Hie Saturdap Review qfjjterature
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
G
ILBERT KEITH C H E S -
TERTON was both a
literary figure and a p o - t'Tl
litical influence of far greater
stature t h a n his somewhat b e -
wildered c o n t e m p o r a r i e s in
England today h a v e as yet a p -
preciated. I stood the other day
at his grave-side, at the g r a v e -
side of this, t h e last to die of m y
intimate personal friends from
the friendships formed in early
manhood—which are the s t r o n g -
est in the world—and I m a r -
velled at the n a t u r e of the
mourners there assembled. I
marvelled not at their exiguity,
for they were very many—nor
at their lack of distinction, for
there was among t h e m t h e
greatest modern writer of E n g -
lish prose, Max Beerbohm; one
of the most famous of the m o d -
ern young men, Aldous Huxley;
the chief of t h e Catholic com-
munion in England, t h e a r c h -
bishop of Westminster, who
officiated at the Requiem and at
the order of burial t h a t fol-
lowed. It was a great and an
impressive gathering. B u t it had
not in it those who should i m -
personally represent society as a whole.
The only official representative of a n y -
thing corporate was t h e High Commis-
sioner for the Irish F r e e State. What an
irony that he alone should be there, of
official figures! He was indeed most
worthily there, for Gilbert Chesterton
had always been alive with u n d e r s t a n d -
ing of t h e Irish people, he had stood in
his later years overtly for that religion
in the defence of which they have almost
perished b u t which they have survived to
defend, establish, and propagate t h r o u g h -
out the world.
It would be I think to* any visitor from
t h e Continent of Europe an incompre-
hensible thing t h a t this very great E n g -
lishman should have been passing through
t h e funeral rites which should be and
commonly are of national moment w h e n
national figures pass, and that there
should be no trace of national recogni-
tion.
We h a v e in this country an official
press, for everything that counts is with
us official; w e have in particular one
daily paper, The Times, which is openly
and by definition official. Its memorial
BY HILAIRE BELLOC
Annan & Sons
G. K. CHESTERTON
upon the dead man omitted all that was
of importance in him—I have elsewhere
called it with justice negligible.
I have written t h u s at the beginning of
what I have to say not from a passing
surprise or indignation, not as a mere e x -
pression of detached emotion, but as a
text for w h a t the m a n was and will be.
He was the most English of Englishmen;
b u t because he stood on one side of a
certain line of cleavage which r u n s
through all m o d e m Europe, and grows
in distinction and profundity with every
passing day, he was not officially recog-
nized b y his country. Though he was d e -
voted to that country with a simple and
permanent filial affection based on a com-
plete comprehension of it, though he was
typical of it in every function of his mind
and in all his habits, it looked at him
somewhat askance and it treated him as
in some w a y exceptional or alien. T h e
line of cleavage of which I speak is the
line dividing not so m u c h the Catholic
faith as the Catholic culture from its
opponents. Official England is strongly
rooted in opposition to the Catholic c u l -
ture, and because Gilbert Chesterton had
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July I 1936
stood during all his active life
upon the one side of the hedge,
in sympathy with the Catholic
culture and with all its p r o d -
ucts, because he h a d in the last
issue openly declared himself
a m e m b e r of t h e alien com-
munion, therefore did official
England pretend that he was
something other than he was.
That official neglect was a most
memorable gesture, and one the
more memorable because in
England it has passed almost
unperceived.
As I so watched the farewell
given on his own soil to this
very great man, I asked myself
a question which m a n y are ask-
ing who k n e w how great he
was: What will the future of
that name be?
There will be nothing of
greater interest in our local
world, over h e r e at this m o -
ment, than to watch the d e -
velopment of tha't future fame.
Not that I shall see it, I am too
old; he was even four years
younger t h a n I; b u t my chil-
dren will begin to see t h e thing
at work, and m y grandchildren
will see it finally registered. He wrote in
the English tongue, and though that is
now so widely spread he wrote at first
only for an English public, piercing later
to English-speaking publics elsewhere.
He wrote wholly for the purpose of being
heard by that public of his fellow citizens
with whom he was in such deep com-
munion. It was this which m a d e h i m so
difficult to translate into any other l a n -
guage; and though the scale of the m a n
was soon recognized upon the continent
of Europe, notably in France, his idiom
was always entirely that of his birth and
surroundings, of his family tradition, and
of that group of things which belongs
wholly to England and cannot properly
UVext
A HORSE IN ARIZONA
By LOUIS PAUL
Reviewed by William Rose Benet
WHOSE CONSTITUTION?
By HENRY A. WALLACE
Reviewed by Felix Morley
 TheSatwrdapRevieuD

be known save to men of the English
experience.
I k n e w h i m I think as well as any man
ever k n e w another, not only from the
depth of my affection, nor only for the
intimacy and very long acquaintance of
that intimacy—close on forty years—you
may say the lifetime of a man, but most
of all because so thoroughly did my mind
j u m p with his, so fully did his answer
meet the question m y own soul was a l -
ways asking, that his conclusions, the
things he found and communicated, his
solutions of the great riddles, his stamp
of certitude, were soon p a r t of myself.
Therefore the testimony I bear to him is
true.
There was in this communion between
u s something of heredity, and h e r e I
must b e pardoned, against all modern
convention, a personal note. I was brought
u p wholly b y my mother, and in E n g -
land: m y father died before I can r e -
member. Now my mother derived directly
from that English middle class of yeomen
and liberal stock which in literature and
the arts, in law and even in arms, in m e r -
chant enterprise, and, most of all, in
metaphysical and religious speculation,
has determined t h e character of England
from t h e moment of the P u r i t a n t r i u m p h
t h r e e h u n d r e d years ago. We were millers
and small landowners of Warwickshire
—of the Midlands—Nonconformist, orig-
inally Puritan, later skeptical, ending in
Unitarianism. It was almost more a cor-
poration than a class, it prided itself most
justly on its high culture, its possession
of the classics, its p u r e breed, its intense
nationalism. Such was m y stock.
Well, t h a t V a s just the social stock
traction of an appetite. He was hungry
for reality. But what is much more, he
could not conceive of himself except as
satisfying that hunger; it was not pos-
sible to him to hesitate in the acceptation
of each new parcel of the truth; it was
not possible for h i m to hold anything
worth holding that was not connected
with t h e t r u t h as a whole. Hence t h a t
strange consistency, which had at once
the simplicity of childhood and the
complexity of the very wise, and which
m a r k e d him throughout the whole of
his life.
What was much more to his fellow
beings even t h a n this passion for w h a t
is, with t h e corresponding rejection, i n -
stinctive and total, of confusion almost
as m u c h as falsehood, was the driving
power moving his spirit to disseminate
what h e knew.
To him should more fully apply than
to any other of o u r contemporaries the
capital sentence:—"The business of a
m a n is to discover reality, and having
discovered it t o h a n d it on to his fel-
lows." For this task he had happily been
furnished with instruments of the most
powerful kind, and it is to these that I
would direct particularly the attention of
Lines to a Certain Critic
By A R T H U R DAVISON FICKE
Y OU are my favorite critic;
You are so easy to read, for
You write the same thing,
Which is:—•
those who may read me here. I would so
direct them particularly because among
his sheaf of talents, coruscating and
gleaming with a multiple gleaming,
there were those which might distract
from the central thing. H e played
so m u c h with the forms of the English
language, he so m u c h loved a jest, and
t h a t exuberant vitality of his was so p a s -
sionately filled with the sense of a d v e n -
ture t h a t t h e central thing in him—power
of proof—may not be as apparent as it
should be. For it w a s not only the central
thing, it was the whole meaning of his
work. I say of his work, not of his life.
T h e whole meaning of his Kfe was the
discovery, the appreciation, of reality".
B u t his work was m a d e u p of b e q u e a t h -
ing to others the treasure of knowledge
and certitude upon which h e h a d come.
F o r it h a s been well and universally
said b y all those who k n e w him that side
by side with and a product of that i m -
mense exuberance in happiness not only
of himself b u t of all around, of that vital
rejoicing not only in m a n b u t in every
other work of God and in God Himself,
the most conspicuous fruit was generos-
ity.
(Continued on page 14)
always

from which Gilbert Chesterton also came.

F r o m the years in which a m a n first b e -
gins to strengthen and grow roots, from
the late twenties, w h e n we first met each
other, each k n e w that the other had in
him that foundation. I h a d been b o m of
a w o m a n d r a w n froni t h a t same blood,
and brought by sheer power of brain into
t h e Catholic Church.
I was not when I first met him as alive
to the strength of that word "Catholic" as
I am today; I myself have gone through
a pilgrimage of approach, to a beginning
at least of understanding in the matter;
b u t it was never m y good fortune to bear
witness by t h e crossing of a frontier; a
public act. Such good fortune was his. I
w a s b o r n within t h e walls of the City of
God: he saw it, approached it, k n e w it,
and entered. I k n o w not which is for the
r u n of men the better fate, b u t his was
certainly of our two fates the better. H a v -
ing said so m u c h in this matter, I will
leave it, for it is too personal and h a s
been too prolonged.
Gilbert Chesterton spent his life not in
t h e search for truth, b u t in the continual
extensive and additional discovery t h e r e -
of. T r u t h h a d for him t h e immediate a t -
"Very inferior work, very inferior.
W h y the a u t h o r should have u n d e r t a k e n
To write this book
Is beyond comprehension.
How preferable it would have been
If a different theme h a d been chosen.
And if it had been differently handled
By a different author.
"To write a book
Requires special inheritance, education, tradition.
Severe discipline, a trained mind, an intellectual temperament,
A familiarity with the Latin, Welsh and Cambodian classics—
In a word, an equipment
Such as only a few of us possess.
This being so.
How could t h e generality expect to escape the pitfalls
T h a t are offered by this profession to the feet of the u n w a r y ?
"It is to be hoped that we shall
Have no further
Attempts at literature by amateurs.
"The grade I assign to this book is
F o r t y - n i n e and eight-tenths percent . . .
Next!" . . .
And I remembered the Knitting Women
Who implacably counted stitches while
The Pride of France mounted the scaffold, smiling.

THE SATURDAY REVIEW OF LITERATURE, published weekly by The Saturday Review Company, Inc., 25 West 45th Street, New York. N. Y.
Noble A. Cathcart, President and Treasurer; Henry Seidel Canby, Vice-President and Chairman; Amy Loveman, Secretary. Subscription, $3.50
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JLILY 4, 1936
Georgia Marches Through
GONE WITH THE WIND. By Margaret
Mitchell. New York: The Macmillan
Co. 1936. $3.
Reviewed by STEPHEN VINCENT BENET
T
HIS is war, and the wreck and r e -
building that follows it, told e n -
tirely from the woman's angle. We
have had other novels about the Civil
W a r by women, including Mary J o h n -
ston's excellent ones and Evelyn Scott's
remarkable "The Wave." But I don't
know of any other in which the interest
is so consistenty centered, not upon t h e
armies and the battles, the flags and the
famous names, b u t upon that other world
of women who heard the storm, waited
it out, succumbed to it or rebuilt after it,
according to their natures. It is in t h e
diaries and the memoirs—in Letitia Mac-
donald and Mrs. Roger A. Pryor and a
dozen more. But it has never been put
so completely in fiction before. And it is
that which gives "Gone
With the Wind" its origi-
nality and its individual
impact.
It is a long book and a
copious one, crowded with
character and incident, and
bound together with one
consistent thread, the strong
g r e e d i n e s s of S c a r l e t t
O'Hara who was bound to
get h e r way, in spite of the
hampering ideal of the
Perfect Southern G e n t l e -
woman and t h e ruin that
follows men's wars. She
didn't, quite, in the end. Jacket Drawing by George Carlson jor "Gone ivith the Wind
though she got a great
m a n y other things, including money and
power—but t h e tale of h e r adventures
and h e r struggles makes as readable,
full-bodied, and consistent a historical
novel as we have had in some time—a
novel which, in certain passages, as in
t h e flight from burning Atlanta, rises to
genuine heights. Miss Mitchell knows h e r
period, her people, and the red hill coun-
t r y of North Georgia—she knows the
clothes and the codes and the little dis-
tinctions that m a k e for authenticity. Tara
is a working plantation, not a w h i t e -
porched movie-set—and Atlanta is itself
and an individual city, not a fabulous
combination of all t h e first-family fea-
tures of Richmond, Charleston, and New
Orleans. The civilization of the a n t e -
bellum South was something a little more
than a picturesque gesture in gentility—
and to a public a little surfeited with
wistful reminiscence of the cape-jessa-
mine side of it, Miss Mitchell's rather
more realistic treatment should come as
a decided relief.
For they are here, the duelists and the
belles that we are accustomed to—but
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t h e r e is also Gerald O'Hara, the a d v e n -
turing Irishman whose quick, restless v i -
tality was able to build Tara into the p a t -
tern of a gentleman's plantation and
whose charm, together with his finely-
bred wife, got him accepted at last as one
of t h e County. A n d there is his daughter
Scarlett, who learned all the outward
signs and symbols of the Perfect G e n t l e -
woman, without ever, in the heart, s u b -
scribing to the code. We see h e r first in
the r a w blooming pride and ruthlessness
of youth, with a most unladylike d e t e r -
mination to m a r r y t h e sensitive, appeal-
ing, rather dawdling Ashley Wilkes
whether he happens to like it or not. We
see h e r last, after three marriages, none
of them to Ashley; bruised and hardened
by life b u t still defiant, still with the
strong, blind confidence of the dominant
that tomorrow or the next day she will
yet bend life completely to h e r will. It
is a consistent portrait and a vivid one.
And as consistent is the portrait of her
opposite, Melanie Wilkes, who never had
to think about being a lady because she
was one, and who k e p t to the end the
slight steel courage of the fine. The two
women, their innate difference, and the
curious bond between them are a d m i -
rably characterized. A n d it is they, with
Rhett Butler, the other nonconformist to
the genteel code, who m a k e the book—
for Ashley, though ably sketched, is
bound to be something of a walking g e n -
tleman and a romantic dream.
As background and accompaniment,
there is the breakdown of a civilization
and the first tentative steps at its r e -
building. Miss Mitchell, as I have said,
attempts no battle-pieces, b u t t h e grind
of the w a r is there, the patriotic fairs and
the slow killing of friend and acquaint-
ance, the false news and the true, the
hope deferred and the end and the
strangeness after the end. When Scarlett
and Melanie, fleeing from Atlanta before
the approach of Sherman's army, r e t u r n
to the O'Hara plantation, they return,
quite literally, to a ruined world. T h a t July, it should reach the wide audience
was the way it was, and Miss Mitchell's
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description of Scarlett's frenzied, tireless
attempt to rebuild some semblance of life
and vigor into Tara is one of the most
fascinating sections of h e r novel. The
young m e n w e r e dead in the war, t h e
land wasted, the field-hands gone. A n d
a plantation, u n d e r those conditions, was
about as easy a place to live in as a b a t -
tleship m mid-ocean without its crew.
But Scarlett bullied for it, slaved for it,
and starved for it—and resolved, with
bleak determination, that, come w h a t
might to the old code of gentility, she,
Scarlett O'Hara, would never be h u n g r y
again.
How she made h e r determination good
and what paths h e r determination led
h e r through form the theme of the last
sections of the book. I shall not spoil
Miss Mitchell's plot by recounting it in
detail, for it is a good one. But her p i c -
t u r e of the early days of Reconstruction
and the tainted society of scalawags and
carpetbaggers through which Scarlett
moved with Rhett Butler is quite as vivid
as h e r picture of the w a r years. T h r o u g h -
out, she draws h e r distinctions with a
sure hand. The extraordinary episode of
the rescue of t h e e x - C o n -
federates by the testimony
of Belle Watling and h e r
girls may not please Miss
Mitchell's Atlanta audience
b u t it has the convincing
ring of folk-lore. A n d t h e
post-war attitude of a dozen
different types of h u m a n
being, from Rhett Butler's
to Ashley Wilkes's, is surely
and deftly done—as is t h e
amazing incident of Archie
the ex-convict, who acted
as chaperone and body-
guard to the ladies of A t -
lanta during Reconstruc-
tion days.
It is only one of a score of such inci-
dents, for Miss Mitchell paints a broad
canvas, and an exciting one. And, in spite
of its length, the book moves swiftly and
smoothly—a t h r e e - d e c k e r with all sails
set. Miss Mitchell has lost neither h e r
characters in h e r background nor h e r
background in h e r characters, and h e r
full-blooded story is in the best t r a d i -
tions of the historical novel. It is a good
novel rather than a great one, by the i m -
palpables that divide good work from
great. And there is, to this reviewer, p e r -
haps unjustly, the shadow of another
green-eyed girl over Scarlett O'Hara—as
Rhett Butler occasionally shows traces
both of St. Elmo and Lord Steyne and
Melanie's extreme nobility tends to drift
into Ameliaishness h e r e and there. N e v e r -
theless, in "Gone With the Wind," Miss
Mitchell has written a solid and vividly
interesting story of war and recon-
struction, realistic in detail and told
from an original point of view—and, as
the Book-of-the-Month selection for
it very genuinely deserves.