In fact, he produced paintings and illustrations throughout his writing career. But growing up, he was mainly considered an absent-minded dunce. He once wandered around the playground during class, explaining he thought it was Saturday. His teachers believed him. His absentmindedness continued throughout his life, even after he was hailed as one of the greatest geniuses of his day. He once telegraphed his wife: "Am at Market Harborough.
Where ought I to be? But the mindless genius loved a great paradox and was considered a master of the form:. These were not mere plays on words—Chesterton saw the nonsense of paradox as a "supreme assertion of truth": "Critics were almost entirely complimentary to what they were pleased to call my brilliant paradoxes," he admitted, "until they discovered that I really meant what I said.
These, and other epigrams fill Chesterton's 70 books, hundreds of newspaper columns, and countless other writings, including those in his own magazine, G. He is, however, considered "a master without a masterpiece," since there is no crowning achievement in his social criticism, literary criticism, theological treatises, or novels. Though many of his works are now forgotten, they have left a legacy on the world.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, prolific journalist and author, was well known for his apologetics, biographies, detective fiction, literary, social, and political commentary, and modern history.
Possessing a keen wit, a comic genius delighting in paradox, and a gift for religious argument, he published nearly books and over 4, newspaper columns and essays. While attending art school in London in the mids when he was about twenty, Chesterton realized his artistic limitations and determined to pursue journalism. A few years later he was writing columns regularly for several newspapers, including the Daily News and the Illustrated London News, and by was widely recognized for his abilities as a political and social critic, and as a writer in general.
During the first decade of the 20th century Chesterton's voluminous written output only increased, and included his first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill , and his classic work on the basics of Christian belief, Orthodoxy. In the following year he published the biography St.
In the first chapter he writes the following:. He was to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour. He was a lover. He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a lover of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation.
A lover of men is very nearly the opposite of a philanthropist; indeed the pedantry of the Greek word carries something like a satire on itself. A philanthropist may be said to love anthropoids. But as St. This vision, not yet specifically religious, though determinedly antimaterialist, helped launch Chesterton into the world that he went out to conquer.
After a failed attempt at art school and a flirtation with politics, he began, at the turn of the century, writing pop journalism. He was an immediate hit. He wrote a regular column for the Illustrated London News for more than a quarter century. He was a big man: six feet four, and constantly expanding outward, from too much food and ale.
Bernard Shaw liked to refer to Chesterton and his close friend the Catholic poet and philosopher Hilaire Belloc as if they were a single right-wing Carrollian monster, the Chesterbelloc. Appearance is the great sorter-out of literary fame; it is hard to become an iconic writer without first looking like an icon. A certain kind of fatuous materialist progressivism was ascendant—the progressivism of Shaw and Wells and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, which envisaged a future of unending technological advance.
As he recognized, the papers wanted what they always want: the passionate assertion of the opposing point, the unexpected view in clown makeup, the contrarian as comedian.
And that he gave, understanding perfectly the role he was to play. He could appeal to heaven, but he never put on airs. What he had to say came pouring out in essays, poems, and books. Most of the inconveniences that make men swear or women cry are really sentimental or imaginative inconveniences—things altogether of the mind.
For instance, we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures.
Because to him the red light and the green light on the signal are like a new sun and a new moon. Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of trains.
They also serve who only stand and wait for the two fifteen. With a comic touch, he goes on to make a serious point, elevating stories over situations:. A friend of mine was particularly afflicted in this way. Every day his drawer was jammed, and every day in consequence it was something else that rhymes to it.
But I pointed out to him that this sense of wrong was really subjective and relative; it rested entirely upon the assumption that the drawer could, should, and would come out easily. Imagine that you are tugging up a lifeboat out of the sea. Imagine that you are roping up a fellow-creature out of an Alpine crevass. Imagine even that you are a boy again and engaged in a tug-of-war between French and English.
I have no doubt that every day of his life he hangs on to the handle of that drawer with a flushed face and eyes bright with battle, uttering encouraging shouts to himself, and seeming to hear all round him the roar of an applauding ring. An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
Chesterton liked to pair himself, congenially, with Shaw, as his opposite, and he was right to do so, for they were the two most perceptive critics of capitalism in their decade. The chief bourgeois vices are hypocrisy and homogenization.
Mercantile capitalist societies profess values that their own appetites destroy; calls for public morality come from the same people who use prostitutes. Meanwhile, the workings of capital turn the local artisan into a maker of mass-produced objects and every high street into an identical strip mall.
He is the grandfather of Slow Food, of local eating, of real ale, the first strong mind that saw something evil in the levelling of little pleasures. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol—a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post card. His was one of the leading voices against the Boer War.
Neither could have seen any meaning in my own fancy for having things on a smaller and smaller scale. The novel tells the story, in a mood deliberately feverish and overlit—snowstorms over St.
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