ABSTRACT
G. K. Chesterton’s audacious reconciliation that are abruptly different from each other, as T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis began more frankly to accommodate aspects of popular culture, while Chesterton found himself, to his surprise, increasingly taking ‘the side of the cultivated and the clever. Lewis’s account of the contents of Lamport’s bookshelf calls to mind a moral drawn half a century earlier by Chesterton in ‘Some Urgent Reforms: The Human Circulating Library’. Long before the emergence of Eliot and Ezra Pound as the modernist Old Possum and Br’er Rabbit, Chesterton had noted that ‘the Uncle Remus stories reveal, what all real folklore reveals’—the falsity of any belief in the ‘cool superiority of one section of life over another’. By picking up the baton in turn with his parody of Eliot’s parody, Chesterton brought to a close a forty-year fascination with the network of notions and allusions that he particularly attached to the mulberry bush rhyme as a metaphor of cultural integration.
