"THE CHESTERTONS "
SIR,—As it happened, I was reading Mrs. Cecil Chesterton's book when I came upon the notice of it in your columns. The impres- sion it made on me was so d:fferent from that of your reviewer that I am moved to ask you to place it on record. Your reviewer describes the book as an explosion of .dislike to the late Mrs. Gilbert Chesterton in particular, and a collection of sneers and jibes expressing the author's dislikes all round. What struck me was the author's incapacity for disliking anybody, amounting almost to an amoral promiscuity in good fellowship.
Your reviewer has, I think, confused dislike with disapproval, which is quite a different matter_ I have liked many people whose views were abhorrent to me, and disliked others who agreed with me. We all have that experience. It is clear from the book that the author liked Gilbert and his wife very cordially, though Frances Chesterton's ways were so foreign to her own and her handling of Gilbert so different from her own handling of Cecil, that she cannot help regarding Gilbert's fate in matrimony as too like that of Swin- burne when he was taken into custody by Theodore Watts Dunton, and, becoming a respectable suburban gentleman, ceased to be a poet.
In my opinion Mrs. Cecil is gravely unjust to herself. Your re- viewer evidently has no consciousness of the fact that she is a serious philanthropist, ranking as such with Peabody and Rowton, who had much more money to spend on housing the homeless. But her book leaves the reader convinced that she is only a Bohemian journalist who, from her sixteenth year, spent every moment of her leisure in taprooms and drinking bars, and still considers this the only school for literary genius. I cannot accept this account, just as I cannot accept the notion that Shakespeare's life was divided between the theatre and the Mermaid tavern. But it explains her remarkable frankness, sincerity and good fellowship.
On other points your reviewer is entitled to his opinion and to my
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