Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV MR. CHESTERTON AMONG THE PROPHETS Ever since Mr. Chesterton began to be prominent the present writer has had frequent discussions with his friends on the nature and extent of his gifts. And it is curious that the books of one man should provoke such opposite judgments in his readers. Setting aside the epithet "brilliant," which seems allowed on all hands, the difference is very complete. The critics from whom I dissent speak of his thought as " superficial" ; I find it penetrating. They talk of him as asking us to believe impossible paradoxes. I find him pre-eminently the propounder of the maxims of common-sense—of maxims and principles so clearly true when they are stated that they might be called truisms. They regard him as primarily a purveyor of acrobatic feats of the intellect—exciting and enjoyable, as any amusing " show " is enjoyable, but not to be taken seriously. I have found him, before all things, quick to defend truths of great practical moment, and the effective opponent of plausible and misleading theories—a very serious and important role. They class him with brilliant writers of the hour, who have no claim to teach the age a serious lesson or to doing more thaninterest us in their own whims and prejudices by stating them with lucidity and enforcing them with telling epigrams. I associate him with those writers of the past who have decried mere ingenuity in theorizing, and striven to find the path of philosophy traced by Nature herself. I class his thought— though not his manner—with that of such men as Burke, Butler, and Coleridge. When his work on Orthodoxy appeared, it seemed to me a triumphant and irrefragable confutation of their view; I found it regarded by them as a confutation of mine. The proverb which begins with the words de gustibus is an o...