If, therefore, I am certain that most sensible people have forgotten the existence of this book—I do not speak in modesty or in pride—I wish only to state a simple and somewhat beautiful fact. In one respect the passing of the period during which a book can be considered current has afflicted me with some melancholy, for I had intended to write anonymously in some daily paper a thorough and crushing exposure of the work inspired mostly by a certain artistic impatience of the too indulgent tone of the critiques and the manner in which a vast number of my most monstrous fallacies have passed unchallenged. I will not repeat that powerful article here, for it cannot be necessary to do anything more than warn the reader against the perfectly indefensible line of argument adopted at the end of p. 28. I am also conscious that the title of the book is, strictly speaking, inaccurate. It is a legal metaphor, and, speaking legally, a defendant is not an enthusiast for the character of King John or the domestic virtues of the prairie-dog. He is one who defends himself, a thing which the present writer, however poisoned his mind may be with paradox, certainly never dreamed of attempting.

Criticism upon the book considered as literature, if it can be so considered, I should, of course, never dream of discussing—firstly, because it is ridiculous to do so; and, secondly, because there was, in my opinion, much justice in such criticism.

But there is one matter on which an author is generally considered as having a right to explain himself, since it has nothing to do with capacity or intelligence, and that is the question of his morals.

I am proud to say that a furious, uncompromising, and very effective attack was made upon what was alleged to be the utter immorality of this book by my excellent friend Mr. C. F. G. Masterman, in the ‘Speaker.’ The tendency of that criticism was to the effect that I was discouraging improvement and disguising scandals by my offensive optimism. Quoting the passage in which I said that ‘diamonds were to be found in the dust-bin,’ he said: ‘There is no difficulty in finding good in what humanity rejects. The difficulty is to find it in what humanity accepts. The diamond is easy enough to find in the dust-bin. The difficulty is to find it in the drawing-room.’ I must admit, for my part, without the slightest shame, that I have found a great many very excellent things in drawing-rooms. For example, I found Mr. Masterman in a drawing-room. But I merely mention this purely ethical attack in order to state, in as few sentences as possible, my difference from the theory of optimism and progress therein enunciated. At first sight it would seem that the pessimist encourages improvement. But in reality it is a singular truth that the era in which pessimism has been cried from the house-tops is also that in which almost all reform has stagnated and fallen into decay. The reason of this is not difficult to discover. No man ever did, and no man ever can, create or desire to make a bad thing good or an ugly thing beautiful. There must be some germ of good to be loved, some fragment of beauty to be admired. The mother washes and decks out the dirty or careless child, but no one can ask her to wash and deck out a goblin with a heart like hell. No one can kill the fatted calf for Mephistopheles. The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be loved first and improved afterwards.

The Defendant appeared in 1902. It was Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s first book of essays, his first book of prose. His publishing debut had been in 1900 with two collections of poetry. Now he was starting to make a name for himself with his reviews and commentary in literary and political papers such as The Bookman, The Daily News, and The Speaker (the last of which first ran the original versions of most of the Defendant essays). Almost immediately, Chesterton had developed his reputation as a purveyor of paradox, and it was certainly cemented with this book. The very theme of The Defendant is paradoxical: that normal things seem abnormal, that they have to be defended. It is a truth that goes against our expectations. In the essay “A Defence of Humility,” he writes, “The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has to-day all the exhilaration of a vice. Moral truisms have been so much disputed that they have begun to sparkle like so many brilliant paradoxes.” Thus, along with his initial collection of paradoxes, begins Chesterton’s lifelong protest that his paradoxes are not really paradoxes, but common sense. But, of course, it is still another paradox that “common sense should be uncommon.”

Most of the things that Chesterton defends are common enough: babies, marriage, and the home (which includes the nation we live in and the planet we live on). These are universal. One reason why G. K. Chesterton is enjoying a revival is that these things are still being attacked—and defended. There is a raging debate about what is normal.

But Chesterton also defends things that do not seem universal or timely. China shepherdesses, for instance. And yet these other things are not as obscure as we might be too quick to conclude. The puzzling collectibles that people store in glass cabinets, the pleasant pastimes of reading pulp fiction and mysteries, the harmless entertainments of humor and popular culture—even if they are nonsense, variations of these are still enjoyed and cherished by the client whom Chesterton continues to represent: the common man.

By defending the common things, Chesterton prevents us from becoming complacent. He calls upon the imagination, whose function, he says, is “not to make strange things settled so much as to make settled things strange; not so much to make wonders facts as to make facts wonders.”

But why defend skeletons? Why do skeletons need to be defended? Well, it turns out that skeletons have gotten a bad rap. For some reason, people are afraid of them, even to the point of running in terror when stumbling upon one. Ironically, these very same folks are relying on a skeleton in the very act of running away from a skeleton. There is that one skeleton we simply cannot run away from. And it always has a smile on its face.

Chesterton also defends ugly things. But this is not meant to be taken as a defense of the loss of beauty that is one of the curses of the modern world. It is characteristic of Chesterton that he defends both beauty and ugliness. But the ugliness he is defending is actually the grotesque, such as we see in the gargoyles that crawl everlastingly along the walls and spires of the great cathedrals. Their grins exceed the mere comical. They represent “the extravagance of vitality,” and yet they are functional. They are the craftsmanship not of masters but of everyday artisans, doodles in stone. Chesterton has no love for the ugliness of modern cities, flattened and grayed by industrial uniformity, or the pretentious abandonment of form and content in modern art. The ugly things that Chesterton defends are humble. They are dignified. They are democratic.

Whether it be in high art or low art, academic halls or beer halls, Chesterton takes on those who sneer, those who dismiss, those who simply forget. New fashions may be flashing and attention-grabbing, but pageantry and tradition represent something deeper and permanent, and it must be protected. The outlaw may be romantic, but the outlaw is attacking civilization itself, and civilization is a fragile affair. Marriage is held together by the thin thread of a vow, but it must be an unbreakable thread. Babies need to be defended because they are defenseless. They must be defended against those who do not understand that with each new baby, the whole universe is again put on trial. And God must be defended not because he needs to be defended, but because it has a beneficial effect on us when we defend him.

The Christian philosophy underlying the essays is something that Chesterton still has not overtly affirmed, as he would, when pressed, a few years later in his book Orthodoxy. But the provocative point he is trying to make here is that by rejecting Christ, we have lost what is human in humanity.

Some may regard the whole thing as merely “A Defence of Optimism” against a pessimistic age and a rising skepticism. But it would be unfair to characterize Chesterton as a reactionary. He is trying to provide balance, because truth is always a balancing act. It would not be long before he would need to criticize the optimist as well as the pessimist, arguing that they both have skewed perspectives. “The optimist,” he writes in Orthodoxy, “thinks everything is good, except the pessimist. The pessimist thinks everything is bad, except himself.” They represent the two sins against hope: presumption and despair.

Chesterton had been gaining attention both as a poet and a critic, and so The Defendant was widely reviewed in the London literary journals. It is not surprising that it received mostly unfavorable reviews. And why is this not surprising? Because the book was reviewed by the very pessimists and skeptics against whom Chesterton had taken up his pen. Chesterton says that critics are like frogs: cold and jumpy. He could have added thin-skinned. When dealing with Chesterton’s first book of essays, they tolerate as best they can his youthful exuberance, but warn that there are no shortcuts to Paradise (assuming there is a Paradise at all). They see an agile mind, but no purposeful thought: “much steam and glory but little motion.” And they see a potential danger in anyone who defends Patriotism.

There was, however, one notable and very distinguished exception among the reviewers: Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, known as “Q,” a poet and scholar and Oxford University professor. He greets the book with great delight. He admires the originality in Chesterton’s thinking—“the courage of his simplicity,” his humor, his wonder, the way he has come to his conclusions through unconventional routes. He is refreshed by the fact that Ches...