The Correspondence between the Author and Mr. G. G. Coulton

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THE CORRESPONDENCE between

The Author and Mr. G. G. Coulton

MR. CHESTERTON’S HISTORY Mr. G. G. CouLTON

Mr. Chesterton lectured to us on Monday night upon “The Superstitions of the Sceptic.’”” When requested to give medieval evidence for what he implied about the Middle Ages, he replied that it was the questioner’s business to produce that evidence, and promised that he would meet this as publicly as it might be produced. I will therefore print as much as the Editor’s space allows. I need not here give references; having done so in other volumes ad libitum or (as unfriendly critics might say) ad nauseam; 1 may fairly throw upon Mr. Chesterton the onus of contradicting my assertions and calling for further proof, at the risk of further exposing himself by such contradictions.

He told us, with regard to the Reformation: “One result of cutting Joose is that you chain yourself more completely. The reformers entered into prisons of their own.... The English people entered the prison of Puritanism.... I could say a vast deal about the Puritans [but I don’t want to spend my time abusing them]. I am trying here to trace a rather curious course of events.... It puzzles me to trace this course of events [in the history of Puritanism].”

I took down these words, I think I may safely claim, verbatim, except those in brackets, which I had only time to paraphrase.

Questions were invited, and these references to Puritanism, chosen from among others which invited almost equally direct historical criticism, formed the subject of discussion. Mr. Chesterton was asked whether he could specify a single point in seventeenth century Puritanism (apart from the doctrine of Predestination, upon which Puritans themselves often differed) which was not also orthodox in the Middle Ages. The reply, which was not easy to follow, implied that monks and ascetics were the only orthodox medieval Puritans; that general Church teaching was free then from all Puritanical taint; and especially that the Middle Ages were ages of dance and innocent mirth. It is with that presentment that we are concerned here. Let us take the typical prescriptions of orthodox medieval Church-men for the laity, quite apart from the monastic ideal. And let us take first the subject on which Mr. Chesterton was so emphatic, and on which, as he said in almost as many words, he was telling his hearers only things which were familiar to everybody who had studied actual medieval records. Let us take the medieval dance.

I know of only two or three exceptional Churchmen in the Middle Ages who make even the most grudging allowance for dancing as compatible with Christian morals. Quite typical is that sentence from Augustine which is repeated from Churchman to Churchman down the Middle Ages, that it is less sinful even to plough on

Sundays than to dance. The friars themselves, though they of all the clergy (except those humble parish parsons whose voice has scarcely ever come down to us) had most sympathy with the village folk—even the friars are dead against dancing. Dancers are anti-christian, a Church of Malignants; they are possessed with devils; they dance to the ruin of their souls. They are worse than the Jews; for these shrank from crucifying Christ on a feast-day, yet it is precisely the feast days of the Church which men choose for dancing. One remedy against dancing is “the remedy of fear and reason; to wit, that we should reflect how this place wherein we are set is a valley of tears and not of dancing, of wretchedness and not of song.” Dancers should be forcibly restrained by their parents and masters; they should be deprived of the finery in which they dance, “as we singe a cat’s skin lest she should go caterwauling abroad.”” They should even be beaten if recalcitrant; it was Eli’s ruin that he did not beat his unruly sons. The clergy have a right to keep them from the dance, “even as the King’s ministers might restrain their subjects from conspiring against the King.”

Mr. Chesterton has evidently never realised how strongly St. Francis’s love of song and mirth at certain moments contrasts, not only with the religious world of his day, but even with the ordinary and reflective St. Francis, the St. Francis who did not run naked about the streets—for by another strange slip, he implied to us that running naked was a product of post-reformation religious imagination, and forgot one of the most striking episodes in the career of a saint whose biography Mr. Chesterton himself has put upon the modern market.

Again, one of the most Franciscan of the early friars (outside the circle of contemporaries who had known the saint personally), is Berthold of Regensburg, whom Roger Bacon commends as the greatest popular preacher of the thirteenth century. Berthold quotes Augustine’s words against the dancers, and only adds as a qualification that folk may dance “at bridals” without sin. Otherwise, they risk mortal sin; he who dies in mortal sin goes inevitably to hell; a sudden heart-failure in our partner’s arms would land us forthwith in a place in which we shall be a thousand times more uncomfortable than if the whole universe were at white-heat, and we white-hot in the midst of it; these tortures will be increased a thousandfold again at the Last Day, when every man will come to his final reward; then they will last for as many years as all the hairs that have ever grown on all the beasts that have crawled on this earth since God first made Adam—and even then, we shall be only at the beginning of our pains. Moreover, as Aquinas and all the great schoolmen agree, the blessed in heaven will take pleasure in the contemplation of these our agonies; not as uncharitable towards us, but accidentaliter, as a glorious object-lesson of the Justice of God.

It was not quite so sinful merely to take pleasure in other folks’ dancing. The sister of one of the greatest Roman saints suffered only fifteen days of purgatory “because once, standing in mine own chamber, I listened with a certain sweetness to the songs of them that danced in the streets, for which I did no penance during my earthly life; wherefore I must now be punished for fifteen days in purgatory.’ But then Albert the Great,

Aquinas's master, is reported to have said from experience that he would rather have been roasted alive with St. Laurence than bear one moment more of the purgatorial flames.

This attitude towards the dance far outlasted the Reformation in Roman Catholic countries; a devout parish priest thought to earn praise from Fénelon for having put down the dance in his parish; in the villages subject to the great abbey of St. Peter in the Black Forest, the customal prescribes: “The parson has the right of forbidding dancing; and when he chooses to prohibit all dance, then every dancer pays a fine of three shillings, be it man or woman.”

In the face of this, and masses of similar evidence, must we not conclude that the course of events which so puzzles Mr. Chesterton is fairly simple? The seventeenth century puritans tried to enforce what the medieval Church had preached, but failed to enforce, often even winking at infractions. Their psychology may have been very defective, but on these points of theology they were orthodox medievalists; they agreed with St. Bernard and with at least nine-tenths of St. Francis.

Let us therefore now put to Mr. Chesterton a counterquestion framed on his own lecture. Can he name a single man of science, who, having gained a great reputation and a rich income by science, is superstitious enough to believe that he could write (for instance) a History of England out of the merest journalistic scraps of historical information? Have not such ventures of faith been mainly characteristic of brilliant littérateurs? Goldsmith’s histories became a byword almost in the author’s lifetime; and they would lie still deeper in the literary hell if Goldsmith had written them to serve a religious sect.

Mr. Chesterton will doubtless remember the story (I quote from memory) of Henry Fielding, who once staved off a few bills more hastily than usual by writing another play after methods even more offhand than his wont. The manager, after the first rehearsal, found the author tobacconing (as our ancestors called it) by the tavern fire, and protested with great concern: “This will never do, Mr. Fielding.”” The author blew a ring, and replied philosophically: “Well, let the fools find it out!’ Then came the first night, and a storm of hisses, and a desperate, incoherent manager bursting in again upon the author, still tobacconising by the same tavern fire. Then Fielding, who had something not only of Mr. Chesterton’s literary genius, but also of his imperturbable bonhomie, blew another ring, and remarked: “So the fools have found it out, have they?” We still read Tom Jones; but that play is probably read, if at all, only as a curiosity in literary history.

G. G. CouLTon.

Nov. 11, 1924.

[From The Cambridge Review, November 14, 1924.] Mr, G. K. CHESTERTON’S REPLY

SIR,—It is a very great honour for a journalist to find his views criticised at all by so distinguished a scholar as Mr. Coulton, and I should like to begin with two apologies to him; the first for the delay in this reply, which was due to my being forced to go wandering in Scotland when his criticism was sent to me, and the second for the circumstances of our too brief public conversation, to which he refers. I am very sorry, but not very much surprised, if he only imperfectly understood my answers; for the truth is that I rather imperfectly heard his questions, which was due perhaps to some acoustical accident, if I may make the guess without being a professor of acoustics.

Mr. Coulton, I fear, thinks me a very frivolous person, yet, in truth, I did not venture upon guesses and generalisations about history without considering somewhat seriously the problem that it raises, touching the inevitable inferiority of the amateur to the specialist. It seems to me a rather difficult problem, with difficulties for the specialist as well as the amateur. My critic has complimented me with a comparison to Goldsmith, and certainly there is more real English history in ten lines of The Deserted Village than in the whole of Hume. But it is the very depth and darkness of my ignorance that discloses the difficulty. I am willing to believe that not only Mr. Coulton, but every other man I meet in Cambridge knows much more than I do. But in that case how inconvenient and incalculable must be my course and progress through the Cambridge streets. I must become a modernist after meeting one man, a medievalist after meeting the next. The man in the street must be wholly at the mercy of an academic priesthood. When the priests quarrel, he cannot even cling to the most learned; for he cannot know which is the most learned without being more learned than all of them. And as there are specialists about everything, it is impossible for any ordinary person to form any impression about anything Even a Protestant priesthood will hardly demand so complete a surrender of private judgment. I have reflected; and I think I see the place of the amateur.

The obscure things, the details and disputed points, the great scholar can always see and note better than we can. It is the obvious things that he cannot see. I do not say this in mere depreciation; I think it is really inseparable from that concentrated research to which the world owes so much. It is the truth in the traditional picture of the absent-minded professor, who remains gazing at a fossil or a Roman coin and fails to observe external objects, such as a house on fire, a revolution, an escaped elephant putting its head through the skylight, and similar things. Mr. Coulton’s view of history shows the same limitations; and it is precisely because I am so much less learned than he that it is my privilege to lead him through common ways, pointing out elephants and other enormous objects. For instance, inferior as I may be in information about the medieval world, I have as much right as anyone else to form impressions of the modern world. And I can hardly trust myself blindly to one who really seems to believe (as does Mr. Coulton) that the field of “science” is free from journalistic adventures, amateur experiments, quacks and charlatans, even as this Chesterton. A man must indeed be imprisoned in the medieval world, if he does not know that the big public event in modern science has been the stepping of great specialists like Sir Oliver Lodge into fields where their foes can call them charlatans. Similarly, 1 can only regard with respectful amazement the spectacle of a capable and cultivated gentleman, walking about in broad daylight in modern Europe, and still quite honestly under the impression (I quote his very words) that the Catholic Church is a religious sect.

The first obvious question is what it is all about. If there is one medieval superstition which I admire more than another it is the habit of our barbarous ancestors of making it quite clear what they were trying to prove. 1 am not sure that I know what Mr. Coulton is trying to prove; and I am pretty sure he does not know what I am trying to prove. In the case at issue, my lecture at Cambridge, he knows so little what I am trying to prove that he actually helps me to prove it. The brilliant specialist is here so blind to the obvious that he does not even know what he himself is doing; in the sense of what he is demonstrating. The thesis of my lecture (if he will pardon the medieval pedantry of logic) was this: that the Reformation was followed, not by the intellect finding freedom, but by its building new and often narrower prisons. As the first of several examples, I mentioned Puritanism. My critic merely suggested, in his question, that there was nothing in Puritanism that there was not in Medievalism, with the exception of predestination. In his letter he merely suggests that the Puritans only applied medieval principles, apparently with more thoroughness. Here, again, he shows a curious innocence about what he is proving. All that this could possibly prove is that Catholics were capable of the Renaissance and Protestants were not; or in other words that the Puritans dragged the world back when the Popes let it go forward. As Iam nota ‘“medievalist”’

but a Catholic, I should not quarrel very much with him for making out this case. But anyhow he has made out my case. His letter substantially supports my lecture. By his own account, the Puritans restored austerity with the addition of predestination. So far from finding freedom, they forged more efficient chains with at least one additional chain; Q.E.D.

Now I have never failed to confess freely that I am ignorant of many such details as my critic adduces about dancing; though I am not ignorant of the way in which such details can be selected and arranged by the most honest partisan. But even by the details as he gives them, that some moralists allowed dancing, that some allowed it at weddings, that some disallowed it on Sundays, I can see that the case was not so simple as he suggests; I recognise that Catholic atmosphere of living complexity that came to be called casuistry. Probably it is what he means by mentioning (though not explaining) the Church’s habit of “winking’’; but he seems to admit that the puritan never indulged in anything so frivolous as a wink. But why did the Church wink? However he explains it, he can only bring out my conclusion; that the schismatics did not find freedom but more constraint.

And now for the general matter. In my verbal reply, which he says was not easy to follow, I merely recited what I should have thought he would have recognised as the ordinary Catholic theory of different vocations; but if he had, he would hardly have translated it as “monks and ascetics” being “the only orthodox medieval Puritans”; or said that it implied in itself that the Middle Ages were ages of dance and innocent mirth.

Indeed, he himself says that this was merely an implication. It seems to me odd that a man should base his whole complaint, not on what was said, but what he. thinks was implied, in a sentence that he could not follow. But anyhow I did not say, and do not imply what he imagines; certainly not what he answers. I do not maintain that medieval priests went about like the new nonconformist preachers, teaching people the Joy of Life. It never needs to be taught except in depressed and debilitated communities. I do not maintain that medievalism was all beer and skittles, or mostly beer and skittles, though I note, as Cobbett did, that it sometimes condemned men to fast on beer and bread. For instance, I should never have expected a scholar to glance at anything so plain and popular as my little book on St. Francis. But I think it strange that any scholar so acute should look at anything so plain without understanding what it says. Mr. Coulton talks as if I ignored the asceticism of St. Francis and his age, and connected him merely with art and song. Having written a whole book almost entirely to show that St. Francis was an ascetic, and not (as his modern admirers suggest) merely a votary of art and song, I cannot but accept this result of my effort with a gentle sigh.

Anybody can look and see what 1 did say about a general ascetical atmosphere that preceded and surrounded St. Francis and doubtless lingered long after him. I compared it to a black cave and a howling wilderness, to a world without stars or flowers, to the fires of purgatory and the fasts that cast out devils; and various other things not commonly identified with dance and Provengal song and sunburnt mirth. I do not see how I could have put it more strongly; and I can only respectfully hope that Mr. Coulton reads medieval books more carefully than modern books. The only difference is that I gave something like a reasonable reason for human beings behaving in so strange a way; whereas he can only fall back on the old unhistorical Protestant method of treating it as a nightmare from nowhere. And that brings me to the vital point at issue. The general thesis I should maintain might be stated thus: “Medieval religion, including medieval asceticism, was totally different from Puritanism, was indeed contrary to Puritanism, and was certainly much less gloomy than Puritanism. It was different in meaning, different in motive, different in atmosphere and different in effect. The two things were so diverse that even when they were the same they were different; as different as a Catholic and an atheist vegetarian when they both refuse meat on Friday.”

What is the matter with my critic’s general view is that it is incredible. It is incredible by a thousand converging things that make up common sense. I will choose only one at random. It is inconsistent with the stark outstanding fact of the figure that the Puritan cuts in history. I mean the effect of the Puritan, as it is felt in life and literature. Men like Shakespeare and Ben Jonson had fathers or grandfathers who must have remembered the old medieval routine as it remained after the Wars of the Roses. Even if the Renaissance had penetrated every byeway of the north (which seems most unlikely) the interruption must have been very recent and very brief. Tradition must still have been full of the momentum of the long medieval memories.

Under these circumstances, if the Puritans had only been like medieval priests, they would have been noticed as being like medieval priests. The tone of the comments on them would have been “Oh Lord, here are the dismal old shavelings back again.” It was totally different. The tone of the comments was “Who ever heard of such nonsense as these new religious people are talking?”’ So Shakespeare’s characters, who accept a friar as something familiar and presumably friendly, will talk of Malvolio being a Puritan as if it were a sort of monster. It is to me simply incredible, as a mere matter of human nature, that people should speak thus of a new thing if all the old things had been exactly like it. I believe that Mr. Coulton has done me the honour to say that I regard history as a branch of fiction. It is one of the talents of the scholar to discover truths that he does not understand. I have read one book of history to his hundred; but I have one advantage over him. I can read a book of history as naturally as if it were a novel. I can remember that it consists of human beings as real as those in a novel. Now suppose somebody applied this principle, say, to David Copper-field; suppose somebody said that Peggoty, being an old-fashioned nurse, had probably treated David quite as harshly as the Murdstones or Mr. Creakle. We should simply know it was not so; because, if it had been so, the stepfather’s régime would never have seemed to David a new and unnatural reign of terror. Nor would the Puritans have been even felt as Puritans, if they had been the same as priests. This is a very good example of what I mean by the invisible elephant; the colossal lump of common sense that seems to be too large for specialists to see. But this is only one of a thousand such things, all pointing to the same common sense conclusion. Why did the Puritan reformers carefully cut out of the old theology exactly those things that lent themselves to a more lenient treatment of lighter weaknesses? Our Lady was popularly conceived as almost illogically indulgent insinuating a finger on the scale in the weighing of souls, saving the drunken monk from the punishment of his folly. They cut her out. Purgatory was conceived as the place of expiation for venial sins, with a background of hope. They cut it out. Why, putting aside secular things, were the colours even of religious things so much more cheerful for the medieval than for the Puritan?.Why was a Catholic prayer-meeting a gayer spectacle than a Puritan banquet? All these and numberless other questions will besiege the mind; but I must not take too much of your space. I will conclude with the fundamental fact that is the answer to them all.

The most obvious of all the obvious things is the world a man lives in. The universe is the supreme example of a thing that is too obvious to be seen; and Mr. Coulton forgets all about it. He said that medievalism and Puritanism were much the same “except for predestination,” as if (heaven help us) it were a sort of parenthesis. No man who says that as a parenthesis understands religious history at all. The man who separated himself from Christendom, to concentrate on his one conviction of predestination, lived in a separate universe. In one sense, perhaps, he was not so much troubled as the priest about sin, because not so much troubled about free-will. But his tone, his terminology, his taste in colour and the rest were more sombre, simply because his sense of sin was a sense of doom. For it is always the fundamental things that are superficial; and subconscious convictions appear in the idiom and the voice. The chasm between the cosmic convictions is far more real than all the very disputable and variable casuistry about things like dancing. Even with the little knowledge I have, I could have guessed for myself that the majority of medieval moralisings would have deplored various dances in various degrees; in what precise degree Mr. Coulton does not make clear, for he seems to be unconscious of the difference between a sin and an occasion of sin. But suppose that, not many priests, or most priests, but all priests had denounced it, suppose (absurd as it is) that the Church denounced dancing as it does stealing, suppose any extravagance along the lines he mentioned... and still you would not be within a thousand miles of the thing we mean when we call Calvinism gloomy. You would not be in the same world with it. A Catholic theologian would have a good deal to say about the dancer who died of heart-failure and went to hell; and the simplification savours somewhat of Hyde Park. But the point is that a Calvinist theologian would simplify it in another and annihilating sense. The priest would only be warding off a blow of the devil in what was (in the most exact sense) a free fight. He would be the very antithesis of the Puritan; whose whole point was that God had made the man and the sin and the dance and the death and everything else, with the deliberate purpose of making the man dance his way to the devil for the divine glory. The Puritan was more gloomy, simply because this view is more gloomy. To D put it shortly, the ascetic only said, “The Day of Judgment is at hand.’”’ The Calvinist really said, “The Day of Judgment is over; let the earth keep silence before the Lord.” That is the Scottish Sabbath. That is what is meant by living in a different world.

May I conclude by saying that, among the obvious things, there are indeed some things that are obvious to us and which we cannot expect to be obvious to him. Every Catholic of course understands quite easily, and from the inside, all the things that Mr. Coulton cannot even on his own principles explain. Every Catholic knows quite well why the huge power of the old Church was in fact felt as less oppressive than the brief cowp d état of the Puritans; why from the very colours of art or outline of architecture a man could tell the difference a mile off; why Catholicism showed a humanistic indulgence long before Protestanism; and why a thousand denunciations do not make one damnation.

But, broadly speaking, 1 will say this. Nobody will ever get any notion of what the Catholic Church is all about, if he is content to quote separate definitions because they sound very definite, and then make his own deductions from what he imagines that they mean. All Catholicism is a balance, made of definitions that correct each other and to some seem to contradict each other. The heretic, such as the Calvinist, is not a man who has this or that thought, but a man who separates himself from others that he may think of nothing else. Thus, if we were to take all modern Catholic sermons about peace, we should probably find the vast majority merely pacific and even platitudinous; very few of them directly supporting war. But anybody who inferred that

Catholics were exactly like Quakers, would have distressing adventures when he got among the Italians or the Irish. The Quaker was not a man who loved peace but a man who loved peace more than unity. The Puritan was not merely a man who had elements of Puritanism; he was a man who rejected all other elements in order to have his Puritanism pure. There might really seem at times to be something Calvinist about a Catholic. But there was nothing Catholic about a Calvinist. Calamity awaits anybody who tries to infer from one dictum, without the balancing dictum, what Catholics are like, instead of looking to see what they are like. We might well take the gay apologue of Mr. Coulton; the little idyll of hell, heart-disease and the dance of death. If a dancer dropped down dead shrieking blasphemies under all the conditions defined as sending a man to the devil, Mr. Coulton (an ardent but ill-instructed convert) would suddenly find himself forbidden to say that the man had gone there. 1 daresay he would be a little bewildered; but I don’t blame him. But there are inconveniences in writing the most learned book about five centuries of religion without knowing what the religion was. Yours, etc., G. K. CHESTERTON.

[From The Cambridge Review, December 3, 1924.] Fr. JoHN Lopes WRITES S1r,—In his article on ‘‘Mr. Chesterton’s History” in your issue of November 14, Dr. Coulton quotes St. Thomas Aquinas as a representative medieval authority on the subject of Hell. May I ask him if he will accept St. Thomas as an equally trustworthy witness to the teaching of the medieval Church on the subject of Dancing? If so, the following passage would seem to justify the careful distinction made by Mr. G. K. Chesterton in his answer to Dr. Coulton’s question on the subject at the Guildhall lecture. Yours, etc., JouHN LoPEs. 2, Round Church Street, Cambridge.

“Deinde quaeritur de ludis chorealibus, utrum sine peccato exerceri possint, propter illud quod dicit: ‘Et plaudebant’: arguit enim hoc tamquam peccatum.

“Ad quod dicendum, quod ludus secundum se non est malus; aliter in ludis non esset virtus quae dicitur, eutrapelia: sed secundum quod ordinatur diverso fine, et vestitur diversis circumstantiis, potest esse actus virtutis et vitii. Quia enim impossibile est semper agere in vita activa et contemplativa; ideo oportet interdum gaudia curis interponere, ne animus nimia severitate frangatur, et ut homo promptius vacet ad opera virtutum. Et si tali fine fiat de ludis cum aliis circumstantiis, erit actus virtutis, et poterit esse meritorius, si gratia informetur. Istae autem circumstantiae videntur in ludo choreali observandae: ut non sit persona indecens, sicut clericus, vel religiosus; ut sit tempore laetitiz, ut liberationis gratia, vel in nuptiis, et hujusmodi: ut fiat cum honestis personis, et cum honesto cantu; et quod gestus non sint nimis lascivi, et si qua hujusmodi sunt. Si autem fiant ad provocandum lasciviam, et secundum alias circumstantias, constat quod actus vitiosus erit.”’

Sancti Thomae Aquinatis In Isaiam prophetam expositio. Caput Tertium. Omnia Opera. Vol. 14. P. 445. Parmae, MDCCCLXIII.

[As this is our last number this term, we have passed the above to Mr. Coulton, and print his reply in the next column.—Ep. C.R.]

[From The Cambridge Review, December 3, 1924.] Mr. G. G. CouLTON REJoINS

Sir,—I did not quote Aquinas as “a representative medieval authority”; on the contrary, he is the most moderate of the great schoolmen, and represents the minimum of medieval Puritanism; e.g. he is far less emphatic than his contemporary, St. Bonaventura, as to the pleasure felt by the blessed in watching the writhing of sinners in hell beneath their feet. And I am glad to see that he shows equal moderation in the matter of the dance; this is distinctly the least unfavourable judgment I have yet seen. Yet, even so, what does Aquinas allow? To avoid sin, the dance must be done “at a time of rejoicing, as, for instance, for the sake of liberation, or at weddings and such like; it should be done with respectable persons and respectable song,” and so on. This is simply abbreviated from Aquinas’s own master, Albert the Great (im lib. IV. Sent. dist. 16). In Albert, it is essential to morality that dances should be “at due time of rejoicing, as at weddings or in time of victory, or of a man’s personal liberation or that of his country, or the home-coming of a friend from some far-off land.” Neither Aquinas nor Albert think of suggesting the ordinary Sunday or holy-day as a time for lawful dances, and, indeed, later Church law explicitly excluded such occasions: “They who dance on Church holidays commit mortal sin,” writes Luther’s adversary and Aquinas’s fellow-Dominican, Guillaume Pépin (Destruct Ninive, Serm. 17); and again: “It is not permitted to any of the faithful to dance publicly on holy-days or Sundays” (Richard et Giraud, Bzb. Sacrée s.v. danse). Again, with regard to the “respectable songs,’ Albert is quite explicit: “That the songs and music which excite [the dancers] on such occasions should not be of the unlawful kind, but songs of moral matters or concerning God.’ There is nothing in Aquinas or Albert, therefore, which a Puritan like Milton could not have echoed; even Joanna Southcott would have permitted dance, with songs about God, on the day when the Bishops opened her Box. Aquinas is, no doubt, in full accord with Father Lopes’ own moderate views, but I contend that he gives no justification whatever for the paradoxes with which Mr. Chesterton entertained us. G. G. CouLTon. Nov, 29, 1924. ®

[From The Cambridge Review, December 3, 1924.] Mr. G, G. CouLTon CoNTINUES Sir,—I find nothing of importance in Mr. Chesterton’s five columns which does not depend upon his putting into my mouth things which I neither said, nor should have been likely to say, unless I had plunged very thoughtlessly into this important subject.

The issue is very simple. Mr. Chesterton insisted on Puritanism as a post-Reformation product; “it was their religious liberty that created the social slavery’’; therefore our discussion turned on the attitude of the Medieval Church towards the dance. Since Mr. Chesterton here complains that “Mr. Coulton does not make clear’’ those degrees of casuistry about dancing which he assumes to be “‘very disputable and variable,” and since it is an academic prejudice at Cambridge that one of two disputants should stick to the point, therefore I crave for space for further quotations, which may possibly entertain some of your readers.

Medieval casuistry about the dance is astoundingly free from variation. Fr. Lopes has printed what, so far as he or I know, is the least unfavourable pronouncement to be found among the whole mass of medieval moralists; yet this goes no farther than the puritan Milton would have gone. The question here is not whether there were good moral reasons for the prohibition of the village dance, but simply whether that prohibition was invented in the Middle Ages or in the sixteenth century; and Mr. Chesterton needed only to look into The Catholic Encyclopedia to realise how rash his own assumptions were. This Encyclopedia, guaranteed by full ecclesiastical licence and imprimatur, does not dare, even at the present day, to go beyond what Aquinas and Milton would have allowed. (Vol. IV., p. 619.) “As to social dancing, now so much in vogue, whilst in itself it is an indifferent act, moralists are inclined to place it under the ban, on account of the various dangers associated with it. Undoubtedly old national dances, in which the performers stand apart, hardly, if at all, holding the partner’s hand, fall under clerical censure scarcely more than any other kind of social intercourse. But, aside from the concomitants—-place, late hours, décolleté, escorting, etc.—common to all such entertainments, round dances, although they may possibly be carried on with decorum and modesty, are regarded by moralists as fraught, by their very nature, with the greatest danger to morals.” Four other Catholic theological dictionaries say very much the same; it is only the three Protestant dictionaries that are really tolerant of the dance. But the most interesting of all is a little monograph which I picked up on a French bookstall: Some Words about Modern Dances, by le Vicomte de St.-Laurent, who claims the support of the Bishop of Bayeux. (3rd ed. Paris, 1857.) He treats it as “‘a matter of life and death for Christian morality” (p. 8). ‘Read Monsignor Bouvier’s Theology; it will teach you that the waltz is a mortal sin in itself.... In fact, when the man is a Christian and his partner also, his hand only leans flat against her waist, the edge of it resting on the flounces of her crinoline. I consider this fashion very immoral, but it is the decentest and rarest fashion” (22—4). The waltz is tolerated because it is a rich man’s sin. “Ye poor peasants, whose dances (less dangerous than this) are so often anathematised by your priests from the pulpit, what do you say when you see this same priest entertained at the chateau, where the biggest landowner in the parish lets his town friends dance and polk?” (34). The poor are saying “Bah! the priests let the rich do what they like, in order to get money out of them to build their churches!”’ (62). And he protests, in words which might have come from a medieval moralist, against the sin of winking in practice at what the Church condemns in theory (57—8). For here is the point at which 1 am least able to follow Mr. Chesterton. He defends “the Church’s habit of ‘winking’ ” at those dances which she publicly forbade; here, he says, “I recognise that Catholic atmosphere of living complexity that came to be called casuistry.” If these words are to be taken setiously, and not merely as an embarrassed debater’s improvisation, then the greatest Catholics of the Middle Ages would have repudiated his plea even more unreservedly, perhaps, than I do. I could easily fill a whole number of The Review with ecclesiastical prohibitions; and it astonishes me even in Mr. Chesterton that he should have had no inkling of these things when he undertook to write social history. Moreover, he seems equally ignorant of what the schoolmen really taught concerning predestination. How can one argue seriously with a sectarian advocate who complacently ignores the greatest scholars of his own sect in those far-off days when it included, with comparatively few exceptions, the ablest and most learned minds in Western Europe? For he must permit me to follow The Oxford English Dictionary, and to bracket his creed with other sects. The fact that he himself prefers to employ that term only as a reproach to outsiders does not really help him; on the contrary, your sectarian par excellence is your exclusivist, who calls other creeds by names which (he thanks God) cannot apply to hisown. However, Mr. Chesterton may prefer to name things, these remain what they are; and he may learn from Bossuet, the greatest Catholic controversialist of all time, that “the worst intellectual a vice is the vice of thinking that things ave, just because we should like them to be.”

He “hopes I read medieval books more carefully”’ than I have read his St. Francis. I never read, nor pretended to have read, that book. I simply pointed out that this Guildhall lecturer, who ignored one of the most startling and familiar events in Francis’s career, was one who had written a life of St Francis. Finally, he protests against non-Catholics even pretending to understand Catholics. In one sense, I grant this with alacrity, and am prepared to go even beyond what Mr. Chesterton postulates. It would need not only a Catholic, but one of rare psychological gifts and casuistic experience, to follow these five columns and summarise their fundamental sense without lapsing into historical nonsense. So far I go; but I respectfully decline to stop half-way, for reasons which 1 have stated on the first page of a recent book of which he has evidently read the title. If indeed it is forbidden to non-Catholics to attempt to understand and describe the thoughts of Catholics, then (I there argue) this “would land us in the logical absurdity of abandoning Mormon history to the Mormons, Bolshevism to the Bolsheviks, and why not even botany to the plants?”

G G. CouLTon. St. John’s College, Dec. 4, 1924.

[From The Cambridge Review, December 4, 1924.] Mr. G. K. CHESTERTON REPLIES

SIR,—What are we to do with a man who is always reading and has never learnt to read? Well, if Mr.

Coulton really cannot recognise common sense as useful in history, I will leave the large ground and meet him on his own ground. Naturally, I cannot straighten out all the details he makes crooked; he must continue laboriously transcribing “moral danger” and “mortal sin” and calling it irrelevant to be told what his words mean. I must keep a straight face while he hovers round a French bookstall, picking up something by a real viscount who thought he was supported by a real bishop in his dislike of waltzing. Lord Byron’s modesty blushed at waltzing; but I refrain, with iron magnanimity, from pressing this point against Protestantism. Our critic must tell his interminable anecdotes, regularly missing the point of each, like that excellent point about popular dances being more dignified than aristocratic ones. I cannot track a thousand errors in a thousand words. But if he demands details, I will take one detail: the text from St. Thomas Aquinas. Granted there are numberless documents I cannot check; but here is one I can check. And if he deals with all the others as he deals with this one, I cheerfully hold myself free to doubt all his conclusions from beginning to end.

This debate arose as follows. I said the Puritan was narrower than the Catholic; I never said a word about dance-prohibition being “invented in the sixteenth century.”’ Mr. Coulton invented the dancing test; and said he could hardly find the most grudging medieval toleration of dances. At the most, he could not find anything more than that. In other words, he could not find St. Thomas Aquinas in his famous medieval library. When that little-known writer was discovered for him, the authority flatly contradicted him. St.

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Thomas does not condemn dancing in any sense whatever. He does not allow it grudgingly. He does not confine it to weddings. He does not do anything that all medievals were described by Mr. Coulton as doing. He recommends it as normally necessary and sometimes meritorious, both in the common and the mystical sense; and that not only as a mystical exercise, but as done with the common motive of refreshing men for their duty. For the rest, all sane men would say dancing should be done at appropriate times and with appropriate people; most would say a Bishop had better not copy the Bishop of Rumtifoo.

When a man uses so general a phrase as “ times of joy, thanksgivings for liberty, weddings and things of that sort,” it is obvious that he means “‘ Don’t be always dancing, but dance on due occasions.’”’ Why say “hujusmodi”’ at all, if he does not mean that?

Challenged by this fact, my critic gave a wonderful exhibition of “an embarrassed debater’s improvisation.” He tried desperately to suggest that St. Thomas can hardly have exactly meant what he said. Apparently he must have meant what somebody else said. He must have been “abbreviating”’ Albertus Magnus, alleged to demand that all such things should be didactic or devotional. But if that was what Albertus said, then most certainly St. Thomas was not repeating what Albertus said. The context conclusively proves it. Whatever else St. Thomas was, he was not quite so inconsequent as Mrs. Nickleby. There was commonly some connection between the end of a sentence and the beginning. And a statement running: “You cannot always be serious; you must have relaxations; see that your utterances are all in praise of God” would amount to saying, “You must sometimes relax; so don’t ever relax.” Moreover, the critic has entangled himself hopelessly by trying to prove too much. If the whole thing was didactic or devotional, why was it improper for a priest to take part in it?

All his arguments are like that; but I think that sample will be conclusive. 1 do not know whether Albertus really meant a theological song; not to mention a theological dance. Was a man to stand on one leg in an attitude expressive of Efficient Grace? But suppose I enquire and find he is wrong about Albertus as he is wrong about Aquinas. Then he will tell me the views of Albertus are not to be found in Albertus but in Anselm; those of Anselm not in Anselm, but in Athanasius; and so on, from refuge to refuge, back to some cavern with a Coptic inscription which (were we learned enough to read it) would cure us of our common delusion that men generally put their own opinions into their own books.

That is his method; for the rest, I never dreamed of basing my case on things only Catholics can understand, save as they are things Mr. Coulton cannot explain. One of them is what he calls “winking,” and I call a sense of proportion; and nobody will be surprised at his not understanding that. I say the Roman Church is not a sect as the Roman Empire was not a small nationality. I like small nationalities; but it was not. I could correct every sentence thus; but I have preferred to clear up one concrete case. Given time and space, I could dispose of his whole tangle of tail-foremost facts easily. - y BE eg G. K. CHESTERTON

48 SUPERSTITIONS OF THE SCEPTIC [From The Cambridge Review, January 16, 1925.]

The Cambridge Review closed the discussion on January 16th. It was agreed between Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Coulton that they should be allowed one more letter each. These letters are printed below.—A.H.J.

Mr. CouLton’s Finat LETTER

The Guildhall discussion turned on Puritanism; I took the dance as a test case, and have therefore stuck mainly to that. Readers must judge whether it supports Mr. Chesterton’s theory that the Church did not preach Puritanism to the people at large before the Reformation. If Mr. Chesterton thinks I am unable to meet the other points he raises, either on the platform or in print, he knows where to find me.

He still relies on inexcusably careless distortions of other men’s words. The Viscount says nothing whatever about ‘more dignified” dances; his words are ‘“‘ less dangerous,” which lend no justification whatever for Mr. Chesterton’s ‘excellent point.” St. Thomas Aquinas does not “recommend [the dance] as normally necessary.” He recommends sport in general, Judus; then, coming to this questionable sport of the dance (/udus chorealis), he insists on narrower limitations than some seventeenth century Puritans would have fixed. His direct master in philosophy, Albert, had suggested only four concrete instances of permissible occasions for dance, all four, by their very nature, rare. Aquinas, following his master very closely at every point, mentions two of Albert’s permissible occasions, and adds, “and such like.” Mr. Chesterton argues that these other like occasions are not like the two he has taken from Albert and the two he has omitted, but must really have been unlike in one important particular; they must have been not rare but frequent; and therefore a sentence which merely folevates dance on two rare occasions “and such like” may be described as “recommending it as normally necessaty.”” 1 am grateful to Mr. Chesterton for his reminder of Mrs. Nickleby.

Mr. CHESTERTON’S FINAL REPLY

I may well depart with warm thanks to Mr. Coulton for confirming my views. It is part of the fun, of course, that he should split two more of his strange straws. The Viscount never mentioned dignity: I never said he did. For the rest, Mr. Coulton argued that even Puritans might permit dancing on occasions that were religious. He now says the occasions named were rare. I say St. Thomas was manifestly not talking of dances that were religious and not thinking of things that were rare. He plainly says we should “‘intersperse’’ or scatter these things through our lives, to avoid fatigue. A man could not avert a nervous breakdown by having been married twenty years ago. Joanna Southcote could not open her box for the first time whenever she felt tired. Mr. Coulton now says that the saint can only mean all the other sports: but if he meant this strange distinction, why did he not say so? Why in the world should he defend a dance which he wished to be rare by an argument that would encourage it to be frequent?

So with his weird evolutions about the word “‘like.” Whenever we say ‘‘Dance at weddings and such like,’

Ly.

there does remain the abstract ambiguity “Like in what respect?” But the most natural sense would seem to be “Like in being ordinary occasions for dancing.’”’ Mr. _ Coulton passionately asserts that it must mean “At certain long intervals of time.” Why?

And now that his whole case hangs by this hair, when even to preserve that, he has to admit an infinity of sports and games, may I respectfully enquire what has become of the old big question which was the only thing I ever discussed in my lecture?

G. K. CHESTERTON.