'Paradoxes flung up in the air'

G.K. Chesterton was born on this day in 1874. Max Beerbohm first met him in 1902 and described him as 'like a mountain, and a volcanic one – constant stream of talk flowing down – paradoxes flung up into the air – very magnificent.' They became friends, and Beerbohm admired him – within limits: 'I am not nearly as witty as Chesterton for one, but certainly I have not prostituted and cheapened my wit as he has' – harsh words, by Max's standards, but fair enough: the unstoppably prolific Chesterton did turn out plenty of substandard stuff.
  Beerbohm parodied Chesterton in full flow in the great parody collection A Christmas Garland. Chesterton is represented by 'Some Damnable Errors About Christmas', a fine stream of paradoxes which asserts that 'for nearly two thousand years mankind has been more glaringly wrong on the subject of Christmas than on any other subject. If mankind had hated Christmas, he would have understood it from the first.' Among the 'more obvious fallacies' are the idea that 'Christmas should be observed as a time of jubilation' and that it 'comes but once a year'. Spiritually, Chesterton asserts, 'Christmas Day recurs exactly seven times a week. When we have frankly acknowledged this, and acted on this, we shall begin to realise the Day's mystical and terrific beauty. For it is only every-day things that reveal themselves to us in all their wonder and their splendour.' All very Chestertonian, 'very magnificent'.
  Above is one of Beerbohm's caricatures of Chesterton. He was a huge man, standing six feet four inches tall – my own height, as it happens – and tipping the scales at something over twenty stone (which I don't). His girth was famously immense: there was a story that during the Great War a lady asked him why he was 'not out at the front', and he replied, 'Madam, if you go round to the side, you will see that I am.' And Wodehouse described a loud crash as 'a sound like G.K. Chesterton falling onto a sheet of tin.' In 1931, the BBC asked him to give a series of talks on the radio, and they were a great success, delivered more or less impromptu, with his wife and secretary in the studio with him. Four years later, Beerbohm began his own series of radio talks, which were also a great success, and were later published in the collection Mainly on the Air, one of his best.