OBITUARY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 79, Issue 141, 16 June 1936, Page 7

OBITUARY

MR. G. K. CHESTERTON AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST [B* Telegraph—Press Xssociation—Copyright] LONDON, June 1-1. The death has occurred of Air. G. K. Chesterton, journalist and author. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who was born in 1874, showed his literary bent quite early in his career. He was educated at St. Paul’s School, London, where at an unusually early age he won the Alilton prize for English verse. When he left school in 1891 it was with the idea of studying art, but his natural bent was literary and he turned to free-lance journalism, although retaining a distinct talent for draughtsmaship. In 1900, having published a volume of clever poems under the caption “The Wild Knight,” he definitely took to journalism as a career, and became a regular contributor of signed articles to the Liberal journals—the Speaker and the Daily News. He established himself from the first as a writer with a distinct personality, combative to a swashbuckling degree, unconventional and dogmatic. He expressed virile contempt for the normal platitudinous man, but never was conventionality defended in so an unconventional manner, hence the legend of Chesterton being a master of paradox. He laid the foundations for a more enduring reputation as a literary critic by his brilliant study of Browning in “The English Men of Letters” series (1903). This was followed three years later by “Charles Dickens,” which has been described as one of the best critical studies in the English language. Essays in religious thought and contemporary politics revealed as much hatred of Victorian pessimism as of Victorian economics. In fiction His fancy found free play, and the tendency grew ever greater to mingle his philosophy with fiction. His success in the writing of detective fiction was verj marked, and his “Father Brown” series and “The Man. Who Knew.Teo Much” showed that he could couple even the writing of sensational mystery stuff with the expression of the views which ho had made peculiarly his own. A wellknown critic once remarked that whereas there had been many Ln ages who could write comic verse. Chesterton was one of the very few who could write comic poetry. His more serious verse has been held to give him rank as the last of the great rhetorical poets. Like all rhetorical poets, he was sometimes tinselly, but his best poems show what rhetoric can be at its best. Of these may be mentioned “Serpents” (1911) and “A Song of the Wheels,” written during the railway strike of 1911. “The Ballad of the White Horse” contains some of his best work, although it is uneven in structure. To many it will be a matter for regret that Chesterton tried his hand so little at play-writing and spent so much time on polemical journalism. “Alagic,” which was the success it deserved to be, was produced in 1913, but this initial attempt was not followed up until 1927. A volume of suggestive and brilliant historical essays appeared in 1917 under the absurd title of “A Short Histcry of England.” A full list of all Chesterton’s published works would occupy much space, but of his later writings one may mention, “The Superstition of Divorce” (1920), “Sit. Francis of Assisi” (1923), “William Cobbett” (1925), “The Everlasting Alan” (1925), 4 ‘The Judgment of Dr. Johnson” (1927), “R. L. Stevenson” (1927), “Generally Speaking” (1929), and “The Poet and .the Lunatics” (1929). An event took place in 1922 which was of the utmost moment in Chesterton's life, that event being his reception into the Roman Catholic Church. It was the natural result of a spiritual and intellectual development such as his had been. This step, however, did not profoundly modify this development of which it was the outcome. One cannot, therefore, sharply divide the “Catholic” from his “ pre-Catholic” writings: the general doctrines which he was preaching during the last ten or twelve years were the same as those he was preaching in 1906. Chesterton’s appearance, like that of his rival, George Bernard Shaw, is known the world over through the art of the caricaturist. He was certainly Falstaffian ,but not nearly so cumbersome as some caricaturists would have the world believe him to be. His appearance when delivering an address resembled that of a huge, absent-mind-ed, and somewhat bashful boy, the like-

ness being somewhat further heightened by the light and youthful quality of his rather small voice. As an essayist and historian of our own times, and as a critic of numberless subjects, Chesterton had no equal among writers of .the present times, but he will probably be remembered longest by his poems and by his work in literary criticism. No cause could possibly be considered lest when he was championing it, and he had the happy knack of appreciating his opponent. This latter quality made the literary Chesterton at once so lovable a personality and so deadly an antagonist. While the volume of his literary output may perhaps be deplored, none will question the reality of his achievement I at its highest, or the strength and purity of his influence upon the literature and thought of his time.