"Who is this guy and
why haven’t I heard of him?"
by Dale Ahlquist
President
American Chesterton Society
I’ve heard the question more than once. It is asked
by people who have just started to discover G.K. Chesterton. They have begun
reading a Chesterton book, or perhaps have seen an issue of Gilbert! Magazine, or maybe they’ve only encountered a series of pithy
quotations that marvelously articulate some forgotten
bit of common sense. They ask the question with a mixture of wonder, gratitude
and . . . resentment. They are amazed by what they have discovered. They are
thankful to have discovered it. And they are almost angry that it has taken so
long for them to make the discovery.
"Who is this guy. .
.?"
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) cannot be
summed up in one sentence. Nor in one paragraph. In
fact, in spite of the fine biographies that have been written of him, he has
never been captured between the covers of one book. But rather than waiting to
separate the goats from the sheep, let’s just come right out and say it: G.K.
Chesterton was the best writer of the 20th century. He said something about everything
and he said it better than anybody else. But he was no mere wordsmith. He was
very good at expressing himself, but more importantly, he had something very
good to express. The reason he was the greatest writer of the 20th
century was because he was also the greatest thinker of the 20th
century.
Born in London, Chesterton was educated at St.
Paul’s, but never went to college. He went to art school. In 1900, he was asked
to contribute a few magazine articles on art criticism, and went on to become
one of the most prolific writers of all time. He wrote a hundred books,
contributions to 200 more, hundreds of poems, including the epic Ballad of
the White Horse, five plays, five novels, and some two hundred short
stories, including a popular series featuring the priest-detective, Father
Brown. In spite of his literary accomplishments, he considered himself
primarily a journalist. He wrote over 4000 newspaper essays, including 30 years
worth of weekly columns for the Illustrated London News, and 13 years of
weekly columns for the Daily News. He also edited his own newspaper, G.K.’s
Weekly. (To put it into perspective, four thousand essays is the equivalent
of writing an essay a day, every day, for 11 years. If you’re not impressed,
try it some time. But they have to be good essays - all of them – as funny as
they are serious, and as readable and rewarding a century after you’ve written them.)
Chesterton was equally at ease with literary and
social criticism, history, politics, economics, philosophy, and theology. His
style is unmistakable, always marked by humility, consistency, paradox, wit,
and wonder. His writing remains as timely and as timeless today as when it
first appeared, even though much of it was published in throw away papers.
This man who composed such profound and perfect
lines as "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has
been found difficult and left untried," stood 6’4" and weighed about
300 pounds, usually had a cigar in his mouth, and walked around wearing a cape
and a crumpled hat, tiny glasses pinched to the end of his nose, swordstick in
hand, laughter blowing through his moustache. And usually had no idea where or
when his next appointment was. He did much of his writing in train stations,
since he usually missed the train he was supposed to catch. In one famous
anecdote, he wired his wife, saying, "Am at Market Harborough. Where ought
I to be?" His faithful wife, Frances, attended to all the details of his
life, since he continually proved he had no way of doing it himself. She was
later assisted by a secretary, Dorothy Collins, who became the couple’s
surrogate daughter, and went on to become the writer’s literary executrix,
continuing to make his work available after his death.
This absent-minded, overgrown elf of a man, who
laughed at his own jokes and amused children at birthday parties by catching
buns in his mouth, this was the man who wrote a book called The Everlasting
Man, which led a young atheist named C.S. Lewis to become a Christian. This
was the man who wrote a novel called The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which
inspired Michael Collins to lead a movement for Irish Independence. This was
the man who wrote an essay in the Illustrated London News that inspired
Mohandas Gandhi to lead a movement to end British colonial rule in India. This
was a man who, when commissioned to write a book on St. Thomas Aquinas, had his
secretary check out a stack of books on St. Thomas from the library, opened the
top book on the stack, thumbed through it, closed it, and proceeded to dictate
a book on St. Thomas. Not just any book. The renowned Thomistic
scholar, Ettienne Gilson, had this to say about it:
"I consider it as being without possible
comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short of genius
can account for such an achievement. Everybody will no doubt admit that it is a
'clever' book, but the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty years in
studying St. Thomas. . . cannot fail to perceive that the so-called 'wit' of
Chesterton has put their scholarship to shame. He has guessed all that which we
had tried to demonstrate, and he has said all that which they were more or less
clumsily attempting to express in academic formulas. Chesterton was one of the
deepest thinkers who ever existed; he was deep because he was right; and he
could not help being right; but he could not either help being modest and
charitable, so he left it to those who could understand him to know that he was
right, and deep; to the others, he apologized for being right, and he made up
for being deep by being witty. That is all they can see of him."
Chesterton debated many of the celebrated
intellectuals of his time: George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow. According to contemporary accounts,
Chesterton usually emerged as the winner of these contests, however, the world
has immortalized his opponents and forgotten Chesterton, and now we hear only
one side of the argument, and we are enduring the legacies of socialism,
relativism, materialism, and skepticism. Ironically,
all of his opponents regarded Chesterton with the greatest affection. And
George Bernard Shaw said: "The world is not thankful enough for
Chesterton."
His writing has been praised by Ernest Hemingway,
Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Karel Capek, Marshall McLuhan, Paul Claudel, Dorothy L.
Sayers, Agatha Christie, Sigrid Undset, Ronald Knox, Kingsley Amis, W.H. Auden,
Anthony Burgess, E.F. Schumacher, Neil Gaiman, and
Orson Welles. To name a few.
T.S. Eliot said that Chesterton "deserves a
permanent claim on our loyalty."
". . . and why haven’t I heard of him?
Why haven’t you heard of him?
There are three answers to this question:
1.
I don’t know.
2.
You’ve been cheated.
3.
Chesterton is the most unjustly neglected writer of
our time. Perhaps it is proof that education is too important to be left to
educators and that publishing is too important to be left to publishers, but
there is no excuse why Chesterton is no longer taught in our schools and why
his writing is not more widely reprinted and especially included in college
anthologies. Well, there is an excuse. It seems that Chesterton is tough to
pigeonhole, and if a writer cannot be quickly consigned to a category, or to one-word
description, he risks falling through the cracks. Even if he weighs three
hundred pounds.
But there
is another problem. Modern thinkers and commentators and critics have found it
much more convenient to ignore Chesterton rather than to engage him in an
argument, because to argue with Chesterton is to lose.
Chesterton
argued eloquently against all the trends that eventually took over the 20th
century: materialism, scientific determinism, moral relativism, and spineless
agnosticism. He also argued against both socialism and capitalism and showed
why they have both been the enemies of freedom and justice in modern society.
And what
did he argue for? What was it he defended? He defended "the common
man" and common sense. He defended the poor. He defended the family. He
defended beauty. And he defended Christianity and the Catholic Faith. These
don’t play well in the classroom, in the media, or in the public arena. And
that is probably why he is neglected. The modern world prefers writers who are
snobs, who have exotic and bizarre ideas, who glorify decadence, who scoff at
Christianity, who deny the dignity of the poor, and who think freedom means no
responsibility.
But even though Chesterton is no longer taught in
schools, you cannot consider yourself educated until you have thoroughly read
Chesterton. And furthermore, thoroughly reading Chesterton is almost a complete
education in itself. Chesterton is indeed a teacher, and the best kind. He
doesn’t merely astonish you. He doesn’t just perform the wonder of making you
think. He goes beyond that. He makes you laugh.