The Notebook

I AM WRITING THIS chapter at a table facing Notre Dame de Paris in front of a cafÉ filled with arguing French workmen—in the presence of God and of Man; and I feel as if I understood the one hatred of G.K.'s life: his loathing of pessimism. "Is a man proud of losing his hearing, eyesight or sense of smell? What shall we say of him who prides himself on beginning as an intellectual cripple and ending as an intellectual corpse?"*

[* From The Notebook.]

SOME PROPHECIES

Woe unto them that keep a God like a silk hat, that believe not in
God, but in a God.

Woe unto them that are pompous for they will sooner or later be
ridiculous.

Woe unto them that are tired of everything, for everything will
certainly be tired of them.

Woe unto them that cast out everything, for out of everything they
will be cast out.

Woe unto them that cast out anything, for out of that thing they
will be cast out.

Woe unto the flippant, for they shall receive flippancy.

Woe unto them that are scornful for they shall receive scorn.

Woe unto him that considereth his hair foolishly, for his hair will
be made the type of him.

Woe unto him that is smart, for men will hold him smart always,
even when he is serious.*

[* Ibid.]

A pessimist is a man who has never lived, never suffered: "Show me a person who has plenty of worries and troubles and I will show you a person who, whatever he is, is not a pessimist."

This idea G.K. developed later in the Dickens, dealing with the alleged over-optimism of Dickens—Dickens who if he had learnt to whitewash the universe had learnt it in a blacking factory, Dickens who had learnt through hardship and suffering to accept and love the universe. But that he wrote later. The quotations given here come from the Notebook begun in 1894 and used at intervals for the next four or five years, in which Gilbert wrote down his philosophy step by step as he came to discover it. The handwriting is the work of art that he must have learnt and practised, so different is it from his boyhood's scrawl. Each idea is set down as it comes into his mind. There is no sequence. In this book and in The Coloured Lands may be seen the creation of the Chesterton view of life—and it all took place in his early twenties. From the seed-thoughts here, Orthodoxy and the rest were to grow—here they are only seeds but seeds containing unmistakably the flower of the future:

They should not hear from me a word
Of selfishness or scorn
If only I could find the door
If only I were born.

He makes the Unborn Babe say this in his first volume of poems. And in the Notebook we see how the babe coming into the world must keep this promise by accepting life with its puzzles, its beauty, its fleetingness: "Are we all dust? What a beautiful thing dust is though." "This round earth may be a soap-bubble, but it must be admitted that there are some pretty colours on it." "What is the good of life, it is fleeting; what is the good of a cup of coffee, it is fleeting. Ha Ha Ha."

The birthday present of birth, as he was later to call it in Orthodoxy, involved not bare existence only but a wealth of other gifts. "A grievance," he heads this thought:

Give me a little time,
I shall not be able to appreciate them all;
If you open so many doors
And give me so many presents, O Lord God.

He is almost overwhelmed with all that he has and with all that is, but accepts it ardently in its completeness.

If the arms of a man could be a fiery circle embracing the round
world, I think I should be that man.

Yet in the face of all this splendour the pessimist dares to find flaws:

The mountains praise thee, O Lord!
But what if a mountain said,
"I praise thee;
But put a pine-tree halfway up on the left
It would be much more effective, believe me."
It is time that the religion of prayer gave
place to the religion of praise.

If the mountains must praise God, if the religion of praise expresses the truth of things, how much more does it express the truth of humanity—or rather of men, for he saw humanity not as an abstraction but as the sum of human and intensely individual beings:

Once I found a friend
"Dear me," I said "he was made for me."
But now I find more and more friends
Who seem to have been made for me
And more and yet more made for me,
Is it possible we were all made for each other
all over the world?

And on another page comes perhaps the most significant phrase in the book: "I wonder whether there will ever come a time when I shall be tired of any one person." Hence a fantastic thought of a way of making the discovery of more people to know and to like:

THE HUMAN CIRCULATING LIBRARY NOTES

Get out a gentleman for a fortnight, then change him for a lady, or your ticket. No person to be kept out after a fortnight, except with the payment of a penny a day. Any person morally or physically damaging a man will be held responsible. The library omnibus calls once a week leaving two or three each visit. Man of the season—old standard man.

Or better still:

My great ambition is to give a party at which everybody should meet everybody else and like them very much.

AN INVITATION

Mr. Gilbert Chesterton
requests the pleasure
Of humanity's company
to tea on Dec. 25th 1896.
Humanity Esq., The Earth, Cosmos E.

G.K. liked everybody very much, and everything very much. He liked even the things most of us dislike. He liked to get wet. He liked to be tired. After that one short period of struggle he liked to call himself "always perfectly happy." And therefore he wanted to say, "Thank you."

You say grace before meals
All right.
But I say grace before the play and the opera,
And grace before the concert and pantomime,
And grace before I open a book,
And grace before sketching, painting,
Swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing;
And grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

Each day seemed a special gift; something that might not have been:

EVENING

Here dies another day
During which I have had eyes, ears, hands
And the great world round me;
And with tomorrow begins another.
Why am I allowed two?

THE PRAYER OF A MAN WALKING

I thank thee, O Lord, for the stones in the street
I thank thee for the hay-carts yonder and for the
houses built and half-built
That fly past me as I stride.
But most of all for the great wind in my nostrils
As if thine own nostrils were close.

THE PRAYER OF A MAN RESTING

The twilight closes round me
My head is bowed before the Universe
I thank thee, O Lord, for a child I knew seven years ago
And whom I have never seen since.

Praised be God for all sides of life, for friends, lovers, art,
literature, knowledge, humour, politics, and for the little red cloud
away there in the west—

For, if he was to be grateful, to whom did he owe gratitude? Here is the chief question he asked and answered at this time. At school he was looking for God, but at the age of 16 he was, he tells us in Orthodoxy, an Agnostic in the sense of one who is not sure one way or the other. Largely it was this need for gratitude for what seemed personal gifts that brought him to belief in a personal God. Life was personal, it was not a mere drift; it had will in it, it was more like a story.

A story is the highest mark
For the world is a story and every part of it
And there is nothing that can touch the world or any part of it
That is not a story.

And again, with the heading, "A Social Situation."

We must certainly be in a novel;
What I like about this novelist is that he takes
such trouble about his minor characters.

The story shapes from man's birth and it is as he meets the other characters that he finds he is in the right story.

A MAN BORN ON THE EARTH

Perhaps there has been some mistake
How does he know he has come to the right place?
But when he finds friends
He knows he has come to the right place.

You say it is a love affair
Hush: it is a new Garden of Eden
And a new progeny will people a new earth
God is always making these experiments.

Life is a story: who tells it? Life is a problem: who sets it?

The world is a problem, not a Theorem
And the word of the last Day will be Q.E.F.

God sets the problem, God tells the story, but can those know Him who are characters in His story, who are working out His problem?

Have you ever known what it is to walk along a road in such a frame
of mind that you thought you might meet God at any turn of the path?

For this a man must be ready, against this he must never shut the door.

There is one kind of infidelity blacker than all infidelities,
Worse than any blow of secularist, pessimist, atheist,
It is that of those persons
Who regard God as an old institution.

VOICES

The axe falls on the wood in thuds, "God, God."
The cry of the rook, "God," answers it
The crack of the fire on the hearth, the voice of the brook, say the
same name;
All things, dog, cat, fiddle, baby,
Wind, breaker, sea, thunderclap
Repeat in a thousand languages—
God.

Next in his thought comes a point where he hesitates as to the meeting place between God and Man. How and where can these two incommensurates find a meeting place? What is Incarnation? The greatness and the littleness of Man obsessed Chesterton as it did Pascal; it is the eternal riddle:

TWO STRANDS

Man is a spark flying upwards. God is everlasting.

Who are we, to whom this cup of human life has been given, to ask for more? Let us love mercy and walk humbly. What is man, that thou regardest him?

Man is a star unquenchable. God is in him incarnate.

His life is planned upon a scale colossal, of which he sees glimpses. Let him dare all things, claim all things: he is the son of Man, who shall come in the clouds of glory.

[I] saw these two strands mingling to make the religion of man.

"A scale colossal, of which he sees glimpses." This, I think, is the first hint of the path that led Gilbert to full faith in Our Lord. In places in these notes he regards Him certainly only as Man—but even then as The Man, the Only Man in whom the colossal scale, the immense possibilities, of human nature could be dreamed of as fulfilled. Two notes on Marcus Aurelius are significant of the way his mind was moving.

MARCUS AURELIUS

A large-minded, delicate-witted, strong man, following the better thing like a thread between his hands.

Him we cannot fancy choosing the lower even by mistake; we cannot think of him as wanting for a moment in any virtue, sincerity, mercy, purity, self-respect, good manners.

Only one thing is wanting in him. He does not command me to perform the impossible.

THE CARPENTER

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
Yes: he was soliloquising, not making something.
Do not the words of Jesus ring
Like nails knocked into a board
In his father's workshop?

On two consecutive pages are notes showing how his mind is wrestling with the question, the answer to which would complete his philosophy:

XMAS DAY

Good news: but if you ask me what it is, I know not;
It is a track of feet in the snow,
It is a lantern showing a path,
It is a door set open.

THE GRACE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST

I live in an age of varied powers and knowledge,
Of steam, science, democracy, journalism, art:
But when my love rises like a sea,
I have to go back to an obscure tribe and a slain man
To formulate a blessing.

JULIAN

"Vicisti GalilÆe," he said, and sank conquered
After wrestling with the most gigantic of powers,
A dead man.

THE CRUCIFIED

On a naked slope of a poor province
A Roman soldier stood staring at a gibbet,
Then he said, "Surely this was a righteous man,"
And a new chapter of history opened,
Having that for its motto.

PARABLES

There was a man who dwelt in the east centuries ago,
And now I cannot look at a sheep or a sparrow,
A lily or a cornfield, a raven or a sunset,
A vineyard or a mountain, without thinking of him;
If this be not to be divine, what is it?

Cecil Chesterton tells us Gilbert read the Gospels partly because he was not forced to read them: I suppose this really means that he read them with a mature mind which had not been dulled to their reception by a childhood task of routine lessons. But I do not think at this date it had occurred to him to question the assumption of the period: that official Christianity, its priesthood especially, had travestied the original intention of Christ. This idea is in the Wild Knight volume (published in 1900) and more briefly in a suggestion in the Notebook for a proposed drama:

Gabriel is hammering up a little theatre and the child looks at his hands, and finds them torn with nails.

Clergyman. The Church should stand by the powers that be.

Gabriel. Yes? . . . That is a handsome crucifix you have there at your chain.

That the clergy, that the Christian people, should have settled down to an acceptance of a faulty established order, should not be alert to all that Our Lord's life signified, was one of the problems. It was, too, a matter of that cosmic loyalty which he analyses more fully in Orthodoxy. Here he simply writes:

It is not a question of Theology, It is a question of whether, placed as a sentinel of an unknown watch, you will whistle or not.

Sentinels do go to sleep and he was coming to feel that this want of vigilance ran through the whole of humanity. In "White Wynd," a sketch written at this time,* he adumbrates an idea to which he was to return again in Manalive especially, and in Orthodoxy—that we can by custom so lose our sense of reality that the only way to enjoy and be grateful for our possessions is to lose them for a while. The shortest way home is to go round the world. In this story of "White Wynd" he applies the parable only to each man's life and the world he lives in. But in Orthodoxy he applies it to the human race who have lost revealed truth by getting so accustomed to it that they no longer look at it. And already in the Notebook he is calling the attention of a careless multitude to "that great Empire upon which the sun never sets. I allude to the Universe."

[* It is published in The Coloured Lands.]

Most of the quotations about Our Lord come in the later part of the book: in the earlier pages he dreams that "to this age it is given to write the great new song, and to compile the new Bible, and to found the new Church, and preach the new Religion." And in one rather obscure passage he seems to hint at the thought that Christ might come again to shape this new religion.

Going round the world, Gilbert was finding his way home; the explorer was rediscovering his native country. He himself has given us all the metaphors for what was happening now in his mind. Without a single Catholic friend he had discovered this wealth of Catholic truth and he was still travelling. "All this I felt," he later summed it up in Orthodoxy, "and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. And all this time I had not even thought of Catholic theology."