Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Page 5

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 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