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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

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.”