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 a