CHESTERTON-VARIED TYPES - THE POSITION OF SIR WALTER SCOTT


BRET HARTE



There are more than nine hundred and ninety-nine excellent reasons

which we could all have for admiring the work of Bret Harte. But one

supreme reason stands not in a certain general superiority to them

all--a reason which may be stated in three propositions united in a

common conclusion: first, that he was a genuine American; second, that

he was a genuine humourist; and, third, that he was not an American

humourist. Bret Harte had his own peculiar humour, but it had nothing in

particular to do with American humour. American humour has its own

peculiar excellence, but it has nothing in particular to do with Bret

Harte. American humour is purely exaggerative; Bret Harte's humour was

sympathetic and analytical.

In order fully to understand this, it is necessary to realise, genuinely

and thoroughly, that there is such a thing as an international

difference in humour. If we take the crudest joke in the world--the

joke, let us say, of a man sitting down on his hat--we shall yet find

that all the nations would differ in their way of treating it

humourously, and that if American humour treated it at all, it would be

in a purely American manner. For example, there was a case of an orator

in the House of Commons, who, after denouncing all the public abuses he

could think of, did sit down on his hat. An Irishman immediately rose,

full of the whole wealth of Irish humour, and said, "Should I be in

order, Sir, in congratulating the honourable gentleman on the fact that

when he sat down on his hat his head was not in it?" Here is a glorious

example of Irish humour--the bull not unconscious, not entirely

conscious, but rather an idea so absurd that even the utterer of it can

hardly realise how abysmally absurd it is. But every other nation would

have treated the idea in a manner slightly different. The Frenchman's

humour would have been logical: he would have said, "The orator

denounces modern abuses and destroys to himself the top-hat: behold a

good example!" What the Scotchman's humour would have said I am not so

certain, but it would probably have dealt with the serious advisability

of making such speeches on top of someone else's hat. But American

humour on such a general theme would be the humour of exaggeration. The

American humourist would say that the English politicians so often sat

down on their hats that the noise of the House of Commons was one

crackle of silk. He would say that when an important orator rose to

speak in the House of Commons, long rows of hatters waited outside the

House with note-books to take down orders from the participants in the

debate. He would say that the whole hat trade of London was disorganised

by the news that a clever remark had been made by a young M. P. on the

subject of the imports of Jamaica. In short, American humour, neither

unfathomably absurd like the Irish, nor transfiguringly lucid and

appropriate like the French, nor sharp and sensible and full of

realities of life like the Scotch, is simply the humour of imagination.

It consists in piling towers on towers and mountains on mountains; of

heaping a joke up to the stars and extending it to the end of the world.

With this distinctively American humour Bret Harte had little or nothing

in common. The wild, sky-breaking humour of America has its fine

qualities, but it must in the nature of things be deficient in two

qualities, not only of supreme importance to life and letters, but of

supreme importance to humour--reverence and sympathy. And these two

qualities were knit into the closest texture of Bret Harte's humour.

Everyone who has read and enjoyed Mark Twain as he ought to be read and

enjoyed will remember a very funny and irreverent story about an

organist who was asked to play appropriate music to an address upon the

parable of the Prodigal Son, and who proceeded to play with great

spirit, "We'll all get blind drunk, when Johnny comes marching home."

The best way of distinguishing Bret Harte from the rest of American

humour is to say that if Bret Harte had described that scene, it would

in some subtle way have combined a sense of the absurdity of the

incident with some sense of the sublimity and pathos of the theme. You

would have felt that the organist's tune was funny, but not that the

Prodigal Son was funny. But America is under a kind of despotism of

humour. Everyone is afraid of humour: the meanest of human nightmares.

Bret Harte had, to express the matter briefly but more or less

essentially, the power of laughing not only at things, but also with

them. America has laughed at things magnificently, with Gargantuan

reverberations of laughter. But she has not even begun to learn the

richer lesson of laughing with them.

The supreme proof of the fact that Bret Harte had the instinct of

reverence may be found in the fact that he was a really great parodist.

This may have the appearance of being a paradox, but, as in the case of

many other paradoxes, it is not so important whether it is a paradox as

whether it is not obviously true. Mere derision, mere contempt, never

produced or could produce parody. A man who simply despises Paderewski

for having long hair is not necessarily fitted to give an admirable

imitation of his particular touch on the piano. If a man wishes to

parody Paderewski's style of execution, he must emphatically go through

one process first: he must admire it, and even reverence it. Bret Harte

had a real power of imitating great authors, as in his parodies on

Dumas, on Victor Hugo, on Charlotte Bronte. This means, and can only

mean, that he had perceived the real beauty, the real ambition of Dumas

and Victor Hugo and Charlotte Bronte. To take an example, Bret Harte has

in his imitation of Hugo a passage like this:

"M. Madeline was, if possible, better than M. Myriel. M. Myriel was an

angel. M. Madeline was a good man." I do not know whether Victor Hugo

ever used this antithesis; but I am certain that he would have used it

and thanked his stars if he had thought of it. This is real parody,

inseparable from admiration. It is the same in the parody of Dumas,

which is arranged on the system of "Aramis killed three of them. Porthos

three. Athos three." You cannot write that kind of thing unless you

have first exulted in the arithmetical ingenuity of the plots of Dumas.

It is the same in the parody of Charlotte Bronte, which opens with a

dream of a storm-beaten cliff, containing jewels and pelicans. Bret

Harte could not have written it unless he had really understood the

triumph of the Brontes, the triumph of asserting that great mysteries

lie under the surface of the most sullen life, and that the most real

part of a man is in his dreams.

This kind of parody is for ever removed from the purview of ordinary

American humour. Can anyone imagine Mark Twain, that admirable author,

writing even a tolerable imitation of authors so intellectually

individual as Hugo or Charlotte Bronte? Mark Twain would yield to the

spirit of contempt which destroys parody. All those who hate authors

fail to satirise them, for they always accuse them of the wrong faults.

The enemies of Thackeray call him a worldling, instead of what he was, a

man too ready to believe in the goodness of the unworldly. The enemies

of Meredith call his gospel too subtle, instead of what it is, a

gospel, if anything, too robust. And it is this vulgar misunderstanding

which we find in most parody--which we find in all American parody--but

which we never find in the parodies of Bret Harte.

"The skies they were ashen and sober,

The streets they were dirty and drear,

It was the dark month of October,

In that most immemorial year.

Like the skies, I was perfectly sober,

But my thoughts they were palsied and sear,

Yes, my thoughts were decidedly queer."

This could only be written by a genuine admirer of Edgar Allan Poe, who

permitted himself for a moment to see the fun of the thing. Parody might

indeed be defined as the worshipper's half-holiday.

The same general characteristic of sympathy amounting to reverence marks

Bret Harte's humour in his better-known class of works, the short

stories. He does not make his characters absurd in order to make them

contemptible: it might almost be said that he makes them absurd in order

to make them dignified. For example, the greatest creation of Bret

Harte, greater even than Colonel Starbottle (and how terrible it is to

speak of anyone greater than Colonel Starbottle!) is that unutterable

being who goes by the name of Yuba Bill. He is, of course, the

coach-driver in the Bret Harte district. Some ingenious person, whose

remarks I read the other day, had compared him on this ground with old

Mr. Weller. It would be difficult to find a comparison indicating a more

completely futile instinct for literature. Tony Weller and Yuba Bill

were both coach-drivers, and this fact establishes a resemblance just

about as much as the fact that Jobson in "Rob Roy" and George Warrington

in "Pendennis" were both lawyers; or that Antonio and Mr. Pickwick were

both merchants; or that Sir Galahad and Sir Willoughby Patten were both

knights. Tony Weller is a magnificent grotesque. He is a gargoyle, and

his mouth, like the mouths of so many gargoyles, is always open. He is

garrulous, exuberant, flowery, preposterously sociable. He holds that

great creed of the convivial, the creed which is at the back of so much

that is greatest in Dickens, the creed that eternity begins at ten

o'clock at night, and that nights last forever. But Yuba Bill is a

figure of a widely different character. He is not convivial; it might

almost be said that he is too great ever to be sociable. A circle of

quiescence and solitude such as that which might ring a saint or a

hermit rings this majestic and profound humourist. His jokes do not flow

upon him like those of Mr. Weller, sparkling, continual, and deliberate,

like the play of a fountain in a pleasure garden; they fall suddenly and

capriciously, like a crash of avalanches from a great mountain. Tony

Weller has the noisy humour of London, Yuba Bill has the silent humour

of the earth.

One of the worst of the disadvantages of the rich and random fertility

of Bret Harte is the fact that it is very difficult to trace or recover

all the stories that he has written. I have not within reach at the

moment the story in which the character of Yuba Bill is exhibited in its

most solemn grandeur, but I remember that it concerned a ride on the

San Francisco stage coach, a difficulty arising from storm and darkness,

and an intelligent young man who suggested to Yuba Bill that a certain

manner of driving the coach in a certain direction might minimise the

dangers of the journey. A profound silence followed the intelligent

young man's suggestion, and then (I quote from memory) Yuba Bill

observed at last:

"Air you settin' any value on that remark?"

The young man professed not fully to comprehend him, and Yuba Bill

continued reflectively:

"'Cos there's a comic paper in 'Frisco pays for them things, and I've

seen worse in it."

To be rebuked thus is like being rebuked by the Pyramids or by the

starry heavens. There is about Yuba Bill this air of a pugnacious calm,

a stepping back to get his distance for a shattering blow, which is like

that of Dr. Johnson at his best. And the effect is inexpressively

increased by the background and the whole picture which Bret Harte

paints so powerfully; the stormy skies, the sombre gorge, the rocking

and spinning coach, and high above the feverish passengers the huge

dark form of Yuba Bill, a silent mountain of humour.

Another unrecovered and possibly irrecoverable fragment about Yuba Bill,

I recall in a story about his visiting a lad who had once been his

protege in the Wild West, and who had since become a distinguished

literary man in Boston. Yuba Bill visits him, and on finding him in

evening dress lifts up his voice in a superb lamentation over the

tragedy of finding his old friend at last "a 'otel waiter." Then,

vindictively pursuing the satire, he calls fiercely to his young friend,

"Hi, Alphonse! bring me a patty de foy gras, damme." These are the

things that make us love the eminent Bill. He is one of those who

achieve the noblest and most difficult of all the triumphs of a

fictitious character--the triumph of giving us the impression of having

a great deal more in him than appears between the two boards of the

story. Smaller characters give us the impression that the author has

told the whole truth about them, greater characters give the impression

that the author has given of them, not the truth, but merely a few hints

and samples. In some mysterious way we seem to feel that even if

Shakespeare was wrong about Falstaff, Falstaff existed and was real;

that even if Dickens was wrong about Micawber, Micawber existed and was

real. So we feel that there is in the great salt-sea of Yuba Bill's

humour as good fish as ever came out of it. The fleeting jests which

Yuba Bill throws to the coach passengers only give us the opportunity of

fancying and deducing the vast mass of jests which Yuba Bill shares with

his creator.

Bret Harte had to deal with countries and communities of an almost

unexampled laxity, a laxity passing the laxity of savages, the laxity of

civilised men grown savage. He dealt with a life which we in a venerable

and historic society may find it somewhat difficult to realise. It was

the life of an entirely new people, a people who, having no certain

past, could have no certain future. The strangest of all the sardonic

jests that history has ever played may be found in this fact: that

there is a city which is of all cities the most typical of innovation

and dissipation, and a certain almost splendid vulgarity, and that this

city bears the name in a quaint old European language of the most

perfect exponent of the simplicity and holiness of the Christian

tradition; the city is called San Francisco. San Francisco, the capital

of the Bret Harte country, is a city typifying novelty in a manner in

which it is typified by few modern localities. San Francisco has in all

probability its cathedrals, but it may well be that its cathedrals are

less old and less traditional than many of our hotels. If its

inhabitants built a temple to the most primal and forgotten god of whose

worship we can find a trace, that temple would still be a modern thing

compared with many taverns in Suffolk round which there lingers a faint

tradition of Mr. Pickwick. And everything in that new gold country was

new, even to the individual inhabitants. Good, bad, and indifferent,

heroes and dastards, they were all men from nowhere.

Most of us have come across the practical problem of London landladies,

the problem of the doubtful foreign gentleman in a street of respectable

English people. Those who have done so can form some idea of what it

would be to live in a street full of doubtful foreign gentlemen, in a

parish, in a city, in a nation composed entirely of doubtful foreign

gentlemen. Old California, at the time of the first rush after gold, was

actually this paradox of the nation of foreigners. It was a republic of

incognitos: no one knew who anyone else was, and only the more

ill-mannered and uneasy even desired to know. In such a country as this,

gentlemen took more trouble to conceal their gentility than thieves

living in South Kensington would take to conceal their blackguardism. In

such a country everyone is an equal, because everyone is a stranger. In

such a country it is not strange if men in moral matters feel something

of the irresponsibility of a dream. To plan plans which are continually

miscarrying against men who are continually disappearing by the

assistance of you know not whom, to crush you know not whom, this must

be a demoralising life for any man; it must be beyond description

demoralising for those who have been trained in no lofty or orderly

scheme of right. Small blame to them indeed if they become callous and

supercilious and cynical. And the great glory and achievement of Bret

Harte consists in this, that he realised that they do not become

callous, supercilious, and cynical, but that they do become sentimental

and romantic, and profoundly affectionate. He discovered the intense

sensibility of the primitive man. To him we owe the realisation of the

fact that while modern barbarians of genius like Mr. Henley, and in his

weaker moments Mr. Rudyard Kipling, delight in describing the coarseness

and crude cynicism and fierce humour of the unlettered classes, the

unlettered classes are in reality highly sentimental and religious, and

not in the least like the creations of Mr. Henley and Mr. Kipling. Bret

Harte tells the truth about the wildest, the grossest, the most

rapacious of all the districts of the earth--the truth that, while it is

very rare indeed in the world to find a thoroughly good man, it is

rarer still, rare to the point of monstrosity, to find a man who does

not either desire to be one, or imagine that he is one already.








ALFRED THE GREAT



The celebrations in connection with the millenary of King Alfred struck

a note of sympathy in the midst of much that was unsympathetic, because,

altogether apart from any peculiar historical opinions, all men feel the

sanctifying character of that which is at once strong and remote; the

ancient thing is always the most homely, and the distant thing the most

near. The only possible peacemaker is a dead man, ever since by the

sublime religious story a dead man only could reconcile heaven and

earth. In a certain sense we always feel the past ages as human, and our

own age as strangely and even weirdly dehumanised. In our own time the

details overpower us; men's badges and buttons seem to grow larger and

larger as in a horrible dream. To study humanity in the present is like

studying a mountain with a magnifying glass; to study it in the past is

like studying it through a telescope.

For this reason England, like every other great and historic nation, has

sought its typical hero in remote and ill-recorded times. The personal

and moral greatness of Alfred is, indeed, beyond question. It does not

depend any more than the greatness of any other human hero upon the

accuracy of any or all of the stories that are told about him. Alfred

may not have done one of the things which are reported of him, but it is

immeasurably easier to do every one of those things than to be the man

of whom such things are reported falsely. Fable is, generally speaking,

far more accurate than fact, for fable describes a man as he was to his

own age, fact describes him as he is to a handful of inconsiderable

antiquarians many centuries after. Whether Alfred watched the cakes for

the neat-herd's wife, whether he sang songs in the Danish camp, is of no

interest to anyone except those who set out to prove under considerable

disadvantages that they are genealogically descended from him. But the

man is better pictured in these stories than in any number of modern

realistic trivialities about his favourite breakfast and his favourite

musical composer. Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells

us about one man and fable tells us about a million men. If we read of a

man who could make green grass red and turn the sun into the moon, we

may not believe these particular details about him, but we learn

something infinitely more important than such trivialities, the fact

that men could look into his face and believe it possible. The glory and

greatness of Alfred, therefore, is like that of all the heroes of the

morning of the world, set far beyond the chance of that strange and

sudden dethronement which may arise from the unsealing of a manuscript

or the turning over of a stone. Men may have told lies when they said

that he first entrapped the Danes with his song and then overcame them

with his armies, but we know very well that it is not of us that such

lies are told. There may be myths clustering about each of our

personalities; local saga-men and chroniclers have very likely

circulated the story that we are addicted to drink, or that we

ferociously ill-use our wives. But they do not commonly lie to the

effect that we have shed our blood to save all the inhabitants of the

street. A story grows easily, but a heroic story is not a very easy

thing to evoke. Wherever that exists we may be pretty certain that we

are in the presence of a dark but powerful historic personality. We are

in the presence of a thousand lies all pointing with their fantastic

fingers to one undiscovered truth.

Upon this ground alone every encouragement is due to the cult of Alfred.

Every nation requires to have behind it some historic personality, the

validity of which is proved, as the validity of a gun is proved, by its

long range. It is wonderful and splendid that we treasure, not the

truth, but the very gossip about a man who died a thousand years ago. We

may say to him, as M. Rostand says to the Austrian Prince:

"Dors, ce n'est pas toujours la Legende qui ment:

Une reve est parfois moins trompeur qu'un document."

To have a man so simple and so honourable to represent us in the

darkness of primeval history, binds all the intervening centuries

together, and mollifies all their monstrosities. It makes all history

more comforting and intelligible; it makes the desolate temple of the

ages as human as an inn parlour.

But whether it come through reliable facts or through more reliable

falsehoods the personality of Alfred has its own unmistakable colour and

stature. Lord Rosebery uttered a profound truth when he said that that

personality was peculiarly English. The great magnificence of the

English character is expressed in the word "service." There is, perhaps,

no nation so vitally theocratical as the English; no nation in which the

strong men have so consistently preferred the instrumental to the

despotic attitude, the pleasures of the loyal to the pleasures of the

royal position. We have had tyrants like Edward I. and Queen Elizabeth,

but even our tyrants have had the worried and responsible air of

stewards of a great estate. Our typical hero is such a man as the Duke

of Wellington, who had every kind of traditional and external arrogance,

but at the back of all that the strange humility which made it

physically possible for him without a gleam of humour or discomfort to

go on his knees to a preposterous bounder like George IV. Across the

infinite wastes of time and through all the mists of legend we still

feel the presence in Alfred of this strange and unconscious

self-effacement. After the fullest estimate of our misdeeds we can still

say that our very despots have been less self-assertive than many

popular patriots. As we consider these things we grow more and more

impatient of any modern tendencies towards the enthronement of a more

self-conscious and theatrical ideal. Lord Rosebery called up before our

imaginations the picture of what Alfred would have thought of the vast

modern developments of his nation, its immense fleet, its widespread

Empire, its enormous contribution to the mechanical civilisation of the

world. It cannot be anything but profitable to conceive Alfred as full

of astonishment and admiration at these things; it cannot be anything

but good for us that we should realise that to the childlike eyes of a

great man of old time our inventions and appliances have not the

vulgarity and ugliness that we see in them. To Alfred a steamboat would

be a new and sensational sea-dragon, and the penny postage a miracle

achieved by the despotism of a demi-god.

But when we have realised all this there is something more to be said in

connection with Lord Rosebery's vision. What would King Alfred have said

if he had been asked to expend the money which he devoted to the health

and education of his people upon a struggle with some race of Visigoths

or Parthians inhabiting a small section of a distant continent? What

would he have said if he had known that that science of letters which he

taught to England would eventually be used not to spread truth, but to

drug the people with political assurances as imbecile in themselves as

the assurance that fire does not burn and water does not drown? What

would he have said if the same people who, in obedience to that ideal of

service and sanity of which he was the example, had borne every

privation in order to defeat Napoleon, should come at last to find no

better compliment to one of their heroes than to call him the Napoleon

of South Africa? What would he have said if that nation for which he had

inaugurated a long line of incomparable men of principle should forget

all its traditions and coquette with the immoral mysticism of the man of

destiny?

Let us follow these things by all means if we find them good, and can

see nothing better. But to pretend that Alfred would have admired them

is like pretending that St. Dominic would have seen eye to eye with Mr.

Bradlaugh, or that Fra Angelico would have revelled in the posters of

Mr. Aubrey Beardsley. Let us follow them if we will, but let us take

honestly all the disadvantages of our change; in the wildest moment of

triumph let us feel the shadow upon our glories of the shame of the

great king.








MAETERLINCK



The selection of "Thoughts from Maeterlinck" is a very creditable and

also a very useful compilation. Many modern critics object to the

hacking and hewing of a consistent writer which is necessary for this

kind of work, but upon more serious consideration, the view is not

altogether adequate. Maeterlinck is a very great man; and in the long

run this process of mutilation has happened to all great men. It was the

mark of a great patriot to be drawn and quartered and his head set on

one spike in one city and his left leg on another spike in another city.

It was the mark of a saint that even these fragments began to work

miracles. So it has been with all the very great men of the world.

However careless, however botchy, may be the version of Maeterlinck or

of anyone else given in such a selection as this, it is assuredly far

less careless and far less botchy than the version, the parody, the

wild misrepresentation of Maeterlinck which future ages will hear and

distant critics be called upon to consider.

No one can feel any reasonable doubt that we have heard about Christ and

Socrates and Buddha and St. Francis a mere chaos of excerpts, a mere

book of quotations. But from those fragmentary epigrams we can deduce

greatness as clearly as we can deduce Venus from the torso of Venus or

Hercules ex pede Herculem. If we knew nothing else about the Founder

of Christianity, for example, beyond the fact that a religious teacher

lived in a remote country, and in the course of his peregrinations and

proclamations consistently called Himself "the Son of Man," we should

know by that alone that he was a man of almost immeasurable greatness.

If future ages happened to record nothing else about Socrates except

that he owned his title to be the wisest of men because he knew that he

knew nothing, they would be able to deduce from that the height and

energy of his civilisation, the glory that was Greece. The credit of

such random compilations as that which "E.S.S." and Mr. George Allen

have just effected is quite secure. It is the pure, pedantic, literal

editions, the complete works of this author or that author which are

forgotten. It is such books as this that have revolutionised the destiny

of the world. Great things like Christianity or Platonism have never

been founded upon consistent editions; all of them have been founded

upon scrap-books.

The position of Maeterlinck in modern life is a thing too obvious to be

easily determined in words. It is, perhaps, best expressed by saying

that it is the great glorification of the inside of things at the

expense of the outside. There is one great evil in modern life for which

nobody has found even approximately a tolerable description: I can only

invent a word and call it "remotism." It is the tendency to think first

of things which, as a matter of fact, lie far away from the actual

centre of human experience. Thus people say, "All our knowledge of life

begins with the amoeba." It is false; our knowledge of life begins with

ourselves. Thus they say that the British Empire is glorious, and at the

very word Empire they think at once of Australia and New Zealand, and

Canada, and Polar bears, and parrots and kangaroos, and it never occurs

to any one of them to think of the Surrey Hills. The one real struggle

in modern life is the struggle between the man like Maeterlinck, who

sees the inside as the truth, and the man like Zola, who sees the

outside as the truth. A hundred cases might be given. We may take, for

the sake of argument, the case of what is called falling in love. The

sincere realist, the man who believes in a certain finality in physical

science, says, "You may, if you like, describe this thing as a divine

and sacred and incredible vision; that is your sentimental theory about

it. But what it is, is an animal and sexual instinct designed for

certain natural purposes." The man on the other side, the idealist,

replies, with quite equal confidence, that this is the very reverse of

the truth. I put it as it has always struck me; he replies, "Not at all.

You may, if you like, describe this thing as an animal and sexual

instinct, designed for certain natural purposes; that is your

philosophical or zooelogical theory about it. What it is, beyond all

doubt of any kind, is a divine and sacred and incredible vision." The

fact that it is an animal necessity only comes to the naturalistic

philosopher after looking abroad, studying its origins and results,

constructing an explanation of its existence, more or less natural and

conclusive. The fact that it is a spiritual triumph comes to the first

errand boy who happens to feel it. If a lad of seventeen falls in love

and is struck dead by a hansom cab an hour afterwards, he has known the

thing as it is, a spiritual ecstasy; he has never come to trouble about

the thing as it may be, a physical destiny. If anyone says that falling

in love is an animal thing, the answer is very simple. The only way of

testing the matter is to ask those who are experiencing it, and none of

those would admit for a moment that it was an animal thing.

Maeterlinck's appearance in Europe means primarily this subjective

intensity; by this the materialism is not overthrown: materialism is

undermined. He brings, not something which is more poetic than realism,

not something which is more spiritual than realism, not something which

is more right than realism, but something which is more real than

realism. He discovers the one indestructible thing. This material world

on which such vast systems have been superimposed--this may mean

anything. It may be a dream, it may be a joke, it may be a trap or

temptation, it may be a charade, it may be the beatific vision: the only

thing of which we are certain is this human soul. This human soul finds

itself alone in a terrible world, afraid of the grass. It has brought

forth poetry and religion in order to explain matters; it will bring

them forth again. It matters not one atom how often the lulls of

materialism and scepticism occur; they are always broken by the

reappearance of a fanatic. They have come in our time: they have been

broken by Maeterlinck.








CHESTERTON-VARIED TYPES - THE POSITION OF SIR WALTER SCOTT