Gilbert Keith Chesterton

by Maisie Ward

Chesterton devotes a long passage in the Autobiography to the dinner given at the old Adelphi Terrace Hotel to Belloc on his sixtieth birthday, in July 1930. I remember very well the high old fashioned car the Chestertons used to hire in Beaconsfield, for I accompanied him with particular instructions to deliver him safely and on time, as was very necessary for he was in the Chair. We might have lost him, for we went first to the Times Office where I was then working, as I had proofs to correct before disappearing for the rest of the evening, and he was seized with the idea that it would be very good fun for him to enter Printing House Square and have it announced that it was Mr. Chesterton come to write the leaders, having brought the thunder with him under his cloak. Quite early on the drive up he began speculating about who would be at the party, and when he had suggested various figures who were certainly not going to be there he said with a mixture of regret and acceptance, "There is always such a sundering quality about Belloc's quarrels." When he rose to propose the toast he said at once that if he or anybody else in the room was remembered at all in the future it would be because they had been associated with the guest of the evening. He meant that. The evening stood out in his memory because it was so unlike the ordinary sort of dinners he knew where he was a principal figure. It delighted him that without any programme or premeditation all the thirty diners in turn made speeches, in the main parody speeches. It was, in short, a party and not a performance.

In the decade when I had the good fortune to know Topmeadow he was still paying the price of a literary fame which he had sought in youth because it meant success in his calling and an income, but which became a barrier he was always meeting and breaking through. Many literary men genuinely enough prefer company in which they are on just the same footing as everyone else to company in which they are little Kings, but Chesterton was exceptional in liking to live in the fullest equality of intercourse not only with all sorts of men but with the lesser practitioners of his own calling. He sought the affection and not the admiration of his fellow men, or, more precisely, he sought neither: what he sought was to do things like discovering the truth in their company. No man more naturally distinguished between a man and his views, or found easier the theological injunction to hate the sin but love the sinner. One of the few occasions on which I recall him as rather hurt was just after he had met Stanley Baldwin, at Taplow, and had not been welcomed as a fellow Englishman sharing immense things like the love of the English country or English letters, but with a cold correctitude from a politician who seemed chiefly conscious he was meeting in G.K. a man who week by week sought to bring political life into hatred, ridicule and contempt.

He was not made by nature for the kind of journalistic tradition which Belloc and Cecil Chesterton established and his loyal affection for them made him adopt. I recall him expounding to the lawyers of the Thomas More Society the absurdity of the legal definition of libel, arguing that of its nature free discussion meant arousing at any rate ridicule and contempt if not hatred against men and measures of which you disapproved. It was ridicule that he preferred to arouse. The lawyers were quite unconvinced, as they generally are when laymen have any complaints about the law, and they soon realized that to Chesterton the whole idea of involving the law because of arguments and discussions and invective was hitting below the belt.

He could be seen at his happiest in the Mock Trials which were held every summer for the last ten years of his life at the London School of Economics, for the King Edward VII Hospital Fund. He was relied upon year after year to prosecute. One year it was leading actors and actresses, another year sculptors and architects, another year politicians, another Headmasters. He entered completely into the spirit of an entertainment which combined two of his abiding interests, public debate and private theatricals. That was a setting in which he could completely exemplify his favourite recipe for the modern world, that it should be approached in a spirit of intellectual ferocity and personal amiability. But what marked his own contributions to these affairs was the intellectual "ferocity," in the weight and content of his criticism. Most of the eminent men who consented to take part came to play a game for the sake of the Hospitals, and because they rarely unbent like that in public they were wholly facetious and trivial. To Chesterton there was no difficulty or incongruity in combining the fun of acting with the fun of genuine intellectual discussion. When he prosecuted the Headmasters of leading public schools for Destroying Freedom of Thought I came down in a lift with them afterwards and found they were volubly nettled at the drastic and serious case he had made inside the stage setting of burlesque, and seemed to think he had not been playing the game when he wrapped up so much meaning in his speech and examinations. This had never entered his head; it had come perfectly naturally to him to make wholly real and material points even in a mock trial and with a wealth of fun. But he liked being one of a troupe on a stage very much more than being a lonely and eminent figure on a platform, because to him the great attraction of discussion was that it should be a joint quest, a mental walk with an object in view, but also with an eye for everything that might and would turn up on the way.

He laughed his high laugh—like Charlemagne his voice was unequal to his physical scale—at his own jokes because they came to him as part of the joint findings of the quest, something he had seen and collected and brought for the pot. When he made jokes about his size as he so commonly did at the outset of a speech, it was to get rid of the elevation of the platform, and to get on to easy equal terms with the audience; "I am not a cat burglar," he began to the Union at Oxford, and had won them. The radio suited him so excellently, precisely because it is a personal sitting down man to man relationship that the successful broadcaster must establish; that was the relationship inside which he naturally thought. His difficulty was that while he had not the faintest desire to be "a Literary Man," and still less a Prophet, the kind of truth he divined was, in fact, on the scale of the prophets. It seemed to me that over the last decade of his life he found himself more and more in the dilemma that in the life of his mind he was living with ideas, the fruit of a contemplative preoccupation with the Incarnation and the Sacraments, which he shrank from talking about, from a natural humility and a clear and grateful understanding of the Catholic tradition of reverence and reticence.

England is full enough of men to whom the distinction between the platform and the pulpit is very unreal; they have a moral message and they do not much mind where they give it. But Chesterton, unlike most public men who deal in general ideas, did not come to the idea of public speaking through the Protestant tradition but through the secular tradition, the freethinker's debate, the political and not the religious side of Hyde Park oratory, where men in knots shout one another down, not where some lonely longhaired prophet declaims conversion. After he became a Catholic he sought to set himself frontiers, the apologetic territory suitable for a layman like himself. But he found himself more and more preoccupied with a territory further inland, penetrating all the time to the deeper meaning of the creed he had embraced. He could look back and see how most of his early books had seized upon some essential part of Catholic doctrine. . . . He had written what he had seen at the time, but he did not stop looking because he had written, and then he always continued to see more, the great contemplative.

He looked out on the universe from a very solid tower of observation because in all but the deepest sense of the word he always had a home. His lasting significance is his pilgrimage, but the spiritual journey was lived out in a warmly rich setting. When he wrote of "the home" he was not dealing with a notion but with a surrounding reality, one on which he had opened his eyes as a baby and which he enjoyed without a break to the end. Frances Chesterton is among the great wives of our literary history. When he said "I can never have enough nothing to do," it was the remark of a man with a house he was generally in, a house full of things.

He loved to produce cigars and wine, but tea also remained an important fixed part of the day, in the Victorian tradition, and when he was told by the doctor he had better drink nothing, he had many alternatives, like detective stories read over tea and buns, which other lovers of wine would perhaps have found no consolation. Other men are secret drinkers, he would confide, I am a secret teetotaller. The first time I had tea with him, in Artillery Mansions in 1926, I was much struck that he brought three detective stories to the teatable. I imagine he always had time for Jack Redskin on the Trail, or whatever it might be because he had the gift, to an extent I have never seen elsewhere, of opening a book and as it were pouring the contents down in one draught like a champion German beer drinker. He once seized from my shelves in Lincoln's Inn, Wyndham Lewis's Apes of God saying it was a book he had not seen and wanted to see. It is a folio and I suggested he should take it away. But he opened it and stood reading it and here and there, not a process which could be called dipping, but a kind of sucking out of the printed contents, as though he were a vacuum cleaner and you could see the lines of type leaving the pages and being absorbed. When he put it down it was to discuss the thesis and illustrations of the book as a man fully possessed of its whole standpoint. Once he made one of his common confusions and forgot he was addressing the Wiseman Dining Society on the Oxford Movement. In the train from Beaconsfield he said how nice it was that he had not got to speak. Frances Chesterton told him not to be silly, he knew he was speaking on the Oxford Movement. He was visibly disconcerted at the start, for many grave seniors had assembled to hear him; but all went well in the discussion as soon as he was attacked for something he had said about Newman's views. You cannot catch me out about Newman, he said, with joy of battle, and he produced then and there a most detailed account of just where in Newman's writings the points in question were developed. Yet he was curiously content to read what happened to come his way and to rely upon his friends for references and facts, remembering what they might tell him, but not ordering the books which would have greatly strengthened him in the sort of newspaper arguments in which he was so often employed. He had a large collection of books at Topmeadow, but they gave the impression that they had assembled themselves. Masses of them were adventure stories, many were presentation copies from writers. You felt that they had got into the house knowing that it was a hospitable one, if not built for books, and that they would probably be allowed to stay. But he had a study which would barely home him, and the library room he did eventually build was only finished as he died.

I think nothing is more superficial or belittling to him than the idea that while he might have liked the real country he could not like Beaconsfield, as it developed into a dormitory town while he lived there. His sympathies were far too wide. He liked to tell how he had had to complain of the noise made by an adjoining Cinema Company. His secretary had said Mr. Chesterton finds he cannot write; and the Cinema people replied we are well aware of that.

He liked to think of Mr. Garvin near by, "not that I see him very much," he said, "but I like to think that that great factory is steaming away night and day." He had great satisfaction when a friend and I, driving away in the evening, knocked down a white wooden post outside the house in starting the car. He held that he had witnessed just how many a grand old local custom must have originated, in men covering up their mistakes by saying they were fulfilling a ritual which had fallen into neglect. You must say you did it on purpose, he said, say it was a rite too long omitted and it will soon be kept up every year and men will forget its origin, and it will be known as the Bump of Beaconsfield. When a friend of his brought him a two-bladed African spear, he said, as he threw it about the lawn, that it was sad to think how many lawns there were in Beaconsfield and how few weapons were ever thrown on any of them, although all men enjoyed, or would enjoy spear throwing more, he believed, than they enjoyed clock golf. He at any rate was a genuinely free man, who did what it amused and pleased him to do, and did not think he had to choose between the forms of activity or rest currently pursued by his neighbours. Much of the serene atmosphere of his home came from that quiet resolute practice of the liberty of a free mind.