Gilbert left to Mrs. Cecil Chesterton sums equal to those later left to her by Frances—£1000 for herself and £500 for Cecil Houses.
The ingratitude that omitted all mention of these benefactions struck the imagination of several of the Chesterton family as the worst feature in the book. But to Gilbert and Frances the giving of money even in their own lifetime was a slight matter. They had given something far greater.
Why is the memory of Cecil Chesterton alive today? Because of his brother's labors. Why is it possible for Mrs. Cecil to declare that he was the greater editor, to imply that he was the greater man? Because Gilbert kept saying so. Never has such devotion been shown by one brother to the memory of another: never has the greater man exalted the lesser to such a pedestal.
We are told in The Chestertons that Frances sacrificed both Gilbert and herself on the altar of her family. Truly there was much self-sacrifice in the lives of both to family, friends and causes. They did not feel it as self-sacrifice to enrich the lives of others even at cost to themselves.
But the heaviest cost they paid lay in the years of a toil that was literally killing Gilbert while Frances watched him growing old too soon and straining his heart with work crushingly heavy: and if there was a single altar for that supreme sacrifice it was no other than the altar of Cecil's memory.
Acknowledgments
I am exceedingly grateful to the following publishers for permission to quote from these books:
DODD, MEAD & CO.:
The Man Who Was Thursday; Orthodoxy; The Napoleon of Notting Hill;
Heretics; George Bernard Shaw; The Ball and the Cross; The Poet and
the Lunatic; Alarms and Discursions; The Ballad of the White Horse;
What's Wrong with the World; Manalive; Sidelights on New London and
Newer York; The Uses of Diversity; The History of England; Irish
Impressions; Collected Poems; The Queen of Seven Swords; The
Everlasting Man; Cobbett; Outline of Sanity; Tales of the Long Bow;
What I Saw in America; The Thing; The Defendant; The Barbarism of
Berlin: or The Appetite of Tyranny; Eugenics and Other Evils;
Collected Poems; G. K. Chesterton, a Criticism (by Cecil Chesterton).
DOUBLEDAY DORAN: St. Francis of Assisi; The Years Between.
E. P. DUTTON & CO., INC.: Criticisms and Appreciations of the Works of Charles Dickens.