While visiting Columbus, Ohio, to lecture, Chesterton had a friendly discussion with Professor Joseph Alexander Leighton and Dr. T. C. Mendenhall, the noted physicist—on the question whether veridical communications from the dead were received by living persons. Dr. Mendenhall contended that some at least of these communications were genuine, and therefore established the reality of life after death. Leighton took the role of skeptic, contending that when, as in some undoubted cases, bits of information, quotations, etcetera, had been received through mediums, they probably were due to subconscious memories, and that in other cases their apparent supernormal character was probably the result of coincidence. Chesterton agreed to the genuineness of the communications, but took the view that they were transmitted by bad spirits and that it was spiritually unhealthy for living persons to have any kind of traffic with them.
No one could condemn a thing in fewer words than Chesterton. Speaking about that much discussed book of other days, Renan’s “Life of Christ,” he said to his friends Desmond Gleeson and George Boyle,
“I remember reading it while I was standing in the queque waiting to see ‘Charlie’s Aunt.’ But it is so obvious which is the better farce, for ‘Charlie’s Aunt’ is still running.”
The old English advertisement of “Charlie’s Aunt” always had a picture of the old woman getting along at top speed, with the words, “still running.”
Father Cyril Martindale did not meet Chesterton very often, but he felt that he knew him well all the same, “this was because despite his shyness, or I should say modesty, he let you know him, and intercepted no barriers. This modesty was again seen in his dealings with young men. It never occurred to him that they could have nothing interesting or useful to say, or that he was called upon to act the oracle.
“And this simplicity could again, I think, be seen in what people called his paradoxes. He always insisted that that was not what they were, but sheer statements of the obvious. To him, it was life as ordinarily lived that seemed ‘paradoxical’—it was amazing to him that men could think the things they did, especially as doing so issued into so uncomfortable as well as, too often, so wicked a life.
“Sometimes the constant appearance of the word ‘wild’ in his writings irritated me. He had a vivid and active imagination, so that he saw all sorts of connections and illustrations that others did not: but his mind in reality worked in a very orderly way. I think the explanation may be this—he constantly described himself as ‘lazy’ and I expect that by temperament he was. He always put down the rapidity of his brother’s conversion with the tardiness of his own, at sheer laziness on his part. Now had he let himself go to laziness, he would have been letting his mind, too, go ‘wild.’ But he did neither. Very likely he used the word in a slightly different sense from the one in which I used it: he felt it as the opposite of ‘smug’ and so forth. It remains that I think he had to conquer a real tendency to laziness, and so, to letting his mind just hop about in a (to me) ‘wild’ and disorderly way.
“I think he died in some ways a broken-hearted man. There were no signs of the world having learnt anything that was good, even from its sufferings: all the more noticeable was his peace and serenity in God; and this is why I do not hesitate to say that I think there was to be discerned in him real holiness.”
Father (now Monsignor) John O’Connor known to fame as Father Brown, recollects that on Sunday, July 30th, 1922, he had “the immense happiness of receiving Chesterton into the Church. Mrs. Chesterton was present, profoundly moved, and Dom Ignatius Rice, O. S. B., in the chapel of the Railway Hotel at Beaconsfield, the first public church in town. I remembered his lines written years before,
‘Prince: Bayard would have smashed his sword