Kirk Chesterton, Madmen, And Madhouses

7/28/2019 Kirk Chesterton, Madmen, And Madhouses

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MODERN AGEA QUARTERLY REVIEW

Chesterton., Madmen, and MadhousesR U S S E L L K I R K

No MA N of his time defended more pas-sionately the cause of sanity and centric-ity than did G. K. Chesterton-despite hi saversion to watches and his uncalculatedpicturesqueness of dress. Yet no imagina-tive writer touched more often than didChesterton upon lunacy, real or alleged: aprospect of his age with the madhouse forits background.

ccIt is, indeed, an absurd exaggerationto say that we are all mad, Chestertonwrites in L m c y and Letters,just as it is true that we are none of usperfectly healthy. If there were toappear in the world a perfectlysane man, he would certainly belocked up. The terrible simplicitywith which he would walk over ourminor morbidities, or sulky vanitiesand malicious self-righteousness; theelephantine innocence with which hewould ignore our fictions or civilization-these would make him a thing moredesolating and inscrutable than a

thunderbolt or a beast or prey. It maybe that the great prophets who appearedto mankind as mad were in reality rav-ing with an impotent sanity.What Burke called metaphysical mad-ness, the delusion of the ideologue and theneoterist, was the modem affliction againstwhich Chesterton contended. The Libraryof the British Museum, Chesterton remarks,discharges a great many of the functions

of a private madhouse. Against the sortof lunacy encountered in libraries, and thesort encountered in public affairs, Chester-ton took his stand. Madhouses, public orprivate, loom large in sevenof his fantasticromances; madmen pop up in high places.In our era, his argument runs, someof thewisest and best men may find themselvesin Bedlam: for the madman and the roguemanipulating madmen are in power.Since Chesterton wrote, madhouses havemultiplied; but seldom do they display theoutward amenities of that asylum (de-signed by Lucifer) in which the zealot and

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the atheist of The Ball and the Cross endtheir flight from the police. Once, pursuingScottish historical researches, I strolled byaccident into a private madhouse to beproud of: a sixteenth century mansion,once a manse, all flowers and lawns withinits high stone dykes. The typical mentalinstitution of our twentieth century, how-ever, is more hygienic, more scientific,more grim, and more voracious: no onecould mistake it for a parsonage.As we slide away from the normality thatChesterton upheld, we fall into a kind ofrationalistic insanity. Starving the moralimagination (which must be nurtured earlyby myth, fable, allegory, and parable), wefind ourselves upon the alienists couch.Chesterton chose fantasy as his weapon fordefending common sense, knowing thatdefecated rationality-private judgmentcarried to its extreme-is the enemy of thehigher reason.Every healthy person at some time mustfeed on fiction as well as fact, Chestertonputs it in his essay Fiction as Food,because fact is a thing which the worldgives to him, whereas fiction is a thinghe gives to the world. It has nothing todo with a man being able to write; oreven with his being able to read. Per-haps itsbest period is that of childhood,and what is called playing or pretend-ing. But it is still true when the childbegins to read or sometimes (heavenhelp him) to write. Anybody who re-members a favorite fairy-story will havea strong sense of its original solidity andrichness and even definite detail; andwill be surprised, if he rereads it inlater life; to find how few and bald werethe words which his own imaginationmade not only vivid but varied. Andeven the errand-boy who read hundreds

of penny-dreadfuls, or the lady whoread hundreds of novels from the circu-lating library, were living an imagina-tive life which did not come whollyfrom without.

By imagination, high or low, the worldis ruled; and not by little tracts and pamphlets. So, though a tractarian polemicistof the first rank, Chesterton set out to rein-vigorate the moral imagination throughfable: by supposal, creating a fiction toimpartamoral. It isonly in our exhaustedand agnostic age, he wrote late in life,that the idea has been started that if oneis moral one must not be melodramatic.The Greeks, the medieval scholars, theProtestant moralists, and the eighteenthcentury rationalistic moralists all knew bet-ter. Fantastic melodrama-from the shape-shifting of the gigantic being calledSunday (Nature incarnate) to the pur-poseful groping of Father Brown-wasChestertons instrument for the recoveryof moral order. And of melodramatic sub-jects, none is more compelling than themadman and the madhouse.In his Audobiography, Chesterton de-scribes himself as a young lunatic at thetime there was taking shape in his mindhisfirst romance, The Napoleon of NottingHill. This madness of his, he writes, wasmore and more moving in the direction ofsome vague and visionary revolt againstthe prosaic flatness of a nineteenth centurycity and civilization . .Only the humoristis sane, Auberon Quin declares in thatnovel (published in 1904). Quin gets upa comic scheme for restoring to the districtsof London a medieval picturesqueness anda medieval autonomy. An heroic fanatic,Adam Wayne, takes Quin literally; lovingNotting Hill, the little platoon he belongsto, he defends-with swords and halberds-Pump Street against all the forces ofprogress; and for twenty years he suc-ceeds, though pulled down at last.This man Wayne, says Buck, one ofWaynes enemies, would be shut up by anydoctors in England. But is Buck himselfless crazy than the Napoleon of NottingHill? Buck is mad, Quin observes, be-

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cause he cares for money, as mad as a manwho lives on opium. The satirist and the fanatic, Quin andWayne, come to understand at the end thatthe two of them are mad-but only be-cause they are two lobes of a brain that hasbeen riven in two.

When dark and dreary days come, youand 1 are necessary, the pure fanatic,the pure satirist. We have between usremedied a great wrong. We have liftedthe modern cities into that poetry whicheveryone who knows mankind knows tobe immeasurably more common than thecommonplace.

This high hope for reuniting the halves ofthe riven modern mind runs through thesecond of Chestertons romances, too. ANightmare is the subtitle of The Adan WhoWas Thursday (1908) ; but though thecharacters of that romance are sufficientlymelodramatic, they are not mad. The onegenuine anarchist among those seven con-spirators is as rational as George BernardShaw. From the money-grubbing oppor-tunist and the death-intoxicated anarchist,the time may be redeemed by commonsense, poetic insights, and a touch of wit.Yet by 1910, when he published WhatsWrong with the World (a tract now almostforgotten), Chesterton began to suspect thatthe social order was sinking into insanity;it was becoming a tremendous madhouse,with scoundrelsas the keepers. So it is thatlunacy, and good men falsely accused ofmadness, peer out of his fantasies from TheBall and the Cnoss (1910) down to F ourFaultless Felons (1930). In 1910, too, hewrote in his Alarms and Discursions thathe was a sculptor of gargoyles:

These monsters are meant for the gar-goyles of a definite cathedral. I haveto carve the gargoyles, because I cancarve nothing else; I leaveto others theangels and the arches and the spires.

But I am very sure of the style of thearchitecture and of the consecration ofthe church.St. Pauls is the Cathedral of The Balland the Cross. In this madhouse able, twoof the gargoyles are M ach, Jacobite andPapist; and Turnbull, militant atheist. Theunreasonable cross surmounting St. Paulsis in danger of being overthrown by Pro-fessor Lucifer. Ours being an age of masksand conventions merely, this time is ripefor the Prince of This World; while beliefendures only in a surviving saint, the monkMichael, and in these two honest opposedzealots, who cross swords literally as theyflee from the indignant police.That long pursuit terminates in a vastcountry-house lunatic-asylum, to whichLucifer-with the assistance of the civilauthorities-has confined Michael, Mac-Ian, Turnbull, and all casual witnesses ofthe combats between Highland Catholicand London atheist. Those two menscandalously believe that religion is worthfighting about; and so long as they remainat liberty, Lucifers consummate rational-ism cannot triumph. The very memory ofburning faith must be immured in thedeepest cells of the asylum.Nevertheless the madhouse, a complexmachine, suffers from any machines in-eluctable imperfections. Hopeful still, Mac-Ian and Turnbull escape from the depths.Michael, the seeming imbecile (who hastouches of the saint of Assisi), is unassail-able in his wisdom, though members ofparliament and magistrates are deludedby Lucifer. The asylum takes fire; Michaelwalks scatheless through the flames; andthe asylums master, Lucifer, hastens awayin his flying-machine, casting overboardthe doctors who were his tools.

One may note here similiarities to C. S.Lewis That Hideous Strength; both Ches-terton and Lewis were influenced early byGeorge Macdonalds fantasies. And there

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occurs a foretaste of Orwell-despite Or-wels lack of affection for Chesterton-inthe final bland address of the Master to hiscaptives:We investigated, on scientific prin-ciples, the story of MacIans challenge,and we are happy to be able to informyou that the whole story of the at-tempted duel isa fable. There never wasany challenge. There never was any mannamed MacIan. I t is a melodramaticmyth, like Calvary. . . The whole storyof the MacIan challenge has been foundto originate in the obsessions of a few

pathological types, who are now allfortunately in our care.Yet patients sometimes set asylums afire;and in the ashes of this madhouse, there arefound the swords of the two men of belief,fallen haphazard in the pattern of across. The Ball and the Cross are not castdown.From the dome of St. Pauls, Chesterton

descended to the lodging-house of Mamlive(1911). Innocent Smith, a towering humor-ist with a knack for reminding people ofthe joy of life-if need be, at pistol point-comes under the observation of two doctorswho think that he ought to be committedto an asylum. But in the mock trial ofSmith, it is revealed that his eccentricitiessprang from a static fact of faith, in itselftian. He is alive; while the doctors whowould lock him up are dry sticks. Smithmakes playful war upon defecated rational-ity.At certain strange epochs, Smith tellsa curate,

mystical, and even childlike and Chris-

it is necessary to have another kind ofpriests, called poets, actually to remindmen that they are not dead yet. The in-tellectuals among whom I moved werenot even alive enough to fear death.They hadnt blood enough in them to be

cowards. Until a pistol barrel was pokedunder their very noses they never evenknew they had been born. For ages look-ing up an eternal perspective it mightbe true that life is a learning to die. Butfor these little white rats it was just astrue that death was their only chance oflearning to live.In TheFlying Inn (1914), he regenerat-ing poets are an adventurer and an inn-keeper, Captain Dalroy and HumphreyPump, who had rather see England drunkand free than sober and servile. This is per-haps the cleverest of Chestertons moral

melodramas, an assault upon prohibition-ists, vegetarians, and all enemiesof customand common sense. Its rationalistic mad-man is Lord Ivywood-who, except for hismanners, is Hitler, foreseen a generationearly. Ivywoods fanatical pleasure in thebreaking of bottles and the smashing ofcasks-the pleasure which his strange,cold, courageous nature could not get fromfood or wine or woman-leads to apos-tasy, a harem, and treason.I have gone where God has never daredto go, says Irywood, at the moment ofhis ruin.

I am above the silly Supermen as theyare above mere men. Where I walk inthe heavens, no man has walked beforeme; and I am alone in the garden. Allthis passing about me is like the lonelyplucking of garden flowers. I will havethis blossom; I will have that . . .By this fault fell the angels. The lust toreign in solitude, usurping the throne ofGod: this is the consummate madness, tocry I am, and none else before me. Thesolipsist is the maddest, and most terrify-ing, of lunatics-and necessarily the worstenemy of both flesh and spirit. This il-lusion is The Mirror of Madmen in

Chestertons first book of serious poems,The Wild Knight (1900) :

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I dreamed a dream of heaven, white asThe splendid stillnessof a living host;Vast choirs of upturned faces, line oerThen my blood frooze, for every face

frost,

line.was mine.

For the decade followingTheFl yi ng I nn,the image of the madhouse was absent fromChestertons writing. Those were the yearsof theWar (from which Chestertons spir-its never wholly recovered), of the Warsdreary aftermath, and of his conversion toCatholicism.Also they were years in whichhis Distriliutisrn struggled vainly againstunprincipled consolidation and againstsocialist ideology.Yet Chesterton did not despair. In 1925,he published The Everlasting Man; in thesame year, Talesao the Long B\ow.That ro-mance of a hard fight against the politicaland commercial despoilers of England (awinning fight, unlike Chestertons own realstruggle) contains a passage describing theforces that Chesterton detested. Owen Hoodsees his favorite reach of the rural Thamesmade hideous by a factory, and the riverpolluted by chemical wastes:

This was the beginning of what wasor Owen Hood a crawling nightmare.The change advanced slowly, by a proc-ess covering years, but it seemed to himall the time that he was helpless andparalyzed in its presence, precisely asa man is paralyzed in an actual night-mare. He laughed with an almost horri-ble laughter to think that a man in amodern society is supposed to be masterof his fate and free to pursue his pleas-ures; when he has not power to preventthe daylight he looks on from beingdarkened, or the air he breathes frombeing turned to poison, or the silencethat is his full possession from beingshaken with the cacophony of hell.At once mover and toady in this devasta-

tion, Dr. Horace Hunter-presently knight-ed-is ready to certify as mad those whodeviate from the dogmasof scientism. Pro-fessor Green delivers an impassioned andvery odd address to a congress of astrono-mers; the trouble with Professor Green isthat he has fallen in love. As a newspaperreports-

No less a person than Sir HoraceHunter, who, although best known as apsycho-physiologist, has taken all knowl-edge for his province, and was presentto show his interest in astronomicalprogress, was able to certify on the spotthat the unfortunate Green was clearlysuffering from dementia, which was im-mediately corroborated by a local doc-tor, so that the unhappy man might beremoved without further scandal.Professor Green isforcibly rescued by anaviator, who spirits him away to the sanctu-ary and stronghold of the rebels againstutilitarian and profiteering oligarchy. TheLeagueof the Long Bow, which in the end

overcomes the despoilers (as much bymirth as by force), is led by lovers; whilethe politicians and industrialists are menof appetite only.In the real England of those years, theDistributists enjoyed no successes like thoseof the League of the Long Bow. In 1927,with unemployment growing and the De-pression settling upon the face of Britain,Chesterton published The Return of DonQuixote. Herne, librarian at a countryhouse, is obsessedby medieval studies, andis made King at Arms in a new order; orthere is something of the prophet in him,and he is fearless. Sick at heart in his hourof victory, however, he casts off his ownaristocratic supporters and comes to wan-der the roads after the fashion of Quixote,because he cannot ignore the injustice doneto Dr. Hendry, the inventor of Hendrys Il-lumination Colors, by the monopolists ofthe paint-market.

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Hendry very nearly is thrust into a mad-house by a new commission empowered tocommit inefficient folk to protective cus-tody. For Hendry expounds a curious the-ory of color-blindness, to account for hisruin at the hands of the monopolists; andsuch foolishness is anathema to Dr. Gam-brel, an agent of the commission. (Gambrelrejoices in his own peculiar theomry ofSpinal Repulsion, tracing brain trouble inall those who sat on the edges of chairs, asHendry did.) Gambrel drags Hendry toa magistrate of the Lunacy Commission:Dr. Gambrel had the power of themodern state, which is perhaps greaterthan that of any state, at least so far asthe departments over which it ranges areconcerned. He had the power to invadethis house and break up this family anddo what he liked with this member ofit ...

The examination of Hendry is conductedin a private house.For the policy of all recent legislationsand customs had been in the directionof conducting public affairs in private.The official was all the more omnipotentbecause he was always in plain clothes.It was possible to take people to andfrom such a place without any particu-lar show of violence; merely becauseeverybody knew that violence would beuseless. The doctor had grown quite ac-customed to taking his mad patients cas-ually in a cab; and they seldom madeany difficulty about it. They were not

so mad as that.Through the contrivance of a waggishknight-errant, the magistrate is misled totake Hendry for the alienist and Gambrelfor the madman; Hendry goes free. ForMonkey Murrel, Hendrys rescuer,the real story lay rather in front of himthan behind him; as if the unexpectedliberation of the poor old crank, with thecolor-blind monomania, were but a sym-

bol of the liberation of many things andthe opening of a brighter world. Some-thing had snapped; if it was only a bitof red tape; and he did not know yethow much had been set free.Chestertons own ride as Quixote was ofsmall avail against the red tape of bureau-cracy and oligopoly, during the Twentics.But he smote hard. In her biography ofChesterton, Maisie Ward does not mentionThe Poet and the Lunatics (1929). Yet Irate that series of fantastic tales high inChestertons fiction.Gabriel Gale, its intuitive hero, has a tal-ent for mollifying madmen and moderatingtheir excesses. The whole book isabout lun-acy and its subtle causes in this century.Genius oughtnt to be eccentric! Galeexclaims.Genius ought to be centric. It ought tobe the core of the cosmos, not on the re-volving edges. People seem to think i ta compliment to accuse one of being anoutsider, and to talk about the eccen-tricities of genius. What would theythink, if I said I only wish to God I hadthe centricities of genius?The maddest of all maniacs is the manof business, as Gale discovers from a con-siderable acquaintance among madmen. Al-so there isthe Russian psychologist who be-lieves in emancipation, expansion, the elim-ination of limits: he begins by liberating

a caged bird (to its destruction), nextfrees goldfish from their bowl, and ends byblowing up himself and the house wherehe has been a guest.What exactly is liberty? Gale inquires,just before the explosion.First and foremost, surely, it is thepower of athing to be itself. In some waysthe yellow bird was free in the cage. . . .We are limited by our brains and bod-

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The lunatic is he who loses his wayand cannot return. Now, almost beforemy eyes, this man had made a greatstride from liberty to lunacy. The manwho opened the bird-cage loved free-dom; possibly too much; certainly verymuch. But the man who broke the bowlmerely because he thought it a prisonfor the fish, when it was their only pos-sible house of life-that man was al-ready outside the world of reason, rag-ing with a desire to be outside of every-thing.

The Russian psychologist could not endurethe round prison of the overarching sky:but his alternative was annihilation, andhe chose it.In these stories, one encounters the sci-entific maniac, purged of conscience, readyto kill for the sake of a museums endow-ment; he artistic maniac, murderous whendisabused of his pet fallacy; the anti-super-stition maniac, more fanatical than anywitch-doctor. One encounters, again, thesolipsist who begins to fancy that he is God,and who can be saved only through intensepain:

There is no cure for that nightmareof omnipotence except pain; becausethat is the thing aman knows he wouldnot tolerate if he could really control it.A man must be in some place fromwhich he would certainly escape if hecould, if he is really to realize that allthings do not come from within. Idoubt whether any of our action isreally anything but an allegory. I doubtwhether any truth can be told exceptin a parable.

Lacking forcible parables, we are swal-lowed up by the monstrous ego.Because he ridiculed certain powerful in-terests, Gale himself escapes being com-mitted to a madhouse only through libera-tion by an armed genuine lunatic. The cor-rupt and treacherous psychologists whowould put Gale behind walls tell him thathe is a megalomaniac, expressing himselfin exaggeration. He has painted huge sar-donic caricatures; and so-You cannot see a large blank wall with-out having an uncontrollable appetite forcovering it with large pictures, the mali-cious Dr. Wolfe tells Gale.Y ou cannot see a swing hung in the airwithout thinking of flying ships career-ing through the air. I will venture toguess that you never see a cat withoutthinking of a tiger or a lizard withoutthinking of a dragon.True enough, Gale replies; but the trou-

ble wih his captors is that they cannot per-ceive essences:Psychology is certainly valuable, Galesays to them.I t seems to teach us how to see into eachothers minds. You, for instance, havea mind which is very interesting; youhave reached a condition which I thinkI recognize. You are in that particularattitude in which the subject, when hethinks of anything, never thinks of thecentre of anything. You see only edgeseaten away. Your malady isthe oppositeto mine, to which you call making a ti-ger out of a cat, or what some call mak-ing a moutain out of a molehiI1. You donot go on and make the cat more of acat; you are always trying to work backand prove that it is less than a cat; thatit is a defective cat or a mentally defi-cient cat. But a cat is a cat; that is thesupreme sanity which is so thicklyclouded in your mind. After all, a mole-hill is a hill and a mountain is a hill. But

Therefore Gale pinned a poor self-intoxi-cated curate to a tree during a fierce storm,until the man recognized his own puniness,and that he was not sitting in the sky, andthat he had no angelic servants going toand fro in colored garments of cloud andflame and the pageant of the seasons.

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you have got into the state of the madqueen, who said she knew hills cam-pared with which this was a valley.You cant grasp the thing called athing. Nothing for you has a centralstalk of sanity. There is no core to yourcosmos. Your trouble begins with beingan atheist. . . .I know what is at the ba& of yourmind, Dr. Simeon Wolfe; and its achaos of exceptions with no rule. Y oucould find anything abnormal, becauseyou have no normal. You could findanybody mad; and as for why you spe-cially want to find me mad-why, thatis another disadvantage of being anatheist.At the end of The Poet and the Lunatics,the more criminal of these two mad-doctorshas set up a private asylum in Wimbledon,its garden very like the splendid groundsof the madhouse in The Bal l and the Cross.But the pretended patients are not mad atall: they are professional criminals, Dr.Starkeys agents, feigning insanity to gainimmunity from prosecution. Somewhat asChesterton the journalist found out rascalsin high political places, Gale finds out Dr.Starkey and his crew. But Chestertonsflesh-and-blood adversaries did not go toprison; they proceeded to higher honorsand emoluments, most of them.The novelettes of Four Faultless Felons

(1930) contain Chestertons last studies inlunacy. The Moderate Murderer has areligious maniac for a foil, and a homicidalbuilder of empire who is madder and moredangerous. Hume, a dominie, averts the as-sassination of the Governor of Polybia byinterrupting the Governors stroll-his in-strument of interruption, in the emergency,being a bullet through the Governors leg.Had the Governor continued his walk, hewould have been killed on the rifle-rangeby the no-nonsense-with-natives DeputyGovernor.Y ou once told me you feared for yourC

family sanity, says the sharpshootingHume to his sweetheart,merely because you had bad dreamsand brooded over things of your ownimagination. Believe me, its not theimaginative people who become insane.Its not they who are mad, even whenthey are morbid. They can always bewoken up from bad dreams by broaderprospects and brighter visions-becausethey are imaginative. The men who gomad are unimaginative. The stubbornstoical men who had only room for oneidea and take it literally. The sort ofman who seems to be silent but stuffedto bursting, congested-.In the same volume, The HonestQuack, a Dr. Judson, endeavors to com-mit his friend Walter Windrush to anasylum, that he may save him from acharge of murder. Judson concocts a The-ory of Arboreal Ambidexterity, expresslyto prove that Windrush (whose life centersround a rare tree he guards in his walled

garden) isan anthropoid sport, not respon-sible for his own actions, because sufferingfrom the rare mental affliction of Duodi-aps ychosis.The result, went on the doctor,the really dangerous result, lies in a ten-dency to separation between the func-tions. Such ambidexterity is not naturalto man in his existing evolutionary stageand may lead to a schism between thelobes of the brain. One part of the mindmay become unconscious of what is at-tempted by the other part. . . .The at-tempt to render the variation ofbranches by simultaneous ambidextrousaction leads to a dissociation of cerebralunity and continuity, a breach of re-sponsible moral control and co-ordinatedconsecutive conservation-.To obtain a colleague for committingWindrush, Dr. Judson successfully buttersup that whited sepulchre Dr. Doone, the

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high authority on Arboreal Man, who signsthe document of committal. After all,though, Windrush is found innocent by thepolice, and the real murderer takes poison-Dr. Doone himself. Walter Windrush isrestored to his guardianship of the uniquesprawling tree-under which, unknown tohim, a murdered mans bones had lain formany a year. Dr. Judson wonders howWindrush can bear dwelling beside the tree

M ac h and Turnbull, entrapped, foundthemselves in the apocalyptic garden ofProfessor Lucifers madhouse; udson andEnid found themselves the new Adam andEve, in the first of all gardens. And Ches-terton, like Owen Hood, was resolved thatsome private gardens must endure. Wrathagainst the sophisters of lunacy-thosepairs of cunning doctors committing sanemen to Bedlam-runs through these sto-now.My dear fellow, and you are the coldand rational man of science, said Wind-rush lightly.

ries: wrath against the devastators of gar-dens.I do not suppose that Chesterton enter-tained any special animosity against doc-In what superstitions you wallow! Inwhat medieval darkness you brood allyour days! I am only a poor, impractic-able, poetic dreamer, but I assure youI am in broad daylight. I n fact, I havenever been out of it, not even when youput me in that pleasant little sanatoriumfor a day or two. I was quite happythere, and as for the lunatics, well Icame to the conclusion that they wererather saner than my friends outside.Privately, Windrush really believes thatthe garden of his Tree is the Garden ofEden; and he is not wrong. The skepticalJudson and his love Enid Windrush discov-er it for themselves:

On top of the once accursed tree asmall bird burst into song, and at thesame moment a great morning windfrom the south rushed upon the garden,bending all its shrubs and bushes andseeming, as does the air when it passesover sunlit foliage, to drive the sunshinebefore it in mighty waves. And itseemed to both of them that somethinghad been broken or been loosened, a lastbond with chaos and the night, a laststrand of the net of some resisting Noth-ing that obstructs Creation, and God hadmade a new garden and they stood aliveon the first foundations of the world.

Gardens are what men make of them.

tors generally; rather, the mad-doctors ofhis parables stand for defecated intellec-tuality in our time-for the cult of Ration-alism leagued with the selfish and domi-neering appetites of men emancipated fromold obligations and loyalties. To his literaryopponents, notably Wells and Shaw, Ches-terton was polite and even kindly when hemet them-being mindful, perhaps, ofAugustines injunction to hate the sin butto love the sinner. His dealings with alien-ists were similar; indeed, he found at leastone admirer among their number.One of the few people who ever appre-hended The Man Who Was Thursday,Chesterton tells us in his Autobiography,was a French psychoanalyst.He made my hair stand on end by say-ing that he had found my very juvenilestory useful as a corrective among hismorbid patients;especiaIly the processby which each of the diabolical anarchsturns out to be a good citizen in dis-guise. I know a number of men whonearly went mad, he said quite gravely,but were saved because they had reallyunderstood The Man Who Was Thurs-day.The world isnot evil; most men, of what-

ever profession, mean ho mischief; delu-sion, rather than malice, is the curse of ourtime, ordinarily. Yet behind the arrogance

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of twentieth century intellectuality, Chester-ton believed, there worksacorrupting pow-er that is not human merely. That samepower employs the consuming selfishnessof the monopolist, the struttingli bido domi-nundi of the unprincipled politician, thegnawing envy of the ideologue. Detestingsanity, this power whispers to men thatthey may be as gods-and draws themwithin the walls of the madhouse.Every private garden-the gardens ofthe spirit, the gardens of the peasant-would be scorched to death by this power.And when this power cannot delude, it op-erates through human pride and injusticeand violence to overwhelm those sane menwho continue to resist. Such is the powerdescribed in the kings vision of The Balladof the White Horse:

The wise men know what wicked thingsThey trim sad lamps, they touch sadHearing the heavy purple wings,Where the forgotten seraph kingsStill plot how God shall die.Those melancholy wise men are of theEast; but the Christian, whatever hisstrength of reason, knows that he cannotknow whether he will fail or win; he goesgaily in the dark, unsure of the end. Nightis thrice night over him, in this time as inKing Alfreds: the enemies of nature are

grown subtle and ruthless. Anarchist andtyrant, positivist and technologist, fraudu-lent psychologist and avaricious oligopolist,undertake his ruin.Unreason and Devastation are the stonyidols of these enemies, and before them themodern crowd bows down. Unreason mayseem fashionably clever, and Devastationhas its charms for the bored and the hope-less. Huddled in a corner of his scientisticcell, often the lunatic detests the light-and would shriek, were he thrust into thesunny garden. It is not Dr. Dryasdust who

Are written on the sky,strings,

can rescue the madman and nurture thegardens of this world; prosy literalness,however well intentioned, cannot redeemthe time; in the phrase of Disraeli, EvenMormon counts more votaries than Ben-t ham If we are to be redeemed at d,we must be saved by the moral imagina-tion, rising out of the historical conscious-ness (the work of The Everlasting Mw)and out of the transcendent truths of alle-gory.If all of our actions are allegories, menmay apprehend reality only through para-bles. Of possible parables, Chesterton-hebeing sane and free--was haunted by theparable of the confining madhouse, and bythe opposed parable of the garden. Themadhouse is sterile, the prison of the solip-sist; he garden, proliferating, expresses animmortal continuity and community, real-ized in time and place. If we burst out ofthe garden, we burst into the madhouse.Innocent Smith, in Manulive, makes hisway afoot quite round the world, that hemay come afresh to wife and children andhouse and garden. But dont you see, heshouts at a Russian station-master,

that all these real leaps and destructionsand escapes are only attempts to getback to Eden-to something we havehad, to something at least we have heardof? Dont you see one only breaks thefence or shoots the moon in order to gethome?His Russian host doesnt see; and thatblindness, Innocent retorts, is why the Rus-sian Revolution has failed.I mean that if there be a house for mein heaven, Innocent Smith declares laterin his travels,it will either have a green lamp-post anda hedge, or something quite as positiveand personal as a green lamp-post anda hedge. I mean that God bade me loveone spot and serve it, and do all thingshowever wild in praise of it, so that this

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one spot might be a witness against allthe infinities and the sophistries; thatParadise is somewhere and not any-where, is something and not anything.And I would not be so very much sur-prised if the house in heaven had a realgreen lamp-post after all.The real world, the world of sanity, therealm of centricity and common sense, ismade known to us through parable; yetonce known, it is a most substantial world,filled with small precious things infinitelydear to the sane man. Men deprived oftheir own lamp-posts may find other usesfor lamp-posts; men whose hedges havebeen grubbed up may be cribbed, cabined,confined. The alternative to the little garden

is the vast madhouse. G. K. Chesterton, de-cidedly a man alive, strove in parable to de-fend the hedges of that one spot which isEden. If those hedges should be sweptaway, we would not find ourselves rejoicedby the elimination of limits. Instead, weshould find ourselves bounded by the wallsof that one spot, forever parched, which isHell.*

Chesterton, M admen, and Madhouses will bepublished in a collection of essays on Christiandoctrine in modern fantasy, edited by Dr. JohnWaiwick M ontgomery: .Vunsoul Revisited. The es-says in this volume originally were lectures in aseries at De Paul University, arranged by Dr.Montgomery.

Winter 1971

Documents

Kirk Chesterton, Madmen, And Madhouses