Word: chesterton
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Magic (by G. K. Chesterton) and Hello, Out There (by William Saroyan) provide a double bill that prompts a single verdict. Both playwrights are much better at dialogue than drama. Saroyan's one-acter is more rewarding because it's simpler and more human. It tells of a guy (Eddie Dowling) in a small-town Texas jail who, before he is killed by a mob, talks through the bars of his cell with the jail's wispish slavey of a cook (Julie Haydon). Theirs is a brief rapprochement, a doomed romance, of two desperately lonely, anonymous souls...
...ARARAT-Michael Innes-Dodd, Mead ($2). A learned Scotland Yarder, marooned with five other loquacious characters on remote Pacific islet, elucidates the slaying of Sir Ponto Unumunu, black anthropologist, and goes on to puncture an Empire-threatening secret of oddly assorted indigenes. Overtones of Evelyn Waugh, G. K. Chesterton and E. P. Oppenheim make it a treat for those who like their mysteries recondite...
Among the great quotations about which the elect may need refreshing: King Ethelred's promise; extracts from the Magna Charta; the Virginia Bill of Rights; libertarian exhortations by J. S. Mill, Henry George, Wendell Phillips, Daniel Webster, Thomas Paine, Emerson, Milton, General Smuts, Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, Cordell Hull, Harold Ickes, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt...
Even to people who have no means of sharing Chesterton's European culture and Roman Catholic faith, his thesis, though it is not unique, will seem uniquely clean-cut. It is serenely distinct from cliches of wartime propaganda. Chesterton points out that, if Europe's politicians had understood the real issues at stake, they would never have weakened Christian Germany (Austria) after the War, nor allowed pagan Prussia again to become strong. He foresaw that Naziism and Bolshevism would get together. "If or when the New Germany moves one inch towards infringing on the present ancient frontiers...
What prevented liberal Englishmen and Americans from thinking Chesterton was right was, for one thing, a disagreement over what constitutes civilization. To Chesterton, Poland was an outpost of civilization because it was a Catholic nation. To the liberal Western mind, Poland seemed a backward and feudal country, greatly inferior in efficient industrial plant and social services-two modern criteria of civilization-even to Nazi Germany. To those who like to dispose of other people's affairs by logic alone, the logical conclusion should have been that it did Poland good last autumn to be taken over and "organized...