“As I say, I admired Gilbert Chesterton throughout his life, and after reading his ‘Autobiography’ I admire him still more. My attitude is rather that of a hero-worshipper than a critic, but I believe that no impartial critic could read this book and fail to see that here was a genius, and better, a brave and an honest man, a man who loved life and loved his friends, loved laughter and hated oppression; in short a very great man. Despite all the modesty with which it is written, the book makes all these things clear. From beginning to end it is a magnificent apologia pro vita sua; nevertheless I hope it will not be the sole record of his life. There are countless things that he could not and would not tell of himself but that should not be forgotten. ‘Belloc,’ he writes, ‘still awaits a Boswell.’ It is equally true that Chesterton awaits one. Is it legitimate to hope that his Boswell may be Belloc? There is a grand harvest to be gathered by his Boswell, whoever that may prove to be. G. K. C. was a brilliant talker. He banished dullness from whatever company he was in. No argument arose but he would drive home his point by some arresting illustration. We were arguing once as to whether some policy or other were good or bad. ‘The word ‘good,’ said G. K., ‘has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of 500 yards I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.’
“No one could stump him by an unexpected question. He took part in a debate many years ago at, I think, the Lyceum Club, and in the course of his speech he discussed, as did other speakers, various racial characteristics. After the debate I was walking round with him when an elderly lady whom he did not know came up and said with something of a simper, ‘Mr. Chesterton, I wonder if you could tell what race I belong to?’ With a characteristic adjustment of his glasses he replied at once, ‘I should certainly say, Madam, one of the conquering races.’
“Only a year or two ago he watched with tolerant, and indeed highly vocal amusement, (his was both the strangest and the jolliest laugh man ever had) a representation of himself in some private theatricals. When they were over he said to the daughter of the player who had impersonated him—a sturdy figure, it is true, but less generously planned than the original—‘Do you know I believe your father is Gilbert Chesterton and I am only a padded impostor.’
“Reading this book has recalled these trifles to my mind just as it has recalled the figure of the boy Chesterton as I first knew him in the early nineties. I can see him now, very tall and lanky, striding untidily along Kensington High Street, smiling and sometimes scowling as he talked to himself, apparently oblivious of everything he passed, but in reality a far closer observer than most, and one who not only observed but remembered what he had seen. The fascination of this book is, in great part, due to the fact that he retained these powers of observation and memory throughout his life, and that he has applied them to himself as rigorously and as vividly as to his fellows.
“‘I should thank God for my creation,’ said Gilbert’s grandfather, ‘if I knew I was a lost soul.’ Gilbert would have done the same. ‘The primary problem for me,’ he writes, ‘was the problem of how men could be made to realize the wonder and splendour of being alive,’ and it is because he himself did realize it that he is able to say of his later years, ‘I have grown old without being bored. Existence is still a strange thing to me, and as a stranger I give it welcome.’
“Chesterton begins this book with a joke about his baptism. It is characteristic of the man. He loved laughter as much as he hated hypocrisy. ‘I have never understood,’ he says, ‘why a solid argument is any less solid because you make the illustrations as entertaining as you can.’ It is because, in this autobiography the philosophy is spiced with fun, and the fun sometimes spiced with philosophy, that so true a picture of the man emerges from the book. When he looks at himself he sees not only an intensely interesting being but also an intensely amusing one. He speaks of his school days as the period during which ‘I was being instructed by somebody I did not know, about something I did not want to know.’ He tells how on his wedding day he stopped to buy a glass of milk at some haunt of his infancy, and again to buy a revolver and cartridges ‘with a general notion of protecting my bride from the pirates doubtless infesting the Norfolk Broads.’
“You will find the same amusement he found if you read and re-read his chapter on ‘Friendship and Foolery,’ his story of the sudden invasion of Henry James’ house at Rye by Mr. Belloc and another, unshaven and dishevelled but vociferous and irrepressible, his account of the birthday dinner to Mr. Belloc at which there were to be no speeches, and at which everybody present spoke, and his story of the aged negro porter in America with a face like a walnut whom, he says, ‘I discouraged from brushing my hat, and who rebuked me saying, ‘Ho, young man, yo’s losing ye dignity before yo times. Yo’s got to look nice for the girls.’
“The sketches of his friends and those of the many public men with whom he came in contact are of extraordinary interest. In a few lines he paints sharp and unforgettable portraits not only of his intimate friends but of men and women with whom he had perhaps but one short conversation. It is thus he tells of his meeting with King George V at the house of the late Lord Burnham. He sums up his impression of ‘about as genuine a person as I ever met’ in these words—‘If it should ever happen that I hear before I die among new generations who never saw George the Fifth that he is being praised either as a strong silent man, or depreciated as a stupid and empty man, I shall know that history has got the whole portrait wrong.’
“There are brilliant little sketches of George Wyndham, Charles Masterman and Cunninghame Graham, among many others; of each one it is the true thing and the generous thing that he sets down. No less arresting are the little cameos of wholly unknown men and women who said or did something that left an impression on his receptive and retentive mind. For example there was the ‘huge healthy simple-faced man of the plastering profession’ who at a Penny Reading, being unable to endure further recitations about to be provided by a gentleman who had already obliged with ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and ‘The May Queen,’ ‘arose slowly in the middle of the room like some vast Leviathan arising from the ocean and observed, ‘Well, I’ve just ’ad about enough of this. Good evening, Mr. Ash. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,’ and shouldered his way out of the Progressive Hall with an unaffected air of complete amiability and profound relief.’
“Memorable as are all the records of his outer life, the insight that he gives us into his mental and spiritual development is of deeper significance. It would be impossible, for me at least, to summarize the subjective side of this autobiography. To be understood, even to be partly understood, it must be read in its entirety. Many readers will not be able to accept the conclusions to which Chesterton found himself inevitably driven, but none can fail to see that his steadfast faith, his sure hope, and his abounding charity were the outcome of no slipshod or haphazard thought, but of mental processes to which he gave the whole of his clear and original mind, and that in his life-long struggle towards the light which he felt assured he had ultimately found he was as completely honest with himself as he always was in his dealings with his fellow men.