“Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of ‘touching’ a man’s heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.”
"Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle."
"The truth has made us free; the tradition has given to men the sort of liberty they really like; local customs, individual craftsmanship, variety of self-expression, the presence of personality in production, the dignity of the human will. These are expressed in a thousand things, from hospitality to adventure, from parents instructing their own children to children inventing their own games, from practical jokes to pilgrimages and from patron saints to pub signs."
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) is quite a complex case, mixing his love for paradox, benevolent eccentricity and multivariance with conservative moralism (at times even mild xenophobia), distributism, and the rhetorical fire of the partisan poems. Still, the imaginative-paradoxical traits are the base that gave him his characteristic voice. His EIE (especially), ILE and EII (for moralism) columns are also visibly elevated above the IEE baseline.
He is famously the "prince of paradox," whose method, as Time observed, was that "whenever possible, Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories — first carefully turning them inside out." Chesterton's prose is always paradoxical and surprising. He is constantly making the move "what if we turn this around". The Father Brown stories are explicitly about this method (the priest as detective who sees the pattern others, with more stereotypical thinking, miss). Father Brown solves crimes not by Holmes-style deduction from clues but by imaginatively projecting himself into the criminal's interior life through Fi-style cognitive empathy. The priest explicitly explains the method: "I had thought out exactly how a thing like that could be done, and in what style or state of mind a man could really do it. And when I was quite sure that I felt exactly like the murderer myself, of course I knew who he was." Even his apologetic tracts, Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, are not systematic-deductive treatises, Thomas Aquinas-style; they are anecdotal and paradoxical, accumulating insight through unexpected angles rather than building from first principles. His battle poems, Lepanto and The Ballad of the White Horse, are the works that pull most strongly toward the EIE component, but they aren't what he is famous for. The point of his best work is ideas and multivariance more than the translation of a certain emotional state.
In one of his lesser known works, a doctor wants to commit the detective-poet Gabriel Gale, telling him: "I will venture to guess that you never see a cat without thinking of a tiger or a lizard without thinking of a dragon". Gale replies, "Your malady is the opposite to mine, to which you call making a tiger out of a cat. You do not go on and make the cat more of a cat; you are always trying to work back and prove that it is less than a cat. But a cat is a cat; that is the supreme sanity." The author's point here is that things have their own unique integrity, and the proper response to the world is recognizing it, rather than reducing or systematizing, without dismissing the inherent magic in everyday life to which every IEE is attracted to. This defense of concrete particularity against the abstract-managerial impulse to dissolve persons and things into categories is quite common for the type. The entire plot of Manalive is a defence of an innocent eccentric against those who see only threats in violation of strict order.
As typical for any strongly intuitive type, Chesterton was quite uncertain in the material world. He did much of his writing in train stations, since he usually missed the train he was supposed to catch. In one famous anecdote, he wired his wife, saying: "Am at Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?"
In theory, Distributism — the doctrine that productive property should be distributed as widely as possible and that both concentrated capitalism and concentrated socialism degrade human dignity — is quite a Delta-quadra political vision. It's just that the inherent collectivism (strong and valued Di, in Talanov parlance) goes badly with Ne and its love for multivariance and paradox, hence your average IEE is not really an "aristocrat" at all. Chesterton's distinctiveness as a thinker was that he was one of the few intellectuals with both Ne and Di highly pronounced. It's peacefully aristocratic in the sense that it tries to generalize the conditions of aristocratic life — land, autonomy, productive sufficiency, the ability to refuse degrading work — to the common man, rather than abolishing aristocracy as such. "Three acres and a cow" makes every man a small lord on his own ground. Chesterton was anti-imperialist on the grounds that imperialism corrupted English patriotism, and sympathized with the Irish home rule partly because Irish Catholics had what he saw as a "naturally distributist outlook on property ownership".
For an example of a more typical IEE writing, you can look at O'Henry. His stories are pure short-form narrative observation of human folly in the paradox of everyday life, without attempting to install an "aristocratic" morality in the reader. Chesterton's style has the same affectionate observation of people and pivoting on the unexpected dignity of an ordinary person, but it operates from a more communalist bent. Many traditional Catholic admirers of Chesterton stress the "Di" aspects of his work. Still, he'd likely mock the people who suggest that Herbert Wells should be burnt at stake for the common good. The Ball and the Cross makes this point as the structural argument of the novel: the Christian and the atheist who set out to kill each other in a duel discover that they have far more in common with each other than either has with the world. Chesterton maintained warm friendships across decades with Shaw and Wells, ideological enemies on every major question of his life. The obituaries from his ideological opponents were the testimony the typing predicts: Shaw wrote to his wife Frances that "he was a man of colossal genius" and offered to help with the family's finances; Wells wrote that he had been "the only one of all my friends with whom I was ever able to differ".
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