Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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Transcriber's note

This electronic edition is intended to contain the complete,
unaltered text of the first published edition of _Gilbert
Keith Chesterton_ by Maisie Ward (New York: Sheed & Ward,
1943), with the following exceptions:

The index, and a few other references to page numbers that do
not exist in this edition, have been omitted.

Italics are represented by underscores at the beginning and
end, _like this_.

Footnotes* have been placed directly below the paragraph
referring to them and enclosed in brackets.

[* Like this.]

Any other deviations from the text of the first edition may be
regarded as defects and attributed to the transcriber.

GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON

by

MAISIE WARD

CONTENTS

Introduction: Chiefly Concerning Sources

CHAPTER

I Background for Gilbert Keith Chesterton
II Childhood
III School Days
IV Art Schools and University College
V The Notebook
VI Towards a Career
VII Incipit Vita Nova
VIII To Frances
IX A Long Engagement
X Who is G.K.C.?
XI Married Life in London
XII Clearing the Ground for Orthodoxy
XIII Orthodoxy
XIV Bernard Shaw
XV From Battersea to Beaconsfield
XVI A Circle of Friends
XVII The Disillusioned Liberal
XVIII The Eye Witness
XIX Marconi
XX The Eve of the War (1911-1915)
XXI The War Years
XXII After the Armistice
XXIII Rome via Jerusalem
XXIV Completion
XXV The Reluctant Editor (1925-1930)
XXVI The Distributist League and Distributism
XXVII Silver Wedding
XXVIII Columbus
XXIX The Soft Answer
XXX Our Lady's Tumbler
XXXI The Living Voice
XXXII Last Days

Appendices:

Appendix A--An Earlier Chesterton
Appendix B--Prize Poem Written at St. Paul's
Appendix C--_The Chestertons_

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

Chiefly Concerning Sources

THE MATERIAL FOR this book falls roughly into two parts: spoken and
written. Gilbert Chesterton was not an old man when he died and many
of his friends and contemporaries have told me incidents and recalled
sayings right back to his early boyhood. This part of the material
has been unusually rich and copious so that I could get a clearer
picture of the boy and the young man than is usually granted to the
biographer.

The book has been in the making for six years and in three countries.
Several times I hid it aside for some months so as to be able to get
a fresh view of it. I talked to all sorts of people, heard all sorts
of ideas, saw my subject from every side; I went to Paris to see one
old friend, to Indiana to see others, met for the first time in
lengthy talk Maurice Baring, H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw; went to
Kingsland to see Mr. Belloc; gathered Gilbert's boyhood friends of
the Junior Debating Club in London and visited "Father Brown" among
his Yorkshire moors.

Armed with a notebook, I tried to miss none who had known Gilbert
well, especially in his youth: E. C. Bentley, Lucian Oldershaw,
Lawrence Solomon, Edward Fordham. I had ten long letters from Annie
Firmin, my most valuable witness as to Gilbert's childhood. For
information on the next period of his life, I talked to Monsignor
O'Connor, to Hilaire Belloc, Maurice Baring, Charles Somers Cocks, F.
Y. Eccles and others, besides being now able to draw on my own
memories. Frances I had talked with on and off about their early
married years ever since I had first known them, but she was, alas,
too ill and consequently too emotionally unstrung during the last
months for me to ask her all the questions springing in my mind.
"Tell Maisie," she said to Dorothy Collins, "not to talk to me about
Gilbert. It makes me cry."

For the time at Beaconsfield, out of a host of friends the most
valuable were Dr. Pocock and Dr. Bakewell. Among priests, Monsignors
O'Connor and Ronald Knox, Fathers Vincent McNabb, O.P. and Ignatius
Rice, O.S.B. were especially intimate.

Dorothy Collins's evidence covers a period of ten years. That of H.
G. Wells and Bernard Shaw is reinforced by most valuable letters
which they have kindly allowed me to publish.

Then too Gilbert was so much of a public character and so popular
with his fellow journalists that stories of all kinds abound:
concerning him there is a kind of evidence, and very valuable it is,
that may be called a Boswell Collective. It is fitting that it should
be so. We cannot picture G.K. like the great lexicographer
accompanied constantly by one ardent and observant witness, pencil in
hand, ready to take notes over the teacups. (And by the way, in spite
of an acquaintance who regretted in this connection that G.K. was not
latterly more often seen in taverns, it was over the teacups, even
more than over the wine glasses, that Boswell made his notes. I have
seen Boswell's signature after wine--on the minutes of a meeting of
The Club--and he was in no condition then for the taking of notes.
Even the signature is almost illegible.) But it is fitting that
Gilbert, who loved all sorts of men so much, should be kept alive for
the future by all sorts of men. From the focussing of many views from
many angles this picture has been composed, but they are all views of
one man, and the picture will show, I think, a singular unity. When
Whistler, as Gilbert himself once said, painted a portrait he made
and destroyed many sketches--how many it did not matter, for all,
even of his failures, were fruitful--but it would have mattered
frightfully if each time he looked up he found a new subject sitting
placidly for his portrait. Gilbert was fond of asking in the _New
Witness_ of people who expressed admiration for Lloyd George: "Which
George do you mean?" for, chameleon-like, the politician has worn
many colours and the portrait painted in 1906 would have had to be
torn up in 1916. But gather the Chesterton portraits: read the files
when he first grew into fame: talk to Mr. Titterton who worked with
him on the _Daily News_ in 1906 and on _G.K.'s Weekly_ in 1936,
collect witnesses from his boyhood to his old age, from Dublin to
Vancouver: individuals who knew him, groups who are endeavoring to
work out his ideas: all will agree on the ideas and on the man as
making one pattern throughout, one developing but integrated mind and
personality.

Gathering the material for a biography bears some resemblance to
interrogating witnesses in a Court of Law. There are good witnesses
and bad: reliable and unreliable memories. I remember an old lady, a
friend of my mother's, who remarked with candour after my mother had
confided to her something of importance: "My dear, I must go and
write that down immediately before my imagination gets mixed with my
memory." One witness must be checked against another: there will be
discrepancies in detail but the main facts will in the end emerge.

Just now and again, however, a biographer, like a judge, meets a
totally unreliable witness.

One event in this biography has caused me more trouble than anything
else: the Marconi scandal and the trial of Cecil Chesterton for
criminal libel which grew out of it. As luck would have it, it was on
this that I had to interrogate my most unreliable witness. I had seen
no clear and unbiased account so I had to read the many pages of Blue
Book and Law Reports besides contemporary comment in various papers.
I have no legal training, but one point stuck out like a spike. Cecil
Chesterton had brought accusations against Godfrey Isaacs not only
concerning his own past career as a company promoter, but also
concerning his dealings with the government over the Marconi
contract, in connection with which he had also fiercely attacked
Rufus Isaacs, Herbert Samuel and other ministers of the Crown. But in
the witness box he accepted the word of the very ministers he had
been attacking, and declared that he no longer accused them of
corruption: which seemed to me a complete abandonment of his main
position.

Having drafted my chapter on Marconi, I asked Mrs. Cecil Chesterton
to read it, but more particularly to explain this point. She gave me
a long and detailed account of how Cecil had been intensely reluctant
to take this course, but violent pressure had been exerted on him by
his father and by Gilbert who were both in a state of panic over the
trial. Unlikely as this seemed, especially in Gilbert's case, the
account was so circumstantial, and from so near a connection, that I
felt almost obliged to accept it. What was my amazement a few months
later at receiving a letter in which she stated that after "a great
deal of close research work, re-reading of papers, etc." (in
connection with her own book _The Chestertons_) and after a talk with
Cecil's solicitors, she had become convinced that Cecil had acted as
he had because "the closest sleuthing had been unable to discover any
trace" of investments by Rufus Isaacs in English Marconis. "For this
reason Cecil took the course he did--not through family pressure.
That pressure, _I still feel_,* was exerted, though possibly not
until the trial was over."

[* Italics mine.]

It was, then, the lady's feelings and not facts that had been offered
to me as evidence, and it was the merest luck that my book had not
appeared before Cecil's solicitors had spoken.

The account given in Lord Birkenhead's _Famous Trials_ is the Speech
for the Prosecution. Mrs. Cecil Chesterton's chapter is an
impressionist sketch of the court scene by a friend of the defendant.
What was wanted was an impartial account, but I tried in vain to
write it. The chronology of events, the connection between the
Government Commission and the Libel Case, the connection between the
English and American Marconi companies--it was all too complex for
the lay mind, so I turned the chapter over to my husband who has had
a legal training and asked him to write it for me.

_The Chestertons_ is concerned with Gilbert and Frances as well as
with Cecil; and the confusion between memory and imagination--to say
nothing of reliance on feelings unsupported by facts--pervades the
book. It can only be called a Legend, so long growing in Mrs. Cecil's
mind that I am convinced that when she came to write her book she
firmly believed in it herself. The starting-point was so ardent a
dislike for Frances that every incident poured fuel on the flame and
was seen only by its light. When I saw her, the Legend was beginning
to shape. She told me various stories showing her dislike: facts
offered by me were either denied or twisted to fit into the pattern.
I do not propose to discuss here the details of a thoroughly
unreliable book. Most of them I think answer themselves in the course
of this biography. With one or two points I deal in Appendix C. But I
will set down here one further incident that serves to show just how
little help this particular witness could ever be.

For, like Cecil's solicitors, I spoilt one telling detail for her.
She told me with great enthusiasm that Cecil had said that Gilbert
was really in love not with Frances but with her sister Gertrude, and
that Gertrude's red hair accounted for the number of red-headed
heroines in his stories. I told her, however, on the word of their
brother-in-law, that Gertrude's hair was not red. Mr. Oldershaw in
fact seemed a good deal amused: he said that Gilbert never looked at
either of the other sisters, who were "not his sort," and had eyes
only for Frances. Mrs. Cecil however would not relinquish this dream
of red hair and another love. In her book she wishes "red-gold" hair
on to Annie Firmin, because in the _Autobiography_ Gilbert had
described her golden plaits. But unluckily for this new theory
Annie's hair was yellow,* which is quite a different colour. And
Annie, who is still alive, is also amused at the idea that Gilbert
had any thought of romance in her connection.

[* See G.K.'s letter to her daughter, p. 633 [Chapter XXXI].]

When Frances Chesterton gave me the letters and other documents, she
said: "I don't want the book to appear in a hurry: not for at least
five years. There will be lots of little books written about Gilbert;
let them all come out first. I want your book to be the final and
definitive Biography."

The first part of this injunction I have certainly obeyed, for it
will be just seven years after his death that this book appears. For
the second half, I can say only that I have done the best that in me
lies to obey it also. And I am very grateful to those who have
preceded me with books depicting one aspect or another of my subject.
I have tried to make use of them all as part of my material, and some
are "little" merely in the number of their pages. I am especially
grateful to Hilaire Belloc, Emile Cammaerts, Cyril Clemens and
"Father Brown" (who have allowed me to quote with great freedom). I
want to thank Mr. Seward Collins, Mr. Cyril Clemens and the
University of Notre Dame for the loan of books; Mrs. Bambridge for
the use of a letter from Kipling and a poem from _The Years Between_.

Even greater has been the kindness of those friends of my own and of
Gilbert Chesterton's who have read this book in manuscript and made
very valuable criticisms and suggestions: May Chesterton, Dorothy
Collins, Edward Connor, Ross Hoffman, Mrs. Robert Kidd, Arnold Lunn,
Mgr. Knox, Father Murtagh, Father Vincent McNabb, Lucian Oldershaw,
Beatrice Warde, Douglas Woodruff, Monsignor O'Connor.

Most of the criticisms were visibly right, while even those with
which I could not concur showed me the weak spot in my work that had
occasioned them. They have helped me to improve the book--I think I
may say enormously.

One suggestion I have not followed--that one name should be used
throughout: either Chesterton or Gilbert or G.K., but not all three.
I had begun with the idea of using "Chesterton" when speaking of him
as a public character and also when speaking of the days before I did
in fact call him "Gilbert." But this often left him and Cecil mixed
up: then too, though I seldom used "G.K." myself, other friends
writing to me of him often used it. I began to go through the
manuscript unifying--and then I noticed that in a single paragraph of
his _Bernard Shaw_ Gilbert uses "GBS," "Shaw," "Bernard Shaw," and
"Mr. Shaw." Here was a precedent indeed, and it seemed to me that it
was really the natural thing to do. After all we do talk of people
now by one name, now by another: it is a matter of slight importance
if of any, and I decided to let it go.

As to size, I am afraid the present book is a large one--although not
as large as Boswell's _Johnson_ or _Gone with the Wind_. But in this
matter I am unrepentant, for I have faith in Chesterton's own public.
The book is large because there is no other way of getting Chesterton
on to the canvas. It is a joke he would himself have enjoyed, but it
is also a serious statement. For a complete portrait of Chesterton,
even the most rigorous selection of material cannot be compressed
into a smaller space. I have first written at length and then cut and
cut.

At first I had intended to omit all matter already given in the
_Autobiography_. Then I realised that would never do. For some things
which are vital to a complete Biography of Chesterton are not only
told in the _Autobiography_ better than I could tell them, but are
recorded there and nowhere else. And this book is not merely a
supplement to the _Autobiography_. It is the Life of Chesterton.

The same problem arises with regard to the published books and I have
tried to solve it on the same line. There has rung in my mind Mr.
Belloc's saying: "A man is his mind." To tell the story of a man of
letters while avoiding quotation from or reference to his published
works is simply not to tell it. At Christopher Dawson's suggestion I
have re-read all the books _in the order in which they were written_,
thus trying to get the development of Gilbert's mind perfectly clear
to myself and to trace the influences that affected him at various
dates. For this reason I have analysed certain of the books and not
others--those which showed this mental development most clearly at
various stages, or those (too many alas) which are out of print and
hard to obtain. But whenever possible in illustrating his mental
history I have used unpublished material, so that even the most
ardent Chestertonian will find much that is new to him.

For the period of Gilbert's youth there are many exercise books,
mostly only half filled, containing sketches and caricatures, lists
of titles for short stories and chapters, unfinished short stories.
Several completed fairy stories and some of the best drawings were
published in _The Coloured Lands_. Others are hints later used in his
own novels: there is a fragment of _The Ball and the Cross_, a first
suggestion for _The Man Who Was Thursday_, a rather more developed
adumbration of _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_. This I think is later
than most of the notebooks; but, after the change in handwriting,
apparently deliberately and carefully made by Gilbert around the date
at which he left St. Paul's for the Slade School, it is almost
impossible to establish a date at all exactly for any one of these
notebooks. Notes made later when he had formed the habit of dictation
became difficult to read, not through bad handwriting, but because
words are abbreviated and letters omitted.

Some of the exercise books appear to have been begun, thrown aside
and used again later. There is among them one only of real
biographical importance, a book deliberately used for the development
of a philosophy of life, dated in two places, to which I devote a
chapter and which I refer to as _the_ Notebook. This book is as
important in studying Chesterton as the Pensees would be for a
student of Pascal. He is here already a master of phrase in a sense
which makes a comparison with Pascal especially apt. For he often
packs so much meaning into a brilliant sentence or two that I have
felt it worth while, in dealing especially with some of the less
remembered books, to pull out a few of these sentences for quotation
apart from their context.

Other important material was to be found in _G.K.'s Weekly_, in
articles in other periodicals, and in unpublished letters. With some
of the correspondences I have made considerable use of both sides,
and if anyone pedantically objects that that is unusual in a
biography I will adapt a phrase of Bernard Shaw's which you will find
in this book, and say, "Hang it all, be reasonable! If you had the
choice between reading me and reading Wells and Shaw, wouldn't you
choose Wells and Shaw."

GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON

CHAPTER I

Background for Gilbert Keith Chesterton

IT IS USUAL to open a biography with some account of the subject's
ancestry. Chesterton, in his _Browning_, after some excellent foolery
about pedigree-hunting, makes the suggestion that middle-class
ancestry is far more varied and interesting than the ancestry of the
aristocrat:

The truth is that aristocrats exhibit less of the romance of
pedigree than any other people in the world. For since it is their
principle to marry only within their own class and mode of life,
there is no opportunity in their case for any of the more interesting
studies in heredity; they exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of
the lower animals. It is in the middle classes that we find the
poetry of genealogy; it is the suburban grocer standing at his shop
door whom some wild dash of Eastern or Celtic blood may drive
suddenly to a whole holiday or a crime.

This may provide fun for a guessing game but is not very useful to a
biographer. The Chesterton family, like many another, had had the ups
and downs in social position that accompany the ups and downs of
fortune. Upon all this Edward Chesterton, Gilbert's father, as head
of the family possessed many interesting documents. After his death,
Gilbert's mother left his papers undisturbed. But when she died
Gilbert threw away, without examination, most of the contents of his
father's study, including all family records. Thus I cannot offer any
sort of family tree. But it is possible to show the kind of family
and the social atmosphere into which Gilbert Chesterton was born.

Some of the relatives say that the family hailed from the village of
Chesterton--now merged into Cambridge, of which they were Lords of
the Manor, but Gilbert refused to take this seriously. In an
introduction to a book called _Life in Old Cambridge_, he wrote:

I have never been to Cambridge except as an admiring visitor; I have
never been to Chesterton at all, either from a sense of unworthiness
or from a faint superstitious feeling that I might be fulfilling a
prophecy in the countryside. Anyone with a sense of the savour of the
old English country rhymes and tales will share my vague alarm that
the steeple might crack or the market cross fall down, for a smaller
thing than the coincidence of a man named Chesterton going to
Chesterton.

At the time of the Regency, the head of the family was a friend of
the Prince's and (perhaps as a result of such company) dissipated his
fortunes in riotous living and incurred various terms of imprisonment
for debt. From his debtors' prisons he wrote letters, and sixty years
later Mr. Edward Chesterton used to read them to his family: as also
those of another interesting relative, Captain George Laval
Chesterton, prison reformer and friend of Mrs. Fry and of Charles
Dickens. A relative recalls the sentence: "I cried, Dickens cried, we
all cried," which makes one rather long for the rest of the letter.

George Laval Chesterton left two books, one a kind of autobiography,
the other a work on prison reform. It was a moment of enthusiasm for
reform, of optimism and of energy. Dickens was stirring the minds of
Englishmen to discover the evils in their land and rush to their
overthrow. Darwin was writing his _Origin of Species_, which in some
curious way increased the hopeful energy of his countrymen: they
seemed to feel it much more satisfying to have been once animal and
have become human than to be fallen gods who could again be made
divine. Anyhow, there were giants in those days and it was hope that
made them so.

When by an odd confusion the _Tribune_ described G. K. Chesterton as
having been born about the date that Captain Chesterton published his
books, he replied in a ballade which at once saluted and attacked:

I am not fond of anthropoids as such,
I never went to Mr. Darwin's school,
Old Tyndall's ether, that he liked so much
Leaves me, I fear, comparatively cool.
I cannot say my heart with hope is full
Because a donkey, by continual kicks,
Turns slowly into something like a mule--
I was not born in 1856.

Age of my fathers: truer at the touch
Than mine: Great age of Dickens, youth and yule:
Had your strong virtues stood without a crutch,
I might have deemed man had no need of rule,
But I was born when petty poets pule,
When madmen used your liberty to mix
Lucre and lust, bestial and beautiful,
I was not born in 1856.*

[* Quoted in _G. K. Chesterton: A criticism_. Aliston Rivers (1908)
pp. 243-244.]

Both _Autobiography_ and _Prison Life_ are worth reading.* They
breathe the "Great Gusto" seen by Gilbert in that era. He does not
quote them in his _Autobiography_, but, just mentioning Captain
Chesterton, dwells chiefly on his grandfather, who, while George
Laval Chesterton was fighting battles and reforming prisons, had
succeeded to the headship of a house agents' business in Kensington.
(For, the family fortunes having been dissipated, Gilbert's
great-grandfather had become first a coal merchant and then a house
agent.) A few of the letters between this ancestor and his son remain
and they are interesting, confirming Gilbert's description in the
_Autobiography_ of his grandfather's feeling that he himself was
something of a landmark in Kensington and that the family business
was honourable and important.

[* See Appendix A.]

The Chestertons, whatever the ups and downs of their past history,
were by now established in that English middle-class respectability
in which their son was to discover--or into which he was to bring--a
glow and thrill of adventurous romance. Edward Chesterton, Gilbert's
father, belonged to a serious family and a serious generation, which
took its work as a duty and its profession as a vocation. I wonder
what young house-agent today, just entering the family business,
would receive a letter from his father adjuring him to "become an
active steady and honourable man of business," speaking of "abilities
which only want to be judiciously brought out, of course assisted
with your earnest co-operation."

Gilbert's mother was Marie Grosjean, one of a family of twenty-three
children. The family had long been English, but came originally from
French Switzerland. Marie's mother was from an Aberdeen family of
Keiths, which gave Gilbert his second name and a dash of Scottish
blood which "appealed strongly to my affections and made a sort of
Scottish romance in my childhood." Marie's father, whom Gilbert never
saw, had been "one of the old Wesleyan lay-preachers and was thus
involved in public controversy, a characteristic which has descended
to his grandchild. He was also one of the leaders of the early
Teetotal movement, a characteristic which has not."*