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."