From Kensington to Beaconsfield

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. JAMES 1:17

A toy theatre. Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born on the twenty-ninth of May, 1874, in Kensington, in west London, the elder son of Edward Chesterton, whose family ran a firm of estate agents, and Marie Louise Grosjean, whose family was of Swiss and French descent. His brother Cecil, five years younger, became his lifelong companion and sparring partner; the two boys argued, it was said, from the day Cecil could talk, and never stopped. Their father was a gentle, inventive man with a gift for hobbies, and he built his sons a toy theatre, with painted scenery and cardboard characters and a tiny proscenium arch. Gilbert never forgot it. The first thing he could remember, he used to say, was a young man with a golden crown crossing a little cardboard bridge, and all his life he saw the world rather like that: a bright, small, astonishing stage on which something tremendous was being played.

The home was kindly, liberal and only loosely religious. The boys were taken to hear a Unitarian minister, but Christianity in any definite form hardly touched them. Gilbert grew up on fairy tales, ballads, pictures and the great English writers, and on long arguments at the family table.

A dreamy schoolboy. At St Paul’s School in London he seemed to his teachers slow and absent-minded, a tall, shambling boy who drew in the margins of his books. But with a circle of friends he founded a debating club and a little magazine, and found that he could write. In 1893 he enrolled at the Slade School of Art, part of University College London, to train as an illustrator, and attended lectures in English literature on the side.

The dark years. Those years at the Slade became the darkest of his life. The artistic world of the 1890s was full of a weary, clever pessimism, a sense that nothing was real and nothing mattered, and the lonely young student breathed it in. He fell into what he afterwards described as a kind of madness. He filled notebooks with morbid and disturbing drawings. He and Cecil played with the planchette and the Ouija board, and he came away convinced of two things: that something was moving the board, and that whatever it was, it told lies. He gave it up, sickened, feeling that he had been meddling with something evil. He came close, he later believed, to losing his reason, or his soul.

Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice. PSALM 130:1–2

A thread of thanks. What brought him back was not, at first, an argument. It was gratitude. Even at the lowest point, he said, he had clung to one thin thread: the sheer conviction that existence is good, that it is better to be than not to be, that a dandelion is a gift and not a matter of course. From that thread he began, slowly and largely by his own thinking, to rebuild a view of the world. In the notebooks of those recovering years he wrote that other people said grace before meals, but he would say grace before plays and concerts, before opening a book, before sketching, swimming, fencing, walking and dancing, and before he dipped his pen in the ink. It was the habit of the rest of his life.

Frances. In 1896 he met Frances Blogg, the eldest daughter of a family in Bedford Park, an artistic suburb of west London full of people who talked about religions. What astonished him about Frances was that she actually practised one. She had been brought up an Anglo-Catholic; she went to church, she prayed, and she seemed entirely untouched by the fashionable moods around her. He fell in love with her almost at once. They were married on the twenty-eighth of June, 1901, at St Mary Abbots, Kensington. Through her faith, and the clergy and Anglican friends she brought into his life, Chesterton found his way into the Church of England. It was a deeply happy marriage, though one marked by the sorrow of having no children. Their house was nonetheless always full of other people’s children, for whom he drew pictures and staged plays in his own toy theatre.

Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favour of the Lord. PROVERBS 18:22

Fleet Street. Chesterton left the Slade without a degree and went to work for a publisher, but he soon found his true calling in journalism. He wrote reviews and essays for The Speaker and the Daily News, and from 1905 he wrote a weekly column for the Illustrated London News, which he kept up for the rest of his life. He became one of the best-known figures in Fleet Street, the street of newspapers: a huge man, well over six feet and broad in proportion, in a cloak and a wide-brimmed hat, carrying a swordstick, his pince-nez never quite straight. He was famously absent-minded. He was also extraordinarily productive. In his lifetime he published some eighty books, hundreds of poems, about two hundred short stories and several thousand essays.

The great debates. He loved an argument, and he picked the biggest opponents he could find. In 1903 and 1904 he answered the atheist editor Robert Blatchford in the pages of The Clarion. For thirty years he debated George Bernard Shaw, in print and on public platforms, and the two men remained affectionate friends throughout. He argued with H. G. Wells about socialism, progress and history. In all of these quarrels he held that the instincts of ordinary people — for home, for property, for freedom, for faith — were wiser than the theories of the intellectuals who despised them.

Heretics and Orthodoxy. In 1905 he published Heretics, a book of essays on the leading thinkers of his day, from Kipling to Shaw, arguing that each of them had got something important wrong. Its critics, among them the writer G. S. Street, complained that he had attacked everybody else’s philosophy without ever stating his own. Chesterton accepted the challenge. His answer, published in 1908, was Orthodoxy. It was not a textbook of theology but, in his own phrase, “a sort of slovenly autobiography”: an account of how he personally had come to believe. He tells it as the story of a man who set out to discover a new truth and found, to his embarrassment, that it had all been discovered already.

Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. JEREMIAH 6:16

In the same year he published The Man Who Was Thursday, a wild nightmare of a novel about anarchists and detectives that turns, at the end, into something like a vision of the day of judgement. He had already written The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), and in 1911 he published The Ballad of the White Horse, a long poem about King Alfred and the Christian hope against overwhelming odds, which was quoted to the nation in the darkest days of the Second World War.

Father Brown. On a lecture tour in Yorkshire in 1904 he met a young Roman Catholic priest, Father John O’Connor, who became one of his closest friends. Chesterton was astonished to discover that this shy, gentle man knew more about the evil in the human heart than any worldly undergraduate. From that surprise came Father Brown, the small, round, unremarkable priest who solves crimes because, having heard so many confessions, he understands sin from the inside. The first collection, The Innocence of Father Brown, appeared in 1911, and the stories have been read and filmed ever since.

Beaconsfield. In 1909 Gilbert and Frances left London for Beaconsfield, a quiet market town in Buckinghamshire, where they lived for the rest of their lives, first in a house called Overroads and later in Top Meadow, across the road, with a great studio that became the scene of plays, parties and endless visitors.

Illness and loss. Late in 1914, worn out by work and by the first months of the war, Chesterton collapsed. His heart was failing, and around Christmas he fell into a coma from which, for weeks, he hardly woke. Frances nursed him through the winter, writing anxious letters to Father O’Connor and begging him to pray. In the early months of 1915 he slowly came back, and both of them afterwards spoke of his recovery as an answer to prayer. Sorrow came again at the war’s end. Cecil, who had enlisted as a private, died of illness in a military hospital in France on the sixth of December, 1918. Gilbert grieved for him deeply, and for years kept going the small political paper his brother had edited, out of loyalty to him and at great cost to his own time and purse.

Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him. JAMES 5:14

Rome. For many years Chesterton had been moving closer to the Roman Catholic Church. On the thirtieth of July, 1922, he was received into it by Father O’Connor, in a makeshift chapel in the Railway Hotel at Beaconsfield, since the town had no Catholic church. Frances found the step hard, and followed him four years later. Chesterton was entirely candid about where he had gone and why, and Catholics count him among the greatest converts of the century. Protestant readers, for their part, have never stopped finding in his books a warm and fearless defence of the faith they share.

The great books. His greatest Christian books came in the years that followed. St Francis of Assisi appeared in 1923. In 1925 came The Everlasting Man, written in answer to Wells’s popular Outline of History: a retelling of the whole human story, from the paintings in the prehistoric caves to the Child born in the cave at Bethlehem, to show that man is no mere animal and Christ no mere man. Among its first readers was a young Oxford tutor named C. S. Lewis, then still an unbeliever, who later counted it among the books that brought him to faith. In the same year Chesterton launched G. K.’s Weekly, the paper through which he and his friends promoted their distributist ideas; in 1926 they founded the Distributist League. St Thomas Aquinas followed in 1933, a short book that scholars of Aquinas have admired ever since.

The last chapter. In 1936, after finishing his Autobiography, Chesterton’s strength began to fail; his heart could no longer carry his enormous frame. Waking from a long silence near the end, he said that the issue was now quite clear: it was between light and darkness, and everyone must choose his side. He died at Top Meadow on the fourteenth of June, 1936, with Frances beside him, and was buried in the Catholic cemetery at Beaconsfield. Frances died two years later and was buried with him.

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. JOHN 1:5

What kind of man. Those who knew him describe a man of enormous laughter and almost no vanity, who never seemed to bear a grudge and never seemed to notice an insult, who forgot appointments, trains and meals but never forgot a kindness. He was generous to a fault, often with money he did not have. He was not a saint in the stained-glass sense: he worked too much, ate and drank too much, was careless of his health and sometimes careless of his facts, and some of what he wrote, as we have said, does him no credit. But he was a man astonished by the world and grateful for it, who believed that the Christian creed was true and that its truth was the best news a human being could hear.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Chesterton was pulled back from despair by a thread of gratitude. If you are in a dark season now, what is one thing, however small, for which you can still give thanks?

2. He was drawn to faith partly by meeting someone who actually practised it. Whose quiet faithfulness has helped your own? Thank God for that person, and ask how you might be such a person for another.

3. He said grace before everything. Try, this week, giving thanks before one ordinary activity you would never think of praying about.

4. He argued with his opponents for decades and kept them as friends. Is there someone with whom you disagree whom you have treated as an enemy? Consider how to change that.

5. Read James 1:17 again. Make a list of ten good gifts you have received this week.

A PRAYER

Father of lights, every good and perfect gift comes down from You.

Thank You for the patience that drew G. K. Chesterton out of darkness by a thread of thanks, and for the patience that has drawn me.

Where I have played with things that are not of You, forgive me and set me free. Where I have taken Your gifts for granted, open my eyes.

Make me grateful in small things, faithful in friendship, cheerful in argument and ready for the last choice between light and darkness, through Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen.