Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 1111
Twice upon a time there was a Samuel Butler who wrote exhilaratingly and died and left the paradoxical contents of his notebooks to be published by posterity. The first (i.e. of Hudibras, not of Erewhon) had many lively things to say on the question of orthodoxy, being the forerunner of G. K.C. And I am greatly tempted to treat Samuel Butler as an ancestor to be described at length. Chesterton might well have said, “It is a dangerous thing to be too inquisitive, and search too narrowly into a true Religion, for 50,000 Bethshemites were destroyed only for looking into the Ark of the Covenant, and ten times as many have been ruined for looking too curiously into that Booke in which that Story is recorded” — in fact in Magic he very nearly did say the same thing. He would have liked (as who would not?) to have been the author of the saying that “Repentant Teares are the waters upon which the Spirit of God moves,” or that “There is no better Argument to prove that the Scriptures were written by Divine Inspiration, than that excellent saying of our Savior, If any man will go to Law with thee for thy cloke, give him thy Coate also.” He might well have written dozens of those puns and aphorisms of Butler which an unkind fate has omitted from the things we read, and even from the things we quote. But Butler provides an answer to Chesterton, for he was an intelligent anticipator who foresaw exactly what would happen when orthodoxy, which is to say the injunction to shout with the larger crowd, should be proclaimed as the easiest way out of religious difficulties. Before a reader has finally made up his mind on Orthodoxy (and it is highly desirable that he should do so), let him consider two little texts:
“They that profess Religion and believe it consists in frequenting of Sermons, do, as if they should say They have a great desire to serve God, but would faine be perswaded to it. Why should any man suppose that he pleases God by patiently hearing an Ignorant fellow render Religion ridiculous?”
“He [a Catholic] prefers his Church merely for the Antiquity of it, and cares not how sound or rotten it be, so it be but old. He takes a liking to it as some do to old Cheese, only for the blue Rottenness of it. If he had lived in the primitive Times he had never been a Christian; for the Antiquity of the Pagan and Jewish Religion would have had the same Power over him against the Christian, as the old Roman has against the modern Reformation.”
Here we leave Samuel Butler. The majority stands the largest chance of being right through the sheer operation of the law of averages. But somehow one does not easily imagine a mob passing through the gate that is narrow and the way that is narrow. One prefers to think of men going up in ones and twos, perhaps even in loneliness, and rejoicing at the strange miracle of judgment that all their friends should be assembled at the journey’s end.
But the final criticism of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy is that it is not orthodox. He claims that he is “concerned only to discuss . . . the central Christian theology (sufficiently summarized in the Apostles’ Creed)” and, “When the word ‘orthodoxy’ is used here it means the Apostles’ Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself Christian until a very short time ago and the general historic conduct of those who held such a creed.” In other words he counts as orthodox Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Orthodox Russians, Nonconformists, Lutherans, Calvinists, and all manner of queer fish, possibly Joanna Southcott, Mrs. Annie Besant, and Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy. He might even, by stretching a point or two (which is surely permissible by the rules of their game), rope in the New Theologians. Now this may be evidence of extraordinary catholicity, but not of orthodoxy. Chesterton stands by and applauds the Homoousians scalping the Homoiousians, but he is apparently willing to leave the Anglican and the Roman Catholic on the same plane of orthodoxy, which is absurd. We cannot all be right, even the Duke in Magic would not be mad enough to assert that. And the average Christian would absolutely refuse his adherence to a statement of orthodoxy that left the matter of supreme spiritual authority an open question.
In the fifteenth century practically every Englishman would have declared with some emphasis that it lay in the Pope of Rome. In the twentieth century practically every Englishman would declare with equal emphasis that it did not. This change of opinion was accompanied by considerable ill-feeling on both sides, and was, as it were, illuminated by burning martyrs. The men of both parties burned in both an active and a passive sense. Those charming Tudor sisters, Bloody Mary (as the Anglicans call her) and Bloody Bess (as the Roman Catholics affectionately name her) left a large smudge upon accepted ideas of orthodoxy; charred human flesh was a principal constituent of it. The mark remains, the differences are far greater, but, to Chesterton, both Anglican and Roman Catholic are “orthodox.” Of such is the illimitable orthodoxy of an ethical society, or of a body of Theosophists who “recognize the essential unity of all creeds and religions” — the liars! Chesterton tells us that Messrs. Shaw, Kipling, Wells, Ibsen and others are heretics, because of their doctrines. But he gives us no idea whether the Pope of Rome, who sells indulgences, is a heretic. And as the Pope is likely to outlive Messrs. Shaw, etc., by perhaps a thousand years, it is possible that Chesterton has been attacking the ephemeral heresies, while leaving the major ones untouched. In effect, Chesterton tells us no more than that we should shout with the largest crowd. But the largest crowd prefers, just now, not to do anything so clamorous.
The most curious feature about the present position of Christianity is the energy with which its opponents combine to keep it going. While Mr. Robert Blatchford continues to argue that man’s will is not free, and Sir Oliver Lodge continues to maintain that it is, the Doctrine of the Resurrection is safe; it is not even attacked. But the net result of all those peculiar modern things called “movements” is a state of immobility like a nicely balanced tug-of-war. Perhaps a Rugby scrum would make a better comparison.
The great and grave changes in our political civilization all belong to the early nineteenth century, not to the later. They belong to the black-and-white epoch, when men believed fixedly in Toryism, in Protestantism, in Calvinism, in Reform, and not infrequently in Revolution. And whatever each man believed in, he hammered at steadily, without scepticism: and there was a time when the Established Church might have fallen, and the House of Lords nearly fell. It was because Radicals were wise enough to be constant and consistent; it was because Radicals were wise enough to be conservative. . . . Let beliefs fade fast and frequently if you wish institutions to remain the same. The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself. The net result of all our political suggestions, Collectivism, Tolstoyanism, Neo-Feudalism, Communism, Anarchy, Scientific Bureaucracy — the plain fruit of them all is that Monarchy and the House of Lords will remain. The net result of all the new religions will be that the Church of England will not (for heaven knows how long) be disestablished. It was Karl Marx, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Cunninghame Graham, Bernard Shaw, and Auberon Herbert, who between them, with bowed, gigantic backs, bore up the throne of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
It is on these grounds that we must believe that, even as the Church survives, and prevails, in order to get a hearing when the atheist and the New Theologian have finished shouting themselves hoarse at each other, so must political creeds be in conformity with the doctrines of the Church. Such is the foundation of democracy, according to Chesterton. Will anybody revise his political views on this basis? Probably not. Every Christian believes that his political opinions are thoroughly Christian, and so entire is the disrepute into which atheism has fallen as a philosophy of life, that a great many atheists likewise protest the entire Christianity of their politics. We are all democrats to-day, in one sense or another; each of us more loosely than his neighbour. It is strange that by the criterion of almost every living man who springs to the mind as a representative democrat, Chesterton is the most undemocratic of us all. This, however, needs a separate chapter of explanation.
VII
THE POLITICIAN WHO COULD NOT TELL THE TIME
Somewhere at the back of all Chesterton’s political and religious ideas lies an ideal country, a Utopia which actually existed. Its name is the Middle Ages. If some unemployed Higher Critic chose to undertake the appalling task of reading steadily through all the works of G. K.C., copying out those passages in which there was any reference to the Middle Ages, the result would be a description of a land flowing with milk and honey. The inhabitants would be large, strong Christian men, and red-haired, womanly women. Their children would be unschooled, save by the Church. They would all live in houses of their own, on lands belonging to them. Their faith would be one. They would speak Latin as a sort of Esperanto, and drink enormous quantities of good beer. The Church — but I have found the passage relating to the Church:
Religion, the immortal maiden, has been a maid-of-all-work as well as a servant of mankind. She provided men at once with the theoretic laws of an unalterable cosmos; and also with the practical rules of the rapid and thrilling game of morality. She taught logic to the student and taught fairy tales to the children; it was her business to confront the nameless gods whose fear is on all flesh, and also to see that the streets were spotted with silver and scarlet, that there was a day for wearing ribbons or an hour for ringing bells.
The inhabitants of this happy realm would be instinctively democratic, and no woman would demand a vote there. They would have that exalted notion of patriotism that works outwards from the village pump to the universe at large. They would understand all humanity because they understood themselves. They would understand themselves because they would have no newspapers to widen their interests and so make them shallower.
In Magic, as we have seen, Chesterton’s mouthpiece, the Conjuror, gave us to understand that it was better to believe in Apollo than merely to disbelieve in God. The Chestertonian Middle Ages are like Apollo; they did not exist, but they make an admirable myth. For Chesterton, in common with the rest of us, flourishes on myths like the green bay; we, however, happen not to know, in most cases, when our myths have a foundation. Mankind demands myths — and it has them. Some day a History of the World’s Myths will be compiled. It will show humanity climbing perilous peaks in pursuit of somebody’s misinterpretations of somebody else’s books, or fighting bloodily because somebody asserted or denied that a nation was the chosen one, or invading new continents, physical or metaphysical, because of legendary gold to be found therein, or in fact committing all its follies under the inspiration of myths — as in fact it has done. The Middle Ages are to Chesterton what King Alfred was to the Chartists and early Radicals. They believed that in his days England was actually governed on Chartist principles. So it happens that two Radical papers of the early part of last century actually called themselves The Alfred, and that Major Cartwright spent a considerable amount of energy in inducing the Greeks to substitute pikes for bayonets in their struggles against the Turks, on the grounds that the pike was used in Alfred’s England.
So there we have Chesterton believing devoutly that that servile state, stricken with plague, and afflicted with death in all its forms, is the dreamland of the saints. His political principles, roughly speaking, are England was decent once — let us apply the same recipe to the England of to-day. His suggestions, therefore, are rather negative than positive. He would dam the flood of modern legislative tendencies because it is taking England farther away from his Middle Ages. But he will not say “do this” about anything, because in the Middle Ages they made few laws, not having, in point of fact, the power to enforce those offences against moral and economic law which then took the place of legislation.
It is impossible to say to what extent Chesterton has surrendered himself to this myth; whether he has come to accept it because he liked it, or in order to please his friend, Mr. Hilaire Belloc, from whom G. K.C. never differs politically. Once they stood side by side and debated against Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells, arguing from Socialism to beer, and thence to religion.
In January, 1908, Chesterton accepted the invitation of the Editor of The New Age to explain why he did not call himself a Socialist, in spite of his claim to possess “not only a faith in democracy, but a great tenderness for revolution.” The explanation is complicated, to say the least. In the first place Chesterton does not want people to share, they should give and take. In the second place, as a democrat (which nobody else is) he has a vast respect (which nobody else has) for the working classes. And
one thing I should affirm as certain, the whole smell and sentiment and general ideal of Socialism they detest and disdain. No part of the community is so specially fixed in those forms and feelings which are opposite to the tone of most Socialists; the privacy of homes, the control of one’s own children, the minding of one’s own business. I look out of my back windows over the black stretch of Battersea, and I believe I could make up a sort of creed, a catalogue of maxims, which I am certain are believed, and believed strongly, by the overwhelming mass of men and women as far as the eye can reach. For instance, that an Englishman’s house is his castle, and that awful proprieties ought to regulate admission to it; that marriage is a real bond, making jealousy and marital revenge at the least highly pardonable; that vegetarianism and all pitting of animal against human rights is a silly fad; that on the other hand to save money to give yourself a fine funeral is not a silly fad, but a symbol of ancestral self-respect; that when giving treats to friends or children, one should give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them; that there is nothing illogical in being furious because Tommy has been coldly caned by a schoolmistress and then throwing saucepans at him yourself. All these things they believe; they are the only people who do believe them; and they are absolutely and eternally right. They are the ancient sanities of humanity; the ten commandments of man.
A week later, Mr. H. G. Wells, who at that time had not yet broken away from organized Socialism, but was actually a member of the Executive Committee of the Fabian Society, wrote a reply to the case against Socialism which had been stated by Chesterton, and, a week earlier, by Mr. Hilaire Belloc. He attempted to get Chesterton to look facts in the face. He pointed out that as things are “I do not see how Belloc and Chesterton can stand for anything but a strong State as against those wild monsters of property, the strong, big, private owners.” Suppose that Chesterton isn’t a Socialist, is he more on the side of the Socialists or on that of the Free Trade Liberal capitalists and landlords? “It isn’t an adequate reply to say [of Socialism] that nobody stood treat there, and that the simple, generous people like to beat their own wives and children on occasion in a loving and intimate manner, and that they won’t endure the spirit of Sidney Webb.”
A fortnight later, Chesterton replied. But, though many have engaged with him in controversy, I doubt if anybody has ever pinned him down to a fact or an argument. On this occasion, G. K.C. politely refused even to refer to the vital point of the case of Mr. H. G. Wells. On the other hand he wrote a very jolly article about beer and “tavern hospitality.” The argument marked time for two weeks more, when Mr. Belloc once again entered the lists. The essence of his contribution is “I premise that man, in order to be normally happy, tolerably happy, must own.” Collectivism will not let him own. The trouble about the present state of society is that people do not own enough. The remedy proposed will be worse than the disease. Then Mr. Bernard Shaw had a look in.
In the course of his lengthy article he gave “the Chesterbelloc”— “a very amusing pantomime elephant” — several shrewd digs in the ribs. It claimed, according to G.B.S., to be the Zeitgeist. “To which we reply, bluntly, but conclusively, ‘Gammon!’” The rest was mostly amiable personalities. Mr. Shaw owned up to musical cravings, compared with which the Chesterbelloc tendency to consume alcohol was as nothing. He also jeered very pleasantly at Mr. Belloc’s power to cause a stampede of Chesterton’s political and religious ideas. “For Belloc’s sake Chesterton says he believes literally in the Bible story of the Resurrection. For Belloc’s sake he says he is not a Socialist. On a recent occasion I tried to drive him to swallow the Miracle of St. Januarius for Belloc’s sake; but at that he stuck. He pleaded his belief in the Resurrection story. He pointed out very justly that I believe in lots of things just as miraculous as the Miracle of St. Januarius; but when I remorselessly pressed the fact that he did not believe that the blood of St. Januarius reliquefies miraculously every year, the Credo stuck in his throat like Amen in Macbeth’s. He had got down at last to his irreducible minimum of dogmatic incredulity, and could not, even with the mouth of the bottomless pit yawning before Belloc, utter the saving lie.”
By this time the discussion was definitely off Socialism. Chesterton produced another article, The Last of the Rationalists, in reply to Mr. Shaw, from which one gathered what one had been previously suspected that “you [namely Mr. Shaw, but in practice both the opposition controversialists] have confined yourselves to charming essays on our two charming personalities.” And there they stopped.
