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
territor