Opening…

Introduction

Chiefly Concerning Sources

THE MATERIAL FOR this book falls roughly into two parts: spoken and written. Gilbert Chesterton was not an old man when he died and many of his friends and contemporaries have told me incidents and recalled sayings right back to his early boyhood. This part of the material has been unusually rich and copious so that I could get a clearer picture of the boy and the young man than is usually granted to the biographer.

The book has been in the making for six years and in three countries. Several times I hid it aside for some months so as to be able to get a fresh view of it. I talked to all sorts of people, heard all sorts of ideas, saw my subject from every side; I went to Paris to see one old friend, to Indiana to see others, met for the first time in lengthy talk Maurice Baring, H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw; went to Kingsland to see Mr. Belloc; gathered Gilbert's boyhood friends of the Junior Debating Club in London and visited "Father Brown" among his Yorkshire moors.

Armed with a notebook, I tried to miss none who had known Gilbert well, especially in his youth: E. C. Bentley, Lucian Oldershaw, Lawrence Solomon, Edward Fordham. I had ten long letters from Annie Firmin, my most valuable witness as to Gilbert's childhood. For information on the next period of his life, I talked to Monsignor O'Connor, to Hilaire Belloc, Maurice Baring, Charles Somers Cocks, F. Y. Eccles and others, besides being now able to draw on my own memories. Frances I had talked with on and off about their early married years ever since I had first known them, but she was, alas, too ill and consequently too emotionally unstrung during the last months for me to ask her all the questions springing in my mind. "Tell Maisie," she said to Dorothy Collins, "not to talk to me about Gilbert. It makes me cry."

For the time at Beaconsfield, out of a host of friends the most valuable were Dr. Pocock and Dr. Bakewell. Among priests, Monsignors O'Connor and Ronald Knox, Fathers Vincent McNabb, O.P. and Ignatius Rice, O.S.B. were especially intimate.

Dorothy Collins's evidence covers a period of ten years. That of H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw is reinforced by most valuable letters which they have kindly allowed me to publish.

Then too Gilbert was so much of a public character and so popular with his fellow journalists that stories of all kinds abound: concerning him there is a kind of evidence, and very valuable it is, that may be called a Boswell Collective. It is fitting that it should be so. We cannot picture G.K. like the great lexicographer accompanied constantly by one ardent and observant witness, pencil in hand, ready to take notes over the teacups. (And by the way, in spite of an acquaintance who regretted in this connection that G.K. was not latterly more often seen in taverns, it was over the teacups, even more than over the wine glasses, that Boswell made his notes. I have seen Boswell's signature after wine--on the minutes of a meeting of The Club--and he was in no condition then for the taking of notes. Even the signature is almost illegible.) But it is fitting that Gilbert, who loved all sorts of men so much, should be kept alive for the future by all sorts of men. From the focussing of many views from many angles this picture has been composed, but they are all views of one man, and the picture will show, I think, a singular unity. When Whistler, as Gilbert himself once said, painted a portrait he made and destroyed many sketches--how many it did not matter, for all, even of his failures, were fruitful--but it would have mattered frightfully if each time he looked up he found a new subject sitting placidly for his portrait. Gilbert was fond of asking in the New Witness of people who expressed admiration for Lloyd George: "Which George do you mean?" for, chameleon-like, the politician has worn many colours and the portrait painted in 1906 would have had to be torn up in 1916. But gather the Chesterton portraits: read the files when he first grew into fame: talk to Mr. Titterton who worked with him on the Daily News in 1906 and on G.K.'s Weekly in 1936, collect witnesses from his boyhood to his old age, from Dublin to Vancouver: individuals who knew him, groups who are endeavoring to work out his ideas: all will agree on the ideas and on the man as making one pattern throughout, one developing but integrated mind and personality.

Gathering the material for a biography bears some resemblance to interrogating witnesses in a Court of Law. There are good witnesses and bad: reliable and unreliable memories. I remember an old lady, a friend of my mother's, who remarked with candour after my mother had confided to her something of importance: "My dear, I must go and write that down immediately before my imagination gets mixed with my memory." One witness must be checked against another: there will be discrepancies in detail but the main facts will in the end emerge.

Just now and again, however, a biographer, like a judge, meets a totally unreliable witness.

One event in this biography has caused me more trouble than anything else: the Marconi scandal and the trial of Cecil Chesterton for criminal libel which grew out of it. As luck would have it, it was on this that I had to interrogate my most unreliable witness. I had seen no clear and unbiased account so I had to read the many pages of Blue Book and Law Reports besides contemporary comment in various papers. I have no legal training, but one point stuck out like a spike. Cecil Chesterton had brought accusations against Godfrey Isaacs not only concerning his own past career as a company promoter, but also concerning his dealings with the government over the Marconi contract, in connection with which he had also fiercely attacked Rufus Isaacs, Herbert Samuel and other ministers of the Crown. But in the witness box he accepted the word of the very ministers he had been attacking, and declared that he no longer accused them of corruption: which seemed to me a complete abandonment of his main position.

Having drafted my chapter on Marconi, I asked Mrs. Cecil Chesterton to read it, but more particularly to explain this point. She gave me a long and detailed account of how Cecil had been intensely reluctant to take this course, but violent pressure had been exerted on him by his father and by Gilbert who were both in a state of panic over the trial. Unlikely as this seemed, especially in Gilbert's case, the account was so circumstantial, and from so near a connection, that I felt almost obliged to accept it. What was my amazement a few months later at receiving a letter in which she stated that after "a great deal of close research work, re-reading of papers, etc." (in connection with her own book The Chestertons) and after a talk with Cecil's solicitors, she had become convinced that Cecil had acted as he had because "the closest sleuthing had been unable to discover any trace" of investments by Rufus Isaacs in English Marconis. "For this reason Cecil took the course he did--not through family pressure. That pressure, I still feel,* was exerted, though possibly not until the trial was over."

[* Italics mine.]

It was, then, the lady's feelings and not facts that had been offered to me as evidence, and it was the merest luck that my book had not appeared before Cecil's solicitors had spoken.

The account given in Lord Birkenhead's Famous Trials is the Speech for the Prosecution. Mrs. Cecil Chesterton's chapter is an impressionist sketch of the court scene by a friend of the defendant. What was wanted was an impartial account, but I tried in vain to write it. The chronology of events, the connection between the Government Commission and the Libel Case, the connection between the English and American Marconi companies--it was all too complex for the lay mind, so I turned the chapter over to my husband who has had a legal training and asked him to write it for me.

The Chestertons is concerned with Gilbert and Frances as well as with Cecil; and the confusion between memory and imagination--to say nothing of reliance on feelings unsupported by facts--pervades the book. It can only be called a Legend, so long growing in Mrs. Cecil's mind that I am convinced that when she came to write her book she firmly believed in it herself. The starting-point was so ardent a dislike for Frances that every incident poured fuel on the flame and was seen only by its light. When I saw her, the Legend was beginning to shape. She told me various stories showing her dislike: facts offered by me were either denied or twisted to fit into the pattern. I do not propose to discuss here the details of a thoroughly unreliable book. Most of them I think answer themselves in the course of this biography. With one or two points I deal in Appendix C. But I will set down here one further incident that serves to show just how little help this particular witness could ever be.

For, like Cecil's solicitors, I spoilt one telling detail for her. She told me with great enthusiasm that Cecil had said that Gilbert was really in love not with Frances but with her sister Gertrude, and that Gertrude's red hair accounted for the number of red-headed heroines in his stories. I told her, however, on the word of their brother-in-law, that Gertrude's hair was not red. Mr. Oldershaw in fact seemed a good deal amused: he said that Gilbert never looked at either of the other sisters, who were "not his sort," and had eyes only for Frances. Mrs. Cecil however would not relinquish this dream of red hair and another love. In her book she wishes "red-gold" hair on to Annie Firmin, because in the Autobiography Gilbert had described her golden plaits. But unluckily for this new theory Annie's hair was yellow,* which is quite a different colour. And Annie, who is still alive, is also amused at the idea that Gilbert had any thought of romance in her connection.

[* See G.K.'s letter to her daughter, p. 633 [Chapter XXXI].]

When Frances Chesterton gave me the letters and other documents, she said: "I don't want the book to appear in a hurry: not for at least five years. There will be lots of little books written about Gilbert; let them all come out first. I want your book to be the final and definitive Biography."

The first part of this injunction I have certainly obeyed, for it will be just seven years after his death that this book appears. For the second half, I can say only that I have done the best that in me lies to obey it also. And I am very grateful to those who have preceded me with books depicting one aspect or another of my subject. I have tried to make use of them all as part of my material, and some are "little" merely in the number of their pages. I am especially grateful to Hilaire Belloc, Emile Cammaerts, Cyril Clemens and "Father Brown" (who have allowed me to quote with great freedom). I want to thank Mr. Seward Collins, Mr. Cyril Clemens and the University of Notre Dame for the loan of books; Mrs. Bambridge for the use of a letter from Kipling and a poem from The Years Between.

Even greater has been the kindness of those friends of my own and of Gilbert Chesterton's who have read this book in manuscript and made very valuable criticisms and suggestions: May Chesterton, Dorothy Collins, Edward Connor, Ross Hoffman, Mrs. Robert Kidd, Arnold Lunn, Mgr. Knox, Father Murtagh, Father Vincent McNabb, Lucian Oldershaw, Beatrice Warde, Douglas Woodruff, Monsignor O'Connor.

Most of the criticisms were visibly right, while even those with which I could not concur showed me the weak spot in my work that had occasioned them. They have helped me to improve the book--I think I may say enormously.

One suggestion I have not followed--that one name should be used throughout: either Chesterton or Gilbert or G.K., but not all three. I had begun with the idea of using "Chesterton" when speaking of him as a public character and also when speaking of the days before I did in fact call him "Gilbert." But this often left him and Cecil mixed up: then too, though I seldom used "G.K." myself, other friends writing to me of him often used it. I began to go through the manuscript unifying--and then I noticed that in a single paragraph of his Bernard Shaw Gilbert uses "GBS," "Shaw," "Bernard Shaw," and "Mr. Shaw." Here was a precedent indeed, and it seemed to me that it was really the natural thing to do. After all we do talk of people now by one name, now by another: it is a matter of slight importance if of any, and I decided to let it go.

As to size, I am afraid the present book is a large one--although not as large as Boswell's Johnson or Gone with the Wind. But in this matter I am unrepentant, for I have faith in Chesterton's own public. The book is large because there is no other way of getting Chesterton on to the canvas. It is a joke he would himself have enjoyed, but it is also a serious statement. For a complete portrait of Chesterton, even the most rigorous selection of material cannot be compressed into a smaller space. I have first written at length and then cut and cut.

At first I had intended to omit all matter already given in the Autobiography. Then I realised that would never do. For some things which are vital to a complete Biography of Chesterton are not only told in the Autobiography better than I could tell them, but are recorded there and nowhere else. And this book is not merely a supplement to the Autobiography. It is the Life of Chesterton.

The same problem arises with regard to the published books and I have tried to solve it on the same line. There has rung in my mind Mr. Belloc's saying: "A man is his mind." To tell the story of a man of letters while avoiding quotation from or reference to his published works is simply not to tell it. At Christopher Dawson's suggestion I have re-read all the books in the order in which they were written, thus trying to get the development of Gilbert's mind perfectly clear to myself and to trace the influences that affected him at various dates. For this reason I have analysed certain of the books and not others--those which showed this mental development most clearly at various stages, or those (too many alas) which are out of print and hard to obtain. But whenever possible in illustrating his mental history I have used unpublished material, so that even the most ardent Chestertonian will find much that is new to him.

For the period of Gilbert's youth there are many exercise books, mostly only half filled, containing sketches and caricatures, lists of titles for short stories and chapters, unfinished short stories. Several completed fairy stories and some of the best drawings were published in The Coloured Lands. Others are hints later used in his own novels: there is a fragment of The Ball and the Cross, a first suggestion for The Man Who Was Thursday, a rather more developed adumbration of The Napoleon of Notting Hill. This I think is later than most of the notebooks; but, after the change in handwriting, apparently deliberately and carefully made by Gilbert around the date at which he left St. Paul's for the Slade School, it is almost impossible to establish a date at all exactly for any one of these notebooks. Notes made later when he had formed the habit of dictation became difficult to read, not through bad handwriting, but because words are abbreviated and letters omitted.

Some of the exercise books appear to have been begun, thrown aside and used again later. There is among them one only of real biographical importance, a book deliberately used for the development of a philosophy of life, dated in two places, to which I devote a chapter and which I refer to as the Notebook. This book is as important in studying Chesterton as the Pensées would be for a student of Pascal. He is here already a master of phrase in a sense which makes a comparison with Pascal especially apt. For he often packs so much meaning into a brilliant sentence or two that I have felt it worth while, in dealing especially with some of the less remembered books, to pull out a few of these sentences for quotation apart from their context.

Other important material was to be found in G.K.'s Weekly, in articles in other periodicals, and in unpublished letters. With some of the correspondences I have made considerable use of both sides, and if anyone pedantically objects that that is unusual in a biography I will adapt a phrase of Bernard Shaw's which you will find in this book, and say, "Hang it all, be reasonable! If you had the choice between reading me and reading Wells and Shaw, wouldn't you choose Wells and Shaw."

GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON

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I. Background for Gilbert Keith Chesterton

IT IS USUAL to open a biography with some account of the subject's ancestry. Chesterton, in his Browning, after some excellent foolery about pedigree-hunting, makes the suggestion that middle-class ancestry is far more varied and interesting than the ancestry of the aristocrat:

The truth is that aristocrats exhibit less of the romance of pedigree than any other people in the world. For since it is their principle to marry only within their own class and mode of life, there is no opportunity in their case for any of the more interesting studies in heredity; they exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of the lower animals. It is in the middle classes that we find the poetry of genealogy; it is the suburban grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash of Eastern or Celtic blood may drive suddenly to a whole holiday or a crime.

This may provide fun for a guessing game but is not very useful to a biographer. The Chesterton family, like many another, had had the ups and downs in social position that accompany the ups and downs of fortune. Upon all this Edward Chesterton, Gilbert's father, as head of the family possessed many interesting documents. After his death, Gilbert's mother left his papers undisturbed. But when she died Gilbert threw away, without examination, most of the contents of his father's study, including all family records. Thus I cannot offer any sort of family tree. But it is possible to show the kind of family and the social atmosphere into which Gilbert Chesterton was born.

Some of the relatives say that the family hailed from the village of Chesterton--now merged into Cambridge, of which they were Lords of the Manor, but Gilbert refused to take this seriously. In an introduction to a book called Life in Old Cambridge, he wrote:

I have never been to Cambridge except as an admiring visitor; I have never been to Chesterton at all, either from a sense of unworthiness or from a faint superstitious feeling that I might be fulfilling a prophecy in the countryside. Anyone with a sense of the savour of the old English country rhymes and tales will share my vague alarm that the steeple might crack or the market cross fall down, for a smaller thing than the coincidence of a man named Chesterton going to Chesterton.

At the time of the Regency, the head of the family was a friend of the Prince's and (perhaps as a result of such company) dissipated his fortunes in riotous living and incurred various terms of imprisonment for debt. From his debtors' prisons he wrote letters, and sixty years later Mr. Edward Chesterton used to read them to his family: as also those of another interesting relative, Captain George Laval Chesterton, prison reformer and friend of Mrs. Fry and of Charles Dickens. A relative recalls the sentence: "I cried, Dickens cried, we all cried," which makes one rather long for the rest of the letter.

George Laval Chesterton left two books, one a kind of autobiography, the other a work on prison reform. It was a moment of enthusiasm for reform, of optimism and of energy. Dickens was stirring the minds of Englishmen to discover the evils in their land and rush to their overthrow. Darwin was writing his Origin of Species, which in some curious way increased the hopeful energy of his countrymen: they seemed to feel it much more satisfying to have been once animal and have become human than to be fallen gods who could again be made divine. Anyhow, there were giants in those days and it was hope that made them so.

When by an odd confusion the Tribune described G. K. Chesterton as having been born about the date that Captain Chesterton published his books, he replied in a ballade which at once saluted and attacked:

I am not fond of anthropoids as such, I never went to Mr. Darwin's school, Old Tyndall's ether, that he liked so much Leaves me, I fear, comparatively cool. I cannot say my heart with hope is full Because a donkey, by continual kicks, Turns slowly into something like a mule-- I was not born in 1856.

Age of my fathers: truer at the touch Than mine: Great age of Dickens, youth and yule: Had your strong virtues stood without a crutch, I might have deemed man had no need of rule, But I was born when petty poets pule, When madmen used your liberty to mix Lucre and lust, bestial and beautiful, I was not born in 1856.*

[* Quoted in G. K. Chesterton: A criticism. Aliston Rivers (1908) pp. 243-244.]

Both Autobiography and Prison Life are worth reading.* They breathe the "Great Gusto" seen by Gilbert in that era. He does not quote them in his Autobiography, but, just mentioning Captain Chesterton, dwells chiefly on his grandfather, who, while George Laval Chesterton was fighting battles and reforming prisons, had succeeded to the headship of a house agents' business in Kensington. (For, the family fortunes having been dissipated, Gilbert's great-grandfather had become first a coal merchant and then a house agent.) A few of the letters between this ancestor and his son remain and they are interesting, confirming Gilbert's description in the Autobiography of his grandfather's feeling that he himself was something of a landmark in Kensington and that the family business was honourable and important.

[* See Appendix A.]

The Chestertons, whatever the ups and downs of their past history, were by now established in that English middle-class respectability in which their son was to discover--or into which he was to bring--a glow and thrill of adventurous romance. Edward Chesterton, Gilbert's father, belonged to a serious family and a serious generation, which took its work as a duty and its profession as a vocation. I wonder what young house-agent today, just entering the family business, would receive a letter from his father adjuring him to "become an active steady and honourable man of business," speaking of "abilities which only want to be judiciously brought out, of course assisted with your earnest co-operation."

Gilbert's mother was Marie Grosjean, one of a family of twenty-three children. The family had long been English, but came originally from French Switzerland. Marie's mother was from an Aberdeen family of Keiths, which gave Gilbert his second name and a dash of Scottish blood which "appealed strongly to my affections and made a sort of Scottish romance in my childhood." Marie's father, whom Gilbert never saw, had been "one of the old Wesleyan lay-preachers and was thus involved in public controversy, a characteristic which has descended to his grandchild. He was also one of the leaders of the early Teetotal movement, a characteristic which has not."*

[* Autobiography, pp. 11-12.]

When Edward became engaged to Marie Grosjean he complained that his "dearest girl" would not believe that he had any work to do, but he was in fact much occupied and increasingly responsible for the family business.

There is a flavour of a world very remote from ours in the packet of letters between the two and from their various parents, aunts and sisters to one another during their engagement. Edward illuminates poems "for a certaln dear good little child," sketches the "look out from home" for her mother, hopes they did not appear uncivil in wandering into the garden together at an aunt's house and leaving the rest of the company for too long. He praises a friend of hers as "intellectual and unaffected, two excellent things in woman," describes a clerk sent to France with business papers who "lost them all, the careless dog, except the Illustrated London News."

A letter to Marie from her sister Harriette is amusing. She describes her efforts at entertaining in the absence of her mother. The company were "great swells" so that her brother "took all the covers of the chairs himself and had the wine iced and we dined in full dress--it was very awful--considering myself as hostess." Poor girl, it was a series of misfortunes. "The dinner was three-quarters of an hour late, the fish done to rags." She had hired three dozen wine-glasses to be sure of enough, but they were "brought in in twos and threes at a time and then a hiatus as if they were being washed which they were not."

In the letters from parents and older relatives religious observances are taken for granted and there is an obvious sincerity in the many allusions to God's will and God's guidance of human life. No one reading them could doubt that the description of a dying relative as "ready for the summons" and to "going home" is a sincere one. Other letters, notably Harriette's, do not lack a spice of malice in speaking of those whose religion was unreal and affected--a phenomenon that only appears in an age when real religion abounds.

Doubtless her generation was beginning to see Christianity with less than the simplicity of their parents. They were hearing of Darwin and Spencer, and the optimism which accompanied the idea of evolution was turning religion into a vague glow which would, they felt, survive the somewhat childish dogmas in which our rude ancestors had tried to formulate it. But with an increased vagueness went also, with the more liberal--and the Chestertons were essentially liberal both politically and theologically--an increased tolerance. In several of his letters, Edward Chesterton mentions the Catholic Church, and certainly with no dislike. He went on one occasion to hear Manning preach and much admired the sermon, although he notes too that he found in it "no distinctively Roman Catholic doctrine." He belonged, however, to an age that on the whole found the rest of life more exciting and interesting than religion, an age that had kept the Christian virtues and still believed that these virtues could stand alone, without the support of the Christian creed.

The temptation to describe dresses has always to be sternly resisted when dealing with any part of the Victorian era, so merely pausing to note that it seems to have been a triumph on the part of Mrs. Grosjean to have cut a short skirt out of 8½ yards of material, I reluctantly lay aside the letters at the time when Edward Chesterton and Marie were married and had set about living happily ever after.

These two had no fear of life: they belonged to a generation which cheerfully created a home and brought fresh life into being. In doing it, they did a thousand other things, so that the home they made was full of vital energies for the children who were to grow up in it. Gilbert recollects his father as a man of a dozen hobbies, his study as a place where these hobbies formed strata of exciting products, awakening youthful covetousness in the matter of a new paint-box, satisfying youthful imagination by the production of a toy-theatre. His character, serene and humorous as his son describes him, is reflected in his letters. Edward Chesterton did not use up his mental powers in the family business. Taught by his father to be a good man of business, he was in his private life a man of a thousand other energies and ideas. "On the whole," says his son, "I am glad he was never an artist. It might have stood in his way in becoming an amateur. It might have spoilt his career; his private career. He could never have made a vulgar success of all the thousand things be did so successfully."

Here, Gilbert sees a marked distinction between that generation of business men and the present in the use of leisure; he sees hobbies as superior to sport. "The old-fashioned Englishman, like my father, sold houses for his living but filled his own house with his life. A hobby is not merely a holiday. . . . It is not merely exercising the body instead of the mind, an excellent but now largely a recognised thing. It is exercising the rest of the mind; now an almost neglected thing." Edward Chesterton practised "water-colour painting and modelling and photography and stained glass and fretwork and magic lanterns and mediaeval illumination." And, moreover, "knew all his English literature backwards."

It has become of late the fashion for any one who writes of his own life to see himself against a dark background, to see his development frustrated by some shadow of heredity or some horror of environment. But Gilbert saw his life rather as the ancients saw it when pietas was a duty because we had received so much from those who brought us into being. This Englishman was grateful to his country, to his parents, to his home for all that they had given him.

I regret that I have no gloomy and savage father to offer to the public gaze as the true cause of all my tragic heritage; no pale-faced and partially poisoned mother whose suicidal instincts have cursed me with the temptations of the artistic temperament. I regret that there was nothing in the range of our family much more racy than a remote and mildly impecunious uncle; and that I cannot do my duty as a true modern, by cursing everybody who made me whatever I am. I am not clear about what that is; but I am pretty sure that most of it is my own fault. And I am compelled to confess that I look back to that landscape of my first days with a pleasure that should doubtless be reserved for the Utopias of the Futurist.*

[* G. K. Chesterton. Autobiography, pp. 22-3.]

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II. Childhood

GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON was born on May 29, 1874 at a house in Sheffield Terrace, Campden Hill, just below the great tower of the Waterworks which so much impressed his childish imagination. Lower down the hill was the Anglican Church of St. George, and here he was baptised. When he was about five, the family moved to Warwick Gardens. As old-fashioned London houses go, 11 Warwick Gardens is small. On the ground floor, a back and front room were for the Chestertons drawing-room and dining-room with a folding door between, the only other sitting-room being a small study built out over the garden. A long, narrow, green strip, which must have been a good deal longer before a row of garages was built at the back, was Gilbert's playground. His bedroom was a long room at the top of a not very high house. For what is in most London houses the drawing-room floor is in this house filled by two bedrooms and there is only one floor above it.

Cecil was five years younger than Gilbert, who welcomed his birth with the remark, "Now I shall always have an audience," a prophecy remembered by all parties because it proved so singularly false. As soon as Cecil could speak, he began to argue and the brothers' intercourse thenceforward consisted of unending discussion. They always argued, they never quarrelled.

There was also a little sister Beatrice who died when Gilbert was very young, so young that he remembered a fall she had from a rocking-horse more clearly than he remembered her death, and in his memory linked with the fall the sense of loss and sorrow that came with the death.

It would be impossible to tell the story of his childhood one half so well as he has told it himself. It is the best part of his Autobiography. Indeed, it is one of the best childhoods in literature. For Gilbert Chesterton most perfectly remembered the exact truth, not only about what happened to a child, but about how a child thought and felt. What is more, he sees childhood not as an isolated fragment or an excursion into fairyland, but as his "real life; the real beginnings of what should have been a more real life; a lost experience in the land of the living."

I was subconsciously certain then, as I am consciously certain now, that there was the white and solid road and the worthy beginning of the life of man; and that it is man who afterwards darkens it with dreams or goes astray from it in self-deception. It is only the grown man who lives a life of make-believe and pretending; and it is he who has his head in a cloud.*

[* Autobiography, p. 49.]

Here are the beginnings of the man's philosophy in the life and experience of the child. He was living in a world of reality, and that reality was beautiful, in the clear light of "an eternal morning," which "had a sort of wonder in it, as if the world were as new as myself." A child in this world, like God in the moment of creation, looks upon it and sees that it is very good. It was not that he was never unhappy as a child, and he had his share of bodily pain. "I had a fair amount of toothache and especially earache." But the child has his own philosophy and makes his own proportion, and unhappiness and pain "are of a different texture or held on a different tenure."

What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world. What gives me this shock is almost anything I really recall; not the things I should think most worth recalling. This is where it differs from the other great thrill of the past, all that is connected with first love and the romantic passion; for that, though equally poignant, comes always to a point; and is narrow like a rapier piercing the heart, whereas the other was more like a hundred windows opened on all sides of the head.*

[* Autobiography, pp. 31-32.]

These windows opening on all sides so much more swiftly for the genius than for the rest of us, led to a result often to be noted in the childhood of exceptional men: a combination of backwardness and precocity. Gilbert Chesterton was in some ways a very backward child. He did not talk much before three. He learnt to read only at eight.

He loved fairy tales; as a child he read them or had them read aloud to him: as a big boy he wrote and illustrated a good many, some of which are printed in The Coloured Lands. I have found several fragments in praise of Hans Andersen written apparently in his schooldays. In the chapter of Orthodoxy called "The Ethics of Elfland" he shows how the truth about goodness and happiness came to him out of the old fairy tales and made the first basis for his philosophy. And George Macdonald's story The Princess and the Goblin made, he says, "a difference to my whole existence, which helped me to see things in a certain way from the start." It is the story of a house where goblins were in the cellar and a kind of fairy godmother in a hidden room upstairs. This story had made "all the ordinary staircases and doors and windows into magical things." It was the awakening of the sense of wonder and joy in the ordinary things always to be his. Still more important was the realization represented by the goblins below stairs, that "When the evil things besieging us do appear, they do not appear outside but inside." In life as in this story there is

. . . a house that is our home, that is rightly loved as our home, but of which we hardly know the best or the worst, and must always wait for the one and watch against the other. . . . Since I first read that story some five alternative philosophies of the universe have come to our colleges out of Germany, blowing through the world like the east wind. But for me that castle is still standing in the mountains, its light is not put out.*

[* Introduction to George Macdonald and His Wife.]

All this to Gilbert made the story the "most real, the most realistic, in the exact sense of the phrase the most like life" of any story he ever read--then or later! Another recurrent image in books by the same author is that of a great white horse. And Gilbert says, "To this day I can never see a big white horse in the street without a sudden sense of indescribable things."*

[* Ibid.]

Of his playmates, "one of my first memories," he writes in the Autobiography, "is playing in the garden under the care of a girl with ropes of golden hair; to whom my mother afterwards called out from the house, 'You are an angel'; which I was disposed to accept without metaphor. She is now living in Vancouver as Mrs. Robert Kidd."

Mrs. Kidd, then Annie Firmin, was the daughter of a girlhood friend of Mrs. Chesterton's. She called her "Aunt Marie." She and her sister, Gilbert says in the Autobiography, "had more to do with enlivening my early years than most." She has a vivid memory of Sheffield Terrace where all three Chesterton children were born and where the little sister, Beatrice, whom they called Birdie, died. Gilbert, in those days, was called Diddie, his father then and later was "Mr. Ed" to the family and intimate friends. Soon after Birdie's death they moved to Warwick Gardens. Mrs. Kidd writes:

. . . the little boys were never allowed to see a funeral. If one passed down Warwick Gardens, they were hustled from the nursery window at once. Possibly this was because Gilbert had such a fear of sickness or accident. If Cecil gave the slightest sign of choking at dinner, Gilbert would throw down his spoon or fork and rush from the room. I have seen him do it so many times. Cecil was fond of animals. Gilbert wasn't. Cecil had a cat that he named Faustine, because he wanted her to be abandoned and wicked--but Faustine turned out to be a gentleman!

Gilbert's story-telling and verse-making began very early, but not, I think, in great abundance; his drawing even earlier, and of this there is a great deal. There is nothing very striking in the written fragments that remain, but his drawings even at the age of five are full of vigour. The faces and figures are always rudimentary human beings, sometimes a good deal more, and they are taken through lengthy adventures drawn on the backs of bits of wall paper, of insurance forms, in little books sewn together, or sometimes on long strips glued end to end by his father. These drawings can often be dated exactly, for Edward Chesterton, who later kept collections of press-cuttings and photographs of his son, had already begun to collect his drawings, writing the date on the back of each. With the earlier ones he may, one sometimes suspects, have helped a little, but it soon becomes easy to distinguish between the two styles.

Edward Chesterton was the most perfect father that could have been imagined to help in the opening of windows on every side. "My father might have reminded people of Mr. Pickwick, except that he was always bearded and never bald; he wore spectacles and had all the Pickwickian evenness of temper and pleasure in the humours of travel." He had, as his son further notes in the Autobiography, a power of invention which "created for children the permanent anticipation of what is profoundly called a 'surprise.'" The child of today chooses his Christmas present in advance and decides between Peter Pan and the Pantomime (when he does not get both). The Chesterton children saw their first glimpses of fantasy through the framework of a toy-theatre of which their father was carpenter, scene-painter and scene-shifter, author and creator of actors and actresses a few inches high. Gilbert's earliest recollection is of one of these figures in a golden crown carrying a golden key, and his father was all through his childhood a man with a golden key who admitted him into a world of wonders.

I think Gilbert's father meant more to him than his mother, fond as he was of her. Most of their friends seem to feel that Cecil was her favorite son. "Neither was ever demonstrative," Annie Firmin says, "I never saw either of them kiss his mother." But in some ways the mother spoilt both boys. They had not the training that a strict mother or an efficient nurse usually accomplishes with the most refractory. Gilbert was never refractory, merely absent-minded; but it is doubtful whether he was sent upstairs to wash his hands or brush his hair, except in preparation for a visit or ceremonial occasion ("not even then!" interpolates Annie). And it is perfectly certain that he ought to have been so sent several times a day. No one minded if he was late for meals; his father, too, was frequently late and Frances during her engagement often saw his mother put the dishes down in the fireplace to keep hot, and wait patiently--in spite of Gilbert's description of her as "more swift, relentless and generally radical in her instincts" than his father. Annie Firmin's earlier memories fit this description better. Much as she loved her "aunt," she writes:

Aunt Marie was a bit of a tyrant in her own family! I have been many times at dinner, when there might be a joint, say, and a chicken--and she would say positively to Mr. Ed, "Which will you have, Edward?" Edward: "I think I'd like a bit of chicken!" Aunt M. fiercely: "No, you won't, you'll have mutton!" That happened so often. Sometimes Alice Grosjean, the youngest of Aunt M.'s family, familiarly known as "Sloper," was there. When asked her preference she would say, diffidently, "I think I'll take a little mutton!" "Don't be a fool, Alice, you know you like chicken,"--and chicken she got.

Visitors to the house in later years dwell on Mrs. Chesterton's immense spirit of hospitality, the gargantuan meals, the eager desire that guests should eat enormously, and the wittiness of her conversation. Schoolboy contemporaries of Gilbert say that although immensely kind, she alarmed them by a rather forbidding appearance--"her clothes thrown on anyhow, and blackened and protruding teeth which gave her a witchlike appearance. . . . The house too was dusty and untidy." She called them always by their surnames, both when they were little boys and after they grew up, "Oldershaw, Bentley, Solomon."

"Not only," says Miss May Chesterton, "did Aunt Marie address Gilbert's friends by their surnames, but frequently added darling to them. I have heard her address Bentley when a young man thus; 'Bentley darling, come and sit over here,' to which invitation he turned a completely deaf ear as he was perfectly content to remain where he was!"

"Indiscriminately, she also addressed her maids waiting at table with the same endearment."

A letter written when Gilbert was only six would seem to show that Mrs. Chesterton had not yet become so reckless about her appearance, and was still open to the appeal of millinery. ("She always was," says Annie.) The letter is from John Barker of High Street, Kensington, and is headed in handwriting, "Drapery and Millinery Establishment, Kensington High Street, September 21, 1880."

MADAM,

We are in receipt of instructions from Mr. Edward Chesterton to wait upon you for the purpose of offering for your selection a Bonnet of the latest Parisian taste, of which we have a large assortment ready for your choice; or can, if preferred, make you one to order.

Our assistant will wait upon you at any time you may appoint, unless you would prefer to pay a visit to our Millinery department yourself.

Mr. Chesterton informs us that as soon as you have made your selection he will hand us a cheque for the amount.

We are given to understand that Mr. Chesterton proposes this transaction as a remembrance of the anniversary of what, he instructs us to say, he regards as a happy and auspicious event. We have accordingly entered it in our books in that aspect.

In conveying, as we are desired to do, Mr. Chesterton's best wishes for your health and happiness for many future anniversaries, may we very respectfully join to them our own, and add that during many years to come we trust to be permitted to supply you with goods of the best description for cash, on the principle of the lowest prices consistent with excellence of quality and workmanship.

We have the honour to be Madam Your most obedient Servants

JOHN BARKER & Co.

The order entered in their books "under that aspect," the readiness to provide millinery "for cash," convinces you (as G.K. himself says of another story) that Dick Swiveller really did say, "When he who adores thee has left but the name--in case of letters and parcels." Dickens must have dictated the letter to John Barker. After all, he was only dead ten years.

"Aunt Marie used to say," adds Annie Firmin, "that Mr. Ed married her for her beautiful hair, it was auburn, and very long and wavy. He used to sit behind her in Church. She liked pretty clothes, but lacked the vanity to buy them for herself. I have a little blue hanging watch that he bought her one day--she always appreciated little attentions."

The playmates of Gilbert's childhood are not described in the Autobiography except for Annie's "long ropes of golden hair." But in one of the innumerable fragments written in his early twenties, he describes a family of girls who had played with him when they were very young together. It is headed, "Chapter I. A Contrast and a Climax," and several other odd bits of verse and narrative introduce the Vivian family as early and constant playmates.

One of the best ways of feeling a genuine friendly enthusiasm for persons of the other sex, without gliding into anything with a shorter name, is to know a whole family of them. The most intellectual idolatry at one shrine is apt to lose its purely intellectual character, but a genial polytheism is always bracing and platonic. Besides, the Vivians lived in the same street or rather "gardens" as ourselves, and were amusing as bringing one within sight of what an old friend of mine, named Bentley, called with more than his usual gloom and severity of expression, "the remote outpost of Kensington Society."

For these reasons, and a great many much better ones, I was very much elated to have the family, or at least the three eldest girls who represent it to the neighbourhood, standing once more on the well-rubbed lawn of our old garden, where some of my earliest recollections were of subjecting them to treatment such as I considered appropriate to my own well-established character of robber, tying them to trees to the prejudice of their white frocks, and otherwise misbehaving myself in the funny old days, before I went to school and became a son of gentlemen only. I have never been able, in fact I have never tried, to tell which of the three I really liked best. And if the severer usefulness and domesticity of the eldest girl, with her quiet art-colours, and broad, brave forehead as pale as the white roses that clouded the garden, if these maturer qualities in Nina demanded my respect more than the levity of the others, I fear they did not prevent me feeling an almost equal tide of affection towards the sleepy acumen and ingrained sense of humour of Ida, the second girl and book-reader for the family: or Violet, a veritably delightful child, with a temper as formless and erratic as her tempest of red hair.

"What old memories this garden calls up," said Nina, who like many essentially simple and direct people, had a strong dash of sentiment and a strong penchant for being her own emotional pint-stoup on the traditional subjects and occasions. "I remember so well coming here in a new pink frock when I was a little girl. It wasn't so new when I went away."

"I certainly must have been a brute," I replied. "But I have endeavoured to make a lifetime atone for my early conduct." And I fell to thinking how even Nina, miracle of diligence and self-effacement, remembered a new pink frock across the abyss of the years. . . . Walking with my old friends round the garden, I found in every earth-plot and tree-root the arenas of an active and adventurous life in early boyhood. . . .*

[* Unpublished fragment.]

Edward Chesterton was a Liberal politically and what has been called a Liberal Christian religiously. When the family went to church--which happened very seldom--it was to listen to the sermons of Stopford Brooke. Some twenty years later, Cecil was to remark with amusement that he had as a small boy heard every part of the teaching now (1908) being set out by R. J. Campbell under the title, "The New Religion." The Chesterton Liberalism entered into the view of history given to their children, and it produced from Gilbert the only poem of his childhood worth quoting. I cannot date it, but the very immature handwriting and curious spelling mark it as early.

Probably most children have read, or at any rate up to my own generation, had read, Aytoun's Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, and played at being Cavaliers as a result. But Gilbert could not play at being a Cavalier. He had learned from his father to be a Roundhead, as had every good Liberal of that day. What was to be done about it? He took the Lays and rewrote them in an excellent imitation of Aytoun, but on the opposite side. In view of his own later developments such a line as "Drive the trembling Papists backwards" has an ironic humour. But one wonders what Aytoun himself would have made of a small boy who took his rhythm and sometimes his very words, turned his hero into a traitor ("false Montrose") and his traitor Argyll into a hero! I have left the spelling untouched.

Sing of the Great Lord Archibald Sing of his glorious name Sing of his covenenting faith And his evelasting fame.

One day he summoned all his men To meet on Cruerchin's brow Three thousand covenenting chiefs Who no master would allow

Three thousand Knights With clamores drawn And targets tough and strong Knights who for the right Would ever fight And never bear the wrong.

And he creid (his hand uplifted) "Soldiers of Scotland hear my vow Ere the morning shall have risen I will lay the trators low Or as ye march from the battle Marching back in battle file Ye shall there among the corpses Find the body of Argyll.

Soldiers Soldiers onward onward Onward soldiers follow me Come, remember ye the crimes Of the fiend of fell Dundee Onward let us draw our clamores Let us draw them on our foes Now then I am threatened with The fate of false Montrose.

Drive the trembling Papists backwards Drive away the Tory's hord Let them tell thier hous of villians They have felt the Campbell's sword."

And the next morn he arose And he girded on his sword They asked him many questions But he answered not a word. And he summoned all his men And he led them to the field And We creid unto our master That we'd die and never yield. That same morn we drove right backwards All the servants of the Pope And Our Lord Archibald we saved From a halter and a rope Far and fast fled all the trators Far and fast fled all the Graemes Fled that cursed tribe who lately Stained there honour and thier names.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

III. School Days

CURIOUSLY ENOUGH Gilbert does not in the Autobiography speak of any school except St. Paul's. He went however first to Colet Court, usually called at that time Bewsher's, from the name of the Headmaster. Though it is not technically the preparatory school for St. Paul's, large numbers of Paulines do pass through it. It stands opposite St. Paul's in the Hammersmith Road and must have been felt by Gilbert as one thing with his main school experience, for he nowhere differentiates between the two.

St. Paul's School is an old city foundation which has had among its scholars Milton and Marlborough, Pepys and Sir Philip Francis and a host of other distinguished men. The editor of a correspondence column wrote a good many years later in answer to an enquirer: "Yes, Milton and G. K. Chesterton were both educated at St. Paul's school. We fancy however that Milton had left before Chesterton entered the school." In an early life of Sir Thomas More we learn of the keen rivalry existing in his day between his own school of St. Anthony and St. Paul's, of scholastic "disputations" between the two, put an end to by Dean Colet because they led to brawling among the boys, when the Paulines would call those of St. Anthony "pigs" and the pigs would call the Paulines "pigeons"--from the pigeons of St. Paul's Cathedral. Now, however, St. Anthony's is no more, and St. Paul's School has long moved to the suburbs and lies about seven minutes' walk along the Hammersmith Road from Warwick Gardens. Gilbert Chesterton was twelve when he entered St. Paul's (in January 1887) and he was placed in the second Form.

His early days at school were very solitary, his chief occupation being to draw all over his books. He drew caricatures of his masters, he drew scenes from Shakespeare, he drew prominent politicians. He did not at first make many friends. In the Autobiography he makes a sharp distinction between being a child and being a boy, but it is a distinction that could only be drawn by a man. And most men, I fancy, would find it a little difficult to say at what moment the transformation occurred. G.K. seems to put it at the beginning of school life, but the fact that St. Paul's was a day-school meant that the transition from home to school, usual in English public-school education,* was never in his case completely made. No doubt he is right in speaking in the Autobiography of "the sort of prickly protection like hair" that "grows over what was once the child," of the fact that schoolboys in his time "could be blasted with the horrible revelation of having a sister, or even a Christian name." Nevertheless, he went home every evening to a father and mother and small brother; he went to his friends' houses and knew their sisters; school and home life met Daily instead of being sharply divided into terms and holidays.

[* The terminology for English schools came into being largely before the State concerned itself with education. A Private School is one run by an individual or a group for private profit. A Public School is not run for private profit; any profits there may be are put back into the school. Mostly they are run by a Board of Governors and very many of them hold the succession to the old monastic schools of England (e.g., Charterhouse, Westminster, St. Paul's). They are usually, though not necessarily, boarding schools, and the fees are usually high. Elementary schools called Board Schools were paid for out of local rates and run by elected School Boards. They were later replaced by schools run by the County Councils.]

This fact was of immense significance in Gilbert's development. Years later he noted as the chief defect of Oxford that it consisted almost entirely of people educated at boarding-schools. For good, for evil, or for both, a boy at a day-school is educated chiefly at home.

In the atmosphere of St. Paul's is found little echo of the dogma of the Head Master of Christ's Hospital. "Boy! The school is your father! Boy! The school is your mother." Nor, as far as we know has any Pauline been known to desire the substitution of the august abstraction for the guardianship of his own people. Friendships formed in this school have a continual reference to home life, nor can a boy possibly have a friend long without making the acquaintance and feeling the influence of his parents and his surroundings. . . . The boys' own amusements and institutions, the school sports, the school clubs, the school magazine, are patronised by the masters, but they are originated and managed by the boys. The play-hours of the boys are left to their several pleasures, whether physical or intellectual, nor have any foolish observations about the battle of Waterloo being won on the cricket-field, or such rather unmeaning oracles, yet succeeded in converting the boys' amusements into a compulsory gymnastic lesson. The boys are, within reasonable limits, free.*

[* MS. History of J.D.C. written about 1894.]

Gilbert calls the chapter on his school days, "How to be a Dunce," and although in mature life he was "on the side of his masters" and grateful to them "that my persistent efforts not to learn Latin were frustrated; and that I was not entirely successful even in escaping the contamination of the language of Aristotle and Demosthenes," he still contrasts childhood as a time when one "wants to know nearly everything" with "the period of what is commonly called education; that is, the period during which I was being instructed by somebody I did not know about something I did not want to know."

The boy who sat next to him in class, Lawrence Solomon (later Senior Tutor of University College, London), remembered him as sleepy and indifferent in manner but able to master anything when he cared to take the trouble--as he very seldom did. He was in a class with boys almost all his juniors. Lucian Oldershaw, who later became his brother-in-law, says of Gilbert's own description of his school life that it was as near a pose as Gilbert ever managed to get. He wanted desperately to be the ordinary schoolboy, but he never managed to fulfil this ambition. Tall, untidy, incredibly clumsy and absent-minded, he was marked out from his fellows both physically and intellectually. When in the later part of his school life some sort of physical exercises were made compulsory, the boys used to form parties to watch his strange efforts on the trapeze or parallel bars. In these early days, he was (he says of himself) "somewhat solitary," but not unhappy, and perfectly good-humoured about the tricks which were inevitably played on a boy who always appeared to be half asleep.

"He sat at the back of the room," says Mr. Fordham, "and never distinguished himself. We thought him the most curious thing that ever was." His schoolfellows noted how he would stride along, "apparently muttering poetry, breaking into inane laughter." The kind of thing he was muttering we learn from a sentence in the Autobiography: "I was one day wandering about the streets in that part of North Kensington, telling myself stories of feudal sallies and sieges, in the manner of Walter Scott, and vaguely trying to apply them to the wilderness of bricks and mortar around me."

"I can see him now," wrote Mr. Fordham, "very tall and lanky, striding untidily along Kensington High Street, smiling and sometimes scowling as he talked to himself, apparently oblivious of everything he passed; but in reality a far closer observer than most, and one who not only observed but remembered what he had seen." It was only of himself that he was really oblivious.

Mr. Oldershaw remembers that on one occasion on a very cold day they filled his pockets with snow in the playground. When class reassembled, the snow began to melt and pools to appear on the floor. A small boy raised his hand: "Please Sir, I think the laboratory sink must be leaking again. The water is coming through and falling all over Chesterton."

The laboratory sink was an old offender and the master must have been short-sighted. "Chesterton," he said, "go up to Mr. ---- and ask him with my compliments to see that the trouble with the sink is put right immediately." Gilbert, with water still streaming from both pockets, obediently went upstairs, gave the message and returned without discovering what had happened.

The boys who played these jokes on him had at the same time an extraordinary respect, both for his intellectual acquirements and for his moral character. One boy, who rather prided himself in private life on being a man about town, stopped him one day in the passage and said solemnly, "Chesterton, I am an abandoned profligate." G.K. replied, "I'm sorry to hear it." "We watched our talk," one of them said to me, "when he was with us." His home and upbringing were felt by some of his schoolfellows to have definitely a Puritan tinge about them, although on the other hand the more Conservative elements regarded them as politically dangerous. Mr. Oldershaw relates that his own father, who was a Conservative in politics and had also joined the Catholic Church, seriously warned him against the Agnosticism and Republicanism of the Chesterton household. But even at this age his schoolfellows recognised that he had begun the great quest of his life. "We felt," said Oldershaw, "that he was looking for God."

I suppose it was in part the keenness of the inner vision that produced the effect of external sleepiness and made it possible to pack Gilbert's pockets with snow; but it was also the fact that he was observing very keenly the kind of thing that other people do not bother to observe. I remember my mother telling me, when I first came out, that she had almost ceased trying to draw people's characters and imaginatively construct their home lives, because for the first time in her life she was trying to notice how they were dressed. She was not noticeably successful. Gilbert Chesterton never even tried to see what everyone else saw. All the time he was seeing qualities in his friends, ideas in literature and possibilities in life. And all this world of imagination had, on his own theory, to be carefully concealed from his masters. In the Autobiography he describes himself walking to school fervently reciting verses which he afterwards repeated in class with a determined lack of expression and woodenness of voice; but when he assumes that this is how all boys behave, he surely attributes his own literary enthusiasms far too widely. One would rather gather that he supposed the whole of St. Paul's School to be in the conspiracy to conceal their love of literature from their masters! Such of his own schoolboy papers as can be found show an imagination rare enough at any age, and an enthusiasm not commonly to be found among schoolboys. A very early one, to judge by the handwriting, is on the advantages for an historical character of having long hair, illustrated by the history of Mary Queen of Scots and Charles the First. In the contrast he draws between Mary and Elizabeth, appear qualities of historical imagination that might well belong to a mature and experienced writer.

. . . As in the cause of the fleeting heartless Helen, the Trojan War is stirred up, and great Ajax perishes, and the gentle Patroclus is slain, and mighty Hector falls, and godlike Achilles is laid low, and the dun plains of Hades are thickened with the shades of Kings, so round this lovely giddy French princess, fall one by one the haughty Dauphin, the princely Darnley, the accomplished Rizzio, the terrible Bothwell, and when she dies, she dies as a martyr before the weeping eyes of thousands, and is given a popular pity and regret denied to her rival, with all her faults of violence and vanity, a greater and a purer woman.

It must indeed have been a terrible scene, the execution of that unhappy Queen, and it is a scene that has been described by too many and too able writers for me to venture on a picture of it. But the continually lamented death of Mary of Scotland seems to me happy compared with the end of her greater and sterner rival. As I think on the two, the vision of the black scaffold, the grim headsman, the serene captive, and the weeping populace fades from me and is replaced by a sadder vision: the vision of the dimly-lighted state-bedroom of Whitehall. Elizabeth, haggard and wild-eyed has flung herself prone upon the floor and refuses to take meat or drink, but lies there, surrounded by ceremonious courtiers, but seeing with that terrible insight that was her curse, that she was alone, that their homage was a mockery, that they were waiting eagerly for her death to crown their intrigues with her successor, that there was not in the whole world a single being who cared for her: seeing all this, and bearing it with the iron fortitude of her race, but underneath that invincible silence the deep woman's nature crying out with a bitter cry that she is loved no longer: thus gnawed by the fangs of a dead vanity, haunted by the pale ghost of Essex, and helpless and bitter of heart, the greatest of Englishwomen passed silently away. Of a truth, there are prisons more gloomy than Fotheringay and deaths more cruel than the axe. Is there no pity due to those who undergo these?

It is surprising to read the series of form reports written on a boy who at fifteen or sixteen could do work of this quality. Here are the half-yearly reports made by his Form Masters from his first year in the school at the age of thirteen to the time he left at the age of eighteen.

December 1887. Too much for me: means well by me, I believe, but has an inconceivable knack of forgetting at the shortest notice, is consequently always in trouble, though some of his work is well done, when he does remember to do it. He ought to be in a studio not at school. Never troublesome, but for his lack of memory and absence of mind.

July 1888. Wildly inaccurate about everything; never thinks for two consecutive moments to judge by his work: plenty of ability, perhaps in other directions than classics.

December 1888. Fair. Improving in neatness. Has a very fair stock of general knowledge.

July 1889. A great blunderer with much intelligence.

December 1889. Means well. Would do better to give his time to "Modern" subjects.

July 1890. Can get up any work, but originates nothing.

December 1890. Takes an interest in his English work, but otherwise has not done well.

July 1891. He has a decided literary aptitude, but does not trouble himself enough about school work.

December 1891. Report missing.

July 1892. Not on the same plane with the rest: composition quite futile, but will translate well and appreciate what he reads. Not a quick brain, but possessed by a slowly moving tortuous imagination. Conduct always admirable.

What is much clearer from the mass of notebooks and odd sheets of paper belonging to these years than from the Autobiography is the degree to which the two processes of resisting and absorbing knowledge were going on simultaneously. At school he was, he says, asleep but dreaming in his sleep; at home he was still learning literature from his father, going to museums and picture galleries for enjoyment, listening to political talk and engaging in arguments, writing historical plays and acting them, and above all drawing.

To most of his early writing it is nearly impossible to affix a date--with the exception of a "dramatic journal," kept by fits and starts during the Christmas holidays when he was sixteen. G.K. solemnly tells the reader of this diary to take warning by it, to beware of prolixity, and it does in fact contain many more words to many fewer ideas than any of his later writings. But it is useful in giving the atmosphere of those years. Great part is in dialogue, the author appearing throughout as Your Humble Servant, his young brother Cecil as the Innocent Child.

The first scene is the rehearsal of a dramatic version of Scott's Woodstock. This has been written by Your Humble Servant who is at the same time engaged on a historic romance. At intervals in the languid rehearsing, endless discussions take place: between Oldershaw and G.K. on Thackeray, between Oldershaw, his father and G.K. on Royal Supremacy in the Church of England. The boys, walking between their two houses, "discuss Roman Catholicism, Supremacy, Papal v. Protestant Persecutions. Your Humble Servant arrives at 11 Warwick Gardens to meet Mr. Mawer Cowtan, Master Sidney Wells and Master William Wells. Conversation about Frederick the Great, Voltaire and Macaulay. Cheerful and enlivening discourse on Germs, Dr. Koch, Consumption and Tuberculosis."

"Conservative" Oldershaw regards his friend as a "red hot raging Republican" and it is interesting to note already faint foreshadowings of Gilbert's future political views. His parents had made him a Liberal but it seemed to him later, as he notes in the Autobiography, that their generation was insufficiently alive to the condition and sufferings of the poor. Open-eyed in so many matters, they were not looking in that particular direction. And so it was only very gradually that he himself began to look.

Your Humble Servant read Oldershaw Elizabeth Browning's "Cry of the Children," which the former could scarcely trust himself to read, but which the latter candidly avowed that he did not like. Part and parcel of Oldershaw's optimism is a desire not to believe in pictures of real misery, and a desire to find out compensating pleasures. I think there was a good deal in what he said, but at the same time I think that there is real misery, physical and mental, in the low and criminal classes, and I don't believe in crying peace where there is no peace.

Of his brother, Gilbert notes, "Innocent Child's fault is not a servile reverence for his elder brother, whom he regards, I believe, as a mild lunatic." And Oldershaw recalls his own detestation of Cecil, who would insist on monopolising the conversation when Gilbert's friends wanted to talk to him. "An ugly little boy creeping about," Mr. Fordham calls him. "Cecil had no vanity," writes Mrs. Kidd, "and thoroughly appreciated the fact that he was not beautiful; when he was about 14 he said at dinner one day: 'I think I shall marry X (a very plain cousin); between us we might produce the missing link.' Aunt Marie was shocked!"

Many of the games arise from the skill in drawing of both Gilbert and his father. A long history of two of the Masters drawn by Gilbert shows them in the Salvation Army, as Christy Minstrels, as editors of a new revolutionary paper, "La Guillotine," as besieged in their office by a mob headed by Lord Salisbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury and other Conservative leaders. Getting tired at last of the adventures of these two mild scholars, Gilbert starts a series of Shakespeare plays drawn in modern dress.

Shylock as an aged Hebrew vendor of dilapidated vesture, with a tiara of hats, Antonio as an opulent and respectable city-merchant, Bassanio as a fashionable swell and Gratiano as his loud and disreputable "pal" with large checks and a billy-cock hat. Portia was attired as a barrister in wig and gown and Nerissa as a clerk with a green bag and a pen behind his ear. This being much appreciated, Your Humble Servant questions what portion of the Bard of Avon he shall next burlesque.

The little group seems certainly at this date to be living in a land in which 'tis always afternoon. In one house or another tea-time goes on until signs of dinner make their appearance. The boys only move from one hospitable dining-room to another, or adjourn to their own bedrooms where Gilbert piles book on book and reduces even neat shelves to the same chaos that reigns in his own room.

The Christmas holidays to which the "dramatic journal" belongs came a few months after the founding of the Junior Debating Club, which became so central in Gilbert's life and which he treated with a gravity, solemnity even, such as he never showed later for any cause, a gravity untouched by humour. It was a group of about a dozen boys, started with the idea that it should be a Shakespeare Club, but immediately changed into a general discussion club. They met every week at the home of one or other and after a hearty tea some member read a paper which was then debated.

At the age of twenty, when he had left school two years, G.K. wrote a solemn history of this institution in which the question of whether it was right or wrong to insist on penny fines for rowdy behaviour is canvassed with passionate feeling! One boy who was expelled asked to be readmitted, saying, "I feel so lonely without it." Gilbert's enthusiasm over this incident could be no greater had he been a bishop welcoming the return of an apostate to the Christian fold. I suppose it was partly because of his early solitary life at school, partly because of the general trend of his thought, partly that at this later date he was under the influence of Walt Whitman and cast back upon his earlier years a sort of glow or haze of Whitman idealism. Anyhow, the Junior Debating Club became to him a symbol of the ideal friendship. They were Knights of the Round Table. They were Jongleurs de Dieu. They were the Human Club through whom and in whom he had made the grand discovery of Man. They were his youth personified. The note is still struck in the letters of his engagement period, and it was only forty years later, writing his Autobiography, that he was able to picture with a certain humorous detachment this group of boys who met to eat buns and criticise the universe.

A year after their first meeting, the energy of Lucian Oldershaw produced a magazine called The Debater. At first it was turned out at home on a duplicator--the efficiency of the production being such that the author of any given paper was able occasionally to recognise a few words of his own contribution. Later it was printed and gives a good record of the meetings and discussions. It shows the energy and ardour of the debaters and also their serious view of themselves and their efforts. At first they are described as Mr. C, Mr. F, etc. Later the full name is given. Besides the weekly debates, they started a Library, a Chess Club, a Naturalists' Society and a Sketching Club, regular meetings of which are chronicled.

"The Chairman [G.K.C.] said a few words," runs a record, after some months of existence, "stating his pride at the success of the Club, and his belief in the good effect such a literary institution might have as a protest against the lower and unworthy phases of school life. His view having been vehemently corroborated, the meeting broke up."

In one fairly typical month papers were read on "Three Comedies of Shakespeare," "Pope," and "Herodotus," and when no paper was produced there was a discussion on Capital Punishment. In another, the subjects were "The Brontës," "Macaulay as an Essayist," "Frank Buckland" (the naturalist) and "Tennyson." A pretty wide range of reading was called for from schoolboys in addition to their ordinary work, even though on one occasion the Secretary sternly notes that the reading of the paper occupied only three and one-half minutes. But they were not daunted by difficulties or afraid of bold attempts.

Mr. Digby d'Avigdor on one occasion "delivered a paper entitled 'The Nineteenth Century: A Retrospect.' He gave a slight resumé of the principal events, with appropriate tribute to the deceased great of this century."

Mr. Bertram, reading a paper on Milton, "dealt critically with his various poems, noting the effective style of 'L'Allegro,' giving the story of the writing of 'Comus' and cursorily analysing 'Paradise Lost,' and 'Paradise Regained.'"

"After discussing the adaptability of Hamlet to the stage, Mr. Maurice Solomon"--who may have been quite fifteen--"passed on to review the chief points in the character of the Prince of Denmark, concluding with a slight review of the other characters which he did not think Shakespeare had given much attention to."

In a discussion on the new humorists, we find the Secretary "taking grievous umbrage at certain unwarrantable attacks which he considered Mr. Andrew Lang had lately made on these choice spirits." This discussion arose from a paper by the Chairman on the new school of poetry "in which, in spite of its good points, he condemned the absence of the sentiment of the moral, which he held to be the really stirring and popular element in literature."

Evidently some of his friends tended towards a youthful cynicism for in a paper on Barrie's Window in Thrums Gilbert apologises to "such of you as are much bitten with the George Moore state of mind."

The book which describes the rusty emotions and toilsome lives of the Thrums weavers will always remain a book that has given me something, and the fact that mine is merely the popular view and that what I feel in it can be equally felt by the majority of fellow-creatures, this fact, such is my hardened and abandoned state, only makes me like the book more. I have long found myself in that hopeless minority that is engaged in protecting the majority of mankind from the attacks of all men. . . .

In this sentiment we recognise the G.K. that is to be, but not when we find him seconding Mr. Bentley in the motion that "a scientific education is much more useful than a classic."

"Mr. M," reading a paper on Herodotus, "gave a minute account of the life of the historian, dwelling much upon the doubt and controversy surrounding his birth and several incidents of his history"; while "Mr. F. read a paper on Newspapers, tracing their growth from the Acta Diurna of the later Roman Empire to the hordes of papers of the present day."

Perhaps best of all these efforts was that of Mr. L.D., who "after describing the governments of England, France, Russia, Germany and the United States, proceeded to give his opinion on their various merits, first saying that he personally was a republican."

Of the boys that appear in The Debater, Robert Vernède was killed in the Great War; Laurence Solomon at his death in 1940 was Senior Tutor of University College, London; his brother Maurice who became one of the Directors of the General Electric Company is now an invalid. I read a year or so ago an interesting Times obituary of Mr. Bertram, who was Director of Civil Aviation in the Air Ministry; Mr. Salter became a Principal in the Treasury, having practised as a solicitor up to the War; Mr. Fordham, a barrister, was one of the Legal Advisers to the Ministry of Labour and has now retired.

The two outstanding "debaters" in G.K.'s life were Lucian Oldershaw who became his brother-in-law and will often reappear in these pages, and Edmund Clerihew Bentley, his friend of friends. Closely united as was the whole group, Lucian Oldershaw once told me that they were frantically jealous of one another: "We would have done anything to get the first place with Gilbert."

"But you know," I said "who had it."

"Yes," he replied, "our jealousy of Bentley was overwhelming."

Mr. Bentley became a journalist and was for long on the editorial staff of the Daily Telegraph, but he is best known for his detective stories--especially Trent's Last Case--and as the inventor of a special form of rhyme, known from his second name as the Clerihew. He wrote the first of these while still at school, and the best were later published in a volume called Biography for Beginners, which G.K. illustrated. Everyone has his favourite. My own is:

Sir Christopher Wren Said "I am going to dine with some men, If anybody calls Say I'm designing St. Paul's."

Or possibly:

The people of Spain think Cervantes Equal to half-a-dozen Dantes, An opinion resented most bitterly By the people of Italy.

Bentley was essentially a holiday as well as term-time companion and when they were not together a large correspondence between the two boys gives some idea of how and where Gilbert spent his summer holidays. They are very much schoolboy letters and not worth quoting at full length, but it is interesting to compare both style and content with the later letters. All the letters begin "Dear Bentley." The first use of his Christian name only occurs after both had left school.

Austria House Pier Street Ventnor, Isle of Wight (undated, probably 1890)

Although you dropt some hints about Paris when you were last in our humble abode, I presume that this letter, if addressed to your usual habitation, will reach you at some period. Ventnor, where, as you will perceive we are, is, I will not say built upon hills, but emptied into the cracks and clefts of rocks so that the geography of the town is curious and involved. . . .

My brother is intent upon "The Three Midshipmen" or "The Three Admirals" or the three coal-scuttles or some other distinguished trio by that interminable ass Kingston. I looked at it today and wondered how I ever could have enjoyed his eternal slave schooners and African stations. I would not give a page of "Mansfield Park" or a verse of "In Memoriam" for all the endless fighting of blacks and boarding of pirates through which the three hypocritical vagabonds ever went. I am getting old. How old it will shortly be necessary for me to state precisely, for, as you doubtless know there is going to be a Census. . . .

I have been trying to knock into shape a story, such as we spoke about the other day, about the first introduction of Tea, and I should be glad of your assistance and suggestions. I think I shall lay the scene in Holland where the merits of tea were first largely agitated, and fill the scene with the traditional Dutch figures such as I sketch. I find in Disraeli's "Curiosities of Literature" which I consulted before coming away that a French writer wrote an elaborate treatise to prove that tea merchants were always immoral members of society. It would be rather curious to apply the theory to the present day. . . .

11, Warwick Gardens, Kensington. (undated.)

I direct this letter to your ancient patrimonial estate unknowing whether it will reach you or where it will reach you if it does; whether you are shooting polar bears on the ice-fields of Spitzbergen or cooking missionaries among the cannibals of the South Pacific. But wherever you are I find some considerable relief in turning from the lofty correspondence of the secretary (with no disparagement of my much-esteemed friend, Oldershaw) to another friend (ifelow-mecallimso as Mr. Verdant Greene said) who can discourse on some other subjects besides the Society, and who will not devote the whole of his correspondence to the questions of that excellent and valuable body. The Society is a very good thing in its way (being the President I naturally think so) but like other good things, you may have too much of it, and I have had. . . .

As I said before, I don't know where you are disporting yourself, beyond some hurried remark about Paris which you dropped in our hurried interview in one of the "brilliant flashes of silence" between those imbecile screams and yells and stamping, which even the natural enthusiasm at the prospect of being "broken up" cannot excuse.

6, The Quadrant, North Berwick, Haddington, Scotland. (? 1891.)

You will probably guess that as far as personal taste and instincts are concerned, I share all your antipathy to the noisy Plebian excursionist. A visit to Ramsgate during the season and the vision of the crowded, howling sands has left in me feelings which all my Radicalism cannot allay. At the same time I think that the lower orders are seen unfavorably when enjoying themselves. In labour and trouble they are more dignified and less noisy. Your suggestion as to a series of soliloquies is very flattering and has taken hold of me to the extent of writing a similar ballad on Simon de Montfort. The order in which they come is rather incongruous, particularly if I include the list I have in mind for the future thus--Danton, William III, Simon de Montfort, Rousseau, David and Russell. . . . I rejoice to say that this is a sequestered spot into which Hi tiddly hi ti, etc. and all the ills in its train have not penetrated.

In these last two letters there are sentences of a kind not to be found anywhere else in Chesterton. The disparagement of Lucian Oldershaw's excessive enthusiasm for the Junior Debating Club, the solemn reprobation of the "imbecile screams and yells and stamping" of the last day at school before the summer holidays, the antipathy expressed for the rowdy enjoyments of the lower orders--these things are not in the least like either the Chesterton that was to be or the Chesterton that then was. But they are very much like Bentley. He was two years younger than Chesterton, but far older than his years and seemed indeed to the other boys (and perhaps to himself) like an elderly gentleman smiling a remote amused smile at the enthusiasms of the young. I get the strongest feeling that at this stage Chesterton not only admired him--as he was to do all his life--but wanted to be like him, to say the kind of thing he thought Bentley would say. This phase did not last, as we shall see; it had gone by the time Chesterton was at the Slade School.

6, The Quadrant, North Berwick Haddington, Scotland. (undated, probably 1891.)

DEAR BENTLEY,

We have been here three days and my brother loudly murmurs that we have not yet seen any of "the sights." For my part I abominate sights, and all people who want to look at them. A great deal more instruction, to say nothing of pleasure is to be got out of the nearest haystack or hedgerow taken quietly, than in trotting over two or three counties to see "the view" or "the site" or the extraordinary cliff or the unusual tower or the unreasonable hill or any other monstrosity deforming the face of Nature. Anybody can make sights but nobody has yet succeeded in making scenery. (Excuse the unaccountable pencil drawing in the middle which was drawn unconsciously on the back of the unfinished letter.) . . .

9, South Terrace, Littlehampton, Sussex. (undated.)

. . . I agree with you in your admiration for Paradise Lost, but consider it on the whole too light and childish a book for persons of our age. It is all very well, as small children to read pretty stories about Satan and Belial, when we have only just mastered our "Oedipus" and our Herbert Spencer, but when we grow older we get to like Captain Marryat and Mr. Kingston and when we are men we know that Cinderella is much better than any of those babyish books. As regards one question which you asked, I may remark that the children of Israel [presumably the Solomons] have not gone unto Horeb, neither unto Sittim, but unto the land that is called Shropshire they went, and abode therein. And they came unto a city, even unto the city that is called Shrewsbury, and there they builded themselves an home, where they might abide. And their home was in the land that was called Castle Street and their home was the 25th tabernacle in that land. And they abode with certain of their own kin until their season be over and gone. And lo! they spake unto me by letter, saying, "Heard ye aught of him that is called Bentley? Is he in the house of his fathers or has he come unto a strange land?" Here endeth the 2nd Lesson.

Hotel de Lille & d'Albion, 223, Rue St. Honoré, Paris. (undated, probably 1892.)

. . . They showed us over the treasures of the Cathedral, among which, as was explained by the guide, who spoke a little English, was a cross given by Louis XIV to "Meess" Lavallière. I thought that concession to the British system of titles was indeed touching. I also thought, when reflecting what the present was, and where it was and then to whom it was given, that this showed pretty well what the religion of the Bourbon regime was and why it has become impossible since the Revolution.

Grand Hotel du Chemin de Fer, Arromanches (Calvados) (undated)

. . . Art is universal. This remark is not so irrelevant and Horace Greeley-like as it may appear. I have just had a demonstration of its truth on the coach coming down here. Two very nice little French boys of cropped hair and restless movements were just in front of us and my pater having discovered that the book they had with them was a prize at a Paris school, some slight conversation arose. Not thinking my French altogether equal to a prolonged interview, I took out a scrap of paper and began, with a fine carelessness to draw a picture of Napoleon I, hat, chin, attitude, all complete. This, of course, was gazed at rapturously by these two young inheritors of France's glory and it ended in my drawing them unlimited goblins to keep for the remainder of the interview.

In May 1891, the Chairman of the J.D.C. attained the maturity of seventeen.

The Secretary then rose and in a speech in which he extolled the merits of the Chairman as a chairman, and mentioned the benefit which the Junior Debating Club received on the day of which this was the anniversary, viz., the natal day of Mr. Chesterton, proposed that a vote wishing him many happy returns of the day and a long continuance in the Chair of the Club should be passed. This was carried with acclamations. The Chairman replied after restoring Order. . . .

Naturally this question of order among a crowd of boys loomed large. At the beginning a number of rules were passed giving great powers to the Chairman, "which that gentleman," he says of himself, "lenient by temperament and republican by principles, certainly would never have put in force. . . . It was seldom enough," he continues:

that a boy of fifteen* found himself in the position of the Chairman, an attitude of command and responsibility over a body of his friends and equals, and it was not to be expected that they would easily take to the state of things. Nor was the Chairman himself, like the Secretary, protected and armed by any personal aptitude for practical proceedings. But solely by the certain degree of respect entertained for his character and acquirements. This respect, sincere and even excessive as it frequently was, contrasted somewhat humorously with the common inattention to questions of order, nor could anything be more noisy than the loyalty of Fordham and Langdon Davies, with the exception of their interruptions. It may then fairly be said that the troubles and discussions of the first months of the Club's existence centred practically round the question of order, the first of the great difficulties of this most difficult enterprise. How boys who could scarcely be got to behave quietly under the strictest schoolmasters could ever be brought to obey the rebuke of their equal and schoolfellow: how a heterogeneous pack of average schoolboys could organise themselves into a self-governing republic, these were problems of real and stupendous difficulty. The fines of a penny and of twopence, which were instituted at the first meeting, were found hopelessly incompetent to cope with the bursts of oblivious hilarity. Fordham in particular, whose constant breaches of order threatened to exhaust even the extensive treasury of that spoilt and opulent young gentleman, soon left calculation far behind, nor can the story be better or more brightly told than by himself. "Mr. F.," he wrote, "at one time, after considerable calculation found that he was in debt to the extent of some 10 or 11 shillings; but as he felt that by refusing to pay the sum he would be striking a blow for the liberty of the subject, he manfully held out against what he considered an unjust punishment for such diminutive frivolities as he had indulged in." . . . At times incidents of a disturbing and playful nature have roused the wrath of the Chairman and Secretary to a pitch awful to behold. At one time Mr. H. (a member who soon resigned) spent a considerable part of a meeting under the table, till he found himself used as a public footstool and a doormat combined. At another as Mr. Bentley was departing from the scene of chaos a penny bun of the sticky order caressingly stung his honoured cheek, sped upon its errand of mercy by the unerring aim of Mr. F.**

[* He was, in fact, sixteen when the J.D.C. began.]

[** MS. History of the J.D.C.]

Mr. Fordham well remembers how G.K. one day took him aside at the Oldershaws' house and told him that he really must be less exuberant. This historic occasion was always alluded to later as "the day on which the Chairman spoke seriously to Mr. F."

After various resignations order was restored, and a little later two of the chief recalcitrants asked to be received back into the Club. "I feel so lonely without it," one of them had remarked; and G.K. comments, "This has always appeared to the present writer one of the most important speeches in the history of the Club. . . . The Junior Debating Club had come through its moments of difficulty and was a fact and an establishment."

Nor was the circulation of The Debater long confined to members of the Club and their own circle of friends and relatives. Some of the boys had no doubt a regular allowance, but probably a small one. Gilbert himself says in his diary that he had no income "except errant sixpences." And printers' bills had to be paid. Moreover in the first number the editor Lucian Oldershaw confessed frankly that one reason for the paper's existence was "that the Society may not degenerate into the position of a mutual admiration Society by totally lacking the admiration of outsiders." The staff were able immediately to note, "Any apprehensions we may have felt on the morning of the publication of The Debater were speedily dispelled, when by nightfall we had disposed of all our copies." Of a later issue the energetic editor sold sixty-five copies in the course of the summer holidays. Masters, too, began to read it and at last a copy was hid on the table of the High Master, Mr. Walker. Cecil Chesterton describes the High Master as a gigantic man with a booming voice. Some Paulines believed he had given Gilbert the first inspiration for the personality of "Sunday" in The Man Who Was Thursday. Another contemporary says that he was reputed to take no interest in anything except examination successes, and that the boys were amazed at the effect on him of reading The Debater. Reading in the light of his future, one sees qualities in Gilbert's work not to be found in that of the other contributors, but it is worth noting that the J.D.C. members were in fact a quite unusually able group. Almost every one of them took brilliant scholarships to Oxford or Cambridge; the High Master had never boasted of so many scholarships from one set of boys. And in reading The Debater (an enjoyment I wish others could share) one has to bear in mind the relative ages of the contributors. It is, I think, striking that all these boys should have recognised Gilbert's quality and accepted his leadership, for they were all a year or so younger than he was and yet were in the same form. They knew that this was only because G.K. would not bother to do his school work; still, I think that at that age they showed insight by knowing it.

Gilbert's work is to be found in every number of The Debater--usually verse as well as prose. Both Fordham and Oldershaw remember most vividly the effect of reading a fanciful essay on Dragons in the first number. "The Dragon," it began, "is the most cosmopolitan of impossibilities." And the boys, rolling the words on their tongues, murmured to one another, "This is literature."

Except for a very occasional flash the one element not yet visible in these Debater essays is humour. This is curious, because some of his most brilliant fooling belongs to the same period. In a collection made after his death, The Coloured Lands is an illustrated jeu d'esprit of 1891, Half Hours in Hades: "an elementary handbook of demonology" which is as amusing a thing as he ever wrote. The drawings he made for it show specimens of the evolution of various types of devil into various types of humans: the devils themselves are carefully classified--the common or garden serpent (Tentator Hortensis), the red devil (Diabolus Mephistopheles) the blue devil (Caeruleus Lugubrius) etc. Mr. J. Milton's "specimen" is discussed and various methods of pursuing observations in supernatural history which "possesses an interest which will remain after health, youth and even life have departed."

There is nothing of this kind in The Debater. Besides the historical soliloquies mentioned in the letter to Bentley, there are poems in which he is beginning to feel after his religious philosophy. One of these in a very early number shows considerable power for a boy not yet seventeen.

ADVENIAT REGNUM TUUM

Not that the widespread wings of wrong brood o'er a moaning earth, Not from the clinging curse of gold, the random lot of birth; Not from the misery of the weak, the madness of the strong, Goes upward from our lips the cry, "How long, oh Lord, how long?" Not only from the huts of toil, the dens of sin and shame, From lordly halls and peaceful homes the cry goes up the same; Deep in the heart of every man, where'er his life be spent, There is a noble weariness, a holy discontent. Where'er to mortal eyes has come, in silence dark and lone, Some glimmer of the far-off light the world has never known, Some ghostly echoes from a dream of earth's triumphal song, Then as the vision fades we cry, "How long, oh Lord, how long?" Long ages, from the dawn of time, men's toiling march has wound Towards the world they ever sought, the world they never found; Still far before their toiling path the glimmering promise lay, Still hovered round the struggling race, a dream by night and day. Mid darkening care and clinging sin they sought their unknown home, Yet ne'er the perfect glory came--Lord, will it ever come? The weeding of earth's garden broad from all its growths of wrong, When all man's soul shall be a prayer, and all his life a song. Aye, though through many a starless night we guard the flaming oil, Though we have watched a weary watch, and toiled a weary toil, Though in the midnight wilderness, we wander still forlorn, Yet bear we in our hearts the proof that God shall send the dawn. Deep in the tablets of our hearts he writes that yearning still, The longing that His hand hath wrought shall not his hand fulfil? Though death shall close upon us all before that hour we see, The goal of ages yet is there--the good time yet to be: Therefore, tonight, from varied lips, in every house and home, Goes up to God the common prayer, "Father, Thy Kingdom come."*

[* The Debater, Vol. I. March-April, 1891.]

Gilbert's prose work in The Debater must have been little less surprising to any master who had merely watched him slumbering at a desk. His historical romance "The White Cockade" is immature and unimportant. But essays on Spenser, Milton, Pope, Gray, Cowper, Burns, Wordsworth, "Humour in Fiction," "Boys' Literature," Sir Walter Scott, Browning, the English Dramatists, showed a range and a quality of literary criticism alike surprising. Perhaps most surprising, however, is the fact that all this does not seem to have made clear to either masters or parents the true nature of Gilbert's vocation. He suffered at this date from having too many talents. For he still went on drawing and his drawings seemed to many the most remarkable thing about him, and were certainly the thing he most enjoyed doing.

Even now his school work had not brought him into the highest form--called not the Sixth, as in most schools, but the Eighth: the highest form he ever reached was 6B. But in the Summer term of 1892 he entered a competition for a prize poem, and won it. The subject chosen was St. Francis Xavier. I give the poem in Appendix A. It is not as notable as some other of his work at that time: what is interesting is that in it this schoolboy expresses with some power a view he was later to explode yet more powerfully. He might have claimed for himself what he said of earlier writers--it is not true that they did not see our modern difficulties: they saw through them. Never before had this contest been won by any but an Eighth Form boy, and almost immediately afterwards Gilbert was amazed to find a short notice posted on the board: "G. K. Chesterton to rank with the Eighth.--F. W. Walker, High Master."

The High Master at any rate had travelled far from the atmosphere of the form reports when Mrs. Chesterton visited him in 1894 to ask his advice about her son's future. For he said, "Six foot of genius. Cherish him, Mrs. Chesterton, cherish him."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

IV. Art Schools and University College

WHEN ALL GILBERT'S friends were at Oxford or Cambridge, he used to say how glad he was that his own choice had been a different one. He never sighed for Oxford. He never regretted his rather curious experiences at an Art School--two Art Schools really, although he only talks of one in the Autobiography, for he was for a short time at a School of Art in St. John's Wood (Calderon's, Lawrence Solomon thought), whence he passed to the Slade School. He was there from 1892 to 1895 and during part of that time he attended lectures on English Literature at University College.

The chapter on the experiences of the next two years is called in the Autobiography, "How to be a Lunatic," and there is no doubt that these years were crucial and at times crucifying in Gilbert's life. During a happily prolonged youth (he was now eighteen and a half) he had developed very slowly, but normally. Surrounded by pleasant friendships and home influences he had never really become aware of evil. Now it broke upon him suddenly--probably to a degree exaggerated by his strong imagination and distorted by the fact that he was undergoing physical changes usually belonging to an earlier age.

Towards the end of his school life Gilbert's voice had not yet broken. His mother took him to a doctor to be overhauled and was told that his brain was the largest and most sensitive the doctor had ever seen. "A genius or an idiot" was his verdict on the probabilities. Above all things she was told to avoid for him any sort of shock. Physically, mentally, spiritually he was on a very large scale and probably for that reason of a slow rate of development. The most highly differentiated organisms are the slowest to mature, and without question Gilbert did mature very late. He was now passing through the stage described by Keats: "The imagination of a boy is healthy and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between"--a period unhealthy or at least ill-focussed.

Intellectually Gilbert suffered at this time from an extreme scepticism. As he expressed it he "felt as if everything might be a dream" as if he had "projected the universe from within." The agnostic doubts the existence of God. Gilbert at moments doubted the existence of the agnostic.

Morally his temptations seem to have been in some strange psychic region rather than merely physical. The whole period is best summarised in a passage from the Autobiography, for looking back after forty years Gilbert still saw it as deeply and darkly significant: as both a mental and moral extreme of danger.

There is something truly menacing in the thought of how quickly I could imagine the maddest, when I had never committed the mildest crime . . . there was a time when I had reached that condition of moral anarchy within, in which a man says, in the words of Wilde, that "Atys with the blood-stained knife were better than the thing I am." I have never indeed felt the faintest temptation to the particular madness of Wilde, but I could at this time imagine the worst and wildest disproportions and distortions of more normal passion; the point is that the whole mood was overpowered and oppressed with a sort of congestion of imagination. As Bunyan, in his morbid period, described himself as prompted to utter blasphemies, I had an overpowering impulse to record or draw horrible ideas and images; lunging deeper and deeper as in a blind spiritual suicide.*

[* Pp. 88-9.]

Two of his intimate friends, finding at this time a notebook full of these horrible drawings, asked one another, "Is Chesterton going mad?"

He dabbled too in spiritualism until he realised that he had reached the verge of forbidden and dangerous ground:

I would not altogether rule out the suggestion of some that we were playing with fire; or even with hell-fire. In the words that were written for us there was nothing ostensibly degrading, but any amount that was deceiving. I saw quite enough of the thing to be able to testify with complete certainty, that something happens which is not in the ordinary sense natural, or produced by the normal and conscious human will. Whether it is produced by some subconscious but still human force, or by some powers, good, bad, or indifferent, which are external to humanity, I would not myself attempt to decide. The only thing I will say with complete confidence, about that mystic and invisible power, is that it tells lies. The lies may be larks or they may be lures to the imperilled soul or they may be a thousand other things; but whatever they are, they are not truths about the other world; or for that matter about this world.*

[*Autobiography, p. 77.]

He told Father O'Connor some years later* that "he had used the planchette freely at one time, but had to give it up on account of headaches ensuing . . . 'after the headaches came a horrid feeling as if one were trying to get over a bad spree, with what I can best describe as a bad smell in the mind.'"

[*Father Brown on Chesterton, p. 74.]

Idling at his work he fell in with other idlers and has left a vivid description in a Daily News article called, "The Diabolist," of one of his fellow students.

. . . It was strange, perhaps, that I liked his dirty, drunken society; it was stranger still, perhaps, that he liked my society. For hours of the day he would talk with me about Milton or Gothic architecture; for hours of the night he would go where I have no wish to follow him, even in speculation. He was a man with a long, ironical face, and close red hair; he was by class a gentleman, and could walk like one, but preferred, for some reason, to walk like a groom carrying two pails. He looked like a sort of super-jockey; as if some archangel had gone on the Turf. And I shall never forget the half-hour in which he and I argued about real things for the first and last time.

. . . He had a horrible fairness of the intellect that made me despair of his soul. A common, harmless atheist would have denied that religion produced humility or humility a simple joy; but he admitted both. He only said, "But shall I not find in evil a life of its own? Granted that for every woman I ruin one of those red sparks will go out; will not the expanding pleasure of ruin . . ."

"Do you see that fire?" I asked. "If we had a real fighting democracy, some one would burn you in it; like the devil-worshipper that you are."

"Perhaps," he said, in his tired, fair way. "Only what you call evil I call good."

He went down the great steps alone, and I felt as if I wanted the steps swept and cleaned. I followed later, and as I went to find my hat in the low, dark passage where it hung, I suddenly heard his voice again, but the words were inaudible. I stopped, startled; but then I heard the voice of one of the vilest of his associates saying, "Nobody can possibly know." And then I heard those two or three words which I remember in every syllable and cannot forget. I heard the Diabolist say, "I tell you I have done everything else. If I do that I shan't know the difference between right and wrong." I rushed out without daring to pause; and as I passed the fire I did not know whether it was hell or the furious love of God.

I have since heard that he died; it may be said, I think, that he committed suicide; though he did it with tools of pleasure, not with tools of pain. God help him, I know the road he went; but I have never known or even dared to think what was that place at which he stopped and refrained.*

[* Quoted in G. K. Chesterton: A Criticism. Alston Rivers Ltd. 1908, pp. 20-22.]

Revulsion from the atmosphere of evil took Gilbert to no new thing but to a strengthening of old ties and a mystic renewal of them. The J.D.C. was idealised into a mystical city of friends:

A LIST

I know a friend, very strong and good. He is the best friend in the world,

I know another friend, subtle and sensitive. He is certainly the best friend on earth.

I know another friend: very quiet and shrewd, there is no friend so good as he.

I know another friend, who is enigmatical and reluctant, he is the best of all.

I know yet another: who is polished and eager, he is far better than the rest.

I know another, who is young and very quick, he is the most beloved of all friends,

I know a lot more and they are all like that.

Amen.

THE COSMIC FACTORIES

What are little boys made of?

Bentley is made of hard wood with a knot in it, a complete set of Browning and a strong spring;

Oldershaw of a box of Lucifer matches and a stylographic pen;

Lawrence of a barrister's wig: files of Punch and salt,

Maurice of watch-wheels, three riders and a clean collar.

Vernède is made of moonlight and tobacco,

Bertram is mostly a handsome black walking-stick.

Waldo is a nice cabbage, with a vanishing odour of cigarettes,

Salter is made of sand and fire and an university extension ticket.

But the strongest element in all can not be expressed; I think it is a sort of star.*

[* From The Notebook.]

There are fragments of a Morality Play entitled "The Junior Debating Club," of a modern novel in which everyone of the Debaters makes his appearance, of a mediaeval story called "The Legend of Sir Edmund of the Brotherhood of the Jongleurs de Dieu." Notes, fragments, letters, all show an intense individual interest that covered the life of each of his friends. If one of them is worried, he worries too; if one rejoices, he rejoices exceedingly. They write to him about their ideas and views, their relations with one another, their reactions in the world of Oxford life, their love affairs. "I am in need of some literary tonic or blood-letting," says Vernède, "which you alone can supply."

"I only hope," writes Bertram, "you may be as much use in the world in future as you have been in the past to your friends."

"Most of the absent Club," writes Salter separated from the others, "lie together in my pocket at this moment." And Gilbert writes in The Notebook:

AN IDYLL

Tea is made; the red fogs shut round the house but the gas burns. I wish I had at this moment round the table A company of fine people. Two of them are at Oxford and one in Scotland and two at other places. But I wish they would all walk in now, for the tea is made.

Gilbert was devoted to them all. But as we have seen, Bentley's was the supreme friendship of his youth. It was a friendship in foolery as we are told by the dedication of Greybeards at Play:

He was through boyhood's storm and shower My best my nearest friend, We wore one hat, smoked one cigar One standing at each end.

It was a deeply serious friendship as we are told in the dedication of The Man Who Was Thursday. With Bentley alone he shared the

Doubts that drove us through the night as we two talked amain, And day had broken on the streets ere it broke upon the brain.

Most young men write or at least begin novels of which they are themselves the heroes. Gilbert wrote and illustrated a fairy story about a boyish romance of Lucian Oldershaw's while two unfinished novels have Bentley for hero. He is, too, in the mediaeval story, Sir Edmund of the Brotherhood of the Jongleurs de Dieu. Gilbert sings, like all young poets, of first love--but it is Bentley's not his own: he was as much excited about a girl Bentley had fallen in love with as if he had fallen in love with her himself. And where a London street has a special significance one discovers it is because of a memory of Bentley's. To Bentley then, with whom all was shared, Gilbert wrote, when through friendship and the goodness of things he had come out again into the daylight. The second thought that had saved him had largely grown out of the first. The J.D.C. meant friendship. Friendship meant the highest of all good things and all good things called for gratitude. As he gave thanks he drew near to God.

Dunedin Lodge Forth Street North Berwick. (undated, but probably Long Vac., 1894.)

Your letter was most welcome: in which, however, it does not differ widely from most of your letters. I read somewhere in some fatuous Complete Letter-writer or something, that it is correct to imitate the order of subjects, etc. observed by your correspondent. In obedience to this rule of breeding I will hurriedly remark that my holiday has been nice enough in itself; we walk about; lie on the sand; go and swim in the sea when it generally rains; and the combination gets in our mouths and we say the name of the Professor in the "Water Babies." Inwardly speaking, I have had a funny time. A meaningless fit of depression, taking the form of certain absurd psychological worries came upon me, and instead of dismissing it and talking to people, I had it out and went very far into the abysses, indeed. The result was that I found that things when examined, necessarily spelt such a mystically satisfactory state of things, that without getting back to earth, I saw lots that made me certain it is all right. The vision is fading into common day now, and I am glad. The frame of mind was the reverse of gloomy, but it would not do for long. It is embarrassing, talking with God face to face, as a man speaketh to his friend.

And in another letter:

A cosmos one day being rebuked by a pessimist replied, "How can you who revile me consent to speak by my machinery? Permit me to reduce you to nothingness and then we will discuss the matter." Moral. You should not look a gift universe in the mouth.

Another powerful influence in the direction of mental health was the discovery of Walt Whitman's poetry. "I shall never forget," Lucian Oldershaw writes, "reading to him from the Canterbury Walt Whitman in my bedroom at West Kensington. The séance lasted from two to three hours, and we were intoxicated with the excitement of the discovery."

For some time now we shall find Gilbert dismissing belief in any positive existence of evil and treating the universe on the Whitman principle of jubilant and universal acceptance. He writes, too, in the Whitman style. By far the most important of his notebooks is one which, by amazing good fortune, can be dated, beginning in 1894 and continuing for several years. In its attitude to man it is Whitmanesque to a high degree, yet it is also most characteristically Chestertonian. Whitman is content with a shouting, roaring optimism about life and humanity. Chesterton had to find for it a philosophical basis. Heartily as he disliked the literary pessimism of the hour, he was not content simply to exchange one mood for another. For whether he was conscious of it at the time or not, he did later see Walt Whitman's outlook as a mood and not a philosophy. It was a mood, however, that Chesterton himself never really lost, solely because he did discover the philosophy needed to sustain it. And thereby, even in this early Notebook, he goes far beyond Whitman. Even so early he knew that a philosophy of man could not be a philosophy of man only. He already feels a presence in the universe:

It is evening And into the room enters again a large indiscernable presence. Is it a man or a woman? Is it one long dead or yet to come? That sits with me in the evening.

This again might have been only a mood--had he not found the philosophy to sustain it too. It is remarkable how much of this philosophy he had arrived at in The Notebook, before he had come to know Catholics. Indeed the Notebook seems to me so important that it needs a chapter to itself with abundant quotation.

Meanwhile, what was Gilbert doing about his work at University College? Professor Fred Brown told Lawrence Solomon that when he was at the Slade School he always seemed to be writing and while listening to lectures he was always drawing. It is probably true that, as Cecil Chesterton says, he shrank from the technical toils of the artist as he never did later from those of authorship; and none of the professors regarded him as a serious art student. They pointed later to his illustrations of Biography for Beginners as proof that he never learnt to draw. Yet how many of the men who did learn seriously could have drawn those sketches, full of crazy energy and vitality? I know nothing about drawing, but anyone may know how brilliant are the illustrations to Greybeards at Play or Biography for Beginners, and later to Mr. Belloc's novels. And anyone can see the power of line with which he drew in his notebooks unfinished suggestions of humanity or divinity. Anyone, too, can recognise a portrait of a man, and faces full of character continue to adorn G.K.'s exercise books. Of living models he affected chiefly Gladstone, Balfour, and Joe Chamberlin. In hours of thought he made drawings of Our Lord with a crown of thorns or nailed to a cross--these suddenly appear in any of his books between fantastic drawings or lecture notes. As the mind wandered and lingered the fingers followed it, and as Gilbert listened to lectures, he would even draw on the top of his own notes. He had always had facility and that facility increased, so that in later years he often completed in a couple of hours the illustrations to a novel of Belloc's. Nor were these drawings merely illustrations of an already completed text, for Mr. Belloc has told me that the characters were often half suggested to him by his friend's drawings.

On one, at any rate, of his vacations, Gilbert went to Italy, and two letters to Bentley show much of the way his thoughts were going:

Hotel New York Florence. (undated, probably 1894.)

DEAR BENTLEY,

I turn to write my second letter to you and my first to Grey [Maurice Solomon], just after having a very interesting conversation with an elderly American like Colonel Newcome, though much better informed, with whom I compared notes on Botticelli, Ruskin, Carlyle, Emerson and the world in general. I asked him what he thought of Whitman. He answered frankly that in America they were "hardly up to him." "We have one town, Boston," he said precisely, "that has got up to Browning." He then added that there was one thing everyone in America remembered: Whitman himself. The old gentleman quite kindled on this topic, "Whitman was a real Man. A man who was so pure and strong that we could not imagine him doing an unmanly thing anywhere." It was odd words to hear at a table d'hôte, from your next door neighbour: it made me quite excited over my salad.

You see that this humanitarianism in which we are entangled asserts itself where, by all guidebook laws, it should not. When I take up my pen to write to you, I am thinking more of a white-moustached old Yankee at an hotel than about the things I have seen within the same 24 hours: the frescoes of Santa Croce, the illuminations of St. Marco; the white marbles of the tower of Giotto; the very Madonnas of Raphael, the very David of Michael Angelo. Throughout this tour, in pursuance of our theory of travelling, we have avoided the guide: he is the death-knell of individual liberty. Once only we broke through our rule and that was in favour of an extremely intelligent, nay impulsive young Italian in Santa Maria Novella, a church where we saw some of the most interesting pieces of mediaeval painting I have ever seen, interesting not so much from an artistic as from a moral and historical point of view. Particularly noticeable was the great fresco expressive of the grandest mediaeval conception of the Communion of Saints, a figure of Christ surmounting a crowd of all ages and stations, among whom were not only Dante, Petrarca, Giotto, etc., etc., but Plato, Cicero, and best of all, Arius. I said to the guide, in a tone of expostulation, "Heretico!" (a word of impromptu manufacture). Whereupon he nodded, smiled and was positively radiant with the latitudinarianism of the old Italian painter. It was interesting for it was a fresh proof that even the early Church united had a period of thought and tolerance before the dark ages closed around it. There is one thing that I must tell you more of when we meet, the tower of Giotto. It was built in a square of Florence, near the Cathedral, by a self-made young painter and architect who had kept sheep as a boy on the Tuscan hills. It is still called "The Shepherd's Tower." What I want to tell you about is the series of bas-reliefs, which Giotto traced on it, representing the creation and progress of man, his discovery of navigation, astronomy, law, music and so on. It is religious in the grandest sense, but there is not a shred of doctrine (even the Fall is omitted) about this history in stone. If Walt Whitman had been an architect, he would have built such a tower, with such a story on it. As I want to go out and have a good look at it before we start for Venice tomorrow, I must cut this short. I hope you are enjoying yourself as much as I am, and thinking about me half as much as I am about you.

Your very sincere friend, GILBERT K. CHESTERTON.

No one would have enjoyed more than Gilbert rereading this letter in after years and noting the suggestion that the fifteenth century belonged to the early church and preceded the Dark Ages. And I think, too, that even in Giotto's Tower, he might later have discovered some roots of doctrine.

Grand Hotel De Milan (undated)

DEAR BENTLEY,

I write you a third letter before coming back, while Venice and Verona are fresh in my mind. Of the former I can really only discourse viva voce. Imagine a city, whose very slums are full of palaces, whose every other house wall has a battered fresco, or a gothic bas-relief; imagine a sky fretted with every kind of pinnacle from the great dome of the Salute to the gothic spires of the Ducal Palace and the downright arabesque orientalism of the minarets of St. Mark's; and then imagine the whole flooded with a sea that seems only intended to reflect sunsets, and you still have no idea of the place I stopped in for more than 48 hours. Thence we went to Verona, where Romeo and Juliet languished and Dante wrote most of "Hell." The principal products (1) tombs: particularly those of the Scala, a very good old family with an excellent taste in fratricide. Their three tombs (one to each man I mean: one man, one grave) are really glorious examples of three stages of Gothic: of which more when we meet. (2) Balconies: with young ladies hanging over them; really quite a preponderating feature. Whether this was done in obedience to local associations and in expectation of a Romeo, I can't say. I can only remark that if such was the object, the supply of Juliets seemed very much in excess of the demand. (3) Roman remains: on which, however, I did not pronounce a soliloquy beginning, "Wonderful people . . ." which is the correct thing to do. Just as I get to this I receive your letter and resolve to begin another sheet of paper. I did read Rosebery's speech and was more than interested; I was stirred. The old order (of parliamentary forms, peerages, Whiggism and right honourable friends) has changed, yielding place to the new (of industrialism, county council sanitation, education and the Kingdom of Heaven at hand) and, whatever the Archbishop of Canterbury may say, God fulfils himself in many ways, even by local government. . . .

Several things in your letter require notice. First the accusation levelled against me of being prejudiced against Professor Huxley, I repel with indignation and scorn. You are not prejudiced against cheese because you like oranges; and though the Professor is not Isaiah or St. Francis or Whitman or Richard le Gallienne (to name some of those whom I happen to affect) I should be the last person in the world to say a word against an earnest, able, kind-hearted and most refreshingly rational man: by far the best man of his type I know. As to what you say on education generally, I am entirely with you, but it will take a good interview to say how much. As for the little Solomons, I am prepared to [be] fond of all of them, as I am of all children, even the grubby little mendicants that run these Italian streets. I am glad you and Grey have pottered. Potter again. I have had such a nice letter from Lawrence. It makes me think it is all going "to be the fair beginning of a time."

Had the months of art study only developed in Gilbert Chesterton his power of drawing, they might still have been worthwhile. But they gave him, too, a time to dream and to think which working for a University degree would never have allowed. His views and his mind were developing fast, and he was also developing a power to which we owe some of his best work--depth of vision.

Most art criticism is the work of those who never could have been artists--which is possibly why it tends to be so critical. Gilbert, who could perhaps have been an artist, preferred to appreciate what the artist was trying to say and to put into words what he read on the canvas. Hence both in his Watts and his Blake we get what some of us ask of an art critic--the enlargement of our own powers of vision. This is what made Ruskin so great an art critic, a fact once realised, today forgotten. He may have made a thousand mistakes, he had a multitude of foolish prejudices, but he opened the eyes of a whole generation to see and understand great art.

G.K. was to begin his published writings with poetry and art criticism--in other words with vision. And this vision he partly owed to the Slade School. Here is a letter (undated) to Bentley containing a hint of what eight years later became a book on Watts:

On Saturday I saw two exhibitions of pictures. The first was the Royal Academy, where I went with Salter. There was one picture there, though the walls were decorated with frames very prettily. As to the one picture, if you look at an Academy catalogue you will see "Jonah": by G. F. Watts, and you will imagine a big silly picture of a whale. But if you go to Burlington House you will see something terrible. A spare, wild figure, clad in a strange sort of green with his head flung so far back that his upper part is a miracle of foreshortening, his hands thrust out, his face ghastly with ecstasy, his dry lips yelling aloud, a figure of everlasting protest and defiance. And as a background (perfect in harmony of colour) you have the tracery of the Assyrian bas-reliefs, such as survive in wrecks in the British Museum, a row of those processions of numberless captives bowing before smiling Kings: a cruel sort of art. And the passionate energy of that lonely screaming figure in front, makes you think of a great many things besides Assyrians: among others of some words of Renan: I quote from memory: "But the trace of Israel will be eternal. She it was who alone among the tyrannies of antiquity, raised her voice for the helpless, the oppressed, the forgotten."

But this only expresses a fraction of it. The only thing to do is to come and look at this excited gentleman with bronze skin and hair that approaches green, his eyes simply white with madness. And Jonah said, "Yea, I do well to be angry: even unto death."

He had learnt to look at colour, to look at line, to describe pictures. But far more important than this, he could now create in the imagination gardens and sunsets and sheer colour, so as to give to his novels and stories pictorial value, to his fantasies glow, and to his poetry vision of the realities of things. In his very first volume of Essays, The Defendant, were to be passages that could be written only by one who had learnt to draw. For instance, in "A Defence of Skeletons":

The actual sight of the little wood, with its grey and silver sea of life is entirely a winter vision. So dim and delicate is the heart of the winter woods, a kind of glittering gloaming, that a figure stepping towards us in the chequered twilight seems as if he were breaking through unfathomable depths of spiders' webs.

In the year 1895, in which G.K. left art for publishing, he came of age "with a loud report." He writes to Bentley:

Being twenty-one years old is really rather good fun. It is one of those occasions when you remember the existence of all sorts of miscellaneous people. A cousin of mine, Alice Chesterton, daughter of my Uncle Arthur, writes me a delightfully cordial letter from Berlin, where she is a governess; and better still, my mother has received a most amusing letter from an old nurse of mine, an exceptionally nice and intelligent nurse, who writes on hearing that it is my twenty-first birthday. Billy (an epithet is suppressed) gave me a little notebook and a little photograph frame. The first thing I did with the notebook was to make a note of his birthday. The first thing I shall do with the frame will be to get Grey to give me a photograph of him to put into it. Yes, it is not bad, being twenty-one, in a world so full of kind people. . . .

I have just been out and got soaking and dripping wet; one of my favourite dissipations. I never enjoy weather so much as when it is driving, drenching, rattling, washing rain. As Mr. Meredith says in the book you gave me, "Rain, O the glad refresher of the grain, and welcome waterspouts of blessed rain." (It is in a poem called "Earth and a Wedded Woman," which is fat.) Seldom have I enjoyed a walk so much. My sister water was all there and most affectionate. Everything I passed was lovely, a little boy pickabacking another little boy home, two little girls taking shelter with a gigantic umbrella, the gutters boiling like rivers and the hedges glittering with rain. And when I came to our corner the shower was over, and there was a great watery sunset right over No. 80, what Mr. Ruskin calls an "opening into Eternity." Eternity is pink and gold. This may seem a very strange rant, but it is one of my "specimen days." I suppose you would really prefer me to write as I feel, and I am so constituted that these Daily incidents get me that way. Yes, I like rain. It means something, I am not sure what; something freshening, cleaning, washing out, taking in hand, not caring-a-damn-what-you-think, doing-its-duty, robust, noisy, moral, wet. It is the Baptism of the Church of the Future.

Yesterday afternoon (Sunday) Lawrence and Maurice came here. We were merely infants at play, had skipping races round the garden and otherwise raced. ("Runner, run thy race," said Confucius, "and in the running find strength and reward.") After that we tried talking about Magnus, and came to some hopeful conclusions. Magnus is all right. As for Lawrence and Grey, if there is anything righter than all right, they are that. . . .

There is an expression in Meredith's book which struck me immensely: "the largeness of the evening earth." The sensation that the Cosmos has all its windows open is very characteristic of evening, just as it is at this moment. I feel very good. Everything out of the window looks very, very flat and yellow: I do not know how else to describe it.

It is like the benediction at the end of the service.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

V. The Notebook

I AM WRITING THIS chapter at a table facing Notre Dame de Paris in front of a café filled with arguing French workmen--in the presence of God and of Man; and I feel as if I understood the one hatred of G.K.'s life: his loathing of pessimism. "Is a man proud of losing his hearing, eyesight or sense of smell? What shall we say of him who prides himself on beginning as an intellectual cripple and ending as an intellectual corpse?"*

[* From The Notebook.]

SOME PROPHECIES

Woe unto them that keep a God like a silk hat, that believe not in God, but in a God.

Woe unto them that are pompous for they will sooner or later be ridiculous.

Woe unto them that are tired of everything, for everything will certainly be tired of them.

Woe unto them that cast out everything, for out of everything they will be cast out.

Woe unto them that cast out anything, for out of that thing they will be cast out.

Woe unto the flippant, for they shall receive flippancy.

Woe unto them that are scornful for they shall receive scorn.

Woe unto him that considereth his hair foolishly, for his hair will be made the type of him.

Woe unto him that is smart, for men will hold him smart always, even when he is serious.*

[* Ibid.]

A pessimist is a man who has never lived, never suffered: "Show me a person who has plenty of worries and troubles and I will show you a person who, whatever he is, is not a pessimist."

This idea G.K. developed later in the Dickens, dealing with the alleged over-optimism of Dickens--Dickens who if he had learnt to whitewash the universe had learnt it in a blacking factory, Dickens who had learnt through hardship and suffering to accept and love the universe. But that he wrote later. The quotations given here come from the Notebook begun in 1894 and used at intervals for the next four or five years, in which Gilbert wrote down his philosophy step by step as he came to discover it. The handwriting is the work of art that he must have learnt and practised, so different is it from his boyhood's scrawl. Each idea is set down as it comes into his mind. There is no sequence. In this book and in The Coloured Lands may be seen the creation of the Chesterton view of life--and it all took place in his early twenties. From the seed-thoughts here, Orthodoxy and the rest were to grow--here they are only seeds but seeds containing unmistakably the flower of the future:

They should not hear from me a word Of selfishness or scorn If only I could find the door If only I were born.

He makes the Unborn Babe say this in his first volume of poems. And in the Notebook we see how the babe coming into the world must keep this promise by accepting life with its puzzles, its beauty, its fleetingness: "Are we all dust? What a beautiful thing dust is though." "This round earth may be a soap-bubble, but it must be admitted that there are some pretty colours on it." "What is the good of life, it is fleeting; what is the good of a cup of coffee, it is fleeting. Ha Ha Ha."

The birthday present of birth, as he was later to call it in Orthodoxy, involved not bare existence only but a wealth of other gifts. "A grievance," he heads this thought:

Give me a little time, I shall not be able to appreciate them all; If you open so many doors And give me so many presents, O Lord God.

He is almost overwhelmed with all that he has and with all that is, but accepts it ardently in its completeness.

If the arms of a man could be a fiery circle embracing the round world, I think I should be that man.

Yet in the face of all this splendour the pessimist dares to find flaws:

The mountains praise thee, O Lord! But what if a mountain said, "I praise thee; But put a pine-tree halfway up on the left It would be much more effective, believe me." It is time that the religion of prayer gave place to the religion of praise.

If the mountains must praise God, if the religion of praise expresses the truth of things, how much more does it express the truth of humanity--or rather of men, for he saw humanity not as an abstraction but as the sum of human and intensely individual beings:

Once I found a friend "Dear me," I said "he was made for me." But now I find more and more friends Who seem to have been made for me And more and yet more made for me, Is it possible we were all made for each other all over the world?

And on another page comes perhaps the most significant phrase in the book: "I wonder whether there will ever come a time when I shall be tired of any one person." Hence a fantastic thought of a way of making the discovery of more people to know and to like:

THE HUMAN CIRCULATING LIBRARY NOTES

Get out a gentleman for a fortnight, then change him for a lady, or your ticket. No person to be kept out after a fortnight, except with the payment of a penny a day. Any person morally or physically damaging a man will be held responsible. The library omnibus calls once a week leaving two or three each visit. Man of the season--old standard man.

Or better still:

My great ambition is to give a party at which everybody should meet everybody else and like them very much.

AN INVITATION

Mr. Gilbert Chesterton requests the pleasure Of humanity's company to tea on Dec. 25th 1896. Humanity Esq., The Earth, Cosmos E.

G.K. liked everybody very much, and everything very much. He liked even the things most of us dislike. He liked to get wet. He liked to be tired. After that one short period of struggle he liked to call himself "always perfectly happy." And therefore he wanted to say, "Thank you."

You say grace before meals All right. But I say grace before the play and the opera, And grace before the concert and pantomime, And grace before I open a book, And grace before sketching, painting, Swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing; And grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

Each day seemed a special gift; something that might not have been:

EVENING

Here dies another day During which I have had eyes, ears, hands And the great world round me; And with tomorrow begins another. Why am I allowed two?

THE PRAYER OF A MAN WALKING

I thank thee, O Lord, for the stones in the street I thank thee for the hay-carts yonder and for the houses built and half-built That fly past me as I stride. But most of all for the great wind in my nostrils As if thine own nostrils were close.

THE PRAYER OF A MAN RESTING

The twilight closes round me My head is bowed before the Universe I thank thee, O Lord, for a child I knew seven years ago And whom I have never seen since.

Praised be God for all sides of life, for friends, lovers, art, literature, knowledge, humour, politics, and for the little red cloud away there in the west--

For, if he was to be grateful, to whom did he owe gratitude? Here is the chief question he asked and answered at this time. At school he was looking for God, but at the age of 16 he was, he tells us in Orthodoxy, an Agnostic in the sense of one who is not sure one way or the other. Largely it was this need for gratitude for what seemed personal gifts that brought him to belief in a personal God. Life was personal, it was not a mere drift; it had will in it, it was more like a story.

A story is the highest mark For the world is a story and every part of it And there is nothing that can touch the world or any part of it That is not a story.

And again, with the heading, "A Social Situation."

We must certainly be in a novel; What I like about this novelist is that he takes such trouble about his minor characters.

The story shapes from man's birth and it is as he meets the other characters that he finds he is in the right story.

A MAN BORN ON THE EARTH

Perhaps there has been some mistake How does he know he has come to the right place? But when he finds friends He knows he has come to the right place.

You say it is a love affair Hush: it is a new Garden of Eden And a new progeny will people a new earth God is always making these experiments.

Life is a story: who tells it? Life is a problem: who sets it?

The world is a problem, not a Theorem And the word of the last Day will be Q.E.F.

God sets the problem, God tells the story, but can those know Him who are characters in His story, who are working out His problem?

Have you ever known what it is to walk along a road in such a frame of mind that you thought you might meet God at any turn of the path?

For this a man must be ready, against this he must never shut the door.

There is one kind of infidelity blacker than all infidelities, Worse than any blow of secularist, pessimist, atheist, It is that of those persons Who regard God as an old institution.

VOICES

The axe falls on the wood in thuds, "God, God." The cry of the rook, "God," answers it The crack of the fire on the hearth, the voice of the brook, say the same name; All things, dog, cat, fiddle, baby, Wind, breaker, sea, thunderclap Repeat in a thousand languages-- God.

Next in his thought comes a point where he hesitates as to the meeting place between God and Man. How and where can these two incommensurates find a meeting place? What is Incarnation? The greatness and the littleness of Man obsessed Chesterton as it did Pascal; it is the eternal riddle:

TWO STRANDS

Man is a spark flying upwards. God is everlasting.

Who are we, to whom this cup of human life has been given, to ask for more? Let us love mercy and walk humbly. What is man, that thou regardest him?

Man is a star unquenchable. God is in him incarnate.

His life is planned upon a scale colossal, of which he sees glimpses. Let him dare all things, claim all things: he is the son of Man, who shall come in the clouds of glory.

[I] saw these two strands mingling to make the religion of man.

"A scale colossal, of which he sees glimpses." This, I think, is the first hint of the path that led Gilbert to full faith in Our Lord. In places in these notes he regards Him certainly only as Man--but even then as The Man, the Only Man in whom the colossal scale, the immense possibilities, of human nature could be dreamed of as fulfilled. Two notes on Marcus Aurelius are significant of the way his mind was moving.

MARCUS AURELIUS

A large-minded, delicate-witted, strong man, following the better thing like a thread between his hands.

Him we cannot fancy choosing the lower even by mistake; we cannot think of him as wanting for a moment in any virtue, sincerity, mercy, purity, self-respect, good manners.

Only one thing is wanting in him. He does not command me to perform the impossible.

THE CARPENTER

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Yes: he was soliloquising, not making something. Do not the words of Jesus ring Like nails knocked into a board In his father's workshop?

On two consecutive pages are notes showing how his mind is wrestling with the question, the answer to which would complete his philosophy:

XMAS DAY

Good news: but if you ask me what it is, I know not; It is a track of feet in the snow, It is a lantern showing a path, It is a door set open.

THE GRACE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST

I live in an age of varied powers and knowledge, Of steam, science, democracy, journalism, art: But when my love rises like a sea, I have to go back to an obscure tribe and a slain man To formulate a blessing.

JULIAN

"Vicisti Galilæe," he said, and sank conquered After wrestling with the most gigantic of powers, A dead man.

THE CRUCIFIED

On a naked slope of a poor province A Roman soldier stood staring at a gibbet, Then he said, "Surely this was a righteous man," And a new chapter of history opened, Having that for its motto.

PARABLES

There was a man who dwelt in the east centuries ago, And now I cannot look at a sheep or a sparrow, A lily or a cornfield, a raven or a sunset, A vineyard or a mountain, without thinking of him; If this be not to be divine, what is it?

Cecil Chesterton tells us Gilbert read the Gospels partly because he was not forced to read them: I suppose this really means that he read them with a mature mind which had not been dulled to their reception by a childhood task of routine lessons. But I do not think at this date it had occurred to him to question the assumption of the period: that official Christianity, its priesthood especially, had travestied the original intention of Christ. This idea is in the Wild Knight volume (published in 1900) and more briefly in a suggestion in the Notebook for a proposed drama:

Gabriel is hammering up a little theatre and the child looks at his hands, and finds them torn with nails.

Clergyman. The Church should stand by the powers that be.

Gabriel. Yes? . . . That is a handsome crucifix you have there at your chain.

That the clergy, that the Christian people, should have settled down to an acceptance of a faulty established order, should not be alert to all that Our Lord's life signified, was one of the problems. It was, too, a matter of that cosmic loyalty which he analyses more fully in Orthodoxy. Here he simply writes:

It is not a question of Theology, It is a question of whether, placed as a sentinel of an unknown watch, you will whistle or not.

Sentinels do go to sleep and he was coming to feel that this want of vigilance ran through the whole of humanity. In "White Wynd," a sketch written at this time,* he adumbrates an idea to which he was to return again in Manalive especially, and in Orthodoxy--that we can by custom so lose our sense of reality that the only way to enjoy and be grateful for our possessions is to lose them for a while. The shortest way home is to go round the world. In this story of "White Wynd" he applies the parable only to each man's life and the world he lives in. But in Orthodoxy he applies it to the human race who have lost revealed truth by getting so accustomed to it that they no longer look at it. And already in the Notebook he is calling the attention of a careless multitude to "that great Empire upon which the sun never sets. I allude to the Universe."

[* It is published in The Coloured Lands.]

Most of the quotations about Our Lord come in the later part of the book: in the earlier pages he dreams that "to this age it is given to write the great new song, and to compile the new Bible, and to found the new Church, and preach the new Religion." And in one rather obscure passage he seems to hint at the thought that Christ might come again to shape this new religion.

Going round the world, Gilbert was finding his way home; the explorer was rediscovering his native country. He himself has given us all the metaphors for what was happening now in his mind. Without a single Catholic friend he had discovered this wealth of Catholic truth and he was still travelling. "All this I felt," he later summed it up in Orthodoxy, "and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. And all this time I had not even thought of Catholic theology."

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VI. Towards a Career

A CURIOUS LITTLE incident comes towards the end of Gilbert's time at the Slade School. In a letter he wrote to E. C. Bentley we see him, on the eve of his 21st birthday, being invited to write for the Academy:

Mr. Cotton is a little bristly, bohemian man, as fidgetty as a kitten, who runs round the table while he talks to you. When he agrees with you he shuts his eyes tight and shakes his head. When he means anything rather seriously he ends up with a loud nervous laugh. He talks incessantly and is mad on the history of Oxford. I sent him my review of Ruskin and he read it before me (Note. Hell) and delivered himself with astonishing rapidity to the following effect: "This is very good: you've got something to say: Oh, yes: this is worth saying: I agree with you about Ruskin and about the Century: this is good: you've no idea: if you saw some stuff: some reviews I get: the fellows are practised but of all the damned fools: you've no idea: they know the trade in a way: but such infernal asses: as send things up: but this is very good: that sentence does run nicely: but I like your point: make it a little longer and then send it in: I've got another book for you to review: you know Robert Bridges? Oh very good, very good: here it is: about two columns you know: by the way: keep the Ruskin for yourself: you deserve that anyhow."

Here I got a word in: one of protest and thanks. But Mr. Cotton insisted on my accepting the Ruskin. So I am really to serve Laban. Laban proves on analysis to be of the consistency of brick. It is such men as this that have made our Cosmos what it is. At one point he said, literally dancing with glee: "Oh, the other day I stuck some pins into Andrew Lang." I said, "Dear me, that must be a very good game." It was something about an edition of Scott, but I was told that Andrew "took" the painful operation "very well." We sat up horribly late together talking about Browning, Afghans, Notes, the Yellow Book, the French Revolution, William Morris, Norsemen and Mr. Richard le Gallienne. "I don't despair for anyone," he said suddenly. "Hang it all, that's what you mean by humanity." This appears to be a rather good editor of the Academy. And my joy in having begun my life is very great. "I am tired," I said to Mr. Brodribb, "of writing only what I like." "Oh well," he said heartily, "you'll have no reason to make that complaint in journalism."

But here is a mystery. Nowhere in the Academy columns for 1895 or 1896 are to be seen the initials G.K.C., yet at that date all the reviews are signed. Mr. Eccles, who was writing for it at the time, told me that he had no recollection of G.K. among the contributors--and later he came to know him well when both were together on the Speaker. In any case, the idea of reviewing for no reward except the book reviewed would scarcely appeal to a more practical man than Gilbert as a hopeful beginning. Perhaps the mystery is solved by the fact that soon after the date of this letter Mr. Cotton got an appointment in India. To Mr. Eccles it appeared somewhat ironical that the unpaid contributors to the Academy were circularised with a suggestion of contributions of money towards a parting present for their late editor.

The actual beginning of G.K.'s journalism was in The Bookman; and in the Autobiography he insists that it was a matter of mere luck: "these opportunities were merely things that happened to me." While still at the Slade School, he was, as we have seen, attending English lectures at University College. There he met a fellow-student, Ernest Hodder Williams, of the family which controlled the publishing house of Hodder & Stoughton. He gave Chesterton some books on art to review for The Bookman, a monthly paper published by the firm. "I need not say," G.K. comments, "that having entirely failed to learn how to draw or paint, I tossed off easily enough some criticisms of the weaker points of Rubens or the misdirected talents of Tintoretto. I had discovered the easiest of all professions, which I have pursued ever since." But neither in the art criticism he wrote for The Bookman nor in the poems he was to publish in The Outlook and The Speaker was there a living. He left the Slade School and went to work for a publisher.

Mr. Redway, in whose office Gilbert now found himself, was a publisher largely of spiritualist literature. Gilbert has described in his Autobiography his rather curious experience of ghostly authorship, but he relates nothing of his office experience, which is described in another undated letter to Mr. Bentley:

I am writing this letter just when I like most to write one, late at night, after a beastly lot of midnight oil over a contribution for a Slade Magazine, intended as a public venture. I am sending them a recast of that "Picture of Tuesday."

Like you, I am beastly busy, but there is something exciting about it. If I must be busy (as I certainly must, being an approximately honest man) I had much rather be busy in a varied, mixed up way, with half a hundred things to attend to, than with one blank day of monotonous "study" before me. To give you some idea of what I mean. I have been engaged in 3 different tiring occupations and enjoyed them all. (1) Redway says, "We've got too many MSS; read through them, will you, and send back those that are too bad at once." I go slap through a room full of MSS, criticising deuced conscientiously, with the result that I post back some years of MSS to addresses, which I should imagine, must be private asylums. But one feels worried, somehow. . . .

(2) Redway says, "I'm going to give you entire charge of the press department, sending copies to Reviews, etc." Consequence is, one has to keep an elaborate book and make it tally with other elaborate books, and one has to remember all the magazines that exist and what sort of books they'd crack up. I used to think I hated responsibility: I am positively getting to enjoy it. (3) There is that confounded "Picture of Tuesday" which I have been scribbling at the whole evening, and have at last got it presentable. This sounds like mere amusement, but, now that I have tried other kinds of hurry and bustle, I solemnly pledge myself to the opinion that there is no work so tiring as writing, that is, not for fun, but for publication. Other work has a repetition, a machinery, a reflex action about it somewhere, but to be on the stretch inventing fillings, making them out of nothing, making them as good as you can for a matter of four hours leaves me more inclined to lie down and read Dickens than I ever feel after nine hours ramp at Redway's. The worst of it is that you always think the thing so bad too when you're in that state. I can't imagine anything more idiotic than what I've just finished. Well, enough of work and all its works. By all means come on Monday evening, but don't be frightened if by any chance I'm not in till about 6.30, as Monday is a busy day. Of course you'll stop to dinner . . . what an idiotically long time 8 weeks is. . . .

This letter does not seem to bear out the suggestion in Cecil's book* of Gilbert's probable uselessness to the publishers for whom he worked. After all, literacy is more needful to most publishers than automatic practicality, because it is so very much rarer. Probably G.K. would have been absolutely invaluable had he been a little less kind-hearted. His dislike of sending back a manuscript and making an author unhappy would have been a bar to his utility as a reader. But there are lots of other things to do besides rejecting manuscripts, and two later letters show how capable Gilbert was felt to be in doing most of them.

[* G. K. Chesterton: A Criticism, see p. 23.]

The exact date at which he left Redway's for the publishing firm of Fisher Unwin (of 11 Paternoster Buildings) I cannot discover, but it was fairly early and he was several years with Fisher Unwin, only gradually beginning to move over into journalism.

"He did nothing for himself," says Lucian Oldershaw, "till we [Bentley and Oldershaw] came down from Oxford and pushed him."

The following letters belong to 1898, being written to Frances when they were already engaged, but I put them here as they give some notion of the work he did for his employer.

. . . The book I have to deal with for Unwin is an exhaustive and I am told interesting work on "Rome and the Empire" a kind of realistic, modern account of the life of the ancient world. I have got to fix it up, choose illustrations, introductions, notes, etc., and all because I am the only person who knows a little Latin and precious little Roman history and no more archaeology than a blind cat. It is entertaining, and just like our firm's casual way. The work ought to be done by an authority on Roman antiquities. If I hadn't been there they would have given it to the office boy.

However, I shall get through it all right: the more I see of the publishing world, the more I come to the conclusion that I know next to nothing, but that the vast mass of literary people know less. This is sometimes called having "a public-school education."*

[* Extract from undated letter (postmarked, Aug. 11, 1898).]

* * *

I have a lot of work to do, as Unwin has given the production of an important book entirely into my hands, as a kind of invisible editor. It is complimentary, but very worrying, and will mean a lot of time at the British Museum.*

[* Extract from undated letter (postmarked, Aug. 29, 1898).]

11 Paternoster Bldgs. (Postmark, December 1898)

. . . For fear that you should really suppose that my observations about being busy are the subterfuges of a habitual liar, I may give you briefly some idea of the irons at present in the fire. As far as I can make out there are at least seven things that I have undertaken to do and everyone of them I ought to do before any of the others.

1st. There is the book about Ancient Rome which I have to do for T.F.U.--arrange and get illustrations etc. This all comes of showing off. It is a story with a moral (Greedy Gilbert: or Little Boys Should be Seen and not Heard). A short time ago I had to read a treatise by Dean Stubbs on "The Ideal Woman of the Poets" in which the Dean remarked that "all the women admired by Horace were wantons." This struck me as a downright slander, slight as is my classical knowledge, and in my report I asked loftily what Dean Stubbs made of those noble lines on the wife who hid her husband from his foes.

_Splendide mendax et in omne virgo Nobilis aevum_

One of the purest and stateliest tributes ever made to a woman. (The lines might be roughly rendered "A magnificent liar and a noble lady for all eternity"; but no translation can convey the organ-voice of the verse, in which the two strong and lonely words "noble" and "eternity" stand solitary for the last line.) In consequence of my taking up the cudgels against a live Dean for the manly moral sense of the dear old Epicurean, the office became impressed with a vague idea that I know something about Latin literature--whereas, as a matter of fact I have forgotten even the line before the one I quoted. However, in the most confidential and pathetic manner I was entrusted with doing with "Rome et l'Empire" work which ought to be done by a scholar. . . .

2nd. Then there is Captain Webster. You ask (in gruff, rumbling tones) "Who is Captain Webster?" I will tell you.

Captain Webster is a small man with a carefully waxed moustache and a very Bond Street get up, living at the Grosvenor Hotel. Talking to him you would say: he is an ass, but an agreeable ass, a humble, transparent honourable ass. He is an innocent and idiotic butterfly. The interesting finishing touch is that he has been to New Guinea for four years or so, and had some of the most hideous and extravagant adventures that could befall a modern man. His yacht was surrounded by shoals of canoes full of myriads of cannibals of a race who file their teeth to look like the teeth of dogs, and hang weights in their ears till the ears hang like dogs' ears, on the shoulder. He held his yacht at the point of the revolver and got away, leaving some of his men dead on the shore. All night long he heard the horrible noise of the banqueting gongs and saw the huge fires that told his friends were being eaten. Now he lives in the Grosvenor Hotel. Captain Webster finds the pen, not only mightier than the sword, but also much more difficult. He has written his adventures and we are to publish them and I am translating the honest captain into English grammar, a thing which appals him much more than Papuan savages. This means going through it carefully of course and rewriting many parts of it, where relatives and dependent sentences have been lost past recovery. I went to see him, and his childlike dependence on me was quite pathetic. His general attitude was, "You see I'm such a damned fool." And so he is. But when I compare him with the Balzacian hauteur and the preposterous posing of many of our Fleet Street decadent geniuses, I feel a movement of the blood which declares that perhaps there are worse things than War. (Between ourselves, I have a sneaking sympathy with fighting: I fought horribly at school. It is well you should know my illogicalities.)

3rd. There is the selection of illustrations for the History of China we are producing. I know no more of China than the Man in the Moon (less, for he has seen it, at any rate), except what I got from reading the book, but of course I shall make the most of what I do know and airily talk of La-o-tsee and Wu-sank-Wei, criticise Chung-tang and Fu-Tche, compare Tchieu Lung with his great successor, whose name I have forgotten, and the Napoleonic vigour of Li with the weak opportunism of Woo. Before I have done I hope people will be looking behind for my pig-tail. The name I shall adopt will be Tches-Ter-Ton.

4th. A MS to read translated from the Norwegian: a History of the Kiss, Ceremonial, Amicable, Amatory, etc.--in the worst French sentimental style. God alone knows how angry I am with the author of that book. I am not sure that I shall not send up the brief report. "A snivelling hound."

5th. The book for Nutt [Greybeards at Play], which has reached its worst stage, that of polishing up for the eye of Nutt, instead of merely rejoicing in the eye of God. Do you know this is the only one of the lot about which I am at all worried. I do not feel as if things like the Fish poem are really worth publishing. I know they are better than many books that are published, but Heaven knows that is not saying much. In support of some of my work I would fight to the last. But with regard to this occasional verse I feel a humbug. To publish a book of my nonsense verses seems to me exactly like summoning the whole of the people of Kensington to see me smoke cigarettes.

Macgregor told me that I should do much better in the business of literature if I found the work more difficult. My facility, he said, led me to undervalue my work. I wonder whether this is true, and those silly rhymes are any good after all.

6th. The collection of more serious poems of which I spoke to you. You shall have a hand in the selection of these when you get back.

7th. The Novel--which though I have put it aside for the present, yet has become too much a part of me not to be constantly having chapters written--or rather growing out of the others.

And all these things, with the exception of the last one, are supposed to be really urgent, and to be done immediately. . . . Now I hope I have sickened you forever of wanting to know the details of my dull affairs. But I hope it may give you some notion of how hard it really is to get time for writing just now. For you see they are none of them even mechanical things: they all require some thinking about.

I am afraid . . . that if you really want to know what I do, you must forgive me for seeming egoistic. That is the tragedy of the literary person: his very existence is an assertion of his own mental vanity: he must pretend to be conceited even if he isn't. . . .

Beginning to publish, beginning to write, and still developing mentally at a frantic rate--this is a summary of the years 1895-8.

As the Notebook shows, Gilbert was reflecting deeply at this time on the relations both between God and man and between man and his fellow man. The realisation that their relations had gone very far wrong was necessarily followed--for Gilbert's mind was an immensely practical one--by the question of what the proposed remedies were worth. He has told us that he became a Socialist at this time only because it was intolerable not to be a Socialist. The Socialists seemed the only people who were looking at conditions as they were and finding them unendurable. Christian Socialism seemed at first sight, for anyone who admired Christ, to be the obvious form of Socialism, and, in a fragment of this period, G.K. traces the resemblance of modern collectivism to early Christianity.

The points in which Christian and Socialistic collectivism are at one are simple and fundamental. As, however, we must proceed carefully in this matter, we may state these points of resemblance under three heads.

(1) Both rise from the deeps of an emotion, the emotion of compassion for misfortune, as such. This is really a very important point. Collectivism is not an intellectual fad, even if erroneous, but a passionate protest and aspiration: it arises as a secret of the heart, a dream of the injured feeling, long before it shapes itself as a definite propaganda at all. The intellectual philosophies ally themselves with success and preach competition, but the human heart allies itself with misfortune and suggests communism.

(2) Both trace the evil state of society to "covetousness," the competitive desire to accumulate riches. Thus, both in one case and the other, the mere possession of wealth is in itself an offence against moral order, the absence of it in itself a recommendation and training for the higher life.

(3) Both propose to remedy the evil of competition by a system of "bearing each other's burdens" in the literal sense, that is to say, of levelling, silencing and reducing one's own chances, for the chance of your weaker brethren. The desirability, they say, of a great or clever man acquiring fame is small compared with the desirability of a weak and broken man acquiring bread. The strong man is a man, and should modify or adapt himself to the hopes of his mates. He that would be first among you, let him be the servant of all.

These are the three fountains of collectivist passion. I have not considered it necessary to enter into elaborate proof of the presence of these three in the Gospels. That the main trend of Jesus' character was compassion for human ills, that he denounced not merely covetousness but riches again and again, and with an almost impatient emphasis, and that he insisted on his followers throwing up personal aims and sharing funds and fortune entirely, these are plain matters of evidence presented again and again, and, in fact, of common admission.

Yet that uncanny thing in Gilbert which always forced him to see facts, mutinied again at this point and produced another fragment in which he has moved closer to Christianity and thereby further away from modern Socialism. The world he lived in contained a certain number of Christians who were, he found, highly doubtful about the Christian impulse of Socialism. And most of his Socialist friends had about them a tone of bitterness and an atmosphere of hopelessness utterly unlike the tone and the atmosphere of Christianity. Just as atheists were the first people to turn Gilbert from Atheism towards dogmatic Christianity, so the Socialists were now turning him from Socialism.

The next fragment is rather long, but it was never published and I think it so important, as showing how his mind was moving, that it cannot well be shortened. It is a document of capital importance for the biography of Chesterton.

Now, for my own part, I cannot in the least agree with those who see no difference between Christian and modern Socialism, nor do I for a moment join in some Christian Socialists' denunciations of those worthy middle-class people who cannot see the connection. For I cannot help thinking that in a way these latter people are right. No reasonable man can read the Sermon on the Mount and think that its tone is not very different from that of most collectivist speculation of the present day, and the Philistines feel this, though they cannot distinctly express it. There is a difference between Christ's Socialist program and that of our own time, a difference deep, genuine and all important, and it is this which I wish to point out.

Let us take two types side by side, or rather the same type in the two different atmospheres. Let us take the "rich young man" of the Gospels and place beside him the rich young man of the present day, on the threshold of Socialism. If we were to follow the difficulties, theories, doubts, resolves, and conclusions of each of these characters, we should find two very distinct threads of self-examination running through the two lives. And the essence of the difference was this: the modern Socialist is saying, "What will society do?" while his prototype, as we read, said, "What shall I do?" Properly considered, this latter sentence contains the whole essence of the older Communism. The modern Socialist regards his theory of regeneration as a duty which society owes to him, the early Christian regarded it as a duty which he owed to society; the modern Socialist is busy framing schemes for its fulfilment, the early Christian was busy considering whether he would himself fulfil it there and then; the ideal of modern Socialism is an elaborate Utopia to which he hopes the world may be tending, the ideal of the early Christian was an actual nucleus "living the new life" to whom he might join himself if he liked. Hence the constant note running through the whole gospel, of the importance, difficulty and excitement of the "call," the individual and practical request made by Christ to every rich man, "sell all thou hast and give to the poor."

To us Socialism comes speculatively as a noble and optimistic theory of what may [be] the crown of progress, to Peter and James and John it came practically as a crisis of their own Daily life, a stirring question of conduct and renunciation.

We do not therefore in the least agree with those who hold that modern Socialism is an exact counterpart or fulfilment of the socialism of Christianity. We find the difference important and profound, despite the common ground of anti-selfish collectivism. The modern Socialist regards Communism as a distant panacea for society, the early Christian regarded it as an immediate and difficult regeneration of himself: the modern Socialist reviles, or at any rate reproaches, society for not adopting it, the early Christian concentrated his thoughts on the problem of his own fitness and unfitness to adopt it: to the modern Socialist it is a theory, to the early Christian it was a call; modern Socialism says, "Elaborate a broad, noble and workable system and submit it to the progressive intellect of society." Early Christianity said, "Sell all thou hast and give to the poor."

This distinction between the social and personal way of regarding the change has two sides, a spiritual and a practical which we propose to notice. The spiritual side of it, though of less direct and revolutionary importance than the practical, has still a very profound philosophic significance. To us it appears something extraordinary that this Christian side of Socialism, the side of the difficulty of the personal sacrifice, and the patience, cheerfulness, and good temper necessary for the protracted personal surrender is so constantly overlooked. The literary world is flooded with old men seeing visions and young men dreaming dreams, with various stages of anti-competitive enthusiasm, with economic apocalypses, elaborate Utopias and mushroom destinies of mankind. And, as far as we have seen, in all this whirlwind of theoretic excitement there is not a word spoken of the intense practical difficulty of the summons to the individual, the heavy, unrewarding cross borne by him who gives up the world.

For it will not surely be denied that not only will Socialism be impossible without some effort on the part of individuals, but that Socialism if once established would be rapidly dissolved, or worse still, diseased, if the individual members of the community did not make a constant effort to do that which in the present state of human nature must mean an effort, to live the higher life. Mere state systems could not bring about and still less sustain a reign of unselfishness, without a cheerful decision on the part of the members to forget selfishness even in little things, and for that most difficult and at the same time most important personal decision Christ made provision and the modern theorists make no provision at all. Some modern Socialists do indeed see that something more is necessary for the golden age than fixed incomes and universal stores tickets, and that the fountain heads of all real improvement are to be found in human temper and character. Mr. William Morris, for instance, in his "News from Nowhere" gives a beautiful picture of a land ruled by Love, and rightly grounds the give-and-take camaraderie of his ideal state upon an assumed improvement in human nature. But he does not tell us how such an improvement is to be effected, and Christ did. Of Christ's actual method in this matter I shall speak afterwards when dealing with the practical aspect, my object just now is to compare the spiritual and emotional effects of the call of Christ, as compared to those of the vision of Mr. William Morris. When we compare the spiritual attitudes of two thinkers, one of whom is considering whether social history has been sufficiently a course of improvement to warrant him in believing that it will culminate in universal altruism, while the other is considering whether he loves other people enough to walk down tomorrow to the market-place and distribute everything but his staff and his scrip, it will not be denied that the latter is likely to undergo certain deep and acute emotional experiences, which will be quite unknown to the former. And these emotional experiences are what we understand as the spiritual aspect of the distinction. For three characteristics at least the Galilean programme makes more provision; humility, activity, cheerfulness, the real triad of Christian virtues.

Humility is a grand, a stirring thing, the exalting paradox of Christianity, and the sad want of it in our own time is, we believe, what really makes us think life dull, like a cynic, instead of marvellous, like a child. With this, however, we have at present nothing to do. What we have to do with is the unfortunate fact that among no persons is it more wanting than among Socialists, Christian and other. The isolated or scattered protest for a complete change in social order, the continual harping on one string, the necessarily jaundiced contemplation of a system already condemned, and above all, the haunting pessimistic whisper of a possible hopelessness of overcoming the giant forces of success, all these impart undeniably to the modern Socialist a tone excessively imperious and bitter. Nor can we reasonably blame the average money-getting public for their impatience with the monotonous virulence of men who are constantly reviling them for not living communistically, and who after all, are not doing it themselves. Willingly do we allow that these latter enthusiasts think it impossible in the present state of society to practise their ideal, but this fact, while vindicating their indisputable sincerity, throws an unfortunate vagueness and inconclusiveness over their denunciations of other people in the same position. Let us compare with this arrogant and angry tone among the modern Utopians who can only dream "the life," the tone of the early Christian who was busy living it. As far as we know, the early Christians never regarded it as astonishing that the world as they found it was competitive and unregenerate; they seem to have felt that it could not in its pre-Christian ignorance have been anything else, and their whole interest was bent on their own standard of conduct and exhortation which was necessary to convert it. They felt that it was by no merit of theirs that they had been enabled to enter into the life before the Romans, but simply as a result of the fact that Christ had appeared in Galilee and not in Rome. Lastly, they never seem to have entertained a doubt that the message would itself convert the world with a rapidity and ease which left no room for severe condemnation of the heathen societies.

With regard to the second merit, that of activity, there can be little doubt as to where it lies between the planner of the Utopia and the convert of the brotherhood. The modern Socialist is a visionary, but in this he is on the same ground as half the great men of the world, and to some extent of the early Christian himself, who rushed towards a personal ideal very difficult to sustain. The visionary who yearns toward an ideal which is practically impossible is not useless or mischievous, but often the opposite; but the person who is often useless, and always mischievous, is the visionary who dreams with the knowledge or the half-knowledge that his ideal is impossible. The early Christian might be wrong in believing that by entering the brotherhood men could in a few years become perfect even as their Father in Heaven was perfect, but he believed it and acted flatly and fearlessly on the belief: this is the type of the higher visionary. But all the insidious dangers of the vision; the idleness, the procrastination, the mere mental aestheticism, come in when the vision is indulged, as half our Socialistic conceptions are, as a mere humour or fairy-tale, with a consciousness, half-confessed, that it is beyond practical politics, and that we need not be troubled with its immediate fulfilment. The visionary who believes in his own most frantic vision is always noble and useful. It is the visionary who does not believe in his vision who is the dreamer, the idler, the Utopian. This then is the second moral virtue of the older school, an immense direct sincerity of action, a cleansing away, by the sweats of hard work, of all those subtle and perilous instincts of mere ethical castle-building which have been woven like the spells of an enchantress, round so many of the strong men of our own time.

The third merit, which I have called cheerfulness, is really the most important of all. We may perhaps put the comparison in this way. It might strike many persons as strange that in a time on the whole so optimistic in its intellectual beliefs as this is, in an age when only a small minority disbelieve in social progress, and a large majority believe in an ultimate social perfection, there should be such a tired and blasé feeling among numbers of young men. This, we think, is due, not to the want of an ultimate ideal, but to that of any immediate way of making for it: not of something to hope but of something to do. A human being is not satisfied and never will be satisfied with being told that it is all right: what he wants is not a prediction of what other people will be hundreds of years hence, to make him cheerful, but a new and stirring test and task for himself, which will assuredly make him cheerful. A knight is not contented with the statement that his commander has hid his plans so as to insure victory: what the knight wants is a sword. This demand for a task is not mere bravado, it is an eternal and natural part of the higher optimism, as deep-rooted as the foreshadowing of perfection.

I do not know whether Gilbert would yet have actually called himself a Christian. He was certainly tending towards the more Christian elements in his surroundings. It seems pretty clear from all he wrote and said later that he did not hold that transformation to have been fully effected until after his meeting with Frances, to whom he wrote many years later:

Therefore I bring these rhymes to you Who brought the Cross to me.

These papers are undated and are arranged in no sequence. It is possible this last one was written after their first meeting. Certain it is that in it he had begun feeling after a more Christian arrangement of society than Socialism offered--and particularly after an arrangement better suited to the nature of man. This thought of man's nature as primary was to remain the basis of his social thinking to the end of his life.

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VII. Incipit Vita Nova

IN THE NOTEBOOK may be seen Gilbert's occasional thoughts about his own future love story.

SUDDENLY IN THE MIDST

Suddenly in the midst of friends, Of brothers known to me more and more, And their secrets, histories, tastes, hero-worships, Schemes, love-affairs, known to me Suddenly I felt lonely. Felt like a child in a field with no more games to play Because I have not a lady to whom to send my thought at that hour that she might crown my peace.

MADONNA MIA

About her whom I have not yet met I wonder what she is doing Now, at this sunset hour, Working perhaps, or playing, worrying or laughing, Is she making tea, or singing a song, or writing, or praying, or reading Is she thoughtful, as I am thoughtful Is she looking now out of the window As I am looking out of the window?

But a few pages later comes the entry:

F.B.

You are a very stupid person. I don't believe you have the least idea how nice you are.

F.B. was Frances, daughter of a diamond merchant some time dead. The family was of French descent, the name de Blogue having been somewhat unfortunately anglicised into Blogg. They had fallen from considerable wealth into a degree of poverty that made it necessary for the three daughters to earn a living. Frances was never strong and Gilbert has told how utterly exhausted she was at the end of each day's toil--"she worked very hard as secretary of an educational society in London."* The family lived in Bedford Park, a suburb of London that went in for artistic housing and a kind of garden-city atmosphere long before this was at all general. Judging by their photographs the three girls must all have been remarkably pretty, and young men frequented the house in great numbers, among them Brimley Johnson who was engaged to Gertrude, and Lucian Oldershaw who later married Ethel. Some time in 1896, Oldershaw took Gilbert to call and Gilbert, literally at first sight, fell in love with Frances.

[* Autobiography, p. 153.]

TO MY LADY

God made you very carefully He set a star apart for it He stained it green and gold with fields And aureoled it with sunshine He peopled it with kings, peoples, republics And so made you, very carefully. All nature is God's book, filled with his rough sketches for you.*

[* The Notebook.]

When almost forty years later Gilbert was writing his Autobiography, Frances asked him to keep her out of it. The liking they both had for keeping private life private made him call it "this very Victorian narrative." Nevertheless he tells us something of the early days of their acquaintance. Gilbert had mentioned the moon:

She told me in the most normal and unpretentious tone that she hated the moon. I talked to the same lady several times afterwards; and found that this was a perfectly honest statement of the fact. Her attitude on this and other things might be called a prejudice; but it could not possibly be called a fad, still less an affectation. She really had an obstinate objection to all those natural forces that seemed to be sterile or aimless; she disliked loud winds that seemed to be going nowhere; she did not care much for the sea, a spectacle of which I was very fond; and by the same instinct she was up against the moon, which she said looked like an imbecile. On the other hand, she had a sort of hungry appetite for all the fruitful things like fields and gardens and anything connected with production; about which she was quite practical. She practised gardening; in that curious cockney culture she would have been quite ready to practise farming; and on the same perverse principle, she actually practised a religion. This was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to the whole fussy culture in which she lived. Any number of people proclaimed religions, chiefly oriental religions, analysed or argued about them; but that anybody could regard religion as a practical thing like gardening was something quite new to me and, to her neighbours, new and incomprehensible. She had been, by an accident, brought up in the school of an Anglo-Catholic convent; and to all that agnostic or mystic world, practising a religion was much more puzzling than professing it. She was a queer card. She wore a green velvet dress barred with grey fur, which I should have called artistic, but that she hated all the talk about art; and she had an attractive face, which I should have called elvish, but that she hated all the talk about elves. But what was arresting and almost blood-curdling about her, in that social atmosphere, was not so much that she hated it, as that she was entirely unaffected by it. She never knew what was meant by being "under the influence" of Yeats or Shaw or Tolstoy or anybody else. She was intelligent, with a great love of literature, and especially of Stevenson. But if Stevenson had walked into the room and explained his personal doubts about personal immortality, she would have regretted that he should be wrong upon the point; but would otherwise have been utterly unaffected. She was not at all like Robespierre, except in a taste for neatness in dress; and yet it is only in Mr. Belloc's book on Robespierre that I have ever found any words that describe the unique quality that cut her off from the current culture and saved her from it. "God had given him in his mind a stone tabernacle in which certain great truths were preserved imperishable."*

[* Autobiography, pp. 151-3.]

A letter to a friend, Mildred Wain, who was now engaged to Waldo d'Avigdor, makes the future tolerably easy to foresee.

. . . My brother wishes me to thank you with ferocious gratitude for the music, which he is enjoying tremendously. It reminds me rather of what Miss Frances Blogg--but that is another story.

In your last letter you enquired whether I saw anything of the Bloggs now. If you went and put that question to them there would be a scene. Mrs. Blogg would probably fall among the fire-irons, Knollys would foam in convulsions on the carpet, Ethel would scream and take refuge on the mantelpiece and Gertrude faint and break off her engagement. Frances would--but no intelligent person can affect an interest in what she does.

Lawrence Solomon told me that Mrs. Edward Chesterton did not approve of the rather arty-crafty atmosphere of Bedford Park--that earliest of Garden Cities, so conventionally unconventional--where Frances lived. She did not like her son's friendship with the Bloggs and she had chosen for him a girl who she felt would make him an ideal wife: "Very open air," Mr. Solomon said. "Not booky, but good at games and practical." He was not sure whether Gilbert realised this, but personally I believe that Gilbert realised everything.

"Of course you know," Annie Firmin wrote to me, "that Aunt Marie never liked Frances? Or Bentley?" Annie was the girl chosen by Gilbert's mother. She was very much a member of the family.

"Did Gilbert ever speak to you," she wrote to me recently, "of the old Saturday night parties at Barnes, at the home of the grandparents--every Saturday night the family, or as many of it as could, used to go down to Barnes to supper, and the 'boys' and Tom Gilbert, Alice Chesterton's husband, used to sing round the supper table. Many a one I went to when I was staying at Warwick Gardens. We used to go on a red Hammersmith bus, before the days of motor cars."

On a longer trip they stayed at Berck in Belgium, and Cecil had a strange idea, apparently regarded by him as humorous, which measures the family absence of a Christian sense at this date. "Cecil urged me to sit at the foot of the big Crucifix in the village street and let him photograph me as Mary Magdalen! I didn't, and I don't know how he thought he'd get away with the modern clothing."

Whatever Gilbert's mother may have planned for them, neither she nor Gilbert had any romantic feeling for each other. Indeed Cecil was definitely her favourite and she believed him the favourite of both parents also. "He had more heart," she says, "than the more brilliant Gilbert." Anyhow, his heart was shown more openly to her.

"Cecil was not much given to versifying," she wrote in another letter, "he sent me the enclosed when my son was born. I value it so much." Headed "To Annie" the poem is a long one. It begins with the "ancient comradeship, loyal and unbroken" in which they had "first seen life together."

Shining nights, tumultuous days, Joy swift caught in sudden ways, All the laughter, love and praise, All the joys of living

These we shared together dear, Plot and jest and story, This is hid, shut off, unknown, Seeing that to you alone Is the wondrous Kingdom shown And the power and Glory!

Annie's thoughts, then, and Cecil's were not greatly on the elder brother, who was pursuing his own romance with a heart that seems to have been fairly adequate in its energies.

Most mothers have watched their sons through one or more experiences of calf love: Gilbert indicates in the Autobiography--and I knew it, too, from some jokes he and Frances used to make--that he had had one or two fancies before the coming of Reality. He must then convince his mother that Reality had come: he must overcome a prejudice avowed by neither: he must call on the deeps of a mother's feelings so effectively that it would never now be avowed, that it might indeed be swept away.

And so, sitting at a table in a seaside lodging, as his mother sat in the same room or moved about making cocoa for the family, Gilbert tried to express what even for him was the inexpressible.

1 Rosebery Villas Granville Road Felixstowe.

MY DEAREST MOTHER,

You may possibly think this a somewhat eccentric proceeding. You are sitting opposite and talking--about Mrs. Berline. But I take this method of addressing you because it occurs to me that you might possibly wish to turn the matter over in your mind before writing or speaking to me about it.

I am going to tell you the whole of a situation in which I believe I have acted rightly, though I am not absolutely certain, and to ask for your advice on it. It was a somewhat complicated one, and I repeat that I do not think I could rightly have acted otherwise, but if I were the greatest fool in the three kingdoms and had made nothing but a mess of it, there is one person I should always turn to and trust. Mothers know more of their son's idiocies than other people can, and this has been peculiarly true in your case. I have always rejoiced at this, and not been ashamed of it: this has always been true and always will be. These things are easier written than said, but you know it is true, don't you?

I am inexpressibly anxious that you should give me credit for having done my best, and for having constantly had in mind the way in which you would be affected by the letter I am now writing. I do hope you will be pleased.

Almost eight years ago, you made a remark--this may show you that if we "jeer" at your remarks, we remember them. The remark applied to the hypothetical young lady with whom I should fall in love and took the form of saying "If she is good, I shan't mind who she is." I don't know how many times I have said that over to myself in the last two or three days in which I have decided on this letter.

Do not be frightened; or suppose that anything sensational or final has occurred. I am not married, my dear mother, neither am I engaged. You are called to the council of chiefs very early in its deliberations. If you don't mind I will tell you, briefly, the whole story.

You are, I think, the shrewdest person for seeing things whom I ever knew: consequently I imagine that you do not think that I go down to Bedford Park every Sunday for the sake of the scenery. I should not wonder if you know nearly as much about the matter as I can tell in a letter. Suffice it to say however briefly (for neither of us care much for gushing: this letter is not on Mrs. Ratcliffe lines) that the first half of my time of acquaintance with the Bloggs was spent in enjoying a very intimate, but quite breezy and Platonic friendship with Frances Blogg, reading, talking and enjoying life together, having great sympathies on all subjects; and the second half in making the thrilling, but painfully responsible discovery that Platonism, on my side, had not the field by any means to itself. That is how we stand now. No one knows, except her family and yourself.

My dearest mother, I am sure you are at least not unsympathetic. Indeed we love each other more than we shall either of us ever be able to say. I have refrained from sentiment in this letter--for I don't think you like it much. But love is a very different thing from sentiment and you will never laugh at that. I will not say that you are sure to like Frances, for all young men say that to their mothers, quite naturally, and their mothers never believe them, also, quite naturally. Besides, I am so confident, I should like you to find her out for yourself. She is, in reality, very much the sort of woman you like, what is called, I believe, "a Woman's Woman," very humorous, inconsequent and sympathetic and defiled with no offensive exuberance of good health.

I have nothing more to say, except that you and she have occupied my mind for the last week to the exclusion of everything else, which must account for my abstraction, and that in her letter she sent the following message: "Please tell your mother soon. Tell her I am not so silly as to expect her to think me good enough, but really I will try to be."

An aspiration which, considered from my point of view, naturally provokes a smile.

Here you give me a cup of cocoa. Thank you.

Believe me, my dearest mother,

Always your very affectionate son

GILBERT.

What exactly Gilbert meant by saying they were "not engaged" it is hard to surmise, in view of Frances's message to her future mother-in-law. Of his sensations when proposing Gilbert gives some idea in the Autobiography:

It was fortunate, however, that our next most important meeting was not under the sign of the moon but of the sun. She has often affirmed, during our later acquaintance, that if the sun had not been shining to her complete satisfaction on that day, the issue might have been quite different. It happened in St. James's Park; where they keep the ducks and the little bridge, which has been mentioned in no less authoritative a work than Mr. Belloc's Essay on Bridges, since I find myself quoting that author once more. I think he deals in some detail, in his best topographical manner, with various historic sites on the Continent; but later relapses into a larger manner, somewhat thus: "The time has now come to talk at large about Bridges. The longest bridge in the world is the Forth Bridge, and the shortest bridge in the world is a plank over a ditch in the village of Loudwater. The bridge that frightens you most is the Brooklyn Bridge, and the bridge that frightens you least is the bridge in St. James's Park." I admit that I crossed that bridge in undeserved safety; and perhaps I was affected by my early romantic vision of the bridge leading to the princess's tower. But I can assure my friend the author that the bridge in St. James's Park can frighten you a good deal.*

[* Autobiography, pp. 154-5.]

Now, with Frances promised to him, Gilbert could enjoy everything properly, could execute, verbally at least, a wild fantasia. Among the first of his friends to be written to was Mildred Wain, because, as he says in a later letter, he felt towards her deep gratitude "for forming a topic of conversation on my first visit to a family with which I have since formed a dark and shameful connection."

DEAR MILDRED,

On rising this morning, I carefully washed my boots in hot water and blacked my face. Then assuming my coat with graceful ease and with the tails in front, I descended to breakfast, where I gaily poured the coffee on the sardines and put my hat on the fire to boil. These activities will give you some idea of my frame of mind. My family, observing me leave the house by way of the chimney, and take the fender with me under one arm, thought I must have something on my mind. So I had.

My friend, I am engaged. I am only telling it at present to my real friends: but there is no doubt about it. The next question that arises is--whom am I engaged to? I have investigated this problem with some care, and, as far as I can make out, the best authorities point to Frances Blogg. There can I think be no reasonable doubt that she is the lady. It is as well to have these minor matters clear in one's mind.

I am very much too happy to write much; but I thought you might remember my existence sufficiently to be interested in the incident.

Waldo has been of so much help to me in this and in everything, and I am so much interested in you for his sake and your own, that I am encouraged to hope our friendship may subsist. If ever I have done anything rude or silly, it was quite inadvertent. I have always wished to please you.

To Annie Firmin he wrote:

I can only think of the day, one of the earliest I can recall of my life, when you came in and helped me to build a house with bricks. I am building another one now, and it would not have been complete without your going over it.

To others he wrote such sentences as he could put together in the whirlwind of his happiness. For himself he stammered in a verse that grew with the years into his great love poetry.

God made thee mightily, my love, He stretched his hands out of his rest And lit the star of east and west Brooding o'er darkness like a dove. God made thee mightily, my love.

God made thee patiently, my sweet, Out of all stars he chose a star He made it red with sunset bar And green with greeting for thy feet. God made thee mightily, my sweet.

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VIII. To Frances

THIS CHAPTER CAN be written only by Gilbert himself. It might seem that he had no words left for an emotion heightened beyond the love of his friends and the joyous acceptance of existence. But in these letters he shows the truth of his own theory, that to love each thing separately strengthens the power of loving, to have tried to love everyone is, as he tells Frances, no bad preparation for loving her. The emotion of falling in love had both intensified his appreciation of all things and cast for him a vivid light on past, present and future, so that in the last of these letters he sketches his life down to the moment when a new life begins.

". . . I am looking over the sea and endeavouring to reckon up the estate I have to offer you. As far as I can make out my equipment for starting on a journey to fairyland consists of the following items.

"1st. A Straw Hat. The oldest part of this admirable relic shows traces of pure Norman work. The vandalism of Cromwell's soldiers has left us little of the original hat-band.

"2nd. A Walking Stick, very knobby and heavy: admirably fitted to break the head of any denizen of Suffolk who denies that you are the noblest of ladies, but of no other manifest use.

"3rd. A copy of Walt Whitman's poems, once nearly given to Salter, but quite forgotten. It has his name in it still with an affectionate inscription from his sincere friend Gilbert Chesterton. I wonder if he will ever have it.

"4th. A number of letters from a young lady, containing everything good and generous and loyal and holy and wise that isn't in Walt Whitman's poems.

"5th. An unwieldy sort of a pocket knife, the blades mostly having an edge of a more varied and picturesque outline than is provided by the prosaic cutter. The chief element however is a thing 'to take stones out of a horse's hoof.' What a beautiful sensation of security it gives one to reflect that if one should ever have money enough to buy a horse and should happen to buy one and the horse should happen to have a stone in his hoof--that one is ready; one stands prepared, with a defiant smile!

"6th. Passing from the last miracle of practical foresight, we come to a box of matches. Every now and then I strike one of these, because fire is beautiful and burns your fingers. Some people think this waste of matches: the same people who object to the building of Cathedrals.

"7th. About three pounds in gold and silver, the remains of one of Mr. Unwin's bursts of affection: those explosions of spontaneous love for myself, which, such is the perfect order and harmony of his mind, occur at startlingly exact intervals of time.

"8th. A book of Children's Rhymes, in manuscript, called the 'Weather Book' about ¾ finished, and destined for Mr. Nutt.* I have been working at it fairly steadily, which I think jolly creditable under the circumstances. One can't put anything interesting in it. They'll understand those things when they grow up.

[* Greybeards at Play.]

"9th. A tennis racket--nay, start not. It is a part of the new régime, and the only new and neat-looking thing in the Museum. We'll soon mellow it--like the straw hat. My brother and I are teaching each other lawn tennis.

"10th. A soul, hitherto idle and omnivorous but now happy enough to be ashamed of itself.

"11th. A body, equally idle and quite equally omnivorous, absorbing tea, coffee, claret, sea-water and oxygen to its own perfect satisfaction. It is happiest swimming, I think, the sea being about a convenient size.

"12th. A Heart--mislaid somewhere. And that is about all the property of which an inventory can be made at present. After all, my tastes are stoically simple. A straw hat, a stick, a box of matches and some of his own poetry. What more does man require? . . ."

". . . The City of Felixstowe, as seen by the local prophet from the neighbouring mountain-peak, does not strike the eye as having anything uncanny about it. At least I imagine that it requires rather careful scrutiny before the eerie curl of a chimney pot, or the elfin wink of a lonely lamp-post brings home to the startled soul that it is really the City of a Fearful Folk. That the inhabitants are not human in the ordinary sense is quite clear, yet it has only just begun to dawn on me after staying a week in the Town of Unreason with its monstrous landscape and grave, unmeaning customs. Do I seem to be raving? Let me give my experiences.

"I am bound to admit that I do not think I am good at shopping. I generally succeed in getting rid of money, but other observances, such as bringing away the goods that I've paid for, and knowing what I've bought, I often pass over as secondary. But to shop in a town of ordinary tradesmen is one thing: to shop in a town of raving lunatics is another. I set out one morning, happy and hopeful with the intention of buying (a) a tennis racket (b) some tennis balls (c) some tennis shoes (d) a ticket for a tennis ground. I went to the shop pointed out by some villager (probably mad) and went in and said I believed they kept tennis rackets. The young man smiled and assented. I suggested that he might show me some. The young man looked positively alarmed. 'Oh,' he said, 'We haven't got any--not got any here.' I asked 'Where?' 'Oh, they're out you know. All round,' he explained wildly, with a graphic gesture in the direction of the sea and the sky. 'All out round. We've left them all round at places.' To this day I don't know what he meant, but I merely asked when they would quit these weird retreats. He said in an hour: in an hour I called again. Were they in now? 'Well not in--not in, just yet,' he said with a sort of feverish confidentialness, as if he wasn't quite well. 'Are they still--all out at places?' I asked with restrained humour. 'Oh no!' he said with a burst of reassuring pride. 'They are only out there--out behind, you know.' I hope my face expressed my beaming comprehension of the spot alluded to. Eventually, at a third visit, the rackets were produced. None of them, I was told by my brother, were of any first-class maker, so that was outside the question. The choice was between some good, neat first-hand instruments which suited me, and some seedy-looking second-hand objects with plain deal handles, which would have done at a pinch. I thought that perhaps it would be better to get a good-class racket in London and content myself for the present with economising on one of these second-hand monuments of depression. So I asked the price. '10/6' was the price of the second-hand article. I thought this large for the tool, and wondered if the first-hand rackets were much dearer. What price the first-hand? '7/6' said the Creature, cheery as a bird. I did not faint. I am strong.

"I rejected the article which was dearer because it had been hallowed by human possession, and accepted the cheap, new crude racket. Except the newness there was no difference between them whatever. I then asked the smiling Maniac for balls. He brought me a selection of large red globes nearly as big as Dutch cheeses. I said, 'Are these tennis-balls?' He said, 'Oh did you want tennis-balls?' I said Yes--they often came in handy at tennis. The goblin was however quite impervious to satire, and I left him endeavouring to draw my attention to his wares in general, particularly to some zinc baths which he seemed to think should form part of the equipment of a tennis-player.

"Never before or since have I met a being of that order and degree of creepiness. He was a nightmare of unmeaning idiocy. But some mention ought to be made of the old man at the entrance to the tennis ground who opened his mouth in parables on the subject of the fee for playing there. He seemed to have been wound up to make only one remark, 'It's sixpence.' Under these circumstances the attempt to discover whether the sixpence covered a day's tennis or a week or fifty years was rather baffling. At last I put down the sixpence. This seemed to galvanise him into life. He looked at the clock, which was indicating five past eleven and said, 'It's sixpence an hour--so you'll be all right till two.' I fled screaming.

"Since then I have examined the town more carefully and feel the presence of something nameless. There is a claw-curl in the sea-bent trees, an eye-gleam in the dark flints in the wall that is not of this world.

"When we set up a house, darling (honeysuckle porch, yew clipt hedge, bees, poetry and eight shillings a week), I think you will have to do the shopping. Particularly at Felixstowe. There was a great and glorious man who said, 'Give us the luxuries of life and we will dispense with the necessities.' That I think would be a splendid motto to write (in letters of brown gold) over the porch of our hypothetical home. There will be a sofa for you, for example, but no chairs, for I prefer the floor. There will be a select store of chocolate-creams (to make you do the Carp with) and the rest will be bread and water. We will each retain a suit of evening dress for great occasions, and at other times clothe ourselves in the skins of wild beasts (how pretty you would look) which would fit your taste in furs and be economical.

"I have sometimes thought it would be very fine to take an ordinary house, a very poor, commonplace house in West Kensington, say, and make it symbolic. Not artistic--Heaven--O Heaven forbid. My blood boils when I think of the affronts put by knock-kneed pictorial epicures on the strong, honest, ugly, patient shapes of necessary things: the brave old bones of life. There are aesthetic pottering prigs who can look on a saucepan without one tear of joy or sadness: mongrel decadents that can see no dignity in the honourable scars of a kettle. So they concentrate all their house decoration on coloured windows that nobody looks out of, and vases of lilies that everybody wishes out of the way. No: my idea (which is much cheaper) is to make a house really allegoric: really explain its own essential meaning. Mystical or ancient sayings should be inscribed on every object, the more prosaic the object the better; and the more coarsely and rudely the inscription was traced the better. 'Hast thou sent the Rain upon the Earth?' should be inscribed on the Umbrella-stand: perhaps on the Umbrella. 'Even the Hairs of your Head are all numbered' would give a tremendous significance to one's hairbrushes: the words about 'living water' would reveal the music and sanctity of the sink: while 'our God is a consuming Fire' might be written over the kitchen-grate, to assist the mystic musings of the cook--Shall we ever try that experiment, dearest. Perhaps not, for no words would be golden enough for the tools you had to touch: you would be beauty enough for one house. . . ."

". . . By all means let us have bad things in our dwelling and make them good things. I shall offer no objection to your having an occasional dragon to dinner, or a penitent Griffin to sleep in the spare bed. The image of you taking a Sunday school of little Devils is pleasing. They will look up, first in savage wonder, then in vague respect; they will see the most glorious and noble lady that ever lived since their prince tempted Eve, with a halo of hair and great heavenly eyes that seem to make the good at the heart of things almost too terribly simple and naked for the sons of flesh: and as they gaze, their tails will drop off, and their wings will sprout: and they will become Angels in six lessons. . . .

"I cannot profess to offer any elaborate explanation of your mother's disquiet but I admit it does not wholly surprise me. You see I happen to know one factor in the case, and one only, of which you are wholly ignorant. I know you . . . I know one thing which has made me feel strange before your mother--I know the value of what I take away. I feel (in a weird moment) like the Angel of Death.

"You say you want to talk to me about death: my views about death are bright, brisk and entertaining. When Azrael takes a soul it may be to other and brighter worlds: like those whither you and I go together. The transformation called Death may be something as beautiful and dazzling as the transformation called Love. It may make the dead man 'happy,' just as your mother knows that you are happy. But none the less it is a transformation, and sad sometimes for those left behind. A mother whose child is dying can hardly believe that in the inscrutable Unknown there is anyone who can look to it as well as she. And if a mother cannot trust her child easily to God Almighty, shall I be so mean as to be angry because she cannot trust it easily to me? I tell you I have stood before your mother and felt like a thief. I know you are not going to part: neither physically, mentally, morally nor spiritually. But she sees a new element in your life, wholly from outside--is it not natural, given her temperament, that you should find her perturbed? Oh, dearest, dearest Frances, let us always be very gentle to older people. Indeed, darling, it is not they who are the tyrants, but we. They may interrupt our building in the scaffolding stages: we turn their house upside down when it is their final home and rest. Your mother would certainly have worried if you had been engaged to the Archangel Michael (who, indeed, is bearing his disappointment very well): how much more when you are engaged to an aimless, tactless, reckless, unbrushed, strange-hatted, opinionated scarecrow who has suddenly walked into the vacant place. I could have prophesied her unrest: wait and she will calm down all right, dear. God comfort her: I dare not. . . ."

". . . Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born of comfortable but honest parents on the top of Campden Hill, Kensington. He was christened at St. George's Church which stands just under that more imposing building, the Waterworks Tower. This place was chosen, apparently, in order that the whole available water supply might be used in the intrepid attempt to make him a member of Christ, a child of God and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven.

"Of the early years of this remarkable man few traces remain. One of his earliest recorded observations was the simple exclamation, full of heart-felt delight, 'Look at Baby. Funny Baby.' Here we see the first hint of that ineffable conversational modesty, that shy social self-effacement, which has ever hidden his light under a bushel. His mother also recounts with apparent amusement an incident connected with his imperious demand for his father's top-hat. 'Give me that hat, please.' 'No, dear, you mustn't have that.' 'Give me that hat.' 'No, dear--' 'If you don't give it me, I'll say 'At.' An exquisite selection in the matter of hats has indeed always been one of the great man's hobbies.

"When he had drawn pictures on all the blinds and tablecloths and towels and walls and windowpanes it was felt that he required a larger sphere. Consequently he was sent to Mr. Bewsher who gave him desks and copy-books and Latin grammars and atlases to draw pictures on. He was far too innately conscientious not to use these materials to draw on. To other uses, asserted by some to belong to these objects, he paid little heed. The only really curious thing about his school life was that he had a weird and quite involuntary habit of getting French prizes. They were the only ones he ever got and he never tried to get them. But though the thing was quite mysterious to him, and though he made every effort to avoid it, it went on, being evidently a part of some occult natural law.

"For the first half of his time at school he was very solitary and futile. He never regretted the time, for it gave him two things, complete mental self-sufficiency and a comprehension of the psychology of outcasts.

"But one day, as he was roaming about a great naked building land which he haunted in play hours, rather like an outlaw in the woods, he met a curious agile youth with hair brushed up off his head. Seeing each other, they promptly hit each other simultaneously and had a fight. Next day they met again and fought again. These Homeric conflicts went on for many days, till one morning in the crisis of some insane grapple, the subject of this biography quoted, like a war-chant, something out of Macaulay's Lays. The other started and relaxed his hold. They gazed at each other. Then the foe quoted the following line. In this land of savages they knew each other. For the next two hours they talked books. They have talked books ever since. The boy was Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The incident just narrated is the true and real account of the first and deepest of our hero's male connections. But another was to ensue, probably equally profound and far more pregnant with awful and dazzling consequences. Bentley always had a habit of trying to do things well: twelve years of the other's friendship has not cured him of this. Being seized with a peculiar desire to learn conjuring, he had made the acquaintance of an eerie and supernatural young man, who instructed him in the Black Art: a gaunt Mephistophelian sort of individual, who our subject half thought was a changeling. Our subject has not quite got over the idea yet, though for practical social purposes he calls him Lucian Oldershaw. Our subject met Lucian Oldershaw. 'That night,' as Shakespeare says, 'there was a star.'

"These three persons soon became known through the length and breadth of St. Paul's School as the founders of a singular brotherhood. It was called the J.D.C. No one, we believe, could ever have had better friends than did the hero of this narrative. We wish that we could bring before the reader the personality of all the Knights of that eccentric round table. Most of them are known already to the reader. Even the subject himself is possibly known to the reader. Bertram, who seemed somehow to have been painted by Vandyck, a sombre and stately young man, a blend of Cavalier and Puritan, with the physique of a military father and the views of an ethical mother and a soul of his own which for sheer simplicity is something staggering. Vernède with an Oriental and inscrutable placidity varied every now and then with dazzling agility and Meredithian humour. Waldo d'Avigdor who masks with complete fashionable triviality a Hebraic immutability of passion tried in a more ironical and bitter service than his Father Jacob. Lawrence and Maurice Solomon, who show another side of the same people, the love of home, the love of children, the meek and malicious humour, the tranquil service of a law. Salter who shows how beautiful and ridiculous a combination can be made of the most elaborate mental cultivation and artistic sensibility and omniscience with a receptiveness and a humility extraordinary in any man. These were his friends. May he be forgiven for speaking of them at length and with pride? Some day we hope the reader may know them all. He knew these people; he knew their friends. He heard Mildred Wain say 'Blogg' and he thought it was a funny name. Had he been told that he would ever pronounce it with the accents of tears and passion he would have said, in his pride, that the name was not suitable for that purpose. But there are oukh eph' emin [Greek characters in original]. . . .

"He went for a time to an Art School. There he met a great many curious people. Many of the men were horrible blackguards: he was not exactly that: so they naturally found each other interesting. He went through some rather appalling discoveries about human life and the final discovery was that there is no Devil--no, not even such a thing as a bad man.

"One pleasant Saturday afternoon Lucian said to him, 'I am going to take you to see the Bloggs.' 'The what?' said the unhappy man. 'The Bloggs,' said the other, darkly. Naturally assuming that it was the name of a public-house he reluctantly followed his friend. He came to a small front-garden; if it was a public-house it was not a businesslike one. They raised the latch--they rang the bell (if the bell was not in the close time just then). No flower in the pots winked. No brick grinned. No sign in Heaven or earth warned him. The birds sang on in the trees. He went in.

"The first time he spent an evening at the Bloggs there was no one there. That is to say there was a worn but fiery little lady in a grey dress who didn't approve of 'catastrophic solutions of social problems.' That, he understood, was Mrs. Blogg. There was a long, blonde, smiling young person who seemed to think him quite off his head and who was addressed as Ethel. There were two people whose meaning and status he couldn't imagine, one of whom had a big nose and the other hadn't. . . . Lastly, there was a Juno-like creature in a tremendous hat who eyed him all the time half wildly, like a shying horse, because he said he was quite happy. . . .

"But the second time he went there he was plumped down on a sofa beside a being of whom he had a vague impression that brown hair grew at intervals all down her like a caterpillar. Once in the course of conversation she looked straight at him and he said to himself as plainly as if he had read it in a book: 'If I had anything to do with this girl I should go on my knees to her: if I spoke with her she would never deceive me: if I depended on her she would never deny me: if I loved her she would never play with me: if I trusted her she would never go back on me: if I remembered her she would never forget me. I may never see her again. Goodbye.' It was all said in a flash: but it was all said. . . .

"Two years, as they say in the playbills, is supposed to elapse. And here is the subject of this memoir sitting on a balcony above the sea. The time, evening. He is thinking of the whole bewildering record of which the foregoing is a brief outline: he sees how far he has gone wrong and how idle and wasteful and wicked he has often been: how miserably unfitted he is for what he is called upon to be. Let him now declare it and hereafter for ever hold his peace.

"But there are four lamps of thanksgiving always before him. The first is for his creation out of the same earth with such a woman as you. The second is that he has not, with all his faults, 'gone after strange women.' You cannot think how a man's self-restraint is rewarded in this. The third is that he has tried to love everything alive: a dim preparation for loving you. And the fourth is--but no words can express that. Here ends my previous existence. Take it: it led me to you."

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