trick.

Now these propositions are not merely snippets from a system of
philosophy, presented after the manner of the admirers of Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche. These are quotations which display a quite exceptional
power of surprising people. The anticlimaxes of the first two passages,
the bold dip into the future at the expense of the past in the third are
more than instances of mere verbal felicity. They indicate a writer
capable of the humour which feeds upon daily life, and is therefore
thoroughly democratic and healthy. For there are two sorts of humour;
that which feeds upon its possessor, Oscar Wilde is the supreme example
of this type of humorist, and that which draws its inspiration from its
surroundings, of which the great exemplar is Dickens, and Chesterton is
his follower. The first exhausts itself sooner or later, because it
feeds on its own blood, the second is inexhaustible. This theory may be
opposed on the ground that humour is both internal and external in its
origin. The supporters of this claim are invited to take a holiday in
bed, or elsewhere away from the madding crowd, and then see how humorous
they can be.

Humour has an unfortunate tendency to stale. The joke of yesteryear
already shows frays upon its sleeves. The wit of the early volumes of
Punch is in the last stages of decrepitude. Watch an actor struggling to
conceal from his audience the fact that he is repeating one of
Shakespeare's puns. We tolerate the humour of Congreve, not because it
is thoroughly amusing, but because it has survived better than most.
Humorous verse stands a slightly better chance of evoking smiles in its
old age. There is always its unalterable verbal neatness; tradition,
too, lingers more lovingly around fair shapes, and a poem is a better
instance of form than a paragraph. Mankind may grow blase, if it will,
but as a poet of the comic, Chesterton will live long years. Take for
example that last and worst of his novels _The Flying Inn_. Into this he
has pitched with a fascinating recklessness a quantity of poems,
garnered from The New Witness and worthy of the immortality which is
granted the few really good comic poems. There is the poem of Noah, with
that stimulating line with which each stanza ends. The last one goes:

But Noah he sinned, and we have sinned; on tipsy feet we trod,
Till a great big black teetotaller was sent to us for a rod,
And you can't get wine at a P.S.A., or Chapel, or Eisteddfod;