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.