Chapter 30 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Dick Bourgeois Doyle. Gilbert Keith Chesterton. By Maisie Ward. Chapter 30. Our Ladies Tumblr.  I like to be commanded or to be free. In both of these, my own soul can take a clear and conscious part. For when I am free, it must be for something that I really like, and not something that I am persuaded to pretend to like. And when I am commanded, it must be by something I know, like the Ten Commandments. But the thing called pressure, of which the blight name is persuasion, I always feel to be a hidden enemy. It is all a part of that worship of formlessness and flowing tendencies, which is really the drift of cosmos back into chaos. I remember how I suddenly recoiled in my youth from the influence of Matthew Arnold, who said many things very well worth saying when he told me that God was a stream of tendency. Since then, I have hated tendencies and like to know where I was going and go there or refuse. GK's Weekly August 18, 1928. In 1932, when Gilbert had been in church just ten years in Francis VI, my husband and I met them at the Eucharist Congress in Dublin. They were staying at the Vice Regal Lodge and were very happy in that gathering of the Catholic world brought about by the Congress. It was this thought of the potential of the faith for a unity the League of Nations could not achieve. Only dogma is strong enough to unite mankind. That gave its title to the book Christendom in Dublin. In the crowd that thronged to that great gathering, he saw a democracy. Its orderliness was more than a mere organization. It was self-determination of the people. A whole mob, what many would call a whole rabble, was doing exactly what it wanted and what it wanted was to be Christian. The mind of the crowd was stretched over the centuries as the faint sound of St. Patrick's bell that had been silent so many centuries was heard in Phoenix Park at the consecration of the Mass. It was stretched over the earth as the people of the earth gathered into one place which had become for the time Rome or the Christian center. During the Congress an Eastern priest accosted G.K. with praise of his writings. His own mind full of the great ideas of Christendom and the faith, he felt a huge disproportion in the illusion to himself.  This sort of humorous yet sincere intellectual humility startles us in the same kind of way as does the spiritual humility of the saints. We have to accept it in the same kind of way without in the least understanding it, but simply because we cannot fail to see it. But the world could fail even to see it. It could and did fail in imagining a mind so absorbed in the contemplation of infinite greatness that its own pinpoint littleness became an axiom. Rather it seemed an effectation. Nonetheless an effectation and much the less pardonable because the laughter was directed against others as well as against himself. There's an old medieval story of a tumbler who converted and become a monk, found himself inapt in the offices of choir and scriptorium. So he went before a statue of our lady and there played all his tricks. Quite exhausted at last he looked up at the statue and said, Lady this is a choice performance. There's more than a touch of our lady's tumbler in Gilbert. He knew he could give in his own fashion a choice performance, but meeting a priest come from a far land where he had reconciled a hitherto schismatic group with the great body of the Catholic Church who could forgive sins and offer the holy sacrifice. He truly felt something disproportionate in finding one's own trivial trade or tricks of the trade amid the far reaching revelations of such a triesting place of all the tribes of men. From Christendom in Dublin, page 35. His awe and reverence for priests was as Father Rice Enormous. He would carefully weigh their opinion however fatuous. His comment on the bad statues and fripperies which so many Catholics find a trial was, it shows the wisdom of the church. The whole thing is so terrific that if people did not have these let downs they would go mad. It may have been a fear of excess of this special let down that made him reluctant to go to Lourdes, least of you he never liked, but he was Dorothy says fascinated by Lourdes when she persuaded him to go. He went several times to the torchlight procession and he said as he had said in Dublin, this is the only real League of Nations. The thing he liked best in Dublin was the spontaneous outburst of little altars and amateur decorations in the poorest quarters of the city. The story he loved to tell was that of the old woman who said when on the last day the clouds looking threatening, well if it rains now he will have brought it on himself. The year of the Congress two other books were published, Sidelights on New London and New York already discussed and Chaucer. The books contrast agreeably one throwing the ideal against the real of his own day, the other evoking his ideal from the past. Chaucer was much criticized chiefly because he was not a Chaucer scholar. As a matter of fact, the notion of his writing this book did not originate with Chesterton, but with Richard Delamar who had projected a series of essays called The Poets on the Poets. This developed still at his suggestion into a literary biography of Chaucer, but in any event GK had all his life combated the notion that only a scholar should write on such themes. He stood resolutely for the rights of the amateur. Yet I think the scholar might well start off with some exasperation on reading that if Chaucer had been called the father of English poetry, so had an obscure Anglo-Saxon like Cademan whose writing was not in that sense poetry, not in any sense English. It is a curious example of one of the faults Chesterton himself most hated, overlooking something because it was too big, something too that he had realized in an earlier work and spoke the language of Alfred the Great. In a brilliant garnering of the fruits of her scholarship, word Horde, Margaret Williams has quoted Chesterton's Alfred as a stirring expression of the significance of the spiritual conquest of England by Christianity. In the same book, she shows how superficial is the view which believes that the English language was a creation of the Norman conquest. The struggle, she says, between the French and English tongues lasted for some 300 years until the two finally blended into a unified language, basically to tonic, richly romantic. The English spirit emerged predominant by a moral victory over its conqueror, from word Horde by Margaret Williams, page 4. No one would wish that Chesterton should have ignored the immense debt owed by our language to the French tributary that so enriched its main street, but it seems strange that in his hospitable mind, in which Alfred's England held so large a place, he should not have found room for an appreciation of the Saxon structure of Chaucer and for all that makes him unmistakably one in a line of which Cadman was the first great poet. In this book, only his debt to France is stressed because England is to be thought of as part of Europe and the part she is a part of is apparently France. Yet what excellent things there are in the book. The great poets exist to show the small man how great he is. The great poet is alone strong enough to measure that broken strength we call the weakness of man. The real vice of the Victorians was that they regarded history as a story that ended well because it ended with the Victorians. They turned all human records into one three volume novel and were quite sure that they themselves were the third volume. He quotes Troilus and Cressida on the Christian Magistry of the Mystery of Marriage. Any man who really understands it does not see a Greek king sitting on an ivory throne nor a feudal lord sitting on a false stool but God in a primordial garden granting the most gigantic of the joys of the children of men. When we talk of wild poetry, we sometimes forget the parallel of wild flowers. They exist to show that a thing may be more modest and delicate for being wild. Romance was a strange byproduct of religion. All the more because religion through some of its representatives may have regretted having produced it. Even the church, as imperfectly represented on its human side, contrived to inspire even what it had denounced and transformed even what it had abandoned. The best chapter is the last, the moral of the story and that moral is that no man should desert that Catholic civilization. It can cure itself, but those who leave it cannot cure it. Not Nestorius, not Muhammad, nor Calvin, nor Lenin have cured nor will cure the real evils of Christendom for the severed hand does not heal the whole body. Healing must come from the recovery of the norm, of the balance of the equilibrium that medieval philosophy and culture were always seeking. The meaning of Aquinas is that medievalism was always seeking a center of gravity. The meaning of Chaucer is that when found, it was always a center of gaiety. The name of Aquinas, thus introduced on almost the last page of this book, shows Chesterton's mind already busy on the next, and perhaps the most important book of his life, St. Thomas Aquinas. Great news this, wrote Shah de Francis, about the Divine Doctor. I've been preaching for years that intellect is a passion that will finally become the most aesthetic of all passions and I've cherished Thomas as the most praiseworthy creature for being my forerunner on this point. When we were told that Gilbert was writing a book on St. Thomas and that we might have the American rights, my husband felt a faint quiver of apprehension. Was Chesterton for once undertaking a task beyond his knowledge? Such masses of research had recently been done on St. Thomas by experts of such high standing and he could not possibly have read it all. Nor should we have been entirely reassured had we heard what Dorothy Collins told us later concerning the writing of it. He began by rapidly dictating to Dorothy about half the book. So far he had consulted no authorities, but at this stage he said to her, I want you to go to London and get me some books. What books? asked Dorothy. I don't know, said G.K. She wrote therefore to Father O'Connor and from him got a list of classic and more recent books on St. Thomas. G.K. flipped them rapidly through which is, says Dorothy, the only way she ever saw him read and then dictated to her the rest of his own book without referring to them again. There are no marks on any of them except a little sketch of St. Thomas which was drawn in the margin opposite a description of the affair which G.K. so vividly dramatizes of Sigurd de Brabant. Had we known all this we should have been asking ourselves even more definitely. What will the experts say? The verdict of the greatest of them we were not long left in doubt. Etienne Gilson who had given two of the most famous of philosophical lecture series the Guilford Lectures at Aberdeen and the William James Lectures at Harvard had begun his admiration for Chesterton with gray beards at play and had thought orthodoxy the best piece of apologetic the century had produced. When St. Thomas appeared he said to a friend of mine Chesterton makes one despair. I've been studying St. Thomas all my life and I could never have written such a book after Gilbert Stath asked to give an appreciation he returned to the same topic. I consider it as being without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for such an achievement. Everybody will no doubt admit that it was a clever book but the few readers who have spent 20 or 30 years in studying St. Thomas Aquinas and who perhaps have themselves published two or three volumes on the subject cannot fail to perceive that the so-called wit of Chesterton has put their scholarship to shame. He has guessed all that which they had tried to demonstrate and he has said all that which they were more or less clumsily attempting to express in academic formulas. Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed. He was deep because he was right and he could not help being right but he could not either help being modest and charitable so he left it to those who could understand him to know that he was right and deep. To others he apologized for being right and he made up for being deep by being witty. That is all they can see of him. Chesterton by Cyril Clemens pages 150 to 151. In joining church Chesterton had found like all converts from St. Paul to Cardinal Newman that he had come into the land of liberty especially of intellectual liberty. Conversion he said calls on a man to stretch his mind as a man awakening from sleep may stretch his arms and legs well and shallows page 130. I suppose one reason why the surrounding world finds it hard to receive this statement from a convert is that he is only to look around him to see so many Catholics wrapped in slumbers as placid as the next man's. To this very real difficulty and to all its implications Chesterton unfortunately seldom averted to that scandal wrought by evil Catholics historical or contemporary he was not blind. He summarized one element in the Reformation Conflict Bad men who had no right to their right reason good men who had good reason to be wrong. But I wish that with his rare insight into minds he had analyzed as average Catholics. He might have startled us awake by explaining to non-Catholics how those who know such truths and feed upon such food can yet appear so dull and lifeless. Anyhow, whether the fault lie in part with us or entirely with the world at large certain it is that in that world a convert is always expected to justify not merely his beliefs but his sincerity in continuing to hold them. I wonder if the Pharisees said to St. Paul that they were sure he really wanted to return to his old allegiance as some said it of Newman or spoke as Arnold Bennett did that he accused Chesterton of being modernist in his secret thoughts. Were St. Paul's epistles an apologia provita sua? An apologia does not of course mean an apology but a justification. And the ground on which justification was sometimes demanded amused Gilbert rather than annoying him. Playing the parlor game which consists of guessing at what point in an article on hydraulics, or Neoplatonism, Dean Inge will burst into his daily attack on the church he wrote. The Dean of St. Paul's got to business. In a paragraph in the second half of his article in which he unveiled to his readers all the horrors of a quotation from Newman a very shocking and shameful passage in which the degraded apostate says that he is happy in his religion and being surrounded by things of his religion that he likes to have objects that have been blessed holy and beloved and that there is a sense of being protected by prayers sacramentals and so on and that happiness of this sort satisfies the soul. The Dean having given us this one ghastly glimpse of the cardinal's spiritual condition drops the curtain with a groan and says it is paganism. How different from the Christian orthodoxy of Plotinus. The thing pages 156 to 157 this playful, not to say frivolous tone this fresh cause of annoyance to those who were apt to be annoyed. It is easier to understand the objection than the opposite one. That he became dull and prosy after he joined the church or alternatively after he left Fleet Street for Beckinsfield. The only real difficulty about his leader work arises from the riot of his high spirits. In his own style I must say there are moments when even I want to read the riot act to admire him less, feel this more keenly. Bad puns they say, wild and sometimes ill mannered jokes are perhaps pardonable in youth but in middle age they're inexcusable. The complainants against the thing are in substance the complainants against orthodoxy grown more vehement with the passage of years. The idea had been adumbrated of calling one of his books a joking apart and only rejected because of the fear that if he said he was not joking everyone would be quite certain that he was. This greatly amused GK and he began the book it actually appeared as the well and the shallows with an apology for buffoons. After defending the human instinct of punning he remarked that many moderns suffer from the disease of the suppressed pun. They are actuated even in their thinking by merely verbal association. I for one greatly prefer the sort of frivolity that is thrown to the surface like froth to the sort of frivolity that festers under the surface like slime. To pelt an enemy with a foolish pun or two will never do him any grave injustice. The firework is obviously a firework and not a deadly fire. It may be playing to the gallery but even the gallery knows it is only playing. Well and shallows pages 11 and 12. Such playing was a necessity if the gallery i.e. all the people were to be made to listen. If the things you were thinking about were important to them as well as to yourself. If the ideas were more important than the dignity or reputation of the person who uttered them. In this book Gilbert sketched briefly one side of his reason for feeling these ideas of paramount importance for everybody. My six conversions concerned reasons given him by the world that would have made him become a Catholic if he were not one already. He even brought up to treasure liberty and in his boyhood the world had seemed freer than the church. In the world of fascism, communism and bureaucracy the church alone offered a reasoned liberty. He had been brought up to reverence certain ideals of purity. Today they were laughed at everywhere but in the church. And the sure conclusions of science that had stood for square in his boyhood had become like a dissolving view. Liberalism had abdicated when the people of Spain freely chose the church and English liberals defended the forcing upon them there are no fascists, there are no socialists there are no liberals, there are no parliamentarians. There is the one supremely inspiring and irritating institution in the world and there are its enemies. Above all he felt increasingly as time went on that those who left the faith did not get freedom but merely fashion. There was something ironic in the name the atheists chose when they called themselves secularists. By definition they had tied themselves in the name of this world that passeth away. These six conversions then were what the world would have forced upon them. The church as an alternative to a continually worsening civilization. While he hated the utopias of the futurists and while he accepted the Christian view of life as a probation he felt to that life today was abnormally degraded and unhappy. There is a sense in which men may be made normally happy but there is another sense in which we may truly say without undue paradox that what they want is to get back to their normal unhappiness. At present they are suffering from an utterly abnormal unhappiness. They have got all the tragic elements essential to the human lot to contend with time and death and bereavement and unrequited affection and satisfaction with themselves but they have not got the elements of consolation and encouragement that ought normally to renew their hopes or restore their self-respect. They have not got vision or a conviction or the mastery of their work or the loyalty of their household or any form of human dignity. Even the latest utopias, the last lingering representatives of that faded and unfortunate race, do not really promise the modern man that he shall do anything or own anything or in any effectual fashion be anything. They only promise that if he keeps his eyes open he will see something. He will see the universal trust or the world state or Lord Melchett coming in the clouds in glory but the modern man cannot even keep his eyes open. He is too weary with toil and long succession of unsuccessful utopias. He has fallen asleep. GK's Weekly, October 20th, 1928 Chestered and demanded urgently that the worldlings who had failed to make the world workable should abdicate. The organic thing called religion has in fact the organs that take hold on life. It can feed where the fastidious doubter finds no food. It can reproduce where the solitary skeptic boasts of being barren. In short, in religion alone was Darwin justified. For Catholicism was the spiritual survival of the fittest from the well and shallows, page 82. If these six conversions are read without the balancing of something deeper, they have the superficial look that belongs to necessity to apologetics. Some essays in the well and the shallows most of the thing, Christendom and Dublin and above all the Queen of Seven Swords, give us that deeper, quieter thinking when the mind is meditating upon the great mysteries of the faith. Only very occasionally is it possible to glimpse beneath Gilbert's reserve but such glimpses are illuminating. Father Walker who prepared him for his first communion writes, it was one of the happy duties I have ever to perform that he was perfectly well aware of the immensity of the real presence on the morning of his first communion can be gathered from the fact that he was covered with perspiration when he actually received our Lord. When I was congratulating him he said, I have spent the happiest hour of my life. Yet he went but seldom to Holy Communion and an unfinished letter to Father Walker gives the reason. The trouble with me is that I am much too frightened of that tremendous reality on the altar. I have not grown up with it and it is too much for me. I think I am morbid but I want to be told so by authority. And in Christendom in Dublin he says the word Eucharist is but a verbal symbol. We might say a vague verbal mask for something so tremendous that the assertion and the denial of it have a like seemed a blasphemy. A blasphemy that has shaken the world with the earthquake of 2000 years. I have heard it said that in these later years Gilbert's writing became obscure and I think it is partly true. Only partly for the old clarity is still there except when he is dealing with matters almost too deep for human speech. He wrote in The Thing A thinking man can think himself deeper and deeper into Catholicism. Great mysteries like the Blessed Trinity or the Blessed Sacrament are the starting point for trains of thought. Stimulating, subtle and even individual to accept the Logos as a truth is to be in the atmosphere of the absolute not only with St John the Evangelist but with Plato and all the great mystics of the world. To exalt the mass is to enter into a magnificent world of metaphysical ideas illuminating all the relations of matter in mind flesh and spirit of the most in personal abstractions as well as the most personal affections. Even what are called doctrinal distinctions are not dull. They are like the finest operations of surgery separating nerve from nerve but giving life. It is easy enough to flatten out everything around for miles with dynamite if our only object is to give death but just as the physiologist is dealing with living tissues so the theologian is dealing with living ideas and if he draws a line between them it is naturally a very fine line. If there appears that contradiction in the picture of Chesterton the philosopher pondering on the Logos and Chesterton the child offering trinkets to our lady we may remember the eternal wisdom playing in the world playing before God always whose delight it is to be with the children of men. End of Chapter 30 Chapter 31 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Larry Wilson Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward The Living Voice Chesterton spoke once of the keen joy for the intellect of discovering the causes of things but he was not greatly interested in science he would have said that although the physical sciences did represent an advance in the grasp of truth it was in the words of Browning only the very superficial truth he desired a knowledge of causes that did not dwell simply on what was secondary but led back to the first and final cause to the medieval thinker science was fascinating as philosophy's little sister it was to philosophy what nature was to man nature had been to St. Francis a little lovely dancing sister science had been to St. Thomas the handmaid of philosophy the modern world thought these proportions fantastic Huxley used nature as a word for God physical science had ousted philosophy an American friend lately told me of a girl who asked if she believed in God replied sure I believe in God but I'm not nuts about him Gilbert was not nuts about science therefore in a world that saw nothing else to be nuts about he was called its enemy and as with other things taken more solemnly by most moderns he preferred to get fun out of the inventions of the age he wrote in a fairly early number of GK's weekly Eskimo song so that audience in Chicago will have the advantage of hearing Eskimo singing or words to that effect wireless program oh who would not want such a wonderful thing as the pleasure of hearing the Eskimo sing I wish I had Eskimos out on the lawn or perched on the window to wake me at dawn with Eskimos singing in every tree oh that would be glory be glory for me oh list to the song that the Eskimos sing when the penguin would be if he could on the wing would soar to the sun if he could like the lark but for most of the time it's totally dark or hark to the Bacchanal songs that resound when they're making a night of it half the year round and carousing for months till the morning is pale go home with the milk of the walrus and whale oh list to the sweet serenades that are hers who expensively gowned in most elegant furs leans forth from the lattice delighted to know that her heart is like ice and her hand is like snow God bless all the dear little people who roam and hail in the icebergs the hills of their home for I might not object to be listening then if I hadn't to hear the whole program began and the president preached international peace and parasites show an alarming increase and a justice at bootle excused the police and how to clean trousers when spotted with grease and a pianist biting his wife from Caprice and an imminent Baptist's arrival at Nice and a banker's regrettably painless disease and the new quarantine for the plucking of geese and a mad millionaires unobtrusive release and Marquess divorced by a user's niece if all of these items could suddenly cease and leave me with one satisfactory thing I really should like to hear Eskimo sing it was hardly the expression of an attitude to science but he did have such an attitude life was to him a story told by God the people in it the characters in the story but since the story was told by God it was quite literally a magic story a fairy story a story full of wonders created by a divine will as a child a toy telephone rigged up by his father from the house to the end of the garden had breathed that magic quality more than the transatlantic cable could reveal it in later life it did not need mechanical inventions to make him see life as marvellous his overruling interest was not in mechanics but in will the will of God had created the laws of nature that could supersede them the will of man could discover these laws and harness them to its purposes God is where you find it and the value of science depends on the will of man a position which may not sound so absurd in the light of the harnessing of science to the purposes of destruction when discussing machines we sometimes tend to overlook the quiet and even bashful presence of the machine-gun there was an impiness in Gilbert especially in his youth that encouraged the idea of his enmity to science where he saw a long white beard he felt like tweaking it an inquiry no simply asked to be polled it was only in comparatively sober age that he bothered in the everlasting man to explain quote, I'm not at issue in this book with sincere and genuine scholars but with a vast and vague public opinion which has been prematurely spread from certain imperfect investigations unquote the everlasting man, page 67 that vast and vague public opinion certainly suspected him of irreverence even towards sincere and genuine scholars yet it was by his use of the most marvelous of modern inventions that he won in the end the widest hearing among the public that he had ever known it is not so many years ago that we donned earphones and a doubtful hope to hear something over the radio it is the less surprising that it was only in the last few years of his life that Gilbert became first interested in the invention and presently one of the broadcasters most in request by the BBC he felt about the radio as he did about most modern inventions that they were splendid opportunities that were not being taken or else were being taken to the harm of humanity by the wrong people it was the use of calling all countries if you had nothing to say to them what much modern science fails to realize, he wrote is that there is little use in knowing without thinking and again writing about the amazing discoveries of the day, quote nobody is taking the smallest trouble to consider who in the future will be in command of the electricity incapable of giving us the shocks with all the shouting about the new marvels hardly anybody utters a word or even a whisper about how they are to be prevented from turning into the old abuses people sometimes wonder why we not inked frequently referred to the old scandal covered by the word Marconi it is precisely because all these things are really covered by that word there could not be a shorter statement of the contradiction than a man howling that word as a discovery and hushing it up as a story unquote particularly August 15, 1925 for the thing that really frightened him about the radio was its possibilities as a new instrument of tyranny the British broadcasting company holds in England a monopoly and is to a considerable extent under government control it is possible to forbid advertising programs because the costs are met by tax of 10 shillings a year levied on the possession of a radio set in an article called Unseen Catastrophe January 28, 1928 Gilbert wrote quote suppose you had told some of the old wigs let alone liberals that there was an entirely new type of printing press eclipsing all others and that as this was to be given to the king all printing would henceforth be government printing they would be roaring like rebels or even regicides yet that is exactly what we have done with the new invention of wireless suppose it were proposed that the king's officers should search all private houses to make sure there were no printing presses they would be ready for a new revolution yet that is exactly what is proposed for the protection of the government monopoly of broadcasting there is really no protection against propaganda being entirely in the hands of the government except indeed the incredible empty-headedness of those who govern on that sort of thing at least we are all socialists now it is wicked to nationalize mines or railroads but we lose no time in nationalizing tongues and talk we might once have used and we shall now never use the 20th century science against the 19th century hypocrisy it was prevented by a swift sweeping and intolerant state monopoly a monster suddenly swallowing all rivals alternatives discussions or delays a trap of its gigantic jaws that is what I mean by saying we cannot see the monsters that overcome us but I suppose even Jonah when once he was swallowed could not see the whale end quote in the summer of 1932 Gilbert was first asked to undertake a series of radio talks for the BBC everyone seems agreed that he was an extraordinary success letters from Broadcasting House are full of such remarks as you do it admirably quite suburb at the microphone in one his work is called unique radio was now added to all his other activities during the four years he still had to live Dorothy kept a diary in which she noted in one year the giving of as many as 40 lectures and entered reminders of engagements of the most varying kinds all over England from the Kings Garden party to the Ellsbury Education Committee and the Oxford Union to Scotland for rectorial campaigns dinners at the inner temple and the philosophical society detection club dinners and mock trials at one of which he was defended on the charge of perversely preferring the past to the present besides the books discussed in the last chapter the Dickens introductions and the collective poems were republished in 1933 other books were planned including one on Shakespeare that same year Gible's mother died during her last illness Francis was torn between London and Beaconsfield for her own mother was dying in a nursing home at Beaconsfield her mother-in-law at Warwick Gardens once I drove her between the two and she told me how she suffered at the difficulty of giving help to two dying agnostics she told me on that drive how she knew her mother-in-law had not liked her but had lately made her very happy by saying she realized that she had been the right wife for Gilbert to a cousin Nora Gross Jean Francis spoke too of how she and Mrs. Edward had drawn together in those last days and she added no mother ever thinks any woman good enough for her son Nora Gross Jean also reports Aunt Marie said to me more than once I always respect Francis she kept Gilbert out of debt Warwick Gardens had been their home so long that vast populations of papers had piled up there Mr. Ed too had been a sort of keeper of the family archives Gilbert glanced at the mass and as I mentioned at the beginning of this book told the dustman to carry it off half had already gone when Dorothy Collins arrived and saved the remainder she piled it into her car and drove back to Beaconsfield Gilbert keeping up a running commentary all the way on the hoarding habits of women the money that came to Gilbert Mrs. Edward's death made it possible for them to plan legacies not only for friends and relatives but also for the Catholic Church in Beaconsfield with which they had increasingly identified their lives and their interests their special dream was that top meadow itself should be a convent best of all a school and in this hope they bequeathed it to the church a year later another family event this time a joyful one took Gilbert back to his youth Molly Kidd, daughter of Annie Ferman became engaged to be married she was a rather special young cousin to Gilbert both because of the old affection for her mother and because she had played hostess to him in Canada when her mother was ill he wrote, quote postmark August 28, 1934 by dear Molly I am afraid that chronologically or by the clock I'm relatively late in sending you my most warm congratulations and yet I do assure you that I write as one still thrilled and almost throbbing with good news it would take pages to tell you all I feel about it beginning with my first memory of your mother when she was astonishingly like you except that she had yellow plates of hair down her back I do not absolutely insist that you should now imitate her in this but you would not be far wrong if you imitate her in anything and so on till we come to the superb rhetorical passage about you and the right fulfillment of you it would take pages and that is why the pages are never written we bad correspondents we vile non-writers of letters have a sort of secret excuse that no one will ever listen to till the day of judgment when all infinite patients will have to listen to so much it is often because we think so much about our friends that we do not write to them the letters would be too long especially in the case of wretched writing men like me who feel in their spare time that writing is loosome and thinking about their friends pleasant in the course of turning out about ten articles on Hitler on humanism, on determinism on distributism, on Dolphus and Darwin and the devil knows what there really are thoughts about real people that cross my mind suddenly and make me really happy in a real way and one of them is the news of your engagement with me dear Molly that I am writing the truth though I am a journalist and give my congratulations to everyone involved, yours with love G.K. Chesterton and in that year came two bits of public recognition of rather different kinds he was elected to the Athenian club under rule two on Uruscauza and he and Belich were given by the pope the title of night commander during these years the paper had gone steadily on at some considerable inconvenience because he said he still felt it had a part to play at home and abroad the scene had been steadily darkening in July 1933 years before Hitler came to chancellorship we find the following among the notes of the week quote, when we are told that the ancient marshal Hindenburg is now dictator of Germany we suspect a note of exaggeration Hindenburg never was the dictator of anything and never will be he is however the man who keeps the seat warm for a dictator to come Hindenburg has led us back to Frederick the Great Hindenburg has now given reign to the extreme nationalists with the delivered provinces to support him in the flush of patriotism and the extreme nationalists have only one policy to reconstitute the unjust frontiers of Germany which Europe fought to amend in 1931 had come the customs union between Germany and Austria the obvious impotence of the league of nations to restain Japan the national government and the falling sterling in England less than two years later Hitler was chancellor of Germany and in 1934 came the murder of Dolphus Chesterton wrote of the tragedy whereby the name Germany was taken from Austria and given to Prussia with Dolphus fell all that was left of the Holy Roman Empire the barbarians had invaded the center of our civilization and like the Turks besieging Vienna has struck at its heart he regarded Hitler merely as the tool of Prussianism the new paganism was the logical outcome of the old Prussianism it was too the apotheosis of tyranny quote in the pagan state in antiquity or modernity you cannot appeal from tyranny to God because the tyranny is the God the book solemnly warned our country that we were making inevitable the death and great pain of innumerable young Englishmen now boys it may be in two years or in five or in ten the blow will fall November 8, 1934 yet even this seemed less terrible to Chesterton than the state of mind then prevailing the mood nay the fever of pacifism that demanded the isolation of England from Europe's peril and maficking for peace a sort of imperialism that forgot that the Atlantic is wider than the Straits of Dover and allowed Lord Beaverbrook to regard England as part of Canada Englishmen who have felt that fever will one day look back on it with shame this most noble and generous nation he wrote with a note of agony which lost its religion in the 17th century as lost its morals in the 20th the League of Nations had, G.K. held to be a kind of Pentecost but had in reality come together to rebuild the tower of Babel and this because it had no common basis in religion quote, humanitarianism does not unite humanity for even one isolated man is half divine unquote but today man had disparate a man quote, hope for the superman is another name for despair of man unquote reading a recent commentary in a book I suddenly saw that politics and economics were not what mattered most in the paper the commentary in question was to the effect that G.K.'s weekly was inferior to the new witness because G.K. had only general principles and ideas and no detailed inside knowledge of how the world of finance and politics was going looking again through the articles I had marked as the most characteristically his I saw that they were not only chiefly about principles but also that they were mostly pure poetry Chesterton was I believe greatest and most permanently effective when he was moved not by a passing irritation with the things that pass but by the great emotions evoked by the eternal emotions which in eternity alone will find full fruition there are in the paper articles in which appearing to speak out of his own knowledge he is merely repeating information given him by Belak and it was quite out of Chesterton's character to write with certainty about what he did not know with certainty hence this writing is his weakest but the paper has too some of his strongest work and his mind as he drew to the end of life lingered on thoughts that had haunted him in its beginning quote before the war war had introduced me to politics or worse still to politicians he wrote in a Christmas article in 1934 I had some vague and groping ideas of my own about a general view or vision of existence it was a long time before I had anything worth calling a religion but I had was not even sufficiently coherent to be called a philosophy but it was in a sense a view of life I had it in the beginning and I am more and more coming back to it in the end my original and almost mystical conviction of the miracle of all existence and the essential excitement of all experience unquote December 6th 1934 this he felt must be the profound philosophy by which distributism should succeed and whereby he tested the modern world and found it wanting quote something of which Christmas is the best traditional symbol it was then no more than a notion about the point at which extremes meet and the most common thing becomes a cosmic and mystical thing I did not want so much to alter the place of things as to weight them with a new dimension to deepen them by going down to the potential nothing to lift them to affinity by measuring from zero the most logical form of this is in thanks to a creator but at every stage I felt that such praises could never rise too high because they could not even reach the height of our own thanks for unthinkable existence or horror of more unthinkable nonexistence and the commonest things as much as the most complex could thus leap up like fountains of praise we shall need a sort of distributive psychology as well as a distributive philosophy that is partly why I am not content with plausible solutions about credit or a corporative rule we need a new or old theory and practice of pleasure the vulgar school of panem et sersensis only gives people circuses it does not even tell them how to enjoy circuses but we have not merely to tell them how to enjoy circuses we have to tell them how to enjoy enjoyment december 13, 1934 in attacking a special abuse chesterton was most successful when he took the thought to a deeper depth the following christmas 1935 he wrote we live in a terrible time of war and rumor of war international idealism and its effort to hold the world together is admittedly weakened and often disappointed I should say simply that it does not go deep enough if we really wish to make vivid the horrors of destruction and mere discipline murder we must see them more simply as attacks on the hearth and the human family and feel about hitler as men felt about hered the modern world tended to gild pure gold and then tried to scrape the guilt off with gingerbread to paint the lily and then complain of its godliness thus it had vulgarized christmas and now demanded the abolition of christmas because it was vulgar it was the truth he had emphasized years ago in contrast with Shaw the world has spoiled the ideas but it was the christian ideas the world needed if only in order to recover the human ideas he went on, quote if we want to talk about poverty we must talk about it as the hunger of a human being we must first say of the beggar not that there is insufficient housing accommodation but that he has not where to lay his head we must talk of the human family in languages plain and practical and positive as that in which the mystics used to talk of the holy family we must learn again to use the naked words that describe a natural thing then we shall draw on the driving force of many thousand years to develop a real humanitarianism out of the depths of humanity, unquote I should like to collect all the essays and poems on christmas he wrote several every year yet each is different each goes to the heart of his thought as Christopher Morley says, quote one of the simple greatnesses of G.K.C. shows in this that we think of him instinctively toward christmas time, unquote Mark Twain quarterly spring 1937 some men it may be our best mood to reform by hate but Chesterton was best moved by love and nowhere does that love shine more clearly than in all he wrote about christmas it will be for this philosophy this charity, this poetry that men will turn over the pages of G.K.'s weekly a century hence if the world still lasts it is for us who are his followers to see that they are truly creative destruction of evil is a great work but if it leaves only a vacuum nature abhors that vacuum creation is what matters for the future and Chesterton's writing is creative so too with the radio in this new medium his mind was alert to present his new old ideas his fundamental philosophy of life after some fresh fashion a letter from the broadcasting house, November 2nd, 1932 after his first talk records the delight of all who heard it quote the building rings with your praises I knew I was not alone in my delight over your first talk I think even you in your modesty will find some pleasure in hearing what widespread interest there is in what you are doing you bring us something very rare to the microphone I am most anxious that you should be with us till after Christmas you will have a vast public by Christmas and it is good that they should hear you would you undertake six further fortnightly talks from January 16th onwards he was asked to submit a manuscript but promised he should not be kept to the letter of it we should like you to make variations as these occur to you as you speak at the microphone only so can the talk have a real show of spontaneity about it you will forgive me one official writes if I insist on speaking to you personally that is how I think of our relations G.K. was unique and they told him so a lot of reading was necessary for these talks each one dealing with from four to ten books and also a principle of selection the principle Gilbert chose for one series was historical quote, literature lives by history otherwise it exists like trigonometry unquote in the fifth talk of the autumn series of 1934 he gives a general idea of what he has been attempting quote this is the hardest job I have had in all these wireless talks and I confront you in a spirit of hatred because of the toils I have endured on your behalf but after all what are my sufferings compared to yours incredible as it may seem to anybody who has heard these talks they had originally a certain consistent plan I dealt first with the heroic and half legendary stories touched upon medieval chivalry then on the party heroes of Elisabethan or Puritan times then on the 18th century and then the 19th in this address I had meant to face the 20th century but I find it almost faceless largely featureless and anyhow very bewildering I had meant to take books typical of the 20th century as a book on steel is typical of the 18th or a book on Rosetti of the 19th and I have collected a number of most interesting 20th century books claiming to declare a 20th century philosophy they really have a common quality but I rather hesitate to define it suppose I said that the main mark of the 20th century in ethics as in economics is bankruptcy I fear you might think I was a little hostile in my criticism suppose I said that all these books are marked by a brilliant futility you might almost fancy that I was not entirely friendly to them you would be mistaken all of them are good some of them are very good indeed but the question does recur what is the good of being good in that way Mr. Jeffrey West Curious post-war credo has one commandment he does say, he does shout we might say he does yell that there must be no war but he cannot impose his view because authority is gone and he cannot prove his view because reason has gone again it all comes back to taste and I have enjoyed the banquet of these excellent books but it leaves a bad taste to my mouth unquote the peculiar half-official half-private direction of broadcasting house is based on a theory of strict impartiality towards all opinions and an attempt simply to give the public the programs that the public wants whether it is possible to maintain such a position is another question in the theory there is no doubt and one result is an abiding uncertainty of mine in most of the officials broadcasting house hangs suspended in the air of public opinion and that fickle breath leaves them in no security as to any of their artists the resulting sensitiveness became sued as the months passed on and they got as near to trusting Chesterton as they ever come with anyone true letters came attacking him but far more enthusiastically approving of him and the attacks he answered often by private letters that turned the critic into a friend some of his suggestions were not acceptable he was warned off for proposed humorous talk about Dean Inge and Bishop Barnes in a series called speeches that never happened subject to serious avoid religion but he was later asked to talk in a series on freedom as Catholic and also to debate with Mr. Burton Russell on who should bring up our children in this debate he was especially brilliant says Maurice Barron and another friend wrote, quote, I have just been listening not without joy to your putting it across Mr. Burton Russell afterthought what a mincer it struck me very much having read much of his writing with interest it just shows that the spoken word still has something that the written one can't convey is there a mincing mind of which a mincing voice would be an awkward and visible warning unquote it was interesting that the last few years of Gilbert's life should have furnished this unique opportunity of contact through the spoken word between him and the English people his voice on the radio had none of the defects that marred it in the hall his material was far better arranged his delivery perfect he seemed to be there beside the listener talking in amity and exchanging confidences Mr. MacDonald passed a barber shop off Chancey Lane the man was lathering a customer's face but recognizing Mr. MacDonald left the customer and ran out brush in hand I just want to say I was sorry to hear the news he said he was a grand man Mr. MacDonald asked him if he knew Chesterton well never read a word he wrote the barber answered but I always listened to him on the wireless channel comments emphasized what I still think that GKC in another year or so would have become the dominating voice from Broadcasting House in 1934 Gilbert had jaundice and on his recovery he started with Francis and Dorothy on one of those trips that were his greatest pleasure they went to Rome it was Holy Year and then to Sicily intending to go on to Palestine at Syracuse however Gilbert became really ill by the nerves of the neck and shoulders they stayed five weeks in Syracuse gave up the trip to Palestine and returned home by Malta Gilbert and Francis were to have dined at Admiralty House but he was too unwell to dine out and only came up one afternoon Lady Fisher remembers going to see them at the Osborne Hotel Gilbert was sitting on a rickety basket chair obviously in pain and talking a good deal in order to hide it he sympathized with him for the cold weather his obvious physical misery and the discomfort of his chair you must never sympathize with me Gilbert answered for I can always turn every chair into a story the next year they motored in France and Italy and Gilbert records in the autobiography an experience in a French cafe when he felt a rare thrill not in talking on the radio but in listening on a day that quote was dateless even for my dateless life I had forgotten time and had no notion of anything anywhere when in a small French town I strolled into a cafe noisy with French talk wireless songs welled and noted which is not surprising for French talk is much better than wireless and then unaccountably I heard a voice speaking in English and a voice I had heard before for I heard the words wherever you are my dear people whether in this country or beyond the sea and I remembered monarchy and an ancient cry for it was the king and that was how I kept the jubilee unquote after he got home I remember how delightedly Gilbert quoted the captions on two banners hung in the heart of the London slums one read down with capitalism God save the king the other read lousy but loyal he knew that it was true and it served to increase the passionate quality of his pity patient he could be for himself but the lot of the poor aroused in him a terrible anger and in a broadcast on liberty he gave that anger vet for worse than the presence of lice in our slums was the absence of liberty he would gladly he said have spoken merely as an Englishman but he had been asked to speak as a Catholic and therefore quote I'm going to point out that Catholicism created English liberty and that the freedom has remained exactly insofar as the faith has remained and that where it is true that all our faith has gone all our freedom is going if I do this I cannot ask most of you to agree with me if I had anything else I could not ask for any of you to respect me quote other speakers in the series had dwelt on the liberty secured to Englishmen by our parliamentary and juridical system both he noted of Catholic origin but in his eyes even that liberty was imperiled today where it was not lost while the most important freedom of all freedom to handle oneself and one's daily life had disappeared for the mass of people the liberty so widely praised that followed the reformation quote has been a limited liberty because it was only a literary liberty you always talked about verbal liberty you hardly ever talked about vital liberty the fattest was free to preach his fans but the free man was no longer free to protect his freedom monarchy aristocracy democracy responsible forms of rule have collapsed under plutocracy which is responsible rule and this has come upon us because we departed from the old morality in three essential points first we supported notions against normal customs second we made the state top heavy with a new and secretive tyranny of wealth and third we forgot that there is no faith in freedom without faith and free will the servile fatalism dogs the creed of materialism because nothing as Dante said less than the generosity of God could give to man after all ordinary orderly gifts the noblest of all things which is liberty the thoughts that had thronged impressed on him for half a century found final expression in these broadcasts most of all in two talks one giving only three months before his death in a series entitled the spice of life the other two years earlier in one called seven days hard he was haunted by the ingratitude of humanity as in his boyhood he saw the wonder of the world that God has given to the children of men and he saw them unconscious of that wonder what did a week mean for most of them seven full days what did it really mean what has really happened during the last seven days and nights seven times we have been dissolved into darkness as we shall be dissolved into dust our very selves so far as we know have been wiped out of the world of living things and seven times we have been raised alive like Lazarus and found all our limbs and senses unaltered with the coming of the day unquote seven days of human life the meaning of the phrase the spice of life both brought the same running motif unquote a great many people are at this moment paying rather too much attention to the spice of life and rather too little attention to life unquote not in any quote distraction from life is the secret we are all seeking the secret of adjoining life I am perfectly certain that all our world will end in despair unless there is some way of making the mind itself the ordinary thoughts we have at ordinary times more healthy and more happy just now to judge by most modern novels and poems unquote a week had never been for Chesterton just seven days hard although he had worked hard enough he had enjoyed the spice of life he had liked beer and skittles and the distractions of life and his high points of achievement quote but it is much more important to remember that I have been intensely and imaginatively happy in the queerst because the quietest places I have been filled with life from within a cold waiting room in a deserted wellway junction I have been completely alive sitting on an iron seat under an ugly lamp post at a third rate watering place in short I have experienced the mere excitement of existence in places that would commonly be called as dull as ditch water and by the way is ditch water dull naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun unquote the younger generation were despairing of life in the face of life's manifold gifts Chesterton as a youth had revolted against the pessimism of his elders now he revolted as an old man against a young generation corroded by yet more poisonous pessimism the hollow men T.S.Elliot had called the poem and in it came the lines this is the way the world ends this is the way the world ends not with a bang but a whimper quote forgive me if I say in my old world fashion that I am damned if I ever felt like that I knew that the world was perishable and would end but I did not think it would end with a whimper but if anything with a trump of doom I will even be so indecently frivolous as to burst into song and say to the young pessimists some sneer some snigger some semper in the youth where we laughed and sang and they may end with a whimper but we will end with a bang unquote his last message for this generation was the sound of a trumpet calling us to resurrection a dead world must find life again must go back to the meaning of the book of Genesis at which he had learnt to sneer must realize a week once more with quote the grandeur of that conception that has become a wonderful and mystical thing in which man imitates God in his labor and in his rest unquote through this call sounds a note of most solemn warning quote unless we can bring men back to enjoying the daily life which moderns call a dull life our whole civilization will be in ruins in about 15 years whenever anybody proposes anything really practical to solve the economic evil today there always is that the solution would not work because the modern town populations would think life dull that is because they are entirely unacquainted with life they know nothing but distractions from life dreams which may be found in the cinema that is brief oblivions of life unless we can make daybreak and daily bread and the creative secrets of labor interesting in themselves there will fall on our civilization a fatigue which is the disease from which civilizations do not recover so died the great pagan civilization a bread in circuses and forgetfulness of the household gods unquote the listener January 31st 1934 this splendid world that God has given us and the furniture of it is as the writer of Genesis saw it in his vision as in it the material happiness of labor and in the true end of labor quote for the true end of all creation is completion and the true end of all completion is contemplation unquote end of chapter 36 chapter 32 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward last days Dorothy told me one day in 1935 that Gilbert had written the beginning of an autobiography some years before but had laid it aside she had she said a superstitious feeling about urging him to get on with it as though the survey of his life and the end of his life would somehow be tied together I urged her to get over this feeling because of all the book would mean to the world after this talk she got out the manuscript and laid it on Gilbert's desk he read what he had written and immediately said about dictating the rest of the book early in 1936 he told a group of friends that the book was finished one of them said nook de mitis and Edward McDonald who was present commented they were chilling though he seemed to be in fairly good health but certainly he was tired the book showed no sign of fatigue high-spirited and intensely amusing it seemed to promise many more for into almost old age he had carried the imagination and energy in which as a very young man we saw his resemblance to the youthful dickens reviewing his life with a thread of thanksgiving that had been he looked back on it as indefensively happy and it wasn't truth a rich and full human existence yet Father Vincent who knew him intimately speaks of him in these last years as heartbroken by public events as suffering with the pains of creation who it's crucified to his thought like St. Thomas he was never away from his thought the fellow friar had to care for Thomas to feed him because of his absorption in his thought thus Father Vincent saw Francis cherishing Gilbert both mind and body a friend protesting vehemently against the phrase crucified to his thought says it was his lifelong beatitude to observe and ponder and conclude of his own so-called paradoxes Gilbert was wont to maintain that it was God not he in here we have surely one of the paradoxes of human life intense vitality joy and living vigor of creative thought brought to their owners immense happiness and acute suffering is it not a part of the most fundamental of all antinomies the greatness and the littleness of man created for eternity and present in time we have no perfect joy in this world and the reaching upward and outward of the mind is at once the keenest joy in the fiercest pain rather as we talk of growing pains only Gilbert loved to grow so much that he would not think of the pain you must never pity me he said to Lady Fisher and all through his life he was saying and meaning you must never pity me but while he was writing the autobiography and giving thanks for his life his last months were shadowed by trials especially heavy for a man of his imagination and temperament for now more than ever his thought was not allowed to concentrate on those realities where the joy of contemplation overpowers the pain of growth he loved Italy even more than France he says in one letter yet he could not but condemn the invasion of Abyssinia the shadow of the Spanish war was rising and behind it a darker shadow in his political thinking Chesterton was haunted by the present war then too while public controversy did not trouble him at all he hated any breach of the peace within the ranks of his own small army the fights among the staff of the paper about disrebutism had been nothing as compared with those about Abyssinia there are leading articles taking in and letters in the cockpit in violent opposition Morris Wreckett writes in as it happened in the last autumn of his life I wrote to him privately and distressed at the line which the weekly was taking on Abyssinia and saying that I felt that I ought to leave the board as I was so much out of sympathy with this I received this reply from which I have deleted only some personal references Top Meadow, Beaconsfield 19th September 1935 My dear Mr. Morris Wreckett I do hope you will forgive me for the delay in answering your most important letter involving as it does tragic dooms of separation which I hope need not be fulfilled I should like to ask you to defer your decision at least until you have seen the next week's number of the paper and further the argument I have used in the current number and bring it I think rather nearer to your natural and justifiable point of view between ourselves and without prejudice to anybody I do think myself that there ought to have been a more definite condemnation of the attack on Abyssinia the whole thing happened while I was having a holiday very shortly the moral danger to me is the rehabilitation of capitalism in spite of the slump which will certainly take the form of a hypocritical patriotism and glorification of England at the expense of Italy or anybody else for the moment I only want you to understand that this is the mountainous peril that towers in my own mind yours always G.K. Chesterton three months later in G.K.'s weekly he wrote about the whole matter in an article in which he treated the question as largely one of proportion not enough was being said in England of her own or the league's position about Japan's attack on China too much in proportion about Italy in Abyssinia if the League of Nations really were an impartial judicial authority and if what is about is probable I were one of the judges and if the Abyssinian case were brought before me I should decide instantly against Italy I have again and again in this place stated in the strongest words the particular case against Italy it was against Italy and Abyssinia as he had been against England and South Africa but I should not be bound to rejoice at the Prussians riding into Paris because it might prevent the British riding into Pretoria tragic dooms of separation on public issues were not the only trouble with G.K.'s weekly the staff were also engaged in violent personal quarries about which Gilbert was asked to take sides was even bitterly reproached by one for supposedly favoring another it would be hard today to say what it was all about but two of the contestants have told me since that had they had the least notion how ill he was getting they would have died rather than so distress him for it was a real and very deep distress it may be remembered that Miss Dunham noted how Gilbert used to make a mysterious sign in the air as he lit his cigar that sign says Dorothy was the sign of the cross long ago he had written of human life as something not gray and drab but shot through with strong and even violent colors but took the patterns of the cross he saw the cross signed by God on the trees as their branches spread to right and left he saw it signed by man as he shaped a pailing or a door post the habit grew upon him of making it constantly in the air with his match as he lit a cigar over a cup of coffee as he entered a room he would make on the door the sign of our redemption no we must never pity him even when his life was pressed upon by that sign which stands for joy through pain those nearest to him grew anxious quite early in 1936 he was overtired in working with the weary insistence that over fatigue can bring the remedy so often successful of a trip to the continent was tried they went to Lord's and the sale and he seemed better in saying a good deal in his tuneless voice as Dorothy drove him through the lanes of France from the sale he wrote a pencil letter long and almost illegible under the shadow of the shrine trying to reconcile the disputance with himself and with one another the summer was cold and bleak and the tour was all too short home again his mind seemed not to grip as well as usual and he began to fall to sleep during his long hours of work the doctor was called very seriously of the state of his heart that heart which many years ago another doctor had called too small for his enormous frame the thought of a Chesterton whose heart was too small presents a paradox in its own best manner to Edward McDonald who had missed a message that he was too ill to be visited Gilbert talked in his old fashion and promised to poem he had just thought of for the paper St. Martin of Tours the point is that he was a true distributionist he gave half his cloak to the beggar soon after this he fell into a sort of reverie from which awakening he said the issue is now quite clear it is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side Francis and he had both thought his recovery in 1916 was a miracle I dare not said Francis to pray for another miracle Monsignor Smith anointed him and then father Vincent arrived in response to a message from Francis which he thought meant she wanted him to see Gilbert for the last time taken to the sick room he sang over the dying man the Salve Regina this hymn to our lady is sung in the Dominican order over every dying friar and it was surely waiting for the biographer of St. Thomas and the ardent suppliant of our lady Salve Regina Mata Misericordia Vita Dolcedo et space nostra salve et jesum benedictum fructum ventris tu novis post hoc exilium ostende Gilbert's pen lay on the table beside his bed and father Vincent picked it up and kissed it it was June 14th 1936 the Sunday within the octave of Corpus Christi the same feast as his reception into the church 14 years earlier the introit for that day's mass was printed on his memorial card so that as father Ignatius Rice noted with a smile even his memorial card had a joke about his size the Lord became my protector and he brought me forth into a large place he saved me because he was well pleased with me I will love thee, O Lord, my strength the Lord is my firmament and my refuge and my deliverer to these words from the mass Francis added Walter de la Mer's tribute night of the Holy Ghost he goes his way wisdom his motley the mills of Satan keep his lance in play pity and innocence his heart at rest the day of the funeral was one of Blazing Sunshine one of your days Gilbert would have said to Francis gray days were his when nature's colors he said were brightest against her more somber background sunny days were hers for she loved a blue blazing sky the little church near the railway was filled to overflowing by his friends from London from all over England from France even and from America all Beaconsfield wanted to honor him so the funeral procession instead of taking the direct route passed through the old town where he had so often sat in the barber chair and chatted with his fellow citizens at Topmetal we gathered to talk Francis a few of us saw for a little while in her own room she uttered self-forgetfulness that was hers she said to her sister in law it was so much worse for you you had Cecil for such a short time later Monsignor Knox preached in Westminster Cathedral to a crowd-far vaster both Francis and Cardinal Hinsley received telegrams from Cardinal Pacelli now Pope Pius XII to Cardinal Hinsley he cabled Holy Father deeply he grieved death Mr. Gilbert Keith Chesterton devoted son Holy Church gifted defender of the Catholic faith his holiness offers paternal sympathy people of England assures prayers dear departed bestows apostolic benediction this telegram was read to the vast crowd in the cathedral and found an echo in the hearts of his fellow countrymen who Kingsmill wrote to Cyril Clemens my friend Hesketh Pearson was staying with me when I read of Chesterton's death I told him of it through the bathroom door and he sent up a hollow groan which must have echoed that morning all over England it was reason that the Pope offered his sympathy not to Catholics alone but to all the people of England to the policeman who said at the funeral we'd all have been there we got off duty it was a grand man to the man at the time's office who broke in on the announcement of his death good God that isn't Chesterton is it the barber who had to leave his customer unshaved that he might talk to Edward McDonald to all of us his friends on whom the loss lay almost unbearably heavy to those for whom his presence would have pierced and lightened even the dark shadow of the war to all the people of England once more a Pope had bestowed upon an Englishman the title defender of the faith the first man to receive it had been Henry VIII and the words are still engraved on the coins of England the secular press would not print the telegram in full because it bestowed upon a subject a royal title after Gilbert's death Francis tried to take up life again she visited her cousins in Germany a university professor and his English wife who were undergoing the persecution of the swastika she was deeply moved by their suffering and the peril they stood in home again she surrounded herself more than ever with children taking a catechism class and encouraging her small scholars to come to top meta where her garden also helped her toward a difficult peace serenity rendered harder by the struggle with ill health soon we began to realize that the physical weakness which all her courage could not overcome was more than merely her old malady what did Francis die of Bernard Shaw wrote to me was it of widowhood in fact it was a most painful cancer heroically endured she was cared for by Dorothy being presently by the nuns of the bon secours her friends visit her as they were allowed Father Vincent McNabb after a talk of almost an hour noted how never once did she speak of herself or of her suffering her concerns were for Dorothy for the church and for Gilbert's memory Eric Gill's monument the biography the permanence of his own writing she survived him little more than two years near the end from the face of a dying woman shrunken with pain we could still see those great heavenly eyes that seemed to make the truth at the heart of things almost too terribly simple and naked for the sons of flesh end of chapter 32 last days chapter 46 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Larry Wilson Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward Appendix A an earlier Chesterton both the autobiography and prison life of George Laval Chesterton are worth reading there is conscious humor we feel it might be our own Chesterton when we hear the captain describing himself as laughing immoderately because he had made a fool of himself and others were laughing at him there is unconscious humor especially in the astonishing style full of such phrases as I was the most obnoxious a teperil or something not far removed from impunity stocked abroad Captain Chesterton started life as a soldier during the penicillar war his regiment was stationed at Cartagena it was a subject of deep mortification to most of us to be thus finally occupied in this lone garrison thereby being debarred from the penicillar metal and hence a widespread disaffection on that most tender subject which no reasoning has been equal to dispel however later he saw a good deal of active service being in the war of 1812 in the course of which the battle of Bladensburg was fought and Washington fell to the British arms the astonished slaves he says describing the advance on Washington rested from their work in the fields contiguous and the awestruck peasants and yeoman of this portion of America be held with perturbation the tremendous preparations to devastate their blooming country to the smaller professional armies of that day peace was a misfortune this quaint style captain Chesterton describes the demonstrations of joy on the part of himself and his fellow officers at the escape of Napoleon from Melba foreseeing as he frankly observes a scope for further adventure and hope of personal advancement this hope was short-lived and we next see him fighting in the British Legion of a rebel South American army against Spain the general mismanagement of this expedition and the fact that they killed all their prisoners was a death blow to all my past enthusiasm in the Republican cause many British officers participating with me in the detestation for cold-blooded butchery conspired from that moment to elude this detested service Marquis who delight in transcendent liberalism the cruel exigencies of such a warfare in his acceptance of transcendent liberalism yet his determination to see truly what passed before his eyes and when needful to change his standpoint this earlier Chesterton was much like the later he had not the genius of Gilbert he could not see so far but he shared his refusal to be blinded by custom theory or even patriotism in his accounts of army life he had commented fearlessly on the cruelty of the punishments and described his fellow officers as made ill by seeing a private receive 500 lashes he had noted corruption in the train service which was consequently divested of its genuine claim to honour featured by the planters of Jamaica he had yet spoken with horror of their slave ownership now he was appointed governor of a prison in England and here began the great work of his life in a frontal attack on the corruptions he discovered the yardsmen did a secret traffic of all the goods forbidden in the prison there were caches of tobacco spirits and such things under the pavements the weaker prisoners were robbed by the stronger the women's and men's quarters were so arranged that by connivance of the jailers frequent meetings took place on one of these occasions captain Chesterton himself appeared my hands were seized with tender impressment and I was addressed as my love my darling creature and all the conventional endearments of the pave were showered upon me I had to struggle for enlargement and beat a hasty retreat quite confounded by my situation into prison discipline and the consternation occasioned by this discovery became perfectly electric attempts to bribe him were followed by attempts to kill him but he stood firm Mrs. Fry invoked his aid to improve the conditions to which the prisoners had to return Chesterton turned to Dickens and to Dickens friend Miss Coutts in defiance of a narrow minded magistrate who perversely insisted as was by cynical interpretation literally too true that Miss Coutts had no right to confer with prisoners within those walls nor was it to be tolerated that Mr. Charles Dickens should walk into the prison whenever he pleased the path feels the reforms begun by Captain Chesterton and warmly seconded by Dickens spread to other prisons although he declares I consented to forego pecuniary advantage I clinged more tenaciously to the credit of my past exertions when beset with fraud, ferocity and moral pollution I achieved a triumph fraught with civilizing influences End of Chapter 46 Chapter 47 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public demand For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Larry Wilson Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward Appendix Beach Prize poem written at St. Paul's This is the only version I have been able to find Across the top is written in another hand This is not exactly the same as given in the prize poem The difference is probably slight St. Francis Xavier The Apostle of the Indies He left his dust by all the myriad tread of yawned dense millions trampled to the strand ornith some cross forgotten lace his head where dark seas whiten on a lonely land he left his work but all his life had planned a waning flame to flicker and to fall mid the huge myths his toil could scarce withstand and the light died in temple and in hall and the old twilight sank and settled over all he left his name a murmur in the east that dies to silence amid older creeds with which he strove in vain the fiery priest of faith less fitted to their router needs as some lone pilgrim with his staff and beads mid-force brutes whom ignorance makes tame he dwelt and sowed in eastern church's seeds he reigned a teacher and a priest of fame he died and dying left a murmur and a name he died and she the church that made him go yawned dim enchantress with her mystic claim has reigned his forehead with her aerial glow and monkey's myth and all the whispered fame of miracle has clung about his name so Rome has said but we what answer we who in grim Indian gods and rites of shame or all the east the teacher's failure see his eastern church a dream his toil a vanity this then we say as time's dark face at last move with its lips of thunder to decree the doom that grew through all the memory past to be the canon of the times to be no child of truth or priest of progress he yet not the last a hero of his wars striving to quench the light he could not see and God who knoweth all that makes and bars judges his soul unseen which throbs among the stars God only knows man failing in his choice how far apparent failure may succeed God only knows what echo of his voice lives in the camp of many a fallen creed God only gives the laborer his mead for all the lingering influence widely spread broad branching into many a word indeed when dim oblivion veils the fountain head so lives and lingers on the spirit of the dead this then we say let all things further rest and this brave life with many thousands more be gathered up in the eternal's breast in that dim past his love is bending or healing all shattered hopes and failure sore since he had bravely looked on death and pain for what he chose to worship and adore cast boldly down his life for loss or gain in the eternal lottery not to be in vain End of Chapter 47 Chapter 48 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Larry Wilson Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward Appendix C. The Chestertons The composition of The Chestertons is not without interest for the student of legendary literature by a curious paradox the book had to be strikingly untrue to be accepted as true since the jokes about sisters in law are legion so that mere commonplace shafts of what is called feminine spite would have gained little credence yet on the other hand Mrs. Cecil Chesterton was able to quote the Mikado to get from her husband a good deal of corroborative detail designed to give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. These details some are true some false all arranged to support the main untruth of Francis and Gilbert's relation to one another. The thesis of the book is that Gilbert was an unhappy and frustrated man A. because Francis shrank from consummating their marriage and B. because she dragged him away from his London life and friends to bury him in a middle class I confess that I am Victorian enough heartily to dislike writing this appendix yet it is necessary for many who read the Chesterton's have supposed that a story told by so near a connection must be true The ground was laid for the introduction of the legend by the tale of the red-haired phantom if I may describe it in terms of a ghost story that ghost was easy to lay see introduction next comes the old account of Gilbert and Francis honeymoon and of the years that followed it is of course possible that the first night of their marriage was not happy especially in the Victorian days of reticence which left wife and even possibly husband unprepared for life together though this did not normally prevent a happy marriage and a pack of children afterwards but I find it impossible to imagine Cecil Chesterton like the bridesmaid on the honeymoon receiving and passing on such a story as that of Gilbert quivering with self-reproach so that after the first night he dared not even contemplate a repetition Gilbert young and vital was condemned to a pseudo monastic life in which he lived with a woman but never enjoyed one there is a psychological reason for thinking this story especially improbable and a physical reason for dismissing it as actually impossible a white horse had from his childhood been for Gilbert the supreme sign of romance and he had chosen to spend the first night of his honeymoon at the white horse inn from his honeymoon he wrote home that he had a wife a piece of string, a pencil and a knife what more can any man want 10 years later he wrote of the white horse and dedicated to Francis saying O go you onward where you are shall honor and laughter be past purple forests and pearl foam God's winged pavilion free to roam your face that is a wandering home a flying home for me and over 30 years later he wrote again of beginning his honeymoon under the shadow of the white horse and compared it to a trip to fairyland can any human being read the record of this recurrent motif and reconcile it with Mrs. Cecil's picture let me refer again to the ballad of the white horse is it conceivable that any man should write after 10 years of frustration and unhappiness up through an empty house of stars being what heart you are up the inhuman steeps of space as on a staircase going grace carrying the firelight on your face on the loneliest star this is not the way a man writes to a neurotic cold hearted woman who has made a hermit of him Mrs. Cecil was of course never in the intimacy of the family she only married Cecil in 1917 by which date Gilbert and Francis had been married 16 years and before that she was merely an acquaintance but Francis's intimates could have told her how absurd her story was for by a rare good fortune the operation Francis underwent to enable her to bear children is itself evidence one could hardly have hoped for in a matter which civilized people are not much given to discussing Francis talked of the operation to Monsignor O'Connor to Dorothy Collins and to Annie Firmann and I have quoted the doctor's letter about it see above chapter 15 it was an abiding tragedy for her wife that it was unsuccessful Francis would have shrunk from no suffering in her passionate wish for a child there is another curiosity in the legend Gilbert despite this story was apparently perfectly happy in London during the first eight years of marriage it was only after the removal to Beaconsfield and in almost middle life that he began to be frustrated poor Francis what a picture of her had been proposed for posterity so powerful she could waft Gilbert away from London and from his friends could force him to make her his banker and reduce him to a bounty strictly limited to half a crown yet so perilous that she had to sign the checks for GK's weekly much as she hated it her poetry described as quite charming is spoken of as appearing in little perished magazines the only paper she cared to read owing to her implacable hatred for Fleet Street it is hard to picture Francis with an implacable hatred for anything and it will be remembered that she actually begged Father O'Connor to leave Gilbert to be a jolly journalist the periodicals in which her poems appeared were The Observer, The Sunday Times The Daily Chronicle The Westminster Gazette and The New Witness personally I have never much admired Francis's verse but a professional journalist might have been quite pleased at making all these papers not one poem ever appeared in a perished magazine so far as either Dorothy or I have been able to ascertain the point is not a very important one but the sneer is symptomatic a curious magic pervades the Chesterton's succulent sausages appear in the kitchen at Overstrand mansion and flow in torrents of beer so that Gilbert can steal away from an unsympathetic wife to consume them with his Fleet Street friends a studio materializes in a meadow at Beaconsfield can we imagine Gilbert cooking or even ordering sausages getting beer to the flat designing or discovering the studio anyone thinking about what really happened would realize that Francis ordered the beer and sausages Francis built the studio but that is not the sort of thought we are to think about Francis about her we are told that she always wore the wrong colors that she gave Gilbert insufficient and indigestible food that she did not know what work meant that Mrs. Bellock thought Gilbert ought to beat her that she kept the journalists away when Gilbert was dying in point of fact both telephone and doorbell were so near the sick roof that the use of both had to be avoided that she did not give her guests enough to eat at his funeral that she actually sought the quiet of her own room instead of staying downstairs to receive condolences when her husband's coffin had just been lowered into the grave with all this bait of detail we are not told that Francis left 1,000 pounds to Mrs. Cecil plus 500 pounds for her Cecil houses even if I could have ignored the attack on Francis I should be obliged as his biographer to deal with the attack on Gilbert more subtly but no less certainly made the story of the marriage affects Gilbert as much as Francis and the book culminates in the final assertion that his drinking killed him here are the comments sent to me by Dorothy of the doctor who attended Gilbert and Francis from 1919 until they died today Dr. Bakewell came in and answered the questions about the book which we asked him one he says that the idea that G.K. was better when drinking in Fleet Street because the stimulus of conversation would eat up effects of the alcohol is absolute nonsense it would have just as bad an effect under any conditions Dr. Bakewell said that G.K. was his patient for nearly 20 years and that during that time he never treated him for alcoholism or saw any trace of it in an absent minded way he was always liable to drink too much of anything if it were there even water without the understanding loving tactful care of Francis he would have died 20 years before certainly if he had racketed around Fleet Street any longer Dr. Bakewell said Gilbert was perfectly happy in Beaconfield and not in any way frustrated there was no frustration of any kind between for London life or friends he was very intimate with Gilbert and would have known if there had been two the doctor says that Gilbert died of a failing heart owing to fatty degeneration leading to dropsy three Francis had arthritis of the spine not curvature as stated by Mrs. Cecil the doctor said that he put him on the water wagon several times and when this was done Gilbert was most meticulously Dr. Bakewell said that he did not do it very often because he did not consider that drink was in any way affecting Gilbert's health during the greater part of the time he knew him in a later conversation he added that when he did forbid alcohol at certain periods it was simply to make liquid less attractive as too much of even water was bad for Gilbert the statement made by Mrs. Cecil that drinking in London was not so serious because the talk and excitement among friends would carry off the effects is thought by doctors almost comic Dr. Bakewell denies it absolutely Dr. Polkak who it will be remembered attended Gilbert during his illness of 1914 to 15 says absolute nonsense would probably have been worse in London he adds also I cannot understand why such an attack was done on GK from my personal observation he owed a very great deal to Mrs. GK who greatly helped his restoration to help one can get one's pin earth of fun out of the chapter on the exile of Beaconsfield when one remembers the true story of those years Rome, Jerusalem, USA, Poland France, Spain, Malta lectures all over England lively contests for the lord rectorship of three universities London again and again for editing mock trials debates and distributists Beano's and frequently in furnished flats which Francis would take for the winter months one can only suppose that Mrs. Cecil was so little intimate with them that she did not realize all this and then Beaconsfield itself parties in the studio people down from London visitors from Poland France America Italy England in other countries the Eric Gilles the Bernard Shaw the Emile Cameron the guest room was always occupied by some intimate meanwhile the books poured out of the little study business Cecil thinks Gilbert hardly ever wrote again a masterpiece after living in Battersea yet in supported this idea she lists as masterpieces the ball in the cross written at Beaconsfield magic written at Beaconsfield Stevenson written at Beaconsfield and the ballad of the white horse mainly written at Beaconsfield of all the books she mentions in this connection only three were written in London and she admits that the world at large did not share her view of the sterilizing effect of Beaconsfield for she writes meanwhile his fame grew wider his sales greater in exile he ruled a literary world Gilbert left to Mrs. Cecil Chesterton sums equal to those later left to her by Francis one thousand pounds for herself and five hundred pounds for Cecil houses the ingratitude that omitted all mention of these benefactions struck the imagination of several of the Chesterton family as the worst feature in the book but to Gilbert and Francis giving of money even in their own lifetime was a slight matter they had given something far greater why was the memory of Cecil Chesterton alive today because of his brother's labors why is it possible for Mrs. Cecil to declare that he was the greater editor to imply that he was the greater man because Gilbert kept saying so never has such devotion been shown by one brother to the memory of another has the greater man exalted the lesser to such a pedestal we are told in the Chesterton's that Francis sacrificed both Gilbert and herself on the altar of her family truly there was much self sacrifice in the lives of both the family friends and causes they did not feel it as self sacrifice to enrich the lives of others even at cost to themselves but the heaviest cost they paid lay in the years of a toll that was literally killing Gilbert while Francis watched him growing old too soon and straining his heart with work crushingly heavy and if there was a single altar for that supreme sacrifice it was no other than the altar Cecil's memory End of Chapter 48 End of Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward