Twelve Types. By G. K. Chesterton. (Arthur L. Humphreys. 35.
6d.)—We cordially recommend as a gift-book from one sensible person with literary tastes to another of like mind the charming little volume called Twelve Types. Newspaper articles reprinted, the papers are short, terse, and effective. But these qualities do not in this case represent the superficial mind and thought that run most readily into effectiveness. Each study is full of depth and originality, and there is not a page of the book from which one is not tempted to quote a judgment of some man or mood. Mr. Chesterton has the gift of reading the type in the individual, but he does not confound the individual with the type. He is good at distinctions, as indeed he ought to be, for one of his best articles—that on Carlyle—is a tilt against the "modern habit" in criticism "of what is vulgarly called 'going the whole hog,' "— that is to say, the mania for "making one's philosophy, religion, politics, and temper all of one piece," and "seeking in all incidents for opportunities to assert and reassert some favourite mental attitude." This craze Mr. Chesterton thinks is comparatively modern. The great men of the past were free from it. "Solomon and Horace, Petrarch and Shakespeare, were pessimists when they were melancholy, and optimists when they were happy. But the optimist of to-day seems obliged to prove that gout and unrequited love make him dance with joy, and the pessimist of to-day to prove that sunshine and a good supper convulse him with inconsolable anguish." Very delightful and refreshing, because so entirely off the common lines of critical writing, is the chapter on Charles II., of whom it is said paradoxically "that he has scarcely a moral virtue to his name, and yet he attracts us morally"; the reason being that the Restoration reaction, and Charles II. as its hero, represent "a revolt of all the chaotic and unclassed parts of human nature, the parts that are left over, and will always be left over, by every rationalistic system of life." Puritanism was a rationalistic system of life, and it left out " politeness " ; but "politeness" came back with the Restoration. Of politeness Mr. Chesterton says enchantingly that it has "about it something mystical ; like religion, it is everywhere understood and nowhere defined." But Puritanism, being fanatical, did not understand it. "Charles is not entirely to be despised, because as the type of this movement [the Restoration] he let himself float upon this
new tide of politeness Unlike George IV., he was a gentleman, and a gentleman is a man who obeys strange statutes, not to be found in any moral text-book, and practises strange virtues nameless from the beginning of the world." Even about Charlotte Bront, even about Tolstoy, even about Sir Walter Scott, Mr. Chesterton finds things to say that are new, true, and striking. But we have no more space for quotation.
Previous page
