G. K. Chesterton

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33425, 5 January 1974, Page 8

G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton. By Dudley Barker. Constable. 304 pp. Illustrated.

Chesterton’s writings have been so long out of fashion — most of them, indeed, out of print — that the time seems right for a serious revaluation. It is a pity, then, that this biography, which attempts a revaluation, should almost succeed in quenching rather than kindling interest in its subject. The fault lies not with Chesterton himself, who somehow manages to survive the worst efforts- of his biographer, but with Mr Barker, who has neither the scholarship of the dedicated historian nor the literary critic’s habit of analysis and evaluation. Chesterton is subjected here to a scrutiny scarcely more searching than the amused curiosity with which his contemporaries treated him, and little of his personality emerges from behind the mask he assumed in public of a self-mocking, hard-drinking, outrageously opinionated clown. On the crucial matters of Chesterton’s personal life—his marriage, his friendships and his religion — Mr Barker writes so superficially that the reader’s understanding of a man who was deeply religious and widely loved is in no way advanced; and his rambling effusions about the writings do nothing to explain why Chesterton won the admiration of such writers as Eliot. Shaw and Auden. Chesterton may not be a forgotten genius, but he deserves much better than this.