assion of life are what we mainly remember--to
combine these two qualities as Mr. Bennett combines them is to hold a
unique position in contemporary literature.

IV

GILBERT CHESTERTON

It has often been pointed out that the intellectuals--the people whose
business it is to formulate opinions in Parliament, Press, and
Pulpit--are not really expressing public opinion; they are only
expressing the opinion of the intellectuals. Perhaps it would be
nearer the mark to say that every civilised or semi-civilised human
being may be divided into two persons, the one an individual who
chooses, walks, eats, feels, and imagines in a private and personal
way; the other a sort of official person who registers formal opinions
when called upon to do so. The latter corresponds to the
"intellectual," and is the dominant element in the souls of the ruling
classes; whilst the former--the instinctive, the spontaneous, the
common-sense element--dominates the man in the street.

It would not be far wrong to describe Mr. Chesterton's philosophy as a
sort of sublimated public opinion _minus_ the opinion of the
intellectuals. To get at what I mean I must for the moment ask the
reader to think of Mr. Chesterton as an abstraction. Let him conceive
an Englishman, unlike any existing Englishman, who has never heard of
Darwin or Spencer; who has never been impregnated with the theory of
induction or analytical psychology; an Englishman who has never read
or heard of Macaulay, Froude, Carlyle, Ruskin, Bagehot, Mill, Seeley,
or Mr. Frederic Harrison; who has read none of the poets since Milton;
who has never been asked to consider the Reform Bill or the Education
Bill, the Oxford Movement or the AEsthetic Movement, Realism or
Impressionism, Non-Resistance or the Will to Power, Mr. Bernard Shaw
or Mr. Aylmer Maude, the Primrose League or the Labour Party, Mr.
Yeats or even Mr. O'Finnigan. Let us imagine that this agreeable
abstraction is in the habit of moving about among other abstractions
like himself; that he knows a horse when he sees it (even if he cannot
ride it); that he is accustomed to hospitable inn-parlours where you
may discuss any philosophy so long as it is not a system; that he has
a chivalrous admiration for women; that he likes sunshine and adores
the moon; that he believes in God, the respectability of wives, ballad
poetry, good fellowship, and good wine.

And now, having stripped Mr. Chesterton so that he is no longer ev