Completion
THERE IS ONE part of this story that has not been told with the rest:
Our Lady's share in Gilbert's conversion. The Chesterton family had
been quite without the strange Protestant prejudice that in the minds
of many Englishmen sets the Mother of God against God the Son. Our
lady was respected though of course not invoked. In a boyhood poem
Gilbert took the blasphemous lines of Swinburne's "Hymn to
Proserpine" and wrote a kind of parody in reverse turning the poem
into a hymn to Mary. He would, too, recite Swinburne's own lines
"deliberately directing them away from Swinburne's intention and
supposing them addressed to the new Christian Queen of life, rather
than to the fallen Pagan queen of death."
But I turn to her still; having seen she shall surely abide
in the end
Goddess and maiden and queen be near me now and befriend.
Nor was it only admiration for art that made him write--also in early
youth:
THE NATIVITY OF BOTTICELLI
Do you blame me that I sit hours before this picture?
But if I walked all over the world in this time
I should hardly see anything worth seeing that is not
in this picture.
Father O'Connor sees in _The Catholic Church and Conversion_ a hint
that Mr. Belloc had been of those who tried to hustle Gilbert in his
younger days. But on this profound reality of Mary's help they could
meet many years before Gilbert had finished the slow rumination of
mind and the painful effort of will that had held him so long. Here
is an early letter Belloc wrote to his friend:
Reform Club, Manchester.
11 Dec. 1907.
MY DEAR GILBERT,
I am a man afraid of impulse in boats, horses and all action though
driven to it. I have never written a letter such as I am writing now,
though I have desired to write some six or seven since I became a
grown man. In the matter we discussed at Oxford I have a word to say
which is easier to say on paper than by word of mouth, or rather,
more valuable. All intellectual process is doubtful, all
inconclusive, save pure deduction, which is a game if one's first
certitudes are hypothetical and immensely valuable if one's first
certitude is fixed, yet remains wholly dependent on that.
Now if we differed in all main points I would not write thus, but
there are one or two on which we agree. One is "Vere passus,
immolatus in cruce pro homine." Another is in a looking up to our
Dear Lady, the blessed Mother of God.
I recommend to you this, that you suggest to her a comprehension for
yourself, of what indeed is the permanent home of the soul. If it is
here you will see it, if it is there you will see it. She never fails
us. She has never failed me in any demand.
I have never written thus--as I say--and I beg you to see nothing
in it but what I say. There is no connection the reason can
seize--but so it is. If you say "I want this" as in your case to know
one way or the other--she will give it you: as she will give health
or necessary money or success in a pure love. She is our Blessed
Mother.
I have not used my judgment in this letter. I am inclined to
destroy it, but I shall send it. Don't answer it.
Yours ever
H. BELLOC.
At top of letter: "My point is If it is right She knows. If it is
not right She knows."
Gilbert believed it, and he knew that as he came to the Church he was
coming to Our Lady.
Now I can scarcely remember a time when the image of Our lady did
not stand up in my mind quite definitely, at the mention or the
thought of all these things. I was quite distant from these things,
and then doubtful about these things; and then disputing with the
world for them, and with myself against them; for that is the
condition before conversion. But whether the figure was distant, or
was dark and mysterious, or was a scandal to my contemporaries, or
was a challenge to myself--I never doubted that this figure was the
figure of the Faith; that she embodied, as a complete human being
still only human, all that this Thing had to say to humanity. The
instant I remembered the Catholic Church, I remembered her; when I
tried to forget the Catholic Church, I tried to forget her! When I
finally saw what was nobler than my fate, the freest and the hardest
of all my acts of freedom, it was in front of a gilded and very gaudy
little image of her in the port of Brindisi, that I promised the
thing that I would do, if I returned to my own land.*
[* _The Well and the Shallows_, pp. 176-7.]
In his _Chaucer_, G.K. quoted with considerable amusement a learned
critic who said it was "possible" that the poet had "passed through a
period of intense devotion, more especially towards the Virgin Mary."
"It is," he comments. "It does occur from time to time. I do not
quite understand why Chaucer must have 'passed through' this fit of
devotion; as if he had Mariolatry like the measles. Even an amateur
who has encountered this malady may be allowed to testify that it
does not usually visit its victim for a brief 'period'; it is
generally chronic and (in some sad cases I have known) quite
incurable."*
[* _Chaucer_, p. 121.]
_The Queen of Seven Swords_ is the great expression of Gilbert's
"chronic" love of Our Lady:
And men looked up at the woman made for the morning
When the stars were young,
For whom more rude than a beggar's rhyme in the gutter
These songs were sung.
"The Return of Eve" exemplified a favourite thought of his: when the
journalist keeps repeating that the life of religion does not lie in
dusty dogmas we should stop him with a great shout, for he is wrong
at the very start. It is from the seed of dogma and from that seed
alone that all the Powers of art and poetry and devotion spring. In
the days of his boyhood, when he thought of Our lady with a vague
and confused respect as _"The_ Madonna" he could not have written
"The Return of Eve." That flower came from the seed of the doctrine of
the Immaculate Conception.
Our lady is the Mother of God and our Mother: this doctrine blossomed
as he wrote:
I found One hidden in every home
A voice that sings about the house.
A nurse that scares the nightmares off
A mother nearer than a spouse
Whose picture once I saw; and there
Wild as of old and weird and sweet
In sevenfold splendour blazed the moon
Not on her brow; beneath her feet.
This poem, "The White Witch" has in it a mingling of the old
classical stories of his boyhood and the new light of Christian
reality. In _The Everlasting Man_ he saw the myths as hunger and the
Faith as bread. Men's hearts today were withered because they had
forgotten to eat their bread. The hunger of the pagans was a
healthier thing than the jaded sterility of the modern world. Our
Lady was ready to give that world the Bread of Life once more. And as
he meditated on the mystery of the Virgin Birth he saw God making
purity creative. She alone who overcame all heresies could overcome
the hideous heresy of birth prevention.
That Christ from this creative purity
Came forth your sterile appetites to scorn.
So: in her house Life without Lust was born,
So in your house Lust without Life shall die.
"Gaude, Virgo Maria, cunctas haereses sola interemisti." Was this
phrase from Our Lady's office ringing in Gilbert's mind as he sang of
the Seven Champions of Christendom disarmed and worsted in the fight,
going back to Our Lady to find that she had hidden their swords where
the gospels tell us she hid and pondered all things--in her heart?
From her wounded heart, Mary takes the seven swords to rearm the
saints who have to reconquer the earth.
Certainly he must often have thought of the Litany. So many verses
are based on it. Our Lord as a baby climbs the Ivory Tower of His
Mother's body and kisses the Mystic Rose of her lips:
A woman was His walking home
Foederis Arca Ora pro nobis.
And he thinks of the sun, moon and stars as trinkets for her to play
with:
With the great heart a woman has
And the love of little things.
For she is a woman: Regina Angelorum, Queen of Powers and Archangels,
she yet belongs to the human race.
Our lady went into a strange country,
Our lady, for she was ours
And had run on the little hills behind the houses
And pulled small flowers;
But she rose up and went into a strange country
With strange thrones and powers.
From a welter of comment and correspondence that followed his
conversion--challenging, scorning, rejoicing, welcoming, I select two
letters from the two closest of Gilbert's Catholic friends--Hilaire
Belloc and Maurice Baring.
i.VIII.22.
MY DEAR GILBERT,
I write to you, from these strange surroundings, the first line
upon the news you gave me. I must write to you again when I have
collected myself: for my reactions are abominably slow. I have,
however, something to say immediately: and that is why I write this
very evening, just after seeing Eleanor off at the Station. The thing
I have to say is this (I could not have said it before your step: I
can say so now. Before it would have been like a selected pleading.)
The Catholic Church is the exponent of Reality. It is true. Its
doctrines in matters large and small are statements of what is. This
it is which the ultimate act of the intelligence accepts. This it is
which the will deliberately confirms. And that is why Faith though an
act of the Will is Moral. If the Ordnance Map tells us that it is 11
miles to [a place] then, my mood of lassitude as I walk through the
rain at night making it feel like 30, I use the Will and say "No." My
intelligence has been convinced and I compel myself to use it against
my mood. It is 11 and though I feel in the depths of my being to have
gone 30 miles and more, I _know_ it is not yet 11 I have gone.
I am by all my nature of mind sceptical. . . . And as to the doubt
of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood: not a conclusion. My
conclusion--and that of all men who have ever once seen it--is the
Faith; Corporate, organised, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a
theory. It.
To you, who have the blessing of profound religious emotion, this
statement may seem too desiccate. It is indeed not enthusiastic. It
lacks meat.
It is my misfortune. In youth I had it: even till lately. Grief has
drawn the juices from it. I am alone and unfed, the more do I affirm
the Sanctity, the Unity, the Infallibility of the Catholic Church. By
my very isolation do I the more affirm it, as a man in a desert knows
that water is right for man: or as a wounded dog not able to walk,
yet knows the way home.
The Catholic Church is the natural home of the human spirit. The
odd perspective picture of life which looks like a meaningless puzzle
at first, seen from that one standpoint takes a complete order and
meaning, like the skull in the picture of the Ambassadors.
So much for my jejune contribution: not without value; because I
know you regard my intelligence--a perilous tool God gave me for his
own purposes; one bringing nothing to me.
But beyond this there will come in time, if I save my soul, the
flesh of these bones--which bones alone I can describe and teach. I
know--without feeling (an odd thing in such a connection) the reality
of Beatitude: which is the goal of Catholic Living.
In hac urbe lux solennis
Ver aeternum pax perennis
Et aeterna gaudia.
Yours,
H. B.
Maurice Baring wrote:
August 25: 1922.
MY DEAR GILBERT,
When I wrote to you the other day I was still cramped by the
possibility of the news not being true although I _knew_ it was true.
I felt it was true at once. Curiously enough I felt it had happened
before I saw the news in the newspaper at all. I felt that your ship
had arrived at its port. But the more I felt this, the more unwilling
I was to say anything before I heard the news from a source other
than the newspapers. I gave way to an excess, a foolish excess
perhaps of scruple. But you will, I think, understand this. In
writing to you the other day I expressed not a tenth part of what I
felt and feel and that baldly and inadequately. Nothing for years has
given me so much joy. I have hardly ever entered a church without
putting up a candle to Our Lady or to St. Joseph or St. Anthony for
you. And both this year and last year in Lent I made a Novena for
you. I know of many other people, better people far than I, who did
the same. Many Masses were said for you and prayers all over England
and Scotland in centres of Holiness. I will show you some day a
letter from some Nuns on the subject. A great friend of mine one of
the greatest saints I have known, Sister Mary Annunciation of the
Convent Orphanage, Upper Norwood, used always to pray for you. She,
alas, died last year.
Did I ever quote you a sentence of Bernard Holland on the subject
of Kenelm Henry Digby when the latter was received?
"Father Scott . . . who, at last, guided him through the narrow
door where one must bend one's head, into the internal space and
freedom of the eternal and universal Catholic Church." _Space_ and
_freedom:_ that was what I experienced on being received; that is
what I have been most conscious of ever since. It is the exact
opposite of what the ordinary Protestant conceives to be the case. To
him and not only to him but to the ordinary English agnostic the
convert to Catholicism is abandoning his will and his independence,
sometimes they think even his nationality; at the best they think he
is sheltering himself in a walled garden; at the worst they think he
has closed on himself an iron door: and shackled himself with foolish
chains and sold his birthright for a crown of tinsel.
And yet their own experience, the testimony of their eyes if they
would only use them, ought to suggest to them that they might perhaps
be mistaken.
It would be difficult for anyone to make out a case for the
UnEnglishness of Manning or indeed of any prominent English Catholic
whether a born Catholic or a convert.
It would be difficult for them to prove that Belloc was a writer
wanting in independence. It would be difficult for them to convince
any one that Father Vaughan and Lord Fitzalan were wearing foolscaps.
And anybody who has thought about history or looked on at politics
must have reflected that freedom resides where there is order and not
where there is license: or no-order.
It is true in politics; it is true in art. It is the basis of our
whole social life in England. Russia has just given us the most
startling of object lessons. The English with their passion for
Committees, their Club-rules and their well organised traffic are
daily realising the fact, however little they may recognise the
theory. Only the law can give us freedom, said Goethe talking of art.
"Und das Gesetz kann nur die Freiheit geben."
Well all I have to say, Gilbert, is what I think I have already
said to you, and what I have said not long ago in a printed book.
That I was received into the Church on the Eve of Candlemass 1909,
and it is perhaps the only act in my life, which I am quite certain I
have never regretted. Every day I live, the Church seems to me more
and more wonderful; the Sacraments more and more solemn and
sustaining; the voice of the Church, her liturgy, her rules, her
discipline, her ritual, her decisions in matters of Faith and Morals
more and more excellent and profoundly wise and true and right, and
her children stamped with something that those outside Her are
without. There I have found Truth and reality and everything outside
Her is to me compared with Her as dust and shadow. Once more God
bless you and Frances. Please give her my love. In my prayers for you
I have always added her name.
Yours,
MAURICE.
It was a bit of great good fortune, although at the time he did not
feel it so, that the death of the _New Witness_ in 1922 for lack of
funds, left Gilbert some months for uninterrupted creative thought
before _G.K.'s Weekly_ took its place. Lawrence Solomon, friend of
his boyhood and at this time a near neighbour, has told me not only
how happy his conversion had made Gilbert but also how it had seemed
to bring him increased strength of character. Worry, he had told
Maurice Baring, did not worry so much as of old because of a
fundamental peace. In this atmosphere were written two of his most
important books: _St. Francis of Assisi_ published 1923, _The
Everlasting Man_ published 1925.
In a poem he has expressed his sense of conversion as a new light
that had transfigured life: indeed of a new life given to him:
After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white,
I walked the ways and heard what all men said.
* * * * *
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.*
[* _Collected Poems_, p. 387, "The Convert."]
Both books shine with that light on the white road of man's
endeavour, thrill with that life. Gilbert felt now the clue to
history in his fingers and he used it increasingly. _The Everlasting
Man_ is the _Orthodoxy_ of his later life and one difficulty in
dealing with it adequately was expressed in a letter from William
Lyon Phelps thanking the author for "a magnificent work of genius and
never more needed than now. I took out my pencil to mark the most
important passages, but I quickly put my pencil in my pocket for I
found I had to mark every sentence." Reading the book for perhaps the
seventh time I can only say (I hope without irreverence) what G.K.
himself says happens to those who can read the words of the Gospels
"simply enough." They "will feel as if rocks had been rolled upon
them. Criticism is only words about words; and of what use are words
about such words as these."
"Rocks rolled upon them." Did he not feel crushed, overwhelmed at
times by his own thought on these immensities, or can the philosopher
carry his thoughts as lightly as Gilbert so often seemed to carry
his? I think not always. He must have needed superhuman strength to
conceive and give birth to this mighty book. The thoughts sketched in
_The New Jerusalem_ had grown to their full fruition in an atmosphere
of meditation. It would be much easier to give an outline of _The
Everlasting Man_ than of _Orthodoxy_, much harder to give an idea of
it. For _Orthodoxy_ consists of a hundred brilliant arguments while
_The Everlasting Man_ really is a vision of history supported by a
historical outline. Comparing his own effort with that of H. G.
Wells, Chesterton says, "I do not believe that the best way to
produce an outline of history is to rub out the lines." He is like
Wells however in not being a specialist but claiming "the right of
the amateur to do his best with the facts the specialists
provide"--only their specialists are different specialists and their
facts therefore largely different facts.
Chesterton, unlike most converts, wrote concerning his own conversion
the least interesting of his later books: but in _The Everlasting Man_
he is not at all concerned with his own spiritual wayfaring, he
merely wants to make everyone else look at what he has come to see at
the end of the way. The book is an attempt to get outside Man and
thus see him as the strange being he really is: to get outside
Christianity and see for the first time its uniqueness among the
religions of the world. Why are not all men aware of the uniqueness
of Man among the animals and the uniqueness of the Church among
religions? Because they do not really look at either. Familiarity has
dulled the edge of awareness. Men must be made to see them as though
for the first time; and it is the towering achievement of this book
that reading it we do so see them. "I desire to help the reader to
see Christendom from the outside in the sense of seeing it as a whole
against the background of other historic things; just as I desire him
to see humanity as a whole against the background of natural things.
And I say that in both cases when seen thus, they stand out from
their background like supernatural things." This being his desire, he
divides the book into two parts--"the first being the main adventure
of the human race in so far as it remained heathen; and the second a
summary of the real difference that was made by it becoming
Christian."
Notable as the first part is, it is only a preparation for the
second, which shows the Church not as one religion among many but as
the only religion, for it is the only Thing that binds into one both
Philosophy (or Thought) and Mythology (or Poetry), giving us a Logos
Who is also the Hero of the strangest story in the world. He asks the
man who talks of reading the Gospels really to read them as he might
read his daily paper and to feel the terrific shock of the words of
Christ to the Pharisees or the behaviour of Christ to the
money-changers: to look at the uniqueness of the Church that has died
so often but like Her Founder risen again from the dead.
Two untrue things, he felt, were constantly reiterated about the
gospel--one that the Church had overlaid and made difficult a plain
and simple story: the other that the hero of this story was merely
human and taught a morality suitable to his own age, inapplicable in
our more complicated society. To anyone who really read the gospels
the instant impression would be rather that they were full of dark
riddles which only historic Christianity has clarified. The Eunuchs
of the heavenly Kingdom would be an idea dark and terrible but for
the historic beauty of Catholic virginity. The ideal of man and woman
"in one flesh" inseparable and sanctified by a sacrament became clear
in the lives of the great married saints of Christendom. The apparent
idealisation of idleness above service in the story of Mary and
Martha was lit up by the sight of Catherine and Clare and Teresa
shining above the little home at Bethany. The meek inheriting the
earth became the basis of a new Social Order when the mystical monks
reclaimed the lands that the practical kings had lost.
Thus if the gospel was a riddle the Church was the answer to the
riddle because both were created by One Who Knew: Who saw the ages in
which His own creation was to find completion: Whose morality was not
one of another age but of another world.
Chesterton gathered history in his mind and saw together before the
Christmas Crib the shepherds who had found their shepherd, the
philosopher kings who "would stand for the same human ideal if their
names had really been Confucius or Pythagoras or Plato. They were
those who sought not tales but the truth of things; and since their
thirst for truth was itself a thirst for God, they also have had
their reward. But even in order to understand that reward, we must
understand that for philosophy as much as mythology, that reward was
the completion of the incomplete."*
[* _The Everlasting Man_, p. 211.]
G.K. too had needed the completion of incomplete human thought: he
too had followed the star from a far country. It had been a fancy of
his boyhood, caught from a fairytale, that evil lurked somewhere in a
hidden room of the human house and the human heart. He saw in the
history of the ancients a consciousness of the Fall, in the sadness
of their songs a sense of "the Presence of the Absence of God." But
at Bethlehem he saw the transformation that had come upon the whole
race of man with that little local infancy concealing the mighty
power of God who had put Himself under the feet of the world.
It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart
of his own house, which he had never suspected; and seen a light from
within. It is as if he found something at the back of his own heart
that betrayed him into good. It is not made of what the world would
call strong materials; or rather it is made of materials whose
strength is in that winged levity with which they brush us and pass.
It is all that is in us but a brief tenderness, that is there made
eternal; all that means no more than a momentary softening that is in
some strange fashion become a strengthening and a repose; it is the
broken speech and the lost word that are made positive and suspended
unbroken; as the strange kings fade into a far country and the
mountains resound no more with the feet of the shepherds; and only
the night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over something more
human than humanity.
[* Ibid., p. 223.]
It seems to me profoundly significant that Gilbert studied first in
the little Poor Man of Assisi what Christ could do in one man before
he came on to the study of what He had done in mankind as a whole, of
Who He was who had done it. For the man thus chosen embodied the
ideals that Gilbert had seen dimly in his boyhood--ideals that most
of us accept a little reluctantly from the Church, but which had
actually attracted him towards the Church. St. Francis "had found the
secret of life in being the servant and the secondary figure". . .
"he seems to have liked everybody, but especially those whom
everybody disliked him for liking." "By nature he was the sort of man
who has that vanity which is the opposite of pride, that vanity which
is very near to humility. He never despised his fellow creatures and
therefore he never despised the opinion of his fellow creatures,
including the admiration of his fellow creatures." "He was above all
things a great giver; and he cared chiefly for the best kind of
giving which is called thanksgiving. If another great man wrote a
grammar of assent, he may well be said to have written a grammar of
acceptance; a grammar of gratitude. He understood down to its very
depths the theory of thanks; and its depths are a bottomless abyss."
Here, in St. Francis, Gilbert saw the apotheosis of his old boyish
thought--that thanksgiving is a duty and a joy, that we should love
not "humanity" but each human. Things shadowed in the Notebook are in
_St. Francis_, for
the transition from the good man to the saint is a sort of
revolution; by which one for whom all things illustrate and
illuminate God becomes one for whom God illustrates and illuminates
all things. It is rather like the reversal whereby a lover might say
at first sight that a lady looked like a flower, and say afterwards
that all flowers reminded him of his lady. A saint and a poet
standing by the same flower might seem to say the same thing; but
indeed though they would both be telling the truth, they would be
telling different truths. For one the joy of life is a cause of
faith, for the other rather a result of faith.*
[* _St. Francis of Assisi_, p. 111.]
_The Everlasting Man_ and the _St. Francis_ seem to me the highest
expression of Gilbert's mysticism. I have hesitated to use the word
for it is not one to be used lightly but I can find no other. Like
most Catholics I have been wont to believe that to be a mystic a man
must first be an ascetic and Gilbert was not an ascetic in the
ordinary sense. But is there not for the thinker an asceticism of the
mind, very searching, very purifying? In his youth he had told
Bentley that creative writing was the hardest of hard labour. That
sense of the pressure of thought that made Newman call creative
writing "getting rid of pain by pain"; the profound depression that
often follows; the exhaustion that seems like a bottomless pit. St.
Theresa said the hardest penance was easier than mental prayer: was
not much of Gilbert's thought a contemplation?
Faith, thanksgiving, love, surely these far above bodily asceticism
can so clear a man's eyesight that he may fittingly be called a
mystic since he sees God everywhere. "The less a man thinks of
himself, the more he thinks of his good luck and of all the gifts of
God." Only a poet who was more than a poet could see so clearly of
what like St. Francis was.
When we say that a poet praises the whole creation, we commonly
mean only that he praises the whole cosmos. But this sort of poet
does really praise creation, in the sense of the act of creation. He
praises the passage or transition from nonentity to entity; there
falls here also the shadow of that archetypal image of the bridge,
which has given to the priest his archaic and mysterious name. The
mystic who passes through the moment when there is nothing but God
does in some sense behold the beginningless beginnings in which there
was really nothing else. He not only appreciates everything but the
nothing of which everything was made. In a fashion he endures and
answers even the earthquake irony of the Book of Job; in some sense
he is there when the foundations of the world are laid, with the
mornings stars singing together and the sons of God shouting for joy.*
[* _St. Francis of Assisi_, pp. 112-13.]
But there was in all those years another element besides the giving
of thanks and the joy of creation: an abiding grief for the sorrows
of the sons of men and especially those of his own land. In this mood
the _Cobbett_ was written.
Nine years separate the publication of _William Cobbett_ from that of
the _History of England_. Written at the time when Englishmen were
fighting so magnificently, that book had radiated G.K.'s own mood of
hope, but to read _Rural Rides_, to meditate on Cobbett's England,
and then turn to the England of the hour was not cheerful. For
Cobbett "did not draw precise diagrams of things as they were. He
only had frantic and fantastic nightmares of things as they are."*
And these nightmares haunted Cobbett's biographer.
[* _Cobbett_, p. 22.]
What he saw was not an Eden that cannot exist, but rather an
Inferno that can exist, and even that does exist. What he saw was the
perishing of the whole English power of self-support, the growth of
cities that drain and dry up the countryside, the growth of dense
dependent populations incapable of finding their own food, the
toppling triumph of machines over men, the sprawling omnipotence of
financiers over patriots, the herding of humanity in nomadic masses
whose very homes are homeless, the terrible necessity of peace and
the terrible probability of war, all the loading up of our little
island like a sinking ship; the wealth that may mean famine and the
culture that may mean despair; the bread of Midas and the sword of
Damocles. In a word, he saw what we see, but he saw it when it was
not there. And some cannot see it--even when it is there.*
[* Ibid., pp. 14, 15.]
Two men had written of the Reformation as the ultimate origin of
these evils at a time when it was still the fashion to treat it as
the dawn of all good. Lingard, himself a Catholic, had written
cautiously, with careful documentation and moderate tone. Cobbett, a
Protestant, had written hastily and furiously, but both men had drawn
in essentials the same picture. Chesterton suspected that Cobbett was
treated with contempt, Lingard with respect, largely because of the
difference in the tone of the two men. Lingard spoke restrainedly but
Cobbett's voice was raised in a loud cry:
He was simply a man who had discovered a crime: ancient like many
crimes; concealed like all crimes. He was as one who had found in a
dark wood the bones of his mother, and suddenly knew she had been
murdered. He knew now that England had been secretly slain. Some, he
would say, might think it a matter of mild regret to be expressed in
murmurs. But when he found a corpse he gave a shout; and if fools
laughed at anyone shouting, he would shout the more, till the world
should be shaken with that terrible cry in the night.
It is that ringing and arresting cry of "Murder!" wrung from him as
he stumbled over those bones of the dead England, that distinguishes
him from all his contemporaries.*
[* Ibid., pp. 176-77.]
Yet, for the Christian, hope remains: no murder can be the end.
"Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God
who knew the way out of the grave." This quotation is from the
chapter called "Five Deaths of the Faith" in _The Everlasting Man_.
Several times in the book Chesterton puts aside tempting lines of
thought with the remark that he intends to develop them later--in one
of the unwritten books that he always felt were so much better than
those he actually wrote. Would any human life have been long enough
to develop them all? Anyhow, even the whole of this life was not
available.
As I turn to the story of the weekly paper rising again from its
ashes I ask myself the question I have often asked: was it worth
while? I cannot answer the question. Something of his manhood seemed
to Gilbert bound up with this struggle, and it may be he would have
been a lesser man had he abandoned it. And yet at moments imagining
the poetry, the philosophy that might have been ours--another _White
Horse_, another _Everlasting Man_--I am tempted to wish that these
years had not thus been sacrificed to the paper which enshrined his
brother's memory.