ious. 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 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 consideration. 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 himself; 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.

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 characters, 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 c