A Circle of Friends

IN THE LAST chapter, this chapter and to a considerable extent those that follow, down to the break made by Gilbert's illness and the war of 1914, it is unavoidable that the same years should be retraced to cover a variety of aspects. For their home was for both Gilbert and Frances the centre of a widening circle. Although I visited Overroads, it seems to me, looking back, I saw them just then much more frequently in London and elsewhere. Several times they stayed at Lotus, our Surrey home. The first time it was a weekend of blazing summer weather. Lady Blennerhassett was there—formerly Countess Leyden and a favourite disciple of DÖllinger. I remember she delighted Gilbert by her comment on Modernism. "I must," she said, "have the same religion as my washerwoman, and Father Tyrrell's is not the religion for my washerwoman." We sat on the terrace in the sunshine and Lady Blennerhassett asked suddenly whether the soles of our boots were, like hers, without hole or blemish. We all looked very odd as we stuck our feet out and tried to see the soles. Gilbert, offered a wicker chair, preferred the grass because, he said, there was grave danger he might unduly "modify" the chair.

After a meeting of the Westminster Dining Society (the predecessor of the Wiseman), he wrote my mother an unnecessary apology:

DEAR MRS. WILFRID WARD—

I have wanted for some days past to write to you, but could not make up my mind whether I was making my position worse or better. But I do want to apologise to you for the way in which I threw out your delightful Catholic Dining Society affair the other day. I behaved badly, dined badly, debated badly and left badly; yet the explanation is really simple. I was horribly worried, and I do not worry well; when I am worried I am like a baby. My wife was that night just ill enough to make a man nervous, a stupid man, and I had sworn to her that I would fulfill some affairs that night on which she was keen. As she is better now and only wants rest, I feel normal and realise what a rotter I must have looked that night. As Belloc wrote in a beautiful epitaph—

"He frequently would flush with fear when other people paled,
He Tried to Do his Duty . . . but how damnably he failed."

This is the epitaph of yours sincerely,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

My father and mother were hardly less excited than I at the discovery of the greatest man of the age, for so we all felt him to be. Gilbert later described my father as "strongly co-operative" with another's mind, and this was perhaps his own chief characteristic in conversation. The two men did not agree on politics, but on religion their agreement was deep and constantly grew deeper as they co-operated in exploring it. Our headquarters were in Surrey but when we came up to London every spring my parents wanted to bring the Chestertons into touch with all their friends. They tended to think of their luncheon table as Chesterton "supported" by those most worthy of the honour. One of the first was of course George Wyndham, already a friend and admirer of Gilbert's. At this luncheon they discussed the modern press, 18th Century lampoons, the ingredients of a good English style, the lawfulness of Revolution, the causes of Napoleon, Scripture criticism, Joan of Arc, public executions, how to bring about reforms. It was absurd, G.K. said, to think that gaining half a reform led to the other half. Supposing it was agreed that every man ought to have a cow, but you say, "We can't manage that just yet: give him half a cow." He doesn't care for it and he leaves it about, and he never asks for the other half.

Talking of the Eastern and Western races Gilbert said it was curious that while the Easterns were so logical and clear in their religion, they were so unpractical in every-day life; the religion of the Westerns is mystical and full of paradoxes. Yet they are far more practical. "The Eastern says fate governs everything and he sits and looks pretty; we believe in Free-will and Predestination and we invent Babbage's Calculating Machine."

As the group grew into one another's thought the talk intensified and we got from considering East and West to considering our own countrymen. What makes a man essentially English? Dickens had it. Johnson had it. "You couldn't," said G.K., "imagine a Scotch Johnson, or an Irish Johnson, or a French or German Johnson."

George Wyndham told us, as we got on to the topic of patriotism, that he had a fear he hardly liked to utter. As we urged him he said he feared a big war might come and we might be defeated. Gilbert agreed that he too had felt that fear. "But," he said, "if you were to say that in the House or I to write it in a paper we should be denounced as unpatriotic."

Small wonder the talk had time to range, for these scrappy notes are all that remain of a meeting beginning about one o'clock and lasting until five. At that hour two little old sisters, the Miss Blounts, known in our family as "the little B's," happened to call on my mother. I shall never forget their faces as they looked at the huge man in the armchair, and the other guests all absorbed and animated, and realised that they were interrupting a luncheon party. A swift glance at the little old ladies, another at the clock, and the party broke up, to remain my most cherished memory for months: until my next visit to their home, when Gilbert and I arrived at the use of each other's Christian names, an agreement that he insisted on calling The Pact of Beaconsfield.

How deep he saw when in his "Defence of Hermits" he analysed a chief joy of human intercourse:

. . . The best things that happen to us are those we get out of what has already happened. If men were honest with themselves, they would agree that actual social engagements, even with those they love, often seem strangely brief, breathless, thwarted or inconclusive. Mere society is a way of turning friends into acquaintances. The real profit is not in meeting our friends, but in having met them. Now when people merely plunge from crush to crush, and from crowd to crowd, they never discover the positive joy of life. They are like men always hungry, because their food never digests; also, like those men, they are cross.*

[* The Well and the Shallows, pp. 104-5.]

There was time in the country for the food of social intercourse to digest. I notice too that in the list of Gilbert's friends quiet-voiced men stood high: Max Beerbohm, Jack Phillimore, Monsignor O'Connor, Monsignor Knox, his own father, Maurice Baring: all these represent a certain spaciousness and leisureliness which was what he asked of friendship. Even if they were in a hurry, they never seemed so.

Jack Phillimore both he and we saw on and off at this time but had often to enjoy in anticipation or in retrospect. Professor, at one time of Greek at another of Latin, at Glasgow University, he was the kind of man Gilbert specially appreciated: he wrote of Phillimore after his death something curiously like what he wrote of his own father—"he was a supreme example of unadvertised greatness, and the thing which is larger inside than outside." At Oxford Phillimore had been known as "one of Belloc's lambs." He was very much one of the group who were to run the Eye-Witness and New Witness but though he always adored Belloc, no one who knew him in the fulness of his powers could think of him as anyone's lamb. He was a quiet, humorous, deeply intelligent man: a scholar of European repute, whose knowledge of Mediaeval Latin verse equalled his Classical scholarship.

Gilbert's keen observation of his friends is never shown better than in what he wrote of Phillimore:

Like a needle pricking a drum, his quietude seemed to kill all the noise of our loud plutocracy and publicity. In all this he was supremely the scholar, with not a little of the satirist.

And yet there was never any man alive who was so unlike a don. His religion purged him of intellectual pride, and certainly of that intellectual vanity which so often makes a sort of seething fuss underneath the acid sociability of academic centres. He had none of the tired omniscience which comes of intellectual breeding in and in. He seemed to be not so much a professor as a practiser of learning. He practised it quietly but heartily and humorously, exactly as if it had been any other business. If he had been a sailor, like his father the Admiral, he would have minded his own business with exactly the same smile and imperceptible gesture. Indeed, he looked much more like a sailor than a professor; his dark square face and clear eyes and compact figure were of a type often seen among sailors; and in whatever academic enclave he stood, he always seemed to have walked in from outside, bringing with him some of the winds of the world and some light from the ends of the earth.*

[* G.K.'s Weekly, Nov. 27, 1926.]

To return to my own notes. It is horribly characteristic that I wrote them in an undated notebook, but I think that luncheon which lasted so long must have been in 1911. The same year my father persuaded both the Synthetic Society to elect Chesterton and Chesterton to attend the Synthetic. Of his first meeting my father wrote to George Wyndham:

Had you been at the Synthetic last night you would have witnessed a memorable scene.

Place: Westminster Palace Hotel. Time: 9.40.

A. J. B. [Arthur Balfour, leader of the Conservative Party] is speaking persuasively and in carefully modulated tones to an attentive audience. Suddenly a crash as though the door were blown open. A. J. B. brought to a halt. The whole company look round and in rushes a figure exactly like the pictures of Mr. Wind when he blows open the door and forces an entrance in the German child's story "Mr. Wind and Madame Rain"—a figure enormous and distended, a kind of walking mountain but with large rounded corners. It was G. K. C. who, enveloped in a huge Inverness cape of light colour, thus made his debut at the Synthetic. He rushed (not walked) to a chair, and was dragged chair and all by Waggett and me as near as might be to the table, where with a fresh crash he deposited his stick, and then his hat. And there he sat, eager and attentive, forgetting all about his stick and hat and coat, filling up the whole space at the bottom of the table, drawing caricatures of the company on a sheet of foolscap, a memorable figure, very welcome to me, but arousing the fury of the conventional and the "dreary and well-informed" well represented by Bailey Saunders who has been at me here half the morning trying to convince me that he will ruin the society and ought never to have been elected.

Some of the reactions of this new recruit have been touched on in his Autobiography:

There I met old Haldane, yawning with all his Hegelian abysses, who appeared to me as I must have appeared to a neighbour in a local debating club when he dismissed metaphysical depths and pointed at me saying: "There is that Leviathan whom Thou hast made to take his sport therein." . . .

There also I met Balfour, obviously preferring any philosophers with any philosophies to his loyal followers of the Tory Party. Perhaps religion is not the opium of the people, but philosophy is the opium of the politicians.

My father belonged to another group besides the Synthetic Society for which it seemed to him that Gilbert was even more ideally fitted. The Club was founded by Dr. Johnson, the home of the best talk in the land, where Garrick and Goldsmith were at times shouted down by the great Lexicographer—a sign, said Chesterton, of his modesty and his essential democracy: Johnson was too democratic to reign as king of his company: he preferred to contend with them as an equal. The old formula still in use had informed my father "you have had the honour to be elected," but Wilfrid Ward felt that the election of the modern Dr. Johnson would be an honour to The Club. To his intense disgust he found that only George Wyndham could be relied upon for whole-hearted support. What may be called the "social" element in the Club had become too strong to welcome a man who boasted in all directions of belonging to the Middle Classes and whose friends merely urged the claim that he was one of the few today who could talk as well as Johnson.

Gilbert met many politicians in other ways but only with one of them did he feel a really close harmony. Of George Wyndham's opinions he said in the Autobiography that they were "of the same general colour as my own," and he went on to stress the word "colour" as significant of the whole man. To depict him in political cartoons as "St. George" had not in it the sort of absurdity of the pictures of the more frigid and philosophic Balfour as "Prince Arthur." George really did suggest the ages of chivalry. "He had huge sympathy with gypsies and tramps." There was about him "an inward generosity that gave a gusto or relish to all he did."

The Chestertons' appreciation of George Wyndham was deepened for them both by an affection, indeed almost a reverence, for "the deep mysticism of his wife; a woman not to be forgotten by anyone who ever knew her, and still less to be merely praised by anyone who adequately appreciated her." For a period at any rate Gilbert and Frances were much in contact with the extreme Anglo-Catholic group in the Church of England. In the best of that group—and many of them are very very good—there is a sense of taking part in a crusade to restore Catholicism to the whole country. Canon Scott Holland led a campaign for social justice and many of the same group mixed this with devotion to Our Lady, belief in the Real Presence, and a profound love of the Catholic past of England. George Wyndham's wife, Lady Grosvenor, was one of this group and also her friend Father Philip Waggett of the Cowley Fathers. Father Waggett, a member of the Synthetic Society and intimate with my parents, became also intimate with the Chestertons.

Ralph Adams Cram described his own meeting with Chesterton, arranged by Father Waggett.

Father Waggett asked my wife and myself once when we were staying in London, whom we would like best to meet—"anyone from the King downward." We chose Chesterton who was a very particular friend of Father Waggett. At that time we put on a dinner at the Buckingham Palace Hotel (in those days the haunt of all the County families) and in defiance of fate, had this dinner in the public dining room. We had as guests Father Waggett, G. K. C. and Mrs. Chesterton. The entrance into the dining room of the short processional created something of a sensation amongst the aforesaid County families there assembled. Father Waggett, thin, cropheaded monk in cassock and rope; G. K. C., vast and practically globular; little Mrs. Chesterton, very South Kensington in moss green velvet; my wife and myself.

The dinner was a riot. I have the clearest recollection of G. K. C. seated ponderously at the table, drinking champagne by magnums, continually feeding his face with food which, as he was constantly employed in the most dazzling and epigrammatic conversation, was apt to fall from his fork and rebound from his corporosity, until the fragments disappeared under the table.

He and Father Waggett egged each other on to the most preposterous amusements. Each would write a triolet for the other to illustrate. They were both as clever with the pencil as with the pen, and they covered the backs of menus with most astonishing literary and artistic productions. I particularly remember G. K. C. suddenly looking out of the dining room window towards Buckingham Palace and announcing that he was now prepared "to write a disloyal triolet!" This was during the reign of King Edward VII, and the result was convincing. I have somewhere the whole collection of these literary productions with their illustrations, but where they are I do not know.*

[* Chesterton by Cyril Clemens, pp. 36-37.]

On a second visit of the Chestertons to Lotus, George Wyndham was there. He had told us of his habit of "shouting the Ballad of the White Horse to submissive listeners" and we had hoped for the same treat. But Gilbert got the book and kicked it under his chair defying us to recover it. We had at that time a vast German cook—of a girth almost equal to his own and possessed of unbounded curiosity in the matter of our guests. Gilbert declared that as he sat peacefully in the drawing room she approached him holding out a paper which he supposed to be a laundry list, and then started back exclaiming that she had thought him to be Mrs. Ward.

It was on this visit that he remarked to a lady who happened to be the granddaughter of a Duke: "You and I who belong to the jolly old upper Middle Classes." Had he been told about her ancestry he would, I imagine, have felt that he had paid her an implied compliment by not being aware of it. For into the world of the aristocracy he and Frances had been received in London, and he viewed it with the same calm humour and potential friendliness as he had for all the rest of mankind. When Frances in her Diary pitied the Duchess of Sutherland and felt that a single day of such a life as the Duchess lived would drive her crazy, she was expressing Gilbert's taste as well as her own for a certain simplicity of life. Social position neither excited nor irritated him. He liked or disliked an aristocrat exactly as he liked or disliked a postman. Gilbert and Cecil Chesterton really were, as Conrad Noel said, personally unconcerned about class. They had, however, a principle against the position of the English aristocracy which will be better understood in the light of their general social and historical outlook. What might be called the social side of it was often expressed by G.K. when lecturing on Dickens. Thus, speaking at Manchester for the Dickens centenary, he was reported as saying:

The objection to aristocracy was quite simple. It was not that aristocrats were all blackguards. It was that in an aristocratic state, people sat in a huge darkened theatre and only the stage was lighted. They saw five or six people walking about and they said, "That man looks very heroic striding about with a sword." Plenty of people outside in the street looked more heroic striding about with an umbrella; but they did not see these things, all the lights being turned out. That was the really philosophic objection to an aristocratic society. It was not that the lord was a fool. He was about as clever as one's own brother or cousin. It was because one's attention was confined to a few people that one judged them as one judged actors on the stage, forgetting everybody else.

Chesterton thought everybody should be remembered whether suburban, proletarian, aristocrat or pauper. Shortly after the removal to Beaconsfield he was summoned to give evidence before a Parliamentary Commission on the question of censorship of the theatre. Keep it, he said, to the surprise of many of his friends, but change the manner of its exercise. Let it be no longer censorship by an expert but by a jury—by twelve ordinary men. These will be the best judges of what really makes for morality and sound sense. He had come to give evidence, he said, not as a writer but as the representative of the gallery, and he was concerned only with "the good and happiness of the English people."

One bewildered Commissioner was understood to murmur that their terms of reference were not quite so wide as that.

The chapter in the Autobiography called "Friendships and Foolery" ends suddenly with a reference to the war but, like the whole book, it leaps wildly about. One point in it is interesting and links up with the introduction to Titterton's Drinking Songs that Gilbert later wrote. To shout a chorus is natural to mankind and G.K. claims that he had done it long before he heard of Community Singing. He sang when out driving, or walking over the moors with Father O'Connor; he sang in Fleet Street with Titterton and his journalist friends; he sang the Red Flag on Trade Union platforms and England Awake in Revolutionary groups. There was, he claims, a legend that in Auberon Herbert's rooms not far from Buckingham Palace "we sang Drake's Drum with such passionate patriotism that King Edward the Seventh sent in a request for the noise to stop."

Yet it was all but impossible to teach Gilbert a tune, and Bernard Shaw felt this (as we have seen) a real drawback to his friend's understanding of his own life and career. Music was to Shaw what line and color were to Chesterton; but to Chesterton singing was just making a noise to show he felt happy. Once he wrote a poem called "Music"—but only as one more flower in the wreath he was always weaving for Frances—who was, says Monsignor Knox, the heroine of all his novels.*

[* The Listener, June 19, 1941.]

Sounding brass and tinkling cymbal,
He that made me sealed my ears,
And the pomp of gorgeous noises,
Waves of triumph, waves of tears,

Thundered empty round and past me,
Shattered, lost for evermore,
Ancient gold of pride and passion,
Wrecked like treasure on a shore.

But I saw her cheek and forehead
Change, as at a spoken word,
And I saw her head uplifted
Like a lily to the Lord.

Nought is lost, but all transmuted,
Ears are sealed, yet eyes have seen;
Saw her smiles (0 soul be worthy!),
Saw her tears (0 heart be clean!)*

[* Collected Poems, p. 129.]

Against the background of all these activities the books went on pouring out as fast from Overroads as they had from Overstrand. A town full of friends forty minutes' journey from London was not exactly the desert into which admirers had advised Gilbert to flee, but he would never have been happy in a desert: he needed human company. He also needed to produce. "Artistic paternity," he once said, "is as wholesome as physical paternity." And certainly he never ceased to bring forth the children of his mind. Within two years of the move seven books were published:

The Ball and the Cross, February 1910,
What's Wrong with the World, June 1910,
Alarms and Discursions, November 1910,
Blake, November 1910,
Criticisms and Appreciations of Dickens, January 1911,
Innocence of Father Brown, August 1911,
Ballad of the White Horse, August 1911.

Of these books, Alarms and Discursions and the Dickens criticisms are collections and arrangements of already published essays. Meanwhile other essays were being written to become in turn other books at a later date.

The Blake is a brilliant short study of art and mysticism. After reading it you feel you understand Blake in quite a new way. And then you wonder—is this illumination light on Blake or simply light on Chesterton? It must never be forgotten that the writer was himself a "spoilt" artist—which means a man with almost enough art in him to have been in the ranks of men consecrated for life to art's service.

"Father Brown" had first made his appearance in magazines and these detective stories became the most purely popular of Gilbert's books. It was a new genre: detection in which the mind of a man means more than his footprints or cigar ash, even to the detective. The one reproduced in most anthologies—"The Invisible Man"—depends for its solution on the fact that certain people are morally invisible. To the question "Has anyone been here" the answer "No" does not include the milkman or the postman: thus the postman is the morally invisible man who has committed the crime. A thread of this sort runs through all the stories, but they are, like all his romances, full too of escape and peril and wild adventure.

Life on several occasions imitated Gilbert's fancies. Thus the Azeff revelations followed his fantastic idea in The Man Who Was Thursday of the anarchists who turn out to be detectives in disguise. The technique of Father Brown himself was imitated by a man in Detroit who recovered a stolen car by putting himself imaginatively in the thief's place and driving an exactly similar car around likely corners till he came suddenly upon his own, left in a lonely road. He wrote to tell Gilbert of this adventure.

From Chicago came an even odder example. "It is extremely difficult," wrote the Tribune, "to determine the proper relationship of the Chiesa-Prudente-Di Cossato duels to Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton's book, The Ball and the Cross" . . .

The flight in search of a duelling ground; the pursuit by the police; the friendly intervention of the anarchist wineshop-keeper, Volpi; the offer of his backyard for fighting purposes; the unfriendly intervention of the police; the friendly intervention of the reporters; the renewed and insistently unfriendly intervention of the police commissioner; the disgust of the duellists; the extreme disgust of the anarchist; the renewed flight of the fighters, seconds, physicians, reporters, and the anarchist over the back fences—all these and other incidents are essentially Chestertonian.

The Di Cossato affair was carried off with fully as much spirit and dash; with fully as many automobiles, seconds, physicians, reporters and police, all scampering over the country roads until the artistic deputy and the aged veteran of the war of 1859, outdistancing their pursuers, could find opportunity in comparative peace to cut the glorious gashes of satisfied honour in each other's faces.*

[* Chicago Tribune, 12 March 1910.]

Two months after this an interviewer from the Daily News visited Beaconsfield and splashed headlines in the paper to the effect that the spirit of Chesterton was inspiring a fight between the leaseholders in Edwardes Square and a firm which had bought up their garden to erect a super-garage. Barricades were erected by day and destroyed in the night: a wild-eyed beadle held the fort with a garden roller, and said G.K. "the creatures of my Napoleon [of Notting Hill] have entered into the bodies of the staid burghers of Kensington."

In none of these cases was there any likelihood, as the Chicago Tribune noted, of the actors in life having read the books they were spiritedly staging. "Ideas have a life of their own," the Daily News interviewer tentatively ventured, but he may have been puzzled as G.K. "agreed heartily" in the words, "I am no dirty nominalist."

Chesterton kept the reviewers busy as well as the interviewers and in all his stories they noted one curiosity: "If time and space—or any circumstances—interfere with the cutting of his Gordian knots, he commands time and space to make themselves scarce, and circumstances to be no more heard of."

About time and space this is true in a unique degree. For him time seems to have had no existence, or perhaps rather to have been like a telescope elongating and shortening at will. As a young man, it may be remembered, he gave in the course of one letter two quite irreconcilable statements of the length of time since events in his school days. He had indeed the same difficulty about time as about money—he mentions in the Autobiography that after his watch was stolen during a pro-Boer demonstration he never bothered to possess another. In his stories this oddity became more marked. In The Ball and the Cross he relates adventures performed in leaping on and off an omnibus in such fashion that the bus must have covered several miles of ground: and then we are suddenly told it had gone the few score yards from the bottom of Ludgate Hill to the top. Still stranger are the records in The Man Who Was Thursday and Manalive of the happenings of a single day, while in The Return of Don Quixote a new organisation of society is described as though many years old and then suddenly announced as having been on foot some weeks.

But to return for one moment to the more serious aspects of the work of these years. While What's Wrong with the World (discussed in some detail in the next chapter) is the first sketch of his social views—a kind of blueprint for a sane and human sort of world—the other books with all their foolery hold a serious purpose. They should be read as illustrations of the philosophy of Orthodoxy— both the book he had written and the thing of which he had said "God and humanity made it and it made me."

"This row of shapeless and ungainly monsters which I now set before the reader," he says of his essays (in the "Introduction on Gargoyles" in Alarms and Discursions), "does not consist of separate idols cut out capriciously in lonely valleys or various islands. These monsters are meant for the gargoyles of a definite cathedral. I have to carve the gargoyles, because I can carve nothing else; I leave to others the angels and the arches and the spires. But I am very sure of the style of the architecture and of the consecration of the church."

The story of The Ball and the Cross, already indicated to the reader by the American-Italian duel which seemed like a parody of it, has the double interest of its bearing on the world of Chesterton's day and its glimpses at a stranger world to come. A young Highlander, coming to London, sees in an atheist bookshop an insult to Our Lady. He smashes the window and challenges the owner to a duel. Turnbull, the atheist, is more than ready to fight; but the world, caring nothing for religious opinions, regards anyone ready to fight for them as a madman and is mainly concerned with keeping the peace. Pursued by all the resources of modern civilisation, the two men spend the rest of the book starting to fight, being interrupted and arrested by the police, escaping, arguing and fighting again. They end up in an asylum with a garden where again they talk endlessly and where the power of Lucifer the prince of this world has enclosed everyone who has been concerned in their wild flight, so that no memory of it may live on the earth.

The two sides of Chesterton's brain are engaged in the duel of minds in this book, and some of his best writing is in it, both in the description of the wild rush across sea and land and in the discussions between the two men. G.K.'s affection for the sincere atheist is noteworthy and his hatred is reserved for the shuffler and the compromiser. It was grand to have such a man as Turnbull to convert—"one of those men in whom a continuous appetite and industry of the intellect leave the emotions very simple and steady. His heart was in the right place but he was quite content to leave it there. His head was his hobby." This might be Chesterton himself—in fact, it is Chesterton himself—and the climax belongs to a later world than that of 1911. For pointing to the Ball bereft of the Cross, the Highlander calls out: "It staggers, Turnbull. It cannot stand by itself; you know it cannot. It has been the sorrow of your life. Turnbull, this garden is not a dream, but an apocalyptic fulfillment. This garden is the world gone mad."

About the time this book appeared Gilbert was asked by an Anglican Society to lecture at Coventry. He said "What shall I lecture on?" They answered "Anything from an elephant to an umbrella." "Very well," he said, "I will lecture on an umbrella." He treated the umbrella as a symbol of increasing artificiality. We wear hair to protect the head, a hat to protect the hair, an umbrella to protect the hat. Gilbert said once he was willing to start anywhere and develop from anything the whole of his philosophy. In the Notebook he had written:

BOOTLACES

Once I looked down at my bootlaces
Who gave me my bootlaces?
The bootmaker? Bah!
Who gave the bootmaker himself?
What did I ever do that I should be given bootlaces?

After the lecture on the umbrella two priests saw him at the railway bookstall and asked him if the rumour was true that he was thinking of joining the Church. He answered, "It's a matter that is giving me a great deal of agony of mind, and I'd be very grateful if you would pray for me."

The following year he broached the subject to Father O'Connor when they were alone in a railway carriage. He said he had made up his mind, but he wanted to wait for Frances "as she had led him into the Anglican Church out of Unitarianism." Frances told Father O'Connor when he came to Overroads later, at the beginning of Gilbert's illness, that she "could not make head or tail" of some of her husband's remarks, especially one about being buried at Kendal Green. When Father O'Connor told her what had been on Gilbert's mind she was half amused at the hints he had been dropping: she recognised his reluctance to move without her, but I think she probably realised too that even to himself his conviction seemed in those years at times more absolute, at times less. We shall see in a later chapter his own analysis of his very slow progress. Meanwhile in his books he was at once deepening and widening his vision of the faith.

Fragments of verse used in The Ballad of the White Horse had come to Gilbert in his sleep; a great white horse had been the romance of his childhood; the beginning of his honeymoon under the sign of the White Horse at Ipswich had been "a trip to fairyland." But it is hard to say when the motif of the White Horse, the verses ringing in his head, and the ideas that make the poem, came together into what many think the greatest work of his life.

In Father Brown on Chesterton we are told of the long time the poem took in the making. They talked of it on the Yorkshire moors in 1906 and Father O'Connor noted how Frances "cherished it. . . . I could see she was more in love with it than with anything else he had in hand." Father O'Connor also gives some interesting illustrations of the way talk ministers to a work of genius. He had begun one day "by saying lightly that none of us could become great men without leaning on the little ones: could not well begin our day but for those who started theirs first for our sake, lighting the fire and cooking the breakfast." This was said just before the dressing bell rang and between the bell and dinner Gilbert had written about nine verses beginning with King Alfred's meditation:

And well may God with the serving folk
Cast in His dreadful lot
Is not He too a servant
And is not He forgot?

In 1907, Gilbert published in the Albany Review a "Fragment from a Ballad Epic of Alfred" which evoked the comment "Mr. Chesterton certainly has in each eye a special RÖntgen ray attachment."

He wrote The White Horse guided by his favourite theory that to realise history we should not delve into the details of research but try only to see the big things—for it is those that we generally overlook.

People talk about features of interest; but the features never make up a face. . . . They will toil wearily off to the tiniest inscription or darkest picture that is mentioned in a guide book as having some reference to Alfred the Great or William the Conqueror; but they care nothing for the sky that Alfred saw or the hills on which William hunted.

In the King Alfred country especially can be found "the far-flung Titanic figure of the Giant Albion whom Blake saw in visions, spreading to our encircling seas."*

[* G.K.'s Weekly, Apr. 16, 1927.]

Gilbert wrote a sketch for the Daily News about this time, telling how an old woman in a donkey cart whom they had left far behind on the road went driving triumphantly past when the car they were in broke down. For this expedition, as so often later, he made full use of the modern invention he derided. In an open touring car hired for the occasion, Gilbert in Inverness cape and shapeless hat, Frances beside him snugly wrapped up, they

Saw the smoke-hued hamlets quaint
With Westland King and Westland Saint,
And watched the western glory faint
Along the road to Frome.

The note struck in the dedication and recurring throughout the poem is that of the Christian idea which had made England great and which he had learnt from Frances:

Wherefore I bring these rhymes to you
Who brought the cross to me,
Since on you flaming without flaw
I saw the sign that Guthrum saw
When he let break his ships of awe
And laid peace on the sea.

In the poem Christian men, whether they be Saxon or Roman or Briton or Celt, are banded together to fight the heathen Danes in defence of the sacred things of faith, in defence of the human things of daily life, in defence even of the old traditions of pagan England

. . . because it is only Christian men guard even heathen things.

Gilbert constantly disclaimed the idea that he took trouble over anything: "taking trouble has never been a weakness of mine": but in what might be termed a large and loose way he really did take immense trouble over what interested him. King Alfred is not an almost mythical figure like King Arthur and an outline of his story with legendary fringes can be traced in the Wessex country and confirmed by literature. Gilbert wanted this general story: he did not want antiquarian exactness of detail.

Into the mouths of Guthrum and of King Alfred, he put the expression of the pagan and the Christian outlook. Nor did he hesitate to let King Alfred prophesy at large concerning the days of G. K. Chesterton. The poem is a ballad in the sense of the old ballads that were stirring stories: it is also an expression of the threefold love of Gilbert's life: his wife, his country and his Faith. And as in all great poetry, there is a quality of eternity in this poem that has made it serve as an expression of the eternal Spirit of man.

During the first world war many soldiers had it with them in the trenches: "I want to tell you," the widow of a sailor wrote, "that a copy of the Ballad of the White Horse went down into the Humber with the R.38. My husband loved it as his own soul—never went anywhere without it."

Almost thirty years have passed and today the poem still speaks. Greeting Jacques Maritain on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, Dorothy Thompson quoted King Alfred's assertion of Christian freedom against "the pagan nazi conquerors of his day." After Crete the Times had the shortest first leader in its history. Under the heading Sursum Corda was a brief statement of the disaster, followed by the words of Our Lady to King Alfred:

I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?

The unbreakable strength of that apparently faint and tenuous thread of faith appeared in the sequel. Many had the ballad in hand in those dark days; many others wrote to the Times asking the source of the quotation. Months later when Winston Churchill spoke of "the end of the beginning," the Times returned to The White Horse and gave the opening of Alfred's speech at Ethandune:

"The high tide!" King Alfred cried.
"The high tide and the turn!"