 CHAPTER XIV PART 1 OF GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON This chapter was read by G.B.S. His remarks are printed in footnotes. A facsimile of the one page altered substantially by him is omitted in this plain text electronic edition. When anyone in the early years of the century made a list of the English writers most in the public eye, such a list always included the names of Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton. But a good many people in writing down these names did so with unconcealed irritation, and I think it is important at this stage to see why. These men were constantly arguing with each other, but the literary public felt all the same that they represented something in common, and the literary public was by no means sure that it liked that something. It could not quite resist Bernard Shaw's plays. It loved Chesterton whenever it could rebuke him affectionately for paradox and levity. What that public succumbed to in these men was their art. It was by no means so certain that it liked their meaning. And so the literary public elected to say that Shaw and Chesterton were having a cheap success by standing on their heads and declaring that black was white. The audience watched a Shaw versus Chesterton debate as a sham fight or a display of fireworks, as indeed it always partly was. For each of them would have died rather than really hurt the other, but Shaw and Chesterton were operating on their minds all the time. They were allowed to sit in the stalls and applaud, but they were themselves being challenged, and that spoiled their comfort. Chesterton in his autobiography complains of the falsity of most of the pictures of England during the Victorian era, the languishing, fainting females who were in fact far stronger minded than their granddaughters today, the tyrannical pious fathers, the dull conventional lives. It all rings false to anyone who grew up in an average Victorian middle class home and was happy enough there. There was, however, one thing fundamentally wrong in such homes, and it was on this fundamental sin that he agreed with Shaw in waging a relentless war. The middle classes of England were thoroughly and smugly satisfied with social conditions that were intolerable for the great mass of their fellow countrymen. They had erected between the classes artificial barriers and now did not even look over the top of them. I remember how when my mother started a settlement in south London, the head worker told us she often saw women groping in the dirt under the fish barrels for the heads and tails of fishes to boil for their children. The settlement began to give the children dinners of dumplings or rice pudding and treacle, and many well-to-do friends would give my mother a pound or so to help this work. But the suggestion that government should intervene with socialism, the idea that here was a symptom of a widespread evil, was scouted utterly. People might have learnt much from their own servants of how the rest of humanity were living, but while, said Chesterton, they laughed at the idea of the medieval baron whose vassals ate below the salt. Their own vassals ate and lived below the floor. At no time in the Christian past had there been such a deep and wide cleverage in humanity. The first thing that G.K.C. and G.B.S., Wells II, and Bellach, were all agreed upon was that the upper and middle classes of England must be reminded, if need were by a series of earthquakes, that they were living in an unreal world. They had forgotten the human race to which they belonged. They, a tiny section, spoke of the mass of mankind as the poor or the lower orders, almost as they might speak of the beasts of the forest. As beings of a different race, Chesterton had a profound and noble respect for the poor. Shaw declared that they were useless, dangerous, and ought to be abolished. But for both men, the handful of coralsome cliques called the literary world was far too small because it was so tiny a section of the human race. Shaw and Chesterton had, in fact, discovered the social problem. Today, whether people intend to do anything about it or not, it is impossible to avoid knowing something about it. But at that date, the idea was general, that all was as well as could be expected, in an imperfect world. The trades unionists were telling a different story, but they could not hope to reach intellectually the classes they were attacking. Here were men who could not be ignored, and I cannot but think that it was sometimes the mere utterance of unwelcome truth in brilliant speech that aroused the cry of paradox. I hear many people, wrote Chesterton, complain that Bernard Shaw deliberately mystifies them. I cannot imagine what they mean. It seems to me that he deliberately insults them. His language, especially on moral questions, is generally as straight and solid as that of a bargey and far less ornate and symbolic than that of a handsome cabman. The prosperous English Philistine complains that Mr. Shaw is making a fool of him, whereas Mr. Shaw is not, in the least, making a fool of him. Mr. Shaw is, with laborious lucidity, calling him a fool. GBS calls a landlord a thief, and the landlord, instead of denying or resenting it, says, ah, that fellow hides his meaning so cleverly that one can never make out what he means. It is also fine, spun and fantastical. GBS calls a statesman a liar to his face, and the statesman cries in a kind of ecstasy, ah, what quaint, intricate and half-tangled trains of thought, ah, what elusive and many-colored mysteries of half meaning. I think it is always quite plain what Mr. Shaw means, even when he is joking, and it generally means that the people he is talking to, ah, to howl, allowed for their sins, but the average representative of them undoubtedly treats the shavi and meaning as tricky and complex when it is really direct and offensive. He always accuses Shaw of pulling his leg at the exact moment when Shaw is pulling his nose. Footnote, George Bernard Shaw. Particular pages 82-3. In footnote, Chesterton was, however, in agreement with the ordinary citizen, and in disagreement with Shaw as to much of Shaw's essential teaching. And here we touch a matter so involved that even today it is hard to disentangle it completely. I suppose it will always be possible for two observers to look at human beings acting, to hear them talking, and to arrive at two entirely different interpretations of what they mean. This is certainly the case with any very recent period, and perhaps especially with our own recent history. We have within living memory ended a period and begun an exceedingly different period, and we tend to judge the former by the light, or the darkness, of the latter. The Victorian age, even in its extreme old age, was still tacitly assuming and legally enforcing as axioms the Christian moral system, especially in regard to marriage and all sex questions and the sacred nature of property. To read many disquisitions on that period today, one would suppose that no one living really believed in these things. That humbug explained the first and greed the second. This is surely a false perspective. The age was an enormously conventional one. These fundamental ideas had become fossilized and meaningless for an increasing number of younger people. But when Bernard Shaw called himself an atheist out of a kind of insane generosity towards Bradlaugh, see his letter to G.K. later in this chapter, or described all property as theft, it was a real moral indignation that was roused in many minds, real but exceedingly confused. It is testified to the need of the ordinary man to live by a creed that he need not question. Shaw and Chesterton were philosophers, and philosophers love asking questions as well as answering them, but the average man wants to live by his creed, not question it, and the elder Victorians had still some kind of creed. There were many who believed in God. There were others who believed that the Christian moral system must remain, because it had commended itself to man's nature as the highest and best and was the true fruit of evolutionary progress. There were certainly some who were angry because they thought chaos must follow any tampering with the existing social order, but if you take the mass of those who tried to laugh Bernard Shaw aside and grew angry when they could not do so, you find at the root of the anger and intense dislike of having any part of a system questioned, which was to them unquestionable, which they had erected into a creed. They thought Shaw's idea is dangerous and wanted to keep them from the young. They did not want anyone to ask how a civilization had laid its principles open to this brilliant and effective siege. They hated Shaw's questions before they began to hate his answers, and that is probably why so many linked Chesterton with Shaw. He gave different answers, but he was asking many of the same questions. He questioned everything as Shaw did, only he pushed his questions further. They were deeper and more searching. Shaw would not accept the old scriptural orthodoxy. G.K. refused to accept the new agnostic orthodoxy. Neither man would accept the orthodoxy of the scientists. Both were prepared to attack what Butler had called the science-ridden, art-ridden, culture-ridden, afternoon-t-ridden cliffs of old England. They attacked first by the mere process of asking questions, and the world thus questioned grew uneasy and seemed to care curiously little for the fact that the two questioners were answering their own questions in an opposite fashion. Where Shaw said, Give up pretending you believe in God, for you don't, Chesterton said. Rediscover the reasons for believing or else our race is lost. Where Shaw said, Abolish private property which has produced this ghastly poverty, Chesterton said, Abolish ghastly poverty by restoring property. And the audience said, These two men in strange paradoxes seem to us to be saying the same thing, if indeed they are saying anything at all. Chesterton wrote later of a young man whose aunt had disinherited him for socialism because of a lecture he had delivered against that economic theory. And I well remember how often after my own energetic attempts to explain why a distributist was not a socialist, I was met with a weary. Well, it's just the same. It was just the same question. It was an entirely different answer, but the audience, annoyed by the question, never seemed to listen to the answer. One man was saying, Sweep away the old beliefs of humanity and start fresh. The other was saying, Rediscover your reasons for these profound beliefs. Make them once more effective, for they are the very nature of man. Shaw and Chesterton were themselves deeply concerned about the answers. Both sincere, both dealing with realities, they were prepared to accept each other's sincerity and to fight the matter out if need were endlessly. Being writers they conducted their discussions in writing, being journalists, they did so mainly in the newspapers to the delight or fury of other journalists. A jealous few were enraged at what they called publicity hunting, but most realized that it was not a private fight. Anyone might join in, and a good many did. Belach was in the fight as early as Chesterton, and of course, on the same side. GBS, who had invented the Chester Belach, declared that Chesterton felt obliged to embrace the dogmas of Catholicism, lest Belach's soul should be damned. HD Wells agreed in the main with Shaw. Both were Fabians, and both were ready with a Fabian utopia for humanity. Which Belach and Chesterton felt would be little better than a prison? Cecil Chesterton, coming in at an angle of his own, wrote some effective articles. He was a Fabian, actually an official Fabian, but his outlook already embraced many of the Chester Belach human and genial ideals. Although he still ridiculed their utopia of the peasant state, small ownership and all that came later to be called distributism, like the Clarion, the New Age, itself a socialist paper, saw the wisdom of giving a platform to both sides, and in this paper appeared the best articles that the controversy produced. Meanwhile, the private friendship between GBS and GKC was growing apace very early on. Shaw had begun to urge GK to write a play. GK was, perhaps, beginning to feel that newspaper controversy did not give him space to say all he wanted about Shaw. Or perhaps it was merely that Monsieur Lane had persuaded him to promise them a book on Shaw for a series they were producing. Anyhow, in a letter of 1908, Shaw again urges the play and gives interesting information for the book. A. Ott St. Lawrence. Well when? Hartz heard, sure. 1st March 1908. My dear GKC. What about that play? It is no use trying to answer me in the New Age. The real answer to my article is the play. I have tried fair means. Each article was the inauguration of an assault below the belt. I shall deliberately destroy your credit as an essayist, as a journalist, as a critic, as a liberal, as everything that offers your laziness a refuge, until starvation and shame drive you to serious dramatic parturition. I shall repeat my public challenge to you. Vaunt my superiority. Insult your corpulence. Torture Baloch. If necessary, call on you and steal your wife's affections by my intellectual and athletic displays, until you contribute something to the British drama. You are played out as an essayist. Your ardor is soddened. Your intellectual substance crumbled by the attempt to keep up the work of your 20s and your 30s. Another five years of this. And you will be the apologist of every infamy that wears a liberal or Catholic mask. You, too, will speak of the portraits of Vicelli and the Assumption of Allegrae, and declare that democracy refuses to lackey label these honest citizens as Titian and Correccio, even that colossal fragment of your ruined honesty that still stupendously dismisses Beethoven as, Some rubbish about a piano will give way to remarks about a graceful second subject in the relative minor. Nothing can save you now except a rebirth as a dramatist. I have done my turn, and I now call on you to take yours and do a man's work. It is my solemn belief that it was my quintessence of epsinism that rescued you and all your ungrateful generation from materialism and rationalism. Footnote Cecil avowed this as far as he was concerned. GBS. And footnote, you were all tired young atheists turning to Kipling and Ruskinnian Anglicanism whilst I, with the angels' wings beating in my ears from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, O blasphemous walker in deafness, gave you in 1880 and 1881 two novels in which you had your rationalist, secularist hero immediately followed by my Beethovenian hero. True, nobody read them, but was that my fault? They are read now, it seems, mostly in pirated reprints. In spite of their appalling puerility and classical perfection of style, you are right as to my being a born pendant like all great artists and are at least useful as documentary evidence that I was no more a materialist when I wrote Love Among the Artists at 24 than when I wrote Candida at 39. My appearances on the platform of the Hall of Science were three in number. Once for a few minutes in a discussion in opposition to Brad Leff, who was defending property against socialism, Brad Leff died after that. Though I do not claim to have killed him, the Socialist League challenged him to debate with me at St. James's Hall. But we could not or would not agree as to the proposition to be debated. He insisting on my being bound by all the publications of the Democratic Federation, to which I did not belong, and I refusing to be bound by anything on earth or in heaven except the proposition that socialism would benefit the English people, and so the debate never came off. Now in those days they were throwing Brad Leff out of the House of Commons with bodily violence, and all one could do was to call oneself an atheist all over the place, which I accordingly did. At the first public meeting of the Shelley Society at University College, addressed by Stopford Brooke, I made my then famous, among a hundred people, declaration. I am a Socialist, an Atheist, and a Vegetarian. Ergo, a true Shelleyan, whereupon two ladies who had been palpating with enthusiasm for Shelley, under the impression that he was a devout Anglican, resigned on the spot. My second Hall of Science appearance was after the last of the Brad Leff, Hindman debates at St. James's Hall, where the two champions never touched the ostensible subject of their difference, the Eight Hours Day, at all, but simply talked socialism or antisocialism with a hearty dislike and contempt for one another. G. V. Foote was then in his prime as the successor of Brad Leff, and as neither the secularists nor the socialists were satisfied with the result of the debate, it was renewed for two nights at the Hall of Science between me and Foote. A verbatim report was published for six pints and is now a treasure of collectors. Having the last word on the second night, I had to make a handsome wind-up, and the secularists were much pleased by my declaring that I was altogether on Foote's side in his struggle with the established religion of the country. When Brad Leff died, the secularists wanted a new leader because Bee's enormous and magnetic personality left a void that nobody was big enough to fill. It was really like the death of Napoleon in that world. There was J. M. Robertson, Foote, and Charles Watts, but Brad Leff liked Foote as little as most autocrats liked their successors, and when he, before his death, surrendered the gavel, the hammer for thumping the table, to secure order at a meeting which was the presidential scepter of the National Secular Society, he did so with an ill will which he did not attempt to conceal. And so, though Foote was the nearest size to Brad Leff's shoes then available, he succeeded him at the disadvantage of inheriting the distrust of the old chief J. M. Robertson, you know. He was not a mob orator. Watts was not sufficient. He had neither Foote's weight being old nor Robertson's scholarship. So whilst the survivors of Brad Leff were trying to keep up the Hall of Science and to establish a memorial library, etc., there they cast round for new blood. What more natural than that they should think of me as a man not afraid to call himself an atheist and able to hold his own on the platform? Accordingly they invited me to address them. And one memorable night I held forth on progress in free thought. I was received with affectionate hope, and when the chairmen announced that I was giving my share of the gate to the memorial library, I have never taken money for lecturing. The enthusiasm was quite touching. The anti-climax was super-shaven. I proceeded to smash materialism, rationalism, and all the philosophy of Tyndall, Helm Holtz, Darwin, and the rest of the 1860 people into smithereens. I ridiculed and exposed every inference of science and justified every dogma of religion, especially showing that the trinity and the immaculate conception were the merest common sense. That finished me up as a possible leader of the NSS. Robertson came on the platform, white with honest, gotch, rationalist rage, and announced me with a fury of conviction that startled his own followers. Never did I grace that platform again. I repeated the address once to a branch of the NSS on the south side of the Thames, Kensington, I think, and was interrupted by yells of rage from the veterans of the society. The Lester secularists, a pious folk, rich and independent of the NSS, were kinder to me, but they were no more real atheists than the congregation of St. Paul's is made holy of real Christians. Foot is still bewildered about me, imagining that I am a pervert, but anybody who reads my stuff from the beginning, a Shellian beginning, as far as it could be labeled at all, will find implicit and sometimes explicit the views which, in their more matured form, will appear in that remarkable forthcoming masterpiece, Shavianism, a Religion. By the way, I have omitted one more appearance at the Hall of Science at a four nights debate on socialism between Foot and Mrs. Bissant. I took the chair on one of the nights. I take advantage of a snowy Sunday afternoon to scribble all this down for you, because you are in the same difficulty that beset me formally. Namely, the absolute blank in the history of the immediate past that confronts every man when he first takes to public life. Written history stops several decades back, and the bridge of personal recollection on which older men stand does not exist for the recruit. Nothing is more natural than that you should reconstruct me as the last of the rationalists. His real name is Blatchford, and nothing could be more erroneous. It would be much nearer the truth to call me, in that world, the first of the mystics. If you can imagine the result of trying to write your spiritual history in complete ignorance of painting, you will get a notion of trying to write mine in ignorance of music. Bradlaugh was a tremendous platform heavyweight, but he had never in his life, as far as I could make out, seen anything, heard anything or read anything in the artistic sense. He was almost beyond belief incapable of intercourse and private conversation. He could tell you his adventures provided you didn't interrupt him, which you were mostly afraid to do, as the man was a mesmeric terror. But as to exchanging ideas or expressing the universal part of his soul, you might as well have been reading the letters of Charles Dickens to his family, those tragic monuments of dumbness of soul and noisiness of pin. Lord help you if you ever lose your gift of speech, GKC. Don't forget that the race is only struggling out of its dumbness, and that it is only in moments of inspiration that we get out a sentence. All the rest is padding. Yours ever, G Bernard Shaw. End of Chapter 14 Part 1 Chapter 14 Part 2 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton This is a LibreBox recording. All LibreBox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibreBox.org. Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward. Chapter 14 Part 2 In the book on Shaw which appeared in August 1909, GK did as he had done with his other literary studies, gave inaccurately only as much biography as seemed absolutely necessary and mainly discussed ideas. He saw Shaw as an Irish man, yet lacking the roots of nationality since he belonged to a mainly alien governing class. He saw him as a Puritan yet without the religious basis of Puritanism. And thirdly, he saw him as so swift a progressive as to be ahead of his own thought and ready to slay it in the name of progress. All these elements in Shaw made for strength, but also created limitations. Shaw is like the Venus of Milo. All that there is of him is admirable. Where he fails is in being unable to see and embrace the full complexity of life. His only paradox is to pull out one thread or cord of truth longer and longer into waste and fantastic places. He does not allow for that deeper sort of paradox by which two opposite cords of truth become entangled in an inextricable knot. Still less can he be made to realize that it is often this knot which ties safely together the whole bundle of human life. Here lies the limitation of that lucid and compelling mind. He cannot quite understand life because he will not accept its contradictions. Humanity is built of these contradictions. Therefore Shaw pities humanity more than he loves it. It was his glory that he pitied animals like men. It was his defect that he pitied men almost too much like animals. Furon said of the democracy, let them eat grass. Shaw said, let them eat greens. He had more benevolence but almost as much disdain. As a vegetarian and a water drinker Shaw himself lacked in Chesterton's eyes something of complete humanity and in discussing social problems he was more economist than man. Shaw, one might almost say, dislikes murder not so much because it wastes the life of the corpse as because it wastes the time of the murderer. This lack of the full human touch is felt even in the place because Shaw cannot be irrational where humanity always is irrational. In Candida it is completely and disastrously false to the whole nature of falling in love to make the young Eugene complain of the cruelty which makes Candida defile her fair hands with domestic duties. No boy in love with a beautiful woman would ever feel disgusted when she peeled potatoes or trimmed lamps. He would like her to be domestic. He would simply feel that the potatoes had become poetical and the lamps gained an extra light. This may be irrational but we are not talking of rationality but of the psychology of first love. Footnote, no two love affairs are the same. This sentence assumed that they are all the same. To Eugene, the poet living in a world of imagination and a pouring reality, Candida was what Dalsenea was to Don Quixote, GBS, and footnote. It may be very unfair to women that the toil and triviality of potato peeling should be seen through a glamour of romance but the glamour is quite a certain effect as the potatoes it may be a bad thing in sociology that men should deify. Domesticity in girls is something dainty and magical but all men do. Personally, I do not think it a bad thing at all but that is another argument. Footnote, George Bernard Shaw. Particular Pages, 120 to 1 and footnote. Yet Shaw's limitations are those of a great man and a genius. In an age of narrow specialism he has stood up for the fact that philosophy is not the concern of those who pass through divinity and greats but of those who pass through birth and death. In an age that has almost chosen death Shaw follows the banner of life but austerely, not joyously. Nowhere in dealing with Shaw's philosophy does Chesterton note his death to Butler. Shaw has himself mentioned it and no reader of Butler could miss it especially in this matter of the life force. It is the special paradox of our age Chesterton notes that the life force should thus need assertion and can thus be followed without joy. To every man and woman, bird, beast and flower life is a love call to be eagerly followed. To Bernard Shaw it is merely a military bugle to be obeyed. In short, he fails to feel that the command of nature if one must use the anthropomorphic fable of nature instead of the philosophic term God can be enjoyed as well as obeyed. He paints life at its darkest and tells the babe on board to take the leap in the dark. That is heroic. And to my instinct, at least, Schopenauer looks like a pygmy beside his pupil. But it is the heroism of a morbid and almost affixiated age. It is awful to think that this world which so many poets have praised has even, for a time, been depicted as a man trap into which we may just have the manhood to jump. Think of all those ages through which men have talked of having the courage to die. And then remember that we have actually fallen to talking of having the courage to live. Footnote George Bernard Shaw Weekend Library Page 190 End Footnote Here comes the great parting of the two men's thought. D.K. believed in God and in joy, but he saw that Shaw had much of value for this strange, diseased world. His primary value was not merely, as some said, that he woke it up. The literary world might not be awake to the social evil, but it was painfully awake to the ills. A real or imaginary inherent in human life. We do not need waking up, rather we suffer from insomnia with all its results of fear and exaggeration and frightful waking dreams. The modern mind is not a donkey which wants kicking to make it go on. The modern mind is more like a motor car on a lonely road, which two amateur motorists have been just clever enough to take to pieces but are not quite clever enough to put together again. Footnote In the same place Particular pages 245-6 End footnote Shaw had not merely asked questions of the age. That would have been worse than useless. What he had done was at moments to rise above his own thoughts and give through his characters, inspired answers. D.K. instances Candida with its revelation of the meaning of marriage when the woman stays with the strong man because he is so weak and needs her. And Shaw had brought back philosophy into drama. That is, he had recreated the atmosphere lost since Shakespeare. Footnote Hard on Goethe and Epson to say nothing of Mozart's magic flute in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, G.B.S. End footnote in which men were thinking and might therefore find the answers that the age needed. And here again we come back to the world which these men were shaking and to the respective philosophies with which they looked at it. It was a world of conventions and these conventions had become empty of meaning. Throw them away, said Shaw and Wells. No, said Chesterton. Keep them and look for their meaning. Revolution does not mean destruction. It means restoration. The same sort of discussion buzzed around this book as around the controversies of which it might be called a prolongation. Shaw himself reviewed it in an article in The Nation in which he called it the best work of literary art I have yet provoked. Everything about me which Mr. Chesterton had to divine, he has divineed miraculously. But everything that he could have ascertained easily by reading my own plain directions on the bottle, as it were, remains for him a muddled and painful problem. From an interchange of private letters it would seem that the move to Beaconsfield took place later in this year than I had supposed. Bernard Shaw's letter is probably not written many days after an on-dated one to him from GK. 48 Overstrand Mansions Battersea Park, South West Dear Bernard Shaw I trust our recent tournaments have not rendered it contrary to the laws of romantic chivalry which you reverence so much for me to introduce to you my friend Mr. Pepler who is a very nice man indeed though a social idealist and who has, I believe, something of a practical sort to ask of you. Please excuse abruptness or of introduction. We are moving into the country and every piece of furniture I begin to write at is taken away and put into a van. Always yours sincerely GK Chesterton 10 Adelphi Terrace West Central 30th October, 1909 Chesterton Shaw Speaks Attention, I saw your man and consoled him spiritually not the subject of this letter. I still think that you could write a useful sort of play if you were started. When I was in Kerry last month I had occasionally a few moments to spare and it seemed to me quite unendurable that you should be wasting your time writing books about me. I liked the book very much especially as it was so completely free from my own influence being evidently found in on a very hazy recollection of the world perusal of man and Superman. But a lot of it was fearful nonsense. There was one good thing about the scientific superstition which you came a little too late for. It taught a man to respect facts. You have no conscience in this respect and your punishment is that you substitute such dull inferences as my narrow puritan home for delightful and fantastic realities which you might very easily have ascertained if you had taken greater advantage of what is really the only thing to be said in favor of Battersea namely that it is within easy reach of Adelphi Terrace. However, I have no doubt that when Wilkins MacArthur Jr. grew up and became imminent in Australia references were made to his narrow puritan home so I do not complain. I told the truth. Nobody would have believed it. Now to business. When one breathes Irish air one becomes a practical man. In England I used to say what a pity it was you did not write a play. In Ireland I sat down and began writing a scenario for you but before I could finish it I had come back to London and now it is all up with the scenario. In England I can do nothing but talk. The thing as far as I scribbled it and I leave you to invent what escapades you please for the hero and to devise some sensational means of getting him back to heaven again unless you prefer to end with the millennium in full swing. Footnote, the scenario dealt with the return of Saint Augustine to the England he remembered converting in footnote but experiences may be very doubtful of the efficacy of help as the means of getting work out of the right sort of man. When I was young I struck out one invaluable rule for myself which was whenever you meet an important man contradict him, if possible insult him but such a rule is one of the privileges of youth. I no longer live by rules yet there is one way in which you may be insultable. It can be plausibly held that you are a venal ruffian pouring forth great quantities of immediately saleable stuff but altogether declining to lay up for yourself treasures in heaven it may be that you cannot afford to do otherwise therefore I am quite ready to make a deal with you. A full length play should contain about 18,000 words between two or three times that number I do not know what your price per thousand is. I used to be considered grossly extortionate by Massingham and others for insisting on 3 pounds. 18,000 words at 3 pounds per thousand is 54 pounds I need make no extra allowance for the republication in book form because even if the play aborted as far as the theater is concerned I could make a book of it all the same. Let us assume that your work is worth twice as much as mine. This would make 108 pounds. I have had two shockingly bad years of it pecuniarily speaking and am therefore in that phase of extravagance which straightened means have always produced in me knock off 8% as a sort of agents commission guarding you on the job and finding you a theme. This leaves 100 pounds. I will pay you 100 pounds down on your contracting to supply me within 3 months with a mechanically possible, in other words stageable drama dealing with the experiences of St. Augustine after revisiting England the literary copyright to be yours accept that you are not to prevent me making as many copies as I may require for stage use the stage right to be mine but you are to have the right to buy it back from me for 250 pounds whenever you like. I could not very well offer him 100 pounds as a present GBS and footnote the play if performed to be announced as your work and not as a collaboration all rights which I may have in the scenario to go with stage right and literary copyright as prescribed as far as you may make use of it what do you say there is a lot of spending in 100 pounds one condition more if it should prove impossible to achieve a performance otherwise than through the stage society which does not pay anything a resort to that body is not to be deemed a breach of the spirit of our agreement do you think it would be possible to make Balak write a comedy if he could only be induced to believe in some sort of God instead of in that wretched little conspiracy against religion which the pious romans have locked up in the Vatican one could get some drive into him as it is he is wasting prodigious gifts in the service of King Leopold and the Pope and other ghastly scarecrows if he must have a pope there is quite a possible one at a Delphi terrace for the next few days I shall be at my country quarters a yacht Saint Lawrence well when hearts for sure I have a motor car which could carry me on sufficient provocation as far as beacons field but I do not know how much time you spend there and how much in fleet street are you only a week ender has your wise wife taken you properly in hand and committed you to a pastoral life yours ever G. Bernard Shaw P.S. remember that the play is to be practical in the common managerial sense only in respect of its being mechanically possible as a stage representation it is to be neither a likely to be successful play nor a literary lark it is to be written for the good of all souls among the reviewers of the book our old friend the Academy surprised me by hating Shaw so much more than Chesterton that the latter came off quite lightly there was a good deal of the usual misunderstanding and lists were made of self contradictions on the author's part still in the main the press sympathetic and even enthusiastic but when Shaw reviewed Chesterton on Shaw more than one paper waxed sarcastic on the point of royalties and remuneration gained by these means the funniest of the more critical comments on the way these men wrote of one another was a suggestion made in the bystander that Shaw and Chesterton were really the same person Shaw it is said tired of socialism weary of wearing Yeagers and broken down by totalism and vegetarianism sought some years ago and escaped from them his adoption however of these attitudes had a decided commercial value which he did not think it advisable to prejudice by wholesale surrender therefore he chased the forbidden joys of individualistic philosophy meat food and strong drink created Chesterton this mammoth myth he decided should enjoy all the forms of fame which Shaw had to deny himself outwardly he should be Shaw's antithesis he should be beardless large in girth smiling of countenance and he should be licensed to sell paradoxes only in essay and novel form all stage and platform rights being reserved by Shaw to enable the imposition to be safely carried out Shaw hit on the idea of residence close to the tunnel which connects Adelphi with the strand emerging from his house plain Yeager clad bearded and Saturnine Shaw he entered the tunnel in a cliff in which was a cellar here he donned the Chesterton properties the immense padding of chest and so on the Chesterton sombrero hat and cloak and pincenas and there he left the Shaw beard in the Shaw clothes the Shaw expression of countenance and all the Shaw theories he emerged into the strand GKC in whose identity he visited all the cafes ate all the products rode in all the cabs and smiled on all the sinners the days work done the Chesterton manuscripts delivered the proofs read the bargains driven the giant figure returned to the tunnel and once again was back in Adelphi the Shaw he was when he left it back to the Yeagers the beard the socialism the statistics and the sardonic letters to the times footnote commander one September 1909 end footnote Bernard Shaw as a man of unusual generosity but I think from his letters he must also be quite a good man of business GK was so greatly the opposite that GBS urged him again and again to do the most ordinary things to protect the literary rights of himself and others thus in the only undated letter in the whole packet he begs Gilbert to back up the author's society my dear GKC I am one of the unhappy slaves who on the two big committees of your trade union the society of authors dredge at the heartbreaking work of defending our miserable profession against being devoured body and soul by the publishers themselves a pitiful gang of literature struck imposters who are crumpled up by the booksellers who those small folk are at least in contact with reality in the shape of the book buyer it is a ghastly and infuriating business because the authors will go to lunch with their publishers and sell them anything for 20 pounds over the cigarettes but it has to be done and I with half a dozen others have to do it now I missed the last committee meeting electioneering I am here doing two colossal meetings of minors every night for Kier Hardy but the harassed secretary writes that it was decided to take proceedings in the case of a book of yours which you oh Issa Issa sold to John John is a well no matter when you take your turn on the committee you will find him out and that though the German lawyer has had seven pounds and is going ahead seven pounds worth of law in Germany takes you to the House of Lords everything is hung up because you will not answer Thring's letters footnote Herbert Thring was the barrister employed by the society of authors and footnote Thring in desperation appeals to me concluding with characteristics simplicity that we must be friends because you have written a book about me as the conclusion is accidentally and improbably true I now urge you to give him whatever satisfaction he requires I have no notion what it is or what the case is about but at least answer his letters however infuriating they may be remember you pay Thring only five hundred pounds for which you get integrity incorruptibility implacability and a disposition greatly to find quarrel in a straw on your behalf even with yourself and don't complain if you don't get twenty thousand pounds worth of tact into the bargain and your obligations to us wretched committee men are simply incalculable we get nothing but abuse and denigration authors weep with indignation when we put our foot on some blood sucking widow cheating orphan starving scoundrel and ruthlessly force him to keep to his might of obligation under an agreement which would have revolted Shylock unless the best men the good professionals help us we are lost we get nothing and spend our time like water for you all we ask you to do is to answer Thring and let us get along with your work look here will you write to Thring please write to Thring I say have you written to Thring yet GBS I doubt whether he had those chance sums he poured from time to time into Francis's lap were usually not what they should have been an advance on a royalty orthodoxy he sold outright for one hundred pounds no man ever worked so hard to earn so little when later Gilbert employed M. A. P. Watt as his literary agents a letter to them on dated of course and written on the old note paper of his first Battersea flat shows a mingling of gratitude to his agents with entire absence of resentment towards his publishers which might be called Essence of Chesterton the prices you have got me for books compared with used weekly to demand seem to me to come out a fairy land it seems to me that there is a genuine business problem which creates a permanent need for a literary agent it consists in this that our work even when it has become entirely a duty in a worry still remains in some vague way a pleasure and how can we put a fair price on what is at once a worry and a pleasure suppose someone comes to me and says I offer you six pence for your history of the Gnostic heresy why after all should I charge more than six pence for a work it was so exuberant to write you on the other hand seeing it from the outside would say that it was worth so and so and you would get it Shaw continued his attempts to stimulate the reluctant playwright two years after drafting the scenario he writes ten adelphi terrace was central fifth april 1912 dear mrs. Chesterton I have promised to drive somebody to beacons field on sunday morning and I shall be in that district more or less for the rest of the day if you are spending Easter at over roads and have no visitors who couldn't stand us we should like to call on you at any time that would be convenient the convenience of time depends on a design of my own which I wish to impart to you first I want to read a play to Gilbert it began by way of being a music hall sketch so it is not three and one half hours long as usual I can get through it in an hour and a half I want to insult and taunt and stimulate Gilbert with it it is the sort of thing he could write and ought to write a religious harlequin aid footnote androcles and the lion evidently gbs and footnote in fact he could do it better if a sufficient number of pins were stuck into him my proposal is that I read the play to him on sunday or at the next convenient date and that you fall into transports of admiration of it declare that you can never love a man write things like that and definitely announce that if Gilbert has not finished a worthy successor to it before the end of the third week next ensuing you will go out like the lady in a doll's house and live your own life whatever that dark threat may mean if you are at home I count on your ready complicity but the difficulty is that you may have visitors and if they are pious Gilbert will be under tacit obligation not to blaspheme or let me blaspheme whilst they are beneath his roof my play is about Christian martyrs and perfectly awful in parts and if they are journalists it will be necessary to administer an oath of secrecy I don't object to the oath and nothing would please Gilbert more than to make them drink blood from a skull the difficulty is they wouldn't keep it in short they must be the right sort of people of whom the more the merrier forgive this long rigmarole it is only to put you in possession of what may happen if you approve and your invitations in domestic circumstances are propitious yours sincerely G. Bernard Shaw Chesterton at last did write magic but that belongs to another chapter like the demand for a play the theme of finance recurs with great frequency in Shaw's letters and after magic appeared he wrote to Francis telling her that in Sweden where the marriage laws are comparatively enlightened I believe you could obtain a divorce on the ground that your husband threw away an important part of the provision for your old age for 20 pieces of silver in the future the moment he finished a play and the question of disposing of it arises lock him up and bring the agreement to me explanations would be thrown away on him end of chapter 14 part 2 chapter 15 part 1 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Candace Tuttle Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Macy Ward chapter 15 part 1 from Battersea to Beaconsfield 1909 to 1911 in 1909 with orthodoxy well behind him and George Bernard Shaw just published and his wife left London for the small country town that was to be their home for the rest of their lives it was an odd coincidence that they should leave over-strand mansions Battersea and come to Overroads Beaconsfield for they did not name their new home but found it ready christened it will be remembered that in one of the letters during the engagement Gilbert had suggested a country home the reason for the choice of Beaconsfield he gives in the autobiography after we were married my wife and I lived for about a year in Kensington the place of my childhood but I think we both knew that it was not to be the real place of our abode I remember that we strolled out one day for a sort of second honeymoon and went upon a journey into the void a voyage deliberately objectless I saw a passing omnibus hand well and feeling this to be an appropriate omen we boarded it and left it somewhere at a stray station which I entered and asked the man in the ticket office where the next train went to he uttered the pedantic reply where do you want to go to and I uttered the profound and philosophic rejoinder wherever the next train goes to it seemed that it went to slew which may seem to be singular taste even in a train however we went to slew and from there set out walking with even less notion of where we were going and in that fashion we passed through the large and quiet crossroads of a sort of village and stayed at an inn called the White Heart we asked the name of the place and were told that it was called Beaconsfield I mean of course that it was called Beaconsfield and not Beaconsfield and we said to each other this is the sort of place where someday we will make our home they both wanted a home they both deeply desired a family the wish is normal to both man and woman normal in a happy marriage and theirs was unusually happy it was almost abnormally keen in both Francis and Gilbert few men have so greatly loved children as a schoolboy his letters are full of it making friends with Scottish children on the seans with French children by the medium of pictures later he was writing in defence of baby worship and welcoming with enthusiasm the arrival of his friends children into the world in the notebook he had written sunlight in a child's hair it is like the kiss of Christ upon all children I blessed the child the blessing would go with him and never leave him and turn first into a toy and then into a game and then into a new friend and as he grew up into friends and then into a woman grass and children grass and children there seems no end to them but if there were but one blade of grass men would see that it is fairer than lilies and if we saw the first child we should worship it as the God come on earth rounds I find that most round things are nice particularly eternity and baby Francis cared no less deeply both for eternity and for babies and for many years went on hoping for the family that would complete their lives at last it was decided to have an operation to enable her to have children her doctor writes I well remember an incident which occurred during her convalescence from that operation I received a telephone call from the matron of the nursing home in which Mrs. Chesterton was staying suggesting that I should come round and remonstrate with Mr. Chesterton on my arrival I found him sitting on the stairs where he had been for two hours greatly incommoting passers up and down and deaf to all requests to move on it appeared that he had written a sonnet to his wife on her recovery from the operation and was bringing it to give her he was not however satisfied with the last line but was determined to perfect it before entering her room to take tea with her by the time they left London she must I think have given up the hope she had so long cherished still if there could not be children there might be perhaps something of a home in the conditions of their life there was danger that any house of bricks and mortar should be rather a headquarters than a home and it was lucky that he was able to feel she took home with her wherever they went your face that is a wandering home a flying home for me the years before them were to be filled with the vast activities that not only took Gilbert to London and all over England incessantly but were to take him increasingly over Europe and America Beaconsfield gave a degree of quiet that made it possible when they were able to be at home not to be swamped by engagements and to lead a life of their own Gilbert could go to London when he liked but he need not always beyond tap to go to say for all the world Francis could have a garden and indulge her hungry appetite for all that was fruitful G.K. later under the title the homelessness of Jones showed his love for a house rather than a flat and they gave even to their first little house Overroads the stamp of a real home for a man and his wife to be their own affair not so however with the Chester-tons after a lapse of over thirty years I find the matter still a subject of furious controversy and indeed passion Francis says one school of opinion committed a crime against the public good by removing Gilbert from Fleet Street No says the other school she had to move him or he would have died of working too hard the suggestion which I believe to be a fact that Gilbert himself wanted to move is seldom entertained there isn't all this the legitimate feeling of distress among any group at losing its chief figure its pride and joy I lost Gilbert Lucien Oldershaw once said first when I introduced him to Belich next when he married Francis and finally when he joined the Catholic Church I rejoiced though perhaps with a maternal sadness at all these fulfilments Cecil wanted his brother always on hand Belich was already in the country a far more remote country but even he coming up to London mourned to my mother she has taken my Chester-tons from me talking it over however after the lapse of years I agreed that in all probability the move was a wise one what may be called the smaller fry of Fleet Street are less reasonable one cannot avoid the feeling that in all this masculine life so sure of its manhood there lingered something of the swarm array of the junior debating club furiously desiring each to be first with Gilbert and in his love of Fleet Street he so identified himself with them all that they felt he was one of them and did not recognise the horizons wider than theirs that were opening before him my husband and I are experts in changing residences and we listened with the amusement of experts to the talk of theorists for it was so constantly assumed that on one side of a choice is disaster on the other perfection actually perfection does not belong to this earthly state if you go to Rome as Gilbert himself once said you sacrifice a rich suggestive life at Wimbledon Newman, writing of a far greater and more irrevocable choice called his story loss and gain but he had no doubt that the gain outweighed the loss there were in Gilbert's adult life three other big decisions decisions of the scale that altered its course the first was his marriage the second was his reception into the church the third was his continued dedication to the paper that his brother and bellic had founded in deciding to marry Francis he was acting against his mother's wishes to which he was extremely sensitive his decision to become a Catholic had to be made alone he had the sympathy of his wife but not her companionship in the decision to edit the paper he had not even her full sympathy she always felt his creative work to be so much more important and to be imperiled by the overwork the paper brought Gilbert was a man slow in action but it would be exceedingly difficult to find instances of his doing anything that he did not want to do the theorists about marriage are like the theorists about moving house if they do not know that decisions made by one party alone are rare indeed and stick out like spikes in the life of a normal and happy couple of the vast majority of decisions it is hard to say who makes them they make themselves after endless talk on the tops of omnibuses going to Hanwell or elsewhere out walking breakfasting especially breakfasting in bed they make themselves above all in the matter of a move in fine weather during a holiday on a hot London Sunday when a flat is stuffy when the telephone rings all day when a book is on the stocks other writers have left London that they might create at leisure and choose their own times for social intercourse why does no one say their wives dragged them away simply I think that being less kind and considerate than Gilbert they do not mind telling their friends that they are not always wanted this Gilbert could not do if people said how they would miss him how they hated his going he would murmur vague and friendly sounds from which they deduced all they wanted to deduce was it more weakness or strength that tenderness of heart that could never faintly suggest to his friends that they would miss him more than he would miss them I never wanted but one thing in my life he had written to Annie Furman and that one thing he was taking with him anyhow the move accomplished he enjoyed defending it in every detail and did so especially in his daily news articles the rush to the country was not uncommon in the literary world of the moment and his journalist friends had urged the point that Beaconsfield was not true country was suburban was being overbuilt his friends, G.K. replied were suffering from a weak-minded swing from one extreme to the other men who had praised London as the only place to live in were now vying with one another to live furthest from a station to have no chimneys visible on the most distant horizon to depend on tradesmen only called once a week from cities so distant that fresh-baked loaves grew stale before delivery rival ruralists would quarrel about which had the most completely inconvenient postal service and there were many jealous heart-burnings if one friend found out any uncomfortable situation which the other friend had thoughtlessly overlooked Gilbert, on the contrary noted soon after his arrival that Beaconsfield was beginning to be built over and he noted it with satisfaction within a stone's throw of my house they are building another house I am glad they are building it and I am glad it is within a stone's throw he did not want a desert he did not want a large land at a state he wanted what he had got a house and a garden he adventurously explored that garden finding a kitchen garden that had somehow got attached to the premises and wondering why he liked it speaking to the gardener an enterprise of no little valor and asking him the name of a strange dark red rose at once theatrical and sulky which turned out to be called Victor Hugo watching, with regret a lot of little black pigs being turned out of my garden watching the neighbouring house grow up from its foundation he noted in an article called the wings of stone what was the reality of a staircase we pad them with carpets and rail them with banisters yet every staircase is truly only an awful and naked ladder running up into the infinite to a deadly height a correspondent pointed out in a letter to the Daily News that here he had touched a reality keenly felt by primitive peoples when Sita Waio King of Zululand visited London he would go upstairs only on hands and knees and that with manifest terror the paddings of civilization may be useful yet Gilbert held more valuable a realisation of the realities of things vision is not fancy but the sight of truth in the notebook he had written things that make me think things beyond all poetry a yellow space or rift in evening sky a chimney or pinnacle high in the air and a path over a hill Chesterton had always the power of conveying in words a painter's vision of some unforgettable scene with the poet's words for what the artist not only sees but imagines such flashes became more frequent as he looked through the doorway of his little house go through the ball and the cross with this in mind and you will see what I mean the crimson seas of the sunset seemed to him like a bursting out of some sacred blood as if the heart of the world had broken there is nothing more beautiful than thus to look as it were through the archway of a house as if the open air an interior chamber and the sun a secret lamp of the place best of all to illustrate this special quality is a longer passage from the poets and the lunatics for the most part he was contented to see the green semicircles of lawn repeat themselves like a pattern of green moons for he was not one to whom repetition was merely monotony only in looking over a particular gate at a particular lawn he became pleasantly conscious or half conscious of a new note of color in the greenness a much bluer green which seemed to change to vivid blue as the object at which he was gazing moved sharply turning a small head on a long neck it was a peacock but he had thought of a thousand things before he thought of the obvious thing the burning blue of the plumage on the neck had reminded him of blue fire and blue fire had reminded him of some dark fantasy about blue devils before he had fully realized even that it was a peacock he was staring at and the tale that trailing tapestry of eyes had led his wandering wits away to those dark but divine monsters of the apocalypse whose eyes were multiplied like their wings before he had remembered that a peacock even in a more practical sense was an odd thing to see in so ordinary a setting yet always to Chesterton the beauty of nature was enhanced by the work of men and if in London men had swarmed too closely it was not to get away from them but to appreciate them more individually that he chose the country yes his literary friends would say in the real country that is true the farmer the labourer even the village barber and the village tradesmen are worth knowing but not suburban neighbours against such discrimination the whole democracy of Chesterton stood in revolt all men were valuable all men were interesting the doctor as much as the barber the clergymen as much as the farmer all men were children of God and citizens of the world if he had a choice in the matter it was discrimination against the literary world itself with all the fads that tended to smother its essential humanity nothing would have induced him to discriminate against the suburban in the last year of his life he wrote in the autobiography I have lived in Beaconsfield from the time when it was almost a village to the time when as the enemy profanely says it is a suburb for the author of the Napoleon of Notting Hill this would hardly be a conclusive argument against any place we should, he once said regard the important suburbs as ancient cities embedded in a sort of boiling lava spouted up by that volcano the speculative builder that lava itself he found interesting but beneath or beside it a little town like Beaconsfield had its share in the great sweep of English history something of the seven sunken Englands could be found in the old town which custom marked off pretty sharply from the new town Burke had lived in Beaconsfield and was buried there and Gilbert once suggested to Mr. Garvin that they should appear at a local festival respectively as Fox apart for which I have no claim to the conference and Burke I admire Burke in many things while disagreeing with him in nearly everything but Mr. Garvin strikes me as being rather like Burke at the barbers he was often seen sitting at the end of a line patiently awaiting his turn for he could never shave himself and it was only years later that Dorothy Collins conceived and put into execution bringing the barber to the house probably an article would be shaping while he waited and the barber's conversation might put the finishing touches to it there were in fact two barbers one of the old town one of the new I once planned, he says a massive and exhaustive sociological work in several volumes which was to be called the two barbers of Beaconsfield and based entirely upon the talk of the two excellent citizens to whom I went to get shaved for those two shops do indeed belong to two different civilizations despite his love for London Gilbert had always felt that life in a country town held one point of special superiority in it you discovered the community in London you chose your friends which meant that you narrowed your life to people of one kind he had noted in the family itself a valuable widening the supreme adventure is being born there we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap there we do see something of which we have not dreamed before our father and mother do lie and wait for us and leap out on us like brigands from a bush our uncle is a surprise our aunt is in the beautiful expression a bolt from the blue when we step into the family by the act of being born we do step into a world which is incalculable into a world which has its own strange laws into a world which could do without us into a world that we have not made here in Beaconsfield the Chesterton's grew into the community the clergyman the doctor the innkeeper the barber the gardener and like the relatives who spring upon you at birth these worthy citizens seem to Gilbert potentials of vast excitement and varied interest discussing an event of much later date a meeting to decide whether a crucifix might be erected as a local war memorial he thus describes the immense forces he found in that small place those who debated the matter were a little group of the inhabitants of a little country town the rector and the doctor and the bank manager and the respectable tradesmen of the place with a few hangers on like myself of the more disreputable professions of journalism or the arts but the powers that were present there in the spirit came out of all the ages and all the battlefields of history Muhammad was there and the colonoclasts who came riding out of the east to ruin the statues of Italy and Calvin and Rousseau and the Russian anarchs and all the older England that is buried under Puritanism and Henry III ordering the little images for Westminster and Henry V after Agencourt on his knees before the shrines of Paris if one could really write that little story of that little place it would be the greatest of historical monographs Chapter 15 Part 2 of Gilbert Keith Chesterton this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Candace Tuttle Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Macy Ward Chapter 15 Part 2 A keen observer often added to the Beaconsfield community in those days was father, now Monsignor John O'Connor close friend of both Gilbert and Francis and inspirer of father Brown of detective fame they had first become friends in 1904 when they met at the house of a friend in Keithley Yorkshire and walked back over the moors together to visit Francis Steindahl at Ilkley this Jew of Frankfurt descent was a great friend of the Chestertons and on their many visits to him the friendship with father O'Connor ripened with both Francis and Gilbert it was among the closest of their lives their letters to him show it the long talks and companionable walks over the moors have an atmosphere of intimacy that is all the more convincing because so little stressed in his book father O'Connor has a pardonable pride in the idea that their talks suggested ideas to Gilbert he takes pleasure in his character of father Brown but he reveals the atmosphere of unique confidence and intimacy by the very absence of all parade of it both he and Gilbert have told the story of how the idea of the detective priest first dawned on their second meeting father O'Connor had startled indeed almost shattered Gilbert with certain rather lurid knowledge of human depravity which he had acquired in the course of his priestly experience at the house to which they were going two Cambridge undergraduates spoke disparagingly of the cloistered habits of the Catholic clergy saying that to them it seemed that to know and meet evil was a far better thing than the innocence of such ignorance to Gilbert still under the shock of a knowledge compared with which these two Cambridge gentlemen knew about as much real evil as two babies in the same perambulator the exquisite irony of this remark suggested a thought why not a whole comedy of cross purposes based on the notion of a priest with a knowledge of evil deeper than that of the criminal he is converting he carried out this idea in the story of the blue cross the first father Brown detective story father O'Connor's account adds the details that he had himself once boasted of buying five sapphires for five shillings and that he always carried a large umbrella and many brown paper parcels at the steinthal dining table an artist friend of the family made a sketch of father O'Connor which later appeared on the wrapper of the innocence of father Brown beyond one or two touches of this sort he had a suggestion for a character not a portrait and in the autobiography and in the Dickens Gilbert had a good deal to say of interest to the novelist about how suggestions come and are used he never believed that Dickens drew a portrait as it were in the round nature just gives hints to the creative artist and it used to amuse father Brown to find that such touches of his imagination as noting where an ashtray had got hidden behind a book seemed to Gilbert quasi miraculous left to himself he merely dropped ashes on the floor from his cigar he did not smoke a pipe and cigarettes were prone to set him on fire in one place or another a frequent visitor father O'Connor noted his fashion of work and reading and the abstracted way he saw it mooning but he never mooned he was always working out something in his mind and when he drifted from his study to the garden and was seen making deadly passes with his sword-stick at the dahlias we knew that he had got to a dead end in his composition and was getting his thoughts into order he played often too with a huge knife which he had for twenty-four years he took it abroad with him took it to bed Francis had to retrieve it often from under his pillow in some hotel once at a lecture in Dublin he drew it absentmindedly to sharpen a pencil as it was seven and a half inches long shut and fourteen open the amusement of the audience may be imagined in origin it was, Father O'Connor relates a Texan or Mexican general utility implement it was with this knife that he won my daughter's heart many years later when she aged three had not seen him for some time and had grown shy of him a little scared of his enormousness she stood far off he did not look in her direction but began to open and shut the vast blade next she was on his knee a little later we heard her remark Uncle Gilbert you make jokes just like my daddy and from him came I do my best the prototype of Father Brown tells of the easy job in detection when Gilbert had been reading a book he had just been reading a shilling pamphlet by Dr. Horton on the Roman menace or some such fearful wild fowl I knew he had read it because no one else could when he had done most of his books as and when read had gone through every indignity a book may suffer and live he turned it inside out dog-eared it penciled it sat on it took it to bed and rolled on it and got up again and spilled tea on it if he were sufficiently interested so Dr. Horton's pamphlet had a refuted look when I saw it Father O'Connor was not the only friend who was added to the Beaconsfield group with some frequency it was easy enough to run down from London or over from Wellwin home of GBS or from Oxford or Cambridge it was most conveniently central Gilbert's brethren of the pen were especially apt to appear at all seasons and always found friendly welcome for he continued to call himself neither poet nor philosopher but journalist Father O'Connor had tried to persuade him, as he neatly puts it to begin to print on handmade paper with gilt edges but Francis begged him to drop the idea you will not change Gilbert you will only fidget him he is bent on being a dolly journalist to paint the town red and he does not need style to do that all he wants is buckets and buckets of red paint journalists coming down from London describe the jolly welcome beer poured, the sword stick flourished conversation flowing as freely as the beer it meant a pleasant afternoon and it meant good copy they visited him in the country they observed him in town one interviewer returned with a photo which showed Chesterton in a somewhat negligee condition the result as he admitted of reading W.W. Jacobs rolling about on the floor waving his legs in the air he was seen working a swan boat at the white city he collapsed it and the placid lake became a raging sea he was seen thinking and even reading under the strangest weather conditions one man saw him under a gas lamp in the street in pouring rain with an open book in his hand reading in Fleet Street one day Gilbert discovered suddenly that the Lord Mayor's show was passing he began to reflect on the show so deeply that he forgot to look at it over roads I remember as a little triangular house much too small for the sort of fun the Chestertons enjoyed Francis bought a field opposite to it and they are built a studio the night the studio was opened Father O'Connor remembers a large party at which charades were acted he himself as canon cross keys gave away the word so that Belfry was loudly shouted by the opposition group the rival company acting torture got away with it successfully especially complains our Yorkshire priest as Ur was pronounced yaw in the best southern manner on that night returning to the house Father O'Connor offered his arm to Gilbert who refused it with a finality foreign to our friendship Father O'Connor went on ahead and Gilbert following in the dark stumbled over a flower pot and broke his arm perhaps because his size made himself consciously aware of his awkwardness Gilbert hated being helped Father Ignatius Rice another close friend says the only time he ever saw Gilbert annoyed was when he offered him an arm going upstairs Gilbert and Francis would both visit Father O'Connor in his Yorkshire parish of Heckman Dwight one year they took rooms at Ilkley and he remembers Gilbert adorning with huge frescoes the walls of the attic and Francis sitting in the window singing oh swallow swallow flying south while Gilbert did a blazen of some fantastic coat of arms the closeness of the intimacy is seen in a letter quoted by Father O'Connor in which Gilbert explained why Francis and he were unable to come to Heckman Dwight for a promised visit July 3, 1909 I would not write this to anyone else but you combine so unusually in your own single personality the characters of one priest being three, man of the world four, man of the other world five, man of science six, old friend seven, new friend not to mention Irishman and picture dealer that I don't mind suggesting the truth to you Francis has just come out of what looked bad enough to be an illness and is just going to plunge into another one of her recurrent problems the two may just be a bit too much for her and I want to be with her every night for a few days there's an Irish bowl for you one of the mysteries of marriage which must be a sacrament and an extraordinary one too is that a man evidently useless like me can become at certain instance indispensable and the further oddity which I invite you to explain is that he never feels so small as when he knows that he is necessary but sometimes she would send him off whether she was well or ill and on father O'Connor would rest the heavy responsibility of getting him on to his next destination or safe back home he tells of one such experience he was most dutiful and obedient to orders but they had to be written ones and backed by the spoken word he brought his dress suit oh with what loving care to Bradford on Sunday for Sheffield on Monday but a careful host found it under the bed in Bradford just as his train left for Sheffield sent at once it was to Beaconsfield where it landed at five p.m. on Thursday just allowing him ten minutes to change and in train for London seen at Beaconsfield what on earth have you done with your dress suit Gilbert I must have left it behind darling but I brought back the ties didn't I another time he came back without his pajamas they had been lost early in the journey why didn't you buy some more his wife asked I didn't know pajamas were things you could buy he said surprised probably if one were Gilbert one couldn't Father O'Connor arriving at Overroads without baggage found that Gilbert's pajamas went round him exactly twice lecturing engagements had of course not come to an end with the move although they had mercifully somewhat lessened what increased with the distance from London was the problem never fully solved of getting Gilbert to the right place at the right time and in clothes not too wildly wrong when he lectured in Lancashire they stayed at Crosby with Francis Blundell my brother-in-law and my sister remembers Francis as incessantly looking through her bag for letters and sending telegrams to confirm engagements that had come unstuck or to refuse others that were in debate the celebrated and now almost legendary telegram from Gilbert to Francis told as from a hundred different cities was really sent am in Market Harbour where ought I to be desperate she wired home because as she told me later it was easier to get him home and start him off again that day's engagement was lost past recall Charles Rowley of the encotes brotherhood received a wire reply paid from Snow Hill Station Birmingham am I coming to you tonight or what reply not this Tuesday but next Wednesday so home he came again to Overroads the Chesterton's made a host of friends in Beaconsfield but the children always held pride of place the doctor's little boy looking along the top of the wall looked down at Gilbert and remarked to his delight I think you're an ogre but when the nurse was heard threatening punishment if he did not get down that minute the child was told by the ogre this wall is meant for little boys to run along one child asked after a party if Mr. Chesterton had been very clever said you should see him catch buns in his mouth what was unusual both with Gilbert and Francis was the fact that they never allowed their disappointment in the matter of children to make them sour or jealous of others who had the joy that they had not all through their lives they played with other people's children they chose on a train compartment full of children they planned amusements for children of their friends over my son's bed hangs a silver crucifix chosen with loving care by Francis after Gilbert had stood godfather to him and he was one of very many Gilbert was however a complete realist as to the ways and manners of the species he so loved playing with children he wrote at this time is a glorious thing but the journalist in question has never understood why it was considered a soothing or idyllic one it reminds him not of watering little budding flowers but of wrestling for hours with gigantic angels and devils moral problems of the most monstrous complexity besiege him incessantly he has to decide before the awful eyes of innocence whether, when a sister has knocked down a brother's bricks in revenge for the brother having taken two sweets out of his turn it is endurable that the brother should retaliate by scribbling on the sister's picture book and whether such conduct does not justify the sister in blowing out the brother's unlawfully lit match just as he is solving this problem upon principles of the highest morality it occurs to him suddenly that he has not written his Saturday article and that there is only about an hour to do it in he wildly calls to somebody probably the gardener to telephone to somewhere for a messenger he barricades himself in another room and tears his hair wondering what on earth he shall write about a drumming of fists on the door outside and a cheerful following encourage and clarify his thoughts he sits down desperately the messenger rings at the bell the children drum on the door the servants run up from time to time to say the messenger is getting bored and the pencil staggers along making the world a present of 1500 unimportant words and making Shakespeare a present of a portion of including fantastic roots wreathed high instead of antique roots peep out then the journalist sends off his copy and turns his attention to the enigma of whether a brother should commandeer a sister's necklace because the sister pinched him at little Hampton in the notebook he had written North Burwick on the sands I romped with children that I did not improve myself by bottling anemones but I say that these children will be men and women and I say that the anemones will not be men and women not just yet at least let us say and I say that the greatest men of the world might romp with children and that I should like to see Shakespeare romping with children and Browning and Darwin romping with children and Mr. Gladstone romping with children and Professor Huxley romping with children and all the bishops romping with children and I say that if a man had climbed to the stars and found the secrets of the angels the best thing and the most useful thing he could do would be to come back and romp with children mv an almost elvish little girl with loose brown hair doing needlework I have spoken to her once or twice I think I must get another book of the same size as this to make notes about her from the Christmas party at Overroads all adults were excluded no nurses no parents the children would hang on Gilbert's neck in an ecstasy of affection and he and Francis schemed out endless games for them Gilbert had started a toy theatre before he left London cutting out and painting figures and scenery and devising plots for plays two of the favourites were St. George and the Dragon and the Seven Champions of Christendom the atmosphere of Overroads is perhaps best conveyed through Gilbert's theories concerning his toy theatre and the other theatricals such as charades sometimes played there when it came to the toy theatre set up to amuse the children he frankly felt that he was himself child number one and got the most amusement out of it he felt too that the whole thing was good enough to be worth analysing in its rules and its effects he threw up a paper of rules and suggestions for its use I will not say positively that a toy theatre is the best of theatres though I have had more fun out of it than out of any other but I will say positively that the toy theatre is the best of all toys it sometimes fails but generally because people are mistaken in the matter of what it is meant to do and what it can or cannot be expected to do as if people should use a toy balloon as a football or a skipping rope as a hammock now the first rule may seem rather contradictory but it is quite true and really quite simple in a small theatre because it is a small theatre you cannot deal with small things because it is a small theatre it must only deal with large things you can introduce a dragon but you cannot really introduce an earwig it is too small for a small theatre and this is true not only of small creatures but of small actions small gestures and small details of any kind all your effects must be made to depend on things like scenery and background the sky and the clouds and the castles and the mountains and so on must be the exciting things along with other things that move all of a piece such as regiments and processions great and glorious things can be done with processions in a real comedy the whole excitement may consist in the nervous curate dropping his teacup though I do not recommend this incident for the drama of the drawing room but if he were nervous let us say about a thunderstorm the toy theatre could hardly represent the nervousness but it might manage the thunderstorm it might be quite sensational and yet entirely simple for it would largely consist of darkening the stage and making horrible noises behind the scenes the second and smaller rule that really follows from this is that everything dramatic should depend not on a character's action but simply on his appearance Shakespeare said of actors that they have their exits and their entrances but these actors ought really to have nothing else except exits and entrances the trick is to so arrange the tale that the mere appearance of a person tells the important truth about him thus supposing the drama to be about Saint George let us say the mere abrupt appearance of the dragon's head, if of a proper ferocity will be enough to explain that he intends to eat people and it will not be necessary for the dragon to explain at length with animated gestures and playful conversation that his nature is carnivorous and that he has not merely dropped into tea there is some further discussion about that I like very gay and glaring colours and I like to give them a good chance to glare the paper concludes on a more serious note it is an old story and for some a sad one that in a sense these childish toys are more to us than they can ever be to children we never know how much of our after imaginations began with such a peep show into paradise I sometimes think that houses are interesting because they are so like doll houses and I am sure that the best thing that can be said for many large theatres is that they may remind us of little theatres I do not look back I look forward to this kind of puppet play I look forward to the day when I shall have time to play with it some day when I am too lazy to write anything or even to read anything I shall retire into this box of marbles and I shall be found still striving hopefully to get inside a toy theatre adults as well as children enjoyed this toy and it was often described by interviewers like the sword stick the great cloak and flapping hat it was felt by some to be Gilbert's way of attracting attention but it was just one of Gilbert's ways of using himself a small nephew of Francis was living with them at the time and it was funny to watch him fencing with his huge uncle who was obviously enjoying himself rather the more of the two on my first visit to Overroads I noticed how as we talked my host's pencil never ceased one evening I collected and kept an imposing red Indian and a caricature of Chesterton himself in a wheel-barrow being carried off to a bonfire I came in too for one of the grown-up parties in which guessing games were a feature lines from the poets were illustrated and we had to guess them at another party Dr. Pocock told me G.K. did the ends of Beaconsfield of which the most successful drawing was that of a sadly dilapidated dragon being turned away from the indoor dragon discovers with disgust that he cannot put up at the George sometimes these drawings were the prize of whoever guessed the line of verse they illustrated sometimes they were sold for a local charity the baby's convalescent home was a favourite object and one admirable picture reproduced in the coloured lands shows the despair of King Herod at discovering children convalescing from the massacre the two closest friendships of early Beaconsfield life were with the rector Mr. Comerline and his wife who are now dead and Dr. and Mrs. Pocock Dr. Pocock was the Chesterton's doctor as well as their friend and he tells me that his great difficulty in treating Gilbert lay in his detachment from his own physical circumstances if there was anything wrong with him he usually didn't notice it he was the most uncomplaining person you had to hunt him all over to find out if anything was wrong this detachment from circumstances still extended to his appearance and Francis one day begged Dr. Pocock to take him to a good tailor it was a huge success he had never looked so well as he did now for a few weeks and then the tailor said to Dr. Pocock Mr. Chesterton has broken my heart it took twice the material and twice the time to make for him but I was proud of it his tailor like his doctor was apt to become a friend Mrs. Pocock recalls how he would go to a dinner of the tradesmen of Beaconsfield and come back intensely interested for all about it you always went away Dr. Pocock said chuckling over something and he summed up the years of their friendship saying you never saw him without getting delight from his presence sometimes he would grow abstracted in the train of his own thought and Father Ignatius Rice remembers an occasion when he was one of a group discussing really bad lines of poetry Gilbert broke into something Francis was saying with the words that irritating person Milton then realizing that he had interrupted her he broke off and apologized profusely when she had finished he went on that irritating person Milton I can't find a single bad line in him Francis one day came in rather suddenly when Dr. Pocock was there and Gilbert exclaimed oh you've broken it she looked round thinking she must have knocked something over no he said it was an idea it will come back Francis said no he said it got broken more usually he was indifferent to interruptions sometimes he welcomed them as grist for his mind's mill daily life went on around him and often in his articles one can find traces daily activities as well as his own attending him for his broken arm Dr. Pocock told him at a certain stage to write something anything to see if he could use a pen again after an instance thought Gilbert headed his paper with the name of a prominent Jew and wrote I am fond of Jews Jews are fond of money never mind of who's I am fond of Jews oh but when they lose damn it all it's funny the name at the head which wild horses would not drag from me is the key to this impromptu it was really true that Gilbert was fond of very many Jews in his original group of J.D.C. friends four Jews had been included and with three of these his friendship continued through life Lawrence Solomon and his wife were among the Beaconsfield neighbors and he saw them often there was another kind of Jew he very heartily disliked but he was at great pains to draw this distinction himself speaking at the Jewish West End Literary Society in 1911 he put the question of what the real Jewish problem was the Jews he said were a race born civilized you never met a Jewish God or Yokel they represented one of the highest of civilized types but while all the other races had local attachments the Jews were universal and scattered they could not be expected to have patriotism for the countries in which they made their homes their patriotism could be only for their race in principle he believed in the solution of Zionism then the reporter in large letters made a headline Mr. Chesterton said that speaking generally as with most other communities the poor Jews were nice and the rich were nasty many years later in Palestine he was to be driven around the country as he described in the New Jerusalem by one of these less wealthy Jews who had sacrificed his career in England and later yet after G.K.'s death Rabbi Wise a leader of American Jewry paid him a tribute in a letter to Syro Clements dated September 8, 1937 indeed I was a warm admirer of Gilbert Chesterton apart from his delightful art and his genius in many directions he was as you know a great religionist he as Catholic I as Jew could not have seen I to I with each other and he might have added particularly seeing that you are cross-eyed but I deeply respected him when Hitlerism came he was one of the first to speak out with all the directness and frankness of a great and unabashed spirit blessing to his memory End of Chapter 15 Part 2 Recording by Candace Tuttle