n upsetting the pseudo-historical,
pseudo-philosophical illusions of Anglo-Saxons, in charmingly
ridiculous pantomimes, which the redeeming humor of that patient race
has just intelligence enough thoroughly to enjoy.

If he were himself less moralistically earnest the spice of the jest
would disappear. His humor is not universal humor. It is topical
humor; and topical humor derives its point from moral contrast,--the
contrast in this case between the virtue of Mr. Shaw and the vices of
modern society.

"Man and Superman" is undoubtedly his most interesting work from a
philosophical point of view, but his later plays--such bewitching
farces as "Fanny's First Play," "Androcles," and "Pygmalion"--seem to
express more completely than anything else that rollicking combative
roguishness which is his most characteristic quality.

86. GILBERT K. CHESTERTON. ORTHODOXY.

Mr. Chesterton may congratulate himself upon being the only man of
letters in England who has had the originality or the insight or the
temperamental courage to adopt a definitely reactionary philosophy;
whereas in France we have Huysmans, Barres, Bourget, Bordeaux, and
many others, whose persuasive and romantic role it is to prop up
tottering altars; in England we have only Mr. Chesterton.

That is doubtless why it is necessary for him to exaggerate his
paradoxes so extravagantly; and also why he is so important and so
dear to the hearts of intelligent clergymen.

Mr. Chesterton's grand philosophical "coup" is a simple and effective
one--the turning of everything, complacently and hilariously, upside
down. One has the salutary amusement in reading him of visualizing the
Universe in the posture of a Gargantuan baby, "prepared" for a sound
smacking. Mr. Chesterton himself is the chief actor in this
performance and wonderful pyrotechnic stars leap into space as its
happy result.

Mr. Chesterton has his own peculiar "religion"--a sort of Chelsea
Embankment Catholicism, in which, in place of Pontifical Encyclicals,
we have Punch and Judy jokes, and in place of Apostolic Doctrine we
have umbrellas, lamp-posts, electric-signs and prestidigitating
clerics.

Mr. Chesterton is never more entertaining, never more entirely at
ease, than when turning one or other of the really noble and tragic
figures of human intellect into preposterous "Aunt Sallies" at whose
battered heads he can fling the turnips and potatoes of the Average
Man's average suspicion, dipped