Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Page 5

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in other periodicals, and in unpublished letters.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 both sides, and if
anyone pedantically objects that that is unusual in a biography I will
adapt a phrase of Bernard Shaw's which you will find in this book, and
say, "Hang it all, be reasonable! If you had the choice between reading
me and reading Wells and Shaw, wouldn't you choose Wells and
Shaw."

GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON

CHAPTER I
Background for Gilbert Keith Chesterton
IT IS USUAL to open a biography with some account of the subject's
ancestry. Chesterton, in his Browning, after some excellent foolery
about pedigree-hunting, makes the suggestion that middle-class
ancestry is far more varied and interesting than the ancestry of the
aristocrat:
The truth is that aristocrats exhibit less of the romance of pedigree than
any other people in the world. For since it is their principle to marry
only within their own class and mode of life, there is no opportunity in
their case for any of the more interesting studies in heredity; they
exhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of the lower animals. It is in the
middle classes that we find the poetry of genealogy; it is the suburban
grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash of Eastern or
Celtic blood may drive suddenly to a whole holiday or a crime.
This may provide fun for a guessing game but is not very useful to a
biographer. The Chesterton family, like many another, had had the ups
and downs in social position that accompany the ups and downs of
fortune. Upon all this Edward Chesterton, Gilbert's father, as head of
the family possessed many interesting documents. After his death,
Gilbert's mother left his papers undisturbed. But when she died Gilbert
threw away, without examination, most of the contents of his father's
study, including all family records. Thus I cannot offer any sort of
family tree. But it is possible to show the kind of family and the social
atmosphere into which Gilbert Chesterton was born.
Some of the relatives say that the family hailed from the village of
Chesterton--now merged into Cambridge, of which they were Lords of
the Manor, but Gilbert refused to take this seriously. In an introduction
to a book called Life in Old Cambridge, he wrote:
I have never been to Cambridge except as an admiring visitor; I have
never been to Chesterton at all, either from a sense of unworthiness or
from a faint superstitious feeling that I might be fulfilling a prophecy in

the countryside. Anyone with a sense of the savour of the old English
country rhymes and tales will share my vague alarm that the steeple
might crack or the market cross fall down, for a smaller thing than the
coincidence of a man named Chesterton going to Chesterton.
At the time of the Regency, the head of the family was a friend of the
Prince's and (perhaps as a result of such company) dissipated his
fortunes in riotous living and incurred various terms of imprisonment
for debt. From his debtors' prisons he wrote letters, and sixty years later
Mr. Edward Chesterton used to read them to his family: as also those of
another interesting relative, Captain George Laval Chesterton, prison
reformer and friend of Mrs. Fry and of Charles Dickens. A relative
recalls the sentence: "I cried, Dickens cried, we all cried," which makes
one rather long for the rest of the letter.
George Laval Chesterton left two books, one a kind of autobiography,
the other a work on prison reform. It was a moment of enthusiasm for
reform, of optimism and of energy. Dickens was stirring the minds of
Englishmen to discover the evils in their land and rush to their
overthrow. Darwin was writing his Origin of Species, which in some
curious way increased the hopeful energy of his countrymen: they
seemed to feel it much more satisfying to have been once animal and
have become human than to be fallen gods who could again be made
divine. Anyhow, there were giants in those days and it was hope that
made them so.
When by an odd confusion the Tribune described G. K. Chesterton as
having been born about the date that Captain Chesterton published his
books, he replied in a ballade which at once saluted and attacked:
I am not fond of anthropoids as such, I never went to Mr. Darwin's
school, Old Tyndall's ether, that he liked so much Leaves me, I fear,
comparatively cool. I cannot say my heart with hope is full