He sees no more, but rides out doubtfully to his last war on a tall grey horse at dawn.
"And all the while on White Horse Hill
The horse lay long and wan,
The turf crawled and the fungus crept,
And the little sorrel, while all men slept,
Unwrought the work of man....
And clover and silent thistle throve,
And buds burst silently,
With little care for the Thames Valley
Or what things there might be."
And the King took London Town.
I have given enough illustrations to show the masculine strength and virility of this amazing poem. We read G. K. Chesterton for his wit, for his brilliance, for his delightful paradoxes, for his sanity and wholesomeness, but we read him most of all for his brave creed, for his defence of Christianity and his love for the eternal values of honour, uprightness, courage, loyalty and devotion, for his steadfast adherence to whatsoever things are of good report.
XI
E. M. FORSTER
This is really a chapter about one book, not about a man. It is quite true that Mr Forster has written a number of novels, but he is only remembered by one and that is a decade old. He is a very skilful and careful artist and interested in classical myth rather more than he is in us: he is a scholar with a good deal of the poetic in him; when he lets his thought dwell on us poor moderns his satiric vein appears predominant, though he too, like the rest of us, had to let the autobiographical have its way in two novels: A Room with a View and the schoolmaster's book, The Longer Journey, give us, if we want to know them, many facts about himself, but wiser people will plump for Howard's End and forget the others—only hoping that he will soon give us something more in that vein.
There was a slight flutter in our dovecotes when we saw the announcement of a novel by him early in 1920, but The Syren is not a novel and is not new. It is a delicious trifle, artistically perfect ... but from a man who can give us real men of the type of Leonard Bast we want no chatter about blue grottoes, however perfect.