I'm glad you asked! He was the greatest and most influential writer and thinker of the 20th century. How much did he write? His complete works are a staggering 48 volumes. Chesterton himself wrote 100 books and contributed to 200 others. He wrote hundreds of poems, five plays and some two hundred short stories.
That's not all. This wasn't even his main form of writing. He was primarily a journalist. He wrote over 4,000 newspaper essays, including 30 years worth of weekly columns for The Illustrated London News, and 13 years of weekly columns for The Daily News. He also edited his own newspaper, G.K.'s Weekly.
Four thousand essays! That is the equivalent of writing an essay a day, every day for 11 years. And every one of them had to be good enough for a major newspaper. Not only are they good, they are great and read as if they were written by a contemporary.
The eternal wisdom and simplicity with which he writes is unrivaled, and I challenge anyone to find a single piece of writing better than the worst of Chesterton's. He writes with such common sense that we readers feel as children listening to our preschool teacher telling us a good story, and we are as drawn into it and as intrigued and as anxious to hear just one more sentence.
But why, you ask, have you not read his works, or heard his name, or been taught about him in school? Well this is a tricky question, but let's think about this: Almost all of us know C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein and Mohandas Gandhi. It may surprise you to learn that C.S. Lewis, considered one of the greatest Christian writers of the 20th Century, was a self-proclaimed atheist until he read Chesterton's The Everlasting Man. Gandhi got the idea of leading an Indian Revolution after reading an essay by Chesterton in The Illustrated London News. Those interested in Irish history may also be surprised to learn that Michael Collins was inspired to lead the Irish Revolution after reading Chesterton's "The Napoleon of Notting Hill."
To give you yet one more idea of his overwhelming genius, when commissioned to write a book on St. Thomas Aquinas, he asked his secretary to check out books about him from the library. After arriving with a stack of books on his desk and thumbing through the top book a bit, he quickly closed it and began dictating a book on St. Thomas Aquinas.
A renowned Thomistic scholar about this same book said, "I consider it as being without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for such an achievement. Everybody will admit, no doubt, that it is a 'clever' book, but the few readers who have spent 20 or 30 years in studying St. Thomas … cannot fail to perceive that the so-called 'wit' of Chesterton has put their scholarship to shame.
"He has guessed all that which we had tried to demonstrate, and he has said all that which they were more or less clumsily attempting to express in academic formulas. Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed; he was deep because he was right; and he could not help being right; but he could not either help being modest and charitable, so he left it to those who could understand him to know that he was right, and deep; to the others, he apologized for being right, and he made up for being deep by being witty. That is all they can see of him."
According to the contemporary accounts, Chesterton won against everyone who had the gall to debate him, including many whom we have heard many times in the classroom and whose books we have been frequently urged to read, including George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and Clarence Darrow.
Why then do we not learn about Chesterton, but everyone knows Shaw, Wells and Russell? Why is it that the one man who defeated all these "great" men in debate is forgotten, but these losers are immortalized? These weren't sour losers either. Every one of these men had the greatest respect for Chesterton, and every one of these men would be disgusted that his great words are not echoing in our classrooms today. George Bernard Shaw said, "The world is not thankful enough for Chesterton," and I, for once, agree with him.
My favorite poet, T.S. Eliot, said Chesterton "deserves a permanent claim on our loyalty." Why has this man been so unjustly neglected?
Surely, no other person had been praised by so many (indeed, nearly every contemporary of his who is remembered to today praised his genius), yet not even a century later been remembered by so few. Mind you, we do Chesterton no injustice compared to the injustice we do to ourselves and our society by not remembering him and more importantly, his words.
Alas, I will try and answer my seemingly rhetorically questions. The reason is many in intelligentsia today do not like what he has to say, since he argued for the common man and common sense. He argued for the simpler, yet greater, things in life. Many in colleges and universities today are concerned only with the bizarre and the trivial.
Since they cannot bring up his ideas and then defeat them, for they are undefeatable, they simply ignore them. The modern elite of The New York Times and National Public Radio prefer writers who are arrogant and have new and strange ideas - Epicureans, who scoff at Christianity, and who think freedom means no responsibility.
Chesterton defended the poor man, who has no one to speak up for him. Chesterton wrote of "Manufacturing Consent," over a half-century before Chomsky. He was one of the first to write of the injustices of Hitler's Anti-Semitism, in 1934 writing, "I am appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities. They have absolutely no reason or logic behind them. It is quite obviously the expedient of a man who has been driven to seeking a scapegoat, and has found with relief the most famous scapegoat in European history, the Jewish people."
He had a perfect balance to him. For example, he argued against both socialism and capitalism. Moreover, he cannot be correctly classified as either a liberal or a conservative. He did not tow anyone's party line or ideas.
He defended all that is truly beautiful. He defended truth, and dared to call it "truth" and sadly, this does not play well in the modern subjective classroom and the modern "enlightened" media.
Most welcoming, however, is that he defended kindness, geniality and mirth. He had a great mind, but even greater was his heart.
David Maxham is a Rutgers College senior majoring in classics and mathematics. His column "David vs. Goliath" runs alternate Mondays.
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