But they that rule in England
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas for England!
They have no graves as yet.’
“He was a Little Englander; partly, one suspects, as a reaction from Kiplingism: but in an age of peace he was a defender of just wars. He inveighed against those who blamed the older generation in 1914 when they decided that war was the only honorable solution and later he said that a universal peace, founded on a universal panic, raised the point as to whether the supreme moral state will be found when everybody is too frightened to fight; and dying, but undefeated, he repeated as a creed, ‘Monarchy, aristocracy, democracy—responsible forms of rule—have collapsed under plutocracy, which is irresponsible rule. And this has come upon us because we departed from the old morality in three essential points. First, we supported notions against known, old customs; secondly, we made the state top-heavy with a new and secretive tyranny of will; and third, we forgot that there is no faith in freedom without faith in free-will. Materialism brings with it a servile fatalism—because nothing, as Dante said, else than ‘the generosity of God could give to man after all ordinary, orderly gifts, the noblest of all things which is——liberty.’”
Chesterton examined and scrutinized the conscience of England as he did his own, but only a fool would deny that from York to Cornwall he loved his country with a Little Englander’s passion!
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE POET
Not a few of his readers feel that Chesterton’s chief bid to fame is his poetry. Alfred Noyes, for instance, writes the author,
“Chesterton led one of the most original lives of his day in Europe. It is well to remember this when it is suggested that men who avail themselves of the rich experiences of the centuries are merely echoes of the past. The true originality does not consist in inventing ideas that have no relation to truth and no roots in reality, but in the discovery and unveiling of something that has always been there, though we may hitherto have lacked the eyes to see it, or the power to express and interpret it. Chesterton had an expert gift for making one see things in all their original miscellaneousness, as things that really are, and yet—cannot be, or give any rational account of themselves. Many years ago in a poem on the death of Francis Thompson, I wrote of the overwhelming mystery that there should be a single grain of dust in existence, the sheer impossibility of it on any rational ground, and how the smallest atom defied exploration and ultimately asserted a superrational origin.
“‘I am ... yet cannot be, ...!