ey are not fit to be seen. It is a pity they are not knocked on
the head at once, before they reach Admiral Baldwin's age.

That, I think, is an excellent example of Miss Austen's genius for
making her characters talk. Luckily, conversation was still formal in
her day, and it was as possible for her as for Congreve to make middling
men and women talk first-rate prose. She did more than this, however.
She was the first English novelist before Meredith to portray charming
women with free personalities. Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse have
an independence (rare in English fiction) of the accident of being
fallen in love with. Elizabeth is a delightful prose counterpart of
Beatrice.

Miss Austen has another point of resemblance to Meredith besides that
which I have mentioned. She loves to portray men puffed up with
self-approval. She, too, is a satirist of the male egoist. Her books are
the most finished social satires in English fiction. They are so perfect
in the delicacy of their raillery as to be charming. One is conscious in
them, indeed, of the presence of a sparkling spirit. Miss Austen comes
as near being a star as it is possible to come in eighteenth-century
conversational prose. She used to say that, if ever she should marry,
she would fancy being Mrs. Crabbe. She had much of Crabbe's realism,
indeed; but what a dance she led realism with the mocking light of her
wit!

III

MR. G.K. CHESTERTON AND MR. HILAIRE BELLOC

1. THE HEAVENLY TWINS

It was Mr. Shaw who, in the course of a memorable controversy, invented
a fantastic pantomime animal, which he called the "Chester-Belloc." Some
such invention was necessary as a symbol of the literary comradeship of
Mr. Hilaire Belloc and Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. For Mr. Belloc and Mr.
Chesterton, whatever may be the dissimilarities in the form and spirit
of their work, cannot be thought of apart from each other. They are as
inseparable as the red and green lights of a ship: the one illumines
this side and the other that, but they are both equally concerned with
announcing the path of the good ship "Mediaevalism" through the
dangerous currents of our times. Fifty years ago, when philology was one
of the imaginative arts, it would have been easy enough to gain credit
for the theory that they are veritable reincarnations of the Heavenly
Twins going about the earth with corrupted names. Chesterton is merely
English for Castor, and Belloc is Pollux transmuted