Gilbert Keith Chesterton

by Maisie Ward

All the agitated reformers who were running about and offering their various nostrums were prepared to confess that something had gone very wrong with modern civilisation. But they suggested that what was wrong with the present generation of adults could be set right for the coming generation by means of education. In the last part of the book, "Education or the Mistake about the Child," he put the unanswerable question: How are we to give what we have not got? "To hear people talk one would think [education] was some sort of magic chemistry, by which, out of a laborious hotch-potch of hygienic meals, baths, breathing-exercises, fresh-air and freehand drawing, we can produce something splendid by accident; we can create what we cannot conceive." The social reformers who were talking about education seem not to have seen very clearly what they meant by the word. They argued about whether it meant putting ideas into the child or drawing ideas out of the child. In any case, as Chesterton pointed out, you must choose which kind of ideas you are going to put in or even which kind you are going to draw out. "There is indeed in each living creature a collection of forces and functions; but education means producing these in particular shapes and training them for particular purposes, or it means nothing at all."

But to decide what they were trying to produce was altogether too much for the men who were directing education in our Board Schools. The Public Schools of England were often the target of Chesterton's attacks; but they had, he declared, one immense superiority over the Board Schools. The men who directed them knew exactly what they wanted and were on the whole successful in producing it. Those responsible for the Board Schools seemed to have no idea excepting that of feebly imitating the Public Schools. One disadvantage of this was that, at its worst and at its best, the Public School idea could only be applicable to a small governing class. The other disadvantage was that whereas in the Public Schools the masters were working with the parents and trying to give the boys the same general shape as their homes would give them, the Board Schools were doing nothing of the kind. The schoolmaster of the poor never worked with the parents; often he ignored them; sometimes he positively worked against them. Such education was, Chesterton held, the very reverse of that which would prevail in a true democracy. "We have had enough education for the people; we want education by the people."

Chesterton felt keenly that while the faddists were perfectly prepared to take the children out of the hands of any parents who happened to be poor, they had not really the courage of their own convictions. They would expatiate upon methods; they could not define their aims; they would take refuge in such meaningless terms as progress or efficiency or success. They were not prepared to say what they wanted to succeed in producing, towards what goal they were progressing or what was the test of efficiency. And part of this inability arose from their curious fear of the past. Most movements of reform have looked to the past for great part of their inspiration. To reform means to shape anew, and he pointed out that every revolution involves the idea of a return. On this point, G.K. attacked two popular sayings. One was "You can't put the clock back"; but, he said, you can and you do constantly. The clock is a piece of mechanism which can be adjusted by the human finger. "There is another proverb: 'As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it'; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God, I will make it again."

It is easy to understand that this sort of philosophy should be out of tune with the Socialist who looked with contempt on the wisdom of his forefathers. It is less easy to understand why it was unacceptable also to most of the Tories. One reviewer asked whether Mr. Chesterton was the hoariest of Conservatives or the wildest of Radicals. And with none of his books are the reviews so bewildered as they are with this one. "The universe is ill-regulated," said the Liverpool Daily Post, "according to the fancy of Mr. Chesterton; but we are inclined to think that if the deity were to talk over matters with him, he would soon come to see that a Chestertonian cosmos would be no improvement on things as they are." On the other hand, the Toronto Globe remarks, "His boisterous optimism will not admit that there is anything to sorrow over in this best of all possible worlds." The Observer suggested that Chesterton would find no disciples because "his converts would never know from one week to another what they had been converted to"; while the Yorkshire Post felt that the chief disadvantage of the book was that "a shrewd reader can pretty accurately anticipate Mr. Chesterton's point of view on any subject whatsoever."

It seems almost incredible that so definite a line of thought, so abundantly illustrated, should not have been clear to all his readers. Some reviewers, one supposes, had not read the book; but surely the Daily Telegraph was deliberately refusing to face a challenge when it wrote: "His whole book is an absurdity, but to be absurd for three hundred pages on end is itself a work of genius." That particular reviewer was shirking a serious issue. He was the official Tory. But those whom I might call the unofficial Tories, such men for instance as my own father, received much of this book with delight and yet declined to take Chesterton's sociology seriously. And I think it is worth trying to see why this was the case.

In a letter to the Clarion, G.K. outlines his own position: "If you want praise or blame for Socialists I have enormous quantities of both. Roughly speaking (1) I praise them to infinity because they want to smash modern society. (2) I blame them to infinity because of what they want to put in its place. As the smashing must, I suppose, come first, my practical sympathies are mainly with them."*

[* Letter to the Clarion, February 8, 1910.]

Such a confession of faith seemed shocking to the honest old-fashioned Tory. And because it shocked him, he made the mistake of calling it irresponsible. Chesterton frequently urged revolution as the only possible means of changing an intolerable state of things. But the word "revolution" suggested streets running with blood. And, on the other hand, they had not the very faintest conception of how intolerable the state of things was against which Chesterton proposed to revolt. I think it must be said too that he was a little hazy as to the exact nature of the revolution he proposed. He certainly hoped to avoid the guillotine! And even when urging the restoration of the common lands to the people of England, he appended a note in which he talked of a land purchase scheme similar to that which George Wyndham had introduced in Ireland. But besides this tinge of vagueness in what he proposed, there was another weakness in his presentment of his sociology which I think was his chief weakness as a writer.

It would be hard to find anyone who got so much out of words, proverbs, popular sayings. He wrung every ounce of meaning out of them; he stood them on their heads; he turned them inside out. And everything he said he illustrated with an extraordinary wealth of fancy; but when you come to illustration by way of concrete facts there is a curious change. In his sociology, he did the same thing that his best critics blamed in his literary biographies. He would take some one fact and appear to build upon it an enormous superstructure and then, very often, it would turn out that the fact itself was inaccurately set down; and the average reader, discovering the inaccuracy, felt that the entire superstructure was on a rotten foundation and had fallen with it to the ground. Yet the ordinary reader was wrong. The "fact" had not been the foundation of his thought, but only the thing that had started him thinking. If the "fact" had not been there at all, his thinking would have been neither more nor less valid. But most readers could not see the distinction.

It is a little difficult to make the point clear; but anyone who has read the Browning and the Dickens and then read the reviews of them will recognise what I mean. It was universally acknowledged that Chesterton might commit a hundred inaccuracies and yet get at the heart of his subject in a way that the most painstaking biographer and critic could not emulate. The more deeply one reads Dickens or Browning, the more even one studies their lives, the more one is confirmed as to the profound truth of the Chesterton estimate and the genius of his insight. A superficial glance sees only the errors; a deeper gaze discovers the truth. It is exactly the same with his sociology. But here we are in a field where there is far more prejudice. When Chesterton talked of State interference and used again and again the same illustration—that of children whose hair was forcibly cut short in a Board School—two questions were asked by Socialists: Was this a solitary incident? Was it accurately reported? When a pained doctor wrote to the papers saying the incident had been merely one of a request to parents who had gladly complied for fear their children should catch things from other and dirtier children, it appeared as though G.K. had built far too much on this one point. It was not the case. He was not building on the incident, he was illustrating by the incident. But it must be admitted that he was incredibly careless in investigating such incidents; and quite indifferent as to his own accuracy. And this was foolish, for he could have found in Police Court records, in the pages of John Bull and later of the Eye Witness itself, abundance of well verified illustrations of his thesis.