pe; a series of
paragraphs on some topical subject, with little spaces between them in
order to encourage the weary reader. Chesterton wrote this class of
article supremely well. He would seize on something apparently trivial,
and exalt it into a symptom. When he had given the disease a name, he
went for the quack doctors who professed to remedy it. He goes to
Letchworth, in which abode of middle-class faddery he finds a teetotal
public-house, pretending to look like the real thing, and calling itself
"The Skittles Inn." He immediately raises the question, Can we
dissociate beer from skittles? Then he widens out his thesis.

Our life to-day is marked by perpetual attempts to
revive old-fashioned things while omitting the
human soul in them that made them more than
fashions.

And he concludes:

I welcome a return to the rudeness of old times;
when Luther attacked Henry VIII for being fat; and
when Milton and his Dutch opponent devoted pages
of their controversy to the discussion of which of
them was the uglier. . . . The new controversialists
. . . call a man a physical degenerate, instead of
calling him an ugly fellow. They say that red hair
is the mark of the Celtic stock, instead of
calling him "Carrots."

Of this class of fun Chesterton is an easy master. It makes him a
fearsome controversialist on the platform or in his favourite lists, the
columns of a newspaper. But he uses his strength a little tyrannously.
He is an adept at begging the question. The lost art called ignoratio
elenchi has been privately rediscovered by him, to the surprise of many
excellent and honest debaters, who have never succeeded in scoring the
most obvious points in the face of Chesterton's power of emitting a
string of epigrams and pretending it is a chain of argument. The case,
in whatever form it is put, is always fresh and vigorous. Another
epigrammatist, Oscar Wilde, in comparison with him may be said to have
used the midnight oil so liberally in the preparation of his witticisms,
that one might almost detect the fishy odour. But as with his prose so
with his verses; Chesterton's productions are so fresh that they seem to
spring from his vitality rather than his intellect. They are generally a
trifle ragged and unpolished as if, like all their author's productions,
they were strangers to revision. And