ABSTRACT
Reginald Arkell’s parodic variation on Chesterton’s air identifies, in the latter remark, the beam in G. K. Chesterton’s own eye—a comparably unwitting lapse into unreflective thinking, which the detective-parodist boasts of having rooted out. Hermes is also ‘the god of commerce, the god of profit—lawful and unlawful’ a combination of pedagogic play and persiflage that accords with the Edwardian reception of Chesterton’s buffoonery. Wyndham Lewis’s lingering irritation over the Times review would surely have been reawakened by Chesterton’s bathetic depiction of Marinetti as a harmless practical joker. Lewis’s bellicosity also reflects the burgeoning gang mentality of the Men of 1914. Lewis and Ezra Pound portrayed themselves as atavistic throwbacks to a more vital time, in which artistic rivalries carried a boisterous energy lacking from the etiolated landscape of post-Edwardian British culture. As Lewis puts it in BLAST, he has assembled a collective of ‘primitive mercenaries in the modern world’.
