Completion

THERE IS ONE part of this story that has not been told with the rest: Our Lady's share in Gilbert's conversion. The Chesterton family had been quite without the strange Protestant prejudice that in the minds of many Englishmen sets the Mother of God against God the Son. Our lady was respected though of course not invoked. In a boyhood poem Gilbert took the blasphemous lines of Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine" and wrote a kind of parody in reverse turning the poem into a hymn to Mary. He would, too, recite Swinburne's own lines "deliberately directing them away from Swinburne's intention and supposing them addressed to the new Christian Queen of life, rather than to the fallen Pagan queen of death."

But I turn to her still; having seen she shall surely abide
in the end
Goddess and maiden and queen be near me now and befriend.

Nor was it only admiration for art that made him write—also in early youth:

THE NATIVITY OF BOTTICELLI

Do you blame me that I sit hours before this picture?
But if I walked all over the world in this time
I should hardly see anything worth seeing that is not
in this picture.

Father O'Connor sees in The Catholic Church and Conversion a hint that Mr. Belloc had been of those who tried to hustle Gilbert in his younger days. But on this profound reality of Mary's help they could meet many years before Gilbert had finished the slow rumination of mind and the painful effort of will that had held him so long. Here is an early letter Belloc wrote to his friend:

Reform Club, Manchester. 11 Dec. 1907.

MY DEAR GILBERT,

I am a man afraid of impulse in boats, horses and all action though driven to it. I have never written a letter such as I am writing now, though I have desired to write some six or seven since I became a grown man. In the matter we discussed at Oxford I have a word to say which is easier to say on paper than by word of mouth, or rather, more valuable. All intellectual process is doubtful, all inconclusive, save pure deduction, which is a game if one's first certitudes are hypothetical and immensely valuable if one's first certitude is fixed, yet remains wholly dependent on that.

Now if we differed in all main points I would not write thus, but
there are one or two on which we agree. One is "Vere passus,
immolatus in cruce pro homine." Another is in a looking up to our
Dear Lady, the blessed Mother of God.

I recommend to you this, that you suggest to her a comprehension for yourself, of what indeed is the permanent home of the soul. If it is here you will see it, if it is there you will see it. She never fails us. She has never failed me in any demand.

I have never written thus—as I say—and I beg you to see nothing in it but what I say. There is no connection the reason can seize—but so it is. If you say "I want this" as in your case to know one way or the other—she will give it you: as she will give health or necessary money or success in a pure love. She is our Blessed Mother.

I have not used my judgment in this letter. I am inclined to destroy it, but I shall send it. Don't answer it.

Yours ever

H. BELLOC.

At top of letter: "My point is If it is right She knows. If it is
not right She knows."

Gilbert believed it, and he knew that as he came to the Church he was coming to Our Lady.

Now I can scarcely remember a time when the image of Our lady did not stand up in my mind quite definitely, at the mention or the thought of all these things. I was quite distant from these things, and then doubtful about these things; and then disputing with the world for them, and with myself against them; for that is the condition before conversion. But whether the figure was distant, or was dark and mysterious, or was a scandal to my contemporaries, or was a challenge to myself—I never doubted that this figure was the figure of the Faith; that she embodied, as a complete human being still only human, all that this Thing had to say to humanity. The instant I remembered the Catholic Church, I remembered her; when I tried to forget the Catholic Church, I tried to forget her! When I finally saw what was nobler than my fate, the freest and the hardest of all my acts of freedom, it was in front of a gilded and very gaudy little image of her in the port of Brindisi, that I promised the thing that I would do, if I returned to my own land.*

[* The Well and the Shallows, pp. 176-7.]

In his Chaucer, G.K. quoted with considerable amusement a learned critic who said it was "possible" that the poet had "passed through a period of intense devotion, more especially towards the Virgin Mary." "It is," he comments. "It does occur from time to time. I do not quite understand why Chaucer must have 'passed through' this fit of devotion; as if he had Mariolatry like the measles. Even an amateur who has encountered this malady may be allowed to testify that it does not usually visit its victim for a brief 'period'; it is generally chronic and (in some sad cases I have known) quite incurable."*

[* Chaucer, p. 121.]

The Queen of Seven Swords is the great expression of Gilbert's "chronic" love of Our Lady:

And men looked up at the woman made for the morning
When the stars were young,
For whom more rude than a beggar's rhyme in the gutter
These songs were sung.

"The Return of Eve" exemplified a favourite thought of his: when the journalist keeps repeating that the life of religion does not lie in dusty dogmas we should stop him with a great shout, for he is wrong at the very start. It is from the seed of dogma and from that seed alone that all the Powers of art and poetry and devotion spring. In the days of his boyhood, when he thought of Our lady with a vague and confused respect as "The Madonna" he could not have written "The Return of Eve." That flower came from the seed of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.

Our lady is the Mother of God and our Mother: this doctrine blossomed as he wrote:

I found One hidden in every home
A voice that sings about the house.
A nurse that scares the nightmares off
A mother nearer than a spouse

Whose picture once I saw; and there
Wild as of old and weird and sweet
In sevenfold splendour blazed the moon
Not on her brow; beneath her feet.

This poem, "The White Witch" has in it a mingling of the old classical stories of his boyhood and the new light of Christian reality. In The Everlasting Man he saw the myths as hunger and the Faith as bread. Men's hearts today were withered because they had forgotten to eat their bread. The hunger of the pagans was a healthier thing than the jaded sterility of the modern world. Our Lady was ready to give that world the Bread of Life once more. And as he meditated on the mystery of the Virgin Birth he saw God making purity creative. She alone who overcame all heresies could overcome the hideous heresy of birth prevention.

That Christ from this creative purity
Came forth your sterile appetites to scorn.
So: in her house Life without Lust was born,
So in your house Lust without Life shall die.

"Gaude, Virgo Maria, cunctas haereses sola interemisti." Was this phrase from Our Lady's office ringing in Gilbert's mind as he sang of the Seven Champions of Christendom disarmed and worsted in the fight, going back to Our Lady to find that she had hidden their swords where the gospels tell us she hid and pondered all things—in her heart? From her wounded heart, Mary takes the seven swords to rearm the saints who have to reconquer the earth.

Certainly he must often have thought of the Litany. So many verses are based on it. Our Lord as a baby climbs the Ivory Tower of His Mother's body and kisses the Mystic Rose of her lips:

A woman was His walking home
Foederis Arca Ora pro nobis.

And he thinks of the sun, moon and stars as trinkets for her to play with:

With the great heart a woman has
And the love of little things.

For she is a woman: Regina Angelorum, Queen of Powers and Archangels, she yet belongs to the human race.

Our lady went into a strange country,
Our lady, for she was ours
And had run on the little hills behind the houses
And pulled small flowers;
But she rose up and went into a strange country
With strange thrones and powers.

From a welter of comment and correspondence that followed his conversion—challenging, scorning, rejoicing, welcoming, I select two letters from the two closest of Gilbert's Catholic friends—Hilaire Belloc and Maurice Baring.

i.VIII.22.

MY DEAR GILBERT,

I write to you, from these strange surroundings, the first line upon the news you gave me. I must write to you again when I have collected myself: for my reactions are abominably slow. I have, however, something to say immediately: and that is why I write this very evening, just after seeing Eleanor off at the Station. The thing I have to say is this (I could not have said it before your step: I can say so now. Before it would have been like a selected pleading.) The Catholic Church is the exponent of Reality. It is true. Its doctrines in matters large and small are statements of what is. This it is which the ultimate act of the intelligence accepts. This it is which the will deliberately confirms. And that is why Faith though an act of the Will is Moral. If the Ordnance Map tells us that it is 11 miles to [a place] then, my mood of lassitude as I walk through the rain at night making it feel like 30, I use the Will and say "No." My intelligence has been convinced and I compel myself to use it against my mood. It is 11 and though I feel in the depths of my being to have gone 30 miles and more, I know it is not yet 11 I have gone.

I am by all my nature of mind sceptical. . . . And as to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood: not a conclusion. My conclusion—and that of all men who have ever once seen it—is the Faith; Corporate, organised, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.

To you, who have the blessing of profound religious emotion, this statement may seem too desiccate. It is indeed not enthusiastic. It lacks meat.

It is my misfortune. In youth I had it: even till lately. Grief has drawn the juices from it. I am alone and unfed, the more do I affirm the Sanctity, the Unity, the Infallibility of the Catholic Church. By my very isolation do I the more affirm it, as a man in a desert knows that water is right for man: or as a wounded dog not able to walk, yet knows the way home.

The Catholic Church is the natural home of the human spirit. The odd perspective picture of life which looks like a meaningless puzzle at first, seen from that one standpoint takes a complete order and meaning, like the skull in the picture of the Ambassadors.

So much for my jejune contribution: not without value; because I know you regard my intelligence—a perilous tool God gave me for his own purposes; one bringing nothing to me.

But beyond this there will come in time, if I save my soul, the flesh of these bones—which bones alone I can describe and teach. I know—without feeling (an odd thing in such a connection) the reality of Beatitude: which is the goal of Catholic Living.

In hac urbe lux solennis
Ver aeternum pax perennis
Et aeterna gaudia.

Yours,

H. B.

Maurice Baring wrote:

August 25: 1922.

MY DEAR GILBERT,

When I wrote to you the other day I was still cramped by the possibility of the news not being true although I knew it was true. I felt it was true at once. Curiously enough I felt it had happened before I saw the news in the newspaper at all. I felt that your ship had arrived at its port. But the more I felt this, the more unwilling I was to say anything before I heard the news from a source other than the newspapers. I gave way to an excess, a foolish excess perhaps of scruple. But you will, I think, understand this. In writing to you the other day I expressed not a tenth part of what I felt and feel and that baldly and inadequately. Nothing for years has given me so much joy. I have hardly ever entered a church without putting up a candle to Our Lady or to St. Joseph or St. Anthony for you. And both this year and last year in Lent I made a Novena for you. I know of many other people, better people far than I, who did the same. Many Masses were said for you and prayers all over England and Scotland in centres of Holiness. I will show you some day a letter from some Nuns on the subject. A great friend of mine one of the greatest saints I have known, Sister Mary Annunciation of the Convent Orphanage, Upper Norwood, used always to pray for you. She, alas, died last year.

Did I ever quote you a sentence of Bernard Holland on the subject of Kenelm Henry Digby when the latter was received?

"Father Scott . . . who, at last, guided him through the narrow door where one must bend one's head, into the internal space and freedom of the eternal and universal Catholic Church." Space and freedom: that was what I experienced on being received; that is what I have been most conscious of ever since. It is the exact opposite of what the ordinary Protestant conceives to be the case. To him and not only to him but to the ordinary English agnostic the convert to Catholicism is abandoning his will and his independence, sometimes they think even his nationality; at the best they think he is sheltering himself in a walled garden; at the worst they think he has closed on himself an iron door: and shackled himself with foolish chains and sold his birthright for a crown of tinsel.

And yet their own experience, the testimony of their eyes if they
would only use them, ought to suggest to them that they might perhaps
be mistaken.

It would be difficult for anyone to make out a case for the
UnEnglishness of Manning or indeed of any prominent English Catholic
whether a born Catholic or a convert.

It would be difficult for them to prove that Belloc was a writer
wanting in independence. It would be difficult for them to convince
any one that Father Vaughan and Lord Fitzalan were wearing foolscaps.

And anybody who has thought about history or looked on at politics
must have reflected that freedom resides where there is order and not
where there is license: or no-order.

It is true in politics; it is true in art. It is the basis of our
whole social life in England. Russia has just given us the most
startling of object lessons. The English with their passion for
Committees, their Club-rules and their well organised traffic are
daily realising the fact, however little they may recognise the
theory. Only the law can give us freedom, said Goethe talking of art.
"Und das Gesetz kann nur die Freiheit geben."

Well all I have to say, Gilbert, is what I think I have already said to you, and what I have said not long ago in a printed book. That I was received into the Church on the Eve of Candlemass 1909, and it is perhaps the only act in my life, which I am quite certain I have never regretted. Every day I live, the Church seems to me more and more wonderful; the Sacraments more and more solemn and sustaining; the voice of the Church, her liturgy, her rules, her discipline, her ritual, her decisions in matters of Faith and Morals more and more excellent and profoundly wise and true and right, and her children stamped with something that those outside Her are without. There I have found Truth and reality and everything outside Her is to me compared with Her as dust and shadow. Once more God bless you and Frances. Please give her my love. In my prayers for you I have always added her name.

Yours,

MAURICE.

It was a bit of great good fortune, although at the time he did not feel it so, that the death of the New Witness in 1922 for lack of funds, left Gilbert some months for uninterrupted creative thought before G.K.'s Weekly took its place. Lawrence Solomon, friend of his boyhood and at this time a near neighbour, has told me not only how happy his conversion had made Gilbert but also how it had seemed to bring him increased strength of character. Worry, he had told Maurice Baring, did not worry so much as of old because of a fundamental peace. In this atmosphere were written two of his most important books: St. Francis of Assisi published 1923, The Everlasting Man published 1925.

In a poem he has expressed his sense of conversion as a new light that had transfigured life: indeed of a new life given to him:

After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white,
I walked the ways and heard what all men said.

* * * * *

They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.*

[* Collected Poems, p. 387, "The Convert."]

Both books shine with that light on the white road of man's endeavour, thrill with that life. Gilbert felt now the clue to history in his fingers and he used it increasingly. The Everlasting Man is the Orthodoxy of his later life and one difficulty in dealing with it adequately was expressed in a letter from William Lyon Phelps thanking the author for "a magnificent work of genius and never more needed than now. I took out my pencil to mark the most important passages, but I quickly put my pencil in my pocket for I found I had to mark every sentence." Reading the book for perhaps the seventh time I can only say (I hope without irreverence) what G.K. himself says happens to those who can read the words of the Gospels "simply enough." They "will feel as if rocks had been rolled upon them. Criticism is only words about words; and of what use are words about such words as these."

"Rocks rolled upon them." Did he not feel crushed, overwhelmed at times by his own thought on these immensities, or can the philosopher carry his thoughts as lightly as Gilbert so often seemed to carry his? I think not always. He must have needed superhuman strength to conceive and give birth to this mighty book. The thoughts sketched in The New Jerusalem had grown to their full fruition in an atmosphere of meditation. It would be much easier to give an outline of The Everlasting Man than of Orthodoxy, much harder to give an idea of it. For Orthodoxy consists of a hundred brilliant arguments while The Everlasting Man really is a vision of history supported by a historical outline. Comparing his own effort with that of H. G. Wells, Chesterton says, "I do not believe that the best way to produce an outline of history is to rub out the lines." He is like Wells however in not being a specialist but claiming "the right of the amateur to do his best with the facts the specialists provide"—only their specialists are different specialists and their facts therefore largely different facts.

Chesterton, unlike most converts, wrote concerning his own conversion the least interesting of his later books: but in The Everlasting Man he is not at all concerned with his own spiritual wayfaring, he merely wants to make everyone else look at what he has come to see at the end of the way. The book is an attempt to get outside Man and thus see him as the strange being he really is: to get outside Christianity and see for the first time its uniqueness among the religions of the world. Why are not all men aware of the uniqueness of Man among the animals and the uniqueness of the Church among religions? Because they do not really look at either. Familiarity has dulled the edge of awareness. Men must be made to see them as though for the first time; and it is the towering achievement of this book that reading it we do so see them. "I desire to help the reader to see Christendom from the outside in the sense of seeing it as a whole against the background of other historic things; just as I desire him to see humanity as a whole against the background of natural things. And I say that in both cases when seen thus, they stand out from their background like supernatural things." This being his desire, he divides the book into two parts—"the first being the main adventure of the human race in so far as it remained heathen; and the second a summary of the real difference that was made by it becoming Christian."

Notable as the first part is, it is only a preparation for the second, which shows the Church not as one religion among many but as the only religion, for it is the only Thing that binds into one both Philosophy (or Thought) and Mythology (or Poetry), giving us a Logos Who is also the Hero of the strangest story in the world. He asks the man who talks of reading the Gospels really to read them as he might read his daily paper and to feel the terrific shock of the words of Christ to the Pharisees or the behaviour of Christ to the money-changers: to look at the uniqueness of the Church that has died so often but like Her Founder risen again from the dead.

Two untrue things, he felt, were constantly reiterated about the gospel—one that the Church had overlaid and made difficult a plain and simple story: the other that the hero of this story was merely human and taught a morality suitable to his own age, inapplicable in our more complicated society. To anyone who really read the gospels the instant impression would be rather that they were full of dark riddles which only historic Christianity has clarified. The Eunuchs of the heavenly Kingdom would be an idea dark and terrible but for the historic beauty of Catholic virginity. The ideal of man and woman "in one flesh" inseparable and sanctified by a sacrament became clear in the lives of the great married saints of Christendom. The apparent idealisation of idleness above service in the story of Mary and Martha was lit up by the sight of Catherine and Clare and Teresa shining above the little home at Bethany. The meek inheriting the earth became the basis of a new Social Order when the mystical monks reclaimed the lands that the practical kings had lost.

Thus if the gospel was a riddle the Church was the answer to the riddle because both were created by One Who Knew: Who saw the ages in which His own creation was to find completion: Whose morality was not one of another age but of another world.

Chesterton gathered history in his mind and saw together before the Christmas Crib the shepherds who had found their shepherd, the philosopher kings who "would stand for the same human ideal if their names had really been Confucius or Pythagoras or Plato. They were those who sought not tales but the truth of things; and since their thirst for truth was itself a thirst for God, they also have had their reward. But even in order to understand that reward, we must understand that for philosophy as much as mythology, that reward was the completion of the incomplete."*

[* The Everlasting Man, p. 211.]

G.K. too had needed the completion of incomplete human thought: he too had followed the star from a far country. It had been a fancy of his boyhood, caught from a fairytale, that evil lurked somewhere in a hidden room of the human house and the human heart. He saw in the history of the ancients a consciousness of the Fall, in the sadness of their songs a sense of "the Presence of the Absence of God." But at Bethlehem he saw the transformation that had come upon the whole race of man with that little local infancy concealing the mighty power of God who had put Himself under the feet of the world.

It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart of his own house, which he had never suspected; and seen a light from within. It is as if he found something at the back of his own heart that betrayed him into good. It is not made of what the world would call strong materials; or rather it is made of materials whose strength is in that winged levity with which they brush us and pass. It is all that is in us but a brief tenderness, that is there made eternal; all that means no more than a momentary softening that is in some strange fashion become a strengthening and a repose; it is the broken speech and the lost word that are made positive and suspended unbroken; as the strange kings fade into a far country and the mountains resound no more with the feet of the shepherds; and only the night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over something more human than humanity.

[* Ibid., p. 223.]

It seems to me profoundly significant that Gilbert studied first in the little Poor Man of Assisi what Christ could do in one man before he came on to the study of what He had done in mankind as a whole, of Who He was who had done it. For the man thus chosen embodied the ideals that Gilbert had seen dimly in his boyhood—ideals that most of us accept a little reluctantly from the Church, but which had actually attracted him towards the Church. St. Francis "had found the secret of life in being the servant and the secondary figure". . . "he seems to have liked everybody, but especially those whom everybody disliked him for liking." "By nature he was the sort of man who has that vanity which is the opposite of pride, that vanity which is very near to humility. He never despised his fellow creatures and therefore he never despised the opinion of his fellow creatures, including the admiration of his fellow creatures." "He was above all things a great giver; and he cared chiefly for the best kind of giving which is called thanksgiving. If another great man wrote a grammar of assent, he may well be said to have written a grammar of acceptance; a grammar of gratitude. He understood down to its very depths the theory of thanks; and its depths are a bottomless abyss."

Here, in St. Francis, Gilbert saw the apotheosis of his old boyish thought—that thanksgiving is a duty and a joy, that we should love not "humanity" but each human. Things shadowed in the Notebook are in St. Francis, for

the transition from the good man to the saint is a sort of revolution; by which one for whom all things illustrate and illuminate God becomes one for whom God illustrates and illuminates all things. It is rather like the reversal whereby a lover might say at first sight that a lady looked like a flower, and say afterwards that all flowers reminded him of his lady. A saint and a poet standing by the same flower might seem to say the same thing; but indeed though they would both be telling the truth, they would be telling different truths. For one the joy of life is a cause of faith, for the other rather a result of faith.*

[* St. Francis of Assisi, p. 111.]

The Everlasting Man and the St. Francis seem to me the highest expression of Gilbert's mysticism. I have hesitated to use the word for it is not one to be used lightly but I can find no other. Like most Catholics I have been wont to believe that to be a mystic a man must first be an ascetic and Gilbert was not an ascetic in the ordinary sense. But is there not for the thinker an asceticism of the mind, very searching, very purifying? In his youth he had told Bentley that creative writing was the hardest of hard labour. That sense of the pressure of thought that made Newman call creative writing "getting rid of pain by pain"; the profound depression that often follows; the exhaustion that seems like a bottomless pit. St. Theresa said the hardest penance was easier than mental prayer: was not much of Gilbert's thought a contemplation?

Faith, thanksgiving, love, surely these far above bodily asceticism can so clear a man's eyesight that he may fittingly be called a mystic since he sees God everywhere. "The less a man thinks of himself, the more he thinks of his good luck and of all the gifts of God." Only a poet who was more than a poet could see so clearly of what like St. Francis was.

When we say that a poet praises the whole creation, we commonly mean only that he praises the whole cosmos. But this sort of poet does really praise creation, in the sense of the act of creation. He praises the passage or transition from nonentity to entity; there falls here also the shadow of that archetypal image of the bridge, which has given to the priest his archaic and mysterious name. The mystic who passes through the moment when there is nothing but God does in some sense behold the beginningless beginnings in which there was really nothing else. He not only appreciates everything but the nothing of which everything was made. In a fashion he endures and answers even the earthquake irony of the Book of Job; in some sense he is there when the foundations of the world are laid, with the mornings stars singing together and the sons of God shouting for joy.*

[* St. Francis of Assisi, pp. 112-13.]

But there was in all those years another element besides the giving of thanks and the joy of creation: an abiding grief for the sorrows of the sons of men and especially those of his own land. In this mood the Cobbett was written.

Nine years separate the publication of William Cobbett from that of the History of England. Written at the time when Englishmen were fighting so magnificently, that book had radiated G.K.'s own mood of hope, but to read Rural Rides, to meditate on Cobbett's England, and then turn to the England of the hour was not cheerful. For Cobbett "did not draw precise diagrams of things as they were. He only had frantic and fantastic nightmares of things as they are."* And these nightmares haunted Cobbett's biographer.

[* Cobbett, p. 22.]

What he saw was not an Eden that cannot exist, but rather an Inferno that can exist, and even that does exist. What he saw was the perishing of the whole English power of self-support, the growth of cities that drain and dry up the countryside, the growth of dense dependent populations incapable of finding their own food, the toppling triumph of machines over men, the sprawling omnipotence of financiers over patriots, the herding of humanity in nomadic masses whose very homes are homeless, the terrible necessity of peace and the terrible probability of war, all the loading up of our little island like a sinking ship; the wealth that may mean famine and the culture that may mean despair; the bread of Midas and the sword of Damocles. In a word, he saw what we see, but he saw it when it was not there. And some cannot see it—even when it is there.*

[* Ibid., pp. 14, 15.]

Two men had written of the Reformation as the ultimate origin of these evils at a time when it was still the fashion to treat it as the dawn of all good. Lingard, himself a Catholic, had written cautiously, with careful documentation and moderate tone. Cobbett, a Protestant, had written hastily and furiously, but both men had drawn in essentials the same picture. Chesterton suspected that Cobbett was treated with contempt, Lingard with respect, largely because of the difference in the tone of the two men. Lingard spoke restrainedly but Cobbett's voice was raised in a loud cry:

He was simply a man who had discovered a crime: ancient like many crimes; concealed like all crimes. He was as one who had found in a dark wood the bones of his mother, and suddenly knew she had been murdered. He knew now that England had been secretly slain. Some, he would say, might think it a matter of mild regret to be expressed in murmurs. But when he found a corpse he gave a shout; and if fools laughed at anyone shouting, he would shout the more, till the world should be shaken with that terrible cry in the night.

It is that ringing and arresting cry of "Murder!" wrung from him as he stumbled over those bones of the dead England, that distinguishes him from all his contemporaries.*

[* Ibid., pp. 176-77.]

Yet, for the Christian, hope remains: no murder can be the end. "Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave." This quotation is from the chapter called "Five Deaths of the Faith" in The Everlasting Man. Several times in the book Chesterton puts aside tempting lines of thought with the remark that he intends to develop them later—in one of the unwritten books that he always felt were so much better than those he actually wrote. Would any human life have been long enough to develop them all? Anyhow, even the whole of this life was not available.

As I turn to the story of the weekly paper rising again from its ashes I ask myself the question I have often asked: was it worth while? I cannot answer the question. Something of his manhood seemed to Gilbert bound up with this struggle, and it may be he would have been a lesser man had he abandoned it. And yet at moments imagining the poetry, the philosophy that might have been ours—another White Horse, another Everlasting Man—I am tempted to wish that these years had not thus been sacrificed to the paper which enshrined his brother's memory.