not be produced to time, with a watch
on the desk. Persons who chatter about the necessity of awaiting
inspirational hypersthenia don't know what the business of being an artist
is. They have only read about it sentimentally. The whole argument is
preposterous, and withal extraordinarily Victorian. And even assuming that
the truth _would_ deal a fatal blow, etc., is that a reason for hiding it?
Another strange sentence is this: "The wonder is, not that Trollope's
novels are 'readable,' but that, _being readable, they are yet_ so closely
packed with that true realism without which any picture of life is
lifeless." (My italics.) I ask myself what quality, in the opinion of the
_Times_ writer, chiefly makes for readableness.

CHESTERTON AND LUCAS

[_7 Oct. '09_]

Two books of essays on the same day from the same firm, "One Day and
Another," by E.V. Lucas, and "Tremendous Trifles," by G.K. Chesterton!
Messrs. Methuen put the volumes together and advertised them as being
"uniform in size and appearance." I do not know why. They are uniform
neither in size nor in appearance; but only in price, costing a crown
apiece. "Tremendous Trifles" has given me a wholesome shock. Its contents
are all reprinted from the _Daily News_. In some ways they are sheer and
rank journalism; they are often almost Harmsworthian in their unscrupulous
simplifying of the facts of a case, in their crude determination to
emphasize one fact at the expense of every other fact. Thus: "No one can
understand Paris and its history who does not understand that its
fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity." So there
you are! If you don't accept that you are damned; the Chesterton
guillotine has clicked on you. Perhaps I have lived in Paris more years
than Mr. Chesterton has lived in it months, but it has not yet happened to
me to understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of
its frivolity. Hence I am undone; I no longer exist! Again, of Brussels:
"It has none of the things which make good Frenchmen love Paris; it has
only the things which make unspeakable Englishmen love it." There are a
hundred things in Brussels that I love, and I find Brussels a very
agreeable city. Hence I am an unspeakable Englishman. Mr. Chesterton's
book is blotched with this particular form of curt arrogance as with a
skin complaint. Happily it is only a skin complaint. More serious than a
skin complaint is Mr. Chesterton's religious or