SOURCE: Review of The Man Who Was Thursday, in The Dial, Chicago, Vol. XLV, No. 520, August 16, 1908, p. 89.

The longtime literary editor of several Chicago publications, Payne reviewed books for twenty-three years at the Dial, one of America's most influential journals of literature and opinion in the early twentieth century. In the following review, he faults The Man Who Was Thursday for its improbable premises.

Among our audacious latter-day sophists, who so neatly make the worse appear the better reason, Mr. Chesterton is gaining a high place. Indeed, he may almost dispute the honors of leadership with the priest-in-chief of the cult of paradox, Mr. G. Bernard Shaw. His latest "budget of paradoxes" takes the form of a novel—or, rather, of a fantastic invention, which has to be described as fiction because it bears no conceivable relation to reality. Even the author balks at his own imaginings, and...