DURING THE EARLIER YEARS of the New Witness Gilbert had nothing to do with the editing, and his contributions to it were only part of the continuing volume of his weekly journalism. It would be almost impossible to trace all the articles in papers and magazines that were never republished: the volumes of essays appearing year by year probably contained the best among them. He was still in 1911 writing for the Daily News and every week until his death he continued to do "Our Notebook" for the Illustrated London News. I have found an unpublished ballade he wrote on the subject:
BALLADE OF A PERIODICAL
In icy circles by the Behring Strait, In moony jungles where the tigers roar, In tropic isles where civil servants wait, And wonder what the deuce they're waiting for, In lonely lighthouses beyond the Nore, In English country houses crammed with Jews, Men still will study, spell, perpend and pore And read the Illustrated London News.
Our fathers read it at the earlier date And twirled the funny whiskers that they wore Ere little Levy got his first estate Or Madame Patti got her first encore. While yet the cannon of the Christian tore The lords of Delhi in their golden shoes Men asked for all the news from Singapore And read the Illustrated London News.
But I, whose copy is extremely late And ought to have been sent an hour before I still sit here and trifle with my fate And idly write another ballad more. I know it is too late; and all is o'er, And all my writings they will now refuse I shall be sacked next Monday. So be sure And read the Illustrated London News.
ENVOY
Prince, if in church the sermon seems a bore Put up your feet upon the other pews, Light a Fabrica de Tabagos Flor And read the Illustrated London News.
Debating and lecturing went on, and an amusing letter from Bernard Shaw shows the preparations for a Three Star Show—Shaw against Chesterton with Belloc in the chair—in 1911. An exactly similar debate years later was published in a slender volume entitled Do We Agree? On both occasions the crowd was enormous and many had to be turned away. All three men were immensely popular figures and all three were at their best debating in a hall of moderate size where swift repartee could be followed by the whole audience.
Gilbert always shone on these occasions. The challenge of a debate brought forth all his powers of wit and humour. His opponent furnished material on which he could work. And how he enjoyed himself! Frank Swinnerton once heard him laugh so much that he gave himself hiccups for the rest of the evening. I heard him against Miss Cicely Hamilton and against Mr. Selfridge and felt the only drawback to be that the fight was so very unequal. The Selfridge debate in particular was sheer cruelty, so utterly unaware was the business man that he was being intellectually massacred by a man who regarded all that Selfridge's stores stood for as the ruin of England. Occasionally Mr. Selfridge looked bewildered when the audience rocked with laughter at some phrase that clearly conveyed no meaning to him at all. But so complete was his failure to understand what it was all about that when the meeting was over he asked if Chesterton would not write his name with a diamond on a window of his store already graced with many great names. For once Chesterton was at a loss for words. "Oh, how jolly!" he murmured feebly.
Very different was it when he debated with Bernard Shaw with Belloc as third performer.
Ayot St. Lawrence, Welwyn, Herts. 27th Oct. 1911.
Don't be dismayed: this doesn't need a reply.
MY DEAR G.K.C.
With reference to this silly debate of ours, what you have to bear in mind is this.
I am prepared to accept any conditions. If they seem unfair to me from the front of the house, all the better for me; therefore do not give me that advantage unless you wish to, or are—as you probably are—as indifferent to the rules as I am.
The old Hyndman-Bradlaugh & Shaw-Foote debates (S-F. was a two-nighter) were arranged thus. Each debater made 3 speeches: 1 of 30 minutes, 1 of 15 and 1 of 10. Strict time was kept (the audiences were intensely jealous of the least departure from the rules); and the chairman simply explained the conditions and called Time without touching the subject of debate.
The advantages of this were, (a) that the opponent or the opener could introduce fresh matter up to the end of his second speech, and was tied up in that respect for the last 10 minutes only, and (b) that the debate was one against one, and not one against two (and with less time allowed for him at that), as it must have been had the chairman dealt with the subject.
The disadvantages for us are that we both want Belloc to let himself go (I simply thirst for the blood of his Servile State—I'll Servile him); and nobody wants to tie you down to matter previously introduced when you make your final reply. We shall all three talk all over the shop—possibly never reaching the Socialism department—and Belloc will not trouble himself about the rules of public meeting and debate, even if there were any reason to suppose that he is acquainted with them. (Do you recollect how Parnell and Biggar floored the House in the palmy days of obstruction by meanly getting up the subject of public order, which no one else suspected the existence of?)
I therefore conclude that we had better make it to some extent a clowns' cricket match, and go ahead as in the debates with Sanders & Macdonald & Cicely Hamilton, which were all wrong technically. In a really hostile debate it is better to be as strict as possible; but as this is going to be a performance in which three Macs who are on the friendliest terms in private will belabor each other recklessly on wooden scalps and pillowed waistcoats and trouser seats, we need not be particular.
Still, you had better know exactly what you are doing: hence this wildly hurried scrawl.
Did you see my letter in Tuesday's Times? Magnificent!
My love to Mrs. Chesterton, and my most distinguished consideration to Winkle.* To hell with the Pope!
[* The Chestertons' dog who preceded Quoodle of the poem.]
Ever
G.B.S.
P.S. I told Sanders to explain to you that you would be entitled to half the gate (or a third if Belloc shares) and that you were likely to overlook this if you were not warned. I take it that you have settled this somehow.
At the second of these debates Belloc opened the proceedings by announcing to the audience "You are about to listen, I am about to sneer." His only contribution to the debate was to recite a poem:
Our civilisation Is built upon coal Let us chant in rotation Our civilisation That lump of damnation Without any soul Our civilisation Is built upon coal.
Bernard Shaw was on the friendliest terms with the others and admired their genius but thought it ill directed. Belloc, he had told Chesterton, was "wasting prodigious gifts" in the service of the Pope.
"I have not met G.K.C.: Shaw always calls him a man of colossal genius" writes Lawrence of Arabia to a friend.
As a lecturer Chesterton's success was less certain than as a debater. Many of his greatest admirers say they have heard him give very poor lectures. He was often nervous and worried beforehand. "As a lecture," wrote the Yorkshire Weekly Post after a performance in this year (1911), "it was a fiasco, but as an exhibition of Chesterton it was pleasing." Although his writing appeared almost effortless he did in fact take far more pains about it than he did in preparing for a lecture. He seemed quite incapable of remembering the time or place of appointment, or of getting there on time, if at all. Stories are told of his non-appearance on various platforms. My husband remembers a meeting in a London theatre at which Chesterton had been billed as one of the speakers. The meeting, arranged by the Knights of the Blessed Sacrament, was well under way before he arrived, panting but unperturbed. His apology ran something like this: "As knights you will understand my not being here at the beginning, for the whole point of knighthood was that the knight should arrive late but not too late. Had St. George not been late there would have been no story. Had he been too late, there would have been no princess."
Even more annoying was his habit of beginning his lecture by saying he had not prepared it. Such a remark is not likely to please any audience, least of all an audience that has paid for admission and knows that the lecturer is receiving a large fee. But money, whether he was receiving it or giving it away, meant nothing to him. He had not a strong voice, and I have seen him, when a microphone was provided, holding a paper of notes between himself and it. An ardent admirer of his writing told me he made far too many jokes about his size. Yet how pleasing they sometimes were: when his Chairman for instance, after a long wait, said he had feared a traffic accident: "Had I met a tram-car," Chesterton replied, "it would have been a great, and if I may say so, an equal encounter."
He thought badly of his own lecturing and began once by saying: "I might call myself a lecturer; but then again I fear some of you may have attended my lectures."
Actually, in spite of the jokes, his thoughts were centred entirely on his subject, not on himself. An anonymous Society Diarist quoted by Cosmo Hamilton writes of an occasion when: "he was given, rather foolishly, a little gold period chair and as he made his points it slowly collapsed under him. He rose just in time and sinking into another chair that someone put behind him began at the word he had last spoken. No acting could have secured such an effect of complete indifference. It was evident that he had barely noticed the incident."
Ellis Roberts completes the picture. He knew Gilbert already as a brilliant talker and came to hear him from a platform:
"I remember the manner of his lecture. It seemed to be written on a hundred pieces of variously shaped paper, written in ink and pencil (of all colours) and in chalk. All the pages were in a splendid and startling disorder and I remember being at first a little disappointed. Then the papers were abandoned and G.K.C. talked."*
[* Reading for Pleasure, p. 96.]
At this time Bernard Shaw scored a victory over his friend. For beside lecturing, journalism and the publication of three considerable and two minor books, Chesterton between 1911 and the War wrote the play that Shaw had been so insistently demanding. The books were: Manalive 1911, A Miscellany of Men (Essays) 1912, The Victorian Age in Literature February 1913, The Wisdom of Father Brown 1914, The Flying Inn 1914. The play was Magic produced at the Little Theatre in October 1913. One who admired it was George Moore. He wrote to Forster Bovill (November 24, 1913):
I followed the comedy of Magic from the first line to the last with interest and appreciation, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I think of all modern plays I like it the best. Mr. Chesterton wished to express an idea and his construction and his dialogue are the best that he could have chosen for the expression of that idea: therefore, I look upon the play as practically perfect. The Prologue seems unnecessary, likewise the magician's love for the young lady. That she should love the magician is well enough, but it materialises him a little too much if he returns that love. I would have preferred her to love him more and he to love her less. But this spot, if it be a spot, is a very small one on a spotless surface of excellence.
I hope I can rely upon you to tell Mr. Chesterton how much I appreciated his Play as I should like him to know my artistic sympathies.
"Artistic sympathies" is not ungenerous considering how Chesterton had written of George Moore in Heretics.
It is rather comic that all the reviews hailing from Germany where the play was very soon produced compare Chesterton with Shaw and many of them say that he is the better playwright. "He means more to it," a Munich paper was translated as saying, "than the good old Shaw." Chesterton's superiority can hardly be entertained in the matter of technique. Actually what the critic meant was that he preferred the ideas of Chesterton to the ideas of Shaw. Both men were chiefly concerned with ideas. But while Shaw excelled chiefly in presenting them through brilliant dialogue, G.K.'s deeper thoughts were conveyed in another fashion. The Duke might almost, it is true, have been a Shaw character, but the fun the audience got out of him was the least thing they received. Chesterton once said that he suspected Shaw of being the only man who had never written any poetry. Many of us suspect that Chesterton never wrote anything else. This play is a poem and the greatest character in it is atmosphere. Chesterton believed in the love of God and man, he believed in the devil: love conquers diabolical evil and the atmosphere of this struggle is felt even in the written page and was felt more vividly in the theatre. After a passage of many years those who saw it remember the moment when the red lamp turned blue as a felt experience.
But as to popularity, in England at least, it would be absurd to compare G.K. with G.B.S. The play's run was a brief one and it was years before he attempted another.
Chesterton was fighting corruption, fighting the Servile State. Above all things he was fighting sterility, fighting it in the name of life—life with its richness, its variety, its sins and its virtues, with its positively outrageous sanity. "Thank you for being alive," wrote an admirer to him.
Manalive is above all things a hymn to life. It is the acid test of a Chestertonian. Reviewers became wildly enthusiastic or bitterly scornful. Borrowing from his own phrase about Pickwick I am inclined to say that men not in love with life will not appreciate Manalive— nor, I should imagine, heaven. The ideas that make up the book had been long in his head. The story of White Wynd written while he was at the Slade School tells one half of the story, an unpublished fragment of the same period entitled "The Burden of Balham" the other half. The Great Wind that blows Innocent Smith to Beacon House is the wind of life and it blows through the whole story. Before an improvised Court of Law Smith is tried on three charges: housebreaking—but it was his own house that he broke into to renew the vividness of ownership; bigamy—but it was his own wife with whom he repeatedly eloped to renew the ecstasy of first love; murder with a large and terrifying revolver—but he dealt life not death from its barrel. For he used it only to threaten those who said they were tired of life or that life was not worth living, and he forced them through fear of death to hymn the praises of life.
The explanation given by Smith to Dr. Eames, the Master of Brakespeare College, of his ideas and his purpose gives the note of fooling and profundity filling the whole book.
"I want both my gifts to come virgin and violent, the death and the life after death. I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him—only to bring him to life. I begin to see a new meaning in being the skeleton at the feast."
"You can scarcely be called a skeleton," said Dr. Eames smiling.
"That comes of being so much at the feast," answered the massive youth. "No skeleton can keep his figure if he is always dining out. But that is not quite what I meant: what I mean is that I caught a kind of glimpse of the meaning of death and all that—the skull and the crossbones, the Memento Mori. It isn't only meant to remind us of a future life, but to remind us of a present life too. With our weak spirits we should grow old in Eternity if we were not kept young by death. Providence has to cut immortality into lengths for us, as nurses cut the bread and butter into fingers."
Manalive appeared in 1911. Next year came what is perhaps his best-known single piece of writing, the Battle of Lepanto. In the spring of 1912 he had taken part in a debate at Leeds, affirming that all wars were religious wars. Father O'Connor supported him with a magnificent description of the battle of Lepanto. Obviously it seized Gilbert's mind powerfully, for while he was still staying with Father O'Connor, he had begun to jot down lines and by October of that year the poem was published. One might fill a book with the tributes it has received from that day to this. Perhaps none pleased him more than a note from John Buchan (June 21, 1915): "The other day in the trenches we shouted your Lepanto."
The Victorian Age in Literature made many of his admirers again express the wish that he would stay in the field of pure literature. His characterisations of some of the Victorian writers were sheer delight.
Ruskin had a strong right hand that wrote of the great mediaeval Minsters in tall harmonies and traceries as splendid as their own; and also, so to speak, a weak and feverish left hand that was always fidgeting and trying to take the pen away—and write an evangelical tract about the immorality of foreigners . . . it is not quite unfair to say of him that he seemed to want all parts of the Cathedral except the altar.
Tennyson was a provincial Virgil . . . he tried to have the universal balance of all the ideas at which the great Roman had aimed: but he hadn't got hold of all the ideas to balance. Hence his work was not a balance of truths, like the universe. It was a balance of whims; like the British Constitution . . . he could not think up to the height of his own towering style.
. . . while Emily Bronte was as unsociable as a storm at midnight and while Charlotte Bronte was at best like that warmer and more domestic thing a house on fire—they do connect themselves with the calm of George Eliot, as the forerunners of many later developments of the feminine advance. Many forerunners (if it comes to that) would have felt rather ill if they had seen the things they foreran.
The best and most profound part of the book was however the working out of certain generalisations—the effect on the literature of the period of the Victorian compromise between religion and rationalism ("Macaulay, it is said, never talked about his religion: but Huxley was always talking about the religion he hadn't got"): the break-up of the compromise when Victorian Protestantism and Victorian rationalism simultaneously destroyed one another; the uniqueness of the nonsense-writing of the later Victorian period.
In one illuminating passage Chesterton defends what seems at first sight merely his own habit of getting dates and events in their wrong order.
The mind moves by instincts, associations, premonitions and not by fixed dates, or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated: notions will be first defined long after they are dead . . . thus Wordsworth shrank back into Toryism, as it were, from a Shelleyan extreme of pantheism as yet disembodied. Thus Newman took down the iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yet delivered, that was coming from the club of Darwin. For this reason no one can understand tradition or even history who has not some tenderness for anachronism.
This was not merely special pleading: it contains a profound truth. Wilfrid Ward proved it of Newman in the biography that G.K. had probably just been reading. Chesterton noted it himself in his book on Cobbett who, as he said, saw what was not yet there. It is almost the definition of genius. Already at this date Chesterton and Belloc were fighting much that to the rest of us only became fully apparent long afterwards.
"I think you would make a very good God," wrote E. V. Lucas to Chesterton. There is indeed something divine in an almost ceaseless outpouring of creative energy. But only God can create tirelessly and Chesterton was at this time beginning to be tired. You can see it in The Flying Inn. The book is still full of vitality and the lyrics in it, later published separately under the title Wine, Water and Song, are as good in that kind as any that he ever wrote. But with all its vigour the book is a less joyful one than Manalive and it is a much more angry one. Manalive was a paean of joy to life. The Flying Inn is fighting for something necessary to its fulness—freedom.
It must have been just while he was writing it that there were threatenings of a case against him by Lever Brothers on account of a lecture given at the City Temple on "The Snob as Socialist." In answering a question he spoke of Port Sunlight as "corresponding to a Slave Compound." Others besides Lever Brothers were shocked and some clarification was certainly called for. Belloc and Chesterton meant by Slavery not that the poor were being bullied or ill treated but that they had lost their liberty. Gilbert went so far as to point out how much there was to be said in defence of a Slave state. Under Slavery the poor were usually fed, clothed and housed adequately. Slaves had often been much more comfortable in the past than were free men in the world of today. A model employer might by his regulations greatly increase the comfort of his workers and yet enslave them.
A letter from Bernard Shaw advising him to get up certain details asks the question of whether the workman at Port Sunlight would forfeit his benefits and savings should he leave. "If this is so," wrote Shaw, "then, though Lever may treat him as well as Pickwick would no doubt have treated old Weller, if he had consented to take charge of his savings, Lever is master of his employee's fate, and captain of his employee's soul, which is slavery." He went on to offer financial help in fighting the case. The "Christian Commonweal" had reported Chesterton's speech and was also threatened with the law. To the editor G. K. wrote:
Only a hasty line to elongate the telephone. I am sorry about this business for one reason only; and that is that you should be even indirectly mixed up in it. Lever can sue me till he bursts: I'm not afraid of him. But it does seem a shame when I've often attacked you (always in good faith and what was meant for good humour), and when you've heaped coals of fire by printing my most provocative words, that your chivalry should get you even bothered about it. I am truly sorry and ask pardon—of you, but not of old Sun and Soapsuds, I can tell you.
Another very hasty line about the way I shall, if necessary, answer; about which I feel pretty confident. I should say it is absurd to have libel actions about Controversies, instead of about quarrels. It would mean every Capitalist being prosecuted for saying that Socialism is robbery and every Socialist for saying property is theft. By great luck, the example lies at the threshold of the passage quoted. The worst I said of Port Sunlight was that it was a slave-compound. Why, that was the very phrase about which half the governing class argued with the other half a few years ago! Are all who called the Chinese slaves to be sued by all who didn't? Am I prosecuted for a terminology . . . enough, you know the rest. Go on with the passage and you will see the luck continues. Abrupt, brief, and perhaps abbreviated as my platform answer was, it really does contain all the safeguards against imputing cruelty or human crime to poor Lever. It defines slavery as the imposition of the master's private morality; as in the matter of the pubs. It expressly suggests it does not imply cruelty: for it goes out of its way to say that such slaves may be better off under such slavery. So they were, physically, both in Athens and Carolina. It then says that a merely mystical thing, which I think is Christianity, makes me think this slavery damnable, even if it is comfortable. I would defend all this, as a lawful sociological comment, in any Court in civilisation.
I tell you my line of defence, to use discreetly and at your discretion. If the other side are bent on fighting, I should reserve the defence. If they seem open to reason, I should point out that it is on our side.
His old schoolfellow Salter was also his solicitor and a letter to Wells shows in part the advice Salter gave.
DEAR WELLS,
I am asked to make a suggestion to you that looks like, and indeed is, infernal impudence: but which a further examination will rob of most of its terrors. Let not these terrors be redoubled when I say that the request comes from my solicitor. It is a great lark; I am writing for him when he ought to be writing for me.
In the forthcoming case of Lever v. Chesterton & Another, the Defendant Chesterton will conduct his own case; as his heart is not, like that of the lady in the song, Another's. He wants to fight it purely as a point of the liberty of letters and public speech; and to show that the phrase "slavery" (wherein I am brought in question) is current in the educated controversy about the tendency of Capitalism today. The solicitor, rather to my surprise, approves this general sociological line of defence; and says that I may be allowed one or two witnesses of weight and sociological standing—not (of course) to say my words are defensible, still less that my view is right—but simply to say that the Servile State, and Servile terms in connection with it, are known to them as parts of a current and quite unmalicious controversy. He has suggested your name: and when I have written this I have done my duty to him. You could not, by the laws of evidence, be asked to mix yourself up with my remarks on Lever: you could only be asked, if at all, whether there was or was not a disinterested school of sociology holding that Capitalism is close to Slavery—quite apart from anybody. Do you care to come and see the fun?
Yours always,
G. K. CHESTERTON.
The suggested line was so successful that Wells's testimony was not called for. The case was withdrawn. No apology was even asked from Gilbert, whose solicitor tells me that Messrs. Lever "behaved very reasonably when once it was made clear to them that Gilbert was not a scurrilous person making a vulgar and slanderous attack upon their business."
With H. G. Wells as with Shaw, Gilbert's relations were exceedingly cordial, but with a cordiality occasionally threatened by explosions from Wells. Gilbert's soft answer however invariably turned away wrath and all was well again. "No one," Wells said to me, "ever had enmity for him except some literary men who did not know him." They met first, Wells thinks, at the Hubert Blands, and then Gilbert stayed with Wells at Easton. There they played at the non-existent game of Gype and invented elaborate rules for it. Cecil came too and they played the War game Wells had invented. "Cecil," says Wells, comparing him with Gilbert, "seemed condensed: not quite big enough for a real Chesterton."
They built too a toy theatre at Easton and among other things dramatized the minority report of the Poor Law Commission. The play began by the Commissioners taking to pieces Bumble the Beadle, putting him into a huge cauldron and stewing him. Then out from the cauldron leaped a renewed rejuvenated Bumble several sizes larger than when he went in.
In the early days of their acquaintance Wells remembers meeting the whole Chesterton family in the street of a French town and inviting them to lunch. His own youngest son, a small boy, had left the room for a moment when Wells exclaimed: "Where's Frank? Good God, Gilbert, you're sitting on him."
The anxious way in which Gilbert got up and turned apologetically towards his own chair was unforgettable. An absent-minded man who in a gesture of politeness once gave his seat to three ladies in a bus might well be alarmed over the fate of a small boy found under him.
In his memoirs Wells relates another pleasing story of a Chestertonian encounter:
I once saw [Henry] James quarrelling with his brother William James, the psychologist. He had lost his calm; he was terribly unnerved. He appealed to me, to me of all people, to adjudicate on what was and what was not permissible in England. William was arguing about it in an indisputably American accent, with an indecently naked reasonableness. I had come to Rye with a car to fetch William James and his daughter to my home at Sandgate. William had none of Henry's passionate regard for the polish upon the surface of life and he was immensely excited by the fact that in the little Rye inn, which had its garden just over the high brick wall of the garden of Lamb House, G. K. Chesterton was staying. William James had corresponded with our vast contemporary and he sorely wanted to see him. So with a scandalous directness he had put the gardener's ladder against that ripe red wall and clambered up and peeped over!
Henry had caught him at it. It was the sort of thing that isn't done. It was most emphatically the sort of thing that isn't done. . . . Henry instructed the gardener to put away that ladder and William was looking thoroughly naughty about it.
To Henry's manifest relief, I carried William off and in the road just outside the town we ran against the Chestertons who had been for a drive in Romney Marsh; Chesterton was heated and I think rather swollen by the sunshine; he seemed to overhang his one-horse fly; he descended slowly but firmly; he was moist and steamy but cordial; we chatted in the road and William got his coveted impression.
The two must have suited each other a good deal better than Chesterton and the more conventional brother. Of Henry's reactions there was a comment from the other side of the Atlantic.
The Louisville Post reported that Henry James, being asked on a visit to his native country, "What do you think of Chesterton in England?" replied "In England we do not think of Chesterton." The Post commented rather neatly "This 'we' of our compatriot must be considered as either mythical or editorial—unless indeed it refers to that small and exquisite circle which immediately surrounds and envelopes him." In his Autobiography Gilbert is appreciative but amusing, describing Henry James's reactions to the arrival of Belloc from a walking tour unbrushed, unwashed and unshaven. After reading Dickens, William wrote from Cambridge, Mass.:
O, Chesterton, but you're a darling! I've just read your Dickens—it's as good as Rabelais. Thanks!
Wells, asked to debate with Gilbert, wrote to Frances:
Spade House, Sandgate. (undated)
DEAR MRS. CHESTERTON
God forbid that I should seem a pig [here a small pig is drawn] and indeed I am not and of all the joys in life nothing would delight me more than a controversy with G.K.C., whom indeed I adore. [Here is drawn a tiny Wells adoring a vast Chesterton.]
But—I have been recklessly promising all and everyone who asks me to lecture or debate; "If ever I do so again it will be for you," and if once I break the vow I took last year—
Also we are really quite in agreement. It's a mere difference in fundamental theory which doesn't really matter a rap—except for after dinner purposes.
Yours ever,
H. G. Wells.
Frances thought Wells was good for Gilbert, he tells me, because he took him out walking, but when the two men were alone Gilbert would say supplicatingly "We won't go for a walk today, will we?" "He thought it terrifying," said Wells, "the way my wife tidied up." Frances, too, tidied up, but cautiously. "She prevented G.K.," says Wells, "from becoming too physically gross. He ought not to have been allowed to use the word 'jolly' more than forty times a day."
He could not, Wells thought, have gone on living in a London which was that of ordinary social life, whether Mayfair or Bloomsbury. "Either the country or Dr. Johnson's London." And of the relation seen by Chesterton between liberty and conviviality he said, "Every time he lifted a glass of wine he lifted it against Cadbury."
In spite of growing restrictions as to sales and hours the Inn still remained for Chesterton a symbol of freedom in a world increasingly enslaved. It was pointed out to him how great a peril lay in drink, how homes were broken up and families destroyed through drunkenness. After the war began, a letter from one of his readers stressed a real danger:
Now I do beg you, Mr. Chesterton, much as you love writing in praise of drink, to give it a rest during the war. . . . You may have the degradation of any number of silly boys to your account without knowing it. . . .
I have written with a freedom—you will say perhaps rudeness—which a casual meeting with you, and a great admiration for your work by no means justifies, but which other things perhaps do. I beg you to forgive me.
It seems to me that this charge he never quite answered. To claim liberty is one thing, to hymn the glories of wine is quite another. And when he was attacked for the latter he always defended the former, saying that he did not deny the peril but that all freedom meant peril—peril must be preferred to slavery. There were things in which a man must be free to choose even if his choice be evil. This was a part of Chesterton's whole philosophy about drink—a subject on which he wrote constantly. It is interesting to note the stages of its development in his mind.
The Chesterton family had not a Puritan tradition in the sense of being teetotal. But Lucian Oldershaw tells me that in their boyhood he always felt G.K. himself to be a bit of a Puritan and I have come upon a boyish poem that seems to confirm this in the matter of wine.
THE TEA POT
Raised high on tripod, flashing bright, the Holy Silver Urn Within whose inmost cavern dark, the secret waters burn Before the temple's gateway the subject tea-cups bow And pass it steaming with thy gift, thy brown autumnal glow. Within thy silver fortress, the tea-leaf treasure piled O'er which the fiery fountain pours its waters undefiled Till the witch-water steals away the essence they enfold And dashes from the yawning spout a torrent-arch of gold. Then fill an honest cup my lads and quaff the draught amain And lay the earthen goblet down, and fill it yet again Nor heed the curses on the cup that rise from Folly's school The sneering of the drunkard and the warning of the fool.
* * *
Leave to the Stuart's cavalier the revel's blood-red wine To hiccup out a tyrant's health and swear his Right Divine Mine, Cromwell's* cup to stir within, the spirit cool and sure To face another Star Chamber, a second Marston Moor. Leave to the genius-scorner, the sot's soul-slaying urns That stained the fame of Addison, and wrecked the life of Burns For Etty's hand his private Pot, that for no waiter waits** For Cowper's lips his "Cup that cheers but not inebriates."
Goal of Infantine Hope, Unknown, mystic Felicity Sangrael of childish quest much sought, aethereal "Real Tea" Thy faintest tint of yellow on the milk and water pale Like Midas' stain on Pactolus, gives joy that cannot fail.
[* Cromwell's teapot was among the first used in England.]
[** Etty, the artist made his own tea in all hotels in a private pot.]
Childhood's "May I have real tea" had grown into the tea-table of the Junior Debating Club, and Lucian Oldershaw remembers Gilbert as a young man still lunching at tea shops. I found recently two versions of a fragment of a story called "The Human Club," written when he was at the Slade School. The second version opens:
A meal was spread on the table, for the members of the Human Club were, as their name implies, human, however glorified and transformed: the meal, however, consisted principally of tea and coffee, for the Humans were total abstainers, not with the virulent assertion of a negative formula, but as an enlightened ratification of a profound social effort (hear, hear), not as the meaningless idolatry (cheers) of an isolated nostrum (renewed cheers), but as a chivalrous sacrifice for the triumph of a civic morality (prolonged cheers and uproar).
The aims of the Human Club were many but among the more practical and immediate was the entire perfection of everything.
"Perfection is impossible," said the host, Eric Peterson, bowing his colossal proportions over the coffee-pot. He was in the habit of showing these abrupt rifts of his train of thought, like gigantic fragments of a frieze. But he said then quite simply, with no change in his bleak blue eyes, "perfection is impossible, thank God. The impossible is the eternal."
We are a long way from tea the "Oriental," cocoa the "vulgar beast," and wine the true festivity of man that we find in Wine, Water and Song. Chesterton had meanwhile discovered the wine-drinking peasants of France and Italy: he had discovered what were left of the old-fashioned inns of England where cider or beer are drunk by the sort of Englishmen he had come to love best—the poor. In his revolt against that dreary and pretentious element that he most hated in the middle classes he had come to feel that the life of the poor, as they themselves had shaped it when they were free men, was the ideal. And that ideal included moderate drinking, drinking to express joy in life and to increase it.
Already in Heretics (1904) he had in the essay called "Omar and the Sacred Vine" attacked the evil of pessimistic drinking. A man should never drink because he is miserable, he will be wise to avoid drink as a medicine for, health being a normal thing, he will tend in search of it to drink too much. But no man expects pleasure all the time, so if he drinks for pleasure the danger of excess is less.
The sound rule in the matter would appear to be like many other rules—a paradox. Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasants of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.*
[* Heretics. John Lane, chapter VII, p. 103.]
But the human will must be brought into action and the gifts of God must be taken with the thanksgiving that is restraint. "We must thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them." The topic seemed to fascinate him; he returned to it again and again. In one essay he described himself opening all the windows in a private bar to get rid of the air of secrecy that he hated. Wine should be taken, not secretly but
Frankly and in fellowship As men in inns do dine.
Cocktails he abominated—and in fact strong spirits were almost as evil as wine and beer were good. In an essay "The Cowardice of Cocktails"* he is especially scathing in his comment on those who urge "that they give a man an appetite for his meals."
[* From Sidelights on New London & Newer York, p. 45.]
This is unworthy of a generation that is always claiming to be candid and courageous. In the second aspect, it is utterly unworthy of a generation that claims to keep itself fit by tennis and golf and all sorts of athletics. What are these athletes worth if, after all their athletics, they cannot scratch up such a thing as a natural appetite? Most of my own work is, I will not venture to say, literary, but at least sedentary. I never do anything except walk about and throw clubs and javelins in the garden. But I never require anything to give me an appetite for a meal. I never yet needed a tot of rum to help me to go over the top and face the mortal perils of luncheon.
Quite rationally considered, there has been a decline and degradation in these things. First came the old drinking days which are always described as much more healthy. In those days men worked or played, hunted or herded or ploughed or fished, or even, in their rude way, wrote or spoke, if only expressing the simple minds of Socrates or Shakespeare, and then got reasonably drunk in the evening when their work was done. We find the first step of the degradation, when men do not drink when their work is done, but drink in order to do their work. Workmen used to wait in queues outside the factories of forty years ago, to drink nips of neat whisky to enable them to face life in the progressive and scientific factory. But at least it may be admitted that life in the factory was something that it took some courage to face. These men felt they had to take an anaesthetic before they could face pain. What are we to say of those who have to take an anaesthetic before they can face pleasure? What of those, who when faced with the terrors of mayonnaise eggs or sardines, can only utter a faint cry for brandy? What of those who have to be drugged, maddened, inspired and intoxicated to the point of partaking of meals, like the Assassins to the point of committing murders? If, as they say, the use of the drug means the increase of the dose, where will it stop, and at what precise point of frenzy and delusion will a healthy grown-up man be ready to rush headlong upon a cutlet or make a dash for death or glory at a ham-sandwich? This is obviously the most abject stage of all; worse than that of the man who drinks for the sake of work, and much worse than that of the man who drinks for the sake of play.
Wine, Chesterton maintained, should not be drunk as an aid to creative production, yet one may find that increased power of creation sometimes follows in its wake. And here of course was a danger to a man who worked as hard as Chesterton. He sometimes spoke of himself as "idle," but I think it would be hard to match either his output or his hours of creative work. I remember one visit that I paid to Beaconsfield when he was writing one of his major books. He was in his study by 10 in the morning, emerged for lunch at 1 and went back from about 2:30 to 4:30. After tea he worked again until a 7:30 dinner. His wife and I went to bed about 10:30 leaving him preparing his material for the next day. Towards 1 A.M. a ponderous tread as he passed my door on his way to bed woke me to a general impression of an earthquake.
In a passage in Magic G.K. makes his hero say, "I happen to have what is called a strong head and I have never been really drunk." It was true of himself, but in these years just before the Great War, before his own severe illness, intimate friends have told me that they had seen him unlike himself, that they felt he had come to depend, "almost absent-mindedly" one said, on the stimulus of wine for the sheer physical power to pour forth so much.
Besides overwork G.K. was in these years mentally oppressed by the strain of the Marconi Case, and then almost overwhelmed by the horror of the World War. A man very tender of heart, sensitive and intensely imaginative, he could not react as calmly as Cecil himself did to what both believed the probability of the latter's imprisonment. And when that strain was removed there remained the stain on national honour, the opening gulf into which he saw his country falling. To him the Marconi Case was a heavier burden than the war. For, as he saw it, in the Marconi Case the nation was wrong in enduring corruption and in the war the nation was magnificently right in resisting tyranny.
So Chesterton felt, yet the outbreak of the war with all its human suffering to mind and body weighed heavily upon him too. He wrote The Barbarism of Berlin of which I will say something in the next chapter—for it belongs to those writings of the war period the series of which is so consistent that in his Autobiography he was able to claim that he had no sympathy "with the rather weak-minded reaction that is going on round us. At the first outbreak of the War I attended the conference of all the English men of letters, called together to compose a reply to the manifesto of the German professors. I at least among all those writers can say, 'What I have written I have written.'"
Then his illness came upon him. Dr. Pocock, coming for a first visit, found the bed partly broken under the weight of the patient who was lying in a grotesquely awkward position, his hips higher than his head.
"You must be horribly uncomfortable," he said.
"Why, now you mention it," said G.K., like a man receiving a new idea, "I suppose I am."
The doctor ordered a water-bed, and almost the last words he heard before the patient sank into coma were, "I wonder if this bally ship will ever get to shore."
The illness lasted several months. We can follow its progress (and his) in extracts from letters* written to Father O'Connor by Frances:
Nov. 25th, 1914. You must pray for him. He is seriously ill and I have two nurses. It is mostly heart-trouble, but there are complications. He is quite his normal self, as to head and brain, and he even dictates and reads a great deal.
Dec. 29th, 1914. Gilbert had a bad relapse on Christmas Eve, and now is being desperately ill. He is not often conscious, and is so weak—I feel he might ask for you—if so I shall wire. Dr. is still hopeful, but I feel in despair.
Jan. 3rd, 1915. If you came he would not know you, and this condition may last some time. The brain is dormant, and must be kept so. If he is sufficiently conscious at any moment to understand, I will ask him to let you come—or will send on my own responsibility. Pray for his soul and mine.
Jan. 7th, 1915. Gilbert seemed decidedly clearer yesterday, and though not quite so well today the doctor says he has reason to hope the mental trouble is working off. His heart is stronger, and he is able to take plenty of nourishment. Under the circumstances therefore I am hoping and praying he may soon be sufficiently himself to tell us what he wants done. I am dreadfully unhappy at not knowing how he would wish me to act. His parents would never forgive me if I acted only on my own authority. I do pray to God He will restore him to himself that we may know. I feel in His mercy He will, even if death is the end of it—or the beginning shall I say?
Jan. 12th, 1915. He is really better I believe and by the mercy of God I dare hope he is to be restored to us. Physically he is stronger, and the brain is beginning to work normally, and soon I trust we shall be able to ask him his wishes with regard to the Church. I am so thankful to think that we can get at his desire.
In January 1915 Frances wrote to my mother: "Gilbert remains much the same in a semi-conscious condition—sleeping a great deal. I feel absolutely hopeless; it seems impossible it can go on like this. The impossibility of reaching him is too terrible an experience and I don't know how to go through with it. I pray for strength and you must pray for me."
"Dearest Josephine," she wrote in a later undated letter, "Gilbert is today a little better, after being practically at a standstill for the past week. He asked for me today, which is a great advance, and hugged me. I feel like Elijah (wasn't it?) and shall go in the strength of that hug forty days. The recovery will be very slow, the doctors tell me, and we have to prevent his using his brain at all."
In this letter she begged to see my mother, and I remember when they met she told her that one day she had tried to test whether Gilbert was conscious by asking him, "Who is looking after you?" "He answered very gravely, 'God' and I felt so small," she said. Presently Frances told my mother that Gilbert had talked to her about coming into the Catholic Church. It was just at this time that she wrote to tell Father O'Connor that Gilbert said to her "Did you think I was going to die?" and followed this with the question, "Does Father O'Connor know?" After her conversation with my mother Frances wrote to her:
March 21
I think I would rather you did not tell anyone just yet of what I told you regarding my husband and the Catholic Church. Not that I doubt for a moment that he meant it and knew what he was saying and was relieved at saying it, but I don't want the world at large to be able to say that he came to this decision, when he was weak and unlike himself. He will ratify it no doubt when his complete manhood is restored. I know it was not weakness that made him say it, but you will understand my scruples. I know in God's good time he will make his confession of faith—and if death comes near him again I shall know how to act.
Thanks for all your sympathy. I did enjoy seeing you.
On Easter Eve Frances wrote two letters, one to Father O'Connor, one to my mother. To Father O'Connor she said:
All goes well here, though still very very slowly—G's mind is gradually clearing, but it is still difficult to him to distinguish between the real and the unreal. I am quite sure he will soon be able to think and act for himself, but I dare not hurry matters at all. I have told him I am writing to you often and he said, "That is right—I'll see him soon. I want to talk to him." He wanders at times, but the clear intervals are longer. He repeated the Creed last night, this time in English.
To my mother:
I feel the enormous significance of the resurrection of the body when I think of my dear husband, just consciously laying hold of life again. Indeed, I will pray that your dear ones may be kept in safety. God bless you for all your sympathy. I am so glad that Gilbert's decision (for I am sure it was a decision) has made you so happy. I dare not hurry anything, the least little excitement upsets him—last night he said the Creed and asked me to read parts of Myers' "St. Paul." He still wanders a good deal when tired but is certainly a little stronger. Love and Easter blessings to you all.
We ourselves were passing then through the shadow of death. Almost as Gilbert rose again to this life my father passed into life eternal. One of the very few letters I possess in Gilbert's own handwriting was also one of the first he wrote on recovery. It was to my mother:
I fear I have delayed writing to you, and partly with a vague feeling that I might so find some way of saying what I feel on your behalf and others'; and of course it has not come. Somewhat of what the world and a wider circle of friends have lost I shall try to say in the Dublin Review, by the kindness of Monsignor Barnes, who has invited me to contribute to it; but of all I feel, and Frances feels, and of the happy times we have had in your house, I despair of saying anything at all.
I can only hope you and yours will be able to read between the lines of what I write either here or there; and understand that the simultaneous losses of a good friend and a fine intellect have a way of stunning rather than helping the expression of either. I would say I am glad he lived to see what I feel to be a rebirth of England, if his mere presence in an older generation did not prove to me that England never died.
This sense of the rebirth of England gave to Gilbert's restored life a special quality of triumph that abode down to the end of the war.
