Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Page 4

the idea of using "Chesterton" when speaking of him as a public character and also when speaking of the days before I did in fact call him "Gilbert." But this often left him and Cecil mixed up: then too, though I seldom used "G.K." myself, other friends writing to me of him often used it. I began to go through the manuscript unifying--and then I noticed that in a single paragraph of his Bernard Shaw Gilbert uses "GBS," "Shaw," "Bernard Shaw," and "Mr Shaw." Here was a precedent indeed, and it seemed to me that it was really the natural thing to do. After all we do talk of people now by one name, now by another: it is a matter of slight importance if of any, and I decided to let it go.
As to size, I am afraid the present book is a large one--although not as large as Boswell's Johnson or Gone with the Wind. But in this matter I am unrepentant, for I have faith in Chesterton's own public. The book is large because there is no other way of getting Chesterton on to the canvas. It is a joke he would himself have enjoyed, but it is also a serious statement. For a complete portrait of Chesterton, even the most rigorous selection of material cannot be compressed into a smaller space. I have first written at length and then cut and cut.
At first I had intended to omit all matter already given in the Autobiography. Then I realised that would never do. For some things which are vital to a complete Biography of Chesterton are not only told in the Autobiography better than I could tell them, but are recorded there and nowhere else. And this book is not merely a supplement to the Autobiography. It is the Life of Chesterton.
The same problem arises with regard to the published books and I have tried to solve it on the same line. There has rung in my mind Mr. Belloc's saying: "A man is his mind." To tell the story of a man of letters while avoiding quotation from or reference to his published works is simply not to tell it. At Christopher Dawson's suggestion I have re-read all the books in the order in which they were written, thus trying to get the development of Gilbert's mind perfectly clear to myself and to trace the influences that affected him at various dates. For this reason I have analysed certain of the books and not others--those which showed this mental development most clearly at various stages, or those (too many alas) which are out of print and hard to obtain. But whenever possible in illustrating his mental history I have used unpublished material, so that even the most ardent Chestertonian will find much that is new to him.
For the period of Gilbert's youth there are many exercise books, mostly only half filled, containing sketches and caricatures, lists of tithes for short stories and chapters, unfinished short stories. Several completed fairy stories and some of the best drawings were published in The Coloured Lands. Others are hints later used in his own novels: there is a fragment of The Ball and the Cross, a first suggestion for The Man Who Was Thursday, a rather more developed adumbration of The Napoleon of Notting Hill. This I think is later than most of the notebooks; but, after the change in handwriting, apparently deliberately and carefully made by Gilbert around the date at which he left St. Paul's for the Slade School, it is almost impossible to establish a date at all exactly for any one of these notebooks. Notes made later when he had formed the habit of dictation became difficult to read, not through bad handwriting, but because words are abbreviated and letters omitted.
Some of the exercise books appear to have been begun, thrown aside and used again later. There is among them one only of real biographical importance, a book deliberately used for the development of a philosophy of life, dated in two places, to which I devote a chapter and which I refer to as the Notebook. This book is as important in studying Chesterton as the Pensées would be for a student of Pascal. He is here already a master of phrase in a sense which makes a comparison with Pascal especially apt. For he often packs so much meaning into a brilliant sentence or two that I have felt it worth while, in dealing especially with some of the less remembered books, to pull out a few of these sentences for quotation apart from their context.
Other important material was to be found in G.K.'s Weekly, in articles in other periodicals, and in unpublished letters. With some of the correspondences I have made considerable use of