Word: chesterton
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Victorian writers, observed G.K. Chesterton, "were lame giants; the strongest of them walked on one leg a little shorter than the other." That remark has been amplified by Phyllis Rose in her lively study of five 19th century couples. The title, Parallel Lives, has two meanings: the disparate views of marriage held by husband and wife, and the juxtaposition of twittering romantic expectations and tragic neuroses. Reading Rose's work is like turning a valentine to find graffiti underneath: not a pleasant experience, but a compelling one. The couples could not have been better chosen. Each contains one famous...
...prince: "A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it"; "One's real life is often the life that one does not lead." George Bernard Shaw saw the aphorism as the new home for political slogans: "All great truths begin as blasphemies." His contemporary G.K. Chesterton was the last master of the paradox: "Silence is the unbearable repartee"; "A figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition"; "Tradition is the democracy of the dead...
...Chesterton came to regard life as a moral melodrama. In it he appropriated the role of God's Fool. Sometimes his undertone was jovial: "And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine/ 'I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine.' " When he spoke disdainfully about preferring "the Jew who is revolutionary to the Jew who is a plutocrat," the result was not so felicitous. Dale never averts her eye from these occasions, but she manages to find a rationale for every...
...clumsy. Examining Chesterton's fiction, Jorge Luis Borges praised "one of the finest writers of our time," possessed with "fortunate invention . . . visual imagination and rhetorical virtues." Lionel Trilling maintained that Chesterton was "a far greater critic than his present reputation might suggest." And W.H. Auden could not think of "a single comic poem that is not a triumphant success...
According to Dale, Chesterton published 78 books. Not all are fine or triumphant, and far more than half are forgotten. But that is no reason for regret. As Father Andrew Greeley, the sociologist and pop novelist, comments, "In Books in Print I found nine volumes of H.G. Wells and eleven volumes of G.B. Shaw ... for Chesterton the list goes up to more than thirty. With thirty volumes listed, who needs a 'revival'?" If one ever becomes necessary, The Outline of Sanity is the place to begin...