G. K. Chesterton’s Ideal of "Christian Courage"

S PECIAL A GRARIAN I SSUE The CHESTERTON REVIEW Vol. XLIV, Nos. 1 & 2, Spring / Summer 2018 Seton Hall University, N.J. 1 1974 — 2018 Celebrating 44 years Volume XLIV, Nos. 1 & 2 Spring | Summer 2018 The Chesterton Review IAN BOYD, C. S. B. . . . . . Introduction 3 G. K. CHESTERTON. . . . . A Politician on Purgatory G. K. CHESTERTON. . . . . The Skeleton, a poem 13 7 15 G. K. CHESTERTON. . . . . The Freeman and the Ford Car G. K. CHESTERTON. . . . . The Song of the Wheels, a poem 21 G. K. CHESTERTON. . . . . Clearing the Ground: Small Shops 25 G. K. CHESTERTON. . . . . The Arena, a poem 31 VINCENT MCNABB O.P. . & JOHN STRACHEY Communism or Distributism 35 HILAIRE BELLOC. . . . . . . The Death and Last Confession of Wandering Peter, a poem 41 CHARLES PÉGUY. . . . . . . La Politique Juive Jewish Policy 44 45 ALLAN C. CARLSON. . . . “Flee to the Fields”: Midwestern Catholicism and the Last Agrarian Crusade, 1920-1941 53 THOMAS STORCK . . . . . . Distributism?—or, Three Acres and a Cow? 77 MACIEJ WąS. . . . . . . . . . “The Real Soil of Southern England”: The Personalist Nationalism of Gilbert Keith Chesterton 89 RUSSELL SPARKES . . . . . Chesterton, Thomas Jefferson, and the Soul of America 97 MATTHEW STEEM . . . . . . Chesterton on Leisure 113 DANIEL FRAMPTON . . . . G. K. Chesterton’s Ideal of “Christian Courage” 131 GARY FURNELL . . . . . . . G. K. Chesterton and Flannery O’Connor: the Irruption of Grace 145 DERMOT QUINN . . . . . . . The Many Faces of Thérèse of Lisieux 165 Book Reviews 177 Film Reviews 199 News & Comments 207 Programmes 353 Letters to the Editor 361 Photo Galleries 371 1 i G. K. Chesterton’s Ideal of “Christian Courage” Daniel Frampton DANIEL FRAMPTON has recently completed a Ph. D. in Art History from the University of East Anglia, England. His research focuses on cultural history in Britain in the twentieth century, including the Catholic literary revival. Knight of the Holy Cross, he goes his way, Wisdom his motley, Truth his loving jest; The mills of Satan keep his lance in play, Pity and innocence his heart at rest.1 –Walter de la Mare’s “Epitaph” to G. K. Chesterton. George Orwell, writing in “Notes on Nationalism” in 1945, accused G. K. Chesterton of having come “to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda.” This sense of “superiority,” which Orwell believed Chesterton really represented, was ultimately “translated into terms of national prestige and military power,” entailing “an ignorant idealisation of the Latin countries, especially France.” Moreover, Chesterton had engaged in “a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war.” Orwell added that this was particularly evident in such “tawdry bits of bombast” as Lepanto and The Ballad of Saint Barbara; poems that made “The Charge of the Light Brigade read like a pacifist tract.”2 In this essay, I will argue that Orwell misinterpreted Chesterton’s apparent “bombast.” The way that Chesterton viewed battle, I seek to show, was far more developed and complex than Orwell realised. Chesterton’s statements on war and courage in general, in The Ballad of Saint Barbara (1922), for instance, were not bombastic, at least not in the sense that they were Countryside near Levington, Suffolk, England, UK 131 The Chesterton Review chauvinist or wholly militaristic. Rather, they were affirmations of his own personal philosophy, as well as protestations of his faith. This is particularly pertinent to any appraisal of Chesterton since he would finally convert to Catholicism: what he termed the “one fighting form of Christianity.”3 Orwell was right, but only in part; Chesterton viewed the Church as a sort of military. Here, however, we will examine, in much more detail than Orwell did, the manner in which this equivalence actually advanced itself. Chesterton’s Concept of Courage “There was far more courage to the square mile in the Middle Ages, when no king had a standing army, but every man had a bow or sword,” Chesterton concluded in his work Heretics (1905). This conception, of the essential rowdiness of the medieval peoples, was linked to Chesterton’s aversion to “the evil of militarism;” not because it showed “certain men to be fierce and haughty and excessively warlike,” but because it revealed “most men to be tame and timid and excessively peaceable.” The reason for this apparent paradox, he explained, was that “the military man gains the civil power in proportion as the civilian loses the military virtues.” In other words, “there never was a time when men were less brave” as his current century. Hence, the “modern army” was “not a miracle of courage.” It was “really a miracle of organisation […] owing to the cowardice of everybody else.”4 Already we can see that Chesterton’s appreciation of what he regarded as “the military virtues,” particularly courage, was far more intricate than Orwell gave him credit for. Certainly, Chesterton possessed a well-developed philosophy of courage. “Physical courage,” he wrote, “is a magnificent fundamental. The one great, wise Englishman of the eighteenth century said truly that if a man lost that virtue he could never be sure of keeping any other.” Additionally, Chesterton also complained that “now it is one of the mean and morbid modern lies that physical courage is connected with cruelty.”5 Here, once again, he raises the point that moderns are essentially timid and cowardly. Importantly, this is in direct contrast to their medieval ancestors. The reason for this, he asserts, was the Christian faith of the Middle Ages. In Orthodoxy (1908), for example, Chesterton 132 G. K. Chesterton’s Ideal of “Christian Courage” described the peculiarity of “Christian courage”: “it means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.” A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. “No philosopher,” he fancied, had “ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity,” but Christianity had at least “marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.” And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life.6 This is a theme that dominates Chesterton’s poem Lepanto (1911); as well as his consideration, elsewhere, of the work of Cervantes. Chesterton noted, in an essay titled “The Divine Parody of Don Quixote,” that the “great truth” of Cervantes’s famous novel was “that the conflict of the world is chiefly a conflict between goods.” What Chesterton meant here was “the battle between the idealism of Don Quixote and the realism of the inn-keeper […] a battle so hot and ceaseless that we know that they must both be right.”7 What I think he means here is the old antagonism between Platonic/Augustinian mysticism, which he terms “the mysticism of the Knight,” and Aristotelian/Thomist immanence, in terms of “the rationalism of the Squire.”8 Both, we might say, are essential elements of “Christian courage.” Chesterton said as much. A Christian must desire to live, which entails a love of material circumstance; yet he must also be prepared to give up this world in order to embrace death. A soldier must be, in some sense, then, a Christian. They are synonymous conceptions. This notion, or rather this theology, parallels Chesterton’s poem Lepanto, Indeed, it lends additional meaning 133 The Chesterton Review to its concluding lines, when the writer Cervantes, a veteran of the battle, perceives “a straggling road in Spain, / Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in / vain.”9 Don Quixote will himself participate in the “ceaseless” battle “between goods.” Cervantes, Chesterton tells us, knows this. Orwell neglected this key proposition. Courage was seen by Chesterton to complement Christianity if applied in the right manner. Moreover, the soldier might be tantamount to a saint. Indeed, Chesterton’s admiration for Francis of Assisi, for example, was founded on the notion that he was “both a soldier and a saint.”10 Here was a man who “dreamed of arms,” and “accepted the dream as a trumpet bidding him to the battlefield,” but dreamed again that he should return to Assisi. Chesterton, writing in St. Francis of Assisi (1923), connected these two dreams with an incident that he believed was their “obvious culmination,” which was Francis’s famous confrontation with the leper. And he knew instantly that his courage was challenged, not as the world challenges, but as one would challenge who knew the secrets of the heart of a man. What he saw advancing was not the banner and spears of Perugia, from which it never occurred to him to shrink; not the armies that fought for the crown of Sicily, of which he had always thought as a courageous man thinks of mere vulgar danger. Francis Bernardone saw his fear coming up the road towards him; the fear that comes from within and not without. This passage is particularly pertinent because Chesterton comes very close to depreciating the soldier in battle; battle being “mere vulgar danger.” The danger that Francis must stand up to is more moral and profound. And as Chesterton also writes, Francis conquered himself when he “rushed on the leper and threw his arms around him.” “Chivalry”—a chivalry that this saint, the “accomplished cavalier and fighting man,” evidently “delighted in”—at this moment replaced his thirst for glory, a thirst that was not initially Christian, but Latin; seeking earthly glory. In this sense, Chesterton concluded, Francis’s heroic instinct was hereafter baptised and directed towards a higher, identifiably Christian, purpose. The soldier and the saint were, in terms of the chivalric ideal, one and the same. We should also note that Chesterton viewed the epic poem The Song of Roland in similar terms. 134 G. K. Chesterton’s Ideal of “Christian Courage” Although it was a piece of “semi-barbaric poetry,” famously recounting the Battle of Roncevaux Pass, it nevertheless sought “to express the idea that Christianity imposes upon its heroes a paradox: a paradox of great humility in the matter of their sins combined with great ferocity in the matter of their ideas.”11 What is important, then, in terms of this article, is that Chesterton saw a definite relation between such barbaric “ferocity” and Christianity itself; a Christianity that quite necessarily imposed a higher, recognisably knightly, standard on the barbarian. As Chesterton wrote elsewhere, “chivalry” was essentially “an attempt to bring the justice and even the logic of the Catholic creed into a military system which already existed.”12 Of course, Chesterton was never a soldier. He would, instead, have to fight his battle elsewhere, as a Christian apologist. The “One Fighting Form of Christianity” Joseph Pearce has pointed out that “one of the secrets of the Chesterbelloc” is that Chesterton was attracted to Hilaire Belloc, his friend and ally, as a “man of action.”13 He “gave body to the ideas in Chesterton’s head. He gave them substance.”14 This was particularly true in terms of Belloc’s Roman Catholic faith. Writing to Maurice Baring, in 1922, he noted that it was suggested that Chesterton “might come in at any time because he showed such a Catholic point of view and so much affection for the Catholic Church.” Despite this, Belloc had reservations: “there is all the difference between enjoying military ideas […] and becoming a private soldier in a common regiment.”15 Belloc’s analogy was particularly apt. When Chesterton converted to Catholicism, later that year, he was, in a way, joining the regiment. In a letter to his mother, Chesterton explained that he had, indeed, enlisted in the “one fighting form of Christianity.” 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.16 135 The Chesterton Review This is telling language, of course: a “new” way of “fighting.” The South African poet Roy Campbell, remembering his own conversion to the Church, expressed a similar sentiment in 1951; that he “had been vaguely and vacillatingly Anglo-Catholic”—which he likened to “staying in the territorials,” remaining “half-apathetic to the great fight”— but decided, in 1937, to finally “step into the front ranks of the Regular Army of Christ.”17 Certainly, Chesterton shared this view, of what he termed “that insatiably fighting thing, the Catholic Church.”18 It might also be said that, for Chesterton, the Church, as well as the Middle Ages, perfectly expressed his vision of that “conflict between goods,” which he also translated into his ideal of “Christian courage.” As we have seen, “fighting,” for Chesterton, did not necessarily mean actual combat. It was a term that could be applied broadly to any form of struggle. This also explains his love of Gothic cathedrals, for instance, and particularly the way he described them. The truth about Gothic is, first, that it is alive, and second, that it is on the march. It is the Church Militant; it is the only fighting architecture. All its spires are spears at rest; and all its stones are stones asleep in a catapult […] I could hear the arches clash like swords as they crossed each other […] The thirsty-throated gargoyles shouted like trumpets from all the roofs and pinnacles. Revealingly, this outward belligerency also accounted for “the gaiety of Gothic.”19 Chesterton, writing in 1904, contrasted “cold Pagan architecture,” including the “dingy dress” of his own “Rationalistic century,” with “the grinning gargoyles of Christendom,” which demonstrated that “Christianity is itself so jolly a thing that it fills the possessor of it with a certain silly exuberance, which sad and high-minded Rationalists might reasonably mistake for mere buffoonery and blasphemy.”20 This description of gothic architecture parallels Chesterton the “fighting” journalist, who, in a way, was a sort of cathedral himself, physically and philosophically. Just as John of Austria, in the poem Lepanto, “loosed the cannonade,” Chesterton bombarded his readers with the breadth and complexity of his own ideas. His essays, in particular, forward themselves in much the same manner as the thrust and parry of a Toledo blade. He does not meander into the fray so much as he charges at full gallop. His poems are extravagantly gothic in terms 136 G. K. Chesterton’s Ideal of “Christian Courage” of their colour and sense of pageantry.21 Plainly, Chesterton enjoyed such constructions, as well as such conflicts, as he admitted in his own autobiography: “I could be a journalist because I could not help being a controversialist.”22 And there is also the sense that Chesterton was conscious that he was forwarding, by his own example, a forgotten ethic. Chivalry, as it was originally conceived, did not survive the Reformation, Chesterton tells us. For example, he likened Don John of Austria, “unmistakably the […] medieval knight,” to such figures as Chevalier de Bayard. Both possessed “the wider accomplishments and ambitions of the Renaissance.”23 But like Byard, he also represented the end of chivalry; being “the last knight of Europe […] the last and lingering troubadour,” as Chesterton relates to him in Lepanto.24 Christopher Dawson, the Catholic historian, wrote similarly of Bayard, as knighthood’s “last representative,” who “died like Roland with his face to the Spaniards at the passage of Sesia, in the age of Luther and Machiavelli.”25 For Chesterton, this was also the age that saw the coming of men such of the Tudor court as William Cecil, a man who was “not chivalrous.”26 There is a pattern here, of course, which is stated even more explicitly in Chesterton’s portrait of Richard III—“truly the last of the medieval kings”—in A Short History of England (1917). Using his own voice like the trumpet of a herald, he challenged his rival to a fight as personal as that of two paladins of Charlemagne. His rival did not reply, and was not likely to reply. The modern world had begun.27 When Chesterton was received into the Catholic Church, he was returning, in his own mind, to the age of troubadours. He had, perhaps, found the one institution that suited his own cavalier self. Chesterton’s Courage On a trip to Poland in 1927, Chesterton was greeted by a group of Polish officers at the main station in Warsaw. Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszowski, a noted poet and army officer, welcomed him, “not as a famous writer, not even as a friend of Poland, but as a born cavalry officer who had just missed his profession.”28 Chesterton enjoyed this 137 The Chesterton Review remark immensely. Indeed, it may be that Wieniawa-Długoszowski had made an especially appropriate observation that struck right at the heart of his essential theology. It might also be said that Graham Greene did, too, when he described the sight of Chesterton’s clumsy hulk labouring “like a Lepanto galleon down Shaftsbury Avenue.”29 In both these observations we have similar lines of thought: not only is Chesterton a combatant; he is also cavalier and accordingly exuberant. In other words, he is fighting for an idea that informs the way he fights that battle, as a defender of the faith. Consequently, it forms the basis of such poems as The Ballad of Saint Barbara. Orwell’s criticism that Chesterton had glossed over “the actual process of war” is, in part, justified. In The Ballad of Saint Barbara, set during the First World War, there are no graphic or statistical descriptions of the brutal realities of modern warfare.30 Deference to this truth was not the point of the poem, however, we should note. Chesterton’s purpose, rather, was to accentuate spiritual reality. This does not mean that Chesterton was necessarily naïve. Indeed, he wrote sardonically that the chief service the literature of the First World War had provided was “to point out the little known fact that peril is perilous and pain is painful.” It may be said, then, that Chesterton was responding the idea that “there is nothing noble about defying horror or enduring the rending of the heart.”31 However, the poem’s central theme, though subtle, is the presence of another higher, specifically spiritual, realm amid the artillery barrages at the Battle of the Marne in 1914. This is evident when Chesterton, referencing the famous three windows in Barbara’s tower, declares that “out of the third lattice”—completing the Trinity—“is a new corner of the sky / And the other side of things.”32 What Chesterton likely means is that “we here [are] on the wrong side of the tapestry […] [and] the things that happen here do not seem to mean anything,” though “they mean something somewhere else.”33 This applies to Orwell especially, who evidently did not believe in “somewhere else,” as he admitted himself. In theory it is still possible to be an orthodox religious believer without being intellectually crippled in the process; but it is far from easy, and in practice books by orthodox believers usually show the same cramped, blinkered outlook as books by orthodox Stalinists or others who are mentally unfree.34 138 G. K. Chesterton’s Ideal of “Christian Courage” Orwell was not, it seems, likely to identify with Chesterton’s poem. But it would be a mistake to assume that the two men were wholly dissimilar. Lionel Trilling once made the observation that Orwell appeared to hold courage in high-esteem. Orwell clung with a kind of wry, grim pride to the old ways of the last class that had ruled the old order. He must sometimes have wondered how it came about that he should be praising sportsmanship and gentlemanliness and dutifulness and physical courage. He seems to have thought, and very likely he was right, that they might come in handy as revolutionary virtues.35 Although Chesterton was never a soldier, unlike Orwell, he certainly clung to the old order; though his order was the institution of knighthood and the Church, which Orwell’s favoured class had ultimately replaced. Nevertheless, both men valued these respective orders for their supposed elevation of valour as a fundamental virtue. Orwell might not always have understood Chesterton, but they were, however, kindred spirits. Indeed, Anna Vaninskaya has noted Orwell’s “uncanny similarity to Chesterton […] his Edwardian predecessor,” though this “underlying kinship” was clouded by “religious bigotry.”36 This likeness was most clear when, in 1944, Orwell wrote that though Chesterton’s “vision of life was false in some ways [...] at least he had courage. He was ready to attack the rich and powerful, and he damaged his career by doing so.”37 In other words, Orwell recognised Chesterton as a fellow soldier. The other major parallel between Chesterton and Orwell is that they both died prematurely. Moreover, they continued to write right up to the end. As William Richard Titterton remembered, Chesterton was a “fighter” who “died working. I am rather inclined to call that heroic.” But as Titterton also noted, it was “his heroic jollity” that he so much admired, since, in reality, “he was a very ill man.” “It is entirely untrue that Gilbert Chesterton suffered little throughout his life.” Though “it would have left many peevish, irritable, [and] unable to take any interest in anything but their own insides,” Chesterton retained his characteristic jollity. Recalling this, Titterton posited the notion that his friend had “died a saint.”38 As Nicholas Madden writes, “there is an intensity 139 The Chesterton Review in the suffering of the saint” coupled with “a simultaneous joy.”39 This, in part, chimes with Cordelia’s assertion, in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited (1945), that “no one is ever holy without suffering”—though her brother, Sebastian, whom she is referring to, appears to exhibit none of Chesterton’s manifest joy.40 Accordingly, Chesterton “is more Falstaff than John of the Cross, more cakes and ale than the dark night of the soul,” as Professor Maurice Harmon has commented.41 Émile Cammaerts, the Belgian author, referred to Chesterton in similar terms, as the “Laughing Prophet,” since his “hope seemed to grow stronger as the issue of the long conflict in which he had been engaged became more remote.” Indeed, Chesterton acquired a new “sense of proportion,” we are told, which “considered the battle from a new angle.” Although “he was still in the front line,” he was now “unimpressed by success or defeat. His ultimate goal was elsewhere.” This was the essence of his joy, Cammaerts concluded: “he walked in the shadow of eternity.”42 Chesterton’s courage, as well as his pageantry, was exactly this sense of joy, I think, and not a “disdain of life.” This was what was at the root of his own chivalry. In this manner, Chesterton exuded a very “Christian courage,” which he made manifest, too, in Cervantes at the conclusion of Lepanto: “he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles / back the blade.…”43 1 Quoted in Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (Sheed and Ward: London, 1944), p. 552. 2 George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism,” in George Orwell: Essays (1984; Penguin Books: London, 2000), pp. 303-304. 3 Quoted in Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (Sheed and Ward: London, 1944), p. 397. 4 G. K. Chesterton, Heretics (John Lane: The Bodley Head: London, 1905), pp. 44, 45. 5 G. K. Chesterton, “The Case for the Public Schools,” in What’s Wrong with the World (Dodd, Mead and Company: New York, 1910), p. 287. 6 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908; The Bodley Head: London, 1957), pp. 153-154. 7 G. K. Chesterton, “The Divine Parody of Don Quixote,” in A Handful of Authors: Essays on Books and Writers, ed. Dorothy Collins (Sheed and Ward: New York, 1953), p. 25. 8 G. K. Chesterton, “The Divine Parody of Don Quixote,” in A Handful of Authors: Essays on Books and Writers, ed. Dorothy Collins (Sheed and Ward: New York, 1953), p. 25. Chesterton, in St Thomas Aquinas (1933), referred to this as the “spirit of 140 G. K. Chesterton’s Ideal of “Christian Courage” Platonic pride in the possession of intangible and untranslatable truths within.” Yet, as he also noted: “Plato was right, but not quite right.” G. K. Chesterton, St Thomas Aquinas (1933; Kelly Bray: House of Stratus, 2001), pp. 7, 52. 9 G. K. Chesterton, “Lepanto,” in Lepanto, With Explanatory Notes and Commentary, ed. Dale Ahlquist (2003; Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2004), p. 17. 10 G. K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi (Hodder and Stoughton: London, 1923), pp. 24, 55, 56-57. 11 G. K. Chesterton, “The Book of Job,” in On Lying in Bed and Other Essays, ed. Alberto Manguel (Bayeux Arts: Calgary, 2000), pp. 178, 179. 12 G. K. Chesterton, A Short History of England (1917; Echo Library: Teddington, 2008), p. 34. 13 As Pearce writes, “Chesterton dreamed of the adventure, Belloc was the adventurer […] Chesterton imagined the bravery of battle, Belloc had been a soldier in the French army.” Joseph Pearce, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton (1996; Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2004), p. 50. Chesterton also lauded Cervantes in much the same way, as an author who ran away to sea, like Belloc, who was a sailor; and as a soldier, Don Quixote’s creator “confronted the considerable probability of torture, and defied it.” In other words: “he did everything that could possibly be expected of a boy’s hero.” Perhaps both Belloc and Cervantes fulfilled the same role for Chesterton, as men of action. G. K. Chesterton, “The True Romance,” in A Handful of Authors: Essays on Books and Writers (Sheed and Ward: New York, 1953), p. 20. 14 Joseph Pearce, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton (1996; Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2004), p. 51. 15 Hilaire Belloc, Letters from Hilaire Belloc, ed. Robert Speaight (Hollis & Carter: London, 1958), p. 124. 16 Quoted in Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (Sheed and Ward: London, 1944), p. 397. 17 Roy Campbell, Light on a Dark Horse: An Autobiography (Hollis & Carter: London, 1951), p. 317. 18 Quoted in “The Style of Newman,” in A Handful of Authors, ed. Dorothy Collins (Sheed and Ward: New York, 1953), p. 133. 19 G. K. Chesterton, “The Architect of Spears,” in A Miscellany of Men (Dodd, Mead and Company: New York, 1912), pp. 246, 249-50. 20 G. K. Chesterton, “Christianity and Rationalism,” in The Religious Doubts of Democracy, ed. George Haw (Macmillan and Co.: London, 1904), p. 18. 21 Dale Ahlquist writes of “Chesterton’s dazzling use of alliteration,” for example, “which adds so much to the beauty and intricacy of almost every line of Lepanto.” Dale Ahlquist, “The Poem,” in G. K. Chesterton, Lepanto, With Explanatory Notes and Commentary, ed. Dale Ahlquist (2003; Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2004), p. 80. 22 G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (Hutchinson: London, 1936), p. 289. It has been pointed out by Sheridan Gilley that “Chesterton also had his model of the journalist as hero”—particularly William Cobbett. Sheridan Gilley, “Chesterton: The Journalist as Saint,” in The Holiness of G. K. Chesterton, ed. William Oddie (Gracewing: Leominster, 2010), p. 115. 23 G. K. Chesterton, “If Don John of Austria had Married Mary Queen of Scots,” in The Common Man (Sheed and Ward: London, 1950), p. 276. 24 G. K. Chesterton, “Lepanto,” in Lepanto, With Explanatory Notes and Commentary, ed. Dale Ahlquist (2003; Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2004), p. 12. 141 The Chesterton Review 25 Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity (1932; The Catholic University of America Press: Washington DC, 2003), p. 253. 26 G. K. Chesterton, “If Don John of Austria had Married Mary Queen of Scots,” in The Common Man (Sheed and Ward: London, 1950), p. 276. 27 G. K. Chesterton, A Short History of England (1917; Echo Library: Teddington, 2008), p. 62. 28 “News and Comments,” in The Chesterton Review, vol. 3, no. 2 (1977), p. 301. 29 Graham Greene, A Sort of Life (Simon & Schuster: New York, 1971), p. 61. 30 For example, Chesterton’s poem is very much unlike Edmund Blunden’s account of a soldier killed by a German artillery shell; the soldier being reduced to “gobbets of blackening flesh […] the eye under the duckboard.” Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (1928; Penguin Books: London, 2010), p. 46. The closest Chesterton comes to this manner of description in The Ballad of St. Barbara is, “Their guns must mash us to the mire.” G. K. Chesterton, “The Ballad of Saint Barbara,” in The Ballad of St. Barbara and Other Verses (Cecil Palmer: London, 1922), p. 5. 31 G. K. Chesterton, The End of Armistice, Second Impression (Sheed and Ward: London, 1940), p. 194. Chesterton even went so far as to joke that the Nazi book burnings had provided a “service to literature” since they had at least incinerated All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). G. K. Chesterton, The End of Armistice, Second Impression (Sheed and Ward: London, 1940), p. 193. 32 G. K. Chesterton, “The Ballad of Saint Barbara,” in The Ballad of St. Barbara and Other Verses (Cecil Palmer: London, 1922), p. 6. 33 G. K. Chesterton, “The Sin of Prince Saradine,” in The Complete Father Brown Stories (1992; Wordsworth Classics: Ware, 2006), p. 124. 34 George Orwell, Keeping Our Little Corner Clean, 1942-1943, ed. Peter Davison (1998; Secker & Warburg: London, 2001), p. 66. 35 Lionel Trilling, “George Orwell and the Politics of Truth,” in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays (2000; Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 2008), p. 269. 36 Anna Vaninskaya, “The Political Middlebrow from Chesterton to Orwell,” in The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880-1950: What Mr. Miniver Read, ed., Kate Macdonald (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2011), p. 173. This “may be put down to Orwell’s own prejudices: Catholics were the historical enemies of England, and Orwell did not hesitate to place his idiosyncratic anti-Catholic bias at the service of the national myth.” Anna Vaninskaya, “The Political Middlebrow from Chesterton to Orwell,” in The Masculine Middlebrow, 1880-1950: What Mr. Miniver Read, ed., Kate Macdonald (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2011), p. 172. Orwell was conscious of his own latent anti-Catholic prejudice, admitting to Brenda Salkeld, in 1932, his “obsession about R.C.s, etc.,” referring to D. B. Wyndham Lewis, in the same letter, as “a stinking RC.” George Orwell, George Orwell: A Life in Letters, ed. Peter Davison (Liveright: New York, 2013), pp. 18, 19. 37 George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3, As I Please, 1943-1945, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Harcourt, Brace & World: New York, 1968), p. 175. 38 W. R. Titterton, G. K. Chesterton: A Portrait (1936; Douglas Organ: London, 1947), pp. 231, 232, 233, 234. 39 Nicholas Madden, “Was Chesterton a Mystic?–1,” in The Holiness of G. K. Chesterton, ed. William Oddie (Gracewing: Leominster, 2010), p. 74. 142 G. K. Chesterton’s Ideal of “Christian Courage” 40 Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945; Penguin Books: London, 2000), p. 290. 41 Quoted in The Holiness of G. K. Chesterton, ed. William Oddie (Gracewing: Leominster, 2010), p. 85. 42 Emile Cammaerts, The Laughing Prophet: The Seven Virtues and G. K. Chesterton (Methuen & Co. Ltd.: London, 1937), p. 84. 43 G. K. Chesterton, “Lepanto,” in Lepanto, With Explanatory Notes and Commentary, ed. Dale Ahlquist (2003; Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2004), p. 17. Cliffs at Port Gaverne, North Cornwall Coast, England, UK 143 The G. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture President: Ian Boyd, C. S. B. Hon. Chairman: † Cardinal Emmett Carter Chairman: Hugh MacKinnon Directors: Daniel Callam, C. S. B., Jeffrey O. Nelson, Dermot A. Quinn and Monsignor Thomas Sullivan Honourary Director: Blanka Rosensteil Advisory Board Dale Ahlquist, Hadley Arkes Conrad Black Mary Ellen Bork Ted Byfield Msgr. Eugene Clark Edwin Feulner Jr. † Elizabeth Fox-Genovese Robert George Frederick Hill Paul Johnson Michael Joyce Annette Kirk † Judith Lea Lewis Lehrman George Marlin † Victor Milione Rabbi David Novak Michael Novak Robert Royal Paul Akio Sawada James V. Schall S. J. David L. Schindler The Chesterton Review The journal of The G. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture Editor: Ian Boyd, C. S. B.—Associate Editor: Dermot A. Quinn Assistant Editor: Daniel Callam, C. S. B. Managing Editor: Gloria Garafulich-Grabois Editorial Assistant: Josseline Rios Editorial Board: William F. Blissett † Stratford Caldecott John Coates Derek Cross Owen Dudley Edwards Sheridan Gilley † Leo A. Hetzler, C. S. B. † Peter Hunt Philip Jenkins Msgr. Richard M. Liddy Race Mathews David Mills Isobel Murray John Saward Thomas Storck Daniel Strait Ewa Thompson † Gertrude M. White Website: www.shu.edu/go/chesterton e-mail: chestertoninstitute@shu.edu CONTENTS IAN BOYD, C. S. B. . . . . . Introduction G. K. CHESTERTON. . . . . A Politician on Purgatory G. K. CHESTERTON. . . . . The Skeleton, a poem G. K. CHESTERTON. . . . . The Freeman and the Ford Car G. K. CHESTERTON. . . . . The Song of the Wheels, a poem G. K. CHESTERTON. . . . . Clearing the Ground: Small Shops G. K. CHESTERTON. . . . . The Arena, a poem VINCENT MCNABB O.P. . & JOHN STRACHEY Communism or Distributism HILAIRE BELLOC. . . . . . . The Death and Last Confession of Wandering Peter, a poem CHARLES PÉGUY. . . . . . . La Politique Juive Jewish Policy ALLAN C. CARLSON. . . . “Flee to the Fields”: Midwestern Catholicism and the Last Agrarian Crusade, 1920-1941 THOMAS STORCK . . . . . . Distributism?—or, Three Acres and a Cow? MACIEJ WąS. . . . . . . . . “The Real Soil of Southern England”: The Personalist Nationalism of Gilbert Keith Chesterton RUSSELL SPARKES . . . . . Chesterton, Thomas Jefferson, and the Soul of America MATTHEW STEEM . . . . . Chesterton on Leisure DANIEL FRAMPTON . . . . G. K. Chesterton’s Ideal of “Christian Courage” GARY FURNELL . . . . . . . G. K. Chesterton and Flannery O’Connor: the Irruption of Grace DERMOT QUINN . . . . . . . The Many Faces of Thérèse of Lisieux Book Reviews Film Reviews News & Comments Programmes Letters Photo Galleries ISSN 1930-1294