Christianity, Patriotism, and Nationhood: The England of G.K. Chesterton

Christianity, Patriotism, and Nationhood

G. K. Chesterton, The Tatler, 15 June 1904.

Christianity, Patriotism, and Nationhood The England of G. K. Chesterton Julia Stapleton

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LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stapleton, Julia. Christianity, patriotism, and nationhood : the England of G. K. Chesterton / Julia Stapleton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2613-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7391-2613-X (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2614-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7391-2614-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3262-3 (electronic) ISBN-10: 0-7391-3262-8 (electronic) 1. Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith), 1874–1936—Political and social views. 2. Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith), 1874–1936—Religion. 3. Great Britain—Politics and government—1901–1910. 4. Great Britain—Politics and government— 1910–1936. 5. Politics and literature—Great Britain—History—20th century. 6. Christianity and literature—Great Britain—History—20th century. I. Title. PR4453.C4Z7635 2009 828'.91209—dc22 2008035875 Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Preface

ix

Abbreviations

xi

Introduction

1

1 Creeds and Identities

13

2 Liberal Journalism and the Patriotic Cosmos

31

3 The Insularity of English Art, Letters, Politics, and Thought: Chesterton’s Critique of the Fin de Siècle

55

4 Liberalism, Democracy, and the English Nation

79

5 The Dissident Liberal

103

6 Authenticity, the English, and the Jews

127

7 Prussianism, Teutonism, and the Literary War

151

8 History versus Historians in the First World War

169

9 Nationalism, Internationalism, and the English Past after 1918

183

Conclusion

207

Bibliography

223

Index

231 v

Acknowledgments

T

his work on Chesterton was made possible by funding from the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I would like to thank both organizations for their support. I have incurred a number of other debts in the course of writing the book. I would like to thank staff at the British Library for their help and efficiency in responding to my requests for material at the St. Pancras and Colindale sites. Once again, I record my gratitude to Judith Walton at Durham University Library for her resourcefulness in processing a stream of interlibrary loan requests. To Christopher Pedley, S.J., librarian of Heythrop College, I owe thanks for his help in locating articles in The Chesterton Review. I have benefited considerably from the attention that Stefan Collini, Sheridan Gilley, Jock Macleod, Denis O’Brien, and Reba Soffer kindly gave to drafts of different chapters. I owe special thanks to Arthur Aughey, not only for reading and commenting on all the chapters in their earlier stages but also for keeping me in touch with the vibrant debate about England and English national identity in British politics today, much of it inspired by Chesterton. I am also most grateful to Bob Dyson for generously giving his time to read through the entire manuscript. The improvements he suggested and his insights into Chesterton have greatly improved the book. Needless to say I am responsible for all remaining errors. My greatest debt is to my husband, Denis O’Brien.

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his book arose out of my interest in the historian Sir Arthur Bryant, Chesterton’s successor as the author of “Our Note Book” in The Illustrated London News. As an English patriot, Bryant was much influenced by Chesterton, although he did not share Chesterton’s antipathy toward the British Empire, or his Roman Catholic faith. On reading Chesterton, I was struck by the ideals and images of England that pervaded his writings; also the close interconnections between his patriotism and his Christian faith. These key features of his thought converged on all that was local, which Chesterton invested with divine significance. This is apparent in his first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), the product of Chesterton’s parochial imagination at its most vivid and intense. The vitality of his patriotism at this level is well captured in the background of Cyrus Cuneo’s painting of Chesterton that appears on the front cover of this book. The epic confrontation in which Adam Wayne resists the imperialist designs of other London boroughs on his beloved Notting Hill emphasizes the narrow frontier of Chesterton’s mind, although one that for him offered the clearest perspective on the cosmos at large. However, understanding the complexities of Chesterton’s outlook entails close attention to its roots in the shifting world of late Victorian belief, both spiritual and political. Chesterton set out to purge the legacy of the fin de siècle in art, politics and thought by defending “true” patriotism focused on England and Christian orthodoxy simultaneously. In the following chapters I have pieced together a narrative of his response to what he perceived as the breakdown of thought at the close of Victoria’s reign and its permutations in the twentieth century. With his keen sense ix

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of Englishness as the focus of this narrative, I have attempted to shed further light on the circumstances and influences that shaped Chesterton as a writer and thinker, and his impact in turn on the culture he inhabited. Attempts to enlist Chesterton’s support for English nationalism today miss much of the depth of his patriotic sensibility. I hope that the following chapters throw into sharper relief the concerns that led him to defend and honor the “secret people” of England across four decades of cultural and political change.

Abbreviations

NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS CR—The Chesterton Review DN—The Daily News DLN (after May 1912)—The Daily News and Leader GKW—G. K.’s Weekly ILN—The Illustrated London News NA—The New Age NW—The New Witness TLS—The Times Literary Supplement WG—The Westminster Gazette THE CHESTERTON PAPERS The British Library, St. Pancras, London. These are indicated by their BL Add MS number, as indexed in The British Library Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts: The G.K. Chesterton Papers, Additional Manuscripts 7318673484 (London: British Museum, 2001). CHESTERTON’S WORKS The Collected Poems of G.K. Chesterton—CP (1927; London: Methuen, 1950). The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton—CW (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986–). xi

xii

Abbreviations

OTHER WORKS Oxford Dictionary of National Biography—ODNB (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

ENDNOTE REFERENCES TO CHESTERTON’S WRITINGS Chesterton’s writings are referenced with just the title of the article or book concerned. The authors of all other material used in the text are identified in the endnotes.

Introduction

Once more Mr. Chesterton is among us, squaring his elbows, patting the cosmos on the back, rattling the stars in his pockets, building up two-foot fences and leaping over them with genial and pardonable pride. It is strange to reflect how well we know him on how short an acquaintance. It is a very few years since he first darted forth as our enfant terrible, and now he has become our enfant gâté to such an extent that we take his smart shower of slaps with a benevolence that must seem to him tirelessly tame.1

S

o wrote the young literary critic, Percy Lubbock, of Chesterton’s first full-length cultural polemic, Heretics, published in 1905, in The Times Literary Supplement. This was a mere four years after Chesterton’s Fleet Street career had commenced as a regular columnist with the leading Liberal newspaper, The Daily News. Lubbock evinced the same combination of fatigue and irritation at Chesterton’s now predictable array of stylistic tricks that was to become a familiar feature of future reviews of his work, particularly those which appeared in journals that circulated among elites. Other reviews of Heretics showed similar signs of impatience with, and hostility toward, a writer who seemed plagued by the vices of verbosity and triteness in about equal measures.2 As for self-indulgence, Chesterton appeared in a league of his own at this time, wantonly foisting his prejudices on the most unlikely candidates. This reaction was evident even among fellow populists, although populists of a different ideological persuasion. Thus, the reviewer of his book on Dickens the following year in The Daily Mail rushed to rescue Dickens’s light liberal frame from the crushing weight of Chesterton’s Radicalism.3 There seemed no prospect that Chesterton would be otherwise than a flash in 1

2

Introduction

the literary pan, a curious aftershock of the 1890s Decadent movement that underlined the author’s isolation in a world of his own making—just the vice he had set out to combat. Despite his concern to enhance appreciation of the intrinsic and magical value of the existing world against fin de siècle pessimism, the upshot could only be a futile quest for a remote Chestertonian planet. As one observer commented wearily, “some day he will have his true reward and gain the place that awaits him among the other men of wit and sorrow in our age.”4 The dismissive verdicts on Chesterton by some of his contemporaries early on in his career contrast markedly with the praise that has been heaped upon him by a stream of biographers since his death. This has been reinforced by the work of the G. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith and Culture in the realm of cultural and spiritual evangelization since its inception in the late 1970s. It is true that Chesterton remains a prime target for the Left on account of his incorrigible political incorrectness; his sins on this account are held to range from xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and traditionalist views of gender to ignorance of the dynamics of empire (even as an opponent of Imperialism), embrace of Roman Catholicism, and Fascist sympathies.5 It is also true that devotion to Chesterton remains a minority taste, albeit one that is impressively worldwide in its reach, thereby to some extent confirming early predictions of his rapid demise. However, questions of the strength and impact of Chesterton’s literary, philosophical, and political legacy today are not the main concern here. Rather, this book seeks to map his place within the cultural and political landscape of Britain during the first four decades of the twentieth century more clearly than in the existing literature on Chesterton. Rejection in some quarters creates a narrative as interesting and compelling as acceptance; it illuminates as much about the circles in which writers fail to find favor as about their perceived literary shortcomings. This reflection invites further inquiry into the ideas and modes of expression that were deemed objectionable in Chesterton, the various settings in which they were shaped and articulated, and the forums and circumstances in which they perhaps did succeed in finding a response. For no matter how isolated authors may appear at times, their concerns are as much rooted within particular spheres of culture, belief, and identity as those that seem to enjoy greater integration. Certainly, Chesterton was not short of admirers, even among those who would have read the damning literary reviews of his works.6 Hitherto, much Chesterton scholarship has existed in a ghetto akin to that which was sometimes associated with his work itself during his lifetime. Chesterton studies have acquired their own niche journal, The Chesterton Review, established in 1974. Few mainstream journals in the fields of history and literature have carried articles on Chesterton, in marked contrast with Shaw, the Webbs, Wells, and other prominent Ed-

Introduction

3

wardian thinkers and writers. With important exceptions, Chesterton scholarship tends to be removed from a wider historiography of the Edwardian period and the dissolution of the pre-war order after 1918.7 Indeed, it is as removed in this respect as some of that historiography is from Chesterton scholarship in turn. Insight into the contours of spiritual and political life in Britain during the Edwardian and interwar years has suffered as a result.8 The principal aim of this book is to deepen historical understanding of one aspect of Chesterton’s work in particular. This is his simultaneous embrace of Christianity, patriotism, and nationhood early on in his career as a writer, and his associated views of England and Englishness. The tight interconnections between these central ideals in his work remain virtually unexplored by Chesterton scholars, along with the historical and personal forces that shaped them into a unity. Some recourse to J. H. Newman’s conception of the “concrete being that reasons” is necessary to understand the foundation of Chesterton’s thinking, a “whole man mov[ing]” and on different lines to that of logic alone. Accordingly, the book emphasizes the crystallization of Chesterton’s religious imagination, political philosophy, and cultural ideals, particularly in response to the Boer War, a crucial stage in his intellectual development that was neither preordained, nor consciously worked through, nor susceptible to logical analysis after the event.9 Chesterton scholarship has also neglected the position and standing of his discourses of nationhood in general and England in particular within the culture to which he belonged. In particular, it has missed an opportunity to compare his Christian conception of patriotism with the religious “or quasi-religious” terms in which patriotism was framed in the nineteenth century among Liberal and Liberal Anglican thinkers such as J. S. Mill, Matthew Arnold, F. D. Maurice, and others.10 Moreover, Chesterton scholars have not appreciated fully his importance as a political “myth-maker,” a teller of persuasive stories at the center of which was the English nation. This explains what has been regarded hitherto as a besetting weakness of his work: its failure to ground arguments in factual evidence.11 His myth-making accords with the high premium he attached to myth and legend generally. In his eyes these genres were more reliable than accounts of events that purported to be “objective.” “Impartial” history often proved highly partisan, as in the case of the Whig interpretation of English history and also its “modernist” successor.12 He was critical only of the mythology that came out of Germany between the wars, rooted as it was in claims and beliefs that were “prehistoric” in the sense of being “entirely unhistorical.”13 At the same time, understanding of a burgeoning English national consciousness and patriotism—often in sharp reaction to the high-water

4

Introduction

mark of empire—that has become a key focus of historical interest of late is limited by passing references to Chesterton, at best.14 There has been a further, related, failure at the level of both Chesterton scholarship and early twentieth-century historical scholarship. This is in linking his work on nationhood and associated ideals to the shifting nature of Liberalism in the early twentieth century, not least the decline of Liberal confidence in the people as agents of democracy with the intensification of industrialization and urbanization.15 Redressing this shortcoming in the literature on Chesterton will shed light on his relationship with the political creed that informed his patriotic attachments and religious beliefs, as well as those attachments and beliefs themselves. Chesterton’s well-known comments about England being a nation that “dare not speak its name” in his poem, “The Secret People” (1907),16 has acquired iconic status in recent discussions of English and British national identity. This is in the wake of devolution within the United Kingdom and growing pressure to establish an English parliament to match the powers of the Scottish and Welsh Assemblies; also, concern to enhance consciousness of and commitment to British nationhood more widely.17 But ready resort to Chesterton in these circumstances ignores entirely his general disillusion with parliamentary democracy in the wake of the Marconi scandal and what he perceived as the destruction of popular liberty by the Liberal government before the First World War.18 The difficulty of recruiting Chesterton to the cause of English nationalism in a narrowly political form raises a host of other issues, although no less pertinent to “the English question” today, which will be addressed in the course of this study. What were his specific goals and interests in bringing England out of the shadow of empire and the Union? In what sense, if any, can he be described as countercultural in doing so? Did he reject entirely the wider national and imperial frameworks with which the English patria had become entangled? What exactly did he find behind the veils of Britain and the British Empire? What was left once—in his terms—a vibrant English comradeship in faith, ale, and arms had been destroyed by a succession of heretics, teetotallers, and pacifists over the centuries? In this respect does his work merely confirm the vast empty space that has been emphasized by recent critics in contemplating the idea of “England as a nation”?19 Alternatively, which “modern” English identities did he attempt to strengthen and which did he attempt to undermine in the early decades of the twentieth century? How constant was his faith in the English people and his conception of their character across the four decades of his literary career? How exclusive was his understanding of nationhood in general and English nationhood in particular, especially in the light of his anti-Semitism? What was the relationship between the peculiar nature of both English patriotism and English nation-

Introduction

5

hood in his view? What revisions in the historiography of English history and conception of the past did he make in order to accommodate the ideals and identities he associated with England? How tied to the travails of Edwardian Liberalism was his understanding of patriotism and his championship of England? In eventually pressing the cause of England against Liberalism, did he abandon Liberalism in the wider, non-party sense, as many of his Liberal critics maintained? These questions provide the focus of the book in examining the sources, dynamic, and influence of Chesterton’s reflections on England and Englishness. As chapter 1 seeks to show, the English patriotism he imbibed as a child, growing up in the otherwise faithless ambience of late nineteenthcentury London, was inspirational and enduring; it was independent of, and was never eclipsed by, the Catholic “triumvirate” he joined with Hilaire Belloc and Maurice Baring in the early years of the twentieth century, one that is said to have reached its “consummation” in Chesterton’s reception into the Roman Catholic Church in 1922.20 The book analyzes the importance he attached to patriotism in general and his related understanding of the English nation. In doing so, it gives particular attention to the largest part of his literary output: his journalism. There are obvious links between his patriotism and his journalistic vocation. As chapter 2 makes clear, he conceived the duty of the journalist as the production of articles marked by sharpness of outline, unlike the flaccid content of much of the “yellow” press. This insistence mirrored his sense of the distinctiveness of national boundaries—cultural more than physical—and in turn the highly structured nature of the cosmos more widely. Furthermore, in Chesterton’s view, the journalist was answerable to the people defined in terms of shared nationhood, not to the elites whom editors and proprietors increasingly served. In this light, some further comments are necessary on the form that Chesterton’s journalism took and the importance it assumes here. Throughout his life, Chesterton addressed his readers primarily through the short essay, seeking to persuade and instruct rather than merely amuse; reporting, as Peter Milward has emphasized, was well outside his journalistic brief.21 He would certainly commence his articles in a jovial style, but this was only the prelude to engagement in political and religious controversy. In a review of his second volume of essays, Twelve Types (1902), one contemporary, Louis McQuilland, interpreted him as the doyen of the literary essay, one who preserved “the best traditions of a fast vanishing art.”22 Other, more fastidious reviewers were less eager to bracket Chesterton with Walter Pater, Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse, Augustine Birrell, W. E. Henley, and other contemporary representatives of the genre, emphasising instead the praise that was due to him as a “writer and critic” only. “No man is a good essayist,” wrote another reviewer of

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Twelve Types, “who has no repose, no interludes; who is always at high pressure, who fires his whole battery simultaneously. An essayist, to be acceptable, companionable, must come nearer to the mood of the reader.”23 Yet however approached, the voluminous reviews, commentaries, and letters that Chesterton contributed regularly to such diverse organs of opinion as The Speaker, The Daily News, The Nation, The Daily Herald, The New Age, The New Witness, G. K.’s Weekly, and The Illustrated London News—as well as countless others on an occasional basis—remain the least explored aspect of his work. Some of this output was absorbed into books of essays published during his lifetime and after his death; other parts provided the basis of studies such as Heretics (1905) and Orthodoxy (1908). Even most of the literary biographies for which he is perhaps best remembered—along with the Father Brown detective stories—were prompted by earlier reviews of books on their subjects. Nevertheless, a substantial proportion of Chesterton’s journalism remains uncollected. Moreover, of the journalism that has been republished as essays in collected volumes, the “lighter” face of Chesterton predominates. This has left much of his political and cultural commentary in the shadows.24 His ever-faithful secretary, Dorothy Collins, seems to have taken a conscious decision in directing the posthumous republication of his work away from this area. She focused one collection, at least, on the “permanent subjects” that Chesterton addressed and what he called “the more fanciful parts of the work.”25 Given that she was aiming to keep his legacy alive in much quieter political times, the choice seems well justified, if highly unrepresentative of his journalistic output from a later perspective. The large journalistic realm that Chesterton created for himself is a dimension of Chesterton’s life that was singularly absent from the first posthumous biography of Chesterton by Maisie Ward, and from its sequel, Return to Chesterton.26 This was despite Chesterton’s identification with journalism more than any other literary calling in his autobiography.27 It was despite, too, the enormous pride he took in being part of what he regarded as the ultimate modern romance, initially at least, for all the abuse to which it was subject: “[T]he record of the common doings of one common day” put together by an army of unseen labor amid lights “burning on through darkness into dawn, and . . . the roar of the printing wheels weaving the destinies of another day.”28 While Chesterton’s journalism has been illuminated in a growing number of studies since, most notably in articles in The Chesterton Review,29 few comment in any detail on the range of publications he served, how he sought to engage and persuade his various readerships, and those with which he found greatest rapport. John Coates’s studies of Chesterton as

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an Edwardian journalist comes closest to defining his populism in relation to the customs and tastes of working people, and its relationship to the public persona he adopted with the development of journalism on a new, “mass” level.30 But although Chesterton scholars are much indebted to Coates for identifying Chesterton’s journalistic role and associated understanding of popular culture thus, much could be done to extend the analysis across Chesterton’s career and journalistic commitments, and also his beliefs. One striking omission from existing studies is Chesterton’s connection with The Illustrated London News over a thirty-one-year period. While most of his contributions under the heading “Our Note Book” have now been republished in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, editorial contextualization of the column is lacking.31 Yet Chesterton’s connection with this leading metropolitan weekly with a worldwide circulation complicates his “populism,”32 his Englishness, and his politics considerably. Chesterton maintained that English patriotism—and indeed any patriotism worthy of the name—is best enhanced by consciousness of national weakness and vulnerability rather than strength. Against one critic who had mocked him by professing to be baffled by his expression of “fear” for England on account of his “love” of it, he cleared up the confusion thus: “You have never begun to love anything until you have begun to fear for it.”33 As chapter 3 shows, this interpretation of patriotism was an attempt to rein in the overweening national pride wrought by Imperialism in the wider literary and artistic context of the fin de siècle. For Chesterton, the latter movement was conspicuous for the insularity of writers and their isolation from humanity, defects that arose from the assertion of art’s separateness from life in a spirit of humility that he regarded as sorely misplaced. More widely, the sentiment of “fear” as the spur to “love” was the starting point of all his critique of society and politics in the early twentieth century. It extended to his plea on behalf of “true” Liberalism against the official Liberalism in which he believed his party and country were currently ensnared. This provides the focus of chapters 4 and 5. A similar response underpinned his enduring concern for the maintenance of cultural authenticity, the subject matter of chapter 6. The chapter moves outwards from an examination of Chesterton’s conception of the locus of Englishness as defined in the pages of The Illustrated London News and elsewhere to his anti-Semitism before 1914. It seeks to define the relationship between these two prominent features of his thought. In attempting to draw the outlines of English nationhood in all their obscurity and in some ways fragility, how well did Chesterton succeed in enhancing consciousness of, and attachment to, England conceived thus? Here the book shifts from Chesterton’s theorizing of the nation and the

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context in which this took place to the diffusion and reception of his English imaginings, particularly in his own country.34 It considers various levels of engagement with Chesterton’s cultural ideals by contemporaries right across his career. This includes the crucial period of the First World War when his ideals of English nationhood acquired new force and form, as will be seen in chapters 7 and 8, only to receive fresh challenges after 1918. These new challenges centered on internationalism and authoritarian forms of nationalism against the complacency with which the Liberal nation and progress were associated in the nineteenth century. They are explored in chapter 9, together with Chesterton’s response, not least at the level of historiography. This chapter also considers assessments of his work at the time of, and immediately after, his death, including the antiSemitism that figured in his writings and which was perceived as antithetical to the Englishness he sought to exalt. Chesterton’s posthumous fate as an apostle of the English nation is considered in the conclusion. This also locates the core of his patriotic ideal in his interest in William Cobbett. In situating Chesterton’s Englishness and patriotism within wider discourses of the nation in Britain both before and after his death, the book seeks to enhance understanding of English national identity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as much as Chesterton’s thought itself. In his book, Orthodoxy, Chesterton retraced the steps by which he “discovered” Christianity by the roundabout route of searching for the most plausible philosophy of existence amid the welter of discordant creeds generated by religious scepticism. He illustrated his foolhardiness by the analogy of an English yachtsman, who mistakenly thought he had discovered “England” as a new island in the South Seas, only to find that he had fetched up on the Sussex shore. The allegory well captured Chesterton’s sense of returning to an old faith while, in common with others of his generation, seeking a replacement.35 But there was more than mere symbolism at work here. For Chesterton was searching simultaneously for England beneath what he perceived as multiple layers of concealment, denial, and mistaken identity in the early twentieth century. In this respect its travails mirrored those of Christianity, obscured as it was by a morass of counterfeit religions and ethical systems. In both cases he pursued a number of false leads before arriving at what he perceived as the “right” destination. Indeed, it is the contention here that an ancestral disposition toward patriotism was instrumental in guiding him to the Christian fold, one that he then sought to justify and strengthen in Christian terms. Henceforth, his patriotism, Englishness, and Christianity became mutually dependent and reinforcing. What was the precise relationship between Christianity and patriotism in his eyes? How did their respective language and ideals interact in his intellectual development and become

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closely intertwined, particularly with regard to, and in turn through his conception of, English nationhood? What relevance, if any, does Chesterton have to the heavily secularized debate concerning the future of England and Englishness today?

NOTES 1. Anon., Percy Lubbock, “Mr. Chesterton’s Essays,” review of Heretics (London: John Lane, 1905), TLS 9 June 1905. 2. See the selected reviews in Denis J. Conlon, ed., G.K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgments (Antwerp: University of Antwerp Press, 1976), 103–11. 3. Anon., “Why Drag in Dickens?” review of G. K. Chesterton, Dickens (London: Methuen, 1906), The Daily Mail, 4 September 1906, 4. 4. Anon., “The Latest of the Decadents,” review of Heretics, in The Academy, 24 June 1905, 654–55. 5. Patrick Wright, “Last Orders,” The Guardian Review, 9 April 2005, 4–6; “Last Orders for the English Aborigine,” Soundings 24 (Spring 2005): 21–34. For a more measured critique, see Tom Villis, Reaction and Avant-Garde: The Revolt against Liberal Democracy in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Tauris, 2006). 6. See, for example, the letter to Chesterton dated 25 February 1907 from the jurist, A. V. Dicey, praising Chesterton for his book on Dickens and a recent address on Sir Walter Scott: BL Add MS 73236, folios 161–62. See also the letter dated 25 February 1911 by the author and fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge A. C. Benson, following a recent visit by Chesterton to the college. He described himself as “a very faithful and admiring reader of your words and works—and I often feel, when I read them, like a gritty match-box edge, on which the match flies into flame”: BL Add MS 73235, folio 93. Finally, see a letter to Chesterton from Jessica Conrad dated 26 January 1933, reporting that her late husband (Joseph Conrad) “was always your great admirer” and that it was always “of no little regret that he did not know you better personally”: BL Add MS 73236, folios 84–85. 7. Notable exceptions are John D. Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull: Hull University Press, 1984). See also Sheridan Gilley, “Chesterton and the English Anti-Catholic Tradition,” CR XXX, nos. 3 and 4 (Fall and Winter 2004): 293–311. One Chesterton scholar cautions against applying historical approaches to Chesterton as all too liable to “assimilate” his ideas to their context, thus obscuring their wider validity: Ian Crowther, G.K. Chesterton (London: The Claridge Press, 1991), 14. However, this neglects the creative nature of the engagement between individuals and their various milieus and the consequent enrichment of their thought, never more so than in the case of Chesterton. 8. As will be discussed in chapter 5, Coates has drawn attention to this shortcoming of the historiography of the Edwardian period in appraising Geoffrey R. Searle’s landmark study, A New England: Peace and War. 1886–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) from a Chesterton perspective: John D. Coates, “The Young Chesterton and a History of his Time,” CR XXX, nos. 3 and 4 (Fall and Winter 2004): 269–91.

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9. I am indebted to Sheridan Gilley for Newman’s explanation of his conversion to Roman Catholicism as a model for understanding Chesterton’s early intellectual development (Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994, 158)); also the lead offered by his suggestion that Chesterton’s “recovery of an objective religion and morality . . . was an outgrowth of his belief in democracy.” See Sheridan Gilley, “Chesterton’s Politics,” CR XXI, nos. 1 and 2 (February and May 1995): 35. 10. See Georgios Varouxakis, “‘Patriotism’, ‘Cosmopolitanism’ and ‘Humanity’ in Victorian Political Thought,” European Journal of Political Theory 5, no. 1 (2006): 100–118. 11. Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (London: Sheed & Ward, 1944), 263–64. On the concept of political myth, see Henry Tudor, Political Myth (London: Macmillan, 1972), 137–40. For a recent defense of myth at the heart of nationalism, see David Archard, “Myths, Lies and Historical Truth: A Defence of Nationalism,” Political Studies 43, no. 3 (September 1995): 472–81. 12. See chapter 9. 13. ILN, 26 May 1934, 808. 14. See Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Robert Colls, The Identity of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Paul Readman, “The Place of the Past in English Culture c. 1890–1914,” Past and Present 186 (February 2005): 147–200; and Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). However, an important exception is John H. Grainger, Patriotisms: Britain, 1900–1940 (London: Routledge, 1986), ch. 7. In this book I seek to extend Grainger’s pathbreaking section on Chesterton in Patriotisms. 15. Gal Gerson, Margins of Disorder: New Liberalism and the Crisis of European Consciousness (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004); Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2006). 16. The Neolith 1 (November 1907): 1–2; reprinted in CP, 173–74. 17. To take just one recent example, see Philip Johnston, “The Day That Dare not Speak Its Name,” The Daily Telegraph, 23 April 2007, 20. This article was written on St. George’s Day on the subject of the forthcoming elections to the Scottish Assembly in the same week as the (uncelebrated) tercentenary of the Union between Scotland and England. For a serious misunderstanding of Chesterton’s famous line as implying that “being free, we did not need to assert the importance of liberty,” see Roy Hattersley, “Englishness: No Fuss Please,” The Times, 26 March 2008. 18. For Chesterton’s disillusion with parliamentary democracy in comparison with that of his brother and Hilaire Belloc, see Jay P. Corrin, G.K. Chesterton & Hilaire Belloc: The Battle Against Modernity (Athens, Ohio, and London: Ohio University Press, 1981), 74. 19. For an incisive discussion of the “absence” thesis, see Arthur Aughey, The Politics of Englishness (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), Part II. 20. Joseph Pearce, Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 96. Pearce has well played up Baring’s influence

Introduction

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on Chesterton, overshadowed as it was by Belloc: ibid., 9. But both in this book, and in his biography of Chesterton, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996) he underestimates the force of English patriotism in Chesterton’s intellectual development. 21. Peter Milward, “G.K. Chesterton’s Faith and Journalism,” CR VII, no. 4 (November 1981): 349. 22. Louis McQuilland, “Sheer Exuberance of Intellect,” NA, 6 November 1902, in G.K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgments, 49. McQuilland became a friend and ally of Chesterton in the battle against secularism and cosmopolitanism, but one who defended a staunch Irish faith and nationalism under modernist cover: Autobiography, in CW XVI (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 153. He was a contributor to The New Witness and literary editor of G.K.’s Weekly. 23. Anon., “Assurance Doubly Sure,” The Academy and Literature, 1 November 1902, in G.K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgments, 48. 24. At least one contemporary regarded Chesterton as “absurdly underrated” as a politician, as well as a poet: Ivor Brown, “A Multiple Man,” The Observer, 16 April 1944, in Denis J. Conlon (ed.), G.K. Chesterton: A Half Century of Views (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 58. 25. Lunacy and Letters, ed. Dorothy Collins (London: Sheed & Ward, 1958), 6. It appears from her foreword that only some eighty essays out of six hundred contributions to The Daily News—the newspaper from which the selection had been compiled—had been republished at the time the book went to press. Not much more from this source was republished in Dorothy Collins’s lifetime, or indeed afterward. Chesterton’s contributions to The Daily News have yet to be included in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton published by Ignatius Press. 26. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton; Maisie Ward, Return to Chesterton (London: Sheed & Ward, 1952). Despite the definitive status of these two works in Chesterton scholarship, they suffer in three respects. The first is the self-centeredness of the author, a family friend of Gilbert and Frances Chesterton, and, relatedly, a certain sanctimoniousness that can be—and was when the former work, certainly, was first published—off-putting: see reviews in BL Add MS. 73407. Second, they are marred by the reproduction of long quotations from Chesterton’s correspondence, much of the content and significance of which goes unremarked. A third shortcoming is inadequate referencing. More generally, they are exercises in hagiography. 27. Autobiography, 276. 28. “The Conspiracy of Journalism: The Reflections of a Book Reviewer,” The Pall Mall Magazine (February 1902): 257–61, at 258. For Chesterton’s increasingly embittered attitude toward the press of the great proprietors, see Sheridan Gilley, “Chesterton, Journalism and Modern English Culture,” CR XXXIII, nos. 3 and 4 (Fall–Winter 2007): 515–17. 29. Milward, “G.K. Chesterton’s Faith and Journalism”; Russell Kirk, “The Journalism of G.K. Chesterton,” CR XVI, no. 2 (May 1990): 15–28; Owen Dudley Edwards, “The Journalism of G.K. Chesterton,” CR XVIII, no. 2 (May 1992): 197–208. 30. Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis, 66–67; “Chesterton and The Speaker,” CR XXIV, nos. 1–2 (February and May 1998): 29–62.

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31. Vols. 27–35. The reprinting has been completed up to 1931 at the time of writing. 32. The term is Margaret Canovan’s in G.K Chesterton: Radical Populist (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977). 33. ILN, 24 August 1907, 260. 34. For the considerable mark he made in Europe, the United States and the Dominions, see Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, ch. 28. For the warm reception he enjoyed during his second visit to America that began in September 1930 and lasted eight months, see Louis McQuilland, “The American Tour: An Omission from Chesterton’s Autobiography,” The Cork Examiner, 21 March 1937. 35. Orthodoxy (1908), in CW (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 211–12. He made the same “mistake” in his poem, “The Rolling English Road,” in The Flying Inn (1914), invoking an imaginary town called “Roundabout” in Sussex at what he later called “the mystic centre” of the “rotatory landscape” of that county, with its rolling hills and “rolling, almost revolving roads.” Only later did he discover that “there really is a town in Sussex called Roundabout, because the men of Sussex had seen the same scenes and dreamed the same dream”: Chaucer: A Study (1932), in CW XVIII (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 313. It was as much the pubs as the landscape that drew Chesterton—and Belloc—to Sussex; a memorable article in The Illustrated London News took its point of departure from the scene at a Sussex Inn: see chapter 6, 145. Sussex, like the Middle Ages and the notion of a downtrodden people, featured prominently in his myth-making about England.

1 ✛

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C

hesterton maintained a permanent interest in the age in which he lived,1 interpreting its beliefs for wide popular audiences through critical and impassioned engagement. He believed fervently in the importance of such endeavor to the individuality of artists and writers, castigating aesthetes such as George Moore for their illusions otherwise.2 Quite apart from this conviction, the importance he attached to the cultural basis of art and thought mirrored his own development. While his religion, politics, and literary criticism were tightly bound up with his character and temperament, these were in turn shaped by close interaction with the intellectual, artistic, and spiritual currents of his formative years. His distinctive and all-encompassing “creed” grew out of an early breakdown and subsequent process of recovery, triggered in particular by seismic shifts in the intellectual and religious life of late Victorian Britain. This chapter examines the channels in which Chesterton’s earliest thought ran, and some of the key influences on the direction they took.

REVOLT, REVOLUTION, AND GOD The details of Chesterton’s breakdown are well documented, not least on the basis of his notebooks and letters written at the time and, subsequently, his Autobiography. Its onset followed an exhilarating childhood in West Kensington, on the cusp of a late adolescence when he was in his final years at St. Paul’s School. It continued into the period of drift and agitated reflection that followed at the Slade School of Art, putting paid to 13

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any future he might have had as an artist. An upbringing on approximately Unitarian lines made its full, agnostic impact upon him while he attended the Slade from January 1893 until 1895. This was in the context of the spiritual void that, as it seemed to him, Unitarianism and other rationalist creeds had merely confirmed in rejecting the doctrines of Christian revelation while simultaneously reacting against the scientific naturalism of the second half of the nineteenth century.3 Chesterton recalled in his autobiography how he had yielded through a “congestion of the imagination” to extremes of mental and moral anarchy as the Decadent movement in art and literature took hold in conjunction with these wider developments. Reviewing the nuanced portrait of the fin de siècle by his friend and contemporary Holbrook Jackson in 1913, he emphasized the sterility and self-idolatry that characterized the artistic imagination of aesthetes such as Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, and lesser lights. He contested Jackson’s view that their willingness to take personal risks “for the sake of life and growth”—exemplified for Chesterton in widespread addiction to absinthe—was a healthy reaction against a resurgent “Nonconformist conscience.”4 Tied to the “new Hedonism” imported into English culture by way of the French Decadent writer Joris Karl Huysmans, the aestheticism of the 1890s never resulted in Jackson’s wave of emancipation as far as Chesterton was concerned. Rather, he regarded its Wildean cult of experimentalism unconstrained by any “theory or system”5 as leading directly to a new form of oppression: the “simplification” of thought in the early twentieth century.6 Nor could its bid for spiritual power be anything more than a pose, a “mood” that wore thin with Chesterton the more it availed itself of Christianity for the aesthetic experience of redemption.7 The pessimism that informed the Decadence through the influence of continental writers such as Baudelaire and (the younger) Maeterlinck offered few of the uplifting prospects its exponents sought. As Chesterton urged any pessimists among readers of his Dickens in 1906, “[A]bandon hopelessness, all ye who enter here.”8 A different focus of exaggeration than the one to which they had grown accustomed would be found in the book— that is, the positive rather than negative features of human life. As Dudley Barker has pointed out, the effect of the Decadence on Chesterton was exacerbated by loneliness. This was engendered by the absence of his school friends, and the contrast between the richness of student life in Oxford conveyed in their letters and the emptiness he experienced at the Slade as art took new, and in his view, disturbing directions.9 Although his friends, being two years younger, did not depart for Oxford until his last year at the Slade in 1894–1895,10 increased separation was inevitable. Even during vacations he was not always assured of their company, complaining to one school friend during this period that he felt

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“buried alive.”11 But what he also called his “strong inward impulse to revolt” enabled him to “dislodge this incubus or throw off this nightmare.”12 The turning point came with the welcome discovery that he was not an atheist. Following a formative encounter at the Slade with a “diabolist” whose morals had been thrown into the wildest confusion, the path of Chesterton’s embrace of Christianity seemed set. The incident—as he recalled in a later essay—was all the more apocalyptic against the backdrop of a winter evening, on the high front steps of the Slade, a Doric building lit up by the red sparks of a gardener’s fire below that “went whirling past . . . like a swarm of scarlet insects in the dark.” The sparks only served to accentuate “the colossal façade of the Doric building, phantasmal, yet filling the sky, as if Heaven were still filled with the gigantic ghost of Paganism.”13 Henceforth, he had no difficulty in distinguishing the process of “blind, spiritual suicide” in which he had been caught up from the wider world of diabolism. Absent from the latter was any sense of the reality of devils, the temptations of which he had experienced, if never acted upon, and which he expressed in his early art and attempts at fiction-writing.14 From such obvious scenes of the abyss, Chesterton took refuge in the small comforts of daily life, particularly well-established schoolboy friendships such as that which he enjoyed with Lucien Oldershaw and Edmund Clerihew Bentley, both of whom went to Oxford while he was concluding his studies at the Slade. From a distance they encouraged his ambition to write rather than draw for a living. To Oldershaw in 1894— the year before he left the Slade—Chesterton reported that he was “writing a great deal, not wisely but too well . . . as soon as I can choose the magazines I am going to open fire on them with verse. I don’t feel doubtful or silly: I can’t imagine why.” After informing Oldershaw that “lecture calls,” he ended the letter on a note of self-reassurance: “[T]hus we see that I . . . may be some use after all.” But he added a postscript, inquiring after the progress of his friend’s literary activity and the potential development of “a companion in guilt.”15 In the following year, Oldershaw urged Chesterton from his Oxford College to “come down on the magazines now. It is surely time. Oxford is waiting. The Speaker, Spectator, Athenaeum, New Review, Fortnightly, even XIXth Century are all worth trying.”16 Chesterton, however, demurred, preferring the relatively secure employment he had acquired as editor in a publishers’ office—Fisher Unwin. He retained this position until 1901,17 the year he began writing for The Daily News. Bentley—the dedicatee of Chesterton’s first volume of (comic) verse, Grey Beards at Play (1900), and his third novel, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)—was the most significant of Chesterton’s early soul mates; he was to become a fellow journalist on The Speaker, then a leader writer for The Daily News and The Daily Telegraph. It was Bentley who—in the words of

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Dudley Barker—transformed Chesterton “from an unconsidered solitary, almost an outcast, into the leader of a small group of younger boys who would turn out to be the school’s most brilliant.”18 Chesterton became chairman of the Junior Debating Club at St. Paul’s that was central to his social circle, and mainstay of the Club’s magazine, The Debater. The seal of Chesterton’s friendship with Bentley was frequent literary communication, as much as three times a week during Bentley’s first year at Oxford.19 It was an activity that was especially important in stemming the suicidal thoughts to which Chesterton was prone. An early poem “E.C.B.,” expressed his debt to Bentley for his role in curing him of his malaise, reinforcing a new embrace of humanity, even at its worst:20 Before the grass grew over me, I knew one good man through and through And knew a soul and body joined Are stronger than the heavens are blue. A wisdom worthy of thy joy, O great heart, read I as I ran; Now, though men smite me on the face, I cannot curse the face of man. I loved the man I saw yestreen Hanged with his babe’s blood on his palms. I loved the man I saw to-day Who knocked not when he came with alms. Hush!—for thy sake I even faced The knowledge that is worse than hell; And loved the man I saw but now Hanging head downwards in the well.21

Chesterton’s warmth toward humanity was partly a result of reading Walt Whitman with Oldershaw,22 but partly also the result of an abiding sense of something “sacred in the English stock, or human stock, which separated me from the pessimism of the period.”23 The reference to the English stock, albeit rapidly qualified as “human stock,” was an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s satirical lines on contemporary fears concerning the possible resumption of hand-to-hand fighting at sea in his poem on the disabled battleship, “Clampherdown.”24 It emphasizes the attachment Chesterton felt to his society, despite his conception of its deep-seated spiritual disorder. The despondency that he overcame with Bentley’s help was induced by a range of forces, from Thomas Hardy’s conception of nature’s evil purpose to a feeling of bewilderment upon recognizing that the “pessimists” and “optimists” in his midst were rubbing shoulders with one another regularly. They did so as “one vast and vague sea of wandering doubters,

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with their wandering doubts, who may be found one Sunday seeking a solution from Theists and another Sunday from Theosophists.”25 He was astounded by the casualness with which the ordinary members of such congregations picked up and discarded doctrines in deference to the whims of their leaders. With Bentley he shared his early despair at this development, and more importantly his opposing sense of wonder in existence, his own especially; he also shared his hopes, framed as they were by the notion of a cosmos imbued with goodness. On his twenty-first birthday he contemplated Meredith’s notion of the “largeness of the evening earth” from the sonnet “Modern Love.” But he did so with none of Meredith’s reflection on the transient nature of reconciliation in a marriage torn apart by adultery, and as an allegory of the estrangement between humanity and the universe more widely. Instead, the line imbued Chesterton with a Christian sense of “the Cosmos hav[ing] all its windows open,” this being “very characteristic of evening. . . . It is like the benediction at the end of the service.”26 Some of Chesterton’s early notebooks exhibit a fascination with modern labor as the human counterpart of divine creativity and thus anchor of faith. They contain poems and proposals for poems with titles such as “The Song of the Wheel,” “The Creator,” “Hymn of the Makers,” and “A Song of the Many.” One such poem, “The March of the Makers,” c. 1893, depicted the divine imprint on human labour thus: Maker, master of makers Lord of the workshops wide Populous, numerous acres Noisy on every side. Looms and pulleys are spinning Levers and tools are shrieking Make, as in the beginning Thou madst heaven and earth.27

The keynote here is one of furious energy and industriousness as humanity and God merge in one long, continuing act of creation. Work, labor, and the laboring class in particular become symbols of defiance against the spiritual chaos of a crumbling religious universe, and the sole title to human worth. His earliest publication—a poem entitled “The Song of Labour” published in The Speaker in 1892—also championed “toil” in words that clearly prefigured his tribute to the English toilers in his famous poem of 1907, “The Secret People”: Through the blaze of the regal ages, through the wrack of the feudal strife, We toiled unseen for ever at the roots of the racial life. Yet laugh not aloud, ye mighty, nor triumph nor pass us on, For the High God heareth for ever the voice of the work we have done.28

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Conspicuous by its absence in Chesterton’s offensive against skeptics and pessimists was any suggestion of the idea to which many of his contemporaries turned, that the state could provide a focus for displaced spiritual emotion and commitment. One of his early exercise books contains notes from articles he had read in The Nineteenth Century, including two by the Russian anarchist Prince Kropotkin in 1896. He was clearly impressed by Kropotkin’s argument in favor of “mutual aid” as the natural condition of human society which the institutions of the modern state had set out to destroy; where they had survived, observed Chesterton, as in Russia, they were “prosperous and progressive.”29 By 1907, Chesterton was using his conception of work as a reflection of the presence of the divine in mankind to justify revolution against apostles of “evolution” such as Burke. In his view, Burke simply sanctioned all things that had come into existence, regardless of their merits, ignoring Burke’s censure of the injustices perpetrated by Warren Hastings in India, the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland, and the crown in America. Extolling the Russian Revolution of 1905, Chesterton taunted his Conservative foes with the biblical words, “Behold I make all things new,” maintaining that revolution represented the “divine part of man.” Insofar as human beings were creators like their maker, they were necessarily revolutionaries seeking the eternal flame of justice. To deny revolution because it involved fighting was to fly in the face of that permanent ideal. To this extent, “all real faith must have fighting.”30 Curiously, the imperative here suggests the “fighting faith” of a certain type of Protestantism that sat ill with the High Church connections Chesterton developed on meeting his future wife, Frances Blogg, in 1897.31 This conception of the purgative effect of revolution was in fact influenced by Whitman, whose poetry had helped to steel Chesterton against the emptiness of a universe bereft of divine agency. Whitman’s conception of the “sacred right of insurrection, the quenchless, indispensable fire” well satisfied Chesterton’s spiritual and political, particularly nationalist yearnings.32 He explained his early attraction to Whitman in an account of his conversion to Catholicism later in life: It was the “new equality” to which Whitman’s poetry pointed that drew him thus, an equality that was not a “dull levelling but an enthusiastic lifting; a shouting exaltation in the mere fact that men were men.” However, Whitman’s poetry could not survive the bleaker currents of the age, representing, as it did, a mere “mood” rather than a “creed.”33 As Maisie Ward has argued, it was Whitman plus the philosophy that was lacking in Whitman that pulled Chesterton up, a philosophy that took God as its center of gravity.34 He travelled part of this forward journey with R. L. Stevenson, “rediscovering” wonder and adventure at the heart of existence in all its manifold variety.35 In the same way, he believed, Stevenson had reinforced, but

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gone beyond, the fairy tales of George Macdonald. These in turn embodied that “true” mysticism, which, in the best tradition of Christian mystics such as St. Francis, “lit up” rather than obscured reality, as in the work of a Celtic mystic like W. B. Yeats.36 Still, for all the additional, religious support that Whitman’s influence on Chesterton acquired by several literary routes, Whitman left an indelible impression upon Chesterton’s mind. This was despite the clash between the gospel of revolution preached by Whitman and Chesterton’s Englishness, which is explored in chapter 6. The tension was less marked, however, between Chesterton’s ready embrace of revolution in the political realm and his contempt for the Decadence in art and letters as largely self-serving. As early as the Slade School period, he was finding relief in the poetry of William Watson, whose Lachrymae Musarum on the death of Tennyson in 1892 he praised unstintingly in a notebook for the poem’s real originality: the paradoxical truth was that “in the face of the stormy innovations and energetic variety of modern literature, [Watson] is content not to be original, [and] is the most original man of all.”37 Not least, respect for tradition in the imaginative realm of art was essential to art’s role as a conduit of national identity; it was that which provided a “language” commensurate with the “alphabet” of art and which also ensured the vibrancy of art.38 This conviction was a product of the very English ambience of Chesterton’s early life in Kensington.

THE CHESTERTONS, ENGLAND, AND ENGLISHNESS Chesterton’s pursuit of justice and democracy was fostered partly by the Liberal and apparently also republican atmosphere of his home. Maisie Ward recounts how the Conservative Oldershaws cautioned their son against imbibing the doctrines with which the Chestertons were associated.39 But the Chestertons’ reputation for radicalism owed more to the Gallic influence of his mother than to his father, Edward Chesterton. The latter’s profession was estate agency and surveying. Established in 1805, the family firm of Chesterton and Sons extended back three generations by the time of Chesterton’s birth. However, if the Chesterton home was far from being a hotbed of Radicalism, Chesterton was careful to exonerate his paternal ancestors from the grasping attitude toward money and the philistine tastes popularly associated with the Victorian middle class. In his Autobiography he emphasized his father’s love of literature; also his penchant for tradition, more so than “many in the liberal age.”40 These dispositions became an integral part of his own cast of mind, too. Indeed, literature and tradition were intimately linked in Chesterton’s outlook, not least through the influence of the

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Reverend Stopford Augustus Brooke. Formerly an Anglican clergyman, Brooke was the minister at Bedford Chapel in Bloomsbury, occasionally frequented by Chesterton’s family. While the Unitarian outlook of Brooke was close to the source of Chesterton’s spiritual despair, he provided a refuge in literature from agnosticism. A notable poet and literary scholar, Brooke—along with Chesterton’s father—sensitized him to the spiritual riches of a developing literary canon, not least, the Romantic end of it in Browning and Tennyson.41 This Chesterton supplemented with Dickens, whose sentimentalism and optimism—manifested in the early novels, at least—were for Chesterton directly related to the misery, hardship, and essential goodness of the English masses.42 Dickens’s England was the “living and invigorating ideal of England,” Chesterton wrote in Heretics in 1905. It was an England free of the emotional inhibition of the modern upper classes that had been celebrated of late in the literature of the “Smart Set.” This emptiness was cleverly disguised by a capacity for “wit” that distanced such types considerably from their more human, “English,” eighteenth-century counterparts: Clive, Nelson, and Chatham, for example.43 As Sheridan Gilley has noted of the Brooke connection, literature became for Chesterton a sort of substitute religion for the failing rationalist religions.44 It made a difference, however, that the literature in question was English literature. As the focus of Englishness broadened out from the language to literature in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Brooke and others played a key role in compiling canonical texts.45 Edward Chesterton was by no means an insular patriot, however. Gilbert Chesterton wrote that his father “loved many old things, and had especially a passion for the French cathedrals and all the Gothic architecture opened up by Ruskin in that time.” This receptivity to European culture was also inherited by Chesterton, although it was to become associated with Roman Catholic sympathies that his father would not have shared. Chesterton’s uncle Sydney—his father’s partner—was not quite so moved by the past as his brother and was a little more sanguine about the future. But, like Edward Chesterton, he affirmed and upheld a code of business conduct as a matter of class pride. Their pride was both symptom and cause of separation from the class immediately above and below, even though it was apparent to both men that the code was not as strong as it had been, with the emergence of the commercial “adventurer.”46 In a weekly column for The Illustrated London News in 1907, Chesterton praised unstintingly the “national” focus of the citizenship of this generation of the English middle class; he wrote that however “cold and puritanical” their citizenship may have been, it was a genuine form of citizenship, maintained by philosophies such as free trade that were believed, however erroneously, to serve a universal, not just a class interest. The corruption of citizenship by class seemed painfully obvious by

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this time in the call by the journalist and dramatist George R. Sims for the middle class to vote openly for their own financial gain—in municipal elections, especially; such had become the scale of “Socialism” at this level, with all its attendant expense.47 The small-mindedness of this proposal was matched by Sims’s anxiety about the “inefficiency” of England as evidenced in the large numbers of foreigners who, he maintained, were employed in its business centers; it was an anxiety that was nevertheless accompanied by an illogical belief in English supremacy in the world.48 Chesterton’s message is clear: the old middle class was much less likely to exaggerate the presence of foreigners in England in the manner of Sims, and less likely, too, to believe that there was no one but Englishmen in the world. Moreover, for all that his “paternal kinsfolk” were woefully ignorant of those less fortunate than themselves—a somewhat surprising claim given that they were living in a city whose poorer quarters had become infamous in a number of late nineteenth-century studies—they won Chesterton’s unqualified praise for their lack of ambition, and for keeping their business interests firmly in perspective. In this, he commented, as in much else, their Englishness was marked, his father’s especially. He celebrated his father as a model of English “amateurism,” a man whose life was cluttered with hobbies, and for whom selling houses was simply a means to the end of “fill[ing] his own house with his life.” As such, Edward Chesterton presented a stark contrast with his American equivalent, who “put all his art into his salesmanship.”49 The parallel lives of the Victorian English gentleman gave a high premium to the genre of Nonsense, as Chesterton explained in The New York Times on the centenary of Lewis Carroll in 1932: It was Carroll’s achievement to discover this “secret” in the mind of the English gentleman, a readiness to abandon common sense, although not conscience, as in the case of the double life lived by Jekyll and Hyde.50 This was by no means an observation that he made late in life, with all the patina of age; in an early article he had attempted to cut through the varied and often conflicting judgments on the English by foreign commentators with a similar conclusion. The truth, indeed, “the only overwhelming truth” about the English was that they care for liberty, for a field of action, for loose, random, happy, sentimental, and often quite useless action; and that they care for little else in comparison.51

Edward Chesterton’s hobbies were the clear source of that uninterrupted sense of wonder that characterized his son’s childhood; they inspired not just his wider philosophy and theology but also his catholic taste in reading if his youthful tribute to the polymath and prolific author

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Andrew Lang as “the patron saint of dilettantes” is any indication.52 The toy theater was the most famous product of a home that abounded in “creative amusements; water-colour painting and modelling and photography and stained glass and fretwork and magic lanterns and mediaeval illumination.” In this respect, Chesterton emphasized, the Chesterton home was the very antithesis of the common association of domesticity with dullness and drudgery, though, significantly, he emptied his positive ideal of domesticity of all female qualities. His mother, Marie Louise Grosjean, receives scant mention, merely to emphasize her ancestry in Scotland and the French-speaking part of Switzerland, an ancestry that was most apparent—he thought—in physical characteristics (dark coloring) and temperament. The latter, marked by tenacity, prejudice, and pugnacity, was chiefly inherited by his brother, Cecil. However, Chesterton emphasized that Cecil, too, was not untouched by the “sleepy sanity” bequeathed by the English side of the family, at least as far as “tranquil loyalty in . . . personal relations” was concerned.53 Pastimes of no obvious value beyond sheer harmless and private pleasure were clearly an English speciality. But Chesterton was not only struck by the “English” character of his ancestors—notably their “good sense not untinged with dreaminess”54 that kept them clearly on the conservative side of Liberalism: he was insistent also upon their ingrained consciousness of being English, and their deep well of English patriotism. In one of his early Daily News articles, he used the example of his immediate forefathers to underline an instinctive English identity and attachment that went back centuries. Like generations of Englishmen before them, they believed “as a solid and most sacred reality that there was a thing called England and a sentiment of patriotism which ought to be felt towards it.” Whether they were correct in this belief was irrelevant beside the fact of their belief. As he wrote in his A Short History of England published in 1917: “We may find men wrong in what they thought they were, but we cannot find them wrong in what they thought they thought.”55 In the Daily News article he maintained that the Englishness of his elders was free of the racial discourse that had muddied the waters of Victorian debate on nationality, particularly the fashionable Teutonism of Stubbs, Freeman, and Green. This, he believed, would have baffled a loyal aristocrat of French blood in Henry V’s army, and a Yorkshire gunner of probable Danish roots in Nelson’s navy. Had he not been writing under pressure, he would surely have mentioned the Welsh archers at Agincourt, too. Such sterling “English” types knew and cared nothing for “fin-de-siècle pedantries” about race, their concern lying only with the “independence and separate value” of their community.56 The independence of English patriotism from all questions of race mirrored the popularity of British monarchs among the

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English people, regardless of the complex ethnic origins of many English kings and queens; this made it perfectly legitimate, he maintained, to refer to “the King of England,” notwithstanding Scottish sensitivities.57 For Chesterton subjectivity was everything in the matter of nationhood; objectivity was a meaningless notion in distinguishing one nation from another. The tensions in his non-essentialist language of nationhood will be discussed in chapter 6. Of significance here is the fact that he revered his ancestors as exemplary but by no means unrepresentative patriots of their time, and throughout English history generally. In his autobiography he applauded the good-tempered jingoism of his grandfather as a point of personal honor to him, lustily singing the dignified patriotic songs of the era of Waterloo and Trafalgar. He believed that these songs were quite unlike the vulgar lyrics that were heard in the music halls following Mafeking night.58 How plausible was Chesterton’s account of the patriotism of his family environment? It certainly conforms well to the recent historiography of Liberalism. Jonathan Parry has shown how a common English-British patriotism was reinforced through the importance of foreign affairs in British politics in the era between the First and Second Reform Acts. Liberals, Liberal Tories, and Radicals were instrumental in this development, exploiting the successes of the Crimean War, the nationalist movement in Italy, and the problem of continental autocracy in the form of Napoleon III. Assertions of the unique centrality of liberty and constitutionalism to the British nation, particularly through their projection onto a world stage in the heyday of British power, enabled the Liberal party to connect with the people ideologically. This was especially so following the repeal of the Corn Laws and despite the elite constitution of the party before 1885. Against the protectionism and Imperialism of the Tory party and also pressure to maintain laissez-faire policies among “doctrinaire” Liberals, the Liberal party successfully promoted itself as the focus of a wellintegrated nation.59 While facing much stronger challenge in this respect after 1886, its “national” status in representing the responsible, self-disciplined English subject was not entirely lost. The cogency of Chesterton’s account of the patriotic values in which his Liberal home was steeped is also illustrated by recent insights into some aspects of the culture of late Victorian and Edwardian England. These were deeply rooted in consciousness of a national past that was English rather than British, and with a strong popular inflection, too. In two seminal articles Paul Readman has unearthed much new evidence of enhanced patriotic interests and activities at this time in which individuals were not merely passive spectators or members of a crowd but active participants.60 He gives as examples the Alfred the Great Millenary in 1901 centred on Winchester, pageants, tourism, architecture, landscapes, the

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Preservation movement, and books of a historical nature. All these phenomena served to situate the national community in continuous historical time while mediating national sentiment by local loyalties. Chesterton’s outlook suggests the influence of at least some of these activities, pageants especially. In his view the latter would have benefited from a still sharper local focus, the want of which prevented them “from being the really national things they might otherwise be.” The microcosm of the nation could never be too small or too provincial for Chesterton; as he wrote in 1908, “there is no true Pimlico sentiment in celebrating names which can be discovered in the British Museum Library, but cannot be discovered in Pimlico.”61 Chesterton certainly took a great deal of interest in the flashpoints between ancient and modern, or rather quasi-modern, that the assertion of local customary rights in the early twentieth century could generate. Onto these he superimposed his own cultural ideals: Englishness, Christianity, local patriotism, and the purity of the past relative to the present. A case in point was the threat to the Haslemere Charter Fair in 1910. The decision of the rural district council to apply to the home secretary for a banning order on grounds of the disruption the fair would cause afforded a fascinating insight into the two equally anti-modern but firmly opposed English types that he assumed were behind the dispute: the “old English agricultural labourer” on the one hand and the “cultured clerk” touched with “Puritanism, Socialism or art,” on the other. He could scarcely conceal his sympathy for the one and antipathy toward the other, despite his typically emollient description of both as “two quite excellent types of men.” Whereas the agricultural laborer who was bent upon staging the fair was outwardly conventional but inwardly intractable, the clerk was a riot of nonconformity in his manners and dress but predictable in all his opinions. The decisive factor was the Christianity that was still “sunk somewhere out of sight” in the soul of the agricultural laborer, ensuring that he failed to take himself seriously. By contrast, the soul of the clerk was “secretly respectable,” reflecting the Puritan legacy that had primarily shaped him. For Chesterton, this was clearly at the expense of his Christianity and Englishness. However, the tensions in English culture brought about by Puritanism were to his mind becoming increasingly localized, a product largely of the suburban frontier of Surrey towns and villages between South London and Sussex; these had witnessed a high concentration of bourgeois culture and fastidiousness, to the detriment of “the relics of healthier ages.”62 Elsewhere, the apparent vibrancy of English national life at a popular level must surely have informed his optimism in 1909 that the deadening influence of Puritanism on nineteenth-century Britain was now on the wane.63 “Mediaeval energy and character” was slowly reviv-

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ing in its place among the people of both England and Scotland; sadly, however, this had not spread to Ireland—hence the absence of sentimentalism and sympathy in the work of George Bernard Shaw, for all his humanitarianism, and his diffidence toward things national in favor of a cold republicanism.64 Regardless of the religious gloss that Chesterton put upon the recent surge of interest in pageantry, he clearly underlined the close interweaving of national, historical, and local consciousness that has been emphasized in recent research, a sensibility that was forward- rather than backward-looking, national as much as—if not more than—Imperialist in sentiment, and straddling class and other divides in English society. Readman suggests that the crystallization of a popular sense of English identity in this period was a response to the challenge of widespread economic, political, and social change and the search for stability and roots with which to negotiate the future.65 Chesterton’s account of the “ancestral” patriotism of his family would seem to be pervaded by this turn-ofthe-century spirit of anchoring the present and future firmly in the past. It was a basis that was at once communal in a national sense, yet, at the same time, accessible on individual terms; the corruption of patriotism en masse was something he associated with Imperialism, as would also seem to be implicit in the wider emphasis on the past in English culture that formed the backdrop to his thought. That backdrop also helps to make sense of his emphasis on the eternal and authentically English quality of the patriotism he embraced, uncomplicated by the different racial strains that were evident in the national genes. For if identification with the nation was central to patriotism, then racial heterogeneity was irrelevant, as Chesterton asserted against Shaw in 1908 when the latter had invoked Chesterton’s French ancestry and indeed imputed French characteristics to Chesterton in an effort to make nonsense of his English patriotism. Turning the argument against Shaw, he suggested that the question was not, as Shaw supposed, whether my maternal great grandfather having come from Switzerland unfits me to be a member of this nation. The question is whether Shaw’s attitude does not unfit him to be a member of any nation.66

In emphasizing patriotic virtues as cherished family as well as national possessions, but located firmly within individuals rather than classes, elites, or undifferentiated masses, Chesterton looked to Liberalism, of all political creeds in Britain, for their safeguarding. But it was increasingly apparent to him that Liberalism was failing in this duty, deserting the imperatives of nineteenth-century nationalism and patriotism for more specious varieties in the early twentieth century and betraying its own ideals

26

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in the process. This realization shaped the patriotic offensive with which he began his journalistic career and left an indelible mark upon his thought thereafter. For he attempted to salvage “true” Liberalism, Christianity, and even art and poetry at the same time, not least the underlying popular impulse that linked them closely to the patriotic ideal.

NOTES 1. Sheridan Gilley, “Chesterton and the English Anti-Catholic Tradition,” CR XXX, nos. 3 and 4 (Fall and Winter, 2004): 294. 2. The Victorian Age in Literature (London: Williams and Norgate, 1913), 9–10. 3. For the reaction among later thinkers against the secular and deterministic cosmology of mid-Victorian science, principally associated with the “New Nature” of Thomas Huxley, while continuing to avoid the snares of revealed religion, see Frank M. Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late-Victorian England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974). This intermediate ground was occupied by a profusion of new religions such as spiritualism, as well as by a large number of Chesterton’s literary opponents such as G. B. Shaw and Edward Carpenter in seeking to counteract the cultural ascendancy of science; ibid., 51–53, 87–93, 5. Chesterton looked favorably on Huxley, as well as Mill and Macaulay, for at least keeping rationalism “rational” and tamed by a concern—often romantic—for morality and justice. With the advent of Darwinism—although not Darwin himself—“the magnificent emancipation evaporated; the mean calculation remained”; Victorian Age in Literature, 209. On Huxley’s conversion to the materialism of Ernst Haeckel after 1868, and away from the “spiritual” form of religion rooted in instinct that he—along with Herbert Spencer—had embraced early in life, see Mark Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007), 148. 4. “The Decay of the Decadents,” review of Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (London: G. Richards, 1913), NW, 20 November 1913, reprinted in CR XIV, no. 4 (November 1988): 509–14. Despite his criticism of the Decadents, Chesterton nonetheless paid tribute to the book. For a perceptive and illuminating analysis of the literary relationship between Holbrook Jackson and Chesterton over many years, see Owen Dudley Edwards, “Holbrook Jackson in Chestertonian Context,” CR XIV, no. 4 (November 1988): 567–90. 5. Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1939), 26–28. 6. See chapter 3, 66. 7. For Chesterton, Wilde “desired all beautiful things, even God.” He conceived Wilde’s attraction to Catholicism as just one more side of his “many-sidedness” that deprived him of the wholeness it would otherwise have furnished if rooted in reason; “Oscar Wilde,” A Handful of Authors: Essays on Books and Writers, ed. Dorothy Collins (London: Sheed & Ward, 1953), 143–46. For a more positive interpretation of Wilde’s “many-sidedness” as emphasizing the possibilities but also limitations of Liberal agency, see David Wayne Thomas, Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and

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the Aesthetic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 158–59, 184. For the conversion to Roman Catholicism of writers associated with the Decadence but as yet another “symbol of defiance” in a culture deeply resistant to Catholicism, see Michael Wheeler, The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), ch. 10. 8. Charles Dickens (London: Methuen, 1906), 19–23. 9. Autobiography, in CW XVI (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 94–96; Dudley Barker, G.K. Chesterton: A Biography (London: Constable, 1973), 51–54. 10. Alzina Stone Dale, The Outline of Sanity: A Biography of G.K. Chesterton (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1982), 32. 11. Lawrence Soloman—writing from his family home in rural Berkshire during one of his school vacations—reassured Chesterton that he was not alone; Soloman to Chesterton [1893?], BL Add MS 73198, folio 148. 12. Autobiography, 96. 13. “The Diabolist,” in Tremendous Trifles (1909; London: Methuen, 1913), 228. 14. Autobiography, 96. Some of this art and fiction was published in The Coloured Lands, ed. Maisie Ward (London: Sheed & Ward, 1938). 15. Chesterton to Lucien Oldershaw [1894], BL Add MS 73197, folio 25. 16. Oldershaw to Chesterton [1895], BL. Add MS 73197, folio 32. 17. Stone Dale, The Outline of Sanity, 47. 18. Barker, G.K. Chesterton, 30. 19. Barker, G.K. Chesterton, 37. Lawrence Soloman was not so fortunate. He regularly begged Chesterton to respond to his letters from Oxford, and was undeterred by Chesterton’s response—as repeated back to Chesterton by Soloman— that he found it easier to read the letters “over and over again than to write back to me”; Soloman to Chesterton [1895?], BL. Add MS 73198, folio 160. It is likely that Soloman was the Jewish boy Chesterton recalled rescuing from an outbreak of playground anti-Semitism, which earned Chesterton Soloman’s undying gratitude, as well as a reputation for “quixotry and priggishness in protecting Jews”; Autobiography, 75. 20. Alzina Stone Dale quotes Chesterton from an entry in a notebook at the depth of his Slade School despond as saying, “I cannot worship Humanity: I have loved men”; The Outline of Sanity, 38. 21. “E.C.B.,” in The Wild Knight (1900), CP, 345–46. 22. Stone Dale, The Outline of Sanity, 35. 23. Autobiography, 135. 24. Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of the ‘Clampherdown,’” in Barrack Room Ballads and Other Verses (London: Methuen, 1893), 138: Captain, the shells are falling fast, And faster still fall we; And it is not meet for English stock To Bide in the heart of an eight-day clock The death they cannot see.

25. Autobiography, 168. 26. Chesterton to Bentley, 1895, cited in Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 55; George Meredith, “Modern Love” (1862), Sonnet XLVII.

28

Chapter 1 We saw the swallows gathering in the sky, And in the osier-isle we heard their noise. We had not to look back on summer joys, Or forward to a summer of bright dye; But in the largeness of the evening earth Our spirits grew as we went side by side. The hour became her husband, and my bride. Love that had robb’d us so, bless’d our dearth!

On the major shift in the Victorian sonnet that “Modern Love” represented, and as an illuminating backdrop to Chesterton’s early milieu, see Stephen Regan, “The Victorian Sonnet from George Meredith to Gerald Manley Hopkins,” Yearbook of English Studies 36, no. 2 (2006): 17–34, at 27–28. Still, Chesterton held Meredith in high regard, particularly as compared to Hardy. While pitting humanity against nature and nature against God, Meredith was at least an optimist, albeit a rational one. By contrast, Hardy was not even a pantheist but a “pandiabolist”; ILN, 22 May 1909, 928, an article marking the death of Meredith as “the last Victorian.” 27. BL Add MS 73323B, folios 31, 32, 34. 28. “The Song of Labour,” The Speaker, 17 December 1892, 742. Chesterton wrote of his triumph in the publication of the poem to his friend, Lawrence Soloman, who duly congratulated him. He asked Chesterton to send him a copy, although joked as to whether he could give his “imprimatur to a socialistic poem” at present; Soloman to Chesterton [1892?], BL Add MS 73198, folio 153. Soloman seems to have stood outside the circle of his friends in this regard: Oldershaw and Bentley were members of the Oxford Fabian Society who gave Fabianism a voice on the committee of the Junior Debating Club of the Oxford Union, as Oldershaw informed Chesterton in a letter dated 8 March 1895, BL Add MS 73197, folio 39. 29. BL Add MS 73341D, folios 2–3. The articles in The Nineteenth Century were “Mutual Aid Amongst Modern Men” (January 1896) and “Mutual Aid Amongst Ourselves” (June 1896). Chesterton had taken some trouble to trace two earlier articles by the same author in the journal. 30. “The Indispensable Fire,” DN, 4 May 1907, 6 (my italics). He acknowledged later in life that the revolutionary spirit tends quickly toward ossification, and nowhere more so than in the realm of art. He wrote incisively of this trend in French and Russian art immediately after the revolutions in 1789 and 1917 respectively, although emphasizing the latter as by far the worst case; ILN, 6 May 1933, 631. 31. He joined a circle of friends under the Anglo-Catholic leadership of Canon Henry Scott Holland. The coterie extended to aspiring journalists and politicians such as Charles Masterman and Radical clergymen such as Conrad Noel, both of whom became close political friends and literary collaborators; Autobiography, 155–65. 32. “The Indispensable Fire”; Walt Whitman, “I hear America Singing,” Leaves of Grass (1860): STILL though the one I sing, (One, yet of contradictions made,) I dedicate to Nationality, I leave in him revolt, (O latent right of insurrection! O quenchless, indispensable fire!) Shut Not Your Doors.

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33. The Thing: Why I am a Catholic (1929), in CW III (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 151. 34. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 49. 35. Leo Hetzler, “Chesterton and Robert Louis Stevenson,” CR XVII, no. 2 (May 1991): 177–87. 36. “George Macdonald,” DN, 23 September 1905, 6. For Chesterton’s conception of the complementarity of Macdonald and Stevenson but at different levels— the one serving the literary needs of childhood, and the other, boyhood, see Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1903), 34. 37. “William Watson,” BL Add MS 73341A, folio 32. The poem was published in William Watson, Lachrymae Musarum and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1893). 38. See his strictures upon the alien nature of modern art in England—not least that of his co-religionist, Eric Gill—for rejecting the Renaissance tradition that defined English national art. According to Chesterton, the development of that tradition was much delayed until the Renaissance was on the ebb; it became crystallized with the “narrowing” of English nationhood on the ascendancy of “the mercantile aristocracy of the Whigs,” and as painting diversified away from patrons to native landscapes; ILN, 13 January 1934, 42, and ILN, 10 June 1933, 826. This is an instance of Chesterton’s conception of English patriotism as flourishing in the most adverse “national” climate—and in large part due to literature, poetry and art—a subject that is explored further in chapter 9. On the distinctiveness of English landscape-painters in taking the weather as their “hero,” see “The Glory of Grey,” in Alarms and Discursions (London: Methuen, 1910), 116. 39. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 26. 40. Autobiography, 34. 41. Gilley, “Chesterton and the English Anti-Catholic Tradition,” 306. 42. In his introduction to Hard Times for Dent’s Everyman series, he noted the bitterness that overcame Dickens in this later novels, his lack of sympathy for the rogues he created reflecting the erosion of his optimistic belief that they were a dying breed; Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (1935; London: Dent, 1911), 269. For Chesterton’s early love of Dickens, see Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 56. 43. Heretics (1905; London: John Lane, 1908), 212–15. 44. Gilley, “Chesterton and the English Anti-Catholic Tradition,” 306. 45. Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 353–54; Stopford Brooke, English Literature: From A.D. 670 to A.D. 1832 (London: Macmillan, 1877). 46. Autobiography, 33. 47. ILN, 26 January 1907, 124. Sims was the Radical author of the satirical poem castigating the poor law, “Christmas Day in the Workhouse” (1879). In 1906 in The Tribune he had launched his tirade against the tax burden shouldered by the lowermiddle classes in the new world of social reform pushed forward by labor interests and spearheaded by the state. This cost him the goodwill of progressives; see Philip Waller, “George Robert Sims (1847–1922),” ODNB 50, 721–23. Interestingly, as late as 1907 it seems, Chesterton was more concerned to defend the “national character” of the middle classes than join Sims in attacking the tyranny of the state; see chapters 4 and 5 for his growing unease at this time about Liberal reform.

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48. ILN, 25 August 1906, 254. 49. Autobiography, 48. 50. “Lewis Carroll” (1932), in A Handful of Authors, 119. 51. “With the Long Bow: Further Remarks on Foreign Criticisms,” The Bystander, 1 June 1904, 805. 52. “Andrew Lang,” BL Add MS 73341A, folio 45. The essay, possibly prompted by Lang’s Homer and the Epic (London: Longmans, 1893) continued: “He is a collector of china and collects in the face of day. He is a bibliophile, naked and not ashamed. In this restless and realistic century, there is something which recalls arcadia in Palestine in the extent to which he has brought the too much neglected art of wasting time. Another of his virtues and the one most noticeable in this book, is his catholic taste in literature.” Chesterton’s use of Lang’s work on primitive religion is considered in chapter 3, along with his less positive gloss on Lang’s amateurishness a decade later. 53. Autobiography, 48. 54. Autobiography, 41. 55. A Short History of England (1917), in CW XX (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), 440. 56. “The Delusion of Races,” DN, 26 November 1904, 6. 57. “Edward VII and Scotland,” in All Things Considered (London: Methuen, 1908), 125–33. 58. Autobiography, 23. 59. Jonathan P. Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 5, 11; and “Liberalism and Liberty,” in Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain, ed. Peter Mandler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 78–80, 82, 85, 100. 60. Paul Readman, “The Place of the Past in English Culture c. 1890–1914,” Past and Present 186 (February 2005): 147–99; and “Landscape Preservation, ‘Advertising Disfigurement’, and English National Identity c. 1890–1914,” Rural History 12, no. 1 (2001): 61–83. 61. ILN, 25 July 1908, 116. 62. ILN, 9 July 1910, 44. 63. For an excellent account of that influence—in both a religious and secular form—see Raphael Samuel, “The Discovery of Puritanism, 1820–1914: A Preliminary Sketch,” in Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, vol. II, Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1998), 276–32. 64. George Bernard Shaw (London: John Lane, 1909), 44, 76–77, 86–87. For the resurgence of Puritanism and Chesterton’s reaction to it in the interwar period, see chapter 9. 65. Readman, “The Place of the Past in English Culture,” 190–97. 66. “The Last of the Rationalists (A Reply to Mr. Bernard Shaw),” NA, 29 February 1908, 348.

2 ✛

Liberal Journalism and the Patriotic Cosmos

L

iterary culture and Liberal journalism had become tightly interlocked by the turn of the twentieth century in response to what has been termed “the first and only mass literary age.”1 The expansion of journalism as a literary calling with the repeal of the stamp tax in 1855 and abolition of paper duty in 1861 created a new space for reviewing that late Victorian recruits to Liberalism were quick to seize. Moved by ideals of democratic reform and inclusive citizenship, progressive Liberals with a strong literary bent were especially alive to the new opportunities that the press afforded for disseminating Liberal values and opinions.2 As John Gross has argued, Edwardian men of letters lost much of the stuffiness of the preceding generation of critics. Unlike the “Sir Sidney Colvins” and the “Sidney Lees,” they no longer conceived the custodial role of literature in narrow, exclusive terms, clamoring instead to “enter the public arena as preachers, debaters, and entertainers” in a way that was reminiscent of their early Victorian counterparts.3 The centrality of the “causerie” to Edwardian journalism was only one of many indicators of the press’s new role; from the French word causeuse, or sofa, it meant a fondness for talking or symposia and suggested a different kind of intimacy between writers and readers than had prevailed hitherto.4 The popular impulse that fired the reviewers of Chesterton’s generation stopped short of cultivating links with the commercialized press associated with Sir Alfred Harmsworth and Sir Arthur Pearson from the 1880s onward. They sought to engage their readers in the discussion of public issues and, like the editor of The Manchester Guardian, C. P. Scott, set their face against allowing a perception of their readers’ attitudes and 31

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preferences to set the journalistic agenda, “yellow” press style.5 Nevertheless, the lines of the elite and popular press—the one pursuing an older, “educational,” the other a new, “representative” ideal of journalism—crossed in other ways.6 The Daily News in particular played a pivotal role in focusing Liberal opinion beyond its national elite, among an amorphous suburban class characterized by “self-regard” and a hunger for self-improvement.7 Chesterton’s journalistic authority quickly became established in this ambience of far-reaching cultural change. It was grounded in polemical commentary upon contemporary literature, drama, poetry, and art as well as politics. Through such means he engaged with a multitude of voices and opinions, all of them in his view of the highest significance. His receptiveness was due not just to an inveterate democratic belief in the value of all contributions; in circumstances rich in potential for publicity and hence widespread error, he attached the utmost importance to subjecting all arguments and beliefs to the closest scrutiny. His method was one of exhaustive examination of their strengths, concluding with fatal exposure of their weaknesses.8 He elaborated the thinking behind his approach in a preamble to his first clash with George Bernard Shaw. It was thinking he couched in clear Liberal terms, although already with a pronounced sense of being in a minority among fellow Liberals in the new century, intent as the majority were upon the exclusion of opponents from the Liberal project: The truth is that we conquer a thing exactly in so far as we appreciate all its merits. As long as we leave one merit unconsidered, that merit will swell and rise against us and cast us down. But nothing can stay the advance of the man who admires all the virtues of his enemy. The foolish notion still lingers, even among Liberals, that victory goes to the fanatic. It is false; victory goes to the universalist, for in sound, strategic phraseology, he surrounds his enemy. . . . The true Liberal conquers all men because he includes them all. . . . We can only reach the falsehoods in any man’s system by clearing away every iota that is true.9

Significantly, it was in identical terms that he later embraced the Roman Catholic Church as uniquely embodying “the truth” as opposed to the mere “truths” of rival intellectual systems and religions. “None of the others,” he explained, “really pretends to be looking out in all directions at once,” standing “outside quarrels because it stands all around [them].”10 While Chesterton readily adopted the mantle of the universalist in his approach to journalism, he was an ardent particularist in the ideals he defended from his earliest newspaper columns, celebrating all that was local and circumscribed. However, the divergence here is only superficial: both the style and substance of his argument were informed by strong

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democratic commitments that found the sharpest focus in patriotism. The present chapter and the one that follows examine the influence of patriotism in shaping his religious and political thought on symmetrical and convergent planes; further, it projects this endeavor as part of a concerted attempt to broaden the sphere of Liberal discourse at the turn of the twentieth century through engaging with the stream of ideas that flowed through the channels of Edwardian journalism. The chapter especially highlights the crucial impact of the Boer War on Chesterton’s intellectual and political development. Not only did this event sensitize him to the importance of differentiation at a variety of cosmic levels, it also sowed the first seeds of suspicion that all was not well with the English patria, the questionable integrity of English journalism being the first symptom of a wider national malaise.

EARLY JOURNALISM Chesterton began writing for The Speaker (subtitled The Liberal Review) in 1900 through his connections with Oldershaw and Bentley.11 They had left Oxford the previous year along with a group of young, dissident Liberals, trenchantly at odds with their party’s support for Imperialism in general and the South African War in particular. This group—headed by F. W. Hirst, John Simon, and Hilaire Belloc—had taken up their offensive in a collection of essays entitled Essays on Liberalism published in 1897.12 Two years later, Hirst’s business sense secured the funding that made possible a change of editor and editorial policy at The Speaker toward the revival of its association with Radicalism in earlier years.13 Under the editorship of J. L. Hammond, the Liberal weekly became a platform for the denunciation of a foreign policy that pursued power and Imperialist expansion, and neglected national well-being at home as a result. At the heart of The Speaker’s cause was vociferous support for “true” patriotism as the basis of Liberal renewal. On the one hand, this was directed against those who rejected patriotism tout court on account of its association with militarism and Imperialism; on the other, it targeted those who manipulated patriotism for their own Imperialist ends. As such, The Speaker became a magnet for a breed of educated Liberals such as L. T. Hobhouse, J. A. Hobson, and H. A. L. Fisher, bent on rescuing England from the moral ignominy of an Imperialist war. They shared an antipathy toward philosophical Idealism—the reigning philosophy of Oxford during their university years—as strongly implicated in the policy of subjugation, especially through its emphasis on opposites merging into a higher unity.14 Similarly, as we shall see presently, Chesterton targeted the pantheism at the root of a number of modernist creeds—and an active

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force in the Idealism of T. H. Green15—as central to the disregard for small nations at the heart of Imperialism. Chesterton continued to write for The Speaker until it merged with The Nation in 1907. He recalled in his Autobiography that he owed an immense debt to the paper. He had written a few reviews of art books in The Bookman before; this resulted from his friendship with Ernest Hodder Williams—whose family owned the journal—while attending the English lectures delivered by W. P. Ker at University College London after his departure from the Slade. But it was The Speaker to which he contributed “the first connected series of articles,” and which gave him “the first regular job in support of a regular cause.”16 The coterie he now joined included Belloc, to whom he had been introduced by Oldershaw—a fellow Balliol student of Belloc’s—shortly after the launch of the new Speaker.17 With Belloc, Hammond, and others, Chesterton forged his ideas in a new, dynamic environment. It is true that Chesterton was not entirely at one with fellow contributors to The Speaker. Not least, he differed from them in emphasizing the importance to journalism of a “panoramic” rather than specialist view of life.18 Moreover, as John Coates has pointed out, he alone among his Speaker associates embraced the opportunities opened up by mass journalism for reaching wide audiences of limited education.19 It was no coincidence that other key Speaker writers were closely associated with The Manchester Guardian under the editorship of C. P. Scott. For all Scott’s concern to revive the critical patriotism of nineteenth-century Radicalism in the face of the Boer War, he maintained resolutely the high intellectual and moral level of public discussion with which the paper had long been associated.20 Also, as Maisie Ward has noted, Chesterton went beyond the antiImperialist stance of other Speaker writers in supporting the Boer cause and that of nationhood more widely.21 It was a difference that was to become magnified during the First World War and beyond, and underlined the fragile unity of the “Little Englanders” who opposed the Boer War.22 At the same time, Chesterton resisted the narrowness of the spirit of party in politics and the growth of alternative Liberal agendas, in both of which The Speaker was complicit. He was particularly concerned about the exaggeration of The Speaker’s differences with newspapers that were effectively on the same side, particularly The Daily News and The Westminster Gazette. In a revealing (unfinished) letter to Hammond quoted by Ward, Chesterton laid out his conception of the role of a paper devoted to bringing a “younger and larger political spirit” to bear on Liberalism. It was not to replicate the spirit of “ferocious triviality” in “Birmingham eloquence,” and the “evil instinct which has disintegrated the Irish Party, the instinct for hating the man who differs from you slightly, more than the man who differs from you altogether.” Instead, he took his cue from the

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Free Traders—those symbols of an older, more public-spirited middle class that he was to extol constantly in his ancestors. “We must,” he asserted, in the undated letter, like the Free Traders . . . have discoveries, definite truths and endless patience in explaining them. We must be more than a political party or we shall cease to be one. Time and again in history victory has come to a little party with big ideas: but can anyone conceive anything with the mark of death more on its brow than a little party with little ideas?23

Yet notwithstanding such differences of outlook, Chesterton was greatly strengthened by the Speaker connection—intellectually, politically, and professionally. Some such appreciation may have been the reason why he abandoned the letter. In particular, his Speaker connection provided the basis on which he began writing reviews for The Daily News in January 1901. Like The Speaker, this prominent Liberal daily once edited by Charles Dickens had also been purchased by anti-Boer War Liberals led by Lloyd George and George Cadbury.24 Chesterton’s journalistic career was launched with the appointment of his friend, Archibald Marshall, as literary editor by the new editor, R. C. Lehmann. Initially, Chesterton’s reviews were unsigned, a practice he always opposed;25 it took nine months for his name to appear as the first byline (“By G. K. Chesterton”). Only gradually did he move away from the literary review as his principal framework for commentary. While he was a regular contributor, the interval between his contributions varied during the first two years of his association with the newspaper. After a five-month hiatus from February 1902—during which the newspaper settled down under A. G. Gardiner after successive changes of editor and conflict within the new management over the direction of Liberal Party policy—his articles resumed. They fell away again in January and February 1903, only to be reestablished in March 1903. He moved to a weekly Saturday slot—his Saturday “pulpit”—in April of that year.26 From February 1904, his column appeared on the editorial page where it remained down to his last article in February 1913. However, by that time Chesterton’s relations with the newspaper were deep in crisis. He had long been out of step with the Nonconformist readership that Gardiner had cultivated deliberately in a bid to strengthen the paper’s Radical credentials.27 Chesterton liked to tease, provoke, and challenge the thickset views of that readership, without alienating it entirely.28 This was especially true of his early columns. By contrast, in the correspondence pages he engaged fiercely with the vocal rather than silent members of The Daily News’s staunch Protestant and Liberal constituency, and also with the editorial line of the paper itself.29 As he grew increasingly embittered by the Liberal government that returned to

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power in 1906, his patience began to wear thin. Not least, this resulted from the constraint that he alone among Daily News journalists was under to refrain from criticizing the government.30 His later columns show far fewer signs of the affable manner in which he had taken issue with what today would be termed “grandstanding” on the flimsiest moral basis.31 At the same time they show ample evidence of his defiance of Gardiner. As a result, his employment on the Liberal daily with the largest circulation—which increased fivefold during the years of his association32—became unsustainable.

LITERATURE, BOUNDARIES, AND THE BORDERS OF LIBERALISM All Chesterton’s early work—whether reviews or commentaries—served primarily as channels for refining and advancing his ideas. He quickly established a reputation, not so much as an iconoclast as a “revivalist,” harking back, in the words of one sympathetic reviewer of The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), to some “ancient good.”33 But he was a revivalist who had a good many scores to settle in the process. He attacked not just the aesthetes themselves—for example, J. M. Whistler, Wilde, and Henley—a reaction that will be considered in more detail in the following chapter; he also challenged their legacy in art and literary criticism. An early review of the authorized biography of Stevenson by Graham Balfour in The Daily News in 1901, a book that characterized the Scottish author as a “faddling hedonist” engaged in “artistic foppery,” completely missed its target as far as Chesterton was concerned.34 It failed to capture the essence of Stevenson’s religious soul, an essence that expressed itself in a “new asceticism of cheerfulness” easily mistaken for pessimism in its “seriousness” about gaiety.35 This derived from Stevenson’s conception of himself as an “unimportant guest at one eternal and uproarious banquet.” Chesterton’s review earned him the praise and friendship of an older generation of distinguished belles-lettrests that included Sir Sydney Colvin and Sir Edmund Gosse.36 A similar review of much recent commentary on Browning37 provided the basis of his first full-length study, Browning, published in 1903 for the prestigious “English Men of Letters” series, under the editorship of John Morley. It was, he later recalled, less a book on Browning than one on “love, liberty, poetry, my own views on God and religion (highly undeveloped), and various theories of my own about optimism, pessimism and the hope of the world.”38 This book in turn led to a more programmatic statement of his quarrel with his contemporaries in Heretics the following year, and was an embryonic expression of the Christian faith that

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he outlined in Orthodoxy in 1908. It will be helpful to summarize the creed he developed in Browning as a basis for understanding the steps by which he gained his early philosophical and religious footing through literary biography, although never in isolation from contemporary politics. Perhaps the most striking feature of the beliefs Chesterton set down in Browning was a concern to develop an expansive form of Liberalism as artistic and religious as well as political in nature. Indeed, for Chesterton, the only political liberalism worthy of the name was that which conformed to the assumptions and beliefs integral to “true” art and religion. He believed that this was exemplified perfectly in the work of Browning, whose unique achievement Chesterton portrayed as harnessing together individuality, nationhood, liberty, and a staunch affirmation of the existence of God. Browning, Chesterton wrote, excelled in bringing out the “energy and joy” at the heart of the natural world no less than the human mind. This was the source of his otherwise inexplicable fascination with grotesque forms and images, driven by an energy that “takes its own form and goes its own way.”39 Browning’s optimism was fueled, in turn, not so much by a belief that all was right with the world, but a passionate, Chestertonian attachment to existence and the associated sense of “strangeness” and wonder that was best expressed poetically. The vitality of poetry as exemplified in Browning was most evident in the “primal and conventional” that provided its essential subject matter— love most of all—but expressed through the most prosaic of things rather than “abstractions.”40 Browning’s alienation from the Decadence, which developed shortly before his death, turned essentially on this point.41 The close relationship of poetry to life was the basis of its nexus with God, reflecting the grounds of Browning’s optimism in experience rather than reason and argument.42 The knaves of Browning’s poetry—Sludge the Medium and Bishop Blougram—also bore testimony to God in their own warped but powerful way. Chesterton here paid tribute to Browning’s conception “of the absolute sanctity of human difference” yet “indifference to humanity.”43 It was far worse, he concluded, to assume one’s own insignificance in a materialist universe than the possibility of friendship with God on individual terms, even from a low moral threshold.44 Not least in Browning’s favor, according to Chesterton, was his conception of the “liberty and personality” of nations as a natural extension of the “wholly transcendental sanctity” with which individuals were regarded in all legal systems. If Chesterton was somewhat carried away here it was by his belief that Browning was at one with the age following the French Revolution. Browning embraced a triumphant form of nationalism that eschewed international enmity and strife for international “partialities” that cut across national loyalties. At the same time, he never called the sanctity of individuals into question. In Carlyle’s

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case this partiality was for Germany and for Browning it was Italy.45 The close interaction between literature, religion, and politics in Chesterton’s mind is already apparent. His work on Browning took Chesterton back to the generation before the Decadence took hold, expounding Browning’s message as he interpreted it for new audiences and in the service of new spiritual and political ends. Characteristically, the interpretation was eccentric. But Browning (and Dickens [1906]), like Heretics and Orthodoxy, was as much an expression of Chesterton’s faith in the expanding press to rekindle popular beliefs and passions now dormant for some thirty years as of his impulse to correct the errors of much recent art and literature. In his view, The Yellow Book—house-journal of the aesthetes—had combined with the yellow press to banish ideas and ideals with explosive potential for good, underlining the essentially conservative direction in which the search for cultural and political novelty had flowed at both its elite and popular ends. In the case of the yellow press, this ensured its abject timidity, its selection of easy targets acceptable to the “respectable man” that were then magnified out of all proportion. He believed that the unsettling, destabilizing critique more characteristic of French and Irish journalism, however lacking in truth, was quite foreign to large parts of the new journalism, and England suffered accordingly. He referred in one early article on the banality of the Harmsworth press to the need for a “new politics” characterized by the “great spiritual sensationalism” of Christianity at its dawn. A rejuvenated popular press would be its chief instrument.46 Chesterton’s responsiveness to vivid symbolism and imagery could not be more evident than here. It is equally visible in his early defense of Christianity against his atheist and pantheist critics. In his controversy with Robert Blatchford in 1903 he urged against one critic from Blatchford’s camp that divinity “lurks not in the all but in everything,” and thereby goes beyond the finite, particular vessels it inhabits. To think otherwise was to mistake the part for the whole, to imagine the cosmos as sui generis, “heartless, brainless, bodyless,” like a “starfish or tadpole”; as such, it was incapable of imparting that “shock of reality” comparable to a “woman’s face or a sting of pain,”47 just as a pugnacious style of journalism would bring democracy to full spiritual life. Such arresting metaphors worked hard here, and indeed throughout Chesterton’s writings, to emphasize the infinitely complex nature of reality. This he contrasted with the “horrible universalism” that characterized the cosmos of rationalists and also the decadents at their most voluptuous in both art and politics.48 One perceptive commentator, Ian Ker, has noted the distinctive grooves in which Chesterton’s ideas ran from an early stage of his career toward separation of form and purpose as symbolic of cosmic vitality and divine will.49 Ker especially emphasizes their signifi-

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cance from the point of view of Roman Catholic theology and the centrality it gives to “dogmas”—unambiguous definitions of doctrines that Chesterton embraced as the sine qua non of unbounded spiritual growth. He identifies Chesterton’s book on Dickens as the root expression of this sensibility, many years before his formal conversion to the Roman Catholic faith. Ker picks up on Chesterton’s alertness to the magnification of individual quirks in the novels of Dickens, producing caricatures that bordered on the grotesque, a quality Chesterton had also praised in Browning.50 He maintains further that the Roman Catholic emphasis upon truth as the precondition of freedom and individuality was in turn reinforced by the large store that Chesterton set by middle-class convention and routine. These were integral to that sense of “limitation” which set the “human hospitalities of Pickwick” off from the “inhumane laughter of Fagin’s den.”51 Chesterton’s penchant for sharpness and distinctiveness of outline was to influence his views on other issues that were central to Edwardian political argument: property, gender, and political corruption, in particular. It was certainly at the heart of his Catholicism. In The Thing (1929), he remarked that for Catholics, it is a fundamental dogma of the Faith that all human beings, without any exception whatever, were specially made, were shaped and pointed like shining arrows, for the end of hitting the mark of Beatitude. It is true that the shafts are feathered with free will; and that the Church (having also been aware for ages of that darker side of truth, which the new sceptics have just discovered) does also draw attention to the darkness of that potential tragedy. But that does not make any difference to the gloriousness of the potential glory. In one aspect it is even a part of it; since the freedom is itself a glory.52

However, the wider “philosophy of life” that Ker sees as integral to Chesterton’s Roman Catholic faith owed as much to his opposition to the Boer War as to his religion. This complicates the idea that Catholicism was but “the natural fulfilment of what Newman would have called his ‘first principles.’”53 Certainly, appreciation of rules, conventions, and discipline as the basis of liberty could exist alongside antipathy toward Roman Catholicism. This was so in the case of James Fitzjames Stephen, a midVictorian advocate of a “manly, muscular” Liberalism most famous for his criticism of John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty.54 But while Stephen, like Chesterton, made patriotism the highest virtue, he was also an Imperialist, a position that—from Chesterton’s perspective—contradicted the doctrine of “limits.” By contrast, Chesterton’s championship of small nations in the face of the Boer War sealed his Catholic disposition toward clear definition and the liberty and fullness of life it alone made possible. As he wrote in an essay of 1904 on “The Patriotic Idea,”

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This conception of patriotism as exclusive to small nations and as expressive of a wider, “primeval” truth about boundaries was not a view that was shared very widely among his contemporaries.56 His suggestion that patriotism was at odds with the Roman Empire was regarded as particularly problematic. It was a point on which he was to change his mind, without altering his belief in the “antiquity” of the sense of nationhood among mankind. His volte-face brought his opinions more into line with Belloc’s conception of the formative influence of Latin culture on Europe via the church as the successor of Rome. But it took a decade and more of growing anti-German feeling in Britain, and most of all the First World War, for Chesterton to concede the Roman focus of the earliest patriotism in England, at least, well preceding the birth of English patriotism proper.57 As well as neglecting the political forces that shaped Chesterton’s strong disposition toward boundaries in this way, Ker also underestimates the literary influence of Stevenson. In his essay of 1902 Chesterton emphasized Stevenson’s “clean-cut angularity,” the pleasure he took in “every muscular and emphatic action of life, even if it were an action that took the life of another.” This delight, he maintained, formed the basis of Stevenson’s belief that “we must worship good for its own value and beauty, without any reference whatever to victory or failure in space and time.”58 The significance that Chesterton attached to this aspect of Stevenson’s work only increased with time. His biography of Stevenson, Robert Louis Stevenson, published in 1927, vindicated the Scottish writer against a new threat, those who judged literature by the standards of the “psychological realism” of the postwar novel, and who dismissed Stevenson’s actioncentered narratives in the process.59 His response was to extol once again the clarity of Stevenson’s characters as expressed in their “cutting and piercing action.”60 The importance of gestures to morality in Stevenson’s writing, he maintained, derived from the pasteboard figures of Skelt’s toy theater. These served as an antidote both to the developing pessimism of the age—as expressed in Edward Fitzgerald’s edition of Omar, especially—and the oppressive Calvinism of Stevenson’s Edinburgh home. Skelt was no mere diversion but encapsulated Stevenson’s fervent conviction—shared fully by Chesterton—that the magic shapes, an allegory

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for human beings, “really were magic,” not just passing shadows of a master light.61 To Chesterton’s regret, Stevenson never made his own transition to “orthodoxy,” despite the parallels in their early spiritual experiences.62 Nevertheless, the maritime setting of Stevenson’s adventure stories particularly impressed upon Chesterton a conception of “edges,” and the capacity of things so defined to “shine” against a background of light, like church windows against the sun, not against the abyss that formed the backdrop of the art and wit of the extremes of the Decadence.63 He was also struck by Stevenson’s applause of the “good captain who flew the Union Jack over the stockade, in defiance of the bad buccaneers. From the standpoint of Art in those days, even that flag was a much too Moral emblem.”64 The example that Chesterton found in Stevenson’s imagery reinforced what he considered to be the “mystical” quality of material objects. While the part should not be confused with the whole, the proximity of part to whole was, in Chesterton’s view, the essence of the religious worldview throughout all its many manifestations, including the Paganism to which nineteenth-century writers such as George Meredith fell prey. But for Chesterton, the modern substitutes for religion—ethical societies and “Higher Thought Centres”—lay well outside the realm of religion so defined. These, he maintained, were deaf to the “mysticism” and the particularity of things; they were slaves instead to dry abstractions and infinities, empty of all sacramental value.65 These pseudo-religions were for Chesterton the counterparts of the modern movement’s attitude toward women in failing to see that identity between the two sexes leads not to equality but inequality.66 The excision of all difference meant the excision of all worth, the negation of democracy and sacramentalism alike. The undifferentiated whole that blighted the imagination of assorted rationalists, decadents, and pantheists had also pervaded the realm of politics. This was especially evident in the Fabian passion for organization, as much a threat to individuality as the individualism it sought to supplant. Chesterton took the opportunity of a review of H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia, published in 1905, to lambast the Fabian conception of the community as “making its members in a sort of mill, giving them all they have, and to be judged by how much it manages to give them.” Wells’s Utopia—constructed in this Fabian mould—offended two seminal Rights of Man: “darkness” on the one hand and “secrecy,” on the other. These expressed the right to liberty, the magic circle round each man of a narrow godhead, an imperfect omnipotence. Utopia may ignore this need; but Utopia will not destroy it. It will certainly destroy Utopia.67

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But it was apparent to Chesterton even then that “darkness” and “secrecy” were rapidly becoming the hallmarks of twentieth-century governments, not the prerogatives of individuals. Another political manifestation of the tendency toward universalism in thought was what Chesterton termed a “freezing and theoretic philanthropy” that nourished “a pity for all humanity which blows men to pieces with dynamite.”68 He was here making a huge but in his eyes quite legitimate extrapolation concerning the universe of unbelievers in all its sprawl and self-sufficiency to the sinister figure of the anarchist. As the nihilistic extreme of the modernist battle against custom and convention, the anarchist was important to Chesterton for dispelling the illusion that cosmopolitans had the superior moral edge over patriots. Besides, the local loyalties and allegiances of the latter were sanctioned by voices “older than the hills” as he put it in an early review in The Speaker of a book by a “cosmopolitan” opponent of patriotism.69 Tradition in this form was not the negation of, but the template for justice and freedom. As such, it had underpinned the old “republican enthusiasm” that had loosely informed politics up until 1870, before succumbing to the modern “evolutionary myth.” Henceforth, liberty—in the sense defined against Wells—and faith receded in political argument, with disastrous consequences.70 Belloc was by no means the mainspring of Chesterton’s political thought, as is often claimed. However, he certainly provided heavy reinforcement for his friend’s fervent defense of patriotism against its modernist enemies. In a letter to Chesterton’s wife, Frances, in 1905 following a military review in Paris on Bastille Day, Belloc contrasted the abject state of England with France. The critical factor was the high sense of national morale in France, which Belloc implicitly linked to the continued strength of religion there. Neglecting the multiple divisions of language and culture within France, he asked Frances to “tell Gilbert” that as the horsemen and the guns hushed over the shaking earth I felt like a terrible vision of the angel Michael the emotion of a magnificent and militant patriotism. . . . What a people are these Frogs! Homogeneous, amiable, powerful, joyous, tragic—they are Europe. And always my mind goes back to your green island, battered ignominiously, squalid, helpless, waiting and waiting for God.71

Like Belloc, Chesterton hoped to persuade his compatriots, much against their current instincts, that patriotism offered the only hope of real social change, and most powerfully in alliance with the religion from which it had been born. However, this entailed some instruction in the place of patriotism in the cosmic order of things, and the disorder created by opposing political schemes.

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LINES, NATIONS, AND TRUTH Clearly, in Chesterton’s mind the war between rationalists and Christians turned on the issue of the ineffaceable “lines” within creation, foremost among which was the “humbling” division between creator and created. However, not content with this most basic of cosmic separations, he sought to apply the metaphor of boundaries throughout the human world. He brought the idea into full play in responding to Conservative attempts to scupper Liberal proposals for reform on the eve of the Liberal Party’s return to power at the end of 1905. In a Daily News column of September 1905, he argued that far from “inorganic nature” providing a model for change in “organic nature,” as had been maintained recently by a Conservative publicist, the action of humanity, “as the highest product of evolution,” was uniquely “cataclysmic.” Moving from the scientific language of evolution to the religious conception of purpose, he pointed to another way in which humanity was marked off from the rest of creation. The fact was, he wrote, that “man’s whole nature and object on earth is to draw those black lines that do not exist in organic nature.” He contrasted cows eating all day with the set meals that marked human habits of consumption and that were conducted in accordance with welldefined norms of hospitality and comradeship. But he also mentioned the institutions of monogamous marriage and nationhood as prime examples of the propensity of human beings to “separate things, and make . . . them special.”72 To whom was this homily on the fundamental human propensity to create fine distinctions between groups and uphold ritual addressed? As well as anarchists, Chesterton targeted Imperialists and a wider breed of cosmopolitans and internationalists (he never distinguished the two). The mark of the Imperialist proper was contempt rather than pity for humanity in actively seeking to obliterate its multitudinous divisions. As a result, Imperialists were guilty not just of isolated immoral acts but an entire “immoral morality.” This was exemplified in the British Proclamation of August 1901 threatening those Boers who did not surrender with exile from their land. The “true” political philosopher would recognize Imperialism for what it was: a “priggish and dehumanised thing, anti-national and anti-humanitarian.” But this critique applied as much to the universalists who were motivated by “pity” as by “contempt.” Chesterton was here addressing an all too representative critic of Imperialism—Ralph Lane, the name under which the internationalist, Norman Angell, began his career as an author with his book, Patriotism under Three Flags (1903). Lane’s sin was to have confused patriotism with Imperialism, losing all his cosmopolitan credentials in the process. He had, in effect, condemned what he had set out to defend, failing to see that “to hate flags

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and drums and drinks and crowds and bonfires is simply to hate humanity.” This strong conception of the nation set Chesterton well apart from Victorian apostles of patriotism such as J. S. Mill and Matthew Arnold, for whom flexibility and restraint over expressions of national identity and pride were essential in realising its humanitarian goals.73 Chesterton argued against Lane that patriotism in England was at a large discount, sufficiently so to scotch any myth of its complicity with Imperialism. The “cosmopolitan mob of the new city,” their heads filled with Imperialist propaganda, had ensured that modern Englishmen could not possibly be held to love their country more, [be prepared to] do more for it, have more knowledge of it, than in the time when Shakespeare, that eloquent Little Englander, spoke of it as a fortress removed by the sea from infection and the hand of war.74

Chesterton certainly did all he could in the early years of his career to make a virtue, not just of patriotism but also of Jingoism, and the real national excellences it could and should be used to extol. For example, he delighted in the promotion of English plays such as Sheridan’s Critic at the Mermaid Repertory Theater in 1905. The interdict on public displays of patriotism in England in the spiritual realm where it mattered most had no counterpart elsewhere in Europe; in addition to national pride in arms and conquest, France extolled her tradition of letters, and Germany the virtues of German culture.75 How is this discourse of smallness, sharpness of outline, and the public exaltation of such qualities best accounted for, not least in cutting right across Chesterton’s religious, political, literary, and cultural imagination? It is clear from his autobiography that a cataclysmic event in his own personal history, one that brought a disposition to think in terms of boundaries to the surface of his mind, was the Jameson Raid of 1895. He recalled its shattering effect on his political beliefs as they had developed hitherto, a loose combination of Socialism and Imperialism held without any real depth of conviction and alongside a subconscious yearning to escape their clutches.76 Before the raid he had endorsed colonial adventure in the tentative belief that it was the only means of protecting England; in that respect, it seemed far superior to pacifism. Also, like other creeds at this time, Imperialism traded on the general climate of unbelief: “Those beacon-fires of an Imperial insularity shot a momentary gleam even over the dark landscape of the Shropshire Lad.”77 Likewise, he claimed in retrospect that he had absorbed Socialism in a mood of despair at the even worse alternative, that of “not being a Socialist,” with all the—for him— intolerable Tory and Darwinian contempt for common humanity it seemed to imply.78 But in the years immediately following the Jameson Raid, he came to perceive a yawning chasm between Socialism and Christianity, despite

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what he called “the common ground of anti-selfish collectivism.” It turned upon the priority that Socialists gave to external change over the spiritual transformation uniquely effected by the “triad” of Christian virtues: humility—“the exalting paradox of Christianity” that made life feel marvellous rather than dull—activity, and cheerfulness.79 The impact of the raid on Chesterton as he described it in his Autobiography was at its most powerful in his concern to set Christianity well above the feeling that was abroad in many Socialist circles, “Christian and other,” of “the possible hopelessness of overcoming the giant forces of success.” For he recalled that the raid had made him take stock of the way in which something that seemed “inevitable and scientific and secure” could have carried a wave of popular and political opinion behind it, most of his family and friends included, not least through the power of the press. Chesterton continued: “I suddenly realised that I hated it; that I hated the whole thing as I had never hated anything before.” Not least, he could not abide the complacency with which the British people anticipated victory in the ensuing South African war between 1899 and 1902.80 He also condemned the hypocrisy of those who sought to defend the war on the ground that patriotism was paramount, yet attacked the Boers who fought for their independence. At least Socialists such as Sydney Webb were consistent in supporting the war in terms of “progress” alone.81 Then there was the defense by organizations such as the Imperial South African Association, and by Conservatives and Liberal Unionists such as Chamberlain and Milner of what the Boers called the “Outlanders”—the “commercial citizens of Johannesburg,” as Chesterton euphemistically termed the Jewish financiers of the Rand. He was quite certain that the latter would likewise be regarded as “Outsiders” at home.82 But in the perverse thinking of an Imperialist such as Milner, the Outlanders were “helots, a struggling democracy ground down by a powerful and cruel order.”83 Chesterton must have abhorred, too, the way in which the Conservative and Liberal Unionist Parties reaped the full advantage of Boer War fever in Britain. These parties won resounding victories at the polls in 1900 on the basis of the patriotic card they played to great effect, leaving a Liberal Party deeply divided by the war and weakened by the stigma of being “unpatriotic.”84 For Chesterton, the ignominy of the war was sealed by the subsequent introduction of indentured Chinese labor in the goldmines. To complacency and hypocrisy was added the sin of sophistry as politicians attempted to conceal a blatant act of slavery by comparing the workers with soldiers.85 But although a serious blow to his national pride in all these different ways, it seems that Chesterton had been able to absorb some of the shock of the Boer War in the light of the Dreyfus case that was almost contemporaneous with its outbreak. In his poem “To a Certain Nation” he had

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taken a staunch pro-Dreyfus line, vilifying France for deserting her revolutionary tradition in convicting an innocent individual of treason.86 While the poem was included in his first volume of poetry, The Wild Knight, published in November 1900, Chesterton had already become suspicious of unanimous support for Dreyfus among journalists in Britain. This he expressed in a note to the second edition of the volume in 1905, although on what grounds he did not make clear. His suspicions certainly predated his first meeting with Belloc in the summer of 1900, whose antiSemitic influence is commonly assumed to be the main force behind his volte-face.87 One source—almost certainly not the only one—was an Oxford friend of Oldershaw, “a quite independent, intelligent Scot,” who had informed Chesterton that the Dreyfusards among English editors “had practically proposed forgery by falsifying the size of handwriting.” This cryptic note was included in his Autobiography.88 Elsewhere, in an article in G. K.’s Weekly in 1928, he had inveighed against the British press for suppressing what seemed to him important information about the French captain, for example, that he had been seen “in German uniform at the German manoeuvres,” and that he had “obtained a passport for Italy and then gone to Germany.” Regardless of the truth of the allegations, he recalled that their concealment marked a great date in my life; it was the last time I was deceived. . . . After the Dreyfus case came the South African War; I had my warning; and I was not deceived. . . . Poor Dreyfus may have been innocent; not so innocent as I had been.

He went on to remark that the failure of the British press—acting “under the seal of the English name”—to report the allegations took a heavy toll on his “British serenity.” It never occurred to him to question whether the claims themselves were suspect and thus beyond the realms of responsible journalism. Nevertheless, what he perceived as serious shortcomings in the reporting of both the Dreyfus case and the Boer War marked the origins of the transfer of his patriotic allegiance from the pays legal that stood at the heart of the Englishness of his family to the pays réel in the tradition of Romantic and Radical politics. For Chesterton, England’s loss of national face was the real tragedy of the trend toward the manipulation of British public opinion at the end of the nineteenth century, and in many other instances to come.89 Henceforth in Chesterton’s mind, the combined fate of journalistic truth, England, national particularity, and patriotism was set, and the duty of reversing the setbacks they had recently suffered fell squarely upon Liberalism, art, literature, and religion. Common to all four custodians was a concern to fence things off, “ring[ing] them with a ring of

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words” in deference to their “sanctity.” By contrast, science—and the Liberal Imperialism it fed—regarded things as conditioned and condemned by external circumstances and processes. “Little lives and little peoples” especially found themselves caught in the deterministic trap set by science and upheld by its opportunist political allies. Science only succeeded in connecting a “thing with everything, that it may be natural and expected.” By contrast, “[a]rt isolates a thing from everything, that it may be unexpected, that it may be supernatural.”90 But the same idea did not apply to art itself; it could no more exist for its own sake than could politics, as the following chapter seeks to make clear.

NOTES 1. Philip Waller, Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1. 2. Jock Macleod, “Across the Great Divide? New Liberalism, Journalism and Majority Culture,” Australasian Victorian Studies Journal 6, no. 1 (2000): 68–83; Liberalism and Letters: Politics, Journalism and Literary Culture, 1886–1916 (forthcoming). 3. John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of English Literary Life since 1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 211, 164. 4. Macleod, Liberalism and Letters, Introduction. For Chesterton’s awareness of having written in the style of the causerie over many years, and his conception of its advantages, see ILN, 1 April 1933, 111. On the subtleties of an older kind of intimacy that prevailed in the higher reaches of Victorian journalism—between “critics and criticized” extending to a wider, although still select readership—see Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 58–59. 5. Mark Hampton, “The Press, Patriotism, and Public Discussion: C.P. Scott, The Manchester Guardian, and the Boer War, 1899–1902,” The Historical Journal 44, no. 1 (March 2001): 178–79. 6. See Mark Hampton, “Rethinking the ‘New Journalism’, 1850s–1930s,” Journal of British Studies 43, no. 2 (April 2004): 278–79; see also his Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 13, which projected the two journalistic ideals as scattered across different organs rather than interlocking in the same organs. Hampton makes no reference to The Daily News. 7. Stephen Koss, Fleet Street Radical: A.G. Gardiner and the Daily News (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 66. 8. For Chesterton’s heavy reliance on paradox, antithesis and dogmatic statement in exposing the lax standards of much contemporary journalism, see John D. Coates, “The Fleet Street Context and the Development of Chesterton’s Prose Style,” Prose Studies 6, no. 1 (May 1983): 57–74. 9. “The Meaning of Mr. Bernard Shaw,” DN, 30 October 1901, 8. 10. “Why I am a Catholic,” from Twelve Modern Apostles and Their Creed (New York: Duffield & Co., 1926), in CW III (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 130–31.

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Chesterton’s obsession with universality can be linked to a wider interest in developing an all-embracing religion that pervaded Liberal Protestantism in the late nineteenth century, only to be subverted by the rival claims of a more radical “New Spirituality.” This embraced a welter of mainly non-Christian, non-Western creeds, including theosophy. On their clash at the World’s Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893, see Linda Woodhead, “The World’s Parliament of Religions and the Rise of Alternative Spirituality,” in Reinventing Christianity: NineteenthCentury Contexts, ed. Linda Woodhead (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), 81–96. For Chesterton’s critique of the particularist mode in which Annie Besant’s theosophy was set, for all its aspirations toward universalism, see “The Universal Hat,” DN, 7 September 1907, 5. 11. Alzina Stone Dale claims that it took a full year after the rehabilitation of the paper in October 1899 for Chesterton’s first contribution to appear in December 1900; The Outline of Sanity: A Biography of G.K. Chesterton (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1982), 58. However he contributed articles much earlier, in the editions of 28 April 1900 (on Ruskin), 23 June 1900 (on Grant Allen), and 29 October 1900 (on the Anglican Church). 12. Hilaire Belloc, John L. Hammond, et al., Essays in Liberalism: By Six Oxford Men (London: Cassell, 1897). 13. John D. Coates, “Chesterton and The Speaker,” CR XXIV, nos. 1 and 2 (February and May, 1998): 36–40. 14. Ibid., 44. 15. On the ambiguity of Green’s philosophy on the question of the existence of a personal God, separate from man, and its resolution in the Idealist notion of the absolute in the work of Bernard Bosanquet and F. H. Bradley, see Melvin Richter, The Politics of Conscience: T.H. Green and his Age (1964; Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996), 184–86. The attempt by Henry Scott Holland and the Christian Social Union to seize the Idealist initiative for Anglicanism would explain Chesterton’s distance from the Church of England in the early years of the twentieth century. Although he never made clear his differences, it is conceivable that the emphasis of Holland et al. upon altruism focused on the state had, for him, come to obscure God Himself. In his Autobiography he talks of becoming “sundered in thought,” although “never in sympathy,” from his friends in the CSU; Autobiography (1936), in CW XVI (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 161. 16. Autobiography, 119. 17. Ibid., 116–18. 18. This difference is clear in his thinly disguised account of the takeover of The Speaker in ILN, 29 September 1906, 430. 19. John D. Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull, UK: Hull University Press, 1984), 58–60. 20. Hampton, “The Press, Patriotism, and Public Discussion,” 180–81, 196. 21. Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (London: Sheed & Ward, 1944), 119. Belloc developed a special distaste for the Boers on account of their Calvinism; see Christopher Hollis, The Mind of Chesterton (London: Hollis & Carter, 1970), 105. 22. For the tensions among Little Englanders, see Anna Vaninskaya, “‘My Mother Drunk or Sober’: G.K. Chesterton and Patriotic Anti-Imperialism,” History of European Ideas (forthcoming).

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23. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 120. 24. Koss, Fleet Street Radical, ch. 2. 25. “Anonymity and Further Counsels,” in All Things Considered (London: Methuen, 1908), 163–68. 26. There is an undated letter from Chesterton to Gardiner, but written while he was finishing his book on Browning published in May 1903, responding warmly to the suggestion that he might contribute to The Daily News on a weekly basis. However, he declined to commit himself until he had cleared his existing workload; Gardiner-Chesterton correspondence, British Library of Political and Economic Science. 27. Koss, Fleet Street Radical, 50. 28. Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis, 66–68. 29. The same pattern emerged in The Speaker following Chesterton’s critical review of a book opposing ritualism in the Church of England. After a hostile exchange between the authors and Chesterton in the correspondence pages, Hammond dissociated himself from Chesterton’s views. Chesterton was not given any further books on religion for review. “How the Church Stands To-Day,” review of William E. Bowen, The Crisis in the English Church (London: J. Nisbet, 1900), introduced by J. Llewelyn Davies, The Speaker, 29 October 1900; reprinted in CR XVII, no. 1 (February 1991): 3–8. Letters of protest by Bowen and Llewellyn Davies appeared in The Speaker, 10 November 1900, 157–58. Llewellyn Davies raged against “the lofty tone of spiritual philosophy with which [G. K. C.] lectures Mr. Bowen and me.” Hammond added a short note to Chesterton’s reply in the same issue of The Speaker, 10 November 1900, 159. 30. Coates suggests that this was due to the role Gardiner assigned to Chesterton as representing his lighter, non-political side that he felt he could not express as editor; Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis, 74. 31. Coates, “The Fleet Street Context,” 61–62, 65–66. 32. Koss, Fleet Street Radical, 66. 33. Anon., The Sunday Sun, 3 April 1904, in Denis J. Conlon, ed., G.K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgments (Antwerp: University of Antwerp Press, 1976), 89. 34. “The Life of Stevenson: Mr. Graham Balfour’s Biography,” DN, 18 October 1901, in A Handful of Authors: Essays on Books and Writers, ed. Dorothy Collins (London: Sheed & Ward, 1953), 1–2. 35. The charge of “pessimism” was laid against Stevenson by Henry Bellyse Baildon, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study in Criticism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1901). See Chesterton’s review of this book, “The Mistake about Stevenson,” in DN, 14 March 1901, reprinted in Twelve Types (London: Arthur Humphreys, 1902), 107–19. 36. Autobiography, 99. 37. “Browning and his Ideal,” DN, 19 August 1901, in A Handful of Authors, 91–95. For the literary debate on Browning—much of it centered on the vexed question of the relationship of religion to his poetry—that would have prompted this article, see Waller, Writers, Readers, and Reputations, 205–9. In “Browning and his Ideal,” Chesterton inveighed against the presentation of Browning as a “riddle for the wise, when he himself first and foremost saluted the simple” (95). He praised Stopford Brooke for a deeper insight into Browning in “Mr. Stopford Brooke’s ‘Browning,’” DN, 25 September 1902, 6.

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38. Autobiography, 101. At this time, and despite his High Church connections, he was still far from being an orthodox Christian, refraining from asserting the divinity of Christ in his famous controversy with the atheist and Socialist, Robert Blatchford; Dudley Barker, G.K. Chesterton: A Biography (London: Constable, 1973), 169. 39. Browning (London: Macmillan, 1903), 148–49. 40. Ibid., 184, 49–50. 41. Ibid., 130. 42. Ibid., 179–80. 43. Ibid., 186–87. 44. Ibid., 202. 45. Ibid., 87. 46. “The Mildness of the Journalist,” DN, 2 May 1903, 8. 47. “The Temple of Everything,” DN, 24 March 1903, 8. On the Blatchford controversy, see David J. Dooley, “Chesterton in Debate with Blatchford: The Development of a Controversialist,” in G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis: The Riddle of Joy, eds. Michael H. MacDonald and Andrew A. Tadie (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1989), 195–214. 48. Holbrook Jackson attempted to put into perspective even the most decadent end of the fin de siècle movement thus: “The decadence was decadent only when it removed energy from the common life and set its eyes in the ends of the earth, whether those ends were pictures, blue and white china, or colonies.” But even here, he insisted, the decadence was simply an example of spiritual overreach, emphasizing its roots in a “surfeit of desires” rather than “senility”; The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (1913; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939), 64. Chesterton, however, took a less indulgent view, particularly in relation to Wilde, whose many-sidedness emphasized that “universalism” was merely a contradiction in terms: to be “everything” meant being “nothing.” See “Oscar Wilde,” in A Handful of Authors, 143–46. 49. Ian Ker, The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 88, 91. 50. Chesterton admired Dickens for his mastery of the grotesque as integral to art, exemplifying both the “immortal” value of art and enhancing its insight into society. See his defense of Dickens and the enduring nature of his legacy on the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 1920; “Dickens 50 Years After,” The Observer, 6 June 1920. 51. Ker, The Catholic Reviva1, 79, 86, 88–89. 52. The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic (1929), in CW III, 150 (my italics). 53. Ker, The Catholic Revival, 88. 54. On Stephen, see J. Stapleton, “James Fitzjames Stephen: Liberalism, Patriotism, and English Liberty,” Victorian Studies 41, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 243–63. 55. “The Patriotic Idea,” in England: A Nation, ed. Lucien Oldershaw (London: R. Brimley Johnson, 1904), 16–17 (my italics). 56. See chapter 4. 57. See chapter 8. Christopher Hollis overemphasizes Chesterton’s dependence on Belloc’s ardent Francophilia for his views on “foreign policy”; he fails to note the factors indigenous to English culture that account for his gradual embrace of

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Rome as the spearhead of Christian civilization, and whose work was continued by the Church—and France above all other nations—after Rome’s decline; Hollis, The Mind of G.K. Chesterton, 158. 58. Twelve Types, 113, 111, 109. 59. Leo Hetzler, “Chesterton and Robert Louis Stevenson,” CR XVII, no. 3 (May 1991): 179–81. Like Stevenson, Chesterton certainly approved of the heavy focus on “consciousness” in the novels of Henry James. He praised James’s sense of “moral proportion,” for all his unique “purity and disinterestedness,” and also the “psychological brotherhood of men” that was central to his world; “Henry James” (undated), in The Common Man, ed. Dorothy Collins (London: Sheed & Ward, 1950), 144–48. His disdain was reserved for the later “stream of consciousness novels that divorced states of mind from external actions and loosened” the psychological connection between their protagonists. On the modern psychological novel, see Chris Baldick, The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 10, The Modern Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), ch. 9. 60. Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1927), 47. 61. Ibid., 94–95. 62. Hetzler, “Chesterton and Robert Louis Stevenson,” 184–85. 63. Robert Louis Stevenson, 92. Chesterton was particularly captivated by the image of the sea not as a vast, interminable expanse but as a “wall” which framed islands such as Britain, and also the horizon. He wrote: “[T]he horizon line is not only hard but tight, like a fiddle-string. I have always a nervous fear that the sealine will snap suddenly”; William Blake (London: Duckworth, 1910, reprinted 1920), 165. 64. Robert Louis Stevenson, 103; Robert L. Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883; London: Penguin Classics, 1999), 96–97. 65. “The Moral Philosophy of Meredith,” The Contemporary Review, 1909, in A Handful of Authors, 68–69; on the religious character of Paganism and Christianity, as opposed to materialism, see “A Glimpse of Paganism,” DN, 17 March 1906, 6. 66. “Women and the Philosophers,” The Speaker, 26 January 1901, 461–63, at 463. 67. “Wells and Liberty,” review of H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (London: Chapman & Hall, 1905), The Speaker, 1 July 1905, 325–26. 68. “The Temple of Everything,” DN, 24 March 1903, 8. 69. “A Denunciation of Patriotism,” review of John Godard, Patriotism and Ethics (London: Grant Richards, 1901), The Speaker, 18 May 1901, 197–98. 70. “Two Revolutions,” DN, 25 November 1905, 6; “The Evil Day,” DN, 26 June 1909, 6. On the negative impact of the “evolutionary myth” on modern politics as seen by Chesterton, see John D. Coates, “Chesterton and the Modernist Cultural Context,” CR XV, nos. 1 and 2 (February and May, 1989): 67–68, 72. 71. Belloc to Frances Chesterton, 23 July 1905, BL Add MS 73190, folio 6. 72. “On Black Lines,” DN, 9 September 1905, 6. 73. See Georgios Varouxakis, “‘Patriotism,’ ‘Cosmopolitanism’ and ‘Humanity’ in Victorian Political Thought,” European Journal of Political Theory 5, no. 1 (2006): 100–118. 74. “Patriotism under Three Flags,” DN, 27 June 1903, 6; for Angell, see Martin Ceadel, “Angell, Sir (Ralph) Norman (1872–1967),” ODNB, vol. 2, 150–53. 75. “Patriotism and Play-Acting,” The Speaker, 29 April 1905, 118–19.

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76. The earliest public expression of his opposition to Imperialism might well have been a review of Rudyard Kipling’s The Seven Seas (London: Methuen, 1896). Of the poem, “The Flowers,” an anonymous reviewer of The Seven Seas in The Athenaeum in 1896 had remarked scathingly that “to our private taste, there is always something a little exotic, almost artificial, in songs which, under an English aspect and dress, are yet so manifestly the product of other skies.” A fuller excerpt from the review heads the poem in Rudyard Kipling’s Verse (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1918), 251. Given Chesterton’s links with the Hodder family in 1896, his authorship cannot be discounted. 77. Autobiography, 141–44. 78. Actually, his early embrace of Socialism had been rather more positive than his later account would suggest. In a letter to his friend, Lucien Oldershaw, in 1891, he wrote of the “curious idea” by which he was sometimes seized of inviting to a tea party a number of “real” individuals such as Christ, Walt Whitman, St. Francis, Robert Burney (?), and Tom Mann (leader of the London dockers in the strike of 1889). He had chosen most of them, he wrote, “[b]efore I noticed that they were none of them victors of individualism[,] that they were all of a class which so-called individualism tends to depress and eliminate.” He maintained that “[u]nder socialism people would have peace and time to be individuals instead of being clerks.” He maintained further that “the dead level barracks idea of socialism is really much more true of warehouse commercialism”; Chesterton to Oldershaw, [1891], BL Add MS 73197, folio 6. 79. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 74–75. 80. Autobiography, 113. 81. “Fabian Futilities,” “Letters to the Editor,” DN, 25 September 1901. 82. Autobiography, 114. 83. Unpublished essay, “The Confessions of Alfred Milner,” BL Add MS 73308A, folios 176–77. The essay was written in response to Milner’s summary of the progress of the war in 1901 in which he admitted that the past year had been one of “retrogression.” But for Chesterton, he stopped well short of the truth, which was that the year had been “appalling” for the cause that Milner represented. 84. Paul Readman, “The Conservative Party, Patriotism, and British Politics: The Case of the General Election of 1900,” Journal of British Studies 40, no. 1 (January 2001): 115, 120. Chesterton had remonstrated with one erstwhile Liberal who had voted Conservative in the election that a sense of patriotism could inform either support for, or opposition to the war. He maintained that the cause of the erstwhile Liberal was ill-served by appealing to the tradition of Cobden and Bright as the benchmark of “true” Liberalism against several significant deviations of late: “Has it ever struck him that they were also called ‘anti-English’ for attacking the now entirely discredited Crimean War?”; “Future of Liberalism: Why Old Liberals should Remain Faithful,” The Daily Chronicle, 23 October 1900, 8. 85. “The Sophist,” DN, 2 April 1904, 6. This concern over Chinese labor contrasts with his neglect of black slave labor on Boer farms; see Vaninskaya, “‘My Mother, Drunk or Sober.’” 86. CP, 355–56. Chesterton wrote an “Open Letter to M. Le President” on T. Fisher Unwin notepaper sometime in the late 1890s, dwelling long and hard on the uncertainty of the evidence against Dreyfus. It was “in no way necessary that

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you should entertain the same absolute conviction of the prisoner’s innocence that I do—all that is needed is that you should admit that there is a serious doubt of his guilt. Better that twenty traitors should escape for lack of evidence, than you his judge should wake up in your peaceful home in the watches of the night and reflect that perhaps an innocent and loyal officer was also waking in his cheerless prison to face in the darkness an immortality of shame”; BL Add MS 73308A, folio 127. 87. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 117–18. 88. Autobiography, 301. 89. “Straws in the Wind: Dreyfus and Dead Illusions,” GKW, 25 February 1928, 993. It was the outcome of the Rennes retrial on 9 September 1899, in which Dreyfus was once again found guilty, that seems to have hardened Chesterton’s attitude toward the British press; see chapter 6 below. This was a full month before the outbreak of the Boer War on 11 October. For the mood of sensationalism and melodrama with which the Dreyfus case was followed in Britain—particularly but not exclusively in the yellow press—and the national stereotypes, both British and French, that informed it, see Martyn Cornick, “The Impact of the Dreyfus Affair in Late-Victorian Britain,” Franco-British Studies 22 (1996): 57–82. 90. “The Poetic Quality of Liberalism,” The Independent Review (February 1905): 55–56, 60.

3 ✛

The Insularity of English Art, Letters, Politics, and Thought Chesterton’s Critique of the Fin de Siècle

F

oremost among the many formative influences on Chesterton’s early thought was a controversy about the merits of artistic and literary detachment from society. As we saw in chapter 1, he was disquieted by support for this stance among the fin de siècle movement. Not least, his unease was prompted by concern about its effects upon the individuality—and hence creativity—of artists and writers. But he was equally anxious about the fate of certain political ideals such as liberty, citizenship, and patriotism in the context of a self-contained aesthetic sphere. This might help to explain why he kept up the pressure on the fin de siècle long after its star had fallen. He clearly believed that the damage it had done in its own and other realms was still being played out years after the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in 1895 brought the Decadent movement into disrepute.1 While he never mentioned the Bloomsbury movement directly, he could not have been unaware of its role in sustaining the fin de siècle divorce between art and society for similar, culturally subversive ends, though in new ways.2 For Chesterton, it was impossible to denounce the consequences of the Decadence without continuing to scourge the cause. As he recognized later in life, the death of the fin de siècle movement had been for him a “living or rather everlasting death,” although in a further, unacknowledged sense than that of having been a “first hatred,” and thereby almost as immortal as “first love.”3 This interpretation of Chesterton’s enduring antagonism to the fin de siècle is reinforced by a famous article he contributed to The Speaker in the midst of the Boer War, especially in the light of his wider history and intellectual development. In “A Gap in English Education,” he protested 55

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against what he called the recent “decay of patriotism” through which “lust of territory” had been confounded with “ancient love of country.” He characterized “patriotic” support for such degenerate national goals in the phrase, “my mother, drunk or sober.” He contrasted the current travails of English patriotism with “the great heritage of high national sentiment” that could be found in English literature, science, philosophy, and political eloquence. On this basis alone, he believed, England was well able to hold her own among other nations. Nor were such accomplishments of insular significance only, having played a distinguished role in the “history of universal thought and sentiment.” However, of late they had become overlaid by a mentality that was “dull, common and brutal.” For this Chesterton blamed the schools, not least because they had failed to teach the national literature. Instead of basking in the intellectual and literary glory of their country, schoolchildren (boys, at least) were condemned to a “dull and infantile” type of patriotism of the kind that was associated with boxes of tin soldiers.4 Yet for Chesterton this lacuna at the heart of the (state) school curriculum would have been symptomatic of a deeper disorder. There is certainly no reason to doubt that he had anything but warmth toward the “toy soldiers” approach to patriotism, as he intimated himself in the article. The wider truth was that, with one or two honorable exceptions, artists and writers no longer took a lead in promoting high national purposes. England was now reeling from the effects, the laudable popular patriotism of earlier times that his grandfather represented proving all too vulnerable to manipulation by self-interested elites. Matters were made worse by what seemed like the slavish imitation by English scholars of the academic institutions of other countries. He likened the proposal to establish the continental-inspired British Academy in 1902 to Watkin’s Folly, an abortive attempt to construct in Wembley an iron tower higher than the Eiffel Tower. An opportunity had been lost, he believed, to extend and popularize the great work of English letters that had taken place outside the universities from Shakespeare to Keats, and in a spirit of “emulation” that was more truly international in preserving national differences than that of mere “imitation.”5 This chapter draws together Chesterton’s critique of artistic and literary withdrawal on the one hand and the corruption of patriotism on the other into a single narrative; it does so with reference to a number of writings that turn out to be closely related. Further, it links these concerns to his perception of a religious vacuum, extending to a more general “dogmatic” vacuum, at the heart of modern ethics and politics. Finally, it focuses on his conception of the spiritual vitality of nations as far more important than their material resources, however far-flung. This was central to Chesterton’s response to what he perceived as the in-

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sularity of late Victorian art, letters, politics, and thought for all their much-vaunted “modernism.”

DECADENCE AND THE NEW TORYISM As the new century opened Chesterton was much preoccupied with the preciousness of artists and writers.6 This he associated not just with the 1890s Decadence but a wider complacency—almost ennui—that had been developing in English letters for several decades. The rot had set in with victory over the Utilitarians by Ruskin, Tennyson, Carlyle, and Browning, a victory so complete that it had brought down not just the “vast brick temple” of those “servile believers in the present” but the whole genre of militant prophecy that had flourished in early Victorian England. This had been impressed upon him in reviewing W. G. Collingwood’s biography of Ruskin in 1901, a eulogy that had, he thought, missed Ruskin’s significance. Chesterton pointed to the fact that Ruskin’s humor had been lost on Collingwood. But he warned against any suggestions of kinship between Ruskin and present espousers of “an art yellow”: Ruskin “was as fond of nonsense as Mr. Max Beerbohm. Only he was fond of other things too. He did not ask humanity to dine on pickles.” With the passing of Ruskin and his generation went the propensity to mount pulpits; the large following attracted by modern writers such as Ibsen and Henry James was attributable precisely to their refusal to engage in prophecy in the widest sense of exhortation. Chesterton speculated on the various factors behind this change: “[misplaced] humility as well as fear, [exaggerated] camaraderie as well as skepticism.”7 Whatever the cause, the cultural shift was a matter of deep regret to him; it marked the disengagement of art from life through its disengagement from philosophy and religion in turn.8 The net result was a large patriotic deficit, exacerbated by a penchant among the governing class for compromise that led to stalemate, not the working compromises of old and for which the English nation was once renowned. The separation of art—in the largest sense—from the people was “the most enormous tragedy of our time,” as Chesterton remarked in reviewing a posthumous volume of essays in 1906 by the writer and editor R. H. Hutton; it had been brought about as much by complacency as by conscious pose, as the book before him made clear. Unconscious of belonging to a generation of writers who, inexcusably, had let down their guard, Hutton explored questions that were now irrelevant: for example, whether writers and poets should be politicians. “The argument,” Chesterton wrote, “is whether an author should govern; the fact is that the average author does not even vote.”9

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For Chesterton, the movement of “art for art’s sake” in late nineteenthcentury art and letters, influenced by the new pagan Romanticism of Théophile Gautier, was a prime manifestation of the malaise of the modern creative mind. He recalled that at the time, I was more inclined to substitute “no art, for God’s sake.” I would rather have had no art at all than one which occupies itself in matching shades of peacock and turquoise for a decorative scheme of blue devils. I started to think it out, and the more I thought of it the more certain I grew that the whole thing was a fallacy; that art could not exist apart from, still less in opposition to, life; especially the life of the soul, which is salvation; and that great art never had been so much detached as that from conscience and common sense, or from what my critic would call moral earnestness.10

In his eyes, Gautier’s dictum, “art for art’s sake,” certainly mirrored the movement toward “ethics for ethics’ sake” in morality, among men of letters, at least. Both had become severed from “a general view of life itself” grounded in two primal human instincts: a sense of mystery and delight in existence on the one hand, and fear of God on the other. This contention provided Chesterton with the framework for an interesting exploration of the work of the artist James McNeill Whistler, and the poet W. E Henley, upon their deaths in 1903.11 It was partially inspired by The Domain of Art by Sir Martin Conway, a mountaineer, art historian, and then Slade Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Cambridge, which Chesterton reviewed favorably in The Daily News the year before.12 Conway linked art simply to the expression of human joy. Chesterton sought to denigrate the tendency in art away from this norm in the late Victorian period, and the parallel trend he perceived in morals away from “fear.” Both were symptoms of “a new Toryism”—a synonym for degenerateness in his eyes—which enjoined artists “to care for nothing but art, and ethicalists for nothing but ethics.” He felt that a resurgent Toryism in art had infected even the religious art of the preRaphaelites, one of the few English sources of the fin de siècle; it was to this movement that the craftsmen of the 1890s—William Morris and Walter Crane, for example—looked back in shifting the focus of the nineties’ renaissance away from “art for art’s sake.”13 Chesterton regarded the Pre-Raphaelites as the epitome of the secular mind in expressing no general enthusiasm, no shared view of life and the spiritual fountain from which it flowed. The pictures of Rossetti and Burne-Jones were so overlaid with German pessimism and doubt as to be blasphemous, he wrote, in reviewing a book that seemed oblivious to this shortcoming.14 His answer to the criticism that he should have supported these fin de siècle movements in accordance with his doctrine of boundaries and limits is easily anticipated. It was that art and morality had es-

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chewed those “extravagant act[s] of faith in the value of something” upon which all revolutions were founded and all clarity depended.15 Moreover, in understandably flying in the face of an “immoral morality” in art that was imbued with “snobbishness, vulgarity and cowardice,” the fin de siècle movement had rejected morality altogether. In doing so it had rejected that framework of limitation and convention that was integral to individual identity and cosmic worth at every level of existence. In this sense it had served only to obscure the outlines of art and morality. Chesterton maintained in connection with Whistler—his manifestos, at least—that art had become “supercilious.”16 Whistler joined Henley in epitomizing the “precocity” of thinkers, writers, and artists that had accompanied the abandonment of any interest in what agnostics of the previous generation had termed “the unknown,” or God. Whistler’s insouciance presented itself as an “excessive and exaggerated modesty,” so different from the “splendid and inspired impudence” of G. F. Watts, for all his personal humility.17 Yet, Chesterton argued, this defect was contrary to Whistler’s artistic skill in producing light, soft strokes through the use of strong pencils and other tools; it was the equivalent in art, he thought, of the “powerful mildness” underlying Christianity. The subtlety of Chesterton’s conception of outlines and the heavy symbolic importance he attached to them is especially apparent in his perceptive account of Whistler’s technique: The great painter’s line was never so faint and filmy as when he worked in charcoal or black chalk or such rich and dark substances, capable, if necessary, of painting the hollows of hell. His touch on the paper was a kind of terrible caress. He seemed at times to have brushed it only with a feather, but the feather was in the wing of an archangel, who could have laid the world waste with the whirlwind of his wings. Through the whole runs the great law of force and gentleness, which is the same in ethics. Whistler the painter gave what the healthy moralist gives—hints.

In this respect Whistler’s paintings served as “sharp moral criticisms” of Henley, whose work underlined the violence of ethics untempered by “wisdom”; the poet’s stroke with the pen took the form of a “savage scratch” rather than a complex action touched by God.18 This was encapsulated in Henley’s poem “Invictus.” with its keynote of defiance in the face of the suffering and futility of the world: Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

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Chapter 3 It matters not how straight the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.19

Ultimately, Whistler and Henley were more divided than united by the “Tory Revival,” whatever their perceptions otherwise.20 Surely some compensation for these artistic dead-ends could be found in the cult of “realism” in fiction? This Chesterton denied; in no sense did realist novels or stories strengthen the contact between literature and “life.” Like the emotional violence of Henley’s poetry, literary realism for Chesterton was more remote from everyday experience than the sentimentalism it sought to supplant. The “savage pleasantry and colossal cynicism” of Kipling’s short stories particularly emphasized the artificiality of realism. By contrast, with all their melodrama, Chesterton asserted, the ballad and the “penny dreadful” were the true faces of realism in literature, as against the “modern idolatry of art” that put the “length” so typical of the ballad at a severe literary discount.21 Chesterton often made the point in these years that aesthetic excellence in poetry and letters was inversely related to their spiritual worth.22 It was undoubtedly the inspiration of Browning that fueled Chesterton’s reaction to the fin de siècle. This is evident in his remonstrance against the parallel that Walter Raleigh attempted to draw between Browning and Whistler in 1905. The context was the Whistler memorial exhibition hosted by The Royal Academy, and the basis of Raleigh’s comparison was their common experience of rejection by the public. But for Chesterton the analogy foundered on Browning’s indifference to his own literary fate, his ability to laugh at himself and enter into a wider “cosmic laughter,” his goodwill toward his opponents, his “thoughtlessness and self-abandon,” which ensured that he, unlike Whistler, was a great man as well as a great artist.23 In Chesterton’s view, to be a great artist and nothing more was to be a deformed human being. Chesterton wrote despairingly in 1902 that the only genuine echo of Browning’s generation in the present was the reissue of the work of a mid-Victorian poet, Roden Noel. Like Chesterton, Noel praised the early Victorians for their faith, hope, and sense of purpose that was particularly expressed in the Great Exhibition of 1851, however ugly its exhibits. Against the fin de siècle, it was an age that really believed that armies were meant for something else than the conquest of savages, and books for something else than the amusement of Mr. Andrew Lang; that the function of art meant something more than keeping pace with French book-covers, and the function of patriotism something more than keeping pace with French clockwork.

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In reviewing the work Chesterton maintained of those who inspired Noel that they “brought poetry into politics: Mr. Alfred Austin, and even Mr. Rudyard Kipling, can only bring politics into poetry.”24 The contrast between earlier and later Victorians that informed Chesterton’s conception of modernity as marking a sharp turn for the worse in the realm of literature was perhaps most apparent to him in Edward Fitzgerald’s edition of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859). He was struck by the spectacle of Omar taunting what was obviously the modern, pantheistic deity in the mistaken belief that he was attacking the abuses of religion per se. Of the God of the medieval philosophers Fitzgerald’s Omar was oblivious; he thus succumbed to the snares of Eastern mysticism that, like the pantheism he rejected, could only result in passivity. For Chesterton, Fitzgerald’s God was made by modern humanity in its own image, that is to say omnipotent but “unshackled by the moral law” through which the God of “medieval theory” had made individuals responsible for their acts. In this respect the Rubáiyát epitomized for Chesterton the “moral isolationism” of the high Victorian age, its conscious removal of itself from the past such that a recent critic could interpret Browning as if he were a “cave man, the first man who really wondered what the world was like.” It was a distancing that made Tennyson’s faith seem pallid compared to the “elemental,” “masculine” quality of Browning’s, grounded in sound theological distinctions; Tennyson was “not quite masculine enough to be devout.” Chesterton’s remarks here were prompted by a book on Victorian poetry published in 1907 by an author who had signally failed to appreciate the parochialism of most of his subjects, and his own narrowness as a critic in the process. The parochialism of the later Victorian poets was not lessened by their turning away from Europe to—in Fitzgerald’s case—Persia; while Fitzgerald remained an artist in the highest European sense, the product of his artistic sensibility was like a “dirty Oriental rug, meant to make men sleep and forget energy and honour.”25 Clearly for Chesterton, salvation for the modern world lay not in the Eastern present but the European past. But it was not a past that could be inhabited simply as a refuge from the “ugliness” of the present, William Morris style. Chesterton’s alternative “modernism” to that of his contemporaries is nowhere more evident than in an early essay on Morris. Here he berated Morris for failing to see that new aesthetic standards should spring “out of the life we [that is, the inhabitants of the present] lead and prefer to lead,” not those of some distant age to which return was made in the style of a historical “fancy-dress” party. What Chesterton most admired in medieval figures such as Chaucer was their sheer authenticity, a notion that was at the heart of his cultural and political universe, as we shall see in chapter 6. The authenticity of medieval

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humanity was manifested in their refusal to “[dress] themselves in the manner of the bowmen at the battle of Senlac, or [paint] themselves an aesthetic blue, after the custom of the ancient Britons.” In the same way, Morris would have done better if he had embraced, not shrunk from, his times, making even the “humblest necessities beautiful.” There were no “modern things made beautiful” in Morris’s lexicon of style, Chesterton lamented, no lampposts, letter boxes, engines, or bicycles enhanced by art—only gates, fountains, cups, chairs, and reading desks.26 Chesterton was never content to take the present as sui generis. He identified an important precedent for the modern trend in art and criticism toward disconnection—what he termed the “deification of technique”27—in the worst kind of Puritanism. As he explained in an early essay on Charles II—marking the beginning of a lifelong interest in and sympathy with the Stuarts—this religion had erred in turning Christianity into a tight logical system through the influence of Calvinism; it “bound omnipotence itself in the chains of syllogism,” reducing its exponents to “intellectual bullies.” When they met their nemesis in Charles II, whose rebellion took the form of unleashing “all the chaotic and unclassed parts of human nature . . . left over by every rationalistic system of life,” their legacy flowed into the channels of that “exultation in sobriety, the frenzy of a restraint . . . that still burns in the heart of England.”28 In kicking away the supports of religion in everyday life, Puritanism had retreated into an ethic of “piety for piety’s sake.”29 In this it was the direct forbear of Evangelicalism, a movement that was responsible for that “ecstatic isolation of the religious sense that had done incalculable harm to religion.” Against this narrow cult of spirituality a painter such as Watts and other great men of the early Victorian age were a standing rebuke.30 But their protest was of little avail. As well as licensing an ethic of “art for art’s sake,” the result was the general ethical confusion that marked the London of his youth, a vague belief in moral progress destroying any basis for distinguishing between good and bad, false and true, or indeed “up or down.”31 However, Chesterton’s despair of contemporary art and letters was not entirely unrelieved. It gave him much pleasure to review a book of “miscellanies” by the poet and dramatist, John Davidson, an erstwhile contributor to The Yellow Book, but who, in the new century, was clearly attempting to escape from his past. In issuing a compilation of different literary forms—“dialogues, fables, lyrics, patches of drama, threads of narrative”—as in a scrapbook, and under the revealing title, The Rosary, Davidson had taken a welcome step back from art in the rarefied way he had practiced it previously. In doing so, he had turned away from his earlier insistence on the “incongruity” of things as a way of asserting the distinctiveness of art; he now proceeded to connect rather than disentangle the complex and multitudinous “threads of life,” embracing “the vast

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metaphysical democracy of things” that was consistent with humanity. Indeed, Chesterton wrote, Davidson had by only a small margin stopped short of embracing journalism as the “new art” toward which he was feeling his way in renouncing the “new art,” old style, of the fin de siècle.32 Alas, as Chesterton reflected a few years later on the impoverished nature of intellectual and spiritual life in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Davidson fell victim to the leaden atmosphere in which he had the misfortune to come of artistic age; he took his own life, a fate he shared with another contemporary the same year, the dramatist St. John Hankin.33 Chesterton’s spirits had also risen at the end of 1902 with the publication of William Watson’s volume of poems, For England, significantly subtitled Poems Written during Estrangement.34 He wrote a favorable review of the book for The Fortnightly Review, still the powerhouse of intellectual Liberalism. As a vigorous opponent of the recent war, Watson’s concern was to rescue England from the “inauthenticity” that had recently corrupted its morals and literature as well as its politics. Watson wrote as an Englishman, Chesterton insisted; he embodied “that ingrainedly ethical turn of mind” in England, “which finds moralising a feast of pleasure,” the antithesis of Puritanism. He applauded Watson’s “ethical scorn” of the Decadents in which the poet, admitting his moral imperfection, nevertheless refrained from “pay[ing] to the world” The evil and the insolent courtesy Of offering it my baseness as a gift.

Chesterton especially held up Watson against Kipling and the essentially continental school of realism associated with Zola and Maupassant that he believed Kipling had imported into England. This was a country in the gravest danger of succumbing to such alien strains as a result of “over-civilization”; “for when men have become very luxurious, novelty is the last and only luxury.” The contrast between the two writers was particularly evident in the landscape that inspired their poetry: in Watson’s case, Northern and English, “a landscape of great uplands and huge pale dawns” reflecting his Yorkshire roots; in the case of Kipling, an “alien landscape, with a stretch of dry places, palms, and a floor of fire.” The two landscapes reflected wholly different moralities and temperaments, the one the “vague practicality, the vague reverence, the vague and exuberant generosity of England,” which made it the most “merciful of nations,” the other the “Southern ethic of the knife” with which Kipling and his associates seemed bent upon “infecting our statesmanship.” In this respect Kipling was another example of the “New Toryism” in politics and morals that isolated him from humanity, while estranging true patriots

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and democrats like Watson from their country, or rather the travesty their country had become. Watson’s unpopularity was hence guaranteed in the current climate, and wrongly so. But, argued Chesterton, there was no reason to assume that patriotism was homogeneous: The doctrine of the united nation is simply a piece of mental confusion. It means that at the precise moment when our country is in most danger you are to become suddenly frivolous and take any opinion you may find lying about the street.35

If this told against the Imperialists, it was fatal also to the patriotism of “little Englanders” such as himself. But Chesterton never showed any awareness that his alternative patriotic ideal might be vulnerable to the same criticism of “partiality” masquerading as universality. He was more interested in understanding and combating what he conceived as the distortion and devaluing of patriotism at the hands of others.

TRUE AND FALSE PATRIOTISM, AND ANTI-PATRIOTISM For Chesterton, there was a clear political as well as moral dimension to aestheticism conceived as the new Nonconformist conscience, only “narrower and harder” than the old.36 This took the form of the threat which a false patriotism and in some cases outright opposition to patriotism posed to the bond between people and country that had been sealed by religion and politics in earlier ages. Both those who corrupted and those who rejected patriotism were impervious to the “mystery” upon which society, no less than art and morality, was built, and against which art and morality had turned of late. Like art and morality in recent times also, patriotism had become the malleable instrument of minority—in this case, Imperialist—interests instead of a common possession answering to certain fundamental human needs. The parallels here were too strong to be merely coincidental. An early article in The Daily News in the autumn of 1901 developed these ideas in connection with a recent volume of patriotic poetry drawn from across the British Empire, about which Chesterton was scathing. Patriotism, he maintained, was a living phenomenon throughout the whole of history, “deep, continuous and unconquerable.” As a universal phenomenon, too, it was therefore mystical, like “love, war, ancestry, death, and child-birth.”37 The varied forms that real patriotism had assumed and the different conditions in which it had taken root did not detract from this one essential truth, nor did “cheap scientific statements about its being an extension of this, or a development of that.” On the contrary, the

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strength of patriotism was a function of weakness and defeat, as reflected in the great lyric literature of the world; it took the form of sentiment steeped in memory and antiquity, the defining moment of birth for all nations, and an aura of “exultant melancholy,” the only basis of a permanent fidelity. It was in this respect that Chesterton found wanting the odes to Britain’s imperial grandeur included in the anthology, and whose inclusion he resented in a book entitled Patriotic Song. He did not rule out the possibility that “our great commonwealths overseas [would] grow in future days the laurel of patriotic literature”; they were, he believed, “rich enough in essential manliness (the only possible source of poetry)” to do so. But, rubbing salt into the wound of a puffed-up imperial patriotism, he proceeded to argue that colonial poetry would have to wait some time before it could compete with the masterpieces of the “maturity” of nations. “We want no hot-house literatures,” he declared, “and feel that we could manage to get on without such verse as the following: ‘Cooee! I send my voice Far North to you, Rose of the water’s choice Dear England true.’”

Patriotism would not flourish while “pay[ing] court to England”; what was required was anxiety not pride, not least anxiety fixed upon misplaced concern about loss of superiority among other imperial powers.38 Such anxiety informed Chesterton’s parody of Kipling’s poem, “Recessional,” in “Lost.” This was a poem which savaged the false sense of Imperialist priorities underlying Kipling’s critique of late Victorian complacency, a critique that nonetheless seemed to have a complacency all of its own.39 Whether merely sarcastic or vituperative, Chesterton’s various denunciations of patriotic triumphalism share a striking similarity to St. Paul’s understanding of the power bestowed by God’s grace as being “at full strength in weakness.” In his second letter to the Corinthians, the apostle gloried not in his virtues but in his infirmities so that he should not be “exalted above measure” and lose “the power of Christ.”40 In Chesterton’s response to the hapless Imperialist songwriters and the arrogance of Kipling, the association between a patriotism infused with humility on the one hand and divine grace on the other, emphasizes once again the mutual reinforcement and enrichment of patriotism and Christianity in his thought. But though he could take some satisfaction from having ridiculed the novice Imperialists thus, other contemporary challenges to patriotism did not present quite such easy targets. In his view the threat to patriotism

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came as much from those who wished to strengthen the link between art and (Christian) morality, but in the most misguided of ways, as from those who sought to push them apart; the authority they wielded was much greater than that of the authors of Imperialist ditties. Tolstoy in particular became the focus of Chesterton’s concern in this regard. The Russian novelist and social reformer formed the subject of two further articles Chesterton wrote for The Daily News toward the end of 1901, and of a contribution he made to an edition of “Bookman Booklets” on Tolstoy in 1903.41 The 1901 articles—both highly critical in tone— were prompted by recent publications, one by a disciple of Tolstoy, the other a reissue of Tolstoy’s short stories.42 They were republished with only slight modification the following year in Twelve Types, and again in 1912, in a pamphlet by the same publisher.43 The “Bookman” essay viewed Tolstoy with somewhat less alarm than the Daily News articles, highlighting his importance as “one of the very few men alive who have a real, solid, and serious view of life.”44 In this he seemed to Chesterton to be at one with two recent prophets at home, Belloc and Shaw (whose work Chesterton first surveyed in The Daily News in the week that followed his second essay on Tolstoy in October 190145). But the 1903 piece also echoed Chesterton’s concern expressed two years previously about the dangers of a movement toward “simplification” in modern thought that often seemed to accompany the return to “dogma.” This was because it reflected a misguided tendency toward the “simplification of life” among contemporaries.46 Such a defect marred the work of both Shaw and Tolstoy, if in different ways, although not that of Belloc. Shaw’s detachment and intellectual Puritanism was only a milder form of Tolstoy’s outright rejection of all that he deemed objectionable in nature—love and war especially—in endeavoring to return to its “pure” form; Shaw merely abhorred the idealization of these pursuits, and the conception of basic human ties such as those of patriotism, religion, and marriage in terms of desire and sentiment rather than utility. But for Chesterton, Shaw—like Tolstoy—was guilty of flying in the face of reality by denying the romance at the heart of it.47 Chesterton argued that the simplification of life was the inevitable outcome of our “deep and continuous contemplation of things” and their unification in the process at the most fundamental level. This broad historical perspective was the substance of his brief amplification in the composite essay on Tolstoy of 1902 in Twelve Types.48 But, he argued, in searching for the essence of things and “a return to nature,” humanity had shown a tendency to merge into its foundations, like a cat chasing its tail.49 This concern was clearly associated with his belief in the unalterable fact of human creativity implicit in the existence of a God who made man in his image. The wrong turning that human inquiry had taken in the

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movement toward simplification affected a range of secular and religious ideologies alike; it was the root cause of a new “fanaticism,” like the example that he gave in 1903 of a Tolstoyan community living in Canada that had liberated all its animals in protest against possession and control.50 Chesterton’s first reactions to Tolstoy were clearly troubled, and remained so as the Tolstoyan grip on political thought in Britain tightened in the years following Tolstoy’s death in 1910. This surge of interest prompted the republication of the 1902 composite essay a decade later.51 Chesterton was all in favor of the simplification of thought if it meant that early Victorian quality, associated with Ruskin and others, that “gave a man the courage to mount a pulpit above the head of his fellows.”52 But the void left by Ruskin’s generation and the ensuing complacency was filled with a new sort of “simplicity”; fundamentally, it spelled a loss of moral and theological perspective as reflected in approaches to the most ordinary human practices, and hence confusion of the first order. In Heretics (1905) he merely rephrased in a more teasing way what he had set out with great seriousness in 1901: Tolstoy would have done better to pursue “high living and plain thinking” than “plain living and high thinking.”53 For Chesterton, Tolstoy’s basic problem was an alarming deficiency as a poet and hence a mystic, the source of all sanity. In the 1903 essay Chesterton readily linked enthusiasm to happiness, but only when informed by mysticism; in the absence of mysticism, enthusiasm degenerated into fanaticism. This could not be more obvious than in Tolstoy’s attacks upon patriotism and related virtues, as Chesterton spelled out in the original Daily News articles. The shortcomings of Tolstoy and his followers led him to question their claim to be true messengers of Christ. In these articles, Chesterton emphasized how Tolstoy had played fast and loose with the Gospels in order to defend, with “strange optimism and appalling logical courage,” a new Quakerism. He singled out for special analysis Tolstoy’s wilful distortion of the fifth commandment, confus[ing] two entirely distinct things. Christ commanded us to have love for all men, but even if we had equal love for all men, to speak of having the same love for all men is merely bewildering nonsense.

Even Christ himself was not above a partiality for Jerusalem, Chesterton claimed. Here Chesterton made free with the Gospels himself, eliding patriotism with something quite different: the focus and destiny that Jesus found in Jerusalem, in keeping with His status as a prophet.54 But Chesterton regarded Tolstoyism as a harbinger of something even more disconcerting. This was of the order of a major break from the older rationalism of the nineteenth century that had merely “dethrone[d] God and drive[n] the angels before” itself. What he termed this “newer race of

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sceptics” had abjured not only “elementary creeds,” but also “the elementary laws of mankind, property, patriotism, civil obedience.” We are faced, he maintained, by such “contempt for all the old ideals of family and nation [as] would evoke horror in a thieves’ kitchen.”55 The disparity between two sets of ethics in Tolstoy, those of the “high art” of his fiction and those of the “manufactured and didactic art” of his doctrine, could not be greater. While Tolstoy’s tales were notable for their human sensitivity, he “screamed” in his doctrine for “an obscene purity, shouting for an inhuman peace, hacking up human life into small sins with a chopper, sneering at men, women, and children out of respect to humanity, combining in one chaos of contradictions an unmanly Puritan and an uncivilized prig.”56 The intensity of Chesterton’s outburst was startling. While he credited Tolstoy with the power to bring rationalists and would-be fellow revolutionists to their (religious) senses, it is not clear that he actually preferred Tolstoy to his godless opponents. Tolstoy and his followers certainly stopped Chesterton in his tracks as early as 1901, transfixed by their simultaneous revolt against “those elementary instincts of the man and the gentleman which cling to the very bones of our civilization,” yet embrace of “two or three remote Oriental anecdotes written in corrupt Greek.” There was something “stunning and hypnotic”—and ultimately incongruous—about this development.57 It worried him that civilization could be so comprehensively rejected in the misguided search for simplicity; for civilization was as “natural” to some societies as barbarism was to others, as he had occasion to point out to Edward Carpenter.58 The ethic of “turning the other cheek” had been transformed into an absolute principle of “never conquer[ing] by force, but always, if we can, conquer[ing] by persuasion.” Chesterton ridiculed this philosophy by pointing to the futility of persuasion in the legend of St. George, on the one hand, and the example of Nero, on the other.59 Chesterton made a similar point in The Speaker a few months previously in attacking John Godard for confusing patriotism with militant jingoism, and hailing “humanitarianism” based on Christian ethics in its place. We encountered his review of Godard’s book in chapter 2 in connection with his conception of national attachments as fundamentally archaic in nature. But the review is also significant for drawing an important distinction. This was between Christianity as a symbol, “the dim and shifting symbol, of a certain love of all things, a certain loyalty to the universe to which we all rise in our highest moments,” far transcending mere “love of humanity,” and those working loyalties which colour and inform everyday life and which we have to preserve in order to preserve our mode of life. That terrible truce in which the lion lies down with the lamb is a vision, not a daily rule.60

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Coates has argued that this passage points clearly to the separation of Christianity and patriotism in Chesterton’s early thought as antithetical moral codes.61 And indeed they are separate at these two opposing levels. But as Chesterton’s commentary on Tolstoy in the same year makes clear, they are reconciled for him in the middle region in which patriotism—as integral to civilization—provides a conduit of Christian faith and an essential weapon in its defense. This ruled out the passivity that might be suggested by his embrace of Christian contemplation in its highest and most sublime form, however far-fetched his opposing conception of the easy conquest of paganism through arms in later works such as The Ballad of the White Horse (1911) may appear.62 Chesterton’s emphasis on the ties between Christianity and patriotism informed his attack upon what he believed were the spurious links between science and patriotism that had been drawn recently, not least by eugenicists. Just a few months before the Godard review, he had written a scathing review of a book by the sociologist Karl Pearson, also in The Speaker. In the forefront of the “national efficiency” movement in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century, Pearson—to Chesterton’s mind— had robbed patriotism of its moral grandeur by tying it to selective breeding and international thuggery under the scientific pretext of “following nature”; in doing so he failed to see that nature was not uniform and that “the first element in conquering nature is to be natural, and it is not natural to us to become a race of placid scientific murderers.”63 Science, so interpreted, was just a ruse for upholding Imperialism, and what Chesterton could not abide—as we have already noted—was the extension of patriotism’s manifold but always spiritual forms to the avaricious cause of empire. Empire was maintained by power, and by the envy and fear bred by power; in this it was quite unlike the morality of patriotism, nourished as it was on that “bull-dog” quality that alone counted for courage. As in his review of the volume of “patriotic poetry,” Chesterton was here clearly attacking as sham the “manliness” at the heart of imperial pride, and the source of endless taunts against pro-Boer Liberals.64 He associated manliness instead with the patriotism he was striving to detach from Imperialism. In the same way he attacked the “intellectualism” that enabled the war party to conquer minds but not hearts, as witnessed by the heavy, “unpoetic,” prosaic nature of what few attempts there had been to construct “ballads of war” in the wake of the conflict in South Africa.65 For to Chesterton’s mind, the Imperialist was simply a fair-weather patriot, loving his country simply for its power; as such, he was doomed to be as weak an adorer as a man who loves a woman for her money. By contrast, the genuine patriot existed at the edge of life; he epitomized “the old saying that man’s extremity is God’s opportunity,” the basis of all hope and “ultimate triumph.”66

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The distortion of patriotism by pseudo-science was all of a piece with its distortion by pseudo-religion. This was reflected for Chesterton in the concern of ethical societies to develop a new secular church as the focus of a national idealism. It was to be reinforced by a civic religion with apparently greater unifying potential than its supernatural counterparts. In a review of a book by Stanton Coit in 1907, Chesterton chided the de facto leader of the ethical societies movement for failing to see that a national revival abstracted from religion risked a return to emperor worship of the worst Roman type.67 In this sense Coit’s ideal was no different from the worship of Japan as the incarnation of the “religion of patriotism” by national efficiency enthusiasts such as Lord Rosebery. For while there were other “duties and contracts” beyond patriotism—a reference to the ultimate obligation to God—it was this higher obligation alone that imparted to patriotism its “grace or humane quality.”68 Thus patriotism was at best, and at its best, a religion within a religion. Further, as became clear in his later writings, that wider religion had only ever been, and could only be Christianity. He argued in a Daily News article of 1906 that Christianity had liberated human beings from the “obvious destiny” of the tribe, a fate that was analogous to the “animal tragedy” of absorption in immediate surroundings; it had set the highest premium upon personal immortality and hence the “adventurous spirit” that became most manifest in the European intellect.69 Its natural handmaidens were nations and the patriotic pride which sustained them; for nations were grounded in “history, conditions, religion and education” far more than race, and expressive of a “practical passion in existence.”70 By contrast, the tribe was formed exclusively on hereditary lines, a view that Chesterton intended as a slight to Friedrich Weismann, then much in vogue among evolutionary thinkers.71 How far Chesterton was consistent in emptying nationhood of all tribal, hereditary traces will be discussed in chapter 6.

DOGMA, MONOTHEISM, AND PATRIAS It rapidly became apparent to Chesterton that the low fortune of patriotism in the early twentieth century was linked inextricably to an instrumental view of human beings inimical to democracy and expressive of a growing contempt for democracy on the part of advanced thinkers that matched their rejection of Christianity. This was common to all modern systems of thought and parties, including, he regretted to say, official Liberalism. At the heart of the problem—as he expressed it in Heretics—was an obsession with “mental progress,” an obsession fueled, moreover, by a conception of the “growth or improvement of the human mind” in essen-

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tially negative terms: “the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas.” Never was it embraced as the “growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas,” in keeping with the nature of human beings as “animal[s] that make dogmas.” Dogmatists certainly abounded in his age—Shaw, Kipling, and Wells, for example. Chesterton delighted in their heavy representation in the arts—however much he disagreed with their particular dogmas—not least because the rest of the fin de siècle had hoped to banish such figures from this domain. But Shaw et al. were arrayed against the far more numerous “bigots” as well as fellow artists, those who professed their indifference toward belief and who condemned others not for what they believed but for the sin of believing in anything. In doing so, like the abject members of tribes, the bigots sank back into a state of inanimateness. In this they emulated the “vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broadminded.” This was another reference to that vacuousness that in Chesterton’s mind dogged belief, collective identity, and the religious imagination alike in the modern world. Of this emptiness the fin de siècle demand for the liberation of art and literature from “all causes and all ethical creeds” was part symptom, part cause.72 Who were these bigots? In Heretics Chesterton gave the hypothetical examples of the “young man in Bond Street,” the “hard-headed stockbrocker” and the “dandy.” But he was aware that the bigotry in question was rife among contemporary anthropologists and sociologists of religion as an “evolutionary” phenomenon. This they traced from the primitive superstition embodied in ancestor-worship to the “rational” monotheism expressed first in the conception of Homeric unity and then in Christianity. Interest in religion conceived thus was but another lever of scepticism, emphasizing mind as its own creation. In a review of 1901 in The Speaker, Chesterton sided with Andrew Lang’s theory of “gods” preceding “ghosts” against evolutionists such as Herbert Spencer and Grant Allen. He praised Lang for emphasizing that ancestor worship was in all probability no more than a “fashionable craze” that developed after an initial embrace by the savage of a creative deity as the only possible force behind the circumstances he was unable to control. But Chesterton challenged the resistance of all three writers to understanding God in paternal terms, an antipathy that informed their conception of primitive ancestor-worship as a “lower spiritual condition” than belief in theistic creation, stripped of all notions of paternity. He underlined the momentous development within religion of the notion of God as a father associated with the Judaeo-Christian tradition. It was no evolutionary throwback, Chesterton emphasized, but the honoring of everyday fatherhood, knitting together God and humanity in a common

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act of “begetting” such that “the name taken from any common father of four babies becomes the loftiest of all the crowns of God.”73 This was another instance of Chesterton’s emphasis on the dual fates of Christianity and democracy at the level of the most common experiences of humanity; indeed, it was a case of a triple fate if patriotism is taken into account, too. Certainly, there is support for the inclusion of patriotism in a triadic relationship if we consider Chesterton’s parallel theory in his A Short History of England some years later of the origins of English nationhood; he located it in Shakespeare’s projection of Henry V as King “Harry,” and the legend that developed thereafter of “a thousand Harries in the army of Agincourt,” linking king and people in a common loyalty to St. George.74 Further support for this conception of patriotism as part of a triadic relationship with Christianity and democracy lies in the distinction he drew between mythology and religion, and his consequent rejection of comparative religion. In his later work on Christian thought, The Everlasting Man, published in 1925, he argued that between the God of the Judeo-Christian religion and the gods worshipped in other religions, there was a yawning chasm, especially marked in the nihilism of the religions of the East. But, Chesterton emphasized, there was also an important distinction to be found within Judeo-Christianity. While the world owed much to Judaism for holding fast to monotheism in the face of a “mass of confused mythology,” it essentially reflected the religion of a nomadic people, unable to see beyond a universal God and the undifferentiated sorrow of the universe at large as encapsulated in the book of Job. For the further advancement of monotheism, an accommodation was needed. This was with all that varied civilisation of fields and fences and walled cities and temples and towns; and the turn of these things also was to come, when the two could be combined in a more definite and domestic religion.

That religion was Christianity, adding a “lighter” but nonetheless necessary truth about the particularity of human life to the weightier insights of Judaism into a “large and serene world under a sky that stretches paternally over all the peoples of the earth.”75 This conception of the unique accommodation by Christianity of local patriotism provided the pivot on which Chesterton’s political and religious thought had turned for some years previously. Its roots lay clearly in his reaction against the fin de siècle, and also those theorists in the new century who attempted to pick up its fragments and blend them into a new, progressive “whole” in the realm of thought and society.76 In particular he rejected the notion that “mind” in the singular constituted the motor-force of evolution. For Chesterton, this misguided conviction dis-

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missed a multitude of beliefs and attachments that were simply lived rather than sanctioned by a universal order of reason at the heart of society, emptied of all supernatural value. In 1900 he took to task Grant Allen—a key fin de siècle figure—for his cynicism, his caddishness, and the distance that separated him from Darwin and early Darwinians such as Huxley; while he purported to be a follower, he was devoid of their religious sense, their awe at the breath of God in everything they contemplated, Browning style. In Chesterton’s view not all rationalists stooped as low as Allen in proclaiming that there was “nothing to be known,”77 but even the best were an unsettling influence. In particular, the current vogue for teleologies of “progress” that renounced dogma seemed intimately linked to superficial, usually hostile views of nationhood. Alternative ideals of rational citizenship traded well in this new intellectual climate, and were instrumental in marking out the boundaries of the New Liberalism. But in offering limited scope for democracy and pride of patriotism, such new twists of fin de siècle thought quickly proved as alien to Chesterton as the Socialism and Imperialism he had abandoned earlier. This is subject of chapter 4.

NOTES 1. Just as the earlier phase of the Decadence, the aesthetic movement proper, had lost credibility through the satires of W. S. Gilbert, W. H. Mallock, and George du Maurier; Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (1913; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1939), 65–66. 2. These new ways are explored by Simon Joyce in a wider reflection on the dispute between Bloomsbury modernism and Victorianism in “On or about 1901: The Bloomsbury Group Looks back at the Victorians,” Victorian Studies 46, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 635, 647. 3. “Milton and Merry England,” published originally in The London Mercury and republished in Fancies Versus Fads (London: Methuen, 1923), 219–38, at 220–21. 4. “A Gap in English Education,” The Speaker, 4 May 1901, 128–29; reprinted in The Defendant (London: Dent, 1901), 165–71. For the interdict on teaching English literature in schools before 1905, and attempts to impart citizenship education through English-language teaching instead—not least, to reinforce loyalty to the state—see Stephen Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race: Constructing Gender, Class, and Englishness in the Elementary School, 1880–1914 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2000). Chesterton’s responsiveness to patriotism has been compared with that of two late Victorian writers, William Morris and Ernest Belfort Bax; see Anna Vaninskaya, “‘My Mother Drunk or Sober’: G.K. Chesterton and Patriotic Anti-Imperialism,” History of European Ideas (forthcoming). 5. “The Ways of the World: The New English Academy,” Pall Mall Magazine (March 1902): 427–31. Chesterton’s attitude to the British Academy mellowed over

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the next six months; “The British Academy,” DN, 4 September 1902, 6. But he misunderstood the shift away from the narrow, “philological” brief its promoters had pursued initially toward a different but equally specialist focus on the disciplines of “moral science”; see Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 21–22. 6. In this he was still by no means alone. For a similar expression of concern for the exclusivity of modern literature, see the article by a fellow Liberal writer and journalist, John A. Spender, “A Plea for the Popular in Literature,” The Nineteenth Century, 61 (1907): 645–57. 7. “Ruskin,” The Speaker, 28 April 1900, 107–8. 8. The intimate link that Chesterton drew between the early to mid-Victorian conception of the rootedness of art in life on the one hand and a parallel view of the “wholeness” of life on the other, is best expressed in his G.F. Watts (London: Duckworth, 1904), 16. 9. “Mr. Hutton’s Essays,” The Speaker, 28 April 1906, 95–96. 10. “Milton and Merry England,” 221. 11. “Two Great Tories,” DN, 1 August 1903, 8. 12. “The Conundrum of Art,” review of William M. Conway, The Domain of Art (London: J. Murray, 1901), DN, 7 February 1902, 8. In 1932 he included Conway’s Memoirs in a broadcast about recently published books. See Conway’s letter of thanks to Chesterton, 18 November 1932, BL Add MS 73236, folio 87. 13. Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties, 31–32, 57. 14. “Art and the Churches,” review of Peter T. Forsyth, Religion in Recent Art (Hodder and Stoughton, 1901), DN, 2 January 1902, 6. 15. “What Happens to Rational Persons,” DN, 12 December 1903, 5. 16. “Two Great Tories”; on Whistler’s conception of the primacy of art over nature as part of a wider, fin de siècle revolt against the obvious and commonplace as “inartistic,” see Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (1913; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1939), 106, 62, 143. 17. G.F. Watts, 12–13, 14–15. 18. “Two Great Tories” (my italics). In his study of St. Thomas Aquinas toward the end of his life, Chesterton qualified this emphasis on “fear of the Lord” as merely the “beginning of wisdom,” not the end. This was in the context of a discussion of the fate of Aquinas’s legacy at the start of the Reformation: Luther’s “brooding, sincere, decidedly morbid” personality was at odds with Thomas’s emphasis on the “natural” qualities of virtue, reason, will, and dignity as the divine face of humanity, emphasizing instead the dependence of man on God for mercy alone; St. Thomas Aquinas (1933), in CW II (San Francisco: St. Ignatius Press, 1986), 547, 549. 19. “Invictus” (1875). Chesterton wrote elsewhere of the superiority of Stevenson to Henley in making Epicureanism rather than Stoicism the mark of his illness; Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1903), 14. 20. Henley dedicated one of his most pessimistic poems to Whistler, “Under a Stagnant Sky,” in Poems (London: David Nutt, 1898, 1907), 229–30. 21. “Eulogy of Robin Hood,” DN, 6 June 1903, 8. Unsurprisingly, Chesterton praised the ballad of Robin Hood, in particular, as representing something deep in the popular soul of England.

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22. In his searching essay, “Milton and Merry England,” published in the early 1920s, Chesterton attempted to combat one of the demons that still haunted him from the fin de siècle—the idea that art could excel in abstraction from life in general and morality in particular, as evident in the poetry of Milton: “His greatness is in a style, and a style which seems to me rather unusually separate from its substance.” But he moved in to defend the anti-Puritan poets among the Cavaliers; their poetry may not have reached the high literary plane of Milton, but the degree to which their religious emotions were in touch with popular (i.e., English) emotions was unexampled: 222, 229–30. See also the significance he attached to this essay in what was for him a rare introduction to a book of his essays: Fancies Versus Fads, viii. 23. “The Butterfly Again,” DN, 25 March 1905, 4. 24. “A Neglected Originality,” DN, 30 October 1902, 8; The Collected Poems of Roden Noel (London, Kegan Paul, 1902). Roden Noel is perhaps best remembered today for his authorship of the poem “Sea Slumber Song,” which headed Edward Elgar’s song cycle, “Sea Pictures” (1899). Austin was Tennyson’s successor as Poet Laureate, an appointment of which it has been said that it was probably based more on “his association with the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, and with his journalistic service to the tory party in The Standard and The National Review, than on his poetic ability”; William H. Scheuerle, “Alfred Austin, 1835–1913,” ODNB, vol. 2, 984–86, at 985. 25. “A Victorian on Victorian Poetry,” review of Arnold Smith, The Main Tendencies of Victorian Poetry: Studies in the Thought and Art of the Greater Poets (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1907), DN, 13 February 1907, 4. 26. “William Morris and His School,” Twelve Types (London: Arthur Humphreys, 1902), 24, 28. 27. “A Neglected Originality.” 28. “The Soul of Charles II,” DN, 16 July 1901, in Twelve Types, 97–98. 29. “The Conundrum of Art.” 30. G.F. Watts, 17. 31. Autobiography (1936), in CW XVI (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 154. 32. “A Good Miscellany,” review of John Davidson, A Rosary (London: Grant Richards, 1903), DN, 10 October 1903, 5. 33. “The Evil Day,” DN, 26 June 1909, 6; Davidson and Hankin were identified as the two unnamed figures in this article by Alan L. Maycock in The Man who Was Orthodox: A Selection from the Uncollected Writings of G.K. Chesterton (London: Dennis Dobson, 1963), 131. 34. William Watson, For England: Poems Written during Estrangement (London: John Lane, 1904). 35. “The Political Poetry of Mr. William Watson,” The Fortnightly Review (December 1904): 764, 766, 768, 763. 36. “The Conundrum of Art.” 37. He was soon to stress the exclusivity of patriotism to Christian countries only. 38. “Patriotic Poetry: What Is Patriotism?” DN, 29 November 1901; review of Patriotic Song, ed. A. Stanley (London: Pearson, 1901). 39. The fourth verse ran as follows: When all the lights are lost and done, when all the skies are broken, Above the ruin of the stars my soul shall sit in state,

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And a closed heart happy in the fullness of fate. “Lost,” CP (collected 1915), 177. 40. II Corinthians 12:7–10. 41. “A Messenger of Tolstoy,” DN, 9 September 1901, 7; “A Re-Issue of Tolstoi,” DN, 24 October 1901, 6; G. K. Chesterton, G. H. Perry, et al., Leo Tolstoy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1903), 1–6. 42. An Unofficial Catechism of the Religion of the Christians, by “One of Them” (London: Francis Riddall Henderson, 1901); Tales from Tolstoi, ed. R. Nisbet Bain (London: Jargold, 1901); and Leo Tolstoy, The Only Means (London: Free Age Press, 1901). 43. “Tolstoy and the Cult of Simplicity,” Twelve Types, 93–106; Simplicity and Tolstoy (London: Arthur Humphreys, 1912). John Coates mistakes the basis of the 1912 reprint as a Daily News article of 1903 supplemented by the Bookman essay; see his Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull, UK: Hull University Press, 1984), 20. What he considers to be a 1903 article was actually one of the original 1901 articles reprinted in a selection of Chesterton’s essays published after his death; “Tales from Tolstoi,” The Common Man, ed. Dorothy Collins (London: Sheed & Ward, 1950), 160–64. 44. Leo Tolstoy, 3. 45. “The Meaning of Mr. Bernard Shaw,” DN, 30 October 1901, 8. Dudley Barker omits this early deliberation on Shaw in dating the start of the Chesterton-Shaw controversy in 1905; Dudley Barker, G.K. Chesterton: A Biography (London: Constable, 1973), 181. 46. Leo Tolstoy, 4. 47. “A Note on Mr. Shaw,” The Independent Review (January 1906): 86–87; “The Meaning of Mr. Bernard Shaw.” 48. Twelve Types, 139–41. 49. “A Re-Issue of Tolstoy.” 50. Leo Tolstoy, 1. 51. There were three biographies in English by 1911, prompting one reviewer to remark: “We must admit that we are getting tired of these biographies by Tolstoy’s friends, with the inevitable assertion in the preface that Tolstoy or his family collaborated in the compilation or corrected the proofs”; Anon., NA, 26 October 1911, 615. 52. “Ruskin,” The Speaker, 28 April 1900, 107. 53. Heretics (1905; London: John Lane: The Bodley Head [fifth ed., 1908]), 137. 54. “A Messenger of Tolstoy.” 55. Ibid. Chesterton here showed his sympathy with what has been well described as “the protracted agony of English agnosticism,” the inability of British thinkers to let go of the moral discourse underlying a crumbling religion in late Victorian Britain against the attractions of nihilism and aestheticism. See Simon J. D. Green, “A Land Unfit for Ideas? British Intellectual History, 1750–1950,” History of European Ideas, 26 (2000): 250. 56. “A Re-issue of Tolstoi.” 57. “A Messenger of Tolstoy.”

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58. “The Agreeable Savage,” review of Edward Carpenter, Civilization: Its Cause and Cure (1889; London: Swann Sonnenschein, 1902), DN, 21 February 1902, 8. 59. “A Messenger of Tolstoy.” 60. “A Denunciation of Patriotism,” review of John Godard, Patriotism and Ethics (London: Grant Richards, 1901), The Speaker, 18 May 1901, 197. 61. John Coates, “Chesterton and The Speaker,” CR XXIV, nos. 1 and 2 (February–May 1998): 50. 62. Christopher Hollis, The Mind of Chesterton (London: Hollis & Carter, 1970), 155. 63. “Science and Patriotism,” review of Karl Pearson, National Life from the Standpoint of Science (London: Adam and Charles Black), The Speaker, 2 February 1901, 488–89, at 488. 64. Paul Readman, “The Conservative Party, Patriotism, and British Politics: The Case of the General Election of 1900,” Journal of British Studies 40, no. 1 (January 2001): 123. 65. “Ballads of War,” review of Hardwicke D. Rawnsley, Ballads of War (London: Dent, 1901), DN, 19 April 1901, 8 66. “Science and Patriotism,” 488. 67. “An Agnostic Establishment,” review of Stanton Coit, National Idealism and a State Church (London: Williams & Norgate, 1908), The Nation, 16 May 1908, 245. 68. “On a Certain Phrase,” DN, 14 October 1905, 6. 69. “The God of the Tribe,” DN, 14 April 1906, 6. 70. “The Delusion of Races,” DN, 26 November 1904, 6. 71. “The God of the Tribe.” 72. Heretics, 285–66, 288, 295–96, 288. 73. “The War of the Ghosts and Gods,” review of Andrew Lang, The Making of Religion (London: Longmans, 1901), The Speaker, 9 February 1901, 519. Chesterton paid tribute to Lang—a fellow contributor to The Illustrated London News—on his death in 1912 as a universalist in an age of specialism and an agnostic in an age of atheism: “If he could not believe in gods he would at least believe in men”; ILN, 27 July 1912, 130. 74. A Short History of England (1917), in CW XX (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), 82. 75. The Everlasting Man (1925), in CW II (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 229–31 (my emphasis). Chesterton’s contrast between Judaism and Christianity in this way represented not just one but two full circles in appraisals of their relationship since F. D. Maurice in the mid-nineteenth century. As Denys Leighton has pointed out, Maurice praised Judaism from a Liberal Anglican perspective for its appreciation of the value of national particularism and patriotism as against the notion of a universal society developed by Christianity. While Matthew Arnold conceived the two religions in identical terms, he reversed Maurice’s evaluation: he castigated Hebraism for its “narrowness” and elevated “culture” informed by Anglican breadth as the basis of national renewal in its place. See Denys Leighton, “T.H. Green and the Dissidence of Dissent: On Religion and National Character in Nineteenth-Century England,” The Parliamentary History Yearbook Trust 27, no. 1 (January 2008): 49–50. As is apparent here, Chesterton reversed the qualities that were attached to the two religions, while maintaining Maurice’s preference for the

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local and national over the universal. Crucially, however, he conceived Roman Catholicism as the locus within which the nation was defined and sanctioned, not Anglicanism; see chapter 7. 76. See Gal Gerson, Margins of Disorder: New Liberalism and the Crisis of European Consciousness (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004). 77. “Grant Allen,” review of Edward Clodd, Grant Allen: A Memoir (London: Grant Richards), The Speaker, 23 June 1900, 335.

4 ✛

Liberalism, Democracy, and the English Nation

I

n defending patriotism against Imperialism, Chesterton was setting out a clear agenda for a reformed Liberalism. It was one that overlapped, superficially at least, with the New Liberalism of the early twentieth century. This twist in Liberalism was supported by many of his friends and the main newspapers for which he wrote. But as a recent historian of the movement has argued, New Liberal thought was characterized by a concern to reconcile the Enlightenment rationalism that had shaped Liberalism in earlier times with the individualism and scepticism of the fin de siècle. Cracks and fissures between Chesterton’s Liberalism and that of his Liberal peers were hence inevitable. He rejected both the fin de siècle trends that they attempted to incorporate into new and more progressive systems of Liberal thought, and the concept of the “social whole” at the root of this synthesis. It soon became apparent to Chesterton that the holistic approach to social reform adopted by New Liberals was far more coercive than old style Liberalism. Indeed, he shared none of their hostility to the twin hallmarks of classical Liberalism: defense of private property and obsession with respectability.1 Most of all for Chesterton, the Liberal agenda of social reform threatened to accelerate the process by which “real” democracy was giving way to democracy conceived as “mere voting.” This chapter and the following consider Chesterton’s ideas concerning Liberalism, democracy, and the English nation in the wider context of progressive Liberalism in the early twentieth century. The analysis includes his response not just to the Liberal Party program but also to the changing assumptions at the heart of intellectual Liberalism and Radicalism in 79

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England in the decade preceding the First World War. In particular, this chapter emphasizes his belief that the vitality of democracy was dependent upon the sustained authority of an ancient English patria. However, in his view, democracy was increasingly threatened by a sphere of common citizenship, the parameters of which were set firmly by the New Liberal state. Chesterton’s conception of the nation as prior to the state and the key focus of patriotism underlined the tenuous nature of the links that mainstream Edwardian Liberalism sought to forge with a patriotism centered largely on the state. Yet, as this chapter argues, it also serves as a reminder of deeper shafts of patriotism that Liberalism had sunk in England over the previous half century, and which directly fueled Chesterton’s opposition to Liberalism from within.

MASTERMAN, PESSIMISM, AND REFORM An appropriate starting point for these enquiries is an analysis of Chesterton’s relationship to Charles Masterman, his friend and ally in the battle for the soul of Liberalism against the corrupting influence of Imperialism. Masterman was a fellow journalist whose political ambitions were fulfilled in his election to Parliament in 1906 as the MP for West Ham. We saw in an earlier chapter that both men were converts to High Church Anglicanism and Christian Socialism through the influence of Henry Scott Holland. This led to a shared antipathy toward the grip of Nonconformity on the Liberal party, an influence that was most evident in the opposition of Liberals to the Education Act of 1902 and their continuing pressure for its repeal once it became law.2 Chesterton and Masterman were also united in their opposition to what Masterman called the “insect state” of Socialism.3 In addition, Masterman was a contributor to the book of essays called England: A Nation, edited by Chesterton’s friend Lucian Oldershaw in 1904, which included Chesterton’s essay “The Patriotic Idea.”4 However, this common ground concealed temperamental and ideological differences that surfaced quite early in their careers as Liberal journalists and activists and were grounded ultimately in different assessments of the character of the English people and their capacity for self-rule under the impact of industrialization, urbanization, and secularization. The territory that separated the two men was apparent in the review that Masterman wrote of Chesterton’s first book of essays, The Defendant, in 1901, a celebration of all that was commonplace in the human material of modern society. The review was published in The Speaker. Early on in the review Masterman made clear his belief that Chesterton was quite beyond the pale of modern Radicalism. At issue was his optimism, his “blas-

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phemous” optimism, in believing that “all things are good”; his attitude of wonder at the modern city and his faith in the nobility of its inhabitants blinded him to the misery in which they were sunk, a “mob moving who are dead.” Emphasizing his despair of the teeming populations that “choked” the modern city, and Chesterton’s alternative claim to have found “treasure” in the “dust-heaps of humanity,” Masterman maintained that “the jewel is manifest in that which humanity discards; it is undiscernible in that which humanity retains.” If Chesterton’s philosophy were to gain ground, it would sound the death knell of the reforming impulse, the hardening of the already tough hearts of the wealthy. To extol “the average decent citizen for his average decency” was as irresponsible as it was to associate pessimism with “minor poetry” rather than a concerted drive for reform.5 Clearly, there was some sense here that Chesterton had erred in failing to appreciate the constructive side of pessimism. According to Masterman, he had instead targeted the arrogance of advanced literary and artistic society in mocking the worldly attachments of commonplace people. Moreover, he did so from a Christian perspective that was all too lowly rather than lofty in its aims. Chesterton was unrepentant, taking the opportunity in a new edition of The Defendant in 1902 to attack the “subtle scepticism” of Masterman’s response to urban and more especially suburban life; it was a response “which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving.” The first lesson of the reformer was that love of an object was the precondition of improvement.6 He was to make the same, essentially Burkean, point against William Morris later that year,7 and again several years later in comparing his and Masterman’s anticipations of how the inhabitants of suburbia would react, were their souls to be “purified by fire.” Whereas Masterman would expect them to destroy the homes that epitomized the emptiness of their lives, Chesterton was convinced that they would kneel before their abodes, “as before a temple,” reflecting their inward transformation.8 Still, Chesterton took his friend’s exasperation with existing society seriously enough to praise his book From the Abyss in a review for The Daily News in 1902. The result of Masterman’s experience of living in South London during 1900–1901, this book was the sequel to another that he had edited in the same year called The Heart of the Empire. Written with a number of recent Cambridge graduates, some destined to become eminent scholars, The Heart of the Empire signaled a bid to recast Liberalism in a new, reformist mold. From the Abyss expanded greatly on the earlier book’s opening chapter, called “Realities at Home.” In it, Masterman had portrayed a new type of human being bred in vast cities and their suburban areas, impoverished spiritually as well as materially. This new human

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type was nevertheless concealed behind a high wall of Imperialist enthusiasm. It was as if all the efforts of Victorian reformers such as Charles Booth, W. T. Stead, and Sir Walter Besant in exposing the horrors of English urban life had been in vain.9 Chesterton took From the Abyss to heart. He praised it as far more effective in enhancing public awareness of the poverty of the London streets than the most comprehensive and accurate set of statistics. Underlining the seriousness with which he viewed such things as widespread starvation and illness in the city of his birth, he declared: “I think people need to be told to admire existence and the stars and their own fingers, but the people make a very great mistake who think that this new realisation or new vision of things will be entirely beautiful or pleasant.” From the Abyss was, for Chesterton, “the only book I ever read which really impressed me with a sense of the problems of the great poor populations of London.”10 Evidently, the review was sufficient to renew Masterman’s faith in the soundness of Chesterton’s Liberalism, for in the following month he contributed an appreciation of Chesterton to The Bookman, extolling even his references to “gas lamps as fairy bubbles, machinery the efforts of a cyclops, the Post Office the wings of a mercury.”11 Yet for all this early rapport, there remained a gulf between Chesterton and Masterman on the precise nature of the “condition” of England, and the reasons, or—increasingly—lack of them, for optimism about the future. It was a gulf that was to widen further in the years ahead. Chesterton was clearly irritated by Masterman’s claim in his next book, The Condition of England, in 1909 that he had joined the ranks of the pessimists in recent years. The joy and freshness had gone out of Chesterton’s writing, Masterman maintained, in keeping with the darker outlook of contemporary writers from Shaw and Wells to Belloc. These writers had been unswerving in their commitment to the overthrow of “reaction,” and in their “undismayed assertion of another ideal.” Once rid of reaction, however (a reference to Liberal victory in 1906), they remained dissatisfied. Their criticism revealed “a rejection, not merely of systems of government or worship of false gods in modern life, but of the whole soul of a civilisation visibly—as it appears to them—sick unto death.”12 There was a clear note of impatience in Masterman’s tone that these once stalwart allies of Liberalism in a broad, if not party, sense had abandoned the revolution before it had really begun. By contrast, he himself had continued to uphold social reform—spearheaded by the state—as the sine qua non of all future progress: moral, spiritual, and material.13 In his response, Chesterton confessed that there was indeed “something that makes small clerks rather quicker than I can learn to love them,” the same thing that had emptied life of the “poetry of common things.” What was it, he asked,

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this force that makes the lamp-post anything less than flaming or the suburban citizen anything less than a man? Is it not simply the growth of a certain cowardice and corruption in high places, and can one defend the lamp-post better than by attacking those who are too rich to spare any money to it? My dislike of the rich class that rules Britain is first and last a dislike of people who are making impossible for the masses this vivid and supernatural vision of their daily life. I am quite certain that the land would be lovable without the landlords. I am quite sure that the house would be holy but for the house rents. I am quite sure that an artificial oligarchy stands between us and very simple appreciations.14

In other words, he did not think that government within the context of a party system serving only the interests of the rich could solve the central problem of the “condition” of England. This was the wholesale disenchantment of—and with—everyday existence. In retrospect, he viewed Masterman’s fate as sealed from the start, a politician of conviction whose leaders exploited his Fabian instinct for “departmental tenacity,” thus ensuring his unpopularity and hence failure.15 It was for this reason that he distanced himself from the persecution of Masterman by his brother and Belloc.16 Increasingly for Chesterton, the move out of the abyss was dependent upon the defeat of a growing penchant for compromise within governing circles.17 This recalled the protest of another prominent Liberal journalist, John Morley, a generation earlier against the corruption of Liberalism by the “temporizing” spirit of politics for short-term gain, a practice in which politicians and parties across the board freely engaged. But for Morley, the effect of this tendency was especially damaging in the realm of intellect, and its incidence was invariably at the expense of free-thinking principles.18 By contrast, for Chesterton, the shifting sands of belief unleashed by agnosticism and its underlying “evolutionary myth” would have enhanced the increasing habit of compromise in modern politics. He certainly regarded Morley as a typical “Front Bench man”—though a good one—in enjoining caution and restraint in the face of new political movements, not least the young pro-Boers within his own party.19 Several months prior to the Liberals’ return to power in December 1905, there was some basis for optimism that fundamental Liberal commitments were not being jettisoned. In one sense Chesterton must have been heartened by a letter he received from J. A. Spender, editor of the Liberal newspaper, The Westminster Gazette, in April of that year. Spender suggested that he would rather back down from appealing for a coalition of Liberals and Unionists to defeat Chamberlain and Balfour over tariff reform than risk controversy with Chesterton and his friends over the inevitable damage to the cause of home rule such a rapprochement would bring: “For after all it is our first business at present to hold together as

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the attacking party, and the limiting conditions in regard to Home Rule are such as no controversy can get rid of.”20 So much importance did Chesterton attach to home rule that he had commended the Conservative government in a Daily News column the previous year for assuming its mantle, albeit in the limited form of “devolution.” He had written with special warmth of the principal supporter of the latest home rule bill, Lord Dunraven, and his enlightened followers in the Irish office under George Wyndham’s stewardship; they represented the “best and fullest” side of Toryism. At the same time, he praised the “disinterestedness” of an old Liberal Imperialist, Saxon Mills, who had pledged himself to the cause of home rule in a recent letter to The Westminster Gazette.21 About none of these figures was there the slightest taint of “compromise.” Chesterton’s response to Spender has not survived. However, while undoubtedly welcoming Spender’s gesture, his unwillingness to discard so central a Liberal goal can be safely assumed. This was despite the fact that the bill was already in jeopardy when Spender approached him, and there was hence little to lose.22 His confidence in the integrity of British politics was not high at this time. In one of his earliest articles for The Illustrated London News, in December 1905, he deplored the decline of political satire. The lack of any Edwardian equivalent of Rowlandson and Gillray in the eighteenth century suggested not so much progress towards a more moderate age—as the eminent caricaturist, F. C. Gould, had recently held—but a sinister consensus within the governing class. The increasing rapport between its different sides, Chesterton maintained, had eroded the passionate and primary attachment to the nation of such late eighteenthcentury patriots as Nelson in England, Camille Desmoulins in France, and Robert Emmet in Ireland.23 Similarly, it became apparent to him as early as 1904 that all was not well with the party to which he had committed his energies and hopes. He made it clear in his Autobiography that while he could not quite put his finger on the reasons then, the patent inferiority of Liberal candidates to those—such as his friends, Belloc and John Simon—who spoke on their behalf had struck him at the level of a “cold and creeping suggestion of the subconscious.”24 With victory in prospect for the Liberals in January 1905, he voiced some concern that they had spent far too little time in opposition in reacquainting themselves with their doctrinal roots, confirming his earlier fears for the party as a young journalist on The Speaker.25 It was only the Marconi scandal that brought the wider problem to full consciousness: the problem of money effacing idealism and talent as the condition of electoral success. This was as much within the Liberal camp as the Conservative one that he had pilloried in his poem on the 1906 election, “An Election Echo.”26

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In 1906 he had already had occasion to attack the government directly in the Liberal press. He was prompted by Augustine Birrell’s attempt to steer through Parliament an education bill that would address Nonconformist resentment of Balfour’s Education Act of 1902 for giving undue advantage to Anglican elementary schools. This had been a pivotal issue in the 1906 election, its repeal made a matter of patriotic principle in the election addresses of several Liberal candidates.27 Birrell’s bill encountered considerable opposition in the House of Lords—led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson—in the face of which the government backed down.28 But while it was still making progress in a House of Commons that possessed its largest intake of Nonconformist members ever,29 Chesterton denounced the attempt by Liberals to unify England on narrow religious lines through the auspices of the state. He made his representations to the Liberal newspaper, The Westminster Gazette, which had supported Birrell’s Bible Reading Compromise as a way of standardizing religious teaching in Board schools, and also allaying Nonconformist fears about the denominational direction of religious instruction in Britain. Chesterton insisted that the “compromise” should not be presented as Christianity in its most basic, uncontroversial form when it was effectively the old, Protestant religion of (independent) “bible-teaching” offered as an “Eirenicon.” A wider basis of agreement was acceptance that “great concessions should be made to the important minorities,” in particular, Anglo-Catholics.30 If Chesterton’s opposition to the “Bible Reading Compromise” remained, he had certainly moved away from his earlier position that religion should be excluded from education altogether. Chesterton’s response in 1909 to Masterman’s comment on his apparent pessimism of late reflected his growing disillusion with a party that should have been a vessel of civilization, but had instead become a tool of those bent upon its destruction. Not least, against his party, he believed that successful reform was contingent upon addressing the vested interests and falsehoods that thrived on misguided patriotism. His stance in this respect illuminates the changing contours of Liberal beliefs and policies in the early years of the twentieth century, especially in relation to the English nation.

THE EVILS OF “RATIONAL” PATRIOTISM AND LIBERAL “PHARISAISM” The message of patriotism as conveyed by Chesterton encountered considerable resistance among all shades of political and intellectual opinion in the early years of the twentieth century. Few reviewers of his first

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novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), were impressed by the hero, Adam Wayne, who fought a battle for local patriotism to the finish. For example, W. L. Courtney—editor of The Fortnightly Review—read and delighted in Napoleon as a parable of the human condition rather than the work of a committed patriot. On this reading, Napoleon emphasized the necessity of both the fanatic and the humorist to bring the world to rights.31 Much the same reception was given to England: A Nation. For example, the reviewer in The Athenaeum welcomed the book primarily for its idealism. But the Liberal—as much as the Conservative—press was united in distancing itself from what it regarded as the narrow ideal of patriotism at the book’s heart. Particularly problematic was the rejection by Chesterton of any possibility of imperial patriotism. This was a clear measure of the way in which Liberals had absorbed—while being at pains to soften— the tub-thumping Imperialism of the 1880s and 1890s that was a legacy of Conservative rule. In doing so, they had deflected a mid-Victorian, Liberal preoccupation with maintaining the values of liberty, liberal constitutionalism, and ethics at the level of foreign as much as domestic politics, as the basis of a clear, national patriotism.32 The reviewer in The Athenaeum expressed astonishment at Chesterton’s apparent failure to appreciate the scale and importance of Roman patriotism throughout all its imperial travails, the record of which could be found in James Bryce’s Holy Roman Empire, then in its twentieth edition.33 Chesterton’s Anglican mentor, Henry Scott Holland, extended his skepticism on this account to the view of another contributor, Conrad Noel, concerning the roots of Christianity in Jewish patriotism. In Holland’s opinion the success of Christianity in transcending its Hebrew roots was quite unjustifiably neglected in the book. Turning to Chesterton, Holland rebuked him thus: I cannot understand how Mr. Chesterton ignores the Roman Empire as he does. He speaks of it only as decadent, and he sometimes almost suggests that Christianity entered it only to break it up into living nations. The truth is that it was a thousand years after Christianity had possessed itself of the body of the Roman Empire that Nationalities in our sense rose at all.

Neither Holland nor other reviewers could accept the absolute division that Chesterton, especially—Masterman less so—drew between domestic patriotism and the empire, and his dismissal of Imperialism as simply another form of cosmopolitanism. Holland highlighted Kipling’s romantic attachment to England in poems such as “The Flowers,”34 and what he regarded as Kipling’s particularist rather than universalist conception of the Empire centred on “the Island Race.” He sanctioned Chesterton’s concep-

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tion of the insensitivity of the British Empire to national difference, but only in cases other than when working “at its best.” The South African war, he claimed, was an intensification—albeit misguided—of the sense of British nationality in wishing all to benefit from the fruits of British civilization, not a cosmopolitan reaction against nationhood.35 Likewise, the reviewers in The Westminster Gazette and The Morning Post were united in resisting Chesterton’s bid to detach “Britishness” from empire. The Gazette’s reviewer cautioned the essayists to think twice before supposing that they are going to eliminate the adventurous, organising, pioneering qualities which compel the Britisher to assert himself, and, as he thinks, simultaneously to magnify the mother-country across the seas and in the remotest parts of the world.

Instead of throwing down the white man’s burden as an injustice to both subject races and “little England” itself, the cause of the essayists would be better served by advocating the maintenance of imperial responsibilities in a manner appropriate to a “free and civilised people.”36 Chesterton certainly did not deny the British their sense of adventure, as we shall see in chapter 6; but he did deny the claim to ownership with which it had become inextricably associated. Most of all, he protested against what he regarded as the eclipse of England in Imperialist apologetics. With the Boer War several years behind him, he continued to spell out his patriotic convictions, and perhaps nowhere more powerfully and insistently than in a Daily News article of 1905.37 Superficially, the spirit of this piece was much in keeping with those antagonistic figures whom J. H. Grainger has characterized as the “anti-incumbency” school of patriotism on the Edwardian Right. Their self-appointed mission was to save the nation from the policy of national drift that seemed to characterize the new era of Liberal government, riddled by faction of one religious and political kind or another.38 However, as well as the Liberals in power, Chesterton denounced equally what he termed “the Jingo of the Rhodes and Milner School.” This was a category that could easily be extended to Rosebery and others in his own party who wished to see England realize her full global power, unburdened by a constitution that enforced only an obsolete ancient liberty.39 For Chesterton, the patriotism of both Conservative and Liberal incumbents-in-waiting was shifting and insincere. They merely “loved” their country for a particular quality with which it was, or should be associated: progress, strength, success, and purity, for example. By contrast, the “bawling jingoist of the street” exemplified an “irrational” patriotism that was far more productive of “efficiency and reform.” The true patriot’s love of and loyalty to his country were unclouded by illusions of its status in

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the world. This required an uncommon degree of vigilance and attachment, well beyond the capacity of the mere “instrumental” patriot. The inferiority of the latter to the true patriot was emphasized by the “monomaniac” who associated national defense with arms and arms alone. This was the cry of the Navy Leaguers, especially, whom Chesterton lambasted in an article two years later in response to the second Hague Peace Conference in 1907. Neglect of the multitude of other threats to national well-being than paucity of ships—wealth, health, “our morals,” and the sentiment of patriotism itself—left England far more exposed.40 We saw in the previous chapter that at the time of the Boer War, Chesterton had replied to Liberal critics who distrusted patriotism that it no more amounted to a cry of “my country, right or wrong,” than love for one’s mother amounted to a cry of “my mother, drunk or sober.”41 His sustained emphasis on the “irrational” nature of patriotism in 1905 and beyond was intended to bring out fully the absence of chauvinism in patriotism so conceived, and its freedom from all vanities concerning racial or national superiority. The sight of the “unreasonable patriot,” he declared, “is clear.” He can root up the most ancient wrongs, he can deny the most fundamental falsities in this apparent England, for his England is not of this world. He is not obliged to cling to the imaginary merits of his country; for he did not take her on her merits . . . He will not be asked to swallow any such insanity as that England is politically more efficient than the Continent. He will not be such a greenhorn as not to know that English politics are corrupt. His relations with his country will be dark and elemental, like the relations of lovers. To him England will cry not any of the pompous appeals to lead the race or reform the world which she cried to Kipling or Henley; she will cry the words of that old and very English song: Love me still and know not why, So hast thou the same reason still To dote on me for ever.42

These rhetorical remarks made major assumptions about the way in which Liberalism should be aligned with the English patria. In expressing them, Chesterton not only faced down his former associates on The Speaker in opposing the Boer War yet distrusting patriotism as a public virtue based on deep, interior ties; at the same time he also turned his back on a nineteenth-century assumption that had sustained Liberalism in particular—the “exemplary” status of the English nation in the light of its “exceptional” history. As Peter Mandler has emphasized, England was perceived in the middle decades of the nineteenth century as being marked by various deposits of European culture—Teutonic, Celt, and Norman—and synthesized by a Christian religion that, especially once reformed, lay at the

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heart of England’s claim to be both civilized and liberal, indeed preeminently so.43 Chesterton raised no objection to this eclectic conception of Englishness, or to claims that were made for its distinctiveness within a common European inheritance. As chapter 8 will make clear, he regarded the sense of nationhood generally as exclusive to Christendom. But he was concerned to challenge the attendant understanding of England as a beacon to the world. This was not because, like Masterman, he had lost faith in the English people; nor because, like Gilbert Murray, he deplored the insufferable smugness of England in the light of the Boer War—a triumph of “unconscious” over “conscious” national ideals that kept humanity at the lowest psychological levels.44 He merely insisted that English culture and politics were quite unsuitable for export, so unique were they to the character of the people who had forged them. In 1904 Chesterton gave his Daily News readers a sobering account of the absence of logic that ran throughout the British political system. The latter was pervaded by legal fictions such as a king “who exists but does not rule, a Prime Minister who does not exist but does rule.” While, with their “common sense,” the English could well get along with such “bewildering anarchy,” it was too much to expect other nations to look up to them. The reputation of England for practicality and efficiency was made by people who had never tried, “with any knowledge of other cities, to get across London in a hurry.”45 There were national goods that had been transplanted successfully: Spanish Catholicism, French Republicanism, Calvinism, and the brandy spread abroad by the British Empire. Yet there was nothing that was sufficiently clear-cut and/or of strong presence in England worthy of diffusion—not democracy, for there was no democracy in England, not Catholicism, Calvinism, or royalism for the same reason. The awful truth about England was that she existed in the same state as a house whose roof leaked, whose windows rattled, and in which children ran wild. This was full of “subtle jolliness” for its inhabitants; but it was wholly irrelevant to the needs of those beyond its walls.46 Thus Chesterton was concerned to exempt England from the onerous responsibility of educating other nations, a role for which he felt she was quite unsuited. He was equally concerned to ensure that England was not placed on the receiving end of other national exemplars—Rosebery’s Japan, for example. At the same time, however, he resisted England’s disappearance into the void of a universal humanity. His opposition to cosmopolitanism for its disregard of national particularism and hence humanity itself has already been noted. This intensified against the backdrop of a sharp rise in tensions between rival imperial powers from 1905 onward and as cosmopolitan ideas became crystallized in enthusiasm for internationalism, not least among Liberals. For Chesterton, the animus toward patriotism and nationalism in this context represented a

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new, inverted form of chauvinism that mirrored the Imperialism it so despised. It was also vitiated by antagonism toward Christianity.47 For example, the prospect of an entente between Britain and Russia in 1907 brought issues of an internationalist kind to the forefront of The Daily News correspondence page. Readers debated whether Russian Liberals really welcomed such a measure, and whether a Liberal government in England should be courting an autocratic regime more in search of money than friends, in the words of the Radical journalist, H. N. Brailsford.48 On the same day as these issues were aired, Chesterton condemned in his Saturday column the Olympian English heights from which Liberals looked down on the ideal of peace in Europe, excoriating other national cultures in the process. “It is sad but true,” he wrote, “that those in this country who call themselves progressive and peace-loving are often the very people who have least reverence for the faiths and chivalries of Europe, for the great Churches, and the high Republics.”49 His thinking here neatly reversed that of his Liberal contemporaries. Christianity was the cornerstone of progress in international affairs, secularism of “reaction”; only a culture steeped in “Pharisaism” could pretend otherwise. Of Russia’s status as an Imperialist power and of the Church’s role in sustaining it he seemed oblivious.50 The distance between Chesterton’s approach to foreign affairs and that of his Liberal employers and readers only widened with the explosion of Liberal wrath in the wake of the Ferrer controversy in October 1909. The parallels with the recent Dreyfus case were obvious, and opinion was divided in similar ways. The incident involved a political dissident of strong anti-clerical leanings who was convicted of treason by the Spanish government and duly executed, to cries of protest from the Liberal press in Britain. Not least, this was because there were grounds for suspicion that the evidence used in the trial was perjured. Provoked by a smug editorial in The Daily News to the effect that England had been spared the “priestcraft” that stood at the root of Spanish oppression, Chesterton denied once again that Liberal England was in any position to judge other nations. In a letter to the editor he wrote that “we are as bad as Spain. In certain and peculiar ways, much worse.” The high moral ground occupied by English critics of Spain was only possible because “we have sunk utterly, silently, and almost without a struggle under the domination of plutocracy.” His defense of the Spanish government was an indication of his growing estrangement from existing England; the latter was far removed from the England that was “not of this world,” which he made the cornerstone of his paean for patriotism in 1905.51 The letter prompted Gardiner to take the unusual step of a lengthy rebuttal. Other correspondents, anxious to celebrate England as a bulwark against papal tyranny, also attacked it. However mired in other “malign influences” she

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may have become, these were minor compared to Catholicism.52 Few were fooled by the charge of “Pharisaism” by which Chesterton advanced his own ideological and religious concerns, just as Chesterton recognized the Protestant sympathies that were driving the pro-Ferrer camp in turn. But it was Chesterton’s response to the war between Italy and the Ottoman Turks over Tripoli in 1911 that most underlined his growing isolation as a Liberal in the realm of foreign as much as domestic affairs; this was despite, indeed because of, his claim to be preserving the spirit of Gladstone when other Liberals appeared to be deserting that standard. As early as 1903 he attempted to explain the Turkish massacres in Macedonia in terms of a “total disregard for human life” within Islam. His Daily News readers were outraged.53 In the crisis over Turkish designs on Tripoli in October 1911, he returned to the attack, defending Italy’s intervention on behalf of its Christian subjects living there against Liberal cries of Italy’s disingenuousness. He protested against a recent editorial in The Daily News that suggested that Italy was acting on the thinnest of pretexts, its real intention being the expansion of commercial interests in North Africa. He argued that such a stance only served to condone Turkish oppression of Christians, which “time and very black experience” showed to be ingrained in Turks, whether old or young.54 His dissent emphasized a growing Liberal assumption, owing much to Radicals such as Hobson and Brailsford, that capitalist expansion under the cloak of “national interests” constituted the primary source of international discord in the twentieth century.55 The defense of Christianity that had driven Gladstone’s war against Bulgarian and Armenian atrocities now seemed suspect when advanced as grounds for intervention in foreign affairs. But while Chesterton sought to reinvigorate that campaign, notwithstanding the revolution of the young, supposedly patriotic Turks against the sultan in 1908, he did so with a far different understanding of nationhood that had little hope of carrying contemporary Liberal opinion with it.56 For Chesterton, not all peoples were nations, and nations were superior to non-nations. He reduced Turkey—and the wider Islamic faith on which it was founded—to the crudest instrument of militarism and Imperialism. Indeed, he maintained that Turkey was the only empire within Europe itself, and being an empire, it could not be a nation at the same time. For the essence of nationhood was “rule” rather than overlordship. Turkey lacked acquaintance with the former, and this was all of a piece with the subjection of women there. “The Turk,” he wrote, “is, first of all a man. . . . There is no such thing in human history as a female Turk.” His equation of freedom with nationhood on the one hand and domination— particularly within the family—with the absence of nationhood on the other, is striking. It was aimed as much at the English suffragettes as at pro-Turk Liberals. In terms of “rule” England qualified as a nation, if only

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just: its earlier history of oppression was redeemed somewhat by the nineteenth century experience of democracy, and the empire in which it was caught up could legitimately be conceived as “British” rather than “English.” The implication is that unlike the “female Turk,” the “Englishwoman” was a feasible notion; this was despite her exclusion from the vote, which the suffragettes mistook for absence of citizenship.57 It is true that, if respect for women was a necessary condition of nationhood, it was not sufficient in Chesterton’s eyes. Famously, he denied the status of nationhood to the Jews as well as to the Turks. This was on account of their lack of a native land and capital city, Jerusalem being no more distinctively Jewish than Constantinople was distinctively Turkish. But in his anti-Jewish polemics, there was never any suggestion that the Jew was merely “the insolent male,” his pride still attached to its aboriginal sources: “the sword, the riding of horses, the multiplicity and therefore the subjection of women.”58

DEMOCRACY AND THE SOIL If Chesterton distanced himself markedly from Liberals of an internationalist hue, especially in the priority they gave to economics over religion in addressing international conflict, he joined forces with an appreciable number of “New” Liberals over the issue of land reform. However, his earliest statements on this issue, and the wider context in which they were made, suggests that once again, his patriotism was primary, his dedication to the success of Liberalism, collectivist style, secondary. This was apparent following the Smallholdings and Allotments (England and Wales) Act of 1908, a measure by which the Liberal government sought a wider distribution of land, but through the auspices of the state. Chesterton was at one with his fellow Liberals in seeing the dispossession of the rural laborer as one of the sharpest thorns in the flesh of modern English nationhood. It was the message on which he concluded his introductory essay, “The Patriotic Idea,” to England: A Nation. Following a long discussion of the virtue of patriotism against its Tolstoyan and Imperialist enemies, he declared that it was high time the English colonized their own land, ending their imprisonment “between hedges” and confinement to the rights of way they enjoyed as mere concessions. The current monopolists of land had every reason for upholding empire, providing as it did an outlet for the colonizing instinct that would otherwise threaten their privileged ownership.59 In the light of these sentiments—expressions of which can be found in some of his earliest, schoolboy letters and which were reinforced subsequently by Belloc, his Irish friends, and holidays in France60—we might expect Chesterton to be a keen supporter of the act. It was legisla-

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tion for which Liberals had pressed for several decades, not just on the grounds that it would correct class injustice, but, as Paul Readman has emphasized, in order to restore an essential element of English nationhood that had been lost to enclosure. Liberals were also drawn to the act on account of its capacity to cement deeper patriotic ties than were in evidence during the Boer War.61 However, Chesterton’s thinking was diametrically opposed to the assumptions that informed the act, as was noted gleefully in an editorial in the radical Socialist journal, The New Age the following year. The editorial emphasized that his position on land ownership was nearer to that of A. J. Balfour. Balfour had condemned the legislation in a recent speech as a piece of Socialist legislation par excellence; it maintained laborers in a condition of servitude to the state as leaseholders, rather than creating a community of freeholders such as he had achieved in Ireland through the Irish Land Act (1903).62 As The New Age pointed out, Chesterton had also advocated “direct ownership of land” in recent addresses and articles.63 In his eyes, this was a human need as primitive as that of religious belief and artistic expression, as witnessed by countless legends and poems.64 He had reinforced this argument in the week preceding the appearance of the New Age editorial in his regular Daily News column.65 Marking his move from Battersea to a small house and plot in rural Beaconsfield, he roundly condemned the landlords of England. They were heirs to those who had made their fortunes from pillaging abbeys and churches, and who had defied the concept of “boundaries” and “finitude” with which property was inextricably associated. In conceiving the Reformation as the source of injustice in land ownership, Chesterton parted company with fellow Liberals who focused on the Enclosure movement. In his view, the principle of proprietorship in land had been compromised well before the eighteenth century. Although he welcomed J. L. Hammond’s positive account of the village laborer on the eve of the Enclosure Acts, this was in order to underline the opposition between “democracy” and “progress” since the eighteenth century.66 In his book, What’s Wrong with the World, also published in 1910, his own recommendation for a redistribution of land took the form of government purchase of land from the great landholders extending over a long period. Four years later, such was his despair with Liberal England that he urged outright confiscation.67 Chesterton appears not to have risen to The New Age’s provocation, although it is evident from his comments elsewhere in 1909 that he certainly approved of Balfour’s position on smallholdings. Not least, this was in giving a clear indication that the previously unshakeable Liberal Unionist belief in English superiority to the Irish in all matters from landownership to industrial progress was now on the wane.68 His sympathies were clearly moving in a rural, Distributist direction at this time.

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The enchantment of the city was now somewhat lost in a wider disillusion with Liberalism that he nevertheless refused to admit against Masterman’s claims to the contrary. In 1910, he marked the recent deaths of two stalwart but opposing remnants of Victorian Liberalism, Professor Goldwin Smith and Sir William Butler, clearly elevating the latter above the former. Goldwin Smith—the “scientific” Radical who had campaigned along with other university Liberals for the Second Reform Act—advocated an ideal of democracy from which “nature” had been drained away, and liberty much compromised in the process. Because Goldwin Smith located democracy in the “mind” rather than the “soil,” he set his face against home rule for Ireland. At the same time, he gravely misjudged Prussia and the American republic as harbingers of democratic freedom, neglecting the Imperialism of the one and the trusts of the other. Indeed, Goldwin Smith seemed to epitomize the urbanization and ultimately the destruction of the democratic instinct when reduced to “mere voting”; this was in keeping with the squalor and degradation of human life in towns generally. As a consequence, man is not found standing under the tree of liberty like a democrat, but rather clinging to a lamp-post like a drunkard. Amid the yellow and blue ribbons of our artificial elections there is little place for those green leaves which Camille Desmoulins wore in his hat; those green leaves which, in the immortal Irish lyric, can be stayed by no laws from growing where they grow.69

Even the word “citizen,” with all its democratic luster, was tarnished by its close links with the city, for “it is often among weeds and cattle that a man is most sure of being a man.” The strongly gendered language here was intentional, if baseless: a true democrat was male because only men engaged in heated discussion sustained by “camaraderie.” This constituted the lifeblood of democracy, to the maintenance of which the vigor and independence of peasant life was uniquely conducive. Women were highly sociable, but they were not interested in argument. As such, they were capable of “mere voting” only. This was why pressure for female enfranchisement was so much in keeping with the tenor of modern political life, and why Chesterton opposed it. In his view, enfranchising women could only diminish the value of democracy.70 Far truer than Goldwin Smith to the authentic spirit of democracy was the Irish soldier and pro-Boer William Butler. Chesterton praised him for his sympathy with “the rights of alien Calvinists, opposite in creed and temper to himself” (he was a Roman Catholic). Precisely because he was no “rational” Radical, his Radicalism was more “consistent” and “reliable.” This was because he was more a “romantic” and “nationalist” type than Smith, the type that flourished in a field, “either the field of tillage or

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the field of battle.” Chesterton’s bracketing of Radicalism, nationalism, trustworthiness, and the earth here is significant. Equally striking is his extolling of the soldier, indeed in this case a soldier of the empire—Butler’s long entry in Who’s Who reads like a catalog of Imperial campaigns conducted since 1858—as the mainstay of democracy along with the peasant. Butler seemed to point backward to liberty in all its democratic, patriotic fullness during its pastoral, eighteenth-century “Spring,” with Rousseau as its prophet. By contrast, Goldwin Smith—for all his anti-Imperialist credentials—seemed to point forward to liberty’s twentieth-century nadir in a narrow cult of citizenship. The fact was that Chestertonian and mainstream Edwardian Liberalism represented two opposing sides of Victorian Liberalism that had once been successfully harmonized but were now in danger of breaking apart. The first was an understanding of “the people” as the cornerstone of democracy and, as such, a modern English nation defined in terms of selfreliance, hard work, and zeal for liberty. But although “the people” were trusted with nominal political sovereignty, this was dependent upon the covert pressures exerted by civil society and, increasingly after 1850, legislation toward the creation of the liberal subject.71 To this end, Liberalism’s economic doctrine of laissez-faire was subordinated to a wider political project of national inclusiveness as successive Reform Acts underlined the importance of an interventionist state to reinforce Liberal virtues, nationally defined.72 The pursuit of liberty hence took place within an ordered context of national unity and readiness to compromise the freedom of women, the poor and others deemed to lack the capacity for liberal citizenship.73 Great patriotic emphasis on the distinctiveness of the English as a people—the other side of the Victorian Liberal coin—was the upshot of this remaking of Liberalism in the image of English national character. This is nowhere more apparent than in the Chesterton family, as chapter 1 made clear. However, toward the end of Victoria’s reign, confidence in the native virtues of the people declined rapidly among elites. Many of the “young” Liberals who had welcomed the 1867 Act despaired of Britain as universal suffrage came of age in a highly industrialized and urbanized society. For example, as Chesterton pointed out, Goldwin Smith turned his sights toward the United States as offering more promising human material for the perpetuation of the English national character, mid-Victorian style.74 By contrast, the new generation of “young” Liberals at the turn of the century viewed government as the main agency for addressing “the condition of the people,” disregarding the concern of Smith and his contemporaries that this would exacerbate the erosion of Liberal qualities. But Chesterton—following Belloc—focused on the betrayal of liberty itself by New Liberals in the interests of a widespread social discipline extending

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to all citizens, not just marginalized groups. He saw few of the continuities of New Liberalism with old classical Liberalism, either in theory or practice, that have been emphasized by recent historians.75 Not least, this was because he was oblivious to the complex role of the state in maintaining the Victorian climate of “governmentality” in which English patriotism under Liberal auspices increasingly flourished. Indeed, as a Liberal, his thought is perhaps best seen as the revenge of a distinctively English patriotism on the Liberalism from which it had drawn considerable succour in the nineteenth century and that had greatly strengthened Liberalism in turn. In the new century, patriotism either seemed to have become surplus to Liberal requirements, or else appeared to be embraced by Liberals only in the most partisan and alien, that is to say, state-centric terms. Here (New) Liberal patriotism sailed dangerously close to Conservative patriotism, differing only in focusing the sense of English and British national loyalty and identity in social legislation such as the Smallholdings Act rather than the institutions of the British state and—increasingly—the empire.76

THE NIETZSCHEAN CURSE Chesterton found little support beyond Belloc for the ruralist sympathies that were rapidly overtaking his urban—and suburban—enthusiasms. This was emphasized by his brother Cecil writing in The New Age the year before as Chesterton’s article on Smith and Butler. “Socialism,” Cecil Chesterton wrote, “is a real, popular demand; Petty [sic] proprietarianism is, as far as England is concerned, a paper demand made by brilliant men of letters.”77 Within three years, Gilbert Chesterton and Belloc had succeeded in converting Cecil to their Distributist cause, the realignment of people and land ownership that would free democracy— and the English nation—from enslavement to the collectivist state. Whether they ever convinced him of the popularity of the peasant ideal is unclear. Certainly, they made few other recruits among The New Age journalists. This was despite some significant cross-currents between the ideas that animated that journal on the one hand and The Eye Witness and its successor, The New Witness led by Belloc, Cecil Chesterton, and—to a lesser extent—Gilbert Chesterton on the other.78 The two Witness papers emerged in the years immediately preceding the First World War in order to bring “truth,” “impartiality,” and honest discussion to bear in journalism; although like The New Age, they sought to expose the limitations of contemporary Liberalism at the same time. The gulf that initially separated Chesterton from The New Age in general and its editor, A. R. Orage,

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in particular is most evident in their divergent appraisals of democracy.79 Carried away by the Nietzschean beliefs that drove his pursuit of a higher form of Socialism, Orage had expressed a preference for the “spiritual few” over the “material many.” This was in the course of advocating female enfranchisement in spite of suggestions that many women—possibly a majority—did not favor it. Upon reading Orage’s article, Chesterton denounced him unreservedly in The Daily News. He pointed to the paradox that democracy was now being embraced by theorists who had ceased to hold that basic “moral or mental sympathy” with what Orage referred to disparagingly as “the material many.” This it was that had “ever made anyone ask for popular government.” To Chesterton it seemed to point to the transformation of democracy into a “superstition,” a worship of machinery that was based on suspicion of, rather than trust in, the people.80 Although Orage hastily attempted to save face in The New Age by denying that his two offending categories were absolute, he was dismissive of Chesterton’s claim that Socialism would run to bureaucratic grass: this would be precluded by the “aristocratic” system to which leaders would be accountable through vigorous debate between Socialists of his—Orage’s—kind.81 It is unlikely that Chesterton would have been convinced by Orage’s assurance that Socialists were “vigorous democrats,” the backbone of a new and progressive spirit of “aristocracy” in government. Indeed, as positive appraisal of the people seemed to fall away, he defended the practices, preferences, and allegiances of “ordinary” humanity as the mainspring of the “superior” morals for which erstwhile Liberals and anti-Liberals were searching hopelessly elsewhere. Against the elitist response of the Nietzschean writer, Anthony Ludovici, to the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, he remarked that the tragedy was an allegory of the narrowing, not, as his antagonist claimed, the widening of “culture and command” in the twentieth century. It was the inevitable concomitant of the “pressing down into impotence” of the “plain qualities of men,” and one that had left the essential “creed” of “justice” at a substantial discount. The solution was not the return of a “ruler-man,” as Ludovici expressed it (much to Chesterton’s irritation at such an affected use of language), for all prominent leaders had gained the ascendant on the basis of pre-existing creeds, none being thinkers and rulers at the same time.82 But as well as flying in the face of the cult of Nietzsche, the terms of his contribution to this debate were in direct contravention of Liberalism as its grip on power intensified. As we shall see in the following chapter, even the Liberal government’s challenge to the House of Lords left him with a feeling that this was a showdown within a plutocratic class, not the conflagration between nation and its oppressors for which he longed.

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NOTES 1. Gal Gerson, Margins of Disorder: New Liberalism and the Crisis of European Consciousness (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004), 27. On the diverse nature of Victorian codes of “respectability” within a class structure that weakened the authority of the state among ordinary people, see Francis M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900 (London: Fontana Press, 1988), 355–56. 2. Chesterton engaged fiercely with the sectarianism of the Nonconformist minister John Clifford, and others who had opposed the maintenance of church schools through the rates in the correspondence pages of The Daily News; see, for example, “Dr. Clifford and the ‘No Popery’ Cry,” DN, 24 September 1902, 6; 27 September 1902, 4; and Clifford’s reply to his critics, “Dr. Clifford’s Reply to Cardinal Vaughan,” DN, 8 October 1902, 5. Chesterton returned to the fray in 1905, arguing that religion should be withdrawn from education as too important to be ground up by “the machinery of mere instruction”; “Some Doubts on Education,” DN, 13 May 1905. He signed off from this controversy with a denunciation of “undenominationalist” education as dogmatic through and through; “A Tail-Piece,” DN, 27 May 1905. 3. Edward David, “The New Liberalism of C.F.G. Masterman,” in Essays in Anti-Labour History: Responses to the Rise of Labour in Britain, ed. Kenneth D. Brown (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1974), 23, 18. 4. England: A Nation, ed. Lucien Oldershaw (London: R. Brimley Johnson, 1904). Chesterton was elected president of “The Patriot’s Club” that was the force behind the essays; see Leo Hetzler, “Chesterton’s Political Views, 1892–1914: With Comments on Chesterton and Anti-Semitism,” CR VII, no. 2 (May 1981): 137, n. 3. For discussion of his essay in the volume, see chapter 2, 39–40. 5. Charles F. G. Masterman, “The Blasphemy of Optimism,” The Speaker, 26 April 1902, in Denis J. Conlon, ed., G.K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgments (Antwerp: Antwerp Studies in English Literature, 1976), 40–45. 6. The Defendant (1901; London: Dent, 1902), 8. 7. “William Morris and his School,” Twelve Types (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1902), 26–30. 8. “On Differing to Agree,” DN, 26 August 1905, 6. 9. Charles F. G. Masterman, “Realities at Home,” in The Heart of the Empire: Discussions of Problems of Modern City Life in England (1901; Brighton: Harvester, 1973), 3. 10. “From the Abyss,” DN, 12 December 1902, 3. Masterman’s book was published anonymously as From the Abyss: Or Its Inhabitants, by One of Them (London: R. Brimley Johnson, 1902). 11. Charles F. G. Masterman, “G.K. Chesterton: An Appreciation,” The Bookman (February 1903) in G.K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgements, 59. 12. Charles F. G. Masterman, The Condition of England (1909; London: Methuen, 1911), 194–200. 13. Ibid., viii. 14. “The Angry Optimist,” DN, 5 June 1909, 6.

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15. “Charles Masterman,” GKW VI, 26 November 1927, 775. 16. Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (London: Sheed & Ward, 1944), 280. 17. “Two Bites of the Cherry,” DN, 11 May 1907, 6. 18. John Morley, On Compromise, ed. John Powell (1874; Staffordshire, UK: Keele University Press, 1997). Morley’s essay was prompted first by James Fitzjames Stephen’s recent attack on the principle of liberty defended by John Stuart Mill, and second, by the Education Act of 1870. For Morley, the latter represented the triumph of a resurgent clericalism, both Protestant and Catholic in kind, that threatened to undermine the nascent democracy of Britain; 74, 149. 19. Autobiography (1936), in CW XVI (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 120. 20. John A. Spender to Chesterton, 17 April 1905, BL Add MS 73240, folio 60. 21. “The Return of the Great Idea,” DN, 1 October 1904, 6. 22. It was soon defeated by extremist Nationalists and Unionists alike; S. L. Gwynn, rev’d Peter Gray, “Quin, Windham Thomas Wyndham, fourth earl of Dunraven and Mount Earl (1841–1926),” ODNB, vol. 45, 698–700, at 699. 23. ILN, 16 December 1905, 886. The reference to Desmoulins is especially interesting, emphasizing as it does that Chesterton was no supporter of the Jacobin terror and the ensuing militarist crusade throughout Europe. For Desmoulins’s critique of the Jacobins for subverting their own, internationalist vision of the nation, see Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the NationState in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 517–19. 24. Autobiography, 126–27. 25. “The Horrors of Victory,” DN, 14 January 1905, 6; see also “The Alphabet of the Liberal,” DN, 21 January 1906, 6. See his letter to Hammond, chapter 2, 34–35. 26. CP, 168–69. 27. Paul Readman, “The Liberal Party and Patriotism in Early Twentieth Century Britain.” Twentieth Century British History 12, no. 3 (2001): 280. 28. Geoffrey R. Searle, A New England? Peace and War, 1886–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 362. 29. For an account of the transformation of Nonconformist influence into impotence on the attainment of political power, which exposed its divisions, see Clyde Binfield, So Down to Prayers: Studies in English Nonconformity, 1780–1920 (London: Dent, 1977), 207–8. 30. “The Enigma of the Education Bill,” WG, 26 April 1906, 4. George Wyndham, a leading Roman Catholic layman, responded to Chesterton in a letter, 27 April 1906, BL Add MS 73241, folio 95: “After four hundred years of battle, always with brains and sometimes with swords, it is a nightmare to watch the Holy Catholic Church being huddled off the stage of history and hope the people do not mean this, or understand it.” For Chesterton’s admiration of Wyndham, see chapter 6, 130, and chapter 8, 177. 31. William L. Courtney, “The Napoleon of Notting Hill,” The Daily Telegraph, 30 March 1904, 12. 32. Jonathan P. Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), conclusion.

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33. Anon., “England a Nation,” The Athenaeum (no. 4033), 11 February 1905, 175–76. 34. For what may have been Chesterton’s opposite views on this poem, see chapter 2, 52n76. 35. Henry S. Holland, “England a Nation,” The Commonwealth: A Christian Social Magazine (Journal of the Christian Social Union) (January 1905): 25–27. 36. Anon., “England: A Nation,” WG, 10 December 1904, 7–8; Anon., “England a Nation,” The Morning Post, 15 December 1904, 2 37. “A Plea for Political Unreason,” DN, 24 June 1905, 6. 38. John H. Grainger, Patriotisms: Britain, 1900–1940 (London: Routledge, 1986), ch. 10. 39. Ibid., 172–73. 40. “The Monomaniac,” DN, 1 June 1907, 6. 41. “A Gap in English Education,” The Speaker, 4 May 1901, 128–29. 42. “A Plea for Political Unreason” (my emphasis). 43. Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 86–105; see also Parry, The Politics of Patriotism, on the sense of “British mission” peculiar to Victorian Liberalism and integral to its moral foundation (392). 44. Gilbert Murray, “National Ideals,” The International Journal of Ethics, October 1900, in Essays and Addresses (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921), 160–82. 45. He wrote an endearing sketch of London in 1914 as “so English, it can hardly be called the capital of England.” Unlike other continental cities, it was “unofficial” through and through, full of “secrets and anomalies” and altogether lacking in grand, Napoleonic boulevards “that could properly be decorated with his victories, or properly cleared with his cannon”; “London,” published privately for Alvin Langdon Coburn, Edmund D. Brookes and their friends, in CW XX (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), 633–37. 46. “The Secret of England,” DN, 20 February 1904, 6. He continued to declaim against the “ruinous self-satisfaction” of much English patriotism—based on blatant falsehoods—in “The Englishman,” DN, 14 November 1908, 6. 47. To some extent, Chesterton’s perceptions have been confirmed by recent scholars of the history of international relations (IR) as a discipline. David Long and Brian C. Schmidt maintain that an internationalism that was deeply enmeshed with Imperialism provided the backbone of IR in the early twentieth century in both Britain and America, not, as commonly assumed, an “idealism” that later met the full force of “realism”; “Introduction,” Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations (New York: State University of New York Press, 2005), 9–15. 48. Henry N. Brailsford, “Entente with Russia,” ON, 25 May 1907, 6. Although a fierce dissenter from the Liberal Party, Brailsford wrote most of the articles on foreign affairs for H. W. Massingham’s The Nation after 1907, and was a regular contributor to The Daily News. Like Chesterton he viewed nationhood in a positive light; unlike Chesterton he extended his sympathy for other nations well beyond the bounds of Christendom, and advocated sweeping policies of intervention on their behalf; Fred M. Leventhal, The Last Dissenter: H.N. Brailsford and his World

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(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 92–97. In this respect he stood midway between the cosmopolitanism of Gilbert Murray and Chesterton’s Little-Englandism. On the gulf that separated their respective philosophies, see Chesterton’s attack on Brailsford in “A Remonstrance with ‘H.N.B.,’” DN, 23 November 1907, 6. 49. “The Two Jingoes,” DN, 25 May 1907, 6. 50. Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), 62–69. 51. “A Plea for Political Unreason.” 52. “Spanish Horror and the English Humbug,” DN, 22 October 1909, 6; 29 October 1909, 3. James A. Walker, “The Spanish Crime,” DN, 28 October 1909, 3; James Hirst Hollowell, “Spanish Horror,” DN, 2 November 1909, 3. For Chesterton’s accusation against Gardiner that he had excluded a letter from Belloc from the correspondence, and Gardiner’s reply, see “Ferrer and Mr. Belloc,” DN, 15 October 1910, 2. 53. John D. Coates,”The Fleet Street Context and the Development of Chesterton’s Prose Style,” Prose Studies 6, no. 1 (1983): 64. The inflammatory article was “The Nature of a Religious War,” DN, 19 September 1903, 6. 54. “Turkey and the Liberals,” DN, 9 October 1911, 6. 55. Leventhal, The Last Dissenter, 109. Although for a view of Hobson, Brailsford et al. as the new face of Gladstonian idealism in the twentieth century, see Eugenio F. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–1906 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 374–75. 56. See letters by Edmund D’Auvergne and M. D. Eder in response to Chesterton’s letter, DN, 10 October 1911, 4; see also Chesterton’s response to these and a letter from a Turkish official (DN, 13 October 1911) in DN, 17 October 1911, 3. 57. See his strictures on the suffragettes’ campaign to disrupt the 1911 census by urging women to stay out all night; ILN, 22 April, 1911, in CW XXIX (San Francisco: Ignatius Press 1988), 74–77. 58. “The Only Imperialist,” DNL, 23 November 1912, 6. 59. “The Patriotic Idea,” 41. 60. Leo Hetzler, “Chesterton’s Political Views, 1892–1914: With Comments on Chesterton and Anti-Semitism, Part II,” CR VII, no. 3 (August, 1981): 240. 61. Readman, “The Liberal Party and Patriotism,” 298–99, 295. 62. The speech was reported as “Mr Balfour in Birmingham,” The Times, 23 September 1909, 7. 63. “Notes of the Week,” NA, 30 September 1909, 405. 64. “A Debate on Socialism,” a debate between G. K. Chesterton and G. B. Shaw, chaired by Hilaire Belloc, NA, 18 March 1909, 419. 65. “The Enemies of Property,” DN, 25 September 1909, 4. 66. “The Sleep of Progress,” DN, 11 November 1911, 4; John L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer, 1760–1832: A Study in the Government of England before the Reform Bill (London: Longmans, Green, 1911). 67. Hetzler, “Chesterton’s Political Views, 1892–1914, Part II,” 243, 247. 68. ILN, 9 September 1911, 396. 69. “The Tree of Liberty,” DN, 18 June 1910, 6. 70. ILN, 5 May 1906, 626.

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71. Mandler, The English National Character, 64–72; “Introduction: State and society in Victorian Britain,” in Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain, ed. Peter Mandler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 13. 72. Jonathan Parry, “Liberalism and Liberty,” in Liberty and Authority, 78–83. 73. Mandler, “Introduction: State and Society,” 2–4. 74. Mandler, The English National Character, 109–10. 75. Mandler, “Introduction: State and Society,” 16–17. 76. On the opposition between the Liberal discourse of English national character as the focus for patriotism on the one hand and Conservative emphasis on the institutions of state and church in this period on the other, see Mandler, English National Character, 122–33. 77. Cecil Chesterton, “G.K.C. on Socialism,” NA, 25 March 1909, 439. 78. Tom Villis, Reaction and Avant-Garde: The Revolt against Liberal Democracy in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Tauris, 2006). 79. Orage later warmed to many of Chesterton’s views, especially religion, although not democracy; see John D. Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull, UK: Hull University Press, 1984), conclusion. 80. “The Vote and the Votary,” DN, 6 February 1909, 4. 81. Alfred R. Orage, “Unedited Opinions. VIII. Democracy and Mr. G.K. Chesterton,” NA, 25 February 1909, 359. The clash between Chesterton and Orage was despite their shared antipathy toward realism in literature, and nostalgia for the Romantic literature of the nineteenth century. For a critical discussion of Orage’s revolt against the Realist novelists in the context of his wider Nietzscheanism, see Tom Steele, “From Gentleman to Superman: Alfred Orage and Aristocratic Socialism,” in The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, eds. Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 124–25. 82. “The End of the Strong Man,” DN, 1 June 1912; Ludovici’s reply, DN, 4 June 1912, 8; and GKC’s reply to Ludovici, DN, 6 June 1912, 8.

5 ✛

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hesterton’s exasperation with Liberal England intensified in the years leading up to the First World War, although his response is hardly in keeping with recent interpretations of the period. As John Coates has pointed out, his conception of the spiritual bankruptcy and political corruption of Edwardian society contrasts with the more sanguine account by the historian G. R. Searle. In this Searle follows the pattern set by the leaders of Liberal opinion themselves in dismissing figures such as Chesterton, who were perturbed by the seemingly downward moral spiral of British politics and culture. Coates views Chesterton’s anxiety about Edwardian England as focused principally on the widespread loss of belief in free will as scientific theories of inevitability superseded religion in accounting for change.1 But we have seen in previous chapters that his concerns were rooted simultaneously in a perceived threat to the vitality and integrity of English nationhood by the conduct of British politics, not least through the auspices of a Liberal government. It appeared to Chesterton that, with the full support of the Liberal press, the Liberal Party in office was rapidly losing touch with Liberalism’s eighteenthcentury roots and with a distinctively Christian and English heritage. This chapter considers the wedge that Chesterton perceived the Liberal government and Liberal journalists were driving between Liberalism and English nationhood in the years immediately preceding the First World War. As the wedge grew thicker, his breach with the Liberal party came closer. The principal issue that this chapter addresses is whether Chesterton left Liberalism or whether Liberalism left him; further, what role his

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evocations of the English people and the English past played in this separation.

POPULAR WRATH AND THE REVOLUTIONARY PRESUMPTION In the first decade of the twentieth century, especially, Chesterton looked to the French Revolution as the benchmark not only of Liberalism but the national ideal par excellence; it represented the fire through which all nations could and should be reborn in a popular mould as they sought to break the fetters of oligarchic and plutocratic control. This was the spirit in which he approached the multiple crises in British politics during the Edwardian era and into the new reign, not least the House of Lords’ rejection of Lloyd George’s budget. Speaking at the Oxford Union in favor of the motion that “[t]his House considers that the House of Lords as at present constituted is a standing menace to the state,” he stressed England’s singularity among the nations although, against Whiggism, for the worse rather than the better. As reported in the press, his concluding address ran: England alone was in the perilous position of not having had an important change for a very long time. It was in that way that nations died. They did not die by being conquered or by civil wars. They died slowly and had always died silently.2

The motion was narrowly lost, 316 votes to 308. But for all Liberalism’s challenge to the obstacle posed by the Lords to national renewal, it remained for Chesterton part of the problem of, rather than the solution to, the entrenched moneyed interest at the root of England’s decay.3 The passion with which Chesterton attacked the Lords as the crisis over the budget deepened was equaled only by his staunch defense, not of their Liberal enemies but of the people themselves; they were what he called “the simplest element of humanity,” the “sub-consciousness of society.” Unlike Liberal intellectuals for whom—after the Boer War—“crowds” became a byword for irrational behavior, Chesterton embraced the people en masse as the desperate instrument of God’s wrath when His “still patience” with “mountains of mystical wickedness” had snapped.4 The contrast with a fellow Liberal, J. A. Hobson, who also emphasized the benign nature of the masses but against social psychologists such as Gabriel Tarde and Gustav Le Bon, could not be greater. Hobson was concerned to incorporate crowds into a Hegelian dialectic of “social reason.” This enabled him to make allowances for the perversion of the “group mind” by

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“external factors” such as government, and yet underline vital points of contact between crowds and the elevated thought of elites in the more rational moments of the former.5 However, Chesterton stressed the primacy, autonomy, and purity of the people. As we have seen, he believed that if they were sometimes corrupted, as on the famous occasion of Mafeking night, this was by false notions such as cosmopolitanism in an Imperialist guise rather than government propaganda.6 The “real mob” in the perjorative sense could be found in the House of Lords, “a crowd, small, fierce, vague and full of all the fevers of the mob.” Far from being a barrier against the people, aristocracies needed to be held in check by the people. This was especially important given their vulnerability to dangerous “fancies and fads” in the fullness of their power.7 The vehement tone of Chesterton’s speech at Oxford and his diatribes against the rule of wealth had been set by his famous poem, “The Secret People.” It was composed two years earlier for the short-lived literary magazine The Neolith (1907–1908), published under the direction, inter alia, of the children’s writer and Socialist campaigner, Edith Nesbit.8 The poem projected the division between rulers and ruled in contemporary England deep into the past, though the gap had never been wider than in the present under the regime of representative government. The last verse conveyed a sense of England’s special, providential status, a combination of extreme backwardness in the art of protest yet promising much the most spectacular outbreak in the future. We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet, Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street. It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first, Our wrath come after Russia’s wrath and our wrath may be the worst. It may be we are meant to mark with our riot and our rest God’s scorn for all men governing. It may be beer is best. But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet. Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.9

If England was in imminent danger of that slow, silent death he referred to in his Oxford speech, he forced himself to believe that her demise was by no means a foregone conclusion. The English people would not retain forever the bogus identities they had assumed in response to cunning appeals by kings and aristocracies to “Anglo-Saxons,” “men of education, like you and me,” “electors of Wapping,” and so forth. Instead, they would rally by “divine authority” to the cause of humanity.10 Nationhood in this sense meant simply the mass convergence of individuals into a whole, losing that sense of personal distinction from others, which allowed injustice to flourish. If such language sounded suspiciously close to

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the empty universalism he so despised, he was careful to stress the national variation in the impulses and tastes by which crowds were forged. This is nowhere clearer than in an article that, when it was read by Mahatma Gandhi, proved to be the catalyst for an Indian nationalism centered on India rather than the western machinery of voting: The test of a democracy is not whether the people vote, but whether the people rule. The essence of a democracy is that the national tone and spirit of the typical citizen is apparent and striking in the actions of the State. . . . Votes may be the most convenient way of achieving this effect; but votes are quite vain if they do not achieve it. And sometimes they do not. I venture to say that the average Frenchman was much more behind the conscription of Napoleon I than the average Englishman was behind the mass of anti-civic nonsense, the Children’s Bill.11

Chesterton accepted that large sections of the English working class currently used their votes to support social reform. But in one article in The New Age in January 1908 he suggested that they did so purely because “they want certain things, or don’t want them,” without being aware of the threat to democracy posed by the form in which these goods were offered. Repudiating even the non-Fabian, libertarian varieties of Socialism that it was the raison d’être of that periodical to promote, he suggested that votes cast for Socialist legislation in no way implied endorsement of the “general ideal” of Socialism, heavily opposed as it was to the principle of private property. He was convinced that ultimately democracy would “move,” that the odds were in favor of a revolution in England that featured all the things that the “actual poor” liked, and that he liked, too— the giving to “every man” private property, “but very specially private property.” Like Orwell some thirty years later, he emphasized the peculiarly English course this revolution would take: “the strong sense of English cosiness, the instinct for special festival, the distinction between the dignities of man and woman, responsibility of a man under his roof.”12 A decade later, he contrasted the attenuation of family life and hence nationhood in England since the Reformation with their vibrancy in Ireland, which the Liberal government had wisely exempted from its reforming legislation before the war.13 To Chesterton’s mind the conditions for successful revolt in England could not be riper in the years leading up to the war. In addition to growing political corruption, formalized collaboration between parties through the habit of interparty conferences weakened significantly the force of democracy in Britain.14 The hardening of his attitudes owed much to the influence of Belloc and Cecil Chesterton. They had roundly condemned “the party system” as the antithesis of democracy in a book of that title published in 1911.15 In a letter to the editor of The Westminster

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Gazette, Chesterton protested against the paper’s unqualified support for the Insurance Act as a triumph of cross-party consensus. He wrote of the tragedy the act represented for the principle of opposition in government, and which could be linked directly to the apparent docility of the English people of late, at least at the polls. He contrasted recent developments with the serious approach to political opposition of his fathers and grandfathers, and those of the Gazette’s readers. He maintained that even though democracy was then in its infancy, these exemplars possessed a reasoned defence of the party system—a defence which I long thought convincing, and which I still find perfectly intelligent and plausible. They held that the people would always be articulate, because the Opposition would always oppose. They knew as well as we do that politicians are mostly either oligarchs or adventurers; but they held that the oligarch out of office would always use the popular will against the oligarch in office. They did not believe in Disraeli’s care for democracy. But they did believe in Disraeli’s taking every advantage of Gladstone’s neglect of democracy; and they were right.16

What he perceived as having changed in his own lifetime was the reluctance any longer of oppositions to “oppose,” signaling that popular assertiveness was now futile. “For some reason or another,” Chesterton speculated, knowingly, the modern politicians would rather help each other than unhorse each other with the spear of democracy—a two edged weapon. The reason may be direct collusion and corruption (as some of my friends tell me); it may be a national trend towards plutocracy; it may be something else that you will suggest to me. But when the Insurance Act was passed by “all parties in the State,” they were not representing the State.17

How could Chesterton be so sure about the unpopularity of the act? It was certainly true that there were prominent dissidents in the Labour Party who defied Ramsay MacDonald’s support for the bill, concerned about the toll the Insurance Act would inevitably take on trade union subscriptions.18 However, with no hard evidence otherwise he simply challenged the editor of The Westminster Gazette, J. A. Spender, to repeat his assurance that the act enjoyed unanimous support “in the State,” for example, in “an omnibus, or a railway train, or a club, or a crowd, or a church, or a public-house.” “Notoriously,” he proclaimed, “the negation of it can be heard on all sides.”19 On this occasion, he well succeeded in wringing from Spender an admission that the act probably did not pass the test of “unanimous popularity,” with the additional, telling comment that “there are some questions in which we think we may fairly expect the representatives of the people to be a little in advance of the people

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themselves.” This was in a prominent leader responding to Chesterton’s letter on the same day.20 For Chesterton, the remark spoke volumes about the unashamed abandonment of the theory of representative government by modern Liberals. On the reasoning of The Westminster Gazette, as he pointed out in a subsequent letter, Parliament need not even attempt to “speak for the people,” quite apart from its institutional limitations as a mirror of popular opinion.21 Yet Chesterton’s own claim to speak on behalf of a wide, national constituency well beyond the narrow reach of the party system was equally unconvincing to his opponents. Just as his brother had questioned the high levels of support for peasant proprietorship that Chesterton claimed, so Shaw poured scorn on the assumptions of his poem “The Secret People.” The problem was not the poem itself; indeed, he thought it might have been a “great poem” had its content—he meant, in respect of the English people—not been such “fearful nonsense.” But in the famous article in which he coined the term “the Chesterbelloc,” Shaw denounced both Chesterton and Belloc as frauds, constantly appealing to an extensive but purely imaginary community as the cornerstone of their personal, highly idiosyncratic beliefs. Thus Chesterton foisted his views on the “dumb democracy of England,” and Belloc, even more audaciously, on the democracy of Europe whose boundaries were set by the Roman Catholic Church.22 Immediate comparison with an analogous critique of Chesterton underlines the resistance his anti-Liberal invective encountered among contemporaries on the ground of its unrepresentative nature. It was advanced by a writer who signed himself “a political journalist” in the letters pages of The New Age in 1911 and who had contested vigorously the claim of the Chestertons and Belloc that the party system was widely discredited.23 Characteristically, Chesterton responded that he could name “a score of men within a stone’s throw” who shared his view, adding that such satisfaction as there was in England with the party system was due wholly to “life being good” even without “good government”: “Nero’s slaves enjoyed Italy, not Nero. Modern Englishmen enjoy England, but certainly not the British Constitution.”24 Again, supporting evidence was lacking, and even if it had not been, his argument showed that life could be perceived as good without good government and that the latter was in no sense a popular priority. Chesterton’s antagonist remained dissatisfied. In his reply, the “political journalist” suggested that the spirit of The Eye Witness paper that was established by Belloc in the wake of The Party System was quite out favor with the British public. No paper had ever succeeded in Britain along the “impartial,” informative lines that The Eye Witness had set as a new standard for journalism. The Daily Mail and The National Review underlined

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the harsh truth that partisanship was the key to high circulation. The critic conceded that “the very small public that requires such an organ” was “the very pick of the intelligence and salt of the nation.” But he cautioned against “imagin[ing] it to be numerically larger than it is.” This Belloc and Cecil Chesterton had done in suggesting that there was “a public of many, many thousands, especially in London, awaiting such an experiment” as The Eye Witness.25 Neither side could prove his respective point with anything approximating conclusiveness. But if Chesterton had few illusions about the Liberal Party from the beginning of the twentieth century, he and his associates certainly erred in overestimating support for their analysis of England’s ills, and also the readiness of the English people to act in the face of a “real and tangible national peril.” Indeed, this was something that Chesterton was to recognize, and accept, after the outbreak of war.

DISCIPLINE, CENSORSHIP, AND DEFIANCE Still, as “a political journalist” evidently recognized, this did not invalidate Chesterton’s point that the “fraud” of the party system and the “secrecy” at the heart of government were separating rulers from the ruled to an unparalleled degree. This separation had the effect of hardening the opposition of rulers to the wave of industrial unrest in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of the First World War. Chesterton loudly supported the strikers in the railways and mines, not least against calls by the Unionist die-hard Lord Halsbury, to strengthen the hand of the police by abolishing rights of redress against perjury or miscarriages of justice in Labour disputes.26 The turmoil in which England was currently embroiled was for Chesterton both cause and consequence of contemporary Liberalism, committed more to the disciplining and regimentation of the people than the extension of popular liberty. The chasm between Chesterton and the editors and readerships of the mainstream organs of Liberal opinion—The Daily News and The Nation, as well as The Westminster Gazette—reached breaking point over the Children’s Act (1908), the Licensing Act (1908), and the Mental Deficiency Act (1913). The last was the only legislative triumph for the eugenics lobby in Britain but one that reflected nonetheless the large inroads it had made on educated opinion.27 He objected strongly to the exclusion of children from pubs and canal boat homes on grounds of the unwarranted interference with the “sacred” sphere of family life it represented. He also protested against the compulsory nature of the levy on medical and unemployment insurance embodied in the Insurance Act. The powers given to local authorities administering the Children’s Act

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and Mental Deficiency Act to suspend habeas corpus seemed to plumb new depths of tyranny in Britain. The book in which he attacked such collectivist initiatives as no better than their individualist alternatives—What’s Wrong with the World (1910)— received hostile reviews in the two main Liberal dailies. The review in The Daily News emphasized the grip that the State had come to exert on Liberalism in the twentieth century; it expressed satisfaction with representative government as the best instrument of democracy available and with the state as the best servant of the needs of the poor, which Chesterton had set out so eloquently.28 The review in The Westminster Gazette vigorously defended those engaged in furthering the agenda of social progress. Far from being filled with a “hopeless conceit in some pseudoscientific panacea,” they were, for the most part, quite modest and humble people with a keen sense of their own fallibility, and of the difficulty of doing anything with human nature. They do not need, as Mr. Chesterton seems to think, to have the conceit taken out of them, but rather to have a little more courage put into them.29

In a review of his paean to King Alfred, The Ballad of the White Horse, the following year, the paper set itself against Chesterton’s tendency to be “always at extremes,” suggesting that it was he who had abandoned the democratic, Liberal ground, not Liberalism.30 By contrast, the anonymous reviewer of What’s Wrong in The Nation was clearly sympathetic; while alive to the strength in England of Chesterton’s bête noire—the view that “progress” could only ever be the work of the few, and that “the common herd should be goaded, cajoled, or deluded into advances for which they had no approval”—he noted that its ascendancy had been challenged of late, not least, in the pages of The Nation itself.31 Chesterton’s attacks upon political corruption caused equal strain in his relations with the Liberal establishment, especially at The Daily News. He played his hand well, initially, at least. The editor, A. G. Gardiner, refused to print his article expressing qualified support for the dissident Liberal MP, H. C. Lea, in 1907 against the government’s involvement in the sale of honors to maintain party funds on which poor Members were dependent. After much protest from Chesterton, Gardiner allowed his columnist to write a letter to the editor that he duly published.32 But the incident marked a watershed in his relationship with Gardiner. He was much less successful in 1911 in persuading Gardiner to lift the embargo on his criticism of the Insurance Act. In an undated letter, Chesterton pleaded that his honor was at stake, and that there was a blatant inconsistency in Gardiner ’s editorial policy whereby H. W. Massingham was permitted to “damn and blast the Lib-

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eral Party to infinity” over its (pro-French) foreign policy, while he, Chesterton, was silenced on Lloyd George’s imposition of a “State stratification of rich & poor practically imposed on Germany by Bismarck himself.” Chesterton’s anti-German sentiments resulting from the German influences on recent social legislation are much in evidence here. He emphasized that at least in the realm of foreign policy he was in full support of the Liberal government, as “(one would think) any free Western citizen might naturally be.”33 Gardiner’s reply has not survived. But clearly he was unmoved by Chesterton’s entreaty, at any rate not sufficiently moved to allow Chesterton to rock the Liberal boat at the crucial hour of the passage of the bill. While assailing the Act in The Westminster Gazette when it first came into effect, Chesterton had to be content in his own paper with denouncing the Liberal government for including in its New Years Honours list in 1912 two leading villains of the Boer War as he saw it, George Albu and Lionel Phillips. They had financed the mines the pro-Boers so hated and Albu was responsible for the introduction of Chinese labor in South Africa. He recollected that even a Jingo mob had refused to cheer Albu some ten years previously in a roll call of leading individuals associated with the war.34 The ban seems to have been lifted in August 1912, although too late to make any real difference. In an open letter to the Liberal Party in his Saturday column, Chesterton expressed his bewilderment that a party ostensibly devoted to liberty and democracy could have passed bills “which destroy liberty, by methods which ignore democracy.” The crux of the problem was that Bills which many people doubtless think right, but which many people certainly think wrong are passed by both parties and both Houses as if they were self-evident. Habeas Corpus is abolished; the Human Stud Farm is started, with less realisation or reporting than used to be given to a Bill about a boat or a field. But with a late leading article in this paper about the poor “anarchists” who resisted the Insurance Act, my poor old conscience has burst its bounds.35

He returned to the attack a fortnight later, pointing out to the would-be “philanthropists” who had denounced him in the correspondence pages of The Daily News that the dispute within Liberalism no longer concerned how much or little liberty the individual should enjoy, but whether liberty “should still be regarded as a good thing at all.” He denied that any parallel could be drawn between the heightened invasiveness of the state of late and the support that the Liberal Party once gave to factory legislation. To one such Liberal opponent who thought otherwise, he responded: “If

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he really does not see a difference between preventing masters from making money in an inhuman way, and preventing servants from spending money in a human way [a sideswipe against the Insurance Act], I simply say that he has not the slightest objection to the institution of slavery.” Further, he made a virtue of his lack of acquaintance with the lives of the poor, not least out of respect for their privacy.36 The silencing of Chesterton over the Insurance Act opened the way to his departure from The Daily News just over a year later in 1913. The circumstances of his break with Gardiner have been the subject of some debate. Against Maisie Ward’s acceptance of Chesterton’s account that he resigned, a number of later biographers maintain that he was sacked. This was in response to his inflammatory poem—“A Song of Strange Drinks”—concerning the “caddishness” of cocoa, published in The New Witness on 23 January 1913.37 But the full surviving evidence confirms Ward’s account, while shedding further light on Chesterton’s state of mind at the time. The poem was certainly a deliberate snub to George Cadbury, proprietor of The Daily News. In a letter dated five days later, Gardiner invited him to “correct the ‘impression’ (baseless, as I am sure it is) to which the poem had given rise ‘in some quarters.’”38 The letter would have arrived just before Chesterton gave an unusually lackluster performance in a debate at the Queen’s Hall on 28 January. This was based on Belloc’s motion that “if we do not re-establish the institution of property, we shall re-establish the institution of slavery; there is no third course.” Shaw had opposed the motion, pointing to Chesterton’s status as “a flourishing property of Mr. Cadbury” in his support.39 Chesterton seems to have suffered a rare sense of humor failure. After the debate, he responded to Gardiner’s letter by denying that he intended any personal snub to Cadbury. But he concluded: It is quite impossible for me to continue taking the money of a man who may think I have insulted him. It is equally impossible for me to permit him or anyone else to control what I choose to write in other places. Therefore I see no other course but to surrender my position on the paper quite finally.40

Gardiner replied, in a much-quoted line: “I hate all separations. This I hate for many reasons. But I will not trouble you with them.” He concluded with the assurance that the correspondence pages of The Daily News would always be open to him in the future.41 This version of events is confirmed by the contents of a “letter to the editor” from Chesterton that was published in The Daily News in 1916. In the course of responding to criticism from H. G. Wells, he discussed the circumstances that had led him to “sever his connection” with the newspaper. He wrote that his position as a columnist had become untenable in the light of the convictions which had drawn him to The New Witness:

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the failure of the “great dailies” to support “the popular cause” in the “great strikes” before the First World War resulting from their capitalist ownership; the tendency of social reform to reinforce the “slave state” of a permanent proletariat to which Belloc had referred in his book, The Servile State of 1907; and the secret political fund as an inevitable concomitant of the professionalization of party politics.42 The publication of the letter signals Gardiner’s apparent willingness to allow Chesterton’s account of his breach with The Daily News to stand. Indeed, Chesterton had outlined the same convictions to Gardiner following his resignation, and in response to the latter’s expression of hatred “of all separations.” With the tension in his relationship with Gardiner now resolved, he emphasized that his political solidarity with his New Witness and Eye Witness friends did not extend to the “blind charge of hypocrisy” they leveled against the Cadbury family; this was an instance of their tendency to be wrong about people, “especially people they did not know.”43 The letter elicited the warmest response from Gardiner: “I never liked a man simply because he agreed with me. I shall never think of you other than with affection.”44 Against this background, the Marconi affair that came to a head a few months after his departure from The Daily News was but the consummation of a long and deepening process of disillusion with Liberalism. Once again, he found himself at odds with Gardiner, even though he was no longer a columnist on the paper by the time the report that cleared the main parties of any wrongdoing was published in June 1913. Still smarting over the successful libel action brought against his brother in response to his charges against Godfrey Isaacs arising out of the affair, he remonstrated against Gardiner’s initial editorial in response to the report. This argued that those who had conducted a vendetta against government ministers—simply, as Gardiner saw it, out of a concern to destroy the government and its policies—had inflicted the greatest damage on the body politic. It was certainly true that those who opposed the Marconi ministers—both inside and outside Parliament—could find little evidence of open corruption.45 But as Chesterton pointed out in a letter to the editor that Gardiner published alongside a second editorial entitled “A Campaign as Cruel and Reckless as any on Record,” the principle was one of the meaning of “honour” in politics, not the guilt of particular individuals.46 With a “packed” select committee in favor of the attorney general, Sir Rufus Isaacs, Chesterton wrote, it was unlikely that the latter would be indicted of the charge of suppressio veri. The charge was fully merited in Chesterton’s view because Isaacs had concealed from the House of Commons in the previous October his purchase of shares in the American Marconi company to which the English company was affiliated. While Chesterton confessed that the affiliation was weaker than had originally

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been alleged by opponents of the ministers, economy with the truth was no different morally than outright falsehood. Chesterton’s letter to The Daily News was much admired by William Watson, an early mentor in politics and poetry.47 Watson’s endorsement emphasizes the continuing hold of the high ideals of probity in public life that had animated Liberal opponents of the Boer War a decade earlier, not least through the invocation of patriotism. This applied even among those—such as Watson—who were outside the main ring of anti-government “conspirators” in the Marconi case. Indeed, Chesterton’s apparent reiteration of those ideals led some of his Imperialist opponents to make overtures toward him as a potential ally. This was in the interests of forging a common patriotism among hitherto divided patriots in the light of recent events.48 If account is taken of the wider culture of public discussion and need for close scrutiny of government with which Liberals such as C. P. Scott had endowed a specifically Liberal conception of patriotism at the turn of the century, it is clear that Chesterton was in one sense, at least, still working well within the boundaries of Liberalism.49 Nevertheless, on what other grounds, if any, could Chesterton still claim to be a Liberal at the end of a period that saw him at the furthest removes from organized Liberalism?

THE WRONG SIDE OF THE NATION At the heart of Chesterton’s critique of the Liberal government was a conception of authority as central to political power and its importance “for nothing so much as the granting of liberties.” Its significance was enhanced for him as the key to understanding “the real England,” the nation that had emerged in the early Middle Ages and to which he paid constant homage. In an article for The Daily News early in 1912 he reflected on the tendency of the government and its supporters in the press to use the word “charter” in extolling recent bills concerning particular classes of citizen—for example, the poor, the infirm, and children. He was anxious to preserve the essential medieval meaning of the term as the granting of liberties and rights to petitioners, not curtailing the freedom of individuals deemed “unfortunate.” Where the concept of the charter did have a modern application—for example, in the attempt by railway workers to secure immunity from prosecution in strikes—he noted that it had been denied. He contrasted the blow to freedom that this move on the part of the government to claim the “charter” idea for its policies represented with the Christian conception of humanity on which the medieval charter was based. For the loss of the original meaning of the charter was in no small part due to the erosion of Christian belief by free thinkers and secularists,

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sapping the foundations of English liberty in the process. To Christian thinkers the charter was a sort of small copy of the Christian idea of man’s creation. Man was free, not because there was no God, but because it needed a God to set him free. By authority he was free. By authority the craftsmen of the guilds were free. Many other great philosophers took and take the other view: the Lucretian pagans, the Moslem fatalists, the modern monists and determinists, all roughly confine themselves to saying that God gave man a law. The medieval Christians insisted that God gave man a charter.50

Much in accord with the “modern” conception of liberty associated with Constant, Burckhardt, de Tocqueville, and Acton, Chesterton insisted that “liberties” enhanced freedom, while “laws” aimed to secure some other, usually elusive political end, that only served to undermine liberty: health and happiness, for example. Would not the idea of the charter have sanctioned women’s rights for which there was considerable agitation in Chesterton’s time? On the surface, at least, it would seem to lend powerful support to this cause. However, Chesterton opposed calls for the extension of opportunities for female employment, not least because he denied that they represented the wishes of the majority of women. In heated exchanges with the editor of The Nation—H. W. Massingham—and its readers at the same time as the “charter” article appeared, he defied his opponents to produce evidence of a groundswell of opinion in favor of such calls from “shopgirls, housemaids, [and] seamstresses.” The deafening silence would underline women’s greater concern for the “self-control and honour of their sex,” far less agreement with “our clumsy speculations” and the “brutal denials” of employers that women workers were a “problem.”51 For Chesterton, such “denials”—seized on by Massingham—pointed wholly to the vested interests of employers in using women as cheap labor. Moreover, to compensate for physical disadvantages, women would be forced to work harder than men, thereby assuming the role of the “blackleg.”52 Chesterton greeted Massingham’s response that such a “display of moral qualities” worked in women’s favor with howls of derision: “It may be in some celestial ethical sense of advantage to the woman,” but not in her “earthly industrial sense.”53 In this one realm of society where “protection” was needed, women were left at the mercy of “slave” employers, complementing a wider enslavement to the state affecting men and women more widely. Chesterton would have been unmoved by the argument of a recent historian that the nineteenthcentury Liberal state pioneered “protection” of women factory workers in order to limit rather than enhance their powers of free agency, through vindicating the male breadwinner; in his eyes, the male breadwinner held the key to the emancipation of women, not their subjection.54

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Chesterton’s relations with The Nation on a wider front had also worsened by this time. He was constantly at odds with its trenchant support of the Liberal government before the First World War, its measured response to the Marconi affair notwithstanding.55 This conflict was despite the publication of some of his best poems there—for example, “The Revolutionist,” a satirical attack on the would-be Conservative leader, Walter Long, following his ill-advised remark that “I never was standing by when a revolution was going on.”56 It was despite, also, a memorable tribute to W. S. Gilbert in 1908, in which he applauded the latter for ridiculing the “false patriotism” of his compatriots at a time when England was in its imperial prime. National greatness ought to make an Englishman humble rather than proud, Chesterton wrote, apropos the famous lines in H. M. S. Pinafore: But in spite of all temptations To belong to other nations He remains an Englishman!57

But tensions with the prominent Liberal weekly arose over the subordinate position of the private member to the executive and the evils of the Prevention of Crime and Children’s Acts, the secret fund, and sale of honors, as well as female employment.58 There was some rapport over the Mental Deficiency Bill in 1912, Chesterton reinforcing The Nation’s opposition to the bill’s eugenic proposals for eliminating the “unfit” through compulsory detention and sterilization. In a “letter to the editor” he passed over The Nation’s main objection to the bill, that it was a substitute for—what would have undoubtedly seemed to him—yet more social reform of a different although still intrusive kind. He concentrated instead on challenging the bill’s supporters—for example, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson—particularly with regard to the role it gave to experts in identifying “mental degenerates.”59 Yet for the wider agreement with The Nation Chesterton must have been immensely grateful, as some of his earlier letters evince concern that he was becoming almost a figure of fun in the Liberal circles he once inhabited with relative ease and enthusiasm. To one such letter in 1911 concerning the tyranny of cabinet government, the editor had simply remarked: “We must be stupid, for we have no idea what Mr. Chesterton means.”60 While this misunderstanding was cleared up in a subsequent letter, he prefaced another the following year with the words “you seem to have taken quite a dislike to me.”61 His book, Orthodoxy, had been subjected to heavy criticism in The Nation, emphasizing the sharp religious differences that to some extent always gave a direction to the political disputes between Chesterton and the journal.62 While his The Victorian Age in Literature of 1913 was reviewed more appreciatively, it was given a rough ride by an old sparring

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partner in the correspondence pages of The Daily News. He was indignant that The Nation, of all papers, had failed to upbraid Chesterton on “the insulting references to Dissent which disfigure [the book’s] pages.”63 The religious differences had been highlighted early on in a dispute concerning what Chesterton considered to be the failure of J. H. Newman’s theology to support “developmentalism” in Christian theology.64 They were further accentuated in the controversy over Lord Swaythling’s will in 1911, a pivotal episode in Chesterton’s transformation into Liberal pariah, which will be explored in the following chapter. Clearly, the mantle of “true Liberalism” was vigorously contested on the cusp of the Edwardian age across a wide range of issues. What most divided Chesterton from mainstream Liberals was his disillusion with Parliament, the sine qua non of progress toward liberty as far as fellow Liberals such as the writer, John Galsworthy, were concerned, whatever its present failings. In a “letter to the editor” of The Times in February 1914, Galsworthy pressed Parliament to take more effective steps to prevent sweated labor, homelessness, idleness, and starvation among children, even animal cruelty. However, Chesterton publicly ridiculed Galsworthy’s “innocence,” not least his belief that modern politicians regarded liberty as “the breath of life, the jewel above price.”65 In Chesterton’s view, Parliament would address these evils, if at all, only by a further enslavement of the poor, a contention that Galsworthy dismissed in a private letter to Chesterton. Parliament was all there was, he insisted; certainly, if it were ever to be “got rid of,” it was unlikely that “we could do any better.”66 In flatly denying that Parliament had any future as an instrument of liberty and reform—most savagely in his poem “Who Goes Home?”67— surely Chesterton’s claim to be a Liberal could not have been more hollow? The focus of the final section of this chapter is his persistent emphasis on lines and limits as the clearest indication that the liberal, if not Liberal, focus of his political thought before 1914 had by no means dissipated.

EVOLUTION, PROGRESS, AND FREEDOM Chesterton’s abiding concern with limits as the condition of liberty is readily apparent in his feud with Edward Carpenter, the Socialist thinker who vied with Chesterton in pushing patriotism and English identity to the forefront of the movement for democratic change in Britain.68 In an article entitled “Morality and Socialism” published in The Albany Review (formerly The Independent Review) in 1907, Carpenter had contrasted favorably the “evolutionary ethics” of the East toward the effacement of all

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restraints with Chesterton’s insistence on the need for rules and “codes.” Chesterton responded by drawing Carpenter’s attention to the party fund in a way that underlined conclusively his impeccable Liberal credentials. [The Party Fund] is not even supposed to exist. And it is, as a matter of fact, a very good example of what does really happen to those who leave themselves open to evolution in politics, which means in practice the strength of all those forces which can work below the surface, and the weakness of all those forces which venture to become conscious, human, and clear.69

The “cloudy” notion of “evolutionary ethics” was instrumental in corrupting democracy and liberty in a further sense, too. The erosion of certainty consequent upon the loss of faith in a created universe, with definite lines of responsibility, had enabled “anarchists”—both rich and poor—to seize the reform initiative for their own ends. The anarchists seemed to deny any law above them, hence clearing the way for “all the philanthropists, eugenic inquirers, and social philosophers” who now crowded the public stage. They were directly responsible in Chesterton’s eyes for the usurpation of “the authority of the community,” embracing a new, spurious notion of democracy as “boss[ing] the poor, without obeying the people.”70 He believed that such figures were integral to the pessimism in which the age was steeped, for all its reforming intent, for they regarded the people not as their own masters—unlike themselves—but as objects upon which external laws operated. At the same time, popular beliefs were considered unsound.71 For all the faults of democracy—and Chesterton readily admitted that “whole tracts of humanity can be sunk in special ignorance or swept with special delusions”72—it was axiomatic to freedom and progress, evolutionary ethics the reverse. Democracy, therefore, was not to be conceived as an instrument of individual self-advancement, or as a passive human body on which collectivist reform was put to work in the name of a chimerical notion of “progress.” It was instead, in the true sense of Rousseau, an organ of collective will that underwrote the freedom of all. But for Chesterton, unlike Rousseau, the community itself was not the result of voluntarism rooted in a “return to nature” to locate its source. As noted in an earlier chapter, it was framed instead by the archaic structures of nationhood—a reflection of the “supernatural” in the “natural” that constituted the missing link of Rousseau’s theory and which offered greater safeguards of personal freedom than contract.73 In embracing this organic approach to the community, Chesterton was not so distant from the Idealist followers of Rousseau among his contemporaries, those who had been inspired by T. H. Green and who supplied the intellectual backbone of Edwardian Liberalism, centered squarely upon the state in reaction against “individual-

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ism.”74 However, he would have differed from them, as well as from Rousseau himself, in the importance he attached to delimitation. The community could never be confused with the state without curtailing the liberty it existed to uphold, not least through defending private property as a right, not merely an expedient of government that was anything but representative in Chesterton’s eyes.75 The preponderant influence at work on Chesterton here might well be seen as Anglican, the Church of England having turned to an organic English nation and away from the British state in maintaining its authority from the 1880s onward.76 As the state sought broader bases of legitimacy in the democratic age, the church followed suit, and Chesterton was associated with Anglicanism when this movement was in full flow. By contrast, the Idealists embraced patriotism and nationhood in the context of a well-ordered state. Green, at least, eschewed the notion of a national religion served by an established church in favor of civic ideals of community. These were sustained by, and in turn reinforced, autonomous religious societies, albeit conceived in the distinctive terms of English Nonconformity and the “national character” it enshrined.77 But while Chesterton may have fallen foul of Edwardian Liberalism in keeping the state at arm’s length and in emphasizing the distinction between state and nation, he remained clearly visible within wider Liberal boundaries. He was certainly in good Liberal company in the concerns he raised about the modern philanthropic spirit that pervaded public policy, as well as much private effort toward social improvement. For example, he shared these concerns with George Unwin, a pioneer economic historian in Britain, and another admirer of Dickens. The son of a publican in Stockport, Unwin regarded middle-class philanthropy as concealing “an unconscious impertinence.” According to his friend and fellow economic historian, R. H. Tawney, Unwin felt that “his people were too good to be the prey of philanthropists.”78 Chesterton embraced national diversity within a broad framework of Christendom and its distinctiveness relative to the cultural and geographical spheres over which other religions held sway. He perceived a clear division in the world between Christian societies, which attached the highest significance to the nation as the safeguard of personal freedom, and other, typically Muslim and Jewish, communities for whom it held little value. The threat of cultures that were seemingly impervious to nationhood was especially menacing for England, a nation that had long been Christendom’s weakest link. Its vulnerability on this score was exacerbated by far-flung imperial connections and the influences outside Christendom to which it had been exposed. In this and the preceding chapter the degree of Chesterton’s alienation from Liberalism in power has been explored on the basis of his ardent belief in the primacy

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of nationhood and democracy to a tradition of liberty that had been shaped by Christianity. Chapter 6 now turns to the various identities Chesterton associated with England before the First World War. It especially addresses the question of their exclusivity in light of the threats to which he believed they were increasingly subject in the early years of the twentieth century.

NOTES 1. John D. Coates, “The Young Chesterton and a History of his Time,” CR XXX, nos. 3 and 4 (Fall and Winter, 2004): 280–83; Geoffrey R. Searle, A New England? Peace and War 1886–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 2. “Lords a Menace to the State,” The Manchester Guardian, 19 November 1909, 9. 3. For instance, he took exception to the quip of the Liberal statesman and thinker Lord Morley that the House of Lords “must be either mended or ended,” implying that either alternative might be acceptable. For Chesterton, they were diametrically opposed: “To mend is to strengthen. I, for instance, disbelieve in oligarchy; so I would no more mend the House of Lords than I would mend a thumbscrew.” What’s Wrong with the World (1910), CW IV (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 208. 4. “The Unpopularity of the People,” DN, 18 December 1909, 6. 5. Gal Gerson, Margins of Disorder: New Liberalism and the Crisis of European Consciousness (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004), 83–86; Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 109. 6. Chapter 2, 44. 7. “The Real Mob,” DN, 13 March 1909, 4. 8. “The Secret People,” The Neolith 1 (November 1907): 1–2. 9. CP, 176. 10. “The Unpopularity of the People,” DN, 18 December 1909, 6. 11. ILN, 18 September 1909, 387 (my emphasis). For the impact on Gandhi, see Philip N. Furbank, “Chesterton the Edwardian,” G.K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal, ed. John Sullivan (London: Paul Elek, 1974), 21. 12. “Why I am not a Socialist,” NA, 4 January 1908, 190. 13. Irish Impressions (1919), CW XX (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), 107–12. 14. For Chesterton’s searing critique of interparty conferences and the “compromising” compromises to which they led, not least over the enfranchisement of women in 1910, see ILN, 25 June 1910, 1008. For a more benign interpretation of the moderation of opposition in these years, one that emphasizes the “camaraderie of the Commons and friendships between the two major parties,” see Searle, A New England?, 189. By contrast, Leo Hetzler questions Maisie Ward’s criticism of Chesterton for reading more into the friendship and cooperation between members of the two parties than was warranted: “Chesterton’s Political Views,

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1892–1914: With Comments on Chesterton and Anti-Semitism,” CR VII, no. 2 (May 1981): 124. 15. Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton, The Party System (London: Stephen Swift, 1911). 16. “The Ruin of Representative Government,” WG, 4 January 1912, 3. See the recent argument of Philip Harling that Gladstone and Disraeli vied with each other to maintain a regime of “negative liberty” against remaining suspicion in society of “old corruption” among newly enfranchised voters. He adds, however, that this did not exclude considerable curbs on the outcasts of society in the way of the Contagious Diseases Act and other provisions for “disciplining” the poor; “The Powers of the Victorian State,” in Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain, ed. Peter Mandler (London: Oxford University Press, 2006), 33. 17. “The Ruin of Representative Government,” WG, 4 January 1912. 18. Searle, A New England?, 439. 19. “The Ruin of Representative Government,” WG, 4 January 1912. 20. Editorial, “‘Representative’ Government,” WG, 4 January 1912, 1. (The quotation marks around “representative” in the heading of the leader here is revealing.) 21. “The Ruin of Representative Government,” WG, 9 January 1912, 3. 22. George B. Shaw, “Belloc and Chesterton,” NA, 15 February 1908, 309. In private correspondence with Chesterton afterward, Shaw explained his response in The New Age as “the inauguration of an assault below the belt.” All fair means had failed to induce Chesterton to give up essay-writing, journalism, criticism, Liberalism, “and everything that offers your laziness a refuge” in favor of becoming a dramatist. Shaw continued: “It is no use trying to answer me in the New Age: the real answer to my article is the play”; Shaw to Chesterton, 1 March 1908, quoted in Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 196. Chesterton duly obliged with his play Magic in 1913, but without compromising his other interests. He had already replied to Shaw in “The Last of the Rationalists,” NA, 29 February 1908, 348. 23. He was responding initially to a discussion in The New Age of The Party System; “Questions for Messrs. Belloc and Chesterton,” NA, 23 February 1911, 405–6. Belloc responded the following week in a letter entitled “The Party System,” NA, 2 March 1911, 425. 24. “The Party System,” NA, 9 March 1911, 450. 25. “A Political Journalist,” “The Party Question,” NA, 16 March 1911, 469–70. Belloc responded in the next issue, NA, 23 March 1911, 499. 26. “The Anti-Liberal,” DNL, 7 September 1912, 4; “A Non-Party Issue,” DNL, 14 December 1912, 6. (I have been unable to trace any record of Halsbury’s speech.) 27. Mandler, The English National Character 129; Coates, “The Young Chesterton,” 283. 28. R.A. Scott-James, “Mr. Chesterton’s Democracy,” DN, 27 June 1910, 4. 29. Anon., “Mr. Chesterton’s New Book,” WG, 2 July 1910, 4. 30. Anon., “The Ballad of G.K.C.,” WG, 23 September 1911, 4. Both this review, and the one above in the same newspaper is heavily edited in Denis J. Conlon’s

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anthology of reviews of Chesterton’s work: G.K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgments (Antwerp: Antwerp Studies in English Literature, 1976), 278–89; the same holds for the review of What’s Wrong in the WG, 246–47. Also, “The Ballad of G.K.C.” is wrongly cited as appearing in The Westminster Review. 31. “The Battle of Hudge and Gudge,” The Nation, 2 July 1910, 483. 32. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 252–54. 33. Chesterton to Gardiner, n.d. [1911], copied from manuscripts by Dorothy Collins, BL Add MS 73232A, folios 35–39; quoted in Stephen Koss, Fleet Street Radical: A.G. Gardiner and the Daily News (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 115. 34. “The Fountain of Honour,” DNL, 13 January 1912, 4. 35. “An Open Letter to the Liberal Party,” DNL, 24 August 1912, 4. 36. “The Anti-Liberal,” DNL, 7 September 1912, 4. 37. Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 255–56; Dudley Barker, G.K. Chesterton: A Biography (London: Constable, 1973), 218–19; Michael Ffinch, G.K. Chesterton (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), 211; Joseph Pearce, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), 186. 38. Chesterton to Gardiner, 28 June [sic] 1913, quoted Koss, Fleet Street Radical, 116. Clearly, the date should be January rather than June. 39. Julius West, G.K. Chesterton: A Critical Study (London: Martin Secker, 1915), 173. 40. Chesterton to Gardiner, n.d., copied from manuscripts by Dorothy Collins, BL Add MS 73232A, folios 35–39. The sentence in italics is omitted by Stephen Koss in his account of the correspondence; Fleet Street Radical, 116. 41. Gardiner to Chesterton, 4 January [sic] 1913, BL Add MS 73232A, folio 43. It is clear that Gardiner misdated the letter—it should have read February. Despite explicitly confining Chesterton’s future appearances in The Daily News to the correspondence pages, he accepted an article entitled “The Thing Called a Nation: The Spiritual Issue of the War” commemorating the late medieval battle of Kosovo for the issue of 28 June 1916; reprinted in CR XX, no. 1 (February 1994): 8–11, and discussed in chapter 7, 162. 42. “Liberty and Mr. Belloc: Mr G.K. Chesterton replies to Mr. Wells,” DNL, 27 July 1916, 4. Wells had attacked The New Witness circle for its “conspiracy mania,” while exempting Chesterton from the worst excesses of his friends. He had expressed his exasperation with The New Witness in undated private correspondence with Chesterton around this time (to judge by his reference to Cecil Chesterton’s avoidance of war service—the latter left for the front in September 1916); Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 350–51. 43. Chesterton to Gardiner, n.d., copied from manuscripts by Dorothy Collins, BL Add MS 73232A, folios 35–39; quoted in Koss, Fleet Street Radical, 116–17. 44. Gardiner to Chesterton, 13 February 1913, BL Add MS 73232A, folio 47. 45. Geoffrey R. Searle, Corruption in British Politics, 1895–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 186–87. 46. “The Honour of Politics,” DNL, 19 June 1913, 6. There is no doubt that Gardiner felt obliged to publish the letter, along with previous ones that Chesterton had sent on the matter, especially as Chesterton reminded him in submitting the letter of “the kind letters you wrote to me when I decided to leave your paper, in which you said I would be welcome as a correspondent.” He assured Gardiner

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that “unless something very violent happens this is the last letter I shall send on this affair”; Chesterton to Gardiner, n.d. BL Add MS 73232A, folios 35–39. 47. Watson to Chesterton, 19 June 1913, BL Add MS 73241, folio 37. 48. For example, Lady Violet Cecil—sister of L. J. Maxse, editor of the proImperialist National Review, and wife of Colonel Edward Cecil, financial adviser to the Egyptian governor—wrote warmly to Chesterton in 1913 at the height of the Marconi libel suit against Chesterton’s brother, Cecil, and The New Witness, which he edited. She was a neighbor of Kipling’s, and she reported that he had followed “every phase of this fight” through her own copy of The New Witness, to such an extent that he had been “almost prevented [from] thinking of anything else at all.” She felt that the weekly journal of advanced opinion was “fighting on the side of English nationalism and that is our common battle.” A disciple of the arch-Imperialist Lord Milner, she urged Chesterton to read the introduction to a recent collection of his speeches (The Nation and the Empire: Being a Collection of Speeches and Addresses [London: Constable, 1913]). He would find, she maintained, that however much “we have all disagreed—do disagree—we are all in the same boat about a lot of things of the first rank”; Lady Violet Cecil to Chesterton, 15 June 1913, BL Add MS 73236, folio 16. There is no record of Chesterton’s response. 49. Mark Hampton, “The Press, Patriotism, and Public Discussion: C.P. Scott, The Manchester Guardian, and the Boer War, 1899–1902,” The Historical Journal 44, no. 1 (January 2001): 194–95. 50. “The Charter,” DNL, 25 May 1912, 6. 51. “The Danger in Women’s Labour,” The Nation, 11 May 1912, 215. 52. “The Danger in Women’s Labour,” The Nation, 4 May 1912, 162. 53. “The Danger in Women’s Labour,” The Nation, 11 May 1912, 215. 54. Harling, “The Powers of the Victorian State,” 38–39. 55. “The True Way Out,” The Nation, 21 June 1913, 444. He gave The Nation full credit for recognizing the weaknesses in parliamentary government following the Marconi affair in “At the Sign of the World’s End: An Open Letter to The Nation,” The New Witness, 7 June 1917, 130. 56. “The Revolutionist,” The Nation, 18 December 1909, 501. Alan L. Maycock wrongly gives the original source as The New Witness in The Man who Was Orthodox: A Selection from the Uncollected Writings of G.K. Chesterton (London: Dennis Dobson, 1963), 33. For full discussion of the poem, see Stephen R. L. Clark, G.K. Chesterton: Thinking Backward, Looking Forward (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2006), 95. 57. “The Genius of Gilbert,” reprinted from The Nation, 1908, in A Handful of Authors: Essays on Books and Writers, ed. Dorothy Collins (London: Sheed & Ward, 1953), 128. 58. “Payments for Party Service,” The Nation, 27 July 1907, 802; “Private Members and the Cabinet,” 21 January 1911, 681; “The Cabinet and the Private Member,” 4 February 1911, 767. 59. “The Crime of Being Inefficient,” The Nation, 15 June 1912, 402; Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, 22 June 1912, 438; Chesterton’s reply, 29 June 1912, 475. See also his response to another supporter of the bill who had attacked him in The Pall Mall Gazette: “An Answer,” DNL, 30 November 1912, 6. Chesterton campaigned with the organization established by his brother in 1913, “The League

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for Clean Government,” against the sterility provisions of the bill, for the defeat of which it rightly claimed credit; see Jay P. Corrin, G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc: The Battle Against Modernity (Athens, Ohio, and London: Ohio University Press, 1981), 53. 60. “Private Members and the Cabinet,” 21 January 1911, 681. One reader put Massingham firmly in his place for this remark with a letter that began: “I do not want to pose as being smarter than the Editor of the Nation, but it seems to me that Mr. Chesterton has made himself perfectly clear.” He went on to underline Chesterton’s concern about the increasing powerlessness of the private member; E. S. Evans, “The Private Member,” The Nation, 11 February 1911, 802. 61. “The Danger in Women’s Labour,” The Nation, 11 May 1912, 215. 62. Anon., “Defender of the Faith,” The Nation, 17 October 1908, in G.K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgements, 174–77. 63. Anon., “Victorian with a Difference,” The Nation, 1 March 1913, 895; Richard Mudie-Smith, “Mr. Chesterton and ‘Little Bethel,’” 8 March 1913, 926. 64. “The Decline of the Oxford Movement,” The Nation, 14 and 21 December 1907. 65. ILN, 7 March 1914, 362; John Galsworthy, “The Heartlessness of Parliament,” The Times, 28 February 1914, 5c. 66. Galsworthy to Chesterton, 12 March 1914, BL Add MS 73237, folio 67. 67. From The Flying Inn (1913; London: Methuen, 1925), 241–42; in CP, 218. 68. Vincent Geoghegan, “Edward Carpenter’s England Revisited,” History of Political Thought 24, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 509–27. 69. “The Evolution of Corruption,” The Albany Review 1 (November 1907): 182–88; he also responded to Carpenter in “The Rule of the Raid,” DN, 28 September 1907. 70. “The Anarchist,” DN, 21 January 1911, 4. 71. “A Democrat’s Scrapbook,” DN, 31 December 1910, 4. 72. “The Anarchist.” This was his reply to the rejoinder of the writer and journalist, James W. Marriott, to “A Democrat’s Scrapbook,” that the vox populi was shifting, parochial, fallible, and “soaked through with feudal ideas”; “Mr. Chesterton’s Favourite Argument,” The Christian Commonwealth, 18 January 1911, 279–80. 73. He made this point against Rousseau in 1930 in otherwise defending Rousseau against the association that Dean Inge made between Rousseau and Bolshevism: “It would be much nearer the truth to say that he was the founder of Distributism,” albeit when supplemented by “older and wiser foundations” in Aquinas and the Ten Commandments; “A Note on Rousseau,” GKW XI (no. 293), 25 October 1930, 103, reprinted in CR XIX, no. 4 (November 1993): 453–56. 74. Idealist followers of Rousseau through the influence of Green were of two contrasting types: those who embraced a minimal state (while resisting “individualism”) and those who were openly “collectivist.” Both were enthusiasts of the state. Bernard Bosanquet was an example of the former in his The Philosophical Theory of the State (London: Macmillan, 1899); Charles E. Vaughan was an example of the latter in his introduction to the first complete edition in Britain of Rousseau’s political writings, The Political Writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915).

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75. On Vaughan’s defense, leaning on Rousseau, of the “expediency” of private property and the recent Collectivist measures such a conception made possible, see Political Writings of Rousseau, 108–10. 76. See Arthur Burns, “The Authority of the Church,” in Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain, 197–98. 77. Julia Stapleton, “Citizenship Versus Patriotism in Twentieth-Century England,” The Historical Journal 48, no. 1 (March 2005): 158–62, and also Denys P. Leighton, The Greenian Moment: T.H. Green, Religion and Political Argument in Victorian Britain (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004), 177–86. Leighton well brings out Green’s “English” sensibility in relation to Nonconformism in “T.H. Green and the Dissidence of Dissent: On Religion and National Character in Nineteenth-Century England,” The Parliamentary History Yearbook Trust 27, no. 1 (January 2008): 43–56. 78. Richard H. Tawney, biographical memoir in Studies in Economic History: The Collected Papers of George Unwin (London: Macmillan, 1927), lxx. I have discussed Unwin’s work, founded on an anti-statist form of Liberalism that had many parallels with that of Chesterton, in “English Pluralism as Cultural Definition: The Social and Political Thought of George Unwin,” Journal of the History of Ideas 52, no. 4 (October–December 1991): 665–84.

6 ✛

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A

s Chesterton became increasingly disillusioned with Liberalism in the years leading up to the First World War, he proceeded to push Liberalism and Englishness well apart. It was not only that the Liberal government had encroached on the democratic rights of the English people and the liberties of the English home; in addition, Liberals seemed impervious to the wider value of authenticity. This, more than any other difference of view, sealed his fate as a Liberal outcast. This chapter explores the pervasiveness of the ideal of authenticity in Chesterton’s thought during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Through the importance he attached to authenticity, Chesterton sought to strengthen the bonds of English nationhood among what he regarded as a culturally discrete people.1 Predictably, this was intertwined with his defense of religious orthodoxy against the tendency toward secularization and modernism in theology. In contrast to the role that authenticity played in French existentialism after the Second World War in cultivating an imperative of individual freedom, the emphasis of Chesterton’s conception fell heavily on the need to maintain relatively fixed communal identities based on faith and a sense of belonging. Only thus could any semblance of truth to oneself and the integrity of different cultural groups be achieved. It was something that marked him well off from Victorian apostles of patriotism such as J. S. Mill, anxious to ensure maximum flexibility within national cultures as building blocks to “humanity.”2 However, the chapter shows that his conception of authenticity in general and English authenticity in particular was, if not quite defined by anti-Semitism, then certainly colored by it. 127

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CLASS, NATION, AND EMPIRE IN ENGLAND A key platform for Chesterton’s cultural criticism centered on authenticity was his regular column in The Illustrated London News. Chesterton’s relationship with this organ is at first glance a puzzle. The first illustrated paper in Britain on its establishment in 1842, the journal prided itself on maintaining high-mindedness, scrupulous accuracy, and balance in reporting—everything that Chesterton’s journalism was not. The editor, Bruce Ingram, had occupied the post for five years by the time Chesterton joined the staff in September 1905. Although The Illustrated London News had lost its monopoly on illustrated news, Ingram made few concessions to the “new journalism.” He retained a highly formal style of commentary on the people and events that were captured in the photographs and drawings. He also reversed the policy of his predecessor, Clement Shorter, who had sought to introduce a more Radical political line in a bid to broaden the journal’s readership.3 His loyalty to his grandfather, Herbert Ingram—the founder and first managing director of The Illustrated London News—was in this way unswerving. Also in keeping with the traditions of the journal, Bruce Ingram retained the long-running column, “Our Note Book.” This involved “a very light discussion on matters of the moment,” but as a beacon of “sanity” in the English-speaking world. It was here that Ingram recognized in Chesterton the ideal candidate to replace L. F. Austin as columnist on the latter’s death.4 Ingram remained the editor throughout the whole of Chesterton’s long association with the journal until Chesterton’s death in 1936 and well beyond, until his own health failed in 1963. His assistant editor, Ernest Hope Goddard, had also joined the editorial staff before Chesterton’s appointment and continued in office until his death in 1939. The stability and continuity of The Illustrated London News throughout Chesterton’s tenure of “Our Note Book” was a Fleet Street phenomenon. These qualities would have greatly enhanced Chesterton’s loyalty to the journal over the years, especially as he and Ingram held each other in high regard. There is no indication that he was ever forced to toe an editorial line in The Illustrated London News as he was required to do at The Daily News before his departure in 1913. His successor as the writer of “Our Note Book,” Arthur Bryant, recalled a meeting with Frances Chesterton shortly after her husband’s death in which she told Bryant that never in thirty-one years of service to the journal had Chesterton received a directive from Ingram. Although he was required to refrain from partisan controversy in politics and religion, he could express the most unorthodox views; he did so freely, if, at times, in code.5 Intriguingly, he never met Ingram personally. Although on several occasions he handed his weekly contribution to Ingram at the offices of the journal, the self-

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effacing editor did not disclose his identity.6 Chesterton’s good relations with Ingram are apparent in the dedication to Ingram of his volume of essays, Come to Think of It, in 1930, marking his “silver jubilee” as a contributor.7 He also refused ever to press Ingram for a rise in remuneration.8 On his part, Ingram commissioned a new, illustrated letterhead for the column in 1907 with a medieval scribe at the center looking over his shoulder at a procession of human life behind him. The figure was evidently Chesterton in thin disguise.9 Both Ingram and Goddard had served their country during war, Ingram in South Africa as part of the East Kent Yeomanry and also at the French front in 1916–1919; Goddard as a member of the Metropolitan Special Constabulary and performer of what he called in his Who’s Who entry, “much work” for the Ministry of Information.10 This would have been especially important to Chesterton during the First World War, which, as we shall see in the next chapter, he supported vigorously. He left George Lansbury’s The Daily Herald, which he had joined on departing from The Daily News, because he was unable to support its pacifist stance in 1914. Chesterton’s long association with The Illustrated London News was due not just to mutual esteem between columnist and editorial staff but also to his close identity with the journal’s readership. Very little of the voluminous correspondence with readers that his columns generated has survived; that which has been preserved is mainly from fellow writers and friends. Yet there is some evidence from the columns themselves to suggest that Chesterton was more at ease with this audience than that of any other paper for which he wrote on a regular basis, even, perhaps, his own journal, G. K.’s Weekly; certainly that of The Daily News, and especially The Daily Herald.11 Not least, this sense of harmony was associated with the part that The Illustrated London News had played in his own upbringing, as he explained in an article marking the seventieth anniversary of the journal in 1912. He expressed his good fortune at having grown up in a household in which back issues had been lovingly preserved in bound volumes, shedding much light on the table-talk of his relatives.12 He claimed that the wealth of pictorial and literary insight contained in the pages of the journal had given him—and his generation more widely—an intimacy with the immediate past now on the wane. Instead, the present had become enslaved by illusions of “progress.” This placed a premium on knowledge of a distant past and discounted “that vivid truth called tradition” that forms in the “afterglow of great events.” He drew a parallel between the loss of connection with the immediate past and the erosion of patriotism through the ascendancy of abstract concepts of “humanity.” Both seemed to suffer from the “remotism” in modern thought that he complained about elsewhere.13 Diminishing contact with the recent past in the early twentieth

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century had bred “self-deception” and “bluff” on the part of both politicians and publicists.14 It was not only nostalgia for his youth that contributed to Chesterton’s affinity with his Illustrated London News readers; to his mind, they were fine upstanding representatives, if increasingly remnants, of the English nation. They certainly epitomized for him the “nobler” side of Imperialism as he wrote in a column of 1913, suggesting that his views on empire were not entirely negative.15 Chesterton’s expression of admiration for his readers in this instance was prompted by the death in that year of one of the few Tories among his friends, George Wyndham. Chesterton never ceased to praise Wyndham’s role in steering the Irish Land Bill through Parliament in 1903; it was in his view one of the few—indeed, the sole—acts of creative statesmanship in modern politics, and one for which its author paid with his political career.16 The empire that appealed to Wyndham was always a “field for English adventure”; it was not “a part of England: even when it seemed to him a fairy land, he always kept the sound, childish distinction between fairyland and home.” To that extent, the empire as envisaged by Wyndham was more a source of wonder than reproach. In what could only have been a broadside against Kipling, he noted that Wyndham balked at the idea of the colonies “pouring into England the currents of Americanism and modernity.” Nothing could be more alien to the people engaged in the actual process of empire-building, held together, it seemed to Chesterton, solely but by no means tenuously by The Illustrated London News. With unconcealed pride he declared that it was not so much the sun as Ingram’s journal “that never sets on the British Empire”: I am constantly receiving letters from the loneliest and wildest places, approving or complaining of what I say on this page. There are letters from islands almost lost on the Admiralty chart; there are letters from towns hardly yet planned or planted out in the colonial maps. Every other week I find myself in controversy with a man who seems to be stamping about with highly intelligent rage, either on Greenland’s icy mountains or India’s coral strand. It seems to be a system of wireless telegraphy by which I can communicate with those most cut off from humanity.17

The Illustrated London News proved the perfect instrument for expressing the more conservative aspects of Chesterton’s thought, as Ingram must have anticipated. He regularly upheld the value of religion, patriotism, tradition, marriage, and monarchy. It is true that he defended these ideals and institutions in order to undermine rather than strengthen the established social order, in which most of them had become—or showed clear signs of becoming—mere travesties.18 Undoubtedly this would have complicated his relationship with his readers and accounted for some of the disagree-

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ment he indicated in the quotation above. However, his dispute with “the moderns”—played out in full in his Illustrated London News column— would have more than compensated for his other, more “suspect” beliefs. For Chesterton, “the moderns” were an assorted collection of iconoclasts that plagued Edwardian life. Particularly susceptible to this critique were an emergent “smart set.” With the support of the king, its members had become a visible part of London society and were strongly linked in Chesterton’s mind, and the minds of others, with the Decadent movement.19 For Chesterton their conspicuous wealth and fashionable chic were responsible for denationalizing what little remained of England following the Reformation. While other countries were also affected by the penchant for “idle travel” and “luxurious curiosity” among this new, international class of plutocrats, English national identity and patriotism were especially threatened. Certainly, he believed that the “selfsupporting”20 middle class was under attack from this quarter, with damaging national consequences. The distance between the two social groups was well captured in Chesterton’s defense of the spirit of his early life in a fracas with H. G. Wells in The New Age in 1908. He was attacking the contempt of “advanced” thinkers and writers such as Wells for the pub culture of the working class. In his view this could never be taken seriously, accompanied as it was by equally unmerited derision for the Victorian middle class. He parodied the “supercilious” middle class that he understood Wells to represent thus: The aesthete attached to the Smart Set always said that because our tables were mahogany, our heads were mahogany. The journalistic duchess always said that our Sunday dinners were dull gluttony; or our conventions cowardice. Now all this I know to be nonsense. I know that in my grandfather’s house there was real hospitality in the heavy meals, real goodwill in pompous birthday speeches.21

Such slurs upon the character of the middle class from within its own ranks were indicative of its fragmentation, a process that was bound up with the erosion of its identity with England. He wrote in 1909 in The Daily News of the “tragedy of England” as its “old” and influential middle class had gone off in search of one panacea after another—the “orchid” of the “smart set” Imperialists or the “sunflower” of the simple life aesthetes. Both were symptomatic of those self-indulgent “fads and fancies” he had long denounced as the scourge of modern life.22 The onceforceful public role of the middle class—particularly in the era of Dr. Johnson—had been eclipsed by a governing class composed of a small and wealthy clique, united in its cynicism about party politics, which it nonetheless manipulated to its own ends.23

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Chesterton’s Illustrated London News column was a powerful weapon for bringing English national identity out of the shadows of imperial pomp on the one hand, and cultural malaise on the other. This was through the opportunity the column afforded of appealing directly to the class that had been a major embodiment of Englishness before its “national character” had fallen away, and in which his readership was heavily concentrated. What are the implications here for understanding the cultural dynamics of English national identity in this period? Most importantly, Chesterton’s contributions to “Our Note Book” offer a different perspective than that of a recent historian, Robert Colls, on the emergence of what he has termed a “national corporate” in England in the late nineteenth century. For Colls, the middle classes, imbued with a new sense of national responsibility in line with their political ascendancy, attempted to fashion England anew out of the qualities of the common people. This endeavor mirrored their commitment to social and economic reform, eschewing the discipline of the market that they had championed previously. As Colls points out, much of the cultural work of redefining the English nation in music, literature, and folklore reflected middle-class tastes and prejudices.24 Nevertheless, he gives the impression that the search for “authentic” nationhood in this period was purely a function of the sifting of popular culture by middle-class cultural activists, a popular culture conceived largely in terms of working-class culture. However much they may differ as to its basis, historians agree that this consciousness of England as “national corporate” was to prove a defining moment, both English and British, in the twentieth century.25 But Colls unduly narrows the range of the social spectrum in which the outlines of the “common people” were seen. For Chesterton, ancient English ideals and loyalties had been perpetuated by the comfortable middle class from whom he hailed, and did not need to be refracted through an idealized working class. He assumed a “national” affinity between the two classes that was never more pronounced than in the age of John Wilkes, as he wrote on the bicentenary of Wilkes’s birth in 1927. The English people had rallied in democratic defense of a rogue who was at least transparent in his roguery. This was unlike members of the governing classes such as Pitt, who concealed his misdemeanors and—as Chesterton argued against Macaulay—was none the more popular for it. Such classic displays of English fair-mindedness could in the eighteenth century (but no longer) count on an elite that did not close ranks entirely, hence the judicial support that Wilkes won against Parliament. Weak policing also ensured the effectiveness of political protest.26 This common Englishness was certainly subjected to considerable strain, if it was not broken entirely, by industrial capitalism. But of late it

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was members of the middle class who had most readily turned their backs on the nation, leaving the working class with the strongest claim to the title of “the English people.” In his typology of the English class system produced for the benefit of Illustrated London News readers in 1910, the governing class of plutocrats ranked higher than the class of “ladies and gentlemen,” an assorted company of the lesser middle class that was cut off from politics and hence marginal to the nation. Subordinate to this class was the “clerkly” company of “citizens,” the serious minded who attended an endless and irrelevant round of political and religious meetings. But it was only at the bottom of the social heap that the “people of England” proper could be found—namely, “the innumerable millions of cabmen, navvies, dustmen, and crossing-sweepers.” With his by now familiar emphasis on their deafening silence, he added: “[I]f ever they begin to talk there will be fun.” This analysis—which put the middle class in all its various political guises to shame—could only be part of a cross-class appeal for unity against those at the top who were characterized by that “taste or hobby or ideal of governing other people.”27 England had been crushed by such tyranny for centuries but never before with such a vengeance and with so little real opposition as in the present. The modernity of the people he identified at the heart of the English nation is especially striking. Despite their predominantly urban occupations, they were nevertheless the basis of the rural, Distributist future. Chesterton’s depiction of England was metropolitan and shire in about equal measure. Writing in The Daily News following a train journey through rural Lancashire in 1911, he let it be known that as far as he was concerned England began somewhere south of Sheffield. He beheld the effect on the trees, no less than the inhabitants, of a heavily industrial, mercantile culture with a mingled sense of horror and disbelief. This recalled his early encounter with the diabolist mentioned in chapter 1: The queerest and most creepy impression is not in the towns but in the fields. A green Arabian palm tree growing in a brown London fog would hardly be more incongruous than all those English trees standing up stubbornly in a haze of shifting smoke, with cinders instead of sods, and sparks instead of glow-worms.28

The article proved to be another source of tension with his Daily News readership.29 But his visit to Lancashire clearly strengthened in his mind the late Victorian association between England and the “south country.”30 This would have enhanced his bond with The Illustrated London News still further. If the north of England, like the empire, was beyond the English pale, then so too were the Imperialists. These were of two kinds. First, there

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were the agents of empire at home who, unlike the “English” toilers in the empire itself, were busy selling England’s soul to the Imperialist devil. Notable among such malefactors was the Imperialist financier, Alfred Beit, who had first raised Chesterton’s ire by endowing a chair in British colonial history at Oxford in 1904.31 When Beit’s will was published in 1906, Chesterton launched an invective against the corruption of England by the wealth of men such as Rhodes and Beit; also their attempt to conceal their sins—made worse by having been committed in England’s name—under a cloak of selective philanthropy. Significantly, he confined his personal attacks on Beit and Rhodes to The Daily News, where for once his sentiments—some of them, at least—corresponded with an editorial. This denounced Beit’s will as “commonplace” compared to that of Rhodes. The leader column also regretted the absence from the will of any provision for compensating the Boer nations caught up in the South African war and the people of South Africa made to suffer the “outrages of the Chinese, foisted [upon them] by a cosmopolitan group of mineowners.”32 But Chesterton used his Illustrated London News column more for targeting a second category of Imperialists who fell short of his ideal of Englishness: the propagandists of empire. These included Kipling and the champions of “Empire Day.” He constantly chided Kipling for his inauthentic, Anglo-Indian perspectives on England. These were shot through with specious evolutionary theories of “natural selection” that colored his views on English politics too, not least the hereditary principle in justifying the House of Lords.33 He also attacked Kipling for the chauvinistic nature of his patriotism, indeed Kipling’s bid to attribute to the English alone the enjoyment of patriotic sentiment. This was a further result of his flawed belief in “chosen” principles working in nature. The Kiplingite patriot, argued Chesterton, was right to praise his country because it is his own; but he is wrong to praise it as if it were the only country that could be praised. . . . [Kiplingite Imperialism] seeks to make English patriotism a sublime monstrosity among other patriotisms, something that no one has ever felt before. That attempt to create the passions in which our brethren have no part is the beginning of all madness and of all decay.34

“Empire Day” was inaugurated in 1904 as a result of the efforts of Reginald Brabazon, the twelfth earl of Meath, to heighten the Imperial sentiments of Britain’s youth in particular, in reaction to the debacle of the Boer War and the waning of Imperialist enthusiasm. Meath’s success ensured that many state schools reserved the morning of 24 May for instruction in the achievements of the empire and the qualities of the race that made them possible. The celebration culminated in the singing of patriotic

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songs, marching, and a ritual saluting of the Union Jack followed by a half-day holiday.35 There was considerable resistance within the Liberal government to making the day a public holiday; a Commons motion along these lines was rejected in 1910, and it was not until 1916 that Empire Day became an official part of the school curriculum.36 Chesterton resented the pressure exerted by the Empire Day lobby for a number of reasons. These he advanced in both The Daily News and The Illustrated London News. His response in the former was predictable in view of his earlier criticism of schools for failing to teach English literature as an integral part of their patriotic duty. He expressed dismay at their eagerness to impart “bombastic doggerel” once a year, yet refusal to familiarize the poor with “those English verses which will last longer than England.”37 But he was at his most expansive on the subject of Empire Day in The Illustrated London News, no doubt sensing the greater vulnerability of this readership to its propaganda. First, modeled as it was on Canadian practice, Empire Day was of the nature of the cultural import he so disliked, and whose sole source of momentum, he believed, was the scurrilous yellow press.38 Second, he could not abide its gimmicks, not least the proposal to adopt the daisy as its symbol.39 Third, he disliked the elision of Englishness at the heart of the Empire Day movement. Fourth, he regarded ritual flag saluting as contrary to that “mysterious quality of embarrassment” for which the English, at least, were renowned in the face of all things “earnest and pompous.” The following, highly lyrical account of English shyness could not have failed to move his Illustrated London News readers. The shyness arose, he suggested, from the profoundly poetical character of the English, that quality of mixed feelings and emotional hesitation which makes the cloudy pictures of Constable or the vague rhythms of Keats. Shakespere [sic] is not so much the greatest of great poets as the most poetical of great poets; he depends less on a structure of hard thought than Dante or Goethe. It is the same with Turner; even if you think Turner was not a painter, you must admit he was a poet. The poetic heat and haze in the feelings produces the strong English shyness. It also produces the strong English humour. And these two things together, the English shyness and the English humour, will always be hard things to crack for anyone who wants to establish, with entire solemnity, and on the spur of the moment, a thing like “Empire Day.”40

How different all this was from the contemporaneous portrait of the English that he drew in his poem, “The Secret People,” seething with grievances and pent-up frustration, and on the verge of revolution.41 The above paean emphasizes instead the sensitivity, complexity, and reticence of his compatriots as the keynotes of English authenticity.

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Chesterton’s final objection to such “jerry-built jubilees” as Empire Day celebrations was that the cabman or railway porter—always his highest court of appeal—cared nothing for them.42 Recent research suggests otherwise: Empire Day, aided by the Northcliffe Press in particular, won enthusiastic support across Britain before 1914, extending to adults as well as children. How much this was due to genuine Imperialist attachment as opposed to the spirit of festivity engendered by the day is difficult to gauge.43 However, Chesterton’s withering opposition to Meath and his movement suggests that militant patriotism in Edwardian England could be as much rooted in an appeal for (native) decorum as (foreign) extravaganza, and with The Illustrated London News an ideal instrument for stiffening middle-class resistance in particular. Of middle-class support, what Bernard Porter has termed the “Imperialist zealots”—Joseph Chamberlain, Kipling, Cecil Rhodes, Ellis Barker, and Alfred Milner—were never quite assured.44 The Illustrated London News was also the perfect instrument for defending English authenticity on another front in the Edwardian and Georgian years: the realm of art and letters. Again, this would have appealed directly to the “old” middle class that had eschewed “the smart set” and provided a basis for realignment with the “people.” Famously, Chesterton supported literary censorship in the troubled years that followed the 1890s, and the increasing challenge posed by sexology, novels, and plays to the boundaries of public decency. But he advocated censorship by people’s juries rather than official censors in local government when that alternative to the Lord Chamberlain’s office was mooted. He gave evidence to this effect before the Committee on Censorship in the House of Commons in 1909. Asked if public opinion was not divided on such matters, he replied: “I think that we English have an ethic, and a morality, and if we had not had we should never be a nation at all.”45 This begged the question of whether the English were a nation in any obvious sense. But his response was designed to maintain the “English” character of English letters, and reinforce English nationhood as if its existence was readily apparent. As he maintained in an Illustrated London News article in 1913, the opposition of fellow members of the literary class to the Censor was based on pursuit of a literary ideal that was alien to the English literary tradition and the wider nation: that of being “‘artistic’ in the fearless and finished manner of the Latins.” But for Chesterton “the revolt of realism” that was at the root of Émile Zola’s French school of naturalistic fiction had dissipated by this time, and in any case the English realists were impervious to the peculiar circumstances in French society that had given to the French novel its “beauty of phrase” yet “ugliness of topic.” These were

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an accumulation of superstitions that really choked religion . . . a network of policies that really prevented politics. The language which attacks such a state of things has to be abnormally intelligible.

English writers should thus resist the aesthetic snares of French prose, concentrating instead on defending “the simplest human loves and liberties.” But, he had to admit, the prospects of success were bleak given the precarious state of English freedom.46 ENGLAND, IRELAND, AND BRITAIN Chesterton insisted on distinguishing England from Britain and its constituent nations. Why, and on what basis did he do so? His first ground was the need to preserve English authenticity, especially endangered by England’s union with Ireland. Using The Daily News to keep up Liberal support for home rule, he maintained that England’s subjugation of Ireland was a curse not only upon the Irish but upon the English as well. In particular, the English penchant for “a certain freedom and ease” that cut across all social classes was fundamentally at odds with the maintenance of imperial rule in Ireland. Predictably, he saw the legacy of the union with Ireland in wholly negative, “un-English” terms: “militarism, the dragooning of civilians by an armed gendarmerie, strong and secret powers for the State, the opening of private letters, the reliance on professional spies, the cold authority of agents and officials without any glamour of aristocracy.” His explanation for this lamentable state of affairs was the corruption of the language of nationhood in the nineteenth century by the racial categories of “Teutons” and “Celts.”47 The English had been deceived by the associated religious, cultural, and economic “sentiments” into adopting a deterministic theory of ascendant and declining nations. In 1912, Chesterton was optimistic that the English were returning to their freedom-loving senses, no longer transfixed by the “horrors” of Roman Catholicism, the servitude of agriculture, and the theory of the “triumphant Teuton” with which they had aligned themselves as a result of the influence of Carlyle and others.48 He had been especially encouraged by the apparent conversion of Shaw to home rule in his play “John Bull’s Other Island” in 1907, signaling Shaw’s break with Fabian Imperialism. This was against all the anti-nationalist sentiments in Shaw—rooted in contempt for “Romantic Liberalism”— which Chesterton had attacked in earlier controversies. However, he was conscious of the different motives from which he and Shaw embraced home rule. For Shaw, there could be no progress for Ireland without home rule, conflict with the English consuming all the energies of the Irish. By

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contrast, Chesterton’s concerns lay predominantly with England, home rule for Ireland being a condition of securing “home rule for England.” He meant here not only the recovery of England’s lost national character that Irish home rule would make possible: he was concerned also to guard against the tendency of conquered nations to “conquer” their conquerors in turn, as had happened to the Tartars in Asia and the Normans in England. While in these cases the former conquerors had been absorbed into the indigenous culture while at the same time being “differentiated,” England was in the peculiar position of being “L’île inconnu” in Europe;49 it was incomprehensible to any would-be conquered nation turned conqueror itself, especially the Irish with their “logical,” universal patterns of thought rooted in their Roman Catholic faith. Chesterton predicted that in this event, “the Irishman would make even more of a mess of governing England than the Englishman has of governing Ireland.”50 Central to the legitimacy of all political unions was their ability to ensure that something “living and organic” could be itself.51 In the case of the union of England with Ireland, it was clear that in no sense did either England or Ireland benefit in this way. But what could be said for the United Kingdom more widely? Chesterton was certainly sympathetic to those Scots who resented the equation of England and Britain; he emphasized the distinctiveness of Scottish nationhood, and the superiority of its culture to that of England in many respects, not least its possession of a “popular theology.” But, as in the case of the union with Ireland, it was concern for England that primarily shaped his approach to the larger nation. While in respect of Ireland the effect of the union had been a distortion of the English national character, union with Scotland had tended more toward England’s effacement. He responded by using the term England in the literal sense. This he pointed out in an Illustrated London News column in 1918 after a misunderstanding had arisen with an indignant Scottish reader. On no account did he mean to “exalt” England by subsuming Scottish achievements in that term; he was not using England as a synonym for Britain. What, then, did “Britain” mean to him? It would seem that it was no more than the sum of its constituent national parts. For example, he made strained references to Britain as “the British group” of nations, albeit with enhanced value and unity in wartime.52 But there is no evidence to suggest that Chesterton would have supported “home rule” for England. On the contrary, in response to another periodic outbreak of Scottish resentment at the English “presumption” in 1910, he upheld the Little Englandism of Alfred the Great as something that went beyond his beloved Wessex but without degenerating into the tyranny of empire. Chesterton applauded Alfred’s “instinctive opposition to Imperialism” as something “rootedly and refreshingly English”; Alfred “dwelt contentedly within moderate dominions, to which he never added

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but in self-defence.” In doing so he secured both Wessex and peace for the “savages and heathen anarchists whom he fought.” The solution to the problem of national difference in Britain was not to bask in the glories of the British Empire, nor to press for the return of the heptarchy, but to follow the example of the Wessex people in “ask[ing] definitely for what they want[ed], for the Wessex cakes and Wessex candles and Wessex alphabet” within the enlarged national framework Alfred had created for them. If Chesterton did little to answer Scottish grievances, he seemed to lend strong support to the idea that Wessex (England) could not survive outside the larger realm of Britain.53 How did he regard England’s partners within that larger British “group of nations”? Of the Scots he could not be more respectful. He expressed a particular regret in the closing stages of the First World War that British foreign policy had acquired an English rather than a Scottish slant over the centuries, the “squirearchy” of southern England having combined with its north German counterpart against the French and Irish Revolutions “in the days when we had not discovered that the German word for squire was junker.” Indeed, against the menace of Prussianism, the Scottish star shone brightly. Chesterton contrasted “the Scottish spirit in history, with its intensity, its romance of continual rebellion, its more or less mystical independence” with “the machinery of modern Prussia, which rules out all rebellion and breaks the back of all individual dignity.”54 Of Wales, however, Chesterton was less complimentary. While he found much heroism and esprit de jeu in Ireland and Scotland, he approached the Welsh with incomprehension. It was an attitude that he thought was typical of his fellow English countrymen. But he believed that Wales was about to make a deeper impression upon Britain as a result of the anti-Semitism that had surfaced in the labor disputes in Wales during the summer of 1911: “Things fierce and unfamiliar, things lost since the Middle Ages, are coming upon us from the West.”55 This statement underlines the strength of Chesterton’s own antiSemitism, despite his strenuous denials otherwise. What was his position on the Jews exactly, and how did it affect his view of England on the eve of the First World War?

BELONGING, TRADITION, AND THE CHAMELEON On the face of it, there was nothing especially anomalous about Chesterton’s anti-Semitism within his thought overall. His animus toward highplaced Jews in particular was but one aspect of his wider war against that turn of the century “inauthenticity” that rejected strong and enduring

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orders of class, nation, or religion into which individuals were often fortunate to have been born. Instead of supporting their cultural and religious inheritance, inauthentic people often chose shallow or contrived associations that were alien to them. Before the interwar years, at least, he denounced the English aristocracy on account of its “openness” to outsiders. This encouraged members of other classes to aspire to joining its ranks, thereby inculcating “that odour and omnipresence of class distinctions which divides caretaker from caretaker and tears asunder the beautiful brotherhood of grocer and grocer.”56 In the same way, Chesterton targeted those who ventured to adopt a new country, change their identity, and flaunt their newfound patriotism. Thus, he denounced the author and German émigré, J. Ellis Barker, mercilessly on this account. He did so not so much for Barker’s advocacy of tariff reform, still less for his views on land reform, which were more in accordance with Chesterton’s own views on peasant proprietorship than those of his state-obsessed party, but rather for his temerity in doing so as an Englishman rather than the foreigner that in Chesterton’s eyes he essentially was—“Herr Eltsbacher.”57 Chesterton’s support in 1911 for the deceased Lord Swaythling—head of the banking firm, Samuel Montague, and one-time Liberal MP for Whitechapel—was rooted in similar disdain, but this time for Swaythling’s critics. In his will Swaythling had stipulated that his heirs should remain orthodox Jews as a condition of inheriting his wealth. This prompted The Nation to register its dismay at the curtailment of the spiritual liberty of Swaythling’s descendants.58 In an angry response to The Nation in turn, Chesterton suggested that if the descendants truly deserved the Nation’s tribute to unorthodox Jewry as “the best minds and lives” in their society, then they should refuse the money. At the same time, he castigated The Nation for praising—alongside the original note on Swaythling—the welcome given by the Free Church Congress recently to “a modified Ritschlian with a qualified rejection of Pragmatism”!59 Against what to him seemed the absurd lengths to which heterodoxy and pedantry had gone in modern theological circles, Chesterton went on to praise those Jews—such as Swaythling—who took steps to safeguard the integrity of their religion. However, his tribute to Swaythling was vitiated by his conception of Swaythling’s noble action as rare indeed for a “wealthy Semite”: it was his “one most honourable moment.” After all, Swaythling was a figure who had “[sat] in the inmost chamber of the State [and] control[ed] it by a million filaments of politics and finance.” In other words, he was guilty of manipulating politics for financial gain, and he had done so as a Jew. The Nation, Chesterton thought, would have been better served in con-

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centrating its fire in this realm, not Swaythling’s “gesture, momentarily sublime,” in “bear[ing] witness to the God of his fathers.”60 Chesterton’s protest against The Nation’s comment on Swaythling’s will caused an outcry touching both his defense and criticism of Swaythling. In response to his initial letter, the editor of The Nation, H. W. Massingham, ridiculed his apparent belief in the importance of “penning a man in the spiritual paddock into which he is born.” As for the paper’s reference to the Free Church Congress, Massingham defended its praise of the speaker in question with the sarcastic remark that “a man must have some relationship with the thinkers of his time. Even Mr. Chesterton has such a relationship. Might he not be described as an unqualified Bellocian?” The strain on Chesterton’s relations with the paper touched upon in the previous chapter told fully at this point. Although he did not rise to the bait of the issue of Belloc’s influence upon him, he returned the barb by denying that he would confine people in “spiritual paddocks”; otherwise, his own flight from the spiritual paddock of the “modernism and new theology,” so enthusiastically upheld by The Nation, was indefensible. But was not such an escape a prime example of the “inauthenticity” he so despised? His response was that so long as a creed was held sincerely by those who embraced it, then they should not be abused for acting upon it, even to the extent of effectively disinheriting their offspring; by the same token, nobody should be held to a creed in which they had ceased to believe.61 He might have added with reference to his own case, especially when he believed that the creed was bankrupt. Correspondents from the Jewish community sought to place his “blood-curdling” portrait of the wire-pullers of modern Jewry in the perspective of mass persecution across Europe, the disproportionate burden on Jews of sweating in England, and the “‘underground working’ of certain high-placed military and clerical zealots of unimpeachable Christian orthodoxy to convict a French Jew of treachery” against all the evidence to the contrary.62 In response, Chesterton asserted his belief—outlined in chapter 2 and never substantiated—that, regardless of Dreyfus’s guilt or innocence, the English journalist certainly betrayed his readers. Gigantic and glaring facts, huge chapters of the story, were totally blacked out by the Dreyfusard censor. The Rennes trial was so mutilated that it scarcely made grammatical sense.63

In vain he upheld “the poor Jew keeping the feast of the Tabernacles in Petticoat Lane” as “not only more Jewish, but more psychologically Christian than a rich Jew ‘extending the borders of his mind,’ his income, and the British Empire all at once.” For this only privileged Jews who were

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recognizably “Christian” in some sense, thus compromising his insistence on authenticity as integral to different cultures and the source of all their uniqueness and value. Chesterton certainly sought to develop a discourse of authenticity that was independent of particular cultures and religions and central to all literary and cultural criticism. At around the same time as the Swaythling controversy, he berated his friend, the writer Israel Zangwill, for turning against “Jewish Democracy” in his later work and calling for a new “world religion.” Like Kipling’s world empire, this would only serve to efface “those deep and vivid variations of men” that he— and Kipling—had once evoked so well. Kipling had done so in Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) before turning in his later fiction to what Chesterton dubbed “Complex Tales from the Cosmopolitan Hotels.” Zangwill had done so in a succession of novels depicting Jews who were faithful, although “in squalid streets and shops,” to “things invented in past ages and perished empires.” Then, after 1908, Zangwill had betrayed his own roots by inventing the specious idea of “the melting pot.”64 In the early 1900s Chesterton had likewise brought the Manx writer, Hall Caine, up short on a similar count. He had centered his most recent novels on “world problems,” that is, “political problems” such as democracy, Christian Socialism, the papacy, and so on. But in abandoning the fixed point of Manx life in earlier novels such as The Manxman (1894) and The Deemster (1887) he had severed rather than strengthened his links to “the universe.”65 At the heart of all these volte-faces Chesterton detected the corrosive modern trend toward skepticism and “compromise” that The Nation applauded through the eclectic figure who had been welcomed by the Free Churchmen. It left local culture systematically devalued by linking “truth” to (rational) “thought.” Chesterton was here responding to Massingham’s request for clarification of a point he had raised in a second letter to The Nation on the Swaythling issue. Massingham had asked whether, in his view, a “dervish dying on the bayonets” was preferable from a Christian perspective to “a Young Turk talking in French or thinking in German.” Chesterton delighted in pointing out the implication of Massingham’s taunt that he, Chesterton, ranked blind “belief” higher than “thought” in the scale of human values. If “belief” of a dervish kind were not so esteemed, the way would be open for capitalists to “mow down men like grass in the Soudan, to steal their land and desecrate their tombs,” all on the ground that “they were not really thinking human beings.”66 Massingham merely shrugged: “It is just as we thought. . . . [Mr. Chesterton] believes in the Old Dispensations, we in New.”67 The implication was that “Old Dispensations” were always worshipped in a spirit of ignorance.

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Nevertheless, Chesterton’s treatment of Swaythling, even while defending his will, was marred by sweeping generalizations about the inability of the Jews to integrate into the nations in which they settled, or to inspire confidence in their loyalty. He denied that the activities of a Jewish capitalist could ever be restrained by the influence of nationality in the same way as an “ordinary,” truly British capitalist. Interviewed by The Jewish Chronicle, he was quite sure of the allegiance of “the great English landowners”; they were “tied to England in a way that no Jewish capitalist can be tied—by something more than [their] land, by association with [their] past.” In the event of the “great national disaster” that Chesterton now foresaw, “our wealthy people will remain here and bear the burden of the nation’s sorrow. The Jews won’t, and we can’t expect them to.”68 This blanket condemnation of the Jews was reinforced in Chesterton’s fiction and more polemical journalism in which Jewish stereotypes abounded. While he invariably portrayed himself as striking a note of openness and fairness in his discussion of the presence of Jews in English life, his tone was often patronizing and prejudiced. For example, in a letter to the editor of The Daily News—to which newspaper the Swaythling controversy had spread—he contrasted the easy acceptance of “jokes about a Jew in church putting on his hat, which is an ancient, sincere, and native custom” with the acute sensitivity that surrounded commentary upon “a Jew in Westminster Abbey putting on a kind of feudal and chivalric crown, which he has purchased by a greasy political job.” He asserted that he would continue to talk about Jews without persecuting any, failing to realize that drawing a distinction between Jews and “others” for political purposes was a form of persecution itself. Thus, “I shall say that a group of financial Jews urged on the African war, because they did: I heard them doing it. But I shall also say that I heard many of the unmistakable artistic and Bohemian Jews denounce the war fiercely.”69 Moreover, while he berated Jewish MPs who supported the Aliens Act of 1905, which denied poor, oppressed Jews in Europe an English refuge, he could see no further than “greed” as their own motive for settling in Britain themselves.70 For all the confidence in the “native” aristocracy that Chesterton mustered to discount the idea that Jews could be loyal subjects of the countries in which they settled, his denial of nationality to Jews was at one level, at least, not in itself anti-Semitic. Instead, it was all of a piece with his wider skepticism about the possibility of naturalization at other than the merely formal, legal status of citizenship. Religious conversions along the lines he sanctioned in the Swaythling dispute were one thing; exchanging the nation of one’s birth for another, and seeking a comparable, and at times, greater level of acceptance, belonging, and prosperity was a different matter altogether. In this respect nationality for

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Chesterton was like marriage: an irrevocable bond, even in the absence of express vows to this effect in the case of nationality. As he wrote in The Superstition of Divorce in 1920 in response to a debate in the press about the reform of divorce law, both marriage and patriotism were based on ties of loyalty that were incapable of being transferred elsewhere in the event of matrimonial or civic breakdown; in both cases, relief could only take the form of “negative sufferings,” the removal of torments, not the contracting of new marital relationships on the part of the divorcee and the adoption of a new homeland on the part of the exiled patriot, whether voluntary or coerced. These sufferings individuals might “honourably be called upon to bear, for the glory of their own oath and the great things by which nations live.”71 Yet such an injunction—like that against changes of name—hit Jews harder than any other people, of which Chesterton was surely aware. As refugees, many Jews were condemned to the lowly status that he described elsewhere as “mere citizenship” rather than being eligible for the higher status of patriot. It was a distinction that turned on “travel[ing] in the ship of state as a passenger,” but without incurring that most exalted of duties, “to go down with the ship” if called upon.72 Not that Chesterton, in denying that Jews could be “true” patriots, made any exception for Jews whose family ties to a country had been established over many generations. He overlooked the fact that Jews had been loyal British subjects for at least two centuries at the time of writing. If naturalization was an instant disqualification for assuming the ultimate duty of self-sacrifice, some newcomers also labored under Chesterton’s suspicion of having willfully misunderstood their adopted country for self-serving ends. At this level, too, Chesterton not only singled out Jews, but all Anglophile Imperialists who had made England their home. Thus, he claimed, Disraeli, Kipling, and Milner loved England for an Imperialism that they believed came naturally to the English. But this could not be more false, as he pointed out in 1908: The one quite distinctive thing about England has been that almost alone among Christian countries it has never had the vision of the Eagle and the Imperial Crown. The primary English trait was a sort of cosy contempt for Caesarism and the great dreams of centralisation. A man who does not know this simply does not know the smell and taste of England.73

Such men were Imperialists because, in Milner’s case, he had “left his own country” (Germany), and in that of Disraeli because presumably— as with Beit—he had “never had a country” in the first place.74 In these circumstances, all three freely projected their alien ideals onto England. They exploited the sole element behind the empire’s “brief and dying”

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influence, which had become apparent to Chesterton in reading a recent essay by Kipling: a weakness among the English for “the pleasure of living with one’s inferiors.” It had made them look to a “lot of small nations” at the furthest reaches of the globe for the purposes of national comparison, in the belief—thoroughly disingenuous in Chesterton’s eyes—that they were England’s superiors. Sadly, this preference for the “safe” mental world of empire, for the company of “our children” as “small copies of ourselves,” reflected England’s decline as a “great nation” among “the four or five great peoples which make up the European power.”75 The brutality of Chesterton’s disparagement of the empire and its “un-English” champions was deliberate, although it hardly reflected the complex motives and interests that underpinned the faith of Imperialists. What Chesterton was clearly striving toward was a critique of “cultural imperialism,” albeit of an inverted kind. His attack upon aspiring patriots from abroad was imbued with a conception of evil that “suits itself to its surroundings,” chameleon-like. This is how he portrayed the dragon pursued by St. George, evading its would-be slayer through blending into the scenery the world over. In a fantasy of the tale set in his favorite Sussex landscape of rolling hills and convivial alehouses, he emphasized that the dragon could not remain incognito forever. Whenever it began to “stand out,” it was time to flee, inhabiting—and corrupting—a new environment in turn. The modern equivalents of the dragon invariably took antiSemitic guises: “the Eastern merchants that look like Sussex squires,” “the moneylenders’ lodges that look like country houses.” But they assumed other forms too—for example, “the ancient tyrants that look like modern philanthropists.”76 The last was a reference to social reformers, always one of Chesterton’s bêtes-noires. Above all, there was a tendency in Chesterton’s thought to make nations the new “prisons” of society. With their exclusive and abiding claims on individuals, these merely replicated rather than superseded the “tribes” from which he believed Christianity had liberated individuals.77 Paradoxically, those Jews who clung tenaciously to their religious and cultural identity provided his model. His narrow approach to the question of nationhood was certainly at odds with his conception of the richness of English national experience and the diversity of English “types.”78 Despite his evidence to the Censorship Committee, Chesterton was acutely aware that England was far from homogeneous in all matters, especially religion, and that a common patriotism was not incompatible with tolerance of, and provision for, religious difference. This is clear in his resistance to Birrell’s Education Bill in 1906 in response to Nonconformist pressure for “denominational” education.79 He recognized that although the Union Jack was “a system of the crosses of Catholic saints,” the English

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were no less patriotic for regarding such saints as “unfamiliar and embarrassing.”80 In this he well succeeded in substituting a more ecumenical conception of England for the narrow legacy left by Puritanism. However, while relatively relaxed about England’s catholic as opposed to Catholic status in peacetime, his response was to change markedly during the First World War. For Chesterton, failure to be a Catholic nation during the war deprived England of much-needed moral authority, as will become clear in chapter 7.

NOTES 1. Jed Esty dates the emergence of a discourse of authenticity pitched at the level of the English nation in the 1930s, underestimating its presence in the early years of the twentieth century in the work of writers such as Chesterton; see A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 46–47. 2. See Georgios Varouxakis, “‘Patriotism’, ‘Cosmopolitanism’ and ‘Humanity’ in Victorian Political Thought,” European Journal of Political Theory, 5, no. 1 (2006): 101. 3. I owe this point to Jock Macleod at Griffiths University. 4. See Ingram’s letters to Chesterton dated 22 and 23 September 1905 inviting Chesterton to take up the post and welcoming his positive response; BL Add MS 73232A, folios 26–27. Austin had been a prolific journalist, spending his days writing in the Reform Club for a wide variety of journals, both metropolitan and provincial. He was the mainstay of The Daily Chronicle where he was a leaderwriter, reviewer, and lately dramatic critic. His literary interests were as broad as his journalistic connections; J. D. S, “The Late L.F. Austin: An Appreciation,” ILN, 23 September 1905, 418. 5. See, for example, his assault upon both the “new theology” of R.J. Campbell and the atheism of Robert Blatchford in an article ostensibly about the ossification of “custom,” regardless of rapidly changing creeds; ILN, 9 March 1907, 366. 6. Arthur Bryant, “Our Note Book,” ILN, 11 May 1957, 75. 7. Come to Think of It: A Book of Essays (London: Methuen, 1930). 8. Dudley Barker, G.K. Chesterton: A Biography (London: Constable, 1973), 161. 9. ILN, 5 January 1907, 4. 10. Who Was Who, vol. III, 1929–1940 (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1941). 11. For the “contemptuous” tone in which Chesterton is held to have addressed the working-class readership of The Daily Herald, see Julian West, G.K. Chesterton: A Critical Study (London: Martin Secker, 1915), 178. 12. Bryant recalled a similar, happy experience as a child of lying on the floor of his father’s study, reading back copies of The Illustrated London News: “Our Note Book,” ILN, 16 May 1942, 566. 13. See conclusion 215. 14. ILN, 25 May 1912, 795.

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15. See his critical remarks on J. A. Hobson for decrying at one particular gathering all those associated with the British Empire, without exception: “I also disliked Imperialism; and yet I almost liked it by the time that Hobson had finished speaking against it”; Autobiography (1936), in CW XVI (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 255–56. 16. For example, see “Straws in the Wind: Away from Democracy?” G. K.’s Weekly, 2 April 1927, 323. See also chapter 8 below for Chesterton’s defense of Wyndham against the sneers of The Nation as his relationship with the latter deteriorated still further during the First World War. 17. ILN, 14 June 1913, 880. See also similar reflections on the empire inspired by his visit to Canada in 1931, “On Thoughts in Canada,” in All Is Grist (London: Methuen, 1931); and also by the “insularity” of the English in taking refuge from Europe in the empire in the 1930s—ILN, 3 November 1934, 688. He expressed this concern against the backdrop of the Ottawa Conference in August 1932, committing the dominions to imperial preference. 18. See his indignant defense against H. G. Wells’s charge that he was a Conservative in the ILN, 22 June 1912, 959. The gist of Chesterton’s article, proudly admitting that he did indeed uphold an ideal of “vinous, loudly-singing, earthy, toiling, custom-ruled, wholesome and insanitary men,” was that in order to be a cultural conservative it was necessary to be a political radical. 19. Geoffrey R. Searle, Corruption in British Politics, 1895–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 21–30. 20. ILN, 2 May 1908, 628. 21. “On Wells and a Glass of Beer,” NA, 25 January 1908, 250. 22. “A Glimpse of My Country” (1909), in Tremendous Trifles (London: Methuen, 1913), 236–37. The orchid was worn by Joseph Chamberlain and became his trademark symbol in politics; see Peter Marsh, “Chamberlain, Joseph (1836–1914),” ODNB, vol. 10, 923–34, at 926. For a different, more sympathetic view of the “simple life” aesthetes in the context of the stultifying power of late Victorian and Edwardian convention, one that overlapped with the critique of the “smart set” in Chesterton’s response to Wells above, see Geoffrey Searle, A New England? Peace and War 1886–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 603. 23. “The Peril of Conferences,” DN, 26 November 1910, 6. 24. Robert Colls, Identity of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 306–11. 25. Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Peter Mandler, “‘The Consciousness of Modernity’? Liberalism and the English National Character, 1870–1940,” in Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II, eds. Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 119–44. 26. “A Scapegoat of Liberty,” The Daily Herald, 18 October 1927, 4. 27. ILN, 26 November 1910, 816. 28. “Ashes,” DN, 11 February 1911, 4. 29. He was reprimanded by a reader from Blackburn for the partiality of his account of Lancashire, and his neglect of the greater area of the county that was “as fair a part of England as the eye of the nature lover might wish to rest his eye

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upon”; “In Praise of Lancashire: A Reply to Mr. Chesterton,” DN, 14 February 1911, 3. 30. The association owed much to Belloc; see Alan Howkins, “The Discovery of Rural England,” in Englishness: Politics and Culture, eds. Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 63. 31. In turn Oxford’s craven role in accepting the Beit bequest lowered the university in his esteem. The absurd lengths to which Oxford had gone recently to keep the flame of Greek alive with all the attendant potential for detecting “the evanescent in the eternal . . . the evil in the good” were risible in the light of its transmission “by men who have not enough knowledge of history to know the most obvious social peril [Beit’s bequest] when they see it”; “Two Tales of Oxford,” DN, 3 December 1904, 6. He was referring to the defeat of a motion to abolish the requirement that science students should learn Greek. 32. “The Rich Man,” DN, 21 July 1906, alongside editorial titled “The Beit Millions.” 33. ILN, 19 November 1910, 776. 34. ILN, 17 July 1909, 74. 35. Jim English, “Empire Day in Britain, 1904–1958,” The Historical Journal 49, no. 1 (March 2006): 248–89. 36. Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 209. 37. “What is It?” DN, 29 May 1909, 6. 38. ILN, 30 May 1908, 778. 39. ILN, 25 May 1907, 788. 40. ILN, 30 May 1908, 778. The reference to Turner’s ambiguous status as a painter reflected the English art world’s rejection of Turner until late in the twentieth century, Ruskin apart; Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 138–39. 41. See chapter 5, 105. 42. ILN, 30 May 1908, 778. 43. English, “Empire Day in Britain,” 254, 256–57. 44. Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists, 234, 242–48. 45. The Times, 25 September 1909, 7e. For Max Beerbohm’s critique of the high place that Chesterton accorded “democracy” in the theatrical world, see his article “Stage Crowds,” The Saturday Review, 23 October 1909, 496. 46. ILN, 17 May 1913, 680. 47. See chapter 7, 154. 48. “The Release of England,” DN, 20 April 1912, 4. 49. An adaptation of the title of the poem by Théophile Gautier. 50. “Mr. Shaw’s Escape,” DN, 20 July 1907, 6. 51. “The Folly of Union,” DN, 11 June 1904, 6. 52. ILN, 14 September 1918, 290; see also “Edward VII and Scotland,” in All Things Considered (London: Methuen, 1908), 125–33. 53. ILN, 13 August 1910, 232. 54. ILN, 14 September 1918, 290. 55. ILN, 2 September 1911, 383.

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56. ILN, 25 August 1906, 254; see chapter 9 below for his changed perspective on an “open” aristocracy in the 1930s. 57. “Mr. Ellis Barker,” letter to the editor, The Nation, 13 November 1909, 278. The letter had been prompted by Barker’s attempt to defend his proposals on land reform against Lloyd George’s attempt to discredit them, not least on the grounds that he was a “foreigner”; “Radical versus Unionist Land Reform,” The Nation, 6 November 1909, 243. Barker really was in bad odor in Liberal circles on account of his more patriotic-than-thou attitudes: a letter the following week by “J. A. S.” [presumably John A. Spender] was headed, “Mr. ‘Ellis Barker’ With Us,” The Nation, 20 November 1909, 333. 58. “Notes for the Day,” The Nation, 11 March 1911, 951. 59. Ritschlianism was based on the ideas of the German Protestant theologian, Albert Ritschl, who grounded theology in ethics rather than metaphysics and philosophy. 60. “The Jews in Modern Life,” The Nation, 18 March 1911, 1004. Interestingly, when asked later in life how he would settle his estate on his heirs should he have amassed a fortune by the time of his death, his response emphasized a greater concern for financial responsibility than theological purity. The bequest would be released in stages, in accordance with increasing appreciation of the value of property with age: youth would squander the inheritance; age would bring recognition of its importance to the maintenance of a “permanent group which is a family.” “How I Would Dispose of My Millions,” interview with W. R. Titterton, Sunday Graphic and Sunday News, 12 June 1932, 11. 61. “The Jew in Modern Life,” The Nation, 25 March 1911, 1040. 62. Lucien Wolf, “The Jew in Modern Life,” The Nation, 25 March 1911, 1040–41. 63. “The Jew in Modern Life,” The Nation, 8 April 1911, 58. 64. “The Higher Realism,” DN, 27 April 1912. Zangwill’s play, The Melting Pot, based on American experience of melding immigrants, was first performed in New York in 1908 and then in London in 1914. Chesterton renewed his attack upon the later Zangwill, prompted by the London performance of the play, in ILN, 28 February 1914, 322. For his attack on Zangwill during the Great War on account of his critique of nationalism, see chapter 7, 161. 65. “Literature and an Island,” DN, 30 July 1904, 6. 66. “The Jew in Modern Life,” 8 April 1911, 58–59. 67. “The Jew in Modern Life,” 8 April 1911, 59. 68. “G.K.C.: Interview for the Jewish Chronicle,” The Jewish Chronicle, 28 April 1911, 18. Leo Hetzler interprets the “crisis” that Chesterton predicted as economic in nature in the light of recent disputes between capital and labor and the enhanced economic power of Germany and the United States; “Chesterton’s Political Views, 1892–1914: with Comments on Chesterton and Anti-Semitism,” CR VII, no. 2 (May 1981): 135. 69. “The Future of the Jew,” DN, 14 June 1911, 4. 70. ILN, 20 March 1909, 408. 71. The Superstition of Divorce (1920), in CW IV (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 279–80. 72. A Short History of England, in CW XX (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), 502.

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73. “On Mr. Kipling,” DN, 21 March 1908, 6. 74. “Two Tales of Oxford,” DN, 3 December 1904, 6. He referred scathingly to Disraeli as “never” having been English, despite being born in England and being baptized as an Anglican: “Well indeed, in one sense, might he speak of Young England. He belonged to a nation compared with which England was uncommonly young. And although there may have been in the adjective as he applied it to England something of hope and reverence, also, it may be prettily [sic] safely affirmed that there was a note in it of considerable patronage”; “Book of the Day: ‘Dizzy’ and his Tales,” DN, 30 December 1904, 3. 75. “On Mr. Kipling,” DN, 21 March 1908, 6. 76. “The True Curse of Khaki,” DN, 8 July 1905, 6. 77. See chapter 3, 70. 78. ILN, 15 March 1924, 138. 79. See chapter 4, 85. 80. ILN, 30 May 1908, 778.

7 ✛

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hroughout the Edwardian years Chesterton had pushed English patriotism to such antagonistic extremes that it was in danger of becoming self-defeating. There seemed little prospect that the opprobrium he now heaped on England could ever succeed in strengthening the bonds of nationhood. His invective was aimed not only at the plutocratic core of British government: the Labour leaders who had sold their rank and file well short of liberty and class solidarity also came within his line of fire.1 The Liberal Party was treated with the same contempt: once the champion of the people, it had delivered the nation into the hands of a corrupt political elite. But the people themselves had done little to resist their increasingly servile fate, confounding his hopes of an English Revolution that would surpass all other revolutions in producing a new moral and political world. Finding himself so completely out of sorts with England, Chesterton seized on the tragedy of war to make full patriotic amends. The first sign of reconciliation was his poem “Blessed are the Peacemakers,” a backhanded tribute to the Germans for ending the bitterness and recrimination of the pre-war years: Therefore to you my thanks, O throne, O thousandfold and frozen folk; For whose cold frenzies all your own The Battle of the Rivers broke;

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Chapter 7 Who have no faith a man could mourn, Nor freedom any man desires; But in a new clean light of scorn Close up my quarrel with my sires; Who bring my English heart to me, Who mend me like a broken toy; Till I can see you fight and flee And laugh as if I were a boy.2

But a sense of personal vindication as much as the need for repentance underlay Chesterton’s relief that hostilities between himself and his country appeared to be over. This is apparent in a letter to Josiah Wedgwood, one of the few Liberal MPs for whom he had any respect. It was written shortly after he had emerged from a life-threatening illness during the winter of 1914 and spring of 1915, and while Wedgwood was serving in the war. After expressing his admiration for Wedgwood’s parliamentary stand against the plutocrats—“the politicians who do literally, like the Germans, fight with poisoned gas”—he continued: the War . . . calls me, though I suppose it sounds horrible to say so, with a sort of satisfaction too enormous to find expression. At last a poor but honest journalist can have the national sentiment without the shadow of an arrière pensée. When my illness was beginning I was bothered about not being able to follow your example. But I am so proud of England now that I should not even care if she were ashamed of me.3

Chesterton rose fully to the call of wartime propaganda, placing his literary talents at the disposal of the Allied cause. He was involved in the propaganda machine established by the government at the start of the war to influence neutral countries. This was centered on Wellington House under the leadership of Masterman, then Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster as his career began its terminal decline. Chesterton attended early meetings of writers organized by Masterman. His two wartime tracts, The Barbarism of Berlin (1914) and The Crimes of England (1915), were among the “privately produced” pamphlets distributed by Wellington House—on a considerable scale and to great effect—before the creation of the War Propaganda Bureau in 1916. The propagandist nature of Wellington House publications was so heavily disguised by their translators that Masterman’s enemies in government complained of his incompetence.4 However, Chesterton’s principal organ of wartime propaganda was The Illustrated London News. His column there was a major boost for wartime morale, both civilian5 and military.6 Through it, he praised the (pro-war) British people, blackened their enemies and their enemies’ apologists, and

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decried those whose commitment to the war stopped short of outright victory. Concerned to write on behalf of what he assumed to be an eternal English nation, past as well as future, not the cosmopolitan (that is, Imperialist) impostors who happened to stand for England in the present, he deliberately focused his weekly column on the “human” dimension of the war.7 In doing so he abstained from criticism of a political system that he nevertheless continued to denounce in his column “At the Sign of the World’s End” in his brother’s paper, The New Witness. Not least, mindful of the worldwide circulation of the illustrated weekly, he was circumspect in his comments about Ireland, particularly given the importance of retaining American goodwill.8 In defending Britain’s role in the war Chesterton portrayed the conflict as a clash between civilization and barbarism, thereby avoiding the language of both English and British patriotism. In this account, “civilization” was represented by nations acting upon long and indigenous memories of Western Christendom and its classical roots; arraigned against them was “barbarism” spearheaded by Prussia, a “parvenu” nation with nothing but contempt for the past and proud of its parvenu status to boot.9 More broadly, the war served to consolidate Chesterton’s ideas concerning nationality and patriotism, particularly their centrality to a Roman Catholic notion of Christendom; at the same time, it confirmed his suspicions of an intimate link between German culture and Imperialism.10 This chapter and the one that follows examine small but perceptible shifts in his thought under the pressure of literary combat between leading men of letters concerning the conflict with Germany and its allies; also the wider issue of England’s moral standing. What further myths of the English did the war trigger in Chesterton’s mind? Did the war move Chesterton’s patriotism onto the militaristic footing to which it had always been close, “cast[ing] a new spurious glamor over the horror of the trenches,” as one critic has alleged?11 How isolated was Chesterton in literary and political circles during the war, and how well did he succeed in reaping the patriotic rewards of war for his abiding conception of “England: a nation”?

THE EXPIATION OF GERMAN AND ENGLISH SINS In the decade before the war Chesterton had touched regularly upon the issue of race and nationality, deploring the recent tendency for the one to become a synonym of the other. This had been the subject of an early article for The Daily News in 1904. He quoted Macaulay’s conception of “superstition” as the inevitable upshot of religious turmoil as one explanation of the ascendancy of the “superstition of race.”12 But in his view the

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effects of secularism had been exacerbated by Imperialism in rejecting nations because they were barriers to “racial” inclusiveness. Chesterton made an example here of his friend, George Wyndham: for all his merits, Wyndham erred in dissolving nations into the amorphous identity of the (Anglo-Saxon) empire; he failed to realize that nationhood was far older and far more effective than race could ever be in cementing lasting human bonds. For Chesterton, “the advantage which nationality has over race is that it does not, like race, depend on the discovery of a document or a Danish camp. It is a practical passion in existence like a great religion.” Nationhood was also more “moral” than race: “A man who admires his own blood admires something inside himself; the man who admires his own commonwealth admires something outside himself, an institution, an idea.” Men would never lay down their lives for “Celticism” in the way they would for Ireland. The reason was that race was never imperiled in the same way as nationhood.13 Thus in the early years of the twentieth century, Chesterton did not lay the blame for “the superstition of race” on Germany alone; he highlighted the folly of Englishmen such as George Wyndham and also Matthew Arnold in portraying the Irish as Celts, the English as Anglo-Saxons, and the Germans as Teutons.14 However, during the war, he condemned Germany as the source of “all the modern exaltation of races, as distinct from nations and creed.”15 On that account, it was the country that almost alone threatened to plunge Christian nationhood into a new dark age. It was saved from the ignominy of sole culpability by Austria’s failure to rid Europe of the Turks following its own liberation with the victory of Don John; also more recently, by rising to Serbian provocation and “breaking the peace.”16 Contrary to his earlier assertion that race was powerless to exact the ultimate sacrifice, he now made an exception of Germany. This was because the hold of race on the German psyche had pushed already high levels of national conceit to new extremes. He wrote in 1917 that while he had known several Germans and had “liked several Germans” in the past, what he liked least about them was “this silly and pompous assumption of some superiority inherent in themselves and their social system.”17 Chesterton urged his fellow countrymen to break England’s association with Prussia and Prussian habits of mind through vigorous support for the war. It was an association that, in the context of war, he portrayed as longstanding. For example, his propagandist tract, The Crimes of England (1915) attacked British foreign policy over several centuries for deserting Britain’s natural ally, France, in favor of its natural enemy, Prussia. Reviewers were unconvinced by so tendentious an account of the background to the war, even in journals that had been sympathetic to him in the past. One such reviewer, Wilfred Whitten, questioned the idea that

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preceding generations could be judged over long periods and indicted for persistent error of a single kind, “pursued from age to age in a world for ever changing, developing and exploding.”18 Especially troubling was Chesterton’s claim that England should never have resisted Napoleon; he had maintained that, with Prussia, England had ruled herself out of the “great spiritual conflicts” between the Jacobin idealism of France and the Catholic mysticism of Russia and Austria by reason of her adoption of a reformed religion.19 It is hard to see how this analysis could have furthered the cause of the war in Britain, at odds as it was with the patriotism that Chesterton was anxious to prime. As Whitten noted, what mattered to Pitt and those who saw off “Bony” was simply “the preservation of their country as they knew and loved it.” This was a sentiment that Chesterton himself had always upheld as axiomatic to patriotism. Yet a redeeming feature of the book lay in the last two chapters: “The Awakening of England” and “The Battle of the Marne.” Their powerful evocation of the delivery of Christendom at Crécy with the failure of the third Prussian advance well succeeded in moving one hitherto exasperated reviewer.20 As well as implying that England was responsible for the war as a consequence of four centuries of misguided foreign policy, Chesterton reproached England on another account. This was in helping to propagate the essentially Teutonic fallacy of the primacy of race in accounting for the divisions among mankind at the root of Prussian aggression. In one wartime article for The Illustrated London News he wrote about an entire post-Macaulay generation of English thinkers who had absorbed the fallacy uncritically; they represented a lamentable contrast with Macaulay, who had wisely followed Milton in resisting the equation of Britain with all things Saxon.21 Recent historians have subjected to close scrutiny the so-called Teutonic turn in English thought during the rule of Napoleon III in France, especially among historians. Peter Mandler has emphasized the less than total receptivity in England to racial explanations of the English love of liberty and the existence of free institutions. It was a skepticism that was recognized even by such arch-apostles of Teutonism as the historian E. A. Freeman, who himself rejected biological reductionism in his theories of the German origins of the English in the Saxon conquests.22 Chesterton was certainly inaccurate in insisting that Teutonism as a doctrine of race was rife among mid-Victorian writers and thinkers. Nevertheless, widespread anti-French sentiment in the wake of Louis Napoleon’s dictatorship23 had given German influences more generally a high premium in British intellectual life. In his wartime propaganda, Chesterton magnified the influence of Teutonism on Victorian Britain by associating it with the cult of the “strong man” as well as Germanic

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interpretations of English history. Targeting Carlyle, especially, he emphasized the damage that admiration for a nation wholly at variance with England had caused; it represented nothing less than a “whitewashing of the bully.” In English letters, the floodgates had opened to “flattery for barbarians, flattery for Germans, and especially of flattery for Frederick the Great.” Gone was the even-handedness of Macaulay’s sense that the virtues of William Rufus and Warren Hastings balanced their vices; in its place was Carlyle’s praise of the vices as virtues. After Carlyle’s death, this tendency spread like a pestilence in the form of praise of the colonial and commercial expansionist, of the imaginative imperial financier, a kind of pawnbroker who not only received stolen goods, but bribed policemen to steal them. We had plays and novels about the strongminded employer of labour who seemed to think himself astonishingly virile because he could manage to starve a man in a siege, when he would never venture to hit him in a fight.24

Clearly, Chesterton embraced the war as a route not only to his own rehabilitation but also to that of the English people as a whole. They had been deprived of their moment of glory at the outset of the war; unlike Russia, which had sprung to the defense of France and the French Revolution more readily, in England there had been a four-day delay in Grey’s decision to take the country into the war.25 Yet the English soon had their chance to reconnect with their real European roots in an experience at once “frightful and fruitful.” Made ignorant by defective education of the rest of that “white civilisation in which, as a Roman province, Britain was born,” they had been catapulted by the war into a “living geography” and a “living history.”26 England’s greatness had become apparent in other ways as the war took its course.27 Not least, Chesterton developed new insights into why a downtrodden people had failed to resist their oppressors, and his response was no longer one of anger and frustration but warmth and admiration. His thoughts were sparked by a Zeppelin raid that had been shrugged off by those who had experienced it in what seemed to Chesterton an exquisite act of contempt masquerading as frivolity. Such playfulness seemed symptomatic of a particular type of courage, all the more admirable on the part of a people who had been failed by their rulers at every level: education, government, subsistence, and religion. The response of the English to danger was linked to what he called a “distant optimism,” a certain “somewhere-elseness” in times of adversity; its byproduct was a large imaginative sympathy with the problems facing other people, as witnessed by the English interest in “remote lands” such as Bulgaria and Japan. There was a higher incidence of this sympathy than in the “more closely logical nations”—presumably, he

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meant France—and was focused especially on the sentiment of patriotism.28 Chesterton was keen to emphasize that an instinctive patriotism underlay the support that the “poor and plain Englishman” extended to the Belgians at the outbreak of war; he felt “not only for their poverty and pain, but for their patriotism—for the flag which Intellectuals call a rag and the nation which they call a name.” It was an expression of solidarity that was more human than solidarity with the Belgian International.29 This comment, written in 1918, was a broadside against the groundswell of support for a League of Nations among the governing and intellectual classes in Britain. Chesterton suspected that the league would merely become an instrument for the subjugation of nationality. His conception of the human character of patriotism—unlike internationalism—was closely linked to his opposition to conscription throughout the war. This was because in his view the English people cared nothing for the state, though they cared “a great deal about the country.” Englishmen approached military service in the same manner in which they approached empire, that is, in a spirit of adventure; as “men” already, they were contemptuous of the argument that war was needed to “make men” of them. This, he claimed, was something that Kitchener instinctively understood in raising an army of three million, while abstaining from a “cult of manliness.”30 In defending Britain’s role in the war Chesterton here built upon the distinction he had drawn earlier between the patriotic servants of empire and “financial” or “cosmopolitan” Imperialists. The “true” servants of empire had found their counterparts in the volunteer army, fighting in defense of patriotism as a principle rather than avenging a wounded “Mafeking pride.” This assertion was the basis of Chesterton’s denial that the war was an Imperialist war like the Boer War.31 England had acted not to protect her interests but to defend what remained of that “mercantile probity which can alone save a nation of shop-keepers from becoming a nation of shop-lifters.”32 Chesterton readily admitted that the principle of property was at stake in the war in a stinging review of Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Social Reconstruction in 1917. According to Chesterton, the English people were fighting for their land in a double sense: first, the land they had once “possessed” but that Russell would deny them on the grounds that possession of property beyond that which is necessary to sustain life itself was the prerogative of a creative minority only; and second, the land as their country for which they would die, as well as by which they would live. Russell, argued Chesterton, exemplified the elitist assumptions that underlay the Union of Democratic Control, as befitted his Whig ancestry (and, he might have added, his recent Bloomsbury connections).33

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LIBERALISM, CATHOLICISM, AND THE NATION IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF WAR To what extent had Chesterton deserted Liberalism in endorsing the war through a highly elastic conception of patriotism that—it has been claimed—was no different from Imperialism and the militarism that went with it?34 Just after his return to The Illustrated London News in May 1915, he expressly denied that he was ever motivated by “blood-lust” and associated “hatred” of the enemy, not least after the humbling experience of life-threatening illness. For once he rebuked William Watson, who had urged his compatriots to follow Germany’s example in this respect.35 At the same time, however, he was concerned to highlight the dangers of the opposite vice. This was the failure to appreciate that “a full frontal conflict between two incompatible things” could not possibly be resolved by a committee, Fabian style.36 Furthermore, Chesterton censured those among his compatriots who favored the adoption of German methods in war—for example, the use of poison gas. He was saddened to learn that his old sparring partner Robert Blatchford was one such advocate. The sacrifice of chivalry to considerations of military honor was wholly misplaced, he maintained. The truth was that “military pride cannot stand alone or grow out of nothing: it must have something to defend, and something that is worth defending.”37 Moreover, Chesterton’s position on the war was in certain respects impeccably Liberal: Gilbert Murray, a figure whose Liberal credentials were unquestioned, supported the war on similar grounds. Like Chesterton, Murray denied that British involvement had anything to do with national aggrandizement, at least as more than a mere “afterthought.” It was premised instead on the importance England attached to “neutralising a crime” and defending certain cardinal Liberal principles: “Public Right as the law of the civilized world; Freedom for all nations, and for the men and women inside the nations; the deliverance of humanity from the power of the Sword.”38 Where Murray parted company with Chesterton was in his contempt for patriotism as the “simple old half-animal” desire for retribution against Germany’s wrongs.39 In Chesterton’s eyes, this was a distortion of patriotism and the “romance” at its heart. The romance of patriotism was the only effective bulwark against the cult of the tribe that otherwise mutated into the Imperialism Liberals professed to loathe. For Chesterton, the proof of this truth was Germany, a country whose naked Imperialist ambitions had corrupted its sense of nationhood, effacing all “genuine” patriotism in the process. It was vital to distinguish Britain from Germany on this score, especially in view of the tendency among many thinkers and writers at the time to assume the moral equiv-

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alence of the two countries. Thus, in a correspondence with Shaw at the outset of the war provoked by Shaw’s pamphlet, Common Sense about the War, Chesterton defended the war from the high moral ground that his antagonist regarded as wholly unwarranted because of the complicity of England’s ruling class in its origins.40 The war was not, wrote Chesterton in a long, impassioned letter that was drafted several times but never sent, an “artificial war, a financial war, a pettifogging war.” It was a war “actually involving more fundamental questions than your modern drama has ever dared to raise and driven by more dynamic passions than ever your modern music has sought to explore and explode.”41 The correspondence was broken off by Chesterton’s illness. But when both his health and his equilibrium had recovered, Chesterton’s response to Shaw was, if more measured, unchanged in essentials.42 Shaw’s response in turn was to claim that “the Prussians must save their own souls.” “We”—or as Shaw quickly corrected himself in distancing himself from the nationhood he so despised—“your country,” merely had the duty of “kill[ing] them until they stop trying to kill us.”43 He went on to say that the English genius had never excelled in the kind of “disciplined idealism” emphasized by Chesterton. Instead, wrote Shaw, “the Englishman is an Anarchist and a grumbler” who knew no such concept as “the Fatherland”; his strength lay in forcing the political class back into line when it had temporarily gone astray.44 Chesterton did not respond to Shaw’s provocation. But in 1918 he might well have had Shaw in mind in waving a pamphlet by the last German ambassador to Britain, Prince Lichnowsky, before those who blamed “the war” for all the current slaughter and misery rather than, more accurately in Chesterton’s view, “a crime.” Chesterton wrote in “Our Note Book” that the ambassador’s revelations proved conclusively that Germany had “commanded human blood to flow,” leaving no doubt as to her culpability. Gilbert Murray wrote a preface to the pamphlet making the same point, much to Chesterton’s delight. He merely paused at Murray’s question as to why Berlin had failed to deny the charge laid down in the pamphlet. The explanation lay not so much in German confidence of imminent victory, and therefore imperviousness to any damage that could be done by the pamphlet, as in the pride it took in its action.45 Chesterton might also have responded to Shaw by elaborating his critique—shortly before he fell ill—of Norman Angell’s claim that conquest in no way threatens the culture of the conquered, thus weakening the case for war in response to military aggression. By contrast, for Chesterton, unless Germany was resisted on higher grounds than the urgency of suspending hostilities, the needs of mere physical survival would lead to peace on any terms. As well as the problem of the wall of incomprehension dividing conquerors from their new subjects, the humiliation of defeat

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would alone ensure cultural demise. He gave as an example the recent case of France: “[T]here was, after 1870, a quite appreciable slump in French intellectual goods, as anyone can see by turning over a pile of journals or magazines, and marking the allusions to Racine, let us say, as compared with the allusions to Schiller.”46 Considerations of cultural as well as moral integrity going beyond militarist imperatives were also an essential part of Chesterton’s propaganda in the Allied cause in Ireland in the closing year of the war. The intensification of “Celticism” under the Sinn Féin banner during the war had taken a heavy toll on recruitment. It threatened to transform Ireland from a once-proud nation of Christendom into a tribe akin to the prehistoric Celts, indifferent to the welfare of the other tribes they destroyed or absorbed.47 He was particularly sensitive to this danger, given—it transpires—that a concern for Catholic Ireland was more instrumental in his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1922 than the influence of Catholic friends such as Belloc and Baring. As he wrote to Maurice Healy in response to Healy’s congratulations on his reception into the church: There mingled from the first with all the feelings of a normal patriotic Englishman a sort of supernatural fear of the sorrows of Ireland; a suspicion of what they might mean; which grew until I was certain that the policy of Castlereagh and Carson was at bottom that of Nero and Diocletian. The Irish were not faultless; nor were the Early Christians: but I knew we had buffeted Christ.48

The Celtic guise that Ireland had assumed in reaction to English oppression compounded English damage to Ireland. Fortunately, Chesterton believed, the Teutonism underlying this oppression had been killed off by the war, but it was a painful memory all the same. Like Ireland, England had once been set firmly on the path of Catholic nationhood, only to suffer delusions first of religious grandeur and then of racial grandeur once Protestant Christianity had declined.49 Ireland had been at the sharp end of both aberrations, the “new spiritual exclusiveness” of Cromwell’s Puritanism as well as Teutonism more recently.50 If she were to avoid perpetrating crimes herself, her only recourse was to rally to the colors—Allied, not English—and fight the common Prussian enemy in the name of Christian nationhood.51 Chesterton conceived the continuation of English rule in Ireland as an anomaly when Liberalism, at least, had lent its full support to other Christian nations in throwing off their imperial yokes. This could only be accounted for in terms of England’s enslavement to Teutonism and its racial categories with regard to the neighboring people whom it was subjugating itself. In all other respects, he believed, England was in full accord with the “catholic” movement of nationalism in the nineteenth century, a

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movement that was “sub-consciously ‘Catholic’” in recreating the spirit of (national) equality at the heart of the Crusades. This claim was made against Israel Zangwill’s denunciation of nationality in a short essay published in 1917.52 Chesterton found in Zangwill’s argument much succour for Prussianism and its conception of a “chosen race.” In despairing of the splintering effect of the assertion of nationality and the obstacle it posed to a “League of Nations,” Zangwill had unwittingly gone to the opposite extreme. He had sanctioned the status quo in Europe before 1914, with Germany the rightful claimant to Alsace and Posen. But, Chesterton reminded Zangwill, the Prussian conception of nationality was based on the crudest type of patriotism, unleavened by the generous spirit of nationalism. In the sense intended here, nationalism entailed recognition of the right of other nationalities to exist on equal terms, a precept—he maintained—upon which Catholic Christendom had always insisted.53 Clearly, Chesterton exaggerated the importance of nationality to the Roman Catholic Church and of the church’s importance to the modern nationalist movement in turn. While the alliance between Catholicism and nationalism was certainly strong among oppressed nations such as Poland and Ireland, there was no necessary link between nationhood and Catholicism among Catholics elsewhere. On one occasion during the war he attempted to assert that there was such a link. This was when challenged to distinguish the “denationalised Jew” from the “denationalised Catholic.”54 Not least, he overlooked the threat which nationalism presented to the Catholic Church in Europe during the nineteenth century. As an earlier English Catholic, Lord Acton, pointed out Piedmont’s war with Austria in the quest for Italian independence was part of a calculated attempt to destroy the church and force through anti-clerical policies. This was in line with the French Revolution, from which nationalism on this model had taken its cue. Chesterton never referred to Acton, and no doubt would greatly have distrusted his Burkean sympathies if he had read his work, but Acton emphasized the tensions between nationalism and Catholicism, particularly the revolutionary kind of nationalism of which Chesterton was so enamored. He also pointed to the existence of other, “organic” forms of nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe more conducive to upholding the liberty on which the church’s vitality depended. Acton especially favored the nationalism of the Hungarian writer and politician, Joszef Eotvos, which rejected Hungarian independence for autonomy within the Hapsburg Empire.55 However, to Chesterton’s mind, asserting the confluence between nationalism and Christianity, especially in its Catholic form, was vital to resisting the multiple forces that threatened both creeds during the First World War. This illustrates once again that nationhood and Christianity were mutually

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reinforcing influences in his thought, although they often changed their complexion when brought into such close proximity. Certainly, it was a form of patriotic persuasion that was not always in keeping with public and literary opinion, although his voice was not entirely discounted. For example, prompted by Serbia’s “victimhood” at the hands of Austria, Chesterton attributed “souls” to nations as the basis of an immortality especially guaranteed by defeat. In his view, the Serbs had enhanced the clarity and meaning of the war as a nation already martyred by their heroic last stand against the Turks at Kosovo in 1389.56 But while—through his Illustrated London News columns—he was at the heart of much strong pro-Serb feeling in Britain after Austria issued its ultimatum, there was little support for his additional concern to keep Serbia separate from other Slav nations. Indeed, the absorption of Serbia in the centralized and secular state of Yugoslavia that came into existence after the war was the negation of all his Christian and nationalist ideals, as he well recognized.57 The difficulties of tying nationhood to Christianity were compounded by the extreme solutions that he deemed essential for its defense in this form, not least the crushing of Germany. For Chesterton, there could be no peace negotiations with countries such as Germany that in his view sought to extinguish the Christian light of nations. He was aghast although not wholly surprised to discover such proposals being mooted in the commentary and correspondence columns of The Nation in 1915. He despaired of the suggestion of some of his erstwhile Liberal friends that a settlement might be reached with Germany; they believed it would both shorten the war and ensure the ascendancy of the “moderates” in Germany, given sufficient restraint within a baying British press.58 He denounced the instigator of this correspondence, John Hobson, for his imperviousness to the “empire of evil” that Prussia represented in Europe, and the accompanying “legend of the unconquerable man” which he believed was well understood across Europe.59 Like Shaw, Hobson was in thrall to arguments for the moral equivalence of England and Germany. Charles Masterman, too, was in Chesterton’s view misguided in denying that a nation could be punished collectively for sins it had committed collectively regardless of the exact proportion of blame that individuals of that nation could be deemed to share.60 Hobson, for his part, returned Chesterton’s contempt, vilifying his “purely romantic view of history” and obsession with retribution that left his mind “unhinged.”61 However, Chesterton’s critique by no means fell on stony ground among Liberals. In private correspondence, John Galsworthy praised his grasp of Germany’s intentions and criticized the “doctrinaireism” that was always the defect of Hobson’s qualities, a characteristic that “does so fearfully blind him and others to the reality of the black cynicism in Germany that must

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be humiliated in the eyes of the world, if anything decent is to have a chance in the future.”62 Clearly, in Chesterton’s view, at the root of this concern for a negotiated peace in The Nation circles was a reluctance to recognize nations in wartime as undivided wholes, encompassing both rulers and ruled. They were capable of committing corporate crimes and provoking collective acts of vengeance by “innocent” nations in return. The reality of the nation in the context of war was so strong for Chesterton that he demanded the complete subjugation of Germany. He deplored what he called “the melancholy deliquescence of certain Liberal groups,” not least the truceseeking The Nation in early 1918.63 It was all of a piece with moderate Socialists who had turned pacifist in the present war, and against whom the “fighting Socialists” such as Ben Tillett, Blatchford, and H. M. Hyndman set a far higher example. Not surprisingly, Chesterton could now even admire the suffragettes for denouncing pacifists as traitors. The war provided the worthy outlet for their zeal denied them by the failure of “men to be men” during the “long plutocratic peace.”64 The problem Chesterton faced was that of forging a common patriotic front in the face of a broad swathe of skepticism about the war among Liberal and Socialist progressives. An important part of his response was A Short History of England written in 1917. How successful was he in providing a “national” focus of the war in a highly polemical history of England from the earliest times, and enhancing his cultural authority in turn? This question will be addressed in chapter 8.

NOTES 1. See for example, “The New Name,” Daily Herald, 15 April 1914, 5. For the dissident role of the Daily Herald in Labour circles, and its cross-currents with The New Witness and The Eye Witness, see Jay P. Corrin, “Anti-Statist Thinking in Britain, 1900–1914,” CR IX, no. 1 (February 1983): 34–41. 2. “Blessed are the Peacemakers,” CP, 123–24. 3. Chesterton to Wedgewood [1915], BL Add MS 73241, folios 55–59. 4. Autobiography (1936), in CW XVI (San Francisco: Ignatius Press), 235–36; Stuart Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics, 1914–1918 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), 171. 5. According to Dudley Barker, Chesterton was so overwhelmed by letters from ILN readers when he returned to the column in May 1915 after his illness that he was forced to employ a secretary; G.K. Chesterton: A Biography (London: Constable, 1973), 230. 6. A young Irish barrister, Maurice Healy, who had joined the Royal Dublin Fusiliers wrote to Chesterton of his cheerfulness in the face of imminent death. He was steeled by Chesterton’s ILN columns on the war and his poems, which Healy

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was reading alongside his infantry manual; Maurice J. Healy to Chesterton, 5 July 1915, BL Add MS 73237, folios 182–83. Healy survived the war and became a friend of the Chestertons. Chesterton received an invitation from Field Marshal Haig to pay a short visit to the British front in early 1917; Arthur H. Hutton-Wilson to Chesterton, 28 January 1917, BL Add MS 73237, folio 203. Chesterton did not go for reasons that are unclear. 7. ILN, 23 November 1918, 652. For his wartime criticism of H. G. Wells in mistaking the cosmopolitan Englishman for the national type, a figure whom Chesterton instantly equated with the trust magnate in true New Witness style, see “The Whereabouts of England,” NW, 31 August 1916, 558. 8. ILN, 24 June 1916, 782. 9. ILN, 19 September 1914, 406. 10. ILN, 1 December 1912, 864. 11. Margaret Canovan, G.K. Chesterton: Radical Populist (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 110–11. Christopher Hollis voiced similar disdain of Chesterton’s “strange obsession” with fighting as irresponsible in The Mind of Chesterton (London: Hollis & Carter, 1970), 148, 111. 12. “Hints on How to Succeed in Life,” DN, 14 May 1904, 6. 13. “The Delusion of Races,” DN, 26 November 1904, 6. 14. In drawing heavily upon racial discourse, Arnold was underlining the heterogeneity of the English as a composite nation; thus their embodiment of cultural universalism rather than (narrow) specificity. On the significance of Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature and on Translating Homer (1883) for literary modernism, see Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 32. The implications of Esty’s work for understanding Chesterton’s place within modernism are discussed in the conclusion, 216. 15. ILN, 20 October 1917, 454. 16. ILN, 19 September 1914, 406; 26 September 1914, 438. 17. ILN, 20 October 1917, 454. 18. Wilfred Whitten, “A Catholic Misfire,” The Bookman (February 1916): 162–63. 19. The Crimes of England (London: Palmer & Hayward, 1915), 41. 20. Anon., “The Crimes of England,” TLS, 12 February 1915, 437. The author was John Cann Bailey, a classicist turned literary critic, a protégé of Gilbert Murray and fellow contributor to the Home University Library with his Dr Johnson and his Circle (London: Williams & Norgate, 1914) and Milton (London: Williams & Norgate, 1915). 21. ILN, 15 December 1917, 746; Chesterton was referring to Milton’s History of Britain, that part of it especially now call’d England (1670). 22. Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 92. Teutonism was an obvious factor in the discrediting of William Stubbs’s definitive Constitutional History at the turn of the twentieth century among a new generation of “modernist” historians; see Michael Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 32.

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23. Some three quarters of a century later, the tide turned in favor of Bonapartism, not least on the part of Chesterton himself. Reviewing two favorable biographies of Napoleon III for one of his highly popular radio talks in 1933, Chesterton wrote that France “discovered the case against Democracy before anybody else had discovered the case for it.” Credit for this was due to the Bonapartes, especially Napoleon III. He wrote: “I confess that I have always been a Bonapartist”; “Understanding France,” The Listener, 4 October 1933, 515. 24. ILN, 15 December 1917, 746. 25. “1914,” NW, 13 August 1914, 456. 26. ILN, 30 October 1915, 548. 27. ILN, 4 November 1916; CW XXX, The Illustrated London News, 1914–1916 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 537. 28. ILN, 25 September 1915; CW XXX, 287–91. 29. ILN, 13 July 1918, 36. 30. ILN, 12 June 1915, 749; 17 June 1916, 756. 31. ILN, 1 December 1917, 664. 32. ILN, 26 September 1914, 438. 33. “At the Sign of the World’s End: The Whiggery of Bertrand Russell,” NW, 11 January 1917, 330. The article is interesting in emphasizing that Chesterton stressed the roots of pacifism in Whiggism as well as Jewry and Quakerism usually associated with “the Chesterbelloc” on this issue; see Jay P Corrin, G.K. Chesterton & Hilaire Belloc: The Battle Against Modernity (London: Ohio University Press, 1981), 69. The offending note concerning property was excised from later editions of Russell’s Principles of Social Reconstruction, although retained in the American edition titled Why Men Fight (New York: Century Press, 1920), 128, n. 1. For an analysis of the Principles, see Philip Ironside, The Social and Political Thought of Bertrand Russell: The Development of an Aristocratic Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ch. 5. 34. Canovan, G.K. Chesterton, 110. 35. ILN, 22 May 1915, 653. 36. He leveled this remark against George Bernard Shaw, who had rallied to the defense of the pacifist, Clive Bell. The strain that the war imposed on Chesterton’s relationship with Shaw is most apparent in their exchange of letters in The Nation; Chesterton, “Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Bell,” 18 September 1915, 801; Shaw, “On Sin and Death,” 25 September 1915, 833–34. 37. ILN, 5 June 1915, in CW XXX, ed. Lawrence J. Clipper (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 219–22. Two of Chesterton’s last articles before his death in G. K.’s Weekly returned to this theme in connection with the aerial bombing of civilians in Abyssinia; “Apologia,” GKW XXIII, no. 583, 14 May 1936, 137–38, and “In Reply to Critics,” GKW XXIII, no. 587, 11 June 1936, 201–2. 38. Gilbert Murray, The Way Forward: Three Articles on Liberal Policy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1917), 14–19; see also John H. Grainger, Patriotisms: Britain, 1900–1939 (London: Routledge, 1986), 314. For the various shifts in Murray’s stance during the First World War, from opponent to apologist of the British government to internationalist—all of which eschewed any express patriotic commitment—see Martin Ceadel, “Gilbert Murray and International Politics,” in

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Reassessing Gilbert Murray: Theatre, Hellenism, and International Politics, ed. Christopher Stray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 217–38. 39. For Murray’s greater sympathy with patriotism during the Second World War, see Julia Stapleton, “The Classicist as Liberal Intellectual: Gilbert Murray and A.E. Zimmern,” in Reassessing Gilbert Murray, 285–89. 40. George B. Shaw, Common Sense about the War, published as a supplement to The New Statesman IV, no. 87, 14 November 1914. The pamphlet was reproduced, together with the reactions of other English “men of letters” both to the war and Shaw’s interpretation of it, in The New York Times Current History: The European War I, issue I, and is now available online as part of Project Gutenberg: http:// www.gutenberg.org/etext/13635. 41. Chesterton to Shaw, November 1914, BL Add MS 73198, folios 55–60. 42. Chesterton to Shaw, 12 June 1915, in Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 332. 43. Shaw to Chesterton, 22 June 1915, BL Add MS 73198, folios 72–75. This passage is missing from the reproduction of the letter in Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 333. 44. Ibid., 334. 45. ILN, 27 April 1918, 484. The pamphlet by Prince Lichnowsky was entitled My Mission to London, 1912–1914 (London: Cassell, 1918). 46. ILN, 31 October 1914, 594. 47. Irish Impressions (1919), in CW XX (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), 150. 48. Quoted in Maisie Ward, Return to Chesterton (London: Sheed & Ward, 1952), 239. 49. Irish Impressions, CW XX, 127–28. 50. A Short History of England (1917) in CW XX (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), 543. 51. Ibid., 147–48. 52. Israel Zangwill, The Principle of Nationalities (London: Watts & Co., 1917). 53. “At the Sign of the World’s End: Mr. Zangwill on Patriotism,” NW, 18 October 1917, 586. 54. “At the Sign of the World’s End: A Reply to the New Age,” NW, 8 November 1917, 34. 55. Timothy Lang, “Lord Acton and ‘the insanity of Nationality,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 1 (January 2002): 145. 56. “The Thing Called a Nation: The Spiritual Issue of the War,” DNL, 28 June 1916; reprinted in CR XX, no. 1 (February 1994): 8–11. 57. William M. Klimon, “Chesterton, and the Vocation of the Christian Nation,” CR XX, no. 1 (February 1994): 41–54. 58. John A. Hobson, “Approaches to Peace,” The Nation, 16 October 1915, 115; supported by Dr. R. F. Horton, 23 October 1915; and Charles Buxton, 30 October 1915, 182. 59. “Approaches to Peace,” 4 December 1915, 355–56; see also his replies to Hobson, 30 October 1915, 18, and 13 November 1915, 243. 60. Charles F. G. Masterman, “Approaches to Peace,” The Nation, 27 November 1915, 325–26. 61. John A. Hobson, “Approaches to Peace,” The Nation, 6 November 1915, 212–13; 20 November 1915, 289–90; and 11 December 1915.

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62. John Galsworthy to Chesterton, 4 December 1915, BL Add MS 73237, folio 73. 63. Chesterton denounced an editorial in The Nation calling for an end to what now seemed an unwinnable war in the ILN, 12 January 1918, 36. He responded to a critique of his article by The Nation’s columnist “The Wayfarer” in the ILN, 16 March 1918, 318. The columnist accused him of being a “hate-mongerer” in espousing the need for a fight to a finish, and, as such, “the most magnificent of all back numbers.” Chesterton taunted “The Wayfarer” by wondering whether his remarks were not suggestive of “us” having grown “dull,” “cynical,” “more gross in our sense of honour,” “more base in our conception of the soldier, more cold about the rights of the citizen—in a word that we have grown more German.” This dispute casts doubt on J. H. Grainger’s claim that the Liberal press and Liberal politicians “came to acknowledge Germany not only as symbolic Apollyon but also, plainly, as the unmasked, inveterate enemy”; Patriotisms, 316. 64. ILN, 3 July 1915, 3. What Chesterton clearly had in mind here was the failure of men to resist the state’s attack on their power base in the home through a raft of social legislation; hence the march that women had stolen on them through the suffrage movement. But the attempt by women in 1914 to refocus the movement on a new definition of citizenship in terms of universal service to the nation, not male service to the state, would not have met with his wholehearted acclaim had he understood this development fully. As has been seen, he absorbed citizenship into the higher category of patriotism, integral to which was not only a willingness but capacity to die for one’s country, a uniquely male privilege. On the transformation of the suffrage movement and ultimately its failure, see Nicoletta F. Gullace, “The Blood of Our Sons”: Men, Women and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).

8 ✛

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or Chesterton, the war at the literary front required more than simply engaging with widespread misconceptions in England about the nature of the conflict and the moral integrity of its leading participants; also necessary was a version of the past that would throw English nationhood and especially the freedom and communal rights with which it had once been associated into sharpest relief. In the absence of such clarification, those who had prospered at the expense of the “real” England would retain their power in the event of victory. Indeed, it was far better to be “the last of the English” fighting for an indigenous liberty than return to an England with the servile state—itself owing much to “Prussian” influence—still intact. This was the defiant, apocalyptic note on which Chesterton concluded his A Short History of England in 1917.1 Its origins lay in a request by the publisher Chatto & Windus, whom he had inadvertently let down, for a history of England in recompense.2 But he quickly turned what was initially a burden into an opportunity to set the context for England’s emancipation in an account of its development from the earliest times. The book’s hero was the English poor, an ill-served people who had nevertheless succeeded often in giving their various minders the slip. Not least, they had resisted the “higher criticism” from Germany, which in Chesterton’s view had been absorbed by the universities uncritically, retaining their religious faith against the advancing tide of skepticism. Even more impressively, under the pressure of war they had become one of the “iron armies of the world.”3 Against the scholarly treatise, he aimed to write a history that was free of the distortions of professional historians, for 169

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whom the people had always been on the receiving end of progress, never its vanguard. His chief target in this respect was the Whig historians of the nineteenth century—T. B. Macaulay, J. R. Green, and J. A. Froude—regardless of their “amateur” status as independent scholars.4 It was an offensive he sustained into the interwar period, as we shall see in the following chapter. This chapter addresses the ways in which Chesterton’s Christian patriotism informed his Short History and the receptiveness of his contemporaries to its themes.

ENGLAND: ANCIENT AND MODERN Chesterton’s outline of English historical development, with the Reformation as the watershed between progress and decline was predictable. But he retained in full the interlocking trajectories of nationhood and religion in the English past that the Whig historians whom he discounted were at pains to emphasize. He merely insisted that, far from creating the condition of modern English nationhood—as Froude, at least, had claimed—the Reformation had sundered a nascent national unity with intricate roots in Catholic Christendom.5 We saw in chapter 3 that for Chesterton, the English had become consciously English only in the aftermath of Agincourt and the legend of “King Harry” that reached its apogee in Shakespeare. Against the “Teutonists” among nineteenth-century historians—J. R. Green especially—he denied that the Angles first “became English” under Saxon influence in the realm of the “practical arts” of government. The Saxon legacy was confined instead to the “mystic” spirit that was cast across England through monastic institutions, establishing the core of society in a common life. Of their status as “ancestors” to the English today the Saxons would have known nothing, Chesterton claimed, the Christians from the South who converted them even less.6 In this sense, King Arthur was “more real” to the English than King Alfred, maintaining a greater hold over popular legend in “the age of legends.”7 It was Rome that first sealed Britain’s corporate consciousness in a shared pride in being Roman, Arthur having defended the Christian rationality of Rome against the Saxon heathens. Against his earlier view of the impossibility of Roman patriotism, Chesterton now declared: “[T]he Roman Empire did not destroy nations; if anything, it created them.”8 In this statement, Chesterton’s transformation from Edwardian Little Englander to crusader for Latin Christendom was complete. On the surface, there was nothing particularly religious about the dawn of English patriotism proper several centuries later, expressed as it was in ballads, songs, and everyday speech, particularly a “fine farcical imagery.”9 However, its emergence as such stood on the back of an accumu-

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lation of forces that confirmed the Christian course of Western history hitherto. These were first the defeat of barbarism through the eleventhhour rescue of Christendom from the heathen tribes advancing on the remains of the Roman Empire, and second the democracy of the Middle Ages whereby slaves were transformed into serfs and apprentices, armed to the hilt with communal rights that were rooted in the practice of the Christian faith.10 Christendom touched everything it transformed with a “hope of permanence,” extending the sacramental tie that bound believers to the church to their native land as well. However, patriotism was not fully secured in Europe until the French Revolution; it was hampered by endemic treason and weak kings in France11 and in England—even more so—by the catastrophe of a reformed religion that played straight into the hands of avaricious noblemen. Here, England paid the price of a feudalism that had been brought under effective but merely personal and therefore temporary control by the Norman kings, lacking the impersonal structures that made the Republic possible in France many centuries later.12 What Chesterton called “the freer element in feudalism” was the only kind of freedom that the English people had ever enjoyed.13 With feudalism never successfully subdued by absolutism, the communal orders of the Middle Ages were eroded by the recasting of the barony during Henry VII’s reign; the king was himself the epitome of the caddish “new man” that the Renaissance ushered in, especially in England. Parliament became the instrument for furthering the ambitions of this figure; it had already shown its true colors as “a ruling class” rather than a “governing body” in the reign of Richard II by quashing the revolt of the peasants. This uprising was the first and last time that “the real English people, the men who work with their hands, lifted their hands to strike their masters.”14 Here was yet another assault on the Whig consensus in Britain, particularly the belief that Parliament had always acted in the interests of the nation to maintain a far-reaching liberty; for Chesterton, the Whig nation reached no further than the maintenance of a self-serving aristocracy upstarts. After the Battle of Bosworth, and what he termed the “thinning of the old Barony,” the elite broke away from their lesser fellow countrymen entirely; they pursued a course of refinement under the new Italian influences—for example, exchanging ale for wine. The difference between the old medieval lord and the new English aristocrat who came of age in the Reformation was summed up in the selfconscious “progressiveness” of the latter. Aristocrats are accused of being proud of their ancestors; it can be truly said that English aristocrats have rather been proud of their descendants. For their descendants they planned huge foundations and piled mountains of wealth; for their descendants they fought for a higher and higher place in the

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government of the state; for their descendants, above all, they nourished every new scheme of social philosophy. . . . As the New Tudor house passes through its generations a new and more rationalist civilisation is being made; scholars are criticizing ancient texts; sceptics are discrediting not only popish saints but pagan philosophers; specialists are analyzing and rationalizing traditions, and sheep are eating men.15

The last reference was to Sir Thomas More’s concerns about the new learning as he contemplated the economic changes that seemed to be its concomitant in England. Some fifteen years later, Chesterton, by then a Roman Catholic, defended More against the charge of another Whig historian, J. A. Froude, that More had struck a blow to English liberty by persecuting the upholders of the new faith as chancellor of England.16 According to Chesterton, More “had no more doubt about these poisonous doctrines than about poisonous drugs. He felt as a man would feel struggling with the growing power of gangsters and gunmen in Chicago.”17 In the triumph of Henry, England was not only cut off from Europe but also cut off from England.18 For Chesterton the Reformation spelled the beginning of the end of England, the downward spiral of decline as an “upstart” aristocracy used Parliament to cultivate their humane tastes and ideals at the expense of humanity around them.19 Enclosure and the game laws were the most obvious symptoms of this relentless drive for the advancement of the aristocracy as a class. As Cobbett saw shrewdly at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the division between landed and mercantile wealth was irrelevant given their combined strength as oppressors.20 Chesterton praised the great orators of the eighteenth-century Parliament, and their even greater opponents—for example, Bolingbroke, Goldsmith, Johnson, and Swift.21 In this sense it was in the best tradition of parliaments as “talking shops,” unlike the Parliament of the present which “merely [did] things because they [did] not bear talking about.”22 But orators inside and outside Parliament aside, England was distinguished from Prussia with which Chatham was making common cause only by the patriotism that ennobled its “paganism.” This was hardly a compliment; for Chesterton, patriotism without Christianity was merely a short step away from a “cannibal theory of a commonwealth, that it can of its nature eat other commonwealths.” It was this that had brought Europe to its current pass.23 But if Chesterton’s aim was to draw a direct line between the Reformation, oligarchy, and the corruption of patriotism, he was also concerned to identify the longer-term origins of the Reformation in an Islam centered on Turkey. We have seen that this religion had preyed heavily upon his mind since at least 1903 when he had condemned Turkish aggression in Macedonia. In 1912, prompted by Father John O’Connor, he wrote his cel-

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ebrated poem in commemoration of Don John of Austria’s decisive blow to Muslim sea power in the Battle of Lepanto of 1571.24 Turkey’s alliance with Germany during the First World War intensified his enmity still further. As a result, the chapter of his Short History on “The Age of Crusades” was one of the most positive of the book. It was an episode he portrayed as having burned deep into popular consciousness; the Crusades, he argued, were “domesticated” in the smallest of English homes through an art and “atmosphere” that marked off their inhabitants clearly from the infidel Turk. Indeed, these wars were less a military struggle for supremacy than a bitter conflict between two opposed conceptions of place. In that conflict, Rome looked eastward to the mysterious cradle of her creed, to a land of which the very earth was called holy. And when she looked eastward for it she saw the face of Mahound. She saw standing in the place that was her earthly heaven a devouring giant out of the deserts, to whom all places were the same.25

Interpreted as such, Islam was “the final flaming up of the accumulated Orientalisms, perhaps of the accumulated Hebraisms, gradually rejected as the Church grew more European, or as Christianity turned into Christendom.” Chesterton depicted Islam as “a sort of minority report of the Hebraists,” a standing reproach to the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation as “idolatry” and the equally cursed idolatry of images made of wood and stone. “This Semite god,” he asserted, “haunted Christianity like a ghost.”26 While at first it strengthened to the point of caricature the Christian commitment to imagery, its iconoclastic fury eventually broke on so distant a land as England.27 Islam’s rejection of the Incarnation was all of a piece with its rootlessness, austerity, and rationalism. For upholding, as it did, a God that was isolated in the transcendental realms of the absolute, Islam was naturally impervious to the reconciliation of God with the world through his Son that made Christian civilization, in Chesterton’s eyes, “full of local affections.” As John Coates has pointed out, this imperviousness was the message about Islam that Chesterton had conveyed through the fictional character of Misyra Ammon in his satirical novel The Flying Inn, published in 1913.28 In A Short History Chesterton elaborated by praising in the Christian obverse of Islam that system of fences which runs like a pattern through everything mediaeval, from heraldry to the holding of land. There was a shape and colour in all their customs and statutes which can be seen in their tabards and escutcheons; something at once strict and gay.29

The contrast between the particularistic nature of the Christian cosmos and the vast empty space that separated Muslims from God could not be

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more marked.30 In Islam, even holy places were places that were valued only for their holiness, not as places of value in themselves.31 For Chesterton this insight shed considerable light on the Reformation in both its religious and social aspect; it was rooted in contempt for particularism that destroyed the fabric of Christian society and belief. This was much in the spirit of its Islamic roots, first in the Saracens and then the Turks. The link may seem speculative, but he perceived an obvious and otherwise unaccountable symmetry between Protestantism and Islam at the level of doctrine on the one hand, and a cavalier attitude toward land and place on the other. In this perspective, Chesterton’s anxiety about the encroaching influence of foreign religions in England at the beginning of the twentieth century due to an expansive Protestantism with universalist ambitions also becomes clearer.32 This is usually explained by the vogue that the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore enjoyed in England just before the First World War.33 But it was a concern that was anchored as much, if not more, in the failure of Western governments, including England’s, to resist a new wave of Turkish massacres in the face of national revolutionary movements within the Ottoman Empire, beginning with Armenia in 1894. The political poet whom Chesterton most admired, William Watson, had protested against this quiescence in a number of sonnets against both the marauding Turk and English dishonor in its wake.34 In the same vein, not least in his novel The Flying Inn (1914), Chesterton condemned the march that the Turk had stolen on England. That it was Islam, of all the religions of the East, that most troubled him then is apparent also in his obituary for Christianity in the poem “March of the Black Mountain,” of the previous year.35 He regarded England as especially vulnerable to Islamic influence because of the alignment between English and Islamic religion since the Reformation. If, having entered through the door opened by Puritanism, Islam were to spread in England, not least through lack of vigilance about Turkey, gone would be those interlocking remnants of Christianity, nationhood, and patriotism upon which individual liberty in this life and salvation in the next depended.

NATIONAL PROPHET AND LIBERAL OUTCAST How well did this anti-Liberal polemic go down with Chesterton’s contemporaries, given a strong tendency toward fatigue, exasperation, and contempt in the reception of his work for the best part of a decade? Significantly, reviewers of the Short History failed to pick up on Chesterton’s concerns about the threat of Islam to English nationhood; they focused instead on the wider political argument and the Christian apologetics that shaped it.

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Chesterton was always guaranteed a favorable response in certain quarters. Thus, the reviewer in The Illustrated London News was moved by the “deep sincerity and burning patriotism” of the essay, the same qualities that inspired Chesterton’s columns in the weekly itself.36 But the book was also well received beyond such confines. For example, the review in The New Statesman—never an obvious ally of Chesterton—applauded his achievement, not least as a deliverance from the “donnish society” of professional historians. With recent experience of the Cambridge History Tripos as well as service at the front, the author of the review, Edward Shanks, exulted in the book’s informing “love of England”; it was a fine tribute, he thought, to Chesterton’s newfound confidence in his nation at the outset of the war and his own impressive revival. While there was little in the overall interpretation of English history that could not be found in Belloc or Lingard, the virtue of Chesterton’s account was that, as the product of an essentially poetic imagination, its “commonsense, passion and sincerity” far outweighed the axe it set out to grind.37 Other reviews also suggest some sympathy for the anti-Reformation view of English history when presented by Chesterton. For example, the reviewer in The Saturday Review—a journal that had always been one of his staunchest critics—readily agreed with its narrative of decline since the creation of a “land grabbing” aristocracy at the Reformation. In this context, he regarded Chesterton’s willingness to give credit where credit was due—especially to the heights of rhetoric scaled by eighteenthcentury aristocrats before their class showed its true colors in response to French and American Republicanism—as not the least endearing aspect of the book; he had long resented the “sneers” of Matthew Arnold at the provincialism of this period. While his enthusiasm stopped well short of Chesterton’s apparent “syndicalist” conception of trade unions as reincarnations of the medieval guilds, he acclaimed the Short History as “the wittiest, most eloquent, and discerning essay on the history of England which we have ever happened to read.”38 Chesterton thus well succeeded in stirring the depths of national feeling. Even The Westminster Gazette praised A Short History as “an honest, hot-headed, violent book, which is well among the finest things he has ever done.”39 But inevitably there were critics. These included the religious descendants of the Reformation, for example, the Wesleyans; they resented the crowding out of their founder by Whig aristocrats in the chapter on the eighteenth century.40 He was pilloried, too, by the establishment end of the Protestant ascendancy in England; the reviewer in The Morning Post was unable to contain his outrage at Chesterton’s “Bolshevik pamphlet” that glossed over the iniquities of the Roman Catholic Church in England.41

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Chesterton was further denounced by the historian A. L. Pollard, incensed by the charge that “true” popular history had always defeated professional historians. Against this contention, Pollard made great play with the partisanship that resulted from Chesterton’s attempt to counteract the bias of historians toward “fact” rather than “legend.” The priority that Chesterton misguidedly gave to “credulity” over incredulity was the result of his “indifferen[ce] to historical truth and unfamiliar[ity] with the ways of finding it.”42 In response to the “Prussian aggression” he had merely written a tract that might as well have been entitled “Protestantism,” just as Carlyle should have entitled his “latter-day pamphlet” at the time of the “papal aggression,” “Jesuitism.” But ideological as well as theological divisions within Liberalism fueled this clash between the professional and poetic approaches to history. For Pollard was a staunch New Liberal whose own popular history of England had exalted the state for supplanting the church as the basis of spiritual authority, “growing more comprehensive [as] the church grew more exclusive.”43 In his review of Chesterton’s book, Pollard elevated Thomas of Lancaster—the Second Earl—over St. Thomas of Canterbury, one of the heroes of Chesterton’s history. The former was an opponent of Edward II whose role in attempting to restrain the king by the “ordinances” of the baronage through the auspices of parliament resulted in his execution.44 The cult following he attracted after his death on account of his ability to work miracles from beyond the grave suggested to Pollard that Chesterton was selective, at the very least, in the figures to whom he attached “legendary” importance. Clearly, the old, pre-war disputes within Liberalism were still conditioning responses to Chesterton, even under the guise of “impartial” historical truth. Some of the journals and newspapers with which he had fallen out of favor were especially anxious to resist his elevation into a prophet of English patriotism before whose tribunal all the achievements of social reform in the pre-war period stood condemned. The Nation continued its review of Chesterton’s work where it had left off with The Ballad of the White Horse in 1911. In its review of the earlier work, it had accused Chesterton of venturing down blind historical alleys where Christian light clashed with heathen darkness, impervious to the wider currents working toward the “greatness” of modern England. For The Nation the battle of Ethandune at the heart of the epic was simply a prelude to that greatness that belonged to the Norman Conquest, a greatness in which Chesterton seemed entirely uninterested. Hence the unusual prominence he gave to the Danes, who, as “merely the obscure enemies of the ungrown greatness of England, are, beyond question, hardly as stimulating to vital poetic hatred as Danes who are the insolent powers of darkness.”45

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The Nation’s review of The Ballad was revealing; it emphasized sustained Liberal confidence in the state—not just Parliament—as the goal toward which all English history had moved, consummating England’s preordained supremacy. The review of Chesterton’s A Short History in The Nation six years later confirmed this reading of the English past. It made haste to dispel his belief that he had placed “the people” centerstage; on the contrary, his “obsession with ‘the governing class’ ha[d] thrust the people into the background.” Not the least of his failings was in not noticing that the governing class “has been continually compelled to enlarge itself, and its tendency is reluctantly to go on doing so until in the end it will be coterminous with the ‘governed class.’” Naturally, the reviewer was aghast at his suggestion that defeat in battle was preferable to returning to the “slave state” of old age pensions and national insurance. And while he too praised Chesterton’s ability to be a “Whig of the Whigs” in paying tribute to the eighteenth-century aristocracy, he could not leave the reader with any other impression of the work than as a “tragic fable or romance of the downfall of liberty in England” on the part of a people who “obeyed not God and despised the tree of Life.”46 But it was clearly not the “real” England as far as this reviewer was concerned, or Robert Lynd in Chesterton’s old paper, The Daily News, for all the “feast of pleasure” for which—Lynd conceded—the book could be recommended.47 By this time, the Liberalism of The Nation and that of Chesterton were far apart. From his column in The Illustrated London News he seized upon a sneering review that had appeared in The Nation of a tribute to George Wyndham to attack The Nation’s persistent and narrowing “political” stance. Such a defect, he maintained, was responsible for all the horrors of the pre-war social reforms. Unlike the mind of Wyndham, that of The Nation had never broadened to embrace the notion of “a universal brotherhood.” This was because Wyndham possessed, while The Nation did not, a capacity to retreat from politics into tastes and pastimes that expressed an “almost vagabond liberality”—that hallmark of Englishness, Chesterton style. Wyndham was thus a quintessential democrat despite, or rather because of, his aristocratic role, for the latter was played out in a “gentlemanly” rather than in a “sham” manner, unlike the behavior of the typical twentieth-century aristocrat. In this article Chesterton poured out all his resentment against the half-measures of the Liberal Party in creating a caddish House of Lords at the same time as a stunted democracy, and in which The Nation had found much cause for Liberal self-congratulation. Most of all, in the fetish it had made of parliamentary democracy in order to serve specious Liberal causes, The Nation had betrayed its namesake. By contrast, a feel for the nation had saved genuine democrats like Wyndham from the cliquishness that marred the journal and the politics for which it stood.48

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The new political vessel in which Chesterton’s Englishness set sail after the First World War was Distributism.49 This was despite the imperviousness of the wider Distributist movement to the parochial colors that Chesterton sought to nail firmly to its mast.50 Evidently sensitive to the peripheral status of the movement in English life, he continued to explore and defend the identity of England beyond the narrow borders of Distributism. But he did so in a climate in which patriotism—particularly English patriotism—was on the defensive. What place was there for a prewar apostle of nationhood and patriotism as internationalism—often aided by the Christian churches—pushed more local ideals aside?

NOTES 1. A Short History of England (1917), in CW XX (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), 591. As Owen Dudley Edwards has remarked, this wartime refrain of Chesterton’s brought him close to the “logic of Nietzsche” in seeking the liberation of humanity; this was after many years of confounding the hopes of his friend—Holbrook Jackson—that he rather than Shaw offered the best chance of bringing the Nietzschean “Superman” to life; Owen Dudley Edwards, “Holbrook Jackson in Chestertonian Context,” CR XIV, no. 4 (November 1988): 578–80. However, as chapter 9 will show, Chesterton soon stepped back from the Nietzschean brink in the early years of peace. 2. Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (London: Sheed & Ward, 1944), 355. 3. Short History, 587–88. 4. The classic work on Whig historiography is John W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); see also Rosemary Jann, The Art and Science of Victorian History (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985). 5. On the close association between church and state in Whig historiography, see Michael Bentley, Modernizing the English Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 2. 6. Short History, 446, 455. 7. Chesterton continued to invoke King Arthur at the expense of “professional” historians in his satirical poem, “The Myth of Arthur,” included in the 1922 edition of his collected poems: CP, 69. It ended on a bittersweet note of irony: Lest human fable touch historic fact, Chase myths like moths, and fight them with a pin. Take comfort; rest—there needs not this ado. You shall not be a myth, I promise you.

Chesterton’s championing of both Arthur and Alfred (as seen in chapter 6) well reflects what John Burrow terms “the divided allegiances of the Victorian imagination”; A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances, and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century (2007; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 221.

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8. Short History, 430. 9. Ibid., 501. 10. Ibid., 449–50, 485–90. 11. Ibid., 501. 12. Ibid., 462. 13. Ibid., 460. 14. Ibid., 518, 509, 507. 15. Ibid., 518. 16. James A. Froude, History of England: From the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth, ten vols., II (London: John W. Parker, second ed., 1858), 77–83. 17. “Thomas More,” in The English Way: Studies in English Sanctity from St. Bede to Newman, ed. Maisie Ward (London: Sheed & Ward, 1933), 215. 18. Short History, 521. 19. Ibid., 570. 20. Ibid., 572–73. 21. Ibid., 554. 22. Ibid., 559. 23. Ibid., 557. 24. John O’Connor, Father Brown on Chesterton (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1937), 84–85; “Lepanto,” 114–21. 25. Short History, 467. 26. Ibid., 465. 27. Ibid., 468, 466. 28. John Coates, “The Philosophy and Religious Background of The Flying Inn,” CR XII, no. 3 (August 1986): 306–7. 29. Short History, 466. 30. For an example of the perception of nationalism as a weakness rather than a strength by a Muslim contemporary of Chesterton, see Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, The Letters, 1928–32 (Istanbul: Sozler Publications, 1997), 75–76, 379–85. Nursi was writing against the backdrop of Turkey’s “apostasy” in becoming a nation, which—as will be seen in chapter 9—Chesterton welcomed. Nursi’s conception of the “negative” qualities of (Western) nationalism—aggressive, divisive, and undemocratic—was clearly linked to the chauvinism that Chesterton and other British Radicals were concerned to combat. I am grateful to Colin Turner for this reference. Chesterton’s concern at the imperviousness of Islam to place, earthly loyalties, and boundaries is shared by Roger Scruton; see his The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat (London: Continuum, 2002), 92–104. 31. Short History, 468. 32. See chapter 2, n. 47–48n10. These ambitions were satirized by Ronald A. Knox on the eve of the First World War in his anonymous pamphlet, Reunion all Round: Or, Jael’s hammer laid aside, and the Milk of Human Kindnefs beaten up into Butter and ferv’d in a Lordly Difh; Being a Plea for the Inclufion within the Church of England of all Mahometans, Jews, Buddhifts, Brahmins, Papifts, and Atheifts, submitted to the Confideration of the Britifh Publick (London: Society of SS. Peter and Paul, 1914). 33. Coates, “Philosophy and Religious Background of The Flying Inn,” 314; A. Stone Dale, The Outline of Sanity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1982), 191.

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34. William Watson, The Year of Shame (London: The Bodley Head, 1897). 35. “March of the Black Mountain,” DN, 31 October 1912, 6; in CP, 121–22. The poem is about a last-ditch rising of Christian remnants against an all-powerful Islam, playing upon St. Paul’s allegory of faith moving mountains: 1 Corinthians 13:2. The uprising failed, but not “in vain,” for the mountain had “more life” than Mahomet against whom it bravely stood up. The poem was prompted by the Montenegrins’ uprising against the Turks that triggered the Balkan Wars; see Christopher Hollis, The Mind of G.K. Chesterton (London: Hollis & Carter, 1970), 185. 36. Anon., “Mr. Chesterton’s History of England,” ILN, 17 November 1917, 612. 37. Edward Shanks, “A Reading of English History,” The New Statesman, 27 October 1917, 85–86. Shanks had been a senior scholar in history at Trinity College, taking his B.A. in 1913. At the time of writing the review he was at the outset of his career as a writer, poet, and journalist. His Chestertonian sympathies are obvious, not least in his novel, The People of the Ruins (London: Collins, 1920). 38. Anon., “Mr Chesterton on England,” The Saturday Review, 17 November 1917, 395. The reference to Matthew Arnold concerns remarks in his essay, “The Literary Influence of Academies” (1864), in Essays in Criticism, First Series (1865). 39. Anon., “Clio Enthusiastic,” WG, 27 October 1917, 3. 40. Wilfred L. Hannan, “Mr. Chesterton’s ‘Short History of England,’” The Methodist Recorder, 9 December 1912, 4. 41. E. E. O., “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” The Morning Post, 26 October 1917, 2. 42. Anon. [Albert F. Pollard], “Mr. Chesterton’s Latter-Day Pamphlet,” TLS, 22 November 1917. 43. Albert F. Pollard, The History of England: A Study in Political Evolution, 55 B.C.–A.D. 1911 (1912; London: Oxford University Press, 1941), 227. The book was written for the Home University Library series. For all Pollard’s “modernist” pose in historiography—rejecting anachronism in historical study in favor of professional, “scientific” research—he was regarded by a fellow modernist, Maurice Powicke, as simply a “gifted amateur”; Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, 102. But as Bentley demonstrates few of the would-be modernizers entirely escaped the Whiggish “ghosts” of late-nineteenth century historiography; Ibid., ch. 4. 44. John R. Maddicott, “Thomas of Lancaster, Second Earl of Lancaster and Earl of Lincoln, c. 1278–1322,” ODNB, vol. 54, 288–95. 45. Anon., “Alfred in Verse,” The Nation, 9 September 1911, 845–86. 46. Anon., “Mr. Chesterton’s New Romance,” The Nation, 10 November 1917, 207–8. 47. Robert Lynd, “Mr. Chesterton as Historian,” DNL, 24 October 1917, 2. Lynd wrote at greater, and more critical length on Chesterton’s conception of England, past and present, in an essay two years later, to which Chesterton responded in ILN, 26 July 1919, 128. 48. “George Wyndham,” in defense of Charles T. Gatty, George Wyndham: Recognita (London: Murray, 1917), in The Uses of Diversity (London: Methuen, 1920), 171–76. The article first appeared in The Illustrated London News. 49. In defending Distributism at a meeting of a branch of the Distributist League in Buckinghamshire—against, inter alia, the Fascist movement in Britain led by

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Mosley—he maintained: “We are reviving a very real English tradition. It is true it has been lost for a long time, but it still has a kind of indestructible vitality in the psychology of the English people, the idea of liberty”; “In Defence of Distributism: Address to the High Wycombe Distributist League,” The Bucks Free Press, 19 May 1933. 50. There were increasing tensions within the Distributist movement. These were between a Liberal wing sustained by Chesterton and local branches of the Distributist League, and a harder, Bellocian wing at national level whose sympathies lay with continental Fascism. See Jay P. Corrin, “Catholic Writers on the Right,” CR XXV, nos. 1 and 2 (February and May 1999): 81–101.

9 ✛

Nationalism, Internationalism, and the English Past after 1918

C

hesterton entered a postwar world that was in the process of political, spiritual, and intellectual upheaval, one that he viewed with considerable alarm. In his eyes, the doubt and confusion of the late Victorian era paled into insignificance beside the disquieting attitudes of postwar modistes. In response, he intensified his attack upon the anti-Victorianism consciously assumed by the latter.1 Unlike Victorian pessimists, their Georgian successors seemed to have plumbed new depths of despair in closing their minds to the evidence of purposefulness and goodness in the world. Likewise, recent skepticism had turned not only against God but against “nature” too, consigning Victorian optimists such as Meredith to obscurity.2 The rationalism that had once been a weapon against “morality”—which had itself struck down “mysticism”—was now descending into irrationalism.3 The Nonconformist conscience was fast being eclipsed by a new wave of Puritanism, obsessed with prohibition and prudery and devoid of all religious moorings in a new alignment with “progressivism.”4 Capitalism had evolved into Bolshevism with effortless ease in Russian towns, with little recognition in Britain of the need to develop a strong peasantry to avert a similar catastrophe there.5 The modern novel emphasized the “moral and mental anarchy” of postwar times.6 And not only the practice but also the ideal of democracy had become imperiled in the work of theorists as diverse as Charles Maurras in France and H. L. Mencken in America.7 As joint figurehead of Distributism with Belloc, Chesterton has been associated with an increasingly entrenched and anti-Semitic “radical right” after the First World War as parliamentary democracy seemed to buckle 183

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under the strain of its plutocratic bias.8 He certainly sympathized with some of the new Fascist movements abroad, particularly in Italy.9 However, he was well removed from both the radical right and the far right in Britain. Against both movements he retained an unswerving, pre-1914 faith in reason, democracy, and the autonomy of nations in the face of the Fascist threat. These ideals sat uneasily with his anti-Semitism but were not diminished by it.10 On the one hand, his discourse of nationhood was levelled against what he regarded as the discredit into which such ideals had fallen as the League of Nations, internationalism, and pacifism became new beacons of hope for mankind. On the other hand, it targeted the hubris that had taken nationalism down new and dark political paths. As during the war, so afterward, England retained first place in his public affections, ensuring both his own cultural centrality and that of the English nation itself; this was despite his drift in other, distinctly unorthodox political directions at the same time. Not least, his column in The Illustrated London News kept Chesterton in the mainstream of national life; it ensured that he did not become the isolated, passé figure after 1910 emphasized by some commentators as he broke with Liberalism and neglected modernism.11 “Our Note Book” certainly offset the largely minority influence and concerns of the journal he established when The New Witness folded in 1922, G. K.’s Weekly.12 In The Illustrated London News and other writings, some of the harder, oppositional edges of his patriotism were blunted in the face of new modulations of class, religion, and culture in England in the aftermath of war. But, as this chapter shows, he made no concessions to the older shibboleths of progress and liberty, particularly as expressed in Whig history, nor did he gesture toward the newer shibboleths of international peace.

PATRIOTISM AND NATIONHOOD IN THE INTERNATIONALIST SHADOW The principles of patriotism and nationhood for which Chesterton had always fought lost much of their cutting edge after the First World War. No longer the basis of a crusading Liberalism and national rallying cry in the Great War itself, they suffered considerable opprobrium in the peace that followed. For example, H. A. L. Fisher changed his views on patriotism markedly in the wake of the war. In his pro-Boer days with The Speaker, he had defended patriotism because of its basis in instinct rather than reason and as a corrective to misguided policy.13 But after 1918, the idea of patriotic duty seemed no more than an anachronism, the dangerous remnant of primitive emotion within civilized mankind and in urgent need of supersession by machinery for avoiding war.14

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Chesterton anticipated this reaction even before the conclusion of the war. Attacking the ideal of the League of Nations as set out by H. G. Wells and Lord Grey, he was apprehensive that it could easily become a League “for the Abolition of Nations.” In their primary concern to provide security for states, the league’s advocates seemed hostile to maintaining the independence of states.15 This was certainly a correct analysis of the “new internationalism” that underlay league thinking, and that was a direct challenge to the “old internationalism” grounded in the state-centered regime of free trade. It was partly motivated by a concern to save nations from “anarchic” nation-states by creating new levels of international organization that would weaken the latter.16 However, much as Chesterton also despised the nation-state, he was even more suspicious of associated attempts to shift the focus of civic identity and participation to “higher,” international levels. He feared the basis of the new internationalism in “mere praise of machinery.”17 He was skeptical that the agricultural laborer who loved his country passionately—and who was prepared to go to the assistance of other countries when attacked, as in the case of Belgium—would be well served by the “wire-pullers” at The Hague.18 His longstanding critique of cosmopolitanism found renewed relevance as “functionalist” visionaries such as Wells and Liberal statesmen such as Grey made common cause at the expense of ingrained loyalties. What we call the modern world is a more ancient world than we thought, and its simplicities will survive its complexities. Men care more for the rag that is called a flag than for the rag that is called a newspaper. Men care more for Rome, Paris, Prague, Warsaw, than for the international railways connecting these towns; or for the international relations that are often as cold, as mechanical, and as dead as the rails. Nobody has any such ecstatic regard for the mere relations of different peoples to each other, as one would gather from the rhetoric of idealistic internationalism.19

It was with considerable delight that Chesterton embraced at least one aspect of the impending peace settlement, the creation of an independent Poland, which was the fulfillment of all his hopes for the rebirth of the “Christendom of the nations.”20 He visited Poland in 1925 and 1927, to much public and official acclaim.21 He was greeted not just as a famous Roman Catholic convert but as an apostle of patriotism whose writings on the subject over a quarter of a century could not be timelier.22 Although soured by anti-Semitism in dismissing pro-German Poles as Jews, he defended Poland ardently throughout the interwar period against its British critics.23 Readily admitting against one such critic of the pro-Poland lobby in Britain that he was indeed moved by “sentiment,” he stressed that a Polish state was essential to the liberty and independence of England. Without such a precipice as Poland on which to

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rest, however precariously, England faced the certain “abyss of death” in confronting a Europe now prey to Bolshevism and Prussianism. German claims on Danzig and the sympathy this elicited in Britain suggested that victory over Germany in the First World War had not been as complete as it should have been.24 For Chesterton, nationhood of a Polish kind was a “fact” of the first order, and one that could never be trumped by “internationalism,” or any other “-ism.” In The Illustrated London News in July 1933 he welcomed the resurgence of nationalism as a general movement, if not in all its disturbing local detail: he confessed his preference for De Valera over Mussolini, and Pilsudski (infinitely so) over Hitler. Although the culture of Europe— and Christianity—was far older than the advent of its modern, constitutive nations, nevertheless it could be said that “those who cling to the nations, however ignorantly, cling to the leavings and to the living leavings of the original life.”25 But as the case of Germany and other parts of Europe showed, nationalism had been corrupted by an “ethnological” type of loyalty that was as far from those “leavings” as internationalism was from being a (real) “thing.” This tribalism was not an inevitable concomitant of nationhood, but instead the decay of religion, the filling up of the “empty hollows” created by the Thirty Years’ War and the drying up of Protestantism, to be replaced by Prussianism.26 Squeezed between these two rogue modernities of internationalism on the one hand and a resurgent tribalism on the other, nationhood was truly on the ropes. The problem was exacerbated by the creation of new nations after the War, not least in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, which Chesterton regarded with some fondness in retrospect. In his Illustrated London News column the week after he discussed the corruption of nationalism in Europe, he wrote that while Austria’s crime in issuing Serbia with an ultimatum at the outset of the war bore all the hallmarks of “Prussianism,” this was “incidental” rather than integral to its policy. Further, like Lord Acton before him, Chesterton emphasized the “liberality and ease” with which the constituent nations of the empire could live with one another. While he thought that some “redistribution” of those nations was just, the new boundaries and names were artificial and, in the case of Yugoslavia, as has been seen, were overshadowed by the state.27 He seems to have taken against Czechoslovakia, in particular, much to the chagrin of his literary admirers there, the most notable being the Czech Angophile, Karel ˇ Capek. It has been suggested that a key reason was his staunch allegiance to Catholic Poland, during his visits to which he would have been made aware of that country’s claim to the Tesin territory now part of the new Czechoslovak Republic. It has also been suggested that he was vulnerable in the 1920s to anti-Czech propaganda in London put about by the Hungarian nobility, resentful of their lost influence over Slovakia.28

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Chesterton certainly seems to have reversed his enthusiastic support during the war for the independence of the Czechs, and it is clear from his Illustrated London News article on Austria that he was very impressionable as far as the East European aristocracy was concerned. But anxiety at the arbitrary nature of the dismemberment of the old empire seems as likely a reason for this as the taking of Polish sides in the Tesin dispute. He compared the recent invention, Czechoslovakia, to an imaginary Irish kingdom of “Celtocaledonia” forged out of the “ancient nationality of Ireland” but with the addition of a “thin and arbitrary strip of Scotland.”29 The lesson was clear: to qualify for independent nationhood, the credential of antiquity in terms of both borders and cultural identity was essential. In the absence of one or both of these factors, the claim to nationhood was not only false but dangerous, too. A further complicating factor in the new world of nationalism in the interwar period was Kemal Atatürk’s attempt to transform Turkey from a Muslim caliphate into a modern nation. Here was another instance in which, on Chesterton’s reading, modernity was playing tricks with the ancient light of nations; this time, however, the effect was all to the good. His animus toward the Turks, and the Muslim religion on which he believed their collective identity was entirely based, has been noted in earlier chapters. Writing in 1928 he relished the prospect of Turkey’s supporters in the West cheering the erosion of its Muslim faith by the movement of nationalism that they regarded elsewhere as thoroughly retrograde. But there was a further irony in Chesterton’s comment on this unlikely development—against the standard of a “modern” nationalism set by Prussia in postwar Europe, Islam offered much needed respite. For all its defects— “sterility and stagnation and a frozen imagery”—Islam possessed “one great and glorious superiority to many of the fads of Western Europe”: It has no Chosen Race; it has no nonsense about lesser breeds without the law; it has no rant of merely racial superiority; there is a brotherhood of men, if it be a brotherhood of Moslems. That was the whole difference between the Turks and the Prussians, and is why any civilised Christian would infinitely prefer the Turks.30

ENGLAND REVISITED Clearly, Chesterton continued to see the post-war world in the same, dualist light that had colored his pre-war approach to world and domestic politics: Prussianism on the one hand versus civilization, “true” nationalism and Christianity on the other. Germany may have been defeated, but Prussianism remained far from crushed. At the end of 1919 he wrote a

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retrospective article about the year that had just passed from the perspective of fifty years hence. Through heavy satire he mourned the inertia of the peace in England, enabling plutocracy and the “Prussian” approach to social reform to become entrenched in a swift “revolution of reaction.” The process had been eased by a people who managed to combine a “surly grumbling at the failure of [their commercial rulers] with an almost servile admiration for their success.” However, posing as a smug beneficiary, he had to admit that it is only too probable that our wealthiest peasantries, our most powerful guilds, are making some large human mistake, such as those which are too easily derided in those fathers of ours, so strangely ignorant of religion, and sometimes (it would seem) so strangely inaccessible to reason, who yet maintained for four years the final crusade to achieve a liberty larger than they knew.31

The emphasis on “too easily derided” suggests that any bitterness and disappointment Chesterton may have felt with England in 1918–1919— its people as well as its government—was short-lived. As at the outbreak of war, he was once again overcome by admiration of his fellow countrymen in refusing to submit to the forces of Prussian darkness in 1914. Addressing an organization for ex-servicemen in London in 1923, he urged them not to brood over the failure of peace to bring about the improvements for which they had yearned in their four-year struggle against Germany. Seemingly backtracking from his own version of the “moral equivalence” between England and Prussia throughout the war and beyond, he argued that when their nation had been endangered, his audience had well recognized its value. Therefore, their subsequent disappointment at the lack of change was “an illogical thing; an effect of time, fatigue, emotions of various kinds; but it is not really rational.”32 To have prevented a worse outcome than the continuance of things as they were was progress in itself. Thus, Chesterton now conceived the English people as primarily heroic rather than revolutionary in nature. But how could their neglect of indigenous threats to liberty at home be squared with their instant resistance to the threat of despotism emanating from abroad? As he noted on the silver jubilee of the reign of George V in 1935, this was grounded in the “religion” that the English alone of all the nations had made of patriotism. While England had lost “a hundred English things which would have been saved by the self-conscious nationality of more tragic lands,” the essentially “subconscious” nature of English nationality ensured that its people would act with “animal instinct” in an emergency. Disregarding fierce opposition to the First World War in England, he suggested that

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all the recrimination against the war came afterward. Such inability to tolerate (foreign) tyranny emphasized that the “Englishman was prepared to be a Pacifist, but not a Defeatist.” Indeed, it was “the final paradox of this most paradoxical people that they may yet live to be the last of the old nations.”33 The emotions of the occasion aside, this analysis was all of a piece with an emphasis that Chesterton had been developing recently on the English “religion of patriotism.” We have seen in a previous chapter that in his early writings he had condemned the cultivation of patriotism as a substitute religion, particularly when linked to the “national efficiency” school of Lord Rosebery. But in the last few years of his life he began to recognize and come to terms with the religious quality of English patriotism. He conceived this phenomenon not as an alien import from exotic places such as Japan but as indigenous to the English; it was a substitute for a religion that had been lost, or rather, forcibly taken away. It was epitomized for him in Kipling’s reference to Westminster Abbey in the poem, “The Native-Born,” when toasting the hush of the dread high altar, Where the Abbey makes us We.34

How perplexing would the pre-Reformation English buried in the Abbey have found these lines, Chesterton remarked. Chaucer would have regarded the abbey as a place in which his dust was sanctified, not a place that his dust sanctified.35 At first glance, this might appear an outright profanity in Chesterton’s eyes, and so at one level it was, but his attitude was also more complex. As he pointed out in an article written for a foreign audience in 1935, the reclusive nature of English nationalism that gave English patriotism this strong religious dimension was evident in the lack of decent, literary songs that reflected a high degree of national pride, such as would inspire the “singing” and “marching” nations. In the absence of such overt expressions of shared identity, the subtle threads of its poetry, literature, and, above all, humor bound together the nation instead. As such, the “real” nation was totally divorced from the “official” nation—that recurrent theme in his work of the pays réel versus the pays legal. The former was internalized in the psyche of its people rather than externalized for public display. What was said in the nation’s name was singularly unrepresentative, the reason being that in Britain, “the organs of the State are very seldom the really organic organs of the people.”36 The separation between nation and state in England had become especially apparent to him following his first visit to America in 1921. Contrasting the unrelenting sociability of the American people with the

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introverted nature of his compatriots, he concluded that Aristotle’s dictum of man being a political animal in no way applied to the English; they were “poetical” instead, reflecting the sanctuary they regularly sought inside themselves. This was the best condition for the creation of great poetry, he remarked, and on no account to be interpreted as an expression of hostility toward the world. Chesterton effectively admitted that the gift for poetry was no match for the failure of the English to learn the meaning of “the public thing, the republic.” This had ensured that “the very State itself has become a State secret.”37 Yet there was a sense in which Chesterton embraced the autonomous nation in England in the interests of its purity and resilience. There was certainly a tension in Chesterton’s analysis of the English in the interwar years. It would seem that the sotto voce character of the “real” English nation and the source of all its spiritual strength was created and sustained by the “official” nation. Not least, this was in channeling patriotism away from nationalism and into the religious vacuum left by the Reformation. Westminster Abbey, after all, was no voluntary foundation. Chesterton failed to acknowledge the backhanded credit that was due to the state in his analysis for sealing England’s probable destiny as the “last” old-style nation. This was on account of its unique patriotic identity that had well succeeded in holding the cultural aberrations of modernity at bay. If the state was one beneficiary—as became clear in his silver jubilee comment about a hundred things being lost to the English as a result of their merely “subconscious” nationality—the English people themselves were by no means losers. Central to Chesterton’s analysis of England throughout his life but particularly after the First World War was his assumption that the English people were unified by a common character that cut across divisions of class, religion, and gender. As might be expected, far from being an expression of complacency, this was well grounded in searing cultural critique. Thus, throughout the interwar years he attacked the monopolization of the ideal of the Englishman by the figure of the “gentleman,” narrowly conceived. This was another symptom of the betrayal of democracy by a sector of the middle class that had preoccupied him before the war. The betrayal took place at two levels, that of comportment and taste. The “stiff upper lip” of a certain type of English gentleman was responsible for the entirely misleading image of the English abroad as a cold, superior race, quite unrepresentative of the warmhearted frivolity characteristic of the bulk of the English people.38 In addition, the essentially cosmopolitan taste of the gentleman in everything from drink (Scotch whiskey instead of English beer) to furniture and paintings was the most “English” thing about him.39

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Nevertheless, Chesterton’s idea of “the true English character” showed the same leanings toward an accommodation with existing England that marked other areas of this thought after the peace settlement. This is well captured in the chapter on “Chaucer as an Englishman” in his literary biography of Chaucer published in 1932. There he portrayed Chaucer as a transitional figure in the development of national consciousness in Europe, and one who first gave literary expression to English national difference. He claimed that in Chaucer’s writings the best qualities of the English gentleman—and the English lady—could be found, undefiled by the “narrowness” of aristocracy and the “sourness” of Puritanism. Not least in Chaucer himself, the “self-effacing sociability” that characterized his remarks about his companions, and the few remarks he made about himself, went to the heart of what made the English gentleman “the best companion in the world.” The Prioress, no less than the male figures in the pilgrimage, was also “English” through and through, “waft[ing] across the ages a delicately mingled atmosphere of refinement and fuss.”40 For Chesterton, what was most striking about The Canterbury Tales was its distinctive sense of humor—good humor—one that remained “satirical” yet lightened by “comicality” and “irrationality.” As such, Chaucer was “well on the road to the Dickensian lunatic-asylum of laughter.” Also like Dickens—the early Dickens, at least—Chaucer’s rogues were lovable: “He does not want the Friar and the Wife of Bath to perish; one would sometimes suspect that he does not really want them to change.” Chaucer resisted the temptation to “hunt down” his villains, “killing them like wild vermin or public pests.” His humor was characteristically English in other ways too—for example, in “using flippancy to avoid an argument and not provoke it.”41 Nothing could be further from Chesterton’s hopes for the English. But it was a symptom of his interwar acceptance of things as they were that he could recognize without too much reproach the role of Chaucer’s Englishness in curbing any impulse he might have had to rebel against the son of John of Gaunt—another upstart noble of the kind Chesterton loathed.42 Nor did Chesterton have anything but praise for the subtlety and ease with which a person of Chaucer’s ability and discretion was able to “slip . . . into the social class above him.” In this way, new avenues of employment for the gentleman were forged in English public life, emphasizing the existence of social openings that were unique to England. While these were strictly regulated, the criteria were personal rather than class-based. It was not fair, he argued, “to forget the good side of this curious opportunist aristocracy adopted by the English,” particularly its basis in “geniality and good humour.” This ensured the survival of the English aristocracy as against the vulnerability of aristocracies elsewhere to democracy or despotism.43

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Clearly, in the 1930s Chesterton was warming toward the figure of the gentleman, broadly conceived. This was the period in which he looked back nostalgically to the Victorian figure of the gentleman epitomized in Lewis Carroll and the members of his own family, with their “parallel lives.”44 Broadly conceived, the gentleman was central to the absorption of members of other social classes into the aristocracy that he had once denounced as an offense against authenticity. One critic—a former associate from his Eye Witness and New Witness days—assailed his defense of the gentleman as inconsistent with his championship of democracy. For Ivor Brown, Chesterton’s warmth toward the “Idle Rich Class” (to use Shaw’s term) was all the more unseemly because it was made at the expense of the rich “who have worked for their money.”45 But in Chesterton’s eyes the self-made rich had forged too far ahead in the class co-option stakes recently,46 a thinly veiled attack upon plutocracy in England. As for the charge that he was backpedaling away from democracy, it is clear from his other writings at the time that he now perceived the gentleman as an ally rather than an enemy of the people. In this he was well within a pattern of English self-projection in the 1930s. He confirmed the wide cultural vogue then enjoyed by the gentleman from a number of different perspectives, not all middle-class and often foreign in provenance.47 However, he hitched this figure firmly to his own political ends. For example, he praised the gentry in the form of poets such as Thomas Gray—and Oliver Goldsmith—and their admirers from the same social background for condemning the destruction of rural England.48 Having lost the wealth and status that once accompanied land, he claimed that the remnants of the gentry were temperamentally opposed to standing in county council elections, the new avenues to riches and power in the countryside. The establishment of the Penn-Gray Society in Chesterton’s own county of Buckinghamshire prompted his reflection that in the absence of a peasantry, England would have been wise to preserve its gentry, a “real aristocracy,” to face down the pseudo-aristocracy that had taken its place in the name of “democracy.”49 For it was not only the future of rural habitats that was at stake in the blind path toward industrialism and commercialism the English people—or rather, their rulers—had taken since the eighteenth century: “the vital traditions of England” were also under threat. So deep were those traditions in the English “subconscious” that Chesterton was confident that the ill effects of industrialism could be reversed through the work of societies such as Penn-Gray. The only alternative was that industrialism would perish of its own internal rottenness.50 As at the outbreak of the First World War, Chesterton certainly felt vindicated in the 1930s in the English patriotism he had always upheld, and which now seemed to have come into its own. At the time of the silver ju-

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bilee of King George V, he wrote appreciatively of the wholly different atmosphere of this event compared to Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee, when England had been largely forgotten in an orgy of jingoism focused on the empire. There were those such as Beaverbrook who still aspired after a reenactment of that “stunt” and the avaricious motives which inspired it: a celebration of “all the activities around the Diamond Mines of Kimberley,” so “modern and up to date” was The Daily Express, commented Chesterton wryly. But the clearest “tendencies” of English patriotism were away from this ersatz variety toward a form that was all of a piece with the national character: “poetic and domestic and part of an inner life.” This was apparent on a number of fronts: greater sensitivity among “historical students” toward the English yeoman;51 the existence of poets who “regret[ted] the [passing of] the English Inn”; and the existence, too, of more educated men who realise, though so late, that we have ruined the most beautiful landscapes of the earth, than there were when the nineteenthcentury tendency was full of triumph and boasting, and could only deck itself with the diamonds of Africa.52

This eulogy to the recent turn in English patriotism away from the bombastic ideals of state and empire was by no means without foundation: it was rooted in a softer cult of Englishness in the interwar period that affirmed many of Chesterton’s longstanding patriotic ideals. The shift was especially evident in the speeches of Stanley Baldwin, where, as in Chesterton’s writings, Christianity and patriotism became mutually reinforcing.53 But the “inward” turn in English patriotism to more homely, individual, and introspective settings reflecting what has been termed an “anti-[John] Bullite” reevaluation of the national character was evident in a wide range of thinkers and writers in the interwar period.54 It would have helped to offset in Chesterton’s mind a contrary trend toward what he perceived as the new, inverted jingoism of the pacifist lobby in the early 1930s, every bit as “blind and unbalanced” as the war party at the turn of the century when he had begun his journalistic career.55 This unwelcome development was crystallized in the mass campaign against war organized by the Reverend Dick Sheppard and the Peace Pledge Union on the one hand, and in the vote for the motion against fighting for king and country by the Oxford Union on the other.56 For Chesterton, both initiatives were based upon fundamental misconceptions about the priority of peace over justice and detestation of war over hatred of evil. They were misconceptions, moreover, that had no warrant in Christianity, the emphasis of which fell on casting out sin rather than achieving “peace” as an end in itself, a critique he had earlier leveled against Tolstoy. Both the

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Peace Pledge Union and the vote in the Oxford Union were driven by contempt for Britain’s role in the Great War; but they failed to perceive the importance of engaging patriotism for a wider end—resisting the “military menace” of Prussia, a menace that was all too obviously resurfacing in postwar Germany. They reflected widespread sentiments in England that led to questions being raised about the glorification of war in his own writings. Even friendly critics voiced these concerns, as he was incensed to find in the review by a former associate of The Eye Witness of his Collected Poems at around the same time.57 Chesterton applauded the tempering of this new and in his view dangerous wave of pacifism by the turn to what he perceived as a more native form of English patriotism than that which had been cultivated before the war: unobtrusive yet resolute in the face of danger. At the same time, however, he continued to challenge received cultural wisdom, not least that which emanated from Whig history.

THE END OF THE WHIG METHOD AND MYTH Chesterton had long been interested in the teaching of history and historiography as the basis of his populist creed. Despite his early gospel of political revolution, he believed that past and present were indissolubly linked, the dead being part of a single, living “democracy.”58 This had major implications for both the study of the past and conceptions of the past. On the first score, the democratic unity of past and present underlined the importance of all sources to historical truth—including legend. This was regardless of the capacity of such sources to contradict the word of modern historians, including the so-called “impartials” who did not even see the “half-truths” of Macaulay and Froude. The new, “modernist” breed of historian was impervious to history as “simply humanity,” the discipline that “humanised all studies, even anthropology.”59 On the second score, the idea of an integral, democratic link between past and present spelled the need for sensitivity to the past as a realm of free, undetermined action; no historical development was the culmination of inexorable forces. Chesterton’s target here was the futurists whom he castigated in an essay written after the First World War that greatly influenced the historiography of Herbert Butterfield, then at the outset of his career as a prominent Cambridge historian.60 The futurists, Chesterton argued, were all too ready to chart the next lines of advance from positions in the present and from remote positions in the future, ignoring entirely the human context of action. What they could not reckon with was the element of “surprise” that ensured that outcomes could have been different, and which at the time were unpredictable. To assume otherwise

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was to commit the absurdity of “expecting the unexpected.” Only materialist and statistical developments could be forecast with any degree of accuracy, all the creative pursuits of humanity being a closed book to the aspiring prophet.61 Chesterton’s conception of the past as open-ended provided the basis of his attack, not just on highly speculative views of the future but misguided ideals of “progress.” From the vantage point of the 1930s, the nineteenth-century belief in “laws” of progress appeared not just illusory but dangerously complacent. The idea of progress possessing its own momentum—embodied in Tennyson’s line, “the thoughts of men are widened by the process of the suns”—upheld an “optimism” and “meliorism” that regarded prosperity, in particular, as self-sustaining. Chesterton distinguished his own belief in progress from that of the preceding generation, emphasizing not so much progress as an independent variable but “effort”: I do definitely believe that better things can grow, if we take the trouble to grow them. I do definitely disbelieve that better things will grow anyhow, by a mere law of growth or evolution.62

However, the necessary “effort” required for progress could not be at the expense of established communities, loyalties, and beliefs. H. G. Wells took much good-natured flak from Chesterton throughout the interwar period for promoting “peace” through the suppression of national ties on the one hand, and the propagation of science on the other. Chesterton reiterated his view at the end of the First World War that no progress could be made toward the “world state”—for Wells, the only avenue of “peace”—by despising the “deepest sentiments of the most democratic States in the world.” On the contrary, the best hope of peace lay not in reading internationalist literature propagating the cause of a world state but the nationalist literature of other peoples.63 Furthermore, no amount of education in science could override transmission of the “soul of society” from one generation to the next—the true meaning of education and the basis of all culture. Indeed, science might easily corrupt the latter, as in the American South and the use of science to legitimate racism. The only safeguard against the distortions of both culture and science was a “sane social philosophy,”64 in essence, a religion. Moreover it was one—the reader is left to presume—that would recognize but at the same time temper “difference,” just as the Roman Catholic faith did in Chesterton’s view. Futurism and cosmopolitanism were hence united in a shared imperviousness to the freedom that exists only in the past and through the creativity made possible by existing identities.

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Of course, the democratic communities of belief and identity in which all hope of progress lay had not always been well served in the past: political maneuvering by elites particularly constrained the potential for humanity’s “wilder adventures.” Those historians who would perpetuate this legacy constructed the past in such a way as to deny even the potential itself. Chesterton’s writings after the First World War bear witness to a sustained antipathy toward what Butterfield—acting on Chesterton’s cue, among others—was to term the Whig interpretation of English history at the level of both method and myth. Not only did the Whig interpretation invoke liberty as an “organic,” unilinear growth within the constitution, each successive advance being preordained by unconscious principles working within the English polity from the earliest to the most recent times; it also created a political mythology of the Whigs as the guardians of a liberty that centered squarely on the nation rather than a particular class and sect. Chesterton disputed both aspects of Whiggism. In February 1931 he attacked the prejudice against the Stuarts that had informed much Whig historiography, instead favoring Puritanism at the root of what became mainstream Protestantism. Legend knew otherwise, he maintained, the legend kept in circulation by the “sentimental gossip” of “nursery maids and grandmothers.” These figures were quick to defend the virtues of Mary Queen of Scots and Charles I against their “Calvinist” opponents. The legend they spun may have been a mere “half-truth,” but it was half true nonetheless. By contrast, schoolteachers were under the same “discipline” as professional historians to perpetuate the outright “lie” that the Puritans championed religious liberty rather than mere religious “loyalty,” that is, to the “logic” of Calvin. The gender configuration here is significant. As the new “chroniclers” of society, women were free from the pressures to which professional (male) historians were subject to practice deception as agents of the “official” culture. Essentially, the propagation of the Whig myth about the seventeenth century was carried out by academic officials of a certain academic system; achieving a fame which depended upon a fashion; successful or unsuccessful, according to the power of a theory; suiting themselves, consciously or unconsciously to a certain school; and when all is said, living by receiving salaries or selling books. They had not the disinterestedness or detachment of gossip. They were not merely mentioning the things they remembered, but remembering only the things they were supposed to mention. Their minds had formed a mechanical habit of recording only the things that were suited to the records, and writing only the records that were suited to the official record office. Some of them were stark liars; some of them, which is much more strange and uncanny, were honest men. But they were, at best, men

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telling untrue stories in the interests of the truth, or what they believed to be the truth.

Attacking the falsehoods of history with the legends of childhood, Chesterton maintained fervently that the last two Stuarts attempted to establish religious toleration against fierce resistance by the Puritans. In doing so he defied the historians of his boyhood—particularly Macaulay and Green.65 He also flew in the face of the rehabilitation of Puritanism in the interwar period as integral to English national character and identity. No longer the tool of abrasive dissenting interests, the virtue of Puritanism in holding the state at bay and in the interest of both liberty and community secured wide acclaim.66 As we saw in chapter 3, Chesterton had written admiringly of Charles II at an early stage in his journalistic career, an admiration founded upon Charles’s ability to outwit his Puritan foes; and his article on the Stuarts of February 1931 was written in much the same vein. Later in the same year, he rejoiced at the publication of a laudatory portrait of Charles II by the young historian, Arthur Bryant, one that was fully in tune with his political sympathies. The book was a major publishing success, confounding Chesterton’s view a few months earlier that only “falsehood” could flourish in the writing of history among his contemporaries. He especially praised the book’s account of Charles’s astuteness in facing down the politicians of the Whig opposition. This was composed of men such as Halifax and Shaftsbury who pressed the Parliamentary cause, but to whom Chesterton thought it unwise to attribute democratic motives. Parliament, he insisted, “was not the people.” Rather, it was, “in its whole attitude and action, a privileged class; a ruling class; a thing like a house of Peers and Princes. It really was, as Charles said, a House of Five Hundred Kings.” Its central concern was with exploiting religious divisions for its own ends, not least in the popish plot. It was to Charles’s credit that he lived through “the whole of that Bedlam and remained at least the sanest of English Kings.”67 But worse was to come for the Whig conjunction of Protestantism, patriotism, and liberty that fueled the falsehoods of English history, and once again it emanated from Bryant. Reviewing the second volume of Bryant’s biography of Samuel Pepys that was published in the autumn of 1935, Chesterton praised Bryant’s defense of Pepys’s royal master, James II, as the force behind the naval reforms that enabled Britannia to rule the waves. This was the same prince, Chesterton maintained, who “was driven across the same waves into exile, simply and solely because he was a Roman Catholic.” Pepys’s awkward connections with James II (from the Whig point of view), and his persecution both by parliamentarians and mobs as a result, meant that his patriotism had to be excised

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from the historical record, his fame being associated merely with salacious diary-keeping. Bryant’s study reversing this trend prompted Chesterton to reflect on further aspects of English “secrecy”—not, on this occasion, the “secrecy” of a people who had been silenced by a succession of masters, but the driving of whole areas of their history behind “screens and scenery, half symbolic and half secretive, to protect a hidden thought.”68 The full realization of the debt that was owed to Pepys’s sponsor would throw into doubt a carefully constructed identity that concealed as much as it revealed about the English and their past. Here was more solid proof for Chesterton that Roman Catholics were not beyond the reach of English nationhood but had been some of its finest patriots. Bryant was not a Catholic and so the new perspective on Pepys would have raised Chesterton’s spirits all the more.69 He perceived Bryant as helping to turn the tide of opinion on the Stuarts, or rather, giving public expression to a bond between the English people and their lost royal house that generations of Whig history had never entirely erased. Further evidence of this was an exhibition to be held in London on “The Age of Charles II” in the year following the publication of Bryant’s study of Charles.70 However, aside from the movement toward what he thought was rightful recognition of the Stuarts’ place in English public affections, and deservedly so, Chesterton embraced the new wave of pro-Stuart publicity for another reason: its discrediting of the method as much as the myth of Whig history, and its implications for understanding the past. The possibility of rejecting the Whig method in history while retaining the Whig myth of an ordered liberty in English politics, as Butterfield did in 1944, would have baffled Chesterton.71 Reviewing a batch of favorable books on the Stuarts in 1935 for a BBC broadcast, Chesterton condemned the belief in historical necessity that was central not only to the authority of Whig history, but to the Whigs as well. It was prompted by a new book on Prince Rupert, German nephew of Charles I, whose main concern, the book contended, was to restore discipline within the Cavalier army. However, Macaulay portrayed Rupert in the poem “Naseby” as being somehow “fated” to fall rather than conquer, in line with the Stuarts in Whig history more widely. Chesterton ended his broadcast with a call to surrender once and for all this “one great Victorian prejudice”: It is the prejudice that the winning side always must have won, and ought to have won. Every soldier knows that every battle was much more nearly lost. And as for the notion that lost causes were lunatic causes, mad; moonstruck and deluded causes—in God’s name get rid of it altogether. If the winning side had always been the wisest side, the world by this time would be a much nicer place than it is.72

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THE NATIONAL CHARACTER OF CHESTERTON The Catholicism that underlay Chesterton’s anti-Whig view of English history was challenged vigorously by professional historians with their own religious sympathies—for example, C. G. Coulton.73 However, there is some evidence to suggest that in other quarters Chesterton benefited from the development in the interwar period of a common Protestantism across the Anglican and Nonconformist divide as emblematic of “Englishness” rather than “Britishness.” This rejected the militant anti-Catholicism of the previous century.74 For example, the reviewer of his Chaucer in The Methodist Review denounced “stingy criticisms” of Chesterton’s work. Chesterton could well be forgiven for “introducing his religious beliefs at every turn” because there was no moment “when it is irrelevant to begin a discussion of religion.” The reviewer continued: “[W]e who are bemoaning the fact that religion is so often left out, ought to rejoice in one who so strenuously works to get it in.”75 Similarly, the reviewer in a leading Nonconformist newspaper of one of Chesterton’s posthumously published works, the novel, The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond (1937), paid tribute to the world that Chesterton had created. It was one in which “impossible things happen and at any turn that strange insight into the soul which marked Chesterton may be revealed.” The encomium was possible despite the reviewer’s confession of being “sadly in error” from Chesterton’s perspective: a Protestant, a dissenter, a teetotaller, but nevertheless one who was grateful for the common ground he shared with Chesterton in holding faith in “our Lord.”76 Other Methodist writers could quote Chesterton approvingly, among them the travel and children’s writer, Arthur Mee. In the introductory volume of his county guide to England, he wrote: “We have found that Mr Chesterton was right when he said that our English village is a miraculous relic, like the relic of a saint.”77 These tributes to Chesterton emphasize a unifying patriotism defined by England’s “Christian” (not merely Protestant) tradition in the 1930s, and in the face of secularism as well as political extremism. It was a tendency that he himself had enhanced since his A Short History of England and earlier; also through writings designed to bind Roman Catholics more tightly to the nation in the interwar period and, in turn, to gain credit where credit was due for the “national” contribution of their religion.78 But the way in which his Englishness—and that of his admirers— often trumped sectarian religious allegiance, especially when focused on place, is nowhere better expressed than in the support he lent to a conservationist project in 1931. This was to protect Jordans Meeting House—an icon of the Quaker movement near his home in Beaconsfield—from the intrusion of road traffic, in the event of a local road-widening scheme going ahead. Responding to the head of the “Penn Country” branch of the

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Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England (Buckinghamshire), he wrote: I am most warmly in favour of the effort . . . which aims at preserving Jordans and its setting from the operation of this dull mania for driving ugly roads through places, and past places, to the disadvantage of those who still possess the intelligence to go to places . . . It is a shrine of pilgrimage . . . not of my religion, but it is one of enormous significance in the history of my country. What many people will not understand is that what should remain sacred in such a place is the place; the approach, the surroundings, the background; not detached and dead objects that might be put in a museum.79

Certainly, it was more Chesterton’s anti-Semitism than his Catholicism that marked him out as problematic from an “English” perspective at the time of his death. This is clear from the review of his recently published autobiography in The Times Literary Supplement by David Murray. Murray was a staff writer for The Times, but he was soon to become editor of The Times Literary Supplement. To put the review into perspective, we should first note that Murray had reviewed very favorably Chesterton’s Cobbett a decade earlier. He had especially applauded the moving account that Chesterton gave of Cobbett’s sense of loss in contemplating the old religious traditions of the rural parish churches destroyed by the Reformation and industrialization. Cobbett’s “keen sightedness” in this respect was rightly praised by Chesterton in Murray’s view, containing as those traditions did, “some of the grandest pages in the history of this island.”80 Murray also endorsed the hatred Chesterton shared with Cobbett of widespread contempt for the suffering of the people under the new industrial regime. He was thus fully receptive to the popular focus of Chesterton’s Englishness. However, while sensitive in treating the nuances of Chesterton’s philosophy and persona expressed in the Autobiography, Murray baulked at some of the things that Chesterton had railed against during his life. He noted something “alien” in this, one of the author’s “most English books,” and that which was “puzzling to understand.” It turned on the difference, Murray explained, between the early chapter in which Chesterton recounted his brawl outside an Imperialist meeting at the time of the Boer War, and the later chapter, “The Case Against Corruption.” His earlier pugnaciousness was all of a piece with English Radicalism; but the acrimonious style of his later work was the attempt, “sometimes comic and sometimes lamentable,” to re-interpret English public life in the terms of the sordid crook-drama which the French yellow press makes French public life out to be, and [import] into

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this country . . . such thoroughly undesirable aliens as Anti-Semitism. It is clean contrary to his own philosophy, which should not sneer at any of the racial diversities of creatures, and should be willing to find virtue in politicians as in grocers—or, since Chesterton was not much enamoured of grocers either, let us say publicans.

Murray was charitable enough to consider Chesterton’s Francophilia, “with its occasional disagreeable consequences,” simply a byproduct of that most English trait to which Chesterton himself gave voice—the pursuit of hobbies, including making a “hobby” of some chosen foreign culture.81 However, the above quotation suggests strongly that in his antiSemitism, Chesterton betrayed both his country and himself, and became the model of the “inauthenticity” he so despised. It is certainly ironic that Chesterton was condemned for aping French ideals (of journalism) that were wholly inappropriate to England, precisely the charge that he had leveled against the English realists during the dispute over literary censorship in 1909.82

NOTES 1. ILN, 13 April 1931, 238. On the anti-Victorian reaction in the twentieth century—and Chesterton’s role with Arthur Quiller-Couch and George Saintsbury in resisting its first wave—see The Victorians since 1901: Histories, Representations and Revisions, ed. Miles Taylor and Michael Wolff (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 4. 2. ILN, 18 February 1933, 218; 12 May 1934, 718. 3. ILN, 17 November 1934, 784; 27 January 1934, 114. 4. ILN, 11 March 1933, 328. 5. ILN, 17 January 1925, 80. 6. ILN, 21 June 1922, 930. 7. ILN, 22 December 1928, 1171; Henry L. Mencken, Notes On Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926). 8. Alan Sykes, The Radical Right in Britain: Social Imperialism to the BNP (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005), 76–77. 9. ILN, 17 July 1926, 100. 10. ILN, 25 May 1929, 890. Dan Stone has rightly pointed to the continuities between discourses of the nation, patriotism, and elitism in British politics before 1914 and pro-Fascist ideas and groups in the interwar period; Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939: Before War and Holocaust (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 114, 186. However, as the example of Chesterton shows, Edwardian patriotism and resistance to aristocratic ideals were also resources for countering Fascism. 11. Frank Swinnerton, The Georgian Literary Scene (1938), quoted in G.K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgements, ed. Denis J. Conlon (Antwerp: University of Antwerp Press, 1976), 26. John Coates distinguishes between the roots of modernism in the

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“evolutionary myth” that attained cultural prominence between 1870 and 1890 and modernist experimentalism in artistic technique after 1910. Chesterton maintained a lifelong assault on the former as far more pernicious than the latter. This explains his distance from second-generation modernists such as T. S. Eliot; “Chesterton and the Modernist Cultural Context,” CR XV, nos. 1 and 2 (February–May, 1989): 67, 69, 55–56. 12. Although Brocard Sewell, who worked in the office of G. K.’s Weekly as a young man, rightly emphasizes some of the strengths of the paper not least, Chesterton’s own contributions on books and contemporaries; “Chesterton and G.K.’s Weekly,” CR XVI, nos. 3 and 4 (August–November, 1990): 209. 13. Herbert A. L. Fisher, “Patriotism,” The Speaker, 4 November 1899, 114. 14. Herbert A. L. Fisher, The Common Weal (Oxford, 1924), 98, 114. This book was based on the Stevenson Lectures that Fisher delivered at Glasgow in the previous year. For the wider context of the lectures in the discount that patriotism suffered after the First World War, see Julia Stapleton, “Citizenship versus Patriotism in Twentieth-Century England,” The Historical Journal 48, no. 1 (March 2005): 163–69. 15. ILN, 7 December 1918, 740. 16. Frank Trentmann, “After the Nation-State: Citizenship, Empire, and Global Co-Ordination in the New Internationalism, 1914–1930,” in Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950, eds. Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentmann (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 34–53; see also Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ch. 5. 17. ILN, 7 December 1918, 740. 18. ILN, 13 July 1918, 36. 19. ILN, 7 December 1918, 740 (my italics). 20. ILN, 7 December 1918, 740. 21. Autobiography (1936), in CW XVI (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 306–7. 22. Stanislawa Swietorzecka to Chesterton, 26 May 1927, BL Add MS 73240 folio 95. The letter, in broken English, hailed Chesterton on behalf of Polish women for his 1901 essay on “Patriotism” in The Defendant (London: Dent, 1901), 165–71. 23. ILN, 18 January 1919, 66. 24. ILN, 5 April 1919, 472. 25. ILN, 1 July 1933, 2. 26. ILN, 10 February 1934, 186. 27. ILN, 8 July 1933, 38; for Chesterton and Yugoslavia, see chapter 7, 162. ˇ 28. B. R. Bradbrook, “Chesterton and Karel Capek: A Study in Personal and Literary Relationship,” CR IV, nos. 3 and 4 (Fall–Winter, 1977): 95–96. 29. ILN, 8 July 1933, 38. 30. ILN, 11 April 1928, 244. 31. “England in 1919,” Pear’s Christmas Annual, 1919, reprinted in CR XIV, nos. 3 and 4 (November 1988): 519–29, at 526, 528–29. 32. “G.K. Chesterton at Mark 1,” report of a lecture on “The Contrast between the Idealism of the War and the Present State of Things” (August 1923), CR XIX, no. 1 (February 1993): 10–15, at 12. For his version of the “moral equivalence” be-

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tween Germany and England, see chapter 8, 169; for that of his opponents, particularly Shaw and Hobson, see chapter 7, 158–59, 162. 33. ILN, 4 May 1935, 730. 34. Rudyard Kipling, “The Native-Born,” The Seven Seas (London: Methuen, 1896), 53. 35. “The Religious Aspect of Westminster Abbey” (undated), in The Spice of Life (Beaconsfield: Darwen Finlayson, 1964), 111. 36. “Explaining the English” (The British Council, 1935), in CW XX (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), 623–24. 37. “The Case for the Englishman,” NW, 20 May 1921, 310–11. 38. “Explaining the English,” 626. 39. Chesterton made this observation in a suggestive essay on Carthew, the hero of R. L. Stevenson’s posthumously published novel, The Wrecker (1904; London: Heinemann, 1924). The English gentleman, par excellence, Carthew was an art student in Paris whose cosmopolitan tastes prompted Chesterton to remark: “There is a sense in which the Englishman, blamed for being insular, has been far too international”; ILN, 7 November 1931, 716. 40. Chaucer: A Study (1932), in CW XVIII (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 302. 41. Ibid., 309–10. 42. Ibid., 305–7. 43. Ibid., 300–301. 44. See chapter 1, 21. 45. Ivor Brown, “Bobbe-Up-And-Down: Have With You to Canterbury,” The Observer, 10 April 1932, 4. 46. Chaucer, 300. 47. Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (London: Yale University Press, 2006), 167–68. 48. ILN, 30 July 1932, 154; 22 March 1919, 398. 49. ILN, 30 July 1932, 154. 50. ILN, 3 February 1923, 154. 51. Chesterton may have had in mind George D. H. Cole’s William Cobbett (London: Collins, 1925), which provided the basis of his ILN column, 4 July 1925, 4. While he praised Cole’s perceptiveness as a biographer, he regretted Cole’s failure to consider Cobbett other than as a “topical” pamphleteer whose social criticism was rooted in the present rather than the past. By contrast, Chesterton wrote, “Cobbett was in some sense not a revival but a survival out of simpler times—the last of the yeoman.” 52. Signed editorial, “Patriotism,” GKW XXI, no. 529, 2 May 1935, 114–15. 53. See Philip Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), ch. 9. Chesterton acknowledged the strength and value of Baldwin’s patriotism and his rare honesty as a politician in ILN, 29 December 1934, 1078. This was despite his criticism in G. K.’s Weekly of Baldwin’s blinkered view of England as one of the last refuges of freedom in the world set out in a recent speech. It was a freedom that, Chesterton alleged, Baldwin had been instrumental in eroding through his membership of the

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national government; unsigned editorial, “Our Freedom,” GKW XX, no. 508, 6 December 1934, 217–18. 54. Mandler, The English National Character, 164. 55. “Mafficking for Peace,” GKW XIX, no. 505, 15 November 1934, 176–77. 56. “Pacifism on a Postcard,” GKW XIX, no. 502, 25 October 1934, 128–29; “Paralytics and Pacifists,” GKW XVI, no. 415, 23 February 1933, 395–96. Chesterton broached the “king and country” debate in The Illustrated London News in the context of the first line of Belloc’s poem “Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine” (“To exalt, enthrone, establish and defend”); 19 August 1933, 270. 57. Desmond McCarthy, “G.K. Chesterton: I Wonder Not at Wondering,” The Sunday Times, 17 September 1933, 5; and Chesterton’s response, “The Happiness of War: Mr. Chesterton and Mr. McCarthy,” The Sunday Times, 24 September 1933, 6. 58. Orthodoxy (1908), in CW I (1986), 250–51. 59. “History Versus Historians,” DN, 25 July 1908, in Lunacy and Letters, ed. Dorothy Collins (London: Sheed & Ward, 1958), 128–29. On the professionalization of history that forms the background of Chesterton’s comments here, see Michael Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 60. ILN, 25 November 1922, 836; for the influence of Chesterton on Butterfield’s conception of the contingency of history, see C. Thomas McIntire, Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 29. 61. ILN, 23 July 1932, 111. 62. ILN, 20 July 1933, 162; the Tennyson quotation was from “Locksley Hall” (1853). 63. ILN, 4 June 1921, 738. 64. ILN, 5 July 1924, 6. 65. ILN, 14 February 1931, 236. There is now a revisionist view of James II as a sincere advocate of religious toleration; John Callow, King in Exile: James II— Warrior, King, and Saint (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2004). 66. Matthew Grimley, “The Religion of Englishness: Puritanism, Providentialism, and ‘National Character’, 1918–1945,” Journal of British Studies 46, no. 4 (October 2007): 896–99. See also Chesterton’s defense of Belloc’s “preCarlylean” view of Cromwell against a friend and distinguished man of letters who had confessed himself “shocked” by such disavowal of Carlyle; ILN, 18 November 1933, 794. 67. ILN, 21 November 1931, 800, reprinted as “The Merry Monarch,” in All I Survey (London: Methuen, 1933); Arthur Bryant, Charles II (London: Longmans, 1931). 68. “And so to Bed,” GKW XXII, no. 567, 23 January 1936, 284–85. 69. For the favorable reception of Bryant’s Pepys trilogy, see Julia Stapleton, Sir Arthur Bryant and National History in Twentieth-Century Britain (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005), 88. 70. ILN, 28 November 1931, 865. 71. See MacIntyre’s exploration of Butterfield’s Whig politics as expressed in The Englishman and His History (1944); Herbert Butterfield, Ch. 5. 72. “The Stuarts,” The Listener, 9 January 1935, 82.

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73. See the controversy with Coulton—and others—engendered by Chesterton’s radio talk in 1935, “The Liberty that Matters.” The talk was published in The Listener, 19 June 1935, 1029–30, 1063. The correspondence ran until December 1935. 74. See Grimley, “The Religion of Englishness,” 888, 891. 75. A. E. Witham, “Bringing Religion In,” The Methodist Recorder, 9 June 1932, 11. 76. Edward Shillito, “Farewell to G.K.C.,” The New Chronicle of Christian Education, 22 April 1937, 245. 77. Arthur Mee, Enchanted Land: Half-a-Million Miles in the King’s England (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1936), 11. 78. See his chapters on “Alfred the Great” and “Sir Thomas More” in The English Way: Studies in English Sanctity from St. Bede to Newman, ed. Maisie Ward (London: Sheed & Ward, 1933), 56–64, 209–17. See also his expression of nostalgia for the Book of Common Prayer in the aftermath of the controversy over the New Prayer Book in 1927–1928; it was written by Catholic apostates, he maintained, and, as such, provided the underpinning of an England “which largely imagined that it possessed and controlled a Church.” By contrast, the “journalese” of the New Prayer Book painfully underlined the Church of England’s less-thannational status; The Well and the Shallows (1935), in CW III (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 372–76. 79. Chesterton to Mr. G. Langley Taylor, 15 July 1931, BL Add MS 73240, folios 98–99. 80. Anon. [David L. Murray], “Mr. Chesterton’s Cobbett,” TLS, 1925, 844. 81. Anon. [David L. Murray], “G.K. Chesterton: Child and Man,” TLS, 7 November 1936, 893–94, at 894. 82. See chapter 6, 136–37.

Conclusion

C

hesterton died three years before the outbreak of the Second World War. The latter served to refocus English patriotism on Christian values, not least through drawing on a resurgent conservatism in Britain during the interwar period. For Conservative thinkers and politicians the nation’s destiny was to provide a vehicle for the workings of divine providence in delivering the world from unprecedented evil; patriotism reinforced by Christianity was the faith that would brace the English people for the trials that lay ahead.1 However, others beyond conservatism also played a role in buttressing the Christian patriotism that helped mobilize Britain for war. Chesterton is a case in point. While he was an ardent propagandist for Roman Catholicism after his conversion in 1922, he continued to address broader issues of Christianity, English national identity, and loyalty to country right up to his death. As we have seen, this was through contributions to newspapers and periodicals with a wide audience and collections of his essays and stories that remained in circulation beyond his death. Had he lived, it can be safely assumed that he would have welcomed Churchill’s wartime leadership, a fellow erstwhile Liberal who had put nation before party not once but twice in the course of his political career. More than that, he would have embraced Churchill as comrade-in-arms among a select group of “obsessed individuals” during the interwar years. These kept up the Edwardian pressure for a nation of patriots against the high tide of pacifist and internationalist opinion.2 While Churchill’s membership of this group has been recognized by historians, Chesterton’s has not.

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Wartime Britain would have been the fulfillment of some, at least, of Chesterton’s hopes for English patriotism: ardent, democratic, and spiritual, unsullied by materialist interests centered on power. Moreover, England was never entirely overshadowed by “Britain,” “the British people,” and the Commonwealth, despite the best efforts of officialdom: populist commentators on both the left and right—J. B. Priestley, George Orwell, and Arthur Bryant, for example—saw to that.3 Chesterton would also have identified with the notion of a heroic national character that drove the war effort; this was something he had articulated after the First World War and on the basis of an acceptance of the English as having followed an “exceptional” path of nationhood marked by absence of revolution. Most of all, he would have rejoiced in the absence of racial categories from wartime ideals of Englishness and Britishness, together with near-universal commitment to Germany’s defeat. But after the Second World War, Chesterton’s championing of patriotism, the English “soul,” and nationhood more widely fell on stony ground. The war on the home front culminated in a massive extension to the edifice of the British welfare state. In the words of the sociologist, T. H. Marshall, who best articulated the raison d’être of social welfare post–Second World War style, citizenship was now predicated on a common level of material enjoyment and the rights and responsibilities it enshrined. Gone was the “patriotic nationalism” that had underpinned the expansion of the ideal of citizenship in its nineteenthcentury guise of political reform and that was at the root of Chesterton’s ideas.4 To a large extent, Chesterton’s stature declined as a result of increasing uncertainty regarding collective identity in post-war Britain. The language of “national character” had been the predominant means of English self-understanding across two centuries, nowhere more so than in Chesterton’s writings. But it now gave way to the outwardly more sophisticated insights into the formation of individual personality offered by social psychology.5 While British national character was still celebrated, it was by virtue of the psychological health it afforded its citizens courtesy of the democratic institutions with which it was intertwined. In turn, this perspective was increasingly undermined by alternative psychological ideals of the “permissive” society from the 1960s and 1970s onward.6 Yet both developments ensured that exponents of a homogeneous, “eternal,” let alone “providential” English nation, whether integrated with, or standing apart from, the “official” nation, found little favor. Chesterton’s young friend from the 1930s and his successor at The Illustrated London News, Arthur Bryant, strove to sustain public interest in English history, patriotic style, with the nation as its own reflexive subject. One edge he was said to possess over his predecessors, Carlyle and

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Chesterton, was that while he lacked their “brilliancies,” he was free of their “falsifications.”7 Even so, he was fighting a losing battle.8 The observance of the centenary of Chesterton’s birth in 1974 benefited from the efforts of Dorothy Collins in keeping Chesterton’s memory alive for several decades after his death. A few other well-placed devotees in the press, for example, Richard Ingrams and Douglas Woodruff, also ensured that the Chesterton centenary was not overlooked.9 This was in contrast with H. G. Wells’s centenary eight years earlier, which could certainly boast no month-long exhibition in London visited by large numbers of people.10 But commentators without any Chesterton connection were bemused by the attention he had attracted in his own day. At best, prompted by a volume of centenary essays that never quite managed to take Chesterton’s full measure as a writer and thinker, The Times Literary Supplement accepted Chesterton at his own, typically modest evaluation—a mere journalist, although one who was not without “certain fugitive mental gifts.” Chief among these was the skill of compression, making him essentially a “miniaturist.” In his essays and stories, “there can be no conclusion because there is no real progress: each sentence is its own justification.”11 However, the reviewer did not do justice to the wider roots of Chesterton’s epigrammatic style in a concern for delimitation at the most local of levels. As seen earlier, this had crystallized in reaction to evolutionary rationalism on the one hand, and Imperialist patriotism on the other. Even the popular niche journal of English nationhood, This England, made no mention of Chesterton’s steadfast English patriotism as a cause that was central to his literary and political heart, nor his associated defense of European Christendom against a multitude of new “pagan” threats. Indeed, an otherwise perceptive article on the occasion of the Chesterton centenary drew a somewhat bizarre conclusion: “He was spared the final agony of seeing the country thrown into a war that would be fought for reasons and objectives that he did not share.”12 Other popular magazines also underplayed Chesterton’s identity with England and his English sensibilities as the cornerstone of his thought.13 What of more recent times? How would Chesterton’s patriotism and Englishness bear up today? This book has shown that his projection of the English nation, his wider patriotic ideal, and his Christianity were an indissoluble whole born of his struggle against the Decadence of his youth. Against the awesome Imperialist agenda set for the English people by Kipling and others, Chesterton stressed the innate humility of his fellow countrymen, yet at the same time their depth of spirit. The Christian resonances of his early thought interacted with his strong, inherited sense of Englishness to ensure his emancipation from the stifling atmosphere of the Decadence. His resultant “creed” would hardly commend itself to

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many partisans of England today.14 While he was in the forefront of a movement that saw the flowering of English national consciousness in the early years of the twentieth century, he never envisaged an autonomous English nation existing outside the Christian cosmos, or even outside of the United Kingdom. Moreover, Chesterton’s fervent defense of the English people as “the secret people” was targeted primarily against the plutocracy that he believed now governed England through the “party system.” This was rapidly eroding what remained of English nationhood after the success of the Reformation—as he saw it—in weakening national bonds by heightening class divisions. The process worked itself out fully in the centuries that followed through political corruption and imperial aggrandizement. A glimmer of light appeared in the nineteenth century as the rivalry between Gladstone and Disraeli to secure maximum personal liberty for the English people gave parliamentary democracy a strong populist and patriotic foundation.15 In Chesterton’s view, this marked the zenith of representative institutions in England, followed by steep decline. In the absence of any change in the conduct of British politics, it is doubtful that Chesterton would have wanted an English parliament as well as, or even instead of, a Westminster parliament for fear that it, too, would only encroach on popular liberty. It is equally doubtful that Chesterton would have been sympathetic to a recent attempt to relocate Englishness in pre-Reformation Catholicism. Not least, he would have resisted the associated concern to absorb England more completely in the European Union. This perspective on contemporary Englishness is fueled by rejection of “the great myth” of England’s separateness from Europe since the Reformation.16 While Chesterton also rejected “the great myth,” he emphasized its grounding not just in repudiation of European Catholicism but in a denial of the English Reformation’s heavy debt to European Protestantism. The influence of Luther on early English Protestantism—particularly its sense of individual powerlessness, the importance of submission to the law, and its intolerance of religious difference—sealed a different, if largely unacknowledged, European destiny for England than the one Chesterton would have liked.17 This was the basis of the Puritanism he loathed, particularly when taken to Calvinist extremes at the time of the English Commonwealth.18 His conception of democracy and nationhood as two sides of the same coin minted in Latin Christendom is considerably at odds with the heavily centralized “European project” today. The outwardly Liberal face of the European Union, expressed, for example, in the doctrine of “subsidiarity” following the Maastricht Treaty, belies its dirigiste subversion of Liberal values, rights, and freedoms centered on the individual and, as a corollary, popular sovereignty.19

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Chesterton would certainly have disdained the “European” vision of England in contemporary English Radicalism. This vision is linked to a thoroughgoing critique of Englishness in the past and present as masking the hegemonic identities of Britain and the British Empire. The “real” England exists only in the future, as a satellite nation of the European Union.20 Supporters of this view are confident that here England—along with its British partners—will flourish among “broader and looser . . . political institutions” than those of the United Kingdom.21 In “shared sovereignty” with Europe lies the realization of the dream of English Radicalism spelled out by Milton, Blake, and Paine: “true” democratic citizenship in a polity that is universally “owned.”22 The problematic nature of “shared sovereignty” aside, Chesterton’s distance from latter-day “progressives” seeking to “speak in the name of England” is best appreciated by noting the mythology on which his own Radicalism was based. This turned on an implicit distinction in his thought between the “authentic” England of the past, however much obscured by the interests of successive (British) elites, and the increasingly “false” England of the present. It was the difference, in his eyes, between the pays réel and the pays legal. In this Chesterton was more a rebel in the tradition of Tory Radicalism after the fashion of William Cobbett (and Dr. Johnson) than a Radical in the Liberal tradition. Cobbett’s influence on nineteenth-century political thought was negligible compared not only with Paine but also with Samuel Coleridge, apostle of the organic state as focus of the nation. Chesterton’s sympathy with Liberal Radicalism—no less than the Liberal Anglicanism that Coleridge helped to shape—was limited. Although both he and Cobbett identified serious flaws in the existing organization of the state, neither placed much faith in the capacity of the republican tradition to address them. Chesterton’s disillusion with Liberalism and republicanism for the mantle of plutocracy and secrecy they assumed after 1870 was such that he regarded (Italian) Fascism as their nemesis.23 While he readily embraced the ideal of the “citizensoldier” in keeping with the republican face of much mid-Victorian Liberalism, he rejected the framework of laws—touching upon education and temperance—in which the accompanying notion of civic virtue was increasingly forged.24 Not least, Liberal Radicalism could entail a supercilious attitude toward popular patriotism. Cobbett encountered this during his first exile in America in the 1790s among other English exiles, notably the leading Radical thinker Joseph Priestley. It was something of which Chesterton made much in his biography of Cobbett published after the First World War.25 Nor was he attracted to the fusion of culture and reason in the ethical state that Liberal Anglicans such as Thomas Arnold and F. D. Maurice developed against utilitarianism and political economy on the back of Coleridge’s philosophy.26

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The truth was that there was a strong anti-political vein in Chesterton’s political thought, going beyond his invective against parliamentary democracy. This is evident in his remarks on Hall Caine and George Wyndham.27 He appreciated that the English nation was only tangentially linked to the British constitution; as the historian Robert Colls has remarked, the constitutional existence of the people of England was always sotto voce, enjoying greater and lesser degrees of representation in different historical periods but never democratic rights.28 But, as Chesterton intimated in “The Secret People,” the English people could well be a means of conveying “God’s scorn for all men governing,” and a reflection of God’s sense—a half-comic, half-serious speculation—that maybe “beer is best.” The Distributism he upheld was another manifestation of the “sublimation of politics” that Sheldon Wolin has found in Western political thought since the advent of Liberalism—the loss of the sense that “the general life of society [is] best expressed through political forms.”29 Chesterton would also have rejected the virtue that was made of austerity in the tradition of civic republicanism that stood at the root of nineteenth-century Radicalism. This he would have regarded as an unwelcome echo of the Puritan legacy, informed by what he called the “genius” of Milton. Chesterton particularly disdained the role of Puritanism in sustaining the destruction of “Merry England,” with its rich texture of communal rights and liberties, begun at the Reformation. The centuries in which guilds and localities flourished were central to his myth of a pure England prior to its corruption in “the Great Pillage.”30 For eighteenthcentury thought in general his enthusiasm was guarded. While he appreciated the humanitarianism in the work of artists such as William Blake, in his view this was independent of the high store that eighteenth-century thinkers set by “the community,” after the fashion of pagan Rome. Chesterton believed that even the humanitarianism was marred by an “oligarchic” mysticism resonant of the secret sects that flourished at the time, and to which Blake himself was drawn through the figure of Cagliostro. This mysticism detracted from the idealist vein in Blake’s republicanism, dragging it down to the level of the “sceptical” republicanism of Voltaire.31 By contrast, Samuel Johnson was blessed with a quality that “many Republican philosophers lacked: he thought as a worker, he thought as a poor man.”32 Thus Chesterton would have agreed with English Radicals today on the need to free Englishness from its British and imperial trappings. But it is likely that he would have contemplated the submergence of England in another and more alien “group of nations” than that of Britain33—the European Union—with dismay. Just as the English have always been reluctant to lose themselves entirely in Britain—as Chesterton himself well illustrates—and even more so the British Empire,34 there is no evidence of

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their willingness to lose themselves in Europe. They have certainly been less enthusiastic about Europe than other nations within the United Kingdom in recent years.35 But for all Chesterton’s disconnection from the more prominent forms of English Radicalism, both old and new, his thoughts on patriotism and nationhood still merit attention. This is particularly in the light of recent affirmations of the importance of national forms of citizenship in Western societies against attempts to develop “multiple and differentiated” alternatives—for example, those based on ties of ecology, gender, culture, technology, and the workplace.36 Such alternatives cut across nations and challenge what is perceived as their inherently arbitrary, parochial, and exclusive nature. This dispute concerning the ethics of nationalism is reminiscent of Chesterton’s war against the cosmopolitanism of H. G. Wells on the one hand and the chauvinism of the Beaverbrook press in the 1930s, on the other. However, in recent years, the manipulation of popular patriotism by plutocratic elites such as those who owned the “yellow press” in Chesterton’s time has been superseded by the imperatives of internationalism and “globalization.” Indeed, the media tycoons of today have more interest in promoting the latter than an ersatz jingoism.37 In this they join forces with progressive opinion, which continues to oppose the kind of patriotism that Chesterton defended—ancestral, spiritual, and non-official—as steeped in reaction.38 The simplification of his often-complex views, not least of the English people, is now being challenged.39 The idea that English national identity and patriotism should become instruments of cosmopolitanism, European integration, and “modernization” suggests a misreading of Englishness as hitherto opposed to these ends; it also implies a distrust of the popular element in contemporary English nationalism for failing to endorse the “correct” interpretation of them.40 As has been seen, far from being “anti-modern,” Chesterton was in the forefront of the movement of his contemporaries to identify the locus of modern society and celebrate its advent. Not least, he welcomed the opportunities created by mass circulation newspapers and periodicals to extend the boundaries of political, religious, and literary discussion. Even when he became disillusioned with the capitalist ownership and control of the press on the eve of the First World War, he continued to prize journalism highly. This was as a means of broadening the basis of cultural and social criticism away from elites.41 At the same time Chesterton attacked the anti-democratic forces that threatened modernity, many masquerading in the guise of “the modern” in the war against custom and convention. Here he identified modernity with “a very cultured and very cynical world.”42 This provided the focus of his novel The Man Who Was Thursday, targeting philosophical rather

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than merely political anarchism as the quintessence of modernity.43 As such, modernity was in his eyes nothing new; on the contrary, it was part of a recurrent historical trend, one that had always brought forth a religious reaction. This explained the rise of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Puritanism, and the (true) Rationalism of the present with which he was associated against the latest (“modernist”) superstition.44 But in embracing modernity in a wider, more positive sense—not least through challenging those who laid exclusive claim to its mantle—Chesterton was part of a “modern movement” in literature, outstretching the limited area that has come to be recognized as modernism proper. As Chris Baldick has argued, modernism as an experimental technique in literature and poetry has monopolized interest in Edwardian culture and its aftermath for several decades. This has been to the detriment of many stimulating writers beyond Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson, and others, Chesterton included.45 Chesterton’s contemporaries had no difficulty in recognizing him as a “modern” writer. For one commentator his “eclectic” spirit meant that he was simply a different kind of modern writer, one who brought the old literature in the form of Chaucer, Browning, and Dickens into contact with the new.46 By extension, his medievalism can be regarded as a form of consciousness that influenced a new understanding of twentiethcentury society and the narrowness of its late Victorian inheritance. Nor was his cult of Romanticism opposed to the “realism” that was central to both modernism and the modern movement more widely. Indeed, it was never intended to be other than ultra-realistic, an exaggeration of the ideals at the heart of reality which he so admired in Dickens’s novels. This was against the tendency of the fin de siècle toward understatement in art and literature as a result of its confusion about what was worthy of exaggeration. The result was a diminished humanity in the drawings of men and women by Aubrey Beardsley and in the paintings of historical figures such as Perseus by Edward BurneJones.47 In this the fin de siècle merely took to its logical conclusion a wider nineteenth-century belief in the universe as a “fixed and godless fate.”48 Accordingly, Chesterton rejected Romanticism as the “sodden subjective delusion” that places the self and its passing feelings at the center of the universe. Romance was instead the belief that the simplified and symbolic version of life, which depicts it, under the image of love and war, as a quest with a prize (especially a princess) is nevertheless a true version of life; that is an enlightening symbol and a legitimate simplification. St. George must kill the Dragon, or the Dragon must kill the princess; that seems to me a truer picture of the aim of life and the lot of man than any realistic novel.49

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Chesterton’s Romanticism was the source of his enchantment with the mundane. He believed that it was in the convergence of the familiar with the unfamiliar that true romance and hence the essence of life itself could be found.50 For some commentators, the wonder that he found in ordinary things can become as cloying as his literary style.51 Certainly, against the fastidiousness he attacked in Matthew Arnold can be pitted his own, no less intemperate cult of the diurnal.52 But Chesterton maintained that literary criticism, Arnold-style, missed much of the humanity of which it was in search. Arnold erred in insisting upon the need for humility as a discipline against the excessive national pride of his fellow countrymen, but in the realm of intellect only. He was blind to the importance of humility as a moral virtue as practiced by the “more beautiful souls of the simpler ages” in pursuit of the “old ecstasies of self-effacement.” For Chesterton, this reflected a larger want of popular sympathy in Arnold, leaving a “hovering doubt as to whether he did like mankind” after all. Arnold may have been a republican, but—like Shaw—he was no democrat.53 If resisting high culture led to defects of an opposite kind in Chesterton’s work, it was nevertheless the basis of his strength as a political and social critic.54 Underlying Chesterton’s response to Arnold was a conception of the abiding spiritual strength of England. This was the “popular half-truth” that remained beyond Arnold’s “unpopular half-truth”: that the English were not so much characterized by greatness as mediocrity in the middle of Victoria’s reign. For Chesterton, no less than Arnold, nations were sustained by an inner life; as such, they were more than simply outward material facts. But the two aspects were often confused, not least in an Arnoldian spirit of correction. In the case of England, the “inward” nation was more solid and enduring than the aspect it currently presented to the world, a mixture of Puritanism and Imperialism not noted for its sensitivity. The transience of this aspect of the nation was already marked, even at the outset of Chesterton’s career. This conception of the two sides of nationhood was related to Chesterton’s sense of a wider failing among modern writers and thinkers. With the single exception of (the later) Maeterlinck, they set greater store by the outer limits of life than its inner core: the amoeba against humans, the empire against England, sex against love. For Chesterton, these inner essences were more “real” than anything that could be found in modern realism, fueling the poetic and religious imagination that far surpassed materialist explanations of the world in their capacity to yield “truth.” What Chesterton termed the “remotism”55 of modern thought mirrored the heightened sense of individuality—to the point of “freakishness”—in portrait painting after G. F. Watts. As a typical early Victorian, Watts had captured the “common humanity” of his subjects, even at the expense of

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their individual features. He had done so because—like his contemporaries—he combined artistic curiosity in the contemporary world with a sense of wonder, steeped in primordialism.56 Patriotism and Englishness were central to Chesterton’s modernist face. In this he was in the vanguard of what has been termed the “anthropological” turn in modernism between the 1930s and 1960s. This was away from the “metropolitan modernism” of the beginning of the twentieth century reflecting the universalism of the British imperial state, toward a distinctive national culture centered on England as that state contracted. In embracing England thus, anthropological modernism went beyond Arnold’s weaker conception of England as a racially heterogeneous nation that nevertheless rose above provincialism. At the same time, those associated with anthropological modernism sought to reunify art and society, which, following the fin de siècle, high modernism had separated.57 Well before this development gathered momentum, Chesterton set the loyalties and attachments that he believed were engendered by England against attempts to elevate the state at their expense. As such he challenges Andrew Vincent’s view that patriotism amounts simply to raison d’état. Vincent has emphasized the historical ties between patriotism and the self-abnegating bond of Christian love understood as agape, unlike the “rational” basis of Hellenic eros in which the self remains intact. Moreover, he maintains that the duty of self-sacrifice at the heart of patriotism redounds solely to the advantage of the state. By contrast, nationalism is only contingently related to the state and religion because it does not impose such an obligation. However, Vincent maintains that both concepts are flawed by their hegemonic ambitions, despite their basis in the defense of local bonds.58 Against this view, Chesterton’s work shows first that patriotism and nationalism share an appreciation of cultural particularity as embodying humanity rather than the interests of state organizations. If this seems a paradox too far, it was only an aspect of his wider belief that the key to understanding the “limitless felicity” of the world lay in isolating each of its features, such as standing on one leg to appreciate the concept of “leggishness.”59 Indeed, as this book has shown, the wider belief was reinforced by the intensification of Chesterton’s patriotic attachment to England at the time of the Boer War. Second, the Christian dimension of patriotism surpasses a “duty of selfsacrifice” in Chesterton’s thought. He exalted local loyalties in accordance with his Christian belief in a God who was separate from the world, but who had revealed Himself to fallen man as the source of all goodness.60 Through a ripple effect, a high premium came to be placed on sharpness of outline among human actors, both individual and collective. To clarity

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of shape was added intensity of attachment, national societies replicating the corpus mysticum/communion sanctorum idea at the heart of Stoic, Hellenistic, and Roman thought.61 Chesterton maintained that uniquely among the monotheistic religions, Christianity accommodated the local and particular within the universal, affirming the sanctity of the world entailed by the doctrine of the Incarnation through the sanctity of place. Third, Chesterton’s patriotism was free of the “super-nationalist” fallacy of the chosen race, authorized by its own destiny to crush what it perceives as lesser nations. Although he varied the terms he used to counter this idea—sometimes patriotism, sometimes nationalism, depending on which he felt had been least corrupted at the time of writing—he denounced the arrogance at its heart. His alternative conception of the nation was as the focus of a “normal and healthy affection,” what would usually be understood as patriotism, but it was accompanied by nationalist insistence on the right of all nations “to be national.” Both were rooted in the notion of a “fellowship of national saints.” This was the basis of “true” national divisions, precluding narrowness and insularity as well as aggrandizement.62 Chesterton also ruled out universal models of the nation. It is true that he upheld revolution after the manner in which the French nation had been born, although—following Dickens—he seriously underestimated the strength of the class of peasant proprietors before 1789.63 But he came to recognize France’s limitations as nationalist exemplar. In particular, he appreciated that the “self-effacing sociability” of the English—epitomized in Chaucer’s characters—militated against the maintenance of a republic on French and American lines. There was no “romance of the citizen” in England, for good or ill. The most he could hope for was that the English would appreciate the (Whitmanesque) egalitarianism at the heart of this romance, the best of its kind.64 In any case, for Chesterton the obstacle to the culture of citizenship posed by a disposition toward “self-effacing sociability” was the key to an aspect of English liberty that was far from inferior to political liberty: appreciation of the darkness, secrecy, and sanctity that marked individuals off from one another. Again, it was ultimately Christian in inspiration. Absence of obtrusiveness was associated with a characteristic that much impressed foreign commentators on the English in the interwar years—the tendency of “social feelings” to take the form of respect for the individuality of others rather than for “the community.”65 The quality of selfeffacement to which Chesterton was always drawn comes close to the “conversational” ideal that has been invoked in English literature and thought.66 Excluding only the overbearing, it is held to have produced a mass of “conversations” in England-Britain that Crown-in-Parliament once succeeded in focusing.67

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There is increasing awareness that resolution of “the English question” in the face of devolution turns on the need to engage with a plethora of historical discourses concerning England and EnglandBritain.68 In this context Chesterton has a strong claim on the attention of researchers and commentators. Secularization may have eroded much of the religious foundation of his imagined England. The determined attempt to “rebrand” St. George as a “post-Christendom” saint of interest to all the oppressed, regardless of creed and identity, is clear evidence of this trend.69 However, he emphasized that as well as being grounded in Christianity and Christendom, English patriotism had also become a substitute religion after the Reformation, and a substitute for nationalism at the same time. Instinctual rather than rational, democratic rather than elitist, English patriotism in this mold found its touchstone in William Cobbett. Chesterton celebrated the “volcanic amalgam” in Cobbett’s subconscious of “ancient loyalties and popular sympathies.” Its full force was felt after his incarceration in 1810–1812 for criticizing the authorities over the humiliation of English soldiers under a guard of German mercenaries at Ely. Henceforth, saving England from commerce and an outmoded constitution paled into insignificance besides saving England from the English. Cobbett was now, in Chesterton’s words, not less of an English patriot, but perhaps he was in one sense a little less of an Englishman; if being an Englishman means being happy and happy-golucky and comforted by compromises and ready to believe anything printed in The Times.70

The target of Cobbett’s patriotic offensive had now extended beyond the sneers of the English Jacobins against their country earlier on in his life to the political and cultural establishment. The complacency and indifference to national wrongs that could be found there masked a similar contempt. A concern to save England from the English who were perceived as not doing the nation any favors is the key to understanding Chesterton’s own motivation as a patriotic thinker and writer. It may have been sustained by a disposition toward conspiracy theory that was unedifying at times. Yet he illustrates the strength of patriotic feeling that the national idea has aroused in England. Attacked today as a “single closed lineage to be conserved against present challenges,”71 Chesterton’s England was framed in reaction to opposing interpretations of the English nation as infinitely pliant. It was a reaction that was not always unhealthy, and one that would not be out of place today.

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NOTES 1. Philip Williamson, “Christian Conservatives and the Totalitarian Challenge, 1933–40,” English Historical Review CXV, no. 462 (June 2000): 607–42. 2. John H. Grainger, Patriotism: Britain, 1900–1939 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 353. 3. Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 194. A recent attempt to question the unity of national identity in Britain during the Second World War is vitiated by the psychoanalytic categories that inform the research; Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 4. Thomas H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class: And Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 40–41, 47. The “civic” emphasis of this essay has been remarked upon by José Harris in “Nationality, Rights and Virtue: Some Approaches to Citizenship in Great Britain,” in Richard Bellamy, Dario Castiglione, and Emilio Santoro, eds., Lineages of European Citizenship: Rights, Belonging and Participation in Eleven Nation-States (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 81. 5. Mandler, The English National Character, ch. 6. 6. For a nuanced account of these shifts, see Mathew Thomson, Psychological Subjects: Identity, Culture, and Health in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chs. 7 and 8. 7. Guy Ramsey, “Story and Glory of England,” Daily Telegraph, 4 December 1953. 8. On the response to Bryant—and national history—after the Second World War, see Julia Stapleton, Sir Arthur Bryant and National History in Twentieth-Century Britain (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005), ch. 13. 9. Richard Ingrams, “The Mystic Beneath the Sombrero,” The Daily Telegraph Magazine, 24 May 1974, 47, 50, 54; Douglas Woodruff, “A Lifelong Love of Truth,” The Tablet, 18 May 1974, 483–85. 10. As noted by “Justin” in The Universe, 13 December 1974, 11. 11. Anon., [Peter J. Keating],“Fleet Street Line,” TLS, 17 May 1974, 518–19; review of G.K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal, ed. John Sullivan (London: Paul Elek, 1974). 12. Ian Barrass Hill, “G.K. Chesterton, 1874–1974: The Centenary Year of a Literary Giant,” This England (Autumn 1974): 27–30. As Frederick Sheed noted in remarking upon Chesterton’s anticipation of a Second World War well before its outbreak, “his one haunting fear was that England might not be in it”; introduction to Chesterton’s posthumously published volume of essays, The End of the Armistice (1940), in CW V (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 526. 13. John Ennis, “The Man Who Was G.K.C.,” Reader’s Digest, May 1974, 154–62. 14. See Arthur Aughey, The Politics of Englishness (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 195–98. 15. See chapter 5, 107. 16. Edwin Jones, The English Nation: The Great Myth (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998). Jones makes no reference to Chesterton, an indication of the sharp divergence in the political uses to which they put their historiography of England.

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17. See James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Renaissance Opponents (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), ch. 3. 18. A Short History of England (1917), in CW XX (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001), 537–58. 19. For the context of the principle of subsidiarity in a series of papal documents up to the Second Vatican Council and its subsequent distortion in Roman Catholic circles, in keeping with the dirigisme that now informs the European Union, see Denis P. O’Brien, “Subsidiarity and Solidarity,” in Catholic Social Teaching and the Market Economy, ed. Philip Booth (London: the Institute of Economic Affairs, 2007), 233–53. 20. On some central contradictions in Radical patriotism in contemporary England, see Aughey, The Politics of Englishness, 108–9. 21. Stephen Haseler, The English Tribe: Identity, Nation and Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 185. 22. David Marquand, “England and Europe: The two ‘E’s that lie in wait for Brown’s Britishness,” http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/articles/ browns_britishness (1 February 2008); see also his Britain since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008): 67–75. 23. The Resurrection of Rome (1930), in CW XXI (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 419–24. 24. Eugenio F. Biagini, “Neo-Roman Liberalism: ‘Republican’ Values and British Liberalism, ca. 1860–1875,” History of European Ideas 29, no. 1 (2003): 55–72. 25. William Cobbett (1925; London: House of Stratus, 2000), 21–22, 39. 26. On the centrality of Coleridge to nineteenth-century political thought, see H. Stuart Jones, Victorian Political Thought (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 43–52. For Chesterton’s less-than-enthusiastic reception of Coleridge’s philosophy—as distinct from his poetry—see his article marking the centenary of his death, ILN, 4 August, 1934, 166. 27. See chapter 6, 142, and chapter 8, 177. 28. Robert Colls, Identity of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 54. 29. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960, 2004), 386. 30. Short History, in CW XX, 538, 551–52. 31. William Blake (London: Duckworth, 1910, repr. 1920), 114–17, 125, 166–67. 32. “The Radicalism of Dr. Johnson,” DN, 18 September 1909, 6; for Chesterton’s use of Dr. Johnson’s famous phrase about patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel, see “Prussian and Plutocrat,” GKW XXII, no. 551, 3 October 1935, 5–6. 33. ILN, 14 September 1918, 290. 34. Stephen Howe, “Internal Decolonization? British Politics since Thatcher as Post-Colonial Trauma,” Twentieth-Century British History 14, no. 3 (2003): 298–99. 35. Atsuko Ichijo, “The Uses of History: Anglo-British and Scottish Views of Europe,” Regional and Federal Studies 13, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 23–43. 36. Rogers Brubaker, “In the Name of the Nation: Reflections on Nationalism and Patriotism,” Citizenship Studies 8, no. 2 (June 2004): 124; see also Margaret Canovan, “Sleeping Dogs, Prowling Cats and Soaring Doves: Three Paradoxes in the Political Theory of Nationhood,” Political Studies 49, no. 2 (June 2001): 203–15.

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37. According to James Curran and Jean Seaton, “globalizing influences on the British press appear to have weakened local tribal loyalty”; Power without Responsibility: The Press, Broadcasting, and New Media in Britain, sixth ed. (London: Routledge, 2003), 75. 38. Patrick Wright, “Last Orders,” The Guardian Review, 9 April 2005, 4–6; and “Last Orders for the English Aborigine,” Soundings 24 (Spring 2005): 21–34. 39. Anna Vaninskaya, “‘My Mother Drunk or Sober’: G.K. Chesterton and Patriotic Anti-Imperialism,” History of European Ideas (forthcoming). 40. Aughey, The Politics of Englishness, 111–13. 41. In this he contrasts with the reaction against a particular view of modernity advanced by the literary critics of the interwar years who wrote for the journal Scrutiny. These looked to the tastes and standards of an educated elite for salvation from the multiple deformities of modern culture, the commercialization of the press included. See Stefan Collini, “Where Did It All Go Wrong? Cultural Critics and ‘Modernity’ in Inter-war Britain,” The Strange Survival of Liberal England: Political Leaders, Moral Values and the Reception of Economic Debate, eds. Ewen H. H. Green and Duncan M. Tanner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 247–74. 42. The Blatchford Controversies (1904), in CW I (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 381–82. 43. The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (London: Arrowsmith, 1908). 44. The Blatchford Controversies (1904), in CW I, 381–82. 45. Chris Baldick, The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 10, The Modern Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 400–401. 46. Ernest Rhys, introduction to Everyman edition of G. K. Chesterton, Stories, Essays, and Poems (London: Dent, 1935), vii. 47. William Blake, 190–96. 48. Orthodoxy (1908), in CW I (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 332. 49. ILN, 18 April 1931, 628. My emphasis. 50. Orthodoxy, 213. 51. William W. Robson, “G.K. Chesterton: An Introduction,” CR XXXIII, nos. 3 and 4 (Fall–Winter, 2007): 505–6. 52. However, this cult of the diurnal was not merely whimsical. For example, it was pitted against “pessimists” such as Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman, who saw nothing but the “grandeur” of despair in the grinding poverty of the peasant. They were blind to the “tangle of traditions” in which the peasant’s life was immersed, and which could offset evil. See his introduction to Mary Webb’s novel, The Golden Arrow (1916; London: Jonathan Cape, 1928), vii–xi. 53. Introduction to Matthew Arnold, Essays Literary and Critical (London: J. M. Dent, 1906, 1964), vii–x. 54. Robson, “G.K. Chesterton: An Introduction,” 505. 55. “The Inside,” DN, 11 April 1903, 6; William Blake, 136. 56. G.F. Watts (London: Duckworth, 1904), 70. 57. Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 32, 133. Esty uses the later work of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, J. M. Keynes, E. M. Forster, and others to illustrate the shift and the tensions that were generated in modernism as a result. However, Chesterton’s significance is only acknowledged in passing; 235, n. 42.

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58. Andrew Vincent, Nationalism and Particularity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 127–35. 59. “The Advantages of Having One Leg,” in Tremendous Trifles (London: Methuen, 1909), 37–42. 60. The Blatchford Controversies, 384–85. 61. The parallel between the corpus mysticum idea in the medieval church and modern nationalism has been drawn by Sheldon Wolin; Politics and Vision, 118–21. Chesterton’s Christian model of nationhood underlines its cogency. The parallel casts doubt on Vincent’s conception of the looser relationship of nationalism to religion than patriotism. However, Chesterton stopped short of affirming “mutual subservience” as the corollary of the comparison between modern nationalism with the medieval church. This facet of nationalism corresponded to the church as a “structure of power” as well as a community. Chesterton’s ambivalence toward nationalism touched on in chapter 9 becomes clearer in this light. 62. ILN, 18 April 1931, 628; 4 May 1929, 744. 63. Muriel Smith, “Chesterton and the French Revolution,” CR XV–XVI, nos. 4 and 1 (November 1989–January 1990): 588. 64. What I Saw in America (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1922), 22. 65. Wilhelm Dibelius, England (London: Jonathan Cape, 1930), 147. 66. For example, see Peter Ackroyd, Albion: the Origins of the English Imagination (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002), 317–18. See also the post-war writings of Michael Oakeshott, who elevated “conversation” as what Robert Grant calls “the metaphor of politics”; Robert Grant, Oakeshott (London: The Claridge Press, 1990), ch. 5. This was clearly English in inspiration; see Robert E. Eccleshall, “Michael Oakeshott and Sceptical Conservatism,” in Political Thought since 1945: Philosophy, Science, Ideology, eds. L. Tivey and A. Wright (Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar, 1992), 182, 184. For an account of “being English” as a function of conversation about the culture, history, and identity of England, see Aughey, The Politics of Englishness, 7–12. 67. Colls, Identity of England, 378–79. 68. Aughey, The Politics of Englishness, ch. 10; and Michael Kenny, Richard English, and Richard Hayton, Beyond the Constitution? Englishness in a Post-Devolved Britain (Newcastle: Institute for Public Policy Research, 2008), 7. 69. Simon Barrow and Jonathan Bartley, When the Saints go Marching Out: ReDefining St. George for a New Era (London: Ekklesia, 2007); Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, “Let’s Hear It for the Multicultural St. George,” The Independent, 23 April 2007. 70. William Cobbett, 30, 36. 71. Wright, “Last Orders for the English Aborigine,” 33.

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Index

The entry under G. K. Chesterton’s name has been confined to references to his writings. References to his social and political thought and other interests will be found under the relevant headings. Throughout the index his name has been abbreviated to GKC. Acton, John E. Dalberg-, first baron, 161 aestheticism, 14, 64 Aitken, (W.) Maxwell, Lord Beaverbrook, 193, 213 Albu, Sir George, 111 Alfred the Great, 110, 170; “little Englandism” of, 138–39 Aliens Act (1905), 143 Allen, (Charles) Grant, 71, 73 America, 189–90 Anarchism and GKC, 42 Angell, Sir (Ralph) Norman, 43 Anglicanism and GKC, 18, 119 anti-Semitism: of GKC, 2, 127, 139–45, 183–84, 200 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 74n18 Armenian massacres (1894), 174 Arnold, Matthew, 3, 44, 77n75, 154, 175, 215–16 “art for art’s sake,” 58, 62 Arthur, King, 170

Atatürk, Kemal, 187 Austin, Alfred, 61 Austin, Louis F., 128 Austria, 154–55, 186 authenticity, 127–28; English, 135–36 Baldwin, Stanley, first earl of Bewdley, 193 Balfour, Arthur J., 83, 93 Baring, Maurice, 5, 160 Barker, J. Ellis, 136, 140 Baudelaire, Charles P., 14 Beaconsfield, 93 Beardsley, Aubrey B., 14, 214 Beaverbrook, Lord. See Aitken (W.) Maxwell Beerbohm, Sir (Henry) Maximilium, 14, 57 Beit, Alfred, 134, 144 Belloc, Hilaire, 5, 33–34, 40, 42, 46, 48n21, 66, 82–84, 95, 96, 106, 108, 160 231

232

Index

Benson, Arthur C., 9n6 Bentley, Edmund C., 15–17, 33 Besant, Annie, 48n10 bigotry, 71 Birrell, Augustine, 5, 85 Blake, William, 211–12 Blatchford, Robert P., 38, 158, 163 Blogg, Frances, 18 the Bloomsbury movement, 55 the Boer War, 34, 39, 45, 55, 87, 88–89, 111, 114, 157, 200; and the Liberal Party, 45. See also Sydney Webb Bolingbroke, St John H., first viscount, 172 Bolshevism, 183 Book of Common Prayer, 205n73 The Bookman, 34 Brabazon, Reginald, twelfth earl of Meath, 134, 136 Brailsford, Henry N., 90–91 Britain, 138 The British Academy, 56 British Proclamation (1901), 43 Brooke, Stopford A., 20, 49n37 Brown, Ivor, 192 Browning, Robert, 20, 37–38, 57, 60–61, 73 Bryant, Sir Arthur W., 128, 197–98, 208 Bryce, Viscount James, 86 Burke, Edmund, 18 Burne-Jones, Sir Edward C., 58, 214 Butler, Sir William F., 94–95 Butterfield, Sir Herbert, 194 Cadbury, George, 35, 112–13, Caine, Sir (Thomas) Hall, 142, 212 Calvinism, 62, 196, 210 ˇ Capek, Karel, 186 Carlyle, Thomas, 37, 57, 137, 156, 176, 208 Carpenter, Edward, 26n3, 68, 117–18 Carroll, Lewis, 21 Chamberlain, Joseph, 45, 83, 136 Charles II, 62, 197 Chatham, first earl. See William Pitt Chaucer, Geoffrey, 189, 191 the “Chesterbelloc,” 108

Chesterton, Cecil, 22, 83, 96, 106 Chesterton, Edward, 19–21 Chesterton, Gilbert K., books of: The Ballad of the White Horse (1911), 69, 110, 176; The Barbarism of Berlin (1914), 152; Charles Dickens (1906), 1, 14, 38, 39; Chaucer: A Study (1932), 12n35; The Crimes of England (1915), 152; The Defendant (1901), 80–81; The Everlasting Man (1925), 72; Father Brown (1910–), 6; The Flying Inn (1913), 173–74; Greybeards at Play (1900), 15; Heretics (1905), 1, 20, 38, 67, 70–71; The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), 15, 213; The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), 36, 86; Orthodoxy (1908), 8, 37, 116; The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond (1937), 199; Robert Browning (1903), 36–38; Robert Louis Stevenson (1927), 40; A Short History of England (1917), 72, 169–77; St. Thomas Aquinas, 7418; Twelve Types (1902), 5, 66; The Victorian Age in Literature(1913), 117; What’s Wrong with the World (1910), 93, 110; The Wild Knight (1900), 46; William Cobbett (1925), 200; essays of; “The Patriotic Idea” (1904), 39–40, 80, 86–87, 92; poems of; “Blessed are the Peacemakers” (1914), 151; “E.C.B,” 16; “An Election Echo” (1906), 84; “Lost,” 65; “The March of the Black Mountain,” 174; “The March of the Makers” (c. 1893), 17; “The Myth of Arthur,” 178n7; “The Revolutionist” (1909), 116; “The Rolling English Road” (1914), 12n35; “The Secret People” (1907), 4, 17, 105, 108, 135, 212; “A Song of Strange Drinks” (1913), 112; “The Song of Labour” (1892); “To a Certain Nation,” 45; “Who goes Home?” (1913), 117 The Chesterton Review, 2, 6 childhood: of GKC, 5, 13–14, 19–23 Children’s Act (1908), 109, 116

Index Chinese labour, 45, 111 Christendom, 119, 153, 155, 171, 173 Christianity, 45, 59, 193; and English nationhood, 8, 199; GKC’s embrace of, 15, 27; and nationhood, 86, 154, 161, 170–71, 173–74, 187, 210, 217. See also patriotism Churchill, Winston S., 207 citizenship, 92, 94–95, 143–44, 208, 213, 217 Clifford, Rev. Dr. John, 98n2 Clive, Baron Robert C., 20 Cobbett, William, 8, 172, 211, 218 Coit, Stanton, G., 70 Coleridge, Samuel T., 211 Collingwood, William G., 57 Collins, Dorothy, 6, 209 Colvin, Sir Sydney, 31, 36 Committee on Censorship (1909), 136, 145, 201 Conrad, Joseph, 9n6 conscription, 157 The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton (1986–), 7 compromise, 83–84, 120n14, Conway, Sir (William) Martin, 58 cosmopolitanism, 42–43. See also internationalism Coulton, George G., 199 Courtney, William L., 86 Crusades, 161, 173 Czechoslovakia, 186–87 The Daily Herald: and GKC, 6, 129 The Daily News, 32, 34; and GKC, 6, 15, 35–36, 109–14, 129 Darwin, Charles R., 26n3, 73 Darwinism, 44 Davidson, John, 62–63 Davidson, Randall T., 85 democracy, 118; abuse of, 97; GKC’s disillusion with existing, 4, 79, 94; and a peasantry, 95. See also the “party system” the Decadent movement, 2, 14, 19, 37, 41, 55, 63, 131 Desmoulins, Camille, 84, 94

233

De Valera, Eamon, 186 Devolution within the United Kingdom, 4 Dicey, Albert V., 9n6 Dickens, Charles, 20, 35, 50n50, 119, 191, 214 Dickinson, Goldsworthy, L., 116 Disraeli, Benjamin, earl of Beaconsfield, 107, 144 Distributism, 93, 96, 133, 178, dogmas, 71 Dreyfus case, 45–46, 90, 141 Dunraven, Lord. See Quin, Windham T. enclosure movement, 93, 172 enfranchisement of women, 94. See also suffragettes Education Act (1902), 80, 85 Education Act (1906), 85, 145 Emmet, Robert, 84 Empire Day, 134–36 England, 105, 114, 138; “condition” of, 82–83; denationalization of, 131; “Merry,” 212. See also Ireland English “amateurism,” 21, 177, 201 the English aristocracy, 140, 192 the English gentleman, 190–92 the English nation, 105, 132–33, 145, 154, 188, 190, 208, 210, 215; pays réel and pays legal, 46, 189, 211; and Liberalism, 88, 93, 95–96, 103, 127; and Roman Catholicism, 198–99; Roman origins of, 156; Saxon influence on, 170 English national character, 95, 156–57, 191, 193, 208 English national consciousness, 3, 23; of GKC’s family, 22 English nationhood, 91–92, 136, 188, 208. See also Christianity Englishness, 19, 193, 199–213. See also authenticity English literature, 20, 56 English parliament, 4, 210 English patriotism, 3, 29n38, 40, 44, 172, 192–93, 208; and race, 22, 25; religious quality of, 189, 218; and

234

Index

Liberalism, 23, 25; Roman origins of, 40, 170 English Radicalism, 211–13 ethical societies, 41 European Union, 210–12 “evolutionary myth,” 83 Fabianism, 41 Fascism, 184 Ferrer, Francesco, 90 fin de siècle, 2, 7, 14, 55, 58–60, 63, 71–72, 79, 214, 216. See also aestheticism; the Decadent movement First World War: GKC’s defense of, 157–59 Fisher, Herbert A. L., 33, 184 Fisher Unwin, 15 Fitzgerald, Edward, 40, 61 Freeman, Edward A., 20, 185 free trade, 20, 185 French patriotism, 42, 44 French press, 38, 200 French Revolution, 104, 161, 171, 217 Froude, James A., 170, 172, 194 futurism, 194–95 Galsworthy, John, 117, 162–63 Gandhi, Mahatma, 106 Gardiner, Alfred G., 35–36, 90, 110–13 Gautier, Théophile, 58 gender: and historiography, 196 George V, 188 George, David L., first earl of Dwyfor, 35, 104, 111 German patriotism, 44, 154 Germany, 3, 111, 154, 158–59, 169; “moral equivalence” with Britain, 158–59, 162, 169. See also imperialism Giffard, Hardinge S., first earl of Halsbury, 109 Gilbert, William S., 73n1, 116 Gill, (Arthur) Eric, 29n38 Gillray, James, 84 G. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith and Culture, 2

G.K.’s Weekly, 6, 129, 184 Gladstone, William E., 91, 107 Goddard, Ernest H., 128 Goldsmith, Oliver, 172, 192 Gosse, Sir Edmund W., 5, 36 Gould, Sir Francis C., 84 Gray, Thomas, 192 Great Exhibition (1851), 60 Green, John R., 22, 170, 197 Green, Thomas H., 34, 118–19 Grey, Edward, first viscount of Fallodon, 156, 185 Grosjean, Marie L., 22 Haig, Douglas, first earl, 164n6 Halsbury, Lord. See Giffard, Hardinge S., first earl of Halsbury Hammond, John L., 33–34, 93 Hankin, St John E., 63 Hardy, Thomas, 16, 28n26 Harmsworth, Alfred C. W., first viscount Northcliffe, 31; Harmsworth Press, 38, 136 Haslemere Charter Fair, 24 Healy, Maurice J., 160, 163n6 Henley, William E., 5, 58–60 Henry V, 22, 72 Hirst, Francis W., 33 Hitler, Adolf, 186 Hobbies. See English “amateurism” Hobhouse, Leonard T., 33 Hobson, John A., 33, 91, 104, 147n15, 162 Holland, Henry S., 28n31, 48n15, 86 House of Lords, 104–5, 177 Hutton, Richard H., 57 Huxley, Thomas H., 26n3 Huysmans, Joris K., 14 Hyndman, Henry M., 163 Ibsen, Henrik, 57 Idealism, 33–34 imperialism:and Germany, 153; and GKC, 44, 130, 154, 158; and science, 47. See also patriotism imperialists, 43, 87, 133–36; and the “true” servants of empire, 130, 157

Index Imperial South African Association, 45 Ingram, Sir Bruce S., 128–29 Ingram, Herbert, 128 Ingrams, Richard, 209 Insurance Act. See National Insurance Act internationalism, 195; Liberals and, 89–90; “new,” 185. See also cosmopolitanism The Illustrated London News, 128–36, 152, 184; and GKC, 7 Ireland, 106, 153; and England, 137–38, 160 Irish Home Rule, 83–84 Irish Land Act (1903), 93, 130 Isaacs, Godfrey C., 113 Isaacs, Rufus D., first marquess of Reading, 113 Islam, 91, 119, 172–74, 187 Jackson, Holbrook, 14 James II, 197 James, Henry, 51n59, 57 Jameson Raid, 44 Jews, 119 Jingoism, 23, 44, 68, 87, 193 Johnson, Samuel, 131, 172, 211–12 Jordans Meeting House, 199 journalism: connection with democracy, Liberalism and patriotism, 5, 32–33, 38, 46; Edwardian, 31; French, 38; Liberal, 31–32. See also the press; the yellow press Judaism, 72 Ker, William P., 34 Kipling, Rudyard, 60–61, 63, 65, 123n48, 130, 134, 136, 144–45; “Clampherdown,” 16; “The Flowers,” 52n76, 86; “The NativeBorn,” 189 Kitchener, Horatio H., first earl of Khartoum, 157 Kropotkin, Prince Pëtr A., 18 Lane, Ralph. See Norman Angell

235

Lang, Andrew, 5, 22, 71 Lea, H. C., 110 League of Nations, 157, 184–85 Le Bon, Gustav, 104 the Left, and GKC, 2 legend, 196 Lehmann, Robert C., 35 Lepanto, 173 Liberalism, 34–35, 109, 117, 184; GKC’s conception of, 37; “New Liberalism,” 79–80, 92, 95; shifting nature of, 4; tensions with democracy, 70, 73, 94. See also cosmopolitanism; the English nation; English patriotism; patriotism Liberal Party, 177; and imperialism, 33, 47. See also the Boer War Lichnowsky, Prince Karl M., 159 liberty, 39, 111, 114–15, 119–20 Licensing Act (1908), 109 lines. See sharpness of outline Little Englanders, 34, 64; GKC’s move away from, 170. See also Alfred the Great London: and GKC, 100n45 Long, Walter H., first viscount of Wraxall, 116 Lubbock, Percy, 1 Ludovici, Anthony M., 97 Luther, Martin, 74n18, 210 Lynd, Robert W., 177 Macaulay, Lord Thomas B., 26n3, 132, 153, 155–56, 170, 194, 197–98 MacDonald, George, 19 MacDonald, (James) Ramsay, 107 Macedonia, 91 Maeterlinck, Maurice P., 14, 215 Mafeking, 23, 157 Marconi affair, 4, 84, 113–14, 116 marriage, 43, 144 Marshall, Thomas H., 208 Massingham, Henry W., 110, 115, 141–42 Masterman, Charles F. G., 28n31, 80–83, 85–86, 89, 94, 152, 162 Maurice, (John) Frederick D., 77n75, 211

236

Index

Maurras, Charles, 183 McQuilland, Louis, 5 Mee, Arthur H., 199 Mencken, Henry L., 183 Mental Deficiency Act (1913), 109, 116 Meredith, George, 17, 41, 183 Mermaid Repertory Theater, 44 the middle class: and GKC, 20–21, 35, 131–33, 136 militarism, 153, 158 Mill, John S., 3, 26n3, 44, 127 Mills, Saxon J., 84 Milner, Alfred, first viscount, 45, 87, 123n48, 136, 144 Milton, John, 75n22, 155, 211–12 modernism, 41, 184, 201n11, 216; in history, 3, 164n22, 194; in literature, 214; in theology, 140 modernity, 187, 190; and GKC, 61–62, 133, 213–14 the “moderns,” 131 Montague, Samuel, first baron Swaythling, 117, 140–43 More, Sir Thomas, 172 Morley, John, first viscount of Blackburn, 36, 83, 120n3 Morris, William, 58, 61–62 Moore, George A., 13 Murray, David L., 200 Murray, (George) Gilbert, 89, 101n48, 158–59 Mussolini, Benito, 186 myth: and GKC, 3 Napoleon Bonaparte, 155 Napoleon, Louis, 155 The Nation, 34, 109–10, 116–17, 140–42, 162–63, 176–77; and GKC, 6 “national efficiency,” 69–70 National Insurance Act (1911), 107, 112 nationalism, 216–17; and Roman Catholicism, 160–61 nationality, 143–44 nationhood, 23, 40, 43, 105, 119; corruption by race, 137, 153–54, 160; and modernity, 186–87. See also Christianity; English nationhood

Navy League, 88 Nelson, Horatio, 20, 22, 84 Nesbit, Edith, 105 The New Age, 93, 96, 108–9; and GKC, 6 Newman, Cardinal John H., 3, 39, 117 The New Witness: and GKC, 6 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 97, 178n1 The Nineteenth Century, 18 Noel, Rev. Conrad, 28n31, 86 Noel, Roden B., 60 Nonconformism, 85 “Nonconformist conscience,” 14, 64 O’Connor, Mgr. John, 172 Oldershaw, Lucien, 15–16, 19, 33–34, 46, 80 optimism, 80–81; and Browning, 37 Orage, Alfred R., 96–97 Orwell, George, 106, 208 “Outlanders,” 45 Oxford, 134: friends of GKC at, 14–16 Oxford Union, 104; king and country debate, 193–94 pacifism, 193–94 party fund, 118 the “party system,” 106–8, 210 paganism, 41 pageants, 23–24 Paine, Thomas, 211 pantheism, 33, 38, 41, 61 the past, 194 Pater, Walter, 5, 14 patriot: status of, 144 patriotism: and Christianity, 3, 70, 72, 153, 172, 193, 207; and the English, 156–57; and GKC, 25, 39–40, 42, 44, 56, 64–73, 129, 157–58, 184; and imperialism, 25, 43–44,64–65, 69; and Liberalism, 80, 114; local, 24; and ownership of land, 92; and raison d’état, 216; “rational” and “irrational,” 87–88. See also English patriotism; French patriotism; German patriotism Peace Pledge Union, 193–94 Pearson, Sir (Cyril) Arthur, 31

Index Pearson, Karl, 69 Penn-Gray Society, 192 Pepys, Samuel, 197–98 Pessimism, 2, 58, 81, 85 Phillips, Sir Lionel, 111 Piludski, Jósef, 186 Pitt, William, first earl of Chatham, 20, 132, 172 plutocrats, 131, 152, poison gas, 152, 158 Poland, 185–86 Pollard, Albert L. 176 populism: of GKC, 7, 104–5, 194 pre-Raphaelites, 58 the press: and the Boer War, 45; and the Dreyfus case, 46 Prevention of Crime Act (1908), 116 Priestley, John B., 207 Priestley, Joseph, 211 Primrose, Archibald P., fifth earl of Rosebery, 70, 87, 89 private property, 106 progress: illusions of, 129, 195 Prussia, 153–55, 172, 194 Prussianism, 187–88 Puritanism, 24, 62–63, 146, 160, 196–97, 210, 212, 215 Quin, Windham T., fourth earl of Dunraven, 84 Racine, Jean, 160 Radicalism, 34 rationalism: GKC’s, 214; misguided, 38, 41, 43, 67, 73 “realism”: in literature, 60, 136, 214 the Reformation, 93, 171–72, 174–75, 190, 210, 212 religion: evolution of, 71–72 “remotism,” 215 Rhodes, Cecil J., 87, 134, 136 Roman Catholic Church: GKC’s reception into, 5, 160 Roman Catholicism: and GKC, 20, 32, 39. See also the English nation The Roman Empire, 40, 170–71 Romanticism: GKC and, 214–15

237

Rowlandson, Thomas, 84 Rosebery, Lord. See Primrose, Archibald P. Rossetti, Dante G., 58 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 95, 118–19 Ruskin, John, 20, 57, 67 Russell, Bertrand A., third earl, 157 Russia, 90, 155–56 Russian Revolution (1905): and GKC, 18 St. Francis, 19 St. George, 145, 218 St. Paul, 65 St. Paul’s School, 13, 16 Schiller, Johann C. von, 160 Scotland, 138–39 Scott, Charles P., 31–32, 34, 114 Serbia, 162 sexual equality, 39, 41, 94, 115 Shanks, Edward (Richard Buxton), 175 sharpness of outline, 39–41, 43, 216 Shaw, George B., 2, 25, 25n3, 32, 66, 71, 82, 108, 112, 162; Common Sense about the War (1914), 159; John Bull’s other Island (1907), 147 Sheffield, 133 Sheridan, Richard B., 44, Sheppard, Very Rev. (H.) Richard, 193 Shorter, Clement, K., 128 Simon, John A., first viscount, 33, 84 Sims, George R., 21 Sinn Féin, 160 Slade School of Art, 13–15, 19, 34 Smallholdings and Allotments Act (1908), 92–93 the “Smart Set,” 20, 131, 136 Smith, Goldwin, 94–95 socialism: GKC’s early, 44 Soloman, Lawrence, 27n11, 27n19, 28n28 the “south country,” 133 The Speaker, 33; and GKC, 6, 17, 33–35, 49n29 Spencer, Herbert, 71 Spender, John A., 74n6, 83–84, 107 Stephen, Sir James F., 39

238

Index

Stevenson, Robert L., 18–19, 36, 40–41, 203n39 the Stuarts, 196–98 Stubbs, William, 22 the South African War. See the Boer War suffragettes, 92, 163 Sussex, 8, 145 Swaythling, Lord. See Montague, Samuel, first baron Swaythling Swift, Jonathan, 172 Tarde, Gabriel, 104 Tawney, Richard H., 119 Tennyson, Alfred L., 19–20, 57, 195 Teutonism, 22, 155, 160 This England, 209 Tillett, Benjamin, 163 Tolstoy, Leo, 66–69, 193 tribalism, 70, 158, 160, 186 Tripoli, 91 Turks, 91 Turkey, 91, 172–74, 187 Union of Democratic Control, 157 Unitarianism, and GKC, 14 universality in (Protestant) religion, 48n10, 174 Unwin, George, 119 Victoria, Queen: Diamond Jubilee of, 193 Victorian belief and doubt, 16–17 Victorians: distinction between earlier and later, 60–62 Voltaire, 212

Wales, 139 Ward, Maisie, 6 Watson, Sir (John) William, 19, 63–64, 114, 158, 174 Watts, George F., 59, 62, 215–16 Webb, Sydney: and the Boer War, 45 Wedgwood, Josiah C., first baron of Barlaston, 152 Weismann, (August) Friedrich, 70 Wellington House, 152 Wells, Herbert G., 2, 82, 112, 131, 185, 195; A Modern Utopia, 41 The Westminster Gazette, 34, 106–10, 175 Wesleyans, 175, 199 Whig interpretation of English history, 3, 170–71, 194–98 Whistler, James M., 36, 58–60 Whitman, Walt, 16, 18–19 Wilde, Oscar, 14, 36, 50n48, 55 Wilkes, John, 132 Williams, Ernest H., 34 the Witness papers, 96, 108–9, 113, 153, 184, 192 Woodruff, (J.) Douglas, 209 Wyndham, George, 84, 99n30, 130, 154, 177, 212 Yeats, William B., 19 The Yellow Book, 38, 62 the yellow press, 38 Yugoslavia, 162 Zangwill, Israel, 142, 161 Zola, Émile, 136