<h3><b><SPAN name="3._The_Two_Mr._Chestertons"></SPAN>3. The Two Mr. Chestertons</b></h3>
<br/>
<p>I cannot help wishing at times that Mr. Chesterton could be divided
in
two. One half of him I should like to challenge to mortal combat as an
enemy of the human race. The other half I would carry shoulder-high
through the streets. For Mr. Chesterton is at once detestable and
splendid. He is detestable as a doctrinaire: he is splendid as a sage
and a poet who juggles with stars and can keep seven of them in the air
at a time. For, if he is a gamester, it is among the lamps of Heaven.
We
can see to read by his sport. He writes in flashes, and hidden and
fantastic truths suddenly show their faces in the play of his sentences.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, his two personalities have become so confused that
his
later books sometimes strike one as being not so much a game played
with
light as a game of hide-and-seek between light and darkness. In the
darkness he mutters incantations to the monstrous tyrannies of old
time:
in the light he is on his knees to liberty. He vacillates between
superstition and faith. His is a genius at once enslaved and
triumphantly rebel. This fatal duality is seen again and again in his
references to the tyrannies of the Middle Ages. Thus he writes: "It
need
not be repeated that the case despotism is democratic. As a rule its
cruelty to the strong is kindness to the weak." I confess I do not know
the "rule" to which Mr. Chesterton refers. The picture of the despot as
a good creature who shields the poor from the rich is not to be found
among the facts of history. The ordinary despot, in his attitude to the
common people suffering from the oppressions of their lords, is best
portrayed in the fable—if it be a fable—of Marie Antoinette and her
flippancy about eating cake.</p>
<p>I fancy, however, Mr. Chesterton's defence of despots is not the
result
of any real taste for them or acquaintance with their history: it is
due
simply to his passion for extremes. He likes a man, as the vulgar say,
to be either one thing or the other. You must be either a Pope or a
revolutionist to please him. He loves the visible rhetoric of things,
and the sober suits of comfortable citizens seem dull and neutral in
comparison with the red of cardinals on the one hand, and of caps of
liberty on the other. This, I think, explains Mr. Chesterton's
indifference to, if not dislike of, Parliaments. Parliaments are
monuments of compromise, and are guilty of the sin of
unpicturesqueness.
One would imagine that a historian of England who did not care for
Parliaments would be as hopelessly out of his element as a historian of
Greece who did not care for the arts. And it is because Mr. Chesterton
is indifferent to so much in the English genius and character that he
has given us in his recent short <i>History of England</i>, instead of
a
History of England, a wild and wonderful pageant of argument.
"Already,"
he cries, as he relates how Parliament "certainly encouraged, and
almost
certainly obliged" King Richard to break his pledge to the people after
the Wat Tyler insurrection:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>Already Parliament is not merely a governing body, but a governing
class.</p>
</div>
<p>The history of England is to Mr. Chesterton largely the history of
the
rise of the governing class. He blames John Richard Green for leaving
the people out of his history; but Mr. Chesterton himself has left out
the people as effectually as any of the historians who went before him.
The obsession of "the governing class" has thrust the people into the
background. History resolves itself with him into a disgraceful epic of
a governing class which despoiled Pope and King with the right hand,
and
the people with the left. It is a disgraceful epic patched with
splendid
episodes, but it culminates in an appalling cry of doubt whether, after
all, it might not be better for England to perish utterly in the great
war while fighting for liberty than to survive to behold the triumph of
the "governing class" in a servile State of old-age pensions and
Insurance Acts.</p>
<p>This theory of history, as being largely the story of the evolution
of
the "governing class," is an extremely interesting and even "fruitful"
theory. But it is purely fantastic unless we bear in mind that the
governing class has been continually compelled to enlarge itself, and
that its tendency is reluctantly to go on doing so until in the end it
will be coterminous with the "governed class." History is a tale of
exploitation, but it is also a tale of liberation, and the
over-emphasis
that Mr. Chesterton lays on exploitation by Parliaments as compared
with
exploitation by Popes and Kings, can only be due to infidelity in
regard
to some of the central principles of freedom. Surely it is possible to
condemn the Insurance Act, if it must be condemned, without apologizing
either for the Roman Empire or for the Roman ecclesiastical system. Mr.
Chesterton, however, believes in giving way to one's prejudices. He
says
that history should be written backwards; and what does this mean but
that it should be dyed in prejudice? thus, he cannot refer to the
Hanoverian succession without indulging in a sudden outburst of heated
rhetoric such as one might expect rather in a leading article in
war-time. He writes:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>With George there entered England something that had scarcely been
seen there before; something hardly mentioned in mediaeval or
Renascence writing, except as one mentions a Hottentot—the barbarian
from beyond the Rhine.</p>
</div>
<p>Similarly, his characterization of the Revolution of 1688 is largely
a
result of his dislike of the governing classes at the present hour:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>The Revolution reduced us to a country wholly governed by gentlemen;
the popular universities and schools of the Middle Ages, like their
guilds and abbeys, had been seized and turned into what they
are—factories of gentlemen when they are not merely factories of snobs.</p>
</div>
<p>Both of these statements contain a grain of truth, but neither of
them
contains enough truth to be true. One might describe them as sweetmeats
of history of small nutritious value. One might say the same of his
comment on the alliance between Chatham and Frederick the Great:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>The cannibal theory of a commonwealth, that it can of its nature eat
other commonwealths, had entered Christendom.</p>
</div>
<p>How finely said! But, alas! the cannibal theory of a commonwealth
existed long before Chatham and Frederick the Great. The instinct to
exploit is one of the most venerable instincts of the human race,
whether in individual men or in nations of men; and ancient Hebrew and
ancient Greek and ancient Roman had exhausted the passion of centuries
in obedience to it before the language spoken either by Chatham or by
Frederick was born. Christian Spain, Christian France, and Christian
England had not in this matter disowned the example of their Jewish and
Pagan forerunners.</p>
<p>What we are infinitely grateful to Mr. Chesterton for, however, is
that
he has sufficient imagination to loathe cannibalism wherever he sees
it.
True, he seems to forgive certain forms of cannibalism on the ground
that it is an exaggeration to describe the flesh of a rich man as the
flesh of a human being. But he does rage with genius at the continual
eating of men that went on in England, especially after the spoliation
of the monasteries in the reign of Henry the Eighth gave full scope to
the greed of the strong. He sees that the England which Whig and Tory
combined to defend as the perfection of the civilized world in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was an England governed by men
whose
chief claim to govern was founded on the fact that they had seized
their
country and were holding it against their countrymen. Mr. Chesterton
rudely shatters the mirror of perfection in which the possessing class
have long seen themselves. He writes in a brilliant passage:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>It could truly be said of the English gentleman, as of another
gallant and gracious individual, that his honour stood rooted in
dishonour. He was, indeed, somewhat in the position of such an
aristocrat of romance, whose splendour has the dark spot of a secret
and a sort of blackmail.... His glory did not come from the Crusades,
but from the Great Pillage.... The oligarchs were descended from
usurers and thieves. That, for good or evil, was the paradox of
England; the typical aristocrat was the typical upstart.</p>
<p> But the secret was worse; not only was such a family founded on
stealing, but the family was stealing still. It is a grim truth that,
all through the eighteenth century, all through the great Whig speeches
about liberty, all through the great Tory speeches about patriotism,
through the period of Wandiwash and Plassey, through the period of
Trafalgar and Waterloo, one process was steadily going on in the
central senate of the nation. Parliament was passing Bill after Bill
for the enclosure by the great landlords of such of the common lands as
had survived out of the great communal system of the Middle Ages. It is
much more than a pun, it is the prime political irony of our history
that the Commons were destroying the commons.</p>
</div>
<p>It would be folly to suggest, however, that, conscious though Mr.
Chesterton is of the crimes of history, he has turned history into a
mere series of floggings of criminals. He is for ever laying down the
whip and inviting the criminals to take their seats while he paints
gorgeous portraits of them in all the colours of the rainbow. His
praise
of the mighty rhetoricians of the eighteenth century could in some
passages scarcely be more unstinted if he were a Whig of the Whigs. He
cannot but admire the rotund speech and swelling adventures of those
days. If we go farther back, we find him portraying even the Puritans
with a strange splendour of colour:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>They were, above all things, anti-historic, like the Futurists in
Italy; and there was this unconscious greatness about them, that their
very sacrilege was public and solemn, like a sacrament; and they were
ritualists even as iconoclasts. It was, properly considered, but a very
secondary example of their strange and violent simplicity that one of
them, before a mighty mob at Whitehall, cut off the anointed head of
the sacramental man of the Middle Ages. For another, far away in the
western shires, cut down the thorn of Glastonbury, from which had grown
the whole story of Britain.</p>
</div>
<p>This last passage is valuable, not only because it reveals Mr.
Chesterton as a marvellous rhetorician doing the honours of prose to
his
enemies, but because it helps to explain the essentially tragic view he
takes of English history. I exaggerated a moment ago when I said that
to
Mr. Chesterton English history is the story of the rise of a governing
class. What it really is to him is the story of a thorn-bush cut down
by
a Puritan. He has hung all the candles of his faith on the sacred
thorn,
like the lights on a Christmas-tree, and lo! it has been cut down and
cast out of England with as little respect as though it were a verse
from the Sermon on the Mount. It may be that Mr. Chesterton's sight is
erratic, and that what he took to be the sacred thorn was really a
Upas-tree. But in a sense that does not matter. He is entitled to his
own fable, if he tells it honestly and beautifully; and it is as a
tragic fable or romance of the downfall of liberty in England that one
reads his <i>History</i>. He himself contends in the last chapter of
the book
that the crisis in English history came "with the fall of Richard II,
following on his failures to use mediaeval despotism in the interests
of mediaeval democracy." Mr. Chesterton's history would hardly be worth
reading, if he had made nothing more of it than is suggested in that
sentence. His book (apart from occasional sloughs of sophistry and
fallacious argument) remains in the mind as a song of praise and dolour
chanted by the imagination about an England that obeyed not God and
despised the Tree of Life, but that may yet, he believes, hear once
more
the ancestral voices, and with her sons arrayed in trade unions and
guilds, march riotously back into the Garden of Eden.</p>
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