is youth. For some years past he had occasionally written
more or less topical verses which appeared in The Outlook and the
defunct Speaker. _Greybeards at Play_ was, after all, merely an
elaborate sneer at the boredom of a decade; the second book was a more
definite attack upon some points of its creeds and an assertion of the
principles which mattered most.

There is one sin: to call a green leaf grey,
Whereat the sun in heaven shuddereth.
There is one blasphemy: for death to pray,
For God alone knoweth the praise of death.

Or again (_The World's Lover_)

I stood and spoke a blasphemy--
"Behold the summer leaves are green."

It was a defence of reality, crying for vengeance upon the realists. The
word realism had come to be the trade-mark of Zola and his followers,
especially of Mr. George Moore, who made a sacrifice of nine obvious,
clean and unsinkable aspects of life so as to concentrate upon the
submersible tenth. Chesterton came out with his defence of the common
man, of the streets

Where shift in strange democracy
The million masks of God,

the grass, and all the little things of life, "things" in general, for
our subject, alone among modern poets, is not afraid to use the word. If
on one occasion he can merely

. . . feel vaguely thankful to the vast
Stupidity of things,

on another he will speak of

The whole divine democracy of things,

a line which is a challenge to the unbeliever, a statement of a
political creed which is the outgrowth of a religious faith.

The same year Chesterton formally stepped into the ranks of journalism
and joined the staff of The Daily News. He had scribbled poems since he
had been a boy at St. Paul's School. In the years following he had
watched other people working at the Slade, while he had gone on
scribbling. Then he had begun to do little odd jobs of art criticism
and reviewing for The Bookman and put in occasional appearances in the
statelier columns of The Speaker. Then came the Boer War, which made G.
K. Chesterton lose his temper but find his soul. In 1900 The Daily News
passed into new hands--the hands of G.K.C.'s friends. And until 1913,
when the causes he had come to uphold were just diametrically opposed to
the causes the victorious Liberal Party had adopted, every Saturday
morning's issue of that paper contained an article by him, whil