G. K. Chesterton

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This article is about the English writer. For his cousin, see A. K. Chesterton.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Born 29 May 1874(1874-05-29)
London, England1
Died 14 June 1936 (aged 62)
Beaconsfield
Occupation Journalist, Novelist
Genres Fantasy, Christian apologetics, Catholic apologetics, Mystery
Influences
Influenced

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (May 29, 1874 – June 14, 1936) was an influential English writer of the early 20th century. His prolific and diverse output included journalism, philosophy, poetry, biography, Christian apologetics, fantasy and detective fiction.

Chesterton has been called the "prince of paradox."[1] He wrote in an off-hand, whimsical prose studded with startling formulations. For example: "Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it."[2] He is one of the few Christian thinkers who are equally admired and quoted by both liberal and conservative Christians, and indeed by many non-Christians. Chesterton's own theological and political views were far too nuanced to fit comfortably under the "liberal" or "conservative" banner. And in his own words he cast aspersions on the labels saying, "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."[3] He routinely referred to himself as an "orthodox Christian," and came to identify such a position with Catholicism more and more, eventually converting to Roman Catholicism.

Contents

[edit] Life

Chesterton at the time of his engagement, 1898
Chesterton at the time of his engagement, 1898

Born in Campden Hill in Kensington in London, Chesterton was educated at St Paul's School. He attended the Slade School of Art in order to become an illustrator and also took literature classes at University College London but did not complete a degree at either. In 1896 Chesterton began working for the London publisher Redway, and T. Fisher Unwin, where he remained until 1902. During this period he also undertook his first journalistic work as a freelance art and literary critic. In 1901 he married Frances Blogg, to whom he remained married for the rest of his life. In 1902 he was given a weekly opinion column in the Daily News, followed in 1905 by a weekly column in The Illustrated London News, for which he would continue to write for the next thirty years.

According to Chesterton, as a young man he became fascinated with the occult and, along with his brother Cecil, experimented with Ouija boards.[4] However, as he grew older, he became an increasingly orthodox Christian, culminating in his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1922.[5]

Chesterton was a large man, standing 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m) and weighing around 21 stone (134 kg or 294 lb). His girth gave rise to a famous anecdote. During World War I a lady in London asked why he wasn't 'out at the Front'; he replied, 'If you go round to the side, you will see that I am.'[6] On another occasion he remarked to his friend George Bernard Shaw, 'To look at you, anyone would think there was a famine in England.' Shaw retorted, 'To look at you, anyone would think you caused it.'[citations needed]

He usually wore a cape and a crumpled hat, with a swordstick in hand, and had a cigar hanging out of his mouth. Chesterton often forgot where he was supposed to be going and would miss the train that was supposed to take him there. It is reported that on several occasions he sent a telegram to his wife from some distant (and incorrect) location, writing such things as "Am at Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?" to which she would reply, "Home."[7]

Chesterton loved to debate, often engaging in friendly public disputes with such men as George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and Clarence Darrow. According to his autobiography, he and Shaw played cowboys in a silent movie that was never released.

Chesterton died on 14 June 1936, at his home in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. The homily at Chesterton's Requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral, London, was delivered by Ronald Knox. He is buried in Beaconsfield in the Catholic Cemetery. Chesterton's estate was probated at 28,389 pounds sterling, approximately equivalent to £1.3 million in modern terms.

[edit] Writing

Chesterton wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4000 essays, and several plays. He was a literary and social critic, historian, playwright, novelist, Catholic theologian and apologist, debater, and mystery writer. He was a columnist for the Daily News, the Illustrated London News, and his own paper, G. K.'s Weekly; he also wrote articles for the Encyclopædia Britannica, including the entry on Charles Dickens and part of the entry on Humour in the 14th edition (1929). His best-known character is the priest-detective Father Brown, who appeared only in short stories, while The Man Who Was Thursday is arguably his best-known novel. He was a convinced Christian long before he was received into the Catholic Church, and Christian themes and symbolism appear in much of his writing. In the United States, his writings on distributism were popularized through The American Review, published by Seward Collins in New York.

Much of his poetry is little known, though well reflecting his beliefs and opinions. The best written is probably Lepanto, with The Rolling English Road the most familiar, and The Secret People perhaps the most quoted ("we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet"). Another much admired poem is A Ballade of Suicide.

Of his nonfiction, Charles Dickens (1903) has received some of the broadest-based praise. According to Ian Ker (The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961, 2003), "In Chesterton's eyes Dickens belongs to Merry, not Puritan, England" ; Ker treats in Chapter 4 of that book Chesterton's thought as largely growing out of his true appreciation of Dickens, a somewhat shop-soiled property in the view of other literary opinions of the time.

Chesterton's writings consistently displayed wit and a sense of humour. He employed paradox, while making serious comments on the world, government, politics, economics, philosophy, theology and many other topics. When The Times invited several eminent authors to write essays on the theme "What's Wrong with the World?" Chesterton's contribution took the form of a letter:

Dear Sirs,
I am.
Sincerely yours,
G. K. Chesterton[8]

Typically, Chesterton here combined wit with a serious point (that of human sinfulness) and self-deprecation.

Much of Chesterton's work remains in print, including collections of the Father Brown detective stories. Ignatius Press is currently in the process of publishing a Complete Works.

[edit] Views and contemporaries

Chesterton's writing has been seen by some analysts as combining two earlier strands in English literature. Dickens' approach is one of these. Another is represented by Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, whom Chesterton knew well: satirists and social commentators following in the tradition of Samuel Butler, vigorously wielding paradox as a weapon against complacent acceptance of the conventional view of things.

Chesterton's style and thinking were all his own, however, and his conclusions were often opposed to those of Wilde and Shaw. In his book Heretics, Chesterton has this to say of Wilde:

“ The same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker] was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw.[9] ”

More briefly, and with a closer approximation of Wilde's own style, he writes in Orthodoxy concerning the necessity of making symbolic sacrifices for the gift of creation:

“ Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde. ”

Chesterton and Shaw were famous friends and enjoyed their arguments and discussions. Although rarely in agreement, they both maintained good-will towards and respect for each other. However, in his writing, Chesterton expressed himself very plainly on where they differed and why. In Heretics he writes of Shaw:

“ After belabouring a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby.[10] ”

Shaw represented the new school of thought, humanism, which was rising at the time. Chesterton's views, on the other hand, became increasingly more focused towards the church. In Orthodoxy he writes:

“ The worship of will is the negation of will. . . If Mr. Bernard Shaw comes up to me and says, "Will something," that is tantamount to saying, "I do not mind what you will," and that is tantamount to saying, "I have no will in the matter." You cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that it is particular.[11] ”

This style of argumentation is what Chesterton refers to as using 'Uncommon Sense' — that is, that the thinkers and popular philosophers of the day, though very clever, were saying things that were nonsensical. This is illustrated again in Orthodoxy:

“ Thus when Mr. H. G. Wells says (as he did somewhere), "All chairs are quite different," he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them "all chairs."[12] ”

Or, again from Orthodoxy:

“ The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless — one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is — well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.[12] ”
“ All healthy men, ancient and modern, Western and Eastern, hold that there is in sex a fury that we cannot afford to inflame; and that a certain mystery must attach to the instinct if it is to continue delicate and sane.[13] ”

Incisive comments and observations occurred almost impulsively in Chesterton's writing. In the middle of his epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse he famously states:

For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.[14]

[edit] The Chesterbelloc

See G. K.'s Weekly for a fuller treatment.

Chesterton is often associated with his close friend, the poet and essayist Hilaire Belloc. Shaw coined the name Chesterbelloc for their partnership, and this stuck. Though they were very different men, they shared many beliefs; Chesterton eventually joined Belloc in his natal Catholicism, and both voiced criticisms towards capitalism and socialism. They instead espoused a third way: distributism.

G. K.'s Weekly, which occupied much of Chesterton's energy in the last 15 years of his life, was the successor to Belloc's New Witness, taken over from Cecil Chesterton, Gilbert's brother who died in World War I.

Both Chesterton and Belloc have faced accusations of anti-Semitism during their lifetimes and subsequently.[15] Their criticisms of the "international Jewish banking families" are some of the most important reasons for these accusations. For example, G.K., Belloc, and G.K.'s brother Cecil were vehement critics of the Isaacs, who were involved in the Marconi scandal in the years before World War I.[16] George Orwell accused Chesterton of being guilty of "endless tirades against Jews, which he thrust into stories and essays upon the flimsiest pretexts."[17]

In The New Jerusalem, Chesterton made it clear that he believed that there was a "Jewish Problem" in Europe, in the sense that he believed that Jewish culture (not Jewish ethnicity/Semitism) separated itself from the nationalities of Europe.[18] He suggested the formation of a Jewish homeland as a solution, and was later invited to Palestine by Jewish Zionists who saw him as an ally in their cause. In 1934, after the Nazi Party took power in Germany he wrote that:

“ In our early days Hilaire Belloc and myself were accused of being uncompromising Anti-Semites. Today, although I still think there is a Jewish problem, I am appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities. They have absolutely no reason or logic behind them. It is quite obviously the expedient of a man who has been driven to seeking a scapegoat, and has found with relief the most famous scapegoat in European history, the Jewish people.[19] ”

The Wiener Library (London's archive on anti-semitism and Holocaust history) has defended Chesterton against the charge of anti-Semitism: "he was not an enemy, and when the real testing time came along he showed what side he was on."[20]

Chesterton condemned the Nuremberg Laws, and he died in 1936, as the Hitlerite antisemitic measures were temporarily decreased due to the Berlin Olympics, long before lethal persecution by the Nazis would start.

[edit] List of major works

See List of books by G. K. Chesterton for all works.

[edit] Influence

[edit] See also

[edit] Literature and biographies on Chesterton

  • Cooney, A., G.K. Chesterton, One Sword at Least, Third Way Publications, London, 1999. ISBN 0-9535077-1-8
  • Coren, M., Gilbert: The Man Who Was G. K. Chesterton, Paragon House, New York, 1990.
  • ffinch, M., G. K. Chesterton, 1986
  • Kenner, H., Paradox in Chesterton, 1947.
  • Paine, R., The Universe and Mr. Chesterton, Sherwood Sugden, 1999. ISBN 0893855111{
  • Pearce, J, Wisdom and Innocence - A Life of G.K.Chesterton, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1996. ISBN 0-340-67132-7
  • Ward, M., Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Sheed & Ward, 1944.
  • Marshall McLuhan wrote an article on G.K. Chesterton, titled "G.K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic" (Dalhousie Review 15 (4), 1936).
  • EWTN features a television series, G. K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense, that focuses on Chesterton and his works.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Douglas, J.D. G.K. Chesterton, the Eccentric Prince of Paradox, May 24, 1974.
  2. ^ The Man Who Was Thursday/Chapter IVThe|Man Who was Thursday, Chapter IV
  3. ^ Illustrated London News (1924-04-19)
  4. ^ Autobiography, Chapter IV
  5. ^ G.K. Chesterton's Conversion Story
  6. ^ A. N. Wilson, Hilaire Belloc, Penguin Books. 1984.
  7. ^ Ward, Maisie. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Chapter XV. Sheed & Ward. 1944.
  8. ^ cited in Yancey, Philip. 2001. Soul Survivor p. 58.
  9. ^ Chesterton. G.K. Heretics, Chapter 7.
  10. ^ Chesterton, G.K. Heretics, Chapter 4.
  11. ^ Chesterton, G.K. Heretics, Chapter 20.
  12. ^ a b Chesterton, G.K. Orthodoxy, Chapter 3.
  13. ^ Chesterton, G.K. The Common Man, Rabelaisian Regrets.
  14. ^ Chesterton, G.K. The Ballad of the White Horse, Book 2.
  15. ^ Last orders,The Guardian, April 9, 2005.
  16. ^ Ward, Maisie. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Sheed & Ward. 1944.
  17. ^ Orwell, George: "Anti-Semitism in Britain"
  18. ^ Chesterton, G.K. The New Jerusalem, Chapter 12.
  19. ^ Coren, M. Gilbert: The Man Who Was G. K. Chesterton, p.216.
  20. ^ A Message from the President, Introduction to The Chesterton Review’s New Issue: Vol. XXXII, Nos. 3&4, Fall / Winter 2006
  21. ^ Found in A Severe Mercy
  22. ^ Found in C. S. Lewis: The Collected Letters, Vol. 2
  23. ^ The Christian Century June 6, 1962
  24. ^ Yancey, Philip. 2001. Soul Survivor, p. 45.
  25. ^ Margery Forester, Michael Collins - The Lost Leader, p.35.

[edit] External links

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Persondata
NAME Chesterton, G. K.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Chesterton, Gilbert Keith
SHORT DESCRIPTION English writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 29, 1874(1874-05-29)
PLACE OF BIRTH Kensington, London, England
DATE OF DEATH June 14, 1936
PLACE OF DEATH Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, England