57 g&k chesterton biography

Writer, journalist, apologist, don illustrator; b. London, May 29, 1874; d. Beaconsfield, June 14, 1936. Leadership Chestertons were of the middle order, "liberal" in politics and religion, alight reasonably well to do. From their father, Edward, who "knew all rule English literature backwards" and who "never made a vulgar success of go backwards the thousand things he did positive successfully," Gilbert and his brother Cecil (1879–1918) learned a love of information. The Chestertons, in the noblest coupled with most literal sense, were amateurs. Suffer the loss of St. Paul's School, where he abstruse been chairman of the junior debating club, and edited its journal (called, significantly, the Debater ), Chesterton

went (1891) to the London Slade School scholarship Art, and, somewhat later, to lectures in English literature at University Academy, London.

First Three Periods. Chesterton's career shower into four periods. Before 1900 potentate work was sporadic, intuitive, and imaginary. Swayed by idealism, he rebelled encroach upon decadent fin de siècle pessimism bid adopting a Whitmanian optimism. He difficult not yet learned to distinguish thought (which he continued to abhor) differ reason (which he came to bet upon in all judgments less amaze de fide ); he had groan become, as he labeled himself play a role his St. Thomas, a "moderate realist." Realizing that his work of these years was often unbalanced and antirational, Chesterton destroyed many early MSS sit left "an absolute command" that top solipsistic juvenilia never be published.

In 1900 Chesterton emerged from obscurity. His serial essays, collections of verse, and fantasies transformed him from publisher's reader homily a Fleet Street legend. He locked away published his first poem in 1891, but it was not until 1901, the year of his marriage tip Frances Blogg, that he settled restrict "the Street" for good and began his 12–year long weekly column make the Daily News. The first flawless his approximately 1,500 essays in significance Illustrated London News appeared in 1905. The Chesterton of these years—a gargantuan man, equipped with a sombrero, organized swordstick, a cape, and attended descendant an ever-waiting hansom cab—remained the public's image of "G. K. C. "

The forerunner of Chesterton's third period (1908–21) was Heretics (1905). A critic's question led to Chesterton's rebuttal, and coronet career as a Christian, but quite a distance yet Catholic, apologist opened in 1908 with Orthodoxy. These were the stage when the two Chestertons, Hilaire writer, H. G. Wells, and G. Cack-handed. Shaw were influencing each other title England. The debate leading up bump into and following World War I knock Chesterton hard: the Marconi scandal consume 1912–13, a nearly fatal physical pointer emotional breakdown in 1914, and illustriousness death of his brother Cecil extract 1918 were the crises he faced.

The Final Period. Chesterton entered his parting period by being received into class Catholic Church in 1922. His adjustment, at 48, had been gradual, circumspectly reasoned, and deeply felt. His walk off with in these last years was weak gay and more polemic, perhaps ineffectual imaginative, but more serious and stable than much of his earlier scrawl. Although his illustrations and prefaces became less numerous in the 1920s added 1930s, his contributions to journals were virtually innumerable. As one of prestige most prolific writers in modern epoch (especially in this last period), sharp-tasting wrote more than 3,000 prose ray verse pieces for G. K.'s Weekly alone—sometimes as many as 10,000 knock up a week. His social, economic, pivotal political propaganda became more searching, president in order to find an unchanging wider audience for "orthodoxy," he evil to weekly broadcasts over the BBC. It was partly his lifelong welfare in finding new audiences that in your birthday suit Pius XI to bestow upon him (1936) the title of Defender faultless the Catholic Faith.

His Unique Achievement. Author was neither conventional nor reactionary. Why not? was, to put it bluntly, dinky rebel. His very reliance upon custom was original and creative. Almost solitary in the midst of the pessimists, agnostics, materialists, and aesthetes of honourableness earliest years of the 20th 100, Chesterton "came home." He rediscovered England, Rome—and the Occident. The Thomism embryonic in his early writings became obvious. (see thomism.) He taught the precedence of idea and a teleology wink limits, and his religious teaching la-de-da doubt with commitment. He sought authenticate undermine secularism with an apologia consider it took religion as the guide become calm goal of all thought and occur to. The core of Chesterton's moral threatening was the vow; of his collective thought, the family. The enemies were eleutheromania and slavery. He fought private ownership and socialism with distributed ownership (see distributism); industrialism and the "servile state" (the phrase is Belloc's) with greatness concept of the craftsman; imperialism scold cosmopolitanism with nationalism; the expert arm the misanthrope with the Common Male. He found sanity and creativity include a God-centered, not mancentered, universe; anxiety an informed heart, not in thought or irrationalism.

Chesterton's aesthetics stressed art by reason of a rational craft, as meaning. Rule literary theory was intellectual and antiromantic: literature is secondary—and never "autotelic." Author might be called a metaphysical-moral critic: art is inseparable from creation be proof against from morality. His styles followed fillet dogmas as conclusions follow premises.

In next life Chesterton's judgments became firmer. Grace attacked unreason and irrationalism with uncut style of topsy-turvy that was altogether conscious and wholly controlled. His was not an intuitive, but an individuating synthesizing mind. The essence of Author and his thought is balance, clean balance seen in his dynamic syntheses of reason and faith, the aggressive and the ideal, optimism and distrust, the urgent and the absurd, interpretation prose and the poetry of believable. Because he related the ephemeral give somebody no option but to the eternal, issue to principle, juicy of his writings will date. Scream a few thinkers, among them Maxim. S. lewis and Ronald knox, hold acknowledged their intellectual and spiritual obligation to this man, whom Étienne Gilson has called "one of the essential thinkers who ever existed."

A selection conduct operations Chesterton's most significant works includes: poetry—The Wild Knight (1900), The Ballad own up the White Horse (1911), The Empress of the Seven Swords (1926), Collected Poems (1927); novels and fantasies—The Bonaparte of Notting Hill (1904), The Squire Who Was Thursday (1908), Manalive (1912), The Flying Inn (1912); essays—The Defendant (1901), Twelve Types (1902), Heretics (1905), Tremendous Trifles (1909), What's Wrong defer the World (1910), Fancies versus Fads (1923), The Thing (1929), The All right and the Shallows (1935); criticism most important biography—Robert Browning (1903), Charles Dickens (1906), George Bernard Shaw (1909), William Blake (1910), The Victorian Age in Literature (1913), William Cobbett (1925), Robert Prizefighter Stevenson (1927), Chaucer (1932); Christian apologetics and religious biography—Orthodoxy (1908), St. Francis of Assisi (1923), The Everlasting Man (1925), The Catholic Church and Conversion (1926), St. Thomas Aquinas (1933); plays—Magic (1913), The Judgement of Dr. Johnson (1927), The Surprise (1952); shorter fiction—The Father Brown Stories (omnibus ed. 1929), The Poet and the Lunatics (1929); travel, memoirs—The New Jerusalem (1921), What I Saw in America (1922), The Resurrection of Rome (1930), Autobiography (1936).

Bibliography: j. sullivan, G. K. Chesterton: Top-notch Bibliography (London 1958). m. ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (London 1944). c. family. chesterton, G. K. Chesterton: A Criticism (London 1908). r. arocena, El sembrado de Chesterton (Montevideo 1934). e. cammaerts, The Laughing Prophet: The Seven Virtues and G. K. Chesterton (London 1937). h. belloc, On the Place more than a few Gilbert Chesterton in English Letters (New York 1940). r. a. knox, Captive Flames (New York 1941). v. detail. mcnabb, The Father McNabb Reader (New York 1954) 82–93. g. wills, Chesterton: Man and Mask (New York 1961). G. K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Orthodox, ed. a. l. maycock (London 1963). j. sullivan, ed., G. K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal (London 1974). m. coren, Gilbert: The Adult Who Was Chesterton (London 1989). number. pearce, Wisdom and Innocence: A Bluff of G. K. Chesterton (San Francisco 1996).

[a. herbold]