G. K. CHESTERTON

is the one C S Lewis during his atheist period considered ‘the most sensible man alive.’ T S Eliot observed that Chesterton ‘did more… than any man of his time… to maintain the existence of the important minority in the modern world.’ He did so not by sounding didactic alarums but by running riot with his pen, from which he poured forth thousands of newspaper articles and over a hundred books of every genre, from the Father Brown detective stories to comic essays like ‘On Running After One’s Hat’ and works of literary and social criticism.

‘The age needs first and foremost to be taught the nature of wonder’, Chesterton writes…

Chesterton reannounces the gospel with lightning-fast analogies and paradoxes so vivid (and, when they are on the mark, so funny) that they restore its pristine clarity and enchantment.

‘It is quite unlike anything else. It is a thing final like the trump of doom though it is also a piece of good news; or news that seems too good to be true. It is nothing less than the loud assertion that this mysterious Maker of the world has visited His world in person. It declares that really and even recently, or right in the middle of historic times, there did walk into the world this original invisible being; about whom the thinkers make theories and the mythologists hand down myths; the Man who made the world.’ (The Everlasting Man).

Give Chesterton to your friends of the MTV generation, for with their shortened attention spans they may find that his scintillating aphorisms enable him, as Masie Ward puts it, to walk into their hearts without knocking. The only problem with reading Chesterton is that for a time afterwards almost any serious writer one reads comes across as a stuffed-shirt. But that’s all right: there can be only one G. K. Chesterton, and every generation needs him.

Carol Zaleski, ‘Generation G K’, Christian Century, July 18-25, 2001, p. 30.