G. K. CHESTERTON

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 19, 23 January 1937, Page 24

G. K. CHESTERTON

HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

G. K. Chesterton's "Autobiography" wel the outstanding book of personal s hii ;velation of the year, and the most pie ttractive for some years past, says the Daily Mail" review. , • It is great, wise, and absorbingly in:resting; serious, but often irresistibly . r musing. He could never, he says jmewhere in this book, understand rhy a solid argument should be con- sQn idered less solid because he illustrated att . ; by entertaining examples. Chester- ter * ans' death last summer was a loss to hu] Inglish gaiety—and sanity. i "A man," he writes, "does not grow Id without being bothered; but I have fut rown old without being bored." He cor ireserved from childhood a faculty for eceptiveness. He never went with the | 0 „ rowd or accepted opinions simply beause they were current. Syr Every page, every anecdote, bears nis he stamp of his vital and unique per- w0 onality. Consider, for instance, this ce£ >rief impression of King George the fifth: , _ sui "About as genuine a person as I ever t j lt net. But he was genuine in a rather p r( mexpected way. He was not only en , lonest but frank, and so free and easy o£ n his likes and dislikes that he might an lave been called indiscreet. ... He r was anything but the supreme Per- de nanent Official many eulogies implied; he le was not like some reliable solicitor ti Q n whom family secrets are locked up, SU| >r some doctor congested with the " a silence of his professional confidences; a b le was much more like a little sea cap- ba tain, who keeps a certain silence and ye stiquette on his , quarter-deck; but ha plenty of anecdotes, not to say gij anathemas, in his cabin." m; "The Victorian age wais almost a Pi complete contrast to all that is now Hi connoted by the word. It had all the th vices that are now called virtues; re- in ligious doubt; intellectual unrest, a en hungry credulity about , new things, a ra complete lack of equilibrium. gr "It also had all the;virtues that are ve now called vices; a. rich sense of romance, a passionate desire to make ve the love, of man and woman once more what it was in Eden, a strong sense of the absolute necessity- of some significance in human life." All his vignettes of people have this penetrating quality. A meeting with m Asquith provokes the comment that w "he had about the fundamentals of b; politics and ethics this curious quality n( of vagueness, which I have found so te often in men holding high responsi- sc bilities." , e: About himself he tells a number of c( diverting anecdotes. He confesses that tr in a momenta of abstraction he once R asked for a cup of coffee instead of a ti ticket at a railway booking office; and D that on one occasion, having borrowed c< a cork-screw ifom a friend, he tried to a open his front door with it, holding his st latchkey in his other hand. He adds n that he was perfectly sober. « On one occasion he broke into a » railway station room at night in order a< to recover a parasol which a friend had left there. ~ THE WOODEN TITAN c .— ' s In "Hindenburg: The Wooden Titan," Jj Mr. J. W. Wheeler-Bennett has writ- * ten an excellent account of the life of Hindenburg or, more accurately, of the last quarter of his life of 86 years, the period during which he played a great if often unconscious part in " German history. There is probably no parallel in history to the career of Hindenburg, for no other man can have become so eminent after a cessation of activity so apparently com- g P *At the outbreak of the Great War, he was 66 years old, in declining health, an unknown retired general g living at a flat in Hanover. Until, as the victor of Tannenberg he became a national hero, scarcely anyone in Germany had any idea of his personal ap- * pearance. His story is again remarkable in that few can have begun a j political career at the age of 77 without any taste or aptitude for politics; for under the Constitution of Weimar the Presidency of the German Reich was no sinecure. In telling the story of Hindenburg s . life Mr. Wheeler-Bennett tells in detail the'history of Germany for 20 years ( except for a gap during the Presidency , of Ebert when Hindenburg was again , in retirement at Hanover, this time m a villa presented to him by the town. , For Hindenburg himself never guided 1 the destinies of Germany, but was the , facade behind which others directed , campaigns, formed policies or mereiy intrigued. . . < Mr. Wheeler-Bennett is well qualified , to write on Germany; much of his information is apparently derived from • the actors-themselves, from,conversations with men like Bruning, whom he greatly admired. The analysis of Hindenburg s character is convincing. Simple, straightforward, loyal, unperturbed in crises, he hated making decisions, and liked to share responsibility _ with others. This weakness caused him to be dominated by others and to ba easily persuaded that in following any given course he was doing what he thought he ought to do, carrying out his duty and serving his country. In consequence he always seemed to be betraying his friends. A LOT IN A NAME There is, apparently, quite a lot of answers to the question: "What's in a name?" so far as its application to book titles is concerned. Mr. E. V. Rieu, late managing director of Messrs. Methuen's, the publishers, has often doubted whether too much importance is not attached to a frequent cause of strife between author and publisher—the naming of books— but at the same time he asks some pertinent questions which, in their issues, tend to lay his doubt. Would "1066 and All That" and "When We Were Very Young"—he asks —have sold quite as well as they did had they been called respectively, "A Diverting History of the English People" and "Verses in Reminiscence of Early Childhood" Like Lewis Carroll's Carpenter, we doubt it. And no doubt you will have fairly definite views on the subject yourselves.