MANAGER'S DEATH.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 140, 15 June 1936, Page 7

MANAGER'S DEATH.

GOLDSBROUGH MORT., LTD. (Received 1.30 p.m.) MELBOURNE, this day. The death is announced of Mr. William Allan Gibson, general manager of Goldsbrough Mort., Ltd., woolbrokers, aged 07.

BRILLIANT WRITER. G. K. CHESTERTON PASSES. LONDON, June 14. The death is announced of the wellknown English author, G. K. Chesterton, aged U2. ■Gilbert Keith Chesterton, essayist, novelist and poet, was born in London in May, 1874, and came of a family of estate agents. He early devoted himself mainly to experimenting in prose and verse. Having published a volume of clever poems, "The -Wild Knight," he entered journalism in 1000 as a pro-Boer, and one of a little group that included Hilaire Belloc, profoundly suspicious of the commercial and cosmopolitan element in Imperialism. Chesterton established himself from the first as a writer with a distinct jffcrsonality, combative to a swashbuckling degree, humorous, unconventional and dogmatic, with a gift for acute criticism.

In 1915 Chesterton published a book of Catholic religious poems, and in a speech delivered in London declared that after the war the future would belong to the Roman Catholic Church. This was the prelude to his formal entry into that community in 1922—a step which excited much interest, and which had been taken in 1912 by his brother Cecil, who fell in the war. He then preached his new faith with great enthusiasm, asserting that only for the gullible and credulous was it possible to be sceptics. At the same time, however, he denounced asccticiem and mortification of the flesh and proclaimed the joy of life. Chesterton was only incidentally a novelist. He was chiefly a journalist, paradoxical and didactic in an age of indifference and scepticism. work is varied and nearly all occasional in character — detached essays and brief books on topical, religious and literary subjects, scintillating with paradoxical witticisms. The only fault of his methods was that the paradoxes tended to become mechanical and stereotyped. As a critic he was full of insight and illumination, as was shown in his books on Dickens, Thackeray, G. F. Watts and Browning, and his collected essays such as "Heretics" and "Orthodoxy." In his "Father Brown" series he presents an apparently guileless priest who is really a second Sherlock Holmes. His other stories include "The Man Who Knew Too Much," 'Tales of the Long Bow," "The Everlasting Man," "The Return of Don Quixote," partly .written before the war, and predicting an anti-revolutionary revolution such as Mussolini carried through in Italy; "The Man Who was Thursday," "The Napoleon of Netting Hill," "The Ball and the Cross," and "Man Alive." \ One of his earliest books of essays, "Twelve Types." was planned out in pencil after he had spent his last penny at a restaurant. He then went round the corner and sold the idea to a publisher foe cash down. In addition to his many other collections of essays, he produced several travel books such as "Irish Impressions." "The New Jerusalem," "What I Saw In America," and a successful "Short History of England." He also collaborated with Hilaire Belloc in a novel, "The Haunted House." In September, 1926, he attempted to found a new political party, wTiose. motto was "distributivism." As a poet Chesterton did admirable work in "The Ballad of the White Horse," "Lepanto," and "The Queen of Seven Swords," and some critics regard his best poems as the finest fruits o£ his genius.

DEATH IN ENGLAND. LORD BLEDISLOE'S BROTHER. LONDON, June 14. The death has occurred of Major Arthur Henry Bathurst, Viscount Bledisloe's brother and his military secretary in New Zealand.