Roger Kimball on G. K. Chesterton: master of rejuvenation - On the vitality of the Jolly Journalist's work. A quote:
Chesterton’s success would have been hard to predict. He was the opposite of precocious. He didn’t learn to read until his ninth year (but after that he was unstoppable). His performance at lower school was lackluster. One schoolmaster exclaimed in exasperation that “if we could open your head we should not find any brain but only a lump of white fat.” Chesterton began to blossom at St. Paul’s (whose notable alumni include Milton, Pepys, and Judge Jeffries), where he met and befriended E. C. Bentley, the creator of the Clerihew, a form Chesterton would have been proud to invent.
After St. Paul’s, Chesterton first contemplated a career in art. For a couple of years, he dabbled in classes at the Slade while also attending lectures in English, French, and Latin at University College, London. He took no degree. And art turned out to be an entrée, an avocation, not an end. He went on to entertain friends with his drawings. But his main revelation concerned criticism. Years later, Chesterton recalled that, “having failed to learn how to draw or paint, I tossed off easily enough some criticisms of the weaker points of Rubens or the misdirected talents of Tintoretto. I had discovered the easiest of all professions; which I have pursued ever since.”
His wife was phobic about sex. That is probably why he got so fat.
