One has the salutary amusement in reading him of visualizing the
Universe in the posture of a Gargantuan baby, "prepared" for a sound
smacking. Mr. Chesterton himself is the chief actor in this
performance and wonderful pyrotechnic stars leap into space as its
happy result.
Mr. Chesterton has his own peculiar "religion"--a sort of Chelsea
Embankment Catholicism, in which, in place of Pontifical Encyclicals,
we have Punch and Judy jokes, and in place of Apostolic Doctrine we
have umbrellas, lamp-posts, electric-signs and prestidigitating
clerics.
Mr. Chesterton is never more entertaining, never more entirely at
ease, than when turning one or other of the really noble and tragic
figures of human intellect into preposterous "Aunt Sallies" at whose
battered heads he can fling the turnips and potatoes of the Average
Man's average suspicion, dipped for that purpose in a fiery sort of
brandy of his own whimsical wit. If we don't become "like little
children"; in other words like jovial, middle-aged swashbucklers, and
protest our belief in Flying Pigs, Pusses in Boots, Jacks on the top
of Beanstalks, Old Women who live in Shoes, Fairies, Fandangos,
Prester Johns, and Blue Devils, there is no hope for us and we are
condemned to a dreadful purgatory of pedantic and atheistic dullness,
along with Li Hung Chang, George Eliot, Herbert Spencer and other
heretics whose view of the Dogma of the Immortality of the Soul
differs from that of Mr.
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