“‘Dim drums throbbing in the hills half heard
Booth enters boldly with his big brass drum.’
“Booth was the first poem in Vachel’s new style, and followed my chanting recitation of the poem—which (my way of reading it) was in turn based on Yeats’ theories of how poetry should be read. Vachel had an unparalleled mental possession of the folk tunes (so to speak) of American speech—camp-meetings, soap-box, tramp, farmer, Negro, and so on—but they never broke through into his own verse until after he had heard the theory of Yeats and the poem of Chesterton.”
Thomas Caldecot Chubb feels that Chesterton has been an important influence in the shaping of a brilliant American poet, “I realize that discussing influences is dangerous and that most people like to think of genius as bursting into the world full grown like Medusa from the forehead of Jove. But quite the opposite is usually true and most men of genius are but the latest—not the last link—in an unending chain. They receive, they use, they pass along. And anyone who will compare ‘The Ballad of the White Horse’ with ‘The Drug Shop, or Endymion in Edmonstoun,’ written by Stephen Vincent Benet when he was less than twenty years old, will realize that Benet obtained more than a handful of his poetic implements from Chesterton. This is a paradox in itself, that the gusty panegyrist of the days following the decline of Rome should make an important contribution to so native and so American a voice.”
No better way to end this chapter than with what Stephen Vincent Benet writes the author,
“Thank you for sending me your Chapter on Chesterton’s poetry which I have read with much interest. I have always greatly admired both ‘Lepanto’ and the ‘Ballad of the White Horse’ and I still re-read them.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHESTERTON THE MAN
Chesterton possessed one of the most likeable characters of contemporary literary men. There is usually something or other that mars the characters of most, but who would have Chesterton different? Even his faults are beloved: his weight, his tardiness, his absentmindedness, his slovenly manner of dressing, his sometimes careless way of eating and drinking. In short he can almost be described as Falstaff without his moral grossness.
Chesterton lived for many years in a flat overlooking the beautiful Battersea Park, where Mrs. Lillian Curt would often see him strolling in deep thought. His wife Frances—a dainty little lady, clever and level-headed and most devoted to her husband—would sometimes get anxious when he was long overdue for meals. Then quickly donning her outdoor garments she would anxiously start off to find him, remarking, “I am off to seek my Mighty Atom.” The reference being to Marie Corelli’s “The Mighty Atom” which had but recently appeared.
“I knew G. K. C.,” writes A. Hamilton Gibbs, “when I was in process of becoming an undergraduate at Oxford. Being so grotesquely fat that he couldn’t dress himself he used to appear in socks at breakfast, eat hugely, and then go out into the garden with a pad of paper and a packet of cigarettes. In the course of a couple of hours there would be a ring of cigarettes on the grass around him and when the wind blew away his pages, he would scream for help with a series of epigrams which I am sure found their way into his later pages. Whenever he went from the country to London there was always a little black bag in his hand. In the bag was a bottle of wine, and in the station refreshment room he would order a cup of tea and a wine glass. Many times I’ve seen him taking alternate sips of tea and wine between mouths of a penny bun!”