CHESTERTON, GILBERT KEITH , Eng lish journalist and author, was born in London on May 29, 1874. He was educated at St. Paul's school, where, at an unusually early age, he gained the "Milton" prize for English verse. He left school in 1891 with the idea of studying art. But though he early developed, and indeed retained, a talent for draftsmanship of a very distinctive kind, his natural bent was literary, and he went through the usual apprenticeship of free-lance journalism, occa sional reviewing and work in a publisher's office.
In 1901 he married Frances Blogg. In 190o after having pro duced a volume of poems, The Wild Knight (1900), which led good critics to expect great things of him as a poet, he became a regular contributor of signed articles to The Speaker and the Daily News. From the first he stood out as the protagonist of revolt against the fin-de-siecle egotism and the weary omniscience of the previous generation, expressing for it the virile contempt of normal platitudinous man in a style unconventional, swash buckling and dogmatic. As Addison turned the weapons of fash ionable folly against itself by making vice ridiculous, so Chester ton laughed loud and long at the blasé self-sufficiency and the dingy little failings of the late Victorian wits. Never was con ventionality defended in a manner so unconventional. Hence the legend of Chesterton as a "master of paradox," which originated among older Victorian contemporaries and persisted far longer than it was reasonable to expect, partly perhaps because the sub ject of the legend was more tickled by it than he need have been. Chesterton's early studies in this vein were reprinted in a series of volumes, The Defendant (19o1), Twelve Types (1902), and Heretics (19o5) . Meanwhile he had laid the foundations of a more enduring reputation as a literary critic by his brilliant study of Browning in the "English Men of Letters" series (Robert Browning, 1903) . This was followed (1906) by Charles Dickens, which has been described as "one of the best critical studies in the language." Orthodoxy (1g08) and What's Wrong with the World (Iwo) succeeded Heretics as essays in religious thought and contemporary politics. To his hatred of the Victorian pessi mists there had by now been added a hatred of Victorian econom ics. He had begun life as an orthodox Liberal but was seized with a growing distrust of the reality of modern party politics, coupled with a fierce dislike of the industrial capitalism which he found dominant in the two old parties. He reacted, however, ultimately as fiercely from Socialism, and, in company with Hilaire Belloc and others, propagated the Distributist theories with which his name is associated.
In fiction his fancy found free play, and the medium was well suited to the expression of his ideas. He produced The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), a fantastic dream-history of civil wars between the suburbs of London, in which the shattering sanity of romantic man is once more vindicated; The Club of Queer Trades (1905), wherein the germs of his later success in detective fic tion may be noticed; The Man Who was Thursday (1908), and The Ball and the Cross (19o9). In these works the tendency to commingle his philosophy with his fiction became even greater. An earlier generation than Chesterton's would have called the books allegories, probably with the enthusiastic assent of the author. During the same period Chesterton produced a quantity of verse, some good, some bad—none of it indifferent. At its best it is very good indeed. A well-known English critic once observed of his light verse that, whereas there had been many in all ages who could write comic verse, Chesterton was one of the very few who could write comic poetry. The compliment was deserved. His more serious verse has been held to give him rank as the last of the great rhetorical poets. Like all rhetorical poets he is some times tinselly, but his best poems show what rhetoric can be at its best. Of these are "Lepanto" (191 1) and "A Song of the Wheels," written during the railway strike of 1911. The Ballad of the White Horse (1911) is uneven, but contains some of his finest work.
During the War Chesterton published little of permanent value. His volume of suggestive and brilliant historical essays, called by some strange oversight A Short History of England 09'7), is most worthy of note. Of his later works, The Superstition of Di vorce (192o), The New Jerusalem (1920), What I saw in Ameri ca (1922), St. Francis of Assisi (1923), William Cobbett (1925), The Everlasting Man (1925), The Judgment of Dr. Johnson (1927), R. L. Stevenson (1927), Generally Speaking (1929), and The Poet and the Lunatics (1929) are the chief.
It is difficult in the limits of such an article to appraise Chester ton's work adequately; but it is not difficult to see how his early reaction against the ideals (or lack of ideals) of the materialist civilization of the Igth century led him inevitably to champion the causes, lost or other, which he has championed (and here, be it said, that it is difficult to imagine that any cause is lost when Chesterton is defending it). He objected not so much to the civilization (for him, too, "Romance brought up the 9.15") as to the complacency of those who thought it the only, or the highest, form of civilization. And yet he could appreciate the great Vic torians as could few of his contemporaries. The generation after the War returned to Trollope and Wilkie Collins. But it was Ches terton who was showing them the way 15 years earlier. Indeed, it is this quality of appreciating his opponent, which he himself so praises in Pope, which makes the literary Chesterton at once so lovable a personality and so deadly an antagonist.
If a prediction may be ventured, Chesterton will be remem bered longest by his poems and his work in literary criticism. Many will regret that he tried his hand so little at play-writing, and spent so much time on polemical journalism. Nearly all will deplore the volume of his output. None will question the reality of his achievement at its highest, or the strength and purity of his influence. He died on June 14, 1936.