G. K. Chesterton:A Biography
Page 19
At the end of the novel, the two voices of Quin and Wayne are heard. Quin confesses to Wayne that what Wayne had taken so seriously was meant only as a joke; what had begun as a ‘farce’ had ended as a ‘tragedy’. In response, Wayne points out that both men had been called mad, Quin for his frivolity and Wayne for his fanaticism: ‘We are mad, because we are not two men but one man. We are mad, because we are two lobes of the same brain, and that brain has been cloven in two’. As a result, Quin has been without ‘the joy of gravity’ and Wayne deprived of ‘humour’. Although apparently the opposite of each other, in fact both men had been aiming at the same thing, the ‘poetry’ of a suburb like Notting Hill, which is ‘romantic’ because even the pillar-boxes are ‘poetic’ and because the ‘street is really more poetical than a meadow, because a street has a secret’. Quin interposes that that does not alter the fact that he had been laughing at and Wayne adoring the same thing. But Wayne’s response is that, when the two lobes of the brain come together in a balanced human being, there is ‘no real antagonism between laughter and respect, [for this] human being, the common man, whom mere geniuses like you and me can only worship like a god’. This, of course, is the voice of Chesterton insisting that seriousness implies humour and humour seriousness. Quin and Wayne are two sides of what should be one and the same coin, as was the case in a ‘healthy’ time like the Middle Ages: ‘The cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are full of blasphemous grotesques.’ But the medieval cathedral, built to the glory of and the worship of God, is not the only serious thing to have a funny side to it—nor the only thing that has a very Catholic, not to say Roman Catholic, aspect to it. For the most startling moment in the book is when the serious Wayne suddenly informs the comical Quin that the Crucifixion itself, the most serious of all things, has a more than funny side to it:
‘Crucifixion is comic. It is exquisitely diverting. It was an absurd and obscene kind of impaling reserved for people who were made to be laughed at … Peter was crucified, and crucified head downwards. What could be funnier than the idea of a respectable old Apostle upside down? … Upside down or right side up, Peter was Peter to mankind. Upside down he still hangs over Europe, and millions move and breathe only in the life of his church’.
The moral of the novel is that, if Quin had taken his joke more seriously and Wayne more humorously, then Notting Hill could have discovered a sense of local identity and pride and set an example to the other boroughs, but without its ‘patriotism’ degenerating into ‘the monstrous absurdity’ of the war and then into imperialism.40
In the same year, 1904, Chesterton also contributed a chapter called ‘The Patriotic Idea’ to England: A Nation, a collection of papers produced by the so-called Patriots’ Club, which, according to Cecil Chesterton, was his brother’s ‘own idea’ but which ‘never did anything as far as I know except to produce the… volume’.41 The book was edited by Lucian Oldershaw and published by R. Brimley Johnson. It opened with Chesterton’s essay. Chesterton begins by comparing the attack on ‘the idea of patriotism as interfering with the larger sentiment of love of humanity’ (which he connects particularly with the name of Tolstoy, ‘perhaps the greatest of living Europeans’) to the idea that ‘nobody should go to church, since God is omnipresent, and not to be found in churches’. In other words, for Chesterton the cause of patriotism is bound up with his key idea that there ‘is one thing that is vitally essential to everything which is to be intensely enjoyed or intensely admired—limitation’: ‘Whenever we look through an archway, and are stricken into delight with the magnetic clarity and completeness of the landscape beyond, we are realizing the necessity of boundaries. Whenever we put a picture in a frame, we are acting upon that primeval truth …’. And it is this ‘truth’ that is ‘the value of small nationalities’, and that underlies patriotism, itself only an example of that ‘devotion to particular things’ that is involved in the idea of limitation.42 He admits that empires look strong and nations comparatively weaker, ‘but that is merely because all things that are eternal always look weak’. He does not deny that nationalism has its dangers, but that does not mean one should resort to what he calls ‘the teetotal method’: one is more likely to drink wine temperately when wine is freely available than when it is prohibited. Because of its dangers, Islam ‘makes wine a poison’, whereas Christianity ‘makes it a sacrament’. Accordingly, ‘the right way to avoid the incidental excesses of patriotism is the same as that in the cases of sex or war—it is to know something about it’. Nor should it be any objection to nationalism that it is ‘the mother of wars’: ‘So in a sense it is, just as love and religion are. Men will always fight about the things they care for, and in many cases quite rightly.’ This was to be a regular theme of Chesterton, not only against pacifism but also against the commonly held view that religion, in particular, must be a bad thing because it leads to wars.43
Apart from Tolstoyan love of humanity as opposed to particular human beings, the other great enemy of patriotism was, of course, imperialism, which could also be termed ‘opportunist cosmopolitanism’. Chesterton contrasts the ‘Little England patriotism’ of Shakespeare with Kipling, whose writing ‘is always at its truest and most beautiful when the writer is speaking of cosmopolitanism, of the sensations of the traveller’. Kipling’s work ‘is very beautiful literature’, Chesterton acknowledges; but, whereas ‘Shakespeare’s patriotism has the joy and pain of a passionate lover; Mr Kipling’s has the gaiety and sadness of a philanderer among the nations’. The English, he argues, would not have to emigrate and colonize other countries rather than their own, except that the ‘immense and absurd estates’ of the land-owning oligarchy ‘make impossible the colonization of England’. And this state of affairs is allowed to remain because the English confuse ‘self-government and independence’ with the parliamentary system. The Boer War, as an instance of imperialism, which ‘is Asiatic’, was simply ‘a crime committed against the European virtue of nationalism’.44
5
In February 1903 Chesterton had received a letter from a Roman Catholic priest called Father John O’Connor, who at the time was a curate at St Anne’s, Keighley, Yorkshire, to say that, though he might not find him ‘quite orthodox in details’, he thanked God ‘for having gifted you with the spirituality which alone makes literature immortal’. The priest had been impressed by the poetry he had read.45 According to O’Connor, writing many years later, they met for the first time at Keighley in Yorkshire in the spring of 1904 in the house of a fellow fan of Chesterton, after which they walked together over the moor to Ilkley, where Chesterton was ‘spending a short holiday’.46 But O’Connor’s memory was at fault: he had already met Chesterton on an earlier occasion when they had taken the walk O’Connor refers to. Perhaps O’Connor confused the two events, because it was in spring 1904, when he came over by himself to Ilkley, that he met Frances for the first time. For it was in October of the same year that O’Connor first contacted him that Chesterton wrote to his Yorkshire fan to say that he was coming to lecture to the Keighley literary society in December and hoped that they might meet. ‘Certainly you may come and see me’, replied O’Connor; though ‘but a salaried minion of this establishment, I may be able to get you put up for the night’, he added, unless Chesterton had already arranged to stay with another member of the society.47 Since, according to O’Connor, they met for the first time at the house of a Herbert Hugill, ‘who was a much older Chesterton fan than I was’,48 it was presumably Hugill who was Chesterton’s host and to whose house probably selected members of the audience were invited to meet the speaker after the lecture. On 6 December 1903 O’Connor wrote to Frances to say, ‘I think I ought to tell you how I enjoyed myself with the great big boy on Thursday—Friday’. It looks, then, as if the lecture was on a Thursday evening, when Chesterton stayed the night with his host, and it was the next day that he and O’Connor ‘walked together over the moor to Ilkley, favoured’, O’Connor told Frances, ‘by the only two hours sunshi
ne in three days. It was all delightful …’. In order ‘to reward his faithful guide and willing slave’, Chesterton had then introduced the priest to a couple, called the Steinthals, who lived in Ilkley, ‘where eight hours went by like one’.49
At the end of March 1904 Chesterton was again staying with the Steinthals, but this time with Frances. The Steinthals’ house, St John’s, stood opposite the church of St Margaret’s, Ilkley, which coincidentally shared the same architect with Bedford Park. The husband was a businessman of German, possibly Jewish, descent and his wife a close friend of Frances from the days when they had worked together at the Parents’ National Educational Union.50 On 31 March Frances confided to her diary her delight to be in the country and away from London: ‘The country is wonderful and there is room to breathe.’ A few days later she met Father O’Connor for the first time and wrote down her impressions on 5 April:
Father O’Connor came over. He is delightful. So boyish, so wise, so young, so old—There is a sort of charm about him difficult to define—He uses his hands to help out his meaning very effectively and yet never suggests affectation or theatricality. It is wonderful that he should lead that quiet life of a parish priest in Keighley when he appears so dazzling.51
It may have been this April that George Holbrook Jackson, the journalist, publisher, and bibliophile, who was then living in Leeds and who ‘doubted the existence of G. K. C.’, decided, since Chesterton was ‘in the locality on holiday… to verify his existence just as one might go to the Arctic regions to verify the existence of the North Pole or the Northwest passage’. A meeting had apparently been arranged, so the explorer was not unexpected.
It was April and raining. I trudged through the damp furze and heather up to the house only to find that the object of my pilgrimage had disappeared without leaving a trace behind him. No alarm was felt, as that was one of his habits. Sometimes he would go down to the railway station, and taking a ticket to any place that had a name which appealed to him, vanish into the unknown, making his way home on foot or wheel as fancy or circumstances directed.
Taken upstairs by Frances, Holbrook Jackson ‘peered into the wild’ of the moor, ‘half hoping that I should first behold the great form of Gilbert Chesterton looming over the bare brow of the wold, silhouetted against the grey sky…’. In the event, Chesterton’s return was rather an anti-climax: ‘For quite close to the house we espied him, hatless and negligently clad in a Norfolk suit of homespun, leaning in the rain against a budding tree, absorbed in the pages of a little red book.’52
Father O’Connor was not only to become a close friend of both the Chestertons but also the inspiration of the Father Brown detective stories. Not that Father Brown was modelled on O’Connor. As his creator explains in the Autobiography, a writer may take ‘a hint from a human being’.
But he will not hesitate to alter the human being, especially in externals, because he is not thinking of a portrait but of a picture. In Father Brown, it was the chief feature to be featureless. The point of him was to appear pointless; and one might say that his conspicuous quality was not being conspicuous. His commonplace exterior was meant to contrast with his unsuspected vigilance and intelligence; and that being so, of course I made his appearance shabby and shapeless, his face round and expressionless, his manners clumsy, and so on. At the same time, I did take some of his inner intellectual qualities from my friend, Father O’Connor… who has not, as a matter of fact, any of these external qualities. He is not shabby, but rather neat; he is not clumsy, but very delicate and dexterous; he not only is but looks amusing and amused. He is a sensitive and quick-witted Irishman, with the profound irony and some of the potential irritability of his race. My Father Brown was deliberately described as a Suffolk dumpling from East Anglia. That, and the rest of his description, was a deliberate disguise for the purpose of detective fiction. But for all that, there is a very real sense in which Father O’Connor was the intellectual inspiration of these stories; and of much more important things as well.53
Chesterton then proceeds to explain how he first met Father O’Connor and how he came to give him the idea of Father Brown.
Particularly just before and after Chesterton was married, he was fated ‘to wander over many parts of England, delivering what were politely called lectures’. At a time when he had to make money where he could, Chesterton found, in those days before cinema or radio, let alone television, that there was ‘considerable appetite for such bleak entertainments, especially in the north of England, the south of Scotland and among certain active Nonconformist centres even in the suburbs of London’. Bleakness and Nonconformity reminded him of one particular experience he had had in a chapel in ‘the last featureless wastes to the north of London’. Although he had to make his way there through ‘a blinding snow-storm’, this was no reason why any reader should ‘weep prematurely over my experience, or imagine that I am pitying myself or asking for pity’. That was no ground for sympathy: on the contrary, he ‘enjoyed’ it ‘very much; because I like snowstorms. In fact, I like practically all kinds of English weather except that particular sort of weather that is called “a glorious day”.’ After nearly two hours in the elements walking or on the top of a bus, he arrived looking like ‘the Snow Man that children make in the garden’. But now something happened that did call for his readers’ pity. After lecturing ‘God knows on what’, he was about to make his journey home
when the worthy minister of the chapel, robustly rubbing his hands and slapping his chest and beaming at me with the rich hospitality of Father Christmas, said in a deep, hearty, fruity voice, ‘Come, Mr. Chesterton; it’s a bitter cold night! Do let me offer you an Oswego biscuit.’ I assured him gratefully that I felt no such craving; it was very kind of him, for there was no possible reason, in the circumstances, for his offering me any refreshment at all. But I confess that the thought of returning through the snow and the freezing blast, for two more hours, with the glow of that one biscuit within me, and the Oswego fire running through all my veins, struck me as a little out of proportion. I fear it was with considerable pleasure that I crossed the road and entered a public-house immediately opposite the chapel, under the very eyes of the Nonconformist Conscience.54
Not that Chesterton had any difficulty in confronting head-on the Nonconformist Conscience. In September 1905, for example, he was to find himself lecturing one Sunday afternoon in a large circus tent, to the noise of the animals enjoying their Sunday rest, on ‘Religion and Liberty’. Drunkenness was, he acknowledged, an evil, but that was because
the most dangerous things and the chief evils of the world are spiritual things. It is only because drink is very nearly a spiritual pleasure that it is so highly dangerous…. If materialism were true, people would be as intemperate over ham sandwiches and pork pies as they are now over drink. It is because man has a soul that he drinks and because animals have no souls that they do not drink.55
Un-spiritual Oswego biscuits were all right for animals but not for human beings.
Recalling those ‘distant days of vagabond lecturing’, Chesterton tells against himself the famous story of how he telegraphed his wife in London: ‘Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?’ True or not, he admits the tale sounded probable enough.56 Invitations came not only from Nonconformists. The ‘immeasurable annoyance’ with which Chesterton had to decline an invitation to ‘sup’ with the publisher John Lane and his wife was ‘increased by a bitterly ironical fact’ that he was ‘engaged … to lecture to a body bearing the wonderful name of THE PECKHAM ETHICAL FELLOWSHIP. Isn’t it too beautiful? I’m sure they come out of a book. I only wish they’d go back into it.’57