The composition of The Chestertons is not without interest for the student of legendary literature. By a curious paradox the book had to be strikingly untrue to be accepted as true, since the jokes about sisters-in-law are legion, so that mere commonplace shafts of what is called "feminine spite" would have gained little credence. Yet on the other hand, Mrs. Cecil Chesterton was able (to quote The Mikado) to get from her husband a good deal of "corroborative detail designed to give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative." Of these details some are true, some false, all arranged to support the main untruth of Frances and Gilbert's relation to one another. The thesis of the book is that Gilbert was an unhappy and frustrated man (a) because Frances shrank from consummating their marriage, and (b) because she dragged him away from his London life and friends to bury him in a middle class suburb.
I confess that I am Victorian enough heartily to dislike writing this appendix. Yet it is necessary, for many who read The Chestertons have supposed that a story told by so near a connection must be true.
The ground was laid for the introduction of the Legend by the tale of the Red Haired Phantom, if I may describe it in the terms of a ghost story. That ghost was easy to lay (see Introduction). Next comes the odd account of Gilbert and Frances' honeymoon and of the years that followed. It is of course possible that the first night of their marriage was not happy—especially in the Victorian days of reticence which left wife and even possibly husband unprepared for life together: (though this did not normally prevent a happy marriage and a pack of children afterwards). But I find it impossible to imagine Cecil Chesterton, like the bridesmaid on the honeymoon, receiving and passing on such a story as that of Gilbert "quivering with self-reproach" so that after the first night he "dared not even contemplate a repetition. . . . Gilbert, young and vital, was condemned to a pseudo-monastic life, in which he lived with a woman but never enjoyed one." (p. 282)
There is a psychological reason for thinking this story especially improbable and a physical reason for dismissing it as actually impossible.
A white horse had from his childhood been for Gilbert the supreme sign of romance, and he had chosen to spend the first night of his honeymoon at the White Horse Inn. From his honeymoon he wrote home that he had "a wife, a piece of string, a pencil and a knife. What more can any man want?" Ten years later he wrote The Ballad of the White Horse and dedicated it to Frances, saying,
"O go you onward, where you are
Shall honour and laughter be.
Past purpled forest and pearled foam,
God's winged pavilion free to roam,
Your face, that is a wandering home,
A flying home for me."
And over thirty years later he wrote again of beginning his honeymoon under the shadow of the White Horse, and compared it to a trip to fairyland.
Can any human being read the record of this recurrent motif and reconcile it with Mrs. Cecil's picture?
Let me refer again to The Ballad of The White Horse. Is it conceivable that any man should write after ten years of frustration and unhappiness:
Up through an empty house of stars
Being what heart you are,
Up the inhuman steeps of space
As on a staircase go in grace
Carrying the firelight on your face
Beyond the loneliest star.