e often
enough there appeared signed reviews and poems. The situation was absurd
enough. The Daily News was the organ of Nonconformists, and G.K.C.
preached orthodoxy to them. It advocated temperance, and G.K.C.
advocated beer. At first this was sufficiently amusing, and nobody
minded much. But before Chesterton severed his connection with the
paper, its readers had come to expect a weekly article that almost
invariably contained an attack upon one of their pet beliefs, and often
enough had to be corrected by a leader on the same page. But the
Chesterton of 1900 was a spokesman of the Liberalism of his day,
independent, not the intractable monster who scoffed, a few years later,
at all the parties in the State.

At this point one is reminded of Watts-Dunton's definition of the two
kinds of humour in The Renascence of Wonder: "While in the case of
relative humour that which amuses the humorist is the incongruity of
some departure from the laws of convention, in the case of absolute
humour it is the incongruity of some departure from the normal as fixed
by nature herself." We have our doubts as to the general application of
this definition: but it applies so well to Chesterton that it might
almost have come off his study walls. What made a series of more than
six hundred articles by him acceptable to The Daily News was just the
skilful handling of "the laws of convention," and "the normal as fixed
by nature herself." On the theory enunciated by Watts-Dunton, everything
except the perfect average is absolutely funny, and the perfect average,
of course, is generally an incommensurable quantity. Chesterton
carefully made it his business to present the eccentricity--I use the
word in its literal sense--of most things, and the humour followed in
accordance with the above definition. The method was simple. Chesterton
invented some grotesque situation, some hypothesis which was glaringly
absurd. He then placed it in an abrupt juxtaposition with the normal,
instead of working from the normal to the actual, in the usual manner.
Just as the reader was beginning to protest against the reversal of his
accustomed values, G.K.C. would strip the grotesque of a few
inessentials, and, lo! a parable. A few strokes of irony and wit, an
epigram or two infallibly placed where it would distract attention from
a weak point in the argument, and the thing was complete. By such means
Chesterton developed the use of a veritable Excalibur of controv