G. K. Chesterton: A Prophet for the 21st Century

44 Pages·2009·0.82 MB·English

by  Aidan Mackey

Distributed exclusively by IHS Press.
ISBN-10 (Ebook): 1-932528-54-7
ISBN-13 (Ebook): 978-1-932528-54-1
Introduction
In the last few years we have seen several new introductions
to G.K. Chesterton, and if God is good to us, we will continue to
see more. This has happened for two reasons. First, since Chester-
ton was neglected and forgotten by an entire generation, it has been
necessary to re-introduce him to a new generation. Second, one in-
troduction is not enough. Every introduction is going to leave some-
thing out. Chesterton is too big. And it is because he is so big that he
needs an introduction. His enormous literary output is intimidating.
No one knows where to begin reading him. The more introductions
the better. The more doorways to Chesterton, the more inviting it
will be for readers to rush to the original texts.
Ironically, Chesterton has been a victim of one of his own
paradoxes. He said that anything can be ignored as long as it is big
enough. It has been easy—and some would argue, necessary—to
ignore the writings of Gilbert Keith Chesterton because they are too
cumbersome to categorize. He is one of the few writers who fully
deserves an entire section to himself at the bookstore. I know of at
least two bookstores that have made the wise decision to do just
that. In the meantime, the rest of the reading public, along with the
rest of the world, wanders in darkness. Chesterton is discovered by
them only by accident since the official institutions, whose supposed
function it is is to pass the wisdom of one generation to the next,
have actively failed to teach Chesterton. But when bumbling souls
such as myself somehow manage to discover this astonishing writer,
whether by an off-hand recommendation, or by stumbling across a
quotation, or by dizzily following an unexpected path, something
remarkable happens. They find, as I did, that they suddenly can’t get
enough of him. They recognize the truth of his insights about every-
thing, from fancies to facts, from aesthetics to economics, from the
criminal mind to the Catholic faith. He dazzles with his wordplay,
he dances on a tightrope, he satisfies with his conclusions. And yet
they want more. More.
Fortunately for those of us who cannot get enough Chest-
erton, he provided what seems to be a bottomless well of words.
But it is safe to say that we would not have the privilege of drinking
deeply from that well were it not for the efforts of one man in par-
ticular. During those decades of neglect, as Chesterton slowly faded
from the curriculum and from the libraries and from the books in
print, there was one man labouring, seemingly all alone, to preserve
Chesterton’s legacy. He was tracking down not only the scattered
journalism and obscure publications containing Chesterton material,
but supplementary sources as well. He served as an endless resource
of information for the occasional student and scholar from the far
corners of the earth who wanted to come to England and study Ches-
terton. And he even picked up the fallen pen from Chesterton’s hand
and fought the very same battles Chesterton fought for social justice,
for self-government and self-sufficiency, for the rights of families,
for the hidden fountains of the home, and for the sacred foundations
of the Faith. It was this good and gentle knight, Aidan Mackey, a
veteran of the RAF, a schoolmaster, a bookseller, and a father of
seven daughters, who was the torchbearer for Chesterton in the dark
ages of the 1960’s and 70’s, when the mindless fashions that Chest-
erton warned about swept nearly the entire world into a confused
mess of materialism and relativism. The world owes Chesterton a
debt of thanks. It owes a similar debt to Aidan Mackey.
One of Aidan’s greatest services to Chesterton scholarship
is to correct misinformation and misunderstandings that have arisen
as the result of bad biographies, repeated rumours, and ugly insinu-
ations. In addition to having the facts at hand, Aidan knew people
who knew G.K. Chesterton, who knew first hand that what has been
written about Chesterton has often been unreliable.
People are always trying to dig up dirt on Chesterton. But
to Aidan has fallen the thankless task of disappointing these thrill-
seekers. He once said to me, “Chesterton failed in his duty to Fleet
Street by not being a philanderer.” He was not any of the things that
certain naysayers would wish him to be. He was not a Socialist. He
was not a careless clown. And he was not an anti-Semite. He has
been accused of all of these things, because the simple labels are

convenient ways to continue to ignore him. His potent arguments in
defence of Distributism can be ignored if he is a Socialist, because
that would explain away his criticisms of Capitalism. His reasoned
arguments in defence of tradition and marriage and babies and beau-
ty can all be ignored if Chesterton is simply a careless clown who
is neither accurate with facts nor serious with his suggestions. And
his dynamic arguments in defence of the Catholic faith can be ig-
nored if Chesterton is anti-Semitic because that would leave him
with no credibility whatsoever in today’s public arena. These simple
one-word lies to dismiss Chesterton have been tossed about so that
Chesterton will continue to be ignored by another generation. But
the shocking truth about him is being uncovered after all. Even big
things cannot be ignored forever.
The shocking truth is that Gilbert Keith Chesterton was a
happily married man who was kind and good and deeply faithful to
his friends and even to his enemies. He was a deep and prophetic
thinker who combined his incredible intellect with joy and laughter.
He disarmed his opponents with both his wit and his charity. He
needs to be rediscovered because we need to learn from him how to
speak the truth in love. The wisdom is nothing without the charity.
The charity is barren without the wisdom.
Dale Ahlquist
President
American Chesterton Society

The cover of the first edition of G.K. Chesterton’s first play,
Greybeards at Play. The cover was designed by the author
himself, and appeared in 1900.
G. K. Chesterton
q
A Biographical Note
G.K. Chesterton was born in1874 into the family of the well-
known Estate Agents, Chesterton & Company in Kensington, Lon-
don. In view of his future role of defender of small family business-
es, it seems ironic that the firm is today a very large international
affair, which would not at all meet with his approval.
The Chesterton household was not, as is often assumed, a
religious one. There was some vague attachment to Unitarianism,
but church-going was not the norm, although Gilbert was baptised
in St George’s Anglican church, in Camden Hill. It was, therefore,
natural that when he later began to seek answers to his questions
about the meaning of life, he first went not to the churches but to the
Ethical and Debating Societies which then abounded.
Despite this, he was from the first instinctively religious, and
among his childhood drawings, many of which have survived, are
two of great interest. One shows a monk, complete with tonsure and
Bible, carrying a crucifix aloft as he is pursued by armed men. In
the background a figure kneels before another crucifix, seemingly a
wayside shrine. The other drawing is of Christ crucified, surrounded
by ministering angels.
What is striking in both is the depiction of the crucifix, for
at that time only Catholics were likely to show Christ on the cross
rather than the cross alone. It would seem that very early in life, for
both were drawn when he was only seven years old, Chesterton had
somehow come into contact with Catholicism, probably at second-
hand through his reading. At odds with that attitude is a poem writ-

ten a couple of years later, heavily influenced by Laytoun’s Lays
of the Scottish Cavaliers. One verse, retaining the young G.K.C.’s
spelling, runs
Drive the trembling Papists backwards
Drive away the Tory’s hord
Let them tell thier hous of villains
They have felt the Campbell’s sword.
He was, clearly, reading voraciously from the start, and
throughout his life retained an astonishingly accurate memory for
things he had read many years earlier. His formal education began
in 1881 at Colet Court Preparatory School, then in January 1887 he
transferred to St. Paul’s which was then, as now, one of our great
public schools. It was at that time situated in Hammersmith but is
now in Barnes, south of the river Thames. He later enrolled at the
Slade School of Art, at University College, London.
His first public appearance in print was in 1892 whilst still at
school, when The Speaker published his poem, The Song of Labour.
In 1900 he published a book of comic verse, Greybeards at Play,
and one of serious verse, The Wild Knight, and from that time the
flow of his immense output hardly ceased.
In 1901, he married Frances, whose French surname, de
Blogue, had been anglicised to Blogg, and after several years in Lon-
don they made their permanent home in the little Buckinghamshire
town of Beaconsfield, near Windsor. The only major sadness in their
union was that Frances, despite undergoing an operation, was un-
able to bear children, but their love for the young caused them to fill
their home and lives with the children of friends, and very many of
them have testified to the warmth and joy of their household.
In 1914, soon after the outbreak of war, G.K.C. fell desper-
ately ill and lay for three months in a coma. In 191 he took over
editorship of The New Witness, the weekly journal, founded by his
brother Cecil, who was then in the trenches. In 1918, Cecil died in
a field hospital, and Gilbert carried on the paper for the rest of his
life, reluctantly allowing it to be re-named G.K.’s Weekly. The jour-
nal was a great drain on his energies and finances, and many of the

Father Brown detective stories were written to fund it.
Some people have deplored this burden, saying that with-
out it he could have written many more books, such as the studies
he planned of Shakespeare, Napoleon and Savonarola. This seems
to me to be a mistaken view, because the paper was central to his
thinking and provided a platform from which some of his best work
issued. He cared nothing for fame either in his time or in the future.
He was a propagandist; an agitator standing in the market-place and
reaching out to the ordinary men and women he so unaffectedly
loved. To ask him to change course and reign as a purely literary
celebrity would amount to asking him not to be Gilbert Keith Chest-
erton.
In the first years of the twentieth century he moved from his
early agnosticism to Christianity and in 19 entered the Roman
Catholic Church, but had for years been so close to it that many sup-
posed him to be already within its portals. In fact he had described
himself as one standing in the church porch, showing others the way
in.
In the later part of his life, the 1920’s and 1930’s, as well
as producing some of his finest and most mature work, he travelled
widely and visited Poland, Palestine, Spain, Canada, and twice made
lecture tours of the United States. In the 1930’s he made a number
of radio broadcasts and was an immediate success. A letter from a
B.B.C. official said, “The building rings with your praises! .... you
bring something very rare to the microphone.... you will have a vast
public by Christmas…” Only a couple of the broadcasts still sur-
vive, but they demonstrate his impressive ability to merge profun-
dity with wit and entertainment.
He died in Beaconsfield in June 1936, and his grave there is
marked by a headstone carved by Eric Gill. He loved the town, and
its people so loved him that his funeral procession was re-routed by
the police so that the crowd could pay him their final respects.
To many people it may seem a little odd that a writer who
thought of himself as being merely a journalist, and who died in the
1930’s, should now be the subject of a strong worldwide revival.
The truth is that G.K. Chesterton was one of the deepest and most
7
lucid thinkers that England has ever produced. His thought and writ-
ing are full of vivid illumination and profound common sense, cut-
ting through the jargon and cant of the day and throwing light into
hitherto dark places, so that the reader constantly thinks, “Of course,
how obvious! Why hadn’t I thought of that before?”
It was this extraordinary capacity for illumination which
made his influence so deep and wide-ranging. A striking example
occurred when, in an article in the Illustrated London News in Oct-
ober 1910, he remarked that the principal weakness of the then bur-
geoning Indian Nationalism was that
“ . . . it seems to be not very Indian and not very national.
It is all about Herbert Spencer and Heaven knows what.
When all is said there is a . . . distinction between a people
asking for its own ancient life and a people asking for
Gilbert Chesterton in front of the microphone at the BBC, bringing
sanity and solutions to the oppressed peoples of the world
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