The Green Overcoat

"The Green Overcoat" is and pretends to be nothing but a piece of amusing foolery. But when a Belloc and a Chesterton collaborate in nonsense, something is "bound to drop." Mr. Chesterton, to be sure, appears here only in the new ro1e of illustrator, but he does a very good job. His drawings belong to no recognizable school or manner, and we are grateful for this as well as for the fact that they actually illustrate the text-a thing which professional illustrators seldom stoop to. He must have had almost as much fun doing the pictures as Mr. Belloc had spinning the yarn. It is a blithe fantasy, in which, thank Heaven, there is not a word of sense. A number of ridiculous things happen to a number of ridiculous persons, and Mr. Belloc conveys them to us with the careless gusto of an after-dinner intimate. It all begins with the purloining by a Professor of Psychology of a magnificent green overcoat belonging to a rich retired merchant. It is the kind of overcoat which brings misfortune to all illegal possessors, and only blesses the original owner. The Professor is pretty roughly handled by fate, becomes a forger and an impostor, and is saved from public exposure and disgrace only by an ingenious turn of chance which makes silence very much to the interest of the overcoat's rightful owner. The Professor is left by the adventure the reputed possessor of a considerable fortune, and a revered authority on psychic phenomena. I love Mr. Belloc's blithe and casual conclusion. Summing up with a row of "hows," he concludes: ". . . How Professor Higginson was compelled for many years to review the wildest books about spooks, and to lecture till he was thin as a rail (often for nothing) upon the same subject-all these things you will have to read in some other book, which I most certainly do not mean to write, and which I do not think anybody else will write for you. . . "
show more