Chapter XI: Married Life in London (1)

_The suburbs are commonly referred to as prosaic. That is a matter of taste. Personally I find them intoxicating_.

Introduction to _Literary London_.

THE WEDDING DAY drew near and the presents were pouring in.

"I feel like the young man in the Gospel," said Gilbert to Annie Firmin, "sorrowful, because I have great possessions."

Conrad Noel married Gilbert and Frances at Kensington Parish Church on June 28, 1901. As Gilbert knelt down the price ticket on the sole of one of his new shoes became plainly visible. Annie caught Mrs. Chesterton's eye and they began to laugh helplessly. Annie thinks, too, that for once in their lives Gilbert and Cecil did not argue at the Reception.

Lucian Oldershaw drove ahead to the station with the heavy luggage, put it on the train and waited feverishly. That train went off (with the luggage), then another, and at last the happy couple appeared. Gilbert had felt it necessary to stop on the way "in order to drink a glass of milk in one shop and to buy a revolver with cartridges in another." The milk he drank because in childhood his mother used to give him a glass in that shop. The revolver was for the defense of his bride against possible dangers. They followed the luggage by a slow train.

This love of weapons, his revolver, his favourite sword-stick, remained with him all his life. It suggested the adventures that he always bestowed on the heroes of his stories and would himself have loved to experience. He noted in _Twelve Types_ Scott's love of armour and of weapons for their own sakes--the texture, the power, the beauty of a sword-hilt or a jewelled dagger. As a child would play with these things Gilbert played with them, but they stood also in his mind for freedom, adventure, personal responsibility, and much else that the modern world had lost.

The honeymoon was spent on the Norfolk Broads. On the way they stopped at Ipswich "and it was like meeting a friend in a fairy-tale to find myself under the sign of the White Horse on the first day of my honeymoon." Annie Firmin was staying in Warwick Gardens for the wedding and afterwards. Gilbert's first letter, from the Norfolk Broads, began "I have a wife, a piece of string, a pencil and a knife: what more can any man want on a honeymoon."

Asked on his return what wallpapers he would prefer in the house they had chosen, he asked for brown paper so that he could draw pictures everywhere. He had by no means abandoned this old habit, and Annie remembers an illness during which he asked for a long enough pencil to draw on the ceiling. Their quaint little house in Edwardes Square, Kensington, lent to them by Mr. Boore, an old friend of Frances, was close to Warwick Gardens. "I remember the house well," wrote E. C. Bentley later, "with its garden of old trees and its general air of Georgian peace. I remember too the splendid flaming frescoes, done in vivid crayons, of knights and heroes and divinities with which G.K.C. embellished the outside wall at the back, beneath a sheltering portico. I have often wondered whether the landlord charged for them as dilapidations at the end of the tenancy."

They were only in Edwardes Square for a few months and then moved to Overstrand Mansions, Battersea, where the rest of their London life was spent. It was here I came to know them a few years later. As soon as they could afford it they threw drawing-room and dining-room together to make one big room. At one end hung an Engagement board with what Father O'Connor has described as a _"loud_ inscription"-- LEST WE FORGET. Beside the engagements was pinned a poem by Hilaire Belloc:

Frances and Gilbert have a little flat
At eighty pounds a year and cheap at that
Where Frances who is Gilbert's only wife
Leads an unhappy and complaining life:
while Gilbert who is Frances' only man
Puts up with it as gamely as he can.

The Bellocs chose life in the country much earlier than the Chestertons, and an undated letter to Battersea threatens due reprisals in an exclusion from their country home, if the Chestertons are not prepared to receive him in town at a late hour.

Kings Land, Shipley, Horsham

It will annoy you a good deal to hear that I am in town tomorrow
Wednesday evening and that I shall appear at your Apartment at 10.45
or 10.30 at earliest. P.M.! You are only just returned. You are
hardly settled down. It is an intolerable nuisance. You heartily wish
I had not mentioned it.

Well, you see that [arrow pointing to "Telegrams, Coolham,
Sussex"], if you wire there before _One_ you can put me off, but if
you do I shall melt your keys, both the exterior one which forms the
body or form of the matter and the interior one which is the mystical
content thereof.

Also if you put me off I shall not have you down here ever to see
the _Oak Room_, the _Tapestry Room_, the _Green Room_ etc.

Yrs,
H.B.

Early in his Battersea life Gilbert received a note from Max Beerbohm, the great humourist, introducing himself and suggesting a luncheon together.

I am quite different from my writings (and so, I daresay, are you
from yours)--so that we should not necessarily fail to hit it off.

I, in the flesh, am modest, full of commonsense, very genial, and
rather dull.

What you are remains to be seen--or not to be seen--by me, according
to your decision.

Gilbert's decision was for the meeting and an instant liking grew into a warm friendship. As in J.D.C. days Gilbert had written verse about his friends, so now did he try to sum up an impression, perhaps after some special talk:

And Max's queer crystalline sense
Lit, like a sea beneath a sea,
Shines through a shameless impudence
As shameless a humility.
Or Belloc somewhat rudely roared
But all above him when he spoke
The immortal battle trumpets broke
And Europe was a single sword.*

[* Unpublished fragment.]

Somewhere about this time must have occurred the incident mentioned by George Bernard Shaw in a note which appeared in the _Mark Twain Quarterly_ (Spring, 1937):

I cannot remember when I first met Chesterton. I was so much struck by a review of Scott's _Ivanhoe_ which he wrote for the _Daily News_ in the course of his earliest notable job as feuilletonist to that paper that I wrote to him asking who he was and where he came from, as he was evidently a new star in literature. He was either too shy or too lazy to answer. The next thing I remember is his lunching with us on quite intimate terms, accompanied by Belloc.

The actual first meeting, forgotten by Shaw, is remembered by Gilbert's brother-in-law, Lucian Oldershaw. He and Gilbert had gone together to Paris where they visited Rodin, then making a bust of Bernard Shaw. Mr. Oldershaw introduced Gilbert to G.B.S., who, Rodin's secretary told them, had been endeavouring to explain at some length the nature of the Salvation Army, leading up (one imagines) to an account of Major Barbara. At the end of the explanation, Rodin's secretary remarked--to a rather apologetic Shaw--"The Master says you have not much French but you impose yourself."

"Shaw talked Gilbert down," Mr. Oldershaw complained. That the famous man should talk more than the beginner is hardly surprising, but all through Gilbert's life the complaint recurs on the lips of his admirers, just as a similar complaint is made by Lockhart about Sir Walter Scott. Chesterton, like Scott, abounded in cordial admiration of other men and women and had a simple enjoyment in meeting them. And Chesterton was one of the few great conversationalists--perhaps the only one--who would really rather listen than talk.

In 1901 appeared his first book of collected essays, _The Defendant_. The essays in it had already appeared in _The Speaker_. Like all his later work it had the mixed reception of enthusiasts who saw what he meant, and puzzled reviewers who took refuge in that blessed word "paradox." "Paradox ought to be used," said one of these, "like onions to season the salad. Mr. Chesterton's salad is all onions. Paradox has been defined as 'truth standing on her head to attract attention.' Mr. Chesterton makes truth cut her throat to attract attention."

Without denying that his love of a joke led him into indefensible puns and suchlike fooleries (though Mgr. Ronald Knox tells me he is prepared to defend all of G.K.'s puns), I think nearly all his paradoxes were either the startling expression of an entirely neglected truth, or the startling re-emphasis of the neglected side of a truth. Once, he said: "It is a paradox, but it is God, and not I, who should have the credit of it." He proved his case a few years later in the chapter of _Orthodoxy_ called "The Paradoxes of Christianity." What it amounted to was roughly this: paradox must be of the nature of things because of God's infinity and the limitations of the world and of man's mind. To us limited beings God can express His idea only in fragments. We can bring together apparent contradictions in those fragments whereby a greater truth is suggested. If we do this in a sudden or incongruous manner we startle the unprepared and arouse the cry of paradox. But if we will not do it we shall miss a great deal of truth.

Chesterton also saw many proverbs and old sayings as containing a truth which the people who constantly repeated them had forgotten. The world was asleep and must be awakened. The world had gone placidly mad and must be violently restored to sanity. That the methods he used annoyed some is undeniable, but he did force people to think, even if they raged at him as the unaccustomed muscles came into play.

"I believe," he said in a speech at this date, "in getting into hot water. I think it keeps you clean." And he believed intensely in keeping out of a narrow stream of merely literary life. To those who exalted the poet above the journalist he gave this answer:

The poet writing his name upon a score of little pages in the
silence of his study, may or may not have an intellectual right to
despise the journalist: but I greatly doubt whether he would not
morally be the better if he saw the great lights burning on through
darkness into dawn, and heard the roar of the printing wheels
weaving the destinies of another day. Here at least is a school of
labour and of some rough humility, the largest work ever published
anonymously since the great Christian cathedrals.*

[* "A Word for the Mere Journalist." _Darlington North Star:_ February 3, 1902.]

He plunged then into the life of Fleet Street and held it his proudest boast to be a journalist. But he had his own way of being a journalist:

On the whole, I think I owe my success (as the millionaires say) to
having listened respectfully and rather bashfully to the very best
advice, given by all the best journalists who had achieved the best
sort of success in journalism; and then going away and doing the
exact opposite. For what they all told me was that the secret of
success in journalism was to study the particular journal and write
what was suitable to it. And, partly by accident and ignorance and
partly through the real rabid certainties of youth, I cannot remember
that I ever wrote any article that was at all suitable to any
paper. . . . I wrote on a Nonconformist organ like the old _Daily
News_ and told them all about French cafés and Catholic cathedrals;
and they loved it, because they had never heard of them before. I
wrote on a robust Labour organ like the old _Clarion_ and defended
mediaeval theology and all the things their readers had never heard
of; and their readers did not mind me a bit.*

[* _Autobiography_, pp. 185-6.]

Mr. Titterton, who worked also on the _Daily News_ and came at this time to know G.K. in the Pharos Club, says that at first he was rather shy of the other men on the staff but after a dinner at which he was asked to speak he came to know and like them and to be at home in Fleet Street. He liked to work amid human contact and would write his articles in a public-house or in the club or even in the street, resting the paper against a wall.

Frank Swinnerton records* a description given him by Charles Masterman of

how Chesterton used to sit writing his articles in a Fleet St.
café, sampling and mixing a terrible conjunction of drinks, while
many waiters hovered about him, partly in awe, and partly in case he
should leave the restaurant without paying for what he had had. One
day . . . the headwaiter approached Masterman. "Your friend," he
whispered, admiringly, "he very clever man. He sit and laugh. And
then he write. And then he laugh at what he write."

[* _Georgian Scene_, p. 94.]

He loved Fleet Street and did a good deal of drinking there. But not only there. When (in the _Autobiography_) he writes of wine and song it is not Fleet Street and its taverns that come back to his mind but "the moonstruck banquets given by Mr. Maurice Baring," the garden in Westminster where he fenced with real swords against one more intoxicated than himself, songs shouted in Auberon Herbert's rooms near Buckingham Palace.

After marriage Frances seems to have given up the struggle, so ardently pursued during their engagement, to make him tidy. By a stroke of genius she decided instead to make him picturesque. The conventional frock-coat worn so unconventionally, the silk hat crowning a mat of hair, disappeared, and a wide-brimmed slouch hat and flowing cloak more appropriately garbed him. This was especially good as he got fatter. He was a tall man, six foot two. As a boy he had been thin, but now he was rapidly putting on weight. Neither he nor Cecil played games (the tennis did not last!) but they used to go for long walks, sometimes going off together for a couple of days at a time. Gilbert still liked to do this with Frances, but the sedentary Daily life and the consumption of a good deal of beer did not help towards a graceful figure. By 1903 G.K. was called a fat humourist and he was fast getting ready to be Dr. Johnson in various pageants. By 1906--he was then thirty-two--he had become famous enough to be one of the celebrities painted or photographed for exhibitions; and Bernard Shaw described a photo of him by Coburn:

Chesterton is "our Quinbus Flestrin," the young Man Mountain, a
large abounding gigantically cherubic person who is not only large in
body and mind beyond all decency, but seems to be growing larger as
you look at him--"swellin' wisibly," as Tony Weller puts it. Mr.
Coburn has represented him as flowing off the plate in the very act
of being photographed and blurring his own outlines in the process.
Also he has caught the Chestertonian resemblance to Balzac and
unconsciously handled his subject as Rodin handled Balzac. You may
call the placing of the head on the plate wrong, the focussing wrong,
the exposure wrong if you like, but Chesterton is right and a right
impression of Chesterton is what Mr. Coburn was driving at.

The change in his appearance G.K. celebrated in a stanza of his "Ballade of the Grotesque":

I was light as a penny to spend,
I was thin as an arrow to cleave,
I could stand on a fishing-rod's end
With composure, though on the _qui vive_;
But from Time, all a-flying to thieve,
The suns and the moons of the year,
A different shape I receive;
The shape is decidedly queer.

"London," said a recently arrived American, "is the most marvellously fulfilling experience. I went to see Fleet Street this morning, and met G. K. Chesterton face to face. Wrapped in a cloak and standing in the doorway of a pie-shop, he was composing a poem reciting it aloud as he wrote. The most striking thing about the incident was that no one took the slightest notice."

I doubt if any writer, except Dickens, has so quickly become an institution as Chesterton. Nor, of course, would his picturesqueness in Fleet Street or his swift success as a journalist have accomplished this but for the vast output of books on every conceivable subject.

But before I come to the books written during those years at Battersea, a word must be said of another element besides his journalistic contacts that was linking G.K. with a wider world than the solely literary. We have seen that even when his religion was at its lowest point, in the difficult Art School days, he never lost it entirely--"I hung on to religion by one thin thread of thanks." In the years of the Notebook, he advanced very far in his pondering on and acceptance of the great religious truths. But this did not as yet mean attachment to a Church. Then he met Frances. "She actually practised a religion. This was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to the whole fussy culture in which she lived." Now that they were married, Frances, as a convinced Anglo-Catholic, was bringing more clergy and other Anglican friends into Gilbert's circle. Moreover, he was lecturing all over England, and this brought him into contact with all sorts of strange religious beliefs. "Amid all this scattered thinking . . . I began to piece together fragments of the old religious scheme; mainly by the various gaps that denoted its disappearance. And the more I saw of real human nature, the more I came to suspect that it was really rather bad for all these people that it had disappeared."*

[* _Autobiography_, p. 177.]

In 1903-04 he had a tremendous battle (the detail of which will be treated in the next chapter) in the _Clarion_ with Robert Blatchford. In it he adumbrated many of the ideas that were later developed in _Orthodoxy_. Of the arguments used by Blatchford and his atheist friends, G.K. wrote that the effect on his own mind was: "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian." In a diary kept by Frances spasmodically during the years 1904-05, she notes that Gilbert has been asked to preach as the first of a series of lay preachers in a city church. She writes:

_March 16th_. One of the proudest days of my life. Gilbert preached at St. Paul's, Covent Garden for the C.S.U. [Christian Social Union] _Vox populi vox Dei_. A crammed church--he was very eloquent and restrained. Sermons will be published afterwards.

Published they were: under the title, _Preachers from the Pew_.

_March 30th_. The second sermon: "The Citizen, the Gentleman and the Savage." Even better than last week. "Where there is no vision the people perisheth."

When it is remembered that the _Browning_, the _Watts_, _Twelve Types_ and the _Napoleon of Notting Hill_ had all been published and received with acclaim, it is touching that Frances should speak thus of the "proudest day" of her life. That Gilbert should himself have vision and show it to others remained her strongest aspiration. Not thus felt all his admirers. The Blatchford controversy on matters religious became more than many of them could bear.

A plaintive correspondent (says the _Daily News_), who seems to have had enough of the eternal verities and the eternal other things, sends us the following "lines written on reading Mr. G. K. Chesterton's forty-seventh reply to a secularist opponent":

What ails our wondrous "G.K.C."
Who late, on youth's glad wings,
Flew fairylike, and gossip'd free
Of translunary things,

That thus, in dull didactic mood,
He quits the realms of dream,
And like some pulpit-preacher rude,
Drones on one dreary theme?

Stern Blatchford, _thou_ hast dashed the glee
Of our Omniscient Babe;
Thy name alone now murmurs he,
Or that of dark McCabe.

All vain his cloudy fancies swell,
His paradox all vain,
Obsessed by that malignant spell
Of Blatchford on the brain.

H.S.S.*

[* _Daily News_, 12 January, 1904.]

Mr. Noel has a livelier memory of Gilbert's religious and social activities. On one occasion he went to the Battersea flat for a meeting at which he was to speak and Gilbert take the chair, to establish a local branch of the Christian Social Union. The two men got into talk over their wine in the dining-room (then still a separate room) and Frances came in much agitated. "Gilbert you must dress. The people will be arriving any moment.

"Yes, yes, I'll go."

The argument was resumed and went on with animation. Frances came back. "Gilbert, the drawing-room is half full and people are still arriving." At last in despair she brought Gilbert's dress-clothes into the dining-room and made him change there, still arguing. Next he had to be urged into the drawing-room. Established at a small table he began to draw comic bishops, quite oblivious of the fact that he was to take the chair at the now assembled meeting. Finally Frances managed to attract his attention, he leaped up overthrowing the small table and scattering the comic bishops.

"Surely this story," said a friend to whom I told it, "proves what some people said about Chesterton's affectation. He must have been posing."

I do not think so, and those who knew Gilbert best believed him incapable of posing. But he was perfectly capable of wilfulness and of sulking like a schoolboy. It amused him to argue with Mr. Noel, it did not amuse him at all to take the chair at a meeting. So, as he was not allowed to go on arguing, he drew comic bishops.

There was, too, more than a touch of this wilfulness in the second shock he administered to respectable Battersea later in the evening. An earnest young lady asked the company for counsel as to the best way of arranging her solitary maid's evening out. "I'm so afraid," ended the appeal, "of her going to the Red Lion."

"Best place she could go," said Gilbert. And occasionally he would add example to precept, for society and Fleet Street were not the only places for human intercourse. "At present," commented a journalist, "he is cultivating the local politics of Battersea; in secluded ale houses he drinks with the frequenters and learns their opinions on municipal milk and on Mr. John Burns."

"Good friends and very gay companions," Gilbert calls the Christian Social Union group of whom, beside Conrad Noel, were Charles Masterman, Bishop Gore, Percy Dearmer, and above all Canon Scott Holland. Known as "Scotty" and adored by many generations of young men, he was "a man with a natural surge of laughter within him, so that his broad mouth seemed always to be shut down on it in a grimace of restraint."* Like Gilbert, he suffered from the effect of urging his most serious views with apparent flippancy and fantastic illustrations. In the course of a speech to a respectable Nottingham audience he remarked, "I dare say several of you here have never been in prison."

[* _Autobiography_, p. 169.]

"A ghastly stare," says Gilbert, describing this speech, "was fixed on all the faces of the audience; and I have ever since seen it in my own dreams; for it has constituted a considerable part of my own problem."

Gilbert's verses, summarizing the meeting as it must have sounded to a worthy Nottingham tradesman, are quoted in the _Autobiography_ and completed in _Father Brown on Chesterton_. I have put them together here for they show how merrily these men were working to change the world.

The Christian Social Union here
Was very much annoyed;
It seems there is some duty
Which we never should avoid,
And so they sang a lot of hymns
To help the Unemployed.

Upon a platform at the end
The speakers were displayed
And Bishop Hoskins stood in front
And hit a bell and said
That Mr. Carter was to pray,
And Mr. Carter prayed.

Then Bishop Gore of Birmingham
He stood upon one leg
And said he would be happier
If beggars didn't beg,
And that if they pinched his palace
It would take him down a peg.

He said that Unemployment
Was a horror and a blight,
He said that charities produced
Servility and spite,
And stood upon the other leg
And said it wasn't right.

And then a man named Chesterton
Got up and played with water,
He seemed to say that principles
Were nice and led to slaughter
And how we always compromised
And how we didn't orter.

Then Canon Holland fired ahead
Like fifty cannons firing,
We tried to find out what he meant
With infinite enquiring,
But the way he made the windows jump
We couldn't help admiring.

I understood him to remark
(It seemed a little odd.)
That half a dozen of his friends
had never been in quod.
He said he was a Socialist himself,
And so was God.

He said the human soul should be
Ashamed of every sham,
He said a man should constantly
Ejaculate "I am"
When he had done, I went outside
And got into a tram.

Partly perhaps to console himself for the loss of his son's Daily company, chiefly, I imagine, out of sheer pride and joy in his success, Edward Chesterton started after the publication of _The Wild Knight_ pasting all Gilbert's press-cuttings into volumes. Later I learnt that it had long been Gilbert's weekly penance to read these cuttings on Sunday afternoon at his father's house. Traces of his passage are visible wherever a space admits of a caricature, and occasionally, where it does not, the caricature is superimposed on the text.

His growing fame may be seen by the growing size of these volumes and the increased space given to each of his books. _Twelve Types_ in 1902 had a good press for a young man's work and was taken seriously in some important papers, but its success was as nothing compared with that of the _Browning_ a year later. The bulk of _Twelve Types_, as of _The Defendant_, had appeared in periodicals, but never in his life did Gilbert prepare a volume of his essays for the press without improving, changing and unifying. It was never merely a collection, always a book.

Still, the _Browning_ was another matter. It was a compliment for a comparatively new author to be given the commission for the English Men of Letters Series. Stephen Gwynn describes the experience of the publishers:

On my advice the Macmillans had asked him to do Browning in the "English Men of Letters," when he was still not quite arrived. Old Mr. Craik, the Senior Partner, sent for me and I found him in white fury, with Chesterton's proofs corrected in pencil; or rather not corrected; there were still thirteen errors uncorrected on one page; mostly in quotations from Browning. A selection from a Scotch ballad had been quoted from memory and three of the four lines were wrong, I wrote to Chesterton saying that the firm thought the book was going to "disgrace" them. His reply was like the trumpeting of a crushed elephant. But the book was a huge success.*

[* Quoted in _Chesterton_, by Cyril Clemens, p. 14.]

In fact, it created a sensation and established G.K. in the front rank. Not all the reviewers liked it, and one angry writer in the _Athenaeum_ pointed out that, not content with innumerable inaccuracies about Browning's descent and the events of his life, G.K. had even invented a line in "Mr. Sludge the Medium." But every important paper had not only a review but a long review, and the vast majority were enthusiastic. Chesterton claimed Browning as a poet not for experts but for every man. His treatment of the Browning love affair, of the poet's obscurity, of "The Ring and the Book," all receive this same praise of an originality which casts a true and revealing light for his readers. As with all his literary criticism, the most famous critics admitted that he had opened fresh windows on the subject for themselves.

This attack on his inaccuracy and admiration for his insight constantly recurs with Chesterton's literary work. Readers noted that in the _Ballad of the White Horse_ he made Alfred's left wing face Guthrum's left wing. He was amused when it was pointed out, but never bothered to alter it. His memory was prodigious. All his friends testify to his knowing by heart pages of his favourite authors (and these were not few). Ten years after his time with Fisher Unwin, Frances told Father O'Connor that he remembered all the plots and most of the characters of the "thousands" of novels he had read for the firm. But he trusted his memory too much and never verified. Indeed, when it was a question merely of verbal quotation he said it was pedantic to bother, and when latterly Dorothy Collins looked up his references he barely tolerated it.

Again while he constantly declared that he was no scholar, he said things illuminating even to scholars. Thus, much later, when Chesterton's _St. Thomas Aquinas_ appeared, the Master-General of the Dominican Order, Père Gillet, O.P., lectured on and from it to large meetings of Dominicans. Mr. Eccles told me that talking of Virgil, G.K. said things immensely illuminating for experts on Latin poetry. In a very different field, Mr. Oldershaw noted after their trip to Paris that though he could set Gilbert right on many a detail yet his generalisations were marvellous. He had, said Mr. Eccles, an intuitive mind. He had, too, read more than was realised, partly because his carelessness and contempt for scholarship misled. Where the pedant would have referred and quoted and cross-referred, he went dashing on, throwing out ideas from his abundance and caring little if among his wealth were a few faults of fact or interpretation. "Abundance" was a word much used of his work just now, and in the field of literary criticism he was placed high, and had an enthusiastic following. We may assume that the _Browning_ had something to do with Sir Oliver Lodge's asking him in the next year (1904) to become a candidate for the Chair of Literature at Birmingham University. But he had no desire to be a professor.

Frances, in her diary, notes some of their widening contacts and engagements. The mixture of shrewdness and simplicity in her comments will be familiar to those who knew her intimately. Meeting her for the first time I think the main impression was that of the "single eye." She abounded in Gilbert's sense, as my mother commented after an early meeting, and ministered to his genius. Yet she never lost an individual, markedly feminine point of view, which helped him greatly, as anyone can see who will read all he wrote on marriage. He shows an insight almost uncanny in the section called, "The Mistake About Women" in _What's Wrong with the World_. "Some people," he said in a speech of 1905, "when married gain each other. Some only lose themselves." The Chestertons gained each other. And by the sort of paradox he loved, Frances did so by throwing the stream of her own life unreservedly into the greater river of her husband's. She writes in her Diary, for 1904:

Gilbert and I meet all sorts of queer, well-known, attractive,
unattractive people and I expect this book will be mostly about
them. . . .

Feb. 17th. We went together to Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Colvin's "At
home." It was rather jolly but too many clever people there to be
really nice. The clever people were Mr. Joseph Conrad, Mr. Henry
James, Mr. Laurence Binyon, Mr. Maurice Hewlett, and a great many
more. Mr. and Mrs. Colvin looked so happy.

Feb. 23rd. Gilbert went as Mr. Lane's guest to a dinner of the "Odd
Volumes" at the Imperial Restaurant. The other guest was Baden
Powell. He and Gilbert made speeches. . . .

March 8th. Gilbert was to speak on "Education" at a C.S.U. meeting
at Sion College, but a debate on the Chinese Labour in South Africa
was introduced instead and went excitingly. There is to be a big
meeting of the C.S.U. to protest. Though I suppose it's all no good
now. When the meeting was over we adjourned to a tea-shop and had
immense fun. Gilbert, Percy Dearmer and Conrad Noel walked together
down Fleet Street, and never was there a funnier sight. Gilbert's
costume consisted of a frock coat, huge felt hat and walking stick
brandished in the face of the passers-by, to their exceeding great
danger. Conrad was dressed in an old lounge suit of sober grey with a
clerical hat jauntily stuck on the back of his head (which led
someone to remark, "Are you here in the capacity of a private
gentleman, poor curate, or low-class actor?"). Mr. Dearmer was clad
in wonderful clerical garments of which he alone possesses the
pattern, which made him look like a Chaucer Canterbury Pilgrim or a
figure out of a Noah's ark. They swaggered down the roadway talking
energetically. At tea we talked of many things, the future of the
"Commonwealth" chiefly . . .

March 22nd. Meeting of Christian Theosophical Society at which
Gilbert lectured on "How Theosophy appears to a Christian." He was
very good. Herbert Burrows vigorously attacked him in debate
afterwards . . . _Napoleon of Notting Hill_ was published.

April 27th. The Bellocs and the Noels came here to dinner. Hilaire
in great form recited his own poetry with great enthusiasm the whole
evening . . .

May 9th. the Literary Fund Dinner. About the greatest treat I ever
had in my life. J. M. Barrie presided. He was so splendid and so
complimentary. Mrs. J. M. Barrie is very pretty, but the most
beautiful woman there was Mrs. Anthony Hope--copper coloured hair,
masses, with a wreath of gardenias--green eyes--and a long neck, very
beautiful figure. The speakers were Barrie, Lord Tennyson, Comyns
Carr, A. E. W. Mason, Mrs. Craigie (who acquitted herself
wonderfully) and Mrs. Flora Annie Steel. After the formal dinner was
a reception at which everyone was very friendly. It is wonderful the
way in which they all accept Gilbert, and one well-known man told me
he was the biggest man present. Anyhow there was the feeling of
brotherhood and fellowship in the wielding of "the lovely and
loathely pen" (J. M. Barrie's speech).

May 12th. Went to see Max Beerbohm's caricature of Gilbert at the
Carfax Gallery. "G.K.C.--humanist--kissing the World." It's more like
Thackeray, very funny though.

June 9th. A political "at home" at Mrs. Sidney Webb's--saw Winston
Churchill and Lloyd George. Politics and nothing but politics is dull
work though, and an intriguer's life must be a pretty poor affair.
Mrs. Sidney Webb looked very handsome and moved among her guests as
one to the manner born. I like Mrs. Leonard Courtenay who is always
kind to me. Charlie Masterman and I had a long talk on the iniquities
of the "Daily News" and goodness knows they are serious enough.

June 22nd. An "at home" at Mrs. ----'s proved rather a dull affair
save for a nice little conversation with Watts Dunton. His walrusy
appearance which makes the bottom of his face look fierce, is
counteracted by the kindness of his little eyes. He told us the inner
story of Whistler's "Peacock Room" which scarcely redounds to
Whistler's credit. The Duchess of Sutherland was there and many
notabilities. Between ourselves Mr. ---- is a good-hearted snob. His
wife nice, intelligent, but affected (I suppose unconsciously). I
don't really like the "precious people." They worry me.

June 30th. Graham Robertson's "at home" was exceedingly select. I
felt rather too uncultivated to talk much. Mr. Lane tucked his arm
into mine and requested to know the news which means, "tell me all
your husband is doing, or going to do, how much is he getting, who
will publish for him, has he sold his American rights, etc." Cobden's
three daughters looked out of place, so solid and sincere are they.
It was all too grand. No man ought to have so much wealth.

July 5th. Gilbert went today to see Swinburne--I think he found it
rather hard to reconcile the idea with the man, but he was
interested, though I could not gather much about the visit. He was
amused at the compliments which Watts Dunton and Swinburne pay to
each other unceasingly.

December 8th. George Alexander has an idea that he wants Gilbert to
write a play for him, and sent for him to come and see him. He was
apparently taken with the notion of a play on the Crusades, and
although there is at present no love incident in Gilbert's mind,
Alexander introduced and acted the supposed love scene with great
spirit. It may come off some day perhaps.

December 31st. H. Belloc's been very ill but is better, thank God.

1905

Feb. 1st. Gilbert, a guest at the "Eighty Club" dinner. Rhoda and I
went to after dinner speeches. G. W. E. Russell (Chair). Augustine
Birrell guest and Sir Henry Fowler. It amused me hugely. Russell so
imprudent and reckless, Birrell so prudent and incapable of giving
himself away, Sir Henry Fowler so commonplace and trite. He looked so
wicked. I thought of Mr. Haldane's story of Fowler's fur coat and his
single remark on examining it: "skunk."

Feb. 11th. Rather an interesting lunch at Mrs. J. R. Green's. Jack
Yeats and Mrs. Thursby were there. The atmosphere is too political
and I imagine Mrs. Green to be a bit of a wire-puller, though I
believe a nice woman.

Feb. 24th. Mr. Halliwell Sutcliffe came over. He is amusing and
nice. Very puzzled at Gilbert's conduct, which on this particular
occasion was peculiarly eccentric.

March 9th. I had an amusing lunch at the Hotel Cecil with Miss
Bisland (representative of McClure). Evidently thinks a lot of
Gilbert and wants his work for McClure. O ye gods and little fishes!
The diplomatic service ought to be all conducted by women. I offered
her Margaret's poems in exchange for a short interview with Meredith
which she wishes Gilbert to undertake.

March 14th. Gilbert dined at the Buxtons, met Asquith.

March 19th. Lienie is in town and we have been with her to call on
the Duchess of Sutherland. When I had got used to the splendour it
was jolly enough. Her Grace is a pretty, sweet woman who was very
nervous, but got better under the fire of Gilbert's chaff. She made
him write in her album which he did, a most ridiculous poem of which
he should be ashamed. It must be truly awful to live in the sort of
way the Duchess does and endeavour to keep sane.

May 20th. Words fail me when I try to recall the sensation aroused
by a J.D.C. dinner. It seems so odd to think of these men as boys, to
realize what their school life was and what a powerful element the
J.D.C. was in the lives of all. And there were husbands and wives,
and the tie so strong, and the long, long thoughts of schoolboys and
schoolgirls fell on us, as if the battle were still to come instead
of raging round us.

May 24th. We went together to see George Meredith. I suppose many
people have seen him in his little Surrey Cottage; Flint Cottage,
Boxhill. He has a wonderful face and a frail old body. He talks
without stopping except to drink ginger-beer. He told us many
stories, mostly about society scandals of some time back. I remember
he asked Gilbert, "Do you like babies?" and when Gilbert said, "Yes,"
he said "So do I, especially in the comet stage."

June 5th. Granville Barker came to see Gilbert, touching the
possibility of a play.

June 29th. A garden party at the Bishop's House, Kennington. The
Bishop told me that A. J. Balfour was very impressed with "Heretics."
Guild of St. Matthew Service and rowdy supper. Gilbert made an
excellent speech.

July 5th. Gilbert dined at the Asquiths; met Rosebery. I think he
hated it.

July 16th. Gilbert went to see Mrs. Grenfell at Taplow. He met
Balfour, Austen Chamberlain and George Wyndham. Had an amusing time,
no doubt. Says Balfour is most interesting to talk to but appears
bored. George Wyndham is delightful.

One felt always with both Frances and Gilbert that this society life stayed on the surface--amusing, distracting, sometimes welcome, sometimes boring--but never infringing the deeper reality of their relationships with old friends, with their own families, with each other. Frances wrote endless business and other letters for them both: in just a handful, mainly to Father O'Connor, does she show her deeper life of thought and feeling. Gilbert had little time now for writing anything but books and articles. Never a very good correspondent he had become an exceedingly bad one. Annie Firmin's engagement to Robert Kidd produced one of the few letters that exist. It is handwritten and undated.

A Restaurant somewhere.

MY DEAR ANNIE,

I have thought of you, I am quite certain, more often than I have
of any human being for a long time past--except my wife who recalls
herself continually to me by virtues, splendours, agreeable memories,
screams, pokers, brickbats and other things. And yet, though whenever
my mind was for an instant emptied of theology and journalism and
patriotism and such rot, it has been immediately filled with you, I
have never written you a line.

I am not going to explain this and for a good reason. It is a part
of the Mystery of the Male, and you will soon, even if you do not
already, get the hang of it, by the society of an individual who
while being unmistakably a much better man than I am, is nevertheless
male. I can only say that when men want a thing they act quite
differently to women. We put off everything we want to do, in the
ordinary way. If the Archangel Michael wrote me a complimentary
letter tomorrow (as perhaps he may) I should put it in my pocket,
saying, "How admirable a reply shall I write to that in a week or a
month or so." I put off writing to you because I wanted to write
something that had in it all that you have been, to me, to all of us.
And now instead I am scrawling this nonsense in a tavern after lunch.

My very dear old friend, I am of a sex that very seldom takes real
trouble, that forgets the little necessities of time, that is by
nature lazy. I never wanted really but one thing in my life and that
I got. Any person inspecting 60 Overstrand Mansions may see that
somewhat excitable thing--free of charge. In another person, whom
with maddening jealousy I suspect of being some inches taller than I
am, I believe I notice the same tendency towards monomania. He also,
being as I have so keenly pointed out, male, he also--I think has
only wanted one thing seriously in his life. He also has got it:
another male weakness which I recognize with sympathy.

All my reviewers call me frivolous. Do you think all this kind of
thing frivolous? Damn it all (excuse me) what can one be but
frivolous about serious things? Without frivolity they are simply too
tremendous. That you, who, with your hair down your back, played at
bricks with me in a house of which I have no memory except you and
the bricks, that you should be taken by someone of my miserable
sex--as you ought to be--what is one to say? I am not going to wish
you happiness, because I am quite placidly certain that your
happiness is inevitable. I know it because my wife is happy with me
and the wild, weird, extravagant, singular origin of this is a
certain enduring fact in my psychology which you will find paralleled
elsewhere.

God bless you, my dear girl.

Yours ever,
GILBERT CHESTERTON.

Married in 1903, Annie and her husband took another flat in Overstrand Mansions.

"Gilbert never cared what he wore," she writes. "I remember one night when my husband and I were living in the same block of flats he came in to ask me to go and sit with Frances who wasn't very well, while he went down to the House to dine with Hugh Law--Gilbert was very correctly dressed except for the fact that he had on one boot and one slipper! I pointed it out to him, and he said: 'Do you think it matters?' I told him I was sure Frances would not like him to go out like that--the only argument to affect him! When he was staying with me here in Vancouver, Dorothy Collins had to give him the once-over before he went lecturing--they had left Frances in Palos Verdes as she wasn't well."

In 1904, were published a monograph on Watts, _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_, and an important chapter in a composite book, _England a Nation_.

The _Watts_ is among the results of Gilbert's art studies. Its reviewers admired it somewhat in the degree of their admiration for the painter. But for a young man at that date to have seen the principles of art he lays down meant rare vision. The portrait-painter, he says, is trying to express the reality of the man himself but "he is not above taking hints from the book of life with its quaint old woodcuts." G.K. makes us see all the painter could have thought or imagined as he sets us before "Mammon" or "Jonah" or "Hope" and bids us read their legend and note the texture and lines of the painting. His distinction between the Irish mysticism of Yeats and the English mysticism of Watts is especially valuable, and the book, perhaps even more than the _Browning_ or the _Dickens_, manifests Gilbert's insight into the mind of the last generation. The depths and limitations of the Victorian outlook may be read in _G. F. Watts_.

The story of the writing of _The Napoleon_ was told me in part by Frances, while part appeared in an interview* given by Gilbert, in which he called it his first important book:

[* Quoted in _Chesterton_, by Cyril Clemens, pp. 16-17.]

I was "broke"--only ten shillings in my pocket. Leaving my worried
wife, I went down Fleet Street, got a shave, and then ordered for
myself, at the Cheshire Cheese, an enormous luncheon of my favourite
dishes and a bottle of wine. It took my all, but I could then go to
my publishers fortified. I told them I wanted to write a book and
outlined the story of "Napoleon of Notting Hill." But I must have
twenty pounds, I said, before I begin.

"We will send it to you on Monday."

"If you want the book," I replied, "you will have to give it to me
today as I am disappearing to write it." They gave it.

Frances meanwhile sat at home thinking, as she told me, hard thoughts of his disappearance with their only remaining coin. And then dramatically he appeared with twenty golden sovereigns and poured them into her lap. Referring to this incident later, Gilbert said, "What a fool a man is, when he comes to the last ditch, not to spend the last farthing to satisfy the inner man before he goes out to fight a battle with wits." But it was his way to let the money shortage become acute and then deal with it abruptly. Frank Swinnerton relates that when, as a small boy, he was working for J. M. Dent, Gilbert appeared after office hours with a Dickens preface but refused to leave it because Swinnerton, the only soul left in the place, could not give him the agreed remuneration.

The _Napoleon_ is the story of a war between the London suburbs, and grew largely from his meditations on the Boer War. Besides being the best of his fantastic stories, it contains the most picturesque account of Chesterton's social philosophy that he ever gave. But it certainly puzzled some of the critics. One American reviewer feels that he might have understood the book if he "had an intimate knowledge of the history of the various boroughs of London and of their present-day characteristics." Others treat the story as a mere joke, and many feel that it is a bad descent after the _Browning_. "Too infernally clever for anything," says one.

Auberon Quin, King of England, chosen by lot (as are all kings and all other officials by the date of this story, which is a romance of the future), is one of the two heroes of this book. He is simply a sense of humour incarnate. His little elfish face and figure was recognised by old Paulines as suggested by a form master of their youth; but by the entire reviewing world as Max Beerbohm. The illustrations by Graham Robertson were held to be unmistakably Max. Frances notes in her diary:

A delightful dinner party at the Lanes. . . . The talk was mostly
about _Napoleon_. Max took me in to dinner and was really nice. He is
a good fellow. His costume was extraordinary. Why should an evening
waistcoat have four large white pearl buttons and why should he look
that peculiar shape? He seems only pleased at the way he has been
identified with King Auberon. "All right, my dear chap," he said to
G., who was trying to apologize. "Mr. Lane and I settled it all at a
lunch." I think he was a little put out at finding no red carpet put
down for his royal feet and we had quite a discussion as to whether
he ought to precede me into the dining room. Graham Robertson was on
my left. He was jolly too, kept on producing wonderful rings and
stones out of his pockets. He said he wished he could go about
covered in the pieces of a chandelier. The other guests were lady
Seton, Mrs. W. K. Clifford, Mr. W. W. Howells and his daughter (too
Burne-Jonesy to be really attractive), Mr. Taylor (police
magistrate), and Mrs. Eichholz (Mrs. Lane's mother) who is more
beautiful than anything except a wee baby. In fact, she looks exactly
like one, so dainty and small. She can never at any time have been as
pretty as she is now.

Gilbert and Max and I drove to his house (Max's), where he basely
enticed us in. He gave me fearful preserved fruits which ruined my
dress--but he made himself very entertaining. Home 1.30.

Caring for nothing in the world but a joke, King Auberon decrees that the dull and respectable London boroughs shall be given city guards in resplendent armour, each borough to have its own coat of arms, its city walls, tocsin, and the like. The idea is taken seriously by the second hero, Adam Wayne of Notting Hill, an enthusiast utterly lacking any sense of humour, who goes to war with the other boroughs of London to protect a small street which they have designed to pull down in the interests of commercial development. Pimlico, Kensington and the rest attack Notting Hill. Men bleed and die in the contest and by the magic of the sword the old ideas of local patriotism and beauty in civic life return to England. The conventional politician, Barker, who begins the story in a frock-coat and irreproachable silk hat, ends it clad in purple and gold.

When Notting Hill, become imperial minded, goes down to destruction in a sea of blood, Auberon Quin confesses to Wayne that this whole story, so full of human tragedy and hopes and fears, had been merely the outcome of a joke. To him all life was a joke, to Wayne an epic; and this antagonism between the humorist and the fanatic has created the whole wild story. Wayne has the last word:

"I know of something that will alter that antagonism, something
that is outside us, something that you and I have all our lives
perhaps taken too little account of. The equal and eternal human
being will alter that antagonism, for the human being sees no real
antagonism between laughter and respect, the human being, the common
man, whom mere geniuses like you and me can only worship like a god.
When dark and dreary days come, you and I are necessary, the pure
fanatic, the pure satirist. We have between us remedied a great
wrong. We have lifted the modern cities into that poetry which every
one who knows mankind knows to be immeasurably more common than the
commonplace. But in healthy people there is no war between us. We are
but the two lobes of the brain of a ploughman. Laughter and love are
everywhere. The cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are
full of blasphemous grotesques. The mother laughs continually at the
child, the lover laughs continually at the lover, the wife at the
husband, the friend at the friend. Auberon Quin, we have been too
long separated; let us go out together. You have a halberd and I a
sword, let us start our wanderings over the world. For we are its two
essentials. Come, it is already day."