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!”