t by the introduction of
self." To learn, a man must "subtract himself from the study of any
solid and objective thing." This humility he had in a high degree and
also that rarer humility which saw his friends and his opponents
alike as his intellectual equals. "Almost anybody," Monsignor Knox
once said, "was an ordinary person compared with him." But this was
an idea that certainly never occurred to him.

The philosophy shaping into _Orthodoxy_ was stimulated by newspaper
controversy, and also by the talk in which Gilbert always delighted.
As I have noted he loved to listen and he was a little slow in
getting off the mark with his own contribution. Many years later an
American interviewer described him, when he did get going, as
answering questions in brief essays. Frank Swinnerton has admirably
described the manner of speech so well remembered by his friends:

His speech is prefaced and accompanied by a curious sort of
humming, such as one may hear when glee singers give each other the
note before starting to sing. He pronounces the word "I" (without
egotism) as if it were "Ayee," and drawls, not in the highly
gentlemanly manner which Americans believe to be the English accent,
and which many English call the Oxford accent, but in a manner
peculiar to himself, either attractive or the reverse according to
one's taste (to me attractive).*

[* _Georgian Scene_, p. 94.]

Even more attractive to most of us was his fashion of making us feel
that we had contributed something very worthwhile. He would take
something one had said and develop it till it shone and glowed, not
from its own worth but from what he had made of it. Almost anything
could thus become a starting point for a train of his best thought.
And the style disliked by some in his writings was so completely the
man himself that it was the same in conversation as in his books. He
would approach a topic from every side throwing light on those
contradictory elements that made a paradox. He himself had what he
attributes to St. Thomas--"that instantaneous presence of mind which
alone really deserves the name of wit." Asked once the traditional
question what single book he would choose if cast on a desert island,
he replied Thomas's _Guide to Practical Shipbuilding_.

In talk, as in his books, G.K. loved to play upon words, and
sometimes of course this was merely a matter of words and the puns
were bad ones. Once, for instance, after tra