G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  Laughter is characteristic not only of men who think they are ordinary rather than superior, but also of religious believers. Neither the Salvation Army nor Roman Catholics are ‘reverent’, for ‘reverence in the sad and delicate meaning of the term reverence is a thing only possible to infidels’. As opposed to the ‘beautiful twilight’ of a Matthew Arnold, the believer is characterized by ‘laughter and war’: ‘A man cannot pay that kind of reverence to truth solid as marble’: a man ‘can only be reverent towards a beautiful lie’. Laughter for Chesterton goes hand-in-hand with sentimentality, which is so dreaded by modern writers, who consequently lack ‘the robust and uproarious humour’ that was natural to the great English writers like Dickens, who had the ‘heart’ not merely for sentimentalism, but a ‘very silly sentimentalism’. All joking ‘is in its nature profane, in the sense that it must be the sudden realization that something which thinks itself solemn is not so very solemn after all’. The ‘oldest jokes’ in the world are about really serious things’—like ‘being married’ or ‘being hanged’. The Bible shows that ‘funny’ is not ‘the opposite of serious’: ‘God himself overwhelms Job with a torrent of terrible levities. The same book which says that God’s name must not be taken vainly, talks easily and carelessly about God laughing and God winking’. If a man is not ‘in part a humorist, he is only in part a man’, since ‘frivolity is a part of the nature of man’.96

  The natural, however, depends on the supernatural: ‘Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural’. Nor is the spiritual opposed to the material: ‘Men only become greedily and gloriously material about something spiritualistic’. A holiday like Christmas is only a holiday because it is a ‘holy day’. Merry Christmas is merry because religion produces merriment: ‘If by vulgarity we mean coarseness of speech, rowdiness of behaviour, gossip, horseplay, and some heavy drinking, vulgarity there always was wherever there was joy, wherever there was faith in the gods. Wherever you have belief you will have hilarity, wherever you have hilarity you will have some dangers’. To be ‘truly gay, we must believe that there is some eternal gaiety in the nature of things’. One has to be ‘serious’ to be ‘really hilarious’: ‘The thing called high spirits is possible only to the spiritual. Ultimately a man cannot rejoice in anything except the nature of things. Ultimately a man can enjoy nothing except religion.’ Comte’s substitute for Christianity, Positivism, is absurd, as it is ‘evidently impossible to worship humanity, just as it is impossible to worship the Savile Club; both are excellent institutions to which we may happen to belong’. But Comte’s new religious calendar recognized that ‘men must always have the sacredness of mummery’ and the ‘rites and forms’ of ritual that is ‘much older than thought’. Daily life indeed is ‘one continual and compressed catalogue of mystical mummery and flummery’.97 The importance and inevitability of ritual were a theme to which Chesterton would often return.

  8

  Politicians apparently were as anxious to meet Chesterton as writers. On 5 July he dined with H. H. Asquith, the future Liberal Prime Minister, where he met the former Liberal Prime Minister Lord Roseberry. ‘I think he hated it’, wrote Frances in her diary. A few days later he met A.J. Balfour, whom he found ‘most interesting to talk to, but appears bored’.98 As a Scottish Presbyterian, Balfour, Chesterton thought, ‘had something in his blood which I think was the cold ferocity of Calvinism’, his ‘long fine head’ reminding Chesterton not of English squires and castles but the manse.99 Chesterton also met Austen Chamberlain (‘stiffer than a gentleman should be’), and George Wyndham, the radical reforming Chief Secretary for Ireland, whom he found ‘delightful’.100

  Wyndham was on the opposite political side to Chesterton, but he was the politician who most attracted and impressed him. In fact, Chesterton regarded him as a Tory rather than a Conservative: indeed, ‘he was capable of being a Jacobite’, which greatly commended him to Chesterton, who ‘always got on much better with revolutionists than with reformers; even when I entirely disagreed with the revolutions or entirely agreed with the reformers’, for revolutionists ‘did, in a sense, judge the world; not justly like the saints; but independently like the saints’, whereas reformers were too ‘much a part of the world they reformed’. Wyndham did not simply ‘wish to preserve Protestantism or Free Trade, or anything grown native to the nation; he wanted to revive things older and really more international’. Realizing that his political opinions ‘were at least of the same general colour’ as his own made Chesterton see ‘the falsity of the Party System’. Like Chesterton, Wyndham was at home with the poor: ‘He had huge sympathy with gypsies and tramps; and collected many men of letters (including myself) who looked rather like tramps’. Remarkably, Wyndham ‘had come through political life without losing his political opinions, or indeed any opinions’. He had ‘a genius for friendship’, and politics had not changed him: he was his own man with his own ‘prejudices and private dogmas for which he would fight like a private person’. Unlike the Liberal Asquith, who ‘was fully satisfied with that sort of broad idealism, that rather diluted “essence of Christianity” which is often sincere but seldom significant of any special social decision’, Wyndham ‘was an Anglo-Catholic as an individual, and would have practised his religion in any state of life. There was about him that edge, like the edge of a sword, which I cannot help preferring to being knocked down with a spiritual sandbag’. Chesterton, however, got ‘great joy out of the hearty humours’ of Asquith, who, like Chesterton himself, ‘rose gloriously to flippancy. Once when he appeared in Court dress, on some superbly important occasion, an uncontrollable impulse of impertinence led me to ask whether the Court sword would really come out of its sheath. “Oh, yes”, he said, shaking a shaggily frowning head at me, “Do not provoke me”’. Chesterton noticed, on the other hand, that he had a curious vagueness about fundamental issue of ethics and politics, a quality he ‘found so often in men holding high responsibilities’. His experience of politicians led him to conclude, ‘politicians have no politics’. He remembered, for instance, a discussion when a difficult question was raised and Churchill ‘smiled the inscrutable smile of the statesman …’.101

  Although it was mostly Liberal politicians, especially those sympathetic to the Daily News’s stance, that Chesterton met, particularly thanks to the hospitality of its owner George Cadbury, it was at one of his house parties that he first met the Labour politician Will Crooks, the only Labour leader he ever knew who ‘reminded me for a single moment of the English labouring classes. His humour really was the humour of an omnibus conductor or a railway porter; and that sort of humour is a much more powerful and real thing than most modern forms of education or eloquence’. His wife also was as representative of the working class. On one occasion, ‘an ethereal little lady with pale blue eyes and pale green garments, who was the wife of a well-known Anti-War journalist’, on hearing another guest mention that during hectic electioneering he had just had time ‘to snatch a cutlet’, intervened; although normally slow to advance her ideas, when she did it was ‘a very serious business indeed’.

  ‘Do you think that was really necessary?’ she said with a painful fixity, like one in a trance. ‘Man is no better than a cutlet. Man does not really need cutlets.’

  At this point she received hearty, one might almost say heavy support, from what was probably an unexpected quarter.

  ‘No, my dear,’ said Mrs Crooks in resounding tones, ‘A man doesn’t want a cutlet! What’s the good of a cutlet? What a man wants is a good chump chop or a bit of the undercut; and I’d see he got it’.

  The other lady sighed; it was not quite what she had meant; and she was obviously a little alarmed to advance again against her large and solid opponent and be felled to the earth with a mutton-bone.

  This scene seemed to Chesterton to be ‘a perfect parable of the two kinds of Simple Life, the false and the true’. Shortly afterwards he had to take the vegetarian lady into dinner, and, on passing through the conservatory,
he pointed out an insect-eating plant to his companion and asked, ‘Don’t you vegetarians feel remorse when you look at that? You live by devouring harmless plants; and here is a plant that actually devours animals. Surely that is a just judgment. It is the revenge of the animal world’. The lady stared at him ‘with staring blue eyes that were absolutely grave and unsmiling. “Oh,” she said, “But I don’t approve of revenge.”’102

  Chesterton was to write an introduction to a biography of Will Crooks, called From Workhouse to Westminster, in 1907, in which he maintained that representative government, the democratic substitute for direct government by the people, ‘may for a time represent the people, and for a time cease to represent anything’. The people’s representative could be either like a shadow or like a stone—either by being like the people he represents or by being useful to the people he represents. The House of Commons, he complained, was full of stones rather than shadows, Will Crooks being the solitary exception as the one Member of Parliament who actually resembled the people he represented. Chesterton looked forward to the day when all Members of Parliament would be like him: then the people would have ‘entered politics’, bringing with it ‘a trail of all the things that politicians detest…’.103

  5

  Dickens

  I

  THE autumn of 1905 brought a welcome improvement in the Chestertons’ financial position. In October the editor of the Illustrated London News invited Chesterton to take over the famous ‘Our Notebook’ column on the death of its previous writer: ‘The article runs to about 2,000 words and takes the form of a light discussion on matters of the moment, and it is treated without political bias…. I do not know that the remuneration is very dazzling…’. On receiving Chesterton’s immediate acceptance of the offer, the editor replied that he was ‘much gratified’, feeling ‘confident that as long as your hand is in it, no-one will question the sanity of that institution, may I say, of English life’. The remuneration was later increased, but Chesterton subsequently refused to allow his literary agent to ask for more: ‘That paper gave me a regular income when I needed it badly.’ Several volumes of these columns were to sell well, the early ones being selected by the essayist E. V. Lucas, who suggested the titles.1

  The general election of January 1906, in which the Liberals won a landslide victory, found Chesterton once again canvassing on behalf of a Liberal candidate, this time Charles Masterman, his friend from the Christian Social Union, who was successfully elected for West Ham North. According to Chesterton, Masterman ‘used to swear with derisive gusto that when we were canvassing together, he went all down one side of a street and up most of the other, and found me in the first house, still arguing the philosophy of government with the first householder’. But Chesterton thought that Masterman’s memory was ‘unduly darkened by a jovial pessimism’ characteristic of the man.2 Hilaire Belloc stood for South Salford as the Liberal candidate and won. ‘This is a great day for the British Empire, but a bad one for the little Bellocs,’ he announced, on arriving at Euston station, to Chesterton and another friend who had been summoned to meet him.3

  Frances acted in effect as both her husband’s valet and secretary (from 1907 she took over correspondence with A. P. Watt, the literary agents, from Chesterton’s father4). She might even be asked to take down an article in dictation as he early began to hate writing by hand. Her husband was the classic mother’s boy who had never lived away from home before getting married and was used to everything practical being done for him, never having had to fend for himself. As one of his friends remarked, he literally passed from the care of his mother to that of his wife.5 Frances looked after his diary so far as she was able; if she was not there to record the acceptance of a writing or speaking invitation, it would be forgotten. But of course she was not present when her husband was in Fleet Street, in whose pubs and restaurants so many of his articles were written. When these were completed there, the necessary cab would be hired to take the article the hundred yards or so to the Daily News office. When they were written at home, invariably at the last minute, Frances would be needed to get them to their destination in time for the deadline. A journalist who later worked on G.K.’s Weekly recalled how one day Chesterton failed to show up for a board meeting, some months after the paper had moved to a new address. When he finally arrived, Chesterton explained that he had been unable to remember the address to give to the cab-driver, and had made the cab wait outside a tea shop while he turned out his pockets over a cup of tea in the hope of finding something with the address on it. Unable to find any clue and still unable to remember the address, he told the driver to take him to a bookstall where he could buy a copy of his own paper, which he managed to do at the third bookstall they visited.6

  There were those who pitied Frances for having such a helpless and unpractical husband. Robert Blatchford, for example, remembered with disgust an occasion when he had to go out into the rain to hail a cab for his wife, whereas it was Frances who had to go out into the rain to get a cab for her husband. The convivial drinking in Fleet Street, the late nights, the money wasted on cabs, the endless talk while the food got cold on the table, the absent-mindedness and forgetfulness, not to mention all the daily ministrations Chesterton required, all suggested the long-suffering wife and the uncaring husband. This after all was a husband who would ‘suddenly say, “Where is Frances? I don’t want her now, but I might want her any minute.”’7 Others saw Chesterton as henpecked by a wife who always got her own way and made all the decisions such as where they went on holiday. There were, not surprisingly, grains of truth in these different perspectives. Daily life was not easy with Chesterton, and inevitably in the circumstances Frances could come across as domineering. But, while Frances may have made all the practical decisions, when it came to something that her husband did care about, like his journalistic work, he made his own decision. Their closest friends saw them as utterly devoted to each other, and could not imagine one without the other. Chesterton himself took the Christian idea of the marriage union, whereby a man and a woman become as one, very literally. According to the Bible, he argued, they become ‘one flesh… parts of one creature … the two ends of a quadruped’:

  an ordinary honest man is a part of his wife even when he wishes he wasn’t…. an ordinary good woman is part of her husband even when she wishes him to the bottom of the sea…. They are a nation, a society, a machine. I tell you they are one flesh, even when they are not one spirit.

  While marriage, Chesterton thought, ‘can be, and I believe generally is, the happiest state for a man, you cannot deprive it of its power to make him the most miserable thing on earth. It is always “for better, for worse”.’ No doubt, as in every marriage, he and Frances experienced something of the ‘worse’ as well as much of the ‘better’. The debt Chesterton owed to her was obvious enough, but one old friend of theirs remarked, ‘She became a much nicer person after she married him’. Although Frances, of course, was not absent-minded and impractical like her husband, she was like him, a close friend from the days in Beaconsfield commented, in being ‘utterly unworldly’: ‘Not even interested in having great people around them. She was too unworldly, she didn’t want to spend money on her clothes. Funny old friends meant more to her than important people. She was wonderful with children, they adored her.’8

  It seems that it was in 1906,9 probably in April, that Frances underwent the operation to enable her to have children. There survives a letter dated 12 April (but no year) in which she tells Father O’Connor that she is about to go into a nursing home for a month ‘to get satisfactorily through an operation’. She was then going to stay at Ilkley for ‘a course of bed and massage’, where she hoped O’Connor would visit her ‘and leave me with your priestly blessing’. ‘It’s all very horrid’, she continued, ‘and I hate leaving my husband, but I’ve been obliged at last to give in and I hope to end as an Amazon’.10 Chesterton stayed with friends in Abercorn Place, London, while Frances convalesced in the nurs
ing home. Freda Rivière was a close friend of Frances from her Bedford Park days, when she had also become friends with Chesterton; her husband Hugh, who was a painter, took the opportunity to paint Chesterton’s portrait. Chesterton would write his articles in the evening while a messenger boy waited in the hall, sometimes on the landings between stairs. Frances’s specialist, Dr Margaret Joyce, who worked at the local Battersea Bridge branch of the Clapham Maternity Hospital,11 one day received a telephone call from the matron of the nursing home complaining that Chesterton was sitting on the stairs there too and ignoring requests to move out of the way. When the doctor arrived, he had been sitting there already for two hours, dissatisfied with the last line of a sonnet he had written to Frances on her recovery from the operation. He refused to go into Frances’s room until he was satisfied with the poem.12 He stayed five days with the Rivières and continued afterwards to come round for sittings. Not having Frances at hand, he failed to bring any luggage with him, apart from a green glass bottle-stopper and a horse-pistol that he had bought on the way. Hugh Rivière found him a delightful sitter who never stopped talking. He and his wife noted how carefully he deposited his huge frame on their antique chairs, none of which he broke. A few years later when Freda visited the Chestertons in their new home at Beaconsfield, he pointed out a small window high in the wall and remarked: ‘I like that window. When the light catches her hair, it gives Frances a halo and makes her look something like what she really is.’13