Consider these things:
If you throw one bomb you are only a murderer; but if you keep on persistently throwing bombs, you are in awful danger of at last becoming a prig.
If we all floated in the air like bubbles, free to drift anywhere at any instant, the practical result would be that no one would have the courage to begin a conversation.
If the public schools stuck up a notice it ought to be inscribed, "For the Fathers of Gentlemen only." In two generations they can do the 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 blasé, 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;
For the Curse of Water has come again because of the wrath of God.
And water is on the Bishop's board, and the Higher Thinker's shrine,
But I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine.
There is a lunatic song against grocers, who are accused of nonconformity, and an equally lunatic song in several instalments on being a vegetarian:
I am silent in the Club,
I am silent in the pub,
I am silent on a bally peak in Darien;
For I stuff away for life
Shoving peas in with a knife,
Because I am at heart a vegetarian.