fort to express the
inexpressible. Later in his more definitely philosophical books G.K.
could say calmly much that here he splashes "on a ten leagued canvas
with brushes of comet's hair"--with all the violent directness of a
vision.

[* In the panegyric preached at Westminster Cathedral, June 27, 1936.]

Of that vision his brother began the interpretation in his
challenging book. Reactions were interesting, for even those who
wanted most ardently to say that Cecil's book should not have been
written found that it was necessary to say it loudly and to say it at
great length. Their very violence showed their sense of Chesterton as
a peril even when they abused anyone who felt him to be a portent. It
was not the kind of contempt that is really bestowed on the
contemptible.

The _Academy_ expended more than two columns saying;

We propose to deal with the quack and leave his sycophants and
lickspittles to themselves . . .

One skips him in his numerous corners of third and fourth rate
journals [e.g. _The Illustrated London News_, _The Bookman_, _Daily
News_!] and one avoids his books because they are always and
inevitably a bore.

Lancelot Bathurst had also dared to write of G.K. in his Daily life
as a journalist, so the article goes on:

Let us kneel with the Hon. Lancelot at his greasy burgundy-stained
shrine, what time the jingling hansom waits us with its rolling
occupant and his sword-stick and his revolver and his pockets stacked
with penny dreadfuls. . . .

The fact is we have in Mr. Chesterton the true product of the
deboshed hapenny press. . . . If the hapenny papers ceased to notice
him forthwith it seems to us more than probable that he would cease
at once to be of the highest importance in literary circles and the
Bishops and Members of Parliament who have honoured him with their
kind notice would be compelled to drop him. . . .

Most of the reviews were very different from this one, which is
certainly great fun (although some few other reviewers suggested
that Gilbert himself wrote the _Criticism_). I have wondered whether
the _Academy_ notices of his own books, all much like this, were
written by a personal enemy or merely by one of the "jolly people" as
he often called them who were maddened by his views.

For some years now Gilbert had been gathering in his mind the
material for _Orthodoxy_. Some of the ideas we have seen faintly
traced in the No