[In the following review, Lewis finds that Defy the Foul Fiend begins on a weak note but soon becomes an accomplished work.]

The diabolical presence who is defied in this book is the demon called Demos. Democracy—as is today on all hands and increasingly the case—is compelled to assume the horn and hoof. And the colours that are sported by this newest hero are the “Tory” colours—though that, I venture to believe, is a mistaken tag, as his politics, as they are revealed to us in partly humorous, partly impassioned scenes, of very great vivacity, are much less artificial than such a term would suggest.

Mr. Collier's narrative opens as the very much stylized history of a fool. You imagine yourself at first to be in the presence of one of those creatures of whom the heroic exemplars are Don Quixote or the Idiot. “Our hero,” as Willoughby Corbo is called, is the by-blow of an impossible decayed nobleman. He is ushered into the book by a mock-melodramatic company, from whose unreality he never quite escapes, nor from the slight confusion ensuing from the doubt as to his status—whether full fool or not. It is in conversation with an individual named Baiye that he first becomes thoroughly real, and also divested of “idiocy.” That is perhaps where this book should have opened—for it turns out that he is no fool but the reverse.

What a very serious and impressive contribution to contemporary fiction Defy the Foul Fiend is will be most apparent to the reader when he reaches those chapters where the relentless Willoughby is engaged in destroying the cherished Marxist dope of the old “wrapper-scrapper,” who eventually, all his proletarian illusions ground to dust, takes his life at a seaside resort to which “our hero” has sent him to recuperate after two weeks of gruelling political argument.

This homeric political debate is the climax of the book—that and the doctrinaire idealism of the love-making that precedes it. The young enthusiast even succeeds in convincing this hardened old Kropotkinite that there is such a thing as honour: for he goes at it hammer and tongs, morning and night. “He had never done anything so seriously in his life before: he spoke with an almost un-English seriousness.” (It is this “un-English seriousness” which is so “modern”—a passion beneath these pastiche literary trappings that no eighteenth-century worthy could have understood at all, and which belongs much more to “extremist” politics of today, of course, than to anything than can distantly be described as “Tory.”) “I have a vague feeling that the old notions of virtue may be salutary,” exclaims this paradoxical young prophet. “One becomes real by practising them. … I was always a little inclined to the sentiment of honour, for example. I shall now perhaps practise it on more conventional lines: never tell a lie, or overlook an affront—all that. It will keep me morally fit.”

His aged companion is profoundly scandalized when the word first falls upon his ears—this word “honour” is the most disquieting thing of all—a word so long taboo among all classes that it is even indelicate so much as to use it. “That word,” the old man objects, “has an aristocratical sound!”

But he succumbs nevertheless, in the end. “In the end he was scarcely an optimist at all. ‘It is all very well,’ he said, ‘but I have had a dream … you ask me to give it up’ … our good Willoughby, with that destructive fury that rages in all who are bit by a certain kind of fly, took care to undermine his belief in the leaders of socialism and science.” There was then little more to be done Again, in some of the most beautiful love-passages in recent fiction we are shown Willoughby converting the kind and virtuous Lucy Langton to emancipated and revolutionary ways of thinking. His work is as effective as it is later on, but the other way round, in the case of his elderly socialist victim. Lucy becomes a doctrinaire libertine (he is appalled at the number of her lapses, when she informs him some years afterwards). When he attempts to reconstruct the unspoilt Lucy, however, upon the ruins of his own making, his efforts are not attended with success. And on the last page we leave him doggedly immured for life upon a seven-hundred-acre estate.

“Such things as beauty, bravery, honour” are then this writer's strange stock-in-trade—just as much as Mr. Lytton Strachey's stock-in-trade, for instance, was the reverse. And “go out into the streets,” says he, and observe Mr. and Mrs. Everyman. “Read their wit in the evening papers, or hear it in a saloon bar.” There is little enough beauty: “their songs do not improve. … They are brave in herds in their blind wars: that salesman was probably brave then, but when they are alone they are not so very bold. As for honour, everyone is a hireling these days, and it is almost impossible for a hireling to be honourable.”

But what comes next is so significant that I will select it for quotation, to conclude this review. It is a passage that does Mr. Collier singular credit, for this is what he says: “It used to give me pleasure to contemplate these little deficiencies,” in Mr. and Mrs. Everyman, namely. “It made me feel superior. Now I perceive that I am contemplating myself. I identify the hateful elements in man by looking into my own greedy, treacherous, sentimental, hypocritical heart.” In other words, he is—you and I are—responsible for the Mr. and Mrs. Everyman we encounter. Every man gets the Mr. and Mrs. Everyman he deserves! But, in the world of literature as we find it today, it is truly magnificent to have arrived, as Mr. Collier has done, at this understanding—to have turned round upon himself—for a man in fine to have blamed himself—where most are content to blame Fate—or their Victorian grandparents—for the pass in which we all find ourselves, without distinction.