[_7 Oct. '09_]
Two books of essays on the same day from the same firm, "One Day and
Another," by E.V. Lucas, and "Tremendous Trifles," by G.K. Chesterton!
Messrs. Methuen put the volumes together and advertised them as being
"uniform in size and appearance." I do not know why. They are uniform
neither in size nor in appearance; but only in price, costing a crown
apiece. "Tremendous Trifles" has given me a wholesome shock. Its contents
are all reprinted from the _Daily News_. In some ways they are sheer and
rank journalism; they are often almost Harmsworthian in their unscrupulous
simplifying of the facts of a case, in their crude determination to
emphasize one fact at the expense of every other fact. Thus: "No one can
understand Paris and its history who does not understand that its
fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity." So there
you are! If you don't accept that you are damned; the Chesterton
guillotine has clicked on you. Perhaps I have lived in Paris more years
than Mr. Chesterton has lived in it months, but it has not yet happened to
me to understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of
its frivolity. Hence I am undone; I no longer exist! Again, of Brussels:
"It has none of the things which make good Frenchmen love Paris; it has
only the things which make unspeakable Englishmen love it." There are a
hundred things in Brussels that I love, and I find Brussels a very
agreeable city. Hence I am an unspeakable Englishman. Mr. Chesterton's
book is blotched with this particular form of curt arrogance as with a
skin complaint. Happily it is only a skin complaint. More serious than a
skin complaint is Mr. Chesterton's religious orthodoxy, which crops up at
intervals and colours the book. I merely voice the opinion of the
intelligent minority (or majority) of Mr. Chesterton's readers when I say
that his championship of Christian dogma sticks in my throat. In my
opinion, at this time of day it is absolutely impossible for a young man
with a first-class intellectual apparatus to accept any form of dogma, and
I am therefore forced to the conclusion that Mr. Chesterton has not got a
first-class intellectual apparatus. (With an older man, whose central
ideas were definitely formed at an earlier epoch, the case might be
different.) I will go further and say that it is impossible, in one's
private thoughts, to think of the accepter of dogma as an intellectual
equal. Not all Mr. Chesterton's immense cleverness and charm will ever
erase from the minds of his best readers this impression--caused by his
mistimed religious dogmatism--that there is something seriously deficient
in the very basis of his mind. And what his cleverness and charm cannot do
his arrogance and his effrontery assuredly will not do. And yet I said
that this book gave me a wholesome shock. Far from deteriorating, Mr.
Chesterton is improving. In spite of the awful tediousness of his
mannerism of antithetical epigram, he does occasionally write finer
epigrams than ever. His imagination is stronger, his fancy more delicate,
and his sense of beauty widened. There are things in this book that really
are very excellent indeed; things that, if they die, will die hard. For
example, the essay: "In Topsy Turvy Land." It is a book which, in the
main, strongly makes for righteousness. Its minor defects are scandalous,
in a literary sense; its central defect passes the comprehension; the book
is journalism, it is anything you like. But I can tell you that it is
literature, after all.
* * * * *
If you desire a book entirely free from the exasperating faults of Mr.
Chesterton's you will turn to Mr. Lucas's. But Mr. Lucas, too, is a highly
mysterious man. On the surface he might be mistaken for a mere cricket
enthusiast. Dig down, and you will come, with not too much difficulty, to
the simple man of letters. Dig further, and, with somewhat more
difficulty, you will come to an agreeably ironic critic of human foibles.
Try to dig still further, and you will probably encounter rock. Only here
and there in his two novels does Mr. Lucas allow us to glimpse a certain
powerful and sardonic harshness in him, indicative of a mind that has seen
the world and irrevocably judged it in most of its manifestations. I could
believe that Mr. Lucas is an ardent politician, who, however, would not
deign to mention his passionately held views save with a pencil on a
ballot-paper--if then! It could not have been without intention that he
put first in this new book an essay describing the manufacture of a
professional criminal. Most of the other essays are exceedingly light in
texture. They leave no loophole for criticism, for their accomplishment is
always at least as high as their ambition. They are serenely well done.
Immanent in the book is the calm assurance of a man perfectly aware that
it will be a passing hard task to get change out of _him_! And even when
some one does get change out of him, honour is always saved. In describing
a certain over of his own bowling, Mr. Lucas says: "I was conscious of a
twinge as I saw his swift glance round the field. He then hit my first
ball clean out of it; from my second he made two; from my third another
two; the fourth and fifth wanted playing; and the sixth he hit over my
head among some distant haymakers." You see, the fourth and fifth wanted
playing.