Though known to posterity as a wit, a controversialist, and a Christian apologist, G.K. Chesterton considered himself primarily to be merely a “jolly journalist” and it was through the writing of essays for newspapers and magazines that he made both his reputation and his living.
G.K. Chesterton is known to posterity as a wit, a controversialist, and a Christian apologist. He is celebrated for books, such as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, the latter of which was instrumental in C. S. Lewis’s conversion, and for poetry, such as The Ballad of the White Horse, and novels, such as The Man Who was Thursday, in addition to his widely respected biographies of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas and his ever-popular Father Brown stories. Yet Chesterton considered himself primarily to be merely a “jolly journalist” and it was through the writing of essays for newspapers and magazines that he made both his reputation and his living. Over a period of thirty-six years, from the publication of his first essays in the Speaker and the Daily News in 1900 until his death in 1936, he wrote countless essays, many of which were collected in sundry volumes, beginning with The Defendant in 1901 and ending in 1936 with As I Was Saying. Further collections of his essays have continued to be published posthumously, most notably In Defense of Sanity: The Best Essays of G. K. Chesterton, of which I was honoured to be one of the three people asked to make the selection. This last book is currently the focus of discussion on the FORMED Book Club, which I co-host with Father Fessio and Vivian Dudro of Ignatius Press.
Having these weekly discussions has been a perfect opportunity to revisit the jolly journalist at his best. There are indeed few essayists, if any, who can write so eloquently and engagingly on such a disparate range of topics as did Chesterton. Whether he’s writing on skeletons, on lying in bed, on gargoyles or on Shakespeare, he’s always entertaining and surprising. He writes on subjects as different as chalk and cheese, not merely figuratively but literally, publishing “A Piece of Chalk” in 1909 and “Cheese” the following year.
In an essay “On Running After One’s Hat”, he wonders why people have an aversion to chasing their hats when they “run much more eagerly after an uninteresting little leather ball”. He reminds us that “the most comic things of all are exactly the things that are most worth doing”, such as courtship, and that “[a] man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a wife”. As ever, however, there’s a serious point lurking beneath the surface of the trivial topic. In this case, it’s the fact that our lives are governed by our attitude to the things that are sent to try us. “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered,” he says. “An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”
Chesterton’s infectious wit is very much to the fore in the essay entitled “What I Found in My Pocket”. He begins with some words of advice that he’d received as a very young man from “one of those men who have made the Empire what it is”. This upstanding imperialist had told him that a young man would never succeed in the world by hanging around with his hands in his pockets. “I made reply with the quite obvious flippancy that perhaps a man got on by having his hands in other people’s pockets,” a flippancy which nonetheless exposed the very core of imperialism and its modus operandi. He then continues by informing his readers that “I have only once in my life picked a pocket, and then (perhaps through some absentmindedness) I picked my own”:
I can always pretty satisfactorily account for all my possessions. I can always tell where they are, and what I have done with them, so long as I can keep them out of my pockets. If once anything slips into those unknown abysses, I wave it a sad Virgilian farewell. I suppose that the things that I have dropped into my pockets are still there; the same presumption applies to the things that I have dropped into the sea. But I regard the riches stored in both these bottomless chasms with the same reverent ignorance. They tell us that on the last day the sea will give up its dead; and I suppose that on the same occasion long strings of extraordinary things will come running out of my pockets. But I have quite forgotten what any of them are; and there is really nothing (excepting the money) that I shall be at all surprised at finding among them.
This long preamble sets the scene for an account of a railway journey in which Chesterton had found himself with nothing to read and with no pencil or paper with which to write. Lost for something to bide the time, he started delving into his pockets and pulling out what he found there. There were “heaps of Battersea tram tickets … enough to equip a paper chase,” which “shook down in showers like confetti”. He pulled out a pocket-knife, a box of matches, a piece of chalk and “a coin of very modest value”. He concludes as follows:
I have not space to say what were the items in the long and splendid procession of poetical symbols that came pouring out. I cannot tell you all the things that were in my pocket. I can tell you one thing, however, that I could not find in my pocket. I allude to my railway ticket.
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The featured image is a caricature of Chesterton, by Max Beerbohm, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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