CHAPTER ONE

BOYHOOD DAYS

One of Chesterton’s earliest and staunchest friends, Mr. E. C. Bentley, recalls,

“Chesterton was in his schooldays the centre of a small group of boys. They formed a club under his chairmanship ... the Junior Debating Club, so called to distinguish it from the School Union Society, which was the preserve of the senior boys. He never did, as he states in his memoirs, any work at school in the academic sense, and so never rose to the position of a star boy. The star boys did not understand him and classed him as a freak who was unlikely to do the school any credit. He was so exceptionally untidy and absent-minded, even at the age when the ordinary boy becomes careful of his appearance, that he did not fit into the picture at all; and it needed the insight of Walker, the High Master of his day, to divine that there was the stuff of genius in him, and to ordain (as G. K. tells in his own modest way) that on the strength of a remarkable prize poem ... the only ‘regular’ thing he ever did at school ... he should ‘rank with the eighth form,’ the highest, to which he would never have attained on his school performance. Very few of the boys of whom he saw most did anything in the field of letters in after life.” The poet Edward Thomas was not at St. Paul’s with G. K. C. as many think. Mr. Robert Eckert, the biographer of Thomas, states that the latter was a schoolmate of Cecil, G. K. C.’s younger brother.

Mr. Bentley continues: “About G. K. C.:--His spare time at school--which, as he makes clear in his Autobiography, was mostly spent.... I should say entirely ... in talking, reading, writing, and drawing pictures. He had a wonderful decorative handwriting, and was already a masterly draughtsman. Apart from walking, of which he never tired as a boy, he took no part in any sport. His sight was always very bad without his glasses. He was nevertheless strong and healthy as a boy, rather slim than otherwise; it was not until the twenties that he began to put on flesh. It was not ordinary fatness; I believe some gland trouble must have been at the root of it.

“Speaking generally, Chesterton would talk about everything when at school that had to do with the realm of ideas. He never took much interest in things that are called practical. Politics in a broad sense he would talk about, but for the details of legislation he cared nothing. He always was, of course, what we know as a Liberal; in the large sense he remained a Liberal all his days.

“Literature he would discuss by the hour, especially poetry. He hated the fashionable decadence of that time ... say 1890–1900 ... as may be seen from the dedication to ‘The Man Who Was Thursday.’ He delighted in pictorial art, above all in the generous idealism of G. F. Watts.

“As to books, G. K. C. never gave any attention to those which constituted school-work. He was passionately fond of Scott and of course, Dickens. He knew Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne by heart, and had enjoyed every other English poet in large degree. He did not care in those days for lighter reading.

“There was a school library, but it was reserved for the use of the highest class in the school, which G. K. C. never attained. There was a popular fiction library also, but he did not, I think, make use of it. G. K. C. was too amiable to get into fights, but he would use his strength occasionally in standing between a small boy and others who were badgering him. He honored religion, but had none whatever of a doctrinal kind until years later.”

“Chesterton, as I knew him in 1889,” writes Mr. E. W. Fordham, another old schoolmate, “was utterly unlike the average English schoolboy. He took no part in games. He showed no particular brilliance as a scholar, and yet far from being looked down upon, he was, I think, always regarded as one who lived in a different mental world from the rest of us, a world that many of us admired from afar but would never expect, or, it may be, ever hope to enter. We felt, though we never alluded to, his mental pre-eminence. Thus when the Junior Debating Club was formed, G. K. became Chairman without question and without a rival. It was obvious that he alone was fitted for the post, and most admirably he filled it. The teas at the houses of the various members of the Club which preceded the debates were often tempestuous to the last degree, but Gilbert, although he took no share in the more physical aspects of our revelry, was very far from playing the part of a wet blanket.

“His laugh was the loudest and the most infectious of all. There were times when the boisterous manifestations of some of us overflowed into, and tended to overpower, the Debates. Then, with the utmost good temper, G. K. would assert himself, and order would be restored.

“I remember once, after I myself had been particularly noisy and troublesome, Gilbert explained to me that the throwing of buns and slices of cake did not really help in the production of good debates, and he hinted, very kindly and seriously, that some restraining action might have to be taken if the rioting did not diminish. I hope, indeed, I believe, I took the hint. This occasion was thereafter referred to as the day ‘when the Chairman spoke seriously to Mr. F.’

“G. K. was the mainspring of the Junior Debating Club. He was valiantly supported by Oldershaw, Bentley, and others, but without him neither the Club itself, nor that strange little magazine, ‘The Debater’ could have flourished as each of them did. Like boy, like man. That which he believed in he put his whole heart into, and never spared himself in furthering its interests. He gave the Junior Debating Club his eager and inspiring support for the two very good reasons, that it gave great enjoyment to himself and a few of his friends, and that he thought it a widening and humanizing influence--completely outside the range of ordinary school affairs. The Chairman loved the Junior Debating Club, and most certainly the J. D. C. loved the Chairman.”

Mr. Fordham pins further recollections around the “Autobiography”:

“I am a prejudiced person. Fifty years of friendship and admiration are an insuperable bar to impartiality.

“G. K. C. and I were at school together: we were fellow members of the Junior Debating Club of which he was Chairman. We both contributed to our Club’s magazine, ‘The Debater.’ I wrote rubbish; he wrote articles and verses of a very different quality. In this book he speaks almost with contempt of his ‘juvenilia.’ They were in fact such as very few boys of his age could have produced. Even then, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, he had a sense of style and a command of language which the High Master of St. Paul’s and other authorities did not fail to recognize. ‘The Dragon,’ one article begins, ‘the Dragon is the most cosmopolitan of impossibilities.’

“As I say, I admired Gilbert Chesterton throughout his life, and after reading his ‘Autobiography’ I admire him still more. My attitude is rather that of a hero-worshipper than a critic, but I believe that no impartial critic could read this book and fail to see that here was a genius, and better, a brave and an honest man, a man who loved life and loved his friends, loved laughter and hated oppression; in short a very great man. Despite all the modesty with which it is written, the book makes all these things clear. From beginning to end it is a magnificent =apologia pro vita sua=; nevertheless I hope it will not be the sole record of his life. There are countless things that he could not and would not tell of himself but that should not be forgotten. ‘Belloc,’ he writes, ‘still awaits a Boswell.’ It is equally true that Chesterton awaits one. Is it legitimate to hope that his Boswell may be Belloc? There is a grand harvest to be gathered by his Boswell, whoever that may prove to be. G. K. C. was a brilliant talker. He banished dullness from whatever company he was in. No argument arose but he would drive home his point by some arresting illustration. We were arguing once as to whether some policy or other were good or bad. ‘The word ‘good,’ said G. K., ‘has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of 500 yards I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.’

“No one could stump him by an unexpected question. He took part in a debate many years ago at, I think, the Lyceum Club, and in the course of his speech he discussed, as did other speakers, various racial characteristics. After the debate I was walking round with him when an elderly lady whom he did not know came up and said with something of a simper, ‘Mr. Chesterton, I wonder if you could tell what race I belong to?’ With a characteristic adjustment of his glasses he replied at once, ‘I should certainly say, Madam, one of the conquering races.’

“Only a year or two ago he watched with tolerant, and indeed highly vocal amusement, (his was both the strangest and the jolliest laugh man ever had) a representation of himself in some private theatricals. When they were over he said to the daughter of the player who had impersonated him--a sturdy figure, it is true, but less generously planned than the original--‘Do you know I believe your father =is= Gilbert Chesterton and I am only a padded impostor.’

“Reading this book has recalled these trifles to my mind just as it has recalled the figure of the boy Chesterton as I first knew him in the early nineties. I can see him now, very tall and lanky, striding untidily along Kensington High Street, smiling and sometimes scowling as he talked to himself, apparently oblivious of everything he passed, but in reality a far closer observer than most, and one who not only observed but remembered what he had seen. The fascination of this book is, in great part, due to the fact that he retained these powers of observation and memory throughout his life, and that he has applied them to himself as rigorously and as vividly as to his fellows.

“‘I should thank God for my creation,’ said Gilbert’s grandfather, ‘if I knew I was a lost soul.’ Gilbert would have done the same. ‘The primary problem for me,’ he writes, ‘was the problem of how men could be made to realize the wonder and splendour of being alive,’ and it is because he himself did realize it that he is able to say of his later years, ‘I have grown old without being bored. Existence is still a strange thing to me, and as a stranger I give it welcome.’

“Chesterton begins this book with a joke about his baptism. It is characteristic of the man. He loved laughter as much as he hated hypocrisy. ‘I have never understood,’ he says, ‘why a solid argument is any less solid because you make the illustrations as entertaining as you can.’ It is because, in this autobiography the philosophy is spiced with fun, and the fun sometimes spiced with philosophy, that so true a picture of the man emerges from the book. When he looks at himself he sees not only an intensely interesting being but also an intensely amusing one. He speaks of his school days as the period during which ‘I was being instructed by somebody I did not know, about something I did not want to know.’ He tells how on his wedding day he stopped to buy a glass of milk at some haunt of his infancy, and again to buy a revolver and cartridges ‘with a general notion of protecting my bride from the pirates doubtless infesting the Norfolk Broads.’

“You will find the same amusement he found if you read and re-read his chapter on ‘Friendship and Foolery,’ his story of the sudden invasion of Henry James’ house at Rye by Mr. Belloc and another, unshaven and dishevelled but vociferous and irrepressible, his account of the birthday dinner to Mr. Belloc at which there were to be no speeches, and at which everybody present spoke, and his story of the aged negro porter in America with a face like a walnut whom, he says, ‘I discouraged from brushing my hat, and who rebuked me saying, ‘Ho, young man, yo’s losing ye dignity before yo times. Yo’s got to look nice for the girls.’

“The sketches of his friends and those of the many public men with whom he came in contact are of extraordinary interest. In a few lines he paints sharp and unforgettable portraits not only of his intimate friends but of men and women with whom he had perhaps but one short conversation. It is thus he tells of his meeting with King George V at the house of the late Lord Burnham. He sums up his impression of ‘about as genuine a person as I ever met’ in these words--‘If it should ever happen that I hear before I die among new generations who never saw George the Fifth that he is being praised either as a strong silent man, or depreciated as a stupid and empty man, I shall know that history has got the whole portrait wrong.’

“There are brilliant little sketches of George Wyndham, Charles Masterman and Cunninghame Graham, among many others; of each one it is the true thing and the generous thing that he sets down. No less arresting are the little cameos of wholly unknown men and women who said or did something that left an impression on his receptive and retentive mind. For example there was the ‘huge healthy simple-faced man of the plastering profession’ who at a Penny Reading, being unable to endure further recitations about to be provided by a gentleman who had already obliged with ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and ‘The May Queen,’ ‘arose slowly in the middle of the room like some vast Leviathan arising from the ocean and observed, ‘Well, I’ve just ’ad about enough of this. =Good= evening, Mr. Ash. =Good= evening, ladies and gentlemen,’ and shouldered his way out of the Progressive Hall with an unaffected air of complete amiability and profound relief.’

“Memorable as are all the records of his outer life, the insight that he gives us into his mental and spiritual development is of deeper significance. It would be impossible, for me at least, to summarize the subjective side of this autobiography. To be understood, even to be partly understood, it must be read in its entirety. Many readers will not be able to accept the conclusions to which Chesterton found himself inevitably driven, but none can fail to see that his steadfast faith, his sure hope, and his abounding charity were the outcome of no slipshod or haphazard thought, but of mental processes to which he gave the whole of his clear and original mind, and that in his life-long struggle towards the light which he felt assured he had ultimately found he was as completely honest with himself as he always was in his dealings with his fellow men.

“This is a noble record of a noble life.”