The Project Gutenberg eBook, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, by Maisie Ward

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Title: Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Author: Maisie Ward

Release Date: June 28, 2006 [eBook #18707] [Most recently updated October 20, 2006]

Language: English

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON***

E-text prepared by David McClamrock

Transcriber's note

This electronic edition is intended to contain the complete, unaltered text of the first published edition of Gilbert Keith Chesterton by Maisie Ward (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1943), with the following exceptions:

   The index, and a few other references to page numbers that do
   not exist in this edition, have been omitted.

   Italics are represented by underscores at the beginning and
   end, like this.

   Footnotes* have been placed directly below the paragraph
   referring to them and enclosed in brackets.

[* Like this.]

Any other deviations from the text of the first edition may be regarded as defects and attributed to the transcriber.

GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON

by

MAISIE WARD

CONTENTS

Introduction: Chiefly Concerning Sources

CHAPTER

     I Background for Gilbert Keith Chesterton
    II Childhood
   III School Days
    IV Art Schools and University College
     V The Notebook
    VI Towards a Career
   VII Incipit Vita Nova
  VIII To Frances
    IX A Long Engagement
     X Who is G.K.C.?
    XI Married Life in London
   XII Clearing the Ground for Orthodoxy
  XIII Orthodoxy
   XIV Bernard Shaw
    XV From Battersea to Beaconsfield
   XVI A Circle of Friends
  XVII The Disillusioned Liberal
 XVIII The Eye Witness
   XIX Marconi
    XX The Eve of the War (1911-1915)
   XXI The War Years
  XXII After the Armistice
 XXIII Rome via Jerusalem
  XXIV Completion
   XXV The Reluctant Editor (1925-1930)
  XXVI The Distributist League and Distributism
 XXVII Silver Wedding
XXVIII Columbus
  XXIX The Soft Answer
   XXX Our Lady's Tumbler
  XXXI The Living Voice
 XXXII Last Days

Appendices:

Appendix A—An Earlier Chesterton
Appendix B—Prize Poem Written at St. Paul's
Appendix C—The Chestertons

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

Chiefly Concerning Sources

THE MATERIAL FOR this book falls roughly into two parts: spoken and written. Gilbert Chesterton was not an old man when he died and many of his friends and contemporaries have told me incidents and recalled sayings right back to his early boyhood. This part of the material has been unusually rich and copious so that I could get a clearer picture of the boy and the young man than is usually granted to the biographer.

The book has been in the making for six years and in three countries. Several times I hid it aside for some months so as to be able to get a fresh view of it. I talked to all sorts of people, heard all sorts of ideas, saw my subject from every side; I went to Paris to see one old friend, to Indiana to see others, met for the first time in lengthy talk Maurice Baring, H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw; went to Kingsland to see Mr. Belloc; gathered Gilbert's boyhood friends of the Junior Debating Club in London and visited "Father Brown" among his Yorkshire moors.

Armed with a notebook, I tried to miss none who had known Gilbert well, especially in his youth: E. C. Bentley, Lucian Oldershaw, Lawrence Solomon, Edward Fordham. I had ten long letters from Annie Firmin, my most valuable witness as to Gilbert's childhood. For information on the next period of his life, I talked to Monsignor O'Connor, to Hilaire Belloc, Maurice Baring, Charles Somers Cocks, F. Y. Eccles and others, besides being now able to draw on my own memories. Frances I had talked with on and off about their early married years ever since I had first known them, but she was, alas, too ill and consequently too emotionally unstrung during the last months for me to ask her all the questions springing in my mind. "Tell Maisie," she said to Dorothy Collins, "not to talk to me about Gilbert. It makes me cry."

For the time at Beaconsfield, out of a host of friends the most
valuable were Dr. Pocock and Dr. Bakewell. Among priests, Monsignors
O'Connor and Ronald Knox, Fathers Vincent McNabb, O.P. and Ignatius
Rice, O.S.B. were especially intimate.

Dorothy Collins's evidence covers a period of ten years. That of H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw is reinforced by most valuable letters which they have kindly allowed me to publish.

Then too Gilbert was so much of a public character and so popular with his fellow journalists that stories of all kinds abound: concerning him there is a kind of evidence, and very valuable it is, that may be called a Boswell Collective. It is fitting that it should be so. We cannot picture G.K. like the great lexicographer accompanied constantly by one ardent and observant witness, pencil in hand, ready to take notes over the teacups. (And by the way, in spite of an acquaintance who regretted in this connection that G.K. was not latterly more often seen in taverns, it was over the teacups, even more than over the wine glasses, that Boswell made his notes. I have seen Boswell's signature after wine—on the minutes of a meeting of The Club—and he was in no condition then for the taking of notes. Even the signature is almost illegible.) But it is fitting that Gilbert, who loved all sorts of men so much, should be kept alive for the future by all sorts of men. From the focussing of many views from many angles this picture has been composed, but they are all views of one man, and the picture will show, I think, a singular unity. When Whistler, as Gilbert himself once said, painted a portrait he made and destroyed many sketches—how many it did not matter, for all, even of his failures, were fruitful—but it would have mattered frightfully if each time he looked up he found a new subject sitting placidly for his portrait. Gilbert was fond of asking in the New Witness of people who expressed admiration for Lloyd George: "Which George do you mean?" for, chameleon-like, the politician has worn many colours and the portrait painted in 1906 would have had to be torn up in 1916. But gather the Chesterton portraits: read the files when he first grew into fame: talk to Mr. Titterton who worked with him on the Daily News in 1906 and on G.K.'s Weekly in 1936, collect witnesses from his boyhood to his old age, from Dublin to Vancouver: individuals who knew him, groups who are endeavoring