A year later another family event, this time a joyful one, took Gilbert back to his youth; Mollie Kidd, daughter of Annie Firmin, became engaged to be married. She was a rather special young cousin to Gilbert both because of the old affection for her mother and because she had played hostess to him in Canada when her mother was ill. He wrote
Postmark. Aug. 28, 1934
MY DEAR MOLLIE,
I am afraid that chronologically, or by the clock, I am relatively late in sending you my most warm congratulations—and yet I do assure you that I write as one still thrilled and almost throbbing with good news. It would take pages to tell you all I feel about it: beginning with my first memory of your mother, when she was astonishingly like you, except that she had yellow plaits of hair down her back. I do not absolutely insist that you should now imitate her in this: but you would not be far wrong if you imitate her in anything. And so on—till we come to the superb rhetorical passage about You and the right fulfilment of Youth. It would take pages: and that is why the pages are never written. We bad correspondents, we vile non-writers of letters, have a sort of secret excuse, that no one will ever listen to till the Day of Judgment, when all infinite patience will have to listen to so much. It is often because we think so much about our friends that we do not write to them—the letters would be too long. Especially in the case of wretched writing men like me, who feel in their spare time that writing is loathsome and thinking about their friends pleasant. In the course of turning out about ten articles, on Hitler, on Humanism, on determinism, on Distributism, on Dollfuss and Darwin and the Devil knows what, there really are thoughts about real people that cross my mind suddenly and make me really happy in a real way: and one of them is the news of your engagement. Please believe, dear Mollie, that I am writing the truth, though I am a journalist: and give my congratulations to everyone involved.
Yours with love,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
And in that year came two bits of public recognition of rather different kinds. He was elected to the Athenaeum Club under Rule II—Honoris causa; and he and Belloc were given by the Pope the title of Knight Commander of St. Gregory with Star. During these years the paper had gone steadily on "at some considerable inconvenience" because, he said, he still felt it had a part to play. At home and abroad the scene had been steadily darkening. In July 1930, three years before Hitler came to the Chancellorship, we find the following among the notes of the Week:
When we are told that the ancient Marshal Hindenburg is now
Dictator of Germany we suspect a note of exaggeration . . .
Hindenburg never was the dictator of anything and never will be. He
is, however the man who keeps the seat warm for a Dictator to come.
Hindenburg has led us back to Frederick the Great. . . .
Hindenburg has now given rein to the extreme Nationalists, with the delivered provinces to support him in the flush of patriotism. And the extreme Nationalists have only one policy: to reconstitute the unjust frontiers of Germany, which Europe fought to amend.
In 1931 had come the Customs Union between Germany and Austria, the obvious impotence of the League of Nations to restrain Japan, the "National" Government and falling sterling in England. Less than two years later Hitler was Chancellor of Germany, and in 1934 came the murder of Dollfuss. Chesterton wrote of the tragedy whereby the name Germany was taken from Austria and given to Prussia. With Dollfuss fell all that was left of the Holy Roman Empire: the barbarians had invaded the center of our civilisation and like the Turks besieging Vienna had struck at its heart. He regarded Hitler merely as the tool of Prussianism. The new Paganism was the logical outcome of the old Prussianism: it was too the apotheosis of tyranny. "In the Pagan State, in antiquity or modernity, you cannot appeal from Tyranny to God; because the Tyranny is the God."