Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_; boldface is
enclosed in =equals signs=. Additional notes will be found near the end
of this ebook.
[Illustration:
G. K. C.
Done especially for this book
by
CONRADO W. MASSAGUER
]
_CHESTERTON_
_As Seen by His
Contemporaries_
CYRIL CLEMENS
Author of
“MY COUSIN MARK TWAIN,”
Etc.
With Introduction by
E. C. BENTLEY
Author of
“TRENT’S LAST CASE,”
Etc.
1939
INTERNATIONAL MARK TWAIN SOCIETY
Webster Groves, Missouri
Number Eight of the Society’s
Biographical Series
WHOLE NUMBER FOURTEEN
Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill,
Chairman Biographical Committee
Copyright
INTERNATIONAL MARK TWAIN SOCIETY
All rights reserved, including the right to
reproduce this book or parts thereof.
Printed in the U. S. A.
by
WEBSTER PRINTING & STATIONERY CO.,
Webster Groves, Missouri
DEDICATED
with his kind permission
to
BENITO MUSSOLINI
a warm admirer of Chesterton
and his work.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction by E. C. Bentley
Chapters
One Boyhood Days
Two Literary Apprenticeship
Three Meetings with G. K. C.
Four Some Friends
Five On the English Platform
Six On the American Platform
Seven Some Recollections of G. K. C.
Eight Chesterton at New Haven
Nine At Notre Dame
Ten Chesterton and American Authors
Eleven The Author Visits Top Meadow
Twelve Father Brown
Thirteen Some Appraisals
Fourteen The Poet
Fifteen Chesterton the Man
_INTRODUCTION_
by E. C. Bentley
Mr. Cyril Clemens’ book about Gilbert Chesterton is of an unusual and,
to my taste, a deeply interesting sort. Some one has remarked that
the most satisfactory biographies were those in which the letters and
journals of the subject bulked largest, since these, telling their
own tale, showed the man better than any biographer could do it. Mr.
Clemens has assembled a vast number of other people’s memories and
appreciations of G. K. C.; and it may be said that they show the
attitude of his contemporaries towards him better than any individual
critic could describe it.
There is a remarkable note of unanimity in these personal recollections
and judgments. There are differences of view about the value of
G. K. C.’s work; about the relative importance of this or that of
its many aspects; about his matter or style in lecturing; about the
quality of his wit, and many points more. But as to the nature of the
man as he was there is hardly any difference at all. He won the hearts
of those who met him because of his manifest goodness of heart and
happiness of temper; these things were as apparent to all who came near
him as was his physical being.
I do not imagine that Mr. Clemens asked me to write this introduction
with the idea of my setting forth any opinions about the place of
G. K. C. in our literature. I could offer none of any critical value,
because for me the man and his work have always been one, and I have
been for most of my life intensely prejudiced in favour of the man.
Mr. Clemens knew of me, I suppose, as a boyhood friend of G. K. C.--as
I appear in his Autobiography--and perhaps as having dedicated a book
of mine to him in terms which told some fraction of what my feeling
towards him was. I may, then, say now that I first met him at that time
of life when personal influence counts for most, and one’s nature is
in the making for good or evil. His friendship was the best thing that
ever happened to me, and I have always thanked God for it.
Essential goodness, perfect sincerity, chivalrous generosity, boundless
good-temper, a total absence of self-esteem--these are lovable traits;
and with them, even in boyhood, were united brilliant intellectual
powers and an enormous gift of humor. The effect of it all on an
impressionable youth of fifteen or so can perhaps be guessed. For years
we were as near to each other as it is possible for friends to be, I
think; but there was no one who knew him even slightly that did not
feel something of the spiritual attraction that he exercised--always in
utter unconsciousness of it.
G. K. C. was too conspicuously unlike the ordinary boy to be popular,
in the sense of being on the best of terms with all and sundry. He
was without any desire to excel or take the lead in any direction. He
was unconscious of the very existence of games. He was steeped in
literature and art; and he could, at need, be perfectly happy with his
own thoughts and the fruits of his imagination. He was, on the other
hand, not unpopular; it was impossible for even an ill-natured boy, I
should think, to dislike him; but his circle of friends was small in
those early days. I have written something about this time of our lives
to Mr. Clemens who has quoted it at the outset of this book. What I
have been saying in this place is an attempt to express what Gilbert
Chesterton meant to me.
That circle of friends which was so small was to become as wide as any
man’s of our time, as the recognition of his genius increased, and the
magic of his personality gained greater scope. No death can ever have
been mourned with a deeper sincerity of personal affection by so many,
in his own country and in others.
CHAPTER ONE
BOYHOOD DAYS
One of Chesterton’s earliest and staunchest friends, Mr. E. C. Bentley,
recalls,
“Chesterton was in his schooldays the centre of a small group of boys.
They formed a club under his chairmanship ... the Junior Debating Club,
so called to distinguish it from the School Union Society, which was
the preserve of the senior boys. He never did, as he states in his
memoirs, any work at school in the academic sense, and so never rose to
the position of a star boy. The star boys did not understand him and
classed him as a freak who was unlikely to do the school any credit.
He was so exceptionally untidy and absent-minded, even at the age when
the ordinary boy becomes careful of his appearance, that he did not
fit into the picture at all; and it needed the insight of Walker, the
High Master of his day, to divine that there was the stuff of genius
in him, and to ordain (as G. K. tells in his own modest way) that on
the strength of a remarkable prize poem ... the only ‘regular’ thing
he ever did at school ... he should ‘rank with the eighth form,’
the highest, to which he would never have attained on his school
performance. Very few of the boys of whom he saw most did anything
in the field of letters in after life.” The poet Edward Thomas was
not at St. Paul’s with G. K. C. as many think. Mr. Robert Eckert, the
biographer of Thomas, states that the latter was a schoolmate of Cecil,
G. K. C.’s younger brother.
Mr. Bentley continues: “About G. K. C.:--His spare time at
school--which, as he makes clear in his Autobiography, was mostly
spent.... I should say entirely ... in talking, reading, writing, and
drawing pictures. He had a wonderful decorative handwriting, and was
already a masterly draughtsman. Apart from walking, of which he never
tired as a boy, he took no part in any sport. His sight was always very
bad without his glasses. He was nevertheless strong and healthy as a
boy, rather slim than otherwise; it was not until the twenties that
he began to put on flesh. It was not ordinary fatness; I believe some
gland trouble must have been at the root of it.
“Speaking generally, Chesterton would talk about everything when at
school that had to do with the realm of ideas. He never took much
interest in things that are called practical. Politics in a broad
sense he would talk about, but for the details of legislation he cared
nothing. He always was, of course, what we know as a Liberal; in the
large sense he remained a Liberal all his days.
“Literature he would discuss by the hour, especially poetry. He hated
the fashionable decadence of that time ... say 1890–1900 ... as may be
seen from the dedication to ‘The Man Who Was Thursday.’ He delighted in
pictorial art, above all in the generous idealism of G. F. Watts.
“As to books, G. K. C. never gave any attention to those which
constituted school-work. He was passionately fond of Scott and of
course, Dickens. He knew Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne by heart, and
had enjoyed every other English poet in large degree. He did not care
in those days for lighter reading.
“There was a school library, but it was reserved for the use of the
highest class in the school, which G. K. C. never attained. There was
a popular fiction library also, but he did not, I think, make use of
it. G. K. C. was too amiable to get into fights, but he would use his
strength occasionally in standing between a small boy and others who
were badgering him. He honored religion, but had none whatever of a
doctrinal kind until years later.”
“Chesterton, as I knew him in 1889,” writes Mr. E. W. Fordham, another
old schoolmate, “was utterly unlike the average English schoolboy. He
took no part in games. He showed no particular brilliance as a scholar,
and yet far from being looked down upon, he was, I think, always
regarded as one who lived in a different mental world from the rest of
us, a world that many of us admired from afar but would never expect,
or, it may be, ever hope to enter. We felt, though we never alluded
to, his mental pre-eminence. Thus when the Junior Debating Club was
formed, G. K. became Chairman without question and without a rival. It
was obvious that he alone was fitted for the post, and most admirably
he filled it. The teas at the houses of the various members of the Club
which preceded the debates were often tempestuous to the last degree,
but Gilbert, although he took no share in the more physical aspects of
our revelry, was very far from playing the part of a wet blanket.
“His laugh was the loudest and the most infectious of all. There were
times when the boisterous manifestations of some of us overflowed
into, and tended to overpower, the Debates. Then, with the utmost good
temper, G. K. would assert himself, and order would be restored.
“I remember once, after I myself had been particularly noisy and
troublesome, Gilbert explained to me that the throwing of buns and
slices of cake did not really help in the production of good debates,
and he hinted, very kindly and seriously, that some restraining action
might have to be taken if the rioting did not diminish. I hope, indeed,
I believe, I took the hint. This occasion was thereafter referred to as
the day ‘when the Chairman spoke seriously to Mr. F.’
“G. K. was the mainspring of the Junior Debating Club. He was valiantly
supported by Oldershaw, Bentley, and others, but without him neither
the Club itself, nor that strange little magazine, ‘The Debater’ could
have flourished as each of them did. Like boy, like man. That which he
believed in he put his whole heart into, and never spared himself in
furthering its interests. He gave the Junior Debating Club his eager
and inspiring support for the two very good reasons, that it gave great
enjoyment to himself and a few of his friends, and that he thought it
a widening and humanizing influence--completely outside the range of
ordinary school affairs. The Chairman loved the Junior Debating Club,
and most certainly the J. D. C. loved the Chairman.”
Mr. Fordham pins further recollections around the “Autobiography”:
“I am a prejudiced person. Fifty years of friendship and admiration are
an insuperable bar to impartiality.
“G. K. C. and I were at school together: we were fellow members of the
Junior Debating Club of which he was Chairman. We both contributed to
our Club’s magazine, ‘The Debater.’ I wrote rubbish; he wrote articles
and verses of a very different quality. In this book he speaks almost
with contempt of his ‘juvenilia.’ They were in fact such as very few
boys of his age could have produced. Even then, at the age of fifteen
or sixteen, he had a sense of style and a command of language which
the High Master of St. Paul’s and other authorities did not fail to
recognize. ‘The Dragon,’ one article begins, ‘the Dragon is the most
cosmopolitan of impossibilities.’
“As I say, I admired Gilbert Chesterton throughout his life, and after
reading his ‘Autobiography’ I admire him still more. My attitude is
rather that of a hero-worshipper than a critic, but I believe that no
impartial critic could read this book and fail to see that here was a
genius, and better, a brave and an honest man, a man who loved life
and loved his friends, loved laughter and hated oppression; in short
a very great man. Despite all the modesty with which it is written,
the book makes all these things clear. From beginning to end it is a
magnificent =apologia pro vita sua=; nevertheless I hope it will not be
the sole record of his life. There are countless things that he could
not and would not tell of himself but that should not be forgotten.
‘Belloc,’ he writes, ‘still awaits a Boswell.’ It is equally true that
Chesterton awaits one. Is it legitimate to hope that his Boswell may be
Belloc? There is a grand harvest to be gathered by his Boswell, whoever
that may prove to be. G. K. C. was a brilliant talker. He banished
dullness from whatever company he was in. No argument arose but he
would drive home his point by some arresting illustration. We were
arguing once as to whether some policy or other were good or bad. ‘The
word ‘good,’ said G. K., ‘has many meanings. For example, if a man were
to shoot his grandmother at a range of 500 yards I should call him a
good shot, but not necessarily a good man.’
“No one could stump him by an unexpected question. He took part in a
debate many years ago at, I think, the Lyceum Club, and in the course
of his speech he discussed, as did other speakers, various racial
characteristics. After the debate I was walking round with him when an
elderly lady whom he did not know came up and said with something of a
simper, ‘Mr. Chesterton, I wonder if you could tell what race I belong
to?’ With a characteristic adjustment of his glasses he replied at
once, ‘I should certainly say, Madam, one of the conquering races.’
“Only a year or two ago he watched with tolerant, and indeed highly
vocal amusement, (his was both the strangest and the jolliest laugh
man ever had) a representation of himself in some private theatricals.
When they were over he said to the daughter of the player who had
impersonated him--a sturdy figure, it is true, but less generously
planned than the original--‘Do you know I believe your father =is=
Gilbert Chesterton and I am only a padded impostor.’
“Reading this book has recalled these trifles to my mind just as it
has recalled the figure of the boy Chesterton as I first knew him in
the early nineties. I can see him now, very tall and lanky, striding
untidily along Kensington High Street, smiling and sometimes scowling
as he talked to himself, apparently oblivious of everything he passed,
but in reality a far closer observer than most, and one who not only
observed but remembered what he had seen. The fascination of this
book is, in great part, due to the fact that he retained these powers
of observation and memory throughout his life, and that he has applied
them to himself as rigorously and as vividly as to his fellows.
“‘I should thank God for my creation,’ said Gilbert’s grandfather,
‘if I knew I was a lost soul.’ Gilbert would have done the same. ‘The
primary problem for me,’ he writes, ‘was the problem of how men could
be made to realize the wonder and splendour of being alive,’ and it is
because he himself did realize it that he is able to say of his later
years, ‘I have grown old without being bored. Existence is still a
strange thing to me, and as a stranger I give it welcome.’
“Chesterton begins this book with a joke about his baptism. It is
characteristic of the man. He loved laughter as much as he hated
hypocrisy. ‘I have never understood,’ he says, ‘why a solid argument is
any less solid because you make the illustrations as entertaining as
you can.’ It is because, in this autobiography the philosophy is spiced
with fun, and the fun sometimes spiced with philosophy, that so true
a picture of the man emerges from the book. When he looks at himself
he sees not only an intensely interesting being but also an intensely
amusing one. He speaks of his school days as the period during which ‘I
was being instructed by somebody I did not know, about something I did
not want to know.’ He tells how on his wedding day he stopped to buy a
glass of milk at some haunt of his infancy, and again to buy a revolver
and cartridges ‘with a general notion of protecting my bride from the
pirates doubtless infesting the Norfolk Broads.’
“You will find the same amusement he found if you read and re-read his
chapter on ‘Friendship and Foolery,’ his story of the sudden invasion
of Henry James’ house at Rye by Mr. Belloc and another, unshaven and
dishevelled but vociferous and irrepressible, his account of the
birthday dinner to Mr. Belloc at which there were to be no speeches,
and at which everybody present spoke, and his story of the aged
negro porter in America with a face like a walnut whom, he says, ‘I
discouraged from brushing my hat, and who rebuked me saying, ‘Ho, young
man, yo’s losing ye dignity before yo times. Yo’s got to look nice for
the girls.’
“The sketches of his friends and those of the many public men with
whom he came in contact are of extraordinary interest. In a few lines
he paints sharp and unforgettable portraits not only of his intimate
friends but of men and women with whom he had perhaps but one short
conversation. It is thus he tells of his meeting with King George
V at the house of the late Lord Burnham. He sums up his impression
of ‘about as genuine a person as I ever met’ in these words--‘If it
should ever happen that I hear before I die among new generations who
never saw George the Fifth that he is being praised either as a strong
silent man, or depreciated as a stupid and empty man, I shall know that
history has got the whole portrait wrong.’
“There are brilliant little sketches of George Wyndham, Charles
Masterman and Cunninghame Graham, among many others; of each one it
is the true thing and the generous thing that he sets down. No less
arresting are the little cameos of wholly unknown men and women who
said or did something that left an impression on his receptive and
retentive mind. For example there was the ‘huge healthy simple-faced
man of the plastering profession’ who at a Penny Reading, being unable
to endure further recitations about to be provided by a gentleman who
had already obliged with ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and ‘The
May Queen,’ ‘arose slowly in the middle of the room like some vast
Leviathan arising from the ocean and observed, ‘Well, I’ve just ’ad
about enough of this. =Good= evening, Mr. Ash. =Good= evening, ladies
and gentlemen,’ and shouldered his way out of the Progressive Hall with
an unaffected air of complete amiability and profound relief.’
“Memorable as are all the records of his outer life, the insight that
he gives us into his mental and spiritual development is of deeper
significance. It would be impossible, for me at least, to summarize
the subjective side of this autobiography. To be understood, even to
be partly understood, it must be read in its entirety. Many readers
will not be able to accept the conclusions to which Chesterton found
himself inevitably driven, but none can fail to see that his steadfast
faith, his sure hope, and his abounding charity were the outcome of no
slipshod or haphazard thought, but of mental processes to which he gave
the whole of his clear and original mind, and that in his life-long
struggle towards the light which he felt assured he had ultimately
found he was as completely honest with himself as he always was in his
dealings with his fellow men.
“This is a noble record of a noble life.”
CHAPTER TWO
LITERARY APPRENTICESHIP
Chesterton had a shorter apprenticeship for a writing career than most
men of letters. After leaving St. Paul’s he went to the Slade Art
School where he graduated in 1891 at the age of seventeen. He forthwith
began reviewing books on art for the “Bookman,” the “Speaker,” and
other periodicals. In 1901 he married Frances Blogg whom he had known
for some time. Among those present at the wedding was Miss Elizabeth
Yeats, the sister of the poet William Butler Yeats, who recalls,
“My sister and I were at the Chesterton’s wedding at St. Mary’s
Abbots in Kensington. Gilbert wanted the ceremony as ceremonial as
possible--but Frances, who then belonged to some new thought people
in religious matters, wanted everything possible cut from the Church
of England Service--except just the legal parts. Gilbert had been, of
course, brought up a nonconformist.”
Chesterton’s marriage was the beginning of thirty-five years of
happiness with a wife who was ideally congenial.[A]
His first book “Greybeards at Play,” consisting of jingles and
sketches, had appeared in 1894. As time went on he gradually found the
expression of ideas more satisfying than any kind of art work.
[A] Frances Chesterton died December 12, 1938.
From 1898 to 1901 he and his brother Cecil helped Hilaire Belloc on
“The New Witness,” a weekly paper pledged to wage eternal against
political corruption. Some years earlier he had severed his connections
with socialism and adopted Belloc’s ideas now known as “Distributism,”
the progress of which was to be ultimately chronicled by the famous
“G. K.’s Weekly” founded in 1926.
Stephen Gwynn recalls the first book written for Macmillan.
“It is so long ago that I only dimly remember my first encounter with
G. K. C. He was married and they let a flat--Battersea Park--a tiny
flat--in 1901. I never knew two people who changed less in nearly forty
years.
“On my advice the Macmillans had asked him to do Browning in the
‘English Men of Letters,’ when he was still not quite arrived. Old
Mr. Craik, the Senior Partner, sent for me and I found him in white
fury, with Chesterton’s proofs corrected in pencil; or rather not
corrected; there were still thirteen errors uncorrected on one page;
mostly in quotations from Browning. A selection from a Scotch ballad
had been quoted from memory and three of the four lines were wrong. I
wrote to Chesterton saying that the firm thought the book was going
to “disgrace” them. His reply was like the trumpeting of a crushed
elephant. But the book was a huge success as it deserved to be.”
J. Lewis May writes about another early book,
“A book that created something of a sensation in its day was the
penetrating study of George Bernard Shaw by Chesterton. The mention of
Chesterton reminds me that it was Lane who published his ‘Orthodoxy’
and his ‘Napoleon of Notting Hill,’ as well as ‘Heretics.’ Those, I
think, were in the days before the royalty system came in, and I fancy
Lane bought them outright. It was in regard to the first that I heard
that Chesterton brought it in chapter by chapter as he wrote it, and it
was written on any miscellaneous scraps of paper that came to his hand.
He did not disdain, I have been told, even the paper that sugar is
wrapped in, for the purpose of recording his valuable thoughts. Anatole
France was accustomed to use the inside of envelopes or the backs of
bills for the same object.”
William Platt gave Chesterton encouragement at the start,
“We are all aware that one of G. K. C.’s first successes was by a
series of articles signed ‘The Defendant’ each one being headed ‘In
Defense of....’
“I wrote immediately to the clever young ‘Defendant’ telling him of the
certainty of his future as a writer. He immediately came ’round to see
me. Tall, young, handsome, vivacious. At once we fraternized.
“After that our trends in life became rather diverse. We met
occasionally, chiefly at public gatherings in London. At rare intervals
we exchanged letters. But G. K. C. never forgot my early prediction of
his inevitable rise to fame, or the many things we had in common, in
his sense of knight-errantry and mine. In any hall the moment he caught
sight of me he would greet me with his radiant smile, or, if free, he
would at once come over to me.”
A newspaperman once asked Chesterton what he considered his first most
important book,
“‘Napoleon of Notting Hill’ and I almost missed writing it. If I hadn’t
written it, I would have stopped writing. I was what you Americans call
‘broke’--only ten shillings in my pocket. Leaving my worried wife, I
went down Fleet Street, got a shave, and then ordered for myself, at
the Cheshire Cheese, an enormous luncheon of my favorite dishes and a
bottle of wine. It took my all, but I could then go to my publishers
fortified. I told them I wanted to write a book and outlined the story
of ‘Napoleon of Notting Hill.’ But I must have twenty pounds, I said,
before I begin.
“‘We will send it to you on Monday.’
“‘If you want the book,’ I replied, ‘you will have to give it to me
today as I am disappearing to write it.’ They gave it.
“Later Chesterton said, ‘What a fool a man is, when he comes to the
last ditch, not to spend the last farthing to satisfy the inner man
before he goes out to fight a battle with wits.’”
Just before the War the Irish Lit-er-a-ry Society had a debate at which
G. K. C. was the principal speaker: the Chairman being Stephen Gwynn,
and among the other speakers was Jimmy Glover at that time conductor of
the Drury Lane orchestra, whose father published the collected edition
of Tom Moore’s melodies. In introducing Chesterton, Stephen Gwynn
chipped him on his life of Browning in the “English Men of Letters
Series,” and on certain mistakes he had made on it, and wondered why he
had undertaken a subject, about which he apparently knew so little.
Chesterton, with his usual chuckle and wiping the perspiration from
his face on to the lapels of his frock coat, retorted that he had had
some doubts on the undertaking, but when he had discovered in the
series entitled “English Men of Letters,” a life written by an Irishman
(Stephen Gwynn) on another Irishman (Tom Moore) he had no further
qualms in the matter. The back-chat continued for a time, and Mr. Boyle
recalls, ended by Chesterton suggesting that he should get on with
the subject of the evening and then proceed with the important matter
before them, which was the weighing of himself against Jimmy Glover
who had had the audacity to state that he was heavier than the famous
author. After the meeting George Boyle had a few words with G. K. C.
and reminded him that he was in St. Paul’s School with him but that he
had been in a higher class than himself. With the same good-natured
chuckle G. K. C. said this was quite impossible as he had always
remained in the very lowest class he could while at that school.
As known from his “Autobiography,” Chesterton wrote a great deal for
“The Speaker” under J. L. Hammond’s editorship. The latter came to know
him through L. R. Oldershaw (an old school friend of his who shared
rooms with Hammond at that time in the Temple.) Oldershaw wrote for
“The Speaker” (mainly fiction reviewing) and he brought Chesterton to
see Hammond. As we can imagine he made a deep impression on Hammond,
and on the other young men who worked for “The Speaker.” The first
contribution he made was an article on Ruskin in the form of a review
of a life by W. G. Collingwood. This appeared on April 26th, 1900. The
first number of “The Speaker” after it had passed into the hands of
a group of Liberals to which Hammond belonged, was published at the
beginning of October, 1899.
Chesterton wrote much during the Boer War, including some excellent
skits on Chamberlain and other topics at the General Election of 1900.
F. W. Hirst has recollections about “The Speaker”:
“As regards G. K. Chesterton, I was partly responsible for publishing
his early contributions to ‘The Speaker’ which I helped edit from
1899 (when I first met him) until after the end of the Boer War. My
political cooperation with Chesterton (and Belloc) was mainly due to
our antipathy to aggressive imperialism which was shared with Mark
Twain.”
CHAPTER THREE
MEETINGS WITH G. K. C.
Miss Alice Henry of Melbourne, Australia, has kindly pointed out to
the author that the following is something which has never had any but
ephemeral publication in a newspaper, and yet it is surely one of the
most striking messages he ever uttered. Chesterton was the one British
writer, utterly unknown before, who built up a great reputation during
the South African War, and it was gained, not through nationalistic
support, but through determined and persistent opposition to the
British policy. After the war ended, he ran a column in the “London
Daily News.” A correspondent had asked him for a definition of his
anti-war attitude. This was his reply,
“The unreasonable patriot is one who sees the faults of his fatherland
with an eye which is clearer and more merciless than any eye of hatred,
the eye of an irrational and irrevocable love.”
The reader will recall that in his “Autobiography” Chesterton states
that it was in Fleet Street that he first met Sir Philip Gibbs “who
carried a curious air of being the right man in the wrong place.”
However, in a letter to the author, Sir Philip disagrees with this,
“As regards G. K. C., he was a good friend of mine and has placed
me on record in his ‘Autobiography’ as ‘the right man in the wrong
place’--though as a matter of fact I claim to have been the right man
in the right place--which was Fleet Street, where he and I met many
times as writers for the Press. His books belong to my mental library
and he will live in English literature as one of our great essayists,
and above all as a good poet.”
Sir Oliver Lodge recalls:
“G. K. C. at one time lived at the set of flats in Artillery Mansions
where I had one of them, and I used to meet him outside sometimes
waiting for a cab in the street and had a few words with him. I also
met him at the Synthetic Society dinners, and once I impounded a
piece of blotting-paper on which he had made a lot of characteristic
scribbles (clever sketches of faces) absentmindedly during a discussion
at one of these dinners.”
Robert Blatchford, the well known editor of “The Clarion” and author
of “Merrie England,” who was born away back in 1851, tells of a long
controversy he had with Chesterton in the press some thirty years ago
about determinism: “Some years later he wrote in some paper, I forgot
which, and paid me the finest compliment I ever received. He said,
“‘Very few intellectual minds have left such a mark on our time: have
cut so deep or remained so clean. His case for Socialism, so far as it
goes, is so clear and simple that any one would understand it when it
was put properly: his genius was that he could put it properly. His
triumphs were triumphs of strong style, active pathos, and picturesque
metaphor: his very lucidity was a generous sympathy with simple minds.
For the rest he had triumphed with being honest and by not being
afraid.’
“Now in paying me that compliment he complimented himself, for only
a very warm-hearted and generous man could have treated an opponent
with such gallantry and kindness. But you cannot publish that
tribute without giving the impression that I am fishing for a cheap
advertisement.
“Then as to his books. I liked what he wrote about Dickens and some of
his poetry, and I recognize his brilliance: but a good deal of his work
I found rather tiresome, and you cannot publish such an opinion.
“We met several times and got on quite pleasantly together.”
W. W. Jacobs, the author of “Many Cargoes,” recollects,
“I cannot recall my first meeting with Chesterton: it was so very long
ago. But I do remember an occasion when he sat next to me at dinner and
said that he had rheumatism so badly that he did not know how he would
be able to stand up for his speech. A difficulty which he solved by
keeping my right shoulder in a strong hand and bearing down upon it. It
was a good speech, but it seemed to be the longest I had ever listened
to.”
“I regret that I never met G. K. C. personally,” laments James Hilton,
“but I did when quite a small boy send him a poem I had written (a
drinking song as a matter of fact), modeled after his own style, and
received a charming letter from his wife, I think, saying that he had
been much interested and ‘believed that after the war there would be a
great recrudescence of drinking songs.’ This was my first letter from
even the wife of a celebrity and I was very proud of it. As a matter
of fact, in my entire life I have only written anything you could call
fan letters to two authors, Chesterton on this one occasion, and again
later to Galsworthy.
“I wish I could give you more interesting reminiscences of Chesterton,
whose work I admire very much, but we were of different generations
and it happened that we never met, though we had many mutual friends.
I think my favorite book of his is ‘The Man Who Was Thursday,’ which I
remember reading during my school days. I am very pleased to hear from
you that he expressed admiration for ‘Goodbye Mr. Chips.’ I did not
know of this and it is a source of deep gratification to me.”
Christopher Hollis first met G. K. C. in company with one of Belloc’s
sons:
“The first time that I met Mr. Chesterton was, when as an undergraduate
at Oxford, I was in the company of Hilary Belloc, the son of Mr.
Belloc, to see the Association Football Cup Final--the culminating
event of the English football season--at Wembley. We were traveling by
motor bicycle from Oxford to Wembley and, passing through Beaconsfield
in the middle of the morning, Hilary Belloc took me to pay a call on
Mr. Chesterton, whom we found walking in the garden with his wife.”
And Hilaire Belloc himself:
“I met Mr. Chesterton first when I was thirty, and he, I think,
twenty-six. That was at the end of the year 1900. I had already
written and spoken for some years on what later became known as
‘Distributism.’ I do not think that he had by that time written or
spoken upon public affairs.”
Gilbert Frankau is “afraid that I only met G. K. Chesterton once.
This was at a debate. He took the chair and was, I remember, a little
sarcastic about my own contribution. But the sarcasm was so beautifully
done that it became almost a compliment. He really had a rare charm
of manner. And he really was a character. Characters being only too
rare in this modern world where all tend to become stereotyped. I
was, of course, a Father Brown fan. But which really made the deepest
impression on my young mind was Chesterton’s poetry. It had, for me,
the supreme virtue of vigor.”
The critic Coulson Kernahan admired Chesterton hugely:
“The first time I met him was when he was lunching with dear old Robert
Barr at the Savage Club. Barr came over to my table to say ‘Chesterton
is my guest and I told him who you were.’ He said ‘Kernahan and I are
two of the rather uncommon authors, today, who write of serious and
religious subjects. I’d like to meet him.’ ‘So come over to my table,
Kernahan, and meet him.’
“I did. At about two o’clock Barr had to leave to keep an editorial
engagement, and I said to G. K. C. ‘I am a member. Won’t you stay on as
my guest now your host is going?’ He did. He stayed till six o’clock,
talking brilliantly all the time (with an interlude for tea--’till then
he had enjoyed the club’s excellent wine), and never once repeated
himself. Then we met again at the Centenary Celebration of George
MacDonald. Ramsay MacDonald was President of the Centenary Memorial,
with Chesterton and myself as Vice-Presidents, and G. K. C. was one of
the speakers, and very happy and interesting in what he said.
“My last meeting with him was in Hastings. My wife and I were passing
the Queen’s Hotel on the front, and I heard myself hailed by name. It
was G. K. C. sitting outside in the sun at a table, with a bottle of
wine before him, and he invited us to come and share it, and as many
more bottles as we felt inclined for. Once again, he talked in that
brilliant paradoxical and ‘intriguing’ way of his and for hours on at a
time. My wife and I came away with his musical, but rather high voice,
still in our ears, and with new and many beautiful, but sometimes
perplexing thoughts, born of what that man of genius had said, in our
minds.
“That, alas, is all I can tell you of G. K. C. But if you can get sight
of my book ‘Celebrities’ which I think Dutton published in America, you
will find G. K. C. figuring there as Judge, (Bernard Shaw as Foreman
and myself as one of the Jury), at the much discussed Edwin Drood trial
held in the June before the war by the Dickens Fellowship of which I
was, and still am, a Vice-President. Chesterton, as I say in my book,
took the part of Judge seriously and finely, for we wished to come to
some discovery about Edwin Drood. But Bernard Shaw ‘guyed’ the show,
and turned a serious inquiry into a farce.”
Eric Gill, the well known sculptor, recalls,
“Apart from seeing Chesterton many times at meetings I don’t think I
actually met him in a personal way until about 1925 on the occasion of
the founding of ‘G. K.’s Weekly,’ when I stayed the night at his house
and we discussed the policy of his paper, especially with reference to
industrialism and art. After we came to live here (which is only a few
miles from Beaconsfield) we saw him more often.”
A party of members of St. George’s Rambling Society, devoted to
historical and archaeological research were visiting Beaconsfield on
a pleasant afternoon in the September of 1935. They called upon the
author at his home, “Top Meadow.” Mrs. Chesterton received them with
much courtesy, and while they were talking to her, he came into the
Lounge Hall of his house, which was fitted up in the Tudor style, with
large fire-place, around which everyone grouped. They rose when he
entered, and he soon engaged all in conversation. He was in excellent
form. His first question, “What really did you come here to see?” was
promptly answered by one of the members, Fred H. Postans, “We came to
see Mr. Chesterton.” He then told an amusing anecdote against himself.
He had been much annoyed by the noise made by the local film studios
quite close to his home, and after sending several ineffectual letters
of protest, eventually asked his secretary to call upon the manager
of the studios. Upon doing so, that lady made a strong protest saying
emphatically, “The position is becoming impossible.... Mr. Chesterton
can’t write,” to which the manager replied, “We were well aware of
that.” He relished the telling of this story immensely. He went on to
give some local details about Beaconsfield. It was asked him whether
he ever intended to write a Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and he said
he thought that had already been done very well by Boswell. Postans
pointed out that there was a little too much Boswell in that, in his
opinion. He seemed to agree and said that he greatly admired the Doctor
and it was not entirely impossible that he might undertake to write his
life.
“My only meeting with Chesterton,” writes Hugh Kingsmill, “was in
the autumn of 1912, when I went to Beaconsfield to interview him for
‘Hearth and Home,’ which was being edited by Frank Harris. One of
his arms was in a sling, and he found great difficulty in pouring
out drink. To my surprise he was not quaffing ale but sipping a
liqueur. He insisted however in pouring the drinks for both of us,
out of courtesy. He seemed to me very absent-minded and gentle, and I
formed an extremely pleasant impression of him. At the same time he
did not strike me as at all alive to ordinary existence. His praise
of the man in the street and of common life has always seemed to
me a defense thrown up against his own temperament. I think he was
naturally an artist and poet of the self-absorbed, rather limited
kind, and that he was afraid of this tendency, and fled to democracy,
Dickens and eventually the Roman Church, in order not to lapse into
pure aestheticism. As far as I know, and I have met many of them,
his friends were drawn from rather cranky people, not from normal
types, and this illustrates the division between his opinions and his
temperament. He was not a good judge of individuals, in my opinion.
Nothing could be further from the truth than his picture of Dickens as
a roistering lover of the poor. On the other hand, his intelligence was
very acute in the destructive criticism of the fads and poses against
which he was always contending. If he did not understand ordinary life,
he certainly understood the aesthetes, faddists and millenarians of
the twenty years before the war, and made brilliant game of them in
‘Heretics.’ Since the war, his work seems to me to have fallen off
greatly. I have seen him several times, wandering about the streets or
in Marylebone station, and was touched by his melancholy look. I think
life depressed him. In his youth he praised the poor man’s literature
of thrillers and shockers. In his later life he denounced the cinema.
What the distinction, at any rate in mind, between printed nonsense
and visible nonsense is, he never explained. I attribute this change
of fact that as he grew older, he could not summon up enough energy
to continue his celebration of the man in the street, and was more
concerned with finding reasons for his faith in his last refuge from a
perplexing world, the Roman Catholic Church.
“But he did a valuable work in destructive criticism, and he was a
lovable figure. I cannot think of any other well-known writer of the
day in England whom one would not sooner spare from the scene than
G. K. My friend Hesketh Pearson was staying with me when I read of
Chesterton’s death. I told him of it through the bathroom door, and he
sent up a hollow groan which must have been echoed that morning all
over England.”
Philip Guedalla recollects, “I first saw Gilbert Chesterton on the
occasion of a visit of his to Oxford when I was an undergraduate
’round about 1909 or 1910. It was a dark vision of the inside of a
four-wheeled cab almost entirely filled with Chesterton. From its
interior an arm and hand emerged and proceeded to struggle wildly with
the outside handle of the vehicle. There was a College debate the
same evening of which Chesterton was the opener; and I was offered
up to him as the only undergraduate with insufficient impudence to
attempt this suicidal controversy. He came back with me to my room
in College and performed two acts which would have struck him as
sacramentally Chestertonian. First he sat through my only arm chair to
its destruction; then he finished all my whisky. On the next morning I
piously presented for signature by its author a copy of ‘Orthodoxy’ and
was profoundly shocked when he inscribed it ‘BOSH BY G. K. CHESTERTON.’”
“Yes, I should be delighted to go on record as one of the admirers
of G. K. Chesterton,” writes Clements Ripley. “He has always been an
enthusiasm of mine. The first book of his I ever read was ‘The Man
Who Was Thursday.’ I couldn’t have been more than fourteen when I
picked this up and of course a great deal of the symbolism and the
metaphysical quality of the book escaped me at that age. I read it for
the story and it was a very fast moving and fascinating story. I think
even then I appreciated the brilliancy of Chesterton’s paradoxical
style, although at that time I certainly wouldn’t have called it that.”
“It seems hardly possible,” ponders Walter de la Mare, “that a human
being with the least claim to a vestige of intelligence should
have forgotten his first meeting with G. K. C. I am, however, that
unfortunate kind of man, and cannot even remember my first observations
on entering this (at least) exceptionally interesting world. I recall
most vividly, of course, many meetings and these memories are not
in the slightest degree composite ones--even if memories ever are
composite. And so vividly, indeed, that it all but amounts to an
hallucination--as if we were meeting again!
“Like how many, many friends of his, I have the greatest affection for,
and admiration of, his work--and how much his work was he himself,
though not, of course, all himself! That, I suppose, can never be.”
“There is in London a distinguished Society,” declares Marie Belloc
Lowndes, “called The Wiseman Dining Society. As its name implies, it
is a Catholic Society, but no distinction is made with regard to the
religion of the speakers. A great number of outstanding men and women
have delivered addresses on every kind of subject of interest to an
educated man and woman. The net thrown has been large, among those who
have spoken being people as different as Lord Cecil (of the League of
Nations), Algernon Blackwood, the famous novelist, Liddell Hart, the
most noted military critic in the English-speaking world, and Bernard
Pares, the great authority on Russia. Of them all, and the Society
has been in existence now for something like ten years--by far the
most interesting, and the most beautifully delivered address, was that
of G. K. C. on Joan of Arc. This was the more remarkable, as to the
best of my belief, Chesterton was not celebrated in this country as
a speaker. I myself never heard him speak in public, but on that one
occasion. No reporters can be admitted to these dinners because a very
free discussion follows every paper read, so I fear no record of the
speech exists.”
Father Owen F. Dudley records, “I remember still quite vividly my
first meeting with Mr. Chesterton and having tea with him in his house
in Beaconsfield, Bucks. He was tremendously jovial over H. G. Wells,
whom we discussed, and whom he considered a thinker who always stopped
thinking. As I watched him, I realized that all the jokes that were
bubbling out of him, as well as the epigrams, would in all probability
appear in some article or book. Mrs. Chesterton and the Secretary were
at tea and it struck me as one of the cheeriest households I had ever
been in.”
CHAPTER FOUR
SOME FRIENDS
“There’s nothing worth the wear of living
Save laughter and the love of friends.”
No one believed more in these words of his friend Hilaire Belloc than
Chesterton himself. He delighted in thousands of steadfast friends and
acquaintances, and they rejoiced in his inimitable wisdom and good
fellowship.
The novelist, Isabel C. Clark, first met him in 1929 when he and his
wife lunched with her at Piazza Grazioli: “I cannot remember that he
said anything at all amusing or arresting, resembling in this the late
Lytton Strachey and Kenneth Graham so that I imagine few authors are as
loquacious as myself. But then I am not a man of genius!
“When I saw him he was fifty-five years of age but looked at least ten
years more, probably on account of his enormous bulk about which he
was fond of joking; indeed I believe he was proud of resembling Dr.
Johnson in this respect.
“I heard him lecture on Henry VIII here at the Convent of the Holy
Child when he said that Henry had no intention of Protestantizing the
Church in England but thought he could have a Catholic Church with
himself at the head of it, and that he was astonished to discover how
rapidly it disintegrated into many sects. I remember his saying on this
occasion: ‘Many people are prejudiced against Henry VIII because he
was a Large Fat Man,’ and then going off into a chuckle of laughter,
swelling himself out to an enormous size as he spoke. His wife told me
he always rather spoilt his own jokes by laughing at them before he
uttered them.”
Ralph Adams Cram met him first in London a good many years ago: “Father
Wagget asked my wife and myself once when we were staying in London,
whom we would like best to meet--‘anyone from the King downward.’ We
chose Chesterton who was a very particular friend of Father Wagget. At
that time we put on a dinner at the Buckingham Palace Hotel (in those
days the haunt of all the County families) and in defiance of fate,
had this dinner in the public dining room. We had as guests Father
Wagget, G. K. C. and Mrs. Chesterton. The entrance into the dining room
of the short processional created something of a sensation amongst
the aforesaid County families there assembled. Father Wagget, thin,
crop-headed monk in cassock and rope; G. K. C., vast and practically
globular; little Mrs. Chesterton, very South Kensington in moss green
velvet; my wife, and myself.
“The dinner was a riot. I have the clearest recollection of G. K. C.
seated ponderously at the table, drinking champagne by magnums,
continually feeding his face with food which, as he was constantly
employed in the most dazzling and epigrammatic conversation, was apt
to fall from his fork and rebound from his corporosity, until the
fragments disappeared under the table.