The Wanganui Chronicle TUESDAY, JUNE 16, 1936. GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 79, Issue 141, 16 June 1936, Page 6

The Wanganui Chronicle TUESDAY, JUNE 16, 1936. GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON

[ ITERARY perversity was laid to rest when Gilbert Keith Chesterton breathed his last. This sounds at once indecorous and inappropriate, but it is in the Gilbertian style. He would not wish for no other epitaph. It will tickle his fancy, he will chuckle over it and go and write an article about it, and if there be newspapers in the Celestial sphere, send to the editor a typescript of his own, with instructions that it be published on a Saturday morning. The typescript will present an argument that his late twenty-three stone was not a weight, that literary perversity was solid, that it is the only commendable product of the literary life, and if it is not perverse it is useless. G.K.C. was an oversize editor of Puck. A man’s feet will not deny avoirdupois, but it does not hamper his spirit. He never, as far as has been recorded, went up in an aeroplane, but he certainly had the wings of a dove attached to his mind. He could always get off the earth when he wanted to. Now Puck is ever on the lookout for the pompous. Consequently those people who took themselves seriously engaged Chesterton’s particular attention. He found dietists, vegetarians, simple-lifers, teetotallers, millionaires, and Mr. Bernard Shaw excellent Aunt Sallies at which he could take shies. He expressed the ordinary hedgerow opinion of the “advanced” in an extraordinary way. Could more shafts be included in so short a paragraph as the following:— “Mr. Mandragon, the Millionaire, I am happy to say is dead; He enjoyed a quiet funeral in a Crematorium shed. And he lies there fluffy and soft and grey, and certainly quite refined; When he might have rotted to flowers and fruit with Adam and ail mankind, Or been eaten by wolves athirst for blood, Or burnt on a good tall pyre of wood, In a towering flame, as a heathen should, Or even sat with us here at food. Merftly taking two-penny ale and pork with a pocket knife; But this was a luxury not for one that went for the Simple Life.” The man who wrote the foregoing would laugh at a staid obituary notice concerning himself, because he would know that such a notice would be foreign to his life and thought. Life, according to the Chestertonian philosophy, should be loved, because it is good. Religion should be believed in because it enriches life. Food and drink are given to make glad the heart of man, and in comradeship of beer and brotherhood do men come to realise that the good Lord made all things and saw that they were good. From this jolly outlook proceeded a joy of the English countryside, its hedges, its lanes and its inns and all the perversities of English life. Ho saw in the English Road the joyful, hearty, muddling Englishman’s work: “Before the Romans came to Hye or out of Severn strode The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road. A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire, And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire; A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.” His patriotism was so intense that he hated the jingo and ail of its empty philosophy. “My country right or wrong,” he cried. “Why it is a thing no patriot could say. It is like saying ‘My mother drunk or sober.’ No doubt if a decent man’s mother took to drink, he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not, is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery. . . . We fall back on gross and frivolous things for our patriotism. . . . Our schoolboys are left to live and die in the infantile type of patriotism which they learned from a box of tin soldiers.” p During the Boer War Chesterton protested against the bullying g of the Boers, and one of his prized possessions for that effort was I a black eye. It was such a democratic protest. | Chesterton was Puck to the end of his days. That is why those who knew him loved him, and because he provided the philosophical and spiritual justification for the average man in i this world of false values and cheap scoffings his work-and his I memory will for long be held dear.