Chesterton embodied the hearty side of mysticism, cape thrown across his shoulders, broad-brimmed hat on his head and sword-stick at his side, a hungry Catholic Pantagruel in London. We see them as we read them: Shaw all crinkled, beaming rationality, Kipling beetle-browed, bespectacled imperial intensity. Writing in London at a time when hundreds of morning newspapers and as many magazines competed for copy, and where mass literacy had created a mass audience without yet entirely removing respect for intellect, they made themselves as much as they made their sentences. But his most strenuous advocates are mainly conservative preVatican II types who are indignant about his neglect without stopping to reflect how much their own uncritical enthusiasm may have contributed to it.Ĭhesterton is one of that company of writers whom we call Edwardian (though they stretch back to the last years of Victoria), a golden generation that emerged in the eighteen-nineties with personas seeming as fully formed as the silent comedians of the Mack Sennett studio, complete with style, costume, and gesture. He has a loving following among liberal Catholics, like Garry Wills and Wilfrid Sheed, and even nonbelievers, like Martin Gardner. His Catholic devotees are legion and fanatic-the small Ignatius Press has taken on the heroic job of publishing everything he wrote in a uniform edition, and is already up to the thirty-fifth volume-but not always helpful to his non-cult reputation, especially when they insist on treating his gassy Church apologetics as though they were as interesting as his funny and suggestively mystical Christian allegories. Those of us who are used to pressing his writing on friends have the hard job of protecting him from his detractors, who think he was a nasty anti-Semite and medievalizing reactionary, and the still harder one of protecting him from his admirers, who pretend that he was not. Its logic is: it turns the lock.”īut he is a difficult writer to defend. If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.” Or: “The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.” Or: “A key has no logic to its shape. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober’ ”-while the deeper ones are genuine Catholic koans, pregnant and profound: “Blasphemy depends on belief, and is fading with it. Even his standard-issue zingers are first-class-“Americans are the people who describe their use of alcohol and tobacco as vices” “There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape-nuts on principle” “ ‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no true patriot would think of saying. His aphorisms alone are worth the price of admission, better than any but Wilde’s. It is also, along with Chesterton’s “The Napoleon of Notting Hill,” the nearest thing that this masterly writer wrote to a masterpiece.Ĭhesterton is an easy writer to love-a brilliant sentence-maker, a humorist, a journalist of endless appetite and invention. “The Man Who Was Thursday” is one of the hidden hinges of twentieth-century writing, the place where, before our eyes, the nonsense-fantastical tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear pivots and becomes the nightmare-fantastical tradition of Kafka and Borges. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday,” and it has come out in at least two new editions on the occasion. This year is the hundredth anniversary of G. Photograph by Howard Coster / Mary Evans Picture Library Chesterton is the great critic of homogenization, but his localism had an ugly side.
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