as superior to sport. "The old-fashioned Englishman, like my father,
sold houses for his living but filled his own house with his life. A
hobby is not merely a holiday. . . . It is not merely exercising the
body instead of the mind, an excellent but now largely a recognised
thing. It is exercising the rest of the mind; now an almost neglected
thing." Edward Chesterton practised "water-colour painting and
modelling and photography and stained glass and fretwork and magic
lanterns and mediaeval illumination." And, moreover, "knew all his
English literature backwards."

It has become of late the fashion for any one who writes of his own
life to see himself against a dark background, to see his development
frustrated by some shadow of heredity or some horror of environment.
But Gilbert saw his life rather as the ancients saw it when _pietas_
was a duty because we had received so much from those who brought us
into being. This Englishman was grateful to his country, to his
parents, to his home for all that they had given him.

I regret that I have no gloomy and savage father to offer to the
public gaze as the true cause of all my tragic heritage; no pale-faced
and partially poisoned mother whose suicidal instincts have cursed
me with the temptations of the artistic temperament. I regret that
there was nothing in the range of our family much more racy than a
remote and mildly impecunious uncle; and that I cannot do my duty
as a true modern, by cursing everybody who made me whatever I
am. I am not clear about what that is; but I am pretty sure that
most of it is my own fault. And I am compelled to confess that I
look back to that landscape of my first days with a pleasure that
should doubtless be reserved for the Utopias of the Futurist.*