“Napoleon said that no man became a writer unless he were a defeatist. When life was too tall and strong for a man, he quit, and in his pen he found corroboration and consolation. That is not, we are aware, altogether so. Although it is true most men who write are running away. But with Chesterton writing was not running away; it was running to—running to reality, to truth. Writing was life with him: it was his breathing, his talk, his laughter, his self. It might be said that those who don’t like Chesterton don’t like the truth. It might ever more accurately be said that those who don’t like Chesterton, don’t like life. That superabundance of his, that hugeness of his, is too much for them. They crawl; he dances (albeit like the mountains of Scripture). They pick-peck; he waves that tremendous sword. They count those corroded little pennies; he empties that fabulous purse of his on the world. He was an extravagant man; extravagant of his riches, his light, his life. It is this shining extravagance that blinds the crawlers and pick-peckers and misers. It is a glory too much for them. A few words of ‘Thoreau’ are, I think, to the point. ‘I fear,’ writes the Concord ascetic, ‘lest my expression may not be extra-vagrant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced ... I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression. Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever?’
“To Chesterton such words as ‘tremendous’ and ‘splendid’ and ‘enormous’ and ‘shattering’ were of common use. (In fact, it was he who made such words popular.) These words came naturally to him because (and he would be the last to admit it) he himself lived these words; such words only could express his vitality and significance. He was a giant. There is no other way of saying it. Except, perhaps, to say he still is.”
James Branch Cabell “enjoyed all the work of Chesterton’s early and middle period. I admit that of his publications during, let us say vaguely, more recent years, I prefer to say nothing, out of loyalty to a person that has given me a vast amount of pleasure. I write this after verifying the fact that his earlier books when I re-read them, can still do this.”
“Indeed I am a warm admirer of Chesterton,” affirms Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. “Apart from his delightful wit and his genius in many directions, he was a great religionist. He as a Catholic, I as a Jew, could see eye to eye with each other, and he might have added, ‘particularly seeing that you are cross-eyed;’ but I deeply respected him. When Hitlerism came, he was one of the first to speak out with all the directness and frankness of a great and unabashed spirit.”
Dr. Alexis Carrel well remembers that “Heretics” was the first Chesterton book that he read almost a quarter of a century ago,
“The extreme clarity and brilliance of his style impressed me greatly. The train of his thought appeared to me as strong, flexible, and shining as a steel blade, and as merciless.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN[B]
THE AUTHOR VISITS TOP MEADOW
In a delightful villa, called Top Meadow, in Beaconsfield, a small town of Buckinghamshire, about forty minutes on the train from London, lives, and has lived for some ten years, Gilbert Keith Chesterton with his charming wife. Chesterton, a huge man, possesses the frankness and enthusiasm of a boy, with unkept curly blond hair, blue eyes, shaggy reddish brown moustache, an exceedingly pleasant and attractive smile, wearing clothes in a somewhat careless and negligent manner. Although clear and resonant, his voice is not as powerful as one would be led to expect for a man of his size. He possesses the little mannerism of twirling the ends of his moustache every now and then. He would make a joke with true Twainian seriousness upon his face, but unlike the great American such feigned seriousness becomes too much for him, and he bursts out in peals of Gargantuan laughter that often renders him speechless for a few seconds. At other times the idea of something funny will cause him to laugh most heartily before he has had a chance to express it in words.
[B] This entire chapter was read, corrected, and approved in its present shape, by Chesterton himself a short time before his death.
In a little hallway, Chesterton introduced me to his wife, and then led the way into the living room, a tremendous chamber fully a hundred feet long, low-ceilinged and surrounded on all sides by shelves bulging and overflowing with books of every description, a massive fire-place built of large stones that must have come from the bed of a nearby brook, and a number of what proved to be exceedingly comfortable chairs grouped around the empty fire-place; for it was midsummer.