is outside us, something that you and I have all our lives
perhaps taken too little account of. The equal and eternal human
being will alter that antagonism, for the human being sees no real
antagonism between laughter and respect, the human being, the common
man, whom mere geniuses like you and me can only worship like a god.
When dark and dreary days come, you and I are necessary, the pure
fanatic, the pure satirist. We have between us remedied a great
wrong. We have lifted the modern cities into that poetry which every
one who knows mankind knows to be immeasurably more common than the
commonplace. But in healthy people there is no war between us. We are
but the two lobes of the brain of a ploughman. Laughter and love are
everywhere. The cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are
full of blasphemous grotesques. The mother laughs continually at the
child, the lover laughs continually at the lover, the wife at the
husband, the friend at the friend. Auberon Quin, we have been too
long separated; let us go out together. You have a halberd and I a
sword, let us start our wanderings over the world. For we are its two
essentials. Come, it is already day."

In the blank white light Auberon hesitated a moment. Then he made
the formal salute with his halberd, and they went away together into
the unknown world.

This is very important to the understanding of Chesterton. With him,
profound gravity and exuberant fooling were always intermingled and
some of his deepest thoughts are conveyed by a pun. He always claimed
to be intensely serious while hating to be solemn and it was a
mixture apt to be misunderstood. If gravity and humour are the two
lobes of the average man's brain, the average man does not bring them
into play simultaneously to anything like the extent that Chesterton
did.

Auberon Quin and Adam Wayne are the most living individuals in any of
his novels--just because they are the two lobes of his brain
individualised. All his stories abound in adventure, are admirable in
their vivid descriptions of London or the countryside of France or
England seen in fantastic visions. They are living in the portrayal
of ideas by the road of argument. But the characters are chiefly
energies through whose lips Gilbert argues with Gilbert until some
conclusion shall be reached.

In 1905 came _The Club of Queer Trades_--least good of the
fantasia--and even admire