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.