 Chapter 4 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 4 Art Schools and University College. When all Gilbert's friends were at Oxford or Cambridge, he used to say how glad he was that his own choice had been a different one. He never sighed for Oxford. He never regretted his rather curious experiences at an art school. Two art schools, really, although he only talks of one in the autobiography, for he was for a short time at a school of art in St. John's Wood. Calderons, Lawrence Solomon thought, once he passed to the Slade School. He was there from 1892 to 1895, and during part of that time he attended lectures on English Literature at University College. The chapter on the experiences of the next two years is called, in the autobiography, How to be a Lunatic. And there is no doubt that these years were crucial and at times crucifying in Gilbert's life. During a happily prolonged youth, he was now 18 and a half, he had developed very slowly, but normally. Surrounded by pleasant friendships and home influences, he had never really become aware of evil. Now it broke upon him suddenly, probably to a degree exaggerated by his strong imagination and distorted by the fact that he was undergoing physical changes, usually belonging to an earlier age. Toward the end of his school life, Gilbert's voice had not yet broken. His mother took him to a doctor to be overhauled and was told that his brain was the largest and most sensitive the doctor had ever seen. A genius or an idiot, was the verdict on the probabilities. Above all things, she was told to avoid for him any sort of shock, physically, mentally, spiritually. He was on a very large scale and probably for that reason, of a slow rate of development. The most highly differentiated organisms are the slowest to mature, and without question Gilbert did mature very late. He was now passing through the stage described by Keats, the imagination of a boy is healthy and the mature imagination of a man is healthy, but there is space of life between, a period, unhealthy, or at least ill-focused. Intellectually, Gilbert suffered at this time from an extreme skepticism. As he expressed it, he felt as if everything might be a dream, as if he had projected the universe from within. The agnostic doubts the existence of God, Gilbert at moments, doubted the existence of the agnostic. Morally, his temptations seemed to have been in some strange psychic region, rather than merely physical. The whole period is best summarized in a passage from the autobiography. For looking back after 40 years, Gilbert still saw it as deeply and darkly significant, as both a mental and moral extreme of danger. There is something truly menacing in the thought of how quickly I could imagine the maddest, when I had never committed the mildest crime. There was a time when I had reached that condition of moral anarchy within, in which a man says, in the words of Wild, Eddus with a bloodstained knife, were better than the thing I am. I've never indeed felt the faintest temptation to the particular madness of Wild, but I could at this time imagine the worst and wildest disproportion and distortions of more normal passion. The point is that the whole mood was overpowered and oppressed with a sort of congestion of imagination. As Bunyan, in his morbid period described himself as prompted to utter blasphemies, I had an overpowering impulse to record or draw horrible ideas and images, lunging deeper and deeper as in a blind spiritual suicide, pages 88 to 89. Two of his intimate friends, finding at this time a notebook full of these horrible drawings, asked one another, Is Chesterton going mad? He dabbled too in spiritualism until he realized that he reached the verge of forbidden and dangerous ground. I would not altogether rule out the suggestion of some that we were playing with fire, or even with hellfire. In the words that were written for us, there was nothing ostensibly degrading, but any amount that was deceiving. I saw quite enough of the thing to be able to testify with complete certainty that something happens which is not in the ordinary sense natural or produced by the normal conscious human will, whether it is produced by some subconscious but still human force, or by some powers good, bad, or indifferent, which are external to humanity. I would not myself attempt to decide. The only thing I will say with complete confidence about that mystic and invisible power is that it tells lies. The lies may be larks, or they may be lures to the imperiled soul, or they may be a thousand other things. But whatever they are, they are not truths about the other world, or for that matter about this world. Autobiography page 77. He told Father O'Connor some years later that he had used the plush hat freely at one time, but had to give it up on account of headaches ensuing. After the headaches came a horrid feeling as if one were trying to get over a bad spree, with what I can best describe as a bad smell in the mind. Father Brown on Chesterton page 74. Idling at his work, he fell in with other idlers, and has left a vivid description in a daily news article called The Diabolist of one of his fellow students. It was strange perhaps that I liked his dirty drunken society. It was stranger still perhaps that he liked my society. For hours of the day he would talk with me about Milton or Gothic architecture. For hours of the night he would go where I have no wish to follow him, even in speculation. He was a man with a long, ironical face, and close red hair. He was by class a gentleman, and could walk like one, but preferred for some reason to walk like a groom carrying two pails. He looked like a sort of super jockey, as if some archangel had gone on the turf. And I shall never forget the half hour in which he and I argued about real things for the first and last time. He had a horrible fairness of the intellect that made me despair of his soul. A common, harmless atheist would have denied that religion produced humility or humility a simple joy, but he admitted both. He only said, but shall I not find an evil, a life its own? Granted, that for every woman I ruin, one of those red sparks will go out, will not the expanding pleasure of ruin. Do you see that fire asked? If we had a real fighting democracy, someone would burn you in it, like the devil worshiper you are. Perhaps he said, in his tired, fair way, only what you call evil, I call good. He went down the great steps alone, and I felt as if I wanted the steps swept and cleaned. I followed later, and as I went to find my hat in the low dark passage where it hung, I suddenly heard his voice again, and the words were inaudible. I stopped, startled, but then I heard the voice of one of the vilest of his associates saying, nobody can possibly know. And then I heard those two or three words which I remember in every syllable and cannot forget. I heard the diabolist say, I tell you I have done everything else. If I do that, I shan't know the difference between right and wrong. I rushed out without daring to pause, and as I passed the fire, I did not know whether it was hell or the furious love of God. I have since heard that he died. It may be said I think that he committed suicide, though he did it with tools of pleasure, not with tools of pain. God help him. I know the road he went, but I have never known or even dared to think what was that place at which he stopped and refrained. Quoted in G.K. Chesterton, a criticism, Alston Rivers Limited, 1908, pages 20-22. Revolition from the atmosphere of evil took Gilbert to no new thing, but to a strengthening of old ties and a mystic renewal of them. The JDC was idealized into a mystical city of friends, a list. I know a friend very strong and good. He is the best friend in the world. I know another friend, subtle and sensitive. He is certainly the best friend on earth. I know another friend, very quiet and shrewd. There is no friend so good as he. I know another friend who is enigmatic and reluctant. He is the best of all. I know yet another who is polished and eager. He is far better than the rest. I know another who is young and very quick. He is the most beloved of all friends. I know a lot more, and they are all like that. Amen. The Cosmic Factories What are little boys made of? Bentley is made of hardwood with a knot in it, a complete set of browning and strong spring. Older Shaw of a box of Lucifer matches and a stylographic pen. Lawrence of a barrister's wig, files of punch and salt. Morris of watch wheels, three riders and a clean collar. Vernet is made of moonlight and tobacco. Bertram is mostly a handsome black walking stick. Waldo is a nice cabbage with a vanishing odor of cigarettes. Salter is made of sand and fire and a university extension ticket. But the strongest element in all cannot be expressed. I think it is a sort of star from the notebook. There are fragments of a morality play entitled The Junior Debating Club, of a modern novel in which everyone of the debaters makes his appearance of a medieval story called The Legend of Sir Edmund of the Brotherhood of the Jean-Glure de Dieu. Notes, fragments, letters all show an intense individual interest that covered the life of each of his friends. If one of them is worried, he worries too. If one rejoices, he rejoices exceedingly. They write to him about their ideas and views, their relations with one another, their reactions in the world of Oxford life, their love affairs. I am in need of some literary tonic or bloodletting, says Vernet, which you alone can supply. I only hope, writes Bertram, you may be as much use in the world in the future as you have been in the past to your friends. Most of the absent club, writes Salter, separated from the others, lie together in my pocket at this moment. And Gilbert writes in the notebook, an idol. T is made, the red fogs shut round the house, but the gas burns. I wish I had, at this moment, round the table, a company of fine people. Two of them are at Oxford, and one in Scotland, and two at other places. But I wish they would all walk in now, for the tea is made. Gilbert was devoted to them all, but as we have seen, Bentley's was the supreme friendship of his youth. It was a friendship of foolery, as we are told by the dedication of greybeards at play. He was, through boyhood's storm and shower, my best, my nearest friend. We wore one hat, smoked one cigar, one standing at each end. It was a deeply serious friendship, as we are told in the dedication of the man who was Thursday. With Bentley alone, he shared the doubts that drove us through the night, as we too talked amin. And day had broken on the streets, air had broke upon the brain. Most young men write, or at least begin, novels of which they are themselves the heroes. Gilbert wrote and illustrated a fairy story about a boyish romance of Lucien Oldershaw's while two unfinished novels have Bentley for a hero. He is, too, in the medieval story, Sir Edmund of the Brotherhood of the Jean-Glure de Dieu. Gilbert sings, like all young poets of first love, but it is Bentley's, not his own. He was as much excited about a girl Bentley had fallen in love with as if he had fallen in love with her himself. And where a London street has a special significance, one discovers it is because of a memory of Bentley's. To Bentley then, with whom all was shared, Gilbert wrote, when through friendship and the goodness of things, he had come out again into the daylight. The second thought that had saved him had largely grown out of the first. The JDC meant friendship. Friendship meant the highest of all good things and all good things called for gratitude. As he gave thanks, he drew near to God. Done it in Lodge, 4th Street, North Burrick, undated probably a long vacation in 1894. Your letter was most welcome in which, however, it does not differ widely from most of your letters. I read somewhere in some fatuous, complete letter writer or something that it is correct to imitate the order of subjects, etc. observed by your correspondent. In obedience to this rule of breeding, I will hurriedly remark that my holiday has been nice enough in itself. We walk about, lie on the sand, go and swim in the sea when it generally rains, and the combination gets in our mouths and we say the name of the professor in the water babies. Inwardly speaking, I have had a funny time. A meaningless fit of depression, taking the form of certain absurd psychological worries, came upon me. And instead of dismissing it and talking to people, I had it out and went very far into the abysses, indeed. The result was that I found that things when examined necessarily spelt such a mystically satisfactory state of things that without getting back to earth, I saw lots that made me certain it is all right. My vision is fading into common day now and I am glad. The frame of mine was the reverse of gloomy, but it would not do for long. It is embarrassing, talking with God face to face as a man speaks to his friend. In another letter, a cosmos one day being rebuked by a pessimist replied, How can you who revile me consent to speak to my machinery? Permit me to reduce you to nothingness, and then we will discuss the matter. Moral, you should not look a gift universe in the mouth. Another powerful influence in the direction of mental health was the discovery of Walt Whitman's poetry. I shall never forget Lucian older Shaw writes, Reading to him from the Canterbury Walt Whitman in my bedroom at West Kensington. The seance lasted from two to three hours and we were intoxicated with the excitement of the discovery. Sometime now we shall find Gilbert dismissing belief of any positive existence of evil and treating the universe on the Whitman principle of jubilant and universal acceptance. He writes too in the Whitman style, By far the most important of his notebooks is one which by amazing good fortune can be dated, beginning in 1894 and continuing for several years. In its attitude to man it is Whitman-esque to a high degree, yet it is also most characteristically Chestertonian. Whitman is content with a shouting, roaring optimism about life and humanity. Chesterton had to find it a philosophical basis. Hardly, as he disliked the literary pessimism of the hour, he was not content simply to exchange one mood for another. For whether he was conscious of it at the time or not, he did later see Whitman's outlook as a mood and not a philosophy. It was a mood, however, that Chesterton himself never really lost, solely because he did discover the philosophy needed to sustain it. And thereby, even in this early notebook, he goes far beyond Whitman. Even so early, he knew that a philosophy of man could not be a philosophy of man only. He already feels a presence in the universe. It is evening and into the room enters again a large indiscernible presence. Is that a man or a woman? Is it one long dead or yet to come that sits with me in the evening? This again might have only been a mood had he not found the philosophy to sustain it. It is remarkable how much of this philosophy he had arrived at in the notebook before he had come to know Catholics. Indeed, the notebook seems to me so important that it needs a chapter to itself with abundant quotation. Meanwhile, what was Gilbert doing about his work at University College? Professor Fred Brown told Lawrence Solomon that when he was at the Slade School, he always seemed to be writing and while listening to lectures, he was always drawing. It is probably true that as Cecil Chesterton says, he shrank from the technical toils of the artist as he never did later from those of authorship. And none of the professors regarded him as a serious art student. They pointed later to his illustrations of biography for beginners as proof that he never learnt to draw. Yet how many of the men who did learn seriously could have drawn those sketches full of crazy energy and vitality? I know nothing about drawing, but anyone may know how brilliant are the illustrations to graybeards at play or biography for beginners and later to Mr. Bellach's novels. Anyone can see the power of line with which he drew in his notebooks, unfinished suggestions of humanity or divinity. Anyone too can recognize a portrait of a man and faces full of character continue to adorn G.K.'s exercise books. Of living models, he affected chiefly Gladstone Balfour and Joe Chamberlain. In hours of thought, he made drawings of our Lord with a crown of thorns or nail to a cross. These suddenly appear in any of his books between fantastic drawings or lecture notes. As the mind wandered and lingered, the fingers followed it. And as Gilbert listened to lectures, he would even draw on the top of his own nose. He had always had facility, and that facility increased so that in later years he often completed in a couple of hours the illustrations to a novel of Bellach's. Nor were these drawings merely illustrations of an already completed text, for Bellach has told me that the characters were often half suggested to him by his friend's drawings. A one at any rate of his vacations, Gilbert went to Italy, and two letters to Bentley show how much of the way his thoughts were going. Hotel New York, Florence, undated probably 1894. Dear Bentley, I turn to write my second letter to you and my first to Gray, Laura Solomon, just after having a very interesting conversation with an elderly American like Colonel Newcomb, though much better informed, two of my compared notes on Botticelli, Ruskin, Carlisle, Emerson, and the world in general. I asked him what he thought of Whitman. He answered frankly that in America they were hardly up to him. We have one town, Boston, he said precisely, that has got up to Browning. He then added that there was one thing everyone in America remembered, Whitman himself. The old gentleman quite kindled on the topic. Whitman was a real man, a man who was so pure and strong that he could not imagine him doing any unmanly thing anywhere. It was odd words to hear a tablet note from your next door neighbor. It made me quite excited over my salad. You see this humanitarianism in which we are entangled asserts itself where? By all guidebook laws it should not. When I take up my pen to write to you, I am thinking more of a white moustached old Yankee at a hotel than about the things I have seen within the same 24 hours. The frescoes of Santa Croce, the illuminations of St. Marco, the white marbles of the Tower of Giato, the very Madonna's of Raphael, and the very David of Michelangelo. Throughout this tour and pursuance of our theory of traveling, we have avoided the guide. He is the death knell of individual liberty. Once only he broke through our rule, and that was in favor of an extremely intelligent, nay impulsive young Italian in Santa Maria Novella, a church where we saw some of the most interesting pieces of medieval painting I have ever seen. Interesting, not so much from an artistic, as from a moral and historical point of view. Particularly noticeable was the great fresco expressive of the grandest medieval conception of the communion of saints. A figure of Christ surmounting a crowd of all ages and stations, among whom were not only Dante, Petrarcha, Giato, etc., etc., but Plato, Cicero, and best of all, Arius. I said to the guide in a tone of expostulation heretico, a word of impromptu manufacture, whereupon he nodded, smiled, and was positively radiant with the latitudinarianism of the old Italian painter. It was interesting for it was a fresh proof that even the early church united had a period of thought and tolerance before the dark ages closed around it. There is one thing I must tell you more of when we meet, the Tower of Giato. It was built in a square of Florence near the cathedral by a self-made young painter and architect who had kept sheep as a boy on the Tuscan Hills. It is still called the Shepherd's Tower. What I want to tell you about is the series of ba reliefs which Giato traced on it, representing the creation and the progress of man, his discovery of navigation, astronomy, law, music, and so on. It is religious in the grandest sense, but there is not a shred of doctrine. Even the fall is omitted from this history in stone. If Walt Whitman had been an architect, he would have built such a tower with such a story in it. As I want to go out and have a look at it before we start for Venice tomorrow, I must cut this short. I hope you are enjoying yourself as much as I am and thinking about me half as much as I am about you. Your very sincere friend, Gilbert K. Chesterton. No one would have enjoyed more than Gilbert rereading this letter in after years and noting the suggestion that the 15th century belonged to the early church and preceded the Dark Ages. And I think too that even in Giato's Tower, he might later have discovered some roots of doctrine. Grand Hotel de Milan, Undated. Dear Bentley, I write you a third letter before coming back while Venice and Verona are fresh in my mind. Of the former, I can really only discourse Viva Voce. Imagine a city whose very slums are full of palaces, whose every other house wall has a battered fresco or a Gothic Ba relief. Imagine a sky fretted with every kind of pinnacle from the great dome of the salute to the Gothic spires of the Ducal Palace and the downright Arabesque Orientalism of the minarets of St. Mark's. And then imagine the whole flooded with a sea that seems only intended to reflect sunsets and you still have no idea of the place I stopped in for more than 48 hours. Thence, we went to Verona where Romeo and Juliet languished and Dante wrote most of Hell. The principal products won tombs, particularly those of the Scala, a very good old family with an excellent taste and fratricide. There are three tombs, one to each man I mean, one man, one grave, are really glorious examples of three stages of Gothic, of which more when we meet. Two balconies with young ladies hanging over them, really quite a preponderating feature. Whether this was done in obedience to local associations and in expectation of a Romeo, I can't say. I can only remark that if such was the object, the supply of Juliet's seems very much in excess of the demand. Three Roman remains, of which, however, I did not pronounce a soliloquy beginning wonderful people, which is the correct thing to do. Just as I get to this, I receive your letter and resolve to begin another sheet of paper. I did read Rosebury's speech and was more than interested, I was stirred. The old order of parliamentary forums, peerages, and the right honorable friends has changed, yielding place to the new of industrialism, county council, sanitation, education in the kingdom of heaven at hand. And whatever the Archbishop of Canterbury may say, God fulfills himself in many ways, even by local government. Several things in your letter require notice. First, the accusation leveled against one of being prejudiced against Professor Huxley. I repel with indignation and scorn. You are not prejudiced against cheese because you like oranges, or though the professor is not Isaiah or St. Francis or Whitman or Richard DeGalion to name some of those whom I happen to affect, I should be the last person in the world to say a word against an earnest, able, kind-hearted, and most refreshingly rational man. By far the best man of his type I know. As to what you say on education generally, I am entirely with you, but it will take a good interview to say how much. As for the little Solomon's, I am prepared to be fond of all of them, as I am of all children, even the grubby little mendicants that run these Italian streets. I am glad you and Gray have pottered. Potter again. I have had such a nice letter from Lawrence. It makes me think it is all going to be the fair beginning of time. Had the Months of Art study only developed in Gilbert Chesterton, his power of drawing, they might still have been worthwhile, but they gave him, too, a time to dream and to think which working for a university degree would never have allowed. His views and his mind were developing fast, and he was also developing a power to which we owe some of his best work, Depth of Vision. Most art criticism is the work of those who never could have been artists, which is possibly why it tends to be so critical. Gilbert, who could perhaps have been an artist, referred to appreciate what the artist was trying to say and put into words what he read on the canvas. Hence, both in his Watts and his Blake, we get what some of us ask of an art critic, the enlargement of our own power of vision. This is what made Ruskin so great an art critic, a fact once realized today forgotten. He may have made a thousand mistakes. He had a multitude of foolish prejudices, but he opened the eyes of a whole generation to see and understand great art. G.K. was to begin his published writings with poetry and art criticism, in other words, with vision. And this vision, he partly owed to the Slade School. Here is a letter, undated to Bentley, containing a hint of what eight years later became a book on Watts. On Saturday, I saw two exhibitions of pictures. The first was the Royal Academy, where I went with Salter. There was one picture there. Though the walls were decorated with frames very prettily, as to the one picture, if you look at an Academy catalog, you will see Jonah by G.F. Watts. And you will imagine a big, silly picture of a whale. But if you go to Burlington House, you will see something terrible. A spare, wild figure, clad in a sort of green with his head flung so far back that his upper part was full of foreshortening. His hands thrust out, his face ghastly with ecstasy, his dry lips yelling aloud, a figure of everlasting protest and defiance. And as a background, perfect in harmony of color, you have the tracery of the Assyrian bar reliefs, such as Survive and Rex in the British Museum, a row of those processions of numberless captives a cruel sort of art. And the passionate energy of that lonely, screaming figure in front makes you think of a great many things besides Assyrians, among others, of some words, of Renan. I quote from memory, but the trace of Israel will be eternal. She, it was, who alone among the tyrannies of antiquity raised her voice for the helpless, the oppressed, the forgotten. But this only expresses a fraction of it. The only thing to do is to look at this excited gentleman with bronze skin and hair that approaches green, his eyes simply white with madness, and Jonah said, I do well to be angry, even unto death. He had learned to look at color, to look at a line to describe pictures, but far more important than this, he could now create in the imagination, gardens and sunsets and sheer color, so as to give to his novels value, to his fantasies glow, and to his poetry vision of the realities of things. In his very first volume of essays, the defendant, were to be passages that could be written only by one who had learned to draw, for instance, in defense of skeletons. The actual sight of the little wood, with its gray and silver sea of life, is entirely a winter vision. So dim and delicate is the heart of the winter woods, a kind of glittering, glowing, that a figure stepping towards us, in the checkered twilight, seems if we were breaking through unfathomable depths of spider webs. In the year 1895, in which G.K. left art for publishing, he came of age with a loud report. He writes to Bedley, being 21 years old is really rather good fun. It is one of those occasions when you remember the existence of all sorts of miscellaneous people. A cousin of mine, Alice Chesterton, daughter of my uncle Arthur, writes me a delightful, cordial letter from Berlin where she is at governess. And better still, my mother has received a most amusing letter from an old nurse of mine, an exceptionally nice and intelligent nurse who writes on hearing that it is my 21st birthday. Billy, an epithet is suppressed, gave me a little notebook and a little photograph frame. The first thing I did with the notebook was to make a note of his birthday. The first thing I shall do with the frame will be to get grey to give me a photograph of him to put in it. Yes, it is not bad being 21 in a world so full of kind people. I've just been out and got soaking and dripping wet, one of my favorite dissipations. I never enjoy weather so much as when it is driving drenching, rattling, washing rain. As Mr. Meredith says in the book you gave me, rain o' the glad refresher of the grain to welcome waterspouts of blessed rain. It is in a poem called Earth and Wetted Woman, which is fat. seldom have I enjoyed a walk so much. My sister water was all there and most affectionate. Everything I passed was lovely. A little boy piggybacking another little boy home, two little girls taking shelter with a gigantic umbrella, the gutters boiling like rivers and the hedges glittering with rain. When I came to our corner the shower was over and there was a great watery sunset right over number 80, what Mr. Ruskin calls an opening into eternity. Eternity is pink and gold. This may seem a very strange rat but it is one of my specimen days. I suppose you can really prefer me to write as I feel and I am so constituted that these daily incidents get me that way. Yes, I like rain. It means something. I'm not sure what. Something refreshing, cleaning, washing out, taking in hand. Not carrying a damn what you think, doing its duty, robust, noisy, moral, wet. It is the baptism of the church of the future. Yesterday afternoon, Sunday, Lawrence and Morris came here. We were merely infants at play, at skipping races around the garden and otherwise raced. Runner run thy race said Confucius and in the running find strength and reward. After that we tried talking about Magnus and came to some hopeful conclusions. Magnus is alright as for Lawrence and Grey. If there is anything righter than alright, they are that. There's an expression in Meredith's book which struck me immensely. The largeness of the evening earth. The sensation that the cosmos has all its windows open is very characteristic of evening just as it is at this moment. I feel very good. Everything out the window looks very, very flat and yellow. I do not know how else to describe it. It is like the benediction at the end of the service. End of chapter 4. Chapter 5 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 5, The Notebook I am writing this chapter at a table facing Notre Dame de Paris in front of a café filled with arguing French workmen in the presence of God and of man. And I feel as if I understood the one hatred of G.K.'s life, his loathing of pessimism. Is a man proud of losing his hearing, eyesight, or sense of smell? What shall we say of him who prides himself on beginning as an intellectual cripple and ending as an intellectual corpse? From The Notebook. Some prophecies Woe unto them that keep a God like a silk hat that believe not in God but in a God. Woe unto them that are pompous, for they will sooner or later be ridiculous. Woe unto them that are tired of everything, for everything will certainly be tired of them. Woe unto them that cast out everything, for out of everything they will be cast out. Woe unto them that cast out anything, for out of that thing they will be cast out. Woe unto the flippant, for they shall receive flippancy. Woe unto them that are scornful, for they shall receive scorn. Woe unto him that considereth his hair foolishly, will be made the type of him. Woe unto him that is smart, for men will hold him smart always, even when he is serious. Also from the notebook. A pessimist is a man who has never lived, never suffered. Show me a person who has plenty of worries and troubles, and I will show you a person who, whatever he is, is not a pessimist. This idea G.K. developed later in the Dickens, dealing with the alleged over-optimism of Dickens. Dickens, who, if he had learnt to whitewash the universe, had learnt it in a blacking factory. Dickens, who had learnt through hardship and suffering to accept and love the universe. But that, he wrote later. The quotations given here come from the notebook, begun in 1894 and used at intervals for the next four or five years, which Gilbert wrote down his philosophy step by step, as he came to discover it. The handwriting is the work of art that he must have learnt and practiced. So different is it from his boyhood's scrawl. Each idea is set down as it comes into his mind. There is no sequence. In this book, and in the colored lands, may be seen the creation of the Chesterton view of life. And it all took place in his early twenties. From the seed thoughts here, orthodoxy, and the rest were to grow. Here, they are only seeds, but seeds containing unmistakably the flower of the future. They should not hear from me a word of selfishness or scorn, if only I could find the door, if only I were born. He makes the unborn babe say this in his first volume of poems. And in the notebook, we see how the babe coming into the world must keep this promise by accepting life with its puzzles, its beauty, its fleetingness. Are we all dust? What a beautiful thing dust is, though. This round earth may be a soap bubble, but it must be admitted that there are some pretty colors in it. What is the good of life? It is fleeting. What is the good of a cup of coffee? It is fleeting. Ha, ha, ha. The birthday present of birth, as he was later to call it in orthodoxy, involved not bare existence only, but a wealth of other gifts. A grievance. He heads this thought. Give me a little time. I shall not be able to appreciate them all. If you open so many doors and give me so many presents, oh Lord God. He is almost overwhelmed with all that he has and with all that is, but accepts it ardently in its completeness. If the arms of a man could be a fiery circle embracing the round world, I think I should be that man. Yet in the face of all this splendor, the pessimist dares to find flaws. The mountains praise thee, oh Lord. But what if a mountain said, I praise thee, but put a pine tree halfway up on the left? It would be much more effective, believe me. It is time that the religion of prayer gave place to the religion of praise. If the mountains must praise God, if the religion of praise expresses the truth of things, how much more does it express the truth of humanity or rather of man? For he saw humanity not as an abstraction, but as the sum of human and intensely individual beings. Once I found a friend, dear me I said, he was made for me, but now I find more and more friends who seem to have been made for me and more and yet more made for me. Is it possible we were all made for each other, all over the world? And on another page comes perhaps the most significant phrase in the book. I wonder whether there will ever come a time when I shall be tired of any one person. Hence a fantastic thought of a way of making the discovery of more people to know and to like. The Human Circulating Library Notes Get out a gentleman for a fortnight, then change him for a lady or your ticket. No person to be kept out after a fortnight, except with a payment of a penny a day. Any person morally or physically damaging a man will be held responsible. The library omnibus calls once a week, leaving two or three each visit. Man of the season, old standard man. Or better still, my great ambition is to give a party at which everybody should meet everybody else and like them very much. An Invitation Mr. Gilbert Chesterton requests the pleasure of Humanities Company to Tea on December 25th, 1896. Humanity Esquire, the Earth, Cosmos East GK liked everybody very much and everything very much. He liked even the things most of us dislike. He liked to get wet. He liked to be tired. After that one short period of struggle, he liked to call himself always perfectly happy and therefore he wanted to say thank you. You say grace before meals. I say grace before the play and the opera and grace before the concert and the pantomime and grace before I open a book and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink. Each day seemed a special gift, something that might not have been. Evening. Here dies another day during which I have had eyes, ears, hands and the great world round me and with tomorrow begins another. Why am I allowed to? The prayer of a man walking. I thank the O Lord for the stones in the street. I thank thee for the hay carts yonder and for the houses built and half built that fly past me as I stride. But most of all for the great wind in my nostrils. As if thy nostrils were close. The prayer of a man resting. The twilight closes round me. My head is bowed before the universe. I thank the O Lord for a child I knew seven years ago and whom I have never seen since. Praise be God for all sides of life, for friends, lovers, art, literature, knowledge, humor, politics and for the little red cloud away there in the west. For if he was to be grateful, to whom did he owe gratitude? Here is the chief question he asked and answered at this time. At school he was looking for God. But the age of sixteen he was, he tells this in orthodoxy and agnostic in the sense of one who is not sure one way or the other. Largely it was this need for gratitude for what seemed personal gifts that brought him to the belief in a personal God. Life was personal. It was not a mere drift. It had will in it. It was more like a story. A story is the highest mark for the world is a story in every part of it and there is nothing that can touch the world or any part of it. It is not a story. And again with heading a social situation. We must certainly be in a novel. What I like about this novelist is that he takes such trouble about his minor characters. The story shapes from man's birth and is as he meets the other characters that he finds he is in the right story. A man born on the earth. Perhaps there has been some mistake. How does he know he has come to the right place? But when he finds his friends, he knows he has come to the right place. You say it is a love affair. Hush. It is a new garden of Eden. And a new progeny will. People a new earth. God is always making these experiments. Life is a story. Who tells it? Life is a problem. Who sets it? The world is a problem. Not a theorem. And the word of the last day will be Q-E-F. Quadrat faciendum. God sets the problem. God tells the story. Those know him who are characters in his story, who are working out his problem. Have you ever known what it is to walk along a road in such a frame of mind that you thought you might meet God at any turn of the path? For this, a man must be ready against this. He must never shut the door. There is one kind of infidelity. Blacker than all infidelities. Worse than any blow of secularist, pessimist, atheist. It is that of those persons who regard God as an old institution. Voices. The axe falls on the wood. It thuds, God, God. The cry of the rook. God answers it. The crack of the fire on the hearth. The voice of the brook. Say the same name. All things, dog, cat, fiddle, baby, wind, breaker, sea, thunderclap, repeat in a thousand languages. God. Next in his thought comes a point where he hesitates as to the meeting place between God and man. How and where can these two incommensurates find a meeting place? What is incarnation? The greatness and the littleness of man obsessed Chesterton as it did Pascal. It is the eternal riddle. Two strands. Man is a spark flying upwards. God is everlasting. Who are we? To whom this cup of human life has been given to ask for more. Let us love mercy. Walk humbly. What is man that thou regardest him? Man is a star unquenchable. God is in him incarnate. His life is planned upon a scale colossal of which he sees glimpses. Let him dare all things, claim all things. He is the Son of man who shall come in the clouds of glory. I saw these two strands mingling to make the religion of man. A scale colossal of which he sees glimpses. This I think is the first hint of the path that led Gilbert to full faith in our Lord. In places in these notes he regards him certainly only as man but even then as the man. The only man in whom the colossal scale, the immense possibilities of human nature could be dreamed of as fulfilled. Two notes on Marcus Aurelius are significant of the way his mind was moving. Marcus Aurelius. A large-minded, delicate-witted, strong man following the better thing like a thread between his hands. Him we cannot fancy choosing the lower even by mistake. We cannot think of him as wanting for a moment in any virtue, sincerity, mercy, purity, self-respect, good manners. Only one thing is wanting in him. He does not command me to perform the impossible. The carpenter. The meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Yes, he was soliloquizing, not making something. Do not the words of Jesus ring like nails knocked into a board in his father's workshop. On two consecutive pages are notes showing how his mind is wrestling with the question, the answer to which will complete his philosophy. Christmas Day. Good news, but if you ask me what it is, I know not. It is a track of feet in the snow. It is a lantern showing a path. It is a door set open. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. I live in an age of varied powers and knowledge, of steam, science, democracy, journalism, art. But when my love rises like a sea, I have to go back to an obscure tribe and a slain man to formulate a blessing. Julian. The Cyste Galilee. He said and sank, conquered after wrestling with the most gigantic of powers. A dead man. The crucified. On a naked slope of a poor province, a Roman soldier stood staring at a gibbet. Then he said, surely this was a righteous man. And a new chapter of history opened, having that for its model. Parables. There was a man who dwelt in the east centuries ago, and now I cannot look at a sheep or a sparrow, a lily or a cornfield, a raven or a sunset, a vineyard, or a mountain without thinking of him. If this be not to be divine, what is it? Cecil Chesterton tells us Gilbert read the gospels partly because he was not forced to read them. I suppose this really means that he read them with a mature mind, which had not been dulled to their reception by a childhood task of routine lessons. But I do not think at this date it had occurred to him to question the assumption of the period that official Christianity, its priesthood especially, had trivestied the original intention of Christ. This idea is in the Wild Night Volume, published in 1900, and more briefly in a suggestion in the notebook for a proposed drama. Gabriel is hammering up a little theater, and the child looks at his hands and finds them torn with nails. Plurgemen. The church should stand by the powers that be. Gabriel. Yes. That is a handsome crucifix you have there at your chain. That the clergy, that the Christian people should have settled down to an acceptance of a faulty established order should not be alert to all that our Lord's life signified was one of the problems. It was too a matter of that cosmic loyalty, which he analyzes more fully in orthodoxy. Here he simply writes, it is not a question of theology, it is a question of whether placed as a sentinel of an unknown watch you will whistle or not. Sentinels do go to sleep, and he was coming to feel that this want of vigilance ran through the whole of humanity. In White Wind, a sketch written at this time, which is published in the Colored Lands, he adumbrates an idea to which he was to return again in Man Alive, especially and in orthodoxy, that we can by custom so lose our sense of reality that the only way to enjoy and be grateful of our possessions is to lose them for a while. The shortest way home is to go round the world. In this story of White Wind, he applies the parable only to each man's life and the world he lives in. But in orthodoxy, he applies it to the human race, who have lost revealed truth by getting so accustomed to it that they no longer look at it. And already in the notebook, he is calling the attention of a careless multitude to that great empire upon which the sun never sets. I allude to the universe. Most of the quotations about our Lord come in the later part of the book. In the earlier pages, he dreams that to this age it is given to write the great new song and to compile the new Bible and to found the new church and preach the new religion. And in one rather obscure passage, he seems to hint at the thought that Christ might come again to shape this new religion. Going round the world, Gilbert was finding his way home. The explorer was rediscovering his native country. He himself has given us all the metaphors for what was happening now in his mind. Without a single Catholic friend, he had discovered this wealth of Catholic truth and he was still traveling. All this I felt, he later summed up in orthodoxy, at the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. And all this time I had not even thought of Catholic theology. End of chapter 5. Chapter 6 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 6. Towards a Career A curious little incident comes towards the end of Gilbert's time at the Slade School. In a letter, he wrote to E. C. Bentley, we see him on the eve of his 21st birthday being invited to write for the Academy. Mr. Cotton is a little bristly, bohemian man, as fidgety as a kitten who runs around the table while he talks to you. When he agrees with you, he shuts his eyes tight and shakes his head. When he means anything rather seriously, he ends up with a loud, nervous laugh. He talks incessantly and is mad on the history of Oxford. I sent him my review of Ruskin, and he read it before me. Note hell, and delivered himself with astonishing rapidity to the following effect. This is very good. You've got something to say. Oh yes, this is worth saying. I agree with you about Ruskin and about the century. This is good. You've no idea if you saw some stuff, some reviews I get. The fellows are practiced, but of all the damn fools, you've no idea. They know the trade in a way, but such infernal asses, as send things up. But this is very good. That sentence does run nicely. But like your point, make it a little longer and then send it in. I've got another book for you to review. You know, Robert Bridges? Oh very good, very good. Here it is, about two columns, you know. By the way, keep the Ruskin for yourself. You deserve that anyhow. Here I got a word in, one of protest and thanks. But Mr. Cotton insisted on my accepting the Ruskin. So, I am really to serve Laban. Laban proves unanalysis to be of the consistency of brick. It is such man as this, that have made our cosmos what it is. At one point he said, literally dancing with glee, oh the other day I stuck some pins into Andrew Lang. I said, dear me, that must be a very good game. It was something about an addition of Scott, but I was told that Andrew took the painful operation very well. We sat up horribly late together, talking about Browning, Afghans, Notes, the Yellow Book, the French Revolution, William Morris, Norseman, and Mr. Richard Legaliand. I don't despair for anyone, he said suddenly. Hang it all, that's what you mean by humanity. This appears to be a rather good editor of the academy. In my joy, in having begun my life, is very great. I am tired, I said to Mr. Baud Ribb, of writing only what I like. Oh well, he said hardly. You have no reason to make that complaint in journalism. But here is a mystery. Nowhere in the academy columns for 1895 or 1896 are to be seen the initials GKC. Yet, at that date, all the reviews were signed. Mr. Eccles, who was writing for it at the time, told me that he had no recollection of GK among the contributors. And later, he came to know him well when both were together on the speaker. In any case, the idea of reviewing for no reward, except the book, reviewed, would scarcely appeal to a more practical man than Gilbert, as a hopeful beginning. Perhaps the mystery is solved by the fact that soon after the date of this letter, Mr. Cotton got an appointment in India. To Mr. Eccles, it appeared somewhat ironical that the unpaid contributors to the academy were circularized with a suggestion of contributions of money towards a parting present for their late editor. The actual beginning of GK's journalism was in the bookman. And in the autobiography, he insists that it was a matter of mere luck. These opportunities were merely things that happened to me. While still at the Slade School, he was, as we have seen, attending English lectures at University College. There, he met a fellow student, Ernest Hodder Williams, of the family which controlled the publishing house of Hodder Stouten. He gave Chesterton some books on art to review for the bookman, a monthly paper published by the firm. I need not say, GK comments, that having entirely failed to learn how to draw or paint, I tossed off easily enough some criticisms of the weaker points of Rubens or the misdirected talents of Tintoretto. I discovered the easiest of all professions, which I have pursued ever since. But neither in the art criticism he wrote for the bookman, nor in the poems he was to publish in the outlook and the speaker, was there a living. He left the Slade School and went to work for a publisher. Mr. Redway, in whose office Gilbert now found himself, was a publisher largely of spiritualist literature. Gilbert has described in his autobiography his rather curious experience of ghostly authorship, but he relates nothing of his office experience, which is described in another undated letter to Mr. Bentley. I am writing this letter just when I like most to write one, late at night, after a beastly lot of midnight oil over a contribution for a Slade magazine intended as a public venture. I am sending them a recast of that picture of Tuesday. Like you, I am beastly busy, but there is something exciting about it. If I must be busy, as I certainly must, being an approximately honest man, I would much rather be busy in a varied mixed up way, with half a hundred things to attend to, than with one blank day of monotonous study before me. To give you some idea of what I mean, I have been engaged in three different tiring occupations and enjoyed them all. One, Redway says, we've got too many manuscripts. Read through them, will you, and send back those that are too bad at once. I go slap through a room full of manuscripts, criticizing, induced conscientiously with the result that I post back some years of manuscripts to addresses which I should imagine must be private asylums, but one feels worried somehow. Two, Redway says, I'm going to give you entire charge of the press department, sending copies to reviews, etc. Consequences, one has to keep an elaborate book and make it tally with other elaborate books, and one has to remember all the magazines that exist and what sort of books they'd crack up. I used to think I hated responsibility. I am positively getting to enjoy it. Three, there is that confounded picture of Tuesday, which I've been scribbling at the whole evening and have at last got it presentable. This sounds like mere amusement, but now that I have tried other kinds of hurry and bustle, I solemnly pledge myself to the opinion that there is no work so tiring as writing. That is, not for fun, but for publication. Other work has a repetition, a machinery, a reflex action about it somewhere, but to be on the stretch inventing fillings, making them out of nothing, making them as good as you can for a matter of four hours leaves me more inclined to lie down and read dickens than I ever feel after nine hours ramp at Redways. The worst of it is that you always think the thing's so bad too when you're in that state. I can't imagine anything more idiotic than what I've just finished. Well, enough of work and all its works. By all means, come on Monday evening. But don't be frightened if, by any chance, I'm not in until about 6.30, as Monday is a busy day. Of course, you'll stop to dinner. What an idiotically long time, eight weeks is. This letter does not seem to bear out the suggestion in Cecil's book, G.K. Chesterton at Criticism, C. Page 23, of Gilbert's probable uselessness to the publishers for whom he worked. After all, literacy is more needful to most publishers than automatic practicality, because it is so very much rare. Probably G.K. would have been absolutely invaluable had he been a little less kind-hearted. His dislike of sending back a manuscript and making an author unhappy would have been a bar to his utility as a reader. But there are lots of other things to do besides rejecting manuscripts. And two later letters show how capable Gilbert was, felt to be, in doing most of them. The exact date at which he left Redways for the publishing firm of Fisher Unwin, of 11 pattern-noster buildings, I cannot discover. But it was fairly early, and he was several years with Fisher Unwin, only gradually beginning to move over into journalism. He did nothing for himself, says Lucian Oldershaw, till we, Bentley and Oldershaw, came down from Oxford and pushed him. The following letters belong to 1898, being written to Francis when they were already engaged. But I put them here as they give some notion of the work he did for his employer. The book I have to deal with for Unwin is an exhaustive, and I am told, interesting work on Rome and the Empire, a kind of realistic, modern account of the life of the ancient world. I've got to fix it up, choose illustrations, introductions, notes, etc. and all because I am the only person who knows a little Latin and precious little Roman history and no more archaeology than a blind cat. It is entertaining and just like our firm's casual way. The work ought to be done by an authority on Roman antiquities. If I hadn't been there, they would have given it to the office boy. However, I shall get through it all right. The more I see of the publishing world, the more I come to the conclusion that I know next to nothing, but that the vast mass of literary people know less. This is something called having a public school education. Extract from Undated Letter, postmarked August 11th, 1898. I have a lot of work to do as Unwin has given me the production of an important book entirely into my hands as a kind of invisible editor. It's complimentary, but very worrying and will mean a lot of time at the British Museum. Extract from Undated Letter, postmarked August 29th, 1898. 11 Paternoster Buildings, postmarked December, 1898. For fear that you should really suppose that my observations about being busy are the subterfuges of a habitual liar, I may give you briefly some idea of the irons at present in the fire. As far as I can make out, there are at least seven things that I have undertaken to do, and every one of them I ought to do before any of the others. First, there is the book about ancient Rome, which I have to do for TFU, arrange and get illustrations, etc. This all comes of showing off. It is a story with a moral, greedy Gilbert, or little boys should be seen and not heard. A short time ago, I had to read a treatise by Dean Stubbs on the ideal woman of the poets, in which the dean remarked that all the women admired by Horace were wantons. This struck me as a downright slander, slight as it is my classical knowledge, and in my report I asked loftily what Dean Stubbs made of those noble lines on the wife who hid her husband from his foes. Splendide Mendax, in Omne Virgo Nobilis Ivan. One of the purest and statelyest tributes ever made to a woman, the lines might be roughly rendered a magnificent liar and a noble lady for all eternity, but no translation can convey the organ voice of the verse in which the two strong lonely words, noble and eternity, stand solitary for the last line. In consequence of my taking up the medgils against a live dean for the manly moral sense of the dear old Epicurean, the office became impressed with a vague idea that I know something about Latin literature, whereas as a matter of fact, I have forgotten even the line before the one I quoted. However, in the most confidential and pathetic manner, I was entrusted with doing with Rome et l'empire work, which ought to be done by a scholar. Then there is Captain Webster. You ask, in gruff rumbling tones, who is Captain Webster? I will tell you. Captain Webster is a small man with a carefully waxed mustache in a very Bond Street get up living at the Groverner Hotel. Talking to him, you would say, he is an ass, but an agreeable ass, a humble, transparent, honorable ass. He is an innocent and an idiotic butterfly. Then a resting finishing touch is that he has been to New Guinea for four years or so and had some of the most hideous and extravagant adventures that could befall a modern man. His yacht was surrounded by shoals of canoes full of myriads of cannibals of a race who file their teeth to look like the teeth of dogs and hang weights in their ears till their ears hang like dog's ears on the shoulder. He held his yacht at the point with the revolver and got away leaving some of his men dead on the shore. All night long he heard the horrible noise of the banqueting gongs and saw the huge fires that told his friends were being eaten. Now he lives in the Groverner Hotel. Captain Webster finds the pen not only mightier than the sword but also much more difficult. He has written his adventures and we are to publish them and I am translating the honest captain to a former, a thing which appalls him much more than the Papuan savages. This means going through it carefully of course and rewriting many parts of it where relatives and dependent sentences have been lost past recovery. I went to see him and his childlike dependence on me was quite pathetic. His general attitude was you see I'm such a damn fool and so he is. But when I compare him with Zacchaean Hautour and the preposterous posing of many of our fleet street decadent geniuses I feel the movement of the blood which declares that perhaps there are worse things than war. Between ourselves I have a sneaking sympathy with fighting. I fought horribly at school as well you should know my illogicalities. Third, there is the selection of illustrations for the history of China we are producing. I know no more of China than the man in the moon. Less for he has seen it at any rate except what I got from reading the book. But of course I shall make the most of what I do know in the early talk of Lao Xi and Wu Sangui and criticized Zheng Tang and Fu Che compared to Qiuling with his great successor whose name I have forgotten and the Napoleonic vigor of Li with a weak optimism of Wu. Before I have done I hope people will be looking behind for my pigtail. The name I shall adopt will be Chase Ter Ton. Fourth, a manuscript to read translated from the Norwegian a history of the kiss ceremonial amicable amatory etc. in the worst French sentimental style. God alone knows how angry I am with the author of that book. I'm not sure that I shall not send up the brief report a sniveling hound. Fifth, the book for nut greybeards at play which has reached its worst stage that of polishing up for the eye of nut instead of merely rejoicing in the eye of God. Do you know this is the only one of the lot about which I am at all worried. I do not feel as if things like the fish poem are really worth publishing. I know they are better than many books that are published, but heaven knows that it is not saying much. In support of some of my work I would fight to the last, but with regard to this occasional verse I feel a humbug. To publish a book of my nonsense verses seems to me exactly like summoning the whole of the people of Kensington to see me smoke cigarettes. But Gregor told me that I should do much better in the business of literature if I found more difficult. My facility he said led me to undervalue my work. I wonder whether this is true and those silly rhymes are any good after all. Sixth, the collection of more serious poems of which I spoke to you. You shall have a hand in the selection of these when you get back. Seventh, the novel which though I have put it aside for the present yet has become too much a part of me not to be writing chapters written or rather growing out of the others. And all these things with the exception of the last one are supposed to be really urgent and to be done immediately. Now I hope I have sickened you forever of wanting to know the details of my dull affairs, but I hope it may give you some notion of how hard it really is to get time for writing just now. For you see there are none of them even mechanical things. All require some thinking about. I am afraid that if you really wanted to know what I do you must forgive me for seeming egoistic. That is the tragedy of the literary person. His very existence is an assertion of his own mental vanity. He must pretend to be conceded even if he isn't. Beginning to publish, beginning to write and still developing mentally at a frantic rate, this is a summary of the years 1895 to 18. As the notebook shows, Gilbert was reflecting deeply at this time on the relations both between God and man and between man and his fellow man. The realization that their relations had gone very far wrong was necessarily followed. For Gilbert's mind was an immensely practical one. By the question of what the proposed remedies were worth. He has told us that he became a socialist at this time only because it was intolerable not to be a socialist. The socialists seemed the only people who were looking at conditions as they were and finding them unendurable. Christian socialism seemed at first sight for anyone who admired Christ to be the obvious form of socialism. And in a fragment of this period G.K. traces the resemblance of modern collectivism to early Christianity. The points in which Christian and socialistic collectivism are at one are simple and fundamental. As however, we must proceed carefully in this matter. We may state these points of resemblance under three heads. One, both rise from the deeps of an emotion. The emotion of compassion for misfortune as such. This is really a very important point. Collectivism is not an intellectual fad, even if erroneous, but a passionate protest and aspiration. It arises as a secret of the heart, a dream of the injured feeling long before it shapes itself as a definite propaganda at all. The intellectual philosophies align themselves with success and preach competition, but the human heart allies itself with misfortune and suggests communism. Two, both trace the evil state of society to covetousness, the competitive desire to accumulate riches. Thus both in one case and the other, the mere possession of wealth is in itself an offense against moral order, the absence of it in itself, a recommendation and training for the higher life. Three, both propose to remedy the evil of competition by a system of bearing each other's burdens in the literal sense. That is to say of leveling, silencing and reducing one's own chances for the chance of your weaker brethren. The desirability they say of a great or clever man acquiring fame is small compared with the desirability of a weak and broken man acquiring bread. The strong man is a man and should modify or adapt himself to the hopes of his mates. He that would be first among you, let him be the servant of all. These are the three fountains of collectivist passion. I have not considered it necessary to enter into elaborate proof of the presence of these three in the Gospels that the main trend of Jesus' character was compassion for human ills, that he denounced not merely covetousness but riches again and again and with an almost impatient emphasis and that he insisted on his followers throwing up personal aims and sharing funds and fortune entirely. These are plain matters of evidence presented again and again and in fact of common admission. Yet that uncanny thing in Gilbert which always forced him to see facts mutinied again at this point and produced another fragment in which he has moved closer to Christianity and thereby further away from modern socialism. The world he lived in contained a certain number of Christians who were he found highly doubtful about the Christian impulse of socialism. And most of the socialist friends had about them a tone of bitterness and an atmosphere of hopelessness, utterly unlike the tone and the atmosphere of Christianity. Just as atheists were the first people to turn Gilbert from atheism towards dogmatic Christianity, so the socialists were now turning him from socialism. The next fragment is rather long but was never published and I think so important as showing how his mind was moving that it cannot well be shortened. It is a document of capital importance for the biography of Chesterton. Now for my own part I cannot in the least agree with those who see no difference between Christian and modern socialism, nor do I for a moment join in some Christian socialist denunciations of those worthy middle class people who cannot see the connection. For I cannot help thinking that in a way these latter people are right. No reasonable man can read the Sermon on the Mount that its tone is not very different from that of most collectivist speculation of the present day. And the Philistines feel this though they cannot distinctly express it. There is a difference between Christ's socialist program and that of our own time. A difference deep, genuine and all important. And it is this which I wish to point out. Let us take two types side by side or rather the same type in the two different atmospheres. Let us take the rich young man of the gospels and place beside the rich young man of the present day on the threshold of socialism. If we were to follow the difficulties theories, doubts, resolves and conclusions of each of these characters we should find two very distinct threads of self-examination running through the two lives. And the essence of the difference was this. The modern socialist is saying what will society do while its prototype as we read said what shall I do. Properly considered, this latter sentence contains the whole essence of the older communism. The modern socialist regards his theory of regeneration as a duty which society owes to him. The early Christian regarded it as a duty which he owed to society. The modern socialist is busy framing schemes for its fulfillment. The early Christian was busy considering whether he would himself fulfill it there and then. The ideal of modern socialism is an elaborate utopia to which he hopes the world may be tending. The ideal of the early Christian was an actual nucleus living the new life to whom he might join himself if he liked. Hence the constant note running through the whole gospel of the importance, difficulty and excitement of the call. The individual and practical request made by Christ to every rich man sell all thou hast and give to the poor. To us socialism comes speculatively as a noble and optimistic theory of what may be the crown of progress. To Peter and James and John it came practically as a crisis of their own daily life, a stirring question of conduct and renunciation. We do not therefore in the least agree with those who hold that modern socialism is an exact counterpart or fulfillment of the socialism of Christianity. We find the difference important and profound despite the common ground of anti-selfish collectivism. The modern socialist regards communism as a distant panacea for society. The early Christian regarded it as an immediate and difficult regeneration of himself. The modern socialist reviles or at any rate reproaches society for not adopting it. The early Christian concentrated his thoughts on the problem of his own fitness and unfitness to adopt it. To the modern socialist it is a theory. The early Christian it was a call. Modern socialism says elaborate a broad, noble and workable system and submit it to the progressive intellect of society. Early Christianity said sell all thou hast to the poor. This distinction between the social and personal way of regarding the change has two sides. A spiritual and a practical which we propose to notice. The spiritual side of it though of less direct and revolutionary importance than the practical has still a very profound philosophic significance. To us it appears something extraordinary that this Christian side of socialism the side of the difficulty of personal sacrifice and the patience cheerfulness and good temper necessary for the protected personal surrender is so constantly overlooked. The literary world is flooded with old men seeing visions and young men dreaming dreams with various stages of anti competitive enthusiasm with economic apocalypses elaborate utopias and mushroom destinies of mankind and as far as we have seen in all this whirlwind of ecstatic excitement there is not a word spoken of the intense practical difficulty of the summons to the individual, the heavy unrewarding cross born by him who gives up the world. For it will not surely be denied that not only will socialism be impossible without some effort on the part of individuals but that socialism if once established would be rapidly dissolved or worse still diseased if the individual members of the community could not make a constant effort to do that which in the present state of human nature must mean an effort to live the higher life. Mere state systems could not bring about and still less sustain a reign of unselfishness without a cheerful decision on the part of the members to forget selfishness even in little things and for that most difficult and at the same time most important personal decision Christ made would not make no provision at all. Some modern socialists do indeed see that something more is necessary for the golden age than fixed incomes and universal stores tickets and that the fountain heads of all real improvement are to be found in human temper and character. William Morris for instance in his News from Nowhere gives a beautiful picture of a land ruled by love and rightly grounds the give and take camaraderie of his ideal state upon an assumed improvement in human nature but he does not tell us how such an improvement is to be affected and Christ did. Of Christ's actual method in this matter I shall speak afterwards when dealing with the practical aspect my object just now is to compare the spiritual and emotional effects of the call of Christ as compared to those of the vision of Mr. William Morris. When we compare this spiritual attitudes of two thinkers one of whom is considering whether social history has been sufficiently a course of improvement to warrant him in believing that it will culminate in universal altruism while the other is considering whether he loves other people enough to walk down tomorrow to the marketplace and distribute everything but his staff and his script. It will not be denied that the latter is likely to undergo certain deep and acute emotional experiences which will be quite unknown to the former and these emotional experiences are what we understand as the spiritual aspect of the distinction. For three characteristics at least the Galilean program makes more provision, humility activity, cheerfulness the real triad of Christian virtues. Humility is a grand and stirring thing the exalting paradox of Christianity the sad want of it in our time is we believe what really makes us think life dull like a cynic instead of marvelous like a child. With this however we have at present nothing to do but we have to do with is the unfortunate fact that among no persons is it more wanting than among socialists, Christian and other the isolated or scattered protest for a complete change in social order the continual harping on one string the necessarily jaundiced contemplation of a system already condemned and above all the haunting pessimistic whisper of a possible hopelessness of overcoming the giant forces of success all these in part undeniably to the modern socialist atone excessively imperious and bitter. Nor can we reasonably blame the average money getting public for their impatience with the monotonous virulence of men constantly reviling them for not living communistically and who after all are not doing it themselves. Willingly do we allow that these latter enthusiasts think it impossible in the present state of society to practice their ideal but this fact while vindicating their indisputable sincerity throws an unfortunate vagueness and inconclusiveness over their denunciations of other people in the same position let us compare with this arrogant and angry tone among the modern utopians who can only dream the life the tone of the early Christian who was busy living it as far as we know the early Christians never regarded it as astonishing that the world as they found it was competitive and unregenerate they seem to have felt that it could not in its pre-Christian ignorance have been anything else and their whole interest was bent on their own standard conduct and exhortation which was necessary to convert it they felt that it was by no merit of theirs that they had been enabled to enter into the life before the Romans but simply as a result of the fact that Christ had appeared in Galilean not Rome. Lastly they never seem to have entertained a doubt that the message would itself convert the world with a rapidity and ease which left no room for severe condemnation to the heathen societies with regard to the second merit that of activity there can be little doubt as to where it lies between the planner of the utopia and the convert of the brotherhood the modern socialist is a visionary but in this he is on the same ground as half the great man of the world and to some extent of the early Christian himself who rushed towards a personal ideal very difficult to sustain the visionary who yearns toward an ideal which is practically impossible is not useless or mischievous but often the opposite the person who is often useless and always mischievous is the visionary who dreams with the knowledge or the half knowledge that is ideal is impossible the early Christian might be wrong in believing that by entering the brotherhood men could in a few years become perfect even as their father in heaven was perfect but he believed it and acted flatly and fearlessly on the belief this is the type of the higher visionary but all the insidious dangers of the vision the idleness the procrastination the mere mental aestheticism come in when the vision is indulged as half our socialist conceptions are as a mere humor or fairy tale with a consciousness half confessed that is beyond practical politics and that we need not be troubled by its immediate fulfillment the visionary who believes in his own most frantic vision is always noble and useful and is the visionary who does not believe in his vision who is the dreamer the idler the utopian this then is the second moral virtue of the older school an immense direct sincerity of action a cleansing away by the sweats of hard work of all those subtle and perilous instincts of mere ethical castle building even like the spells of an enchantress around so many of the strong men of our own time the third merit which I have called cheerfulness is really the most important of all we may perhaps put the comparison in this way it might strike many persons as strange that in a time on the whole so optimistic in its intellectual beliefs as this is in an age when only a small minority disbelieve in social progress and a large majority believe in ultimate social perfection there should be such a tired and blasé feeling among numbers of young men this we think is due not to the want of an ultimate ideal but to that of an immediate way of making for it not of something to hope for but of something to do a human being is not satisfied never will be satisfied with being told that it is all right what he wants is not a prediction of what other people will be hundreds of years hence to make him cheerful but a new and stirring test and task for himself which will assuredly make him cheerful a knight is not contended with the statement that his commander has hid his plans so as to ensure victory what the knight wants is a sword this demand for a task is not mere bravado but a part of the higher optimism as deep rooted as the foreshadowing of perfection I do not know whether Gilbert would yet have actually called himself a Christian he was certainly tending towards the more Christian elements in his surroundings it seems pretty clear from all he wrote and said later that he did not hold that transformation have been fully affected until after his meeting with Francis to whom he wrote many years later therefore I bring these rhymes to you who brought the cross to me these papers are undated and are arranged in no sequence it is possible this last one was written after their first meeting certain it is that in it he had begun feeling after a more Christian arrangement of society than socialism offered and particularly after an arrangement better suited to the nature of man this thought of man's nature as primary was to remain the basis of his social thinking to the end of his life end of chapter 6 chapter 7 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 7 in Cipriate Vita Nova in the notebook may be seeing Gilbert's occasional thoughts about his own future love story suddenly in the midst suddenly in the midst of friends of brothers known to me more and more and their secrets, histories tastes, hero worships schemes, love affairs known to me suddenly I felt lonely felt like a child in a field with no more games to play as I have not a lady to whom to send my thought at that hour that she might crown my peace Madonna Mia about her whom I have not yet met I wonder what she is doing now at this sunset hour working perhaps or playing, worrying or laughing is she making tea or singing a song or writing or praying or reading is she thoughtful is she looking now out the window as I am looking out the window but a few pages later comes the entry FB you are a very stupid person I don't believe you have the least idea how nice you are FB was Francis daughter of a diamond merchant sometime dead the family was of French descent the name de blog having been somewhat unfortunately long ago they had fallen from considerable wealth into a degree of poverty that made it necessary for the three daughters to earn a living Francis was never strong and Gilbert has told how utterly exhausted she was at the end of each day's toil she worked very hard as secretary of an educational society in London the family lived in Bedford Park a suburb of London that went in for artistic housing in the atmosphere long before this was at all general judging by their photographs the three girls must all have been remarkably pretty and young men frequented the house in great numbers among them Brimley Johnson who was engaged to Gertrude and Lucian Oldershaw who later married Ethel sometime in 1896 Oldershaw took Gilbert to call and Gilbert literally at first sight from the autobiography page 153 to my lady God made you very carefully he set a star apart for you he stained it green and gold with fields and Oriol did with sunshine he peopled it with kings peoples republics and so made you very carefully all nature is God's book filled with his rough sketches for you when almost 40 years later Gilbert was writing his autobiography Francis asked him to keep her out of it the liking they both had for keeping private life private made him call it this very Victorian narrative nevertheless he tells us something of the early days of their acquaintance Gilbert had mentioned the moon she told me in the most normal and unpretentious tone that she hated the moon I talked to the same lady several times afterwards and found that this was a perfectly honest statement of fact her attitude on this and other things might be called a prejudice but it could not possibly be called a fad still less an affection she really had an obstinate objection to all those natural forces that seemed to be sterile or aimless she disliked loud winds that seemed to be going nowhere she did not care much for the sea which I was very fond and by the same instinct she was up against the moon which she said looked like an imbecile on the other hand she had a sort of hungry appetite for all the fruitful things like fields and gardens and anything connected with production about which she was quite practical she practiced gardening in that curious cockney culture she would have been quite ready to practice farming and on the same perverse principle this was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to the whole fussy culture in which she lived any number of people proclaimed religions chiefly oriental religions analyzed or argued about them but that anybody could regard a religion as a practical thing like gardening was something quite new to me and to her neighbors new and incomprehensible she had been by accident brought up in the school of an Anglo-Catholic convent and to all the agnostic or mystic world practicing a religion was much more puzzling than professing it she was a queer card she wore a green velvet dress barred with gray fur which I should have called artistic but that she hated all the talk about art and she had an attractive face which I should have called elfish but that she hated all talk about elves but what was arresting and almost blood curdling about her is that social atmosphere was not so much that she hated it as that she was entirely unaffected by it she never knew what was meant by being under the influence of yates or Shah or Tolstoy or anybody else she was intelligent with a great love of literature and especially of Stevenson but if Stevenson had walked into the room and made his personal doubts about personal immortality she would have regretted that he should be wrong upon the point but would otherwise have been utterly unaffected she was not at all like Robespierre except in a taste for neatness and dress and yet it is only in Mr. Bellock's book on Robespierre that I have ever found any words that describe the unique quality that cut her off from the current culture and saved her from it and given him in his mind a stone tabernacle in which certain great truths were preserved imperishable autobiography pages 151 to 153 a letter to a friend Mildred Wayne who was now engaged to Waldo Avedor makes the future tolerably easy to foresee my brother wishes me to thank you with ferocious gratitude for the music which he is enjoying tremendously it reminds me rather of what Ms. France's blog but that is another story in your past letter you inquired whether I saw anything of the blogs now if you went and put that question to them there would be a scene Ms.'s blog would probably fall upon the fire irons nollies would foam and convulsions on the carpet Ethel would scream and take refuge on the mantelpiece and Gertrude would faint and break off her engagement Francis would but no intelligent person can affect an interest in what she does Lawrence Solomon told me that Mrs. Edward Chesterton did not approve of the rather arty crafty atmosphere of Bedford Park that earliest of garden cities so conveniently unconventional where Francis lived she did not like her son's friendship with the blogs and she had chosen for him a girl who she felt would make him an ideal wife very open air Mr. Solomon said not booky but good at games and practical he was not sure whether Gilbert realized this but personally I believe that Gilbert realized everything of course you know Annie Furman wrote to me that Aunt Marie never liked Francis or Bentley Annie was the girl chosen by Gilbert's mother she was very much a member of the family did Gilbert ever speak to you she wrote to me recently of the old Saturday night parties at Barnes at the home of the grandparents every Saturday night the family or as many of it is could used to go down to Barnes to supper and the boys in Tom Gilbert Alice Chesterton's husband used to sing around the supper table many a one I went to when I was staying at Warwick Gardens on a red Hammersmith bus before the days of motorcars on a longer trip they stayed at Burke in Belgium and Cecil had a strange idea apparently regarded by him as humorous which measures the family absence of a Christian sense at this date Cecil urged me to sit at the foot of the big crucifix in the village street and let him photograph me as Mary Magalene I didn't I don't know how he thought he'd get away with modern clothing whatever Gilbert's mother may have planned for them neither she nor Gilbert had any romantic feeling for each other indeed Cecil was definitely her favorite and she believed him the favorite of both parents also he had more heart she says than the more brilliant Gilbert anyhow his heart was shown more openly to her Cecil was not much given to versifying she wrote in another letter closed when my son was born I value it so much headed to Annie the poem is a long one it begins with the ancient comradeship loyal and unbroken in which they had first seen life together shining nights tumultuous days joy swift caught in sudden ways all the laughter love and praise all the joys of living these we shared together dear this is hid shut off unknown seeing that to you alone is the wondrous kingdom shown and the power and glory Annie's thoughts then and Cecil's were not greatly on the elder brother who is pursuing his own romance with the heart that seems to have been fairly adequate in its energies most mothers have watched their sons through one or more experiences of calf love Gilbert indicates in the autobiography and I knew it too from some jokes he and Francis used to make that he had one or two fancies before the coming of reality he must then convince his mother that reality had come he must overcome a prejudice avowed by neither he must call on the deeps of a mother's feelings so effectively that it would never now be avowed that it might indeed be swept away and so sitting at a table in a side lodging as his mother's side in the same room were moved about making cocoa for the family Gilbert tried to express what even for him was the inexpressible one roseberry villas Granville Road Felix Stowe dearest mother you may possibly think this is a somewhat eccentric proceeding you are sitting opposite and talking about Mrs. Burline but I take this method of addressing you it occurs to me that you might possibly wish to turn the matter over in your mind before writing or speaking to me about it I am going to tell you the whole of a situation in which I believe I have acted rightly though I am not absolutely certain and to ask for your advice on it it was a somewhat complicated one and I repeat that I do not think I could rightly have acted otherwise but if I were the greatest fool in the three kingdoms and had made nothing but a mess but there is one person I should always turn to and trust mothers know more of their son's idiocies than other people can and this has been particularly true in your case I've always rejoiced at this and not been ashamed of it this has always been true and always will be these things are easier written than said but you know it is true don't you I am inexpressibly anxious that you should for having done my best and for having constantly had in mind the way in which you would be affected by the letter I am now writing I do hope you will be pleased almost eight years ago you made a remark this may show you that if we jeer at your remarks we remember them the remark applied to the hypothetical young lady with whom I should fall in love and took the form of saying if she is good I shan't mind who she is I don't know how many times I have said that over to myself in the past two or three days in which I have decided on this letter do not be frightened or suppose that anything sensation or final has occurred I am not married my dear mother neither am I engaged you are called to the council of chiefs very early in its deliberations if you don't mind I will tell you briefly the whole story you are I think the shrewdest person for seeing things whom I ever knew consequently I imagine that you do not think that I go down to Bedford park every Sunday for the sake of the scenery I should not wonder if you know nearly as much about the matter as I can tell in a letter suffice it to say however briefly for neither of us care much for gushing this letter is not on mrs. Radcliffe lines that the first half of my time of acquaintance with the blogs was spent in enjoying a very intimate but quite breezy and platonic friendship with Francis blog reading talking and enjoying life together having great sympathies in all subjects and the second half and making the thrilling but painfully responsible discovery that platonism on my side had not the field by any means to itself that is how we stand now no one knows except her family and yourself my dearest mother I am sure you are at least not unsympathetic indeed we love each other more than we shall either of us ever be able to say I have refrained from sentiment in this letter for I don't think you like it much but love is a very different thing from sentiment and you will never laugh at it I will not say that you are sure to like Francis for all young men say that to their mothers quite naturally and their mothers will never believe them also quite naturally besides I am so confident I should like you to find her out for yourself she is in reality very much the sort of woman you like what is called I believe a woman's woman very humorous inconsequent and sympathetic and defiled with no offensive exuberance of good health I have nothing more to say except that you and she have occupied my mind for the last week to the exclusion of everything else which must account for my abstraction and that in her letter she sent the following message please tell your mother soon tell her I am not so silly as to expect her to think me good enough but really I will try to be an aspiration which considered from my point of view naturally provokes a smile here you give me a cup of cocoa thank you believe me my dearest mother always your affectionate son Gilbert what exactly Gilbert meant by saying they were not engaged is hard to surmise in view of Francis' message to her future mother-in-law of his sensations when proposing Gilbert gives some idea in the autobiography it was fortunate however that our next most important meeting was not under the sign of the moon but of the sun she is often affirmed during our later acquaintance the sun had not been shining to her complete satisfaction on that day the issue might have been quite different it happened in St. James Park where they keep the ducks in the little bridge which has been mentioned in no less authoritative work than Mr. Bellock's essay on bridges since I find myself quoting that author once more I think he deals in some detail in his best topographical manner with various historic sites on the continent but later relapses into a larger manner somewhat thus the time has now come to talk at large about bridges the longest bridge in the world is the fourth bridge and the shortest bridge in the world is a plank over a ditch in the village of Loudwater the bridge that frightens you most is the Brooklyn Bridge and the bridge that frightens you least is the bridge in St. James Park I admit that I crossed that bridge in undeserved safety a very romantic vision of the bridge leading to the princess's tower but I can assure my friend the author that the bridge in St. James Park can frighten you a good deal from the autobiography pages 154 to 155 now with Francis promise to him Gilbert could enjoy everything properly could execute verbally at least a wild fantasia among the first of his friends to be written to was Milford Wayne because as he says in a later letter he felt towards her deep gratitude for forming a topic of conversation on my first visit to a family with which I have since formed a dark and shameful connection Dear Milford, on rising this morning I carefully washed my boots in hot water and black in my face then assuming my coat with graceful ease and with the tails in front I descended to breakfast where I gaily poured the coffee and sardines and put my hat on the fire to boil these activities will give you some idea of my frame of mind my family observing me leave the house by way of the chimney and take the fender with me under one arm thought I must have something on my mind so I had my friend I am engaged I am only telling it at present to my real friends but there is no doubt about it the next question that arises whom am I engaged to I have investigated this problem with some care and as far as I can make out the best authorities point to Francis blog there can I think be no reasonable doubt that she is the lady it is as well to have these minor matters clear in one's mind I am very much too happy to write much but I thought you might remember my existence sufficiently to be interested in the incident Waldo has been of so much help to me with this and in everything and I am so much interested in you for his sake and your own that I am encouraged to hope our friendship may subsist if ever I have done anything rude or silly it was quite inadvertent I have always wished to please you to Annie Furman he wrote I can only think of the day one of the earliest I can recall of my life when you came in and helped me to build a house with bricks I am building another one now complete without you going over it to others he wrote such sentences as he could put together in the whirlwind of his happiness for himself he stammered in a verse that grew with the years into his great love poetry God made thee mightily my love he stretched his hands out of his rest and lit the star of east and west brooding or darkness like a dove God made thee mightily my love God made thee patiently my sweet out of all stars he chose a star he made it red with sunset bar and green with greeting for thy feet God made thee mightily my sweet End of chapter 7