CHAPTER EIGHT
CHESTERTON AT NEW HAVEN
Thomas Caldecot Chubb met Chesterton at the Elizabethan Club in New Haven almost twenty years ago, and his initial impression still persists that he was a large man in every way, “Physically, of course, he was the size of Falstaff, but that is not all I am talking about. Perhaps the best way of saying what I mean, is to point out that he had this further in common with the huge knight who is, in a sense, truly Shakespeare’s most tragic figure: that beneath surface-wit and brilliance there was something one must label deep and profound.”
Chesterton had been lecturing to a typical Yale audience of the early ’20’s--four or five consciously literary undergraduates who made a grim duty of never missing such a talk, and about ninety percent of the membership of the local women’s clubs. The Speaker spilled over, like a wine keg broached, into the Middle Ages. Among other things, he spoke, naturally, of their individual craftsmanship. He related how it appeared even in such matters as meat and drink. He regretted with a nostalgic gusto those gone days when, as he put it, every monastery, almost every home had its own brand of liqueur or wine. Then he was transported from the crowded hall with its murmurs of polite, not too comprehending, applause, and made to stand in the dark living room of the white building across the street, with its comfortable shabby leather chairs, and its stiff painting of an acidulous and very white-faced Virgin Queen; and as he stood there--wearing a grey suit (so the picture, though perhaps inaccurately after so long a time, comes back to Chubb) and holding a cup of tea in one hand, his eyeglasses in the other--Chubb was introduced to him.
“Mr. Chesterton,” Chubb said, “you have your wish.”
Obviously, he wanted to know what wish and how he had it.
“Thanks to Prohibition, every house is making, if not its own liqueur, at least its own likker.”
It cannot truthfully be related that he was hugely diverted by Chubb’s attempt at being facetious. Bathtub gin was, it may be supposed, hardly just the evocation he would have wished of the spirit of the age of Abelard and Aquinas. And furthermore, Prohibition was a serious matter, not a jesting one. So Chubb was properly covered with an appropriate undergraduate confusion which he tried to hide by holding out a copy of “The Ballad of the White Horse.” This haltingly--after his previous boldness--he asked him to autograph and to write a verse from it upon the fly-leaf.
“There is no need to go into details about his courteous compliance other than to indicate the thrill it gave me,” recollects Chubb, “by saying that in that varnished period the ‘Ballad’ seemed to me a high point in English poetry. It seemed almost incredible I was actually talking to and facing the man who wrote it. But a confession must be added to this statement. It was virtually all of Chesterton I knew by having read. That and ‘Lepanto’ were the only Chestertonian works I had deigned to cast my eyes upon. Of course, I knew the names of others. But that anyone who could write this immortal stuff should waste his time turning out such poor trash as a series of fluent novels, certain aggravating essays, a contradicting sort of history of England, and--horror of horrors--the Father Brown ‘detective’ stories, was, in a ghastly way, incredible. It was pot-boiling. It was prostituting one’s genius. It was selling out to Mammon and the Philistines. And that was, of course, the sin against the Holy Ghost.
“It is now necessary to reverse that stand--though here perhaps youth’s headlong egotism has merely been replaced by incipient middle age’s complacent one. For somehow the swinging lines which relate Alfred’s adventures seem a little bouncy now. They are dated, just as a brass radiator and acetylene lamps would date even a T-model Ford. Even the young don’t turn to them, being engaged in writing not quite grammatical verses to Communism and proletarian poetry which no member of the proletariat can make head or tail of. And ‘Lepanto,’ which--with ‘Ivry’ and what Tennyson has to say about the Revenge--is among the most stirring short narrative poetry of the language, does not set the pulses beating quite as rapidly in 1939 as it did in 1922. But the entertainment and wisdom of ‘The Flying Inn,’ ‘The Man Who Was Thursday,’ and ‘The Napoleon of Notting Hill,’ and the cool, paradoxical truths--well, anyway, from time to time they are true--of the essays, of the history, of the writing on Browning, Thackeray and Dickens, of the controversies with that irritating but likeable friend-adversary G. B. S., still have their power to stimulate. And personally I now believe that the best of Chesterton can be found, if you delve for it, in the Father Brown stories; that out of them can be mined by an attentive prospector the purest Chestertonian gold.
“All of which, if true, places the man for us. A stimulating writer, a delightful writer, on certain occasions even an important writer, but was he quite a great one? With Kipling, Wells, Shaw, Arnold Bennett and perhaps half a dozen others with whom I will not rashly provoke controversy by naming, he will be compulsory reading for every student of the era. It is less certain that the general public will turn to him after a hundred or even after fifty years.
“Yet he has given a lot, and in no way more than by his provocative way of seeing and saying things. He loves Meredith and he hates Hardy, yet he nails truth to the wall by saying that the man of the two who had a healthy point of view had the perverse and crabbed style, whereas the one with the perverse and crabbed point of view had the healthy and manly style. He stated pungently and accurately--writing of ‘The Book of Snobs’--that ‘aristocracy does not have snobs any more than democracy does.’ Thackeray might have learned something from this. He had the insight to realize that Browning was among the finest love poets of the world though quite to the contrary runs the general opinion. (A similar, though not the same, revolutionary statement might be made of our own E. A. Robinson, substituting perhaps emotion for love.) He considered--a half truth--that the whole of present day England was the remains of Rome; and--a whole truth--that Henry VIII was as unlucky in his wives as they were in him. Which statements, plucked very haphazardly from out of his writings, ought to indicate what I mean.”
Another who heard him at Yale was Mr. Harold Chapman Bailey:
“Chesterton’s lecture, as I recall it, was given in the Sprague Memorial Hall, which is part of the Yale Music School. The entire subject matter of the Chesterton address has escaped me, but in the question period afterward the first two or three questions were so puerile that despite my youth I was emboldened to rise with this query: ‘Will you not tell me something about William Cobbett?’
“I recall that at first Mr. Chesterton did not understand my question, but when I repeated it, he seemed greatly pleased to find that in far away America there was some interest in Cobbett. Accordingly he spent at least five minutes explaining to us who William Cobbett was, what he stood for, and how in a measure Cobbett was his own spiritual ancestor. He concluded by remarking that the Yale University Press would do well to get out a new edition of Cobbett’s works. I have often wondered whether this query of mine played any part in stimulating him later on to write a volume on Cobbett.”
Major James B. Pond also met G. K. C. at New Haven, and had the privilege of being present when Chesterton and ‘A. E.’ (George Russell) met at the William Lyon Phelps’ house in New Haven. It was the first time these two men ever met. Russell hardly ever went out of Ireland and these two famous men had to come to New Haven to get personally acquainted. It happened they were both lecturing the same day.