thodoxy, 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
powerfu