Last Days
DOROTHY TOLD ME one day in 1935 that Gilbert had written the
beginning of an autobiography some years before but had laid it
aside. She had, she said, a superstitious feeling about urging him to
get on with it--as though the survey of his life and the end of his
life would somehow be tied together. I urged her to get over this
feeling because of all the book would mean to the world. After this
talk she got out the manuscript and laid it on Gilbert's desk. He
read what he had written and immediately set about dictating the rest
of the book.
Early in 1936 he told a group of friends that the book was finished.
One of them said "Nunc dimittis" and Edward Macdonald, who was
present, commented: "The words were chilling, though he seemed to be
in fairly good health. But certainly he was tired. . . ."
The book showed no sign of fatigue. High-spirited and intensely
amusing, it seemed to promise many more--for into almost old age he
had carried the imagination and energy in which as a very young man
we saw his resemblance to the youthful Dickens.
Reviewing his life with the thread of thanksgiving that had been his
clue throughout, he looked back on it as "indefensibly happy" and it
was in truth a rich and full human existence. Yet Father Vincent, who
knew him intimately, speaks of him in these last years as heartbroken
by public events, as suffering with the pains of creation. "He was
crucified to his thought. Like St. Thomas he was never away from his
thought. A fellow friar had to care for Thomas, to feed him 'sicut
nutrix' because of his absorption in his thought." Thus Father
Vincent saw Frances cherishing Gilbert both mind and body.
A friend, protesting vehemently against the phrase "crucified to his
thought" says, "It was his life-long beatitude to observe and ponder
and conclude."
Of his own so-called paradoxes Gilbert was wont to maintain that it
was God not he, who made them, and here we have surely one of the
paradoxes of human life. Intense vitality, joy in living, vigor of
creative thought bring to their owners immense happiness _and_ acute
suffering.
Is it not a part of the most fundamental of all antinomies--the
greatness and the littleness of man? Created for eternity and
prisoned in time, we have no perfect joy in this world, and the
reaching upward and outward of the mind is at once the keenest joy
and the fiercest pain--rather as we talk of growing pains. Only
Gilbert loved to grow so much that he would not think of the pain.
"You must never pity me," he said to Lady Fisher, and all through his
life he was saying and meaning "You must never pity me."
But while he was writing the _Autobiography_ and giving thanks for
his life, its last months were shadowed by trials especially heavy
for a man of his imagination and temperament. For now more than ever
his thought was not allowed to concentrate on those realities where
the joy of contemplation overpowers the pain of growth.
He loved Italy--even more than France he says in one letter--yet he
could not but condemn the invasion of Abyssinia. The shadow of the
Spanish war loomed on the horizon and behind it a darker shadow. In
his political thinking Chesterton was haunted by the present war.
Then too, while public controversy did not trouble him at all, he
hated any breach of the peace within the ranks of his own small army.
The fights among the staff of the paper about Distributism had been
as nothing compared with those about Abyssiania. There are leading
articles taking one line and letters in the Cockpit in violent
opposition. Maurice Reckitt writes in _As it Happened:_
In the last autumn of his life I wrote to him privately in distress
at the line which the _Weekly_ was taking on Abyssinia, and saying
that I felt that I ought to leave the board, as I was so much out of
sympathy with this. I received this reply, from which I have deleted
only some personal references:
"Top Meadow, Beaconsfield 19th September 1935.
"MY DEAR MR. MAURICE RECKITT,
"I do hope you will forgive me for the delay in answering your most
important letter, involving as it does tragic dooms of separation
which I hope need not be fulfilled. . . . I should like to ask you to
defer your decision at least until you have seen the next week's
number of the paper, in which I expand further the argument I have
used in the current number and bring it, I think, rather nearer to
your natural and justifiable point of view. Between ourselves, and
without prejudice to anybody, I do think myself that there ought to
have been a more definite condemnation of the attack on Abyssinia.
The whole thing happened while I was having a holiday. . . .
"Very shortly, the mortal danger, to me, is the rehabilitation of
Capitalism, in spite of the slump, which will certainly take the form
of a hypocritical patriotism and glorification of England, at the
expense of Italy or anybody else. For the moment I only want you to
understand that this is the mountainous peril that towers in my own
mind.
"Yours always,
"G. K. CHESTERTON."
Three months later in _G.K.'s Weekly_ he wrote about the whole matter
in an article in which he treated the question as largely one of
proportion. Not enough was being said in England of her own or the
League's position about Japan's attack on China: too much (in
proportion) about Italy in Abyssinia. "If the League of Nations
really were an impartial judicial authority; and if (what is about as
probable) I were one of the judges; and if the Abyssinian Case were
brought before me, I should decide instantly against Italy. I have
again and again in this place stated in the strongest words the
particular case against Italy." He was against Italy in Abyssinia as
he had been against England in South Africa. But "I should not be
bound to rejoice at the Prussians riding into Paris because it might
prevent the British riding into Pretoria."
"Tragic dooms of separation" on public issues were not the only
trouble with _G.K.'s Weekly:_ the staff were also engaged in violent
personal quarrels about which Gilbert was asked to take sides--was
even bitterly reproached by one for supposedly favouring another. It
would be hard today to say what it was all about, but two of the
contestants have told me since that had they had the least notion how
ill he was getting they would have died rather than so distress him.
For it was a real and a very deep distress.
It may be remembered that Miss Dunham noted how Gilbert used to make
a mysterious sign in the air as he lit his cigar. That sign, says
Dorothy, was the sign of the cross. Long ago he had written of human
life as something not grey and drab but shot through with strong and
even violent colours that took the pattern of the Cross. He saw the
Cross signed by God on the trees as their branches spread to right
and left: he saw it signed by man as he shaped a paling or a door
post. The habit grew upon him of making it constantly: in the air
with his match, as he lit his cigar, over a cup of coffee. As he
entered a room he would make on the door the sign of our Redemption.
No, we must never pity him even when his life was pressed upon by
that sign which stands for joy through pain.
Those nearest to him grew anxious quite early in 1936. He was
overtired and working with the weary insistence that over-fatigue can
bring. The remedy so often successful of a trip to the continent was
tried. They went to Lourdes and Lisieux and he seemed better and sang
a good deal in his tuneless voice as Dorothy drove them through the
lanes of France. From Lisieux he wrote a pencilled letter, long and
almost illegible "under the shadow of the shrine"--trying to
reconcile the disputants with himself and with one another.
The summer was cold and bleak and the tour was all too short. Home
again his mind seemed not to grip as well as usual and he began to
fall asleep during his long hours of work. The doctor was called and
thought very seriously of the state of his heart--that heart which
many years ago another doctor had called too small for his enormous
frame. The thought of a Chesterton whose heart was too small presents
a paradox in his own best manner.
To Edward Macdonald who had missed a message that he was too ill to
be visited, Gilbert talked in his old fashion and promised a poem he
had just thought of for the paper--on St. Martin of Tours. "The point
is that he was a true Distributist. He gave _half_ his cloak to the
beggar."
Soon after this he fell into a sort of reverie from which awaking he
said:
"The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and
every one must choose his side."
Frances and he had both thought his recovery in 1916 was a miracle.
"I did not dare," said Frances, "to pray for another miracle."
Monsignor Smith anointed him and then Father Vincent arrived in
response to a message from Frances which he thought meant she wanted
him to see Gilbert for the last time. Taken to the sick room he sang
over the dying man the Salve Regina. This hymn to Our Lady is sung in
the Dominican Order over every dying friar and it was surely fitting
for the biographer of St. Thomas and the ardent suppliant of Our Lady:
"Salve Regina, mater misericordiae, vita dulcedo et spes nostra
salve. . . . Et Jesum benedictum fructum ventris tui nobis post hoc
exsilium ostende. . . ."
Gilbert's pen lay on the table beside his bed and Father Vincent
picked it up and kissed it.
It was June 14, 1936, the Sunday within the Octave of Corpus Christi,
the same Feast as his reception into the Church fourteen years
earlier. The Introit for that day's Mass was printed on his Memorial
card, so that, as Father Ignatius Rice noted with a smile, even his
Memorial card had a joke about his size:
The Lord became my protector and he brought me forth into a large
place. He saved me because he was well pleased with me. I will love
thee O Lord my strength. The Lord is my firmament and my refuge and
my deliverer.
To these words from the Mass, Frances added Walter de la Mare's
tribute:
Knight of the Holy Ghost, he goes his way
Wisdom his motley, Truth his loving jest;
The mills of Satan keep his lance in play,
Pity and innocence his heart at rest.
The day of the funeral was one of blazing sunshine. "One of your
days," Gilbert would have said to Frances. Grey days were his, when
nature's colours he said were brightest against her more sombre
background, sunny days were hers for she loved a blue blazing sky.
The little church near the railway was filled to overflowing by his
friends from London, from all over England, from France even and from
America. All Beaconsfield wanted to honour him, so the funeral
procession instead of taking the direct route passed through the old
town where he had so often sat in the barber's shop and chatted with
his fellow citizens. At Top Meadow we gathered to talk. Frances a few
of us saw for a little while in her own room. With that utter
self-forgetfulness that was hers she said to her sister-in-law, "It
was so much worse for you. You had Cecil for such a short time."
Later Mgr. Knox preached in Westminster Cathedral to a crowd far
vaster. Both Frances and Cardinal Hinsley received telegrams from
Cardinal Pacelli (now Pope Pius XII). To Cardinal Hinsley he cabled
"Holy Father deeply grieved death Mr. Gilbert Keith Chesterton
devoted son Holy Church gifted Defender of the Catholic Faith. His
Holiness offers paternal sympathy people of England assures prayers
dear departed, bestows Apostolic Benediction." This telegram was read
to the vast crowd in the Cathedral and found an echo in the hearts of
his fellow countrymen.
Hugh Kingsmill wrote to Cyril Clemens: "My friend Hesketh Pearson was
staying with me when I read of Chesterton's death. I told him of it
through the bathroom door, and he sent up a hollow groan which must
have echoed that morning all over England." It was with reason that
the Pope offered his sympathy not to Catholics alone, but to all the
people of England. To the policeman who said at the funeral, "We'd
all have been here if we could have got off duty. He was a grand
man." To the man at the _Times_ office who broke in on the
announcement of his death, "Good God. That isn't _our_ Chesterton, is
it?" To the barber who had to leave his customer unshaved that he
might talk to Edward Macdonald. To all of us, his friends, on whom
the loss lay almost unbearably heavy. To those for whom his presence
would have pierced and lightened even the dark shadow of the war. To
all the people of England.
Once more a Pope had bestowed upon an Englishman the title Defender
of the Faith. The first man to receive it had been Henry VIII and the
words are still engraved on the coins of England. The secular press
would not print the telegram in full because it bestowed upon a
subject a royal title.
After Gilbert's death Frances tried to take up life again. She
visited her cousins in Germany, a university professor and his
English wife, who were undergoing the persecution of the Swastika.
She was deeply moved by their suffering and the peril they stood in.
Home again she surrounded herself more than ever with children,
taking a Catechism class and encouraging her small scholars to come
to Top Meadow where her garden also helped her towards a difficult
peace and serenity, rendered harder by the struggle with ill health.
Soon we began to realise that the physical weakness, which all her
courage could not overcome, was more than merely her old malady.
"What did Frances die of?" Bernard Shaw wrote to me. "Was it of
widowhood?"
In fact it was a most painful cancer heroically endured. She was
cared for by Dorothy and presently by the nuns of the Bon Secours.
Her friends visited her as they were allowed. Father Vincent McNabb,
after a talk of almost an hour, noted how never once did she speak of
herself or of her suffering.
Her concerns were for Dorothy, for the Church, and for Gilbert's
memory; Eric Gill's monument, the biography, the permanence of his
own writing. She survived him little more than two years. Near the
end, from the face of a dying woman shrunken with pain, we still
could see those "great heavenly eyes that seem to make the truth at
the heart of things almost too terribly simple and naked for the sons
of flesh."*
[* Letter from Gilbert, see [Chapter VIII].]
APPENDIX A
AN EARLIER CHESTERTON
BOTH THE _Autobiography_ and _Prison Life_ of George Laval Chesterton
are worth reading. There is conscious humour: we feel it might be our
own Chesterton when we hear the Captain describing himself as
"laughing immoderately" because he had made a fool of himself and
others were laughing at him. There is unconscious humour, especially
in the astonishing style, full of such phrases as "I was the most
obnoxious to peril," or "something not far removed from impunity
stalked abroad."
Captain Chesterton started life as a soldier. During the Peninsular
War his regiment was stationed at Cartagena. "It was a subject of
deep mortification to most of us to be thus supinely occupied in this
lone garrison, thereby being debarred from the Peninsular medal, and
hence a widespread disaffection on that most tender subject which no
reasoning has been equal to dispel." However, later he saw a good
deal of active service, being in the War of 1812, in the course of
which the battle of Bladensburg was fought and Washington fell to the
British arms. "The astonished slaves," he says, describing the
advance on Washington, "rested from their work in the fields
contiguous; and the awe-struck peasants and yeomen of this portion of
America beheld with perturbation the tremendous preparations to
devastate their blooming country."
To the smaller professional armies of that day peace was a
misfortune, and in his quaint style Captain Chesterton describes the
demonstrations of joy on the part of himself and his fellow officers
at the escape of Napoleon from Elba, foreseeing, as he frankly
observes, "a scope for further adventure and hope of personal
advancement." This hope was short-lived and we next see him fighting
in the British Legion of a rebel South American army against Spain.
The general mismanagement of this expedition, and the fact that the
Republicans killed all their prisoners "was a death blow to all my
past enthusiasm in the Republican cause." Many British officers
"participating with me in the detestation for cold-blooded butchery,
conspired from that moment to elude this detested service. . . . Mark
ye who delight in transcendant Liberalism . . . the cruel exigencies
of such a warfare."
In his acceptance of "transcendant Liberalism," yet his determination
to see truly what passed before his eyes and when needful to change
his standpoint, this earlier Chesterton was much like the later. He
had not the genius of Gilbert, he could not see so far, but he shared
his refusal to be blinded by custom, theory or even patriotism. In
his accounts of army life he had commented fearlessly on the cruelty
of the punishments and described his fellow officers as made ill by
seeing a private receive five hundred lashes. He had noted corruption
in the "Train Service" which "was consequently divested of its
genuine claim to honour." Fêted by the planters of Jamaica, he had
yet spoken with horror of their slave ownership.
Now he was appointed governor of a prison in England and here began
the great work of his life in a frontal attack on the corruptions he
discovered. The yardsmen did a secret traffic in all the goods
forbidden in the prison, there were caches of tobacco, spirits and
such things under the pavements, the weaker prisoners were robbed by
the stronger. The women's and men's quarters were so arranged that by
connivance of the jailors frequent meetings took place. On one of
these occasions Captain Chesterton himself appeared:
My hands were seized with tender empressement, and I was addressed
as "my love," "My darling," "my dear creature:" and all the
conventional endearments of the pavé were showered upon me. I had to
struggle for enlargement, and beat a hasty retreat, quite confounded
by my initiation into "prison discipline." And the consternation
occasioned by this discovery became perfectly electric.*
[* _Revelations of Prison Life_, pp. 84-85.]
Attempts to bribe him were followed by attempts to kill him, but he
stood firm. Mrs. Fry invoked his aid to improve the home conditions
to which the prisoners had to return. Chesterton turned to Dickens
and to Dickens's friend, Miss Coutts, in defiance of a narrow-minded
magistrate
who perversely insisted (as was by cynical interpretation literally
too true) that Miss Coutts had no right to confer with prisoners
within those walls, nor was it "to be tolerated that Mr. Charles
Dickens should walk into the prison whenever he pleased."*
[* Ibid., p. 186.]
From Cold Bath Fields the reforms begun by Captain Chesterton and
warmly seconded by Dickens spread to other prisons, "Although (he
declares) I consented to forego pecuniary advantage, I cling the more
tenaciously to the credit of my past exertions; when, beset with
fraud, ferocity, and moral pollution, I achieved a triumph fraught
with civilizing influences."*
[* Ibid., p. v.]
APPENDIX B
Prize Poem Written at St. Paul's
This is the only version I have been able to find. Across the top is
written in another hand: "This is not exactly the same as given in
the prize poem." The difference is probably slight.
ST. FRANCIS XAVIER
The Apostle of the Indies
He left his dust, by all the myriad tread
Of yon dense millions trampled to the strand,
Or 'neath some cross forgotten lays his head
Where dark seas whiten on a lonely land:
He left his work, what all his life had planned,
A waning flame to flicker and to fall,
Mid the huge myths his toil could scarce withstand,
And the light died in temple and in hall,
And the old twilight sank and settled over all.
He left his name, a murmur in the East,
That dies to silence amid older creeds,
With which he strove in vain: the fiery priest
Of faiths less fitted to their ruder needs:
As some lone pilgrim, with his staff and beads,
Mid forest-brutes whom ignorance makes tame,
He dwelt, and sowed an Eastern Church's seeds
He reigned a teacher and a priest of fame:
He died and dying left a murmur and a name.
He died: and she, the Church that bade him go,
Yon dim Enchantress with her mystic claim,
Has ringed his forehead with her aureole-glow,
And monkish myths, and all the whispered fame
Of miracle, has clung about his name:
So Rome has said: but we, what answer we
Who in grim Indian gods and rites of shame
O'er all the East the teacher's failure see,
His eastern church a dream, his toil a vanity.
This then we say: as Time's dark face at last
Moveth its lips of thunder to decree
The doom that grew through all the murmuring past
To be the canon of the times to be:
No child of truth or priest of progress he
Yet not the less a hero of his wars
Striving to quench the light he could not see,
And God, who knoweth all that makes and mars,
Judges his soul unseen which throbs among the stars.
God only knows, man failing in his choice,
How far apparent failure may succeed,
God only knows what echo of His voice
Lives in the cant of many a fallen creed,
God only gives the labourer his meed
For all the lingering influence widely spread
Broad branching into many a word and deed
When dim oblivion veils the fountain-head;
So lives and lingers on the spirit of the dead.
This then we say: let all things further rest
And this brave life, with many thousands more
Be gathered up in the eternal's breast
In that dim past his Love is bending o'er
Healing all shattered hopes and failure sore:
Since he had bravely looked on death and pain
For what he chose to worship and adore
Cast boldly down his life for loss or gain
In the eternal lottery: not to be in vain.
APPENDIX C
The Chestertons
The composition of _The Chestertons_ is not without interest for the
student of legendary literature. By a curious paradox the book had to
be strikingly untrue to be accepted as true, since the jokes about
sisters-in-law are legion, so that mere commonplace shafts of what is
called "feminine spite" would have gained little credence. Yet on the
other hand, Mrs. Cecil Chesterton was able (to quote _The Mikado_) to
get from her husband a good deal of "corroborative detail designed to
give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."
Of these details some are true, some false, all arranged to support
the main untruth of Frances and Gilbert's relation to one another.
The thesis of the book is that Gilbert was an unhappy and frustrated
man (a) because Frances shrank from consummating their marriage, and
(b) because she dragged him away from his London life and friends to
bury him in a middle class suburb.
I confess that I am Victorian enough heartily to dislike writing this
appendix. Yet it is necessary, for many who read _The Chestertons_
have supposed that a story told by so near a connection must be true.
The ground was laid for the introduction of the Legend by the tale of
the Red Haired Phantom, if I may describe it in the terms of a ghost
story. That ghost was easy to lay (see Introduction). Next comes the
odd account of Gilbert and Frances' honeymoon and of the years that
followed. It is of course possible that the first night of their
marriage was not happy--especially in the Victorian days of reticence
which left wife and even possibly husband unprepared for life
together: (though this did not normally prevent a happy marriage and
a pack of children afterwards). But I find it impossible to imagine
Cecil Chesterton, like the bridesmaid on the honeymoon, receiving and
passing on such a story as that of Gilbert "quivering with
self-reproach" so that after the first night he "dared not even
contemplate a repetition. . . . Gilbert, young and vital, was
condemned to a pseudo-monastic life, in which he lived with a woman
but never enjoyed one." (p. 282)
There is a psychological reason for thinking this story especially
improbable and a physical reason for dismissing it as actually
impossible.
A white horse had from his childhood been for Gilbert the supreme
sign of romance, and he had chosen to spend the first night of his
honeymoon at the White Horse Inn. From his honeymoon he wrote home
that he had "a wife, a piece of string, a pencil and a knife. What
more can any man want?" Ten years later he wrote _The Ballad of the
White Horse_ and dedicated it to Frances, saying,
"O go you onward, where you are
Shall honour and laughter be.
Past purpled forest and pearled foam,
God's winged pavilion free to roam,
Your face, that is a wandering home,
A flying home for me."
And over thirty years later he wrote again of beginning his honeymoon
under the shadow of the White Horse, and compared it to a trip to
fairyland.
Can any human being read the record of this recurrent motif and
reconcile it with Mrs. Cecil's picture?
Let me refer again to _The Ballad of The White Horse_. Is it
conceivable that any man should write after ten years of frustration
and unhappiness:
Up through an empty house of stars
Being what heart you are,
Up the inhuman steeps of space
As on a staircase go in grace
Carrying the firelight on your face
Beyond the loneliest star.
This is not the way a man writes to a neurotic cold-hearted woman who
has made a hermit of him!
Mrs. Cecil was of course never in the intimacy of the family. She
only married Cecil in 1917--by which date Gilbert and Frances had
been married sixteen years--and before that she was merely an
acquaintance. But Frances's intimates could have told her how absurd
her story was, for by a rare good fortune the operation Frances
underwent to enable her to bear children is itself evidence one could
hardly have hoped for in a matter which civilized people are not much
given to discussing. Frances talked of the operation to Monsignor
O'Connor, to Dorothy Collins and to Annie Firmin, and I have quoted
the doctor's letter about it (see above, [Chapter XV]). It was an
abiding tragedy for both husband and wife that it was unsuccessful.
Frances would have shrunk from no suffering in her passionate wish
for a child.
There is another curiosity in the Legend: Gilbert, despite this
story, was apparently perfectly happy in London during the _first
eight years of marriage:_ it was only after the removal to
Beaconsfield and in almost middle life that he began to be
"frustrated."
Poor Frances: what a picture of her had been proposed for posterity:
so powerful she could waft Gilbert away from London and from his
friends, could force him to make her his banker and reduce him to a
"bounty" strictly limited to half-a-crown, yet so powerless that "she
had to sign" the cheques for _G.K.'s Weekly_, much as she hated it.
Her poetry (described as "quite charming") is spoken of as appearing
in "little Parish Magazines"--the only papers she cared to read owing
to her implacable hatred for Fleet Street. It is hard to picture
Frances with an implacable hatred for anything, and it will be
remembered that she actually begged Father O'Connor to leave Gilbert
to be "a jolly journalist." The periodicals in which her poems
appeared were _The Observer_, _The Sunday Times_, _The Daily Chronicle,_
the _Westminster Gazette_ and _The New Witness_. Personally I have
never much admired Frances's verse, but a professional journalist
might have been quite pleased at "making" all these papers. Not one
poem ever appeared in a Parish Magazine so far as either Dorothy or I
have been able to ascertain. The point is not a very important one
but the sneer is symptomatic.
A curious magic pervades _The Chestertons:_ succulent sausages appear
in the kitchen at Overstrand Mansions, and flowing torrents of beer,
so that Gilbert can steal away from an unsympathetic wife to consume
them with his Fleet Street friends. A studio materialises in a meadow
at Beaconsfield. Can we imagine Gilbert cooking or even ordering
sausages, getting beer to the flat, designing or discovering the
studio? Anyone thinking about what really happened would realise that
Frances ordered the beer and sausages, Frances built the studio. But
that is not the sort of thought we are to think about Frances.
About her we are told: that she always wore the wrong colors: that
she gave Gilbert insufficient and indigestible food: that she did not
know what work meant: that Mrs. Belloc thought Gilbert ought to beat
her: that she kept the journalists away when Gilbert was dying (in
point of fact both telephone and door bell were so near the sick room
that the use of both had to be avoided): that she did not give her
guests enough to eat at his funeral: that she actually sought the
quiet of her own room instead of staying downstairs to receive
condolences when her husband's coffin had just been lowered into the
grave.
With all this spate of detail, we are not told that Frances left
£1000 to Mrs. Cecil plus £500 for her Cecil Houses.
Even if I could have ignored the attack on Frances, I should be
obliged as his biographer to deal with the attack on Gilbert--more
subtly but no less certainly made. The story of the marriage affects
Gilbert as much as Frances, and the book culminates in the final
assertion that his drinking killed him. Here are the comments (sent
to me by Dorothy) of the doctor who attended Gilbert and Frances from
1919 until they died:
"Today Dr. Bakewell came in and answered the questions about the book
which we asked him.
"(1) He says that the idea that G.K. was better when drinking in Fleet
Street because the stimulus of conversation would eat up effects of
the alcohol is absolute nonsense. It would have just as bad an effect
under any conditions. Dr. Bakewell said that G.K. was his patient for
nearly twenty years and during that time he never treated him for
alcoholism or saw any trace of it, though in an absentminded way he
was always liable to drink too much of anything if it were
there--even water.
"Without the 'understanding, loving, tactful care' of Frances he would
have died twenty years before. Certainly if he had racketted around
Fleet Street any longer.
"Dr. Bakewell said Gilbert was 'perfectly happy in Beaconsfield and
not in any way frustrated. There was no frustration of any kind and
no longing for London life or friends.' He was very intimate with
Gilbert and would have known if there had been.
"(2) The doctor says that Gilbert died of a failing heart owing to
fatty degeneration, leading to dropsy.
"(3) Frances had arthritis of the spine. (Not curvature as stated by
Mrs. Cecil.)
"The doctor said that he put him on the water wagon several times and
when this was done Gilbert observed the rule most meticulously. Dr.
Bakewell said that he did not do it very often because he did not
consider that drink was in any way affecting Gilbert's health during
the greater part of the time he knew him."
In a later conversation he added that when he did forbid alcohol at
certain periods it was simply to make liquid less attractive, as too
much of even water was bad for Gilbert.
The statement made by Mrs. Cecil that drinking in London was not so
serious because the talk and excitement among friends would carry off
the effects, is thought by doctors almost comic. Dr. Bakewell denies
it absolutely: Dr. Pocock who, it will be remembered, attended
Gilbert during his illness of 1914-15 says, "Absolute nonsense: would
probably have been worse in London." He adds also, "I cannot
understand why such an attack was made upon G.K. From my personal
observation he owed a very great deal to Mrs. G.K. who greatly helped
his restoration to health."
One can get one's pen'orth of fun out of the chapter on the Exile of
Beaconsfield when one remembers the true story of those years: Rome,
Jerusalem, U.S.A., Poland, France, Spain, Malta, lectures all over
England, lively contests for the Lord Rectorship of three
universities, London again and again--for editing, mock trials,
debates and Distributist Beanos--and frequently in furnished flats
which Frances would take for the winter months. One can only suppose
that Mrs. Cecil was so little intimate with them that she did not
realise all this.
And then Beaconsfield itself--parties in the Studio; people down from
London, visitors from Poland, France, America, Italy, Holland and
other countries; the Eric Gills, the Bernard Shaws, the Garvins, the
Emile Cammaerts and others living in the neighborhood; the guest room
always occupied by some intimate. Meanwhile the books poured out of
the little study. Mrs. Cecil thinks Gilbert hardly ever again wrote a
masterpiece after leaving Battersea, yet in support of this idea she
lists as masterpieces _The Ball and the Cross_ (written at
Beaconsfield), _Lepanto_ (written at Beaconsfield), _Magic_ (written
at Beaconsfield), _Stevenson_ (written at Beaconsfield) and _The
Ballad of the White Horse_(mainly written at Beaconsfield). Of all
the books she mentions in this connection only three were written in
London! And she admits that the world at large did not share her view
of the sterilizing effect of Beaconsfield, for she writes, "Meanwhile
his fame grew wider, his sales greater. In exile he ruled a literary
world."*
[* P. 83.]
Gilbert left to Mrs. Cecil Chesterton sums equal to those later left
to her by Frances--£1000 for herself and £500 for Cecil Houses.
The ingratitude that omitted all mention of these benefactions struck
the imagination of several of the Chesterton family as the worst
feature in the book. But to Gilbert and Frances the giving of money
even in their own lifetime was a slight matter. They had given
something far greater.
Why is the memory of Cecil Chesterton alive today? Because of his
brother's labors. Why is it possible for Mrs. Cecil to declare that
he was the greater editor, to imply that he was the greater man?
Because Gilbert kept saying so. Never has such devotion been shown by
one brother to the memory of another: never has the greater man
exalted the lesser to such a pedestal.
We are told in _The Chestertons_ that Frances sacrificed both Gilbert
and herself on the altar of her family. Truly there was much
self-sacrifice in the lives of both to family, friends and causes.
They did not feel it as self-sacrifice to enrich the lives of others
even at cost to themselves.
But the heaviest cost they paid lay in the years of a toil that was
literally killing Gilbert while Frances watched him growing old too
soon and straining his heart with work crushingly heavy: and if there
was a single altar for that supreme sacrifice it was no other than
the altar of Cecil's memory.
Acknowledgments
I am exceedingly grateful to the following publishers for permission
to quote from these books:
DODD, MEAD & CO.:
_The Man Who Was Thursday; Orthodoxy; The Napoleon of Notting Hill;
Heretics; George Bernard Shaw; The Ball and the Cross; The Poet and
the Lunatic; Alarms and Discursions; The Ballad of the White Horse;
What's Wrong with the World; Manalive; Sidelights on New London and
Newer York; The Uses of Diversity; The History of England; Irish
Impressions; Collected Poems; The Queen of Seven Swords; The
Everlasting Man; Cobbett; Outline of Sanity; Tales of the Long Bow;
What I Saw in America; The Thing; The Defendant; The Barbarism of
Berlin: or The Appetite of Tyranny; Eugenics and Other Evils;
Collected Poems; G. K. Chesterton, a Criticism_ (by Cecil Chesterton).
DOUBLEDAY DORAN:
_St. Francis of Assisi; The Years Between_.
E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC.:
_Criticisms and Appreciations of the Works of Charles Dickens_.
FARRAR & RINEHART:
_Chaucer_.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY:
_Robert Browning; The Catholic Church and Conversion_.
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS:
_The Victorian Age in Literature_.
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS:
_Rufus Isaacs, First Marquess of Reading_.
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME:
_The Arena_.
"Gehazi," by Rudyard Kipling, from _The Years Between_, copyright
1914, 1919 by Rudyard Kipling, is reprinted by permission of Mrs.
Bambridge and Doubleday Doran and Co., Inc., of New York, and The
Macmillan Company, of Canada, publishers.
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1920. _The Uses of Diversity_.
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1928. _Generally Speaking_.
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1929. _The Poet and the Lunatics_.
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1930. _The Grave of Arthur_. Short Poem. Ariel Poem Series.
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1934. _Avowals and Denials_. Essays.
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1936. _Autobiography_.
1937. _The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond_.
1938. _The Colored Lands_.
1940. _The End of the Armistice_.
PREFACES TO OTHER AUTHORS' BOOKS
1902. Carlyle, _Past and Present_.
_Nonsense Rhymes_, by W. C. Monkhouse.
_R.L.S._, in Bookman Booklets.
_Tolstoy_, in Bookman Booklets.
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_Elsie Lang_. Literary London.
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W. W. Crotch, _The Cottage Homes of England_.
1909. Darrell Figgis. _A Vision of Life_.
Margaret Arndt, _Meadows of Play_.
1910. _Thackeray, Selection_. Masters of Literature Series.
_Eyes of Youth, Anthology_.
1911. _Johnson, Extracts_. Ed. Alice Meynell.
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1917. S. Nordentoft, _Practical Pacifism and Its Adversaries_.
1918. Sybil Bristowe, _Provocations_.
William Dyson, _Australia at War_.
Leonard Merrick, _House of Lynch_.
1919. Cecil Chesterton, _History of the U. S. A_.
Bernard Capes, _The Skeleton Key_.
1920. M. E. Jones, _Life in Old Cambridge_.
1921. Vivienne Dayrell, _Little Wings_.
H. M. Bateman, _A Book of Drawings_.
1922. Jane Austen, _Love and Friendship_.
1923. Irene Hernaman, _Child Mediums_.
0. R. Vassall Phillips, _The Mustard Tree_.
1924. 0. F. Dudley, _Will Men Be Like Gods_.
Greville Macdonald, _George Macdonald and His Wife_.
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1925. Fulton Sheen, _God and Intelligence_.
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_The Man Who Was Thursday_, Dramatized Version.
W. S. Masterman, _The Wrong Letter_.
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H. Massis, _Defence of the West_.
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1928. Mary Webb, _The Golden Arrow_.
1929. H. Ghéon, _The Secret of the Cure D'ars_, trans. F. Sheed.
W. R. Titterton, _Drinking Songs_.
1930. Miss C. Noran, _Book on Spanish History_.
_King Lear_. De Luxe Edition. Illustrated Yunge.
Introduction to _Vanity Fair_, Thackeray. Limited Edition
Club, New York.
1931. _Giotto's Frescoes at Assisi Reproduced_.
John Gibbons, _Through Unknown Portugal_.
F. Goetel, _The Messenger of the Snow_.
Francis Thompson, _The Hound of Heaven_.
A. A. Thomas, _The Burns We Love_.
J. P. de Fonseka, _Serendipitry_.
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1932. Gleeson, _Essays_.
_Essays of the Year_, Argonaut Press.
_Six Centuries of English Literature_, Vol. vi. Meredith to
Rupert Brooke.
Mrs. Homewood, _Reminiscences_.
_Penn Country Book_.
1933. _Life of Sydney Smith_. Hesketh Pearson.
_Tale of Two Cities_.
1934. _Peregrine Pickle_. First Edition Club, U. S. A.
Pamphlet on _Nazi Germany_ for Friends of Europe publication,
edited by Lord Tyrrell.
_G.K.'s Miscellany_.
1935. Fr. Dowsell, _The Betrayal: A Passion Play_.
Fr. Vincent McNabb, _Book of Essays_.
_Detective Stories_. Collection from Hutchinson.
1936. F. A. MacNutt, _A Papal Chamberlain_.
1935. Letterpress to _Stations of the Cross_, by F. Brangwyn.
I doubt whether the list of introductions is complete but Dorothy
Collins has done her best to make it so. Of the books and essays
about Chesterton there is no end. Those I have used in writing this
book are
_Father Brown on Chesterton_, Monsignor O'Connor.
_G. K. Chesterton, a Criticism_, Cecil Chesterton.
_The Place of Chesterton in English Literature_, Hilaire Belloc.
_The Laughing Prophet_, Emile Cammaerts.
_G. K. Chesterton_, Cyril Clemens.
For the chapters on Sociology I have consulted the invaluable series
on the English Labourer by the Hammonds, C. S. Orpen's _Open Fields_,
Trevelyan's _Social History of England_, Cobbett's _Rural Rides and
Cottage Economy_ and Haas' _English Labourer_.
For the Marconi Chapter I have used the Reports of the Parliamentary
Commission and of the trial of Cecil Chesterton, C. F. G. Masterman's
_Life_ and that of Lord Reading, and contemporary press accounts.
Throughout I have made use of the files of _The Eyewitness, The New
Witness_ and _G.K.'s Weekly_.