86.  GILBERT K. CHESTERTON.  ORTHODOXY.

Mr. Chesterton may congratulate himself upon being the only man of letters in England who has had the originality or the insight or the temperamental courage to adopt a definitely reactionary philosophy; whereas in France we have Huysmans, Barres, Bourget, Bordeaux, and many others, whose persuasive and romantic role it is to prop up tottering altars; in England we have only Mr. Chesterton.

That is doubtless why it is necessary for him to exaggerate his paradoxes so extravagantly; and also why he is so important and so dear to the hearts of intelligent clergymen.

Mr. Chesterton’s grand philosophical “coup” is a simple and effective one—­the turning of everything, complacently and hilariously, upside down.  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. Chesterton.

87.  OSCAR WILDE.  INTENTIONS.  THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST. DE PROFUNDIS.

“Intentions” is perhaps the most original of all Wilde’s remarkable works.

His supreme art, as he himself well knew, was, after all, the art of conversation.  One might even put it that his greatest achievement in life was just the achievement of being brazenly and shamelessly what he naturally was—­especially in conversation.  To call him a “poseur” with the implication that he pretended or assumed a manner, were just as absurd as to call a tiger striped with the implication that the beast deliberately “put on” that mark of distinction.

If it is a pose to enjoy the sensation of one’s own spontaneous gestures, Wilde was indeed the worst of pretenders.  But the stupid gravity of many generals, judges and archbishops is not more natural to them than his exquisite insolence was to him.