Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Page 4

me the weak spot in my work that had
occasioned them. They have helped me to improve the book--I think I
may say enormously.
One suggestion I have not followed--that one name should be used
throughout: either Chesterton or Gilbert or G.K., but not all three. I had
begun with 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,