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The War on the Word
The First World War broke out with Prussian-ruled Germany pre-emptively invading France and doing so by invading through relatively unfortified and neutral Belgium. England, France and Prussia were until then party to a treaty which guaranteed Belgian sovereignty and neutrality. Queen Victoria's husband Albert had been a Belgian prince. Kaiser Wilhelm II, Czar Nicholas, and King George V were cousins; the grandchildren of Albert and Victoria.
The Kaiser's government pled with Britain not to see the invasion as a violation of promised Belgian neutrality, and not to enter the war on the side of the French, promising not to annex or otherwise further violate Belgium. Chesterton, in an essay called "The War on the Word," scoffed that the Germans therefore promised England "on condition that she [England] broke a promise, and on the implied condition that the new promise might be broken as easily as the old one."
Chesterton's essay ends with the quote that starts this thread. It begins by arguing that words, including presumably treaties, have meanings:
"It is not necessary to settle in any argument what a word means or ought to mean. But it is necessary in every argument to settle what we propose to mean by the word. So long as our opponent understands what is the thing of which we are talking, it does not matter to the argument whether the word is or is not the one he would have chosen. A soldier does not say 'We were ordered to go to Mechlin; but I would rather go to Malines.' [I.e., two names for the same city in Belgium.] He may discuss the etymology and archaeology of the difference on the march; but the point is that he knows where to go."
Chesterton is one of the greatest of English writers, and, I would venture, the best prose stylist of the Twentieth Century. His point above applies whether one speaks of international treaties, campaign speeches, or debates on this forum. The subject matter of his writing varied from his own poetry and fiction to the criticism of the poetry and fiction of others, from essays on politics, history, philosophy and religion, to newspaper columns and monographs on Shakespeare and on Catholic saints.
It is said that he published some hundred books during his life, which ended in 1936. The End of the Armistice, published posthumously in 1940, contains thirty-six essays which, almost from the end of hostilities in 1918, predicted the inevitability of their resumption. The essays have such titles as "Prussia, the enemy of Germany," "The Heresy of Race," "Hitler versus History," "The Truth about Tribes," "The End of the Pacifists" and "Torture and the Wrong Tool."
Chesterton was a foe of pacifism, militarism, hedonism, puritanism, relativism, asceticism, Deweyism, racism, socialism and just about any other "-ism" that plagued his day and ours. He famously called himself the "last [classical] Liberal." Hence today he is not simply forgotten - he is studiously ignored. This is a loss to our culture and the history of human thought. His work is of aesthetic, historical, and intellectual value. He is a pleasure to read. He writes about the most formative era of the last century. He compares well to Orwell, Hitchens and Mencken as a critic. His use of the devastating analogy is positively Randian. He is, inconveniently for Objectivists, a convert from childhood Protestant disbelief to adult Catholic baptism. But save for his explicitly religious writing, his religion is reflected in his moral confidence, not in mystical outbursts or stultifying theological mumbo jumbo. If you find yourself disagreeing with him, you will nevertheless understand him, and given his incredible style, will even enjoy doing so.
(Edited by Ted Keer on 7/02, 11:21pm)
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We fight for the trust and for the tryst; for fixed memories and the possible meeting of men; for all that makes life anything but an uncontrollable nightmare. We fight for the long arm of honour and remembrance; for all that can lift a man above the quicksands of his moods, and give him the mastery of time.
