G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  Marie Chesterton did not do much in the way of house-training her sons; there was no attempt to insist on punctuality at meals, for example. On the other hand, Annie Firmin remembered her ‘as a bit of a tyrant in her own family’, in deciding, for instance, what members of the family should eat at meals. She was famous for her hospitality and the huge meals she served. Like her husband, she had a sense of humour and was known for her witty conversation. Her appearance, however, was as untidy as her house, while her ‘blackened and protruding teeth which gave her a witchlike appearance’ made her a somewhat forbidding figure.28 Her sons, too, were not known for their cleanliness and tidiness. But that did not stop the Italian artist Attilio Baccani, who lived in London, from so admiring the little Gilbert’s golden locks that he asked his father if he could paint his portrait when he met them out for a walk. The finished portrait was hung up in the dining-room and showed Gilbert in his sailor suit.29

  As he looked back on his childhood, Chesterton could not agree with Robert Louis Stevenson, a writer he so admired, that there was anything ‘vague’ about it. Far from ‘moving with his head in a cloud’ or being ‘in a dazed daydream’, unable to ‘distinguish fancy from fact’, he remembered his childhood as being chiefly characterized by ‘clearness’: ‘Mine is a memory of a sort of white light on everything, cutting things out very clearly, and rather emphasising their solidity.’ Although this white light had ‘a sort of wonder in it, as if the world were as new as myself’,30 nevertheless the world was nothing if not ‘real’. And not only that, but he had ‘never lost the sense that this was my real life; the real beginning of what should have been a more real life’—if only it had not been darkened by the grown-up ‘dreams’, ‘self-deception’, ‘make-believe and pretending’ of the adult with ‘his head in a cloud’. Of course, as a child he was not explicitly ‘conscious’ of the distinctions he was now aware of, but he ‘contained’ them implicitly. Thus he knew that pretending was not the same as deceiving, and that imagination was ‘almost the opposite of illusion’. Far from life seeming a dream, he seemed then ‘more wide-awake’ than he was now, he seemed to be ‘moving in broader daylight’. Yet that did not mean that he never suffered unhappiness as a child; he did, but ‘the pain did not leave on my memory the sort of stain of the intolerable or mysterious that it leaves on the mature mind’.31

  Everything was both wonderful and real, whether it was his father’s toy theatre, which he knew was not a real theatre, or a street scene, which might have been a scene in a theatre but which was in fact a real street scene. There was one street scene of which he retained a vivid memory, and with which Chesterton concludes his account of his early childhood—he had promised the reader earlier that he would drop, like a detective-story writer, some clues as to his future development.

  I remember once walking with my father along Kensington High Street, and seeing a crowd of people gathered by a rather dark and narrow entry on the southern side of that thoroughfare. I had seen crowds before; and was quite prepared for their shouting or shoving. But I was not prepared for what happened next. In a flash a sort of ripple ran along the line and all these eccentrics went down on their knees on the public pavement. I had never seen people play any such antics except in church; and I stopped and stared. Then I realised that a sort of little dark cab or carriage had drawn up opposite the entry; and out of it came a ghost clad in flames. Nothing in the shilling paint-box had ever spread such a conflagration of scarlet, such lakes of lake; or seemed so splendidly likely to incarnadine the multitudinous sea. He came on with all his glowing draperies like a great crimson cloud of sunset, lifting long frail fingers over the crowd in blessing. And then I looked at his face and was startled with a contrast; for his face was dead pale like ivory and very wrinkled and old, fitted together out of naked nerve and bone and sinew; with hollow eyes in shadow; but not ugly; having in every line the ruin of great beauty. The face was so extraordinary that for a moment I even forgot such perfectly scrumptious clothes.

  We passed on; and then my father said, ‘Do you know who that was? That was Cardinal Manning.’32

  It seems that Chesterton’s father had actually been to hear Manning preach on one occasion, and the references to the Roman Catholic Church in his letters showed no hostility. Liberal in politics and religion, Mr Ed was comparatively tolerant of Popery.33

  The Chesterton family themselves were irregular attenders at church, and when they did go it was to listen to the sermons of the Revd Stopford Brooke, a well-known Unitarian preacher, who had left the Church of England’s ministry because he could not believe in miracles.34 As Chesterton was later to write in one of his early ‘clerihews’:

  The Rev. Stopford Brooke

  The Church forsook.

  He preached about an apple

  In Bedford Chapel.35

  In his Autobiography Chesterton remembered him as a ‘large-hearted and poetic orator’, whose ‘optimistic theism’ he accepted for a long time: ‘it was substantially the same as that which I had learnt since childhood under the glamorous mysticism of George Macdonald. It was full and substantial faith in the Fatherhood of God, and little could be said against it, even in theological theory, except that it rather ignored the free-will of man. Its Universalism was a sort of optimistic Calvinism.’36

  Chesterton thought his parents ‘were rather exceptional, among people so intelligent, in believing at all in a personal God or in personal immortality’.37 But it was a liberal, un-dogmatic religion that naturally went hand-in-hand with their liberal politics. And the young Chesterton grew up knowing that he was a Roundhead and not a Cavalier—so much so that as a small boy he rewrote William Aytoun’s popular Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, turning the Cavalier hero Montrose into a ‘false’ traitor and the traitor Argyll into the hero who triumphantly ‘drove right backwards | All the servants of the Pope’, ‘the trembling Papists’.38

  2

  The first school Chesterton attended was Colet Court, generally called ‘Bewsher’s’ after the name of the headmaster, a day as opposed to the usual boarding preparatory school, which stood opposite St Paul’s School in the Hammersmith Road, for which it was first the unofficial and later the official preparatory school. The date of his entry is unknown (he does not even refer to it in the Autobiography), although the fact that when he went to St Paul’s his classmates were a year or two younger suggests that he went later than was normal, perhaps at the age of 9 in 1883.39 One of his contemporaries who lived nearby remembered walking to school with him and passing ‘a very entrancing toy shop’; but he had ‘very little money’, so on one occasion the young Gilbert, with the generosity that would be characteristic of him, offered him the ten shillings, then a very large sum of money for a small boy, that he had at home. It seems that Chesterton appeared as unpromising a pupil as he was to strike the staff at St Paul’s, his form master once remarking: ‘You know, Chesterton, if we could open your head, we should not find any brain but only a lump of white fat!’ A fellow pupil Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who gave his name to the ‘clerihew’ and who became a journalist like Chesterton and the author of the prototype of the modern detective novel Trent’s Last Case (1913), doubted if he was ever beaten, although Samuel Bewsher was a believer in caning; at St Paul’s the practice had become very rare and would hardly have been provoked by Chesterton, who was, one of the masters there recalled, ‘as easy to control as an old sheep’. The young Gilbert must have been something of a sight at Bewsher’s, still dressed in a sailor suit but as tall as the average grown man.40

  At the age of 12 in January 1887, he graduated to St Paul’s. It too was, very unusually for a public school, a day school, so Chesterton never suffered the trauma of leaving home at an early age and suffering the hardships and brutality of the typical public school with its regime of fagging and cult of games (indeed, it was only in his later years at the school that physical exercise became compulsory). Unlike generations of Englishmen of his class, Chesterton continued to e
njoy the amenities of home and never endured abrupt separation from family life. A happy childhood was followed by a happy boyhood, and his innocence, especially of sex, lasted much longer than was normal for his middle-class contemporaries who encountered at the age of 13 the typical homosexual culture of the all-male boarding-school.41 Surprisingly, perhaps, Chesterton does not allude to what he, with his enormous sense of the importance of the family, must have regarded as his huge good fortune. Instead, he speaks of the ‘mysterious transformation’ of the child into ‘that monster the schoolboy’; whereas the pupils at St Paul’s were hardly the ‘monsters’ that Chesterton would have encountered at the great public schools, where the discipline of the classroom was heaven compared with the discipline of the boarding houses, which was left in the hands of the largely unsupervised older boys. Many of his contemporaries would have laughed contemptuously or enviously at the 12-year-old for whom the transition to schoolboy meant chiefly encountering the Greek small letters for the first time! The large letters he had learned at home ‘for fun’, whereas the small he learned ‘during the period of what is commonly called education; that is, the period during which I was being instructed by somebody I did not know, about something I did not want to know’. How common an experience this really is may be doubted, but Chesterton himself could give his ‘own private testimony to the curious fact that … a boy often does pass, from an early stage when he wants to know nearly everything, to a later stage when he wants to know next to nothing’. In his view, childhood was simple compared with ‘complex and incomprehensible’ boyhood. The child does not pretend to be what it is not: it says, ‘let’s pretend’; but the boy really does pretend to be a man. ‘Schoolboys in my time could be blasted with the horrible revelation of having a sister, or even a Christian name. And the deadly nature of this blow really consisted in the fact that it cracked the whole convention of our lives; the convention that each of us was on his own; an independent gentleman living on private means.’42

  One particular peculiarity about boyhood Chesterton singles out, ‘a callousness, a carelessness, a … random and quite objectless energy’. This energy also curiously seemed to be exercised by boys all over the world by ‘going about in threes’, ‘having no apparent object in going about at all’, and ‘suddenly attacking each other and equally suddenly desisting from the attack’. Thus, when Chesterton first met E. C. Bentley, who was to become his best friend at St Paul’s, in the playground, he ‘fought with him wildly for three-quarters of an hour; not scientifically and certainly not vindictively (I had never seen him before and I have been very fond of him ever since) but by a sort of inexhaustible and insatiable impulse’. The other great friend was Lucian Oldershaw, the son of an actor and Chesterton’s future brother-in-law, ‘who brought into our secrets the breath of ambition and the air of the great world’. In particular, ‘there possessed him, almost feverishly, a vast, amazing and devastating idea, the idea of doing something; of doing something in the manner of grown-up people’. According to Chesterton, it was Oldershaw who ‘proposed in cold blood that we should publish a magazine of our own; and have it printed at a real printer’s’.43 The first printed issue appeared in March 1891, some months after the first meeting of the Junior Debating Club in July 1890, the debating society that Chesterton and his friends founded, since the official school debating society, the ‘Union’, was open only to boys ‘in the top form’.44 But there is a typically undated letter of Chesterton to Bentley—Ronald Knox once remarked in amused exasperation, ‘You have the habit of the Immortals—not dating your letters’45—in which Chesterton proposes that they start a ‘periodical’, ‘bringing out the papers read at each meeting, with notes, essays, or even stories written by members’ of the Junior Debating Club.46 It would be typical of Chesterton to give the credit to someone else, but perhaps the truth is that, while it was originally his idea, it was Oldershaw who was ‘the moving spirit’.47 At first the Debater, which was edited by Oldershaw, was produced, after being typed, on a duplicating machine at one of the boys’ houses, but Oldershaw was so successful in selling copies at sixpence a copy to other boys and to parents—the first issue sold out on the first day—that after the first two issues it was printed as a magazine with ‘pale fawn colours’ and attained a circulation of between sixty and a hundred.48 His own ‘turgid poems’ Chesterton dismissed as a mixture of ‘bad imitations’ of Swinburne and even ‘worse’ ones of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome. Nevertheless, they attracted the attention of the school authorities: ‘One day, to my consternation, the High Master stopped me in the street and led me along, roaring in my deafened and bewildered ears that I had a literary faculty which might come to something if somebody could give it solidity.’ Later, on a prize-giving day, ‘he bellowed aloud to a whole crowd of parents and other preposterous intruders … that our little magazine showed signs of considerable talent’.49

  The weekly meetings of the Junior Debating Club, which had originally been intended to be the Shakespeare Club, consisted almost entirely not of political debate but of the reading and discussion of literary papers, although other topics were possible when there was no paper given. The first meeting was held in 1890, when Chesterton was 16, and Chesterton was elected chairman, with Oldershaw as secretary, although apparently it was his, Oldershaw’s, initiative.50 In the words of Bentley, Chesterton was chairman ‘because we insisted on his being … the club centred in his personality’. They all vied with one another for his friendship and were greatly jealous of the fact that Bentley was clearly his best friend.51 As Bentley wrote after his death, he had an ‘extraordinary power—of which he always remained quite unconscious—of inspiring affection and trust in all who had to do with him’. His ‘essential goodness, perfect sincerity, chivalrous generosity, boundless good temper, a total absence of self-esteem … and with them, even in boyhood, were united brilliant intellectual powers and an enormous gift of humor’, which was combined with as great a ‘sense of beauty and his sense of reverence’. Bentley emphasized his unusual ‘faculty of enjoying things’, especially in ‘vigorous and long-sustained arguments’, which were his keenest pleasure even more than his ‘joy in books’ and his drawing.52 Bentley was a year younger, but his experience of the world made him seem much older than his years. The group met for tea in one another’s houses before the paper and ensuing discussion. These ample teas were often extremely boisterous, when buns and slices of cake flew through the air; as chairman, Chesterton, whose ‘laugh was the loudest and the most infectious of all’, took no part in the horseplay, which he would stop when it threatened the discussion. In this fraternity the presence of Chesterton’s younger brother Cecil was not welcome to his friends. Oldershaw recalled later how he used to hate Cecil, who insisted on monopolizing the conversation; another of the circle remembered him as an ‘ugly little boy creeping about’. Every issue of the Debater contained contributions from Chesterton, generally both verse and prose. The first number contained an essay about dragons, which began: ‘The Dragon is the most cosmopolitan of impossibilities.’ This struck the others as real literature. For the most part it is conspicuous how little of the Chestertonian humour is evident—apart from Chesterton’s own scribbled caricatures and drawings on his own copies. But his literary papers are striking in their range and quality and must have astonished any of the masters who taught him.53 The truth is that he was a voracious reader, even devouring, in his own words, ‘whole volumes of Chambers’ Encyclopaedia and of a very musty and unreliable History of English Trade. The thing was a mere brute pleasure of reading, a pleasure in leisurely and mechanical receptiveness. It was the sort of pleasure that a cow must have in grazing all day long.’54

  But in the classroom he was extremely successful in concealing his ability. Only two masters, he maintained, managed, heaven knows how, to penetrate through my deep and desperately consolidated desire to appear stupid; and discover the horrible secret that I was, after all, endowed with the gift of reason above the bru
tes’. One of them ‘would suddenly ask me questions a thousand miles away from the subject at hand, and surprise me into admitting that I had heard of the Song of Roland, or even read a play or two of Shakespeare’. This was very embarrassing, as ‘perhaps the only consistent moral principle’ English schoolboys then possessed was a horror of showing off’. Chesterton could remember ‘running to school in sheer excitement repeating militant lines’ of Scott’s Marmion ‘with passionate emphasis and exultation; and then going into class and repeating the same lines in the lifeless manner of a hurdy-gurdy, hoping that there was nothing whatever in my intonation to indicate that I distinguished between the sense of one word and another’.55 But Chesterton was being slightly disingenuous, as his desire not to be noticed did not prevent him from putting in a successful entry for a prize poem in the summer term of 1892, his last term at the school, the subject set being St Francis Xavier. Still, in his defence, it was ‘the only “regular” thing he ever did at school’, according to his friend Bentley.56 After successfully winning the Milton school prize for poetry—which he left behind on the platform so confused was he at his success’57—he was frozen with astonishment’ to find an announcement on the notice board to the effect that he was to be given the privileges of the top form, although he was two forms below.58 This was an edict by the formidable High Master of St Paul’s, Frederick Walker, who reminded Chesterton in some ways of Dr Johnson, ‘in the startling volume of his voice, in his heavy face and figure, and in a certain tendency to explode at what did not seem to be exactly the appropriate moment; he would talk with perfect good humour and rationality and rend the roof over what seemed a trifle’. The famous story told of him was that, when a fastidious lady wrote to ask him what was the social standing of the boys at his school, he replied, “Madam, so long as your son behaves himself and the fees are paid, no questions will be asked about his social standing.”’59