From Battersea to Beaconsfield
(1909-1911)
IN 1909, WITH _Orthodoxy_ well behind him, and _George Bernard Shaw_
just published, Gilbert and his wife left London for the small
country town that was to be their home for the rest of their lives.
It was an odd coincidence that they should leave Overstrand Mansions,
Battersea, and come to Overroads, Beaconsfield, for they did not name
their new home but found it ready christened.
It will be remembered that in one of the letters during the
engagement Gilbert had suggested a country home. The reason for the
choice of Beaconsfield he gives in the _Autobiography:_
After we were married, my wife and I lived for about a year in
Kensington, the place of my childhood; but I think we both knew that
it was not to be the real place for our abode. I remember that we
strolled out one day, for a sort of second honeymoon, and went upon a
journey into the void, a voyage deliberately objectless. I saw a
passing omnibus labelled "Hanwell" and, feeling this to be an
appropriate omen,* we boarded it and left it somewhere at a stray
station, which I entered and asked the man in the ticket-office where
the next train went to. He uttered the pedantic reply, "Where do you
want to go to?" And I uttered the profound and philosophical
rejoinder, "Wherever the next train goes to." It seemed that it went
to Slough; which may seem to be singular taste, even in a train.
However, we went to Slough, and from there set out walking with even
less notion of where we were going. And in that fashion we passed
through the large and quiet cross-roads of a sort of village, and
stayed at an inn called The White Hart. We asked the name of the
place and were told that it was called Beaconsfield (I mean of course
that it was called Beconsfield and not Beaconsfield), and we said to
each other, "This is the sort of place where some day we will make
our home."**
[* At Hanwell is London's most famous lunatic asylum.]
[** _Autobiography_, p. 219.]
They both wanted a home. They both deeply desired a family. The wish
is normal to both man and woman, normal in a happy marriage, and
theirs was unusually happy; it was almost abnormally keen in both
Frances and Gilbert. Few men have so greatly loved children. As a
schoolboy his letters are full of it--making friends with Scottish
children on the sands, with French children by the medium of
pictures. Later he was writing "In Defence of Baby Worship" and
welcoming with enthusiasm the arrival of his friends' children into
the world.
In the Notebook he had written:
Sunlight in a child's hair.
It is like the kiss of Christ upon all children.
I blessed the child: and hoped the blessing would go with him
And never leave him;
And turn first into a toy, and then into a game
And then into a friend,
And as he grew up, into friends
And then into a woman.
GRASS AND CHILDREN
Grass and children
There seems no end to them.
But if there were but one blade of grass
Men would see that it is fairer than lilies,
And if we saw the first child
We should worship it as the God come on earth.
ROUNDS
I find that most round things are nice,
Particularly Eternity and a baby.
Frances cared no less deeply both for Eternity and for babies and for
many years went on hoping for the family that would complete their
lives. At last it was decided to have an operation to enable her to
have children. Her doctor writes:
I well remember an incident which occurred during her convalescence
from that operation. I received a telephone call from the matron of
the Nursing Home in which Mrs. Chesterton was staying, suggesting
that I should come round and remonstrate with Mr. Chesterton. On my
arrival I found him sitting on the stairs, where he had been for two
hours, greatly incommoding passers up and down and deaf to all
requests to move on. It appeared that he had written a sonnet to his
wife on her recovery from the operation and was bringing it to give
her. He was not however satisfied with the last line, but was
determined to perfect it before entering her room to take tea with
her.
By the time they left London she must, I think, have given up the
hope she had so long cherished. Still if there could not be children
there might be perhaps something of a home. In the conditions of
their life, there was danger that any house of bricks and mortar
should be rather a headquarters than a home, and it was lucky that he
was able to feel she took home with her wherever they went--
Your face that is a wandering home
A flying home for me.
The years before them were to be filled with the vast activities that
not only took Gilbert to London and all over England incessantly, but
were to take him increasingly over Europe and America. Beaconsfield
gave a degree of quiet that made it possible, when they were able to
be at home, not to be swamped by engagements and to lead a life of
their own. Gilbert could go to London when he liked, but he need not
always be on tap, so to say, for all the world. Frances could have a
garden and indulge her hungry appetite for all that was fruitful.
G.K., later, under the title "The Homelessness of Jones"* showed his
love for a house rather than a flat, and they gave even to their
first little house "Overroads" the stamp of a real home.
[* A chapter in _What's Wrong with the World_.]
For a man and his wife to leave London for the country might seem to
be their own affair. Not so, however, with the Chestertons. After a
lapse of over thirty years I find the matter still a subject of
furious controversy and indeed passion. Frances, says one school of
opinion, committed a crime against the public good by removing
Gilbert from Fleet Street. No, says the other school, she had to move
him or he would have died of working too hard and drinking too much.
The suggestion, which I believe to be a fact, that Gilbert himself
wanted to move, is seldom entertained.
There is in all this the legitimate feeling of distress among any
group at losing its chief figure, its pride and joy. "I lost
Gilbert," Lucian Oldershaw once said, "first when I introduced him to
Belloc, next when he married Frances, and finally when he joined the
Catholic Church. . . . I rejoiced, though perhaps with a maternal
sadness, at all these fulfillments."
Cecil wanted his brother always on hand. Belloc was already in the
country--a far more remote country--but even he, coming up to London,
mourned to my mother, "she has taken my Chesterton from me." Talking
it over however after the lapse of years, he agreed that in all
probability the move was a wise one. What may be called the smaller
fry of Fleet Street are less reasonable. One cannot avoid the feeling
that in all this masculine life so sure of its manhood, there
lingered something of the "schwärmerei" of the Junior Debating Club
furiously desiring each to be first with Gilbert. And in his love of
Fleet Street he so identified himself with them all that they felt he
was one of them and did not recognise the horizons wider than theirs
that were opening before him.
My husband and I are experts in changing residences and we listened
with the amusement of experts to the talk of theorists. For it was so
constantly assumed that on one side of a choice is disaster, on the
other perfection. Actually perfection does not belong to this earthly
state: if you go to Rome, as Gilbert himself once said, you sacrifice
a rich suggestive life at Wimbledon. Newman writing of a far greater
and more irrevocable choice called his story _Loss and Gain_--but he
had no doubt that the gain outweighed the loss. There were in
Gilbert's adult life three other big decisions--decisions of the
scale that altered its course. The first was his marriage. The second
was his reception into the Church. The third was his continued
dedication to the paper that his brother and Belloc had founded. In
deciding to marry Frances he was acting against his mother's wishes,
to which he was extremely sensitive. His decision to become a
Catholic had to be made alone: he had the sympathy of his wife but
not her companionship. In the decision to edit the paper he had not
even fully her sympathy: she always felt his creative work to be so
much more important and to be imperilled by the overwork the paper
brought. Gilbert was a man slow in action but it would be exceedingly
difficult to find instances of his doing anything that he did not
want to do. The theorists about marriage are like the theorists about
moving house, if they do not know that decisions made by one party
alone are rare indeed and stick out like spikes in the life of a
normal and happy couple. Of the vast majority of decisions it is hard
to say who makes them. They make themselves: after endless talk: on
the tops of omnibuses going to Hanwell or elsewhere: out walking:
breakfasting--especially breakfasting in bed. They make
themselves--above all in the matter of a move--in fine weather:
during a holiday: on a hot London Sunday: when a flat is stuffy: when
the telephone rings all day: when a book is on the stocks.
Other writers have left London that they might create at leisure and
choose their own times for social intercourse. Why does no one say
their wives dragged them away? Simply, I think, that being less kind
and considerate than Gilbert, they do not mind telling their friends
that they are not always wanted. This Gilbert could not do. If people
said how they would miss him, how they hated his going, he would
murmur vague and friendly sounds, from which they deduced all they
wanted to deduce. Was it more weakness or strength, that tenderness
of heart that could never faintly suggest to his friends that they
would miss him more than he would miss them? "I never wanted but one
thing in my life," he had written to Annie Firmin. And that "one
thing" he was taking with him.
Anyhow, the move accomplished, he enjoyed defending it in every
detail, and did so especially in his _Daily News_ articles. The rush
to the country was not uncommon in the literary world of the moment,
and his journalist friends had urged the point that Beaconsfield was
not true country, was suburban, was being built over. His friends,
G.K. replied, were suffering from a weak-minded swing from one
extreme to the other. Men who had praised London as the only place to
live in were now vying with one another to live furthest from a
station, to have no chimneys visible on the most distant horizon, to
depend on tradesmen who only called once a week from cities so
distant that fresh-baked loaves grew stale before delivery. "Rival
ruralists would quarrel about which had the most completely
inconvenient postal service; and there were many jealous
heartburnings if one friend found out any uncomfortable situation
which the other friend had thoughtlessly overlooked."
Gilbert, on the contrary, noted soon after his arrival that
Beaconsfield was beginning to be built over and he noted it with
satisfaction. "Within a stone's throw of my house they are building
another house. I am glad they are building it and I am glad it is
within a stone's throw." He did not want a desert, he did not want a
large landed estate, he wanted what he had got--a house and a garden.
He adventurously explored that garden, finding a kitchen-garden that
had "somehow got attached" to the premises, and wondering why he
liked it; speaking to the gardener, "an enterprise of no little
valour," and asking him the name "of a strange dark red rose, at once
theatrical and sulky," which turned out to be called Victor Hugo;
"watching (with regret) a lot of little black pigs being turned out
of my garden."
Watching the neighbouring house grow up from its foundation he noted
in an article called, "The Wings of Stone," what was the reality of a
staircase. We pad them with carpets and rail them with banisters, yet
every "staircase is truly only an awful and naked ladder running up
into the infinite to a deadly height." (A correspondent pointed out
in a letter to the _Daily News_ that here he had touched a reality
keenly felt by primitive peoples. When Cetewayo, King of Zululand,
visited London, he would go upstairs only on hands and knees and that
with manifest terror.) The paddings of civilisation may be useful,
yet Gilbert held more valuable a realisation of the realities of
things. Vision is not fancy, but the sight of truth.
In the Notebook he had written
There are three things that make me think;
things beyond all poetry:
A yellow space or rift in evening sky:
A chimney or pinnacle high in the air;
And a path over a hill.
Chesterton had always the power of conveying in words a painter's
vision of some unforgettable scene with the poet's words for what the
artist not only sees but imagines. Such flashes became more frequent
as he looked through the doorway of his little house. Go through _The
Ball and the Cross_ with this in mind and you will see what I mean.
"The crimson seas of the sunset seemed to him like a bursting out of
some sacred blood, as if the heart of the world had broken." "There
is nothing more beautiful than thus to look as it were through the
archway of a house; as if the open sky were an interior chamber, and
the sun a secret lamp of the place." Best of all to illustrate this
special quality is a longer passage from the _Poet and the Lunatics_.
For the most part he was contented to see the green semicircles of
lawn repeat themselves like a pattern of green moons; for he was not
one to whom repetition was merely monotony. Only in looking over a
particular gate at a particular lawn, he became pleasantly conscious,
or half conscious, of a new note of colour in the greenness; a much
bluer green, which seemed to change to vivid blue, as the object at
which he was gazing moved sharply, turning a small head on a long
neck. It was a peacock. But he had thought of a thousand things
before he thought of the obvious thing. The burning blue of the
plumage on the neck had reminded him of blue fire, and blue fire had
reminded him of some dark fantasy about blue devils, before he had
fully realised even that it was a peacock he was staring at. And the
tail, that trailing tapestry of eyes, had led his wandering wits away
to those dark but divine monsters of the Apocalypse whose eyes were
multiplied like their wings, before he had remembered that a peacock,
even in a more practical sense, was an odd thing to see in so
ordinary a setting.
Yet always to Chesterton the beauty of nature was enhanced by the
work of men, and if in London men had swarmed too closely, it was not
to get away from them but to appreciate them more individually that
he chose the country. Yes, his literary friends would say: in the
real country that is true; the farmer, the labourer, even the village
barber and the village tradesmen are worth knowing, but not suburban
neighbours. Against such discrimination the whole democracy of
Chesterton stood in revolt. All men were valuable, all men were
interesting, the doctor as much as the barber, the clergyman as much
as the farmer. All men were children of God and citizens of the
world. If he had a choice in the matter it was discrimination against
the literary world itself with all the fads that tended to smother
its essential humanity. Nothing would have induced him to
discriminate against the suburban. In the last year of his life he
wrote in the _Autobiography:_ "I have lived in Beaconsfield from the
time when it was almost a village, to the time when, as the enemy
profanely says, it is a suburb."
For the author of _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_ this would hardly be
a conclusive argument against any place. We should, he once said,
"regard the important suburbs as ancient cities embedded in a sort of
boiling lava spouted up by that volcano, the speculative builder."
That "lava" itself he found interesting, but beneath or beside it a
little town like Beaconsfield had its share in the great sweep of
English history. Something of the "seven sunken Englands" could be
found in the Old Town which custom marked off pretty sharply from the
"New Town." Burke had lived in Beaconsfield and was buried there; and
Gilbert once suggested to Mr. Garvin that they should appear at a
local festival, respectively as Fox ("a part for which I have no
claim except in circumference") and Burke ("I admire Burke in many
things while disagreeing with him in nearly everything. But Mr.
Garvin strikes me as being rather like Burke").
At the barber's he was often seen sitting at the end of a line
patiently awaiting his turn, for he could never shave himself and it
was only years later that Dorothy Collins conceived and put into
execution the bold project of bringing the barber to the house.
Probably an article would be shaping while he waited and the barber's
conversation might put the finishing touches to it. There were in
fact two barbers, one of the old town, one of the new. "I once
planned," he says, "a massive and exhaustive sociological work, in
several volumes, which was to be called 'The Two Barbers of
Beaconsfield' and based entirely upon the talk of the two excellent
citizens to whom I went to get shaved. For those two shops do indeed
belong to two different civilisations."
Despite his love for London, Gilbert had always felt that life in a
country town held one point of special superiority--in it you
discovered the Community. In London you chose your friends--which
meant that you narrowed your life to people of one kind. He had noted
in the family itself a valuable widening:
The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into
a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we
have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us
and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a
surprise. Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt
from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being
born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world
which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without
us, into a world that we have not made.*
[* _Heretics_, pp. 191-2.]
Here in Beaconsfield the Chestertons grew into the community: the
clergyman, the doctor, the inn-keeper, the barber, the gardener. And
like the relatives who spring upon you at birth these worthy citizens
seemed to Gilbert potentials of vast excitement and varied interest.
Discussing an event of much later date--a meeting to decide whether a
crucifix might be erected as a local war memorial--he thus describes
the immense forces he found in that small place:
Those who debated the matter were a little group of the inhabitants
of a little country town; the rector and the doctor and the bank
manager and the respectable tradesmen of the place, with a few
hangers-on like myself, of the more disreputable professions of
journalism or the arts. But the powers that were present there in the
spirit came out of all the ages and all the battlefields of history;
Mahomet was there and the Iconoclasts, who came riding out of the
East to ruin the statues of Italy, and Calvin and Rousseau and the
Russian anarchs and all the older England that is buried under
Puritanism; and Henry the Third ordering the little images for
Westminster and Henry the Fifth, after Agincourt, on his knees before
the shrines of Paris. If one could really write that little story of
that little place, it would be the greatest of historical monographs.*
[* _Autobiography_, p. 244.]
A keen observer often added to the Beaconsfield community in those
days was Father (now Monsignor) John O'Connor, close friend of both
Gilbert and Frances and inspirer of "Father Brown" of detective fame.
They had first become friends in 1904 when they met at the house of a
friend in Keighley, Yorkshire, and walked back over the moors
together to visit Francis Steinthal at Ilkley. This Jew, of Frankfort
descent, was a great friend of the Chestertons and on their many
visits to him the friendship with Father O'Connor ripened. With both
Frances and Gilbert it was among the closest of their lives. Their
letters to him show it: the long talks, and companionable walks over
the moors, have an atmosphere of intimacy that is all the more
convincing because so little stressed in his book. Father O'Connor
has a pardonable pride in the idea that their talks suggested ideas
to Gilbert, he takes pleasure in his character of "Father Brown," but
he reveals the atmosphere of unique confidence and intimacy by the
very absence of all parade of it.
Both he and Gilbert have told the story of how the idea of the
detective priest first dawned. On their second meeting Father
O'Connor had startled, indeed almost shattered Gilbert, with certain
rather lurid knowledge of human depravity which he had acquired in
the course of his priestly experience. At the house to which they
were going, two Cambridge undergraduates spoke disparagingly of the
"cloistered" habits of the Catholic clergy, saying that to them it
seemed that to know and meet evil was a far better thing than the
innocence of such ignorance. To Gilbert, still under the shock of a
knowledge compared with which "these two Cambridge gentlemen knew
about as much of real evil as two babies in the same perambulator,"
the exquisite irony of this remark suggested a thought. Why not a
whole comedy of cross purposes based on the notion of a priest with a
knowledge of evil deeper than that of the criminal he is converting?
He carried out this idea in the story of "The Blue Cross," the first
Father Brown detective story. Father O'Connor's account adds the
details that he had himself once boasted of buying five sapphires for
five shillings, and that he always carried a large umbrella and many
brown paper parcels. At the Steinthal dining table, an artist friend
of the family made a sketch of Father O'Connor which later appeared
on the wrapper of _The Innocence of Father Brown_.
Beyond one or two touches of this sort the idea had been a suggestion
for a character, not a portrait, and in the _Autobiography_ and in
the _Dickens_ Gilbert has a good deal to say of interest to the
novelist about how such suggestions come and are used. He never
believed that Dickens drew a portrait, as it were, in the round.
Nature just gives hints to the creative artist. And it used to amuse
"Father Brown" to find that such touches of observation as noting
where an ash-tray had got hidden behind a book seemed to Gilbert
quasi miraculous. Left to himself he merely dropped ashes on the
floor from his cigar. "He did not smoke a pipe and cigarettes were
prone to set him on fire in one place or another."
A frequent visitor, Father O'Connor noted his fashion of work and
reading, and the abstracted way he often moved and spoke. "Call it
mooning, but he never mooned. He was always working out something in
his mind, and when he drifted from his study to the garden and was
seen making deadly passes with his sword-stick at the dahlias, we
knew that he had got to a dead end in his composition and was getting
his thoughts into order."
He played often, too, with a huge knife which he had for twenty-four
years. He took it abroad with him, took it to bed: Frances had to
retrieve it often from under his pillow in some hotel. Once at a
lecture in Dublin he drew it absent-mindedly to sharpen a pencil: as
it was seven and a half inches long shut, and fourteen open, the
amusement of the audience may be imagined. In origin it was, Father
O'Connor relates, a Texan or Mexican general utility implement. It
was with this knife that he won my daughter's heart many years later
when she, aged three, had not seen him for some time and had grown
shy of him. A little scared of his enormousness she stood far off. He
did not look in her direction but began to open and shut the vast
blade. Next she was on his knee. A little later we heard her remark,
"Uncle Gilbert, you make jokes just like my Daddy." And from him
came, "I do my best."
The prototype of Father Brown tells of the easy job in detection when
Gilbert had been reading a book:
He had just been reading a shilling pamphlet by Dr. Horton on the
Roman Menace or some such fearful wild fowl. I knew he had read it,
because no one else could when he had done. Most of his books, as and
when read, had gone through every indignity a book may suffer and
live. He turned it inside out, dog-eared it, pencilled it, sat on it,
took it to bed and rolled on it, and got up again and spilled tea on
it--if he were sufficiently interested. So Dr. Horton's pamphlet had
a refuted look when I saw it.
Father O'Connor was not the only friend who was added to the
Beaconsfield group with some frequency. It was easy enough to run
down from London or over from Welwyn (home of G.B.S.) or from Oxford
or Cambridge. It was most conveniently central. Gilbert's brethren of
the pen were especially apt to appear at all seasons and always found
friendly welcome. For he continued to call himself neither poet nor
philosopher but journalist. Father O'Connor had tried to persuade
him, as he neatly puts it, to "begin to print on handmade paper with
gilt edges." But Frances begged him to drop the idea: "You will not
change Gilbert, you will only fidget him. He is bent on being a jolly
journalist, to paint the town red, and he does not need style to do
that. All he wants is buckets and buckets of red paint."
Journalists coming down from London describe the "jolly" welcome,
beer poured, the sword-stick flourished, conversation flowing as
freely as the beer. It meant a pleasant afternoon and it meant good
copy. They visited him in the country, they observed him in town. One
interviewer returned with a photo which showed Chesterton "in a
somewhat négligé condition," the result as he admitted of reading W.
W. Jacobs "rolling about on the floor waving his legs in the air."
He was seen working a swan boat at the White City: "he collapsed it
and the placid lake became a raging sea." He was seen thinking and
even reading under the strangest weather conditions: one man saw him
under a gas lamp in the street in pouring rain with an open book in
his hand. Reading in Fleet Street one day Gilbert discovered suddenly
that the Lord Mayor's Show was passing. He began to reflect on the
Show so deeply that he forgot to look at it.
Overroads I remember as a little triangular house, much too small for
the sort of fun the Chestertons enjoyed. Frances bought a field
opposite to it and there built a studio. The night the studio was
opened Father O'Connor remembers a large party at which charades were
acted. He himself as Canon Cross-Keys gave away the word so that
"Belfry" was loudly shouted by the opposition group. The rival
company acting Torture got away with it successfully, especially,
complains our Yorkshire priest "as 'ure' was pronounced 'yaw' in the
best southern manner."
On that night, returning to the house, Father O'Connor offered his
arm to Gilbert who "refused it with a finality foreign to our
friendship." Father O'Connor went on ahead and Gilbert following in
the dark stumbled over a flowerpot and broke his arm. Perhaps because
his size made him self-consciously aware of awkwardness Gilbert hated
being helped. Father Ignatius Rice, another close friend, says the
only time he ever saw Gilbert annoyed was when he offered him an arm
going upstairs.
Gilbert and Frances would both visit Father O'Connor in his Yorkshire
Parish of Heckmondwike. One year they took rooms at Ilkley and he
remembers Gilbert adorning with huge frescoes the walls of the attic
and Frances sitting in the window singing, "O swallow, swallow flying
south" while Gilbert "did a blazon of some fantastic coat of arms."
The closeness of the intimacy is seen in a letter quoted by Father
O'Connor* in which Gilbert explained why Frances and he were unable
to come to Heckmondwike for a promised visit.
[* _Father Brown on Chesterton_, p. 123.]
(July 3rd, 1909)
I would not write this to anyone else, but you combine so unusually
in your own single personality the characters of (1) priest, (2)
human being, (3) man of the world, (4) man of the other world, (5)
man of science, (6) old friend, (7) new friend, not to mention
Irishman and picture dealer, that I don't mind suggesting the truth
to you. Frances has just come out of what looked bad enough to be an
illness, and is just going to plunge into one of her recurrent
problems of pain and depression. The two may be just a bit too much
for her and I want to be with her every night for a few days--there's
an Irish Bull for you!
One of the mysteries of Marriage (which must be a Sacrament and an
extraordinary one too) is that a man evidently useless like me can
yet become at certain instants indispensable. And the further oddity
(which I invite you to explain on mystical grounds) is that he never
feels so small as when he knows that he is necessary.
But sometimes she would send him off whether she was well or ill, and
on Father O'Connor would rest the heavy responsibility of getting him
on to his next destination or safe back home. He tells of one such
experience.
He was most dutiful and obedient to orders, but they had to be
written ones and backed by the spoken word. He brought his
dress-suit, oh! with what loving care, to Bradford on Sunday for
Sheffield for Monday, but a careful host found it under the bed in
Bradford just as his train left for Sheffield. Sent at once it was to
Beaconsfield, where it landed at 5 P.M. on Thursday, just allowing
him ten minutes to change and entrain for London.
Scene at Beaconsfield:
"What on earth have you done with your dress-suit, Gilbert?"
"I must have left it behind, darling, but I brought back the ties,
didn't I?"*
[* Ibid., p. 43.]
Another time he came back without his pyjamas. They had been lost
early in the journey. "Why didn't you buy some more?" his wife asked.
"I didn't know pyjamas were things you could buy," he said,
surprised. Probably if one were Gilbert one couldn't! Father O'Connor
arriving at Overroads without baggage found that Gilbert's pyjamas
went around him exactly twice.
Lecturing engagements had of course not come to an end with the move
although they had (mercifully) somewhat lessened. What increased with
the distance from London was the problem--never fully solved--of
getting Gilbert to the right place at the right time and in clothes
not too wildly wrong. When he lectured in Lancashire they stayed at
Crosby with Francis Blundell (my brother-in-law), and my sister
remembers Frances as incessantly looking through her bag for letters
and sending telegrams to confirm engagements that had come unstuck or
to refuse others that were in debate. The celebrated and now almost
legendary telegram from Gilbert to Frances told as from a hundred
different cities was really sent: "Am in Market Harborough. Where
ought I to be?"
Desperate, she wired, "Home," because, as she told me later, it was
easier to get him home and start him off again. That day's engagement
was lost past recall.
Charles Rowley of the Ancoats Brotherhood received a wire, reply
paid, from Snow Hill Station, Birmingham: "Am I coming to you tonight
or what?" Reply: "Not this Tuesday but next Wednesday."
So home he came again to Overroads.
The Chestertons made a host of friends in Beaconsfield but the
children always held pride of place. The doctor's little boy, running
along the top of the wall, looked down at Gilbert and remarked to his
delight, "I think you're an ogre." But when the nurse was heard
threatening punishment if he did not get down "that minute," the
child was told by the ogre, "This wall is meant for little boys to
run along." One child, asked after a party if Mr. Chesterton had been
very clever, said, "You should see him catch buns in his mouf."
What was unusual both with Gilbert and Frances was the fact that they
never allowed their disappointment in the matter of children to make
them sour or jealous of others who had the joy that they had not. All
through their lives they played with other people's children: they
chose on a train a compartment full of children: they planned
amusements, they gave presents to the children of their friends. Over
my son's bed hangs a silver crucifix chosen with loving care by
Frances after Gilbert had stood godfather to him. And he was one of
very many.
Gilbert was however a complete realist as to the ways and manners of
the species he so loved.
Playing with children [he wrote at this time] is a glorious thing:
but the journalist in question has never understood why it was
considered a soothing or idyllic one. It reminds him, not of watering
little budding flowers, but of wrestling for hours with gigantic
angels and devils. Moral problems of the most monstrous complexity
besiege him incessantly. He has to decide before the awful eyes of
innocence, whether, when a sister has knocked down a brother's
bricks, in revenge for the brother having taken two sweets out of his
turn, it is endurable that the brother should retaliate by scribbling
on the sister's picture-book, and whether such conduct does not
justify the sister in blowing out the brother's unlawfully lit match.
Just as he is solving this problem upon principles of the highest
morality, it occurs to him suddenly that he has not written his
Saturday article; and that there is only about an hour to do it in.
He wildly calls to somebody (probably the gardener) to telephone to
somewhere for a messenger; he barricades himself in another room and
tears his hair, wondering what on earth he shall write about. A
drumming of fists on the door outside and a cheerful bellowing
encourage and clarify his thoughts. . . . He sits down desperately;
the messenger rings at the bell; the children drum on the door; the
servants run up from time to time to say the messenger is getting
bored; and the pencil staggers along, making the world a present of
fifteen hundred unimportant words, and making Shakespeare a present
of a portion of Gray's _Elegy_; putting "fantastic roots wreathed
high" instead of "antique roots peep out."* Then the journalist sends
off his copy and turns his attention to the enigma of whether a
brother should commandeer a sister's necklace because the sister
pinched him at Littlehampton.
[* Chesterton had actually made this slip, and the present quotation
is from the article he wrote in apology.]
In the Notebook he had written:
NORTH BERWICK
On the sands I romped with children
Do you blame me that I did not improve myself
By bottling anemones?
But I say that these children will be men and women
And I say that the anemones will not be men and women
(Not just yet, at least, let us say).
And I say that the greatest men of the world might romp with
children
And that I should like to see Shakespeare romping with children
And Browning and Darwin romping with children
And Mr. Gladstone romping with children
And Professor Huxley romping with children
And all the Bishops romping with children;
And I say that if a man had climbed to the stars
And found the secrets of the angels,
The best thing and the most useful thing he could do
Would be to come back and romp with children.
M. V.
An almost elvish little girl with loose brown hair, doing
needlework. I have spoken to her once or twice.
I think I must get another book of the same size as this
to make notes about her.
From the Christmas party at Overroads all adults were excluded--no
nurses, no parents. The children would hang on Gilbert's neck in an
ecstasy of affection and he and Frances schemed out endless games for
them. Gilbert had started a toy theatre before he left London,
cutting out and painting figures and scenery, and devising plots for
plays. Two of the favourites were "St. George and the Dragon" and
"The Seven Champions of Christendom."
The atmosphere of Overroads is perhaps best conveyed through
Gilbert's theories concerning his toy theatre and the other
theatricals such as Charades sometimes played there. When it came to
the toy theatre set up to amuse the children, he frankly felt that he
was himself child No. 1 and got the most amusement out of it. He felt
too that the whole thing was good enough to be worth analysing in its
rules and its effects. And so he drew up a paper of rules and
suggestions for its use.
I will not say positively that a toy-theatre is the best of
theatres; though I have had more fun out of it than out of any other.
But I will say positively that the toy-theatre is the best of all
toys. It sometimes fails; but generally because people are mistaken
in the matter of what it is meant to do, and what it can or cannot be
expected to do; as if people should use a toy balloon as a football
or a skipping rope as a hammock. . . .
Now the first rule may seem rather contradictory; but it is quite
true and really quite simple. In a small theatre, because it is a
small theatre, you cannot deal with small things. Because it is a
small theatre it must only deal with large things. You can introduce
a dragon; but you cannot really introduce an earwig; it is too small
for a small theatre. And this is true not only of small creatures,
but of small actions, small gestures and small details of any
kind. . . . All your effects must be made to depend on things like
scenery and background. The sky and the clouds and the castles and
the mountains and so on must be the exciting things; along with other
things that move all of a piece, such as regiments and processions;
great and glorious things can be done with processions. . . . In a
real comedy the whole excitement may consist in the nervous curate
dropping his tea-cup; though I do not recommend this incident for the
drama of the drawing-room. But if he were nervous, let us say, about
a thunderstorm, the toy-theatre could hardly represent the
nervousness but it might manage the thunder-storm. It might be quite
sensational and yet entirely simple; for it would largely consist of
darkening the stage and making horrible noises behind the
scenes. . . .
The second and smaller rule, that really follows from this, is that
everything dramatic should depend not on a character's action, but
simply on his appearance. Shakespeare said of actors that they have
their exits and their entrances; but these actors ought really to
have nothing else except exits and entrances. The trick is to so
arrange the tale that the mere appearance of a person tells the
important truth about him. Thus, supposing the drama to be about St.
George let us say, the mere abrupt appearance of the dragon's head
(if of a proper ferocity) will be enough to explain that he intends
to eat people; and it will not be necessary for the dragon to explain
at length, with animated gestures and playful conversation, that his
nature is carnivorous and that he has not merely dropped in to tea.
There is some further discussion on colour effects ("I like very gay
and glaring colours, and I like to give them a good chance to
glare"). The paper concludes on a more serious note:
It is an old story, and for some a sad one, that in a sense these
childish toys are more to us than they can ever be to children. We
never know how much of our after imaginations began with such a
peep-show into paradise. I sometimes think that houses are
interesting because they are so like doll houses and I am sure the
best thing that can be said for many large theatres is that they may
remind us of little theatres. . . .
I do not look back, I look forward to this kind of puppet play; I
look forward to the day when I shall have time to play with it. Some
day when I am too lazy to write anything, or even to read anything, I
shall retire into this box of marvels; and I shall be found still
striving hopefully to get inside a toy-theatre.
Adults as well as children enjoyed this toy and it was often
described by interviewers. Like the sword-stick, the great cloak and
flapping hat, it was felt by some to be Gilbert's way of attracting
attention. But it was just one of Gilbert's ways of amusing himself.
A small nephew of Frances was living with them at the time and it was
funny to watch him fencing with his huge uncle who was obviously
enjoying himself rather the more of the two. On my first visit to
Overroads, I noticed how as we talked my host's pencil never ceased.
One evening I collected and kept an imposing red Indian and a
caricature of Chesterton himself in a wheelbarrow being carried off
to the bonfire. I came in too for one of the grown-up parties in
which guessing games were a feature. Lines from the poets were
illustrated and we had to guess them. At another party, Dr. Pocock
told me, G.K. did the Inns of Beaconsfield, of which the most
successful drawing was that of a sadly dilapidated dragon being
turned away from the inn door: "Dragon discovers with disgust that he
cannot put up at the George."
Sometimes these drawings were the prize of whoever guessed the line
of verse they illustrated, sometimes they were sold for a local
charity. The Babies' Convalescent Home was a favourite object and one
admirable picture (reproduced in _The Coloured Lands_) shows the
"Despair of King Herod at discovering children convalescing from the
Massacre." The two closest friendships of early Beaconsfield life
were with the rector, Mr. Comerline and his wife, who are now dead,
and Dr. and Mrs. Pocock. Dr. Pocock was the Chestertons' doctor as
well as their friend, and he tells me that his great difficulty in
treating Gilbert lay in his detachment from his own physical
circumstances. If there was anything wrong with him he usually didn't
notice it. "He was the most uncomplaining person. You had to hunt him
all over" to find out if anything was wrong.
This detachment from circumstances still extended to his appearance
and Frances one day begged Dr. Pocock to take him to a good tailor.
It was a huge success: he had never looked so well as he did now--for
a few weeks. And then the tailor said to Dr. Pocock, "Mr. Chesterton
has broken my heart. It took twice the material and twice the time to
make for him, but I _was_ proud of it." His tailor like his doctor
was apt to become a friend. Mrs. Pocock recalls how he would go to a
dinner of the tradesmen of Beaconsfield and come back intensely
interested and wanting to tell her all about it.
"You always went away," Dr. Pocock said, "chuckling over something,"
and he summed up the years of their friendship, saying, "You never
saw him without getting delight from his presence."
Sometimes he would grow abstracted in the train of his own thought,
and Father Ignatius Rice remembers an occasion when he was one of a
group discussing really bad lines of poetry. Gilbert broke into
something Frances was saying with the words, "That irritating person
Milton"--then, realising he had interrupted her, he broke off and
apologised profusely. When she had finished he went on "That
irritating person Milton--I can't find a single bad line in him."
Frances one day came in rather suddenly when Dr. Pocock was there,
and Gilbert exclaimed, "Oh you've broken it." She looked round
thinking she must have knocked something over. "No," he said, "it was
an idea." "It will come back," said Frances. "No," he said, "it got
broken." More usually he was indifferent to interruptions: sometimes
he welcomed them as grist for his mind's mill. Daily life went on
around him and often in his articles one can find traces of Frances's
daily activities as well as his own.
Attending him for his broken arm, Dr. Pocock told him at a certain
stage to write something--anything--to see if he could use a pen
again. After an instant's thought, Gilbert headed his paper with the
name of a prominent Jew and wrote:
I am fond of Jews
Jews are fond of money
Never mind of whose
I am fond of Jews
Oh, but when they lose
Damn it all, it's funny.
The name at the head (which wild horses would not drag from me) is
the key to this impromptu. It was really true that Gilbert was fond
of very many Jews. In his original group of J.D.C. friends, four Jews
had been included and with three of these his friendship continued
through life. Lawrence Solomon and his wife were among the
Beaconsfield neighbours and he saw them often. There was another kind
of Jew he very heartily disliked but he was at great pains to draw
this distinction himself.
Speaking at the Jewish West End Literary Society in 1911 he put the
question of what the real Jewish problem was. The Jews, he said, were
a race, born civilised. You never met a Jewish clod or yokel. They
represented one of the highest of civilised types. But while all
other races had local attachments, the Jews were universal and
scattered. They could not be expected to have patriotism for the
countries in which they made their homes: their patriotism could be
only for their race. In principle, he believed in the solution of
Zionism. And then the reporter in large letters made a headline: "Mr.
Chesterton said that speaking generally, as with most other
communities, 'THE POOR JEWS WERE NICE AND THE RICH WERE NASTY.'"
Many years later in Palestine he was to be driven around the country,
as he has described in _The New Jerusalem_, by one of these less
wealthy Jews who had sacrificed his career in England to his national
idealism. And later yet, after G.K.'s death, Rabbi Wise, a leader of
American Jewry, paid him tribute (in a letter to Cyril Clements dated
September 8, 1937):
Indeed I was a warm admirer of Gilbert Chesterton. Apart from his
delightful art and his genius in many directions, he was, as you
know, a great religionist. He as Catholic, I as Jew, could not have
seen eye to eye with each other, and he might have added
"particularly seeing that you are cross-eyed"; but I deeply respected
him. When Hitlerism came, he was one of the first to speak out with
all the directness and frankness of a great and unabashed spirit.
Blessing to his memory!