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.

OFFICIAL RECOGNITION OF POETRY

[14 Oct. ’09]