I wonder that no one has written a wild romance about the adventures of such an alien, seeking the great English aristocrats, and only guided by the names; looking for the Duke of Bedford in the town of that name, seeking for some trace of the Duke of Norfolk in Norfolk. He might sail for Wellington in New Zealand to find the ancient seat of the Wellingtons. The last scene might show him trying to learn Welsh in order to converse with the Prince of Wales.
Here is an idea that is distinctly amusing when made to fill one short paragraph, and might be deadly tedious if extended into a wild romance. Perhaps the best way of summarizing the peculiar decadence into which Chesterton seemed at one time to be falling is by the statement that up to the present he has not found time to write the book, but has done others like it. And yet the decadence has never showed signs of that fin de siècle rustiness that marked the decadent movement (if it was really a movement and not just an obsession) of the generation that preceded Chesterton. He cursed it in the dedication to Mr. E. C. Bentley of The Man who was Thursday, and he remained true to the point of view expressed in that curse for ever afterwards.
A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,
Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul, when we were boys together.
Science announced nonentity, and art admired decay;
The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay.
Round us in antic order their crippled vices came—
Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.
Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom,
Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume.
Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung;
The world was very old indeed when you and I were young.
They twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named:
Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed.
The Chestertonian decadence was not even an all-round falling-off. If anybody were to make the statement that in the year nineteen-hundred-and-something Chesterton produced his worst work it would be open to anybody else to declare, with equal truth, that in the same year Chesterton produced his best work. And the year in which these extremes met would be either 1913 or 1914, the years of Father Brown and The Flying Inn on one hand, and of Father Brown and some of the songs of The Flying Inn on the other. It was not a technical decline, but the period of certain intellectual wearinesses, when Chesterton's mental resilience failed him for a time, and he welcomed with too much enthusiasm the nasty ideas from which no man is wholly free.
The main feature indeed of this period of decadence is the brandishing about of a whole mass of antipathies. A man is perfectly entitled to hate what he will, but it is generally assumed that the hater has some ideas on the subject of the reform of the hatee. But Chesterton is as devoid of suggestions as a goat is of modesty. A man may have a violent objection against women earning their own livings, and yet be regarded as a reasonable being if he has any alternative proposals for the well-being of the unendowed and temporarily or permanently unmarriageable woman, with no relatives able to support her—and there are two or three millions of such women in the United Kingdom. But a mere "You shouldn't" is neither here nor there.
Take this verse. It was written two or three years ago and is from a poem entitled To a Turk.
With us too rage against the rood
Your devils and your swine;
A colder scorn of womanhood,
A baser fear of wine,
And lust without the harem,
And Doom without the God,
Go. It is not this rabble
Sayeth to you "Ichabod."
A previous stanza talks about "the creedless chapel." Here is a whole mass of prejudices collected into a large splutter at the expense of England. If the verse means anything at all, it means that the English are nearer the beasts than the Turks.
Another of Chesterton's intellectual aberrations is his anti-Semitism. He continually denied in the columns of The Daily Herald that he was an anti-Semite, but his references to the Jews are innumerable and always on the same side. If one admits what appears to be Chesterton's contention that Judaism is largely just an exclusive form of contemporary atheism, then one is entitled to ask, Why is a wicked Gentile atheist merely an atheist, while a Jewish atheist remains a Jew? Surely the morals of both are on the same level, and the atheism, and not the race, is the offensive feature. The Jews have their sinners and their saints, including the greatest Saint of all.
They and they only, amongst all mankind,
Received the transcript of the eternal mind;
Were trusted with His own engraven laws,
And constituted guardians of His cause:
Their's were the prophets, their's the priestly call,
And their's, by birth, the Saviour of us all.