An Imaginary Conversation Between

Samual Johnson and Gilbert Chesterton

L . J . Filewood

The following ^^Imaginary Conversation" is an attempt to

place Chesterton in company with one of his peers. In the long
run (and maybe much sooner than many suppose) he will be
seen as one of the giants of English Literatureor so I believe.
His place is with such men as Newman and Coleridge, Matthew
Arnold and Johnsonnot to mention the great poets.

Place: Purgatory. Earth-time: 1978.

In Purgatory, time is foreshortened,

passing at ten times the speed of Earth-time.

Somewhere in the Universe there is a place like no other,

but whether it is in the nearer or further constellation no one
knows. Only in dreams has it ever been seen, and that, rarely
and as in the manner of dreams, on waking up, the substance
quickly fades, leaving only an uncertain impression, growing
fainter until it virtually disappears. The brief description that
follows is therefore not the outline of a remembered dream
but an imprint on a forgotten dream. The landscape in that
world is never drenched in light though there are degrees of
brightness: the colours do not reach the intensity of blue, green
and gold that transfigure the Earth. The nearest to glory there,
is a general atmosphere of silver under a sky of sombre violet
as in a painting of Nicholas Poussin. Yet that world is never
dark for it is lighted by two suns, but pale compared with the
splendour of ours. As one sets in the south, so another rises
in the north, and during this dual operation the silver atmos-
phere subdues to grey and the violet sky to a deep indigo. From

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day to day the temperature hardly varies and is taken for

granted, like breathing, by the inhabitants. Those who live in
that strange world are in sober harmony with it. The tone
is not sad, nor even melancholy, but austere and acquiescent.

Two figures are approaching along an avenue of cypresses.

Their bodies are translucent yet distinct. One moves more
buoyantly than the other as though less impeded by the pull
of gravity. Both are massive. Samuel Johnson is addressing
Gilbert Chesterton with ponderous courtesy:

Johnson: So we meet, though separated in the flesha great

deal of fleshby a century and a half. It is splendid to see
you face to face.

Chesterton: Sir, I am honoured. Charles Lamb was my guide.

He is spending the afternoon listening to Coleridge. I was
glad to learn that you were not yet whisked awaya selfish
thought but tempered by surprise.

Johnson: The length of my stay here is no surprise to me

and no great hardship.
Chesterton: "Time is on our side," was a popular slogan in our
previous lifeand quite false, but here it is literally true.
Do you know how much longer?
Johnson: I begin to know. My body gets lighter every hour.
Time is certainly a great mystery. It used to drag its feet
when I was alone, and fly like an arrow in good company.
Here we use it to grow in the knowledge of our Creator
and of one another.
Chesterton: To know one's self was the first and worst thrust.
Alleviations came later, but the shock of that initial con-
frontation numbs the brain. It is as if one were harbouring
a traitor.
Johnson: Even traitors must be allowed sanctuary. That first
revelation cleaves the soulbut you will get over it. In the
World, sickness and suffering issue in death: here, they flower

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into life. The humanity of Christ makes him a partner in

our sorrow's mysteriesin the disease as well as the cure.

Chesterton: Many of my pains now seem to be growing pains.

The mind seems more muscularstretched beyond its former
capacity. Words come from everywhere, often the words of
others, and I know their source intuitivelywho said them
or who wrote them.

Johnson: A poet has recently joined us, much of whose work

I already know word for word. A passage from one of his
poems comes now into my mind:

Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age

To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue . . .1

I need not go on. Yes, old age prefigures the entry into
Purgatory. The light goes out in rending pain.

Chesterton: That poem has great insight, but I doubt whether

such experiences unrelieved are common towards the end of
life. For my own part there were still a few kindly hghts:
all the candles were not blown out.
Johnson: I was afraid of death until I saw it, plain: then, at
the close, my mind was undisturbed.
Chesterton: So much I regretted, so many acts I recalled with
embarrassment! Meetings, movements, debates seemed in
retrospect to be a fuss about nothing. Yet all was not vanity.
Other things, long forgotten, rose up out of the pastsunny

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mornings in Fleet Street, laughter and the love of friends,

moonlight in Beaconsfield . . . .
Johnson: You wasted no time; your life was fulldefending the
Faith, demolishing heresies (as you called them), seeking to
restore property to the people, turning out fantastic stories,
criticism and playseven one about me: a handsome compli-
mentand your Everlasting Man (that astounding work of
philosophy), not to mention innumerable essays and contro-
versial journalism. Did you plan it all? So many hours for
this, so many minutes for that?
Chesterton: One thing grew out of anothermore like a story
than a plan. New vistas opened at the turn of every page.
Signposts offered new directions to unknown places. I was
much supported by the imperatives of the Faiththe solid
walls of Christian dogma. I knew that despair was as great
a sin as presumptionthat hope is a duty, not a mere mood
beyond the control of the will. There were black moments
but never mind. You will possibly agree that there are times
when our condition needs the dark more than the light. *'There
is in God (some say) a deep but dazzling darkness."2
Johnson: Such sayings are the riddles of metaphysical poetry.
Although esteemed by many, they are not for me. To be
sure, there are many kinds of poetry and none should be
excluded on theoretical grounds. My own belonged to its age;
it had weight and measure and moral forcebut little vision
and no joy. Life was to be endured: submission was required
of us, and I never found it easy to submit. Nor could I
wrestle with God, like Jacob. One man's boldness is another's
presumption. "Thy will be done," was within my reachbut
grudgingly. I was blind to the glory of life, though not (thank
God!) to the glory of God. I lived by reason and revelation.
Reason, I believed to be a heavenly thing, but the rich abun-
dance of the world of sense was closed to me. Revelation came
not personally but through the Scriptures and the Church.
Work when I was not indolent, and prayer when I was not
sensual, were my two solaces. Only in company could I
approach a kind of happiness.

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Chesterton: But you did better. Your conversation gave happi-

ness to hundreds in your Hfetime and to tens of thousands
through Boswell ever since. Where else should we look for
such Olympian jests, such eloquent arguments, such triumph-
ant conclusions!

Johnson: I will not deny it, but there was in me too little con-
sideration for those whose minds were insufficiently equipped
for intellectual disputeor whose fund of knowledge was
unequal to the complexities of the question. Too often I
brought my opponents down in wretched confusionand
sometimes it was said that I talked only for victory.

Chesterton: I suspect that your critics blamed you not because

you talked for victory but because you got it. 3 A l l of us in
the heat of debate clutch at straws, magnify trifles and omit
subordinate considerations that seem to tell against us; though
I believe that such manoeuvres generally arise when time or
circumstance will not allow for every thread to be traced and
untangled.
Johnson: That is true, and there is a further justifying reason.
In conversation we do not know necessarily where each
member of the company stands in relation to the bases of
belief and the ultimates of speculation. There is a false notion,
far too commonly held, that logical and dispassionate think-
ing will of itself lead to accurate conclusionsas though
truth were to be found at the end of a series of formal
propositions progressive and interlocked without reference to
preconceptions whether rational or prejudicial.

Chesterton: I agree. For example, your rebuttal of Berkeley was

valid, since his conclusion lacked a premise. That matter
exists objectively is held alike by the simple and the learned.
To deny it requires not contradiction but demonstration
and Berkeley gives none. Your kicking of the stone was hard
physical evidence based on common sense.-* Metaphysical
support for Berkeley is unavailable. His theory is, therefore,
either self-evident or nothing. Clearly it is not self-evident.
An argument based on mere assertion cannot succeed.

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Johnson: Without a base in reaUty there is neither direction nor

destination. Plato will bear this out. The Republic is founded
on the moral being of man. I n one form or another the op-
ponents of Socrates attack this proposition, driving the
argument away from its proper direction. Relying on logic
while forfeiting the base, the sophists seem for a moment to
have as good a case as their master, but the master knows
his goal. Not without guile he allows error to develop to a
point of absurditythat Justice is no more than the advan-
tage of the more powerful. Back to the fork in the road, the
true argument is recovered and resumed, but this could not
be unless Plato had known his destination, s

Chesterton: Academic philosophy extols the virtue of pure reason,

but when reason separates itself from other human faculties
it goes crippled into a futile maze of roundabout logic.
Reason is a heavenly thing, but what sets it in motion? I
believe the answer to be a sense of justice outraged, resulting
in anger. We are falhble creatures born into a treacherous
world that hurts us in a hundred ways. There are compensa-
tionstrue and beautiful solaces of love and friendship, joy
in the glory of earth, an ardent sense that we are born for
a great purpose; moments when the abundance of life over-
flows in us and we feel like gods. But all these things are
held perilously. Sin, suffering and death riddle them through
and through. They can be snatched away at any moment
by our own fault or through no fault of our own: even the
nobility, the aspiration to do some noble work, is flawed by
a deep sense of corruption for which there seems to be
no cure.

Johnson [without enthusiasm]: You are, of course, describing

the human condition. I did so once, though not so eloquently,
in a long didactic poem.^ I believed, and still beheve, that
there is more to be endured than enjoyed in the span of
earthly life. Yet, we know the alleviations. We know by
revelation before we reach this place the provision made by
Almighty God for our salvation. What is this anger you
speak of, this sense of injustice that adds warmth to reason

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and makes it^what? A weapon presumably against our

Creatora justification for all the evil we do. We have a
right, you suggest, to our anger . . . .

Chesterton [not put out]: We have a right, more, a duty, to

represent life as we deeply feel it. To suppress what we feel
is a kind of treason. You gave expression to your deepest
feelings in "The Vanity of Human Wishes" and in Rasselas.
These works reflected exactly and without restraint your
considered view of the human condition. For myself, I confess
that in my youth, I suppressed, in fact buried, certain terrible
thoughts, black nightmares, not because I considered them
false, but because I felt them to be held in the clutch of
forces more dreadful than the legions of Hell because they
were ultimate and absolute. Earthquakes, storms, natural dis-
asters of every kind plunged mankind into unspeakable misery,
whilst evils alleged to be of his own making were in fact
a part, an unavoidable part, of this background of unholy
terror. Sin was not the revolt of angels nor the corruption of
our first parents, but a crooked knife in the heart of the
universe. Suffering was not an accident but of the essence
of Being. To such a vision, suicide was the only rational
response.

Johnson: Yet you did not destroy yourself. The origin of evil
has been debated through the centuries by eminent divines
and philosophers of genius; but the question is unanswerable
unless we ascribe it to Almighty Goda conclusion from
which we rightly shrink. The soul rejects it with violence.
In youth our minds are not sufficiently informed by knowledge,
experience and reflection to locate and fix the modifying and
mitigating factors in trains of thought that plunge us into the
dark whirlpools of despair. A l l we can do is to resist the
impulses that set up conflict between our logical thoughts and
our deepest instincts. These, our deepest instincts ( I hold) are
in correspondence with the truths of the Christian Faith. We
do not know that God is a God of love until He is externally
revealed to us. Human reason alone, no matter how pro-
found or piercing, cannot comprehend this truth; but when

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the supernatural light of Heaven has penetrated our darkness,

human reason confirms it with such power that the proposition,
"God is Love," seems to be within our own unaided grasp.
We wonder why people cannot be drawn into Christianity
by irresistable arguments. We suspect them of obstinacy, of
deliberate and wanton rejection of clear truths. We accuse
them of bad faith. But no. We should remember the words
of Jesus when St. Peter confessed, "Thou art the Christ, the
Son of the living God." "Blessed art thou, Simon-bar-Jona,
for flesh and blood have not revealed it unto thee, but My
Father which is in heaven."

Chesterton: I can say Amen to that: but the black thoughts of

my youth should have been more openly admitted. I merely
mentioned them in my Autobiography. I have never committed
a crime but there was a time when I reached that condition
of moral anarchy in which a man says, in the words of the
poet, "Atys with the blood-stained knife were better than
the thing I am.""^ I could imagine the worst and wildest dis-
proportions and distortions of passion. As Bunyan was
prompted to utter blasphemies, so I had an overpowering
impulse to draw or record horrible ideas and images, plunging
deeper and deeper as in a blind spiritual suicide. Yet, even
the dark is a kind of truth. Had I admitted the long night-
mare, the shallow term, "optimist" would never have been
flung at me. As it was, I embraced the word for awhile, as
though I were blind to the tragedy of human life, unaware
of that vast aboriginal calamity spoken of by Newman.

Johnson: I have conversed with Newman, a saintly man of

tremendous intellectual force somewhat muffled by a too
feminine sensibility; a mind given to exposition rather than
debate. I believe he left us recently, in which case he would
now be enjoying the society of the early Fathers for whom
he had so much reverence.
Chesterton: Were you surprised to find your Church in error
concerning the existence of a middle state?

Johnson: No Sir. I knew that the doctrine of Purgatory was

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propounded in 1439 and developed and fixed by the Council

of Trent in 1563: but the Church of England rejected it as
not founded on Scripture. For my own part I thought it
a reasonable doctrine. I recall saying to Boswell that the
generality of mankind are neither so wicked as to deserve
everlasting punishment, nor so good as to be admitted at once
into the society of blessed spirits. Accordingly, there was
nothing objectionable about the notion of an intermediate
state. 8

Chestreton: Surely it is a most comforting doctrine, for Purga-

tory is a passport to our ultimate glory. To know (as we do
now) that we are bound for Heaven outweighs all inter-
mediate pain and discomfort. Further, our sense of justice
is satisfied. The grace of God is beyond measure, but our
capacity to receive it is limited and variable. I have a strange
feeling that I might be unhappy in Heaven if I had not first
passed through Purgatory.

Johnson: And I might affirm that, though, there is a Hell, no-

body goes there, because that satisfies my sense of compassion.
No, Sir: you drive paradox too far. We should not peer too
curiously into mysteries which have been sufficiently revealed
to support us in our journey from this world to the next
and to warn us against presuming on the limitless mercy of
our Creator. It is enough to realise that since we are fallible
creatures, compassion is a necessary part of justice.

Chesterton: You are right, and I shall not pursue these un-
profitable speculations. There are more pressing questions.
I find that I have a vivid though not uniform recollection
of much of my previous life. Matters which seemed to be
important then are fading: I mean social and political
questions that engrossed too much of one's attention. On the
other hand, trivial thoughts, half-involuntary acts loom large
and painfully.
Johnson: Without memory you would not be the same person.
Without memory you would not know why you were here.
With indiscriminate memory the pattern of your previous

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life would merely be extended into this one. You are steadily
losing inessentials while things you had almost forgotten press
upon you sharply.
Chesterton: Yet, this is not entirely a place of gloom.
Johnson: By no means. There is much good company to enjoy.
Poets abound. Many have been here for several centuries.
Kit Marlowe thinks he will outlast Milton. Poor Swift begins
to smilethough grimly. Shakespeare was gone long before
I arrived. It is said that he re-discovered the Pilgrim's Way
through the Forest of Arden. Keats, that extraordinary young
man, was no more than a brief visitor. His feet barely touched
the ground. [After a brief pause, with sudden vigour] Many
of your works. Sir, are to be found hereand I suspect that
many are here because of your works. You have a rare gift
for sporting in the depths.
Chesterton: I believe that truth is to be sought earnestly but
not solemnly. When we find it, or rather, when it is revealed
to us, we are released and invigorated. The Gloria is an out-
burst of high spirits. The Credo is our proclaimed response
to tidings of great joy. On receiving a great gift, laughter
and singing are natural to the human heart.
Johnson: Would you not agree that we are distinguished from
one another by differing temperaments? For my own part,
I receive gifts more soberly though, I trust, not less grate-
fully.
Chesterton: You mentioned Keats, a magnificent poet of mar-
vellous maturitya young man who saw beauty and truth
as indivisible. He speaks to all ages. But I would like to know
what you think of another poetof my own ageEliot, whose
work you must be well acquainted with, since you quoted
several lines from one of his later poems.

Johnson: His matter is poetry but his manner, his style, his
versification, is often too loose, too lacking in regularity to
be called poetry. He broods his way into patterns of language
approaching poetic form, but to my ear these patterns are

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closer to prose than to poetry. I hear in the background the

solemn tones of Sir Thomas Brownea subdued, yet fully
articulated reverie, a deliberate control and foreshortening of
epic material, a concern to make every word carry its weight
without extravagance on the one hand or diminution on
the other.

Chesterton: I didn't care for his early work which I read when
it was published. His satire had too little direction. But the
later poems, communicated to us here in the poet's lifetime,
have a different tonepenetrating and utterly original. I hope
there will be more.

Johnson: His early work was like a desertto use his own
words"Thoroughly small and dry." He made things grow
out of dust and ashes. His poetry is in some sense the opposite
of yours, in spite of a similarity in uUimate theme. In satire
I consider you to be his superiorand in verification you
are much closer to my century. Your verse-forms are regular
and compulsiveadmirable except in your most ambitious
poem, "The White Horse." Allow me the luxury of being
critical. I intend no discourtesy. The ballad is a crude form,
suitable to the infancy of a literature. It is true that your
theme came out of a primitive state of life, but the soul of
a nation was your chief concern. I had rather, Sir, that you
had couched your story in heroic couplets which would have
sustained the gallop of horses and the clash of spears without
damaging the larger structure of the struggle for the sur-
vival of Christendom in a time of mortal peril. Nevertheless,
your poem is a thing of splendour. It triumphs over the con-
straints of the form you chose for it. Also extraordinary is
your "Lepanto." The insistent beat calls up a vision of an
advancing and irresistible army, confident of victory. Of such
tumultuous rhetoric one does not ask, "Is it poetry?" but only
"does it succeed?" Kit Marlowe might look upon it with envy.

Chesterton: Sir, you are generous. I confess that poetry con-

stantly tugged at my heart, but my mind was set upon three
things: the shameful plight of the poor, the shameless greed

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of the powerful, and the arrogant perversities of our intel-

lectual leaders. "Shall not the God of all the earth do right!"
is an inescapable truth for time and eternity: "The hungry
sheep look up and are not fed,"^ is an inescapable truth for
the time being. To point the hungry and distressed to the
hereafter is to insult and outrage them. The practice of charity
and the love of God should be more than enough to feed
the hungry, yet the philosophers worship Adam Smith and
the golden calf, while the prophets put their faith in a
mythical creature of the distant future miscalled Superman.
These thoughts often made me feel that poetry was a trivial
diversion and the practice of the arts no more than artful
practice.

Johnson: Men will always find arguments to justify self-interest, to

put a gloss of necessity or virtue on their own most dishonour-
able pursuits. Greed has its paralogisms and political assassina-
tion, its impudent advocates. Theft seeks only to redistribute
wealth, and tyranny uses the rope and the rack solely to enforce
the rule of law. True philosophy must ever expose these imbecilic
sophistries, though often in vain. Far more than by philosophy,
the world is made better by good men.'o We know when we
are in the presence of goodness. I once told Boswell that we
should all spend part of every day with a good man, for, by
doing so, we ourselves grow better. I account myself fortunate
to have known many, by the grace of God. \ Smiling somewhat
ruefully] I trust that the infection was one-way and that I
did not make them worse.
Chesterton: Might I ask what you do herewhen you are alone?
Johnson [a trifle surly]: To be alone is rarely my desire, but
when compelled to be so, I write poetry, for I , too, wished
above all things to be a poet: but I did not persevere. I could
not rival my predecessors. The dogs were too good for me.
[Rumbling with laughter] They never starved in a garret,
but Pope and Dryden must now look to their laurels.
Chesterton: You had a living to earn and a wife to keep. Neces-
sity drives us in directions we do not choose. With even a

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modest income you might have chosen Oxford instead of

Londona life of scholarship rather than one of hterature
and lexicography.

Johnson: No, Sir. London was my loadstone. The book-sellers

drove me hard, but I needed the spur and the whip. Hunger
may not cure indolence but at its most pressing it stimulates
the mind wonderfully. Starvation in a wealthy city offers an
image of enormous disproporation. It is monstrous and intoler-
ableyet we tolerated it. But in most of Europe, no one,
I understand, now starves. How great a stride that is towards
a civilised and humane society! So many things have changed
mostly, no doubt, for the better: yet all may be destroyed by
the fearful engines of war.

Chesterton: The evolutionists tell us that progress is inevitable,

but that is no more than fatalism in fancy dress. Physical
science continues to probe for the secret of life, but since its
chief direction lies in the field of nuclear physics, it seems
probable that the secret of life will prove to be death.

Johnson: These discoveries are known to me in some measure,

but one development in the study of moral theology I am
unable to credit, unable even to understand. The thing is
known, I am told, as psycho-analysis. Can you enlighten me?
What is psycho-analysis?

Chesterton: Psycho-analysis is a technique, part medical, part

mystical, part psychological, for discharging the burden of
guilt without forfeiting the pleasures of sin.

Johnson: That, Sir, must be a highly esteemed area of investi-

gation and practice. Would you say that it amounts to the
abolition of conscience?

Chesterton: The atrophy of conscience is not its avowed pur-

pose, but when it succeedsif it succeedsthat is what
probably occurs.

Johnson: Can you tell me more about this curious doctrine?

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Chesterton: As I understand it, the practitioner (or analyst, as

he is called) invites the patient to lie on a couch and bring
both mind and body into a state of relaxation. Tensions, dis-
turbances, mental anxieties should be, for the time being at
least, banished. The analyst then tells the patient to lie fallow
and allow thoughts to come as they willto speak them
aloud, giving rein to remote memories, not disguising or re-
pressing anything, however unpleasant it may be. The role of
the analyst is to listen, to make notes and say as little as
possible. He hopes by this method to explore and illuminate
that region of the mind which is now known as the "uncon-
scious" (or sometimes, "subconscious"). The patient, if he
responds, gives vent to that smothered undertow of acts and
thoughts which he has been too ashamed or too fearful to
acknowledge. Many sessions are generally needed to bring
the troubled spirit to the point of confessing or articulating
his trouble. It may be a trifle enormously exaggerated, it may
be a terrible crime, it may be merely a squalid and sinful
habit. In general it is reckoned to be sexual.

Johnson: So! The analyst probes the soul which is troubled and
guihy. This I understandbut what is the cure?
Chesterton: There are several views on thisbut the prevailing
view is that since a sense of guilt is the cause of suppression,
the removal of suppression releases the patient from a sense
of guilt.
Johnson: But that is false thinking, for guilt relates to the act,
not to the covering up of the act.
Chesterton: Precisely. In effect you have confession without
absolution, i '
Johnson: Or diagnosis without cure: or is there subsequent
treatment?
Chesterton: The aim of the Freudian analyst is to achieve trans-
ference. His role is to receive the whole weight of the sin
or crime or evil experience, and so relieve his patient of the
entire burden.

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Johnson: Surely, this cannot be. It is nothing more than a

parody on the doctrine of the Atonement. Do many persons
avail themselves of the services of these analysts?

Chesterton: Great numbers do, but this therapy is costly, far

beyond the reach of the poor.

Johnson: Blessed are the poor! But I cannot imagine the rich
entering into such a relationship. Is the curewhen it takes
placepermanent?
Chesterton: Who can tell! Another aim of the analyst is to per-
suade the patient to come to terms with his moral sickness,
to accept himselfmind, body and soulfor what he is. I f
the thing is obsessional or compulsive, the cure lies in yielding
to it. I f you fight it, the resulting tensions issue in nervous
collapse and mental disorder. Get rid of your sense of guilt,
for it can do you nothing but harm. You are not responsible
for the twist in your nature.
Johnson: And is this convenient solution also widely accepted?
Chesterton: Certainly it is fashionable. Many rich people retain
an analyst just as in former times it was common for a
wealthy man to retain a spiritual adviser.
Johnson: You spoke of a man called Freud. I have not met him,
for I understand that he is confined to an area reserved for
men of especially distinguished minds uncontaminated by
common sensemen who spend their time in furthering their
own ingenious philosophies by mutual examination and debate
to the point of reductio ad absurdum. They are thus cured
and become fit and free to mix with less gifted folk. But one
more thing about this singular doctrine. Is it not opposed
with vigour by men who hold that conscience must not be
violatedthat it is better to perish than to do evil and not
feel guilty?

Chesterton: Yes, Sir. There are many who reject this doctrine
as I have done, and with more vigour than I can command.
My friend, Hilaire Belloc has denounced it in the strongest

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and simplest terms. His words, as I recall them, are these:

"To go on doing dehberately that which you know to be evil,
rots the soul."'2
Johnson: Belloc! That is well saidlike a bullet to its mark.
I have met Belloc but have not conversed with him. Some-
thing came between: [playfully] I think it was Myself.
Chesterton: Sir, you will enjoy one another when the impediment
has been removed.
Johnson: When all impediments are removedAh! then we shall
rejoice forever in the glory of God and the love of our
neighbour. Our Club must be enlarged, though by not too
many. I shall learn to sing under the tutelage of my friend
Burney. Music was for me an unopened volume.

Chesterton: And also for me. I was deaf to its charms, but my
ears will be unstopped.
Johnson: We shall study it together. I shall play the trumpet.
Chesterton [slyly]: And I , the bagpipes.
Johnson: In heaven all things are possible. Together we shall
draw iron tears down Pluto's cheek. Butwhat is this!
Has my time come? [His feet are off the ground and he
floats with a kind of massive grace up and away, lifting and
waving his right arm in a gesture of farewell]. Good-bye,
Gilbert! We shall mount up with wings as eagles.
Chesterton: Farewell, Sam. [He, too, waves to the receding figure
and then turns away, murmuring] The levity of the leaf is
more than the gravity of the grave. The resurrection of the
body bears witness to the salvation of the soul.

1 T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," Four Quartets.

2 Henry Vaughan, "The Night."
^ G.K. Chesterton, "Dr. Johnson," in G.K.C. as M.C.
* James Boswell, "A.D. 1763," in Life of Johnston.
^* Plato, The Rejmlic.
^ Samuel Johnson, "Vanity of Human W^ishes."

102

I
Imaginary Conversation Between

' Oscar Wilde, as quoted by G.K. Chesterton in Autobiography,

8 James Boswell, "A.D. 1769," in Life of Johnson.
9 John Milton, "Lycidas."
1* James Boswell, Life of Johnson.
11 G.K. Chesterton, "On Psychoanalysis," Come to Think of It.
^ Hilaire Belloc said or wrote this; I forget where.
13 John Milton, "II Penseroso."