Gilbert Keith Chesterton

by Maisie Ward

The boy who sat next to him in class, Lawrence Solomon (later Senior Tutor of University College, London), remembered him as sleepy and indifferent in manner but able to master anything when he cared to take the trouble—as he very seldom did. He was in a class with boys almost all his juniors. Lucian Oldershaw, who later became his brother-in-law, says of Gilbert's own description of his school life that it was as near a pose as Gilbert ever managed to get. He wanted desperately to be the ordinary schoolboy, but he never managed to fulfil this ambition. Tall, untidy, incredibly clumsy and absent-minded, he was marked out from his fellows both physically and intellectually. When in the later part of his school life some sort of physical exercises were made compulsory, the boys used to form parties to watch his strange efforts on the trapeze or parallel bars. In these early days, he was (he says of himself) "somewhat solitary," but not unhappy, and perfectly good-humoured about the tricks which were inevitably played on a boy who always appeared to be half asleep.

"He sat at the back of the room," says Mr. Fordham, "and never distinguished himself. We thought him the most curious thing that ever was." His schoolfellows noted how he would stride along, "apparently muttering poetry, breaking into inane laughter." The kind of thing he was muttering we learn from a sentence in the Autobiography: "I was one day wandering about the streets in that part of North Kensington, telling myself stories of feudal sallies and sieges, in the manner of Walter Scott, and vaguely trying to apply them to the wilderness of bricks and mortar around me."

"I can see him now," wrote Mr. Fordham, "very tall and lanky, striding untidily along Kensington High Street, smiling and sometimes scowling as he talked to himself, apparently oblivious of everything he passed; but in reality a far closer observer than most, and one who not only observed but remembered what he had seen." It was only of himself that he was really oblivious.

Mr. Oldershaw remembers that on one occasion on a very cold day they filled his pockets with snow in the playground. When class reassembled, the snow began to melt and pools to appear on the floor. A small boy raised his hand: "Please Sir, I think the laboratory sink must be leaking again. The water is coming through and falling all over Chesterton."

The laboratory sink was an old offender and the master must have been short-sighted. "Chesterton," he said, "go up to Mr. —— and ask him with my compliments to see that the trouble with the sink is put right immediately." Gilbert, with water still streaming from both pockets, obediently went upstairs, gave the message and returned without discovering what had happened.

The boys who played these jokes on him had at the same time an extraordinary respect, both for his intellectual acquirements and for his moral character. One boy, who rather prided himself in private life on being a man about town, stopped him one day in the passage and said solemnly, "Chesterton, I am an abandoned profligate." G.K. replied, "I'm sorry to hear it." "We watched our talk," one of them said to me, "when he was with us." His home and upbringing were felt by some of his schoolfellows to have definitely a Puritan tinge about them, although on the other hand the more Conservative elements regarded them as politically dangerous. Mr. Oldershaw relates that his own father, who was a Conservative in politics and had also joined the Catholic Church, seriously warned him against the Agnosticism and Republicanism of the Chesterton household. But even at this age his schoolfellows recognised that he had begun the great quest of his life. "We felt," said Oldershaw, "that he was looking for God."

I suppose it was in part the keenness of the inner vision that produced the effect of external sleepiness and made it possible to pack Gilbert's pockets with snow; but it was also the fact that he was observing very keenly the kind of thing that other people do not bother to observe. I remember my mother telling me, when I first came out, that she had almost ceased trying to draw people's characters and imaginatively construct their home lives, because for the first time in her life she was trying to notice how they were dressed. She was not noticeably successful. Gilbert Chesterton never even tried to see what everyone else saw. All the time he was seeing qualities in his friends, ideas in literature and possibilities in life. And all this world of imagination had, on his own theory, to be carefully concealed from his masters. In the Autobiography he describes himself walking to school fervently reciting verses which he afterwards repeated in class with a determined lack of expression and woodenness of voice; but when he assumes that this is how all boys behave, he surely attributes his own literary enthusiasms far too widely. One would rather gather that he supposed the whole of St. Paul's School to be in the conspiracy to conceal their love of literature from their masters! Such of his own schoolboy papers as can be found show an imagination rare enough at any age, and an enthusiasm not commonly to be found among schoolboys. A very early one, to judge by the handwriting, is on the advantages for an historical character of having long hair, illustrated by the history of Mary Queen of Scots and Charles the First. In the contrast he draws between Mary and Elizabeth, appear qualities of historical imagination that might well belong to a mature and experienced writer.

. . . As in the cause of the fleeting heartless Helen, the Trojan War is stirred up, and great Ajax perishes, and the gentle Patroclus is slain, and mighty Hector falls, and godlike Achilles is laid low, and the dun plains of Hades are thickened with the shades of Kings, so round this lovely giddy French princess, fall one by one the haughty Dauphin, the princely Darnley, the accomplished Rizzio, the terrible Bothwell, and when she dies, she dies as a martyr before the weeping eyes of thousands, and is given a popular pity and regret denied to her rival, with all her faults of violence and vanity, a greater and a purer woman.

It must indeed have been a terrible scene, the execution of that unhappy Queen, and it is a scene that has been described by too many and too able writers for me to venture on a picture of it. But the continually lamented death of Mary of Scotland seems to me happy compared with the end of her greater and sterner rival. As I think on the two, the vision of the black scaffold, the grim headsman, the serene captive, and the weeping populace fades from me and is replaced by a sadder vision: the vision of the dimly-lighted state-bedroom of Whitehall. Elizabeth, haggard and wild-eyed has flung herself prone upon the floor and refuses to take meat or drink, but lies there, surrounded by ceremonious courtiers, but seeing with that terrible insight that was her curse, that she was alone, that their homage was a mockery, that they were waiting eagerly for her death to crown their intrigues with her successor, that there was not in the whole world a single being who cared for her: seeing all this, and bearing it with the iron fortitude of her race, but underneath that invincible silence the deep woman's nature crying out with a bitter cry that she is loved no longer: thus gnawed by the fangs of a dead vanity, haunted by the pale ghost of Essex, and helpless and bitter of heart, the greatest of Englishwomen passed silently away. Of a truth, there are prisons more gloomy than Fotheringay and deaths more cruel than the axe. Is there no pity due to those who undergo these?

It is surprising to read the series of form reports written on a boy who at fifteen or sixteen could do work of this quality. Here are the half-yearly reports made by his Form Masters from his first year in the school at the age of thirteen to the time he left at the age of eighteen.