Belloc solemnly warned our country that we were making inevitable "the death in great pain of innumerable young Englishmen now boys. . . . It may be in two years or in five or in ten the blow will fall." (November 8, 1934.)
Yet even this seemed less terrible to Chesterton than the state of mind then prevailing: the mood—nay the fever—of pacifism that demanded the isolation of England from Europe's peril. He called it "Mafficking for peace": a sort of Imperialism that forgot that the Atlantic is wider than the Straits of Dover and allowed Lord Beaverbrook to regard England as a part of Canada. "Englishmen who have felt that fever will one day look back on it with shame." "This most noble and generous nation," he wrote with a note of agony, "which lost its religion in the seventeenth century has lost its morals in the twentieth."
The League of Nations had, G. K. held, been thought at first to be a kind of Pentecost but had in reality "come together to rebuild the Tower of Babel." And this because it had no common basis in religion. "Humanitarianism does not unite humanity. For even one isolated man is half divine." But today man had despaired of man. "Hope for the superman is another name for despair of man."
Reading a recent commentary in a review, I suddenly saw that politics and economics were not what mattered most in the paper. The commentary in question was to the effect that G.K.'s Weekly was inferior to the New Witness because G.K. had "only" general principles and ideas and no detailed inside knowledge of how the world of finance and politics was going. Looking again through the articles I had marked as most characteristically his, I saw that they were not only chiefly about ideas and principles but also that they were mostly pure poetry. Chesterton was, I believe, greatest and most permanently effective when he was moved, not by a passing irritation with the things that pass, but by the great emotions evoked by the Eternal, emotions which in Eternity alone will find full fruition.
There are in the paper articles in which, appearing to speak out of his own knowledge, he is merely repeating information given him by Belloc. And it was quite out of Chesterton's character to write with certainty about what he did not know with certainty. Hence this writing is his weakest. But the paper has, too, some of his strongest work and his mind as he drew to the end of life lingered on thoughts that had haunted him in its beginning.
Before the Boer War had introduced me to politics, or worse still to politicians [he wrote in a Christmas article in 1934], I had some vague and groping ideas of my own about a general view or vision of existence. It was a long time before I had anything worth calling a religion; what I had was not even sufficiently coherent to be called a philosophy. But it was, in a sense, a view of life; I had it in the beginning; and I am more and more coming back to it in the end. . . . my original and almost mystical conviction of the miracle of all existence and the essential excitement of all experience.*
[* December 6, 1934.]
This he felt must be the profound philosophy by which Distributism should succeed and whereby he tested the modern world and found it wanting—
something of which Christmas is the best traditional symbol. It was then no more than a notion about the point at which extremes meet, and the most common thing becomes a cosmic and mystical thing. I did not want so much to alter the place and use of things as to weight them with a new dimension; to deepen them by going down to the potential nothing; to lift them to infinity by measuring from zero.
The most logical form of this is in thanks to a Creator; but at every stage I felt that such praises could never rise too high; because they could not even reach the height of our own thanks for unthinkable existence, or horror of more unthinkable non-existence. And the commonest things, as much as the most complex, could thus leap up like fountains of praise. . . .