GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON. — English writer, b. in London on 29 May 1874, d. at Beaconsfield on 14 June 1936. After his early studies at St. Paul’s School, he attended the Slade School of Art and some university lectures, though without seeking a degree, and devoted himself entirely to journalism. After a brief period of doubt and uncertainty in his youth, he became a fervent Anglican, and in 1922 he converted to Catholicism.
His was a militant religion. A polemicist of the first order, his polemics first manifested themselves in essays, collected over time into volumes, notable among which are: *Tremendous Trifles* (1909), *Fancies versus Fads* (1923), *Generally Speaking* (1928), *The Thing* (1929), and *The Well and the Shallows* (1935). More unified in character are *Orthodoxy* (1908), written during his Anglican period, *The Everlasting Man* (1925), to be considered a continuation and complement of *Orthodoxy*, composed during his Catholic period, and *The Resurrection of Rome* (1930), an apology and glorification of what the Church has accomplished over the centuries, from the defense of dogma to the protection of the arts. Chesterton’s view of life may be represented by the closing words of the essay *Is Humanism a Religion?* (republished in *The Thing*), where the Church is indicated as the only institution within which true humanism can be realized. After asking: “What will prevent one humanist from desiring chastity without humility, another humility without chastity, and another from accepting truth or beauty without either?”, he continues: “The problem of an enduring ethics and culture lies in finding an arrangement of the pieces that stand in relation to one another like the stones of an arch. And I know of only one scheme that has proven its solidity in this sense, striding across lands and ages with its giant arches and carrying everywhere the broad river of Baptism in the hollow of a Roman aqueduct.”
The intertwining of human and Christian values is characteristic of Chesterton’s writing, whether in novels or detective stories (from the convoluted *The Man Who Was Thursday* [1908], through the tales of Father Brown the priest-detective, to *Manalive* [1911]), in biographies (*R. Browning* [1903], *C. Dickens* [1906], *G. B. Shaw* [1909], *St. Francis of Assisi* [1923], *Chaucer* [1932], *St. Thomas Aquinas* [1933]), in poetry (his most ambitious poem being that dedicated to the deeds of Alfred the Great, *The Ballad of the White Horse* [1911]), or in the essays already mentioned. Chesterton also edited his own weekly, *G. K.’s Weekly*.