by Ian Ker
he should purchase The Pink-up and turn it into a paper combining the two interests, and sold at every bookstall under the name of The Sporting and Spiritual Times. This, I said, could not fail to lift bookmakers and jockeys into a loftier sphere of spiritual contemplation, not to mention owners, who probably needed it quite as much; while it would give to Spiritualism a sound, shrewd and successful business side, vastly increase its popularity, and give to some of its followers an indefinable air of contact with concrete objective matters and what is coarsely called common sense, which some of them, as I felt at the time, seemed in some fashion to lack.95
Years later, he told Father John O’Connor, who was to play such a significant role in his life, that he gave up playing with planchette after getting headaches, following which there came a horrid feeling as if one were trying to get over a very bad spree, with what I can best describe as a bad smell in the mind’.96 Later, when he denounced Spiritualism, he did so not because he did not believe in it but because he did believe in it: the real objection to Spiritualism is that it calls entirely upon unknown gods—that is, upon any spirits that may be strolling about…. Spiritualists do not worship gods; they advertise for gods. They lay themselves open to evil …’.97
What else was Chesterton ‘dabbling in’? The one thing he was not supposed to be dabbling in’ and was, was art, which he was supposed to start studying seriously when in October 1893 he entered University College, London, of which the Slade School for Art was a constituent part. For the year 1892–3, the year he spent between St Paul’s and University College, we have very little information, apart from what the minutes of the Junior Debating Club tell us.98 There was a meeting on 16 December to discuss the future of the Club. It was decided to discontinue the Debater but not the Club, although the rule that it should be limited to twelve members was abolished. The February 1893 issue of the Debater announced that it was the last issue; it had been losing money and, apart from Chesterton himself, who was no longer at St Paul’s, the other main contributors had to concentrate their efforts on gaining scholarships to Oxford. In fact, one further issue appeared in June to commemorate the club’s demise.99 Chesterton no longer saw his friends on a daily basis at school, but he could still see them at weekends and during school holidays. Apparently, he was attending at least for some of the time an art school in St John’s Wood, called ‘Calderon’s’ according to Lawrence Solomon.100 In September 1893 Chesterton ended what was presumably a kind of ‘gap’ year between school and university by completing a series of drawings for a notebook collection of four-line verses, edited by Bentley, which later came to be known as clerihews’ after Bentley’s second name. Bentley was the principal contributor, but contributions came from the other members of the Junior Debating Club, and even Chesterton’s father contributed some lines.101 Chesterton himself contributed one of the best:
The Spanish people think Cervantes
Equal to half a dozen Dantes;
An opinion resented most bitterly
By the people of Italy.102
On 6 October 1893 Chesterton entered University College to study art at its Slade School. At that time the Slade did not give even diplomas, let alone degrees; instead certificates were issued for different art subjects. The normal course of study was three years.103 Since the Slade was a part of University College, Chesterton took the opportunity to attend lectures in other faculties. This may have been unusual, not to say irregular, for, when he returned to the College in 1927 to give a lecture, the Provost introduced him by saying: ‘He was a member of the Slade School. I believe that during his period of studentship he frequented lectures in other Faculties almost as much as he frequented the Slade School. At all events, whether that was strictly according to rule or not, we know that it was a very wise proceeding.’104 In fact, since he gave up studying fine art at the Slade after only one year, but stayed on at University College for another year, he actually ended up attending more lectures in other faculties, as even in his first year when he was supposed to be studying at the Slade, he attended lecture courses in English, French, and Latin.105 There was no incentive or obligation to sit for examinations in these subjects, as he was officially enrolled at the Slade. At the time it was noted that when studying at the Slade he always seemed to be writing and when attending the lectures always to be drawing.106 According to Bentley, it had been a quite fruitless enterprise of study at the Slade’, when he did not learn the slightest shade of technical improvement on his natural gift for decorative and grotesque drawing’.107 One of his teachers, the formidable and sarcastic Henry Tonks, who would become Slade Professor of Fine Art, told his parents that he had such a mature style of his own that they could teach him nothing without spoiling his originality, which … amounted to genius’.108 However, his brother Cecil thought that, while he had a ‘considerable gift as a draftsman … it was not in that direction that his deepest impulses led. He proved this by the fact that he shrank from the technical toils of art as he [had] never shrunk from the technical toils of writing.’109 While he was a student110 he did, in fact, write two short stories that were eventually published in the Quarto, a short-lived journal that was intended to be quarterly and to publish work principally by those who had studied at the Slade, and that was published in large, hardbound volumes, the first appearing in the summer of 1896 and the fourth and last in 1898. ‘A Picture of Tuesday’ is the story of four young men who belong to a sketching club and who pick Tuesday as their weekly subject: one of them draws ‘a huge human figure … driving up a load of waters, while below his feet moved upon a solemn infinite sea’, with the text from the Book of Genesis written below: And God divided the waters …’. The artist demands to know, Why there are no rituals for every day?’—after all: ‘The week is the colossal epic of creation.’ Less seriously, another member of the club draws a picture of his mother’s At-Home day’ with the appended scriptural text: And Job lifted up his voice and cursed his day.’ 111 The second story, ‘A Crazy Tale’, which is also on the subject of the wonder of existence, is the story of a boy ‘called mad by his neighbours, who is utterly aware of the mysteries of life taken by them as commonplace’ and who seems to see everything as though it were ‘for the first time’.112
Because of the psychological and spiritual crisis that Chesterton always associated with his year at the Slade, it is often forgotten that in the event fine art was not his only or even principal subject of study. Among the professors in the arts faculty whose lectures he attended were two famous scholars. One was Professor A. E. Housman, the eminent classical scholar and also, of course, the author of A Shropshire Lad, published three years after Chesterton’s arrival. However, after a year he dropped Latin, but continued attending lectures in English and French, as well as in history and political economy.113 In recounting his time at University College in the Autobiography, Chesterton does not mention Housman, who had begun his great edition of Manilius in 1893 when he was appointed to the chair of Latin at the College, and whose A Shropshire Lad was published in 1896. But he does mention the extraordinarily lively and stimulating learning’ of W. P. Ker, whose lectures on English literature he attended for two years, at one of which he had
the honour of constituting the whole of Professor Ker’s audience. But he gave as thorough and thoughtful a lecture as I have ever heard given, in a slightly more colloquial style; asked me some questions about my reading; and, on my mentioning something from the poetry of Pope, said with great satisfaction, ‘Ah, I see you have been well brought up.’
Unlike most of the other students, Chesterton was not studying for an examination—‘I had not even that object in this objectless period of my life’—and therefore ‘gained an entirely undeserved reputation for disinterested devotion to culture for its own sake’.114 But what is important in the light of his future career is that he had the benefit of the teaching of one of the greatest literary scholars. When he returned to lecture at the College in 1927, he remarked self-deprecatin
gly:
It was at the Slade School that I discovered I should never be an artist; it was at the lectures of Professor A. E. Housman that I discovered that I should never be a scholar; and it was at the lectures of Professor W. P. Ker that I discovered I should never be a literary man. The warning, alas! fell on heedless ears, and I still attempted the practice of writing, which, let me tell you in the name of the whole Slade School, is very much easier than the practice of drawing and painting.115
Since Chesterton had come to University College principally in order to study art at the Slade School, it is ironic that he ended up by actually studying English and French literature for two years and art for only one. But, of course, it was the right outcome, as his future lay in writing not painting. Looking back, Chesterton thought: There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning.’ That explains why an art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature’. The former do not want to be discursive and philosophical; because the trick they are trying to learn is at once incommunicable and practical; like playing the violin’. But the latter have plenty of time for philosophy … and it is generally a very idle philosophy’. At the time Chesterton was at the Slade it was also a very negative and even nihilistic philosophy’. But, although he never accepted it altogether, it threw a shadow over my mind and made me feel that the most profitable and worthy ideas were, as it were, on the defensive’. As one of the ‘very idle’, he knew only too well how ‘very idle’ a place such an institution can be. The dominant school of art at the time was the Impressionism of Whistler, which had ‘a spiritual significance’ in that it had a connection with the scepticism of the age: I mean that it illustrated scepticism in the sense of subjectivism. Its principle was that if all that could be seen of a cow was a white line and a purple shadow, we should only render the line and the shadow; in a sense we should only believe in the line and the shadow, rather than in the cow.’ Such a theory ‘naturally lends itself to the metaphysical suggestion that things only exist as we perceive them, or that things do not exist at all’, for the philosophy of Impressionism is necessarily close to the philosophy of illusion’. It certainly tended to contribute, however indirectly, to a certain mood of unreality and sterile desolation that settled at this time upon’ the young Chesterton. Looking back, it was surprising to Chesterton how at that youthful age he had been able so quickly to think his way back to thought itself. It is a very dreadful thing to do; for it may lead to thinking that there is nothing but thought.’ He
did not very clearly distinguish between dreaming and waking; not only as a mood but as a metaphysical doubt, I felt as if everything might be a dream. It was as if I had myself projected the universe from within, with its trees and stars; and that is so near to the notion of being God that it is manifestly even nearer to going mad.
But, far from being mad in any medical sense, he ‘was simply carrying the scepticism of my time as far as it would go’. He had outplayed the sceptics at their own game, so that, when ‘dull atheists came and explained to me that there was nothing but matter, I listened with a sort of calm horror of detachment, suspecting that there was nothing but mind’. As a result, he had ‘always felt that there was something thin and third-rate about materialists and materialism ever since. The atheist told me so pompously that he did not believe there was any God; and there were moments when I did not even believe there was any atheist.’116
But even intellectual scepticism was not as bad as the moral scepticism of the Decadents of the fin de siècle, chief among them Oscar Wilde. Chesterton, however, surprisingly places very little blame on them in contrast to the Impressionists in the Autobiography. He tells us: ‘There is something truly menacing in the thought of how quickly I could imagine the maddest, when I had never committed the mildest crime.’ But he then merely remarks: ‘Something may have been due to the atmosphere of the Decadents, and their perpetual hints of the luxurious horrors of paganism; but I am not disposed to dwell much on that defence; I suspect I manufactured most of my morbidities for myself.’ In spite of having reached a condition of moral anarchy’, he pointedly adds that he had never felt the faintest temptation to the particular madness of Wilde’, referring to Wilde’s homosexuality, even though he could at this time imagine the worst and wildest disproportions and distortions of more normal passion’, overpowered and oppressed with a sort of congestion of imagination’ as he was. He had an overpowering impulse to record or draw horrible ideas and images; plunging in deeper and deeper as in a blind spiritual suicide’.117 Part of the crisis was probably due to the fact that ‘he was going through an unusually late puberty … his voice had barely broken’, so that he was experiencing the kind of sexual awareness that would normally have come much earlier at school.118 Contemporary ideas of the relativity of evil or the unreality of sin’ barely occurred to him: for he had ‘dug quite low enough to discover the devil; and even in some dim way to recognise the devil’. As a result, when he eventually emerged as what was called an Optimist, it was because I was one of the few people in that world of diabolism who really believed in devils’.119
Chesterton does not mention in the Autobiography his encounter with a real diabolist, which clearly affected him very powerfully, a failure that suggests that in retrospect he underestimated the influence of the Decadent atmosphere of the 1890s on his mood and exaggerated the effects of adolescence aggravated by idleness and lack of purpose in his studies. In fact, in 1907, only little more than a decade later when the memory of the event and of the time was much fresher in his mind than at the end of his life, he wrote an account of this encounter in an article for the Daily News called The Diabolist’. And here he makes it very clear that his experience of moral evil was by no means uninfluenced by others. What he makes clear, unlike in the Autobiography, is that his own idleness at the Slade threw him into the company of other idlers ‘who were very different from myself, and who were idle for reasons very different from mine’. Chesterton was idle not merely because he was drifting and dabbling in various things, but because he was very much occupied; I was engaged about that time in discovering, to my own extreme and lasting astonishment, that I was not an atheist’. However, there were other idlers at a loose end who were engaged in discovering’ very different things. Chesterton remembered very vividly one of these ‘blackguards’, ‘a man with a long, ironical face, and close and red hair; he was by class a gentleman, and could walk like one, but preferred, for some reason, to walk like a groom carrying two pails’. Similarly, he was different from his dirty, drunken’ cronies, with whom he could talk a foul triviality’ as easily as he would talk with me about Milton or Gothic architecture’. One dark wintry evening he and Chesterton were strolling on the long flight of steps in front of the College building where the Slade was housed. All that could be distinguished below was a bonfire in the grounds, from which ‘from time to time the red sparks went whirling past us’; above it was just possible to make out ‘the colossal façade of the Doric building, phantasmal, yet filling the sky, as if Heaven were still filled with the gigantic ghost of Paganism’. Suddenly, his companion asked Chesterton why he was becoming ‘orthodox’. Because, Chesterton replied:
‘I have come, rightly or wrongly, after stretching my brain till it bursts, to the old belief that heresy is worse even than sin. An error is more menacing than a crime, for an error begets crimes.’ ‘You mean dangerous to morality,’ he said in a voice of wonderful gentleness. ‘I expect you are right. But why do you care about morality?’
He had thrust his head forward into the light of the bonfire, ‘so that he looked like a fiend staring down into the flaming pit’. Chesterton had the ‘sense of being tempted in the wilderness’. As some more sparks flew past, he asked his companion, ‘Aren’t those sparks splendid?’ If his companion would grant that, as he did, then Chesterton declared tha
t he could ‘deduce Christian morality’ from them. He himself had once thought that ‘one’s pleasure in a flying spark was a thing that would come and go with the spark’. Now he knew that the pleasure in fact depended on the humble gratitude that things existed at all. With a horrible fairness of the intellect that made me despair of his soul’, the diabolist freely admitted that religion produced humility and humility joy: ‘But,’ he countered, ‘shall I not find in evil a life of its own? Granted that for every woman I ruin one of those red sparks will go out; will not the expanding pleasure of ruin …’. ‘Do you not see that fire?’ Chesterton interrupted, ‘If we had a real fighting democracy, some one would burn you in it; like the devil-worshipper that you are.’ In his ‘tired, fair way’, the diabolist concluded the exchange: ‘Perhaps. Only what you call evil I call good.’ He descended the steps alone, ‘and I felt as if I wanted the steps swept and cleaned’. Following him later into the building to collect his hat that hung in a low, dark passage’, Chesterton heard him uttering the unforgettable words to one of the vilest of his associates’: ‘I tell you I have done everything else. If I do that I shan’t know the difference between right and wrong.’ Chesterton ‘rushed out without daring to pause; and as I passed the fire I did not know whether it was hell or the furious love of God.’120
In his Autobiography Chesterton explains how he had come to his ‘orthodox’ position. After having been for some time in ‘the darkest depths of the contemporary pessimism’, he had ‘a strong inward impulse to revolt; to dislodge this incubus or throw off this nightmare’. And he came, ‘with little help from philosophy and no real help from religion’, to invent ‘a rudimentary and makeshift mystical theory of my own’, namely, that ‘even mere existence … was extraordinary enough to be exciting. Anything was magnificent compared with nothing.’ For this idea of fundamental gratitude he was to some extent indebted to such writers as Whitman, Browning, and Stevenson, even though he had his own inchoate way of understanding that no man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything’. Religion and art were meant ‘to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy’. When, then, he began to write, he was filled with a ‘fiery’ determination ‘to write against the Decadents and the Pessimists who ruled the culture of the age’. He mentions as an example his poem ‘By the Babe Unborn’ (in The Wild Knight), ‘which imagined the uncreated creature crying out for existence and promising every virtue if he might only have the experience of life. Another conceived the scoffer as begging God to give him eyes and lips and a tongue that he might mock the giver of them; a more angry version of the same fancy.’ He also thought of the idea that would become the theme of his novel Manalive.121