Gilbert Keith Chesterton

ANY life of G. K. Chesterton must be interesting and entertaining, especially if it is in considerable part a rescension of his published and unpublished writings. As a boy he loved fairy tales and he never lost the vivid sense that life is miraculous. One might say that he thought with his sense of wonder — a different thing from the mere emotionalism of wonder. In the dogma of the Catholic Church, Chesterton found scope for his never dulled apprehension of the fabulousness of life and for another prime characteristic, his capacity for friendship, engagingly revealed in Maisie Ward’s account of his school club, the Junior Debating Society. For all his humor and friendliness, he was a hard fighter, shocked into political commentary by the Boer War, when he became a “Little Englander,” and again by the Marconi scandal, which turned him into a sharp critic of plutocracy and international finance. Maisie Ward perhaps stands too close to her subject and occasionally carries eulogy into doting; her book would have benefited from pruning of the trivial and repetitious. But more critical biographers of this great journalist — G. K. C. accurately called himself a journalist — will always be in debt to her industry.