"It met a temporary need and survives as a permanent monument."

NRO has been making available articles that appeared in National Review in the 1960s and '70s. One of the most recent of those articles is a 1961 review by Evelyn Waugh of Chesterton: Man and Mask, by Gary Wills. The review is interesting enough, but Waugh's comments in conclusion about Chesterton are even more interesting:

For [Wills], as for this reviewer, Chesterton is primarily the author of the Everlasting Man. In that book all his random thoughts are concentrated and refined; all his aberrations made straight. It is a great, popular book, one of the few really great popular books of the century; the triumphant assertion that a book can be both great and popular. And it needs no elucidation. It is brilliantly clear. It met a temporary need and survives as a permanent monument. Besides this, Chesterton wrote a number of memorable and delightful verses, notably Lepanto. He was a lovable and much loved man abounding in charity and humility. Humility is not a virtue propitious to the artist It is often pride, emulation, avarice, malice — all the odious qualities — which drive a man to complete, elaborate, refine, destroy, renew, his work until he has made something that gratifies his pride and envy and greed. And in doing so he enriches the world more than the generous and good, though he may lose his own soul in the process. That is the paradox of artistic achievement.

It was a happy chance that Chesterton lived before the era of television. His gifts, his amiability, his very simple eccentricities would have tempted him to become one of the great performers on that damning machine. He lived on the edge of the chasm. Men still had to express themselves in writing until Chesterton was too well habituated to literature to learn new tricks. Living today his words would be lost, his prestige prodigious and his renown brief.

The Everlasting Man is still widely considered one of Chesterton's two or three greatest works, a rollicking and fascinating book that, states the Ignatius Press description, outlines Chesterton's "whole view of world history as informed by the Incarnation. Beginning with the origin of man and the various religious attitudes throughout history, Chesterton shows how the fulfillment of all of man's desires takes place in the person of Christ and in Christ's Church." In essence, it is an apologetic for the Incarnation, the "particular paradox of the divine being in the cradle."

Read an excerpt:

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[Brian J. Schuettler]

It was a happy chance that Chesterton lived before the era of television. His gifts, his amiability, his very simple eccentricities would have tempted him to become one of the great performers on that damning machine. He lived on the edge of the chasm. Men still had to express themselves in writing until Chesterton was too well habituated to literature to learn new tricks. Living today his words would be lost, his prestige prodigious and his renown brief.

“In his commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews, St Thomas makes the terrible statement that continuous success in temporal affairs may, in some cases, be a sign of reprobation. It seems, in those cases, as if God wishes to reward in this life acts that are valueless for heaven. Speaking of the virtues of Cyrus and Alexander, St Augustine considers that God raised up these men ‘for the adornment of this present age. There have been numbers of great artists and geniuses who have worked for the world of culture and neglected the warnings given by love. St Augustine held that they have received their reward in this life, a reward that was futile, as they were futile. Soren Kierkegaard’s terrible remark: ‘God is so great a Lord that, far from making it difficult, he makes it exceedingly easy to deceive him; he goes so far as to give his prizes to the deceivers and to reward them with all the goods of the earth. Though time may redeem the work of a poet, as Shelley said, and remove its poison, it does not redeem his soul” (THE MEANING OF GRACE – Cardinal Charles Journet).