Gilbert Keith Chesterton

by Maisie Ward

In coming into some of these more stable cities of the States I felt something quite sincerely of that historic emotion which is satisfied in the eternal cities of the Mediterranean. I felt in America what many Americans suppose can only be felt in Europe. I have seldom had that sentiment stirred more simply and directly than when I saw from afar off, above that vast grey labyrinth of Philadelphia, great Penn upon his pinnacle like the graven figure of a god who had fashioned a new world; and remembered that his body lay buried in a field at the turning of a lane, a league from my own door.

In Baltimore the Catholic history appealed to him yet more strongly, and, invited to visit Cardinal Gibbons, he felt himself touching "the end of a living chain." In Boston, "much more beautiful than its name," he companioned again with the Autocrat and recalled how in his own youth English and American literature seemed to be one thing. Indeed he was there reminded even "of English things that have largely vanished from England." Washington he saw both as a beautiful city and an idea—"a sort of paradise of impersonal politics without personal commerce." And in Nashville, Tennessee it was "with a sort of intensity of feeling" that he found himself "before a dim and faded picture; and from the dark canvas looked forth the face of Andrew Jackson, watchful like a white eagle."

The things Chesterton chose for description all have relevance to the main thesis of the book which has often been missed and which emerges most clearly in the first and the last chapters. He insists always that he writes as a foreigner—and indeed repeats frequently that it is by keeping our own distinct nationality that Englishmen and Americans will best understand and like one another—but he writes also as a man not unconscious of history. Thus writing, the older cities represent to him one trend in the States and New York another. I am sorry to say that he does not appreciate New York as he ought, because of his dislike of cosmopolitanism. Its beauty he sees as breath-taking: not solid and abiding but a kind of fairyland. The lights on Broadway evoked from him the exclamation "What a glorious garden of wonders this would be for anyone who was lucky enough to be unable to read," and he imagines a simple peasant who fancies that they must be announcing in letters of fire: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," and must be put up on occasion of some great national feast, whereas they are but advertising signs put up to make money.

The Skyline seemed to him most lovely: "vertical lines that suggest a sort of rush upwards, as of great cataracts topsy turvy—the strong daylight finds everywhere the broken edges of things and the sort of hues we see in newly turned earth or the white sections of trees. . . ." He feels the intense "imaginative pleasure of those dizzy turrets and dancing fires." But he ends with the note that really spoilt New York for him: "If those nightmare buildings were really all built for nothing, how noble they would be."

Advertisement, Big Business, Monopoly might have invaded the old traditionary cities of America as they had those of England, but New York existed (he felt) as a new and startling expression of them. They shrieked in every light and from every sky-scraper. The whole question of America was: would the older simpler really great historical tradition win, or would it be defeated by the new and towering evil? He has an interesting chapter on the countryside, finding hope in the considerable extension of small ownership among the farmers and in the houses built from the growing material that wood is, but he is again depressed at the reflection that the culture of the countryside is not its own but imported from the towns—therefore itself largely commercialised.

Roaming over the world in search of his examples Chesterton sees the ideal of the early republicans as dead in the republics of today, and nowhere more dead than in America. It would be useless, he feels, to invoke Jefferson or Lincoln in the modern world against the tyranny of wage-slavery or in favour of racial justice because "the bridge of brotherhood had broken down in the modern mind."

Jefferson the Deist "said the sight of slavery in his country made him tremble, remembering that God is just," but the modern who has lost these absolute standards has "grown dizzy with degree and relativity." Hence came the same terrible peril in both England and America: that in the eyes of the new plutocracy the idea of manhood has gone. "There were different sorts of apes; but there was no doubt that we were the superior sort."

Only in one direction did he see real hope. The new dreams of the 18th century had gone, but the ancient dogmas of the Catholic Church remained. Catholics might forget brotherhood, like their fellows, but "the Catholic type of Christianity had rivetted itself irrevocably to the manhood of all men." "The church would always continue to ordain negroes and canonise beggars and labourers." "Where its faith was fixed by creeds and councils it could not save itself even by surrender. . . . THERE IS NO BASIS FOR DEMOCRACY EXCEPT IN A DOGMA ABOUT THE DIVINE ORIGIN OF MAN."

I have put that final sentence in capitals for it is the climax both of Gilbert's thinking about America and of one of the most important trains of thought that brought him to the home of liberty secured for the human race by dogma—that is to say by revealed truth. He went home to be received into the Catholic Church as I have earlier related.

What I Saw in America is of special importance in relation to later discussions in G.K.'s Weekly. While the journalists seemed convinced on his first visit that he had nothing but roses to throw, and compared him favorably to Dickens, a collection of quotations could be made from G.K.'s Weekly of a quite opposite kind, yet I do not think he ever attacks America as much as he attacks England. He was himself much amused at finding he was expected to be either "For America" or "Against America," both of which attitudes appeared to him absurd. In that sense he was neither for nor against his own country. He liked Americans, he disliked certain trends in America: because he loved England he disliked the same trends even more in England. Certain things in modern civilisation which he hated he did regard as primarily American. American comfort to him seemed acute discomfort. He thought every American lives in an "airless furnace in the middle of which he sits and eats lumps of ice."