G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  About eight years ago, you made a remark.—This may show you that if we ‘jeer’ at your remarks, we remember them. The remark applied to the hypothetical young lady with whom I should fall in love and took the form of saying ‘If she is good, I shan’t mind who she is.’ I don’t know how many times I have said that over to myself in the last two or three days in which I have decided on this letter.

  He was not married, he assured her, or even engaged. But he was sure that his mother realized that he did not go to Bedford Park every Sunday ‘for the sake of the scenery’. At first, he had simply enjoyed ‘a very intimate, but quite breezy and Platonic friendship with Frances Blogg, reading, talking and enjoying life together, having great sympathies on all subjects’. But then he made ‘the thrilling, but painfully responsible discovery that Platonism, on my side, had not the field by any means to itself’. ‘That is how we stand now,’ he concluded. Noone [sic]knows, except her family and yourself.’ Frances herself had asked him to tell his mother soon’: Tell her I am not so silly as to expect her to think me good enough, but really I will try to be.’ This, from Chesterton’s point of view, was an ‘aspiration which …naturally provokes a smile’. At this his mother came up to him: ‘Here you give me a cup of cocoa. Thank you.’24 It is ironic that at this most important moment of his life Chesterton should have been offered cocoa, a drink that he was much later famously to revile.

  In assuring his mother that they were not yet engaged, Chesterton presumably meant that their engagement had not been publicly announced and formalized by the wearing of engagement rings, since that could not be done until their parents had been told. Chesterton’s admission to his mother that he was not absolutely certain’ that he had ‘acted rightly’ presumably refers to his getting informally engaged so quickly; he does not seem to have had any doubt about his love for Frances or hers for him, but perhaps he means to acknowledge that he should possibly have talked to his mother before committing himself. As for his prospective mother-in-law, his first meeting with her after his engagement was apparently marked with great embarrassment, so, looking for a topic for conversation, she asked him how he liked the new wallpaper. He went straight over to the wall, gazed at it and drew a piece of chalk out of his pocket, with which he proceeded to draw a portrait of Frances on the new wallpaper. Mrs Blogg said nothing but had the drawing wiped off. It seems that she thought that the engagement should be kept secret, since it looked as if they would not be in a financial position to marry for a long time. But such a secret could hardly be kept—especially when Chesterton would visit Frances’s office most mornings before going to work in order to write a message for her on her blotting-paper. In a letter thanking her for sending him some pressed flowers in the Victorian fashion, including a forget-me-not, he wrote: I must answer with proper caution. I will try not to forget you.’ As for keeping their engagement secret, he assured her that she and her mother were ‘the only guardians of reticence’ that she needed to appease or satisfy’:

  For my part, it is no exaggeration but the simple fact that if any fine morning you feel inclined to send the news on a postcard to Queen Victoria, I should merely be pleased at the incident. I want everybody to know: I want even the Siberian standing beside his dog-sledge to have something to rejoice his soul: I hunger for the congratulations of the Tasmanian blacks. Always tell anyone you feel inclined to and the instant you feel inclined to. For the sake of your Mother’s anxieties I cheerfully put off the time when I can appear in my regalia, but it is rather rough to be timidly appealed to as if I were the mystery-mongering blackguard adventurer of ‘the secret engagement’, despised even by the Editress of ‘Home Chats’.25

  In his Autobiography Chesterton tells us that he had had a distant vision of Bedford Park before being introduced to the Blogg family. In the years after he had left school he had been accustomed to walk for miles in London. Before the advent of motor traffic it was possible to walk for most of the way from Kensington to St Paul’s Cathedral, for instance, in the middle of the road. It was on one of these walks that he ‘first saw as from afar, the first fantastic signal of something new and as yet far from fashionable; something like a new purple patch on that grey stretch of streets’. He had been wandering towards Kew through Hammersmith, when he ‘turned for some reason, or more likely without a reason, into a side street and straggled across the dusty turf through which ran a railway, and across the railway one of those disproportionately high bridges which bestride such narrow railway-lines like stilts’. Again, for no particular reason, he climbed up to this bridge: ‘it was evening and I think it was then I saw in the distance of that grey landscape, like a ragged red cloud of sunset, the queer artificial village of Bedford Park.’ Its ‘manufactured quaintness’ was very suitable for ‘a colony for artists who were almost aliens; a refuge for persecuted poets and painters hiding in their red-brick catacombs or dying behind their red-brick barricades, when the world should conquer Bedford Park’.26

  The most famous inhabitant of Bedford Park was the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, ‘perhaps the best talker I ever met, except his old father who alas will talk no more in this earthly tavern, though I hope he is still talking in Paradise’. The older Yeats was the painter John Butler Yeats, who owned the house in Bedford Park where Chesterton got to know ‘the family more a less as a whole’, not only the poet but his brother Jack and sisters Lily and Lolly, ‘names cast backwards and forwards in a unique sort of comedy of Irish wit, gossip, satire, family quarrels and family pride’. The father had that rare but very real thing, entirely spontaneous style’: ‘That style, or swift construction of a complicated sentence, was the sign of a lucidity now largely lost.’ It was to be found in ‘the most spontaneous explosions of Dr Johnson’; but since then ‘some muddled notion’ had ‘arisen that talking in that complete style is artificial; merely because the man knows what he means and means to say it’. The idea that there was something artificial about eloquence was a prejudice that Chesterton often attacked: I know not from what nonsense world the notion first came; that there is some connection between being sincere and being semi-articulate.’ The poet son ‘affected’ Chesterton strongly, but in two opposite ways; like the positive and negative poles of a magnet’. He stood out against the drab background of dreary modern materialism’ that he attacked with his ‘concrete mysticism’. Chesterton approved of Yeats’s belief in fairies, whose existence Yeats defended with an argument that Chesterton never forgot and that was bound to appeal to him—namely, that it was not abnormal men like artists, but normal men like peasants’, who witnessed to their existence. But Yeats’s belief in theosophy, on the other hand, he disliked’, even at a time when he himself was, he says with more than a little exaggeration, ‘almost entirely Pagan and Pantheist’. But perhaps it was not so much theosophy that Chesterton disliked as theosophists who were elitists who had no interest in a common man like the peasant:

  they had shiny pebbly eyes and patient smiles. Their patience mostly consisted of waiting for others to rise to the spiritual plane where they themselves already stood … they never seemed to hope that they might evolve and reach the plane where their honest green-grocer already stood. They never wanted to hitch their own lumbering wagon to a soaring cabman; or see the soul of their charwoman like a star beckon to the spheres where the immortals are.

  However, Yeats himself was very different from the usual theosophical lady who had Mrs Besant as her ‘special spiritual prophetess’, ‘a dignified, ladylike, sincere, idealistic egoist’. Instead, Yeats ‘sought out Madam Blavatsky, who was a coarse, witty, vigorous, scandalous old scally-wag; and I admire his taste’. But Chesterton did think that this particular Oriental twist led’ Yeats ‘a dance, when he followed the fakirs and not the fairies’. Chesterton thought that Yeats had been ‘bewitched’ and that ‘Madam Blavatsky was the witch’. On the other hand, Yeats was not deceived’ and ‘taken in by the theosophical smile; or all that shining, or rather shiny, surface of optimism. He, having a mo
re penetrating mind, had already penetrated to the essential pessimism that lies behind the Asiatic placidity; and it is arguable that the pessimism was not so depressing as the optimism.’ Anyway, Chesterton found himself in ‘this odd double attitude towards the poet, agreeing with him about the fairytales on which most people disagreed with him, and disagreeing with him about the philosophy on which most people agreed with him’.27

  Among Bedford Park’s artistic and intellectual attractions was a debating club called the ‘I.D.K.’. It was there that Chesterton first tried crudely to expound his inchoate and half-baked philosophy’ that where there is anything there is God’; philosophically inadequate as this proposition was, at the time he would have been amazed to know how near in some ways was my Anything to the Ens of St Thomas Aquinas’. There was an awful awe of secrecy’ that was supposed to attach to the true meaning of the initials’ by which the club was named. For

  it was a strict rule of the club that its members should profess ignorance of the meaning of its name … The stranger, the mere intruder into the sacred village, would ask, ‘But what does I.D.K. mean?’—and the initiate was expected to shrug his shoulders and say, I don’t know,’ in an off hand manner; in the hope that it would not be realised that, in a seeming refusal to reply, he had in fact replied.

  Chesterton did not know whether the motto was indicative of the ‘mysticism’ and ‘Celtic twilight’ of the school of Yeats or ‘the materialistic midnight’ of religious agnosticism—‘both points of view were, of course, present; and I think they pretty well divided that intellectual world between them’. As for himself, he preferred the former.28 Frances Blogg was one of its founders, her sister Ethel the secretary, and her brother Knollys the treasurer. Chesterton wrote to ‘Miss Blogg’ asking if he might bring his friend Bentley to a meeting, in accordance with the rules of the I. D. K. ‘(which I repeat nightly before laying my head on my pillow) [where] it is written that any member may bring a visitor to a meeting provided he does not bring same visitor twice during the same Term (vol. CCXXXIX. Fol 2299183512.sect 676 ab)’. If Miss Blogg had no objection, he would bring Bentley to the next debate. However, the rules also indicated ‘the desirability of letting the hostess know of the contemplated invasion. This seems slightly reasonable. But though I love, reverence and adore the hostess I do not know who she is.’ Perhaps Miss Blogg would kindly tell him her name, or alternatively tell her herself if the notification ought to come from her.29

  In his Autobiography Chesterton recalled how one day Ethel Blogg came home to announce with delight that Yeats had cast her horoscope, or performed some such occult rite, and told her that she was especially under the influence of the moon. I happened to mention this to a sister of the secretary, who had only just returned to the family circle, and she told me in the most normal and unpretentious tone that she hated the moon.’ The sister was Frances. Apart from hating the moon and

  all those natural forces that seemed to be sterile or aimless; she disliked loud winds that seemed to be going nowhere; she did not care much for the sea, a spectacle of which I was very fond; and by the same instinct she was up against the moon, which she said looked like an imbecile. On the other hand, she had a sort of hungry appetite for all the fruitful things like fields and gardens and anything connected with production; about which she was quite practical.

  However, not only did this strange young lady ‘practise gardening’—but she ‘actually practised a religion’. Professing a religion, especially an oriental religion, was not uncommon in the ‘fussy culture’ of Bedford Park—‘but that anybody could regard religion as a practical thing like gardening was something quite new to me and, to her neighbours, new and incomprehensible’. Apparently, Frances had been sent to an Anglo-Catholic convent school, where she had imbibed high Anglicanism. She struck Chesterton as ‘a queer card’. He remembered the ‘green velvet dress barred with grey fur’ she wore; he would have told her it was ‘artistic’—‘but that she hated all the talk about art’. Again, Chesterton noticed that she had an attractive face, which I should have called elvish’—‘but that she hated all the talk about elves’.30 In ‘An Encyclopaedia of Bloggs’, written on sheets of foolscap when he first got to know the family, the entry for Frances (all the other entries apart from the one on Ethel were never filled in), is not inconsistent with Chesterton’s later memory:

  A harmony in green and brown. There is some gold somewhere in it, but cannot be located on examination. Probably the golden crown. Harp not yet arrived. Physically there is not quite enough of her to carry all that temperament: she looks slight, fiery and wasted, with a face which would be a Burne Jones if it were not brave: it has the asceticism of cheerfulness, not the easier asceticism of melancholy. Devouring appetite for sensations; very fond of the Bible; very fond of dancing. When she is enjoying herself thoroughly, one has a sense that it would be well for her to go to sleep for a hundred years. It would be jolly fine for some prince too.

  One of the few girls, with all their spiritual superiority, who have souls, i.e. intellect and emotion pulling the same way. That all women are supernatural is obvious to the meanest capacity. But she is especially so. She dresses nicely and looks all green and furry.31

  Cecil Chesterton’s widow remembered her not dissimilarly if more prosaically: ‘She had a queer elusive attraction … with her pale face, quite devoid of powder or the least tinge of make-up, and curiously vague eyes. She looked charming in blue or green, but she rarely wore those shades, and usually affected dim browns or greys.’32

  What really astonished Chesterton about this strange girl was not so much that she hated the culture of Bedford Park, but that she was entirely unaffected’ by it. To her the idea of being ‘under the influence’ of somebody like Yeats was incomprehensible. It was not that she did not love literature; she did, and her favourite writer was none other than Stevenson, who had had a part in bringing Chesterton back to sanity. But, unlike the other inhabitants of Bedford Park, she did not therefore regard Stevenson as her teacher or master—indeed, if he had walked into the room and explained his personal doubts about personal immortality, she would have regretted that he should be wrong upon the point; but would otherwise have been utterly unaffected’.33 When she and the hugely well-read Chesterton became engaged, it was only natural that she would want to extend her reading under the tutelage of her fiancé. ‘So glad’, he wrote to her, ‘you want to read that fascinating old liar, the Father of History [Herodotus]. I don’t know why he was called the Father of History, except that he didn’t pay much attention to it: may be said to have cut it off with a shilling.’34 Meredith the novelist, on the other hand, she had almost certainly read and could respond to her fiancé’s view that he was the only writer who

  completely realised my profoundest conviction that the discreditable secrets of human nature seemed hugely discreditable mainly because they are secrets; weaknesses and contradictions which do not fit into the severe classical outline of our external theory of ourselves. We feel them grinning in the dark, as Robinson Crusoe saw with terror the eyes gleaming in the dark cave. But it was only his goat …35

  Frances like any London commuter had to spend a good deal of her day travelling, and it struck Chesterton that the worst of work nowadays is what happens to people when they cease working; the racketing of trains and trams and the slow return to remote homes’. One day ‘through sheer fatigue’ Frances left her parasol in a station waiting-room; it was a fortunate loss, for it provided her shy admirer with a rare opportunity. Walking home that night from Bedford Park to his parents’ home in Kensington where he was still living, Chesterton chanced to notice the station in question—‘and I committed my first and last crime which was burglary, and very enjoyable’. The station was apparently closed, and so he climbed up the grass embankment and then crawled under the platform on to the line, whence he could climb onto the platform and recover the missing parasol: ‘as I looked back up the tilt of turf grey in the moonshine, like unear
thly lunar grasses, I did not share the lady’s impiety to the patroness of lunatics.’ After that momentous night of chivalrous devotion, their next most important meeting was not under the sign of the moon but of the sun’.36

  Frances later often used to tell him that, ‘if the sun had not been shining to her complete satisfaction on that day, the issue might have been quite different’.37 It was fortunate, then, for the suitor that it was the kind of glorious’ day that he did not enjoy, preferring that grey weather’, which, his ungrateful countrymen’ complained, was quite as common in summer’ as in winter and appeared to last all the year round’.38 In the Autobiography, after quoting from an essay on bridges by Belloc, where he says that the bridge that least frightens you is the bridge in St James’s Park, Chesterton confesses: I admit that I crossed that bridge in undeserved safety; and perhaps I was affected by my early romantic vision of the bridge leading to the princess’s tower. But I can assure my friend the author that the bridge in St James’s Park can frighten you a good deal.’39 On the evening after Chesterton had proposed to Frances in the summer of 189840 on the bridge in St James’s Park and had been accepted, he wrote what seems to have been his first letter to her. He had, he informed her, been recently appointed to the post of Emperor of Creation’. And he had ‘discovered that my existence until today has been, in truth past [sic] in the most intense gloom’. Never, he assured her, had he known before what happiness was: Happiness is not at all smug: it is not peaceful or contented, as I have always been till today. Happiness brings not peace but a sword: it shakes you like rattling dice: it breaks your speech and darkens your sight. Happiness is stronger than oneself and sets its palpable foot upon one’s neck.’ Going home that evening in the bus (he was ‘pained … that it was not a winged omnibus’), for the first time since he was a small child he felt himself ‘in a kind of fierce proximity to tears’, ‘a new weird feeling’. He had also discovered that, ‘if there is such a thing as falling in love with anyone over again, I did it in St James’s Park’. There was a way of testing a man’s love: one can always tell the real love from the slight by the fact that the latter weakens at the moment of success; the former is quadrupled’. They would be seeing each other tomorrow of course’: Should you then be inclined to spurn me, pray do so. I can’t think why you don’t, but I suppose you know your own business best.’ In another love letter, probably written not long after, he turns to her beauty: