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The Wit and Wisdom of G K Chesterton by Bevis Hillier (view source)
Revision as of 12:05, 14 November 2010
, 12:05, 14 November 2010no edit summary
A Puritan, Chesterton tells us, ''originally meant a man whose mind had no holidays'', while as young man, he ''knew all about politics and nothing about politicians''. Is it not rather absurd, he suggests, to dissuade a man from drinking his tenth whisky by slapping him on the back and urging him to ''be a man,'' while never trying to dissuade a crocodile from eating his tenth explorer by slapping it on the back and saying, ''be a crocodile''? If there were no God, he suggests, there would be no atheists. According to Father Brown, ''every crime depends on somebody not waking up too soon, and in every sense most of us wake up too late.'' And who among us can resist the one-sentence story of the woman who took apartments in which she was not allowed to keep a cat or a dog. She applied for permission to keep a bird, and eventually walked round to her new lodgings accompanied by an ostrich. Quite daft, and maybe oddly quaint, dated even alongside 21st century humour, but none the less amusing for all that.
Amongst the dryly comic quotations are a few serious thoughtswords. In a prediction worthy of the prophet Nostradamus, we have a paragraph from 1933 in which he says the world is ''drifting horribly near to a New War, which will probably start on the Polish Border'', before drawing comparisons between ''the despised and driveling Old Men of 1914'' and the young men of the day who have had nineteen years in which to learn how to avoid war. On another page he contemplates Stonehenge, ''the vast void roll of the empty land towards Salisbury, the grey tablelands like primeval altars…[telling] of a very ancient and very lonely Britain.''' Then he follows it with the observation that it must rather spoil the vistorvisitor's mood to arrive there and find it all surrounded by a barbed wire fence, with a policeman keeping guard and a shop selling souvenir postcards. So now we know that mass commercialization and keeping undesirables out was not unknown even in the 1930s. Finally, he says that the tale of Joseph of Arimathea coming to Britain is presumably legend, but not such a preposterous or incredible idea as one might suppose. It is generally thought of as being just as comic as if one said that Wat Tyler went to Chicago, or that John Bunyan discovered the North Pole.
Full of amusing and serious thoughts, it makes the ideal book either to dip into or read cover to cover. Those who are already familiar with Chesterton's books might get rather more out of it, but even so those for whom he is an unknown quantity will certainly find this a rewarding read as well as perhaps introduce them to a writer who is less remembered today than he should be.