Gilbert Keith Chesterton

and Univer

curious experiences at an Art School-two Art Schools really, although he only talks of one in the Autobiography, for he was for a short time at a School of Art in St. John's Wood (Calderon's,

e. During a happily prolonged youth (he was now eighteen and a half) he had developed very slowly, but normally. Surrounded by pleasant friendships and home influences he had never really become aware

s. Above all things she was told to avoid for him any sort of shock. Physically, mentally, spiritually he was on a very large scale and probably for that reason of a slow rate of development. The most highly differentiated organisms are the slowest to mature, and wit

"felt as if everything might be a dream" as if he had "projected the universe from within." The

he whole period is best summarised in a passage from the Autobiography, for looking back after forty ye

lood-stained knife were better than the thing I am." I have never indeed felt the faintest temptation to the particular madness of Wilde, but I could at this time imagine the worst and wildest disproportions and distortions of more normal passion; the point is that the whole mood was

p. 8

ime a notebook full of these horrible drawings

he realised that he had reached the v

omething happens which is not in the ordinary sense natural, or produced by the normal and conscious human will. Whether it is produced by some subconscious but still human force, or by some powers, good, bad, or indifferent, which are external to humanity, I would not myself attempt to decide. The only thin

ography,

d to give it up on account of headaches ensuing . . . 'after the headaches came a horrid feeling as i

wn on Cheste

as left a vivid description in a Daily News article c

night he would go where I have no wish to follow him, even in speculation. He was a man with a long, ironical face, and close red hair; he was by class a gentleman, and could walk like one, but preferred, for some reason, to wa

hat religion produced humility or humility a simple joy; but he admitted both. He only said, "But shall I not find in evil a life

eal fighting democracy, some one would burn you

tired, fair way. "Only what

. I stopped, startled; but then I heard the voice of one of the vilest of his associates saying, "Nobody can possibly know." And then I heard those two or three words which I remember in every syllable and cannot forget. I heard the Diaboli

id it with tools of pleasure, not with tools of pain. God help him, I know the road he went; but

ton: A Criticism. Alston R

ing but to a strengthening of old ties and a mystic renewal of

LI

strong and good. He is

rl

subtle and sensitive. H

d on

very quiet and shrewd

d a

who is enigmatical an

of

ho is polished and ea

the

young and very quick,

l fri

re and they are

m

SMIC F

little bo

rd wood with a knot i

and a str

f Lucifer matches an

ister's wig: files

eels, three riders

de of moonlig

y a handsome bla

age, with a vanishin

and fire and an unive

all can not be expressed; I

The No

ongleurs de Dieu." Notes, fragments, letters, all show an intense individual interest that covered the life of each of his friends. If one of them is worried, he worries too; if one rejoices, he rejoices exceedingly. They write to

e as much use in the world in future as y

d from the others, "lie together in my pocket at

I

fogs shut round the h

t this moment

y of fin

xford and one in Sco

ac

ld all walk in now,

was the supreme friendship of his youth. It was a friendship i

h boyhood's s

my neare

hat, smoke

ding at

e told in the dedication of The Man Who Was

through the night a

n the streets ere it

ike all young poets, of first love-but it is Bentley's not his own: he was as much excited about a girl Bentley had fallen in love with as if he had fallen in love with her himself. And where a London street has a special significance one discovers it is because of a memory of Bentley's. To Bentley then, with whom all was shared, Gil

din

h St

h Be

probably Lon

d swim in the sea when it generally rains; and the combination gets in our mouths and we say the name of the Professor in the "Water Babies." Inwardly speaking, I have had a funny time. A meaningless fit of depression, taking the form of certain absurd psychological worries came upon me, and instead of dismissing it and talking to people, I had it out and went very far into the abysses, indeed. The result

another

onsent to speak by my machinery? Permit me to reduce you to nothingness and then we

never forget," Lucian Oldershaw writes, "reading to him from the Canterbury Walt Whitman in my bedroom at West Ken

itmanesque to a high degree, yet it is also most characteristically Chestertonian. Whitman is content with a shouting, roaring optimism about life and humanity. Chesterton had to find for it a philosophical basis. Heartily as he disliked the literary pessimism of the hour, he was not content simply to exchange one mood for another. For whether he was conscious of it at the time or not, he did la

s ev

ters again a large i

man or

ong dead or

ith me in t

ble how much of this philosophy he had arrived at in The Notebook, before he had come to know Catholics

ould have drawn those sketches, full of crazy energy and vitality? I know nothing about drawing, but anyone may know how brilliant are the illustrations to Greybeards at Play or Biography for Beginners, and later to Mr. Belloc's novels. And anyone can see the power of line with which he drew in his notebooks unfinished suggestions of humanity or divinity. Anyone, too, can recognise a portrait of a man, and faces full of character continue to adorn G.K.'s exercise books. Of living models he affected chiefly Gladstone, Balfour, and Joe Chamberlin. In hours of thought he made drawings of Our Lord with a

rt went to Italy, and two letters to Bentley

lorence. (undate

BEN

ld in general. I asked him what he thought of Whitman. He answered frankly that in America they were "hardly up to him." "We have one town, Boston," he said precisely, "that has got up to Browning." He then added that there was one thing everyone in America remembered: Whitman himsel

nteresting not so much from an artistic as from a moral and historical point of view. Particularly noticeable was the great fresco expressive of the grandest mediaeval conception of the Communion of Saints, a figure of Christ surmounting a crowd of all ages and stations, among whom were not only Dante, Petrarca, Giotto, etc., etc., but Plato, Cicero, and best of all, Arius. I said to the guide, in a tone of expostulation, "Heretico!" (a word of impromptu manufacture). Whereupon he nodded, smiled and was positively radiant with the latitudinarianism of the old Italian painter. It was interesting for it was a fresh proof that even the early Church united had a period of thought and tolerance before the dark ages closed around it. There is one thing that I must tell you more of when we meet, the tower of Giotto. It w

y sincer

K. CHE

uggestion that the fifteenth century belonged to the early church and preceded the Dark Ages. And

l De Milan

BEN

went to Verona, where Romeo and Juliet languished and Dante wrote most of "Hell." The principal products (1) tombs: particularly those of the Scala, a very good old family with an excellent taste in fratricide. Their three tombs (one to each man I mean: one man, one grave) are really glorious examples of three stages of Gothic: of which more when we meet. (2) Balconies: with young ladies hanging over them; really quite a preponderating feature. Whether this was done in obedience to local associations and in expectation of a Romeo, I can't say. I can only remark that if such was the object, the supply of Juliets seemed very much in excess of

e some of those whom I happen to affect) I should be the last person in the world to say a word against an earnest, able, kind-hearted and most refreshingly rational man: by far the best man of his type I know. As to what you say on education generally, I am entirely with you, but it will take a good interview to say how much.

But they gave him, too, a time to dream and to think which working for a University degree would never have allowed. His vie

rying to say and to put into words what he read on the canvas. Hence both in his Watts and his Blake we get what some of us ask of an art critic-the enlargement of our own powers of vision. This is what made Ruskin so

with vision. And this vision he partly owed to the Slade School. Here is a letter (u

figure, clad in a strange sort of green with his head flung so far back that his upper part is a miracle of foreshortening, his hands thrust out, his face ghastly with ecstasy, his dry lips yelling aloud, a figure of everlasting protest and defiance. And as a background (perfect in harmony of colour) you have the tracery of the Assyrian bas-reliefs, such as survive in wrecks in the British Museum, a row of those process

this excited gentleman with bronze skin and hair that approaches green, his eyes sim

ts and sheer colour, so as to give to his novels and stories pictorial value, to his fantasies glow, and to his poetry vision of the realities of things. In his v

im and delicate is the heart of the winter woods, a kind of glittering gloaming, that a figure stepping tow

rt for publishing, he came of age "wit

is a governess; and better still, my mother has received a most amusing letter from an old nurse of mine, an exceptionally nice and intelligent nurse, who writes on hearing that it is my twenty-first birthday. Billy (an epithet is suppressed) gave me a little notebook and a little

all there and most affectionate. Everything I passed was lovely, a little boy pickabacking another little boy home, two little girls taking shelter with a gigantic umbrella, the gutters boiling like rivers and the hedges glittering with rain. And when I came to our corner the shower was over, and there was a great watery sunset right over No. 80, what Mr. Ruskin calls an "opening into Eternity." Eternity is pink and gold. This m

raced. ("Runner, run thy race," said Confucius, "and in the running find strength and reward.") After that we tried talking about Magnus, and c

ation that the Cosmos has all its windows open is very characteristic of evening, just as it is at this moment. I f

nediction at the