Genealogy: G.K. Chesterton, 1874 – 1936
“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.” - G. K. Chesterton
By Brooke Lehmann
Perhaps one of the greatest examples of a man who relished life in all its fullness, the English journalist, novelist, critic and Christian G.K. Chesterton’s influence lingers on till the present day. His Catholic, romantic and “
distributionist” concepts of a pastoral, egalitarian England (aka “Merrie Englandism”) liberated from machines infused even the London Olympic games.
As
Daily Telegraph blogger Tim Stanley wrote of the opening scene's depiction of a pastoral England, "Was this written by GK Chesterton? It's fantastic."
A generous thinker and gentleman, Chesterton cherished his work, his friends, his wife, his religion, which was underwritten by an unquenchable curiosity, substantial creativity, excellent sense of humour and chivalrous sensibility. He took equal delight in the peculiarities of the rhinoceros as the faces of men on the street. He saw each person as having, "the incredible unexpectedness of a fairy-tale".
His writings are cherished by literary scholars, fantasy boffins, intellectuals and Christians alike, his achievements vast and widespread. It was said when he visited America in 1922, his lectures were reported by the national and international press. He was once granted the company of the Pope.
In the homily given by Ronald Knox at Chesterton’s funeral at Westminster Cathedral in 1936, Knox said, "All of this generation has grown up under Chesterton's influence so completely that we do not even know when we are thinking Chesterton."
The Chesterton Society has proposed his beatification.
Standing at six feet and four inches tall, with a rather impressive girth, Chesterton's gargantuan appearance is one that seems as aptly suited to his sizeable literary contribution as to one of the many fairytales he was entranced by. A public figure rather than an academic, his prolific writing career percolated into poetry, novels, short stories, journalism, essays, and biographies.
There is hardly a genre that was not pervaded by this most ardent of expositors. He was known to be an encouragement and inspiration to many well-known writers who shared a similar proclivity towards the written word in its many splendid forms, such as C. S. Lewis, who credits Chesterton’s commentary
The Everlasting Man with "baptising" his intellect, and J.R.R. Tolkien who quotes Chesterton favourably in his cherished essay, “On Fairy Stories”.
His circle of literary friends included the playwright George Bernard Shaw, with whom he shared a lively "Chestershawian" discourse. The two disagreed on essential points of truth. "It is necessary to disagree with him as much as I do, in order to admire him as much as I do; and I am proud of him as a foe even more than as a friend," Chesterton once said of his “too grave” and “too serious” friend Shaw. Of Chesterton, Shaw said, "He was a man of colossal genius".
Chesterton: “To look at you, anyone would think there was a famine in England.”
Shaw: “To look at you, anyone would think you caused it.”
Dorothy L. Sayers, who read his
Orthodoxy as a schoolgirl when her faith was mired in adolescent doubt, said of Chesterton in 1952, “To the young people of my generation, G.K.C. was a kind of Christian liberator." Evelyn Waugh described his
The Everlasting Man as a “triumphant assertion that a book can be both great and popular." Chesterton was said to have influenced the original conception of Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited.