"THE LAUGHING PROPHET"

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23330, 23 October 1937, Page 4

"THE LAUGHING PROPHET"

CHESTERTON AS A FRIEND " The Laughing Prophet." By Bmile Caramaerts. London: Methucn. Emile Cammaerts as a lecturer and writer reveals himself as a citizen of the world. At the same time, no one who has read his work "Belgium's Agony" could fail to recognise in him a local patriot. Perhaps it is for this very reason that the writings of G. K. Chesterton have an instant appeal to him, for was not Chesterton the author of "The Napoleon of Notting Hill"? M. Cammaerts is a Belgian, and one would expect of him a kind of proprietary interest in that heroic man of peace in the early chapters of the Great War, Cardinal Mercier. It is a source of satisfaction to M. Cammaerts that his friend Gilbert Chesterton should have been a student of Thomas Aquinas, since the work instituted by the Cardinal at Louvaine bore fruit in the work of "The Laughing Prophet." One cannot say whether Chesterton was endowed with a genius for friendship, but he certainly grappled a friend to him in the person of M. Cammaerts. The sage of Beaconsfield has made himself known to us through his writings. The present reviewer can claim a fleeting and casual acquaintance connected with a certain thunder-ridden Sunday afternoon at "Top Meadow," Beaconsfield, and his testimony, for what it is worth, is added to that of M. Cammaerts concerning the Chestertonian courtesy. His eulogist writes of him: "He was an ideal friend, the kind of friend whom you could meet after a year as if you had left him the day before. Love at first sight has been frequently described, friendship at first sight is a rarer experience. Why he awoke it sooner than any man I ever met is a mystery as sacred as the purity of the human soul. His manner combined a schoolboy jollity with a gentle and almost old-fashioned courtesy. The way he talked to anyone as to an intellectual equal on almost any subject which chance brought forward, never leading the conversation, but rather following it, the way he listened, a rarer gift in a lecturer, interpreting his interlocutor's remarks as to give them a deeper and often unexpected significance, above all, the way he behaved, as a big, clumsy, forgetful child, always ready to attenuate the faults of others and to acknowledge his own." M. Cammaerts has happily conceived the form of his study. It consists of eight chapters, the first introductory, the following seven concerned each

with one of the seven virtues. In writing of Chesterton's charity, M. Cammaerts subconsciously drops into the Chestertonian manner himself: He loved them [men], not as he imagined them, according to his own prejudices or preferences, but as they were standing around him, in his home, in the houses of his friends, and in public places. Like his St. Francis, he deliberately did not, see the wood for the trees, he did" not see the mob for the men.

It may be that the zeal of M. Cammaerts has imparted a radiance to this later portrait which the disinterested idealist will disparage. In the absence of disinterestedness, however, one is grateful to the Belgian poet for his ratification of what one has always felt about Chesterton oneself. He must be read in toto to be appreciated. It would be quite easy to promulgate a superficial view of him as a clever journalist, which he certainly was. One might think of his levity as heartless if one merely encountered him in a few back numbers of the Illustrated London News, or in a single collection of essays such as " What's Wrong with the World." Chesterton scolded heresies. He seldom, if ever, scolded men. Shaw, his lifelong antagonist in the intellectual and spiritual field, was his friend. When Dean Inge called him a drunken helot he held his tongue and spake nothing. He may irritate us sometimes by his mannerisms. His absent-mindedness may appear a little over-elaborate, like the practical pleasantries of Beerbohm Tree, but what one retains from recollections of Chesterton in debate, on paper, or at his own board, is a sense of something peculiarly winning behind that dazzling intellect. Emile Cammaerts ratifies this impression all the way along his book, and one is grateful to him for this comfort and reassurance. C. R. A.