CHESTERTONIAN WISDOM.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 200, 24 August 1929, Page 2 (Supplement)

CHESTERTONIAN WISDOM.

Many years ago Mr. Chesterton (recalls a writer 'in the London "Observer") wrote a book called "The Defendant," in jSgdiich he undertook a spirited defence of many unusual causes. To-day he puts the old lance in rest, and appears as the champion of Public Curiosity, but curiosity with a difference. He is writing (in the

"Illustrated London News") 'of. to-day's Thanksgiving Service; and he remarks that the popular sympathy, and even the popular curiosity, in the case of King George's illness has in it "something that is not merely vulgar like the news of the Smart Set:" — .

Indeed, it is because it is popular that it is not vulg'ir. It is vulgar to be frightfully excited on hearing that the Duchess of Dulwich has a diamond tiara casting half a million, when we ourselves could not afford a stone for a stud or a cuff-link; because it is idolatry, or the worship of a stone god alien to our own household gods. But it is not vulgar to sympathise with a Queen whose house is darkened by sickness; because for that high moment her household gods and ours lire the same. It is vulgar to be thrilled with joy because a millionaire has buirt a gigantic yacht big enough to contain a swimming bath; because we know in our hearts that he and we would both be healthier and happier if we were content to swim in the sea. But it is not vulgar to be touched by a man sitting and looking at the sea. when he hardly thought to look again upon the sun, even if the man is a King as well as a suilor. It is because; the story of this perilous recovery has come to us so much in the common outlines of countless stories of the kind that for the first time in such cases the modern curiosity is not an intrusion.

The point could hardly be better put.