We shall need a sort of Distributist psychology, as well as a Distributist philosophy. That is partly why I am not content with plausible solutions about credit or corporative rule. We need a new (or old) theory and practice of pleasure. The vulgar school of panem et circenses only gives people circuses; it does not even tell them how to enjoy circuses. But we have not merely to tell them how to enjoy circuses. We have to tell them how to enjoy enjoyment.*
[* December 13, 1934.]
In attacking a special abuse, Chesterton was most successful when he took the thought to a deeper depth. The following Christmas (1935) he wrote:
We live in a terrible time, of war and rumour of war. . . . International idealism in its effort to hold the world together . . . is admittedly weakened and often disappointed. I should say simply that it does not go deep enough. . . . If we really wish to make vivid the horrors of destruction and mere disciplined murder we must see them more simply as attacks on the hearth and the human family; and feel about Hitler as men felt about Herod.
The modern world tended to gild pure gold and then try to scrape the gilt off the gingerbread, to paint the lily and then complain of its gaudiness. Thus it had vulgarised Christmas and now demanded the abolition of Christmas because it was vulgar. It was the truth he had emphasised years ago in contrast with Shaw: the world had spoilt the ideas but it was the Christian ideas the world needed, if only in order to recover the human ideas. He went on—
If we want to talk about poverty, we must talk about it as the hunger of a human being. . . . We must say first of the beggar, not that there is insufficient housing accommodation, but that he has not where to lay his head . . . we must talk of the human family in language as plain and practical and positive as that in which mystics used to talk of the Holy Family. We must learn again to use the naked words that describe a natural thing. . . . Then we shall draw on the driving force of many thousand years, and call up a real humanitarianism out of the depths of humanity.
I should like to collect all the essays and poems on Christmas; he wrote several every year, yet each is different, each goes to the heart of his thought. As Christopher Morley says: "One of the simple greatnesses of G.K.C. shows in this, that we think of him instinctively toward Christmas time."* Some men, it may be, are best moved to reform by hate, but Chesterton was best moved by love and nowhere does that love shine more clearly than in all he wrote about Christmas. It will be for this philosophy, this charity, this poetry that men will turn over the pages of G.K.'s Weekly a century hence if the world still lasts. It is for us who are his followers to see that they are truly creative. Destruction of evil is a great work but if it leaves only a vacuum, nature abhors that vacuum. Creation is what matters for the future and Chesterton's writing is creative.
[* Mark Twain Quarterly, Spring, 1937.]
So too with the radio. In this new medium his mind was alert to present his new-old ideas, his fundamental philosophy of life after some fresh fashion. A letter from Broadcasting House (Nov. 2, 1932) after his first talk records the delight of all who heard it:
The building rings with your praises! I knew I was not alone in my delight over your first talk. I think even you in your modesty will find some pleasure in hearing what widespread interest there is in what you are doing. You bring us something very rare to the microphone. I am most anxious that you should be with us till after Christmas. You will have a vast public by Christmas and it is good that they should hear you. Would you undertake six further fortnightly talks from January 16th onwards?