Friday, February 14, 2014

Chesterton whiffed a few

Chesterton sometimes misfired. He wasn't terribly fond of Prohibition, and in one response penned the poem starting thusly:
Feast on wine or fast on water
And your honour shall stand sure.
God Almighty's son and daughter
He the valiant, she the pure;
If an angel out of heaven
Brings you something else to drink
Thank him for his kind attentions,
Go and pour them down the sink.
The omission of beer from the list wouldn't endear him to most Wisconsinites(*), but more dramatically in another stanza he wrote "Cocoa is a cad and coward, Cocoa is a vulgar beast."

He must never have spent an afternoon sledding and come home to thaw out with a mug of hot cocoa. You may argue in his favor that he didn't grow up with such things--but neither did I. It isn't necessary to have been born to something to recognize a perfect fit when it is handed to you.

I gather he held a grudge against Cadbury for the Cadbury newspaper's role in convicting Chesterton's brother of libel. Still, he was a man of enough humility that I believe he would have dropped his bias if given a cup and a seat by the fire.


(*) Although I would omit it too. Beer is fine for baiting garden slugs but it seems inhumane to inflict it on people.

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