den
with undisclosable attributes, and that romance is hidden here.

Now all these things add up, as it were, to a tendency to say a thing as
emphatically as possible. Emphasis of statement from a humorist gifted
with the use of words results sometimes in epigram, sometimes in fun, in
all things except the dull things (except when the dullness is due to an
unhappy succession of scintillations which have misfired). For these
reasons Chesterton is regarded as entirely frivolous--by persons without
a sense of humour. He is, in point of fact, extremely serious, on those
frequent occasions when he is making out a case. As he himself points
out, to be serious is not the opposite of to be funny. The opposite of
to be funny is not to be funny. A man may be perfectly serious in a
funny way.

Now it has befallen Chesterton on more than one occasion to have to
cross swords with one of the few true atheists, Mr. Joseph MacCabe, the
author of a huge number of books, mostly attacking Christianity, and as
devoid of humour as an egg-shell is of hair. The differences and the
resemblances between Chesterton and Mr. MacCabe might well be the
occasion of a parable. Chesterton has written some of the liveliest
books about Christianity, Mr. MacCabe has written some of the dullest.
Chesterton has written the most amusing book about Mr. Bernard Shaw; Mr.
MacCabe has written the dullest. Chesterton and Mr. MacCabe have a habit
of sparring at one another, but up to the present I have not noticed
either make any palpable hits. It is all rather like the Party System,
as Mr. Hilaire Belloc depicts it. The two antagonists do not understand
each other in the least. But, to a certain degree, Mr. MacCabe's
confusion is the fault of Chesterton and not of his own lack of humour.
When Chesterton says, "I also mean every word I say," he is saying
something he does not mean. He is sometimes funny, but not serious, like
Mr. George Robey. He is sometimes irritating, but not serious, like a
circus clown. And he sometimes appears to be critical, but is not
serious, like the young lady from Walworth in front of a Bond Street
shop-window, regretting that she could not possibly buy the crockery and
glass displayed because the monogram isn't on right. Chesterton's
readers have perhaps spoiled him. He has pleaded, so to speak, for the
inalienable and mystic right of every man to be a blithering idiot in
all seriousness. So seriously, in fact, that when he exercised