A Circle of Friends
IN THE LAST chapter, this chapter and to a considerable extent those
that follow, down to the break made by Gilbert's illness and the war
of 1914, it is unavoidable that the same years should be retraced to
cover a variety of aspects. For their home was for both Gilbert and
Frances the centre of a widening circle. Although I visited
Overroads, it seems to me, looking back, I saw them just then much
more frequently in London and elsewhere. Several times they stayed at
Lotus, our Surrey home. The first time it was a weekend of blazing
summer weather. Lady Blennerhassett was there--formerly Countess
Leyden and a favourite disciple of Döllinger. I remember she
delighted Gilbert by her comment on Modernism. "I must," she said,
"have the same religion as my washerwoman, and Father Tyrrell's is
not the religion for my washerwoman." We sat on the terrace in the
sunshine and Lady Blennerhassett asked suddenly whether the soles of
our boots were, like hers, without hole or blemish. We all looked
very odd as we stuck our feet out and tried to see the soles.
Gilbert, offered a wicker chair, preferred the grass because, he
said, there was grave danger he might unduly "modify" the chair.
After a meeting of the Westminster Dining Society (the predecessor of
the Wiseman), he wrote my mother an unnecessary apology:
DEAR MRS. WILFRID WARD--
I have wanted for some days past to write to you, but could not
make up my mind whether I was making my position worse or better. But
I do want to apologise to you for the way in which I threw out your
delightful Catholic Dining Society affair the other day. I behaved
badly, dined badly, debated badly and left badly; yet the explanation
is really simple. I was horribly worried, and I do not worry well;
when I am worried I am like a baby. My wife was that night just ill
enough to make a man nervous, a stupid man, and I had sworn to her
that I would fulfill some affairs that night on which she was keen.
As she is better now and only wants rest, I feel normal and realise
what a rotter I must have looked that night. As Belloc wrote in a
beautiful epitaph--
"He frequently would flush with fear when other people paled,
He Tried to Do his Duty . . . but how damnably he failed."
This is the epitaph of yours sincerely,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
My father and mother were hardly less excited than I at the discovery
of the greatest man of the age, for so we all felt him to be. Gilbert
later described my father as "strongly co-operative" with another's
mind, and this was perhaps his own chief characteristic in
conversation. The two men did not agree on politics, but on religion
their agreement was deep and constantly grew deeper as they
co-operated in exploring it. Our headquarters were in Surrey but when
we came up to London every spring my parents wanted to bring the
Chestertons into touch with all their friends. They tended to think
of their luncheon table as Chesterton "supported" by those most
worthy of the honour. One of the first was of course George Wyndham,
already a friend and admirer of Gilbert's. At this luncheon they
discussed the modern press, 18th Century lampoons, the ingredients of
a good English style, the lawfulness of Revolution, the causes of
Napoleon, Scripture criticism, Joan of Arc, public executions, how to
bring about reforms. It was absurd, G.K. said, to think that gaining
half a reform led to the other half. Supposing it was agreed that
every man ought to have a cow, but you say, "We can't manage that
just yet: give him half a cow." He doesn't care for it and he leaves
it about, and he never asks for the other half.
Talking of the Eastern and Western races Gilbert said it was curious
that while the Easterns were so logical and clear in their religion,
they were so unpractical in every-day life; the religion of the
Westerns is mystical and full of paradoxes. Yet they are far more
practical. "The Eastern says fate governs everything and he sits and
looks pretty; we believe in Free-will and Predestination and we
invent Babbage's Calculating Machine."
As the group grew into one another's thought the talk intensified and
we got from considering East and West to considering our own
countrymen. What makes a man essentially English? Dickens had it.
Johnson had it. "You couldn't," said G.K., "imagine a Scotch Johnson,
or an Irish Johnson, or a French or German Johnson."
George Wyndham told us, as we got on to the topic of patriotism, that
he had a fear he hardly liked to utter. As we urged him he said he
feared a big war might come and we might be defeated. Gilbert agreed
that he too had felt that fear. "But," he said, "if you were to say
that in the House or I to write it in a paper we should be denounced
as unpatriotic."
Small wonder the talk had time to range, for these scrappy notes are
all that remain of a meeting beginning about one o'clock and lasting
until five. At that hour two little old sisters, the Miss Blounts,
known in our family as "the little B's," happened to call on my
mother. I shall never forget their faces as they looked at the huge
man in the armchair, and the other guests all absorbed and animated,
and realised that they were interrupting a luncheon party. A swift
glance at the little old ladies, another at the clock, and the party
broke up, to remain my most cherished memory for months: until my
next visit to their home, when Gilbert and I arrived at the use of
each other's Christian names, an agreement that he insisted on
calling The Pact of Beaconsfield.
How deep he saw when in his "Defence of Hermits" he analysed a chief
joy of human intercourse:
. . . The best things that happen to us are those we get out of
what has already happened. If men were honest with themselves, they
would agree that actual social engagements, even with those they
love, often seem strangely brief, breathless, thwarted or
inconclusive. Mere society is a way of turning friends into
acquaintances. The real profit is not in meeting our friends, but in
having met them. Now when people merely plunge from crush to crush,
and from crowd to crowd, they never discover the positive joy of
life. They are like men always hungry, because their food never
digests; also, like those men, they are cross.*
[* _The Well and the Shallows_, pp. 104-5.]
There was time in the country for the food of social intercourse to
digest. I notice too that in the list of Gilbert's friends
quiet-voiced men stood high: Max Beerbohm, Jack Phillimore, Monsignor
O'Connor, Monsignor Knox, his own father, Maurice Baring: all these
represent a certain spaciousness and leisureliness which was what he
asked of friendship. Even if they were in a hurry, they never seemed
so.
Jack Phillimore both he and we saw on and off at this time but had
often to enjoy in anticipation or in retrospect. Professor, at one
time of Greek at another of Latin, at Glasgow University, he was the
kind of man Gilbert specially appreciated: he wrote of Phillimore
after his death something curiously like what he wrote of his own
father--"he was a supreme example of unadvertised greatness, and the
thing which is larger inside than outside." At Oxford Phillimore had
been known as "one of Belloc's lambs." He was very much one of the
group who were to run the _Eye-Witness_ and _New Witness_ but though
he always adored Belloc, no one who knew him in the fulness of his
powers could think of him as anyone's lamb. He was a quiet, humorous,
deeply intelligent man: a scholar of European repute, whose knowledge
of Mediaeval Latin verse equalled his Classical scholarship.
Gilbert's keen observation of his friends is never shown better than
in what he wrote of Phillimore:
Like a needle pricking a drum, his quietude seemed to kill all the
noise of our loud plutocracy and publicity. In all this he was
supremely the scholar, with not a little of the satirist.
And yet there was never any man alive who was so unlike a don. His
religion purged him of intellectual pride, and certainly of that
intellectual vanity which so often makes a sort of seething fuss
underneath the acid sociability of academic centres. He had none of
the tired omniscience which comes of intellectual breeding in and in.
He seemed to be not so much a professor as a practiser of learning.
He practised it quietly but heartily and humorously, exactly as if it
had been any other business. If he had been a sailor, like his father
the Admiral, he would have minded his own business with exactly the
same smile and imperceptible gesture. Indeed, he looked much more
like a sailor than a professor; his dark square face and clear eyes
and compact figure were of a type often seen among sailors; and in
whatever academic enclave he stood, he always seemed to have walked
in from outside, bringing with him some of the winds of the world and
some light from the ends of the earth.*
[* _G.K.'s Weekly_, Nov. 27, 1926.]
To return to my own notes. It is horribly characteristic that I wrote
them in an undated notebook, but I think that luncheon which lasted
so long must have been in 1911. The same year my father persuaded
both the Synthetic Society to elect Chesterton and Chesterton to
attend the Synthetic. Of his first meeting my father wrote to George
Wyndham:
Had you been at the Synthetic last night you would have witnessed a
memorable scene.
Place: Westminster Palace Hotel. Time: 9.40.
A. J. B. [Arthur Balfour, leader of the Conservative Party] is
speaking persuasively and in carefully modulated tones to an
attentive audience. Suddenly a crash as though the door were blown
open. A. J. B. brought to a halt. The whole company look round and in
rushes a figure exactly like the pictures of Mr. Wind when he blows
open the door and forces an entrance in the German child's story "Mr.
Wind and Madame Rain"--a figure enormous and distended, a kind of
walking mountain but with large rounded corners. It was G. K. C. who,
enveloped in a huge Inverness cape of light colour, thus made his
debut at the Synthetic. He rushed (not walked) to a chair, and was
dragged chair and all by Waggett and me as near as might be to the
table, where with a fresh crash he deposited his stick, and then his
hat. And there he sat, eager and attentive, forgetting all about his
stick and hat and coat, filling up the whole space at the bottom of
the table, drawing caricatures of the company on a sheet of foolscap,
a memorable figure, very welcome to me, but arousing the fury of the
conventional and the "dreary and well-informed" well represented by
Bailey Saunders who has been at me here half the morning trying to
convince me that he will ruin the society and ought never to have
been elected.
Some of the reactions of this new recruit have been touched on in his
_Autobiography:_
There I met old Haldane, yawning with all his Hegelian abysses, who
appeared to me as I must have appeared to a neighbour in a local
debating club when he dismissed metaphysical depths and pointed at me
saying: "There is that Leviathan whom Thou hast made to take his
sport therein." . . .
There also I met Balfour, obviously preferring any philosophers
with any philosophies to his loyal followers of the Tory Party.
Perhaps religion is not the opium of the people, but philosophy is
the opium of the politicians.
My father belonged to another group besides the Synthetic Society for
which it seemed to him that Gilbert was even more ideally fitted.
_The_ Club was founded by Dr. Johnson, the home of the best talk in
the land, where Garrick and Goldsmith were at times shouted down by
the great Lexicographer--a sign, said Chesterton, of his modesty and
his essential democracy: Johnson was too democratic to reign as king
of his company: he preferred to contend with them as an equal. The
old formula still in use had informed my father "you have had the
honour to be elected," but Wilfrid Ward felt that the election of the
modern Dr. Johnson would be an honour to The Club. To his intense
disgust he found that only George Wyndham could be relied upon for
whole-hearted support. What may be called the "social" element in the
Club had become too strong to welcome a man who boasted in all
directions of belonging to the Middle Classes and whose friends
merely urged the claim that he was one of the few today who could
talk as well as Johnson.
Gilbert met many politicians in other ways but only with one of them
did he feel a really close harmony. Of George Wyndham's opinions he
said in the _Autobiography_ that they were "of the same general
colour as my own," and he went on to stress the word "colour" as
significant of the whole man. To depict him in political cartoons as
"St. George" had not in it the sort of absurdity of the pictures of
the more frigid and philosophic Balfour as "Prince Arthur." George
really did suggest the ages of chivalry. "He had huge sympathy with
gypsies and tramps." There was about him "an inward generosity that
gave a gusto or relish to all he did."
The Chestertons' appreciation of George Wyndham was deepened for them
both by an affection, indeed almost a reverence, for "the deep
mysticism of his wife; a woman not to be forgotten by anyone who ever
knew her, and still less to be merely praised by anyone who
adequately appreciated her." For a period at any rate Gilbert and
Frances were much in contact with the extreme Anglo-Catholic group in
the Church of England. In the best of that group--and many of them
are very very good--there is a sense of taking part in a crusade to
restore Catholicism to the whole country. Canon Scott Holland led a
campaign for social justice and many of the same group mixed this
with devotion to Our Lady, belief in the Real Presence, and a
profound love of the Catholic past of England. George Wyndham's wife,
Lady Grosvenor, was one of this group and also her friend Father
Philip Waggett of the Cowley Fathers. Father Waggett, a member of the
Synthetic Society and intimate with my parents, became also intimate
with the Chestertons.
Ralph Adams Cram described his own meeting with Chesterton, arranged
by Father Waggett.
Father Waggett asked my wife and myself once when we were staying
in London, whom we would like best to meet--"anyone from the King
downward." We chose Chesterton who was a very particular friend of
Father Waggett. At that time we put on a dinner at the Buckingham
Palace Hotel (in those days the haunt of all the County families) and
in defiance of fate, had this dinner in the public dining room. We
had as guests Father Waggett, G. K. C. and Mrs. Chesterton. The
entrance into the dining room of the short processional created
something of a sensation amongst the aforesaid County families there
assembled. Father Waggett, thin, cropheaded monk in cassock and rope;
G. K. C., vast and practically globular; little Mrs. Chesterton, very
South Kensington in moss green velvet; my wife and myself.
The dinner was a riot. I have the clearest recollection of G. K. C.
seated ponderously at the table, drinking champagne by magnums,
continually feeding his face with food which, as he was constantly
employed in the most dazzling and epigrammatic conversation, was apt
to fall from his fork and rebound from his corporosity, until the
fragments disappeared under the table.
He and Father Waggett egged each other on to the most preposterous
amusements. Each would write a triolet for the other to illustrate.
They were both as clever with the pencil as with the pen, and they
covered the backs of menus with most astonishing literary and
artistic productions. I particularly remember G. K. C. suddenly
looking out of the dining room window towards Buckingham Palace and
announcing that he was now prepared "to write a disloyal triolet!"
This was during the reign of King Edward VII, and the result was
convincing. I have somewhere the whole collection of these literary
productions with their illustrations, but where they are I do not
know.*
[* _Chesterton_ by Cyril Clemens, pp. 36-37.]
On a second visit of the Chestertons to Lotus, George Wyndham was
there. He had told us of his habit of "shouting the Ballad of the
White Horse to submissive listeners" and we had hoped for the same
treat. But Gilbert got the book and kicked it under his chair defying
us to recover it. We had at that time a vast German cook--of a girth
almost equal to his own and possessed of unbounded curiosity in the
matter of our guests. Gilbert declared that as he sat peacefully in
the drawing room she approached him holding out a paper which he
supposed to be a laundry list, and then started back exclaiming that
she had thought him to be Mrs. Ward.
It was on this visit that he remarked to a lady who happened to be
the granddaughter of a Duke: "You and I who belong to the jolly old
upper Middle Classes." Had he been told about her ancestry he would,
I imagine, have felt that he had paid her an implied compliment by
not being aware of it. For into the world of the aristocracy he and
Frances had been received in London, and he viewed it with the same
calm humour and potential friendliness as he had for all the rest of
mankind. When Frances in her Diary pitied the Duchess of Sutherland
and felt that a single day of such a life as the Duchess lived would
drive her crazy, she was expressing Gilbert's taste as well as her
own for a certain simplicity of life. Social position neither excited
nor irritated him. He liked or disliked an aristocrat exactly as he
liked or disliked a postman. Gilbert and Cecil Chesterton really
were, as Conrad Noel said, personally unconcerned about class. They
had, however, a principle against the position of the English
aristocracy which will be better understood in the light of their
general social and historical outlook. What might be called the
social side of it was often expressed by G.K. when lecturing on
Dickens. Thus, speaking at Manchester for the Dickens centenary, he
was reported as saying:
The objection to aristocracy was quite simple. It was not that
aristocrats were all blackguards. It was that in an aristocratic
state, people sat in a huge darkened theatre and only the stage was
lighted. They saw five or six people walking about and they said,
"That man looks very heroic striding about with a sword." Plenty of
people outside in the street looked more heroic striding about with
an umbrella; but they did not see these things, all the lights being
turned out. That was the really philosophic objection to an
aristocratic society. It was not that the lord was a fool. He was
about as clever as one's own brother or cousin. It was because one's
attention was confined to a few people that one judged them as one
judged actors on the stage, forgetting everybody else.
Chesterton thought everybody should be remembered whether suburban,
proletarian, aristocrat or pauper. Shortly after the removal to
Beaconsfield he was summoned to give evidence before a Parliamentary
Commission on the question of censorship of the theatre. Keep it, he
said, to the surprise of many of his friends, but change the manner
of its exercise. Let it be no longer censorship by an expert but by a
jury--by twelve ordinary men. These will be the best judges of what
really makes for morality and sound sense. He had come to give
evidence, he said, not as a writer but as the representative of the
gallery, and he was concerned only with "the good and happiness of
the English people."
One bewildered Commissioner was understood to murmur that their terms
of reference were not quite so wide as that.
The chapter in the _Autobiography_ called "Friendships and Foolery"
ends suddenly with a reference to the war but, like the whole book,
it leaps wildly about. One point in it is interesting and links up
with the introduction to Titterton's _Drinking Songs_ that Gilbert
later wrote. To shout a chorus is natural to mankind and G.K. claims
that he had done it long before he heard of Community Singing. He
sang when out driving, or walking over the moors with Father
O'Connor; he sang in Fleet Street with Titterton and his journalist
friends; he sang the _Red Flag_ on Trade Union platforms and _England
Awake_ in Revolutionary groups. There was, he claims, a legend that
in Auberon Herbert's rooms not far from Buckingham Palace "we sang
Drake's Drum with such passionate patriotism that King Edward the
Seventh sent in a request for the noise to stop."
Yet it was all but impossible to teach Gilbert a tune, and Bernard
Shaw felt this (as we have seen) a real drawback to his friend's
understanding of his own life and career. Music was to Shaw what line
and color were to Chesterton; but to Chesterton singing was just
making a noise to show he felt happy. Once he wrote a poem called
"Music"--but only as one more flower in the wreath he was always
weaving for Frances--who was, says Monsignor Knox, the heroine of all
his novels.*
[* _The Listener_, June 19, 1941.]
Sounding brass and tinkling cymbal,
He that made me sealed my ears,
And the pomp of gorgeous noises,
Waves of triumph, waves of tears,
Thundered empty round and past me,
Shattered, lost for evermore,
Ancient gold of pride and passion,
Wrecked like treasure on a shore.
But I saw her cheek and forehead
Change, as at a spoken word,
And I saw her head uplifted
Like a lily to the Lord.
Nought is lost, but all transmuted,
Ears are sealed, yet eyes have seen;
Saw her smiles (0 soul be worthy!),
Saw her tears (0 heart be clean!)*
[* _Collected Poems_, p. 129.]
Against the background of all these activities the books went on
pouring out as fast from Overroads as they had from Overstrand. A
town full of friends forty minutes' journey from London was not
exactly the desert into which admirers had advised Gilbert to flee,
but he would never have been happy in a desert: he needed human
company. He also needed to produce. "Artistic paternity," he once
said, "is as wholesome as physical paternity." And certainly he never
ceased to bring forth the children of his mind. Within two years of
the move seven books were published:
The Ball and the Cross, February 1910,
What's Wrong with the World, June 1910,
Alarms and Discursions, November 1910,
Blake, November 1910,
Criticisms and Appreciations of Dickens, January 1911,
Innocence of Father Brown, August 1911,
Ballad of the White Horse, August 1911.
Of these books, _Alarms and Discursions_ and the Dickens criticisms
are collections and arrangements of already published essays.
Meanwhile other essays were being written to become in turn other
books at a later date.
The _Blake_ is a brilliant short study of art and mysticism. After
reading it you feel you understand Blake in quite a new way. And then
you wonder--is this illumination light on Blake or simply light on
Chesterton? It must never be forgotten that the writer was himself a
"spoilt" artist--which means a man with almost enough art in him to
have been in the ranks of men consecrated for life to art's service.
"Father Brown" had first made his appearance in magazines and these
detective stories became the most purely popular of Gilbert's books.
It was a new genre: detection in which the mind of a man means more
than his footprints or cigar ash, even to the detective. The one
reproduced in most anthologies--"The Invisible Man"--depends for its
solution on the fact that certain people are _morally_ invisible. To
the question "Has anyone been here" the answer "No" does not include
the milkman or the postman: thus the postman is the morally invisible
man who has committed the crime. A thread of this sort runs through
all the stories, but they are, like all his romances, full too of
escape and peril and wild adventure.
Life on several occasions imitated Gilbert's fancies. Thus the Azeff
revelations followed his fantastic idea in _The Man Who Was Thursday_
of the anarchists who turn out to be detectives in disguise. The
technique of Father Brown himself was imitated by a man in Detroit
who recovered a stolen car by putting himself imaginatively in the
thief's place and driving an exactly similar car around likely
corners till he came suddenly upon his own, left in a lonely road. He
wrote to tell Gilbert of this adventure.
From Chicago came an even odder example. "It is extremely difficult,"
wrote the _Tribune_, "to determine the proper relationship of the
Chiesa-Prudente-Di Cossato duels to Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton's book,
_The Ball and the Cross"_ . . .
The flight in search of a duelling ground; the pursuit by the
police; the friendly intervention of the anarchist wineshop-keeper,
Volpi; the offer of his backyard for fighting purposes; the
unfriendly intervention of the police; the friendly intervention of
the reporters; the renewed and insistently unfriendly intervention of
the police commissioner; the disgust of the duellists; the extreme
disgust of the anarchist; the renewed flight of the fighters,
seconds, physicians, reporters, and the anarchist over the back
fences--all these and other incidents are essentially Chestertonian.
The Di Cossato affair was carried off with fully as much spirit and
dash; with fully as many automobiles, seconds, physicians, reporters
and police, all scampering over the country roads until the artistic
deputy and the aged veteran of the war of 1859, outdistancing their
pursuers, could find opportunity in comparative peace to cut the
glorious gashes of satisfied honour in each other's faces.*
[* _Chicago Tribune_, 12 March 1910.]
Two months after this an interviewer from the _Daily News_ visited
Beaconsfield and splashed headlines in the paper to the effect that
the spirit of Chesterton was inspiring a fight between the
leaseholders in Edwardes Square and a firm which had bought up their
garden to erect a super-garage. Barricades were erected by day and
destroyed in the night: a wild-eyed beadle held the fort with a
garden roller, and said G.K. "the creatures of my Napoleon [of
Notting Hill] have entered into the bodies of the staid burghers of
Kensington."
In none of these cases was there any likelihood, as the _Chicago
Tribune_ noted, of the actors in life having read the books they were
spiritedly staging. "Ideas have a life of their own," the _Daily
News_ interviewer tentatively ventured, but he may have been puzzled
as G.K. "agreed heartily" in the words, "I am no dirty nominalist."
Chesterton kept the reviewers busy as well as the interviewers and in
all his stories they noted one curiosity: "If time and space--or any
circumstances--interfere with the cutting of his Gordian knots, he
commands time and space to make themselves scarce, and circumstances
to be no more heard of."
About time and space this is true in a unique degree. For him time
seems to have had no existence, or perhaps rather to have been like a
telescope elongating and shortening at will. As a young man, it may
be remembered, he gave in the course of one letter two quite
irreconcilable statements of the length of time since events in his
school days. He had indeed the same difficulty about time as about
money--he mentions in the _Autobiography_ that after his watch was
stolen during a pro-Boer demonstration he never bothered to possess
another. In his stories this oddity became more marked. In _The Ball
and the Cross_ he relates adventures performed in leaping on and off
an omnibus in such fashion that the bus must have covered several
miles of ground: and then we are suddenly told it had gone the few
score yards from the bottom of Ludgate Hill to the top. Still
stranger are the records in _The Man Who Was Thursday_ and _Manalive_
of the happenings of a single day, while in _The Return of Don
Quixote_ a new organisation of society is described as though many
years old and then suddenly announced as having been on foot some
weeks.
But to return for one moment to the more serious aspects of the work
of these years. While _What's Wrong with the World_ (discussed in
some detail in the next chapter) is the first sketch of his social
views--a kind of blueprint for a sane and human sort of world--the
other books with all their foolery hold a serious purpose. They
should be read as illustrations of the philosophy of _Orthodoxy_--
both the book he had written and the thing of which he had said "God
and humanity made it and it made me."
"This row of shapeless and ungainly monsters which I now set before
the reader," he says of his essays (in the "Introduction on
Gargoyles" in _Alarms and Discursions_), "does not consist of
separate idols cut out capriciously in lonely valleys or various
islands. These monsters are meant for the gargoyles of a definite
cathedral. I have to carve the gargoyles, because I can carve nothing
else; I leave to others the angels and the arches and the spires. But
I am very sure of the style of the architecture and of the
consecration of the church."
The story of _The Ball and the Cross_, already indicated to the
reader by the American-Italian duel which seemed like a parody of it,
has the double interest of its bearing on the world of Chesterton's
day and its glimpses at a stranger world to come. A young Highlander,
coming to London, sees in an atheist bookshop an insult to Our Lady.
He smashes the window and challenges the owner to a duel. Turnbull,
the atheist, is more than ready to fight; but the world, caring
nothing for religious opinions, regards anyone ready to fight for
them as a madman and is mainly concerned with keeping the peace.
Pursued by all the resources of modern civilisation, the two men
spend the rest of the book starting to fight, being interrupted and
arrested by the police, escaping, arguing and fighting again. They
end up in an asylum with a garden where again they talk endlessly and
where the power of Lucifer the prince of this world has enclosed
everyone who has been concerned in their wild flight, so that no
memory of it may live on the earth.
The two sides of Chesterton's brain are engaged in the duel of minds
in this book, and some of his best writing is in it, both in the
description of the wild rush across sea and land and in the
discussions between the two men. G.K.'s affection for the sincere
atheist is noteworthy and his hatred is reserved for the shuffler and
the compromiser. It was grand to have such a man as Turnbull to
convert--"one of those men in whom a continuous appetite and industry
of the intellect leave the emotions very simple and steady. His heart
was in the right place but he was quite content to leave it there.
His head was his hobby." This might be Chesterton himself--in fact,
it is Chesterton himself--and the climax belongs to a later world
than that of 1911. For pointing to the Ball bereft of the Cross, the
Highlander calls out: "It staggers, Turnbull. It cannot stand by
itself; you know it cannot. It has been the sorrow of your life.
Turnbull, this garden is not a dream, but an apocalyptic fulfillment.
This garden is the world gone mad."
About the time this book appeared Gilbert was asked by an Anglican
Society to lecture at Coventry. He said "What shall I lecture on?"
They answered "Anything from an elephant to an umbrella." "Very
well," he said, "I will lecture on an umbrella." He treated the
umbrella as a symbol of increasing artificiality. We wear hair to
protect the head, a hat to protect the hair, an umbrella to protect
the hat. Gilbert said once he was willing to start anywhere and
develop from anything the whole of his philosophy. In the Notebook
he had written:
BOOTLACES
Once I looked down at my bootlaces
Who gave me my bootlaces?
The bootmaker? Bah!
Who gave the bootmaker himself?
What did I ever do that I should be given bootlaces?
After the lecture on the umbrella two priests saw him at the railway
bookstall and asked him if the rumour was true that he was thinking
of joining the Church. He answered, "It's a matter that is giving me
a great deal of agony of mind, and I'd be very grateful if you would
pray for me."
The following year he broached the subject to Father O'Connor when
they were alone in a railway carriage. He said he had made up his
mind, but he wanted to wait for Frances "as she had led him into the
Anglican Church out of Unitarianism." Frances told Father O'Connor
when he came to Overroads later, at the beginning of Gilbert's
illness, that she "could not make head or tail" of some of her
husband's remarks, especially one about being buried at Kendal Green.
When Father O'Connor told her what had been on Gilbert's mind she was
half amused at the hints he had been dropping: she recognised his
reluctance to move without her, but I think she probably realised too
that even to himself his conviction seemed in those years at times
more absolute, at times less. We shall see in a later chapter his own
analysis of his very slow progress. Meanwhile in his books he was at
once deepening and widening his vision of the faith.
Fragments of verse used in _The Ballad of the White Horse_ had come
to Gilbert in his sleep; a great white horse had been the romance of
his childhood; the beginning of his honeymoon under the sign of the
White Horse at Ipswich had been "a trip to fairyland." But it is hard
to say when the motif of the White Horse, the verses ringing in his
head, and the ideas that make the poem, came together into what many
think the greatest work of his life.
In _Father Brown on Chesterton_ we are told of the long time the poem
took in the making. They talked of it on the Yorkshire moors in 1906
and Father O'Connor noted how Frances "cherished it. . . . I could
see she was more in love with it than with anything else he had in
hand." Father O'Connor also gives some interesting illustrations of
the way talk ministers to a work of genius. He had begun one day "by
saying lightly that none of us could become great men without leaning
on the little ones: could not well begin our day but for those who
started theirs first for our sake, lighting the fire and cooking the
breakfast." This was said just before the dressing bell rang and
between the bell and dinner Gilbert had written about nine verses
beginning with King Alfred's meditation:
And well may God with the serving folk
Cast in His dreadful lot
Is not He too a servant
And is not He forgot?
In 1907, Gilbert published in the _Albany Review_ a "Fragment from a
Ballad Epic of Alfred" which evoked the comment "Mr. Chesterton
certainly has in each eye a special Röntgen ray attachment."
He wrote _The White Horse_ guided by his favourite theory that to
realise history we should not delve into the details of research but
try only to see the big things--for it is those that we generally
overlook.
People talk about features of interest; but the features never make
up a face. . . . They will toil wearily off to the tiniest inscription
or darkest picture that is mentioned in a guide book as having some
reference to Alfred the Great or William the Conqueror; but they care
nothing for the sky that Alfred saw or the hills on which William
hunted.
In the King Alfred country especially can be found "the far-flung
Titanic figure of the Giant Albion whom Blake saw in visions,
spreading to our encircling seas."*
[* _G.K.'s Weekly_, Apr. 16, 1927.]
Gilbert wrote a sketch for the _Daily News_ about this time, telling
how an old woman in a donkey cart whom they had left far behind on
the road went driving triumphantly past when the car they were in
broke down. For this expedition, as so often later, he made full use
of the modern invention he derided. In an open touring car hired for
the occasion, Gilbert in Inverness cape and shapeless hat, Frances
beside him snugly wrapped up, they
Saw the smoke-hued hamlets quaint
With Westland King and Westland Saint,
And watched the western glory faint
Along the road to Frome.
The note struck in the dedication and recurring throughout the poem
is that of the Christian idea which had made England great and which
he had learnt from Frances:
Wherefore I bring these rhymes to you
Who brought the cross to me,
Since on you flaming without flaw
I saw the sign that Guthrum saw
When he let break his ships of awe
And laid peace on the sea.
In the poem Christian men, whether they be Saxon or Roman or Briton
or Celt, are banded together to fight the heathen Danes in defence of
the sacred things of faith, in defence of the human things of daily
life, in defence even of the old traditions of pagan England
. . . because it is only Christian men
guard even heathen things.
Gilbert constantly disclaimed the idea that he took trouble over
anything: "taking trouble has never been a weakness of mine": but in
what might be termed a large and loose way he really did take immense
trouble over what interested him. King Alfred is not an almost
mythical figure like King Arthur and an outline of his story with
legendary fringes can be traced in the Wessex country and confirmed
by literature. Gilbert wanted this general story: he did not want
antiquarian exactness of detail.
Into the mouths of Guthrum and of King Alfred, he put the expression
of the pagan and the Christian outlook. Nor did he hesitate to let
King Alfred prophesy at large concerning the days of G. K.
Chesterton. The poem is a ballad in the sense of the old ballads that
were stirring stories: it is also an expression of the threefold love
of Gilbert's life: his wife, his country and his Faith. And as in all
great poetry, there is a quality of eternity in this poem that has
made it serve as an expression of the eternal Spirit of man.
During the first world war many soldiers had it with them in the
trenches: "I want to tell you," the widow of a sailor wrote, "that a
copy of the Ballad of the White Horse went down into the Humber with
the R.38. My husband loved it as his own soul--never went anywhere
without it."
Almost thirty years have passed and today the poem still speaks.
Greeting Jacques Maritain on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday,
Dorothy Thompson quoted King Alfred's assertion of Christian freedom
against "the pagan nazi conquerors of his day." After Crete the
_Times_ had the shortest first leader in its history. Under the
heading _Sursum Corda_ was a brief statement of the disaster,
followed by the words of Our Lady to King Alfred:
I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?
The unbreakable strength of that apparently faint and tenuous thread
of faith appeared in the sequel. Many had the ballad in hand in those
dark days; many others wrote to the _Times_ asking the source of the
quotation. Months later when Winston Churchill spoke of "the end of
the beginning," the _Times_ returned to _The White Horse_ and gave
the opening of Alfred's speech at Ethandune:
"The high tide!" King Alfred cried.
"The high tide and the turn!"