“Now, no one could possibly think of me as slipping through a half-closed door! (Laughter).
“I do not know Canada as Mr. Kipling knows it. I have traveled here and there in the miserable capacity of one giving lectures. I might call myself a lecturer; but then again I fear some of you may have attended my lectures. The reason for my presence here today is to return hospitality. I have been twice to Canada. My first visit was made twelve years ago when I crossed to the Dominion from America—that was in the early days of Prohibition. The second time I went up the St. Lawrence. Then I knew that Canada had the foundations of all literature, because she had indeed a country. There was that vast natural background necessary to the growth of literary culture, and there was also what is necessary for all literature—legend. On the Plains of Abraham I was uplifted in the sense in which poetry or great music or even a great monument uplifts one.
“The magnificent cordiality and courtesy of the Canadian people was, to me, amazing. The hospitality of the Canadian Authors’ Association was overwhelming. The Canadian Literature Society rushed out to welcome any stray traveler, and in the confusion I was mistaken for a literary man. (Laughter). I tried to explain I was merely a lecturer, and one of the first things for a lecturer to do is talk about things he does not understand, such as Canada.”
“Are you coming with us to Downing Street, Mr. Chesterton?” asked Miss Carter as the authors all left the hotel.
“No—o,” he drawled, with a delicious sort of chant. “Unfortunately, I have to attend a wretched meeting with three other men; all madmen, like myself!”
Mr. James Truslow Adams happened to have been one of the four or five Americans elected to the Royal Society of Literature, and so he found himself in the rather odd situation of an American who was entertaining Canadians at an empire meeting.
“Chesterton,” recalls Mr. Adams, “was very witty, and although he took a number of sharp cracks at American journalism, I being the only person in the room who was not of the British Empire, there was nothing untrue or unkind. I have an extremely vivid impression of the man, not only of his enormous physical bulk and of his constant mopping of his forehead with his handkerchief, but also of his intellectual vitality.”
The President of the Canadian Authors’ Association, the late Charles W. Gordon (Ralph Connor) was “struck with the freshness of Chesterton’s thought, the brilliancy of his imagination, and his warm human sympathy. I had heard him spoken of as cold, but I could not say that of his speech or of his personality that day.”
Mr. Rodolphe L. Megroz made a pilgrimage in 1922, to Chesterton’s home.
“Oh, yes, certainly, sir,” said the railway porter at Beaconsfield when asked where Chesterton lived. “Turn to your left at the bridge and along the road to the old town. When you come to the film studios, go across into the side road and it’s surrounded by a field. His house is called ‘Top Meadow’.”