"Mr Chesterton was not mistaken in his vocation when he set out to write stories. He is a born story-teller, which is quite a different thing from being a born novelist. The old trade of story-telling is, as he himself has said, a much older thing than the modern art of fiction. The Oriental who spread his carpet in the marketplace, the medieval bard who sang a ballad at his master's feast, made no appeal to that curiosity about the varieties of the human soul which is increasingly the inspiration of the modern novel. If he touched on human psychology at all he dealt only with those primal passions and desires which are common to all normal men. But, for the interest of his art, he depended simply upon his capacity to tell a good story, and to tell it well. In the last resort, Mr. Chesterton's novels depend for their interest on the same power."