A Long Engagement

GILBERT SYMPATHIZED WITH his future mother-in-law's anxiety at Frances's engagement to "a self-opinionated scarecrow," but I doubt if it at all quickly occurred to him that the basis of that anxiety was the fact that he was earning only twenty-five shillings a week! Frances herself, Lucian Oldershaw, and the rest of his friends believed he was a genius with a great future and this belief they tried to communicate to Frances's family. But even if they succeeded, faith in the future did not pay dividends in a present income on which to set up house. A widow, considering her daughter's future, might well feel a little anxiety. But one can see wheels within wheels of family conclaves and matters to perplex the simple which drew another letter from Gilbert to Frances:

. . . It is a mystic and refreshing thought that I shall never understand Bloggs.

That is the truth of it . . . that this remarkable family atmosphere . . . this temperament with its changing moods and its everlasting will, its divine trust in one's soul and its tremulous speculations as to one's "future," its sensitiveness like a tempered sword, vibrating but never broken: its patience that can wait for Eternity and its impatience that cannot wait for tea: its power of bearing huge calamities, and its queer little moods that even those calamities can never overshadow or wipe out: its brusqueness that always pleases and its over-tactfulness that sometimes wounds: its terrific intensity of feeling, that sometimes paralyses the outsider with conversational responsibility: its untranslatable humour of courage and poverty and its unfathomed epics of past tragedy and triumph—all this glorious confusion of family traits, which, in no exaggerative sense, make the Gentiles come to your light and the folk of the nations to the brightness of your house—is a thing so utterly outside my own temperament that I was formed by nature to admire and not understand it. God made me very simply—as he made a tree or a pig or an oyster: to perform certain functions. The best thing he gave me was a perfect and unshakable trust in those I love. . . .

Gilbert's sympathy with his future mother-in-law may have been put to some slight strain by an incident related by Lucian Oldershaw. Mrs. Blogg begged him to talk to Gilbert about his personal appearance—clothes and such matters—and to entreat him to make an effort to improve it. One can imagine how much he must have disliked the commission! Anyhow, he decided it would be better to do it away from home and he suggested to Gilbert a trip to the seaside. Arrived there he broached the subject. Gilbert, he says, was not the least angry, but answered quite seriously that Frances loved him as he was and that it would be absurd for him to try to alter. It was only out of a later and deeper experience of women that he was able to write "A man's friends like him but they leave him as he is. A man's wife loves him and is always trying to change him."

A good many things happened in the course of this long engagement. Frances and Gilbert were both young and long engagements were normal at that period, when the idea of a wife continuing to earn after marriage was unheard of. There were obvious disadvantages in the long delay before marriage but also certain advantages. The two got to know each other with a close intimacy: they were comrades as well as lovers and carried both these relationships into married life. For the biographer the advantage has been immense, since every separation between the pair meant a batch of letters. The discerning will have noted that there are in these letters considerable excisions: parts Frances would not show even to the biographer. . But they are the richest quarry from which to dig for the most important period of any man's life; the period richest in mental development and the shaping of character. It is, too, the only period of his adult life when Gilbert wrote letters at all, unless they were absolutely unavoidable.

Even in a small family two members will tend to draw together more closely than the rest, and this was so with Frances and her sister Gertrude. They adored one another and Frances offered her to Gilbert as a sister, with especially confident pride. He had never had a sister since babyhood and he enjoyed it. The happiness of the engagement was terribly broken into by the sudden death of Gertrude in a street accident. Frances was absolutely shattered. The next group of letters belongs to the months after Gertrude's death, when Gilbert was still trying to be a publisher, but, urged on by Frances, beginning also to be a writer. During part of this time she had gone abroad for rest and recovery after the shock. Gilbert pictures her reading his letters "under the shadow of an alien cathedral."

None of these letters are dated but most of them have kept their postmarks.

11, Paternoster Buildings (postmarked July 8, 1899)

. . . I am black but comely at this moment: because the cyclostyle has blacked me. Fear not. I shall wash myself. But I think it my duty to render an accurate account of my physical appearance every time I write: and shall be glad of any advice and assistance. . . . I have been reading Lewis Carroll's remains, mostly Logic, and have much pleasure in enlivening you with the following hilarious query: "Can a Hypothetical, whose protasis is false, be legitimate? Are two Hypotheticals of the forms, If A, then B, and If A then not B compatible?" I should think a Hypothetical could be, if it tried hard. . . .

To return to the Cyclostyle. I like the Cyclostyle ink; it is so inky. I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud. It is just the same with people. When we call a man "manly" or a woman "womanly" we touch the deepest philosophy.

I will not ask you to forgive this rambling levity. I, for one have sworn, I do not hesitate to say it, by the sword of God that has struck us, and before the beautiful face of the dead, that the first joke that occurred to me I would make, the first nonsense poem I thought of I would write, that I would begin again at once with a heavy heart at times, as to other duties, to the duty of being perfectly silly, perfectly extravagant, perfectly trivial, and as far as possible, amusing. I have sworn that Gertrude should not feel, wherever she is, that the comedy has gone out of our theatre. This, I am well aware, will be misunderstood. But I have long grasped that whatever we do we are misunderstood—small blame to other people; for, we know ourselves, our best motives are things we could neither explain nor defend. And I would rather hurt those who can shout than her who is silent.

You might tell me what you feel about this: but I am myself absolutely convinced that gaiety that is the bubble of love, does not annoy me: the old round of stories, laughter, family ceremonies, seems to me far less really inappropriate than a single moment of forced silence or unmanly shame. . . .

I have always imagined Frances did not know of her mother's efforts to tidy Gilbert, but very early in their engagement she began her own abortive attempts to make him brush his hair, tie his tie straight and avoid made-up ones, attend to the buttons on his coat, and all the rest. It would seem that for a time at any rate he made some efforts, but evidently simply regarded the whole thing as one huge joke.

11 Warwick Gardens (Postmarked July 9th, 1899)

. . . I am clean. I am wearing a frockcoat, which from a superficial survey seems to have no end of buttons. It must be admitted that I am wearing a bow-tie: but on careful research I find that these were constantly worn by Vikings. A distinct allusion to them is made in that fine fragment, the Tryggvhessa Saga, where the poet says, in the short alliterative lines of Early Norse poetry:

Frockcoat Folding then
Hakon Hardrada
Bow-tie Buckled
Waited for war

(Brit. Mus. Mss. CCCLXIX lines 99981-99985)

I resume. My appearance, as I have suggested, is singularly exemplary. My boots are placed, after the fastidious London fashion, on the feet: the laces are done up, the watch is going, the hair is brushed, the sleeve-links are inserted, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. As for my straw hat, I put it on eighteen times consecutively, taking a run and a jump to each try, till at last I hit the right angle. I have not taken it off for three days and nights lest I should disturb that exquisite pose. Ladies, princes, queens, ecclesiastical processions go by in vain: I do not remove it. That angle of the hat is something to mount guard over. As Swinburne says—"Not twice on earth do the gods do this."

It is at present what is, I believe, called a lovely summer's night. To say that it is hot would be as feeble a platitude as the same remark would be in the small talk of Satan and Beelzebub.

If there were such a thing as blue-hot iron, it would describe the sky tonight. I cannot help dreaming of some wild fairy-tale in which the whole round cosmos should be a boiling pot, with the flames of Purgatory under it, and that soon I shall have the satisfaction of seeing such a thing as boiled mountains, boiled cities, and a boiled moon and stars. A tremendous picture. Yet I am perfectly happy as usual. After all, why should we object to be boiled? Potatoes, for example, are better boiled than raw—why should we fear to be boiled into new shapes in the cauldron? These things are an allegory.

. . . I am so glad to hear you say . . . that, in your own words "it is good for us to be here"—where you are at present. The same remark, if I remember right, was made on the mountain of the Transfiguration. It has always been one of my unclerical sermons to myself, that that remark which Peter made on seeing the vision of a single hour, ought to be made by us all, in contemplating every panoramic change in the long Vision we call life—other things superficially, but this always in our depths. "It is good for us to be here—it is good for us to be here," repeating itself eternally. And if, after many joys and festivals and frivolities, it should be our fate to have to look on while one of us is, in a most awful sense of the words, "transfigured before our eyes": shining with the whiteness of death—at least, I think, we cannot easily fancy ourselves wishing not to be at our post. Not I, certainly. It was good for me to be there.

* * * *

11 Warwick Gardens (postmarked July 11, 1899.)

. . . The novel, after which you so kindly enquire, is proceeding headlong. It received another indirect stimulus today, when Mr. Garnett insisted on taking me out to lunch, gave me a gorgeous repast at a restaurant, succeeded in plucking the secret of my private employment from my bosom, and made me promise to send him some chapters of it. I certainly cannot complain of not being sympathetically treated by the literary men I know. I wonder where the jealous, spiteful, depreciating man of letters we read of in books has got to. It's about time he turned up, I think. Excuse me for talking about these trivialities. . . .

I have made a discovery: or I should say seen a vision. I saw it
between two cups of black coffee in a Gallic restaurant in Soho: but
I could not express it if I tried.

But this was one thing that it said—that all good things are one thing. There is no conflict between the gravestone of Gertrude and a comic-opera tune played by Mildred Wain. But there is everlasting conflict between the gravestone of Gertrude and the obscene pomposity of the hired mute: and there is everlasting conflict between the comic-opera tune and any mean or vulgar words to which it may be set. These, which man hath joined together, God shall most surely sunder. That is what I am feeling . . . now every hour of the day. All good things are one thing. Sunsets, schools of philosophy, babies, constellations, cathedrals, operas, mountains, horses, poems—all these are merely disguises. One thing is always walking among us in fancy-dress, in the grey cloak of a church or the green cloak of a meadow. He is always behind, His form makes the folds fall so superbly. And that is what the savage old Hebrews, alone among the nations, guessed, and why their rude tribal god has been erected on the ruins of all polytheistic civilisations. For the Greeks and Norsemen and Romans saw the superficial wars of nature and made the sun one god, the sea another, the wind a third. They were not thrilled, as some rude Israelite was, one night in the wastes, alone, by the sudden blazing idea of all being the same God: an idea worthy of a detective story.

11, Paternoster Buildings (postmarked July 14, 1899.)

. . . costume slightly improved. The truth is that a mystical and fantastic development has taken place. My clothes have rebelled against me. Weary of scorn and neglect, they have all suddenly come to life and they dress me by force every morning. My frockcoat leaps upon me like a lion and hangs on, dragging me down. As I struggle my boots trip me up—and the laces climb up my feet (never missing a hole) like snakes or creepers. At the same moment the celebrated grey tie springs at my throat like a wild cat.

I am told that the general effects produced by this remarkable psychical development are superb. Really the clothes must know best. Still it is awkward when a mackintosh pursues one down the street. . . .

. . . There is nothing in God's earth that really expresses the bottom of the nature of a man in love except Burns' songs. To the man not in love they must seem inexplicably simple. When he says, "My love is like the melody that's sweetly played in tune," it seems almost a crude way of referring to music. But a man in love with a woman feels a nerve move suddenly that Dante groped for and Shakespeare hardly touched. What made me think of Burns, however, was that one of his simple and sudden things, hitting the right nail so that it rings, occurs in the song of "O a' the airts the wind can blaw," where he merely says that there is nothing beautiful anywhere but it makes him think of the woman. That is not really a mere aesthetic fancy, a chain of sentimental association—it is an actual instinctive elemental movement of the mind, performed automatically and instantly. . . .

Felixstowe (undated)

. . . I have as you see, arrived here. I have done other daring things, such as having my hair shampooed, as you commanded, and also cut. The effect of this is so singularly horrible that I have found further existence in London impossible. Public opinion is too strong for me. . . . There are many other reasons I could give for being pleased to come: such as that I have some time for writing the novel; that I can make up stories I don't intend to write . . . that there are phosphorescent colours on the sea and a box of cigarettes on the mantelpiece.

Some fragments of what I felt [about Gertrude's death] have struggled out in the form of some verses which I am writing out for you. But for real strength (I don't like the word "comfort") for real peace, no human words are much good except perhaps some of the unfathomable, unintelligible, unconquerable epigrams of the Bible. I remember when Bentley had a burning boyish admiration for Professor Huxley, and when that scientist died some foolish friend asked him quite flippantly in a letter what he felt about it. Bentley replied with the chapter and verse reference to one of the Psalms, alone on a postcard. The text was, "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of one of his saints." The friend, I remember, thought it "a curious remark about Huxley." It strikes me as a miraculous remark about anybody. It is one of those magic sayings where every word hits a chain of association, God knows how.

"Precious"—we could not say that Gertrude's death is happy or
providential or sweet or even perhaps good. But it is something.
"Beautiful" is a good word—but "precious" is the only right word.

It is this passionate sense of the value of things: of the richness of the cosmic treasure: the world where every star is a diamond, every leaf an emerald, every drop of blood a ruby, it is this sense of preciousness that is really awakened by the death of His saints. Somehow we feel that even their death is a thing of incalculable value and mysterious sweetness: it is awful, tragic, desolating, desperately hard to bear—but still "precious." . . . Forgive the verbosity of one whose trade it is to express the inexpressible.

The verses he speaks of in this letter, Frances treasured greatly. She showed them to me, in a book which opens with a very touching prayer in her own writing. In a later chapter I quote the lines in which Gilbert writes of his own tone-deafness, and of how he saw what music meant as he watched his wife's face. Something of the same effect is produced on me by these verses. Gilbert was not of course tone-deaf to this tragedy, yet it was chiefly in its effect on Frances that it affected him.

The sudden sorrow smote my love
That often falls twixt kiss and kiss
And looking forth awhile she said
Can no man tell me where she is.

And again

Stricken they sat: and through them moved
My own dear lady, pale and sweet.

This soul whose clearness makes afraid
Our souls: this wholly guiltless one—
No cobweb doubts—no passion smoke
Have veiled this mirror from Thy sun.

In letters to Frances he could enter so deeply into her grief as to make it his own. But when he wrote verse and spoke as it were to himself or to God, the reflected emotion was not enough. These verses could never rank with his real poetry.

It was not possible in fact for a man so happily in love to dwell lastingly on any sorrow. And I cannot avoid the feeling that, quite apart from any theory, cheerfulness was constantly "breaking in." For Gilbert was a very happy man. Across the top of one of his letters is written: "You can always tell the real love from the slight by the fact that the latter weakens at the moment of success; the former is quadrupled."

The next of his letters is a mingling of the comic and the fantastic, very special to G.K.C.

11, Paternoster Buildings (postmarked Sept. 29, 1899.)

. . . I fear, as you say, that my letters do not contain many practical details about myself: the letters are not very long to begin with, as I think it better to write something every day than a long letter when I have leisure: and when I have a little time to think in, I always think of the Kosmos first and the Ego afterwards. I admit, however, that you are not engaged to the Kosmos: dear me! what a time the Kosmos would have! All its Comets would have their hair brushed every morning. The Whirlwind would be adjured not to walk about when it was talking. The Oceans would be warmed with hot-water pipes. Not even the lowest forms of life would escape the crusade of tidiness: you would walk round and round the jellyfish, looking for a place to put in shirt-links.

Under these circumstances, then, I cannot but regard it as fortunate that you are only engaged to your obedient Microcosm: a biped inheriting some of the traits of his mother, the Kosmos, its untidiness, its largeness, its irritating imperfection and its profound and hearty intention to go on existing as long as it possibly can.

I can understand what you mean about wanting details about me, for I want just the same about you. You need only tell me "I went down the street to a pillar-box," I shall know that you did it in a manner, blindingly, staggeringly, crazily beautiful. It is quite true, as you say, that I am a person wearing certain clothes with a certain kind of hair. I cannot get rid of the impression that there is something scorchingly sarcastic about the underlining in this passage. . . .

. . . as to what I do every day: it depends on which way you want it narrated: what we all say it is, or what it really is.

What we all say happens every day is this: I wake up: dress myself, eat bacon and bread and coffee for breakfast: walk up to High St. Station, take a fourpenny ticket for Blackfriars, read the Chronicle in the train, arrive at 11, Paternoster Buildings: read a MS called "The Lepers" (light comedy reading) and another called "The Preparation of Ryerson Embury"—you know the style—till 2 o'clock. Go out to lunch, have—(but here perhaps it would be safer to become vague), come back, work till six, take my hat and walking-stick and come home: have dinner at home, write the Novel till 11, then write to you and go to bed. That is what, we in our dreamy, deluded way, really imagine is the thing that happens. What really happens (but hist! are we observed?) is as follows.

Out of the starless night of the Uncreated, that was before the stars, a soul begins to grope back to light. It gropes its way through strange, half-lighted chambers of Dreams, where in a brown and gold twilight, it sees many things that are dimly significant, true stories twisted into new and amazing shapes, human beings whom it knew long ago, sitting at the windows by dark sunsets, or talking in dim meadows. But the awful invading Light grows stronger in the dreams, till the soul in one last struggle, plunges into a body, as into a house and wakes up within it. Then he rises and finds himself in a wonderful vast world of white light and clear, frankly coloured shapes, an inheritor of a million stars. On enquiry he is informed that his name is Gilbert Keith Chesterton. This amuses him.

He goes through a number of extraordinary and fantastic rituals; which the pompous elfland he has entered demands. The first is that he shall get inside a house of clothing, a tower of wool and flax; that he shall put on this foolish armour solemnly, one piece after another and each in its right place. The things called sleevelinks he attends to minutely. His hair he beats angrily with a bristly tool. For this is the Law. Downstairs a more monstrous ceremony attends him.

He has to put things inside himself. He does so, being naturally polite. Nor can it be denied that a weird satisfaction follows. He takes a sword in his hand (for what may not befall him in so strange a country!) and goes forth: he finds a hole in the wall, a little cave wherein sits One who can give him the charm that rules the horse of water and fire. He finds an opening and descends into the bowels of the earth. Down, among the roots of the Eternal hills, he finds a sunless temple wherein he prays. And in the centre of it he finds a lighted temple in which he enters. Then there are noises as of an earthquake and smoke and fire in the darkness: and when he opens the door again he is in another temple, out of which he climbs into another world, leagues and leagues away. And when he asks the meaning of the vision, they talk gibberish and say, "It is a train."

So the day goes, full of eerie publishers and elfin clerks, till he returns and again puts things inside him, and then sits down and makes men in his own head and writes down all that they said and did. And last of all comes the real life itself. For half-an-hour he writes words upon a scrap of paper, words that are not picked and chosen like those that he has used to parry the strange talk of the folk all day, but words in which the soul's blood pours out, like the body's blood from a wound. He writes secretly this mad diary, all his passion and longing, all his queer religion, his dark and dreadful gratitude to God, his idle allegories, the tales that tell themselves in his head; the joy that comes on him sometimes (he cannot help it!) at the sacred intoxication of existence: the million faults of idleness and recklessness and the one virtue of the unconquered adoration of goodness, that dark virtue that every man has, and hides deeper than all his vices—he writes all this down as he is writing it now. And he knows that if he sticks it down and puts a stamp on it and drops it into the mouth of a little red goblin at the corner of the street—he knows that all this wild soliloquy will be poured into the soul of one wise and beautiful lady sitting far away beyond seas and rivers and cities, under the shadow of an alien Cathedral. . . . This is not all so irrelevant as you may think. It was this line of feeling that taught me, an utter Rationalist as far as dogma goes, the lesson of the entire Spirituality of things—an opinion that nothing has ever shattered since. I can't express myself on the point, nobody can. But it is only the spirituality of things that we are sure of. That the eyes in your face are eyes I do not know: they may have other names and uses. I know that they are good or beautiful, or rather spiritual. I do not know on what principle the Universe is run, I know or feel that it is good or spiritual. I do not know what Gertrude's death was—I know that it was beautiful, for I saw it. We do not feel that it is so beautiful now—why? Because we do not see it now. What we see now is her absence: but her Death is not her absence, but her Presence somewhere else. That is what we knew was beautiful, as long as we could see it. Do not be frightened, dearest, by the slow inevitable laws of human nature, we shall climb back into the mountain of vision: we shall be able to use the word, with the accent of Whitman. "Disembodied, triumphant, dead."

In the Notebook he was writing:

There is a heart within a distant town
Who loves me more than treasure or renown
Think you it strange and wear it as a crown.

Is not the marvel here; that since the kiss
And dizzy glories of that blinding bliss
One grief has ever touched me after this.

We see Gilbert in the next two letters more concerned about a grand dinner of the J.D.C. than about his future fame and fortune. In the second he mentions almost casually that he is leaving Fisher Unwin. From now on he was to live by his pen.

11 Warwick Gardens, W. Tuesday Night. 3rd Oct. 1899.

. . . Nothing very astonishing has happened yet, though many astonishing things will happen soon. The Final perfection of Humanity I expect shortly. The Speaker for this week—the first of the New Speaker, is coming out soon, and may contain something of mine though I cannot be quite sure. A rush of the Boers on Natal, strategically quite possibly successful, is anticipated by politicians. The rising of the sun tomorrow morning is predicted by astronomers. My father again is engaged in the crucial correspondence with Fisher Unwin, at least it has begun by T.F.U. stating his proposed terms—a rise of 5/—from October, another rise possible but undefined in January, 10 per cent royalty for the Paris book and expenses for a fortnight in Paris. These, as I got my father to heartily agree, are vitiated to the bone as terms by the absence of any assurance that I shall not have to write "Paris," for which I am really paid nothing, outside the hours of work for which I am paid 25/—. In short, the net result would be that instead of gaining more liberty to rise in the literary world, I should be selling the small liberty of rising that I have now for five more shillings. This my father is declining and asking for a better settlement. The diplomacy is worrying, yet I enjoy it: I feel like Mr. Chamberlain on the eve of war. I would stop with T.F.U. for £100 a year—but not for less. Which means, I think, that I shall not stop at all.

But all these revolutions, literary, financial and political fade into insignificance compared with the one really tremendous event of this week. It will take place on Saturday next. The sun will stand still upon Leicester Square and the Moon on the Valley of Wardour St. For then will assemble the Grand Commemorative Meeting of the Junior Debating Club. The Secretary, Mr. L.R.F. Oldershaw, will select a restaurant, make arrangements and issue the proclamations, or, to use the venerable old Club phrase "the writs." When this gorgeous function is over, you must expect a colossal letter. Everyone of the old Brotherhood, scattered over many cities and callings, has hailed the invitation, and is coming, with the exception of Bentley, who will send a sensational telegram from Paris. The fun is expected to be fast and furious, the undercurrent of emotion (twelve years old) is not likely to be much disguised. As I say, I will write you a sumptuous description of it; it is somewhat your due, for the thing is, and always will be, one of the main strands of my life. . . .

None can say what will occur. It is one of those occasions when Englishmen are not much like the pictures of them in Continental satires . . . there is more in this old affair of ours than possibly meets the eye. It is a thing that has left its roots deep in the hearts of twelve strangely different men. . . . And now that seven of us have found the New Life that can only be found in Woman, it would be mean indeed not to turn back and thank the old. . . .

11, Warwick Gardens, W.

. . . This is the colossal letter. I trust you will excuse me if the paper is conceived on a similar scale of Babylonian immensity. I cannot make out exactly whether I did or did not post a letter I wrote to you on Saturday. If I did not, I apologise for missing the day. If I did, you will know by this time one or two facts that may interest you, the chief of which is that I am certainly leaving Fisher Unwin, with much mutual courtesy and goodwill.

This fact may interest you, I repeat: at this moment I am not sure whether it interests me. For my head, to say nothing of another organ, is filled with the thundering cheers and songs of the dinner on Saturday night. It was, I may say without hesitation, a breathless success. Cholmeley, who must be experienced being both a schoolmaster, a diner out and a clever man, told me he had never in his life heard eleven better speeches. I quite agree with him, merely adding his own. Everyone was amusing and what is much better, singularly characteristic. Will you forgive me, dearest, if I reel off to the only soul that can be trusted to enjoy my enjoyment, a kind of report of the meeting? It will revivify my own memories. And one thing at least that I said in my speech I thoroughly believed in—"if there is any prayer I should be inclined to make it is that I should forget nothing in my life."

The proceedings opened with dinner. The illustrated menus were wildly appreciated: every person got all the rest to sign on the menu and then took it away as a memento. Then the telegrams from Kruger, Chamberlain, Dreyfus and George Meredith were read. Then I proposed the toast of the Queen. I merely said that nothing could ever be alleged against the Queen, except the fact that she is not a member of the J.D.C. and that I thought it spoke well for the chivalry of Englishmen that with this fact she had never been publicly taunted. I said I knew that the virtues of Queen Victoria had become somewhat platitudinous, but I thought it was a fortunate country in which the virtues of its powerful ones are platitudes. The toast was then drunk. . . .

After a pause and a little conversation, I called upon Lawrence Solomon to propose the toast of "The School." He was very amusing indeed. Most of his speech would not be very comprehensible to an outsider for it largely consisted of an ingenious dove-tailing of the sentences in the Latin and Greek Arnold. I shall never forget the lucid and precise enunciation with which he delivered the idiotic sentences in those works, more especially where he said, "such a course would be more agreeable to Mr. Cholmeley and I would rather gratify such a man as he than see the King of the Persians."

Cholmeley, amid roars of welcome, rose to respond. I think I must have told you in a former letter that Cholmeley is a former classmaster of ours, a former house-master of Bentley's, and one of the nicest men at St. Paul's. We invited him as the only visitor. He said a great deal that was very amusing, mostly a commentary on Solomon's remarks about the Latin Arnold. One remark he made was that he possessed one particular Latin Arnold, formerly the property of the President, which he had withdrawn from him "with every expression of contumely"—because it was drawn all over with devils. He made some very sound remarks about the Club as an answer to the common charge against St. Paul's School that it was aridly scholastic, without spontaneous growth in culture or sentiment.

Then Fordham proposed "The Ladies." He was killing. Fordham is a personality whom I think you do not know. He is one of the most profoundly humourous men I ever knew, but his humour is more thickly coated on him, so to speak, than Bentley or Oldershaw, i.e., it is much more difficult to make him serious. He is one of the most fascinating "typical Englishmen" I ever knew: strong, generous, flippant on principle, rowdy by physical inspiration, successful, popular, married—a man to discharge all the normal functions of life well. But his most entertaining gift which he displayed truly sumptuously on this occasion is a wonderful gift of burlesque and stereotyped rhetoric. With melodramatic gestures he drew attention to the torrents of the President's blood pouring "from the wound of the tiny god." Amid sympathetic demonstration he protested against the pathos of the toast, "the conquered on the field of battle toasting the conquerors." As the only married member of the Club he ventured to give us some advice on (A) Food, (B) Education, (C) Intercourse. He sat down in a pure whirlwind of folly, without saying a word about the feelings that were in all hearts, including his own, just then. But I was delighted to find that marriage had not taken away an inch of his incurable silliness.

Nothing could be a greater contrast than the few graceful and dignified but very restrained words in which Bertram responded to the toast. He is not a man who cares to make fun of women, however genially.

Then came Langdon-Davies, whom I called upon to propose "The Club." His was perhaps the most interesting case of all. When I knew Langdon-Davies in the Junior Debating Club, he was one of the most frivolous young men I ever knew. . . . But knowing that he was a good speaker in a light style, and had been President of the Cambridge Union, I put him down to propose the Club, thinking that we should have enough serious speaking and would be well to err on the side of entertainment.

Langdon-Davies got up and proceeded to deliver a speech that made me jump. It was, I thought, the best speech of the evening: but I am sure it was the most serious, the most sympathetic and a long way the most frankly emotional.

He said that the Club was not now a club in the strict sense. It was two things preeminently and everlastingly—a memory and an influence. He spoke with a singular sort of subdued vividness of the influence the Club had had on him in boyhood. He then turned to the history of the Club. And here, my dearest lady, I am pained to have to report that he launched suddenly and dramatically into a most extraordinary, and apparently quite sincere eulogium upon myself and the influence I had on my schoolfellows. I will not repeat his words—I did not believe them, but they took me by surprise and shook me somewhat. Mr. B. N. Langdon-Davies, I may remark, and yourself, are the only persons who have ever employed the word "genius" in connection with me. I trust it will not occur again.

I replied. My speech was a medley, but it appeared very successful. I discussed largely the absence of any successor to the J.D.C. I described how I watched the boys leaving school today—a solitary figure, clad in the latest fashion, moodily pacing the Hammersmith Road—and asked myself "where among these is the girlish gush of a Bentley—the passionate volubility of a VernÈde, the half-ethereal shyness of a Fordham?!!" I admitted that we had had misfortunes, one of us had a serious illness, another had had a very good story in the Strand Magazine: but I thought that a debating club of 12 members that had given three presidents to the University Unions, had not done badly. The rest was sentimental. Then began a most extraordinary game of battledore and shuttlecock. VernÈde proposed the Secretary, Mr. Oldershaw. Mr. Oldershaw, instead of replying properly, proposed Mr. Bentley and the absent members. Waldo responded for these or rather instead of responding proposed Mr. Maurice Solomon. Mr. Maurice Solomon instead of responding proposed Mr. Salter. The latter was the only one who had not spoken and on rising he explained his reasons for refusing. He had not been in the same room with Mr. Cholmeley, he said, since he had sat five years ago in the Lower Fourth and Mr. Cholmeley had told him that he talked too much. He had no desire on his first reappearance to create in Mr. Cholmeley's mind the idea that he had been at it ever since.

After this we passed on to singing and nearly brought down the roof of Pinoli's restaurant. Cholmeley, the awful being of whose classic taste in Greek iambics I once stood in awe, sang with great feeling a fragment of lyric literature of which the following was, as far as I remember, the refrain:

"Singing Chooral-i-chooral-i-tiddity
Also—Chooral-i-chooral-i-tay
And chanting Chooral-i-chooral-i-dititty
Not forgetting—chooral-i-chooral-i-day—"

VernÈde sang a Sussex pothouse chorus in an indolent and refined way which was exquisitely incongruous: Waldo and Langdon-Davies also sang. I recited an Ode which I had written for the occasion and Lucian recited one of Bentley's poems that came out in an Oxford magazine. Then we sang the Anthem* of the J.D.C., of which the words are, "I am a Member—I'm a Member—Member of the J.D.C. I belong to it forever—don't you wish that you were me."

[* It was sung to the tune of "Clementine."]

Then we paid the bill. Then we borrowed each other's arms and legs in an inextricable tangle and sang "Auld Lang Syne." Then we broke up.

There now. Five mortal pages of writing and nothing about you in it. How relieved you must be, wearied out with allusions to your hair and your soul and your clothes and your eyes. And yet it has been every word of it about you really. I like to make my past vivid to you, especially this past, not only because it was on the whole, a fine, healthy, foolish, manly, enthusiastic, idiotic past, with the very soul of youth in it. Not only because I am a victim of the prejudice, common I trust to all mankind, that no one ever had such friends as I had. . . .

Readers of the Autobiography will remember that many many years later, at the celebration of Hilaire Belloc's sixtieth birthday, the guests threw the ball to one another in just this same fashion. Chesterton had by then so far forgotten this earlier occasion that he spoke of the Belloc birthday party as the only dinner in his life at which every diner made a speech.

Two more extracts from his letters must be given, showing the efforts made by Frances to look after Gilbert, and his reactions. One of his friends remarked that Gilbert's life was unique in that, never having left home for a boarding school or University, he passed from the care of his mother to the care of his wife. I think too that the degree of his physical helplessness affected all who came near him with the feeling that while he might lead them where he would intellectually, it was their task to look after a body that would otherwise be wholly neglected.

The old religionists used to talk about a man being "a fool for Christ's sake"—certainly I have been a blithering fool for your sake. I went to see the doctor, as you requested. He asked me what he could do for me. I told him I hadn't the least idea, but people thought my cold had been going on long enough. He said, "I've no doubt it has." He then, to afford some relief to the idiotic futility of the situation, wrote me a prescription, which I read on my way up to business, weeping over the pathetic parts and laughing heartily at the funny ones. I have since had some of it. It tastes pretty aimless.

I cannot remember for certain whether I mentioned in my letter that I had had an invitation including yourself, from my Aunt Kate for this Friday. As you do not refer to it, I expect I didn't—so I wrote to her giving both our thanks and explaining the state of affairs. "All is over," I said, "between that lady and myself. Do not name her to me, lest the hideous word 'Woman' should blind me to the seraphic word 'Aunt.' My life is a howling waste—but what matter? Ha! Ha! Ha!" I cannot remember my exact words, of course. . . .

. . . I am a revolting object. My hair is a matted chaos spread all over the floor, my beard is like a hard broom. My necktie is on the wrong way up: my bootlaces trail half-way down Fleet St. Why not? When one's attempts at reformation are "not much believed in" what other course is open but a contemptuous relapse into liberty?

Your last letter makes me much happier. I put great faith in the healing power of the great winds and the sun. "Nature," as Walt Whitman says, "and her primal sanities." Mrs. S . . . , also, is a primal sanity. It is not, I believe, considered complimentary, in a common way, to approach an attractive lady and say pleasantly, "You are thousands of years old." Or, "You seem to me as old as the mountains." Therefore I do not say it. But I always feel that anyone beautiful and strong is really old—for the really old things are not decrepit: decrepit things are dying early. The Roman Empire was decrepit. A sunrise cloud is old.

So I think there are some people, who even in their youth, seem to have existed always: they bear the mark of the elemental things: the things that recur; they are as old as springtime, as old as daybreak—as old as Youth.