Sublime

Gilbert Keith Chesterton—that Catholic equivalent of Hotei, the “laughing Buddha”—who, though neither a great poet nor a great theologian, had the sort of bewitched imagination from which great poetry and theology can be made. He shone as an essayist and fantast, and of all his many essays the most profound and provoking was “On Nonsense,” the

In short, a thing is either bad or good in its original aims and functions.

It is, indeed, in the clash of circumstances that men are most alive.

Like so many men and nations who grow up with nature and the common things, he understood the supernatural before he understood the natural.

It is when he drives through the poorest parts of London that he finds the streets paved with gold, being paved with prostrate servants; it is when he sees the grey lean leagues of Bow and Poplar that his soul is uplifted and he knows he is secure. This is not rhetoric, but economics.

The first and most striking feature is a stupidity that rises into a sort of ghastly innocence.

He brings, not something which is more poetic than realism, not something which is more spiritual than realism, not something which is more right than realism, but something which is more real than realism.

He has that real disadvantage which has arisen out of the modern worship of progress and novelty; and he thinks anything odd and new must be an advance.

In a primary sense puns are a perfect type of literary art.