Or roll upon the ground about,

  In the happy town of Roundabout,

  That makes the world go round.

  And there are lots more like this.

  Then there are the Ballades Urbane which appeared in the early volumes of The Eye-Witness. They have refrains with the true human note. Such as “But will you lend me two-and-six?”

  Envoi

  Prince, I will not be knighted! No!

  Put up your sword and stow your tricks!

  Offering the Garter is no go —

  BUT WILL YOU LEND ME TWO-AND-SIX?

  In prose Chesterton is seldom the mere jester; he will always have a moral or two, at the very least, at his fingers’ ends, or to be quite exact, at the end of his article. He is never quite irresponsible. He seldom laughs at a man who is not a reformer.

  Or let us take another set of illustrations, this time in prose. (Once more I protest that I shall not take the reader through all the works of Chesterton.) I mean the articles “Our Note Book” which he contributed to The Illustrated London News. They are of a familiar type; a series of paragraphs on some topical subject, with little spaces between them in order to encourage the weary reader. Chesterton wrote this class of article supremely well. He would seize on something apparently trivial, and exalt it into a symptom. When he had given the disease a name, he went for the quack doctors who professed to remedy it. He goes to Letchworth, in which abode of middle-class faddery he finds a teetotal public-house, pretending to look like the real thing, and calling itself “The Skittles Inn.” He immediately raises the question, Can we dissociate beer from skittles? Then he widens out his thesis.

  Our life to-day is marked by perpetual attempts to revive old-fashioned things while omitting the human soul in them that made them more than fashions.

  And he concludes:

  I welcome a return to the rudeness of old times; when Luther attacked Henry VIII for being fat; and when Milton and his Dutch opponent devoted pages of their controversy to the discussion of which of them was the uglier. . . . The new controversialists . . . call a man a physical degenerate, instead of calling him an ugly fellow. They say that red hair is the mark of the Celtic stock, instead of calling him “Carrots.”

  Of this class of fun Chesterton is an easy master. It makes him a fearsome controversialist on the platform or in his favourite lists, the columns of a newspaper. But he uses his strength a little tyrannously. He is an adept at begging the question. The lost art called ignoratio elenchi has been privately rediscovered by him, to the surprise of many excellent and honest debaters, who have never succeeded in scoring the most obvious points in the face of Chesterton’s power of emitting a string of epigrams and pretending it is a chain of argument. The case, in whatever form it is put, is always fresh and vigorous. Another epigrammatist, Oscar Wilde, in comparison with him may be said to have used the midnight oil so liberally in the preparation of his witticisms, that one might almost detect the fishy odour. But as with his prose so with his verses; Chesterton’s productions are so fresh that they seem to spring from his vitality rather than his intellect. They are generally a trifle ragged and unpolished as if, like all their author’s productions, they were strangers to revision. And vitality demands boisterous movement, more even than coherence. Sometimes the boisterousness is apparently unsupported by the sense of the words.

  So you have gained the golden crowns and grasped the golden weather,

  The kingdoms and the hemispheres that all men buy and sell,

  But I will lash the leaping drum and swing the flaring feather,

  For the light of seven heavens that are lost to me like hell.

  Here the stanza actually goes with such a swing that the reader will in all probability not notice that the lines have no particular meaning.

  On the other hand, Chesterton’s poetry has exuberant moments of sheer delight. In one of his essays he is lamenting the songlessness of modern life and suggests one or two chanties. Here they are:

  Chorus of Bank Clerks:

  Up, my lads, and lift the ledgers, sleep and ease are o’er.

  Hear the Stars of Morning shouting: “Two and Two are Four.”

  Though the creeds and realms are reeling, though the sophists roar,

  Though we weep and pawn our watches, Two and Two are Four.

  Chorus of Bank Clerks when there is a run on the bank:

  There’s a run upon the Bank —

  Stand away!

  For the Manager’s a crank and the Secretary drank, and the Upper Tooting Bank

  Turns to bay!

  Stand close: there is a run

  On the Bank.

  Of our ship, our royal one, let the ringing legend run, that she fired with every gun

  Ere she sank.

  The Post Office Hymn would begin as follows:

  O’er London our letters are shaken like snow,

  Our wires o’er the world like the thunderbolts go.

  The news that may marry a maiden in Sark,

  Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park.

  Chorus (with a swing of joy and energy):

  Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park.

  The joke becomes simply immense when we picture the actual singing of the songs.

  But that is not the only class of humour of which Chesterton is capable. He can cut as well as hack. It is to be doubted whether any politician was ever addressed in lines more sarcastic than those of Antichrist, an ode to Mr. F. E. Smith. This gentleman, speaking on the Welsh Disestablishment Bill, remarked that it “has shocked the conscience of every Christian community in Europe.” It begins:

  Are they clinging to their crosses,

  F. E. Smith.

  Where the Breton boat-fleet tosses,

  Are they, Smith?

  Do they, fasting, tramping, bleeding,

  Wait the news from this our city?

  Groaning “That’s the Second Reading!”

  Hissing “There is still Committee!”

  If the voice of Cecil falters,

  If McKenna’s point has pith,

  Do they tremble for their altars?

  Do they, Smith?

  Then in Russia, among the peasants,

  Where Establishment means nothing

  And they never heard of Wales,

  Do they read it all in Hansard

  With a crib to read it with —

  “Welsh Tithes: Dr. Clifford answered.”

  Really, Smith?

  The final verse is:

  It would greatly, I must own,

  Soothe me, Smith,

  If you left this theme alone,

  Holy Smith!

  For your legal cause or civil

  You fight well and get your fee;

  For your God or dream or devil

  You will answer, not to me.

  Talk about the pews and steeples

  And the Cash that goes therewith!

  But the souls of Christian peoples . . .

  — Chuck it, Smith!

  The wilting sarcasm of this poem is a feature which puts it with a few others apart from the bulk of Chesterton’s poems. Even as bellicosity and orthodoxy are two of the brightest threads which run through the whole texture of his work, so Poems of Pugnacity (as Ella Wheeler Wilcox would say) and religious verses constitute the largest part of the poetic works of G. K.C. His first book of verses — after Greybeards at Play — The Wild Knight contained a bloodthirsty poem about the Battle of Gibeon, written with strict adhesion to the spirit of the Old Testament. It might have been penned by a survivor, glutted with blood and duly grateful to the God of his race for the solar and lunar eccentricities which made possible the extermination of the five kings of the Amorites. In 1911 came The Ballad of the White Horse, which is all about Alfred, according to the popular traditions embodied in the elementary history books, and, in particular, the Battle of Ethandune. How Chesterton revels in that Homeric slaughter! The words blood and bloody punctuate the largest poem of G. K.C. to the virtual obliteration in our memory of the fine imagery, the occasional tendernesses, and the blustering aggressiveness of some of the metaphors and similes. Not many men would have the nerve, let alone the skill, to write:

  And in the last eclipse the sea

  Shall stand up like a tower,

  Above all moons made dark and riven,

  Hold up its foaming head in heaven,

  And laugh, knowing its hour.

  But, at the same time, this poem contains very touching and beautiful lines. The Ballad of the White Horse is an epic of the struggle between Christian and Pagan. One of the essentials of an epic is that its men should be decent men, if they cannot be heroes. The Iliad would have been impossible if it had occurred to Homer to introduce the Government contractors to the belligerent powers. All the point would have gone out of Orlando Furioso if it had been the case that the madness of Orlando was the delirium tremens of an habitual drunkard. Chesterton recognizing this truth makes the pagans of the White Horse behave like gentlemen. There is a beautiful little song put into the mouth of one of them, which is in its way a perfect expression of the inadequacy of false gods.

  There is always a thing forgotten

  When all the world goes well;

  A thing forgotten, as long ago

  When the gods forgot the mistletoe,

  And soundless as an arrow of snow

  The arrow of anguish fell.

  The thing on the blind side of the heart,

  On the wrong side of the door,

  The green plant groweth, menacing

  Almighty lovers in the spring;

  There is always a forgotten thing,

  And love is not secure.

  The sorrow behind these lines is more moving, because more sincere, than the lines of that over-quoted verse of Swinburne’s:

  From too much love of living,

  From hope and fear set free,

  We thank with brief thanksgiving

  Whatever gods there be —

  That no life lives for ever,

  That dead men rise up never,

  That even the weariest river

  Winds somewhere safe to sea.

  This is insincere, because a pagan (as Swinburne was) could have committed suicide had he really felt these things. Swinburne, like most modern pagans, really hated priestcraft when he thought he was hating God. Chesterton’s note is truer. He knows that the pagan has all the good things of life but one, and that only an exceptionally nice pagan knows he lacks that much.

  And so one might go on mining the White Horse, for it contains most things, as a good epic should. Two short stanzas, however, should be quoted, whatever else is omitted, for the sake of their essential Christianity, their claim that a man may make a fool of himself for Christ’s sake, whatever the bishops have to say about it.

  The men of the East may spell the stars,

  And times and triumphs mark,

  But the men signed of the Cross of Christ

  Go gaily in the dark.

  The men of the East may search the scrolls

  For sure fates and fame,

  But the men that drink the blood of God

  Go singing to their shame.

  In his last volume of Poems (1915) Chesterton presents us with a varied collection of works, written at any time during the last twelve or so years. The pugnacious element is present in Lepanto, through the staccato syllables of which we hear drum-taps and men cheering. There is a temptation to treat Lepanto, and indeed most of Chesterton’s poems, with special reference to their technique, but we must resist this temptation, with tears if need be, and with prayer, for to give way to it would be to commit a form of vivisection. G. K.C. is not a text, praise be, and whether he lives or dies, long may he be spared the hands of an editor or interpreter who is also an irrepressible authority on anapaests and suchlike things. He is a poet, and a considerable poet, not because of his strict attention to the rules of prosody, but because he cannot help himself, and the rules in question are for the persons who can, the poets by deliberate intention, the writers who polish unceasingly. Chesterton has more impulse than finish, but he has natural gifts of rhythm and the effective use of words which more or less (according to the reader’s taste) compensate for his refusal or his incapacity to take pains.

  Finally there are the religious poems. From these we can best judge the reality of Chesterton’s poetic impulse, for here, knowing that affectation would be almost indecent, he has expressed what he had to express with a care denied to most of his other works. In one of his essays, G. K.C. exults in that matchless phrase of Vaughan, “high humility.” He has both adopted and adapted this quality, and the results are wonderful. In The Wise Men occurs this stanza:

  The Child that was ere worlds begun

  (. . . We need but walk a little way,

  We need but see a latch undone . . .)

  The Child that played with moon and sun

  Is playing with a little hay.

  The superb antithesis leaves one struggling against that involuntary little gasp which is a reader’s first tribute to a fine thought. He could be a great hymn writer, if he would. One of his poems, in fact, has found its way into The English Hymnal, where it competes (if one may use the word of a sacred song) with Recessional for the favour of congregations. If we take a glance at a few of the finest hymns, we shall find that they share certain obvious qualities: bold imagery, the vocabulary of conflict, an attitude of humility that is very nearly also one of great pride, and certain tricks of style. And when we look through Chesterton’s poems generally, we shall find that these are exactly the qualities they possess.

  VI

  THE RELIGION OF A DEBATER

  In his book on William Blake, Chesterton says that he is “personally quite convinced that if every human being lived a thousand years, every human being would end up either in utter pessimistic scepticism or in the Catholic creed.” In course of time, in fact, everybody would have to decide whether they preferred to be an intellectualist or a mystic. A debauch of intellectualism, lasting perhaps nine hundred and fifty years, is a truly terrible thing to contemplate. Perhaps it is safest to assert that if our lives were considerably lengthened, there would be more mystics and more madmen.

  To Chesterton modern thought is merely the polite description of a noisy crowd of persons proclaiming that something or other is wrong. Mr. Bernard Shaw denounces meat and has been understood to denounce marriage. Ibsen is said to have anathematized almost everything (by those who have not read his works). Mr. MacCabe and Mr. Blatchford think that, on the whole, there is no God, and Tolstoy told us that nearly everything we did, and quite all we wanted to do, was opposed to the spirit of Christ’s teaching. Auberon Herbert disapproved of law, and John Davidson disapproved of life. Herbert Spencer objected to government, Passive Resisters to State education, and various educational reformers to education of any description. There are people who would abolish our spelling, our clothing, our food and, most emphatically, our drink. Mr. H. G. Wells adds the finishing touch to this volume of denials, by blandly suggesting in an appendix to his Modern Utopia, headed “Scepticism of the Instrument,” that our senses are so liable to err, that we can never be really sure of anything at all. This spirit of denial is extraordinarily infectious. A man begins to suspect what he calls the “supernatural.” He joins an ethical society, and before he knows where he is, he is a vegetarian. The rebellious moderns have a curious tendency to flock together in self-defence, even when they have nothing in common. The mere aggregation of denials rather attracts the slovenly and the unattached. The lack of positive dogma expressed by such a coalition encourages the sceptic and the uneducated, who do not realize that the deliberate suppression of dogma is itself a dogma of extreme arrogance. We trust too much to the label, nowadays, and the brief descriptions we attach to ourselves have a gradually increasing connotation. In politics for example, the conservative creed, which originally contained the single article that aristocracy, wealth and government should be in the same few hands, now also implies adhesion to the economic doctrine of protection, and the political doctrine that unitary government is preferable to federal. The liberal creed, based principally upon opposition to the conservative, and to a lesser degree upon disrespect for the Established Church, has been enlarged concurrently with the latter. The average liberal or conservative now feels himself in honour bound to assert or to deny political dogmas out of sheer loyalty to his party. This does not make for sanity. The only political creed in which a man may reasonably expect to remain sane is Socialism, which is catholic and not the least dependent upon other beliefs. Apart from the inconsiderable number of Socialists, the average politician follows in the footsteps of those gentlemen already mentioned. He is not allowed to believe, so he contents himself with a denial of the other side’s promises. Assertion is infinitely more brain-wearing than denial.

  Side by side with the increase in those who deny is a growth in the numbers of those who come to regard apathy, suspended judgment, or a lack of interest in a religious matter as a state of positive belief. There are agnostics quite literally all over the place. Belief peters down into acceptance, acceptance becomes a probability, a probability declines into a reasonable doubt, and a reasonable doubt drifts into “it is highly conjectural and indeed extremely unlikely,” or something of that sort. Tolerance was once an instrument for ensuring that truth should not be suppressed; it is now an excuse for refusing to bother. There is, in fact, a growing disrespect for truth. A great many men went to the stake years ago rather than admit the possibility that they were wrong; they protested, so far as human endurance allowed them to protest, that they were orthodox and that their persecutors, and not they, were the heretics. To-day a bunch of Cambridge men calls itself “The Heretics” and imagines it has found a clever title. At the same time there is an apparent decline in the power to believe. The average politician (the principal type of twentieth-century propagandist) hardly ever makes a speech which does not contain one at least of the following phrases:

  “I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that . . .”

  “We are all subject to correction, but as far as we know . . .”