never wrote anything else. This play is a
poem and the greatest character in it is atmosphere. Chesterton
believed in the love of God and man, he believed in the devil: love
conquers diabolical evil and the atmosphere of this struggle is felt
even in the written page and was felt more vividly in the theatre.
After a passage of many years those who saw it remember the moment
when the red lamp turned blue as a felt experience.

But as to popularity, in England at least, it would be absurd to
compare G.K. with G.B.S. The play's run was a brief one and it was
years before he attempted another.

Chesterton was fighting corruption, fighting the Servile State. Above
all things he was fighting sterility, fighting it in the name of
life--life with its richness, its variety, its sins and its virtues,
with its positively outrageous sanity. "Thank you for being alive,"
wrote an admirer to him.

_Manalive_ is above all things a hymn to life. It is the acid test of
a Chestertonian. Reviewers became wildly enthusiastic or bitterly
scornful. Borrowing from his own phrase about Pickwick I am inclined
to say that men not in love with life will not appreciate _Manalive_--
nor, I should imagine, heaven. The ideas that make up the book had
been long in his head. The story of White Wynd written while he was
at the Slade School tells one half of the story, an unpublished
fragment of the same period entitled "The Burden of Balham" the
other half. The Great Wind that blows Innocent Smith to Beacon House
is the wind of life and it blows through the whole story. Before an
improvised Court of Law Smith is tried on three charges:
housebreaking--but it was his own house that he broke into to renew
the vividness of ownership; bigamy--but it was his own wife with whom
he repeatedly eloped to renew the ecstasy of first love; murder with
a large and terrifying revolver--but he dealt life not death from its
barrel. For he used it only to threaten those who said they were
tired of life or that life was not worth living, and he forced them
through fear of death to hymn the praises of life.

The explanation given by Smith to Dr. Eames, the Master of
Brakespeare College, of his ideas and his purpose gives the note of
fooling and profundity filling the whole book.

"I want both my gifts to come virgin and violent, the death and the
life after death. I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the
Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him--o