G.K. Chesterton to Frances Blogg (189?)

...I am looking over the sea and endeavouring to reckon up the estate
I have to offer you.  As far as I can make out my equipment for
starting on a journey to fairyland consists of the following items.

1st.  A Straw Hat.  The oldest part of this admirable relic shows
traces of pure Norman work.  The vandalism of Cromwell's soldiers
has left us little of the original hat-band.

2nd.  A Walking Stick, very knobby and heavy:  admirably fitted
to break the head of any denizen of Suffolk who denies that you
are the noblest of ladies, but of no other manifest use.

3rd.  A copy of Walt Whitman's poems, once nearly given to Salter,
but quite forgotten.  It has his name in it still with an affectionate
inscription from his sincere friend Gilbert Chesterton.
I wonder if he will ever have it.

4th.  A number of letters from a young lady, containing everything
good and generous and loyal and holy and wise that isn't in
Walt Whitman's poems.

5th.  An unwieldy sort of a pocket knife, the blades mostly having
an edge of a more varied and picturesque outline than is provided
by the prosaic cutler.  The chief element however is a thing 'to
take stones out of a horse's hoof.'  What a beautiful sensation
of security it gives one to reflect that if one should ever have money
enough to buy a horse and should happen to buy one and the horse
should happen to have stone in his hoof--that one is ready;
one stands prepared, with a defiant smile!

6th.  Passing from the last miracle of practical foresight,
we come to a box of matches.  Every now and then I strike one
of these, because fire is beautiful and burns your fingers.
Some people think this waste of matches:  the same people who object
to the building of Cathedrals.

7th.  About three pounds in gold and silver, the remains of one of
Mr. Unwin's bursts of affection:  those explosions of spontaneous love
for myself, which, such is the perfect order and harmony of his mind,
occur at startingly exact intervals of time.

8th.  A book of Children's Rhymes, in manuscript, called the
'Weather Book' about 3/4 finished, and destined for Mr. Nutt.
I have been working at it fairly steadily, which I think jolly creditable
under the circumstances.  One can't put anything interesting in it.
They'll understand those things when they grow up.

9th.  A tennis racket--nay, start not.  It is a part of the new regime,
and the only new and neat-looking thing in the Museum.
We'll soon mellow it---like the straw hat.  My brother and I are
teaching each other lawn tennis.

10th.  A soul, hitherto idle and omnivorous but now happy enough
to be ashamed of itself.

11th.  A body, equally idle and quite equally omnivorous,
absorbing tea, coffee, claret, sea-water, and swimming.
I think, the sea being a convenient size.

12th.  A Heart--mislaid somewhere.  And that is about all
the property of which an inventory can be made at present.
After all, my tastes are stoically simple.  A straw hat,
a stick, a box of matches and some of his own poetry.
What more does man require?....

...The City of Felixstowe, as seen by the local prophet from
the neighbouring mountain-peak, does not strike the eye as having
anything uncanny about it.  At least I imagine that it requires
rather careful scrutiny before the eerie curl of a chimney pot,
or the elfin wink of a lonely lamp-post brins home to the startled soul
that it is really the City of a Fearful Folk.  That the inhabitants
are not human in the ordinary sense is quite clear, yet it has
only just begun to dawn on me after staying a week in the Town of
Unreason with its monstrous landscape and grave, unmeaning customs.
Do I seem to be raving?  Let me give my experiences.

I am bound to admit that I do not think I am good at shopping.
I generally succeed in getting rid of money, but other observances,
such as bringing away the goods that I've paid for,
and knowing what I've bought, often pass over as secondary.
But to shop in a town of ordinary tradesmen is one thing:
to shop in a town of raving lunatics is another.  I set out one morning,
happy and hopeful with the intention of buying (a) a tennis racket (b)
some tennis balls (c) some tennis shoes (d) a ticket for a tennis ground.
I went to the shop pointed out by some villager (probably mad)
and went in and said I believed they kept tennis rackets.
The young man smiled and assented.  I suggested that he might
show me some.  The young man looked positively alarmed.
'Oh', he said, 'We haven't got any--not got any here.'
I asked 'Where?'  'Oh, they're out you know.  All round,'
he explained wildly, with a graphic gesture in the direction of the sea
and the sky.  'All out round.  We've left them all round at places.'
To this day I don't know what he meant, but I merely asked
when they would quit these weird retreats.  He said in an hour:
in an hour I called again.  Were they in now?  'Well not in--
not in, just yet,' he said with a sort of feverish confidentialness,
as if he wasn't quite well.  'Are they still--all out at places?'
I asked with a a restrained humor.  'Oh, no!' he said with a burst
of reassuring pride.  'They are only out there--out behind, you know.'
I hope my face expressed my beaming comprehension of the spot
alluded to.  Eventually, at a third visit, the rackets were produced.
None of them, I was told by my brother, were of any first-class maker,
so that was outside the question.  The choice was between some good,
neat first-hand instruments which suited me, and some seedy-looking
second-hand objects with plain deal handles, which would have done
at a pinch.  I thought that perhaps it would be better to get
a good-class racket in London and content myself for the present
with economising on one of these second-hand monuments of depression.
So I asked the price.  '10/6' was the price of the second-hand article.
I thought this large for the tool, and wondered if the first-hand
rackets were much dearer.  What price the first-hand? '7/6'
said the Creature, cheery as a bird.  I did not faint.
I am strong.

I rejected the article which was dearer because it had been hallowed
by human possession, and accepted the cheap, new crude racket.
Except the newness there was no difference between them whatever.
I then asked the smiling Maniac for balls.  He brought me a selection
of large red globes nearly as big as Dutch cheeses.  I said,
'Are these tennis-balls?'  He said, 'Oh, did you want tennis-balls?'
I said Yes--they often came in handy at tennis.  The goblin was
quite impervious to satire, and I left him endeavouring to draw
my attention to his wares in general, particularly to some zinc
baths which he seemed to think should form part of the equipment
of a tennis player.

Never before or since have I met a being of that order and degree
of creepiness.  He was a nightmare of unmeaning idiocy.
But some mention ought to be made of the old man at the entrance
to the tennis ground who opened his mouth in parables on
the subject of the fee for playing there.  He seemed to have
been wound up to make only one remark, 'It's sixpence.'
Under these circumstances the attempt to discover whether the sixpence
covered a day's tennis or a week or fifty years was rather baffling.
At last I put down the sixpence.  This seemes to galvanise him into life.
He looked at the clock, which was indicating five past eleven
and said, 'It's sixpence an hour--so you'll be all right till two.'
I fled screaming.

Since then I have examined the town more carefully and feel the presence
of something nameless.  There is a claw-curl in the sea-bent trees,
an eye-gleam in the dark flints in the wall that is not of this world.

When we set up a house, darling (honeysuckle porch,
yew clipt hedge, bees, poetry and eight shillings a week), I think
you will have to do the shopping.  Particularly at Felixstowe.
There was a great and glorious man who said, 'Give us the luxuries
of life and we will dispense with the necessities.'  That I think
would be a splendid motto to write (in letters of brown gold)
over the porch of our hypothetical home.  There will be a sofa
for you, for example, but no chairs, for I prefer the floor.
There will be a select store of chocolate-creams (to make
you do the Carp with) and the rest will be bread and water.
We will each retain a suit of evening dress for great occasions,
and at other times clothe ourselves in the skins of wild beasts
(how pretty you would look) which would fit your taste in furs
and be economical.

I have sometimes thought it would be very fine to take an ordinary house,
a very poor, commonplace house in West Kensington, say, and make
it symbolic.  Not artistic - Heaven - O Heaven forbid.  My blood boils
when I think of the affronts put by knock-kneed pictorial epicures
on the strong, honest, ugly, patient shapes of necessary things:
the brave old bones of life.  There are aesthetic pattering prigs
who can look on a saucepan without one tear of joy or sadness:
mongrel decadents that can see no dignity in the honourable scars
of a kettle.  So they concentrate all their house decoration on coloured
windows that nobody looks out of, and vases of lilies that everybody
wishes out of the way.  No:  my idea (which is much cheaper) is to make
a house really (allegoric) really explain its own essential meaning.
Mystical or ancient sayings should be inscribed on every object,
the more prosaic the object the better; and the more coarsely and rudely
the inscription was traced the ! better.  'Hast thou sent the Rain
upon the Earth?' should be inscribed on the Umbrella-Stand: perhaps
on the Umbrella.  'Even the Hairs of your Head are all numbered'
would give a tremendous significance to one's hairbrushes:
the words about 'living water' would reveal the music and sanctity
of the sink:  while 'Our God is a consuming Fire' might be written
over the kitchen-grate, to assist the mystic musings of the cook
- Shall we ever try that experiment, dearest.  Perhaps not,
for no words would be golden enough for the tools you had to touch:
you would be beauty enough for one house..."

... By all means let us have bad things in our dwelling and make them
good things.  I shall offer no objection to your having an occasional
dragon to dinner, or a penitent Griffin to sleep in the spare bed.
The image of you taking a sunday school of little Devils is pleasing.
They will look up, first in savage wonder, then in vague respect;
they will see the most glorious and noble lady that ever lived
since their prince tempted Eve, with a halo of hair and great
heavenly eyes that seem to make the good at the heart of things
almost too terribly simple and naked for the sons of flesh:
and as they gaze, their tails will drop off, and their wings will sprout:
and they will become Angels in six lessons....

I cannot profess to offer any elaborate explanation of your
mother's disquiet but I admit it does not wholly surprise me.
You see I happen to know one factor in the case, and one only,
of which you are wholly ignorant.  I know you ... I know one
thing which has made me feel strange before your mother - I
know the value of what I take away.  I feel (in a weird moment)
like the Angel of Death.

You say you want to talk to me about death:  my views about death
are bright, brisk and entertaining.  When Azrael takes a soul it may be
to other and brighter worlds:  like those whither you and I go together.
The transformation called Death may be something as beautiful and dazzling
as the transformation called Love.  It may make the dead man 'happy,'
just as your mother knows that you are happy.  But none the less
it is a transformation, and sad sometimes for those left behind.
A mother whose child is dying can hardly believe that in the inscrutable
Unknown there is anyone who can look to it as well as she.
And if a mother cannot trust her child easily to God Almighty, shall I
be so mean as to be angry because she cannot trust it easily to me?
I tell you I have stood before your mother and felt like a thief.
I know you are not going to part:  neither physically, mentally,
morally nor spiritually.  But she sees a new element in your life,
wholly from outside - is it not na! tural, given her temperament,
that you should find her perturbed?  Oh, dearest,
dearest Frances, let us always be very gentle to older people.
Indeed, darling, it is not they who are the tyrants, but we.
They may interrupt our building in the scaffolding stages:
we turn their house upside down when it is their final home and rest.
Your mother would certainly have worried if you had been engaged to the
Archangel Michael (who, indeed, is bearing his disappointment very well):
how much more when you are engaged to an aimless, tactless, reckless,
unbrushed, strange-hatted, opinionated scarecrow who has suddenly
walked into the vacant place.  I could have prophesied her unrest:
wait and she will calm down all right, dear.  God comfort her:
I dare not....

... Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born of comfortable but honest
parents on the top of Campden Hill, Kensington.  He was christened at
St. George's Church which stands just under that more imposing building,
the Waterworks Tower.  This place was chosen, apparently, in order
that the whole available water supply might be used in the intrepid
attempt to make him a member of Christ, a child of God and an inheritor
of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Of the early years of this remarkable man few traces remain.
One of his earliest recorded observations was the simple exclamation,
full of heart-felt delight, 'Look at Baby.  Funny Baby.'
Here we see the first hint of that ineffable conversational modesty,
that shy social self-effacement, which has ever hidden his light
under a bushel.  His mother also recounts with apparent amusement an
incident connected with his imperious demand for his father's top-hat.
'Give me that hat, please.'  'No, dear, you mustn't have that.'
'Give me that hat.'  'No, dear - ' 'If you don't give it me,
I'll say 'At.' An exquisite selection in the matter of hats has
indeed always been one of the great man's hobbies.

When he had drawn pictures on all the blinds and tablecloths and towels
and walls and windowpanes it was felt that he required a larger sphere.
Consequently he was sent to Mr. Bewsher who gave him desks and copy-books
and Latin grammars and atlases to draw pictures on.  He was far
too innately conscientious not to use these materials to draw on.
To other uses, asserted by some to belong to these objects, he paid
little heed.  The only really curious thing about his school life was
that he had a weird and quite involuntary habit of getting French prizes.
They were the only ones he ever got and he never tried to get them.
But though the thing was quite mysterious to him, and though he made
every effort to avoid it, it went on, being evidently a part of some
occult natural law.

For the first half of his time at school he was very solitary and futile.
He never regretted the time, for it gave him two things, complete mental
self-sufficiency and a comprehension of the psychology of outcasts.

But one day, as he was roaming about a great naked building land
which he haunted in play hours, rather like an outlaw in the woods,
he met a curious agile youth with hair brushed up off his head.
Seeing each other, they promptly hit each other simultaneously
and had a fight.  Next day they met again and fought again.
These Homeric conflicts went on for many days, till one morning
in the crisis of some insane grapple, the subject of this
biography quoted, like a war-chant, something out of Macaulay's Lays.
The other started and relaxed his hold.  They gazed at each other.
Then the foe quoted the following line.  In this land of savages
they knew each other.  For the next two hours they talked books.
They have talked books ever since.  The boy was Edmund Clerihew Bentley.
The incident just narrated is the true and real account
of the first and deepest of our hero's male connections.
But another was to ensue, probably equally profound and far
more pregnant with awful an! d dazzling consequences.
Bentley always had a habit of trying to do things well:
twelve years of the other's friendship has not cured him of this.
Being seized with a particular desire to learn conjuring,
he had made the acquaintance of an eerie and supernatural young man,
who instructed him in the Black Art:  a gaunt Mephistophelian sort
of individual, who our subject half thought was a changeling.
Our subject has not quite got over the idea yet, though for
practical social purposes he calls him Lucian Oldershaw.
Our subject met Lucian Oldershaw.  'That night,' as Shakespeare says,
'there was a star.'

These three persons soon became known through the length and breadth
of St. Paul's School as the founders of a singular brotherhood.
It was called the J.D.C. No one, we believe, could ever have had better
friends than did the hero of this narrative.  We wish that we could
bring before the reader the personality of all the Knights of that
eccentric round table.  Most of them are known already to the reader.
Even the subject himself is possibly known to the reader.
Bertram, who seemed somehow to have been painted by Vandyck,
a sombre and stately young man, a blend of Cavalier and Puritan,
with the physique of a military father and the views of an ethical mother
and a soul of his own which for sheer simplicity is something staggering.
Vernede with an Oriental and inscrutable placidity varied every
now and then with dazzling agility and Meredithian humour.
Waldo d'Avigdor who masks with complete fashionable triviality
a Hebraic immutability of passion tried in a more ironi! cal and
bitter service than his Father Jacob.  Lawrence and Maurice Solomon,
who show another side of the same people, the love of home,
the love of children, the meek and malicious humour, the tranquil
service of a law.  Salter who shows ho beautiful and ridiculous
a combination can be made of the most elaborate mental cultivation
and artistic sensibility and omniscience with a receptiveness
and a humility extraordinary in any man.  These were his friends.
May he be forgi ven for speaking of them at length and with pride?
Some day we hope the reader may know them all.  He knew these people;
he knew their friends.  He heard Mildred Wain say 'Blogg'
and he thought it was a funny name.  Had he been told that he would ever
pronounce it with the accents of tears and passion he would have said,
in his pride, that the name was not suitable for that purpose.
But there are [Greek letters]....

He went for a time to an Art School.  There he met a great many
curious people.  Many of the men were horrible blackguards:
he was not exactly that:  so they naturally found each other interesting.
He went through some rather appalling discoveries about human
life and the final discovery was that there is no Devil - no,
not even such a thing as a bad man.

One pleasant Saturday afternoon [his friend] Lucian said to him, 'I am
going to take you to see the Bloggs.'  'The what?' said the unhappy man.
'The Bloggs,' said the other, darkly.  Naturally assuming that it
was the name of a public-house he reluctantly followed his friend.
He came to a small front-garden; if it was a public-house it
was not a businesslike one.  They raised the latch - they rang
the bell (if the bell was not in the close time just then).
No flower in the pots winked.  No brick grinned.  No sign
in Heaven or earth warned him.  The birds sang on in the trees.
He went in.

The first time he spent an evening at the Bloggs there was no
one there.  That is to say there was a worn but fiery little lady
in a grey dress who didn't approve of 'catastrophic solutions
of social problems.'  That, he understood, was Mrs. Blogg.
There was a long, blonde, smiling young person who seemed
to think him quite off his head and who was addressed as Ethel.
There were two people whose meaning and status he couldn't imagine,
one of whom had a big nose and the other hadn't.... Lastly,
there was a Juno-like creature in a tremendous hat who eyed him
all the time half wildly, like a shying horse, because he said
he was quite happy....

But the second time he went there he was plumped down on a sofa
beside a being of whom he had a vague impression that brown
hair grew at intervals all down her like a caterpillar.
Once in the course of conversation she looked straight at him
and he said to himself as plainly as if he had read it in a book:
'If I had anything to do with this girl I should go on my knees
to her:  if I spoke with her she would never deceive me:
if I depended on her she would never deny me:  if I loved her she
would never play with me:  if I trusted her she would never go
back on me:  if I remembered her she would never forget me.
I may never see her again.  Goodbye.'  It was all said in a flash:
but it was all said....

Two years, as they say in the playbills, is supposed to elapse.
And here is the subject of this memoir sitting on a balcony above
the sea.  The time, evening.  He is thinking of the whole bewildering
record of which the foregoing is a brief outline:  he sees how far he has
gone wrong and how idle and wasteful and wicked he has often been:
how miserably unfitted he is for what he is called upon to be.
Let him now declare it and hereafter for ever hold his peace.

But there are four lamps of thanksgiving always before him.  The first
is for his creation out of the same earth with such a woman as you.
The second is that he has not, with all his faults, 'gone after
strange women.'  You cannot think how a man's self restraint is rewarded
in this.  The third is that he has tried to love everything alive:
a dim preparation for loving you.  And the fourth is--but no words
can express that.  Here ends my previous existence.  Take it:
it led me to you.