G·K· Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton stood six foot four and weighed some twenty stone, wore a cape and a crumpled hat, carried a sword-stick, and was forever losing his way — once wiring his wife from a distant town, “Am in Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?” He was a journalist who became a prophet by accident, a debater so generous that his opponents counted him a friend, and perhaps the only man who could argue you out of despair by making you laugh.

He began as an illustrator and art-student, haunted in his twenties by a pessimism that touched the edge of madness. He climbed out of it not by argument but by a discovery so simple it sounds like a child's: that existence itself is a gift, and a gift implies a giver, and gratitude is therefore the most reasonable response a man can make to the morning. From that single seed grew everything — the books, the paradoxes, the cheerful and ferocious defence of ordinary things against the clever people who despised them.

“The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things.”

His method was paradox, which he insisted was not a trick but a confession: the world is so much stranger than our flat sentences about it that only a sentence turned upside-down can tell the truth. So he wrote that a thing must be loved before it is lovable, that the madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason, that traditions are votes cast by the dead, and that we should defend the indefensible — the family, the fairy tale, the small shop, the common man — precisely because the whole machinery of the age was lined up to crush them.

He fought giants. Against the eugenists and the imperial cynics, against the worship of mere progress and mere efficiency, he set the hearth, the pub, the parish, and the human face. In Orthodoxy he turned Christianity from a museum-piece into the most dangerous adventure on offer; in The Everlasting Man he made the whole of human history hinge on a child in a cave; in the Father Brown stories he hid a theology of mercy inside a hundred murders.

“Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.”

He debated George Bernard Shaw for years across public halls and printed pages, each delighting in the other; he and Hilaire Belloc were yoked so often that Shaw dubbed the pair the “Chesterbelloc.” He argued for the small against the large in everything — small farms, small shops, small nations, small kindnesses — and called the programme Distributism, which was only the wish that the dignity of owning one's own corner of the world be possible for everyone, not the few.

He died in 1936, mourned by friends and adversaries alike — the Pope sent a telegram naming him “Defender of the Faith.” What he leaves is not a system but a way of seeing: eyes washed clean enough to be astonished at a lamp-post, a leg, a dandelion, a Tuesday. Read him and the ordinary world comes back to you wrapped, like a parcel you had forgotten was a present.