"That man," Edward Macdonald comments, "emphasised what I still think: that G.K.C. in another year or so would have become the dominating voice from Broadcasting House."
In 1934 Gilbert had jaundice and on his recovery he started with Frances and Dorothy on one of those trips that were his greatest pleasure. They went to Rome—it was Holy Year—and thence to Sicily, intending to go on to Palestine. At Syracuse, however, Gilbert became really ill with inflammation of the nerves of the neck and shoulders. They stayed five weeks in Syracuse, gave up the trip to Palestine and returned home by Malta. Gilbert and Frances were to have dined at Admiralty House but he was too unwell to dine out and only came up one afternoon. Lady Fisher remembers going to see them at the Osborne Hotel. Gilbert was sitting on a rickety basket chair, obviously in pain and talking a good deal in order to hide it. She sympathised with him for the cold weather, his obvious physical misery, and the discomfort of his chair.
"You must never sympathise with me," Gilbert answered, "for I can always turn every chair into a story."
The next year they motored in France and Italy and Gilbert records in theAutobiographyan experience in a French café when he felt a rare thrill—not in talking on the radio but in listening—on a day that "was dateless, even for my dateless life; for I had forgotten time and had no notion of anything anywhere, when in a small French town I strolled into a café noisy with French talk. Wireless songs wailed unnoted; which is not surprising, for French talk is much better than wireless. And then, unaccountably, I heard a voice speaking in English; and a voice I had heard before. For I heard the words, '. . . wherever you are, my dear people, whether in this country or beyond the sea,' and I remembered Monarchy and an ancient cry; for it was the King; and that is how I kept the Jubilee."
After he got home I remember how delightedly Gilbert quoted the captions on two banners hung in the heart of the London slums. One read, "Down with Capitalism—God Save the King." The other read, "Lousy but loyal." He knew that it was true and it served to increase the passionate quality of his pity. Patient he could be for himself, but the lot of the poor aroused in him a terrible anger—and in a broadcast on Liberty he gave that anger vent. For worse than the presence of lice in our slums was the absence of liberty. He would gladly, he said, have spoken merely as an Englishman but he had been asked to speak as a Catholic, and therefore, "I am going to point out that Catholicism created English liberty; that the freedom has remained exactly in so far as the faith has remained; and that where it is true that all our Faith has gone, all our freedom is going. If I do this, I cannot ask most of you to agree with me; if I did anything else, I could not ask any of you to respect me."
Other speakers in the series had dwelt on the liberty secured to Englishmen by our Parliamentary and Juridical system, both, he noted of Catholic origin. But in his eyes even that liberty was being imperilled today where it was not lost, while the most important freedom of all—freedom to handle oneself and one's daily life—had disappeared for the mass of the people. The liberty so widely praised that followed the Reformation
has been a limited liberty because it was only a literary liberty. . . . You always talked about verbal liberty; you hardly ever talked about vital liberty . . . the faddist was free to preach his fads; but the free man was no longer free to protect his freedom. . . . Monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, responsible forms of rule, have collapsed under plutocracy, which is irresponsible rule. And this has come upon us because we departed from the old morality in three essential points. First, we supported notions against normal customs. Second, we made the State top-heavy with a new and secretive tyranny of wealth. And third, we forgot that there is no faith in freedom without faith in free will. A servile fatalism dogs the creed of materialism; because nothing, as Dante said, less than the generosity of God could give to Man, after all ordinary orderly gifts, the noblest of all things, which is Liberty.
The thoughts that had thronged and pressed on him for half a century found final expression in these broadcasts. Most of all in two talks: one given only three months before his death in a series entitled "The Spice of Life," the other two years earlier in one called "Seven Days Hard." He was haunted by the ingratitude of humanity. As in his boyhood, he saw the wonder of the world that God has given to the children of men and he saw them unconscious of that wonder. What did a week mean for most of them? Seven dull days. What did it really mean? "What has really happened during the last seven days and nights? Seven times we have been dissolved into darkness as we shall be dissolved into dust; our very selves, so far as we know, have been wiped out of the world of living things; and seven times we have been raised alive like Lazarus, and found all our limbs and senses unaltered, with the coming of the day."
Seven days of human life, the meaning of the phrase, "the spice of life," both brought the same recurring motif that "a great many people are at this moment paying rather too much attention to the spice of life, and rather too little attention to life." Not in any "distraction from life is the secret we are all seeking, the secret of enjoying life. I am perfectly certain that all our world will end in despair unless there is some way of making the mind itself, the ordinary thoughts we have at ordinary times, more healthy and more happy than they seem to be just now, to judge by most modern novels and poems. . . ." A week had never been for Chesterton just seven days hard, although he had worked hard enough. He had enjoyed the spice of life, he had liked Beer and Skittles and the distractions of life and its high points of achievement.
But it is much more important to remember that I have been intensely and imaginatively happy in the queerest because the quietest places. I have been filled with life from within in a cold waiting-room, in a deserted railway junction. I have been completely alive sitting on an iron seat under an ugly lamp-post at a third rate watering place. In short, I have experienced the mere excitement of existence in places that would commonly be called as dull as ditchwater. And, by the way, is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.
The younger generation were despairing of life in the face of life's manifold gifts. Chesterton as a youth had revolted against the pessimism of his elders, now he revolted as an old man against a young generation corroded by a yet more poisonous pessimism. "The Hollow Men" T. S. Eliot had called a poem and in it came the lines
This is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.
Forgive me if I say in my old world fashion, that I'm damned if I ever felt like that . . . I knew that the world was perishable and would end, but I did not think it would end with a whimper, but, if anything, with a trump of doom . . . I will even be so indecently frivolous as to burst into song, and say to the young pessimists:
Some sneer; some snigger; some simper;In the youth where we laughed, and sang.And they may end with a whimperBut we will end with a bang.
His last message for this generation was the sound of a trumpet calling us to resurrection. A dead world must find life again, must go back to the meaning of the book of Genesis at which it had learnt to sneer: must realise a week once more with—"the grandeur of that conception, by which a week has become a wonderful and mystical thing in which Man imitates God in his labour and in his rest."
Through his call sounds a note of most solemn warning.
Unless we can bring men back to enjoying the daily life which moderns call a dull life, our whole civilisation will be in ruins in about fifteen years. Whenever anybody proposes anything really practical, to solve the economic evil today, the answer always is that the solution would not work, because the modern town populations would think life dull. That is because they are entirely unacquainted with life. They know nothing but distractions from life; dreams which may be found in the cinema; that is, brief oblivions of life. . . . Unless we can make daybreak and Daily bread and the creative secrets of labour interesting in themselves, there will fall on all our civilisation a fatigue which is the one disease from which civilisations do not recover. So died the great Pagan civilisation; of bread and circuses and forgetfulness of the household gods.*
[*The Listener, January 31, 1934.]
This splendid world that God has given us, and the furniture of it as the writer of Genesis saw it in his vision, has in it the material of happiness in labour and in the true end of labour. "For the true end of all creation is completion; and the true end of all completion is contemplation."
Last Days
DOROTHY TOLD ME one day in 1935 that Gilbert had written the beginning of an autobiography some years before but had laid it aside. She had, she said, a superstitious feeling about urging him to get on with it—as though the survey of his life and the end of his life would somehow be tied together. I urged her to get over this feeling because of all the book would mean to the world. After this talk she got out the manuscript and laid it on Gilbert's desk. He read what he had written and immediately set about dictating the rest of the book.
Early in 1936 he told a group of friends that the book was finished. One of them said "Nunc dimittis" and Edward Macdonald, who was present, commented: "The words were chilling, though he seemed to be in fairly good health. But certainly he was tired. . . ."
The book showed no sign of fatigue. High-spirited and intensely amusing, it seemed to promise many more—for into almost old age he had carried the imagination and energy in which as a very young man we saw his resemblance to the youthful Dickens.
Reviewing his life with the thread of thanksgiving that had been his clue throughout, he looked back on it as "indefensibly happy" and it was in truth a rich and full human existence. Yet Father Vincent, who knew him intimately, speaks of him in these last years as heartbroken by public events, as suffering with the pains of creation. "He was crucified to his thought. Like St. Thomas he was never away from his thought. A fellow friar had to care for Thomas, to feed him 'sicut nutrix' because of his absorption in his thought." Thus Father Vincent saw Frances cherishing Gilbert both mind and body.
A friend, protesting vehemently against the phrase "crucified to his thought" says, "It was his life-long beatitude to observe and ponder and conclude."
Of his own so-called paradoxes Gilbert was wont to maintain that it was God not he, who made them, and here we have surely one of the paradoxes of human life. Intense vitality, joy in living, vigor of creative thought bring to their owners immense happinessandacute suffering.
Is it not a part of the most fundamental of all antinomies—the greatness and the littleness of man? Created for eternity and prisoned in time, we have no perfect joy in this world, and the reaching upward and outward of the mind is at once the keenest joy and the fiercest pain—rather as we talk of growing pains. Only Gilbert loved to grow so much that he would not think of the pain. "You must never pity me," he said to Lady Fisher, and all through his life he was saying and meaning "You must never pity me."
But while he was writing theAutobiographyand giving thanks for his life, its last months were shadowed by trials especially heavy for a man of his imagination and temperament. For now more than ever his thought was not allowed to concentrate on those realities where the joy of contemplation overpowers the pain of growth.
He loved Italy—even more than France he says in one letter—yet he could not but condemn the invasion of Abyssinia. The shadow of the Spanish war loomed on the horizon and behind it a darker shadow. In his political thinking Chesterton was haunted by the present war. Then too, while public controversy did not trouble him at all, he hated any breach of the peace within the ranks of his own small army. The fights among the staff of the paper about Distributism had been as nothing compared with those about Abyssiania. There are leading articles taking one line and letters in the Cockpit in violent opposition. Maurice Reckitt writes inAs it Happened:
In the last autumn of his life I wrote to him privately in distress at the line which theWeeklywas taking on Abyssinia, and saying that I felt that I ought to leave the board, as I was so much out of sympathy with this. I received this reply, from which I have deleted only some personal references:
"Top Meadow, Beaconsfield 19th September 1935.
"I do hope you will forgive me for the delay in answering your most important letter, involving as it does tragic dooms of separation which I hope need not be fulfilled. . . . I should like to ask you to defer your decision at least until you have seen the next week's number of the paper, in which I expand further the argument I have used in the current number and bring it, I think, rather nearer to your natural and justifiable point of view. Between ourselves, and without prejudice to anybody, I do think myself that there ought to have been a more definite condemnation of the attack on Abyssinia. The whole thing happened while I was having a holiday. . . .
"Very shortly, the mortal danger, to me, is the rehabilitation of Capitalism, in spite of the slump, which will certainly take the form of a hypocritical patriotism and glorification of England, at the expense of Italy or anybody else. For the moment I only want you to understand that this is the mountainous peril that towers in my own mind.
"Yours always,
Three months later inG.K.'s Weeklyhe wrote about the whole matter in an article in which he treated the question as largely one of proportion. Not enough was being said in England of her own or the League's position about Japan's attack on China: too much (in proportion) about Italy in Abyssinia. "If the League of Nations really were an impartial judicial authority; and if (what is about as probable) I were one of the judges; and if the Abyssinian Case were brought before me, I should decide instantly against Italy. I have again and again in this place stated in the strongest words the particular case against Italy." He was against Italy in Abyssinia as he had been against England in South Africa. But "I should not be bound to rejoice at the Prussians riding into Paris because it might prevent the British riding into Pretoria."
"Tragic dooms of separation" on public issues were not the only trouble withG.K.'s Weekly:the staff were also engaged in violent personal quarrels about which Gilbert was asked to take sides—was even bitterly reproached by one for supposedly favouring another. It would be hard today to say what it was all about, but two of the contestants have told me since that had they had the least notion how ill he was getting they would have died rather than so distress him. For it was a real and a very deep distress.
It may be remembered that Miss Dunham noted how Gilbert used to make a mysterious sign in the air as he lit his cigar. That sign, says Dorothy, was the sign of the cross. Long ago he had written of human life as something not grey and drab but shot through with strong and even violent colours that took the pattern of the Cross. He saw the Cross signed by God on the trees as their branches spread to right and left: he saw it signed by man as he shaped a paling or a door post. The habit grew upon him of making it constantly: in the air with his match, as he lit his cigar, over a cup of coffee. As he entered a room he would make on the door the sign of our Redemption. No, we must never pity him even when his life was pressed upon by that sign which stands for joy through pain.
Those nearest to him grew anxious quite early in 1936. He was overtired and working with the weary insistence that over-fatigue can bring. The remedy so often successful of a trip to the continent was tried. They went to Lourdes and Lisieux and he seemed better and sang a good deal in his tuneless voice as Dorothy drove them through the lanes of France. From Lisieux he wrote a pencilled letter, long and almost illegible "under the shadow of the shrine"—trying to reconcile the disputants with himself and with one another.
The summer was cold and bleak and the tour was all too short. Home again his mind seemed not to grip as well as usual and he began to fall asleep during his long hours of work. The doctor was called and thought very seriously of the state of his heart—that heart which many years ago another doctor had called too small for his enormous frame. The thought of a Chesterton whose heart was too small presents a paradox in his own best manner.
To Edward Macdonald who had missed a message that he was too ill to be visited, Gilbert talked in his old fashion and promised a poem he had just thought of for the paper—on St. Martin of Tours. "The point is that he was a true Distributist. He gavehalfhis cloak to the beggar."
Soon after this he fell into a sort of reverie from which awaking he said:
"The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and every one must choose his side."
Frances and he had both thought his recovery in 1916 was a miracle."I did not dare," said Frances, "to pray for another miracle."
Monsignor Smith anointed him and then Father Vincent arrived in response to a message from Frances which he thought meant she wanted him to see Gilbert for the last time. Taken to the sick room he sang over the dying man the Salve Regina. This hymn to Our Lady is sung in the Dominican Order over every dying friar and it was surely fitting for the biographer of St. Thomas and the ardent suppliant of Our Lady:
"Salve Regina, mater misericordiae, vita dulcedo et spes nostra salve. . . . Et Jesum benedictum fructum ventris tui nobis post hoc exsilium ostende. . . ."
Gilbert's pen lay on the table beside his bed and Father Vincent picked it up and kissed it.
It was June 14, 1936, the Sunday within the Octave of Corpus Christi, the same Feast as his reception into the Church fourteen years earlier. The Introit for that day's Mass was printed on his Memorial card, so that, as Father Ignatius Rice noted with a smile, even his Memorial card had a joke about his size:
The Lord became my protector and he brought me forth into a large place. He saved me because he was well pleased with me. I will love thee O Lord my strength. The Lord is my firmament and my refuge and my deliverer.
To these words from the Mass, Frances added Walter de la Mare's tribute:
Knight of the Holy Ghost, he goes his wayWisdom his motley, Truth his loving jest;The mills of Satan keep his lance in play,Pity and innocence his heart at rest.
The day of the funeral was one of blazing sunshine. "One of your days," Gilbert would have said to Frances. Grey days were his, when nature's colours he said were brightest against her more sombre background, sunny days were hers for she loved a blue blazing sky. The little church near the railway was filled to overflowing by his friends from London, from all over England, from France even and from America. All Beaconsfield wanted to honour him, so the funeral procession instead of taking the direct route passed through the old town where he had so often sat in the barber's shop and chatted with his fellow citizens. At Top Meadow we gathered to talk. Frances a few of us saw for a little while in her own room. With that utter self-forgetfulness that was hers she said to her sister-in-law, "It was so much worse for you. You had Cecil for such a short time."
Later Mgr. Knox preached in Westminster Cathedral to a crowd far vaster. Both Frances and Cardinal Hinsley received telegrams from Cardinal Pacelli (now Pope Pius XII). To Cardinal Hinsley he cabled "Holy Father deeply grieved death Mr. Gilbert Keith Chesterton devoted son Holy Church gifted Defender of the Catholic Faith. His Holiness offers paternal sympathy people of England assures prayers dear departed, bestows Apostolic Benediction." This telegram was read to the vast crowd in the Cathedral and found an echo in the hearts of his fellow countrymen.
Hugh Kingsmill wrote to Cyril Clemens: "My friend Hesketh Pearson was staying with me when I read of Chesterton's death. I told him of it through the bathroom door, and he sent up a hollow groan which must have echoed that morning all over England." It was with reason that the Pope offered his sympathy not to Catholics alone, but to all the people of England. To the policeman who said at the funeral, "We'd all have been here if we could have got off duty. He was a grand man." To the man at theTimesoffice who broke in on the announcement of his death, "Good God. That isn'tourChesterton, is it?" To the barber who had to leave his customer unshaved that he might talk to Edward Macdonald. To all of us, his friends, on whom the loss lay almost unbearably heavy. To those for whom his presence would have pierced and lightened even the dark shadow of the war. To all the people of England.
Once more a Pope had bestowed upon an Englishman the title Defender of the Faith. The first man to receive it had been Henry VIII and the words are still engraved on the coins of England. The secular press would not print the telegram in full because it bestowed upon a subject a royal title.
After Gilbert's death Frances tried to take up life again. Shevisited her cousins in Germany, a university professor and hisEnglish wife, who were undergoing the persecution of the Swastika.She was deeply moved by their suffering and the peril they stood in.
Home again she surrounded herself more than ever with children, taking a Catechism class and encouraging her small scholars to come to Top Meadow where her garden also helped her towards a difficult peace and serenity, rendered harder by the struggle with ill health. Soon we began to realise that the physical weakness, which all her courage could not overcome, was more than merely her old malady. "What did Frances die of?" Bernard Shaw wrote to me. "Was it of widowhood?"
In fact it was a most painful cancer heroically endured. She was cared for by Dorothy and presently by the nuns of the Bon Secours. Her friends visited her as they were allowed. Father Vincent McNabb, after a talk of almost an hour, noted how never once did she speak of herself or of her suffering.
Her concerns were for Dorothy, for the Church, and for Gilbert's memory; Eric Gill's monument, the biography, the permanence of his own writing. She survived him little more than two years. Near the end, from the face of a dying woman shrunken with pain, we still could see those "great heavenly eyes that seem to make the truth at the heart of things almost too terribly simple and naked for the sons of flesh."*
[* Letter from Gilbert, see [Chapter VIII].]
BOTH THEAutobiographyandPrison Lifeof George Laval Chesterton are worth reading. There is conscious humour: we feel it might be our own Chesterton when we hear the Captain describing himself as "laughing immoderately" because he had made a fool of himself and others were laughing at him. There is unconscious humour, especially in the astonishing style, full of such phrases as "I was the most obnoxious to peril," or "something not far removed from impunity stalked abroad."
Captain Chesterton started life as a soldier. During the Peninsular War his regiment was stationed at Cartagena. "It was a subject of deep mortification to most of us to be thus supinely occupied in this lone garrison, thereby being debarred from the Peninsular medal, and hence a widespread disaffection on that most tender subject which no reasoning has been equal to dispel." However, later he saw a good deal of active service, being in the War of 1812, in the course of which the battle of Bladensburg was fought and Washington fell to the British arms. "The astonished slaves," he says, describing the advance on Washington, "rested from their work in the fields contiguous; and the awe-struck peasants and yeomen of this portion of America beheld with perturbation the tremendous preparations to devastate their blooming country."
To the smaller professional armies of that day peace was a misfortune, and in his quaint style Captain Chesterton describes the demonstrations of joy on the part of himself and his fellow officers at the escape of Napoleon from Elba, foreseeing, as he frankly observes, "a scope for further adventure and hope of personal advancement." This hope was short-lived and we next see him fighting in the British Legion of a rebel South American army against Spain. The general mismanagement of this expedition, and the fact that the Republicans killed all their prisoners "was a death blow to all my past enthusiasm in the Republican cause." Many British officers "participating with me in the detestation for cold-blooded butchery, conspired from that moment to elude this detested service. . . . Mark ye who delight in transcendant Liberalism . . . the cruel exigencies of such a warfare."
In his acceptance of "transcendant Liberalism," yet his determination to see truly what passed before his eyes and when needful to change his standpoint, this earlier Chesterton was much like the later. He had not the genius of Gilbert, he could not see so far, but he shared his refusal to be blinded by custom, theory or even patriotism. In his accounts of army life he had commented fearlessly on the cruelty of the punishments and described his fellow officers as made ill by seeing a private receive five hundred lashes. He had noted corruption in the "Train Service" which "was consequently divested of its genuine claim to honour." Fêted by the planters of Jamaica, he had yet spoken with horror of their slave ownership.
Now he was appointed governor of a prison in England and here began the great work of his life in a frontal attack on the corruptions he discovered. The yardsmen did a secret traffic in all the goods forbidden in the prison, there were caches of tobacco, spirits and such things under the pavements, the weaker prisoners were robbed by the stronger. The women's and men's quarters were so arranged that by connivance of the jailors frequent meetings took place. On one of these occasions Captain Chesterton himself appeared:
My hands were seized with tender empressement, and I was addressed as "my love," "My darling," "my dear creature:" and all the conventional endearments of the pavé were showered upon me. I had to struggle for enlargement, and beat a hasty retreat, quite confounded by my initiation into "prison discipline." And the consternation occasioned by this discovery became perfectly electric.*
[*Revelations of Prison Life, pp. 84-85.]
Attempts to bribe him were followed by attempts to kill him, but he stood firm. Mrs. Fry invoked his aid to improve the home conditions to which the prisoners had to return. Chesterton turned to Dickens and to Dickens's friend, Miss Coutts, in defiance of a narrow-minded magistrate
who perversely insisted (as was by cynical interpretation literally too true) that Miss Coutts had no right to confer with prisoners within those walls, nor was it "to be tolerated that Mr. Charles Dickens should walk into the prison whenever he pleased."*
[* Ibid., p. 186.]
From Cold Bath Fields the reforms begun by Captain Chesterton and warmly seconded by Dickens spread to other prisons, "Although (he declares) I consented to forego pecuniary advantage, I cling the more tenaciously to the credit of my past exertions; when, beset with fraud, ferocity, and moral pollution, I achieved a triumph fraught with civilizing influences."*
[* Ibid., p. v.]
Prize Poem Written at St. Paul's
This is the only version I have been able to find. Across the top is written in another hand: "This is not exactly the same as given in the prize poem." The difference is probably slight.
ST. FRANCIS XAVIERThe Apostle of the Indies
He left his dust, by all the myriad treadOf yon dense millions trampled to the strand,Or 'neath some cross forgotten lays his headWhere dark seas whiten on a lonely land:He left his work, what all his life had planned,A waning flame to flicker and to fall,Mid the huge myths his toil could scarce withstand,And the light died in temple and in hall,And the old twilight sank and settled over all.
He left his name, a murmur in the East,That dies to silence amid older creeds,With which he strove in vain: the fiery priestOf faiths less fitted to their ruder needs:As some lone pilgrim, with his staff and beads,Mid forest-brutes whom ignorance makes tame,He dwelt, and sowed an Eastern Church's seedsHe reigned a teacher and a priest of fame:He died and dying left a murmur and a name.
He died: and she, the Church that bade him go,Yon dim Enchantress with her mystic claim,Has ringed his forehead with her aureole-glow,And monkish myths, and all the whispered fameOf miracle, has clung about his name:So Rome has said: but we, what answer weWho in grim Indian gods and rites of shameO'er all the East the teacher's failure see,His eastern church a dream, his toil a vanity.
This then we say: as Time's dark face at lastMoveth its lips of thunder to decreeThe doom that grew through all the murmuring pastTo be the canon of the times to be:No child of truth or priest of progress heYet not the less a hero of his warsStriving to quench the light he could not see,And God, who knoweth all that makes and mars,Judges his soul unseen which throbs among the stars.
God only knows, man failing in his choice,How far apparent failure may succeed,God only knows what echo of His voiceLives in the cant of many a fallen creed,God only gives the labourer his meedFor all the lingering influence widely spreadBroad branching into many a word and deedWhen dim oblivion veils the fountain-head;So lives and lingers on the spirit of the dead.
This then we say: let all things further restAnd this brave life, with many thousands moreBe gathered up in the eternal's breastIn that dim past his Love is bending o'erHealing all shattered hopes and failure sore:Since he had bravely looked on death and painFor what he chose to worship and adoreCast boldly down his life for loss or gainIn the eternal lottery: not to be in vain.
The Chestertons
The composition ofThe Chestertonsis not without interest for the student of legendary literature. By a curious paradox the book had to be strikingly untrue to be accepted as true, since the jokes about sisters-in-law are legion, so that mere commonplace shafts of what is called "feminine spite" would have gained little credence. Yet on the other hand, Mrs. Cecil Chesterton was able (to quoteThe Mikado) to get from her husband a good deal of "corroborative detail designed to give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative." Of these details some are true, some false, all arranged to support the main untruth of Frances and Gilbert's relation to one another. The thesis of the book is that Gilbert was an unhappy and frustrated man (a) because Frances shrank from consummating their marriage, and (b) because she dragged him away from his London life and friends to bury him in a middle class suburb.
I confess that I am Victorian enough heartily to dislike writing this appendix. Yet it is necessary, for many who readThe Chestertonshave supposed that a story told by so near a connection must be true.
The ground was laid for the introduction of the Legend by the tale of the Red Haired Phantom, if I may describe it in the terms of a ghost story. That ghost was easy to lay (see Introduction). Next comes the odd account of Gilbert and Frances' honeymoon and of the years that followed. It is of course possible that the first night of their marriage was not happy—especially in the Victorian days of reticence which left wife and even possibly husband unprepared for life together: (though this did not normally prevent a happy marriage and a pack of children afterwards). But I find it impossible to imagine Cecil Chesterton, like the bridesmaid on the honeymoon, receiving and passing on such a story as that of Gilbert "quivering with self-reproach" so that after the first night he "dared not even contemplate a repetition. . . . Gilbert, young and vital, was condemned to a pseudo-monastic life, in which he lived with a woman but never enjoyed one." (p. 282)
There is a psychological reason for thinking this story especially improbable and a physical reason for dismissing it as actually impossible.
A white horse had from his childhood been for Gilbert the supreme sign of romance, and he had chosen to spend the first night of his honeymoon at the White Horse Inn. From his honeymoon he wrote home that he had "a wife, a piece of string, a pencil and a knife. What more can any man want?" Ten years later he wroteThe Ballad of the White Horseand dedicated it to Frances, saying,
"O go you onward, where you areShall honour and laughter be.Past purpled forest and pearled foam,God's winged pavilion free to roam,Your face, that is a wandering home,A flying home for me."
And over thirty years later he wrote again of beginning his honeymoon under the shadow of the White Horse, and compared it to a trip to fairyland.
Can any human being read the record of this recurrent motif and reconcile it with Mrs. Cecil's picture?
Let me refer again toThe Ballad of The White Horse. Is it conceivable that any man should write after ten years of frustration and unhappiness:
Up through an empty house of starsBeing what heart you are,Up the inhuman steeps of spaceAs on a staircase go in graceCarrying the firelight on your faceBeyond the loneliest star.
This is not the way a man writes to a neurotic cold-hearted woman who has made a hermit of him!
Mrs. Cecil was of course never in the intimacy of the family. She only married Cecil in 1917—by which date Gilbert and Frances had been married sixteen years—and before that she was merely an acquaintance. But Frances's intimates could have told her how absurd her story was, for by a rare good fortune the operation Frances underwent to enable her to bear children is itself evidence one could hardly have hoped for in a matter which civilized people are not much given to discussing. Frances talked of the operation to Monsignor O'Connor, to Dorothy Collins and to Annie Firmin, and I have quoted the doctor's letter about it (see above, [Chapter XV]). It was an abiding tragedy for both husband and wife that it was unsuccessful. Frances would have shrunk from no suffering in her passionate wish for a child.
There is another curiosity in the Legend: Gilbert, despite this story, was apparently perfectly happy in London during thefirst eight years of marriage:it was only after the removal to Beaconsfield and in almost middle life that he began to be "frustrated."
Poor Frances: what a picture of her had been proposed for posterity: so powerful she could waft Gilbert away from London and from his friends, could force him to make her his banker and reduce him to a "bounty" strictly limited to half-a-crown, yet so powerless that "she had to sign" the cheques forG.K.'s Weekly, much as she hated it. Her poetry (described as "quite charming") is spoken of as appearing in "little Parish Magazines"—the only papers she cared to read owing to her implacable hatred for Fleet Street. It is hard to picture Frances with an implacable hatred for anything, and it will be remembered that she actually begged Father O'Connor to leave Gilbert to be "a jolly journalist." The periodicals in which her poems appeared wereThe Observer,The Sunday Times,The Daily Chronicle,theWestminster GazetteandThe New Witness. Personally I have never much admired Frances's verse, but a professional journalist might have been quite pleased at "making" all these papers. Not one poem ever appeared in a Parish Magazine so far as either Dorothy or I have been able to ascertain. The point is not a very important one but the sneer is symptomatic.
A curious magic pervadesThe Chestertons:succulent sausages appear in the kitchen at Overstrand Mansions, and flowing torrents of beer, so that Gilbert can steal away from an unsympathetic wife to consume them with his Fleet Street friends. A studio materialises in a meadow at Beaconsfield. Can we imagine Gilbert cooking or even ordering sausages, getting beer to the flat, designing or discovering the studio? Anyone thinking about what really happened would realise that Frances ordered the beer and sausages, Frances built the studio. But that is not the sort of thought we are to think about Frances.
About her we are told: that she always wore the wrong colors: that she gave Gilbert insufficient and indigestible food: that she did not know what work meant: that Mrs. Belloc thought Gilbert ought to beat her: that she kept the journalists away when Gilbert was dying (in point of fact both telephone and door bell were so near the sick room that the use of both had to be avoided): that she did not give her guests enough to eat at his funeral: that she actually sought the quiet of her own room instead of staying downstairs to receive condolences when her husband's coffin had just been lowered into the grave.
With all this spate of detail, we are not told that Frances left £1000 to Mrs. Cecil plus £500 for her Cecil Houses.
Even if I could have ignored the attack on Frances, I should be obliged as his biographer to deal with the attack on Gilbert—more subtly but no less certainly made. The story of the marriage affects Gilbert as much as Frances, and the book culminates in the final assertion that his drinking killed him. Here are the comments (sent to me by Dorothy) of the doctor who attended Gilbert and Frances from 1919 until they died:
"Today Dr. Bakewell came in and answered the questions about the book which we asked him.
"(1) He says that the idea that G.K. was better when drinking in Fleet Street because the stimulus of conversation would eat up effects of the alcohol is absolute nonsense. It would have just as bad an effect under any conditions. Dr. Bakewell said that G.K. was his patient for nearly twenty years and during that time he never treated him for alcoholism or saw any trace of it, though in an absentminded way he was always liable to drink too much of anything if it were there—even water.
"Without the 'understanding, loving, tactful care' of Frances he would have died twenty years before. Certainly if he had racketted around Fleet Street any longer.
"Dr. Bakewell said Gilbert was 'perfectly happy in Beaconsfield and not in any way frustrated. There was no frustration of any kind and no longing for London life or friends.' He was very intimate with Gilbert and would have known if there had been.
"(2) The doctor says that Gilbert died of a failing heart owing to fatty degeneration, leading to dropsy.
"(3) Frances had arthritis of the spine. (Not curvature as stated by Mrs. Cecil.)
"The doctor said that he put him on the water wagon several times and when this was done Gilbert observed the rule most meticulously. Dr. Bakewell said that he did not do it very often because he did not consider that drink was in any way affecting Gilbert's health during the greater part of the time he knew him."
In a later conversation he added that when he did forbid alcohol at certain periods it was simply to make liquid less attractive, as too much of even water was bad for Gilbert.
The statement made by Mrs. Cecil that drinking in London was not so serious because the talk and excitement among friends would carry off the effects, is thought by doctors almost comic. Dr. Bakewell denies it absolutely: Dr. Pocock who, it will be remembered, attended Gilbert during his illness of 1914-15 says, "Absolute nonsense: would probably have been worse in London." He adds also, "I cannot understand why such an attack was made upon G.K. From my personal observation he owed a very great deal to Mrs. G.K. who greatly helped his restoration to health."
One can get one's pen'orth of fun out of the chapter on the Exile of Beaconsfield when one remembers the true story of those years: Rome, Jerusalem, U.S.A., Poland, France, Spain, Malta, lectures all over England, lively contests for the Lord Rectorship of three universities, London again and again—for editing, mock trials, debates and Distributist Beanos—and frequently in furnished flats which Frances would take for the winter months. One can only suppose that Mrs. Cecil was so little intimate with them that she did not realise all this.
And then Beaconsfield itself—parties in the Studio; people down from London, visitors from Poland, France, America, Italy, Holland and other countries; the Eric Gills, the Bernard Shaws, the Garvins, the Emile Cammaerts and others living in the neighborhood; the guest room always occupied by some intimate. Meanwhile the books poured out of the little study. Mrs. Cecil thinks Gilbert hardly ever again wrote a masterpiece after leaving Battersea, yet in support of this idea she lists as masterpiecesThe Ball and the Cross(written at Beaconsfield),Lepanto(written at Beaconsfield),Magic(written at Beaconsfield),Stevenson(written at Beaconsfield) andThe Ballad of the White Horse(mainly written at Beaconsfield). Of all the books she mentions in this connection only three were written in London! And she admits that the world at large did not share her view of the sterilizing effect of Beaconsfield, for she writes, "Meanwhile his fame grew wider, his sales greater. In exile he ruled a literary world."*
Gilbert left to Mrs. Cecil Chesterton sums equal to those later left to her by Frances—£1000 for herself and £500 for Cecil Houses.
The ingratitude that omitted all mention of these benefactions struck the imagination of several of the Chesterton family as the worst feature in the book. But to Gilbert and Frances the giving of money even in their own lifetime was a slight matter. They had given something far greater.
Why is the memory of Cecil Chesterton alive today? Because of his brother's labors. Why is it possible for Mrs. Cecil to declare that he was the greater editor, to imply that he was the greater man? Because Gilbert kept saying so. Never has such devotion been shown by one brother to the memory of another: never has the greater man exalted the lesser to such a pedestal.
We are told inThe Chestertonsthat Frances sacrificed both Gilbert and herself on the altar of her family. Truly there was much self-sacrifice in the lives of both to family, friends and causes. They did not feel it as self-sacrifice to enrich the lives of others even at cost to themselves.
But the heaviest cost they paid lay in the years of a toil that was literally killing Gilbert while Frances watched him growing old too soon and straining his heart with work crushingly heavy: and if there was a single altar for that supreme sacrifice it was no other than the altar of Cecil's memory.
Acknowledgments
I am exceedingly grateful to the following publishers for permission to quote from these books:
DODD, MEAD & CO.:The Man Who Was Thursday; Orthodoxy; The Napoleon of Notting Hill;Heretics; George Bernard Shaw; The Ball and the Cross; The Poet andthe Lunatic; Alarms and Discursions; The Ballad of the White Horse;What's Wrong with the World; Manalive; Sidelights on New London andNewer York; The Uses of Diversity; The History of England; IrishImpressions; Collected Poems; The Queen of Seven Swords; TheEverlasting Man; Cobbett; Outline of Sanity; Tales of the Long Bow;What I Saw in America; The Thing; The Defendant; The Barbarism ofBerlin: or The Appetite of Tyranny; Eugenics and Other Evils;Collected Poems; G. K. Chesterton, a Criticism(by Cecil Chesterton).
DOUBLEDAY DORAN:St. Francis of Assisi; The Years Between.
E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC.:Criticisms and Appreciations of the Works of Charles Dickens.
FARRAR & RINEHART:Chaucer.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY:Robert Browning; The Catholic Church and Conversion.
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS:The Victorian Age in Literature.
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS:Rufus Isaacs, First Marquess of Reading.
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME:The Arena.
"Gehazi," by Rudyard Kipling, fromThe Years Between, copyright1914, 1919 by Rudyard Kipling, is reprinted by permission of Mrs.Bambridge and Doubleday Doran and Co., Inc., of New York, and TheMacmillan Company, of Canada, publishers.
Bibliography
In this list I have given dates of earliest publication. In some cases publication in England preceded that in the United States.
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1901.The Defendant.
1902.G. F. Watts.Twelve Types.
1903.Robert Browning.
1904.The Napoleon of Notting Hill.
1905.The Club of Queer Trades.Heretics.
1906.Charles Dickens.
1907.The Man Who Was Thursday.
1908.Orthodoxy.All Things Considered.
1909.George Bernard Shaw.The Ball and the Cross.Tremendous Trifles.Defence of Nonsense.
1910.What's Wrong with the World?William Blake.Alarms and Discursions.Five Types.
1911.The Innocence of Father Brown.Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens.The Ballad of the White Horse.
1912.Manalive.A Miscellany of Men.Simplicity of Tolstoy.The Victorian Age in Literature.
1913.Magic. A Play.
1914.The Wisdom of Father Brown.The Flying Inn.The Barbarism of Berlin.
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1916.A Shilling for My Thoughts.
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1919.Irish Impressions.
1920.The Uses of Diversity.The New Jerusalem.The Superstition of Divorce.
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1928.Generally Speaking.Essays of To-day and Yesterday Series.Short Stories of To-day and Yesterday Series. Reprinted fromother volumes.The Sword of Wood. Short Story. Edition de Luxe, Signed.Reprinted in Everyman Edition.
1929.The Poet and the Lunatics.Omnibus Volume—Father Brown Stories.Ubi Ecclesia. Short Poem.The Thing. Catholic Essays.G.K.C. as M.C. Collection of Introductions.The Turkey and the Turk. Christmas Play. Ill. by Thomas Derrick.
1930.The Grave of Arthur. Short Poem. Ariel Poem Series.Come to Think of It. Essays. Edited by E. V. Lucas.The Resurrection of Rome.
1931.All is Grist. Essays edited by E. V. Lucas.
1932.Chaucer. A Study.Sidelights on New London and Newer York. Essays.Christendom in Dublin. Essays on Eucharistic Congress,Dublin.
1933.All I Survey. Essays. Edited by E. V. Lucas.St. Thomas Aquinas.Collected Poems. RepublishedCollected Prefaces to Charles Dickens's Works. Reprinted.Methuen's Library of Humour. 1 vol.
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1918. Sybil Bristowe,Provocations. William Dyson,Australia at War. Leonard Merrick,House of Lynch.
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1920. M. E. Jones,Life in Old Cambridge.
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1928. Mary Webb,The Golden Arrow.
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1930. Miss C. Noran,Book on Spanish History.King Lear. De Luxe Edition. Illustrated Yunge.Introduction toVanity Fair, Thackeray. Limited EditionClub, New York.
1931.Giotto's Frescoes at Assisi Reproduced.John Gibbons,Through Unknown Portugal.F. Goetel,The Messenger of the Snow.Francis Thompson,The Hound of Heaven.A. A. Thomas,The Burns We Love.J. P. de Fonseka,Serendipitry.Daniel O'Grady,Cosmology.
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I doubt whether the list of introductions is complete but Dorothy Collins has done her best to make it so. Of the books and essays about Chesterton there is no end. Those I have used in writing this book are
Father Brown on Chesterton, Monsignor O'Connor.G. K. Chesterton, a Criticism, Cecil Chesterton.The Place of Chesterton in English Literature, Hilaire Belloc.The Laughing Prophet, Emile Cammaerts.G. K. Chesterton, Cyril Clemens.
For the chapters on Sociology I have consulted the invaluable serieson the English Labourer by the Hammonds, C. S. Orpen'sOpen Fields,Trevelyan'sSocial History of England, Cobbett'sRural Rides andCottage Economyand Haas'English Labourer.
For the Marconi Chapter I have used the Reports of the Parliamentary Commission and of the trial of Cecil Chesterton, C. F. G. Masterman'sLifeand that of Lord Reading, and contemporary press accounts.
Throughout I have made use of the files ofThe Eyewitness, The NewWitnessandG.K.'s Weekly.