Reflections on Charity

G.K. Chesterton

This uncollected Chesterton piece was first published in the January 4,

1933 issue of The Listener. // is the text of one of Chesterton s radio talks.
The books which he discusses are the following: Reminiscences of a Spe-
cialist by Greville Macdonald; The Week-End Calendar, compiled by
Gerald Barry; Passage Through the Present by George Buchanan; Our
Mothers: 1870-1900 by Alan Bott and Irene Clephane; and 1933 and Still
Going Wrong by J.B. Morton.

Charity, as applied to humanity, means a more or less mystical reali-

sation of the value and even virtue of humanity; even i f it be hidden
virtue; and it is sometimes hidden very successfully indeed. Now the first
thing to note is that, by this very definition, it is not a merely sentimental
or even a merely emotional thing; as Blake said very truly, a tear is an in-
tellectual thing. The Christian has to use his brain to see the hidden good
of humanity; just as much as the detective has to use his brain to see the
hidden evil of humanity. There is a fashionable way of talking about 'see-
ing good in everybody', as i f it were quite an easy thing, achieved by any-
body who is easygoing. But that is not seeing good or seeing anything. To
see good is to see God; and seeing God is not a casual affair; a very para-
doxical homily has even required for it a certain purity of heart. But my
own purpose concerns a humbler and more practical point. M y first sug-
gestion is this; that people should be charitable to their neighbours by lis-
tening to what their neighbours actually say. Sympathy is always associ-
ated with understanding, but understanding is an intellectual effort.
I do not know how many quarrels among friends or families may be
raging even at this Christmas, because somebody has come flaming with
indignation and the news that Aunt Susan has said this or that; when the
chances are that she has said something which a logician can perceive to

St. Botolph's Church, Boston Stump, Lincolnshire

443
 The Chesterton Review

be quite different. Aunt Susan is not, as we know, the most lucid and ex-
act of thinkers; but she has a right to be judged by what she did say; and
not by what somebody else, in a furious temper, believes may sound a lit-
tle bit like it. By way of illustration, I will even give a case from my own
broadcasting talk, in which I myself enacted the part of Aunt Susan. A
number of critics complained that I had been uncharitable; and especially
uncharitable to Quakers. Now as a fact I expressed no opinion whatever
about Quakers. I said it was odd that the Jingo journalists (the only people
I was attacking) had treated Asquith as i f he were a shuffling Quaker, that
is, a hesitating and insincere Quaker, when he had always made it plain
that he was a quite consistent Imperialist. Now i f you will look at that sen-
tence intelligently, as you would look at a puzzle in a paper in order to
win a prize, you will see that the question of my charging Quakers with
shuffling simply does not arise. I not only never said that there were any
shuffling Quakers; I never even said that there were any Quakers. So far
as the logic of that sentence goes, a Quaker might be quite a fabulous ani-
mal, like a unicorn. Suppose I write in a story: 'Considering that Mr.
Binks was a very meek little man, it is odd that the housemaid should
have screamed at him as i f he were a bloodthirsty dragon.' Do I thereby
express a belief in dragons? Do I even utter a slander against dragons, by
saying they are all bloodthirsty? Shall I have letters from sensitive drag-
ons sent me through the B.B.C.? Obviously the sentence does not deal
with what I think, but with what the housemaid may be supposed to have
thought. That is only one example; but there are thousands of them in the
muddled controversies of our day. Let us have charity to all, to the Quak-
ers, to foreigners, to outcasts of the lowest type, even to the speakers of
the B.B.C. The muddle is not merely due to the sin of anger; that is, to
people losing their tempers with each other. It is also due to the sin of
sloth; to people not taking the trouble to listen to each other, or take note
of what each other really says. M y first point, therefore, is that sloth, intel-
lectual sloth, as well as mere emotional anger, is a great modem foe to
charity.
The next point about charity now very much needed is this: that it is
not only due to other sects, like the Quakers; not due even exclusively to
other nations, like the French; though it is even more due in the latter
case, since opinions can be right or wrong in themselves, but a nation can-
not be wrong in itself. But at this moment the bond of charity is most
needed, not as binding creeds or nationalities, but above all as binding
generations. There is much more danger at this moment of old people

444
Reflections on Charity

misunderstanding young people, and especially of young people misun-

derstanding old people, than there is of misunderstanding about definable
doctrine, which can be discussed, or about definite national demands,
which can be debated. An excellent example of the best sort of survival of
an earlier culture and temperament can be found in Reminiscences of a
Specialist, by Greville Macdonald. Dr. Macdonald is the son of the cele-
brated George Macdonald, the mystic and poetical novelist of the Victo-
rian times, and in many ways one of its most symbolic and satisfying ex-
ponents. It is difficult to be the son of a poet; and few men have ever
succeeded in the profession, in fact, I do not know anybody else who has
succeeded in it, except Dr. Greville Macdonald. His own personal profes-
sion is medicine, in which he has gained great distinction of his own; but
he has contrived to carry on the atmosphere of imagination and spiritual
subtlety, even while quite steadily engaged in minding his own business.
If I said that he has combined a medical with a mystical understanding,
you would very rightly recoil in horror. You would fancy I meant that he
is one of those repulsive quacks who deal in occult medicine or mix up
the sort of nonsense that is called psychological with the even worse sort
of nonsense that is called psychic. But Dr. Macdonald has not the faintest
smell or whiff of these things. He is simply a very conscientious Victorian
with an enlarged imagination not common to all the Victorians. And yet it
is just here that I am afraid of that quarrel between the generations, that is
so much more dangerous than a quarrel between the sects or the nations. I
am not sure that the quarrel is always rightly stated. The old school is
called reticent, but Dr. Macdonald is not specially reticent. Many would
say that he makes too much rather than too little of private things such as
his father's first love or a tragic love-affair of Ruskin. The difference—
right or wrong—is this: he does not treat them as secret, but he does treat
them as sacred. It is possible to have reverence in public, as when the
High Priest handles the sacred vessels at the altar, and that is how the
older writer handled family matters. Yet I can imagine a modern reader
feeling a sort of bewilderment and merely saying to himself that these old
Victorians took themselves terribly seriously. They may have taken them-
selves too seriously and sometimes too sentimentally, but that is not the
point. The point is that, having delicate things to handle, the elders found
it easier to handle them carefully, but the juniors actually find it easier to
handle them callously—^perhaps it steadies their nerve. That is the second
word of warning I would say about charity. Be charitable to your father
and grandfather. Be charitable to Aunt Susan. Do not call her dumb. She

445
The Chesterton Review
Reflections on Charity

would probably tell you too much rather than too little, but remember that
for her you seem to wear a mask of callousness less natural than her mask
of refinement.
The third point about charity is this. In the name of charity, above all
things, we must certainly avoid the opposite error; the pestilent priggish
pessimism of some of the old when they criticise the young. Some of the
young, I say, are serious enough to commit suicide; or possibly frivolous
enough to commit suicide. But those who remember the convivial cama-
raderie of the finest of the old fiction, the revels of Chaucer at the Tabard,
or Shakespeare at the Mermaid, or Johnson at the Cock, or Pickwick at
the George and Vulture, ought to be the first to realise that there is an ex-
tremely good convivial literature being produced now; in things like the
well-known Week-End Book, and a most amusing extension of it com-
piled by M r . Gerald Barry f r o m the contributions to the Week-End
Review. It is called The Week-End Calendar, and contains a mass of
amusing things; fehcitously pat and still more felicitously patchy. It is in-
vidious to pick out a patch in such a quilt of quaint colours; but I should
like to draw attention to the perfectly superb essay by my friend Mr. E.G.
Bentley, on the grave historical researches which led him to the original
discovery, forever to be associated with his name, that:
Sir Humphry Davy
Detested gravy;
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.
This little essay is as good as his whole book of Biography for Beginners,
and that is saying a great deal.
Then there is another sort of scrapbook, which perhaps needs a little
more of the active and discriminating sort of charity; because it is a patch-
work of opinions, some of which we may accept and some reject. But
there are a number of very sincere, interesting and arresting books of this
kind being published just now. Perhaps that patchy quality, as in a jazz
pattern, prevents the thought from being so coherent as I , in my anti-
quated way, prefer all thoughts to be; but such books are well worth read-
ing, i f only to disagree with them. A good example of this type, is Pas-
sage Through the Present, by George Buchanan. The author says all sorts
of things which I believe I could answer in one violent sentence, i f I had
him here to hit; but meanwhile he often drops remarks that stick to the
memory like burrs; as, for instance, that Milton should be read in his orig-

447
 The Chesterton Review

inal spelling, like Chaucer. And then he adds a point that marks one of the
remaining advantages of the poor old newspaper, magazine, or even the
miserable book over that great new art which I am myself at this moment
practising, the art of broadcasting. Whatever I do I cannot convey to you
over the wireless the effect that is produced by seeing words spelt in a dif-
ferent way. Yet that effect, both for brilliancy and for character and for
contempt, is overwhelming. A great deal of the fuss about Dickens arises
from it, and here the writer points out—I mention only one among the
million points of this—that the spelling of Milton is often far finer than
the modem spelling.
I ought to have mentioned, in connection with the quarrel of the gen-
erations, an amusing compilation called Our Mothers: 1870-1900, by
Alan Bott and Irene Clephane, which is quite worth studying, so long as
we do not take such studies seriously. It is a sort of Victorian album full
of pictures of the recent but already forgotten fashions. May I say that this
sort of thing ought never to be taken seriously as a barrier between human
beings. To laugh at the dress of our ancestors is exactly like laughing at
the dress of foreigners or social inferiors. It is snobbish. There was a time
when all Englishmen laughed at the fact that Frenchmen wore wooden
shoes; it was the same time in which a large number of Englishmen could
not afford any shoes. But, while every fashion is funny when it is old-
fashioned, there is something more to be said. The joke is very fugitive in
any case. I f there is one thing we know, as we know that we shall all be
dead, it is that we shall all be old-fashioned. But there are some spirited
and gifted people in history, called satirists. The satirist is a man who can
see that a fashion is funny even while it is still fashionable. There are not
many men of that sort in any age. One of them is J.B. Morton, whom we
all know as Beachcomber; and whose book is called 1933 and Still Going
Wrong, and whose effects are almost perfectly repeated in the very origi-
nal talent of his illustrator, Mr. Nicolas Bentley. For this is the last and the
most paradoxical of all the challenges of charity. You, who claim to ac-
cept all men—if you have not accepted the satirist, you have not accepted
all men. You, who say that charity accepts every human thing— unless it
accepts the fighting spirit, it does not accept every human thing. That is
the great gap in nearly all schemes of peace and reconciliation; I will not
be so incautious as to allude again to the Quakers, or even the Hindoos.
But I think we may take it as essential to every great religion that it must
contain in its idea of charity the idea of the capacity for scom and indig-
nation. Otherwise it will not be completely human, and therefore not com-

448
Reflections on Charity

pletely divine. Even at Christmas we should not be Christian i f we did not

know the difference between St. George and the Dragon. You see we had
to bring in dragons after all.

A lane near Bredon Village

449