OUR FRIEND CECIL

New Zealand Tablet, 6 March 1919, Page 11

OUR FRIEND CECIL

(By Louis J. McQuilland, in the New Witness.)

Mr. Hilaire Belloc has paid a noble tribute to the late Cecil Chesterton as a public man. I desire to lay my little chaplet of ivy beside his wreath of laurel, and to speak of my dead friend in his private relations as a good and sterling comrade, a man who went through life inspired by a sacramental feeling of confraternity. I knew Cecil Chesterton for close on twenty years of light and shade, of storm and ease, of gaiety and gravity. Even in his very early manhood his brain was fully matured ; even in his later years he kept the heart of a child. He was the simplest and least self-conscious being I have ever encountered. Whatever society he entered into, he was one with his fellows. He had an everlasting zest for life, which makes his death seem utterly unreal. For myself, I shall never feel that he has left us. The spirit of the man was so vital that it will abide with us as long as our lives last. Cecil was the best Bohemian I have ever known. His generosity was almost ludicrous ; his good humor was irrepressible. He was a tremendous talker, and it was all good talk. He took his mission in life seriously; but he never took himself • seriously. He had many eccentricities, but they were all lovable ones. I am told that the Tommies adored him. They could not fail to do so. They are great gentlemen, and they recognised a brother in chivalry. Fleet Street is a street of cynics, in the spnse that it has no sentimentalities, and that it is a pitiless judge of men and motives. Cecil Chesterton was one of the best beloved figures that ever walked along its narrow and universal way. Cecil was a great journalist; he was better than that— was a good fellow. To the needy he gave all ’that he had to give; to the miserable he extended a sympathy as high as heaven and as deep as the sea. Fleet Street was the home of his heart. In it he spent all the best years of his life. In Fleet Street he found the great romance of his career in his wife, comrade and fellow-journalist, “John K. Prothero.” At his wedding-breakfast in The Olde Cheshire Cheese” all his friends of the pen were gathered round him—what a short space it is, and what an eternity, looking back again to that sunny day of wine and gladness in June, 1917. At the beautiful and simple service in Maiden Lane on Saturday last the men who had clinked glasses with him, with laughter and good , wishes, assembled to do him a last honor in a day of darkness and desolation. The Rector of Corpus Christi, who had officiated at his marriage, celebrated the Mass of Requiem for the repose of his soul. The server at the altar, in khaki, was his old- friend Joseph Clayton, writer and democrat. The eloquent priest who preached his panegyric, Father Vincent MacNabb, was one of his warmest admirers,

and, in a sense, a fellow-journalist. Every single member of the congregation mourned with an intimate personal grief for the good soldier of God, who has gone to his reward. . ./ : I cannot close this rough and inadequate tribute to a prince of friends without testifying to his high service and unshaken fidelity to the cause of my country. The Irish in England will cherish while life lasts the memory of their fearless champion who lies in his soldier’s grave at Boulogne. Time takes them all that we loved, fair lives and famous. To the soft, long sleep, to the broad, sweet bosom of Death; But the flower of their souls he shall not take away to shame us, Nor their lips lack song forever that now lack breath.” i