CHAPTER THIRTEEN

SOME APPRAISALS.

“Chesterton was one of the great and dynamic forces during the time he lived,” declares Ralph Adams Cram. “I ‘fell for him’ many years ago when almost by accident I found and read ‘The Napoleon of Notting Hill.’ That settled the case for me, and after that I was, so to speak, his intellectual and spiritual slave. Of all his books it seems to me this, together with ‘The Man Who Was Thursday,’ ‘The Bell and the Cross,’ ‘The Flying Inn’ and ‘The Victorian Age of English Literature’ are those for which I care most. This may seem a curious selection, but in most of these he makes his points through indirection, and in some ways this seems to me a more powerful method of conveying his ideas and inspiring the public than the more explicit works, the object of which is very obvious. This is not to disparage anything he ever did--except, perhaps, the Father Brown Mystery stories, which seem to me rather unworthy of him, though even these serve to show the immense breadth of his interest, his knowledge, and his literary ability.”

The late W. B. Yeats wrote the author that he found Chesterton “a kindly and generous man of whom I constantly heard from friends, but as far as I can recollect I only met him socially twice, once at a Club dinner and once for tea at a country house. So much of my life has always been spent in Ireland that I know comparatively little of the English celebrities. I don’t want to write about his works: I have read very little of it, and to write even of that little would open up great questions I don’t want to come to any decision about in my present ignorance (which is likely to endure).”

In his “Autobiography,” Chesterton states that he had some talk about poetry and property with Yeats at the Dublin Art Club, “a most exhilarating evening.” Yeats asked Chesterton to debate at the Abbey Theatre, defending property on its more purely political side, against an able leader of Liberty Hall, the famous stronghold of Labor politics in Dublin, Robert Johnson, who was exceedingly popular with the proletarian Irish.

“That passage from G. K. C.’s ‘Autobiography’ is correct so far as I can remember,” wrote Yeats in a second letter. “It was a time when the English Government was stopping discussion and we kept discussion open at the Abbey Theatre when it had stopped elsewhere, by getting people to speak on the conservative side and letting debate develop as it likes afterwards. Johnson who replied to Chesterton was at that time the most important Irish labour leader: he is still very important. He was in the Irish Senate for some years, Bernard Shaw lectured either the week after or the week before Chesterton. Both men were brilliant, Chesterton taking the line that the possession of small properties was essential to liberty, Johnson putting the Trades Union point of view that it was more important for the workman to spend his money on his children than to save it.”

Cuthbert Wright’s only personal connection with Chesterton was to have been mentioned in one of his last books, “The Well and the Shadows”: “Some year ago I had published a review of G. K. C.’s ‘Catholic Church and Conversion,’ in which I drew attention to what I considered a stylistic defect, his mania for alliteration. He seems to have remembered it during the intervening years, and doing me the honor to couple my name with that of Mr. T. S. Eliot wrote as follows,

“‘It must be a terrible strain on the presence of mind to be always ready with a synonym. I can imagine Mr. T. S. Eliot just stopping himself in time and saying, ‘Waste not, require not.’ I like to think of Mr. Cuthbert Wright having the self-control to cry, ‘Time and fluctuation wait for no man.’ I can imagine his delicate accent when speaking of a pig in a receptacle or of bats in the campanile.”

Professor Roman Dyboski of Krakow, Poland, was first drawn to Chesterton when he read some articles in the “Illustrated London News,” and some passages from his historical poem, “The Ballad of the White Horse.” The professor suggested his advanced students making a special study on the author, and the result was two Polish books on G. K. C. Soon translations of Chesterton’s works became fairly numerous in Poland. His play “Magic” had several successful runs on Polish stages, and the Polish Radio popularized “The Man Who Was Thursday” in a dramatic version.

Shortly after his visit to Poland early in 1927, Chesterton sent Dr. Dyboski an introduction to a collective volume of studies by Polish scholars written to commemorate the Seventh Hundred Anniversary of the death of St. Francis of Assisi, and the services of the Franciscans to civilization.

On July 7, 1927, Chesterton spoke on Poland at the Essex Hall in the Strand. Crowds of his admirers were present; the late Cardinal Bourne himself appeared on the platform; the Polish Ambassador took the chair; Hilaire Belloc moved the vote of thanks which was seconded by Dyboski. The first part of the address struck all present as the most illuminating English opinion that had ever been expressed on Poland,

“I am to speak on Poland, a country very unfamiliar to the average English person. In order to facilitate approach to the subject, let me begin by saying that Poland is Poland. This is the kind of statement which, when I make it, is of course called a paradox (Laughter). Yet what I wish to express is something quite plain and simple. Those of you who have studied medieval history, may remember the ancient kingdom of Bohemia--situated, according to Shakespeare, by the sea-side--now you hear much of Czechoslovakia, unknown to you before. Again, those of you who are old enough to remember the World War, will recall the fervent admiration which we all felt for the heroism of the Servian nation: now we often hear the name of Yugoslavia, which we never heard in those days. As for Poland, she is now known by the same name which she bore through centuries, when she was a great power in Europe, and by which our fathers knew her to exist in those days when she had disappeared from the map, yet continued to live as a nation and to struggle for freedom. That is why I begin by saying that Poland is Poland, and submit that as a fundamental fact for you to consider before we go further.”

It is difficult to imagine more eloquent and emphatic words of recognition for the continuity of Poland’s national tradition through eight centuries of recorded independent existence, through a century and more of division and captivity, and into the dawn of reunion and regained liberty. Chesterton, who in these words as well as in various poems and essays, always acknowledged in Poland one of the corner-stones of the historical structure of European civilization, remained a faithful friend of Poland to his death.

“Grey Beards at Play,” a book of poems in the Mark Twain tradition with G. K.’s own illustrations, first impressed the philosopher L. E. Gilson. But the book which remains with him as the most stimulating is “Orthodoxy,” “When it came out I hailed it as the best piece of apologetic the century had produced. In a sense all his later works are a variation on the same theme. I was interested in the biography of the conversion of a well known American financial expert whose conversion was brought about by reading in succession Chesterton’s ‘Orthodoxy,’ Fulton Sheen’s ‘God and the Intelligence,’ and Karl Adams’ ‘Spirit of Catholicism.’ I don’t wonder they would convert the Devil if he had a sense of humor, and open mind, and could pray for grace!”

Mr. Gilson believes that Chesterton will not really be fully appreciated before a century or two. The book of his which he likes best is “St. Thomas Aquinas:” “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 we 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.”

Eileen Duggan gives the opinion of a New Zealander,

“One of the innumerable society diarists who writes for a hobby recorded an anecdote that illustrates Chesterton’s complete absorption in a subject. He had been given, rather foolishly, a little gold period chair, and as he made his points, it slowly crashed beneath him. He rose just in time and sinking into another chair that someone put behind him, began at the word he had last spoken. It was evident to all that he had barely noticed the incident rather than that he had decided to ignore it.

“A New Zealander who heard him lecture relates that his appearance after a long delay caused the Chairman to express relief that he had not been knocked down by a tramcar. G. K. C. rose calmly and thanked him for his solicitude, ‘but,’ said he, ‘Mr. Chairman, had I met a tramcar it would have been a great and, if, I may say so, an equal encounter.’”

“His journalistic training,” continues Miss Duggan, “had taught him simplification and the author of those penetrating studies on Dickens and Browning would put his points on Distributism so that they could be understood by the man in the street. A sacrifice seemed worthless to Chesterton, unless it were voluntary and not State-imposed; in Distributism, then, he saw the solution of the world’s problems, the answer for soul and for body of its ills.

“It has been charged that he was the enemy of Jewry, but his hand was against only a small and powerful Oligarchy within it which, he claimed, harmed the poor Jew of the ghetto more than the Gentile and, commenting on the anti-Jewish excesses which have outraged the world, he said that he had now to defend the Jews against Hitler. It will be remembered that he struck at all internal abuses and certain lines of his were arrowheads in the national flesh. These for instance, on postwar corruption drew blood,

“‘Oh, they that fought for England, Following a fallen star, Alas, alas for England! They have their graves afar.

But they that rule in England In stately conclave met, Alas, alas for England! They have no graves as yet.’

“He was a Little Englander; partly, one suspects, as a reaction from Kiplingism: but in an age of peace he was a defender of just wars. He inveighed against those who blamed the older generation in 1914 when they decided that war was the only honorable solution and later he said that a universal peace, founded on a universal panic, raised the point as to whether the supreme moral state will be found when everybody is too frightened to fight; and dying, but undefeated, he repeated as a creed, ‘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 known, old customs; secondly, we made the state top-heavy with a new and secretive tyranny of will; and third, we forgot that there is no faith in freedom without faith in free-will. Materialism brings with it a servile fatalism--because nothing, as Dante said, else than ‘the generosity of God could give to man after all ordinary, orderly gifts, the noblest of all things which is----liberty.’”

Chesterton examined and scrutinized the conscience of England as he did his own, but only a fool would deny that from York to Cornwall he loved his country with a Little Englander’s passion!