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Title: Father Brown on Chesterton
Author: O'Connor, John (1870-1952)
Date of first publication: 1937
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Frederick Muller, 1937
   (first edition)
Date first posted: 25 October 2009
Date last updated: 25 October 2009
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #407

This ebook was produced by:
Iona Vaughan, David T. Jones, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net




FATHER BROWN ON
CHESTERTON

BY

JOHN O'CONNOR

_Parish Priest of St. Cuthbert's, Bradford
Privy Chamberlain to Pope Pius XI_

LONDON

Frederick Muller Ltd.

29 GREAT JAMES STREET
W. C. 1


FIRST PUBLISHED BY FREDERICK MULLER LTD.
IN 1937
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY THE BOWERING PRESS
PLYMOUTH


_TO
FRANCES_


FATHER BROWN ON CHESTERTON




I


Having to write this book reminds me of a Phil May drawing in _Punch_
round about the days of Spion Kop: a large man, oiled and curled, the
oil being plainly machine-oil, sits down, uninvited, at a tea-shop
table, where a small man is finishing his tea.

"I'm just after punchin' a fella's face for talkin' rot about Buller.
What do _you_ think about Buller?"

Hoping to avoid imputations of talking rot about Chesterton, I go
forward. We met at Keighley in the spring of 1904, at the house of Mr.
Herbert Hugill, who was a much older Chesterton fan than I was. (He
had and, I trust, still has, one of the four copies of _The Wild
Knight_ which constituted the first issue of the first edition.) There
we agreed to walk over the moor to Ilkley, where Chesterton was
spending a short holiday, and I was his willing guide. The actual
conditions for both of us were as near the ideal as makes no
difference: he was on holiday, having delivered his lecture to the
Keighley intelligentsia, and I was in possession of the heart's
desire, which was to talk with him. March was awaking and blowing the
hair out of her eyes, and our bit of moorland is among the finest in
Yorkshire, especially when white clouds race across the blue.

That prince of journalists, Wilfrid Meynell, when journalism still was
a profession, had early drawn our attention to a young writer called
Chesterton, author of a book of essays called _The Defendant_. After
thirty-five years some phrases still resound: _A defendant is chiefly
required when worldlings despise the world--a counsel for the defence
would not have been out of place in that terrible day when the sun was
darkened over Calvary and Man was rejected of men._

And in the Defence of Penny Dreadfuls: _We lose our bearings entirely
by speaking of the "lower classes" when we mean humanity minus
ourselves.... But this is what we have done with this lumberland of
foolish writing, we have probed, as if it were some monstrous new
disease, what is, in fact, nothing but the foolish and valiant heart
of man._

Freud and Jung, note well, had not then swum into our ken, but Cesare
Lombroso and his French kinsmen were making our flesh creep, until
some wag got at them with a "skull of Charlotte Corday". (She only had
one, and that wasn't the one!) I mention this because, in a few months
from that date, March, 1904, Chesterton was going to be tickled to
death about it all.

His lecture of the evening before our stroll had been on one of his
dearly beloved aspects of Modern Thought, the guileless pretence at
getting everything both ways: liberty without justice, ease without
vigilance, Peace alongside of Push, the Palm without the Pang. And how
folk would shout hooray! if you kept on talking like this: "Whilst
avoiding the manifest difficulties of institutional religion, let us
cultivate that nobler, broader atheism which allows for a personal
God".

It must have been the reflection on this, i.e. everyone wanting
everything both ways, that set me telling him a piece of secondary
education which had come to me through living three minutes from the
Bradford Casual Ward. I discovered, soon enough, that Old Stagers
used to wait outside the Tramp Ward until they heard the Town Clock
strike nine, so as to be able to tell me they were locked out. I told
this to the tramp-master, a fine well-balanced sort of man, as he had
need to be. He went on to initiate me a little deeper. "They do
anything sooner than come here with children, because we keep them an
extra night to rest the children. My wife gives children a good time
and they need it badly, poor things. Aye, and some of them are
stolen." Ignorant letters to the papers plead in favour of these
vermin and against their victims.

I remember, too, telling a fearful story from the papers about a
good-natured Frenchman who used to give alms to a woman with a wailing
child, always at the same corner. He was hard-headed as well as
good-natured, and the wail of the child used to haunt him. So he told
a _sret_ man, who arrested the woman. The baby was found to have a
bandaged eye. Under the bandage was a walnut-shell, and inside the
shell a spider, which had eaten a large hole in the little eyelid!

Moral: Never give money until you know perfectly who is getting it.
The "never" may be modified by St. Vincent's inspired words: It is
better to lose money than to lose pity. And he was a Frenchman!

As we crossed the canal before breasting the steep Morton Bank, Zola
chanced to be a topic--I think I was recalling how Zola had offered
money to a Lourdes _miracule_ to induce her denial of the
miracle(!)--and Chesterton interjected that the _Daily News_ Editor
had blue-pencilled his recent classification of Zola as an "obscene
Nonconformist". "Not", he went on, "that I ever thought Nonconformists
obscene, only Zola! He would like to turn civilization into a drowsy
Sunday afternoon, which is, I think, a Nonconformist ideal; and he
made use of obscenity to advance the good cause of safety first in
morals, economic ease in circumstances. Nothing heroic, risky,
elegant, or quite untrammelled. That is all I intended, but I had not
made it clear enough, I suppose."




II


By association of ideas, we got on to the curious itch for confession
characteristic of those who patronize escaped priests, emancipated
nuns and all that sulphuretted hydrogen ghost of expiring
Protestantism. Twenty-five years before the "Oxford Movement"
(Buchman, not Newman). The lark of it all, quoth I, is that these
amateur confessors and penitents are barking up the wrong tree. Even
those High Churchmen who tried to restore Confession in the Church of
England were led into incidents untoward or comic, through lack of
experience. We of the primitive obedience have been confessing our own
sins for nearly twenty years before we begin to hear those of others.
In sacramental confession picturesque detail is hopelessly
irrelevant--it simply isn't done, and that is the only thing that
varies the monstrous monotony of the catalogue of crime. For there
are only ten commandments and only three or four ways of breaking
them, so figure to yourself if there is any excitement in hearing
confessions. The only excitement is a rare thing among thrills: it is
the vision of a submerged soul coming up out of the dark night of
ocean into the pearly radiance of the morning. No words will describe
the glimpse of glory vouchsafed for a passing instant to a confessor
half-dazed with repetitions and numb from the knees down. But I have
been often favoured to the extent I try to picture.

That was all I ever said to him on the subject, but I feel bound to
subjoin here an embodiment of the case in verse which I did for G.
K.'s Weekly as a pendant to Paul Claudel's stark poem on Confession,
translated in October, 1934. Though done thirty years after, it is
worth reproducing here for its own sake, and the Priest's Soliloquy is
only the steady experience of a lifetime, as witness my hand.


    The priest, in whom priesthood clouds over the countenance live
       and humane
    Perturbs by the fact of his presence, our sly self-legerdemain:
    The earth is a-quake with Christ's treading, a ferret the warren
       has stirr'd,
    A shuddering horror has traversed the swine of the Gadarene herd:
    Black-Avis can't show on our threshold but we sense the reek of
       the brute:
    The possess'd one is troubled right inly to where the possession
       has root;
    And the Root, full of horror and fury has symptoms prognostic of
       fate,
    Sin's vomit essential, enormous, convulsively hiccup'd in spate.

    Vain to keep anything back, keep that to ourselves at the least,
    Vain to stuff down by main force, keep back in its den unreleased.
    No way now to shirk the avowal, word for word, less fearfully
       "guilty" to plead
    With lips to that ear like the keyhole of justice with its
       unbearable heed.
    No more way than to hold back the babe ripe for birth, ripe sin in
       dark matrix blot out;
    There is the priest, here its moment to budge, unmask its
       unspeakable snout.
    Lazarus gives no more sign. Does he sleep? What could better betide?

        *    *    *    *    *

    "Lord, hadst Thou been here our brother had not died."
    'Twas not yesterday that he sickened: Ah! where wast Thou hidden
       the while?
    How have we to do when we need Thee, and where rediscover Thy
       smile?
    Oh! You Who to call us made silence Your trumpet, as others
       the voice,
    Must you needs so deal with your creatures that absence at times
       is Your choice?

    Mary is weeping, her brother is dead, but behind her on tiptoe one
       steals,
    "The Master is here and calleth for thee," at the whisper
       despondency thrills:
    The Lord will have thee explain Him how things have fallen, He
       needs thee, I trow.
    Thou art cited to court, Magdalen, from thee the Creator must know
    What to do in the case, and He wants to consult the text of thy woe!

    Bring Me where you have laid him. I myself will e'en go the same
       road,
    I, Second in Trinity, the Father on foot in His Son's Person, God.
    Take away the great stone; let My face feel the force of the
       cavern's breath.
    Even so in a careful entombment (for Lazarus was what they call in
       easy circumstances) modern man is laid out at his death.

    Science with reason, fine newspaper-stuff, things taught at high
       schools in the town,
    Uncleanness, injustice, sloth, custom, pride on top, like a cover
       screwed down;
    Trust only in things you can touch, like a close-fitting garment
       or groove,
    All has made of us something so free that a finger one hardly can
       move.

    Long-winded screeds of philosophy, mealy-mouth courtesan words, have
       us swaddled and wrapt to the nape
    Till inside is no more the live man, but a supine great doll,
       ridiculous, trussed out of shape.
    And...I may be mistaken--what say you? but by now it would seem
       there's a niff, as of mortification as link.
    After all, he is buried four days, and a shaky voice near me
       says: _Stink_.

    Lazarus brother lies there so still. His mother won't know him by
       now.
    Jesus stands at the edge of the tomb. He is groaning. _Infremnit
       spiritu._
    Where the Three Persons Divine are bonded in union supreme
    Even there pierces death's chill. Gospel says: He troubled Him.
    Thomas lays finger on Peter, bids him the Master descry.
    What! that Majestic Face! Nay, no error. He weeps just like us when
       we cry;
    _How He loved him_ the Pharisees hoarsely tell one another,
       standing by.

    Dead man on the floor of the pit, hear again the commandment that
       made thee!
    From the father in need of his child not even the tomb can
       o'ershade thee.
    Death itself is no safeguard for thee if the voice of the Living
       God call,
    Rise, dark paralytic: rise up, rotting corpse, grinning skull, up
       ghost, crime and all!
    Out with thee, up with thee monster! Rise, brother, rise, son of
       mine!

    _Lazare, veni foras!_


    FROM THE PRIEST'S SIDE

    To be frank, this routine work is killing: boxed up here hour after
       hour
    Absolving the careless, the innocent, seems like a waste of good
       power.
    But stay, Peter's net is enclosing a something, a fish worth our
       while,
    He's heavy. With guilt? So it seems. But candid, denuded of guile.
    Now the Lord in thy heart be almighty, and clear and sincere on thy
       lips,
    That so thou discover condignly and truly the tale of thy slips.

    Not so bad as one sees in the papers. The scarlet is bleaching
       awain.
    Ah child! were not God deep down in you, such things would not touch
       you with pain.
    If Omnipotence were not all-piteous, Justiciar of torment were He,
    Self-slaughter the only religion. But He loves to restore and set
       free.
    Go in peace. Mount for ever the stairway of Light unbeginning.
       Henceforth
    What ill thou hast suffered, good compassed, accrue to imperishable
       worth.

    And what have I done to deserve it? Dear God! so to see without eyes
    The haunted morass of corruption transfigured to young Paradise?
    'Tis Thy work, Thou Fount of Renewal! From its mire doth the mist of
       our fen
    Make the rainbow for ever that decks Thee. I know. I am witness.
       Amen.


We discussed as freely as the March wind blew such matters as the pros
and cons of frequent Confession. If everyone frequented the Sacrament
of penance as much as mere pious authors urge, it would soon kill off
all the confessors, but the modern practice keeps the track smooth,
open, and safe. If people went to confess only great crimes, the
C.I.D. might begin to haunt our churches after a murder or a burglary,
and this would lead to heavier complications.

I had just seen Maria Monk, her book, still for sale on a Bradford
bookstall, and told him that our people had seen it distributed free
at the Bradford Mills (not all, but some). I had tried to read it, but
had found it insufferably drab and of laborious invention, tired out
before the race, as it were. So far as my experience of such literary
efforts went, and I had had some original unpublished documents in my
hands, it was the effusion of a tainted brain, an imbecile. This I
recognized later in one of Chesterton's essays, where he closes the
whole question with "Maria Monk, a dirty half-wit". Let me point out
his terrible power of invective, not generally understood, because he
seldom used it. And let us be again thankful for the fine charity
which kept that weapon sheathed.

We even got on to the burning of heretics. Neither of us could bear to
look on it as practical politics; neither of us could bear to apply a
hot flat-iron to the soles of their feet, as I once in an hospital,
pretending to be the visiting doctor, recommended very loudly for a
woman who was shamming epilepsy; but Chesterton was already convinced
that something drastic was necessary for bad cases which could and did
occur. Because the Christian Commonwealth is an institution; and the
more prosperous and settled any institution is, even the most
beneficent, the more venomously is it assailed, and often the venom is
inhumanly occult and subtle. I instanced the famous heresy of the
German Tyrol in the eighteenth century: how a Catholic peasantry
became infatuated with the doctrine (a doctrine which depended on a
wrong preposition) that in order to be saved you had to die just as
Jesus Christ died. How whole families scourged and crucified one
another, and over twenty thousand of all ages perished by crucifixion,
protesting they felt no pain but perfect delight. It spread for twenty
years, and government was impotent, since no punishment came amiss to
the fanatics. It was just what they wanted. Finally an old bishop, I
think, advised government to burn up everything the fanatics owned,
clothes, _corpses_, farm-houses, furniture and cattle. That settled
the question, and the mad religion disappeared. We agreed that there
must be something in the burning that destroyed infection, though to
burn things or people alive seemed needless cruelty--they could be
burned dead, as was so often done in France. But witches and sorcerers
were burned to prevent their remains being used in Black Magic.




III


From this I went on to relate some of my adventures. They had been the
reverse of spectacular, but they got to the very nerve[1] of
certitude--a double story.

Once in a Poor Law Institute I was invited by the Head to peep into
the padded room where a very violent case was detained on her way to
the asylum. She was attitudinizing in the middle of the room, but as
soon as I lifted the shutter she stopped dead and glared right through
me, like frozen lightning. My knees gave way, and I dropped that
shutter as if it were red hot. Years afterwards, I was doing my
morning round in a county jail. It was a lovely spring morning and the
cell doors were all open, some of the women sitting outside, sewing or
knitting. All was peace, almost joy.

[Footnote 1: Certitude has a nerve. I have known amiable and cultured
neuropaths who were incapable of certitude on anything except
pain.]

The wardress led me into an open cell where a young and pretty woman
was bent over a seam. She wore her prison cap with elegance. When I
said good morning she lifted her eyes--_the same eyes as I remembered
since the padded room_. Again my knees gave way and I longed to hide
behind the wardress. I said something--anything seemed to do--and beat
a more or less dignified but hasty retreat. The charge on the
cell-door, which I read as I went out, was "_Obscene language and
solicitation in Manningham Lane_".

The padded room in the men's side of Bradford's Imbecile Ward had been
the scene of an occurrence which some kinds of scientists have no
difficulty in explaining. A year after my first peep into the padded
room, and three years before my discomfiture in a dungeon-cell, the
attendants were standing at the main entrance at 10.30 on a Saturday
morning in April.

"Would you like to see something, sir? We're waiting for the doctor to
see what _he_ says." Just inside the portal the padded cell stood
open. About nine feet square and twenty feet high, walls upholstered
all the way up in smooth pigskin, and floor padded in the same
material. Untearable except with steel claws. Fourteen feet up was a
square window without any suspicion of ledge or handhold, smooth
pigskin to the sash. The white clouds of uncertain glory were sailing
across the blue, and plainly seen, for there was no window. Glass and
sash and bars all were gone. "We've left everything as we found it,
sir, for the doctor to see. Last night a madman came in in a
strait-jacket. Nothing for it but the padded room. He made an awful
noise all night, and at five this morning we heard a smash and then
all was quiet. When we looked in he was gone. He must have sailed
through that window and carried it with him, bars and all. He had
twenty feet to fall outside, but it was soft clay just under and he
fell _just under_; you can see the marks." I never heard the doctor's
remarks, and I never heard that the man was seen again. Old stories of
complete disappearance under uncanny circumstances, we all are wont to
call legends. This is not a legend.

We reflected then that we were tramps, and began to philosophise on
tramps. Not in the George Borrow vein, but more realistically, I went
on to describe how a fine Monday after a bad week-end was the time to
see them in their glory. During a bad spell they throng round the fire
in the model lodging house, "pinching" one another's eggs and bacon
and, of course, fighting about it. This is why you never see
professionals out in bad weather, barring accidents.

A fine Monday morning is the time to watch churches and their
poor-boxes. Every church ought to have a crypt, because a crypt is
handy for storing things; because it keeps the building drier and
preserves the floor from rot; and because the slot of the boxes ought
to go down into the said crypt. I had recently been attached to two
different churches. One had had its boxes broken and rifled of large
sums, five pounds and more, because the parish priest trusted to his
keys and failed to empty the boxes for months at a time. So insanely
he decided to keep his church locked all day. This kept the boxes
empty all right. The other church had "shoots" going down into a
crypt. When we examined our crypt we found besides coin, long hooked
wires, limed string, and nearly as many spent matches as coins. The
human vermin had dropped lighted matches down the shoots, willing to
burn down the town on the off-chance of twopence-halfpenny.




IV


Soon the exhilarating moorland air uplifted us out of these dark
topics and we cheered the way with singing. There is a point on the
high moorland where everyone breaks into song. Not that Gilbert could
sing then, he was tone-deaf, though most sensitive to musical rhythm
or tempo. As years went on, he grew to appreciate a melody and even to
repeat one, if not too subtle. He did reproduce to my satisfaction and
retention an impromptu of Beachcomber at a sing-song. The rule was
that nobody could shirk his turn when it came. J.B.M. looked
inhibited, then inspired and, in the nasal manner affected by taproom
artists, intoned:


    In my gardin there are rowziz:
      Rowziz red and violets blew:
    In my gardin there is sunshine
      In my gardin there is yew! (top note)
    (Angry undertone) _Ya bloody worm_.


This in the second last year of his life. But that morning he was only
in his thirtieth year.

He had written ballades at the rate of two in a morning under the
influence of escape from work and change of air, and he was full of
Baring, Bentley, and Belloc as well. Ballades had to be exchanged
between the club members, and the Envoi had to insult the Prince, the
more grossly the better. So it often happened that the Envoi was
complete before the ballade was begun, and so it remains in some cases
even unto this day. Another rule was that one of the stanzas had to be
poetic in flight, with at least one best line. Three or four of
Chesterton's ballades recited that day are to be found in his
_Collected Poems_, one or two of Belloc's, one of Phillimore's (he was
of the club), one of Bentley's, and one of Baring's, though I speak
without the book, are to be found in the files of the _New Witness_.
Shall we quote?

Some I could quote at length or nearly, others are fragments hauled
through the sieve of memory.

_I was always the elephant's friend._ This he had done that week.
Another:

_Refrain_: We shall be ready when the gods return.


    _Envoi_

    Prince, you look pale tho' girt in gold and red,
    Through all your wealth a want I can discern;
    What you require is clouting on the head.
    We shall be ready when the gods return.


_I think I will not hang myself to-day_ is in the _Collected Poems_,
but it was written that week, at least I have always understood so.

_A state of some unrest is brought about_ shows influence of the Boer
War, Fleet Street, and the small rift in the Great Liberal Party which
Lord Rosebery failed to mend.

Two more Envois I recall:


    Prince, may I venture, since it's only you,
    To speak discreetly of the Crucified!
    He was extremely unsuccessful too:
    The devil didn't like Him, and He died.

    Prince, if you meet upon a 'bus
    A man who makes a great display
    Of Doctor Haeckel, argue thus:
    The wind has blown him all away.


And why not one of my own, with ballade still unpondered?


    Prince, with your whistle so perpetually wet,
    Against yourself you've weighted all the scales.
    Unless you mend, you can't expect to get
    As near to Paradise as Cumbrian vales.


From Bentley, afterwards printed in the _Eye Witness_, a ballade of
the B.P., I quote the last verse:


    They speak of England as a moral wreck,
    Stone-deaf, and blind to all reality,
    Her mind asleep, the usurer on her neck,
    Her God forgotten, and her history.
    They say: Shall these things perish utterly?
    These that were England through the glorious years,
    Faith and green fields, and honour and the sea?
    I simply wag my great long furry ears.

    _Envoi_

    Prince, they deride your purse, your pedigree,
    Your taste in pictures, wines, and clothes and peers.
    These things make no impression upon me,
    I simply wag my great long furry ears.


And all I can recall of a very topical ballade of Chesterton's own,
about which he was at the time fairly blithe:


    Why is my head covered with curious hairs?
    Why is the sun still rising in the East?
    Oh! why do stallions mostly mate with mares?
    And why is bread so often made with yeast?
    When those Raid Wires were pawed about and pieced,
    What is that one whose text has not transpired?
    Now Chartereds have so painfully decreased
    I think an explanation is required.

    Why noxious animals must hunt in pairs
    Is not made clear by saying: Mark o' the Beast,
    When Sergeant Sheridan sought balmier airs,
    How were the wheels of his wild chariot greased?
    "Hmm Hmm." Yes, doubtless, as you say, the priest
    Forced on a darkened world with fear inspired
    Wild explanations. But to say the least
    I think an explanation is required.


The Raid in question is the Jameson Raid. For the nearest thing to an
explanation, see _The Autobiography of Sir William Butler_.

Sergeant Sheridan was an Irish policeman who himself committed
agrarian outrages, and brought men in guilty of them on "police
evidence". One man was still doing time and another had died in prison
serving a seven-year sentence when George Wyndham, as Chief Secretary
for Ireland, had the matter looked into. Even then he had to find
four hundred pounds of "Government money" to provide the travelling
expenses of the Sergeant! G.W. was fairly indignant about it all, but
"not in a position to explain".

There appeared in the _Eye-Witness_, years after, a ballade worth
preserving, which keeps the rules of the Club with one startlingly
splendid line. It was not given that day, for it was not yet written,
but I may mention that it begins:

_O you that dwell where City slush and grime_

and the last two lines before the Envoi are:


    Hearing below bridges o'er the giant slime
    Returning rivers to the ancient sea.

    _Envoi_

    Prince, is that you! Lor' lumme, oh gorblime----!
    (I too resume the speech of my degree)
    O crikey Bill! Lor' luvvaduck, well, I'm----!
    Returning rivers to the ancient sea.


This is perhaps the most gleeful of all the glad Envois. Unless we
except some of the envois that never had a ballade before them, such
as Belloc's, quoted that miraculous day:


    Prince, do not let your nose, your purple nose,
    Your large imperial nose be out of joint:
    Although you cannot match my "special prose"
    Painting on vellum is my weakest point.


And


    Prince, you are ugly, old, and rather low,
    Extremely bald, and very nearly blind:
    The women hate you, and they tell you so,
    But do not let it prey upon your mind.


He quoted also, though it was not yet in print, the matchless lonesome
Envoi in the essays _On Nothing_:


    Prince, draw this sovran draught in your despair,
    That when your riot in that rest is laid,
    You shall be merged with an essential air,
    Dear tenuous stuff, of which the world was made.


The stately beauty of it! of saying:


    Prince, you amount to nothing, and you know it.
    Let it comfort you, even as it comforts us.


So came we just in time for lunch to St. John's, Ilkley, opposite the
best-kept church in the world, St. Margaret's, unto a house of the
open door, to the guest and the wanderer free. It was shepherd's pie
for lunch. Mrs. Chesterton was there. She was so pleased to see
Gilbert return in good order and good form that she made me free of
the _mnage_ ever after. It is to her that we owe the most and some of
the best of Gilbert Chesterton. In all things she was his angel, a
small Cockney, a connexion of the first editor of _Punch_. She even
converted him from what he calls the Higher Unitarianism to the more
loyal and rational kind of Anglicanism--Tractarian more than
Ritualistic. She was educated by the nuns of Clewer. On the father's
side she was Huguenot, of the family of de Blogue, anglicised
unsympathetically into Blogg.




V


Apart from shepherd's pie, what I remember of that meal was Gilbert
saying in a debating voice: "If my father had been a Duke, instead of
a--NICE MAN--I should have gone to Oxford, and learned at great
expense the insane optimism of the idle rich". From this the talk
wandered on to enquiry as to what made the rich man's optimism so
insane--does money destroy the mind--even so, does not the mind make
the money which annihilates it--are the rich always idle--how do they
lose the industrious habit which made them rich? And so on. We played
with the idea. How does a rich man understand getting up in the
morning when he has it done for him as far as is physically possible?
Naturally he drinks and is drunk much sooner than the poor man, not
merely because he can pay for more, _but because all his corks are
ready drawn_. So we worked our way back to the truth of the Gospel as
to the hideous peril of hoarding the unearned increment, because it
rots the human container. Ill fares the land, etc., we quoted, and:

_Ah Maud, you milk-white fawn, you are all unmeet for a wife
You have but lain on the lilies and supp'd on the roses of life._

In a minute it was tea-time, or so it seemed. Because, after lunch,
Mrs. Chesterton told me of the Epic in contemplation, of which a deal
was already composed. Alfred's vision was given as a sample. Then as a
_bonne bouche_ the description of the illuminated manuscript: _And
suns, and spouting whales._


    With little pictures red and blue
    Keyholes of Heaven and Hell.


I am careful not to seek the printed page for verification, but I
write as I recall the words after thirty-odd years, and above all:


    Her face was as a spoken word
    When brave men speak and choose
    The very colours of her coat
    Were better than good news.


All through the ensuing year Gilbert kept planning and adding to the
Epic of Alfred, now extant as _The Ballad of the White Horse_. Mrs.
Chesterton cherished it very carefully, I could see she was more in
love with it than with anything else he had in hand, and my own
unfeigned delight in the "samples" was a help to the composition (I
hope).

I am ashamed to think how little pressing I required to make me stay
to dinner that evening, but so it was done. The master of the house
came home from business, a man in ten thousand for charm and
integrity, as we often proved in small things and in great. Francis
Steinthal, Bradford born, of Frankfurt ancestry and the Israel of God.
I speak with strong persuasion, for once, at his table, when we were
drifting into mischievous merriment at the expense of one of the
neighbours, nothing spiteful, but of the horseplay order, he pulled us
all up sharp with a "Now, none of that". We felt safe in his shadow
ever after.

His house was dedicated to the Beloved Disciple whose emblem
surmounted the hearth in the midmost room of the house, a William de
Morgan enamel, over peacock-coloured tiles by the same craftsman. The
house was planned by Norman Shaw whilst he was engaged on St.
Margaret's Church opposite. A broad staircase led up to the lounge; on
the right was the drawing-room and on the left the dining-room. All
these apartments were of noble proportions with big furniture designed
for each. Space, comfort, elegance were all achieved painlessly, a
cure for self-consciousness. Perhaps the talk was influenced by the
surroundings--I have never known more lively or lengthy discussions;
and one evening a newly-trained virtuosa from Frankfurt, Vera Dawson,
gave us the Bach Great-Organ Fugue, redacted for the piano, gave it
with such exact _tempo_ and fine phrasing that it could be followed
from start to finish as an intellectual treat. They were the great
days of Bradford music, dimmed by the Great War. But that was about
1906.

The first evening I had to leave early, being under a certain
green-eyed observation which passed away, as bad things do, some two
years later. I scarcely think I was Father Brown that day at all,
though Chesterton on the moor above had been admiring _Trent's Last
Case_ and expressing an ambition to increase and improve the breed of
detective stories. Up to that time there had been no C.I.D. in
fiction, save only Conan Doyle's Sherlock and that wonderful man
Andrew Lang.[2] I wonder who knows his detective stories now? He never
touched what he did not adorn, and was there anything he did not have
a try at, from pulverising Anatole France to uprooting the Golden
Bough?

[Footnote 2: _The Disentanglers_ (Longmans).]




VI


It was the next time Chesterton came to St. John's that I was bidden
to spend the day with him. It was late autumn, and perhaps he had
already started Father Brown. The length of my tether was more
generous, and I stayed well after dinner, and met the two young men
who looked in for coffee and occasioned the _Brown_ Epos after my
departure, as the _Autobiography_ puts on record.

A third invitation was to dine and sleep, and it was certainly later
than the _Wisdom of Father Brown_, because there was a deep plot to
capture a likeness for the dust-jacket of the _Innocence_. As soon as
we sat to table our host addressed me a kind of challenge: what case
could be made for Home Rule for Ireland? Since I knew he was a Home
Ruler (his wife became a Sinn Feiner in 1919) and since Chesterton had
often expressed himself to the same effect, I sailed ahead with the
remark that except Poland, Ireland was the only Christian country not
allowed to govern itself. Say that they had abused their opportunities
and that they had themselves to blame, and all that, no nation could
possibly deserve to have a Government which could only be called an
ignorant spasmodic interference. Even India had more
self-determination than Ireland, and on the whole, less ignorant
interference.

It was in the course of that monologue that I told some of those
things which appear in _The Crimes of England_. It was my grandmother
who always apologised to the company for having spoken of a soldier,
though she had a grandson who described himself as "champion
broncho-buster to the smartest squadron of the smartest cavalry of the
smartest army in the world". Grenfell's, I think, of the Ninth
Lancers.

And so the ball rolled, but my memory is over-laid with mystification,
because I became aware of two young ladies opposite who seemed to be
watching me too closely. One, Miss Maria Zimmern, was scribbling below
the table, and the daughter of the house was looking at me and then
at the scribble with amused interest. It really was the portrait of
Father Brown for the dust-cover of the _Innocence_, and was as near to
a likeness as most such feats. The whole thing _was_ a plot, but it
was quite a year before I saw it. For I am a bit of an owl, always
was; and the creation of Father Brown came from the fact that I noted
and chronicled small beer, whereas Chesterton was the very opposite.
He never forgot anything he heard or read, but he never remembered
what day it was, or if lunch were still to come. As for me, even when
I smoked cigarettes, I could always find the ash-tray. This to Gilbert
seemed miraculous! But he always kept his power of wondering.

His wife told me that he often took her breath away with his power of
recalling. Whilst dictating an Introduction to Thackeray (it might
have been Milton) he interjected: "As Miss...remarked..." She assured
me he had only been strolling through the lounge after tea when he
casually over-heard Miss Blank, and Mrs. Chesterton could only aver
that it must have been nearly ten years before. "He must have read
ten thousand novels for Fisher Unwin before he was twenty-two, and I
guess he knows all the plots and most of the characters yet." I tested
this the same day at Beaconsfield:

ME. "Do you recollect passing for publication a novel by Dr. William
Barry, called _The Two Standards_?"

G.K.C. "Let me see.... Oh yes! that's where the Rector's daughter goes
atheist through reading the Book of Job, isn't it?" Yes, it is.

He remembered people less by name, face, dress, than by what they
talked about. There he had them by heart. "The lady in nigger-brown?
If only she had _been_ a nigger-brown----" "Gilbert, don't be absurd,
the one who couldn't take Indian tea." "Oh yes! she was vaguely
looking for a society to prevent cruelty to vegetables. It made her
sick to think of all the sufferings of cut flowers. Only she didn't
seem sure enough to put any money into it."




VII


My native talent for detection was of the slenderest, but it appealed
to Chesterton's faculty for wonder; as thus: we discussed on the first
day of our meeting, the pros and cons of mathematics versus literature
in education. I pointed out in the spirit of gaiety, how a
mathematician would put two and two together and the result would be
four, whereas your writer or man of letters would put them together so
as to make them twenty-two. Great kudos was mine in an Irish school
when I pointed out to the master (we were swotting up _The Lady of the
Lake_, and I was eleven minus), how FitzJames, noting the great sword
which fell in the night, concluded that none but Douglas would have
any use for a brand like that, and that he, FitzJames, had taken
refuge in the lion's den. At an English school to which I had been
transferred at twelve plus, I was conscious of a perturbing habit of
seeing right through the silly poses and transparent pretences of the
new chums. The only cant practised in Irish schools, I found, was the
patriotic cant. The others, we conclude, would not take in anyone. Not
in Ireland, but in English schools, the boys _learn_ from one another
transparent artifice, and so they grow to be what ignorant foreigners
call hypocrites. It should be humbugs. All this I told him. The flat
hat is true to life, but it perished in its prime, for it was wrong as
wrong for my style of architecture. The large and cheap umbrella was
my defence against wearing an overcoat, and the sapphire cross
figuring in the first of the stories must have been a reminiscence of
my boast that I had just bought five sapphires for five shillings. One
was very deep, so it must have been of good water. Brown paper
parcels! I carried them whenever I could, having no sense of style in
deportment.

Long after, ten years and the War intervening, I was introduced to a
smart young International Crook as Father Brown. He and his
confederate vanished within twenty-four hours. They had been getting
valuable rare editions from the London booksellers, using the American
Consulate in Bradford as their reference. A good man in the trade
warned the London people, and not too soon, after the two had _spurlos
versenkt_ two hundred pounds' worth of rarities. _Magni nomini umbra._

Chesterton must have been working hard at Father Brown, because later
in the first year his wife laughingly warned me not to let him pick my
brains. To such brain as I had he was always welcome, even to the pick
of it. But I cannot, even in my inmost consciousness, discover the
beginnings of any Father Brown stories. They are wonderfully well
done, and that is my feeling on a second reading. At first I found his
idiom strange--there is often a lack of mellowness in his proper
names, and his material circumstances are too suddenly introduced as I
thought then, but I am less fastidious now.

Call it the spring of 1905 that I came in to St. John's from over the
moor, where I had been pondering things in Chestertonian key. It is
the business of a true contemplative to hand on his harvest of a
quiet eye, so I at once informed Gilbert that I had decided against
all drinks except wine, because it was the most vegetarian, more so
than beer or whisky. Milk was disgustingly animal. It did not take him
long to write:


   I will stick to Port and Sherry
   Because they are so very
   So very very very vegetarian.


He laughed "frequent and free" and right into the treble clef; and,
when I remarked on this, Mrs. Steinthal, who had the child-portrait in
her drawing-room, told me how his voice stayed so long high-treble
that he was taken to a brain-specialist, who held forth to the
following effect: This boy must be preserved from mental shock or
strain. He has the largest and most sensitive brain I have ever met
with, and it is even chances whether he become a genius or an
imbecile. Fortunately, there never seemed to be any inclination to the
imbecile. But being a somewhat spoiled child after this verdict, he in
his younger days was obstinate and inclined to sulk, and we took care
not to give him occasion.

It is but fair to say that he never tried to impose his will or to
refuse his best; the only sign of imbecility was an inability to cross
or disappoint or refuse anyone. So he promised you what he had already
promised me, and his wife admirably kept his appointments and adjusted
conflicting claims. In the Battersea flat a baize board, taped, was
behind his head where he wrote, _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_ and
such. All invitations and engagements were stuck there under a _loud_
inscription: LEST WE FORGET. One of Belloc's early odes was pinned to
this:


    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.


But we did manage to forget at times, and the episode in the
_Autobiography_ has more than one double. It was Charles Rowley of the
Ancoats Brotherhood who once received a wire, reply paid, from Snow
Hill Station, Birmingham, on a Tuesday morning: "Am I coming to you
to-night or what?" Reply was: "Not this Tuesday but next Wednesday."
What affected Rowley was the thought that, for all he knew, they might
be sitting up for Chesterton in Newcastle that night. Much depended on
the health of Mrs. Chesterton, which just then gave ground for
anxiety. He was most dutiful and obedient to orders, but they had to
be written ones and backed by the spoken word. He brought his
dress-suit, oh! with loving care, to Bradford on Sunday for Sheffield
for Monday, but a careful host found it under the bed in Bradford just
as his train left for Sheffield. Sent at once it was to Beaconsfield,
where it landed at 5 p.m. on Thursday, just allowing him ten minutes
to change and entrain for London where he was wanted to attend at the
dramatisation of _The Man who was Thursday_. Scene at Beaconsfield:
What on earth have you done with your dress-suit, Gilbert? I must have
left it behind, darling, but I brought back the ties, didn't I? The
darling wrote at the end of this narration: "Never, _never_, NEVER
again must Gilbert go away without me."

At home or abroad, courtesy was with him both a passion and a
principle; it was a new thrill every time to see the vast mass of
G.K.C. nimbly mobilising itself to make room or place a chair or get
out of the way. He was very often late in tumbling to the situation
because of his habitual abstraction. There is _atmosphere_ as well as
pure fun in the _ben trovato_ story of him giving up his seat to
_three_ ladies in the 'bus. Call it mooning, but he never mooned. He
was always working out something in his mind, and when he drifted from
his study to the garden and was seen making deadly passes with his
sword-stick at the dahlias, we knew that he had got to a dead end in
his composition and was getting his thoughts into order. He had two of
the finest sword-sticks I have ever seen; one got worn out and the
other got lost. He would lurk inside a doorway in the costume drama of
his dreams, waiting for the Duke of Guise, or some adversary of the
moment. He was arrested by the Ilkley police for pinking the forestry,
but released when it was found that he was staying with a local
Justice of the Peace. See his column in the _Daily News_.

We sent him a prize Wensleydale (cheese) for Christmas: it was at home
to callers while it lasted at Overstrand Mansions, and gave rise to an
essay in the _Daily News_. I believe it also inspired Belloc to a
strophe or two of special prose in praise of cheese.

It was at Overstrand Mansions that I saw Max Beerbohm's cartoon of
Belloc converting Chesterton from the errors of Calvinism. The
conversion was almost complete, the pint pot being nearly empty. A
special dedication in Max's hand I do not remember verbatim, but it
was a paragraph in the Chestertonian manner to the effect that
scoffing was true worship, and the Yah! of the rude boy in the street
is but an act of reverence, being the first syllable of the
Unutterable Name!

It was from the Battersea flat that we went to a "Lords and Gentlemen"
dinner at the Criterion, Gilbert being called back by his wife, who
was ill in bed, to see if he was wearing a clean collar, and he
wasn't. We took a cab to save time, and about two hundred yards from
the restaurant he kept the cab nearly half an hour waiting while he
visited the hairdresser. Showing that he took a purely metaphysical
view even of cab-fares. The Union Debating Club were holding their
annual dinner.

G.K.C. in his speech referred to sitting on a policeman's head. Having
to reply for the Guests, I warned Chesterton that for him to sit on a
policeman's head would be at least manslaughter, unless the head were
as bony as one whom I had seen in the witness-box at the Assizes.
Police evidence may be true, but any I have heard is too carefully
prepared and has a made-up look just like a well-considered lie. How a
stupid magistrate can discern a true police-story from a false one
seems one of those things which no fellow can understand. Lord Justice
Vaughan Williams was the guest of the evening.




VIII


His brother Cecil must have come to St. John's, Ilkley, for a few days
in 1907. I try to keep a rough chronological order in the sequence of
our intercourse. It must have been the spring of 1907, because the
1906 Election was well over except the shouting. ("O Lor! Padre, what
price A.J.B.? Our _broomsticks_ are sweeping them!")

Gilbert was full of that magnanimous ease which usually follows upon
our side winning, and Cecil went calmly about showing him that only a
new crop of wild oats had been very successfully sown. Cecil was a
rare, even wonderful mind; for him victory and defeat were but
episodes in a campaign; he was a veritable Bayard of debate, clear and
dauntless, and he put into his thought and diction that lucid
vehemence which in most of us (not excluding the present writer) turns
to defects of temper or of statement. As barrister he must have gone
straight to the Woolsack, if going straight leads anywhere. Not so
plain as Cardinal Logue, he was plain enough, and thickset and sturdy:
plainer than Gilbert, though I feel bound to say that a gentle lady,
who had taken a good deal of trouble to be asked to meet us, and had
put off more luscious meals to join at ours, lost her appetite
completely when she set eyes on G.K.C. This was at Heckmondwike.

You could call Cecil a Tory Fabian--his "Gladstonian Ghosts" is a
reprint from the _Fabian Review_. His later articles ought to be put
into book form, for he is Cobbett come again, only better. He is the
reason why Gilbert was never afraid to debate with anyone, nor ever
wholly unprepared, except for a debate in America on Fundamentalism
which he was not out to defend. The adversary began by scuttling
Noah's Ark and scouting Jonah's whale with all the brilliant ignorance
of detail and forensic skill which is mistakenly used instead of
evidence. Chesterton had really been getting ready for hard stuff, and
put up a cardboard sheet against that ancient snowball. He was too
well prepared on that occasion in America, as he told me after his
second visit.

It was a grand full dress affair with Clarence Darrow, which Gilbert,
feeling that he was responsible for America's immortal soul, had
really prepared with care, loading himself to the muzzle with such
deep points as the absurdity of a series that does not begin and
therefore cannot end, questions that do extend the mind. But it was
Ingersoll and water, a Flood in which the critical point was the
capacity of Noah's Ark, and another Flood when all depended on the
incapacity of Jonah's whale.

How Cecil contended with him that day can best be gathered from a few
sayings in _Gladstonian Ghosts:_

"There is no historical ground for regarding the Liberal Party as the
friend of the working classes. The Liberal Party is historically an
essentially Capitalist Party."

"'The humane capitalists will not attack us if we remain peaceful and
unaggressive.' Perhaps not. One does not muzzle sheep."

"The commercial instinct, unless subjected to energetic and unsparing
State supervision, is certain to become a cause of ruinous social
disorder.

"Lest I should be accused of 'sitting on the fence' (a phrase much
beloved by those who always want to have judgment first and evidence
afterwards), I may as well state definitely that, in my opinion, a
protective tariff, if framed by genuine reformers solely in the public
interest, would be decidedly advantageous to Labour.

"The only logical conclusion of the Passive Resistance policy is
complete Anarchism--Anarchism from which the Liberal ideal sprang, and
in which it will end."

An instance of Cecil's gradual conversion of Gilbert that afternoon
may be quoted from "The Modern Martyr" in _All things Considered:_

"Undoubtedly, as a fact, Dr. Clifford is quite honourably indignant
with what he considers to be clericalism; but he does not prove it by
having his teapot sold; for a man might easily have his teapot sold,
as an actress has her diamonds stolen, for personal advertisement.

"Mr. Massingham appears to have eyes and ears for nothing but the
diabolical wickedness of Imperialism. Dr. Clifford, once the rising
hope of Collectivist Dissent, is now too busy promoting sectarian
anarchism to pay any perceptible attention to the
condition-of-the-people question.

"We have drained our countryside and betrayed our agriculture, to a
great extent deliberately, in order to obtain this vast city
proletariat. Its condition is appalling; it is starved at school,
overworked when it is just growing into manhood, and afterwards drifts
into the ghastly backwaters of our towns, now sweated, now unemployed,
always an open sore, a contamination, a menace to our natural life.
That is what fifty years of applied Liberalism have made of about a
third of the English people."

Fancy what reading this sort of thing would make for Gilbert in the
new and golden dawn of rejuvenated Liberalism. Chinese labour was to
be drowned in the scorn of a triumphant democracy, etc. Chinese Labour
did by no means drown.

Gilbert was no ghost, but he walked and walked all that day round the
big dining-table, having it out with Cecil. From luncheon to tea, from
tea to dressing-bell they both held out. Gilbert got the worst of the
argument, but all I remember was the number of times he said: "What I
mean to say is this". Cecil had chosen his case, Gilbert had only
inherited his. But, in the end, they shared the thunder, and Cecil
diluted his Fabianism and Shavianism with Catholicism, being received
into the Church some ten years before his elder brother.

"The vision is always a fact. It is the reality that is often feared.
As much as ever I did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy
time of innocence when I believed in Liberals" (_Orthodoxy_, 1909).




IX


G.K.C. was heroically faithful to Democracy. Being myself on the side
of the angels I used to amuse myself at teasing him with occasional
objections. He had written long before in _The Wild Knight_:


    But now a great thing in the street
    Seems any human nod
    Where shift in strange democracy
    The million masks of God.


Meaning to say that his democratic principles transcended political
theory and were rooted and founded in Divine Charity, which is quite
beyond reason and all reasons. He would agree with me that
Conservatism had the best case and the worst advocates of any cause
whatever, but that, says he, is because the advocates are so much
drawn from the aristocracy, who are choked with the riches and
pleasures of this life and so never come to the fruition of anything.
Their case is the case of the people all right, but which of them
_really_ knows, or cares?

Then I would point out that it is a monstrous unsure basis for
anything, the notion of equality. It is so confused with similarity in
value, static or dynamic, whereas their mothers could testify that
even twins were not so equal as they looked. But he had it pat
already, that this error led to levelling down, whereas the true
equality was a mystical fact, only divinely revealed, that all men are
equal only in the sight of God, and so those who had no God could only
make a hideous mess with this very secret instrument of reform.

Then I quoted Siey's famous but forgotten aphorism that you could not
be free until you were just; and how could the mass of men evolve
justice, which is the perfect balance of conflicting rights, every
right being perfect in itself, especially to the owner of the right;
so perfect, in fact, that it perpetually obscured the vision of any
other right? Of course, said he, nothing can ever bring about true
freedom except stark, undiluted, and omnipotent Christianity. This led
to our joint aphorism, for I certainly swear that I said it first:
Christianity has only failed where it has not been tried.[3] This
appeared a year or two afterwards on a wayside pulpit in Ashley Place,
Westminster, for he used it in a lay sermon in Lent at St. Paul's,
Covent Garden.

Before I quit the point, let me note that in _Ways and Crossways_,
Paul Claudel draws a wide distinction between ideal justice or Divine
Right, and material justice or commercial right, which has to be
commutative or give-and-take or else goods could never be exchanged in
fairness for money, but only bread for bread and shoes for shoes and
twenty shillings for a pound. That is merely ideal.

When I instanced that the mistakes and excesses of any form of
government could be capped with worse disorders by the people, he
would distinguish between the people at rest and the people driven
mad. And anyhow the people could repent, and did so, much oftener than
the kings. Besides, the people start from zero whereas their governors
have all the advantages to start with, and throw them away as they
go. Lord Acton says that history contains no instance of a man being
improved by power.

[Footnote 3: I remember pointing out how Christianity could never fail
since it began with the perfect failure of Jesus of Nazareth.]

All our reasons led to the one conclusion, that the business of Church
and State, the only business worthy of their efforts, was to aim at
making people fit to govern themselves. And what splendid things in
the process, even the failures could be! As for instance? says I: the
failure of Savonarola produced St. Philip Neri who reformed even Rome,
and Michelangelo, who built St. Peter's. Worse luck says I, for the
old St. Peter's was more interesting. Michael himself wept to see it
pulled down. Thus did we fill in the hours between lunch and tea. But
there were other fillings.

As, for instance, the need for authority. A mob is a mob, helpless and
useless without authority. If the authority comes from the mob, then
is the mob "an army straight with pride", which it never is.
Therefore, etc. But the mob may choose its rulers. It may, but does it
ever? In turbulent times the rulers are self-appointed. The mob thinks
it appoints them, but anyone who gets near enough to the seat of
power knows that intrinsic fitness is indispensable, and the ruler has
to rule by his own will and intelligence. Great men are often thrown
up to meet the occasion, but does not Revolution devour its own best
men first? I instanced the general contempt for the French National
Assembly when they got to voting themselves cloaks and plumes to
conceal their distressing incompetence, whereupon appeared Napoleon,
the First Consul.

All very fine, and quite true, says my Gilbert, but it does not kill
the case for Democracy. Because the people do not create authority;
that is from Above, with a big A, but they have the right, first and
last and all the time to say who shall hold that authority. They
cannot abolish the sovran Seat, but who shall sit in it is their
affair. Thus did we slake the ever-smouldering question, noting that
every uprising against authority, whatever be the pretext, results in
harder and heavier pressure on the people.

Therefore, as in Carlyle's best passage, true guidance in return for
loving obedience is properly, if he knew it, the prime want of man.
And the two arms of the Cross by which alone is salvation, are the
Obedience unto death, and regard for the poor.

Obedience is quite beyond reason, therefore it is of divine
revelation. Conversely the idolatry of freedom is the highest reach of
civilised reason and has made lunacy of all political systems. For it
is liberty of disintegration, the sacred right of starving to death,
as Carlyle calls it. Liberty is given us only to exchange for
something useful. So the Libertarian is merely a professional smasher
who loves to distraction the fun of beginning all over again.
Rebellion began all evil, it cannot begin all good, no matter how it
reasons. Therefore, God came on earth to do the most hopeless mad
thing, to teach us obedience by object-lesson. There is plenty of
authority to force us so long as swords are keen and swift or scourges
heavy. It is obedience that is scarce and has to be supplied from the
Infinite Obedience of the Divine Sonship.

The other arm of the Cross of Salvation is regard, consideration for
the Poor. It is the whole business of the new life to which we are
born of water and the Holy Ghost. No trouble in talking like this to
Gilbert, he was always ready and willing to give anything to anyone
according to his need and even more so, and especially regardless of
the needs of G. K. Chesterton.

Now the poor do not deserve all that consideration and assuredly will
never repay it. That is why they are poor. As we well-to-do people in
great things incalculable have need of the Infinite Compassion, so the
poor in millionfold small annoyances need our large consideration.
They cannot be taught to spend money wisely any more than a man can
swim until he has water. They are poor just because of their
abominable foolishness about money and goods of any kind. So our
superior prudence and wisdom are their sole resource. And our penury
towards them is their sole instruction and of this there is never any
lack. Except that the only Son of our common Father warns us that
excess of penury will more certainly than anything else in the
universe bring us to dwell with everlasting burnings. The just judge
gets quite vicious about this.

You cannot escape by leaving them things in your will. Your charity
must be as untiring as their childish wastefulness, to which there is
no bounds but the scarcity of things to waste from day to day.

These two arms of the Cross are the balance of the world below, and it
does suffer from nausea, does it not? That is, from lack of balance.
But we did agree that industrial disputes would never end so long as
dividends were the aim of industry; because wages also are a dividend,
and the work-man's two hands were his investment in the concern and
much more a part of him than my loose cash is of me. Anyhow, it is
monstrous to expect him to have higher ideals than mine in running the
concern. We both serve Mammon, and it is quite absurd to appeal to God
if we fall out.

But obedience unto death is the soldier's claim to everlasting life,
and is the political arm of the Cross; whilst care for the poor and
indulgence of their shortcomings is the Economic or Social arm of the
Cross.




X


It was round about this stage of our acquaintance that I began to be
solicitous that G.K. should cease to spread and dissipate his gifts on
daily papers, and begin to print on handmade paper with gilt edges. In
other words, to go in for Literature, as we understood it. In spite of
knowing all about the bitter cleavage between William Ernest Henley
and Robert Louis Stevenson on this very point, we small folk were
incorrigible. But the Great Man held on his rejoicing way, and his
wife intervened with a wisdom higher than ours. "You will not change
Gilbert, you will only fidget him. He is bent on being a jolly
journalist, to paint the town red, and he does not need style to do
that. All he wants is buckets and buckets of red paint."

As if to correct my tendency to gird at the democratic ideal, I was
compelled to narrate to him one of my "seizures", call it a wave of
intuition. He always seemed to welcome anything I thought fit to say,
more and more so as we met. I hope I did not presume on his large
hospitality of mind, which more and more delighted to entertain my
random remarks as I made them.

Once on a quiet evening in a Yorkshire village street, I had a sudden
vision of the PEOPLE, their immeasurable power in repose, their
endless patience, and how like the sea their serenity. With this the
dreadful folly of those who presume upon that patience, as also of the
insane pride of politicians who trouble that mighty rest for their own
personal fads, under whatever name they hide them. How all the storms,
all the movements failed to improve their lot in any of the ways
pretended, so that their only comfort was really the hope of Heaven:
So that whatever injures or destroys that hope is the inexpiable wrong
which brings calamity to all and sundry.

I remember that I began by saying lightly that none of us could be
great men but for our leaning upon the little ones; could not well
begin our day but for those who started theirs first for our sakes,
lighting the fire and cooking the breakfast. Hence the promised word
of final cheer: Well done, good and faithful servant, the high patent
of nobility, conferred by Him Who chose to serve through the Father
who had given all into His hands. And more to this effect.

_The Ballad of the White Horse_ was then on the stocks, and this was
the passage written that evening, between dressing-bell and dinner:


    And well may God with the serving-folk
    Cast in His dreadful lot.
    Is not He too a servant? And is not He forgot?

    Did not a great grey servant of all my sires and me
    Build this pavilion of the pines, and herd the fowls
       and fill the vines,
    And labour and pass and leave no signs save mercy and
       mystery?

    For God is a great servant, and rose before the day
    From some primordial slumber torn;
    But all we living, later born, sleep on and rise after the morn
    And the Lord has gone away.

    For who shall guess the good riddle, or speak of the Holiest
    Save in faint figures and failing words,
    Who loves, yet laughs among the swords; labours and is at rest?
    But some see God, like Guthrum,
    Crowned, with a great beard curled,
    But I see God like a good giant that labouring lifts the world.

    Wherefore was God on Golgotha slain as a serf is slain,
    And hate He had of prince and peer, and love He had, and made
       good cheer
    Of them that like this woman here go powerfully in pain.

        *    *    *    *    *

    ...But it seems to sing of a wilder worth,
    A time discrowned of death and birth,
    And the kingdom of the poor on earth come, as it is in heaven.

    But even though such days endure,
    How shall it profit her?
    Who shall go groaning to the grave with many a meek and mighty
       slave,
    Field-breaker and fisher on the wave, and woodman and waggoner.

    Bake ye the big world all again
    A cake with kinder leaven,
    Yet these are sorry evermore--
    Unless there be a little door,
    A little door in heaven.


These lines follow the section named The Harp of Alfred, which
contains some of the best lyric _thinking_ in all the literature known
to me. Wagner is a penny trumpet in this unique tournament of song, in
which the sensual Pagan, the poetic Pagan, the savage Pagan, and the
cultured Pagan say their say with music, before Alfred says the say of
Christian Fact. I wish I could claim any suggestions of mine as
occasioning such immortal lines, but the nearest I can remember is
that I made merry at the expense of My Lord Macaulay's phrase about
burying one's blighted love in the solitude of the cloister. If there
was one place where blighted love or anything of a blighted
description would go mouldy sooner than elsewhere, it would be the
cloister. It needs a strong and hopeful disposition to be anything but
a nuisance in the cloister.

I had still earlier held forth to him on my favourite seventeenth
chapter of St. John, the inmost shrine of revealed religion. Did this,
I wonder, result in a new verse?


    The meanest hind in grey fields gone
    Behind the set of sun
    Heareth between star and other star
    Through the doors of the darkness fallen ajar
    The Council eldest of things that are
    The talk of the Three in One.


"I have glorified Thy Name upon the earth: I have finished the work
which Thou gavest me to do.

"And now glorify Thou Me, O Father, with Thyself, with the glory which
I had before the world was, with Thee."

Only in the supreme moment of the Battle of Ethandune can I trace any
other moment of our intercourse. I did one day enlarge on the beauty,
as distinct from the accuracy, of the Latin Vulgate, how in lots of
passages it was as good as an original, as in the Psalm _Notus in
Judaea Deus_, hard to beat for sonorous music:


    The God that heweth kings in oak,
    Writeth songs on vellum,
    Confregit potentias
    Arcuum, scutum, Gorlias!
    Gladium et bellum.


I apologise for so much of the first person singular, but it was much
clearer to me than my share in Father Brown, that I had inspired or
suggested many things to Chesterton which he had taken up beyond my
best surmise. I was confused, and then transfused with sober delight,
when one July evening at Overroads, Beaconsfield, he put the whole MS.
of the Ballad into my hands, and Mrs. Chesterton explained that I was
to censor it, as so much of mine was in it. That, if I remember right,
was the great occasion on which I was presented to some jolly
undergraduates and to Miss Maisie Ward, as Father Brown; and dreaming
suspicion became waking certitude. They were thrilled with a few
quotations from the Ballad, and were among the first to read it in
print. I feel sure that it was the same set about a year afterwards,
that pointed out how Alfred's left wing faced Guthrum's left at the
Battle of Ethandune. How keen these young blades be! Many stray
Napoleons are doubtless yet about. I wonder how many eminent
strategists have discovered this? But as Chesterton had done it, he
could not be "fashed" to put it straight in a second edition.

The whole epic of Alfred began from a dream he had at Battersea. He
dreamed this verse (before Ethandune):


    People, if you have any prayers,
    Say prayers for me:
    And lay me under a Christian stone
    In that lost land I thought my own,
    To wait till the holy horn is blown,
    And all poor men are free.


A dainty thrill it was when one evening after tea at St. John's,
during the children's hour, his niece, Gertrude Monica Oldershaw, aged
six, and called _Wooz'l_ for short, stood between Uncle Gilbert's
knees to recite:


    The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap.


I am glad to recall the scene, small and brief and very quiet, because
it left a company of grown-ups moist-eyed and tongue-tied as at the
end of a mighty symphony.




XI


When he was doing his book on Shaw, we had an undress debate on Shaw,
at St. John's after tea one fine afternoon. Curious, that I can
remember where some of us sat in the central lounge. I wish I could as
well recall all that was said. We debated about the Plays Pleasant and
Unpleasant, Gilbert leading against Shaw. The feeling of the meeting
was that the Plays could not be among the Classics of Dramatic Art,
because they were Shaw's personal opinions and vigorously counter to
average sense or common experience in the main. We made an exception
of _Candida_, which is of immortal beauty, since the eternal Woman in
the end cuts all the knots with the Mother instinct. Thence we rambled
on to account for Shaw's sharp habit of putting right things wrong
amid so much setting wrong things right. All the Irish are
cantankerous about something, "same as the English", said the Irish
present. But Shaw more than most, because he was a Protestant in
Ireland, bred in contrary environment and born in opposition. So that
his mental vision was impaired or crooked or squinty. Strenuous
protest was registered by a dear old retired colonel who disclaimed
all this on behalf of Irish Protestants of whom he himself was one.
What charming Irishmen Protestants can be is well seen from the case
of Samuel Lover. Even if he invented the Stage Irishman, Dan O'Connell
patented him. But it is treated at length in the book on George
Bernard Shaw, which made them fast friends ever after. And those who
have known Shaw intimately are agreed in his own idiom that "he isn't
half sich a blaggard as he wants to let on". This after thirty years'
trial. But in the book it is all worked out exquisitely (1910 _c_.) on
pages 39 _et seqq_.

Nearer to 1930 than to 1910 it was my good luck to listen to a week of
Shavian Drama, and to be much persuaded of the perfect ear of Shaw for
the spoken word. It appeared to me that he could "get away" with
almost anything by sheer beauty of diction. About one week later I
came upon an amateur performance of Chesterton's _Magic_ and was
startled to find his dialogue even better than Shaw's. At Beaconsfield
in the autumn of that year I told Chesterton my findings. "Strange you
should say it," quoth he; "Shaw has been telling me the same thing,
urging me to go in for play-writing. He says I could do it so much
better than himself."

He was, at the time of those words, engaged on a new kind of play, and
one half was laid out, he told me. The first part a "Costume
Melodrama" in which all the characters do what the author intended
them to do. Then a Franciscan speaks an interlude, introducing the
same play but with every character having a will of his own. It was to
be a super-Pirandello. But only his literary executor now can tell us
if it came to anything.




XII


His intuition was so great and clear that it is well for us all that
his good nature and goodwill to everything human has been greater
still. Of our talks on spiritism and kindred subjects I shall speak
presently. This seems the right moment to recall the incident in
_Magic_ where the red lamp changes colour. A lady from Switzerland who
had never read a line of Chesterton and certainly never had heard of
the play, told me in 1919 (_Magic_ ran for three weeks in March, 1914)
that she in her own home had seen a stranger blow out the electric
light! He had done it to prove his powers, powers which put her back
up completely. He was the head of the German Secret Service among
neutrals, I understood her to say, and handed round little pictures
like postcards in which all the figures moved about! I say the tale as
'twas said to me. I certainly recognised his description in the daily
press at the time of his death.

I had always been a hater of sham ghost stories and a collector of
real ones, noting how untrue stories give themselves away, whereas
true stories do not vary very much, but keep the rules of the
spirit-world. Even lawless spirits cannot vary their antics very much,
being restricted, for demonstration purposes, to rapid transport and
quick transit. So that if the elect can only keep their heads, they
are not taken in. It is even possible to cow false spirits by superior
will and courage, so that they cease to perform. All these points and
more we used to discuss together at length. How Sir Walter Scott
picked up some correct details from his perusal of ancient chronicles,
e.g. describing Michael Scott in his tomb at Melrose:


    High and majestic was his look
    At which the fellest fiends had shook, etc.


This and many another "natural law of the Spirit World" have been
verified by the Psychical Research Society, but our grandmothers could
have told us, if we had not been busy ignoring evidence. William
Crookes and Andrew Wilson had done their scientific best with mediums
and manifestations, and Godfrey Raupert had given invaluable
testimony from the very inside, when Gilbert came to lunch with me at
Heckmondwike in the May of 1911. I chanced to mention that the Sacred
Congregation of Rites had just condemned the use of the Planchette,
after forty years of carefully weighing the evidence. He told me then
how he had used the Planchette freely at one time, but had had to give
it up on account of headaches ensuing. "Were they in front of the head
or at the back?" said I. "At the back," said he. "But after the
headaches, came a horrid feeling as if one were trying to get over a
very bad spree, with what I can best describe as a bad smell in the
mind."

"The beginning of despair," I diagnosed. "The demon tries to get at
the grey matter of the brain, so you have to be passive as the first
condition of producing 'phenomena', and this passivity has long been
discountenanced by the Church even in the prayer of quiet. We must
never abandon our will to an unknown power, because there can be no
guarantee that the power is beneficent, and, besides, God has given us
ourselves in the will, and to give ourselves away to any but Him is
the beginning of the reprobate choice. I think it mechanistic
theology, the old teaching (never formal, but common in bad sermons),
that there is for everyone a last grievous sin which settles our
eternal fate, as in Judas' case. But perpend: Judas began very much
further back than that to prepare his final choice. So that it is on
the whole balance of good and evil in a man's career that his eternal
destiny depends."

An Italian waiter in London once, in a slack hour after luncheon,
opened with me a discussion on a point which he said mystified him
very much: Did the balance of good and evil in the world always remain
much the same, or did the world have a swing of the pendulum from good
to ill and back? I gave it as my opinion that the balance must be
generally equal, but that the Smart Set sometimes made evil
fashionable. Hence, woe to the rich! Because no matter how ill-behaved
are the poor, they have not time to gloat on evil nor to preach it,
whereas the rich----

This, of course, was duly reported to Chesterton, in the hope of
provoking discussion. But we agreed so perfectly that we could only
confirm each other in our persuasions.

On another occasion we were together in the drawing-room at St. John's
very snugly after tea when I started to orate about the _Messe Noire_,
its history, its favourite haunt and so on, from Huysmans, Mrs. Hugh
Frazer and others, with footnotes about Alister Crowley and Satanism.
Our hostess was doing needlework in a chair by the fire. "Now that is
most interesting," said she, all of a sudden. "We had a Satanist here
to tea three weeks ago. She had been to Bradford in search of likely
candidates, had found one, and was taking her to Bristol to be
trained, I suppose." Sensation. G.K. and I were most eager to hear
more, but the lady had told us all she knew.




XIII


We conversed on all these things more than once, they were staple
topics, and therefore better remembered, but there was one evening of
autumn in Ilkley when Gilbert and his wife were in rooms and we sat in
the open window whilst Mrs. Chesterton sang _O Swallow! Swallow!
flying, flying South_, from _The Princess_; while Gilbert with his
crayons "did a blazon" for the Purity League. That is, he made a
projection of arms, whether such be known to the Herald's College or
not. The attic of St. John's was all storied by the coloured chalks of
G.K.C., being beautifully accessible and cosy on wet mornings, but the
later tenants preferred naked elegance and white-washed wall.

We had a real Penny Gaff in Heckmondwike, and I sent him the playbills
thereof. _The Lady in Red, or the Power of a Mother's Love_, came back
to me as the Lady in Bed, or the Power of Mrs. Eddy's Love. _The
Shaughraun_ was altered to the Shaw Grin. Both plays were done in a
tent, next to John Murphy's CAVIOLIPHONE. Even Chesterton could never
improve on that.

He ran a toy theatre and wrote plays and cut out figures for it, and
this became so popular at one time, especially with children of any
age, that Mrs. Chesterton bought ground across the road from
Overroads, and built a brick-and-timber studio for the enlarged
audiences. We acted charades there after the toy theatre had been
given up. I never saw any of his puppet-plays, but I was Canon
Crosskeys in a charade, which was so simple that when I said the word
Belfry in my speech at the Parochial Meeting, the whole audience
shouted the word after me. The rival company did one on Torture, which
nobody guessed, especially as _Ure_ was pronounced _Yaw_ in the best
Southern manner. (Do the English hear themselves any better than they
see themselves?) Miss Lily Yeats, sister of the poet, was of the
company that time.

The evening waxed late, and I offered my arm to Gilbert going over to
the house, but he refused it with a finality foreign to our
friendship. So I went on ahead. As I entered the house ten yards in
front, he fell over a tree-pot at the corner, and broke his arm at
11.45 p.m. Six weeks in bed was the result. It was then he composed
several comic operas in the style (more or less) of his great
namesake. One was on Christian Science:


    'Tis a pale old world, a stale old world
      And it must renew its youth:
    So don't coddle up, but toddle up
      And tumble to the truth.


Very early he made up a comic opera out of the P.N.E.U. of which Mrs.
Chesterton was secretary. All the characters are real, and Mrs.
Steinthal, at a crisis in the action (not the outcome of crowded
intrigue or violence) distributes Floyd knives to all the children,
enjoining them not to carve their aunts or their little sisters,
but--if the parents fail to disappoint--imbrue the weapons in the
parents' gore.

This is a random sample from yards of merry doggerel. The lines which
he omits from his song on the Christian Social Union at Nottingham, I
am able to replace, as I took them down from his own lips. He observed
from the platform the stolid demeanour of the audience, and as he put
it, they looked like banks of oysters. So he did what he called a
subjective impression of the average Notts man.


    The Christian Social Union here are very much annoyed:
    It seems there are some duties which we never should avoid:
    And so they sing a lot of hymns to help the unemployed.

        *    *    *    *    *

    Then Canon Holland fired ahead like fifty cannons firing, etc.
    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.


These are the lines suppressed in the _Autobiography_.

In due course a house was built on to the studio, and the stage of the
studio is now the dining-room, curtained off from the body of the
hall, which is lounge, drawing-room and reception-room and library all
in one, the musicians' gallery being used to store translations of
his works and books of no immediate use or interest, or review copies
amongst which I browsed or battened (taking away what I thought worth
while). Under the musicians' gallery is the old entrance to the
studio, leading straight to the den, which has access to the garden or
to the road, so that Gilbert could wander out in search of the _mot
juste_ without being detained and distracted in the lounge. At
Battersea, Mrs. Chesterton had a tariff for proof-reading and general
first-aid in composition. A halfpenny a comma, or such minor detail, a
penny a correction, and twopence the _mot juste_. If it was a blazing
brilliant _mot juste_ she got sixpence, I think. As for rhymes in
ballades, he had them all thought out first, as a general rule. "Like
a sonnet, only more so," he said.

On one side of the lounge is an open hearth, and facing it is a wide
window beginning very low down, with a window-seat, the "summer
hearth" in opposition to the winter hearth. A side-table for Gilbert's
cigars, of which he was reasonably fond, as he did not smoke a pipe,
and cigarettes were prone to set him on fire in one place or another.
Matches were there too when he hadn't put them where they could never
be found again. I got a paragraph in print once for noticing that he
had put our only box behind a vase on the very high mantelshelf. It
saved us from mobilising the kitchen round about ten at night. Such
things on my part aroused his never very latent sense of wonder. I
related, with a forlorn hope of his improvement, how I once set my
room with fourteen ash-trays for eleven cigarette-smokers, and how
every one of the eleven, at one stage or another, jeopardised the
discussion by wandering all round the room looking for _the_ ash-tray,
and not finding, put the ashes into the gas-stove and threw butts and
match-ends into the fender. But his sense of wonder was enough for him
to the end. He tells in the _Autobiography_ how his mental life began
with that same sense, the miracle of seeing things for the first time,
which makes all other miracles more than credible. So there entered
Heaven, Chesterton the child, as was so truly said of him by the
author of his premature epitaph.




XIV


I think it was in the late spring of 1912 that we both took part in
the Ladies' Debating Society at Leeds. He led the discussion: that all
wars were religious wars. This at the time was one of his
commonplaces, but not so evident to me. I held that the worst wars
were religious wars because of the _odium theologicum_ being the most
inveterate of animosities. I could not see the religious motive in
some of them, though I had to admit that wars about trade or territory
were religious too, waged by the worshippers of Mammon, who were quite
fanatically religious, as far as that religion went. At the end of
this discriminating support, I, with a kind of remorse, rallied to him
with the age-long resistance of the Popes to the Grand Turk; how Pius
II died at Ancona after reviewing the combined fleets of Christendom,
which thereupon did nothing for a century. (The silver crown-piece
minted in honour of the occasion, is one of the greatest rarities for
coin-collectors, the Vatican had only one until 1922, when a better
one, bought in London, was presented by a friend of mine).

I told of Lepanto, how Philip the Second of Spain had been assembling
his Armada to invade England, and could only spare two ships to face
the hundred galleys of the Porte; and how Don John of Austria, the
only commander under whom Genoa would agree with Venice, burst the
battle-line on a sinking ship, after fighting through all the hours of
daylight. And the story of the Pope's prayer all that day, and his
vision of the crisis of the action at three in the afternoon, with his
vision of the victory about the time of the Angelus. Thus, I take it,
came Chesterton to write the incomparable _Ballad of Lepanto_. It was
the week of the anniversary, and it came out on the date, October 7th.
But he finished it with the postman pawing the ground downstairs
saying he had but ten minutes to get it with his mail to the train. I
had a piece of foolscap to wrap something in a month or two later,
and it was blank except for a line at the top in the well-known hand:

The Pope is bent and praying like a man beneath the yoke.

This was discarded for:


    The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke.
    (_Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke._)


On the way home I got fierce about what trash it made of English
history, and what rubbish we talked and sang of Nelson and Trafalgar.
What was at stake at Trafalgar? Only the Industrial Revolution and the
Financial Supremacy of the City of London, with child-labour and
Gin-Palaces, only one small department of the gilded manure-heap
called Modern Progress.

He interrupted me--we were alone in the train going back to Ilkley--by
telling me he had made up his mind to be received into the Church and
was only waiting for Frances to come with him, as she had led him into
the Anglican Church out of Unitarianism. "Because I think I have known
intimately by now all the best kinds of Anglicanism, and I find them
only a pale imitation." I was thrilled, naturally, but not surprised.
The surprise always had been at his natural affinity for all those
things for which Catholics are persecuted or brow-beaten. I found
during those years of intercourse preceding that night that, whatever
he believed, he had rejected before I knew him all the slanders, and
had unravelled for himself all the misrepresentations.

I hope this narrative has so far made it clear that I never attacked
the Anglican position. I can do so and have done it often enough, but
it is a sovran principle with me to strengthen what faith I find in a
man, and not to weaken it. That is too greatly daring. And I recognise
the truth of Mark Twain's aphorism, that true reverence never derides
what other people revere. This is only to say that truth is but a
nuisance without charity. We had often agreed about, and pointed out
to each other, the phenomenon that some people can make any truth look
like the most damnable or odious falsehood. For this reason, sensing
Chesterton's unique gift, I had always tried to give him only my own
best findings, and not the opinions of others, least of all, their
statements of opinion. I may have held forth on Newman's ideas, but I
have no recollection, except on the Development of Doctrine, which I
discovered for myself and have dearly cherished since the summer of
1892. This I must have dragged in often in illustration or
explanation, and a few flashes from St. Thomas Aquinas, though he was
a long-dead friend of my youth. One thing I know I was strong about:
the utter necessity of certitude. Because one cannot fight to the
death for what is susceptible of doubt, and fighting to the death
means resisting any temptation, for this is the daily death of self.
Ethics? There are no ethics without dogmatics and there's an end. He
was much tickled with this, as his early adventures among ethical
societies had left him still chuckling. More detail on this is found
in the _Autobiography_, but I can still hear his treble laughter as he
told me his experiences.




XV


I feel bound to set down here one of the matters which arose between
us out of my impish urge to tilt at his devotion to democracy. This
was a kind of mystic passion, an insight in him which I well
understood from his early poem:


    Lo! I am come to Autumn
    When all the leaves are gold:
    Grey hair and golden leaves cry out
    This year and I are old.

    But now a great thing in the street
    Seems any human nod,
    Where shift in strange democracy
    The million masks of God.


He goes on to hint that he had been saved from the cult of the
Superman, about which Nietzsche had done a book or books, and which
Shaw had done or was about to do into a play, preparing the way for
those Dictators which have become a common aspiration, to say nothing
of execration. I put it to him that Democracy lent itself and was
lending itself to exasperation by agitators, and how this had got into
the very blood of the peoples, and was like a fever, which made it
next door to impossible that the patient should survive the number of
rousing political wines which were the only treatment he was getting.
To this he could only reply that the people would have to cultivate
their sense of the ridiculous. But they do not understand satire, I
said. And but for Belloc, the English people would not be getting any
to understand. This led him up the garden walk into an admiring
dissertation on the powers of Belloc. I pointed out how his power was
spent in vain, just as Matthew Arnold's had been in _A Friendship's
Garland_. So he wrote in the Press about the importance of satire, and
the fewness of its adepts, and Belloc replied, and the two of them
agreed that the spirit of the age was impervious to satire.
Conclusion: one can only hope for a change in the Spirit of the Age.
However it remains that Chesterton did as much to glorify the sense of
the ridiculous as any writer of his time. To the decadents announcing
that "Life is too important to be taken seriously", Chesterton made
answer: "Man is so responsible that to bear life at all gracefully and
well, a sense of humour is the next best thing to the grace of God.
Solemnity is only one remove from hypocrisy". Among others he loved
Susan Mitchell, as do I, and he had great comfort of her delicious
Irish humour so pointed with wit. He had a theory not easy to
understand as first presented, that God invented laughter to free the
human soul, and in his young violent period he wrote a poem on the
subject: how it is an arcane thing, and how Jesus Christ, spending the
night in prayer to God, must have used laughter in His communing with
His Father. This seemed to me rather callow, as it is possible to be
above laughter as well as beside it, and I have not seen the poem
reprinted anywhere. However, he fell back on the irony of God in the
Old Testament, and the flashing irony of our Lord in some of His
exchanges with the Scribes. In Chesterton's essay on Carlyle he points
out how Carlyle brought back from the Old Testament the idea of Divine
irony in all history. Which is a bigger thing to say of Carlyle than
any of his other admirers, so far as I am aware, have been able to
attribute.

I do not refer to his Carlyle of the Twelve Types, but to a later
essay for the _Bookman_, copiously illustrated.

It must have been in the days of the Scotch terrier called Winkle (in
verse, Quoodle), before the building of Top Meadow, that Mrs.
Chesterton and I on a bright morning, coming back from a small
shopping-trip to the village, suddenly saw Gilbert at his largest, on
all fours on top of the pergola, peering down through the creepers.
Whereas we had left him "sending articles to hell", as he called his
life-long pursuits. With outcry I rushed to the rescue, but Mrs.
Chesterton was quite cool, calling me back with: "Don't worry, I had
the pergola very strongly built in anticipation of Gilbert's antics."

Another time, being run down for the afternoon from London, and
sincerely pressed to stay, I was accommodated with Gilbert's pyjamas.
They went twice round me, exactly. Ought one to suppress a detail of
this sort? Not according to modern custom. Be the stream of
consciousness never so turbid, no one has any use for a strainer.
Chesterton once lectured in the Aula Maxima at Leeds University on:
What is the matter with the Drama? Only that it is not dramatic. It is
evolutionary. The characters are all possessed of private means, and
not having to work for a living, they stay on the stage all the time,
boring one another to tears, and there is a triangle, isosceles or
equilateral, and sometimes one triangle inside another, and they keep
on jarring until they get divorced and live happy ever after. This,
besides being the very opposite to the old drama which had a something
to make for, aids in the annihilation of interest and even of thought,
and fails of all object whatsoever, and is thoroughly inhuman. Whereas
drama was invented to show how every man comes to a crisis in which he
makes a free choice for good or ill, and the audience, allowed to
suspect the tendencies, are held to watch how they work themselves
out, teleology being the second deepest of all human instincts,
causality being the deepest.

We had in our talks, often recurred to the fact that the great Drama
of the Heathen was a demonstration of Blind Unpitying Fate, whereas
Christianity had based its drama on the great and difficult fact of
Responsibility, arising from the Freedom of the Will. But modern Drama
portrayed people as doing what they liked, and as nothing is so
abysmally boring, it was decaying whilst it grew. Dried blossoms,
empty fruits. If one thing is as good as another, where is the use of
selection?




XVI


In the last month of 1914 Chesterton collapsed utterly. He had been
writing pamphlets at Government suggestion and at high pressure, as
for instance _The Crimes of England_, which were translated into
several European languages, and was exhausted beyond recovery. He got
what can only be described as gout all over. Brain, stomach, lungs
were affected, and he was ten weeks unconscious, and had to be kept
so, since the doctor said that a shock of recognition might destroy
the brain. After a miracle of patient and watchful treatment, he
recovered and I went to see him at Easter, when I noted that his
clothes fitted him where they touched, but he looked fifteen years
younger. In January, 1915, Mrs. Wilfrid Ward telegraphed to me that he
was _in extremis_, and would I go to him. I went and met her at the
Ladies' Club in London, and thence went that afternoon to
Beaconsfield, prepared to give him the last rites, on the strength of
what he had said to me nearly three years before. But his wife
explained to me that part of the treatment, which was so strict that
she alone could enter the sick-room. A total stranger might make no
difference, but his mother was only allowed to peep at him from over
the bed-rail when it was certain that he slept. Then I told her why I
had wished to see him, the talk in the train in 1912. She gave a long
half-amused cry: "So that is what Gilbert meant by all the dark hints
about being buried in Kensal Green, and so on. I never could make head
or tail. I suppose he wanted to put it to me straightforwardly, but
couldn't bring himself to the crisis. It's just like him." Of course
he was dying to influence her to his way of thinking, and that was all
the form it took. As he could not go anywhere without her, he still
more shrank from leaving for good the spiritual home of the Church of
England, where she had made him so comfortable. So I left as I had
come. After Easter, when I saw him again, nothing was said by either
of them, and I left it at that.

But his secretary, Miss Nellie Allport, sat with us and entertained us
with her adventures in novel-writing for the _Family Herald_. How once
in a way she wrote of low life and the villain got drowned in the
duck-pond, but the editor told her it would not do at all. So it had
to be persons of title as before, with the villain drowning himself in
the ornamental water of the Ducal Seat, the splash being unheard
because the string band was playing for dinner. Chesterton was
moralising and chuckling in his old form, and we wandered on to
haunted houses, when Miss Allport told us her own experience. She had
been trained by her father in dialectical materialism and was a
disciple of Herbert Spencer if anything. A respectable and reverent
Agnostic, but impervious to the unseen. But not entirely, after her
adventure. She had got a really handy and suitable flat near the
British Museum, so cheap that there must have been a catch in it. When
she moved in, on the first day she thought she was followed from the
door, and when she sat down to write or read, she could not get away
from the feeling that someone was looking over her shoulder. But like
a good Spencerian, she made light of this more or less subjective
hallucination. However, that night, just as she was sinking into
slumber, a frightful bang resounded on the outer door of the flat.
Shaken with indignation she got up and opened the door, looking high
and low and even going some way up and down the stairway to discover
the author of the outrage. Nobody was about and all was still and
lonesome. As she was sinking to sleep again the same thing happened
without any agency being discoverable. Again a third time. Sleep being
then out of the question she made tea and sat up all night. In the
morning, at Beaconsfield, Chesterton noticed her haggard appearance,
and she told him all about it. "You must have a Crucifix on that
door," he said. That afternoon he went to London with her and at Burns
and Oates's in Baker Street, bought her a one-and-sixpenny crucifix,
instructing her to nail it on the inside of the door. She was no more
molested in any way, she said, and was still residing in the flat at
the time of speaking.

_Here is a sequence of extracts from letters which Mrs. Chesterton
wrote, all during his illness:_


     Oct. 16th, 1914. "Appallingly busy, no time for
     anything. Doing a lot of Government stuff which is most
     wearing and difficult. The _New Witness_ must keep its
     end up whilst Cecil is in the trenches."

     Nov. 25th. "You must pray for him. He is seriously ill
     and I have two nurses. It is mostly heart-trouble, but
     there are complications. He is quite his normal self,
     as to head and brain, and he even dictates and reads a
     great deal."

     Dec. 29th, 1914. "Gilbert had a bad relapse on
     Christmas Eve, and now is being desperately ill. He is
     not often conscious, and is so weak--I feel he might
     ask for you--if so I shall wire. Dr. is still hopeful,
     but I feel in despair."

     Jan. 3rd, 1915. "If you came he would not know you, and
     this condition may last some time. The brain is
     dormant, and must be kept so. If he is sufficiently
     conscious at moment to understand, I will ask him to
     let you come--or will send on my own responsibility.
     Pray for his soul and mine."

     Jan. 7th, 1915. "Gilbert seemed decidedly clearer
     yesterday, and though not quite so well to-day the
     doctor says he has reason to hope the mental trouble is
     working off. His heart is stronger, and he is able to
     take plenty of nourishment. Under the circumstances
     therefore I am hoping and praying he may soon be
     sufficiently himself to tell us what he wants done. I
     am dreadfully unhappy at not knowing how he would wish
     me to act. His parents would never forgive me if I
     acted only on my own authority. I do pray to God He
     will restore him to himself that we may know. I feel in
     His mercy He will, even if death is the end of it--or
     the beginning shall I say?"

     Jan. 9th (postcard). "There has been quite distinct
     improvement and awaking the last three days--we hope
     the recovery may move much more rapidly now, but we may
     do nothing to hasten the brain or make any suggestions.
     He is sleeping a great deal."

     Jan. 12th, 1915. "He is really better I believe and by
     the mercy of God I dare hope he is to be restored to
     us. Physically he is stronger, and the brain is
     beginning to work normally, and soon I trust we shall
     be able to ask him his wishes with regard to the
     Church. I am so thankful to think that we can get at
     his desire."

     Jan. 18th, 1915. "Gilbert has improved yesterday and
     again to-day, after having been at a standstill for a
     week. He _asked_ for me to-day, which is a great
     advance. He is dreadfully weak, but the brain-clouds
     are clearing, though the doctors won't allow him to
     make the slightest effort to think. Please God he will
     recover normally--and I can only abide in His patience.
     I will let you know of his welfare as often as I can."

     Jan. 29th, 1915. "Gilbert moves very slowly, but so far
     forward, though progress is almost inappreciable, as
     seen day by day. We can only pray that nothing may
     hinder the return to complete consciousness, and the
     doctor says all will come right, but it will need
     infinite patience--I will let you know if there is any
     change."

     March 15th, 1915. "Things are going on satisfactorily
     with Gilbert though very very slowly. He has to be kept
     very quiet, as he is easily upset, and that affects his
     heart. He is gradually clearing and is realising his
     surroundings. He said to me yesterday, "Did you think I
     was going to die?" I said, "I feared it at one time,
     but now you are to live." He said, "Does Father
     O'Connor know?" and I said, "Yes." He then wandered off
     again into something else. I thought you would like to
     know he had been and was evidently thinking of you.

     "The doctor has no doubt that before very long he will
     be quite normal, though it is impossible to foretell
     how long it will take. So, dear Padre, he needs your
     prayers still. So do I."

     Easter Eve, 1915. "All goes well here, though still
     very very slowly--G's mind is gradually clearing, but
     it is still difficult to him to distinguish between the
     real and the unreal. I am quite sure he will soon be
     able to think and act for himself, but I dare not hurry
     matters at all. I have told him I am writing to you
     often and he said, 'That is right--I'll see him soon. I
     want to talk to him.' He wanders at times, but the
     clear intervals are longer. He repeated the Creed last
     night, this time in English.

     "I feel I understand something of the significance the
     resurrection of the body when I see him just
     consciously laying hold of life again."

     Many prayers were said for him up and down the country
     by Catholics, who in some mysterious way recognised his
     claim on them. At Hawkesyard, in 1916, Father Vincent
     McNabb pointed out to me an old lay-brother, gnarled
     and bronzed, the very breed for Ghirlandajo. "I don't
     know where he got it, he doesn't read Chesterton; but
     he never missed saying the whole Rosary for him every
     day of this illness."

    *    *    *    *    *

We agreed so perfectly in our admiration of Mark Twain as a humourist
and as a writer, that all one needs to say here is that I could add
nothing to Gilbert's store except a reference to Buck Fanshaw's
funeral, and a few aphorisms from Puddn-head Wilson's Moral Calendar.
As for instance: Let us be careful to gather from our experiences only
such wisdom as they happen to contain. For instance, a cat that has
once sat down on a hot stove-lid will never do so any more, but
neither will she sit down upon a cold one.

In a first edition of _Orthodoxy_, John Lane, MCMIX, I find on the
fly-leaf after an inscription by the author, the following quotation:
"When throwing a waste-paper basket over the head of a virtuous and
clear-minded pontiff, it is unnecessary to inscribe many explanatory
words upon porcelain.

     Later works of Kai Lung
        Unpublished."

This testifies to the influence of that immortal work _The Wallet of
Kai Lung_ upon Chesterton and his less-known contemporaries. It was
about 1900 that Robert Hudson introduced the book to all those friends
who were within call, for he was a fellow-villager with the author,
Ernest Bramah, whose real name was Smith. Lord Rosebery, Augustine
Birrell, Charles Gatty, George Wyndham, and many more, had many
pleasant thrills from the _Wallet_. It was such a school of style
without tears, that folk would amuse themselves with imitating the
diction. Ordinary proverbs and commonplace episodes were couched in
the Chinese literary manner so very painfully that one could spend
wet afternoons undeciphering them. "There's many a slip 'twixt the cup
and the lip" would be rendered; "Beware lest when about to embrace the
sublime Emperor, you tread upon the elusive banana-peel." And
_chercher midi  quatorze heures_ is translated: "It is a mark of
insincerity of purpose to look for the sublime Emperor among the
low-class tea-shops." But not even Chesterton could recapture the
fresh inventions of that unique work. Even the author himself, when at
last induced to repeat the experiment, failed to carry it out, except
in places, with that glee of primal inspiration for which it stands
alone. Like Mozart, it has a great future before it yet.




XVII


We once compared notes on the scarcity of courage amongst hangmen, and
from this we got on to the mystical military fact, ignored only by
incompetent generals, that once a soldier loots or murders, his
military value peters out. Nor must he be muddled with police or given
their work to do, as occurred during the deathly incompetence of the
eighties in Ireland when General Buller openly refused to let his men
guard the violence of evictions. The sword has a sacredness which
deserts it as soon as it is turned against the inoffensive. Military
men know this by instinct, unless they are in the army for social
standing only, i.e. for purely decorative purposes. It pleased Gilbert
immensely and seemed to tune him up when he got occasion to air his
admiration of the true soldier, to point out that all the soldier's
glory lay not in his weapons, but in the enemy's; that he was not
mighty to kill, but ready to give his life. He was never what is
called a Pacifist, though always a man of peace, and he especially
delighted in the Church's settlement of the vexed question: that a man
may justly be exempted from military service if he have first and
foremost given up those things for which men are wont to fight:
Wealth, Wife, Will. In other words, those who take the three Vows of
Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience have the right to be always
non-combatant. They did not all use this right in France, even Bishops
came across the world to join up in 1914. This is decidedly a stretch
and even Quixotic, but then Conscription is a return of Pagan Csarism
and has by no means called forth that resistance which the Church of
the Fathers successfully made to the Lord of the World. In all such
considerations I was first to remark on those freaks of Christian
Polity; he hung back as not presuming to lay hands on the Ark.

For the same reason, it would appear, he never undertook the book on
Savonarola which I often encouraged him to begin. I think he read up
a little for it somewhere in the past ten years, but he found it too
involved in both events and principles to afford him that clear
inspiration in which his soul could free itself. As in the Savonarola
Essay in _Twelve Types_. He had nothing to go upon then except George
Eliot's report of a report about the burning of the vanities. No works
of art were sacrificed, only wigs and masks and loan robes, and Sandro
Botticelli was there to replace any paintings, but no paintings were
given up. Savonarola was a Catholic Reformer, not a Puritan enemy of
stained glass. Chesterton most wonderfully concentrates on his real
motive for stirring up Florence: Civilisation had got to the point of
self-adoration, and the Medici, artistic pawn-brokers, professional
usurers, were its riders as well as its type, beggars on horseback,
riding to hell. In such a world, new things would soon grow old, and
old things could never be renewed, and this Savonarola saw with the
penetration of genius, as Chesterton is quick to point out. But the
political aims of Pope Alexander the Sixth, which envenomed his
hostility to the Friar, and put him on the wrong side for all time;
the details of the excommunication which made it uncanonical and
invalid apart from its purely secular motives, these were unknown to
Gilbert at the outset, and later on deterred him from specialising in
Church history. So one of the few satisfactory books for the many on
the great and deeply-injured Prior of San Marco, has failed to come
our way. I told him how Villari had solved the problem of Fra
Girolamo's alleged contumacy as no one else had dreamt. But Gilbert
was busy with _The Everlasting Man_ just then, and could not see his
way clear.




XVIII


I begged him to write in my copy of _The Ballad of the White Horse_,
and thought he was taking a long time. It seems now time well spent.

_To Father O'Connor--G. K. Chesterton_


    The scratching pen, the aching tooth,
    The Plea for Higher Unity,
    The aged buck, the earnest youth,
    The Missing Link, the Busy Bee,
    The Superman, the Third Degree
    Are things that I should greatly like
    To take and sling quite suddenly
    As far as Heaven from Heckmondwike.

    As far as Hood is from Fitzooth,
    As far as seraphs from a flea,
    As far as Campbell from the truth,
    Or old Bohemia from the sea,
    Or Shakespeare from Sir Herbert Tree
    Or Nathan from an Arab sheik,
    Or most of us from  s. d.
    As far as Heaven from Heckmondwike.

    As far as actresses from youth,
    As far, as far as lunch from tea,
    As far as Horton from Maynooth,
    As far as Paris from Paree;
    As far as Hawke is from a gee,
    Or I am from an old high bike,
    As far as Stead from sanity,
    As far as Heaven from Heckmondwike.

    _Envoi_

    Prince, Cardinal that is to be,
    Cardinals do not go on strike
    I'm far from wishing it (D.V.)
    As far as Heaven from Heckmondwike.


In Kensington High Street I stood myself a copy of _The Ball and the
Cross_, just out, and took it on with me to Beaconsfield to be
inscribed. He was ten minutes late for lunch, but he brought down the
book inscribed as follows (it had a bright orange dust-jacket):


    This is a book I do not like,
    Take it away to Heckmondwike,
    A lurid exile, lost and sad
    To punish it for being bad.
    You need not take it from the shelf
    (I tried to read it once myself:
    The speeches jerk, the chapters sprawl,
    The story makes no sense at all)
    Hide it your Yorkshire moors among
    Where no man speaks the English tongue.

    Hail Heckmondwike! Successful spot!
    Saved from the Latin's festering lot,
    Where Horton and where Hocking see
    The grace of Heaven, Prosperity.
    Above the chimneys, hung and bowed
    A pillar of most solid cloud;
    To starved oppressed Italian eyes,
    The place would seem a Paradise,
    And many a man from Como Lake,
    And many a Tyrolese would take
    (If priests allowed them what they like)
    Their holidays in Heckmondwike.

    The Belgian with his bankrupt woes,
    Who through deserted Brussels goes,
    The hind that threads those ruins bare
    Where Munich and where Milan were--
    Hears owls and wolves howl like Gehenna
    In the best quarters of Vienna,
    Murmurs in tears, "Ah, how unlike
    The happiness of Heckmondwike!"

    In Spain the sad guitar they strike,
    And, yearning, sing of Heckmondwike;
    The Papal Guard leans on his pike
    And dreams he is in Heckmondwike.
    Peru's proud horsemen long to bike
    But for one hour in Heckmondwike;
    Offered a Land Bill, Pat and Mike
    Cry: "Give us stones!--in Heckmondwike!"
    Bavarian Bier is good, belike:
    But try the gin of Heckmondwike.
    The Flamands drown in ditch and dyke
    Their itch to be in Heckmondwike:
    Rise, Freedom, with the sword to strike!
    And turn the world to Heckmondwike.

    Take then this book I do not like--
    It may improve in Heckmondwike.
                          G. K. CHESTERTON.

He had just been reading a shilling pamphlet by Dr. Horton on the
Roman Menace or some such fearful wild fowl. I know he had read it,
because no one else could when he had done. Most of his books, as and
when read, had gone through every indignity a book may suffer and
live. He turned it inside out, dog-eared it, pencilled it, sat on it,
took it to bed and rolled on it, and got up again and spilled tea on
it--if he were sufficiently interested. So Dr. Horton's pamphlet had a
refuted look when I saw it.




XIX


There is one more dedication-poem inscribed in _The Secret of Father
Brown_, 1927. But first let us register remorse. I stayed up too long
with him, despite some plain tips from Mrs. Chesterton. His best time
of all for his own best work or _prep_ as he might call it, was from
ten until midnight. Some half of this I wasted. He loved to sip a
glass of wine and to stroll between sips in and out of his study,
brooding and jotting, and then the dictation was ready for the
morning. Perhaps I wasted a whole afternoon once under his cherry
tree, chewing windfalls and pumping Christmas carol tunes into him,
when the craze was acute. That he never minded, but it was mortgaging
his creative work to rob him of his bedtime ruminations. The fact that
he could, in his last decade, enjoy music, may have killed my
perception, but I used to croon Kipling's "Follow me 'Ome", and
"Kabul River", which latter I knew he ranked as one of Kipling's
finest verses. We agreed that Kipling's violence was a killer of true
poesy, and that his work suffered from a lack of spirituality, but we
ranked him very high since we both disclaimed being high-brow. His
"Crack of Day" was hideously mistaken as a noise and as a metaphor.
"And those eyes, the break of day, Lights that do mislead the morn,"
we quoted in final condemnation. Besides, it had led muscular penmen
of sports' reports to talk perpetually about "smashing" a record. This
is a thing that cannot be done even in metaphor. Only a gramophone
record can be smashed. An athletic record can be altered by an inch or
a second, but this is not to _smash_. For all this perversion of
English we put the blame on Kipling, mostly towards dead of night.

But more than once I had to repeat for him the most entirely precious
of all folk-songs I ever heard, _The Six Dukes_. It is entirely
sophisticated in that the local bard was straining his resources, and
is truly rural, as will appear from the text in which I endeavour to
indicate the original Doric.


    Six Dukes they went fishing
      Down by the se-side.
    They spy'd a dead boddee
      Wash'd up with the tide.

    One of them says to each other:
      (These wurds I heer'd um say)
    'Tis the royal Duke of Grantham
      Wich the tide has 'ee wash'd away.

    They took 'im up tew Portsmouth
      Tew the place where 'ee wuz known:
    They took him up to London
      Tew the place where 'ee wuz born.

    They took out hees bowills
      And stretchid out hees feet,
    And they balmid hees boddee
      With rosiz so sweet.

    Now lies he between the two towers,
      Now lies he in the cold clay:
    And the royal Queen of Grantham
      Went weeping away.


In _The Secret of Father Brown_ he wrote on the fly-leaf, "To Father
O'Connor with love", and on the end-paper:


            _Folk-Song_

    Six detectives went fishing
      Down by the sea-side--
    They found a Dead Body
      And enquired how it died.

    Father Brown he informed them
      Quite mild, without scorn:
    "Like you and me and the rest of us,
      He died of being born."

    The Detective from the _Daily News_
      Asked: "Where are the Dead?"
    And Father Brown coughed gently,
      And he answered and said:

    "If you come to St. Cuthbert's
      I'll tell you to-day."
    But the other Five Detectives
      Went weeping away.

  (It was just the end of the Silly Season.)

Turning over a leaf or two, one comes on the Secret of Father Brown.
As manifested by the original Brown, it took the form of a contention
that some people cultivate the habit of being shocked, and get so vain
about it that they expect their clergy to be even more shockable than
themselves. This is either the grossest of stupidities, or dismallest
spiritual pride. To pretend that you are incapable of even imagining
things that happen every day, means making or manufacturing scandal,
advertising evil, which is miles worse than merely talking or giving
scandal. No professional man has any business to be shocked at the
possibilities for evil in human nature,--on the contrary, it is his
business to know them all. But he is not expected to know them by
experience. I was once nervous about confessing my sins in a foreign
language, and asked a companion what the Confessor was like. "Oh, when
you say 'I have done sixteen murders since my last confession', he
will say, 'and is that all?'" This to Gilbert was pure jam, especially
as I explained to him that it is the great saints who are related to
have sustained the worst temptations. So they are not shocked in the
newspaper manner to hear of anyone yielding to the same. It seems to
be a law of human nature that those who have never been within sight
of the extreme are prone to hold extreme views, especially in morals.
But we never had time enough together to work this out, much as he
would have loved to do it, and much as I should admire his doing.
However, all through his writings are glints of the great sea's
inestimable light.




XX


One story gave much merriment to his declining years. He had it from
Father Ronald Knox, who had been lunching at Brighton with Monsignor
Wallis, who from lunch was called out to hear a French confession. (He
is bi-lingual or nearly.) At his return to table one of the curates
took care that he should hear him discoursing on the comparative
facility _he_ had with confessions in French. "You've only got to say:
Oh! vous avez, avez-vous!"

His big knife was given to me by Mrs. Chesterton as the most entirely
Gilbertian thing. He had had it for twenty-four years and had taken it
abroad and even to bed. She often retrieved it from under his pillow
in foreign hotels, for fear of complications. It is seven and a half
inches long when shut and fourteen inches open, a Mexican or Texan
general utility implement. He cut new books with it, but once, during
a public debate in Dublin, he absent-mindedly drew it to sharpen a
pencil, and the opposition speech was drowned in delighted laughter by
the audience. More than once it gave him occasion to tell one of
Belloc's fancy tales, somewhat in the following manner: The dying
brigand chief said to the priest who assisted him: "Father, I have no
means of recompensing the invaluable service you have rendered me,
nothing but my old knife and a principle which has served me well in
all my difficulties,--thumb on the blade, and strike upwards."

Besides a wishfulness to write on Savonarola, he desired to do an
extensive essay on the history of the Jesuit mission in Paraguay,
perhaps the most blasting of all indictments against the merchant in
politics. But to use Mrs. Chesterton's words, he had everyone pulling
him everywhere about something, and my remorse for wasting a little of
his precious time becomes complacency when I think of the other wild
asses who trampled so much possible value into nothingness. Henry
James has a beautiful and cultured view of this perpetual tragedy in
_The Death of the Lion_. It is all untinged with the savage
indignation which tore the heart of Swift, but it leaves an indelible
impression that lions are rare and jackasses so plentiful that they
enhance the lack of lions. Only those who lived with Chesterton from
day to day can give us any notion of what we have lost to those
portentous hooves. I have sorrow of one most raging jackass who
insisted on being noticed by him, and he was a clergyman and used me
in my innocence, and he was only one out of hundreds, I feel certain.




XXI


The Great War was over and Cecil was dead in it, and Gilbert was
invited to America, and very busy with the long and careful
adjustments of his work which any such engagement made necessary in
advance, when Mrs. Chesterton gave up some grave symptoms to the
X-ray, symptoms making it seem out of the question to travel at all.
And it was only two months to the start for U.S.A. At once I procured
public prayers in a Crippled Children's Home in Vienna, to which both
husband and wife had been very friendly in the starvation days of
Austria after Versailles. In a fortnight's time the grave alarm was
off and the first American tour went forward to a happy issue.

A second visit to America was made some years later. Mrs. Chesterton
was more informing on the whole than Gilbert. He recorded his surprise
at the big hotels: their lounges were a bit like Trafalgar Square
with less privacy--rather like the Grands Magasins du Louvre. He also
remarked a nervous apprehension, subconscious for the most part, but
far from comfortable, induced by the stampedability of the American
public. Their journalism gives them the jumps, and at a crisis will
stampede them. "I don't suppose you mean the South," said I, "for they
have always been charming, in my opinion." "No: East and Middle West,
who keep persuading themselves that they are the United States." I
asked Mrs. Chesterton for her impressions. "Is it not a legacy from
Pilgrim Fathers and that, that the women are such self-appointed
arbiters of behaviour, and is it not a peril or a corrosive that this
should be so? For the men have plainly given up their birthright."
"That has been the case so long now, that nobody minds it or feels it:
the formidable thing is the women's wonderful power of organising
themselves. They took over one of the biggest New York hotels and ran
it for a week, devoting all the profits to charity. And the profits
were larger than usual."




XXII


Extract from a letter of July 3rd, 1909:


     "I would not write this to anyone else, but you combine
     so unusually in your own single personality the
     characters of (1) priest, (2) human being, (3) man of
     the world, (4) man of the other world, (5) man of
     science, (6) old friend, (7) new friend, not to mention
     Irishman and picture dealer, that I don't mind
     suggesting the truth to you. Frances has just come out
     of what looked bad enough to be an illness, and is just
     going to plunge into one of her recurrent problems of
     pain and depressions. The two may be just a bit too
     much for her and I want to be with her every night for
     a few days--there's an Irish Bull for you!

     "One of the mysteries of Marriage (which must be a
     Sacrament and an extraordinary one too) is that a man
     evidently useless like me can yet become at certain
     instants indispensable. And the further oddity (which
     I invite you to explain on mystical grounds) is that he
     never feels so small as when he knows that he is
     necessary.

              Yours ever,
                G. K. CHESTERTON."


This was  propos a joint visit to Heckmondwike from Ilkley, but Mrs.
Chesterton was too ill to come and this delayed Gilbert's visit too.
Holograph letters from Gilbert were very rare: the next is dated:

                              _Xmas Eve_,
                                        1920.

DEAR FATHER O'CONNOR,

     I feel I must scribble you a line, with incongruous
     haste and crudity, to send you our love at Xmas and to
     ask for your prayers. Frances and I are going away to
     America for a month or two; and I am glad of it, for I
     shall be at least free from the load of periodical work
     that has prevented me from talking properly to anybody,
     even to her; and I want to talk very much. When it is
     over I shall probably want to talk to you, about very
     important things--the most important things there are.
     Frances has not been well, and though I think she is
     better, I have to do things in a considerate way, if
     you understand me; I feel it is also only right to
     consult with my Anglo-Catholic friends; but I have at
     present a feeling that it will be something like a
     farewell. Things have shaken me up a good deal
     lately--especially the persecution of Ireland. But of
     course there are even bigger things than that.

        Forgive this confused scrawl.
                            Yours always,
                               G. K. CHESTERTON.

He was longing to have it out with Frances about his conversion, but
his work and her delicate health were his excuses for not satisfying
that longing. But it was also, as she had already guessed, his
congenital aversion from starting a crisis. The first visit to
America, taking place early in 1921, did much to mitigate his
aversion, but did not take him quite over it.

Here is the deciding letter, undated, but post-mark July 11, 1922:

                              Top Meadow,
                                        Beaconsfield.

DEAR FATHER O'CONNOR,

     I ought to have written to you long before in reply to
     your kind letter; but indeed I do not answer it now in
     order to agree with you about Ireland or disagree with
     you about France; if indeed we do disagree about
     anything. I write with a more personal motive; do you
     happen to have a holiday about the end of next week or
     thereabouts; and would it be possible for you to come
     south and see our new house--or old studio? This sounds
     a very abrupt invitation; but I write in great haste,
     and am troubled about many things. I want to talk to
     you about them; especially the most serious ones,
     religious and concerned with my own rather difficult
     position. Most of the difficulty has been my own fault,
     but not all; some of my difficulties would commonly be
     called duties; though I ought perhaps to have learned
     sooner to regard them as lesser duties. I mean that a
     Pagan or Protestant or Agnostic might even have excused
     me; but I have grown less and less of a Pagan or
     Protestant, and can no longer excuse myself. There are
     lots of things for which I never did excuse myself; but
     I am thinking now of particular points that might
     really be casuistical. Anyhow, you are the person that
     Frances and I think of with most affection, of all who
     could help in such a matter. Could you let me know if
     any time such as I name, or after, could give us the
     joy of seeing you?

                       Yours always sincerely,
                                  G. K. CHESTERTON.

To this I replied at once that I would hold myself at his disposal any
day during the ensuing fortnight. I wrote the same day to Belloc, with
an untoward sequel for me, as shall presently appear.

Frances Chesterton writes on July 23rd:

     "I just want to know if you can send _me_ a line as to
     how long you can stay in Beaconsfield. I have a spare
     bed for Wednesday night, but after that I must get a
     room out or at one of the inns for you. Please don't
     think me inhospitable. I am only too pleased that G.
     wants you--and I am sure that you will now be able to
     give him all the advice and help he wants. But I must
     make arrangements, and I want you to have all the time
     you may need together."

Wednesday, July 26th, 1922, was the day agreed upon for me to make for
Top Meadow. But on Monday morning, July 24th, a wire came, reply paid:
"Appoint meet me to-day London. Belloc." I replied: "Westminster
Cathedral 3.30." With some hustle I caught the 10.20; St. Paneras 2.20
or so. Westminster Cathedral before 3.30, waiting until long after
4.30. No sign of Belloc, but he had been seen in London that forenoon.
Six weeks later, on meeting Belloc I asked him the reason of his
telegram. "I wanted to keep you from going to Gilbert. I thought he
would never be a Catholic." Only Belloc I fancy can tell us if he had
made any vain efforts, as passages in Chesterton's book on Conversion
seem to indicate. It was easy to fluster Gilbert but impossible to
hustle him.

Alone in London from Monday to Wednesday! but I saw the outside of St.
Alban's while waiting for the 'bus.

On Thursday morning, on one of our trips to the village, I told Mrs.
Chesterton: there is only one thing troubling Gilbert about the great
step,--the effect it is going to have on you. "Oh! I shall be
infinitely relieved. You cannot imagine how it fidgets Gilbert to have
anything on his mind. The last three months have been exceptionally
trying. I should be only too glad to come with him, if God in His
mercy would show the way clear, but up to now He has not made it clear
enough to me to justify such a step." So I was able to reassure
Gilbert that afternoon. We discussed at large such special points as
he wished, and then I told him to read through the Penny Catechism to
make sure there were no snags to a prosperous passage. It was a sight
for men and angels all the Friday to see him wandering in and out of
the house with his fingers in the leaves of the little book, resting
it on his forearm whilst he pondered with his head on one side. He
knew well the story of his friend Phillimore who called on the
Archbishop of Glasgow to ask to be received to Holy Church. The butler
brought down a Penny Catechism with: His Grace says will you call
again when you know all this by heart? Tell His Grace, says
Phillimore, that I've come to be examined in it now.


    Prince, Bayard would have smashed his sword
      To see the sort of knights you dub.
    Is that the last of them? Oh Lord!
      Will someone take me to a pub.


The Headmaster of Douai Abbey School, one of Chesterton's oldest and
keenest admirers, holding a unique collection of Chestertoniana, had
suggested the Abbey's sacred shade to be the scene of Gilbert's
reception to the Church. But the Railway Hotel had its dance-room
fitted up with Sir Philip Rose's Chapel fixtures, fairly handsome they
were; and Mrs. Borlase was a buxom landlady from the west of Ireland
and could be trusted to play up. So after lunch at Top Meadow on
Sunday, July 30th, 1922, Gilbert and I set out for the Railway Hotel,
Gilbert selecting from the stand with special solicitude, a rare and
beautiful snakewood stick which the Knights of Columbus had just given
him in America. The Creed of Pius the Fourth was repeated very
fervently--I recalled inwardly that at one time or another in our
numerous encounters, he had stoutly proclaimed his adherence to
almost every clause. Dom Ignatius Rice, O.S.B., came over from Douai,
and dear Frances--my eyes fill to think of it, was present, in tears
which I am sure were not all grieving.

We went out into the sunshine, and off to tea with Lady Ruggles-Brise,
who had refused to be put off that morning. Prison Reform was
naturally a prominent topic, especially as General Chesterton had been
a Light of the North in this regard long before. Lady R.-B. had been a
Stonor _en premires noces_, and as Archbishop Stonor had ordained me
priest, we had a few harmonious chords to strike. It was a good
set-off to the tension of the early afternoon, better than going back
to Top Meadow, where Frances was giving tea to Father Rice.

During the twenty minutes' walk from the Railway Hotel to the
"Village", I recalled to him some of my remarks of the preceding days:
that there was never an Anglican but minimised some point, great or
small, of dogma, that is of accepted fact in religion, and that now he
would be inebriated with the plenteousness of the Lord's House, and
do better work than ever, even as Newman of the Parochial and Plain
was but the try-out for Newman of Gerontius and the Second Spring.

Full soon he answered with _The Everlasting Man_ and at once with _St.
Francis_, which a Franciscan professor once said in my hearing to be
worth all the other books on St. Francis. He was unwontedly silent
that afternoon, or so it seemed to me. I do hope _I_ did not talk too
much, though it would not have been the first time if I had.




XXIII


It would be tedious to detail the letters of congratulation from those
who had long loved and prayed for Gilbert. Cardinal Bourne, Cardinal
Merry del Val, Father Vincent McNabb, all voiced tranquil joy. It was
not like the conversion of Saul--Gilbert had always been a skilled and
keen defender of all Catholic ideals, as is manifest in his book
called _Orthodoxy_, and in many more besides. He came into great
demand on public occasions, and naturally was pulled to pieces by the
"Oh let's" Brigade. I was much solicited by the obscure well-meaning
to get him to do this, that and the other; and though I held out
manfully I fear I let him be preyed upon to no one's advantage but
that of the would-be important. There is a growing plaint in Mrs.
Chesterton's letters of the way he is beset and worried and kept off
his work and pulled to pieces and done to death by folk whose whole
imagination is bounded by themselves and their interests. The
Savonarola book could not be got at, not within miles and miles, and
the immortal verse we have lost through the sheer wear and tear of
worrying the lion to death can never be estimated.

One of my own mistakes did, I hope, provoke something better than
itself. Remorse overtook me too late one night at Top Meadow. I had
kept him up too long with enlarging on the place of St. Michael the
Archangel in the scheme of things. The natural gap between Creator and
Creature had been doubled by the creature's rebellion. Michael was the
first creature to resist temptation, to resist it utterly and once for
all. So he watches over all undoings of the disaster, especially the
Passion. That is why I feel sure that he is the "angel who with awe
amid the garden shade the great Creator in His sickness saw sooth'd by
a creature's aid." And it was he who rolled away the stone, since the
Resurrection is the Challenge-Miracle, and he whose name is itself the
challenge against all insane disloyalties of the creation, did most
appropriately indicate the emptiness of the tomb as type of the
fatuity of going against God. And so on, to his rare interferences in
history, traceable by the utter silence and coma of the erstwhile
menace. In 1929, I think, Gilbert printed:


        _Ode to Saint Michael in Time of Peace_

    When the world cracked because of a sneer in Heaven,
    Leaving out for all time a scar upon the sky,
    Thou didst rise up against the horror in the highest,
    Dragging down the highest who look'd down on the Most High!
    Rending from the seventh heaven the hall of exaltation
    Down the seven heavens till the dark seas burn.
    Thou that in thunder threwest down the Dragon
    Knowest in what silence the Serpent can return.

    When from the deeps a dying God astounded
    Angels and devils who do all but die,
    Seeing Him fallen where thou could'st not follow,
    Seeing Him mounted where thou could'st not fly,--
    Hand on the hilt, thou hast halted all thy legions
    Waiting the [Greek: tetelestai] and the acclaim:
    Swords that salute Him Dead and Everlasting,
    God beyond God, and greater than His Name!


It is first printed in the _British Legion Book_ for 1929, and has
been reprinted in _G.K.'s Weekly_, September 27th, 1936. It seems to
me one of the high-water marks of religious contemplation. For
Chesterton was contemplative and intuitive, and when he seems to be
maundering, he is _quartering_ the idea like a hawk, and will suddenly
swoop to a conclusion with startling effect. Anything might set him
off. When I remarked that the ancient tragedies left one braced if
saddened, but the modern tragedies were an infliction because you knew
there would be no fun at the funeral, it might result in a book, if he
were at a loose end, which he hardly ever was, but it would certainly
breed an essay or a lecture. In like manner we would discuss modern
art, and allowing for the need perpetual to refresh the convention,
all art being convention, we would class painting into the paint which
tries to get at us through mere reason, and that which appeals to
intuition by flattering the eye, making it see more and better. Music,
too, from being sensual overmuch had got to enlisting farm-yard noises
and animal passion, as distinct from the intellectual pleasure of
studied composition. Where this is totally absent, music is in
grievous danger of being half-witted. "God is my witness", writes
Beethoven in one of his letters, "that I have never set down a note
except for His glory". Though Gilbert was for much of his life
tone-deaf, he could jump to a conclusion from this, that the repulsion
in many modern art-efforts came from denial or ignoring of God,--they
smelt of despair. Even in his earliest verse, he has traces of this
intuition:


    "Where men are weary of green wine
     And sick of crimson seas,"--(White Horse.)


And again:


    "They trim sad lamps, they touch sad strings,
     Hearing the heavy purple wings
     Where the forgotten Seraph-Kings
     Still plot how God shall die."


We never sat in judgment on his bygone Anglican tastes or feelings or
friends, because he had made them all stepping-stones to the fullness
of belief, and one does not despise the ladder by which one has
climbed. He could no more say a disparaging word about those things
than he could abuse or trick an adversary in debate. But if occasion
demanded, he could be definite enough. Here is his own account of
himself translated from the French paper, _La Vie Catholique_, in
1925:

"Before arriving at Catholicism I passed through different stages and
was a long time struggling. The various stages are hard to explain in
detail. After much study and reflection, I came to the conclusion that
the ills from which England is suffering: Capitalism, crude
Imperialism, Industrialism, Wrongful Rich, Wreckage of the Family, are
the result of England not being Catholic. The Anglo-Catholic position
takes for granted that England remained Catholic in spite of the
Reformation or even because of it. After my conclusions, it seemed
unreasonable to affirm that England is Catholic. So I had to turn to
the sole Catholicism, the Roman. Before my conversion I had a lot of
Catholic ideas, and my point of view in fact had but little altered.

"Catholicism gives us a doctrine, puts logic into our life. It is not
merely a Church Authority, it is a base which steadies the judgment.
For instance, here everyone is writing about fashion, discussing
short skirts, undressed women, but criticisms from no fixed
standpoint. I'll tell you why: they don't know the meaning of
chastity, whereas a Catholic does know, and so he knows why he
condemns the fashions of to-day. To be a Catholic is to be all at
rest! To own an irrefragable metaphysic on which to base all one's
judgments, to be the touchstone of our ideas and our life, to which
one can bring everything home."

To the correspondent of the _Toronto Daily Star_ he said: "The change
I have made is from being an Anglo-Catholic to being a Roman Catholic.
I have always believed, at least for twenty years, in the Catholic
view of Christianity. Unless the Church of England was a branch of the
Catholic Church I had no use for it. If it were a Protestant Church I
did not believe in it in any case. The question always was whether the
Church of England can claim to be in direct descent from the medival
Catholic Church. That is the question with every Anglo-Catholic or
Higher Churchman.

"Among the people who have most helped me to answer the question
whether the Church of England is Catholic, and to whom I am most
indebted, are the chief Protestant leaders in the Church of England,
such as the Dean of St. Paul's and Bishop Hensley Henson. They have
done me this good service, and I wish to express gratitude for it.
They have done me the best service one man can do to another.

"It appears to me quite clear that any church claiming to be
authoritative, must be able to answer quite definitely when great
questions of public morals are put. Can I go in for cannibalism, or
murder babies to reduce the population, or any similar scientific and
progressive reform? Any Church with authority to teach must be able to
say whether it can be done. But Protestant churches are in utter
bewilderment on these moral questions--for example on birth control,
on divorce, and on Spiritualism.

"You have people like Dean Inge coming out publicly and definitely to
champion what I regard as a low and poisonous trick, not far removed
from infanticide. It is perfectly true that there are in the Church of
England and other Protestant bodies, men who would denounce these
heathen vices as much as I can. Bishop Gore would speak about them as
strongly as the Pope.

"But the point is that the Church of England does not speak strongly.
It has no united action. I have no use for a Church which is not a
Church militant, which cannot order battle and fall in line and march
in the same direction."

Belloc writes, August 12th, 1922: "It is very great news indeed!--and
you were the Agent therein. I send you my Act of Grace, typewritten
because my eyes are bothering me, but it is as sincere as though I had
written it by hand. I will shortly write you at greater length. I am
overwhelmed by it. I have written to him."

August 23rd: "I still remain under the _coup_ of Gilbert's conversion.
I had never thought it possible!

"The Catholic Church is central, and therefore approached at every
conceivable angle! I have written to him and shall write again--but I
am a poor hand at such things."

August 25th: "The more I think on Gilbert the more astonished I
become!"

September 9th: "I saw Gilbert two days ago. I went to stop a night
with him. He is very happy. In the matter of explanation you are
right. But I have no vision."

(Follows an exquisite tiny pengraph of a blind man led by a dog, and
tapping with a stick.)




XXIV


Once walking in Leeds with Belloc, when he had made me throw out my
chest and swagger with him along Boar Lane, to the tune which he said
the Gauls must have sung on their first invasion of Rome:


    A peine issu de la vacarme
    Que j'encoutrai, une vemm, sans charme
    Une vemm' sans charme----


I sobered him down with:


    Sleeps Hector on Scamander side
    And Harold by the Sussex sea,
    And Egypt's awful eyes undried
    Above the bones of Antony----


He grasped my arm with: "Whose is that? Who wrote that?" "Why who
could, except Gilbert?" said I. "Ah! the Master!" said Belloc. That
Ballade is only to be found in the _Daily News_, perhaps 1908, and
Chesterton said he had chucked it in ready-made, to fill up a column
when he was pressed for time. Another day he was quoting me Belloc's
sonnet to his wife:


      When you to Acheron's ugly waters come
    Where darkness is, and shapes of mourning brood--


When he stopped: "No one but Hilary can supply the right word in the
second line,--that is as near as I can think of"--and Hilary took
twenty years to get that second line to his taste, publishing long
afterwards: "Where darkness is, and formless mourners brood".

No one ever enjoyed his verse more than Chesterton, or better relished
the cameo quality in those sonnets, a form which he must have shrunk
from himself. He had no instinct for staging or elaborating his
effects, and many of his poems I worship for one or two lines only,
which are fairly unapproachable. His few translations are a work of
genius, to be read alongside the originals, that note may be taken of
the wonderful way in which he reproduces the operative word and
expands a subtle word into a perfect interpretation.

In _Dante_ for instance:

        _Paradiso XXXIII, 49-78_

    Bernardo m' accennava, e sorridea
    Perch' io guardassi suso: ma io era
    Gi per me stesso tal qual' ei volea!
    Ch la mia vista, venendo sincera,
    E pi e pi entrava per lo raggio
    Dell' alta luce, che da se  vera.
    Da quinci innanzi il mio veder fu maggio
    Ch il parlar nostro ch'a tal vista cede,
    E cede la memoria a tanto oltraggio.
    Qual' e' colui che sognando vede
    Ch dopo il sogno la passione impressa
    Rimane, e l'altno alla mente non riede
    Cotal son' io, ch quasi tutta cessa
    Mia visione, ed ancor mi distilla
    Nel cor lo dolce che nacque da essa.
    Cos la neve al sol si disigilla,
    Cos al vento nelle foglie lievi
    Si perdea la sentenza di Sibilla.
    O somma luce, che tanto ti levi
    Dai concetti mortali, alla mia mente
    Ripresta un poco di quel che parevi,
    E fa la lingua mia tanto possente,
    Ch'una favilla sol della tua gloria
    Possa lasciare alla futura gente.

      The version:

    Then Bernard smiled at me that I should gaze,
    But I had gazed already, caught the view,
    Fac'd the unfathomable Ray of rays
    Which to itself and by itself is two.

    Then was my vision mightier than man's speech,
    Speech snapp'd before it like a flying spell,
    And memory and all that time can teach
    Before that splendid outrage fail'd and fell.

    As one who from a dream, remembers not
    Waking, what were his pleasures or his pains,
    With every feature of the dream forgot,
    The printed passion of the dream remains,

    Even so was I, within whose thought abides
    No picture of the dream, nor any part,
    Nor any memory: in whom resides
    Only a happiness within the heart:

    A recent happiness that soaks the heart
    As hills are soaked by slow-insoaking snow
    Or secret as that wind without a chart
    Whereon the leaves of the wild Sibyl go.

    O Light uplifted from all mortal moving
    Send back a little of that glimpse of Thee,
    That from the glory I may kindle glowing
    One tiny spark for all men yet to be.

      And this from Du Bellay:

    Hereux qui comme Ulysse a fait un beau voyage
    Ou comme cestui-l qui conquit la toison,
    Et puis est retourn plein d'usage et raison
    Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son ge.
    Quand revoirai-je, helas, de mon petit village
    Fumer la chemine, et en quelle raison
    Passerai-je le clos de ma pauvre maison
    Qui m'est une province, et beaucoup davantage?
    Plus me plaist le sjour qu'ont basti mes aieulx
    Que des palais Romains le front audacieux:
    Plus que le Marbre dur me plaist l'ardoise fine,
    Plus le Loire franais que le Tybre latin,
    Plus mon petit Lyr que le Mont Palatin,
    Et plus que l'air marin la doulceur Angeuine.

    Happy who like Ulysses, or the lord
    That raped the fleece, returning full and sage
    With wisdom and the world's wide reason stored
    'Mid his own kin can taste the end of age.
    When shall I see, when shall I see, God knows,
    My little village smoke, or pass the door
    The old dear door of that unhappy house
    Which is to me a kingdom and much more?
    Mightier to me the house my fathers made
    Than your audacious heads, ye halls of Rome.
    More than immortal marble undecayed
    The thin sad slates that cover up my home.
    More than your Tiber is my Loire to me,
    Than Palatine my little Lyr there,
    And more than all the winds of all the sea
    The quiet kindness of the Avgevin air.


Why did he say his favourite line of poetry was "Over the hills and
far away"? Because all poetry is a freeing of the soul, and nothing
does this more effectively than the suggestion of swift motion over
limitless tracts of land or sea or air. This does not early come to
children because they are busy exploring their world, and it is big
enough for them, for a time. That is why in composition they find it
hard to make a transition without walking the intervening space. The
great poets have to teach them, as Keats


    Away! away! for I will fly to thee...
    Already with thee. Tranquil is the night, etc.


and Milton:


    Now that the heaven by the sun's beam untrod
    Hath took no print of the approaching light
    And all the spangled host keep watch in squadrons bright.


As we grow up the love of distance and free flight steals upon us.
Music best satisfies this instinct, but for those who are tone-deaf
that poetry which comes nearest to music will do as well.


    Oh hark! oh hear! How thin and clear
    And thinner, clearer, farther going,
    Oh! sweet and far from cliff and scar
    The horns of Elf-land faintly blowing!




XXV.


It now seems strange that I saw him less after the memorable July
Sunday when his genius consummated itself by entering the Kingdom of
Heaven with the formalities of the Kingdom. I had an instinct that he
ought to find out the best things for himself, and the dear soul went
at it with a will, in three years producing his masterpiece, _The
Everlasting Man_. It is in the middle, close and difficult reading
because of the _density_ of the matter. He took the whole jungle of
Comparative Religion (the "Science" of) upon his hay-fork, and made
hay. But anthologies not yet dreamed will produce pages as discoveries
of what English prose can be. He had at last a thesis worthy of his
declamatory powers, and he was not teaching himself philosophy, he had
mastered all that. Peace! His triumph shall be sung by some yet
unmoulded tongue, far on in summers that we shall not see.

Our talks were jollier on the rare occasions when we met, though he
seemed to want to hold back and let me do the talking. Freely we
chatted over the byways of theology and the points in the
Resurrection-story which the Higher Critics never never thought of, as
for instance, how anyone could get out of the city before sunrise; and
again, the cumulative evidence for the Real Presence, not merely in
the wonders of the Saints, but in the spirituality and innocence of
the poor, and the purposed holiness of young children; the real
scandals of Church History, inseparable from humanity in the mass,
scandals which the enemy never saw and would not know if he saw them.
His conversation no more than his style, lost anything in thirty-three
years, and his attraction to the Universal remained the leading
feature in his mental outlook. But in October, 1933, I noticed his
breathing very laboured, and his slowness in converse very different
from what I had always known. A winter trip to Italy improved him
notably, and he was his old self again in March, 1934. I never saw him
after that.

Early in 1936 he went to Lourdes and Lisieu, and was so much
benefited, that his secretary tells me how, having a hundred and fifty
miles of road to drive, she said: "Gilbert, sing us something". For
the whole way he sang all he knew, repeated verses and cracked jokes,
at the top of his form. A fortnight after his return home, he began to
do what he had never done before, fall asleep whilst dictating. He
next repeated himself in the same words, as if losing his grasp a
little. So, as soon as he complained, he was put to bed, and on the
doctor's verdict that he had just a sporting chance that the heart
would rally, he was anointed and received his Last Communion on Friday
morning, June 12th and then was comatose with brief conscious
intervals. In the afternoon, Fr. Vincent McNabb sang the Salve Regina
at his bedside, the custom with dying Dominicans. On Sunday morning at
9.50 he gave his soul to God, of Whom he had been so constantly aware.
Our children at St. Cuthbert's were just then praying for him at a
Mass which I was celebrating for him. These details are of great
import to those who know what we know, and that is why I mention them
with care.

At the desire of the Archbishop of Westminster, I sang the Requiem
Mass for him at Westminster Cathedral on Saturday, June 27th. It was
the solemn commemoration of him by and for those who could not be
present at Beaconsfield at his burial, myself for instance having been
confined to bed all that week. The Deacon of the Mass was Dom Ignatius
Rice, O.S.B., the Headmaster of Douai School, Woolhampton, one of his
earliest admirers; and the Sub-Deacon was Father Vincent McNabb, O.P.,
who loved him with devotion, as did all his friends.

H. G. Wells is reported to have said (I heard it on the day at
Westminster), "If ever I get to Heaven, presuming there _is_ a Heaven,
it will be by the intervention of Gilbert Chesterton". Bernard Shaw
wrote a most touching letter to Mrs. Chesterton, bespeaking a heart as
capacious as his head. Walter de la Mare wrote:


    Knight of the Holy Ghost, he goes his way,
      Wisdom his motley, truth his loving jest:
    The mills of Satan keep his lance in play,
      Pity and Innocence his heart at rest.


And his premature epitaph was beautifully brought up to date as
follows:

Place upon his hand the jewel, on his brow the diadem.
He who lived in an age of miracles dared to believe in them.

    Chesterton, companion
      His companions mourn:
    Chesterton Crusader
      Leaves a cause forlorn.

    Chesterton the critic
      Pays no further heed:
    Chesterton the poet
      Lives while men shall read.

    Chesterton the dreamer
      Is by sleep beguiled,
    And there enters Heaven
      Chesterton the child.


Saved evermore from shock or strain he is, and the threat of
imbecility sinks into nothingness, while genius kicks the beam.




XXVI


I must not close this patchwork narrative without an attempt at one
consistent paragraph on Chesterton as I was privileged to know him. I
have said already that even in his growing infirmity (and he was as
fat as St. Thomas Aquinas), his nimbleness in the cause of courtesy
was a recurring surprise. It was part of his philosophy, that
unfailing consideration for others. He tells quite simply in the
_Autobiography_, how he went through the pains of subjectivism, and
finding that it gave him a pain, he emerged into the liberty of glory
which philosophers class as Moderate Realism. The thing is what lets
you play, and introspection is a servant, not a master. If you serve
introspection you are in bondage to the narrowest of all things, which
is Self. He discovered the right way in philosophy by trying the wrong
ways first, for the wrong ways were all thrust upon him by
Contemporary Thought.

His whole History of Mind is, could we see it clearly, a commentary on
the Universe, seen and unseen. When philosophy begins, it is faced
with a dilemma. Do I begin from thought within myself, or from reality
outside my thought? If I choose my thought as the measure of reality,
I am free to perish in the wilderness, if such freedom boots at all.
If I choose Reality as the measure of my thoughts, I am not so free
for empty speculation, but my philosophising will be fruitful because
rooted in the soil, and I carry ballast, and do not capsize in a gale.

The Judo-Christian tradition is that the Prince of this world, the
Rebel Archangel, being God's masterpiece among creatures, was dazzled
by his own light and chose himself to worship instead of the Only
Worshipful; and even in this world, on the Hill of Temptation, it was
once said to him: Begone, Satan. While Time shall be, and change (from
which Philosophy is our only refuge in nature), this contrast must
rage, and even Philosophy can be as mistaken as the Devil. This was
the thesis which was always being tested behind those wonderful brows
which were the glory of the face of G.K.C.

He knew enough to be content with not knowing everything. His God had
given him the world to play with, and like God, he saw that it was
good. He also saw that it is much too big to be taken into our bounded
mind; that the least thing has fold on fold for our delight; and he
calls it magic, the inexhaustible secret in common things, a secret
never more than half-hidden, but never wholly manifest. This
manifestation is the "garish day" which Newman hints it is
unprofitable to love. Out of this clear view came his laughter, which
he always insisted, was divine, the shout of joy of the sons of God.

Even when Philosophy has made the right choice at the very outset,
Subjectivism is lying in wait for it when it comes to examine its own
operations, and much error is due to the muddle of thinking how one
thinks. It is the penalty of shirking the initial drudgery of Moderate
Realism. That he was well aware of the snag is plain from his splendid
prayer:


    Give me miraculous eyes to see my eyes,
      Those rolling mirrors made alive in me,--
    Terrible crystal, more incredible
      Than all the things they see.


He is quite soberly estimated by those who know best to be a portent
of the _Philosophia Perennis_, since he discovered it himself and
adorned it all his life, so that a Dominican professor said his works
would do for footnotes to the _Philosophy of St. Thomas_. Thomas was
so pleasant to even tiresome persons that he was called the Angelic
Doctor. Call Chesterton the Angelic Jester. One of his largest jests
was taking me for Father Brown. Here it seems good to add a ballade
that sums up his whole career:


       _A Ballade of Ephemeral Controversy_

    I am not as that Poet that arrives,
    Nor shall I pluck the laurel that persists
    Through all perverted ages and revives:
    Enough for me, that if with feet and fists
    I fought these pharisaic atheists,
    I need not crawl and seek when all is done
    My motley pennon trampled in the lists
    It will not matter when the fight is won.

    If scratch of mine amid a war of knives
    Has caused one moment's pain to pessimists,
    Poisoned one hour in Social Workers' lives,
    I count such comfort more than amethysts
    But less than claret, and at after trysts
    We'll meet and drink such claret by the tun
    Till you and I and all of us (What? Hists!).
    It will not matter when the fight is won.

    When men again want women for their wives,
    And even woman owns that she exists,
    When people ask for houses and not hives
    When we have climbed the tortured ivy's twists
    To where like statues stand above the mists
    The strong incredible sanities in the sun,
    This dazed and overdriven bard desists.
    It will not matter when the fight is won.

    _Envoi_

    Prince, let me place these handcuffs on your wrists
    While common Christian people get some fun,
    Then go and join your damned Theosophists.
    It will not matter when the fight is won.

                                             G.K.C.

Certain elephantine efforts were made at the outset of his career to
trample his motley pennon before it could so much as be seen in the
lists. In the sixth chapter of the _Autobiography_, "The Fantastic
Suburb", he sets forth with delighted penetration the British state
of mind "in the ironical silence which follows the great controversy",
when Agnosticism was the Established Religion. The next chapter is
entitled: "The Crime of Orthodoxy". Amusing is the account of what
persons and things led up to the crime and how the book was destroyed
in Russia as it was guessed to be an attack upon the Russian Church.
Mr. G. S. Street is blamed for bringing the book to be written, since
he, when reviewing _Heretics_, "casually used the expression" that he
would not bother about his theology until Chesterton had stated his.
Readers of G.K.C. often miss the deeps because his brilliance flashes
and dazzles so, but here is a scathing of G. S. Street and others, if
they but knew. For it does appear that Chesterton has stated his
theology and his philosophy in half a hundred volumes and in a great
variety of poems, but G. S. Street has not yet so far condescended.
This seems to have been a chronic ailment of the British public: it
was the trammels of a reasonable service that they were perpetually
shirking. So long as the sheep could run after the shadow of a
shepherd, they did not care how soon they lost him and roamed again,
bleating. They worshipped the noise of that bleat, and called it,
maybe still call it, religion, or that in us which makes for
righteousness. Chesterton was highly amused with my story of a friend,
who, taking a young lady in to dinner one evening in London, was
accosted thus: "I know you're a Roman Catholic, but what do you
_really_ think about Religion?" (This happened about the very time
Chesterton was dealing faithfully with Blatchford in the _Clarion_.)

My friend was a bit of a wag, and answered with mighty carefulness:
"To tell you the truth, I think it is an awful fraud". Sensation. "All
but one religion. If you look at them all you will find them to be a
kind of eye-wash for making us forget our sins. But to be a Roman
Catholic is to be kept in constant mind of sin. It's a cursed
nuisance; that is the real reason why people hate it so. Of course
it's nothing when you're used to it----" but she had had enough, and
serve her right.




XXVII


Street and the man in the street were fighting the rearguard action of
that ragged army which was the ruined remnant of the established
religion of Agnosticism which had gone to pieces by sheer force of
incoherence. And whenever the light horse of Orthodoxy or right
thinking bore down upon them, one or other was sure to cry aloud: They
_really_ belong to us, they do not _really_ hold what they say they
hold. It was said of Chesterton _ad nauseam_, for it is a dismally
stale device, until it was seen not to cramp his hilarity one whit. He
was especially amused that those who thought reality so scarce should
be so in love with real reality, _la vraie vrit_, as to wonder how
any thinking man could think the opposite of their thoughts, when the
incapacity for thinking at all was what ailed them. Lest I should be
suspect of talking through my hat, let me give the most perfect
nonsense expressed in verse, years, I think, before _jabber-wocky_ was
thought of:


    There is more faith in honest doubt,
    Believe me, than in all the creeds.


This was to Gilbert and me such pure and perfect jam that we kept it
for tea-time always, and got our fingers sticky with it, and made
door-knobs intolerable with it, just like a pair of spoiled children.
Honest doubt? Dishonest doubt is seen pictured by G.K. in _The Life
and Death of Emmanuel Burden_. What is honest doubt? Would you call a
man honestly tuberculous if he were vain of it, and refused sanatorium
treatment? Or would you call dipsomania honest booze?

At any rate, if honest doubt is so lovely and desirable why should we
put it from us to the extent of believing _you_? You, who talk such
sub-human bosh? What have the creeds ever done to deserve that you
should be preferred to them? You and your doubts!

This is not the way we would have conversed with Tennyson because
Tennyson was all his life much greater and deeper than that casual
slip bespeaks him; but he had been for a moment captivated by what
was in the air, mistaking snake's odour for musk. On a colossal scale
has Chesterton disinfected literature of this kind of reek; if only by
showing in his light-hearted way, the superior attraction of thought
versus sentimentality, of perennial philosophy versus the hogwash of
mutual admirations.

The semi-smart are still at it, it is their nature to be so. The false
high-brow condemns tragedy for its lack of comic relief, and comedy
for its lack of seriousness. So Chesterton's mastery in debate is
disregarded or belittled as irresponsible, and they vote it his
paradox to point out that the Missing Link is a long time missing. St.
Thomas Aquinas has similarly been ignored for the opposite reason. His
unrelenting rationality and calm are lacking--not in lightness of
touch, but in gaiety. So solemnity calls Chesterton flippant, but
refuses Aquinas for being consciously responsible and lucid and
orderly. Like unto children playing in the market-place, they take
turns at sulking.




XXVIII


It is easy now to laugh at the enemy from those ramparts which
Chesterton has so gaily built about the City of God, but the "Don that
durst attack my Chesterton" had a good deal of dull earth to heap upon
him before his great bulk and still greater agility could bring him
out on top. The _Times Literary Supplement_ for October 1st, 1908,
affords a sample of the sort of wisdom which set great store by
itself.

"He is not a great teacher. He is a great entertainer. He is not a
prophet. He is too entertaining. As journalism his writing seemed to
have a permanent value; in book form it becomes ephemeral. _Orthodoxy_
is a more powerful and concentrated essence of Chestertonianism, but
it has a main thesis of a serious kind." (We miss our entertainer now,
he is too serious.) "His motives in philosophy are in fact not
rational, but wholly aesthetic!" (Sold again! What is Beauty anyhow?
Define your terms.)

"He refuses to believe in the first postulate of Science, the
uniformity of Nature, it is too dull to believe in." (What about the
famous passage about children wanting everything repeated, and God
saying ever to Sun and Moon: Do it again!) This the reviewer actually
quotes, but now "it is grotesque, and if you like, irreverent, but it
is very fine; the only question is: does he believe it?" (We have to
be Agnostics in order to know anything!) "The fact is Mr. Chesterton
cannot believe or disbelieve anything, because his organ of belief has
been displaced by his organ of preference." Here I had better leave
the reviewer because he is obviously stewing in his own juice,
reviewing so a book which the author _says_ he has written in order to
take stock of his beliefs and why he holds them. What is an organ of
belief? "I don't tell the truth with my hands," said Alice. If you
have an organ of anything, are you bound to be always using it? Is it
necessary to point out that for his most ponderous self-contradictions
the reviewer uses almost consecutive sentences? Even journalistic
science was immoderately pleased, almost dazzled with Relativity
(which all but scientific journalists had long known as a
commonplace); dazzled with it because it "freed us from the trammels
of wooden-headed Physics!"

Let us end where we began. On Keighley moor I wasted valuable
opportunities of listening to Gilbert because I was loaded to the
muzzle with views on the soft and yielding character of the Laws of
Nature. "Science" only made them wooden so as to deny the possibility
as well as the fact of miracle, and it was being ridden by its hobby
when Einstein came along with a live horse and put Science up again.

    *    *    *    *    *

It was very fresh in my memory at the time how I had met a doctor who
was also a Justice of the Peace, on a Monday morning in a back street,
over the dead body of a woman, to me reported to have only just
dropped down dead. Fallen down the stone stairs, the neighbours said.
I was prepared to anoint the senseless clay, but it was cold. Her
husband had not been seen since Saturday night, and the doctor
pointed out to me that the injuries were all on the back of the head.
But what can we do? said he. Not a soul in this street will tell the
truth--they are all ready with the same tale. Conversely I related how
a disconsolate widow had rolled under the coffin whilst I was reading
the Burial Service, and we all knew that the husband had died of
ill-treatment long endured. But he was a very patient man. We agreed
to class all these with Dooley's short and simple scandals of the
poor. Gilbert's sense of wonder was thrilled to hear that I had twice
been in touch with wilful murder, never proven.

The same doctor was deep in the confidence of one of the best
policemen I ever knew. This officer was in charge of the station, and
a citizen well-known and even looked up to, was brought in one night
uproarious, resisting the police. (It might happen to the best of us,
and the police know this.) In the morning, an S.O.S. was sent to the
doctor to come at once upon the Bench as Court was opening very
punctual. At 10.30 the prisoner was alone with the magistrate, charge
was preferred. No defence. One and sixpence and costs. As the Court
rose about 10.31 the public, including reporters, straggled in,
knowing nothing of His First Offence.

We used to discuss literature, for the inspector was a mighty
book-collector, "something to alleviate impending retirement", he used
to say. It was his copy of Nietzsche's _Zarathustra_ that I read quite
with such care as it deserves, and his Fraser's _Golden Bough_ muddled
my head enormously, so that I suggested Golden Rag-Bag as an improved
title for the collective edition. He had a drawer full of blasphemous
and seditious pamphlets, emanating all from a rival town, but they
were not plainly enough over the edge to justify criminal proceedings.
His wife used to sit with us when tidying up was over, the prettiest
grandmother ever. "Shocking irregularities going on in those cells,"
said he, jerking his thumb at the iron door. "I caught a woman
stealing my key and taking hot milk in the middle of the night to some
of your Irish Drunks. She said she wanted them to be sober for their
trial in the morning. But if I was to inform the Home Office I
couldn't say what would happen to her. The worst of it is, she thinks
nothing of wasting my substance. All the less for us to retire on."
The woman was grandmamma, choking with laughter.

When this very good-natured man pointed out one of my flock as the
"wickedest woman in Keighley", my vigilance was aroused, at least such
vigilance as I possessed, to see if I could discover any redeeming
features. I fear I never found any, as she was quite cynical with it
all, and I do not know how she ended. But she had a grandson who
played truant, and later on stole for her, and got sent to an
industrial school. Five years after I met him in Heckmondwike, boarded
out with a decent quiet family who found him steady and well-behaved
until: One fine day he got the woman of the house out shopping; he
found her keys, opened a drawer and took all the money he could lay
hands on, and disappeared, leaving the bull-dog, a very friendly beast
and devoted to him, with its throat cut. The heart of the mystery
always was why he should have made away with the poor pet of the
house. Perhaps he thought it was a bloodhound.

We discussed in the midst of these seamy disclosures that unnoticed
paradox of the Gospel: Professional saints are scolded and threatened,
whilst professional sinners are bidden to hope. This is all that I can
honestly claim as a title to the character of Father Brown.




    _Index_


Acton, Lord, 56

Allport, Miss Nellie, 96

_All Things Considered_, 50

America, visit to, 121

Arnold, Matthew, 89

_Autobiography of Sir William Butler_, 25


_Ball and the Cross, The_, 110

_Ballad of Lepanto, The_, 84

_Ballad of the White Horse, The_ 31, 63, 109

Ballades, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 143, 157

Baring, Maurice, 22

Barry, Dr. William, 37

Battersea, 42

Beachcomber, 21

Beerbohm, Max, 45

Belloc, Hilaire, 22, 42, 45, 89, 119, 128, 141

Bentley, Nicholas, 22

Bourne, Cardinal, 133

Borlase, Mrs. 130

Bradford Casual Ward, 3

Bradford Imbecile Ward, 17

Bramah, Ernest, 103

Brown, Father, 34, 40, 67, 170

Burns and Oates, 97


_Candida_, 69

Chesterton, Cecil, 47, 98, 121

Chesterton, Mrs. Frances, 28, 30, 42, 77, 85, 98-102, 113, 121, 127, 133, 152

Christian Science, 79

Christian Social Union, Nottingham, 79

Church, Reception into, 85, 99, 101, 125

Claudel, Paul, 7, 55

_Crimes of England, The_, 35, 94

Crookes, William, 73

Crowley, Alistair, 76


Dante, 145

Darrow, Clarence, 49

Dawson, Vera, 32

Death of G. K. C., 151

_Defendant, The_, 2

de la Mare, Walter, 152

Douai Abbey School, 130

Du Bellay, 14

Eliot, George, 107

Epitaph, premature, 82

_Everlasting Man, The_, 108, 132, 149

_Eye Witness, The_, 24, 26


France, Anatole, 33

Fraser's _Golden Bough_, 168

Frazer, Mrs. Hugh, 76


Ghost Stories, 73

_G. K.'s Weekly_, 7, 135

_Gladstonian Ghosts_, 48, 49


Hawkesyard, 102

Heckmondwike, 109, 110, 111, 124, 169

Heckmondwike, Penny Gaff, 77

Henley, W. E., 61

Holland, Canon, 80

Horton, Dr., 112

Hudson, Robert, 103

Hugill, Herbert, 1

Huysmans, 76


Ilkley, 1

Ilkley, St. John's, 27, 40, 47, 68, 76

Ilkley, St. Margaret's, 27

_Innocence of Father Brown, The_, 34


James, Henry, 119

Jameson Raid, 25


Keighley, 1, 166, 169

Kipling, Rudyard, 113

Knox, Father Ronald, 118


Ladies' Debating Society, Leeds, 83

Lang, Andrew, 33

Leeds, 83, 92, 143

Lisieux, 151

Lombroso, Cesare, 3

Lourdes, 151

Lover, Samuel, 70


McNabb, Father Vincent, 102, 133, 151

_Magic_, 72

May, Phil, 1

Merry del Val, Cardinal, 133

Messe Noire, 76

Meynell, Wilfrid, 2

Mitchell, Susan, 90

Monk, Maria, 13

Morton, J. B., 21


_Napoleons of Notting Hill, The_, 42

_New Witness, The,_ 22, 98

Nietzsche, 88, 168

Nottingham, 79


O'Connell, Dan, 70

_Ode to Saint Michael_, 135

Oldershaw, Gertrude Monica, 68

_On Nothing_, 27

Overroads, Beaconsfield, 67


Penny Catechism, 129

Phillimore, --, 22

Planchette, 74

P.N.E.U., 79

Psychical Research Society, 73

Purity League, 77


Raupert, Godfrey, 74

Rice, O.S.B., Dom Ignatius, 131, 152

Rose, Sir Philip, 130

Rowley, Charles, 42

Ruggles-Brise, Lady, 131


St. Cuthbert's, 151

_St. Francis_, 132

St. Thomas Aquinas, 87, 154, 163

Satanism, 76

Savonarola, 56, 106, 119

Scott, Sir Walter, 73

_Secret of Father Brown, The_, 113, 115

Shaw, G. Bernard, 69, 152

Sheridan, Sergeant, 25

Sieys, 54

_Six Dukes, The_, 114

Spencer, Herbert, 96

Steinthal, Francis, 31

Steinthal, Mrs., 41, 79

Stevenson, R. L., 61

Stonor, Archbishop, 131

Street, G. S., 159

Swift, 120


_Times Literary Supplement_, 164

Top Meadow, Beaconsfield, 91, 128, 134

_Toronto Daily Star_, 139

Tramps, 19

_Trent's Last Case_, 33

Twain, Mark, 86, 102

_Twelve Types_, 107


_Vie Catholique, La_, 138


Wallis, Monsignor, 118

Ward, Miss Maisie, 67

Ward, Mrs. Wilfrid, 95

_Ways and Crossways_, 55

Wells, H. G., 152

_Wild Knight, The_, 1

Williams, Lord Justice Vaughan, 46

Wilson, Andrew, 73

_Wisdom of Father Brown, The_, 34

Wyndham, George, 25


Yeats, Miss Lily, 78


Zimmern, Miss Maria, 35

Zola, 5


Transcriber's Note:

Some instances of spelling, grammar and punctuation have been left as
in the original, to reflect the usage of the time. Other minor
printer's errors in punctuation have been changed silently.




[End of _Father Brown on Chesterton_ by John O'Connor]
