Literary Giants Literary Catholics (13 page)

Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy
is a book that needed to be written. Unfortunately, after the shoddiness of this particular effort, it is a book that still needs to be written.

8

_____

I
T COMES AS A DISAPPOINTMENT
to learn that Chesterton is once more the victim of gossip. The gossip is not new. In fact, it is an old chestnut that has been hauled out at regular intervals. Chesterton is tarred with a Fascist brush. If not a Fascist in the strict sense of the word, he is described at least as a fellow traveler, besmirched by association with the creed of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco. The charge is not really worth serious consideration. It has, however, been leveled, and the case for the defense must be mounted.

One should start with essentials. Before the innocence of Chesterton, the defendant, can be established, we must consider the nature of the crime. Exactly what is Fascism? This is not an easy question to answer. There is the
precise
definition, the
not-so-precise
definition, the
too-imprecise
definition and, then, there is the generally
accepted
definition. The
precise
definition of “Fascism” in
The Concise Oxford English Dictionary
¹
is “principles and organisation of the patriotic and anti-communist movement in Italy started during the 1914-18 war, culminating in the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini and imitated by Fascist or blackshirt associations in other countries.” Chesterton could possibly be accused of sympathizing with this Fascism for a time during the 1920s before finally declaring his opposition to it. He had met Mussolini in 1929 and came away with, at best, ambivalent and, at worst, positive impressions of the Italian dictator,
as a man
. Yet in his account of the meeting in
The Resurrection of Rome
, he was at pains to point out his concern that his views “may be mistaken for a defence of Fascism”.
²
One might acquit Chesterton of the allegations of Fascism on that statement alone. Yet Chesterton is at least partly responsible for misapprehensions because his analysis of Mussolini’s Fascism is uncharacteristically incoherent. He appeared to prefer Fascist syndicalism to either the capitalist or Communist alternatives but saw it nonetheless as only the least objectionable of this pernicious bunch, not necessarily desirable in itself, and certainly not as praiseworthy as distributism. At worst, Chesterton painted the blackshirts less dark than they deserved because he felt that almost anything was preferable to multinational plutocracy. At his best, he rejected the authoritarian stance of Mussolini:

I think there is a case for saying that this revolution is too much of a reaction. I mean it in the psychological sense of a recoil; that he does sometimes recoil so much from anarchy as to talk only of authority; that he does recoil from mere pacifism as to seem to endorse mere militarism; that he does recoil so much from the babel of tongues talking different heresies and contrary forms of nonsense as to make his own moral thesis a little too much on one note.
³

That Chesterton had no time for Mussolini’s moral thesis was owing to his allegiance to the other man with whom he had an audience during his visit to Rome in 1929, Pope Pius XI. Ultimately, however, he appears to have rejected Mussolini’s politics as well as his philosophy:

I am well aware that two black shirts do not make a white. But I assure the reader that I am not, in this case, in the least trying to prove that black is white. I wish there were in the world a real white flag of freedom, that I could follow, independently of the red flag of Communist or the black flag of Fascist regimentation. By every instinct of my being, by every tradition of my blood, I should prefer English liberty to Latin discipline.
⁴

By instinct, Chesterton was against any form of dictatorship and eventually arrived at the “logical case against Fascism”, which is, in itself, a wonderful example of Chestertonian wit and wisdom: “The intellectual criticism of Fascism is really this; that it appeals to an appetite for authority, without very clearly giving the authority for the appetite.”
⁵
In this epigram Chesterton not merely rejected Fascism but gave it a brilliant and pithy putdown. He ended his discussion of Italian Fascism by stating that his remarks should be taken as “a warning against Fascism, as a wise man in the early eighteenth century might have uttered a warning against the French Revolution.”
⁶

One can hardly see how the allegation that Chesterton was a Fascist, in the precise definition of the word, can be maintained. Far from supporting it, he was responsible for its most precise, succinct and effective condemnation.

The worst Chesterton could be accused of is an initial naïveté in accepting an audience with Mussolini. One thinks of Shaw and Wells, both of whom had audiences with Josef Stalin, a tyrant who murdered thousands for every one murdered by Mussolini. And yet no one brands them Stalinists. Furthermore, Chesterton saw the error of Mussolini’s actions and condemned them, whereas Shaw and Wells, blinded by their own utopianism, obstinately refused to recognize Stalinist tyranny.

We can proceed to a discussion of the
not-so-precise
definition of Fascism. It can be taken to encompass any right-wing totalitarianism but, for the present purpose, will be limited to Hitler’s National Socialist regime in Germany and Franco’s Fascist regime in Spain. With regard to National Socialism, no defense of Chesterton is necessary because there is no case against him. Almost as soon as Hitler had become chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Chesterton began to condemn the evils for which he stood. In one of his articles for the
Illustrated London News
, later collected and published in
Avowals and Denials
(1934), Chesterton likened Hitler’s rise to “the Return of the Barbarian”: “ever since Herr Hitler began to turn the beer-garden into a bear-garden, there has been an increasing impression on sensitive and intelligent minds that something very dangerous has occurred. A particular sort of civilisation has turned back towards barbarism.”
⁷
By the end of 1933 Chesterton had become as preoccupied with the Nazis in Germany as he had been with the Fascists in Italy four years earlier. He condemned Hitler’s return to “the stale theories of Eugenics; the talk of compulsory action to keep the breed in a certain state of bestial excellence; of nosing out every secret of sex and origin, so that nobody may survive who is not Nordic; of setting a hundred quack doctors to preserve an imaginary race in its imaginary purity.”
⁸
From this imaginary purity the Nazis had resurrected an imaginary deity: “Mythology has returned; the clouds are rolling over the landscape, shutting out the broad daylight of fact; and Germans are wandering about saying they will dethrone Christ and set up Odin and Thor.”
⁹

On 20 April 1933 Chesterton had already written in
G. K.’s Weekly
on “The Heresy of Race”:

In the lands of the new religions, rapidly turning into new irreligions, there had already sprung up a number of new tests and theories; of which the most menacing was the new theory of Race . . . that a modern science of ethnology revealed a superior Teutonic type, spread everywhere from prehistoric times, and wherever that type could be recognised (by square heads, saucer blue eyes, hair like tow or other signs of god-hood) there the new German Kaiser would stamp his foot crying, “This is German land.”

   
I think this wild worship of Race far worse than even the excessive concentration on the nation, which many Catholics rightly condemn. Nationalism may in rational proportion help stability, and the recognition of traditional frontiers. But Anthropology gone mad, which is the right name for Race, means ever-lastingly looking for your own countrymen in other people’s countries.

In the following edition of
G. K.’s Weekly
, Chesterton resumed the attack. Hitler had built a successful career “by raving against Catholicism and hounding the Jews like rats” and by “making his great speeches about Race”:

Oh those speeches about Race! Oh the stewed staleness and stupidity of the brains of a thousand boiled owls, diluted and filtered through the brains of a thousand forgotten Prussian professors! The German is not only a German. He is an Aryan. His heart leaps up when he beholds a Swastika in the sky; because Professor Esel found it carved on quite a number of prehistoric stones in Northern Europe. The Jew, on the other hand, is not an Aryan. Most of us imagined that it was enough for general common sense, that he was a Jew; but, alas, he is a Semite. Show him a Swastika and he remains cold. . . . Need even a new Religion fall back on anything quite so faded and threadbare as the notion that nobody is any good but a Teuton?

Although the tone of the article was somewhat softened with satire, this was Chesterton in an unusually savage mood. He concluded by branding the Nazism of Hitler as “one huge and howling Heresy: a Heresy run quite wild and raving: Race and the pride of Prussia.”

One positive result of Chesterton’s abhorrence of Hitler’s regime was the softening of his attitude toward the Jews. For Chesterton the whole issue was tied up with questions of justice. He had criticized Jews when he believed that they were the perpetrators of injustice, particularly in the wake of the Marconi Scandal of 1913, when he felt that his brother had been unjustly attacked by his Jewish adversaries; but as soon as he saw that the Jews had themselves become the victims of persecution, he was swift in their defense. As early as 1923 Chesterton had expressed misgivings about the rise of crude anti-Semitism in Fleet Street newspapers. Newspapers that had been talking nothing but nonsense about Bolshevism, he said, were not likely to begin talking sense about Jews.
¹⁰
There was certainly an element of both irony and paradox in the fact that the final reconciliation between Chesterton and the Jews came about as a direct result of Hitler’s anti-Semitism. The Jews forgave Chesterton his earlier indiscretions because, in the words of Rabbi Wise, “he was one of the first to speak out with all the directness and frankness of a great and unabashed spirit” when Hitlerism came.
¹¹
Meanwhile, Chesterton altered his attitude toward the Jews because he was horrified at the hardening of attitudes in Germany and its results. In 1989 two British Jews, Anthony Read and David Fisher, wrote
Kristallnacht: The Nazi Night of Terror
, in which they documented the opening of the Nazi campaign of anti-Semitic persecution. In it they wrote:

Belloc, like his friend Chesterton, like so many of the English middle class, was prejudiced against Jews. He did not like them. Nevertheless, he was not anti-Semitic—certainly not in the Nazi sense and the idea of employing physical brutality against a single Jew would have appalled him. He was an honourable man, uneasily aware that there was something going on in Germany of which, in conscience, he could not approve.
¹²

Toward the end of his life, Chesterton echoed these sentiments:

In our early days Hilaire Belloc and myself were accused of being uncompromising anti-Semites. Today, although I still think there is a Jewish problem, I am appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities. They have absolutely no reason or logic behind them. It is quite obviously the expedient of a man who has been driven to seeking a scapegoat, and has found with relief the most famous scapegoat in European history, the Jewish people. I am quite ready to believe now that Belloc and I will die defending the last Jew in Europe.
¹³

Perhaps it is now safe to assume that Chesterton can be cleared of any sympathy with Nazi Germany, and indeed that he can be cleared of the charge of anti-Semitism. There still remains, however, the specter of the other regime that falls within the boundaries of the not-so-precise definition of Fascism, namely that of General Franco in Spain.

The charge that Chesterton was a supporter of Franco is as unfounded as saying that he was a supporter of Hitler. In this case, however, his defense lies not in what he did say but in what he failed to say. Chesterton was notably silent about General Franco. Yet, before the thought police of political correctness insinuate that his silence condemns him, that there was something suspicious in his failure to speak out against the Spanish dictator, perhaps one should be aware of his alibi. By the time that Franco had become dictator of Spain, Chesterton was dead. One may dismiss autopsies that imply that Franco would have been supported by Chesterton if Chesterton hadn’t died. The fact is that Chesterton escapes the charge by the simple expedient of having expired before it was committed.

More may be said, however, about Franco and the Spanish civil war. The fact is that
if
Chesterton had lived and if he had failed to support Franco’s side in the civil war, he would have been out of step with most of his Catholic contemporaries around the world. This prompts an important question: Does the fact that the majority of Catholics supported Franco indicate that they were Fascists?

Some words Chesterton wrote in a Christmas article at the end of 1935, six months before his death, will serve as an appropriate place to begin a discussion on this subject:

We live in a terrible time, of war and rumour of war. . . . International idealism in its effort to hold the world together . . . is admittedly weakened and often disappointed. I should say simply that it does not go deep enough. . . . If we really wish to make vivid the horrors of destruction and mere disciplined murder we must see them more simply as attacks on the hearth and the human family; and feel about Hitler as men felt about Herod.
¹⁴