Gilbert: The Man Who was G. K. Chesterton
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His Fine Art professor, Frederick Brown, had joined the Slade in 1892 and had much of the authority of Gilbert’s High Master at St Paul’s, with far less of his attraction. After one year of study Gilbert was asked to leave. The teachers claimed that they could teach him nothing. His notebook art at this period was quite exceptional, full of delicate illustrations and products of a fertile artistic mind. Nothing, however, is as vulnerable as a fashion; and those teachers were at the sharp end of the new artistic trends. Gilbert could always, would always, be a threat to those who regarded themselves as comfortably entrenched in either old philosophies or new ideas. He challenged. What could be more annoying than a student arguing with the intense wit and understanding of a genius against concepts which one knew to be correct, knew were going to transform the artistic environment? There was no room for this youth with a high-pitched voice and a ridiculous laugh, who could be moved to breathlessness by objects of natural beauty.
Shortly after Gilbert’s time at the Slade students were definitely painting from female models who were seated naked in front of them. It seems likely that Gilbert also would have been painting nudes. If so, it would have been his first vision of adult nudity in women, and to his wandering mind the shock must have been great. He was interested in girls, and showed a healthy envy of his friends who had begun even the most innocuous relationships with young ladies from Oxford and London. He wrote to Lawrence Solomon after hearing that his St Paul’s friend was seeing a young lady, “It is with deep pain that I hear of your ‘carryings on.’ You too, my poor friend, are being driven on the rock of the sirens (I allude to the fascinating Miss …)” Bentley was proving himself a success with the female population of Oxford, and Gilbert looked upon all this as a heroic battle, with his friend the knight rescuing distressed damsels, and, a little less child-like and romantic, giving Gilbert the passed on pleasure of female companionship. Because, although he was not to be particularly slow in asking girls out or approaching women, at this stage in his life there was no woman, and he regretted it bitterly. News of his close friend’s conquests — often only to the extent of winning a kiss or a hand held — would give him pleasure and a sense of satisfaction. He may not have been the handsome youth in demand at every society party in the university town of Oxford and the fine districts of London, but his friend was. Touches of pathos, hints of innocent longing.
In the summer of 1894 Gilbert travelled more widely. Scotland was visited again; more important, he saw Italy. He wrote to Bentley often, informing him of the delights of the country. From Florence, in the Hotel New York he sent his second letter, telling of a chance encounter with an elderly American colonel. The two tourists compared notes on Botticelli, Ruskin, Carlyle and Emerson, discussed their respective homelands and debated world issues. The American was a well informed and experienced traveller. Gilbert enjoyed and exploited the conversation
… 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 himself. The old gentleman quite kindled on this topic. “Whitman was a real Man. A man who was so pure and strong that we could not imagine him doing an unmanly thing anywhere.” It was odd words to hear at a table d’hôte, from your next door neighbour: it made me quite excited over my salad. You see that this humanitarianism in which we are entangled asserts itself where, by all guidebook laws, it should not. When I take up my pen to write to you, I am thinking more of a white-moustached old Yankee at a hotel than about the things I have seen within the same 24 hours: the frescoes of Santa Croce, the illuminations of St Marco; the white marbles of the tower of Giotto; the very Madonnas of Raphael, the very David of Michelangelo. Throughout this tour, in pursuance of our theory of travelling, we have avoided the guide: he is the death-knell of individual liberty. Once only we broke through our rule and that was in favour of an extremely intelligent, nay impulsive young Italian in Santa Maria Novella, a church where we saw some of the most interesting pieces of mediaeval paintings I have ever seen, interesting 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 fresh proof that even the early Church 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 was built in a square of Florence, near the Cathedral, by a self-made young painter and architect who had kept sheep as a boy on the Tuscan hills. It is still called “The Shepherd’s Tower.”
What I want to tell you about is a series of bas-reliefs, which Giotto traced on it, representing the creation and progress of man, his discovery of navigation, astronomy, law, music and so on. It is religious in the grandest sense, but there is not a shred of doctrine (even the Fall is omitted) about this history in stone. If Walt Whitman had been an architect, he would have built such a tower, with such a story on it. As I want to go out and have a good look at it before we start for Venice tomorrow, I must cut this short. I hope you are enjoying yourself as much as I am, and thinking about me half as much as I am about you.
The affection for Bentley and subsequent missing of him is evident. The affection for Walt Whitman stemmed from an introduction to the author by Lucian Oldershaw; they had read Leaves of Grass to each other in Oldershaw’s bedroom for over three hours during their last year at St Paul’s, breaking only for drinks at Oldershaw’s Talgarth Road house in Kensington. Whitman had gone a long way towards saving Gilbert in the earlier days of his depression, instilling in him a new lust for life and an instinct for survival.
Whitman is usually remembered by his portrait in the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855. In it the bearded poet wears an open shirt and slouch hat, with his head cocked to one side, full of that zestful enthusiasm and vibrance which Gilbert found so attractive and reassuring. He had been born in 1819 in Long Island, one of a family of ten children. He was raised on the literature of the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare and Scott — the similarities with Gilbert are striking here — and became a teacher and printer. After a period as a journalist and editor Whitman travelled with his brothers to the south, and for the next few years shared his life between the urban growth of nineteenth-century New York and the expanse of the American south-east and mid-west. He began to see man as a part of nature, with love being at the root of humanity. He read the German school of thought which was so pessimistic about the future of humanity, and dismissed it.
In 1855 came Leaves of Grass, a series of thirteen poems which earned him as much dislike as praise. It was in England that his reputation grew most, not in his native United States. As the poet of democracy, who was to suffer during the Civil War and become an ill man in middle age, recognition was not forthcoming. His poetry is full of warmth and a sense of the transcendental qualities which mattered much to Gilbert. In his book The Thing: Why I Am A Catholic, published in 1930, Gilbert would write of Whitman that “he seemed to me something like a crowd turned to a giant, or like Adam, the first man … I did not care about whether his unmetrical poetry were a wise form or no, any more than whether the true Gospel of Jesus was scrawled on parchment or stone … What I saluted was a new equality, which was not a dull levelling, but an enthusiastic lifting … Real men were greater than unreal gods; and each remained as mystic and majestic as a god, while he became as frank and comforting as a comrade … A glory was to cling about men … the least and lowest of men … A hump-backed negro hal
f-wit, with one eye and homicidal mania, must not be painted without his numbus of gold-coloured light.”
Whitman’s influence on Gilbert both at this time and later was vast. As a poet he helped to shape Gilbert’s writings, as a thinker he helped to shape Gilbert’s life. If it were not for literature the young man, alone and aware of it, may have found his life too shallow to continue. His 1894 notebook contains a number of ideas and verses clearly based upon Whitman themes, and throughout his Italian holiday, in Verona and Venice and Milan, he read and thought of his new literary mentor. He was to need the Whitmanesque attitude towards optimism when he returned from Italy, for October 1894 was the month he dropped Latin from his studies at University College and instead attempted to come to terms with the college classes in History and Political Economy. He wrote and remembered little of this term of study, unhappy with content and methods. For him it was “failure.”
Any suicidal impulses which may have entered Gilbert’s mind were not recorded outside the most cryptic of drawings, far too disguised for any serious study. Suicide, or attempts at it, by people in his situation are not uncommon: isolation, friends from the earliest days discovering new lives and doing well, a belief that one is failing in so many things, no partner or even best friend. University students between the ages of eighteen and twenty are particularly prone to severe depression and suicidal thoughts when their familiar supports and props simply drop away. Gilbert did indulge in “mad” thoughts, but gives no literal reference to the “madness” of suicide. “There is something truly menacing in the thought of how quickly I could imagine the maddest, when I had never committed the mildest crime. Something may have been due to the atmosphere of the Decadents [he saw them as in direct conflict with Whitman] and their perpetual hints of the luxurious horrors of paganism; but I am not disposed to dwell much on that defence, I suspect I manufactured most of my morbidities for myself. But anyhow, it is true that there was a time when I had reached that condition of moral anarchy within, in which a man says, in the words of Wilde, that ‘Atys with the blood-stained knife were better than the thing I am.’ I have never felt the faintest temptation to the particular madness of Wilde; but I could at this time imagine the worst and the wildest disproportions of more normal passion; the point is that the whole mood was overpowered and oppressed with a sort of congestion of imagination. As Bunyan, in his morbid period, described himself as prompted to utter blasphemies, I had an overpowering impulse to record or draw horrible ideas and images; plunging deeper and deeper as in a blind spiritual suicide.” Suicide of the spirit was Gilbert’s particular ailment, and he was only to fully recover from the near fatality when he threw off those childish things which tied him firmly to unhappiness; the comfortable late-Victorian family and the comfortable late-Victorian suburb would not follow him into adult life. When he came to terms with this, painful though it was, he was virtually cured.
Writing and writings eased the path. Of the latter it was of course Whitman who did most of the good work. Oscar Wilde also contributed. As a great man to argue against with friends and oppose as a point of principle Mr Wilde had no rivals. His fame and infamy during the 1890s made him an easy hero and even easier target. Gilbert knew that he was against what Wilde stood for, but was conscious that what Wilde actually wrote was great literature. He emulated Wilde’s “The Fisherman and His Soul” in one of his notebooks, and frequently referred to him in the course of debate and conversation.
Of Robert Louis Stevenson’s writings Gilbert admired the notion of the lone hero battling against forces greater and more sinister than himself. He showed when he wrote his biography of Stevenson in 1926 and 1927 that he felt a parallel between that author’s boyhood and his own. His admiration for Stevenson clearly extended beyond mere love of his writings, he experienced a sense of identification. In a cleansing style he would write in the biography: “What was the matter with Stevenson, I fancy … was that there was too sharp a contrast between the shelter and delicate fancies of his childhood and the sort of world which met him like a wind on the front doorstep. The ideal development of a man’s destiny is … from the child’s garden of verses to the man’s garden of vows. I do not think that time of transition went right with Stevenson; I think that something thwarted or misled him … I think that in his childhood he had the worst luck in the world; and that this explains most of his story.”
No leaps of imagination are required; Gilbert’s own story is strikingly similar. He gained a solid platform of comfort from the lives of authors and poets of the past; an experience shared was an experience partially understood and, with the greatest of efforts, almost accepted. He was searching out paths back to calmness and sanity, and discovering them in the lives of great men. It was as though the supreme authors of ages past were holding out a hand of salvation.
Stevenson’s outstretched arm was always the strongest. “He stood up suddenly amid all these things and shook himself with a sort of impatient sanity; a shrug of scepticism about scepticism,” Gilbert wrote about the man who provided such help. “His real distinction is that he had the sense to see that there is nothing to be done with Nothing. He saw that in that staggering universe it was absolutely necessary to stand somehow on something … he did seek for a ledge on which he could really stand. He did definitely and even dramatically refuse to go mad; or, what is very much worse, to remain futile.” He continued the theme in The Poet and the Lunatics, published in July 1929. In the chapter entitled “The Crime of Gabriel Gale” Gilbert discussed madness, a subject which would appear time and again in his books. He clearly had a fascination both for the liberation as well as the agony of insanity by the time he came out of his black period; it was the interest of one who had seen the door, knocked hard, but recoiled when the first lock was opened.
A very large number of young men nearly go mad. But nearly all of them only nearly do it; and normally they recover the normal. You might almost say it’s normal to have an abnormal period. It comes when there’s a lack of adjustment in the scale of things outside and within. Lots of those boys, those big healthy schoolboys you hear about, who care for nothing but cricket or the tuckshop, are busting with a secret and swelling morbidity. [He then went on to describe an individual case] … in this young man it was rather symbolically expressed even in the look of him. It was like his growing out of his clothes, or being too big for his boots. The inside gets too big for the outside. He doesn’t know how to relate to two things; and generally he doesn’t relate them at all. In one way his own mind and self seem to be colossal and cosmic and everything outside them small or distant. In another way the world is much too big for him; and his thoughts are fragile things to be hidden away. There are any number of cases of that disproportionate secretiveness.
The tunnel had seemed interminable, ever dark. There was now some light at the end, some ripples of hope. Gilbert’s descent into instability was akin to a man slipping down a muddy hill, no matter how far he dug his fingers into the dirt his slide continued, and when he rested his hands for a moment the drop resumed with even greater velocity. It was a nightmare image. As he neared his twenty-first birthday the conclusion suddenly appeared to be reachable. Peace and calm had in fact been growing steadily more accessible for eighteen months, but by its very nature such a mental quandary does not allow the sufferer to perceive any ray of hope until the end is upon him. He began to grapple with perspective, and the concept of existence. If only he would relax, he told himself, and accept the joy of the present, the problems of the future would no longer be problems. He was finding meaning. In a notebook of the time he wrote
If I set the sun beside the moon,
And if I set the land behind the sea,
And if I set the tower beside the country,
And if I set the man beside the woman,
I suppose some fool would talk about one being better.
And in another, which he called “The Daisy,” he penned
Colossal leagues of powers
And colossal choirs of angels
Could not give thanks for it.
Gilbert’s life was beginning to be filled with a vague image of god; God would come later. He was grateful for life, grateful for what he now saw to be wonderful gifts and opportunities. Gratitude was something to be considered and relished, and he made notes on the subject
You say grace before meals.
All right.
But I say grace before the play and the opera,
And grace before the concert and pantomime,
And grace before I open a book,
And grace before sketching, painting,
Swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing;
And grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
He was excited about his partial recovery, and felt well enough to inform Bentley of the news. Writing to other people on the history of his suffering was a major breakthrough. Bentley was no longer a loved friend to be envied and mourned for while he was away at Oxford, but someone who could be trusted completely with a profound example of openness. “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 was that I found that things, when examined, necessarily spelt such a mystically satisfactory state of things, that without getting back to earth, I saw lots that made me certain it is all right. The vision is fading into common day now, and I am glad. It is embarrassing, talking with God face to face, as a man speaketh to a friend.”
Of a higher being, a force behind creation, he now spoke often. He was reading the Bible, especially the Old Testament, with his usual passion for words. His notebooks contain fewer drawings and illustrations, more passages from proposed novels and short poems. He became convinced that his future — he now had a future he believed — lay in the world of literature and not in the realm of fine art. The paradox makes an early appearance: “The stone that gathers most moss is the gravestone,” and one which was to occur much later in his life under a different heading: “About what else than serious subjects can one possibly make jokes?” Most important of all in the notebooks was a statement hidden between idle jottings and careless aphorisms. “The right way is the Christian way, to believe there is a positive evil somewhere and fight it.” Out of an experience of hell, a taste of evil, came a dim vision of heaven. He proceeded to write more poetry on his new, evolving philosophy