From Battersea to Beaconsfield (1909-1911)

IN 1909, WITH Orthodoxy well behind him, and George Bernard Shaw just published, Gilbert and his wife left London for the small country town that was to be their home for the rest of their lives. It was an odd coincidence that they should leave Overstrand Mansions, Battersea, and come to Overroads, Beaconsfield, for they did not name their new home but found it ready christened.

It will be remembered that in one of the letters during the engagement Gilbert had suggested a country home. The reason for the choice of Beaconsfield he gives in the Autobiography:

After we were married, my wife and I lived for about a year in Kensington, the place of my childhood; but I think we both knew that it was not to be the real place for our abode. I remember that we strolled out one day, for a sort of second honeymoon, and went upon a journey into the void, a voyage deliberately objectless. I saw a passing omnibus labelled "Hanwell" and, feeling this to be an appropriate omen,* we boarded it and left it somewhere at a stray station, which I entered and asked the man in the ticket-office where the next train went to. He uttered the pedantic reply, "Where do you want to go to?" And I uttered the profound and philosophical rejoinder, "Wherever the next train goes to." It seemed that it went to Slough; which may seem to be singular taste, even in a train. However, we went to Slough, and from there set out walking with even less notion of where we were going. And in that fashion we passed through the large and quiet cross-roads of a sort of village, and stayed at an inn called The White Hart. We asked the name of the place and were told that it was called Beaconsfield (I mean of course that it was called Beconsfield and not Beaconsfield), and we said to each other, "This is the sort of place where some day we will make our home."**

[* At Hanwell is London's most famous lunatic asylum.]

[** Autobiography, p. 219.]

They both wanted a home. They both deeply desired a family. The wish is normal to both man and woman, normal in a happy marriage, and theirs was unusually happy; it was almost abnormally keen in both Frances and Gilbert. Few men have so greatly loved children. As a schoolboy his letters are full of it—making friends with Scottish children on the sands, with French children by the medium of pictures. Later he was writing "In Defence of Baby Worship" and welcoming with enthusiasm the arrival of his friends' children into the world.

In the Notebook he had written:

Sunlight in a child's hair.
It is like the kiss of Christ upon all children.
I blessed the child: and hoped the blessing would go with him
And never leave him;
And turn first into a toy, and then into a game
And then into a friend,
And as he grew up, into friends
And then into a woman.

GRASS AND CHILDREN

Grass and children
There seems no end to them.
But if there were but one blade of grass
Men would see that it is fairer than lilies,
And if we saw the first child
We should worship it as the God come on earth.

ROUNDS

I find that most round things are nice,
Particularly Eternity and a baby.

Frances cared no less deeply both for Eternity and for babies and for many years went on hoping for the family that would complete their lives. At last it was decided to have an operation to enable her to have children. Her doctor writes:

I well remember an incident which occurred during her convalescence from that operation. I received a telephone call from the matron of the Nursing Home in which Mrs. Chesterton was staying, suggesting that I should come round and remonstrate with Mr. Chesterton. On my arrival I found him sitting on the stairs, where he had been for two hours, greatly incommoding passers up and down and deaf to all requests to move on. It appeared that he had written a sonnet to his wife on her recovery from the operation and was bringing it to give her. He was not however satisfied with the last line, but was determined to perfect it before entering her room to take tea with her.

By the time they left London she must, I think, have given up the hope she had so long cherished. Still if there could not be children there might be perhaps something of a home. In the conditions of their life, there was danger that any house of bricks and mortar should be rather a headquarters than a home, and it was lucky that he was able to feel she took home with her wherever they went—

Your face that is a wandering home
A flying home for me.

The years before them were to be filled with the vast activities that not only took Gilbert to London and all over England incessantly, but were to take him increasingly over Europe and America. Beaconsfield gave a degree of quiet that made it possible, when they were able to be at home, not to be swamped by engagements and to lead a life of their own. Gilbert could go to London when he liked, but he need not always be on tap, so to say, for all the world. Frances could have a garden and indulge her hungry appetite for all that was fruitful. G.K., later, under the title "The Homelessness of Jones"* showed his love for a house rather than a flat, and they gave even to their first little house "Overroads" the stamp of a real home.

[* A chapter in What's Wrong with the World.]

For a man and his wife to leave London for the country might seem to be their own affair. Not so, however, with the Chestertons. After a lapse of over thirty years I find the matter still a subject of furious controversy and indeed passion. Frances, says one school of opinion, committed a crime against the public good by removing Gilbert from Fleet Street. No, says the other school, she had to move him or he would have died of working too hard and drinking too much. The suggestion, which I believe to be a fact, that Gilbert himself wanted to move, is seldom entertained.

There is in all this the legitimate feeling of distress among any group at losing its chief figure, its pride and joy. "I lost Gilbert," Lucian Oldershaw once said, "first when I introduced him to Belloc, next when he married Frances, and finally when he joined the Catholic Church. . . . I rejoiced, though perhaps with a maternal sadness, at all these fulfillments."

Cecil wanted his brother always on hand. Belloc was already in the country—a far more remote country—but even he, coming up to London, mourned to my mother, "she has taken my Chesterton from me." Talking it over however after the lapse of years, he agreed that in all probability the move was a wise one. What may be called the smaller fry of Fleet Street are less reasonable. One cannot avoid the feeling that in all this masculine life so sure of its manhood, there lingered something of the "schwÄrmerei" of the Junior Debating Club furiously desiring each to be first with Gilbert. And in his love of Fleet Street he so identified himself with them all that they felt he was one of them and did not recognise the horizons wider than theirs that were opening before him.

My husband and I are experts in changing residences and we listened with the amusement of experts to the talk of theorists. For it was so constantly assumed that on one side of a choice is disaster, on the other perfection. Actually perfection does not belong to this earthly state: if you go to Rome, as Gilbert himself once said, you sacrifice a rich suggestive life at Wimbledon. Newman writing of a far greater and more irrevocable choice called his story Loss and Gain—but he had no doubt that the gain outweighed the loss. There were in Gilbert's adult life three other big decisions—decisions of the scale that altered its course. The first was his marriage. The second was his reception into the Church. The third was his continued dedication to the paper that his brother and Belloc had founded. In deciding to marry Frances he was acting against his mother's wishes, to which he was extremely sensitive. His decision to become a Catholic had to be made alone: he had the sympathy of his wife but not her companionship. In the decision to edit the paper he had not even fully her sympathy: she always felt his creative work to be so much more important and to be imperilled by the overwork the paper brought. Gilbert was a man slow in action but it would be exceedingly difficult to find instances of his doing anything that he did not want to do. The theorists about marriage are like the theorists about moving house, if they do not know that decisions made by one party alone are rare indeed and stick out like spikes in the life of a normal and happy couple. Of the vast majority of decisions it is hard to say who makes them. They make themselves: after endless talk: on the tops of omnibuses going to Hanwell or elsewhere: out walking: breakfasting—especially breakfasting in bed. They make themselves—above all in the matter of a move—in fine weather: during a holiday: on a hot London Sunday: when a flat is stuffy: when the telephone rings all day: when a book is on the stocks.

Other writers have left London that they might create at leisure and choose their own times for social intercourse. Why does no one say their wives dragged them away? Simply, I think, that being less kind and considerate than Gilbert, they do not mind telling their friends that they are not always wanted. This Gilbert could not do. If people said how they would miss him, how they hated his going, he would murmur vague and friendly sounds, from which they deduced all they wanted to deduce. Was it more weakness or strength, that tenderness of heart that could never faintly suggest to his friends that they would miss him more than he would miss them? "I never wanted but one thing in my life," he had written to Annie Firmin. And that "one thing" he was taking with him.

Anyhow, the move accomplished, he enjoyed defending it in every detail, and did so especially in his Daily News articles. The rush to the country was not uncommon in the literary world of the moment, and his journalist friends had urged the point that Beaconsfield was not true country, was suburban, was being built over. His friends, G.K. replied, were suffering from a weak-minded swing from one extreme to the other. Men who had praised London as the only place to live in were now vying with one another to live furthest from a station, to have no chimneys visible on the most distant horizon, to depend on tradesmen who only called once a week from cities so distant that fresh-baked loaves grew stale before delivery. "Rival ruralists would quarrel about which had the most completely inconvenient postal service; and there were many jealous heartburnings if one friend found out any uncomfortable situation which the other friend had thoughtlessly overlooked."

Gilbert, on the contrary, noted soon after his arrival that Beaconsfield was beginning to be built over and he noted it with satisfaction. "Within a stone's throw of my house they are building another house. I am glad they are building it and I am glad it is within a stone's throw." He did not want a desert, he did not want a large landed estate, he wanted what he had got—a house and a garden. He adventurously explored that garden, finding a kitchen-garden that had "somehow got attached" to the premises, and wondering why he liked it; speaking to the gardener, "an enterprise of no little valour," and asking him the name "of a strange dark red rose, at once theatrical and sulky," which turned out to be called Victor Hugo; "watching (with regret) a lot of little black pigs being turned out of my garden."

Watching the neighbouring house grow up from its foundation he noted in an article called, "The Wings of Stone," what was the reality of a staircase. We pad them with carpets and rail them with banisters, yet every "staircase is truly only an awful and naked ladder running up into the infinite to a deadly height." (A correspondent pointed out in a letter to the Daily News that here he had touched a reality keenly felt by primitive peoples. When Cetewayo, King of Zululand, visited London, he would go upstairs only on hands and knees and that with manifest terror.) The paddings of civilisation may be useful, yet Gilbert held more valuable a realisation of the realities of things. Vision is not fancy, but the sight of truth.

In the Notebook he had written

There are three things that make me think;
things beyond all poetry:
A yellow space or rift in evening sky:
A chimney or pinnacle high in the air;
And a path over a hill.

Chesterton had always the power of conveying in words a painter's vision of some unforgettable scene with the poet's words for what the artist not only sees but imagines. Such flashes became more frequent as he looked through the doorway of his little house. Go through The Ball and the Cross with this in mind and you will see what I mean. "The crimson seas of the sunset seemed to him like a bursting out of some sacred blood, as if the heart of the world had broken." "There is nothing more beautiful than thus to look as it were through the archway of a house; as if the open sky were an interior chamber, and the sun a secret lamp of the place." Best of all to illustrate this special quality is a longer passage from the Poet and the Lunatics.

For the most part he was contented to see the green semicircles of lawn repeat themselves like a pattern of green moons; for he was not one to whom repetition was merely monotony. Only in looking over a particular gate at a particular lawn, he became pleasantly conscious, or half conscious, of a new note of colour in the greenness; a much bluer green, which seemed to change to vivid blue, as the object at which he was gazing moved sharply, turning a small head on a long neck. It was a peacock. But he had thought of a thousand things before he thought of the obvious thing. The burning blue of the plumage on the neck had reminded him of blue fire, and blue fire had reminded him of some dark fantasy about blue devils, before he had fully realised even that it was a peacock he was staring at. And the tail, that trailing tapestry of eyes, had led his wandering wits away to those dark but divine monsters of the Apocalypse whose eyes were multiplied like their wings, before he had remembered that a peacock, even in a more practical sense, was an odd thing to see in so ordinary a setting.

Yet always to Chesterton the beauty of nature was enhanced by the work of men, and if in London men had swarmed too closely, it was not to get away from them but to appreciate them more individually that he chose the country. Yes, his literary friends would say: in the real country that is true; the farmer, the labourer, even the village barber and the village tradesmen are worth knowing, but not suburban neighbours. Against such discrimination the whole democracy of Chesterton stood in revolt. All men were valuable, all men were interesting, the doctor as much as the barber, the clergyman as much as the farmer. All men were children of God and citizens of the world. If he had a choice in the matter it was discrimination against the literary world itself with all the fads that tended to smother its essential humanity. Nothing would have induced him to discriminate against the suburban. In the last year of his life he wrote in the Autobiography: "I have lived in Beaconsfield from the time when it was almost a village, to the time when, as the enemy profanely says, it is a suburb."

For the author of The Napoleon of Notting Hill this would hardly be a conclusive argument against any place. We should, he once said, "regard the important suburbs as ancient cities embedded in a sort of boiling lava spouted up by that volcano, the speculative builder." That "lava" itself he found interesting, but beneath or beside it a little town like Beaconsfield had its share in the great sweep of English history. Something of the "seven sunken Englands" could be found in the Old Town which custom marked off pretty sharply from the "New Town." Burke had lived in Beaconsfield and was buried there; and Gilbert once suggested to Mr. Garvin that they should appear at a local festival, respectively as Fox ("a part for which I have no claim except in circumference") and Burke ("I admire Burke in many things while disagreeing with him in nearly everything. But Mr. Garvin strikes me as being rather like Burke").

At the barber's he was often seen sitting at the end of a line patiently awaiting his turn, for he could never shave himself and it was only years later that Dorothy Collins conceived and put into execution the bold project of bringing the barber to the house. Probably an article would be shaping while he waited and the barber's conversation might put the finishing touches to it. There were in fact two barbers, one of the old town, one of the new. "I once planned," he says, "a massive and exhaustive sociological work, in several volumes, which was to be called 'The Two Barbers of Beaconsfield' and based entirely upon the talk of the two excellent citizens to whom I went to get shaved. For those two shops do indeed belong to two different civilisations."

Despite his love for London, Gilbert had always felt that life in a country town held one point of special superiority—in it you discovered the Community. In London you chose your friends—which meant that you narrowed your life to people of one kind. He had noted in the family itself a valuable widening:

The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a surprise. Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made.*

[* Heretics, pp. 191-2.]

Here in Beaconsfield the Chestertons grew into the community: the clergyman, the doctor, the inn-keeper, the barber, the gardener. And like the relatives who spring upon you at birth these worthy citizens seemed to Gilbert potentials of vast excitement and varied interest. Discussing an event of much later date—a meeting to decide whether a crucifix might be erected as a local war memorial—he thus describes the immense forces he found in that small place:

Those who debated the matter were a little group of the inhabitants of a little country town; the rector and the doctor and the bank manager and the respectable tradesmen of the place, with a few hangers-on like myself, of the more disreputable professions of journalism or the arts. But the powers that were present there in the spirit came out of all the ages and all the battlefields of history; Mahomet was there and the Iconoclasts, who came riding out of the East to ruin the statues of Italy, and Calvin and Rousseau and the Russian anarchs and all the older England that is buried under Puritanism; and Henry the Third ordering the little images for Westminster and Henry the Fifth, after Agincourt, on his knees before the shrines of Paris. If one could really write that little story of that little place, it would be the greatest of historical monographs.*

[* Autobiography, p. 244.]

A keen observer often added to the Beaconsfield community in those days was Father (now Monsignor) John O'Connor, close friend of both Gilbert and Frances and inspirer of "Father Brown" of detective fame. They had first become friends in 1904 when they met at the house of a friend in Keighley, Yorkshire, and walked back over the moors together to visit Francis Steinthal at Ilkley. This Jew, of Frankfort descent, was a great friend of the Chestertons and on their many visits to him the friendship with Father O'Connor ripened. With both Frances and Gilbert it was among the closest of their lives. Their letters to him show it: the long talks, and companionable walks over the moors, have an atmosphere of intimacy that is all the more convincing because so little stressed in his book. Father O'Connor has a pardonable pride in the idea that their talks suggested ideas to Gilbert, he takes pleasure in his character of "Father Brown," but he reveals the atmosphere of unique confidence and intimacy by the very absence of all parade of it.

Both he and Gilbert have told the story of how the idea of the detective priest first dawned. On their second meeting Father O'Connor had startled, indeed almost shattered Gilbert, with certain rather lurid knowledge of human depravity which he had acquired in the course of his priestly experience. At the house to which they were going, two Cambridge undergraduates spoke disparagingly of the "cloistered" habits of the Catholic clergy, saying that to them it seemed that to know and meet evil was a far better thing than the innocence of such ignorance. To Gilbert, still under the shock of a knowledge compared with which "these two Cambridge gentlemen knew about as much of real evil as two babies in the same perambulator," the exquisite irony of this remark suggested a thought. Why not a whole comedy of cross purposes based on the notion of a priest with a knowledge of evil deeper than that of the criminal he is converting? He carried out this idea in the story of "The Blue Cross," the first Father Brown detective story. Father O'Connor's account adds the details that he had himself once boasted of buying five sapphires for five shillings, and that he always carried a large umbrella and many brown paper parcels. At the Steinthal dining table, an artist friend of the family made a sketch of Father O'Connor which later appeared on the wrapper of The Innocence of Father Brown.

Beyond one or two touches of this sort the idea had been a suggestion for a character, not a portrait, and in the Autobiography and in the Dickens Gilbert has a good deal to say of interest to the novelist about how such suggestions come and are used. He never believed that Dickens drew a portrait, as it were, in the round. Nature just gives hints to the creative artist. And it used to amuse "Father Brown" to find that such touches of observation as noting where an ash-tray had got hidden behind a book seemed to Gilbert quasi miraculous. Left to himself he merely dropped ashes on the floor from his cigar. "He did not smoke a pipe and cigarettes were prone to set him on fire in one place or another."

A frequent visitor, Father O'Connor noted his fashion of work and reading, and the abstracted way he often moved and spoke. "Call it mooning, but he never mooned. He was always working out something in his mind, and when he drifted from his study to the garden and was seen making deadly passes with his sword-stick at the dahlias, we knew that he had got to a dead end in his composition and was getting his thoughts into order."

He played often, too, with a huge knife which he had for twenty-four years. He took it abroad with him, took it to bed: Frances had to retrieve it often from under his pillow in some hotel. Once at a lecture in Dublin he drew it absent-mindedly to sharpen a pencil: as it was seven and a half inches long shut, and fourteen open, the amusement of the audience may be imagined. In origin it was, Father O'Connor relates, a Texan or Mexican general utility implement. It was with this knife that he won my daughter's heart many years later when she, aged three, had not seen him for some time and had grown shy of him. A little scared of his enormousness she stood far off. He did not look in her direction but began to open and shut the vast blade. Next she was on his knee. A little later we heard her remark, "Uncle Gilbert, you make jokes just like my Daddy." And from him came, "I do my best."

The prototype of Father Brown tells of the easy job in detection when
Gilbert had been reading a book:

He had just been reading a shilling pamphlet by Dr. Horton on the Roman Menace or some such fearful wild fowl. I knew he had read it, because no one else could when he had done. Most of his books, as and when read, had gone through every indignity a book may suffer and live. He turned it inside out, dog-eared it, pencilled it, sat on it, took it to bed and rolled on it, and got up again and spilled tea on it—if he were sufficiently interested. So Dr. Horton's pamphlet had a refuted look when I saw it.

Father O'Connor was not the only friend who was added to the Beaconsfield group with some frequency. It was easy enough to run down from London or over from Welwyn (home of G.B.S.) or from Oxford or Cambridge. It was most conveniently central. Gilbert's brethren of the pen were especially apt to appear at all seasons and always found friendly welcome. For he continued to call himself neither poet nor philosopher but journalist. Father O'Connor had tried to persuade him, as he neatly puts it, to "begin to print on handmade paper with gilt edges." But Frances begged him to drop the idea: "You will not change Gilbert, you will only fidget him. He is bent on being a jolly journalist, to paint the town red, and he does not need style to do that. All he wants is buckets and buckets of red paint."

Journalists coming down from London describe the "jolly" welcome, beer poured, the sword-stick flourished, conversation flowing as freely as the beer. It meant a pleasant afternoon and it meant good copy. They visited him in the country, they observed him in town. One interviewer returned with a photo which showed Chesterton "in a somewhat nÉgligÉ condition," the result as he admitted of reading W. W. Jacobs "rolling about on the floor waving his legs in the air."

He was seen working a swan boat at the White City: "he collapsed it and the placid lake became a raging sea." He was seen thinking and even reading under the strangest weather conditions: one man saw him under a gas lamp in the street in pouring rain with an open book in his hand. Reading in Fleet Street one day Gilbert discovered suddenly that the Lord Mayor's Show was passing. He began to reflect on the Show so deeply that he forgot to look at it.

Overroads I remember as a little triangular house, much too small for the sort of fun the Chestertons enjoyed. Frances bought a field opposite to it and there built a studio. The night the studio was opened Father O'Connor remembers a large party at which charades were acted. He himself as Canon Cross-Keys gave away the word so that "Belfry" was loudly shouted by the opposition group. The rival company acting Torture got away with it successfully, especially, complains our Yorkshire priest "as 'ure' was pronounced 'yaw' in the best southern manner."

On that night, returning to the house, Father O'Connor offered his arm to Gilbert who "refused it with a finality foreign to our friendship." Father O'Connor went on ahead and Gilbert following in the dark stumbled over a flowerpot and broke his arm. Perhaps because his size made him self-consciously aware of awkwardness Gilbert hated being helped. Father Ignatius Rice, another close friend, says the only time he ever saw Gilbert annoyed was when he offered him an arm going upstairs.

Gilbert and Frances would both visit Father O'Connor in his Yorkshire Parish of Heckmondwike. One year they took rooms at Ilkley and he remembers Gilbert adorning with huge frescoes the walls of the attic and Frances sitting in the window singing, "O swallow, swallow flying south" while Gilbert "did a blazon of some fantastic coat of arms."

The closeness of the intimacy is seen in a letter quoted by Father O'Connor* in which Gilbert explained why Frances and he were unable to come to Heckmondwike for a promised visit.

[* Father Brown on Chesterton, p. 123.]

(July 3rd, 1909)

I would not write this to anyone else, but you combine so unusually in your own single personality the characters of (1) priest, (2) human being, (3) man of the world, (4) man of the other world, (5) man of science, (6) old friend, (7) new friend, not to mention Irishman and picture dealer, that I don't mind suggesting the truth to you. Frances has just come out of what looked bad enough to be an illness, and is just going to plunge into one of her recurrent problems of pain and depression. The two may be just a bit too much for her and I want to be with her every night for a few days—there's an Irish Bull for you!

One of the mysteries of Marriage (which must be a Sacrament and an extraordinary one too) is that a man evidently useless like me can yet become at certain instants indispensable. And the further oddity (which I invite you to explain on mystical grounds) is that he never feels so small as when he knows that he is necessary.

But sometimes she would send him off whether she was well or ill, and on Father O'Connor would rest the heavy responsibility of getting him on to his next destination or safe back home. He tells of one such experience.

He was most dutiful and obedient to orders, but they had to be
written ones and backed by the spoken word. He brought his
dress-suit, oh! with what loving care, to Bradford on Sunday for
Sheffield for Monday, but a careful host found it under the bed in
Bradford just as his train left for Sheffield. Sent at once it was to
Beaconsfield, where it landed at 5 P.M. on Thursday, just allowing
him ten minutes to change and entrain for London.

Scene at Beaconsfield:

"What on earth have you done with your dress-suit, Gilbert?"

"I must have left it behind, darling, but I brought back the ties, didn't I?"*

[* Ibid., p. 43.]

Another time he came back without his pyjamas. They had been lost early in the journey. "Why didn't you buy some more?" his wife asked. "I didn't know pyjamas were things you could buy," he said, surprised. Probably if one were Gilbert one couldn't! Father O'Connor arriving at Overroads without baggage found that Gilbert's pyjamas went around him exactly twice.

Lecturing engagements had of course not come to an end with the move although they had (mercifully) somewhat lessened. What increased with the distance from London was the problem—never fully solved—of getting Gilbert to the right place at the right time and in clothes not too wildly wrong. When he lectured in Lancashire they stayed at Crosby with Francis Blundell (my brother-in-law), and my sister remembers Frances as incessantly looking through her bag for letters and sending telegrams to confirm engagements that had come unstuck or to refuse others that were in debate. The celebrated and now almost legendary telegram from Gilbert to Frances told as from a hundred different cities was really sent: "Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?"

Desperate, she wired, "Home," because, as she told me later, it was easier to get him home and start him off again. That day's engagement was lost past recall.

Charles Rowley of the Ancoats Brotherhood received a wire, reply paid, from Snow Hill Station, Birmingham: "Am I coming to you tonight or what?" Reply: "Not this Tuesday but next Wednesday."

So home he came again to Overroads.

The Chestertons made a host of friends in Beaconsfield but the children always held pride of place. The doctor's little boy, running along the top of the wall, looked down at Gilbert and remarked to his delight, "I think you're an ogre." But when the nurse was heard threatening punishment if he did not get down "that minute," the child was told by the ogre, "This wall is meant for little boys to run along." One child, asked after a party if Mr. Chesterton had been very clever, said, "You should see him catch buns in his mouf."

What was unusual both with Gilbert and Frances was the fact that they never allowed their disappointment in the matter of children to make them sour or jealous of others who had the joy that they had not. All through their lives they played with other people's children: they chose on a train a compartment full of children: they planned amusements, they gave presents to the children of their friends. Over my son's bed hangs a silver crucifix chosen with loving care by Frances after Gilbert had stood godfather to him. And he was one of very many.

Gilbert was however a complete realist as to the ways and manners of the species he so loved.

Playing with children [he wrote at this time] is a glorious thing: but the journalist in question has never understood why it was considered a soothing or idyllic one. It reminds him, not of watering little budding flowers, but of wrestling for hours with gigantic angels and devils. Moral problems of the most monstrous complexity besiege him incessantly. He has to decide before the awful eyes of innocence, whether, when a sister has knocked down a brother's bricks, in revenge for the brother having taken two sweets out of his turn, it is endurable that the brother should retaliate by scribbling on the sister's picture-book, and whether such conduct does not justify the sister in blowing out the brother's unlawfully lit match.

Just as he is solving this problem upon principles of the highest morality, it occurs to him suddenly that he has not written his Saturday article; and that there is only about an hour to do it in. He wildly calls to somebody (probably the gardener) to telephone to somewhere for a messenger; he barricades himself in another room and tears his hair, wondering what on earth he shall write about. A drumming of fists on the door outside and a cheerful bellowing encourage and clarify his thoughts. . . . He sits down desperately; the messenger rings at the bell; the children drum on the door; the servants run up from time to time to say the messenger is getting bored; and the pencil staggers along, making the world a present of fifteen hundred unimportant words, and making Shakespeare a present of a portion of Gray's Elegy; putting "fantastic roots wreathed high" instead of "antique roots peep out."* Then the journalist sends off his copy and turns his attention to the enigma of whether a brother should commandeer a sister's necklace because the sister pinched him at Littlehampton.

[* Chesterton had actually made this slip, and the present quotation is from the article he wrote in apology.]

In the Notebook he had written:

NORTH BERWICK

On the sands I romped with children
Do you blame me that I did not improve myself
By bottling anemones?
But I say that these children will be men and women
And I say that the anemones will not be men and women
(Not just yet, at least, let us say).
And I say that the greatest men of the world might romp with
children
And that I should like to see Shakespeare romping with children
And Browning and Darwin romping with children
And Mr. Gladstone romping with children
And Professor Huxley romping with children
And all the Bishops romping with children;
And I say that if a man had climbed to the stars
And found the secrets of the angels,
The best thing and the most useful thing he could do
Would be to come back and romp with children.

M. V.

An almost elvish little girl with loose brown hair, doing needlework. I have spoken to her once or twice. I think I must get another book of the same size as this to make notes about her.

From the Christmas party at Overroads all adults were excluded—no nurses, no parents. The children would hang on Gilbert's neck in an ecstasy of affection and he and Frances schemed out endless games for them. Gilbert had started a toy theatre before he left London, cutting out and painting figures and scenery, and devising plots for plays. Two of the favourites were "St. George and the Dragon" and "The Seven Champions of Christendom."

The atmosphere of Overroads is perhaps best conveyed through Gilbert's theories concerning his toy theatre and the other theatricals such as Charades sometimes played there. When it came to the toy theatre set up to amuse the children, he frankly felt that he was himself child No. 1 and got the most amusement out of it. He felt too that the whole thing was good enough to be worth analysing in its rules and its effects. And so he drew up a paper of rules and suggestions for its use.

I will not say positively that a toy-theatre is the best of theatres; though I have had more fun out of it than out of any other. But I will say positively that the toy-theatre is the best of all toys. It sometimes fails; but generally because people are mistaken in the matter of what it is meant to do, and what it can or cannot be expected to do; as if people should use a toy balloon as a football or a skipping rope as a hammock. . . .

Now the first rule may seem rather contradictory; but it is quite true and really quite simple. In a small theatre, because it is a small theatre, you cannot deal with small things. Because it is a small theatre it must only deal with large things. You can introduce a dragon; but you cannot really introduce an earwig; it is too small for a small theatre. And this is true not only of small creatures, but of small actions, small gestures and small details of any kind. . . . All your effects must be made to depend on things like scenery and background. The sky and the clouds and the castles and the mountains and so on must be the exciting things; along with other things that move all of a piece, such as regiments and processions; great and glorious things can be done with processions. . . . In a real comedy the whole excitement may consist in the nervous curate dropping his tea-cup; though I do not recommend this incident for the drama of the drawing-room. But if he were nervous, let us say, about a thunderstorm, the toy-theatre could hardly represent the nervousness but it might manage the thunder-storm. It might be quite sensational and yet entirely simple; for it would largely consist of darkening the stage and making horrible noises behind the scenes. . . .

The second and smaller rule, that really follows from this, is that everything dramatic should depend not on a character's action, but simply on his appearance. Shakespeare said of actors that they have their exits and their entrances; but these actors ought really to have nothing else except exits and entrances. The trick is to so arrange the tale that the mere appearance of a person tells the important truth about him. Thus, supposing the drama to be about St. George let us say, the mere abrupt appearance of the dragon's head (if of a proper ferocity) will be enough to explain that he intends to eat people; and it will not be necessary for the dragon to explain at length, with animated gestures and playful conversation, that his nature is carnivorous and that he has not merely dropped in to tea.

There is some further discussion on colour effects ("I like very gay and glaring colours, and I like to give them a good chance to glare"). The paper concludes on a more serious note:

It is an old story, and for some a sad one, that in a sense these childish toys are more to us than they can ever be to children. We never know how much of our after imaginations began with such a peep-show into paradise. I sometimes think that houses are interesting because they are so like doll houses and I am sure the best thing that can be said for many large theatres is that they may remind us of little theatres. . . .

I do not look back, I look forward to this kind of puppet play; I look forward to the day when I shall have time to play with it. Some day when I am too lazy to write anything, or even to read anything, I shall retire into this box of marvels; and I shall be found still striving hopefully to get inside a toy-theatre.

Adults as well as children enjoyed this toy and it was often described by interviewers. Like the sword-stick, the great cloak and flapping hat, it was felt by some to be Gilbert's way of attracting attention. But it was just one of Gilbert's ways of amusing himself. A small nephew of Frances was living with them at the time and it was funny to watch him fencing with his huge uncle who was obviously enjoying himself rather the more of the two. On my first visit to Overroads, I noticed how as we talked my host's pencil never ceased. One evening I collected and kept an imposing red Indian and a caricature of Chesterton himself in a wheelbarrow being carried off to the bonfire. I came in too for one of the grown-up parties in which guessing games were a feature. Lines from the poets were illustrated and we had to guess them. At another party, Dr. Pocock told me, G.K. did the Inns of Beaconsfield, of which the most successful drawing was that of a sadly dilapidated dragon being turned away from the inn door: "Dragon discovers with disgust that he cannot put up at the George."

Sometimes these drawings were the prize of whoever guessed the line of verse they illustrated, sometimes they were sold for a local charity. The Babies' Convalescent Home was a favourite object and one admirable picture (reproduced in The Coloured Lands) shows the "Despair of King Herod at discovering children convalescing from the Massacre." The two closest friendships of early Beaconsfield life were with the rector, Mr. Comerline and his wife, who are now dead, and Dr. and Mrs. Pocock. Dr. Pocock was the Chestertons' doctor as well as their friend, and he tells me that his great difficulty in treating Gilbert lay in his detachment from his own physical circumstances. If there was anything wrong with him he usually didn't notice it. "He was the most uncomplaining person. You had to hunt him all over" to find out if anything was wrong.

This detachment from circumstances still extended to his appearance and Frances one day begged Dr. Pocock to take him to a good tailor. It was a huge success: he had never looked so well as he did now—for a few weeks. And then the tailor said to Dr. Pocock, "Mr. Chesterton has broken my heart. It took twice the material and twice the time to make for him, but I was proud of it." His tailor like his doctor was apt to become a friend. Mrs. Pocock recalls how he would go to a dinner of the tradesmen of Beaconsfield and come back intensely interested and wanting to tell her all about it.

"You always went away," Dr. Pocock said, "chuckling over something," and he summed up the years of their friendship, saying, "You never saw him without getting delight from his presence."

Sometimes he would grow abstracted in the train of his own thought, and Father Ignatius Rice remembers an occasion when he was one of a group discussing really bad lines of poetry. Gilbert broke into something Frances was saying with the words, "That irritating person Milton"—then, realising he had interrupted her, he broke off and apologised profusely. When she had finished he went on "That irritating person Milton—I can't find a single bad line in him."

Frances one day came in rather suddenly when Dr. Pocock was there, and Gilbert exclaimed, "Oh you've broken it." She looked round thinking she must have knocked something over. "No," he said, "it was an idea." "It will come back," said Frances. "No," he said, "it got broken." More usually he was indifferent to interruptions: sometimes he welcomed them as grist for his mind's mill. Daily life went on around him and often in his articles one can find traces of Frances's daily activities as well as his own.

Attending him for his broken arm, Dr. Pocock told him at a certain stage to write something—anything—to see if he could use a pen again. After an instant's thought, Gilbert headed his paper with the name of a prominent Jew and wrote:

I am fond of Jews
Jews are fond of money
Never mind of whose
I am fond of Jews
Oh, but when they lose
Damn it all, it's funny.

The name at the head (which wild horses would not drag from me) is the key to this impromptu. It was really true that Gilbert was fond of very many Jews. In his original group of J.D.C. friends, four Jews had been included and with three of these his friendship continued through life. Lawrence Solomon and his wife were among the Beaconsfield neighbours and he saw them often. There was another kind of Jew he very heartily disliked but he was at great pains to draw this distinction himself.

Speaking at the Jewish West End Literary Society in 1911 he put the question of what the real Jewish problem was. The Jews, he said, were a race, born civilised. You never met a Jewish clod or yokel. They represented one of the highest of civilised types. But while all other races had local attachments, the Jews were universal and scattered. They could not be expected to have patriotism for the countries in which they made their homes: their patriotism could be only for their race. In principle, he believed in the solution of Zionism. And then the reporter in large letters made a headline: "Mr. Chesterton said that speaking generally, as with most other communities, 'THE POOR JEWS WERE NICE AND THE RICH WERE NASTY.'"

Many years later in Palestine he was to be driven around the country, as he has described in The New Jerusalem, by one of these less wealthy Jews who had sacrificed his career in England to his national idealism. And later yet, after G.K.'s death, Rabbi Wise, a leader of American Jewry, paid him tribute (in a letter to Cyril Clements dated September 8, 1937):

Indeed I was a warm admirer of Gilbert Chesterton. Apart from his delightful art and his genius in many directions, he was, as you know, a great religionist. He as Catholic, I as Jew, could not have seen eye to eye with each other, and he might have added "particularly seeing that you are cross-eyed"; but I deeply respected him. When Hitlerism came, he was one of the first to speak out with all the directness and frankness of a great and unabashed spirit. Blessing to his memory!