There are some books of verse which to criticise scrupulously seems almost a sacrilege. They may be full of eccentricities, carelessness, and distortions of metaphor and expression, laying themselves open to protest or damaging parody, but withal so full of vision, emotion, and rich music that the confounding cussedness and impish obscurity which sprawls into every third page gets very nearly obliterated when an unprejudiced reviewer pronounces a final judgment. Mr. G. K. Chesterton's Ballad of St. Barbara and Other Verses is one of these extraordinary books. The present reviewer would begin by saying that Mr. Chesterton is intensely original and individual. If you try to yoke him to one of his established English predecessors you will have a thankless task. Maybe at moments he sounds a little like Lord Macaulay, and at another time like a sort of ghostly fusion of Kit Marlowe and Blake, or of Swinburne and Blake; but the resemblance at closest is not too pronounced. Of course, Mr. Chesterton must have read all the old ballads written in the English tongue; and he may perhaps have read all the few existing epics and fragmentary poems of the Saxon scops. Add to that, if you like, everything else Teutonic, be it Danish, Icelandic, or German (though one cannot tell which particular poems); and if you have never read him at all and bear in mind that he also loves the use of amazing paradoxes, you will have some idea of his bewildering but forcible quality. A reviewer who turns over the pages of, say, three representative German anthologies containing selections from mediæval to recent times (one of them to be a student's drinking song-book) will certainly find a great deal that is remindful of Mr. Chesterton (both in this and his other verse books), particularly noticeable in their intensely racial outlook and something straightforwardly musical, resonant, and rhetorical in the language—to say nothing of their wine and beer-imbibing enthusiasm. One is tolerably certain that poets like Bürger, Schiller, and Liliencron, and probably also the divine and demoniacal Heine, would have derived pleasure from Mr. Chesterton once they had sifted away the paradoxes and the lyrics containing the most extravagant figures of speech. There is a royalist strain in the man, too. You may sing of Liberty and shout, “Down with Tyrants!” as hard as you like, but you cannot be quite so enthusiastic about mediævalism and write in the old-fashioned manner without recalling Elroy Flecker's heartening “We poets of the proud old lineage,” spattering meanwhile half a hemisphere with your ancestral blue blood. Dislocate Mr. Chesterton, shake all his limbs out of joint, but at the same time preserve unbroken the great frame of the man, and then place him a little behind mediævalism or at the very door of it, and confidently assume that in remote times his disturbing voice thrilled the hearts of the thanes guarding our democratic King Alfred, and that his hand tintinnabulated on the harp while the great monarch at repose was watching his clock-candles and planning to withstand an onslaught from the Danes or other barbarians.

Of course, if in this country things go from bad to worse, Mr. Chesterton will probably be interned. Not for his mediævalism and outward Teutonic qualities (for he pretends to fearfully hate all Germans) but because he espouses the cause of the distressed and downtrodden, and smokes and blazes with uncompromising indignation when he is face to face with certain kinds of barbarians. How hard he smites at such selfish self-seekers as profiteers, land-taxers, and usurers! Take, for instance, these two stanzas culled from “On the Downs,” one of the best ringing songs he ever put on perishable paper:

It has not been as the great wind spoke
On the great green down that day:
We have seen, wherever the wide wind spoke,
Slavery slaying the English folk:
The robbers of land we have seen command,
The rulers of land obey.
We have seen the gigantic golden worms
In the garden of paradise:
We have seen the great and the wise make terms
With the peace of snakes and the pride of worms,
And them that plant make covenant
With the locust and the lice.

It is excellently well phrased and searingly truthful, that

gigantic golden worms
In the garden of paradise.

It is also typical Chestertonese, and in this instance is no example of either violence, extravagance, or bombast—three of Mr. Chesterton's most insidious pitfalls (though none of these so bad as that present-day fashionable one, the anæmic). Moreover, both stanzas are so natural and easy. A great deal of damaging nonsense has been pegged to the reviewer's condemnatory “facile.” It is a good shield to push in the faces of indisputable minor poets when they do little else save smother good work beneath their own aggressive derivations; but that does not alter the essential fact that first-rate short poems (particularly those which have endured) nearly always sound “facile,” and it is the conscientious poet's business to work at his stanzas until they seem as if struck from a swift and sudden pen. Often Mr. Chesterton's seemingly sudden facility under severe examination reveals very vigorous application, as in the following exceedingly moving and inspiriting lines:

There are more windows in one house than there are eyes to see,
There are more doors in a man's house, but God has hid the key;
Ruin is a builder of windows; her legend witnesseth
Barbara, the saint of gunners, and a stay in sudden death.

At any rate, it is a very good example of the facility of the artist and visionary, though, perhaps, nothing in this book for spontaneous ease and beauty will surpass the single line,

Still as the heart of a whirlwind the heart of the world stood
still.

Then take another typical stanza from a particularly musical and prophetic poem:

His horse-hoofs go before you,
Far beyond your bursting tyres;
And time is bridged behind him
And our sons are with our sires.
A trailing meteor on the Downs he rides above the rotting towns,
The Horseman of Apocalypse, the Rider of the Shires,
For London Bridge is broken down, broken down, broken down;
Blow the horn of Huntingdon from Scotland to the sea—
… Only a flash of thunder light, a flying dream of thunder light,
Had shown under the shattered sky a people that were free.

The temptation to quote a preceding stanza is not to be withstood:

I saw the kings of London town,
The kings that buy and sell,
That built it up with penny loaves
And penny lies as well:
And where the streets were paved with gold, the shrivelled paper
shone like gold,
The scorching light of promises that pave the streets of hell.
For penny loaves will melt away, melt away, melt away,
Mock the mean that haggled in the grain they did not grow;
With hungry faces in the gate, a hundred thousand in the gate,
A thunder-flash on London and the finding of the foe.

There is also a frequent note of real anguish in this book, as in the last line of “The English Graves”:

They died to save their country, and they only saved the world.

Another of Mr. Chesterton's distinctions is that he is one of the few good poets who have written several poems about Christmas, though the lyric included in this book is not of a very elevating character, as the first stanza of it will show:

God rest you merry, gentlemen,
Let nothing you dismay;
The Herald Angels cannot sing
The cops arrest them on the wing,
And warn them of the docketing
Of anything they say.

But it is almost a relief from the fierce tension of his passionate strains to turn to such poems and to the impish satire of his paradox oddities and the queer kaleidoscope Songs of Education. One of the best of these isThe Higher Mathematics, a snatch of which runs:

Half of two is one,
Half of four is two,
But half of four is forty per cent. if your name is Montagu:
For everything else is on the square
If done by the best quadratics;
And nothing is low in High Finance
Or the Higher Mathematics,

and then winds up with the exceedingly brilliant and veracious,

Where you hide in the cellar and then look down
On the poets that live in the attics;
For the whole of the house is upside down
In the Higher Mathematics.

But all this is not illustrative of everything. There are scores of questionable flashes in the book like:

Our blameless blasphemies of praise,

and

Dreams dizzy and crazy we shall know.

One could fill a page with these highly alliterative, fizzing, crackling lines that Mr. Chesterton perhaps ought not to have written; but the good and sound parts of the book are so good that much of the chaff burns with a clear steady flame, and is consumed under the heat of the good. And he is what you call a Christian poet, takes a firm stand, and plays with neither folly, vice, nor greed. His prevailing motto seems to be “He that is not with us is against us.” Nor are his errors of outlook sufficiently numerous and pronounced to earn him in any way the reproach of “fanatic.”