Word: chesterton
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Belloc held that "all political questions are ultimately theological." In the debate with the rationalists, he became chief Roman Catholic protagonist, wrote political novels as a counterblast to those of H. G. Wells, pamphlets at George Bernard Shaw and the Fabian Socialists. He converted G. K. Chesterton to the Roman Catholic Church, and a critic has described Shaw addressing the formidable Chesterton: "But there dawned a day?a terrible day for you?when Hilaire Belloc loomed into your life. Then indeed you were lost forever. He made you dignify your monstrosities with the name of Faith . . . he turned your pranks...
...poem of hate to the "Remote and ineffectual Don that dared attack my Chesterton" is in the anthologies. Together Belloc and Chesterton created the modern legend of a medieval England vigorous in its earthy Christianity, bluff country squires, boon companions, Catholic piety and roistering taverns. Sang Belloc...
...Chesterton's friend Nicolas Bentley believed that if G.K. had become "a decorative draughtsman" instead of a writer, "he would have had very few equals." Many of his numerous drawings have perished; but the sharpness of his talent may be glimpsed in a cartoon entitled "WHEN THE REVOLUTION HAPPENS: Bernard Shaw Refuses to Drink the Blood of Aristocrats on Vegetarian Principles and out of Kindness to the Lower Animals." This work is not only a splendid parody of Daumier, it is also an example of Chesterton's genius for translating his gravest opinions into...
...Vials of Gloom? Some of his acquaintances could not believe that his idiosyncrasies were genuine: "I always felt Chesterton was an actor," one of them told Maisie Ward. "He played a part and dressed a part." And when O.K. became a Catholic, even G.B.S. was shaken into protesting: "This is going too far." On the other hand, his more extravagant admirers regarded him as a pure & simple saint-a man "taught by the Holy Ghost...
Biographer Ward's own opinion is that Chesterton's "ready acceptance of life's normal pleasures" rules him out of saintly ranks. But it does not put him among those who, precisely because they "fail to reach sanctity . . . pour out upon us the vials of their gloom." Chesterton ranks, she believes, among the "spiritual geniuses" of the human race-"to which," as G.K. once observed, "so many of my readers belong...