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Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2000 15:11:22 -0400
To: classics@u.washington.edu
From: James Pfundstein <jmpfund@bgnet.bgsu.edu>
Subject: Chestertonian unabashed (WASs: Chesterton Bashing)
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At 4:06 PM -0500 22.11.2000, P. T. Rourke wrote:
>JMP, let us say that with Chesterton, his talent (as a prose stylist, as a
>narrator, what have you) is below the threshold at which "de gustibus"
>becomes operative (which is not the case with, e.g., Milton, most certainly
>"one of the most brilliant writers in the English language").
>PTR

I'm not sure that I can agree on this. Even the biggest figures of 
the canon are not immune to changes in collective taste or cultural 
preference. (Milton's stock has certainly seen some ups and downs 
this century. I hope it doesn't sound hybristic or merely 
argumentative when I say I don't consider Milton's status beyond 
question.) What is beyond "de gustibus" disputing, though, is that 
some books go on being read, generation after generation and century 
after century; they have a more than merely historical importance. 
Milton's poetry is in this category, and clearly some of Chesterton's 
prose is, too.

Chesterton is a trifler, a nugator, in fact. But I would resist the 
idea that this makes him less interesting or less valuable than a big 
grumpy writer of epics, like Milto(w)n. As one writer of nugae was 
told by his sordid muse:

	Scribant ista graves nimium nimiumque severi,
		quos media miseros nocte lucerna videt;
	at tu Romano lepidos sale tingue libellos:
		adgnoscat mores vita legatque suos.
	Angusta cantare licet uidearis avena,
		dum tua multorum vincat avena tubas.

JM("Martial 8.3.17ff")P

.