G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  As Chesterton looked back on his life he found himself returning to those objects that were among the first he ever saw with his eyes—the little church and the waterworks opposite. They seemed to him now to be symbolic of life itself. For the ‘notion of a tower of water’ was to suggest to his imagination some ‘colossal water-snake that might be the Great Sea Serpent, and had something of the nightmare nearness of a dragon in a dream’; while ‘over against it, the small church rose in a spire like a spear; and I have always been pleased to remember that it was dedicated to St George’.8

  He was born into a literally ‘respectable’ middle-class family, who were business people but who minded ‘their own business’ and were not desirous of swallowing up ‘everybody else’s business’. He could remember his father’s father, ‘a fine-looking old man with white hair and beard and manners that had something of that rounded solemnity that went with the old-fashioned customs of proposing toasts’, who ‘kept up the ancient Christian custom of singing at the dinner-table’. This was a middle class that truly was middle and separate from both the classes above and below. Its weakness was that it knew too little about the working class, not least the domestic servants who worked for it. Towards them his own family were kind, ‘but in the class as a whole there was neither the coarse familiarity in work, which belongs to democracies … nor the remains of a feudal friendliness such as lingers in the real aristocracy’. Instead, there was ‘a sort of silence and embarrassment’. Chesterton recalled a female member of his family who went to stay in the house of an absent friend where the attending servant liked to eat what was left over from the meals she served, but the guest, thinking nothing should be wasted, was determined to eat whatever was served, however much the servant might increase the portions—in the hope that there might be something left for her to eat—with the result that presumably the servant starved and the guest burst … There was a terror lest children might pick up the accent of the servants; but this was not so much snobbishness as the understandable fear of a class that had managed to acquire culture and education. Chesterton’s own father, for example, ‘knew all his English literature backwards’, and Chesterton himself ‘knew a great deal of it by heart’ long before he could properly understand it. To learn poetry by heart uncomprehendingly was ‘perhaps the right way to begin to appreciate verse’. This Victorian middle class was equally cut off from the upper classes. It had a pride of its own and had no desire to get into Society.9

  Chesterton’s mother was born Marie Grosjean, one of twenty-three children, her father belonging to a family that had originally come from French Switzerland, while her mother was a Keith from Aberdeen—hence Chesterton’s middle name.10 Chesterton liked his Scots ancestry, partly because, while he never knew his maternal grandfather, his maternal grandmother ‘was a very attractive personality’, and partly because ‘of a certain vividness in any infusion of Scots blood or patriotism’, which ‘made a sort of Scottish romance in my childhood’. However, the grandfather ‘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.’ But Chesterton thought there must have been much more to his grandfather than being a controversialist and teetotaller because of two casual remarks he was remembered as making: one was that, far from fashion being merely convention, it was ‘civilisation’, and the other was that, far from life being depressing, he would thank God for his creation even if he knew he was ‘a lost soul’.11

  One of Chesterton’s father’s ancestors was a Captain George Laval Chesterton (whose letters he also used to read out to the family), a friend of Dickens and a prison-reformer, who had served in the Peninsular War and later saw military action in both North and South America before becoming a prison governor in England; he published his autobiography as well as a book about prison life.12 Chesterton imagined that he was himself something of a Dickens character—like the friend of his father’s father who used to go for a walk on Sundays carrying a prayer book but without the slightest intention of attending church, a practice he defended by ‘calmly’ saying ‘with uplifted hand’, ‘I do it … as an example to others’. The brazenness of such hypocrisy showed that Dickens did not invent Dickensian characters; they already existed. The exuberance of that expansive era, Chesterton thought, was the effect of ‘that popular humour, which is perhaps our only really popular institution, working upon the remains of the rhetoric of the eighteenth-century orators, and the almost equally rhetorical rhetoric of the nineteenth-century poets, like Byron and Moore’. The ‘savour’ of it then could be found in ‘countless common or average people’. This was ‘a race that really dealt in periods as rounded as Christmas platters and punchbowls’, with whom there was even a ‘pomp and ritual about jokes’, just as there was ‘something as stately about the cheap-jacks demanding money as the orators demanding fame’. The ‘pompous geniality’ and the joviality of the jeers combined ‘the mock heroic’ in a way that marked these Victorians. And the world, thought Chesterton, was ‘less gay for losing that solemnity’.13

  Although Chesterton came from a ‘respectable’ commercial middle-class family that thoroughly disapproved of a new kind of businessmen they branded as ‘adventurers’, nevertheless they ‘were entirely of that period that believed in progress, and generally in new things, all the more because they were finding it increasingly difficult to believe in old things; and in some cases in anything at all’. They were Liberals who ‘believed in progress’, even if they did recognize a deterioration in commercial probity. His uncle Sidney was his father’s partner in the firm of estate agents (it still exists) founded by Chesterton’s great-grandfather. ‘Mr Ed’, as his father was known to the family, retired early from the business because of a weak heart. Since his real interest was not in selling houses but in art and literature, retirement was a blessing. Like his son, Mr Chesterton was ‘one of the few men … who really listened to argument’. Like his son, too, the father was a traditionalist in spite of his liberalism: ‘he loved many old things, and had especially a passion for the French cathedrals and all the Gothic architecture opened up by Ruskin at that time.’ Uncle Sidney, on the other hand, was a thoroughgoing progressive typical of his age, who ‘had the same scrupulous sense of the duty of accepting new things, and sympathising with the young, that older moralists may have had about preserving old things and obeying the elders’. But, while both brothers were ‘indignant’ at the ‘swindling’ that was beginning to enter business, they were ‘ignorant of, or even indifferent to the sweating’—that is, to the question of ‘economic exploitation’. A lingering Puritanism, Chesterton thought, was responsible for the delay of ‘the full triumph of flashy finance and the mere antics of avarice’.14

  The word ‘Victorian’ suggests ‘solid respectability’, but these Victorians were hardly Victorian in that sense, for it was ‘a period of increasing strain’ in which ‘ethics and theology were wearing thin’. Even Victorian domesticity was something of a misnomer, for this kind of Englishman’s home ‘was not half so domestic as that of the horrid foreigner; the profligate Frenchman’. After all, this was ‘the age when the Englishman sent all his sons to boarding-school and sent all his servants to Coventry’. Far from the Englishman’s house being his castle, ‘he was one of the few Europeans who did not even own his house; and his house was avowedly a dull box of brick, of all the houses the least like a castle’. But the greatest paradox of all was that, ‘so far from being stiff with orthodox religion, it was almost the first irreligious home in all human history’. This was ‘the first generation that ever asked its children to worship the hearth without the altar’. It made no difference, claimed Chesterton, whether these Victorians ‘went to church at eleven o’clock … or were reverently agnostic or latitudinarian, as was much of my own circle’. These Victorians were the first people ‘for whom there were no household gods but
only furniture’. Although ‘the darker side’ had been exaggerated, still it was true that the Victorian domestic tyrant did exist and he was sui generis, for he was ‘the product of the precise moment when a middle-class man still had children and servants to control; but no longer had creeds or guilds or kings or priests or anything to control him. He was already an anarchist to those above him; but still an authoritarian to those below.’ Apart from financial probity, the ‘Puritanic element’ showed itself in ‘a rather illogical disapproval of certain forms of luxury and expenditure’. For, while the Chesterton family table would ‘groan under far grander dinners than many aristocrats eat today’, they ‘had, for instance, a fixed feeling that there was something raffish about taking a cab. It was probably connected with their sensitive pride about not aping the aristocracy.’ Chesterton could remember his grandfather,

  when he was nearly eighty and able to afford any number of cabs, standing in the pouring rain while seven or eight crowded omnibuses went by; and afterwards whispering to my father (in a hushed voice lest the blasphemy be heard by the young), ‘If three more omnibuses had gone by, upon my soul I think I should have taken a cab.’15

  Chesterton was more than to make up for his forebears’ scruples.

  The greatest influence on the child came from his father. Apart from being bearded and not bald, he might have brought Mr Pickwick to mind; he certainly had ‘all the Pickwickian evenness of temper’. What was most remarkable about him was his ‘versatility both as an experimentalist and a handy man’: ‘His den or study was piled high with the stratified layers of about ten or twelve creative amusements; water-colour painting and modelling and photography and stained glass and fretwork and magic lanterns and mediaeval illumination.’ Watching his father at work had given Chesterton a love of ‘seeing things done’, and this experience had made him

  profoundly sceptical of all the modern talk about the necessary dullness of domesticity; and the degrading drudgery that only has to make puddings and pies. Only to make things! There is no greater thing to be said of God Himself than that He makes things…. Toffee still tastes nicer to me than the most expensive chocolate which Quaker millionaires sell by the million; and mostly because we made toffee for ourselves.

  All his father’s hobbies were purely private pursuits that he would never have dreamed of pursuing professionally in any way. There had been an idea of his studying art in his youth, as his son was to do, but the latter was glad he had not done so: ‘It might have stood in his way in becoming an amateur. It might have spoilt his career; his private career.’ There was nothing more English about him than this love for hobbies. Nor was it ‘a question of one hobby but a hundred hobbies, piled on top of each other’. But of all those hobbies, ‘the one which has clung to my memory through life is the hobby of the toy theatre’.16

  It was indeed a scene in his father’s toy theatre that provided Chesterton with his first memory:

  The very first thing I can ever remember seeing with my own eyes was a young man walking across a bridge. He had a curly moustache and an attitude of confidence verging on swagger. He carried in his hand a disproportionately large key of a shining yellow metal and wore a large golden or gilded crown. The bridge he was crossing sprang on the one side from the edge of a highly perilous mountain chasm, the peaks of the range rising fantastically in the distance; and at the other end it joined the upper part of the tower of an almost excessively castellated castle. In the castle tower there was one window, out of which a young lady was looking. I cannot remember in the least what she looked like; but I will do battle with anyone who denies her superlative good looks.

  The scene was not just the first thing he could remember seeing; it was more significant than that, for it had ‘a sort of aboriginal authenticity impossible to describe; something at the background of all my thoughts; like the very back-scene of the theatre of things’. He had no recollection of what the scene was meant to represent, but nevertheless ‘that one scene glows in my memory like a glimpse of some incredible paradise’. And the significance of it for Chesterton brings us to the most important theme that pervades his thought and writings: the idea of limitation, which was central to his thought on art, literature, politics, and religion. ‘Why should looking through a square hole, at yellow pasteboard, lift anybody into the seventh heaven of happiness …’ The scene was, Chesterton explained, ‘a sort of symbol of all that I happen to like in imagery and ideas. All my life I have loved edges; and the boundary line that brings one thing sharply against another. All my life I have loved frames and limits; and I will maintain that the largest wilderness looks larger seen through a window.’ And so in his view ‘the perfect drama must strive to arise to the higher ecstasy of the peep-show’. This was why he particularly liked ‘abysses and bottomless chasms and everything else that emphasises a fine shade of distinction between one thing and another; and the warm affection I have always felt for bridges is connected with the fact that the dark and dizzy arch accentuates the chasm even more than the chasm itself.’ In these earliest sensations, Chesterton believed he was ‘feeling the fragmentary suggestions of a philosophy I have since found to be true’.17

  Another early memory was ‘playing in the garden under the care of a girl with ropes of golden hair; to whom my mother afterwards called out from the house, “You are an angel;” which I was disposed to accept without metaphor’. But perhaps this young lady was indeed a veritable angel for the little Gilbert at this time if he had just been bereaved:

  I had a little sister who died when I was a child. I have little to go on; for she was the only subject about which my father did not talk. It was the one dreadful sorrow of his abnormally happy and even merry existence; and it is strange to think that I never spoke to him about it to the day of his death. I do not remember her dying; but I remember her falling off a rocking-horse … the greater catastrophe must somehow have become confused and identified with the smaller one. I always felt it as a tragic memory, as if she had been thrown by a real horse and killed.

  This was the problem about memory: ‘we have remembered too much—for we have remembered too often.’ Thus another of his earliest memories was

  of a long upper room filled with light (the light that never was on sea or land) and of somebody carving or painting with white paint the deal head of a hobbyhorse … Ever since that day my depths have been stirred by a wooden post painted white; and even more so by any white horse in the street; and it was like meeting a friend in a fairy-tale to find myself under the sign of the White Horse at Ipswich on the first day of my honeymoon.

  Chesterton’s point was that, the more we dwell on a memory, the more ‘it becomes … our own memory of the thing rather than the thing remembered’; the more we dwell on a memory the more we ‘transform’ and even ‘veil’ it.18

  What was really memorable about childhood was that ‘anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.’ So central to Chesterton’s vision of life was this sense of wonder that he even tells us that, if he were to ‘think of the backs of houses of which I saw only the fronts; the streets that stretched away behind the streets I knew; the things that remained round the corner’—they would ‘still give me a thrill’. So uniquely developed was this sense in Chesterton that one of his favourite games—it would be hard to imagine anyone else playing it—all his life was ‘to take a certain book with pictures of old Dutch houses, and think not of what was in the pictures but of all that was out of the pictures, the unknown corners and side-streets of the same quaint town’. But, if the child’s world is full of wonders, that does not mean that a child ‘is concerned only with make-believe’. On the contrary, Chesterton insists, the child ‘does not confuse fact and fiction…. To him no two things could possibly be more totally contrary than playing at robbers and stealing sweets.’ Another confusion is to suppose that a ‘child dislikes a fable that has a moral’ and that a child regards rewards for good actions as bribes,
as a cynical adult would, rather than as their natural accompaniment.19

  Although his mother’s ancestry clearly seemed to the child more interesting than his father’s, there is no question but that his father had far more influence on the young Chesterton’s formative years. Indeed, in his account of his childhood his mother is only mentioned twice in connection with her ancestry. The second time is to contrast the French make-up of her family—‘tough, extraordinarily tenacious, prejudiced in a humorous fashion and full of the fighting spirit’—with the ‘extraordinarily English’ background on his father’s side—‘of good nature, of good sense … and a certain tranquil loyalty in their personal relations’. Significantly, Chesterton adds that the last quality ‘was very notable even in one, like my brother Cecil, who in his public relations was supremely pugnacious and provocative’. The implication is clearly that Cecil took more after his mother, whose favourite he was, whereas his elder brother was more like his father.20 Gilbert was 5 when Cecil was born, whereupon he remarked, ‘Now I shall always have an audience.’21 In fact, it seems that the little Gilbert had not long had the power of speech at this point. For there was a family story that ‘the power of language descended on him like a tongue of flame, suddenly and irresistibly’ on the occasion of a children’s party when a younger cousin about 4 years old was so talkative that he ‘became indignant, and seizing her arms shook her to and fro, pouring out a flood of unintelligible eloquence. From that day his vocabulary increased and multiplied, ready, as his father once said, for the arrival of his brother.’22 Gilbert’s remark on the arrival of Cecil was always remembered by the family because it proved to be so totally off the mark, since as soon as Cecil could speak the two brothers began to argue incessantly, arguments that the younger brother dominated, having been, as his brother was to remark, ‘born a fighter … [who] argued from his very cradle’.23 Their longest recorded argument lasted for just over eighteen hours while they were on holiday at the seaside, beginning at breakfast and ending in the early hours of the next day. Their liberal parents refused to interfere with their freedom of speech.24 Chesterton’s wife, Frances, too recounted how once, when they were on holiday at the seaside, ‘the landlady would sometimes clear away breakfast, leaving the brothers arguing, come to set lunch and later set dinner while still they argued. They had come to the seaside but they never saw the sea.’25 Cecil was born in the new home, 11 Warwick Gardens, which was also in Kensington but south of the old house at 32 Sheffield Terrace and to which the family had moved after the death of Beatrice at the age of 8. Beatrice, or Birdie as she was called, had been five years older than Gilbert.26 After her death the two brothers were never allowed to see a funeral cortège pass. Their mother was told by her husband never again to mention Birdie’s name, and her portrait was turned to the wall. Their father had too a horror of sickness, which was also a forbidden subject, a horror that his elder son inherited. The golden-haired angel, Annie Firmin, recalled how he would rush from the room if his younger brother gave the slightest sign of choking at meals. She also remembered how, when his father was dying, Chesterton ‘only with real pain and difficulty … summoned sufficient fortitude to see the dying man’.27