Old and New Masters — 03 - Ch.3.i - Mr G.K. Chesterton and Mr Hilaire Belloc: 1. The Heavenly Twins

MR.

G.

K.

CHESTERTON AND MR.

HILAIRE BELLOC

1. THE HEAVENLY TWINS

It was Mr. Shaw who, in the course of a memorable controversy, invented a fantastic pantomime animal, which he called the "Chester-Belloc."

Some such invention was necessary as a symbol of the literary comradeship of Mr. Hilaire Belloc and Mr. Gilbert Chesterton.

For Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton, whatever may be the dissimilarities in the form and spirit of their work, cannot be thought of apart from each other.

They are as inseparable as the red and green lights of a ship: the one illumines this side and the other that, but they are both equally concerned with announcing the path of the good ship "Mediaevalism" through the dangerous currents of our times.

Fifty years ago, when philology was one of the imaginative arts, it would have been easy enough to gain credit for the theory that they are veritable reincarnations of the Heavenly Twins going about the earth with corrupted names.

Chesterton is merely English for Castor, and Belloc is Pollux transmuted into French.

Certainly, if the philologist had also been an evangelical Protestant, he would have felt a double confidence in identifying the two authors with Castor and Pollux as the Great Twin Brethren, Who fought so well for Rome.

A critic was struck some years ago by the propriety of the fact that Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc brought out books of the same kind and the same size, through the same publisher, almost in the same week.

Mr. Belloc, to be sure, called his volume of essays _This, That, and the Other_, and Mr. Chesterton called his _A Miscellany of Men.

_ But if Mr. Chesterton had called his book _This, That, and the Other_ and Mr. Belloc had called his _A Miscellany of Men_, it would not have made a pennyworth of difference.

Each book is simply a ragbag of essays--the riotous and fantastically joyous essays of Mr. Chesterton, the sardonic and arrogantly gay essays of Mr. Belloc.

Each, however, has a unity of outlook, not only an internal unity, but a unity with the other.

Each has the outlook of the mediaevalist spirit--the spirit which finds crusades and miracles more natural than peace meetings and the discoveries of science, which gives Heaven and Hell a place on the map of the world, which casts a sinister eye on Turks and Jews, which brings its gaiety to the altar as the tumbler in the story brought his cap and bells, which praises dogma and wine and the rule of the male, which abominates the scientific spirit, and curses the day on which Bacon was born.

Probably, neither of the authors would object to being labelled a mediaevalist, except in so far as we all object to having labels affixed to us by other people.

Mr. Chesterton's attitude on the matter, indeed, is clear from that sentence in _What's Wrong with the World_, in which he affirms: "Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages.

Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout."

And if, on learning some of the inferences he makes from this, you protest that he is reactionary, and is trying to put back the hands of the clock, he is quite unashamed, and replies that the moderns "are always saying 'you can't put the clock back.'

The simple and obvious answer is, 'You can.'

A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour."

The effrontery of an answer like that is so magnificent that it takes one's breath away.

The chief difficulty of Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc, however, seems to be that they want their clock to point to two different hours at the same time, neither of which happens to be the hour which the sun has just marked at Greenwich.

They want it to point at once to 878 and 1789--to Ethandune and the French Revolution.

Similar though they are in the revolutio-mediaevalist background of their philosophy, however, Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc are as unlike as possible in the spirit in which they proclaim it.

If Mr. Chesterton gets up on his box to prophesy against the times, he seems to do so out of a passionate and unreasoning affection for his fellows.

If Mr. Belloc denounces the age, he seems also to be denouncing the human race.

Mr. Chesterton is jovial and democratic; Mr. Belloc is (to some extent) saturnine and autocratic.

Mr. Chesterton belongs to the exuberantly lovable tradition of Dickens; indeed, he is, in the opinion of many people, the most exuberantly lovable personality which has expressed itself in English literature since Dickens.

Mr. Belloc, on the other hand, has something of the gleaming and solitary fierceness of Swift and Hazlitt.

Mr. Chesterton's vision, coloured though it is with the colours of the past, projects itself generously into the future.

He is foretelling the eve of the Utopia of the poor and the oppressed when he speaks of the riot that all good men, even the most conservative, really dream of, when the sneer shall be struck from the face of the well-fed; when the wine of honour shall be poured down the throat of despair; when we shall, so far as to the sons of flesh is possible, take tyranny, and usury, and public treason, and bind them into bundles, and burn them.

There is anger, as well as affection, in this eloquence--anger as of a new sort of knight thirsting to spill the blood of a new sort of barbarian in the name of Christ.

Mr. Belloc's attack on the barbarians lacks the charity of these fiery sentences.

He concludes his essay on the scientific spirit, as embodied in Lombroso, for instance, with the words, "The Ass!"

And he seems to sneer the insult where Mr. Chesterton would have roared it.

Mr. Chesterton and he may be at one in the way in which they regard the scientific criminologists, eugenists, collectivists, pragmatists, post-impressionists, and most of the other "ists" of recent times, as an army of barbarians invading the territories of mediaeval Christendom.

But while Mr. Chesterton is in the gap of danger, waving against his enemies the sword of the spirit, Mr. Belloc stands on a little height apart, aiming at them the more cruel shafts of the intellect.

It is not that he is less courageous than Mr. Chesterton, but that he is more contemptuous.

Here, for example, is how he meets the barbarian attack, especially as it is delivered by M. Bergson and his school:-- In its most grotesque form, it challenges the accuracy of mathematics; in its most vicious, the processes of the human reason.

The Barbarian is as proud as a savage in a top hat when he talks of the elliptical or the hyperbolic universe, and tries to picture parallel straight lines converging or diverging--but never doing anything so vulgarly old-fashioned as to remain parallel.

The Barbarian, when he has graduated to be a "pragmatist," struts like a nigger in evening clothes, and believes himself superior to the gift of reason, etc. , etc. It would be unfair to offer this passage as an example of Mr. Belize's dominating genius, but it is an excellent example of his domineering temper.

His genius and his temper, one may add, seem, in these essays, to, be always trying to climb on one another's shoulders, and it is when his genius gets uppermost that he becomes one of the most biting and exhilarating writers of his time.

On such occasions his malice ceases to be a talent, and rises into an enthusiasm, as in _The Servants of the Rich_, where, like a mediaeval bard, he shows no hesitation in housing his enemies in the circles of Hell.

His gloating proclamation of the eternal doom of the rich men's servants is an infectious piece of humour, at once grim and irresponsible:-- Their doom is an eternal sleeplessness and a nakedness in the gloom....

These are those men who were wont to come into the room of the Poor Guest at early morning, with a steadfast and assured step, and a look of insult.

These are those who would take the tattered garments and hold them at arm's length, as much as to say: "What rags these scribblers wear!"

and then, casting them over the arm, with a gesture that meant: "Well, they must be brushed, but Heaven knows if they will stand it without coming to pieces!"

would next discover in the pockets a great quantity of middle-class things, and notably loose tobacco....

...

Then one would see him turn one's socks inside out, which is a ritual with the horrid tribe.

Then a great bath would be trundled in, and he would set beside it a great can, and silently pronounce the judgment that, whatever else was forgiven the middle-class, one thing would not be forgiven them--the neglect of the bath, of the splashing about of the water, and of the adequate wetting of the towel.

All these things we have suffered, you and I, at their hands.

But be comforted.

They writhe in Hell with their fellows.

Mr. Belloc is not one of those authors who can be seen at their best in quotations, but even the mutilated fragment just given suggests to some extent the mixture of gaiety and malice that distinguishes his work from the work of any of his contemporaries.

His gifts run to satire, as Mr. Chesterton's run to imaginative argument.

It is this, perhaps, which accounts for the fact that, of these two authors, who write with their heads in the Middle Ages, it is Mr. Chesterton who is the more comprehensive critic of his own times.

He never fights private, but always public, battles in his essays.

His mediaevalism seldom degenerates into a prejudice, as it often does with Mr. Belloc.

It represents a genuine theory of the human soul, and of human freedom.

He laments as he sees men exchanging the authority of a spiritual institution, like the Church, for the authority a carnal institution, like a bureaucracy.

He rages as he sees them abandoning charters that gave men rights, and accepting charters that only give them prohibitions.

It has been the custom for a long time to speak of Mr. Chesterton as an optimist; and there was, indeed, a time when he was so rejoiced by the discovery that the children of men were also the children of God, that he was as aggressively cheerful as Whitman and Browning rolled into one.

But he has left all that behind him.

The insistent vision of a world in full retreat from the world of Alfred and Charlemagne and the saints and the fight for Jerusalem--from this and the allied world of Danton and Robespierre, and the rush to the Bastille--has driven him back upon a partly well-founded and partly ill-founded Christian pessimism.

To him it now seems as if Jerusalem had captured the Christians rather than the Christians Jerusalem.

He sees men rushing into Bastilles, not in order to tear them down, but in order to inhabit the accursed cells.

When I say that this pessimism is partly ill-founded, I mean that it is arrived at by comparing the liberties of the Middle Ages with the tyrannies of to-day, instead of by comparing the liberties of the Middle Ages with the liberties of to-day, or the tyrannies of the Middle Ages with the tyrannies of to-day.

It is the result, sometimes, of playing with history and, sometimes, of playing with words.

Is it not playing with words, for instance, to glorify the charters by which medieval kings guaranteed the rights and privileges of their subjects, and to deny the name of charter to such a law as that by which a modern State guarantees some of the rights and privileges of children--to deny it simply on the ground that the latter expresses itself largely in prohibitions?

It may be necessary to forbid a child to go into a gin-palace in order to secure it the privilege of not being driven into a gin-palace.

Prohibitions are as necessary to human liberty as permits and licences.

At the same time, quarrel as we may with Mr. Chesterton's mediaevalism, and his application of it to modern problems, we can seldom quarrel with the motive with which he urges it upon us.

His high purpose throughout is to keep alive the human view of society, as opposed to the mechanical view to which lazy politicians are naturally inclined.

If he has not been able to give us any very, coherent vision of a Utopia of his own, he has, at least, done the world a service in dealing some smashing blows at the Utopia of machinery.

None the less, he and Mr. Belloc would be the most dangerous of writers to follow in a literal obedience.

In regard to political and social improvements, they are too often merely Devil's Advocates of genius.

But that is a necessary function, and they are something more than that.

As I have suggested, above all the arguments and the rhetoric and the humours of the little political battles, they do bear aloft a banner with a strange device, reminding us that organized society was made for man, and not man for organized society.

That, in the last analysis, is the useful thing for which Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc stand in modern politics.

It almost seems at times, however, as though they were ready to see us bound again with the fetters of ancient servitudes, in order to compel us to take part once more in the ancient struggle for freedom.