“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!