CHESTERTON, GILBERT KEITH. - 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 not in order to obtain 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 religion was militant. A polemicist of the first order, his polemic manifested itself above all in essays, collected over time into volumes, among which may be remembered: Tremendous Trifles (1909), Fancies versus Fads (1923), Generally Speaking (1928), The Thing (1929), The Well and the Shallows (1935). More unified in character are Orthodoxy (1908), written during his Anglican period, The Everlasting Man (1925), to be regarded as a continuation and complement of Orthodoxy, composed during his Catholic period, and The Resurrection of Rome (1930), an apology for and glorification of what the Church has done through the centuries, from the defense of the home to the protection of the arts. Chesterton's vision of life can be represented in the sentence that closes the essay Is Humanism a Religion? (republished in The Thing), where the Church is indicated as the only institution within which true humanism can unfold. After asking himself: "What will prevent one humanist from wanting chastity without humility, another humility without chastity, and another from accepting truth or beauty without either of the two?", he continues: "The problem of a lasting ethics and culture consists in finding the 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 proved its solidity in this sense, traversing with long strides the lands and the ages with its gigantic arches and carrying everywhere the broad river of Baptism in the hollow of a Roman aqueduct." The interweaving of human and Christian values is the characteristic of Chesterton's writing, whether it be novels or detective stories (from the confused The Man who was Thursday [1908], through the stories of Father Brown the priest-detective, up to Manalive [1911]), or biographies (R. Browning [1903], C. Dickens [1906], G. B. Shaw [1909], St. Francis of Assisi [1923], Chaucer [1932], St. Thomas Aquinas [1933]), or poetry (his most ambitious poem is the one dedicated to the deeds of Alfred the Great, The Ballad of the White Horse [1911]), or the essays already cited. Chesterton also edited his own weekly, G. K.'s Weekly.
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Alberto Castelli