and the deliberate contrasts. He has written prefaces without number,
and the British Museum has not a complete set of the books introduced
by him. The Fables of AEsop, the Book of Job, Matthew Arnold's Critical
Essays, a book of children's poems by Margaret Arndt, Boswell's Johnson,
a novel by Gorky, selections from Thackeray, a life of Mr. Will Crooks,
and an anthology by young poets are but a few of the books he has
explained.

The last thing to be said on Chesterton as a critic is by way of
illustration. For a series of books on artists, he wrote two, on William
Blake and G. F. Watts. The first is all about mysticism, and so is the
second. They are for the layman, not for the artist. They could be read
with interest and joy by the colourblind. And, incidentally, they are
extremely good criticism. Therein is the triumph of Chesterton. Give him
a subject which he can relate with his own view of the universe, and
space wherein to accomplish this feat, and he will succeed in presenting
his readers with a vividly outlined portrait, tinted, of course, with
his own personality, but indisputably true to life, and ornamented with
fascinating little gargoyles. But put him among the bourgeoisie of
literature and he will sulk like an angry child.

V

THE HUMORIST AND THE POET

THERE are innumerable books--or let us say twenty--on Mr. Bernard Shaw.
They deal with him as a sociologist, a dramatist, or what not, but never
as a humorist. There is a mass of books on Oscar Wilde, and they deal
with everything concerned with him, except his humour. The great
humorists--as such--go unsung to their graves. That is because there is
nothing so obvious as a joke, and nothing so difficult to explain. It
requires a psychologist, like William James, or a philosopher, like
Bergson, to explain what a joke is, and then most of us cannot
understand the explanation. A joke--especially another man's joke--is a
thing to be handled delicately and reverently, for once the bloom is
off, the joke mysteriously shrivels and vanishes. Translators are the
sworn enemies of jokes; the exigencies of their deplorable trade cause
them to maul the poor little things about while they are putting them
into new clothes, and the result is death, or at the least an appearance
of vacuous senescence. But jokes are only the crystallization of humour;
it exists also in less tangible forms, such as style and all that
collection of effects vaguely lumped togethe