Gilbert: The Man Who was G. K. Chesterton Read online

  The cutting stabs of loneliness continued, always with the friends at Oxford believing they were doing the best thing by keeping Gilbert informed, not leaving him out even though he was not present. Salter wrote that “There was a meeting of the Human one night last week at Oldershaw’s, but nobody read a paper” and “I went to breakfast with Bentley yesterday. You ought to come up, if only to see his new rooms. He had just had them packed full overnight with some twenty-two men come to hear a paper of his on Chaucer.” His closest friend, the romantic notion of the academic breakfast, his adored Chaucer being debated. Not only Bentley, but Salter, Oldershaw and Vernède at Oxford and together. The strain was monumental.

  Gilbert’s response was full of pathos. When he received letters telling of love lost and found, of pretty young things and sporting heroics, he could only reply with suburban gossip and family news. When he told of the progress of locals who were known by the group the information seemed sterile, the tellings of a time and place far away, of children and playing. He became overly concerned with his friends, who were themselves undergoing the often difficult process of becoming students, with all of the consequent assumptions and poses; as well as the realisation that large intellectual reputations in small schools do not dictate large intellectual reputations in large universities. He wrote a poem about them, hopeful but ultimately maudlin. It was titled “An Idyll”

  Tea is made; the red fogs shut round the house but the gas burns.

  I wish I had at this moment round the table

  A company of fine people.

  Two of them are at Oxford and one in Scotland and two at other places.

  But I wish they would all walk in now, for the tea is made.

  Bentley professed his love for Nina Vivian, one of a family who lived near to Gilbert in Warwick Gardens. Gilbert knew of this, and in a notebook poem he dwelt on her characteristics, as well as those of her sister Ida. “What are little girls made of? … Nina is made of water-colours, three lilies and an apron; Ida of three good novels and a paper cracker —” He also recorded in his notebook the composition of Bentley: “hard wood with a knot in it, a complete set of Browning and a strong spring.” Of Oldershaw he perceived Lucifer matches and a pen, Lawrence Solomon was a barrister’s wig, salt and copies of Punch, and his brother Maurice a clean collar and watch-wheels. Knowing of Bentley’s interest in the Vivian family he wrote to him of them. “Today is Sunday, and Ida’s birthday. Thus it commemorates two things, the creation of Ida and the creation of the world. And the Lord looked and beheld they were good. Really it is most interesting to think that nineteen years ago the Cosmic Factory was at work; the vast wheel of stars revolved, the archangels had a conference and the result was another person … I should imagine that sun, wind, colours, chopsticks, circulating library books, ribbons, caricatures and the grace of God were used.” Gilbert’s frustration is beyond question, but the notebooks which have been relied upon to give shape and form to those unhappy years of his life are mostly what they appear to be: notebooks. They are not profound sexual admissions or nightmares of the real Gilbert. And Gilbert probably worried about his “lunatic” years more than was strictly necessary. He had nobody of his own age and experience to confess to or be guided by. It was too much for a boy alone. In his Autobiography he dwelt on the period, and was harsh with himself

  … I am not proud of believing in the Devil. To put it more correctly, I am not proud of knowing the Devil. I made his acquaintance by my own fault; and followed it up along lines which, had they been followed further, might have led me to devil-worship or the devil knows what … What I may call my period of madness coincided with a period of drifting and doing nothing; in which I could not settle down to any regular work. I dabbled in a number of things; and some of them may have had something to do with the psychology of the affair. I would not for a moment suggest it as a cause, far less as an excuse, but it is a contributory fact that among these dabblings in this dubious time, I dabbled in Spiritualism without having even the decision to be a Spiritualist. Indeed I was, in a rather unusual manner, not only detached but indifferent. My brother and I used to play with planchette, or what the Americans call the ouija board; but we were among the few, I imagine, who played in a mere spirit of play … I saw quite enough of the thing to be able to testify, with complete certainty, that something happens which is not in the ordinary sense natural, or produced by the normal and conscious human will. Whether it is produced by some subconscious but still human force, or by some powers, good, bad or indifferent, which are external to humanity, I would not myself attempt to decide. The only thing I will say with complete confidence, about that mystic and invisible power, is that it tells lies. The lies may be larks or they may be lures to the imperilled soul or they may be a thousand other things; but whatever they are, they are not truths about the other world; or for that matter about this world.

  Spiritualism, and those pseudo-sciences on the fringes of the occult, are often the preserve of the vulnerable and the lonely. For men and women who find no contentment with the established order of events and lack an appropriate number of stable relationships a contact with powers beyond the day-to-day is highly valuable. It is in essence an escape, and Gilbert knew what he wanted to escape from, and to an extent where he wanted to escape to. Many have looked into the world of the psychic; indeed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, that sanest of Englishmen, was obsessed with spiritualism and at times appallingly gullible. A need, rather than an inclination, to search for meaning and understanding in what may loosely be termed black magic is not particularly sinister. And if, as Gilbert later believed, there was only one true path and only that path could provide complete satisfaction it was only natural for a young man then without that truth to look elsewhere.

  If there was a deeper mental anxiety plaguing Gilbert at the time it was almost certainly his struggle with a late blooming of sexual awareness. He only began noticing women after he left St Paul’s and consequently had no one with whom to share his observations. Such a feeling as “I am the only person undergoing this, the only man wanting to masturbate and to be physically intimate with women” is entirely typical in lonely boys at the time of puberty. It is usually those coming from a close circle of brothers and friends who manage to discover that their emotions and desires are neither unique, nor evil and wrong. Gilbert’s only close male companion was his brother Cecil, still too young to hear such stuff.

  So he continued to explore the world which he so hated and feared. Its very darkness attracted him, for Gilbert was always an adventurer searching without success for an adventure. He gave examples of his undertakings with candour

  We asked planchette, in our usual random fashion, what advice it would give to an acquaintance of ours, a solid and rather dull Member of Parliament who had the misfortune to be an authority on education. Planchette wrote down with brazen promptitude (in these later times it was always very prompt, though not always very clear) the simple words, “Get a divorce.” The wife of the politician was so respectable, and I will add so hideous, that the materials of a scandalous romance seemed to be lacking. So we sternly enquired of our familiar spirit what the devil he meant; possibly an appropriate invocation. The result was rather curious. It wrote down very rapidly an immensely and indeed incredibly long word, which was at first quite illegible. It wrote again; it wrote it four or five times; it was always quite obviously the same word; and towards the end it was apparent that it began with the three letters Orr … I said, “This is all nonsense; there is no word in the English language beginning Orr, let alone a word as long as that.” Finally it tried again and wrote the word out quite clearly; and it ran: Orriblerevelationsinighlife.

  Gilbert’s rationality broke through the artificial tension. He recalled how he felt after the experience, which runs the border between chilling horror and ludicrous hoax

  If it was our subconsciousness, our subconsciousness at least had a simple sense of humour. But that it was our subconsciousness rath
er than our consciousness (if it was not something outside both) is proved by the practical fact that we did go on puzzling over the written word, when it was again and again rewritten, and really never had a notion of what it was, until it burst upon us at last. Nobody who knew us, I think, would suppose us capable of playing a long and solemn and silly deception on each other.

  He concluded his anecdote with a warning

  But cases of this kind fill me with wonder and a faint alarm, when I consider the number of people who seem to be taking spirit communications seriously, and founding religions and moral philosophies upon them. There would indeed have been some Orrible Revelations in Igh Life, and some Orrible Revelations about our own mental state and moral behaviour, if we had trotted off to the M.P. with our little message from the higher sphere.

  Some purpose was injected into Gilbert’s life when he began to study at University College, London. His course was Fine Art and included English, French and Latin. He had the monumental opportunity of studying Latin under Alfred Edward Housman. Housman had had an undistinguished career at Oxford, only managing a pass degree, and was forced into employment as a civil servant in London for the first ten working years of his life. It was only later that he began to shine as a scholar, building a reputation in the academic journals of the time. From 1892 until 1911 he was Professor of Latin at University College, during which time he wrote the profound and piquant A Shropshire Lad. In 1911 he was appointed to the chair of Latin at Cambridge, and continued to write until the mid 1930s. He died in 1936, the same year as Gilbert. It was rare for Gilbert to miss the flavour of genius in those with whom he made contact, but he did so with his Latin teacher at University College. After one year of the course he was asked, and agreed, to give up the subject. Yet Latin had been, and was to be, always a particular joy for Gilbert. It was not the theme of the lectures which disappointed him but the lectures on the theme. His studies were anarchic, as was his personality. He loved to learn at his own pace — which was frequently faster than that of his contemporaries — and along his own criteria and values. Rigid structures of education could not hold him, and neither could controlled intellectual curiosity. Gilbert’s journey was one of startled, larger-than-life discovery, learning for learning’s sake and not for somebody else’s narrow concept of education.

  Gilbert’s butterfly mind — he would settle on one subject for a time, absorb all the beauty and wisdom he could from it and then move to another issue, often completely neglecting the initial area for years — found difficulty in coping with the other academic disciplines at the College as well. He studied English for two years, and achieved indifferent results. But his professor, W.P. Ker, was a popular teacher and recognised Gilbert’s promise. Gilbert wrote

  … I am able to boast myself among the many pupils who are grateful to the extraordinarily lively and stimulating learning of Professor W.P. Ker. Most of the other students were studying for examinations; but I had not even that object in this objectless period of my life. The result was that I gained an entirely undeserved reputation for disinterested devotion to culture for its own sake; and I once had the honour of constituting the whole of Professor Ker’s audience. But he gave as thorough and thoughtful a lecture as I have ever heard given, in a slightly more colloquial style; asked me some questions about my reading; and, on my mentioning something from the poetry of Pope, said with great satisfaction: “Ah, I see you have been well brought up.” Pope had much less than justice from that generation of the admirers of Shelley and Swinburne.

  The only close friend he made during his time at University College was Ernest Hodder Williams, a member of the publishing family Hodder and Stoughton. Hodder Williams was to help Gilbert begin his literary career, and Gilbert was to acknowledge that “in the case of my association with Hodder Williams, it was against all reason that so unbusinesslike a person should have so businesslike a friend.” The friendship pleased Gilbert, but was never as intense as the relationship which existed between himself and Bentley or the others in the J.D.C; in fairness, it was not supposed to have been. The loneliness was still there, still digging away at the foundations of his sanity and composure. He later wrote a description of a companion of these heavy days for the Daily News. There are overwhelmingly autobiographical currents in the piece. He called it “The Diabolist.”

  … It was strange, perhaps, that I liked his dirty, drunken society; it was stranger still, perhaps, that he liked my society. For hours of the day he would talk with me about Milton or Gothic architecture; for hours of the night he would go where I have no wish to follow him, even in speculation. He was a man with a long, ironical face, and red hair; he was by class a gentleman, and could walk like one, but preferred, for some reason, to walk like a groom carrying two pails. He looked like a sort of super-jockey; as if some archangel had gone on the Turf. And I shall never forget the half-hour in which he and I argued about real things for the first and last time … He had a horrible fairness of the intellect that made me despair of his soul. A common, harmless atheist would have denied that religion produced humility or humility a simple joy; but he admitted both. He only said, “But shall I not find in evil a life of its own? Granted that for every woman I ruin one of those red sparks will go out; will not the expanding pleasure of ruin …”

  “Do you see that fire?” I asked. “If we had a real fighting democracy, some one would burn you in it; like the devil-worshipper that you are.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, in his tired, fair way. “Only what you call evil I call good.”

  He went down the great steps alone, and I felt as if I wanted the steps swept and cleaned. I followed later, and as I went to find my hat in the low, dark passage where it hung, I suddenly heard his voice again, but the words were inaudible. I stopped, startled; but then I heard the voice of one of the vilest of his associates saying, “Nobody can possibly know.” And then I heard those two or three words which I remember in every syllable and cannot forget. I heard the Diabolist say, “I tell you I have done everything else. If I do that I shan’t know the difference between right and wrong.” I rushed out without daring to pause; and, as I passed the fire I did not know whether it was hell or the furious love of God.

  I have since heard that he died; it may be said, I think, that he committed suicide; though he did it with tools of pleasure, not with tools of pain. God help him, I know the road he went; but I have never known or even dared to think what was that place at which he stopped and refrained.

  The pattern of self-analysis is clear, as is a form of cathartic imagining. How much is a real encounter, how much an artificial construction and how much a revelation of Gilbert’s own feelings and actions, both real and mental, is not known. There are undeniable traits displayed which clear some of the mud from his own predicament at the time. There is no record, either from himself or from any friend or relative or enemy, of his having committed any hideous sins, or any minor ones outside of the usual transgressions. Fear would not have held him back — cowardice was not one of Gilbert’s shortcomings — and the London of the 1890s presented opportunities for the hopeful sinner. An innate sense of morality and ethics held him in place, securely within the realm of conscience. His black crimes would have to be lived out vicariously, through the pen and the fictional actions of others.

  The Fine Art part of his course took place at the Slade School, a department of University College, which was then beginning to build a reputation which would become international. It had opened its doors in 1871, part of the new thrust in learning which was enabling the middle classes, as opposed to upper and upper-middle, to take advantage of higher education. Felix Slade, a Victorian benefactor and art collector, had founded the institution, leaving enough money for art professorships to be maintained and a college to be entirely devoted to an English school of painting. Women were admitted, and it was also the fashion to let the students draw and paint from live models as well as mannequins and plaster figures. Both aspects of the Slade were cons
idered radical, going beyond the bounds of modern education. The tone of the whole college was modernity, whether it needed it or not; change and progress come what may. Such a quality never appealed to Gilbert. He was not at home there, and nobody attempted to alter the fact. His understanding of art and the artistic differed fundamentally from the dominant notions of the teachers and the students. He was different from the majority; worse, he was seen as being behind the times.

  “Art may be long, but schools of art are short and very fleeting; and there have been five or six since I attended an art school!” he wrote. “Mine was the time of Impressionism; and nobody dared to dream there could be such a thing as Post-Impressionism or Post-Post-Impressionism. The very latest thing was to keep abreast of Whistler, and take him by the white forelock, as if he were Time himself. Since then that conspicuous white forelock has rather faded into a harmony of white and grey, and what was once so young has in its turn grown hoary …” Nor was he content to leave it there. He suffered, both in hurt pride and humiliating criticisms, and he would reply. “An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature. Moreover, those who work are, I will not say the least intelligent, but, by the very nature of the case, for the moment the most narrow; those whose keen intelligence is for the time narrowed to a strictly technical problem.”