A review-essay on Julia Stapleton’s Christianity, Patriotism, and Nationhood: The England of G.K. Chesterton (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009)

In her still unsurpassed biography of G. K. Chesterton from 1943, Maisie Ward declared that the three great loves of the great man’s life were “his wife, his country and his Faith” (245). The question raised by Julia Stapleton’s magisterial study of Chesterton’s politics concerns their proper arrangement: Which love rightly orders the relative importance of the other two? Stapleton’s study doesn’t offer a ready answer, obvious though it might seem. She insists, on the contrary, that Chesterton’s patriotism was stitched inextricably together with his Christianity so as to form a seamless fabric. “Indeed, it is the contention here that an ancestral disposition toward patriotism was instrumental in guiding [GKC] to the Christian fold, one that he then sought to justify and strengthen in Christian terms. Henceforth his patriotism, Englishness, and Christianity were mutually dependent and reinforcing” (8).

Stapleton, a Reader in Politics at the University of Durham, carefully traces the various reconfigurations of the pattern that Chesterton sought repeatedly to weave into a single carpet of religious belief and political practice. She accomplishes her difficult task by attending not only to Chesterton’s well-known works but also to the mass of still-uncollected essays from his journalism, most notably his 600 contributions to The Daily News. She also draws on her extensive knowledge of the Edwardian and Georgian eras to give us the fullest picture yet of Chesterton’s middle years. In fact, her book serves as a splendid sequel to William Oddie’s Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC 1874–1908 (Oxford University Press, 2008). We must now await some other scholar to provide such a similarly detailed account of Chesterton’s life and work from 1919 until his death in 1936.

In the meantime, Stapleton has excellently documented Chesterton’s middle-aged scorn for internationalism, puritanism, and imperialism—especially as all three ideologies came to single focus in the new Liberalism of the early 20th century. She demonstrates that, as an advocate of the old Liberalism, Chesterton found his real inspiration in the great 19th century Liberal authors: Browning and Stevenson, Ruskin and Carlyle. They were writers unafraid to mount their political pulpits, there to proclaim a patriotism that linked English particularity with an abiding concern for the poor, not as an abstract class but as fellow countrymen. So did Chesterton follow the practice of his literary forebears—thundering, for example, against the jingoism of Kipling, the imperialism of the Boer war, the eugenics efforts to control the “feeble-minded,” as well as the getting-and-spending capitalism that laid waste to England’s powers. “The whole case for Christianity,” he wrote, “is that a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of life is a corrupt man, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt. There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints have said with a sort of savage monotony. They have said simply that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck.”

Surprisingly for the Catholic he was well on his way toward becoming, Chesterton also remained an apologist for the French Revolution. It was the great shining example of a patriotic spirit that could throw off the shackles of money and privilege, delivering common people from their bondage, granting them a social and political liberty theretofore unknown. Despite the carnage and blasphemy of the Reign of Terror, Chesterton hailed the French people for recovering a fundamental teaching of the Church that the Church itself had often neglected. By way of a triple theological, political, and visual pun—it occurs in his splendid book on his literary hero, Charles Dickens—Chesterton vividly stated the Christian premise undergirding democracy: “All men are equal as all pennies are equal, because the only value in any of them is that they bear the image of the King.”

Yet for Chesterton, liberty and equality and fraternity were never to be fulfilled by lifting all constraints. He was fond of declaring, on the contrary, that, “Art, like morality, consists of drawing a line somewhere.” Edges and borders, the local and the particular and the confined, do not stifle liberty and individuality but enable them to flourish. Chesterton first acquired these sentiments from his native love of the English shires, the “merry England” of Chaucer and the Middle Ages, but also, later, from his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Dogmas provided him the means for spiritual growth, just as he found that patriotic loyalty to one’s own homeland overcame the imperialist impulse to conquer other nations and peoples. So did the sacraments resist the puritan denial of the world’s inherent goodness. In similar fashion, the conventions and routines of middle-class life helped stanch the internationalist desire to dissolve English uniqueness into the bland broth of cosmopolitanism. Chesterton thus espoused a modest patriotism, a loyalty that, as Stapleton says, was “best enhanced by consciousness of national weakness and vulnerability rather than strength” (7).

Chesterton regarded the New Liberalism that began to emerge among the Edwardians as a deadly abandonment of the Old Liberal ideals. In alleged concern for the poor, these new liberals were in fact oligarchs and plutocrats who formed a new governing class that held the poor in covert contempt. Like G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells, liberals now looked to the interventionist state for solutions to inveterate human ills. Their call for efficiency and reform, for progress and success, for cleanliness greater than godliness—these cures struck Chesterton as symptoms of a sickness unto death. These patronizing oppressors of impoverished commoners ignored the actual lives of those whom they sought to help. The wretched objects of governmental largesse thus become pawns and tokens, mere instruments, for realizing the putative goods promoted by the enlightened. “If the barricades went up in our streets and the poor became masters,” Chesterton wrote in his 1906 book on Dickens, “I think the priests would escape, I fear the gentlemen would; but I believe the gutters would simply be running with the blood of philanthropists.”

Chesterton undertook his own campaign in behalf of the silent throng, the anonymous masses whom he hoped would rise up against their well-meaning overlords. In one of his most famous poems, “The Secret People” (1908), he spoke in their stead:

Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget.
For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet.
[ . . . ]
There are no folk in the whole world so helpless or so wise.
There is hunger in our bellies, there is laughter in our eyes;
You laugh at us and love us, and both mugs and eyes are wet:
Only you do not know us. For we have not spoken yet.

Though Chesterton had a large following among the cultured readers for whom he wrote in various newspapers, there was never any groundswell of revolt among the industrialized masses. He supported their labor unions but he became increasingly convinced that even the wages they bargained for were but a higher form of slavery to employers. Hence the increasing shrillness, indeed the unreality, of Chesterton’s mystical ideal of Englishness.

[ . . . ] England is not of this world. [The true patriot] is not obliged to cling to the imaginary merits of his country, for he did not take her on her merits . . . He will not [ . . . ] swallow any such insanity as that England is politically more efficient than the Continent. [. . . . ] To him England will cry not any of the pompous appeals to lead the race or reform the world which she cried to Kipling and Henley; she will cry the words of that very old English song:

Love me still and know not why,
So hast thou the same reason still
To dote on me for ever. (88)

That this anonymous 17th century song is intended for a woman and not a nation is nothing to the point. For Chesterton, our patria—no less than our spouse and our religion—should remain our true love. Therein lies the problem, despite all that is admirable in Chesterton’s antique liberalism: he virtually conflated the fatherland with the Fatherland. This is to contravene St. Augustine’s summons for Christians to order their political commitments according to their love of God as enabled by Christ and his Church. A single concrete example will have to suffice. Chesterton rightly opposed British imperialism, Stapleton shows, on the grounds that English culture and politics were unique to the people who forged them, making them unsuitable for export to other milieux (89). Yet he wrongly concluded that only Christianity is able to produce such unique cultures. Muslims are desert-dwellers whose crescent moon is never satisfied except as it encircles other peoples, while Jews are perpetual exiles whose loyalty to their hosts always remains suspect. Neither Judaism nor Islam can produce distinctive nations because they are not rooted in time and place, in blood and soil.

The overtones of Blut und Erde indicate nothing totalitarian about Chesterton’s politics. He forecast, with horror, the rise of Hitler. Neither was his momentary fascination with Mussolini at all Fascist. And while modern Israel and the various Arab countries prove that Christianity is not the sole source of nationhood, Chesterton’s instincts were right. He sought a mystical means for resisting the depredations of the omnivorous nation-state. Like T. S. Eliot, he thought that the English patriotic and religious spirit provided a transcendent defense against modern political abuses. Eliot became an Anglo-Catholic rather than a Roman Catholic, at least in part, because of this same conviction. Alas, they both were wrong.

The extent of Chesterton’s mistake can best be discerned in his unwavering enthusiasm for the Great War. It was as if England’s unique character made it immune from committing the brutalities of the German aggressors. Chesterton ignored the mutual culpabilities for the war, especially the bristling territorial and economic rivalries that had set Germany, France, Great Britain, Russia, and Austria-Hungary at each other’s throats. Prussia, for him, was the gross embodiment of Teutonic and Protestant imperialism, while England and France were sufficiently steeped in ancient Latin Christianity to be justified in crushing the Huns from the pagan North. As Margaret Canovan has observed (in G. K. Chesterton: Radical Populist), it was also folly to define patriotism as the defense of small communities against gigantic forces, while supporting a war that was not confined to Notting Hill, nor even to Germany and France, but that stretched to Gallipoli and Jerusalem.