Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and violinist.
G. K. CHESTERTON: quoted in The New York Times, 16 November 1967
He was educated at St Paul’s School and the Slade. His first book was a medley of poetry and sketches, Greybeards at Play – Literature and Art for Old Gentlemen (1990), which was followed in the same year by The Wild Knight and Other Poems, a volume of verse that included ‘The donkey’; Kipling was sent the book by a friend and responded: ‘I agree with you that there is any amount of promise in the work – and I think marriage will teach him a good deal too. It will be curious to see how he’ll develop in a few years.’ He made his reputation as a journalist, published articles in The Bookman and The Illustrated London News and, with Belloc, wrote for The Speaker anti-imperial, pro-Boer pieces on the Boer War. Shortly after his death in 1936, a memorial Requiem Mass was celebrated for him in Westminster Cathedral, attended by over 2,000 people, and a telegram from Pope Pius XI was read out, offering sympathy to the people of England – Chesterton converted to Catholicism in 1922, to the anguish of his wife, Frances, who remained an Anglican. His many publications include The Man Who was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908) and a number of books on celebrated writers: Robert Browning (1903), William Blake (1910) and Chaucer (1932). His star has since waned. Novels such as The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), which romanticizes the notion of ‘Merry England’ and takes a Betjeman-like stance against technological ‘progress’, are now rarely read, and his fame rests on the Father Brown stories, such as The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), which deal with a modest East Anglian Roman Catholic priest adept at solving crime, and poems such as ‘Lepanto’. His witty essays were collected in a number of volumes, including All Things Considered (1908), A Miscellany of Men (1912), The Uses of Diversity (1920) and As I was Saying (1936). Hilaire Belloc wrote a highly amusing poem (‘Lines to a Don’) that defends Chesterton from unwarranted criticism, and begins ‘Remote and ineffectual Don/That dared attack my Chesterton’. W. H. Auden was a great admirer and edited a selection of Chesterton’s non-fiction prose.
When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
On all four-footed things.
The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.
(Boughton, Hageman)