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Chesterton in America Chesterton in America Ian Boyd, C. S. B. IAN BOYD, C.S.B., is the President of the G. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture, and Editor of The Chesterton Review. The following article was delivered at the Gerety Lecture at Seton Hall University on December 2, 2009. Fr. Boyd lectured on the same theme at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA on March 25, 2010, and at the University of Notre Dame on October 4, 2010 on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of Chesterton’s visit to both universities. Chesterton‘s earliest writing about America is found in a fragment which he composed while a teenager. In it he wrote this about the central character of the story: He wished to discover America. His gay and thoughtless friends, who could not understand him, pointed out that America had already been discovered, I think they said by Christopher Columbus, some time ago, and that there were big cities of Anglo-Saxon people there already, New York and Boston, and so on. But the Admiral explained to them, kindly enough, that this had nothing to do with it. They might have discovered America, but he had not. The passage is from a notebook containing which was published after his death by his biographer Maisie Ward entitled The Coloured Lands. Chesterton‘s actual discovery of America took place during two visits, the first of which was from early January until mid April of 1921, and the second ten years later, a longer visit, from early October 1930 until late March 1931. These two visits to America came at a critical time in Chesterton‘s life. In 1921, though close to making his great life-changing decision, he had not yet been received into the Catholic Church. When nine years later, he visited America as a Catholic, he was received with great enthusiasm at Notre Dame University, where he lectured for six weeks, and at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he received an honourary doctorate. His change in religion illuminates the difference in mood which marked his return visit to America. Although the lectures he gave on his second tour occurred in dozens of cities and were attended by audiences which were not predominantly Catholic, the atmosphere was changed. In 1921, his view of America was somewhat pessimistic; in 1930 it was far more positive. In both instances, however, his reaction to America provides an excellent way of understanding Chesterton and the major themes of his social philosophy. They also throw light on what he learned from America. In the course of his 1921 visit, Chesterton confirmed the public image that had been gradually forming during the first two decades of his public life. He was proud to describe himself as a journalist, but he was a journalist of a most unusual kind. His meteoric rise to fame in the early years of the twentieth century had made him one of the best –known literary figures of the age. In addition to the hundreds of articles he wrote for newspapers and journals, he also achieved fame by a seemingly inexhaustible flood of imaginative writing. During these years, he wrote biographies of Robert Browning, G. F. Watts, Charles Dickens and G. B. Shaw, as well as almost all his highly regarded Dickens criticism. There were also a critical study of Victorian literature, a play, and a history of England. During these years he wrote the best of his poetry, including his greatest poem, The Ballad of the White Horse. Incredibly he was also a novelist and a short-story writer, with nearly a dozen novels and what is his most famous fiction, The Father Brown stories. He was recognised as an influential thinker. All his writing represented a coherent philosophy of life, so that in the tradition of the Victorian sage, he had become the moral standard for a generation of readers in the English-speaking world and beyond. Although he was not yet a Catholic, he acted as a spokesman for Catholic beliefs. His account of how he came to believe in Christianity was expressed in a religious and philosophical treatise he entitled Orthodoxy, a book which tells the story of his attempt to invent a new religion and of his subsequent discovery that like America it had already been discovered and was called Christianity. ―I did not make it,‖ he writes, ―God and humanity made it and it made me.‖ Though never disguising his Catholic sympathies, the creed he defended in this 1908 book was cheerfully ecumenical: ―When the word ‗orthodoxy‘ is used here,‖ he explains, ―it means the Apostles‘ Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself Christian until a very short while ago, and the general historical conduct of those who held such a creed.‖ Chesterton‘s fame in these early years of his career before his first visit to America was based on this role as a moralist and as a defender of an endangered religious tradition. He was an admirer of Dr. Samuel Johnson, appearing once in a pageant as that great English moralist whose thinking was so like his own. Fond as he was of debate, he understood that the malaise of the age could not be healed by argumentation alone. He (and the Anglo-Catholic group with which he worked) understood that it was useless to evangelise individuals, without altering the moral atmosphere which affected individuals as decisively as the physical world around them. Since the collective mind he was attempting to influence was still in some sense Christian, his work was essentially that of Christian education. Even his apparent limitations were a help in performing this immense task. Since his marriage in 1901 to Frances Blogg, a devout Anglican, he had been in contact with a remarkable group of Anglo-Catholic theologians who were working out a strategy for the religious regeneration of England. He lectured for the Christian Social Union and wrote for their journal Commonwealth, as well as for less congenial journals, such as the Church Socialist Quarterly, the Hibbert Journal and A. R. Orage‘s New Age. He was a friend of Anglican social theologians, including Henry Scott Holand, Bishop Charles Gore, Charles Masterman, and that radical Christian Conral Noel. Many of the ideas which came to be identified as Chestertonian were borrowed from them. They were his teachers, but they also were influenced by him. Nevertheless he was never an Anglican in the ordinary sense of the word. He seldom attended Anglican religious services, and he was never confirmed as an Anglican. In many ways, his religious position kept some of the vagueness of the Liberal Unitarian universalism which had characterised the religious atmosphere of his childhood home. But if these were limitations, they were limitations which made him a comfortable figure to his readers on both shores of the Atlantic. He was a sacramental Christian who could speak to evangelical Protestants and other non-sacramental Christians unthreateningly, because he was not a Roman Catholic. His writings were all the more persuasive because he seemed to find room in them for every good thing he found in contemporary life. In his own person, he maintained a genial friendliness with apparently irreconcilably hostile points of view. He was a Liberal in politics and a Catholic Christian in religion, even though the Liberal governments of his day were hostile to the Catholic ideas he championed. Typically, his novels seldom have a single hero or defend a single point of view. Like Adam Wayne and Auberon Quinn, the heroes of his first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), he is both an idealist and a critic of idealism. Like Evan MacIan and James Turnbull, the heroes of his most explicitly religious novel, The Ball and the Cross (1910), he is a spokesman for Catholicism and a critic of romantic Catholicism. He is like the Church he describes in Orthodoxy, welcoming a variety of apparently opposite points of view and keeping them intact in a complex balance. It is important to remember that the Chesterton who arrived in America at the beginning of 1921 was already known to the American reading public. Chesterton himself had already noted that the English and Americans read each others‘ authors. Hawthorne and Mark Twain were as well known in Britain as they were in America, and Dickens and Thackery were read by Americans even if they knew little about the backgrounds of these intensely English writers. So too it was with Chesterton. Most of his books found American publishers; and although his American readers were unlikely to have fully understood the complex and idiosyncratic English background which provided the context for his writing, they had come to have an affection for an author whom they regarded as wise and humorous—a British Will Rogers, as it were. But if one is to understand Chesterton‘s reaction to America during his 1921 visit, it is necessary to note another, hidden aspect of his complex personality. Much which seems surprising in Chesterton‘s philosophy of life can be explained by a personal crisis which he experienced in 1893-1894 when he was a student at London University‘s Slade School of Art .The mental and spiritual crisis that he experienced at that time is known to philosophy as solipsism. In chapter IV of his Autobiography, ―How to be a Lunatic,‖ Chesterton describes how this extreme form of idealism affected him, He writes: At a very early age I had thought my way back to thought itself. It is a very dreadful thing to do; for I may lead to thinking that there was nothing but thought.
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