There is a cartoon by Beerbohm somewhere showing a distended G.K. Chesterton banging the table with his fist and saying he'd 'had enough of all this bloody nonsense'. It seems surprising now, but for peaceful humanitarians like Beerbohm Chesterton represented a very definite threat to the liberal pieties of the status quo. So did Kipling, whom Beerbohm really feared and hated. Gissing gloated that Barrack Room Ballads showed the real right savagery that was about to burst on the world: and that too now seems a surprising judgment. Yeats is more plausible when he hailed Jarry's Ubu Roi as evangelist of the Savage God who was to come. But in retrospect the prophecies of apocalyptic brutality, the day when all civilised pretence shall have its end, seem, where the writers who made them are concerned, to have gone off rather at half-cock. Nietzsche is the first in that field: the rest nowhere.

LRB 22 June 1989 | PDF Download