Our Lady's Tumbler

I hate to be influenced. 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 polite 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 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 liked to know where I was going and go there—or refuse.

G.K.'s Weekly, Aug. 18, 1928.

IN 1932, WHEN Gilbert had been in the Church just ten years and Frances six, my husband and I met them at the Eucharistic 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 Democracy. Its orderliness was more than a mere organisation: 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 that 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 Centre.

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 allusion to himself. And when later the priest asked to be photographed at his side it flashed through G.K.'s mind that he had heard in the East that an idiot was supposed to bring luck. 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 pin-point littleness became an axiom: rather it seemed an affectation—none the less an affectation and much the less pardonable because the laughter was directed against others as well as against himself.

There is an old mediaeval story of a tumbler who, converted and become a monk, found himself inapt at 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 is 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 trysting-place of all the tribes of men."*

[* Christendom in Dublin, p. 35.]

His awe and reverence for priests was, says 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."

Yet it may have been a fear of excess of this special let-down that made him reluctant to go to Lourdes. Lisieux he never liked but he was, Dorothy says, fascinated by Lourdes when she persuaded him to go. He went several times to the torch-light 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 looked 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 Newer 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. The Chaucer was much criticised—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 de la Mare 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 G.K. had all his life combatted 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 Caedmon," whose writing was "not in that sense poetry and 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 realised in an earlier work—for Caedmon spoke the language of Alfred the Great.

In a brilliant garnering of the fruits of her scholarship—Word Hoard—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 English and French tongues lasted for some three hundred years, until the two finally blended into a unified language, basically Teutonic, richly romantic. The English spirit emerged predominant by a moral victory over its conqueror. . . ."*

[* Word Hoard by Margaret Williams, p. 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 stream, 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 Caedmon 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 poet exists 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 majesty 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 faldstool 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 by-product 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] civilisation. It can cure itself but those who leave it cannot cure it. Not Nestorius, nor Mahomet, 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 a recovery of the norm, of the balance, of the equilibrium that mediaeval philosophy and culture were always seeking. "The meaning of Aquinas is that mediaevalism was always seeking a centre of gravity. The meaning of Chaucer is that, when found, it was always a centre 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 most important book of his life: St. Thomas Aquinas.

"Great news this," wrote Shaw to Frances, "about the Divine Doctor. I have been preaching for years that intellect is a passion that will finally become the most ecstatic of all the passions; and I have cherished Thomas as a 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 dramatises, of Siger of Brabant.

Had we known all this we should have been asking ourselves even more definitely: What will the experts say? Of the verdict of the greatest of them we were not long left in doubt. Etienne Gilson, who has given two of the most famous of philosophical lecture series—the Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen and the William James Lectures at Harvard—had begun his admiration for Chesterton with Greybeards 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 have been studying St. Thomas all my life and I could never have written such a book." After Gilbert's death, 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 is a "clever" book, but the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty 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 the 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, pp. 150-151.]

In joining the Church Chesterton had found like all converts, from St. Paul to Cardinal Newman, that he had come into the land of liberty and 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, p. 130.]

I suppose one of the reasons why the surrounding world finds it hard to receive this statement from a convert is that he has 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 adverted. To the scandal wrought by evil Catholics, historical or contemporary, he was not blind—he summarised 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 analysed us 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 of 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 when he accused Chesterton of being Modernist in his secret thoughts? Were St. Paul's epistles an Apologia pro Vita 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 Parlour Game which consists of guessing at what point in an article on hydraulics, elegiacs or neo-Platonism 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 in being surrounded by the things of his religion; that he likes to have objects that have been blessed by the holy and beloved, 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, pp. 156-7.]

This playful, not to say frivolous, tone was fresh cause of annoyance to those who were apt to be annoyed. It is easier to understand their objection than the opposite one: that he became dull and prosy after he joined the Church (or alternatively after he left Fleet Street for Beaconsfield). The only real difficulty about his later 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. And those who 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 are 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: 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 G.K. 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, pp. 11-12.]

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 had been brought up to treasure liberty and in his boyhood the world had seemed freer than the Church. Today in a 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. The "sure conclusions" of Science that had stood foursquare 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 of a minority rule. "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; that there was something ironic in the name the atheists chose when they called themselves Secularists. By definition they had tied themselves to the fashion of this world that passeth away.

These six conversions then were what the world would have forced upon him: the Church as an alternative to a continually worsening civilisation. While he hated the Utopias of the Futurists and while he accepted the Christian view of life as a probation he felt too 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 dissatisfaction 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 conviction, or the mastery of their work, or the loyalty of their household, or any form of human dignity. Even the latest Utopians, the last lingering representatives of that fated 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 a long succession of unsuccessful Utopias. He has fallen asleep.*

[* G.K.'s Weekly, October 20, 1928.]

Chesterton 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 sceptic boasts of being barren." In short, in religion alone was Darwin justified, for Catholicism was the "spiritual Survival of the Fittest."*

[* Well and Shallows, p. 82.]

If these Six Conversions are read without the balancing of something deeper they have the superficial look that belongs of necessity to Apologetics. Some essays in The Well and the Shallows, most of The Thing, Christendom in 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 most happy duties I had 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 alike seemed a blasphemy; a blasphemy that has shaken the world with the earthquake of two thousand 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 . . . the 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 and mind, of flesh and spirit, of the most impersonal abstractions as well as the most personal affections. . . . Even what are called the fine 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 a 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 is to be with the children of men.