Chesterton refuses to go away. You may think he should have done so. Orwell tried to show him the door:
Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who chose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. In the last 20 years of his life … every book that he wrote, every paragraph, every sentence, every incident in every story, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan.
Given that Orwell asserted that everything he himself wrote was intended to advance the cause of Democratic Socialism, I’m not sure that he was entitled to complain that others were writing propaganda, but of course it was the nature of the propaganda and the tenor of Chesterton’s argument that he found offensive.
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