It will appear to many a somewhat grotesque matter to talk about a period in which most of us were born and which has only been dead a year or two, as if it were a primal Babylonian empire of which only a few columns are left crumbling in the desert. And yet such is, in spirit, the fact. There is no more remarkable psychological element in history than the way in which a period can suddenly become unintelligible … To the early Victorian period we have in a moment lost the key: the Crystal Palace is the temple of a forgotten creed. The thing always happens sharply: a whisper runs through the salons, Mr Max Beerbohm waves a wand and a whole generation of great men and great achievement suddenly looks mildewed and unmeaning. We see precisely the same thing in that other great reaction towards art and the vanities, the Restoration of Charles II. In that hour both the great schools of faith and valour which had seemed either angels or devils to all men: the dreams of Strafford and the great High Churchmen on the one hand; the Moslem frenzy of the English Commons, the worship of the English law upon the other; both seemed ridiculous. The new Cavalier despised the old Cavalier even more than he despised the Roundhead …
All the grand sweeps and understandings of history, analysis and meaning were present in the book, enough so to provoke an invitation that Gilbert should be nominated for the Chair of English Literature at Birmingham University. Unlike his friend Hilaire Belloc he had no academic pretensions, and much to the bewilderment and chagrin of his supporters in Birmingham he rejected the flattering request with polite apologies. If the biography of G.F. Watts produced an enthusiastic audience, his next book placed him firmly amongst the leading handful of English writers of his era, and still enjoys constant publication and a healthy readership. It is possibly his finest book, certainly his most ambitious and successful of his early years. As with so many of his projects, the surface plot and meaning of the book had little to do with its actual content. It was the product of years of daydreaming and attempted stories in notebooks and diaries, and included a philosophy of what was, and what was possible, which says more about Gilbert than most of his directly autobiographical writings. The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a fantasy set in the future — not an unusual device in literature — and as with other books which have employed such a style it gives warnings and interpretations about contemporary society, asking the reader to think what might happen if certain trends continue, and to draw conclusions from one man’s vision. It manages to be both optimistic and pessimistic, never pointing out the potential gloom without also highlighting the ways out.
In Gilbert’s tale of things to come the nation is ruled by a king who is chosen out of the ranks of the civil service by a perverse form of democracy: when an individual’s name is chosen, he has to serve his time as monarch, however unsuitable he may be. Auberon Quin, the man who finds himself King at the beginning of Notting Hill, is an eccentric character who tells unintelligible jokes and outrages his companions with his behaviour and odd manners. E.C. Bentley, reviewing the book for the Bystander, described the story as that of “a cynically humorous Autocrat of England who, a century hence, has the idea of reviving in the swarming parochial divisions of London the old mediaeval pomps and prides of municipal patriotism. Thus, King Auberon endows Notting Hill, West Kensington, Hammersmith, Bayswater, and all the other recognised neighbourhoods (including Battersea) with town charters, coats of arms, and mottoes, together with funny privileges and immemorial rights, invented on the spur of the moment. Also, it is the story of a splendid visionary, Adam Wayne, who alone of all men takes the King’s freak quite seriously, and as provost of Notting Hill, infects all his fellow Notting Hillers with his own ardour — the story, in fact, of the triumph of a spiritual idea over the multitude of common-minded men, a possibility of which Mr Chesterton is, to his great honour, one of the resolute maintainers.”
The influences on the book are as clear as they are powerful. His childhood adventures along the streets of West London were centred around the areas mentioned in Notting Hill, those streets where his often lonely, sometimes bewildered imagination came to grips with romantic dreams of battles and chivalry. He would pass small corner shops in the morning as they opened their doors to trade and the sunshine, and pass by them again as they closed up for the evening. It seemed an insular, satisfying life, embodying so much of what Gilbert’s home and country represented; he was attracted by the self-contained smallness of urban villages, and would rush to their defence whenever so called upon. That Notting Hill stands firm for its ancient rights in the book and is prepared to fight for them to the last man is an extension of Gilbert’s longing for a time when local honour required, demanded, stout support; if indeed that era ever existed. The Napoleon of Notting Hill was the setting down of a wistful, wishful fantasy.
The story of the commissioning of the book is as indicative of its author as the writing itself. “I was ‘broke’ — only ten shillings in my pocket,” wrote Gilbert. “Leaving my worried wife, I went down Fleet Street, got a shave, and then ordered for myself, at the Cheshire Cheese, an enormous luncheon of my favourite dishes and a bottle of wine. It took my all, but I could then go to my publishers fortified. I told them I wanted to write a book and outlined the story of Napoleon of Notting Hill. But I must have twenty pounds, I said, before I begin. ‘We will send it to you on Monday.’ ‘If you want the book,’ I replied, ‘you will have to give it to me today as I am disappearing to write it.’ They gave it.”
Conflict dominates Notting Hill, as it would do most of Gilbert’s novels; between religion and atheism, modern and traditional, native and alien, light and dark. The struggle, and blurring, of the serious and the humorous arise again and again, never as strongly as in the men of Notting Hill fighting and dying for what their absurd king had begun simply as a glorified joke. The reader is not told what to think, what to conclude from the story; the cynical and the stridently dedicated are given their moments of triumph. Adam Wayne, the young lion of belief, is nearest to the hero in the book, explaining to his monarch at the end that he understands the antagonism between the causes, and that when “dark and dreary days come, you and I are necessary, the pure fanatic, the pure satirist. We have between us remedied a great wrong. We have lifted the modern cities into that poetry which every one who knows mankind knows to be immeasurably more common than the common place. But in healthy people there is no war between us. We are but the two lobes of the brain of a ploughman. Laughter and love are everywhere. The cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are full of blasphemous grotesques. The mother laughs continually at the child, the lover laughs continually at the lover, the wife at the husband, the friend at the friend. Auberon Quin, we have been too long separated; let us go out together …”
The success of Notting Hill made reputation more than money. Gilbert was writing and speaking enough for three authors, but still finding it difficult to keep his fees in his wallet or pockets for any period of time; he was generous, and he was frequently irresponsible with cash. With the larger-than-life energy which characterised his earlier years he set about earning more money in the only way he knew, by working harder. In 1905 he published two books, both major achievements. The Club of Queer Trades contained a number of stories, with illustrations by the author, which had either appeared before or ran along a theme which Gilbert had previously explored. There are shades of Father Brown in the tales, all journeys into outlandish mystery and puzzles of the most obscure kind. The link between each tale is the “Club” in question, with each member of the institution having to prove that he earns his living by a “queer trade.” He leaps from a character who decides to communicate in a new sign language, to someone who lives in a tree-house, to a professional victim who hires himself out in order to lose witty arguments. It was a perfect vehicle for the Chestertonian mind, set free to range as far as it wanted and needed. Critics, and even some admirers, were disappointed with the book; it is one of the few volumes by Gilbert which has probably increased in popularity over the decades.
Heretics followed soon after, and reassured all of those who were upset by Gilbert’s wanderings into detective fiction. It was published on 6th June by John Lane, to immediate praise and immediate offence. It was by its very nature a contemporary book, looking at literary people. Rudyard Kipling, Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells were three of the people analysed and criticised, also Lowes Dickinson, George Moore and Joseph McCabe, but most of those discussed are now obscure and forgotten and therefore inevitably a great deal of its passion and cutting edge has been lost. He wrote
Nothing more strangely indicates an enormous and silent evil of modern society than the extraordinary use which is made nowadays of the word “orthodox.” In former days the heretic was proud of not being a heretic. It was the kingdoms of the world and the police and the judges who were heretics. He was orthodox. He had no pride in having rebelled against them; they had rebelled against him. The armies with their cruel security, the kings with their cold faces, the decorous processes of State, the reasonable processes of law — all of these like sheep had gone astray. The man was proud of being orthodox, was proud of being right. If he stood alone in a howling wilderness he was more than a man; he was a church. He was the centre of the universe; it was round him that the stars swung. All the tortures torn out of forgotten hells could not make him admit that he was heretical. But a few modern phrases have made him boast of it. He says, with a conscious laugh, “I suppose I am very heretical,” and looks round for applause. The word “heresy” not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word “orthodoxy” not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing, and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right. For obviously a man ought to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical. The Bohemian, with a red tie, ought to pique himself on his orthodoxy. The dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that, whatever else he is, at least he is orthodox.
The spirit of right-thinking which Gilbert promulgated in Heretics was the result of years of theorising and debate. In criticising other writers of the period he was not making personal attacks, but pulling at the structure of modernity which had been established in the early years of the century. The book advocated a return to fundamentals, and in that sense was truly radical; only by returning to the roots, looking again at our beliefs and changing accordingly can we achieve an equitable society. Each of the individuals discussed embodied something which was wrong with Edwardian Britain. Gilbert had been waiting to write the book most of his adult life, the public had been waiting for such a book for just as long.
H.G. Wells was the most able and advanced proponent of the “new” world, of scientific progress; his antipathy to religion was constantly publicised and cleverly supported. He and Gilbert found friendship difficult — Wells had the greater problem — and the chapter on the Wellsian heresy began with a blast rather than a caress: “We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity.” On the character of Wells himself he wrote of “a man of genius” and “scientific humility.” It was still an intense assault on the comfortable preconceptions of a generation of reformers, the like of which had not been seen before and, more importantly, was not at all expected.
Joseph McCabe was a man who has many imitators today. A former priest, after leaving the Church he decided to attack all that he had claimed and sworn to believe. McCabe had made Gilbert one of his main targets, launching attacks upon him and taking issue with most of his writings. McCabe was treated with the utmost courtesy in Heretics, but behind the polite phrases was an angry diatribe; he was the physical culmination of most of the ills which Gilbert perceived in the modern world. “Humanity stands at a solemn parting of the ways,” stated McCabe. “Towards some unknown goal it presses through the ages, impelled by an over-mastering desire of happiness. Today it hesitates, light-heartedly enough, but every serious thinker knows how momentous the decision may be. It is, apparently, deserting the path of religion and entering the path of secularism …” It was not the sort of statement which could go unanswered, at least in Gilbert’s eyes. He was particularly sensitive to McCabe’s attack on his use of humour and wit. “To sum up the whole matter very simply” he wrote, “if Mr McCabe asks me why I import frivolity into a discussion of the nature of man, I answer, because frivolity is a part of the nature of man. If he asks me why I introduce what he calls paradoxes into a philosophical problem, I answer, because all philosophical problems tend to become paradoxical. If he objects to my treatment of life riotously, I reply that life is a riot …”
In his chapter on Bernard Shaw — a lifelong friend and admirer — he showed sympathy if not full agreement. Kipling was vulgar and ridiculous in his colonial mentality, Ibsen a man of ambivalence and doubt. Style and content impressed all, from the Prime Minister and highest bishops of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, to a wave of students and young scholars who embraced this new thinking as the vanguard of a totally new and liberating form. Gilbert was not sure how to handle the acclaim, always mildly uncomfortable with praise and flattery. His usual solution was to laugh at the enthusiastic critics, and laugh even louder at the unkind ones. He was now drinking heavily, becoming increasingly absent-minded and working far too hard. Still financial security and stability eluded him. That changed at the end of 1905 when Sir Bruce Ingram, editor of the Illustrated London News, began his search for a successor to L.F. Austin as the author of the “Our Notebook” column. “The article runs to about 2,000 words and takes the form of a light discussion on matters of the moment” wrote Sir Bruce, “and it is treated without political bias. I feel that no-one is better fitted than yourself to do the work and I shall be extremely glad if your other engagements permit you to take it up. The remuneration would be at the rate of £350 per annum, but I should propose that in the first instance the agreement should be for six months. In the event of your acceptance I shall send you further particulars as to the time for copy. I do not know that the remuneration is very dazzling, but I thought perhaps that you might have sufficient interest in this ancient journal to induce you to become a regular. If so, I should feel extremely honoured.”
Such a gracious invitation, and such a timely offer of a regular income, was accepted immediately. Gilbert was to write the column for over thirty years, contributing some 1600 articles. They lacked the cutting edge of some of his other short pieces — politics and religion were not included in his subjects — but were precisely what a journal such as the Illustrated London News required; clever, beautifully written and able to appeal to a broad range of reader. He became as essential to the magazine as its title.
In January 1922, squeezed in between an article on submarines, a piece on the dangers of fishing and “A Week’s Shooting Trip in the Jungles of Nepal,” he wrote
A daily paper recently published a leading article on the good old subject of the good old days. Of course, it was devoted to the defence of the present against the past, for this practice also is by this time tolerably old. As a result, those who discuss the good old days and how bad they were, are a little vague about how old they are.
And in one of the last Illustrated London News articles before his death
The time has come to protest against certain very grave perils in the cinema and the popular films. I do not mean the peril of immoral films, but the peril of moral ones …
It was a shining two years for Gilbert, full of works being published, friends being made and a theology being shaped. The death of Frances’s brother, Knollys, interrupted the happiness. The wretched young man had been in a state of depression since Gertrude’s death. He had attempted to find ways out of his illness, eventually discovering a certain peace inside the Roman Catholic Church. Hence the shock at his suicide, by drowning. Frances reacted badly to the event, rejecting Gilbert’s support and sinking into a black period of grief and guilt herself. It was to lead to her asking, insi
sting, that she and Gilbert abandon the Fleet Street scene to which she was becoming increasingly hostile.
Gilbert found solace, as usual, in his work. His love affair with Charles Dickens had intensified, culminating in his biography of the man and his writings in the summer of 1906. Shaw was quick to comment: “As I am a supersaturated Dickensite, I pounced on your book and read it, as Wegg read Gibbon and other authors, right slap through …” Once again, Gilbert viewed his subject in the context of his time, exhibiting a unique ability for empathy. It was not the presentation of the facts of Dickens’s life which impressed readers, so much as the portrayal of his character and writings which shone out of the book. Nor did Gilbert abstain from writing about himself in the biography, just as he had done with Browning. Writing of Dickens’s remarkable popularity he said
There is one aspect of Charles Dickens which must be of interest even to that subterranean race which does not admire his books. Even if we are not interested in Dickens as a great event in English literature, we must still be interested in him as a great event in English history … If he had not his place with Fielding and Thackeray, he would still have his place with Wat Tyler and Wilkes; for the man led a mob. He did what no English statesman, perhaps, has really done; he called out the people. He was popular in a sense of which we moderns have not even a notion. In that sense there is no popularity now. There are no popular authors today. We call such authors as Mr Guy Boothby or Mr William Le Queux popular authors. [Their current obscurity proves his point.] But this is popularity altogether in a weaker sense; not only in quantity, but in quality. The old popularity was positive; the new is negative. There is a great deal of difference between the eager man who wants to read a book, and the tired man who wants a book to read. A man reading a Le Queux mystery wants to get to the end of it. A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they know it so well. If a man can read a Le Queux story six times it is only because he can forget it six times. In short, the Dickens novel was popular, not because it was an unreal world, but because it was a real world; a world in which the soul could live. The modern “shocker” at its very best is an interlude in life. But in the days when Dickens’s work was coming out in serial, people talked as if real life were itself the interlude between one issue of “Pickwick” and another.
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