by Ian Ker
6
Orthodoxy
I
IN the summer of 1908 the Chestertons ‘took a house’ at Rye in Sussex, ‘that wonderful inland island, crowned with a town as with a citadel, like a hill in a mediaeval picture’. It so happened that the rented house was next door to Lamb House, ‘the old oak-panelled mansion which had attracted, one might almost say across the Atlantic, the fine aquiline eye of Henry James’. As an American, ‘who had reacted against America; and steeped his sensitive psychology in everything that seemed most antiquatedly and aristocratically English’, James had, in his ‘search for the finest shades among the shadows of the past’, picked out, as ‘one might have guessed that he would … that town from all towns and that house from all houses’.
It had been the seat of a considerable patrician family of the neighbourhood, which had long ago decayed and disappeared. It had, I believe, rows of family portraits, which Henry James treated as reverently as family ghosts. I think in a way he really regarded himself as a sort of steward or custodian of the mysteries and secrets of a great house, where ghosts might have walked with all possible propriety. The legend says (I never learned for certain if it was true) that he had actually traced that dead family-tree until he found that there was far away in some manufacturing town, one unconscious descendant of the family, who was a cheerful and commonplace commercial clerk. And it is said that Henry James would ask this youth down to his dark ancestral house, and receive him with funereal hospitality, and I am sure with comments of a quite excruciating tact and delicacy. Henry James always spoke with an air which I can only call gracefully groping; that is not so much groping in the dark in blindness as groping in the light in bewilderment, through seeing too many avenues and obstacles. … feeling [his] way through a forest of facts; to us often invisible facts. It is said, I say, that these thin straws of sympathy and subtlety were duly split for the benefit of the astonished commercial gentleman, while Henry James, with his bowed domelike head, drooped with unfathomable apologies and rendered a sort of silent account of his stewardship. It is also said that the commercial gentleman thought the visit a great bore and the ancestral home a hell of a place …
Whatever the truth of the legend, what was ‘certain was that Henry James inhabited the house with all the gravity and loyalty of the family ghost; not without something of the oppressive delicacy of a highly cultured family butler’. This ‘very stately and courteous old gentleman’ was ‘uniquely gracious’ in his ‘cult of tact’, which rang true in at least one respect: ‘He was serious with children. I saw a little boy gravely present him with a crushed and dirty dandelion. He bowed; but he did not smile.’ However, his ‘solemnity and slowness’ were too much for his neighbour H. G. Wells, who had a house on the other side of Romney Marsh from Rye on the Kent coast at Sandgate, and ‘who used… to make irreverent darts and dashes through the sombre house and the sacred garden and drop notes to me over the garden wall’.1
Wells was not the only guest of Henry James to misbehave over the garden wall. While the Chestertons were staying in Rye, William James, the philosopher, was staying next door with his brother. William James had been impressed by Heretics: ‘A tremendously strong writer and true thinker, despite his mannerism of paradox.’ Now William was ‘immensely excited’ that this ‘great teller of the truth’ was actually living next door.2 Wells, who tells us the story, thought in his memoirs that Chesterton was staying at the Mermaid Inn, ‘which had its garden just over the high brick wall of the garden of Lamb House’.3 But, apart from the fact that Chesterton tells us that they took a house’, the inn is in Mermaid Street and Lamb House in the adjacent West Street, nor does the garden of the inn border on that of Lamb House. It is reasonable to suppose that Wells’s mistake was due to the fact that the Chestertons were staying at a house in Mermaid Street. At the time there was only one house in Mermaid Street that had a garden bordering on that of Lamb House, 4 Mermaid Street, on the other side of the street from the Mermaid Inn, so it is more than probable that this was the house the Chestertons were renting that summer.4 At any rate, Wells recalled how William ‘with a scandalous directness … had put the gardener’s ladder against that ripe red wall and clambered up and peeped over’! Unfortunately, Henry ‘caught him at it’, ‘lost his calm’, and ‘was terribly unnerved’. ‘He appealed to me, of all people, to adjudicate on what was and what was not permissible behaviour in England. William was arguing about it in an indisputably American accent, with an indecently naked reasonableness.’ Sadly, he ‘had none of Henry’s passionate regard for the polish upon the surfaces of life’. ‘It was the sort of thing that isn’t done. It was most emphatically the sort of thing that isn’t done …’ Henry James ordered the gardener to put away the ladder. William, meanwhile, ‘was looking thoroughly naughty’. To the ‘manifest relief’ of Henry, Wells, who had come to take his brother and niece to his house at Sandgate, ‘carried William off and in the road just outside the town we ran against the Chestertons … Chesterton was heated and I think rather swollen by the sunshine; he seemed to overhang his one-horse fly; he descended slowly but firmly; he was moist and steamy but cordial; we chatted in the road for a time and William got his coveted impression.’5
Subsequently, after Belloc’s dramatic arrival in Rye, which unnerved Henry James at least as much as his brother’s peeping, William James recorded in his diary: ‘at nine to Chestertons’s where we sat till midnight drinking port with Hilaire Belloc.’6 What neither Wells nor William presumably knew was that the ‘unnerved’ Henry James was not above a little peeping himself—even if the peeping had to be done by somebody else rather than the Sage of Rye himself. His secretary, Theodora Bosanquet, recorded in her diary on 27 July 1908: ‘In the course of the morning Mr James made me go and peep through the curtain to see “the unspeakable Chesterton” pass by7—a sort of elephant with a crimson face and oily curls. He [ James] thinks it very tragic that his mind should be imprisoned in such a body.’8 When he did meet Chesterton, he noticed that ‘he had “an enormous little slavey” of a wife with him’. He was ‘impressed by the way Chesterton used to retire into the corner of a room and just sat and wrote. It was wonderful to be able to do that, he told Theodora Bosanquet; he could not quite do it himself.’9
Chesterton’s own memory was of Henry James calling on them ‘after exactly the correct interval’. It was naturally ‘a very stately call of state’, and, although William James was ‘breezier’ than his brother when you got to know him, ‘there was something finally ceremonial about this idea of the whole family on the march’.10 Still, ‘there was an almost fantastic contrast’ between the older brother William, ‘as breezy as the sea’, ‘so hearty about abstract studies generally considered dry’, who ‘talked about the metabolism and the involution of values with the air of a man recounting his flirtations on the steamer’, and the younger brother, ‘so solemn about social details often considered trivial’, who ‘talked about toast and teacups with the impressiveness of a family ghost’.11 At any rate, on this particular occasion it seems that they all talked about ‘the best literature of the day’. James was ‘complimentary about something of mine; but represented himself as respectfully wondering how I wrote all I did. I suspect him of meaning why rather than how.’ While they were ‘gravely’ considering the works of Hugh Walpole, ‘with many delicate degrees of appreciation and doubt’, there was ‘heard from the front-garden a loud bellowing noise resembling that of an impatient fog-horn’. Chesterton knew immediately that it was in fact no foghorn, ‘because it was roaring out, “Gilbert! Gilbert!” and was like only one voice in the world’. It was Belloc, ‘probably shouting for bacon and beer’—but even Chesterton ‘had no notion of the form or guise under which he would present himself’. So far as Chesterton was concerned, Belloc was on a walking tour of France with a friend from the Foreign Office who belonged to one of the old Catholic families. It seemed they had, by some miscalculation, run out of money. Belloc boasted of his ability
to live like a tramp, and, practically penniless, they began thus to walk home, unshaven and dressed in workmen’s clothes. Presumably they had had just enough money to make the crossing to Dover, whence they began walking to Rye, knowing that Chesterton was staying there. ‘They arrived, roaring for food and drink and derisively accusing each other of having secretly washed, in violation of an implied contract between tramps. In this fashion they burst in upon the balanced tea-cup and tentative sentence of Mr Henry James.’12
The scene was too subtle even for Henry James, renowned as he was for his subtlety, to appreciate. Chesterton was sure that he missed ‘the irony of the best comedy in which he ever played a part’.
He had left America because he loved Europe, and all that was meant by England or France; the gentry, the gallantry, the traditions of lineage and locality, the life that had been lived beneath old portraits in oak-panelled-rooms. And there, on the other side of the tea-table, was Europe, was the old thing that made France and England, the posterity of the English squires and the French soldiers; ragged, unshaven, shouting for beer, shameless above all shades of poverty and wealth; sprawling, indifferent, secure. And what looked across at it was still the Puritan refinement of Boston; and the space it looked across was wider than the Atlantic.
Chesterton remained ‘haunted by the contradictions of that comedy’, ‘the most comic comedy of cross-purposes that ever happened in the world’, about which books could be written ‘about its significance, social, national, international and historic’. He felt that, if he could ‘ever express all that was involved in it’, he would ‘write a great book on international affairs’. Still, James could be forgiven for a certain dismayed astonishment, when even the local English inn-keeper, who knew that Belloc and his friend were not tramps, nevertheless found it hard to believe that one of these two disreputable companions was a Member of Parliament and the other an official of the Foreign Office. But when one of them ‘insisted on having a bottle of port decanted and carrying it through the streets of Rye, like a part of a religious procession’, his disbelief was dispelled.13 As for Henry James, Chesterton may not have known that thirty years before he had published a delightful and funny novel, The Europeans, contrasting American and European ways—although, it has to be said, James’s conception of the European hardly included the idea of Hilaire Belloc.
During this summer at Rye, Chesterton ‘learnt to appreciate’ what it was in Wells that ‘made him rebel against the atmosphere of Henry James’. Actually, James himself ‘did really appreciate that quality’ and ‘expressed it as well as it could be expressed by saying, “Whatever Wells writes is not only alive, but kicking” ‘. It seemed to Chesterton ‘rather unfortunate that, after this, it should have been Henry James who was kicked’. But he could ‘sympathise in some ways’ with Wells’s ‘mutiny against the oak-panelling and the ghosts’. What he had ‘always liked about Wells’ was ‘his vigorous and unaffected readiness for a lark. He was one of the best men in the world with whom to start a standing joke; though perhaps he did not like it to stand too long after it was started.’ Together they had devised a toy-theatre pantomime about Wells’s fellow Fabian Sidney Webb, as well as one about the Poor Law Commission, in which the Commissioners took Mr Bumble the Beadle to pieces, and then stewed him in a cauldron, until he jumped out, rejuvenated and much enlarged. And together they had ‘invented the well-known and widespread national game of Gype’, which had all sorts of variations, including ‘Table Gype; a game for the little ones’. It was decided that players of the game who were too keen ‘tended to suffer from Gype’s ear’. Allusions to ‘the fashionable sport’ were introduced into articles by Chesterton and his journalist friends. ‘Everything was in order and going forward; except the game itself, which has not yet been invented.’ Chesterton could understand why Wells would assume that Henry James ‘would show a certain frigidity towards Gype’; and ‘for the sacred memory of Gype’, he could ‘excuse’ Wells’s feeling. But Wells’s own reactions in Chesterton’s view were not above reproach: he thought that Wells ‘reacted too swiftly to everything’; indeed, to use the word that would most annoy Wells, he was a ‘permanent reactionary’. Wells always ‘seemed to be coming from somewhere, rather than going anywhere’. He was ‘so often nearly right’ that his reactions ‘irritated’ Chesterton, ‘like the sight of somebody’s hat being perpetually washed up by the sea and never touching the shore’. It struck Chesterton that Wells ‘thought that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the mind’, whereas he, Chesterton, was ‘incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid’.14 Or, as he put it in an article published later in the year: ‘An open mind is really a mark of foolishness, like an open mouth. Mouths and minds were made to shut; they were made to open only in order to shut.’15
Wells, for his part, remembered Chesterton on one memorable occasion sitting down on something quite solid without even noticing. Wells had bumped into the whole Chesterton family in a town in France and invited them to lunch. Noticing that his youngest son, then a small boy, was missing, Wells exclaimed: ‘Where’s Frank? Good God, Gilbert, you’re sitting on him.’ At this Chesterton got up and looked down apologetically at his chair and the small boy. His wife thought Wells was good for her husband because he would take him out walking. But when Frances was not present, Chesterton inquired anxiously, ‘We won’t go for a walk today, will we?’ In Wells’s view, Frances was good for Chesterton because she prevented him from becoming even more obese than he already was.16 But he also thought that Chesterton’s presence was good for any company where he found himself: ‘I notice that the whole gathering is by a sort of radiation convivial.’17
When Chesterton compared Wells with Shaw, ‘the other genius of the Fabians’, he felt ‘rather more in sympathy’ with the latter. But Shaw’s Puritan ‘austerity’ did not appreciate ‘buffoonery’, and here Chesterton felt more in tune with Wells who understood ‘the glow and body of good spirits, even when they are animal spirits’. It was not that Shaw did not have ‘plenty of appetite for adventure’, but the adventure had to have ‘a levity in some sense celestial’, which meant ‘skylarking’ as opposed to ‘larking’. In the matter of the Boer War, like most Fabians both Shaw and Wells had been imperialists, the latter holding that, while all wars were ‘indefensible’, this was ‘the only sort of war to be defended’, on the ground that ‘it might be necessary, in policing the planet, to force backward peoples to open their resources to cosmopolitan commerce’. In other words, Fabians like Wells defended the one kind of war that Chesterton considered despicable, ‘the bullying of small states for their oil or gold’, while condemning the only sort of war that Chesterton considered defensible—namely, ‘a war of civilisations and religions, to determine the moral destiny of mankind’.18
When Chesterton looked back on his friendship with Shaw, he seemed to have been in one long argument with him. And yet he had ‘learned to have a warmer admiration and affection out of all that argument than most people get out of agreement’. In his view, Shaw was ‘at his best when he is antagonistic. I might say that he is seen at his best when he is wrong. Or rather, everything is wrong about him but himself.’ He had argued on practically every subject with Shaw, as he had done with his brother, but without ever quarrelling or with any ‘animosity’. He had never argued with Shaw without ending ‘in a better and not a worse temper or frame of mind’, such were his ‘inexhaustible fountains of fairmindedness and intellectual geniality’. It seemed that Chesterton had to argue with him as much as he did in order to admire him as much as he did—’and I am proud of him as a foe even more than as a friend’. The odd thing was that, while there were few of his contemporaries he liked better, they had actually ‘met more in public than in private; and generally upon platforms’—‘especially upon platforms where we were put up to fight each other, like two knock-about comedians’. If not exactly a comedian, Shaw was certainly eccen
tric in ways that hampered ‘conventional conviviality’: ‘Even hostesses, let alone hosts, are sometimes puzzled by a gentleman who has rather more horror of tea than of wine or beer.’ In retrospect, Chesterton thought that all their differences came back to a religious difference—as ‘indeed I think all differences do’. Shaw and his followers believed in ‘evolution’ just as imperialists believed in ‘expansion’. Chesterton, on the other hand, was a believer in the philosophy of limitation:
They believe in a great growing and groping thing like a tree; but I believe in the flower and the fruit; and the flower is often small. The fruit is final and in that sense finite; it has a form and therefore a limit. There has been stamped upon it an image, which is the crown and consummation of an aim … And as applied to man, it means this; that a man has been made more sacred than any superman or super-monkey; that his very limitations have already become holy and like a home; because of that sunken chamber in the rocks, where God became very small.19
Chesterton’s book on Shaw would appear a year after the holiday in Rye, in the summer of 1909. In the meantime, he was about to publish one of his major works in which he would defend the religion in which God was not a limitless ‘life-force’ but a tiny baby born in a cave. But a month before publication tragedy again came to Frances and her family.
On 25 August 1908 Frances received another great blow, this time the death of her brother Knollys. According to the newspaper report,20 ‘the body of a well-dressed man was discovered in the [river] Cuckmere a short distance on the sea side of Exeat Bridge’, near Seaford in East Sussex, where the inquest was held. The dead man’s brother-in-law, Lucian Oldershaw, identified the body from previous injuries and also from a ring and other articles and writings found on the body. Oldershaw, who was described as ‘a tutor, living at Fernley, Maidenhead’, explained that Knollys, who was 36, had ‘recently’ been tutoring a pupil in Rye—which might explain why the Chestertons were spending the summer there. He added that he was a writer and had written a book. Oldershaw had been expecting his brother-in-law to come and stay at Maidenhead on 15 August, but had received a telegram to say that Knollys was feeling unwell and would come later. ‘A few years ago,’ Oldershaw told the inquest, ‘while in business in London’, the deceased ‘had a nervous breakdown … which affected his mind, and he had to go to the Holloway Sanatorium. He had left that institution for about three years and seemed to have recovered perfectly with the exception that he was at times somewhat despondent.’ At the time of his death he had been staying at nearby West Dean ‘with the members of a London Working Men’s Club in which he was interested, as he had done a year previously’. Oldershaw knew of nothing that could have been on the dead man’s mind: ‘He could always have made a home with his mother. He was not suffering from a lack of means.’ Indeed, Oldershaw had ‘just made arrangements’ to get him ‘more work next year and his prospects in life were bright’. The steward at the Hammersmith Working Men’s Club, where Knollys worked as a helper, which was ‘managed on temperance lines’, told the court that the club organized a country holiday for working men every summer. On 15 August, when the holiday ended and when the dead man was supposed to go to Maidenhead, he failed to catch the train and returned to West Dean Farm, where they had been staying, saying that ‘he had had a letter and it was inconvenient for him to go that day, but he would leave on the following day’. He slept at the farm that night ‘and it was arranged that he should leave Seaford about 2 p.m. on the following day’, which was a Sunday. However, the steward was surprised to see him about six o’clock on Sunday evening and asked why he had not gone, but the dead man ‘turned away as though he resented being asked questions’. That was the last the steward saw of him. The dead man had not complained of being unwell: ‘He was naturally a very quiet man and had the appearance of being very studious. He seemed in good health and spirits, and on the Thursday previous gave several recitations at a concert which was held.’ The body had been discovered in the afternoon of 21 August by a shepherd in the river about 30 yards below Exeat Bridge. The surgeon who examined the body told the court that the face was unrecognizable and that he thought the body had been in the water for five or six days before being discovered, but that death had not probably been due to drowning. ‘On both sides of the neck there were clear cut wounds, leaving about an inch of healthy skin between them at the throat. The wound on the left side was the deeper and had divided the jugular vein … Both wounds could have been self-inflicted and that on the left side would have been fatal.’ The surgeon also testified that at some time in the past the dead man’s right leg had been broken and his left elbow fractured. Oldershaw explained that the injuries to the leg and elbow had been self-inflicted while his brother-in-law had been in Holloway Sanatorium. The coroner’s verdict was suicide resulting from depression.