G-K CHESTERTON
A CRITIC AL STUDY- BY
JULIUS WEST
G. K. CHESTERTON
UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME:
W. B. YEATS
BY FORREST REID
J. M. SYNGE
BY P. P. HOWE
HENRY JAMES
BY FORD MADOX HUEFFER
HENRIK IBSEN
BY R. ELLIS ROBERTS
THOMAS HARDY
BY LASCELLES ABEHCROMBIE
BERNARD SHAW
BY P. P. HOWE
WALTER PATER
BY EDWARD THOMAS
WALT WHITMAN
BY BASIL DE SELINCOURI
SAMUEL BUTLER
BY GILBERT CANNAN
A. C. SWINBURNE
BY EDWARD THOMAS
GEORGE GISS1NG
BY FRANK SWINNERTON
R. L. STEVENSON
BY FRANK SWINNERTON
RUDYARD KIPLING
BY CYRIL FALLS
WILLIAM MORRIS
BY JOHN DRINKWATER
ROBERT BRIDGES
BY F. E. BRETT YOUNG
FYODOR DOSTOIEVSKY
BY J. MlDDLETON MURRY
MAURICE MAETERLINCK
BY UNA TAYLOR
G. K. CHESTERTON
A CRITICAL STUDY
BY
JULIUS WEST
LONDON
MARTIN SECKER
NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET
ADELPHI
MCMXV
I HAVE to express my gratitude to Messrs. Burns and Gates,
Messrs. Methuen and Co., and Mr. Martin Seeker for their
kind permission to quote from works by Mr. G. K. Chesterton
published by them. I have also to express my qualified
thanks to Mr. John Lane for his conditional permission to
quote from books by the same author published by him.
My thanks are further due, for a similar reason, to Mr.
Chesterton himself.
TO
J. C. SQUIRE
CONTENTS
CHARTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY 11
II. THE ROMANCER 23
III. THE MAKER OF MAGIC 59
IV. THE CRITIC OF LARGE THINGS 76
V. THE HUMORIST AND THE POET 91
VI. THE RELIGION OF A DEBATER 109
VII. THE POLITICIAN WHO COULD NOT
TELL THE TIME 136
VIII. A DECADENT OF SORTS 163
BIBLIOGRAPHY 185
INTRODUCTORY
THE habit, to which we are so much addicted,
of writing books about other people who have
written books, will probably be a source of
intense discomfort to its practitioners in the
twenty-first century. Like the rest of their
kind, they will pin their ambition to the pos
sibility of indulging in epigram at the expense
of their contemporaries. In order to lead up
to the achievement of this desire they will
have to work in the nineteenth century and
the twentieth. Between the two they will
find an obstacle of some terror. The eighteen
nineties will lie in their path, blocking the
way like an unhealthy moat, which some
myopes might almost mistake for an aquarium.
All manner of queer fish may be discerned in
these unclear waters.
To drop the metaphor, our historians will
find themselves confronted by a startling
change. The great Victorians write no longer,
but are succeeded by eccentrics. There is
11
G. K. CHESTERTON
Kipling, undoubtedly the most gifted of them
all, but not everybody s darling for all that.
There is that prolific trio of best-sellers,
Mrs. Humphry Ward, Miss Marie Corelli, and
Mr. Hall Caine. There is Oscar Wilde, who
has a vast reputation on the Continent, but
never succeeded in convincing the British that
he was much more than a compromise between
a joke and a smell. There is the whole Yellow
Book team, who never succeeded in convincing
anybody. The economic basis of authorship
had been shaken by the abolition of the three-
volume novel. The intellectual basis had been
lulled to sleep by that hotchpotch of conven
tion and largeness that we call the Victorian
Era. Literature began to be an effort to ex
press the inexpressible, resulting in outraged
grammar and many dots. . . .
English literature at the end of the last
century stood in sore need of some of the
elementary virtues. If obviousness and sim
plicity are liable to be overdone, they are not
so deadly in their after-effects as the bizarre
and the extravagant. The literary movement
of the eighteen nineties was like a strong
stimulant given to a patient dying of old age.
Its results were energetic, but the energy was
convulsive. We should laugh if we saw a man
apparently dancing in mid-air until we noticed
12
INTRODUCTORY
the rope about his neck. It is impossible to
account for the success of the Yellow Book
school and its congeners save on the assump
tion that the rope was, generally speaking,
invisible.
In this Year of Grace, 1915, we are still too
close to the eighteen nineties, still too liable
to be influenced by their ways, to be able to
speak for posterity and to pronounce the final
judgment upon those evil years. It is possible
that the critics of the twenty-first century, as
they turn over the musty pages of the Yellow
Book, will ejaculate with feeling : " Good God,
what a dull time these people must have had !
On the whole it is probable that this will be
their verdict. They will detect the dullness
behind the mechanical brilliancy of Oscar
Wilde, and recognize the strange hues of the
whole ^Esthetic Movement as the garments of
men who could not, or would not see. There
is really no rational alternative before our
critics of the next century ; if the men of the
eighteen nineties, and the queer things they
gave us, were not the products of an intense
boredom, if, in strict point of fact, Wilde,
Beardsley, Davidson, Hankin, Dowson, and
Lionel Johnson were men who rollicked in the
warm sunshine of the late Victorian period,
then the suicide, drunkenness and vice with
13
G. K. CHESTERTON
which they were afflicted is surely the strangest
phenomenon in the history of human nature.
To many people, those years actually were
dull.
The years from 1885 to 1898 were like the hours of
afternoon in a rich house with large rooms ; the
hours before teatime. They believed in nothing
except good manners ; and the essence of good
manners is to conceal a yawn. A yawn may be
denned as a silent yell.
So says Chesterton, yawning prodigiously.
One may even go farther, and declare that
in those dark days a yawn was the true sign
of intelligence. It is no mere coincidence that
the two cleverest literary debutants of that
last decade, Mr. Max Beerbohm and the sub
ject of this essay, both stepped on the stage
making a pretty exhibition of boredom. When
the first of these published, in 1896, being
then twenty-four years old, his Works of Max
Beerbohm he murmured in the preface, I
shall write no more. Already I begin to feel
myself a trifle outmoded. . . . Younger men,
with months of activity before them . . . have
pressed forward . . . Cedo junioribus"
So too, when Chesterton produced his first
book, four years later, he called it Greybeards
at Play : Literature and Art for Old Gentlemen,
and the dedication contained this verse :
14
INTRODUCTORY
Now we are old and wise and grey,
And shaky at the knees ;
Now is the true time to delight
In picture books like these.
The joke would have been pointless in any
other age. In 1900, directed against the
crapulous exoticism of contemporary litera
ture, it was an antidote, childhood was being
used as a medicine against an assumed attack
of second childhood. The attack began with
nonsense rhymes and pictures. It was a com
plete success from the very first. There is this
important difference between the writer of
nonsense verses and their illustrator ; the
former must let himself go as much as he can,
the latter must hold himself in. In Greybeards
at Play, Chesterton took the bit between his
teeth, and bolted faster than Edward Lear had
ever done. The antitheses of such verses as
the following are irresistible :
For me, as Mr. Wordsworth says,
The duties shine like stars ;
I formed my uncle s character,
Decreasing his cigars.
Or
The Shopmen, when their souls were still,
Declined to open shops
And cooks recorded frames of mind,
In sad and subtle chops.
The drawings which accompanied these gems,
it may be added, were such as the verses
15
G. K. CHESTERTON
deserved. They exhibit a joyous inconsistency,
the disproportion which is the essence of
parody combined with the accuracy which is
the sine qua non of satire.
About a month after Chesterton had pro
duced his statement of his extreme senility
(the actual words of the affidavit are
I am, I think I have remarked, [he had not],
Terrifically old.)
he published another little book, The Wild
Knight and Other Poems, as evidence of his
youth. For some years past he had occasion
ally written more or less topical verses which
appeared in The Outlook and the defunct
Speaker. Greybeards at Play was, after all,
merely an elaborate sneer at the boredom of
a decade ; the second book was a more definite
attack upon some points of its creeds and an
assertion of the principles which mattered
most.
There is one sin : to call a green leaf grey,
Whereat the sun in heaven shuddereth.
There is one blasphemy : for death to pray,
For God alone knoweth the praise of death.
Or again (The World s Lover)
I stood and spoke a blasphemy
" Behold the summer leaves are green."
It was a defence of reality, crying for ven
geance upon the realists. The word realism
16
INTRODUCTORY
had come to be the trade-mark of Zola and
his followers, especially of Mr. George Moore,
who made a sacrifice of nine obvious, clean
and unsinkable aspects of life so as to concen
trate upon the submersible tenth. Chesterton
came out with his defence of the common man,
of the streets
Where shift in strange democracy
The million masks of God,
the grass, and all the little things of life,
things in general, for our subject, alone
among modern poets, is not afraid to use the
word. If on one occasion he can merely
. . . feel vaguely thankful to the vast
Stupidity of things,
on another he will speak of
The whole divine democracy of things,
a line which is a challenge to the unbeliever,
a statement of a political creed which is the
outgrowth of a religious faith.
The same year Chesterton formally stepped
into the ranks of journalism and joined the
staff of The Daily News. He had scribbled
poems since he had been a boy at St. Paul s
School. In the years following he had watched
other people working at the Slade, while he
had gone on scribbling. Then he had begun
to do little odd jobs of art criticism and
B 17
G. K. CHESTERTON
reviewing for The Bookman and put in occa
sional appearances in the statelier columns of
The Speaker. Then came the Boer War, which
made G. K. Chesterton lose his temper but
find his soul. In 1900 The Daily News passed
into new hands the hands of G.K.C. s friends.
And until 1913, when the causes he had come
to uphold were just diametrically opposed to
the causes the victorious Liberal Party had
adopted, every Saturday morning s issue of
that paper contained an article by him, while
often enough there appeared signed reviews
and poems. The situation was absurd enough.
The Daily News was the organ of Noncon
formists, and G.K.C. preached orthodoxy to
them. It advocated temperance, and G.K.C.
advocated beer. At first this was sufficiently
amusing, and nobody minded much. But
before Chesterton severed his connection with
the paper, its readers had come to expect a
weekly article that almost invariably con
tained an attack upon one of their pet beliefs,
and often enough had to be corrected by a
leader on the same page. But the Chesterton
of 1900 was a spokesman of the Liberalism of
his day, independent, net the intractable
monster who scoffed, a few years later, at all
the parties in the State.
At this point one is reminded of Watts-Dun-
18
INTRODUCTORY
ton s definition of the two kinds of humour in
The Renascence of Wonder : " While in the
case of relative humour that which amuses the
humorist is the incongruity of some departure
from the laws of convention, in the case of
absolute humour it is the incongruity of some
departure from the normal as fixed by nature
herself." We have our doubts as to the
general application of this definition : but it
applies so well to Chesterton that it might
almost have come off his study walls. What
made a series of more than six hundred articles
by him acceptable to The Daily News was just
the skilful handling of " the laws of conven
tion," and the normal as fixed by nature
herself." On the theory enunciated by Watts-
Dunton, everything except the perfect average
is absolutely funny, and the perfect average,
of course, is generally an incommensurable
quantity. Chesterton carefully made it his
business to present the eccentricity I use the
word in its literal sense of most things, and
the humour followed in accordance with the
above definition. The method was simple.
Chesterton invented some grotesque situation,
some hypothesis which was glaringly absurd.
He then placed it in an abrupt juxtaposition
with the normal, instead of working from the
normal to the actual, in the usual manner.
19
G. K. CHESTERTON
Just as the reader was beginning to protest
against the reversal of his accustomed values,
G.K.C. would strip the grotesque of a few
inessentials, and, lo ! a parable. A few strokes
of irony and wit, an epigram or two infallibly
placed where it would distract attention from
a weak point in the argument, and the thing
was complete. By such means Chesterton
developed the use of a veritable Excalibur of
controversy, a tool of great might in political
journalism. These methods, pursued a few
years longer, taught him a craftsmanship he
could employ for purely romantic ends. How
he employed it, and the opinions which he
sought to uphold by its means will be the
subjects of the following chapters. Chesterton
sallied forth like a Crusader against the politi
cal and literary Turks who had unjustly come
into possession of a part of the heritage of a
Christian people. We must not forget that
the leading characteristic of a Crusader is his
power of invigorating, which he applies im
partially to virtues and to vices. There is a
great difference between a Crusader and a
Christian, which is not commonly realized.
The latter attempts to show his love for his
enemy by abolishing his unchristianness, the
former by abolishing him altogether. Although
the two methods are apt to give curiously
20
INTRODUCTORY
similar results, the distinction between a
Crusader and a Christian is radical and will be
considered in greater detail in the course of
this study. This study does not profess to be
biographical, and only the essential facts of
Chesterton s life need be given here. These
are, that he was born in London in 1873, is the
son of a West London estate agent who is also
an artist and a children s poet in a small but
charming way, is married and has children.
Perhaps it is more necessary to record the fact
that he is greatly read by the youth of his
day, that he comes in for much amused toler
ance, that, generally speaking, he is not recog
nized as a great or courageous thinker, even
by those people who understand his views
well enough to dissent from them entirely, and
that he is regarded less as a stylist, than as the
owner of a trick of style. These are the false
beliefs that I seek to combat. The last may
be disposed of summarily. When an author s
style is completely sincere, and completely
part of him, it has this characteristic ; it is
almost impossible to imitate. Nobody has
ever successfully parodied Shakespeare, for
example ; there are not even any good paro
dies of Mr. Shaw. And Chesterton remains
unparodied ; even Mr. Max Beerbohm s effort
in A Christmas Garland rings false. His style
21
G. K. CHESTERTON
is individual. He has not " played the sedulous
ape."
But, on the other hand, it is not proposed
to acquit Chesterton of all the charges brought
against him. The average human being is
partly a prig and partly a saint ; and some
times men are so glad to get rid of a prig that
they are ready to call him a saint Simon
Sty lit es, for example. And it is not suggested
that the author of the remark, " There are
only three things that women do not under
stand. They are Liberty, Equality, Frater
nity," is not a prig, for a demonstration that
he is a complete gentleman would obviously
leave other matters of importance incon
veniently crowded out. We are confronted
with a figure of some significance in these
times. He represents what has been called
in other spheres than his " the anti-intellec-
tualist reaction." We must answer the ques
tions ; to what extent does he represent mere
unqualified reaction ? What are his qualifi
cations as a craftsman ? What, after all, has
he done ?
And we begin with his romances.
22
II
THE ROMANCER
IN spite of Chesterton s liberal production of
books, it is not altogether simple to classify
them into " periods," in the manner beloved
of the critic, nor even to sort them out accord
ing to subjects. G.K.C. can (and generally
does) inscribe an Essay on the Nature of
Religion into his novels, together with other
confusing ingredients to such an extent that
most readers would consider it pure pedantry
on the part of anybody to insist that a Ches-
tertonian romance need differ appreciably from
a Chestertonian essay, poem, or criticism. That
a book by G.K.C. should describe itself as a
novel means little more than that its original
purchasing price was four shillings and six
pence. It might also contain passages of love,
hate, and other human emotions, but then again,
it might not. But one thing it would contain,
and that is war. G.K.C. would be pugnacious,
even when there was nothing to fight. His
characters would wage their wars, even when
23
G. K. CHESTERTON
the bone of contention mattered as little as
the handle of an old toothbrush. That, we
should say, is the first factor in the formula
of the Chestertonian romance and all the rest
are the inventor s secret. Imprimis, a body
of men and an idea, and the rest must follow,
if only the idea be big enough for a man to
fight about, or if need be, even to make him
self ridiculous about.
In The Napoleon of Notting Hill we have this
view of romance stated in a manner entirely
typical of its author. King Auberon and the
Provost of Notting Hill, Adam Wayne, are
speaking. The latter says :
" I know of a magic wand, but it is a wand that
only one or two may rightly use, and only seldom.
It is a fairy wand of great fear, stronger than those
who use it often frightful, often wicked to use. But
whatever is touched with it is never again wholly
common ; whatever is touched with it takes a magic
from outside the world. If I touch, with this fairy
wand, the railways and the roads of Notting Hill,
men will love them, and be afraid of them for ever."
" What the devil are you talking about ? " asked
the King.
" It has made mean landscapes magnificent, and
hovels outlast cathedrals," went on the madman.
" Why should it not make lamp-posts fairer than
Greek lamps, and an omnibus-ride like a painted
ship ? The touch of it is the finger of a strange
perfection."
24
THE ROMANCER
" What is your wand ? cried the King, im
patiently.
" There it is," said Wayne ; and pointed to the
floor, where his sword lay flat and shining.
If all the dragons of old romance were looked
upon the fiction of our day, the result, one
would imagine, would be something like that
of a Chestertonian novel. But the dragons
are dead and converted into poor fossil ich-
thyosauruses, incapable of biting the timidest
damsel or the most corpulent knight that ever
came out of the Stock Exchange. That is the
tragedy of G.K.C. s ideas, but it is also his
opportunity. " Man is a creature who lives
not upon bread alone, but principally by
catch- words," says Stevenson. Give me my
dragons," says G.K.C. in effect, " and I will
give you your catch- words. You may have
them in any one of a hundred different ways.
I will drop them on you when you least expect
them, and their disguises will outrange all
those known to Scotland Yard and to Drury
Lane combined. You may have catastrophes
and comets and camels, if you will, but you
will certainly have your catch- words."
The first of Chesterton s novels, in order of
their publication, is The Napoleon of Notting
Hill (1904). This is extravagance itself;
fiction in the sense only that the events never
25
G. K. CHESTERTON
happened and never could have happened.
The scene is placed in London, the time, about
A.D. 1984. " This ere progress, it keeps on
goin on," somebody remarks in one of the
novels of Mr. H. G. Wells. But it never goes
on as the prophets said it would, and conse
quently England in those days does not greatly
differ from the England of to-day. There have
been changes, of course. Kings are now chosen
in alphabetical rotation, and the choice falls
upon a civil servant, Auberon Quin by name.
Now Quin has a sense of humour, of absolute
humour, as the Watts-Dunton definition already
cited would have it called. He has two bosom
friends who are also civil servants and whose
humour is of the official variety, and whose
outlook upon life is that of a Times leader.
Quin s first official act is the publication of a
proclamation ordering every London borough
to build itself city walls, with gates to be closed
at sunset, and to become possessed of Provosts
in mediaeval attire, with guards of halberdiers.
From his throne he attends to some of the
picturesque details of the scheme, and enjoys
the joke in silence. But after a few years of
this a young man named Adam Wayne be
comes Provost of Notting Hill, and to him his
borough, and more especially the little street
in which he has spent his life, are things of
26
THE ROMANCER
immense importance. Rather than allow that
street to make way for a new thoroughfare,
Wayne rallies his halberdiers to the defence
of their borough. The Provosts of North
Kensington and South Kensington, of West
Kensington and Bayswater, rally their guards
too, and attack Notting Hill, purposing to
clear Wayne out of the way and to break down
the offending street. Wayne is surrounded at
night but converts defeat into victory by
seizing the offices of a Gas Company and turn
ing off the street lights. The next day he is
besieged in his own street. By a sudden sortie
he and his army escape to Campden Hill.
Here a great battle rages for many hours, while
one of the opposing Provosts gathers a large
army for a final attack. At last Wayne and
the remnants of his men are hopelessly out
numbered, but once more he turns defeat into
victory. He threatens, unless the opposing
forces instantly surrender, to open the great
reservoir and flood the whole of Notting Hill.
The allied generals surrender, and the Empire
of Notting Hill comes into being. Twenty
years later the spirit of Adam Wayne has gone
beyond his own city walls. London is a wild
romance, a mass of cities filled with citizens
of great pride. But the Empire, which has
been the Nazareth of the new idea, has waxed
27
G. K. CHESTERTON
fat and kicked. In righteous anger the other
boroughs attack it, and win, because their
cause is just. King Auberon, a recruit in
Wayne s army, falls with his leader in the
great battle of Kensington Gardens. But they
recover in the morning.
It was all a joke," says the King in apology.
" No," says Wayne ; " we are two lobes of the same
brain . . . you, the humorist ... I, the fanatic.
. . . You have a halberd and I have a sword, let us
start our wanderings over the world. For we are its
two essentials."
So ends the story.
Consider the preposterous elements of the
book. A London with blue horse- buses.
Bloodthirsty battles chiefly fought with hal
berds. A King who acts as a war correspon
dent and parodies G. W. Stevens. It is pre
posterous because it is romantic and we are
not used to romance. But to Chaucer let us
say it would have appeared preposterous
because he could not have realized the initial
premises. Before such a book the average
reader is helpless. His scale of values is
knocked out of working order by the very first
page, almost by the very first sentence.
(" The human race, to which so many of my
readers belong, has been playing at children s
games from the beginning, and will probably
28
THE ROMANCER
do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the
few people who grow up.") The absence of a
love affair will deprive him of the only " human
interest he can be really sure of. The Ches-
tertonian idiom, above all, will soon lead him
to expect nothing, because he can never get
any idea of what he is to receive, and will
bring him to a proper submissiveness. The
later stages are simple. The reader will wonder
why it never before occurred to him that area-
railings are very like spears, and that a distant
tramcar may at night distinctly resemble a
dragon. He may travel far, once his imagina
tion has been started on these lines. When
romantic possibilities have once shed a glow
on the offices of the Gas Light and Coke Com
pany and on the erections of the Metropolitan
Water Board, the rest of life may well seem
filled with wonder and wild desires.
Chesterton may be held to have invented a
new species of detective story the sort that
has no crime, no criminal, and a detective
whose processes are transcendental. The Club
of Queer Trades is the first batch of such stories.
The Man who was Thursday is another specimen
of some length. More recently, Chesterton has
repeated the type in some of the Father Brown
stories. In The Club of Queer Trades, the trans
cendental detective is Basil Grant, to describe
29
G. K. CHESTERTON
whom with accuracy is difficult, because of
his author s inconsistencies. Basil Grant, for
instance, is " a man who scarcely stirred out
of his attic," yet it would appear elsewhere
that he walked abroad often enough. The
essentials of this unprecedented detective are,
however, sufficiently tangible. He had been a
K.C. and a judge. He had left the Bench
because it annoyed him, and because he held
the very human but not legitimate belief that
some criminals would be better off with a trip
to the seaside than with a sentence of imprison
ment. After his retirement from public life
he stuck to his old trade as the judge of a
Voluntary Criminal Court. " My criminals
were tried for the faults which really make
social life impossible. They were tried before
me for selfishness, or for an impossible vanity,
or for scandal-mongering, or for stinginess to
guests or dependents." It is regrettable that
Chesterton does not grant us a glimpse of this
fascinating tribunal at work. However, it is
Grant s job, on the strength of which he becomes
the president and founder of the C.Q.T. Club
of Queer Trades. Among the members of this
Club are a gentleman who runs an Adventure
and Romance Agency for supplying thrills to
the bourgeois, two Professional Detainers, and
an Agent for Arboreal Villas, who lets off a
30
THE ROMANCER
variety of birds nest. The way in which these
people go about their curious tasks invariably
suggests a crime to Rupert Grant, Basil s
amateur detective brother, whereupon Basil
has to intervene to put matters right. The
author does not appear to have been struck
by the inconsistency of setting Basil to work
to ferret out the doings of his fellow club-
members. The book is, in fact, full of joyous
inconsistencies. The Agent for Arboreal Villas
is clearly unqualified for the membership of
the Club. Professor Chadd has no business
there either. He is elected on the strength of
having invented a language expressed by
dancing, but it appears that he is really an
employee in the Asiatic MSS. Department
of the British Museum. Things are extremely
absurd in The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old
Lady. At the instigation of Rupert, who has
heard sighs of pain coming out of a South
Kensington basement, Basil, Rupert, and the
man who tells the story, break into the house
and violently assault those whom they meet.
Basil sprang up with dancing eyes, and with three
blows like battering-rams knocked the footman into
a cocked hat. Then he sprang on top of Burrows,
with one antimacassar in his hand and another in his
teeth, and bound him hand and foot almost before he
knew clearly that his head had struck the floor. Then
Basil sprang at Greenwood . . . etc. etc.
31
G. K. CHESTERTON
There is a good deal more like this. Having
taken the citadel and captured the defenders
(as Csesar might say), Basil and company reach
the sighing lady of the basement. But she
refuses to be released. Whereupon Basil
explains his own queer trade, and that the
lady is voluntarily undergoing a sentence for
backbiting. No explanation is vouchsafed of
the strange behaviour of Basil Grant in attack
ing men who, as he knew, were doing nothing
they should not. Presumably it was due to
a Chestertonian theory that there should be
at least one good physical fight in each book.
It will be seen that The Club of Queer Trades
tends to curl up somewhat (quite literally, in
the sense that the end comes almost where the
beginning ought to be) when it receives heavy
and serious treatment. I should therefore
explain that this serious treatment has been
given under protest, and that its primary
intention has been to deal with those well-
meaning critics who believe that Chesterton
can write fiction, in the ordinary sense of the
word. His own excellent definition of ficti
tious narrative (in The Victorian Age in Litera
ture) is that essentially " the story is told . . .
for the sake of some study of the difference
between human beings." This alone is enough
to exculpate him of the charge of writing
32
THE ROMANCER
novels. The Chestertonian short story is also
in its way unique. If we applied the methods
of the Higher Criticism to the story just
described, we might base all manner of odd
theories upon the defeat (inter olios) of
Burrows, a big and burly youth, by Basil
Grant, aged sixty at the very least, and armed
with antimacassars. But there is no necessity.
If Chesterton invents a fantastic world, full of
V
fantastic people who speak Chestertonese,
then he is quite entitled to waive any trifling
conventions which hinder the liberty of his
subjects. As already pointed out, such is his
humour. The only disadvantage, as some
body once complained of the Arabian Nights,
is that one is apt to lose one s interest in a
hero who is liable at any moment to turn into
a camel. None of Chesterton s heroes do, as a
matter of fact, become camels, but I would
nevertheless strongly advise any young woman
about to marry one of them to take out an
insurance policy against unforeseen trans
formations.
Although it appears that a few reviewers
went to the length of reading the whole of
The Man who was Thursday (1908), it is obvious
by their subsequent guesswork that they did
not notice the second part of the title, which
is, very simply, A Nightmare. The story takes
c 33
G. K. CHESTERTON
its name from the Supreme Council of Anar
chists, which has seven members, named after
the days of the week. Sunday is the Chairman.
The others, one after the other, turn out to be
detectives. Syme, the nearest approach to the
what might be called the hero, is a poet whom
mysterious hands thrust into an Anarchists
meeting, at which he is elected to fill the
vacancy caused by the death of last Thursday.
A little earlier other mysterious hands had
taken him into a dark room in Scotland Yard
where the voice of an unseen man had told him
that henceforth he was a member of the anti-
anarchist corps, a new body which was to
deal with the new anarchists not the com
paratively harmless people who threw bombs,
but the intellectual anarchist. We say that
the most dangerous criminal now is the en
tirely lawless modern philosopher," somebody
explains to him. The bewildered Syme walks
straight into further bewilderments, as, one
after the other, the week-days of the committee
are revealed. But who is Sunday ? Chesterton
makes no reply. It was he who in a darkened
room of Scotland Yard had enrolled the
detectives. He is the Nightmare of the story.
The first few chapters are perfectly straight
forward, and lifelike to the extent of describing
personal details in a somewhat exceptional
34
THE ROMANCER
manner for Chesterton. But, gradually, wilder
and wilder things begin to happen until, at
last, Syme wakes up.
The trouble about The Man who was Thurs
day is not its incomprehensibility, but its
author s gradual decline of interest in the
book as it lengthened out. It begins excel
lently. There is real humour and a good deal
of it in the earlier stages of Syme. And there
are passages like this one on the " lawless
modern philosopher
55
Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are
essentially moral men ; my heart goes out to them.
. . . Thieves respect property. They merely wish
the property to become their property that they may
more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike
property as property ; they wish to destroy the very
idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect
marriage, or they would not go through the highly
ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy.
But philosophers despise marriage as marriage.
But his amiable flow of paradox soon runs out.
The end of the book is just a wild whirl, a
nightmare with a touch of the cinematograph.
People chase one another, in one instance they
quite literally chase themselves. And the end
ing has all the effect of a damaged film that
cannot be stopped, on the large blank spaces
of which some idiot has been drawing absurd
35
G. K. CHESTERTON
pictures which appear on the screen, to the
confusion of the story. One remembers the
immense and dominating figure of Sunday,
only because the description of him reads very
much like a description of Chesterton himself.
But if the person is recognizable, the person
ality remains deliberately incomprehensible.
He is just an outline in space, who rode down
Albany Street on an elephant abducted from
the Zoological Gardens, and who spoke sadly
to his guests when they had run their last race
against him.
Until recent years the word mysticism was
sufficiently true to its derivation to imply
mystery, the relation of God to man. But
since the cheaper sort of journalist seized hold
of the unhappy word, its demoralization has
been complete. It now indicates, generally
speaking, an intellectual defect which ex
presses itself in a literary quality one can only
call woolliness. There is a genuine mysticism,
expressed in Blake s lines :
To see the world in a grain of sand
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
And there is a spurious mysticism, meaning
less rubbish of which Rossetti s Sister Helen
36
THE ROMANCER
is a specimen. What could be more idiotic
than the verse :
" He has made a sign and called Halloo !
Sister Helen,
And he says that he would speak with you."
"Oh tell him I fear the frozen dew,
Little brother."
(0 Mother, Mary Mother,
Why laughs she thus between Hell and Heaven ?)
The trouble about the latter variety is its
extreme simplicity. Anybody with the gift of
being able to make lines scan and rhyme can
produce similar effects in a similar way. Hence
the enormous temptation exercised by this
form of mysticism gone wrong. There is a
naughty little story of a little girl, relating to
her mother the mishaps of the family coal
merchant, as seen from the dining-room win
dow. He slipped on a piece of orange-peel,
the child had explained. " And what happened
then ? " Why, mummy, he sat down on the
pavement and talked about God." Chesterton
(and he is not alone in this respect) behaves
exactly like this coal-heaver. When he is at
a loss, he talks about God. In each case one
is given to suspect that the invocation is due
to a temporarily overworked imagination.
This leads us to The Ball and the Cross (1906).
In The Man who was Thursday, when the
37
G. K. CHESTERTON
author had tired of his story, he brought in
the universe at large. But its successor is
dominated by God, and discussions on him by
beings celestial, terrestrial, and merely infernal.
And yet The Ball and the Cross is in many
respects Chesterton s greatest novel. The first
few chapters are things of joy. There is much
said in them about religion, but it is all sincere
and bracing. The first chapter consists, in
the main, of a dialogue on religion, between
Professor Lucifer, the inventor and the driver
of an eccentric airship, and Father Michael, a
theologian acquired by the Professor in Western
Bulgaria. As the airship dives into the ball
and the cross of Saint Paul s Cathedral, its
passengers naturally find themselves taking a
deep interest in the cross, considered as symbol
and anchor. Lucifer plumps for the ball, the
symbol of all that is rational and united. The
cross
" is the conflict of two hostile lines, of irreconcilable
direction. . . . The very shape of it is a contradiction
in terms." Michael replies, " But we like contra
dictions in terms. Man is a contradiction in terms ;
he is a beast whose superiority to other beasts consists
in having fallen."
Defeated on points, Lucifer leaves the Father
clinging literally to the cross and flies away.
Michael meets a policeman on the upper gallery
38
THE ROMANCER
and is conducted downwards. The scene
changes to Ludgate Circus, but Michael is no
longer in the centre of it. A Scot named Turn-
bull keeps a shop here, apparently in the
endeavour to counterbalance the influence of
St. Paul s across the way. He is an atheist,
selling atheist literature, editing an atheist
paper. Another Scot arrives, young Evan
Maclan, straight from the Highlands. Unlike
the habitual Londoner, Maclan takes the little
shop seriously. In its window he sees a copy
of The Atheist, the leading article of which
contains an insult to the Virgin Mary. Maclan
thereupon puts his stick through the window.
Turnbull comes out, there is a scuffle, and
both are arrested and taken before a Dicken-
sian magistrate. The sketch of Mr. Cumber
land Vane is very pleasing : it is clear that the
author knew what he was copying. Lord
Melbourne is alleged to have said, " No one
has more respect for the Christian religion
than I have ; but really, when it comes to in
truding it into private life ..." Mr. Vane
felt much the same way when he heard
Mac Ian s simple explanation: He is my
enemy. He is the enemy of God." He said,
It is most undesirable that things of that
sort should be spoken about a in public,
and in an ordinary Court of Justice. Religion
39
G. K. CHESTERTON
is a too personal a matter to be mentioned
in such a place." However, Maclan is fined.
After which he and Turnbull, as men of honour,
buy themselves swords and proceed to fight
the matter out. With interruptions due to
argument and the police, the fight lasts several
weeks. Turnbull and Maclan fight in the back
garden of the man from whom they bought
the swords, 1 until the police intervene. They
escape the police and gain the Northern
Heights of London, and fight once more, with
a madness renewed and stimulated by the
peace-making efforts of a stray and silly
Tolstoy an. Then the police come again, and
are once more outdistanced. This time mortal
combat is postponed on account of the san-
guinolence of a casual lunatic who worshipped
blood to such a nauseating extent that the
duellists deferred operations in order to chase
him into a pond. Then follows an intermin
able dialogue, paradoxical, thoroughly Shavian,
while the only two men in England to whom
God literally is a matter of life and death find
that they begin to regard the slaughter of one
by the other as an unpleasant duty. Again
1 Chesterton jeers at this man s " Scottish " ancestry because his
surname was Gordon and he was obviously a Jew. The author is
probably unaware that there are large numbers of Jews bearing
that name in Russia. If he had made his Jew call himself
Macpherson, the case would have been different.
40
THE ROMANCER
they fight and are separated. They are motored
by a lady to the Hampshire coast, and there
they fight on the sands until the rising tide
cuts them off. An empty boat turns up to
rescue them from drowning ; in it they reach
one of the Channel Islands. Again they fight,
and again the police come. They escape from
them, but remain on the island in disguise,
and make themselves an opportunity to pick
a quarrel and so fight a duel upon a matter
in keeping with local prejudice. But Turn-
bull has fallen in love. His irritatingly
calm and beautiful devotee argues with him
on religion until he is driven to cast off his
disguise. Then the police are on his tracks
again. A lunatic lends Turnbull and Maclan
his yacht and so the chase continues. But by
this time Chesterton is getting just a trifle
bored. He realizes that no matter how many
adventures his heroes get into, or how many
paradoxes they fling down each other s throats,
the end of the story, the final inevitable end
which alone makes a series of rapid adventures
worth while, is not even on the horizon. An
element of that spurious mysticism already
described invades the book. It begins to be
clear that Chesterton is trying to drag in a
moral somehow, if need be, by the hair of its
head. The two yacht ers spend two weeks of
41
G. K. CHESTERTON
geographical perplexity and come to a desert
island. They land, but think it wiser, on the
whole, to postpone fighting until they have
finished the champagne and cigars with which
their vessel is liberally stored. This takes a
week. Just as they are about to begin the
definitive duel they discover that they are not
upon a desert island at all, they are near
Margate. And the police are there, too. So
once more they are chased. They land in a
large garden in front of an old gentleman who
assures them that he is God. He turns out to
be a lunatic, and the place an asylum. There
follows a characteristic piece of that abuse of
science for which Chesterton has never at
tempted to suggest a substitute. Maclan and
Turnbull find themselves prisoners, unable to
get out. Then they dream dreams. Each sees
himself in an aeroplane flying over Fleet Street
and Ludgate Hill, where a battle is raging.
But the woolly element is very pronounced by
this time, and we can make neither head nor
tail of these dreams and the conversations
which accompany them. The duellists are
imprisoned for a month in horrible cells. They
find their way into the garden, and are told
that all England is now in the hands of the
alienists, by a new Act of Parliament : this
has been the only possible manner of putting
42
THE ROMANCER
a stop to the revolution started by Maclan
and Turnbull. These two find all the persons
they had met with during their odyssey,
packed away in the asylum, which is a won
derful place worked by petroleum machinery.
But the matter-of-fact grocer from the Channel
Island, regarding the whole affair as an in
fringement of the Rights of Man, sets the
petroleum alight. Michael, the celestial being
who had appeared in the first chapter and
disappeared at the end of it, is dragged out
of a cell in an imbecile condition. Lucifer
comes down in his airship to collect the doctors,
whose bodies he drops out, a little later on.
The buildings vanish in the flames, the keepers
bolt, the inmates talk about their souls.
Maclan is reunited to the lady of the Channel
Island, and the story ends.
When a stone has been tossed into a pond,
the ripples gradually and symmetrically grow
smaller. A Chesterton novel is like an adven
turous voyage of discovery, which begins on
smooth water and is made with the object of
finding the causes of the ripples. As ripple
succeeds ripple or chapter follows chapter-
so we have to keep a tighter hold on such
tangible things as are within our reach. Finally
we reach the centre of the excitement and are
either sucked into a whirlpool, or hit on the
43
G. K. CHESTERTON
head with a stone. When we recover conscious
ness we feebly remember we have had a thrill
ing journey and that we had started out with
a misapprehension of the quality of Chester-
tonian fiction. A man whose memory is
normal should be able to give an accurate
synopsis of a novel six months after he has
read it. But I should be greatly surprised if
any reader of The Ball and the Cross could tell
exactly what it was all about, within a month
or two of reading it. The discontinuity of it
makes one difficulty ; the substitution of
paradox for incident makes another. Yet it
is difficult to avoid the conviction that this
novel will survive its day and the generation
that begot it. If it was Chesterton s endeavour
(as one is bound to suspect) to show that the
triumph of atheism would lead to the triumph
of a callous and inhuman body of scientists,
then he has failed miserably. But if he was
attempting to prove that the uncertainties of
religion were trivial things when compared
with the uncertainties of atheism, then the
verdict must be reversed. The dialogues on
religion contained in The Ball and the Cross
are alone enough and more than enough to
place it among the few books on religion which
could be safely placed in the hands of an
atheist or an agnostic with an intelligence.
44
THE ROMANCER
If we consider Manalive (1912) now we shall
be departing from strict chronological order,
as it was preceded by The Innocence of Father
Brown. It will, however, be more satisfactory
to take the two Father Brown books together.
In the first of these and Manalive, a change
can be distinctly felt. It is not a simple
weakening of the power of employing instru
ments, such as befell Ibsen when, after writing
The Lady from the Sea, he could no longer keep
his symbols and his characters apart. It is a
more subtle change, a combination of several
small changes, which cannot be studied fairly
in relation only to one side of Chesterton s
work. In the last chapter an attempt will be
made to analyze these, for the present I can
only indicate some of the fallings-off noticeable
in Manalive, and leave it at that. Chesterton s
previous romances were not constructed, the
reader may have gathered, with that minute
attention to detail which makes some modern
novels read like the report of a newly promoted
detective. But a man may do such things and
yet be considered spotless. Shakespeare, after
all, went astray on several points of history
and geography. The authors of the Old
Testament talked about "the hare that cheweth
the cud." And, if any reader should fail to
see the application of these instances to
45
G. K. CHESTERTON
modern fiction, I can only recommend him to
read Vanity Fair and find out how many
children had the Rev. Bute Crawley, and what
were their names. No, the trouble with
Manalive is not in its casual, happy-go-lucky
construction. It is rather in a certain lack of
ease, a tendency to exaggerate effects, a con
tinual stirring up of inconsiderable points.
But let us come to the story.
There is a boarding-house situated on one
of the summits of the Northern Heights. A
great wind happens, and a large man, quite
literally, blows in. His name is Innocent
Smith and he is naturally considered insane.
But he is really almost excessively sane. His
presence makes life at the house a sort of
holiday for the inmates, male and female.
Smith is about to run for a special licence in
order to marry one of the women in the house,
and the other boarders have just paired off
when a telegram posted by one of the ladies
in a misapprehension brings two lunacy experts
around in a cab. Smith adds to the excite
ment of the moment by putting a couple of
bullets through a doctor s hat.
Now Smith is what somebody calls " an
allegorical practical joker." But Chesterton
gives a better description of him than
that.
46
THE ROMANCER
He s comic just because he s so startlingly common
place. Don t you know what it is to be in all one
family circle, with aunts and uncles, when a school
boy comes home for the holidays ? That bag there
on the cab is only a schoolboy s hamper. This tree
here in the garden is only the sort of tree that any
schoolboy would have climbed. Yes, that s the sort
of thing that has haunted us all about him, the thing
we could never fit a word to. Whether he is my old
schoolfellow or no, at least he is all my old school
fellows. He is the endless bun-eating, ball-throwing
animal that we have all been.
Innocent has an idea about every few
minutes, but so far as the book is concerned
we need mention only one of them. That one
is local autonomy for Beacon House. This
may be recommended as a game to be played
en famille. Establish a High Court, call in a
legal member, and get a constitution. The
rest will be very hilarious. The legal member
of the Beacon House menage is an Irish ex-
barrister, one Michael Moon, who plans as
follows :
The High Court of Beacon, he declared, was a
splendid example of our free and sensible constitu
tion. It had been founded by King John in defiance
of Magna Carta, and now held absolute power over
windmills, wine and spirit licences, ladies travelling
in Turkey, revision of sentences for dog-stealing and
parricide, as well as anything whatever that hap
pened in the town of Market Bosworth. The whole
47
G. K. CHESTERTON
hundred and nine seneschals of the High Court of
Beacon met about once in every four centuries ; but
in the intervals (as Mr. Moon explained) the whole
powers of the institution were vested in Mrs. Duke
[the landlady]. Tossed about among the rest of the
company, however, the High Court did not retain its
historical and legal seriousness, but was used some
what unscrupulously in a riot of domestic detail. If
somebody spilt the Worcester Sauce on the table
cloth, he was quite sure it was a rite without which
the sittings and findings of the Court would be
invalid ; and if somebody wanted a window to
remain shut, he \vould suddenly remember that none
but the third son of the lord of the manor of Penge
had the right to open it. They even went the length
of making arrests and conducting criminal inquiries.
Before this tribunal Innocent Smith is
brought. One alienist is an American, who is
quite prepared to acknowledge its jurisdiction,
being by reason of his nationality not easily
daunted by mere constitutional queerness.
The other doctor, being the prosecutor and a
boarder, has no choice in the matter. The
doctors, it should be added, have brought with
them a mass of documentary evidence, incrimi
nating Smith.
How the defence has time to collect this
evidence is not explained, but this is just one
of the all-important details which do not
matter in the Chestertonian plane. Smith is
48
THE ROMANCER
tried for attempted murder. The prosecution
fails because the evidence shows Smith to be
a first-class shot, who has on occasion fired life
into people by frightening them. Then he is
tried for burglary on the basis of a clergyman s
letter from which it is gathered that Smith
tried one night to induce him and another
cleric to enter a house burglariously in the
dark. This charge breaks down because a
letter is produced from the other clergyman
who did actually accompany Smith over house
tops and down through trap-doors into his own
house ! Smith, it is explained, is in the habit
of keeping himself awake to the romance and
wonder of everyday existence by such courses.
From the second letter, however, it appears
that there is a Mrs. Smith, so the next charge
is one of desertion and attempted bigamy. A
series of documents is produced, from persons
in France, Russia, China, and California re
counting conversations with Smith, a man
with a garden-rake, who left his house so that
he might find it, and at the end leapt over the
hedge into the garden where Mrs. Smith was
having tea. In the words of the servant " he
looked round at the garden and said, very loud
and strong : Oh, what a lovely place you ve
got, just as if he d never seen it before/ After
which the court proceeds to try Smith on
D 49
G. K. CHESTERTON
a polygamy charge. Documentary evidence
shows that Smith has at one time or another
married a Miss Green, a Miss Brown, a Miss
Black, just as he is now about to marry a Miss
Gray, Moon points out that these are all the
same lady. Innocent Smith has merely broken
the conventions, he has religiously kept the
commandments. He has burgled his own
house, and married his own wife. He has been
perfectly innocent, and therefore he has been
perfectly merry. Innocent is acquitted, and
the book ends.
In the course of Manalive, somebody says,
" Going right round the world is the shortest
way to where you are already." These are the
words of an overworked epigrammatist, and
upon them hangs the whole story. If Manalive
is amusing, it is because Chesterton has a style
which could make even a debilitated paradox
of great length seem amusing. The book has
a few gorgeous passages. Among the docu
ments read at the trial of Innocent Smith, for
example, is a statement made by a Trans-
Siberian station-master, which is a perfectly
exquisite burlesque at the expense of the
Russian intelligentsia. The whole series of
documents, in fact, are delightful bits of self-
expression on the part of a very varied team
of selves. While Chesterton is able to turn out
50
THE ROMANCER
such things we must be content to take the
page, and not the story, as his unit of work.
Manalive, by the way, is the first of the
author s stories in which women are repre
sented as talking to one another. Chesterton
seems extraordinarily shy with his feminine
characters. He is a little afraid of woman.
The average woman is a despot, the average
man is a serf." 1 Mrs. Innocent Smith s view
of men is in keeping with this peculiar notion.
4 At certain curious times they re just fit to
take care of us, and they re never fit to take
care of themselves." Smith is the Chester-
tonian Parsifal, just as Prince Muishkin is
Dostoievsky s.
The transcendental type of detective, first
sketched out in The Club of Queer Trades, is
developed more fully in the two Father Brown
books. In the little Roman priest who has
such a wonderful instinct for placing the
diseased spots in people s souls, we have
Chesterton s completest and most human crea
tion. Yet, with all their cleverness, and in
spite of the fact that from internal evidence it
is almost blatantly obvious that the author
enjoyed writing these stories, they bear marks
which put the books on a lower plane than
either The Napoleon of Notting Hill or The Ball
1 All Things Considered, p. 106.
51
G. K. CHESTERTON
and the Cross. In the latter book Chesterton
spoke of " the mere healthy and heathen horror
of the unclean ; the mere inhuman hatred of
the inhuman state of madness." His own
critical work had been a long protest against
the introduction of artificial horrors, a plea for
sanity and the exercise of sanity. But in The
Innocence of Father Brown these principles,
almost the fundamental ones of literary decency,
were put on the shelf. Chesterton s criminals
are lunatics, perhaps it is his belief that crime
and insanity are inseparable. But even if this
last supposition is correct, its approval would
not necessarily license the introduction of some
of the characters. There is Israel Gow, who
suffers from a peculiar mania which drives him
to collect gold from places seemly and un
seemly, even to the point of digging up a
corpse in order to extract the gold filling from
its teeth. There is the insane French Chief of
Police, who commits a murder and attempts
to disguise the body, and the nature of the
crime, by substituting the head of a guillotined
criminal for that of the victim. In another
story we have the picture of a cheerful teeto
taller who suffers from drink and suicidal
mania. There is also a doctor who kills a mad
poet, and a mad priest who drops a hammer
from the top of his church-tower upon his
52
THE ROMANCER
brother. Another story is about the loathsome
treachery of an English general. It is, of course,
difficult to write about crime without touching
on features which revolt the squeamish reader,
but it can be done, and it has been done, as in
the Sherlock Holmes stories. There are sub
jects about which one instinctively feels it is
not good to know too much. Sex, for example,
is one of them. Strindberg, Weininger, Mau
passant, Jules de Goncourt, knew too much
about sex, and they all went mad, although it
is usual to disguise the fact in the less familiar
terms of medical science. Madness itself is
another such subject. There are writers who
dwell on madness because they cannot help
themselves Strindberg, Edgar Allan Poe,
Gogol, and many others but they scarcely
produce the same nauseating sensation as the
sudden introduction of the note of insanity
into a hitherto normal setting. The harnessing
of the horror into which the discovery of in
sanity reacts is a favourite device of the feeble
craftsman, but it is illegitimate. It is abso
lutely opposed to those elementary canons of
good taste which decree that we may not jest
at the expense of certain things, either because
they are too sacred or not sacred enough. The
opposite of a decadent author is not neces
sarily a writer who attacks decadents. Many
53
G. K. CHESTERTON
decadents have attacked themselves, by com
mitting suicide, for example. The opposite of
a decadent author is one to whom decadent
ideas and imagery are alien, which is a very
different thing. For example, the whole story
The Wrong Shape is filled with decadent ideas ;
one is sure that Baudelaire would have en
tirely approved of it. It includes a decadent
poet, living in wildly Oriental surroundings,
attended by a Hindoo servant. Even the air
of the place is decadent ; Father Brown on
entering the house learns instinctively from it
that a crime is to be committed.
Considered purely as detective stories, these
cannot be granted a very good mark. There
is scarcely a story that has not a serious flaw
in it. A man Flambeau, of whom more later
-gains admittance to a small and select dinner
party and almost succeeds in stealing the silver,
by the device of turning up and pretending to
be a guest when among the waiters, and a
waiter when among the guests. But it is not
explained what he did during the first two
courses of that dinner, when he obviously had
to be either a waiter or a guest, and could not
keep up both parts, as when the guests were
arriving. Another man, a " Priest of Apollo,"
is worshipping the sun on the top of a sky-
scraping " block of offices in Westminster, while
54
THE ROMANCER
a woman falls down a lift-shaft and is killed.
Father Brown immediately concludes that the
priest is guilty of the murder because, had he
been unprepared, he would have started and
looked round at the scream and the crash of
the victim falling. But a man absorbed in
prayer on, let us say, a tenth floor, is, in point
of fact, quite unlikely to hear a crash in the
basement, or a scream even nearer to him.
But the most astonishing thing about The Eye
of Apollo is the staging. In order to provide
the essentials, Mr. Chesterton has to place " the
heiress of a crest and half a county, as well as
great wealth," who is blind, in a typist s
office ! The collocation is somewhat too singu
lar. One might go right through the Father
Brown stories in this manner. But, if the
reader wishes to draw the maximum of enjoy
ment out of them, he will do nothing of the
sort. He will believe, as fervently as Alfred
de Vigny, that L Idee C est Tout, and lay down
all petty regard for detail at the feet of Father
Brown. This little Roman cleric has listened
to so many confessions (he calls himself " a man
who does next to nothing but hear men s real
sins," but this seems to be excessive, even for
a Roman Catholic) that he is really well
acquainted with the human soul. He is also
extremely observant. And his greatest friend
55
G. K. CHESTERTON
is Flambeau, whom he once brings to judg
ment, twice hinders in crime, and thence
forward accompanies on detective expeditions.
The Innocence of Father Brown had a sequel,
The Wisdom of Father Brown, distinctly less
effective, as sequels always are, than the pre
decessor. But the underlying ideas are the
same. In the first place there is a deep detes
tation of " Science (whatever that is) and
the maintenance of the theory incarnate in
Father Brown, that he who can read the human
soul knows all things. The detestation of
science (of which, one gathers, Chesterton
knows nothing) is carried to the same absurd
length as in The Ball and the Cross. In the
very first story, Father Brown calls on a
criminologist ostensibly in order to consult
him, actually in order to show the unfortunate
man, who had retired from business fourteen
years ago, what an extraordinary fool he was.
The Father Brown of these stories moon
faced little man is a peculiar creation. No
other author would have taken the trouble to
excogitate him, and then treat him so badly.
As a detective he never gets a fair chance. He
is always on the spot when a murder is due to
be committed, generally speaking he is there
before time. When an absconding banker
commits suicide under peculiar circumstances
56
THE ROMANCER
in Italian mountains, when a French publicist
advertises himself by fighting duels with him
self (very nearly), when a murder is committed
in the dressing-room corridor of a theatre,
when a miser and blackmailer kills himself,
when a lunatic admiral attempts murder and
then commits suicide, when amid much in
coherence a Voodoo murder takes place, when
somebody tries to kill a colonel by playing on
his superstitions (and by other methods), and
when a gentleman commits suicide from envy,
Father Brown is always there. One might
almost interpret the Father Brown stories by
suggesting that their author had written them
in order to illustrate the sudden impetus given
to murder and suicide by the appearance of
a Roman priest.
Here we may suspend our reviews of Ches-
tertonian romance. There remains yet The
Flying Inn, which shall be duly considered
along with the other debris of its author. In
summing up, it may be said of Chesterton that
at his best he invented new possibilities of
romance and a new and hearty laugh. It may
be said of the decadents of the eighteen
nineties, that if their motto wasn t " Let s all
go bad," it should have been. So one may
say of Chesterton that if he has not selected
Let s all go mad " as a text, he should have
57
G. K. CHESTERTON
done. Madness, in the Chestertonian, what
ever it is in the pathological sense, is a defiance
of convention, a loosening of visible bonds in
order to show the strength of the invisible
ones ; perhaps, as savages are said to regard
lunatics with great respect, holding them to be
nearer the Deity than most, so Chesterton
believes of his own madmen. Innocent Smith,
of course, the simple fool, the blithering idiot,
is a truly wise man.
58
Ill
THE MAKER OF MAGIC
CHESTERTON S only play, Magic., was written
at the suggestion of Mr. Kenelm Foss and
produced by him in November, 1913, at the
Little Theatre, where it enjoyed a run of more
than one hundred performances. This charm
ing thing does not make one wish that Ches
terton was an habitual playwright, for one feels
that Magic was a sort of tank into which its
author s dramatic talents had been draining
for many years although, in actual fact,
Chesterton allowed newspaper interviewers to
learn that the play had been written in a very
short space of time. His religious ideas were
expressed in Magic with great neatness. Most
perhaps of all his works this is a quotable
production.
Patricia Carleon, a niece of the Duke, her
guardian, is in the habit of wandering about
his grounds seeing fairies. On the night when
her brother Morris is expected to return from
America she is having a solitary moonlight
59
G. K. CHESTERTON
stroll when she sees a Stranger, " a cloaked
figure with a pointed hood," which last almost
covers his face. She naturally asks him what
he is doing there. He replies, mapping out the
ground with his staff :
I have a hat, but not to wear ;
I have a sword, but not to slay ;
And ever in my bag I bear
A pack of cards, but not to play.
This, he tells her, is the language of fairies. He
tells her that fairies are not small things, but
quite the reverse. After a few sentences have
been spoken the prologue comes to an end,
and the curtain rises upon the scene of the
play, the drawing-room of the Duke. Here is
seated the Rev. Cyril Smith, a young clergy
man, an honest man and not an ass." To
him enters the Duke s Secretary, to tell him
the Duke is engaged at the moment, but will
be down shortly. He is followed by Dr. Grim-
thorpe, an elderly agnostic, the red lamp of
whose house can be seen through the open
French windows. Smith is erecting a model
public-house in the village, and has come to
ask the Duke for a contribution towards the
cost. Grimthorpe is getting up a league for
opposing the erection of the new public-house,
and has also come to the Duke for help. They
discover the nature of each other s errand.
60
THE MAKER OF MAGIC
Smith s case is, " How can the Church have a
right to make men fast if she does not allow
them to feast ? " ; Grimthorpe s, that alcohol
is not a food. The Duke s Secretary enters
and gives Smith a cheque for 50, then he
gives the Doctor another also for 50. This
is the first glimpse we have of the Duke s
eccentricity, an excessive impartiality based
on the theory that everybody " does a great
deal of good in his own way," and on sheer
absence of mind an absence which sometimes
is absolutely literal. The Doctor explains in
confidence to the Clergyman that there is some
thing wrong about the family of Patricia and
Morris, who are of Irish origin. . . ." They saw
fairies and things of that sort."
SMITH. And I suppose, to the medical mind, seeing
fairies means much the same as seeing snakes ?
DOCTOR. [With a sour smile.] Well, they saw
them in Ireland. I suppose it s quite correct to see
fairies in Ireland. It s like gambling at Monte Carlo.
It s quite respectable. But I do draw the line at their
seeing fairies in England. I do object to their bring
ing their ghosts and goblins and witches into the poor
Duke s own back garden and within a yard of my
own red lamp. It shows a lack of tact.
Patricia, moreover, wanders about the park
and the woods in the evenings. " Damp
evenings for choice. She calls it the Celtic
61
G. K. CHESTERTON
twilight. I ve no use for the Celtic twilight
myself. It has a tendency to get on the chest."
The Duke, annoyed by this love of fairies, has
blundered, in his usual way, on an absurd com
promise between the real and the ideal. A
conjuror is to come that very night. When
explanations have gone so far, the Duke at
last makes his entry. The stage directions tell
us that " in the present state of the peerage
it is necessary to explain that the Duke,
though an ass, is a gentleman." His thoughts
are the most casual on earth. He is always
being reminded of something or somebody
which has nothing to do with the case. As for
instance, " I saw the place you re putting up
. . . Mr. Smith. Very good work. Very good
work, indeed. Art for the people, eh ? I par
ticularly liked that woodwork over the west
door I m glad to see you re using the new
sort of graining . . . why, it all reminds one
of the French Revolution." After one or two
dissociations of this sort, the expected Morris
Carleon enters through the French window ;
he is rather young and excitable, and America
has overlaid the original Irishman. Morris
immediately asks for Patricia and is told that
she is wandering in the garden. The Duke
lets out that she sees fairies ; Morris raves a
bit about his sister being allowed out alone
62
THE MAKER OF MAGIC
with anything in the nature of a man, when
Patricia herself enters. She is in a slightly
exalted state ; she has just seen her fairy, him
of the pointed hood. Morris, of course, is
furious, not to say suspicious.
DOCTOR. [Putting his hand on MORRIS S shoulder.]
Come, you must allow a little more for poetry. We
can t all feed on nothing but petrol.
DUKE. Quite right, quite right. And being Irish,
don t you know, Celtic, as old Buffle used to* say,
charming songs, you know, about the Irish girl who
has a plaid shawl and a Banshee. [Sighs pro
foundly.] Poor old Gladstone ! [Silence.]
SMITH. [Speaking to DOCTOR.] I thought you
yourself considered the family superstition bad for
the health ?
DOCTOR. I consider a family superstition is better
for the health than a family quarrel.
A figure is seen to stand in front of the red
lamp, blotting it out for a moment. Patricia
calls to it, and the cloaked Stranger with the
pointed hood enters. Morris at once calls him
a fraud.
SMITH. [Quickly.] Pardon me, I do not fancy
that we know that . . .
MORRIS. I didn t know you parsons stuck up for
any fables but your own.
SMITH. I stick up for the thing every man has a
right to. Perhaps the only thing every man has a
right to.
63
G. K. CHESTERTON
MORRIS. And what is that ?
SMITH. The benefit of the doubt.
Morris returns to the attack. The Stranger
throws off his hood and reveals himself to the
Duke. He is the Conjuror, ready for the even
ing s performance. All laugh at this denoue
ment, except Patricia, between whom and the
Conjuror this bit of dialogue ensues :
STRANGER. [Very sadly.] I am very sorry I am
not a wizard.
PATRICIA. I wish you were a thief instead.
STRANGER. Have I committed a worse crime than
thieving ?
PATRICIA. You have committed the cruellest
crime, I think, that there is.
STRANGER. And what is the cruellest crime ?
PATRICIA. Stealing a child s toy.
STRANGER. And what have I stolen ?
PATRICIA. A fairy tale.
And the curtain falls upon the First Act.
An hour later the room is being prepared
for the performance. The Conjuror is setting
out his tricks, and the Duke is entangling him
and the Secretary in his peculiar conversation.
The following is characteristic :
THE SECRETARY. . . . The only other thing at all
urgent is the Militant Vegetarians.
DUKE. Ah ! The Militant Vegetarians ! You ve
64
THE MAKER OF MAGIC
heard of them, I m sure. Won t obey the law [to the
CONJUROR] so long as the Government serves out meat.
CONJUROR. Let them be comforted. There are a
good many people who don t get much meat.
DUKE. Well, well, I m bound to say they re very
enthusiastic. Advanced, too oh, certainly advanced.
Like Joan of Arc.
[Short silence, in which the CONJUROR stares at him.]
CONJUROR. Was Joan of Arc a Vegetarian ?
DUKE. Oh, well, it s a very high ideal, after all.
The Sacredness of Life, you know the Sacredness of
Life. [Shakes his head.] But they carry it too far.
They killed a policeman down in Kent.
This conversation goes on for some time,
while nothing in particular happens, except
that the audience feels very happy. The Duke
asks the Conjuror several questions, receiving
thoroughly Chestertonian answers. [" Are you
interested in modern progress ? " Yes. We
are interested in all tricks done by illusion."]
At last the Conjuror is left alone. Patricia
enters. He attempts to excuse himself for the
theft of the fairy tale. He has had a trouble
some life, and has never enjoyed " a holiday
in Fairyland." So, when he, with his hood up,
because of the slight rain, was surprised by
Patricia, as he was rehearsing his patter, and
taken for a fairy, he played up to her. Patricia
is inclined to forgive him, but the conversation
is interrupted by the entrance of Morris, in a
E 65
G. K. CHESTERTON
mood to be offensive. He examines the ap
paratus, proclaims the way it is worked, and
after a while breaks out into a frenzy of free
thought, asking the universe in general and
the Conjuror in particular for " that old
apparatus that turned rods into snakes." The
Clergyman and the Doctor enter, and the con
versation turns on religion, and then goes back
to the tricks. Morris is still extremely quarrel
some, and for the second time has to be quieted
down. The Conjuror is dignified, but cutting.
The whole scene has been, so far, a discussion
on Do Miracles Happen ? Smith makes out
a case in the affirmative, arguing from the
false to the true. Suppose, as Morris claims,
the " modern conjuring tricks are simply the
old miracles when they have once been found
out. . . . When we speak of things being
sham, we generally mean that they are imita
tions of things that are genuine." Morris gets
more and more excited, and continues to in
sult the Conjuror. At last he shouts ..." You ll
no more raise your Saints and Prophets from
the dead than you ll raise the Duke s great
grandfather to dance on that wall." At which
the Reynolds portrait in question sways slightly
from side to side. Morris turns furiously to the
Conjuror, accusing him of trickery. A chair
falls over, for no apparent cause, still further
66
THE MAKER OF MAGIC
exciting the youth. At last he blurts out a
challenge. The Doctor s red lamp is the lamp
of science. No power on earth could change
its colour. And the red light turns blue, for
a minute. Morris, absolutely puzzled, comes
literally to his wits end, and rushes out,
followed shortly afterwards by his sister and
the Doctor. The youth is put to bed, and left
in the care of Patricia, while the Doctor and
the Clergyman return to their argument. Smith
makes out a strong case for belief, for simple
faith, a case which sounds strangely, coming
from the lips of a clergyman of the Church
of England.
DOCTOR. Weren t there as many who believed
passionately in Apollo ?
SMITH. And what harm came of believing in
Apollo ? And what a mass of harm may have come
of not believing in Apollo ? Does it never strike you
that doubt can be a madness, as well be faith ? That
asking questions may be a disease, as well as pro
claiming doctrines ? You talk of religious mania !
Is there no such thing as irreligious mania ? Is there
no such thing in the house at this moment ?
DOCTOR. Then you think no one should question
at all ?
SMITH. [With passion, pointing to the next room.]
I think that is what comes of questioning ! Why can t
you leave the universe alone and let it mean what it
Irkes ? Why shouldn t the thunder be Jupiter ?
67
G. K. CHESTERTON
More men have made themselves silly by wondering
what the devil it was if it wasn t Jupiter.
DOCTOR. [Looking at him.] Do you believe in your
own religion ?
SMITH. [Returning the look equally steadily.] Sup
pose I don t : I should still be a fool to question it.
The child who doubts about Santa Claus has in
somnia. The child who believes has a good night s
rest.
DOCTOR. You are a Pragmatist.
SMITH. That is what the lawyers call vulgar abuse.
But I do appeal to practice. Here is a family over
which you tell me a mental calamity hovers. Here is
the boy who questions everything and a girl who
can believe anything. Upon whom has the curse
fallen ?
At this point the curtain was made to fall
on the Second Act. The Third and last Act
takes place in the same room a few hours later.
The Conjuror has packed his bag, and is going.
The Doctor has been sitting up with the
patient. Morris is in a more or less delirious
state, and is continually asking how the trick
was done. The Doctor believes that the ex
planation would satisfy the patient and would
probably help him to turn the corner. But the
Conjuror will not provide an explanation. He
has many reasons, the most practical of which
is that he would not be believed. The Duke
comes in and tries to make a business matter
68
THE MAKER OF MAGIC
of the secret, even to the extent of paying
2000 for it. Suddenly the Conjuror changes
his mind. He will tell them how the trick was
done, it was all very simple. "It is the sim
plest thing in the world. That is why you will
not laugh. ... I did it by magic." The
Doctor and the Duke are dumbfounded. Smith
intervenes ; he cannot accept the explanation.
The Conjuror lets himself go, now he is voicing
Chesterton s views. The clergyman who merely
believes in belief, as Smith does, will not do.
He must believe in a fact, which is far more
difficult.
CONJUROR. I say these things are supernatural.
I say this is done by a spirit. The doctor does not
believe me. He is an agnostic ; and he knows every
thing. The Duke does not believe me ; he cannot
believe anything so plain as a miracle. But what the
devil are you for, if you don t believe in a miracle ?
What does your coat mean if it doesn t mean that
there is such a thing as the supernatural ? What
does your cursed collar mean if it doesn t mean that
there is such a thing as a spirit ? [Exasperated.] Why
the devil do you dress up like that if you don t
believe in it ? [With violence.] Or perhaps you don t
believe in devils ?
SMITH. I believe . . . [After a pause.] I wish I
could believe.
CONJUROR. Yes. I wish I could disbelieve.
Here Patricia enters. She wants to speak
69
G. K. CHESTERTON
to the Conjuror, with whom she is left alone.
A little love scene takes place : rather the
result o two slightly sentimental and rather
tired persons of different sexes being left alone
than anything else. But they return to
realities, with an effort. Patricia, too, wants
to know how the trick was done, in order to
tell her brother. He tells her, but she is of
the world which cannot believe in devils, even
although it may manage to accept fairies as
an inevitable adjunct to landscape scenery by
moonlight. In order to convince her the Con
juror tells her how he fell, how after dabbling
in spiritualism he found he had lost control
over himself. But he had resisted the temp
tation to make the devils his servants, until
the impudence of Morris had made him lose
his temper. Then he goes out into the garden
to see if he can find some explanation to give
Morris. The Duke, Smith, the Doctor, and
the Secretary drift into the room, which is now
tenanted by something impalpable but hor
rible. The Conjuror returns and clears the air
with an exorcism. He has invented an ex
planation, which he goes out to give to Morris.
Patricia announces that her brother immedi
ately took a turn for the better. The Conjuror
refuses to repeat the explanation he gave
Morris, because if he did, " Half an hour after
70
THE MAKER OF MAGIC
I have left this house you will all be saying
how it was done." He turns to go.
PATRICIA. Our fairy tale has come to an end in the
only way a fairy tale can come to an end. The only
way a fairy tale can leave off being a fairy tale.
CONJUROR. I don t understand you.
PATRICIA. It has come true.
And the curtain falls for the last time.
No doubt Magic owed a great deal of its
success to the admirable production of Mr.
Kenelm Foss and the excellence of the cast.
Miss Grace Croft was surely the true Patricia.
Of the Duke of Mr. Fred Lewis it is difficult
to speak in terms other than superlative.
Those of my readers who have suffered the
misfortune of not having seen him, may gain
some idea of his execution of the part from the
illustrations to Mr. Belloc s novels. The Duke
was an extraordinarily good likeness of the
Duke of Battersea, as portrayed by Chesterton,
with rather more than a touch of Mr. Asquith
superadded. Mr. Fred Lewis, it may be stated,
gagged freely, introducing topical lines until
the play became a revue in little but without
injustice to the original. Several of those who
saw Magic came for a third, a fourth, even a
tenth time.
The Editor of The Dublin Review had the
happy idea of asking Chesterton to review
71
G. K. CHESTERTON
Magic. The result is too long to quote in full,
but it makes two important points which may
be extracted.
I will glide mercifully over the more glaring errors,
which the critics have overlooked as that no Irish
man could become so complete a cad merely by going
to America that no young lady would walk about in
the rain so soon before it was necessary to dress for
dinner that no young man, however American,
could run round a Duke s grounds in the time between
one bad epigram and another that Dukes never
allow the middle classes to encroach on their gardens
so as to permit a doctor s lamp to be seen there that
no sister, however eccentric, could conduct a slightly
frivolous love-scene with a brother going mad in the
next room that the Secretary disappears half-way
through the play without explaining himself ; and
the conjuror disappears at the end, with almost equal
dignity. . . .
By the exercise of that knowledge of all human
hearts which descends on any man (however un
worthy) the moment he is a dramatic critic, I per
ceive that the author of Magic originally wrote it as
a short story. It is a bad play, because it was a good
short story. In a short story of mystery, as in a
Sherlock Holmes story, the author and the hero (or
villain) keep the reader out of the secret. . . . But the
drama is built on that grander secrecy which was
called the Greek irony. In the drama, the audience
must know the truth when the actors do not know it.
That is where the drama is truly democratic : not
because the audience shouts, but because it knows
and is silent. Now I do quite seriously think it is a
72
THE MAKER OF MAGIC
weakness in a play like Magic that the audience is not
in the central secret from the start. Mr. G. S. Street
put the point with his usual unerring simplicity by
saying that he could not help feeling disappointed
with the Conjuror because he had hoped he would
turn into the Devil.
A few additions may easily be made to the
first batch of criticisms. Patricia s welcome
to her brother is not what a long-lost brother
might expect. There is really no satisfactory
reason for the Doctor s continued presence.
Patricia and Morris can only be half Irish by
blood, unless it is possible to become Irish by
residence. Why should the Conjuror rehearse
his patter out in the wet ? Surely the Duke s
house would contain a spare room ? Where
did the Conjuror go, at the end of the Third
Act, in the small hours of the morning ? And
so on.
But these are little things that do not matter
in an allegory. For in Magic " things are not
what they seem." The Duke is a modern man.
He is also the world, the flesh, and the devil.
He has no opinions, no positive religion, no
brain. He believes in his own tolerance, which
is merely his fatuousness. He follows the line
of least resistance, and makes a virtue of it.
He sits on the fence, but he will never come
off. The Clergyman is the church of to-day,
73
G. K. CHESTERTON
preaching the supernatural, but unwilling to
recognize its existence at close quarters. As
somebody says somewhere in The Wisdom of
Father Brown, " If a miracle happened in your
office, you d have to hush it up, now so many
bishops are atheists." The Doctor is a less
typical figure. He is the inconsistencies of
science, kindly but with little joy of life, and
extremely Chestertonian, which is to say un
scientific. Morris is the younger generation,
obsessed with business and getting on, and
intellectually incapable of facing a religious
fact. Patricia is the Chestertonian good woman,
too essentially domestic to be ever fundamen
tally disturbed. The Conjuror, if not the Devil,
is at any rate that inexplicable element in all
life which most people do not see.
Nevertheless there is a flaw in Magic which
really is serious. If I were to see, let us say,
a sheet of newspaper flying down the road
against the wind, and a friend of mine, who
happened to be a gifted liar, told me that he
was directing the paper by means of spirits,
I should still be justified in believing that
another explanation could be possible. I
should say, " My dear friend, your explanation
is romantic ; I believe in spirits but I do not
believe in you. I prefer to think that there
is an air-current going the wrong way." That
74
THE MAKER OF MAGIC
is the matter with the Conjuror s explanation.
Why should the Clergyman or the Doctor-
professional sceptics, both of them, which is
to say seekers after truth take the word of
a professional deceiver as necessarily true ?
There are two works which the critic of
Chesterton must take into special considera
tion. They are Magic and Orthodoxy ; and it
may be said that the former is a dramatized
version of the latter. The two together are
a great work, striking at the very roots of
disbelief. In a sense Chesterton pays the
atheist a very high compliment. He does what
the atheist is generally too lazy to do for him
self ; he takes his substitute for religion and
systematizes it into something like a philosophy.
Then he examines it as a whole. And he finds
that atheism is dogma in its extremist form,
that it embodies a multitude of superstitions,
and that it is actually continually adding to
their number. Such are the reasons of the
greatness of Magic. The play, one feels, must
remain unique, for the prolegomenon cannot
be rewritten while the philosophy is unchanged.
And Chesterton has deliberately chosen the
word orthodox to apply to himself, and he has
not limited its meaning.
75
IV
THE
CRITIC OF LARGE THINGS
THE heroes of Chesterton s romances have an
adipose diathesis, as a reviewer has been heard
to remark. In plain English they tend towards
largeness. Flambeau, Sunday, and Innocent
Smith are big men. Chesterton, as we have
seen, pays little attention to his women char
acters, but whenever it comes to pass that he
must introduce a heroine, he colours her as
emphatically as the nature of things will
admit. Which is to say that the Chestertonian
heroine always has red hair.
These things are symptomatic of their author.
He loves robustness. If he cannot produce it,
he can at any rate affect it, or attack its enemies.
This worship of the robust is the fundamental
fact of all Chesterton s work. For example, as
a critic of letters he confines himself almost
exclusively to the big men. When Mr. Bernard
Shaw a few years ago committed what Ches
terton imagined was an attack upon Shake-
76
CRITIC OF LARGE THINGS
speare, he almost instinctively rushed to the
defence in the columns of The Daily News.
When Chesterton wrote a little book on The
Victorian Age in Literature he showed no
interest in the smaller people. The book, it
may be urged in his excuse, was a little one,
but we feel that even if it was not, Chesterton
would have done much the same thing. Among
the writers he omitted to mention, even by
name, are Sir Edwin Arnold, Harrison Ains-
worth, Walter Bagehot, R. Blackmore, A. H.
Clough, E. A. Freeman, S. R. Gardiner, George
Gissing, J. R. Green, T. H. Green, Henry
Hallam, Jean Ingelow, Benjamin Jowett, W.
E. H. Lecky, Thomas Love Peacock, W. M.
Praed, and Mrs. Humphry Ward. The criti
cism which feeds upon research and comparison,
which considers a new date or the emendation
of a mispunctuated line of verse, worthy of
effort, knows not Chesterton. He is the student
of the big men. He has written books about
Dickens, Browning, and Shaw, of whom only
one common quality can be noted, which is
that they are each the subjects of at least
twenty other books. To write about the things
which have already yielded such a huge crop
of criticism savours at first of a lack of imagin
ation. The truth is quite otherwise. Any
body, so to speak, can produce a book about
77
G. K. CHESTERTON
Alexander Pope because the ore is at the dis
posal of every miner. But that larger mine
called Dickens has been diligently worked by
two generations of authors, and it would appear
that a new one must either plagiarize or labour
extremely in order to come upon fresh seams.
But Chesterton s taste for bigness has come to
his service in criticism. It has given him a
power of seeing the large, obvious things which
the critic of small things misses. He has the
thinking in millions trick of the statistician
transposed to literary ends.
Or as a poet. The robustness is omni
present, and takes several forms. A grandilo
quence that sways uneasily between rodomon
tade and mere verbiage, a rotundity of diction,
a choice of subjects which can only be described
as sanguinolent, the use of the bludgeon where
others would prefer a rapier.
Or as a simple user of words. Chesterton
has a preference for the big words : awful,
enormous, tremendous, and so on. A word
which occurs very often indeed is mystic : it
suggests that the noun it qualifies is laden with
undisclosable attributes, and that romance is
hidden here.
Now all these things add up, as it were, to
a tendency to say a thing as emphatically as
possible. Emphasis of statement from a
78
CRITIC OF LARGE THINGS
humorist gifted with the use of words results
sometimes in epigram, sometimes in fun, in all
things except the dull things (except when the
dullness is due to an unhappy succession of
scintillations which have misfired). For these
reasons Chesterton is regarded as entirely
frivolous by persons without a sense of
humour. He is, in point of fact, extremely
serious, on those frequent occasions when he
is making out a case. As he himself points out,
to be serious is not the opposite of to be funny.
The opposite of to be funny is not to be funny.
A man may be perfectly serious in a funny way.
Now it has befallen Chesterton on more than
one occasion to have to cross swords with one
of the few true atheists, Mr. Joseph MacCabe,
the author of a huge number of books, mostly
attacking Christianity, and as devoid of humour
as an egg-shell is of hair. The differences and
the resemblances between Chesterton and Mr.
MacCabe might well be the occasion of a
parable. Chesterton has written some of the
liveliest books about Christianity, Mr. MacCabe
has written some of the dullest. Chesterton
has written the most amusing book about
Mr. Bernard Shaw ; Mr. MacCabe has written
the dullest. Chesterton and Mr. MacCabe have
a habit of sparring at one another, but up to
the present I have not noticed either make any
79
G. K. CHESTERTON
palpable hits. It is all rather like the Party
System, as Mr. Hilaire Belloc depicts it. The
two antagonists do not understand each other
in the least. But, to a certain degree, Mr.
MacCabe s confusion is the fault of Chesterton
and not of his own lack of humour. When
Chesterton says, " I also mean every word I
say," he is saying something he does not mean.
He is sometimes funny, but not serious, like
Mr. George Robey. He is sometimes irritating,
but not serious, like a circus clown. And he
sometimes appears to be critical, but is not
serious, like the young lady from Walworth
in front of a Bond Street shop-window, regret
ting that she could not possibly buy the
crockery and glass displayed because the
monogram isn t on right. Chesterton s readers
have perhaps spoiled him. He has pleaded,
so to speak, for the inalienable and mystic
right of every man to be a blithering idiot in
all seriousness. So seriously, in fact, that when
he exercised this inalienable and mystic right,
the only man not in the secret was G. K.
Chesterton.
There are few tasks so ungrateful as the
criticism of a critic s criticisms, unless it be
the job of criticizing the criticisms of a critic s
critics. The first is part of the task of him
who would write a book in which all Chester-
80
CRITIC OF LARGE THINGS
ton s works are duly and fitly considered ; and
the second will not be wholly escaped by him.
Concerned as we are, however, with the ideas
of one who was far more interested in putting
the world to rights than with guiding men and
women around literary edifices, there is no
need for us to give any very detailed study to
Chesterton s critical work. Bacon said " dis
tilled books are like common distilled waters,
flashy things." A second distillation, perhaps
even a third, suggests a Euclidean flatness.
The sheer management of a point of view,
however, is always instructive. We have seen
an author use his exceptional powers of criti
cism upon society in general, and ideas at
large. How is he able to deal with ideas and
inventions stated in a more definite and par
ticular manner ? The latter task is the more
difficult of the two. We all know perfectly
well, to take an analogous illustration, how
to deal with the Prussian militarist class, the
4 Junker caste," and so on. But we differ
hopelessly on the treatment to be meted out
to the National Service League.
The outstanding feature of Chesterton s
critical work is that it has no outstanding
features which differentiate it from his other
writings. He is always the journalist, writing
for the day only. This leads him to treat all
F 81
G. K. CHESTERTON
his subjects with special reference to his own
day. Sometimes, as in the essay on Byron in
Twelve Types, his own day is so much under
discussion that poor Byron is left out in the
cold to warm himself before a feebly nickering
epigram. In writing of Dickens, Chesterton
says that he " can be criticized as a contem
porary of Bernard Shaw or Anatole France or
C. F. G. Masterman . . . his name comes to
the tongue when we are talking of Christian
Socialists or Mr. Roosevelt or County Council
Steamboats or Guilds of Play." And Chester
ton does criticize Dickens as the contemporary
of all these phenomena. In point of fact,
to G.K.C. everybody is either a contemporary
or a Victorian, and " I also was born a Vic
torian." Little Dorrit sets him talking about
Gissing, Hard Times suggests Herbert Spencer,
American Notes leads to the mention of Maxim
Gorky, and elsewhere Mr. George Moore and
Mr. William Le Queux are brought in. If
Chesterton happened to be writing about
Dickens at a time when there was a certain
amount of feeling about on the subject of rich
Jews on the Rand, then the rich Jews on the
Rand would appear in print forthwith, whether
or not Dickens had ever depicted a rich Jew
or the Rand, or the two in conjunction.
Chesterton s first critical work of importance
82
CRITIC OF LARGE THINGS
was Robert Browning in the " English Men of
Letters Series." It might be imagined that
the austere editorship of Lord Morley might
have a de journalizing effect upon the style
of the author. Far otherwise. The t s are
crossed and the i s are dotted, so to speak,
more carefully in Robert Browning than in
works less fastidiously edited, but that is all.
The book contains references to Gladstone
and Home Rule, Parnell, Pigott, and Rud-
yard Kipling, Cyrano de Bergerac, W. E.
Henley, and the Tivoli. But of Browning s
literary ancestors and predecessors there is
little mention.
It is conventional to shed tears of ink over
the journalistic touch, on the ground that it
must inevitably shorten the life of whatever
book bears its marks. If there is anything in
this condemnation, then Chesterton is doomed
to forgetfulness, and his critical works will be
the first to slip into oblivion, such being the
nature of critical works in general. But if
this condemnation holds true, it includes also
Macaulay, R. L. Stevenson, Matthew Arnold,
and how many others ! The journalistic touch,
when it is good, means the preservation of a
work. And Chesterton has that most essential
part of a critic s mental equipment what we
call in an inadequately descriptive manner,
83
G. K. CHESTERTON
insight. He was no mean critic, whatever the
tricks he played, who could pen these judg
ments :
The dominant passion of the artistic Celt, such as
Mr. W. B. Yeats or Sir Edward Burne- Jones, lies in
the word " escape " ; escape into a land where
oranges grow on plum trees and men can sow what
they like and reap what they enjoy. (G. F. Watts.)
The supreme and most practical value of poetry
is this, that in poetry, as in music, a note is struck
which expresses beyond the power of rational state
ment a condition of mind, and all actions arise from
a condition of mind. (Robert Browning.)
This essential comedy of Johnson s character is one
which has never, oddly enough, been put upon the
stage. There was in his nature one of the unconscious
and even agreeable contradictions loved by the true
comedian. ... I mean a strenuous and sincere
belief in convention, combined with a huge natural
inaptitude for observing it. (Samuel Johnson.)
Rossetti could, for once in a way, write poetry
about a real woman and call her " Jenny." One has a
disturbed suspicion that Morris would have called her
" Jehanne." (The Victorian Age in Literature.)
These are a few samples collected at random,
but they alone are almost sufficient to enthrone
Chesterton among the critics. He has a won
derful intuitive gift of feeling for the right
metaphor, for the material object that best
symbolizes an impression. But one thing he
84
CRITIC OF LARGE THINGS
lacks. Put him among authors whose view
of the universe is opposed to his own, and
Chesterton instantly adopts an insecticide atti
tude. The wit of Wilde moves him not, but
his morals stir him profoundly ; Mr. Thomas
Hardy is " a sort of village atheist brooding
and blaspheming over the village idiot." Only
occasionally has he a good word to say for the
technique of an author whose views he dis
likes. His critical work very largely consists
of an attempt to describe his subjects views
of the universe, and bring them into relation
with his own. His two books on Charles
Dickens are little more than such an attempt.
When, a few years ago, Mr. Edwin Pugh, who
had also been studying the " aspects of
Dickens, came to the conclusion that the
novelist was a Socialist, Chesterton waxed
exceeding wrath and gave the offending book
a severe wigging in The Daily News.
He loves a good fighter, however, and to
such he is always just. There are few philoso
phies so radically opposed to the whole spirit
of Chesterton s beliefs as that of John Stuart
Mill. On religion, economic doctrine, and
woman suffrage, Mill held views that are
offensive to G.K.C. But Mill is nevertheless
invariably treated by him with a respect which
approximates to reverence. The principal
85
G. K. CHESTERTON
case in point, however, is Mr. Bernard Shaw,
who holds all Mill s beliefs, and waves them
about even more defiantly. G.K.C. s admira
tion in this case led him to write a whole book
about G.B.S. in addition to innumerable
articles and references. The book has the
following characteristic introduction :
Most people either say that they agree with
Bernard Shaw or that they do not understand him.
I am the only person who understands him, and I do
not agree with him.
Chesterton, of course, could not possibly
agree with such an avowed and utter Puritan
as Mr. Shaw. The Puritan has to be a revolu
tionary, which means a man who pushes for
ward the hand of the clock. Chesterton, as
near as may be, is a Catholic Tory, who is a
man who pushes back the hand of the clock.
Superficially, the two make the clock show the
same hour, but actually, one puts it on to a.m.,
the other back to p.m. Between the two is all
the difference that is between darkness and
day.
Chesterton s point of view is distinctly like
Samuel Johnson s in more respects than one.
Both critics made great play with dogmatic
assertions based on the literature that was
before their time, at the expense of the litera
ture that was to come after. In the book on
86
CRITIC OF LARGE THINGS
Shaw, Chesterton strikes a blow at all inno
vators, although he aims only at the obvious
failures.
The truth is that all feeble spirits naturally live in
the future, because it is featureless ; it is a soft job ;
you can make it what you like. The next age is blank,
and I can paint it freely with my favourite colour.
It requires real courage to face the past, because the
past is full of facts which cannot be got over ; of
men certainly wiser than we and of things done which
we cannot do. I know I cannot write a poem as good
as Lycidas. But it is always easy to say that the
particular sort of poetry I can write will be the poetry
of the future.
Sentiments such as these have made many
young experimentalists feel that Chesterton is
a traitor to his youth and generation. Nobody
will ever have the detachment necessary to
appreciate futurist poetry until it is very
much a thing of the past, because the near past
is so much with us, and it is part of us, which
the future is not. But fidelity to the good
things of the past does not exonerate us
from the task of looking for the germs of
the good things of the future. The young
poet of to-day sits at the feet of Sir
Henry Newbolt, whose critical appreciation
is undaunted by mere dread of new things,
while to the same youth and to his friends it
has simply never occurred, often enough, to
87
G. K. CHESTERTON
think of Chesterton as a critic. It cannot be
too strongly urged that an undue admiration
of the distant past has sat like an incubus
upon the chest of European literature, and
Shakespeare s greatness is not in spite of his
small Latin and less Greek," which probably
contributed to it indirectly. Had Shakespeare
been a classical scholar, he would almost cer
tainly have modelled his plays on Seneca or
Aeschylus, and the results would have been
devastating. Addison s Cato, Johnson s Irene,
and the dramas of Racine and Corneille are
among the abysmal dullnesses mankind owes
to its excessive estimation of the past. Men
have always been too ready to forget that we
inherit our ancestors bad points as well as
their good ones. Ancestor-worship has de
prived the Chinese of the capacity to create,
it has seriously affected Chesterton s power to
criticize. Chesterton s own generation has
seen both the victory and the downfall of
form in the novels of Mr. Galsworthy and
Mr. H. G. Wells. It has witnessed fascinating
experiments in stagecraft, some of which have
assuredly succeeded. It has listened to new
poets and wandered in enchanted worlds where
no Victorians trod. A critic in sympathy with
these efforts at reform would have written the
last-quoted passage something like this :
88
CRITIC OF LARGE THINGS
" The truth is that all feeble spirits natur
ally live in the past, because it has no boun
daries ; it is a soft job ; you can find in it
what you like. The past ages are rank, and I
can daub myself freely with whatever colours
I extract. It requires no courage to face the
past, because the past is full of facts which
neutralize one another ; of men certainly no
wiser than we, and of things done which we
could not want to do. I know I cannot write
a poem as good as Lycidas. But I also know
that Milton could not write a poem as good as
The Hound of Heaven or M Andrew s Hymn.
And it is always easy to say that the particular
kind of poetry I can write has been the poetry
of some period of the past."
But Chesterton didn t; quite the reverse.
So that one comes to the sorrowful conclu
sion that Chesterton is at his best, as a critic,
when he is writing introductions, because then
he has to leave the past alone. When he is
writing an introduction to one of the works
of a great Victorian (Dickens always excepted)
he makes his subject stand out like a solitary
giant, not necessarily because he is one, but
on account of the largeness of the contours,
the rough shaping, and the deliberate con
trasts. He has written prefaces without num
ber, and the British Museum has not a complete
89
G. K. CHESTERTON
set of the books introduced by him. The
Fables of JEsop, the Book of Job, Matthew
Arnold s Critical Essays, a book of children s
poems by Margaret Arndt, BoswelFs Johnson,
a novel by Gorky, selections from Thackeray,
a life of Mr. Will Crooks, and an anthology by
young poets are but a few of the books he has
explained.
The last thing to be said on Chesterton as
a critic is by way of illustration. For a series
of books on artists, he wrote two, on William
Blake and G. F. Watts. The first is all about
mysticism, and so is the second. They are
for the layman, not for the artist. They could
be read with interest and joy by the colour
blind. And, incidentally, they are extremely
good criticism. Therein is the triumph of
Chesterton. Give him a subject which he can
relate with his own view of the universe, and
space wherein to accomplish this feat, and he
will succeed in presenting his readers with a
vividly outlined portrait, tinted, of course,
with his own personality, but indisputably
true to life, and ornamented with fascinating
little gargoyles. But put him among the
bourgeoisie of literature and he will sulk like
an angry child.
90
V
THE
HUMORIST AND THE POET
\
THERE are innumerable books or let us say
twenty on Mr. Bernard Shaw. They deal
with him as a sociologist, a dramatist, or what
not, but never as a humorist. There is a
mass of books on Oscar Wilde, and they deal
with everything concerned with him, except
his humour. The great humorists as such-
go unsung to their graves. That is because
there is nothing so obvious as a joke, and
nothing so difficult to explain. It requires a
psychologist, like William James, or a phil
osopher, like Bergson, to explain what a joke
is, and then most of us cannot understand the
explanation. A joke especially another man s
joke is a thing to be handled delicately and
reverently, for once the bloom is off, the joke
mysteriously shrivels and vanishes. Trans
lators are the sworn enemies of jokes ; the
exigencies of their deplorable trade cause them
to maul the poor little things about while they
91
G. K. CHESTERTON
are putting them into new clothes, and the
result is death, or at the least an appearance
of vacuous senescence. But jokes are only the
crystallization of humour ; it exists also in
less tangible forms, such as style and all that
collection of effects vaguely lumped together
and called " atmosphere." Chesterton s pecu
liar "atmosphere" rises like a sweet exhala
tion from the very ink he sheds. And it is
frankly indefinable, as all genuine style is. The
insincere stylists can be reduced to a formula,
because they work from a formula ; Pater may
be brought down to an arrangement of adjec
tives and commas, Doctor Johnson to a suc
cession of rhythms, carefully pruned of excres
cences, and so on, but the stylist who writes
as God made him defies such analysis. Meredith
and Shaw and Chesterton will remain mysteries
even unto the latest research student of the
Universities of Jena and Chicago. Patient
students (something of the sort is already being
done) will count up the number of nouns and
verbs and commas in The Napoleon of Notting
Hill and will express the result in such a form
as this
Chesterton (G. ^^ + v^21og e bn-
sm
But they will fail to touch the essential Ches-
92
HUMORIST AND POET
terton, because one of the beauties of this
form of analysis is that when the formula has
been obtained, nobody is any the wiser as to
the manner of its use. We know that James
Smith is composed of beef and beer and bread,
because all evidence goes to show that these are
the only things he ever absorbs, but nobody
has ever suggested that a synthesis of food
stuffs will ever give us James Smith.
Now the difficulty of dealing with the
humour of Chesterton is that, in doing so, one
is compelled to handle it, to its detriment.
If in the chapter on his Romances any reader
thought he detected the voice and the style of
Chesterton, he is grievously mistaken. He
only saw the scaffolding, which bears the same
relation to the finished product as the skeleton
bears to the human body.
Consider these things :
If you throw one bomb you are only a murderer ;
but if you keep on persistently throwing bombs, you
are in awful danger of at last becoming a prig.
If we all floated in the air like bubbles, free to drift
anywhere at any instant, the practical result would be
that no one would have the courage to begin a con
versation.
If the public schools stuck up a notice it ought to
be inscribed, " For the Fathers of Gentlemen only."
In two generations they can do the trick.
93
G. K. CHESTERTON
Now these propositions are not merely
snippets from a system of philosophy, pre
sented after the manner of the admirers of
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. These are quota
tions which display a quite exceptional power
of surprising people. The anticlimaxes of the
first two passages, the bold dip into the future
at the expense of the past in the third are
more than instances of mere verbal felicity.
They indicate a writer capable of the humour
which feeds upon daily life, and is therefore
thoroughly democratic and healthy. For there
are two sorts of humour ; that which feeds upon
its possessor, Oscar Wilde is the supreme ex
ample of this type of humorist, and that which
draws its inspiration from its surroundings,
of which the great exemplar is Dickens, and
Chesterton is his follower. The first exhausts
itself sooner or later, because it feeds on its
own blood, the second is- inexhaustible. This
theory may be opposed on the ground that
humour is both internal and external in its
origin. The supporters of this claim are
invited to take a holiday in bed, or elsewhere
away from the madding crowd, and then see
how humorous they can be.
Humour has an unfortunate tendency to
stale. The joke of yesteryear already shows
frays upon its sleeves. The wit of the early
94
HUMORIST AND POET
volumes of Punch is in the last stages of
decrepitude. Watch an actor struggling to
conceal from his audience the fact that he is
repeating one of Shakespeare s puns. We
tolerate the humour of Congreve, not because
it is thoroughly amusing, but because it has
survived better than most. Humorous verse
stands a slightly better chance of evoking
smiles in its old age. There is always its un
alterable verbal neatness ; tradition, too, lin
gers more lovingly around fair shapes, and a
poem is a better instance of form than a para
graph. Mankind may grow blase, if it will,
but as a poet of the comic, Chesterton will
live long years. Take for example that last
and worst of his novels The Flying Inn. Into
this he has pitched with a fascinating reckless
ness a quantity of poems, garnered from The
New Witness and worthy of the immortality
which is granted the few really good comic
poems. There is the poem of Noah, with that
stimulating line with which each stanza ends.
The last one goes :
But Noah he sinned, and we have sinned ; on tipsy feet
we trod,
Till a great big black teetotaller was sent to us for a rod,
And you can t get wine at a P.S.A., or Chapel, or Eistedd
fod ;
For the Curse of Water has come again because of the
wrath of God.
95
G. K. CHESTERTON
And water is on the Bishop s board, and the Higher
Thinker s shrine,
But I don t care where the water goes if it doesn t get
into the wine.
There is a lunatic song against grocers, who
are accused of nonconformity, and an equally
lunatic song in several instalments on being
a vegetarian :
I am silent in the Club,
I am silent in the pub,
I am silent on a bally peak in Darien ;
For I stuff away for life
Shoving peas in with a knife,
Because I am at heart a vegetarian.
There is a joyous thing about a millionaire
who lived the simple life, and a new version of
" St. George for Merry England." Tea, cocoa,
and soda-water are the subjects of another
poem. The verses about Roundabout are very
happy :
Some say that when Sir Lancelot
Went forth to find the Grail,
Grey Merlin wrinkled up the roads,
For hope that he should fail ;
All roads led back to Lyonnesse
And Camelot in the Vale,
I cannot yield assent to this
Extravagant hypothesis,
The plain shrewd Briton will dismiss
Such rumours (Daily Mail).
96
HUMORIST AND POET
But in the streets of Roundabout
Are no such factions found,
Or theories to expound about
Or roll upon the ground about,
In the happy town of Roundabout,
That makes the world go round.
And there are lots more like this.
Then there are the Ballades Urbane which
appeared in the early volumes of The Eye-
Witness. They have refrains with the true
human note. Such as " But will you lend me
two-and-six ?
ENVOI
Prince, I will not be knighted ! No !
Put up your sword and stow your tricks !
Offering the Garter is no go
BUT WILL YOU LEND ME TWO-AND-SIX ?
In prose Chesterton is seldom the mere jester;
he will always have a moral or two, at the
very least, at his fingers ends, or to be quite
exact, at the end of his article. He is never
quite irresponsible. He seldom laughs at a
man who is not a reformer.
Or let us take another set of illustrations,
this time in prose. (Once more I protest that
I shall not take the reader through all the
works of Chesterton.) I mean the articles
Our Note Book " which he contributed to
The Illustrated London News. They are of a
G 97
G. K. CHESTERTON
familiar type ; a series of paragraphs on some
topical subject, with little spaces between
them in order to encourage the weary reader.
Chesterton wrote this class of article supremely
well. He would seize on something apparently
trivial, and exalt it into a symptom. When he
had given the disease a name, he went for the
quack doctors who professed to remedy it.
He goes to Letchworth, in which abode of
middle-class faddery he finds a teetotal public-
house, pretending to look like the real thing,
and calling itself "The Skittles Inn." He
immediately raises the question, Can we dis
sociate beer from skittles ? Then he widens
out his thesis.
Our life to-day is marked by perpetual attempts
to revive old-fashioned things while omitting the
human soul in them that made them more than
fashions.
And he concludes :
I welcome a return to the rudeness of old times ;
when Luther attacked Henry VIII for being fat ;
and when Milton and his Dutch opponent devoted
pages of their controversy to the discussion of which
of them was the uglier. . . . The new controversial
ists . . . call a man a physical degenerate, instead of
calling him an ugly fellow. They say that red hair
is the mark of the Celtic stock, instead of calling him
" Carrots."
98
HUMORIST AND POET
Of this class of fun Chesterton is an easy
master. It makes him a fearsome contro
versialist on the platform or in his favourite
lists, the columns of a newspaper. But he
uses his strength a little tyrannously. He is
an adept at begging the question. The lost
art called ignoratio elenchi has been privately
rediscovered by him, to the surprise of many
excellent and honest debaters, who have never
succeeded in scoring the most obvious points
in the face of Chesterton s power of emitting
a string of epigrams and pretending it is a
chain of argument. The case, in whatever
form it is put, is always fresh and vigorous.
Another epigrammatist, Oscar Wilde, in com
parison with him may be said to have used
the midnight oil so liberally in the prepara
tion of his witticisms, that one might almost
detect the fishy odour. But as with his prose
so with his verses ; Chesterton s productions
are so fresh that they seem to spring from his
vitality rather than his intellect. They are
generally a trifle ragged and unpolished as if,
like all their author s productions, they were
strangers to revision. And vitality demands
boisterous movement, more even than coher
ence. Sometimes the boisterousness is ap
parently unsupported by the sense of the
words.
99
G. K. CHESTERTON
So you have gained the golden crowns and grasped the
golden weather,
The kingdoms and the hemispheres that all men buy
and sell,
But I will lash the leaping drum and swing the flaring
feather,
For the light of seven heavens that are lost to me like
hell.
Here the stanza actually goes with such a
swing that the reader will in all probability
not notice that the lines have no particular
meaning.
On the other hand, Chesterton s poetry has
exuberant moments of sheer delight. In one
of his essays he is lamenting the songlessness
of modern life and suggests one or two chanties.
Here they are :
Chorus of Bank Clerks :
Up, my lads, and lift the ledgers, sleep and ease are o er.
Hear the Stars of Morning shouting : " Two and Two
are Four."
Though the creeds and realms are reeling, though the
sophists roar,
Though we weep and pawn our watches, Two and Two
are Four.
Chorus of Bank Clerks when there is a run on
the bank :
There s a run upon the Bank
Stand away !
For the Manager s a crank and the Secretary drank, and
the Upper Tooting Bank
Turns to bay !
100
HUMORIST AND POET
Stand close : there is a run
On the Bank.
Of our ship, our royal one, let the ringing legend run,
that she fired with every gun
Ere she sank.
The Post Office Hymn would begin as follows :
O er London our letters are shaken like snow,
Our wires o er the world like the thunderbolts go.
The news that may marry a maiden in Sark,
Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park.
Chorus (with a swing of joy and energy) :
Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park.
The joke becomes simply immense when we
picture the actual singing of the songs.
But that is not the only class of humour of
which Chesterton is capable. He can cut as
well as hack. It is to be doubted whether any
politician was ever addressed in lines more
sarcastic than those of Antichrist., an ode to
Mr. F. E. Smith. This gentleman, speaking
on the Welsh Disestablishment Bill, remarked
that it has shocked the conscience of every
Christian community in Europe." It begins :
Are they clinging to their crosses,
F. E. Smith.
Where the Breton boat-fleet tosses,
Are they, Smith ?
Do they, fasting, tramping, bleeding,
Wait the news from this our city ?
Groaning " That s the Second Reading ! "
Hissing " There is still Committee ! "
101
G. K. CHESTERTON
If the voice of Cecil falters,
If McKenna s point has pith,
Do they tremble for their altars ?
Do they, Smith ?
Then in Russia, among the peasants,
Where Establishment means nothing
And they never heard of Wales,
Do they read it all in Hansard
With a crib to read it with
" Welsh Tithes : Dr. Clifford answered."
Really, Smith ?
The final verse is :
It would greatly, I must own,
Soothe me, Smith,
If you left this theme alone,
Holy Smith !
For your legal cause or civil
You fight well and get your fee ;
For your God or dream or devil
You will answer, not to me.
Talk about the pews and steeples
And the Cash that goes therewith !
But the souls of Christian peoples . . .
Chuck it, Smith 1
The wilting sarcasm of this poem is a feature
which puts it with a few others apart from the
bulk of Chesterton s poems. Even as bellicosity
and orthodoxy are two of the brightest threads
which run through the whole texture of his
work, so Poems of Pugnacity (as Ella Wheeler
Wilcox would say) and religious verses consti
tute the largest part of the poetic works of
102
HUMORIST AND POET
G.K.C. His first book of verses after Grey
beards at Play The Wild Knight contained a
bloodthirsty poem about the Battle of Gibeon,
written with strict adhesion to the spirit of the
Old Testament. It might have been penned
by a survivor, glutted with blood and duly
grateful to the God of his race for the solar and
lunar eccentricities which made possible the
extermination of the five kings of the Amorites.
In 1911 came The Ballad of the White Horse,
which is all about Alfred, according to the
popular traditions embodied in the elementary
history books, and, in particular, the Battle
of Ethandune. How Chesterton revels in that
Homeric slaughter ! The words blood and
bloody punctuate the largest poem of G.K.C.
to the virtual obliteration in our memory of
the fine imagery, the occasional tendernesses,
and the blustering aggressiveness of some of
the metaphors and similes. Not many men
would have the nerve, let alone the skill, to
write :
And in the last eclipse the sea
Shall stand up like a tower,
Abo 
