11 America and Conversion

The Chestertons returned home in April 1920. The appointment in June of Herbert Samuel as High Commissioner in Palestine explained why they had encountered him out there. The appointment of a Jew angered Chesterton for two reasons: he thought it was obviously selfcontradictory, first that a Jewish High Commissioner should have been appointed, ‘the whole point of the experiment being that the Jews were to develop as a separate entity’; and, second, that a Jewish High Commissioner should have been entrusted with the task of ensuring that the non-Jewish inhabitants were treated fairly. The New Witness, nevertheless, continued to support the Zionist cause. But by August the paper was in a serious financial state, and Chesterton was forced to appeal to its readers for money. By Christmas just over £1,000 had been raised, but half had been given by Chesterton himself and his mother had donated £100. In fact, twice that amount was needed to secure the paper’s future, but the money raised at least meant that some outstanding debts could be paid, and the rest enabled the paper to continue for the time being.¹ Chesterton’s contributions included some delightful parodies of Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Yeats and Whitman, which appeared in the issue of 10 December 1920, with the note that they ‘were originally written for the Beaconsfield Convalescent Home and were on sale at a Bazaar to raise much-needed funds’. Chesterton had been asked to impersonate Old King Cole at the bazaar, at which he had run a tobacco stall. The parodies were later republished in The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton, published in 1927, under the title ‘Variations of an Air: Composed on Having to Appear in a Pageant as Old King Cole’.²

Apparently some time after their return home, Chesterton wrote in an undated letter to Maurice Baring that he had ‘not forgotten the things we talked of last year; though they have had further complications’, about which he would ‘soon probably have more to tell’ him. But what preoccupied him in this letter was Frances:

For deeper reasons than I could ever explain, my mind has to turn especially on the thought of my wife, whose life has been in many ways a very heroic tragedy; and to whom I am so much in debt of honour that I cannot bear to leave her, even psychologically, if it be possible by fact and sympathy to take her with me. We have had a very difficult time lately; but the other day she rather abruptly faced the thing herself in a new way, and spoke as if she knew where we would both end. But she asked for a little time; as a great friend of hers is also (with the approval of the priest whom she consulted) delaying for the moment till she is more certain. She and Frances want to meet and have it out, I think, and I cannot imagine any way in which Frances is more likely to be moved in that direction than by an Anglican or ex-Anglican friend of exactly that type. Fond as we are of each other, I am just a little too Bellocian already, if you understand me, to effect the precise thing I mean. I only write this to tell you the thing may look rather stationary, and yet it moves.³

In a later undated letter he wrote to say that he intended to call on Baring in the next few days:

I would have called on you long ago, let alone written, but for this load of belated work which really seems to bury me day after day. I never realised before that business can really block out much bigger things. As you may possibly guess, I want to consider my position about the biggest thing of all, whether I am to be inside it or outside it. I used to think one could be an Anglo-Catholic and really inside it; but if that was (to use an excellent phrase of your own) only a Porch, I do not think I want a Porch, and certainly not a Porch standing some way from the building. A Porch looks so silly, standing all by itself in a field. Since then, unfortunately, there have sprung up round it real ties and complications and difficulties; difficulties that seemed almost duties. … Sometimes one suspects the real obstacles have been the weaknesses one knows to be wrong, and not the doubts that might be relatively right, or at least rational. I suppose all this is a common story; and I hope so; for wanting to be uncommon is really not one of my weaknesses...⁴

As he had written during the war in a notebook, using a different metaphor: ‘Catholicism necessarily feels for Protestantism not the superiority a man feels over sticks and straws, but that he feels over clippings of his hair and nails. She feels Protestantism not merely as something insufficient, but something that would never have been even that, but for herself.’⁵ He wrote again to Baring, most probably in July not long after the event took place, to say that he had ‘had the other day a trying experience, and I think a hard case of casuistry; I am not sure that I was right; but also not by any means sure I was wrong’.

Long ago, before my present crisis, I had promised somebody to take part in what I took to be a small debate on labour. Too late, by my own carelessness, I found to my horror it had swelled into a huge Anglo-Catholic Congress at the Albert Hall. I tried to get out of it, but I was held to my promise. Then I reflected that I could only write (as I was already writing) to my Anglo-Catholic friends on the basis that I was one of them now in doubt about continuing such; and that their conference in some sense served the same purpose as their letters. What affected me most, however, was that by my own fault I had put them into a hole. Otherwise, I would not just now speak from or for their platform, just as I could not (as yet at any rate) speak from or for yours. So I spoke very briefly, saying something of what I think about social ethics. Whether or not my decision was right, my experience was curious and suggestive, though tragic; for I felt it like a farewell. There was no doubt about the enthusiasm of those thousands of Anglo-Catholics. But there was also no doubt, unless I am much mistaken, that many of them besides myself would be Roman Catholics rather than accept things they are quite likely to be asked to accept—for instance, by the Lambeth Conference. For though my own distress, as in most cases I suppose, has much deeper grounds than clerical decisions, yet if I cannot stay where I am, it will be a sort of useful symbol that the English Church has done something decisively Protestant or Pagan. I mean that to those to whom I cannot give my spiritual biography, I can say that the insecurity I felt in Anglicanism was typified in the Lambeth Conference.... A young Anglo-Catholic curate has just told me that the crowd there cheered all references to the Pope, and laughed at every mention of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It’s a queer state of things. I am concerned most, however, about somebody I value more than the Archbishop of Canterbury; Frances, to whom I owe much of my own faith, and to whom therefore (as far as I can see my way) I also owe every decent chance for the conventional defence of her faith. If her side can convince me, they have a right to do so; if not, I shall go hot and strong to convince her. I put it clumsily, but there is a point in my mind.

‘Logically’, therefore, he ‘must await answers’ to his questions from Father Waggett and Bishop Charles Gore, as well as from Father Ronald Knox, who had been a leading Anglo-Catholic priest before converting to Roman Catholicism in 1917, and Father Vincent McNabb, the well-known Dominican preacher.⁶ This Anglo-Catholic Congress, where Chesterton was ‘received with enormous enthusiasm’,⁷ was the first of a number that took place between the two world wars when Anglo-Catholics seemed poised to take control of the Church of England, and took place at the Albert Hall from 29 June to 1 July 1920. Along with Bishop Gore, Chesterton spoke on the Church and social and industrial problems.

At the end of the year, just before leaving for America, he wrote again to Baring ‘the shortest, hastiest and worst written letter in the world’ to say that he had to leave for America: ‘I am glad for I shall see something of Frances, without walls of work between us.’ The brief note concluded: ‘I have pretty well made up my mind about the thing we talked about. Fortunately, the thing we talked about can be found all over the world.’⁸ Just before leaving, Chesterton had also written one of his ‘rare’ letters to Father O’Connor on Christmas Eve 1920. He asked O’Connor for his prayers, telling him that they were off to America ‘for a month or two’. Chesterton was ‘glad of it, because I shall be at least free from the load of periodical work that has prevented me from talking properly to anybody, even to [Frances]; and I want to talk very much’. When he returned to England, he would ‘probably want to talk’ with O’Connor ‘about very important things—the most important things there are’.

Frances has not been well, and though I think she is better, I have to do things in a considerate way, if you understand me; I feel it is only right to consult also with my Anglo-Catholic friends; but I have at present a feeling that it will be something like a farewell. Things have shaken me up a good deal lately—especially the persecution of Ireland. But of course there are even bigger things than that.⁹

O’Connor felt that Chesterton was ‘longing to have it out with Frances about his conversion, but his work and her delicate health were his excuses for not satisfying that longing. But it was also, as she had already guessed, his congenital aversion from starting a crisis.’¹⁰

Two months before the Chestertons were due to leave for America on a lecture tour, tests showed that Frances’s arthritis of the spine had seriously deteriorated. It seemed the trip would have to be cancelled. But Father O’Connor asked for prayers at a crippled children’s home in Vienna, which the couple had helped support financially when Austria was starving after the Treaty of Versailles. After a fortnight Frances’s condition improved, and the tour could go ahead.¹¹

Before leaving for America Chesterton had to go to the American consulate in London to obtain a visa. His experience there told him a great deal about the country he was about to visit for the first time. He was given a form to fill in, a form that was ‘very different from any form I had ever filled up in my life’. It was a kind of examination paper. It enquired of the applicant, for example, ‘ ‘‘Are you an anarchist?’’ to which a detached philosopher would naturally feel inclined to answer, ‘‘What the devil has that to do with you? Are you an anarchist?’’...’. Another question was: ‘Are you in favour of subverting the government of the United States by force?’ To this Chesterton was inclined to respond: ‘I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour and not the beginning.’ His ‘inquisitor’ had then enquired, ‘in his more than morbid curiosity’: ‘Are you a polygamist?’ The obvious answer to this was ‘No such luck’—or else ‘Not such a fool’— depending on one’s ‘experience of the other sex’. Among the ‘many things that amused’ Chesterton ‘almost to the point of treating the form’ with disrespect was ‘the thought of the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat it respectfully’.¹²

Now it was easy to laugh at such a strange form, and there was no harm in a foreigner doing so, provided he went on to consider ‘the deeper causes that make people so different from him’. The contrast with Chesterton’s experience of travelling in the Middle East was certainly striking. There his papers had been examined by officials of ‘governments which many worthy people in the West would vaguely identify with corsairs and assassins’; but these ‘slaves of Asiatic autocracy were content, in the old liberal fashion, to judge me by my actions; they did not inquire into my thoughts. They held their power as limited to the limitation of practice; they did not forbid me to hold a theory.’ What, then, Chesterton remembered asking himself as he stood in the consulate with the examination paper in his hand, is it ‘which makes America peculiar, or which is peculiar to America’? The answer, he realized, was the key to understanding the ‘ultimate idea of what America is—namely, that ‘America is the only country in the world that is founded on a creed’—for the ‘American Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed’. Now a creed like the Christian creed was ‘at once the broadest and the narrowest thing in the world’, for it brought together the most disparate peoples, while at the same time insisting that they conform to certain beliefs: it was a ‘net’ that drew in all kinds of people but it was ‘a net of a certain pattern, the pattern of Peter the Fisherman’. In a not dissimilar way ‘the great American experiment’ was ‘the experiment of a democracy of diverse races which has been compared to a melting-pot’. But that melting pot was ‘of a certain shape and a certain substance’: ‘The melting-pot must not melt.’ America invited everyone to become its citizen, but this implied ‘the dogma that that there is such a thing as citizenship’. Before mass immigration into Europe much later in the twentieth century, America did seem to a European ‘incongruous or comic’ in its ‘racial admixtures’, and that was why ‘the American international examination paper’ did seem funny to an Englishman like Chesterton. But that was because England was English and took ‘certain national traditions for granted’. There was no ‘inquisition’ for visitors to its shores because there was no ‘creed’. Where there was a ‘type’, there was no need for a ‘test’. And where there were ‘national types’, the types could be ‘allowed to hold any theories’. But there was no such American type, and so America had to be ‘not only democratic but dogmatic’, both ‘inquisitive’ and ‘intolerant’. For America wanted to make its ‘new citizens patriotic Americans’. This was ‘Americanisation’, ‘the amazing ambition to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy Ainu’. As he stood there in the American consulate with the examination paper in his hand, Chesterton realized what it was that made America so different from Europe: ‘We are not trying to Anglicise thousands of French cooks or Italian organ grinders. France is not trying to Gallicize thousands of English trippers or German prisoners of war.’ The American visa application form was indeed ‘abnormal’, but then America was abnormal in its ‘experiment of a home for the homeless’. It was indeed an ‘asylum’—but, added Chesterton, writing down what he had felt that day in the consulate, it was ‘only since Prohibition that it has looked a little like a lunatic asylum’.

Before leaving for America, Chesterton at least understood, unlike his fellow countrymen, that America was far from being ‘a sort of Anglo-Saxon colony, knowing that it was more and more thronged with crowds of very different colonists’. In that sense, it was closer to Europe than England, and during the war Chesterton had tried to persuade his countrymen ‘not to appeal to the American as if he were a rather dowdy Englishman, who had been rusticating in the provinces and had not heard the latest news about the town’.¹³

On New Year’s Day 1921 the Chestertons left London’s Euston Station at 8.30 in the morning for Liverpool, where they arrived at 1.45 p.m. On boarding their ship, Chesterton was interviewed by two journalists. Frances was delighted at how empty the ship was, writing in the diary she kept during their trip to North America: ‘all the pleasanter’.¹⁴ The purser gave them a better cabin than the one they had booked: ‘Beautiful cabin’, Frances noted, ‘with a sort of sitting room attached and really quite spacious’. On Sunday 2 January they had breakfast on deck. The weather was ‘wonderful outside but the indoor rooms are very overheated’, a complaint that Frances was to make about American hotel rooms. They had discovered ‘a lending library with plenty of the new books’. They sat at the Captain’s table, where they made ‘a nice little party’. That night the weather became ‘rough’ with wind and rain; and because they had left the porthole open, ‘everything on the dressing table got soaked’. Next day Frances felt ‘pretty sea-sick’, but Chesterton was unaffected: ‘G. perfectly well’. The Captain told Frances that the ship was ‘making the long course 100 miles to the South for fear of icebergs’. On Tuesday 4 January Frances noted in her diary that the ship was not as empty as she had implied in her first entry:

We have over 1000 immigrants on board of every nationality. The poor souls look so wretched though often they are merry enough. There are only two classes of passengers on this boat 1st. and 3rd. It seems a shame that 100 first class passengers should occupy nearly the whole of the ship with a winter garden, library, smoke room, drawing room, dining room and endless cabins and staterooms and these poor folk be confined in a very small space on the lower deck, but I hear they are very well fed most often better than ever in their lives before.

Four days later on Sunday 8 January Chesterton presided at an evening concert and ‘made an excellent speech on behalf of the Merchant Service orphanage’; according to the ship’s officers, there was a record collection.¹⁵

On Monday 10 January, nine days after leaving Liverpool, the Chestertons arrived in New York. After lunch, ‘the fun (or the horrors) began. Interviewers, photographers, film men—all seized on us and we spent our last hour on the boat in a mob of what I can only term lunatics,’ recorded the dismayed Frances, while noting at the same time how good-humoured her husband remained throughout.¹⁶ In the lengthy report in the New York Times next day, which noted that he spoke in ‘essays’ and that it was ‘difficult ... to get a direct reply to any leading question’, Chesterton was quoted as saying that he had come to America ‘to lose his impressions of the United States’. For he had plenty of ideas about America, but he supposed that they were ‘all quite wrong’. He had come ‘to give inadequate after-dinner speeches known as lectures’. He did not know what he would say till the time came: ‘I am a journalist and so am vastly ignorant of many things, but because I am a journalist I write and talk about them all.’ He then ‘shook hands with some half dozen Customs officials who welcomed him to the city’.

The impression given by Mr Chesterton as he moved majestically along the pier or on the ship was one of huge bulk. To the ordinary sized people on the pier he seemed to blot out the liner and the river. Mrs Chesterton was busy with the luggage.

‘My wife understands these things,’ he said with a sweep of his stick, ‘I don’t.’

He did not think that anything that George Bernard Shaw said about England or the English could do any harm, as he had been out of touch with events for the last ten years.¹⁷

In order to get the two figures into the same picture, the photographers requested Mr Chesterton to sit in a big armchair while his wife stood beside him. When they were settled in the required pose, he exclaimed: ‘I say, I don’t like this; people will think that I am a German.’ While Frances, who ‘looked very small’ beside her husband, ‘attended to the luggage examination, opening trunks and bags’, he ‘delivered a short essay on the equality of men and women in England since the war’.¹⁸

The irony of the scene was apparently not lost on Chesterton, for six years later in his play The Judgement of Dr Johnson a couple arrives on a wild coast after a sea voyage, and, while the wife busies herself lighting a fire, the husband merely holds forth, observing: ‘Wherever we find the manual work forced upon the weaker sex, while the man merely amuses himself in his own fashion, there we have the rude original savage state of man, before the dawn of reason.’¹⁹

When the Chestertons arrived at their hotel, ‘another frenzied mob of newspapermen attacked us and even penetrated to our room and took photographs there’.²⁰ As he answered the reporters’ questions, Chesterton wondered if he was not violating some amendment to the American constitution by smoking. Asked about the amendment enforcing Prohibition, he replied that he did not approve of it, hastily adding that it had not affected him when a reporter wondered if he had been suffering since landing. ‘No country on earth’, he declared, ‘could ever force me to touch a drop of cocoa, but if any country forbad its citizens to drink cocoa ... I should immediately want to drink it ...’ As the ship approached New York harbour, he had been ‘tempted to take all the liquor on board and pour it out to the Statue [of Liberty] in a final libation’. (Later, he was to note how it had ‘a soothing effect on earnest Prohibitionists on the boat to urge, as a point of dignity and delicacy, that it ought to be given back to the French, a vicious race abandoned to the culture of the vine’.²¹) He offered his condolences to the reporters on the fact that their country had ‘started out with the Declaration of Independence and ended up with prohibition’. (On another occasion during the lecture tour, he was to refuse to discuss Prohibition on the ground that he had promised on his visa application not to upset the American government!²²) Asked why he had come to America, he replied: ‘It would be absurd for a man to go to his grave without seeing America. I’m all for the Statue of Liberty.’ Inevitably, the Irish question came up, and Chesterton did not hesitate to deplore the fact that Catholic Ireland had opposed the Allied cause, with which it sympathized ‘at heart’, while recognizing all the wrongs it had suffered at the hands of the British. Asked if he would be going to the West Coast, he responded that he did not expect to go further west than Chicago: ‘having seen both Jerusalem and Chicago, I think I shall have touched on the extremes of civilization.’ He refused to give his impressions of America on his first day there: ‘I am only human.’²³

Anyway, Chesterton did not feel that he was the sightseer, as he explained to the readers of the New Witness in one of the articles he wrote from America that would become the book What I Saw in America. On the contrary, it was his lecture audiences that were the sightseers, even if they were ‘seeing a rather melancholy sight’. It was said that people came ‘to see the lecturer and not to hear him—in which case it seemed ‘rather a pity that he should disturb and distress their minds with a lecture’: ‘He might merely exhibit himself on a stand or platform for a stipulated sum; or be exhibited like a monster in a menagerie.’²⁴

But, if the American public stared at Chesterton, the famous man himself stared with amazement at what he saw in the New York hotel, the Biltmore, which the Chestertons were to make their base for the lecture tour. He was to discover that the inns of Europe did not exist in America. The Prohibitionists had closed the saloons, but no one could accuse them of the ‘desecration’ of ‘chucking Chaucer out of the Tabard and Shakespeare out of the Mermaid’. However, hotels existed such as Chesterton had never before seen—or rather ‘only one hotel’ existed, to be found in all parts of America. For every hotel was built on the same ‘rational pattern’ with every floor exactly the same. There were no ‘lifts’ but only ‘elevators’, an example Chesterton thought of the American tendency ‘to linger upon long words’, which was ‘rather strange’ considering their fondness for ‘hustle and hurry’. More used to stairs than to lifts, Chesterton at first wondered whether Americans ‘possessed and practised a new and secret religion, which was the cult of the elevator’. Certainly, it was noticeable that gentlemen always took off their hats to ladies in this ‘tiny temple’, as though they were in church, but not in the lobby of the hotel, which ‘is thrown open to the public streets and treated as a public square’: ‘My first impression was that I was in some sort of high street or market-place during a carnival or revolution.’²⁵

The day after arriving in New York, the Chestertons took the 10 a.m. train to Boston. ‘The heat of the trains and hotels is indescribable—but no windows are allowed to be opened,’ Frances lamented. What she saw from the window of the train was no less dismal: ‘Nothing had prepared me for the utterly neglected look of these unending collections of wooden houses. There are no gardens to any of them ...’. They arrived in Boston at 4 o’clock in the afternoon to the same reception as in New York: ‘Again assaulted by a wailing crowd of journalists ...’. Next day, after the usual interviews and photographs, Frances recorded in her diary her distinctly unfavourable feelings about America: ‘So far my feelings towards this country are entirely hostile—but it would be unfair to judge too soon.’ The contrast between the temperature outside and inside continued to dismay her: ‘Bitterly cold outside and the heat unbearable inside’. Still, at least the audiences were ‘most appreciative’ and enjoyed Chesterton’s humour. He lectured in Boston on ‘The Ignorance of the Educated’. His mannerisms as a lecturer inevitably attracted the attention of journalists. It was noted that he spoke ‘clearly’ but ‘in a rather high-pitched voice’, accompanying ‘his remarks with many nervous little gestures’: ‘His hands, at times, stray into his pockets. He leans over the reading desk as if he would like to get down into the audience and make it a sort of heart-to-heart talk.’ One reporter was fascinated by the movement of his right hand as it ‘spent a restless and rather disturbing evening’:

It would start from the reading desk at which he stood and fall to the points of that vast waistcoat which inspired the description of him as ‘a fellow of infinite vest’. It would wander aimlessly a moment about his—stomach is a word that is taboo among the polite English—equator, and then shift swiftly to the rear until the thumb found the hip pocket. There the hand would rest a moment, to return again to the reading desk and to describe once more the quarter circle. Once in a while it would twist a ring upon the left hand, once in a while it would be clasped behind the broad back, but only for a moment. To the hip pocket and back again was its sentry-go, and it was a faithful soldier.²⁶

Chesterton had begun his lecture by observing that he was the only person in the auditorium who could not lecture, since, no lecturer himself, he found himself in the land of lecturers. The mark of being truly educated, he declared, was that one did not believe what the newspapers say.²⁷

The press was interested in Frances as well as her famous husband: ‘I was interviewed to my amusement but insisted on seeing a proof so that nothing too outrageous should be printed.’²⁸ On 15 January, Frances, who was constantly feeling tired and ill, saw a doctor, who told her she must rest for four hours a day, refuse all invitations, and absent herself from her husband’s lectures. The doctor advised a few days in a nursing home but instead agreed to give her ‘a strong tonic and sleeping draught’.²⁹

Back in New York, they had lunch with their old friends from Overstrand Mansions, Battersea, Rann and Edith Kennedy—‘a very great joy after 10 years’. The Rann Kennedys, who were now living near Poughkeepsie in New York state, had become American citizens in 1917. In spite of the doctor’s orders, Frances was ‘interviewed and photographed all the afternoon’.³⁰ Chesterton lectured on the same subject as in Boston, this time asserting that to be truly educated was to refrain from either reading or writing for the newspapers! He began the lecture by admitting, ‘Mine is the voice of the original mouse that came out of the mountain,’ and apologizing to those who could not hear him—and even more to those who could hear him!³¹ He had been introduced as a man whose ‘voice was heard on four continents. ‘‘But you will have reason, I fear,’’ said the lecturer, ‘‘to gather that it is not heard in all theatres.’’ ’³²

On 18 January the Chestertons left New York for Northampton, Massachusetts, where Chesterton lectured at Smith College. Their hosts welcomed them in English style—‘a wood fire to welcome us—tea ...’. After the lecture the entertainment was more American: they ‘sat round the fire and made pop-corn and toasted mallows’. Next day Frances felt much better: ‘Got a good night sleep at last ...’. It seems the reporters were almost as interested in her—‘I saw many interviewers’—as in her husband, the ‘leading American bestseller’.³³

Back in New York, the Chestertons had lunch again on 22 January with the Kennedys at the Women’s University Club, where Chesterton ‘only said a few words’. The American fascination with celebrities amazed Frances: ‘Why several hundred women should come together in a hot and crowded room to see us, when there was not even a speech to be made is beyond my understanding but they like to do it it seems.’ That evening, only a week after seeing the doctor who had advised her not to attend her husband’s lectures, Frances was present at the Brooklyn Institute to hear him speak: ‘We went by subway—a new experience, like our tube but not so good.’ She thought New York was ‘a wonderful sight at night especially the view from Brooklyn Bridge (1 mile long)’.³⁴ Her husband had ‘looked, not without joy’, at Broadway’s ‘long kaleidescope of coloured lights arranged in large letters and sprawling trade-marks, advertising everything, from pork to pianos, through the agency of the two most vivid and most mystical of the gifts of God: colour and fire’, remarking in his ‘simplicity’ to his American friends (it ‘seemed for some reason to amuse them’): ‘What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any one who was lucky enough to be unable to read.’³⁵ Next day Frances had another bad headache, but went for a short walk in Central Park—‘a poor substitute for a park as we mean it’; but still it was ‘a relief from the streets’.³⁶

Four days later they left for New Haven, Connecticut, where Chesterton lectured to ‘a very enthusiastic audience—hundreds of Yale boys stormed the platform afterwards for hand shakes and autographs’. Next day they left for a lecture at Bridgeport, Conn. Two days later they arrived in Philadelphia, where they were met as usual by reporters and photographers. ‘What I’ve seen of Philadelphia’, Frances recorded in her diary, ‘I really like’.³⁷ Chesterton told the press that, because of his extensive knowledge of detective stories, he imagined he would ‘be right at home with any thieves in Philadelphia, if she has any’.³⁸ They returned to New York next day, but were back again three days later on 2 February, when they ‘lunched at a cafeteria, quite an amusing experience—you take a tray and place on it all you want to eat and then get a ticket punched’.³⁹ After one of the lectures in Philadelphia, a woman asked Chesterton what made women talk so much, to which he replied, briefly, ‘God, Madam’.⁴⁰ On this second visit a reporter asked him whether he liked lecturing, to which he responded: ‘I always feel like a quack doctor. As to nervousness, I am obsessed, before I go upon the stage, by the feeling that I shall make a fool of myself; and I always have a warm, glowing feeling, when I leave the stage, that I actually have made a fool of myself.’⁴¹

Two days later they were in Baltimore for a lecture. During the questions at the end, Chesterton was asked if Shaw was to some extent himself the Superman and replied: ‘I do not think it is as bad as that.’ Would he himself prefer to be the Superman or the Missing Link? The latter, replied Chesterton without hesitation. Interviewed by the press, Frances insisted: ‘The real truth is that I care more for my dog, donkey and garden in the little English village where we live than for all the publicity in the world.’ ‘Thank Heaven’, she continued, ‘my husband is thoroughly normal and unaffected; he doesn’t care for popularity any more than I do, and we are both just terribly homesick for our home in England.’ Her worst duty as the wife of a famous man, she confessed, was having to ‘read stupid letters from feminine admirers’.⁴² The state of Maryland, Chesterton was to remind his readers in the New Witness, ‘was the first experiment in religious freedom in human history’, but the fact that ‘the first religious toleration ever granted in the world was granted by Roman Catholics’ was ‘one of those little informing details with which our Victorian histories did not exactly teem’. Chesterton visited the first monument raised to Washington after the American Revolution, where he fell into conversation with two children ‘who were clambering about the bases of the monument’: ‘I felt a profound and radiant peace in the thought that they at any rate were not going to my lecture. It made me happy that in that talk neither they nor I had any names. I was full of that indescribable waking vision of the strangeness of life, and especially of the strangeness of locality ...’. Baltimore was also memorable as providing ‘the only sample of the substance called ‘‘tea’’ ever found on the American continent’.⁴³ The spirit of freedom that characterized Baltimore for Chesterton reminded him of the Irish struggle for freedom. ‘When you hear of an organization in England fighting for liberty,’ he told an Irish American he met, ‘you must find whether or not that organization contains much Irish blood.’ A strike in Glasgow, for instance, meant an ‘exciting’ strike: ‘The reason is that a mass of the Irish poor is found in that city, and the Irish will not submit meekly when any person or any group tries to trample upon them.’ True, there were ‘plenty of old radicals in England, who, as individuals, are sincere defenders of liberty, but they are isolated’. But the Irish ‘love for liberty seems to have been created by the Catholic Church—their only corporate defender of liberty today—is the Catholic Church. Liberty means much to her—something to be protected.’⁴⁴

Returning to New York, Chesterton gave a lecture on 6 February, which the New York Times reported next day. When the time for questions arrived, he was asked about the ‘psychological significance’ of his use of paradoxes, which elicited the grave reply: ‘I never use paradox. The statements I make are wearisome and obvious common sense. I have even been driven to the tedium of reading through my own books, and have been unable to find any paradox. In fact, the thing is quite tragic, and some day I shall hope to write an epic called ‘‘Paradox Lost’’.’⁴⁵ Asked by the New York Herald about his famous love of paradox, Chesterton declared: ‘I should not know a paradox if it met me on the street.’⁴⁶ The Chestertons then travelled on to Pittsburgh, where there was a collective gasp from the audience when they saw the huge expanse of the lecturer, who hastened to reassure them in his opening words at the microphone: ‘At the outset I want to reassure you I am not of this size, really; dear no, I’m being amplified by the thing.’⁴⁷ After a lecture in Washington, the Chestertons left New York on Saturday 12 February for Montreal on the night train, arriving at 7.45 a.m. on Sunday morning. In the afternoon Frances went for a sleigh ride to the top of Mount Royal. Interviewed by the Montreal Daily Star, Chesterton said that being in New York was ‘very much like being in hell—pleasantly, of course. I had a wild and whirling experience.’ By contrast, a city like Baltimore gave ‘a very definite impression of that fine old republican spirit, which English people have never really understood’.⁴⁸

Apparently, Chesterton had stipulated before leaving England that he must have three days free of lectures so that he could spend some time with his relations in Ottawa. But when the time for his visit approached, there was a smallpox scare, which caused Chesterton’s lecture agent, Lee Keedick, to send a telegram to say that, if there was going to be any difficulty about leaving the city, he would not be able to come. But the reply was that so long as he was vaccinated there would be no problem.⁴⁹

Accordingly, at 5 p.m. the Chestertons left Montreal for Ottawa, arriving there at eight, where Chesterton’s uncle Walter Chesterton, an architect who designed many of the public buildings in Ottawa, met the train and took them to his house at 300 Waverley Street. Unfortunately, when the Chestertons went upstairs to their bedroom, they discovered that Chesterton had the wrong suitcase. Lilian, the daughter of the house, heard ‘a scream of laughter from upstairs, a door opened and both Gilbert and Frances called out, ‘‘Lil, come here.’’ ’ Running upstairs, Lilian found them standing over the strange suitcase. ‘What amused them most was thinking of the plight of the owner if he tried to wear Gilbert’s clothes!’⁵⁰

‘Such a lovely day of snow and sunshine,’ Frances wrote in her diary the next day. In the afternoon there was another sleigh drive followed by sightseeing, which ‘included a glimpse’ of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, ‘who had just opened Parliament’, in their ‘state sleigh with outriders in scarlet against the dazzling snow’.⁵¹ Asked by a reporter if England would ever introduce Prohibition, Chesterton replied with a chuckle that, if the governing class could be assured of its indispensable glass of champagne, then it was not impossible. They were leaving America in April, on April Fool’s Day, he hoped, after failing as a lecturer.⁵² On Wednesday the 16th they left Ottawa at midday, arriving back in Montreal at four o’clock. After Chesterton had given a lecture in the evening, they ‘hurried off to catch the night train to Toronto’, where they arrived next day at 7.30 in the morning. Frances found the King Edward Hotel ‘noisy and crowded’.⁵³ There were the usual interviews and photographs. Chesterton gave a lecture in the evening on ‘The Ignorance of the Educated’. The professor of English who was in the chair ‘thought there must have been an error in the title as printed, and announced that Mr Chesterton would speak on The Ignorance of the Uneducated’.⁵⁴ That night the Chestertons’ sleep was disturbed by ‘a jazz band which went on till 2 a.m.’.⁵⁵

On Friday 18 February the Chestertons left Toronto to cross back into the United States, arriving in Albany at seven o’clock in the evening, where they found a pile of letters awaiting them. The next evening Chesterton gave a lecture. Frances informed the press when she was interviewed: ‘I didn’t know I was the wife of a great man till I came to America. It had never bothered me before.’ While in America she had failed to encounter a single draught or Prohibitionist. On Sunday they woke up to find it had snowed heavily during the night. Unable to get a taxi, they had to borrow a car to drive to Buffalo, where they arrived at 7.30 in the evening of Sunday 20 February. Next day they were driven to see the Niagara Falls, which ‘were a disappointment’. After a lecture in the evening—‘a tremendous success’—they left Buffalo at midnight for Chicago, where they arrived at one o’clock next day ‘very tired’. Frances went to bed and stayed there till it was time for dinner with the Rann Kennedys. It was raining heavily and what Frances saw of Chicago looked ‘dreadful’, although Lake Michigan looked ‘rather wonderful’.⁵⁶

Next morning Chesterton visited a bookshop in the Marshall Field building, where he encountered the English writer John Drinkwater and the American novelist Sinclair Lewis, the author of the best-selling satire on small town America, Main Street, which had been published the previous year. The visitors were invited into the proprietor’s office. Lewis told the others that he had ‘received floods of letters from people in the small towns throughout the middle west taking him to task’ for implying that Main Street was a typical American town. An onlooker of this literary gathering suggested that the three writers should collaborate in a play, a suggestion that was ‘received with delight’. The proprietor invited them to stay for lunch, which he would have sent up from the tea rooms on the floor below: ‘Upon his saying that he had something rare in his safe besides books, Chesterton decided to stay.’ The rest of the company immediately followed suit. Lewis’s proposal that the play should be named Marry the Queen of Scotch was met with approval by the others, now ‘in a haze of alcohol’, and it was agreed that Chesterton should write the first act, which, Chesterton announced, would feature a murder mystery: ‘There is nothing like a nice murder.’ The hero was to be the son of a rich English whisky distiller and the heroine the daughter of an American ex-distiller from Peoria, Illinois. An American Prohibitionist of ‘international fame’ would be found dead in his Paris hotel room, the weapon, a broken bottle, lying beside the body. The rooms on either side would be occupied by the hero and heroine, upon whom suspicion would naturally fasten.⁵⁷

Meanwhile, Frances, after ‘a wonderful lunch’ with some ‘very nice women’, was taken to see ‘the famous Marshal Field Store’, where Selfridge, the owner of the famous London shop named after him, used to work. Chesterton gave ‘a fine lecture’ in the evening in Orchestra Hall to an audience of 3,000, but ‘did not seem done up after it’.⁵⁸ Interviewed in his hotel by a reporter, he insisted first of all on lighting a cigar, saying: ‘Some men write with a pencil, others with a typewriter, I write with my cigar.’ Asked which of his works he considered the greatest, he replied: ‘I don’t consider any of my works in the least great.’ Slang, he told the reporter, was ‘too sacred and precious to be used promiscuously. Its use should be led up to reverently for it expresses what the King’s English could not.’⁵⁹

They left Chicago on Thursday morning, arriving in Columbus, Ohio, at 8.20 in the evening. The couple they stayed with were ‘very delightful people—so affectionate and warm hearted’. On Friday morning they were taken by car ‘to see something of the very dull country of the Middle West’. The lecture in the evening was ‘a real scrum but quite good fun’. On Saturday 26 February they left Columbus in the morning for Detroit, where they arrived over six hours later at 4.30 in the afternoon. The evening lecture next day in Orchestra Hall ‘went well’.⁶⁰ Chesterton acknowledged that he spoke with an ‘English axn’t’—‘and regretted deeply that he might never apprehend what it was like’.⁶¹ A Detroit newspaper reported that actually seeing and hearing the man provided ‘a meal for the imagination’ such as no books by or about Chesterton could give. The subject of his lecture, as in Toronto, was the ignorance of the educated: the trouble with educated people was that they substituted theories for things, whereas the uneducated simply stated the facts as they saw them: they would say, for example, that they saw that a German was drinking beer, not that a Teuton was consuming alcohol. Another Detroit newspaper quoted from the lecture: ‘There is a deeper side to such fallacies. The whole catastrophe of the Great War may be traced to the racial theory. If people had looked at peoples as nations in place of races the intolerable ambition of Prussia might have been stopped before it attained the captaincy of the South German States.’⁶² In a newspaper interview next morning, Frances confessed: ‘I was never interviewed in my life until I came to America.’ What had most touched her was ‘the genuine affection’ with which her husband was greeted everywhere. When the reporter congratulated her husband on his lecture the evening before, Chesterton responded: ‘You can gather what I think of my lectures from the fact that I always precipitately leave town the next day!’⁶³

The Chestertons left Detroit on Monday 28 February at midday ‘on a miserable day of mist and rain’, arriving in the evening in Cleveland. As usual, Frances found the heat of the train unbearable, and she went to bed with a headache, lying in late next morning. Both Chestertons were interviewed before lunch. Chesterton assured the Cleveland Press that he was losing his impressions about America. He thought politics should be kept ‘as local as possible’: ‘Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It’s terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hung today.’ He claimed he was not troubled by his weight: ‘I’ve never taken the trouble to weigh myself.’ Anyway, his weight gave him ‘something with which to start after-dinner speeches’.⁶⁴ After dinner they were invited to meet Helen Keller, the author and political activist, who was staying in the same hotel. In her diary Frances describes her as ‘the blind girl who [was] also deaf and dumb’. In fact, Helen Keller was only deaf and blind as a result of an illness when she was a baby. Frances thought she was ‘quite wonderful or rather ... the lady [was] who taught her’ sign language and became her companion. Rather ‘pretty and very lively’, Helen ‘amused herself by making up paradoxes and retailing them’ to Chesterton—‘very good they were too’. The writer of paradoxes would have been less amused by the progressive views of Helen Keller, who had founded the American Civil Liberties Union the previous year, and who was a Socialist, a suffragette, and an advocate of contraception. Wednesday 2 March was a ‘very fine day, quite a feeling of spring’. Chesterton gave an evening lecture in the hotel ball room.

Next day they left Cleveland on the 8.30 train back to Toronto, where they arrived in the evening, whereupon Frances went to bed in the same hotel she had so disliked on their previous visit. Utterly exhausted, Frances stayed in bed till four o’clock the next afternoon and did not attend Chesterton’s lecture in the evening. On Saturday 5 March she had ‘to submit to an interview for the Toronto ‘‘Daily Star’’ ’, before leaving after midday for Detroit, where they arrived at 10.20 in the evening, ‘very done for by that time’. The 2.30 train next day took them to Dayton, Ohio, where they arrived at 11.30 at night. The next morning was another morning in bed for Frances, but in the afternoon she was taken for ‘a lovely ride round Dayton which is really very pretty’.⁶⁵ It was here in Dayton, Chesterton later recalled, that he was interviewed on the roof of the hotel where they were staying:

after answering the usual questions about Labour, the League of Nations, the length of ladies’ dresses, and other great matters, I took refuge in a rhapsody of warm and well-deserved praise of American bathrooms. The editor, I understand, running a gloomy eye down the column of his contributor’s ‘story’, and seeing nothing but metaphysical terms such as justice, freedom ... and the like, paused at last upon the ablutionary allusion, and his eye brightened. ‘That’s the only copy in the whole thing,’ he said, ‘A Bath-tub in Every Home’. So these words appeared in enormous letters above my portrait in the paper. It will be noted that, like many things that practical men make a great point of, they miss the point. What I had commended as new and national was a bathroom in every bedroom. Even feudal and moss-grown England is not entirely ignorant of the occasional bath-tub in the home. But what gave me great joy was what followed. I discovered with delight that many people, glancing rapidly at my portrait with its prodigious legend, imagined that it was a commercial advertisement, and that I was a very selfadvertising commercial traveller.

This ‘charming error’ Chesterton was only able regretfully to trace ‘with certainty’ to ‘two individuals’, who naturally supposed that, because there was ‘a Laundry Convention going on in the same hotel’, he had come to Dayton to attend the said Laundry Convention, ‘and had made an eloquent speech to that senate, no doubt exhibiting my tubs’.⁶⁶ After Chesterton had given a lecture at Victory Hall, there was ‘a rush’ to get to the station to catch the night train for Chicago.⁶⁷

They arrived back in Chicago at the hotel at 7.30 a.m. after ‘a horrible night journey’, ‘the worst I’ve experienced’, wrote Frances miserably in her diary after a sleepless night. After lunch Chesterton went off to lecture, but Frances stayed in the hotel ‘too tired to move’. On Wednesday 9 March they left Chicago for Madison, a four-and-a-half-hour journey. Frances was cheered up by the ‘really pretty journey through Wisconsin’. The farmhouses they saw through the train window had ‘that settled and ordered look that belongs to older countries’. The hotel where they stayed was also satisfactorily ‘small and countrified (comparatively)’. Chesterton lectured for an hour and a half to ‘a crowded and amused audience’ at the university, where the ‘college yell greeted him’.⁶⁸ During questions, he asserted that, in spite of being accused of an excessive love of paradox, he could not find any paradoxes in his books, only dull monotonous good sense!⁶⁹ The next day was free until they took the 9.30 p.m. train for Duluth in Minnesota, where they arrived next morning at 8.30. Frances went immediately to bed, ‘very done up’. Chesterton gave a lecture in the evening, while Frances stayed in bed. On Saturday 12 March they left Duluth in the afternoon and arrived in Minneapolis in the late evening.

They had a day off here to break the journey before taking the night train to Omaha, where they arrived at 7.45 a.m. on the Monday morning after a sleepless night on a ‘very shaky train’. Frances was glad that there were only four more lectures to give before returning to New York. At Omaha they were entertained to lunch by the ladies of the Fine Arts Club, who had arranged the lecture Chesterton gave in the afternoon in the hotel ball room.⁷⁰ This was the only lecture of the entire tour that met with a decidedly negative response: the lecturer told his audience at the beginning of the lecture that he was ‘one of those famous Englishmen who cannot lecture—and do’. The Omaha Daily Bee reported that by the end of the hour ‘the majority of his audience agreed with him’. However, one lady confessed that, while like the rest of the audience she did not get much from the lecture, ‘I think the reason we didn’t is because our own education is so superficial; he’s beyond us’. The Omaha Daily Bee subsequently explained that the anger felt by the citizens of Omaha arose from their fear that they had ‘missed the fine points’ of the lecture and that it was above their heads.⁷¹ Chesterton, for his part, told reporters that he had ‘left a trail of wailing rabbis all across the continent’, one of whom in Omaha he believed had warned ‘every lover of his fellow man’ to stay away from his lecture. This did not worry him in the slightest, as he liked a small audience: ‘Just picture to yourself a few misanthropes, sitting several chairs apart, scowling into space, and all the humanitarians staying at home.’ As for his book The New Jerusalem, if the rabbis had ‘read all the chapters on the Jews’ and considered they constituted ‘fanaticism, then all the fanaticism is on their side’.⁷² He was ‘not a little hurt and puzzled about their unreasonable attitude because in that work I have honestly tried to be objective, fair, and understanding, but they won’t see that’.⁷³ He thought Americans took his ‘work absolutely too seriously, though they make the best audience to lecture to in the world. In England a lecture is a most dry affair. It is not a national sport.’ What most impressed him about America were the en suite hotel rooms.⁷⁴

Next day, Tuesday 15 March, they left for Kansas City at 1.30 p.m., where they arrived at 8.30 in the evening. They then took the night train to Oklahoma City, a town that had been ‘created out of the ... prairie in less than thirty years’ owing to the discovery of oil, where they arrived shortly after midday on the 16th. ‘The journey was so lovely,’ wrote Frances, ‘through little spring woods with wild cherry—almond—peach and all in flower’.⁷⁵ There was no lecture that day, but Chesterton faced the usual interviews that afternoon. He found it, he said, ‘interesting and agreeable to find people who were proud of having lived in a community for only three minutes’. As for himself, he lamented that he felt ‘like a race horse being hauled about in a box car, if I may be permitted to compare myself with so useful and elegant an animal’.⁷⁶ The following day they were taken for ‘a lovely ride ... about this startlingly new but interesting place’. After calling on the state governor, Chesterton lectured in the evening at the Presbyterian church.⁷⁷

While they were in Oklahoma City an accident occurred that ‘could not have happened in any other country’ that Chesterton had ‘ever clapped eyes on’. If he could understand it, he seriously believed he would understand America. Oklahoma was what foreigners imagined wrongly was true of all American cities: it was ‘proud of having no history. [It was] glowing with the sense of having a great future—and nothing else.’ While strolling down the main street, Chesterton was accosted by a stranger who demanded to know what he was doing in the city. The ‘most singular thing about him was that the front of his coat was covered with a multitude of shining metallic emblems made in the shape of stars and crescents’. To this singular stranger’s question, Chesterton replied ‘with restraint’ that he was lecturing. To this the stranger replied ‘without restraint, but with an expansive and radiant pride, ‘‘I also am lecturing. I am lecturing on astronomy.’’ ’

Expanding his starry bosom and standing astraddle, with the air of one who owned the street, the strange being continued, ‘Yes, I am lecturing on astronomy, anthropology, archaeology, palaeontology, embryology, eschatology,’ and so on in a thunderous roll of theoretical sciences apparently beyond the scope of any single university, let alone any single professor. Having thus introduced himself, however, he got to business. He apologised with true American courtesy for having questioned me at all, and excused it on the ground of his own exacting responsibilities. I imagined him to mean the responsibility of simultaneously occupying the chairs of all the faculties already mentioned. But these apparently were trifles to him, and something far more serious was clouding his brow. ‘I feel it to be my duty’ he said, ‘to acquaint myself with any stranger visiting this city; and it is an additional pleasure to welcome here a member of the Upper Ten.’ I assured him earnestly that I knew nothing about the Upper Ten, except that I did not belong to them ... He waved my abnegation aside and continued, ‘I have a great responsibility in watching over this city. My friend the mayor and I have a great responsibility.’ And then an extraordinary thing happened. Suddenly diving his hand into his beast-pocket, he flashed something before my eyes like a hand-mirror; something which disappeared again almost as soon as it appeared. In that flash I could only see that it was some sort of a polished metal plate, with some letters engraved on it like a monogram. But the reward of a studious and virtuous life, which has been spent chiefly in the reading of American detective stories, shone forth for me in that hour of trial; I received at last the prize of a profound scholarship in the matter of imaginary murders in tenth-rate magazines. I remembered who it was who in the Yankee detective yarn flashes before the eyes of Slim Jim or the Lone Hand Crook a badge of metal sometimes called a shield. Assuming all the desperate composure of Slim Jim himself, I replied, ‘You mean you are connected with the police authorities here, don’t you? Well, if I commit a murder here, I’ll let you know.’ Whereupon that astonishing man waved a hand in deprecation, bowed in farewell with the grace of a dancing master; and said, ‘Oh, these are not the things we expect from the Upper Ten.’ Then that moving constellation moved away, disappearing in the dark tides of humanity ...

‘Who and what was that man?’ Chesterton wondered. ‘Was he an astronomer? Was he a detective? Was he a wandering lunatic?’ Two things Chesterton did know. First, he knew that ‘he had something else in his pocket besides a badge’ and that ‘under certain circumstances he would have ... shot me dead’. Second, he knew that, confronted with ‘this mysterious figure’, he was ‘confronted with the fullness and depth of the mystery of America. Because I understand nothing, I recognise the thing that we call a nation; and I salute the flag.’⁷⁸

On Friday 18 March the Chestertons left Oklahoma City for St Louis, which they reached at about 8.15 next morning after travelling all night with little sleep. Still, they had ‘a comfortable drawing room car’ and the countryside was ‘looking lovely and the weather ... like a perfect English June’. Frances found her hotel room ‘decorated with lovely roses a gift from the management’, and a pile of letters from England awaiting her: ‘I was so glad of them.’ Next day was Palm Sunday: ‘Oh for Jerusalem,’ sighed Frances. That afternoon they received an ‘urgent invitation’ to call at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, where Frances was presented with ‘the loveliest bouquet of roses’. ‘We like St Louis—though the town itself is not much to boast of but it is older and mellower than the middle west towns such as Omaha and Oklahoma City,’ Frances recorded in her diary. Chesterton’s lecture took place in the hall of the Ethical Society: ‘very successful and many questions were asked and delightfully answered.’ On Monday they left St Louis at 8.15 in the morning and travelled all day through ‘pretty country’ to Nashville. Next day Frances was suffering from one of her headaches and stayed in bed till after lunch. It was pouring with rain. The lecture in the evening was ‘tremendously appreciated’.⁷⁹ They stayed at the Hotel Hermitage, which had been President Andrew Jackson’s home. Frances was again interviewed and again declared, ‘I was never interviewed in my life until I came to America.’ At the end of the interview her husband appeared and again told the press, ‘You can gather what I think of my lectures from the fact that I always precipitately leave town the next day.’⁸⁰ They duly left Nashville next day, Wednesday the 23rd, on the 7.25 train and travelled all day to Indianapolis, where they arrived at 6.30 in the evening, after changing trains at Louisville. Next day in the Masonic Hall there was ‘a very enthusiastic though small audience’ at Chesterton’s lecture—‘this is the last lecture on tour—thank heaven,’ recorded Frances with relief. After going to church next day, which was Good Friday, they left for New York at three o’clock in the afternoon, arriving there at about two in the afternoon next day, when they were met by Chesterton’s agent Lee Keedick. On Easter Sunday, which fell that year on 27 March, they ‘got to early celebration at the Church of St Mary the Virgin near this hotel’. That evening Frances attended her husband’s ‘very good’ lecture ‘The Revolt against Reason’.⁸¹

Apart from the voyage home, their travels were now ended, and Frances had time to rest, as well as to see friends, including the Rann Kennedys, although it fell to her, of course, to make the practical arrangements for their departure. Before they could leave America they had to pay 8 per cent tax on the proceeds of the lecture tour. There was also a pile of correspondence waiting to be attended to. On 3 April Chesterton lectured at the Apollo Theatre on ‘Ireland and the Parallel of the Confederacy’. On the evening of 5 April they left the hotel for an apartment at 56 85th East Street that belonged to some friends. During the day they saw a friend from Bedford Park days, ‘old Mr Yeats who is the same as ever—talked delightfully’. On the 9th the Chestertons went to a lunch given in their honour at the National Arts Club by the Dickens Fellowship; they were greeted with great enthusiasm, Chesterton ‘made an excellent speech’, and even Frances was called upon to say a few words. They ‘rushed away’ to catch the 3.30 train for Poughkeepsie, where they stayed the night at Millbrook with the Kennedys, who were joint heads of the drama department at Bennett School for Girls. In the evening they went to watch at the Greek theatre—which the Kennedys had had built⁸²—a ‘part performance’ of Euripides’ Electra. Frances thought the chorus was ‘quite wonderful, and Edith splendid’. Afterwards a lot of the girls came round to the Kennedys’ home—‘such a happy party’, Frances wrote in her diary. Next day the Chestertons visited the school, where Rann and Edith Kennedy ‘gave a reading’ of his one-act 1912 play The Terrible Meek, before returning to New York in the afternoon. On 11 April Chesterton lectured for the last time.⁸³

One thing that had delighted him about lecturing in America was the American sense of time: people arrived at his lectures (he would ‘heartily recommend the habit of coming too late’) frequently ‘three-quarters of an hour or even an hour after time ... it gave me a sort of dizzy exaltation to find I was not the most unpunctual person ...’. Any fears that his disapproval of Prohibition might displease his hosts were soon dispelled: ‘I went to America with some notion of not discussing Prohibition. But I soon found that well-to-do Americans were only too delighted to discuss it over the nuts and wine. They were even willing, if necessary, to dispense with the nuts.’ It was ‘to some extent enforced among the poor; at any rate it was intended to be enforced among the poor’, but it was ‘certainly not enforced among the rich; and I doubt whether it was intended to be’.⁸⁴ Frances had felt tired or ill for much of the trip, as well as homesick. One newspaper reported that she noticeably cheered up on hearing from the current secretary back at Overroads, Kathleen Chesshire, that the crocuses were in bloom. Frances again told a reporter that she cared more for her dog, donkey, and garden back home than for ‘all the publicity in the world’. Far from being an adorer of her husband, while she admired intelligence, she thought life was ‘too short to put one’s husband on a pedestal’, apart from being ‘unutterably boring’. Anyway, her husband was ‘thoroughly normal and unaffected’ and did not ‘care for popularity’ any more than she did. She claimed that, while her husband lectured, she was ‘organizing a campaign for the emancipation of the wives of famous men’.⁸⁵

On Tuesday 12 April they said goodbye to America. Asked by reporters what had most impressed him in America, Chesterton replied: ‘The number of people who came to my lectures. Such an outpouring of people could hardly be possible in England!’⁸⁶ The ship sailed at 12.30. On the instructions of the Cunard shipping line they were given a better cabin than they had booked, a state room with a bathroom attached. On the 14th Frances recorded that Chesterton had had ‘a long and interesting talk’ with Sir Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic explorer, who gave a ‘delightful’ lecture with slides the following evening. The next day Chesterton presided at a concert in aid of the Liverpool Seamen’s Orphanage, in which the film star Pearl White, the so-called Stunt Queen of the silent films, participated. It was ‘quite a magnificent affair’, and over £100 was collected. On Sunday 17 April both Chestertons attended a religious service that the Captain held in the lounge. Next day they reached Cherbourg. And on the 19th they arrived at Southampton at daybreak, where they caught the 10.15 train to Waterloo. On arrival they found Kathleen Chesshire, together with Chesterton’s mother and ‘Keith’, awaiting them. After lunch at Waterloo and a visit to Warwick Gardens, they caught the 5.38 train from Marylebone Station to Beaconsfield—‘and so home once more, and as I am feeling now,’ wrote Frances, ‘never again’.⁸⁷

On 15 February 1921 Chesterton had published an article in the Manchester Guardian condemning British atrocities in Ireland, albeit themselves a response to outrages committed by the Irish Republican Army or IRA. He expressed more briefly the same sentiments in ‘What are Reprisals?’, a pamphlet published by the Peace with Ireland Council either at the end of 1920 or in early 1921.⁸⁸ Like the British press in general, Chesterton expected the British government forces to behave in an altogether different way from the IRA, which was regarded as a terrorist organization of which the worst could be expected. In December 1918, following the execution of many of the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916 and the threat of compulsory military service, the nationalist party Sinn Féin won a majority of the Irish seats in the Westminster parliament. Refusing to sit as members of the House of Commons in January 1919, they assembled in Dublin, set up a separate parliament, and declared an independent Irish republic. War then broke out between the British and the IRA. Michael Collins, the IRA leader, who led the Sinn Fein delegation at the peace talks that led eventually to the treaty of 6 December 1921 establishing the Irish Free State, was influenced in the formation of his nationalism by The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which he described as his favourite book. Hearing of this, Lloyd George gave copies of the book to his Cabinet before the negotiations began for insights into the mind of the Irish nationalist leader.⁸⁹ Joseph Plunkett, one of those executed after the Easter 1916 rising, was also a passionate admirer of Chesterton.⁹⁰

Chesterton’s article, which was subsequently published as a pamphlet by the Peace with Ireland Council in London under the title ‘The Danger to England’, began: ‘The whole world thinks that England has gone mad.’ The British entertained the ‘most curious idea that what is done in Ireland is done in a corner and concerns only themselves. We treat Ireland not only as if it were our own farmyard, but our own backyard. The Government and the gangs of murderers between them are rapidly turning it into something rather resembling a churchyard.’ Writing from North America, Chesterton maintained that people abroad knew more about what was being done in Ireland, as the details were often suppressed in British newspapers, as had been the case in the Marconi scandal. The British had effectively ceased to govern in Ireland, but instead were conducting what could only be called a ‘Prussian war’. That is to say, they were carrying out a war of reprisals against the southern Catholic Irish, the principle of which was ‘the very opposite of law and order’. Instead of ruling, the British were raiding the country; although the British government said they would never recognize Ireland as a separate nation, they were in fact ‘paying the plainest possible compliment to its independence’—they were ‘invading it’ exactly as the Germans had invaded Belgium in the war. And, because the British seemed to be ‘snatching at something as though it were slipping’ from them, it gave the impression abroad that the British Empire was breaking up. Anti-British sentiment was growing worldwide, just as it had against the Germans. But the peoples Germany had invaded were not ‘scattered everywhere among all the new democracies of the earth’, and Britain could afford even less than Germany to make enemies everywhere, ‘for we gather our food everywhere’. What people abroad saw when they saw ‘the ‘‘black-and-tan’’ uniform in Ireland’ was ‘what we saw when we saw the black and yellow flag flying over Belgium’. Patriots like Chesterton who predicted the result of British reprisals would never desert their country but would be with it to the last—‘to take our share in the hatred of humanity and our portion in the wrath of God’. In another article at the time, also published by the Peace with Ireland Council under the same title as that of the earlier pamphlet, ‘What are Reprisals?’, Chesterton again drew the analogy with the German invasion of Belgium that had brought Britain into war with Germany. Reprisals were intended to be ‘indiscriminate’: ‘When men in our uniform shoot a woman with a baby in her arms, or kill a little girl of eight, it is a confusion of thought to profess that it was an accident, or even to discuss whether it was an accident. The whole system is designed to produce such accidents, even if you call them accidents.’ The whole point of ‘terror’ was that innocent people should suffer. But the policy was clearly a failure: ‘The very outburst of new demands for repression proves that it does not repress.’ The British had copied what the Germans had done in Belgium—‘down to the very last detail of all—that they were defeated’. The truth was that the British government was ‘fighting against something that may express itself in wild and wicked ways but is not in itself wicked or even wild; and which therefore draws perpetually on infinite sources of strength . . .’. Wise statesmen would seek ‘to avoid the necessity of stemming any such main stream of the nature of mankind; fighting against the love of home or the desire of freedom or the respect for the dead’. A government that had succeeded in stirring up ‘all that mass of sympathies and half-sympathies’ against it had ceased to govern. The common view in Ireland was that the British were ‘not only wickeder but wilder’ than the republican guerrillas.

The very first of the articles that would be collected together in What I Saw in America, published on 18 February 1921 in the New Witness, pointed out that Britain in its dispute with Ireland was dealing not just with the native Irish but with the huge Irish diaspora in English-speaking countries, which included a particularly numerous and powerful community in the United States.

In September 1922 Chesterton published What I Saw in America, rather less than a third of which consists of the articles he had already published while in America in the New Witness. He had already broken the promise he had made before leaving England, according to the New York Times,⁹¹ that ‘he would not write a book of American impressions on his return, as so many other’ English writers had done, with the articles he had written for the New Witness while still in America. The book begins with the paradoxical assertion that ‘travel narrows the mind’, as the traveller tends to look at ‘the outside’ rather than ‘the inside’ of what he sees. In particular, the traveller is apt to be too ‘much amused ... to be instructed’. There was nothing wrong in ‘thinking a thing funny because it is foreign’, only in ‘thinking it wrong because it is funny’. That was the mistake of Dickens when he visited America, thinking that Americans were ‘foolish because they were funny’. The traveller was ‘perfectly entitled to laugh at anything’ so long as he understood that he himself was ‘laughable’. Chesterton himself had never lost the sense of his own ‘laughable position’ while he was in America. Moreover, the traveller must realize that his sense of humour was not necessarily the same as that of the foreigner. Indeed, the American and English senses of humour ‘are in one way directly contrary’:

The most American sort of fun involves a soaring imagination, piling one house on another in a tower like that of the sky-scraper. The most English humour consists of a sort of bathos, of a man returning to the earth his mother in a homely fashion; as when he sits down suddenly on a butter-slide. English farce describes a man as being in a hole. American fantasy, in its more aspiring spirit, describes a man as being up a tree.

American humour made ‘life more wild and impossible than it is’, and English humour made ‘it more flat and farcical than it is’. The ‘road to international friendship’, Chesterton thought, was through understanding the other nations’ ‘jokes’.⁹²

What made America superior to England in his view was that the British constitution lacked ‘the theory of equality’ that is ‘the chief mark of the Declaration of Independence’: ‘Citizenship is the American ideal; and it has never been the English ideal.’ On the other hand, if England could boast of ‘less equality and fraternity’, it had ‘certainly more liberty’. And American equality did ‘tend too much to uniformity’, but then that uniformity reflected the idea of the ‘dignity’ of every citizen rather than the ‘social superiority’ of England. The ‘danger’ of a real democracy like America was ‘convention’, ‘a general impression of unity verging on uniformity’. For democracy was ‘no respecter of persons’. The American cult of individualism was, paradoxically, ‘the death of individuality’, since ‘individualism is the reverse of individuality’: ‘Where men are trying to compete with each other they are trying to copy each other.’ Again, the ‘worship of personality’ made Americans ‘almost impersonal’. Unlike ‘English eccentricity’, there was not enough ‘unconsciousness’ in America ‘to produce real individuality’. American women particularly tended ‘too much to this cult of impersonal personality’.⁹³

The uniformity of American life, Chesterton thought, undermined its democracy. It explained why, where there was ‘so genuine a sense of human dignity, there should be so much of an impossible petty tyranny’. This was a country where not only was the ‘sin of drink’ punished but also ‘the equally shameless sin of smoking a cigarette in the open air’, not to mention people ‘kissing each other’. How was it possible to reconcile such tyranny with ‘the genuine democratic spirit’ of the masses? What made ‘this great democracy so unlike all other democracies, and in this so manifestly hostile to the whole democratic idea’? The ‘first historical cause’ was what Chesterton called ‘Progressive Puritanism’—that is, ‘unlimited limitation’, in which ‘prohibitions are bound to progress ... more human rights and pleasures must of necessity be taken away’:

Progressives are prophets ... anybody who chooses to prophesy and prohibit can tyrannise over the people ... people are afraid to contradict him for the fear they should be contradicting their own great-grandchild. For their superstition is an inversion of the ancestor-worship of China; and instead of vainly appealing to something that is dead, they appeal to something that may never be born.

Another cause of ‘this strange servile disease in American democracy’ was American feminism. For, though ‘the aggressive feminists are a minority, they are in this atmosphere ... in which there is a sort of sanctity about the minority’. A ‘feminine fad’ was surrounded by ‘a curious halo of hopeful solemnity’, so that, when the ‘earnest lady-reformer ... utters a warning against the social evil of beer’, for example, she was ‘seen to be walking clothed in light, like a prophetess’. Chesterton wondered why, if drinking and smoking were prohibited, talking, which tends to lead to these two evil practices, should not also be ‘put a stop to’. Indeed, ‘nine-tenths of the harm in the world’ was ‘done simply by talking’. So perhaps the government should issue lists of subjects suitable for talking about, perhaps ‘a formal application in writing’ should be compulsory for making jokes, perhaps all should have to ‘wear gags’ except between one and three, when English pubs were allowed to open. But Chesterton knew that, if ever ‘the statutory silence of the populace’ became law, an exception for the rich would be made: ‘It will only be the populace that is silent. The politicians will go on talking.’⁹⁴

The worst example of ‘petty tyranny’ in America was Prohibition, which simply meant that the wealthy sipped their cocktails while ‘discussing how much harder labourers can be made to work if only they can be kept from festivity’. That was the argument for it: ‘that employees work harder, and therefore employers get richer’. Prohibition had originally been introduced in many states to prevent blacks, whose ‘enslavement and importation ... had been the crime and catastrophe of American history’, from drinking; but, once ‘tried successfully on black labour’, it ‘could be extended to all labour’. Chesterton takes the opportunity to point out that, regarding slavery, ‘the eighteenth century was more liberal than the nineteenth century’ with its dogma of inevitable progress. But then ‘the utter separation and subordination of the black like a beast was a progress; it was a growth of nineteenth-century enlightenment and experiment; a triumph of science over superstition’. The ‘dawn’ of Darwinian evolution heralded ‘the break-up of our brotherhood’, with its ‘growing evolutionary suspicion that savages were not a part of the human race’. Another ‘movement of the progressive sort’ that meant a ‘more brazen and brutal’ slavery was that of industrialization, which encouraged a ‘commercial and competitive’ slavery.⁹⁵

American democracy was also threatened by capitalism, which resulted in the ‘unnatural ... combination of political equality with extreme economic inequality in practice’. For ‘the democratic ideal’ of America was in conflict with ‘another tendency, an industrial progress which is of all things on earth the most undemocratic’. Industrialism, of course, was not unique to America, but it was ‘alone in emphasising the ideal’ that was at odds with industrialism. In addition, America had (unlike England) a ‘counterweight’ to industrial urban capitalism in the shape of ‘a free agriculture, a vast field of free farms dotted with small freeholders’. Unfortunately, however, the ‘culture’ of these Puritan smallholders of the Mid West came from the city (‘the Puritan tradition was originally a tradition of the town’), which meant that they were not a ‘true peasantry’ in that they did not ‘produce their own spiritual food, in the same sense as their own material food’, and they did not ‘create other kinds of culture beside the kind called agriculture’. There was no ‘peasant play’ in Oklahoma, only the cinema: ‘And the objection to the cinema is not so much that it goes to Oklahoma as that it does not come from Oklahoma.’ But it certainly was not for the English, who had allowed their land ‘to be stolen by squires and then vulgarised by sham squires, to sneer at such colonists as crude and prosaic’: ‘They at least have really kept something of the simplicity, and, therefore, the dignity of democracy ...’. Still, it was unfortunate that their ‘culture, and to some great extent their creed, do come along the railroads from the great modern urban centres ...’. Chesterton concludes with a paradox that must have given him some pleasure: ‘It is that influence that alone prevents the Middle West from progressing towards the Middle Ages.’⁹⁶

Chesterton noticed what other English visitors still notice when they visit America: ‘the cold passion’ for ‘piling up ice’, the fallacy of supposing that Americans speak ‘the same’ language, the wooden houses that looked ‘almost as fantastic to an English eye as if they had all been made of cardboard’, the fact that America exports its worst rather than its best (‘the best things do not travel’), the skies ‘so clear’ as to make it seem that ‘clouds were English products like primroses’, England being blessed with ‘the noble thing called weather; most other countries having to be content with climate’. But, above all, Chesterton was struck by the sheer ‘restlessness’ of life, particularly in New York, ‘a place of unrest’ loved by its admirers for ‘the romance of its restlessness’. Paradoxically, Chesterton thought that the unpunctuality he had noticed at his lectures ‘had the same origin as the hustling’, since Americans were ‘impulsive’ with ‘an impulse to stay as well as an impulse to go’, being possessed by ‘the romance of business’, which really was ‘like a love-affair’ in that it involved ‘not only rushing but lingering’. It was customary for the English to condemn America as ‘materialist’ because of its ‘worship of success’—but ‘this very worship, like any worship’, was mystical rather than materialistic. For Americans worshipped ‘success in the abstract, as a sort of ideal vision’, and to say that they ‘worship’ the dollar is ‘a compliment’ to their ‘fine spirituality’, for they adore the dollar as ‘an idol’, ‘an image of success and not of enjoyment’. That this ‘romance’ of success was ‘also a religion’ was shown by the fact that there was ‘a queer sort of morality attached to it’: ‘America does vaguely feel a man making good as something analogous to a man being good or a man doing good.’ Doing business really was a ‘romance’, for it was not ‘reality’, since half the financial operations involved dealt with ‘things that do not even exist’, ‘all finance’ being ‘in that sense ... a fairy-tale’. Success involved work, and Americans had ‘a very real respect for work’, for ‘the dignity of labour’, not being enchanted with the English ideal of the gentleman of leisure—although there was ‘a good side to the Englishman’s daydream of leisure, and one which the American spirit tends to miss’, the concept of the ‘holiday’ and even more that of the ‘hobby’. The restlessness of Americans could also be seen in their idea that ‘enthusiasm’ was ‘itself ... meritorious’, ‘the excitement itself ... dignified’. They were ‘proud’ not only of their ‘energy’ but of their ‘excitement’. They admired people for being ‘impressionable’, for being ‘excited’. They were ‘not ashamed of curiosity’, which they felt to be ‘consistent with ... dignity, because dignity is consistent with vivacity’. That they were like children, ‘in the very best sense of childhood’, the ‘most childlike thing about a child’ being ‘his curiosity ... and his power of wonder at the world’, was a great compliment coming from Chesterton. The moodiness of the English was a ‘mystery’ to Americans, since in America there were ‘no moods’ but ‘only one mood’, whether it was called ‘hustle or uplift’. The ‘ups and downs of the English temperament’ were a mystery to a ‘people living on such a lofty but level tableland’. Such ‘subtlety’ of mood was simply swept away by American ‘sociability’.⁹⁷

On their return to England in April 1921, the Chestertons had practical problems that had to be faced. The lease on Overroads would expire in the summer of next year and could not be renewed.⁹⁸ Fortunately, the American lecture tour had brought in sufficient funds to proceed with building a house in Top Meadow around the studio that had already been built. The tree in the meadow that Chesterton had said he would like to build a house round was cut down and used for the newel of the staircase.⁹⁹

They gladly resumed life in their beloved Beaconsfield. On 14 July Chesterton played Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while his Jewish friend Margaret Halford played Puck, in aid of a new engine for the local fire brigade and an extension to the Church of England school.¹⁰⁰ But the religious problem remained on his mind. On Christmas Day 1921, the last Christmas they spent at Overroads, he wrote to Maurice Baring to say that he had ‘been troubled for some time about a particular problem in connection with the great subject (which has hardly left my mind for an hour) and I hope the decision I have come to does not sound abrupt and incoherent in this hasty note’. He would very much like to see Baring, but he would also like to see ‘some priest of your acquaintance, about what is involved in a certain case’. He did not ‘particularly’ want the priest to be a friend of his: although he knew ‘they would consider principles and not friendship’, he did not want ‘to burden their friendship’ till it was ‘necessary’. If Baring would let him know after the feast of the Epiphany on 6 January ‘(to preserve the twelve days of Xmas)’, he would arrange an appointment at Baring’s at the priest’s convenience.¹⁰¹ What became of this request is not known.

His doubts about Anglicanism had hardly been dispelled by news of a church congress in Birmingham in October 1921, at which a Lord Dawson pronounced that artificial contraception was not inconsistent with Christian morality, in spite of the recent Lambeth Conference’s condemnation of it in 1920. The way was being paved for the reversal of this teaching at the next Lambeth Conference in 1930. In an editorial of 21 October in the New Witness Chesterton commented on the press’s agreement that the Church of England must ‘move with the times’ or with the ‘world’: ‘We do not want, as the newspapers say, a Church that will move with the world. We want a Church that will move the world.’ He did not mind people who simply rejected Christian morals nearly so much as so-called Christians who ‘brazenly’ betrayed Christianity.

In Eugenics and Other Evils, published in February 1922, Chesterton condemned the view that ‘the spread of destitution will never be stopped until we have educated the lower classes in the methods by which the upper classes prevent procreation’. Certainly, there were ‘unwanted children; but unwanted by whom?’ Not by the parents, Chesterton suggested, but by the employers who did not want to pay the parents properly. At the beginning of the book, Chesterton explained to his readers that, while ‘most of the conclusions, especially towards the end, were conceived with reference to recent events, the actual bulk of preliminary notes about the science of Eugenics were written before the war’:

It was a time when this theme was the topic of the hour; when eugenic babies (not visibly very distinguishable from other babies) sprawled all over the illustrated papers; when the evolutionary fancy of Nietzche was the new cry among the intellectuals; and when ... Shaw and others were considering the idea that to breed a man like a cart-horse was the true way to attain that higher civilization, of intellectual magnanimity and sympathetic insight, which may be found in cart-horses.

But the craze for eugenics, Chesterton considered, was simply part of ‘a modern craze for scientific officialism and strict social organization’, in other words for Prussianism. Once ‘the older culture of Christendom’ had prevailed against Prussia in the war, he had assumed the notes he had made had become ‘irrelevant’. But, to his astonishment, he found that ‘the ruling classes in England [were] still proceeding on the assumption that Prussia [was] a pattern for the whole world’.¹⁰²

To cry out before one is hurt seemed to Chesterton to be the ‘wisest thing’: ‘It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt.’ History showed that ‘most tyrannies’ succeeded ‘because men moved too late’: ‘It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists. It is no answer to say, with a distant optimism, that the scheme is only in the air. A blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air.’ Evils like eugenics had throughout history triumphed through ‘a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin’. In the case of eugenics there was ‘a cloud of skirmishers, of harmless and confused modern sceptics, who ought to be cleared off or calmed down before we come to debate with the real doctors of the heresy’: ‘When we have answered the immediate protestation of all these good, shouting, shortsighted people, we can begin to do justice to those intelligences that are really behind the idea.’ These harmless skirmishers could be divided into ‘five sects; whom I will call the Euphemists, the Casuists, the Autocrats, the Precedenters, and the Endeavourers’. Most of them were ‘Euphemists’, who were startled by ‘short words’ and soothed by ‘long words’, and who were ‘utterly incapable of translating the one into the other’, ‘however obviously’ they meant ‘the same thing’.

Say to them ‘The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generations does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females’; say this to them and they sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them ‘Murder your mother,’ and they sit up quite suddenly. … Say to them, ‘It is not improbable that a period may arrive when the narrow if once useful distinction between the anthropoid homo and the other animals, which has been modified on so many moral points, may be modified even also in regard to the important question of the extension of human diet’; say this to them, and beauty born of murmuring sound will pass into their faces. But say to them, in a simple, manly, hearty way ‘Let’s eat a man!’ and their surprise is quite surprising.

Then there were the ‘casuists’, who would respond to the complaint, ‘I dislike this spread of Cannibalism in the West End restaurants,’ ‘Well, after all Queen Eleanor when she sucked blood from her husband’s arm was a cannibal.’ For the ‘Autocrats’, ‘every modern reform will ‘‘work’’ all right, because they will be there to see.’ As for the ‘Precedenters’, they were mostly ‘solemn’ Parliamentarians who would say, for instance, that they ‘could not understand the clamour against the Feeble-Minded Bill as it only extended the ‘‘principles’’ of the old Lunacy Laws’—to which the only answer was, ‘Quite so. It only extends the ‘‘principles’’ of the Lunacy Laws to persons without a trace of lunacy.’ Finally, there were the ‘Endeavourers’, the ‘weakest’ of all these ‘helpless’ skirmishers, the ‘prize specimen’ of whom was an MP ‘who defended the same Bill as ‘‘an honest attempt’’ to deal with a great evil: as if one had a right to dragoon and enslave one’s fellow citizens as a kind of chemical experiment; in a state of reverent agnosticism about what would come of it’. But there remained ‘a class of controversialists so hopeless and futile’ that Chesterton could not find a name for them: they were the kind of people who would say: ‘You object to all State interference; I am in favour of State interference. You are an Individualist; I, on the other hand,’’ etc.’ Apart from these ‘controversialists’, there was ‘an enormous mass’ of ‘rather thoughtless people, whose rooted sentiment is that any deep change in our society must be in some way infinitely distant’, ‘a thing that, good or bad, will have to fit itself to their great-great-great-grandchild, who may be very different and may like it; and who in any case is rather a distant relative’.¹⁰³

In fact, what Chesterton considered to be the first eugenics law, the Mental Deficiency Act, which he called ‘the Feeble-Minded Bill’, had already been passed in 1913 ‘with the applause of both parties’ by the House of Commons.

It is, and quite simply and literally, a Bill for incarcerating as madmen those whom no doctor will consent to call mad. It is enough if some doctor or other may happen to call them weak-minded. Since there is scarcely any human being to whom this term has not been conversationally applied by his own friends and relatives on some occasion or another (unless his friends and relatives have been lamentably lacking in spirit), it can be clearly seen that this law, like the early Christian Church (to which, however, it presents points of dissimilarity), is a net drawing in all kinds.

It was ‘openly said’ that the purpose of the bill was ‘to prevent any person whom these propagandists do not happen to think intelligent from having any wife or children. Every tramp who is sulky, every labourer who is shy, every rustic who is eccentric, can quite easily be brought under such conditions as were designed for homicidal maniacs.’ The state had ‘suddenly and quietly gone mad’, not so much because it admitted the abnormal as because it could not ‘recover the normal’. And ‘anarchy’ was that condition in which a loss of ‘self-control’ prevented any return to the ‘normal’. As always for Chesterton, it was the lack of ‘rational limits’ that was to blame. This limitless anarchy could be seen in ‘the vague extension of punishments like imprisonment’. In the past, the state would torture a man by stretching him on the rack—but not by stretching ‘the rack out’. When the practice was to burn so-called witches, no one suggested that the practice should be extended to other supposedly unsocial characters such as ‘backbiting’ women. The definition of crime was becoming ‘more and more indefinite’, so that, for example, cruelty to children had ‘come to cover almost every negligence that can occur in a needy household’. The modern age was unique in its ‘highly-paid’ experts’ inability to offer ‘some kind of logical account’ for their actions:

The lowest sophist in the Greek schools would remember enough of Socrates to force the Eugenist to tell him (at least) whether Midias was segregated because he was curable or because he was incurable. The meanest Thomist of the mediaeval monasteries would have the sense to see that you cannot discuss a madman when you have not discussed a man. The most owlish Calvinist commentator in the seventeenth century would ask the Eugenist to reconcile such Bible texts as derided fools with the other Bible texts that praised them. The dullest shopkeeper in Paris in 1790 would have asked what were the Rights of Man, if they did not include the rights of the lover, the husband, and the father.¹⁰⁴

Without any idea of the exception actually proving the rule, the eugenist regards the heredity of everyone as ‘doubtful’, in which case the eugenist’s judgement itself is ‘the result of a doubtful heredity’. Eugenists wanted doctors ‘to meddle with the public definition of madness’ and ‘to enforce a new conception of sanity’. A eugenist would say that a consumptive like Keats should never have been allowed to come into this world and to endure the suffering of consumption, but happiness unlike consumption was not ‘a calculable matter’: ‘Keats died young; but he had more pleasure in a minute than a Eugenist gets in a month.’ Atheists noticeably avoided language that implied people have souls, preferring to speak of the ‘outbreak’ rather than the ‘waging’ of war, of international ‘solidarity’ rather than ‘sympathy’ (as though nations were ‘physically stuck together like dates in a grocer’s shop’), of‘the relations of the sexes’ rather than ‘love’ or ‘lust’ (‘as if a man and a woman were two wooden objects standing in a certain angle and attitude to each other, like a table and a chair’). Similarly, eugenists were ‘as passive in their statements as they are active in their experiments. Their sentences always enter tail first, and have no subject, like animals without heads.’ When she wanted to disembowel, Lady Macbeth demanded a dagger, whereas the eugenist preferred to say more indirectly, ‘in such cases the bowels should, etc.’. In most cases, when the eugenist announced that something ‘should’ be done, the ‘lost subject’ governing the eugenist’s verb was the eugenist himself. In any case, if Chesterton were a eugenist, he would not ‘personally elect’ to ‘waste [his] time locking up the feeble-minded’: ‘The people I should lock up would be the strong-minded.’ He had noticed when he was at school that ‘the kind of boy who likes teasing halfwits was not the sort that stood up to bullies’. The eugenists seemed to be ‘actually proud of the dimness of their definitions and the incompleteness of their plans’. They were ‘ready to reproduce the secrecies and cruelties of the Inquisition’, but they certainly could not be accused of offending ‘with any of that close and complicated thought, that arid and exact logic which narrowed the minds of the Middle Ages; they have discovered how to combine the hardening of the heart with a sympathetic softening of the head’. The eugenists thought that there could be experts on health and sanity, but the truth was that there could only be experts on disease and insanity ‘because experts can only arise out of exceptional things’. If prosecuted for trespass, one could consult a solicitor on what constituted trespass; but, if the solicitor wanted to ‘map out’ one’s country walks, ‘then that solicitor would solicit in vain’. The eugenist argued that ‘a young man about to be married should be obliged to produce his health-book as he does his bank-book’, but health was not calculable like money.¹⁰⁵

The real established religion of England was not the Church of England (to which disestablishment ‘would do a good deal of good’) but science, which ‘really does use the secular arm’:

And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen—that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the Government will really help it to persecute its heretics.

But this persecution is ‘a new sort of persecution’, for the old kind of persecutor ‘violently enforced his creed, because it was unchangeable’, whereas the new scientific persecutor persecuted on behalf of a ‘hypothesis’, which ‘he boasts that he will always abandon’. There was another difference: ‘The old persecutor was trying to teach the citizen, with fire and sword. The new persecutor is trying to learn from the citizen, with scalpel and germ-injector.’ Eugenics was ‘the first religion to be experimental instead of doctrinal. All other established Churches have been based on somebody having found the truth. This is the first Church that was ever based on not having found it.’ This was ‘an Established Church of Doubt—instead of Faith’. There was no science of eugenics all, but the eugenists promised that if people gave themselves ‘up to be vivisected they [would] very probably have one some day’.¹⁰⁶

In Chesterton’s view, eugenics was the natural consequence of a capitalism that ‘thought that a margin of men out of work was good for his business’, since

the same inequality and insecurity that makes cheap labour may make bad labour, and at last no labour at all. It was as if a man who wanted something from an enemy, should at last reduce the enemy to come knocking at his door in the despair of winter, should keep him waiting in the snow to sharpen the bargain; and then come out to find the man dead upon the doorstep.

As a result of ‘the keeping of the worker half in and half out of work ... the degraded class was really degenerating’. For the problem was that, although it was ‘right and proper enough to use a man as a tool’ and therefore ‘quite reasonable and respectable, of course, to fling away a man like a tool’, there was a snag in the ‘comparison’: ‘If you pick up a hammer, you do not find a whole family of nails clinging to it. If you fling away a chisel by the roadside, it does not litter and leave a lot of little chisels.’ For, although ‘the meanest of tools’, man had a ‘strange privilege which God had given him, doubtless by mistake’. Swift could hardly have bettered the savagery of Chesterton’s satire: ‘The time came at last when the rather reckless breeding in the abyss below ceased to be a supply, and began to be something like a wastage; ceased to be something like keeping foxhounds, and began alarmingly to resemble a necessity of shooting foxes.’ And so the capitalist’s ‘ideas began, first darkly and unconsciously, but now more and more clearly, to drift’ towards the preferred solution: ‘He could alter the marriage in the house in such a way as to promise himself the largest possible number of the kind of children he did want, with the smallest number of the kind he did not.’¹⁰⁷

As a true liberal, Chesterton deplored the loss of liberty, if nothing else, that eugenics represented. But it was not the only infringement on liberty by the state. Legislation against the consumption of alcohol was no longer based on the danger to others of drunkenness but on health: now it was said that ‘the government must safeguard the health of the community’, and, if alcohol was now to be regarded as ‘poison’, then nicotine might soon be so classified. But in that case the government might as well ‘control all the habits of the citizens, and among the rest their habits in the matter of sex’. If ‘personal health’ was to be ‘a public concern’, then the ‘most private acts’ were ‘more public’ than the ‘most public acts’. And so the English people who did not have ‘equality’ like the French or ‘a great religion’ like the Irish were now losing their ‘life’, which was their liberty. But with whom had England gone to war so recently?

England went to war with the Superman in his native home. She went to war with that very land of scientific culture from which the very ideal of a Superman had come.... She gave battle to the birthplace of nine-tenths of the professors who were the prophets of the new hope of humanity.... The very name of Nietzsche, who had held up this hope of something superhuman to humanity, was laughed at for all the world as if he had been touched with lunacy.

But the English who had once been led to believe that Germany was ‘the model State’ could be deceived again—‘though all the millions who died to destroy Prussianism stood up and testified against it’.¹⁰⁸

After he had become a Catholic, Chesterton was to write that in his ‘experience the convert commonly passes through three stages or states of mind’. In the first stage, the future convert ‘imagines himself to be entirely detached’ and anxious ‘to be fair to the Church of Rome’. The second stage was when the convert ‘begins to be conscious not only of the falsehood’ of the charges levelled at the Church but of its ‘truth, and is enormously excited to find that there is far more of it than he would ever have expected’. This process of ‘discovering the Catholic Church’ was ‘perhaps the most pleasant and straightforward part of the business’. It was ‘like discovering a new continent full of strange flowers and fantastic animals ... at once wild and hospitable’. But the third stage, when the convert ‘is trying not to be converted’, was ‘the most terrible’. For the convert had ‘come too near to the truth’ and had ‘forgotten that truth is a magnet, with the powers of attraction and repulsion’. Or, to change the metaphor, the convert was now threatened with ‘the tragic and menacing grandeur of a great love affair’. ‘I may say,’ Chesterton confessed, ‘that I for one was never less troubled by doubts than in the last phase, when I was troubled by fears.’ And he doubted that he would ever ‘again have such absolute assurance’ of the truth of Catholicism than when he made his ‘last effort to deny it’.¹⁰⁹

The two people, according to Chesterton, who helped him most in this last stage were Maurice Baring and Father Ronald Knox, who had travelled the same road themselves.¹¹⁰ Knox had admired Chesterton since he was a schoolboy, and they ‘had met several times on public occasions and had written to, and of, one another with enthusiasm’, but they were not personal friends.¹¹¹ It seems that Chesterton asked to meet Knox, whose account of his conversion in A Spiritual Aenead had been published in 1918. In the first of a series of undated letters to Knox (whose letters have not survived), the first three of which were written from Overroads before the move to Top Meadow in the summer of 1922, Chesterton said that their meeting had ‘got into every chink of [his] thoughts, even the pauses of talk on practical things’. But in the meantime, he had been ‘distracted’ by the financial problems of the New Witness, which was in ‘a crisis about which shareholders etc. have to be consulted’. ‘I can’t let my brother’s paper,’ he explained, ‘that stands for all he believed in, go without doing all I can; and I am trying to get it started again, with Belloc to run it if possible.’ At their meeting he had not been able to ‘explain’ himself properly to Knox, and he wanted to try again: ‘I could not explain what I mean about my wife without saying much more. I see in principle it is not on the same level as the true Church; for nothing can be on the same level as God. But it is on quite a different level from social sentiments about friends and family.’ He felt a ‘responsibility’ about Frances, ‘more serious than affection, let alone passion’. First, she had given him his ‘first respect for sacramental Christianity’, and, second, ‘she is one of the good who mysteriously suffer; and I am partly to blame and have never been good enough for her’. So far as his own ‘feelings’ were concerned, he thought that he ‘might rightly make application to be instructed as soon as possible’; but he did not want ‘to take so serious a step without reopening the matter’ with Frances, which he ‘could do by the end of the week’: ‘I have had no opportunity before, because she has only just recovered from an illness, and is going away for a few days.’ He wanted Knox to tell him how he could ‘arrange matters with some priest or religious in London’ who might be able to see him ‘once or twice a week, or whatever is required’, or else to give him ‘the address of someone to write to, if that is the correct way’. There were priests in High Wycombe, the nearest large town, but he imagined they were ‘very busy parochial clergy’. Chesterton concluded the letter by saying that he had meant to write about ‘the convictions involved in a more abstract way’, but he was afraid that he had filled his letter ‘with one personal point’. When he wrote again after talking with Frances he would write ‘about the other matters’—‘and as they are more intellectual and less emotional, I hope I may be a little more coherent’.¹¹²

In May 1922 Chesterton’s father, Mr Ed, died. According to ‘Keith’ Chesterton, in the autumn of 1921 Mr Ed had ‘developed an obstinate cold, and though there was nothing sinister or alarming in his symptoms, the condition increased his nervous apprehensions and he decided to go to bed’. At first, his hypochondria only kept him in bed till tea-time, when he would get up ‘and grow quite cheerful over buttered toast and cress sandwiches; but as the days shortened he left his bed less frequently’. Recommended by the doctor to leave London for ‘a change of air’, he refused to move, claiming he did not have the energy. That winter ‘his periods of inertia grew more frequent, and he would sometimes remain silent for quite a long time’. But when he felt better he would tell fairy tales to the devoted maid’s little boy. The family were accustomed to his dread of illness and did not take his condition very seriously; he would surely be on his feet again in the warmer weather of spring. But gradually he spent longer and longer in bed till the time came when he seemed to lose the energy to get up. His mental powers began to fail and ‘he drifted into lassitude and inertia’.¹¹³

Before his father died, Chesterton had written to Knox to apologize for not having written before. By now his father was ‘very ill’, but his anxiety did ‘not so much turn the current of [his] thoughts as deepen it’. Chesterton was, of course, thinking of his conversion to Catholicism: ‘to see a man so many million times better than I am, in every way, and one to whom I owe everything, under such a shadow makes me feel, on top of all my particular feelings, that shadow that lies on us all.’ His father was ‘the very best man’ that he ‘ever knew of that generation, that never understood the new need of a spiritual authority’, living ‘almost perfectly by the sort of religion men had when rationalism was rational’. ‘I think’, added Chesterton, ‘he was always subconsciously prepared for the next generation having less theology than he has; and is rather puzzled at its having more. But I think he understood my brother’s conversion better than my mother did; she is more difficult, and of course I cannot bother her just now.’ However, his ‘family trouble’ had a ‘practical’ consequence so far as his reception into the Church was concerned:

As this may bring me to London more than I thought, it seems possible I might go there after all, instead of Wycombe, if I knew to whom to go. Also I find I stupidly destroyed your letter with the names of the priests at Wycombe to whom you referred me. Would it bother you very much to send me the names again, and any alternative London ones that occur to you; and I will let you know my course of action then.

Just when he was ‘settling down’ to write ‘a full reply’ to Knox’s reply, Chesterton received a telegram calling him urgently to London, apparently because his father was not expected to live rather than that he had actually died. Since his father’s death, he now wrote, he had ‘been doing the little’ he could for his mother—‘but even that little involves a great deal of business—the least valuable sort of help’. He would not now attempt to tell Knox ‘all that this involves in connection with [his] deeper feelings and intentions’, but was sending ‘this interim scribble as an excuse for delaying the letter [he] had already begun; and which nothing less than this catastrophe would have prevented [him] from finishing’. He hoped to ‘finish it in a few days’. He was not sure whether he would by then have returned to Beaconsfield, but if he had he would be at a new address: Top Meadow.¹¹⁴ In the meantime he had heard again from Maurice Baring, who wrote to send his condolences. Baring said that he had ‘lately felt strangely near’ to Chesterton, and had ‘had (quite wrongly perhaps) the impression’ that his ‘buffetings were over’ and that his ‘ship was in calm waters, well in sight of the harbour’.¹¹⁵

It was from his new home, Top Meadow, that Chesterton next wrote to Knox, apologizing for ‘the disreputable haste of [his] letter’: ‘my normal chaos is increased by moving into a new house, which is still like a waste-paper basket.’ He had

meant to make some attempt to finish the fuller reply I had actually begun to the very kind letter you sent me, I am ashamed to think how long ago, before my recent trouble; and though the trail and tangle of those troubles will still, I fear, make this very inadequate, there were two things in your letter I feel I ought to acknowledge even so late.

First, he could not say how ‘pleased and honoured’ he felt ‘even by the suggestion’ that Knox might ‘possibly’ give him the necessary instruction for reception into the Church: ‘It is something that I should value more vividly and personally than I can possibly express.’ But, as this ‘was so long ago, before so many delays and interruptions’, he was afraid that Knox’s ‘margin of Sundays in London must now be very much narrowed’. But he thought that ‘there must be still a Sunday or two left on [his] list’, and with his ‘permission’ he proposed to come to London next Sunday if there was a possibility of seeing him then. He imagined that a meeting could be arranged through Maurice Baring, for example, unless Knox would prefer to make his own ‘arrangements’. They could then discuss the ‘possibility’ of Knox instructing him or ‘finally make some arrangement about another one’. In any event, he would welcome the chance of another talk with Knox if it was not inconvenient. Second, he wanted to assure Knox that there was no need for him to apologize for what he had said about ‘private troubles’ disqualifying a person from appearing on ‘public platforms’, ‘for it is exactly what I am feeling most intensely myself’.

I am in a state now when I feel a monstrous charlatan, as if I wore a mask and were stuffed with cushions, whenever I see anything about the public G.K.C.; it hurts me; for though the views I express are real, the image is horribly unreal compared with the real person who needs help just now. I have as much vanity as anybody about these superficial successes while they are going on; but I never feel for a moment that they affect the reality of whether I am utterly rotten or not; so that any public comments on my religious position seem like a wind on the other side of the world; as if they are about somebody else—as indeed they are. I am not troubled about a great fat man who appears on platforms and in caricatures, even when he enjoys controversies on what I believe to be the right side. I am concerned about what has become of a little boy whose father showed him a toy theatre, and a schoolboy whom nobody ever heard of, with his brooding on doubts and dirt and daydreams of crude conscientiousness so inconsistent as to [be] near to hypocrisy; and all the morbid life of the lonely mind of a living person with whom I have lived. It is that story, that so often came near to ending badly, that I want to end well. Forgive this scrawl; I think you will understand me.

He ended the latter by saying that he was going to London next day, when he would ‘try to fix something up with Maurice [Baring] or somebody’.¹¹⁶

In the end, it seems that Knox suggested that he should come and see Chesterton in Beaconsfield. This, unfortunately, was not possible, Chesterton replied:

I feel horribly guilty in not having written before, and I do most earnestly hope you have not allowed my delay to interfere with any of your own arrangements. I have had a serious and very moving talk with my wife; and she is only too delighted at the idea of your visit in itself; in fact she really wants to know you very much.

The problem was that as yet they had only one spare room at Top Meadow, which was currently occupied by a nurse who was giving Frances ‘a treatment that seems to be doing her good’ and that he did not want to stop if he could help it.

In our conversation my wife was all that I hope you will some day know her to be; she is incapable of wanting me to do anything but what I think right; and admits the same possibility for herself: but it is much more of a wrench for her, for she has been able to practise her religion in complete good faith; which my own doubts have prevented me from doing.

He was ashamed, he added in a postscript, that he had failed to post the letter for two days ‘owing to executor business. Nobody so unbusinesslike as I am ought to be busy.’ Knox apparently wrote back to say that he could visit Chesterton during the summer vacation (he was teaching at St Edmund’s College, Ware). But again there was the problem of the resident nurse who was giving Frances ‘a treatment of radiant heat’ for her arthritic spine (which ‘one would hardly think needed in this weather’), although he hoped to be able to give Knox a definite answer ‘in a day or two’ and ‘should love to accept’ his ‘generous suggestion’ if at all possible. In the next undated letter that survives from Chesterton, he writes (‘almost stepping on to the boat’) of having ‘to go and lecture for a week in Holland’, having only just emerged from a ‘hurricane of business’, no doubt to do with the ailing New Witness. However, he promises to write again ‘more fully about the business of instruction’ on his return in about ten days’ time. On returning from Holland, it seems he changed his mind, writing to Knox that he ought to have told him ‘long ago’ what he had ‘done about the most practical of business matters’. His excuse for not writing was the usual one: ‘I have again been torn in pieces by the wars of the New Witness.’ Nevertheless, he had ‘managed to have another talk’ with Frances, after which he had written to ‘our old friend Father O’Connor and asked him to come here, as he probably can’ from what Chesterton had heard. He felt ‘sure’ that he had made the right decision:

Frances is just at the point where Rome acts both as the positive and the negative magnet; a touch would turn her either way; almost (against her will) to hatred, but with the right touch to a faith far beyond my reach. I know Father O’Connor’s would be the touch that does not startle, because she knows him and is fond of him; and the only thing she asked of me was to send for him. If he cannot come, of course I shall take other action and let you know.

On 17 July Knox wrote back: ‘I’m awfully glad to hear that you’ve sent for Father O’Connor and that you think he’s likely to be available. I must say that, in the story, Father Brown’s powers of neglecting his parish always seemed to me even more admirable than Dr Watson’s powers of neglecting his practice; so I hope this trait was drawn from the life.’¹¹⁷

Chesterton had written an undated letter, postmarked 11 July 1922, to Father O’Connor, in which he asked the priest if he could get away ‘about the end of next week or thereabouts: and would it be possible for you to come south and see our new house—or old studio?’

This sounds a very abrupt invitation; but I write in great haste, and am troubled about many things. I want to talk to you about them; especially the most serious ones, religious and concerned with my own rather difficult position. Most of the difficulty has been my own fault, but not all; some of my difficulties would commonly be called duties; though I ought perhaps to have learned sooner to regard them as lesser duties.

He concluded by saying that O’Connor was ‘the person’ that he and Frances thought of ‘with most affection, of all who could help in such a matter’. The priest immediately replied that he was at their disposal at any time during the next fortnight. On 23 July Frances wrote to ask how long he could stay in Beaconsfield. The only small spare bedroom—‘We’ve got to build another room, but cannot afford it yet!’—was free for one night, but after that, presumably because the nurse would be back in residence, she would have to get him a room either with friends or at one of the inns. She was ‘only too pleased’ that her husband wanted to see him: ‘I am sure you will now be able to give him all the advice and help he wants.’ She wanted them to have all the time they needed.¹¹⁸ It was agreed that Father O’Connor should come on 26 July, the day the spare room was free. But then on the morning of 24 July O’Connor received a telegram (‘reply paid’) from Hilaire Belloc, to whom he had written to tell of Chesterton’s apparently impending conversion. Belloc wanted to meet him in London that day. O’Connor duly took the morning train to St Pancras Station, arriving some time before the appointed time of 3.30 p.m. at the appointed place, Westminster Cathedral. There he waited ‘until long after 4.30’ in vain. There was no sign of Belloc, although he had been seen that afternoon in London. No doubt O’Connor was so flattered to know such famous people that he seems not even to have complained to Belloc about his non-appearance when he saw him six weeks later, when he asked him why he had sent the telegram. The answer was, ‘I wanted to keep you from going to Gilbert. I thought he would never be a Catholic.’ O’Connor thought that Belloc had made some ‘vain efforts’ himself: ‘It was easy to fluster Gilbert but impossible to hustle him.’ O’Connor’s impatience at having to stay two nights in London was restricted to the single exclamation, ‘Alone in London from Monday to Wednesday!’¹¹⁹

When O’Connor arrived in Beaconsfield, he told Frances that there was ‘only one thing troubling Gilbert about the great step’ he was proposing to take—the effect it would have on her. ‘Oh! I shall be infinitely relieved,’ she responded. ‘You cannot imagine how it fidgets Gilbert to have anything on his mind. The last three months have been exceptionally trying. I should be only too glad to come with him, if God in His mercy would show the way clear, but up to now He has not made it clear enough to me to justify such a step.’ Having given Chesterton the reassurance he needed, O’Connor discussed at length with him ‘such special points’ as he wanted to raise, before telling him ‘to read through the Penny Catechism to make sure there were no snags to a prosperous passage’. ‘It was’, O’Connor later recalled, ‘a sight for men and angels all the Friday to see him wandering in and out of the house with his fingers in the leaves of the little book, resting it on his forearm whilst he pondered with his head on one side.’ O’Connor was reminded of the story, which Chesterton ‘knew well’, of how J. S. Phillimore had called on the Archbishop of Glasgow and asked to be received into the Church: ‘The butler brought down a Penny catechism with: His Grace says will you call again when you know all this by heart?’ Phillimore retorted that he had ‘come to be examined in it’. Because there was as yet no Catholic church in Beaconsfield, which was then part of the parish of St Augustine’s, High Wycombe, Chesterton’s reception into the Catholic Church took place on Sunday 30 July in ‘a small tin shed, painted red-brick, which stood among the sculleries and outhouses’¹²⁰ of the Railway Hotel, where one Mass was then celebrated on Sundays and Holydays, by courtesy of the landlady of the hotel, a Mrs Borlase, who was an Irish Catholic, and her convert husband.¹²¹ Dom Ignatius Rice, the headmaster of Douai Abbey School, ‘one of Chesterton’s oldest and keenest admirers’, who had offered the Abbey for the service, joined O’Connor for breakfast at the inn where he was staying, after which they walked up to Top Meadow. There they found Chesterton in an armchair perusing the Penny Catechism, ‘pulling faces and making noises as he used to do when reading’. At lunch he abstained from wine and drank water. At about three o’clock they set off for the Railway Hotel. Chesterton ‘had no doubts or difficulties just before’ his reception into the Church—‘only fears, fears of something that had the finality and simplicity of suicide’. While Chesterton made his confession to Father O’Connor, Frances, who was weeping, and Dom Ignatius Rice sat in the hotel bar. After conditional baptism had been administered, the two priests left Chesterton and Frances by themselves in the makeshift chapel. Returning to collect something he had forgotten, Rice saw them coming down the aisle, Chesterton with a comforting arm round his weeping wife (not all her tears were of grief, O’Connor thought).¹²² The day after the reception O’Connor wrote to the local bishop, Bishop Cary Elwes of Northampton, to report that the famous convert had been ‘very humble and fervent’ and that his wife had been ‘much moved, but not as much as he’. ‘It all took place in the Railway Hotel, the which seems rather waggish on the part of the Powers who arrange these coincidences.’¹²³

After the service, O’Connor and Chesterton went to tea with the wife of Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, the prison reformer and founder of the Borstal juvenile system, ‘who had refused to be put off that morning’. Since Chesterton had on his father’s side a famous prison reformer, Captain Chesterton, prison reform was an obvious topic of conversation. But Lady Ruggles-Brise was the widow of the head of one of England’s oldest Catholic families, the Stonors, and, since O’Connor had been ordained by an Archbishop Stonor, there was another obvious topic of conversation. It was, thought O’Connor, ‘a good set-off to the tension of the early afternoon, better than going back to Top Meadow, where Frances was giving tea to Father Rice’. On their twenty-minute walk into Beaconsfield from the Railway Hotel, O’Connor recalled what he had said to Chesterton during the last couple of days:

that there never was an Anglican but minimised some point, great or small, of dogma, that is of accepted fact in religion, and that now he would be inebriated with the plenteousness of the Lord’s House, and do better work than ever, even as Newman of the Parochial and Plain [Sermons] was but the try-out for Newman of Gerontius and the Second Spring sermon.¹²⁴

That somewhat obtuse comment about Newman, about whom Chesterton knew a great deal, perhaps partly explains Chesterton’s lack of response: ‘He was unwontedly silent that afternoon, or so it seemed to me. I do hope I did not talk too much, though it would not have been the first time if I had.’¹²⁵ Father Rice, who had accompanied Frances back to Top Meadow and was not present to hear his Irish colleague’s prognostications of Chesterton’s brilliant future, remembered only that for the rest of the day Chesterton was ‘in brilliant form ... quoting poetry and jesting in the highest spirits’. He also wrote a poem, ‘The Convert’, to celebrate his new life as a convert:¹²⁶

After one moment when I bowed my head

And the whole world turned over and came upright,

And I came out where the old road shone white,

I walked the ways and heard what all men said,

Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,

Being not unlovable but strange and light;

Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite But softly, as men smile about the dead.

The sages have a hundred maps to give

That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,

They rattle reason out through many a sieve

That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:

And all these things are less than dust to me

Because my name is Lazarus and I live.¹²⁷

Chesterton was now faced with no doubt the most difficult letter he had had to write since writing to tell his mother that he was unofficially engaged to Frances.

My dearest Mother,

I write this (with the worst pen in South Bucks) to tell you something before I write about it to anyone else; something about which we shall probably be in the position of the two bosom friends at Oxford, who ‘never differed except in opinion’. You have always been so wise in not judging people by their opinions, but rather the opinions by the people. It is in one sense a long story by this time; but I have come to the same conclusion that Cecil did about needs of the modern world in religion and right dealing, and I am now a Catholic in the same sense as he, having long claimed the name in its Anglo-Catholic sense. I am not going to make a foolish fuss of reassuring you about things I am sure you never doubted; these things do not hurt any relations between people as fond of each other as we are; any more than they ever made any difference to the love between Cecil and ourselves. … I have thought about you, and all that I owe to you and my father, not only in the way of affection, but of the ideals of honour and freedom and charity and all other good things you always taught me: and I am not conscious of the smallest break or difference in those ideals; but only of a new and necessary way of fighting for them. I think, as Cecil did, that the fight for the family and the free citizen and everything decent must now be waged by [the] one fighting form of Christianity.... I have thought this out for myself and not in a hurry of feeling. It is months since I saw my Catholic friends and years since I talked to them about it. I believe it is the truth.¹²⁸

The last but one sentence of this letter could be misleading.¹²⁹ Chesterton must mean that he had not talked for a long time to his friends about ‘the truth’ that he refers to in the last sentence, the truth, that is, of Catholicism, which he had long come to believe was true, as opposed to the question of his actual reception, which of course he had discussed with both Baring and O’Connor. He wanted to assure his mother that his decision had been carefully thought through and not under the influence of Catholic friends like Belloc. Mrs Chesterton replied that she was ‘not altogether surprised’ to hear the news. Nor could she object to anything that her son thought ‘right’: ‘I only pray that it will bring you happiness and peace. It was kind of you to tell me first—I know how you love me. I have no one left but you my darling, and I feel so lonely I am glad to have your love and confidence ...’. She ended by expressing her ‘love and sympathy’ with him in his ‘resolve’.¹³⁰

He wrote now to Baring to assure him that his ‘abominable delay’ in writing to him deserved ‘every penalty conceivable, hanging, burning and boiling in oil; but really not so inconceivable an idea as that I should be offended with you at any time (let alone after all you have done in this matter) however thoroughly you might be justified in being offended with me’. The reason for his delay was that he had wanted and hoped to write a letter ‘quite different from all those I have had to write to other people; a very long and intimate letter, trying to tell you all about this wonderful business, in which you have helped me so much more than anyone else’. The only other person he had ‘meant to write to in the same style’ was Father Knox—‘and his [letter] has been delayed in the same topsy-turvy way. I am drowning in whirlpools of work and worry over the New Witness which nearly went bankrupt for good this week. But worry does not worry so much as it did before ...’. If it was not ‘adding insult to injury’, he would ‘send the long letter after all’. The present letter was an immediate acknowledgement of Baring’s letter, which had apparently contained a stamped return envelope—which he would ‘humiliate’ himself by using.¹³¹

On receiving the news of his conversion from Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc replied on 1 August in terms of what Catholicism meant to him: ‘The Catholic Church is the exponent of Reality. It is true. Its doctrines in matters large and small are statements of what is.’ By all his ‘nature of mind’ he was sceptical. But this was only a ‘mood: not a conclusion’: ‘My conclusion—and that of all men who have ever once seen it—is the Faith: Corporate, organised, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.’ To Chesterton, who was blessed with ‘profound religious emotion’, this might seem too desiccated; and indeed it did lack enthusiasm. He blamed his lack of feeling on the death of his beloved Elodie:

It is my misfortune. In youth I had it: even till lately. Grief has drawn the juices from it. I am alone and unfed. The more do I affirm the Sanctity, the Unity, the Infallibility of the Catholic Church. By my very isolation do I the more affirm it, as a man in a desert knows that water is right for man: or as a wounded dog, not able to walk, yet knows the way home.

In short: ‘The Catholic Church is the natural home of the human spirit.’ There was no hint of congratulation or pleasure that Chesterton was now his co-religionist. But Belloc admitted that his ‘reactions’ were ‘abominably slow’: ‘I must write to you again when I have collected myself ...’.¹³²

To Father O’Connor he wrote: ‘It is very great news indeed!—and you were the agent therein.’ And again he wrote on the 23rd: ‘I had never thought it possible! ... I have written to him and shall write again—but I am a poor hand at such things.’ Two days later he reiterated his astonishment: ‘The more I think on Gilbert the more astonished I become!’¹³³ On 25 August Baring wrote again but in very different terms from Belloc:

When I wrote to you the other day I was still cramped by the possibility of the news not being true although I knew it was true. I felt it was true at once. Curiously enough I felt it had happened before I saw the news in the newspaper at all. … Nothing for years has given me so much joy. I have hardly ever entered a church without putting up a candle to Our Lady or to StJoseph or St Anthony for you.¹³⁴

On the same day, Belloc wrote to express his astonishment to Baring:

People said that he might come in at any time because he showed such a Catholic point of view and so much affection for the Catholic Church. That always seemed to me quite the wrong end of the stick. Acceptation of the Faith is an act, not a mood. Faith is an act of will and as it seemed to me the whole of his mind was occupied in expressing his liking for and attraction towards a certain mood, not all towards the acceptation of a certain Institution as defined and representing full reality in this world. There is all the difference between enjoying military ideas and even joining the volunteers, and becoming a private soldier in a common regiment.

Belloc, however, admitted that he was ‘not very much good at understanding what is going on in other people’s minds ...’.¹³⁵ He might have added that there were other approaches to Catholicism apart from his own very individual one.

An Irish politician, whom Chesterton had come to know when he was in Ireland, and who sent him a missal, received a remarkable letter of thanks. After acknowledging his debt to friends like Baring and Belloc, Chesterton confided that he had ‘an inner certainty that there was one thing which was dragging me in that divine direction long before’ he knew them—‘and the name of it was Ireland’.

There mingled from the first with all the feelings of a normal patriotic Englishman a sort of supernatural fear of the sorrows of Ireland; a suspicion of what they might mean; which grew until I was certain that the policy of Castlereagh and Carson was at bottom that of Nero and Diocletian. The Irish were not faultless; nor were the early Christians: but I knew we had buffeted Christ.

It was true that he had sympathized politically with Ireland long before he felt any ‘religious sympathy with her’. But the fact that he had held on to his political sympathy while ‘the other Liberals seemed to be abandoning all their Liberal ideas, made me guess it was more than political’.¹³⁶

After his reception into the Catholic Church, Chesterton went to High Wycombe to be prepared by the parish priest, Father Thomas Walker, for his first Holy Communion and Confirmation. At the morning Mass in the ‘shed’ at the Railway Hotel in Beaconsfield on Sunday 24 September Chesterton made his first Communion, and in the afternoon was confirmed in St Augustine’s, High Wycombe, by Bishop Cary Elwes, who belonged to a well-known old Catholic family, taking the confirmation name of Francis after his favourite saint, Francis of Assisi. Afterwards he met the Bishop in the presbytery.¹³⁷ Father Walker remembered preparing Chesterton for his first Communion as ‘one of the happiest duties I had ever to perform’: ‘It certainly did not take long to prepare him for he evidently knew as much as I could tell him. Nevertheless, he said I was to treat him as any child whom I was teaching.’ Since Father Walker ‘had at the time’ twice ‘carefully waded through’ Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, this was a somewhat daunting task.

However, I went through the catechism (he was importunate that I should use it as he said all the children made use of it), very meticulously explained all the details, to which he lent a most vigilant and unswerving attention. For instance, he wanted me to explain the reason of the drop of water being put into the wine at the preparing of the chalice for the Holy Sacrifice.

So ‘aware’ was Chesterton ‘of the immensity of the Real Presence on the morning of his First Communion ... that he was covered with perspiration when he actually received Our Lord. When I was congratulating him he said, ‘‘I have spent the happiest hour of my life.’’ ’¹³⁸ But, at least to begin with, he found it difficult going to Holy Communion, his ‘best happiness’: he was ‘too much frightened of that tremendous reality on the altar. I have not grown up with it and it is too much for me.’ That he was ‘morbid’ he did not doubt—but he needed ‘to be told so by authority’.¹³⁹ It was not only the Eucharist but even priests themselves who inspired ‘awe and reverence’ in him: ‘He would carefully weigh their opinions however fatuous,’ Dom Ignatius Rice remembered.¹⁴⁰ A 12-year old boy who used to serve Mass in the tin shed at the Station Hotel in Beaconsfield was ‘always impressed at the wrapt attention with which he listened to the rather poor sermons. He obviously saw much more in them than the rest of the congregation.’¹⁴¹

The last chapter of Chesterton’s Autobiography is entitled ‘The God with the Golden Key’. The point of the title is revealed at the end of the chapter, when he recalls ‘the figure of a man who crosses a bridge and carries a key; as I saw him when I first looked into fairyland through the window of my father’s peep-show’. Now he ‘starts up again before me, standing sharp and clear in shape as of old’ and ‘I know that he who is called Pontifex, the Builder of the Bridge, is called also the Claviger, the Bearer of the Key; and that such keys were given him to bind and loose when he was a poor fisher in a far province, beside a small and almost secret sea’. He had already explained that, when asked why he had become a Catholic, his ‘first essential answer’, even though it was ‘partly an elliptical answer’, was: ‘ ‘‘To get rid of my sins.’’ For there is no other religious system that does really profess to get rid of people’s sins.’¹⁴² Presumably by italicizing the word ‘really’, Chesterton (who was forgetting the Orthodox Church) was referring to the Anglican Church, where sacramental confession was practised by a party within it but not by the Church in general, which, he presumably meant, could not therefore be said ‘really’ to ‘profess to get rid of people’s sins’. (There is in fact evidence to suggest that Chesterton himself may have received the sacrament while still an Anglican, not unnaturally, since he professed to be an Anglo-Catholic.¹⁴³) He proceeds to explain that the Roman Catholic Church believes that ‘sin confessed and adequately repented is actually abolished’—he forgets to add ‘when absolved’ —‘and that the sinner does really begin again as if he had never sinned’. This doctrine brought ‘sharply’ back to him ‘those visions or fancies’ with which he had dealt in his chapter on childhood. There he had spoken of‘that strange daylight, which was something more than the light of common day, that still seems in my memory to shine on those steep roads down from Campden Hill, from which one could see the Crystal Palace from afar’. Similarly,

when a Catholic comes from Confession, he does truly, by definition, step out again into that dawn of his own beginning and look with new eyes across the world to a Crystal Palace that is really of crystal. He believes that in that dim corner, and in that brief ritual, God has really remade him in His own image. He is now a new experiment of the Creator. He is as much a new experiment as he was when he was really only five years old. He stands, as I said, in the white light at the worthy beginning of the life of a man. The accumulations of time can no longer terrify. He may be grey and gouty; but he is only five minutes old.¹⁴⁴

Catholic doctrines seemed to Chesterton to ‘link up’ the whole of his life, ‘as no other doctrines could do; and especially to settle simultaneously the two problems of [his] childish happiness and [his] boyish brooding’. In particular, they affected what he hoped it was not ‘pompous’ to call ‘the chief idea’ of his life—namely, ‘the idea of taking things with gratitude, and not taking things for granted’. The sacrament of confession gave ‘a new life’, but the ‘gift’ was ‘given at a price’—that is, ‘facing the reality about oneself’. He had first seen ‘the two sides of this single truth stated together’ when he had read in the Penny Catechism: ‘The two sins against Hope are presumption and despair.’ From the first, he had had ‘an almost violently vivid sense’ of the danger of both presumption and despair. The ‘aim of life’ was ‘appreciation’, and this depended on having ‘humility’ and feeling ‘unworthy’. Both despair and presumption, on the other hand, were inspired by ‘pride’. The intellectuals who thought one had a ‘right’ to things, he had noticed, also believed there was ‘no such thing as right and wrong’. But to be ‘thankful’ meant being ‘thankful’ to somebody. And the only person one could be grateful to for existence was God. It seemed to Chesterton that Catholic theology alone had ‘not only thought, but thought of everything’. Other philosophies and religions were happy with ‘one idea’, ‘to follow a truth ... and apply it to everything’. Catholicism was in Chesterton’s experience the only ‘creed that could not be satisfied with a truth, but only with the Truth, which is made of a million ... truths and yet is one’. Had he, like Shaw, made up his ‘own philosophy out of [his] own precious fragment of truth’, merely because he had found it out for himself, he would ‘soon have found that truth distorting itself into a falsehood’. His sense of wonder ‘would, if unbalanced by other truths, have become … very unbalanced indeed’. The one idea of ‘transcendental contentment’ could easily have led him into solipsism and ‘political Quietism’.¹⁴⁵

As he comes to the end of his Autobiography, Chesterton sees himself as ‘finishing a story’ that was ‘very much of a mystery-story’: he was ‘answering at the end only the questions’ he had ‘asked at the beginning’. Since childhood he had had ‘a certain romance of receptiveness’: he had never been ‘bored’: ‘Existence is still a strange thing to me; and as a stranger I give it welcome.’ Now he found himself‘ratified’ in his ‘realisation of the miracle of being alive … in a definite dogmatic sense’. However, his ‘rude and primitive religion of gratitude’ had not saved him from ingratitude, the sin that was ‘perhaps most horrible’ to him. But precisely because ‘the evil’ had been ‘mainly of the imagination, it could only be pierced by that conception of confession which is the end of mere solitude and secrecy’. He had found the only religion that ‘dared to go down’ with him ‘into the depths’ of himself. His early ‘morbidities’ had been ‘mental as well as moral’ and had ‘sounded the most appalling depths of fundamental scepticism and solipsism’. And ‘there again’ he had found that ‘the Church had gone before [him] and established her adamantine foundations; that she had affirmed the actuality of external things’. Again, his ‘instinct’ had been ‘to defend liberty in small nations and poor families; that is, to defend the rights of man as including the rights of property; especially the property of the poor’. But he had not really understood what he ‘meant by Liberty’ until he ‘heard it called by the new name of Human Dignity’: ‘It was a new name to me; though it was part of a creed nearly two thousand years old’—the ‘one key which can unlock all doors’.¹⁴⁶

The change in Chesterton that conversion had brought was noticeable to at least one observer. His old Jewish school friend Lawrence Solomon, now a neighbour in Beaconsfield, noticed ‘not only how happy his conversion had made [him] but also how it seemed to bring him increased strength of character’.¹⁴⁷

Between October 1922 and April 1923 Chesterton wrote a series of brief apologetic articles under the general title Where All Roads Lead in the Dominican review Blackfriars, which were published a month later in the American periodical the Catholic World.¹⁴⁸ There were, he insisted, always only two ‘fundamental reasons’ for converting to Catholicism: because it was true and because it offered ‘liberation from ... sins’. What had changed since the nineteenth century was ‘the challenge of the Church’. Up until then, the convert to the Catholic Church had to justify his conversion: ‘Today a man is really expected to give reasons for not joining it.’ At least subconsciously, he thought this was true for many people, who were ‘conscious non-Catholics’. Certainly, that was the experience of Chesterton himself, who had never felt called upon to give reasons for not joining the Orthodox or the Quakers or Islam. It was not that these ‘conscious non-Catholics’ did not have ‘real objections’; on the contrary, they felt obliged ‘to object’, ‘to kick and struggle’. This ‘consciousness of the challenge of the Church’ was ‘connected with something else’, which had been ‘the strongest of all the purely intellectual forces’ that had ‘dragged’ Chesterton ‘towards the truth’—and that was the ‘singular nature’ of ‘the survival of the faith’, for this ‘old religion’ was a religion that refused ‘to grow old’. It was this ‘aggressiveness of Catholicism’ that had put ‘intellectuals on the defensive’. Personally, Chesterton could not ‘understand how this unearthly freshness in something so old’ could ‘possibly be explained, except on the supposition that it [was] indeed unearthly’. History showed that it was not ‘orthodoxy’ that had ‘grown old slowly’ but heresy that had ‘grown old quickly’. The Reformation had grown ‘old amazingly quickly’, whereas ‘the Counter-Reformation ... was full of the fire and even of the impatience of youth’. The Church had had ‘any number of opportunities of dying, and even of being respectfully interred. But the younger generation always began once again to knock at the door; and never louder than when it was knocking at the lid of the coffin, in which it had been prematurely buried.’ It was the Church that ‘preserved the only seed and secret of novelty’. Whenever Catholicism was ‘driven out as an old thing’, it always returned ‘as a new thing’. It was not just ‘a survival’, like any ‘very old thing’ that managed to ‘survive’. The Church was characterized not by ‘endurance’ but by ‘recovery’. It was to the ‘complexity’ of its doctrines, ‘of which religious reformers have so constantly complained’, that it owed ‘its victory over modern minds’, owing ‘its most recent revivals to the very fact that it is the one creed that is still not ashamed of being complicated’. It was ‘the simple religions’ that were ‘sterile’ and that became ‘very rapidly stale’. A simple religion that simply said that God was Love could only elicit ‘a rather feeble’ response, such as ‘Oh’ or ‘Well, well’. It was not ‘complex’ enough to be ‘living’. It was ‘too simple to be true’. But a complex religion like Catholicism had ‘innumerable aspects’ and was ‘rich’ in always having ‘a number of ideas in reserve’. New Catholic ‘movements’ generally emphasized ‘some Catholic idea that was only neglected in the sense that it was not till then specially needed’; but, when it was needed, ‘nothing else’ could meet the need. The Church’s ‘power of resurrection’ depended on ‘this possession of reserves’, and in order to have this power it was necessary to possess ‘the whole’ of Catholicism and not just ‘parts’ of it, like Anglo-Catholics who ‘took their pick in the fields of Christendom’, but without possessing the fields, especially ‘the fallow fields’: ‘They could not have all the riches, because they could not have all the reserves of the religion.’ Chesterton himself in his youth had made for himself, in an age of pessimism, ‘a sort of rudimentary philosophy ... founded on the first principle that it is, after all, a precious and wonderful privilege to exist at all’. But this ‘optimism of wonder’ was only a ‘half-truth’ that needed to be taken into ‘the culture of the Catholic Church’, where it could be ‘balanced by other truths’—where this optimism, which was ‘an incomplete philosophy’, would not degenerate into ‘an orgy of anarchy or a stagnation of slavery’. The Penny Catechism’s condemnation of the ‘two sins against hope’ ‘seemed exactly to sum up and define ... something that I had been trying to realize and express through all my struggles with the sects and schools of my youth’, for the ‘heresies that have attacked human happiness in my time, have all been variations either of presumption or despair; which, in the controversies of modern culture, are called optimism and pessimism’.¹⁴⁹

Chesterton had been drawn out of ‘ordinary Protestantism’ by the Virgin Mary ‘being beautiful’, while he had been drawn out of Anglicanism by the Church. In other words, he was drawn by ‘the positive attractions’ of what he had ‘not yet got’ rather than by ‘negative disparagements’ of what he had ‘managed to get already’. The Anglo-Catholicism he had left behind could easily be called ‘a piece of English half-conscious hypocrisy’ insofar as it complained about the Protestantism of England, while at the same time ‘arguing that she had remained Catholic’. And it was true that there were Anglo-Catholics who talked ‘as if Catholicism had never been betrayed and oppressed’ and who could be unfavourably contrasted with St Peter who ‘denied his Lord; but at least ... never denied that he had denied Him’.¹⁵⁰

The Church was accused of being ‘too stiff and stationary’. And it was true that she could not ‘change quite so fast as the charges against her’ did: ‘She is sometimes caught napping and still disproving what was said about her on Monday, to the neglect of the completely contrary thing that is said about her on Tuesday.’ She did ‘sometimes live pathetically in the past, to the extent of innocently supposing that the modern thinker’ would ‘think to-day what he thought yesterday’: ‘Modern thought does outstrip her, in the sense that it disappears, of itself, before she has done disproving it. She is slow and belated, in the sense that she studies heresy more seriously than the heresiarch does.’ Indeed, ‘Catholicism was ignorant; it did not even know that Protestantism was dead’. The very things that the Church had had to defend were being ‘reintroduced by the modern world, and always in a lower form’: ‘The Puritans rejected art and symbolism, and the decadents brought them back again, with all the old appeal to sense and an additional appeal to sensuality. … Protestant moralists abolished the confessional and the psychoanalysts have re-established the confessional, with every one of its alleged dangers and not one of its admitted safeguards....’¹⁵¹