G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  On 30 October 1909 Shaw responded to a letter (undated, of course) from Chesterton introducing a man who needed Shaw’s help: Chesterton. I Shaw speaks. | Attention!’ In his letter Chesterton had asked Shaw to excuse his abruptness in this letter of introduction’: they were moving into the country and every piece of furniture I begin to write at is taken away and put in a van’.27 Shaw again urged Chesterton to write a play. It was ‘quite unendurable’ that he should be ‘wasting [his] time’ writing about Shaw. He had, however, liked Chesterton’s book, particularly since he had in no way at all influenced what Chesterton had written, which was ‘evidently founded on a very hazy recollection of a five-year-old perusal of Man and Superman’—and ‘a lot of it was fearful nonsense’. Chesterton had ‘no conscience’ regarding facts; and his ‘punishment’ was that, instead of ‘dull inferences’ as to Shaw’s narrow Puritanism, he could have easily ascertained’ the delightful and fantastic realities’ of Shaw’s home had Chesterton taken greater advantage of what is really the only thing to be said in favor of Battersea; namely, that it is within easy reach of Adelphi Terrace’ where Shaw lived. He was now writing to tell Chesterton that he had been in his native Ireland the previous month, where one becomes a practical man’, and where, instead of merely urging his friend to write for the theatre, he had actually written a ‘scenario’ for him. This unfinished scenario—he could do nothing but talk’ in England—he was now sending to Chesterton as far as he had scribbled it’. However, experience had taught Shaw that offering help of this sort was not necessarily the best way of getting work’ out of somebody like Chesterton. He was therefore resorting to his youthful rule of insulting an important man’ if possible. And he thought there was one respect in which Chesterton was ‘insultable’. It could ‘be plausibly held that you are a venal ruffian, pouring forth great quantities of immediately saleable stuff, but altogether declining to lay up for yourself treasures in heaven’. Well, perhaps Chesterton could not afford to do otherwise’, and he therefore was ready to make him an attractive financial proposition, which he proceeded to outline. He would be at his country quarters’ at Ayot St Lawrence near Welwyn in Hertfordshire, where he had ‘a motor car which could carry me on sufficient provocation as far as Beaconsfield; but I do not know how much time you spend there and how much in Fleet Street’. Was Chesterton ‘only a weekender’, or had his ‘wise wife’ taken him ‘properly in hand’ and ‘committed’ him to a pastoral life’?28

  Shaw’s scenario for the proposed play, dated October 1909, begins with the Devil asking St Augustine of Canterbury who he is and what he has done. When Augustine innocently’ replies that he has converted England to Christianity, the Devil, overcome by the stupendousness of the joke, roars with laughter’. Augustine thereupon, accompanied by the Devil, comes to England to investigate. On arriving at the House of Commons, Augustine asks Balfour, the Leader of the Opposition, if there is a Christian who could show him round. Balfour professes not to know of any, but says that Mr Bellaire Hilloc claims to be one. The astonished policeman on duty exclaims, ‘Fancy you a Christian, Mr Hilloc. We never thought you was anything.’29

  From the date of Shaw’s letter it seems clear that the Chestertons finally moved to Beaconsfield in October 1909. By a curious coincidence they had exchanged Overstrand Mansions for ‘Overroads’, the name of their new house, which they also rented. For Frances there were only advantages in the move. First and foremost, she had removed her husband from the taverns and late nights of Fleet Street. As a lover and practitioner of gardening, who had a sort of hungry appetite for all the fruitful things like fields and gardens and anything connected with production’,30 she now had the large garden she could scarcely have had in London, even if she had had a house rather than a gardenless flat. For Chesterton there was obviously the loss of the life of Fleet Street, but on the other hand the gain of Frances’s happiness; there was also the gain of finding himself in a small community where he could rub shoulders with his beloved common man in a way in which it was not possible in London, even in the comparatively circumscribed district of Battersea. Moreover, he was by no means cut off in Beaconsfield, where there was a railway station with regular trains to London.

  However, it was not only his brother, parents, and friends who deplored his leaving London, but Belloc, too, now himself living down in Sussex, lamented, ‘She [Frances] has taken my Chesterton from me’—although later he admitted it was probably a wise move.31 As for Cecil and ‘Keith’ Jones, they remained utterly unreconciled to the move. They even hatched a plan to charter a plane, fly to Beaconsfield, and invite Chesterton up for a spin in the air: ‘Once on the wing, the plane would make for Calais, where he could be held to ransom—the renunciation of Beaconsfield or enforced liberty in France.’32 Whatever the loss to Fleet Street, it is more than probable that, if Chesterton had not left its irregular life, with its male camaraderie and heavy drinking, his life could easily have been cut short, given his obesity and all the dangers to health that that presented. At Beaconsfield, there was the possibility of a routine and an ordered way of life, with Frances there to supervise as far as possible his eating and drinking. As his doctor in later years said, had he racketed around Fleet Street any longer’ he would have died twenty years earlier than he did.33

  Cecil Chesterton and Keith’ Jones had mocked, as other intellectuals would have done, the move to quasi-suburban Beaconsfield as opposed to the real countryside. But Chesterton enjoyed defending the despised move in his Daily News column. He actually derived satisfaction from the fact that Beaconsfield was already being built over:

  Within a stone’s throw of my house they are building another house. I am glad they are building it and I am glad it is within a stone’s throw; quite well within it, with a good catapult. Nevertheless, I have not yet cast the first stone at the new house—not being, strictly speaking, guiltless myself in the matter of new houses.

  He liked having other human beings near him. But that was not then the usual attitude of intellectuals and writers like himself: ‘Rival ruralists would quarrel about which had the most completely inconvenient postal service; and there were many jealous heartburnings if one friend found out any uncomfortable situation which the other friend had thoughtlessly overlooked.’ He was to sound the same defiant note in his Autobiography at the end of his life: ‘I have lived in Beaconsfield from the time when it was almost a village, to the time when, as the enemy profanely says, it is a suburb.’34

  3

  Just before the move to Beaconsfield, a selection of Chesterton’s columns in the Daily News called Tremendous Trifles was published on 23 September 1909. Prolific as he was as a journalist and writer, Chesterton inevitably was not as prolific in ideas, and the familiar themes emerge in these weekly articles. First, there was the usual emphasis on seeing the wonder of existence, the startling facts that run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence’. In a well-known essay he celebrates a piece of chalk, telling his readers that he had once planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.’ ‘The way to love anything’, whether or not it was in one’s pocket, was ‘to realize that it might be lost’. The point of travel was not to see foreign countries but to see one’s own country for the first time: ‘it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.’35

  Limitation, that other central theme in Chesterton’s thought, is the way to appreciate how ‘awful and beautiful’ this world is: ‘If you wish to perceive that limitless felicity, limit yourself if only for a moment.’ Indeed, to ‘love anything is to love its boundaries’, since ‘boundaries are the most beautiful things in the world’. Art ‘consists of limitation’, ‘is limitation’. (As he wrote elsewhere, artistic ‘convention is a form of freedom’: ‘A dramatic convention is not a constraint on the dramatist; it is a permission to the dramatist. It is a permit allowing him to depart from the routine of external reality, in orde
r to express a more internal and intimate reality.’36) One very important form of limitation for Chesterton was dogma, which becomes ‘elaborate’ not because it is dead but because ‘it is only the live tree that grows too many branches’. Dogma was akin to architecture, which also was ‘insolent’ enough to claim ‘permanence’ and was also ‘difficult to get rid of’. And the reason why there was ‘no typical architecture of the modern world’ was because ‘we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring…’. Gothic architecture, on the contrary, was based on a dogma—namely, the words of Christ in rebuke to ‘certain priggish disciples’ who rebuked ‘the street children’ for making too much noise ‘in the name of good taste’: ‘He said: “If these were silent the very stones would cry out.” With these words He called up all the wealth of artistic creation that has been founded on this creed.’ For the very stones did cry out: ‘The front of vast buildings is thronged with open mouths, angels praising God, or devils defying Him. Rock it self is racked and twisted, until it seems to scream.’ The Greeks had ‘preferred to carve their gods and heroes doing nothing’, whereas mediaeval art chose to represent ‘people doing something’: ‘the whole front of a great cathedral has the hum of a huge hive.’37 Analogously, the ‘origin and essence’ of ritual lay in the fact that ‘in the presence of… sacred riddles about which we can say nothing it is often more decent merely to do something’. Again, rhetorical energy in speaking does not betray insincerity but sincerity: contrary to the contemporary assumption, one becomes ‘more rhetorical’ the ‘more sincere’ one becomes.38

  Limitation is also for Chesterton the whole point of his beloved toy theatre—‘you are looking through a small window’: ‘Has not every one noticed how sweet and startling any landscape looks when seen through an arch? This strong, square shape, this shutting off of everything else is not only an assistance to beauty; it is the essential of beauty. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.’ The same was true of ideas like Greek philosophy, which ‘could fit easier into the small city of Athens than into the immense empire of Persia’ because it was only possible to ‘represent very big ideas in very small spaces’. Boundaries, Chesterton was even prepared to assert, ‘are the most beautiful things in the world’.39 The reason why adults do not play with toys like toy theatres is because it ‘takes so very much more time and trouble than anything else. Playing as children mean playing is the most serious thing in the world.’40 Nor did Chesterton despise the ‘popular things’, such as the popular press, a particular object of the intellectuals’ contempt. He thought it was preferable to the broadsheets because of its ‘healthiness’, its ‘essential antiquity and permanence’: ‘Even in the crudest and most clamorous aspects of the newspaper world I still prefer the popular to the proud and fastidious.’ Nobody believed in a tabloid newspaper like the Daily Mail, which never had any new ideas but which contained all the ‘old human’ things of interest to ordinary human beings, unlike the Times, which people did believe in. The ‘new democratic journalism’ had simply replaced the ‘old chronicles’ that also chiefly recorded ‘accidents and prodigies’. The same was true of the places frequented by the masses: ‘Ruskin could have found more memories of the Middle Ages in the Underground Railway than in the grand hotels outside the stations.’ And it was twelve ‘ordinary men’ not the ‘specialists’ in law who determined guilt or innocence in the courts of law: ‘The same was done, if I remember rightly, by the Founder of Christianity.’41

  Chesterton made the same point the day after the publication of Tremendous Trifles, when he appeared before a Joint Select Committee of both Houses of Parliament inquiring into the question of stage censorship. Unlike Shaw, who was also called, Chesterton, he said, appeared on behalf of the audience not the playwright or the critic. While in favour of censorship, he thought the official censor should be replaced by a jury of ‘twelve ordinary men’. There were photographs in the papers of Chesterton in the company of the Jewish author Israel Zangwill. A couple of months later a weekly reported on the apparition of this successor of Dr Johnson on the streets of London:

  His huge figure, enveloped in its cloak and shaded by a slouch hat, rolls through the streets unheeding his fellow beings. His eyes stare before him in a troubled dream; his lips move, muttering, composing, arguing. He is an imposing figure; of immense proportions, almost balloon-like with a fine impetuous head which rises over the surrounding crowds; his hair is properly shaggy, his countenance open and frank, wearing indeed a curious childlike unconsciousness in spite of the thought intensity that clouds his brow.42

  4

  The subject of children brings one to the huge advantage that Beaconsfield had over Battersea for both the Chestertons: the childless couple now had plenty of room to have the offspring of relatives and friends to stay. Then there was a big garden too, which Chesterton explored on his arrival. He plucked up courage to speak to the gardener, ‘an enterprise of no little valour’, to ask the name of ‘a strange dark red rose, at once theatrical and sulky’. Unlike Frances, whose knowledge of the names of flowers he admired, Chesterton, according to another gardener who later worked for them, only knew the name of the wallflower: ‘Master, he do like a bit of wallflower. It’s the only flower he knows the name of.’ There was also a vegetable garden.43

  Children adored this huge giant of a man who encouraged them to call him ‘uncle’ or ‘unclet’, and who was not only a fund of stories, but could also draw whatever they wanted. Charles and Stephen Johnson, the children of one of Frances’s cousins, often stayed during school holidays. Chesterton ‘took immense trouble and devoted many hours of his overworked time’ to a couple of magazines the boys started, to which everyone in the house was expected to contribute. Chesterton would say, ‘I must just go upstairs and finish an article for the Daily News and then I can come down and do some serious work.’ Teas at Overroads were memorable events, fulfilling ‘all one’s dreams of the perfect tea’. One child later in life recalled Chesterton founding a Seed Cake Club, from which he excluded Frances, who did not like seed cake. As a middle-aged woman, she admired how Frances was able to talk to children as though they were her mental and moral equals’, without at the same time losing her authority. Chesterton’s study was upstairs and from its window, she remembered, he would throw out great birds cut out of brown paper’ for the children to shoot at with home-made bows and arrows. On one occasion he threw a sea serpent down the stairs for harpooning in the hall. But Chesterton was not only seeking to amuse the children, he was also amusing himself. He would walk by himself around the garden endlessly shooting arrows with a bow or throwing a stick in the air and catching it. But he would also work while walking in the garden. Lucy Masterman remembered on one visit watching him walking up and down the lawn while he wrote a poem: He had the paper in one hand, a swordstick in the other, and his fountain pen in his teeth. Whenever he added a line the swordstick had to be laid down to enable him to use the pen.’ When a child was about 12, Chesterton would introduce him or her to the detective story. He always gave the impression of being busy, writing on Sundays and dictating on weekdays to a secretary, while walking up and down and making passes at the cushions with his sword-stick. He was always in his study or wandering round talking to himself. He never seemed to relax.’ But nor did he ever seem to be angry. At Christmas there was always a pantomime to be acted, and Chesterton liked to sit by the dressing-up box running through his fingers the materials of the various costumes, just as he would ‘feel the wood of a chair’ or ‘finger a pencil’ or ‘roll a walking stick between his hands’. In accordance with his philosophy of wonder at existence, he relished these insignificant things for what they were in themselves. What all the children remembered most of all was how they were treated as equals—that is, as adults; he did not come down to their level by pretending to be a small boy, but he brought children up to his own level by making them feel they were adults, whose views were important and w
ith whom a serious conversation was possible. He was never patronizing, nor did he make children feel they were ignorant or stupid. As Ronald Knox put it, he did not ‘exploit the simplicity of childhood for his own amusement. He entered, with tremendous gravity, into the tremendous gravity of the child.’ On only one occasion was Chesterton known to have punished a child, when a little girl was rude to the maid and was told by him to apologize. ‘She retorted “What does it matter? She’s only a servant.”’ Chesterton angrily sent her to her room. All the children who stayed at Overroads had vivid memories of the two dogs, Winkle and Quoodle, his successor, after whom a character in Chesterton’s novel The Flying Inn was named. Chesterton would ‘surreptitiously feed them during meals until Frances called a halt’. Chesterton was particularly fond of Quoodle, whom he would allow to sit with him on the sofa, contrary to Frances’s edict. When Quoodle died, one child was met by Frances in the hall with the request: ‘Quoodle is dead, so please don’t mention him to Gilbert.’ He was once heard anxiously asking about a ‘rather stupid little dog’ they had, ‘I think Dolfuss quite likes me, don’t you, Frances?’ There was also a cat called Perky, who was once caught eating the kippers that Chesterton loved for breakfast; but when the housemaid was about to throw out the half-eaten kippers, Chesterton stopped her: I don’t mind eating after Perky.’ Frances, of course, was the disciplinarian, but she did not always have her way: there is a story that on one occasion Chesterton demanded that some children should be allowed to stay up late and banged the table with his slipper saying, ‘You see, I am putting my foot down.’44