The Disillusioned Liberal
_The English were not wrong in loving liberty. They were only wrong
in losing it_.
_G.K.'s Weekly_, June 1, 1933.
ONE MAIN DIFFICULTY in writing biography lies in the various strands
that run through every human life. It is as I have already said
impossible to keep a perfect chronological order with anyone whose
occupations and interests were so multifarious. In the present
chapter and the two that follow we shall consider the movement of
Chesterton's mind upon politics and sociology. This will involve
going back to the general election of 1906 and forward to the Marconi
Trial of 1913. For those who are interested in his poetry or his
humour or his philosophy or his theology but not at all in his
sociological and political outlook, I fear that these three chapters
may loom a little uninvitingly. If they are tempted to skip them
altogether, I shall not blame them; yet they will miss a great deal
that is vital to the understanding of his whole mind and the course
his life was to take. These are not the most entertaining chapters in
the book, but if we are really to know Chesterton the events they
cover must be considered most carefully.
As a boy Gilbert Chesterton spoke of politics as absorbing "for every
ardent intellect"; and during these years he was himself deeply
concerned with the politics of England. The ideal Liberalism sketched
in his letter to Hammond during the Boer War [Chapter X] had appeared
to him, if not perfectly realised, at least capable of realisation,
in the existing Liberal Party. The Tory Party was in power and all
its acts, to say nothing of its general ineptitude, appeared to
Liberals as positive arguments for their own party. At this date so
convinced a Tory as Lord Hugh Cecil could describe his own party as
"to mix metaphors, an eviscerated ruin."* Several letters and
postcards from Mr. Belloc announcing his own election as Liberal
member for South Salford show the high hope with which young
Liberalism was viewing the world in 1906:
[* In a letter to Wilfrid Ward.]
(undated)
I have, as you will have seen, pulled it off by 852. It is huge
fun. I am now out against all Vermin: Notably South African Jews. The
Devil is let loose: let all men beware. H. B.
(Written across top of letter)
Tomorrow Monday Meet the Manchester train arriving Euston 6.10 and
oblige your little friend HB _St. Hilary's Day_.
Don't fail to meet that train. Stamps are cheap! HB
I beg you. I implore you. _Meet that 6.10 train_.
HB
Stamps are a drug in the market.
852
Meet that train!
Stamps are _given away_ now in _Salford_.
From 1902, when the general election left the Conservatives still in
power, until 1906 the Liberal party had been, as Chesterton described
it, "in the desert." And the younger members of the party were deeply
concerned with hammering out a positive philosophy which might
inspire a true programme for their own party. A group of them wrote a
book called _England A Nation_ with the sub-title _Papers of A
Patriot's Club_. The Patriot's Club had no real existence, but I
imagine that Lucian Oldershaw who edited the book believed that its
publication might create the club. Belloc was not one of the
contributors, but Hugh Law wrote ably on Ireland, J. L. Hammond on
South Africa, and Conrad Noel, Henry Nevinson and C. F. G. Masterman
on other aspects of the political scene.
The whole book is on a fairly high level but Chesterton's essay was
the only one much noticed by reviewers. It was the introductory
chapter, far longer than any of the others, and gave the key to the
whole book. Entitled "The idea of Patriotism" it was, like _The
Napoleon of Notting Hill_, which it does much to illumine, a plea for
patriotism that was really for England and not for the British
Empire. Such a patriotism recognizes the limitations proper to
nationality and admits, nay admires, other patriotisms for other
nations. Thus, in Chesterton's eyes a true English patriot should
also be an ardent home ruler for Ireland since Ireland too was a
nation.
He stressed the danger that the nationhood of England should be
absorbed and lost in the Imperial idea. The claim that in an empire
the various races could learn much from one another he considered a
bit of special pleading on the part of Imperialists. England had
learned much from France and Germany but, although Ireland had much
to teach, we had not learned from Ireland. The real patriotism of the
Englishman had been dimmed both by the emphasis on the Imperial idea
and by the absence of roots in his own land. The governing classes
had destroyed those roots and had almost forgotten the existence of
the people. From the dregs and off-scourings of the population a vast
empire had been created, but the people of England were not allowed
to colonize England.
The Education Bill of 1902, brought in by the Conservatives and
giving financial support to Church schools, saw Gilbert in general
agreement with the Liberal attacks. He did not yet appreciate the
Catholic idea that education must be of one piece and he did not
think it fair that the country should support specifically Catholic
schools. Parents could give at home the religious instruction they
wanted their children to have. But with that fairness of mind which
made it so hard for him to be a party man he saw why the Liberal
"compromise" of simple Bible teaching for all in the State schools
could not be expected to satisfy Catholics. He wrote to the _Daily
News:_
The Bible compromise is certainly in favour of the Protestant view
of the Bible. The thing, properly stated, is as plain as the nose on
your face. Protestant Christianity believes that there is a Divine
record in a book; that everyone ought to have free access to that
book; that everyone who gets hold of it can save his soul by it,
whether he finds it in a library or picks it off a dustcart. Catholic
Christianity believes that there is a Divine army or league upon
earth called the Church; that all men should be induced to join it;
that any man who joins it can save his soul by it without ever
opening any of the old books of the Church at all. The Bible is only
one of the institutions of Catholicism, like its rites or its
priesthood; it thinks the Bible only efficient when taken as part of
the Church. . . . This being so, a child could see that if you have
the Bible taught alone, anyhow, by anybody, you do definitely decide
in favour of the first view of the Bible and against the second.
Discussing a few years later whether it was possible or satisfactory
to teach the Bible simply as Literature he put his finger on the
Catholic objection. "I should not mind," he said, "children being
told about Mohammed because I am not a Mohammedan. If I were a
Mohammedan I should very much want to know what they were told about
him."
While as for the unfortunate teacher: in case a child should ask if
the things in the Bible happened, "Either the teacher must answer him
insincerely and that is immorality, or he must answer him sincerely,
and that is sectarian education, or he must refuse to answer him at
all, and that is first of all bad manners and a sort of timid
tyranny . . ."
Chesterton's Liberalism received a further shock from the fact that
Liberals, in attacking the Bill, were attacking also the Catholic
faith and raising the cry of No Popery. In a correspondence with Dr.
Clifford he reminded him of how they had stood together against
popular fanaticism during the Boer War.
There are two cries always capable of raising the English in their
madness--one that the Union Jack is being pulled down, and one that
the Pope is being set up. And upon the man who raises one of them
responsibility will lie heavy till the last day. For when they are
raised, the best are mixed with the worst, every rational compromise
is dashed to pieces, every opponent is given credit for the worst
that the worst of his allies has by his worst enemy been said to
have said. That horror of darkness swept across us when the war
began. . . .
Beyond all question this is true--that if we choose to fight on the
"No Popery" cry, we may win. But I can imagine something of which I
should be prouder than of any victory--the memory that we had shown
our difference from Mr. Chamberlain simply and finally in this--that
to our hand had lain (as it once laid to his) an old, an effectual,
an infallible, and a filthy weapon, and that we let it lie.*
[* Letter to the _Daily News_, October 1902.]
Yet it was fairly easy to be a Liberal in opposition. At the
elections of 1902 (which the Liberals lost) and 1906 (which they won)
Chesterton canvassed for the Liberal party. Charles Masterman used to
tell a story of canvassing a street in his company. Both started at
the same end on opposite sides of the road. Masterman completed his
side and came back on the other to find Chesterton still earnestly
arguing at the first house. For he was passionately serious in his
belief that the Liberal Party stood for a real renewal, even
revolution, in the life of England. "At the present moment of
victory," says the report of a speech by Gilbert following the great
swing of the Liberal party into power in 1906, he called for "that
magnanimity towards the defeated that characterized all great
conquerors. It was important that all should develop--even the Tory."
It needed the experience of seeing the Liberal party in power to
shake his faith.
In the new House of Commons the Conservatives were in a minority:
against them were the two old parties--the Liberals and the Irish
members who were in general allied to them, and a small group forming
a new party known as Labour. The Labour Members who got into
Parliament in 1906 and 1909 were regarded by Conservatives as being a
kind of left-wing extension of the Liberal Party. Such a Liberal as
Chesterton saw them there with delight, and, although he would still
have called himself a Liberal, he at first hoped in the Labour men as
something more truly expressive of the people's wishes.
In an introduction to _From Workhouse to Westminster_, a life of Will
Crooks, Gilbert expressed a good deal of his own political
philosophy. As a democrat he believed in the ideal of direct
government by the people. But obviously this was only possible in a
world that was also his ideal--a world consisting of small and even
of very small states. The democrat's usual alternative,
representative government, was, Gilbert said, symbolic in character.
Just as religious symbolism "may for a time represent a real emotion
and then for a time cease to represent anything, so representative
government may for a time represent the people, and for a time cease
to represent anything."
Further, the very idea of representation itself involved two
perfectly distinct notions: a man throws a shadow or he throws a
stone. "In the first sense, it is supposed that the representative is
like the thing he represents. In the second case, it is only supposed
that the representative is useful to the thing he represents."
Workmen, like Conservatives, sent men to Parliament not to show what
they themselves were like, but to attack the other party in their
name. "The Labour Members as a class are not representatives but
missiles. . . . Working men are not at all like Mr. Keir Hardie. If
it comes to likeness, working men are more like the Duke of
Devonshire. But they throw Mr. Keir Hardie at the Duke of Devonshire,
knowing that he is so curiously shaped as to hurt anything at which
he is thrown."* In the same way Mr. Balfour was entirely unlike the
Tory squires who used him as a weapon. To this rule, that men do not
choose to be represented by their like, Chesterton took Will Crooks
as the one exception:
[* Introduction to _From Workhouse to Westminster_, p. XV.]
You have not yet seen the English people in politics. It has not
yet entered politics. Liberals do not represent it; Tories do not
represent it; Labour Members, on the whole, represent it rather less
than Tories or Liberals. When it enters politics it will bring with
it a trail of all the things that politicians detest; prejudices (as
against hospitals), superstitions (as about funerals), a thirst for
respectability passing that of the middle classes, a faith in the
family which will knock to pieces half the Socialism of Europe. If
ever that people enters politics it will sweep away most of our
revolutionists as mere pedants. It will be able to point only to one
figure, powerful, pathetic, humorous and very humble, who bore in any
way upon his face the sign and star of its authority.*
[* Ibid., p. XX.]
It was sad enough after this to see Will Crooks fathering one of
those very Bills for the interference with family life which
Chesterton most hated. But, indeed, the years that followed the 1906
election are a story of a steadily growing disillusionment with the
realities of representative government in England.
Chesterton wrote regularly for the _Daily News_ and was regarded as
one of their most valuable contributors. But when, following an
attack in the House of Commons on the Liberal leader Campbell-Bannerman
over the sale of peerages, he sent in an article on the subject, the
Editor A. G. Gardiner wrote (July 12, 1907):
I have left your article out tonight not because I do not entirely
agree with its point of view but because just at this moment it would
look like backing Lea's unmannerly attack on C. B. I am keeping the
article in type for a later occasion when the general question is not
complicated with a particularly offensive incident.
It was a test case, and it seemed to Chesterton not a question of
good manners, but of something far more fundamental. The assertion
had been made in the House of Commons that peerages were being sold,
and that the price of such sales was the chief support of the secret
party funds. But the _Daily News_ was a Liberal paper and this was an
attack on the Liberal party. Chesterton replied (July 11, 1907):
I am sure you know by this time that I never resent the exclusion
of my articles as such. I should always trust your literary judgment,
if it were a matter of literature only: and I daresay you have often
saved me from an indiscretion and your readers from a bore.
Unfortunately this matter of the party funds is not one of that sort.
My conscience does not often bother you, but just now the animal is
awake and roaring. Your paper has always championed the rights of
conscience, so mine naturally goes to you. If you disagreed with me,
it would be another matter. But since you agree with me (as I was
sure you would) it becomes simply a question of which is the more
important, politeness or political morality. I agree that Lea did go
to the point of being unmannerly. So did Plimsoll, so did Bradlaugh:
so did the Irish members. But surely it would be a very terrible
thing if anyone could say "The _Daily News_ suppressed all demand for
the Plimsoll line," or "The _Daily News_ did not join in asking for
Bradlaugh's political rights." I am sure that this is not your idea.
You think that this matter can be better raised later on. I am
convinced of its urgency. I am so passionately convinced of its
urgency that if you will not help me to raise it now, I must try some
other channel. They are going on Monday to raise a "breach of
privilege" (which is simply an aristocratic censorship of the Press)
in order to crush this question through the man who raised it: and to
crush it forever. I have said that I think Lea's questions violent
and needless. But they are not attacking his questions. They are
attacking his letter, which contains nothing that I do not think,
probably nothing that you do not think. Lea is to be humiliated and
broken because he said that titles are bought; as they are: because
he said that poor members are reminded of their dependence on the
party funds; as they are: because he said that all this was hypocrisy
of public life; as it is. . . .
One thing is quite certain. Unless some Liberal journalists speak
on Monday or Tuesday, the secret funds and the secret powers are
safe. These Parliamentary votes mark eras: they are meant to. And
that vote will not mark a defence of C. B. The letter had nothing to
do with C. B. It will mark the final decision that any repetition of
what Lea said in his letter is an insult to the House. That is, any
protest against bought titles will be an insult to the House. Any
protest against secret funds will be an insult to the House.
I would willingly burn my article if I were only sure you would
publish one yourself tomorrow on the same lines. But if not, here is
at least one thing you can do. An article, even signed, may perhaps
commit the paper too much. But your paper cannot be committed by
publishing a letter from me stating my opinions. It might publish a
letter from Joe Chamberlain, stating his opinions. I therefore send
you a short letter, pointing out the evil, and disassociating it as
far as possible from the indiscretions of Lea. I am sure you will
publish this, for it is the mere statement of a private opinion and
as I am not an M. P. I can say what I like about Parliament. You will
not mind my confessing to you my conviction and determination in this
matter. I do not think we could quarrel, even if we had to separate.
The letter was published, and was quoted in the House of Commons by
Lord Robert Cecil amid general applause. But it was twenty years
before a Bill was passed that forbade this particular unpleasantness.
While political corruption stirred Chesterton deeply, I think his
outlook was even more affected by the progressive Socialism of
Liberal legislation. He had honestly believed that the Liberal Party
stood, on the whole, for liberty. He found that it stood increasingly
for daily and hourly interference with the lives of the people. He
found too that the Liberal papers, which he held should have been
foremost in criticism of these measures, were as determined to uphold
measures brought in by a Liberal Government as they had been to
attack anything that the Tories brought forward.
It has been well said by Mr. Belloc that Chesterton could never write
as a party man. But to the ordinary party newspaper such an attitude
was utterly incomprehensible. I think that we can also see at this
point how alien his fundamental outlook was from that even of the
best members of his own Party. A great admirer said to me the other
day that it had taken her a long time to appreciate Chesterton's
sociology. "You see, I was brought up to think that it was quite
right for the poor to have their teeth brushed by officials." This is
undoubtedly the normal Socialistic outlook and the outlook most
abhorrent to Chesterton. "The philanthropist," he once said, "is not
a brother; he is a supercilious aunt."
The five years of Liberal Government had been disillusioning to many
others besides Belloc and the Chesterton brothers. Probably many men
in newspaper offices and elsewhere continued vaguely to support the
party to which their own paper belonged. But there were others who
were in those days going through a struggle between principles and
Party which became increasingly acute. Gilbert has described his own
feelings in a review of Galsworthy's play _Loyalties_, written
several years later during the first World War.
. . . The author of _Loyalty_ suffers one simple and amazing
delusion. He imagines that in those pre-war politics Liberalism was
on the side of Labour. On this point at least I can correct him from
the most concrete experience. In the newspaper office where his hero
lingered, wondering how much longer he could stand its Pacifism, I
was lingering and wondering how much longer I could stand its
complete and fundamental Capitalism, its invariable alliance with the
employer, its invariable hostility to the striker. No such scene as
that in which the Liberal editor paced the room raving about his
hopes of a revolution ever occurred in the Liberal newspaper office
that I knew; the least hint of a revolution would have caused quite
as much horror there as in the offices of the _Morning Post_. On
nothing was the Pacifist more pacifist than upon that point. No
workman so genuine as the workman who figures in _Loyalty_ ever
figured among such Liberals. The fact is that such Liberalism was in
no way whatever on the side of Labour; on the contrary, it was on the
side of the Labour Party. . . .
Both Chesterton and Belloc had begun to point out that a Free Press
had almost disappeared from England. The revenue of most of the
newspapers depended not on subscriptions but on advertisement.
Therefore nothing could be said in them which was displeasing to
their wealthy advertisers. Nor was this the worst of it. Very rich
men were often owners of half a dozen papers or more and dictated
their policy. An outstanding example was Alfred Harmsworth--Lord
Northcliffe--whose newspapers ranged from the _Times_ through the
_Daily Mail_ to _Answers_. Thus to every section of the English
people, Harmsworth was able to convey day by day such news as he
thought best together with his own outlook and philosophy of life
such as it was. Still worse, the _Times_ had not lost in the eyes of
Europe, to say nothing of America, that reputation it had held so
long of being _the_ official expression of English opinion. It was
still the _Jupiter_ of Trollope's day, the maker of ministries or
their undoing. In the days of a Free Press a paper held such a
position in virtue of the talents of its staff. Editors were then
powerful individuals and would brook little interference. But today
the editor was commonly only the mouthpiece of the owner.
It is surprising that Gilbert and the official Liberal Press so long
tolerated one another. The _Daily News_ and other papers owned by Mr.
Cadbury (of Cadbury's Cocoa) were often referred to as "the Cocoa
Press" and it happened that it was not in the end political
disagreement alone that brought the Chesterton-Cadbury alliance to an
end. In one of Gilbert's poems in praise of wine are the lines:
Cocoa is a cad and coward,
Cocoa is a vulgar beast.
In the _Autobiography_ he tells us that after he had published the
poem he felt he could write no longer for the _Daily News_. He went
from the _Daily News_ to the _Daily Herald_, to the Editor of which
he wrote that the _News_ "had come to stand for almost everything I
disagree with; and I thought I had better resign before the next
great measure of social reform made it illegal to go on strike." G.K.
was a considerable asset to any paper and had recently been referred
to by Shaw (in a debate with Belloc) as "a flourishing property of
Mr. Cadbury's."
Politically the break was bound to come, for even when _Dickens_ was
published Gilbert Chesterton had reached the stage of saying "as much
as ever I did, more than ever I did, I believe in Liberalism. But
there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals." At
this time too he infuriated an orthodox Liberal journalist by saying
of the party leaders "some of them are very nice old gentlemen, some
of them are very nasty old gentlemen, and some of them are old
without being gentlemen at all." An orthodox church journalist in a
periodical charmingly entitled _Church Bells_ got angrier yet. "A
certain Mr. G. K. Chesterton," he wrote, had, when speaking for the
C.S.U. in St. Paul's Chapter House, remarked "the best of his
Majesty's Ministers are agnostics, and the worst devil worshippers."
_Church Bells_ cries out: "We only mention this vulgar falsehood
because we regret that an association, with which the names of many
of our respected ecclesiastics are connected, should have allowed the
bad taste and want of all gentlemanly feeling displayed by the words
quoted, to have passed unchallenged." "Vulgar falsehood" is surely
charming.
But perhaps even deeper than his disillusionment with any Party was
his growing sense of the unreality of the political scene. He has
described it in the _Autobiography:_
I was finding it difficult to believe in politics; because the
reality seemed almost unreal, as compared with the reputation or the
report. I could give twenty instances to indicate what I mean, but
they would be no more than indications, because the doubt itself was
doubtful. I remember going to a great Liberal club, and walking about
in a large crowded room, somewhere at the end of which a bald
gentleman with a beard was reading something from a manuscript in a
low voice. It was hardly unreasonable that we did not listen to him,
because we could not in any case have heard; but I think a very large
number of us did not even see him . . . it is possible, though not
certain, that one or other of us asked carelessly what was supposed
to be happening in the other corner of the large hall. . . . Next
morning I saw across the front of my Liberal paper in gigantic
headlines the phrase: "Lord Spencer Unfurls the Banner." Under this
were other remarks, also in large letters, about how he had blown the
trumpet for Free Trade and how the blast would ring through England
and rally all the Free-Traders. It did appear, on careful
examination, that the inaudible remarks which the old gentleman had
read from the manuscript were concerned with economic arguments for
Free Trade; and very excellent arguments too, for all I know. But the
contrast between what that orator was to the people who heard him,
and what he was to the thousands of newspaper-readers who did not
hear him, was so huge a hiatus and disproportion that I do not think
I ever quite got over it. I knew henceforward what was meant, or what
might be meant, by a Scene in the House, or a Challenge from the
Platform, or any of those sensational events which take place in the
newspapers and nowhere else.*
[* Pp. 201-2.]
As in _Orthodoxy_ Chesterton had formulated his religious beliefs, so
in _What's Wrong with the World_ he laid the foundations of his
sociology. It will be remembered that, giving evidence before the
Commission on the Censorship, Chesterton declared himself to be
concerned only with the good and happiness of the English people.
Where he differed from nearly every other social reformer was that he
believed that they should themselves decide what was for their own
good and happiness.
"The body of ideas," says Monsignor Knox of Gilbert's sociology,
"which he labelled, rather carelessly, 'distributism' is a body of
ideas which still lasts, and I think will last, but it is not exactly
a doctrine, or a philosophy; it is simply Chesterton's reaction to
life."*
[* _The Listener_, June 19, 1941.]
It may be said that a man's philosophy is in the main a formulation
of his reaction to life. Anyhow life seems to be the operative
word--for it is the word that best conveys the richness of this first
book of Chesterton's sociology. All the wealth of life's joys, life's
experiences, is poured into his view of man and man's destiny.
Already developing manhood to its fullest potential he found in this
book a new form of expression. To quote Monsignor Knox again, "I call
that man intellectually great who is an artist in thought . . . I
call that man intellectually great who can work equally well in any
medium." The poet-philosopher worked surprisingly well in the medium
of sociology.
He had intended to call the book, "What's Wrong?" and it begins on
this note of interrogation. The chapter called "The Medical Mistake"
is a brilliant attack on the idea that we must begin social reform by
diagnosing the disease. "It is the whole definition and dignity of
man that in social matters we must actually find the cure before we
find the disease." The thing that is most terribly wrong with our
modern civilisation is that it has lost not only health but the clear
picture of health. The doctor called in to diagnose a bodily illness
does not say: we have had too much scarlet fever, let us try a little
measles for a change. But the sociological doctor does offer to the
dispossessed proletarian a cure which, says Chesterton, is only
another kind of disease. We cannot work towards a social ideal until
we are certain what that ideal should be. We must, therefore, begin
with principles and we are to find those principles in the nature of
man, largely through a study of his history. Man has had
historically--and man needs for his fulfilment--the family, the home
and the possession of property. The notion of property has, for the
modern age, been defiled by the corruptions of Capitalism; but modern
Capitalism is really a negation of property because it is a denial of
its limitations. He summarises this idea with one of his most
brilliant illustrations: "It is the negation of property that the
Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as
it would be the negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one
harem."
But property in its real meaning is almost the condition for the
survival of the family. It is its protection, it is the opportunity
of its development. God has the joy of unlimited creation--He can
make something out of nothing; but He has given to Man the joy of
limited creation--Man can make something out of anything. "Fruitful
strife with limitations," self-expression "with limits that are
strict and even small,"--all this belongs to the artist, but also to
the average man. "Property is merely the art of the democracy."
The family, protected by the possession of some degree of property,
will grow by its own laws. What are these laws? Clearly there are two
sets of problems, one concerned with life within the family, the
other with the relation of the family to the state. These two sets of
problems provide the subject-matter of the book. On both Chesterton
felt that there had been insufficient thinking. Thus he says of the
first: "There is no brain-work in the thing at all; no root query of
what sex is, of whether it alters this or that." And of the second:
"It is quite unfair to say that Socialists believe in the State but
do not believe in the Family. But it is true to say that Socialists
are especially engaged in strengthening and renewing the State; and
they are not especially engaged in strengthening and renewing the
Family. They are not doing anything to define the functions of
father, mother and child, as such--they have no firm instinctive
sense of one thing being in its nature private and another public."
It is precisely this kind of root-thinking that the book does. In the
free family there will be a division of the two sides of life,
between the man and the woman. The man must be, to a certain extent,
a specialist; he must do one thing well enough to earn the daily
bread. The woman is the universalist; she must do a hundred things
for the safeguarding and development of the home. The modern fad of
talking of the narrowness of domesticity especially provoked
Chesterton. "I cannot," he said
with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When
domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty
arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means
dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man
might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at
Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because
it is trifling, colourless and of small import to the soul, then as I
say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen
Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours
and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys,
boots, sheets, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain
area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can
understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how
it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other
people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell
one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the
same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a
woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not
because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her
task; I will never pity her for its smallness.*
[* _What's Wrong With the World_, chapter 3, "The Emancipation of
Domesticity."]
While he was writing these pages and after their appearance in print,
G.K. was constantly asked to debate the question of Women's Suffrage.
He was an anti-suffragist, partly because he was a democrat. The
suffrage agitation in England was conducted by a handful of women,
mainly of the upper classes; and it gave Cecil Chesterton immense
pleasure to head articles on the movement with the words, "Votes for
Ladies." G.K. too felt that the suffrage agitation was really doing
harm by dragging a red herring across the path of necessary social
reform. If the vast majority of women did not want votes it was
undemocratic to force votes upon them. Also, if rich men had
oppressed poor men all through the course of history, it was
exceedingly probable that rich women would also oppress poor women.
Both in _What's Wrong With the World_ and in debating on the subject,
Chesterton brushed aside as absurd and irrelevant the suggestion that
women were inferior to men and what was called the physical force
argument. But he did maintain that if the vote meant anything at all
(which it probably did not in the England he was living in), it meant
that side of life which belongs to masculinity and which the normal
woman dislikes and rather despises.
All we men had grown used to our wives and mothers, and
grandmothers, and great aunts all pouring a chorus of contempt upon
our hobbies of sport, drink and party politics. And now comes Miss
Pankhurst with tears in her eyes, owning that all the women were
wrong and all the men were right. . . . We told our wives that
Parliament had sat late on most essential business; but it never
crossed our minds that our wives would believe it. We said that
everyone must have a vote in the country; similarly our wives said
that no one must have a pipe in the drawing-room. In both cases the
idea was the same. "It does not matter much, but if you let those
things slide there is chaos." We said that Lord Huggins or Mr.
Buggins was absolutely necessary to the country. We knew quite well
that nothing is necessary to the country except that the men should
be men and the women women. We knew this; we thought the women knew
it even more clearly; and we thought the women would say it.
Suddenly, without warning, the women have begun to say all the
nonsense that we ourselves hardly believed when we said it. . . .*
[* From chapter VII, _The Modern Surrender_.]
All the agitated reformers who were running about and offering their
various nostrums were prepared to confess that something had gone
very wrong with modern civilisation. But they suggested that what was
wrong with the present generation of adults could be set right for
the coming generation by means of education. In the last part of the
book, "Education or the Mistake about the Child," he put the
unanswerable question: How are we to give what we have not got? "To
hear people talk one would think [education] was some sort of magic
chemistry, by which, out of a laborious hotch-potch of hygienic
meals, baths, breathing-exercises, fresh-air and freehand drawing, we
can produce something splendid by accident; we can create what we
cannot conceive." The social reformers who were talking about
education seem not to have seen very clearly what they meant by the
word. They argued about whether it meant putting ideas into the child
or drawing ideas out of the child. In any case, as Chesterton pointed
out, you must choose which kind of ideas you are going to put in or
even which kind you are going to draw out. "There is indeed in each
living creature a collection of forces and functions; but education
means producing these in particular shapes and training them for
particular purposes, or it means nothing at all."
But to decide what they were trying to produce was altogether too
much for the men who were directing education in our Board Schools.
The Public Schools of England were often the target of Chesterton's
attacks; but they had, he declared, one immense superiority over the
Board Schools. The men who directed them knew exactly what they
wanted and were on the whole successful in producing it. Those
responsible for the Board Schools seemed to have no idea excepting
that of feebly imitating the Public Schools. One disadvantage of this
was that, at its worst and at its best, the Public School idea could
only be applicable to a small governing class. The other disadvantage
was that whereas in the Public Schools the masters were working with
the parents and trying to give the boys the same general shape as
their homes would give them, the Board Schools were doing nothing of
the kind. The schoolmaster of the poor never worked with the parents;
often he ignored them; sometimes he positively worked against them.
Such education was, Chesterton held, the very reverse of that which
would prevail in a true democracy. "We have had enough education for
the people; we want education by the people."
Chesterton felt keenly that while the faddists were perfectly
prepared to take the children out of the hands of any parents who
happened to be poor, they had not really the courage of their own
convictions. They would expatiate upon methods; they could not define
their aims; they would take refuge in such meaningless terms as
progress or efficiency or success. They were not prepared to say what
they wanted to succeed in producing, towards what goal they were
progressing or what was the test of efficiency. And part of this
inability arose from their curious fear of the past. Most movements
of reform have looked to the past for great part of their
inspiration. To reform means to shape anew, and he pointed out that
every revolution involves the idea of a return. On this point, G.K.
attacked two popular sayings. One was "You can't put the clock back";
but, he said, you can and you do constantly. The clock is a piece of
mechanism which can be adjusted by the human finger. "There is
another proverb: 'As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it';
which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable,
please God, I will make it again."
It is easy to understand that this sort of philosophy should be out
of tune with the Socialist who looked with contempt on the wisdom of
his forefathers. It is less easy to understand why it was
unacceptable also to most of the Tories. One reviewer asked whether
Mr. Chesterton was the hoariest of Conservatives or the wildest of
Radicals. And with none of his books are the reviews so bewildered as
they are with this one. "The universe is ill-regulated," said the
_Liverpool Daily Post_, "according to the fancy of Mr. Chesterton;
but we are inclined to think that if the deity were to talk over
matters with him, he would soon come to see that a Chestertonian
cosmos would be no improvement on things as they are." On the other
hand, the _Toronto Globe_ remarks, "His boisterous optimism will not
admit that there is anything to sorrow over in this best of all
possible worlds." The _Observer_ suggested that Chesterton would find
no disciples because "his converts would never know from one week to
another what they had been converted to"; while the _Yorkshire Post_
felt that the chief disadvantage of the book was that "a shrewd
reader can pretty accurately anticipate Mr. Chesterton's point of
view on any subject whatsoever."
It seems almost incredible that so definite a line of thought, so
abundantly illustrated, should not have been clear to all his
readers. Some reviewers, one supposes, had not read the book; but
surely the _Daily Telegraph_ was deliberately refusing to face a
challenge when it wrote: "His whole book is an absurdity, but to be
absurd for three hundred pages on end is itself a work of genius."
That particular reviewer was shirking a serious issue. He was the
official Tory. But those whom I might call the unofficial Tories,
such men for instance as my own father, received much of this book
with delight and yet declined to take Chesterton's sociology
seriously. And I think it is worth trying to see why this was the
case.
In a letter to the _Clarion_, G.K. outlines his own position: "If you
want praise or blame for Socialists I have enormous quantities of
both. Roughly speaking (1) I praise them to infinity because they
want to smash modern society. (2) I blame them to infinity because of
what they want to put in its place. As the smashing must, I suppose,
come first, my practical sympathies are mainly with them."*
[* Letter to the _Clarion_, February 8, 1910.]
Such a confession of faith seemed shocking to the honest
old-fashioned Tory. And because it shocked him, he made the mistake
of calling it irresponsible. Chesterton frequently urged revolution
as the only possible means of changing an intolerable state of
things. But the word "revolution" suggested streets running with
blood. And, on the other hand, they had not the very faintest
conception of how intolerable the state of things was against which
Chesterton proposed to revolt. I think it must be said too that he
was a little hazy as to the exact nature of the revolution he
proposed. He certainly hoped to avoid the guillotine! And even when
urging the restoration of the common lands to the people of England,
he appended a note in which he talked of a land purchase scheme
similar to that which George Wyndham had introduced in Ireland. But
besides this tinge of vagueness in what he proposed, there was
another weakness in his presentment of his sociology which I think
was his chief weakness as a writer.
It would be hard to find anyone who got so much out of words,
proverbs, popular sayings. He wrung every ounce of meaning out of
them; he stood them on their heads; he turned them inside out. And
everything he said he illustrated with an extraordinary wealth of
fancy; but when you come to illustration by way of concrete facts
there is a curious change. In his sociology, he did the same thing
that his best critics blamed in his literary biographies. He would
take some one fact and appear to build upon it an enormous
superstructure and then, very often, it would turn out that the fact
itself was inaccurately set down; and the average reader, discovering
the inaccuracy, felt that the entire superstructure was on a rotten
foundation and had fallen with it to the ground. Yet the ordinary
reader was wrong. The "fact" had not been the foundation of his
thought, but only the thing that had started him thinking. If the
"fact" had not been there at all, his thinking would have been
neither more nor less valid. But most readers could not see the
distinction.
It is a little difficult to make the point clear; but anyone who has
read the _Browning_ and the _Dickens_ and then read the reviews of
them will recognise what I mean. It was universally acknowledged that
Chesterton might commit a hundred inaccuracies and yet get at the
heart of his subject in a way that the most painstaking biographer
and critic could not emulate. The more deeply one reads Dickens or
Browning, the more even one studies their lives, the more one is
confirmed as to the profound truth of the Chesterton estimate and the
genius of his insight. A superficial glance sees only the errors; a
deeper gaze discovers the truth. It is exactly the same with his
sociology. But here we are in a field where there is far more
prejudice. When Chesterton talked of State interference and used
again and again the same illustration--that of children whose hair
was forcibly cut short in a Board School--two questions were asked by
Socialists: Was this a solitary incident? Was it accurately reported?
When a pained doctor wrote to the papers saying the incident had been
merely one of a request to parents who had gladly complied for fear
their children should catch things from other and dirtier children,
it appeared as though G.K. had built far too much on this one point.
It was not the case. He was not building on the incident, he was
illustrating by the incident. But it must be admitted that he was
incredibly careless in investigating such incidents; and quite
indifferent as to his own accuracy. And this was foolish, for he
could have found in Police Court records, in the pages of _John Bull_
and later of the _Eye Witness_ itself, abundance of well verified
illustrations of his thesis.
In the same way, when he talked of the robbery of the people of
England by the great landlords, he did not take the slightest trouble
to prove his case to the many who knew nothing of the matter. It must
be remembered that the sociological side of English history was only
just beginning to be explored to any serious extent. In the _Village
Labourer_, Mr. and Mrs. Hammond point out to what an extent they had
had to depend on the Home Office papers and contemporary documents
for the mass of facts which this book and the _Town Labourer_ brought
for the first time to the knowledge of the general public. Chesterton
had worked with Hammond on the _Speaker_ for some years. Just as with
his book about Shaw so too with the background of his sociology he
could have gone round the corner and got the required information. He
knew the thing in general terms; he would not be bothered to make
that knowledge convincing to his readers. If to his genius for
expounding ideas had been added an awareness of the necessity of
marshalling and presenting facts, he must surely have convinced all
men of goodwill.
For in this matter the facts were there to marshal. It was less than
a hundred years since the last struggle of the English yeomen against
a wholesale robbery and confiscation that catastrophically altered
the whole shape of our country. And it seems to have left no trace in
the memory of the English poor. In _Northanger Abbey_, Jane Austen
describes Catherine Morland finding the traces of an imaginary crime.
But Chesterton comments that the crime she failed to discover was the
very real one that the owner of Northanger Abbey was not an Abbot.
The ordinary Englishman, however, thinks little of a crime that
consisted in robbing "a lot of lazy monks." That they had possessed
so much of the land of England merely seemed to make the act a more
desirable one: yet it was a confiscation, not so much of monks' land
as of the people's land administered by the monasteries.
What is even less realised is how much of the structure of the
mediaeval village remained after the Reformation and how widespread
was small ownership nearly to the end of the eighteenth century, when
Enclosures began estimated by the Hammonds at five million acres.
This land ceased in effect to be the common property of the poor and
became the private property of the rich. This business of the
Enclosures must be treated at some little length because it had the
same key position in Chesterton's sociological thinking as the
Marconi Case (shortly to be discussed) had in his political.
In every village of England had been small freeholders, copyholders
and cottagers, all of whom had varying degrees of possession in the
common lands which were administered by a manorial court of the
village. These common lands were not mere stretches of heath and
gorse but consisted partly of arable cultivated in strips with strict
rules of rotation, partly of grazing land and partly of wood and
heath. Most people in the village had a right to a strip of arable,
to cut firing of brushwood and turf, and rushes for thatch, and to
pasture one or more cows, their pigs and their geese. A village
cowherd looked after all the animals and brought them back at night.
Cobbett in his _Cottage Economy_ (to a new edition of which
Chesterton wrote a preface) reckoned that a cottager with a
quarter-acre of garden could well keep a cow on his own cabbages plus
commonland grazing, could fatten his own pig and have to buy very
little food for his family except grain and hops for home-baking and
brewing. He puts a cottager's earnings, working part-time for a
farmer, at about 10 sh. a week. This figure would vary, but the
possession of property in stock and common rights would tide over bad
times. A man with fire and food could be quasi-independent; and
indeed some of the larger farmers, witnessing before Enclosure
Enquiry Committees, complained of this very spirit of independence as
producing idleness and "sauciness."
The case for the Enclosures was that improved agricultural methods
could not be used in the open fields: more food was grown for
increasing town populations: much waste land ploughed: livestock
immeasurably improved. Only later was the cost counted when cheap
imported food for these same towns had slain English agriculture. The
"compensation" in small plots or sums of money could not for the
smaller commoners replace what they had lost--even when they
succeeded in getting it. Claims had to be made in writing--and few
cottagers could write. How difficult too to reduce to its money value
a claim for cutting turf or pasturing pigs and geese. A commissioner,
who had administered twenty Enclosure Acts, lamented to Arthur Young
that he had been the means of ruining two thousand poor people. But
the gulf was so great between rich and poor that all that the commons
had meant to the poor was not glimpsed by the rich. Arthur Young had
thought the benefits of common "perfectly contemptible," but by 1801
he was deeply repentant and trying in vain to arrest the movement he
had helped to start.
Before enclosure, the English cottager had had milk, butter and
cheese in plenty, home-grown pork and bacon, home-brewed beer and
home-baked bread, his own vegetables (although Cobbett scorned green
rubbish for human food and advised it to be fed to cattle only), his
own eggs and poultry. After enclosure, he could get no milk, for the
farmers would not sell it; no meat, for his wages could not buy it;
and he no longer had a pig to provide the fat bacon commended by
Cobbett. Working long hours he lived on bread, potatoes and tea, and
insufficient even of these. Lord Winchelsea, one of the very few
landowners who resisted the trend of the time, mentioned in the House
of Lords the discovery of four labourers, starved to death under a
hedge, and said this was a typical occurrence.
At the beginning of the Enclosure period the Industrial Revolution
was barely in its infancy. A large part of the spinning, weaving and
other manufactures was carried on in the cottages of men who had
gardens they could dig in and cows and pigs of their own. The
invention of power machines, the discovery of coal wherewith those
machines could be worked, led to the concentration of factories in
the huge cities. But it was the drift from the villages of
dispossessed men, together with the cheap child labour provided by
Poor Law Guardians, that made possible the starvation wages and the
tyranny of the factory system. And here the tyrants were largely of a
different class. There were some landowners who also had factories,
and more who possessed coal-mines, but many of the manufacturers had
themselves come from the class of the dispossessed.
Successful manufacturers made money--a great deal of money. Many of
the men's appeals gave the figures at which the goods were sold in
contrast with their rate of wages, and the contrast is startling. So,
as the towns grew, the masters left the smoke they were creating and
bought country places and became country gentlemen, preserved their
own game and judged their own tenants. And thus disappeared yet
another section of the ancient country folk. For the large landowners
would seldom sell and the land bought by the new men was mostly the
land of small farmers and yeomen. This was the age of new country
houses with a hundred rooms and vast offices that housed an army of
servants. "Labour was cheap," the descendants of those who built just
then will tell you, as they gaze disconsolate at their unwieldy
heritage. Old and new families alike built or rebuilt, added and
improved.
Cobbett rode rurally and angrily through the ruins of a better
England (described a century earlier by another horseman, Daniel
Defoe). Goldsmith mourned an early example in his "Deserted Village,"
but they are the only voices in an abundant literature. Jane Austen
is, indeed, the perfect example of what Chesterton always
realised--the ignorance that was almost innocence with which the
wealthy had done their work of destruction. He did not account them
as evil as they would seem by a mere summary of events. And what he
saw at the root of those events was in his eyes still present:
England was still possessed and still governed by a minority. The
Conservatives were "a minority that was rich," the liberals "a
minority that was mad." And those two minorities tended to join
together and rob and oppress the ordinary man, in the name of some
theory of progress and perfection.
Thus the Protestant Reformation had closed the monasteries, which
were the poor man's inns, in the name of a purer religion; the
economists had taken away his land and driven him into the factories
with a promise of future wealth and prosperity. These had been the
experts of their day. Now the new experts were telling him with equal
eagerness that hygienic flats and communal kitchens would bring about
for him the new Jerusalem. But never did the expert think of asking
Jones, the ordinary man, what he himself wanted. Jones just wanted
the "divinely ordinary things"--a house of his own and a family life.
And that was still denied him as is related in the chapter called
"The Homelessness of Jones."
In a debate in the Oxford Union, G.K. maintained that the House of
Lords was a menace to the State, because it failed precisely in what
was supposed to be its main function, that of conservation. It had
not saved, it had destroyed the Church lands and the common lands; it
was ready to pass any Bill that affected only the lower classes. "We
are all Socialists now," Sir William Harcourt had lately said, and
Chesterton saw that Socialism would mean merely further restriction
of liberty and continued coercion of the poor by the experts and the
rich. So, looking at the past, Chesterton desired a restoration which
he often called a Revolution. There were two forms of government that
might succeed--a real Monarchy, in which one ordinary man governed
many ordinary men--or a real democracy, in which many ordinary men
governed themselves. Aristocracy may have begun well in England when
it was an army protecting England: when the Duke was a Dux. Now it
was merely plutocracy and it had become "an army without an enemy
billeted on the people."
All this and more formed the background of Chesterton's mind. But
what he wrote was a comment on the scene, not a picture of it. He
wrote of the terrible irony whereby "the Commons were enclosing the
commons." He spoke of the English revolution of the eighteenth
century, "a revolution of the rich against the poor." He mourned with
Goldsmith the destruction of England's peasantry. He cried aloud like
Cobbett, for he too had discovered the murder of England his mother.
But his cry was unintelligible and his hopes of a resurrection
unmeaning to those who knew not what had been done to death.