Chesterton possessed one of the most likeable characters of contemporary literary men. There is usually something or other that mars the characters of most, but who would have Chesterton different? Even his faults are beloved: his weight, his tardiness, his absentmindedness, his slovenly manner of dressing, his sometimes careless way of eating and drinking. In short he can almost be described as Falstaff without his moral grossness.

Chesterton lived for many years in a flat overlooking the beautiful Battersea Park, where Mrs. Lillian Curt would often see him strolling in deep thought. His wife Frances—a dainty little lady, clever and level-headed and most devoted to her husband—would sometimes get anxious when he was long overdue for meals. Then quickly donning her outdoor garments she would anxiously start off to find him, remarking, “I am off to seek my Mighty Atom.” The reference being to Marie Corelli’s “The Mighty Atom” which had but recently appeared.

“I knew G. K. C.,” writes A. Hamilton Gibbs, “when I was in process of becoming an undergraduate at Oxford. Being so grotesquely fat that he couldn’t dress himself he used to appear in socks at breakfast, eat hugely, and then go out into the garden with a pad of paper and a packet of cigarettes. In the course of a couple of hours there would be a ring of cigarettes on the grass around him and when the wind blew away his pages, he would scream for help with a series of epigrams which I am sure found their way into his later pages. Whenever he went from the country to London there was always a little black bag in his hand. In the bag was a bottle of wine, and in the station refreshment room he would order a cup of tea and a wine glass. Many times I’ve seen him taking alternate sips of tea and wine between mouths of a penny bun!”

Whenever he visited Glasgow, Chesterton stayed with Professor Phillimore who occupied the Greek chair at Glasgow University. Phillimore entertained many literary people in Glasgow, Hilaire Belloc, Thomas Hardy, Galsworthy, and so forth. Usually disengaged in the mornings, the visitors were often brought to the Annam Gallery to be entertained by looking at paintings and etchings. Mr. Annam had the opportunity of making photographic portraits of Chesterton in 1912, when the latter was at his bulkiest. He seemed much interested in his striking appearance and in his likeness to Dr. Johnson. He wore a dark grey highland cloak and a tiny Homburg hat. As he was leaving the studio a small boy stopped and stared at the great man. G. K. noticed the youngster’s interest and puffed himself out to his very biggest for his benefit. Nothing was said, of course, but the pose was obvious. In the course of conversation he made various references to his appearance.

Mrs. Hugh C. Riviere remembers Chesterton as a school boy at St. Paul’s, a tall slim youth who even then had the feeling of the romance of weapons that runs through so much of his work. He went to stay with Mr. and Mrs. Riviere after his marriage when his wife was ill in bed and unable to see to his packing. The result was that he arrived with nothing but an old revolver bought on the way, and his favorite sword-stick with an ivory-handle!

The Sunday after the Great War had commenced Riviere was staying the week-end at a house a few miles from Beaconsfield, and walked over to see the Chestertons. They were in a very national state of excitement and emotion, as all were on such a day. His first thought was, what could he do to help his country,

“I couldn’t wield a sword as I can’t lift my right arm above my shoulder. I should be no use in cavalry, no horse could carry me.” Then with a sudden hopefulness and that humor that was so often directed against himself, “I might possibly form part of a barricade.”

The Chestertons, his brother Cecil, and his friend W. C. Worsdell, all belonged to a debating society known as “I. D. K.” (I Don’t Know). In the earlier period G. K. C. attended the meetings pretty regularly but later on rarely, being, as his wife declared, “too busy.” One of the earliest meetings was at the Chiswick house, of his wife’s family, the Bloggs. At the end of the discussion Chesterton remarked in his usual jocular style,

“We’re in a complete fog!”

But more than once he declared that the speeches of the I Don’t Knows were much cleverer than those heard in the House of Commons. At one meeting Chesterton could not find a chair, so he was obliged to squat on the floor, and he dropped down with a thud that shook the whole house!

One year the Chestertons were coming back from Bromley after a delightful afternoon spent at E. W. Fordham’s house where the guests had produced some plays written by their host—one of them an exceedingly clever and amusing take-off of G. K. C. himself which the original had greeted with continuous chuckles and gurgles of laughter. Having returned with them year after year from this show and knowing his habit, Riviere remarked,

“Aren’t you going to have the usual cigar, Gilbert?”

“I was not going to have a cigar and I don’t want a cigar, but if it’s a case of a holy ritual here goes,” he answered characteristically with a chuckle as he took out a cigar and commenced smoking.

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,

“In 1925 Mrs. Chesterton followed him into the Church on the Feast of All Saints. They almost at once began to sponsor the erection of a permanent church near the railway station. And now it is being enlarged as a memorial to him.

“Gilbert Chesterton and I were wont to call down Mark Twain’s name in benediction and to wish there were more like him, whether in his own States or any others. I recall many of our delighted exchanges on Mark the deathless. I was once thrilled to give him a patiche out of something he had not read,

‘Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral.’

“That he had not read it was to me a miracle. He had read everything I ever heard of that Mark Twain had written.”

Patrick Braybrooke saw his cousin Chesterton for the last time at Beaconsfield. “It was a hot afternoon in summer and in the sweet garden at his home he recited poetry, made up verses, discussed American hotels, and came to the conclusion that Stevenson was the bravest man who ever wrote.”

One morning not long afterwards as he was sitting in the refreshment room of a London underground, Braybrooke picked up casually enough a newspaper. “I saw some words and my world seemed to fall into pieces. For I read SUDDEN DEATH OF G. K. CHESTERTON. It seemed like the end of an era of literary greatness in every way. But I was glad he did not have a long illness—a long drawn-out anti-climax was not for him. When his time came he went home quickly, almost as though like one of the Stevenson characters—hit by an arrow. He went home and the Catholic Church which he loved so well took care of his soul and in the little Church at Beaconsfield to the subdued mutters of the Mass we said our last farewell.”

Chesterton died on June 14, 1936, and was buried in the graveyard of the Beaconsfield Catholic Church. Just recently the Republic of Ireland has given a great bell for the Chesterton Memorial Church thus inscribed.

“Presented to the parish of Beaconsfield by friends and admirers of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, to ring the call to faith, which he so chivalrously answered in song, in word, and in example, to the glory of God and of England.”

Walter de la Mare penned a memorial quatrain to his life-long friend,