A Long Engagement
GILBERT SYMPATHIZED WITH his future mother-in-law's anxiety at
Frances's engagement to "a self-opinionated scarecrow," but I doubt
if it at all quickly occurred to him that the basis of that anxiety
was the fact that he was earning only twenty-five shillings a week!
Frances herself, Lucian Oldershaw, and the rest of his friends
believed he was a genius with a great future and this belief they
tried to communicate to Frances's family. But even if they succeeded,
faith in the future did not pay dividends in a present income on
which to set up house. A widow, considering her daughter's future,
might well feel a little anxiety. But one can see wheels within
wheels of family conclaves and matters to perplex the simple which
drew another letter from Gilbert to Frances:
. . . It is a mystic and refreshing thought that I shall never
understand Bloggs.
That is the truth of it . . . that this remarkable family
atmosphere . . . this temperament with its changing moods and its
everlasting will, its divine trust in one's soul and its tremulous
speculations as to one's "future," its sensitiveness like a tempered
sword, vibrating but never broken: its patience that can wait for
Eternity and its impatience that cannot wait for tea: its power of
bearing huge calamities, and its queer little moods that even those
calamities can never overshadow or wipe out: its brusqueness that
always pleases and its over-tactfulness that sometimes wounds: its
terrific intensity of feeling, that sometimes paralyses the outsider
with conversational responsibility: its untranslatable humour of
courage and poverty and its unfathomed epics of past tragedy and
triumph--all this glorious confusion of family traits, which, in no
exaggerative sense, make the Gentiles come to your light and the folk
of the nations to the brightness of your house--is a thing so utterly
outside my own temperament that I was formed by nature to admire and
not understand it. God made me very simply--as he made a tree or a
pig or an oyster: to perform certain functions. The best thing he
gave me was a perfect and unshakable trust in those I love. . . .
Gilbert's sympathy with his future mother-in-law may have been put
to some slight strain by an incident related by Lucian Oldershaw.
Mrs. Blogg begged him to talk to Gilbert about his personal
appearance--clothes and such matters--and to entreat him to make an
effort to improve it. One can imagine how much he must have disliked
the commission! Anyhow, he decided it would be better to do it away
from home and he suggested to Gilbert a trip to the seaside. Arrived
there he broached the subject. Gilbert, he says, was not the least
angry, but answered quite seriously that Frances loved him as he was
and that it would be absurd for him to try to alter. It was only out
of a later and deeper experience of women that he was able to write
"A man's friends like him but they leave him as he is. A man's wife
loves him and is always trying to change him."
A good many things happened in the course of this long engagement.
Frances and Gilbert were both young and long engagements were normal
at that period, when the idea of a wife continuing to earn after
marriage was unheard of. There were obvious disadvantages in the long
delay before marriage but also certain advantages. The two got to
know each other with a close intimacy: they were comrades as well as
lovers and carried both these relationships into married life. For
the biographer the advantage has been immense, since every separation
between the pair meant a batch of letters. The discerning will have
noted that there are in these letters considerable excisions: parts
Frances would not show even to the biographer. . But they are the
richest quarry from which to dig for the most important period of any
man's life; the period richest in mental development and the shaping
of character. It is, too, the only period of his adult life when
Gilbert wrote letters at all, unless they were absolutely unavoidable.
Even in a small family two members will tend to draw together more
closely than the rest, and this was so with Frances and her sister
Gertrude. They adored one another and Frances offered her to Gilbert
as a sister, with especially confident pride. He had never had a
sister since babyhood and he enjoyed it. The happiness of the
engagement was terribly broken into by the sudden death of Gertrude
in a street accident. Frances was absolutely shattered. The next
group of letters belongs to the months after Gertrude's death, when
Gilbert was still trying to be a publisher, but, urged on by Frances,
beginning also to be a writer. During part of this time she had gone
abroad for rest and recovery after the shock. Gilbert pictures her
reading his letters "under the shadow of an alien cathedral."
None of these letters are dated but most of them have kept their
postmarks.
11, Paternoster Buildings
(postmarked July 8, 1899)
. . . I am black but comely at this moment: because the cyclostyle
has blacked me. Fear not. I shall wash myself. But I think it my duty
to render an accurate account of my physical appearance every time I
write: and shall be glad of any advice and assistance. . . . I have
been reading Lewis Carroll's remains, mostly Logic, and have much
pleasure in enlivening you with the following hilarious query: "Can a
Hypothetical, whose protasis is false, be legitimate? Are two
Hypotheticals of the forms, _If A, then B_, and _If A then not B_
compatible?" I should think a Hypothetical could be, if it tried
hard. . . .
To return to the Cyclostyle. I like the Cyclostyle ink; it is so
inky. I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce
pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of
water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the
steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud. It is just the
same with people. When we call a man "manly" or a woman "womanly" we
touch the deepest philosophy.
I will not ask you to forgive this rambling levity. I, for one have
sworn, I do not hesitate to say it, by the sword of God that has
struck us, and before the beautiful face of the dead, that the first
joke that occurred to me I would make, the first nonsense poem I
thought of I would write, that I would begin again at once with a
heavy heart at times, as to other duties, to the duty of being
perfectly silly, perfectly extravagant, perfectly trivial, and as far
as possible, amusing. I have sworn that Gertrude should not feel,
wherever she is, that the comedy has gone out of our theatre. This, I
am well aware, will be misunderstood. But I have long grasped that
whatever we do we are misunderstood--small blame to other people; for,
we know ourselves, our best motives are things we could neither
explain nor defend. And I would rather hurt those who can shout than
her who is silent.
You might tell me what you feel about this: but I am myself
absolutely convinced that gaiety that is the bubble of love, does not
annoy me: the old round of stories, laughter, family ceremonies,
seems to me far less really inappropriate than a single moment of
forced silence or unmanly shame. . . .
I have always imagined Frances did not know of her mother's efforts
to tidy Gilbert, but very early in their engagement she began her own
abortive attempts to make him brush his hair, tie his tie straight
and avoid made-up ones, attend to the buttons on his coat, and all
the rest. It would seem that for a time at any rate he made some
efforts, but evidently simply regarded the whole thing as one huge
joke.
11 Warwick Gardens
(Postmarked July 9th, 1899)
. . . I am clean. I am wearing a frockcoat, which from a
superficial survey seems to have no end of buttons. It must be
admitted that I am wearing a bow-tie: but on careful research I find
that these were constantly worn by Vikings. A distinct allusion to
them is made in that fine fragment, the Tryggvhessa Saga, where the
poet says, in the short alliterative lines of Early Norse poetry:
Frockcoat Folding then
Hakon Hardrada
Bow-tie Buckled
Waited for war
(Brit. Mus. Mss. CCCLXIX lines 99981-99985)
I resume. My appearance, as I have suggested, is singularly
exemplary. My boots are placed, after the fastidious London fashion,
on the feet: the laces are done up, the watch is going, the hair is
brushed, the sleeve-links are inserted, for of such is the Kingdom of
Heaven. As for my straw hat, I put it on eighteen times
consecutively, taking a run and a jump to each try, till at last I
hit the right angle. I have not taken it off for three days and
nights lest I should disturb that exquisite pose. Ladies, princes,
queens, ecclesiastical processions go by in vain: I do not remove it.
That angle of the hat is something to mount guard over. As Swinburne
says--"Not twice on earth do the gods do this."
It is at present what is, I believe, called a lovely summer's
night. To say that it is hot would be as feeble a platitude as the
same remark would be in the small talk of Satan and Beelzebub.
If there were such a thing as _blue_-hot iron, it would describe
the sky tonight. I cannot help dreaming of some wild fairy-tale in
which the whole round cosmos should be a boiling pot, with the flames
of Purgatory under it, and that soon I shall have the satisfaction of
seeing such a thing as boiled mountains, boiled cities, and a boiled
moon and stars. A tremendous picture. Yet I am perfectly happy as
usual. After all, why should we object to be boiled? Potatoes, for
example, are better boiled than raw--why should we fear to be boiled
into new shapes in the cauldron? These things are an allegory.
. . . I am so glad to hear you say . . . that, in your own words "it
is good for us to be here"--where you are at present. The same remark,
if I remember right, was made on the mountain of the Transfiguration.
It has always been one of my unclerical sermons to myself, that that
remark which Peter made on seeing the vision of a single hour, ought
to be made by us all, in contemplating every panoramic change in the
long Vision we call life--other things superficially, but this always
in our depths. "It is good for us to be here--it is good for us to be
here," repeating itself eternally. And if, after many joys and
festivals and frivolities, it should be our fate to have to look on
while one of us is, in a most awful sense of the words, "transfigured
before our eyes": shining with the whiteness of death--at least, I
think, we cannot easily fancy ourselves wishing not to be at our
post. Not I, certainly. It was good for me to be there.
* * * *
11 Warwick Gardens
(postmarked July 11, 1899.)
. . . The novel, after which you so kindly enquire, is proceeding
headlong. It received another indirect stimulus today, when Mr.
Garnett insisted on taking me out to lunch, gave me a gorgeous repast
at a restaurant, succeeded in plucking the secret of my private
employment from my bosom, and made me promise to send him some
chapters of it. I certainly cannot complain of not being
sympathetically treated by the literary men I know. I wonder where
the jealous, spiteful, depreciating man of letters we read of in
books has got to. It's about time he turned up, I think. Excuse me
for talking about these trivialities. . . .
I have made a discovery: or I should say seen a vision. I saw it
between two cups of black coffee in a Gallic restaurant in Soho: but
I could not express it if I tried.
But this was one thing that it said--that all good things are one
thing. There is no conflict between the gravestone of Gertrude and a
comic-opera tune played by Mildred Wain. But there is everlasting
conflict between the gravestone of Gertrude and the obscene pomposity
of the hired mute: and there is everlasting conflict between the
comic-opera tune and any mean or vulgar words to which it may be set.
These, which man hath joined together, God shall most surely sunder.
That is what I am feeling . . . now every hour of the day. All good
things are one thing. Sunsets, schools of philosophy, babies,
constellations, cathedrals, operas, mountains, horses, poems--all
these are merely disguises. One thing is always walking among us in
fancy-dress, in the grey cloak of a church or the green cloak of a
meadow. He is always behind, His form makes the folds fall so
superbly. And that is what the savage old Hebrews, alone among the
nations, guessed, and why their rude tribal god has been erected on
the ruins of all polytheistic civilisations. For the Greeks and
Norsemen and Romans saw the superficial wars of nature and made the
sun one god, the sea another, the wind a third. They were not
thrilled, as some rude Israelite was, one night in the wastes, alone,
by the sudden blazing idea of all being the same God: an idea worthy
of a detective story.
11, Paternoster Buildings
(postmarked July 14, 1899.)
. . . costume slightly improved. The truth is that a mystical and
fantastic development has taken place. My clothes have rebelled
against me. Weary of scorn and neglect, they have all suddenly come
to life and they dress me by force every morning. My frockcoat leaps
upon me like a lion and hangs on, dragging me down. As I struggle my
boots trip me up--and the laces climb up my feet (never missing a
hole) like snakes or creepers. At the same moment the celebrated grey
tie springs at my throat like a wild cat.
I am told that the general effects produced by this remarkable
psychical development are superb. Really the clothes must know
best. Still it is awkward when a mackintosh pursues one down the
street. . . .
. . . There is nothing in God's earth that really expresses the
bottom of the nature of a man in love except Burns' songs. To the man
not in love they must seem inexplicably simple. When he says, "My
love is like the melody that's sweetly played in tune," it seems
almost a crude way of referring to music. But a man in love with a
woman feels a nerve move suddenly that Dante groped for and
Shakespeare hardly touched. What made me think of Burns, however, was
that one of his simple and sudden things, hitting the right nail so
that it rings, occurs in the song of "O a' the airts the wind can
blaw," where he merely says that there is nothing beautiful anywhere
but it makes him think of the woman. That is not really a mere
aesthetic fancy, a chain of sentimental association--it is an actual
instinctive elemental movement of the mind, performed automatically
and instantly. . . .
Felixstowe (undated)
. . . I have as you see, arrived here. I have done other daring
things, such as having my hair shampooed, as you commanded, and also
cut. The effect of this is so singularly horrible that I have found
further existence in London impossible. Public opinion is too strong
for me. . . . There are many other reasons I could give for being
pleased to come: such as that I have some time for writing the novel;
that I can make up stories I don't intend to write . . . that there
are phosphorescent colours on the sea and a box of cigarettes on the
mantelpiece.
Some fragments of what I felt [about Gertrude's death] have
struggled out in the form of some verses which I am writing out for
you. But for real strength (I don't like the word "comfort") for real
peace, no human words are much good except perhaps some of the
unfathomable, unintelligible, unconquerable epigrams of the Bible. I
remember when Bentley had a burning boyish admiration for Professor
Huxley, and when that scientist died some foolish friend asked him
quite flippantly in a letter what he felt about it. Bentley replied
with the chapter and verse reference to one of the Psalms, alone on a
postcard. The text was, "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the
death of one of his saints." The friend, I remember, thought it "a
curious remark about Huxley." It strikes me as a miraculous remark
about anybody. It is one of those magic sayings where every word hits
a chain of association, God knows how.
"Precious"--we could not say that Gertrude's death is happy or
providential or sweet or even perhaps good. But it is something.
"Beautiful" is a good word--but "precious" is the only right word.
It is this passionate sense of the _value_ of things: of the
richness of the cosmic treasure: the world where every star is a
diamond, every leaf an emerald, every drop of blood a ruby, it is
this sense of preciousness that is really awakened by the death of
His saints. Somehow we feel that even their death is a thing of
incalculable value and mysterious sweetness: it is awful, tragic,
desolating, desperately hard to bear--but still "precious." . . .
Forgive the verbosity of one whose trade it is to express the
inexpressible.
The verses he speaks of in this letter, Frances treasured greatly.
She showed them to me, in a book which opens with a very touching
prayer in her own writing. In a later chapter I quote the lines in
which Gilbert writes of his own tone-deafness, and of how he saw what
music meant as he watched his wife's face. Something of the same
effect is produced on me by these verses. Gilbert was not of course
tone-deaf to this tragedy, yet it was chiefly in its effect on
Frances that it affected him.
The sudden sorrow smote my love
That often falls twixt kiss and kiss
And looking forth awhile she said
Can no man tell me where she is.
And again
Stricken they sat: and through them moved
My own dear lady, pale and sweet.
This soul whose clearness makes afraid
Our souls: this wholly guiltless one--
No cobweb doubts--no passion smoke
Have veiled this mirror from Thy sun.
In letters to Frances he could enter so deeply into her grief as to
make it his own. But when he wrote verse and spoke as it were to
himself or to God, the reflected emotion was not enough. These verses
could never rank with his real poetry.
It was not possible in fact for a man so happily in love to dwell
lastingly on any sorrow. And I cannot avoid the feeling that, quite
apart from any theory, cheerfulness was constantly "breaking in." For
Gilbert was a very happy man. Across the top of one of his letters is
written: "You can always tell the real love from the slight by the
fact that the latter weakens at the moment of success; the former is
quadrupled."
The next of his letters is a mingling of the comic and the fantastic,
very special to G.K.C.
11, Paternoster Buildings
(postmarked Sept. 29, 1899.)
. . . I fear, as you say, that my letters do not contain many
practical details about myself: the letters are not very long to
begin with, as I think it better to write something every day
than a long letter when I have leisure: and when I have a little
time to think in, I always think of the Kosmos first and the Ego
afterwards. I admit, however, that you are not engaged to the
Kosmos: dear me! what a time the Kosmos would have! All its
Comets would have their hair brushed every morning. The Whirlwind
would be adjured not to walk about when it was talking. The
Oceans would be warmed with hot-water pipes. Not even the lowest
forms of life would escape the crusade of tidiness: you would
walk round and round the jellyfish, looking for a place to put in
shirt-links.
Under these circumstances, then, I cannot but regard it as
fortunate that you are only engaged to your obedient Microcosm: a
biped inheriting some of the traits of his mother, the Kosmos, its
untidiness, its largeness, its irritating imperfection and its
profound and hearty intention to go on existing as long as it
possibly can.
I can understand what you mean about wanting details about me, for
I want just the same about you. You need only tell me "I went down
the street to a pillar-box," I shall know that you did it in a
manner, blindingly, staggeringly, crazily beautiful. It is quite
true, as you say, that I am a person wearing _certain_ clothes with a
_certain_ kind of hair. I cannot get rid of the impression that there
is something scorchingly sarcastic about the underlining in this
passage. . . .
. . . as to what I do every day: it depends on which way you want
it narrated: what we all say it is, or what it really is.
What we all say happens every day is this: I wake up: dress myself,
eat bacon and bread and coffee for breakfast: walk up to High St.
Station, take a fourpenny ticket for Blackfriars, read the Chronicle
in the train, arrive at 11, Paternoster Buildings: read a MS called
"The Lepers" (light comedy reading) and another called "The
Preparation of Ryerson Embury"--you know the style--till 2 o'clock.
Go out to lunch, have--(but here perhaps it would be safer to become
vague), come back, work till six, take my hat and walking-stick and
come home: have dinner at home, write the Novel till 11, then write
to you and go to bed. That is what, we in our dreamy, deluded way,
really imagine is the thing that happens. What really happens (but
hist! are we observed?) is as follows.
Out of the starless night of the Uncreated, that was before the
stars, a soul begins to grope back to light. It gropes its way
through strange, half-lighted chambers of Dreams, where in a brown
and gold twilight, it sees many things that are dimly significant,
true stories twisted into new and amazing shapes, human beings whom
it knew long ago, sitting at the windows by dark sunsets, or talking
in dim meadows. But the awful invading Light grows stronger in the
dreams, till the soul in one last struggle, plunges into a body, as
into a house and wakes up within it. Then he rises and finds himself
in a wonderful vast world of white light and clear, frankly coloured
shapes, an inheritor of a million stars. On enquiry he is informed
that his name is Gilbert Keith Chesterton. This amuses him.
He goes through a number of extraordinary and fantastic rituals;
which the pompous elfland he has entered demands. The first is that
he shall get inside a house of clothing, a tower of wool and flax;
that he shall put on this foolish armour solemnly, one piece after
another and each in its right place. The things called sleevelinks he
attends to minutely. His hair he beats angrily with a bristly tool.
For this is the Law. Downstairs a more monstrous ceremony attends him.
He has to put things inside himself. He does so, being naturally
polite. Nor can it be denied that a weird satisfaction follows. He
takes a sword in his hand (for what may not befall him in so strange
a country!) and goes forth: he finds a hole in the wall, a little
cave wherein sits One who can give him the charm that rules the horse
of water and fire. He finds an opening and descends into the bowels
of the earth. Down, among the roots of the Eternal hills, he finds a
sunless temple wherein he prays. And in the centre of it he finds a
lighted temple in which he enters. Then there are noises as of an
earthquake and smoke and fire in the darkness: and when he opens the
door again he is in another temple, out of which he climbs into
another world, leagues and leagues away. And when he asks the meaning
of the vision, they talk gibberish and say, "It is a train."
So the day goes, full of eerie publishers and elfin clerks, till he
returns and again puts things inside him, and then sits down and
makes men in his own head and writes down all that they said and did.
And last of all comes the real life itself. For half-an-hour he
writes words upon a scrap of paper, words that are not picked and
chosen like those that he has used to parry the strange talk of the
folk all day, but words in which the soul's blood pours out, like the
body's blood from a wound. He writes secretly this mad diary, all his
passion and longing, all his queer religion, his dark and dreadful
gratitude to God, his idle allegories, the tales that tell themselves
in his head; the joy that comes on him sometimes (he cannot help it!)
at the sacred intoxication of existence: the million faults of
idleness and recklessness and the one virtue of the unconquered
adoration of goodness, that dark virtue that every man has, and hides
deeper than all his vices--he writes all this down as he is writing
it now. And he knows that if he sticks it down and puts a stamp on it
and drops it into the mouth of a little red goblin at the corner of
the street--he knows that all this wild soliloquy will be poured into
the soul of one wise and beautiful lady sitting far away beyond seas
and rivers and cities, under the shadow of an alien Cathedral. . . .
This is not all so irrelevant as you may think. It was this line of
feeling that taught me, an utter Rationalist as far as dogma goes,
the lesson of the entire Spirituality of things--an opinion that
nothing has ever shattered since. I can't express myself on the
point, nobody can. But it is _only_ the spirituality of things that
we are sure of. That the eyes in your face are eyes I do not know:
they may have other names and uses. I know that they are _good_ or
beautiful, or rather spiritual. I do not know on what principle the
Universe is run, I know or feel that it is _good_ or spiritual. I do
not know what Gertrude's death was--I know that it was beautiful, for
I saw it. We do not feel that it is so beautiful now--why? Because we
do not see it now. What we see now is her absence: but her Death is
not her absence, but her Presence somewhere else. That is what we
_knew_ was beautiful, as long as we could see it. Do not be
frightened, dearest, by the slow inevitable laws of human nature, we
shall climb back into the mountain of vision: we shall be able to use
the word, with the accent of Whitman. "Disembodied, triumphant, dead."
In the _Notebook_ he was writing:
There is a heart within a distant town
Who loves me more than treasure or renown
Think you it strange and wear it as a crown.
Is not the marvel here; that since the kiss
And dizzy glories of that blinding bliss
One grief has ever touched me after this.
We see Gilbert in the next two letters more concerned about a grand
dinner of the J.D.C. than about his future fame and fortune. In the
second he mentions almost casually that he is leaving Fisher Unwin.
From now on he was to live by his pen.
11 Warwick Gardens, W.
Tuesday Night. 3rd Oct. 1899.
. . . Nothing very astonishing has happened yet, though many
astonishing things will happen soon. The Final perfection of Humanity
I expect shortly. The _Speaker_ for this week--the first of the _New
Speaker_, is coming out soon, and may contain something of mine though
I cannot be quite sure. A rush of the Boers on Natal, strategically
quite possibly successful, is anticipated by politicians. The rising
of the sun tomorrow morning is predicted by astronomers. My father
again is engaged in the crucial correspondence with Fisher Unwin, at
least it has begun by T.F.U. stating his proposed terms--a rise of
5/--from October, another rise possible but undefined in January, 10
per cent royalty for the Paris book and expenses for a fortnight in
Paris. These, as I got my father to heartily agree, are vitiated to
the bone as terms by the absence of any assurance that I shall not
have to write "Paris," for which I am really paid nothing, _outside_
the hours of work for which I am paid 25/--. In short, the net result
would be that instead of gaining more liberty to rise in the literary
world, I should be selling the small liberty of rising that I have
now for five more shillings. This my father is declining and asking
for a better settlement. The diplomacy is worrying, yet I enjoy it: I
feel like Mr. Chamberlain on the eve of war. I would stop with T.F.U.
for £100 a year--but not for less. Which means, I think, that I shall
not stop at all.
But all these revolutions, literary, financial and political fade
into insignificance compared with the one really tremendous event of
this week. It will take place on Saturday next. The sun will stand
still upon Leicester Square and the Moon on the Valley of Wardour St.
For then will assemble the Grand Commemorative Meeting of the Junior
Debating Club. The Secretary, Mr. L.R.F. Oldershaw, will select a
restaurant, make arrangements and issue the proclamations, or, to use
the venerable old Club phrase "the writs." When this gorgeous
function is over, you must expect a colossal letter. Everyone of the
old Brotherhood, scattered over many cities and callings, has hailed
the invitation, and is coming, with the exception of Bentley, who
will send a sensational telegram from Paris. The fun is expected to
be fast and furious, the undercurrent of emotion (twelve years old)
is not likely to be much disguised. As I say, I will write you a
sumptuous description of it; it is somewhat your due, for the thing
is, and always will be, one of the main strands of my life. . . .
None can say what will occur. It is one of those occasions when
Englishmen are not much like the pictures of them in Continental
satires . . . there is more in this old affair of ours than possibly
meets the eye. It is a thing that has left its roots deep in the
hearts of twelve strangely different men. . . . And now that seven of
us have found the New Life that can only be found in Woman, it would
be mean indeed not to turn back and thank the old. . . .
11, Warwick Gardens, W.
. . . This is the colossal letter. I trust you will excuse me if
the paper is conceived on a similar scale of Babylonian immensity. I
cannot make out exactly whether I did or did not post a letter I
wrote to you on Saturday. If I did not, I apologise for missing the
day. If I did, you will know by this time one or two facts that may
interest you, the chief of which is that I am certainly leaving
Fisher Unwin, with much mutual courtesy and goodwill.
This fact may interest you, I repeat: at this moment I am not sure
whether it interests me. For my head, to say nothing of another
organ, is filled with the thundering cheers and songs of the dinner
on Saturday night. It was, I may say without hesitation, a breathless
success. Cholmeley, who must be experienced being both a
schoolmaster, a diner out and a clever man, told me he had never in
his life heard eleven better speeches. I quite agree with him, merely
adding his own. Everyone was amusing and what is much better,
singularly characteristic. Will you forgive me, dearest, if I reel
off to the only soul that can be trusted to enjoy my enjoyment, a
kind of report of the meeting? It will revivify my own memories. And
one thing at least that I said in my speech I thoroughly believed
in--"if there is any prayer I should be inclined to make it is that I
should forget nothing in my life."
The proceedings opened with dinner. The illustrated menus were wildly
appreciated: every person got all the rest to sign on the menu and
then took it away as a memento. Then the telegrams from Kruger,
Chamberlain, Dreyfus and George Meredith were read. Then I proposed
the toast of the Queen. I merely said that nothing could ever be
alleged against the Queen, except the fact that she is not a member
of the J.D.C. and that I thought it spoke well for the chivalry of
Englishmen that with this fact she had never been publicly taunted. I
said I knew that the virtues of Queen Victoria had become somewhat
platitudinous, but I thought it was a fortunate country in which the
virtues of its powerful ones are platitudes. The toast was then
drunk. . . .
After a pause and a little conversation, I called upon Lawrence
Solomon to propose the toast of "The School." He was very amusing
indeed. Most of his speech would not be very comprehensible to an
outsider for it largely consisted of an ingenious dove-tailing of the
sentences in the Latin and Greek Arnold. I shall never forget the
lucid and precise enunciation with which he delivered the idiotic
sentences in those works, more especially where he said, "such a
course would be more agreeable to Mr. Cholmeley and I would rather
gratify such a man as he than see the King of the Persians."
Cholmeley, amid roars of welcome, rose to respond. I think I must
have told you in a former letter that Cholmeley is a former
classmaster of ours, a former house-master of Bentley's, and one of
the nicest men at St. Paul's. We invited him as the only visitor. He
said a great deal that was very amusing, mostly a commentary on
Solomon's remarks about the Latin Arnold. One remark he made was that
he possessed one particular Latin Arnold, formerly the property of
the President, which he had withdrawn from him "with every expression
of contumely"--because it was drawn all over with devils. He made
some very sound remarks about the Club as an answer to the common
charge against St. Paul's School that it was aridly scholastic,
without spontaneous growth in culture or sentiment.
Then Fordham proposed "The Ladies." He was killing. Fordham is a
personality whom I think you do not know. He is one of the most
profoundly humourous men I ever knew, but his humour is more thickly
coated on him, so to speak, than Bentley or Oldershaw, i.e., it is
much more difficult to make him serious. He is one of the most
fascinating "typical Englishmen" I ever knew: strong, generous,
flippant on principle, rowdy by physical inspiration, successful,
popular, married--a man to discharge all the normal functions of life
well. But his most entertaining gift which he displayed truly
sumptuously on this occasion is a wonderful gift of burlesque and
stereotyped rhetoric. With melodramatic gestures he drew attention to
the torrents of the President's blood pouring "from the wound of the
tiny god." Amid sympathetic demonstration he protested against the
pathos of the toast, "the conquered on the field of battle toasting
the conquerors." As the only married member of the Club he ventured
to give us some advice on (A) Food, (B) Education, (C) Intercourse.
He sat down in a pure whirlwind of folly, without saying a word about
the feelings that were in all hearts, including his own, just then.
But I was delighted to find that marriage had not taken away an inch
of his incurable silliness.
Nothing could be a greater contrast than the few graceful and
dignified but very restrained words in which Bertram responded to
the toast. He is not a man who cares to make fun of women, however
genially.
Then came Langdon-Davies, whom I called upon to propose "The Club."
His was perhaps the most interesting case of all. When I knew
Langdon-Davies in the Junior Debating Club, he was one of the most
frivolous young men I ever knew. . . . But knowing that he was a good
speaker in a light style, and had been President of the Cambridge
Union, I put him down to propose the Club, thinking that we should
have enough serious speaking and would be well to err on the side of
entertainment.
Langdon-Davies got up and proceeded to deliver a speech that
made me jump. It was, I thought, the best speech of the evening:
but I am sure it was the most serious, the most sympathetic and a
long way the most frankly emotional.
He said that the Club was not now a club in the strict sense. It
was two things preeminently and everlastingly--a memory and an
influence. He spoke with a singular sort of subdued vividness of the
influence the Club had had on him in boyhood. He then turned to the
history of the Club. And here, my dearest lady, I am pained to have
to report that he launched suddenly and dramatically into a most
extraordinary, and apparently quite sincere eulogium upon myself and
the influence I had on my schoolfellows. I will not repeat his
words--I did not believe them, but they took me by surprise and shook
me somewhat. Mr. B. N. Langdon-Davies, I may remark, and yourself,
are the only persons who have ever employed the word "genius" in
connection with me. I trust it will not occur again.
I replied. My speech was a medley, but it appeared very successful.
I discussed largely the absence of any successor to the J.D.C. I
described how I watched the boys leaving school today--a solitary
figure, clad in the latest fashion, moodily pacing the Hammersmith
Road--and asked myself "where among these is the girlish gush of a
Bentley--the passionate volubility of a Vernède, the half-ethereal
shyness of a Fordham?!!" I admitted that we had had misfortunes, one
of us had a serious illness, another had had a very good story in the
Strand Magazine: but I thought that a debating club of 12 members
that had given three presidents to the University Unions, had not
done badly. The rest was sentimental. Then began a most extraordinary
game of battledore and shuttlecock. Vernède proposed the Secretary,
Mr. Oldershaw. Mr. Oldershaw, instead of replying properly, proposed
Mr. Bentley and the absent members. Waldo responded for these or
rather instead of responding proposed Mr. Maurice Solomon. Mr.
Maurice Solomon instead of responding proposed Mr. Salter. The latter
was the only one who had not spoken and on rising he explained his
reasons for refusing. He had not been in the same room with Mr.
Cholmeley, he said, since he had sat five years ago in the Lower
Fourth and Mr. Cholmeley had told him that he talked too much. He had
no desire on his first reappearance to create in Mr. Cholmeley's mind
the idea that he had been at it ever since.
After this we passed on to singing and nearly brought down the roof
of Pinoli's restaurant. Cholmeley, the awful being of whose classic
taste in Greek iambics I once stood in awe, sang with great feeling a
fragment of lyric literature of which the following was, as far as I
remember, the refrain:
"Singing Chooral-i-chooral-i-tiddity
Also--Chooral-i-chooral-i-tay
And chanting Chooral-i-chooral-i-dititty
Not forgetting--chooral-i-chooral-i-day--"
Vernède sang a Sussex pothouse chorus in an indolent and refined
way which was exquisitely incongruous: Waldo and Langdon-Davies also
sang. I recited an Ode which I had written for the occasion and
Lucian recited one of Bentley's poems that came out in an Oxford
magazine. Then we sang the Anthem* of the J.D.C., of which the words
are, "I am a Member--I'm a Member--Member of the J.D.C. I belong to
it forever--don't you wish that you were me."
[* It was sung to the tune of "Clementine."]
Then we paid the bill. Then we borrowed each other's arms and legs
in an inextricable tangle and sang "Auld Lang Syne." Then we broke up.
There now. Five mortal pages of writing and nothing about you in
it. How relieved you must be, wearied out with allusions to your hair
and your soul and your clothes and your eyes. And yet it has been
every word of it about you really. I like to make my past vivid to
you, especially this past, not only because it was on the whole, a
fine, healthy, foolish, manly, enthusiastic, idiotic past, with the
very soul of youth in it. Not only because I am a victim of the
prejudice, common I trust to all mankind, that no one ever had such
friends as I had. . . .
Readers of the _Autobiography_ will remember that many many years
later, at the celebration of Hilaire Belloc's sixtieth birthday, the
guests threw the ball to one another in just this same fashion.
Chesterton had by then so far forgotten this earlier occasion that he
spoke of the Belloc birthday party as the only dinner in his life at
which every diner made a speech.
Two more extracts from his letters must be given, showing the efforts
made by Frances to look after Gilbert, and his reactions. One of his
friends remarked that Gilbert's life was unique in that, never having
left home for a boarding school or University, he passed from the
care of his mother to the care of his wife. I think too that the
degree of his physical helplessness affected all who came near him
with the feeling that while he might lead them where he would
intellectually, it was their task to look after a body that would
otherwise be wholly neglected.
The old religionists used to talk about a man being "a fool for
Christ's sake"--certainly I have been a blithering fool for your
sake. I went to see the doctor, as you requested. He asked me what he
could do for me. I told him I hadn't the least idea, but people
thought my cold had been going on long enough. He said, "I've no
doubt it has." He then, to afford some relief to the idiotic futility
of the situation, wrote me a prescription, which I read on my way up
to business, weeping over the pathetic parts and laughing heartily at
the funny ones. I have since had some of it. It tastes pretty aimless.
I cannot remember for certain whether I mentioned in my letter that
I had had an invitation including yourself, from my Aunt Kate for
this Friday. As you do not refer to it, I expect I didn't--so I wrote
to her giving both our thanks and explaining the state of affairs.
"All is over," I said, "between that lady and myself. Do not name her
to me, lest the hideous word 'Woman' should blind me to the seraphic
word 'Aunt.' My life is a howling waste--but what matter? Ha! Ha!
Ha!" I cannot remember my exact words, of course. . . .
. . . I am a revolting object. My hair is a matted chaos spread all
over the floor, my beard is like a hard broom. My necktie is on the
wrong way up: my bootlaces trail half-way down Fleet St. Why not?
When one's attempts at reformation are "not much believed in" what
other course is open but a contemptuous relapse into liberty?
Your last letter makes me much happier. I put great faith in the
healing power of the great winds and the sun. "Nature," as Walt
Whitman says, "and her primal sanities." Mrs. S . . . , also, is a
primal sanity. It is not, I believe, considered complimentary, in a
common way, to approach an attractive lady and say pleasantly, "You
are thousands of years old." Or, "You seem to me as old as the
mountains." Therefore I do not say it. But I always feel that anyone
beautiful and strong is really old--for the really old things are not
decrepit: decrepit things are dying early. The Roman Empire was
decrepit. A sunrise cloud is old.
So I think there are some people, who even in their youth, seem to
have existed always: they bear the mark of the elemental things: the
things that recur; they are as old as springtime, as old as
daybreak--as old as Youth.