G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  Frances is just at the point where Rome acts both as the positive and the negative magnet; a touch would turn her either way; almost (against her will) to hatred, but with the right touch to a faith far beyond my reach. I know Father O’Connor’s would be the touch that does not startle, because she knows him and is fond of him; and the only thing she asked of me was to send for him. If he cannot come, of course I shall take other action and let you know.

  On 17 July Knox wrote back: ‘I’m awfully glad to hear that you’ve sent for Father O’Connor and that you think he’s likely to be available. I must say that, in the story, Father Brown’s powers of neglecting his parish always seemed to me even more admirable than Dr Watson’s powers of neglecting his practice; so I hope this trait was drawn from the life.’117

  Chesterton had written an undated letter, postmarked 11 July 1922, to Father O’Connor, in which he asked the priest if he could get away about the end of next week or thereabouts: and would it be possible for you to come south and see our new house—or old studio?’

  This sounds a very abrupt invitation; but I write in great haste, and am troubled about many things. I want to talk to you about them; especially the most serious ones, religious and concerned with my own rather difficult position. Most of the difficulty has been my own fault, but not all; some of my difficulties would commonly be called duties; though I ought perhaps to have learned sooner to regard them as lesser duties.

  He concluded by saying that O’Connor was ‘the person’ that he and Frances thought of ‘with most affection, of all who could help in such a matter’. The priest immediately replied that he was at their disposal at any time during the next fortnight. On 23 July Frances wrote to ask how long he could stay in Beaconsfield. The only small spare bedroom—‘We’ve got to build another room, but cannot afford it yet!’—was free for one night, but after that, presumably because the nurse would be back in residence, she would have to get him a room either with friends or at one of the inns. She was ‘only too pleased’ that her husband wanted to see him: ‘I am sure you will now be able to give him all the advice and help he wants.’ She wanted them to have all the time they needed.118 It was agreed that Father O’Connor should come on 26 July, the day the spare room was free. But then on the morning of 24 July O’Connor received a telegram (‘reply paid’) from Hilaire Belloc, to whom he had written to tell of Chesterton’s apparently impending conversion. Belloc wanted to meet him in London that day. O’Connor duly took the morning train to St Pancras Station, arriving some time before the appointed time of 3.30 p.m. at the appointed place, Westminster Cathedral. There he waited ‘until long after 4.30’in vain. There was no sign of Belloc, although he had been seen that afternoon in London. No doubt O’Connor was so flattered to know such famous people that he seems not even to have complained to Belloc about his non-appearance when he saw him six weeks later, when he asked him why he had sent the telegram. The answer was, ‘I wanted to keep you from going to Gilbert. I thought he would never be a Catholic.’ O’Connor thought that Belloc had made some ‘vain efforts’ himself: ‘It was easy to fluster Gilbert but impossible to hustle him.’ O’Connor’s impatience at having to stay two nights in London was restricted to the single exclamation, ‘Alone in London from Monday to Wednesday!’119

  When O’Connor arrived in Beaconsfield, he told Frances that there was ‘only one thing troubling Gilbert about the great step’ he was proposing to take—the effect it would have on her. ‘Oh! I shall be infinitely relieved,’ she responded. ‘You cannot imagine how it fidgets Gilbert to have anything on his mind. The last three months have been exceptionally trying. I should be only too glad to come with him, if God in His mercy would show the way clear, but up to now He has not made it clear enough to me to justify such a step.’ Having given Chesterton the reassurance he needed, O’Connor discussed at length with him ‘such special points’ as he wanted to raise, before telling him ‘to read through the Penny Catechism to make sure there were no snags to a prosperous passage’. ‘It was’, O’Connor later recalled, ‘a sight for men and angels all the Friday to see him wandering in and out of the house with his fingers in the leaves of the little book, resting it on his forearm whilst he pondered with his head on one side.’ O’Connor was reminded of the story, which Chesterton ‘knew well’, of how J. S. Phillimore had called on the Archbishop of Glasgow and asked to be received into the Church: ‘The butler brought down a Penny catechism with: His Grace says will you call again when you know all this by heart?’ Phillimore retorted that he had ‘come to be examined in it’. Because there was as yet no Catholic church in Beaconsfield, which was then part of the parish of St Augustine’s, High Wycombe, Chesterton’s reception into the Catholic Church took place on Sunday 30 July in ‘a small tin shed, painted red-brick, which stood among the sculleries and outhouses’120 of the Railway Hotel, where one Mass was then celebrated on Sundays and Holydays, by courtesy of the landlady of the hotel, a Mrs Borlase, who was an Irish Catholic, and her convert husband.121 Dom Ignatius Rice, the headmaster of Douai Abbey School, ‘one of Chesterton’s oldest and keenest admirers’, who had offered the Abbey for the service, joined O’Connor for breakfast at the inn where he was staying, after which they walked up to Top Meadow. There they found Chesterton in an armchair perusing the Penny Catechism, ‘pulling faces and making noises as he used to do when reading’. At lunch he abstained from wine and drank water. At about three o’clock they set off for the Railway Hotel. Chesterton ‘had no doubts or difficulties just before’ his reception into the Church—‘only fears, fears of something that had the finality and simplicity of suicide’. While Chesterton made his confession to Father O’Connor, Frances, who was weeping, and Dom Ignatius Rice sat in the hotel bar. After conditional baptism had been administered, the two priests left Chesterton and Frances by themselves in the makeshift chapel. Returning to collect something he had forgotten, Rice saw them coming down the aisle, Chesterton with a comforting arm round his weeping wife (not all her tears were of grief, O’Connor thought).122 The day after the reception O’Connor wrote to the local bishop, Bishop Cary Elwes of Northampton, to report that the famous convert had been ‘very humble and fervent’ and that his wife had been ‘much moved, but not as much as he’. ‘It all took place in the Railway Hotel, the which seems rather waggish on the part of the Powers who arrange these coincidences.’123

  After the service, O’Connor and Chesterton went to tea with the wife of Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, the prison reformer and founder of the Borstal juvenile system, ‘who had refused to be put off that morning’. Since Chesterton had on his father’s side a famous prison reformer, Captain Chesterton, prison reform was an obvious topic of conversation. But Lady Ruggles-Brise was the widow of the head of one of England’s oldest Catholic families, the Stonors, and, since O’Connor had been ordained by an Archbishop Stonor, there was another obvious topic of conversation. It was, thought O’Connor, ‘a good set-off to the tension of the early afternoon, better than going back to Top Meadow, where Frances was giving tea to Father Rice’. On their twenty-minute walk into Beaconsfield from the Railway Hotel, O’Connor recalled what he had said to Chesterton during the last couple of days:

  that there never was an Anglican but minimised some point, great or small, of dogma, that is of accepted fact in religion, and that now he would be inebriated with the plenteousness of the Lord’s House, and do better work than ever, even as Newman of the Parochial and Plain [Sermons] was but the try-out for Newman of Gerontius and the Second Spring sermon.124

  That somewhat obtuse comment about Newman, about whom Chesterton knew a great deal, perhaps partly explains Chesterton’s lack of response: ‘He was unwontedly silent that afternoon, or so it seemed to me. I do hope I did not talk too much, though it would not have been the first time if I had.’125 Father Rice, who had accompanied Frances back to Top Meadow and was not present to hear his Irish colleague’s prognostications of Chesterton’s brilliant future, remembered only that for the rest of
the day Chesterton was ‘in brilliant form… quoting poetry and jesting in the highest spirits’. He also wrote a poem, ‘The Convert’, to celebrate his new life as a convert:126

  After one moment when I bowed my head

  And the whole world turned over and came upright,

  And I came out where the old road shone white,

  I walked the ways and heard what all men said,

  Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,

  Being not unlovable but strange and light;

  Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite

  But softly, as men smile about the dead.

  The sages have a hundred maps to give

  That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,

  They rattle reason out through many a sieve

  That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:

  And all these things are less than dust to me

  Because my name is Lazarus and I live.127

  Chesterton was now faced with no doubt the most difficult letter he had had to write since writing to tell his mother that he was unofficially engaged to Frances.

  My dearest Mother,

  I write this (with the worst pen in South Bucks) to tell you something before I write about it to anyone else; something about which we shall probably be in the position of the two bosom friends at Oxford, who ‘never differed except in opinion’. You have always been so wise in not judging people by their opinions, but rather the opinions by the people. It is in one sense a long story by this time; but I have come to the same conclusion that Cecil did about needs of the modern world in religion and right dealing, and I am now a Catholic in the same sense as he, having long claimed the name in its Anglo-Catholic sense. I am not going to make a foolish fuss of reassuring you about things I am sure you never doubted; these things do not hurt any relations between people as fond of each other as we are; any more than they ever made any difference to the love between Cecil and ourselves.…I have thought about you, and all that I owe to you and my father, not only in the way of affection, but of the ideals of honour and freedom and charity and all other good things you always taught me: and I am not conscious of the smallest break or difference in those ideals; but only of a new and necessary way of fighting for them. I think, as Cecil did, that the fight for the family and the free citizen and everything decent must now be waged by [the] one fighting form of Christianity. … I have thought this out for myself and not in a hurry of feeling. It is months since I saw my Catholic friends and years since I talked to them about it. I believe it is the truth.128

  The last but one sentence of this letter could be misleading.129 Chesterton must mean that he had not talked for a long time to his friends about the the truth’ that he refers to in the last sentence, the truth, that is, of Catholicism, which he had long come to believe was true, as opposed to the question of his actual reception, which of course he had discussed with both Baring and O’Connor. He wanted to assure his mother that his decision had been carefully thought through and not under the influence of Catholic friends like Belloc. Mrs Chesterton replied that she was ‘not altogether surprised’ to hear the news. Nor could she object to anything that her son thought ‘right’: ‘I only pray that it will bring you happiness and peace. It was kind of you to tell me first—I know how you love me. I have no one left but you my darling, and I feel so lonely I am glad to have your love and confidence…’. She ended by expressing her ‘love and sympathy’ with him in his ‘resolve’.130

  He wrote now to Baring to assure him that his abominable delay’ in writing to him deserved ‘every penalty conceivable, hanging, burning and boiling in oil; but really not so inconceivable an idea as that I should be offended with you at any time (let alone after all you have done in this matter) however thoroughly you might be justified in being offended with me’. The reason for his delay was that he had wanted and hoped to write a letter ‘quite different from all those I have had to write to other people; a very long and intimate letter, trying to tell you all about this wonderful business, in which you have helped me so much more than anyone else’. The only other person he had ‘meant to write to in the same style’ was Father Knox—‘and his [letter] has been delayed in the same topsy-turvy way. I am drowning in whirlpools of work and worry over the New Witness which nearly went bankrupt for good this week. But worry does not worry so much as it did before …’. If it was not ‘adding insult to injury’, he would ‘send the long letter after all’. The present letter was an immediate acknowledgement of Baring’s letter, which had apparently contained a stamped return envelope—which he would ‘humiliate’ himself by using.131

  On receiving the news of his conversion from Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc replied on 1 August in terms of what Catholicism meant to him: The Catholic Church is the exponent of Reality. It is true. Its doctrines in matters large and small are statements of what is.’ By all his ‘nature of mind’ he was sceptical. But this was only a ‘mood: not a conclusion’: My conclusion—and that of all men who have ever once seen it—is the Faith: Corporate, organised, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.’ To Chesterton, who was blessed with ‘profound religious emotion’, this might seem too desiccated; and indeed it did lack enthusiasm. He blamed his lack of feeling on the death of his beloved Elodie:

  It is my misfortune. In youth I had it: even till lately. Grief has drawn the juices from it. I am alone and unfed. The more do I affirm the Sanctity, the Unity, the Infallibility of the Catholic Church. By my very isolation do I the more affirm it, as a man in a desert knows that water is right for man: or as a wounded dog, not able to walk, yet knows the way home.

  In short: ‘The Catholic Church is the natural home of the human spirit.’ There was no hint of congratulation or pleasure that Chesterton was now his co-religionist. But Belloc admitted that his ‘reactions’ were abominably slow’: ‘I must write to you again when I have collected myself…’.132

  To Father O’Connor he wrote: ‘It is very great news indeed!—and you were the agent therein.’ And again he wrote on the 23rd: ‘I had never thought it possible!…I have written to him and shall write again—but I am a poor hand at such things.’ Two days later he reiterated his astonishment: ‘The more I think on Gilbert the more astonished I become!’133 On 25 August Baring wrote again but in very different terms from Belloc:

  When I wrote to you the other day I was still cramped by the possibility of the news not being true although I knew it was true. I felt it was true at once. Curiously enough I felt it had happened before I saw the news in the newspaper at all.…Nothing for years has given me so much joy. I have hardly ever entered a church without putting up a candle to Our Lady or to St Joseph or St Anthony for you.134

  On the same day, Belloc wrote to express his astonishment to Baring:

  People said that he might come in at any time because he showed such a Catholic point of view and so much affection for the Catholic Church. That always seemed to me quite the wrong end of the stick. Acceptation of the Faith is an act, not a mood. Faith is an act of will and as it seemed to me the whole of his mind was occupied in expressing his liking for and attraction towards a certain mood, not all towards the acceptation of a certain Institution as defined and representing full reality in this world. There is all the difference between enjoying military ideas and even joining the volunteers, and becoming a private soldier in a common regiment.

  Belloc, however, admitted that he was ‘not very much good at understanding what is going on in other people’s minds…’.135 He might have added that there were other approaches to Catholicism apart from his own very individual one.

  An Irish politician, whom Chesterton had come to know when he was in Ireland, and who sent him a missal, received a remarkable letter of thanks. After acknowledging his debt to friends like Baring and Belloc, Chesterton confided that he had ‘an inner certainty that there was one thing which was dragging me in that divine direction long before’ he knew them—‘and the name of it was Ir
eland’.

  There mingled from the first with all the feelings of a normal patriotic Englishman a sort of supernatural fear of the sorrows of Ireland; a suspicion of what they might mean; which grew until I was certain that the policy of Castlereagh and Carson was at bottom that of Nero and Diocletian. The Irish were not faultless; nor were the early Christians: but I knew we had buffeted Christ.

  It was true that he had sympathized politically with Ireland long before he felt any ‘religious sympathy with her’. But the fact that he had held on to his political sympathy while ‘the other Liberals seemed to be abandoning all their Liberal ideas, made me guess it was more than political’.136

  After his reception into the Catholic Church, Chesterton went to High Wycombe to be prepared by the parish priest, Father Thomas Walker, for his first Holy Communion and Confirmation. At the morning Mass in the ‘shed’ at the Railway Hotel in Beaconsfield on Sunday 24 September Chesterton made his first Communion, and in the afternoon was confirmed in St Augustine’s, High Wycombe, by Bishop Cary Elwes, who belonged to a well-known old Catholic family, taking the confirmation name of Francis after his favourite saint, Francis of Assisi. Afterwards he met the Bishop in the presbytery.137 Father Walker remembered preparing Chesterton for his first Communion as ‘one of the happiest duties I had ever to perform’: ‘It certainly did not take long to prepare him for he evidently knew as much as I could tell him. Nevertheless, he said I was to treat him as any child whom I was teaching.’ Since Father Walker ‘had at the time’ twice ‘carefully waded through’ Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, this was a somewhat daunting task.