 Introduction 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 Larry Wilson. Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Massey Ward. Introduction. Chiefly concerning sources. The material for this book falls roughly into two parts, spoken and written. Gilbert Chesterton was not an old man when he died, and many of his friends and contemporaries have told me incidents and recalled sayings right back to his early boyhood. This part of the material has been unusually rich and copeless, so that I could get a clearer picture of the boy and the young man that is usually granted to the biographer. The book has been in the making for six years and in three countries. Several times I hid it aside for some months so as to be able to get a fresh view of it. I talked to all sorts of people, heard all sorts of ideas, saw my subject from every side. I went to Paris to see one old friend, to Indiana to see others. Met for the first time in lengthy talk Maurice Bering, H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw, went to Kingsland to see Mr. Bellick, gathered Gilbert's boyhood friends of the junior debating club in London, and visited Father Brown among his Yorkshire moors. Armed with a notebook I tried to miss none who had known Gilbert well, especially in his youth. E. C. Bentley, Lucian Oldershaw, Lawrence Solomon, Edward Fordham. I had ten long letters from Annie Furman, my most valuable witness as to Gilbert's childhood. For information on the next period of his life I talked to Monsignor O'Connor to Hill Air Bella, Maurice Bering, Charles Summers Cox, F. Y. Eccles, and others besides being now able to draw on my own memories. Francis I had talked with on and off about their early married years ever since I had first known them, but she was a last too ill and consequently too emotionally unstrung during the last months for me to ask her all the questions springing in my mind. Tell Massey, she said to Dorothy Collins, not to talk to me about Gilbert. It makes me cry. For the time at Beaconsfield, out of a host of friends the most valuable were Dr. Polcock and Dr. Bakewell. Among priests Monsignor O'Connor and Ronald Knox, fathers Vincent McNabb, OP, and Ignatius Rice OSB were especially intimate. Dorothy Collins' evidence covers a period of ten years. That of H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw is reinforced by most valuable letters which they have kindly allowed me to publish. Then too Gilbert was so much of a public character and so popular with his fellow journalists that stories of all kinds abound. Concerning him there is a kind of evidence and very valuable ideas that may be called a boss well collected. It is fitting that it should be so. We cannot picture G. K. like the great lexicographer, accompanied constantly by one ardent and observant witness. Pencil in hand ready to take notes over the tea cups. And by the way, in spite of an acquaintance who regretted in this connection that G. K. was not laterally more often seen in taverns, it was over the tea cups even more than over the wine glasses that Boswell made his notes. I have seen Boswell's signature after wine, of the minutes of a meeting of the club, and he was in no condition then for the taking of notes. Even the signature is almost illegible. But it is fitting that Gilbert, who loved all sorts of men so much, should be kept alive for the future by all sorts of men. From the focusing of many views, from many angles this picture has been composed. But they are all views of one man, and the picture will show, I think, a singular unity. When Whistler, as Gilbert himself once said, painted a portrait, he made and destroyed many sketches. How many it did not matter, for all, even of his failures, were fruitful. But it would have mattered frightfully if each time he looked up, he found a new subject sitting placently for his portrait. Gilbert was fond of asking in the new witness of people who express admiration for Lloyd George. Which George do you mean? For chameleon like the politician has worn many colors, and the portrait painted in 1906 would have had to be torn up in 1916. But gather the Chesterton portraits, read the files when he first grew into fame. Talk to Mr. Titterton, who worked with him on the daily news in 1906, and on G.K.'s weekly in 1936. Collect witnesses from his boyhood to his old age, from Dublin to Vancouver. Individuals who knew him, groups who are endeavoring to work out his ideas. All will agree on the ideas and on the man as making one pattern throughout, one developing but integrated mind and personality. Gathering the material for a biography bears some resemblance to interrogating witnesses in a court of law. There are good witnesses and bad, reliable and unreliable memories. I remember an old lady, a friend of my mother's, who remarked with candor after my mother had confided to her something of importance. My dear, I must go and write that down immediately before my imagination gets mixed with my memory. One witness must be checked against another. There will be discrepancies in detail, but the main facts will in the end emerge. Just now and again, however, a biographer like a judge meets a totally unreliable witness. The event in this biography has caused me more trouble than anything else. The Marconi scandal and the trial of Cecil Chesterton were criminal libel which grew out of it. As luck would have it, it was on this that I had to interrogate my most unreliable witness. I had seen no clear and unbiased account, so I had to read the many pages of the Blue Book and law reports besides contemporary comment in various papers. I have no legal training, but one point stuck out like a spike. Cecil Chesterton had brought accusations against Godfrey Isaacs, not only concerning his own past career as a company promoter, but also concerning his dealings with the government over the Marconi contract, in connection with which he had also fiercely attacked Wufus Isaacs, Herbert Samuel, and other ministers of the Crown. But in the witness box he accepted the word of their very ministers he had been attacking and declared that he no longer accused them of corruption, which seemed to me a complete abandonment of his main position. Having drafted my chapter on Marconi, I asked Mr. Cecil Chesterton to read it, but more particularly to explain this point. She gave me a long and detailed account of how Cecil had been intensely reluctant to take this course, but violent pressure had been exerted on him by his father and by Gilbert, who were both in a state of panic over the trial. Unlikely as this seemed, especially in Gilbert's case, the account was so circumstantial and from so near a connection that I felt almost obliged to accept it. What was my amazement a few months later at receiving a letter in which she stated that after a great deal of close research work, rereading of papers, etc., in connection with her own book, The Chesterton's, and after a talk with Cecil's solicitors, she had become convinced that Cecil had acted as he had because the closest sleuth he had been unable to discover any trace of investments by Wufus Isaacs in English Marconi's. For this reason, Cecil took the course he did, not through family pressure. That pressure I still feel was exerted, though possibly not until the trial was over. It was then the ladies' feelings and not facts that had been offered to me as evidence, and it was the merest luck that my book had not appeared before Cecil's solicitors had spoken. The account given in Lord Birkenhead's famous trials is the speech for the prosecution. Mrs. Cecil Chesterton's chapter is an impressionist sketch of the court scene by a friend of the defendant. What was wanted was an impartial account, but I tried in vain to write it. The chronology of events, the connection between the government commission and the libel case, the connection between the English and American Marconi companies. It was all too complex for my lay mind, so I turned the chapters over to my husband, who has had a legal training and asked him to write it for me. The Chesterton's is concerned with Gilbert and Francis as well as with Cecil, and the confusion between memory and imagination to say nothing of reliance on feelings unsupported by facts pervades the book. It can only be called a legend, so long growing in Mrs. Cecil's mind that I am convinced that when she came to write her book, she firmly believed in it herself. The starting point was so ardent to dislike for Francis that every incident poured fuel on the flame and was seen only in its light. When I saw her, the legend was beginning to shape. She told me various stories showing her dislike. Facts offered by me were either denied or twisted to fit into the pattern. I do not propose to discuss here the details of a thoroughly unreliable book. Most of them I think answer themselves in the course of this biography, with one or two points ideal in Appendix C, but I will set down here one further incident that serves to show just how little help this particular witness could ever be. For like Cecil's solicitors, I spoke with one telling detail for her. She told me with great enthusiasm that Cecil had said that Gilbert was really in love or not with Francis, but with her sister Gertrude, and that Gertrude's red hair accounted for the number of red-headed heroines in his stories. I told her, however, on the word of their brother-in-law that Gertrude's hair was not red. Mr. Oldershaw, in fact, seemed a good deal amused. He said that Gilbert never looked at either of the other sisters who were not his sort and had eyes only for Francis. Mrs. Cecil, however, would not relinquish this dream of red hair and another love. In her book, she wishes red-gold hair on to Annie Furman, because in the autobiography Gilbert had described her golden plates. But unluckily for this new theory, Annie's hair was yellow, which is quite a different color, and Annie, who is still alive, is also amused at the idea that Gilbert had any thought of romance in her connection. When Francis Chesterton gave me the letters and other documents, she said, I don't want the book to appear in a hurry, not for at least five years. There will be lots of little books written about Gilbert. Let them all come out first. I want your book to be the final and definitive biography. The first part of this injunction I have certainly obeyed, for it will be just seven years after his death that this book appears. For the second half I can say only that I have done the best that any lies to obey it also. I am very grateful to those who have preceded me with books depicting one aspect or another of my subject. I have tried to make use of them all as part of my material, and some are little, merely in the number of their pages. I am especially grateful to Healer Balak, Emile Cammeritz, Cyril Clemens, and Father Brown, who have allowed me to quote with great freedom. I want to thank Mr. Seward Collins, Mr. Cyril Clemens, and the University of Notre Dame for the loan of books. Mrs. Bambridge for the use of a letter from Kipling and a poem from The Years Between. Even greater has been the kindness of those friends of my own and of Gilbert Chesterton's who have read this book in manuscript and made very valuable criticisms and suggestions. Mae Chesterton, Dorothy Collins, Edward Connery, Ross Hoffman, Mrs. Robert Kidd, Arnold Lund, this year Knox, Father Murtaugh, Father Vincent McNabb, Lucian Oldershaw, Beatrice Ward, Douglas Woodruff, Monsignor O'Connor. Most of the criticisms were visibly right, while even those with which I could not concur showed me the weak spot in my work that had occasioned them. They have helped me to improve the book. I think I may say enormously. One suggestion I have not followed, that one name should be used throughout, either Chesterton or Gilbert or G.K., but not all three. I had begun with the idea of using Chesterton when speaking of him as a public character and also when speaking of the days before I did, in fact, call him Gilbert. But this often left him and Cecil mixed up. Then too, though I seldom used G.K. myself, other friends writing to me of him often used it. I began to go through the manuscript unifying and then I noticed that in a single paragraph of his Bernard Shaw, Gilbert uses G.B.S., Shaw, Bernard Shaw, and Mr. Shaw. Here was a precedent indeed, and it seemed to me that it was really the natural thing to do. After all, we do talk of people now by one name, now by another. It is a matter of slight importance, if of any, and I decided to let it go. As to size, I am afraid the present book is a large one, although not as large as Boss Wales Johnson or Gone With the Wind. But in this matter I am unrepentant, for I have faith in Chesterton's own public. The book is large because there is no other way of getting Chesterton onto the canvas. It is a joke he would himself have enjoyed, but it is also a serious statement. For a complete portrait of Chesterton, even the most rigorous selection of material cannot be compressed into a smaller space. I have first written at length and then cut and cut. At first I had intended to omit all matter already given in the autobiography, then I realized that it would never do. For some things which are vital to a complete biography of Chesterton are not only told in the autobiography better than I could tell them, but are recorded there and nowhere else. And this book is not merely a supplement to the autobiography, it is the life of Chesterton. The same problem arises with regard to the published books and I have tried to solve it on the same line. There was rung in my mind Mr. Bellick saying, a man is his mind. To tell the story of a man of letters while avoiding quotation from or reference to his published works is simply not to tell it. At Christopher Dawson's suggestion, I have reread all the books in the order in which they were written. Thus trying to get the development of Gilbert's mind perfectly clear to myself and to trace the influences that affected him at various dates. For this reason I have analyzed certain of the books and not others. Those which show this mental development most clearly at various stages are those, too many alas, which are out of print and hard to obtain. But whenever possible in illustrating his mental history, I have used unpublished material so that even the most ardent Chestertonian will find much that is new to him. For the period of Gilbert's youth there are many exercise books, mostly only half-filled, containing sketches and caricatures, lists of titles for short stories and chapters, unfinished short stories. Several completed fairy stories and some of the best drawings were published in the colored lands. Others are hence later used in his own novels. There's a fragment of the Ball and the Cross, a first suggestion for the man who was Thursday. A rather more developed ad-dembration of the Napoleon of Notting Hill. This I think is later than most of the notebooks. But after the change in handwriting apparently deliberately and carefully made by Gilbert around the date in which he left St. Paul's for the Slade School, it is almost impossible to establish a date at all exactly for any one of these notebooks. Notes made later when he had formed the habit of dictation became difficult to read, not through bad handwriting, but because words are abbreviated and letters omitted. Some of the exercise books appear to have been begun, thrown aside and used again later. There is among them one only of real biographical importance, a book deliberately used for the development of a philosophy of life, dated in two places, to which I devote a chapter and which I refer to as The Notebook. This book is as important in studying Chesterton as the pen says would be for a student of Pascal. He is here already a master of phrase in a sense which makes a comparison with Pascal especially apt. For he often packs so much meaning into a brilliant sentence or two that I have felt at work while in dealing especially with some of the less remembered books to pull out a few of these sentences for quotation apart from their context. Other important material was to be found in GK's weekly, in articles in other periodicals and in unpublished letters. With some of the correspondences I have made considerable use of both sides and if anyone pedantically objects that that is unusual in a biography I will adapt a phrase of Bernard Shaw's which you will find in this book and say, Hang it all, be reasonable. If you had the choice between reading me and reading Wells and Shaw, wouldn't you choose Wells and Shaw? End of introduction. Chapter one 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 Larry Wilson. Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Macy Ward. Background for Gilbert Keith Chesterton. It is usual to open a biography with some account of the subject's ancestry. Chesterton in his Browning, after some excellent foolery about pedigree hunting, makes the suggestion that middle class ancestry is far more varied and interesting than the ancestry of the aristocrat. The truth is that aristocrats exhibit less of the romance of pedigree than any other people in the world. For since it is their principle to marry only within their own class and mode of life, there is no opportunity or in their case for any of the more interesting studies in heredity. They exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of the lower animals. It is in the middle classes that we find the poetry of genealogy. It is the suburban grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash of eastern or Catholic blood may drive suddenly to a whole holiday or a crime. This may provide fun for a guessing game, but it is not very useful to a biographer. The Chesterton family, like many another, had had the ups and downs in social position that accompany the ups and downs of fortune. Upon all this Edward Chesterton, Gilbert's father, as head of the family possessed many interesting documents. After his death Gilbert's mother left his papers undisturbed, but when she died Gilbert threw away without examination most of the contents of his father's study including all family records. Thus I cannot offer any sort of family tree, but it is possible to show the kind of family that the social atmosphere into which Gilbert Chesterton was born. Some of the relatives say that the family held from the village of Chesterton now merged into Cambridge of which they were lords of the manner, but Gilbert refused to take this seriously. In an introduction to a book called Life in Old Cambridge he wrote, I have never been to Cambridge except as an admiring visitor. I have never been to Chesterton at all, either from a sense of unworthiness or from a faint superstition feeling that I might be fulfilling a prophecy in the countryside. Anyone with a sense of savor of the old English country rhymes and tales will share my vague alarm that the steeple might crack or the market-cross fall down for a smaller thing than the coincidence of a man named Chesterton going to Chesterton. At the time of the Regency the head of the family was a friend of the princes, and perhaps as a result of such company dissipated his fortunes in riotous living and incurred various terms of imprisonment for debt. From the debtor's prisons he wrote letters, and sixty years later Mr. Edward Chesterton used to read them to his family. As also those of another interesting relative, Captain George Laval Chesterton, prison reformer and friend of Mrs. Fry and Charles Dickens. A relative recalls the sentence, I cried, Dickens cried, we all cried, which makes one rather long for the rest of the letter. George Laval Chesterton left two books, one a kind of autobiography, the other a work on prison reform. It was a moment of enthusiasm for reform, of optimism and of energy. Dickens was stirring the minds of Englishmen to discover the evils in their land and rushed to their overthrow. Darwin was writing his origin of species, which in some curious way increased the hopeful energy of his countrymen. They seemed to feel it much more satisfying to have been once animal and to have become human than to be fallen gods who could again be made divine. Anyhow, there were giants in those days and it was hope that made them so. When by an old confusion the Tribune described G.K. Chesterton as having been born about the date that Captain Chesterton published his books, he replied in a ballad which at once saluted an attack. I am not fond of Arthur Podds as such, I never went to Mr. Darwin's school. Old Tyndalls, either, that he liked so much, leaves me, I fear, comparatively cool. I cannot say my heart with hope is full, because a donkey by continual kicks turned slowly into something like a mule. It was not born in 1856. Age of my father, truer at the touch than mine, great age of Dickens, youth, and yule. Had your strong virtue stood without a crutch I might have deemed that man had no need of rule. But I was born when petty poets' pure, when madmen used your liberty to mix, looker in lust, bestial and beautiful, I was not born in 1856. Note quoted in G.K. Chesterton at criticism, Allison Rivers, 1908. Both autobiography and prison life are worth reading. They breathe the great gusto seen by Gilbert in that era. He does not quote them in his autobiography, but just mentioning Captain Chesterton dwells chiefly on his grandfather, who while George Laval Chesterton was fighting battles and reforming prisons, had succeeded to the headship of a house agent's business in Kensington. For the family fortunes have been dissipated, Gilbert's great grandfather had become first a coal merchant, and then a house agent. A few of the letters between this ancestor and his son remain, and they are interesting, confirming Gilbert's description in the autobiography of his grandfather's feeling that he himself was something of a landmark in Kensington, and that the family business was honorable and important. The Chestertons, whatever the ups and downs of their past history, were by now established in that English middle-class respectability in which their son was to discover, or into which he was to bring, a glow and thrill of adventurous romance. Edward Chesterton, Gilbert's father, belonged to a serious family and a serious generation, which took its work as a duty and his profession as a vocation. I wonder what young house agent today, just entering the family business, would receive a letter from his father, aduring him to become an active, steady and honorable man of business, speaking of abilities which only want to be judiciously brought out, of course assisted with your earner's cooperation. Gilbert's mother was Marie Grossjean, one of a family of 23 children. The family had long been English, but came originally from French Switzerland. Marie's mother was from an Aberdeen family of Keith's, which gave Gilbert his second name and a dash of Scottish blood, which appealed strongly to my affections and made a sort of Scottish romance in my childhood. Marie's father, whom Gilbert never saw, had been one of the old Wesleyan lay preachers and was thus involved in public controversy, a characteristic which has descended to his grandchild. He was also one of the leaders of the early T. Total Movement, a characteristic which has not. When Edward became engaged to Marie Grossjean, he complained that his dearest girl would not believe that he had any work to do, but he was in fact much occupied and increasingly responsible for the family business. There is a flavor of a world very remote from ours in the packet of letters between the two and from their various parents, aunts and sisters, to one another during their engagement. Edward illuminates poems for a certain dear good little child, sketches that look out from home for her mother, hopes they did not appear uncivil in wandering into the garden together at an aunt's house and leaving the rest of the company for too long. He praises a friend of hers as intellectual and unaffected, two excellent things in woman, describes a clerk sent to France with business papers who lost them all the careless dog except the illustrated London News. A letter to Marie from her sister Harriet is amusing. She describes her efforts at entertaining in the absence of her mother. The company were great swells so that her brother took all the covers of the chairs himself and had the wine iced and we dined in bold dress. It was very awful, considering myself as hostess. Poor girl, it was a series of misfortunes. The dinner was three quarters of an hour late. The fish done to rags. She had hired three dozen wine glasses to be sure of enough, but they were brought in twos and threes at a time and then a high ages as if they were being washed which they were not. In the letters from parents and older relatives, religious observances are taken for granted and there is an obvious sincerity in many allusions to God's will and God's guidance of human life. No one reading them could doubt that the description of a divine relative as ready for the summons and to going home is a sincere one. Other letters, notably Harriet's, do not lack a spice of malice in speaking of those whose religion was unreal and affected, a phenomenon that only appears in an age when real religion abounds. Doubtless her generation was beginning to see Christianity with less than the simplicity of their parents. They were hearing of Darwin and Spencer and the optimism which accompanied the idea of evolution was turning religion into a vague glow which would they felt survive the somewhat childish dogmas in which our rude ancestors had tried to formulate it. But with an increased vagueness went also with the more liberal Chesterton's were essentially liberal both politically and theologically and increased tolerance in several of his letters Edward Chesterton mentions the Catholic Church and certainly with no dislike he went on one occasion to hear Manning preach and much admired the sermon although he notes too that he found in it no distinctively Roman Catholic doctor. He belonged however to an age that on the whole found the rest of life more exciting and interesting than religion an age that had kept the Christian virtues and still believed that these virtues could stand alone without the support of the Christian creed. The temptation to describe dresses has always been sternly resisted when dealing with any part of the Victorian era so merely pausing to note that it seems to have been a triumph on the part of Mrs. Grossjin to have cut a short skirt out of eight and a half yards of material I reluctantly lay aside the letters at the time when Edward Chesterton and Marie were married and had said about living happily ever after. These two had no fear of life. They belonged to a generation which cheerfully created a home and brought fresh life into being. In doing it they did a thousand other things so that the home they made was full of vital energies for the children who were to grow up in it. Gilbert recollects his father as a man of a dozen hobbies. His study as a place where these hobbies formed strata of exciting products. Awaking youthful covetousness in the matter of a new paint box satisfying youthful imagination by the production of a toy theater. His character, serene and humorous as his son describes him is reflected in his letters. Edward Chesterton did not use up his mental powers in the family business. Taught by his father to be a good man of business he was in his private life a man of a thousand other energies and ideas. On the whole says his son, I am glad he was never an artist. It might have stood in his way in becoming an amateur. It might have spoiled his career, his private career. He could never have made a vulgar success of all the thousand things he did so successfully. Here Gilbert sees a marked distinction between that generation of businessmen and the present in the use of leisure. He sees hobbies as superior to sport. The old fashioned Englishman like my father sold houses for his living that filled his own house with his life. A hobby is not merely a holiday. It is not merely exercising the body instead of the mind. An excellent but now largely recognized thing. It is exercising the rest of the mind. It is also an almost neglected thing. Edward Chesterton practiced watercolor painting and modeling and photography and stained glass and fret work and magic lanterns and medieval illumination. And moreover knew all his English literature backwards. It has become of late the fashion for anyone who writes of his own life to see himself against a dark background, to see his development frustrated by or some horror of the environment. But Gilbert saw his life rather as the ancients saw it when Pietus was a duty because we had received so much from those who brought us into being. This Englishman was grateful to his country, to his parents, to his home for all they had given him. I regret that I have no gloomy and savage father to offer to the public gaze as the true cause of all my tragic heritage. No pale-faced and partially poisoned mother whose suicidal instincts have cursed me with the temptations of the artistic temperament. I regret that there is nothing in the range of our family much more racy than a remote and mildly impugnious uncle and that I cannot do my duty as a true modern by cursing everybody who made me whatever I am. I am not clear about what that is but I am pretty sure that most of it is my own fault and I am compelled to confess that I look back to that landscape of my first days with a pleasure that should doubtless be reserved for Utopias of the Futurist. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 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 2 Childhood Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born on May 29, 1874 at a house in Sheffield Terrace, Camden Hill just below the Great Tower of the Waterworks which so much impressed his childish imagination. Lower down the hill was the Anglican Church of St. George and here he was baptized. When he was about five, the family moved to Warwick Gardens. As old-fashioned London houses go, eleven Warwick Gardens is small. On the ground floor, a back and front room were for the Chesterton's drawing room and dining room, with the folding door between the only other sitting room being a small study built out over the garden. A long, narrow green strip which must have been a good deal longer or a row of garages was built at the back was Gilbert's playground. His bedroom was a long room at the top of a not very high house. For what is in most London houses, the drawing room floor is in this house filled by two bedrooms and there is only one floor above it. Cecil was five years younger than Gilbert who welcomed his birth with a remark, now I shall always have an audience. A prophecy remembered by all parties because it proved so singularly false. As soon as Cecil could speak, he began to argue and the brothers intercourse fenced forward consistent of unending discussion. They always argued. They never quarreled. There was also a little sister, Beatrice, who died when Gilbert was very young, so young that he remembered a fall she had from a rocking horse more clearly than he remembered her death. And in his memory, linked with the fall, the sense of loss and sorrow that came with the death. It would be impossible to tell the story of his childhood one half so well as he has told it himself. It is the best part of his autobiography. Indeed, it is one of the best childhoods in literature. For Gilbert Chesterton most perfectly remembered the exact truth, not only about what happened to a child but about how a child thought and felt, what is more, he sees childhood not as an isolated fragment or an excursion into fairyland but as his real life, the real beginnings of what should have been a more real life, a lost experience in the land of the living. I was subconsciously certain then, as I am consciously certain now, that there was the white and solid road and the worthy beginning of the life of man and that it is man who afterwards darkens it with dreams or goes astray from it in self-deception. It is only the grown man who lives the life of make-believe and pretending and it is he who has his head in a cloud. Autobiography, page 49. Here are the beginnings of the man's philosophy and life and experience of the child. He was living in a world of reality and that reality was beautiful in the clear light of an eternal morning which had a sort of wonder at it as if the world were as new as myself. A child in this world, like God in the moment of creation, looks upon it and sees that it is very good. It was not that he was never unhappy as a child and he had his share of bodily pain. I had a fair amount of toothache and especially earache but the child has his own philosophy and makes his own proportion and unhappiness and pain are of a different texture or held on a different tenure. What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles. It was a miraculous world. What gives me this shock is almost anything I really recall. Not the things I should think most worth recalling. This is where it differs from the other great thrill of the past. All that is connected with first love and the romantic passion. For that, though equally poignant, comes always to a point and is narrow, like a rapier piercing the heart. Whereas the other was more like a hundred windows opened on all sides of the head. Autobiography pages 31 to 32. These windows opening on all sides, so much more swiftly for the genius than for the rest of us, led to a result often to be noted in the childhood of exceptional men. A combination of backwardness and precocity. Gilbert Chesterton was in some ways a very backward child. He did not talk much before three. He learned to read only at eight. He loved fairy tales. As a child he read them or had them read aloud to him. As a big boy he wrote and illustrated a good many, some of which are printed in the colored lands. I have found several fragments in praise of Hans Andersen, written apparently in his school days. In the chapter of orthodoxy called The Ethics of Elfland, he shows how the truth about goodness and happiness came to him out of the old fairy tales and made the first bases for his philosophy. In George McDonald's story, the princess and the goblin made, he says, a difference to my whole existence, which helped me to see things in a certain way from the start. It is the story of a house where goblins were in the cellar and a kind of fairy godmother in a hidden room upstairs. This story had made all the ordinary staircases and doors and windows into magical things. It was the awakening of the sense of ordinary things always to be his. Still, more important, was the realization represented by the goblins below stairs, that when evil things besieging us do appear, they do not appear outside but inside. In life, as in this story, there is a house that is our home, that is rightly loved as our home, but of which we hardly know the best or the worst and we always wait for the one and watch against the other. Since I first read that story, some five alternative philosophies of the universe have come to our colleagues out of Germany, blowing through the world like the east wind, but for me, that castle is still standing in the mountains. Its light is not put out. Introduction to George McDonald and his wife. All this to Gilbert made the story possible, the most realistic in the exact sense of the phrase the most like life, of any story he ever read, then or later. Another recurrent image in books by the same author is that of a great white horse. And Gilbert says, to this day I can never see a big white horse in the street without a sudden sense of indescribable things. Of his playmates, one of his first memories of his autobiography is playing in the garden under the care of a girl with ropes of golden hair to whom my mother afterwards called out from the house, you are an angel, which I was disposed to accept without metaphor. She is now living in Vancouver as Mrs. Robert Kidd. Mrs. Kidd, then Annie Furman, was the daughter of a girlhood friend and her sister, Gilbert says in the autobiography, had more to do with enlivening my early years than most. She has a vivid memory of Sheffield Terrace where all three Chesterton children were born and where the little sister Beatrice, whom they called Bertie, died. Gilbert in those days was called Diddy. His father then and later was Mr. Edd to the family and intimate friends. Soon after Bertie's death Mrs. Kidd writes, the little boys were never allowed to see a funeral. If one passed down Warwick Gardens they were hustled from the nursery window at once. Possibly this was because Gilbert had such a fear of sickness or accident. If Cecil gave the slightest sign of choking a dinner, Gilbert would throw down a spoon or fork and rush from the room. I have seen him do it many times. Cecil was fond of animals. Gilbert wasn't. But he named Faustine because he wanted her to be abandoned and wicked. But Faustine turned out to be a gentleman. Gilbert's storytelling and verse making began very early but not I think in great abundance. His drawing even earlier and of this there is a great deal. There is nothing very striking in the written fragments that remain but his drawings even at the age of five are full of vigor. The faces and figures are always rudimentary human beings. Sometimes a good deal more and they are taken through lengthy adventures drawn on the backs of bits of wallpaper of insurance forms and little books sewn together or sometimes a long strips glued end to end by his father. These drawings can often be dated exactly for Edward Chesterton who later kept collections of press cuttings and photographs of his son had already begun to collect his drawings writing the date on the back of each. With the earlier ones he may one sometimes suspects have helped a little but it soon becomes easy to distinguish between the two styles. Edward Chesterton was the most perfect father that could have been imagined to help in the opening of windows on every side. My father might have reminded people of Mr. Pickwick except that he was always bearded and never bald. He wore spectacles and had all the Pickwickian evenness of temper and pleasure and the humors of travel. He had as his son further notes in the autobiography a power of invention which created for children the permanent anticipation of what is profoundly called a surprise. The child of today chooses his Christmas present in advance and decides between Peter Pan and the pantomime when he does not get both. The Chesterton children saw their first glimpses of fantasy through the framework of a toy theater of which their father was Carpenter scene painter and scene shifter author and creator of actors and actresses a few inches high. Gilbert's earliest recollection is of one of these figures in a golden crown carrying a golden key and his father was all through his childhood a man with a golden key who admitted him into a world of wonders. I think Gilbert's father meant more to him than his mother fond as he was of her most of their friends seemed to feel that Cecil was her favorite son. Neither was ever demonstrative Annie Furman says I never saw either of them kiss his mother but in some ways the mother spoiled both boys they had not the training that a strict mother or an efficient nurse usually accomplishes with the most refractory Gilbert was never refractory merely absent minded but it is doubtful whether he was said upstairs to wash his hands or brush his hair except in preparation for a visit or ceremonial occasion not even then interpolates Annie and it is perfectly certain that he ought to have been so several times a day no one minded if he was late for meals his father too was frequently late and Francis during her engagement often saw his mother put the dishes down in the fireplace to keep hot and wait patiently in spite of Gilbert's description of her as more swift relentless and generally radical in her instincts than his father Annie Furman's earlier memories fit this description better much as she loved her aunt she writes Aunt Marie was a bit of a tyrant in her own family I have been many times a dinner when there might be a joint say and a chicken and she would say positively to Mr. Redd which will you have Edward? Edward I think I'd like a bit of chicken Aunt M fiercely no you won't you'll have mutton that happens so often sometimes Alice Grosjean the youngest of Aunt M's family familiarly known as Sloper was there when I asked her preference she would say differently I think I'll take a little mutton don't be a fool Alice you know you like chicken and chicken she got visitors to the house in later years dwell on Mrs. Chesterton's immense spirit of hospitality the gargantuan meals the eager desire the guests should eat enormously and the wittiness of her conversation schoolboy contemporaries of Gilbert say that although immensely kind she alarmed them by a rather forbidding appearance her clothes thrown on anyhow and blackened and protruding teeth which gave her a witch like appearance the house too was dusty and untidy she called them always by their surnames both when they were little boys and after they grew up older Shaw Bentley Solomon not only says Mrs. Mae Chesterton did Aunt Marie address Gilbert's friends by their surnames but frequently added darling to them I have heard her address Bentley when a young man thus Bentley darling come and sit over here to which invitation he turned a completely deaf ear as he was perfectly content to remain where he was indiscriminately she also addressed her mates waiting at table with the same endearment a letter written when Gilbert was only six would seem to show that Mrs. Chesterton had not yet become so reckless about her appearance and was still open to the appeal of millinery she always was says Annie the letter is from John Barker of High Street Kensington and is headed in handwriting drapery and millinery establishment Kensington High Street September 21st 1880 Madam we are in receipt of instructions from Mr. Edward Chesterton to wait upon you for the purpose of offering for your selection a bonnet of the latest Parisian taste of which we have a large assortment ready for your choice or can if preferred make you one to order our assistant will wait upon you at any time you may appoint unless you would prefer to pay a visit to our millinery department yourself Mr. Chesterton informs us that as soon as you have made your selection he will hand us a check for the amount we are given to understand that Mr. Chesterton proposes this transaction as a remembrance of the anniversary of what he instructs us to say he supports as a happy and auspicious event we have accordingly entered it in our books in that aspect in conveying as we are desired to do Mr. Chesterton's best wishes for your health and happiness and for many future anniversaries may we very respectfully join to them our own and add that during many years to come we trust to be permitted to supply you with goods of the best description for cash on the principle of the lowest prices consistent with excellence quality and workmanship we have the honor to be madam your most obedient servants John Barker and company the order entered in their books under that aspect the readiness to provide millinery for cash convinces you as G.K. himself says of another story that Dick Swivel really did say when he who adores the has left but the name in case of letters and parcels Dickens must have dictated the letter to John Barker after all he was only dead ten years Aunt Marie used to say as Annie Furman that Mr. Ed married her for her beautiful hair it was Auburn and very long and wavy he used to sit behind her in church she liked pretty clothes but lacked the vanity to buy them for herself I have a little blue hanging watch that she bought one day she always appreciated little attentions the playmates of Gilbert's childhood are not described in the autobiography except for Annie's long ropes of golden hair but in one of the innumerable fragments written in his early twenties he describes a family of girls who played with them when they were very young together it is headed chapter one a contrast and a climax and several other odd bits of verse and narrative introduce the Vivian family as early and constant playmates the best ways of feeling a genuine friendly enthusiasm for persons of the other sex without gliding into anything with a shorter name is to know a whole family of them the most intellectual idolatry at one shrine is apt to lose its purely intellectual character but a genial polytheism is always bracing and platonic besides the Vivians lived in the same street or rather gardens as ourselves as bringing one within sight of what an old friend of mine named Bentley called with more than his usual glum and severity of expression the remote outpost of Kensington society for these reasons and a great many much better ones I was very much elated to have the family or at least the three eldest girls who represented to the neighborhood standing once more on the well rubbed lawn of our old garden where some of my earliest recollections were of subjecting them to treatment such as I considered appropriate to my own well established character of robber tying them to trees to the prejudice of their white frocks and otherwise misbehaving myself in the funny old ways before I went to school and became a son of a gentleman only I've never been able and in fact I've never tried to tell which of the three I really liked best and if the pure usefulness and domesticity of the eldest girl with her quiet art colors and broad brave forehead as pale as the white roses the cloud of the garden if these mature qualities and Nina demanded my respect more than the levity of the others I fear they did not prevent me from feeling an almost equal tide of affection towards the sleepy acumen and ingrained sense of humor of Ida the second girl and book reader of the family or violet a veritable delightful child with a temper as formless and erratic as her tempest of red hair what old memories this garden calls up said Nina like many essentially simple and direct people had a strong dash of sentiment and a strong penchant for being her own emotional pint stoop on the traditional subjects and occasions I remember so well coming here in a new pink frock when I was a little girl it wasn't so new when I went away I certainly must have been a brute I replied but I have endeavored to make a lifetime atone for my early conduct and I fell into thinking of how even Nina miracle of diligence and self-effacement remembered a new pink frock across the abyss of the years walking with my old friends around the garden I found in every earth plot and tree root the arenas of an attractive and adventurous life in early boyhood an unpublished fragment Edward Chesterton was a liberal politically and what has been called a liberal Christian religiously when the family went to church which happened very seldom it was to listen to the sermons of stopford brook so 20 years later Cecil was to remark with amusement that he had as a small boy heard every part of the teaching now 1908 being cut out by R.J. Campbell under the title the new religion the Chesterton liberalism entered into the view of history given to their children and it produced from Gilbert the only poem of his childhood worth quoting I cannot date it but the very immature handwriting and curious spelling mark it as early probably most children have read or at any rate to my own generation had read Aitans lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and played at being Cavaliers as a result but Gilbert cannot play at being a Cavalier he had learned from his father to be a round head as had every good liberal of that day what was to be done about it he took the lays and rewrote them in an excellent imitation of Aitans but on the opposite side and view of his own later developments such a line as drive the trembling papists backwards has an ironic humor but one wonders what Aitans himself would have made of a small boy who took his rhythm and sometimes his very words turned his hero into a traitor Faltz Montrose and his traitor Argyle into a hero I have left the spelling untouched sing of the great Lord Archibald sing of his glorious name sing of his covenanting faith and his everlasting fame one day he summoned all his men to meet on Kirchin's brow 3,000 covenanting chiefs who no master would allow 3,000 knights with claymores drawn and targets tough and strong knights who for the right would ever fight and never bear the wrong and he cried his hand uplifted soldiers of Scotland hear my vow air the morning shell of Risen lay the traitors low or as ye march from the battle marching back in battlefile ye shell there among the corpses find the body of Argyle soldiers soldiers onward onward onward soldiers follow me come remember ye the crimes of the fiend of Fel Dundee onward let us draw our claymores let us draw them on our foes now then I am threatened by the fate of false Montrose drive the trembling papus backwards drive away the tories hoard let them tell their house of villains they have felt the Campbell sword and the next morning he arose and he girded on his sword they asked him many questions but he answered not a word and he summoned all his men and he led them to the field and we cried unto our master that we die and never yield that same morning we drove right backwards all the servants of the pope and our lord archibald we saved from a halter and a rope far and fast fled all the traitors far and fast fled all the gremes fled that cursed tribe who lately stained their honor and their names end of chapter 2 chapter 3 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 Dick Bourgeois Doyle Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward chapter 3 part 1 school days curiously enough Gilbert does not in the autobiography speak of any school except St. Paul's he went however for us to call it court usually called at that time bouchers from the name of the headmaster though it is not technically the preparatory school for St. Paul's large numbers of Paulines do pass through it it stands opposite St. Paul's and the Hammersmith Road and must have felt by Gilbert as one thing with his main school experience for he know where differentiates between the two an old city foundation which has had among its scholars Milton and Marlboro, Peeps and Sir Philip Francis and a host of other distinguished men the editor of a correspondence column wrote a good many years later an answer to an inquirer yes Milton and GK Chesterton were both educated at St. Paul's school we fancy however that Milton had left before Chesterton entered the school in an early life of Sir Thomas Moore we learn of the keen rivalry existing in his day between his own school of St. Anthony and St. Paul's of scholastic disputations between the two put an end to by Dean Collett because they led to brawling among the boys when the Paulines would call those of St. Anthony pigs and the pigs would call the Paulines pigeons from the pigeons of St. Paul's Cathedral now however St. Anthony's is no more and St. Paul's has long moved to the suburbs and lies about 7 minutes walk along the Hammersmith Road from Warwick Gardens Gilbert Chesterton was 12 when he entered St. Paul's in January 1887 and he was placed in the second form his early days at school were very solitary his chief occupation being to draw all over his books he drew caricatures of his masters he drew scenes from Shakespeare he drew prominent politicians he did not at first make many friends in the autobiography he makes a sharp distinction between being a child and being a boy but it is a distinction that could only be drawn by a man and most men I fancy would find it a little difficult to say at what moment the transformation occurred G. K. seems to put it at the beginning of school life but the fact that St. Paul's was a day school meant that the transition from home to school usual in English public school education was never in his case completely made no doubt he is right in speaking in the autobiography of the sort of prickly protection like hair that grows over what was once the child the fact that school boys in his time could be blasted with a horrible revelation of having a sister or even a Christian name nevertheless he went home every evening to a father and mother and a small brother he went to his friends houses and he knew their sisters school and home life met daily instead of being sharply divided into terms and holidays the terminology for English schools came into being largely before the state concerned itself with education a private school is one run by an individual school or a group for private profit a public school is not run for private profit any profits there may be are put back into the school mostly they are run by a board of governors and very many of them hold the succession to the old monastic schools of England for example Charter House Westminster St. Paul's they are usually though not necessarily boarding schools and the fees are usually high elementary schools called board schools were paid out of the local rates and run by elected school boards they were later replaced by schools run by the county councils this fact was of immense significance in Gilbert's development years later he noted as the chief defect of Oxford that it consisted almost entirely of people educated at boarding schools for good for evil or for both a boy at a day school was educated chiefly at home in the atmosphere of St. Paul's is found little echo of the dogma of the headmaster of Christ's hospital boy the school is your father boy the school is your mother nor as far as we know as any Paul line been known to desire the substitution of the august abstraction for the guardianship of his own people friendships formed in this school have a continual reference to home life nor can a boy possibly have a friend long without making the acquaintance and feeling the influence of his parents and his surroundings the boys own amusements and institutions the school sports the school clubs the school magazine are patronized by the masters but they are originated and managed by the boys the play hours of the boys are left to their several pleasures with their physical or intellectual nor have any foolish observations about the battle of Waterloo being one on the cricket field or such rather unmeaning oracles yet succeeded in converting the boys amusements into a compulsory gymnastic lesson the boys are within reasonable limits free manuscript for history of J. D. C. written about 1894 Gilbert calls the chapter on his school days how to be a dunce and although in mature life he was on the side of his masters and grateful to them that my persistent efforts not to learn Latin were frustrated and that I was not entirely successful even in escaping the contamination of the language of Aristotle and Demosthenes he still contrasts childhood as a time when one wants to know nearly everything with the period of what is commonly called education and the period during which I was being instructed by somebody I did not know about something I did not want to know the boy who sat next to him in class Lawrence Solomon later senior tutor of University College London remembered him as sleepy and indifferent in manner but able to master anything when he cared to take the trouble as he very seldom did he was in class with boys almost all his juniors who later became his brother in law says of Gilbert's own description of his school life that it was as near opposed as Gilbert ever managed to get he wanted desperately to be the ordinary schoolboy but he never managed to fulfill this ambition tall untidy incredibly clumsy and absent minded he was marked out from his fellows both physically and intellectually when in the latter part of his school life some sort of physical exercises were made compulsory the boys used to form parties to watch his strange efforts on the trapeze or parallel bars in these early days he was, he says of himself somewhat solitary but not unhappy and perfectly good humor to vote the tricks which were inevitably played on a boy who always appeared to be half asleep he sat at the back of the room says Mr. Fordham and never distinguished himself he thought him the most curious thing that ever was his school fellows noted how he would stride along apparently muttering poetry breaking into a mean laughter the kind of thing he was muttering we learn from a sentence in the autobiography I was one day wondering about the streets in that part of North Kensington telling myself stories of feudal salles and sieges in the manner of Walter Scott and vaguely trying to apply them to the bitterness of bricks and mortar around me I can see him now, wrote Mr. Fordham very tall and lanky striding untitly along Kensington High Street smiling and sometimes scowling as he talked to himself apparently oblivious to everything he passed but in reality a far closer observer than most and one who not only observed but remembered what he had seen it was only of himself that he was really oblivious Mr. Oldershaw remembers that on one occasion on a very cold day they filled his pockets with snow on the playground when class reassembled the snow began to melt and pools to appear on the floor a small boy raised his hand please sir, I think the laboratory sink must be leaking again the water is coming through and falling all over Chesterton the laboratory sink was an old offender and the master must have been short-sighted Chesterton he said go up to Mr. Blank and ask him with my compliments to see that the trouble with the sink is put right immediately Gilbert with water still streaming from both pockets obediently went upstairs gave the message and returned without discovering what had happened the boys who played these jokes on him had at the same time in an extraordinary respect both for his intellectual acquirements and for his moral character one boy who rather prided himself in private life on being a man about town stopped him one day in the passage and said solemnly Chesterton, I am an abandoned profligate G.K. replied I'm sorry to hear that we watched our talk one of them said to me when he was with us his home and upbringing were felt by some of his school fellows to have definitely a puritan tinge about them although on the other hand the more conservative elements regarded them as politically dangerous Mr. Oldershaw relates that his own father who was a conservative in politics and had also joined the Catholic Church seriously warned him against the agnosticism and republicanism of the Chesterton household but even at this age his school fellows recognized that he had begun the great quest of his life we felt said Oldershaw he was looking for God I suppose it was in part the keenness of the inner vision that produced the effect of external sleepiness and made it possible to pack Gilbert's pockets with snow but it was also the fact that he was observing very keenly the kind of thing that other people did not bother to observe I remember my mother telling me when I first came out that she had almost ceased trying to draw people's characters and imaginatively construct their home lives because for the first time in her life she was trying to notice how they were dressed she was not noticeably successful Gilbert Chesterton never even tried to see what everyone else saw all the time he was seeing qualities in his friends, ideas in literature and possibilities in life and all this world of imagination had on his own theory to be carefully concealed from his masters in the autobiography he describes himself walking to school fervently reciting verses which he afterwards repeated in class with a determined lack of expression and woodenness of voice but when he assumes this is how all boys behave he surely attributes his own literary enthusiasm far too widely one would rather gather that he supposed the whole of St. Paul's school to be in the conspiracy to conceal their love of literature from their masters his own schoolboy papers as can be found show an imagination rare enough at any age and an enthusiasm not commonly to be found among schoolboys a very early one to judge by the handwriting is on the advantages for a historical character of having long hair illustrated by the history of Mary, Queen of Scots and Charles I in the contrast he draws between Mary and Elizabeth appeared qualities of historical imagination that might well belong to a mature and experienced writer as in the cause of the fleeting heartless Helen the Trojan War is stirred up and great Ajax perishes and the gentle Patroclus is slain and mighty Hector falls and godlike Achilles is laid low and the Dun Plains of Hades are thickened with the shades of King so round this lovely giddy French princess fall one by one the haughty Dauphan the princely Darnley the accomplished Ritcio the terrible Bothwell and when she dies, she dies as a martyr before the weeping eyes of thousands and is given a popular pity and regret denied to her rival with all her faults of violence and vanity a greater and a purer woman it must indeed have been a terrible scene the execution of that unhappy queen and it is a scene that has been described by too many and too able writers for me to venture on a picture of it but the continually lamented death of Mary of Scotland seems to me happy compared with the end of her greater and sterner rival as I think of the two the vision of the black scaffold the grim headsman the serene captive and the weeping populace fades from me and is replaced by a sadder vision the vision of the dimly lighted state bedroom of Whitehall Elizabeth haggard and wild-eyed has flung herself prone upon the floor and refuses to take meat or drink but lies there surrounded by ceremonious courtiers but seeing with that terrible insight that was her curse that she was alone that their homage was a mockery that they were waiting eagerly for her death to crown their intrigues with her successor that there was not in the whole world a single being who cared for her seeing all this and bearing it with the iron fortitude of a race but underneath that invincible silence the deep woman's nature crying out with a bitter cry that she has loved no longer thus gnawed by the fangs of a dead vanity haunted by the pale ghost of Essex and helpless and bitter of heart the greatest of English women passed away silently of a truth there are prisons more gloomy than fathering gay and deaths more cruel than the axe is there no pity due to those who undergo these? it is surprising to read the series of form reports written on a boy who at 15 and 16 could do work of this quality here are the half yearly reports made by his form masters from his first year in school at the age of 13 to the time he left at the age of 18 December 1887 too much for me means well by me I believe but has an inconceivable knack of forgetting at the shortest notice is consequently always in trouble though some of his work is well done when he does remember to do it he ought to be in a studio not a school never troublesome but for his lack of memory and absence of mind July 1888 wildly inaccurate about everything never thinks for two consecutive moments to judge by his work plenty of ability perhaps in other directions than classics December 1888 fair, improving in neatness has a very fair stock of general knowledge July 1889 a great blunderer with much intelligence December 1889 means well would do better to give his time to modern subjects July 1890 can get up any work but originates nothing December 1890 takes an interest in his English work but otherwise has not done well July 1891 he has a decided literary aptitude but does not trouble himself enough about schoolwork December 1891 report missing July 1892 not on the same plane with the rest composition quite futile but will translate well and appreciate what he reads not a quick brain but possessed by a slowly moving tortuous imagination conduct always admirable but as much clear from the mass of notebooks and odd sheets of paper belonging to these years then from the autobiography is the degree to which the two possesses of resisting and absorbing knowledge were going on simultaneously at school he was he says asleep but dreaming in his sleep at home he was still learning literature from his father going to museums and picture galleries for enjoyment listening to political talk and engaging in arguments writing historical plays and acting in them and above all drawing to most of his early writing it's nearly impossible to affix a date with the exception of a dramatic journal kept by fits and starts during the Christmas holidays when he was 16 G. K. Solemney tells the reader of his diary to take warning by it and it does in fact contain many more words to many fewer ideas than any of his later writings but it's useful in giving the atmosphere of those years great part is in the dialogue and the author appearing throughout as your humble servant his young brother Cecil as the innocent child the first scene is the rehearsal of a dramatic version of scott's woodstock this has been written by your humble servant who is at the same time engaged on historic romance at intervals in the languid rehearsing endless discussions take place between older Shaw and G. K. on factory between older Shaw his father and G. K. on royal supremacy in the church of England the boys walking between their two houses discuss Roman Catholicism supremacy, papal and protestant persecutions your humble servant arrives at 11 warwick gardens to meet Mr. Mauer master Sidney Wells and master William Wells conversations about Frederick the Great Voltaire and Macaulay cheerful and an aligning discourse on germs, Dr. Koch consumption and tuberculosis conservative older Shaw regards his friend as a red hot raging Republican and it is interesting to note already faint foreshadowings of Gilbert's future political views his parents had made him a liberal but it seemed to him later as he notes in the autobiography that their generation was insufficiently alive to the condition and sufferings of the poor opened eyes in so many matters they were not looking in that particular direction and so it was only very gradually that he himself began to look your humble servant read older Shaw Elizabeth Browning's cry of the children which the former could scarcely trust himself to read but which the latter candidly avowed that he did not like part and parcel of older Shaw's optimism is a desire not to believe in pictures of real misery and a desire to find out compensating pleasures I think there was a good deal in what he said but at the same time I think that there is real misery physical and mental in the low and criminal classes and I don't believe in crying peace where there is no peace of his brother Gilbert notes that he is not a servile reverence for his elder brother whom he regards I believe as a mild lunatic and older Shaw recalls his own detestation of Cecil who would insist on monopolizing the conversation when Gilbert's friends wanted to talk to him an ugly little boy creeping about Mr. Fordham calls him Cecil had no vanity writes Mrs. Kidd and thoroughly appreciated the fact when he was about 14 he said at dinner one day I think I shall marry X a very plain cousin between us we might produce the missing link and Marie was shocked many of the games arise from the skill and drawing of both Gilbert and his father a long history of two of the masters drawn by Gilbert shows them in the Salvation Army as Christy Minstrels as editors of a new revolutionary paper like he attained as besieged in their office by a mob headed by Lord Salisbury the Archbishop of Canterbury and other conservative leaders getting tired at the last of the adventures of these two mild scholars Gilbert starts a series of Shakespeare plays drawn in modern dress Shylock as an aged Hebrew vendor of dilapidated vesture with a tiara of hats Antonio as an opulent and respectable city merchant Asanio as a fashionable swell and Gretanio as his loud and reputable pal with large cheeks and a billy cock hat Portia is attired as a barrister in wig and gown and Narissa as a clerk with a green bag and a pen behind his ear this being much appreciated your humble servant questions what portion of the bard of Avon he shall next burlesque the group seems certainly at this date to be living in a land in which it is always afternoon in one house or another tea time goes on until signs of dinner make their appearance the boys only move from one hospitable dining room to another to adjourn to their own bedrooms where Gilbert piles book on book and reduces even neat shelves to the same chaos that reigns in his own room the Christmas holidays to which the dramatic journal belongs came a few months after the founding of the junior debating club which became so central in Gilbert's life in which he treated with a gravity solemnity even such as he never showed later for any cause a gravity untouched by humor it was a group of about a dozen boys started with the idea that it should be a Shakespeare club but immediately changed into a general discussion group they met every week at the home of one or other and after a hearty tea some member read a paper which was then debated at the age of 20 when he had left school two years GK wrote a solemn history of this institution in which the question of whether it was right or wrong to insist on penny fines for rowdy behaviors canvassed with passionate feeling one boy who was expelled asked to be readmitted saying I feel so lonely without it Gilbert's enthusiasm over this incident later had he been a bishop welcoming the return of an apostate to the Christian fold I suppose it was partly because of his early solitary life at school partly because of the general trend of his thought partly that at this later date he was under the influence of Walt Whitman and cast back upon his earlier years a sort of glow or haze of Whitman idealism anyhow the junior debating club they were real friendship they were knights of the round table they were Jean-Glure de Dieu they were the human club through whom and in whom he had made the grand discovery of man they were his youth personified the note is still stuck in the letters of his engagement period and it was only 40 years later writing his autobiography that he was able to picture with a certain humorous detachment this group of boys who met to criticize the universe a year after their first meeting the energy of Lucien Oldershaw produced a magazine called The Debater at first it was turned out at home on a duplicator the efficiency of the production being such that the author of any given paper was able occasionally to recognize a few words of his own contribution later it was printed and gives a good record of meetings and discussions it shows the energy and art of the debaters and also their serious view of themselves and their efforts at first they were described as Mr. C, Mr. F, etc later the full name is given besides the weekly debates they started a library, a chess club a naturalist society and a sketching club regular meetings of which are chronicled the chairman, GKC said a few words runs a record after some months of existence stating his pride the success of the club and his belief in the good effect such a literary institution might have as a protest against the lower and unworthy phases of school life his view having been vehemently corroborated the meeting broke up and one fairly typical month papers were read on three comedies of Shakespeare Pope and Herodotus and when no paper was produced there was a discussion on capital punishment in another the subjects were the Brontes Macaulay is an essayist Frank Buckland the naturalist and Tennyson a pretty wide range of reading was called for from school boys in addition to their ordinary work even though on one occasion the secretary sternly notes that the reading of the paper occupied only three and one half minutes but they were not daunted by difficulties or afraid of bold attempts Mr. Digby Davingdor on one occasion delivered a paper entitled the 19th century a retrospect he gave a slight resume of the principal events with appropriate tribute to the deceased great of this century Mr. Bertram reading a paper on Milton dealt critically with his various poems noting the effective style of La Legaro giving the story of the writing of Commis and curiously analyzing Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained after discussing the adaptability of Hamlet to the stage Mr. Morris Solomon who may have been quite fifteen passed on to review the chief points in the character of the Prince of Denmark concluding with a slight review of the other characters which he did not think Shakespeare had given much attention to in a discussion on the new humorists we find the secretary taking grievous umbrage at certain unwarrantable attacks which he considered Mr. Andrew Lang had lately made on these choice spirits this discussion arose from a paper by the chairman on the new school of poetry in which in spite of its good points he condemned the absence of the sentiment of the moral which he held to be the really stirring and popular element in literature evidently some of his friends tended towards a youthful cynicism for in a paper on Barry's window in Thrum's Gilbert apologizes to such a view as are much bitten with the George Moore state of mind the book which describes the rusty emotions and toilsome lives of the Thrum's weavers will always remain a book that has given me something and the fact that mine is merely the popular view and where I feel in it can be equally felt by the majority of fellow creatures this fact such as my hardened and abandoned state only makes me like the book more I have long found myself in that hopeless minority that is engaged in protecting the majority of mankind from the attacks of all men in this sentiment we recognize the gk that is to be but not when we find him seconding Mr. Bentley in the motion that a scientific education is much more useful than a classic Mr. M reading a paper on Herodotus gave a minute account of the life of the historian dwelling much upon the doubt and controversy surrounding his birth in several incidents of his history while Mr. F read a paper on newspapers tracing their growth from the active Giorna of the later Roman Empire to the hordes of papers of the present day perhaps the best of all these efforts was that of Mr. LD who after describing the governments of England France, Russia, Germany and the United States proceeded to give his opinion on their various merits by first saying that he personally was a Republican of the boys that appear in the debater, Robert Vernet was killed in the great war Lawrence Solomon at his death in 1940 was senior tutor of University College London his brother Morris who became one of the directors of the general electric company is now an invalid I read a year or so ago an interesting Times obituary for Mr. Bertram who was director of civil aviation in the air ministry Mr. Salter became a principal in the treasury having practiced as a solicitor up to the war Mr. Fordham a barrister was one of the legal advisers to the ministry of labor and has now retired end of chapter three part one chapter three part two 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 three part two school days the two outstanding debaters of GK's life were Lucian Oldershaw who became his brother in law and will often appear in these pages and Edmund Cleary Hugh Bentley his friend of friends closely united as was the whole group Lucian Oldershaw once told me that they were frantically jealous of one another we would have done anything to get the first place with Gilbert but you know I said who had it yes he replied our jealousy of Bentley was overwhelming Mr. Bentley became a journalist and was for long on the editorial staff of the Daily Telegraph but he is best known for his detective stories especially Trent's last case and as the inventor of a special form of rhyme known from his second name as the Cleary Hugh he wrote the first of these while still at school and the best were later published in a volume called Biography for Beginners which GK illustrated everyone has his favorite my own is Sir Christopher Wren said I'm going to dine with some men if anybody calls say designing St. Paul's or possibly the people of Spain think Cervantes equal to half a dozen Dante's an opinion resented most bitterly by the people of Italy Bentley was essentially a holiday as well as a term time companion and when they were not together a large correspondence between the two boys gives some idea of how and where Gilbert spent his summer holidays they're very much school boy letters and not worth quoting full length but it is interesting to compare both style and content with the later letters all the letters begin dear Bentley the first use of his Christian name only occurs after both had left school Austria House, Peer Street Vettner, Isle of Right undated probably 1890 although you dropped some hints about Paris when you were last in our humble abode I presume that this letter of address to your usual habitation will reach you at some period Vettner where as you will perceive we are is I will not say built upon hills but emptied into the cracks and clefts of rocks so that the geography of the town is curious and involved my brother is intent upon the three midshipmen or the three admirals or the three coal scuttles or some other distinguished trio by that interminable as Kingston I looked at it today and wondered how I ever could have enjoyed his eternal slave schooners and African stations I would not give a page of Mansfield Park or a verse of in memoriam for all the endless fighting of blacks and boarding of pirates through which the three hypocritical vagabonds ever went I am getting old how old it will shortly be necessary for me to state precisely for as you doubtless know there is going to be a census I have been trying to knock into shape a story such as we spoke about the other day about the first introduction of tea and I should be glad of your assistance and suggestions I think I shall lay the scene in Holland where the merits of tea were first largely agitated and fill the scene with the traditional Dutch figures such as I sketch I find in disraelis curiosities of literature which I consulted before coming away that a French writer wrote an elaborate treatise to prove that tea merchants were always immoral members of society it would be rather curious to apply the theory to the present day 11 Warwick Gardens Kensington, Undated I direct this letter to your ancient patrimonial estate to find whether it will reach you or where it will reach you if it does whether you are shooting polar bears on the ice fields of Spitzbergen or cooking missionaries among the cannibals of the south pacific but wherever you are I find some considerable relief in turning from the lofty correspondence of the secretary with no disparagement of my much esteemed friend Oldershaw to another friend Iphelo McElimso who can discourse on some other subjects besides the society and who will not devote the whole of its correspondence to the questions of that excellent and valuable body the society is a very good thing in its way being the president I naturally think so but like other good things you may have too much of it and I have had as I said before I don't know where you are desporting yourself beyond some hurried remark about Paris which you dropped in our hurried interview in one of the brilliant flashes of silence between those imbecile screams and yells and stamping which even the natural enthusiasm at the prospect of being broken up cannot excuse 6. The Quadrant North Burrick Haddington, Scotland 1891 You will probably guess that as far as personal taste and instincts are concerned I share all your antipathy to the noisy plebeian excursionist a visit to Ramsgate during the season and the vision of the crowded howling sands has left in me feelings which all my radicalism cannot allay. At the same time I think that the lower orders are seen unfavorably when enjoying themselves in labor and trouble they are more dignified and less noisy Your suggestion as to a series of soliloquies is very flattering and has taken hold of me to the extent of writing a similar ballad on Simon de Montfort The order in which they come is rather incongruous particularly if I include the list I have in my mind for the future Thus, Danton, William III Simon de Montfort Russo, David and Russell I rejoice to say that this is a sequestered spot into which hiddily, high T, etc. and all the ills and trains have not penetrated In these last two letters there are sentences of a kind not to be found anywhere else in Chesterton The disparagement of Lucian Oldershaw's excessive enthusiasm for the junior debating club the solemn reprobation of the imbecile screams and yells and stamping of the last day at school before the summer holidays and the antipathy expressed for the rowdy enjoyments of the lower orders these things are not in the least like either the Chesterton that was to be or the Chesterton that then was but they are very much like Bentley He was two years younger than Chesterton but far older than his years and he seemed indeed to the other boys and perhaps to himself like an elderly gentleman smiling a remote, amused smile at the enthusiasm of the young I get the strongest feeling that at this stage Chesterton not only admired him as he was to do all his life but wanted to be like him to say the kind of thing he thought Bentley would say this phase did not last as we shall see it had gone by the time Chesterton was at the Slade School the quadrant North Burwick Haddington Scotland, undated probably 1891 Dear Bentley we have been here three days and my brother loudly murmurs that we have not yet seen any of the sights for my part I abominate sights and all people who want to look at them a great deal more instruction to say nothing of pleasure is to be got out of the nearest haystack or hedgerow taken quietly then trotting over two or three counties to see the view or the sight or the extraordinary cliff or the unusual tower or the unreasonable hill or any other monstrosity deforming the face of nature anybody can make sights but nobody has yet succeeded in making scenery excuse the unaccountable pencil drawing in the middle which was drawn unconsciously on the back of the unfinished letter 9 South Terrace, Little Hampton Sussex, Undated I agree with you in your admiration for Paradise Lost but consider it on the whole too light and childish a book for persons our age it is all very well as small children to read pretty stories about Satan and Belial when we have only just mastered our Oedipus and our Herbert Spencer but when we grow older we get to like Captain Marriott and Mr. Kingston and when we are men we know that Cinderella is much better than any of those babyish books as regards one question which you asked I may remark that the children of Israel presumably the Solomon's have not gone unto Arup neither unto Sittim but unto the land that is called Shropshire they went and abode therein and they came upon a city even unto the city that is called Shrewsbury and there they builded themselves a home where they might abide and their home was in the land that was called Castle Street and their home was the 25th Tabernacle in that land and they abode with certain of their own kin until their season be over and gone and lo they spake unto me by letter saying heard ye out of him that is called Bentley in the house of his fathers or has he come upon a strange land here endeth the second lesson Hotel de Lille et d'Albion 223 Rue Saint-Honoré Paris undated probably 1892 they showed us over the treasures of the cathedral among which as was explained by the guide who spoke a little English was a cross given by Louis the 14th to Mace Lavalier I thought that concession to the British system of titles was indeed touching I also thought when reflecting what the present was and where it was and then to whom it was given that this showed pretty well what the religion of the Bourbon regime was and why it has become impossible since the revolution Grand Hotel du chemin de fer Eremanche Calvados Art is universal this remark is not so irrelevant and Horace Greeley like as it may appear I've just had a demonstration of its truth on the coach coming down here two very nice little French boys of cropped hair and restless movements were just in front of us and my father having discovered that the book they had with them was a prize at a Paris school some slight conversation arose not thinking my French altogether equal to a prolonged interview I took out a scrap of paper and began with a fine carelessness to draw a picture of Napoleon the first hat, chin, attitude all complete this of course was gazed at rapturously by these two young inheritors of France's glory and it ended in my drawing them unlimited goblins to keep for the remainder of the interview in May 1891 the chairman of the JDC attained the maturity of 17 the secretary then arose in a speech in which he extolled the merits of the chairman as a chairman and mentioned the benefit which the junior debating club received on the day of which this was the anniversary the natile day of Mr. Chesterton proposed that a vote wishing him many happy returns of the day long continuance in the chair of the club should be passed this was carried with acclamations the chairman replied after restoring order naturally this question of order among a crowd of boys loomed large at the beginning a number of rules were passed giving great powers to the chairman which that gentleman lenient by temperament and republican by principles certainly would never have put in force it was seldom enough that a boy of 15 found himself in the position of the chairman an attitude of command and responsibility over a body of his friends and equals and it was not to be expected that they would easily take to the state of things nor was the chairman himself like the secretary protected and armed by any personal aptitude for practical proceedings but solely by the certain degree of respect entertained for his character and requirements with respect sincere and even excessive as it frequently was contrasted somewhat humorously with the common inattention to questions of order nor could anything be more noisy than the loyalty of Fordham and Langdon Davies with the exception of their interruptions it may then fairly be said that the troubles and discussions of the first months of the club's existence centered practically around the question of order the first of the great difficulties of both enterprise how boys could scarcely be got to behave quietly under the strictest school masters could ever be brought to obey the rebuke of their equal and school fellow how a heterogeneous pack of average school boys could organize themselves into a self-governing republic these were problems of real and stupendous difficulty the fines of a penny and of a tuppence which were instituted at the first meeting was endlessly incompetent to cope with the bursts of obvious hilarity Fordham in particular whose constant breaches of order threatened to exhaust even the extensive treasury of that spoilt and opulent young gentleman soon left calculation far behind nor can the story be better or more brightly told than by himself Mr. F. he wrote at one time after considerable calculation found that he was in debt to the extent of some 10 or 11 shillings but as he felt that by refusing to pay the sum he would be striking a blow for the liberty of the subject he manfully held out against what he considered an unjust punishment for such diminutive frivolities as he had indulged in at times incidents of a disturbing and playful nature have roused the wrath of the chairman and the secretary to a pitch awful to behold at one time Mr. H. a member who soon resigned spent a considerable part of a meeting under the table till he found himself used as a public footstool and a doormat combined at another as Mr. Bentley was departing from the scene of chaos a penny bun of the sticky order caressingly stung his honored cheek sped upon its errand of mercy by the unerring aim of Mr. F GK was in fact 16 when the JDC began manuscript history of the JDC Mr. Fordham well remembers how GK one day took him aside at the older Shaw's house and told him that he really must be less exuberant this historic occasion was always alluded to later as the day on which the chairman spoke seriously to Mr. F after various resignations order was restored and a little later two of the chief recalcitrants asked to be received back into the club I feel so lonely without it one of them had remarked and GK comments this has always appeared to the president writer one of the most important speeches in the history of the club the junior debating club had come through its moments of difficulty and was a fact and an establishment nor was the circulation of the debater long confined to members of the club and their own circle and relatives some of the boys had no doubt a regular allowance but probably a small one Gilbert himself says in his diary that he had no income except Aaron six pence's and printers bills had to be paid moreover in the first number the editor Lucian older Shaw confessed frankly that one reason for the papers existence was that the society may not degenerate into the position of a mutual admiration society by totally lacking the admiration of outsiders the staff were able immediately to note any apprehensions we may have felt in the morning of the publication of the debater were speedily dispelled when by nightfall we had disposed of all our copies of a later issue the energetic editor sold 65 copies in the course of the summer holidays masters too began to read it and at last a copy was hit on the table of the high master Mr. Walker Cecil Chesterton describes the high master as a gigantic man with a booming voice some Paul lines believed he had given Gilbert the first inspiration for the personality of Sunday and the man who was Thursday another contemporary says that he was reputed to take no interest in anything except examination successes and that the boys were amazed at the effect on him of reading the debater reading in the light of his future one sees qualities in Gilbert's work not to be found in that of the other contributors but it is worth noting that the JDC members were in fact a quite unusually able group almost every one of them took brilliant scholarships to Oxford or Cambridge the high master had never boasted of so many scholarships from one set of boys and in reading the debater which others could share one has to bear in mind the relative ages of the contributors it is I think striking that all these boys should have recognized Gilbert's quality and accepted his leadership for they were all a year or so younger than he was and yet were in the same form they knew that this was only because GK would not bother to do his school work still I think at that age they showed insight by knowing it to be found in every number of the debater usually verse as well as prose both Fordham and Oldershaw remember most vividly the effect of reading a fanciful essay on dragons in the first number the dragon it began is the most cosmopolitan of impossibilities and the boys rolling the words on their tongues murmured to one another this is literature except for an occasional flash the one element not yet visible in these debater essays is humor this is curious because some of his most brilliant fooling belongs to the same period in a collection made after his death the colored lands is an illustrated Jus de Spree of 1891 half hours in Hades an elementary handbook on demonology which is as musing a thing as he ever wrote the drawings he made for it show specimens of the evolution of devils into various types of humans the devils themselves are carefully classified the common or garden serpent tentator Hortensis the red devil Diabolus Mephi Staflis the blue devil Carolus Lugubrius et cetera Mr. J. Milton specimen is discussed in various methods of pursuing observations in supernatural history which possess an interest which will remain after health youth and even life have departed there is nothing of this kind in the debater besides the historical soliloquies mentioned in the letter to Bentley there are poems in which he is beginning to feel after his religious philosophy one of these in a very early number shows considerable power for a boy not yet 17 Adveniat Aregnum Tuum not that the widespread wings of wrong brood or a moaning earth not from the clean curse of gold the random lot of birth not from the misery of the weak the madness of the strong goes upward from our lips the cry how long oh lord how long not only from the huts of toil the dens of sin and shame from lordly halls and peaceful homes the cry goes up the same deep in the heart of every man where his life be spent there is a noble weariness a holy discontent where the mortal eyes has come in silence dark and lone some glimmer of the far off light the world has never known some ghostly echoes from a dream of earth's triumphal song that as the vision fades we cry how long oh lord how long ages from the dawn of time man's toiling march has blown towards the world they ever sought the world they never found still far before their toiling path the glimmering promise lay still hovered round the struggling race a dream by night and day mid darkening care and clinging sin they sought their unknown home yet near the perfect glory came lord will ever come the weeding of earth's gardens brought from all its growths of wrong when all man's soul shall be a prayer and all his life a song I, though through many a starless night we guard the flaming oil though we have watched a weary watch and toiled a weary toil though in the midnight wilderness we wander still forlorn we in our hearts the proof that God shall send the dawn deep in the tablets of our hearts he writes that yearning still the longing that his hand hath wrought shall not his hand fulfill though death shall close upon us all before that hour we see the goal of ages yet is there the good time yet to be therefore tonight from varied lips in every house and home goes up to God the common prayer Father, Thy Kingdom come the Debater, Volume 1 March, April, 1891 Gilbert's prose work in the Debater must have been a little less surprising to any master who had merely watched him slumbering at a desk. His historical romance, the white cockade, is immature and unimportant but essays on Spencer, Milton, Pope, Grey, Cowper, Burns, Wordsworth, humor and fiction, Boy's Literature, Sir Walter Scott, Browning, the English Dramatists, showed a range and a quality of literary criticism alike, surprising. Perhaps most surprising, however, is the fact that all this does not seem to have been made clear to either masters or parents the true nature of Gilbert's vocation. He suffered at this date from having too many talents for he still went on drawing and his drawings seemed to many the most remarkable thing about him were certainly the thing he most enjoyed doing. Even now his schoolwork had not brought him into the highest form, called not the sixth as in most schools but the eighth. The highest form he ever reached was 6B, but in the summer term of 1892 he entered a competition for a prize poem and one night. The subject chosen was St. Francis Xavier. I give the poem an appendix A. It is not as notable as some other of his work at that time. What is interesting is that in it this schoolboy expresses with some power a view he was later to explode yet more powerfully. He might have claimed for himself what he said of earlier writers. It is not true that they did not see our modern difficulties they saw through them. Never before had this contest been won by any but an eighth form boy. And almost immediately afterwards Gilbert was amazed to find a short notice posted on the board. G.K. Chesterton to rank with the eighth. F.W. Walker, High Master. The High Master at any rate had traveled far from the atmosphere of the form reports when Mrs. Chesterton visited him in 1894 to ask his advice about her son's future. For he said Six foot of genius. Cherish him, Mrs. Chesterton Cherish him. End of Chapter 3 Part 2