Mr. Gilson believes that Chesterton will not really be fully appreciated before a century or two. The book of his which he likes best is “St. Thomas Aquinas:” “I consider it as being without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for such an achievement. Everybody will no doubt admit that it is a ‘clever’ book, but the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty years in studying St. Thomas Aquinas, and who, perhaps, have themselves published two or three volumes on the subject, cannot fail to perceive that the so-called ‘wit’ of Chesterton has put their scholarship to shame. He has guessed all that which we had tried to demonstrate, and he has said all that which they were more or less clumsily attempting to express in academic formulas. Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed; he was deep because he was right; and he could not help being right; but he could not either help being modest and charitable, so he left it to those who could understand him to know that he was right, and deep; to the others, he apologized for being right, and he made up for being deep by being witty. That is all they can see of him.”
Eileen Duggan gives the opinion of a New Zealander,
“One of the innumerable society diarists who writes for a hobby recorded an anecdote that illustrates Chesterton’s complete absorption in a subject. He had been given, rather foolishly, a little gold period chair, and as he made his points, it slowly crashed beneath him. He rose just in time and sinking into another chair that someone put behind him, began at the word he had last spoken. It was evident to all that he had barely noticed the incident rather than that he had decided to ignore it.
“A New Zealander who heard him lecture relates that his appearance after a long delay caused the Chairman to express relief that he had not been knocked down by a tramcar. G. K. C. rose calmly and thanked him for his solicitude, ‘but,’ said he, ‘Mr. Chairman, had I met a tramcar it would have been a great and, if, I may say so, an equal encounter.’”
“His journalistic training,” continues Miss Duggan, “had taught him simplification and the author of those penetrating studies on Dickens and Browning would put his points on Distributism so that they could be understood by the man in the street. A sacrifice seemed worthless to Chesterton, unless it were voluntary and not State-imposed; in Distributism, then, he saw the solution of the world’s problems, the answer for soul and for body of its ills.
“It has been charged that he was the enemy of Jewry, but his hand was against only a small and powerful Oligarchy within it which, he claimed, harmed the poor Jew of the ghetto more than the Gentile and, commenting on the anti-Jewish excesses which have outraged the world, he said that he had now to defend the Jews against Hitler. It will be remembered that he struck at all internal abuses and certain lines of his were arrowheads in the national flesh. These for instance, on postwar corruption drew blood,
“‘Oh, they that fought for England,
Following a fallen star,
Alas, alas for England!
They have their graves afar.