News and Comments

George Grant was recently interviewed by Professor Larry

Schmidt for Grail, a new Canadian magazine. Grant's reply to
some questions about abortion will be of interest to readers of
this special issue:
SCHMIDT: Your pessimism is rooted in a . . . .
GRANT: Often I am called a pessimist. Anybody who believes
in God . . . cannot be a pessimist. The words optimism and pessimism
originated with Leibnitz and they refer to the nature of the world. I
think we live in an atrocious political era. But it is God's world and if
you assert that, you cannot be a pessimist. Politics are not the uhi-
mate issue to me. I think one of the supreme strengths of Christianity
is that it says, " I t always matters what happens in the world." If you
get out of that you become a person who just says it doesn't matter
that somebody is starving, or something Hke that. And that's just non-
sense. But one must say also that what happens in the world is seen in
the light of eternity. And for Christianity eternity is there. I don't see
how you can get out of that. You don't have Christianity if you do.
SCHMIDT: Can we talk a little hit about your public stand on
abortion, and euthanasia.
GRANT: Oh yes, I think that is the great and cardinal issue of
North America (I'm putting Canada and the United States together
here). I have always totally admired Roman Catholics for their stand
on this and it's been wonderful that they kept their opposition going
in years when there were only silly people around, but it's a great
thing that southern and western Protestantism in the United States
has joined them in this, because the mainline Protestant churches in
Canada certainly have been awful, and I say this as a member of one
of these . . . . A society where murder is being done for short term
convenience is a ghastly place. The most powerful sort of political
argument almost within secularism, secularism at its best, is the
argument that if people have all these rights, they are of the same
species as the children in the womb who are being slaughtered. It
seems to me ours is a society which is turning on large numbers of the
weak. Foetuses are one of the weakest communities of human beings
and are being faced with extremity. It is a fact that the foetus has a
unique genetic code, and human characteristics from its very earliest

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days. There can be no doubt that foetuses are individuals of our spe-
cies. I don't very much like the language of "persons"; it is a Kantian
language; I like the language of soul. Foetuses are certainly something
which we have always treated with the greatest seriousness under
Christianity until this period in history, and I think it's shattering that
this is happening. I mean, apart from those souls who are murdered,
what it does to the murderers is appalling. I don't mean the women
here, because I consider the medical profession much more responsi-
ble for this than the women.
SCHMIDT: In the United States the Catholic bishops have
taken quite a strong stand on abortion, but they have also attempted
under the leadership of Cardinal Bernardin to develop an ethic that is
referred to as a seamless garment by linking the issues of nuclear
peace, capital punishment and abortion. Cardinal Bernardin, it seems
to me, does not want to be caught in the position of holding what
might be viewed as a right-wing position on abortion.
GRANT: I see no reason that this is a right-wing or left-wing
position. I am not very right-wing; I have come to be friends with
many right-wing people and many left-wing people over abortion.
Murder surely transcends these kinds of passing American categories.
With regard to the seamless garment, I think it is great. Two
points, however, have to be made: (a) I don't think lay people can be
doing everything. They have to choose issues. It's nice to have a seam-
less garment in your mind, but what matters about practical issues is
action(theoretical issues are to be thought aboutpractical issues
require that we do something about them). Most people haven't got
the time to do something about everything. They are busy with fam-
ily, job, etc. The very best of us do much more than the rather lazy
slobs like myselfbut you have to choose. I think that is the first
thing, (b) I think there is a grave, grave difference between abortion
and the other issues. Abortion seems to me crystal clear, while an
extremely complex issue like nuclear peace is less clear. My brother-
in-law, George Ignatieff, who has studied this issue carefully, has cer-
tain views on peace. But the difficulty for people like myself, and I'm
not saying that I don't try to think it out, is to see the extremes. There
are honest differences of opinion about the pragmatic levels of the
question of deterrence. I don't think that you can ask any great world
empire to go in for unilateral disarmament. I think you can ask indi-
viduals to advocate it, and advocate it yourself, but I don't think you
can ask the empires. That is talking nonsense.

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News and Comments

Imperial College, London will be the site of an International

H.G. Wells Symposium, "Wells Under Revision," July 24-27,
1986. The Executive Committee of the H.G. Wells Society invites
proposals for papers to be read at this symposium. Proposals for
papers should be sent to: Christopher Rolfe, Prince of Wales
Road, Polytechnic of North London, London NW5 3LB. Dead-
line for submission is 15th november, 1985.

Readers of the Review will want to know of the publication in

early June of The Bodley Head G.K. Chesterton. The anthology
has been selected and introduced by P.J. Kavanagh; it will be
available in Canada through the Academic Press. M r . Kavanagh
has published five volumes of poems and five novels, two of
them for children. The Perfect Stranger was awarded the Richard
Hillary Prize, and his first novel, A Song and Dance, the Guard-
ian Fiction Prize. His Selected Poems was published in 1982. He
is also the editor of Complete Poems of Ivor Gurney and co-
editor, with James Michie, of The Oxford Book of Short Poems.
In the Chesterton anthology, M r . Kavanagh attempts to sum up
Chesterton by means of his writings. He shows the many sides of
Chesterton's versatile mind and gives the reader a picture of the
writer's development f r o m his first works to those of his matur-
ity, after his conversion to Catholicism. M r . Kavanagh draws no
sharp distinction between Chesterton the fantasist and Chesterton
the critic, since he believes that Chesterton continued to exercise
a creative and inventive mind in everything he wrote, whether his
topic was education, English poetsor belief in God. Nonethe-
less, Chesteron the novelist is represented in this anthology by a
complete novel. The Man Who Was Thursday; Chesterton, the
poet is represented by a selection of favourite verse; but Chester-
ton, the essayist and journaUst enjoys the lion's share of the
volume, thus bringing him most vividly to life as he joins the
debates of the day. This anthology should stand as a fitting tes-
tament to a writer whom the dust-jacket describes as one of the
most stimulating and well-loved writers of the twentieth century.
The anthology is 552 pages and sells for 12.95 in Great Britain.

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The Chesterton Review

A reader in Britain sends a news item f r o m the London Times

(4 April, 1984) which makes a point that will be of interest to
Chestertonians. On the subject of small-scale farming in Russia,
Richard Owen, the Times Moscow correspondent, writes: "Pri-
vate peasant plots account for under one percent of agricultural
land in Russia, yet produce nearly a third of the total agricultural
output, including fruit, vegetables and meat."

M r . Edward Lambert of 11927 - 87 Street, Edmonton, sends an

article f r o m a magazine called The Mother Earth News
(November, 1976). The article provides the text of interviews with
E.F. Schumacher, the author of Small is Beautiful, and a thinker
who shares a number of ideas with Chesterton and George
Grant. What follows are some excerpts f r o m the article:
INTERVIEWER: John Maynard Keynes, father of today's pre-
vailing school of economic thought, championed one of the first pages
you wrote. And you have held responsible positions in the field
throughout your career. But the whole economics profession, from
top to bottom, is positively steeped in the understanding that "bigger
is always better." Whatever possessed you, then, to begin saying that
"small can be beautiful"?
SCHUMACHER: I did not deliberately set out to develop this
idea. No. Any economic ideas I've had have come from my larger
search for meaning in life. My father was a professor of economics
and I had what was basically a rationalist-scientific upbringing. But
that education didn't answer the questions that I , as a human being,
struggled with: "Why are we here? What is the meaning of it all? I am
just an accidental collection of atoms," as Bertrand Russell used to
say, "or do I have a specific purpose?" . . . . In 1955 I was requested
by the Burmese Government to come and advise the Prime Minister
there. There, for the first time, I realised that you do not find clarity
in the mind . . . but in the heart. And the heart will not speak to you
unless you quiet yourself and Hberate yourself from such masters as
greed and envy. But if you can do this you will find, in the stillness
that follows, insights of wisdom that are obtainable in no other way.
You will begin to see things as they really are. You will become en-
lightened. . . . I could have derived the same ideas from the teachings
of the Christian, Judaic, Islamic, or any other great religious tradition.

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INTERVIEWER: As I understand it, your 1955 trip to Burma, and

the travels which followed, were also educational to you in other ways.
SCHUMACHER: Yes, they taught me many things. I learned, for
instance, that statistics can be very misleading. I had looked at the
figures before going to Burma and found that it was one of the poor-
est countries in the world, with an annual per-capita income of only
$50.00. And being totally ignorant, I expected to find poverty there as
I had never seen it before. Instead, I found the happiest people I had
ever met. They were well-fed, beautifully dressed, and lived in houses
that were suited to the cUmate. And they had time! They had no
labour saving machinery, but they had great bags of time in which to
relax and be happy. There seemed to be no strain in Burma. The
people there were the most joyous you could possibly encounter. They
were living life as it should be lived. This contrasted sharply with what
I found in the United States and Germany. There, in the two coun-
tries most cluttered with labour saving machinery, life was a constant
agitation. I loved America but I was bothered by the terrible pressure,
the nervous strain, the number of people on psychiatrists' couches.
England, I realised, was somewhere in the middle. It was industrial-
ized, but its equipment was not as modern and not as labour saving as
the machines in Germany or the United States. And its pace was
really quite agreeable. Kindly and safe. This led me to formulate an
idea that I was tempted to release as this law of economics: the
amount of real leisure a society enjoys tends to be in inverse propor-
tion to the amount of labour-saving machinery it employs.
INTERVIEWER: But why were the Burmese you met so happy?
How could they take so much joy from life when they were so poor?
SCHUMACHER: I asked myself that question. Which led me to a
closer inspection of all the conditions we call "poverty." And I quickly
realised that the sheer amount of money an individual earns in a year
does not necessarily tell you how happy that person is. During the
Great Depression, for example, I saw unemployed workers in Eng-
land whose whole gait showed they were broken men. Yet their actual
cash income from unemployment insurance was more than the
income of a Spanish peasant whose eyes shone with manhness, who
greeted you with open arms, and who asked you into his hovel to
share everything he had. Eventually I decided that the absolute bot-
tom level of existencewhere you don't have enough to even begin to
keep body and soul togethershould be called misery. The next level
upwhere people can reach the fullness of humanity but in a modest
and frugal way with nothing really to spareis actually what should
be known as poverty. Then comes sufficiency . . . where you do have

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something to spare. This was the normal condition of Western Europe

for centuries during the latter half of the Middle Ages when, as we
know, great cathedrals were built and many advances were made in
the arts and sciences. And finally, there is surfeit . . . which is hmit-
less. I would say that the bottom layer of misery and the top layer of
surfeit are both very unhealthy. But between sufficiency and poverty I
don't really argue which is better.
INTERVIEWER: That's not what our prevalent economic theory
tells us. It very clearly states that more is always better.
SCHUMACHER: Oh yes. The implicit doctrine of development,
which has been drummed into our ears for the last half century or so
and upon which all of modern society is founded, holds up material
wealth as the be-all, end-all of existence. "Do you want to be happy?"
it asks. "Then become rich. And do you want to be happier still? Then
become even richer. In fact you have not only the right to become
rich . . . but the duty! The faster the better. And what is rich? Why
material possessionsgoods!of course. The more and the bigger of
everything you possessand the faster you do it!the better off
you'll be. There is no such thing as 'enough.' You must always have
more, more, more!" This tenet of life, i f anything, is applied even
more stringently to nations than to individuals. Which is why we now
have this terrible fetish of measuring the gross national product of a
country and dividing it by the number of people who live there to get
the average income per head. And that figure then becomes the final
indicator of the nation's status in the world . . . while the prime object
of admiration is not the income level that has already been attained,
but its current rate of growth. In other words, more is always better
. . . and it's even better yet if you can get that "more" faster than the
next country.

INTERVIEWER: But what about the question of simplicity versus

complexity?
SCHUMACHER: Everything has become too complex. And, just as
foreseen 150 years ago, this complexity and sophistication has made
us useless. It has taken us away from ourselves. It distracts us and
puts so much strain on us and makes us so narrow-minded and so
bothered and so specialized that we no longer have time to become
wise. Thomas Aquinas said that, "The smallest knowledge of the
highest things is more to be desired than the most certain knowledge
of the lower things." But the complexity of modern life forces us to
become so specialized that we have no time to consider the higher
things at all. We have no time to realize our true potential. Life

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becomes an agitation and a strain which crowds out the spirit. . . .

Any intelligent fool can use large enough means to solve a problem
after he has blundered into creating it in the first place. But this
approach to life has turned even our medicinewith its radiation
treatments and chemical therapy and other "break-throughs"into a
thing of violence. A clever chap has asked, " I f one of our ancestors
visited us today, what would he find more astonishing: the skill of our
dentists . . . or the rottenness of our teeth?" Instead of solving this
very personal problem in the gentle way with proper diet and other
good habits, you see, we choose to live with ever-more rotten teeth
and the greater and greater skill of our dentists. We even pride our-
selves on this decision. But the world doesn't need for us to develop
greater skill in th.e handling of problems that our heedlessness has
created in the first place.

INTERVIEWER: I'm afraid that some people are going to be fright-

ened of your ideas for taking control of work "away from the
machines" and putting it "back into the hands of the average worker."
That sounds very much as if you're advocating the overthrow of all
modern advances in favour of a return to some sort of difficult and
primitive hand labour.

SCHUMACHER: Not at all! I'm talking only of returning our

society to a human scale . . . of putting people in charge of their own
destinies once more. I'm talking about overthrowing the machine in
favour of the tool. And I do make this distinction between machines
and tools: Tools serve man while machines demand that man serve
them. Tools enhance a man's skill and power while machines, which
are supposed to be man's slave, sooner or later wind up enslaving the
men who build and tend them. As Ananda Coomaraswamy has said,
"The craftsman himself can always, if allowed to, draw the delicate
distinction between the machine and the tool. The carpet loom is a
tool, a contrivance for holding warp threads at a stretch for the pile to
be woven round them by the craftsmen's fingers . . . but the power
loom is a machine, and its significance as a destroyer of culture lies in
the fact that it does the essentially human part of the work." So we
are not talking about dropping our man-dominating and nature-
ravaging modern technology for a return to the primitive, brutish
hand labour of our distant ancestors. We're talking about trading
both of those extremes in for something in the middle. We're talking
about the development of something new . . . an intermediate tech-
nology. A technology that we can all own a part of and which will
allow us to realize our highest human potentials while helping us nur-

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 The Chesterton Review

ture and tend and preserve the earth. As Gandhi said, we do not need
mass production . . . but production by the masses.

Dr. Bruce Rowat of I I A Edgevalley Drive, Islington, Toronto

M 9 A 4N6 sends an item f r o m the February 1985 issue of an
Evangelical Protestant journal called Eternity. The article is writ-
ten by John R. Vile and entitled "Neglected Giant of Christian
Thought." The theme of the article is that it is time f o r evangeli-
cals to listen to Thomas Aquinas. What follows are some
excerpts f r o m the article which are reprinted with permission:

he gulf between Thomists and evangelicals is a wide one.

It perhaps has been widened unduly by past misunder-
standings, and at times by overly simplistic analyses on
both sides. As the foremost church apologist from
Augustine to the Reformation, Thomas Aquinas (1225
1274) is naturally viewed as the epitome of Catholic thinking with all
of its real and imagined faults. Yet for all the red flags his name sends
up, we still can learn much from this formidable Christian thinker. . . .
This emphasis on developing a Christian worldview and on relat-
ing Christian faith to the philosophies of this world is itself a whole-
some emphasis for modern evangelicals, who often spend more time
fighting one another over doctrine than engaging in dialogue with the
world. Ronald Nash has observed that, "While many Protestants
could find nothing more important to do than defend dispensational-
ism, Thomist scholars were combatting the great errors of the twen-
tieth centurysubjectivism, relativism, secularism, pragmatism, posit-
ivism, and Marxism."

here are other aspects of Aquinas's thought which evan-

gelicals might also take to heart. While Aquinas is
often associated with rather arid sounding "proofs" of
God's existence (the so-called "Five Ways"), he, Hke
Isaiah, pointed to a God "high and Hfted up." This view
of God is especially pronounced in Aquinas's teaching that God's
nature is so transcendent that it can never be fully grasped by the
human mind or fully described by means of human language. For
Aquinas, all speech about God is necessarily analogical. One can
properly refer to God as his Father, his Redeemer, his Shepherd, the
Light of the World, or the Bread of Life, but only if one also realizes

242
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that each analogy is necessarily incomplete, presenting only one of

God's many aspects, and this not in its fullness. Aquinas was not, in
short, a God-in-the-box theologian, nor was his God too small.
Just as Aquinas had a clear view of God's transcendence, so too
he had a holistic perspective of mankind. As Aquinas described him,
man was not the autonomous creature of modern philosophers but
the created subject of a loving God. Moreover, man is neither com-
pletely a body (as modern materialists affirm) or only important as a
soul (as Platonists and their descendants affirm). Rather, man is body
and spirit in combination and association. To quote Chesterton's
summary of Aquinas's view: "A man is not a man without his body,
just as he is not a man without a soul."
It is not, of course, a great distance from such a hoUstic view of
humanity to the perception that the church must properly minister to
the whole person. Moreover, a proper recognition of our social and
political nature, which Aquinas found so heartily affirmed in Aris-
totle's philosophy, leads to a recognition of the importance of institu-
tions such as the family, the village, and the city (or state), and the
corresponding desirability of Christian affirmation and support of
these God-ordained institutions.
On this point, it is instructive to compare the writings of a con-
temporary Thomist Jacques Maritain in his book, Man and the State
(University of Chicago Press), with the pleas of people like James
Dobson or groups like the Moral Majority which reflect an evangeli-
cal perspective. It is not surprising that on political and social issues,
particularly those related to the family and other social institutions
like the schools, evangelicals are increasingly finding themselves in the
company of Roman Catholics and others (like the Mormons, for
example) with whom they have profound doctrinal differences.
Aquinas's positive affirmation of the importance of social and
political institutions was an important step beyond the rather stark
distinction St. Augustine had so forcefully posed between the City of
God and the City of Man. For Augustine, government was often por-
trayed as but a necessary evil, occasioned by the fall of man and
designed almost solely for punishing evildoers and attaining peace.
Augustine's view is well-summarized by a question he posed: "For, as
far as the life of mortals is concerned, which is spent and ended in a
few days, what does it matter under whose government a dying man
lives, if they who govern do not force him to impiety and iniquity?"
For Aquinas, by contrast, such traditional topics of political phi-
losophy as the forms of government, the best state, and the legitimacy
of revolution were proper and important areas of inquiry, and were

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thus opened up for a leavening Christian influence. While Aquinas's

answers may not have always been correct or finalas where he rea-
sons from God's governance of the universe to the desirability of
earthly monarchythey, like the brilliant answers of Aristotle before
him, are frequently suggestive of approaches to these subjects which
modern Christians might consider.

oreover. Christians who, like Aquinas, see government

as a positive, God-ordained institution are far more

mm likely to participate in politics than are those who see it

in a largely negative light. As members of this latter
group, evangelicals tend to participate more spasmod-
ically in politics, often only after being prodded to action by highly
volatile, emotion-charged moralistic issues. When they do become
involved with such issues, one suspects that many evangelicals have
neither the experience and the political sophistication to translate
their views into public policy, nor are they as familiar with the greater
need for compromise in the public realm, and the need to find com-
mon ground with those who do not adhere to identical religious
beliefs.
Aquinas's view of law, like his view of reason, does offer such a
basis for finding common ground with those who might embrace all
other Christian doctrines. Whereas modern positivists argue that there
is no law other than the positive law enacted and enforced by
governments, Aquinas's view was firmly grounded on the belief that
there was a higher legal standard than that embodied in any regime.
His view was not, of course, new. Long before, Aristotle had sug-
gested that certain actions were "right by nature," whereas others were
not. . . .
The laws of men, or human laws, must, if they are to be legiti-
mate, be in accord with, or in the very least not contrary to, such
natural laws. Indeed, Aquinas argues that human laws which are con-
trary to natural law are not laws at all, a proposition with which most
evangelicals should be comfortable. Evangelicals may, of course,
argue that natural laws, however important, are not complete; and
Aquinas would certainly agree. For him, divine law, or revealed law,
constituted a final and necessary category. Indeed, he insisted on the
superiority of such laws and on the need for such laws, both in help-
ing to apply natural law propositions to particular situations and in
guiding people in those cases where their passions might distort their
judgment.
Aquinas would undoubtedly have recognized, as modern evangel-
icals must too, that in a largely secular society, appeals to human

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News and Comments

reason (appeals which are themselves based on man's nature as a

rational creature) may often have to parallel attempts to appeal to
divine revelation. This indeed, was Aquinas's general strategy as out-
lined in his Summa Contra Gentiles, written to help missionaries to
Spain facing not only Christians but also Jews and pagans:
It is difficult because some of them, such as the Mohamme-
dans and the pagans, do not agree with us in accepting the
authority of any Scripture, by which they may be convinced of
their error. Thus, against the Jews we are able to argue by means
of the Old Testament, while against heretics we are able to argue
by means of the New Testament. But the Mohammedans and
the pagans accept neither the one nor the other. We must, there-
fore, have recourse to the natural reason, to which all men are
forced to give their assent. (Quoted from James Wiser, Political
Philosophy: A History of the Search for Order, 1983.)
Evangelicals may be able to learn from such a strategy, particu-
larly when involved with the public realm. When evangelicals
approach the public forum with appeals to revelation unbuttressed by
logical arguments or research into social consequences, they appear
far more innocent than doves and far less wise than serpents. More
than this, it appears they believe themselves to have a monopoly on
truth not capable of being shared with those in other theological or
political camps. This, one suspects, is why (correctly or not) evangeli-
cals are so often accused of the twin errors of political intolerance and
the failure to understand that America is a pluraHstic society.

In outlining a developed theory of natural law and in stressing

appeals to common human reason, Aquinas suggested a way to avoid
being guilty of such accusations. Moreover, he did so while affirming
a thoroughly Christian view of both God and man, and he indicated
that man's social and political associations were, even for Christian
pilgrims on this earth, of real and continuing importance. Surely,
however evangelicals may otherwise differ with Aquinas, they can
profit from such emphases.

Accompanying Mr. Vile's article are some passages from Chesterton's

Saint Thomas Aquinas which we here reprint:
When he was not sitting still, reading a book, he walked round
and round the cloisters and walked fast and even furiously, a very
characteristic action of men who fight their battles in the mind. When-
ever he was interrupted, he was very polite and more apologetic than
the apologizer. But there was that about him, which suggested that he
was rather happier when he was not interrupted. He was ready to stop

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The Chesterton Review

his truly Peripatetic tramp: but we feel that when he resumed it, he
walked all the faster.
All this suggests that his superficial abstraction, that which the
world saw, was of a certain kind. I think he had the sort of bemused
fit, which really belongs to the practical man rather than the entirely
mystical man. I f he talked to himself, it was because he was arguing
with somebody else. We can put it another way, by saying that his
daydreams, like the dreams of a dog, were dreams of hunting; of pur-
suing the error as well as pursuing the truth; of following all the twists
and turns of evasive falsehood, and tracking it at last to its lair in hell.
Being himself resolved to argue, to argue honestly, to answer
everybody, to deal with everything, he produced books enough to sink
a ship or stock a library though he died in comparatively early middle
age. Probably he could not have done it at all, if he had not been
thinking even when he was not writing; but above all thinking com-
batively. This, in his case, certainly did not mean bitterly or spitefully
or uncharitably; but it did mean combatively. As a matter of fact, it is
generally the man who is not ready to argue, who is ready to sneer.
That is why, in recent literature, there has been so little argument and
so much sneering.

- A review of the 10th anniversary issue of the Chesterton Review

appeared in A p r i l , 1985 number of the Tokyo literary journal
Eigo Seinea (The Rising Generation). The review was written by
Professor Yamagata, the author of a new critical study of Ches-
terton. Professor Yamagata has already written a book about
C S . Lewis.

- T h e following item appeared in Douglas W o o d r u f f s book Talk-

ing at Random, published in London, 1941.
At Frances Chesterton's funeral I was toldand had later con-
firmationthat the Chesterton home at Topmeadow has been left to
the Church. It deserved some special fate, for it was not at all an
ordinary house, and it sums up in itself so much of G.K.C. It is
medieval in centring in a great living hall, with nothing above it, and
this reassertion of an older building tradition in the heart of an outer
suburb was not designed; it came about as a natural result of his
writing and his hobbies. Originally Topmeadow was the building

X6
News and Comments

across the road from the first Beaconsfield home, a place to which he
retreated to write and where plays were staged. Readers of the Auto-
biography will recollect how that profound book is constructed round
the toy theatre which played so big a part in G.K.'s youth, and which
led so early to that analysis of the imagination as the discoverer of
reality, and that search after the nature and meaning of innocence,
which is the special burden of the book. As I was standing in that
hall, after the body of Frances Chesterton had been laid beside her
husband, I felt I was looking at somethingat property as the exten-
sion of personalitysoon to vanish and become a memory, but still
waiting, undissolved, but doomed, the source of its vitality gone. The
massed books in a confusion of arrangement, and the Catholic works
of art and devotion which crowned them, as, too, the Catholic years
crowned their long married life, summed up this story of a Christian
hearth and of letters baptised. I had known the house over some ten
years, and I was glad that my last sight of it was when it was still alive
with a poignant hospitality and the sense of many friends.
Chesterton wrote for his own day, and it was a matter of chance
whether he kept copies of his own books, and he worried little enough
about being read in the future. But it is likely to be found true, I
think, of one particular book of his that it appeared thirty years too
soon. It is only in the world of the Marxist and the Nazi that the real
meaning of The Man Who Was Thursday, and the immediacy and
truth of its study of the dual role men play, will be widely understood.
When it appeared, conspirators were rare romantic figures, but in
great stretches of Europe and Asia now every man is acting a role and
misjudging the rest of the world while misleading it about himself.
As for The Ballad of the White Horse, it has all the story of our
generation in it. As far as I know, no one has ever attempted to buy
and transport to America the Uffington White Horse, sod by sod, and
he is now safely scheduled as the very ancient monument he is. The
Uffington horse easily leads in the White Horse race. The one at
Ethandune was changed over and the head cut where the tail used to
be in the eighteenth century, and the one at Weymouth is landed with
George I I I on his back. There are smaller, quite modern horses,
including a red one in Warwickshire, and I think the total is eleven.

The G.K. Chesterton Society held a meeting in association with

the Annual General Meeting of the Modern Language Associa-
tion. The meeting was held on December 28, 1984 in the

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Kennedy Room of the Sheraton Hotel in Washington, D.C. Two

papers were read. Professor William L . Isley, Jr., of Drew
University, read a paper entitled "Chesterton and the Romance
Tradition." Father Leo A. Hetzler of St. John Fisher College,
who presided at the meeting, read a paper entitled "Stevenson's
Place in Chesterton's Development."

Mr. Martin Gardner of 103 Woods End Drive, Hendersonville,

North Carolina, 28739, U.S.A., writes:

I am currently working on some 150 notes for The Annotated

Innocence of Father Brown, a book that the Oxford Press will publish
in 1986. Listed below are some questions I have not yet been able to
answer. I would be grateful to readers of the Chesterton Review for
help in answering any of them. Letters should be addressed to me at
103 Woods End Drive, Hendersonville, North CaroHna, 28739, USA.
1. The Innocence of Father Brown book is dedicated to Waldo and
Mildred d'Avigdor. Waldo was a Jewish friend of Chesterton's at
St. Paul's School, with whom he maintained a lifelong associa-
tion. Waldo married Mildred Bain, whom Chesterton also knew
as a friend when he was an art student at The Slade School. (He
once wrote a poem called "Our Lady of Wain.") Was Mildred
also Jewish? Does anyone know when Waldo and Mildred died,
or any biographical details about their lives after Chesterton's
death? ( I am, of course, familiar with what is said about them in
Chesterton's Autobiography and in the books by Maisie Ward.)
2. Carstairs and Bullock are two streets mentioned in "The Blue
Cross." Did such streets exist in northern London in 1910, or did
Chesterton make up the names?
3. Does any collector own the twelve issues of Storyteller and Cas-
sell's Magazine in which the book's twelve stories first appeared,
and who would allow me to pay for xeroxed copies of the
pages? I am particularly anxious to know if any of the stories
were illustrated, and if so, by whom?
4. I assume that Cobhole, a town in Essex where Father Brown had
a parish, is an invented name. The same story ("The Secret
Garden") also mentions an American poet named Link P.
Tanner, from a non-existent town in Pennsylvania called Paris. I
assume Tanner is another invention. Does anyone know
otherwise?

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5. In "The Blue Cross" Father Brown is likened to a clergyman in

"The Private Secretary," a then-popular three-act farce. In his
book on Shaw, Chesterton refers to the play as conveying a "too
amiable view of a clergyman." Was the text of this play ever
published in English? Apparently it was based on a German
comedy. Any information about this farce and its plot would be
welcome.
6. Is Ludbury ("The Invisible Man") an invented place name?
7. In "The Invisible Man" someone remarks that he needs "a little
Flambeau." This pun on Flambeau's name may mean only that
the speaker wants some light shed on the situation. Is it possible
there was a popular drink of the time called Flambeau?
8. Chesterton is often quoted as saying that he enjoyed all kinds of
weather except the sort people call a glorious day. Where did he
say that?
9. In what Father Brown story is it first mentioned that the near-
sighted priest wears glasses? (There is no mention of glasses in the
Innocence of Father Brown, which is the first volume of Father
Brown stories.
10. Is Bohun Beacon ("The Hammer of God") another invented
town?
11. In "The Eye of Apollo" Father Brown's church in Camberwell is
called St. Xavier's Church. Was there a church by this name in
Camberwell?
12. In "The Sign of the Broken Sword" Chesterton refers to a Black
River in Brazil. Is there such a river there? (There is a town called
Rio Negro in Brazil, and a river of the same name in Argentina.)
13. Why is Father Brown called Paul in the first British edition ("The
Sign of the Broken Sword")? The name was removed in later
printings, and there is no mention of a first name for Father
Brown in any later story. Does "Paul" appear in the first maga-
zine appearance of the story?
14. Why, in the first paragraph of "The Eye of Apollo" (in the book's
first British edition), is Father Brown called "The Reverend J.
Brown"? The initial was removed from later editions. Is the "J" in
the magazine printing?
15. In "The Blue Cross" Chesterton refers to the "paradox of Poe,"
which asserts the importance of excepting the unforeseen. Where
did Poe state this?

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16. The Armchair Detective, on the cover of its Spring 1983 issue,
reproduced an original painting of Father Brown by an artist who
signed himself Frank J. Jeffries, and dated the picture 1924.
Inside the issue the editors write that the picture has been pub-
lished elsewhere, but they have been unable to locate its original
appearance. A free subscription is offered to the first reader who
can identify the book or magazine where the picture was first re-
produced. No one has since supplied the answer. Who was
the artist, where was his painting first published, and does the
original still exist?

The following note written by R.J. Dingley of the University of

New England, New South Wales, appeared in Notes and Queries
in December, 1984 and is being reprinted with permission.

Chesterton's story "The House of the Peacock," published

in 1929 in The Poet and the Lunatics, opens in a characteristically
Chestertonian manner with the hero, Gabriel Gale, encountering a
peacock in the suburban garden. The garden also houses a ladder
placed at an open window, which Gale ascends, finding himself in a
dining room decorated with peacock feathers and hung with green.
The table is set for thirteen, the saltcellars have been knocked over,
the knives have been crossed, the mirror is cracked, and the house-
holder, when he appears, sports an opal stud in his shirt-front. Gale
realises that the ladder at the window was placed there not to be
climbed, but to be walked under, and that he has happened upon the
dinner of a club dedicated to the flaunting of superstitionthe Thir-
teen Club.
The story's accumulation of surreally juxtaposed images, and,
indeed, the very conception of a Thirteen Club, appear to be typical
products of Chesterton's exotic imagination. In fact, however, the
Thirteen Club actually existed, and the account of it contained in
Harry Furniss's Confessions of a Caricaturist (London, 1901), corres-
ponds almost exactly with Chesterton's description. Furniss, who pre-
sided at the Club's dinner at the Holborn Restaurant on January 13,
1894, recalls in his memoirs "the ladder we all had to walk under, the
peacock's feathers, the black cat, the spilling of salt, breaking of mir-
rors, presenting of green ties . . . or opal rings." Furthermore, accord-
ing to Furniss, the "Thirteen Club idea," which originated in America,
"was taken up by the Press, and paragraphs, leaderettes and leaders
appeared in nearly every journal all over the country." Chesterton's

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story, it seems safe to conclude, owes less to his invention than to his
capacious memory.

Rev. William J. Gaynor, Star Route 35205, Auburn, New York,

writes:
An article which I recently found among papers may be of some
interest to readers of the Review. It is from the March, 1945 issue of
the NCCS Magazine. It describes an organisation which we estab-
lished at Gowen Field, an Army Air Force Base near Boise, Idaho
during World War I I . It was called the "Chesterbelloc Club," and was
inspired by Chesterton's writings. Most of the meetings were based on
something in Chesterton's books, or his basic philosophy. The presen-
tations were on a high intellectual and spiritual level, not without
humour, which I believe, would have delighted Chesterton himself. A
passage from the magazine runs as follows: "Major William J.
Gaynor, Catholic Chaplain at the Base, conducts informal meetings in
co-operation with NCCS director, Elliott Hymans, which consist of
the reading of a book review, a review of a magazine article, and a
discussion on a current topic. Ask any one of the thirty-five WAC's
officers, nurses, and enlisted men who regularly meet at the NCCS-
operated USO club in Boise, Idaho, and they'll tell you that they have
named their Catholic literary society for two of the greatest contem-
porary defensores fideithe irrepressible Chesterton and the scholarly
historian, Hilaire Belloc." Among the surviving articles, I also found a
picture of the "Steering Committee," four members of the Chester-
belloc Club who helped to plan and co-ordinate the monthly meet-
ings. The third article which I uncovered was an eulogy I gave on
Chesterton at St. Mary's Church, Elmira, New York, where I was the
assistant pastor. It was given on the Sunday after Chesterton's death
in June, 1936. These things have survived only because I have never
discarded anything connected with Chesterton. I have been an avid
reader of Chesterton since 1929 when I began studies at St. Andrew's
Preparatory Seminary, and later at St. Bernard's Seminary, New
York. Chesterton made me think, and at the same time provided me
with an uproarious good time. As Maurice Evans in G.K. Chesterton
says: " A t his worst, he provokes thought, while at his best he is
unsurpassed by any essayist in the century, and worthy to be placed
with Max Beerbohm and the classics of the modern essay." A simple
truth, often overlooked, contained in a statement of Chesterton also
attracted me to him: "It is in private life that we find the great charac-
ters. They are too great to get into the public world."

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M r . Karl Schmude writes an article entitled "Suicideand the

Reversal of Values" which was published in The CathoUc Weekly
(Australia), 25 May, 1983. Excerpts f r o m this article are printed
with permission.

When the famous writer Arthur Koestler and his wife took their
lives in London recently, there were not the expressions of remorse
that might have been expected.
Certainly, Koestler himself had provided intimations of his future
suicide. Despite a life of prodigious literary achievement, he was a
member of the voluntary euthanasia society. Exit. In 1981, he con-
tributed to their controversial publication on how to commit suicide,
entitled Guide to Self-Deliverance.
Yet the reaction to his death had an air of inevitability about it;
as though his general outlook and poor health made suicide the only
path for a reasonable person to follow.
Some commentators seemed implicitly to praise his action,
echoing the remarks of the early Greek Epictetus:
What, does he who is at liberty to leave the banquet when he
will, and play the game no longer, keep on annoying himself by
staying?
For an increasing number, it would appear, suicide is no longer
interpreted as a lurch of tragic despair so much as an act of sobre
consideration and courage. It undoubtedly claims a growing number
of lives, particularly among the young, and it ranks as a major cause
of death among older adolescents. Dermont Purgavie, a correspond-
ent for the Sunday Telegraph (Sydney), recently reported from
Australia that the rate of adolescent suicides has reached distressing
proportions. An average of eighteen young people kill themselves
daily in the United States, and about ninety more attempt it. In five
years, suicides by fifteen- to twenty-four-year-old's have risen
markedly, now run at a rate of one in four thousand. Such figures are
likely to be conservative, since there is a natural resistance on the part
of the authorities to identifying suicide as the cause of death; both
because doubt exists in many cases (e.g., when the young die from
falls or car accidents), and the desire is strong, in any event, to spare
families from further pain.
In some quarters, however, suicide is not ignored but romanti-
cised. The rock music stars who have taken their own lives in recent
times have gained mythical stature, as though they sacrificed them-
selves to a worthy god instead of some of the most manipulative of
modern business promoters. It is part of the present-day reversal of

252

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Christian values that a tacit acceptance of suicide has grown as the

martyrdom has become remote and even unthinkable.
The very meaning of suicide and that of martyrdom has been
enveloped in confusion, although the two acts are utterly distinct. As
G.K. Chesterton pointed out in his famous discourse on "the para-
doxes of Christianity" (a central chapter of his book. Orthodoxy):
A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside
him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man
who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see
the last of everything. One wants something to begin; the other
wants everything to end. In other words, the martyr is noble,
exactly because (however he renounces the world or execrates
all humanity) he confesses this ultimate link with life; he sets his
heart outside himself; he dies that something may live. The sui-
cide is ignoble because he has not this link with being; he is a
mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe.
Chesterton went on to elucidate the contrast between suicide and
martyrdom by probing the meaning of courage. This virtue he defined
as "almost a contradiction in terms," meaning "a strong desire to live
taking the form of a readiness to die." The courage of a soldier sur-
rounded by enemies and intent to escape, for example, is shown by
the combination of an intense desire for living with a strange careless-
ness about dying:
He must 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 . . .
Christianity, said Chesterton, has expressed this paradox with
profound clarity, but it has also "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."
In one sense, the growing evidence of suicide today is not surpris-
ing, though it remains shocking. In a world marred by abundant evi-
dence of the cheapening of lifewars, abortions, terrorist assaults,
etc.it is not hard to see why suicide should be gaining acceptance. I f
the "right to life" is so often nullified in the case of others, why should
it hold sway in the case of oneself? Yet, While such evidence has
probably never confronted the human sensibility as forcefully as in
our own media-saturated era, it has always existed as a possible
inducement to suicide. Human evil and corruption darken the uni-
verse in every age and represent a powerful temptation to despair;
only the Light of Christ can redeem us from them.

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What, then, is different about the circumstances of the late twenti-

eth century? Curiously, a fundamental factor in the new upsurge of
suicides would appear to be, not an excess of despair, but an excess of
hope. The revolutionary changes that underlay the modern decHne of
Christianity brought forth a new religion in our centurya religion of
earthly optimism and happiness, which one author called "Wellsian-
ity" after one of its most ardent popularisers, H.G. Wells. This faith
had science as its god, evolution as its history, and natureincluding
manas its congregation. The people of the West were conditioned to
pin their hopes on the world's future rather than a future world. Polit-
ical expressions of this faithnotably Marxismwere of particular
appeal to intellectuals; among them, Arthur Koestler, who was a
Communist for most of the 1930s.
In 1950, however, he contributed the opening chapter to an
anthology called The God That Failed, in which he recounted how his
despair of Western society had ushered in a new and misplaced
hopethe "new revelation from the East," that of Communism. In
time, this hope proved a cruel illusion. By contrast with Koestler, for
whom all false gods finally failed, another couple were deterred from
suicide by their discovery of the True God.
At the outset of this century, Jacques Maritain and his wife,
Raissa, were students in Paris and overwhelmed by a heartless and
unhappy world which the prevailing philosophies of the time did
nothing to explain or soften. They decided that, if the meaning of life
did not soon reveal itself, they would commit suicide. "We wanted to
die by a free act," wrote Raissa later, " i f it were impossible to live
according to the truth." But they found the truth and entered the
Catholic Church. Jacques Maritain became one of the towering Chris-
tian thinkers of our century.
Suicide was finally rejected. The meaning of life, and our responsi-
bility to him as creatures.

- A reader in Britain sends a news item f r o m the London Times

(April 4, 1984) which makes a point which will be of interest to
Chestertonians. On the subject of small-scale farming in Russia,
Richard Owen, the Times Moscow correspondent, writes: "Pri-
vate peasant plots account for under one percent of agricultural
land in Russia, yet produce nearly a third of the total agricultural
output, including fruit, vegetables and meat."

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