The Living Voice
CHESTERTON SPOKE ONCE of the keen joy for the intellect of
discovering the causes of things, but he was not greatly interested
in science. He would have said that although the physical sciences
did represent an advance in the grasp of truth it was, in the words
of Browning, only the "very superficial truth." He desired a
knowledge of causes that did not dwell simply on what was secondary
but led back to the First and Final Cause. To the mediaeval thinker,
science was fascinating as Philosophy's little sister: it was to
Philosophy what Nature was to man. Nature had been to St. Francis a
little lovely, dancing sister. Science had been to St. Thomas the
handmaid of philosophy. The modern world thought these proportions
fantastic. Huxley used Nature as a word for God. Physical Science had
ousted Philosophy.
An American friend lately told me of a girl who, asked if she
believed in God replied, "Sure, I believe in God, but I'm not nuts
about Him." Gilbert was not "nuts" about Science: therefore in a
world that saw nothing else to be "nuts" about he was called its
enemy. And as with other things taken more solemnly by most moderns
he preferred to get fun out of the inventions of the age.
He wrote in a fairly early number of _G.K.'s Weekly:_
ESKIMO SONG
. . . So that the audience in Chicago will have the advantage of
hearing Eskimos singing. (Or words to that effect.)
--_Wireless Programme_.
Oh who would not want such a wonderful thing
As the pleasure of hearing the Eskimos sing?
I wish I had Eskimos out on the lawn,
Or perched on the window to wake me at dawn:
With Eskimos singing in every tree
Oh that would be glory, be glory for me!
Oh list to the song that the Eskimos sing,
When the penguin would be if he could on the wing,
Would soar to the sun if he could, like the lark,
But for most of the time it is totally dark.
Or hark to the bacchanal songs that resound
When they're making a night of it half the year round,
And carousing for months till the morning is pale,
Go home with the milk of the walrus and whale.
Oh list to the sweet serenades that are hers,
Who expensively gowned in most elegant furs,
Leans forth from the lattice delighted to know
That her heart is like ice and her hand is like snow.
* * * * *
God bless all the dear little people who roam
And hail in the icebergs the hills of their home;
For I might not object to be listening in
If I hadn't to hear the whole programme begin.
And the President preach international peace,
And Parricide show an alarming increase,
And a Justice at Bootle excuse the police,
And how to clean trousers when spotted with grease,
And a pianist biting his wife from caprice,
And an eminent Baptist's arrival at Nice,
And a banker's regrettably painless decease,
And the new quarantine for the plucking of geese,
And a mad millionaire's unobtrusive release,
And a marquis divorced by a usurer's niece--
If all of these items could suddenly cease
And leave me with one satisfactory thing
I really _should_ like to hear Eskimos sing.
This was hardly the expression of an attitude to science, but he did
have such an attitude. Life was to him a story told by God: the
people in it the characters in that story. But since the story was
told by God it was, quite literally, a magic story, a fairy story, a
story full of wonders created by a divine will. As a child a toy
telephone rigged up by his father from the house to the end of the
garden had breathed that magic quality more than the Transatlantic
Cable could reveal it in later life. It did not need mechanical
inventions to make him see life as marvellous. His over-ruling
interest was not in mechanics but in Will: the will of God had
created the laws of nature and could supersede them: the will of Man
could discover these laws and harness them to its purposes. Gold is
where you find it and the value of science depends on the will of
man: a position which may not sound so absurd in the light of the
harnessing of science to the purposes of destruction. When discussing
machines "we sometimes tend," said Chesterton in _Sidelights_, "to
overlook the quiet and even bashful presence of the machine gun."
There was an impishness in Gilbert, especially in his youth, that
encouraged the idea of his enmity to science. Where he saw a long
white beard he felt like tweaking it: an enquiring nose simply asked
to be pulled. It was only in (comparatively) sober age that he
bothered in _The Everlasting Man_ to explain "I am not at issue in
this book with sincere and genuine scholars, but with a vast and
vague public opinion which has been prematurely spread from certain
imperfect investigations."* That "vast and vague public opinion"
certainly suspected him of irreverence even towards sincere and
genuine scholars. Yet it was by his use of the most marvelous of
modern inventions that he won in the end the widest hearing among
that public that he had ever known.
[* _The Everlasting Man_, p. 67.]
It is not so many years ago that we donned earphones in a doubtful
hope of being able to hear something over the radio. It is the less
surprising that it was only in the last few years of his life that
Gilbert became first interested in the invention and presently one of
the broadcasters most in request by the B.B.C. He felt about the
radio as he did about most modern inventions: that they were splendid
opportunities that were not being taken--or else were being taken to
the harm of humanity by the wrong people. What was the use of
"calling all countries" if you had nothing to say to them.
"What much modern science fails to realise," he wrote, "is that there
is little use in knowing without thinking."
And again, writing about the amazing discoveries of the day: "Nobody
is taking the smallest trouble to consider who in the future will be
in command of the electricity and capable of giving us the shocks.
With all the shouting about the new marvels, hardly anybody utters a
word or even a whisper about how they are to be prevented from
turning into the old abuses. . . . People sometimes wonder why we not
infrequently refer to the old scandal covered by the word Marconi. It
is precisely because all these things are really covered by that
word. There could not be a shorter statement of the contradiction
than in men howling that word as a discovery and hushing it up as a
story."*
[* _G.K.'s Weekly_, Aug. 15, 1925.]
For the thing that really frightened him about the radio was its
possibilities as a new instrument of tyranny. The British
Broadcasting Company holds in England a monopoly and is to a
considerable extent under Government control. It is possible to
forbid advertising programmes because the costs are met by a tax of
10 sh. a year levied on the possession of a radio set.
In an article called "The Unseen Catastrophe" (January 28,
1928) Gilbert wrote:
Suppose you had told some of the old Whigs, let alone Liberals,
that there was an entirely new type of printing press, eclipsing all
others; and that as this was to be given to the King, all printing
would henceforth be government printing. They would be roaring like
rebels, or even regicides, yet that is exactly what we have done with
the whole new invention of wireless. Suppose it were proposed that
the king's officers should search all private houses to make sure
there were no printing presses, they would be ready for a new
revolution. Yet that is exactly what is proposed for the protection
of the government monopoly of broadcasting. . . . There is really no
protection against propaganda . . . being entirely in the hands of
the government; except indeed, the incredible empty-headedness of
those who govern. . . . On that sort of thing at least, we are all
Socialists now. It is wicked to nationalize mines or railroads; but
we lose no time in nationalizing tongues and talk . . . we might once
have used, and we shall now never use, the twentieth century science
against the nineteenth century hypocrisy. It was prevented by a
swift, sweeping and intolerant State monopoly; a monster suddenly
swallowing all rivals, alternatives, discussions, or delays, with one
snap of its gigantic jaws. That is what I mean by saying, "We cannot
see the monsters that overcome us." But I suppose that even Jonah,
when once he was swallowed, could not see the whale.
In the autumn of 1932 Gilbert was first asked to undertake a series
of radio talks for the B.B.C. Every one seems agreed that he was an
extraordinary success. Letters from Broadcasting House are full of
such remarks as: "You do it admirably," "quite superb at the
microphone." In one his work is called "unique." Radio was now added
to all his other activities during the four years he still had to
live. Dorothy kept a diary in which she noted in one year the giving
of as many as forty lectures, and entered reminders of engagements of
the most varying kinds all over England: from the King's Garden Party
to the Aylesbury Education Committee and the Oxford Union: to
Scotland for Rectorial Campaigns: dinners at the Inner Temple and the
Philosophical Society: Detection Club dinners and Mock Trials, at one
of which he was Defendant on the charge of "perversely preferring the
past to the present."
Besides the books discussed in the last chapter, the Dickens'
_Introductions_ and the _Collected Poems_ were republished in 1933.
Other books were planned, including one on Shakespeare.
That same year Gilbert's mother died. During her last illness Frances
was torn between London and Beaconsfield, for her own mother was
dying in a Nursing Home at Beaconsfield, her mother-in-law at Warwick
Gardens. Once I drove with her between the two and she told me how
she suffered at the difficulty of giving help to two dying Agnostics.
She told me on that drive how she knew her mother-in-law had not
liked her but had lately made her very happy by saying she realised
now that she had been the right wife for Gilbert. To a cousin, Nora
Grosjean, Frances spoke too of how she and Mrs. Edward had drawn
together in those last days and she added, "No mother ever thinks any
woman good enough for her son." Nora Grosjean also reports, "Aunt
Marie said to me more than once, 'I always respect Frances--she kept
Gilbert out of debt.'"
Warwick Gardens had been their home so long that vast accumulations
of papers had piled up there. "Mister Ed." too had been in a sort
keeper of the family archives. Gilbert glanced at the mass and, as I
mentioned at the beginning of this book, told the dustman to carry it
off. Half had already gone when Dorothy Collins arrived and saved the
remainder. She piled it into her car and drove back to Beaconsfield,
Gilbert keeping up a running commentary all the way on "the hoarding
habits of women."
The money that came to Gilbert and Frances after Mrs. Edward's death
made it possible for them to plan legacies not only for friends and
relatives but also for the Catholic Church in Beaconsfield with which
they had increasingly identified their lives and their interests.
Their special dream was that Top Meadow itself should be a
convent--best of all a school--and in this hope they bequeathed it to
the Church.
A year later another family event, this time a joyful one, took
Gilbert back to his youth; Mollie Kidd, daughter of Annie Firmin,
became engaged to be married. She was a rather special young cousin
to Gilbert both because of the old affection for her mother and
because she had played hostess to him in Canada when her mother was
ill. He wrote
Postmark. Aug. 28, 1934
MY DEAR MOLLIE,
I am afraid that chronologically, or by the clock, I am relatively
late in sending you my most warm congratulations--and yet I do assure
you that I write as one still thrilled and almost throbbing with good
news. It would take pages to tell you all I feel about it: beginning
with my first memory of your mother, when she was astonishingly like
you, except that she had yellow plaits of hair down her back. I do
not absolutely insist that you should now imitate her in this: but
you would not be far wrong if you imitate her in anything. And so
on--till we come to the superb rhetorical passage about You and the
right fulfilment of Youth. It would take pages: and that is why the
pages are never written. We bad correspondents, we vile non-writers
of letters, have a sort of secret excuse, that no one will ever
listen to till the Day of Judgment, when all infinite patience will
have to listen to so much. It is often because we think so much about
our friends that we do not write to them--the letters would be too
long. Especially in the case of wretched writing men like me, who
feel in their spare time that writing is loathsome and thinking about
their friends pleasant. In the course of turning out about ten
articles, on Hitler, on Humanism, on determinism, on Distributism, on
Dollfuss and Darwin and the Devil knows what, there really are
thoughts about real people that cross my mind suddenly and make me
really happy in a real way: and one of them is the news of your
engagement. Please believe, dear Mollie, that I am writing the truth,
though I am a journalist: and give my congratulations to everyone
involved.
Yours with love,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
And in that year came two bits of public recognition of rather
different kinds. He was elected to the Athenaeum Club under Rule
II--Honoris causa; and he and Belloc were given by the Pope the title
of Knight Commander of St. Gregory with Star. During these years the
paper had gone steadily on "at some considerable inconvenience"
because, he said, he still felt it had a part to play. At home and
abroad the scene had been steadily darkening. In July 1930, three
years before Hitler came to the Chancellorship, we find the following
among the notes of the Week:
When we are told that the ancient Marshal Hindenburg is now
Dictator of Germany we suspect a note of exaggeration . . .
Hindenburg never was the dictator of anything and never will be. He
is, however the man who keeps the seat warm for a Dictator to come.
Hindenburg has led us back to Frederick the Great. . . .
Hindenburg has now given rein to the extreme Nationalists, with the
delivered provinces to support him in the flush of patriotism. And
the extreme Nationalists have only one policy: to reconstitute the
unjust frontiers of Germany, which Europe fought to amend.
In 1931 had come the Customs Union between Germany and Austria, the
obvious impotence of the League of Nations to restrain Japan, the
"National" Government and falling sterling in England. Less than two
years later Hitler was Chancellor of Germany, and in 1934 came the
murder of Dollfuss. Chesterton wrote of the tragedy whereby the name
Germany was taken from Austria and given to Prussia. With Dollfuss
fell all that was left of the Holy Roman Empire: the barbarians had
invaded the center of our civilisation and like the Turks besieging
Vienna had struck at its heart. He regarded Hitler merely as the tool
of Prussianism. The new Paganism was the logical outcome of the old
Prussianism: it was too the apotheosis of tyranny. "In the Pagan
State, in antiquity or modernity, you cannot appeal from Tyranny to
God; because the Tyranny is the God."
Belloc solemnly warned our country that we were making inevitable
"the death in great pain of innumerable young Englishmen now
boys. . . . It may be in two years or in five or in ten the blow will
fall." (November 8, 1934.)
Yet even this seemed less terrible to Chesterton than the state of
mind then prevailing: the mood--nay the fever--of pacifism that
demanded the isolation of England from Europe's peril. He called it
"Mafficking for peace": a sort of Imperialism that forgot that the
Atlantic is wider than the Straits of Dover and allowed Lord
Beaverbrook to regard England as a part of Canada. "Englishmen who
have felt that fever will one day look back on it with shame." "This
most noble and generous nation," he wrote with a note of agony,
"which lost its religion in the seventeenth century has lost its
morals in the twentieth."
The League of Nations had, G. K. held, been thought at first to be a
kind of Pentecost but had in reality "come together to rebuild the
Tower of Babel." And this because it had no common basis in religion.
"Humanitarianism does not unite humanity. For even one isolated man
is half divine." But today man had despaired of man. "Hope for the
superman is another name for despair of man."
Reading a recent commentary in a review, I suddenly saw that politics
and economics were not what mattered most in the paper. The
commentary in question was to the effect that _G.K.'s Weekly_ was
inferior to the _New Witness_ because G.K. had "only" general
principles and ideas and no detailed inside knowledge of how the
world of finance and politics was going. Looking again through the
articles I had marked as most characteristically his, I saw that they
were not only chiefly about ideas and principles but also that they
were mostly pure poetry. Chesterton was, I believe, greatest and most
permanently effective when he was moved, not by a passing irritation
with the things that pass, but by the great emotions evoked by the
Eternal, emotions which in Eternity alone will find full fruition.
There are in the paper articles in which, appearing to speak out of
his own knowledge, he is merely repeating information given him by
Belloc. And it was quite out of Chesterton's character to write with
certainty about what he did not know with certainty. Hence this
writing is his weakest. But the paper has, too, some of his strongest
work and his mind as he drew to the end of life lingered on thoughts
that had haunted him in its beginning.
Before the Boer War had introduced me to politics, or worse still
to politicians [he wrote in a Christmas article in 1934], I had some
vague and groping ideas of my own about a general view or vision of
existence. It was a long time before I had anything worth calling a
religion; what I had was not even sufficiently coherent to be called
a philosophy. But it was, in a sense, a view of life; I had it in the
beginning; and I am more and more coming back to it in the end. . . .
my original and almost mystical conviction of the miracle of all
existence and the essential excitement of all experience.*
[* December 6, 1934.]
This he felt must be the profound philosophy by which Distributism
should succeed and whereby he tested the modern world and found it
wanting--
something of which Christmas is the best traditional symbol. It was
then no more than a notion about the point at which extremes meet,
and the most common thing becomes a cosmic and mystical thing. I did
not want so much to alter the place and use of things as to weight
them with a new dimension; to deepen them by going down to the
potential nothing; to lift them to infinity by measuring from zero.
The most logical form of this is in thanks to a Creator; but at
every stage I felt that such praises could never rise too high;
because they could not even reach the height of our own thanks for
unthinkable existence, or horror of more unthinkable non-existence.
And the commonest things, as much as the most complex, could thus
leap up like fountains of praise. . . .
We shall need a sort of Distributist psychology, as well as a
Distributist philosophy. That is partly why I am not content with
plausible solutions about credit or corporative rule. We need a new
(or old) theory and practice of pleasure. The vulgar school of panem
et circenses only gives people circuses; it does not even tell them
how to enjoy circuses. But we have not merely to tell them how to
enjoy circuses. We have to tell them how to enjoy enjoyment.*
[* December 13, 1934.]
In attacking a special abuse, Chesterton was most successful when he
took the thought to a deeper depth. The following Christmas (1935) he
wrote:
We live in a terrible time, of war and rumour of war. . . .
International idealism in its effort to hold the world together . . .
is admittedly weakened and often disappointed. I should say simply
that it does not go deep enough. . . . If we really wish to make
vivid the horrors of destruction and mere disciplined murder we must
see them more simply as attacks on the hearth and the human family;
and feel about Hitler as men felt about Herod.
The modern world tended to gild pure gold and then try to scrape the
gilt off the gingerbread, to paint the lily and then complain of its
gaudiness. Thus it had vulgarised Christmas and now demanded the
abolition of Christmas because it was vulgar. It was the truth he had
emphasised years ago in contrast with Shaw: the world had spoilt the
ideas but it was the Christian ideas the world needed, if only in
order to recover the human ideas. He went on--
If we want to talk about poverty, we must talk about it as the
hunger of a human being. . . . We must say first of the beggar, not
that there is insufficient housing accommodation, but that he has not
where to lay his head . . . we must talk of the human family in
language as plain and practical and positive as that in which mystics
used to talk of the Holy Family. We must learn again to use the naked
words that describe a natural thing. . . . Then we shall draw on the
driving force of many thousand years, and call up a real
humanitarianism out of the depths of humanity.
I should like to collect all the essays and poems on Christmas; he
wrote several every year, yet each is different, each goes to the
heart of his thought. As Christopher Morley says: "One of the simple
greatnesses of G.K.C. shows in this, that we think of him
instinctively toward Christmas time."* Some men, it may be, are best
moved to reform by hate, but Chesterton was best moved by love and
nowhere does that love shine more clearly than in all he wrote about
Christmas. It will be for this philosophy, this charity, this poetry
that men will turn over the pages of _G.K.'s Weekly_ a century hence
if the world still lasts. It is for us who are his followers to see
that they are truly creative. Destruction of evil is a great work but
if it leaves only a vacuum, nature abhors that vacuum. Creation is
what matters for the future and Chesterton's writing is creative.
[* _Mark Twain Quarterly_, Spring, 1937.]
So too with the radio. In this new medium his mind was alert to
present his new-old ideas, his fundamental philosophy of life after
some fresh fashion. A letter from Broadcasting House (Nov. 2, 1932)
after his first talk records the delight of all who heard it:
The building rings with your praises! I knew I was not alone in my
delight over your first talk. I think even you in your modesty will
find some pleasure in hearing what widespread interest there is in
what you are doing. You bring us something very rare to the
microphone. I am most anxious that you should be with us till after
Christmas. You will have a vast public by Christmas and it is good
that they should hear you. Would you undertake six further
fortnightly talks from January 16th onwards?
He was asked to submit a manuscript but promised he should not be
kept to the letter of it. "We should like you to make variations as
these occur to you as you speak at the microphone. Only so can the
talk have a real show of spontaneity about it." "You will forgive
me," one official writes, "if I insist on speaking to you personally.
That is how I think of our relations." G.K. was unique and they told
him so.
A lot of reading was necessary for these talks--each one dealing with
from four to ten books--and also a principle of selection. The
principle Gilbert chose for one series was historical: "Literature
lives by history. Otherwise it exists: like trigonometry." In the
fifth talk of the Autumn series of 1934, he gives a general idea of
what he has been attempting.
This is the hardest job I have had in all these wireless talks; and
I confront you in a spirit of hatred because of the toils I have
endured on your behalf; but, after all, what are my sufferings
compared to yours? Incredible as it may seem to anybody who has heard
these talks, they had originally a certain consistent plan. I dealt
first with heroic and half-legendary stories, touched upon medieval
chivalry, then on the party-heroes of Elizabethan or Puritan times;
then on the eighteenth century and then the nineteenth. In this
address I had meant to face the twentieth century; but I find it
almost faceless, largely featureless; and, anyhow, very bewildering.
I had meant to take books typical of the twentieth century as a book
on Steele is typical of the eighteenth or a book on Rossetti of the
nineteenth. And I have collected a number of most interesting
twentieth century books, claiming to declare a twentieth-century
philosophy; they really have a common quality; but I rather hesitate
to define it. Suppose I said that the main mark of the twentieth
century in ethics as in economics, is bankruptcy. I fear you might
think I was a little hostile in my criticism. Suppose I said that all
these books are marked by a brilliant futility. You might almost
fancy that I was not entirely friendly to them. You would be
mistaken. All of them are good; some of them are very good indeed.
But the question does recur; what is the good of being good in that
way? . . .
Mr. Geoffrey West's curious "Post War Credo" has one Commandment.
He does say, he does shout, we might say, he does yell, that there
must be No War . . . but he cannot impose his view because authority
has gone; and he cannot prove his view; because reason has gone. So
again it all comes back to taste. And I have enjoyed the banquet of
these excellent books; but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
The peculiar half-official half-private direction of Broadcasting
House is based on a theory of strict impartiality towards all
opinions and an attempt simply to give the public the programmes that
the public wants. Whether it is possible to maintain such a position
is another question: that this is the theory there is no doubt--and
one result is an abiding uncertainty of mind in most of the officials.
Broadcasting House hangs suspended in the air of public opinion and
that fickle breath leaves them in no security as to any of their
artists. The resulting sensitiveness became soothed as the months
passed on and they got as near to trusting Chesterton as they ever
come with any one. True, letters came attacking him, but far more
enthusiastically approving of him. And the attacks he answered often
by private letters that turned the critic into a friend.
Some of his suggestions were not acceptable. He was warned off a
proposed humorous talk about Dean Inge and Bishop Barnes in a series
called "Speeches that never happened"--("Subject too serious," "avoid
religion"). But he was later asked to talk in a series on Freedom as
a Catholic and also to debate with Bertrand Russell on "Who should
bring up our children." In this debate he was especially brilliant,
says Maurice Baring; and another friend wrote "I have just been
listening not without joy to your putting it across Mr. Bertrand
Russell. . . .
"_Afterthought:_ What a Mincer! It struck me very much, having read
much of his writing with interest. It just shows that the spoken word
still has something that the written one can't convey. Is there a
Mincing Mind, of which a mincing voice is the outward and visible
warning?"
It was interesting that the last few years of Gilbert's life should
have furnished this unique opportunity of contact through the spoken
word between him and the English people. His voice on the radio had
none of the defects that marred it in a hall: his material was far
better arranged, his delivery perfect. He seemed to be there beside
the listener, talking in amity and exchanging confidences. The
morning after his death Edward Macdonald passed a barber's shop off
Chancery Lane. The man was lathering a customer's face but
recognising Mr. Macdonald, left the customer and ran out brush in
hand.
"I just want to say I was sorry to hear the news," he said. "He was a
grand man."
Mr. Macdonald asked him if he knew Chesterton well.
"Never read a word he wrote," the barber answered. "But I always
listened to him on the wireless. He seemed to be sitting beside me in
the room."
"That man," Edward Macdonald comments, "emphasised what I still
think: that G.K.C. in another year or so would have become the
dominating voice from Broadcasting House."
In 1934 Gilbert had jaundice and on his recovery he started with
Frances and Dorothy on one of those trips that were his greatest
pleasure. They went to Rome--it was Holy Year--and thence to Sicily,
intending to go on to Palestine. At Syracuse, however, Gilbert became
really ill with inflammation of the nerves of the neck and shoulders.
They stayed five weeks in Syracuse, gave up the trip to Palestine and
returned home by Malta. Gilbert and Frances were to have dined at
Admiralty House but he was too unwell to dine out and only came up
one afternoon. Lady Fisher remembers going to see them at the Osborne
Hotel. Gilbert was sitting on a rickety basket chair, obviously in
pain and talking a good deal in order to hide it. She sympathised
with him for the cold weather, his obvious physical misery, and the
discomfort of his chair.
"You must never sympathise with me," Gilbert answered, "for I can
always turn every chair into a story."
The next year they motored in France and Italy and Gilbert records in
the _Autobiography_ an experience in a French café when he felt a
rare thrill--not in talking on the radio but in listening--on a day
that "was dateless, even for my dateless life; for I had forgotten
time and had no notion of anything anywhere, when in a small French
town I strolled into a café noisy with French talk. Wireless songs
wailed unnoted; which is not surprising, for French talk is much
better than wireless. And then, unaccountably, I heard a voice
speaking in English; and a voice I had heard before. For I heard the
words, '. . . wherever you are, my dear people, whether in this
country or beyond the sea,' and I remembered Monarchy and an ancient
cry; for it was the King; and that is how I kept the Jubilee."
After he got home I remember how delightedly Gilbert quoted the
captions on two banners hung in the heart of the London slums. One
read, "Down with Capitalism--God Save the King." The other read,
"Lousy but loyal." He knew that it was true and it served to increase
the passionate quality of his pity. Patient he could be for himself,
but the lot of the poor aroused in him a terrible anger--and in a
broadcast on Liberty he gave that anger vent. For worse than the
presence of lice in our slums was the absence of liberty. He would
gladly, he said, have spoken merely as an Englishman but he had been
asked to speak as a Catholic, and therefore, "I am going to point out
that Catholicism created English liberty; that the freedom has
remained exactly in so far as the faith has remained; and that where
it is true that all our Faith has gone, all our freedom is going. If
I do this, I cannot ask most of you to agree with me; if I did
anything else, I could not ask any of you to respect me."
Other speakers in the series had dwelt on the liberty secured to
Englishmen by our Parliamentary and Juridical system, both, he noted
of Catholic origin. But in his eyes even that liberty was being
imperilled today where it was not lost, while the most important
freedom of all--freedom to handle oneself and one's daily life--had
disappeared for the mass of the people. The liberty so widely praised
that followed the Reformation
has been a limited liberty because it was only a literary
liberty. . . . You always talked about verbal liberty; you hardly
ever talked about vital liberty . . . the faddist was free to preach
his fads; but the free man was no longer free to protect his
freedom. . . . Monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, responsible forms of
rule, have collapsed under plutocracy, which is irresponsible rule.
And this has come upon us because we departed from the old morality
in three essential points. First, we supported notions against normal
customs. Second, we made the State top-heavy with a new and secretive
tyranny of wealth. And third, we forgot that there is no faith in
freedom without faith in free will. A servile fatalism dogs the creed
of materialism; because nothing, as Dante said, less than the
generosity of God could give to Man, after all ordinary orderly
gifts, the noblest of all things, which is Liberty.
The thoughts that had thronged and pressed on him for half a century
found final expression in these broadcasts. Most of all in two talks:
one given only three months before his death in a series entitled
"The Spice of Life," the other two years earlier in one called "Seven
Days Hard." He was haunted by the ingratitude of humanity. As in his
boyhood, he saw the wonder of the world that God has given to the
children of men and he saw them unconscious of that wonder. What did
a week mean for most of them? Seven dull days. What did it really
mean? "What has really happened during the last seven days and
nights? Seven times we have been dissolved into darkness as we shall
be dissolved into dust; our very selves, so far as we know, have been
wiped out of the world of living things; and seven times we have been
raised alive like Lazarus, and found all our limbs and senses
unaltered, with the coming of the day."
Seven days of human life, the meaning of the phrase, "the spice of
life," both brought the same recurring motif that "a great many
people are at this moment paying rather too much attention to the
spice of life, and rather too little attention to life." Not in any
"distraction from life is the secret we are all seeking, the secret
of enjoying life. I am perfectly certain that all our world will end
in despair unless there is some way of making the mind itself, the
ordinary thoughts we have at ordinary times, more healthy and more
happy than they seem to be just now, to judge by most modern novels
and poems. . . ." A week had never been for Chesterton just seven
days hard, although he had worked hard enough. He had enjoyed the
spice of life, he had liked Beer and Skittles and the distractions of
life and its high points of achievement.
But it is much more important to remember that I have been
intensely and imaginatively happy in the queerest because the
quietest places. I have been filled with life from within in a cold
waiting-room, in a deserted railway junction. I have been completely
alive sitting on an iron seat under an ugly lamp-post at a third rate
watering place. In short, I have experienced the mere excitement of
existence in places that would commonly be called as dull as
ditchwater. And, by the way, is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with
microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.
The younger generation were despairing of life in the face of life's
manifold gifts. Chesterton as a youth had revolted against the
pessimism of his elders, now he revolted as an old man against a
young generation corroded by a yet more poisonous pessimism. "The
Hollow Men" T. S. Eliot had called a poem and in it came the lines
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Forgive me if I say in my old world fashion, that I'm damned if I
ever felt like that . . . I knew that the world was perishable and
would end, but I did not think it would end with a whimper, but, if
anything, with a trump of doom . . . I will even be so indecently
frivolous as to burst into song, and say to the young pessimists:
Some sneer; some snigger; some simper;
In the youth where we laughed, and sang.
And they may end with a whimper
But we will end with a bang.
His last message for this generation was the sound of a trumpet
calling us to resurrection. A dead world must find life again, must
go back to the meaning of the book of Genesis at which it had learnt
to sneer: must realise a week once more with--"the grandeur of that
conception, by which a week has become a wonderful and mystical thing
in which Man imitates God in his labour and in his rest."
Through his call sounds a note of most solemn warning.
Unless we can bring men back to enjoying the daily life which
moderns call a dull life, our whole civilisation will be in ruins in
about fifteen years. Whenever anybody proposes anything really
practical, to solve the economic evil today, the answer always is
that the solution would not work, because the modern town populations
would think life dull. That is because they are entirely unacquainted
with life. They know nothing but distractions from life; dreams which
may be found in the cinema; that is, brief oblivions of life. . . .
Unless we can make daybreak and Daily bread and the creative secrets
of labour interesting in themselves, there will fall on all our
civilisation a fatigue which is the one disease from which
civilisations do not recover. So died the great Pagan civilisation;
of bread and circuses and forgetfulness of the household gods.*
[* _The Listener_, January 31, 1934.]
This splendid world that God has given us, and the furniture of it as
the writer of Genesis saw it in his vision, has in it the material of
happiness in labour and in the true end of labour. "For the true end
of all creation is completion; and the true end of all completion is
contemplation."