AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

A pleasant afternoon,
But Man is always born too late
Or else he dies too soon.
while Lawrence Solomon, the learned Jewish friend of whom I have
spoken, wrote about the best of the parodies of FitzGerald’s Omar, then a
fashionable theme, warning undergraduates not to expect a Blue or a First:
“For these were not for me; how should they be for you?” As a fact, I think he
did get a First; but all of them must have lived to realise the further moral:
For them that win and them that lose the game
For you, for me, the ending is the same,
To climb the stairs to our old College room
Look o’er the door; and see another’s name.
There seemed a general tendency of these schoolfellows of mine to excel
in light verse; Fordham, who went to Cambridge, has written many satiric
lyrics which have been published and many satiric dramas which ought to be
published. If I wind up here some of the stories of my old friends, it is not
because I dismiss them from my memories, but because I must admit a
multitude of much less interesting people into my memoirs. One contrast in
their subsequent careers has always struck me as a curious case of the
incalculable individuality and freewill of man. A friend of Fordham, normal,
virile and ambitious, popular rather in the sense of fashionable, always struck
me as the sort of man who could wear a uniform in camp or court, serving the
obvious virtues. When the Great War came, he became an uncompromising
and unconventional Pacifist agitator. Another, a friend of Vernède, one of
those rare spiritual types in which a Puritan tradition has really flowered into a
full Hellenic culture, is the most unselfish man I ever knew in my life, of the
sort that is still unsatisfied even with its own unselfishness. I should say he
was something rather like a saint; but I should never have been surprised if he
had been a Conscientious Objector. As a fact, he went to the Front in a flash
like fire; and had his leg shot off in his first battle.
But all this time very queer things were groping and wrestling inside my
own undeveloped mind; and I have said nothing of them in this chapter; for it
was the sustained and successful effort of most of my school life to keep them
to myself. I said farewell to my friends when they went up to Oxford and
Cambridge; while I, who was at that time almost wholly taken up with the idea
of drawing pictures, went to an Art School and brought my boyhood to an end.