 Chapter 8 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. This is Librevox Recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org. Recording by Dick Bourgeois Doyle. Gilbert Keith Chesterton. By Macy Ward. Chapter 8 To Francis. This chapter can be written only by Gilbert himself. It might seem that he had no words left for an emotion heightened beyond the love of his friends and the joyous acceptance of existence. But in these letters he shows the truth of his own theory, that to love each thing separately strengthens the power of loving. To have tried to love everyone is, as he tells Francis, no bad preparation for loving her. The emotion of falling in love had both intensified his appreciation of all things and cast for him a vivid light on past, present, and future, so that in the last of these letters he sketches his life down to the moment when a new life begins. I am looking over the sea and endeavoring to reckon the estate I have to offer you. As far as I can make out, my equipment for starting on a journey to Fairyland consists of the following items. First, a straw hat. The oldest part of this admirable relic shows traces of pure Norman work. The vandalism of Cromwell's soldiers has left as little of the original hat band. Second, a walking stick. Very knobby and heavy. Admirably fitted to break the head of any denizen of Suffolk who denies that you are the noblest of ladies, but of no other manifest use. Third, a copy of Walt Whitman's poems. Once nearly given to Salter, but quite forgotten. It has his name in it still, with an affectionate inscription from his sincere friend Gilbert Chesterton. I wonder if he will ever have it. Fourth, a number of letters from a young lady containing everything good and generous and loyal and holy and wise that isn't in Walt Whitman's poems. Fifth, an unwieldy sort of pocket knife. The blade's mostly having an edge of a more varied and picturesque outline than is provided by the prosaic cutter. The chief element, however, is a thing to take stones out of a horse's hoof. What a beautiful sensation of security it gives one to reflect that if one should ever have money enough to buy a horse, and should happen to buy one, and the horse should happen to have a stone in its hoof, that one is ready. One stands prepared with a defiant smile. Sixth, passing from the last miracle of practical foresight, we come to a box of matches. Every now and then I strike one of these, because fire is beautiful and burns your fingers. Some people think this waste of matches, the same people who object to the building of cathedrals. Seventh, about three pounds in gold and silver. The remains of one of Mr. Unwin's bursts of affection. Those explosions of spontaneous love for myself, which, such as the perfect order and harmony of his mind, occur at startling exact intervals of time. Eighth, a book of children's rhymes in manuscript called The Weather Book, about three quarters finished and destined for Mr. Nut. This was Grey Beards at Play. I've been working at it fairly steady, which I think jolly credible under the circumstances. One can't put anything interesting in it. They'll understand those things when they grow up. Ninth, a tennis racket. Nay, start not. It is part of a new regime, and the only new and neat looking thing in the museum will soon mellow it, like the straw hat. My brother and I are teaching each other lawn tennis. Tenth, a soul, hitherto idle and omnivorous, but now happy enough to be ashamed of itself. Eleventh, a body, equally idle and quite equally omnivorous, absorbing tea, coffee, clare, seawater and oxygen to its own perfect satisfaction. It is happiest swimming, I think, the sea being about a convenient size. Twelfth, a heart, mislaid somewhere, and that is about all the property of which an inventory can be made at present. After all, my tastes are stoically simple. A straw hat, a stick, a box of matches, and some of his own poetry. What more does a man require? The city of Felix Stowe, as seen by the local prophet from the neighboring mountain peak, does not strike the eye as having anything uncanny about it. At least I imagine that it requires rather careful scrutiny before the eerie curl of the chimney pot or the elfin wink of a lonely lamppost brings home to the startled soul that it is really the city of a fearful folk. That the inhabitants are not human in the ordinary sense is quite clear. Yet it has only just begun to dawn on me after staying a week in the town of Unreason with its monstrous landscape and grave unmeaning customs. Do I seem to be raving? Let me give my experiences. I am bound to admit that I do not think I am good at shopping. I generally succeed in getting rid of money, but other observances, such as bringing away the goods that I've paid for and knowing what I've bought, I often pass over as secondary. But to shop in a town of ordinary tradesmen is one thing. To shop in a town of raving lunatics is another. I set out one morning happy and hopeful with the intention of buying A, a tennis racket, B, some tennis balls, C, some tennis shoes, D, a ticket for a tennis ground. I went to the shop pointed out by some villager, probably mad, and went in and said, I believe they kept tennis rackets. The young man smiled and ascended. I suggested that he might show me some. The young man looked positively alarmed. Oh, he said, we haven't got any, not got any here. I asked, where? Oh, they're out, you know, all round. He explained wildly with a graphic gesture in the direction of the sea in the sky. All out round. We've left them all round at places. To this day, I don't know what he meant, but I merely asked when they would quit these weird retreats. He said in an hour, and in an hour I called again. Were they in now? Well, not in, not in just yet, he said, with a sort of feverish confidentialness, as if he wasn't quite sure. Are they still all out at places? I asked with restrained humor. Oh, no, he said, with the burst of reassuring pride. They're only out there, out behind, you know. I hope my face expressed my beaming comprehension of the spot alluded to. Eventually, at a third visit, the rackets were produced. None of them, I was told by my brother, were of any first class maker. So that was outside the question. The choice was between some good neat first handed instruments which suited me and some C looking second hand objects with plain deal handles, which would have done in a pinch. I thought that perhaps it would be better to get a good class racket in London and content myself for the present with economizing on one of the second hand monuments of depression. So I asked the price. 10-6 was the price of the second hand article. Well, I thought this large for the tool and wondered if the first hand rackets were much dearer. What price for the first hand? 7-6, said the creature. Cherry is a bird. I did not faint. I am strong. I rejected the article, which was dearer, because it had been hollowed by human possession and accepted the cheap new crude racket. Except the newness, there was no difference between them whatever. I then asked the smiling maniac for balls. He brought me a selection of large red globes, nearly as big as Dutch cheeses. I said, are these tennis balls? He said, oh, did you want tennis balls? I said yes. They often come in handy at tennis. The goblin was, however, quite impervious to satire, and I left him endeavoring to draw my attention to his wares in general, particularly to some zinc baths, which he seemed to think should form part of the equipment of a tennis player. Never before since have I met a being of that order and degree of creepiness. He was a nightmare of unmeaning idiocy, but some mention not to be made of the old man at the entrance to the tennis ground, who opened his mouth in parables on the subject of the fee for playing there. He seemed to have been wound up to make only one remark. It's six pence. Under these circumstances, the attempt to discover whether the six pence covered a day's tennis or a week or 50 years was rather baffling. At last, I put down the six pence. This seemed to galvanize him into life. He looked at the clock, which was indicating five past eleven and said, it's six pence an hour, so you'll be all right till two. I fled screaming. Since then, I have examined the town more carefully and feel the presence of something nameless. There is a claw curl in the sea bent trees, an eye gleam in the dark flints in the wall that is not of this world. When we set up house, darling, honeysuckle porch, you put hedge bees poetry and eight shillings a week. I think you will have to do the shopping. Particularly at Felix Stone, there was a great and glorious man who said, give us the luxuries of life and we will dispense with the necessities. That, I think, would be a splendid motto to write in letters of brown gold over the porch of our hypothetical home. There will be a sofa for you, for example, but no chairs, for I prefer the floor. There will be a select store of chocolate creams to make you do the carp with, and the rest will be bread and water. We will each retain a suit of evening dress for great occasions, and at other times, clothe ourselves in the skins of wild beasts. How pretty you would look, which would fit your taste in furs and be economical. I have sometimes thought it would be very fine to take an ordinary house, a very poor commonplace house in West Kensington, say, and make it symbolic. Not artistic, heaven, oh heaven forbid. My blood boils when I think of the affronts put by knock-kneed pictorial epicures on the strong, honest, ugly patient shapes of necessary things, the brave old bones of life. There are aesthetic pottering prigs, who can look on a saucepan with one tear of joy, or sadness, mongrel decadence, who can see no dignity in the honorable scars of a kettle. So they concentrate all their house decoration on colored windows that nobody looks out of and vases of lilies that everybody wishes out of the way. No, my idea, which is much cheaper, is to make a house really allegoric, really explain its own essential meaning. Mystical or ancient sayings should be inscribed on every object. The more prosaic the object, the better, and the more coarsely and rudely the inscription was traced, the better. Hast thou sent the rain upon the earth, should be inscribed on the umbrella stand, perhaps on the umbrella? Even the hairs of your head are all numbered, would give a tremendous significance to one's hairbrushes. The words about living water would reveal the music and sanctity of the sink, while our God is consuming fire might be written over the kitchen grate to assist the mystic musings of the cook. Shall we ever try that experiment, dearest? Perhaps not. For no words would be golden enough for the tools you had to touch. You would be beauty enough for one house. By all means, let us have bad things in our dwelling and make them good things. I shall offer no objection to your having an occasional drag into dinner, or a penitent griffin to sleep in the spare bed. The image of you taking a Sunday school of little devils is pleasing. They will look up, first in savage wonder, then in vague respect. They will see the most glorious and noble lady that ever lived since their prince tempted Eve, with a halo of hair and great heavenly eyes that seemed to make the good at the heart of things almost too terribly simple, and naked for the sons of flesh, and as they gaze their tails will drop off, and their wings will sprout, and they will become angels in six lessons. I cannot profess to offer any elaborate explanation of your mother's disquiet, but I admit it does not wholly surprise me. You see, I happen to know one factor in the case, and one only, of which you are wholly ignorant. I know you. I know one thing which has made me feel strange before your mother. I know the value of what I take away. I feel, in a weird moment, like the angel of death. You say you want to talk to me about death. My views about death are bright, brisk, and entertaining. And when Israel takes a soul, it may be to other and brighter worlds, like those wither you and I go together. The transformation called death may be something as beautiful and dazzling as the transformation called love. It may make the dead man happy, just as your mother knows that you are happy. But nonetheless, it is a transformation, and sad sometimes for those left behind. A mother whose child is dying can hardly believe that in the inscrutable unknown, there is anyone who can look to it as well as she. And if a mother cannot trust her child easily to God Almighty, shall I be so mean as to be angry because she cannot trust it easily to me? I tell you, I have stood before your mother and felt like a thief. I know you are not going to part, neither physically, mentally, morally, or spiritually, but she sees a new element in your life, wholly from outside. Is it not natural, given her temperament, that you should find her perturbed? Oh dearest, dearest Francis, let us always be very gentle to older people. Indeed, darling, it is not they who are the tyrants, but we. They may interrupt our building in the scaffolding stages. We turn their house upside down when it is their final home and rest. Your mother certainly would have been worried if you had been engaged to the archangel Michael, who indeed is bearing his disappointment very well. How much more, when you are engaged to an aimless, tactless, reckless, unbrushed, strange-hatted, opinionated scarecrow who has suddenly walked into the vacant place? I could have prophesized her unrest. Wait, and she will calm down all right, dear. God comfort her, I dare not. Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born of comfortable but honest parents on the top of Camden Hill, Kensington. He was christened at St. George's Church, which stands just under that more imposing building, the Waterworks Tower. This place was chosen apparently in order that the whole available water supply might be used in the intrepid attempt to make him a member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven. Of the early years of this remarkable man, few traces remain. One of his earliest recorded observations was the simple exclamation, full of heartfelt delight, look at baby, funny baby. Here we see the first hint of that ineffable conversational modesty, that shy social self-effacement, which has ever hidden his light under a bushel. His mother also recounts with the parent amusement an incident connected with his imperious demand for his father's top hat. Give me that hat, please. No, dear, you mustn't have that hat. Give that hat, no, dear. If you don't give it to me, I'll say at. An exquisite selection in the manner of hats has indeed always been one of the great man's hobbies. When he had drawn pictures of all the blinds and tablecloths and towels and walls and windowpains, it was felt that he required a larger sphere. Consequently, he was sent to Mr. Buescher, who gave him desks and copy books and Latin grammars and atlases to draw pictures on. He was far too innately conscientious not to use these materials to draw on. To other uses, asserted by some to belong to these objects, he paid little heed. The only really curious thing about his school life was that he had a weird and quite involuntary habit of getting French prizes. They were the only ones he ever got, and he never tried to get them. But though the thing was quite mysterious to him, and though he made every effort to avoid it, it went on, being evidently a part of some occult, natural law. For the first half of his time at school, he was very solitary and futile. He never regretted the time, for it gave him two things, complete mental self-sufficiency and a comprehension of the psychology of outcasts. But one day, as he was roaming about a great naked-building land, which he haunted in the play hours, rather like an outlaw in the woods, he met a curious agile youth with hair brushed off his head. Seeing each other, they promptly hit each other simultaneously and had a fight. Next day, they met again and fought again. These Homeric conflicts went on for many days, till one morning, in the crisis of some insane grapple, the subject of this biography quoted, like a war chat, something out of Macaulay's lays. The other started and relaxed his hold. They gazed each other. Then the foe quoted the following line. In this land of savages, they knew each other. For the next two hours, they talked books. They have talked books ever since. The boy was Edmund Clare Hugh Bentley. The incident, just narrated, is the true and real account of the first and deepest of our hero's male connections. But another was to ensure probably equally profound and far more pregnant with awful and dazzling consequences. Bentley always had the habit of trying to do things well. 12 years of the other's friendship has not cured him of this. Being seized with a peculiar desire to learn conjuring, he had made the acquaintance of an eerie and supernatural young man who instructed him in the black art. A god, Mephistophelian, sort of individual, who our subject, half-thought, was a changeling. Our subject has not quite got over the idea yet, though for practical social purposes he calls him Lucian Oldershaw. Our subject met Lucian Oldershaw that night as Shakespeare says, there was a star. These three persons soon became known through the length and breadth of St. Paul's school as the founders of a singular brotherhood. It was called the JDC. No one, we believe, could ever have had better friends than did the hero of this narrative. We wish that we could bring before the reader the personality of all the knights of that eccentric round table. Most of them are known already to the reader, even the subject himself is possibly known to the reader. Bertram, who seems somehow to have been painted by Van Dyke, a somber and stately young man, a blend of cavalier and Puritan, with the physique of a military father in the views of an ethical mother and a soul of his own, which for sheer simplicity is something staggering. Fernet, with an oriental and inscrutable placidity, varied every now and then with dazzling agility and meridithian humor. Waldo Davenure, who masks with complete fashionable triviality, a hebraic immutability of passion tried in a more ironical and bitter service than his father Jacob. Lawrence and Morris Solomon, who show another side of the same people, the love of homes, the love of children, the meek and malicious humor, the tranquil service of a law. Salter, who shows how beautiful and ridiculous a combination can be made of the most elaborate mental cultivation and artistic sensibility, and an omniscience and a receptiveness and a humility extraordinary in any man. These were his friends. May he be forgiven for speaking of them at length and with pride. Someday we hope the reader may know them all. He knew these people. He knew their friends. He heard Mildred Wayne say blog, and he thought it was a funny name. He had been told that he would ever pronounce it with the accents of tears and passion he would have said in his pride, that the name was not suitable for that purpose. But there are look at Emin. He went for a time to an art school. There he met a great many curious people. Many of the men were horrible black guards. It was not exactly that. So they naturally found each other interesting. He went through some rather appalling discoveries about human life. And the final discovery was that there is no devil. No, not even such a thing as a bad man. One pleasant Saturday afternoon, Lucien said to him, I'm going to take you to see the blogs. The what? said the unhappy man. The blogs said the other darkly. Naturally assuming that it was the name of a public house, he reluctantly followed his friend. He came to a small front garden. If it was a public house, it was not a business like one. They raised the latch, they rang the bell, and if the bell was not in the close time just then, no flower in the pots winked, no brick grand, no sign in heaven or earth warned him. The bird sang on in the trees. He went in. The first time he spent an evening at the blogs, there was no one there. That is to say, there was a worn but fiery little lady in a gray dress who didn't approve of catastrophic solutions of social problems. That he understood was Mrs. Blog. There was a long blonde, smiling young person who seemed to think him quite off his head and who was addressed as Ethel. There were two people whose meaning and status he couldn't imagine, one of whom had a big nose and the other hadn't. Lastly, there was a Juno-like creature in a tremendous hat who eyed him all the time half wildly, like a shying horse, because he said he was quite happy. But the second time he went there, he was plumped down on the sofa beside a being of whom he had a vague impression that brown hair grew at intervals all down her like a caterpillar. In the course of conversation, she looked straight at him and he said to himself as plainly as if he had read it in a book. If I had anything to do with this girl, I should go on my knees to her. If I spoke with her, she would never deceive me. If I depended on her, she would never deny me. If I loved her, she would never play with me. If I trusted her, she would never go back on me. If I remembered her, she would never forget me. I may never see her again. Goodbye. It was all said in a flash, but it was all said. Two years, as they say in the playbills, is supposed to elapse. And here is the subject of this memoir sitting on a balcony above the sea. The time evening. He is thinking of the whole bewildering record of which the foregoing is a brief outline. You see how far he has gone wrong and how idle and wasteful and wicked he has often been. How miserably unfitted he is for what he is called upon to be. Let him now declare it, and hereafter forever hold his peace. But there are four lamps of thanksgiving always before him. The first is for his creation out of the same earth with such a woman as you. The second is that he has not, with all his faults, gone after strange women. You cannot think how a man self-restrained is rewarded in this. The third is that he has tried to love everything alive, a dim preparation for loving you. And the fourth is, but no words can express that. Here ends my previous existence. Take it. It led me to you. End of chapter 8. Chapter 9 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Dick Bourgeois Doyle, Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward. Chapter 9. A Long Engagement. Gilbert sympathized with his future mother-in-law's anxiety at Francis' engagement to a self-opinionated scarecrow. By a doubt if it had all quickly occurred to him that the basis of that anxiety was the fact that he was earning only 25 shillings a week. Francis herself, Lucian Oldershaw, and the rest of his friends believed he was a genius with a great future, and this belief they tried to communicate to Francis' family. But even if they succeeded, faith in the future did not pay dividends in a present income on which to set up a house. A widow, considering her daughter's future, might well feel a little anxiety, but one can see wheels within wheels of family conclaves and matters to perplex the simple, which drew another letter from Gilbert to Francis. It is a mystic and refreshing thought that I shall never understand blogs. That is the truth of it. That is this remarkable family atmosphere. This temperament with its changing moods and its everlasting will. Its divine trust in one's soul and its tremulous speculations as to one's future. Its sensitiveness like a tempered sword, vibrating but never broken. Its patience that can wait for eternity and its impatience that cannot wait for tea. Its power of bearing huge calamities and its queer little moods that even those calamities can never overshadow or wipe out. Its brusqueness that always pleases and its overtackfulness that sometimes wounds. Its terrific intensity of feeling that sometimes paralyzes the outsider with conversational responsibility. Its untranslatable humor of courage and poverty and its unfathomed epics of past tragedy and triumph. All this glorious confusion of family traits, which in no exaggerated sense make the Gentiles come to your light and the folk of the nations to the brightness of your house, is a thing so utterly outside my own temperament that I was formed by nature to admire and not understand it. God made me very simply as he made a tree or a pig or an oyster to perform certain functions. The best thing he gave me was a perfect and unshakable trust in those I love. Gilbert's sympathy with his future mother-in-law may have been put to some slight strain by an incident related by Lucian Oldershaw. Mrs. Blog begged him to talk to Gilbert about his personal appearance, clothes and such matters, and to entreat him to make an effort to improve it. One can imagine how much he must have disliked the commission. Anyhow he decided it would be better to do it away from home, and he suggested to Gilbert a trip to the seaside. Arrived there he broached the subject. Gilbert, he says, was not the least angry, but answered quite seriously that Francis loved him as he was, and that it would be absurd for him to try to alter. It was also out of the latter and deeper experience of women that he was able to write, a man's friends like him, but they leave him as he is. A man's wife loves him and is always trying to change him. A good many things happened in the course of this long engagement. Francis and Gilbert were both young and long engagements were normal at that period, when the idea of a wife continuing to earn after marriage was unheard of. There were obvious disadvantages in the long delay before marriage, but also certain advantages. The two got to know each other with a close intimacy. They were comrades as well as lovers and carried both these relationships into married life. For the biography, the advantage has been immense, since every separation between the pair meant a batch of letters. The discerning will have noted that there are in these letters considerable excisions. Parts Francis would not show even to the biographer, but they are the richest quarry from which to dig for the most important period of any man's life. The period richest in mental development and the shaping of character. It is too the only period of his adult life when Gilbert wrote letters at all, unless they were absolutely unavoidable. Even in a small family, two members will tend to draw together more closely than the rest, and this was so with Francis and her sister Gertrude. They adored one another, and Francis offered her to Gilbert as a sister, with especially confident pride. He had never had a sister since babyhood, and he enjoyed it. The happiness of the engagement was terribly broken into by the sudden death of Gertrude in a street accident. Francis was absolutely shattered. The next group of letters belongs to the months after Gertrude's death, when Gilbert was still trying to be a publisher, but urged on by Francis, beginning also to be a writer. During part of this time, she had gone abroad for rest and recovery after the shock. Gilbert pictures her reading his letters under the shadow of an alien cathedral. None of these letters are dated, but most of them have kept their postmarks. 11. Baternoster Buildings Postmarked July 8th, 1899 I am black but comely at this moment because the cyclostyle has blackened me. Fear not, I shall wash myself, but I think it might duty to render an accurate account of my physical appearance every time I write, and shall be glad of any advice and assistance. I've been reading Louis Carroll's Remains, mostly logic, and have much pleasure in enlivening you with the following hilarious query. Can a hypothetical, whose protasses is false, be legitimate? Are two hypotheticals of the form, if A, then B, and if A, then not B, compatible? I should think a hypothetical could be if it tried hard. To return to the cyclostyle. I like the cyclostyle ink. It is so inky. I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of paper excites and intoxicates me. The fireiness of fire, the stilliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud is just the same with people. When we call a man manly, or a woman womanly, we touch the deepest philosophy. I will not ask you to forgive this rambling levity. I, for one, have sworn, I do not hesitate to say it, by the sword of God that has struck us, and before the beautiful face of the dead, that the first joke that occurred to me I would make, and the first nonsense poem I thought of I would write, and that I would begin again at once with a heavy heart at times, as to other duties, to the duty of being perfectly silly, perfectly extravagant, perfectly trivial, and as far as possible amusing. I have sworn that Gertrude should not feel, wherever she is, that the comedy has gone out of our theatre. This, I am well aware, will be misunderstood. But I have long grasped that whatever we do, we are misunderstood. Small blame to other people, for, we know ourselves, our best motives are things we could do neither explain nor defend, and I would rather hurt those who can shout than her who is silent. You might tell me what you feel about this, but I am myself absolutely convinced that gaiety, that is the bubble of love, does not annoy me. The old round of stories, laughter, family ceremonies seems to me far less really inappropriate than a single moment of forced silence or unmanly shame. I have always imagined Francis did not know of her mother's efforts to tidy Gilbert, but very early in their engagement she began her own abortive attempts to make him brush his hair, tie his tie straight, and avoid made up ones, attend to the buttons on his coat, and all the rest. It would seem that for a time at any rate, he made some efforts, but evidently, simply regarded the whole thing as one huge joke. 11 Warwick Gardens, postmarked July 9th, 1899. I am clean, I am wearing a frock coat, which from a superficial survey seems to have no end of buttons. It must be admitted that I am wearing a bow tie, but on careful research I find that these were constantly worn by Vikings. A distinct allusion to them is made in that fine fragment, the Tri-Griff-Hassah saga, where the poet says in the short alliterative lines of early Norse poetry. Frock folding then, hack on hard drada, bow tie buckled, wait for war. I resume my appearance as I have suggested in a singularly exemplary. My boots are placed after the fastidious London fashion on the feet, and the laces are done up, the watch is going, the hair is brushed, the sleeve links are inserted, for of such is the kingdom of heaven. As for my straw hat, I put it on eighteen times consecutively, taking a run and a jump to each try, till at last I hit the right angle. I have not taken it off for three days and nights, lest I should disturb that exquisite pose. Ladies, princes, queens, ecclesiastical processions go by in vain, I do not remove it. That angle of the hat is something to mount guard over. As Swineburn says, not twice on earth do the gods do this. It is at present what it is, I believe, called a lovely summer's night. To say that it is hot would be as feeble a platitude as the remark would be in the small talk of Satan and Beeslebub. If there were such a thing as blue hot iron, it would describe the sky tonight. I cannot help dreaming of some wild fairy tale in which the whole round cosmos should be a boiling pot, with the flames of purgatory under it, and that soon I shall have the satisfaction of seeing such a thing as boiled mountains, boiled cities, and a boiled moon and stars. A tremendous picture, yet I am perfectly happy as usual. After all, why should we object to be boiled? Potatoes, for example, are better boiled than raw. Why should we fear to be boiled into new shapes in the cauldron? These things are an allegory. I am so glad to hear you say that in your words it is good for us to be here, where you are at present. The same remark, if I remember right, was made on the mountain of the transfiguration. It has always been one of my unclerical sermons to myself, that that remark, which Peter made on seeing the vision of a single hour, ought to be made by us all, contemplating every panoramic change in the long vision we call life. Other things superficially, but this always in our depths. It is good for us to be here. It is good for us to be here, repeating itself eternally. And if, after many joys and festivals and frivolities, it should be our fate to have to look on, while one of us is, in a most awful sense of the words, transfigured before our eyes, shining with a whiteness of death at least, I think we cannot easily fancy ourselves wishing not to be at our post. Not I certainly. It was good for me to be there. 11 Warwick Gardens, postmarked July 11, 1898. The novel, after which you so kindly inquire, is preceding headlong. It received another indirect stimulus today when Mr. Garnet insisted on taking me out to lunch, gave me a gorgeous repast at a restaurant, succeeded in plucking the secret of my private employment from my bosom, and made me promise to send him some chapters of it. I certainly cannot complain of not being sympathetically treated by the literary man I know. I wonder where the jealous, spiteful, depreciating man of letters we read of in books has got to. It's about time he turned up, I think. Excuse me for talking about these trivialities. I've made a discovery, or I should say, seen a vision. I saw it between two cups of black coffee in a Gaelic restaurant in Soho, but I could not express it if I tried. But this was one thing that it said, that all good things are one thing. There is no conflict between the gravestone of Gertrude and a comic opera tune played by Mildred Wayne. But there is everlasting conflict between the gravestone of Gertrude and the obscene pomposity of the hired mute. And there is everlasting conflict between the comic opera tune and any mean or vulgar words to which it may be set. These, which Manhattan joined together, God shall most surely sunder. That is what I am feeling, now every hour of the day. All good things are one thing. Sunsets, schools of philosophy, babies, constellations, cathedrals, operas, mountains, horses, poems. All these are merely disguises. One thing is always walking among us in fancy dress. In the gray cloak of the church or the green cloak of a meadow. He is always behind. His form makes the folds fall superbly. And that is what the savage old Hebrews, alone among the nations, guessed. And why their rude tribal God has been erected on the ruins of all polytheistic civilizations. For the Greeks and Norsemen and Romans saw the superficial wars of nature and made the sun one God and the sea another in the wind a third. They were not thrilled as some rude Israelite was one night in the wastes alone by the sudden blazing idea of all being the same God. An idea worthy of a detective story. 11 Peter and Esther Buildings, postmarked July 14th, 1899. Costumes slightly improved. The truth is that a mystical and fantastic development has taken place. My clothes have rebelled against me. Weary of scorn and neglect. They have all suddenly come to life and they dress me by force every morning. My frock coat leaps upon me like a lion and hangs on dragging me down. As I struggle my boots trip me up and the laces climb up my feet. Never missing a hole like snakes or creepers. At the same moment the celebrated gray tie springs at my throat like a wildcat. I'm told that the general effects produced by this remarkable psychical development are superb. Really the clothes must know best. Still it is awkward when a Macintosh pursues one down the street. There is nothing in God's earth that really expresses the bottom of the nature of a man in love except burn songs. To the man not in love they must seem inexplicably simple. When he says my love is like the melody that's sweetly played in tune it seems almost a crude way of referring to music. But a man in love with a woman feels a nerve move suddenly the Dante, Groupe IV and Shakespeare hardly touched. What made me think of burns however was that one of the simple and sudden things hitting the right nail so that it rings occurs in the song of Oh Ah the Arts The Wind Can Blow where he merely says that there is nothing beautiful anywhere but it makes him think of the woman. That is not really a mere aesthetic fancy, a chain of sentimental association. It is an actual instinctive elemental movement of the mind performed automatically and instantly. Felix though, undated. I have as you see arrived here, I have done other daring things such as having my hair shampooed as you commanded and also cut. The effect of this is so singularly horrible that I have found further existence in London impossible. Public opinion is too strong for me. There are many other reasons I could give for being pleased to come such as that I have some time for writing the novel. That I can make up stories that don't intend to write. That there are phosphorescent colors on the sea and a box of cigarettes on the mantelpiece. Some fragments of what I felt about Gertrude's death have struggled out in the form of some verses which I am writing out for you. But the real strength, I don't like the word comfort, for real peace. No human words are much good except perhaps some of the unfathomable, unintelligible, unconquerable epigrams of the Bible. I remember when Bentley had a burning boyish admiration for Professor Huxley and when the scientist died some foolish friend asked him to write flippantly in a letter what he felt about it. Bentley replied with the chapter in verse reference to one of the Psalms alone on a postcard. The text was, Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of one of his saints. The friend I remember thought it a curious remark about Huxley. It strikes me as a miraculous remark about anybody. It is one of those magic sayings where every word hits a chain of association. God knows how. Precious, we could not say that Gertrude's death is happy or providential or sweet or even perhaps good. But it is something. Beautiful is a good word, but precious is the only right word. It is this passionate sense of the value of things, of the richness of the cosmic treasure, the world where every star is a diamond, every leaf an emerald, every drop of blood a ruby. It is this sense of preciousness that is really awakened by the death of his saints. Somehow we feel that even their death is a thing of incalculable value and mysterious sweetness. It is awful, tragic, desolating, desperately hard to bear, but still precious. Forgive the verbosity of one whose trade it is to express the inexpressible. The verses he speaks of in this letter Francis treasured greatly. She showed them to me in a book which opens with a very touching prayer in her own writing. In a later chapter I quote lines in which Gilbert writes of his own tone deafness and of how he saw what music meant as he watched his wife's face. Something of the same effect is produced on me by these verses. Gilbert was of course not tone deaf to this tragedy, yet it was chiefly in its effect on Francis that it affected him. The sudden sorrow smote my love that often falls to kiss and kiss. And looking forth the while she said, can no man tell me where she is? And again, stricken they sat and through them moved, my own dear lady pale and sweet. The soul whose clearness makes afraid are souls this holy guiltless one. No cobweb doubts, no passion smoke avail this mirror from thy son. In letters to Francis he could enter so deeply into her grief as to make it his own. But when he wrote verse and spoke as if it were to himself or to God, the reflected emotion was not enough. These verses could never rank with the real poetry. It was not possible in fact for a man so happily in love to dwell lastingly on any sorrow. And I cannot avoid the feeling that quite apart from any theory, cheerfulness was constantly breaking in. For Gilbert was a very happy man. Across the top of one of his letters is written, you can always tell the real love from the slight by the fact that the latter weakens at the moment of success. The former is quadrupled. The next of his letters is a mingling of the comic and the fantastic. Very special to GKC. 11, Pattern Oster Buildings, postmark September 29th, 1899. I fear as you say that my letters do not contain many practical details about myself. The letters are not very long to begin with, as I think it better to write something every day than a long letter when I have leisure. And when I have little time to think in, I always think of the cosmos first and the ego afterwards. I admit, however, that you are not engaged to the cosmos, dear me. What a time the cosmos would have. All its comets would have their hair brushed every morning. The whirlwind would be adjured not to walk about when it was talking. The oceans would be warmed with hot water pipes. Not even the lowest forms of life would escape the crusade of tidiness. You would walk around and around the jellyfish, looking for a place to put it in shirtlinks. Under these circumstances then, I cannot but regard it as fortunate that you are only engaged to your obedient microcosm. A biped inheriting some of the traits of his mother, the cosmos, its untidiness, its largeness, its irritating imperfection, and its profound and hearty intention to go on existing as long as it possibly can. I can understand what you mean about wanting details about me, for I want just the same about you. You need only tell me, I went down the street to a pillar box. I shall know that you did it in a manner blindingly, staggeringly, crazily beautiful. It is quite true, as you say, that I am a person wearing certain clothes with a certain kind of hair. I cannot get rid of the impression that there is something scorchingly sarcastic about the underlying of this passage. As to what I do every day, it depends on which way you want it narrated. What we all say it is or what it really is. What we all say happens every day is this. I wake up, dress myself, eat bacon and bread and coffee for breakfast. I walk up to High Street Station. Take a four-penny ticket for Black Friars. Read the chronicle in the train. Arrive at 11 Pattern Oster buildings. Read a manuscript called The Leppers, like comedy reading, and another called the Preparation of Ryerson Embry. Read the style till 2 o'clock. Go out to lunch, have, but here perhaps it would be safer to become vague. Come back, work till 6, take my hat, and walking stick, and come home. Have dinner at home, write the novel until 11, then write to you and go to bed. That is what we in our dreamy deluded way really imagine is the thing that happens. But what really happens, but are we observed, is as follows. Out of the starless night of the uncreated, that was before the stars, a soul begins to grop back to light. It gropes its way through strange half-lighted chambers of dreams, where in a brown and gold twilight it sees many things that are dimly significant. True stories twisted into new and amazing shapes, human beings whom it knew long ago. Sitting at the windows by dark sunsets or talking in dim meadows, but the awful invading light grows stronger in the dreams till the soul in one last struggle plunges into a body, as into a house, and wakes up within it. Then he rises and finds himself in a wonderful vast world of white light and clear, frankly colored shapes and an inheritor of a million stars. An inquiry is formed that his name is Gilbert Keith Chesterton. This amuses him. He goes through a number of extraordinary and fantastic rituals, which the pompous elf land he has entered demands. The first is that he shall get inside a house of clothing, a tower of wool and flax, that he shall put on this foolish armor solemnly, one piece after another, and each in its right place. The things called sleeve links he attends to minutely. His hair he beats angrily with a bristly tool. For this is the law. Downstairs a more monstrous ceremony attends him. He has to put things inside himself. He does so being naturally polite, nor can it be denied that a weird satisfaction follows. He takes a sword in his hand for what may not be fallen in so strange a country and goes forth. He finds a hole in the wall, a little cave wherein sits one who can give him the charm that rules the horse of water and fire. He finds an opening and descends into the bowels of the earth. Down among the roots of the eternal hills, he finds a sunless temple wherein he prays, and in the center of it he finds a lighted temple in which he enters. Then there are noises as of an earthquake and smoke and fire in the darkness, and when he opens the door again he is in another temple, out of which he climbs into another world, leagues and leagues away. And when he asks the meaning of the vision, they talk gibberish and say, it is a train. So the day goes full of eerie publishers and elfin clerks, till he returns and again puts things inside him, and then sits down and makes men in his own head and writes down all that they said and did. And last of all comes the real life itself. For half an hour he writes words upon a scrap of paper, words that are not picked and chosen like those that he has used to parry the strange talk of the folk all day, but words in which the soul's blood pours out, like the body's blood from a wound. He writes secretly this mad diary, all his passion and longing, all his queer religion, his dark and dreadful gratitude to God, his idle allegories, the tales that tell themselves in his head, the joy that comes on him sometimes, he cannot help it, at the sacred intoxication of existence, the million faults of idleness and recklessness, and the one virtue of the unconquered adoration of goodness, that dark virtue that every man has and hides deeper than all his vices. He writes all this down as he is writing it down, and he knows that he sticks it down and puts a stamp on it and drops it into the mouth of a little red goblin at the corner of the street. He knows that all this wild soliloquy will be poured into the soul of one wise and beautiful lady sitting far away beyond seas and rivers and cities under the shadow of an alien cathedral. This is not all so irrelevant as you may think. It was this line of feeling that taught me an utter rationalist as far as dogma goes, the lesson of the entire spirituality of things, an opinion that nothing has ever shattered since. I can't express myself on the point, nobody can, but it is only the spirituality of things that we are sure of, that the eyes in your face are eyes I do not know. They may have other names and uses. I know that they are good or beautiful or rather spiritual. I do not know on what principle the universe has run. I know or feel that it is good or spiritual. I do not know what Gertrude's death was. I know that it was beautiful for I saw it. We do not feel that it is so beautiful now. Why? Because we do not see it now. What we see now is our absence, but our death is not our absence, but our presence somewhere else. That is what we knew was beautiful, as long as we could see it. Do not be frightened, dearest, by the slow, inevitable laws of human nature. We shall climb back into the mountain of vision, we shall be able to use the word with the accent of Whitman, disembodied, triumphant, dead. In the notebook he was writing, There is a heart within a distant town who loves me more than treasure or renown. Think you at strange and where it is a crown. It is not the marvel here that sense the kiss and dizzy glories of that blinding bliss. One grief has ever touched me after this. We see Gilbert in the next two letters more concerned about a grand dinner of the J.D.C. than about his future fame and fortune. In the second he mentions almost casually that he is leaving Fisher Unwin. From now on he was to live by his pen. 11 Warwick Gardens, West. Tuesday night, 3rd of October 1899. Nothing very astonishing has happened yet, though many astonishing things will happen soon. The final perfection of humanity I expect shortly. The speaker for this week, the first of the new speaker is coming out soon, and may contain something of mine, though I cannot be quite sure. A rush of the boers on Natal, strategically quite possibly successful, is anticipated by politicians. The rising of the sun tomorrow morning is predicted by astronomers. My father again is engaged in the crucial correspondence with Fisher Unwin. At least it has begun by T.F.U., stating his proposed terms, a rise of five. From October, another rise possible but undefined in January. 10% royalty for the Paris book and expenses for a fortnight in Paris. These, as I got my father to hardly agree, are vitiated to the bone as terms by the absence of any assurance that I shall have to write Paris, for which I am really paid nothing outside the hours of work for which I am paid, 25. In short, the net result would be that instead of gaining more liberty to rise in the literary world, I should be selling the small liberty of rising that I have now for five more shillings. This my father is declining in asking for a better settlement. The diplomacy is worrying, yet I enjoy it. I feel like Mr. Chamberlain on the eve of war. I would stop with T.F.U. for a hundred pounds a year but not for less, which means I think that I shall not stop at all. But all these revolutions, literary, financial and political, fade into insignificance compared with the one really tremendous event of this week. It will take place on Saturday next. The sun will stand still upon Lester Square and the moon on the valley of Warder Street, for then will assemble the grand commemorative meeting of the junior debating club. The secretary, Mr. L. R. F. Oldershaw, will select a restaurant, make arrangements and issue the proclamations, or to use the venerable old club phrase, the Ritz. When this gorgeous function is over, we must expect a colossal letter. Every one of the old brotherhoods scattered over many cities and callings has hailed the invitation in his coming, with the exception of Bentley, who will send a sensational telegram from Paris. The fund is expected to be fast and furious. The undercurrent of emotion, 12 years old, is not likely to be much disguised. As I say, I will write you a sumptuous description of it. It is somewhat your do for the thing is, and always will be, one of the main strands of my life. None can say what will occur. It is one of those occasions when Englishmen are not much more like the pictures of them in the continental satires. There is more in this old affair of ours than possibly meets the eye. It is a thing that has left its roots deep in the hearts of 12 strangely different men. And now that 7 of us have found the new life that can only be found in women, it would mean indeed not to turn back and thank the old. 11. Warwick Gardens West This is the colossal letter. I trust you will excuse me if the paper is conceived on a similar scale of Babylonian immensity. I cannot make out exactly whether I did or did not post a letter I wrote to you on Saturday. If I did not I apologize for missing the day. If I did, you will know by this time one or two facts that may interest you, the chief of which is that I am certainly leaving Fisher Unwin with much mutual courtesy and goodwill. This fact may interest you. I repeat, at this moment I am not sure whether it interests me. For my head, to say nothing of another organ, is filled with the thundering cheers and songs of the dinner on Saturday night. It was, I may say, without hesitation a breathless success. Chamele, who must be experienced being both a schoolmaster, a diner out and a clever man, told me he had never in his life heard 11 better speeches. I quite agree with him merely adding his own. Everyone was amusing and what is much better singularly characteristic. Will you forgive me, dearest, if I reel off to the only soul that can be trusted to enjoy my enjoyment, a kind of report of the meeting. I will revivify my own memories. One thing at least that I said in my speech I thoroughly believed in. If there is any prayer I should be inclined to make, it is that I should forget nothing in my life. The proceedings opened with dinner. The illustrated menus were wildly appreciated. Every person got all the rest to sign on the menu and then took it away as a memento. Then the telegrams from Kruger, Chamberlain, Dreyfus and George Meredith were read. Then I proposed the toast of the Queen. I merely said that nothing could ever be alleged against the Queen except the fact that she is not a member of the JDC and that I thought it spoke well for the chivalry of Englishmen that with this fact she had never been publicly taunted. I said I knew that the virtues of Queen Victoria had become somewhat platitudinous, but I thought it was a fortunate country in which the virtues of its powerful ones are platitudes. The toast was then drunk. After a pause and a little conversation I called upon Lawrence Solomon to propose the toast of the school. He was very amusing indeed. Most of his speech would not be very comprehensible to an outsider for it largely consisted of an ingenious dovetailing of the sentences in the Latin and Greek Arnold. I shall never forget the lucid and precise enunciation with which he delivered the idiotic sentences in those works, more especially where he said such a course would be more agreeable to Mr. Chamele, and I would rather gratify such a man as he than see the king of the Persians. Chamele, midroars of welcome, rose to respond. I think I must have told you in a former letter that Chamele is a former classmaster of ours, a former hostmaster of Bentley's and one of the nicest men at St. Paul's. We invited him as the only visitor. He said, a great deal that was very amusing. Mostly a commentary on Solomon's remarks about the Latin Arnold. One remark he made was that he possessed one particular Latin Arnold, formerly the property of the president which he had withdrawn from him with every expression of contumely, because it was drawn all over with devils. He made some very sound remarks about the image against St. Paul's school that it was aridly scholastic without spontaneous growth in culture or sentiment. Then, Fordham proposed the ladies. He was killing. Fordham is a personality whom I think you do not know him. He was one of the most profoundly humorous men I ever knew. But his humor is more thickly coated on him, so to speak, than Bentley or Oldershawe. For example, it is much more difficult than Englishmen I ever knew. Strong, generous, flippant on principle, rowdy by physical inspiration, successful, popular, married, a man to discharge all the normal functions of life well. But his most entertaining gift, which he displayed truly sumptuously on this occasion, is a wonderful gift of burlesque and stereotyped rhetoric. With melodramatic gestures he drew attention to the torrents of the president's blood pouring from the wound of the tiny god. In a dramatic demonstration, he protested against the pathos of the toast. The conquered on the field of battle toasting the conquerors. As the only married member of the club, he ventured to give us some advice on A. Food. B. Education. C. Intercourse. He sat down in a pure whirlwind of folly without saying a word about the feeling that we're in all hearts, including his own just then. But I was delighted to find that marriage had not taken away an inch of his incurable silliness. Nothing could be a greater contrast than the few graceful and dignified but very restrained words in which Bertram responded to the toast. He is not a man who cares to make fun of women, however genially. Then came Langdon Davies, whom I called upon to propose the club. His was perhaps the most interesting case of all. When I knew Langdon Davies in the junior debating club, he was one of the most frivolous young men I ever knew. But knowing that he was a good speaker in a light style, it had been president of the Cambridge Union. I put him down to propose the club, thinking that we should have enough serious speaking and would be well to err on the side of entertainment. Langdon Davies got up and proceeded to deliver a speech that made me jump. It was, I thought, the best speech of the evening, but I am sure it was the most serious, the most sympathetic and a long way from the most frankly emotional. He said that the club was not now a club in the strict sense. It was two things, preeminently and everlastingly a memory and an influence. He spoke with a singular sort of subdued vividness of the influence the club had had on him in boyhood. He then turned to the history of the club and here my dearest lady, I am pained to have to report that he launched suddenly and dramatically into a most extraordinary and apparently quite sincere eulogym upon myself and the influence I had on my school follows. I will not repeat his words. I did not believe them, but they took me by surprise and shook me somewhat. Mr. B. N. Langdon Davies, I may remark and yourself are the only persons who have ever employed the word genius in connection with me. I trust it will not occur again. I replied, my speech was a medley, but it appeared very successful. I discussed largely the absence of any successor to the JDC. I described how I watched the boys leaving school today, a solitary figure clad in the latest fashion, mudally pacing the Hammersmith Road and asked myself, where among these is the girlish gush of Bentley, the passionate vulnerability of a vernair and the half ethereal shyness of Fordham. I admitted that we had had misfortunes. One of us had a serious illness, another had had a very good story in the strand magazine, but I thought that a debating club of twelve members that had given three presidents to the university unions had not done badly. The rest was sentimental, then began a most extraordinary game of battle door and shuttle cock. Vernet proposed the secretary, Mr. Oldershaw, Mr. Oldershaw instead of replying properly, proposed Mr. Bentley and the absent members. Waldo responded for these, or rather instead of responding, proposed Mr. Morris Solomon, Mr. Morris Solomon instead of responding proposed Mr. Salter. The latter was the only one who had not spoken in on rising and explained his reasons for refusing. He had not been in the same room with Mr. Chumily, he said since he had sat five years ago in the lower fourth, and Mr. Chumily had told him that he talked too much. He had no desire in his first reappearance to create in Mr. Chumily's mind the idea that he had been at it ever since. After this we passed on to singing a nearly brought down the roof on Pinoli's restaurant. Chamele, the awful being whose classic taste in Greek iambics I once stood in law, sang with great feeling, a fragment of lyric literature of which the following was as far as I remember the refrain. Singing Charalee, Charalee Tiddity, also Charalee Charalee Te, enchanting Charalee Charalee Tiddity, not forgetting Charalee Charalee Day. For not saying a Sussex Pothouse chorus in an indolent and refined way, which was exquisitely incongruous, Waldo and Langdon Davies also sang, I recited an ode which I had written for the occasion, and Lucien recited one of Bentley's poems that came out in an Oxford magazine. Then we sang the anthem of the JDC, of which the words are I am a member, I am a member, member of the JDC, I belong to it forever, don't you wish that you were me. It was sung to the tune of Clementine. Then we paid the bill, then we borrowed each other's arms and legs in an extricable tangle and sang Old Lang Sin. Then we broke up. There now, five mortal pages of writing and nothing about you in it. How relieved you must be, reared out with illusions to your hair and your soul and your clothes and your eyes, and yet it has been every word of it about you really. I like to make my past vivid to you, especially this past, not only because it was on the whole a fine, healthy, foolish, manly, enthusiastic, idiotic past, but with the very soul of youth in it. Not only because I am a victim of the prejudice common I trust to all mankind that no one ever had such friends as I had. Readers of the autobiography will remember that many, many years later at the celebration of a lair block 60th birthday, the guests threw the ball to one another in just this same fashion. Chesterton had by then so far forgotten this earlier occasion that he spoke of the bellic birthday party that he was going to enter in his life at which he had made a speech. Two more extracts from his letters must be given showing the efforts made by Francis to look after Gilbert and his reactions. One of his friends remarked that Gilbert's life was unique in that never having left home for a boarding school or university he passed from the care of his mother to the care of his wife. I think too that the degree of his physical helplessness affected all who came near him with the feeling that while actually it was their task to look after a body that would otherwise be wholly neglected. The old religionists used to talk about a man being a fool for Christ's sake. Certainly I have been a blithering fool for your sake. I went to see the doctor as you request it. He asked me what he could do for me. I told him I hadn't the least idea but people thought my cold had been going on long enough. He said I have no doubt it has. He then in some relief to the idiotic futility of the situation wrote me a prescription which I read on my way up to business. Weeping over the pathetic parts and laughing hardly at the funny ones. I have since had some of it. It tastes pretty aimless. I cannot remember for certain whether I mentioned in my letter that I had had an invitation including yourself from my Aunt Kate for this Friday. As you do not refer to it I expect I didn't. So I wrote to her both our thanks and explaining the state of affairs. All is over I said between that lady and myself. Do not name her to me lest the hideous word woman should blind me to this seraphic word aunt. My life is a howling waste. But what matter ha ha ha. I cannot remember my exact words of course. I am a revolting object. My hair is a matted chaos spread all over the floor my beard is like a hard broom. My necktie is on the wrong way up. My bootlaces trail halfway down fleet street. Why not? When one's attempts at reformation are not much believed in what other course is open but a contemptuous relapse into liberty. Your last letter makes me much happier. I put great faith in the healing power of the great winds and the sun. Nature as Walt Whitman says and her primal sanities. Mrs. S also is a primal sanity. It is not I believe considered complimentary in a common way to approach an attractive lady and say pleasantly you are thousands of years old or you seem to me as old as the mountains therefore I do not say it but I always feel that anyone beautiful and strong is really old for the really old things are not decrepit decrepit things are dying early the Roman Empire was decrepit a sunrise cloud is old so I think there are some people who even in their youth seem to have existed always they bear the mark of the elemental things the things that recur there is old as springtime as old as daybreak as old as youth end of chapter 9 Chapter 10 Part 1 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton This is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Candace Tuttle Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward Chapter 10 Part 1 Who is GKC The Boer War and the whole country enthusiastically behind it the Liberal Party as a whole went with the Conservatives the leading Fabians Bernard Shaw Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb Hubert Gland Cecil Chesterton and the semi-detached Fabian H.G. Wells were likewise for the war only a tiny minority remained in opposition most of whom were pacifists or cranks of one kind or another to the same minority of this minority Gilbert found himself belonging it is something of a tribute to the national feeling at such a moment of tension that as an American has noted Chesterton was the one British writer utterly unknown before who built up a great reputation and it was gained not through nationalistic support but through determined and persistent opposition to British policy in his daily news column a correspondent later asked him to define his position Chesterton replied the unreasonable patriot is one who sees the faults of his fatherland with an eye which is clearer than any eye of hatred the eye of an irrational and irrevocable love his attitude sprang he claimed not from defect but from excess of patriotism it is hard to imagine anything that would clarify better the ideas of a strong mind than finding itself in opposition this opposition began at home in argument with Cecil later the two brothers would agree about most main issues but now Cecil was a Tory Democrat Gilbert a pro-bore and what was known as a little Englander the tie between the two brothers was very close as the innocent child developed into the combative companion there is no doubt that he proportionately affected Gilbert all their friends talk of the endless amicable arguments through which both grew Conrad Noel remembers parties at Warwick Gardens during the Boer War at which the two brothers would walk up and down like the two pistons of an engine to the disorganization of the company and the dismay of their parents it was at this time that Francis engaged to a deeply devoted Gilbert found even that devotion insufficient to pry him and Cecil apart when an argument had got well under way I must go home Gilbert I shall miss my train usually he would have sprung to accompany her but now she must miss many trains before the brothers could be separated Francis told me that when they were at the seaside the landlady would sometimes clear away breakfast leaving the brothers arguing come to set lunch and later set dinner while still they argued they had come to the seaside but never saw the sea Francis was staying with them at a house they had taken by the sea her room was next to Cecil's and she could not sleep for the noise of the discussion that went on hour after hour about one in the morning she wrapped on the wall and said oh Cecil do send Gilbert to bed a brief silence followed and then the remark in a rather abashed voice there's no one here Cecil had been arguing with himself Gilbert too argued with himself for the stand he was taking was a hard one Mr. Bellick has told me that he felt Gilbert suffered at any word against England that his patriotism was passionate and now he had himself to say that he believed his country to be in the wrong to admit it to himself to state it to others this autumn of 1899 G.K. began to write for the speaker the weekly of this title had long been in a languishing condition when it was taken over by a group of young liberals of very marked views Hammond became editor and Philip Coman's car sub editor Sir John Simon was among the group for a short while but he soon told one of them that he feared close association with the speaker might injure his career F.Y. Eccles was in charge of the review department he is able to date the start of what was known as the new speaker with great exactitude for when the first number was going to press the ultimatum had been sent to Kruger and the editors hesitated as to whether they should take the risk of announcing that it was war in South Africa they decided against it but before their second number appeared war had been declared my difficulty in getting a picture of the first meeting of Bellick and Chesterton illustrates the problem of human testimony and the limits of that problem for I imagine a scripture critic old style would end by concluding that the men never met at all F.Y. Eccles E.C. Bentley and Lucian Oldershaw all claimed to have made the momentous introduction Mr. Eccles adding that it took place at the office of the speaker while Gilbert himself has described the meeting twice once in the street once in a restaurant Bellick remembers the introduction as made in the year 1900 by Lucian Oldershaw who was living at the time with Hammond Mr. Oldershaw usually has the accuracy of the hero worshipper and upon this matter he adds several amusing details for some time he had been trying to get the group on the speaker to read Chesterton and had in vain taken several articles to the office Mr. Eccles declared the handwriting was that of a Jew and he prejudiced Bellick, says Oldershaw against reading anything written by my Jew friend but when at last they did meet Bellick opened the conversation by saying in his most pontifical manner Chesterton you write very well Chesterton was then 26 Bellick four years older it was at Mont Blanc a restaurant in Gerard Street Soho and the meeting was celebrated with a bottle of Moulin avant the first description given by Gilbert himself is at once earlier and more vivid than the better known one in the autobiography when I first met Bellick he remarked to the friend who introduced us that he was in low spirits his low spirits were and are much more uproarious and enlivening than anybody else's high spirits he talked into the night and left behind in it a glowing track of good things when I have said that I mean things that are good and certainly not merely Beaumont I have said all that can be said in the most serious aspect about the man who has made the greatest fight for good things of all the men of my time we met between a little Soho paper shop and a little Soho restaurant his arms and pockets with French nationalist and French atheist newspapers he wore a straw hat shading his eyes which are like a sailors and emphasizing his Napoleonic chin the little restaurant to which we went had already become a haunt for three or four of us who held strong but unfashionable views about the South African war which was then in its earliest prestige most of us were writing on the speaker what he brought into our dream was this Roman appetite for reality and for reason and action and when he came into the door there entered with him the smell of danger it was from that dingy little Soho cafe Chesterton writes in the autobiography that there emerged the quadruped the twy formed monster Mr. Shaw has nicknamed the Chester Bellock listening to Bellock is intoxicating I have heard many brilliant talkers but none to whom that word can so justly be applied he goes to your head he takes you off your feet he leaves you breathless he can convince you of anything my mother and brother both counted it as one of the great experiences of their lives to have dined with Bellock in a small Paris restaurant Au Vaudon de Bougogne and then to have walked with him the streets of that glorious city while he discoursed of its past imagination staggers before the picture of a bellock in his full youth and vigor in a group fitted to strike from him his brightest fire at a moment big with issues for the world's future in Chesterton's autobiography a chapter is devoted to the portrait of a friend while bellock in turn has something of Chesterton in obituary notices and also in a brief study of his position in English literature none of these documents give much notion of the intellectual flames struck out by one mind against the other it is often been asked how much bellock influenced Chesterton the best test of an influence in a writer's life is to compare what he wrote before with what he wrote after he was first subjected to it it is easy to apply this test to bellock's influence on GKC because of the mass we still have of his boyhood writings in pure literature in philosophy and theology he remains untouched by the faintest change pages from the notebook could be woven into orthodoxy essays from the debater introduced into the Victorian age in literature and it would look simply like buds and flowers on the same bush bellock has characterized himself as ignorant of English literature and says he learnt from Chesterton most of what he knows of it whereas no doubt Chesterton was by far the greater philosopher with politics, sociology and history and the relation of religion to all three it is different bellock himself told me he thought the chief thing he had done for Chesterton when they first met was to open his eyes to reality Chesterton had been unusually young for his 26 years and unusually simple in regard to the political scene he was in fact the young man he himself was later to describe as knowing all about politics and nothing about politicians the four years between the two men seemed greater than it was partly because of bellock's more varied experience of life French military training life at Oxford wide travel and an early marriage bellock then could teach Chesterton a certain realism about politics far more valuable however was what bellock had to give him in sociology we have seen that G.K. was already dissatisfied with socialism before he met bellock it may be that by his consideration of the nature of man he would later have reached the positions so individually set out in what's wrong with the world but this can only remain a theoretical question for bellock did actually this state answer the sociological question that Chesterton at this state was putting answered it brilliantly and answered it truly every test that G.K. could later apply of profound human reality of truth divinely revealed convinced him that the answer was true he had, he has told us been a socialist because it was so horrible not to be one but he now learned of the historical Christian alternative equally opposed to socialism and to capitalism well distributed property this had worked in the past was still working in many European countries could be made to work again in England the present trend appeared to bellock to be toward the servile state and in the book with this title and a second book The Restoration of Property he later developed his sociology after this meeting two powerful and very different minds would reciprocally influence one another an admirer of both told me that he thought Chesterton got the idea of small property from bellock but gave bellock a fuller realization of the position of the family one difference between them is that bellock writes sociology as a text book while Chesterton writes it as a human document all the wealth of imagination that bellock pours into the path to Rome or the four men he sternly excludes from the servile state the poet, traveller, essayist is one man the sociologist another the third field of influence was history here bellock did Chesterton two great services he restored the proportion of English history and he put England back into its context since the Reformation English history had been written with all the stress of the Protestant period Lingard had written earlier but had not been popularized and certainly would not be used at St. Paul's school and even Lingard had laid little stress on the social effects of the Reformation Mr. Hammond's contemporary work on English social history fitted into bellock's more vivid documented vision none of this could be disregarded by later writers bellock too restored that earlier England to the Christendom to which it belonged the England of Macaulay or of Green had, like Mr. Mantellini's Dowager, either no outline or a demmed outline for it was cut out of a larger map and Chesterton was always seeking an outline of history to get England back into the context of Christendom a great thing just how great must depend upon how rightly Christendom is conceived one cannot always escape the feeling that bellock conceives it too narrowly his famous phrase the faith is Europe and Europe is the faith omits too much the east out of which Christianity came the new worlds into which Europe has flowed bellock of course knows these things and has often said them it is rather a question of emphasis of how things loom in the mind when judgments have to be made in that sense he does tend to narrow the faith to Europe in exactly the same sense he does tend to narrow Europe to France born in France of a French father educated in England bellock chose his mother's nationality chose to be English but his creator had chosen differently and there is not much a man who can do in competition with his creator I do not for a moment suggest that bellock having chosen to be English is conscious of anything but loyalty to the country of his adoption the thing lies far below the mind's conscious movements bellock thinks of himself as an Englishman with a patriotic duty to criticize his country but his feelings are not really those of an Englishman once at least he recognized this when he wrote the verse when first they talked of the church he told bellock that he wanted the example of someone entirely English who should nonetheless have come in when criticizing his country his voice has the note of pain that only love can give bellock saw him as intensely national English of the English a mirror of England he writes with an English accent it is of some interest that after meeting bellock Gilbert added notes to two early poems each note reflecting a judgment of bellocks on the dryfus case which bellock saw as all French Catholic saw it on Anglo-American relations which bellock saw as most Latin Europeans would see it the first was the poem entitled to a certain nation addressed to France in commentary on the dryfus case of 1899 which must be briefly explained for those who are too young to remember Captain Dryfus a Jewish officer in the French army had been found guilty of treachery and sent to Devil's Island all France was divided into two camps on the question of his guilt or innocence in general Catholics and what we should call the right were for his guilt atheists, anti-clericals and believers in the Republic were for his innocence passions were roused to fury on both sides English opinion was almost entirely for his innocence I was a small girl at the time and I remember that my brother and I amused ourselves by crying viva dryfus on all possible and impossible occasions for the annoyance of our pious French governess I remember also that our parents were startled by the vehemence of the French Catholic paper Lacroix from which our governess imbibed her views Ultimately the case was reopened and Dryfus, after years of horror on Devil's Island found not guilty and restored to his rank in the army but there are I know Catholic French men alive today who refused to believe in his innocence and hold that the whole thing was a Jewish Masonic plot that hampered the French espionage service and nearly lost us the war of 1914 In the first edition of the Wild Night written before the meeting with Bellick Gilbert, like any other English liberal had assumed Dryfus's innocence and in the poem To a Certain Nation had reproached the France of the Revolution the France he had loved as unworthy of herself and we who knew thee once we have a right to weep The note in the second edition shows him as now undecided about Dryfus's guilt and concludes there may have been a fog of injustice in the French courts I know that there was a fog of injustice in the English newspapers In an alliance Chesterton had gloried in the blood of Hengist and hemmed an Anglo-American alliance with the enthusiasm of a young Republican who took for granted the links of language and of origin that might draw together two great countries into something significant In change Clips and peril under the whole world scorn by blood and death and darkness the Saxon peace is sworn that all our fruit be gathered and all our race take hands and the sea be a Saxon river that runs through Saxon lands but in the note to the second edition he says in the matter of the Anglo-American alliance I have come to see that our hopes of brotherhood with America are the same in kind as our hopes of brotherhood with any other of the great independent nations of Christendom and a very small study of history was sufficient to show me that the American nation which is a hundred years old is at least fifty years older than the Anglo-Saxon race the poem was of course only a boyish expression of a boyish dream like all dreams like all boyhood dreams especially much yet it contained a thought that might well have borne rich fruit in Gilbert's Catholic life my mother told me once that when after three years study of Queen Elizabeth's character she came to a different conclusion from Belec she found it almost impossible to resist his power and hold on to her own view it must be realized that Chesterton actually preferred the attitude of a disciple a mutual friend has told me that Chesterton listened to Belec all the time and said very little himself in matters historical where he felt his own ignorance Gilbert's tendency was simply to make an act of faith in Belec on nothing were the two men more healthily in accord than on the Boer War in an interesting study of Belec prefixed to a French translation of contemporary England F. Y. Eccles explains how he and most of the speaker group differed from the pacifist pro-boers who hated the South African war because they hated all wars the young liberals on the speaker were not pacifists they hated the war because they thought it would harm England harm her morally to be fighting for an unjust cause and even materially to be shedding the blood of her sons and pouring out her wealth of alien financiers thus far Gilbert was among one group with whom he was in fullest sympathy but I think he went further Mr. Eccles told me that most of the speaker group had no sympathy with the boers Gilbert had he thought of them as human beings who might well have been farmers of Sussex or of Kent something of an older civilization resisting money power thereby few indeed of the liberal party held Chesterton's ideal an England, territorially small spiritually great the speaker was struggling against odds it was the voice of a tiny group to Gilbert it seemed that this mattered nothing so long as that little group held to their great ideas so long as the paper represented not merely a group or a party but the liberal idea in an unfinished letter to Hammond is to be found this idea as he saw it and his dawning disappointment even with the paper that most nearly stood for it I am just about to commit a serious impertinence I believe however that you will excuse it because it is about the paper and I know that there is not another paper dead or alive for which I would take the trouble or run the risk of offence I am hearing on all sides the paper complained of by the very people who should be and would be, if they could its enthusiastic supporters and I cannot altogether deny the truth of their objections though I am glad to notice both in them and in myself the fact that those objections are tacitly based on the assumption of the speaker having an aim and standard higher than other papers if the speaker were a mere party rag like Judy it would be only remarkable for moderation but to us who have built hopes on it as the pioneer of a younger and larger political spirit it is difficult to be silent when we find it as it seems to us poisoned with that spirit of ferocious triviality which is the spirit of Birmingham eloquence and with that evil instinct which has disintegrated the Irish party the instinct for hating the man who differs from you slightly than the man who differs from you altogether of two successive numbers during the stress of the fight a fight in which we had first to unite our army and then to use it a considerable portion was devoted first to sneering at the daily news and then to sneering at the Westminster Gazette there is a sentence in the book of Proverbs which expresses the whole of my politics for the liberal man who lives at liberal things and by his liberality he shall stand now what I object to is sneering at the Westminster as a supporter of Chamberlain when everyone knows that it hardly lets a day pass without an ugly caricature of him what I object to in this is that it is talking brimudjum it is not devising liberal things but spiteful superficial illiberal things and temporary deception of the patriotism before politics order to all this you will say there is an obvious answer the speaker is a party paper and does not profess to be otherwise but here I am sure we are mistaking our mission what the speaker is I hope and believe destined to do is to renovate liberalism and though liberalism like every other party conducted by claptrap it has never been renovated by claptrap but by great command of temper and the persistent exposition of persuasive and unanswerable truths it is while we are in the desert that we have the vision we being a minority must be all philosophers we must think for both parties in the state it is no good our devoting ourselves to the flowers of mob oratory with no mob to address them to we must like the free traders for instance have discoveries definite truths and endless patience in explaining them we must be more than a political party or we shall cease to be one time and again in history victory has come to a little party with big ideas but can anyone conceive anything with the mark of death more on its brow than a little party with little ideas such liberalism was not perhaps of this world it certainly was not of the liberal party Gilbert argued much with himself during these years he had come out of his time of trial with firm faith in God and in man but his philosophy was still in the making and he made it largely out of the material supplied by ordinary London suburban society and by the rather less than usual society of cranks and enthusiasts so plentiful at the end of the 19th century he has written in the autobiography of the artistic and dilettante groups where everyone discussed religion and no one practiced it of the Christian socialists and other societies into which he and Cecil found their way and some of the friendships they formed among these one of the closest was with Conrad Knoll who wrote an answer to my request for his recollections we met G. K. C. for the first time at the Staples in Bloomsbury Square at a series of meetings of the Christotheosophic society he was like a very big fish out of water he was comparatively thin however in those days nearly 40 years ago we had been much intrigued by the weekly contribution of an unknown writer to the speaker and the nation, brilliant work and my wife and I independently came to the conclusion when we heard this young man speak that it must be he the style was unmistakable I thought of writing him to congratulate him on his speech but before I could do so I got a letter from him saying that he was coming to hear me in the same series in a week or so it was thus we first became acquainted and the acquaintance ripened into a warm friendship with both of us he and his brother Cecil sat in Paddington Green where I was assistant to curate he was genial bubbling over with jokes at which he roared with laughter the question was becoming insistent when would there be enough money for Francis and Gilbert to get married in one letter Francis asks him what he thinks of Omar Kayam he replies at great length and concludes you see the result of asking me I have written it very hurriedly if I had paused I might make an essay of it commercial pig never mind sweetheart that essay might be a saucepan some day or at any rate a cheap toast rack end of chapter 10 part 1 recording by Candace Tuttle