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Title: Chesterton as seen by his contemporaries
Author: Cyril Clemens
Author of introduction, etc.: E. C. Bentley
Illustrator: Conrado Walter Massaguer
Release date: January 21, 2025 [eBook #75165]
Language: English
Original publication: Webster Groves, MO: International Mark Twain Society, 1939
Credits: Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHESTERTON AS SEEN BY HIS CONTEMPORARIES ***
Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_; boldface is
enclosed in =equals signs=. Additional notes will be found near the end
of this ebook.
[Illustration:
G. K. C.
Done especially for this book
by
CONRADO W. MASSAGUER
]
_CHESTERTON_
_As Seen by His
Contemporaries_
CYRIL CLEMENS
Author of
“MY COUSIN MARK TWAIN,”
Etc.
With Introduction by
E. C. BENTLEY
Author of
“TRENT’S LAST CASE,”
Etc.
1939
INTERNATIONAL MARK TWAIN SOCIETY
Webster Groves, Missouri
Number Eight of the Society’s
Biographical Series
WHOLE NUMBER FOURTEEN
Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill,
Chairman Biographical Committee
Copyright
INTERNATIONAL MARK TWAIN SOCIETY
All rights reserved, including the right to
reproduce this book or parts thereof.
Printed in the U. S. A.
by
WEBSTER PRINTING & STATIONERY CO.,
Webster Groves, Missouri
DEDICATED
with his kind permission
to
BENITO MUSSOLINI
a warm admirer of Chesterton
and his work.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction by E. C. Bentley
Chapters
One Boyhood Days
Two Literary Apprenticeship
Three Meetings with G. K. C.
Four Some Friends
Five On the English Platform
Six On the American Platform
Seven Some Recollections of G. K. C.
Eight Chesterton at New Haven
Nine At Notre Dame
Ten Chesterton and American Authors
Eleven The Author Visits Top Meadow
Twelve Father Brown
Thirteen Some Appraisals
Fourteen The Poet
Fifteen Chesterton the Man
_INTRODUCTION_
by E. C. Bentley
Mr. Cyril Clemens’ book about Gilbert Chesterton is of an unusual and,
to my taste, a deeply interesting sort. Some one has remarked that
the most satisfactory biographies were those in which the letters and
journals of the subject bulked largest, since these, telling their
own tale, showed the man better than any biographer could do it. Mr.
Clemens has assembled a vast number of other people’s memories and
appreciations of G. K. C.; and it may be said that they show the
attitude of his contemporaries towards him better than any individual
critic could describe it.
There is a remarkable note of unanimity in these personal recollections
and judgments. There are differences of view about the value of
G. K. C.’s work; about the relative importance of this or that of
its many aspects; about his matter or style in lecturing; about the
quality of his wit, and many points more. But as to the nature of the
man as he was there is hardly any difference at all. He won the hearts
of those who met him because of his manifest goodness of heart and
happiness of temper; these things were as apparent to all who came near
him as was his physical being.
I do not imagine that Mr. Clemens asked me to write this introduction
with the idea of my setting forth any opinions about the place of
G. K. C. in our literature. I could offer none of any critical value,
because for me the man and his work have always been one, and I have
been for most of my life intensely prejudiced in favour of the man.
Mr. Clemens knew of me, I suppose, as a boyhood friend of G. K. C.--as
I appear in his Autobiography--and perhaps as having dedicated a book
of mine to him in terms which told some fraction of what my feeling
towards him was. I may, then, say now that I first met him at that time
of life when personal influence counts for most, and one’s nature is
in the making for good or evil. His friendship was the best thing that
ever happened to me, and I have always thanked God for it.
Essential goodness, perfect sincerity, chivalrous generosity, boundless
good-temper, a total absence of self-esteem--these are lovable traits;
and with them, even in boyhood, were united brilliant intellectual
powers and an enormous gift of humor. The effect of it all on an
impressionable youth of fifteen or so can perhaps be guessed. For years
we were as near to each other as it is possible for friends to be, I
think; but there was no one who knew him even slightly that did not
feel something of the spiritual attraction that he exercised--always in
utter unconsciousness of it.
G. K. C. was too conspicuously unlike the ordinary boy to be popular,
in the sense of being on the best of terms with all and sundry. He
was without any desire to excel or take the lead in any direction. He
was unconscious of the very existence of games. He was steeped in
literature and art; and he could, at need, be perfectly happy with his
own thoughts and the fruits of his imagination. He was, on the other
hand, not unpopular; it was impossible for even an ill-natured boy, I
should think, to dislike him; but his circle of friends was small in
those early days. I have written something about this time of our lives
to Mr. Clemens who has quoted it at the outset of this book. What I
have been saying in this place is an attempt to express what Gilbert
Chesterton meant to me.
That circle of friends which was so small was to become as wide as any
man’s of our time, as the recognition of his genius increased, and the
magic of his personality gained greater scope. No death can ever have
been mourned with a deeper sincerity of personal affection by so many,
in his own country and in others.
CHAPTER ONE
BOYHOOD DAYS
One of Chesterton’s earliest and staunchest friends, Mr. E. C. Bentley,
recalls,
“Chesterton was in his schooldays the centre of a small group of boys.
They formed a club under his chairmanship ... the Junior Debating Club,
so called to distinguish it from the School Union Society, which was
the preserve of the senior boys. He never did, as he states in his
memoirs, any work at school in the academic sense, and so never rose to
the position of a star boy. The star boys did not understand him and
classed him as a freak who was unlikely to do the school any credit.
He was so exceptionally untidy and absent-minded, even at the age when
the ordinary boy becomes careful of his appearance, that he did not
fit into the picture at all; and it needed the insight of Walker, the
High Master of his day, to divine that there was the stuff of genius
in him, and to ordain (as G. K. tells in his own modest way) that on
the strength of a remarkable prize poem ... the only ‘regular’ thing
he ever did at school ... he should ‘rank with the eighth form,’
the highest, to which he would never have attained on his school
performance. Very few of the boys of whom he saw most did anything
in the field of letters in after life.” The poet Edward Thomas was
not at St. Paul’s with G. K. C. as many think. Mr. Robert Eckert, the
biographer of Thomas, states that the latter was a schoolmate of Cecil,
G. K. C.’s younger brother.
Mr. Bentley continues: “About G. K. C.:--His spare time at
school--which, as he makes clear in his Autobiography, was mostly
spent.... I should say entirely ... in talking, reading, writing, and
drawing pictures. He had a wonderful decorative handwriting, and was
already a masterly draughtsman. Apart from walking, of which he never
tired as a boy, he took no part in any sport. His sight was always very
bad without his glasses. He was nevertheless strong and healthy as a
boy, rather slim than otherwise; it was not until the twenties that
he began to put on flesh. It was not ordinary fatness; I believe some
gland trouble must have been at the root of it.
“Speaking generally, Chesterton would talk about everything when at
school that had to do with the realm of ideas. He never took much
interest in things that are called practical. Politics in a broad
sense he would talk about, but for the details of legislation he cared
nothing. He always was, of course, what we know as a Liberal; in the
large sense he remained a Liberal all his days.
“Literature he would discuss by the hour, especially poetry. He hated
the fashionable decadence of that time ... say 1890–1900 ... as may be
seen from the dedication to ‘The Man Who Was Thursday.’ He delighted in
pictorial art, above all in the generous idealism of G. F. Watts.
“As to books, G. K. C. never gave any attention to those which
constituted school-work. He was passionately fond of Scott and of
course, Dickens. He knew Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne by heart, and
had enjoyed every other English poet in large degree. He did not care
in those days for lighter reading.
“There was a school library, but it was reserved for the use of the
highest class in the school, which G. K. C. never attained. There was
a popular fiction library also, but he did not, I think, make use of
it. G. K. C. was too amiable to get into fights, but he would use his
strength occasionally in standing between a small boy and others who
were badgering him. He honored religion, but had none whatever of a
doctrinal kind until years later.”
“Chesterton, as I knew him in 1889,” writes Mr. E. W. Fordham, another
old schoolmate, “was utterly unlike the average English schoolboy. He
took no part in games. He showed no particular brilliance as a scholar,
and yet far from being looked down upon, he was, I think, always
regarded as one who lived in a different mental world from the rest of
us, a world that many of us admired from afar but would never expect,
or, it may be, ever hope to enter. We felt, though we never alluded
to, his mental pre-eminence. Thus when the Junior Debating Club was
formed, G. K. became Chairman without question and without a rival. It
was obvious that he alone was fitted for the post, and most admirably
he filled it. The teas at the houses of the various members of the Club
which preceded the debates were often tempestuous to the last degree,
but Gilbert, although he took no share in the more physical aspects of
our revelry, was very far from playing the part of a wet blanket.
“His laugh was the loudest and the most infectious of all. There were
times when the boisterous manifestations of some of us overflowed
into, and tended to overpower, the Debates. Then, with the utmost good
temper, G. K. would assert himself, and order would be restored.
“I remember once, after I myself had been particularly noisy and
troublesome, Gilbert explained to me that the throwing of buns and
slices of cake did not really help in the production of good debates,
and he hinted, very kindly and seriously, that some restraining action
might have to be taken if the rioting did not diminish. I hope, indeed,
I believe, I took the hint. This occasion was thereafter referred to as
the day ‘when the Chairman spoke seriously to Mr. F.’
“G. K. was the mainspring of the Junior Debating Club. He was valiantly
supported by Oldershaw, Bentley, and others, but without him neither
the Club itself, nor that strange little magazine, ‘The Debater’ could
have flourished as each of them did. Like boy, like man. That which he
believed in he put his whole heart into, and never spared himself in
furthering its interests. He gave the Junior Debating Club his eager
and inspiring support for the two very good reasons, that it gave great
enjoyment to himself and a few of his friends, and that he thought it
a widening and humanizing influence--completely outside the range of
ordinary school affairs. The Chairman loved the Junior Debating Club,
and most certainly the J. D. C. loved the Chairman.”
Mr. Fordham pins further recollections around the “Autobiography”:
“I am a prejudiced person. Fifty years of friendship and admiration are
an insuperable bar to impartiality.
“G. K. C. and I were at school together: we were fellow members of the
Junior Debating Club of which he was Chairman. We both contributed to
our Club’s magazine, ‘The Debater.’ I wrote rubbish; he wrote articles
and verses of a very different quality. In this book he speaks almost
with contempt of his ‘juvenilia.’ They were in fact such as very few
boys of his age could have produced. Even then, at the age of fifteen
or sixteen, he had a sense of style and a command of language which
the High Master of St. Paul’s and other authorities did not fail to
recognize. ‘The Dragon,’ one article begins, ‘the Dragon is the most
cosmopolitan of impossibilities.’
“As I say, I admired Gilbert Chesterton throughout his life, and after
reading his ‘Autobiography’ I admire him still more. My attitude is
rather that of a hero-worshipper than a critic, but I believe that no
impartial critic could read this book and fail to see that here was a
genius, and better, a brave and an honest man, a man who loved life
and loved his friends, loved laughter and hated oppression; in short
a very great man. Despite all the modesty with which it is written,
the book makes all these things clear. From beginning to end it is a
magnificent =apologia pro vita sua=; nevertheless I hope it will not be
the sole record of his life. There are countless things that he could
not and would not tell of himself but that should not be forgotten.
‘Belloc,’ he writes, ‘still awaits a Boswell.’ It is equally true that
Chesterton awaits one. Is it legitimate to hope that his Boswell may be
Belloc? There is a grand harvest to be gathered by his Boswell, whoever
that may prove to be. G. K. C. was a brilliant talker. He banished
dullness from whatever company he was in. No argument arose but he
would drive home his point by some arresting illustration. We were
arguing once as to whether some policy or other were good or bad. ‘The
word ‘good,’ said G. K., ‘has many meanings. For example, if a man were
to shoot his grandmother at a range of 500 yards I should call him a
good shot, but not necessarily a good man.’
“No one could stump him by an unexpected question. He took part in a
debate many years ago at, I think, the Lyceum Club, and in the course
of his speech he discussed, as did other speakers, various racial
characteristics. After the debate I was walking round with him when an
elderly lady whom he did not know came up and said with something of a
simper, ‘Mr. Chesterton, I wonder if you could tell what race I belong
to?’ With a characteristic adjustment of his glasses he replied at
once, ‘I should certainly say, Madam, one of the conquering races.’
“Only a year or two ago he watched with tolerant, and indeed highly
vocal amusement, (his was both the strangest and the jolliest laugh
man ever had) a representation of himself in some private theatricals.
When they were over he said to the daughter of the player who had
impersonated him--a sturdy figure, it is true, but less generously
planned than the original--‘Do you know I believe your father =is=
Gilbert Chesterton and I am only a padded impostor.’
“Reading this book has recalled these trifles to my mind just as it
has recalled the figure of the boy Chesterton as I first knew him in
the early nineties. I can see him now, very tall and lanky, striding
untidily along Kensington High Street, smiling and sometimes scowling
as he talked to himself, apparently oblivious of everything he passed,
but in reality a far closer observer than most, and one who not only
observed but remembered what he had seen. The fascination of this
book is, in great part, due to the fact that he retained these powers
of observation and memory throughout his life, and that he has applied
them to himself as rigorously and as vividly as to his fellows.
“‘I should thank God for my creation,’ said Gilbert’s grandfather,
‘if I knew I was a lost soul.’ Gilbert would have done the same. ‘The
primary problem for me,’ he writes, ‘was the problem of how men could
be made to realize the wonder and splendour of being alive,’ and it is
because he himself did realize it that he is able to say of his later
years, ‘I have grown old without being bored. Existence is still a
strange thing to me, and as a stranger I give it welcome.’
“Chesterton begins this book with a joke about his baptism. It is
characteristic of the man. He loved laughter as much as he hated
hypocrisy. ‘I have never understood,’ he says, ‘why a solid argument is
any less solid because you make the illustrations as entertaining as
you can.’ It is because, in this autobiography the philosophy is spiced
with fun, and the fun sometimes spiced with philosophy, that so true
a picture of the man emerges from the book. When he looks at himself
he sees not only an intensely interesting being but also an intensely
amusing one. He speaks of his school days as the period during which ‘I
was being instructed by somebody I did not know, about something I did
not want to know.’ He tells how on his wedding day he stopped to buy a
glass of milk at some haunt of his infancy, and again to buy a revolver
and cartridges ‘with a general notion of protecting my bride from the
pirates doubtless infesting the Norfolk Broads.’
“You will find the same amusement he found if you read and re-read his
chapter on ‘Friendship and Foolery,’ his story of the sudden invasion
of Henry James’ house at Rye by Mr. Belloc and another, unshaven and
dishevelled but vociferous and irrepressible, his account of the
birthday dinner to Mr. Belloc at which there were to be no speeches,
and at which everybody present spoke, and his story of the aged
negro porter in America with a face like a walnut whom, he says, ‘I
discouraged from brushing my hat, and who rebuked me saying, ‘Ho, young
man, yo’s losing ye dignity before yo times. Yo’s got to look nice for
the girls.’
“The sketches of his friends and those of the many public men with
whom he came in contact are of extraordinary interest. In a few lines
he paints sharp and unforgettable portraits not only of his intimate
friends but of men and women with whom he had perhaps but one short
conversation. It is thus he tells of his meeting with King George
V at the house of the late Lord Burnham. He sums up his impression
of ‘about as genuine a person as I ever met’ in these words--‘If it
should ever happen that I hear before I die among new generations who
never saw George the Fifth that he is being praised either as a strong
silent man, or depreciated as a stupid and empty man, I shall know that
history has got the whole portrait wrong.’
“There are brilliant little sketches of George Wyndham, Charles
Masterman and Cunninghame Graham, among many others; of each one it
is the true thing and the generous thing that he sets down. No less
arresting are the little cameos of wholly unknown men and women who
said or did something that left an impression on his receptive and
retentive mind. For example there was the ‘huge healthy simple-faced
man of the plastering profession’ who at a Penny Reading, being unable
to endure further recitations about to be provided by a gentleman who
had already obliged with ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and ‘The
May Queen,’ ‘arose slowly in the middle of the room like some vast
Leviathan arising from the ocean and observed, ‘Well, I’ve just ’ad
about enough of this. =Good= evening, Mr. Ash. =Good= evening, ladies
and gentlemen,’ and shouldered his way out of the Progressive Hall with
an unaffected air of complete amiability and profound relief.’
“Memorable as are all the records of his outer life, the insight that
he gives us into his mental and spiritual development is of deeper
significance. It would be impossible, for me at least, to summarize
the subjective side of this autobiography. To be understood, even to
be partly understood, it must be read in its entirety. Many readers
will not be able to accept the conclusions to which Chesterton found
himself inevitably driven, but none can fail to see that his steadfast
faith, his sure hope, and his abounding charity were the outcome of no
slipshod or haphazard thought, but of mental processes to which he gave
the whole of his clear and original mind, and that in his life-long
struggle towards the light which he felt assured he had ultimately
found he was as completely honest with himself as he always was in his
dealings with his fellow men.
“This is a noble record of a noble life.”
CHAPTER TWO
LITERARY APPRENTICESHIP
Chesterton had a shorter apprenticeship for a writing career than most
men of letters. After leaving St. Paul’s he went to the Slade Art
School where he graduated in 1891 at the age of seventeen. He forthwith
began reviewing books on art for the “Bookman,” the “Speaker,” and
other periodicals. In 1901 he married Frances Blogg whom he had known
for some time. Among those present at the wedding was Miss Elizabeth
Yeats, the sister of the poet William Butler Yeats, who recalls,
“My sister and I were at the Chesterton’s wedding at St. Mary’s
Abbots in Kensington. Gilbert wanted the ceremony as ceremonial as
possible--but Frances, who then belonged to some new thought people
in religious matters, wanted everything possible cut from the Church
of England Service--except just the legal parts. Gilbert had been, of
course, brought up a nonconformist.”
Chesterton’s marriage was the beginning of thirty-five years of
happiness with a wife who was ideally congenial.[A]
His first book “Greybeards at Play,” consisting of jingles and
sketches, had appeared in 1894. As time went on he gradually found the
expression of ideas more satisfying than any kind of art work.
[A] Frances Chesterton died December 12, 1938.
From 1898 to 1901 he and his brother Cecil helped Hilaire Belloc on
“The New Witness,” a weekly paper pledged to wage eternal against
political corruption. Some years earlier he had severed his connections
with socialism and adopted Belloc’s ideas now known as “Distributism,”
the progress of which was to be ultimately chronicled by the famous
“G. K.’s Weekly” founded in 1926.
Stephen Gwynn recalls the first book written for Macmillan.
“It is so long ago that I only dimly remember my first encounter with
G. K. C. He was married and they let a flat--Battersea Park--a tiny
flat--in 1901. I never knew two people who changed less in nearly forty
years.
“On my advice the Macmillans had asked him to do Browning in the
‘English Men of Letters,’ when he was still not quite arrived. Old
Mr. Craik, the Senior Partner, sent for me and I found him in white
fury, with Chesterton’s proofs corrected in pencil; or rather not
corrected; there were still thirteen errors uncorrected on one page;
mostly in quotations from Browning. A selection from a Scotch ballad
had been quoted from memory and three of the four lines were wrong. I
wrote to Chesterton saying that the firm thought the book was going
to “disgrace” them. His reply was like the trumpeting of a crushed
elephant. But the book was a huge success as it deserved to be.”
J. Lewis May writes about another early book,
“A book that created something of a sensation in its day was the
penetrating study of George Bernard Shaw by Chesterton. The mention of
Chesterton reminds me that it was Lane who published his ‘Orthodoxy’
and his ‘Napoleon of Notting Hill,’ as well as ‘Heretics.’ Those, I
think, were in the days before the royalty system came in, and I fancy
Lane bought them outright. It was in regard to the first that I heard
that Chesterton brought it in chapter by chapter as he wrote it, and it
was written on any miscellaneous scraps of paper that came to his hand.
He did not disdain, I have been told, even the paper that sugar is
wrapped in, for the purpose of recording his valuable thoughts. Anatole
France was accustomed to use the inside of envelopes or the backs of
bills for the same object.”
William Platt gave Chesterton encouragement at the start,
“We are all aware that one of G. K. C.’s first successes was by a
series of articles signed ‘The Defendant’ each one being headed ‘In
Defense of....’
“I wrote immediately to the clever young ‘Defendant’ telling him of the
certainty of his future as a writer. He immediately came ’round to see
me. Tall, young, handsome, vivacious. At once we fraternized.
“After that our trends in life became rather diverse. We met
occasionally, chiefly at public gatherings in London. At rare intervals
we exchanged letters. But G. K. C. never forgot my early prediction of
his inevitable rise to fame, or the many things we had in common, in
his sense of knight-errantry and mine. In any hall the moment he caught
sight of me he would greet me with his radiant smile, or, if free, he
would at once come over to me.”
A newspaperman once asked Chesterton what he considered his first most
important book,
“‘Napoleon of Notting Hill’ and I almost missed writing it. If I hadn’t
written it, I would have stopped writing. I was what you Americans call
‘broke’--only ten shillings in my pocket. Leaving my worried wife, I
went down Fleet Street, got a shave, and then ordered for myself, at
the Cheshire Cheese, an enormous luncheon of my favorite dishes and a
bottle of wine. It took my all, but I could then go to my publishers
fortified. I told them I wanted to write a book and outlined the story
of ‘Napoleon of Notting Hill.’ But I must have twenty pounds, I said,
before I begin.
“‘We will send it to you on Monday.’
“‘If you want the book,’ I replied, ‘you will have to give it to me
today as I am disappearing to write it.’ They gave it.
“Later Chesterton said, ‘What a fool a man is, when he comes to the
last ditch, not to spend the last farthing to satisfy the inner man
before he goes out to fight a battle with wits.’”
Just before the War the Irish Lit-er-a-ry Society had a debate at which
G. K. C. was the principal speaker: the Chairman being Stephen Gwynn,
and among the other speakers was Jimmy Glover at that time conductor of
the Drury Lane orchestra, whose father published the collected edition
of Tom Moore’s melodies. In introducing Chesterton, Stephen Gwynn
chipped him on his life of Browning in the “English Men of Letters
Series,” and on certain mistakes he had made on it, and wondered why he
had undertaken a subject, about which he apparently knew so little.
Chesterton, with his usual chuckle and wiping the perspiration from
his face on to the lapels of his frock coat, retorted that he had had
some doubts on the undertaking, but when he had discovered in the
series entitled “English Men of Letters,” a life written by an Irishman
(Stephen Gwynn) on another Irishman (Tom Moore) he had no further
qualms in the matter. The back-chat continued for a time, and Mr. Boyle
recalls, ended by Chesterton suggesting that he should get on with
the subject of the evening and then proceed with the important matter
before them, which was the weighing of himself against Jimmy Glover
who had had the audacity to state that he was heavier than the famous
author. After the meeting George Boyle had a few words with G. K. C.
and reminded him that he was in St. Paul’s School with him but that he
had been in a higher class than himself. With the same good-natured
chuckle G. K. C. said this was quite impossible as he had always
remained in the very lowest class he could while at that school.
As known from his “Autobiography,” Chesterton wrote a great deal for
“The Speaker” under J. L. Hammond’s editorship. The latter came to know
him through L. R. Oldershaw (an old school friend of his who shared
rooms with Hammond at that time in the Temple.) Oldershaw wrote for
“The Speaker” (mainly fiction reviewing) and he brought Chesterton to
see Hammond. As we can imagine he made a deep impression on Hammond,
and on the other young men who worked for “The Speaker.” The first
contribution he made was an article on Ruskin in the form of a review
of a life by W. G. Collingwood. This appeared on April 26th, 1900. The
first number of “The Speaker” after it had passed into the hands of
a group of Liberals to which Hammond belonged, was published at the
beginning of October, 1899.
Chesterton wrote much during the Boer War, including some excellent
skits on Chamberlain and other topics at the General Election of 1900.
F. W. Hirst has recollections about “The Speaker”:
“As regards G. K. Chesterton, I was partly responsible for publishing
his early contributions to ‘The Speaker’ which I helped edit from
1899 (when I first met him) until after the end of the Boer War. My
political cooperation with Chesterton (and Belloc) was mainly due to
our antipathy to aggressive imperialism which was shared with Mark
Twain.”
CHAPTER THREE
MEETINGS WITH G. K. C.
Miss Alice Henry of Melbourne, Australia, has kindly pointed out to
the author that the following is something which has never had any but
ephemeral publication in a newspaper, and yet it is surely one of the
most striking messages he ever uttered. Chesterton was the one British
writer, utterly unknown before, who built up a great reputation during
the South African War, and it was gained, not through nationalistic
support, but through determined and persistent opposition to the
British policy. After the war ended, he ran a column in the “London
Daily News.” A correspondent had asked him for a definition of his
anti-war attitude. This was his reply,
“The unreasonable patriot is one who sees the faults of his fatherland
with an eye which is clearer and more merciless than any eye of hatred,
the eye of an irrational and irrevocable love.”
The reader will recall that in his “Autobiography” Chesterton states
that it was in Fleet Street that he first met Sir Philip Gibbs “who
carried a curious air of being the right man in the wrong place.”
However, in a letter to the author, Sir Philip disagrees with this,
“As regards G. K. C., he was a good friend of mine and has placed
me on record in his ‘Autobiography’ as ‘the right man in the wrong
place’--though as a matter of fact I claim to have been the right man
in the right place--which was Fleet Street, where he and I met many
times as writers for the Press. His books belong to my mental library
and he will live in English literature as one of our great essayists,
and above all as a good poet.”
Sir Oliver Lodge recalls:
“G. K. C. at one time lived at the set of flats in Artillery Mansions
where I had one of them, and I used to meet him outside sometimes
waiting for a cab in the street and had a few words with him. I also
met him at the Synthetic Society dinners, and once I impounded a
piece of blotting-paper on which he had made a lot of characteristic
scribbles (clever sketches of faces) absentmindedly during a discussion
at one of these dinners.”
Robert Blatchford, the well known editor of “The Clarion” and author
of “Merrie England,” who was born away back in 1851, tells of a long
controversy he had with Chesterton in the press some thirty years ago
about determinism: “Some years later he wrote in some paper, I forgot
which, and paid me the finest compliment I ever received. He said,
“‘Very few intellectual minds have left such a mark on our time: have
cut so deep or remained so clean. His case for Socialism, so far as it
goes, is so clear and simple that any one would understand it when it
was put properly: his genius was that he could put it properly. His
triumphs were triumphs of strong style, active pathos, and picturesque
metaphor: his very lucidity was a generous sympathy with simple minds.
For the rest he had triumphed with being honest and by not being
afraid.’
“Now in paying me that compliment he complimented himself, for only
a very warm-hearted and generous man could have treated an opponent
with such gallantry and kindness. But you cannot publish that
tribute without giving the impression that I am fishing for a cheap
advertisement.
“Then as to his books. I liked what he wrote about Dickens and some of
his poetry, and I recognize his brilliance: but a good deal of his work
I found rather tiresome, and you cannot publish such an opinion.
“We met several times and got on quite pleasantly together.”
W. W. Jacobs, the author of “Many Cargoes,” recollects,
“I cannot recall my first meeting with Chesterton: it was so very long
ago. But I do remember an occasion when he sat next to me at dinner and
said that he had rheumatism so badly that he did not know how he would
be able to stand up for his speech. A difficulty which he solved by
keeping my right shoulder in a strong hand and bearing down upon it. It
was a good speech, but it seemed to be the longest I had ever listened
to.”
“I regret that I never met G. K. C. personally,” laments James Hilton,
“but I did when quite a small boy send him a poem I had written (a
drinking song as a matter of fact), modeled after his own style, and
received a charming letter from his wife, I think, saying that he had
been much interested and ‘believed that after the war there would be a
great recrudescence of drinking songs.’ This was my first letter from
even the wife of a celebrity and I was very proud of it. As a matter
of fact, in my entire life I have only written anything you could call
fan letters to two authors, Chesterton on this one occasion, and again
later to Galsworthy.
“I wish I could give you more interesting reminiscences of Chesterton,
whose work I admire very much, but we were of different generations
and it happened that we never met, though we had many mutual friends.
I think my favorite book of his is ‘The Man Who Was Thursday,’ which I
remember reading during my school days. I am very pleased to hear from
you that he expressed admiration for ‘Goodbye Mr. Chips.’ I did not
know of this and it is a source of deep gratification to me.”
Christopher Hollis first met G. K. C. in company with one of Belloc’s
sons:
“The first time that I met Mr. Chesterton was, when as an undergraduate
at Oxford, I was in the company of Hilary Belloc, the son of Mr.
Belloc, to see the Association Football Cup Final--the culminating
event of the English football season--at Wembley. We were traveling by
motor bicycle from Oxford to Wembley and, passing through Beaconsfield
in the middle of the morning, Hilary Belloc took me to pay a call on
Mr. Chesterton, whom we found walking in the garden with his wife.”
And Hilaire Belloc himself:
“I met Mr. Chesterton first when I was thirty, and he, I think,
twenty-six. That was at the end of the year 1900. I had already
written and spoken for some years on what later became known as
‘Distributism.’ I do not think that he had by that time written or
spoken upon public affairs.”
Gilbert Frankau is “afraid that I only met G. K. Chesterton once.
This was at a debate. He took the chair and was, I remember, a little
sarcastic about my own contribution. But the sarcasm was so beautifully
done that it became almost a compliment. He really had a rare charm
of manner. And he really was a character. Characters being only too
rare in this modern world where all tend to become stereotyped. I
was, of course, a Father Brown fan. But which really made the deepest
impression on my young mind was Chesterton’s poetry. It had, for me,
the supreme virtue of vigor.”
The critic Coulson Kernahan admired Chesterton hugely:
“The first time I met him was when he was lunching with dear old Robert
Barr at the Savage Club. Barr came over to my table to say ‘Chesterton
is my guest and I told him who you were.’ He said ‘Kernahan and I are
two of the rather uncommon authors, today, who write of serious and
religious subjects. I’d like to meet him.’ ‘So come over to my table,
Kernahan, and meet him.’
“I did. At about two o’clock Barr had to leave to keep an editorial
engagement, and I said to G. K. C. ‘I am a member. Won’t you stay on as
my guest now your host is going?’ He did. He stayed till six o’clock,
talking brilliantly all the time (with an interlude for tea--’till then
he had enjoyed the club’s excellent wine), and never once repeated
himself. Then we met again at the Centenary Celebration of George
MacDonald. Ramsay MacDonald was President of the Centenary Memorial,
with Chesterton and myself as Vice-Presidents, and G. K. C. was one of
the speakers, and very happy and interesting in what he said.
“My last meeting with him was in Hastings. My wife and I were passing
the Queen’s Hotel on the front, and I heard myself hailed by name. It
was G. K. C. sitting outside in the sun at a table, with a bottle of
wine before him, and he invited us to come and share it, and as many
more bottles as we felt inclined for. Once again, he talked in that
brilliant paradoxical and ‘intriguing’ way of his and for hours on at a
time. My wife and I came away with his musical, but rather high voice,
still in our ears, and with new and many beautiful, but sometimes
perplexing thoughts, born of what that man of genius had said, in our
minds.
“That, alas, is all I can tell you of G. K. C. But if you can get sight
of my book ‘Celebrities’ which I think Dutton published in America, you
will find G. K. C. figuring there as Judge, (Bernard Shaw as Foreman
and myself as one of the Jury), at the much discussed Edwin Drood trial
held in the June before the war by the Dickens Fellowship of which I
was, and still am, a Vice-President. Chesterton, as I say in my book,
took the part of Judge seriously and finely, for we wished to come to
some discovery about Edwin Drood. But Bernard Shaw ‘guyed’ the show,
and turned a serious inquiry into a farce.”
Eric Gill, the well known sculptor, recalls,
“Apart from seeing Chesterton many times at meetings I don’t think I
actually met him in a personal way until about 1925 on the occasion of
the founding of ‘G. K.’s Weekly,’ when I stayed the night at his house
and we discussed the policy of his paper, especially with reference to
industrialism and art. After we came to live here (which is only a few
miles from Beaconsfield) we saw him more often.”
A party of members of St. George’s Rambling Society, devoted to
historical and archaeological research were visiting Beaconsfield on
a pleasant afternoon in the September of 1935. They called upon the
author at his home, “Top Meadow.” Mrs. Chesterton received them with
much courtesy, and while they were talking to her, he came into the
Lounge Hall of his house, which was fitted up in the Tudor style, with
large fire-place, around which everyone grouped. They rose when he
entered, and he soon engaged all in conversation. He was in excellent
form. His first question, “What really did you come here to see?” was
promptly answered by one of the members, Fred H. Postans, “We came to
see Mr. Chesterton.” He then told an amusing anecdote against himself.
He had been much annoyed by the noise made by the local film studios
quite close to his home, and after sending several ineffectual letters
of protest, eventually asked his secretary to call upon the manager
of the studios. Upon doing so, that lady made a strong protest saying
emphatically, “The position is becoming impossible.... Mr. Chesterton
can’t write,” to which the manager replied, “We were well aware of
that.” He relished the telling of this story immensely. He went on to
give some local details about Beaconsfield. It was asked him whether
he ever intended to write a Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and he said
he thought that had already been done very well by Boswell. Postans
pointed out that there was a little too much Boswell in that, in his
opinion. He seemed to agree and said that he greatly admired the Doctor
and it was not entirely impossible that he might undertake to write his
life.
“My only meeting with Chesterton,” writes Hugh Kingsmill, “was in
the autumn of 1912, when I went to Beaconsfield to interview him for
‘Hearth and Home,’ which was being edited by Frank Harris. One of
his arms was in a sling, and he found great difficulty in pouring
out drink. To my surprise he was not quaffing ale but sipping a
liqueur. He insisted however in pouring the drinks for both of us,
out of courtesy. He seemed to me very absent-minded and gentle, and I
formed an extremely pleasant impression of him. At the same time he
did not strike me as at all alive to ordinary existence. His praise
of the man in the street and of common life has always seemed to
me a defense thrown up against his own temperament. I think he was
naturally an artist and poet of the self-absorbed, rather limited
kind, and that he was afraid of this tendency, and fled to democracy,
Dickens and eventually the Roman Church, in order not to lapse into
pure aestheticism. As far as I know, and I have met many of them,
his friends were drawn from rather cranky people, not from normal
types, and this illustrates the division between his opinions and his
temperament. He was not a good judge of individuals, in my opinion.
Nothing could be further from the truth than his picture of Dickens as
a roistering lover of the poor. On the other hand, his intelligence was
very acute in the destructive criticism of the fads and poses against
which he was always contending. If he did not understand ordinary life,
he certainly understood the aesthetes, faddists and millenarians of
the twenty years before the war, and made brilliant game of them in
‘Heretics.’ Since the war, his work seems to me to have fallen off
greatly. I have seen him several times, wandering about the streets or
in Marylebone station, and was touched by his melancholy look. I think
life depressed him. In his youth he praised the poor man’s literature
of thrillers and shockers. In his later life he denounced the cinema.
What the distinction, at any rate in mind, between printed nonsense
and visible nonsense is, he never explained. I attribute this change
of fact that as he grew older, he could not summon up enough energy
to continue his celebration of the man in the street, and was more
concerned with finding reasons for his faith in his last refuge from a
perplexing world, the Roman Catholic Church.
“But he did a valuable work in destructive criticism, and he was a
lovable figure. I cannot think of any other well-known writer of the
day in England whom one would not sooner spare from the scene than
G. K. My friend Hesketh Pearson was staying with me when I read of
Chesterton’s death. I told him of it through the bathroom door, and he
sent up a hollow groan which must have been echoed that morning all
over England.”
Philip Guedalla recollects, “I first saw Gilbert Chesterton on the
occasion of a visit of his to Oxford when I was an undergraduate
’round about 1909 or 1910. It was a dark vision of the inside of a
four-wheeled cab almost entirely filled with Chesterton. From its
interior an arm and hand emerged and proceeded to struggle wildly with
the outside handle of the vehicle. There was a College debate the
same evening of which Chesterton was the opener; and I was offered
up to him as the only undergraduate with insufficient impudence to
attempt this suicidal controversy. He came back with me to my room
in College and performed two acts which would have struck him as
sacramentally Chestertonian. First he sat through my only arm chair to
its destruction; then he finished all my whisky. On the next morning I
piously presented for signature by its author a copy of ‘Orthodoxy’ and
was profoundly shocked when he inscribed it ‘BOSH BY G. K. CHESTERTON.’”
“Yes, I should be delighted to go on record as one of the admirers
of G. K. Chesterton,” writes Clements Ripley. “He has always been an
enthusiasm of mine. The first book of his I ever read was ‘The Man
Who Was Thursday.’ I couldn’t have been more than fourteen when I
picked this up and of course a great deal of the symbolism and the
metaphysical quality of the book escaped me at that age. I read it for
the story and it was a very fast moving and fascinating story. I think
even then I appreciated the brilliancy of Chesterton’s paradoxical
style, although at that time I certainly wouldn’t have called it that.”
“It seems hardly possible,” ponders Walter de la Mare, “that a human
being with the least claim to a vestige of intelligence should
have forgotten his first meeting with G. K. C. I am, however, that
unfortunate kind of man, and cannot even remember my first observations
on entering this (at least) exceptionally interesting world. I recall
most vividly, of course, many meetings and these memories are not
in the slightest degree composite ones--even if memories ever are
composite. And so vividly, indeed, that it all but amounts to an
hallucination--as if we were meeting again!
“Like how many, many friends of his, I have the greatest affection for,
and admiration of, his work--and how much his work was he himself,
though not, of course, all himself! That, I suppose, can never be.”
“There is in London a distinguished Society,” declares Marie Belloc
Lowndes, “called The Wiseman Dining Society. As its name implies, it
is a Catholic Society, but no distinction is made with regard to the
religion of the speakers. A great number of outstanding men and women
have delivered addresses on every kind of subject of interest to an
educated man and woman. The net thrown has been large, among those who
have spoken being people as different as Lord Cecil (of the League of
Nations), Algernon Blackwood, the famous novelist, Liddell Hart, the
most noted military critic in the English-speaking world, and Bernard
Pares, the great authority on Russia. Of them all, and the Society
has been in existence now for something like ten years--by far the
most interesting, and the most beautifully delivered address, was that
of G. K. C. on Joan of Arc. This was the more remarkable, as to the
best of my belief, Chesterton was not celebrated in this country as
a speaker. I myself never heard him speak in public, but on that one
occasion. No reporters can be admitted to these dinners because a very
free discussion follows every paper read, so I fear no record of the
speech exists.”
Father Owen F. Dudley records, “I remember still quite vividly my
first meeting with Mr. Chesterton and having tea with him in his house
in Beaconsfield, Bucks. He was tremendously jovial over H. G. Wells,
whom we discussed, and whom he considered a thinker who always stopped
thinking. As I watched him, I realized that all the jokes that were
bubbling out of him, as well as the epigrams, would in all probability
appear in some article or book. Mrs. Chesterton and the Secretary were
at tea and it struck me as one of the cheeriest households I had ever
been in.”
CHAPTER FOUR
SOME FRIENDS
“There’s nothing worth the wear of living
Save laughter and the love of friends.”
No one believed more in these words of his friend Hilaire Belloc than
Chesterton himself. He delighted in thousands of steadfast friends and
acquaintances, and they rejoiced in his inimitable wisdom and good
fellowship.
The novelist, Isabel C. Clark, first met him in 1929 when he and his
wife lunched with her at Piazza Grazioli: “I cannot remember that he
said anything at all amusing or arresting, resembling in this the late
Lytton Strachey and Kenneth Graham so that I imagine few authors are as
loquacious as myself. But then I am not a man of genius!
“When I saw him he was fifty-five years of age but looked at least ten
years more, probably on account of his enormous bulk about which he
was fond of joking; indeed I believe he was proud of resembling Dr.
Johnson in this respect.
“I heard him lecture on Henry VIII here at the Convent of the Holy
Child when he said that Henry had no intention of Protestantizing the
Church in England but thought he could have a Catholic Church with
himself at the head of it, and that he was astonished to discover how
rapidly it disintegrated into many sects. I remember his saying on this
occasion: ‘Many people are prejudiced against Henry VIII because he
was a Large Fat Man,’ and then going off into a chuckle of laughter,
swelling himself out to an enormous size as he spoke. His wife told me
he always rather spoilt his own jokes by laughing at them before he
uttered them.”
Ralph Adams Cram met him first in London a good many years ago: “Father
Wagget asked my wife and myself once when we were staying in London,
whom we would like best to meet--‘anyone from the King downward.’ We
chose Chesterton who was a very particular friend of Father Wagget. At
that time we put on a dinner at the Buckingham Palace Hotel (in those
days the haunt of all the County families) and in defiance of fate,
had this dinner in the public dining room. We had as guests Father
Wagget, G. K. C. and Mrs. Chesterton. The entrance into the dining room
of the short processional created something of a sensation amongst
the aforesaid County families there assembled. Father Wagget, thin,
crop-headed monk in cassock and rope; G. K. C., vast and practically
globular; little Mrs. Chesterton, very South Kensington in moss green
velvet; my wife, and myself.
“The dinner was a riot. I have the clearest recollection of G. K. C.
seated ponderously at the table, drinking champagne by magnums,
continually feeding his face with food which, as he was constantly
employed in the most dazzling and epigrammatic conversation, was apt
to fall from his fork and rebound from his corporosity, until the
fragments disappeared under the table.
“He and Father Wagget egged each other on to the most preposterous
amusements. Each would write a triolet for the other to illustrate.
They were both as clever with the pencil as with the pen, and they
covered the backs of menus with most astonishing literary and artistic
productions. I particularly remember G. K. C. suddenly looking out of
the dining room window towards Buckingham Palace and announcing that
he was now prepared ‘to write a disloyal triolet.’ This was during
the reign of King Edward VII, and the result was convincing. I have
somewhere the whole collection of these literary productions with their
illustrations, but where they are, I do not know.”
“Ten or fifteen years ago,” recollects Stephen Gwynn, whom we have
already quoted, “Barrie had taken a big house for August, and there was
a large party, including several schoolboys and the Chestertons. It
was decided to play the game of clues, and in the evening a dozen or
more of us were each given bits of paper containing some mystification
in verse. At the end all the clues led us to a most amusing charcoal
portrait of Lord Beaverbrook. Everybody went to bed, and I was settling
down to a quiet chat with G. K. C. over whiskey and soda when three
schoolboys filed past. ‘Thank you very much,’ they said to him, ‘for
giving us an amusing evening.’
“Next morning I said to the spokesman’s mother, ‘Your youngster said
his piece very well.’ But she knew nothing about it. It had been the
schoolboy’s own idea. Admittedly the Chestertons were the best guests
in that gathering of a long and very mixed list.
“I remember how Lord David Cecil when still a boy, sitting up there one
night and expounding to us two elders the point of view of the younger
generation. Not only the easiest man in the world to talk with, but
also a very good listener.”
Lucille Borden, the novelist, found G. K.’s personality was even more
impressive than the things he put to paper: “I remember once on meeting
him I asked him what he thought of a certain small English boy (who
calls us Aunt-Uncle though we are no relation) who used to plot out
London in sections, selecting the men of prominence in those sections,
then call on them. This between the ages of nine and thirteen. He
was very small and fragile, and by reason of this, all flunkies and
secretaries let him pass. So he not only gained access to the great man
but used to go and sit with him, looking for all the world like Tiny
Tim.
“‘Indeed I remember that boy--he was an extraordinary chap. He will
go far but he needs a guiding hand.’ ... This after the boy had
grown. The thing that was so remarkable was, that Terence had only
his inquisitive personality to recommend him. He has gone far but
without the guiding hand, and drifted into the set pseudo-literati,
sponsored by the Sitwells. However, at the age of eighteen or nineteen
he married--a very clever young woman over whom the London newspapers
fought and whom the “Daily Mail” finally acquired--as one of their
top-notch women. This gives Terry leisure to write terrible but correct
poetry--and to carry on a most extraordinary and original literary
career.
“Back to ‘nos moutons’--we’ve seen Gilbert Chesterton start a
broadcast-speech to a club on whose Board I am--for which he was
allowed forty minutes: He rose from the speakers’ table--put his watch
in front of him--began one of the most stirring prose poems to which we
all ever listened--made his introduction--points in phrases as colorful
as a rainbow--approached his conclusion--made his logical deductions
and finished on the fortieth minute. It was such a tour de force as was
rarely done in the earliest days of radio.”
“When I was introduced to Chesterton,” writes Adolphe de Castro, “I
was a bit abashed. He was so formidable and such a mighty eater. But
his conversation and his wit were delightful. I have my doubts if any
one ever had the temerity to ask Mr. Chesterton why he had embraced
Catholicism. I asked him. Americans in those days were forgiven much,
and a friend of the late Ambrose Bierce was a particularly privileged
character. Chesterton twirled the end of his scraggly moustache for
some time, then he said: ‘Because of its primitivity.’
“‘Then you ought to have become a Jew,’ I said. ‘Judaism has greater
primitivity.’
“To which he rejoined: ‘It has too much primitivity and is not
sufficiently elastic for adaptability.’
“‘You hold with Heine that Judaism is not a religion but a misfortune?’
I asked.
“‘Heine was a great poet,’ returned Chesterton. ‘And do you recall what
John Locke said, ‘A merchant lies for gain; a poet lies for pleasure.’
Do you happen to write poetry?’
“I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out a sheaf of papers, extracted
one and gave it to him. He read it. ‘I like this,’ he said.
“It was a quasi sonnet entitled ‘The Jewish Poet.’”
“At one time I doubted the existence of G. K. C.,” declares Holbrook
Jackson. “I listened to the stories of him as one listens to the yarns
of men who have been in the ends of the earth. And even now, after
I have looked upon him with my own eyes, I have to nudge myself to
realize his probability. He has the reality of one of those dragons or
fairies in which he has such invincible faith. I first beheld him on a
Yorkshire moor far from his natural element, which is in London. He
was in the locality on a holiday, and I had gone over to verify his
existence just as one might go to the Arctic regions to verify the
existence of the North Pole or the Northwest Passage.
“He was staying at the house of a Bradford merchant adjoining the
moor, and I was to meet him there. It was April and raining. I trudged
through the damp furze and heather up to the house only to find
that the object of my pilgrimage had disappeared without leaving a
trace behind him. No alarm was felt, as that was one of his habits.
Sometimes he would go down to the railway station, and taking a ticket
to any place that had a name which appealed to him, vanish into the
unknown, making his way home on foot or wheel as fancy or circumstances
directed. On this occasion, however, nothing so serious had happened.
Therefore I adjourned with the lady of the house and Mrs. Chesterton
to an upper hall, where a noble latticed window commanded a wide vista
of the moor. I peered into the wild, half hoping that I should first
behold the great form of Gilbert Chesterton looming over the bare brow
of the wold, silhouetted against the grey sky like the symbol of a
large new faith.
“His coming was not melodramatic; it was, on the contrary, quite
simple, quite idyllic, and quite characteristic. In fact, he did
not come at all, rather was it that our eyes, and later our herald,
went to him. For quite close to the house we espied him, hatless and
negligently clad in a Norfolk suit of homespun, leaning in the rain
against a budding tree, absorbed in the pages of a little red book.
“This was a most fitting vision. It suited admirably his unaffected,
careless, and altogether childlike genius. He came into the house
shortly afterwards and consumed tea and cake like any mortal and
talked the talk of Olympus with the abandonment and irresistibility
of a child. I found his largeness wonderfully proportionate, even, as
is so rarely the case with massive men, to his head. This is amply in
keeping with the rest of his person. He wears a tangled mass of light
brown hair prematurely streaked with grey, and a slight moustache. His
grey-blue eyes laugh happily as his full lips unload themselves of a
constant flow of self-amused and piquant words. Like Dr. Johnson whom
he resembles so much in form, he is a great talker. But while I looked
at him I was not reminded of the lexicographer, but of Balzac. And as
his monologue rolled on and we laughed and wondered, I found myself
carried away to a studio in France, where the head of Chesterton
became one with the head of Rodin’s conception of France’s greatest
literary genius.
“Since my first meeting I have seen G. K. C. many times. I have seen
him standing upon platforms defending the people’s pleasures against
the inroads of Puritanism. I have seen him addressing men from a
pulpit, and on one memorable occasion at Clifford’s Inn Hall I saw him
defending the probability of the liquefication of the blood of St.
Januarius in the teeth of a pyrotechnic heckling from Bernard Shaw.
Again I have seen his vast person dominating the staring throng in
Fleet Street like a superman; and I have seen the traffic of Ludgate
Circus held up for him, as he strolled by in cloak and sombrero like a
brigand of Adelphi drama or a Spanish hidalgo by Velasquez, oblivious
alike of critical bus-driver and wonder-struck multitude.
“But best it is to see him in his favorite habitat of Bohemian Soho.
There in certain obscure yet excellent French restaurants with Hilaire
Belloc and other writers and talkers, he may be seen, sitting behind a
tall tankard of lager or a flagon of Chianti, eternally unravelling the
mysterious tangle of living ideas; now rising mountainously on his feet
to overshadow the company with weighty argument, anon brandishing a
wine bottle as he insists upon defending some controversial point until
‘we break the furniture’; and always chuckling at his own wit and the
sallies of others, as he fights the battle of ideas with indefatigable
and unconquerable good-humour.”
CHAPTER FIVE
ON THE ENGLISH PLATFORM
In the course of his life, Chesterton accomplished much lecturing and
public speaking as did most of the English writers of his generation
such as Shaw, Wells, and to a lesser extent Galsworthy and Bennett.
Like many Englishmen his success as a speaker was variable and
subject to his health and feelings even more than most men. Yet no
matter how indifferently Chesterton might have done in the formal
part of his address, he always more than redeemed himself in the
question-and-answer period that followed. The speed with which he
would answer questions was simply incredible. As one listened to him
answering one question after another usually of so unrelated a nature,
one marvelled at ability and nimbleness so extraordinary.
The distinguished author R. Ellis Roberts, heard a lecture at Oxford:
“I do not, alas! remember what Mr. Chesterton lectured to us about.
I remember the manner of his lecture. It seemed to be written on a
hundred written pieces of variously shaped paper, written in ink and
pencils (of all colors and in chalk). All the papers were in a splendid
and startling disorder, and I remember being at first just a little
disappointed. Then the papers were abandoned, and G. K. C. talked, and
we got more and more interested and pleased. I remember a passage about
cathedrals and railway stations which aroused opposition; and with
opposition and question the real Chesterton broke loose. He will, I am
sure, if he reads this in the next world, forgive me for saying that to
myself I whispered ‘Elephant’. All day the image had been present with
me of something vast and weighty, incredibly simple, incalculably wise,
and unquestionably kindly. Foolishly I mourned a certain sluggishness.
Then as I say, came opposition; and suddenly--trunk up, roaring,
speeding, faster and faster--the wisest of us was pursuing his trifling
opponents through quickset hedge and over ploughed fields of argument.
How he raced! I know, because of all the opposition none ran faster
than I!”
“My own acquaintance with Chesterton,” Father Francis J. Yealy, S. J.,
writes “has been gained from his books and from one of his lectures
delivered in Cambridge, England, in 1925. Just outside the town of
Cambridge is a village called Chesterton, the Anglican vicar of which
sat on the stage during the lecture. Afterwards he made a short speech,
inviting G. K. to visit the village and, I believe, suggesting that
it might have been named after his ancestors. At any rate Chesterton
responded gracefully and played most amusingly with this identity of
names. It was possible, he said, that the place had been named after
one of his ancestors, but it seemed more likely that the family had
taken their name from it. Perhaps they had lived there in the remote
past under a different name, and one of them, who would no doubt have
been a worthless fellow, had eventually been run out of town. The
natural place to go was of course Cambridge; and the people there with
their great kindliness allowed him to loiter about. In time he became
a familiar figure in Cambridge; but, as no one knew his name, they
began to refer to him as the fellow from Chesterton and later simply as
Chesterton. This he thought was very reasonable theory of the origin of
his name.”
“One day in February, 1902,” records Mr. Karl H. Harklander, “I
happened to notice on the announcing board of the Leeds University that
a G. K. Chesterton would lecture about ‘Man, Great Man, Super-man.’ I
was a young textile manufacturer on a business journey and hungered
for more than ‘bread alone!’ That night I heard the best and also the
shortest lecture of my life; in less than twenty minutes our assembly
was quite clear about ‘Man, Great man, Super-man.’ I marked my young
‘man’ who might become super-man,’ but who chose to be ‘great man’ in
accordance with the exposition of the 1902 lecture.”
A charming reminiscence comes from Edward Brown:
“In 1927 the great man accepted the Honorary Presidency of the
University College of Wales (Aberystwyth) Debates Union. The
undergraduates resolved that he should be conveyed from the station
to the Queen’s Hotel in a manner worthy of his greatness and of our
reputation for hospitality. An old fashioned vehicle of the ‘growler’
variety was dug out from the lumber yard of an inn and some of the dust
and signs of neglect were removed therefrom.
“As Secretary of Debates Union I demanded and won, the privilege
of driving this state coach. Our Officers Training Corps received
permission to act as escort but were refused the privilege of carrying
arms. They accordingly armed themselves with hoes, rakes, spades, axes,
etcetera.
“It had been arranged that the President of the Union should sit with
Chesterton (‘back to the engine’) and the President of Ladies’ Hostel
... fortunately a very small lady ... with Mrs. Chesterton. But as soon
as the two guests had taken their seats, the O. T. C. rushed the coach
and some half dozen of them secured a seat or footing of some sort. A
burly sergeant with battle axe (borrowed from the Art Department) sat
beside Mrs. Chesterton facing G. K. C. My stolid steeds were replaced
by forty undergraduates, and we tore through the narrow streets at a
most reckless pace.”
In reply to the demand for a speech, G. K. C. stood at the top of
Queen’s Hotel steps and said,
“You need never be ashamed of the athletic prowess of this College. The
Pyramids, we are told, were built by slave labor. But the slaves were
not expected to haul the pyramids in one piece!”
In his address that evening he commented on the ancient custom
of sending a condemned man to his death in the same coach as the
executioner; and described his feelings as he faced the great axe in
the coach. Later he presented the “executioner” with an exquisite
caricature of them both with the axe between them. The caricature now
hangs in the Men’s Union.
An Honorary President of the Debate Union at Aberystwyth is always
elected by the D. U. Committee (all students, save for one Lecturer).
The name is submitted to the Senate for its approval. The Debate
Union was formed from an amalgamation of the Literary and Debating
Society and the Political Union in 1925 about a year before G. K. C.’s
Presidency. Chesterton was succeeded by John Drinkwater, John van
Druten, and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.
G. K. C.’s speech was on “Liberty: the Last Phase,” by which he
explained he meant the =latest= phase. Just as barons had fought
against the tyranny of would-be despots, just as yeoman had fought
those same barons for freedom of property and action, just as ... etc.
factory-hands; electors ... so ought men today to band in a great
crusade to defend the common man’s freedom of the highway, a freedom
which was being denied him by the motorist. The cause was obscured
by the common man’s desire to join the enemy as soon as his means
permitted him to do so. Envy of our enemy inspired a desire to emulate
him. His chariots were objects of admiration, instead of loathing
and furious hostility ... But the fact remained that our roads, our
ancient highways were being wrested from us. “The price of liberty is
eternal vigilance.”
The Senior History Lecturer and some others were of the opinion that
the whole thesis of the address was a gigantic leg-pull!
The students that evening were a songful crowd, and they had evolved
in G. K. C.’s honour a parody of a well-known Salvation Army hymn that
went, “I’m H-A-P-P-PY, I know I am, I’m sure I am, I’m H-A-P-P-Y!”
They had already several parodies on that spelling motif, such as “I’m
D-R-U-N-K!”
That evening as G. K. C. entered, they all burst into, “I’m G. K.
Chester--TON,” with terrific and increasing emphasis on the TON, later
varying it “G. K.... Just-a TON.” The great man was delighted and
bowed, smiled, and clapped his hands.
Of Chesterton in Liverpool Mr. Clarence Fry recalls, “I was living in
Liverpool at the time Mr. Chesterton joined the Roman Catholic Church.
Having been charmed with his writings, I went to see and hear him
lecture. I remember how disappointed I was with his address (perhaps
owing to Protestant prejudices). But I had reckoned without my host.
The Chairman said all questions asked on paper would be answered
by the Speaker. And then Mr. Chesterton rose and reading out each
question, replied in a few pregnant words; immediately sitting down and
beaming most angelically all round the hall on the audience, as much as
to say, ‘How’s that! Beat that, if you can!’ And in =no= one case could
any answer be ventured. I was delighted and overwhelmed with the sense
of his masterly dealing with the issues laid before him. The replies
were electric in their concise power. Also, as you may believe, I was
charmed with his whole personality.”
The chairman was the late Roman Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool,
Dr. Keating, supported by the Catholic Bishop of Birmingham and
other dignitaries. The occasion aroused great interest, as not long
before G. K. C. had joined the Catholic Church. The meeting was
arranged so that this new “Defender of the Faith” might help the cause
of Catholicism in the city. The speech was largely devoted to an
exposition of his newly-found faith.
“Chesterton seldom came to Glasgow,” records George Mortimer, “and the
only time I heard him was on his first visit to the city one Sunday
evening fully thirty years ago when he lectured in the Berkeley Hall
which seats about six hundred people. His subject was ‘Some New
Dangers of Oligarchies.’ In those days Sunday evening lectures were not
popular in Scotland, and neither are they now. The churches are in most
cases meagrely attended in the evening, the majority of people either
going for a walk, visiting their friends or remaining at home and
listening to the wireless.
“Evidently G. K. Chesterton, whom I had first seen referred to years
previously as a new Carlyle, proved a powerful magnet, for instead of
going to church I traveled from Paisley to Glasgow--seven miles by
tramcar. All I remember about the meeting is that the hall was well
filled; that a Scottish author, David Lowe, at present contributing
reminiscences which he calls ‘Lowe Life’ to a Glasgow paper, was
chairman; that Chesterton, then thirty years of age, was a large and
fleshy man with a fine head of luxuriant brown hair; and that he made
reference to the Boer War, to Lord Rosebery, and to Mr. Parks, a
prominent lawyer, business man, Methodist and Liberal M. P., I have a
general impression that he showed himself a democrat.”
“Chesterton was a past master of the art known popularly as ‘pulling
your leg,’” according to Mr. William Platt. “With him, this was not
merely a manifestation of his exuberant temperament; it was also a
matter of principle, a determination to make the other man see that
there are two sides to every question.
“I remember well his address to the British Humanitarian League. This
body was of excellent principles, and supported by many and able and
eminent persons; but it also contained many who had become rabid and
fanatical, and so provided targets, for G. K. C.
“‘If’ he said ‘you ask me to extend my sympathy to the poor fox,
pursued by savage sportsmen, shall I not also extend it to the poor
sportsman, pursued by savage humanitarians?’
“And he proceeded to draw a contrast between the typical elderly
colonel, who ought by profession to be a man of blood, but who in
point of fact was the kindest and mildest of men, and the typical
humanitarian, who ought to be brimming over with human kindness, but
who on the contrary was furiously ready to assail any unfortunate who
happened in his or her opinion to transgress the code.
“Bernard Shaw was present, and during the debate received a delicious
setback from a witty Irishman called Connel. ‘Shaw is out to persuade
us to be vegetarians,’ he said; ‘but if we all adopt that creed, what
would happen? Rabbits would obey the Scriptural command to increase
and multiply until they overran the whole country-side and ate up every
vegetable; and where then would Mr. Bernard Shaw get his daily bunch of
carrots?’
“Despite Chesterton’s ability to state the other side, and to state it
wittily and well, he was no mere arguer for argument’s sake. He would
not put forward any viewpoint unless he was convinced that there was
ground for his support. He hated that type of politician or publicist
who from sheer intellectual dexterity could argue in favor of any cause
that it paid him to support, probably with his tongue in his cheek.
This is very clearly seen in his brilliant retort to Lord Birkenhead,
ending with that overwhelming:--‘Chuck it, Smith!’
“Probably the finest instance of the effective use of slang by a great
literary stylist!
“When he spoke to me about my work he used to say:--
“‘What I admire about your idealism, as shown in your writings, is
the fact that I know it to be genuine. For writers who merely pay
lip-service to ideals, because they think it safest to do so, I have no
use whatever. But I know that what you say, you mean.’
“Chesterton, like most artistic persons, had a dislike for officialdom
and bureaucracy. It seems so often to lead to a dull and spurious
uniformity and standardization. The natural love of the artist is for
variety, reaching out to a fullness of life and experience.
“I remember hearing G. K. C. make a very amusing point at a meeting of
educationists where he was the chief speaker. He pictured a state of
things where the official director of education might be a man with
chronic catarrh. Far from realizing this as a deficiency, the official,
he supposed, would attempt to impose it on others; to require that all
pupils should be told to pronounce English as the director pronounced
it. Or, as Chesterton amusingly put it:--
“‘He wadted theb do brodoudce Idglish as he hibself brodoudced it, this
bad with the groddig gattarrh. Ibadgidge it for yourselves.’
“To those who never heard G. K. C. speak in public I would say that he
stood on the platform as the very essence of good humour. He beamed
on all and sundry. He radiated kindliness. He smiled, he laughed, he
bubbled over. He was out to enjoy himself and to make every one present
enjoy himself. A personification of mirth, good temper and happy
humanity.”
“Prof. A. J. Armstrong, head of the English Department of Baylor
University, Waco, Texas, heard G. K. C. in England,
“He talked to the members of my group for more than an hour on
Browning. He referred to his own life of Browning as an immature work,
although he said it was necessary for him to do a great deal of hack
work when he was young, about the time of this publication.
“When one of the ladies present interrupted and said,
“‘Mr. Chesterton, the Browning work has some wonderful things in it,’
he only laughed and went on. In his thoughts he stayed close to the
things that he had said in his book. His general conversation, of
course, was delightful and was filled with the paradoxes for which he
was so famous.
“He took dinner with us at the Hotel Victoria, off Trafalgar Square,
and Mrs. Chesterton was with him. I sat next Mrs. Chesterton the whole
evening and she was a lovely woman, quiet, refined, a poetess, with a
great many experiences which she told delightfully.
“Mr. Chesterton had a delightful wit, was a vigorous speaker, and was
a man of great power,--although--and I believe that this is not given
with what one usually knows of him--he had a shy way of looking under
his glasses that was charming.
“A little later we had our symposium in London where Mr. Chesterton
addressed a group of friends. I do not know whether you ever heard
of Mrs. French-Sheldon or not. Before her death all the “Who’s Who”
carried her. She was an American who learned her ‘A B C’s’ from
Washington Irving, and from that time until her death her life was
one long spectacle. She told me that at one time she was the guest of
George Sand, and that Chopin came in, and Victor Hugo later joined
them. Just imagine such a coterie!
“Mrs. French-Sheldon was one who did a great deal of exploring in
Africa, and was the first white woman to enter one side of the African
Continent and come out on the other. Later under the direction of J. B.
Pond, she made twenty-three addresses in America and received $23,000
in cash for them, that is, one thousand dollars a night.
“When I was interested in getting Mr. Chesterton to speak in Waco his
fee was one thousand dollars. So in London when I introduced Mrs.
French-Sheldon in the charming coterie, I said to Mr. Chesterton:
‘Probably when you were a little boy in short trousers this lady was
touring American cities at one thousand dollars a night, so you can
see that you are not the only one that gets that price, and she got it
twenty years before you did.’ Mr. Chesterton answered with a smile.
But he seemed tremendously impressed, for in the social hour that
followed the symposium, he showed Mrs. French-Sheldon a number of
courtesies.”
Mrs. Lillian Curt heard a lecture in London,
“His large body was rather picturesque, but one received a shock when
a tiny, high pitched voice emanated from it. I well remember on one
occasion before the War that G. K. C. was asked to speak in the large
Town Hall of Battersea. The occasion was the Annual Soiree of the West
Lambeth Association of Teachers--a large and important local gathering
of learned folk and their friends. G. K. C. then in his prime, was
the lion of the evening and the lion was expected to roar when his
turn came. But no, G. K. C. stood, like a huge cherub, emitting little
squeaky phrases. The teachers huddled closer together and craned their
necks forward. G. K. C. went on unconcernedly and those who could
hear, heard gems of the first (literally) water pour from those curved
lips. Not that one sentence had much to do with the last, but each was
a superb thought complete in itself and miraculously moulded. I was
there, so I know--and enjoyed a delightful tete-a-tete with him and his
charming wife afterwards. He was in strange contrast with his brother
Cecil--a little man, wee-proportioned, with a charming literary style
and good lecture-voice, who fell in the Great European war.”
In 1928 Chesterton spoke before the Summer Course at the Victoria and
Albert Museum. Mr. Charles A. Eva recalls that it was a sweltering hot
July day, and when Chesterton turned up late owing to a train delay, he
began his discourse by remarking,
“This is no sort of weather for lecturing or listening, as the lecturer
on this occasion can rely on the weather, and not on himself, to send
the audience to sleep.”
CHAPTER SIX
ON THE AMERICAN PLATFORM
Chesterton made two extended visits to the United States, in 1920–1,
and in 1930–1. Both times he traversed the length and breadth of the
country, delivering innumerable lectures, making many addresses,
and participating in not a few debates. No matter what the occasion
he never forgot his sense of humor. At the Soldiers’ Memorial Hall,
Pittsburgh, he was introduced to a large audience by Bishop Hugh C.
Boyle. When G. K. stood up there arose a collective audible gasp at the
enormous size of the man making his way to the amplifier. His opening
words were,
“At the outset I want to reassure you I am not this size, really; dear
no, I’m being amplified by the thing.”
He debated with Cosmo Hamilton at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on
November 26th, 1930. The subject of debate was presumably unknown to
the two authors, and was announced by the Chairman William C. Redfield,
Secretary of Commerce under Wilson, “Is Immorality in the Novel
Justified.” The audience was composed chiefly of educators, priests,
college instructors, and grade teachers; all seemed properly pleased
by the title of the evening’s discourse, and settled back to enjoy the
action ... Chesterton annihilating his gracious and graceful opponent.
They were not denied. Chesterton scored decidedly when he showed that
what is moral is justified, and that the contrary, of course, could
never be justified.
This Chesterton explained in his introductory remarks, which he took
from written notes, as Hamilton also did when he arose. Apparently
they were formulated, and used in more than one debate in their tour.
Chesterton charmingly denied he was there to make a football of
Hamilton, who had protested such, but that he was rather a football in
appearance, even if on the side of the angels, and Hamilton more the
lithe athlete. After these amenities, Chesterton divided his argument
into three sections: immorality in the novel violates ... first, good
morals; second, good manners; third, good taste.
“You can’t discuss inflaming the passions without doing it,” Chesterton
pointed out. In reply to a query from Hamilton, “On the contrary, I
like and admire very much the works of Aldous Huxley, but, (here he
showed genuine anger) as for that weak, sniveling, dirty, pacifistic
Enrique Maria Remarque, I have nothing but contempt.”
Chesterton made many notes, chuckling to himself as he scribbled
something soon to come forth as a sally, pausing now and then to survey
the audience or his opponent, and again interrupting his writing to
place his pencil between his teeth to applaud some remark of Hamilton’s.
“Chesterton’s voice was a fairly high tenor,” recalls Mr. Daniel
Kern who was present, “not at all surprising. I have observed that
many Englishmen despite bulk and great size, possess the same type
voice. For example, H. G. Wells’ ... so high and snuffled that it was
execrable coming over the radio. The loud-speaker system made it easy
to hear both men. Both speakers were making use of a word which sounded
like ‘eppitet’ or ‘epithet,’ which in the context could have had no
meaning. The people about us were confused. As we became used to their
voices, it developed that the word was ‘appetite.’ You can estimate the
frequency of the occurrence of this word in an ethical discussion when
it is coupled with the modifiers ‘innate’ and ‘acquired’.”
G. K. C.’s pink face, framed by a white mane of hair, isolated by a
rumpled dinner jacket, shining beautifully at the audience, caused
Kern’s companion, a singular personality, to remark wistfully,
“Chesterton’s just a saint, just a saint.”
The warm, human, simple childlike nature, and the beaming benevolence
of Chesterton’s smile was so utterly charming that Mr. W. D. Hennessy
also present, was immediately reminded of two quite disparate
characters his “favorite uncle, now deceased and Santa Claus. As I
thought more about it, I realized that my first instinctive impression
in its childlike simplicity, was founded upon a correct perception. My
uncle was loved by every man, woman, child, and dog in his town and he
was the most natural democrat I ever knew. I am just as certain that
Chesterton was a beloved figure to his neighbors and that he was a true
democrat in the best sense of that much abused term.
“Mr. Hamilton several times referred to Chesterton as a cherub and
a teacher. G. K. C. expressed difficulty in reconciling the picture
of a cherub and a teacher, but I think Cosmo Hamilton’s appellations
were apt, for was not Chesterton an angelic teacher? And when a casual
remark about the New York subway was made by Hamilton, I was delighted
at the way G. K. C. pounced upon it as a perfect allegory, comparing
the modern world looking for its way with the stranger lost in the
labyrinths of the subway.”
Mr. Joseph J. Reilly attended a debate at Mecca Temple in New York
City, between Chesterton and Clarence Darrow, which dealt with the
story of creation as presented in Genesis. It was a Sunday afternoon
and the Temple was packed. At the conclusion of the debate everybody
was asked to express his opinion as to the victor and slips of paper
were passed around for that purpose. The award went directly to
Chesterton. Darrow in comparison, seemed heavy, uninspired, slow of
mind, while G. K. C. was joyous, sparkling and witty ... quite the
Chesterton one had come to expect from his books. The affair was like a
race between a lumbering sailing vessel and a modern steamer.
Mrs. Frances Taylor Patterson also heard the Chesterton-Darrow debate,
but went to the meeting with some misgivings because she was a trifle
afraid that Chesterton’s “gifts might seem somewhat literary in
comparison with the trained scientific mind and rapier tongue of the
famous trial lawyer. Instead, the trained scientific mind, the clear
thinking, the lightning quickness in getting a point and hurling back
an answer, turned out to belong to Chesterton. I have never heard
Mr. Darrow alone, but taken relatively, when that relativity is to
Chesterton, he appears positively muddle-headed.”
Although the terms of the debate were determined at the outset, Darrow
either could not or would not stick to the definitions, but kept
going off at illogical tangents and becoming choleric over points
that were not in dispute. He seemed to have an idea that all religion
was a matter of accepting Jonah’s whale as a sort of luxury-liner. As
Chesterton summed it up, he felt as if Darrow had been arguing all
afternoon with his fundamentalist aunt, and the latter kept sparring
with a dummy of his own mental making. When something went wrong with
the microphone, Darrow sat back until it could be fixed. Whereupon
G. K. C. jumped up and carried on in his natural voice, “Science you
see is not infallible!” Whatever brilliance Darrow had in his own
right, it was completely eclipsed. For all the luster that he shed,
he might have been a remote star at high noon drowned by the bright
incandescent arc light of the sun. Chesterton had the audience with
him from the start, and when it was over, everyone just sat there, not
wishing to leave. They were loath to let the light die!
Clarence Darrow wrote the author shortly before his death,
“I was favorably impressed by, warmly attached to, G. K. Chesterton.
I enjoyed my debates with him, and found him a man of culture and
fine sensibilities. If he and I had lived where we could have become
better acquainted, eventually we would have ceased to debate, I firmly
believe.”
Bishop George Craig Stewart of Chicago, presided at Orchestra Hall
when Chesterton debated in that city with Dr. Horace J. Bridges of the
Ethical Cultural Society on the subject, “Is Psychology a Curse?” In
his closing remarks Chesterton devastatingly sideswiped his opponent
and wound up the occasion in a storm of laughter and applause,
“It is clear that I have won the debate, and we are all prepared
to acknowledge that psychology is a curse. Let us, however, be
magnanimous. Let us allow at least one person in this unhappy world
to practice this cursed psychology, and I should like to nominate Dr.
Bridges.”
During Dr. Bridges’ share of the debate Chesterton was drawing funny
pictures on the back of a torn envelope which he produced out of his
capacious inner pocket. At the close of the debate, Bishop Stewart
begged the torn envelope with the funny pictures, which the artist
initialed “From G. K. C. to G. C. S.” It now hangs framed with one of
G. K.’s photographs in the episcopal drawingroom.
At luncheon Bishop Stewart remarked, “Mr. Chesterton, =securus judicat
orbis terrarum=. You have become a Roman Catholic, and I do not doubt
that you have gained the whole world, but may I suggest that one may
gain the whole world and lose one’s soul, and I think you have lost
the soul of Chestertonianism, for after all, when you were an Anglican
you were both a Protestant and a Catholic, and that was a delightfully
Chestertonian position. Now you have become a Romanist, you have ceased
to be a Chestertonian.”
Chesterton’s only response to this Anglican leg pulling was a beaming
and chuckling acknowledgment of the charge.
At the luncheon Chesterton talked just as he wrote, on any subject that
came up, in a free, flowing, brilliant manner, and everything he said
might have been taken down and published as a part of his weekly letter
to the “Illustrated London News.”
In introducing Chesterton for the debate, Bishop Stewart had quoted
Oliver Hereford’s delightful verse,
“When plain folks such as you and I
See the sun sinking in the sky,
We think it is the setting sun:
But Mr. Gilbert Chesterton
Is not so easily misled;
He calmly stands upon his head,
And upside down obtains a new
And Chestertonian point of view ...
Observing thus how from his nose
The sun creeps closer to his toes
He cries in wonder and delight,
How fine the sunrise is tonight!”
When the lecture was over, Chesterton strode down the aisle towards
the main entrance where Mr. Edward Cassidy was standing with his wife
who wished to get his autograph on a book. Suddenly a very important
looking lorgnetted dowager accompanied by her daughter confronted the
massive man.
“Mr. Chesterton,” she demanded, “might I ask when did you become
famous?”
“I became famous, if you can call it that,” the great author chuckled,
“at a time when there were no famous men in England.”
He went on to explain that there had been no very great writers or
journalists in England during the Boer War. His bitter opposition to
the war ran so counter to the English press of the period that he
became famous for his disloyalty, and for refusing to run with the
crowd.
Chesterton impressed the late Reverend Frederic Seidenberg, S. J., who
was also present in Orchestra Hall, as a man one could never forget,
“not only his huge size, but his striking personality and ever present
smile are things that one would carry through life. We had a full
house, but his voice was so thin that I immediately had the speaker’s
desk placed at the edge of the footlights. When he began again to
speak several in the balcony called out, ‘Louder!’ After a moment’s
hesitation, Chesterton looked up and said, ‘Good brother, don’t worry,
you’re not missing a thing.’ The audience roared.”
Dr. Horace J. Bridges has kindly given his impressions,
“I had two public debates with Chesterton, one in Chicago and one in
Milwaukee. He struck me as a curious mixture of great personal charm,
wide reading, exquisite critical faculty (manifested particularly in
his interpretations of Browning and of Dickens), delightful humor, and
a certain intellectual recklessness that made him indifferent to truth
and reality. I cannot but feel that fundamentally--perhaps I should
say subconsciously--he was a thorough-going skeptic and acted upon
the principle that, since we cannot really be positive about anything,
we had better believe what it pleases us to believe. I think he never
did justice to the real arguments for a case he opposed; and he had a
slap-dash way of assuming that the weaknesses in an opponent’s case
proved not only the falsity of that case, but--which is obviously a
very different matter--the truth of his own case.
“One may think my criticism of him unfair. I certainly do not mean it
to be so, nor do I fail to recognize that men much more earnest in
their truth-seeking than he was have sincerely believed the things he
said he believed. My comment is on his mental processes, in distinction
from the question of his particular beliefs.”
Chesterton spoke in St. Louis at the Odeon Theatre. On the stage his
entire appearance was distinctive: shaggy, tousled dark-light hair
topped a massive head and full, ruddy face; eyes which seemed always
half-closed were protected by thick-lensed glasses; heavy shoulders and
ponderous girth bulked above long, slender legs. Over evening dress
he wore a black cape; when he doffed it and stood ready to speak, his
stiff, white shirt-front became awry and crept several degrees out of
proper position.
“A gentle giant Chesterton seemed,” recalls Mr. James O’Neill, “as
he commenced to address his audience. His high-pitched voice sounded
somewhat of a plaintive and apologetic note.”
Lamenting the pseudo-sophistication of the day and the loss of
appreciation for the simple pleasures of yore, Chesterton complained
that the modern man and woman were seeking to escape ennui by finding
new thrills, which tendency was expressed in our entertainments and
even in our foods. Whereas we had once been satisfied with the taste
of one palatable comestible at a time, we now demanded a combination
of several in such an assembly as the modern three-deck sandwich. He
regretfully observed that whereas our esthetic sense had once been
pleased by such a dainty little figurine as the china shepherdess, we
were now regaled by only such heroic figures as the billboard likeness
of the lady who keeps her schoolgirl complexion by using a certain kind
of soap and proclaims her secret to all who read. He was saddened by
these thoughts and yearned for a return of the more simple but much
more wholesome aesthetic attitudes currents in the days of his early
manhood.
Mrs. Katharine Darst says that when there was a call for questions,
they were slow coming, and dull when finally blurted out. Then there
was a long, embarrassing pause. And finally, “Well, we’ve heard from
the educated. Now, have the ignorant anything to ask?” ... this from
the Chairman. Chesterton had such a vicious way of tearing poseurs
apart with his sharp shafts that the reluctance of the audience to
place itself at his mercy was natural. But here was too good a chance
to miss. A number who had hesitated to make inquiries were on their
feet at once. If they asked as the ignorant, they felt that they were
armed against Chesterton’s barbs!
A group of St. Louis women also heard Chesterton deliver a lecture
paradoxically entitled,
“The New Enslavement of Women.”
This gave a compelling portrayal of how women exchanged the freedom of
home for the slavery of office,
“Twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry, ‘WE
WILL NOT BE DICTATED TO!’ And immediately proceeded to become
stenographers!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF G. K. C.
Mr. Bernard Shaw told the author that he was so much struck by a
review of Scott’s “Ivanhoe” which appeared in the “Daily News” while
Chesterton was holding his earliest notable job as feuilletonist to the
paper that he wrote to him, “asking him who he was and where he came
from, as he was evidently a new star in literature. He was either too
shy or too lazy to answer. The next thing I remember is his lunching
with us on quite intimate terms, accompanied by Belloc.
“Our actual physical contacts, however, were few, as he never belonged
to the Fabian Society nor came to its meetings (this being my set)
whilst his Fleet Street Bohemianism lay outside my vegetarian,
teetotal, non-smoking tastes. Besides, he apparently liked literary
society; and it had the grace to like him. I avoided it and it loathed
me.
“But, of course, we were very conscious of one another. I enjoyed him
and admired him keenly; and nothing could have been more generous than
his treatment of me. Our controversies were exhibition spars, in which
nothing could have induced either of us to hurt the other.”
In July, 1933, the Canadian Authors’ Association paying its first
official visit to England, was entertained at Claridge’s by the Royal
Society of Literature. Miss Paty Carter recalls that at the end of the
luncheon the toast was proposed by Rudyard Kipling and ably seconded by
Chesterton. The contrast in appearance between the mover and seconder
of the toast, caused a ripple of amusement: a contrast that might be
likened to the Giant and Jack in the fairy story. Though Kipling,
in reality, was only slightly below average size, and if a giant,
Chesterton at least conveyed the impression of an amiable, gentle,
likable giant.
“You will be much puzzled at my occupying any space--so much space--in
this august assembly,” he began, “and why any word of mine could
possibly add to what this great literary genius, Mr. Kipling, has said.
I cannot pose as a newspaper man; one reads of newspaper men slipping
in through half-closed doors.
“Now, no one could possibly think of me as slipping through a
half-closed door! (Laughter).
“I do not know Canada as Mr. Kipling knows it. I have traveled here
and there in the miserable capacity of one giving lectures. I might
call myself a lecturer; but then again I fear some of you may have
attended my lectures. The reason for my presence here today is to
return hospitality. I have been twice to Canada. My first visit was
made twelve years ago when I crossed to the Dominion from America--that
was in the early days of Prohibition. The second time I went up the
St. Lawrence. Then I knew that Canada had the foundations of all
literature, because she had indeed a country. There was that vast
natural background necessary to the growth of literary culture, and
there was also what is necessary for all literature--legend. On the
Plains of Abraham I was uplifted in the sense in which poetry or great
music or even a great monument uplifts one.
“The magnificent cordiality and courtesy of the Canadian people was,
to me, amazing. The hospitality of the Canadian Authors’ Association
was overwhelming. The Canadian Literature Society rushed out to welcome
any stray traveler, and in the confusion I was mistaken for a literary
man. (Laughter). I tried to explain I was merely a lecturer, and one of
the first things for a lecturer to do is talk about things he does not
understand, such as Canada.”
“Are you coming with us to Downing Street, Mr. Chesterton?” asked Miss
Carter as the authors all left the hotel.
“No--o,” he drawled, with a delicious sort of chant. “Unfortunately,
I have to attend a wretched meeting with three other men; all madmen,
like myself!”
Mr. James Truslow Adams happened to have been one of the four or five
Americans elected to the Royal Society of Literature, and so he found
himself in the rather odd situation of an American who was entertaining
Canadians at an empire meeting.
“Chesterton,” recalls Mr. Adams, “was very witty, and although he took
a number of sharp cracks at American journalism, I being the only
person in the room who was not of the British Empire, there was nothing
untrue or unkind. I have an extremely vivid impression of the man, not
only of his enormous physical bulk and of his constant mopping of his
forehead with his handkerchief, but also of his intellectual vitality.”
The President of the Canadian Authors’ Association, the late Charles W.
Gordon (Ralph Connor) was “struck with the freshness of Chesterton’s
thought, the brilliancy of his imagination, and his warm human
sympathy. I had heard him spoken of as cold, but I could not say that
of his speech or of his personality that day.”
Mr. Rodolphe L. Megroz made a pilgrimage in 1922, to Chesterton’s home.
“Oh, yes, certainly, sir,” said the railway porter at Beaconsfield when
asked where Chesterton lived. “Turn to your left at the bridge and
along the road to the old town. When you come to the film studios, go
across into the side road and it’s surrounded by a field. His house is
called ‘Top Meadow’.”
Mr. and Mrs. Chesterton received the visitor in a little room with
white-washed walls and book-cases, and a long desk below a window that
ran the length of the room. Megroz was anxious to compare Chesterton’s
ideas with those of H. G. Wells whom he had seen shortly before, and
particularly wished to question the former’s opinions on patriotism
and nationalism. Although such books as the jolly “Napoleon of Notting
Hill” belonged to the pre-war period, G. K. C.’s own journalistic
writings had shown no change in his dislike of internationalism and the
kind of social organization favored by Wells.
“The trouble is,” he said, “that terms like patriotism and nationalism
are very often used by people who mean something quite different from
what I mean. My idea in ‘The Napoleon of Notting Hill’ was that men
have a natural loyalty for their own home and their own land, I do
not see why, instead of progress lying in the direction of bigger and
bigger everything, it should not be found in the opposite direction, in
local patriotism. I say let a man go on loving his own home, he will
all the better recognize the other fellow’s right to do so.”
“H. G. Wells,” continued Chesterton, “talks about abstractions like the
World State, which has no root. The League of Nations lost its grip on
realities by ignoring local patriotism.”
When Megroz repeated Chesterton to H. G. Wells the latter remarked,
“Possibly the World State is an abstraction at present, but what are
not abstractions are the flying machines and poison gas; electricity
and wireless; the fact that the food grown in India may be eaten in
England, and the food grown in Australia may be eaten at the Cape.
These are hard facts, and they demand sane treatment as hard facts,
and the only possible sane treatment is to bring them under one
comprehensive control.”
Megroz got the impression that Chesterton was “certainly a romanticist,
often escaping from reality. By fantasies, among which may be included
his medievalism; but always one comes back to his great sanity, his
poetic insight, his sweetness which redeemed all his propaganda,
illuminated his poetry, and could fill even the detective story with a
wisdom akin to mysticism.”
What Chesterton wrote his friend Mr. W. R. Titterton about Wells is
pertinent, and is here published for the first time, and with Mr.
Wells’ leave,
My dear Titterton:
I think we might drop the formal address on both sides; especially
as I want to write to you about a personal feeling which I don’t
want you to take too officially, or in that sense too seriously.
I ought to have written direct to Pugh to thank him for his great
generosity in giving us his most interesting sketch about Wells,
which you were good enough to arrange for us. My task is made
a little more delicate now, because there is something I feel
about it, which I do hope neither he nor you would exaggerate or
misunderstand. I was the more glad of his kind offer, when he
made it, because I thought nobody could more ably and sincerely
appreciate Wells; and I was rather pleased that Wells should be
appreciated in a paper where he had been so often criticized. I do
hope this work will not turn into anything that looks like a mere
attack on Wells; especially in the rather realistic and personal
modern manner, which I am perhaps too Victorian myself to care
very much about. I do not merely feel this because I have managed
to keep Wells as a friend on the whole. I feel it much more (and
I know you are a man to understand such sentiments) because I
have a sort of sense of honor about him as an enemy, or at least
a potential enemy. We are so certain to collide in controversial
warfare, that I have a horror of his thinking I would attack him
with anything but fair controversial weapons. My feeling is so
entirely consistent with a faith in Pugh’s motives, as well as an
admiration of his talents, that I honestly believe I could explain
this to him without offense; and I will if necessary write to him
to do so; but I thought I would write to you first; as you know him
and may possibly know his aims and attitude as I do not.
I am honestly in a very difficult position on the “New Witness,”
because it is physically impossible for me really to edit it, and
also do enough outside work to be able to edit it unpaid, as well
as having a little over to give to it from time to time. What we
should have done without the loyalty and capacity of you and a few
others I can’t imagine. I cannot oversee everything that goes into
the paper and it would certainly be most uncomfortable for either
of us to exercise our rights of “cutting” stuff given to us under
such circumstances as Pugh’s: but I think I should exercise it if
Pugh went very far in the realistic manner about some of the weak
points in Wells’ career. There were one or two phrases about old
quarrels in the last number which strike a note I should really
regret touching more serious things; and I should like to consult
with you about such possibilities before they appear in the paper.
I cannot do it with most things in the paper, as I say; and nobody
could possibly do it better than you. On the other hand, I cannot
resign, without dropping, as you truly say, the work of a great
man who is gone; and who, I feel, would wish me to continue it. It
is like what Stevenson said about Marriage and its duties: “There
is no refuge for you; not even suicide.” But I should have to
consider even resignation, if I felt that the acceptance of Pugh’s
generosity really gave him the right to print something that I
really felt bound to disapprove. It may be that I am needlessly
alarmed over a slip or two of the pen, in vivid descriptions of a
very odd character; and that Pugh really admires his Big Little
H. G. as I thought he did at the beginning of the business. I only
write this to confide to you what is in my mind, which is far from
an easy task; but I think you are one to understand. If the general
impression on the reader’s mind is of the Big Wells and not the
little Wells, I think the doubt I mean would really be met.
Yours always sincerely,
G. K. Chesterton.
Mr. Titterton wrote in a letter a few years ago:
“Edward Macdonald assists G. K. C. in editing the ‘Rag.’ In fact he
does all the technical editing, though G. K. C. controls the strategy.
He is a splendid fellow, very simple and humble, very loyal, very
wise. His editing of “G. K.’s Weekly” is a labor of love. What I know
of G. K. you know already. You must be with him day by day to see
the infinite simplicity--innocence--and friendliness of the man. We
are fortunate to be led by a little child. When we were starting the
Distributist League, I suggested that it should be called ‘The League
of the Little Man.’ And G. K. C. said that, though he liked the title,
he thought that, with him as President, it would be regarded as a great
joke. Probably it would have been. Yet, in fact, he IS the little Man.”
Mr. Hugo C. Riviere has pleasant recollections of having painted
Chesterton’s portrait:
“What excellent talk I heard when he was sitting to me. It was, as I so
often saw him, in his big Inverness cape with that massive head at that
time covered with a big mane of brown hair, his hat on the grass and a
favorite sword stick brandished against the sky. It was just after his
‘Napoleon of Notting Hill’ was written. A little later I was to be made
a very proud man by receiving a copy of ‘The Flying Inn’ and finding
it was dedicated to me. You know, of course, what a fine large style
G. K. C. had himself as a draughtsman with a great and free grasp of
form and character. How often when dining with us I have seen him take
out an old envelope and rapidly cover it with extraordinary sketches.
I have one carefully treasured in my ‘Napoleon of Notting Hill’ an old
envelope covered with every sort and type of hand and figure, some in
medieval dress, and some modern, two or three clever heads of G. B.
Shaw and other clerical and political and imaginary. How delightful
were the illustrations he made for ‘The Biography of Beginners’ that
he and E. C. Bentley did together. I also remember G. K. C., after
writing an article, over his last glass of wine when all of us, and he
too, were talking after dinner, and the boy sent by whatever magazine
it was destined for, waiting in the hall. His favorite, and I think,
characteristic, taste in wine was red Burgundy, but he did not notice
his food much, as he was far too busy thinking and talking.”
Mr. Hermon Ould, the Secretary-General of the P. E. N. Club, met
Chesterton many times. When H. G. Wells found the presidency too
onerous and was threatening to resign, Mr. Ould offered the office to
Chesterton who replied in a characteristic letter, dated August 2, 1935:
Dear Mr. Ould:
You might imagine how miserable I feel in having again delayed a
reply to your kind letters; and being again, after a struggle,
forced back on the same dismal reply. The truth is that I did very
much wish to accept this great distinction you have offered me;
and have been trying to think of various ways in which it might
be managed; but have come back to the conclusion that it really
cannot be managed. The delay was partly due to your own persuasive
powers; for I must admit that I was a good deal shaken by what you
said about the possibilities of using the position for many things
in which I believe. If I may say so, you must be a very good
secretary; and a good secretary is much more important than a good
president. But I am practically certain that I should not be a good
president. I am honestly thinking in the interests of the Club;
and I feel it would be better for me to decline the candidature
than for me to resign rather abruptly soon afterwards, because I
found the responsibilities you describe too incompatible with the
responsibilities I have already. As you truly say, it would be
unworthy to accept what is merely a sinecure; and I really cannot
manage this additional cure of souls....
Yours faithfully,
G. K. Chesterton.
Father Vincent C. Donovan spent a good part of an afternoon with
Chesterton and his wife at Boston’s Chatham Hotel. Many things
were discussed, but Father Donovan recalls that the visitors were
particularly interested in their impressions of America. They found
Boston very English in appearance and atmosphere. Among other things
Chesterton said,
“All the Jews have been hounding me as a result of my ‘New Jerusalem.’
I am not a little hurt and puzzled about their unreasonable attitude
because in that work I have honestly tried to be objective, fair, and
understanding, but they won’t see that.”
Mr. Vincent de Paul Fitzpatrick first met Chesterton at the Belvedere
Hotel, Baltimore, in February, 1921, and recalls that he praised the
persistency of the Irish in struggling for their rights:
“When you hear of an organization in England fighting for liberty, you
must find whether or not that organization contains much Irish blood.
It means all the difference in the world. If you hear in this country
of a strike in the Cycle Valley, it is nothing to get worried over. But
if you hear of a strike in Glasgow, you may expect something exclusive
and exciting. The reason is that a mass of the Irish poor is found in
that city, and the Irish will not submit meekly when any person or any
group tries to trample upon them.
“We see the English people grumbling at the perpetual interference
with their rights and at the various restrictions to which they are
subjected, but they are not organized. There are plenty of old radicals
in England, who, as individuals, are sincere defenders of liberty,
but they are isolated. Take, for example, old Dr. Johnson. With the
Irish Catholics things are different. Their love for liberty seems
to have been created by the Catholic Church--their only corporate
defender of liberty today--is the Catholic Church. Liberty means much
to her--something to be protected. She defends it with her powerful
organization. When we speak of the English Labor party in England
fighting for its rights, we do not mean the English labor party, at
all, we mean the Scotch-Irish Labor party.”
On December 7, 1930, Mr. Fitzpatrick had a long talk with Chesterton
at the St. Moritz, New York City. It was the eve of the feast of the
Immaculate Conception, and Chesterton was thinking of his newly found
Faith,
“It stands to reason that Christmas means more to me now that I am a
Catholic than it did before I was converted to the Faith. But Christmas
has meant much to me ever since my boyhood. I believed in Christmas
before I believed in Christ. In the years immediately before my
conversion I naturally thought much more seriously about Christmas, my
thoughts became more consoling and Christmas was more beautiful as the
passing days drew me nearer to the Church.
“I believed in the spirit of Christmas and I liked Christmas, even when
I was a boy filled with radicalistic tendencies when I really thought
I was atheistic. In those days I wrote a poem to the Blessed Virgin.
I was quite young and the poem, God help me, must have been a rather
wretched thing, though I imitated Swinburne, or at least, tried to
imitate him when I wrote it.
“From my early years I had an affection for the Blessed Virgin and
for the Holy Family. The story of Bethlehem and the story of Nazareth
appealed to me deeply when I was a boy. Long before I joined the
Catholic Church the Immaculate Conception had my allegiance. That
allegiance has been intensified steadily.
“Aside from the teaching of the Church on the subject, a doctrine which
we as Catholics accept, the thought that there was in all the ages
one creature, and that creature a woman, who was preserved from the
slightest taint of sin, won my heart.”
Mother Mary St. Luke recalls that during Chesterton’s visit to Rome
in the late Autumn of 1929, he went several times to the Convent of
the Holy Child, where he lectured one day before a crowded audience
on “Thomas More and Humanism.” At the conclusion, a Father Cuthbert
thanked the speaker and expressed the appreciation of the audience,
remarking on the mental resemblance of More and Chesterton, saying that
he could quite well imagine them sitting together making jokes, some
of them VERY good, and some of them VERY bad.
The Chestertons were also present in the Vatican at the reading of
the Degree for the Beatification of the English Martyrs. At the
conclusion of the ceremony there was the usual rush and confusion
in the neighborhood of the cloak-room next to the sala Clementina.
A group of Holy Child pupils having gathered around Chesterton, and
learned of his dismay at not being able to retrieve his famous cloak
from the “Bussolanti” on account of the milling crowd, plunged into
the melee and brought it back to him in triumph. They also secured a
taxi for them in the Piazza di San Pietro--no small feat on such an
occasion! G. K. expressed his appreciation of their efforts in his own
beautiful “architectural” handwriting, which constitutes one of the
most treasured possessions of the school,
“For the Young Ladies Suffering
Education at the Convent of the
Holy Child.
“To be a Real Prophet once
For you alone did I desire,
Who dragged the Prophet’s Mantle down
And brought the Chariot of Fire.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHESTERTON AT NEW HAVEN
Thomas Caldecot Chubb met Chesterton at the Elizabethan Club in New
Haven almost twenty years ago, and his initial impression still
persists that he was a large man in every way, “Physically, of course,
he was the size of Falstaff, but that is not all I am talking about.
Perhaps the best way of saying what I mean, is to point out that he
had this further in common with the huge knight who is, in a sense,
truly Shakespeare’s most tragic figure: that beneath surface-wit and
brilliance there was something one must label deep and profound.”
Chesterton had been lecturing to a typical Yale audience of the early
’20’s--four or five consciously literary undergraduates who made a
grim duty of never missing such a talk, and about ninety percent of
the membership of the local women’s clubs. The Speaker spilled over,
like a wine keg broached, into the Middle Ages. Among other things, he
spoke, naturally, of their individual craftsmanship. He related how it
appeared even in such matters as meat and drink. He regretted with a
nostalgic gusto those gone days when, as he put it, every monastery,
almost every home had its own brand of liqueur or wine. Then he was
transported from the crowded hall with its murmurs of polite, not
too comprehending, applause, and made to stand in the dark living
room of the white building across the street, with its comfortable
shabby leather chairs, and its stiff painting of an acidulous and
very white-faced Virgin Queen; and as he stood there--wearing a grey
suit (so the picture, though perhaps inaccurately after so long a
time, comes back to Chubb) and holding a cup of tea in one hand, his
eyeglasses in the other--Chubb was introduced to him.
“Mr. Chesterton,” Chubb said, “you have your wish.”
Obviously, he wanted to know what wish and how he had it.
“Thanks to Prohibition, every house is making, if not its own liqueur,
at least its own likker.”
It cannot truthfully be related that he was hugely diverted by Chubb’s
attempt at being facetious. Bathtub gin was, it may be supposed, hardly
just the evocation he would have wished of the spirit of the age of
Abelard and Aquinas. And furthermore, Prohibition was a serious matter,
not a jesting one. So Chubb was properly covered with an appropriate
undergraduate confusion which he tried to hide by holding out a copy
of “The Ballad of the White Horse.” This haltingly--after his previous
boldness--he asked him to autograph and to write a verse from it upon
the fly-leaf.
“There is no need to go into details about his courteous compliance
other than to indicate the thrill it gave me,” recollects Chubb, “by
saying that in that varnished period the ‘Ballad’ seemed to me a high
point in English poetry. It seemed almost incredible I was actually
talking to and facing the man who wrote it. But a confession must be
added to this statement. It was virtually all of Chesterton I knew by
having read. That and ‘Lepanto’ were the only Chestertonian works I had
deigned to cast my eyes upon. Of course, I knew the names of others.
But that anyone who could write this immortal stuff should waste his
time turning out such poor trash as a series of fluent novels, certain
aggravating essays, a contradicting sort of history of England,
and--horror of horrors--the Father Brown ‘detective’ stories, was, in a
ghastly way, incredible. It was pot-boiling. It was prostituting one’s
genius. It was selling out to Mammon and the Philistines. And that
was, of course, the sin against the Holy Ghost.
“It is now necessary to reverse that stand--though here perhaps
youth’s headlong egotism has merely been replaced by incipient middle
age’s complacent one. For somehow the swinging lines which relate
Alfred’s adventures seem a little bouncy now. They are dated, just
as a brass radiator and acetylene lamps would date even a T-model
Ford. Even the young don’t turn to them, being engaged in writing not
quite grammatical verses to Communism and proletarian poetry which no
member of the proletariat can make head or tail of. And ‘Lepanto,’
which--with ‘Ivry’ and what Tennyson has to say about the Revenge--is
among the most stirring short narrative poetry of the language, does
not set the pulses beating quite as rapidly in 1939 as it did in
1922. But the entertainment and wisdom of ‘The Flying Inn,’ ‘The Man
Who Was Thursday,’ and ‘The Napoleon of Notting Hill,’ and the cool,
paradoxical truths--well, anyway, from time to time they are true--of
the essays, of the history, of the writing on Browning, Thackeray
and Dickens, of the controversies with that irritating but likeable
friend-adversary G. B. S., still have their power to stimulate. And
personally I now believe that the best of Chesterton can be found, if
you delve for it, in the Father Brown stories; that out of them can be
mined by an attentive prospector the purest Chestertonian gold.
“All of which, if true, places the man for us. A stimulating writer, a
delightful writer, on certain occasions even an important writer, but
was he quite a great one? With Kipling, Wells, Shaw, Arnold Bennett
and perhaps half a dozen others with whom I will not rashly provoke
controversy by naming, he will be compulsory reading for every student
of the era. It is less certain that the general public will turn to him
after a hundred or even after fifty years.
“Yet he has given a lot, and in no way more than by his provocative way
of seeing and saying things. He loves Meredith and he hates Hardy, yet
he nails truth to the wall by saying that the man of the two who had
a healthy point of view had the perverse and crabbed style, whereas
the one with the perverse and crabbed point of view had the healthy
and manly style. He stated pungently and accurately--writing of ‘The
Book of Snobs’--that ‘aristocracy does not have snobs any more than
democracy does.’ Thackeray might have learned something from this.
He had the insight to realize that Browning was among the finest
love poets of the world though quite to the contrary runs the general
opinion. (A similar, though not the same, revolutionary statement
might be made of our own E. A. Robinson, substituting perhaps emotion
for love.) He considered--a half truth--that the whole of present day
England was the remains of Rome; and--a whole truth--that Henry VIII
was as unlucky in his wives as they were in him. Which statements,
plucked very haphazardly from out of his writings, ought to indicate
what I mean.”
Another who heard him at Yale was Mr. Harold Chapman Bailey:
“Chesterton’s lecture, as I recall it, was given in the Sprague
Memorial Hall, which is part of the Yale Music School. The entire
subject matter of the Chesterton address has escaped me, but in the
question period afterward the first two or three questions were so
puerile that despite my youth I was emboldened to rise with this query:
‘Will you not tell me something about William Cobbett?’
“I recall that at first Mr. Chesterton did not understand my question,
but when I repeated it, he seemed greatly pleased to find that in
far away America there was some interest in Cobbett. Accordingly he
spent at least five minutes explaining to us who William Cobbett was,
what he stood for, and how in a measure Cobbett was his own spiritual
ancestor. He concluded by remarking that the Yale University Press
would do well to get out a new edition of Cobbett’s works. I have often
wondered whether this query of mine played any part in stimulating him
later on to write a volume on Cobbett.”
Major James B. Pond also met G. K. C. at New Haven, and had the
privilege of being present when Chesterton and ‘A. E.’ (George Russell)
met at the William Lyon Phelps’ house in New Haven. It was the first
time these two men ever met. Russell hardly ever went out of Ireland
and these two famous men had to come to New Haven to get personally
acquainted. It happened they were both lecturing the same day.
CHAPTER NINE
AT NOTRE DAME.
Chesterton was guest lecturer at Notre Dame University for the first
semester of the 1930–1 school year, delivering eighteen lectures on
English history, and the same number on the Victorian age of English
literature.
Visiting Beaconsfield a few years ago, Father John F. O’Hara, President
of the University, told Chesterton that he had received “numerous
letters from former students who were just beginning to appreciate the
lectures he had given them. Chesterton was that way. One was forced
to remember his striking sentences, and the underlying truth forced
itself on the mind of the undergraduate when greater experience made
understanding possible.”
As Chesterton walked out on the stage and faced his first Notre Dame
audience, he leaned upon the lectern and said, “Until quite recently, I
was not at all certain that I would be able to be here tonight. Had I
not come, you would now be gazing upon a great yawning void instead of
myself.”
This bit of humor and the manner in which it was expressed gave
Father Charles Morton the feeling that here was a man of rare
humility and of the simplicity which always accompanies genuine
culture. As the lecture series progressed, two other qualities became
prominent,--brilliance of mind and a profound Catholic faith. No matter
what the subject of his lecture was, whether in the field of literature
or of history, he invariably found a way at the end to relate all he
had said to some profound religious truth. That people should praise
him as a learned man was a source of genuine embarrassment to him. It
amused him to be addressed as “professor,” and he invariably referred
to himself as a “mere journalist.”
Father Patrick J. Carroll looked upon Chesterton, master of antithesis
“as himself the antithesis. A large lumbering hulk of a man, you would
expect from him a deep, thundering speech. You are mistaken: his
language is swift, sudden, arresting. Epigram follows epigram, until
you get tired of brilliance, and begin to wonder if this big man is
not more concerned with his sword play than with the serious business
of defending truth against truth’s enemies. That is how you sometimes
think: but, of course, your thinking is wrong.”
Prof. Norbert Engels of the College of Arts and Sciences recalls that
“at every lecture knowledge poured forth. He never used a paper,
a note, or a reference of any kind. He would quote extremely long
passages of poetry or prose with utmost ease. I did not tire of his use
of paradox as he used it with such consummate art. Those are inadequate
judges of his genius who pronounce upon him from his writings only. To
know Chesterton fully, besides his works, one should have heard him
lecture, in order to catch the spirit of the man.”
All the breath and flavor of ages of Christian culture came with
Chesterton in the opinion of Father Charles M. Carey, “he entered
our campus like some great Catholic warrior stepping down from the
centuries that date back to a time when England was really ‘Merrie
England.’ Huge in girth and mind and heart, he was the embodiment of
all that was good in that splendid Catholic heritage.
“As his vast physical bulk lumbered from the wings to the rostrum,
then slouched down in his chair, he threw a ruddy scowl across the
rows of young University men before him, and a great feeling of awe
swallowed up the idle chatter. There was not a single heart in that
young Catholic audience that did not somehow experience the presence
of greatness in our midst. To the man who knew little of the great
apologist, it may have been a moment of confused terror and curiosity.
To anyone who had read but a paragraph from his pen, it was the moment
which finds one helplessly silent in the presence of a superior being.
“‘So,’ I thought to myself, as Chesterton thundered and swayed slightly
to his place, his bushy hair in its own convenient parting and his
wrinkled and baggy clothing left to look after itself with a pronounced
abandon, ‘can this be the man that is so mentally nimble, so sure
footed in thought, so precise in diction, so accurate in his thrusts,
so merciless in heaping wrath on adversaries, and so loud in his
frequent laughter at the absurdity of those who oppose his Christian
fighting?’”
Once he began to speak, Chesterton’s eyes lit up with a joy born of
that common bond that is the Catholic faith, thus destroying all
barriers of racial differences because, as he said, “Under the portals
of our Lady’s Shrine, all men are at home.” That was the spirit that
characterized his stay at Notre Dame. To his young listeners he was
an inspiration. Every word that he uttered had a clear, certain and
convincing ring in it that made for conviction. He was thoroughly
Catholic. For him life was full of faith and beauty and romance. Every
word that he uttered had a freshness and wonder about it. His adroit
phraseology, his accent and his inexhaustible flow of genuine humor
quickened his youthful audience to frequent bursts of applause and
measured gaiety.
Chesterton had the honorary degree of Doctor of Law conferred upon
him Wednesday afternoon, November 5, 1930, in Washington Hall. Many
honorary degrees had been conferred by Notre Dame, but this was the
first time in the history of the University that a special convocation
of the Faculty had been called to participate in the conferring of a
degree.
At four-thirty the academic procession left the University parlors and
made its way to Washington Hall where members of the Senior Class and
the guests were assembled. After an introductory musical program had
been given by the student orchestra and Glee Club, Father J. Leonard
Carrice, Director of Studies, announced the conferring of the degree,
“The University of Notre Dame, in this special convocation of the
Faculty, confers the degree of Doctor of Law, =honoris causa=, on a
man of letters recognized as the ablest and most influential in the
English-speaking world of today, a defender of the Christian tradition,
whose keen mind, right heart, and versatile literary genius have been
valiantly devoted to eternal truth, goodness and beauty, in literature,
and in life--Gilbert Keith Chesterton, of London, England.”
After receiving the Degree from Notre Dame’s President, the Rev.
Charles L. O’Donnell, Doctor Chesterton replied,
“I only wish it were possible for me to say, as you have suggested,
something of what is in my heart in the way of gratitude. Gratitude is
what I feel most deeply at present, and it is the irony of human fate
that it is perhaps the only thing that cannot be expressed. If I said
all the things which are usually said on these occasions, I should only
be expressing my feelings, for in my case, they happen to be perfectly
true. It is usual to say that one is not worthy of such an honor, and
the vividness of my own unworthiness is so acute in my own mind that
I find it almost impossible to express it and to thank you for the
far too generous things which have been said. I have given a series
of lectures on a subject on which a number of you are much better
acquainted than I. If I happen to say something about the history of
the Victorian age, the history which I am supposed to talk about, or
if I happen to say something about the Victorian age in literature,
I am all too painfully reminded that you have learned history and
have studied literature. If I mention the Province of Canada, I am
reminded that you have studied geography. Therefore I am afraid that I
am not only unworthy but almost in a false position before you. I am
a journalist, and the one thing I can claim is that I have endeavored
to show that it is possible to be an honest journalist. Therefore, a
great academic distinction of this kind gives me a very strong sense of
gratitude. I can only thank you from the bottom of my heart, not only
for this favor extended to me, but also for the very great patience
with which you have listened to my lectures.
“There is always a bond between us that would make you tolerant of me,
I know. I have only once before gone through a ceremony of this kind
and that was at the highly Protestant University of Edinburgh, where I
found that part of the ceremony consisted of being lightly touched on
the head with the cap of John Knox. I was very much relieved to find
that it was not part of the ceremony on the present occasion that I
should, let us say, wear the hat of Senator Heflin! I remember that,
when I came to America before, about nine years ago, when I was not a
catholic, and when I had hardly realized that there were Catholics in
America, my first sensation in this country was one of terror. I recall
the first landing and that great hotel in New York, the Biltmore, the
name of which held for me such terrifying possibilities. (Surely there
would not be =more= of it!) It all seemed alien, although I quickly
discovered what kind and generous people the Americans are. I did not
feel at all like that when I came to America for the second time.
If you want to know why I felt different, the reason is in the name
of your University. That name was quite sufficient as far as I was
concerned. It would not have mattered if it had been in the mountains
of the moon. Wherever She has erected Her pillars, all men are at home,
and I knew that I should not find strangers. And, if any of you who are
young should go to other countries, you will find that what I have said
is true.”
Prof. Daniel O’Grady was invited to a social evening with Chesterton
at Notre Dame’s Sorin Hall ... among those present were the host
Charles Philips, Paul Fenlon, Pat Manion, John Frederick, Lee Flateley,
John Connolly, Steve Roney, Rufus Rauch ... all either professors or
students. The affair started at nine in the evening and lasted until
almost three in the morning.
When Manion asked whether liquor in England produced immorality,
G. K. C. replied,
“Undoubtedly it does in certain London districts. When I stayed at the
Royal York in Toronto on my way down to Notre Dame I noticed something
oligarchical about the Ontario system inasmuch as there was a dance on
and those who could afford a room left the ballroom on occasion and
went upstairs for a nip displaying visible evidences thereof as one met
them in the hall. Moreover in Ontario a permit was necessary whereas in
Catholic Quebec this Protestant condition did not prevail.
“I live near Oxford, and I often visit friends there. In Cambridge too
I know and admire many men, such as the poet A. E. Housman, and the
historians George M. Trevelyan and Holland Rose, the great Napoleonic
authority. Speaking of the latter place you know the old yarn about the
Italian doctor on his way to Cambridge to debate some don there. On
stopping to inquire directions of some pedestrians he was answered in
Greek verse by Cambridge students disguised as workmen, whereupon he
ordered the coachman to turn around and go back because said he, if the
laborers are so learned, what must the dons be?...”
When O’Grady said he had heard that the difference between the two
schools was that an Oxford man went around as though he owned the
place, while a Cambridge man acted as though he didn’t give a damn who
did, Chesterton retorted,
“And both about equally obnoxious!”
When the discussion turned to some well known Englishmen, Chesterton
said,
“If my description of Lord Beaverbrook was based on his journalistic
methods I would have to call him a guttersnipe. I feel that Bertrand
Russell is a disgrace to English literature, not only on account of his
writings, but also because of his way of life.”
“Masefield’s a fine fellow and a good writer,” said Chesterton in reply
to another question, “but Ramsay MacDonald had to choose Masefield
as Poet Laureate, there being no other poet so sympathetic to Labor.
However, Yeats was by far our best poet. Yet hardly ever has the best
poet been made laureate. There is too much politics in the appointment,
just as is the case with the appointment of the Anglican bishops. One
need only consider Barnes of Birmingham. The idea of calling York’s
archbishop ‘by divine permission’ and Canterbury’s ‘by divine consent,’
has always seemed to me rather far-fetched.”
When reference was made to Rebecca West’s resigning from the “Bookman”
because the editorial policy favored the New Humanists, Chesterton
remarked,
“How extremely foolish that is--as though that affected your
contributions!”
Asked about Lord Beaverbrook who had but recently died, Chesterton
reflected,
“Birkenhead has always been a puzzle to me because he was cynical and
worldly ambitious, and yet, it must be confessed, overfond of his
liquor. One expects such a weakness only from a poet or one who has the
poetical imagination.”
A comparison being made between certain types of Russian and English
characters, Chesterton went on to say,
“The Russians in their writings are always brooding over fate or some
silly thing. For the most part the English gentry are fine, sensible
fellows, although, of course, there are some bounders amongst them. You
will now find not a few Catholics among them, although for many years
the only Catholics were either English aristocrats or Irish paupers.”
Asked if he found the Americans all very mad in the pursuit of money,
he shook his head with a smile,
“Quite the contrary, I find the Americans less worshipful of money
than my fellow English. However, I do prefer even our English
gentry although mad about money, to some of your vulgar and blatant
millionaires.”
During a discussion of the Church and State, Chesterton remarked,
“I read the other day of a western magistrate who sentenced a woman to
go to Church for the next fifty Sundays. I wondered at the time whether
that was consistent with the American doctrine of the separation of
Church and State. Even though we have a state church in England, I do
not think that an English judge would have given such a sentence.”
In autographing a book just before the party broke up, Chesterton threw
a lot of ink on the floor, but merely remarked,
“I’m always cluttering up people’s carpets.”
His hostess rather prim and proper, kept shoving ash-trays at him which
he completely ignored and continued dropping ashes from his cigarettes
all over the floor. But no one minded this little thoughtlessness of
genius.
As he put on his Inverness cape and black sombrero-like hat he shouted
out in merry tones,
“If anyone ever tries to tell me Catholicism is inconsistent with fun
and play, I’ll say did you ever hear of the University of Notre Dame?”
Before Chesterton left the University, Mr. William L. Piedmont had a
pleasant chat with him. Asked what he thought of our great American
sports, G. K. C. answered,
“I witnessed the Notre Dame-Navy game, and was much impressed by the
popularity that your game of football enjoys. In my youth I played
English football and even rounders which might be described as an
English equivalent of baseball.”
“I very gravely doubt if the nations are becoming closer and closer
together,” declared Chesterton when the conversation touched the
League of Nations. “Quite the contrary, I feel the various countries
are becoming more national. An example would be in the literary fact
that in my youth Thoreau, Hawthorne, Mark Twain and the rest were as
widely known and read in Europe as in America, while today the strange
and awful stuff of American writers is unknown abroad with very few
exceptions. I attribute this to the fact that America has become so
different and in Europe the news hasn’t gotten through yet as to what
it’s all about in America.”
On being asked if he thought the world (and especially, the United
States) possessed any great thinkers, he replied humorously,
“If there are any people in the world today who do think, witness my
‘Age of Unreason,’ I feel America can certainly claim some of them.”
After confessing that he read very few novels, but mentioning the works
of Sheila Kaye-Smith with approbation, he went on to say,
“But I consider Rebecca West the most interesting woman writer, if
for no other reason than because she is gradually becoming more
respectable. I suppose (with a characteristic chuckle) that her
marrying a banker is not really the cause of respectability, even
though marrying a banker may be a sort of worldly parallel to being
confirmed in grace!”
Of the winner of the Nobel prize for literature, he said,
“On the whole, I think Sinclair Lewis is the scourge of God--a calamity
in some respects like the Great Fire of London. I do not believe that
Mr. Lewis has enough sympathy with the Middle West people of whom he
writes, nor has he the right slant on the people of Main Street--as I
have observed them during my sojourn in America. I think it about time
somebody made fun of the greasy optimism prevalent in recent novels.
Lewis has a good deal of righteous indignation, but what he lacks is
the positive moral idea which should be found in the representative
literature of every nation. I like Lewis when he is simply humorous
like in “The Man Who Knew Coolidge,” but in general the bestowal of the
prize is like giving a medal to a great scavenger.”
When he arrived in Washington, D. C. to lecture at Trinity College,
Chesterton gave Miss Syd Walsh an interesting and picturesque
description of Notre Dame,
“I think the faculty and students awfully jolly people and the campus
itself a bit of medievalism with its constant stream of youths in
bright colors pouring in and out of old stone buildings with gilded
domes. As long as I live I will never forget their way of letting off
fireworks before a big game and generally playing the goat in a cheery
way.”
[Illustration: FACSIMILE WRITING
of
MR. AND MRS. G. K. CHESTERTON]
CHAPTER TEN
CHESTERTON AND AMERICAN AUTHORS.
Recently there appeared a statement to the effect that although
Chesterton had considerable popularity with the average American
reader, our authors cared but little for the man and his work. Doubting
such a sweeping statement, I wrote to various men of letters who would
serve as a good cross-section of American literature, and their replies
proved unusually illuminating.
“Of course you may put me down as an admirer of Chesterton,” declares
Channing Pollock, “though I recall surprisingly little of his work.
I have read so much that, after fifty-six years, I begin to find
recollections blurred. My admiration of Chesterton is founded on my
impression of the man--of what he was and stood for; of his sincerity,
courage, forthrightness and general altruism.”
“As a boy of ten,” records Thomas O. Mabbott, “I read regularly copies
of the ‘London Illustrated News’ to which G. K. C. was a regular
contributor. I am one of those people who, while not exactly a
prodigy, developed very early and think very much more as I did when
sixteen than most people seem to do. I often boast how little most
writers influence my own thought but Chesterton is one of the few who
did! I read much of his work as a very young man, and believe he is one
of the very few authors who impressed me =profoundly=. I saw ‘Magic’
when it was given in New York during the war--a mark of devotion,
surely, since I rarely went to a serious play. Incidentally I thought
it =very= effective as an acted play.”
Clement Wood first read “Heretics” and then “Orthodoxy,” and
immediately obtained the impression that the author was “one of the
world’s most alert and persuasively brilliant minds. He made the
persons treated of real and significant to me for the first time.
Thereafter I read most of his work. His novels are absolutely unique,
I wouldn’t be without one, and of all, the ‘Napoleon of Notting Hill’
is the most precious--the glorious effort to revive medievalism
today (which I am 100% against intellectually) won me forever. His
Father Brown stories, in spite of the ever-present propaganda for
Catholicism--which again I am against, but I believe that if religion
persists, it will either be Roman Catholic or the Quaker non-Christian
(Religious Society of Friends) non-evangelical faith--I regard as by
all odds the greatest detective stories ever written. Poe and Doyle are
forerunners, and then G. K. C. whose every word is a work of art. I
have memorized the plots of nearly all and the wording of many of his
memorable openings. His ‘Peacock Trees,’ ‘Club of Queen Trades,’ rank
as highly.
“The play ‘Magic’ is immortal and weighs more to me than all Shaw!”
“You may certainly enroll me as one of his admirers,” affirms Donald
Ogden Stewart. “Although I do not recall the name of the first book of
his which I read, I do remember, however, that it was while I was in
my senior year at Yale, and that it had such an influence on me that I
immediately proceeded to read every one of his books that I could lay
my hands on.”
Henry Hazlitt first encountered Chesterton’s writings in 1916 and “was
quickly carried away by his stylistic brilliance. My admiration, I must
confess, was not sustained at its original level, but it most certainly
never deserted me. I never met him personally, but I heard him debate
with Clarence Darrow, and was impressed by his immense superiority
over his antagonist, and by his charm as a man.”
William Thomas Walsh first heard about G. K. C. when he was a student
at Yale in 1909: “I think it was Professor Chauncey B. Tinker who
recommended him in class that year, and I seem to remember that William
Lyon Phelps was also a Chesterton enthusiast at that early period. The
book that helped and influenced me most was ‘The Everlasting Man.’ I
liked it so well that I bought three copies, intending to lend them
to as many people as possible, for I thought the whole world should
drink at that fountain of wisdom. I soon discovered, however, that
some people loved the book and others hated it just as fervently. This
was to be expected, perhaps, about anything so profoundly Christian in
its perceptions. In fact, I began to entertain an almost superstitious
notion that the book had a practical value apart from literary
considerations, in what St. Ignatius, following St. John, called the
Discernment of Spirits. The various agnostics and pagans to whom I lent
the book usually kept it a long while, and finally returned it saying
apologetically that they had never found time to read it, though I knew
that every one of them had read several other books in the interim.
Finally the three volumes disappeared completely from my life. It
was partly my fault, for I have a bad habit of lending books, and
forgetting to whom: and as the number of people who have to be reminded
to return books is apparently very large, I have lost the best part
of my library in consequence: for it is usually the book that one is
enthusiastic about that one lends. But I can’t help thinking the Devil
must have had a particular grudge against so true and so powerful a
book, and has continued to hide all three of my volumes on the most
obscure shelves of as many sons of Belial. Still, as good comes out
of evil in the long run, it may be that the sons of these benighted
individuals may inadvertently come upon them on rainy days, and in
their innocence read and be enlightened.
“In my biography of Philip the Second, I have had to differ with
Chesterton’s interpretations of that most misunderstood gentleman. But
when G. K. wrote his glorious ‘Lepanto,’ he was still partly deceived
by the tradition that had so long dominated English letters, so far as
Spain was concerned. It is the only mistake of importance I have ever
noted in the work of that phenomenal man.”
Hamlin Garland met him at the Savage Club in London, and several times
in America: “As a matter of fact, I introduced him when he made his
first address in New York City. I enjoyed his mystery stories much
better than some of his more pretentious work. From my point of view he
worked the paradoxes altogether too hard. He was a very singular and
interesting character.”
Waldo Frank remembers that when he was “in college and out of it,
the essays of G. K. C. stimulated me, indeed. His critique of modern
society, his destruction of its complacencies, his suggestive
references to other values now absent, meant a good deal to me.”
Myles Connolly feels that Chesterton “will not, try as I will, come
under the head of remembrance. He seems vividly contemporary, vitally
alive. It’s a worn-out form of tribute, I know, but there’s none
greater and I will say it: he lives. The stuff of immortality was so
strong in him that beside his memory as the world calls it, it is we
who are dead.
“Napoleon said that no man became a writer unless he were a defeatist.
When life was too tall and strong for a man, he quit, and in his pen
he found corroboration and consolation. That is not, we are aware,
altogether so. Although it is true most men who write are running away.
But with Chesterton writing was not running away; it was running
to--running to reality, to truth. Writing was life with him: it was
his breathing, his talk, his laughter, his self. It might be said that
those who don’t like Chesterton don’t like the truth. It might ever
more accurately be said that those who don’t like Chesterton, don’t
like life. That superabundance of his, that hugeness of his, is too
much for them. They crawl; he dances (albeit like the mountains of
Scripture). They pick-peck; he waves that tremendous sword. They count
those corroded little pennies; he empties that fabulous purse of his
on the world. He was an extravagant man; extravagant of his riches,
his light, his life. It is this shining extravagance that blinds the
crawlers and pick-peckers and misers. It is a glory too much for them.
A few words of ‘Thoreau’ are, I think, to the point. ‘I fear,’ writes
the Concord ascetic, ‘lest my expression may not be =extra-vagrant=
enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily
experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been
convinced ... I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man
in a waking moment to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced
I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true
expression. Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he
should speak extravagantly any more forever?’
“To Chesterton such words as ‘tremendous’ and ‘splendid’ and ‘enormous’
and ‘shattering’ were of common use. (In fact, it was he who made such
words popular.) These words came naturally to him because (and he would
be the last to admit it) he himself lived these words; such words only
could express his vitality and significance. He was a giant. There is
no other way of saying it. Except, perhaps, to say he still is.”
James Branch Cabell “enjoyed all the work of Chesterton’s early and
middle period. I admit that of his publications during, let us say
vaguely, more recent years, I prefer to say nothing, out of loyalty
to a person that has given me a vast amount of pleasure. I write this
after verifying the fact that his earlier books when I re-read them,
can still do this.”
“Indeed I am a warm admirer of Chesterton,” affirms Rabbi Stephen S.
Wise. “Apart from his delightful wit and his genius in many directions,
he was a great religionist. He as a Catholic, I as a Jew, could see eye
to eye with each other, and he might have added, ‘particularly seeing
that you are cross-eyed;’ but I deeply respected him. When Hitlerism
came, he was one of the first to speak out with all the directness and
frankness of a great and unabashed spirit.”
Dr. Alexis Carrel well remembers that “Heretics” was the first
Chesterton book that he read almost a quarter of a century ago,
“The extreme clarity and brilliance of his style impressed me greatly.
The train of his thought appeared to me as strong, flexible, and
shining as a steel blade, and as merciless.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN[B]
THE AUTHOR VISITS TOP MEADOW
In a delightful villa, called Top Meadow, in Beaconsfield, a small
town of Buckinghamshire, about forty minutes on the train from London,
lives, and has lived for some ten years, Gilbert Keith Chesterton with
his charming wife. Chesterton, a huge man, possesses the frankness and
enthusiasm of a boy, with unkept curly blond hair, blue eyes, shaggy
reddish brown moustache, an exceedingly pleasant and attractive smile,
wearing clothes in a somewhat careless and negligent manner. Although
clear and resonant, his voice is not as powerful as one would be led
to expect for a man of his size. He possesses the little mannerism of
twirling the ends of his moustache every now and then. He would make
a joke with true Twainian seriousness upon his face, but unlike the
great American such feigned seriousness becomes too much for him, and
he bursts out in peals of Gargantuan laughter that often renders him
speechless for a few seconds. At other times the idea of something
funny will cause him to laugh most heartily before he has had a chance
to express it in words.
[B] This entire chapter was read, corrected, and approved in
its present shape, by Chesterton himself a short time
before his death.
In a little hallway, Chesterton introduced me to his wife, and then led
the way into the living room, a tremendous chamber fully a hundred feet
long, low-ceilinged and surrounded on all sides by shelves bulging and
overflowing with books of every description, a massive fire-place built
of large stones that must have come from the bed of a nearby brook, and
a number of what proved to be exceedingly comfortable chairs grouped
around the empty fire-place; for it was midsummer.
As we sat down before the fire-place, Chesterton said he was vastly
amused over a delegation from America that had called on him the day
before.
“They were making a tour of Europe for the express purpose of
unearthing everything they could about Browning. They called on me
because I have once written a book on the poet. It was a grave mistake
on their part to think that because a man has written a book on a
particular subject in the dim and distant past, he therefore knows
everything about that subject. At the time of writing the book, I
probably was a little more up on Robert Browning than the average
person, but all my superior knowledge has slipped from me long ago.”
The question of modern youth came up for discussion.
“Young people today have the idea that old timers are landmarks. I
hope I do not fill as much space as Saint Paul’s, but at least I am a
Victorian ruin dating from the year 1874. The last time I was in New
York I noticed that the landscape was always changing. When a baby is
born he just has time to look at the skyscrapers a week or so before
they are pulled down. Pulling down New York seems to be the local
industry. A baby goes out in his perambulator and his home is pulled
down before he gets back.”
“What do you think of the young people today, Mr. Chesterton?”
“Well,” he replied, “their chief trouble is they don’t want to admit
that old people really do know the modern movement because we are
able to compare it with movements of the past. But the young people
know nothing else but the present. The result is that they do not
give modern conditions much thought. For instance, if we had moving
sidewalks today, the young people would take it for granted, the old
ones alone could compare them with the stationary sidewalks.”
“Do you think that much change has taken place in the last fifty
years,” I asked.
“We cannot grasp the tremendous change that has taken place since 1874,
my birth year. Your country used not to pay much attention to culture.
When Matthew Arnold began his lecture series in America, he was worried
about what the American papers would say of him for his criticism
of certain phases of American culture which he had handled rather
severely, but was relieved to find that the papers had large headlines
reading,
“‘Matthew Arnold has side whiskers.’ But today you have a very high
regard for culture in your country.”
“What literary people did you meet in America, Mr. Chesterton?”
“Among others I met Robert Cortes Holliday, and Sinclair Lewis,” he
replied. “I found Lewis a pleasant fellow. He was anxious to learn
about the conditions in England. That man, I think, has considerable
genius. I met ‘A. E.’ George Russell, also when I was at Yale. He was
completely wrapped up in giving his lectures on agriculture to you
Americans.”
“What does he think of our country?”
“He has a semi-humorous, rather critical, attitude towards you.
He won’t write anything much in praise or anything particularly
hostile.”[C]
[C] This prophesy of Chesterton’s proved to be correct.
“What American cities especially appealed to you?”
“Baltimore I found exceedingly charming,” answered Chesterton. “There
is a quaint atmosphere about the place that is hard to describe. Saint
Louis I also liked, a most pleasant cultured city.”
“I once heard you lecture in Saint Louis, Mr. Chesterton,” I remarked,
“and I agree with what you said about the underdog:
“‘When the very poor man gets angry and ‘bites,’ everyone, even the
social workers, treat him as though he were a mad dog. Has he not
the right to get deliberately angry, the same as anybody else? Once
I debated with Clarence Darrow, and when I talked to him after the
lecture, he seemed to have sympathy for the poor man, the underdog,
who was goaded on to do things, by saying that he was mad. Why cannot
people give the underdog credit for biting when he wants to, instead of
contending that he is just the same as a mad dog on a rampage?’”
When Galsworthy became the topic of conversation, Chesterton remarked,
“Galsworthy always reminds me of the solicitor of an old English
family. I cannot altogether feel that he reflects modern England. He
lays too much stress upon a college education. He believes that a man
not blessed with a college education might at any time murder his
mother. Galsworthy also lacks the sweet balance of humor, only a rather
limited amount of humor breathes forth from his works. Like Darrow he,
too, holds to the belief that the underdog is always mad if he causes
the slightest trouble.
“Again Galsworthy never seems to write with set purpose, while I am one
of those people who believe that you’ve got to be dominated by your
moral slant. I’m no ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ man. I am quite incapable of
talking or writing about Dutch gardens or the game of chess, but if
I did, I have no doubt that what I say or write about them would be
colored by my view of the cosmos.”
When the question of pessimism came up, I mentioned that the week
before I had had the pleasure of dining with A. E. Housman at
Cambridge[D] who facetiously told me that he was often compared to
Hardy because both their names began with an “H”.
[D] See “An Evening with A. E. Housman,” by Cyril Clemens, 1937.
“That is all the basis critics often have for forming comparisons,”
replied Chesterton with a smile, “but in this case there is a measure
of truth in the comparison. Both undoubtedly have a certain amount of
pessimism. Poet Housman’s, however, has the tang of the fresh air about
it, whereas Hardy’s seems somewhat unpleasant.”
And to illustrate his point, Chesterton quoted from “A Shropshire Lad,”
“Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.”
A little later we went to the small dining room which was a few steps
higher than, and was separated by a heavy silk curtain from, the living
room. At a massive oaken table we sat down to a delicious tea.
When I asked Mrs. Chesterton what was the national dish of England, she
promptly replied,
“Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, undoubtedly.”
“Fried eggs and bacon is my favorite dish,” spoke up Chesterton.
I then asked the author what would be his choice if he had to go on a
desert island and could take but one book along.
“It would depend upon the circumstances,” he replied. “If I were a
politician who wanted to impress his constituents, I would take Plato
or Aristotle. But the real test would be with people who had no chance
to show off before their friends or their constituents. In that case
I feel certain that everyone would take Thomas’ ‘Guide to Practical
Shipbuilding’ so that they could get away from the island as quickly as
possible. And then if they should be allowed to take a second book it
would be the most exciting detective story within reach. But if I could
only take one book to a desert isle and was not in a particular hurry
to get off, I would without the slightest hesitation put ‘Pickwick
Papers’ in my handbag.”
The talk switched to the Russian situation. Chesterton thinks that
Lenin was of the mad Russian type, just such a type as Tolstoy,
“But Trotsky is at once both more commercial and cunning; he is the
typical Russian or German Jew.”
The Chestertons own a pert little Scotch terrier named Quoodle. “I
named him Quoodle,” explained Chesterton, “after the hero of one of my
early, but alas forgotten, novels, in the hope that unwary visitors
like you would ask about the origin of the name and I would have a good
excuse to talk about my novel! But when only the family is present we
shorten the name to Quo: a handy name and one that can be yelled to the
top of the lungs.”
Among the other delectable viands that Mrs. Chesterton’s bounty
provided were some cakes made out of the white of eggs, that caused me
to say,
“These cakes put me in mind of some period of English Literature.”
“They remind me, rather,” responded Chesterton with a hearty laugh, “of
icebergs and I wish that I was sitting on a large one just now. (It was
an extremely hot August afternoon.) But if we must compare them to some
period of English literature they remind me of the rococo period, the
age of Horace Walpole, in particular of some of the decorations of his
home ‘Strawberry Hill’.”
Tea over, Chesterton suggested going to see his garden. After putting
on an enormous sombrero, and taking in his hand something like a small
axe, but which proved to be a walking stick which his Polish friend,
Roman Dyboski, had given him, he led the way through a French window
out into a tidy little garden. We sat on camp chairs in a pleasant
spot. Chesterton’s one seemed somewhat frail, shaking a little, and to
make matters worse, the cat Stanley Baldwin came along and fell sound
asleep right under his master’s chair! If anything had happened to the
chair, Baldwin would have awakened in cat heaven!
The conversation turned on the rather whimsical subject of chairs.
“H. G. Wells in one of his books,” remarked Chesterton, “has written
several pages on the subject of chairs. Some non-materialists might
very well contend there is no such a thing as a chair. They would argue
that since there are all kinds and varieties of chairs, when you use
the word ‘chair’ you cannot have any particular one in mind: therefore
the word is only abstract and hence has no equivalent in actuality!”
When I wondered if anything had ever been written on the subject of
shoes, Chesterton answered that his friend Hilaire Belloc had done an
exceedingly entertaining essay on the subject, “Belloc makes the point
that the kind of shoes a man wears and how he keeps them, is a better
indication of his character, than any other piece of apparel.”
Chesterton told of a literary club which had lately given a fancy
dressed ball for its members, and that he went as Doctor Samuel
Johnson. When I asked who Mrs. Chesterton went as, he replied with a
merry twinkle in his eye,
“My wife went dressed as one of the characters in a novel that I am
going to write in the near future! You see that I devise ways and means
to advertise both my old novels and my new ones!”
The subject of Rome and Mussolini came up, and when I expressed
admiration for “The Resurrection of Rome,” he snapped,
“I think it was a pretty bad book.”
At my disagreement, a look of mild surprise appeared on Chesterton’s
face,
“Well,” explained he, “it was written just after a stay in Rome, and I
think that I made the fatal mistake of reading the book too soon after
it was written. That should never be done by any author. The longer
after the writing that I wait to read one of my books, the better it
seems.”
When I mentioned that Mussolini had told me how much he had enjoyed
reading “The Man Who Was Thursday,” and had found it exceedingly funny,
Chesterton answered,
“Does anyone find my books funny? It pleases me to hear that, for at
times I fear that my humorous works are taken seriously and my serious
ones humorously. I also had an audience with Mussolini. He did not
act in a high and mighty manner at all, but showed a genuine interest
in England and asked me numerous questions about the country. He was
indeed a jolly card.”
“In what language did you carry on your conversation,” I asked.
“We spoke in French,” replied Chesterton, “and when leaving I said, ‘I
hope you excused my poor French, Your Excellency.’ To which Mussolini
answered, ‘That’s all right; you speak French about as well as I speak
English’.”
After a moment’s pause Chesterton reflected, “I don’t suppose that was
much of a compliment for my French, because at that time Mussolini knew
practically no English.”
“When do you do most of your writing, Mr. Chesterton?”
“Whenever I get a chance, I do not care much for the typewriter and I
find pen or pencil much too tedious, for I am a rather slow writer. At
present I do a considerable amount of dictating. I can compose just as
readily this way.”
One of the last questions I asked my host was his opinion of Mark Twain,
“I have always admired the genius of Mark Twain which may truly
be called gigantic. Mark Twain dealt so much with the gigantic
exaggeration of imagination; the skyscrapers of literature. He was the
greatest master of the tall story who has ever lived and was also, what
is more important, a thoroughly sincere man.”
As the cab to take me to my London train was announced, Chesterton
graciously inscribed his “History of England” in the following fashion,
“Greetings to the Mark Twain Society
from an Innocent at Home
G. K. Chesterton
Known as the Unjumping Frog of
Bucks County.”
and Mrs. Chesterton added,
“And from Frances Chesterton
Wife of the Innocent.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
FATHER BROWN.
Once in telling his creator what delight Father Brown had given him,
the author asked if the spiritual detective was a real person.
“Indeed he is,” answered Chesterton. “His name is Father John O’Connor
and he lives in Bradford, Yorkshire.”
“‘Trent’s Last Case’ had recently appeared,” Father O’Connor himself
writes the author, “and Chesterton full of admiration for E. C.
Bentley, was humbly envious, longing to add to the small (as it was
then) crop of detective stories. He also was bitten with costume drama
and would without provocation ‘lurk’ by the jamb of a doorway with
cloak-and-sword (he had a sword-stick) as it were in wait for the Duke
of Guise. He had a column the next week in ‘The Daily News,’ relating
how the forest-keepers of Ilkley apprehended him for making passes at
the local trees, but released him on learning that he was a guest of a
Justice of the Peace.
“Many a glorious day we had together under that hospitable roof of
Francis Steinthal and his ever gracious wife. Chesterton himself tells
how two young men that first evening, after I had gone home, wondered
how a sheltered existence like mine could ever take part in the rude,
naughty world as it stood, and how this gave the first push off to the
Father Brown series. Disguise is mingled with description--I did carry
a specially large and cheap umbrella--had quite a habit of brown-paper
parcels--and the episode of the sapphire cross--(in America, a diamond
cross, of course) has this relation to sordid fact, that I was still
vain in having bought five sapphires for five shillings in an obscure
pawnshop in Bradford. Many years later, in Bradford again, some duffer
introduced me as Father Brown to two international crooks who were
playing themselves into the book-trade, and they both disappeared,
leaving no trace, within twenty-four hours!”
Father O’Connor never forgot the day that he spent with the two
Chesterton brothers at St. John’s, Ilkley, and has often wondered since
if anyone ever had a better chance to observe their mental difference
and their deep attachment at such close quarters as he did that day.
Cecil was a Church of England Conservative Fabian Socialist, Gilbert
was almost an official Liberal, and at that time writing for “The Daily
News.” Cecil had already, in “The Fabian Review,” battered daylight
through the Liberal Party in many a large hole. This can be seen in his
“Gladstonian Ghosts.” From lunch till tea and from tea till dinner,
Cecil stood his ground, and Gilbert must have walked many miles around
the large dining table trying to reply to his brother’s arguments.
Chesterton gave the author his own version of how he first conceived
the idea for the famous character,
“While at tea with Father O’Connor the conversation turned to
philosophical and moral channels, and I mentioned with considerable
timidity, a certain rather sordid question of vice and crime, which
I intended to discuss in a future essay. I was vastly astonished to
find that the priest not only had a thorough working knowledge of the
subject but was able to furnish me with further facts of an almost
sensational nature.
“Some days later Father O’Connor and I took dinner with two Cambridge
undergraduates. When the priest left the room, the young men remarked
on what a thoroughly charming and cultivated person he was despite the
fact that in his cloistered existence he knew so little of the world.
One of them remarked, ‘It’s a very beautiful thing to be innocent
and ignorant, but I think it’s a much finer thing not to be afraid of
knowledge.’
“The complete and crushing irony of the remark so touched my
imagination that there was born in my mind the idea of a priest who
should appear to know nothing, but as a matter of fact, knows more
about crime than the criminals themselves. The point of him (Father
Brown) was to appear pointless; and one might say that his conspicuous
quality was in NOT being conspicuous. I have always thought that the
most appropriate compliment ever paid my famous detective priest came
from the lips of a charming Catholic lady who remarked, ‘I am very fond
of that ‘officious little loafer’.”
The prototype of one of the Father Brown characters, Hesketh Pearson,
writes the author,
“I greatly enjoyed the Father Brown stories, and remember his telling
me that he had described me in one of them, though I cannot remember
which. My last meeting with him was not altogether a pleasant one
because he started it by asking,
“‘Why, are you not a Catholic? All the best writers of today are
Catholics and you are much too clever to be anything else!’
“I was forced to explain my view of God, which was not his,
and this disagreement cast a slight shade over the subsequent
conversation--though I am sure he was much too kindly a soul to let it
affect his feelings towards me, which were always most cordial. He was
extremely generous to me at two crucial moments in my life, and I shall
always remember him with gratitude, admiration and affection.”
Rafael Sabatini’s first acquaintance with Chesterton’s work “was made
through Father Brown, and I don’t know that I cared more for any of
his creations. He was, we all know, one of three contemporaries to
whom allusion was commonly made by their triple initials: G. K. C. in
his case. The other two, G. B. S. (George Bernard Shaw and Clement K.
Shorter). One day that perverse genius, T. W. H. Crossland (of whom
little may have been known in the States) was in my study chatting
with me in his usual disgruntled fashion. The conversation turned on
Shorter. Whilst he talked he scribbled on a British Museum reading
room ticket, which he left carelessly on my table. After he had gone I
looked at the ticket and found on it scribbled the following quatrain,
which has remained hitherto unpublished,
‘G. K. S.
G. K. C.
G. B. S.
N. B. G.’”
G. B. Stern has “received intense pleasure from a good deal of G. K. C.
One of my most treasured books is a first edition of ‘The Napoleon
of Notting Hill’ which excited me wildly when I first read it, some
time in my teens. I was born in Holland Park, and used to be sent as
a child for daily walks all over Campden Hill and up and down through
‘Napoleon’ kingdom, so that it had a strong local interest as well as
its romantic appeal. I think, therefore, this remains the favorite of
his works, together with ‘Lepanto,’ ‘The Secret People,’ and two or
three of the other poems; but I also greatly enjoy and have re-read
several times the Father Brown stories and ‘The Flying Inn.’ Also I was
present at the very first performance in London of the play, ‘Magic,’
which seemed to me even then inspired with those queer colored bursts
of truth which were so peculiarly Chesterton.”
The late Mr. S. S. Van Dine, author of “The ‘Canary’ Murder Case” and
“The Philo Vance Murder Case,” wrote the author, “I am very glad to
be included as one of America’s admirers of G. K. C.’s Father Brown
series. Father Brown has long been a favorite with me.”
And Mary Roberts Rinehart, “Of course I was a great admirer of the
Father Brown stories, and was naturally pleased that Mr. Chesterton
liked my own work. In a way we formed a sort of mutual admiration
society.”
“Chesterton and I wrote a detective story together,” recalls Sir Max
Pemberton. “I opened the mystery--he closed it, most ably, of course. I
can’t remember what it was about, but I am sure he brought the villain
to justice.
“He was a truly great figure--a worthy successor to the immortal Doctor
Johnson. Both had rare gifts, of literature and Faith.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SOME APPRAISALS.
“Chesterton was one of the great and dynamic forces during the time
he lived,” declares Ralph Adams Cram. “I ‘fell for him’ many years
ago when almost by accident I found and read ‘The Napoleon of Notting
Hill.’ That settled the case for me, and after that I was, so to speak,
his intellectual and spiritual slave. Of all his books it seems to
me this, together with ‘The Man Who Was Thursday,’ ‘The Bell and the
Cross,’ ‘The Flying Inn’ and ‘The Victorian Age of English Literature’
are those for which I care most. This may seem a curious selection, but
in most of these he makes his points through indirection, and in some
ways this seems to me a more powerful method of conveying his ideas and
inspiring the public than the more explicit works, the object of which
is very obvious. This is not to disparage anything he ever did--except,
perhaps, the Father Brown Mystery stories, which seem to me rather
unworthy of him, though even these serve to show the immense breadth
of his interest, his knowledge, and his literary ability.”
The late W. B. Yeats wrote the author that he found Chesterton “a
kindly and generous man of whom I constantly heard from friends, but as
far as I can recollect I only met him socially twice, once at a Club
dinner and once for tea at a country house. So much of my life has
always been spent in Ireland that I know comparatively little of the
English celebrities. I don’t want to write about his works: I have read
very little of it, and to write even of that little would open up great
questions I don’t want to come to any decision about in my present
ignorance (which is likely to endure).”
In his “Autobiography,” Chesterton states that he had some talk
about poetry and property with Yeats at the Dublin Art Club, “a most
exhilarating evening.” Yeats asked Chesterton to debate at the Abbey
Theatre, defending property on its more purely political side, against
an able leader of Liberty Hall, the famous stronghold of Labor politics
in Dublin, Robert Johnson, who was exceedingly popular with the
proletarian Irish.
“That passage from G. K. C.’s ‘Autobiography’ is correct so far as I
can remember,” wrote Yeats in a second letter. “It was a time when the
English Government was stopping discussion and we kept discussion
open at the Abbey Theatre when it had stopped elsewhere, by getting
people to speak on the conservative side and letting debate develop as
it likes afterwards. Johnson who replied to Chesterton was at that time
the most important Irish labour leader: he is still very important. He
was in the Irish Senate for some years, Bernard Shaw lectured either
the week after or the week before Chesterton. Both men were brilliant,
Chesterton taking the line that the possession of small properties was
essential to liberty, Johnson putting the Trades Union point of view
that it was more important for the workman to spend his money on his
children than to save it.”
Cuthbert Wright’s only personal connection with Chesterton was to have
been mentioned in one of his last books, “The Well and the Shadows”:
“Some year ago I had published a review of G. K. C.’s ‘Catholic Church
and Conversion,’ in which I drew attention to what I considered
a stylistic defect, his mania for alliteration. He seems to have
remembered it during the intervening years, and doing me the honor to
couple my name with that of Mr. T. S. Eliot wrote as follows,
“‘It must be a terrible strain on the presence of mind to be always
ready with a synonym. I can imagine Mr. T. S. Eliot just stopping
himself in time and saying, ‘Waste not, require not.’ I like to think
of Mr. Cuthbert Wright having the self-control to cry, ‘Time and
fluctuation wait for no man.’ I can imagine his delicate accent when
speaking of a pig in a receptacle or of bats in the campanile.”
Professor Roman Dyboski of Krakow, Poland, was first drawn to
Chesterton when he read some articles in the “Illustrated London News,”
and some passages from his historical poem, “The Ballad of the White
Horse.” The professor suggested his advanced students making a special
study on the author, and the result was two Polish books on G. K. C.
Soon translations of Chesterton’s works became fairly numerous in
Poland. His play “Magic” had several successful runs on Polish stages,
and the Polish Radio popularized “The Man Who Was Thursday” in a
dramatic version.
Shortly after his visit to Poland early in 1927, Chesterton sent Dr.
Dyboski an introduction to a collective volume of studies by Polish
scholars written to commemorate the Seventh Hundred Anniversary of the
death of St. Francis of Assisi, and the services of the Franciscans to
civilization.
On July 7, 1927, Chesterton spoke on Poland at the Essex Hall in the
Strand. Crowds of his admirers were present; the late Cardinal Bourne
himself appeared on the platform; the Polish Ambassador took the
chair; Hilaire Belloc moved the vote of thanks which was seconded by
Dyboski. The first part of the address struck all present as the most
illuminating English opinion that had ever been expressed on Poland,
“I am to speak on Poland, a country very unfamiliar to the average
English person. In order to facilitate approach to the subject, let me
begin by saying that Poland is Poland. This is the kind of statement
which, when I make it, is of course called a paradox (Laughter). Yet
what I wish to express is something quite plain and simple. Those of
you who have studied medieval history, may remember the ancient kingdom
of Bohemia--situated, according to Shakespeare, by the sea-side--now
you hear much of Czechoslovakia, unknown to you before. Again, those
of you who are old enough to remember the World War, will recall the
fervent admiration which we all felt for the heroism of the Servian
nation: now we often hear the name of Yugoslavia, which we never heard
in those days. As for Poland, she is now known by the same name which
she bore through centuries, when she was a great power in Europe,
and by which our fathers knew her to exist in those days when she
had disappeared from the map, yet continued to live as a nation and
to struggle for freedom. That is why I begin by saying that Poland
is Poland, and submit that as a fundamental fact for you to consider
before we go further.”
It is difficult to imagine more eloquent and emphatic words of
recognition for the continuity of Poland’s national tradition through
eight centuries of recorded independent existence, through a century
and more of division and captivity, and into the dawn of reunion
and regained liberty. Chesterton, who in these words as well as in
various poems and essays, always acknowledged in Poland one of the
corner-stones of the historical structure of European civilization,
remained a faithful friend of Poland to his death.
“Grey Beards at Play,” a book of poems in the Mark Twain tradition
with G. K.’s own illustrations, first impressed the philosopher L. E.
Gilson. But the book which remains with him as the most stimulating
is “Orthodoxy,” “When it came out I hailed it as the best piece of
apologetic the century had produced. In a sense all his later works
are a variation on the same theme. I was interested in the biography
of the conversion of a well known American financial expert whose
conversion was brought about by reading in succession Chesterton’s
‘Orthodoxy,’ Fulton Sheen’s ‘God and the Intelligence,’ and Karl
Adams’ ‘Spirit of Catholicism.’ I don’t wonder they would convert the
Devil if he had a sense of humor, and open mind, and could pray for
grace!”
Mr. Gilson believes that Chesterton will not really be fully
appreciated before a century or two. The book of his which he likes
best is “St. Thomas Aquinas:” “I consider it as being without possible
comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short
of genius can account for such an achievement. Everybody will no
doubt admit that it is a ‘clever’ book, but the few readers who have
spent twenty or thirty years in studying St. Thomas Aquinas, and who,
perhaps, have themselves published two or three volumes on the subject,
cannot fail to perceive that the so-called ‘wit’ of Chesterton has put
their scholarship to shame. He has guessed all that which we had tried
to demonstrate, and he has said all that which they were more or less
clumsily attempting to express in academic formulas. Chesterton was
one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed; he was deep because he
was right; and he could not help being right; but he could not either
help being modest and charitable, so he left it to those who could
understand him to know that he was right, and deep; to the others, he
apologized for being right, and he made up for being deep by being
witty. That is all they can see of him.”
Eileen Duggan gives the opinion of a New Zealander,
“One of the innumerable society diarists who writes for a hobby
recorded an anecdote that illustrates Chesterton’s complete absorption
in a subject. He had been given, rather foolishly, a little gold period
chair, and as he made his points, it slowly crashed beneath him. He
rose just in time and sinking into another chair that someone put
behind him, began at the word he had last spoken. It was evident to all
that he had barely noticed the incident rather than that he had decided
to ignore it.
“A New Zealander who heard him lecture relates that his appearance
after a long delay caused the Chairman to express relief that he had
not been knocked down by a tramcar. G. K. C. rose calmly and thanked
him for his solicitude, ‘but,’ said he, ‘Mr. Chairman, had I met a
tramcar it would have been a great and, if, I may say so, an equal
encounter.’”
“His journalistic training,” continues Miss Duggan, “had taught him
simplification and the author of those penetrating studies on Dickens
and Browning would put his points on Distributism so that they could
be understood by the man in the street. A sacrifice seemed worthless
to Chesterton, unless it were voluntary and not State-imposed; in
Distributism, then, he saw the solution of the world’s problems, the
answer for soul and for body of its ills.
“It has been charged that he was the enemy of Jewry, but his hand
was against only a small and powerful Oligarchy within it which, he
claimed, harmed the poor Jew of the ghetto more than the Gentile and,
commenting on the anti-Jewish excesses which have outraged the world,
he said that he had now to defend the Jews against Hitler. It will be
remembered that he struck at all internal abuses and certain lines
of his were arrowheads in the national flesh. These for instance, on
postwar corruption drew blood,
“‘Oh, they that fought for England,
Following a fallen star,
Alas, alas for England!
They have their graves afar.
But they that rule in England
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas for England!
They have no graves as yet.’
“He was a Little Englander; partly, one suspects, as a reaction from
Kiplingism: but in an age of peace he was a defender of just wars. He
inveighed against those who blamed the older generation in 1914 when
they decided that war was the only honorable solution and later he said
that a universal peace, founded on a universal panic, raised the point
as to whether the supreme moral state will be found when everybody
is too frightened to fight; and dying, but undefeated, he repeated
as a creed, ‘Monarchy, aristocracy, democracy--responsible forms of
rule--have collapsed under plutocracy, which is irresponsible rule.
And this has come upon us because we departed from the old morality in
three essential points. First, we supported notions against known, old
customs; secondly, we made the state top-heavy with a new and secretive
tyranny of will; and third, we forgot that there is no faith in freedom
without faith in free-will. Materialism brings with it a servile
fatalism--because nothing, as Dante said, else than ‘the generosity of
God could give to man after all ordinary, orderly gifts, the noblest
of all things which is----liberty.’”
Chesterton examined and scrutinized the conscience of England as he did
his own, but only a fool would deny that from York to Cornwall he loved
his country with a Little Englander’s passion!
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE POET
Not a few of his readers feel that Chesterton’s chief bid to fame is
his poetry. Alfred Noyes, for instance, writes the author,
“Chesterton led one of the most original lives of his day in Europe.
It is well to remember this when it is suggested that men who avail
themselves of the rich experiences of the centuries are merely echoes
of the past. The true originality does not consist in inventing ideas
that have no relation to truth and no roots in reality, but in the
discovery and unveiling of something that has always been there,
though we may hitherto have lacked the eyes to see it, or the power
to express and interpret it. Chesterton had an expert gift for making
one see things in all their original miscellaneousness, as things that
really =are=, and yet--=cannot= be, or give any rational account of
themselves. Many years ago in a poem on the death of Francis Thompson,
I wrote of the overwhelming mystery that there should be a single grain
of dust in existence, the sheer impossibility of it on any rational
ground, and how the smallest atom defied exploration and ultimately
asserted a superrational origin.
“‘I am ... yet cannot be, ...!
“Chesterton tosses out his thoughts in a glorious liberality; but I
am proud to think that this line unconsciously found its way into two
of Chesterton’s poems afterwards--‘The House of Christmas,’ where he
speaks of ‘the things that cannot be, and that are,’ and the splendid
lyric ‘Second Childhood,’ where he says,
“‘And stones still shine along the roads
That are and cannot be!’
“Like most men of genius he kept his own immortal childhood all his
life; and it was in the matrix of it, the vision that ‘saw’ as a
manifestation of something ‘supernatural,’ ‘something that ultimately
defied reason, not because it was merely difficult to understand, but
because it rested on an eternal and absolute mystery (above and beyond
the range of secondary causes) it was in this wonder at the abiding in
the terrestrial that he made me feel the power of his faith,
“‘When all my days are ending
And I have no songs to sing
I think I shall not be too old
To stare at everything,
As I stared once at a nursery door
Or a tall tree and a swing--
Strange crawling carpets of the grass
Wide windows of the sky--’
“One of the greatest of all his poems is the sonnet entitled ‘The
Convert,’ in which he describes how, after he had ‘bowed his head,’ he
came out where the old world shone white, and heard ‘myriads of tongues
like autumn leaves,’ ‘not so loveable,’ but ‘strange and light,’
in their whispering assumption that, among the old riddles and new
creeds, he must now be taken as belonging to a dead past. He sees them
singing--not harshly--‘but softly as men smile about the dead.’ And
then comes this magnificent and soul-stirring challenge from the ‘dead
man’,
“‘The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree.
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That holds the soil, but lets the gold go free;
And all these things are less than dust to me
=Because my name is Lazarus, and I live!=’”
Francis B. Thornton, the authority on Gerard Manley Hopkins, first knew
Chesterton through his drinking songs, “An admirable introduction; they
were so much more than their title signifies, and they transported me
to the happy age which preceded the Malvolios and their hatred of cakes
and ale. To me Chesterton will always be the poet. He not only saw what
other men looked at, he saw =through= as well, and it was this faculty
which gave an angelic quality to his humor. He was like a bull in a
china shop, but it was a papal bull enunciating principles in the midst
of a wreck of fragile half-truth.”
Mr. J. Corson Miller “was introduced to the poetry of Chesterton by Mr.
William Rose Benet who dilated on the vigor and splendor of ‘The Ballad
of the White Horse.’ I read that magnificent work, and thereafter read
all the verse that G. K. C. produced. I am a great admirer of his
poetical work. I admire his flexible sonnets, with their vast sweep
of thought, and radiant vision. His various lyrics, love, nature, and
religious lyrics, are all excellent; his religious poetry is sublime.
His well known lyric, ‘The Donkey,’ with its superb last two lines,
or couplet, is unforgettable. His ‘Queen of the Seven Swords’--his
second last, if not his last, published volume of verse, bears in my
humble opinion, the breadth and fire of eternal life. His was, indeed,
a great spirit: no toadying, or cavilling; no smirking or masking,
but strong and free, with the strength of the clean West wind, he put
his thoughts and opinions and visions in books and papers, and let
the seeds of his ideas fall where they would, with results be what
they might. His many-sided genius is well known: political and social
economist; poet, historian, novelist, short-story writer, artist and
cartoonist, playwright--hardly any field in art and literature can be
mentioned--without his having touched it in some manner and left his
mark, too.”
Prof. Joseph J. Reilly holds that Chesterton will be best remembered
for his poetry,
“The initial book I read was ‘Varied Types.’ My first reaction was one
of delight in Chesterton’s brilliance, my second a realization that his
views were colored so decidedly by his personality that one could not
hope to get a genuinely objective appraisal from him. This has always
seemed to me an element of strength and of weakness and ever since
I have turned to Chesterton’s criticism most largely for the unusual
flashes of insight which he shows than for any completely balanced
judgment. In one sense he is like a delicious dessert: it is not the
main part of a dinner but no dinner would be satisfying without it.
“My next acquaintance was with his ‘Orthodoxy’ which I found full of
wisdom, insight, and inspiration. As I went on, I sometimes grew a
little weary of his paradoxes but changed my mind when I happened one
day upon his statement that to him paradox was ‘truth standing on its
head.’
“After reading his volume of poems through several times and
thinking him over for many months preparatory to writing an
article on Chesterton as poet, I came to the conclusion to which I
still cling that Chesterton’s best claim to the attention of our
great-grand-children will be based on his poetry.”
John Gould Fletcher considers “Lepanto” is Chesterton’s finest poem,
“next to that superb ‘Ballad of the White Horse’--too long for most
people, I fancy, but absolutely characteristic of his great, generous,
simple, and manly nature.
“I did not learn to like his poetry because of a parent or teacher.
From my earliest years I have always read all the poets I could lay
my hands on; and in later years, I have continued the practice. I read
‘Lepanto’ and the ‘Ballad’ some time back in 1912 as I recall, during
my early years in London--read them and liked them. As regards the
American poets, I should say that it was particularly marked in the
case of Vachel Lindsay.”
“I am on record,” declares Clement Wood, “that he is the greatest
poet of his generation. I well remember when ‘Lepanto’ was recited to
Vachel Lindsay by Floyd Dell; but Lindsay missed the rhythm which was
ballad measure--seven beats to the line. Lindsay was influenced by
Chesterton’s ballad measure which he re-used in the ‘Congo’ and other
poems--but as four beats to the line.
“‘The Ballad of the White Horse’ is the greatest of all modern ballads,
possibly the greatest of all ballads,--more sustainedly memorable,
glorious throughout. Many of the shorter pieces, too, have my warmest
admiration.”
“The story of my reading ‘The Battle of Lepanto’ on the shore of Lake
Michigan to Vachel Lindsay is true,” declares Floyd Dell. “Note the
echo of ‘Lepanto’ in ‘General William Booth,’
“‘Dim drums throbbing in the hills half heard
Booth enters boldly with his big brass drum.’
“Booth was the first poem in Vachel’s new style, and followed my
chanting recitation of the poem--which (my way of reading it) was in
turn based on Yeats’ theories of how poetry should be read. Vachel had
an unparalleled mental possession of the folk tunes (so to speak) of
American speech--camp-meetings, soap-box, tramp, farmer, Negro, and so
on--but they never broke through into his own verse until after he had
heard the theory of Yeats and the poem of Chesterton.”
Thomas Caldecot Chubb feels that Chesterton has been an important
influence in the shaping of a brilliant American poet, “I realize that
discussing influences is dangerous and that most people like to think
of genius as bursting into the world full grown like Medusa from the
forehead of Jove. But quite the opposite is usually true and most men
of genius are but the latest--not the last link--in an unending chain.
They receive, they use, they pass along. And anyone who will compare
‘The Ballad of the White Horse’ with ‘The Drug Shop, or Endymion in
Edmonstoun,’ written by Stephen Vincent Benet when he was less than
twenty years old, will realize that Benet obtained more than a handful
of his poetic implements from Chesterton. This is a paradox in itself,
that the gusty panegyrist of the days following the decline of Rome
should make an important contribution to so native and so American a
voice.”
No better way to end this chapter than with what Stephen Vincent Benet
writes the author,
“Thank you for sending me your Chapter on Chesterton’s poetry which
I have read with much interest. I have always greatly admired both
‘Lepanto’ and the ‘Ballad of the White Horse’ and I still re-read
them.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHESTERTON THE MAN
Chesterton possessed one of the most likeable characters of
contemporary literary men. There is usually something or other
that mars the characters of most, but who would have Chesterton
different? Even his faults are beloved: his weight, his tardiness,
his absentmindedness, his slovenly manner of dressing, his sometimes
careless way of eating and drinking. In short he can almost be
described as Falstaff without his moral grossness.
Chesterton lived for many years in a flat overlooking the beautiful
Battersea Park, where Mrs. Lillian Curt would often see him strolling
in deep thought. His wife Frances--a dainty little lady, clever and
level-headed and most devoted to her husband--would sometimes get
anxious when he was long overdue for meals. Then quickly donning her
outdoor garments she would anxiously start off to find him, remarking,
“I am off to seek my Mighty Atom.” The reference being to Marie
Corelli’s “The Mighty Atom” which had but recently appeared.
“I knew G. K. C.,” writes A. Hamilton Gibbs, “when I was in process
of becoming an undergraduate at Oxford. Being so grotesquely fat that
he couldn’t dress himself he used to appear in socks at breakfast,
eat hugely, and then go out into the garden with a pad of paper and a
packet of cigarettes. In the course of a couple of hours there would
be a ring of cigarettes on the grass around him and when the wind blew
away his pages, he would scream for help with a series of epigrams
which I am sure found their way into his later pages. Whenever he went
from the country to London there was always a little black bag in his
hand. In the bag was a bottle of wine, and in the station refreshment
room he would order a cup of tea and a wine glass. Many times I’ve seen
him taking alternate sips of tea and wine between mouths of a penny
bun!”
Whenever he visited Glasgow, Chesterton stayed with Professor
Phillimore who occupied the Greek chair at Glasgow University.
Phillimore entertained many literary people in Glasgow, Hilaire Belloc,
Thomas Hardy, Galsworthy, and so forth. Usually disengaged in the
mornings, the visitors were often brought to the Annam Gallery to be
entertained by looking at paintings and etchings. Mr. Annam had the
opportunity of making photographic portraits of Chesterton in 1912,
when the latter was at his bulkiest. He seemed much interested in his
striking appearance and in his likeness to Dr. Johnson. He wore a dark
grey highland cloak and a tiny Homburg hat. As he was leaving the
studio a small boy stopped and stared at the great man. G. K. noticed
the youngster’s interest and puffed himself out to his very biggest for
his benefit. Nothing was said, of course, but the pose was obvious. In
the course of conversation he made various references to his appearance.
Mrs. Hugh C. Riviere remembers Chesterton as a school boy at St.
Paul’s, a tall slim youth who even then had the feeling of the romance
of weapons that runs through so much of his work. He went to stay
with Mr. and Mrs. Riviere after his marriage when his wife was ill in
bed and unable to see to his packing. The result was that he arrived
=with nothing= but an old revolver bought on the way, and his favorite
sword-stick with an ivory-handle!
The Sunday after the Great War had commenced Riviere was staying the
week-end at a house a few miles from Beaconsfield, and walked over to
see the Chestertons. They were in a very national state of excitement
and emotion, as all were on such a day. His first thought was, what
could he do to help his country,
“I couldn’t wield a sword as I can’t lift my right arm above my
shoulder. I should be no use in cavalry, no horse could carry me.” Then
with a sudden hopefulness and that humor that was so often directed
against himself, “I might possibly form part of a barricade.”
The Chestertons, his brother Cecil, and his friend W. C. Worsdell, all
belonged to a debating society known as “I. D. K.” (I Don’t Know). In
the earlier period G. K. C. attended the meetings pretty regularly but
later on rarely, being, as his wife declared, “too busy.” One of the
earliest meetings was at the Chiswick house, of his wife’s family, the
Bloggs. At the end of the discussion Chesterton remarked in his usual
jocular style,
“We’re in a complete fog!”
But more than once he declared that the speeches of the I Don’t Knows
were much cleverer than those heard in the House of Commons. At one
meeting Chesterton could not find a chair, so he was obliged to squat
on the floor, and he dropped down with a thud that shook the whole
house!
One year the Chestertons were coming back from Bromley after a
delightful afternoon spent at E. W. Fordham’s house where the guests
had produced some plays written by their host--one of them an
exceedingly clever and amusing take-off of G. K. C. himself which the
original had greeted with continuous chuckles and gurgles of laughter.
Having returned with them year after year from this show and knowing
his habit, Riviere remarked,
“Aren’t you going to have the usual cigar, Gilbert?”
“I was not going to have a cigar and I =don’t= want a cigar, but if
it’s a case of a holy ritual here goes,” he answered characteristically
with a chuckle as he took out a cigar and commenced smoking.
While visiting Columbus, Ohio, to lecture, Chesterton had a friendly
discussion with Professor Joseph Alexander Leighton and Dr. T. C.
Mendenhall, the noted physicist--on the question whether veridical
communications from the dead were received by living persons. Dr.
Mendenhall contended that some at least of these communications were
genuine, and therefore established the reality of life after death.
Leighton took the role of skeptic, contending that when, as in some
undoubted cases, bits of information, quotations, etcetera, had been
received through mediums, they probably were due to subconscious
memories, and that in other cases their apparent supernormal character
was probably the result of coincidence. Chesterton agreed to the
genuineness of the communications, but took the view that they were
transmitted by bad spirits and that it was spiritually unhealthy for
living persons to have any kind of traffic with them.
No one could condemn a thing in fewer words than Chesterton. Speaking
about that much discussed book of other days, Renan’s “Life of Christ,”
he said to his friends Desmond Gleeson and George Boyle,
“I remember reading it while I was standing in the queque waiting to
see ‘Charlie’s Aunt.’ But it is so obvious which is the better farce,
for ‘Charlie’s Aunt’ is still running.”
The old English advertisement of “Charlie’s Aunt” always had a picture
of the old woman getting along at top speed, with the words, “still
running.”
Father Cyril Martindale did not meet Chesterton very often, but he
felt that he knew him well all the same, “this was because despite
his shyness, or I should say modesty, he =let= you know him, and
intercepted no barriers. This modesty was again seen in his dealings
with young men. It never occurred to him that they could have nothing
interesting or useful to say, or that he was called upon to act the
oracle.
“And this simplicity could again, I think, be seen in what people
called his paradoxes. He always insisted that that was not what they
were, but sheer statements of the obvious. To him, it was life as
ordinarily lived that seemed ‘paradoxical’--it was amazing to him that
men could think the things they did, especially as doing so issued into
so uncomfortable as well as, too often, so wicked a life.
“Sometimes the constant appearance of the word ‘wild’ in his writings
irritated me. He had a vivid and active imagination, so that he saw all
sorts of connections and illustrations that others did not: but his
mind in reality worked in a very orderly way. I think the explanation
may be this--he constantly described himself as ‘lazy’ and I expect
that by temperament he was. He always put down the rapidity of his
brother’s conversion with the tardiness of his own, at sheer laziness
on his part. Now had he let himself go to laziness, he would have been
letting his mind, too, go ‘wild.’ But he did neither. Very likely he
used the word in a slightly different sense from the one in which I
used it: he felt it as the opposite of ‘smug’ and so forth. It remains
that I think he had to conquer a real tendency to laziness, and so, to
letting his mind just hop about in a (to me) ‘wild’ and disorderly way.
“I think he died in some ways a broken-hearted man. There were no
signs of the world having learnt anything that was good, even from its
sufferings: all the more noticeable was his peace and serenity in God;
and this is why I do not hesitate to say that I think there was to be
discerned in him =real holiness=.”
Father (now Monsignor) John O’Connor known to fame as Father Brown,
recollects that on Sunday, July 30th, 1922, he had “the immense
happiness of receiving Chesterton into the Church. Mrs. Chesterton was
present, profoundly moved, and Dom Ignatius Rice, O. S. B., in the
chapel of the Railway Hotel at Beaconsfield, the first public church in
town. I remembered his lines written years before,
‘Prince: Bayard would have smashed his sword
To see the sort of Knights you dub.
Will someone take me to a pub?
Is =that= the last of them? O Lord!
Will someone take me to a pub?’
“In 1925 Mrs. Chesterton followed him into the Church on the Feast
of All Saints. They almost at once began to sponsor the erection of
a permanent church near the railway station. And now it is being
enlarged as a memorial to him.
“Gilbert Chesterton and I were wont to call down Mark Twain’s name
in benediction and to wish there were more like him, whether in his
own States or any others. I recall many of our delighted exchanges on
Mark the deathless. I was once thrilled to give him a patiche out of
something he had not read,
‘Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral.’
“That he had not read it was to me a miracle. He had read everything I
ever heard of that Mark Twain had written.”
Patrick Braybrooke saw his cousin Chesterton for the last time at
Beaconsfield. “It was a hot afternoon in summer and in the sweet garden
at his home he recited poetry, made up verses, discussed American
hotels, and came to the conclusion that Stevenson was the bravest man
who ever wrote.”
One morning not long afterwards as he was sitting in the refreshment
room of a London underground, Braybrooke picked up casually enough a
newspaper. “I saw some words and my world seemed to fall into pieces.
For I read SUDDEN DEATH OF G. K. CHESTERTON. It seemed like the end of
an era of literary greatness in every way. But I was glad he did not
have a long illness--a long drawn-out anti-climax was not for him. When
his time came he went home quickly, almost as though like one of the
Stevenson characters--hit by an arrow. He went home and the Catholic
Church which he loved so well took care of his soul and in the little
Church at Beaconsfield to the subdued mutters of the Mass we said our
last farewell.”
Chesterton died on June 14, 1936, and was buried in the graveyard
of the Beaconsfield Catholic Church. Just recently the Republic of
Ireland has given a great bell for the Chesterton Memorial Church thus
inscribed.
“Presented to the parish of Beaconsfield by friends and admirers of
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, to ring the call to faith, which he so
chivalrously answered in song, in word, and in example, to the glory of
God and of England.”
Walter de la Mare penned a memorial quatrain to his life-long friend,
“Knight of the Holy Ghost, he goes his way,
Wisdom his motley, Truth his loving jest;
The mills of Satan keep his lance in play,
Pity and Innocence his heart at rest.”
INDEX
Page
Adams, James Truslow, meets Chesterton 78
Adams, Karl 150
Aristotle 131
Armstrong, Prof. A. J., entertains C. 58
Arnold, Matthew 127
Autobiography 145
“Ballad of the White Horse” 94, 160, 162
Baltimore, liked by Chesterton 128
Barnes, Bishop E. W. 108
Barr, Robert 25
Barrie, James M. 37
Beaverbrook, Lord 108
Belloc, Hilaire 7, 10, 14
First meets Chesterton 24
Quoted 35, 44, 75, 133
Benet, Stephen Vincent 162–3
Benet, William R. 158
Bentley, E. C. Iff., 5, 137
Bierce, Ambrose 40
“Biography for Beginners” 85
Birkenhead, Lord 56, 109
Blackwood, Algernon 33
Blatchford, Robt. complimented by C. 21–3
Blessed Virgin 89–90
Blogg, Frances, marries C. 13
Boer War, opposed by C. 19–20
Borden, Lucille 39
Boswell 7, 28
Bourne, Francis Cardinal 148
Braybrooke, Patrick, at C.’s funeral 172–3
Bridges, Horace J., debates with C. 68 ff.
Brown, Edw. tells of C.’s Welsh lecture 49–52
Browning, Robert 3, 14, 58, 95, 125–6, 152
Cabell, James Branch 122
Carrell, R. Alexis, on C. 123
Cecil, Lord 33
Cecil, Lord David 38
Cambridge 107
Canadian Authors’ Society, toasted by C. 76
Catholic Church, C. joins 90, 102
Chamberlain, Joseph 19
Chesterton, Cecil, brother 14, 138–9, 167, 170
Chesterton, G. K.
Chubb, T. C., describes C. at Yale 92–7
Clarke, Isabel C., entertains C. in Rome 35–6
Clemens, Samuel L. (Mark Twain) 19
Praised by C. 135, 149, 172
Cobbett, William 97–8
Columbus, Ohio, C. visits 168
Connolly, Myles, impressions of C. 120
“Convert, The,” poem by C. 157
Cram, Ralph Adams 33 ff., 144 ff.
Dante 153
Darrow, C., debates with C. 66 ff., 117, 128
de la Mare, Walter, meets C. 32–3, quoted
de Castro, Adolphe, meets C. 40
Dickens, Charles, admired by C. 3, 30, 95
“Pickwick Papers,” C.’s favorite 131, 152
Distributism 14, 24
Drinkwater, John 51
Drood, Edwin 27–7
Doyle, Conan 117
Dudley, Owen F., meets C. 34
Duggan, Eileen 151 ff.
Dyboski, Roman 132, 147 ff.
Eliot, T. S. 146
“Everlasting Man” 118
Falstaff 92
Father Brown 25, 94, 144
Fletcher, James Gould 160–1
“Flying Inn, The” 85, 95, 144
Fordham, E. W., boyhood friend 4 ff.,168
France, Anatole 15
Frank, Waldo, admires C. 120
Frankau, Gilbert, meets C. 25
Galsworthy, John 24
discussed by C. 129
Garland, Hamlin, meets C. 119
George Fifth, King, meets C. 11
Gibbs, A. Hamilton, meets C. 165
Gibbs, Sir Philip, meets C. 20–1
Gill, Eric, C.’s friend 27
Gilson, L. E. 149 ff.
“G. K.’s Weekly” 14, 27
Glasgow, C. lectures in 53
visits 165–6
“Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” praised by C. 24
Gordon, Charles W., describes C. 78
Graham, Cunninghame 11
Graham, Kenneth, compared to C. 35
“Greybeards at Play,” C.’s first book 14
Guedalla, Philip, meets C. 31–2
Gwynn, S., recalls C.’s first book 14, 17, 18, 38
Hamilton, Cosmo, debates with C. 62 ff.
Hammond, J. L. 18–9
Hardy, Thomas 129
Harris, Frank 29
Hawthorne 111
Henry Eighth, King 36, 97
Hereford, Oliver, quoted 69
Hazlitt, Henry 117
Heine 41
“Heretics” 15, 30, 116
Hilton, James, writes C. as a boy 23
Hirst, F. W., edits Speaker with C. 19
“History of England” 136
Holliday, Robert Cortes, meets C. 127
Hollis, Christopher, meets C. 24
Holy Ghost 95
Housman, A. E. 107
quoted by C. 129–130
Huxley, Aldous, admired by C. 63
“History of England” 136
Jackson, Holbrook, meets C. 41–45
Jacobs, W. W., meets C. 23
James, Henry 10
Joan of Arc, C. speaks on 33
Johnson, Dr. Samuel 28, 36, 43, 88, 143, 165
Chesterton dressed as 134
Kaye-Smith, Sheila, praised by C. 112
Kernahan, Coulson, meets C. 25–6–7
Kingsmill, Hugh, meets C. 29
Kipling, Rudyard 76, 96, 153
Knox, John 105
Lane, John 15
Lenin 131
“Lepanto,” poem by C. 94, 119, 160
Lewis, Sinclair 112–3, 127
Lindsay, Vachel 161
Liverpool, C. lectures in 53
Locke, John 41
Lodge, Sir Oliver 21
Lowdnes, Mrs. Marie Belloc, meets C. 33
Mabbott, T. O., praises C. 115–6
MacDonald, George 26
MacDonald, Ramsay 26, 108
“Magic,” play by C. 116–7
“Man Who Was Thursday” 3
Praised by James Hilton 24, 32, 95
Admired by Mussolini 134, 144
Martindale, Cyril C. 167–171
Masefield, John 108
Masterman, Charles 11
May, J. Lewis 15
Megroz, Rodolphe L., visits C. 79
Miller, J. Corson 158
Moore, Tom 17, 18
More, Thomas 90
Mussolini, Benito, visited by C. 134–5
Napoleon, quoted 120
“Napoleon of Notting Hill” 15, 16–7, 79, 85, 95, 116, 144
“New Jerusalem” 87
“New Witness” 14
Notre Dame University, C. at 99–113
Noyes, Alfred 155–8
O’Connor, Father John 137–140
Receives Chesterton Into Church 171–2
Oldershaw, J. L. 5, 18, 19
“Orthodoxy” 15, 32, 116, 149–50, 160
Ould, Hermon, offers C. club presidency 86
Oxford 107
Patterson, Mrs. F. T., hears C. lecture 66 ff.
Pearson, Hesketh 31, 140–1
Pemberton, Sir Max 143
Phelps, William Lyon 98, 118
Philip the Second, misinterpreted by C. 119
Pollock, Channing 115
Poland 148 ff.
Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur 51
Redfield, William C. 62
Remarque, Enrique Maria, C. dislikes 64
Rinehart, Mary Roberts 143
Ripley, Clements, admires C. 32
Riviere, Hugo C., paints C. 85–6
Roberts, R. Ellis, hears C. lecture 46
Robinson, E. A. 166, 97
Rodin 44
Rome, C. visits 90, 97, 134
Rose, Sir Holland 107
Roseberry, Lord 54
Ruskin, John 19, 107
Russell, Bertrand, C.’s opinion of 108
Russell, George 98, 127–8
Sabatini, Rafael 141–2
Saint Januarius 44
St. Louis, Missouri, C. lectures 72–4, 128
Saint Paul’s School 13
“Saint Thomas Aquinas” 150
Scott, Walter 3
“Ivanhoe” reviewed by C. 75
Shaw, Bernard, C.’s book on 15, 27, 44, 46, 55
Meets Chesterton 75–6, 95, 96, 141, 146
Shorter, Clement K. 141
Sheen, Fulton 150
Slade Art School, attended by C. 13
“Speaker,” The 18–9
Stevenson, Robert Louis, quoted 83
Stewart, Bishop G. C., at C.’s lecture 68 ff.
Stewart, Donald Ogden, admires C. 117
Strachey, Lytton, compared to C. 35
Swinburne 3
Tennyson 3, 95
Thackeray 95
Thompson, Francis 155
Thomas, Edward 2
Thoreau 111
quoted 121
Tinker, Chauncey B. 118
Titterton, W. R., C. writes 81–3
Describes C. 84
Tolstoy 131
“Trent’s Last Case,” by E. C. Bentley 137
Trevelyan, George M. 107
Trotsky 131
Van Dine, S. S., admires Father Brown 142
Van Druten, John 51
“Varied Types” 159
Velasquez 44
“Victorian Age of English Literature” 144
Walker, Headmaster, discovers C.’s genius 1
Walpole, Horace 132
Walsh, William Thomas, describes C. 118–9
Watts, G. F., admired by C. 3
“Well and the Shadows” 146
Wells, H. G. 34, 46, 64, 79–80–81, 86, 96, 133
West, Rebecca 109
Wise, Stephen S., admires C. 122
Wood, Clement 161
Wright, Cuthbert 146
Wyndham, George 11
Yealy, Francis J., hears C. lecture 47
Yeats, Elizabeth, at G. K.’s wedding 13
Yeats, William B. 108
meets C. 145–6
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
Footnotes, originally at the bottoms of the pages that referenced them,
have been sequentially alphabetized and placed below the paragraphs
that reference them.
The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page
references. The entry for “Chesterton, G. K.” has no page references
(which makes sense, as the entire book is about him). Some entries that
were misalphabetized have been moved to the correct places, but the
Transcribers did not do this systematically.
Page i: “unanimity” was printed as “unanmity”; changed here.
Page 12: “just ’ad” was printed as “just ’as”; changed here.
Page 13: The footnote anchor originally was placed at the end of the
next paragraph, but was moved because the footnote refers to the person
mentioned in the earlier paragraph.
Page 14: “pledged to wage eternal against” seems to be missing a word.
Page 30: “finding reasons for his” was printed as “finding seasons for
his”; changed here.
Page 31: “with insufficient impudence” was printed that way; perhaps it
should be “sufficient”.
Page 38: “quiet chat” was printed as “quite chat”; changed here.
Page 38: “I remember how Lord David Cecil when still a boy” was printed
that way; “how” seems to be extraneous.
Page 40: “in phases as colorful” was printed that way.
Page 40: “points in phrases” was printed as “points in phases”; changed
here.
Page 41: Extraneous opening single quote removed just before “Do you
happen to write poetry”.
Page 41: Missing closing quote mark added after “It was a quasi sonnet
entitled ‘The Jewish Poet.’”
Page 44: “sombrero” was printed as “comprero”; changed here.
Page 48: “This he thought was very reasonable theory” was printed that
way.
Page 49: The second occurrence of “Debates Union” was printed as
“Debate’s Union”; changed here.
Page 51: “Liberty: the Last Phase,” was printed as “Liberty: the Last
Phrase,”; changed here.
Page 57: Extraneous closing quote removed after “of life and
experience.”
Page 62: “he never forgot” was printed as “he never forget”; changed
here.
Page 88: “Cycle Valley” was printed that way.
Page 89: “it did before” was printed as “it did befire”; changed here.
Page 90: “Thomas More” was printed as “Thomas Moore”; changed here.
Page 94: “that varnished period” was printed that way.
Page 106: “It would not have mattered” was printed as “I would not have
mattered”; changed here.
Page 107: Extraneous closing quote removed after “condition did not
prevail.”
Page 108: “no other poet” was printed as “no other post”; changed here.
Page 118: “just as fervently” was printed as “just as feverently”;
changed here.
Page 121: “It might ever more accurately” was printed that way; “ever”
may be a typo for “even.”
Page 122: “significance” was printed as “signifcance”; changed here.
Page 139: “battered daylight” was printed as “bettered daylight”;
changed here.
Page 140: “knows more about crime” was printed as “know more about
crime”; changed here.
Page 146: “was essential” was printed as “was ensential”; changed here.
Page 146: “debate develop as it likes” was printed as “debate develop
as it like”; changed here.
Page 146: “Some year ago” was printed that way.
Page 149: “Grey Beards at Play” was printed that way, but should be
“Greybeards”.
Page 150: “I consider it as being” was printed as “I consider is as
being”; changed here.
Page 158: “Gerard Manley Hopkins” was printed as “Gerald Manley
Hopkins”; changed here.
Page 162: “Booth was the first poem” was printed as “Both was the first
poem”; changed here.
Page 171: The stanza of a poem is reproduced here as it was printed in
the original book, but differs from reproductions of that stanza in
most other sources.
Page 172: “patiche” probably should be “pastiche”.
Page 175: “Benet, Stephen Vincent” was printed as “Bent, Stephen
Vincent”; changed here.
Page 177: “edits Speaker” was printed as “edits speaker”; changed here.
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