G. K. CHESTERTON

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 140, 15 June 1936, Page 8

G. K. CHESTERTON

Mr. G. K. Chesterton, whose death is announced today, was one of those great figures of striking individuality who seem to crop up in every generation in Britain to embody the peculiar genius of the race. He was great in every sense, not only in mind and spirit, but in and physique. He was well described by an American writer some years ago: He fitted perfectly into the picture— his suit unpressed, his sandy hair, with its silver glints, tousled and disarranged, the cord attached to his remarkably shaped glasses mended in a knot. His gigantic form was deposited in a chair which seemed ridiculously small, as any chair on which he sits would seem. It was artistically perfect—this huge man absorbing innumerable cups of tea in the very part of London where Samuel Johnson, to whom he bears a strange resemblance, toiled and wrote. *

The resemblance to Dr. Johnson was not only physical, but intellectual also. Chesterton had the same type of mind, massive and independent, and the same essentially religious spirit, though subscribing to a different creed. Both stood like , rocks in a changing world, averring that though externals might alter mankind* remained fundamentally the same through the ages, and that human nature had the same needs no matter what the system was in any particular period. It was this that made Chesterton seem to some people old-fashioned. He had the basic conservatism of the triie Englishman, coupled with an immense sanity of outlook, tolerant of frailties, but not of falseness.

Unlike Johnson, who preferred to talk, Chesterton wrote voluminously, and his weekly observations on passing things, in the "Illustrated London News," running on for years almost to his death, was always a treasury of shrewd insight and paradoxical humour. There was nothing like it in current comment to stimulate thought along novel lines discovered by Chesterton's extraordinarily original turn of mind. As recently as the end of April he wrote, in his weekly page, this about a certain trend of opinion in England:

The man who supposes that England can be content to know nothing about Europe is simply a man who knows nothing about England. He knows nothing about English history in the past or of . the actual position of English politics in the present. . . .

In the intellectual and spiritual sense, if we ever had enjoyed any Isolation, it most certainly would not have been Splendid Isolation. . . ."

Chesterton abhorred all "isms," mass production, and the rationalisation and systematisation of a machinc age. With his bosom friend, Mr. Hilaire Belloc, he exercised for many years a profound influence over English thought. Towards the end he may have found the world moving too quickly for him, but lie always maintained that in the long run it would come back to his way of thinking, which may be described as the sublimated common sense of the ages. Like Dr. Johnson he was a great English "original," and the world will be the poorer for his passing.