Chesterton: The Flying Sword
Wood, Clement
July 14, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL z63 CHESTERTON: THE FLYING...
...stories...
...In addition to the two glorious opening brilliance, to remind ourselves of his firm achievements dedications, the fine hymn, 0 God of Earth and Altar, as poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and fly- the magnificent Christmas sonnet, the glittering light ing sword of the Lord in behalf of all the causes for verse, one poem, Lepanto, taught a new music to which he is such a forthright spokesman...
...but this latter starring one of the finer popular magazines with a poem is the source of Le Gallienne's Flos Aevorum, new series of the inimitable Father Brown stories, and and of countless pages from lesser American and Engwith editing and largely writing his own scintillant lish writers...
...are: But, on the other hand, perhaps it was worth exploring...
...brilliance like this is unanswerable...
...In a sky of dark green-blue-like Orthodoxy are the most famous, show a keen mind slate the stars were bleak and brilliant like splintered ice...
...Sat, like an owl, the evil sage: "The world's a bubble," solemnly Poe wrote the first detective stories...
...Chesterton's finest sustained poem, The weekly, he has produced within half a year his monu- Ballad of the White Horse, has not yet found imitamental The Everlasting Man, and now a brilliant tors...
...and G. K. He read, and turned a second page...
...But carillons are pealing in the sky, delightful Manalive tells the story of a man who went Through the Wild Swan their echoes crash and leap, around the world, to arrive home again: jocose and It is less glorious to live than dieGargantuan fooling, readable throughout...
...books of our times," typical touches of the flying sword It was a queer night for anyone to explore a churchyard...
...The Of the hall clock are dwindling and are slow...
...The balanced series of essays, of which Heretics and The thousand arms of the forest were grey, and its million fingers silver...
...The Man Who Was Thursday is the wildest of the fantasies, based upon the notion that the central gov- Passing Hour erning body of the world's anarchists, by now, may be completely composed of police secret agents...
...and the chime not conspirators, but fellow limbs of the law...
...though as a matbe a lost soul who cannot chuckle over ter of fact they were walking about on it all the time...
...It will be worth living English poets...
...As poet, dramaBut the song of Beauty and Art and Love tist, fictionist, and essayist, he has already won for Is simply an utterly stinking song, himself one of the high places in our age: and there To double you up and drag you down, is every reason to hope that the future will lift him, And damn your soul alive...
...But who will write us a riding song, Or a fighting song or a drinking song, Chesterton would be the first to uphold anyone's Fit for the fathers of you and me, right to differing beliefs...
...Thomas Hardy is a weary soul philandering with housemaids...
...At the age of seventeen, he left Saint Paul's Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half-attainted stall, School, with the idea of studying art...
...and whether Browning, Dickens, or Cobbett holds the limeonly Chesterton could have written three dozen such light, be sure that the product will be readable in the stories, each splendidly plotted, and each subtly an ultimate, and surprising throughout...
...The Ball The storm-king highway arches into sleep...
...but no one can prevent an That knew how to think and thrive...
...and we terton shouted, in The Wild Knight have The Congo, stemmed straight from Chesterton "Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room," and the rest Beneath the gnarled old knowledge-tree of it...
...we will find, in the most casual lyric flung glitteringly Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far, Don John of Austria is going to the war, out, that the same polemic emotion is at work that has Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold, produced his most penetratingly argumentative essays...
...It The song of the sorrow of Tara is sung to a harp unstrung, has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression that they do understand it and everything else...
...done finer narratives, and flames with a more living Don John of Austria Is riding to the sea...
...Great in every field he has sung, has touched, in the end it may be that his less polemic That once went singing southward when all the world was works will endure longest-his work especially in young...
...More than five lusters ago Ches- lines to the then unknown Vachel Lindsay...
...Touch, my lord...
...his sonnets have a tired loveliness...
...Even the square stone tower of the of the blade...
...at work upon its predecessors and contemporaries...
...The song...
...He must evidence that they had discovered it...
...but Chesterton has Death-light of Africa...
...be sung...
...yet for more than half of that time he has been Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has before the public as a literary artist of high magni- stirred, tude...
...of the cheerful Shropshire Kid I consider a per- just as many of them live under a sort of illusion that fectly horrid song, And the song of the happy Futurist is a song that can't they have read the Origin of Species...
...weird merry chase the various pseudo-anarchists have And dandelions that you pluck and blow of it, pending their discoveries that their fellows are, To see if heaven wants you...
...Chesterton is just entering upon his fifty-second Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard, year...
...poetry, the drama, and fiction...
...Far away in some strange constellation in skies infinitely The Flying Inn, the story of England's last tavern, remote, there is a small star, which astronomers may some which roamed the stretch of the island to escape the day discover...
...When G. K. C. sets himself to biography, easily able to solve the most tortuous mysteries...
...English poetry...
...and the next volume added to while, as preparation for his next display of amazing his stature...
...and so flawless is its handling, that the fact is study of the neglected William Cobbett...
...but there is a growing tendency among the other Don John laughing in the brave beard curled, pundits to note belatedly the poetic bulk of the great Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world, singer of Lepanto...
...From The Everlasting Man, which Prochurch looked northern to the point of heathenry, as if it fessor Phelps hailed this year as "one of the important were some barbaric tower among the sea rocks of Iceland...
...but how ultimately less than its prototype...
...and All that thickly wooded and sparsely tenanted countryside woe for the sham and the paste when Chesterton turns was stiff with a bitter and brittle frost...
...and Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade...
...July 14, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL z63 CHESTERTON: THE FLYING SWORD By CLEMENT WOOD ONE of the marvels of literary energy in the The exquisite perfection of his tribute to the donkey, world today is G. K. Chesterton...
...Only Chesterton could have made, of a fool264 THE COMMONWEAL July 14, 1926 ish-looking little Roman Catholic priest, a detective position...
...and a The world grows strange and swings in different time...
...Chesterton beyond all argument wrote the greatest of "A bubble, then, old crow," I cried, them...
...beauty...
...not inexplicable...
...The best of Gaboriau, Conan Doyle, Arthur "Gcd keep you in your weary wit ! B. Reeves, and the rest of the modern strivers, falls A bubble-have you ever spied hopelessly behind the weakest of the Father Brown The colors I have seen on it...
...The life of argument for his own religious faith...
...The song of the fury of Fragolette is a florid song and One of his loveliest touches is this a torrid song, But evolution really is mistaken for explanation...
...and the Cross is another moving chronicle of derringdo, picturing the woeful state of England if she took Dreary November turns to opal June, too seriously proselyting attempts of the Moslem and Tomorrow's sun on other lands is rising, alliances with the Turk...
...but its recoil is never against the agile wielder of incalculable cold...
...The black hol- the sword of his mind upon the false masquerading as lows between the trunks of the trees looked like bot- the true 1 His weapon in the essays is primarily the tomless, black caverns of that Scandinavian hell, a hell paradox...
...Yet he is one of those In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid, well integrated people whose soul is his cause...
...and the strong soul has a habit of The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird bringing its seeds to birth...
...that the acclaim of his later works will cause some This poem alone puts Chesterton ahead of all the blur of the worth of his earlier ones...
...Turn where with its fine burst of reverence, is better known than you will, he is before you...
...My angel smiles and brings, for my surprisingI have not retained much space to speak of the No, not the moon but something longer known ; essays-after all, these are Chesterton in the field My miracle of death, my own, my own...
...Whatever field this man Within his hand, round silver of the moon, touches, he writes interestingly and permanently...
...for years, constantly higher and higher in achievement...
...The prose style Browning is the most engrossing biography I have ever throughout is exquisite, as witness this opening of The read-done with all the glitter of Macaulay, and with Sign of the Broken Sword: far more accuracy of understanding and phrasing...
...Masefield have a rude post-Chaucerian strength, and Love-light of Spain-hurrah...
...But writing The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall, was in his soul...
...The long coarse narratives of Holding his head up for a flag of all the free...
...It is his power of seeing the usual The very danger in such an aggressive career is with new sight that marks him off from lesser singers...
...intense admiration of this brilliance...
...Not content with such a little gem as The Beatific Vision...
...In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold, Theodore Maynard is, I believe, the only critic on Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums, either side of the water, barring this writer, who has Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and hailed Chesterton as the greatest poet in living Eng- he comes, land...
...where he is best known, and need little additional ex- ISABEL FIsKE CONANT...
...the younger English poets follow It is literary history that Floyd Dell, in some midtepid gelatinous or harlequinning gods, and falter with western town, a few years later read these stirring a thin first edition...
...At least I could never observe in the faces reforming prohibitionists, is marked by much of the or demeanors of most astronomers or men of science any best light verse that Chesterton has written...
Vol. 4 • July 1926 • No. 10
