by Ian Ker
Chesterton’s gratitude for life itself included a special gratitude for friendship. Among his notebooks that survive, which contain both drawings and stories (finished and unfinished),122 there is one in particular that dates from 1894 to 1896,123 that is a kind of record of Chesterton’s emerging philosophy of life, and that for convenience may be referred to as the Notebook’. There in An Idyll’ he writes:
Tea is made; the red fogs shut round the house but the gas burns.
I wish I had at this moment round the table
A company of fine people.
Two of them are at Oxford and one in Scotland and two at other places.
But I wish they would all walk in now, for the tea is made.124
To his great friend Bentley he wrote while on holiday in North Berwick, presumably in the summer of 1894:
Inwardly speaking, I have had a funny time. A meaningless fit of depression, taking the form of certain absurd psychological worries, came upon me, and instead of dismissing it and talking to people, I had it out and went very far into the abysses, indeed. The result was that I found that things, when examined, necessarily spelt such a mystically satisfactory state of mind, that without getting back to earth, I saw lots that made me certain it is all right. The vision is fading into common day now, and I am glad. The frame of mind was the reverse of gloomy, but it would not do for long. It is embarrassing, talking with God face to face, as a man speaketh to his friend.
In another letter he wrote: A cosmos one day being rebuked by a pessimist, replied, “How can you, who revile me, consent to speak by my machinery? Permit me to reduce you to nothingness and then we will discuss the matter.” Moral. You should not look a gift universe in the mouth.’125 In the Notebook he noted charmingly: ‘Existence is the deepest fact we can think of | And it is such a nice fact.’126
Lucian Oldershaw remembered reading Walt Whitman to Chesterton in his bedroom: ‘The séance lasted from two to three hours, and we were intoxicated with the excitement of the discovery.’127 And Cecil Chesterton testified to the ‘profound and decisive’ influence of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass on his brother:
The effect … was electric. They [the poems] seemed to sum up the aspirations of his own youth. They gave him a faith to hold to, and a gospel to preach. He set himself to proclaim ‘the whole divine democracy of things,’ as he calls it in the Wild Knight. He idealized the remnant of the J.D.C. into the Mystical City of Friends. He embraced passionately the three great articles of Whitman’s faith, the ultimate goodness of all things implying the acceptance of the basest and meanest no less than the noblest in life, the equality and solidarity of men, and the redemption of the world by comradeship. You will find Whitman’s influence everywhere present in his earlier work … 128
The idea of the ‘equality and solidarity of men’ is reflected in a letter Chesterton wrote to Bentley while on holiday in Scotland, in which he rejoices in the absence of ‘the cursed class feeling’.129 Above all, Whitman was a salutary antidote to the Decadents. In a novel he wrote probably either in late 1893 or early 1894, which was unpublished during his lifetime, Basil Howe: A Story of Young Love,130 his hero defended ‘the egalitarian vigour of the modern world against the aesthetic distaste of a young poet’ in true Whitmanian fashion.131 Writing again, apparently in the same summer of 1894, to Bentley from Florence, Chesterton declares that Whitman, had he been an architect, would have built a tower like that of Giotto in the Piazza del Duomo, with its series of bas-reliefs celebrating the achievements of man: It is religion in the grandest sense, but there is not a shred of doctrine (even the Fall is omitted) about the history in stone.’ Delighted to find that ‘the great fresco’ in Santa Maria Novella describing the communion of saints contained not only Plato and Cicero but best of all, Arius’, he exclaimed ‘“Heretico!” (a word of impromptu manufacture)’ to the guide, who nodded, smiled and was positively radiant with the latitudinarianism of the old Italian painter’. Chesterton’s own reflection, which would have greatly embarrassed him later, was: ‘It was interesting for it was a fresh proof that even the early Church united had a period of thought and tolerance before the dark ages closed round it.’132
Gratitude for existence and life implied gratitude to someone, and it seems from Chesterton’s Notebook that his new-found ‘orthodoxy’ at first simply meant that Chesterton reverted to the Unitarian theism of the Revd Stopford Brooke. The emphasis is on the humanity of Christ, the Son of Man, who is the perfect human being, but who is only the Son of God in the sense that every man is. But a late entry towards the end of 1896 shows a distinct development away from this religion of humanity to a more orthodox Christianity. It is a brief but striking poem entitled ‘Parables’:
There was a man who dwelt in the east centuries ago,
And now I cannot look at a sheep or a sparrow,
A lily or a cornfield, a raven or a sunset,
A vineyard or a mountain, without thinking of him;
If this be not to be divine, what is it?133
It was in the autumn of 1896 that Chesterton also first met his future wife, who was a Christian.
2
Publishing and Engagement
1
ACCORDING to Chesterton’s account in the Autobiography, it was Ernest Hodder Williams, a fellow student and friend at University College, whose family ran the publishing house of Hodder & Stoughton, who was responsible for his change of intended career from art to literature. Their literary conversations following Professor Ker’s lectures persuaded Williams that Chesterton could write, a delusion which he retained to the day of his death’. As a result and in the light of his art studies, Williams gave him some books on art to review for the Bookman, ‘the famous organ of his firm and family’. Having ‘entirely failed to learn how to draw or paint’ at the Slade, he tossed off easily enough some criticisms of the weaker points of Rubens or the misdirected talents of Tintoretto’. He had found his métier: ‘I had discovered the easiest of all professions; which I have pursued ever since.’ What struck Chesterton as he looked back was his ‘extraordinary luck’. It was particularly extraordinary that ‘so unbusinesslike a person should have so businesslike a friend’. And it was also ‘outrageously unjust that a man should succeed in becoming a journalist merely by failing to become an artist’.1 In actual fact, it was not until December 1899 that a review of a book on Velasquez and Poussin appeared, but without his name, in the Bookman. But it was not his first publication,2 nor his first review, which appeared in the Academy on 22 June 1895, an unsigned review of a Ruskin reader.
On the eve of his twenty-first birthday in May 1895, Chesterton had written to tell Bentley that he had been asked to write for the Academy. He described his interview with the ‘fidgety’ editor, a Mr Cotton, ‘who runs round the table while he talks with you. When he agrees with you he shuts his eyes tight and shakes his head. When he means anything rather seriously he ends up with a loud nervous laugh.’ Chesterton had sent him a review of a Ruskin anthology, which Cotton read in his presence, and then delivered himself with astonishing rapidity to the following effect: “This is very good: you’ve got something to say: Oh, yes: this is worth saying …”’. Cotton asked him to ‘make it a little longer and then send it in’. Cotton also offered him a book of prose by Robert Bridges to review. The two reviews appeared unsigned among the shorter, unsigned reviews in the June and October issues.3 Chesterton’s journalistic career had begun. And Cotton was his ‘first taskmaster’. He was ‘tired of writing about what [he] liked’. ‘Well,’ he was told, ‘you’ll have no reason to complain of that in journalism’.4
When he later looked back on ‘these first stages’ in his career, Chesterton wondered at the ‘element of luck, and even of accident’. For ‘these opportunities were merely things that happened to me’. It was not lack of ambition:
The essential reason was that my eyes were turned inwards rather than outwards … I was still oppressed with the metaphysical nightmare of negations about mind
and matter, with the morbid imagery of evil, with the burden of my own mysterious brain and body; but by this time I was in revolt against them; and trying to construct a healthier conception of cosmic life, even if it were one that should err on the side of health. I even called myself an optimist, because I was so horribly near to being a pessimist.5
Obviously, these small commissions—and contributors to the Academy were not even paid—could not support Chesterton. And so, after leaving University College in the summer of 1895, without a degree, he got a job at Redway’s, a publisher of occult literature, possibly on the suggestion and even with the help of Williams.6 The office was near the British Museum. He told Bentley that he was beastly busy, but there is something exciting about it’. For he would much rather be busy in a varied, mixed up way, with half a hundred things to attend to, than with one blank day of monotonous “study” before me’. He was writing late at night after working during the evening on the revision of his story A Picture of Tuesday’ that would be published in the Slade’s new Quarto journal.7 And he contrasted this with the varied day’s work:
there is no work so tiring as writing: that is, not for fun, but for publication. Other works [sic] has a repetition, a machinery, a reflex action about it somewhere, but to be on the stretch inventing things, making them out of nothing, making them as good as you can for a matter of four hours leaves me more inclined to lie down and read Dickens than I ever feel after nine hours ramp at Redway’s.
He had two jobs at Redway’s: reading manuscripts sent for publication and sending out review copies of published books.8 He had begun work at Redway’s at the end of September 1895 and remained there for just over a year, before moving to the much more prestigious publishing house of Fisher Unwin at 11 Paternoster Buildings at the end of October 1896.9
Here he was involved in editing books as well as reviewing manuscripts, some of which required expert knowledge he did not possess—but the more I see of the publishing world, the more I come to the conclusion that I know next to nothing, but that the vast mass of literary people know less’. One of the books he had to edit was a travel book by a sea captain whose ship was attacked off the New Guinea coast by ‘shoals of canoes full of myriads of cannibals of a race who file their teeth to look like the teeth of dogs, and hang weights in their ears till the ears hang like dogs’ ears, on the shoulder’. The captain had escaped, but some of his men were left dead on the shore: All night long he heard the horrible noise of the banqueting gongs and saw the huge fires that told his friends were being eaten.’ Chesterton’s job was to translate ‘the honest captain into English grammar, a thing which appals him much more than Papuan savages’, and that meant a good deal of rewriting where relatives and dependent sentences have been lost past recovery’. Then there was a book of Chinese history for which he had to find illustrations—but ‘I know no more of China than the man in the moon (less, for he has seen it, at any rate)’. He hoped that he would become so knowledgeable that people will be looking behind for my pig-tail’.10
Chesterton also had a practical chore to perform at Fisher Unwin. Having written up publicity blurbs for books the firm was publishing, he had to duplicate them on a cyclostyle. This was the hardest of his jobs, from which he would emerge covered with ink to the vast amusement of the rest of the office. Always untidily dressed, he would invariably carry a sword-stick, from which the rapier would slip and clatter down the steps outside the office as he fiddled with the handle, adding to the mirth of his colleagues within.11
At the same time Chesterton was busy with his own writing. He was polishing up a collection of nonsense verse, Greybeards at Play, to send to a publisher; he was also putting together a collection of his serious verse that would become The Wild Knight. There was also a novel that has become too much a part of me not to be constantly having chapters written—or rather growing out of the others’.12
In 1893 Chesterton had enthusiastically embraced the Socialism of Robert Blatchford’s Merrie England, which he saw as essentially Christian: ‘what the old churches felt instinctively to be the essential conflict between riches and the soul.’13 But now he rejected the idea that a Christian must be a Socialist: no reasonable person could confuse the tone of the Sermon on the Mount with that of contemporary Socialist literature. The rich young man of the gospel asked ‘What shall I do?’—whereas the modern rich young man who becomes a Socialist asks not what he should do but What will society do?’ Humility was the exciting paradox of Christianity’, but its absence was especially notable among Socialists, even if they were Christian Socialists. Then there was Christian joy, or what Chesterton calls ‘cheerfulness’, and its absence was strangely conspicuous among Socialists, who believed so optimistically in the inevitability of social progress; but it was not so surprising when one considered the difference again between predicting, however confidently, ‘ultimate social perfection’ and actually having ‘something to do’ that makes a human being ‘cheerful’, whose nature demands not an ultimate idea’ but ‘an immediate way of making for it’.14 Whether or not Chesterton had yet met his future wife, ‘Who brought the Cross to me’ (according to the dedication in The Ballad of the White Horse15), when he wrote any of this, we do not know.16
Not long before meeting her, he had written whimsically in a notebook ‘begun in 1894 and used at intervals for the next four or five years, in which [he] wrote down his philosophy step by step as he came to discover it’:17
About Her whom I have not yet met
I wonder what she is doing
Now, at this sunset hour,
Working perhaps, or playing, worrying or laughing,
Is she making tea, or singing a song, or writing,
or praying, or reading?
Is she thoughtful, as I am thoughtful?
Is she looking now out of the window
As I am looking out of the window?
A little later in this notebook, however, he wrote: ‘You are a very stupid person, j I don’t believe you have the least idea how nice you are.’ The lines are entitled ‘F.B.’.18 The couplet appears ten pages before ‘Parables’ in the notebook, ‘with its question “If this be not divine, what is it?”’ Was it possible to detect here the influence of ‘F.B.’?19
2
Frances Blogg was the eldest daughter of a deceased diamond merchant. She was four years older than Chesterton.20 The original Huguenot French surname ‘de Blogue’ had been unfortunately anglicized into Blogg’. The father’s early death had left the family in reduced circumstances, and the three daughters had had to find jobs. Frances herself was a secretary at the Westminster headquarters of the Parents’ National Educational Union. Chesterton first met the family in the autumn of 1896 through his friend Oldershaw, who was romantically interested in one of the three attractive daughters who was called Ethel, whom he was to marry.21 The family lived at 6 Bath Road, Bedford Park, an outer suburb of West London, to the west of Hammersmith. Bedford Park was the first garden city in the world, built in half-timbered red brick with quaintly twisted high chimneys, and set in tree-lined avenues with spacious lawns.22
Chesterton’s mother did not approve of arty-crafty Bedford Park, which was frequented by artists and writers. Besides, she had already chosen a wife for her son, the golden-tressed angel he had played with as a child, Annie Firmin, the daughter of a childhood friend of hers.23 ‘Very open air,’ according to Lawrence Solomon, not booky, but good at games and practical’. No doubt Mrs Chesterton saw her as the perfect foil to her intellectual son’s impracticality. As a married lady in Vancouver, Annie years later recalled that Chesterton’s mother never liked either his best friend Bentley or Frances. Annie herself preferred Cecil to his brother (not that she was in the least romantically interested in him either), and thought that Cecil was the favourite of both his parents, having, as she put it, more heart than the brilliant Gilbert’. No doubt, it was Chesterton’s realization of his mother’s feelings that made him tell her by letter, while sitting in the
same room (‘You may possibly think this a somewhat eccentric proceeding’), of his feelings for Frances. ‘I am going to tell you,’ he wrote, the whole of a situation in which I believe I have acted rightly, though I am not absolutely certain, and to ask for your advice on it.’ The approach could not have been more diplomatic or sensitive. He cleverly then quoted a remark of his mother’s back at her: