Now this distinction (made without prejudice as to Chesterton’s views on capital or corporal punishment) holds good through his whole criticism of modern legislation. He believes that it is better that a man and his family should starve in their own slum, than that they should be moulded, by a cumbersome apparatus of laws and officials and inspectors, into a tame, mildly prosperous and mildly healthy group of individuals, whose opinions, occupations and homes should be provided for them. On these lines he attacks whatever in his opinion will tend to put men into a position where their souls will be less their own. He believes that the man who has been costered by the Government into a mediocre state of life will be less of a man than one who has been left unbothered by officials, and has had to shift for himself.

  Very largely, therefore, Chesterton’s political faith is an up-to-date variety of the tenets of the Self-Help School, which was own brother to the Manchester School. And here we come to a curious contradiction, the first of a series. For Chesterton loathes the Manchester School.

  The contradiction comes of an inveterate nominalism. To G. K.C. all good politics are summed up in the words Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. But nobody, not even a Frenchman, can explain what they mean. Chesterton used to believe that they mean Liberalism, being led astray by the sound of the first word, but he soon realized his error. Let a man say “I believe in Liberty” and only the vagueness of the statement preserves it from the funniness of a Higher Thinker’s affirmation, “I believe in Beauty.” A man has to feel Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, for they are not in the nature of facts. And one suspects horribly that what Chesterton really feels is merely the masculine liberty, equality and fraternity of the public-house, where men meet together but never do anything. For Chesterton has not yet asked us to do anything, he only requests Parliament to refrain. He supports no political programme. He is opposed to Party Government, which is government by the Government. He is in favour of Home Rule, it may be inferred; and of making things nasty for the Jews, it may be supposed. But he does not poach on the leader-writers’ preserves, and his political programme is left hazy. His opposition to Liberal proposals brings him near the Tories. If the Liberals continue in power for a few years longer, and Home Rule drops out of the things opposed by Tories, the latter may well find Chesterton among their doubtful assets. He will probably continue to call himself a Liberal and a “child of the French Revolution,” but that will be only his fun. For the interesting abortions to which the French Revolution gave birth — well, they are quite another story.

  Chesterton is a warm supporter of the queerly mixed proposals that are known as the “rights of small nationalities,” and the smaller the nationality, the more warmly he supports (so he would have us believe) its demand for self-government. Big fleas have little fleas, alas, and that is the difficulty he does not confront. For Home Rule carried to its final sub-division is simply home rule; the independence of homes. Political Home Rule is only assented to on general principles; apparently on the ground that on the day when an Englishman’s home really does become his castle he will not, so to speak, mind much whether he is an Englishman or an Irishman.

  And here we may bid farewell to the politician who is Chesterton. His politics are like his perverse definitions of the meaning of such words as progress and reform. He is like a child who plays about with the hands of a clock, and makes the surprising discovery that some clocks may be made to tell a time that does not exist — with the small hand at twelve and the large at six, for example. Also that if a clock goes fast, it comes to register an hour behind the true time, and the other way round. And so Chesterton goes on playing with the times, until at last a horrid suspicion grips us. What if he cannot tell the time himself?

  VIII

  A DECADENT OF SORTS

  An idea, if treated gently, may be brought up to perform many useful tasks. It is, however, apt to pine in solitude, and should be allowed to enjoy the company of others of its own kind. It is much easier to overwork an idea than a man, and of the two, the wearied idea presents an infinitely more pathetic appearance. Those of us who, for our sins, have to review the novels of other people, are accustomed to the saddening spectacle of a poor little idea, beautiful and fresh in its youth, come wearily to its tombstone on page 300 (where or whereabouts novels end), trailing after it an immense load of stiff and heavy puppets, taken down from the common property-cupboards of the nation’s fiction, and not even dusted for the occasion. Manalive, as we have seen, suffered from its devotion to one single idea, but the poor little thing was kept going to the bitter end by the flow of humorous encouragement given it by the author. The later works of Chesterton, however, are symbolized by a performing flea, dragging behind it a little cartload of passengers. But it sometimes happens that the humour of Manalive is not there, that one weary idea has to support an intolerable deal of prose.

  In An Essay on Two Cities there is a long passage illustrating the adventures of a man who tried to find people in London by the names of the places. He might go into Buckingham Palace in search of the Duke of Buckingham, into Marlborough House in quest of the Duke of Marlborough. He might even look for the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo.

  I wonder that no one has written a wild romance about the adventures of such an alien, seeking the great English aristocrats, and only guided by the names; looking for the Duke of Bedford in the town of that name, seeking for some trace of the Duke of Norfolk in Norfolk. He might sail for Wellington in New Zealand to find the ancient seat of the Wellingtons. The last scene might show him trying to learn Welsh in order to converse with the Prince of Wales.

  Here is an idea that is distinctly amusing when made to fill one short paragraph, and might be deadly tedious if extended into a wild romance. Perhaps the best way of summarizing the peculiar decadence into which Chesterton seemed at one time to be falling is by the statement that up to the present he has not found time to write the book, but has done others like it. And yet the decadence has never showed signs of that fin de siècle rustiness that marked the decadent movement (if it was really a movement and not just an obsession) of the generation that preceded Chesterton. He cursed it in the dedication to Mr. E. C. Bentley of The Man who was Thursday, and he remained true to the point of view expressed in that curse for ever afterwards.

  A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,

  Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul, when we were boys together.

  Science announced nonentity, and art admired decay;

  The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay.

  Round us in antic order their crippled vices came —

  Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.

  Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom,

  Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume.

  Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung;

  The world was very old indeed when you and I were young.

  They twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named:

  Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed.

  The Chestertonian decadence was not even an all-round falling-off. If anybody were to make the statement that in the year nineteen-hundred-and-something Chesterton produced his worst work it would be open to anybody else to declare, with equal truth, that in the same year Chesterton produced his best work. And the year in which these extremes met would be either 1913 or 1914, the years of Father Brown and The Flying Inn on one hand, and of Father Brown and some of the songs of The Flying Inn on the other. It was not a technical decline, but the period of certain intellectual wearinesses, when Chesterton’s mental resilience failed him for a time, and he welcomed with too much enthusiasm the nasty ideas from which no man is wholly free.

  The main feature indeed of this period of decadence is the brandishing about of a whole mass of antipathies. A man is perfectly entitled to hate what he will, but it is generally assumed that the hater has some ideas on the subject of the reform of the hatee. But Chesterton is as devoid of suggestions as a goat is of modesty. A man may have a violent objection against women earning their own livings, and yet be regarded as a reasonable being if he has any alternative proposals for the well-being of the unendowed and temporarily or permanently unmarriageable woman, with no relatives able to support her — and there are two or three millions of such women in the United Kingdom. But a mere “You shouldn’t” is neither here nor there.

  Take this verse. It was written two or three years ago and is from a poem entitled To a Turk.

  With us too rage against the rood

  Your devils and your swine;

  A colder scorn of womanhood,

  A baser fear of wine,

  And lust without the harem,

  And Doom without the God,

  Go. It is not this rabble

  Sayeth to you “Ichabod.”

  A previous stanza talks about “the creedless chapel.” Here is a whole mass of prejudices collected into a large splutter at the expense of England. If the verse means anything at all, it means that the English are nearer the beasts than the Turks.

  Another of Chesterton’s intellectual aberrations is his anti-Semitism. He continually denied in the columns of The Daily Herald that he was an anti-Semite, but his references to the Jews are innumerable and always on the same side. If one admits what appears to be Chesterton’s contention that Judaism is largely just an exclusive form of contemporary atheism, then one is entitled to ask, Why is a wicked Gentile atheist merely an atheist, while a Jewish atheist remains a Jew? Surely the morals of both are on the same level, and the atheism, and not the race, is the offensive feature. The Jews have their sinners and their saints, including the greatest Saint of all.

  They and they only, amongst all mankind,

  Received the transcript of the eternal mind;

  Were trusted with His own engraven laws,

  And constituted guardians of His cause:

  Their’s were the prophets, their’s the priestly call,

  And their’s, by birth, the Saviour of us all.

  Even if Chesterton cannot work himself up to Cowper’s enthusiasm (and few of us can), he cannot deny that the race he is continually blackguarding was preparing his religion, and discovering the way to health at a time when his own Gentile ancestors were probably performing human sacrifices and eating worms. Unquestionably what is the matter with the modern Jew, especially of the educated classes, is that he refuses to be impressed by the Christian Church. But the Christian Church cannot fairly be said to have made herself attractive in the past; her methods of Inquisition, for example. . . .

  It is difficult to write apathetically on this extreme instance of a great writer’s intolerance. One single example will suffice. A year or two ago, a Jew called Beilis was put on his trial (after an imprisonment of nearly three years) for the murder of a small Christian boy named Yushinsky, in order that his blood might be used for ritual purposes. Yushinsky, who was found dead under peculiar circumstances, was probably a Jew himself, but that does not affect the point at issue. Mr. Arthur Henderson, M.P., tried to arouse an agitation in order to secure the freedom of Beilis, because it was perfectly evident from the behaviour of certain parties that the prisoner’s conviction would be the signal for the outbreak of a series of massacres of the Jews, and because a case which had taken nearly three years to prepare was obviously a very thin case. Chesterton wrote a ribald article in The Daily Herald on Mr. Henderson’s attempt at intervention, saying in effect, How do you know that Beilis isn’t guilty? Now it is impossible to hold the belief that Beilis might be guilty and at the same time disbelieve that the Jews are capable of committing human sacrifice. When a leading Russian critic named Rosanov, also an anti-Semite, issued a pamphlet proclaiming that the Jews did, in fact, commit this loathsome crime, he was ignominiously ejected from a prominent Russian literary society. The comparison should appeal to Chesterton.

  The nadir of these antipathies is reached in The Flying Inn, a novel published a few months before the Great War broke out, and before we all made the discovery that, hold what prejudices we will, we are all immensely dependent on one another. In this book we are given a picture of England of the future, conquered by the Turk. As a concession to Islam, all intoxicating drink is prohibited in England. It is amusing to note that a few months after the publication of this silly prognostication, the greatest Empire in Christendom prohibited drink within its frontiers in order to conquer the Turk — and his Allies. A Patrick Dalroy, an Irishman (with red hair), and of course a giant, has been performing Homeric feats against the conquering Turks. A Lord Ivywood, an abstraction bloodless to the point of albinism, is at the head of affairs in England. The Jews dominate everything. Dalroy and Humphrey Pump, an evicted innkeeper, discovering that drinks may still be sold where an inn-sign may be found, start journeying around England loaded only with the sign-board of “The Green Man,” a large cheese, and a keg of rum. They are, in fact, a peripatetic public-house, and the only democratic institution of its kind left in England. Every other chapter the new innkeepers run into Ivywood and his hangers-on. As the story wriggles its inconsequent length, the author curses through the mouths of his heroes. He anathematizes teetotallers, brewers, vegetarians, temperance drinks, model villages, æsthetic poets, Oriental art, Parliament, politicians, Jews, Turks, and infidels in general, futurist painting, and other things. In the end, Dalroy and Pump lead a vast insurrection, and thousands of dumb, long-suffering Englishmen attack Ivywood in his Hall, and so free their country from the Turk.

  Only the songs already described in Chapter V preserve this book from extreme dullness. Technically it is poor. The action is as scattered as the parts of a futurist picture. A whole chapter is devoted to a picture of a newspaper editor at work, inventing the phraseology of indefiniteness. Epigrams are few and are very much overworked. Once a catchword is sprung, it is run to death. The Turk who by means of silly puns attempts to prove that Islamic civilization is better than European, never ceases in his efforts. The heartlessness of Ivywood is continuous, and ends in insanity.

  Parts of The Flying Inn convey the impression that Chesterton was tired of his own style and his own manner of controversy, and had taken to parodying himself. The arguments of the already-mentioned Turk, for example, might well pass for a really good parody of the theological dispute in the first chapter of The Ball and the Cross. There, it may be remembered, two men (more or less) discussed the symbolism of balls and crosses. In The Flying Inn people discuss the symbolism of crescents and crosses, and the Turk, Misysra Ammon, explains, “When the English see an English youth, they cry out ‘He is crescent!’ But when they see an English aged man, they cry out ‘He is cross!’” On these lines a great deal of The Flying Inn is written.

  We now come to Chesterton’s political decadence, traceable, like many features in his history, to Mr. Hilaire Belloc. The friendship between G. K.C. and the ex-Liberal M.P. for Rochdale bore a number of interesting fruits. There were the amusing illustrations to The Great Enquiry, an amusing skit on the Tariff Reform League, to Emmanuel Burden and The Green Overcoat. But curious artificialities sprang into existence, like so many funguses, under the lengthening shadow of Mr. Belloc. To him is due the far-fetchedness of some of Chesterton’s pleading in support of the miraculous element in religion. To him also is due the growing antipathy against the Liberal Party and the party system in general.

  Up to the end of January, 1913, Chesterton had continued his connection with The Daily News. On January 28th there took place, at the Queen’s Hall, London, a debate between Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Hilaire Belloc. The latter moved “That if we do not re-establish the institution of property, we shall re-establish the institution of slavery; there is no third course.” The debate was an extremely poor affair, as neither combatant dealt, except parenthetically, with his opponent’s points. In the course of it Mr. Shaw, to illustrate an argument, referred to Chesterton as “a flourishing property of Mr. Cadbury,” a remark which G. K.C. appears to have taken to heart. His quarrel with official Liberalism was at the moment more bitter than ever before. Mr. Belloc had taken a very decided stand on the Marconi affair, and Mr. Cecil Chesterton, G. K.C.’s brother, was sturdily supporting him. The Daily News, on the other hand, was of course vigorously defending the Government. Chesterton suddenly severed his long connection with The Daily News and came over to The Daily Herald. This paper, which is now defunct, except in a weekly edition, was the organ of Syndicalism and rebellion in general. In a letter to the editor of The Herald, Chesterton explained with pathetic irony that The Daily News “had come to stand for almost everything I disagree with; and I thought I had better resign before the next great measure of social reform made it illegal to go on strike.”

  A week or so later, Chesterton started his series of Saturday articles in The Daily Herald. His first few efforts show that he made a determined attempt to get down to the intellectual level of the Syndicalist. But anybody who sits down to read through these articles will notice that before many weeks had passed Chesterton was beginning to feel a certain discomfort in the company he was keeping. He writes to say that he likes writing for The Daily Herald because it is the most revolutionary paper he knows, “even though I do not agree with all the revolutions it advocates,” and goes on to state that, personally, he likes most of the people he meets. Having thus, as it were, cleared his conscience in advance, Chesterton let himself go. He attacked the Government for its alleged nepotism, dishonesty, and corruption. He ended one such article with, “There is nothing but a trumpet at midnight, calling for volunteers.” The New Statesman then published an article, “Trumpets and How to Blow Them,” suggesting, among other things, that there was little use in being merely destructive. It is typical of what I have called the decadence of Chesterton that he borrowed another writer’s most offensive description of a lady prominently connected with The New Statesman in order to quote it with glee by way of answer to this article. The Syndicalist hates the Socialist for his catholicity. The Socialist wishes to see the world a comfortable place, the Syndicalist merely wishes to work in a comfortable factory. Chesterton seized the opportunity, being mildly rebuked by a Socialist paper, to declare that the Fabians “are constructing a man-trap.” A little later on he writes, with reference to a controversialist’s request, that he should explain why, after all, he was not a Socialist: