Yet always to Chesterton the beauty of nature was enhanced by the work of men, and if in London men had swarmed too closely, it was not to get away from them but to appreciate them more individually that he chose the country. Yes, his literary friends would say: in the real country that is true; the farmer, the labourer, even the village barber and the village tradesmen are worth knowing, but not suburban neighbours. Against such discrimination the whole democracy of Chesterton stood in revolt. All men were valuable, all men were interesting, the doctor as much as the barber, the clergyman as much as the farmer. All men were children of God and citizens of the world. If he had a choice in the matter it was discrimination against the literary world itself with all the fads that tended to smother its essential humanity. Nothing would have induced him to discriminate against the suburban. In the last year of his life he wrote in the Autobiography: "I have lived in Beaconsfield from the time when it was almost a village, to the time when, as the enemy profanely says, it is a suburb."
For the author of The Napoleon of Notting Hill this would hardly be a conclusive argument against any place. We should, he once said, "regard the important suburbs as ancient cities embedded in a sort of boiling lava spouted up by that volcano, the speculative builder." That "lava" itself he found interesting, but beneath or beside it a little town like Beaconsfield had its share in the great sweep of English history. Something of the "seven sunken Englands" could be found in the Old Town which custom marked off pretty sharply from the "New Town." Burke had lived in Beaconsfield and was buried there; and Gilbert once suggested to Mr. Garvin that they should appear at a local festival, respectively as Fox ("a part for which I have no claim except in circumference") and Burke ("I admire Burke in many things while disagreeing with him in nearly everything. But Mr. Garvin strikes me as being rather like Burke").
At the barber's he was often seen sitting at the end of a line patiently awaiting his turn, for he could never shave himself and it was only years later that Dorothy Collins conceived and put into execution the bold project of bringing the barber to the house. Probably an article would be shaping while he waited and the barber's conversation might put the finishing touches to it. There were in fact two barbers, one of the old town, one of the new. "I once planned," he says, "a massive and exhaustive sociological work, in several volumes, which was to be called 'The Two Barbers of Beaconsfield' and based entirely upon the talk of the two excellent citizens to whom I went to get shaved. For those two shops do indeed belong to two different civilisations."
Despite his love for London, Gilbert had always felt that life in a country town held one point of special superiority—in it you discovered the Community. In London you chose your friends—which meant that you narrowed your life to people of one kind. He had noted in the family itself a valuable widening:
The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a surprise. Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made.*
[* Heretics, pp. 191-2.]
Here in Beaconsfield the Chestertons grew into the community: the clergyman, the doctor, the inn-keeper, the barber, the gardener. And like the relatives who spring upon you at birth these worthy citizens seemed to Gilbert potentials of vast excitement and varied interest. Discussing an event of much later date—a meeting to decide whether a crucifix might be erected as a local war memorial—he thus describes the immense forces he found in that small place:
Those who debated the matter were a little group of the inhabitants of a little country town; the rector and the doctor and the bank manager and the respectable tradesmen of the place, with a few hangers-on like myself, of the more disreputable professions of journalism or the arts. But the powers that were present there in the spirit came out of all the ages and all the battlefields of history; Mahomet was there and the Iconoclasts, who came riding out of the East to ruin the statues of Italy, and Calvin and Rousseau and the Russian anarchs and all the older England that is buried under Puritanism; and Henry the Third ordering the little images for Westminster and Henry the Fifth, after Agincourt, on his knees before the shrines of Paris. If one could really write that little story of that little place, it would be the greatest of historical monographs.*
[* Autobiography, p. 244.]
A keen observer often added to the Beaconsfield community in those days was Father (now Monsignor) John O'Connor, close friend of both Gilbert and Frances and inspirer of "Father Brown" of detective fame. They had first become friends in 1904 when they met at the house of a friend in Keighley, Yorkshire, and walked back over the moors together to visit Francis Steinthal at Ilkley. This Jew, of Frankfort descent, was a great friend of the Chestertons and on their many visits to him the friendship with Father O'Connor ripened. With both Frances and Gilbert it was among the closest of their lives. Their letters to him show it: the long talks, and companionable walks over the moors, have an atmosphere of intimacy that is all the more convincing because so little stressed in his book. Father O'Connor has a pardonable pride in the idea that their talks suggested ideas to Gilbert, he takes pleasure in his character of "Father Brown," but he reveals the atmosphere of unique confidence and intimacy by the very absence of all parade of it.