AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

will indeed seem idle if I recall that the old taverns in which men drank, or the
old courts in which they starved, were often full of starving poets and drunken
scholars; and all sorts of perverse personalities who sometimes even tried to
tell the truth; men of the type of old Crosland, that queer cantankerous man,
who hated so many things (including me) but had often justified his great
farewell, in which he said bitterly that he had:
. . . trod the path to hell,
But there were many things he might have sold
And did not sell.
For one thing, it was always said of him that he nearly died of hunger in
Fleet Street with a volume of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in his pocket.
A man of that impossible sort, of finer spiritual culture and, therefore, of
less fame or success, was Johnston Stephen, who was, I am proud to say, my
friend. He was of the great Scottish family, of Leslie Stephen and of “J.K.S.”;
and he was quite as wise as the one and as witty as the other. But he had a
certain distinction very difficult to define; the world with which he dealt
simplified it by saying he was mad. I should prefer to say that he could not
completely digest anything; he refused things of which he thoroughly
approved at the last moment, with a movement like that of a bucking horse.
Sometimes his objection was profound enough, and always illuminated by an
idea; but he lacked the power of final adherence. He once made to me the very
sensible remark, “The only little difficulty that I have about joining the
Catholic Church is that I do not think I believe in God. All the rest of the
Catholic system is so obviously right and so obviously superior to anything
else, that I cannot imagine anyone having any doubt about it.” And I
remember that he was grimly gratified when I told him, at a later stage of my
own beliefs, that real Catholics are intelligent enough to have this difficulty;
and that St. Thomas Aquinas practically begins his whole argument by saying,
“Is there a God? Apparently not.” But, I added, it was my experience that
entering into the system even socially brought an ever-increasing certitude
upon the original question. For the rest, while a fierily patriotic Scotsman, he
had too much of such sympathy to be popular with many Scots. I remember
when he was asked whether the Church was not corrupt and crying out for the
Reformation, he answered with disconcerting warmth, “Who can doubt it?
How horrible must have been the corruption which could have tolerated for so
long three Catholic priests like John Knox and John Calvin and Martin
Luther.”
Somebody ought to have written a life of Stephen or collected his literary
remains; which were left to vanish as journalistic remains. I once had a notion
of doing it myself; it is one of the many duties I have neglected. There was an