Silver Wedding
THE CONSIDERATION OF the Distributist League that flowed out of the
foundation of _G.K.'s Weekly_ in 1925 has carried us some years ahead
of our story. Back then to 1926 when Frances and Gilbert had been
married 25 years.
One of the things taught me long ago when I first visited them at
Beaconsfield was that it was properly to be called Beckonsfield: that
it was not named for Disraeli but that he, impertinently, had chosen
to be named for it. Gilbert often spelt it Bekonsfield to impress his
point. Both in theory and practice he had a lot of local patriotism
and a little of that special pride taken by all men in houses built
by themselves. But most of his pride went out to the fact that his
home was intensely English. He quoted a lover of Sussex who said
among the beech trees of Buckinghamshire, "This is really the most
English part of England." He felt it "no accident that has called
this particular stretch of England the home counties." Public life
was so ugly just now, the decay of patriotism under the corroding
influence of an evil and cowardly sort of pacifism was hateful to
him, but England still remained to re-vitalise the English when the
time should come. The oaks that had made our ships could still fill
us with "heroic memories; of Nelson dying under the low oaken beams
or Collingwood scattering the acorns that they might grow into
battleships." Yet if, he said, "I were choosing an entirely English
emblem, I should choose the beech-tree." Beaconsfield was, by one
theory, named from the beech forests that surrounded it, and while
the oaks suggested adventure and the British lion, the beeches
suggest rather the pigs that feed upon their mast and villages that
grow up in the hollows and slow curves of the hills.
"The return to the real England with real Englishmen would be a
return to the beech-woods, which still make this town like a home. At
least they did until recently. I shall probably be told tomorrow that
several beech forests have been removed to enable a motorist,
temporarily deaf and blind, to go from Birmingham to Brighton."
It is at Top Meadow, whither they moved in 1922, that I always see
Frances and Gilbert in a memory picture. They were to live there for
the rest of their lives, and life there was the quiet background for
all the vast mental activity and the journeying over England and
Ireland and Europe and America that marked the years that remained.
The house began simply as a huge room or studio built in the field
opposite Overroads. At one end was a stage which became the dining
room: at the other end a minute study for Gilbert. The roof was high
with great beams: at the study end was a musicians' gallery. A wide
open fireplace held two rushbottomed seats on one of which Frances
sat in winter. They were the only warm corners, but Gilbert did not
feel the cold and certainly could not have fitted into the inglenook.
Opposite the fire was a long low window looking into the prettiest
garden, where St. Francis stood guardian and preached perpetually to
the birds. A pool held water lilies; and the flowers that surrounded
the pool and the house were also cut and brought indoors in great
quantities. Frances loved to have them in glowing masses against the
background of books.
New shelves had to be added every year as the books accumulated. Big
as the room was, the wall space was not enough and one large bookcase
was built out from the wall near the fireplace into the middle of the
room, as in a public library. It looked well there and it screened
one from the bitterest blasts. For the place seemed full of air from
the four winds of heaven. The rest of the house was built on to this
room and looked tiny beside it. Kitchen and servants' quarters, two
fair-sized and one very small bedroom, a minute sitting room for
Frances where she kept her collection of tiny things--toys and
ornaments mostly less than an inch, many far smaller, that were the
delight of children. She had not, Gilbert remarked, allowed her taste
to guide her in choosing a husband.
A mixture of Gilbert's strong and weak qualities affected his
dealings with his dependents. I am not sure he felt certain that it
was quite right that he should have a gardener: anyhow, no man was
ever paid so highly and allowed to idle so completely as was the
gardener I remember there, an exceedingly able gardener when he chose
to work. To such trifles as the disappearance of coal or tools,
neither Gilbert nor Frances would dream of adverting. And they were
entirely at the mercy of a "hard case" story at all times. One man
used to call weekly to receive ten shillings--for what service no one
was able to form the faintest conception. Should he fail to appear
Gilbert mailed the money. He was found one day fighting another man
on the doorstep for daring to beg from Mr. Chesterton!
From a conventional point of view the maids were inconceivably
casual. Neither Gilbert nor Frances would have thought it right to
insist on caps or indeed on any sort of uniform. It is my impression
that I have been waited on at dinner by someone garbed in a skirt, a
sweater and a pair of bedroom slippers. And the parlor maid took for
granted her own presence beside Frances and Dorothy Collins as a
chief mourner at Gilbert's funeral.
According to Bernard Shaw, writing of Dickens, marriage between a
genius and an ordinary or normal woman could not succeed--the gap was
too wide. Dickens had thought he could go through with it, only
because he had not measured the gap. In this theory, as in so much
else, Gilbert stood violently opposed to Shaw. No doubt he must at
times have realised that there was an intellectual gap between
himself and the ordinary man or woman, but it was a thing utterly
unimportant. Character, love, sanity: these things mattered
infinitely more, and he more than once depicts the genius as
painfully climbing to reach the ordinary.
His views concerning the sexes were equally at variance with those
of Shaw and of most of the moderns. He was quite frankly the
old-fashioned man and Frances was the old-fashioned woman. They both
agreed that there is one side of life that belongs to man--the side
of endless cigars smoked over endless discussions about the universe.
Gilbert, in _What's Wrong With the World_, tells us that the voice in
which the working woman summons her husband from the tavern is the
same voice as that of the hostess who, leaving the men in the dining
room, tells her husband not to stay too long over the cigars.
Of this voice he entirely approved so long as it did not ask to stay
on in the dining room. He often said that the important thing for a
country was that the men should be manly, the women womanly: the
thing he hated was the modern hybrid: the woman who gate-crashes the
male side of life: no one, he had said in a letter of his engagement
time, "takes such a fierce pleasure as I do in things being
themselves." And both he and Frances found amusement in that "eternal
equality" which Gilbert saw in the sexes so long as they kept their
eternal separateness. If everything, he said, is trying to be red
some things are redder than others, but there is an eternal and
unalterable equality between red and green.
It so happens that in the matter of the wives of great men he had
something to say more than once. He longed to hear the point of view
of Mrs. Cobbett who "remains in the background of his life in a sort
of powerful silence." He combated Shaw's notion that the young poet
would repudiate domestic toils for his wife: rather he would idealise
them--though this, Gilbert admits, might at times be hard on the
wife. But the matter is best expressed in the love scene in one of
his later romances: _Tales of the Long Bow:_
That valley had a quality of repose with a stir of refreshment,
as if the west wind had been snared in it and tamed into a summer
air. . . .
"What would you say if I turned the world upside down and set my
foot upon the sun and the moon?"
"I should say," replied Joan Hardy, still smiling, "that you wanted
somebody to look after you."
He stared at her for a moment in an almost abstracted fashion as if
he had not fully understood; then he laughed quite suddenly and
uncontrollably, like a man who has seen something very close to him
that he knows he is a fool not to have seen before. So a man will
fall over something in a game of hiding-and-seeking, and get up
shaken with laughter.
"What a bump your mother earth gives you when you fall out of an
aeroplane," he said. "What a thing is horse-sense, and how much finer
really than the poetry of Pegasus! And when there is everything else
as well that makes the sky clean and the earth kind, beauty and
bravery and the lifting of the head--well, you are right enough,
Joan. Will you take care of me?"*
[* Pp. 89, 119.]
Frances was not especially interesting intellectually although she
had much more mind than Joan in the story, but above all she carried
with her a "quality of repose with a stir of refreshment."
"Will you take care of me?"
Neither of them probably had measured at first all that that care
would mean. Only bit by bit would the full degree of his physical
dependence, as we have seen it through the years, become clear to
her. The strenuous campaign in the matter of appearances begun during
the engagement might alter in direction but had rather to be
intensified in degree as he grew older. Shaving, bathing, even
dressing were daily problems to him. "Heat the water," an early
secretary at Overroads heard Frances saying to the cook, "Mr.
Chesterton is going to have a bath." And "O, need I," came in tones
of deepest depression from the study. The thought of that vast form
climbing into and out of the bathtub does make one realise how a
matter of easy everyday practice to the normal person became to him
almost a heroic venture. His tie, his boots, were equally a problem:
I remember his appearing once at breakfast in two ties and claiming,
when I noticed it, that it proved he paid too much, not too little,
attention to dress. Doctors, dentists, oculists were all needed at
times, but Gilbert would never discover the need or achieve
appointments or the keeping of them. Still more serious was the
question of how the two were to live and to do all the acts of
generosity that to them both seemed almost more necessary than their
own living. Hard as he worked, Dorothy Collins has told me that when
she came to them in this year (1926) they had almost nothing saved.
It may be remembered that Gilbert wrote to Frances during their
engagement that his only quality as a shopper was ability to get rid
of money and that he was not good at "such minor observances" as
bringing home what he had bought or even remembering what it was.
Through boyhood and into manhood his parents, as we have seen, had
never given him money to handle and he certainly never learnt to
handle it later in life. "He spent money like water," Belloc told me.
Realising his own incapacity he arranged fairly early to have Frances
look after their finances, bank the money and draw checks. "When we
set up a house, darling," he had said, "I think you will have to do
the shopping." All he handled was small sums by way of pocket
money--"very playfully regarded by both" Father O'Connor writes, for
he had often witnessed the joke that they made of it.
"What could she do," he continues, "when Gilbert went out with
£5.18.6 or words to that effect, and came back invariably without a
copper, not knowing where his money had gone?"
At a hotel in Warsaw the manager entreated him not to bring every
beggar in town around the door. He could never refuse a beggar and
the money not given away was probably dropped in the street or in a
shop. The solution they hit upon was that of accounts at the shops
and hotels or anything that could not simply be brought home by
Frances and placed by his side. Father O'Connor wrote to Dorothy
Collins of "the loving care with which Frances anticipated all his
wishes--never was the cigar box out of date--_you_ know this, and it
was so long before you came. And his toddle to the Railway Hotel for
port or a quart according to climatic conditions. . . . She devised
and built the studio for Gilbert to play at and play in. It used to
be crowded at receptions, as on the night when Gilbert broke his arm.
He had been toying with the tankard that evening, to the detriment of
social intercourse, but not much, I thought. We were all in good
fettle. The _Ballad of the White Horse_ was just going to the
printers. That was never penned in Fleet Street. Nor _The Everlasting
Man_. He wrote verbosely there in the office. At Beaconsfield he was
pulled together, braced."
The studio, become the house, almost certainly cost more than they
had planned--building always does--but the two great drains were the
benefactions and the paper. Frances signed, as a matter of course,
every check Gilbert wanted, but I imagine it was sometimes with a
little sigh that she wrote the checks for the endless telephones,
telegrams, printers' bills and other expenses that poured out to
support a paper which to her seemed chiefly a drain on Gilbert's
energies that could not but diminish his creative writing. In the six
years 1927-1933, he paid over £3000 into the paper. 1931-2 were the
worst years. In them the checks she had to sign totalled £1500.
The last sentences quoted from Father O'Connor touch on the
deepest--perhaps the only deep--problem for them both. For far the
hardest thing was the struggle against the real danger that he might
again drink too much, as he had before the illness that so nearly
killed him in 1915. This struggle was rendered especially hard by two
elements in her make-up: Frances wanted always to give Gilbert
exactly what _he_ wanted, and she hated to admit even to herself
anything that could be called a fault in him. She saw the overwork
that she was powerless to stop: she could not but be aware how great
it made the temptation. It was for her to remember the old illness,
to be vigilant without worrying him, to help him against himself.
After the long illness Dr. Pocock had advised total abstinence for
some years, largely because, as he told me, Gilbert, unless specially
warned, ate and drank absentmindedly anything that happened to be
there! He observed this prohibition faithfully until Dr. Pocock left
Beaconsfield in 1919. Dr. Bakewell, who succeeded him advised
moderation but only occasionally found it necessary to order total
abstention. It was the amount of liquid he feared rather than its
nature. When he forbade wine he did so because wine increased the
general tendency to absorb liquid. For Gilbert was always unslakeably
thirsty. Daily he drank several bottles of Vichy Water or Evian, also
of claret at what may be called the "open" seasons, and many cups of
tea and coffee. Spirits he practically never touched, nor such
heavier wines as port and sherry. But even two bottles of claret or
Burgundy, although usually appearing to brighten his intellect, might
well be a serious strain on the digestion of a man who overworked the
mind without exercising the body. "He loved to sip a glass of wine,"
Monsignor O'Connor writes, "and to stroll between sips in and out of
his study, brooding and jotting, and then the dictation was ready for
the morning."
Dorothy Collins once kept a record for a few weeks of the number of
words dictated of the book of the moment--usually thirteen to
fourteen thousand, about twenty-one hours weekly--exclusive of
journalism, editing and lecturing. The pressure was tremendous and
increasing, nor was it felt by Gilbert only. In a letter to Maurice
Baring at the time of his conversion he writes: "For deeper reasons
than I could ever explain, my mind has to turn especially on the
thought of my wife, whose life has been in many ways a very heroic
tragedy; and to whom I am so much in debt of honour that I cannot
bear to leave her, even psychologically, if it be possible by tact
and sympathy to take her with me."
Frances would indeed have been amazed to find herself cast for such a
part. Her life had held two tragic events--Gertrude's death and the
much sadder death of her brother, believed to have killed himself.
With her faith and her profound affections such an end had stabbed
deep. Yet certainly Frances did not view herself as other than happy:
in fact, I think she very seldom thought about herself at all. There
was something of heroism in this very self-forgetfulness. Frances
never had good health and for some years had suffered from arthritis
of the spine. Yet intimate as I was I knew this only after her death.
My husband was saying lately that had he been asked to choose
adjectives to describe Frances he would have chosen "cheerful" and
"well-balanced." Of all the people we have known we felt she was one
of the closest to the norm of sanity and mental health: quite an
achievement for a woman suffering from a really painful complaint.
Yet I think when Gilbert used the strong phrase "heroic tragedy" he
saw with his great insight that his frail wife, beside their heavy
cross of childlessness, beside the burden of her own physical and
spiritual sufferings, was carrying the weight of his achievement, and
that it was not a light one. Heroic was the right word but tragedy
the wrong, for this life given to her keeping ended on a note of
triumph.
The treatment of a situation of this kind can, of course, easily be
made unreal. In the sort of golden glow cast by the imagination on
Fleet Street with its taverns and its drinks, next morning's headache
is always omitted: but even the finer, deeper glow of the domestic
hearth has its ashy moments. No finite beings can conduct their lives
with complete absence of errors and regrets. In any human
relationship, however perfect, the people concerned sometimes bore or
annoy or even hurt one another. That is one of the main things that
sends Catholics week by week or month by month to the Confessional,
which brings for everyman something of the renewal and re-creation of
daily joy that the genius Gilbert saw when he wrote _Manalive_. In
this story the hero is always eloping with his own wife and marrying
her again. Flora Finching's "It was not ecstasy it was comfort" is a
common enough view of a reasonably successful marriage, but Gilbert
wanted to keep and did keep the flashes of ecstasy. When he wrote
_Manalive_ he had been married eleven years and he used a thought
that had inspired a poem to Frances while they were engaged. The
heroine in the story keeps changing her second name, but the name is
always a colour: in one town the hero runs away with her as Mary
Grey, in another as Mary Green. Thus as a girl Gilbert had seen
Frances in green and had understood why green trees and fields are
beautiful; had seen her in grey and had learnt a new love for grey
winter days, and the grey robes of palmers; and in blue--
Then saw I how the fashioner
Splashed reckless blue on sky and sea
And ere 'twas good enough for her
He tried it on eternity.
When they came back from Jerusalem Gilbert dedicated to Frances the
_Ballad of St. Barbara_ and we find him again at his old trick:
seeing as her throne the great stones of the mediaeval walls, seeing
nature as her background. With all apologies to the cynics I am
afraid that the judgment of the biographer upon all the evidence must
be that after twenty-five years Gilbert not only loved his wife
tenderly, but was still ardently in love with her!
A curious prayer of his youth was fulfilled as they celebrated this
year their silver wedding.
A wan new garment of young green,
Touched as you turned your soft brown hair;
And in me surged the strangest prayer
Ever in lover's heart hath been.
That I who saw your youth's bright page,
A rainbow change from robe to robe,
Might see you on this earthly globe,
Crowned with the silver crown of age.
Your dear hair powdered in strange guise,
Your dear face touched with colours pale,
And gazing through the mask and veil
The mirth of your immortal eyes.*
[* "The Last Masquerade," _Collected Poems_, pp. 348-9.]
Four years earlier Frances had aided Gilbert in making the decision
for which she was not yet herself ready, to do the act which he
called "the most difficult of all my acts of freedom." And indeed
much of that freedom of full manhood he owed to her.
Now after four years of waiting she was almost ready to join him. She
wrote to Father O'Connor:
June 20 [1926]
DEAR PADRE--
I want now, as soon as I can see a few days clear before me to
place myself under instruction to enter the Church. The whole
position is full of difficulties and I pray you Padre to tell me the
first step to take. I _don't_ want my instruction to be here. I don't
want to be the talk of Beaconsfield and for people to say I've only
followed Gilbert. It isn't true and I've had a hard fight not to let
my love for him lead me to the truth. I knew you would not accept me
for such motives. But I am very tired and very worried. Many things
are difficult for me. My health included which makes strenuous
attention a bit of a strain. I know you understand--Tell me what I
shall do.
Yours affecly
FRANCES CHESTERTON.
Between this letter and the next Gilbert and Frances celebrated
their silver wedding.
July 12
MY DEAR PADRE--
We have had such a week of alarums and excitements that I had not
even time to thank you for the spoons. They are just what I like and
incidentally just what I wanted. I feel so hopeless at getting out of
this net of responsibilities in which I am at present enmeshed and to
find time for instruction. I feel I have a lot to learn and I think
after all I had better go quietly to Father Walker* and talk to him.
Gilbert is writing to you himself. I know he thinks I have made
myself rather unhappy about things--and he is so involved with the
paper (I pray he gives it up) we have not been able to talk over
things sensibly. Please be very patient with me, because it is so
difficult to get clear. My nephew Peter is very ill and I have to
spend a lot of time with my poor sister.
[* The Parish Priest.]
Yrs gratefully
FRANCES CHESTERTON.
[Undated]
DEAR PADRE--
Many grateful thanks. Did you receive your copy of the "Incredulity
of Father Brown." It was put aside for you, but I do not know if it
was sent off or appropriated by somebody else. I have written to
Father Walker and after having seen him and had a talk I shall know
what I ought to do. It is only the mass of work, the paper, my poor
Peter and money worries that keep me on the edge from morning till
night. I feel the paper must go, it is too much for Gilbert (4 days
work always) and consequently too much for me who have to attend to
everything else. Trying to settle an income-tax dispute has nearly
brought me to tears.
You will understand how difficult it is to get time to think and
adjust my conclusions.
Yrs affect.
FRANCES CHESTERTON.
This group of letters is for Frances amazingly unreserved. I have
never known a happier Catholic than she was once the shivering on the
bank was over and the plunge had been taken. One would say she had
been in the Church all her life.
This was indeed a year of fulfillment: the year of the completion of
their home, for they surprisingly acquired a daughter! I sometimes
wondered why Frances and Gilbert had never adopted a child: they
lavished much love on nieces, nephews and godchildren, but this was
the only fulfillment to their longing until almost old age--and even
then their conscious act was merely that of engaging a secretary.
They had had many secretaries before, some of whom came with a quite
inadequate training. "They learnt on Gilbert," as a friend once put
it. It was difficult, too, for the secretaries, since neither Gilbert
nor Frances had any idea of hours or of the arrangement of work. It
was quite probable that Gilbert would suddenly want to dictate late
in the evening or again that Frances would ask the secretary of the
moment to run into the village for the fish in the middle of the
morning. Hence rather general discomfort. Gilbert dictated straight
to the typewriter, so shorthand was not needed. He went very slowly
with many pauses. But it is typical of this period that no carbons
were kept of letters sent, no files of letters received.
In 1926 came Dorothy Collins. Not only did she bring order out of
chaos, but she became first the very dear friend of both Frances and
Gilbert and finally all that their own daughter could have been. I
remember how Frances talked of her to me when she was hoping Dorothy
would become a Catholic (which she did some years later) and again
when she herself was left solitary by her husband's death, and how I
felt with inward thanksgiving that no child could mean more to her
mother. But long before this stage was reached came a great
lightening of the burden of living. No longer would Frances cry over
income tax returns, no longer would money worry her. Chauffeur as
well as secretary Dorothy drove them both to London for engagements
and through England and Europe on holidays or lecture tours. She went
with them to America and handled the business of their second tour
there. Now when friends rang up to make arrangements Frances or
Gilbert could say: "Would you ring again when Dorothy comes in. I'm
not quite sure. She keeps the engagement book." And while Dorothy
sternly warded off the undesirables, it worked out much better for
friends as no engagement book had been kept before with any
regularity. Now engagements were kept as well as an engagement book.
Frances would still deal with the clothing question, but Dorothy
handled it if she were unwell, and in every case delivered him
punctually and brought him home again. A few of the lectures and
debates of these years were: "Is Journalism Justifiable?", "An Aspect
of St. Francis of Assisi," "The Problem of Liberty," "Is the House of
Commons any Use," "What Poland Is," "Culture and the Coming Peril,"
"Progress and Old Books," "Americanization," "The Modern Novel," "If
I Were a Dictator."
The excitement of Catholics everywhere had been intense when Gilbert
came into the church: in England it was almost as great over Frances.
Her real wish to remain in the background, her dislike of publicity,
were seldom believed in by those who did not know her. I happened to
be present at a conversation between the proprietor and the editor of
a Catholic paper which had displayed a poster all over London
announcing her conversion. One of them had heard that she was annoyed
and for a moment both seemed a little dashed. Then said one: "Of
course she has to pretend not to like it"--and this was at once
accepted by the other: for both took for granted that such publicity
could in reality have given her nothing but pleasure.
It was difficult at first for either Frances or Gilbert to see the
wood for the trees in their new environment, and it was the greatest
good fortune that the year of Frances's reception was also that of
the new simplification following upon Dorothy's arrival. For the
preceding few years had resembled the hectic period of the lionising
of the young Chesterton of 1904. Requests poured in, for lectures,
for articles, for introductions to books. "Are there no other
Catholics to do things?" Frances asked me rather plaintively. Of
these years Monsignor Knox said later, "his health had begun to
decline, and he was overworked, partly through our fault."
A dip into the post bag brings up some letters from Father Martindale
to Gilbert and Frances passing on various requests, but also
realising the difficulty: "I sympathize with all desperately busy
men": "I have already protected him by advising small or fussy groups
not to invite him now and again." The solitary recollection I have of
any interest Gilbert showed in a review of his books is the remark he
made to my husband when Father Martindale had said of _The Queen of
Seven Swords_ "Francis Thompson is here outpassed." Gilbert repeated
the phrase and said eagerly: "He wouldn't say it unless he meant it,
would he?"
C.C.M., who has himself been caricatured talking on the radio, typing
and eating at the same time, as different from G.K.C. as possible in
his pale slimness and almost transparent appearance, was no less busy
over a thousand activities. It was interesting that he should ask
Gilbert's help, especially in that cementing of Catholics throughout
the Empire that has always so passionately preoccupied him. In the
War he had discovered in military hospitals the ordinary Englishman
and above all the ordinary Australian and New Zealander. To them and
to the Apostolate of the Sea he was to devote primarily all his later
life.
Writing therefore to counsel the Chestertons as to which Catholic
works should have precedence, we find him wanting an article for a
New Zealand paper "the only one of its sort in N.Z., and you may say
that it affects the _entire Catholic_ community of the two islands,"
an autographed book for "a hulking devotee of yours and a member of
the Australia rugger team, I think eight of them are Catholics." This
"would give enormous joy to him" and "would be known in no time
throughout Australia. Do try to."
From South Africa he wrote to Frances:
You will be surprised to get a letter from me from a nameless place
50 miles inland from the Nyanga mountains, which you will find
(variously spelt) westward from, say Beira on the African east coast.
This is the reason--
Recently a boy in a kraal here was found cutting pious pictures
from a newspaper that he had somehow got hold of (he was a good
little Catholic!). "Why are you cutting out that one?" "Because
_this_ is a Great Mukuru in the Catholic Church." (Mukuru is
Potentate and will serve from St. Joseph right along to the Pope, not
to mention the Little Flower. . . .) The Great Mukuru in this case
was yourself! So there!
I hope you will smile with pleasure, but not try to answer, as
please God I sail on the 31st and ought to be back in London in early
Sept., a good deal better, thank God.
Please remember me affectionately to Gilbert. This is the first
time a typemachine has clicked just here; its accompaniment, in an
otherwise dead silence, is a distant gurgling yodel, so to say--some
native feeling happy in the brilliantly hot sunlight, which, all the
same, cannot make the thin air hot. I sleep (when possible) under
furs, with the occasional insect dropping off the thatch over my head.
Later, planning a meeting for the Apostolate of the Sea at Queen's
Hall, he writes to Gilbert:
Similarly Fr. McNabb must be given his head and I have told him he
shall be given it. I hope to be purely practical and possibly a
little sentimental. . . . The Seaman is everywhere, yet, for us,
nowhere. He carries everywhere his child's heart, man's body, hungry
unfed soul, unique power of feeding his goodness into others. The
all-round (the world) man; the sea-limited man; the man whose life
is made up of storms and stars; the most secretive and the most
open-hearted man of any. . . . Now _I_ will do all the clumsy stuff.
_You_ pull it all up into the human-sublime divine-humble air.
He has no privacy, and is more lonely than anyone. He has Water, and
God; and MUST find Christ walking over the waves towards him. And no
ghost.
Father Vincent McNabb who was to be "given his head" at this meeting
was not a new friend of Catholic days but a very old one. A friendly
critic of my manuscript asks whether he, even more than Belloc or
Chesterton, does not merit the title of the Father of Distributism.
At least he brings into the movement something none other could
bring. He bases his social philosophy closely on the gospels--of
which his knowledge is almost unique--and his articles bear such
titles as "The Economics of Bethlehem" or "Big Scale Agriculture and
the Gospels." Hatred of machinery has combined with love of poverty
to sunder him from a typewriter, and these articles are all
handwritten in most exquisite and legible script. His letters have
always come in old envelopes turned inside out; he walks whenever
possible and wears a shabby white habit and broken boots. Both
Frances and Gilbert loved him dearly and their rare meetings were red
letter days for both. Besides the link of Distributism the two men
were united in caring deeply for the reawakened interest in St.
Thomas and his philosophy.
The Benedictine, as well as the Dominican, outlook and history
especially appealed to Gilbert, and the friendship with Father
Ignatius Rice, which had begun almost with the century, grew
steadily. He assisted, as we have seen, at Gilbert's reception into
the Church: and whenever they met after that Gilbert would remind
him, "We were together on the great day."
High Wycombe was the Chesterton's parish until, largely by their
help, a church could be built at Beaconsfield. At first this church
was served by Father Walker, parish priest of High Wycombe. It was he
who had prepared Gilbert for his First Communion and he has sent me
some of his recollections:
It certainly did not take long to prepare him for he evidently knew
as much as I could tell him. Nevertheless, he said I was to treat him
as I would any child whom I was teaching. This, knowing the man whom
I was instructing, for I had at the time carefully waded through his
Orthodoxy twice, was, indeed, an undertaking of magnitude. However, I
went through the catechism (he was importunate that I should use it
as he said all the children made use of it), very meticulously
explaining all the details, to which he lent a most vigilant and
unswerving attention. For instance, he wanted me to explain the
reason of the drop of water being put into the wine at the preparing
of the chalice for the Holy Sacrifice.
Father Walker describes Gilbert opening a bazaar and spending
lavishly at every stall, afterwards being photographed in his
company. Father Walker himself weighed 245 lbs., and the caption was
"Giants in the Faith." On his departure, Gilbert presided at the
farewell meeting and made a speech which, says Father Walker, "gave
me no end of delight." Father (now Monsignor) Smith became the first
rector of Beaconsfield as a separate parish. The Chestertons loved
the little church there which later became Gilbert's memorial and to
which, among other things, they gave a very beautiful statue of Our
Lady. But when it had first been dedicated there had been for both
Frances and Gilbert a deep disappointment. Curiously enough, neither
of them had any devotion to the Little Flower who was chosen as
Patron: they had hoped for a dedication to the English Martyrs. Later
Gilbert used to tell Dorothy, who loved St. Thérèse, that he could
not care for her, "with all apologies to you, Dorothy."
He did not go often to Confession, Dorothy says, but when he did go
you could hear him all over the church. Getting up in the morning was
always a fearful effort to him, and starting for early Mass he would
say to her, "what but religion would bring us to such an evil pass!"
Meanwhile the books went on. In 1926 appeared _The Outline of Sanity,
The Catholic Church and Conversion_, chiefly concerned with his own
mental history, _The Incredulity of Father Brown_ and _The Queen of
Seven Swords_. In 1927 for the first time his scattered poems were
brought into the volume of _Collected Poems_.
St. Augustine asks whether we can praise God before we know Him:
Gilbert answered that question when by praise and thanksgiving he
came as a boy to the discovery of God, beginning by a passionate
desire to thank someone for the Universe. There is much praise in the
Collected Poems. There is the note of hope in an almost hopeless
fight in _The Ballad of the White Horse_. There are lovely poems to
his wife. Since Browning none has understood the Sacrament of
Marriage as well as Gilbert Chesterton.
In 1927 there also appeared, beside a couple of pamphlets:
The Return of Don Quixote
Robert Louis Stevenson
The Secret of Father Brown
The Judgment of Dr. Johnson
_Robert Louis Stevenson_ took Gilbert back to his boyhood and is by
general agreement among the best of his literary studies. But the
best thing he ever said apropos of Stevenson came not in this book
but in his attack on the "science" of eugenics:
Keats died young; but he had more pleasure in a minute than a
Eugenist gets in a month. Stevenson had lung trouble; and it may, for
all I know, have been perceptible to the Eugenic eye even a
generation before. But who would perform that illegal operation: the
stopping of Stevenson? Intercepting a letter bursting with good news,
confiscating a hamper full of presents and prizes, pouring torrents
of intoxicating wine into the sea, all this is a faint approximation
for the Eugenic inaction of the ancestors of Stevenson. This,
however, is not the essential point; with Stevenson it is not merely
a case of the pleasure we get, but of the pleasure he got. If he had
died without writing a line, he would have had more red-hot joy than
is given to most men. Shall I say of him, to whom I owe so much, let
the day perish wherein he was born? Shall I pray that the stars of
the twilight thereof be dark and it be not numbered among the days of
the year, because it shut not up the days of his mother's womb? I
respectfully decline; like Job, I will put my hand upon my mouth.*
[* _Eugenics and Other Evils,_ p. 57.]
When the _Stevenson_ itself appeared, Sir Edmund Gosse wrote:
I have just finished reading the book in which you smite the
detractors of R.L.S. hip and thigh. I cannot express without a sort
of hyperbole the sentiments which you have awakened; of joy, of
satisfaction, of relief, of malicious and vindictive pleasure. We are
avenged at last. . . .
It is and always since his death has been impossible for me to
write anything which went below the surface of R.L.S. I loved him,
and still love him, too tenderly to analyse him. But you, who have
the privilege of not being dazzled by having known him, have taken
the task into your strong competent hands. You could not have done it
better.
The latest survivor, the only survivor, of his little early circle
of intimate friends thanks you from the bottom of his heart.
_Don Quixote_ is a fantasia about the future: in which the study of
heraldry leads to the discovery of England and the centuries of her
happiness and of her faith. Increasingly Gilbert saw the only future
for his country in a re-marriage between those divorced three hundred
years ago: England and the Catholic Church. _Don Quixote_ is among
the less good of his books, but like all the works of these years it
is saturated with Catholicism. I wondered whether I felt more
admiration or amazement when a man once asked us to publish a book on
Chesterton saying, "I am an atheist myself but that doesn't matter,
as I don't deal with his religion."
As a young man Gilbert had wanted to marry the religion of Dr.
Johnson to the Republicanism of Wilkes and in his Catholic faith of
today he saw simply the rounding out and the completing of the
religion of Dr. Johnson. _The Judgment of Dr. Johnson_, his play
about that great man was, like _Magic_, an immense succès d'estime
but not a stage success: it was brilliantly acted and appreciatively
criticised but could not win a public. Bernard Shaw was still
constantly urging Gilbert towards the drama. Belloc too believed he
could write a successful play and he and Anstey (author of _Vice
Versa_) suggested the dramatising of a Belloc story. But neither the
scenario they jointly sketched for Belloc's _Emerald_ nor another
made by Gilbert alone for his own _Flying Inn_ ever reached the stage.
I remember going with the Chestertons to a pre-view of a Father Brown
picture. Two of the stories had been cleverly combined, the cast was
first rate, including Una O'Connor and Walter Connolly, and I came
out feeling convinced that Father Brown would become another Charlie
Chan. The stories would adapt so well, abounding as they do in scenes
impossible for the stage but perfectly easy for the screen--high
walls, windows, ladders, flying harlequins. But the first picture
failed (possibly because it was too short) and no more were made. The
drama remained the one field in which he had no success.
Shaw's name for Gilbert and Belloc--the Chesterbelloc--had come by
the public to be used for the novels in which they collaborated.
Belloc wrote the story, Chesterton drew the pictures, and the
resulting product was known as the Chesterbelloc. A number of letters
from Mr. Belloc beg Gilbert to do the drawings early in order to help
the story. "I have already written a number of _situations_ which you
might care to sketch. I append a list. Your _drawing_ makes all the
difference to my _thinking:_ I see the people in action more
clearly." And again, "I can't write till I have the inspiration of
your pencil. For the comedy in me is ailing."
Belloc would come over to Beaconsfield for a day or a night and the
two men retire into Gilbert's minute study whence hoots of laughter
would be heard. At the end of a couple of hours they would emerge
with the drawings for a book complete, indeed several more than were
needed.
Father Rice asked Gilbert once what he was writing and he replied,
"My publishers have demanded a fresh batch of corpses." The little
detective-priest ("I am very fond," said one reader to Chesterton,
"of that officious little loafer") became a feature in crime
anthologies, and when Anthony Berkeley in 1929 wanted to found the
Detective Club he wrote that it "would be quite incomplete without
the creator of Father Brown."
Gilbert soon became President. "Needless to say," writes Dorothy
Sayers, "he read his part of the initiation ceremony with tremendous
effect and enormous gusto."
In an article Gilbert wrote about the Club, he called it "a very
small and quiet conspiracy, to which I am proud to belong." Meeting
in various restaurants its members would "discuss various plots and
schemes of crime." Some results of these discussions may be seen in
the Initiation ceremonies which he made public in the article
"thereby setting a good example to the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan, the
Illuminati . . . and all the other secret societies which now conduct
the greater part of public life, in the age of Publicity and Public
Opinion."
_The Ruler shall say to the Candidate:_
M.N. is it your firm desire to become a Member of the Detection
Club?
_Then the Candidate shall answer in a loud voice:_
That is my desire.
_Ruler:_
Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the
crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to
bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine
Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery,
Coincidence or Act of God?
_Candidate:_
I do.
_Ruler:_
Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader?
_Candidate:_
I do.
_Ruler:_
Do you promise to observe a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs,
Conspiracies, Death-Rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism, Trap-Doors, Chinamen,
Super-Criminals and Lunatics; and utterly and for ever to forswear
Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science?
_Candidate:_
I do.
_Ruler:_
Will you honour the King's English?
_Candidate:_
I will.
_Then the Ruler shall ask:_
M.N. Is there anything you hold sacred?
_Then the Candidate having named a Thing which he holds of peculiar
sanctity, the Ruler shall ask:_
M.N. Do you swear by (_Here the Ruler shall name the Thing which
the Candidate has declared to be his Peculiar Sanctity_) to observe
faithfully all these promises which you have made, so long as you are
a member of the Club?
_But, if the Candidate is not able to name a Thing which he holds
sacred, then the Ruler shall propose the Oath in this manner
following:_
M.N. Do you, as you hope to increase your Sales, swear to observe
faithfully all these promises which you have made, so long as you are
a member of the Club?
A book called _The Floating Admiral_ was brought out by the Club.
Chesterton wrote the introduction and each member produced one
chapter. Reading it without inside knowledge I conceived that the
idea was for each to clear up the problems created by his predecessor
and create fresh ones for his successor. Gilbert tells of the subtler
joke underlying the story:
Perhaps the most characteristic thing that the Detection Club ever
did was to publish a detective story, which was quite a good
detective story, but the best things in which could not possibly be
understood by anybody except the gang of criminals that had produced
it. It was called _The Floating Admiral_, and was written somewhat
uproariously in the manner of one of those "paper games" in which
each writer in turn continues a story of which he knows neither head
nor tail. It turned out remarkably readable, but the joke of it will
never be discovered by the ordinary reader; for the truth is that
almost every chapter thus contributed by an amateur detective is a
satire on the personal peculiarities of the last amateur detective.
This, it will be sternly said, is not the way to become a
best-seller. It is a matter of taste; but to my mind there is always
a curious tingle of obscure excitement, in the works of this kind
which have remained here and there in literary history; the sort of
book that it is even more enjoyable to write than to read.
_The Floating Admiral_ was a fair success financially. "We hired a
sort of garret," writes Monsignor Knox "with the proceeds, as Club
Rooms; and on the night after we all received our keys the premises
were burglariously entered; why or by whom is still a mystery, but it
was a good joke that it should happen to the Detective Club."
Lord Peter and Father Brown and Monsieur Poirot--how were the mighty
fallen!
There is a custom in both English and Scottish universities of
electing a Lord Rector with the accompaniment of much undergraduate
"ragging" of the choicest kind. The candidates usually each represent
a political party but personal popularity has much to say in their
success. At the Scottish universities the contests are particularly
spirited, and his keen sense of fun made Gilbert ready to accept
frequent invitations to stand. At Glasgow in 1925 Austen Chamberlain
got 1242, votes, Chesterton 968 and Sidney Webb 285. "What swamped
you," wrote Jack Phillimore, always critical of the gentler sex, "was
the women, whose simple snobbery cannot get past the top hat and
frock coat and Right Honourable . . . Boyle was never kidnapped:
others were removed into the mountains."
The last sentence might have been lifted from Sir Walter: it refers
to a pleasing habit among Scots undergraduates of kidnapping the
supporters of their opponents and keeping them safely concealed till
after the election.
Whether or not it was through their simple snobbery, as Professor
Phillimore said, it was certainly the women's vote that swamped him:
of the 374 votes by which Austen Chamberlain beat Chesterton, the men
only accounted for 20, the women for 354. But it must have been some
profounder passion that caused one of England's leading women
novelists to write to the Secretary of the Glasgow University Liberal
Club:
I fail to see why you should desire to embarrass Liberalism at one
of its least happy moments by associating it with that village idiot
on a large scale who is responsible for the muddled economics and
disagreeable fantastics of "G.K.'s Weekly."
This was the outlook of that official Liberalism which had long made
it so difficult for Gilbert to go on calling himself a Liberal. The
Servile State was in full swing and official Liberalism asked nothing
better than to be allowed to operate it. Whether Belloc and Cecil
Chesterton had been right or wrong at an earlier date in seeing the
political parties in collusion it is certain that by now an utter
bankruptcy in statesmanship had reduced them all to saying the same
things while they did nothing. Ten years later, on the day of the
last General election of his life, Gilbert wrote:
The Liberal has formed the opinion that Peace is decidedly
preferable to its alternative of War; and that this should be
achieved through support of the League of Nations interfering with
the ambitions of other nations. The Ministerialist, on the other
hand, holds that we should, if possible, employ a machinery called
the League of Nations; with the object of securing Peace, to which he
is much attached. The Ministerialist demands that strong action
should be taken to reduce Unemployment; but the Liberal does not
scruple to retort that Unemployment is an evil, against which strong
action must be taken. The Liberal thinks that we ought to revive our
Trade, thus thwarting and throwing himself across the path of the
National Tory, who still insists that our Trade should be revived.
Thus the two frowning cohorts confront each other; and I hear the
noise of battle even as I write.
In June 1928 he was invited to stand for Edinburgh University. He
replied:
I do hope you will forgive me if there has been any delay in
acknowledging your exceedingly flattering communication; I have been
away from home and moving about a good deal; and have only just
returned from London. Certainly there is nothing which I should feel
as so great an honour, or one so exciting or so undeserved, as to
receive even the invitation to stand for such a position in the great
University that has already been so generous to me. If you really
think it would be of any service to your cause, I can hardly refuse
such a compliment. Of course you understand that it is only in a
rather independent sense, though as I think in the right sense, that
I shall always call myself a Liberal; indeed, I find it difficult to
imagine any real sort of Liberal who is not really an independent
Liberal. I am quite certain I am not a Tory or a Socialist.
He was defeated at this election by Winston Churchill who got 864
votes to 593 for G.K. and 332 for Mrs. Sidney Webb. He was again
defeated at Aberdeen in 1933, coming second to Major Elliott, the
other candidates being C. M. Grieve and Aldous Huxley. At one stage
of the contest the _Daily Express_ writes: "The Huxley supporters are
smarting under the surprise attack made by the Chestertonians at the
Huxley concert at the week-end and are preparing reprisals."
The following letter is G.K.'s reply to the first proposal from the
Aberdeen students:
25th October, 1933
I can at least assure you that the delay in acknowledging properly
the most flattering compliment which you have paid me was not due to
any notion of neglecting it. It was due to the practical necessity at
the moment of discovering and deciding on a fact which may, for all I
know, save you the trouble of further consideration of the matter;
and it is for this reason that I mention the practical difficulty
first. I now find that I shall almost certainly be obliged to be out
of England (and Scotland) for about three or four months, or
conceivably a little more, beginning about the middle of January. I
do not know what preliminary formalities would be demanded of me as a
candidate, or when the demand for them would arise. But I was so
strongly impressed with the honour you have paid me that I thought it
my duty to find out the facts on this particular point, so that you
might act on it in any way you think right. In any case, if the delay
thus involved has placed you in any difficulty, I need not say that I
shall fully understand your finding the project unworkable; and I
shall be quite content to remember the compliment of the request.
There is another consideration which would help the practical side
of the case; and for that I fear I must make the practical enquiries
of you, as people understanding the circumstances. You do not mention
the Party you represent; and though I am, like most of us, long past
attaching a horrid sanctity to the name, I hope you will forgive that
much curiosity in a poor bewildered journalist, who has been
exhibited in many lights and cross-lights. I was put up as a
candidate at Glasgow as a Liberal, which is really quite true; but I
think I managed in my election pamphlet to give my own definition of
Liberalism. I have also more recently, on a public platform in
Glasgow, supported my friend Mr. Compton Mackenzie when he stood as a
Scottish Nationalist. Both these positions I am quite prepared to
defend; but in the latter, you might naturally prefer a Nationalist
candidate who was not only a quarter of a Scotsman. I may remark that
as the quarter is called Keith, and comes from Aberdeen, I am rather
thrilled at the name of Marischal College.
There is one other point I think it only right to mention, for your
sake as much as my own. You know the local conditions. Do you think
it likely that we should be left with one and a half votes, looking a
little ridiculous, because the miserable quarter of a Scot happens to
have the same religion as Bruce and Maxy Stuart? I only ask for
information; which you alone could supply. But it may be that the
considerations I have already mentioned have disposed of the matter.
Believe me, my gratitude is none the less.
Gilbert said of my father that he showed an embarrassing respect for
younger men. Surely Gilbert's own tone of respect must here have
embarrassed even undergraduates. The uncertainty of success or
failure only troubled him as it might affect his supporters. The
sporting element in the contest appealed to his undying boyishness.
Perhaps this chapter may find its best conclusion in the vivid
memories written down in answer to my request of one of Gilbert's
younger friends--Douglas Woodruff--who came to know him in the year
of that Silver Wedding which meant so much that I have chosen it for
the title of a chapter covering much of Chesterton's Catholic life.
Chesterton devotes a long passage in the _Autobiography_ to the
dinner given at the old Adelphi Terrace Hotel to Belloc on his
sixtieth birthday, in July 1930. I remember very well the high old
fashioned car the Chestertons used to hire in Beaconsfield, for I
accompanied him with particular instructions to deliver him safely
and on time, as was very necessary for he was in the Chair. We might
have lost him, for we went first to the Times Office where I was then
working, as I had proofs to correct before disappearing for the rest
of the evening, and he was seized with the idea that it would be very
good fun for him to enter Printing House Square and have it announced
that it was Mr. Chesterton come to write the leaders, having brought
the thunder with him under his cloak. Quite early on the drive up he
began speculating about who would be at the party, and when he had
suggested various figures who were certainly not going to be there he
said with a mixture of regret and acceptance, "There is always such a
_sundering_ quality about Belloc's quarrels." When he rose to propose
the toast he said at once that if he or anybody else in the room was
remembered at all in the future it would be because they had been
associated with the guest of the evening. He meant that. The evening
stood out in his memory because it was so unlike the ordinary sort of
dinners he knew where he was a principal figure. It delighted him
that without any programme or premeditation all the thirty diners in
turn made speeches, in the main parody speeches. It was, in short, a
party and not a performance.
In the decade when I had the good fortune to know Topmeadow he was
still paying the price of a literary fame which he had sought in
youth because it meant success in his calling and an income, but
which became a barrier he was always meeting and breaking through.
Many literary men genuinely enough prefer company in which they are
on just the same footing as everyone else to company in which they
are little Kings, but Chesterton was exceptional in liking to live in
the fullest equality of intercourse not only with all sorts of men
but with the lesser practitioners of his own calling. He sought the
affection and not the admiration of his fellow men, or, more
precisely, he sought neither: what he sought was to do things like
discovering the truth in their company. No man more naturally
distinguished between a man and his views, or found easier the
theological injunction to hate the sin but love the sinner. One of
the few occasions on which I recall him as rather hurt was just after
he had met Stanley Baldwin, at Taplow, and had not been welcomed as a
fellow Englishman sharing immense things like the love of the English
country or English letters, but with a cold correctitude from a
politician who seemed chiefly conscious he was meeting in G.K. a man
who week by week sought to bring political life into hatred, ridicule
and contempt.
He was not made by nature for the kind of journalistic tradition
which Belloc and Cecil Chesterton established and his loyal affection
for them made him adopt. I recall him expounding to the lawyers of
the Thomas More Society the absurdity of the legal definition of
libel, arguing that of its nature free discussion meant arousing at
any rate ridicule and contempt if not hatred against men and measures
of which you disapproved. It was ridicule that he preferred to
arouse. The lawyers were quite unconvinced, as they generally are
when laymen have any complaints about the law, and they soon realized
that to Chesterton the whole idea of involving the law because of
arguments and discussions and invective was hitting below the belt.
He could be seen at his happiest in the Mock Trials which were held
every summer for the last ten years of his life at the London School
of Economics, for the King Edward VII Hospital Fund. He was relied
upon year after year to prosecute. One year it was leading actors and
actresses, another year sculptors and architects, another year
politicians, another Headmasters. He entered completely into the
spirit of an entertainment which combined two of his abiding
interests, public debate and private theatricals. That was a setting
in which he could completely exemplify his favourite recipe for the
modern world, that it should be approached in a spirit of
intellectual ferocity and personal amiability. But what marked his
own contributions to these affairs was the intellectual "ferocity,"
in the weight and content of his criticism. Most of the eminent men
who consented to take part came to play a game for the sake of the
Hospitals, and because they rarely unbent like that in public they
were wholly facetious and trivial. To Chesterton there was no
difficulty or incongruity in combining the fun of acting with the
fun of genuine intellectual discussion. When he prosecuted the
Headmasters of leading public schools for Destroying Freedom of
Thought I came down in a lift with them afterwards and found they
were volubly nettled at the drastic and serious case he had made
inside the stage setting of burlesque, and seemed to think he had not
been playing the game when he wrapped up so much meaning in his
speech and examinations. This had never entered his head; it had come
perfectly naturally to him to make wholly real and material points
even in a mock trial and with a wealth of fun. But he liked being one
of a troupe on a stage very much more than being a lonely and eminent
figure on a platform, because to him the great attraction of
discussion was that it should be a joint quest, a mental walk with an
object in view, but also with an eye for everything that might and
would turn up on the way.
He laughed his high laugh--like Charlemagne his voice was unequal
to his physical scale--at his own jokes because they came to him as
part of the joint findings of the quest, something he had seen and
collected and brought for the pot. When he made jokes about his size
as he so commonly did at the outset of a speech, it was to get rid of
the elevation of the platform, and to get on to easy equal terms with
the audience; "I am not a cat burglar," he began to the Union at
Oxford, and had won them. The radio suited him so excellently,
precisely because it is a personal sitting down man to man
relationship that the successful broadcaster must establish; that was
the relationship inside which he naturally thought. His difficulty
was that while he had not the faintest desire to be "a Literary Man,"
and still less a Prophet, the kind of truth he divined was, in fact,
on the scale of the prophets. It seemed to me that over the last
decade of his life he found himself more and more in the dilemma that
in the life of his mind he was living with ideas, the fruit of a
contemplative preoccupation with the Incarnation and the Sacraments,
which he shrank from talking about, from a natural humility and a
clear and grateful understanding of the Catholic tradition of
reverence and reticence.
England is full enough of men to whom the distinction between the
platform and the pulpit is very unreal; they have a moral message and
they do not much mind where they give it. But Chesterton, unlike most
public men who deal in general ideas, did not come to the idea of
public speaking through the Protestant tradition but through the
secular tradition, the freethinker's debate, the political and not
the religious side of Hyde Park oratory, where men in knots shout one
another down, not where some lonely longhaired prophet declaims
conversion. After he became a Catholic he sought to set himself
frontiers, the apologetic territory suitable for a layman like
himself. But he found himself more and more preoccupied with a
territory further inland, penetrating all the time to the deeper
meaning of the creed he had embraced. He could look back and see how
most of his early books had seized upon some essential part of
Catholic doctrine. . . . He had written what he had seen at the time,
but he did not stop looking because he had written, and then he
always continued to see more, the great contemplative.
He looked out on the universe from a very solid tower of
observation because in all but the deepest sense of the word he
always had a home. His lasting significance is his pilgrimage, but
the spiritual journey was lived out in a warmly rich setting. When he
wrote of "the home" he was not dealing with a notion but with a
surrounding reality, one on which he had opened his eyes as a baby
and which he enjoyed without a break to the end. Frances Chesterton
is among the great wives of our literary history. When he said "I can
never have enough nothing to do," it was the remark of a man with a
house he was generally in, a house full of things.
He loved to produce cigars and wine, but tea also remained an
important fixed part of the day, in the Victorian tradition, and when
he was told by the doctor he had better drink nothing, he had many
alternatives, like detective stories read over tea and buns, which
other lovers of wine would perhaps have found no consolation. Other
men are secret drinkers, he would confide, I am a secret teetotaller.
The first time I had tea with him, in Artillery Mansions in 1926, I
was much struck that he brought three detective stories to the
teatable. I imagine he always had time for _Jack Redskin on the
Trail_, or whatever it might be because he had the gift, to an extent
I have never seen elsewhere, of opening a book and as it were pouring
the contents down in one draught like a champion German beer drinker.
He once seized from my shelves in Lincoln's Inn, Wyndham Lewis's
_Apes of God_ saying it was a book he had not seen and wanted to see.
It is a folio and I suggested he should take it away. But he opened
it and stood reading it and here and there, not a process which could
be called dipping, but a kind of sucking out of the printed contents,
as though he were a vacuum cleaner and you could see the lines of
type leaving the pages and being absorbed. When he put it down it was
to discuss the thesis and illustrations of the book as a man fully
possessed of its whole standpoint. Once he made one of his common
confusions and forgot he was addressing the Wiseman Dining Society on
the Oxford Movement. In the train from Beaconsfield he said how nice
it was that he had not got to speak. Frances Chesterton told him not
to be silly, he knew he was speaking on the Oxford Movement. He was
visibly disconcerted at the start, for many grave seniors had
assembled to hear him; but all went well in the discussion as soon as
he was attacked for something he had said about Newman's views. You
cannot catch me out about Newman, he said, with joy of battle, and he
produced then and there a most detailed account of just where in
Newman's writings the points in question were developed. Yet he was
curiously content to read what happened to come his way and to rely
upon his friends for references and facts, remembering what they
might tell him, but not ordering the books which would have greatly
strengthened him in the sort of newspaper arguments in which he was
so often employed. He had a large collection of books at Topmeadow,
but they gave the impression that they had assembled themselves.
Masses of them were adventure stories, many were presentation copies
from writers. You felt that they had got into the house knowing that
it was a hospitable one, if not built for books, and that they would
probably be allowed to stay. But he had a study which would barely
home him, and the library room he did eventually build was only
finished as he died.
I think nothing is more superficial or belittling to him than the
idea that while he might have liked the real country he could not
like Beaconsfield, as it developed into a dormitory town while he
lived there. His sympathies were far too wide. He liked to tell how
he had had to complain of the noise made by an adjoining Cinema
Company. His secretary had said Mr. Chesterton finds he cannot write;
and the Cinema people replied we are well aware of that.
He liked to think of Mr. Garvin near by, "not that I see him very
much," he said, "but I like to think that that great factory is
steaming away night and day." He had great satisfaction when a friend
and I, driving away in the evening, knocked down a white wooden post
outside the house in starting the car. He held that he had witnessed
just how many a grand old local custom must have originated, in men
covering up their mistakes by saying they were fulfilling a ritual
which had fallen into neglect. You must say you did it on purpose, he
said, say it was a rite too long omitted and it will soon be kept up
every year and men will forget its origin, and it will be known as
the Bump of Beaconsfield. When a friend of his brought him a
two-bladed African spear, he said, as he threw it about the lawn,
that it was sad to think how many lawns there were in Beaconsfield
and how few weapons were ever thrown on any of them, although all men
enjoyed, or would enjoy spear throwing more, he believed, than they
enjoyed clock golf. He at any rate was a genuinely free man, who did
what it amused and pleased him to do, and did not think he had to
choose between the forms of activity or rest currently pursued by his
neighbours. Much of the serene atmosphere of his home came from that
quiet resolute practice of the liberty of a free mind.