Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Page 7

Doubtless her generation was beginning to see Christianity with less
than the simplicity of their parents. They were hearing of Darwin and
Spencer, and the optimism which accompanied the idea of evolution
was turning religion into a vague glow which would, they felt, survive
the somewhat childish dogmas in which our rude ancestors had tried to
formulate it. But with an increased vagueness went also, with the more
liberal--and the Chestertons were essentially liberal both politically and
theologically--an increased tolerance. In several of his letters, Edward
Chesterton mentions the Catholic Church, and certainly with no dislike.
He went on one occasion to hear Manning preach and much admired
the sermon, although he notes too that he found in it "no distinctively
Roman Catholic doctrine." He belonged, however, to an age that on the
whole found the rest of life more exciting and interesting than religion,
an age that had kept the Christian virtues and still believed that these
virtues could stand alone, without the support of the Christian creed.
The temptation to describe dresses has always to be sternly resisted
when dealing with any part of the Victorian era, so merely pausing to
note that it seems to have been a triumph on the part of Mrs. Grosjean
to have cut a short skirt out of 8½ yards of material, I reluctantly lay
aside the letters at the time when Edward Chesterton and Marie were
married and had set about living happily ever after.
These two had no fear of life: they belonged to a generation which
cheerfully created a home and brought fresh life into being. In doing it,
they did a thousand other things, so that the home they made was full
of vital energies for the children who were to grow up in it. Gilbert
recollects his father as a man of a dozen hobbies, his study as a place
where these hobbies formed strata of exciting products, awakening
youthful covetousness in the matter of a new paint-box, satisfying
youthful imagination by the production of a toy-theatre. His character,

serene and humorous as his son describes him, is reflected in his letters.
Edward Chesterton did not use up his mental powers in the family
business. Taught by his father to be a good man of business, he was in
his private life a man of a thousand other energies and ideas. "On the
whole," says his son, "I am glad he was never an artist. It might have
stood in his way in becoming an amateur. It might have spoilt his
career; his private career. He could never have made a vulgar success
of all the thousand things be did so successfully."
Here, Gilbert sees a marked distinction between that generation of
business men and the present in the use of leisure; he sees hobbies as
superior to sport. "The old-fashioned Englishman, like my father, sold
houses for his living but filled his own house with his life. A hobby is
not merely a holiday. . . . It is not merely exercising the body instead of
the mind, an excellent but now largely a recognised thing. It is
exercising the rest of the mind; now an almost neglected thing."
Edward Chesterton practised "water-colour painting and modelling and
photography and stained glass and fretwork and magic lanterns and
mediaeval illumination." And, moreover, "knew all his English
literature backwards."
It has become of late the fashion for any one who writes of his own life
to see himself against a dark background, to see his development
frustrated by some shadow of heredity or some horror of environment.
But Gilbert saw his life rather as the ancients saw it when pietas was a
duty because we had received so much from those who brought us into
being. This Englishman was grateful to his country, to his parents, to
his home for all that they had given him.
I regret that I have no gloomy and savage father to offer to the public
gaze as the true cause of all my tragic heritage; no pale-faced and
partially poisoned mother whose suicidal instincts have cursed me with
the temptations of the artistic temperament. I regret that there was
nothing in the range of our family much more racy than a remote and
mildly impecunious uncle; and that I cannot do my duty as a true
modern, by cursing everybody who made me whatever I am. I am not
clear about what that is; but I am pretty sure that most of it is my own

fault. And I am compelled to confess that I look back to that landscape
of my first days with a pleasure that should doubtless be reserved for
the Utopias of the Futurist.*
[* G. K. Chesterton. Autobiography, pp. 22-3.]
CHAPTER II
Childhood
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON was born on