My
thanks are further due, for a similar reason, to Mr. Chesterton
himself.

TO
J. C. SQUIRE

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY 11
II. THE ROMANCER 23
III. THE MAKER OF MAGIC 59
IV. THE CRITIC OF LARGE THINGS 76
V. THE HUMORIST AND THE POET 91
VI. THE RELIGION OF A DEBATER 109
VII. THE POLITICIAN WHO COULD NOT TELL THE TIME 136
VIII. A DECADENT OF SORTS 163
BIBLIOGRAPHY 185

I

INTRODUCTORY

THE habit, to which we are so much addicted, of writing books about
other people who have written books, will probably be a source of
intense discomfort to its practitioners in the twenty-first century.
Like the rest of their kind, they will pin their ambition to the
possibility of indulging in epigram at the expense of their
contemporaries. In order to lead up to the achievement of this desire
they will have to work in the nineteenth century and the twentieth.
Between the two they will find an obstacle of some terror. The eighteen
nineties will lie in their path, blocking the way like an unhealthy
moat, which some myopes might almost mistake for an aquarium. All manner
of queer fish may be discerned in these unclear waters.

To drop the metaphor, our historians will find themselves confronted by
a startling change. The great Victorians write no longer, but are
succeeded by eccentrics. There is Kipling, undoubtedly the most gifted
of them all, but not everybody's darling for all that. There is that
prolific trio of best-sellers, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Miss Marie Corelli,
and Mr. Hall Caine. There is Oscar Wilde, who has a vast reputation on
the Continent, but never succeeded in convincing the British that he was
much more than a compromise between a joke and a smell. There is the
whole Yellow Book team, who never succeeded in convincing anybody. The
economic basis of authorship had been shaken by the abolition of the
three-volume novel. The intellectual basis had been lulled to sleep by
that hotchpotch of convention and largeness that we call the Victorian
Era. Literature began to be an eff