I wrote you twice without getting any answer; but it is Christian to insist, and so I write you again. Please, would you be so kind to tell me, if it shall be possible for you to come next year to Prague? Our PEN club is anxious to invite you as our guest of honour. If you would like to come next spring, I beg you to be my guest. You are fond of old things: Prague is one. You shall find here so many people who cherish you. I like you myself as no other writer; it's for yours sake that being in London I went to habit in Notting-Hill and it is for yours sake that I liked it. I cannot believe that I should not meet you again. Please, come to Prague.
I wish you a happy New Year, Mr. Chesterton. You must be happy, making your readers happier. You are so good.
Yours sincerely,
KAREL CAPEK.
He never, alas, got to Prague, or to many another country that wanted him. There are letters asking him to lecture in Australia, to lecture again in U.S.A., in South America "to make them aware of English thought and literature." "The Argentine Intelligencia," says Philip Guedalla, "is acutely aware of your writings. Local professors terrified me by asking me on various occasions to explain the precise position which you occupied in our Catholic youth. . . . A visit from you would mean a very great deal to British intellectual prestige in these parts."
No Catholic Englishman was anything like so widely known in Europe. Books have been written about him in many languages and his works translated into French, German, Dutch, Czech, Russian, Polish, Spanish and Italian. A letter from Russia asks for his photograph for The Magazine of International Literature as a writer whose works are well known in the Soviet Union. The Kulturbund in Vienna sends an emissary inviting him there also and, like Prague, the Vienna P.E.N. Club wants him.
"You have a distressing habit," Maude Royden once wrote, "of being the only person one really wants to hear on certain subjects."
A visit to Rome in 1929 produced The Resurrection of Rome. Despite brilliant passages the book is disappointing. It bears no comparison with The New Jerusalem and gives an impression of being thrown together hastily before the ideas had been thought through to their ultimate conclusions. Perhaps Rome was too big even for Chesterton.
He never loved the Renaissance as he did the Middle Ages, but he saw it not as primarily pagan but as one more example of the immense vitality of a Catholicism which had had so many rebirths that it had buried its own past deeper than the past of paganism. He loved the fountains that threw their water everywhere and he felt about Rome that the greatest monuments might be removed and yet the city's personality would remain. For Rome is greater than her monuments. He wanted to argue with those who cared for Pagan Rome alone and who spent their time despising the "oratory in stone" of the Papal city and gazing only on the Forum. "And it never once occurs to them to remember that the old Romans were Italians, or to ask what a Forum was for."
He was, as usual, constantly invited to lecture—at the English College, the Scots College, the American College, the Beda. At the Holy Child Convent he spoke to a crowded audience on "Thomas More and Humanism." Father Cuthbert, O.S.F.C., thanking him, remarked on the mental resemblance between More and Chesterton, saying that he could quite well imagine them sitting together making jokes, some of them very good and some of them very bad. "Chesterton and More," says Father Vincent McNabb, "were both cockneys." Gilbert's classical insight also seemed to him like the great Chancellor's; "Erasmus says that though More didn't know much Greek, he knew what the words ought to mean."