The Sins of GK Chesterton (Richard Ingrams, 2021)
I - Introduction
If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.
- The Napoleon of Notting Hill
Richard Ingrams has been a feature of British letters for many years, co-founding the satirical magazine Private Eye in 1962, part of a boom in political satire which included the TV show That Was The Week That Was, and Peter Cook's nightclub The Establishment, which he modelled on “those wonderful Berlin cabarets…that did so much to stop the rise of Hitler”. Ingrams edited Private Eye from 1963-1986, and went on to found the Oldie magazine in 1992, as well as writing for the Spectator, the Independent and the Observer. A lifelong fan of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, he wrote a retrospective article on the writer on the centenary of his birth in 1974, and wrote the introduction to a re-issue of Chesterton's autobiography in 1986.
Most famous for his Father Brown detective series, Chesterton described himself as a “rollicking journalist”, specialising in the long form essay, and was also a novelist, poet, and Christian apologist, converting to the Catholic Church in 1922. His best work glows with joie de vivre, wit and charm, a mixture of the eccentricity of early Dickens, Newman's gentlemanly Catholicism, Kierkegaard’s religious paradox and HG Wells’ gift for the grotesque. He has a wide range of admirers: Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman dedicated Good Omens to GK Chesterton, “a man who knew what was going on” and ACX readers will be aware of Scott Alexander's fondness for Chesterton which includes a pastiche article by Chesterton on “Thinking Machines”. Chesterton's religious writings are treasured in Catholic circles, especially Orthodoxy which has inspired many conversions, and a cause for his canonisation was launched in 2013, before being abandoned in 2019.
The abandonment of the canonisation was mainly due to Chesterton's anti-semitism. Alongside his friend and fellow writer Hillaire Belloc, and his brother Cecil Chesterton, GK Chesterton made a series of scabrous accusations against Herbert Samuel, a prominent Jewish politician, regarding the conduct of Samuel and others during the Marconi affair i.e the granting of a monopoly on radio transmission to the Marconi company and the sale of shares in its sister company in America to prominent politicians. Godfrey Isaacs successfully sued Cecil Chesterton for libel, but Gilbert failed to update his views and developed a grudge, worsened by Cecil's war-adjacent death in 1918, and culminating in reckless observations in the New Jerusalem and partial support for Mussolini in the 1930s.
In this book, Ingrams aims to set the record straight. With the passing of time, Chesterton's attractive personality and his image as a steampunk holy fool have tended to obscure his darker side, especially in Catholic circles, and Ingrams himself now regrets underplaying these issues in his introduction to Chesterton's autobiography. The book largely achieves Ingrams’ purpose: it is a useful and readable introduction to Chesterton and his flaws. However it is not perfect. The book is both unfair on the Chestertons and Belloc at times for issues not relevant to anti-semitism, whilst missing an opportunity to ask deeper questions about Chesterton's magical worldview and its vulnerabilities to prejudice. This matters because whilst Chesterton's anti-semitism is of an old-fashioned and mostly obsolete kind, anti-semitism is on the rise again today alongside all manner of prejudice. In this context, is Chestertonism as a whole a force for good in the world?
II. The book
Chesterton’s Circle
Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.
- The Rolling English Road
Ingrams begins by painting the more familiar picture of GK Chesterton: a jolly, witty buffoon. 6’2” and 20 stone with long curly chestnut hair, he was “charmingly absent minded” and once filed copy written on torn-off wallpaper. Born in 1874, the son of estate agent Edward Chesterton (the family firm is still trading in North London), he attended St Paul's school then spent a year at Slade school of Art before entering journalism. A staunch Liberal, he began working for the Daily News in 1902, shortly after its purchase by the Quaker chocolatier and philanthropist George Cadbury in 1901. He developed a unique observational style of journalism centred on the romance of the everyday, summed up in the title of a volume of his articles, Tremendous Trifles. “Either everything is interesting or nothing is” was his motto. Ingrams draws the analogy of Blake seeing the world in a grain of sand. Like Blake, Chesterton was drawn to the supernatural. After dabbling in the occult at school, he was drawn to the Anglican Church under the influence of his wife Frances who he married in 1901. Chesterton opposed the Boer War (1899-1902), but also wrote in favour of the military virtues and this, as well as his praise of drink, drew ire from the readers of the Daily News who were generally pacifist teetotallers. But editor A.G Gardiner, with a number of impressive writers on his payroll including George Bernard Shaw and H.G Wells, was nonetheless highly impressed: “He is like a visitor out of some fairy tale, a legend in the flesh, a survivor of the childhood of the world…For all the ordinary material cares of life he has no taste, almost no consciousness…He lives in a world of Romance peopled with giants and gay with the laughter of fairies”. Gardiner named his youngest son Gilbert after Chesterton, who was the boy's godfather.
Others weren't quite so sure. Brother Cecil's wife (confusingly nicknamed Keith), affronted by both brothers’ absent-mindedness and the mental load it created for the women in their lives, was censorious: “A rigid discipline in their early youth might have inculcated a more desirable sense of fitness in these two bundles of temperament and talent, but mercury is not easily handled…(Gilbert) had no more sense of clothes than a steamroller”. Cecil, five years younger than Gilbert, also had complicated feelings towards his brother. From an early age they seem to have quarrelled relentlessly - for a whole day on one occasion according to Keith - but with the more docile Gilbert generally backing down. Whilst Gilbert had height, good looks and was well liked at school, Cecil was short, unattractive and, according to Leonard Woolf, a contemporary at St Paul's and later husband of Virginia, unlikeable. But Cecil developed a strong personality and achieved a certain power over Gilbert which followed them until Cecil's death. In a less agreeable mood, Gilbert later described his brother as a man of “staggering obstinacy”. After an unsuccessful stint in the family firm, Cecil followed Gilbert into journalism. Ingrams relies heavily on an anonymous pamphlet which may have been published by Cecil concerning Gilbert, the crux of which was Cecil believed Gilbert was not taking his vocation seriously enough. Whilst Ingrams describes Gilbert's attitude to Cecil as one of “subservience”, this was one area where Gilbert was not willing to give way to his younger brother. Content with his tremendous trifles, Gilbert said regarding his legacy “I have no feeling for immortality…I would rather live now and die”
The Chesterton wives were as different as the brothers. Cecil's wife Keith, born Ada Eliza Jones in 1869 and going by aliases Margaret Hamilton and J.K Prothero, worked as a journalist from the age of 16 in an era where female journalists were rare. Gilbert was impressed with her: “she not only could do everything but she would do anything”. The feeling was not altogether mutual - ten years older than her husband Cecil, Keith dominated Cecil without checking his over-confidence, instead insisting that he was as talented as his brother. Frances, Gilbert's wife, also dominated Gilbert, but with very different motivations. Although Gilbert was very much in love, he was also married to Fleet Street, London's press district: its drink, smoke and talk (later satirized by Ingrams’ Private Eye in the character Lunchtime O'Booze). Hillaire Belloc made a virtue of the drinking culture of Fleet Street at a time when temperance movements were on the rise in England as well as America. His epic drinking sessions were acts of loyalty to beer-loving medieval Christendom against the march of Quaker puritanism. The brothers and Keith joined his crusade, but Gilbert and Cecil couldn't compete with Belloc. Frances was left to pick up the pieces, as Gilbert's health and productivity declined and his spending ran rampant. Eventually she took control of the household finances and issued him an allowance. In 1909 she persuaded him to move to Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire, accessible by railway to London but far from the temptations of Fleet Street. Gilbert seems to have taken this treatment as an encounter with the sublime, evidence of the mysterious thrift of women, and his health and productivity improved, but Cecil & Keith never forgave her for removing Gilbert from their bosom. Cecil hatched a plan to rescue Gilbert from Beaconsfield on a private aeroplane, and years later Keith, while writing the biography The Chestertons, cast aspersions on Gilbert & Frances's sex life, in what Graham Greene described as “a passage of staggering vulgarity”.
Belloc’s Influence
I have seen something today that is worse than death: and the name of it is Peace.
- The Flying Inn
Belloc was very much the leader of the pack. He was born in 1870, the son of a French emigre from the Franco-Prussian war who died when he was two. He attended Cardinal Newman's school in Edbaston before joining the French army and studying History at Oxford, where he gained a 1st class degree and was president of the union. He was a Liberal member of parliament for Salford from 1906-1910, but became disillusioned with the party system and with Lloyd George's nascent plans for the welfare state. He was socially and intellectually belligerent. In Gardiner's words, “his talk thunders along in ceaseless torrent. You suspect that if you only had time to think, time to turn round, time to stem that torrent, you would find some of his authorities a little shady, some of his facts a little thin”. Chesterton had no such doubts. He met Belloc in 1902 and was immediately enthralled. As Gardiner saw it, Belloc was an opportunity for the more sluggish Chesterton to live vicariously through a more vigorous man - “he watches his volcanic leader flashing into the lists and he winds his mighty horn to cheer him on”. Belloc’s views were already strongly influenced by a rising tide of anti-semitism in France. After defeat to Prussia in 1870, a strong nationalist movement arose, eager to restore France’s lost dignity and eventually recapture Alsace-Lorraine, surrendered to Prussia. Suspicion of Jews increased after some high profile banking scandals in the 1880s, and reached fever pitch with the Dreyfus Affair. Dreyfus was a jewish officer in the French Army, who in 1894 was accused of spying for Germany, was found guilty by a secret court martial and exiled to Devil’s Island in South America. Emil Zola argued in the pamphlet J’Accuse that Dreyfus was innocent and the evidence against him was forged. Many in France though were suspicious that a conspiracy was afoot to undermine the army and put the project of national revanche at risk. Belloc was firmly of this opinion. He maintained that Dreyfus was guilty. GK Chesterton, like much of the English press, was more inclined to see Dreyfus as the underdog and wrote the poem “to a Certain Nation” to this effect. But in 1905 he added a footnote to the poem, saying that while he hadn’t reached a firm conclusion on Dreyfus’s guilt, there was “a fog of injustice in the English newspapers” and that “the British public was systematically and despotically duped”. As Belloc put it, “I opened his eyes to reality” and sadly it would not be the last time.
Cecil Chesterton also fell under Belloc’s spell, having previously been a socialist. Baptised into the Church of England in 1905, he became a Catholic under Belloc’s influence (along with Elodie Belloc’s wife). After Belloc left parliament, the two worked together on The Party System, which exposed corruption in politics such as the selling of peerages and alleged the Liberals and the Tories in practice did not differ substantially because of the role of dark money behind the scenes. Exposing corruption is worthwhile, but Belloc had something specific in mind: the role of Jewish finance. Soon after The Party System was published, the publisher agreed to finance a weekly magazine, The New Witness, which would be an organ for Cecil & Belloc’s campaign against corruption as they defined it. Their views by this stage were virtually the same, but Belloc the oxonian had the refinement necessary to maintain some plausible deniability. Cecil was more provocative, and this would prove costly to everyone concerned.
An early target of Cecil & Belloc was Charles Masterman. Although not Jewish, his wife was a distant relation of the Rothschild family, but it’s not clear this was the original source of the beef. Masterman was a fellow writer on the Daily News and entered parliament as a Liberal in the same year as Belloc, but whereas Belloc failed to make a name for himself, Masterman became a protege first of Winston Churchill (then a Liberal) and later David Lloyd George. He married Lucy Lyttleton, who, although a staunch Liberal, was the niece of the prominent Conservative Alfred Lyttleton. Cecil and Belloc exploited this family relationship as evidence of the far too cosy relationship between the Tories and the Liberals, and the Rothschild connection, such as it was, added spice to the accusation. When Masterman stood for election in Bethnal Green in 1912, Cecil & Belloc, having formed the League For Clean Government, campaigned against him for the Tories, issuing copies of Lucy’s family tree. She was pelted with whelk shells by an angry mob and Masterman was defeated. He stood again in 1914 in Ipswich, but Cecil & Belloc again pursued him, again he lost and a promising career was cut short.
Charles and Lucy had been great friends of Gilbert & Frances. The Mastermans were strong Anglo-Catholics and knew Frances through the Church. The four often dined together and Gilbert dedicated What’s Wrong With the World? to Masterman. But Belloc and Cecil’s influence took priority. In 1913 Gilbert sent a bizarre break up letter to Masterman saying that he was opposed to him in politics, saying his friends were right and “I will never say no”.
Another instance of Belloc’s hold over Gilbert concerned Cadbury. The chocolate manufacturer, a Quaker, was a conscientious employer and built an entire village for his workers, Bourneville, which contained a theatre, gymnasium and swimming pool. But no pub - Cadbury was teetotal and disapproved of drink. On one occasion a Daily News outing to Bourneville was organised, but the lack of alcohol was extremely unpopular among the journalists. Belloc and Cecil saw Cadbury as a puritan, interfering with the liberty of his staff - when Cecil found out that swimming was compulsory for the ladies at Bourneville, he described it as “plain slavery”. Soon Gilbert was following the party line. He claimed that his “Song of Strange Drinks” was not aimed at Cadbury, but Cadbury had been attacked in the press as a “malevolent cocoa magnate” and interpreted Gilbert’s verse on cocoa as an attack - it described cocoa as a “cad”, which he took to be a reference to his name. Gardiner strongly rebuked Gilbert who then resigned. Gilbert insisted it was a coincidence. In any case soon after the Great War, Chesterton was settled on Belloc’s anti-Quaker position: had it not been for Quakers like Cadbury financing the Liberal Party, Britain could have publicly committed to back France if Germany invaded, and war could have been avoided. If the idea of a Global Quaker Conspiracy sounds like pure farce worthy of Chesterton at his funniest, he wasn’t joking. “They sign a check, and pacifist literature is sent across England like a snow storm, blinding men against the blazing actualities of peril”
The Marconi Affair
The mere facts! Do you really admit---are you still so sunk in superstitions, so clinging to dim and prehistoric altars, that you believe in facts? Do you not trust an immediate impression?
- The Club of Queer Trades
Guglielmo Marconi invented wireless telegraphy in 1897, and founded companies in Britain and the United States. When the British Government decided to install a wireless telegraphy network across the whole empire, they awarded the tender to the British Marconi Company, the responsibility of Herbert Samuel, who was Postmaster General and the first non-Christianised Jew to hold a cabinet position. The managing director of British Marconi was Godfrey Isaacs, the brother of the Attorney General, Rufus Isaacs. After the deal with the British Government had been signed but before it had been made public, Godfrey went to America to help the American Marconi company raise capital to buy out a rival. They issued new shares and gave a tranche of shares to Godfrey, who on returning to the UK proceeded to sell tohem to several prominent cabinet members, including David Lloyd George. Although government ministers did profit from a deal which wasn’t available to the public, there was no evidence whatsoever that the ethnicity of Samuels and the Isaacs brothers made any difference. After a lot of heat which included an investigation by a House of Commons select committee, the story died.
But not for Belloc and Cecil. Belloc saw the opportunity to emulate his heroes Charles Maurras & Paul Deroulede: to turn Marconi into the British Dreyfus affair. Cecil took over editing the Eye-Witness in June 1912, Belloc being keen to return to lecture tours and travel writing. Thus it was the less careful Cecil who led the Eye-Witness’s response to the scandal, although Ingrams makes a strong argument that various pieces were anonymously written by Belloc. Not content with the evidence of wrong-doing regarding the Marconi shares, Cecil looked at Godfrey Isaac’s previous business ventures, some of which had failed, and accused him of being deliberately corrupt. Isaacs had had enough, and sued. Cecil’s prosecutors were daunting to say the least: F.E Smith, widely tipped as a future Conservative Prime Minister, and Edward Carson, leader of the Unionists in Northern Ireland. Under questioning, Cecil withdrew his accusation of corruption, which in effect meant the jury had to find him guilty. He avoided prison and was fined £100. Belloc avoided trial, as he hadn’t officially authored any of the offending pieces, but he did have to face the House of Commons select committee, where he admitted that he and Cecil had no evidence for their claims beyond what was in the public domain.
Gilbert was present at the trial and called as a character witness. The trial deeply affected him. He had had bouts of depression throughout his life, and in 1914 experienced a breakdown, which left him bedridden in what Ingrams describes as a catatonic state. Looking back on the trial in his autobiography in 1936, he said that “history should be divided into Pre-Marconi and Post-Marconi days” because it was then that “the ordinary English citizen lost his invincible ignorance”. At the time, the affair was “systematically misrepresented” but in time it will be seen as “one of the turning points in the history of England and the World”. The reason for this, as he saw it, was the defeat of his brave comrades Cecil & Belloc emboldened their murky antagonists to consolidate their position and push for more power, just in time for the Great War.
War
Likelier the barricades shall blare
Slaughter below and smoke above,
And death and hate and hell declare
That men have found a thing to love.
- The Napoleon of Notting Hill
The lenient sentence in the libel trial enabled Cecil and Belloc to claim a moral victory. They were in no mood for circumspection, and as the Great War broke out and British Jews were interred for having German-sounding names, the New Witness continued its attacks on the Marconi Men and “anglo-judaic” plutocracy. As Cecil put it though: “We do not attack them for being Jews, indeed we rather excuse them on that ground, thinking them less morally guilty than an Englishman would be if he acted in the same fashion”. In other words, what else can you expect from foreigners? Foreigners, though, are at least human. For Keith Chesterton, Jews were something worse. Animals. This was because of their failure, according to Keith, to exercise the national stiff upper lip while sheltering in the London Underground during air raids - instead they cried and beat their breasts, and consequently should be moved to “a bomb-proof ghetto in the Midlands where they can exhibit the cowardice of their race in decent privacy” (n.b: at least five Jewish soldiers were awarded the Victoria Cross during The Great War). Keith was a communist, so anti-semitism on the New Witness was very much a bipartisan affair. Gilbert was by this time editing the paper, but he published this disgusting piece with a mere acknowledgement that “an able colleague has described with a vividness approaching ferocity a Jew with a gold watch-chain grovelling on the floor of the tube”. A hint of passive aggression recalls Gilbert’s judgement that Keith was “not and has never been a person I could treat like an ordinary subordinate”, as the wife of his over-bearing brother. This feature of their relationship became more important after Cecil’s tragic death.
Despite initially being declared unfit for military service, Cecil was later given a liaison role in France. After the armistice was signed in November 1918, Cecil took part in a long march in the rain, contracting nephritis, which proved fatal. Gilbert, obviously, was heartbroken. Unable to accept the futile and prosaic nature of his brother’s death, he developed a notion that Cecil had died a hero, “of the effects of exposure of the last fierce fighting that broke the Prussian power over Christendom”. He never moved on from this false view of Cecil’s death and his biographers repeated it. More worrying, though, was Gilbert’s open letter to ‘Marconi Man’ Rufus Isaacs, now Lord Reading, who was due to take part in the upcoming Versailles peace conference. This letter was published in December 1918, less than a month after Cecil’s death, and while it’s understandable that the letter might have been drafted in anger, sending it to Isaacs and publishing it too reflects very badly on Gilbert. Essentially he alleges that Isaacs as a Jew cannot be trusted to represent the national interest: “If it be decreed that the English nation is to lose its public honour, it will be partly because certain men of the tribe of Isaacs kept their own strange private loyalty”. England’s public honour, according to Gilbert, depended on honouring the territorial claims of Poland. “Is there any man who doubts that the Jewish International is unsympathetic with that full national demand? And is there any man who doubts that you will be sympathetic with the Jewish International?”. In fact Isaacs, a patriot who had I Vow to Thee My Country at his funeral, went to Versailles with Lloyd George hoping to continue the blockade of Germany, but the Germans were starving and the contrary view prevailed. It’s a sobering thought that while the German far right were already blaming the Jews for undermining the German war effort, English rabble rousers were blaming Jews for taking the side of Germany and its Jewish financiers.
From the New Jerusalem to Mussolini
Oh, I knew a Doctor Gluck,
And his nose it had a hook,
And his attitudes were anything but Aryan;
So I gave him all the pork
That I had, upon a fork;
Because I am myself a Vegetarian.
- The Logical Vegetarian
In 1917, the Balfour declaration guaranteed a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, now part of the British Empire. Chesterton visited in 1920, and the resulting book, The New Jerusalem, was rejected by the Daily Telegraph, because Chesterton felt the need to include the following observations:
“Let a Jew be the Lord Chief Justice if his exceptional veracity and reliability have clearly marked him out for that post…But let there be one single-clause bill; one sweeping law about Jews, and no other. Be it enacted…that every Jew must be dressed like an Arab…the point is that we should know where we are; and know where he is, which is in a foreign land”. Interesting stuff. Should Belloc, the Frenchman, have worn a Beret, a Breton top and a string of onions? Chesterton doesn’t address this. If, like me, you fell in love with GK Chesterton as a young man, this passage in particular is a bitter pill to swallow - the analogy with yellow stars and the Nazis speaks for itself.
Cecil’s death might have been an opportunity for Chesterton to move on from his brother’s influence, but in a sense the opposite happened. Chesterton was wracked with grief and saw his brother as a war hero. This, and the strong influence of Keith & Belloc, led to Chesterton making it his mission to secure his brother’s legacy. This led to the founding of GK’s Weekly, which ran from 1925 to 1936. More than just a reactionary rag, it included contributions from old sparring partner George Bernard Shaw, and launched the career of Eric Blair, later George Orwell. But it did feature Belloc & Keith, as well as Chesterton’s own observations. The paper struggled financially and Chesterton ran it at a loss with the proceeds of his Fr Brown series.
In 1926, Chesterton founded the Distributist League. The Liberal Party of Chesterton’s youth had been superseded by the Labour Party, who were even more committed to the expansion of the state than Lloyd George. Some Liberals, like Churchill, drifted towards the Conservatives at this point. But Chesterton despised the Tories who represented plutocracy. So he promoted a middle way based on elements of Georgism, William Morris’s Arts-and-Crafts socialism and the social teaching of Pope Leo XIII. The basic idea was that private property was at risk both from state socialism and capitalist oligarchy; the solution was boosting small property ownership, especially shops, workshops and farms. Except to the eye of love, the idea didn’t catch fire. Eric Gill founded an artist’s commune in Sussex and Distributists stood for parliament, but vagueness and factionalism set in.
At the height of the movement, the Distributist League in effect merged with GK’s Weekly. The 1930s were heady days for Belloc. Shortly after Hitler came to power, he visited Germany and wrote a column for the Weekly, in which he said “the anti-Jew business and all the spirit that goes with it is not thought to be of permanent effect”. Mussolini had long been a figure for hero-worship, and Belloc was granted an audience with Il Duce in 1924. Chesterton, now in his 60s, was still taking his cues from Belloc. When Mosley’s blackshirts marched through London, this was Chesterton’s commentary: “That England is now tottering under terrible evils, its idiotic diplomacy, its brainless plutocracy, its corrupt incompetent politics, is one of the truths that bind us so far in sympathy with the Fascists of Great Britain.” In 1935, Italy invaded Abyssinia. Chesterton’s editorial deplored Mussolini’s aggression, but argued that Britain had no right to “administer a moral rebuke” and accused the press of “unlimited vainglory”. Readers were horrified. Was this not the man who so eloquently defended the rights of Boers, Ireland, the Zulus? After long-standing friend Maurice Rickett resigned from the board of GKW in protest, Chesterton tried to explain: “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”. This may have convinced Rickett, but the Distributist League never recovered, and folded up. Chesterton died in 1936. I would love to believe that, had he lived to see the consequences of fascism, he would have changed his opinion, aided perhaps by his deep patriotic sense. But you have to say there is little reason to believe this. In his autobiography, published the same year as his death, he is still thoroughly Marconi-pilled, meanwhile Belloc, who died in 1953, never changed. “Poor man” he said of Captain Dreyfus, a propos of nothing, towards the end of his life, “he was guilty as sin”.
III - Some Criticism of the Book (and Chesterton)
I say that Comrade Gregory is unfit to be Thursday, for all his amiable qualities. He is unfit to be Thursday because of his amiable qualities
- The Man Who Was Thursday
Any criticism of the book risks missing the wood for the trees. If I’m right the book is sometimes unfair to Chesterton, “I really don’t care, Margaret” is a fair response. But it’s reasonable to expect a book having the word Sins in the title to make some attempt to use the word in its technical sense. Civil laws and the judgement of posterity can be random. Did Chesterton fail on his own terms, and if so how? I don’t expect the fine distinctions between calumny and detraction. But there are three conditions for mortal sin - grave matter, full knowledge and full consent. Certainly the matter is grave - but then Chesterton was one man, and when Ingrams says “Chesterton & Belloc…helped to promote a concept of Jews as foreigners and aliens (or worse), thus fostering, in Britain, a more tolerant attitude towards Nazi barbarities than might otherwise have prevailed”, you have to say, really? The first half of that sentence is indisputable, but the second is too strong. The history of what the British people knew when about the holocaust and how it affected their view of the war effort is very complicated. It’s not a story of simple heroism: Orwell references petty antagonism towards Jewish shop-keepers re: rationing. But did Chesterton and Belloc’s propaganda affect any major decisions? Did it delay the war? It seems unlikely. Catholics in general were far too tolerant of fascism throughout Europe. But this is easy to say with hindsight. Communism was an existential risk to the Church in Russia and Mexico. If Chesterton & Belloc thought they were better off with fascism than communism, they weren’t alone. Meanwhile, one aspect of Nazism that Chesterton most definitely would not have supported was eugenics, which he campaigned against for his whole career, and Ingrams doesn’t mention it once.
But if I seem like I’m downplaying the gravity of Chesterton’s sins, I also think Ingrams undermines his own argument by inadvertently casting doubt on Chesterton’s knowledge and consent. If Chesterton was a depressive, bullied by his best friend & brother and wracked with grief for the latter, these are facts which tend to lessen the gravity of a sin, and this is very much the impression the book gives. Ingrams makes Belloc in particular such a pantomime villain that you tend to feel sorry for Chesterton.
Speaking of Belloc, I believe it’s a strategic error to frame anything an extremist believes as an extreme belief by association. Belloc’s view that welfare is slavery, whilst cringe, is standard conservative fare and not a few people on the centre left believe it too. Will this view stand the test of time? No. But to use it as a way to paint Belloc as a reactionary, as Ingrams does, is outrageous. It’s also unhistorical. Throughout the 19th century, it was the Liberals who wanted to promote self-determination and progress; they were pro-market, pro-free trade and skeptical of the state. Before Lloyd George it was the Tories who were more pragmatic about the need for hand-outs (not for nothing: they weren’t socialists, they expected deference and decorum from the masses). So no: Belloc isn't promoting a conservative view, he’s promoting a liberal view that was gradually being eclipsed by socialist tendencies in the Liberal movement. Mugged by reality, he became a type we have come to know intimately in our own time: a neo-conservative.
Returning to Chesterton, ironically Ingrams is willing to give Chesterton a pass on some features of his thought that seem inherently vulnerable to prejudice and error. Chesterton was of the view that “the most important and practical thing about a man is still his view of the universe”. So it’s really Chesterton’s philosophy above all that deserves scrutiny, and Ingrams doesn’t really get under the bonnet of it. The closest we come is a brief rebuttal of Orwell’s remarks on Chesterton in Notes on Nationalism. Orwell says that Chesterton’s journalism always seeks to display the superiority of Catholic civilization over the protestant and pagan. This just seems a plain fact, whether you like Chesterton or not, but Ingrams takes exception. Chesterton can’t have been a bigot, he was a democrat. He’s not wrong exactly, but the sense of the word democrat applied to Chesterton is very messy. Certainly Belloc and the Chestertons had a strong sense of protectiveness for the dignity of common man, expressed beautifully by Belloc in his poem “The People”: “When wilt thou save the people? Oh God of mercy, when? The people Lord, the people! Not thrones and kings but Men?” Stirring stuff, but read the smallprint. In the Party System, Belloc and Cecil claim that ideally, MPs will be so closely aligned with their constituents, they will be elected by acclamation with no need for voting. Forget “the silent majority”, that’s weak sauce! For Belloc there is a silent unanimity among the people, if only we could get rid of the plutocrats running the show. Chesterton describes tradition as the "democracy of the dead” which is a wonderful quote and I would defend it as one of his paradoxes designed to awaken men to a neglected truth, but taken literally, if a majority of living women support abortion, should the “democracy of the dead” carry the day? That would seem to undermine Belloc’s position that the MP for Bethnal Green should vote Aye if the people of Bethnal Green would vote Aye. There are some absolutes that shouldn’t be a matter for public vote, and it’s okay to believe that, but describing Chesterton as a democrat is quite a weak defence in this context. But if I’m being unfair, it turns out that being a democrat doesn’t stop you being a bigot. Ingrams deploys Chesterton’s preference for the Daily Mail over The Times as evidence of his plebian sympathies. But the Daily Mail was strongly supportive of Mosley and the Blackshirts, more so than Chesterton. All it proves is that Chesterton was another type we’ve come to know in our own time: a populist.
Orwell’s critique of Chesterton is part of a broader critique of the role of “competitive prestige” in public discourse. You find your tribe and follow the party line, cutting the truth to fit accordingly. We have always been at war with Oceania. Notes on Nationalism is a devastating essay. Orwell’s use of ‘nationalism’ is a little esoteric and includes any tribal loyalty to a political power unit, which can be a different nation to one’s own, or in the case of Chesterton, the Catholic Church. Orwell thus describes a phenomenon in some ways more relevant to our own time than the fascism Belloc & Chesterton flirted with in the 1930s. Competitive prestige is everywhere. Catholics in my view should pay attention to our tendency to slip into this mode of thinking. JD Vance’s defence of Donald Trump’s accusations of electoral fraud is a living example of the spirit of Belloc & the Chestertons during the Marconi scandal. The target may not be Jews, but the short-circuiting of the facts in favour of one’s preferred power unit and its prestige is still alive and well. And Chesterton still has a big influence among conservative catholics.
Is there a causal link? We may well ask. Chesterton’s supreme gift was an ability to play with scale, proportion, meaning and fact. In Tremendous Trifles, one essay is entitled A Piece of Chalk - which turns out to refer to the entire Sussex Downs, one gigantic chalk deposit. This is what makes him such an adorable writer - honestly you just want to hug him and if that makes me an anti-semite, get me a job at UNWRA - but it also makes him a Bayesian nightmare. Seeing the world in a grain of sand makes for great art and terrible statistical inference. Any theist is obviously going somewhat beyond the senses, but Chesterton makes it into something of a fetish. The bellyfeel of a good story was too much for him - as Gardiner said, he lived in a fairy tale. But sometimes there is no story, no faeries or djinns - sometimes a Jewish businessman just makes a mistake, and sometimes states just initiate emergency measures so that people can vote in a time of pandemic.
Chesterton, then, combined an agreeable personality with a world view open to many possibilities beyond the senses and an anarchic spirit of charity. But in the real world some acts of agreeableness, belief or even charity, are zero sum. If “the people, lord, the people” show up first, with a prejudice against a racial group grounded in half-baked facts and downright lies, agreeableness to the people will necessarily result in disagreeableness to the racial group. It is what it is.
IV - Remarks on the Last Decade
Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good—” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.
- Heretics
A Chesterton De-fense (sorry)
His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run
Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?
The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,
But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch.
God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear
The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.
- The Rolling English Road
To defend Chesterton, I would like to place him in the context of what I will call Greater Anglo-Catholicism, which encompasses the Oxford Movement in the Church of England and the “Second Spring” in the Roman Catholic Church in England & Wales. The revival began in Oxford in the first half of the 19th century, birthing the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Established Church and nourishing the newly emancipated Catholic Church with a stream of converts. The Oxford Movement began with a loose group of clerical dons sharing some basic ideas: that English society was drifting away from Christianity, that the English Church was drifting in a liberal protestant direction, and that scholarly work on the early Church vindicated Catholic teaching on the Blessed Sacrament, the Virgin Mary and the power of the Pope. “To be deep in history” wrote John Henry Newman “is to cease to be protestant” Also important was a growing aesthetic sense regarding liturgical worship - for this was the Romantic era and a thing of beauty was a joy forever. Believing that “nothing great was ever done by committee”, Newman began Tracts for the Times, outlining the group's goals. These included disestablishing the Church of England, so that she could preserve her Christian character - no more liberal politicians appointing bishops. Supporters of antidisestablishmentarianism were horrified, and popular anti-popery was stirred up - the Gordon Gin riots were still a living memory. Newman eventually am go too far. As a don he was obliged to sign the 39 articles of the Church of England, which explicitly rejected the popish doctrine of original sin. Newman tried to argue that the articles merely condemned particular expressions of original sin in circulation during the Reformation, not the Church's perennial teaching on the matter, but this early act of post-structuralism didn't convince the university authorities. Newman resigned his academic and clerical posts, and after a spell as a layman, became a Roman Catholic. Within a couple of years he was ordained a priest and was made a Cardinal in 1879. He returned to writing after being accused of promoting dissimulation by Charles Kingsley. The result was an autobiography of his religious opinions, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, where he stressed the continuity of his faith as an Anglican and a Catholic (the book was later praised by James Joyce as a model of literary style).
Initially dubious about the definition of Papal Infallibility by Pius IX at the First Vatican Council, Newman defended the doctrine in a limited sense in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, in which he responded to a challenge by Gladstone: would Newman drink to the Pope first or the King? Newman's response was typical: he would drink to conscience first, and the Pope second.
Thus Newman left behind not only a Catholic legacy in the Church of England, he also introduced something of an Anglican latitudinarian spirit into the Catholic Church. His theory of development, first outlined in The Development of Christian Doctrine, was intended as a limited defence of some apparent drifts in Catholic doctrine (e.g Thomas Aquinas's argument against the Immaculate Conception), but the idea took on a life of its own. There is no controversy within the Church today which does not have development at the root of the matter. Can the Church bless homosexual couples? Can she grant funerals to those who have availed themselves of assisted suicide? Is everyone saved? Newman may well have been horrified at these, uh, developments. He was a staunch anti-liberal. And yet you have to say he left behind a habit of academic hair-splitting and an ambivalent attitude to authority.
But Newnan was above all a priest. He was firmly grounded in his own tradition and other people's; his view of conscience enabled a generous view of penitents; and his love for the practical joker St Phillip Neri, founder of Newman's order, the Oratorians, bequeathed a cheerful pastoral approach. Meanwhile the Catholic Church in England was booming, largely through Irish immigration, but with a creative minority of former Anglicans such as Cardinal Manning, supported by the wealth of old catholic families who had kept the faith privately through penal times. When the London dockers went on strike in 1889, Manning brokered a deal between the employers and the predominantly Irish workers. Architect Charles Pugin became a Catholic presence in the Arts & Crafts movement, leaving behind the interior of the Palace of Westminster, and Edward Elgar set Dream of Gerontius, Newman's poem of one soul's journey through purgatory, to music. Westminster Cathedral opened in 1903 - anyone entering and seeing the magnificent fresco of the Ascension must have felt that Christ's body in England was also on the up.
Chesterton, then, encountered a Christian culture which combined a strong emphasis on tradition with something more playful, tolerant and confident. In his best writing he made this culture his own. While Newman agreed with Johnson that the devil was “the first Whig”, Belloc & the Chestertons brought strong Liberal energy to Greater Anglo-Catholicism. The next generation of Catholic writers picked up the thread: Waugh and Greene were strongly influenced by Chesterton's sentiments regarding the good bad man -
Waugh’s Lord Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited and Greene's whiskey priest in the Power and the Glory are in the vein of Chesterton’s rolling English drunkard. In my opinion this is about as liberal as traditional catholicism can get. A soul on its way to maturity, frequently falling and picking itself up, ignoring alike voices to turn back or to rush. Chesterton may have failed in charity, but his vision of charity as the “a reverent agnosticism towards the complexity of the soul” remains inspiring and relevant. His splendid silliness was not mere play, it was nothing less than an act of war against false pride and despair. So, mindful of his sins, I’m going to give Chesterton the last word. As Britain descended into a labour crisis in 1912, tensions frayed, and at a picket line on the London docks, radical preacher Ben Tillett prayed publicly for the death of Lord Devonport, director of the Port of London Authority. As we address our own political divisions, Chesterton’s poetic response to Tillett’s fatwa seems appropriate:
We whom great mercy holds in fear,
Boast not the claim to cry,
Stricken of any mortal wrong,
‘Lord, let this live man die!’But not incuriously we ask,
Pondering on life and death,
What name befits that round of years,
What name that span of breath.
(...)
O mighty to arise and smite,
O mightier to forgive,
Sunburst that blasted Lazarus,
Lord, let this dead man live!