Gerald Gould, “Mr. Chesterton and Others.” The Observer. May 15, 1927, p.8.

MR. CHESTERTON 
AND OTHERS.
_______

“The Return of Don Quixote.” By G. K.
Chesterton. (Chatto and Windus. 7s. 6d.)
“Mr. Fortune’s Maggot.” By Sylvia Townsend 
Warner. (Chatto and Windus. 7s.)
“To the Lighthouse.” By Virginia Woolf.
(Hogarth Press. 7s. 6d.)
“A Man Beset.” By John Carruthers. (Cape.
7s. 6d.)
“Gerfalcon.” By Leslie Barringer. (Heinemann. 
7s. 6d.)
“The Blue Rib.” By Charles Beadle. (Allan.
7s. 6d.)

(BY GERALD GOULD.)

Those of us who were school-boys
when Mr. Chesterton’s muse burst like a 
Falstaffian fairy upon the world, and
turned our heads by standing on its
own, find ourselves in a peculiar difficulty 
when we are nowadays offered the 
sort of thing that Mr. Chesterton nowadays 
offers. What is one to do, confronted 
with sentences like: “The real
danger of feminine politics is too much
love of a masculine policy”—or with a
wit who, when Gothic spires are praised
for pointing to Heaven, says: “It’s
rude to point”—or with a dreamy and
Quixotic hero who is supposed to be
profound and impressive when he tells
us that “we have had enough of 
science, enough of enlightenment,
enough of education . . .”? This
sort of verbal trick has grown on Mr. 
Chesterton. It used to be employed as
argument: now it is employed instead
of argument. But my complaint against
Mr. Chesterton is not mainly that he
does not develop, that he has failed to 
come off because he has failed to come 
on: it is that, with all his magnificent
gifts—his courage, his wit, his genius,
the splendour of his poetry, the charm of
his personality—he would have been 
bound to come on, if there had not been
something deeply wrong in his whole
philosophy from the beginning. (By
philosophy I mean, of course, something 
much more fundamental than
opinions.) He appealed to us when we 
were young because youth still believes
in the short cut; and he came preaching 
the virtues of the short cut, of the cap
of invisibility and the magic sword—
which is to say the loaded dice and the 
weighted scale, all the dishonour of 
fairyland. Alas! what is pretty innocence 
in the young may become plain 
nescience in the adult! The fairy-tales
are not true. There is no magic sword,
there is no short cut. And in the end
the facts prevail.

* * *

“The Return of Don Quixote” is very
much what we have learnt to expect. I
have quoted some of the worst sentences. 
It is only fair to quote some of
the best. We read of one man: “He
was in favour of moderate indulgence
in meat; and moderate indulgence in 
personal immortality.” The popularity
of the Derby is explained by a politician
who says: “The democracy cares a 
damn sight more about the inequality
of horses than about the equality of
men.” And there are sustained passages 
of rhetoric, too long to reproduce,

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in which the old Chestertonian lightning 
flashes and the old thunder 
troubles the heavens. Nobody but this
author could have written this book;
and yet it is not worthy of its author.
It is a fantasy that does not hold 
together. And only realism can afford 
not to give all its facts and join
all its flats. Fantasy must be logical if
it is anything; how exquisitely does Lilliput 
fit itself! Mr. Chesterton tells us
of a librarian who, beginning by dressing 
up to act in a play about the Middle
Ages, starts a revolution and brings 
back a sort of middle-aged constitution.
This gentleman has an armed force
which effects the arrest of the leaders of
a syndicalist strike; but, when the
strikers are tried, they turn out to be by
the old laws in the right, as against the
property-owners who oppose them.
What the police, the law courts, and the
army are doing meanwhile, we are
never clearly told. Nor do I know what
the acts of the characters, or their
speeches (all equally and conscientiously 
couched in Chestertonese), are
supposed to prove. But I do know that
I don’t believe in them. It seems to me
that their creator scarcely cares whether
they are convincing or not. He leaves
me with an uneasy doubt whether he
himself is sure that things were thus
and thus and only thus. That is what
I mean when I urge that there is something 
fundamentally wrong—something
more fundamental than any opinion—
in Mr. Chesterton’s work.

* * *

One comes with high hopes to both
Miss Warner and Mrs. Woolf. Each of 
them has lovely gifts; in the art of each,
again, I feel there is something wrong.
I offer the criticism in all humility; but,
again, what can one do? About “Mr.
Fortune’s Maggot” I state a purely 
subjective impression; I defend that impression 
by no critical canon; I just
meekly and mournfully record it. If
anybody had told me that I should find 
anything by the author of “Lolly Willowes” 
dull, I should have denied it with
derision. But “Mr. Fortune’s Maggot” 
struck me as dull. I persevered, 
but never to the end did I begin to discover 
what it was about, or why it had
been written. I caught no breath of inspiration 
in it. Mr. Fortune was a missionary, 
and went to a care-free island,
where he made one intimate friend and
(as he thought) convert—the boy Lueli.
Lueli, however, went on privately worshipping 
his own god. And that was
more than Mr. Fortune could do for
his. Lueli’s god, being of wood, could
be visibly destroyed; and it was; and
Lueli pined away; and Mr. Fortune 
tried to revive him by teaching him
(why?) geometry. Lueli not unnaturally 
attempted suicide, and 
Mr. Fortune realised that he
ought to have let the boy alone.
“How dreadful it is,” he reflected,
“that because of our wills we can never
love anything without messing it
about!” So he went away! But
surely this shirks the only problem it
raises. If loving were merely leaving,
there would be no difficulty; the problem 
is to love and stay. I feel, in
short, that Miss Warner did not know
what to do with Mr. Fortune, nor why
she had made him at all. She writes
always with grace, and sometimes with
an admirable irony—as when she says:

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“Fighting Lueli understood very well, 
but other aspects of civilisation needed
a great deal of explaining.” The whole
thing, though . . .?

* * *

Mrs. Woolf is never dull. She has to
an extraordinary degree the power to 
make ordinary incident and atmosphere
exciting. In her latest novel she presents
a household which her description of it
renders thrilling: the famous but difficult 
husband, the beautiful middle-aged
wife, the eight restless children, the visitors 
incongruous and inept: she catches
them on holiday, and for about two-
thirds of the volume displays them in
tiny domestic scenes, touching off their
varying moods ironically and beautifully. 
Then in a few pages she scrambles
through ten years, kills the beautiful 
mother, kills a son in the war and a 
daughter in childbed; and then again,
thirdly, takes her family, diminished in
numbers and vitality, to the scene of the
original holiday, and despatches some
of them on that visit to the lighthouse
which was planned ten years before. 
The insight into character is amazing:
and yet perhaps it is insight into mood
rather than into the permanent character 
that suffers the mood. The story is
a series of brilliant pictures—some
more brilliant, some less: it does not 
compose into a unity. And perhaps the 
something wrong here is a style that
frequently defeats its own natural 
beauty on a theory—a style that goes
tumbling from comma to comma, from
semi-colon to semi-colon, in a hopeless
attempt to keep pace with flying time. 
The story remains memorable, almost 
as much for its defects as for its charms.
It is full of exquisite touches. I like
particularly “the thought of Mrs. Ramsay 
presiding with immutable calm over
destinies which she completely failed to
understand.”

* * *

Mr. Carruthers wrote a remarkable
book in “Adam’s Daughter,” and has
written a slightly less remarkable one
in “A Man Beset”—a long, careful,
courageous, inconclusive study of a 
man in whom a natural violence of lust
and temper is restrained by the unnaturally 
strict taboos of his childhood’s 
environment, but breaks loose 
all the more devastatingly when his inhibitions 
are removed by drink. Thus 
summarised, the story may sound in 
the bad, formal sense, “psychological”;
but it does not deserve the reproach. It
is concrete, and rich in detail—almost
too rich: there is a tendency to overload 
and distract. The hero’s relationship
with his adored sister, similarly, could
be explained out of the psychological 
text-books, but is made real all the same.
The central character-situation may be
illustrated by what the “man beset”
says near the end about himself (“split
into two men”) and his relationship 
with his wife: “I dared not let her find 
me other than cold. She would have 
fled in loathing and horror from the
brute that is in me, had it ever been
allowed to gain dominion over me.”

* * *

The publishers recall “The Forest
Lovers” in connection with “Gerfalcon.” 
Well, “Gerfalcon” is not “The
Forest Lovers” by a long way; but the 
resemblance of kind is there. It is all
very brutal and gallant. The difference
is that you will like “Gerfalcon” only
if you happen to be particularly attached
to that manner; whereas you like “The
Forest Lovers” anyway. “The Blue
Rib” is a would-be smart account of
smartness on the Riviera, and will serve
for a very idle hour.