Columbus
_He wished to discover America. His gay and thoughtless friends, who
could not understand him, pointed out that America had already been
discovered, I think they said by Christopher Columbus, some time ago,
and that there were big cities of Anglo-Saxon People there already,
New York and Boston and so on. But the Admiral explained to them,
kindly enough, that this had nothing to do with it. They might have
discovered America, but he had not_.
From _A Fragment_, in _The Coloured Lands_.
IN THE CHAPTER of his _Autobiography_ entitled "The Incomplete
Traveller" Chesterton has said "after all, the strangest country I
ever visited was England." It was of the very essence of his
philosophy that each one of us has to make again the discoveries of
our ancestors if we are to be travellers and not trippers. "The
traveller sees what he sees; the tripper sees what he has come to
see." Thus Chesterton tried to discover each country that he visited
and he records that the nearer countries are sometimes harder to
discover than the more remote. For Poland is more akin to England
than is France: Ireland more mysterious than Italy.
France, Ireland and supremely Palestine brought their contribution to
that mental and spiritual development traced in earlier chapters. On
Ireland, Rome, Jerusalem and the United States he wrote books. It may
really be said that on the States he wrote two books, for in the
volume of essays _Sidelights on New London and Newer York_ which
followed his second visit he showed a much greater understanding than
in _What I Saw in America_. His first visit took place in 1921-22,
his second in 1930.
On the first trip Frances kept clippings of almost all their
interviews. Gilbert himself said that, while the headlines in
American newspapers became obscure in their violent efforts to
startle, what was written underneath the headlines was usually good
journalism and the press cuttings of this tour bear out his remark.
Interviewers report accurately and with a good deal of humour.
Sketches of G.K.'s personal appearance abound, and if occasionally
they contradict one another in detail they yet contrive to convey a
vivid and fairly truthful impression of the "leonine" head, the bulky
form, the gestures and mannerisms. That a man of letters and lecturer
should choose to wear proudly not one of these titles but that of
journalist, was pleasing and flattering to the brotherhood. The
atmosphere of the tour is best conveyed by rather copious quotation.
A crowd of journalists met him at the boat. One of them writes of
. . . his voluminous figure, quite imposing when he stands up,
though not so abundantly Johnsonian as his pictures lead one to
expect. He has cascades of grey hair above a pinkly beaming face, a
rather straggly blond mustache, and eyes that seem frequently to be
taking up infinity in a serious way.
His falsetto laugh, prominent teeth and general aspect are rather
Rooseveltian. . . .
Mr. Chesterton, who is accompanied by Mrs. Chesterton, and who will
deliver a lecture soon in Boston on the Ignorance of the Educated,
said he did not expect to go further west than Chicago, since "having
seen both Jerusalem and Chicago, I think I shall have touched on the
extremes of civilization."
In the event he visited Omaha and Oklahoma City and went south as far
as Nashville, Tennessee.
Possibly Frances had thought she would pass unnoticed but in fact,
besides constant photographs of the pair, the lynx eye of the
interviewer was upon her as much as upon him. On arrival at New York:
He shook hands with some half-dozen Customs officials who welcomed
him to the city on their own behalf. The impression given by Mr.
Chesterton as he moved majestically along the pier or on the ship was
one of huge bulk. To the ordinary sized people on the pier he seemed
to blot out the liner and the river. Mrs. Chesterton was busy with
the baggage.
"My wife understands these things," he said with a sweep of his
stick. "I don't." . . .
In order to get the two figures into the same picture one of the
newspaper photographers requested Mr. Chesterton to sit in a big
armchair while his wife stood beside him. When they were settled in
the required pose he exclaimed: "I say I don't like this; people will
think that I am a German."
Another newspaper remarks: "He was accompanied by his wife, who
looked very small beside him. She attended to the baggage
examination, opening trunks and bags while her husband delivered a
short essay on the equality of men and women in England since the
war." This reporter was perhaps not without irony: but if it actually
happened like that, G.K. must have seen the joke too for he has a
similar situation in the first scene of his play "The Judgement of
Dr. Johnson." The same reporter adds that Chesterton speaks in
essays, so that his interviewers "received a brief essay instead of a
direct reply to a leading question."
We next come upon them in their New York hotel:
I found, with Mrs. Chesterton at the Biltmore, this big, gentle,
leonine man of letters six feet of him and 200 odd lbs. There is a
delightful story of how an American, driving with him through London,
remarked "Everyone seems to know you, Mr. Chesterton."
"Yes," mournfully responded the gargantuan author, "and if they
don't they ask."
He really doesn't look anything like as fat as his caricatures make
him, however, and he has a head big enough to go with his massive
tallness. His eyes are brilliant English blue behind the big rimmed
eyeglasses: his wavy hair, steel grey; his heavy mustache, bright
yellow. Physically he is the crackling electric spark of the
heaven-home-and-mother party, the only man who can give the cleverest
radical debaters a Roland for their Oliver.
In subsequent interviews G.K.'s height grew to six foot three and his
weight to 300 lbs. (which was surely closer to the mark); his
mannerisms were greatly remarked.
Mr. Chesterton speaks clearly, in a rather high-pitched voice. He
accompanies his remarks with many nervous little gestures. His hands,
at times, stray into his pockets. He leans over the reading desk as
if he would like to get down into the audience and make it a sort of
heart-to-heart talk.
Mr. Chesterton's right hand spent a restless and rather disturbing
evening. It would start from the reading desk at which he stood and
fall to the points of that vast waistcoat which inspired the
description of him as "a fellow of infinite vest." It would wander
aimlessly a moment about his--stomach is a word that is taboo among
the polite English--equator, and then shift swiftly to the rear until
the thumb found the hip pocket. There the hand would rest a moment,
to return again to the reading desk and to describe once more the
quarter circle. Once in a while it would twist a ring upon the left
hand, once in a while it would be clasped behind the broad back, but
only for a moment. To the hip pocket and back again was its
sentry-go, and it was a faithful soldier.
Several interviewers remark on the unexpected calibre of his voice.
He himself spoke of it as "the mouse that came forth from the
mountain."
One would never suspect him of being our leading American
best-seller. His accent, mannerisms, and dress are pro-Piccadilly and
he likes his Oolong with a lump of sugar. He thinks with his cigar, a
black London cheeroot.
He, Gilbert K. Chesterton, was sipping a cup of tea, expertly
brewed by Mrs. Chesterton when a reporter yesterday entered his room
at the Blackstone [in Chicago]. Before he submitted to interrogation
he lighted the cigar.
"My muse," he explained. "A Parnassian pleasure. Tobacco smoke is
the Ichor of mental life. Some men write with a pencil, others with a
typewriter, I write with my cigar." . . .
Throughout the interview he was profoundly concerned not with the
subjects under discussion, but with the black cheeroot. Seven times
it went out. Seven times he relighted it. The eighth time he tossed
it away.
When asked which of his works he considered the greatest, he said: "I
don't consider any of my works in the least great." . . .
"Slang," he said, "is too sacred and precious to be used
promiscuously. Its use should be led up to reverently for it
expresses what the King's English could not."
"Seeing and hearing a man like Gilbert Keith Chesterton," said a
Detroit newspaper, "makes a meal for the imagination that no reading
of books by him or about him can accomplish."
He spoke Sunday in Orchestra Hall on the Ignorance of the Educated;
it grows more difficult as his tour progresses, he admits, and the
Lecture, he insists, grows worse. His thesis is that "the besetting
evil of all educated people is that they tend to substitute theories
for things." The uneducated man never makes this mistake. He states
the simple fact that he sees a German drinking beer: he does not say
"there is a Teuton consuming alcohol."
At Toronto the Chairman--a professor of English--thought that there
must have been an error in the title as printed, and announced that
Mr. Chesterton would speak on The Ignorance of the _Un_educated.
Another Detroit newspaper quotes from the lecture:
There is a deeper side to such fallacies. The whole catastrophe of
the Great War may be traced to the racial theory. If people had
looked at peoples as nations in place of races the intolerable
ambition of Prussia might have been stopped before it attained the
captaincy of the South German States.
The only other lecture subjects mentioned are "Shall We Abolish the
Inevitable" and "The Perils of Health." There are innumerable
caricatures. One by Cosmo Hamilton is accompanied with a story of how
he once debated with Chesterton. The subject was: "There is no law in
England." G.K. made so overwhelming a case that Hamilton decided the
only way of making reply possible was to twist the subject making it
"there are no laws in England" and "go off at 1000 tangents like a
worried terrier."
To hear Chesterton's howl of joy when he twigged how I had slipped
out, to see him double himself up in an agony of laughter at my
personal insults, to watch the effect of his sportsmanship on a
shocked audience who were won to mirth by his intense and
pea-hen-like quarks of joy was a sight and a sound for the gods.
Probably Chesterton has forgotten this incident but I haven't and
never will, and I carried away from that room a respect and
admiration for this tomboy among dictionaries, this philosophical
Peter Pan, this humorous Dr. Johnson, this kindly and gallant cherub,
this profound student and wise master which has grown steadily ever
since.
In the _Daily Sketch_, Hamilton later described G.K. speaking in this
debate:
During the whole inspired course of his brilliant reasoning, he
caught the little rivulets which ran down his face, and just as they
were about to drop from the first of his several chins flicked them
generously among the disconcerted people who sat actually at his
feet. From time to time, too, unaware of this, he grasped deep into
his pockets and rattled coins and keys, going from point to point,
from proof to proof, until the Constitution of England was quite
devoid of Law and out from under his waistcoat bulged a line of shirt.
It was monstrous, gigantic, amazing, deadly, delicious. Nothing
like it has ever been done before or will ever be seen, heard and
felt like it again.
A clever caricature depicts Dickens in one corner, his arms full of
bricks, hammers and jagged objects, labelled "American Notes." The
rest of the picture is an immense drawing of a smiling Chesterton,
his arms full of roses, labelled "Kind Words for America." He is
pointing at Dickens and saying: "America must have changed a great
deal since then."
Not only Gilbert but also Frances was constantly interviewed. "I tell
them," one interviewer quotes her as saying, "that I didn't know I
was the wife of a great man till I came to America. It never bothered
me before."
This, coming from one of those English wives, so popularly
portrayed as representing the acme of submission, was delightful. A
slight, slim little figure, looking slighter and slimmer in the wake
of her overshadowing husband, with an outward appearance of
unsurpassed mildness and meekness which her conversation readily
dispelled, the wife of this delightful Englishman of letters
presented a very intimate Chestertonian paradox.
Frances kept a Diary of which almost the first entry is "So far my
feelings towards this country are entirely hostile, but it would be
unfair to judge too soon. We have refused all invitations; it's the
only thing to do." This idea they must have abandoned, for one paper
after Gilbert's death describes him as an immense success socially
but "a big bland failure" as a lecturer. As the tour proceeds the
entries in the Diary become more favorable but unlike her letters
from Poland--where what she liked best was anything really
Polish--the Diary shows Frances as singling out for approval those
things approximately English--e.g., houses where she stayed in Boston
and Philadelphia. She hated hustle, heat and crowds, and the Diary is
full of remarks about her exhaustion.
G.K. commented in one interview on the different conception of a Club
in England and in America. While groups of men entertained him,
Women's Clubs were entertaining his wife. But an English Club "is
really a promoter of unsociability. . . . And while the English woman
in her Club does not, perhaps, stare into vacancy with the same
fervour, fixity and ferocity as the English man, still there is
something of the sort, you know." After a lecture in Philadelphia a
lady asked him, "Mr. Chesterton, what makes women talk so much?"
Heaving himself out of his chair, he answered only "God, Madam."
Two further caricatures were an impression drawn by Will Coyne for
the New York _Evening Post_ of Chesterton as Porthos of the Pen, and
another, drawn for the New York _Herald_ by Stewart Davis, of
Chesterton supplying "Paradoxygen to the World." This was accompanied
by a poem called Paradoxygen, by Edward Anthony:
O Gilbert I know there are many who like
Your talks on the darkness of light,
The shortness of length and the weakness of strength
And the one on the lowness of height.
My neighbour keeps telling me "How I adore
His legality of the illicit
And I've also a liking intense for his striking
Obscurity of the explicit."
But I am unmoved. What's the reason? 0, well,
The same I intend to expound
Some evening next week, when I'm going to speak
On the shallowness of the profound.
"Everyone who goes to America for a short time," said G.K., "is
expected to write a book; and nearly everybody does." In accordance
with this convention he wrote _What I Saw in America_. He did see a
great deal. The same imagination that had found the mediaeval aspect
of Jerusalem saw many elements missed not only by the ordinary
tourist but by the people themselves who live nearest to them. Thus
he keenly appreciated the traditional elements in Philadelphia,
Boston and Baltimore:
In coming into some of these more stable cities of the States I
felt something quite sincerely of that historic emotion which is
satisfied in the eternal cities of the Mediterranean. I felt in
America what many Americans suppose can only be felt in Europe. I
have seldom had that sentiment stirred more simply and directly than
when I saw from afar off, above that vast grey labyrinth of
Philadelphia, great Penn upon his pinnacle like the graven figure of
a god who had fashioned a new world; and remembered that his body lay
buried in a field at the turning of a lane, a league from my own door.
In Baltimore the Catholic history appealed to him yet more strongly,
and, invited to visit Cardinal Gibbons, he felt himself touching "the
end of a living chain." In Boston, "much more beautiful than its
name," he companioned again with the Autocrat and recalled how in his
own youth English and American literature seemed to be one thing.
Indeed he was there reminded even "of English things that have
largely vanished from England." Washington he saw both as a beautiful
city and an idea--"a sort of paradise of impersonal politics without
personal commerce." And in Nashville, Tennessee it was "with a sort
of intensity of feeling" that he found himself "before a dim and
faded picture; and from the dark canvas looked forth the face of
Andrew Jackson, watchful like a white eagle."
The things Chesterton chose for description all have relevance to the
main thesis of the book which has often been missed and which emerges
most clearly in the first and the last chapters. He insists always
that he writes as a foreigner--and indeed repeats frequently that it
is by keeping our own distinct nationality that Englishmen and
Americans will best understand and like one another--but he writes
also as a man not unconscious of history. Thus writing, the older
cities represent to him one trend in the States and New York another.
I am sorry to say that he does not appreciate New York as he ought,
because of his dislike of cosmopolitanism. Its beauty he sees as
breath-taking: not solid and abiding but a kind of fairyland. The
lights on Broadway evoked from him the exclamation "What a glorious
garden of wonders this would be for anyone who was lucky enough to be
unable to read," and he imagines a simple peasant who fancies that
they must be announcing in letters of fire: "Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity," and must be put up on occasion of some great national
feast, whereas they are but advertising signs put up to make money.
The Skyline seemed to him most lovely: "vertical lines that suggest a
sort of rush upwards, as of great cataracts topsy turvy--the strong
daylight finds everywhere the broken edges of things and the sort of
hues we see in newly turned earth or the white sections of
trees. . . ." He feels the intense "imaginative pleasure of those
dizzy turrets and dancing fires." But he ends with the note that
really spoilt New York for him: "If those nightmare buildings were
really all built for nothing, how noble they would be."
Advertisement, Big Business, Monopoly might have invaded the old
traditionary cities of America as they had those of England, but New
York existed (he felt) as a new and startling expression of them.
They shrieked in every light and from every sky-scraper. The whole
question of America was: would the older simpler really great
historical tradition win, or would it be defeated by the new and
towering evil? He has an interesting chapter on the countryside,
finding hope in the considerable extension of small ownership among
the farmers and in the houses built from the growing material that
wood is, but he is again depressed at the reflection that the culture
of the countryside is not its own but imported from the
towns--therefore itself largely commercialised.
Roaming over the world in search of his examples Chesterton sees the
ideal of the early republicans as dead in the republics of today, and
nowhere more dead than in America. It would be useless, he feels, to
invoke Jefferson or Lincoln in the modern world against the tyranny
of wage-slavery or in favour of racial justice because "the bridge of
brotherhood had broken down in the modern mind."
Jefferson the Deist "said the sight of slavery in his country made
him tremble, remembering that God is just," but the modern who has
lost these absolute standards has "grown dizzy with degree and
relativity." Hence came the same terrible peril in both England and
America: that in the eyes of the new plutocracy the idea of manhood
has gone. "There were different sorts of apes; but there was no doubt
that we were the superior sort."
Only in one direction did he see real hope. The new dreams of the
18th century had gone, but the ancient dogmas of the Catholic Church
remained. Catholics might forget brotherhood, like their fellows, but
"the Catholic type of Christianity had rivetted itself irrevocably to
the manhood of all men." "The church would always continue to ordain
negroes and canonise beggars and labourers." "Where its faith was
fixed by creeds and councils it could not save itself even by
surrender. . . . THERE IS NO BASIS FOR DEMOCRACY EXCEPT IN A DOGMA
ABOUT THE DIVINE ORIGIN OF MAN."
I have put that final sentence in capitals for it is the climax both
of Gilbert's thinking about America and of one of the most important
trains of thought that brought him to the home of liberty secured for
the human race by dogma--that is to say by revealed truth. He went
home to be received into the Catholic Church as I have earlier
related.
_What I Saw in America_ is of special importance in relation to later
discussions in _G.K.'s Weekly_. While the journalists seemed
convinced on his first visit that he had nothing but roses to throw,
and compared him favorably to Dickens, a collection of quotations
could be made from _G.K.'s Weekly_ of a quite opposite kind, yet I do
not think he ever attacks America as much as he attacks England. He
was himself much amused at finding he was expected to be either "For
America" or "Against America," both of which attitudes appeared to
him absurd. In that sense he was neither for nor against his own
country. He liked Americans, he disliked certain trends in America:
because he loved England he disliked the same trends even more in
England. Certain things in modern civilisation which he hated he did
regard as primarily American. American comfort to him seemed acute
discomfort. He thought every American lives in an "airless furnace in
the middle of which he sits and eats lumps of ice."
He had a great hatred of intelligence tests which he called the
"palpable balderdash of irresponsible Yankee boomsters. . . . It is
really one of the maladies of American democracy to be swept by these
prairie fires of pseudo-scientifc fads, and throw itself into
Eugenics or Anthropometric inquiry with the buoyancy of babies." He
believed that there was more democracy in America than in England.
But he hated what he called the "glare of American Advertisement." He
spoke of a "common thief like the American Millionaire" but he
certainly did not exclude the English Millionaire from the same
indictment. His whole view of advertisement reaches a peak in an
article* entitled "If You Have Smiles."
[* _G.K.'s Weekly_, December 10, 1927.]
We read the other day an absolutely solemn and almost tender piece
of advice, in a leading American magazine, about the preservation of
Beauty and Health. It was intended quite seriously. . . . After
describing in most complicated detail how the young woman of today
(well known to be enamored of all that is natural and free) is to
strap up her head and face every night, as if it had to be bandaged
after an accident, it proceeds to say with the most refined American
accent: "With the face thus fixed in smile formation: . . ." but we
have a difficulty about taking this serious advice of American Beauty
Business even so seriously as to meditate on its social menace. The
prospect of such a world of idiots ought to depress us, but . . . no,
it is no good. Our faces are fixed in smile formation when we think
of that American.
He repeated often how much he liked the inhabitants of Main Street
(grievously wronged by Sinclair Lewis).
American ideals are not nearly so nice as American realities. We
lament not so much what Babbitt is as what he is trying to be. What
he is is a simple and kindly man . . . what he's trying to be is the
abomination of desolation; the Man who made Salesmanship an Art; the
Man Who Would Not Stay Down; the Man Who Got the Million Dollar Post
After Taking Our Correspondence Course; the Man Who Learned Social
Charm in Six Lessons.*
[* Jan. 14, 1928.]
At the time of the depreciation of the franc Belloc's articles in
_G.K.'s Weekly_, echoed in the Leaders, pointed to finance,
especially American finance, as the criminal that was forcing down
the French currency. An American correspondent in the paper attacked
these attacks on the ground that they were inspired by British
Imperialism! Chesterton felt it a little hard to be at this date
confused with Kipling. He replied that his correspondent committed
"the blunder of an extravagant and excessive admiration for England."
He speaks of
that tremendous procession that passed through Paris, literally an
army of cripples. It was a march of all those walking units, those
living fragments of humanity that had been left by the long stand of
five years upon the French frontiers; a devastated area that passed
endlessly like a river . . . they illustrate the main fact that
France was in the center of that far-flung fighting line of
civilization; that it was upon her that the barbarian quarrel
concentrated; and that is an historical fact which the foolish vanity
of many Englishmen, as well as of many Americans, is perpetually
tempted to deny. Our critic is therefore quite beside the mark if he
imagines that I am trying to score off his country out of a cheap
jealousy on behalf of my own. My jealousy is for justice and for a
large historical understanding of this great passage in history. My
own country won glory enough in that and other fields to make it
quite unnecessary for any sane Englishman to shut his eyes to Europe
in order to brag about England. . . . I have not the faintest doubt
what Thomas Jefferson would have said, if he had been told that a few
financial oligarchs who happen to live in New York, were beating down
the French wealth; and had then seen pass before him that awful
panorama of the wrecks of the French Republican Army; heart-shaking,
like a resurrection of the dead. . . . I do not admit, therefore,
that in supporting the French peasants and soldiers against the money
dealers and wire-pullers of the town, I am attacking America or even
merely defending France.*
[* _G.K.'s Weekly_, Sept. 1, 1926.]
On November 6 and 13, 1926 he writes two articles on "The Yankee and
the Chinaman," in which he contrasts the philosophic spirit with the
so-called scientific. Like Bishop Barnes in England wanting to
analyse the Consecrated Host, Edison was reported in America as
having said that he would find out if there was a soul by some
scientific test:
Any philosophic Chinaman would know what to think of a man who
said, "I have got a new gun that will shoot a hole through your
memory of last Monday," or "I have got a saw sharp enough to cut up
the cube root of 666," or "I will boil your affection for Aunt Susan
until it is quite liquid."
In 1927 Gilbert, Frances and Dorothy spent a month in Poland where
immense enthusiasm was shown for the man who had consistently
proclaimed Poland's greatness and its true place in Europe.
Invited by the Government, "all the hospitality I received," he says,
"was far too much alive to remind me of anything official." One of
the multitude of unwritten books of which G.K. dreamed was a book
about Poland. The Poles and the English were, he felt, alike in many
things but the Englishman had never been given the opportunity to
understand the Pole. We knew nothing of their history and did not
understand the resurrection we had helped to bring about. "The
nonsense talked in the newspapers when they discuss what they call
the Polish Corridor" was only possible from want of realisation of
what Poland had been before she was rent in three by Prussia, Austria
and Russia. Thus too we did not realise "the self-evident fact that
the Poles always have a choice of evils." Pilsudski told him that _of
the two_ he preferred Germany to Russia, while Dmowski voiced the
more general opinion in telling him that _of the two_ he preferred
Russia to Germany. For the moment at any rate tortured Poland was
herself and incredibly happy. Revival in this agricultural country
had been amazingly swift. Peasant proprietors abounded and lived well
on twelve acres or so, while even labourers possessed plots of land
and a cow or two.
"The P.E.N. Club Dinner," Frances wrote in a letter to her mother,
"was, I fancy, considered by the Poles a huge success. If numbers
indicate anything, it certainly was. I found it a little embarrassing
to have to eat hot kidneys and mushrooms standing about with hundreds
of guests, and this was only the preliminary to a long dinner that
followed and refreshments that apparently continued until two o'clock
in the morning. The speeches were really perfectly marvellous and
delivered in English quite colloquial and very witty and showing a
detailed knowledge of Gilbert's works which no Englishman of my
acquaintance possesses. Gilbert made an excellent, in fact, a very
eloquent speech in reply, which drew forth thunders of applause."
Their hosts drove the Chestertons all over the country and showed
them home life on the little farms, home industries and
arts--brightly woven garments and pottery for use, not for
exhibition--and the great historic scenes of Poland's history. With
the scene he remembered most vividly, Gilbert's musings on Poland
conclude: they were visiting a young nobleman who excused the
devastation of his own home by Bolshevik soldiers in the heat of
battle but added, "There is only one thing I really resent."
. . . He led us out into a long avenue lined with poplars; and at
the end of it was a statue of the Blessed Virgin; with the head and
the hands shot off. But the hands had been lifted; and it is a
strange thing that the very mutilation seemed to give more meaning to
the attitude of intercession; asking mercy for the merciless race of
men.*
[* _Autobiography_, p. 330.]
Karel Capek who had long wanted Chesterton to visit Prague wrote
mournfully, "You wrote me that it would be difficult for you to come
to Prague this spring. But it was in the newspapers that you were
last month in Warsaw; why in Heaven's sake did you not come to Prague
on this occasion? What a pity for us! Now we are waiting for a
compensation." Two earlier letters had shown him eager for
contributions from Chesterton for a leading review. Another
delightful letter is dated December 24th (no year given):
MY DEAR MR. CHESTERTON,
It is just Christmas Eve; my friends presented me with some of your
books, and I cannot omit to thank you for the consolation and trust I
found there as already so many times. Be blessed, Mr. Chesterton.
I wrote you twice without getting any answer; but it is Christian
to insist, and so I write you again. Please, would you be so kind to
tell me, if it shall be possible for you to come next year to Prague?
Our PEN club is anxious to invite you as our guest of honour. If you
would like to come next spring, I beg you to be my guest. You are
fond of old things: Prague is one. You shall find here so many people
who cherish you. I like you myself as no other writer; it's for yours
sake that being in London I went to habit in Notting-Hill and it is
for yours sake that I liked it. I cannot believe that I should not
meet you again. Please, come to Prague.
I wish you a happy New Year, Mr. Chesterton. You must be happy,
making your readers happier. You are so good.
Yours sincerely,
KAREL CAPEK.
He never, alas, got to Prague, or to many another country that wanted
him. There are letters asking him to lecture in Australia, to lecture
again in U.S.A., in South America "to make them aware of English
thought and literature." "The Argentine Intelligencia," says Philip
Guedalla, "is acutely aware of your writings. Local professors
terrified me by asking me on various occasions to explain the precise
position which you occupied in our Catholic youth. . . . A visit from
you would mean a very great deal to British intellectual prestige in
these parts."
No Catholic Englishman was anything like so widely known in Europe.
Books have been written about him in many languages and his works
translated into French, German, Dutch, Czech, Russian, Polish,
Spanish and Italian. A letter from Russia asks for his photograph for
_The Magazine of International Literature_ as a writer whose works
are well known in the Soviet Union. The Kulturbund in Vienna sends an
emissary inviting him there also and, like Prague, the Vienna P.E.N.
Club wants him.
"You have a distressing habit," Maude Royden once wrote, "of being
the only person one really wants to hear on certain subjects."
A visit to Rome in 1929 produced _The Resurrection of Rome_. Despite
brilliant passages the book is disappointing. It bears no comparison
with _The New Jerusalem_ and gives an impression of being thrown
together hastily before the ideas had been thought through to their
ultimate conclusions. Perhaps Rome was too big even for Chesterton.
He never loved the Renaissance as he did the Middle Ages, but he saw
it not as primarily pagan but as one more example of the immense
vitality of a Catholicism which had had so many rebirths that it had
buried its own past deeper than the past of paganism. He loved the
fountains that threw their water everywhere and he felt about Rome
that the greatest monuments might be removed and yet the city's
personality would remain. For Rome is greater than her monuments. He
wanted to argue with those who cared for Pagan Rome alone and who
spent their time despising the "oratory in stone" of the Papal city
and gazing only on the Forum. "And it never once occurs to them to
remember that the old Romans were Italians, or to ask what a Forum
was for."
He was, as usual, constantly invited to lecture--at the English
College, the Scots College, the American College, the Beda. At the
Holy Child Convent he spoke to a crowded audience on "Thomas More and
Humanism." Father Cuthbert, O.S.F.C., thanking him, remarked on the
mental resemblance between More and Chesterton, saying that he could
quite well imagine them sitting together making jokes, some of them
very good and some of them very bad. "Chesterton and More," says
Father Vincent McNabb, "were both cockneys." Gilbert's classical
insight also seemed to him like the great Chancellor's; "Erasmus says
that though More didn't know much Greek, he knew what the words ought
to mean."
He interviewed Mussolini and found that Mussolini was interviewing
him, so that he talked at some length of Distributism and his own
social ideal. Mussolini knew at least some of Gilbert's books. He
told Cyril Clemens that he had keenly enjoyed _The Man Who Was
Thursday_. He promised at the end of this interview that he would go
away and think over what Chesterton had said, and it might have been
better for the world had he kept that promise. For what had been said
was an outline of the one possible alternative to the growing tyranny
of governments.
From his anxiety to be fair to Fascism, Gilbert was often accused of
being in favour of it, but, both in this book and in several
articles, having given the case for it he went on to give the case
against it--a much stronger case than that usually given by its
opponents. The case for Fascism lay in the breakdown of true
democracy and the reign of the tyranny of wealth in the democratic
countries. Chesterton would, he said, have been on the side of the
Partito Popolare as against the Fascism that succeeded it; in England
and America he would "have infinitely preferred that the purgation of
our plutocratic politics should have been achieved by Radicals and
Republicans. It was they who did not prefer it." It was not that
Fascism was not open to attack but "that Liberalism has unfortunately
lost the right to attack it."
Those of us who were in Italy at that time will remember the truth of
his description of the vitality and happiness that seemed to glow
among the people. _Giovinezza, bellezza_, heard everywhere, had then
no hollow sound at the heart of it. Italy was radiant with hope.
In Mussolini himself Gilbert saluted a belief in "the civic necessity
of Virtue," in the "ideal that public life should be public," in
human dignity, in respect for women as mothers, in piety and the
honour due to the dead. Yet, summing up the man and the movement, he
saw it as primarily the sort of riot that is provoked by the evils of
an evil government, only "in the Italy of the twentieth century the
rioters have become the rulers." For although Mussolini had in many
ways made his rule popular, although in his concessions to modern
ideas and inventions he was "rather breathlessly progressive," yet in
the true sense of the word Mussolini was a Reactionary. A Reactionary
is one who merely reacts against something, or permits "that
something to make [him] do something against it. . . . A Reactionary
is one in whom weariness itself has become a form of energy. Even
when he is right there is always a danger that what was really good
in the previous society may be destroyed by what is good in the new
one."
Mussolini's reaction was against the Liberalism in which as an idea
Chesterton still believed, it was a reaction from democracy to
authority. And his weakness, the fundamental weakness of Fascism was
that "it appeals to an appetite for authority, without very clearly
giving the authority for the appetite. . . . When I try to put the
case for it in philosophical terms, there is some doubt about the
ultimates of the philosophy." It seemed to Chesterton that there were
only two possible fixed and orderly constitutions, hereditary
Monarchy or Majority Rule. The demand of the Fascists to hold power
as an intelligent and active minority was in fact to invite other
intelligent and active minorities to dispute that rule; and then only
by tyranny could anarchy be prevented.
"Fascism," he said in summary, "has brought back order into the
State; but this will not be lasting unless it has brought back order
into the mind."
The two things in the Roman visit that remain most prominent in
Dorothy's memory are Gilbert's loss of a medal of Our Lady that he
always wore and his audience with the Holy Father. The loss of the
medal seemed to distress him out of all normal proportion. He had the
elevator boy looking for it on hands and knees and gave him a huge
reward for finding it. Gilbert has left no record of his Papal
audience. But, says Dorothy, it excited him so greatly that he did no
work for two days before the event or two days after.
Their second visit to America in 1930-31 was far better enjoyed by
Gilbert, and also I think by Frances until she got ill, because on it
they came much closer to the real people of the country, especially
during the period when he was lecturing at the University of Notre
Dame, Indiana. They lived at a little house in South Bend and he
lectured every night, alternating a course on Victorian Literature
with one on the great figures of Victorian history. There were 36
lectures all told, and the average attendance at each lecture was 500.
At Notre Dame and the Sister College of St. Mary's, I felt the best
way to get the atmosphere of this visit would be to get together for
a talk the people who remembered Gilbert: they would stimulate one
another's memories. I invoked the aid of Sister Madeleva and she
suggested the two Fathers Leo Ward, Professors Engels and O'Grady,
and, best of all Johnnie Mangan the chauffeur. Johnnie is a great
institution at Notre Dame. He remembered driving my father nearly
thirty years ago and he had specially vivid memories of the
Chesterton period. We all sat in a circle in Sister Madeleva's
sitting room. I give here the notes I took.
Johnnie Mangan: "It was the hardest job getting him into the car,
harder getting him out. He'd walk on the porch and all the children
came. He'd talk to the children on the road. Money meant nothing to
him: the lady would give me the money saying himself would leave it
in the shop if the barber wasn't honest enough to give change.
"He enjoyed everything: when they dedicated the stadium he stayed
till the very end. Father O'Donnell introduced him to all the naval
officers and he was the last off the ground. He enjoyed talking to
all the naval officers. He loved cheer-leading."
Mr. O'Grady: "He spent one evening in Professor Phillips' room
after the lecture from 9 to 2.30 A.M. His host was deaf, G.K. learnt
later, and he made another date when he found his host had missed
most of the fun."
Mr. Engels: "He would sit around consuming home-made ale by the
quart; said the head of the philosophy faculty made the best brew in
the college. Enjoyed little drives round the countryside. The faculty
were a little shy of inviting him."
"In a lecture he got an immense laugh by calling Queen Elizabeth an
'old crock.' He then laughed above all the rest."
Mr. Engels noticed mannerisms: "The constant shifting of his great
bulk around," "rotating while he was talking," "flipping his
eyeglasses," "lumbering on to the stage, going through all his
pockets, finally finding a piece of dirty yellow paper and talking
from it as if most laboriously gathered and learned notes. But the
paper was only for show. Father Burke saw him get out of the cab, he
got on to the stair landing and then saw G.K.'s yellow paper on the
ground. He had delivered his whole course with hardly a single
note--occasionally looked through material for a quarter of an hour
or so before speaking." All thought him a great entertainer as well
as an informing talker. "No one enjoyed himself more than he did."
Trying to get him for an informal gathering they mentioned they had
some Canadian Ales--quite something in Prohibition days.
G.K.: "The ales have it."
Johnnie: "He'd chat all the time he was driving."
Father Leo L. Ward: "The problem of getting G.K. to and fro in a
coupe was only solved by backing him in."
They remembered G.K. "in Charley's big chair, his hands barely
touching over his great expanse."
They recalled that on receiving his honorary degree he said the last
time he received one at Edinburgh they tapped him with John Knox's
hat. He did not expect anything so drastic here: perhaps they might
tap him with Tom Heflin's sombrero.* When he had been invited to Notre
Dame he was not certain where it was but with a name like that, even
if it were in the mountains of the moon, he should feel at home. "If
I ever meet anybody who suggests there's something Calvinistic or
Puritanical in Catholicism I shall ask, 'Have you ever heard of
the University of Notre Dame?'"
[* Tom Heflin was the fiercely anti-Catholic Senator from Alabama.]
Johnnie: "He'd do anything she'd say, or Miss Collins. They
certainly had that man by the neck, but they took wonderful care of
him."
Mr. O'Grady: "It was a very intelligent arrangement. And did they
tidy him."
Johnnie: "Very much so. It was their business every evening."
Sister Madeleva: "Did he walk on the campus and see the students?"
Johnnie: "He didn't walk much only to Charlie Phillips' rooms. He
didn't mind being a little late but his lady and Miss Collins loaded
him into the car to get him there on time.
"The woman they lodged with used to swear like a trooper. But she
(the landlady) cried like a kid when he left. And he and the lady
seemed lonesome at leaving her.
"In his spare time at the house he would be drawing some fancy
stuff."
"What did he talk to you about?"
Johnnie: "He'd just talk about the country, he'd admire the streams
and things like that. I took him to the Virgin Forest and I could
hardly get him back. He even got out to notice the trees. He spent
almost an hour. The women raved at me and said I must get him back at
a certain time. He'd ask me the names of the trees. He loved rivers
and would ask me about the fish. At one time Father O'Donnell thought
he should drive to Chicago or some big town but he didn't care for
towns, said they all looked alike to him, so after that we always
went to the country."
Someone asked, "Did he ever get grouchy?"
Johnnie: "He always had a smile. Was always calling kids over to
talk to him. He'd touch one with his stick to make him look round and
play with him, and then he'd laugh himself sick playing with them.
The kids were always around him. The ones of four or five years,
those were the ones he'd notice the most. He liked to ask them things
and then if they gave a good answer he could get a good laugh at it."
Mr. O'Grady: "I know he enjoyed himself here. I met him in Ottawa
afterwards. He was autographing a book, the pen was recalcitrant and
he shook it over the rug, 'Dear me, I'm always cluttering up people's
rugs.' His cousin in Ottawa had him completely surrounded by ash
trays but the cigar had ash almost half length and it was falling
everywhere."
Father Ward: "Father Miltner one evening in pleasant fall weather
found G.K. on the porch. The campus was empty. He got a grunt in
return to his greeting, tried three or four times, almost no answer.
G.K. looked glum.
"'Well, you're not very gay this evening.'
"'One should be given the luxury of a little private grouch once in
a while.'"
To Johnnie--"Did he take the lecture business seriously?"
"No. He just wanted five minutes on the porch when he would talk to
no one but the kids."
Mr. O'Grady: "He said once, 'What I like about notes is that when
once you begin you can completely disregard them.' He stood for the
first lecture but mostly he sat. He enjoyed a joke so much, and they
enjoyed his enjoyment."
Mr. Engels: "For the first lecture he stood--part of him stood
behind a little rostrum, after that he sat at a big table."
Father Leo R. Ward was at Oxford when he debated "That the Law is a
Hass" and was amazed at the way the undergraduates adored him. "His
opponent begged them not to vote for G.K. at this critical moment in
the world's history. They cheered G.K. but voted against him to make
the other fellow feel good."
Sister Madeleva: "What did he do for recreation?"
Johnnie: "He did a lot of--sketching I guess you'd call it--and
he'd read the papers."
Sister Madeleva: "Did he like the campus?"
Johnnie: "Very much."
"Did he ever go down to the Grotto?"
Johnnie: "He seen it but he never got out of the car."
"Was it hard for him to walk?"
Johnnie: "No, he could walk kinda fast, but it was so hard for him
to get in or out of the car."
"Where did he go to church?"
Johnnie: "He came here to Notre Dame. He was close to 400 lbs. but
he'd never give it away. He'd break an ordinary scale, I guess. I
brought him under the main building, he got stuck in the door of the
car. Father O'Donnell tried to help. Mr. Chesterton said it reminded
him of an old Irishwoman: 'Why don't you get out sideways?' 'I have
no sideways.'"
To the debate with Darrow, Frances Taylor Patterson had gone a little
uneasy lest Chesterton's arguments "might seem somewhat literary in
comparison with the trained scientific mind and rapier tongue of the
famous trial lawyer." She found however that both trained mind and
rapier tongue were the property of G.K.C.
I have never heard Mr. Darrow alone, but taken relatively, when
that relativity is to Chesterton, he appears positively muddle headed.
As Chesterton summed it up, he felt as if Darrow had been arguing
all afternoon with his fundamentalist aunt, and simply kept sparring
with a dummy of his own mental making. When something went wrong with
the microphone, Darrow sat back until it could be fixed. Whereupon
G.K.C. jumped up and carried on in his natural voice, "Science you
see is not infallible!" . . . Chesterton had the audience with him
from the start, and when it was over, everyone just sat there, not
wishing to leave. They were loath to let the light die!*
[* _Chesterton_ by Cyril Clemens, pp. 67-68.]
As in England, so also in the States, Gilbert's debating was held to
be far better than his straight lecturing. He never missed the
opportunity for a quick repartee and yet when he scored the audience
felt that he did so with utter kindness. At a debate with Dr. Horace
T. Bridges of the Ethical Cultural Society on "Is Psychology a
Curse?" Bishop Craig Stewart who presided, describes how:
In his closing remarks Chesterton devastatingly sideswiped his
opponent and wound up the occasion in a storm of laughter and
applause, "It is clear that I have won the debate, and we are all
prepared to acknowledge that psychology is a curse. Let us, however,
be magnanimous. Let us allow at least one person in this unhappy
world to practice this cursed psychology, and I should like to
nominate Dr. Bridges."
The Bishop on another occasion introduced Gilbert at a luncheon in
Chicago by quoting Oliver Herford's lines:
When plain folks such as you and I
See the sun sinking in the sky,
We think it is the setting sun:
But Mr. Gilbert Chesterton
Is not so easily misled;
He calmly stands upon his head,
And upside down obtains a new
And Chestertonian point of view.
Observing thus how from his nose
The sun creeps closer to his toes
He cries in wonder and delight
How fine the sunrise is tonight!
The fact that nearly all the headlines he chose sounded like
paradoxes, the fact that they did not themselves agree with him, had
on Chesterton's opponents and on some members of his audience one
curious effect. Dr. Bridges when asked his opinion of his late
sparring partner, after paying warm tribute to his brilliance as a
critic, his humour and his great personal charm, discovered in his
"subconscious" (Is Psychology a Curse?) "a certain intellectual
recklessness that made him indifferent to truth and reality . . .
fundamentally--perhaps I should say subconsciously--he was a
thorough-going skeptic and acted upon the principle that, since we
cannot really be positive about anything we had better believe what
it pleases us to believe."
So too at the British University of Aberystwyth when Chesterton spoke
on "Liberty," taking first historically the fights of Barons against
despots, yeomen against barons, factory hands against owners, and
then giving as a modern instance the fight of the pedestrian to keep
the liberty of the highway, we are told that "the Senior History
Lecturer and some others were of the opinion that the whole thesis of
the address was a gigantic leg-pull."
Chesterton must have seen again the fixed stare on the faces of the
Nottingham tradesmen thirty years earlier on the famous occasion when
he himself "got up and played with water." But that earlier audience
had the intellectual advantage over the university professors that
they
Tried to find out what he meant
With infinite inquiring.
Gilbert often said that his comic illustrations ought not to have
prevented this. But it was really more his inability to resist making
himself into a figure of fun. He was funny and the jokes were funny
but they did prevent his really being given by all the position given
him by so many, of the modern Dr. Johnson.
It is possible, though not easy, to imagine Johnson dragged from the
station to his hotel by forty undergraduates of Aberystwyth while
members of the O.T.C. secured a footing on the carriage armed with a
battle axe (borrowed from the Arts Department), hoes, rakes, spades,
etc.--their officers having refused them the privilege of bearing
arms on the occasion.
But it is scarcely possible to imagine the Doctor called upon for a
speech standing on the steps of the hotel and saying, "You need never
be ashamed of the athletic prowess of this College. The Pyramids, we
are told, were built by slave labour. But the slaves were not
expected to haul the pyramids in one piece!"*
[* _Chesterton_ by Cyril Clemens, p. 50.]
In San Francisco I saw many people who had met Gilbert including a
journalist who took him to a "bootleg joint"--which is Western for a
Speakeasy. There he asked for "some specialty of the house" and was
offered a Mule.
"Six of these babies will put you on your ear," remarked the
bartender.
"What did he say about my ear?" Gilbert queried.
He downed three of the potent mixture, in spite of his theory against
cocktails and his host remarked his continued poise with admiration
while the bartender commented "He can take it," another slang
expression that appeared to be new to Gilbert. He told his host, Mr.
Williams, that he delighted in meeting such folk as bartenders and
all the simpler people whom he saw too seldom. This suggested an
idea--would he come out to a school across the bay which could not
afford his fees, because it educated the daughters of poorer
Catholics. He agreed at once and not only talked to them brilliantly
for three quarters of an hour, but also wrote for the children about
50 autographs.
But of course, he had forgotten something--an engagement to attend a
big social function. A huge car arrived at the school complete with
chauffeur and several agitated ladies. "Mr. Chesterton, you have
broken an important engagement." "I have filled an important
engagement," he answered, "lecturing to the daughters of the poor."
If it were possible for Gilbert to be better loved anywhere than in
England that anywhere was certainly America. From coast to coast I
have met his devotees. I have come across only one expression of the
opposite feeling--and that from a man who seems (from his opening
sentence) to have been unable to stay away from the lectures he so
detested:
I heard Chesterton some six or seven times in this country. His
physical make-up repelled me. He looked like a big eater and
animalism is repugnant to most of us. His appearance was against him.
Not one of his lectures seemed to me worth the price of admission
and some of them were so bad that they seemed contemptuous morsels
flung at audiences for whom he adjudged anything good enough.
One of his lectures, at the Academy Brooklyn, was a great
disappointment. And he charged $1,000 for it. It was not worth $10
and Chesterton knew it. After the lecture, he remarked to a friend of
mine, "I think that was the worst lecture I ever gave." He may have
been right. Certainly it was the worst I ever heard him give. But he
took the thousand and a bonus of $200 for the extra large crowd in
attendance. No: I did not like Chesterton.
What of the money? With his American agent Chesterton had a quite
usual arrangement: he received half the fees paid. The agent made
engagements, paid travelling expenses and received for this the other
half. Out of the half Chesterton received, he paid a further ten per
cent to the London agent who had introduced him to the American
agent; he also had to pay the expenses of his wife and his secretary
and further gave a large present to his secretary for her trouble on
the tour: the rest went chiefly into _G.K.'s Weekly_. I doubt if he
could have told anyone at what figure the original fee stood for any
lecture.
One of the Basilian Fathers, then a novice, remembers Gilbert's
appearance in Toronto. The subject of this lecture was "Culture and
the Coming Peril." The Coming Peril, he explained, was not Bolshevism
(because Bolshevism had now been tried--"The best way to destroy a
Utopia is to establish it. The net result of Bolshevism is that the
modern world will not imitate it"). Nor by Coming Peril did he mean
another great war (the next great war, he added, "would happen when
Germany tried to monkey about with the frontiers of Poland"). The
Coming Peril was the intellectual, educational, psychological,
artistic overproduction which, equally with economic overproduction,
threatened the well-being of contemporary civilisation. People were
inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of
vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure,
thought, or creation from within themselves.
At question period he was asked:
"Why is Dean Inge gloomy?"
"Because of the advance of the Catholic Church. Next question please."
"How tall are you and what do you weigh?"
"I am six feet two inches, but my weight has never been accurately
calculated."
"Is George Bernard Shaw a coming peril?"
"Heavens, no. He is a disappearing pleasure."
For an apparently haphazard collection of essays _Sidelights on New
London and Newer York_, published on his return to England from the
second visit, has a surprising unity. Blitzed in London and out of
print in New York it is now hard to obtain, which is a pity as it is
full of good things. Discussing the fashions of today Chesterton
attempts "to remove these things from the test of time and subject
them to the test of truth," and this rule of an eternal test is the
one he tried to apply in all his comments. Obviously nothing human is
perfect--and this includes the human judgment, even Chesterton's
judgment. Talking of the past or of the present, of England or
America, he may often have been wrong and he would certainly have
been the last man to claim infallibility for his judgments. His
weakness as a critic was perhaps a tendency to get his proportions
wrong--to make too much of some things he saw or experienced, to
little of others. His qualities were intellectual curiosity and
personal amiability together with the measuring rod of an eternal
standard.
This second visit to America only deepened in Gilbert's mind many of
the impressions made by the first. Yet the atmosphere of the book is
curiously different from that of _What I Saw in America_. Living in
the country even a few months had so greatly deepened his
understanding. He still preferred the Quakers to the Puritans, "The
essential of the Puritan mood is the misdirection of moral anger." He
still felt that as a whole the United States had started with "a
great political idea, but a small spiritual idea": that it needed a
"return to the vision" in politics and sociology. It was the fashion
today to laugh at the wish for "great open spaces," yet the "real
sociological object in going to America was to find those open
spaces. It was not to find more engineers and electric batteries and
mechanical gadgets in the home. These may have been the result of
America: they were not the causes of America." Asked why he admired
America yet hated Americanisation, he replied:
I should have thought that I had earned some right to apply this
obvious distinction to any foreign country, since I have consistently
applied it to my own country. If the egoism is excusable, I am myself
an Englishman (which some identify with an egoist) and I have done my
best to praise and glorify a number of English things: English inns,
English roads, English jokes and jokers; even to the point of
praising the roads for being crooked or the humour for being Cockney;
but I have invariably written, ever since I have written at all,
against the cult of British Imperialism.
And when that perilous power and opportunity, which is given by
wealth and worldly success, largely passed from the British Empire to
the United States, I have applied exactly the same principle to the
United States. I think that Imperialism is none the less Imperialism
because it is spread by economic pressure or snobbish fashion rather
than by conquest; indeed I have much more respect for the Empire that
is spread by fighting than for the Empire that is spread by finance.*
[* _Sidelights on New London & Newer York_, p. 178.]
He felt that the real causes for admiration, the real greatness of
America, could be found partly through facing its incompleteness and
defects, partly through contemplating the character of the greatest
and most typical of Americans, Abraham Lincoln.
Whilst I was in America, I often lingered in small towns and
wayside places; and in a curious and almost creepy fashion the great
presence of Abraham Lincoln continually grew upon me. I think it is
necessary to linger a little in America, and especially in what many
would call the most uninteresting or unpleasing parts of America,
before this strong sense of a strange kind of greatness can grow upon
the soul. . . . The externals of the Middle West affect an Englishman
as ugly, and yet ugliness is not exactly the point. There are things
in England that are quite as ugly or even uglier. Rows of red brick
villas in the suburbs of a town in the Midlands are, one would
suppose, as hideous as human half-wittedness could invent or endure.
But they are different. They are complete; they are, in their way,
compact; rounded and finished with an effect that may be prim or
smug, but is not raw. The surroundings of them are neat, if it be in
a niggling fashion. But American ugliness is not complete even as
ugliness. It is broken off short; it is ragged at the edges; even its
worthy objects have around them a sort of halo of refuse. Somebody
said of the rugged and sardonic Dr. Temple, once Archbishop of
Canterbury: "There are no polished corners in our Temple."
. . . there are no polished corners even in the great American
cities, which are full of fine and stately classical buildings, not
unworthy to be compared to temples. Nobody seems to mind the
juxtaposition of unsightly things and important things. There is some
deep difference of feeling about the need for completeness and
harmony, and there is the same thing in the political and ethical
life of the great Western nation. It was out of this landscape that
the great President came, and one might almost trace a fanciful
shadow of his figure in the thin trees and the stiff wooden pillars.
A man of any imagination might look down these strange streets, with
their frame-houses filled with the latest conveniences and surrounded
with the latest litter, till he could see approaching down the long
perspective that long ungainly figure, with the preposterous
stove-pipe hat and the rustic umbrella and deep melancholy eyes, the
humour and the hard patience and the heart that fed upon hope
deferred.
That is admiring Abraham Lincoln, and that is admiring America.*
[* Ibid., pp. 168-170.]
Among the "stately and classical buildings" were those making up the
University of Notre Dame where he had been lecturing and which turned
his musings in a direction they were ever inclined to take. Founded
by a group of Frenchmen a century ago with a capital of four hundred
dollars in a small log building on a clearing of ten acres, the
University today numbers forty-five buildings on a seventeen hundred
acre campus. The gold dome of the Church visible from miles away, the
interesting combination of the extraordinary fame of its football
team with a keen spiritual life, especially fascinated Gilbert. He
wrote a poem dedicated to the University and called "The Arena." In
it he pictures first the golden image on "the gilded house of Nero"
that stood for all the horrors of the Pagan Amphitheatre. Then comes
in contrast another image:
I have seen, where a strange country
Opened its secret plains about me,
One great golden dome stand lonely with its golden image, one
Seen afar, in strange fulfilment,
Through the sunlit Indian summer
That Apocalyptic portent that has clothed her with the Sun.
The boys shout "Notre Dame" as they watch the fortunes of the fray
and Chesterton sees Our Lady presiding fittingly even over a football
contest.
And I saw them shock the whirlwind
Of the world of dust and dazzle:
And thrice they stamped, a thunderclap; and thrice the sand-wheel
swirled;
And thrice they cried like thunder
On Our Lady of the Victories,
The Mother of the Master of the Masterers of the World.
He recurs to a favourite thought that the Mother of Sorrows is the
cause of human joy:
Queen of Death and deadly weeping
Those about to live salute thee,
Youth untroubled; youth untortured; hateless war and harmless mirth
And the New Lord's larger largesse
Holier bread and happier circus,
Since the Queen of Sevenfold Sorrow has brought joy upon the earth.
No wonder that, as Johnnie Mangan said, you could not drag him away
from the game, if the game meant also a meditation. The "holier
bread" came perhaps to his mind from the fact that the average of
Daily Communion is unusually high at Notre Dame.
When he desired for Americans a return to their great political
vision he desired also an opening of the eyes to that greater
spiritual vision which was to him the supreme opportunity of the
human spirit. E. S. P. Haynes in _Fritto Misto_, comments on the
absence of any reference to universities in _What I Saw in America_.
Nor have I anywhere found any discussion by Chesterton of the
intellectual quality of Catholic education--any comparison with the
secular teaching--either in England or in America. But that the
problems of these two countries and of all the world could be solved
only by what that golden Dome housed he cried with no uncertain
voice. Death is in the world around, Resurrection in the Church of
the God who died and rose again.
Queen of Death and Life undying
Those about to live salute thee.