by Ian Ker
Looking back, Chesterton thought that the chief impression he left on both the masters and his contemporaries was that he was asleep. But if he was asleep he was also dreaming, so that my mind was already occupied, though I myself was idle’.60
Lawrence Solomon, later a lecturer at University College, London, who sat next to him in class, remembered him as sleepily indifferent to what went on, but he also noticed that it was not ability he lacked but the will to apply himself. Tall, untidy, clumsy, and absent-minded, he became a spectacle of fun to the other boys when some form of physical exercise became compulsory and Chesterton would endeavour to fulfil the requirement in the gymnasium on the trapeze and parallel bars, where he was the despair of the instructor. Even if he had been so inclined, his poor eyesight would have made it impossible for him to take any part in sport. But he was a great walker, and still slim till his twenties, when he began to get fat, probably at least partly because of glandular trouble. One friend and member of the Junior Debating Club was to recall: I can see him now, very tall and lanky, striding untidily along Kensington High Street, smiling and sometimes scowling as he talked to himself, apparently oblivious of everything he passed, but in reality a far closer observer than most, and one who not only observed but remembered what he had seen.’61 Bentley remembered his serious, even brooding, expression that gave way very easily to one of laughing happiness. He was by nature the happiest boy and man I have ever known … laughter was never far away …’.62 At the same time, however, his absent-mindedness made him an obvious target for practical jokes, as on one very cold day when the other boys, unbeknown to Chesterton, filled his pockets with snow in the playground, which began to melt in the classroom, forming pools around him, all completely unnoticed by him.63 One friend recorded: ‘He meandered his way through school like a rudderless bark. He put up a smoke-screen over his real interests.’ Years later the same friend could still see him wandering round the corridors … His Greek primer all dog-eared, tattered, covered with drawings … all over the text as well as in the margins.’ Called on to construe—that is, translate from Greek or Latin—‘he would sway backwards and forwards, his head bowed over a hopelessly ragged book. He would hold it in one hand and clutch it with the other to prevent it from disintegrating. He would construe adequately enough—but he would do the minimum.’ There was a much-repeated story told of him that ‘he had been found wandering round the playground in school hours and gave as his excuse that he thought it was Saturday”’.64
Before Chesterton had made any friends, he had been somewhat solitary; not sharply unpopular or in any sense persecuted, but solitary’.65 He was never unpopular at school but nor was he a popular boy outside his small circle of friends.66 He was too big and strong to be bullied, while he used to accept [teasing] with such unfailing good temper that there soon ceased to be any fun in it’.67 His strength was useful ‘in standing between a small boy and others who were badgering him’.68 In his failure or refusal to apply himself to conventional academic work, he was unlike an unusually large number of the boys at St Paul’s, which, not being a conventional boarding public school with the usual cult of sport, encouraged on the contrary those who in schoolboy slang were called swots’. Another reason why swottishness’ was a feature of St Paul’s was the high proportion of Jewish boys. And here, early in his Autobiography, Chesterton takes the opportunity to defend himself against the anti-Semitism with which he has often been charged both in his lifetime and since. He points out that he had a number of Jewish friends at school, some of whom had remained lifelong friends, where he was known rather for his pro-Semitism and for protecting Jewish boys from bullying and teasing.69 The Jewish brothers Lawrence and Maurice Solomon were both members of the Junior Debating Club, as were the D’Avigdor brothers, Digby and Waldo, who, between them, constituted no less than a third of the membership of the Junior Debating Club.70 But a couple of letters to Bentley make it perfectly clear, however jocularly, that the other boys were very conscious of their Jewishness.71 Both schoolboy and wider English society, says Chesterton in the Autobiography, regarded Jews as ‘foreigners; only foreigners that were not called foreigners’.72 But there is no evidence of anti-Semitism in the usual sense. On the contrary, he strongly condemned the pogroms of Jews in Russia and Poland, to the extent of even writing in a poem, ‘Christ has borne from you more insult than from Israel he has borne | Ye have placed the scourge of murder where they placed the reed of scorn.’73 A magazine article he read in January 1891 about the brutal ill-treatment of a Jewish girl in Russia filled him with fury, and he wrote in his diary: ‘Made me feel strongly inclined to knock somebody down, but refrained.’74 And in the Debater he wrote a fictional letter from an Englishman in Russia who springs to the defence of a Jewish student against an attack by Czarist troops, having previously written that the Russian persecution of the Jews had at least done one service to orthodoxy. It has restored my belief in the devil.’75
Partly because he had never in fact reached the top form because of his unwillingness to apply himself in the classroom and partly because he was almost wholly taken up with the idea of drawing pictures’, when his time at St Paul’s came to an end in the summer of 1892, Chesterton, unlike his friends, was not destined for Oxford or Cambridge but for art school.76 Bentley remembered his wonderful decorative handwriting’ and his masterly’ draughtsmanship.77 In spite of his striking literary contributions to the Debater, neither his parents nor his teachers appear to have seen where his real talents lay. According to Bentley, Chesterton himself had no literary ambitions, while his parents were more hopeful about his artistic gifts;78 perhaps too his father was thinking of what he would have wanted to do at that age. At any rate, when Mrs Chesterton two years later consulted the High Master on her son’s prospects in the light of his disappointing progress at the Slade School, the great man was in no doubt about one thing: ‘Six foot of genius. Cherish him, Mrs. Chesterton, cherish him.’79
As for Chesterton’s own awareness of himself, as we have already seen, failure at academic work had not meant that his mind was inactive: on the contrary, ‘all this time very queer things were groping and wrestling inside my own undeveloped mind’. But, in not saying anything about them in his autobiographical account of his schooldays, he was being consistent with ‘the sustained and successful effort of most of my school life to keep them to myself’.80
Chesterton’s poems in the Debater give us some idea of the ways in which his mind was working during these formative two years.81 In view of his impending crisis at the Slade School, it is striking that in the Junior Debating Club debates he strongly upheld the moral basis of literature as opposed to any pure aestheticism or art for art’s sake. His religious attitudes were distinctly ambivalent. On the one hand, the theological liberalism with which he had grown up is evident enough. Half of his twelve poems in the Debater are overtly religious and explicitly anti-dogmatic. They specifically echo the views of the Revd Stopford Brooke, whose sermons in the Bedford Chapel the family attended, albeit intermittently, and for whom the gospel of Christ was ‘simple’ as opposed to complex’ as the creeds made it. In these poems dogma and church authority are ‘almost synonymous with intolerance and bloodshed’.82 But there is definitely a spiritual note, which confirms Oldershaw’s comment to Maisie Ward that: ‘We felt that he was looking for God.’83 Thus he would write to Bentley, apparently in the summer of 1893, when he was 19, that it was ‘impossible’ to ‘feel’ that the world was a ‘sham’, ‘the sum of all things being barren’: Whatever the secret of the world may be, it must in the face of feelings that are in me, be something intelligible and satisfying. This instinct of the hidden meaning is the eternal ground of all religions … religion has always been, relatively to the time, good news.’84 The last of the Debater poems, ‘Ave Maria’, begins on an anti-dogmatic note, and then continues:, ‘Hail Mary, thou blessed among women, generations shall rise up to greet, | After ages of wrangle and dogma, I come with a prayer to thy feet.
’ And Chesterton proceeds to regret that ‘the crown’ has been ‘reft from thy forehead’ by ‘stern elders’.85 There is also a remarkable article written in 1892 when he was 18, where he defends ‘the vivid democratic medieval piety which felt that there was in reality a great “communion of saints” in which they and their personal acquaintances could walk naturally with angels and archangels’, as opposed to a religion shut up in a cupboard and exhibited on Sundays’. This was a real’ not a sham’ religion, and it was this intense reality in their religion which marks’ the religion of Dante in contrast to ‘the vague renaissance mythology of the great poem of Milton’.86 In his prize poem of the same year, ‘St Francis Xavier’, Chesterton had been rather less flattering about the Church of Rome; there the great Jesuit missionary, while acknowledged as ‘a hero of his wars’, is nevertheless ‘No child of truth or priest of progress he’.87 A less ambivalent attitude to Roman Catholicism would no doubt have been more acceptable to his religious mentor, the Revd Stopford Brooke.
His later political and social views are also anticipated in these last two happy and stimulating years at St Paul’s, the years of the Junior Debating Club and The Debater. In a ‘dramatic journal’ that he kept during the Christmas holidays when he was 16, his ‘Conservative’ friend Oldershaw accuses Chesterton of being a red hot raging Republican’; but Chesterton insists that there is real misery, physical and mental, in the low and criminal classes, and I don’t believe in crying peace where there is no peace’.88
However, Oldershaw was not typical of the Junior Debating Club. To Lawrence Solomon Chesterton wrote that he cordially’ assented with his Socialism; and a significant connection is made for the benefit of his Jewish friend with Christianity: It is almost as impracticable as Christianity.’ Later Chesterton informed Solomon that those early Christians were the only true socialists … for democracy is an essentially spiritual idea, a contradiction of the modern materialism which would encourage the brute-tendency to an aristocracy of the physically “fittest”’.89 And then in December 1892, two years later, Chesterton’s first published writing in the national press appeared in the Speaker, a poem called ‘The Song of Labour’, in which the author wholly aligned himself with the workers of the world, who have claimed and conquered the earth’ and to whom ‘work is the title of worth’.90 In the following year he read a best-seller called Merrie England, a collection of articles on Socialism originally published in the Clarion newspaper by its founder and editor, Robert Blatchford. It was a publishing sensation, with over two million copies sold, almost doubling the Clarion’s circulation. Blatchford was influenced by William Morris and idealised pre-industrial societies in which workers could be artists and craftsmen’. It is quite possible that the book influenced Chesterton’s own later idealization of the Middle Ages. Be that as it may, it certainly confirmed Chesterton in his Socialism. ‘A Blatchford! A Blatchford! St Henry George [an American socialist journalist who invented the concept of wage slavery] for “Merrie England” and down with everything,’ he wrote excitedly to Oldershaw. The idea of Socialism leading to centralization and collectivism, which he later held to be true, is here dismissed: The fact is that the dead level barrack idea of socialism is really much more true of warehouse commercialism. Under socialism people would have peace and time to be individuals instead of being clerks.’91
No doubt to mark his eighteenth year and his leaving school, as well as his success in winning the Milton prize, Chesterton’s father took him on his first trip abroad for a holiday in France. They travelled by train round northern France, going first to Rouen and ending up in Paris. The voluble Latin was a new experience for English people in the nineteenth century visiting the Continent for the first time: ‘The people are most rapid, obliging and polite, but talk too much.’ Close as Normandy was to England, it seemed to Chesterton to be another world: A foreign town is a very funny sight with solemn old abbés in their broad brims and black robes and sashes and fiery bronzed little French soldiers staring right and left under their red caps, dotted everywhere among the blue blouses of the labourers and the white caps of the women.’92
3
Chesterton entitled the fourth chapter of his Autobiography ‘How to be a Lunatic’: ‘I deal here with the darkest and most difficult part of my task; the period of youth which is full of doubts and morbidities and temptations; and which, though in my case mainly subjective, has left in my mind for ever a certitude upon the objective solidity of Sin.’ (It is worth noting, however, lest too much is read into his words, that, according to his friend Bentley, ‘even in [this] adolescent phase of morbid misery … laughter was never far away’.93) It was a period, he explains, when through his ‘own fault’ he made the ‘acquaintance’ of the Devil, ‘and followed it up along lines which, had they been followed further, might have led me to devil-worship of the devil knows what’. On the subject of sin and the Devil he knew he was ‘intellectually right only through being morally wrong’. And he knew that those who held that evil was ‘only relative’ and sin ‘only negative’ were ‘talking balderdash only because they are much better men than I’. This ‘period of madness coincided with a period of drifting and doing nothing; in which I could not settle down to any regular work’. Instead, he had ‘dabbled in a number of things; and some of them may have had something to do with the psychology of the affair’.94
One of the things he ‘dabbled in’ was Spiritualism—although he ‘would not for a moment suggest it as a cause, far less as an excuse’—but it was ‘a contributory fact’. His brother and he played with planchette, although only for fun, unlike most people who played. But, while he was never seriously interested in Spiritualism, nevertheless he was sure that ‘something happens which is not in the ordinary sense natural, or produced by the normal and conscious human will’. He did not profess to know whether it was ‘by some subconscious or still human force, or by some powers, good, bad or indifferent, which are external to humanity’—what he did know was that the planchette ‘tells lies’. For example, when asked the maiden name of an uncle’s wife Chesterton had never known, the oracle replied ‘Manning’. Told it was talking nonsense, it responded defiantly ‘Married before’; and when asked to whom, the answer immediately came back, ‘Cardinal Manning’. Playing with planchette ‘without reason and without result’ and without coming to any particular conclusion about it illustrated for Chesterton how during this confused period of his life he was ‘merely dreaming and drifting; and often drifting onto very dangerous rocks’. But, if Spiritualism was sinister, it still had its amusing side. In his first job with a publisher who ‘rather specialised in spiritualistic and theosophical literature’, he remembered a distraught lady bursting into the office and demanding books suitable for her spiritual condition; but when Chesterton offered her The Life and Letters of the Late Dr Anna Kingsford, which they had just published, the said lady ‘shrank away with something like a faint shriek’, crying that Anna Kingsford had only that morning forbidden her to read the book; whereupon the young Chesterton expressed a hope that Dr Kingsford was not giving the advice to too many people, as it would be rather bad for business’ and would suggest malice on the part of Dr Kingsford. This lady had boasted that she had killed a number of men merely by thinking about them’ on the ground that they defended vivisection. She also boasted of very visionary but very intimate interviews with various eminent public men, apparently in a place of torture’, including one with Gladstone, in which a discussion about Ireland and the Sudan was interrupted by Mr Gladsone gradually growing red-hot’ from inside. “Feeling that he would wish to be alone,” said Dr Anna Kingsford with delicacy, “I passed out.”’ She was obviously a lady with a ‘fine tact and sense of social decorum, which told her that turning completely red-hot is what no gentleman would desire to do in the presence of a lady’. However, the jolliest’ Spiritualist and the most sympathetic psychic enquirer’ Chesterton met in those days was a man who had once received a successful tip for the Derby from
some medium and was ever on the look-out for similar information. Chesterton therefore suggested to him that