CHESTERTONIAN HUMOUR

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 52, 29 August 1925, Page 17

CHESTERTONIAN HUMOUR

"Talcs of the Long Bovr;" By Gilbert K. Chesterton. London and Melbourne: Cassell and Co., Ltd. Eight tales in sequence and pure, undiluted Chesterton constitute- this collection. What Brock and Payne ttp La

the realm of pyrotechnics, bo is Mr. Chesterton in that of words. There are people who exclaim: "Oh, Chesterton; well, yes, I've honestly tried to read him, but, irankly, can't stand him for long." This to many is a confession of rank herfcsyj but the world is made up of the normal and thq others. What Mr. Chesterton has done in this collection is to take a number of popular sayings, Buch as "When pigs fly," and "I'd eat my hat," and "Setting the Thames on fire," and to knead them into accomplished facts. A retired and choleric colonel, for instance, does eat his hat, an American millionaire manufactures a purse out of a bow's ear, and the Thames is set alight. It is all very absurd, but vastly .entertaining, and even readers who may glory in their shame at not being^among Mr. Chesterton's uncountable admirers will concede that ho is amusing besides as well as verbose. He is a mastor at posing paradoxes, and there arc a few in "Tales of the Long Bow." It is his philosophical comments on men and things that matter, as for example, when he describes a locality as having no public-houses for miles around, and, therefore, no public opinion. Again his playful comment on politics, when he shows his readers the Bail of Eden as "in truth a man of great experience and dexterity in his own profession. He had just succeeded in routing the Socialist Party and overthrowing, the Socialist Government, largely by the use of certain rhymed mottoes and maxims which he had himself invented with considerable amusement. His great slogan of 'Don't Nationalise but Rationalise' was generally believed to have led him to victory." And, great as is the temptation to quote, there is the different viewpoints' of youth and age as Mr. Chesterton sees uhem, pointing out that: "There is always a- difference between the eccentricity of an elderly man who defies the world and the enthusiasm of a younger man who hopes to alter it. The old gentleman may be willing, in. a sense, to stand on his head; but he does not hope, as the boy does, to stand the world on its head." "Tales of the Long Bow" is a good mixture of commonsense and nonsense.