“His coming was not melodramatic; it was, on the contrary, quite simple, quite idyllic, and quite characteristic. In fact, he did not come at all, rather was it that our eyes, and later our herald, went to him. For quite close to the house we espied him, hatless and negligently clad in a Norfolk suit of homespun, leaning in the rain against a budding tree, absorbed in the pages of a little red book.
“This was a most fitting vision. It suited admirably his unaffected, careless, and altogether childlike genius. He came into the house shortly afterwards and consumed tea and cake like any mortal and talked the talk of Olympus with the abandonment and irresistibility of a child. I found his largeness wonderfully proportionate, even, as is so rarely the case with massive men, to his head. This is amply in keeping with the rest of his person. He wears a tangled mass of light brown hair prematurely streaked with grey, and a slight moustache. His grey-blue eyes laugh happily as his full lips unload themselves of a constant flow of self-amused and piquant words. Like Dr. Johnson whom he resembles so much in form, he is a great talker. But while I looked at him I was not reminded of the lexicographer, but of Balzac. And as his monologue rolled on and we laughed and wondered, I found myself carried away to a studio in France, where the head of Chesterton became one with the head of Rodin’s conception of France’s greatest literary genius.
“Since my first meeting I have seen G. K. C. many times. I have seen him standing upon platforms defending the people’s pleasures against the inroads of Puritanism. I have seen him addressing men from a pulpit, and on one memorable occasion at Clifford’s Inn Hall I saw him defending the probability of the liquefication of the blood of St. Januarius in the teeth of a pyrotechnic heckling from Bernard Shaw. Again I have seen his vast person dominating the staring throng in Fleet Street like a superman; and I have seen the traffic of Ludgate Circus held up for him, as he strolled by in cloak and sombrero like a brigand of Adelphi drama or a Spanish hidalgo by Velasquez, oblivious alike of critical bus-driver and wonder-struck multitude.
“But best it is to see him in his favorite habitat of Bohemian Soho. There in certain obscure yet excellent French restaurants with Hilaire Belloc and other writers and talkers, he may be seen, sitting behind a tall tankard of lager or a flagon of Chianti, eternally unravelling the mysterious tangle of living ideas; now rising mountainously on his feet to overshadow the company with weighty argument, anon brandishing a wine bottle as he insists upon defending some controversial point until ‘we break the furniture’; and always chuckling at his own wit and the sallies of others, as he fights the battle of ideas with indefatigable and unconquerable good-humour.”
CHAPTER FIVE
ON THE ENGLISH PLATFORM
In the course of his life, Chesterton accomplished much lecturing and public speaking as did most of the English writers of his generation such as Shaw, Wells, and to a lesser extent Galsworthy and Bennett. Like many Englishmen his success as a speaker was variable and subject to his health and feelings even more than most men. Yet no matter how indifferently Chesterton might have done in the formal part of his address, he always more than redeemed himself in the question-and-answer period that followed. The speed with which he would answer questions was simply incredible. As one listened to him answering one question after another usually of so unrelated a nature, one marvelled at ability and nimbleness so extraordinary.
The distinguished author R. Ellis Roberts, heard a lecture at Oxford:
“I do not, alas! remember what Mr. Chesterton lectured to us about. I remember the manner of his lecture. It seemed to be written on a hundred written pieces of variously shaped paper, written in ink and pencils (of all colors and in chalk). All the papers were in a splendid and startling disorder, and I remember being at first just a little disappointed. Then the papers were abandoned, and G. K. C. talked, and we got more and more interested and pleased. I remember a passage about cathedrals and railway stations which aroused opposition; and with opposition and question the real Chesterton broke loose. He will, I am sure, if he reads this in the next world, forgive me for saying that to myself I whispered ‘Elephant’. All day the image had been present with me of something vast and weighty, incredibly simple, incalculably wise, and unquestionably kindly. Foolishly I mourned a certain sluggishness. Then as I say, came opposition; and suddenly—trunk up, roaring, speeding, faster and faster—the wisest of us was pursuing his trifling opponents through quickset hedge and over ploughed fields of argument. How he raced! I know, because of all the opposition none ran faster than I!”
“My own acquaintance with Chesterton,” Father Francis J. Yealy, S. J., writes “has been gained from his books and from one of his lectures delivered in Cambridge, England, in 1925. Just outside the town of Cambridge is a village called Chesterton, the Anglican vicar of which sat on the stage during the lecture. Afterwards he made a short speech, inviting G. K. to visit the village and, I believe, suggesting that it might have been named after his ancestors. At any rate Chesterton responded gracefully and played most amusingly with this identity of names. It was possible, he said, that the place had been named after one of his ancestors, but it seemed more likely that the family had taken their name from it. Perhaps they had lived there in the remote past under a different name, and one of them, who would no doubt have been a worthless fellow, had eventually been run out of town. The natural place to go was of course Cambridge; and the people there with their great kindliness allowed him to loiter about. In time he became a familiar figure in Cambridge; but, as no one knew his name, they began to refer to him as the fellow from Chesterton and later simply as Chesterton. This he thought was very reasonable theory of the origin of his name.”
“One day in February, 1902,” records Mr. Karl H. Harklander, “I happened to notice on the announcing board of the Leeds University that a G. K. Chesterton would lecture about ‘Man, Great Man, Super-man.’ I was a young textile manufacturer on a business journey and hungered for more than ‘bread alone!’ That night I heard the best and also the shortest lecture of my life; in less than twenty minutes our assembly was quite clear about ‘Man, Great man, Super-man.’ I marked my young ‘man’ who might become super-man,’ but who chose to be ‘great man’ in accordance with the exposition of the 1902 lecture.”