Fiction
The Second Napoleon of Notting Hill
The Return of Don Quixote. By ti. K. Chesterton. (Chatto and Windus. 7s. (3d.) ir is so many years since we read Mr. Chesterton's first state- ment of his unchanging creed, that we have lost count of the details, the names and the occupations of his heroes who fought on Campden Hill for the love of the Guilds, and Illuminative Processes, and Pride of Parish. But the allegory remains in our mind ; and it discovers itself to be much the same allegory as that of the Faerie Queene, that deepest expression of the mysticism which is in green, tragic, and joyous England. If we remember rightly, in Notting Hill was a newsagent who suddenly saw the local paper transfigured into a Social Testament, which he must carry into the High Street to dam the tides of commercial cosmo- politanism which flowed there.
Here again is that leader of forlorn hopes, the modern Quixote who stands for the free expression of individuality in an individualistic state. The latter has vanished, and the former has not yet found a footing in the Deluge that has followed the foundering. Mr. Chesterton hates the machine, and Mr. Chesterton is therefore. mad. He is hating his own right hand ; he is hating the passionate conceptions of his brain, by which the combined inertias of the human body [kW its earthly environment and confederate may be forced fo a new animation and a More direct obedience to the living Mind and soul. Prometheus snatched fire from heaven. *hat was he but the first.engineer, who laid the foundations of that network -Of organisms by Which the drudgery and Physical misery of human life are to be reduced to a purely Medicinal' scale ? In Mr. Chesterton's Golden Feudal Age that drudgery was a 'heavy and stultifying poison. Let him not forget that in his Gothic delirium: Somebody must Standup and declare our faith in our .works, rind deny Mr. uhesterton's belief that we moderns are a Frankenstein who ha8 orea. ted. a hideous mechanical monster which is destroying the world of faith, and religion, and eternal reality.
That world was being destroyed_ in.the days of the Black
Prince, and of Pope DOe Mr. Cliestirton deny that
there is to-day a living Christ of Steel and Flying Wheels, the voice of the ever-revealing knowledge which lifts Man up and makes him master of his desolating and choking fate ? We cannot cry out loudly enough against the wilful and perverse beauty of this noble-charactered genius ; against the dazzling wit and far-reaching poetic vision which inspire this book, and inform its fine indolence with power. Mr. Chesterton writes with one hand in his pocket ; but that hand cocks a loaded pistol which is aimed at our hearts. Beware of him ; his beauty is treacherous because it is partly true. Yet it is a truth that has sunk into the ground of time and been exhumed again. It is a truth of yesterday and therefore a ghost. But a ghost can set our conscience on fire, and bring us the touchstone of reality which crumbles our political, moral, and social illusions to dust.
Thus alive to our danger, we can enjoy every page of this riotous fantasy, in which the research-crazed librarian of Seawood Abbey suddenly proclaimed a Chivalric Crusade with pike and bow against the strikers in the coal-tar product factories, and ended in siding with them; and in turning against the Trust magnates who had assumed his Robin Hood livery. The story is told with all of Mr. Chesterton's intuitive lightness and directness of touch. Like most beautiful things, it consists of a theme and variations ; or, if the author prefers us to put it in his terms of dogma, of an argument. and proofs. Here is the theme. " It seems to be u sign of education first to take a thing for granted, and then to forget to sec if it is still there.'' Obviously, that is an ancient theme -7-the theme of all the poets.
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