Chapter XI: Married Life in London (2)

In the blank white light Auberon hesitated a moment. Then he made
the formal salute with his halberd, and they went away together into
the unknown world.

This is very important to the understanding of Chesterton. With him, profound gravity and exuberant fooling were always intermingled and some of his deepest thoughts are conveyed by a pun. He always claimed to be intensely serious while hating to be solemn and it was a mixture apt to be misunderstood. If gravity and humour are the two lobes of the average man's brain, the average man does not bring them into play simultaneously to anything like the extent that Chesterton did.

Auberon Quin and Adam Wayne are the most living individuals in any of his novels--just because they are the two lobes of his brain individualised. All his stories abound in adventure, are admirable in their vivid descriptions of London or the countryside of France or England seen in fantastic visions. They are living in the portrayal of ideas by the road of argument. But the characters are chiefly energies through whose lips Gilbert argues with Gilbert until some conclusion shall be reached.

In 1905 came _The Club of Queer Trades_--least good of the fantasia--and even admirers have begun to wonder if too many fields are being tried; in 1906, _Dickens_ and _Heretics_.

It will remain a moot point whether the _Browning_ or the _Dickens_ is Chesterton's best work of literary criticism. The _Dickens_ is the more popular, largely because Dickens is the more popular author. Most Dickens idolators read anything about their idol if only for the pleasure of the quotations. And no Dickens idolator could fail to realise that here was one even more rapt in worship than himself. After the publication of _Charles Dickens_, Chesterton undertook a series of prefaces to the novels. In one of them he took the trouble to answer one only of the criticisms the book had produced: the comment that he was reading into the work of Dickens something that Dickens did not mean.

Criticism does not exist to say about authors the things that they
knew themselves. It exists to say the things about them which they
did not know themselves. If a critic says that the _Iliad_ has a
pagan rather than a Christian pity, or that it is full of pictures
made by one epithet, of course he does not mean that Homer could have
said that. If Homer could have said that the critic would leave Homer
to say it. The function of criticism, if it has a legitimate function
at all, can only be one function--that of dealing with the
subconscious part of the author's mind which only the critic can
express, and not with the conscious part of the author's mind, which
the author himself can express. Either criticism is no good at all (a
very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an
author the very things that would have made him jump out of his
boots.*

[* Introduction to "Old Curiosity Shop." Reprinted in _Criticisms and Appreciations of the Works of Charles Dickens_, 1933 ed. pp. 51-2.]

He attended not at all to the crop of comments on his inaccuracies. One reviewer pointed out that Chesterton had said that every postcard Dickens wrote was a work of art; but Dickens died on June 9th, 1870 and the first British postcard was issued on October 1st, 1870. "A wonderful instance of Dickens's never-varying propensity to keep ahead of his age." After all, what did such things matter? Bernard Shaw, however, felt that they did. He wrote a letter from which I think Gilbert got an important hint, utilized later in his introduction to _David Copperfield:_

6th September, 1906.

DEAR G.K.C.

As I am a supersaturated Dickensite, I pounced on your book and
read it, as Wegg read Gibbon and other authors, right slap through.

In view of a second edition, let me hastily note for you one or two
matters. First and chiefly, a fantastic and colossal howler in the
best manner of Mrs. Nickleby and Flora Finching.

There is an association in your mind (well founded) between the
quarrel over Dickens's determination to explain his matrimonial
difficulty to the public, and the firm of Bradbury and Evans. There
is also an association (equally well founded) between B. & E. and
Punch. They were the publishers of Punch. But to gravely tell the XX
century that Dickens wanted to publish his explanation in Punch is
gas and gaiters carried to an incredible pitch of absurdity. The
facts are: B. & E. were the publishers of Household Words. They
objected to Dickens explaining in H.W. He insisted. They said that in
that case they must take H.W. out of his hands. Dickens, like a lion
threatened with ostracism by a louse in his tail, published his
explanation, which stands to this day, and informed his readers that
they were to ask in future, not for Household Words, but for All the
Year Round. Household Words, left Dickensless, gasped for a few weeks
and died. All the Year Round, in exactly the same format, flourished
and entered largely into the diet of my youth.

* * * * *

There is a curious contrast between Dickens's sentimental
indiscretions concerning his marriage and his sorrows and quarrels,
and his impenetrable reserve about himself as displayed in his
published correspondence. He writes to his family about waiters,
about hotels, about screeching tumblers of hot brandy and water, and
about the seasick man in the next berth, but never one really
intimate word, never a real confession of his soul. David Copperfield
is a failure as an autobiography because when he comes to deal with
the grown-up David, you find that he has not the slightest intention
of telling you the truth--or indeed anything--about himself. Even the
child David is more remarkable for the reserves than for the
revelations: he falls back on fiction at every turn. Clennam and Pip
are the real autobiographies.

I find that Dickens is at his greatest after the social awakening
which produced _Hard Times_. Little Dorrit is an enormous work. The
change is partly the disillusion produced by the unveiling of
capitalist civilization, but partly also Dickens's discovery of the
gulf between himself as a man of genius and the public. That he did
not realize this early is shown by the fact that he found out his
wife _before he married her_ as much too small for the job, and yet
plumbed the difference so inadequately that he married her thinking
he could go through with it. When the situation became intolerable,
he must have faced the fact that there was something more than
"incompatibilities" between him and the average man and woman. Little
Dorrit is written, like all the later books, frankly and somewhat
sadly, _de haut en bas_. In them Dickens recognizes that quite
everyday men are as grotesque as Bunsby. Sparkler, one of the most
extravagant of all his gargoyles, is an untouched photograph almost.
Wegg and Riderhood are sinister and terrifying because they are
simply real, which Squeers and Sikes are not. And please remark that
whilst Squeers and Sikes have their speeches written with anxious
verisimilitude (comparatively) Wegg says, "Man shrouds and grapple,
Mr. Venus, or she dies," and Riderhood describes Lightwood's sherry
(when retracting his confession) as, "I will not say a hocussed wine,
but a wine as was far from 'elthy for the mind." Dickens doesn't care
what he makes Wegg or Riderhood or Sparkler or Mr. F's aunt say,
because he knows them and has got them, and knows what matters and
what doesn't. Fledgeby, Lammle, Jerry Cruncher, Trabbs's boy, Wopsle,
etc. etc. are human beings as seen by a master. Swiveller and
Mantalini are human beings as seen by Trabbs's boy. Sometimes
Trabbs's boy has the happier touch. When I am told that young John
Chivery (whose epitaphs you ignore whilst quoting Mrs. Sapsea's)
would have gone barefoot through the prison against rules for little
Dorrit had it been paved with red hot ploughshares, I am not so
affected by his chivalry as by Swiveller's exclamation when he gets
the legacy--"For she (the Marchioness) shall walk in silk attire and
siller hae to spare." Edwin Drood is no good, in spite of the stone
throwing boy, Buzzard and Honeythunder. Dickens was a dead man before
he began it. Collins corrupted him with plots. And oh! the
Philistinism; the utter detachment from the great human heritage of
art and philosophy! Why not a sermon on that?

G.B.S.

Note in the Introduction to _David Copperfield_ what G.K. says as to the break between the two halves of the book. He calls it an instance of weariness in Dickens--a solitary instance. Is not Shaw's explanation at once fascinating and probable?

Kate Perugini, the daughter of Dickens, wrote two letters of immense enthusiasm about the book saying it was the best thing written about her father since Forster's biography. But she shatters the theory put forth by Chesterton that Dickens thrown into intimacy with a large family of girls fell in love with them all and happened unluckily to marry the wrong sister. At the time of the marriage her mother, the eldest of the sisters, was only eighteen, Mary between fourteen and fifteen "very young and childish in appearance," Georgina eight and Helen three! Nothing could better illustrate the clash between enthusiasm and despair that fills a Chestertonian while reading any of his literary biographies. For so much is built on this theory which the slightest investigation would have shown to be baseless.

_Heretics_ aroused animosity in many minds. Dealing with Browning or Dickens a man may encounter literary prejudices or enthusiasms, but there is not the intensity of feeling that he finds when he gets into the field with his own contemporaries. Reviewers who had been extending a friendly welcome to a beginner found that beginner attacking landmarks in the world of letters, venturing to detest Ibsen and to ask William Archer whether he hung up his stocking on Ibsen's birthday, accusing Kipling of lack of patriotism. It is, said one angrily, "unbecoming to spend most of his time criticising his contemporaries." "His sense of mental perspective is an extremely deficient one." "The manufacture of paradoxes is really one of the simplest processes conceivable." "Mr. Chesterton's sententious wisdom."

In fact it was like the scene in _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_ when most people present were purple with anger but an intellectual few were purple with laughter. And even now most of the reviewers seemed not to understand where G.K. stood or what was his philosophy. "Bernard Shaw," says one, "whom _as a disciple_* he naturally exalts." This, after a series of books in which G.K. had exposed, with perfect lucidity and a wealth of examples, a view of life differing from Shaw's in almost every particular. One reviewer clearly discerned the influence of Shaw in _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_, "but without a trace of Shaw's wonderful humour and perspicacity."

[* Italics mine.]

Belloc's approval was hearty. He wrote:

I am delighted with what I have read in the _Daily Mail_. Hit them
again. Hurt them. Continue to binge and accept my blessing. Give them
hell. It is the only book of yours I have read right through. Which
shows that I don't read anything. Which is true enough. This letter
is written in the style of Herbert Paul. Continue to bang them about.

You did wrong not to come to the South coast. Margate is a fraud.
What looks like sea in front of it is really a bank with hardly any
water over it. I stuck on it once in the year 1904 so I know all
about it. Moreover the harbour at Margate is not a real harbour.
Ramsgate round the corner has a real harbour on the true sea. In both
towns are citizens not averse to bribes. Do not fail to go out in a
boat on the last of the ebb as far as the Long Nose. There you will
see the astonishing phenomenon of the tide racing down the North
Foreland three hours before it has turned in the estuary of the
Thames, which you at Margate foolishly believe to be the sea. Item no
one in Margate can cook.

Gilbert was not really concerned in this book to bang his contemporaries about so much as to study their mistakes and so discover what was wrong with modern thought. Shaw, George Moore, Ibsen, Wells, The Mildness of the Yellow Press, Omar and the Sacred Vine, Rudyard Kipling, Smart novelists and the Smart Set, Joseph McCabe and a Divine Frivolity--the collection was a heterogeneous one. And in the introduction the author tells us he is not concerned with any of these men as a brilliant artist or a vivid personality, but "as a Heretic--that is to say a man whose view of things has the hardihood to differ from mine . . . as a man whose philosophy is quite solid, quite coherent and quite wrong. I revert to the doctrinal methods of the thirteenth century, inspired by the general hope of getting something done."

In _England a Nation_ and even more in the study of Kipling in this book there is one touch of inconsistency which we shall meet with again in his later work. He hated Imperialism yet he glorified Napoleon; himself ardently patriotic he accused Kipling of lack of patriotism on the ground that a man could not at once love England and love the Empire. For there was a curious note in the anti-Imperialism of the Chesterbelloc that has not always been recognised. The ordinary anti-Imperialist holds that England has no right to govern an Empire and that her leadership is bad for the other dominions. But the Chesterbelloc view was that the Dominions were inferior and unworthy of a European England. The phrase "suburbs of England" (quoted in a later chapter) was typical. But Kipling was thrilled by those suburbs and Chesterton, who had as a boy admired Kipling, attacks him in _Heretics_ for lack of patriotism. _Puck of Pook's Hill_ was not yet written, but like Kipling's poem on Sussex it expressed a patriotism much akin to Gilbert's own. Remember the man who returned from the South African veldt to be the Squire's gardener--"Me that have done what I've done, Me that have seen what I've seen"--that man, with eyes opened to a sense of his own tragedy, was speaking for Chesterton's people of England who "have not spoken yet." Yes, they have spoken through the mouth of English genius: as Langland's Piers Plowman, as Dickens's Sam Weller, but not least as Kipling's Tommy Atkins. It was a pity Chesterton was deaf to this last voice. With a better understanding of Kipling he might in turn have made Kipling understand what was needed to make England "Merrie England" once again, have given him the philosophy that should make his genius fruitful.

For the huge distinction between Chesterton and most of his contemporaries lay not in the wish to get something done but in the conviction that the right philosophy alone could produce fruitful action. A parable in the Introduction shows the point at which his thinking had arrived.

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good." At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, today, tomorrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was Right after all, that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.*

[* _Heretics_, pp. 22-3.]

Every year during this time at Battersea, the press books reveal an increasing flood of engagements. Gilbert lectures for the New Reform Club on "political watchwords," for the Midland Institute on "Modern Journalism," for the Men's Meeting of the South London Central Mission on "Brass Bands," for the London Association of Correctors of the Press at the Trocadero, for the C.S.U. at Church Kirk, Accrington, at the Men's Service in the Colchester Moot Hall. He debates at the St. German's Literary Society, maintaining "that the most justifiable wars are the religious wars"; opens the Anti-Puritan League at the Shaftesbury Club, speaks for the Richmond and Kew branch of the P.N.E.U. on "The Romantic Element in Morality," for the Ilkley P.S.A., on "Christianity and Materialism," and so on without end. All these are on a few pages of his father's collection, interspersed with clippings recording articles in reviews innumerable, introductions to books, interviews and controversies.

There was almost no element of choice in these engagements. G.K. was intensely good-natured and hated saying No. He was the lion of the moment and they all wanted him to roar for them. In spite of the large heading, "Lest we forget," that met his eye daily in the drawing-room, he did forget a great deal--in fact, friends say he forgot any engagement made when Frances was not present to write it down directly it was made. She had to do memory and all the practical side of life for him. There might have been one slight chance of making Gilbert responsible in these matters--that chance was given to his parents and by them thrown away. How far it is even possible to groom and train a genius is doubtful: anyhow no attempt was made. Waited on hand and foot by his mother, never made to wash or brush himself as a child, personally conducted to the tailor as he grew older, given by his parents no money for which to feel responsible, not made to keep hours--how could Frances take a man of twenty-seven, and make him over again?

But there is, of course, a most genuine difficulty in all this, which Gilbert once touched on when he denied the accusation of absence of mind. It was, he claimed, presence of mind--on his thoughts--that made him unaware of much else. And indeed no man can be using his mind furiously in every direction at once. Anyone who has done even a little creative work, anyone even who has lived with people who do creative work, knows the sense of bewilderment with which the mind comes out of the world of remoter but greater reality and tries to adjust with that daily world in which meals are to be ordered, letters answered, and engagements kept. What must this pain of adjustment not have been to a mind almost continuously creative? For I have never known anyone work such long hours with a mind at such tension as Gilbert's.

There was no particular reason why he should have written his article for the _Daily News_ as the reporter writes his--at top speed at a late hour--but he usually did. The writing of it was left till the last minute and, if at home, he would need Frances to get it off for him before the deadline was reached. But he often wrote by preference in Fleet Street--at the Cheshire Cheese or some little pub where journalists gathered--and then he would hire a cab to take the article a hundred yards or so to the _Daily News_ office.

The cab in those days was the hansom with its two huge wheels over which one perilously ascended, while the driver sat above, only to be communicated with by opening a sort of trap door in the roof. Gilbert once said that the imaginative Englishman in Paris would spend his days in a café, the imaginative Frenchman in London would spend his driving in a hansom. In the _Napoleon_, the thought of the cab moves him to write:

Poet whose cunning carved this amorous cell
Where twain may dwell.

E. V. Lucas, his daughter tells us, used to say that if one were invited to drive with Gilbert in a hansom cab it would have to be two cabs: but this is not strictly true. For in those days I drove with Gilbert and Frances too in a hansom--he and I side by side, she on his knee. We must have given to the populace the impression he says any hansom would give on first view to an ancient Roman or a simple barbarian--that the driver riding on high and flourishing his whip was a conqueror carrying off his helpless victims.

Like the "buffers" at the Veneering election, he spent much of his time "taking cabs and getting about"--or not even getting about in them, but leaving them standing at the door for hours on end. Calling on one publisher he placed in his hands a letter that gave excellent reasons why he could not keep the engagement! The memory so admirable in literary quotations was not merely unreliable for engagements but even for such matters as street numbers and addresses. Edward Macdonald, who worked with him later, on _G.K.'s Weekly_, relates how some months after the paper had changed its address he failed one day to turn up at a board meeting.

Finally he appeared with an explanation. On calling a taxi at Marylebone he realized that he could not give the address, so he told the driver to take him to Fleet Street. There as his memory still refused to help, he stopped the taxi outside a tea-shop, left it there while he was inside, and ordering a cup of tea began to turn out all his pockets in the hope of finding a letter or a proof bearing the address. Then as no clue could be found, he told the driver to take him to a bookstall that stocked the paper. At the first and second he drew blanks but at the third bought a copy of his own paper and thus discovered the address.

I am not sure at what date he began to hate writing anything by hand. My mother treasured two handwritten letters. I have none after a friendship of close on thirty years. But I remember on his first visit to my parents' home in Surrey his calling Frances that he might dictate an article to her. His writing was pictorial and rather elaborate. "He drew his signature rather than writing it," says Edward Macdonald, who remembers him saying as he signed a cheque: "'With many a curve my banks I fret.' I wonder if Tennyson fretted his." At one of our earliest meetings I asked him to write in my Autograph Book. It was at least five years before the _Ballad of the White Horse_ appeared, but the lines may be found almost unchanged in the ballad:

VERSES MADE UP IN A DREAM
(which you won't believe)

People, if you have any prayers
Say prayers for me.
And bury me underneath a stone
In the stones of Battersea.
Bury me underneath a stone,
With the sword that was my own;
To wait till the holy horn is blown
And all poor men are free.

The dream went on, he said, for pages and pages. And I think Frances was anxious, for the mind must find rest in sleep.

The little flat at Battersea was a vortex of requests and engagements, broken promises and promises fulfilled, author's ink and printer's ink, speeches in prospect and speeches in memory, meetings and social occasions. A sincere admirer wrote during this period of his fears of too great a strain on his hero--and from 1904 to 1908 the only change was an increase of pressure:

I see that Chesterton has just issued a volume on the art of G. F.
Watts. His novel was published yesterday. Soon his monograph on
Kingsley should be ready. I believe he has a book on some modern
aspects of religious belief in the press. He is part-editor of the
illustrated Booklets on great authors issued by the Bookman. He is
contributing prefaces and introductions to odd volumes in several
series of reprints. He is a constant contributor to the _Daily News_
and the _Speaker_; he is conducting a public controversy with
Blatchford of the _Clarion_ on atheism and free-thinking; he is
constantly lecturing and debating and dining out; it is almost
impossible to open a paper that does not contain either an article or
review or poem or drawing of his, and his name is better known now to
compositors than Bernard Shaw.

Now, both physically and mentally Chesterton is a Hercules, and
from what I hear of his methods of work he is capable of a great
output without much physical strain; nevertheless, it is clear, I
think to anyone that at his present rate of production he must either
wear or tear. No man born can keep so many irons in the fire and not
himself come between the hammer and the anvil. It is a pitiable thing
to have a good man spend himself so recklessly; and I repeat once
more that if he and his friends have not the will or power to
restrain him, then there should be a conspiracy of editors and
publishers in his favour. Not often is a man like Chesterton born. He
should have his full chance. And that can only come by study and
meditation, and by slow, steady accumulation of knowledge and wisdom.*

[* Shan F. Bullock in the _Chicago Evening Post_, 9th April, 1906.]

In a volume made up of Introductions written at this time to individual novels of Dickens, we find a passage that might well be Gilbert's summary of his own life:

The calls upon him at this time were insistent and overwhelming;
this necessarily happens at a certain stage of a successful writer's
career. He was just successful enough to invite others and not
successful enough to reject them . . . there was almost too much work
for his imagination, and yet not quite enough work for his
housekeeping. . . . And it is a curious tribute to the quite curious
greatness of Dickens that in this period of youthful strain we do not
feel the strain but feel only the youth. His own amazing wish to
write equalled or outstripped even his readers' amazing wish to read.
Working too hard did not cure him of his abstract love of work.
Unreasonable publishers asked him to write ten novels at once; but he
wanted to write twenty novels at once.

Thus too with Gilbert. The first eight years of his married life saw in swift succession the publication of ten books comprising literary and art criticism and biography, poetry, fiction (or rather fantasy), light essays and religious philosophy. All these were so full at once of the profound seriousness of youth, and of the bubbling wine of its high spirits, as to recall another thing Gilbert said: that Dickens was "accused of superficiality by those who cannot grasp that there is foam upon deep seas." That was the matter in dispute about himself, and very furiously disputed it was during these years. Was G.K. serious or merely posing, was he a great man or a mountebank, was he clear or obscure, was he a genius or a charlatan? "Audacious reconciliation," he pleaded--or rather asserted, for his tone could seldom be called a plea, "is a mark not of frivolity but of extreme seriousness."

A man who deals in harmonies, who only matches stars with angels,
or lambs with spring flowers, he indeed may be frivolous; for he is
taking one mood at a time, and perhaps forgetting each mood as it
passes. But a man who ventures to combine an angel and an octopus
must have some serious view of the universe. The man who should write
a dialogue between two early Christians might be a mere writer of
dialogues. But a man who should write a dialogue between an early
Christian and the Missing Link would have to be a philosopher. The
more widely different the types talked of, the more serious and
universal must be the philosophy which talks of them. The mark of the
light and thoughtless writer is the harmony of his subject matter;
the mark of the thoughtful writer is its apparent diversity. The most
flippant lyric poet might write a pretty poem about lambs; but it
requires something bolder and graver than a poet, it requires an
ecstatic prophet, to talk about the lion lylng down with the lamb.*

* G. K. Chesterton. _Criticisms and Appreciations of the World of Charles Dickens_. Dent. 1933 pp. 68-9.

A man starting to write a thesis on Chesterton's sociology once complained bitterly that almost none of his books were indexed, so he had to submit to the disgusting necessity of reading them all through, for some striking view on sociology might well be embedded in a volume of art criticism or be the very centre of a fantastic romance. Chesterton's was a philosophy universal and unified and it was at this time growing fast and finding exceedingly varied techniques of expression. But the whole of it was in a sense in each of them--in each book, almost in each poem. As he himself says of the universe of Charles Dickens, "there was something in it--there is in all great creative writers--like the account in Genesis of the light being created before the sun, moon and stars, the idea before the machinery that made it manifest. Pickwick is in Dickens's career the mere mass of light before the creation of sun or moon. It is the splendid, shapeless substance of which all his stars are ultimately made." And again, "He said what he had to say and yet not all he had to say. Wild pictures, possible stories, tantalising and attractive trains of thought, perspectives of adventure, crowded so continually upon his mind that at the end there was a vast mass of them left over, ideas that he literally had not the opportunity to develop, tales that he literally had not the time to tell."