"You always went away," Dr. Pocock said, "chuckling over something," and he summed up the years of their friendship, saying, "You never saw him without getting delight from his presence."
Sometimes he would grow abstracted in the train of his own thought, and Father Ignatius Rice remembers an occasion when he was one of a group discussing really bad lines of poetry. Gilbert broke into something Frances was saying with the words, "That irritating person Milton"—then, realising he had interrupted her, he broke off and apologised profusely. When she had finished he went on "That irritating person Milton—I can't find a single bad line in him."
Frances one day came in rather suddenly when Dr. Pocock was there, and Gilbert exclaimed, "Oh you've broken it." She looked round thinking she must have knocked something over. "No," he said, "it was an idea." "It will come back," said Frances. "No," he said, "it got broken." More usually he was indifferent to interruptions: sometimes he welcomed them as grist for his mind's mill. Daily life went on around him and often in his articles one can find traces of Frances's daily activities as well as his own.
Attending him for his broken arm, Dr. Pocock told him at a certain stage to write something—anything—to see if he could use a pen again. After an instant's thought, Gilbert headed his paper with the name of a prominent Jew and wrote:
I am fond of Jews
Jews are fond of money
Never mind of whose
I am fond of Jews
Oh, but when they lose
Damn it all, it's funny.
The name at the head (which wild horses would not drag from me) is the key to this impromptu. It was really true that Gilbert was fond of very many Jews. In his original group of J.D.C. friends, four Jews had been included and with three of these his friendship continued through life. Lawrence Solomon and his wife were among the Beaconsfield neighbours and he saw them often. There was another kind of Jew he very heartily disliked but he was at great pains to draw this distinction himself.
Speaking at the Jewish West End Literary Society in 1911 he put the question of what the real Jewish problem was. The Jews, he said, were a race, born civilised. You never met a Jewish clod or yokel. They represented one of the highest of civilised types. But while all other races had local attachments, the Jews were universal and scattered. They could not be expected to have patriotism for the countries in which they made their homes: their patriotism could be only for their race. In principle, he believed in the solution of Zionism. And then the reporter in large letters made a headline: "Mr. Chesterton said that speaking generally, as with most other communities, 'THE POOR JEWS WERE NICE AND THE RICH WERE NASTY.'"
Many years later in Palestine he was to be driven around the country, as he has described in The New Jerusalem, by one of these less wealthy Jews who had sacrificed his career in England to his national idealism. And later yet, after G.K.'s death, Rabbi Wise, a leader of American Jewry, paid him tribute (in a letter to Cyril Clements dated September 8, 1937):
Indeed I was a warm admirer of Gilbert Chesterton. Apart from his delightful art and his genius in many directions, he was, as you know, a great religionist. He as Catholic, I as Jew, could not have seen 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. Blessing to his memory!