by Ian Ker
It was on one of these lecturing jaunts that Chesterton found himself in the same house as Father O’Connor. He was ‘struck by the tact and humour’ with which this ‘small man with a smooth face and a demure but elfish expression … mingled with his very Yorkshire and very Protestant company’. It was clear that he was appreciated as a ‘character’. Hitherto Chesterton had consorted with English Anglo-Catholic clergy, but now he warmed to this Irish Roman Catholic priest—although, ‘if you had told me that ten years afterwards I should be a Mormon Missionary in the Cannibal Islands, I should not have been more surprised than at the suggestion that, fully fifteen years afterwards, I should be making to him my General Confession and being received into the Church that he served’. The day after the lecture, when they walked over the moor to Ilkley, the priest stayed on with the Steinthals, to whom he introduced his new friend. The priest stayed on for lunch, tea, and dinner—and perhaps also for the night, Chesterton thought. It was there that they were usually to meet. And it was one of these meetings that led to the Father Brown stories. While out for a walk, Chesterton mentioned to O’Connor an article he was intending to write on ‘some rather sordid social questions of vice and crime’. His companion, however, thought he was ill informed, and proceeded to tell him ‘certain facts he knew about perverted practices’. Having in his own youth ‘imagined’ for himself ‘any amount of iniquity… it was a curious experience to find that this quiet and pleasant celibate had plumbed those abysses far deeper’—’I had not imagined that the world could hold such horrors.’ On returning to the house, they met a couple of Cambridge undergraduates who were on holiday. O’Connor impressed them with his wide knowledge; but one of the undergraduates could not help remarking when the priest had left the room that it was wrong to shut oneself away like that from the world and all its evil. Chesterton could hardly restrain himself from laughing out loud at this ‘colossal and crushing irony’: ‘For I knew perfectly well that, as regards all the solid Satanism which the priest knew and warred against with all his life, these two Cambridge gentlemen (luckily for them) knew about as much of real evil as two babies in the same perambulator.’ It was this incident that gave Chesterton the idea of a detective story in which the priest would be the detective who ‘should appear to know nothing and in fact know more about crime than the criminals’. But the detective priest would otherwise be very different from Father O’Connor: ‘I permitted myself the great liberty of taking my friend and knocking him about; beating his hat and umbrella shapeless, untidying his clothes, punching his intelligent countenance into a condition of pudding-faced fatuity… The disguise… was a deliberate piece of fiction, meant to bring out or accentuate the contrast that was the point of the comedy.’ Not the least of the flaws in the stories, Chesterton was aware, was ‘the general suggestion of Father Brown having nothing in particular to do, except to hang about in any household where there was likely to be a murder’. He was appropriately complimented by a ‘very charming’ Catholic lady he knew who said, ‘I am very fond of that officious little loafer.’58 The real Father O’Connor thought that it was his ‘miraculous’ attention to the practical details of life—as it seemed to the utterly absent-minded Chesterton—that had inspired the meticulously minded Father Brown. Like Father Brown, he was also very given to carrying brown paper parcels.59
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On 26 April 1904 Frances enjoyed a ‘delightful dinner party’ at John Lane’s house; the publisher was in America, but ‘that didn’t matter’ as his American wife was ‘an ideal hostess’. ‘How is it’, Frances wondered, ‘that Americans entertain so much better than we do? She behaves as if she were beautiful. Most Americans do. It is the secret of their charm.’ The talk that evening was ‘mostly’ about Chesterton’s recently published novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Max Beerbohm took Frances into dinner and was ‘really nice’; he was ‘a good fellow’—although his ‘costume was extraordinary’. Beerbohm ‘seemed only pleased’ at the way he had been identified with King Auberon, one of the two protagonists in the novel. He told Chesterton not to apologize: he and John Lane, who had published the book the month before, had ‘settled it all at lunch’. Frances wondered if he was not ‘a little put out’ at ‘finding no red carpet put down for his royal feet’. They ‘had quite a discussion as to whether as a king he should not precede Frances into the dining room’. Graham Robertson, who was sitting on the other side of Frances, had done the illustrations for The Napoleon of Notting Hill, taking Max Beerbohm as his model for King Auberon. He ‘kept on producing wonderful rings and stones out of his pockets’, and said ‘he wished he could go about covered in the pieces of a chandelier’. The Chestertons drove Beerbohm home, ‘where he basely enticed us in’ and ‘made himself very entertaining’. They did not get home till 1.30 in the morning. The next day the Bellocs with the Noels came to dinner; Belloc ‘recited his own poetry with great enthusiasm the whole evening’. On 9 May they attended the ‘Literary Fund Dinner’—‘about the greatest treat I have [ever] had in my life’. J. M. Barrie, who presided, was ‘so splendid and so complimentary’, telling Frances ‘he thought a lot of Gilbert’s work’; the speakers included Barrie and A. E. W. Mason, the author of The Four Feathers.60 Another who spoke was Arthur S. Comyns Carr, the barrister and economist, who ‘was not only regarded as the patriarch or oldest inhabitant’ of the Bedford Park community, ‘but in some sense as the founder and father of the republic’. Barrie was to become a great friend of Chesterton, of all friends the least egotistical’ with his ‘humorous self-effacement’.61 Frances noted how pretty his wife was, but her accolade for beauty went to the wife of Anthony Hope, the author of The Prisoner of Zenda. ‘It is wonderful’, she wrote, ‘the way in which they all accept Gilbert, and one well-known man told me he was the biggest man present’. A few days later she went to see Max Beerbohm’s very funny’ caricature of her husband on display in a gallery: ‘G.K.C.—Humanist Kissing the World.’ Next month Frances recorded a political ‘at home’ at the Fabian Mrs Sidney Webb’s (who she thought was very handsome’), where she saw the future prime ministers Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George. She thought politics and nothing but politics’ was dull work’, and an intriguer’s life must be a pretty poor affair’. Towards the end of June there was another at home’ at the house of the poet Alice Meynell, a convert to Roman Catholicism, who Frances thought was nice, intelligent, but affected (I suppose unconsciously)’. I don’t really like the “precious people”. They worry me.’ Her husband Wilfrid, also a writer, struck her as a good-hearted snob’. On 23 June there was a gorgeous “at home” at the Duchess of Sutherland’s’, where Frances was interested to see’ the Birmingham politician Austen Chamberlain, the future Conservative foreign secretary, and impressed with his extraordinary eagerness and his only too apparent vulgarity’. On 30 June the illustrator Graham Robertson held an exceedingly select’ at home’, where Frances felt rather too uncultivated to talk much’.62
On 5 July Chesterton went by himself to visit Swinburne, who was very gratified by a review Chesterton had written of a book about his friend Tennyson. Because of the deafness of the poet, a visit was suggested for the afternoon by his companion and disciple, after the clatter of feeding time is over’.63 This ‘Grand Vizier’ to the ‘Sultan and Prophet of Putney’ was the writer Theodore Watts-Dunton. For, by this time, the aged poet was a sort of god in a temple, who could only be approached through a high-priest’—namely, Watts-Dunton. Chesterton found Swinburne ‘quite gay and skittish, though in a manner that affected me strangely as spinsterish’. His companion, or rather high priest, was on the contrary very serious indeed. It is said that he made the poet a religion; but what struck me as odd, even at that time, was that his religion seemed to consist largely of preserving and protecting the poet’s irreligion’—although the prophet was not really a commander of the faithful because there was no faith’.64 In her diary Frances wrote that she thought her husband ‘found it rather hard to reconcile the idea wi
th the man, but he was interested, though I could not gather much about the visit. He was amused at the compliments which Watts Dunton and Swinburne pay to each other unceasingly.’ The Meynells’ ‘at home’ on 22 June—‘rather a dull affair’—had been enlivened by ‘a nice little conversation with Watts Dunton. His walrus-y appearance which makes the bottom of his face looked [sic] fierce, is counteracted by the kindness of his little eyes.’65
On 13 November there was a supper party at Laurence Housman’s; his brother A. E. Housman was also there, who Frances thought was ‘much nicer’. The Impressionist painter Walter Sickert ‘dropped in after supper. The talk was interesting but dilletante [sic] and I can’t help a certain numbness creeping over me in this sort of society. It is so futile.’ The 8 December diary entry records that the impresario and actor manager George Alexander ‘has an idea that he wants Gilbert to write a play for him and sent for him to come and see him. He was apparently taken with the notion of a play on the Crusades … It may come off some day, perhaps.’66
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A year after the publication of Chesterton’s first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, his second work of fiction, The Club of Queer Trades, appeared in March 1905. It consists of amusing, whimsical stories of detection by the members of a club whose membership depends on their practising a ‘queer’ trade they had invented themselves. The first story had been published in December 1903 in Harper’s Weekly and the other stories in the middle of 1904 both in Harper’s Magazine and the Idler. The latter were commissioned by the Idler’s editor and founder, Jerome K. Jerome, the author of Three Men in a Boat (1889), and with illustrations by Chesterton. Jerome was more than fulsome in his praise of the six stories: ‘They form the most remarkable set of stories that any magazine has ever been privileged to print since magazines were first published. Their humour is delicious; their ingenuity is marvellous; they are unique, and will always stand alone in the literature of short stories.’67 However, what is so striking is that Chesterton is never as funny in his fiction as he is in his non-fiction prose writings, particularly his Autobiography, or in his letters. He could be whimsically amusing in his stories and novels, but he never achieved the same level of irony and satire. It is striking, for instance, that the ‘Introductory Remarks on the Art of Prophecy’ that preface The Napoleon of Notting Hill, in which he satirizes the practice of linear prophecy—whereby ‘the prophets of the twentieth century… took something or other that was certainly going on in their time, and then said it would go on more and more until something extraordinary happened’—is funnier than anything in the novel itself.68 The Club of Queer Trades is the least ambitious of Chesterton’s fictional works—although the stories are very readable and entertaining69—and there are fewer of the Chestertonian paradoxical insights. The most interesting is the observation ‘how facts obscure truth… Facts point in all directions’: ‘The mere facts! Do you really admit—are you still so sunk in superstition, so clinging to dim and historic altars, that you believe in facts? Do you not trust an immediate impression?’70 And it is consistent with one of Chesterton’s views on biography: that it should be an accurate ‘caricature’ in the sense of ‘something as simple as the single line that marks the sweeping curve of the sharp corner in a weather-chart’. Or, as he puts it in an essay on Boswell when condemning ‘the realistic or keyhole method of biography: ‘Facts always contradict each other’. This kind of biography ‘does not give the true portrait of a man.’71 It certainly was not the kind of biography practised by Chesterton, on whom the facts sat lightly but for whom it was all important to get to the essence and heart of his subject.
On 16 March 1905, Frances proudly noted in her diary: ‘One of the proudest days of my life. Gilbert preached at St Paul’s Covent Garden for CSU [Christian Social Union] … A crammed church—he was very eloquent and restrained’. On 30 March she recorded that he preached ‘even better than last week’.72 He was the first in a series of lay preachers, and the sermons were published under the title Preachers from the Pew.73 Frances’s pride at her already famous husband’s preaching in a city church shows how important her religion was to her and how much it meant to her that her husband now shared it.
Conrad Noel was to recall an occasion when Frances was less pleased with her husband. He had gone to their flat in Battersea to speak at a meeting, which Chesterton was to chair, to establish a local branch of the Christian Social Union. The two men were still talking in the dining room (still a separate room) when Frances in some agitation told Chesterton that he must get dressed as people would be arriving any moment. On finding the two men still arguing as the drawing room began to fill up, she brought his clothes into the dining room and made him change. Propelled into the drawing room, he began drawing caricatures of bishops, only to knock over the small table at which he was sitting when Frances forced him to take the chair of the meeting. It was probably a small fit of sulks rather than absent-mindedness, as he was not used to having an argument interrupted. Later in the evening he scandalized a serious young lady who asked the company’s advice about her maid’s evening off: ‘I’m so afraid of her going to the Red Lion’. Chesterton’s response was: ‘Best place she could go to’. 74
On 18 May the Chestertons called on the Duchess of Sutherland:
When I had got used to the splendour, it was jolly enough. Her Grace is a pretty, sweet woman who wears the ugliest hat I’ve ever seen. She was very nervous, but got better under the fire of Gilbert’s chaff. She made him write in her album which he did, a most ridiculous poem of which he should be ashamed. It must be truly awful to live in the sort of way the Duchess does, and endeavour to keep sane.
On 20 May 1905 Frances Chesterton noted in her diary that words failed her when she tried ‘to recall the sensation aroused by a J.D.C. dinner. It seems so odd to think of these men as boys, to realize what their school life was and what a powerful element the J.D.C. was in the lives of all.’75
On 24 May both Chesterton and Frances went down to see George Meredith in Surrey. ‘He talks without stopping except to drink ginger-beer’, noted Frances after the visit. ‘He told us many stories, mostly about society scandals of some time back. I remember he asked Gilbert, “Do you like babies?”’76 Chesterton himself remembered him as very old but still ‘magnificently vain… even, for instance, to the point of preferring to dazzle women rather than men; for he talked the whole time to my wife rather than to me’. He, too, was struck by how he ‘talked and talked, and drank ginger-beer, which he assured us with glorious gaiety he had learned to like quite as much as champagne’. Unlike most novelists he appeared more interested in the books he had not written than in those he had.77
On 5 June Harley Granville Barker, the theatre director and producer, came to see Chesterton ‘touching the possibility of a play’.78 This was a very distinct sign of Chesterton’s growing reputation, as the young Granville Barker began directing in 1904 with brilliant success at the Royal Court Theatre, where for the next three years he produced not only the classics but also contemporary plays, in particular those of George Bernard Shaw, whose reputation he effectively established. On 27 June the Bishop of Southwark told Frances at a garden party that A. J. Balfour, the Conservative Prime Minister, had told him that he had been ‘very impressed’ by her husband’s latest book.79
Heretics, one of Chesterton’s major, if not great, works, had been published only three weeks before. It consists of revised articles he had already published in the Daily News over several years,80 some pre-dating the controversy with Blatchford, some written contemporaneously with it, others after it, together with additional material added later. Some of the book is consequently more openly and specifically Christian than other parts.81 The book comprises by no means therefore purely negative critiques of ‘heretics’ and only by implication a work of Christian apologetics.82 Belloc wrote to tell him that he was ‘delighted’ with what he had read in the newspaper: ‘Hit them again. Hurt them…. Give them hell.’83
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bsp; In his ‘Introductory Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy’ (with its glance at the author of The Importance of Being Earnest84), Chesterton condemns the fundamental heresy of his time—the idea that a person’s ‘philosophy does not matter’. It was perfectly acceptable to talk about anything—but ‘that strange object, the universe’, for as soon as one did that one would ‘have a religion, and be lost’. And so underlying all the contemporary heresies was the heresy that ‘everything matters—except everything’. This had not been the intention of the Victorian liberals when they achieved freedom of speech in defence of religious freedom. It had once been ‘bad taste’ to be an atheist; now it was ‘bad taste’ even to discuss religion. But, in fact, ‘the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe’. Chesterton’s famous example of the importance of discussing ‘fundamentals’ is the lamp post that a number of people wish to pull down. A monk, ‘who is the spirit of the Middle Ages’, is consulted and promptly proceeds to suggest a preliminary discussion about the value of light itself. At this everybody else rushes forward and proceeds to pull the lamp post down, ‘congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality’. But, unfortunately, those pulling down the lamp post have very different reasons for doing so. And eventually it becomes clear that the monk was right, that one has to be theoretical before being practical: ‘Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.’ Far from the ‘absence of definite convictions giving ‘the mind freedom and agility’, the opposite is true because somebody ‘who believes something… has all his weapons about him’. The fundamental contention of the book is that ‘it is a fundamental point of view, a philosophy or religion which is needed … The things we need most for immediate practical purposes are all abstractions. We need a right view of the human lot, a right view’ of the human society…’. But we cannot have a ‘right view unless we have ‘a clear idealism’, unless we have a ‘definite image of good’. To be without ‘ideals’ is to be ‘in permanent danger of fanaticism’. The ‘most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all’. And bigotry ‘may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions’, ‘the appalling frenzy of the indifferent’. But, that said, everybody does have ‘a general view of existence, whether we like it or not; it alters, or, to speak more accurately, it creates and involves everything we say or do, whether we like it or not’. In that sense, ‘religion is exactly the thing which cannot be left out—because it includes everything’. It is impossible to be without some kind of ‘a metaphysical system’. The problem is that the ‘modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas’. The concept of ‘progress’ is considered to be ‘progressive’, but in fact it is a ‘dogma’. Again, it does not strike people that it is ‘dogmatic’ to assume the good of collecting scientific ‘facts for the sake of facts, even though they seem as useless as sticks and straws’. Consequently, while a society that does not believe in ‘oracles or sacred places’ sees ‘the full frenzy of those who killed themselves to find the sepulchre of Christ’, it cannot see ‘the full frenzy of those who kill themselves to find the North Pole’ because it believes in the ‘dogma of facts for facts’ sake’. At the end of the book, Chesterton teasingly urges his readers: ‘Let us, then, go upon a long journey and enter on a dreadful search. Let us, at least, dig and seek till we have discovered our own opinions. The dogmas we really hold are far more fantastic, and, perhaps, far more beautiful than we think.’ Even more teasingly, he assures the rationalists: ‘There are no rationalists. We all believe fairy-tales, and live in them’. They may think they are free of undemonstrable religious dogmas, but they hold ‘the equally undemonstrable dogma of the existence of the man next door’. When a truth is denied it becomes a dogma. Scepticism, then, does not destroy beliefs: ‘rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape.’ Rationalism denies common-sense truths that then become dogmas to be defended, and the author concludes with a wonderfully paradoxical Chestertonian peroration: