Almost thirty years have passed and today the poem still speaks. Greeting Jacques Maritain on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, Dorothy Thompson quoted King Alfred's assertion of Christian freedom against "the pagan nazi conquerors of his day." After Crete the Times had the shortest first leader in its history. Under the heading Sursum Corda was a brief statement of the disaster, followed by the words of Our Lady to King Alfred:
I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?
The unbreakable strength of that apparently faint and tenuous thread of faith appeared in the sequel. Many had the ballad in hand in those dark days; many others wrote to the Times asking the source of the quotation. Months later when Winston Churchill spoke of "the end of the beginning," the Times returned to The White Horse and gave the opening of Alfred's speech at Ethandune:
"The high tide!" King Alfred cried.
"The high tide and the turn!"
CHAPTER XVII
The Disillusioned Liberal
The English were not wrong in loving liberty. They were only wrong in losing it.
G.K.'s Weekly, June 1, 1933.
ONE MAIN DIFFICULTY in writing biography lies in the various strands that run through every human life. It is as I have already said impossible to keep a perfect chronological order with anyone whose occupations and interests were so multifarious. In the present chapter and the two that follow we shall consider the movement of Chesterton's mind upon politics and sociology. This will involve going back to the general election of 1906 and forward to the Marconi Trial of 1913. For those who are interested in his poetry or his humour or his philosophy or his theology but not at all in his sociological and political outlook, I fear that these three chapters may loom a little uninvitingly. If they are tempted to skip them altogether, I shall not blame them; yet they will miss a great deal that is vital to the understanding of his whole mind and the course his life was to take. These are not the most entertaining chapters in the book, but if we are really to know Chesterton the events they cover must be considered most carefully.
As a boy Gilbert Chesterton spoke of politics as absorbing "for every ardent intellect"; and during these years he was himself deeply concerned with the politics of England. The ideal Liberalism sketched in his letter to Hammond during the Boer War [Chapter X] had appeared to him, if not perfectly realised, at least capable of realisation, in the existing Liberal Party. The Tory Party was in power and all its acts, to say nothing of its general ineptitude, appeared to Liberals as positive arguments for their own party. At this date so convinced a Tory as Lord Hugh Cecil could describe his own party as "to mix metaphors, an eviscerated ruin."* Several letters and postcards from Mr. Belloc announcing his own election as Liberal member for South Salford show the high hope with which young Liberalism was viewing the world in 1906: