Gilbert: The Man Who was G. K. Chesterton

by Michael Coren

  He could have made the comparison, in his own terms, between Dickens and any number of writers of the early twentieth century. It was pointed out that the book about a nineteenth-century novelist, travel writer and reformer was as much a critique of modern literature and values as it was a biography. The comment pleased Gilbert; he had not intended it to be anything but such an achievement. There were few criticisms of his analysis of Dickensian characters, described by him as all being “great fools.”

  There is the same difference between a great fool and a small fool as there is between a great poet and a small poet. The great fool is a being who is above wisdom rather than below it … A man can be entirely great while he is entirely foolish. We see this in the epic heroes, such as Achilles. Nay, a man can be entirely great because he is entirely foolish. We see this in all the great comic characters of all the great comic writers of whom Dickens was the last. Bottom the Weaver is great because he is foolish; Mr Toots is great because he is foolish. The thing I mean can be observed, for instance, in innumerable actual characters. Which of us has not known, for instance, a great rustic? — a character so incurably characteristic that he seemed to break through all canons about cleverness or stupidity; we do not know whether he is an enormous idiot or an enormous philosopher; we know only that he is enormous, like a hill. These great, grotesque characters are almost entirely to be found where Dickens found them — among the poorer classes. The gentry only attain this greatness by going slightly mad …

  After describing the different types of characters which Dickens invented and brought to vibrant life he discussed the staggering number of such individuals. “The whole point of Dickens is that he not only made them, but made them by myriads; that he stamped his foot, and armies came out of the earth.” He used the character of Mr Toots, “a good example of the real work of Dickens,” and dwelt on the “grotesque greatness” of the man.

  Toots is a type that we all know as well as we know chimney-pots. And of all conceivable human figures he is apparently the most futile and the most dull. He is the blockhead who hangs on at a private school, overgrown and underdeveloped. He is always backward in his lessons, but forward in certain cheap ways of the world; he can smoke before he can spell. Toots is a perfect and pungent picture of the wretched youth. Toots has, as this youth always has, a little money of his own; enough to waste in a semi-dissipation he does not enjoy, and in a gaping regard for sports in which he could not possibly excel. Toots has, as this youth always has, bits of surreptitious finery, in his case the incomparable ring. In Toots, above all, is exactly rendered the central and most startling contradiction; the contrast between a jauntiness and a certain impudence of the attire, with the profound shame and sheepishness of the visage and the character …

  For all the favourable reviews there was one constant theme of criticism: Gilbert was still a careless biographer, refusing to check his references and relying on a memory which was more susceptible than most to a vivid imagination. He was almost proud of some of the errors in his factual books which so outraged the traditional teachers and critics of his age, refusing to change them or apologise — in his mind there was nothing for which to apologise. He had waxed lyrical about Dickens and the postcard, and was not particularly upset when one reviewer stated that the first postcard in Britain was seen some three months after the great man’s death. On one issue he was touched, and was prepared to act upon it. Dicken’s daughter, Kate Perugini, wrote two letters to Gilbert, praising his biography of her father and congratulating him on its success. She did however take issue with his statement that Dickens had married the wrong sister in the Hogarth family, and that he was in fact in love with all the sisters.

  “My mother had no sister at that time with whom it was possible to fall in love,” she wrote. “Or, no doubt, my father, being young and quite likely very impressionable, might have done so. As it was, he sincerely loved my mother, or thought he did, which came to the same thing, for he married her and, as you know, they did not live happy ever after, although I fancy they had several years of very great happiness indeed before my poor father found out his mistake, and before my poor mother suffered from this discovery. They were both to be pitied.” She also informed Gilbert that as at the time of her parents’ marriage her mother was the eldest of the Hogarth sisters and the other girls were aged fifteen and younger it was hardly likely that Dickens had any romantic feelings towards them. As to the suggestion that the family would have to listen to Dickens’s laments and abusive tantrums she wrote, “In my father’s unhappiness there were no railings. When he was really sorrowful he was very quiet, and depression with him never took the form of petulance. For in his unhappy moods he was singularly gentle and thoughtful for those around him.”

  Gilbert was a feeling man, moved to tears at times, always vulnerable to a story of grief or loss. The letters from Mrs Perugini genuinely upset him, and he was anxious to put matters right. The lady lived in Victoria Road in Kensington, and Gilbert lost no time in visiting and explaining himself. He was contrite, grateful, and would amend his statements in all future editions of the Dickens biography. Such was Gilbert’s sorrow at the pain caused this delightful lady that she herself became worried about his own state of mind, and wrote to Frances explaining that the protest was only made on behalf of her mother: “From my own knowledge of her I feel sure that at the time she was engaged to my father she was a very winning and affectionate creature, and although the marriage, like many other marriages, turned out a dismal failure, I am also convinced that my dear father gained much from her refining influence and that of her family, and perhaps would never have been quite what he became without that influence.”

  The postscript to this incident is indicative of Gilbert’s character. Here he was, sincerely upset and willing to do virtually anything to correct his mistake. It would have been relatively simple for him to inform his publishers of his wishes and make the relevant corrections for subsequent editions of the book, and subsequent editions there most certainly would be. No corrections were made, all his statements remained in the biography of Charles Dickens for posterity. Why? Malice and deceit were not the reasons; only over the death of a loved person would he ever show anything resembling bitterness and lack of charity, and the telling of a lie was as unnatural to Gilbert as the act of going on a diet. His memory was frequently poor, he was a very busy man and there were many other pressures on him at the time of the Dickens book. The central explanation lies elsewhere. After a brief time he came to the conclusion that corrections and apologies didn’t matter. The victim would not harbour a grudge, Dickens was long dead. He was to exhibit this form of unintending insensitivity throughout his life, and most of his allegedly anti-Semitic comments in later years were the result not of racism, but of too humorous an attitude towards other people’s feelings, demanding of them as thick a skin as he himself possessed.

  His growing faith was a major factor in enlarging his sense of conscience and concern for others. His reading and thinking had taken him in the direction of orthodox Christianity for some years, and his friendship with Father O’Connor — though O’Connor scrupulously avoided any attempts at conversion — opened up the door to Roman Catholicism. He was perceived quite early on as a defender of the Church in all of its many shapes, and this was acknowledged by enemies as well as friends. One opponent who had taken issue with Gilbert as soon as he had encountered him was Robert Blatchford, editor of the Clarion and, according to Gilbert, “an old soldier with brown Italian eyes and a walrus moustache, and full of the very sentiments that soldiers have and Socialists generally have not.” The confrontation between the two men and the two beliefs had begun in 1903 when Blatchford and his allies had written an atheistic manifesto entitled “God and My Neighbour.” Gilbert comments upon Blatchford and his writings in the Daily News

  The problem is what is normal in man or, to put it more simply, what is human in him. Now, there are some who maintain, like Mr Blatchford, that the r
eligious experience of the ages was abnormal, a youthful morbidity, a nightmare from which he is gradually waking. There are others like myself who think that on the contrary it is the modern rationalist civilisation which is abnormal, a loss of ancient human powers of perception of ecstasy in the feverish cynicism of cities and empire. We maintain that man is not only part of God, but that God is part of man; a thing essential, like sex. We say that (in the light of actual history) if you cut off the supernatural what remains is the unnatural. We say that it is in believing ages that you get men living in the open and dancing and telling tales by the fire. We say that it is in ages of unbelief, that you get emperors dressing up as women, and gladiators, or minor poets wearing green carnations and praising unnamable things. We say that, taking ages as a whole, the wildest fantasies of superstition are nothing to the fantasies of rationalism …

  Blatchford replied by putting four questions to Gilbert. “Are you a Christian?” he asked. Gilbert: “Certainly.” “What do you mean by the word Christianity?” Gilbert: “A belief that a certain human being whom we call Christ stood to a certain superhuman being whom we call God in a certain unique transcendental relationship which we call sonship.” “What do you believe?” Gilbert: “A considerable number of things. That Mr Blatchford is an honest man, for instance. And (but less firmly) that there is a place called Japan. If he means what do I believe in religious matters, I believe the above statement (answer 2) and a large number of other mystical dogmas, ranging from the mystical dogma that man is the image of God to the mystical dogma that all men are equal and that babies should not be strangled.” “Why do you believe it?” Gilbert: “Because I perceive life to be logical and workable with these beliefs and illogical and unworkable without them.”

  The dispute was by now interesting other people, provoking letters and taking up a great deal of time. Each time an attack was defended and parried another thrust would follow. Did not the believers realise, the new thinkers argued, that Christianity inspired manic depression, the black asceticism which had caused so much damage? Not so, replied Gilbert, and the “very oddity and completeness of these men’s surrender make it look very much as if there were really something actual and solid in the thing for which they sold themselves. They gave up all pleasures for one pleasure. They gave up all human experiences for the sake of one superhuman experience …” The response was not attacked; another attack was conceived. What of the torture, cruelty and intolerance which had followed devout Christian belief? “Men commit crimes not only for bad things, far more often for good things,” wrote Gilbert. “For no bad things can be desired quite so passionately and persistently as good things can be desired, and only very exceptional men desire very bad and unnatural things.” It did not satisfy Blatchford, and not for that matter many of the observers of the debate.

  He pursued the point, introducing the example of the French Revolution

  … And if the slow and polite preaching of rational fraternity in a rational age ended in the massacres of September, what an a fortiori is here! What would be likely to be the effect of the sudden dropping into a dreadfully evil century of a dreadfully perfect truth? What would happen if a world baser than the world of Sade were confronted with a gospel purer than the gospel of Rousseau?

  The mere flinging of the polished pebble of Republican Idealism into the artificial lake of eighteenth-century Europe produced a splash that seemed to splash the heavens, and a storm that drowned ten thousand men. What would happen if a star from heaven really fell into the slimy and bloody pool of a hopeless and decaying humanity? Men swept a city with a guillotine, a continent with a sabre, because Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity were too precious to be lost. What if Christianity was yet more maddening because it was yet more precious?

  But why should we labour the point when One who knew human nature as it can really be learnt, from fishermen and women and natural people, saw from his quiet village the track of his truth across history, and, in saying that He came to bring not peace but a sword, set up eternally His colossal realism against the eternal sentimentality of the Secularist?

  Blatchford was dying, but would not lie down. His attacks became less intense, less striking and difficult to answer. He fired his final shot with an accusation that the Jewish people’s God was a mere manifestation of the Jewish people’s need, at a time when they were under the iron and agonising rule of either an Egyptian or a Roman empire. This was a God of ancient Judea and Israel, not a God of the world that was, and was to be. What was the sense in believing in a parochial overbeing? The tribalism of the ancient Hebrews, Blatchford claimed, negated the universal theme of the Christian God; and the conditions of the time and state of ancient Israel made ridiculous any claims that scripture should apply to twentieth-century Britain or even fourteenth-century Europe. Gilbert was anxious to reply to this particular point, it being an argument he had considered seriously in the past, and come to strong conclusions

  This is an excellent example of one of the things that if I were conducting a detailed campaign I should use as an argument for the validity of Biblical experience. For if there really are some other and higher beings than ourselves, and if they, in some strange way, at some emotional crisis, really revealed themselves to rude poets or dreamers in very simple times, that these rude people should regard revelation as local, and connect it with the particular hill or river where it happened, seems to be exactly what any reasonable human being would expect. It has a far more credible look than if they had talked cosmic philosophy from the beginning. If they had, I should have suspected “priestcraft” and forgeries and third-century Gnosticism.

  If there be such a being as God, and He can speak to a child, and if God spoke to a child in the garden, the child would, of course, say that God lived in a garden. I should not think it less likely to be true for that. If the child said: “God is everywhere; an impalpable essence pervading and supporting all constituents of the Cosmos alike” — if, I say the infant addressed me in the above terms I should think he was much more likely to have been with the governess than with God.

  So if Moses had said God was an Infinite Energy, I should be certain he had seen nothing extraordinary. As he said he was a Burning Bush, I think it very likely that he did see something extraordinary. For whatever be the Divine Secret, and whether or no it has (as all peoples have believed) sometimes broken bounds and surged into our world, at least it lies on the side furthest away from pedants and their definitions, and nearest to the silver souls of quiet people, to the beauty of bushes, and the love of one’s native place.

  Thus, then, in our last instance (out of hundreds that might be taken), we conclude in the same way. When the learned sceptic says: “The visions of the Old Testament were local, and rustic, and grotesque,” we shall answer: “Of course. They were genuine.”

  The Blatchford affair had a twin effect on Gilbert’s reputation. For all the acclaim he received from the religious communities in Britain, North America and Europe, he was completely misunderstood by the bulk of secular opinion, which was beginning to regard any committed form of theology as something extreme, alien and undesirable. It was not something which would, or could, have concerned him; such apparent suffering for the cause delighted him no end. The damage inflicted was in society’s perception of him as a man to be taken seriously, but not too seriously, and that opinion has followed Gilbert down to the modern day, contributing to his relatively low standing as a modern novelist and philosopher. There is little doubt that if his cause had been socialism or the pursuit of a permissive age he would now be known and read by a far larger audience. The literate world of Edwardian England was just as irreligious as the contemporary world, with a stronger pressure from the positively anti-religious sectors in the country. Gilbert was polarising his readers between those who saw him as their champion and those who thought him a gifted, fundamentally wrong and extreme eccentric. Gilbert considered his writings against Blatchford were eminently moderate

&nbs
p; It was not a question of some abstract theological thesis, like the definition of the Trinity or the dogmas of Election or Effectual Grace. I was not yet so far gone in orthodoxy as to be so theological as all that. What I was defending seemed to me a plain matter of ordinary human morals. Indeed it seemed to me to raise the question of the very possibility of any morals. It was the question of Responsibility, sometimes called the question of Free Will, which Mr Blatchford had attacked in a series of vigorous and even violent proclamations of Determinism; all apparently founded on having read a little book or pamphlet by Professor Haeckel. The question had a great many amusing or arresting aspects … It was the secularists who drove me to theological ethics, by themselves destroying any sane or rational possibility of secular ethics. I might myself have been a secularist, so long as it meant that I could be merely responsible to secular society …

  Nor was the unfortunate Mr Blatchford the only subject of Gilbert’s vehement writings. Darwinism, in both its biological and social manifestations, was a phenomenon which he detested, and was willing to comment upon whenever the opportunity arose. It was not merely Darwin himself and his theories which outraged the traditional Christian writer, but the floodgates of cynicism and modern thought which were opened following the publication of Darwin’s ideas. Gilbert’s longing for an age when men knew what they believed and believed what they knew — or pretended to — often led him along paths of irrational thought. When he dressed as Dr Johnson and lamented the passing of that man’s age, he lapsed into the fault of anachronism; the notion that there was a watershed in British history separating middle English decency and the stout yeomanry who loved their God and their country on one side, and the darker men of false prophets and dangerous politics on the other, was clearly absurd. Nevertheless, he did believe that the world was on a dangerous slope towards something still unimaginable, and that the concept of evolution was one of the root problems. In a satire upon a famous poem by Thomas Hood he wrote his own entitled “Race-Memory, by a dazed Darwinian”