Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Page 6

Because a
donkey, by continual kicks, Turns slowly into something like a mule-- I
was not born in 1856.
Age of my fathers: truer at the touch Than mine: Great age of Dickens,
youth and yule: Had your strong virtues stood without a crutch, I might

have deemed man had no need of rule, But I was born when petty poets
pule, When madmen used your liberty to mix Lucre and lust, bestial
and beautiful, I was not born in 1856.*
[* Quoted in G. K. Chesterton: A criticism. Aliston Rivers (1908) pp.
243-244.]
Both Autobiography and Prison Life are worth reading.* They breathe
the "Great Gusto" seen by Gilbert in that era. He does not quote them in
his Autobiography, but, just mentioning Captain Chesterton, dwells
chiefly on his grandfather, who, while George Laval Chesterton was
fighting battles and reforming prisons, had succeeded to the headship
of a house agents' business in Kensington. (For, the family fortunes
having been dissipated, Gilbert's great-grandfather had become first a
coal merchant and then a house agent.) A few of the letters between
this ancestor and his son remain and they are interesting, confirming
Gilbert's description in the Autobiography of his grandfather's feeling
that he himself was something of a landmark in Kensington and that the
family business was honourable and important.
[* See Appendix A.]
The Chestertons, whatever the ups and downs of their past history,
were by now established in that English middle-class respectability in
which their son was to discover--or into which he was to bring--a glow
and thrill of adventurous romance. Edward Chesterton, Gilbert's father,
belonged to a serious family and a serious generation, which took its
work as a duty and its profession as a vocation. I wonder what young
house-agent today, just entering the family business, would receive a
letter from his father adjuring him to "become an active steady and
honourable man of business," speaking of "abilities which only want to
be judiciously brought out, of course assisted with your earnest
co-operation."
Gilbert's mother was Marie Grosjean, one of a family of twenty-three
children. The family had long been English, but came originally from
French Switzerland. Marie's mother was from an Aberdeen family of
Keiths, which gave Gilbert his second name and a dash of Scottish

blood which "appealed strongly to my affections and made a sort of
Scottish romance in my childhood." Marie's father, whom Gilbert never
saw, had been "one of the old Wesleyan lay-preachers and was thus
involved in public controversy, a characteristic which has descended to
his grandchild. He was also one of the leaders of the early Teetotal
movement, a characteristic which has not."*
[* Autobiography, pp. 11-12.]
When Edward became engaged to Marie Grosjean he complained that
his "dearest girl" would not believe that he had any work to do, but he
was in fact much occupied and increasingly responsible for the family
business.
There is a flavour of a world very remote from ours in the packet of
letters between the two and from their various parents, aunts and sisters
to one another during their engagement. Edward illuminates poems "for
a certaln dear good little child," sketches the "look out from home" for
her mother, hopes they did not appear uncivil in wandering into the
garden together at an aunt's house and leaving the rest of the company
for too long. He praises a friend of hers as "intellectual and unaffected,
two excellent things in woman," describes a clerk sent to France with
business papers who "lost them all, the careless dog, except the
Illustrated London News."
A letter to Marie from her sister Harriette is amusing. She describes her
efforts at entertaining in the absence of her mother. The company were
"great swells" so that her brother "took all the covers of the chairs
himself and had the wine iced and we dined in full dress--it was very
awful--considering myself as hostess." Poor girl, it was a series of
misfortunes. "The dinner was three-quarters of an hour late, the fish
done to rags." She had hired three dozen wine-glasses to be sure of
enough, but they were "brought in in twos and threes at a time and then
a hiatus as if they were being washed which they were not."
In the letters from parents and older relatives religious observances are
taken for granted and there is an obvious sincerity in the many allusions
to God's will and God's guidance of human life. No one reading them

could doubt that the description of a dying relative as "ready for the
summons" and to "going home" is a sincere one. Other letters, notably
Harriette's, do not lack a spice of malice in speaking of those whose
religion was unreal and affected--a phenomenon that only appears in an
age when real religion abounds.