene. He knows what is fleeting and what is eternal. He recognizes what is good in modern art and literature and philosophy, and why it is good, and why, so often, it is not.

His description of modern books as “piles of ingenuity, piles of futility,”® is perfectly succinct. And it shows that Chesterton is easy to please and hard to satisfy. He is pleased with creativity and cleverness but is not satisfied with emptiness and fruitlessness. Nor should any one be. Chesterton is not only a great critic, he is also a great critic of critics; he is especially successful in analyzing the present demise of art and literature, where other critics have failed. Perhaps the main reason for his success is that as a critic, he does not represent the artist as much as he represents the audience.

In fact, in 1909 when Chesterton was asked to testify at a

parliamentary hearing on censorship, he said he was not appearing as an author, but rather as a member of the audience.

Chesterton is our advocate.°

And I would argue that that is certainly one of the most Christ-like things about him. And that is the last thing that I have to say. You will be pleased to know that for the rest of this paper, you will read nothing but Chesterton’s own words, which someone has cunningly tried to weave together in such a way as to support the assertions I have just made. So, in contrast to the watered-down Chesterton that you will undoubtedly find in the other papers, get ready for a heavy, concentrated dose of the pure stuff.

Real primary creation (such as the sun or the birth of a child) calls forth not criticism, not appreciation, but a kind of incoherent gratitude. This is why most hymns about God are bad.’ Pleasure in the beautiful is a sacred thing.* This is the beginning of all sane art criticism: wonder combined with the complete serenity of the conscience in the acceptance of such wonder.’

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A critic of poetry should be a poetical critic. Literary history is littered with the disasters of good critics who become bad critics, merely by colliding with good poets. But one of the first facts which a good poetical critic will realise, is one which the poet... realises: the limitation of language, and especially the poverty and clumsiness of the language of praise. There is hardly any‘praise of poets that does not sound as if they were all the same sort of poets, and this is true even when the praise is intended to say precisely the opposite. Thus the habit of calling somebody “unique” has become universal, and we may insist that a man is original, and still leave the impression that originality is about as rare as original sin."° The supreme business of criticism is to discover that part of a man's work which is his and to ignore that part which belongs to others. Why should any critic of poetry spend time and attention on that part of a man’s work which is unpoetical? Why should any man be interested in aspects which are uninteresting? The business of a critic is to discover the importance of men and not their crimes. It is true that the Greek word critic carries with it the meaning of a judge, and up to this point of history judges have had to do with the valuation of men's sins, and not with the valuation of their virtues." The function of criticism, if it has a legitimate function at all,

can only be one function - that of dealing with the subconscious part of the author's mind which only the critic can express, and not with the conscious part of the author's mind, which the author himself can

express. Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.” Anything beautiful always means more than it says." It is impossible for anything to signify nothing." If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in danger of seeing it for the first time.’ In expressing confused ideas, the moderns have great subtlety and sympathy. It is in expressing clear ideas that they generally find their limitations." [The] art-critic...sits in front of [a work of modern art] dazed but submissive. He actually say|s], in so many words, that he can

make neither head nor tail of it, but that the Future will.” The artists of the twentieth century worship the twenty-first century. The poets of [free verse] are particularly anxious to be as new as possible. The critics are still newer, and may be said to praise the poetry before it is

written.” [The critic] prostrate[s] himself in the dust, not only before Picasso, but before a totally imaginary great-grandchild, who will

profess to see some sense in Picasso. This condition is plainly ee

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intolerable: we cannot go about thinking that all our thoughts are wrong without having even any notion of what thoughts are nent? It is perfectly true that there is something in all good things that is beyond all speech or figure of speech. But it is also true that there is in all good things a perpetual desire for expression and concrete embodiment; and though the attempt to embody it is always inadequate, the attempt is always made. If the idea does not seek to be the word, the chances are that it is an evil idea. If the word is not

made flesh it is a bad word. Thus Giotto at once admitted theologically that God but they would always try to paint Him. that representing Him as a rather quaint

or Fra Angelico would have was too good to be painted; And they felt (very rightly) old man with a gold crown

and a white beard, like a king of the elves, was less profane than

resisting the sacred impulse to express Him in some way. That is why the Christian world is full of gaudy pictures and twisted statues which seem, to many refined persons, more blasphemous than the secret volumes of an atheist. The trend of good is always towards Incarnation.

[It is] those refined thinkers who worship the Devil [who]

always insist upon the shapelessness, the wordlessness, the unutterable character of the abomination . . And as it is with moral good and evil, so it is also with mental clarity and mental confusion. There is one very valid test by which we may separate genuine ... originality... from mere impudent innovation and bluff. The man who really thinks he has an idea will

always try to explain that idea. The charlatan who has no idea will always confine himself to explaining that it is much too subtle to be explained. The first idea may really be very ... difficult to express to ordinary people. But because the man is trying to express it, it is most probable that there is something in it, after all. The honest man is he who is always trying to utter the unutterable, to describe the indescribable; but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing to come out of it. Perhaps this distinction is most comically plain in the case of the thing called Art, and the people called Art Critics. It is obvious that an attractive landscape or a living face can only half express the holy cunning that has made them what they are. It is equally obvious that a landscape painter expresses only half of the landscape; a portrait painter only half of the person; they are lucky if they express so much. And again it is yet more obvious that any literary description of the pictures can only express half of them, and that the less important half. Still, it does express something; the thread is not broken that connects God with Nature, or Nature with men, or men

with critics . . Now the modern critic is a humbug, because he professes to be entirely inarticulate. Speech is his whole business; and een oul

he boasts of being speechless. Before Botticelli he is mute . . .And the eulogists of the latest artistic insanities (Cubism and PostImpressionism and Mr. Picasso) are eulogists and nothing else. They are not critics; least of all creative critics. They do not attempt to translate beauty into language; they merely tell you that it is untranslatable - that is, unutterable, indefinable, indescribable, impalpable, ineffable, and all the rest of it. The cloud is their banner;

they cry to chaos and old night. They circulate a piece of paper on which Mr. Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried to dry it with his boots, and they seek to terrify democracy by the good old anti-democratic muddlements: that “the public” does not understand these things; that “the likes of us" cannot dare to question the dark decisions of our lords... If the art critics can say nothing about the artists except that they are good it is because the artists are bad. They can explain nothing because they have found nothing; and they have found nothing because there is nothing to be found.” Art is a right and human thing, like walking or saying one's prayers; but the moment it begins to be talked about very solemnly, a man may be fairly certain that the thing has come into a congestion and a kind of difficulty. The artistic temperament is a disease ... which arises from men not having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being. It is healthful to every sane man to utter the art within him; it is essential to every sane man to get rid of the art within him at all costs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily, or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic

temperament. Thus, very great artists are able to be ordinary men men like Shakespeare or Browning. [But men] of the artistic temperament [suffer] tragedies of vanity or violence or fear. But the

great[est] tragedy of the artistic temperament is that it cannot produce any art.” The [modern] poet has not ... performed the full literary function of translating living thoughts into literature. He still needs

an interpreter; and a crowd of interpreters has officiously rushed between the poet and the public ... and it does do a certain amount of harm, I think, by ... intercepting the true process of the perfecting of human expression. It is not wrong because it encourages the great man to talk. It is wrong because it actually discourages the great man from talking plainly. The priests and priestesses of the temple take a

pride in the oracle remaining oracular. That vast but vague revolution that we call the modern world largely began about the time when men demanded that the Scriptures should be translated into English.

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It has ended in a time when nobody dares to demand that English poets should be translated into English. Some of these poets, indeed, can talk as plainly as they know how, and still be obscure. Their style is a sort of impediment in the speech; their only rhythm or recurrence resembles the repetition of stammering.” Style is [supposed to be] a truly democratic thing ... it touches all common things with the same fairy wand ... the ideal lover of mankind would linger over a postcard to his washerwoman, transposing words and modifying adjectives until it was as perfect as a

sonnet.” There are, when all is said and done, some things which a

fifth-rate painter knows which a first-rate art critic does not know; there are some things which a sixth-rate organist knows which a firstrate judge of music does not know.’ An extraordinary idea has arisen that the best critic of religious institutions is the man who talks coldly about Religion. Nobody supposes that the best critic of music is the man who talks coldly about music. Within reasonable bounds, the more excited the musician is about music, the more he is likely to be right about it. Nobody thinks a man a correct judge of poetry because he looks down on poems. But there is an idea that a man is a correct judge of religion because he looks down on religions.” [Those critics] might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, [have] neither one nor the other.” All very great teachers and leaders have had [the] habit of assuming their point of view to be one which was human and casual, one which would readily appeal to every passing man. If a man is genuinely superior to his fellows the first thing that he believes in is the equality of man.” The public does not like bad literature. The public likes a certain kind of literature and likes that kind of literature even when it is bad better than another kind of literature even when it is good. Nor is this unreasonable; for the line between different types of literature is as real as the line between tears and laughter; and to tell people who can only get bad comedy that you have some first-class tragedy is as irrational as [comforting] a man who is shivering over weak, warm coffee [by offering him] a really superior sort of ice. Ordinary people dislike the delicate modern work, not because it is good or because it is bad, but because it is not the thing that they asked for.” Commonness and the common mind are now generally spoken of as meaning in some manner inferiority and the inferior mind; the mind of the mere mob. But the common mind means the mind of all the artists and heroes; or else it would not be common. Plato had the common mind; Dante had the common mind ... Commonness means oo Ok Se

eee 33

the quality common to the saint and the sinner, to the philosopher and the fool; and it was this that Dickens grasped and developed. In everybody there is a certain thing that loves babies, that fears death, that likes sunlight: that thing enjoys Dickens.” When I say that everybody understands Dickens I do not mean that he is suited to the untaught intelligence. I mean that he is so plain that even scholars understand him.” In reading the works of really able modern critics, | am constantly struck by the contrast between their brilliant sensibility in art and their baffling confusion in philosophy.” A good novelist has a philosophy; but a good novel is never a book of philosophy.” Modern philosophy has taken the life out of the modern fiction.” If we - compare, let us say, the morality of the Divine Comedy with the morality of Ibsen’s Ghosts, we shall see all that modern ethics have really done... Dante describes three moral instruments — Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, the vision of perfection, the vision of

improvement, and the vision of failure. Ibsen has only one — Hell... Modern realists are indeed Terrorists, like the dynamiters; and they fail just as much in their effort to create a thrill. Both realists and dynamiters are well-meaning people engaged in the ultimately hopeless task of using science to promote morality.* The whole modern world, at any rate, the whole modern Press, has a perpetual and consuming terror of plain morals. Men always attempt to avoid condemning a thing upon merely moral grounds.*° If the authors and publishers of ‘Dick Deadshot,’ and [other books which we call “Penny Dreadfuls”], were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class, were to take down the names of every man, however distinguished, who was caught at a University ... Lecture, were to confiscate all our novels and warn us all to correct our lives, we should be seriously annoyed. Yet they have far more right to do so

than we; for they, with all their idiocy, are normal and we are abnormal. It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the

uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the ... errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room tables. If the dirtiest old

owner of the dirtiest old bookstall ... dared to display works really recommending polygamy or suicide, his stock would be seized by the police. These things are our luxuries. And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleled in history, we [be]rate the gutter-boys for their immorality at the very time that we are

discussing (with equivocal German Professors) whether morality is valid at all. . . At the very instant we accuse [the Penny Dreadful] (quite unjustly) of . . . indecency, we are cheerfully reading philosophies which glory in . . . indecency. At the very instant that we — ee

34

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charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life, we are placidly discussing whether life is worth preserving.” The [leading] characteristic of the modern movements . . . is the apotheosis of the insignificant . . .[They take] three pages with stage directions to describe a parlour . . . They have all become terribly impressed with, and a little bit alarmed at, the mysterious powers of small things. Their difference from the old epic poets is the whole difference between an age that fought with dragons and an age that fights with microbes.* There is nothing queerer to-day than the importance of unimportant things. Except, of course, the unimportance of important things.” Marriage and the family . . . are essential and sacred things, exactly for those reasons that cannot be adequately expressed in art at all; for all art is a thing of glimpses, and marriage is a thing of continuity. Dramas, however realistic, deal with events. But monogamy is not merely a good event; it is a good habit. Art cannot be entirely realistic. But if it were entirely realistic, it would be almost entirely romantic.* Realism, when entirely emptied of romance, becomes utterly unreal.” Wit is a fighting thing and a working thing. . . Wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point, as well as see it.** [But] there is nO necessary connection between wit and mirth. A man’s wit overpowers his enemies; but his mirth overpowers him|self].* [Laughter means] self-abandonment and humility.“ A laugh is like a love affair in that it carries a man completely off his feet; a laugh is like a creed or a church in that it asks that a man should trust himself to it. A man must sacrifice himself to the God of laughter, who has stricken him with a sacred madness. As a woman can make a fool of a man, so a joke makes a fool of a man. And a man must love a joke more than himself, or he will not surrender his pride for it. . . Laughter has been from the beginning the one indestructible brotherhood,

the one undeniably social thing.* [It is] the power of

uproarious reaction against ourselves and our own incongruities.” The tendency of the recent culture has been to tolerate the smile but discourage the laugh. There are three differences involved here. First, the smile can unobtrusively turn into the sneer; second, the smile is always individual and even secretive, while the laugh can be social and gregarious . . .; and third, laughing lays itself open to criticism, is innocent and unguarded, has the sort of humanity which

has always something of humility. The recent stage of culture and criticism might very well be summed up as the men who smile criticising the men who laugh.” The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.* Tragedy is the point when things are left to God and men can do no more.”

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Everything human must have in it both joy and sorrow; the only matter of interest is the manner in which the two things are balanced or divided ... The mass of men have been forced to be [happy] about the little things, but sad about the big ones. [But] ... Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the stiperficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live ... Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one corner of the world. Grief ought to be a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity ... [But in] Christianity... joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small. The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the

silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness in a sick-room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.® 1 Orthodoxy(1908) The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton (Hereafter CW) Vol. 1 (San Francisco: Ignatius. 1987) 17. 2 Orthodoxy. 247. 3 Nash's Pall Mall Magazine. (April, 1935) 5. 4 “The Romance of Rhyme” Fancies vs. Fads. (London: Methuen 1923) 16. 5 Orthodoxy. 43. . 6 Chesterton’s testimony can be found in the Chesterton Review. V. 12, N.1, Feb., 1986. 7 “The Great Dickens Characters” Charles Dickens. CW 15:177. 8 “A Grammar of Shelley” A Handful of Authors. (London: Sheed and Ward, 1953) 84. 9 “The Pantomime” The Common Man. (New York: Sheed and Ward, LISOMS72 10“Walter de la Mare” The Common Man. 206. 11 “Tennyson” Varied Types. (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1909) 251. 12 “The Oldi@urtosity Shops) GW 15:272; 13 Robert Louis Stevenson. CW 18:118. 14 “Victor Hugo” A Handful of Authors. 40. 15 The Napoleon of Notting Hill. CW 6:227.

16 Illustrated London News (Hereafter ILN) Sept. 12, 1931. IV LEN Deer 230 Lois ee

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18 JEN Feb. 11, 1922. LOTIEN Dece237 LOT. 20 “The Mystagogue” A nee of Men. (London: Methuen 1912) 145-151. 21 “On the Wit of Whistler” Heretics. CW 1: 171. 22, ILN June 6, 1931.

23 ILN Feb..11, 1922. 24 “The Style of Newman” A Handful of Authors. 130. 25 Robert Browning. (London: Macmillan 1903) 84.

26 ILN Oct. 10, 1908. 27 Orthodoxy. 290. 28 “On the Wit of Whistler” Heretics. CW 1: 173. 29 Charles Dickens. CW 15: 98. 30 Ibid. 99. 31 Ibid. 100. S2IEN Och 22; 1921. 33 “Vanity Fair” A Handful of Authors. 61. 34ILN Mar. 8, 1930. 35 “On the Negative Spirit” Heretics. 49-50. 36 ILN Nov. 24, 1906. 37 “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls” The Defendant. (New York: Dodd, Mead 1901, 1904) 14-15. 38 Robert Browning. 164 — 165.

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

ILN Jan. 3, 1914. “Ibsen” A Handful of Authors. 141. "Romantic Love" A Handful of Authors. 196. “Mark Twain” A Handful of Authors. 11. “W.W. Jacobs” A Handful of Authors. 28-29. “On the Wit of Whistler” Heretics. CW 1: 170. “W.W. Jacobs” A Handful of Authors. 29. ILN Sept. 9, 1922. “Laughter” The Common Man. 157. ILN Feb. 10, 1906. “Vanity Fair” A Handful of Authors. 65. Orthodoxy. 36S.

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Chesterton and the Law Chesterton’s attitude toward the law exhibited profound tension between reverence and contempt; reverence for the law as master of the powerful; contempt for it as their servant. He might have said of the law what the nineteenth century American politician John Roanoke said of Robert Livingston: “[It] shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight.” What he did say about the law in What’s Wrong with the World was: Every Statute is a declaration of war, to be backed by arms. Every tribunal is a revolutionary tribunal. In a republic all punishment is as sacred and solemn as lynching.” Try that paragraph sometime on someone who insists on labeling Chesterton as a conservative. Or a liberal. It is nothing short of radical. Chesterton’s reverence for the law was real and unaffected. Although many of his early essays emphasize the secular aspects of law, as early as Orthodoxy, published in 1908, he realized the Christian underpinnings of law: Christian doctrine detected the oddities of life. It not only discovered the law, but it foresaw the exceptions. Those underrate Christianity who say that it discovered mercy; any one might discover mercy. In fact every one did. But to discover a plan for being merciful and also severe — that was to anticipate a strange need of human nature. For no one wants to be forgiven for a big sin as if it were a little one.’ In a 1920 Illustrated London News essay, he encapsulated his view of

man’s relationship to the law: The whole point of liberty, and the only point of democracy, is expressed in the word self-government. The word implies that a man should not be governed by another man than himself; but it also implies that a man should be governed by himself. It implies that there is a moral authority in man, because there is a moral authority above man; and that the divine part of human nature has legitimate rule over the bestial. But it also implies that over large parts of his life, at least, he must exercise this moral authority himself, and if it is taken from

him he becomes a slave.* For in The Everlasting Man, he reminded us of why we need laws:

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Whatever else men have believed, they have all believed that there is something the matter with mankind. This sense of sin has made it impossible to be natural and have no clothes, just as it has made it impossible to be natural and have no laws.®

And without following the law, we would have a bad time of it indeed: Do a lawless thing and you will get into an atmosphere much more suffocating than that of law. Indeed, it is a mistake to speak of a man as ‘breaking out.’ The lawless man never breaks out; he breaks in. He smashes a door and finds himself in another room, he smashes a wall and finds himself in yet a smaller one. The more he shatters the more his habitation shrinks. Where he ends you may read in the end of Macbeth.’ Let’s go into the law courts with Chesterton and see what he thought about the various participants in a trial as a way of illuminating his thoughts about the law. First of all, we must discuss the lawyers, and at least one of the

co-authors of this paper must note that Chesterton would be appalled at being dissected by that figure of horror to him, the “lady barrister.” There are at least five essays’ on this topic, emphasizing his point in What’s Wrong with the World that the ugliness of state coercion and violence can be tolerated as long as half of humanity is kept out of it.* No less than three of these five columns were published in Augusts, the traditional silly season of British journalism when one is desperate for topics, but over the span of his career, they continue to illustrate his chivalrous denial of the fact that half of the origin of original sin and the need for law can be traced to a female. “As for seeing any woman I like in the barristers’ seats, I think, on the whole, I would rather see her in the dock.” These lady barrister essays, however, do illustrate at length Chesterton's thoughts on the problems of lawyers. For instance, in 1912, he wrote: Before I count it a joyful thing for a lady to be a barrister, I

want to feel quite firm and sure that it is a joyful thing for anybody to be a barrister. Many of the most honorable men that ever lived have been advocates; but the more honourable they were the more they have always felt the peril of their own trade and its easy degeneration into that of a hired bully and a sophistical butcher. Why a woman would want to have such a trade I cannot conceive; but that is purely personal, and I let it pass...The real problem today is not the exclusion of eS Ss

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women from the wrangles of lawyers but rather the intrusion of lawyers into the quarrels of everybody else... we can only giggle with delight over turning women into advocates, when we ought to be trying to turn advocates into men. Chesterton’s seminal work on the law courts is “The Twelve Men,” his

essay on jury duty”. The Quotemeister of the American Chesterton Society tells us it is frequently requested, particularly by trial lawyers. We must quote it at length:

Now it is a terrible business to mark a man out for the vengeance of men. But it is a thing to which a man can grow accustomed,

as he can to other terrible things; he can even

grow accustomed to the sun. And the horrible thing about all legal officials, even the best, about all judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policemen is not that they are

wicked (some of them are quite good), not that they are stupid (several of them are quite intelligent), it is simply that they have got used to it. Strictly, they do not see the prisoner in the dock; all they see is the usual man in the usual place. They do not see the awful court of judgment; they only see their own workshop. Therefore, the instinct of Christian civilization has most wisely declared that into their judgments there shall upon every occasion be infused fresh blood and fresh thoughts from the streets. Men shall come in who can see the court and the crowd, and coarse faces of the policeman and the professional criminals, the wasted faces of the wastrels, the unreal faces of

the gesticulating counsel, and see it all as one sees a new picture or a play hitherto unvisited. Our civilization has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law

than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifles of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing, was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.”

41

Even more trustworthy than jurors are witnesses. In 1909, he was horrified at the proposal by a professor of psychology that witnesses ought to be first examined by a professional to determine exactly how perceptive and reliable they were. He noted that this simply placed the overlay of the professional’s biases and perceptions over whatever the witness’s human perceptions had seen, and was yet another example of the theory that “scientific men are gods and other men men.”” All that we want in a witness to an incident is that the witness should be honest and in possession of his five senses. One does not need any learning to say that a man was killed or that a man was raised from the dead. One does not need to be an astronomer to say that a star fell from heaven; or a botanist

to say that a fig tree withered; or a chemist to say that one had seen water turned to wine; or a surgeon to say that one has seen wounds in the hands of St. Francis. On such points an ordinary man is either a liar or he is a madman, or he is telling the truth; there is no possibility of being an expert witness. And it is undemocratic to refuse popular evidence on such points. It is like refusing to believe that anyone but a judge in wig and gown could really have been a witness to a burglary. And this is the really important peculiarity of the new scientific proposal: that, like nearly all new scientific proposals, it is a proposal to crush the people. We are to examine the witness — that is, the ordinary citizen. No one

suggests that we should examine the Judge as to his private life, his politics, and above all, his enormous income. No one demands that we should allow for the bias and habit of the lawyer; no one asks whether men do not get dusty from living in gowns, or woolly from living in wigs, as much as efts get slimy from living in ponds or fish get wet from living in the sea. Mr. H. G. Wells has most sensibly protested against criminals being overhauled with thermometers and microscopes and ‘the silly callipers of witless anthropology.’ But now it is not even the criminal who is to be thus insulted. It is the witness — that is to say, the only man in the whole court who is doing a plain public service for nothing. The witness is, normally speaking, the only reliable man in court.

The barristers are unreliable, avowedly and honestly unreliable: it is their duty to be unreliable. The prisoner is unreliable, with even more excuse. The prosecutor is unreliable, with the same excuse.

The Judge is unreliable, as

all human history proves, which is a mere tissue of the sv

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partialities, pious frauds, Government persecutions and hack butcheries of the hired Judge on the bench. The jury, though vastly more reliable than the Judge, is somewhat weakened,

and, infatuated by the official atmosphere, may take itself too seriously and become a clique or club for the occasion. The one person who is conceivably trying to tell the truth is the ordinary man in the street who saw the murder in the street. Therefore science has pounced upon him. All the diseases that devour States it easily passes by — the rapacity and ambition of magistrates, the leathern cruelty of lawyers, the corruption of experts, and the rust of routine. It is only the healthy man whom science cannot comprehend. ! When Chesterton wrote an essay on “The Lawlessness of Lawyers,” it wasn't lawyers he was criticizing, but judges. “If I were a magistrate — well, I suppose I should resign.” “The real dignity of the Judge’s position can only be that he is supported by right reason, and by human society.” Unfortunately, Chesterton saw few judges who he thought were supported by right reason: The English judge is always an advocate, not in the sense of being partial, but in the sense of being ingenious. It is the business of an advocate to take some long and complicated business, and make up a connected theory about it which shall leave his client blameless: it is the business of the other advocate to make up another theory which shall equally exonerate his. He must have some of the talents of a novelist as well as a historian. When these two clear and clever stories are put before the judge, the judge may be perfectly impartial as regards those two stories. But he has been making up such stories for the greater part of his life; he has (in the cases we

are considering) an active, inventive, perhaps even creative,

mind; he has a relish for his old trade and the sight of younger men competing in it. The result is that he has a tendency to cap the two ingenious theories, not with a dull summary of all the facts, but with some third ingenious theory of his own.” If you doubt the perspicacity of that view of judges, we refer you to Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, the judge in the Microsoft antitrust case, America’s case of the year, speaking of his awe at the legal prowess he watched in his courtroom.

“It’s exhilarating to watch,” he said. “You’ll never

see better.”"* Unfortunately for Microsoft, its intransigence so irritated him that he didn’t bother to formulate a third theory, but just allied himself with the government’s. 43

In a common law system, however, that ingeniousness of judges gives them the power to say upon occasion, as Judge Parry did in Chesterton’s time, that “there comes a breaking-point where a great judge recognizes that the precedents in the books are obsolete, and what has to be stated is the justice 19 of the case according to the now existing standard of human righteousness. For many years, the United States Supreme Court has held this view, and Chesterton’s retort is one we should all keep in mind:

First, it encourages legislators to be lazy and leave a bad statute they ought to repeal. Second, they leave it so that it can be resharpened in some reaction or panic against particular people...And third, and most important of all, the same judge who has said that prisoners must not be tortured for evidence may say some fine morning that prisoners may be vivisected for scientific inquiry; and he may have the same reason for saying the one as the other, the simple reason that such talk is fashionable in his set. And the set is very small and very rich; we are dealing strictly with fashion and not even, in any large sense, with public opinion. The standards of that world are often special and sometimes rather secretive.” In a 1906 essay, Chesterton expanded this theme: What we call the common sense of our Judges, the way in which they mould the law to fit special occasions; the way in which an English Judge will become often a kind of benevolent opportunist; all this may be a good thing. But it is paternal despotism...The whole point is, however, not that our Judges have a personal power, but that the whole world around them, the newspapers, the tone of opinion, encourage

them to use it in a very personal way. In our legal method there is too much lawyer and too little law. For we must never forget one fact, which we tend to forget nevertheless: that a fixed rule is the only protection of ordinary humanity against

clever men — who are the natural enemies of humanity. A dogma is the only safeguard of democracy. The law is our only barrier against lawyers.”!

In the years before May, 1913, Chesterton filled his Ilustrated London News columns with generic cautions such as these about law courts, but increasingly, he came to focus on the problem of the law’s treatment of the

poor, a problem that he had highlighted as early as Heretics, in 1905:

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It is a sufficient proof that we are not an essentially democratic state that we are always wondering what we shall do with the poor. If we were democrats, we should be wondering what the

poor will do with us. With us the governing class is always Saying to itself, ‘What laws shall we make?’ In a purely democratic state it would always be saying, ‘What laws can we obey?’ A purely democratic state perhaps there has never been. But even the feudal ages were in practice thus far democratic, that every feudal potentate knew that any laws which he made would in all probability return upon himself. His feathers might be cut off for breaking a sumptuary law. His head might be cut off for high treason. But the modern laws are almost always laws made to affect the governed class, but not the governing. We have public-house licensing laws, but not sumptuary laws. That is to say, we have laws against the festivity and hospitality of the poor, but no laws against the festivity and hospitality of the rich. We have laws against blasphemy — that is, against a kind of coarse and offensive speaking in which nobody but a rough and obscure man would be likely to indulge. But we have no laws against heresy — that is, against the intellectual poisoning of the whole people, in which only a prosperous and prominent man would be likely to be successful. The evil of aristocracy is not that it necessarily leads to the infliction of bad things or the suffering of sad ones; the evil of aristocracy is that it places everything in the hands of a class of people who can always inflict what they can never suffer. Whether what they inflict is, in their intention, good or bad, they become equally frivolous.” The abuse of power denied what was divine in the person oppressed, while impairing what was divine in the oppressor; it ignored one soul and imperiled the other.

Vox populi vox Dei is not a maxim we are in any danger of overdoing; for the modern world has profoundly lost faith in both the two entities. But there is one sense in which the voice of the people is really like the voice of God; and that is that most of us take precious little notice of it.”

Chesterton spent these years before 1913 championing the causes of the poor against the legislators and courts and police whom he saw becoming their oppressors. He decried the persecution of the gypsies in the street when the palmists to the wealthy escaped unscathed.” He fought the assumption he saw among the respectable that a decent prison was the natural place for the nna 45

poor,’ battled laws assessing housing penalties against the poor” and fought proposals to imprison inebriates even if they had committed no crimes.” THie bitterly opposed the concept of indeterminate sentences, where the poor would be kept in jail not for a specific term of expiation for their crime but until some expert thought they had received the necessary treatment: I say most emphatically that punishment ought to be proportioned to the ‘heinousness of the offence,’ and most emphatically not to the ‘needs of the offender.’ The offender might need all the purgatorial fires to burn out of him the smallest meanness. But law is not required to save the sinner, but to prevent or punish the sin. Once adopt the distinction employed in the above paragraph — the treatment of doubtful souls instead of the punishment of convicted ones — and there is no reason why anyone should be out of prison....What they would mean is this very true and practical circumstance: that prison-reform has no perils for you and me; for only poor people are sent either to the old prison or the new.” Chesterton did not support capital punishment:

For my part, I would have no executions except by the mob; or, at least, by the people acting quite exceptionally. I would make capital punishment impossible except by act of attainder. Then there would be some chance of a few of our real oppressors getting hanged.” And increasingly as time went by, he came to see the law courts as the places where the real oppressors ruled supreme:

We have begun to realise that we must leave the mere hanging of the evil-doers, for whom

the law is a natural enemy, and

begin to sharpen some public weapons against those evildoers for whom the law is a natural protection. To have overthrown

the wealthy, subtle and cautious financier in a law-court is to have fought the monster in his lair and knifed the eagle on the edge of the precipice; to have trapped the Red Indian in the forest, and broken the clans in the pass of Killiecrankie.*° Suddenly, abuses came to a literature and the Chesterton focus

in May of 1913, the torrent of writings on the law and its halt. The I/lustrated London News columns talk about Middle Ages, education and art, but not until 1920 does again on law. The reason, of course, is that the wealthy,

subtle and cautious financier had not been overthrown in the law courts in Ss eS—S—S—esesesSsSsh 46

the course of the Marconi case, and Gilbert Chesterton would take years to get over the blow. In his Autobiography, published in 1936, Chesterton would divide recent history into the Pre-Marconi and Post-Marconi days” and claim the case would be regarded as one of the turning-points in the whole history of England and the world. But in the immediate aftermath of the case, the wounds were too deep for him to write about law. The Marconi case” itself is not particularly interesting from a legal standpoint. Members of the British government, including Rufus Isaacs and David Lloyd George, created at a minimum a gross appearance of impropriety by trading in newly issued shares of the American Marconi Company while an immensely valuable potential contract between that company’s British sister corporation and the British government was awaiting approval by Parliament. They compounded the offense by selling many of their shares, within a few weeks of ostensible purchase, to members of the public at profits of 50% to 100%, raising much the same suspicions as an American politician would excite if he or she made $100,000 on a first-time, short-term futures

trade involving a company being regulated by a close relative. A fair inference would have been that, whether Isaacs and Lloyd George were peddling their influence or not, the Marconi Company was certainly trying to buy it. G.K.’s beloved brother, Cecil Chesterton, did not merely accuse those

involved of trading on inside information or of taking unfair advantage of ordinary investors or even of influence-peddling. He accused them of accepting bribes in exchange for saddling the British government and the English people with a broadcasting system that they knew to be grossly deficient and inferior to others available. This was almost certainly false; and Cecil Chesterton was in any event quite incapable of proving it was true. When he relentlessly pressed his campaign in The New Witness, the Liberal government eventually prosecuted him for criminal libel. He acted as his own lawyer and, as the adage about having a fool for a client predicts, made a hash out of it — although it is doubtful that the cream of English barristers could have avoided conviction. He might theoretically have been imprisoned but was in fact merely fined and assessed costs, the whole amounting to some £2,000 or $10,000 (a far more

substantial sum at the time than it would be today). G.K. Chesterton regarded the Marconi case as an historical turning point. He believed that, hundreds of years from now, people would look back on that case as the start of an irreversible decline into political decadence. He did not believe that, however, because he thought that it represented a misuse of the law. Criminal law, to be sure, was a remarkably blunt and clumsy instrument to use against a newspaper editor who had managed to discover the one crime that scoundrels in public office have not committed and accuse them of it. In contemporary America, the airwaves are filled with accusations

that the President of the United States has imported drugs into his home state ot eee ee 2, 47

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by way of a secret landing strip for airplanes, has murdered a reporter who got too close, and has murdered an aide who was about to crack. Those of us

habituated to this milieu may find the proceeding against Cecil Chesterton not only misguided but unthinkable. There was nothing particularly shocking about it in 1912 England, however. In living memory England had faced, in the Chartist movement of the 1840's, the very real-threat of armed revolution incited by fiery screeds in the radical press aimed at workers and farmers, and had imprisoned men for years in order to check that threat. Governments were thought to have a right to defend themselves against the pen as well as the sword, and laws against criminal libel were viewed as an essential weapon in their arsenal for that purpose. Indeed, it is far from clear that, even in the United States, the First Amendment

would have barred such a prosecution at

that time. In our opinion, G.K. Chesterton took a melodramatic view of the case because he saw the larger issue that it represented. He saw that the only motivation of the Liberal Party leaders for acting as they did in the scandal was to stay in power at any price, and the only motivation of the liberal newspapers (including the one that he worked for at the time) in supporting them was to keep them in power. Power had thus become an end in itself; not power to do anything in particular; just power to be exercised for the sake of exercising it. Politics, on this view, could never again hope to be a clash of ideas. Politics — the struggle over who would control the law — had been irrevocably reduced to Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach “where ignorant armies clash by night.” And Chesterton’s hopes for reform in the world no longer centered on the law and politics, but on the law of God. For three years, we attended law classes at Harvard in Langdell Hall, a majestic classical building above whose columns was carved Bracton’s medieval concept of limited royal authority, which insisted that the king must be “non sub homine sed sub Deo et lege” — “under no man, but under God and the law.”* Chesterton quotes Bracton’s formula in his essay on Thomas More, collected in The Well and the Shallows, and aptly points out, that in that context “law” meant not simply legislation but “the morality implied in all our institutions.”** Law, as the medieval phrase hinted, was a touch of divine

grace in practical human to Caesar; and there was By the 1920s and the Lawgiver rather than

affairs. Or, as Chesterton noted, “There were limits liberty with God.”*® 1930s, Chesterton’s writings on the law trust God Parliament and Judges, the Lawmakers. In 1925, he

wrote in The Everlasting Man about the revolution that came with the birth of Christ, “about the change which this conception of a deity born like an outcast or even an outlaw had upon the whole conception of law and its duties to the poor and outcast.”* In answering the question “Why lama Catholic” in 1926, he gave as one of the major reasons, “It is the only large

attempt to change the world from the inside; working through wills and not laws.”*” He continued to fight for the poor, but he started taking a particular ee ee 48

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_ interest in the limits of law. In 1910, he had written in What’s Wrong with the World : Just as there are fields too far off for law, so there are fields too near; as a man may see the North Pole before he sees his own

backbone. Small and near matters escape control at least as much as vast and remote ones; and the real pains and pleasures of the family form a strong instance of this.°* By 1922, he was writing:

If a policeman is engaged in preventing a man from standing treat to an old friend in a public-house, he cannot at the same moment be preventing another man from stabbing an old enemy in another public-house. The common sense of this consideration was as obvious as broad daylight to our fathers, and was embodied in the old legal tag of ‘De minimis non curat lex.’ But that maxim has certainly been entirely reversed and repudiated in modern social legislation. Our officials are so much occupied in controlling diet and details of medical theory, and disputed points of decorum in the arts, that such a trifle as a corpse on a doorstep or an assassination a few yards

from a lamp-post appears almost in the nature of an irritating and unexpected addition to their daily toils. They cannot be expected to concentrate on anything so barbaric and elementary. ‘De maximis non curat lex.’...A scheme of official control which is too ambitious for human life has broken down, and broken down exactly where we need it most. Instead of law being a strong cord to bind what it is really possible to bind, it has become a thin net to cover what it is quite impossible to cover. It is the nature of a net so stretched to break everywhere; and the practical result of our

bureaucracy is something very near to anarchy.”

One notable way in which the limits of law in an imperfect world permeated his thought was in the matter of distributism. In the United States, John Sherman, the brother of William Tecumseh Sherman who marched

through Georgia to memorable effect, was worried in the late nineteenth century about protecting small businessmen and farmers from the overwhelming economic power of massive corporations that emerged from the nationalization of the American economy in the aftermath of the Civil War.” He authored a famous 200-odd word opus called the Sherman Antitrust Act, and it has recently been invoked to split up the richest corporation in the world on the ground that it acted like a bully to other wealthy corporations. oe

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Chesterton would have approved — but his approval would not have come unleavened by irony.’ For Sherman’s Act was a classic example of a law seeking to accomplish an essentially spiritual end without embracing spirituality. Sherman trusted judges and lawyers in their interpretations of terms like “contracts in restraint of trade” and “monopolization” and ended up with a law whose purpose was perverted from protecting small shop holders and farmers to increasing efficiency and consumer welfare. The sugar trust and the steel trust were extremely efficient. That was precisely Sherman’s objection to them. They were so large and efficient that they squeezed smaller producers out. Microsoft was also efficient and claimed to increase consumer welfare. Its only trouble was that its dealings were so egregious that they irritated a federal judge who was suspicious that Bill Gates could testify on Capitol Hill but not make time for live court testimony.” Chesterton, though he urged the passage of laws to restrain monopolists, didn’t stop with legal remedies: I begin by enunciating the paradox that one way of supporting small shops would be to support them... it is a lie to say that we cannot make a law to imprison monopolists, or pillory monopolists, or hang monopolists if we choose, as our fathers did before us. And in the same sense it is a lie to say that we cannot help buying the best advertised goods or going to the biggest shop or falling in, in our general social habits, with the general social trend.*

In other words, it’s all very good for the government to sue Microsoft, and even win. But when was the last time you bought an Apple computer? Chesterton’s distributism is a theory of hope, a wager that human beings can be convinced to receive God’s grace and look to their souls ahead of their day-trading accounts. Senator Sherman’s distributism was more a shrug of resignation, if not despair. Men are the way they are, Sherman would have said, they always will be, all we can do is try to channel their selfishness and avarice into courses that might perversely serve the common good in spite of themselves.’ Chesterton’s distributism insisted on the common people asserting their freedom and free will in the entire range of ways they possibly could. That is why Chesterton might have recognized that in heaven the lion lies down with the lamb and there are no lawyers; whereas in hell, the lion devours the lamb, but in the fine tradition of the English court system, due process of law is scrupulously observed as if it were a sporting match.” It should be noted, in conclusion, that Father Brown commonly refuses to deliver the murderers he has exposed to the police. And that in The Club of Queer Trades, Basil Grant retires from the legal bench to sit as a purely moral judge to settle those moral disputes which really make social life ee

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impossible, such as selfishness, vanity, scandal-mongering or stinginess.*° In the imaginary world he could control, the fairy tale world of the mystery story,” Chesterton gave us his real opinion on the limits of the law. And those are limits all lawyers should keep in mind. One week in June, 2000, two judges made the front pages of the Washington Post. One was Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, pronouncing judgment on the largest corporation in the land. The other was a judge in a less-glamorous cause, a common landlord-tenant dispute over unpaid rent, but as Chesterton noted, it is the judges who preside over the lowest courts who come into intimate contact with the most vivid truths.** Judge Donald P. McDonough had before him a married deaf couple, Deborah Morris and Louis Swann, who had committed an atrocity in the eyes of the social services department — they had gotten married in middle age, long after meeting at a school for the deaf. As a result of the marriage, Deborah’s disability benefits had been unexpectedly sharply reduced, and their rent was in arrears. Judge McDonough slowed the assembly line of 150 landlord-tenant cases on the day’s docket. “Can’t you settle?” he asked the landlord’s lawyer. “No,” said the lawyer. Judge McDonough left the courtroom, returned a

minute later with two crisp $100 bills and a $50 bill in his hands, handed them to the lawyer, and scrawled on the case folder, “Dismissed as paid.” Four

other lawyers whipped out their checkbooks and raised another $1250. The judge refused to be interviewed by the press for his deed. The landlord’s attorney whined that the judge was “pro-tenant” and had made him and his client seem miserly. And Deborah Morris, when the signlanguage interpreter told her what had happened, pressed her hands to her chest in unaffected rapture. As long as the Judge McDonoughs of America are about in the land, there is hope for the law. Fighting Microsoft is fine, but it’s part of the game of law. It was Judge McDonough who affirmed by his actions the truth of Chesterton’s most profound statement of the law, in Orthodoxy : If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe

in any miracle in any age. If a man believes in a will behind law, he can believe in any miracle in any age.” 1 Quoted in Robert Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph (New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1979) 63. 2 What’s Wrong with the World (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1956) 122. CW) Vol. I. 3 Orthodoxy, 1908, Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton (Hereafter (San Francisco: Ignatius. 1987) 303. 4 Illustrated London News (Hereafter ILN) June 5, 1920.

5 The Everlasting Man (1925) CW 2: 185. 6 “The Macbeths”, collected in The Spice of Life, ed. by Dorothy Collins, (Beaconsfield: Darwen Finlayson, 1964) 46-47. jee Sy

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7 “Shakespeare and the Legal Lady”, Fancies versus Fads. (London: Methuen 1929) pp. 46-54); ILN, February 27, 1909; ILN August 31, 1912;

ILN August 8,

1914; ILN August 13, 1921. 8 What’s Wrong with the World. 121. 9 ILN August 8, 1914. 10 “The Twelve Men”, collected in Tremendous Trifles, 1909, and Chesterton Essays (London: Methuen, 1953) 18-21.

1 Thidv21: 12 TENAprilsl 771909) 13 Ibid. 14 “The Lawlessness of Lawyers” in The Uses of Diversity (New York: Dodd, Mead. 1921) 79-88. 15 ILN April 4, 1914. 16 Ibid. p. 74. 17 ILN December 9, 1911. 18 “Retracing the Missteps in the Microsoft Defense”, New York Times, June 9,

2000. Al. 19 “Lawlessness of Lawyers” 84. 20 Ibid. 86. ZISILN September 22,51906: 22 Heretics 1905) CW

eis LI0-191;

23 JUN September 9, 1911. 24 ILN June 17, 1911. 25

ILN December 30, 1911.

26 ILN April 5, 1913. 27 ILN MayeZo 1912. 28 ILN April 20, 1912. 29 ILN February 6, 1909. See also ILN May 6, 1911 and

JLN January

20, 1923.

30 ILN August 22, 1908. 31 The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton, CW 16: 192. 32 This discussion of the Marconi case is based primarily on the account in Maisie Ward’s biography, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1943) 331-362. 33 Chesterton also discussed this concept in What’s Wrong with the World, p. 119: “The religious basis of government was not so much that people put their trust in princes, as that they did not put their trust in any child of man.” 34 The Well and the Shallows. (1935) CW 3: 507.

35 Ibid. 36 The Everlasting Man. 305. 3/7 Wihy-lvamy ai Gatholics(1526)"GWess127. 38 What’s Wrong with the World. 38. SOTIDN Aprils 22. 40 Although it is diametrically opposed to more than a century of legal ————— ee

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development, including numerous decisions by the United States Supreme Court, this view is not controversial as a matter of legislative history or, for that matter, of history, period. For a statement of the basic thesis and a collection of the essential authorities, see Hovenkamp, “The Robinson-Patman Act and Competition: Unfinished Business,” 68 Antitrust Law Journal 125, 130-31 & n.17 (2000)(“The legislative histories of the Sherman Act, [and] the

Clayton Act... were fairly dominated by a fear of big business that we would today regard as exaggerated, and by a strong desire to protect small business from the ravages of excessive competition. This was true to a substantial degree of Senator John Sherman’s original vision of the Act that bears his name.”).

41 Chesterton unambiguously condemned the “plutocratic collectivism” of trusts and ridiculed the cowardly view that “we cannot make a law to imprison monopolists, or pillory monopolists, or hang monopolists if we choose, as our fathers did before us.” The Outline of Sanity, CW 5: 108, 113. See also ILN January 14, 1922, to the same effect. 42 “For Antitrust Judge, Trust, or Lack of It, Really Was the Issue,” Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2000. Al, A8. 43 The Outline of Sanity (1926) CW 5: 110,113. See also Chesterton’s

discussion of medieval forestalling, or cornering the market in JLN, January 1471922. 44 Cf. Chesterton’s discussion in ILN January 20, 1906, reprinted in All Things Considered, 1908 as “The Vote and the House,” of how the optimistic reformer

is far more effective than the pessimistic reformer. 45 Cf. Chesterton’s comparison of the English and French legal systems in ILN July 17, 1909 (“The spirit of our law is that the prisoner must be protected by the rules of the game; if he can be caught and killed in accordance with those rules, no one has the slightest pity for him.”) 46 The Club of Queer Trades (1904) CW 4: 212. 47 ILN January 20, 1923. 48 ILN December 9, 1911. 49 Orthodoxy. 278.

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Peter Floriani

“Doctor Chesterton, Ontology! Stat!” Iam a computer scientist, so that means, like Gabriel Gale, “I often

stare at windows.” At the company I work for, I have arranged a message system from our headquarters in Pennsylvania to bounce off a satellite in

geosynchronous orbit somewhere high above the longitude of the western boundary of Kansas. This is quite fun, and gave me a most curious opportunity: in order to safeguard the messages, I must mark them with an identifying code, and I chose to label each of them with the Ignatian AMDG, Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam. (“To the greater glory of God.”) Also, in an unexpected place I found a very powerful technique to efficiently manage the distribution of computerized video clips. It’s called “subsidiarity” and it was invented over 100 years ago by Pope Leo XIII. In order to explain this to my boss and other co-workers, I quoted Chesterton’s Heretics: “I revert to the doctrinal methods of the thirteenth century, inspired by the general hope of getting something done.”” So now, there is at least one high-tech company on earth that knows about Chesterton, they know about subsidiarity, and they also know that thirteenth century metaphysics is the means by which so much of our work is now being done. That is why I have picked the topic of Chesterton’s metaphysics and titled this paper, “Doctor Chesterton, Ontology, Stat!” You see, in the book called On the Consolation of Philosophy, the author Boethius, a sixth-century Christian, is writing in prison, and the spirit of Philosophy appears to him as a woman, dressed in a robe woven by her own hands, and bearing in its border the letters PI below and THETA above, with steps leading up from PI to THETA. These letters signify PRAXIS (the Practical), and THEORIA (the Theoretical): the divisions of Philosophy. And while I am indeed not a

philosopher, I somehow think that it is the staircase between the two which is the most interesting point of Philosophy’s allegorical robe. Josef Pieper, in a most amazing little book, writes: “Philosophy does not serve any purpose,” and “The contemplation of reality is properly called ‘theoretical’ whenever the aim is to discover the truth and nothing else.”’ And I, who delight in reading Chesterton who said, “I never can get enough Nothing to do,”* will not dispute it at present. But! in another, and even more amazing book, called The Sanctifier, |

read that St. Augustine said “Virtue is order in love”; and the great (dare I say immense) (St. Thomas Aquinas teaches “It belongs to wisdom to set things in order.

MS

Hence the staircase between THETA and PI must signify both love and wisdom — and since love (or charity) is the greatest of the virtues, and wisdom the greatest of the gifts of the Spirit, I must not fail to recognize that at the celebration of Pentecost that Divine Person, the Holy Spirit, is called Dulcis Hospes Animae (“the sweet Guest of the soul”). 159

If you look up that word Hospes, you will find another one of those amazing ideas which we don’t have in English. Like the Vietnamese who stick the word Duc into the Gloria, magnifying the glory of the Divine Name by referring to God as “His Majesty,” the Romans had the word hospes for the relation between host and guest — a most special one for them, and one which nowadays probably exists only among those most theoretical and practical people called Chestertonians. But in any case, there is an English word connected with this Latin one ( the word “hospital,” and it is in a

hospital that I found the major ideas I wish to set forth. re

tee)

Whether you have been in a hospital, or read a story about a hospital, or seen a TV show set in a hospital, I am sure you have heard the PA system call for a doctor to report to some room or wing or department — and, whether you have had some Latin, or even no Latin at all, you may know

that that call is often followed by word “stat” — which is medical jargon for “immediately” (statim in Latin). You may also know, either because you have a degree in philosophy, or because you know Greek, or because you like to read, that the word “ontology” is the term for that branch of philosophy which is the study of being itself — where we find essences which have no smell, and accidents

which require no paramedics, and a variety of other technical terms, arrayed in a complexity which confuse — or more accurately bore — the nonphilosophers — and especially those very modern and very technical nonphilosophers who one encounters everywhere. Of course the idea of being bored by philosophy — and especially by ontology — is very funny, because we are always “doing” philosophy even if we are not thinking it. And those of us who are technical, who do technical things, or use technical things — indeed, most especially those who use technical things without knowing it — all of us are depending directly upon some of the most abstract and intricate (yet fundamental) aspects of ontology, and we all place implicit faith in its absolute power. I had planned a detailed analysis of the Chestertonian view of ontology, about which it is so easy to find innumerable examples, but I am

not a philosopher, and I don’t want to bore you. So instead I am going to tell you a story. | want you to come with me to the emergency room of a hospital, where doctors struggle to deal with the injuries and trauma of humanity. [Note that in the following story, the meaning of the name of Doctor Joshua Elpis is relevant: Elpis means “hope” in Greek.]

Doctor Joshua Elpis walked down the hallway smiling — confident and reliable, he has had years of experience in trauma. Alice, the head ER nurse, came up to him shaking her head. “We’ve ss eee

160

got a real puzzle here, doctor. Aga 3. I’ve never seen something this bad.” “What is it?” “You'll have to see for yourself.” The doctor nodded; he liked a challenge. If Alice couldn’t give him the expected summary, it had to be something tricky. In Room 3, the man lay flat on his back. A nurse was checking his blood pressure. The EKG graph showed normal sinus thythm. Another nurse stood by the equipment cabinets, holding the case clipboard. She was going to hand it to Doctor Elpis, but he went right to the patient. He felt the pulse, checked the pupil reaction, sniffed the mouth. “Heart rate ok, probably not a bee-sting. . . Maybe an overdose.” He rolled up the patient’s shirtsleeves, looking for needle marks. Shaking his head, he ordered, “Full blood chemistry. . .” “That won’t help,” Alice stated. The doctor glared at her. “What do you mean?” “Can't you see? It’s nothing physical. This man is bored.” “Hmm.” He looked again at the man’s eyes. “Fixed and dilated. Vital signs normal — but total lack of interest, motion, or activity. In a word,

lethargy.” Alice nodded. “Yes, I’ve heard it’s insidious — and pervasive.” “It’s becoming an epidemic — the journals are full of it.” Almost to himself the doctor added, “Sometimes I think the journals are spreading it.” The doctor looked at Alice, with whom

he had faced so much human

suffering. “There’s nothing I can do.” “Josh! You — you’re giving up? You mean there’s no hope?” “No, there’s always hope. But only a miracle can save him now.” Alice nodded.

“Well, if I want any miracles, I know where to get

them.”° The doctor shrugged. “This man needs true happiness — it’s the only antidote to boredom.” Alice smiled. “‘You should learn whence true happiness may be sought. The other nurses looked at her oddly, but Doctor Elpis only replied, “‘For that I have been impatiently awaiting.’” “‘But divine help must be sought in small things as well as great... so you, must we do to deserve to find the place of that highest think what, good?’” The doctor had a strange feeling that he had once read something like this somewhere, perhaps during his undergraduate years. The words seemed to fall into a strange order, as if he were quoting Gray’s Anatomy: “’Call upon the Father of all, for if we do not do so, no undertaking would be rightly or duly begun.’” “You are right,” Alice said, and thus she cried aloud:

“Grant, O Father, that this mind of ours may rise to Thy throne of in 161

EET

majesty; grant us to reach that fount of good. Grant that we may set on Thee unblinded eyes; cast Thou therefrom the heavy clouds of this material world. Shine forth upon us in Thine own true glory. Thou art the bright and peaceful rest of all Thy children that worship Thee. To see Thee clearly is the limit of our aim. Thou art our beginning, our progress, our guide, our way, our end.’”’ Then, suddenly, they heard the PA system*blaring, “Doctor Chesterton, Doctor G. K. Chesterton! Ontology, stat.”

Out in the hallway there was a sudden burst of laughter, and the door flew open. An immense man strode in, beaming with smiles. “Doctor Chesterton, at your service.” Doctor Elpis stared at the man, who was dressed all in white — no, it

couldn’t be something unusual, he thought to himself; it was merely the standard physician’s lab coat. The nurse standing by the patient was staggered. “You’re awfully fat, for a doctor,” and she barely suppressed a giggle. Alice glared at her rude employee, but the large man chuckled. “Fatness itself is a valuable quality. While it creates admiration in the onlookers, it creates modesty in the possessor.” He made a slight bow towards the outspoken nurse, and walked towards the patient. “If there is anything on which I differ from the monastic institutions of the past, it is that they sometimes sought to achieve humility by means of emaciation. It may be that the thin monks were holy, but I am sure it was the fat monks who were humble. Falstaff said that to be fat is not to be hated, but it certainly is to be

laughed at, and that is a more wholesome experience for the soul of man.”* Doctor Elpis frowned. “Doctor, it may be wholesome,

but I don’t

think it will help this man if we laugh at him.” Chesterton bent slightly and looked at the man’s face. “It’s clear that he is suffering from acute and chronic boredom.” He shook his head and looked at Doctor Elpis. “Mr. Aldous Huxley remarked that those who are now pursuing pleasure are not only fleeing from boredom, but are acutely suffering from it. It is no longer a question of A Good Time coming; for The Good Times have gone with the arrival of A Good Time All the Time. Mr. Huxley is no romanticist or sentimentalist, or what some call “Mediaevalist”; he is, if

ever there was one, a realist. But he confessed that he sought out the rude and secluded villages where there are still what our fathers called Feasts. That is, there are still festive celebrations of particular dates and events, which people feel as exceptions and enjoy as exceptions. But men cannot even enjoy riot when the riot is the rule.” “True,” Doctor Elpis acknowledged, “but people are bored everywhere, it seems, riots or no riots, feasts or no feasts.”

Chesterton frowned momentarily. “Yes. For instance, we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a ee eS

162

railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures.”!° The nurse watching the EKG monitor said, “Doctor, the patient’s heart rate has increased!” Doctor Chesterton nodded. “Good, then we'll proceed,” He turned away from the patient, looking slowly around the room. “Ah,” he chuckled at a diagram on the wall, “the actual details of the human throat!” “Of course,” Doctor Elpis shrugged, wondering what this had to do with boredom. “The mouth, the pharynx, the larynx, and the trachea...” “The larynx — hmm, the only time I seem to recall using the word was in an essay about the Drood murder by Dickens.” ' But such intricately detailed art! Apparently, I must extend my metaphor, and say that anatomy, like art and morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.” ” “Indeed, it is for that reason we give each part its proper name,” replied Doctor Elpis. “In the larynx itself, there are the thyroid cartilage, the cricoid, the epiglottis, and six others, then there are the eight main muscles, and a variety of ligaments, all supplied by the ninth and tenth cranial nerves, via the laryngeal and pharyngeal branches, and not to mention the mucous membrane...” “Ah, names, hmm.

Ah, but what did you say? There is mucus in the

windpipe?” “Yes, indeed; it serves to lubricate the vocal chords.”

“T would not have thought of it, being more apt to lubricate mine with beer...” “Doctor!” Alice interrupted, “his eyes flashed open just then!” Chesterton merely nodded: “Perhaps he is thirsty. Reminds me of something I read recently: Oh water cold we may pour at need, Down a thirsty throat and be glad indeed, But better is beer if drink we lack,

And water hot poured down the back.” The big man smacked his lips. “All that wonderful complexity of machinery...” He glanced at the doctor. “Otherwise, he is physically in good condition?” “Except for this seemingly terminal boredom, he’s in splendid health, thankfully. And speaking of his larynx, I am sure he could talk — I mean, speak, and speak freely — if he only had something to talk about.” The big doctor smiled warmly at Dr. Elpis. “I think you have completely grasped the situation. Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of man. He takes his political benefits for granted, just as he takes the skies and the seasons for granted ... Just as we forget where we stand in relation to natural phenomena,

so we forget it in relation to social

phenomena. We forget ... that free speech is a paradox” "* Alice smiled at this, and Doctor Elpis was about to comment, but Qo

ee

EEE 163

again the nurse by the patient interrupted. “Look, Doctor, his eyes are open!” “Ah,” said Chesterton, “he has begun to heal, and soon he will be

ready to join us. You see,” he chuckled warmly, “the object of my school is to show how many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing.” » “I don’t think I see,” stated the other nurse, unconscious of her pun. “We don’t know what this man has gone through — what kind of difficulties of work or family life he faces. This man is clearly bored with life as it is for him — and you force him to this ‘single activity of seeing’? You ought to be more open-minded to the problems of today.” Chesterton laughed then, and the patient’s eyes blinked quickly. Alice was glad the heart monitor was not connected to her, as she felt a sudden thrill at G.K.’s next words. “The modern man fancies he has reached supreme culture because he opens his intellect. But the supreme culture (in the forcible modern phrase) is to know when to shut your head.” Or, to put it another way, I am incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” " The patient moved as if he wanted to sit up, but Alice cautioned him, “Just lie still for a few moments more.”

Chesterton came over to the patient and looked into his eyes again. To himself he murmured, “Ah, now the gleam is returning.” In his normal voice he said, “Sometimes, when you're lost in a dark forest, where all the

trees are straight, you need to look for the telegraph pole, which really is straight.”” The patient gulped, and said in a weak voice, “Thanks, Doctor!” Doctor Elpis smiled, and with a gesture ordered the nurses to put the equipment away. “Doctor Chesterton, do you have anything to prescribe?” Chesterton glanced back to the diagram of the larynx and nodded. Looking back at the patient, he grasped his arm in a friendly and supportive clasp. “There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking. For he who has realized this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to infinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and that under all our grumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude. That light of the positive is the business of the poets, because they see all things in the light of it more than do other men.”” He nodded again, and pulling a notebook and a green pencil from his pocket he scribbled out a prescription. “Carry this pencil and notebook with you. Every day for the next week I want you to write a poem. And, if you should again feel this malady arising, quickly sit down and write a poem in it sg eeeeSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSFFsee

164

— ah, a poem on any topic you please. But,” he paused, with a twinkle in his eye, “You might find it easier if start you off with a topic or two.” He chuckled a little, and said, “Start today with a poem on cheese. You, know,

poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.””° ***

“Doctor Chesterton, ontology, stat.” Yes, it is true that “Few of us have ever, in desperate haste, summoned

a metaphysician.”*' Perhaps it is time that we did. We have in Chesterton an intimate contact with one of the truly great metaphysicians of all time. We ought to be lovers of Chesterton, and not merely by reading his writing, but by trying to imitate him. I don’t mean we ought to gain a couple of hundred pounds, carry a walking sword-stick, and write newspaper columns at the very last minute. But I do mean this: Chesterton imitated the Master of Nazareth in hating the sin, but loving the sinner. “The Bible tells us to love our neighbours,” and also to love our enemies;* probably because they are generally the same people. And there is a real human reason for this. You think of a remote man merely as a man; that is, you think of him in the right way... But you do not think about the soul of your next-door neighbour. He is not a man; he is an environment. He is the barking of a dog; he is the noise of a pianola; he is a dispute about a party wall. . .”” Or, as he commented elsewhere: “Before any modern man talks with authority about loving men, I insist (I insist with violence) that he shall

always be very much pleased when his barber tries to talk to him. His barber is humanity: let him love that. If he is not pleased at this, I will not accept any substitute in the way of interest in the Congo or in the future of Japan. If a man cannot love his barber whom he has not seen?””

he has seen, how shall he love the

Japanese whom

But there is more. As Chesterton remarked to Dr. Elpis, ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of man. That must therefore mean that “Thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” Hence, we ought to do as St. Paul commands,

“Dedicate

yourselves to thankfulness.” And this gratitude, this thankfulness must be authentic, not a mere

meaningless social custom. Love is of the will, not the emotion, and we are commanded to love our neighbors. This is as far removed from the current fad of open-mindedness as it is possible to get. Note, too: we might not agree with someone, but we can try to see things from his view. This is the height of philosophy: “Now the Schoolman always had two ideas in his head; if they were only the Yes and No of his own proposition. The Schoolman was not only the schoolmaster but also the schoolboy; he examined himself; he cross-examined himself; he may be said to have heckled himself for hundreds of pages. Nobody can read St. Thomas's theology without hearing all the arguments against St. Thomas’s theology. ot

i 165

Therefore, even when that sort of faith produced what many would call ferocity, it always produced what I mean here by fairness; the almost involuntary intellectual fairness of one who cannot help knowing that the universe is a many-sided thing.”” Humor, most will agree, was a real specialty of Chesterton; they’ll admit that he was witty even if they won’t admit*his wisdom. But, as he pointed out, “What we call wit the French call esprit — spirit. When they want to call a man witty, they call him spiritual. They actually use the same word for wit which they use for the Holy Ghost.”” But I must come to an end (dare I say draw the line?) somewhere, and there is one more thing I must mention, which is one of the most powerful of all Chesterton’s lines, and one which I think few of us here have ever taken to

heart — and the one which we had better begin to implement as quickly as we can. In The Man Who Was Thursday, Lucien Gregory the anarchist says to Gabriel Syme: “You don’t expect me to revolutionize society on this lawn?” Our hero, Syme looks straight into his eyes and smiles sweetly. “No, I don’t,” he says, “but I suppose that if you were serious about your Chesterton, that is exactly what you would do.” It’s true that Gabriel Syme actually says the word “anarchism” instead of “Chesterton,” but my point is this: WHEN ARE WE GOING TO START TAKING CHESTERTON

SERIOUSLY?

If only we did, we WOULD

revolutionize

society.

For example: we, despite our different backgrounds, our different religions, our different interests, have a common interest in Chesterton, and more than that, we all have some degree of agreement with him. Well, then,

isn’t that a place wherein we might seek some ecumenism — some REAL centrality? Perhaps instead of debating and mere historical mud-slinging, we might argue, as the Schoolmen once did, in the pursuit of truth. Indeed, we must begin to revolutionize society here and now — because we Chestertonians know, as he did, that our God knows the way out of the grave*' (the only real revolution in history was the stone that revolved on Easter)!°” May we who follow the Everlasting Man never fail to “call upon the Father of all, for if we do not do so, no undertaking would be rightly or duly begun.” May we henceforth strive to imitate Gilbert Chesterton, as he imitated the Master in love and gratitude. And may the Holy Ghost, the sweet Guest of the soul, who “renews

the face of the earth,” assist us to bring to the world the astonishing and true knowledge of being! Amen. 1 The Poet and the Lunatics. (New York: Sheed and Ward 1955) 98. 2 Heretics CW 1:46. 166

3 Josef Pieper. In Defence of Philosophy. 41, 46. 4 Autobiography. CW 16: 202. 5 Luis M. Martinez. The Sanctifier (Boston: Pauline 1985) 3. 6 See the Father Brown story “The Miracle of Moon Crescent.” 7 Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. (tr. W.V.Cooper) 58-60. 8 Illustrated London News (Hereafter ILN) May 8, 1909.

9 Sidelights. CW 21: 506. 10 ILN July 21, 1906. 11 ILN December

11, 1920.

12 ILN May S, 1928, quoting ILN June 5, 1920. 13 Actually, Chesterton didn’t read this. It’s from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The

Fellowship of the Ring. 14 Robert Browning. (1903) (London: MacMillan 1906)173-174. 15 Tremendous Trifles (New York: Sheed and Ward 1956) 6.

16 ILN October 15, 1909. 17 Autobiography. 212. 18 See the essay “The Telegraph Poles” in Alarms and Discursions (New York: Dodd, Mead

19 20 21 22 23 24

1911) 30-37.

Chaucer. CW 18:172-173. Alarms and Discursions. 70. ILN June 14, 1930. Matthew 22:39 and Leviticus 19:18 Matthew 5:44 ILN July 9, 1910.

25 Tremendous Trifles. 113 (See I John 4:20) 26 A Short History of England (1917) (Kent, England:Fisher Press 1994) 43. 27 Colossians 3:15 as it appears in the Divine Office: Common of Holy Men, First Reading. 28 Chaucer, 367: 29 Lunacy and Letters. (London: Sheed and Ward 1958) 84. 30 The Man Who Was Thursday. CW 6:481. 31 See The Everlasting Man. CW 2:382. 32 See the Vulgate version of the Gospel for Easter Sunday.

James Reidy

The Four Bellocs The magazine Gilbert! takes its name from a very revealing incident in the life of G. K. Chesterton. It happened on a summer afternoon in 1908, and what it reveals is the character of a remarkable man and a great Catholic writer, Hilaire Belloc. Chesterton recounts the incident in his autobiography. He and Frances had taken a summer house in Rye and living next door was Henry James. “After exactly the correct interval,” Chesterton writes, James

came to call, accompanied by his brother William. “Needless to say, it was a very stately call of state,” Chesterton goes on, with James making comments of a “quite excruciating tact and delicacy” and the three of them discussing some contemporary literary work “gravely and with delicate degrees of appreciation and doubt,” when suddenly they heard from the front garden “a bellowing noise resembling an impatient foghorn: ‘Gilbert!’” It was Belloc “shouting for bacon and beer.” Then, bedraggled and with his bedraggled hiking companion in tow — they were returning from a trek in France — he came “bursting in on the balanced tea-cup and tentative sentence of Mr. Henry James.” Now, Chesterton has written appreciatively of the subtle genius of our great American novelist, but he thought this situation too subtle even for James. “I doubt to this day whether he, of all men, did not miss the irony of

the best comedy in which he ever played a part.” To Chesterton it was a comedy of ironic contrast. On the one side, the American expatriate in love with European culture, as Chesterton puts it, with the “gentry, the gallantry, the traditions of lineage and locality, the life that had been lived beneath old portraits in oak-panelled rooms.” But on the other side of the tea-table, was the real Europe, “the old thing,” Chesterton says, “that made France and England... ragged, unshaven, shouting for beer, shameless above all shades of poverty and wealth; sprawling, indifferent, secure.” The old thing, the real

thing in the person of Hilaire Belloc was too much for James to take in. As Chesterton concludes, the distance across the tea-table between the Puritan

refinement of Boston and the Europe Belloc Atlantic ocean. ' In light of this introduction, it may brief paper to characterize a man and writer But, of course, James never had hold of the

represented was as wide as the

seem bold for anyone to try in a too large even for Henry James. right clue for appreciating Belloc,

and that is the Catholic Faith, itself “the old thing, the real thing” which had

made the European civilization James only incompletely understood because he had loved it from afar. And it was the Faith that generated the Christian humanism Belloc so exuberantly represents for us, that loving comprehensiveness which ranges from the mysteries of the infinite down to bacon and beer. Happily for my purpose there is one of Belloc’s greatest books that can EE 169

be taken as a kind of self-study of the man who wrote it. The title of this book is The Four Men, and it is the story of an imagined hike of several days across the county of Sussex in south England which was Belloc’s home for most of his life. Four men take this long walk together. The first is called Myself, the writer of the account, and the other three are an old man, a sailor, and a poet.

As they go along they note the landscape, contemplate the present in light of the past, philosophize about the deep questions of life, death, and love, drink at the inns, and sing their own songs. In real life Belloc had a passion for walking tours like this, and it becomes clear looking back on The Four Men that the three besides the author are reflections of the author, each revealing

both a side of Belloc’s character and a type of the writing he did. Then, as Frederick Wilhelmsen demonstrates in an excellent study of Belloc as the four men — which I'm largely following in this paper ( what we have represented in them is indeed the Christian humanism that is at the heart of Western culture. Hilaire Belloc: No Alienated Man is the title of Wilhelmsen’s book, his

thesis being that Belloc, unlike modern man, was not alienated from the world of the past or the present or the world beyond, nor alienated from his own self. We will start with Myself, the author, and a bit of biography. Belloc was born in 1870 in France, of a French father and an English mother, and

was baptized Catholic. He was brought up in England after his father died, and though he went back to serve as a conscript in the French army for a short time, he later got an Oxford degree and made England his home. He was elected twice to Parliament as a young man, but left politics in disgust and settled down to write. Like Chesterton he wrote for the papers, personal essays that were collected and published in a string of little volumes, and then he wrote histories and historical studies, biographies, travel books, novels, and a significant amount of poetry both comic and lyric. Belloc surpasses even his friend Chesterton in the total amount of publication: a hundred and fiftythree books by the time he died in 1953. Though less known today than Chesterton, as late as 1970 he was still being called “a many-sided genius, one of the greatest and most versatile writers of our age” — that from the forward to a Belloc anthology published at the centenary of his birth.’ Now, through all his prodigious and varied output, there runs a consistent Bellocian theme. We have it in the title of one of his best known and most controversial books: Europe and the Faith. It was Catholic Europe that absorbed him, the past that made this civilization, the forces that caused its decline,

and the forces that in our time bid fair to destroy it altogether. As he once put it, it was “all that beauty and right-living and tradition which once inspired and maintained Christendom: the soul of the west.”? This is what he studied and defended, and the way he heartily embraced and lived it may be glimpsed in the persons of the four men. So let's look at each of the three symbolic men who constitute Myself. First there is the old man called Grizzlebeard. In Grizzlebeard we have the ee ee

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archetype of experience and ancient lore, the man with the long memory who represents continuity with the past. This, of course, is Belloc the historian. With the old man of the four, then, we have an invitation to

consider Belloc’s achievement as a chronicler of the past. As I have said, his preoccupation is Europe, and throughout all the historical part of his work, the biographies and surveys of a period, Belloc brought forward a consistent conception of the civilization of Europe. For him it meant Christendom defined as that fusion of the Catholic and Greco-Roman classical tradition which for a thousand years shaped the institutions, formed the consciences, and in the visual and literary arts, incarnated the hopes of Western civilization. In Belloc’s words, it is “the corporate tradition which made Europe: the thing which is the core and soul of all our history for fifteen hundred years, and on into the present time: the continuator of all our Pagan origins transformed, baptized, illumined; the matrix of such culture as we still

retain.” For any European, he adds, “not to know the elements of that affair is to be in a blind ignorance of all his making, and, therefore, of his self.’ Whatever period Belloc dealt with, his eye was on the foundation stones of Europe and on what had been handed down to form contemporary civilization and what had been broken up and lost along the way. He saw in Christendom certain universal elements of a sane and deeply human society. It was a society where, in spite of many limitations and failures, human beings could be reasonably secure and happy in a unity of outlook on such things as the dignity of every person made in the image and likeness of God, the sacredness of marriage and the goodness of creation, the reality of the supernatural, and the assurance of immortality. Needless to say, for us now Belloc can serve as a champion of Western Culture against the demolition of it which the rank, historically ignorant secularism of our day is perpetrating in the name of multiculturism. On the other hand, Belloc has been criticized for going too far in

equating the Catholic faith itself with the Christendom he championed. After all he did claim in Europe and the Faith that “Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe.” “How’s that again?” is a common reaction to this thesis. But to those who objected to it, as Evelyn Waugh did among others, Belloc in defense distinguished between the theological question and the historical. Theologically speaking, the Faith transcends all human cultures and can take root in and transform any of them. But under Divine Providence, the Church in fact took root in and transformed the Mediterranean world and the European continent, so that historically speaking, the thesis about the Faith as Europe can hold. “I have never said that the Church was necessarily European,” Belloc wrote in a published letter. “The Church will last forever, and on this earth, until the end of the world; and our remote descendants

may find its chief membership to have passed to Africans or Asiatics in some civilization yet unborn. What I have said is that the European thing is essentially a Catholic thing, and that European values would disappear with ee LVL

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the disappearance of Catholicism.”’ As he says bluntly at the end of his book: “Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish.” A prophecy to give urgency to our prayers for that re-evangelization of Europe Pope John Paul calls for and to our hopes for that “springtime of Christianity” he assures us will happen in this third millennium of the Redemption. Belloc was never taken seriously by historians of his time, the so-called Whig historians of the British establishment who ignored or deprecated the role of the Catholic faith and tradition in England’s past. For them, the Reformation was a popular movement that had inaugurated what liberalism was continuing in their day, and that is modern Progress with a capital P. Belloc took fierce issue with this, and on one particular thesis that stands out in his account of the Reformation in England, he has just recently been solidly vindicated. He always claimed that the revolution came from the top and not from the English people. It resulted in large measure from the despoiling of the Church — the seizing of the monasteries — for the benefit of individual princes, nobles, squires, merchants and adventurers, and from

the dispossession of Catholic laymen who remained faithful to the Church. This is the dominant fact about the Reformation in England. As Belloc puts it in one of his historical essays, “Those who worked the movement to their enrichment took advantage of genuine religious excitement in a few brave, sincere, and often unbalanced men; but it was not these who made England Protestant — it was a pack of robbers.”® Furthermore, Belloc held that the Reformation would never have taken hold as it did in Europe if England had remained Catholic, given her power and influence as the modern age got underway. Well, the conclusion Belloc arrived at from careful study seemed a preposterous contradiction of the received view of how and why the Reformation took place in England. But now today, revisionist historians are proving Belloc to have been quite on target. Of Eamon Duffy’s account of what took place in England, The Stripping of the Altars published by Yale University Press in 1992, the Intercollegiate Review has this to say in a recent issue: “[It is] a correction to centuries of Whig historiography. [It] demonstrates that the brute force of the state can destroy even the most beloved institutions. What do you know... Belloc was right.”” One cause of the surprise of those who are surprised that Belloc was right after all is the fact that he was in no way an academic historian. The drawback to this, of course, is that he writes history without footnotes,

without the citations and cross-references considered so necessary to substantiate a case. Those in sympathy with Belloc were always confident that, if challenged, he could give the evidence that supports his conclusions. But there is no need for that now that others are supplying the documentation. Belloc’s How the Reformation Happened and Characters of the Reformation can be safely recommended as reliable history — without footnotes. 172

Yet for all that, it is generally agreed that Belloc’s greatest appeal as a historian is this, that he had the rare quality of making the past live on his pages. He tried to put himself in the past, and with his superb prose style, he could make many an episode of European history as real for his reader as he had made it real for himself. Here is an example of his way of doing history, taken from his account of another walk following the old pilgrimage road from Winchester to Canterbury: For my part I desired to step exactly in the footprints of such ancestors. I believed that, as I followed their hesitations at the river

crossings, as I climbed where they had climbed to a shrine whence they also had seen a wide plain, as I suffered the fatigue they suffered, and laboriously chose, as they had chosen, the proper soils for going, something of their much keener life would wake again in the blood I drew from them, and that in a sort I should forget the vileness of my own time, and renew for some few days the better freedom of that vigorous morning when men were already erect, articulate, worshipping God, but not yet broken by complexity and the long accumulation of evil.* To resurrect the past accurately and vividly, Belloc assembled precise facts and then as he describes here, he often went over the ground himself where some event had taken place, pacing off the ranges of the guns in some battle or other, writing about the Danish invasion of Britain only after sailing his small cutter from the North Sea to Norwich, before the same wind. “It is not possible,” he wrote once, “to put into human language that emotion which arises when a man stands upon some plot of European soil and can say with certitude to himself, such-and-such a great or wonderful or beautiful thing happened here.” The burden of pages of his histories and scores of essays was to make his readers feel that emotion. So now, if you haven't forgotten our point of departure for describing Belloc, in the symbolism of The Four Men, the old man Grizzlebeard

representing a man in communion with the past is Belloc the historian who can put us so thoroughly in communion with our past as heirs of Christian Europe. An appreciation of that past is a necessary component of the integrated grasp of things we call Christian humanism. As to its importance today, let me insert something here from Pope John Paul II. It is quite evident in George Weigel’s recent biography that Christian humanism is a major concern of this pope, Already in preparing for the Second Vatican Council, he wrote that “the crucial issue of our time is the human person. At the end of two thousand years,” he says, “the world is asking the Church: what is

Christian humanism and how does it differ from the sundry other humanisms on offer in late modernity? What is the Church’s answer to modernity’s widespread despair about any and all human existence?” As the Oia

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four men, Belloc contributes his answer to these questions. On we go, then, to the second man in Belloc’s self-revealing book, a sailor. This man claims that he “has sailed upon all the seas of the world.” So as the eternal adventurer, the sailor is a man in communion with the physical universe as Grizzlebeard is a man in communion with the past. In his itch for travel and his high spirits and relish for the fare in’ old English inns, he is, you might say, a Christian humanist celebrating the goodness of God’s creation much as Chesterton saw Belloc to be when he came shouting for bacon and beer just home from a walking tour in France. The adventurer in Belloc gave us several and varied sketches of Europe as he saw it on foot. “The best way to travel is on foot, where one is a man like any other man, with the sky above one, and the road beneath, and the world on every side and time to see all.” He saw a great deal. England everywhere and in all weathers, France, Spain, the Pyrenees, North Africa,

Sailing in his cutter, the Nona, he explored the coasts of Britain, the capes, bays, and rivers. In all this he is hungry, as he said, “For real colors and men, and the seeming of things.” And his prose catches it all, as in this rhythmic sentence from his seafaring book The Cruise of the Nona etching the look of dawn. at sea: But just as the morning was beginning on the third day, when it was already so light that the sea looked white against the black land, and before the first touch of the colour had made living the edges of the inland hills, cool with morning, quiet and cheery, not too strong, a friendly wind blew down from old Wales upon the sea."

Belloc put down what he experienced in hundreds of essays collected under titles like “On Everything,” “On Something,” “On Anything,” and just “On.” One of the best of these is called “Hills and the Sea,” a little volume full

of the recurrent themes of all Belloc’s essays: old inns, landscapes and especially the downs of South England, weather and seasons, historical places

of all kinds in Europe, poetry and song, ships and sailing. There is more fine descriptive writing in these essays. In Belloc’s hearty enjoyment of things, we have that spirit of affirmation in the goodness of all created essential to a humanism that is Christian. This is the place to mention what was and is the most loved of Belloc’s books, The Path to Rome. He said it was the only book he wrote

than these things all for

love. He claimed he wrote all the others for money, which he was in constant

need of as a freelance writer and family man with several children. Those who don't know the book may think the title has to do with conversions to the Church of Rome. In fact, The Path to Rome is a travel book. It is the record of a walking pilgrimage Belloc made, age 31, from a spot in southern France on down to the eternal city. One part of it is just a rollicking travelogue with a great deal of humor and much charm in the writing — easily recommendable es eee

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as the first experience the author alone have

of Belloc’s books to read for making his acquaintance. My own reading it is that of a reviewer when it first appeared who said that must be placed “among those few who through the written word been able to excite an almost personal affection.””? But while The

Path to Rome is, as Michael Novak says in the preface to a recent edition, “a

delicious revel in the simple pleasures of the Moselle valley, the Alps, and Tuscany,” it is also, he points out, where we see Belloc “placing himself in touch with ordinary, lived Christianity, without which the civilization of

Europe is unintelligible.” Here, then, is where we see what is especially Christian about Christian humanism — a unity of faith, to begin with. For example, there is the day, the Feast of Corpus Christi, when he comes upon the landlady of an inn in German-speaking Alsace: She was of a very different sort from that good tribe of the Moselle valley beyond the hill; yet she also was Catholic ( she had a little tree set up before her door for the Corpus Christi: see what religion is, that makes people of utterly different races understand each other; for when I saw that tree I knew precisely where I stood. So once we Europeans understood each other, but now we are divided by the worst malignancies of nations and classes." In his recent book Literary Converts Joseph Pearce tells how Arnold Lunn remembered that “this particular passage struck a responsive chord... I was one,” Lunn says, “who first discovered in Belloc’s writings that sense of a

European unity created by the Faith and destroyed by schism.” Pearce goes on to say that Chesterton had earlier made this same discovery in Belloc."* To cite Pope John Paul again. He has said that it is “a spiritual genealogy from Christ that makes Europe Europe,” and “Christianity must commit itself anew to the spiritual unity of Europe. Economic and political reasons alone cannot do it. We must go deeper ...We must give a Christian face again to old Europe.”’ In such encounters as the one with the good woman of the inn on the feast day, Belloc lets us glimpse the Christian face of old Europe. As the sailor-adventurer Belloc will not discover Catholicism for the first time on his path to Rome, of course, but something about it, a certain quality in it, will come home to him with almost the force of a conversion. It is a realization of another component in Christian humanism besides the solidarity of a common faith. It happened most vividly when he witnessed one evening the entire population, as it seemed, of the Alpine village of Undervelier going into their parish church for vespers. “At this I was very much surprised,” he says, “not having been used at any time of my life to the unanimous devotion of an entire population, but having always thought of the Faith as something fighting odds, and having seen unanimity only in places where some sham religion or other glazed over our tragedies and excused our sins. Certainly to see all men, women, oe

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children of a place taking Catholicism for granted was a new sight, and so I put my cigar carefully down under a stone on the top of the wall and went in with them.” Both A. N. Wilson in his biography and Michael Novak see this as an especially decisive moment for Belloc, because, as he goes on, after hearing them sing “that very noble good-night and salutation to God which begins 'Te lucis ante terminum,' my whole mind was taken up and transfigured by this collective act, and I saw for a moment the Catholic Church quite plain, and I remembered Europe and the centuries... | went out with them into the clear evening and the cool. I found my cigar and lit it again, and musing much more deeply than before, not without tears, I considered the nature of Beliciy. Along with the unforgettable impression of its universality, Belloc suggests here something of the concreteness and reality of Catholicism. It is as real and ordinary as the cigar he puts down to go into the church and relights when he is again outside, a “thing” just as for Chesterton the Church was, The Thing, the title of a book of his on the Church. As Belloc put it in a letter once, Catholicism is a “living thing... not a document or a mere record,” a “Thing... an organized body instituted for a definite end, disciplined in a definite way, and remarkable for the possession of definite and concrete doctrine...” This is because God has revealed Himself to the world “through a corporation — a thing, not a theory... an organism by which He may continue to be known to mankind for the fulfilment of the great drama of the Incarnation...” And, Belloc goes on, it was “the Faith, reality,” which kept him, a natural skeptic, from “the extreme of harm, final harm, despair.”'? We

recall the pope saying the world needs the Church’s answer to “modernity’s widespread despair about any and all human existence.” We can make still another point with the symbolic stogie that sort of brackets the experience of vespers in the Alpine village. Michael Novak connects its significance with a saying of Chesterton, that Catholicism is a steak, a cigar, and a glass of stout — meaning that as “a sacramental religion it sees the presence of God in every concrete, individual, created thing.” But not to be too solemn about this whole episode, Belloc ends it with an observation

about the food he ate in the village: “They cook worse in Undervelier than any place I was ever in, with the possible exception of Omaha, Neb.” There is one further aspect of The Path to Rome that I should mention, and that is a dark note such as creeps into Belloc’s later writing after the premature death of his beloved wife Elodie in 1914 but that is there from the beginning, and this is simply the dark note of Christianity, the reality of the Cross. Christian humanism cannot mean merely a celebration of the good of creation and civilization in proper subordination to things divine. To maintain that subordination entails detachment and sacrifice, hard choices

and a long discipline. Still in the Alpine village after vespers, reflecting on his own experience of these realities, Belloc writes: “The Catholic Church will 176

permit no comforts; the cry of martyrs is in her far voice; her eyes that see beyond the world present to us heaven and hell to the confusion of our human reconciliations, or happy blending of good and evil things. By the Lord! I begin to think this intimate religion is as tragic as first love... [It] drags us Out into the void away from our dear homes.” Well, finally among the four men that were Belloc there is the poet. Belloc began as a writer of comic verse and right away caught the delighted attention of readers with his small volumes entitled The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts, Cautionary Tales, and More Beasts for Worse Children. Here’s a specimen: The Lion, the Lion, he dwells in the waste,

He has a big head and a very small waist; But his shoulders are stark, and his jaws they are grim, And a good little child will not play with him. Also in the comic vein are some unecumenical

lines about heretics

(from The Path to Rome):

Heretics all, wherever you may be, In Tarbes or Nimes or over the sea,

You never shall have good words from me. Caritas non conturbat me."*

Or there are satirical epigrams like this one to characterize the high society Belloc always contemptuously referred to as “the rich”; Good morning Algernon. Good morning Percy. Good morning Mrs. Roebeck. Christ have mercy. As one critic says, “There is a laconic perfection in Belloc’s satirical verse unsurpassed in our own or any language.”” As you

would

expect,

Belloc

would

not

be bothered

either

by the

phoney tolerance enforced these days as political correctness. On one occasion in The Four Men, the sailor sings a Christmas carol:

May all good fellows that here agree Drink Audit Ale in heaven with me. And may all my enemies go to hell! Noel! Noel! Noel! Noel! May all my enemies go to hell Noel! Noel! Grizzlebeard is shocked and cries “Rank blasphemy.” “No, just great, hefty howl-verse,” replies the Sailor. He intends no offence.” oo

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I suppose the best known of Belloc’s epigrams is this one: When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet but his books were read.

Of the four men in the book, it is the poet who speaks for Belloc’s lyric verse, and there is much of that, many songs and sonnets. In the lines the poet composes along the way we see the classical form and some typical themes of Belloc’s serious poetry. As when he sings of “my own country”: I shall go without companions, And with nothing in my hand; Until I come to my own country, Which is a pleasant land! The trees that grow in my own country Are the beech tree and the yew; Many stand together, And some stand few. In the month of May in my own country All the woods are new. When I get to my own country I shall lie down and sleep; I shall watch in the valleys The long flocks of sheep. And then I shall dream, for ever and all,

A good dream and deep. In this poet of The Four Men, we have a suggestion of what can only be termed the mystical side of Belloc’s character and writing. A reaching toward the transcendent is, of course, an essential element in Christian

humanism. Yet this mystical edge to Belloc was a surprise for me when I first started coming across it in his writing. As we see him in The Four Men, Belloc

the poet is a man not at home in this world. When they first meet, Myself puts him down as one of those men “whose thoughts are always woolgathering, and who seem to have no purpose...” His eyes “were arched and large as though in a perpetual surprise... They didn't seem to see the things before them, but other things beyond.” * Call him the Platonic seer, the poet of The Four Men, one with intuitions of the divine and eternal such as are

consonant with the transcendental vision of faith. A sense of the eternal in or through landscape and poetry is a prominent strain in Belloc’ s writing, and reveals a sensibility unsuspected by those who know him only in the character of the crusty defender of the faith. 178

Take up a volume of selected essays, and you will find writing like this: We see some one thing in this world, and suddenly it becomes particular and sacramental; a woman and a child, a man at evening... notes of music... after a long night a shaft of light upon the tops of hills at morning: there is a resurrection and we are refreshed and renewed. It is the miraculous moment of intense emotion in which whether we are duped or transfigured [by what appears to our eyes], we are in touch with a finer reality than the reality of this world. For such sights are the manifestation of that glory which lies permanent beyond the changing of the world.” Or there is the passage in The Path to Rome describing how he felt when he first saw the Alps, a range of them suddenly spread before him when he emerged from a wood: To what emotion shall I compare this astonishment?... These, the great Alps, seen thus, link one in some way to one’s immortality. Let me put it thus: that from the height of Weissenstein I saw, as it were, my religion. | mean, humility, the fear of death, the terror of height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentiality of reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul... For I know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of merriment in the soul of a sane man. Since I could now see such a wonder and it could work such things in my mind, therefore, some day I should be part of it. That is what I felt. Then he adds, typically in the spirit of the book, “This it is also which leads some men to climb mountain-tops, but not me, for I am afraid of

slipping down.”” For the visionary Belloc, history itself can afford eternal moments, as he explains in his book on the Winchester to Canterbury pilgrims:

The chief charm of historical learning lies in mere antiquity... Though things are less observable as they are farther away, yet their appeal is directly increased by such a distance in a manner which all know though none can define it. It is not an illusion; perhaps an ultimate reality stands out when the details are obscured... Antiquity conveys (I cannot pretend to say how) echoes which are exactly attuned to whatever is least perishable in us. These echoes, he adds, lead to religion and merge with it.”

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Along with Belloc’s sense of the eternal is an almost pagan sadness over the transience of all we hold dear in this world. The four men had set out on their walk over the country of the downs in an elegiac mood because before long, they knew, the developers, already at work in their time, would be developing it out of existence. At the outset, Belloc addresses the ground he loved; “I would not issue this book at all, Sussex, did I not know that you,

who must like all created things decay, might with the rest of us be very near your ending,” Later on the journey, the old man says, “There is nothing that remains, nor any home, nor any castle, however strong; nor any love, however tender and sound; nor any comradeship among men, however hardy.” * The underlying tone of The Four Men is autumnal, and this sense of mortality gives rise to a beautiful song at the end of the book. Myself composes it as he goes back alone after parting from the others. He thinks about his own mortal end, but then he is consoled by a sense that the spirit of a man who has loved a landscape can somehow endure with it, at least as long as it endures. He does not die that can bequeath Some influence to the land he knows, Or dares, persistent, interwreath

Love permanent with the wild hedgerows; He does not die, but still remains

Substantiate with his darling plains. The spring’s superb adventure calls His dust athwart the woods to flame; His boundary river’s secret falls Perpetuate and repeat his name He rides his loud October sky: He does not die. He does not die. The beeches know the accustomed head Which loved them, and a peopled air Beneath their benediction spread Comforts the silence everywhere;

For native ghosts return and these Perfect the mystery in the trees. So, therefore, though myself be crosst The shuddering of that dreadful day When friend and fire and home are lost And even children drawn away — The Passer-by shall hear me still, A boy who sings on Duncton Hill.

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In other of his writings, Belloc with a more Christian sense of things,

sees through mortality to what he called “the place of recovery”— an eternity where the good things are fixed and complete and nothing is lost. Talking it Over one evening with a stranger in an old Sussex inn, he even wonders if paradise might be “a place where our final satisfaction will include a sensual pleasure: fragrance and landscape, and a visible home that shall be dearer than these dear hills.” ”° But when he goes strictly by the assurance of faith, as in his essay “On Immortality” he says simply: “I feel, under the effect of the Faith, not only with emotion, but by the process of all my being and especially with the lucid cogitative part of myself, those lines often recited triumphantly in song: Qui vitam sine termino

Nobis donet in patria ” So the lines stand in what was once the universal language of our civilization and as we still sometimes sing them at Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. In our modern local vernacular they mean: [Praise to the Blessed Trinity] “who shall give us life without end in our native land.” Toward the end of The Four Men, when Myself, the old man, the sailor,

and the poet part from each other, it is symbolic of the fact that we ourselves cannot be forever in this life. And so it is that Christian humanism, though it puts us in communion with the past and with all aspects of the real in this world, has for its chief aim to link us with the world to come. To achieve that

end, as we are made to see throughout Belloc’s writings, there is one and only one means given to man, one refuge of hope for mortal human beings. It is the “thing” he spent his life defending. Toward the end of a late volume entitled Essays of a Catholic, he writes:

One thing in this world is different from all other. It has a personality and a force. it is recognized and (when recognized) most violently loved or hated. It is the Catholic Church. Within that household the human spirit has roof and hearth. Outside it, is the night.*

So I would say finally that the best thing about Belloc is that he can impart to us so memorably his own recognition of this household where the human spirit has roof and hearth. As the four men he does it: the old man with the long memory, the wandering sailor, the visionary poet, and the magnificent Myself who writes it all down. 1 Chesterton. Autobiography. CW

16:209-210.

2, Herbert Van Thal, ed. Belloc: A Biographical Anthology (New York: Alfred

Knopf 1970) xiii. 3 Hilaire Belloc. The Path to Rome (New York: Putnam 1936) vii. SS e a e I 181

4 The Cruise of the Nona (Westminster, Maryland: The Newman

Press

1956) 515.9; 5 Quoted in Robert Speaight, The Life of Hilaire Belloc (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Cudahay 1957) 387. 6 Essays ofa Catholic (1931) (Rockford, Illinois: Tan Books 1992) 103. 7 The Intercollegiate Review, Fall, 1999, 10. 8 Hillaire Belloc.,The Old Road (London:Methuen

1951) 234, 230.

9 George Weigel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul I (New York:Harper Collins, 1999),199, 10 Hillaire Belloc. Hills and the Sea (London: Methuen

1951) 234, 230.

11 The Cruise of the Nona. 61. 12 Quoted in Speaight. 163. 13 The Path to Rome (Chicago: Henry Regnery 1954) 96. 14 Joseph Pearce. Literary Converts (San Francisco: Ignatius Press 1999) 59. 15 Witness to Hope. 834. 16 The Path to Rome. 157-161. 17 Robert Speaight ed. Letters from Hilaire Belloc (New York: MacMillan 1958) 151, 248. Essays of a Catholic. 112. 18 Literally, “Charity does not disturb me.” 19 A Biographical Anthology. xiii. 20 The Four Men (London: Thomas Nelson 1952) 243.

ZA Ibide24 526 22 J. B. Morton ed. Selected Essays of Hilaire Belloc (London: Methuen 1955) 2615730: 23 The Path to Rome. 180-181. 24 The Old Road. 10. 25 The Four Men. 302. 26 Hills and the Sea (London: Methuen

1951) 256.

27 One Thing and Another (London: Hollis Carter 1955) 223. 28 Essays of a Catholic. 234.

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Contributors Dale Ahlquist is the President and Co-Founder of the American Chesterton Society in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and creator of the television series “G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense.” Bro. David Andrews,

C.S.C. is Executive Director of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference in Des Moines, Iowa.

David Beresford is an insect ecologist, PhD. candidate, writer, and farmer, in

Peterborough, Ontario.

Sara and Michael Bowen are graduates of Harvard Law School and lawyers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Sara is a Columnist for Gilbert! Magazine, and Michael is the author of nine novels. Frances Farrell, from Milwaukee, is a Contributing Editor for Gilbert!

Magazine and one of the matriarchs of the Midwest Chesterton Society. Peter Floriani, PhD. is a computer scientist in Reading, Pennsylvania, and creator of the “Amber Chesterton Collection,” which will eventually contain all of Chesterton’s writings in a computer database.

Carl Hasler, PhD. is a Professor of Philosophy at Collin County Community College, Plano, Texas.

Aidan Mackey is Director of the Chesterton Library, Plater College, Oxford, England, Editor of Chesterton’s Collected Poems, and author of Mr. Chesterton Comes to Tea.

Tom Martin, PhD. is Professor of Philosophy at the University of NebraskaKearney, and Editor of The Examined Life.

Fr. James Reidy, PhD. is a retired Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota and a priest of the Archdiocese of St. PaulMinneapolis. John C. Tibbetts, PhD. is a Professor of Film Studies at the University of Kansas, and author of Dvorak in America and Novels Into Film and several

articles on Chesterton’s detective fiction.

Ekaterina Volokhonskaia teaches English at the Russian State Pedagogical University, St. Petersburg, Russia, where she is completing her doctoral thesis on Chesterton.

185

Those in the academy have never quite known what to do with Chesterton. They can’t figure out if he belongs in the English department or the Theology department. Or Medieval Studies. Since he cannot be assigned neatly to any category, they have found that the most convenient thing to do with Chesterton has been to ignore him. The other problem is that he represents too cumbersome an exception to everything else in the 20th century: the despair in philosophy, the decadence in art, the joylessness in literature, and the myopia in polilitcs. He offered a possible alternative to the total trust that has been placed in science and technology. And against a rising tide of relativism and skepticism, he provided a clear and wellreasoned defense of Christianity in general and Catholicism in specific. But while it is possible to find Chesterton quoted to prove a point it is all but impossible to see him studied as a whole. However,

not only does Chesterton

deserve

to be studied,

he should be required reading on the first day of class in every classroom, no matter what the subject. It is Chesterton more than anyone who provides the right frame of mind for any student opening the door on any subject. His message is this: What you are about to see you might have missed. What you are about to experience is a gift, wrapped up just for you. Unwrap it carefully. It is a treasure. And like the best gifts, the best thing about it is that it is a surprise. It is not what you think it is. Without such a perspective of wonder and gratitude, you really cannot learn anything. The world will never starve for want for wonders, he says, only for want of wonder. In everything, there is a mystery calling to you to try to solve it. — from the introduction by Dale Ahlquist

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