Our Lady's Tumbler
_I hate to be influenced. I like to be commanded or to be free. In
both of these my own soul can take a clear and conscious part: for
when I am free it must be for something that I really like, and not
something that I am persuaded to pretend to like: and when I am
commanded, it must be by something I know, like the Ten Commandments.
But the thing called Pressure, of which the polite name is
Persuasion, I always feel to be a hidden enemy. It is all a part of
that worship of formlessness, and flowing tendencies, which is really
the drift of cosmos back into chaos. I remember how I suddenly
recoiled in youth from the influence of Matthew Arnold (who said many
things very well worth saying) when he told me that God was "a stream
of tendency." Since then I have hated tendencies: and liked to know
where I was going and go there--or refuse_.
_G.K.'s Weekly_, Aug. 18, 1928.
IN 1932, WHEN Gilbert had been in the Church just ten years and
Frances six, my husband and I met them at the Eucharistic Congress in
Dublin. They were staying at the Vice-Regal Lodge and were very happy
in that gathering of the Catholic world brought about by the
Congress. It was this thought of the potential of the faith for a
unity the League of Nations could not achieve--only dogma is strong
enough to unite mankind--that gave its title to the book _Christendom
in Dublin_.
In the crowd that thronged to that great gathering he saw Democracy.
Its orderliness was more than a mere organisation: it was
Self-determination of the People. "A whole mob, what many would call
a whole rabble, was doing exactly what it wanted; and what it wanted
was to be Christian." The mind of that crowd was stretched over the
centuries as the faint sound of St. Patrick's bell that had been
silent so many centuries was heard in Phoenix Park at the
Consecration of the Mass: it was stretched over the earth as the
people of the earth gathered into one place which had become for the
time Rome or the Christian Centre.
During the Congress an Eastern priest accosted G.K. with praise of
his writings. His own mind full of the great ideas of Christendom and
the Faith, he felt a huge disproportion in the allusion to himself.
And when later the priest asked to be photographed at his side it
flashed through G.K.'s mind that he had heard in the East that an
idiot was supposed to bring luck. This sort of humorous yet sincere
intellectual humility startles us in the same kind of way as does the
spiritual humility of the saints. We have to accept it in the same
kind of way--without in the least understanding it, but simply
because we cannot fail to see it.
But the world could fail even to see it. It could and did fail in
imagining a mind so absorbed in the contemplation of Infinite
Greatness that its own pin-point littleness became an axiom: rather
it seemed an affectation--none the less an affectation and much the
less pardonable because the laughter was directed against others as
well as against himself.
There is an old mediaeval story of a tumbler who, converted and
become a monk, found himself inapt at the offices of Choir and
Scriptorium so he went before a statue of Our Lady and there played
all his tricks. Quite exhausted at last he looked up at the statue
and said, "Lady, this is a choice performance." There is more than a
touch of Our Lady's tumbler in Gilbert. He knew he could give in his
own fashion a choice performance, but meeting a priest come from a
far land where he had reconciled a hitherto schismatic group with the
great body of the Catholic Church, who could forgive sins and offer
the Holy Sacrifice, he truly felt "something disproportionate in
finding one's own trivial trade, or tricks of the trade, amid the
far-reaching revelations of such a trysting-place of all the tribes
of men."*
[* _Christendom in Dublin_, p. 35.]
His awe and reverence for priests was, says Father Rice, enormous.
"He would carefully weigh their opinion however fatuous." His comment
on the bad statues and fripperies which so many Catholics find a
trial was: "It shows the wisdom of the Church. The whole thing is so
terrific that if people did not have these let-downs they would go
mad."
Yet it may have been a fear of excess of this special let-down that
made him reluctant to go to Lourdes. Lisieux he never liked but he
was, Dorothy says, fascinated by Lourdes when she persuaded him to
go. He went several times to the torch-light procession and he said
as he had said in Dublin, "This is the only real League of Nations."
The thing he liked best in Dublin was the spontaneous outburst of
little altars and amateur decorations in the poorest quarters of the
city. The story he loved to tell was that of the old woman who said
when on the last day the clouds looked threatening: "Well, if it
rains now He will have brought it on Himself."
The year of the Congress two other books were published: _Sidelights
on New London and Newer York_, already discussed, and _Chaucer_. The
books contrast agreeably: one throwing the ideal against the real of
his own day, the other evoking his ideal from the past. The _Chaucer_
was much criticised--chiefly because he was not a Chaucer scholar. As
a matter of fact the notion of his writing this book did not
originate with Chesterton but with Richard de la Mare who had
projected a series of essays called "The Poets on the Poets." This
developed, still at his suggestion, into a literary biography of
Chaucer. But in any event G.K. had all his life combatted the notion
that only a scholar should write on such themes. He stood resolutely
for the rights of the amateur: yet I think the scholar might well
start off with some exasperation on reading that if Chaucer had been
called the Father of English poetry, so had "an obscure Anglo-Saxon
like Caedmon," whose writing was "not in that sense poetry and not in
any sense English." It is a curious example of one of the faults
Chesterton himself most hated--overlooking something because it was
too big: something too that he had realised in an earlier work--for
Caedmon spoke the language of Alfred the Great.
In a brilliant garnering of the fruits of her scholarship--_Word
Hoard_--Margaret Williams has quoted Chesterton's Alfred as a
stirring expression of the significance of the spiritual conquest of
England by Christianity. In the same book she shows how superficial
is the view which believes that the English language was a creation
of the Norman Conquest. The struggle, she says "between the English
and French tongues lasted for some three hundred years, until the two
finally blended into a unified language, basically Teutonic, richly
romantic. The English spirit emerged predominant by a moral victory
over its conqueror. . . ."*
[* _Word Hoard_ by Margaret Williams, p. 4.]
No one would wish that Chesterton should have ignored the immense
debt owed by our language to the French tributary that so enriched
its main stream, but it seems strange that in his hospitable mind, in
which Alfred's England held so large a place, he should not have
found room for an appreciation of the Saxon structure of Chaucer and
for all that makes him unmistakably one in a line of which Caedmon
was the first great poet. In this book, only his debt to France is
stressed, because England is to be thought of as part of Europe--and
the part she is a part of is apparently France!
Yet what excellent things there are in the book:
The great poet exists to show the small man how great he is. . . .
The great poet is alone strong enough to measure that broken
strength we call the weakness of man.
The real vice of the Victorians was that they regarded history as a
story that ended well because it ended with the Victorians. They
turned all human records into one three-volume novel; and were quite
sure that they themselves were the third volume.
He quotes Troilus and Cressida on "The Christian majesty of the
mystery of marriage":
Any man who really understands it does not see a Greek King sitting
on an ivory throne, nor a feudal lord sitting on a faldstool but God
in a primordial garden, granting the most gigantic of the joys of the
children of men.
When we talk of wild poetry, we sometimes forget the parallel of
wild flowers. They exist to show that a thing may be more modest and
delicate for being wild.
Romance was a strange by-product of Religion; all the more because
Religion, through some of its representatives may have regretted
having produced it. . . . Even the Church, as imperfectly represented
on its human side, contrived to inspire even what it had denounced,
and transformed even what it had abandoned.
The best chapter is the last: The Moral of the Story--and that moral
is: "That no man should desert that [Catholic] civilisation. It can
cure itself but those who leave it cannot cure it. Not Nestorius, nor
Mahomet, nor Calvin, nor Lenin have cured, nor will cure the real
evils of Christendom; for the severed hand does not heal the whole
body."
Healing must come from a recovery of the norm, of the balance, of the
equilibrium that mediaeval philosophy and culture were always
seeking. "The meaning of Aquinas is that mediaevalism was always
seeking a centre of gravity. The meaning of Chaucer is that, when
found, it was always a centre of gaiety. . . ."
The name of Aquinas thus introduced on almost the last page of this
book shows Chesterton's mind already busy on the next and perhaps
most important book of his life: _St. Thomas Aquinas_.
"Great news this," wrote Shaw to Frances, "about the Divine Doctor. I
have been preaching for years that intellect is a passion that will
finally become the most ecstatic of all the passions; and I have
cherished Thomas as a most praiseworthy creature for being my
forerunner on this point."
When we were told that Gilbert was writing a book on St. Thomas and
that we might have the American rights, my husband felt a faint
quiver of apprehension. Was Chesterton for once undertaking a task
beyond his knowledge? Such masses of research had recently been done
on St. Thomas by experts of such high standing and he could not
possibly have read it all. Nor should we have been entirely reassured
had we heard what Dorothy Collins told us later concerning the
writing of it.
He began by rapidly dictating to Dorothy about half the book. So far
he had consulted no authorities but at this stage he said to her:
"I want you to go to London and get me some books."
"What books?" asked Dorothy.
"I don't know," said G.K.
She wrote therefore to Father O'Connor and from him got a list of
classic and more recent books on St. Thomas. G.K. "flipped them
rapidly through," which is, says Dorothy, the only way she ever saw
him read, and then dictated to her the rest of his own book without
referring to them again. There are no marks on any of them except a
little sketch of St. Thomas which was drawn in the margin opposite a
description of the affair, which G.K. so vividly dramatises, of Siger
of Brabant.
Had we known all this we should have been asking ourselves even more
definitely: What will the experts say? Of the verdict of the greatest
of them we were not long left in doubt. Etienne Gilson, who has given
two of the most famous of philosophical lecture series--the Gifford
Lectures at Aberdeen and the William James Lectures at Harvard--had
begun his admiration for Chesterton with _Greybeards at Play_ and had
thought _Orthodoxy_ "the best piece of apologetic the century had
produced." When _St. Thomas_ appeared he said to a friend of mine
"Chesterton makes one despair. I have been studying St. Thomas all my
life and I could never have written such a book." After Gilbert's
death, asked to give an appreciation, he returned to the same topic--
I consider it as being without possible comparison the best book
ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for
such an achievement. Everybody will no doubt admit that it is a
"clever" book, but the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty
years in studying St. Thomas Aquinas, and who, perhaps, have
themselves published two or three volumes on the subject, cannot fail
to perceive that the so-called "wit" of Chesterton has put their
scholarship to shame. He has guessed all that which they had tried to
demonstrate, and he has said all that which they were more or less
clumsily attempting to express in academic formulas. Chesterton was
one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed; he was deep because he
was right; and he could not help being right; but he could not either
help being modest and charitable, so he left it to those who could
understand him to know that he was right, and deep; to the others, he
apologized for being right, and he made up for being deep by being
witty. That is all they can see of him.*
[* _Chesterton_, by Cyril Clemens, pp. 150-151.]
In joining the Church Chesterton had found like all converts, from
St. Paul to Cardinal Newman, that he had come into the land of
liberty and especially of intellectual liberty. "Conversion," he
said, "calls on a man to stretch his mind, as a man awakening from
sleep may stretch his arms and legs."*
[* _Well and Shallows_, p. 130.]
I suppose one of the reasons why the surrounding world finds it hard
to receive this statement from a convert is that he has only to look
around him to see so many Catholics wrapped in slumbers as placid as
the next man's. To this very real difficulty, and to all its
implications, Chesterton unfortunately seldom adverted. To the
scandal wrought by evil Catholics, historical or contemporary, he was
not blind--he summarised one element in the Reformation conflict:
Bad men who had no right to their right reason
Good men who had good reason to be wrong.
But I wish that with his rare insight into minds he had analysed us
average Catholics. He might have startled us awake by explaining to
non-Catholics _how_ those who know such Truths and feed upon such
Food can yet appear so dull and lifeless. Anyhow, whether the fault
lie in part with us or entirely with the world at large, certain it
is that in that world a convert is always expected to justify not
merely his beliefs but his sincerity in continuing to hold them. I
wonder if the Pharisees said of St. Paul that they were sure he
really wanted to return to his old allegiance as some said it of
Newman, or spoke as Arnold Bennett did when he accused Chesterton of
being Modernist in his secret thoughts? Were St. Paul's epistles an
Apologia pro Vita Sua?
An Apologia does not of course mean an apology but a justification,
and the ground on which justification was sometimes demanded amused
Gilbert rather than annoying him. Playing the Parlour Game which
consists of guessing at what point in an article on hydraulics,
elegiacs or neo-Platonism Dean Inge will burst into his daily attack
on the Church, he wrote:
The Dean of St. Paul's got to business, in a paragraph in the
second half of his article, in which he unveiled to his readers all
the horrors of a quotation from Newman; a very shocking and shameful
passage in which the degraded apostate says that he is happy in his
religion, and in being surrounded by the things of his religion; that
he likes to have objects that have been blessed by the holy and
beloved, that there is a sense of being protected by prayers,
sacramentals and so on; and that happiness of this sort satisfies the
soul. The Dean, having given us this one ghastly glimpse of the
Cardinal's spiritual condition, drops the curtain with a groan and
says it is Paganism. How different from the Christian orthodoxy of
Plotinus!*
[* _The Thing_, pp. 156-7.]
This playful, not to say frivolous, tone was fresh cause of annoyance
to those who were apt to be annoyed. It is easier to understand their
objection than the opposite one: that he became dull and prosy after
he joined the Church (or alternatively after he left Fleet Street for
Beaconsfield). The only real difficulty about his later work arises
from the riot of his high spirits. In his own style I must say there
are moments when even I want to read the Riot Act. And those who
admire him less feel this more keenly. Bad puns, they say, wild and
sometimes ill-mannered jokes are perhaps pardonable in youth but in
middle age they are inexcusable. The complainants against _The Thing_
are in substance the complainants against _Orthodoxy_ grown more
vehement with the passage of years.
The idea had been adumbrated of calling one of his books: _Joking
Apart_ and only rejected because of the fear that if he said he was
_not_ joking everyone would be quite certain that he was. This
greatly amused G.K. and he began the book (it actually appeared as
_The Well and the Shallows_) with "An Apology for Buffoons." After
defending the human instinct of punning he remarked that "many
moderns suffer from the disease of the suppressed pun." They are
actuated even in their thinking by merely verbal association.
I for one greatly prefer the sort of frivolity that is thrown to
the surface like froth to the sort of frivolity that festers under
the surface like slime. To pelt an enemy with a foolish pun or two
will never do him any grave injustice; the firework is obviously a
firework and not a deadly fire. It may be playing to the gallery, but
even the gallery knows it is only playing.*
[* _Well and Shallows_, pp. 11-12.]
Such playing was a necessity if the gallery, i.e. all the people,
were to be made to listen; if the things you were thinking about were
important to them as well as to yourself: if the ideas were more
important than the dignity or reputation of the person who uttered
them. In this book Gilbert sketched briefly one side of his reason
for feeling these ideas of paramount importance for everybody. "My
Six Conversions" concerned reasons given him by the world that would
have made him become a Catholic if he were not one already.
He had been brought up to treasure liberty and in his boyhood the
world had seemed freer than the Church. Today in a world of Fascism,
Communism and Bureaucracy the Church alone offered a reasoned
liberty. He had been brought up to reverence certain ideals of
purity: today they were laughed at everywhere but in the Church. The
"sure conclusions" of Science that had stood foursquare in his
boyhood had become like a dissolving view. Liberalism had abdicated
when the people of Spain freely chose the Church and English Liberals
defended the forcing upon them of a minority rule. "There are no
Fascists; there are no Socialists; there are no Liberals; there are
no Parliamentarians. There is the one supremely inspiring and
irritating institution in the world and there are its enemies." Above
all, he felt increasingly, as time went on that those who left the
Faith did not get Freedom but merely Fashion; that there was
something ironic in the name the atheists chose when they called
themselves Secularists. By definition they had tied themselves to the
fashion of this world that passeth away.
These six conversions then were what the world would have forced upon
him: the Church as an alternative to a continually worsening
civilisation. While he hated the Utopias of the Futurists and while
he accepted the Christian view of life as a probation he felt too
that life today was abnormally degraded and unhappy.
There is a sense in which men may be made normally happy; but there
is another sense in which we may truly say, without undue paradox,
that what they want is to get back to their normal unhappiness. At
present they are suffering from an utterly abnormal unhappiness. They
have got all the tragic elements essential to the human lot to
contend with; time and death and bereavement and unrequited affection
and dissatisfaction with themselves. But they have not got the
elements of consolation and encouragement that ought normally to
renew their hopes or restore their self-respect. They have not got
vision or conviction, or the mastery of their work, or the loyalty of
their household, or any form of human dignity. Even the latest
Utopians, the last lingering representatives of that fated and
unfortunate race, do not really promise the modern man that he shall
do anything, or own anything, or in any effectual fashion be
anything. They only promise that, if he keeps his eyes open, he will
see something; he will see the Universal Trust or the World State or
Lord Melchett coming in the clouds in glory. But the modern man
cannot even keep his eyes open. He is too weary with toil and a long
succession of unsuccessful Utopias. He has fallen asleep.*
[* _G.K.'s Weekly_, October 20, 1928.]
Chesterton demanded urgently that the worldlings who had failed to
make the world workable should abdicate. "The organic thing called
religion has in fact the organs that take hold on life. It can feed
where the fastidious doubter finds no food; it can reproduce where
the solitary sceptic boasts of being barren." In short, in religion
alone was Darwin justified, for Catholicism was the "spiritual
Survival of the Fittest."*
[* _Well and Shallows_, p. 82.]
If these Six Conversions are read without the balancing of something
deeper they have the superficial look that belongs of necessity to
Apologetics. Some essays in _The Well and the Shallows_, most of _The
Thing, Christendom in Dublin_, and above all, _The Queen of Seven
Swords_ give us that deeper quieter thinking when the mind is
meditating upon the great mysteries of the faith.
Only very occasionally is it possible to glimpse beneath Gilbert's
reserve, but such glimpses are illuminating. Father Walker, who
prepared him for his First Communion, writes, "It was one of the most
happy duties I had ever to perform. . . . That he was perfectly well
aware of the immensity of the Real Presence on the morning of his
First Communion, can be gathered from the fact that he was covered
with perspiration when he actually received Our Lord. When I was
congratulating him he said, 'I have spent the happiest hour of my
life.'"
Yet he went but seldom to Holy Communion, and an unfinished letter to
Father Walker gives the reason. "The trouble with me is that I am
much too frightened of that tremendous Reality on the altar. I have
not grown up with it and it is too much for me. I think I am morbid;
but I want to be told so by authority."
And in _Christendom in Dublin_, he says: "The word Eucharist is but a
verbal symbol, we might say a vague verbal mask, for something so
tremendous that the assertion and the denial of it have alike seemed
a blasphemy; a blasphemy that has shaken the world with the
earthquake of two thousand years."
I have heard it said that in these later years Gilbert's writing
became obscure, and I think it is partly true. Only partly, for the
old clarity is still there except when he is dealing with matters
almost too deep for human speech. He wrote in _The Thing:_
A thinking man can think himself deeper and deeper into Catholicism
. . . the great mysteries like the Blessed Trinity or the Blessed
Sacrament are the starting-point for trains of thought . . .
stimulating, subtle and even individual. . . . To accept the Logos as
a truth is to be in the atmosphere of the absolute, not only with St.
John the Evangelist, but with Plato and all the great mystics of the
world. . . . To exalt the Mass is to enter into a magnificent world
of metaphysical ideas, illuminating all the relations of matter and
mind, of flesh and spirit, of the most impersonal abstractions as
well as the most personal affections. . . . Even what are called the
fine doctrinal distinctions are not dull. They are like the finest
operations of surgery; separating nerve from nerve but giving life.
It is easy enough to flatten out everything around for miles with
dynamite if our only object is to give death. But just as the
physiologist is dealing with living tissues so the theologian is
dealing with living ideas; and if he draws a line between them it is
naturally a very fine line.
If there appears a contradiction in the picture of Chesterton the
philosopher pondering on the Logos and Chesterton the child offering
trinkets to Our Lady, we may remember the Eternal Wisdom "playing in
the world, playing before God always" whose delight is to be with the
children of men.