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“It is now necessary to reverse that stand—though here perhaps youth’s headlong egotism has merely been replaced by incipient middle age’s complacent one.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.”