CHAPTER TEN

CHESTERTON AND AMERICAN AUTHORS.

Recently there appeared a statement to the effect that although Chesterton had considerable popularity with the average American reader, our authors cared but little for the man and his work. Doubting such a sweeping statement, I wrote to various men of letters who would serve as a good cross-section of American literature, and their replies proved unusually illuminating.

“Of course you may put me down as an admirer of Chesterton,” declares Channing Pollock, “though I recall surprisingly little of his work. I have read so much that, after fifty-six years, I begin to find recollections blurred. My admiration of Chesterton is founded on my impression of the man--of what he was and stood for; of his sincerity, courage, forthrightness and general altruism.”

“As a boy of ten,” records Thomas O. Mabbott, “I read regularly copies of the ‘London Illustrated News’ to which G. K. C. was a regular contributor. I am one of those people who, while not exactly a prodigy, developed very early and think very much more as I did when sixteen than most people seem to do. I often boast how little most writers influence my own thought but Chesterton is one of the few who did! I read much of his work as a very young man, and believe he is one of the very few authors who impressed me =profoundly=. I saw ‘Magic’ when it was given in New York during the war--a mark of devotion, surely, since I rarely went to a serious play. Incidentally I thought it =very= effective as an acted play.”

Clement Wood first read “Heretics” and then “Orthodoxy,” and immediately obtained the impression that the author was “one of the world’s most alert and persuasively brilliant minds. He made the persons treated of real and significant to me for the first time. Thereafter I read most of his work. His novels are absolutely unique, I wouldn’t be without one, and of all, the ‘Napoleon of Notting Hill’ is the most precious--the glorious effort to revive medievalism today (which I am 100% against intellectually) won me forever. His Father Brown stories, in spite of the ever-present propaganda for Catholicism--which again I am against, but I believe that if religion persists, it will either be Roman Catholic or the Quaker non-Christian (Religious Society of Friends) non-evangelical faith--I regard as by all odds the greatest detective stories ever written. Poe and Doyle are forerunners, and then G. K. C. whose every word is a work of art. I have memorized the plots of nearly all and the wording of many of his memorable openings. His ‘Peacock Trees,’ ‘Club of Queen Trades,’ rank as highly.

“The play ‘Magic’ is immortal and weighs more to me than all Shaw!”

“You may certainly enroll me as one of his admirers,” affirms Donald Ogden Stewart. “Although I do not recall the name of the first book of his which I read, I do remember, however, that it was while I was in my senior year at Yale, and that it had such an influence on me that I immediately proceeded to read every one of his books that I could lay my hands on.”

Henry Hazlitt first encountered Chesterton’s writings in 1916 and “was quickly carried away by his stylistic brilliance. My admiration, I must confess, was not sustained at its original level, but it most certainly never deserted me. I never met him personally, but I heard him debate with Clarence Darrow, and was impressed by his immense superiority over his antagonist, and by his charm as a man.”

William Thomas Walsh first heard about G. K. C. when he was a student at Yale in 1909: “I think it was Professor Chauncey B. Tinker who recommended him in class that year, and I seem to remember that William Lyon Phelps was also a Chesterton enthusiast at that early period. The book that helped and influenced me most was ‘The Everlasting Man.’ I liked it so well that I bought three copies, intending to lend them to as many people as possible, for I thought the whole world should drink at that fountain of wisdom. I soon discovered, however, that some people loved the book and others hated it just as fervently. This was to be expected, perhaps, about anything so profoundly Christian in its perceptions. In fact, I began to entertain an almost superstitious notion that the book had a practical value apart from literary considerations, in what St. Ignatius, following St. John, called the Discernment of Spirits. The various agnostics and pagans to whom I lent the book usually kept it a long while, and finally returned it saying apologetically that they had never found time to read it, though I knew that every one of them had read several other books in the interim. Finally the three volumes disappeared completely from my life. It was partly my fault, for I have a bad habit of lending books, and forgetting to whom: and as the number of people who have to be reminded to return books is apparently very large, I have lost the best part of my library in consequence: for it is usually the book that one is enthusiastic about that one lends. But I can’t help thinking the Devil must have had a particular grudge against so true and so powerful a book, and has continued to hide all three of my volumes on the most obscure shelves of as many sons of Belial. Still, as good comes out of evil in the long run, it may be that the sons of these benighted individuals may inadvertently come upon them on rainy days, and in their innocence read and be enlightened.

“In my biography of Philip the Second, I have had to differ with Chesterton’s interpretations of that most misunderstood gentleman. But when G. K. wrote his glorious ‘Lepanto,’ he was still partly deceived by the tradition that had so long dominated English letters, so far as Spain was concerned. It is the only mistake of importance I have ever noted in the work of that phenomenal man.”

Hamlin Garland met him at the Savage Club in London, and several times in America: “As a matter of fact, I introduced him when he made his first address in New York City. I enjoyed his mystery stories much better than some of his more pretentious work. From my point of view he worked the paradoxes altogether too hard. He was a very singular and interesting character.”

Waldo Frank remembers that when he was “in college and out of it, the essays of G. K. C. stimulated me, indeed. His critique of modern society, his destruction of its complacencies, his suggestive references to other values now absent, meant a good deal to me.”

Myles Connolly feels that Chesterton “will not, try as I will, come under the head of remembrance. He seems vividly contemporary, vitally alive. It’s a worn-out form of tribute, I know, but there’s none greater and I will say it: he lives. The stuff of immortality was so strong in him that beside his memory as the world calls it, it is we who are dead.

“Napoleon said that no man became a writer unless he were a defeatist. When life was too tall and strong for a man, he quit, and in his pen he found corroboration and consolation. That is not, we are aware, altogether so. Although it is true most men who write are running away. But with Chesterton writing was not running away; it was running to--running to reality, to truth. Writing was life with him: it was his breathing, his talk, his laughter, his self. It might be said that those who don’t like Chesterton don’t like the truth. It might ever more accurately be said that those who don’t like Chesterton, don’t like life. That superabundance of his, that hugeness of his, is too much for them. They crawl; he dances (albeit like the mountains of Scripture). They pick-peck; he waves that tremendous sword. They count those corroded little pennies; he empties that fabulous purse of his on the world. He was an extravagant man; extravagant of his riches, his light, his life. It is this shining extravagance that blinds the crawlers and pick-peckers and misers. It is a glory too much for them. A few words of ‘Thoreau’ are, I think, to the point. ‘I fear,’ writes the Concord ascetic, ‘lest my expression may not be =extra-vagrant= enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced ... I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression. Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever?’

“To Chesterton such words as ‘tremendous’ and ‘splendid’ and ‘enormous’ and ‘shattering’ were of common use. (In fact, it was he who made such words popular.) These words came naturally to him because (and he would be the last to admit it) he himself lived these words; such words only could express his vitality and significance. He was a giant. There is no other way of saying it. Except, perhaps, to say he still is.”

James Branch Cabell “enjoyed all the work of Chesterton’s early and middle period. I admit that of his publications during, let us say vaguely, more recent years, I prefer to say nothing, out of loyalty to a person that has given me a vast amount of pleasure. I write this after verifying the fact that his earlier books when I re-read them, can still do this.”

“Indeed I am a warm admirer of Chesterton,” affirms Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. “Apart from his delightful wit and his genius in many directions, he was a great religionist. He as a Catholic, I as a Jew, could see eye to eye with each other, and he might have added, ‘particularly seeing that you are cross-eyed;’ but I deeply respected him. When Hitlerism came, he was one of the first to speak out with all the directness and frankness of a great and unabashed spirit.”

Dr. Alexis Carrel well remembers that “Heretics” was the first Chesterton book that he read almost a quarter of a century ago,

“The extreme clarity and brilliance of his style impressed me greatly. The train of his thought appeared to me as strong, flexible, and shining as a steel blade, and as merciless.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN[B]

THE AUTHOR VISITS TOP MEADOW

In a delightful villa, called Top Meadow, in Beaconsfield, a small town of Buckinghamshire, about forty minutes on the train from London, lives, and has lived for some ten years, Gilbert Keith Chesterton with his charming wife. Chesterton, a huge man, possesses the frankness and enthusiasm of a boy, with unkept curly blond hair, blue eyes, shaggy reddish brown moustache, an exceedingly pleasant and attractive smile, wearing clothes in a somewhat careless and negligent manner. Although clear and resonant, his voice is not as powerful as one would be led to expect for a man of his size. He possesses the little mannerism of twirling the ends of his moustache every now and then. He would make a joke with true Twainian seriousness upon his face, but unlike the great American such feigned seriousness becomes too much for him, and he bursts out in peals of Gargantuan laughter that often renders him speechless for a few seconds. At other times the idea of something funny will cause him to laugh most heartily before he has had a chance to express it in words.

[B] This entire chapter was read, corrected, and approved in its present shape, by Chesterton himself a short time before his death.

In a little hallway, Chesterton introduced me to his wife, and then led the way into the living room, a tremendous chamber fully a hundred feet long, low-ceilinged and surrounded on all sides by shelves bulging and overflowing with books of every description, a massive fire-place built of large stones that must have come from the bed of a nearby brook, and a number of what proved to be exceedingly comfortable chairs grouped around the empty fire-place; for it was midsummer.

As we sat down before the fire-place, Chesterton said he was vastly amused over a delegation from America that had called on him the day before.

“They were making a tour of Europe for the express purpose of unearthing everything they could about Browning. They called on me because I have once written a book on the poet. It was a grave mistake on their part to think that because a man has written a book on a particular subject in the dim and distant past, he therefore knows everything about that subject. At the time of writing the book, I probably was a little more up on Robert Browning than the average person, but all my superior knowledge has slipped from me long ago.”

The question of modern youth came up for discussion.

“Young people today have the idea that old timers are landmarks. I hope I do not fill as much space as Saint Paul’s, but at least I am a Victorian ruin dating from the year 1874. The last time I was in New York I noticed that the landscape was always changing. When a baby is born he just has time to look at the skyscrapers a week or so before they are pulled down. Pulling down New York seems to be the local industry. A baby goes out in his perambulator and his home is pulled down before he gets back.”

“What do you think of the young people today, Mr. Chesterton?”

“Well,” he replied, “their chief trouble is they don’t want to admit that old people really do know the modern movement because we are able to compare it with movements of the past. But the young people know nothing else but the present. The result is that they do not give modern conditions much thought. For instance, if we had moving sidewalks today, the young people would take it for granted, the old ones alone could compare them with the stationary sidewalks.”

“Do you think that much change has taken place in the last fifty years,” I asked.

“We cannot grasp the tremendous change that has taken place since 1874, my birth year. Your country used not to pay much attention to culture. When Matthew Arnold began his lecture series in America, he was worried about what the American papers would say of him for his criticism of certain phases of American culture which he had handled rather severely, but was relieved to find that the papers had large headlines reading,

“‘Matthew Arnold has side whiskers.’ But today you have a very high regard for culture in your country.”

“What literary people did you meet in America, Mr. Chesterton?”

“Among others I met Robert Cortes Holliday, and Sinclair Lewis,” he replied. “I found Lewis a pleasant fellow. He was anxious to learn about the conditions in England. That man, I think, has considerable genius. I met ‘A. E.’ George Russell, also when I was at Yale. He was completely wrapped up in giving his lectures on agriculture to you Americans.”

“What does he think of our country?”

“He has a semi-humorous, rather critical, attitude towards you. He won’t write anything much in praise or anything particularly hostile.”[C]

[C] This prophesy of Chesterton’s proved to be correct.

“What American cities especially appealed to you?”

“Baltimore I found exceedingly charming,” answered Chesterton. “There is a quaint atmosphere about the place that is hard to describe. Saint Louis I also liked, a most pleasant cultured city.”

“I once heard you lecture in Saint Louis, Mr. Chesterton,” I remarked, “and I agree with what you said about the underdog:

“‘When the very poor man gets angry and ‘bites,’ everyone, even the social workers, treat him as though he were a mad dog. Has he not the right to get deliberately angry, the same as anybody else? Once I debated with Clarence Darrow, and when I talked to him after the lecture, he seemed to have sympathy for the poor man, the underdog, who was goaded on to do things, by saying that he was mad. Why cannot people give the underdog credit for biting when he wants to, instead of contending that he is just the same as a mad dog on a rampage?’”

When Galsworthy became the topic of conversation, Chesterton remarked,

“Galsworthy always reminds me of the solicitor of an old English family. I cannot altogether feel that he reflects modern England. He lays too much stress upon a college education. He believes that a man not blessed with a college education might at any time murder his mother. Galsworthy also lacks the sweet balance of humor, only a rather limited amount of humor breathes forth from his works. Like Darrow he, too, holds to the belief that the underdog is always mad if he causes the slightest trouble.

“Again Galsworthy never seems to write with set purpose, while I am one of those people who believe that you’ve got to be dominated by your moral slant. I’m no ‘art-for-art’s-sake’ man. I am quite incapable of talking or writing about Dutch gardens or the game of chess, but if I did, I have no doubt that what I say or write about them would be colored by my view of the cosmos.”

When the question of pessimism came up, I mentioned that the week before I had had the pleasure of dining with A. E. Housman at Cambridge[D] who facetiously told me that he was often compared to Hardy because both their names began with an “H”.

[D] See “An Evening with A. E. Housman,” by Cyril Clemens, 1937.

“That is all the basis critics often have for forming comparisons,” replied Chesterton with a smile, “but in this case there is a measure of truth in the comparison. Both undoubtedly have a certain amount of pessimism. Poet Housman’s, however, has the tang of the fresh air about it, whereas Hardy’s seems somewhat unpleasant.”

And to illustrate his point, Chesterton quoted from “A Shropshire Lad,”

“Oh many a peer of England brews Livelier liquor than the Muse, And malt does more than Milton can To justify God’s ways to man. Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink For fellows whom it hurts to think: Look into the pewter pot To see the world as the world’s not.”

A little later we went to the small dining room which was a few steps higher than, and was separated by a heavy silk curtain from, the living room. At a massive oaken table we sat down to a delicious tea.

When I asked Mrs. Chesterton what was the national dish of England, she promptly replied,

“Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, undoubtedly.”

“Fried eggs and bacon is my favorite dish,” spoke up Chesterton.

I then asked the author what would be his choice if he had to go on a desert island and could take but one book along.

“It would depend upon the circumstances,” he replied. “If I were a politician who wanted to impress his constituents, I would take Plato or Aristotle. But the real test would be with people who had no chance to show off before their friends or their constituents. In that case I feel certain that everyone would take Thomas’ ‘Guide to Practical Shipbuilding’ so that they could get away from the island as quickly as possible. And then if they should be allowed to take a second book it would be the most exciting detective story within reach. But if I could only take one book to a desert isle and was not in a particular hurry to get off, I would without the slightest hesitation put ‘Pickwick Papers’ in my handbag.”

The talk switched to the Russian situation. Chesterton thinks that Lenin was of the mad Russian type, just such a type as Tolstoy,

“But Trotsky is at once both more commercial and cunning; he is the typical Russian or German Jew.”

The Chestertons own a pert little Scotch terrier named Quoodle. “I named him Quoodle,” explained Chesterton, “after the hero of one of my early, but alas forgotten, novels, in the hope that unwary visitors like you would ask about the origin of the name and I would have a good excuse to talk about my novel! But when only the family is present we shorten the name to Quo: a handy name and one that can be yelled to the top of the lungs.”

Among the other delectable viands that Mrs. Chesterton’s bounty provided were some cakes made out of the white of eggs, that caused me to say,

“These cakes put me in mind of some period of English Literature.”

“They remind me, rather,” responded Chesterton with a hearty laugh, “of icebergs and I wish that I was sitting on a large one just now. (It was an extremely hot August afternoon.) But if we must compare them to some period of English literature they remind me of the rococo period, the age of Horace Walpole, in particular of some of the decorations of his home ‘Strawberry Hill’.”

Tea over, Chesterton suggested going to see his garden. After putting on an enormous sombrero, and taking in his hand something like a small axe, but which proved to be a walking stick which his Polish friend, Roman Dyboski, had given him, he led the way through a French window out into a tidy little garden. We sat on camp chairs in a pleasant spot. Chesterton’s one seemed somewhat frail, shaking a little, and to make matters worse, the cat Stanley Baldwin came along and fell sound asleep right under his master’s chair! If anything had happened to the chair, Baldwin would have awakened in cat heaven!

The conversation turned on the rather whimsical subject of chairs.

“H. G. Wells in one of his books,” remarked Chesterton, “has written several pages on the subject of chairs. Some non-materialists might very well contend there is no such a thing as a chair. They would argue that since there are all kinds and varieties of chairs, when you use the word ‘chair’ you cannot have any particular one in mind: therefore the word is only abstract and hence has no equivalent in actuality!”

When I wondered if anything had ever been written on the subject of shoes, Chesterton answered that his friend Hilaire Belloc had done an exceedingly entertaining essay on the subject, “Belloc makes the point that the kind of shoes a man wears and how he keeps them, is a better indication of his character, than any other piece of apparel.”

Chesterton told of a literary club which had lately given a fancy dressed ball for its members, and that he went as Doctor Samuel Johnson. When I asked who Mrs. Chesterton went as, he replied with a merry twinkle in his eye,

“My wife went dressed as one of the characters in a novel that I am going to write in the near future! You see that I devise ways and means to advertise both my old novels and my new ones!”

The subject of Rome and Mussolini came up, and when I expressed admiration for “The Resurrection of Rome,” he snapped,

“I think it was a pretty bad book.”

At my disagreement, a look of mild surprise appeared on Chesterton’s face,

“Well,” explained he, “it was written just after a stay in Rome, and I think that I made the fatal mistake of reading the book too soon after it was written. That should never be done by any author. The longer after the writing that I wait to read one of my books, the better it seems.”

When I mentioned that Mussolini had told me how much he had enjoyed reading “The Man Who Was Thursday,” and had found it exceedingly funny, Chesterton answered,

“Does anyone find my books funny? It pleases me to hear that, for at times I fear that my humorous works are taken seriously and my serious ones humorously. I also had an audience with Mussolini. He did not act in a high and mighty manner at all, but showed a genuine interest in England and asked me numerous questions about the country. He was indeed a jolly card.”

“In what language did you carry on your conversation,” I asked.

“We spoke in French,” replied Chesterton, “and when leaving I said, ‘I hope you excused my poor French, Your Excellency.’ To which Mussolini answered, ‘That’s all right; you speak French about as well as I speak English’.”

After a moment’s pause Chesterton reflected, “I don’t suppose that was much of a compliment for my French, because at that time Mussolini knew practically no English.”

“When do you do most of your writing, Mr. Chesterton?”

“Whenever I get a chance, I do not care much for the typewriter and I find pen or pencil much too tedious, for I am a rather slow writer. At present I do a considerable amount of dictating. I can compose just as readily this way.”

One of the last questions I asked my host was his opinion of Mark Twain,

“I have always admired the genius of Mark Twain which may truly be called gigantic. Mark Twain dealt so much with the gigantic exaggeration of imagination; the skyscrapers of literature. He was the greatest master of the tall story who has ever lived and was also, what is more important, a thoroughly sincere man.”

As the cab to take me to my London train was announced, Chesterton graciously inscribed his “History of England” in the following fashion,

“Greetings to the Mark Twain Society from an Innocent at Home G. K. Chesterton Known as the Unjumping Frog of Bucks County.”

and Mrs. Chesterton added, “And from Frances Chesterton Wife of the Innocent.”