Chapter VIII

].]

APPENDIX A

AN EARLIER CHESTERTON

BOTH THE _Autobiography_ and _Prison Life_ of George Laval Chesterton are worth reading. There is conscious humour: we feel it might be our own Chesterton when we hear the Captain describing himself as "laughing immoderately" because he had made a fool of himself and others were laughing at him. There is unconscious humour, especially in the astonishing style, full of such phrases as "I was the most obnoxious to peril," or "something not far removed from impunity stalked abroad."

Captain Chesterton started life as a soldier. During the Peninsular War his regiment was stationed at Cartagena. "It was a subject of deep mortification to most of us to be thus supinely occupied in this lone garrison, thereby being debarred from the Peninsular medal, and hence a widespread disaffection on that most tender subject which no reasoning has been equal to dispel." However, later he saw a good deal of active service, being in the War of 1812, in the course of which the battle of Bladensburg was fought and Washington fell to the British arms. "The astonished slaves," he says, describing the advance on Washington, "rested from their work in the fields contiguous; and the awe-struck peasants and yeomen of this portion of America beheld with perturbation the tremendous preparations to devastate their blooming country."

To the smaller professional armies of that day peace was a misfortune, and in his quaint style Captain Chesterton describes the demonstrations of joy on the part of himself and his fellow officers at the escape of Napoleon from Elba, foreseeing, as he frankly observes, "a scope for further adventure and hope of personal advancement." This hope was short-lived and we next see him fighting in the British Legion of a rebel South American army against Spain. The general mismanagement of this expedition, and the fact that the Republicans killed all their prisoners "was a death blow to all my past enthusiasm in the Republican cause." Many British officers "participating with me in the detestation for cold-blooded butchery, conspired from that moment to elude this detested service. . . . Mark ye who delight in transcendant Liberalism . . . the cruel exigencies of such a warfare."

In his acceptance of "transcendant Liberalism," yet his determination to see truly what passed before his eyes and when needful to change his standpoint, this earlier Chesterton was much like the later. He had not the genius of Gilbert, he could not see so far, but he shared his refusal to be blinded by custom, theory or even patriotism. In his accounts of army life he had commented fearlessly on the cruelty of the punishments and described his fellow officers as made ill by seeing a private receive five hundred lashes. He had noted corruption in the "Train Service" which "was consequently divested of its genuine claim to honour." Fêted by the planters of Jamaica, he had yet spoken with horror of their slave ownership.

Now he was appointed governor of a prison in England and here began the great work of his life in a frontal attack on the corruptions he discovered. The yardsmen did a secret traffic in all the goods forbidden in the prison, there were caches of tobacco, spirits and such things under the pavements, the weaker prisoners were robbed by the stronger. The women's and men's quarters were so arranged that by connivance of the jailors frequent meetings took place. On one of these occasions Captain Chesterton himself appeared:

My hands were seized with tender empressement, and I was addressed as "my love," "My darling," "my dear creature:" and all the conventional endearments of the pavé were showered upon me. I had to struggle for enlargement, and beat a hasty retreat, quite confounded by my initiation into "prison discipline." And the consternation occasioned by this discovery became perfectly electric.*

[* _Revelations of Prison Life_, pp. 84-85.]

Attempts to bribe him were followed by attempts to kill him, but he stood firm. Mrs. Fry invoked his aid to improve the home conditions to which the prisoners had to return. Chesterton turned to Dickens and to Dickens's friend, Miss Coutts, in defiance of a narrow-minded magistrate

who perversely insisted (as was by cynical interpretation literally too true) that Miss Coutts had no right to confer with prisoners within those walls, nor was it "to be tolerated that Mr. Charles Dickens should walk into the prison whenever he pleased."*

[* Ibid., p. 186.]

From Cold Bath Fields the reforms begun by Captain Chesterton and warmly seconded by Dickens spread to other prisons, "Although (he declares) I consented to forego pecuniary advantage, I cling the more tenaciously to the credit of my past exertions; when, beset with fraud, ferocity, and moral pollution, I achieved a triumph fraught with civilizing influences."*

[* Ibid., p. v.]

APPENDIX B

Prize Poem Written at St. Paul's

This is the only version I have been able to find. Across the top is written in another hand: "This is not exactly the same as given in the prize poem." The difference is probably slight.

ST. FRANCIS XAVIER The Apostle of the Indies

He left his dust, by all the myriad tread Of yon dense millions trampled to the strand, Or 'neath some cross forgotten lays his head Where dark seas whiten on a lonely land: He left his work, what all his life had planned, A waning flame to flicker and to fall, Mid the huge myths his toil could scarce withstand, And the light died in temple and in hall, And the old twilight sank and settled over all.

He left his name, a murmur in the East, That dies to silence amid older creeds, With which he strove in vain: the fiery priest Of faiths less fitted to their ruder needs: As some lone pilgrim, with his staff and beads, Mid forest-brutes whom ignorance makes tame, He dwelt, and sowed an Eastern Church's seeds He reigned a teacher and a priest of fame: He died and dying left a murmur and a name.

He died: and she, the Church that bade him go, Yon dim Enchantress with her mystic claim, Has ringed his forehead with her aureole-glow, And monkish myths, and all the whispered fame Of miracle, has clung about his name: So Rome has said: but we, what answer we Who in grim Indian gods and rites of shame O'er all the East the teacher's failure see, His eastern church a dream, his toil a vanity.

This then we say: as Time's dark face at last Moveth its lips of thunder to decree The doom that grew through all the murmuring past To be the canon of the times to be: No child of truth or priest of progress he Yet not the less a hero of his wars Striving to quench the light he could not see, And God, who knoweth all that makes and mars, Judges his soul unseen which throbs among the stars.

God only knows, man failing in his choice, How far apparent failure may succeed, God only knows what echo of His voice Lives in the cant of many a fallen creed, God only gives the labourer his meed For all the lingering influence widely spread Broad branching into many a word and deed When dim oblivion veils the fountain-head; So lives and lingers on the spirit of the dead.

This then we say: let all things further rest And this brave life, with many thousands more Be gathered up in the eternal's breast In that dim past his Love is bending o'er Healing all shattered hopes and failure sore: Since he had bravely looked on death and pain For what he chose to worship and adore Cast boldly down his life for loss or gain In the eternal lottery: not to be in vain.

APPENDIX C

The Chestertons

The composition of _The Chestertons_ is not without interest for the student of legendary literature. By a curious paradox the book had to be strikingly untrue to be accepted as true, since the jokes about sisters-in-law are legion, so that mere commonplace shafts of what is called "feminine spite" would have gained little credence. Yet on the other hand, Mrs. Cecil Chesterton was able (to quote _The Mikado_) to get from her husband a good deal of "corroborative detail designed to give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative." Of these details some are true, some false, all arranged to support the main untruth of Frances and Gilbert's relation to one another. The thesis of the book is that Gilbert was an unhappy and frustrated man (a) because Frances shrank from consummating their marriage, and (b) because she dragged him away from his London life and friends to bury him in a middle class suburb.

I confess that I am Victorian enough heartily to dislike writing this appendix. Yet it is necessary, for many who read _The Chestertons_ have supposed that a story told by so near a connection must be true.

The ground was laid for the introduction of the Legend by the tale of the Red Haired Phantom, if I may describe it in the terms of a ghost story. That ghost was easy to lay (see Introduction). Next comes the odd account of Gilbert and Frances' honeymoon and of the years that followed. It is of course possible that the first night of their marriage was not happy--especially in the Victorian days of reticence which left wife and even possibly husband unprepared for life together: (though this did not normally prevent a happy marriage and a pack of children afterwards). But I find it impossible to imagine Cecil Chesterton, like the bridesmaid on the honeymoon, receiving and passing on such a story as that of Gilbert "quivering with self-reproach" so that after the first night he "dared not even contemplate a repetition. . . . Gilbert, young and vital, was condemned to a pseudo-monastic life, in which he lived with a woman but never enjoyed one." (p. 282)

There is a psychological reason for thinking this story especially improbable and a physical reason for dismissing it as actually impossible.

A white horse had from his childhood been for Gilbert the supreme sign of romance, and he had chosen to spend the first night of his honeymoon at the White Horse Inn. From his honeymoon he wrote home that he had "a wife, a piece of string, a pencil and a knife. What more can any man want?" Ten years later he wrote _The Ballad of the White Horse_ and dedicated it to Frances, saying,

"O go you onward, where you are Shall honour and laughter be. Past purpled forest and pearled foam, God's winged pavilion free to roam, Your face, that is a wandering home, A flying home for me."

And over thirty years later he wrote again of beginning his honeymoon under the shadow of the White Horse, and compared it to a trip to fairyland.

Can any human being read the record of this recurrent motif and reconcile it with Mrs. Cecil's picture?

Let me refer again to _The Ballad of The White Horse_. Is it conceivable that any man should write after ten years of frustration and unhappiness:

Up through an empty house of stars Being what heart you are, Up the inhuman steeps of space As on a staircase go in grace Carrying the firelight on your face Beyond the loneliest star.

This is not the way a man writes to a neurotic cold-hearted woman who has made a hermit of him!

Mrs. Cecil was of course never in the intimacy of the family. She only married Cecil in 1917--by which date Gilbert and Frances had been married sixteen years--and before that she was merely an acquaintance. But Frances's intimates could have told her how absurd her story was, for by a rare good fortune the operation Frances underwent to enable her to bear children is itself evidence one could hardly have hoped for in a matter which civilized people are not much given to discussing. Frances talked of the operation to Monsignor O'Connor, to Dorothy Collins and to Annie Firmin, and I have quoted the doctor's letter about it (see above, [