Chapter XXVII: Silver Wedding (2)

I can at least assure you that the delay in acknowledging properly
the most flattering compliment which you have paid me was not due to
any notion of neglecting it. It was due to the practical necessity at
the moment of discovering and deciding on a fact which may, for all I
know, save you the trouble of further consideration of the matter;
and it is for this reason that I mention the practical difficulty
first. I now find that I shall almost certainly be obliged to be out
of England (and Scotland) for about three or four months, or
conceivably a little more, beginning about the middle of January. I
do not know what preliminary formalities would be demanded of me as a
candidate, or when the demand for them would arise. But I was so
strongly impressed with the honour you have paid me that I thought it
my duty to find out the facts on this particular point, so that you
might act on it in any way you think right. In any case, if the delay
thus involved has placed you in any difficulty, I need not say that I
shall fully understand your finding the project unworkable; and I
shall be quite content to remember the compliment of the request.

There is another consideration which would help the practical side
of the case; and for that I fear I must make the practical enquiries
of you, as people understanding the circumstances. You do not mention
the Party you represent; and though I am, like most of us, long past
attaching a horrid sanctity to the name, I hope you will forgive that
much curiosity in a poor bewildered journalist, who has been
exhibited in many lights and cross-lights. I was put up as a
candidate at Glasgow as a Liberal, which is really quite true; but I
think I managed in my election pamphlet to give my own definition of
Liberalism. I have also more recently, on a public platform in
Glasgow, supported my friend Mr. Compton Mackenzie when he stood as a
Scottish Nationalist. Both these positions I am quite prepared to
defend; but in the latter, you might naturally prefer a Nationalist
candidate who was not only a quarter of a Scotsman. I may remark that
as the quarter is called Keith, and comes from Aberdeen, I am rather
thrilled at the name of Marischal College.

There is one other point I think it only right to mention, for your sake as much as my own. You know the local conditions. Do you think it likely that we should be left with one and a half votes, looking a little ridiculous, because the miserable quarter of a Scot happens to have the same religion as Bruce and Maxy Stuart? I only ask for information; which you alone could supply. But it may be that the considerations I have already mentioned have disposed of the matter. Believe me, my gratitude is none the less.

Gilbert said of my father that he showed an embarrassing respect for younger men. Surely Gilbert's own tone of respect must here have embarrassed even undergraduates. The uncertainty of success or failure only troubled him as it might affect his supporters. The sporting element in the contest appealed to his undying boyishness.

Perhaps this chapter may find its best conclusion in the vivid memories written down in answer to my request of one of Gilbert's younger friends--Douglas Woodruff--who came to know him in the year of that Silver Wedding which meant so much that I have chosen it for the title of a chapter covering much of Chesterton's Catholic life.

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.