He was an influential English writer from 1900 till his death in 1936. His prolific and diverse output included journalism, philosophy, poetry, biography, Christian apologetics, fantasy, and detective fiction.
Not many have equalled him in literary stature in modern times and his fame as playwright, poet, novelist, literary commentator, editor, pamphleteer, apologist and essay writer is awe-inspiring.
The range of his interests is staggering and the variety of subjects about which he wrote is enormous.
A career in journalism gave Chesterton mastery over one of his favourite literary forms. He became the most popular essayist of his day, upheld as a model to the generations of English School Children between the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and the end of the II World War. 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 Encyclopedia Britannica. In the United States, his writings on distributism were popularized through The American Review, published by Seward Collins in New York.
Chesterton was a BBC Radio personality of renown. During the early days of broadcasting, his piping voice became as well known as the high-pitched tones of H G Wells (1866-1946), the urbanities of Max Beerbohm (1872-1956) or carefully nurtured brogue of Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) all the time enhanced by Chesterton’s obesity and eccentric touches of dress.
G K Chesterton’s overriding sense of life’s complexity and contradictions led him to be known in his time as a ‘Master of the Paradox’. He wrote in an off-hand, often informal, whimsical prose studded with startling paradoxes. Here is a striking example of his style: ‘Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.’
He was a literary critic of the first order and wrote books of lasting importance about Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and Robert Browning (1812-1889). He also produced a classic book in 1913 titled ‘The Victorian Age in Literature’.
In my view, Chesterton’s master piece was his work ‘Orthodoxy’ which was published in 1908. This book was written more than a decade before his conversion to Catholicism. It is a comprehensive view of the conservative approach to religious and social life. In it, Chesterton argues that in life it is sensible to change anything excepting our goals what he termed ‘fixed ideals’. His point being: So long as we hold to a single end, our failures to achieve it will still move us closer to success; but if the goal keeps changing, all our failures are pointless!
Chesterton 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 too finely nuanced to fit comfortably under either the ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ banner. Chesterton attacked both these labels in this manner: ‘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.’
Chesterton also wrote a series of celebrated detective stories about the Priest-Sleuth Father Brown. The Man Who Was Thursday is arguably his best-known novel. He has the well deserved reputation for being one of the wittiest men who ever lived and he was rarely bested in riposte.
Chesterton was a large man, standing six feet four inches tall and weighing around 134 kg. His obesity marked by his great 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.’
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.’ 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 usually wore a funny cap 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 location (often mistaken and many times wrong!), sending such messages as ‘Am at Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?’ to which she would reply, ‘Home.’
In his autobiography, Chesterton wrote about himself as follows: Apart from vanity or mock modesty (which healthy people always use as jokes!), my real judgement of my work is that I have spoilt a number of jolly good ideas in my time.... I can, if you will let me, lay claim to one little modest negative virtue. I have always been free from envy. I believe the biographers or bibliographers of the future, if they find any trace of me at all, will say something like this: ‘Chesterton, Gilbert Keith: From the fragments left by this now forgotten writer it is difficult to understand the cause even of such publicity as he obtained in his own days; nevertheless there is reason to believe that he was not without certain fugitive mental gifts’.
In a famous essay titled ‘A Defence of Nonsense’, Chesterton wrote: It is altogether advisedly that we quote chiefly from Mr Edward Lear’s (1812-1888) ‘Nonsense Rhymes’. To our minds he is both chronologically and essentially the father of nonsense; we think him superior to Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)... Lewis Carroll’s ‘Wonderland’ is a country populated by insane mathematicians. We feel the whole is an escape into a world of masquerade, we feel that if we could pierce their disguises, we might discover that Humpty Dumpty and the March Hare were professors and doctors of divinity enjoying a mental holiday. This sense of escape is certainly less emphatic in Edward Lear, because of the completeness of his citizenship in the world of unreason... Edward Lear introduces his unmeaning words and his amorphous creations, not with the pomp of reason, but with the romantic prelude of rich hues and haunting rhythms.... Our claim is that nonsense is a new literature (we might almost say a new sense)... .Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out of mere art, any more than anything essentially reasonable has ever arisen out of the pure reason. There must always be a rich moral soil for any great aesthetic growth. The principle of ART FOR ART’S SAKE is a very good principle if it means there is a vital distinction between the earth and the tree that has its roots in the earth; but it is a very bad principle if it means that the tree could grow just as well with its roots in the air... If, therefore, nonsense is really to be the literature of the future, it must have its own version of the Cosmos to offer, the world must not only be the tragic, romantic and religious, it must be nonsensical too. And here we fancy that nonsense will, in a much unexpected way, come to the aid of the spiritual view of things... The simple sense of wonder at the shape of things, and of their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality as it is the basis of nonsense. Nonsense and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook. The well meaning person who, by merely studying the logical side of things, has decided that ‘faith is nonsense’, does not know how truly he speaks; later it may comeback to him in the form that nonsense is faith.
Chesterton’s poem ‘The Great Minimum’ is my favourite poem. Here are a few lines from this great poem:
‘It is something to have wept as we have wept,
It is something to have done as we have done,
It is something to have watched where all men slept,
And seen the stars which never see the sun
It is something to have smelt the mystic rose,
Although it break and leave the thorny rods,
It is something to have hungered once as those
Must hunger who have ate the bread of God’s
Lo! Blessed are our ears for they have heard;
Yes, blessed are our eyes for they have seen:
Let thunder break on man and beast and bird
And the lightning. It is something to have been.
In all his writings, Chesterton consistently displayed wit and a sense of humour. 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
Olá,
ReplyDeleteFiquei muito impressionado com a beleza e qualidade do que vi aqui. Abraços. Domingos, Brasil.