The Life and Words of GK Chesterton Read Free

domain, he very much enjoyed writing for the Debater. Perhaps it was writing for his own club magazine that led him to start sending out poetry to the national press. His first ever nationally published poem was The Song of Labour, a poem in which Chesterton aligned himself with the workers of the world, and it appeared in a journal called the Speaker in 1892, when Gilbert was 18 years old.
     
    When Gilbert’s time at St. Paul’s came to an end in the summer of 1892, Edward Chesterton decided to take his eldest son on a joint graduation and 18th birthday trip. It was Gilbert’s first trip abroad. They traveled across the English Channel by boat and explored the northern French coast of Normandy. As close as Normandy is to England, it was a whole new world to Chesterton, with its abbeys and the nuns in their black robes and broad rimmed wimples.
     
    Returning to England, Gilbert took a gap year of sorts during which he spent much of his time completing drawings for a collection of four-line verses. His best friend Bentley was not only the editor of said collection but also the primary contributor, although several others from the old debating club at St. Paul’s School joined in.
     
    Unlike his friends, Gilbert was not destined for Oxford or Cambridge. He had his mind set on art school. Although he had already been published in the national press and spent much of his time working on writing for the Debater while in school, Gilbert, his friends, his parents, and his teachers all felt that art was where Gilbert’s true talent lay. So in October 1893 he enrolled at the Slade School of Art at University College London.
     
    Since Slade was part of University College London, Chesterton was allowed to attend any of the university’s lectures, and although it was unusual to do so, Gilbert did so with gusto. He attended nearly as many lectures for other departments as he did his own. In particular, he favored the Latin, English, and French departments. Being enrolled at Slade, however, he did not need passing grades in any of the classes that he took, so he did not take any exams. He thus gained a reputation amongst his fellow students and some of the faculty as a man devoted to culture for culture’s sake, a rumor that Gilbert himself felt was entirely undeserved.
     
    If we are to trust Bentley, Gilbert did not improve his art at all during his time at Slade. Even his teachers seem to have felt that studying art was a waste of Gilbert’s time. Henry Tonks, one of Gilbert’s art instructors, told the Chestertons that their son had such genius and such a mature style to start with that his teachers could only ruin his originality by trying to teach him anything.
     
    The real problem, however, was that Gilbert was not enthusiastic enough about art. He was a natural at the decorative and the grotesque but lacked the patience for the labor and technical toil of fine art. Curiously, he never felt that way about writing even though he expressed to his friends that creative writing was the “hardest of hard labour” and that “there is no work so tiring as writing; that is, not for fun, but for publication.”
     
    He ended up studying art for only one year and English and French for two; leaving University College London at the age of 20 in the summer of 1895 without a degree in anything.
     
    His school years were also a time when Chesterton himself purported to have gotten to know the devil intimately. His trespass into the sinner’s territory may seem very light in most modern eyes, but in Chesterton’s eyes, it was a grave and dangerous misstep. “But I am not proud of believing in the Devil. To put it more correctly, I am not proud of knowing the Devil,” he wrote. “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.” He called it his period of “madness.” In reality, he did not come closer