CHESTERTON AND LUCAS

[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