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.”