All Is Grist: A Book of Essays

by G.K. Chesterton

This early work by G. K. Chesterton was originally published in 1903. Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London in 1874. 'All is Grist' is a collection of essays. He studied at the Slade School of Art, and upon graduating began to work as a freelance journalist. Over the course of his life, his literary output was incredibly diverse and highly prolific, ranging from philosophy and ontology to art criticism and detective fiction. However, he is probably best-remembered for his Christian apologetics, most notably in Orthodoxy (1908) and The Everlasting Man (1925). We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Genres: Essays

234 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1931

About the author

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic.

He was educated at St. Paul’s, and went to art school at University College London. In 1900, he was asked to contribute a few magazine articles on art criticism, and went on to become one of the most prolific writers of all time. He wrote a hundred books, contributions to 200 more, hundreds of poems, including the epic Ballad of the White Horse, five plays, five novels, and some two hundred short stories, including a popular series featuring the priest-detective, Father Brown. In spite of his literary accomplishments, he considered himself primarily a journalist. He wrote over 4000 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.

Chesterton was equally at ease with literary and social criticism, history, politics, economics, philosophy, and theology.

Reviews

[Mary Catelli]

As the title promises, a collection of essays that Chesterton wrote on a whole lot of topics.

Such as the value of education

The whole point of education is that it should give a man abstract and eternal standards, by which he can judge material and fugitive conditions. If the citizen is to be a reformer, he must start with some ideal which he does not obtain merely by gazing reverently at the unreformed institutions. And if any one asks, as so many are asking: 'What is the use of my son learning all about ancient Athens and remote China and medieval guilds and monasteries, and all sorts of dead or distant things, when he is going to be a superior scientific plumber in Pimlico?' the answer is obvious enough. 'The use of it is that he may have some power of comparison, which will not only prevent him from supposing that Pimlico covers the whole planet, but also enable him, while doing full credit to the beauties and virtues of Pimlico, to point out that, here and there, as revealed by alternative experiments, even Pimlico may conceal somewhere a defect.'

Also, the illogical and romantic view of logic. Whether Dante's Beatrice really existed. How he was old enough to remember when telephones came in. The Significant Literature of his day, and why he preferred pure philosophy and murder mysteries. And much more.

[Jarrod Terry]

If I could give it 3.5 I would

It's everything you would come to expect from old G.K. - wit, clever turns of phrase, and occasional long-windedness.

As it goes with many of his works, the lack of cultural context around certain names and situations he discusses sometimes takes you out of it. But as always, there are bars of gold among the brush.

Favorite quote from "On Experience"

"Now, if there is one thing of which I have been certain since my boyhood, and grow more certain as I advance in age, it is that nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze. All this talk of waiting for experiences in order to write is simply a confession of incapacity to experience anything."

[Abigail Drumm]

All Is Grist contains a greater focus on history, political and religious, than other compilations of Chesterton essays that I've read. There are also more than a few pieces dedicated to discussion of the moderns and the young people of his day (including "On the Laureateship," "On the Pleasures of no Longer being Very Young," and "On Sophistication"), as well as some on logic (including "On Logic and Lunacy" and "On Quacks in the Home"), which were among my favorite. Not being from England and, thus, not raised in the same cultural climate as Chesterton, some of the references blew right past me, but these mismatches did not, I think, detract from the moral of any given essay.

[pk]

Great book. VII. On Flocking was my favourite.

[Ryan]

It has the sort-of famous essay "On Business Education" that Fr. Gallagher made reference to in my first Spiritual Conference given by him in 2004 at St. Mary's College, St. Mary's Kansas. Awesome work!