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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, by Patrick
+Braybrooke
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Gilbert Keith Chesterton
+
+
+Author: Patrick Braybrooke
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 19, 2008  [eBook #27569]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON***
+
+
+E-text prepared by David Clarke, Meredith Bach, and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
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+
+
+
+
+
+GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON
+
+By the Same Author
+
+ODDMENTS
+SUGGESTIVE FRAGMENTS
+
+
+[Illustration: _G. K. CHESTERTON_
+
+_Photograph reproduced by kind permission of Messrs. Speaight Ltd.,
+London_]
+
+
+GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON
+
+by
+
+PATRICK BRAYBROOKE
+
+With an Introduction by Arthur F. Thorn
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+London, MCMXXII
+The Chelsea Publishing Company
+16 Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea
+
+Printed at
+The Curwen Press
+Plaistow, E. 13
+
+
+
+
+_Preface_
+
+
+It is certain that up to a point in the evolution of Self most people
+find life quite exciting and thrilling. But when middle age arrives,
+often prematurely, they forget the thrill and excitements; they become
+obsessed by certain other lesser things that are deficient in any kind
+of Cosmic Vitality. The thrill goes out of life: a light dies down and
+flickers fitfully; existence goes on at a low ebb--something has been
+lost. From this numbed condition is born much of the blind anguish of
+life.
+
+It is one of the tragedies of human existence that the divine sense of
+wonder is eventually destroyed by inexcusable routine and more or less
+mechanical living. Mental abandon, the exercise of fancy and
+imagination, the function of creative thought--all these things are
+squeezed out of the consciousness of man until his primitive enjoyment
+of the mystical part of life is affected in a very serious way.
+
+Nothing could be more useful, therefore, than to write a book about a
+man who has done more than any other living writer to stimulate and
+preserve the primitive sense of wonder and joy in human life. Gilbert
+Keith Chesterton has never lost mental contact with the cosmic
+simplicity of human existence. He knows, as well as anybody has ever
+known, that the life of man goes wrong simply because we are too lazy to
+be pleased with simple, fundamental things.
+
+We grow up in our feverish, artificial civilization, believing that the
+real, satisfying things are complex and difficult to obtain. Our lives
+become unnaturally stressed and tormented by the pitiless and incessant
+struggle for social conditions which are, at best, second-rate and
+ultimately disappointing.
+
+G. K. Chesterton would restore the primitive joys of wonder and
+childlike delight in simple things. His ideal is the _real_, not the
+merely impossible. Unlike most would-be saviours of the race, he seeks
+not to merge a new humanity into a brand new glittering civilization. He
+would have us awaken once more to the ancient mysteries and eternal
+truths. He would have us turn back in order to progress.
+
+Science makes us proud, but it does not make us happy. Efficiency makes
+us slaves--we have forgotten the truth about freedom. Success is our
+narcotic deity, and weans more men into despair than failure; for, as
+G.K.C. has said, 'Nothing fails like Success.' We have yet to rediscover
+the spiritual health that comes with a clear recognition of the part
+that life cannot be great until it is lived madly and wildly. We have to
+learn all over again that grass really is green, and the sky, at times,
+very blue indeed.
+
+                       ARTHUR F. THORN
+
+                          (_Author of 'Richard Jefferies'_),
+                             _Assistant-Director of Studies,
+                               London School of Journalism._
+
+
+
+
+_Author's Note_
+
+
+This book is the outcome of many and repeated requests to the author to
+write it. While realizing the difficulties involved, he feels that the
+opportunities he has enjoyed give him at least some qualifications for
+the task, for not only is he a kinsman of Mr. Chesterton, but also has
+spent much time in his company.
+
+The book aims to be a popular study of the Writer and the Man. It is
+dedicated to lovers of the works of G.K.C. and to the wider public who
+wish to know about one of the most brilliant minds of the day.
+
+                                                      PATRICK BRAYBROOKE.
+
+ _46 Russell Square, W.C. 1_
+           1922.
+
+
+
+
+_Contents_
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                     PAGE
+
+    I THE ESSAYIST                               1
+
+   II DICKENS                                   15
+
+  III THACKERAY                                 29
+
+   IV BROWNING                                  42
+
+    V CHESTERTON AS HISTORIAN                   57
+
+   VI THE POET                                  67
+
+  VII THE PLAYWRIGHT                            76
+
+ VIII THE NOVELIST                              79
+
+   IX CHESTERTON ON DIVORCE                     90
+
+    X 'THE NEW JERUSALEM'                       96
+
+   XI MR. CHESTERTON AT HOME                    99
+
+  XII HIS PLACE IN LITERATURE                  105
+
+ XIII G.K.C. AND G.B.S.                        113
+
+  XIV CONCLUSION                               119
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter One_
+
+THE ESSAYIST
+
+
+It is extremely difficult in the somewhat limited space of a chapter to
+give the full attention that should be given to such a brilliant and
+original essayist (which is not always an _ipso facto_ of brilliant
+essayists) as Chesterton. Essayists are of all men extremely elastic.
+Occasionally they are dull and prosy, very often they are obscure, quite
+often they are wearisome. The only criticism which applies adversely to
+Chesterton as an essayist is that he is very often--and I rather fear he
+likes being so--obscure. He is brilliant in an original manner, he is
+original in a brilliant way; scarcely any thought of his is not
+expressed in paradox. What is orthodox to him is heresy to other people;
+what is heresy to him is orthodox to other people; and the surprising
+fact is that he is usually right when he is orthodox, and equally right
+when he is heretical. An essayist naturally has points of view which he
+expresses in a different way to a novelist. A novelist, if he adheres to
+what a novel should be--that is, I think, a simple tale--does not
+necessarily have a particular point of view when he starts his book. An
+essayist, on the other hand, starts with an idea and clothes it. Of
+course, Chesterton is not an essayist in the really accepted manner of
+an essayist. He is really more a brilliant exponent of an original point
+of view. In other words, he essays to knock down opinions held by other
+essayists, whether writers or politicians. It would be manifestly absurd
+to praise Chesterton as being equal to Hazlitt, or condemn him as being
+inferior to J.S. Mill. Comparisons are usually odious, which is
+precisely the reason so much use is made of them. In this case any
+comparison is not only odious; it is worse, it is merely futile, for
+the very simple fact that there has been no essayist ever quite like
+Chesterton, which is a compliment to him, because it proves what every
+one who knows is assured, that he is unique.
+
+There are, of course, as is to be expected, people who do not like his
+essays. The reason is not far to seek, as in everything else people set
+up for themselves standards which they do not like to see set aside.
+Consequently people who had read Lamb, Hazlitt, Hume, and E.V. Lucas
+astutely thought that no essayist could be such who did not adhere to
+the style of one of these four. Therefore they were a little alarmed and
+upset when there descended upon them a strange genius who not only upset
+all the rules of essay writing, but was at the same time acclaimed by
+all sections of the Press as one of the finest essayists of the day.
+
+With the advent of Chesterton the essay received a shock. It had to
+realize that it was a larger and wider thing than it had been before. As
+it had been almost insular, so it became international; as it had been
+almost theological in its orthodoxy, so it became in its catholicity
+well-nigh heretical. Which is the best possible definition of a heresy?
+It is the expanding of orthodoxy or the lessening of it. Thus Chesterton
+was a pioneer. He gave to the essay a new impetus--almost, we might say,
+a 'sketch' form; it dealt with subjects not so much in a dissertation as
+in a dissection. Having dissected one way so that we are quite sure no
+other method would do, he calmly dissects again in the opposite manner,
+leaving us gasping, and finding that there really are two ways of
+looking at every question--a thing we never realize till we think
+about it. I have in this chapter taken five of Chesterton's most
+characteristic books of essays, displaying the enormous depth of his
+intellect, the vast range of subject, the unique use of paradox. Of
+these five books I have again taken rather necessarily at random
+subjects depicting the above Chestertonian attributes, with an attempt
+to give some idea of what it really means when we say that he is an
+essayist.
+
+That Chesterton's book of essays, entitled 'Heretics,' should have an
+introductory and a concluding chapter on the importance of orthodoxy is
+exactly what we should expect to find. There is a great deal of what is
+undeniably true in this book; there is also, I venture to think, a good
+deal that is undeniably untrue. I do not think it is unfair to say that
+in some respects Chesterton allows his cleverness to lead him to certain
+errors of judgment, and a certain levity in dealing with matters that
+are to a number of people so sacred that to reinterpret them is almost
+to blaspheme.
+
+I am thinking of the chapter in this book that is a reply to Mr. McCabe,
+an ex-Roman Catholic, who, being a keen logician, is now a rationalist.
+He accuses Chesterton of joking with the things _de profundis_.
+
+Certain clergymen have also taken exception to Chesterton's writings on
+the ground of this supposed levity. It is merely that he sees that the
+Bible has humour, because it has said that 'God laughed and winked.' I
+do not think he intends to offend, but for many people any idea of
+humour in the Bible is repugnant, and this view is not confined to
+clergymen.
+
+In an absolutely charming chapter Chesterton writes of the literature of
+the servant girl, which is really the literature of Park Lane. It is the
+literature of Park Lane, for the very obvious reason that it is probably
+never read there; but the literature is about Park Lane, and is read by
+those who may live as near it as Balham or Surbiton. What he contends,
+and rightly, is that the general reader likes to hear about an
+environment outside his own. It is inherent in us that we always really
+want to be somewhere else; which is fortunate, as it makes it certain
+that the world will never come to an end through a universal
+contentment. It has been said that contentment is the essence of
+perfection. It is equally true that the essence of perfection is
+discontent, a striving for something else. This, I think, Chesterton
+feels when he says of the penny novelette that it is the literature to
+'teach a man to govern empires or look over the map of mankind.'
+
+Rudyard Kipling finds a warm spot in Chesterton's heart, but he is a
+little too militaristic, which is exactly what he is not. Kipling loves
+soldiers, which is no real reason why he should be disliked as a
+militarist. Many a servant girl loves a score of soldiers, she may even
+write odes to her pet sergeant, but she is not necessarily a militarist.
+Rudyard Kipling likes soldiers and writes of them. He does not, as
+Chesterton lays to his charge, 'worship militarism.' He accuses Kipling
+of a want of patriotism, which is about as absurd as accusing Chesterton
+of a love of politics. But when he says that Kipling only knows England
+as a place, he is on safe ground, because England is something that is
+not bound by the confines of space.
+
+Not being exactly a champion of Kipling, Chesterton turns to a different
+kind of man, George Moore, and has nothing to say for him beyond that he
+writes endless personal confessions, which most people do if there are
+those who will read them. But not only this, poor George Moore 'doesn't
+understand the Roman Catholic Church, he doesn't understand Thackeray,
+he misunderstands Stevenson, he has no understanding of Christianity.'
+It is, in fact, a hopeless case, but it is also possible that Chesterton
+has not troubled to understand George Moore.
+
+Mr. Bernard Shaw is, so Chesterton contends, a really horrible eugenist,
+because he wants to get a super-man who, having more than two legs, will
+be a vastly superior person to a man. Chesterton loves men. He tells us
+why St. Peter was used to found the Church upon. It was because he 'was
+a shuffler, a coward, and a snob--in a word, a man.' Even the
+Thirty-Nine Articles and the Councils of Trent have failed to find a
+better reason for the founding of the Church. It is a defence of the
+fallibility of the Church, the practical nature of that Body, an
+organization founded by a Man who had Divine powers in a unique way and
+was God.
+
+Presumably, then, the mistake of Shaw is that instead of trying to
+improve man he wishes to invent a kind of demi-god.
+
+Chesterton has a great deal to say for Christmas; in fact, he has no
+sympathy for those superior beings who find Christmas out of date. Even
+Swinburne and Shelley have attacked Christianity in the grounds of its
+melancholy, showing a lamentable forgetfulness that this religion was
+born at a time that had always been a season of joy. Chesterton is
+annoyed with them, and is sure that Swinburne did not hang up his socks
+on Christmas Eve, nor did Shelley. I wonder whether Chesterton hangs up
+his socks on the eve of Christmas?
+
+'Heretics' is a book that deals with a great number of subjects
+universal in their scope. The writing is at times too paradoxical,
+leading to obscurity of thought. There are splendid passages in this
+book, which is, when all is said, brilliantly original, even if at times
+a little puzzling.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+'Orthodoxy' is, I think, one of the most important of Chesterton's
+books. The lasting importance of a book depends not so much on its
+literary qualities or on its popularity, but rather on the theme
+handled.
+
+There are really two central themes handled in this book. One is of
+Fairyland, the other is of the defence of Christianity; not that it is
+either true or false, but that it is rational, or the most
+shuffle-headed nonsense ever set to delude the human race. The method of
+apology that Chesterton takes is one that would cause the average
+theological student to turn white with fear.
+
+The theological colleges, excellent as they are in endeavouring to train
+efficient laymen into equally efficient priests, usually assume that the
+best way to know about Christianity is to study Christian books. It is
+the worst way, because these books are naturally biased in favour of it.
+It is better to study any religion by seeing what the attackers have to
+say against it. Then a personal judgment can be formed.
+
+This is, I feel, the method that Chesterton adopts in his deep and
+original treatise, 'Orthodoxy,' which is more than an essay and less
+than a theological work.
+
+The Chestertonian contention is that philosophers like Schopenhauer and
+Nietzsche have embarked on the suicide of thought, and that a later
+disciple to this self-destruction is Bernard Shaw.
+
+In the same way these pseudo philosophers have attacked the Christian
+religion, 'tearing the soul of Christ into silly strips labelled
+altruism and egoism. They are alike puzzled by His insane magnificance
+and His insane meekness.'
+
+As I have said, the method to realize the worth of Christianity is to
+read all the attacks on it. This is what Chesterton does. In doing so he
+discovers that these attacks are the one thing that demonstrate the
+strength of Christianity. Because the attackers reject it upon reasons
+that are contradictory to each other. Thus some complain that it is a
+gloomy religion; others go to the opposite extreme and accuse it of
+pointing to a state of perpetual chocolate cream; yet again it is
+attacked on grounds of effeminancy, it is upbraided as being fond of a
+sickly sentimentalism.
+
+Thus it is attacked on opposite grounds at once. It is condemned for
+being pessimistic, it is blamed for being optimistic. From this position
+Chesterton deduces that it is the only rational religion, because it
+steers between the Scylla of pessimism and avoids the Charybdis of a
+facile optimism. Regarding presumably the early Church she has also kept
+from extremes. She has ignored the easy path of heresy, she has adhered
+to the adventurous road of orthodoxy. She has avoided the Arian
+materialism by dropping a Greek Iota; she has not succumbed to Eastern
+influences, which would have made her forget she was the Church on earth
+as well as in heaven. With tremendous commonsense she has remained
+rational and chosen the middle course, which was one of the cardinal
+virtues of the ancient Greek philosophers.
+
+The Christian religion is, then, rational because attacked along
+irrational grounds; the Church is also reasonable because she has not
+been swayed by the attraction of heresy nor listened to the glib
+fallacies of those who always want to make her something more or
+something less.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+The other and lesser contention of the book is the wisdom of the land of
+the Fairies. This is, Chesterton feels, the land where is found the
+philosophy of the nursery that is expressed in fairy tales--tales that
+every grown-up should read at Christmas.
+
+Fairyland is for Chesterton the sunny land of commonsense. It is more,
+it is a place that has a very definite religion; it is, in fact, really
+the child's land of Christ. Take the lesson of Cinderella, says
+Chesterton; it is really the teaching of the Prayer Book that the humble
+shall be exalted, because humility is worthy of exaltation.
+
+Or the Sleeping Beauty. Is it not the significance of how love can
+bridge time? The prince would have been there to wake the princess had
+she slept a thousand instead of a hundred years.
+
+Yet again the land of the Fairies is the abode of reason. If Jack is the
+son of a miller, then a miller is the father of Jack. It is no good in
+Fairyland trying to prove that two and two do not make four, but it is
+quite possible to imagine that the witch really did turn the unlucky
+prince into a pig. After all, such a procedure is not a monopoly of the
+fairies. Lesser persons than princes have been turned into pigs, not by
+the wand of a witch, but by the wand of good or bad fortune.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+'Orthodoxy' is probably the sanest book that Chesterton has ever
+written. It is, I venture to think, the work that will gain for him
+immortality. It is a book on the greatest of themes, the reasonableness
+of the Christian religion. There have been many books written to attack
+the Christian religion, equally many to defend it, but Chesterton has
+made his apology for the religion on original grounds--the
+contradictories of the detractors of it. 'Orthodoxy' goes alone with
+Christ into the mountain, and the eager multitudes receive the real
+philosophy of Chesterton.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+The child who has eaten too much jam and feels that too much of a good
+thing is a truism is rather like the philosopher who, having studied
+everything, comes to the sad conviction that there is something wrong
+with the world. The child finds that large quantities of jam are a
+delusion; the philosopher discovers that the world is even more wrong
+than he thought it was.
+
+Sitting in his study, Chesterton, looking out on the garden which is the
+world, discovers that there is something wrong with it, and it is caused
+by the machinations of the 1,500 odd millions of people who, like ants,
+crawl about its surface. 'What's wrong with the World?' is the result,
+and a very entertaining book it is. Like many other sociological
+treatises it leaves us still convinced that the world is wrong, because
+we don't know what we really want.
+
+The pessimist is convinced that the world is a bad place, the optimist
+is sure that it can be good. That is the point of the book. Chesterton
+has his own ideas of what is wrong, and he says so with astonishing
+paradox.
+
+When this book was written, Feminism was demanding votes, and, not
+getting them at once, became naughty, and tied itself to the House of
+Commons or pushed policemen over. Chesterton devotes a large section of
+this book to demanding what is the mistake of Feminism.
+
+'The Feminists probably agree that womanhood is under shameful tyranny
+in the shops and mills. I want to destroy this tyranny. They (the
+Feminists) want to destroy womanhood.' They do this by attempting to
+drive women into the world and turn them away from the home. This is
+what is wrong with the woman's world: they have it that the home is
+narrow, that the world is wide. The converse is the truth: woman is the
+star of the home. It is a pity if she has to make chains--significant
+word--at Cradley Heath.
+
+Education is not for Chesterton an unqualified success; there is a
+mistake about it somewhere. In fact, there is 'no such thing as
+education.' Education is not an object, it is a 'transmission' or an
+'inheritance.' It means that a certain standard of conduct is passed on
+from generation to generation. The keynote of education for Chesterton
+is undoubtedly dogma, and dogma is certainly the result of a narrowing
+tendency.
+
+At this present time there is a controversy about the use of our public
+schools. Whenever a harassed editor in Fleet Street cannot think what to
+put in those two spare columns, he works up a 'stunt' on the use or
+otherwise of the public schools. This is always exciting, as the public
+schools hardly ever see the controversy, being blissfully immersed in
+the military strategy of Hannibal or the political intrigues of the
+Caesars. Thus the controversy is conducted by those who generally think
+that commerce is superior to Greek, money-grubbing to good manners.
+
+Even Chesterton must say something about these schools that are the
+backbone of England. Unfortunately he thinks that they are weakening the
+country, that the headmasters 'are teaching only the narrowest of
+manners.' But the public schools 'manufacture gentlemen; they are
+factories for the making of aristocrats.' If he is right, the more of
+these schools there are the better it is for the country.
+
+It is well that he is not averse to Greek. In these days the classics
+are looked upon as waste of time. Political economy and profiteering are
+more useful. As he says, a man of the type of Carnegie would die in a
+Greek city. I am not sure whether this is not unfair. The real use of
+Greek is that it teaches culture. There is use in Plato's philosophy; it
+is quite as useful as the knowledge acquired that results in peers made,
+not born. I don't think Chesterton understands the public schools at
+all well; they are both bad and good, but at least they are very
+English.
+
+He hasn't a great deal to say for Imperialism. Imperialism is a very
+difficult ethic; it is not easy to say whether it is a selfish or an
+unselfish policy.
+
+Thus we may quite conceivably pat ourselves on the back and say that, as
+English rule is good for natives, it is only right that we should keep
+India; but we might find that an equally good and more popular reason
+for doing so would be to prevent any one else having her. Thus our
+Imperial policy is a little selfish and a little unselfish.
+
+For Chesterton, Imperialism is something that is both weak and perilous.
+It is really, he contends, a false idealism which tends to try and make
+people locally discontented, contented with pseudo visions of distant
+realms where the cities are of gold, where blue skies are never hidden
+by yellow fog. But is it a false idealism? If it is, it is that
+conception which has made men leave their homes in England to build up
+the Imperial Empire which is the daughter of the Great Imperial Island.
+The vision may not be always useful, but Imperialism has done much to
+make England and Empire synonymous.
+
+Business is, according to Chesterton, a nasty thing that will not wait.
+It hates leisure, it has no use for brotherhood, it is one of the things
+that is wrong in the world--not, of course, that business is wrong in
+itself, but the method. Thus he disagrees that if a soap factory cannot
+be run on brotherhood lines the brotherhood must be scrapped. He would
+have the converse to be better.
+
+He contends that it is better to be without soap than without society.
+As a matter of fact, society without soap would be an abomination.
+Society without any brotherhood would soon cease to be a society at all.
+Utopia is a little soap, a little society, with a flavouring of
+brotherhood in each.
+
+Another and obviously good reason that the world is wrong is that it is
+only half finished. This is a matter for extreme optimism; it is the
+one great thing that makes it certain that the world will be found all
+right if it comes to an end. That is, if it delays long enough for the
+Irish question to be settled.
+
+This is what Chesterton contends in this fine book, that reforms are not
+reforms at all, rather the same things dressed up in other clothes.
+Values are set up on false standards. Women in trying to become
+emancipated are likely to become slaves; the fear of the past is given
+over to a too delicate introspection of the probable vices and virtues
+of generations not yet born.
+
+Imperialism is liable to a false idealism, drawing men from Seven Dials
+to find Utopia in Brixton. The public schools are weakening the country
+in some respects. Education is not education at all; in fact, we really
+must start the wrong world over again. I don't quite see where
+Chesterton proposes we are to start, or exactly how, whether backwards
+or forwards. Perhaps, as in 'Orthodoxy,' the middle course is the happy
+and safe one.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+'Tremendous Trifles' is a Chestertonian philosophy of the importance and
+interest of small things. It is a remarkable thing that we never see the
+things that we daily gaze upon. Chesterton finds scope for all kinds of
+subjects in this book, from a 'Piece of Chalk' to 'A Dragon's
+Grandmother.' Provided we believe in dragons, there is good reason to
+suppose that they have grandmothers. It is not so easy to write a good
+essay on the subject. Chesterton does so with great skill, and it makes
+it quite certain to be so intellectual as to hate fairies is a piteous
+condition.
+
+What he brings out in this particular essay is that what modern
+intellectualism has done is to make 'the hero extraordinary, the tale
+ordinary,' whereas the fairy tale makes 'the hero ordinary, the tale
+extraordinary.'
+
+In this book of short essays it is only possible to take a few, but care
+has been taken to attempt to show the enormous versatility of
+Chesterton's mind. It has been said quite wrongly that Chesterton cannot
+describe pathos. This is certainly untrue. He can so admirably describe
+humour that he cannot help knowing the pathetic, which is often so akin
+to humour. I am not sure that this ability to describe the melancholy is
+not to be seen in one of these essays that narrates how he travelled in
+a train in which there was a dead man whose end he never knew.
+
+Perhaps there is nothing more interesting than turning out one's
+pockets--all sorts of long forgotten mementoes cause a lump in the
+throat or a gleam in the eye; but it is very annoying, on arriving at a
+station where tickets are collected, to find everything that relates to
+your past twenty years of life and be unable to find the ticket that
+makes you a legitimate rider on the iron way. This is what Chesterton
+describes in a delightful essay.
+
+One day, so Chesterton tells us in the 'Riddle of the Ivy,' he happened
+to be leaving Battersea, and being asked where he was going, calmly
+replied to 'Battersea.' Which is really to say that we find our way to
+Brixton more eagerly by way of Singapore than by way of Kennington. In a
+few words, it is what we mean when we say, as every traveller says at
+times, 'Home, sweet home.' I fancy this is what Mr. Chesterton means. It
+is a beautiful thought--a fine love of the home, a strange understanding
+of the wish of the traveller who once more wishes to see the old cottage
+before he journeys 'across the Bar.'
+
+The sight of chained convicts being taken to a prison causes Chesterton
+to essay on the 'filthy torture' of our prisons, the whole system of
+which is a 'relic of sin.' Perhaps he is right! But is it that the
+prisons are wrong, or is it that society makes criminals? After all,
+convicts are chained that they shall not endure a worse penalty for
+attempted escape. At present prisons are as necessary to the State as
+milk is to a baby; the thing against them is that they turn criminal men
+into criminal devils.
+
+At his home in Beaconsfield, Chesterton has a wonderful toy theatre. He
+writes in this book a sketch about it. This toy theatre has a certain
+philosophy. 'It can produce large events in a small space; it could
+represent the earthquake in Jamaica or the Day of Judgment.' We must
+take Chesterton's word for it. I am not convinced that the toy theatre
+of Chesterton has added to philosophy; I don't think it has made any
+remarkable contribution to thought, nor is it, as he claims, more
+interesting and better than a West-end theatre; but I do believe that in
+having amused a few hundred children it has a place in the Book of
+Life--perhaps near the name of Santa Claus.
+
+While it is true that 'Tremendous Trifles' is not nearly as important as
+some of the Chesterton books, it is true to say that it is a remarkably
+pleasant book about small things that are really tremendous when we come
+to study them.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+'The Defendant' is, as the title suggests, a defence of all kinds of
+things that are usually attacked by other people.
+
+It takes a brave man to defend 'penny dreadfuls.' Chesterton assumes
+this role. He defends them on their remarkable powers of imagination.
+One has only to study Sexton Blake to discover the intricate psychology
+of that wondrous personality who can solve the foulest murder or unravel
+stories that the divorce courts would quail before.
+
+There is something to be said for the skeleton so long as he doesn't
+come out of his cupboard. Chesterton defends skeletons. 'The truth is
+that man's horror of the skeleton is not horror of death at all; it is
+that the skeleton reminds him that his appearance is shamelessly
+grotesque.' But he sees no objection to this at all. After all, he says,
+the frog and the hippopotamus are happy. Why, then, should man dislike
+it that his anatomy without flesh is inelegant?
+
+It is to be expected that Chesterton would write a defence of baby
+worship, because they are so 'very serious and in consequence very
+happy.' 'The humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of
+all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together.' Probably we are all agreed
+that the defence of baby worship is a desirable thing; possibly it is
+the only point upon which there is universal agreement with Chesterton.
+
+'The Defendant' is a series of papers that are light, but conceal a
+depth of thought behind them. They demonstrate that there is something
+to be said for everything which may be a slight solution of the eternal
+problem that theological professors are paid to try and discover, the
+problem of evil. It may be that there is really no such thing, but it
+would be disastrous to these professors to discover this, so the dear
+old problem goes on from year to year.
+
+As an essayist, Chesterton is never dull: the philosophy contained in
+his essays is not prosy. The only fault is that he is at times so clever
+that it is a little difficult to know what he means. But this really
+does not matter, as a shrewd critic of one of his books made it public
+through the Press that Chesterton did not know himself what he meant.
+But I wonder if he did really know?
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Two_
+
+DICKENS
+
+
+If there is fault to be found in Chesterton's masterly study of Charles
+Dickens it lies in the fact that in parts of the book the meaning is not
+always clear, or, rather, it is not always so at a first reading.
+Whether this may be justly termed a fault depends largely upon what the
+reader of a critical study demands.
+
+If he desires that he shall read Chesterton superficially and yet
+understand, he will be doomed to disappointment. Perhaps of all writers
+Chesterton must be read with the head between the hands, with a fierce
+determination that the meaning veiled in brilliant paradox shall be
+sought out.
+
+He is not only a keen critic, he is also a deliberate commentator. The
+difference is fundamental. The commentator builds upon the foundation
+the critic has erected; he does not merely state what he thinks about a
+book or character, rather he explains the criticism already made.
+
+This is the method adopted with regard to Dickens. Chesterton has
+written a commentary on the soul of Dickens, he has not in any strict
+sense written a biography; this was not necessary; the difficulty of
+Dickens lies in the interpretation of his work; his life, though having
+a great influence on his writings, has been written so often that
+Chesterton has refrained from building on 'another's foundation.' In a
+word, it is an intensely original work, far more than our critic's
+companion book on Browning.
+
+As was Browning born to a world in the throes of the aftermath of the
+French Revolution, so was Dickens. Chesterton lays great stress on the
+youth of Dickens; it is only right that he should do this; the early
+life of Dickens was probably responsible for the wonderful genius of his
+art. The blacking factory that nearly killed the physical Dickens gave
+birth to the literary Dickens. Dickens was, in fact, born at the
+psychological moment, which is not to say that we are born at the
+unpsychological moment, but that Dickens was born at a time that allowed
+his natural powers to be used to the best advantage.
+
+Chesterton feels this strongly. 'The background of the Dickens era was
+just that background that was eminently suitable to him'; it was a
+background that needed a Dickens as much as the pagan world, with all
+its Greek philosophies, had needed a Christ.
+
+He begins his study of Dickens with a keen survey of the Dickens period.
+'It was,' he says, 'a world that encouraged anybody to anything. And in
+England and literature its living expression was Dickens. It is useless
+for us to attempt to imagine Dickens and his life unless we are able to
+imagine his confidence in common men.'
+
+It is this supreme confidence in common men that was the keynote to the
+wonderful power of Dickens in making characters from those who were in a
+world sense undistinguished. On this position Chesterton lays great
+stress. It was this, he thinks, that made him an optimist. It was the
+same position that made Browning an optimist. It is the disbelief in the
+Divine image in Man that makes the cynic and the pessimist.
+
+Swift hated men because they were capable of better things but would not
+realize it. Dickens knew men were kings, though ordinary men; the result
+was that he loved humanity. It is a queer point of psychology that with
+the same wish two such minds as Swift and Dickens came to the extremes
+of the emotions of love and hate.
+
+In some ways Dickens was more than a maker of books, he was a maker of
+worlds; he tried to make 'not only a book but a cosmos.' This may be a
+curious and obscure kind of clericalism that popularly expresses itself
+as an effort to run with the hare and follow with the hounds, but is
+really an heroic attempt to see both sides of the question, and is not a
+cheap pandering after popularity.
+
+Many critics have disliked Dickens because of this tendency of
+universalism, a tendency liable to intrude on minds of a giant intellect
+and a ready sympathy. Chesterton does not think that Dickens was right
+in this attitude of universalism, and says so with, I think, a certain
+amount of cheap disdain. 'He was inclined to be a literary Whiteley, a
+universal provider.' Really Dickens wanted to have a say about
+everything, in which he is strangely like Chesterton.
+
+The result of this was a result that meant the greatest value: it meant
+and was 'David Copperfield.' The book was for Chesterton a classic, and
+it was so because it was an autobiography. It is in this work that
+Dickens makes his defence of the rather exaggerated situations in some
+of his books, for in this book Dickens proves that his greatest romance
+is based on the experiences of his own life. 'David Copperfield is the
+great answer of a romancer to the realists. David says in effect, "What!
+you say that the Dickens tales are too purple really to have happened.
+Why, this is what happened to me, and it seemed the most purple of all.
+You say that the Dickens heroes are too handsome and triumphant! Why, no
+prince or paladin in Ariosto was ever so handsome and triumphant as the
+head boy seemed to me walking before me in the sun. You say the Dickens
+villains are too black. Why, there was no ink in the Devil's inkstand
+black enough for my own stepfather when I had to live in the same house
+with him."'
+
+This is the point that Chesterton brings out so well. The Dickens
+characters are not overdrawn because, though they move between book
+covers, their originals have moved on the face of the earth; they have
+moved with Dickens and he has made them his own. His brilliant apology
+for this alleged 'overdrawing' is one of the most effective replies ever
+penned to superior Dickens detractors. It is effective because it is
+true; it is true because it is obvious that Dickens created that which
+lay hidden in his own mind, the misery of his factory days.
+
+It is, I think, with this view in mind that Chesterton pays so much
+attention to that period of Dickens' life which he spent in the blacking
+factory, with its crude noise, its blatant vulgarity, its vile language
+that left the small boy Dickens' sick, but with a sickness that
+discovered his literary genius. The factory was the germ that made the
+great writer. Chesterton is a true critic of Dickens because he has this
+somewhat singular insight of seeing the importance of the early miseries
+of Dickens' life with regard to their influence on his literary output
+and his queerly favoured delineation of common folks, the sort of people
+we always meet but hardly ever talk about because we are foolish enough
+to think them ordinary.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is from the account of the early life of Dickens that Chesterton
+gently leads us to the birth of the immortal Mr. Pickwick, that supreme
+Englishman who is a byword amongst even those who scarcely know Dickens.
+The birth pangs of the advent of Pickwick was a sharp quarrel 'that did
+no good to Dickens, and was one of those which occurred far too
+frequently in his life.'
+
+Without any hesitation for Chesterton, 'Pickwick Papers' is Dickens'
+finest achievement, which is a pleasant enough problem if we happen to
+remember that he also wrote 'David Copperfield.' Possibly it is really
+unfair to compare them. 'Pickwick Papers' is not in the strict sense a
+novel; 'David Copperfield' is a novel even if it is an autobiography. At
+any rate Pickwick was a fairy, and as fairies are pretty elastic he
+probably was in that category of beings, but he was even more a royal
+fairy, none other than the 'fairy prince.'
+
+In Pickwick, Dickens made a great discovery, which was that he could
+write ordinary stuff like the 'Sketches by Boz,' and also could produce
+Mr. Pickwick and write 'David Copperfield,' which was to say that
+Dickens discovered he had a good chance of being the Shakespeare of
+literature.
+
+'It is in "Pickwick Papers" that Dickens became a mythologist rather
+than a novelist; he dealt with men who were gods.' That is, no doubt,
+that they became household gods; in other words, as familiar as the
+characters of Shakespeare.
+
+There is one tremendous outstanding characteristic of Dickens which
+Chesterton brings out with considerable force. It is that above all
+things Dickens created characters. It is almost as if the setting of his
+books were on a stage where the environment changes but the essentials
+of the characters remain unchanged.
+
+The story is almost subordinated to the drawing of the principal
+character; it is almost a modern idea of the psychoanalytical kind of
+novel that our young novelists love to draw. But still there is the
+great difference that the characters of Dickens pursue there own way
+regardless of the trend of events round them.
+
+Naturally the modern novel is inferior to some of Dickens' works, but
+they do not deserve the hard things Chesterton says about them. Thus he
+remarks in passing that the modern novel is 'devoted to the bewilderment
+of a weak young clerk who cannot decide which woman he wants to marry or
+which new religion he believes in; we still give this knock-kneed cad
+the name of hero.'
+
+This is, I think, unfair. The modern novel is very often still a good
+healthy love tale; the hero is more often than not a gentleman who has
+not the brains to be a cad; his trouble about marriage is that he wants
+to marry the right woman to their mutual well being; he is neither a cad
+nor a hero, but an ordinary Englishman whom we need not walk half a mile
+to see; he usually marries a girl who can be seen in any suburb or at
+any church bazaar. I have dwelt on this at some length, as Chesterton
+has a tendency to despise modern novelists while being one himself.
+
+At this period, when 'Pickwick' had once and for all brought fame to
+Dickens, it will be interesting to see why Dickens attained the enormous
+popularity he did. He was, our critic thinks, a 'great event not only in
+literature but also in history.'
+
+He considers that Dickens was popular in a sense that we of the
+twentieth century cannot understand. In fact, he goes so far as to say
+that there are no really popular authors to-day.
+
+This is probably not entirely true. When we say an author is popular we
+do not mean that necessarily, as Chesterton seems to suggest, he is a
+'best seller'; rather we call him popular in the sense that a large
+number of people find pleasure in reading him, even if the subject is
+not a pleasant one. Dickens was popular in a different way: he was read
+by a public who wished his story might never end. They not only loved
+his books, they loved his characters even more. No matter that there
+might be five sub-stories running alongside of the main one, the central
+character retained the public affection. His characters were known
+outside their particular stories, and not only that, this was by no
+means confined to the principal ones.
+
+They were known, as Chesterton points out, as Sherlock Holmes is known
+to-day. But even so there is again a difference. People do not speak of
+the minor characters of Conan Doyle's tales as they do, for instance, of
+Smike.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is now convenient to turn to the Christmas literature of Dickens. I
+am convinced that Chesterton has very badly misconstrued the character
+of Scrooge, that delightful person whose one virtue was consistency.
+
+Above everything, Scrooge was consistent; he hated Christmas as we hate
+anything that does not agree with our temperament. Merry Christmas was
+nonsense to him because he did not know how to be merry. He was a cold,
+cynical bachelor, and at that, so far, was perfectly within the law,
+moral and legal.
+
+But Chesterton, by rather an unfortunate attempt to be too original, has
+turned him into a filthy hypocrite who needed no appearances of spirits
+whatever; for he says of Scrooge, 'He is only a crusty old bachelor, and
+had, I strongly suspect, given away turkeys secretly all his life.'
+
+When Chesterton says that Scrooge gave away turkeys secretly all his
+life it is merely saying that the whole attitude of Scrooge to life was
+a silly and unmeaning pose, which makes him ridiculous, and robs the
+'Christmas Carol' of all its real worth, that of the miraculous
+conversion of Scrooge.
+
+But, then, the actual story does not mean much for Chesterton: 'the
+repentance of Scrooge is highly improbable.' If it is true that Scrooge
+really did give away turkeys secretly, then it is quite obvious that
+Scrooge never did repent; he was past it. But I fancy that Chesterton
+has erred badly here; he has attempted without success to put a secret
+meaning into a simple and beautiful story.
+
+'Chimes' is, for Chesterton, an attack on cant. It was a story written
+by Dickens to protest against all he hated in the nature of
+oppression. Dickens hated the vulgar cant that only helps to bring
+self-advertisement: the ethic that the poor must listen to the rich, not
+because the rich are the best law-givers, but because society is at
+present so constituted that no other method can be adopted.
+
+Dickens loved the attitude the poor always take to Christmas; it is that
+attitude which is the proof that at its bedrock humanity is extremely
+lovable. Chesterton is entirely in agreement with Dickens on this
+matter. 'There is nothing,' he says, 'upon which the poor are more
+criticized than on the point of spending large sums on small feasts;
+there is nothing in which they are more right.'
+
+Dickens did not in any way forget that the real spirit of Christmas is
+to be found in the cheery group round the blazing fire. 'The Cricket on
+the Hearth' is a pleasant tale about all that we associate with
+Christmas, that very thing that has made Hearth and Christmas
+synonymous; yet Chesterton considers this one of the weakest of the
+Dickens' stories, which is a surprising criticism for a writer who
+really loves Christmas as he does.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+In a later period of Dickens, Chesterton informs us of his brief entry
+into the complex and exciting world that has its headquarters in Fleet
+Street. For a short period Dickens occupied the editorship of the _Daily
+News_, but the environment was not a very congenial one. Dickens was
+unsettled with that strange restlessness that seizes all literary men at
+some time or other. This was the time that saw the publication of
+'Dombey and Son.' Chesterton thinks that the essential genius found its
+most perfect expression in this work though the treatment is grotesque.
+This book is almost, so our critic thinks, 'a theological one: it
+attempts to distinguish between the rough pagan devotion of the father
+and the gentler Christian affection of the mother.'
+
+The grotesque manner of treatment of this work was as natural as the
+employment of the grotesque by Browning. Dickens must work in his own
+way, in the manner that suited his inmost soul; he could not be made to
+write to order. In a brilliant paradox Chesterton says of 'Dombey and
+Son': the 'story of Florence Dombey is incredible, although it is true,'
+which is what many people feel about Christianity. 'Dombey and Son' was
+the outlet for that curious psychology of Dickens which could get the
+best out of a pathetic incident by approaching it from a grotesque
+angle. It came, as Chesterton points out in his own inimitable way,
+'into the inner chamber by coming down the chimney.' Which demonstrates
+the ever nearness of pathos to humour, of the absurd to the pathetic.
+
+It will not be out of place to refer at this time to some of the defects
+with which people have charged Dickens. Chesterton does not agree with
+the critics on these points, but admits that these charges have been
+levelled against Dickens. It will be advisable to take one or two
+examples of these alleged flaws.
+
+There is that most popular thing of which Dickens is accused, that of
+exaggeration. Many people are quite incredulous that there could ever
+have existed such a character as Little Nell. Chesterton, however,
+thinks that Dickens did know a girl of this nature, and that Little Nell
+was based on her. Little Nell is not really more improbable than 'Eric,'
+the famous hero of Dean Farrar, and he was certainly based on a living
+boy.
+
+People who live in these enlightened days are piously shocked at the
+amount of drinking described by Dickens. Well-bred and garrulous ladies
+have shuddered at the scenes described, and have declared that Dickens
+was at least fond of the Bacchanalian element. So he was, but the reason
+was not that he loved hard drinking, but that, as our critic brings out,
+drinking was the symbol of hospitality as roast beef is the symbol of a
+Sunday in a thousand English rectories. As Dickens described the social
+life of England he could not leave out its most characteristic feature
+and shudder in pious horror that the red wine dyed old England a merry
+crimson.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+It would be no doubt an exaggeration to call Dickens a socialist. What
+he saw was that there was a mass of beings that was called humanity,
+that the two ends of the political pole were indifferent to this mass.
+The party to which a man gave his allegiance did not matter as long as
+that party worked for man's ultimate good. Chesterton is quite sure that
+Dickens was not a socialist; he was not the kind that ranted at street
+corners and dined in secret at the Ritz, nor was he of the kind who said
+all men are equal but I am a little better. He was a socialist in the
+sense that he hated oppression of any kind.
+
+'Hard Times' strikes a note that is a little short of being harsh. The
+reason that Dickens may have exaggerated Bounderby is that he really
+disliked him. The Dickensian characters undoubtedly suffered from their
+delineator's likes and dislikes.
+
+About this time Dickens wrote a book that was unique for him; it was a
+book that dealt with the French Revolution, and was called 'The Tale of
+Two Cities.' Chesterton does not think that Dickens really understood
+this gigantic upheaval; in fact, he says his attitude to it was quite a
+mistaken one. Even, thinks our critic, Carlyle didn't know what it
+meant. Both see it as a bloody riot, both are mistaken. The reason that
+Carlyle and Dickens didn't know all about it was that they had the good
+fortune to be Englishmen; a very good supposition that Chesterton has
+still something to learn of that Revolution.
+
+After all, the main point of 'The Tale of Two Cities' is the exquisite
+pathos of it. Whether its attitude to the French Revolution is
+absolutely accurate does not matter very much for the reader who is not
+a keen historical student.
+
+With 'Hard Times' and 'A Tale of Two Cities' Dickens has struck a graver
+note. This is peculiarly emphasized in 'Great Expectations.' This story
+is 'characterized by a consistency and quietude of individuality which
+is rare in Dickens.' It is really a book with a moral--that life in the
+limelight is not always synonymous with getting the best out of it.
+Really, the hero behaves in a sneakish manner. Probably Dickens doesn't
+like him, and the writer is still on the stern side.
+
+In 1864, so Chesterton tells us, Dickens was in a merrier mood, and
+published 'Our Mutual Friend,' a book that has, as our critic says, 'a
+thoroughly human hero and a thoroughly human villain.' This work is 'a
+satire dealing with the whims and pleasures of the leisured class.' But
+this is by no means a monopoly of the so-called idle rich: the
+hardworking middle and poorer classes have whims and pleasures in a like
+manner, but have not so much opportunity in indulging in them.
+
+As I have indicated, the story is not the principal part of the Dickens'
+literature; it is the drawing of characters to which he pays so much
+attention. It will not be out of place at this time to see what our
+critic has to say with regard to this tendency of Dickens. It is an
+essential of Dickens, and is therefore of vast import to any critique on
+him.
+
+The essence of Dickens, for Chesterton, is that he makes kings out of
+common men: those folks who are the ordinary people of this strange,
+fascinating world, those who have no special claim to a place in the
+stars, those who, when they die, do not have two lines in any but a
+local paper, those who are common but are never commonplace.
+
+There is a vast difference between the common and the commonplace, as
+Chesterton points out. Death is common to all, yet it is never
+commonplace; it is in its very essence a grand and noble thing, because
+it is a proof of our common humanity; it gives the lie that the Pope is
+of more importance than the dustman; it makes the busy editor equal to
+the newsboy shouting the papers under his office windows.
+
+The common man is he who does not receive any special distinction:
+universities do not compete to do him honour, his name is but mentioned
+in a small circle. These are those of whom Dickens wrote. 'It is,' says
+Chesterton, 'in private life that we find the great characters. They are
+too great to get into the public world.' They are people who are
+natural--natural in a sense that the holders of high office never can
+be. Dickens could only write of natural people, so he wrote of common
+men: 'You will find him adrift as an impecunious commercial traveller
+like Micawber; you will find him but one of a batch of silly clerks like
+Swiveller; you will find him as an unsuccessful actor like Crumples; you
+will find him as an unsuccessful doctor like Sawyer; you will always
+find the rich and reeking personality where Dickens found it among the
+poor.'
+
+Not only were the characters Dickens chose common men, they were also
+'great fools,' because Chesterton will have us believe that a man can
+be entirely great while he is entirely foolish. It is no doubt in the
+spiritual sense so admirably expressed in the Pauline Epistles, where
+'foolish in the eyes of the world but wise before God' is a condition
+that is of merit.
+
+'Mr. Toots is great because he is foolish.' He is great because he has a
+soul that glorifies his weak and foolish body, not that he is great
+because, _ipso facto_, he is foolish.
+
+There is a great and permanent value in the writings of Dickens. I
+cannot do better than quote our critic: 'If we are to look for lessons,
+here at least are the last and deepest lessons of Dickens. It is in our
+own daily life that we are to look for the portents and the prodigies.
+This is the truth, not merely of the fixed figures of our life, the
+wife, the husband, the fool that fills the day. Every day we neglect
+Tootses and Swivellers, Guppys and Joblings, Simmerys and Flashers. This
+is the real gospel of Dickens, the inexhaustible opportunities offered
+by the liberty and variety of man. It is when we pass our own private
+gate and open our own secret door that we step into the land of the
+giants.'
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+It will now be convenient to consider the question of the attitude of
+our critic to the 'Mystery of Edwin Drood,' that tale that has produced
+one of those literary mysteries that are so dear to a number of folks of
+the kind who would be disappointed were the problem to be finally
+solved. 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood' was cut short by the sudden death
+that fell upon Dickens on a warm June night some half century ago.
+
+For Chesterton the book 'might have proved to be the most ambitious that
+Dickens ever planned.' It is non-Dickensian in the sense that its value
+depends entirely on a story. The workmanship is very fine. The book was
+purely and simply a detective story. 'Bleak House' was the nearest
+approach to its style, but the mystery there was easy to unravel. It was
+as though Dickens wished in 'Edwin Drood' to make one last 'splendid
+and staggering' appearance before the curtain rang down, not to be rung
+up again until the last Easter morning.
+
+'Yes,' says Chesterton, 'there were many other Dickenses, 'an
+industrious Dickens, a public spirited Dickens, but the last one (that
+is Edwin Drood) was the great one. The wild epitaph of Mrs. Sapsea,
+"Canst thou do likewise?" should be the serious epitaph of Dickens.'
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is more than fifty years since Dickens died. What is the future of
+Dickens likely to be? At least, Chesterton has no doubt of the permanent
+influence of Dickens; he is as sure of immortality as is Shakespeare.
+The kings of the earth die, yet their works remain; the princes pass on
+but are not entirely forgotten; writers write and in their turn sleep;
+but there is that to which in every age we inscribe the word Immortal.
+It is enough to say that Dickens is immortal because he is Dickens.
+There is a further reason, that he proved what all the world had been
+saying, that common humanity is a holy thing. To quote Chesterton: 'He
+did for the world what the world could not do for itself.' Dickens'
+creation was poetry--it dealt with the elementals; it is therefore
+permanent.
+
+In final words he says, 'We shall not be further troubled with the
+little artists who found Dickens too sane for their sorrows and too
+clear for their delights. But we have a long way to travel before we get
+back to what Dickens meant; and the passage is a long, rambling English
+road, a twisting road such as Mr. Pickwick travelled.'
+
+'But the road leads to eternity, because the inn is at the end of the
+road, and at that inn is a goodly company of common men who are immortal
+because Dickens made them. Here we shall meet Dickens and all his
+characters, and when we shall drink again it shall be from great flagons
+in the tavern at the end of the world.'
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+What, then, is the essential part of Chesterton's study of Charles
+Dickens? It is certainly not a biography; it is for all practical
+purposes a keen study of what Dickens was, what he wrote, why he wrote
+as he did, why he has a place in literature no one else has.
+
+There are faults in the book--it would be a poor book if it had none. At
+times I think Chesterton allows his genius to overcome his critical
+judgment. Particularly is this so in his strange misconstruction of the
+character of Scrooge. But this merely demonstrates yet once more that
+Dickens, like Christ, is unique, because no one has ever completely
+understood him.
+
+The book is a tribute by a great writer to a greater writer, by a great
+man to a great man, by a complex personality to a complex personality;
+above all it is a tribute by a lover of the things of the 'doorstep' to
+a writer who has made the doorstep and the street the road to heaven,
+because the beings who pass along have been made immortal.
+
+When the critics of Dickens meet at the inn there will be none more
+worthy of a place close to the Master Writer than Chesterton.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Three_
+
+THACKERAY
+
+
+There are no doubt thousands of people who would be annoyed to be
+thought the reverse of well read who nevertheless know Thackeray only as
+a name. They know that he was a really great English novelist--they may
+even know that he lived as a contemporary of Dickens--but they do not
+know a line of any of his works.
+
+In lesser manner Dickens is unknown to very many people of the present
+day who could tell you intelligently of every modern book that is
+produced. The reason is, I think, one that is not so generally thought
+of as might be expected.
+
+It is often said that Thackeray and Dickens are out of date, that they
+have had their day, that this era of tube trains and other abominations
+cannot fall into the background of lumbering stage coaches.
+
+This is, I think, a profound and grave error. It is an error because it
+presupposes that human interest changes with the advent of different
+means of transport: that Squeers is no longer of interest because he
+would now travel to Yorkshire by the Great Northern Railway and would
+have lunch in a luncheon car instead of inside a four-horse stage coach.
+
+The fundamental reason that modern people do not read these great
+authors is that they are not encouraged to do so. The very best way to
+instil a love of Thackeray into the modern world is to make the modern
+world read just so much of him that its voracious appetite is sharpened
+to wish for more.
+
+In an altogether admirable series of the masters of literature Thackeray
+finds a place, and treatment of him is left to Chesterton, who writes a
+fine introductory 'Biography' and then takes picked passages from his
+writings. This is, I think, the most useful means possible of
+popularizing an author. It requires a good deal of pluck in these days
+to sit down and steadily pursue a way through a long book of Thackeray
+unless it has been proved, by the perusal of a selected passage, that
+riches in the book warrant the act of courage in beginning the work.
+
+In this chapter it will be convenient to pay special attention to the
+introduction that is so ably contributed by Chesterton. It will only be
+possible to refer to the passages he has selected from Thackeray, and
+the reader must judge of the merit of the choosing. It is one of the
+hardest things possible to choose representative passages from a great
+writer. Shall he choose those that display the literary qualities of the
+writer, shall he choose those which depict his powers of drama, shall he
+select those which bring out the humour of the writer, shall he pick at
+random and let the passage stand or fall on its own merits? These are
+questions that must be faced in a work of the nature of Chesterton's
+Thackeray. What the method has been will, I hope, be clear at the end of
+this chapter.
+
+It was Thackeray's expressed wish that there should be no biography
+written of him, a position that might indicate extreme modesty, colossal
+conceit, or distinct cowardice. Whatever the reason, it has not been
+entirely obeyed, and rightly. A man of the power of Thackeray cannot
+live without the world being in some way better; it is only good that
+those who never knew him in the flesh should at least know him in a
+book. It is not enough that, as Chesterton points out, he 'was of all
+novelists the most autobiographical,' which is not to say that he wrote
+unending personal confessions with a very large I, but rather that his
+books were drawn from the experiences of his life, a field that is
+productive of the richest literary worth.
+
+Thackeray was born, we are told, in the year 1811, so that he was a year
+old when the world received two babies who were like ten thousand other
+babies, except that they happened to be Browning and Dickens. It was the
+time when the world trembled, because that mighty soldier Napoleon stood
+with arms folded, waiting to strike, it knew not where. It was the time
+when military genius reached its height, a height that could be only
+brought low by one thing, and that was an English General with a long
+nose and a cocked hat.
+
+Although Thackeray was born in Calcutta, he was as English as he could
+possibly be. But he did not forget his Eastern beginning. 'A certain
+vague cosmological quality was always mixed with his experience, and it
+was his favourite boast that he had seen men and cities like Ulysses.'
+Which is to say that he had not only seen the world, he had felt it; if
+he had not seen a one-eyed giant, he had at least seen a two-eyed Hindu.
+
+His early life followed the ordinary life of a thousand other boys born
+of Anglo-Indian parents; that was, he went to school, where 'a girl
+broke his heart and a boy broke his nose,' and he discovered that the
+nose took longer to mend.
+
+At Cambridge, Chesterton tells us, Thackeray found that it was a quite
+easy thing to sit down and play cards and lose L1,500 in an evening, a
+fact that very probably was more useful to him than twenty degrees.
+Trinity College was the Thackeray College: it has had no more famous
+son. It was said that Thackeray could order a dinner in every language
+in Europe, which is to say he could have dined in comfort in any
+restaurant in Soho.
+
+From Cambridge, we learn, he made his way to the Bar, and at the same
+time wrote articles in the hope that some editor might keep them from
+the waste-paper basket. Chesterton tells us an interesting legend that
+about this time Thackeray offered to illustrate the books of Dickens.
+The offer was declined, which he thinks was 'a good thing for Dickens'
+books and a good thing for Thackeray's.' Whether Thackeray ever really
+did meet Dickens does not matter much; it is at least picturesque; 'it
+affects the imagination as much as the meeting with Napoleon.'
+
+There has always been what is for Chesterton a silly discussion--a
+controversy as to whether Thackeray was a cynic. This was because he
+happened to write first about villains, then about heroes; villains are
+always more interesting than heroes, and not infrequently are much
+better mannered. A cynic is a person who doesn't take the trouble to
+find the motives for things, or he takes it for granted that the motives
+are never disinterested ones. To say that Thackeray was a cynic because
+he drew a large number of villains is as untrue as to say Swift was a
+cynic because he wrote satire. Thackeray wrote about villains because he
+wished to also write about heroes; Swift was satirical because he had
+the intelligence to see that his contemporaries were fools when they
+might have been wise. The cynics are the people of to-day who write
+books which attribute low motives to every one, which turn love into
+lust, which care not what is written so long as it can be made certain
+that there is nothing in the world which has not a hidden meaning.
+
+The first appearance of Thackeray in literature was in 'Fraser's
+Magazine,' under the pseudo name of Michael Angelo Titmarsh. It is on
+these unimportant papers that Chesterton thinks was based the attack on
+Thackeray for being a cynic.
+
+In passing, it is not necessary to say more than that Thackeray's
+marriage ended in a horrible manner: Mrs. Thackeray was sent to an
+asylum. 'I would do it over again,' said Thackeray; which was a 'fine
+thing to say.' It was really carrying out 'for better or worse,' which
+often enough really means for better only.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+It will now be well at once to plunge into the very heart of Thackeray,
+that heart which beat beneath the huge, gaunt frame. The two books which
+have made his name famous, and what Chesterton thinks of them, must be
+now gone into.
+
+'The Book of Snobs' was one of those literary rarities that has genius
+in its very name. No one probably really thinks himself a snob; every
+one likes to read of one. Thackeray brought snobbishness to a classic.
+There had been books of scoundrels, there had been books of heroes,
+there had been books of nincompoops, now there was a book of those
+people who abound in every community, and who are snobs.
+
+'This work was much needed and very admirably done. The solemn
+philosophic framework, the idea of treating snobbishness as a science,
+was original and sound; for snobbishness is indeed a disease in our
+Society.'
+
+Unfortunately Chesterton is not nearly hard enough on snobbishness. Were
+it a disease, it might be excusable as being at times unavoidable; it is
+nothing of the sort, it is a deliberate thing that undermines society
+more than anything; it is entirely spontaneous, and flourishes in every
+community, from the Church to the Jockey Club.
+
+'Aristocracy does not have snobs any more than democracy'; but this
+'Thackeray was too restrained and early Victorian to see.' There are at
+the present day a great number of people who will not see that
+Bolshevism is as snobbish as Suburbia, that the poor man in the Park
+Lodge is as much a snob as his master, who only knows the county folks.
+Snobbery is not the monopoly of any one set; even also is it, as
+Thackeray says,'a mean admiration' that thinks it is better to be a
+'made' peer than an honest gardener.
+
+'The true source of snobs in England was the refusal to take one side or
+the other in the crisis of the French Revolution.'
+
+The title of 'Vanity Fair' was an inspiration. It gives the ideas of the
+disharmonies that can be found in any market place in any English market
+town on any English market day. It brings out 'the irrelevancy of
+Thackeray.' A good motto for the book is, for Chesterton, that
+attributed to Cardinal Newman: 'Evil always fails by overleaping its aim
+and good by falling short of it.' Our critic feels that the critics
+have been unfair to Thackeray with respect to their denouncement of the
+character of Amelia Sedley as being much too soft, whereas Chesterton
+thinks she was really a fool, which is the logical outcome of being the
+reverse of hard.
+
+But Amelia was soft in a very delightful way. She was 'open to all
+emotions as they came'--in fact, she was a fool who was wise because she
+has retained her power of happiness, while the hard Rebecca has arrived
+at hell, 'the hell of having all outward forces open, but all receptive
+organs closed.'
+
+It is necessary again to refer to the charge of cynicism that is
+levelled against Thackeray. The mistake is, as our critic points out,
+'taking a vague word and applying it precisely.' It all depends upon
+what cynicism really means. 'If it means a war on comfort, then
+Thackeray was, to his eternal credit, a cynic'; 'if it means a war on
+virtue, then Thackeray, to his eternal honour, was the reverse of a
+cynic.' His object is to show that silly goodness is better than clever
+vice. As I have indicated, the long and the short of the matter is that
+Thackeray created a lot of villains, and has therefore been called a
+cynic by those who don't even know what the word means, or that there is
+a literary blessedness in the making of villains to bring out the more
+excellent virtues of the heroes.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+From these two monumental works that were original in every way and
+might almost be called propaganda, Thackeray passed on to a novel which
+bore the name of 'Pendennis.' It was 'a novel with nothing else but a
+hero, only that the hero is not very heroic,' which makes him all the
+more interesting, for it makes him all the more human.
+
+But Pendennis is more than a man--he is a type or symbol. He is 'the old
+mystical tragedian of the Middle Ages, Everyman.' It is an epic, because
+it celebrates the universal man with all his glorious failings and
+glorious virtues. The love of Pendennis for Miss Fotheringay is a
+different thing to the ordinary love of man for woman; it is rather the
+love that is in every man for every woman. This is what I think
+Chesterton means when he says 'it is the veritable Divine disease, which
+seems a part of the very health of youth.'
+
+The Everyman of the Middle Ages was a symbol of what man really was.
+Chesterton feels that every outside force that came to Everyman had to
+be abnormal--for instance, 'Death had to be bony'--so he contends in
+'Pendennis' that the shapes that intrude on the life of Arthur Pendennis
+have aggressive and allegorical influences.
+
+'Pendennis' is an epic because it celebrates not the strength of man but
+his weakness. In the character of Major Pendennis, Chesterton feels that
+Thackeray did a great work, because he showed that the life of the
+so-called man of the world is not the gay and careless one that fiction
+depicts. It is the religious people who can afford to be careless. 'If
+you want carelessness you must go to the martyrs.' The reason is fairly
+obvious. The worldling has to be careful, as he wants to remain in the
+world; the religious man, of whom the martyr was the true prototype, can
+afford to be careless; he is not necessarily careless of life, but he
+can put things at their proper value. The martyr facing the lions in the
+Roman arena knew what life really was; the worldly woman spending her
+life trying to be in the company of titled people has no real idea of
+the value of it. It is the religious people who know the world; it is
+the worldly people who know nothing of it.
+
+With the publication of 'Pendennis' the reputation of Thackeray reached
+that position which is sought by all authors, that of being able to
+write a book that should not, on publication, be put to the indignity of
+being asked who the writer was. Thackeray was now in the delightful
+position of being well established, a position that very often results
+in careless and poor work. It has been said with some truth that once a
+writer is established he can write anything he likes. This is to an
+extent true, and such work may even be published and fairly popular, but
+he will find sooner or later that his influence is on the wane.
+
+In the 'Newcomes' Thackeray drew a character in Colonel Newcome, to whom
+was given the highest of literary honours, that of being spoken of apart
+from the book--I mean in the way that people speak of Micawber or
+Scrooge, almost unconsciously, without really having the actual work in
+which the character appears in mind. Of this book Chesterton says 'the
+public has largely forgotten all the Newcomes except one, the Colonel
+who has taken his place with Don Quixote, Sir Roger de Coverley, Uncle
+Toby, and Mr. Pickwick.'
+
+Chesterton feels that Thackeray at times falls into the trick common to
+many writers, that of repeating himself, a trick that is natural, as it
+does seem in some ways that the human mind, like history, is apt to move
+in circles. The reason was that in some way Thackeray became tired of
+Barnes Newcome; the result was that from being a convincing villain he
+develops into a stereotyped one, the type who fires pistols into the air
+and is the squire's runaway son, so often found at the Lyceum.
+
+If Thackeray 'sprawled' in the Newcomes he atones for this in 'Esmond,'
+if any atonement is needed for sprawling, which is probably only that
+Thackeray felt that there is nothing so elastic and sprawling as a human
+person, whether he be a villain or the reverse.
+
+For Chesterton, 'Esmond' is in the modern sense a work of art, which is
+to say that it was a book that could be read anywhere. 'It had no word
+that might not have been used at the court of Queen Anne.' It is a
+highly romantic tale, but it is a sad story. It is a great Queen Anne
+romance; but, 'there broods a peculiar conviction that Queen Anne is
+dead.' The whole tale moves round a complicated situation in which a
+young man loves a mother and her daughter, and finally marries the
+mother. This work is, for Chesterton, Thackeray's 'most difficult task.'
+It is difficult for the reason that the situation of the tale is placed
+between possibilities of grace and possibilities even of indecency. It
+is not hard to write a graceful tale, it is easy to write a loose
+story; it is extremely difficult to write a story that may by a stroke
+of the pen be either beautiful or merely sordid. But Thackeray
+manipulates the keys of the tale so that 'it moves like music,' an
+extremely apt metaphor, where harmonies can be made disharmonies by a
+single note.
+
+It is a strange fact that a sequel is seldom to be compared to its
+forerunner: 'Tom Brown's Schooldays' is of a schoolboy who is an eternal
+type; 'Tom Brown at Oxford' is a poor book that does not in the least
+understand Oxford. The fact is, I think, that an author cannot be
+inspired twice on the same subject--the gods give but sparingly, their
+gifts do not fall as the rains.
+
+The sequel to 'Esmond' that Thackeray wrote, 'The Virginians,' is an
+'inadequate sequel,' which is not to say that it is a poor book, but
+rather that it is an unnecessary one. Yet, as Chesterton says,
+'Thackeray never struck a smarter note than when, in "The Virginians,"
+he created the terrible little Yankee Countess of Castlewood.' In the
+same way as 'The Virginians' was a sequel to 'Esmond,' so 'Philip' was a
+sequel (also an inadequate one) to the 'Newcomes.'
+
+It is strange that in two things at least Thackeray's life followed the
+same course as Dickens. Both occupied the editorial chair: Dickens that
+of the _Daily News_, Thackeray that of the _Cornhill Magazine_. Both
+left unfinished works: Dickens that of 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood,'
+Thackeray that of 'Denis Duval.'
+
+Thackeray's last work, 'Lovell the Widower,' is 'a very clever sketch,
+but as a novel is rather drawn out.' 'The Roundabout Papers' make very
+pleasant reading. In one 'he compares himself to a pagan conqueror
+driving in his chariot up the Hill of Coru, with a slave behind him to
+remind him that he is only mortal.' In 1863, suddenly, Thackeray died,
+seven years before Dickens also passed away.
+
+Chesterton has in the space of a short introduction given a very clear
+account of the chief characteristics of Thackeray's works; it is no
+easy matter to give in a few lines the essence of a great novel, and
+Chesterton is not always the most concise of writers. It will now be
+convenient to take a few of the characteristics of Thackeray and observe
+what he says of them.
+
+At once he is aware of the fact that there is no writer from whom it is
+more difficult to make extracts than from Thackeray. The reason is that
+Thackeray worked by 'diffuseness of style.' If he wished to be satirical
+about a character he was not so directly; rather he worked his way to
+the inside of the character, got to know all about it, and then began to
+be satirical. This is what Chesterton feels about the matter; it is no
+doubt the fairest way of being satirical and the most effective. Many
+people and writers are satirical without first of all demonstrating upon
+what grounds they have the right to be so. Satire is a wholly laudable
+thing if it is directed in a fair minded manner, but if it is only an
+excuse for bitter cynicism it is altogether contemptible. Thus he says
+of the Thackerean treatment of 'Vanity Fair,' 'he was attacking "Vanity
+Fair" from the inside.' It comes to this: if you want to make an extract
+from Thackeray you must dive about all over the place to make apparent
+irrelevancy become relevancy.
+
+If the use of the grotesque was a strength of Browning (as Chesterton
+contends against other critics), so in the case of Thackeray that which
+some critics have held to be a weakness--I mean his 'irrelevancy'--is
+for our critic a strength. It was a strength, because it was 'a very
+delicate and even cunning literary approach.' It is the perfect art of
+Thackeray to get the right situation, not by an assumption of it, but by
+so approaching it that there is no way out, which is arriving at the
+situation by the fairest means possible.
+
+'No other novelist ever carried to such perfection as Thackeray the art
+of saying a thing without saying it. Thus he may say that a man drinks
+too much, yet it may be false to say that he drinks.' What he did was
+not to say that a man had arrived at such and such a state, but rather
+that things must change. If, as Chesterton says, Miss Smith finds
+marriage the reverse of the honeymoon, Thackeray does not say that the
+marriage is a failure, but that joy cannot last for ever; that if there
+are roses there are also thorns. It is an admirable method, far better
+than saying a thing straight out. It is better to tell a man who is a
+cad that there is such a thing as being a gentleman, than to tell him he
+is a cad.
+
+In his later life Thackeray was inclined to imitate himself. It is, I
+think, that the human brain is prone to move in circles. In the case of
+Thackeray, as our critic points out, in later days he used his rambling
+style, and, as was to be expected, he rather lost himself. 'He did not
+merely get into a parenthesis, he never got out of it,' which is to say
+that as Thackeray got older he inherited the tendencies of old age.
+
+I have said earlier in this chapter that the charge against Thackeray of
+cynicism was one that was founded on a false premise. The charge that
+his irrelevancy was a weakness is based on another false but popular
+premise, that the direct method is always the best. It is usually the
+worst. It is the worst in warfare, it is the worst in literature, but it
+is possibly the best in literary criticism.
+
+Thackeray had another quality that has laid him open to adverse
+criticism; that is, his 'perpetual reference to the remote past.' This
+repeated reference to the past may be a matter of conceit, or it may be
+that the influence of the past is genuinely felt. The reason that, as
+Chesterton points out, Thackeray referred so much to the remote past,
+was that he wished it to be known that 'there was nothing new under the
+sun'; not even, as our critic says, 'the sunstroke.' Chesterton admits
+that at times Thackeray carried this tendency to an excess; also
+Thackeray wanted to show that the oldest thing in the world was its
+youth. Thus in writing of a fashionable drawing-room in Mayfair, if he
+referred to some classic, it was to 'remind people how many _debutantes_
+had come out since the age of Horace.' It was quite a different thing
+to the pompous bishop quoting Greek at the squire's house to show that
+his doctor's degree, though an honorary one, had some classical learning
+behind it, or the small boy translating Horace to avoid the headmaster's
+cane. In the case of the bishop and the schoolboy, the use of the
+classics is, on the one hand, pomposity; on the other, discretion. In
+the case of Thackeray it was a reverence for the past, that it was a
+very large part of the present.
+
+There are, then, roughly three main characteristics of Thackeray: his
+irrelevancy, his rambling style, and his frequent reference to the past.
+All these, Chesterton makes it clear, are matters in which the strength
+of Thackeray lies. Not that they are free always from exaggerations.
+Sometimes Thackeray became lost in his irrelevancy, sometimes he became
+almost unintelligible in his rambling style, now and then his use of
+ancient quotation became irritating. 'Above all things, Thackeray was
+receptive. The world imposed on Thackeray, and Dickens imposed on the
+world.' But it could not be put more truly than that Thackeray
+represents, in that gigantic parody called genius, the spirit of the
+Englishman in repose. 'This spirit is the idle embodiment of all of us;
+by his weakness we shall fail, and by his enormous sanities we shall
+endure.' This is the crux of the matter which Chesterton brings out,
+that the weaknesses of Thackeray are his strength. He loved liberty, not
+because it meant restraint from law, but because he 'was a novelist'; he
+was open to all the influences round him, not because he had no
+standpoint, but because he could see merit in selection; he had an open
+mind, but knew when to shut it.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+The passages selected from the various works have been chosen with care.
+It was evidently by no means an easy task. The passage chosen to show
+Colonel Newcome in the 'Cave of Harmony' gives in one poignant incident
+his character; the selection from 'Pendennis' does much the same. In the
+passage from 'Esmond' the story of the duel is a fine selection; the
+chapter on 'Some Country Snobs' is an apt choosing; the celebrated
+'Essay on George IV' demonstrates Thackeray in a very different mood.
+The 'Fall of Becky Sharp,' taken from 'Vanity Fair,' has not been
+included without forethought.
+
+Of Thackeray's poems, Chesterton has included the most significant, and
+not without due 'The Cane-Bottomed Chair' finds a prominent place.
+
+Enough has been said to show that Chesterton is not a critic of
+Thackeray who has no discrimination in choosing from his works. He knows
+what Thackeray was, wherein lay his strength and weakness. He has added
+a worthy companion to his fuller works on Browning and Dickens.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Four_
+
+BROWNING
+
+
+It will be convenient for our purpose to adhere as closely as possible
+to the order of Chesterton's book. It is a hard task to do justice to
+Browning even in a long book; the task is not simplified when, in a
+chapter, it is hoped to give a criticism of an intricate criticism of
+Browning.
+
+There are two ways to approach such a task: The first is to take the
+book as a whole and write a review of it, which is a method liable to a
+superficiality; the second is to take such a work chapter by chapter,
+and to piece the various criticisms into an ordered whole. This I have
+attempted to do. I make no attempt to criticize the method of
+Chesterton's approach to Browning, or his combination of the effect of
+his life on his work; rather I wish to take what the critic says and
+comment on his remarks.
+
+There is undoubtedly a fundamental difference between Browning and
+Dickens which is at once clear to any critic of these two writers.
+Dickens was, as I have said in an earlier chapter, born at the
+psychological moment. Browning happened to be born early in the
+nineteenth century. I cannot see that it would have mattered had he been
+born at the beginning of the twentieth. His early life, unlike Dickens,
+was normal, but it did not affect Browning adversely. Had Dickens' life
+been uneventful, I think it not improbable that his literary output
+would have been commonplace instead of, as nearly as possible, divine.
+
+There is no particular account of Browning's family, which was probably
+a typical middle-class family, which is to say that they were, like many
+thousands of their kind, lovers of the normal--a very good reason why
+later Browning should have acquired a love for the grotesque, which many
+people quite wrongly define as the abnormal.
+
+The grotesque is a queer psychological state of mind; the abnormal is an
+extreme kind of individualism that is probably insane, provided the
+opposite is sane.
+
+What is important, as Chesterton feels, is that we shall get some
+account of Browning's home. It is in the home that we can usually detect
+the embryo of future activity. The germ, although sometimes hidden, is
+nevertheless there, which is exactly why the commonplace home life of a
+genius, before the public has discovered the fact, is interesting.
+
+To quote our critic: 'Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman of
+the middle class,' and he remained so through his life.
+
+But this middle-class Englishman walking through the streets of
+Camberwell, as the boys played in the gutters, was Browning, not then
+the master poet of the Victorian Era, but the young man who could 'pass
+a bookstall and find no thrill in beholding on a placard the name of
+Shelley.'
+
+Browning found his early life in an age 'of inspired office boys,' an
+age that emerged from the shadow of the French Revolution, that extreme
+method of optimism which Chesterton believes no Englishman can
+understand, not even Carlyle himself. It was an optimism that was so,
+because it held that man was worthy of liberty, which is to say that no
+man is by his nature ever meant to be a slave.
+
+While Browning was living his daily life in Camberwell, Dickens was
+existing in the blacking factory; yet again it was an age of the
+beginning of intellectual giants.
+
+The Chestertonian standpoint with regard to the early days of Browning
+is interesting. It is a ready acknowledgment of the poetic instinct that
+was being slowly but surely nurtured in the heart of the unknown young
+man of Camberwell.
+
+It is in this early period of his life that Browning attempts what
+Chesterton rightly describes as the most difficult of literary
+propositions, that of writing a good political play. This Browning
+essayed to do, and wrote 'Strafford,' a play that dealt with that most
+controversial part of history, the time when kings could be executed in
+Whitehall under the shadow of their own Parliament.
+
+For our critic, Strafford was one of the greatest men ever born with the
+sacred name of England on his brow. The play was not a gigantic success,
+it was not a failure; it was, as was to be expected, popular with a
+limited public, which is very often one of the surest criterions of
+merit in a book or play. The success of the play was sufficient to
+assure the public that Browning had brains and, what was more unusual,
+could put them to a good advantage.
+
+Browning became then 'a detached and eccentric personality who had
+arisen on the outskirts; the world began to be conscious of him at this
+time.'
+
+In 1840 our critic tells us 'Sordello' was published. It was a poem that
+caused people to wonder whether it was really deep, or merely pure
+nonsense, a distinction some people cannot ever discover in regard to
+Browning.
+
+Of this poem, its unique reception by the literary world lies in the
+fact 'that it was fashionable to boast of not understanding,' which, as
+I have said, was an indication that it might be termed extremely clever
+or extremely stupid. It was not a poem, as has been held by some
+critics, that was a piece of intellectual vanity. Browning was far too
+great a man to stoop down to such mere banal conceit. The poem was a
+very different thing. It was a creature created by the obscurity of
+Browning's mind, which, as Chesterton thinks, was the natural reaction
+for a genius, born in a villa street in South London.
+
+What is the explanation of this poem? What is its meaning? Wherein lies
+its soul? These are questions every lover of Browning has constantly to
+ask. Our critic supplies an answer, an answer that is original, and is,
+I think, true--the poem is an epic on 'the horror of great darkness,'
+that darkness that strangely enough seems to attack the young more
+frequently than the old.
+
+That which is levelled against Browning, his obscurity, is a very
+bulwark protecting a subtle and clear mind. This is specially so with a
+poet who probably of all men so lives in his own poetic world that he
+forgets his ideas, though clear to himself, are vague to the world
+occupied with conventionalities.
+
+The real difficulty of 'Sordello' lies in the fact that it is written
+about an obscure piece of Italian history of which Browning happened to
+have knowledge--the struggles of mediaeval Italy. This obscurity is not
+studied, as in the case of academic distinction; it is natural. The
+obscurity of many of the passages of St. John's Gospel is natural
+because the mind of St. John dwelt on the 'depths,' as did Browning's
+dwell on the grotesque. The result is the same. Each needs an
+interpreter, each has an abundance of the richest philosophy, each has
+an imprint of the Finger of God.
+
+With all the controversy it has caused, 'Sordello' has had no great
+influence on Browningites; its name has passed into almost contempt.
+Chesterton has done much to give the true meaning of this strange work.
+With his next poem Browning spoke with a voice that, as our critic says,
+proved that he had found that he was not Robinson Crusoe, which is to
+say that he had found that the world contained a great number of people.
+Despite the 1,500 millions amongst whom we 'live and move and have our
+being' we are apt to think that we alone are important, which is not
+conceit but a mere proposition demonstrating that man is a universe in
+himself while being but an infinitesimal part of the universe.
+
+'Pippa Passes' is a poem which expresses a love of humanity; it is an
+epic of unconscious influence which, no doubt, Browning felt was the key
+to all that is best and noble in human activity. 'The whole idea of the
+poem lies in the fact that "Pippa Passes" is utterly remote from the
+grand folk whose lives she troubles and transforms.'
+
+Browning's poetry in the poetical sense was now nearing its zenith. The
+'Dramatic Lyrics' were published in 1842, possibly about the time that
+Dickens was returning from his triumphant American tour. These showed,
+Chesterton thinks, the two qualities most often denied to Browning,
+passion and beauty. They are the contradiction to critics, other than
+ours, who regard Browning as wholly a philosophic poet, which is to say
+a poet who wrote poetry not for its own sake but for purely utilitarian
+purpose; not that poetry of the emotions is not useful--it is on a
+different plane.
+
+The poems were those that 'represent the arrival of the real Browning of
+literary history'; for in these he discovered what was, for Chesterton,
+Browning's finest achievement, his dramatic lyrical poems.
+
+Critics have said that Browning's poetry lacks passion and the most
+poignant emotion of human nature, love. Chesterton, on the other hand,
+considers that Browning was the finest love poet of the world. It is
+real love poetry, because it talks about real people, not ideals; it
+does not muse of the Prince Charming meeting the Fairy Princess, and
+forget the devoted wife meeting her husband on the villa doorstep with
+open arms and a nice dinner in the parlour. Sentiment must be based on
+reality if it is to have worth. This is the strong point, for our
+critic, of Browning's love poetry.
+
+The next work of importance that came from Browning's pen was the
+'Return of the Druses,' which shows Browning's interest in the strange
+religions of the East, that queer phantastic part of the world that gave
+birth to a Western religion which has transformed the West, leaving the
+East to gaze afar off. This poem is, for Chesterton, a psychological
+one. It is an attempt to give an account of a human being; perhaps the
+most difficult task in the world, because it can never hope to solve all
+sides of the question. The central character of this splendid poem is
+one 'Djubal,' a queer mixture of the virtues of the Deity with the vices
+of Humanity. He is for Browning the first of a series of characters on
+which he displays his wonderful powers of apologizing for apparently
+bad men.
+
+He attempted, to quote our critic, 'to seek out the sinners whom even
+sinners cast out,' which Christ always did, and which His Church does
+not always do.
+
+Again Browning turned his hand to writing plays, but he was always a
+'neglected dramatist' in the sense that he had to push his plays; his
+plays did not push him.
+
+His next play, 'A Blot on the "Scutcheon,"' is chiefly interesting, as
+it was the occasion of a quarrel between its author and that most
+eccentric of theatrical personalities, Macready. The quarrel was, our
+critic points out, a matter of money. But Browning failed to see this;
+he was a man of the world in his poems, but not in his life.
+
+It is interesting here to see what our critic says of Browning about
+this period before we consider the question of his marriage. 'There were
+people who called Browning a snob. He was fond of wealth and fond of
+society; he admired them as the child who comes in from the desert. He
+bore the same relation to the snob that the righteous man bears to the
+Pharisee--something frightfully close and similar and yet an everlasting
+opposite.'
+
+It has been left for Chesterton to give the truest definition of a
+Pharisee that has yet been penned, because it is exactly what every man
+feels but has never expressed in so brilliant a paradox.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+That Browning had faults Chesterton would be the last to deny. Faults
+are as much a part of a great man as virtues. The more pronounced the
+fault, the more exquisite is the virtue, especially in a man of the
+character of Browning, a character that had a certain 'uncontrollable
+brutality of speech,' together with a profound and unaffected respect
+for other people.
+
+Chesterton's chapter on Browning and his marriage is one of the most
+homely chapters of the book; it gives the lie to those critics who have
+glibly said that he has no way in which to reach our hearts or cause a
+lump in our throats.
+
+The very method of describing how a great man wooed a great woman, how
+the two loved, married, and disagreed upon certain matters, is one that
+has an essential appeal to the heart. The exquisite description of the
+effect of the death of his wife on Browning is pathetic by its very
+simplicity.
+
+It is enough to say that Browning's marriage was a successful one, which
+is not to say that it was entirely free from certain disagreements. The
+domestic relations of great writers and poets have not always been of
+the rosiest. Swift did not make an ideal marriage--at least, not on
+conventional lines. Milton had a wife who utterly misunderstood that her
+husband was a genius. Dickens was not blessed with matrimonial bliss.
+Shelley found faith in one woman hard.
+
+But Browning and his wife had no disagreements on their life interests.
+They were both poets, though of a different calibre. What they really
+did not see eye to eye upon was something which the human race is still
+much divided about. This great point of difference was with regard to
+spiritualism. Browning did not dislike spiritualism; he disliked
+spiritualists. The difference is tremendous. Unfortunately many of the
+interpreters of spiritualism have degraded it into a kind of blatant
+necromancy which is in no way dignified or useful. It is entirely
+opposed to proper psychic research.
+
+Miss Barrett had been an invalid. Therefore Browning feared that
+spiritualism might have a really bad effect on his wife. 'He was
+sensible to put a stop to it.'
+
+The theory, on the other hand, held by other critics of Browning than
+Chesterton was that his dislike of spiritualism was fostered by a direct
+disbelief in immortality, which is as absurd a statement as is possible
+to make. Spiritualism and Immortality have no necessary connection
+whatever, though to a certain extent Spiritualism is presumed on the
+belief in a future life.
+
+But this, as Chesterton points out, was not the reason for Browning's
+position; it was entirely that Browning thought 'if he had not
+interposed when she was becoming hysterical she might have ended in a
+lunatic asylum.'
+
+As Browning spent so much of his life in Italy it will be well to see
+what our critic considers he thought of that country under the blue
+skies jutting on to the blue seas of the Mediterranean.
+
+'Italy,' says Chesterton, 'to Browning and his wife, was not by any
+means merely that sculptured and ornate sepulchre that it is to so many
+of those cultured Englishmen who live in Italy and despise it. To them
+it was a living nation, the type and centre of the religion and politics
+of a continent, the ancient and flaming heart of Western history, the
+very Europe of Europe.'
+
+Browning's life in Italy was more or less uneventful. It consisted of a
+conventional method--the meeting of famous Englishmen visiting Italy,
+the writing of numerous poems, the pleasant domestic life of a literary
+genius and his wife.
+
+There was only one thing that could break it, and it came in 1861. Mrs.
+Browning died. 'Alone in the room with Browning. He, closing the door of
+that room behind him, closed a door in himself, and none ever saw
+Browning upon earth again but only a splendid surface.'
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+During his wife's life Browning had planned his great work, that of the
+'Ring and the Book.' In the meantime came the death of his wife, and
+Browning moved on the earth alone. Of this period of his life, shortly
+after the death of Mrs. Browning, Chesterton gives us a clear picture.
+'Browning liked social life, he liked the excitement of the dinner, the
+exchange of opinions, the pleasant hospitality that is so much a part of
+our life. He was a good talker because he had something to say.'
+
+One of his chief faults, according to our critic, was prejudice.
+Prejudice is probably an unconscious obeying of instinct; it may even
+be a warning. Yet it can be and often is entirely unreasonable.
+
+Browning's prejudice was, Chesterton thinks, the type that hated a thing
+it knew nothing about, a state of mind that is comparatively harmless.
+What is dangerous is disliking a thing when we know what it is. The
+prejudice of Browning was synonymous with his profound contempt for
+certain things of which he can only speak 'in pothouse words.'
+
+About this period Browning produced 'Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangu, Saviour
+of Society.' This is 'one of the most picturesque of Browning's
+apologetic monologues.' It is Browning's courageous attempt to allow
+Napoleon III to speak for himself. Yet again Browning 'took in those
+sinners whom even sinners cast out.'
+
+Two years later, we are told, Browning produced one of his most
+characteristic works, 'Night-cap Country.' It is an elegant poem of the
+sicklier side of the French Revolution and the more sensual side of the
+French temperament.
+
+This is the period in Browning's life when he produced his most
+characteristic work. It was that time when he was nearly middle aged,
+when the lamp of youth was just flickering, and when the lamp of old age
+was about to be lighted.
+
+Chesterton treats the whole of this period with a calm
+straightforwardness that we are not accustomed to in his writings. There
+is no doubt, I think, of all our critic's books, that his work on
+Browning is the least Chestertonian, which is not in any way to
+disparage it, but rather to state that the book might have been written
+by any biographer who knew Browning's works and had the sense to see
+that his characteristics were such that many of his critics were unfair
+to him. Chesterton will never allow for an instant that Browning
+suffered from anything but an evident 'naturalness,' which expressed
+itself in a rugged style, concealing charity in an original
+grotesqueness of manner.
+
+It is now convenient to turn to Browning's greatest work, 'The Ring and
+the Book,' and see what Chesterton has to say about it.
+
+Rumour is really distorted truth, or rather very often originates from a
+different standpoint being taken of the same thing. Thus a man may say
+that another man is a good fellow but borrows money too often; another
+may say of the same man he is a good fellow but talks too much; a third
+that he is a good fellow but would be better without a moustache. The
+essential man is the same, but his three critics make really a different
+person, or, at least, each sees him from a different angle.
+
+As Chesterton so finely points out, the conception of 'The Ring and the
+Book' is the studying of a single matter from nine different
+standpoints. In successive monologues Browning is endeavouring to depict
+the various strange ways a fact gets itself presented to the world.
+
+Further, the work indicates the extraordinary lack of logic used by
+those who would be ashamed to be denied the name of dialectician.
+Probably, thinks Chesterton, very many people do harm in their cause,
+not by want of propaganda, but by the fallaciousness of their arguments
+for it.
+
+There have been critics who have denied to this work the right of
+immortality. Chesterton is not one of these; rather he contends such a
+criticism is a gross misunderstanding of the work. For our critic the
+greatness of this poem is the very point upon which it is attacked, that
+of environment. For once and all Browning has demonstrated that there
+are riches and depths in small things that are often denied to what we
+think is greater.
+
+'It is an epic round a sordid police court case.' 'The essence of "The
+Ring and the Book" is that it is the great epic of the nineteenth
+century, because it is the great epic of the importance of small
+things.' Browning says, 'I will show you the relation of man to heaven
+by telling you a story out of a dirty Italian book of criminal trials,
+from which I select one of the meanest and most completely forgotten.'
+
+It is then that Chesterton sees that this poem is more than a mere poem;
+it is a natural acknowledgment of the monarchy of small things, the same
+idea that made Dickens believe that common men could be kings--that is,
+in the same category as the Divine care of the hairs of the head. It
+gives the lie to the rather popular fallacy that events are important by
+their size. It is once more a position that the stone on the hillside is
+as mighty as the mountain of which it is only a small part.
+
+Again, 'The Ring and the Book' is an embodiment of the spiritual in the
+material, the good that can be contained in a sordid story; it is the
+typical epic of our age, 'because it expresses the richness of life by
+taking as a text a poor story. It pays to existence the highest of all
+possible compliments, the great compliment of selecting from it almost
+at random.'
+
+There is a second respect, he feels, which makes this poem the epic of
+the age. It is that every man has a point of view. And, what is more,
+every man probably has a different point of view at least in something.
+
+'The Ring and the Book,' to sum up briefly why Chesterton thinks so
+highly of it, is an epic; it is a national expression of a
+characteristic love of small things, the germination of great truths; it
+pays a compliment to humanity by asserting the value of every opinion,
+it demonstrates that even in so sordid a thing as a police court there
+is a spiritual spark; in a word, it is an attempt to see God, not on the
+hill-tops or in the valleys, but in the back streets teeming with common
+men.
+
+It is now time to turn to two qualities of Browning that are full of the
+deepest interest, and which are dealt with by Chesterton with the
+greatest skill and judgment. These two qualities may be described as
+Browning as a literary artist and Browning as a philosopher. For our
+purpose it will be useful to take Browning as a literary artist first
+and see what was his position. Philosophy is usually in the nature of a
+summing up. The philosophy of a poet is best looked at when the poet has
+been studied; therefore it is best to follow Chesterton's order and
+take Browning's philosophical position at the end of this chapter.
+
+He feels that in some ways the critics want Browning to be poet and
+logician, and are rather cross when he is either. They want him to be a
+poet and are annoyed that he is a logician; they want him to be a
+logician and are annoyed that he is a poet. The fact of the matter is he
+was probably a poet!
+
+Chesterton is convinced that Browning was a literary artist--that is to
+say, he was a symbolist. The wealth of Browning's poetry depends on
+arrangement of language. It is so with all great literature: it is not
+so much what is said as how it is said, in what way the sentences are
+formed so that the climax comes in the right place.
+
+For all practical purposes Browning was, our critic thinks, a deliberate
+artist. The suggestion that Browning cared nothing for form is for
+Chesterton a monstrous assertion. It is as absurd as saying that
+Napoleon cared nothing for feminine love or that Nero hated mushrooms.
+What Browning did was always to fall into a different kind of form,
+which is a totally different thing to saying he disregarded it.
+
+There is rather an assumption among a certain class of critics that the
+artistic form is a quality that is finite. As a matter of fact, it is
+infinite; it cannot be bound up with any particular mode of expression;
+it is elastic, and so elastic that certain critics cannot adjust their
+minds to such lucidity.
+
+There is, our critic feels, another suggestion--that if Browning had a
+form, it was a bad one. This really does not matter very much. Whether
+form in an artistic sense is good or bad can only be determined by
+setting up a criterion; this is not possible in the case of Browning,
+because, though he has many forms, they are original ones, which render
+them impervious to values of good and bad.
+
+Chesterton is naturally aware that Browning wrote a great deal of bad
+poetry--every poet does. The way to take with Browning's bad poetry is
+not to condemn him for it, but to say quite frankly this poem or that
+poem was a failure. It is by his masterpieces that Browning must be
+judged.
+
+Perhaps, as he points out, the peculiar characteristic of Browning's art
+lay in his use of the grotesque, which, as I said at the beginning of
+this chapter, is a totally different thing from the abnormal.
+
+In other words, Browning was rugged. It was as natural for him to be
+rugged as for Ruskin to be polished, for Swift to be cynical (in an
+optimistic sense), for Chesterton to be paradoxical. Ruggedness is a
+form of beauty, but it is a beauty that is quite different from the
+commonly accepted grounds. A mountain is rugged and it is beautiful, a
+woman is beautiful; but the two features of the aesthetic are quite
+different. It is the same with poetry. There is (and Browning proved it)
+a 'beautifulness' in the rugged; it is a sense of being 'beautifully'
+rugged.
+
+Enough has been said to make it quite clear that Browning was a literary
+artist; but, as Chesterton contends, an original one. He did not confine
+himself to any one form: his beauty lay in the placing of the 'rugged'
+before his readers, the method he used of employing the grotesque.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is now an excellent time in which to look at Browning's philosophy
+and Chesterton's interpretation of it.
+
+As it is perfectly true to say that every man has a point of view, a
+position so admirably brought out by Browning in his 'Ring and the
+Book,' so it is also, I think, a truism that every man has (not always
+consciously) a philosophy. A philosophy is, after all, a point of view;
+it is not necessarily an abstract academic position; nor is it always a
+well-defined attempt to discover the ultimate purpose of things. It can
+be, and very often is, a point of view really acquired by experience.
+
+Naturally a man of the intellect of Browning would have a philosophy,
+and he had, as our critic points out, a very definite one.
+
+In his quaint way Chesterton tells us 'Browning had opinions as he had
+a dress suit or a vote for Parliament.' And he had no hesitation in
+expressing these opinions. There was no reason why he should; at least
+part of his philosophy, as I have indicated, lay in his knowledge of the
+value of men's opinions--yet again brought out in 'The Ring and the
+Book.'
+
+He had, so we are told, two great theories of the universe: the first,
+the hope that lies in man, imperfect as he is; the second, a bold
+position that has offended many people but is nevertheless at least a
+reasonable one, that God is in some way imperfect; that is, in some
+obscure way He could be made jealous.
+
+This is, no doubt, a highly unorthodox position. Yet it is a position
+that thousands have felt does make it plainer (as it did to
+Browning)--the necessity of the Crucifixion; it was a pandering to
+Divine jealousy.
+
+These are, as Chesterton admits, great thoughts, and, as such, are
+liable to be disliked by those Christians and others who will not think
+and dislike any one else doing so.
+
+This strange theological position of Browning is, I think, indicated in
+'Saul.'
+
+Chesterton usually does not agree with the other critics about most
+things, but he does at least agree in regard to the fact that Browning
+was an optimist. His theory of the use of men, though imperfect, is as
+good an argument for optimism as could well be found. Browning's
+optimism was, as our critic says, founded on experience, it was not a
+mere theory that had nothing practical behind it.
+
+As I have said, Browning disliked Spiritualists; but that is not, our
+critic thinks, the reason he wrote 'Sludge the Medium.' What this poem
+showed was that Spiritualism could be of use in spite of insincere
+mediums. It was in no way an attack on the tenets of Spiritualism.
+
+The understanding of this poem gives the key to other poems of
+Browning's, as 'Bishop Blougram's Apology,' and some of the monologues
+in 'The Ring and the Book'; which is, that 'a man cannot help telling
+some truth, even when he sets out to tell lies.'
+
+This may be the right interpretation of these poems, but I think
+Browning really meant that there is an end somewhere to lying; in other
+words, lying is negative and temporary; truth is positive and eternal.
+
+The summing up of Browning's knaves cannot be better expressed than by
+Chesterton. 'They are real somewhere. We are talking to a garrulous and
+peevish sneak; we are watching the play of his paltry features, his
+evasive eyes and babbling lips. And suddenly the face begins to change
+and harden, the eyes glare like the eyes of a mask, the whole face of
+clay becomes a common mouthpiece, and the voice that comes forth is the
+voice of God uttering his everlasting soliloquy.'
+
+It is the essence of Browning; it is the certainty that however far
+distant there is the face of God behind the human features.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+If there is one characteristic about this study of Browning it lies in
+the fact that it is a very clear exposition of a remarkable poet. A man
+might take up the book knowing Browning only as a name; he might well
+lay it down knowing what Browning was, what he achieved, what his
+essence was. The book is a masterly study--it lays claim to our
+sympathies; and never more so than when our critic describes that moment
+when Browning, alone in the room, saw his wife die.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Five_
+
+CHESTERTON AS HISTORIAN
+
+
+The reason that Chesterton has written a history of England is that he
+says no member of the public has ever done so before. This is a thing to
+be supremely thankful for if true; but it is entirely untrue, for the
+very obvious fact that history has never been written by any one who is
+not a member of the public. Every historian is a member of the public.
+Let him imagine he is not, let him carry this imagination out to a
+logical conclusion, and he will have a good chance of landing in a
+prison for failing to pay the king's taxes.
+
+The very best people to write histories are historians, but they will
+never deal with history in a popular way. This Chesterton laments. He
+wants a history that shall be about the things that never ordinarily get
+into history. If he is told about the charters of the barons, he wishes
+to hear of the charters of the carpenters. This, he thinks, would make
+history popular, that word which is always used to denote something
+rather slight and superficial. He exclaims that the people are ignored,
+whereas the historian really would not be one at all if he was guilty of
+this charge.
+
+The fact of the matter is, that the whole of the history of England has
+been so misunderstood that Chesterton has come to the rescue and has
+told us what really happened--in fact, all we learnt at school was waste
+of time; poor Green really wrote an anti-history of this country. The
+Romans are not of the remote past; the whole of present-day England is
+the remains of Rome, which is merely to say that our civilization comes
+down from Rome, a statement that quite able historians have hinted at
+now and again. No one for an instant is so foolish as to think that the
+chief remains of the Romans consist of the few broken-up baths and
+villas up and down the country, when a splendid high road stares them in
+the face.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+Chesterton pays enormous attention to the Middle Ages. They have, he
+thinks, been rather badly dealt with by historians. Too much attention
+is, he contends, paid to the time of the Stuarts onwards. Chesterton
+asks us to contemplate history as we should if we had never learnt it at
+school. It is, of course, true that we do not learn the essentials of
+our country in our schooldays. It is of no real importance that William
+conquered Harold in 1066, but it is of vast importance to know how he
+behaved as a conqueror, a fact seldom taught. But if we forgot all the
+history we ever knew, we should not be able to appreciate Chesterton's
+history, which aims to reconstruct all that we had believed while
+pouring over Green in the fifth form.
+
+Chesterton covers so much ground in this book, his treatment is so
+intricate, his method so full of various peculiar contentions, that the
+only possible method in a chapter is to take some of the more important
+points he touches upon and try and discover what he feels about them. It
+will be well to realize at once that however he may differ from
+recognized historians, his history loses all its meaning unless the
+standard historians are known fairly well.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+There are probably two tremendous turning points in history--the one
+occurred at the moment that the fatal arrow entered the eye of Harold at
+Senlac, the other when Henry VIII set fire to the ecclesiastical faggots
+that ended in the Reformation. That period which lay between them may
+roughly be called the Middle Ages, which part of history Chesterton
+thinks has been badly treated. Whether this is so is a question that
+opens up a broader one: Has the history of England ever received the
+attention it deserves? Has right proportion been given to the most
+important events? Should history be made popular in the modern sense of
+this much misinterpreted word? These are questions to which no adequate
+answer can be given in the space of a chapter, nor is it within the
+scope of this book.
+
+Chesterton is very annoyed to find that to possess Norman blood is, to
+many people, a hall mark of aristocracy: 'This fashionable fancy misses
+what is best in the Normans.' What he contends, and I think rightly, is
+that William was a conqueror until he had conquered. Then England passed
+out of his hands. He had wished it to be an autocracy; instead, it
+developed into a monarchy--'William the Conqueror became William the
+Conquered.' This is a line that the ordinary historians do not appear to
+take, though I fancy they imply it when they say that feudalism didn't
+exist in the time of the Georges.
+
+Perhaps one of the most picturesque parts of history is that time when
+men looked across the sea and saw in the far distance a huge cross that
+seemed to beckon as the voices later called to Joan of Arc. The Crusades
+were a time when wars were holy because they were waged for a holy
+thing. Six hundred years, so Chesterton tells us, had elapsed since
+Christianity had arisen and covered the world like a dust-storm, when
+there arose 'a copy and a contrary: the creed of the Moslems'; in a
+sense Islam was 'like a Christian heresy.' Historians, so he thinks,
+have not understood the Crusades. They have taken them to be
+aristocratic expeditions with a Cross as the prey instead of a deer,
+whereas really they were 'unanimous risings.' 'The Holy Land was much
+nearer to a plain man's house than Westminster, and immeasurably nearer
+than Runnymede.' But I am not sure that Chesterton has scored over the
+orthodox historians who made a good deal out of the fact that Crusade
+had a close affinity to _Crux_, which word meant a cross that was not
+necessarily bound up with Calvary.
+
+In dealing with the Middle Ages, he propounds the proposition that the
+best way to understand history is to read it backwards--that is, if we
+are to understand the Magna Charta we must be on speaking terms with
+Mary. 'If we really want to know what was strongest in the twelfth
+century, it is no bad way to ask what remained of it in the fourteenth.'
+This is a very excellent method, as it demonstrates what were the
+historical events and what were the mere local and temporary.
+
+Becket was one of those queer people of history who was half a priest
+and half a statesman, and he had to deal with a king who was half a king
+and half a tyrant. Every schoolboy knows about Becket, and delights to
+read of the wild ride to Canterbury, which began with the spilling of
+Becket's brains and ended with the spilling of the King's blood by his
+tomb.
+
+For Chesterton, Becket 'may have been too idealistic: he wished to
+protect the Church as a sort of earthly paradise, of which the rules
+might seem to him as paternal as those of heaven, but might well seem to
+the king as capricious as those of Fairyland.' The tremendously
+suggestive thing of the whole story of Becket is that Henry II submitted
+to being thrashed at Becket's tomb. It was like 'Cecil Rhodes submitting
+to be horsewhipped by a Boer as an apology for some indefensible death
+incidental to the Jameson Raid.' Undoubtedly Chesterton has got at the
+kernel of the story that made an Archbishop a saint (a rare occurrence)
+and an English king a sportsman (a rarer occurrence).
+
+But clever as Chesterton is in regard to this particular story, the
+ordinary schoolboy would do better to stick to the common tale of Becket
+that came on the hasty words spoken by a hasty king; he will better
+understand the significance of the whipping of the king when he can read
+history back to the days when kings could not only not be whipped, but
+could whip whom they chose, and put men's eyes out when they used them
+to shoot at the king's deer.
+
+A great part of the Middle Ages is concerned with the French wars, those
+wars that staggered the English exchequer and made the English kings
+leaders of armies. The reason of these wars was, Chesterton tells us,
+the fact that Christianity was a very local thing. It was more--it was a
+national thing that was bound up with England. 'Men began to feel that
+foreigners did not eat or drink like Christians,' which is to say that
+the Englishman began his contempt for the foreigner which has resulted
+in nearly all our wars, and has made the Englishman abroad a
+supercilious creature, and has made the English schoolboy put his tongue
+out at the French master.
+
+The French wars were something more than a national hatred, they were a
+national dislike of foreigners, a dislike that had its probable origin
+in the Tower of Babel. But this was not the only reason of the incessant
+French wars--there was a question of policy. France began to be a
+nation, and 'a true patriotic applause hailed the later victory of
+Agincourt.' France had become something more than a nation; it had
+become a religion, because it had as its figure a simple girl who
+believed in voices, and took her part in the struggles of a defeated
+country.
+
+Chesterton's chapter is a fine understanding of the French wars; it is
+an amplification of the mere skeletons of ordinary history, and as such
+is very valuable.
+
+From being a reasonable national dislike, the French wars 'gradually
+grew to be almost as much a scourge to England as they were to France.'
+'England was despoiled by her own victories; luxury and poverty
+increased at the extremes of society, and the balance of the better
+mediaevalism was lost.' It resulted in the revolt connected with Wat
+Tyler, a revolt that 'was not only dramatic but was domestic'; it ended
+in the death of Tyler and the intervention of the boy king, who, in
+swaying the multitude that was a dangerous mob, 'gives us a fleeting and
+final glimpse of the crowned sacramental man of the Middle Ages.'
+
+From this period Chesterton tells us that a rather strange thing
+happened--men began to fight for the crown. The Wars of the Roses was
+the result. The English rose was then the symbol of party, as ever since
+it has been the symbol of an English summer.
+
+Chesterton makes no attempt to follow the difficult path that the Wars
+of the Roses travel, from the military standpoint, nor the adventures
+that followed the king-maker Warwick and the warlike widow of Henry V,
+one Margaret. There was, so he says, a moral difference in this conflict
+that took the name of a Rose to fight for a Crown. 'Lancaster stood, as
+a whole, for the new notion of a king propped by parliaments and
+powerful bishops; and York, on the whole, for the remains of the older
+idea of a king who permits nothing to come between him and his people.
+This is everything of permanent political interest that could be traced
+by counting all the bows of Barnet or all the lances of Tewkesbury.'
+
+The time when the Middle Ages was drawing near to the Tudors is
+interesting, because of the riddle of Richard III. Chesterton's
+description of this strange king is full of fascination if also it is
+full of truth: 'He was not an ogre shedding rivers of blood, yet a
+crimson cloud cannot be dispelled from his memory. Whether or not he was
+a good man, he was apparently a good king, and even a popular one. He
+anticipated the Renaissance in an abnormal enthusiasm for art and music,
+and he seems to have held to the old paths of religion and charity.'
+
+He was indeed, as Chesterton says, the last of the mediaeval kings, and
+he died hard; his blood flowed over an England that did not know what
+loyalty was, a country that had nobles who would fly from their king on
+the first sign of danger; the Last Post of the old kings was sounding,
+and Richard answered its challenge. His description of this remarkable
+king is perhaps the best thing in the book, and is certainly far better
+than the ordinary history that attempts to give the character of a king
+in a couple of lines.
+
+With the end of the mediaeval kings we pass to a period that is none
+other than the Renaissance, one of the most important epochs in English
+history, 'that great dawn of a more rational daylight which for so many
+made mediaevalism seem a mere darkness.'
+
+The character of Henry VIII is one that is a veritable battleground. He
+is attacked because he found a variety of wives pleasing; he is condoned
+as a young man who promised to be a great king. There are, as Chesterton
+points out, two great things that intruded into his reign: the one was
+the difficulty of his marriages, the other was the question of the
+monasteries. If Henry was a Bluebeard, he was such because his wives
+were not a fortunate selection. 'He was almost as unlucky in his wives
+as they were in their husband.' But the one thing that Chesterton feels
+broke Henry's honour was the question of his divorce. In doing this he
+mistook the friendship of the Pope for something that would make him go
+against the position of the Church. 'Henry sought to lean upon the
+cushions of Leo and found he had struck his arm upon the rock of Peter.
+The result was that Henry finished with the Papacy in the pious hope
+that it had done with him; Henry became head of the Church that was
+national, and soon Wolsey fell, to die in a monastery at Leicester.
+
+But this terrible king 'struck down the noblest of the Humanists, Thomas
+More, who died the death of a saint, gloriously jesting.' The question
+of the monasteries is one that is solved by the simple statement that
+the King wanted money and the monasteries supplied it. Is there any
+justification for the crimes of Henry? For Chesterton 'it is unpractical
+to discuss whether Froude finds any justification for Henry's crimes in
+the desire to create a strong national monarchy. For whether or not it
+was desired, it was not created.'
+
+Chesterton in an original way has given a very clear account of the
+difficulties of the reign of Henry VIII, a reign that had perhaps more
+influence on English history than any other, a reign that showed what
+the licence of an English monarchy could do and, what is of more
+importance, what it could not, a reign that showed that the fall of a
+great man could be so precipitate that the significance of it could not
+be felt at the time, a reign that showed that the Pope was something
+more than the friend of the English throne--he was in matters of Church
+discipline its checkmate. This was the time that England trembled at the
+devilry of a king and rejoiced at the sun of a new learning that was
+slowly dispelling the fog of the Dark Ages.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is usually assumed that Mary was a bad woman because she burned
+people who were so unwise as not to be at least officially Catholics.
+Historians have applied the word 'bloody' to her, whereas the better
+word would be fanatic. 'Her enemies were wrong about her character,'
+says Chesterton. 'She was in a limited sense a good woman.' If
+Chesterton means she was a good Catholic he is right, if the burning of
+heretics is a good thing for a Christian Church. But the fortunate part
+of the whole affair was that not even burning could restore the power of
+the Papacy in England in Mary's time any more than the arrogance of the
+Roman Catholics to-day can restore the Pope to London and unfrock the
+Archbishop of Canterbury. Mary was a sincere fanatic, and like most
+fanatics was an extremely ignorant woman; consequently she could not see
+that the fire that burnt Cranmer also burnt the last hope of England
+bowing to the Pope of Rome. I cannot feel that Chesterton has in the
+least vindicated the character of Mary.
+
+Historians are apt to think that the days of Queen Elizabeth were those
+in which England first realized that she was great. On the other hand,
+Chesterton is convinced that it is in this period that 'she first
+realized that she was small.' The business of the Armada was to her what
+Bannockburn was to the Scots, or Majuba to the Boers--a victory that
+astonished the victors. The fact of the matter was that Spain realized
+after the battle that the victory does not always go to the big
+battalions, which the present Kaiser is no doubt writing in his
+'Imperial' copybook to-day.
+
+The 'magnificance of the Elizabethan times has traces in mediaeval times
+and far fewer traces in modern times.' 'Her critics indeed might
+reasonably say that in replacing the Virgin Mary by the Virgin Queen,
+the English reformers merely exchanged a true virgin for a false one.'
+If Elizabeth was crafty it was because it was good she should be so. If
+she had not been so, the history of England might have found Philip of
+Spain on the English throne and Mary Queen of Scots a worse menace in
+England, a menace that by the skill of Elizabeth developed into a
+headless corpse. Had Elizabeth had a different historical background,
+she might have been a different Queen; but, as it was, she dealt with it
+as only a genius could who had followed a maniacal Queen who failed in
+everything she did.
+
+From the times of Elizabeth, Chesterton moves on to the age of the
+Puritans, those rather dull people who have always been the byword for
+those who are more popularly known as Prigs. 'The Puritans were
+primarily enthusiastic for what they thought was pure religion. Their
+great and fundamental idea was that the mind of man can alone directly
+deal with the mind of God. Consequently they were anti-sacramental.' Not
+only in ecclesiastical matters, they were in doctrine Calvinistic--that
+is, they believed 'that men were created to be lost and saved,' a
+theological position that makes God a Person who wastes a lot of
+valuable time. It was to a large extent this belief in Calvin that made
+the Puritans dislike a sacramental principle; it was, of course, quite
+unnecessary to have one. If a man was either lost or saved, the need of
+any human meditators was not felt.
+
+It is, of course, true, as Chesterton says, that 'England was never
+Puritan.' Neither was it ever entirely Catholic, neither has it ever
+been entirely Protestant. It is one of the things to be thankful for
+that men have ever held different religious opinions. It would be the
+greatest mistake if ever the Church was so misguided as to listen to the
+cries that come for unity, a unity that could only be founded on the
+subordinating of the opinions of the many to the opinion of the few.
+
+I have said at the beginning of this chapter that Chesterton has said
+that the Middle Ages have not had the historical attention they deserve.
+Whether this is so is a question that cannot be answered here. What we
+have to say is whether this book is a valuable one. There are, of
+course, many opinions expressed in it that do not take the usual
+historical standpoint, or they have a more original way of expression. I
+cannot feel that this book is the best of Chesterton's works, not
+because it has not some very sound opinions expressed in it, but rather
+because to understand its import the ordinary histories must be well
+known. It is perhaps a matter of an unsuitable title, 'A Short History
+of England.' It would have been better to have called it a 'History of
+the Histories of England, and the Mistakes therein.' It would be no use
+as an historical book in the school sense, but as an original book on
+some of the turning-points of English history it is valuable. Mr.
+Chesterton tells us to read history backwards to understand it. This we
+may well do if we have read it as fully forward as he evidently has.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Six_
+
+THE POET
+
+
+Amongst the many outstanding qualities of Chesterton there is one that
+is pre-eminent--his extraordinary versatility. It cannot be said that
+this quality is always an advantage; a too ready versatility is not
+always synonymous with valuable work; especially is this so in literary
+matters. There are quite a number of writers who, without success,
+attempt to be a little of everything. This is not the case with
+Chesterton; if he is better as an essayist than as a historian, he is at
+least good as the latter; if he is better at paradox than at concise
+statements, he can be, if he chooses, quite free from paradox; if he
+excels in satire of a light nature, he can also be the most serious of
+critics if the subject needs such treatment.
+
+It has often been said that a good prose writer seldom makes a good
+poet. This may be to a certain extent a truism; the opposite is more
+often the case; that a good poet is quite often a poor producer of
+prose. There is a good reason for this: the mind of a poet is probably
+of a different calibre to that of a prose writer; a poet must have a
+poetical outlook on life and nature; the tree to him is something more
+than a tree, it is probably a symbol, but to a prose writer more often
+than not a tree is merely a mass of bark and leaves that adorns the
+landscape.
+
+Chesterton has written a great many poems, all of which can claim to be
+poetical in the true sense, but he has only written one really important
+poetical work. It is a ballad that is important for two things; firstly,
+it is about a very English thing; secondly, the style of the writing is
+nothing short of delightful, a statement that is not true of all good
+poetry. It has been said that Chesterton might well be the Poet
+Laureate; at least, it is a matter for extreme joy that he is not, not
+because he is not worth that honour, but because anything that tended to
+reduce his poetical output would be a serious thing in these days when
+good poets are as scarce as really good novelists.
+
+The poem that has established Chesterton for all time as a poet is the
+one he has called with true poetical genius 'The Ballad of the White
+Horse.' There have been many white horses, but there is The White Horse,
+and he lies alone on the side of a hill down Wiltshire way, where he has
+watched with a mournful gaze the centuries pass away as the horizon
+passes away in a liquid blue.
+
+The White Horse stands for something that year by year we are
+forgetting, those quaint old English feasts that have done so much to
+make England merry, and have made history into a beautiful legend that
+bears the name of Alfred. Yet the White Horse is falling into neglect.
+The author of 'Tom Brown's Schooldays' lamented the fact that people
+flew past the White Horse in stuffy first class carriages; were he alive
+now he would lament still more that English men and English women can
+pass the White Horse without a glance up from the novel they are reading
+bound in a flaring yellow cover. But there is one great Englishman who
+will never do this, and that is Chesterton; rather he writes of the
+White Horse, the lonely horse that is worthy of this splendid poem.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+In connection with the Vale of White Horse there are three
+traditions--one, that Alfred fought a great battle there; another, that
+he played a harp in the camp of the Danes; a third, that Alfred proved
+himself a very bad cook who wasted a poor woman's cake, a poor woman who
+would willingly have sacrificed cakes every day to have the honour of
+the king under her roof.
+
+It is of these three traditions that Chesterton writes his poem.
+Whether they may be historically accurate does not much matter; there is
+no doubt that the Vale had something to do with the King of Wessex, and
+popular tradition has made the name of Alfred a national legend.
+
+When Chesterton writes of the vision of the king he is no doubt writing
+of his own vision of the events that led up to the gathering of the
+chiefs. The Danes had descended on England like a cloud of locusts; it
+was the time that needed a National Champion, as time and again in the
+past the Israelites had needed one. It is one of the strange things of
+history that a champion has always appeared when he was most needed. The
+name of the Danes inspired terror; Wessex was shattered--
+
+    'For earthquake following earthquake
+    Uprent the Wessex tree ...'
+
+The kings of Wessex were weary and disheartened: fire and pillage had
+laid the countryside bare with that horrible bareness that only lies in
+the wake of conqueror:
+
+    'There was not English armour left,
+      Nor any English thing,
+    When Alfred came to Athelney
+      To be an English king.'
+
+This was the vision that Alfred had, and he gathered the disheartened
+chiefs to his side till, in victory, he could bear the name of king.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the wake of national champions there have ever appeared popular tales
+demonstrating the human qualities of these giants; if Napoleon could
+conquer empires, tradition has never forgotten that he once pardoned a
+sentry he found asleep at his post. If Wellington won the battle of
+Waterloo by military genius, so popular hearsay has urged that he
+commanded the Guards to charge 'La Grande Armee' in cockney terms.
+Around the almost sacred name of Alfred many and various are the old
+wives' tales, among which the story of his harp is not the least
+picturesque; it is one on which Chesterton expends a good deal of poetic
+energy.
+
+From the gist of the poem it is evident that Alfred, in the course of
+his wanderings, came near to the White Horse, but as though for very
+sorrow--
+
+    'The great White Horse was grey.'
+
+Down the hill the Danes came in headlong flight and carried Alfred off
+to their camp; his fame as a harpist had pierced the ears of the
+invaders:
+
+    'And hearing of his harp and skill,
+    They dragged him to their play.'
+
+The Danes might well laugh at the song of the king, but it was a laugh
+that was soon to be turned to weeping when the king had finished his
+song:
+
+    'And the king with harp on shoulder
+      Stood up and ceased his song;
+    And the owls moaned from the mighty trees,
+      And the Danes laughed loud and long.'
+
+There is in this poem a pleasant rhythm and a clearness of meaning that
+is absent from much good poetry. Chesterton has caught the wild romantic
+background of the time when the King of England could play a harp in the
+camp of his enemies; when he could, by a note, bring back the
+disheartened warriors to renew the fight; when he could be left to look
+after the cakes and be scolded when, like the English villages, they
+were burnt. One of the most popular of the legends is the one connected
+with Alfred and the woman of the forest. It has made Chesterton write
+some of his most charming verse.
+
+And Alfred came to the door of a woman's cottage and there rested, with
+the promise that in return he would watch the cakes that they did not
+burn.
+
+But--
+
+    'The good food fell upon the ash,
+      And blackened instantly.'
+
+The woman was naturally annoyed that this unknown tramp should let her
+cooking spoil:
+
+    'Screaming, the woman caught a cake
+      Yet burning from the bar,
+    And struck him suddenly on the face,
+      Leaving a scarlet scar.'
+
+The scar was on the king's brow, a scar that tens of thousands should
+follow to victory:
+
+    'A terrible harvest, ten by ten,
+    As the wrath of the last red autumn--then
+      When Christ reaps down the kings.'
+
+In a preface to this poem, with regard to that part which deals with the
+battle of Enthandune, Chesterton says: 'I fancy that in fact Alfred's
+Wessex was of very mixed bloods; I have given a fictitious Roman, Celt,
+and Saxon a part in the glory of Enthandune.'
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+The battle of Enthandune is divided into three parts. The poetry is
+specially noticeable for the great harmony of the words with the subject
+of the lines; it is one of the great characteristics of Chesterton's
+poetry that he uses language that intimately expresses what he wants to
+describe. He can, in a few lines, describe the discipline of an army:
+
+    'And when they came to the open land
+    They wheeled, deployed, and stood.'
+
+It is perfect poetry concerning the machine-like movements of
+highly-trained troops.
+
+The death of an earl that occurs in a moment of battle: we can almost
+see the blow, the quick change on the face from life to death; we can
+almost hear the death gurgle:
+
+    'Earl Harold, as in pain,
+    Strove for a smile, put hand to head,
+    Stumbled and suddenly fell dead,
+    And the small white daisies all waxed red
+    With blood out of his brain.'
+
+Of the tremendous power of a charge, Chesterton can give us the meaning
+in two lines that might otherwise take a page of prose:
+
+    'Spears at the charge!' yelled Mark amain,
+    'Death to the gods of Death.'
+
+Whether it be to victory or defeat, the last charge grips the
+imagination, just as the latest words of a great man are remembered long
+after he has turned to dust. The final charge of the Old Guard, the
+remnant of Napoleon's ill-fated army at Waterloo, the dying words of
+Nelson, these are the things that produce great poetry.
+
+Some of the verses describing the last charge at Enthandune are the
+finest lines Chesterton has so far written. It will not be out of place
+to quote one or two of the best--the challenge of Alfred to his
+followers to make an effort against the dreaded Danes, at whose very
+name strong men would pale:
+
+    'Brothers-at-arms,' said Alfred,
+      'On this side lies the foe;
+    Are slavery and starvation flowers,
+      That you should pluck them so?'
+
+Or the death of the Danish leader, who would have pierced Alfred through
+and through:
+
+    'Short time had shaggy Ogier
+    To pull his lance in line--
+    He knew King Alfred's axe on high,
+    He heard it rushing through the sky;
+    He cowered beneath it with a cry--
+    It split him to the spine;
+    And Alfred sprang over him dead,
+    And blew the battle sign.'
+
+The last part of the poem is that which gives an account of the scouring
+of the White Horse, in the years of peace:
+
+    'When the good king sat at home.'
+
+But through everything the White Horse remained--
+
+    'Untouched except by the hand of Nature:
+    The turf crawled and the fungus crept,
+    And the little sorrel, while all men slept,
+    Unwrought the work of man.'
+
+'The Ballad of the White Horse' is in its way one of the best things
+Chesterton has done: it is a fine poem about a very picturesque piece of
+English legend, which may or may not be based on history. Poetry can,
+and very often does, fulfil a great patriotic mission in arousing
+interest in those distant times when Englishmen, with their backs to the
+wall, responded to the cry of Alfred, as they did when, centuries later,
+the hordes of Germans attempted to cut the knot of Haig's army.
+
+For hundreds of years Alfred has been turned to dust, but the White
+Horse remains, a perpetual monument to the great days when England was
+invaded by the Danes. 'The Ballad of the White Horse' is a ballad worthy
+of the immortal horse that will remain centuries after the author of the
+poem has passed out of mortal sight.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+In an early volume of light verse Chesterton wrote of the kind of games
+that old men with beards would delight in. 'Greybeards at Play' is a
+delightful set of satirical verses in which the ardent philosopher
+confers a favour on Nature by being on intimate and patronising terms
+with her.
+
+This dear old philosopher, with grey beard and presumably long nose and
+large spectacles, is full of admiration for the heavenly beings:
+
+    'I love to see the little stars
+      All dancing to one tune;
+    I think quite highly of the Sun,
+      And kindly of the Moon.'
+
+Coming to earth, this same philosopher is full of friendly relations
+with America, for--
+
+    'The great Niagara waterfall
+    Is never shy with me.'
+
+In the same volume Chesterton writes of the spread of aestheticism, and
+that the cult of the Soul had a terrible effect on trade:
+
+    'The Shopmen, when their souls were still,
+      Declined to open shops--
+    And Cooks recorded frames of mind
+      In sad and subtle chops.'
+
+In a small volume of poems called 'Wine, Water, and Song,' we have some
+of the poems that appear in Chesterton's novels. They have a delightful
+air of brilliancy and satire, about dogs and grocers and that peculiar
+king of the Jews, Nebuchadnezzar, who, when he is spoken of by scholars,
+alters his name to Nebuchadrezzar. We have but room for one quotation,
+and the place of honour must be given to the epic of the grocer who,
+like many of other trades, makes a fortune by giving short weights:
+
+    'The Hell-Instructed Grocer
+      Has a Temple made of Tin,
+    And the Ruin of good innkeepers
+      Is loudly urged therein;
+    But now the sands are running out
+      From sugar of a sort,
+    The Grocer trembles, for his time,
+      Just like his weight, is short.'
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+The hymn that Mr. Chesterton has written, called 'O God of Earth and
+Altar,' is unfortunately so good and so entirely sensible that the
+clergy on the whole have not used it much; rather they prefer to sing of
+heaven with a golden floor and a gate of pearl, ignoring a really fine
+hymn that pictures God as a sensible Being and not a Lord Chief Justice
+either of sickly sentimentality or of the type of a Judge Jeffreys.
+
+It must be said that to many people who know Chesterton he is first and
+foremost an essayist and lastly a poet. The reason is that he has
+written comparatively little serious poetry; this is, I think, rather a
+pity--not that quantity is always consistent with quality, but that in
+some way it may not be too much to say that Chesterton is the best poet
+of the day; and I do not forget that he has as contemporaries Alfred
+Noyes and Walter de la Mare.
+
+The strong characteristic of his poetry, as I have said, is the wealth
+of language; to this must be added the exceedingly pleasant rhythm that
+runs as easily as a well-oiled bicycle. If Mr. Chesterton is not known
+to posterity as one of the leading poets of the twentieth century it
+will be because his prose is so well known that his poetry is rather
+crowded out.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Seven_
+
+THE PLAYWRIGHT
+
+
+Nearly eight years ago all literary and dramatic London focused its eyes
+on a theatre that was known as the Little Theatre. On the night of
+November 7th the critics might have been seen making their way along
+John Street with just the faintest suspicion of mirth in their eyes.
+
+The reason was that the most eccentric genius of the day had written a
+play, and it was to be produced that night, and had the name of MAGIC, a
+title that might indicate something that turned princes into wolves, or
+transported people on carpets to distant lands, or might be more simply
+a play that dealt with Magic in the sense that there really was such a
+thing.
+
+The play was a success--I could see that it would be at the moment Mr.
+Bernard Shaw so forgot himself as to be interested in something he had
+not himself written. The Press was charmed with the play and went so far
+as to say, with a gross burlesque of Chesterton, that it was 'real
+phantasy and had soul.' Chesterton by his one produced play had earned
+the right to call himself a dramatic author, who could make the public
+shiver and think at the same time, an unusual combination.
+
+I rather fancy that Magic is a theological argument, disguised in the
+form of a play, that relies for its effects on clever conversation, the
+moving of pictures, and a mysterious person who may have been a conjurer
+and may have also been a magician.
+
+When I say that the play is really a theological one, I do not mean to
+say that it has anything to do with the Thirty-Nine Articles, the
+Validity of the Anglican Orders, or even the truth of the Virgin Birth;
+rather it is about an indefinable 'something' that is so simple that it
+is misunderstood by every one.
+
+The play turns upon five people who are thrown together in a room that
+has a nasty habit of becoming ghostly at times.
+
+The five people are a doctor who is a scientist, who does not believe in
+anything not material being scientific; a vicar who is a typical
+clergyman, who thoroughly believes in supernatural things until they are
+proved, when he becomes an agnostic; a young American who is a cad and a
+fool; a girl who believes in fairies and goes to Holy Communion, which
+is the one thing that depicts she has a certain amount of sense; a duke
+who ends every sentence with a quotation from Tennyson to Bernard Shaw.
+
+These five people are influenced by a Pied Piper kind of fellow who
+calls himself a conjurer, and is rather too clever for the company.
+
+Apparently the conjurer has been strolling about the garden when he
+meets Patricia, who thinks he can produce fairies. In due course the
+conjurer comes into the room, where he has encounters with the various
+occupants, who don't believe in his tricks; the conjurer is unlucky
+enough to meet the young American cad Morris Carleon, who is really
+quite rude to the conjurer and discovers (so he thinks) all the tricks
+except one in which the conjurer turns the red lamp at the doctor's gate
+blue. This so worries Morris that he goes up to his room with a chance
+of going mad.
+
+The others beseech the conjurer to explain the trick; he does so, and
+says it is done by magic, which is the whole point of the play, that we
+are left to wonder whether it was by magic or by a natural phenomenon.
+
+The conjurer gets the better of the parson, the Rev. Cyril Smith, who
+believes in a model public house and the Old Testament, and takes a good
+stipend for pretending to believe in the supernatural.
+
+The result of the whole matter is magic, by which we presume the trick
+may have been done.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+The play is in some ways a difficult one: we are left wondering whether
+or not Chesterton believes in magic; if he does, then the conjurer need
+not have been so upset that he had gained so much power of a psychic
+nature; if he does not, then the conjurer was a clever fraud or a
+brilliant hypnotist.
+
+One thing is quite certain, Chesterton brings out the weaknesses of the
+dialectic of the parson and doctor in a remarkable way; he makes us
+realise that there are some things we really know nothing about; if
+lamps turn blue suddenly it may quite well be a 'Something' that may be
+magic and might be God or Satan; anyhow, it cannot be explained by an
+American young man; it is of the things that the clergy profess to
+believe in and very often do not.
+
+It is, I think, undoubtedly a problem play, and I doubt very much if
+Chesterton knows what was the agency that did the trick, but I rather
+think that 'Magic' is a great play, not because of the situations, but
+rather because the more the play is studied the more difficult is it to
+say exactly what is the lesson of it.
+
+Magic is called a phantastic comedy; it might well be called a
+phantastic tragedy.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Eight_
+
+THE NOVELIST
+
+
+There is perhaps no word in the English language which is more elastic
+than the word novel as applied to what is commonly known as fiction. The
+word novel is used to describe stories that are as far apart as the
+Poles. Thus it is used to describe a classic by Thackeray or Dickens, or
+a clever love tale by Miss Dell, or a brilliantly outspoken sex tale by
+Miss Elinor Glyn, or a romance by Miss Corelli, or a tale of adventure
+by Joseph Conrad, or a very modern type of analytical novel by very
+modern writers who are a little bit young and a big bit old.
+
+I do not think that it is an exaggeration to say that Chesterton as a
+novelist carries the art yet a step farther and has added elasticity to
+the word. It would, I think, be probably untrue to say that Chesterton
+is a popular novelist; he is much too unlike one to be so. That he is
+read by a wide public is not the same thing; he has not the following of
+the millions that Charles Garvice had, for the millions who understood
+him might find Chesterton difficult. Really Chesterton is read by a
+select number of people who would claim to be intellectual; very
+up-to-date clergymen rave about his catholicity, high-brow ladies of
+smart clubs delight in his knave whimsicalities, but the girl in the
+suburban train to Wimbledon passes by on the other side.
+
+One of the characteristic features of Chesterton's novels is his clever
+selection of titles that are by their very nature fit to designate his
+original works. If in journalism nine-tenths of the importance of an
+article depends upon its title, it is equally true that the title of a
+novel is of the same import. Either a title should give some indication
+of the nature of the book, or it should be of the kind that makes us
+want to read it; this is the case with regard to the Chesterton novels,
+their designations are so phantastic that our curiosity is aroused. Thus
+'The Man who was Thursday' gives no possible explanation of what it is
+about, but it does suggest that it is interesting to know about a man
+who was Thursday; 'The Flying Inn' may be a forecast of prohibition or
+it may be a romance of the time when inns shall fly to the ends of the
+earth; 'The Napoleon of Notting Hill' leads us to suppose that perhaps
+there was a hidden history of that part of London, that Notting Hill can
+boast of a past that makes it worthy of having been a station on the
+first London tube.
+
+It is unsafe to prophesy any limit to the versatility of Chesterton, but
+it is improbable that he could write an ordinary novel; the reason is, I
+fancy, that he cannot write of the ordinary emotions with the ease that
+he can construct grotesque situations. This is why I have said that, as
+a novelist, Chesterton is not popular in the sense that he is read by
+the masses (that word that the Church always uses to indicate those who
+form the bulk of the community). As a novelist, Chesterton stands apart,
+not because he is better than contemporary writers of fiction, but
+because his books are unlike those of any one else.
+
+I have taken Chesterton's most famous novels and have written a
+short survey of their character. They are not always easy to
+understand--sometimes they seem to indicate alternative points of view;
+they teem with pungent wit and shrewd observations, they are without
+doubt phantastic, they are in the true sense clever.
+
+
+'THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL'
+
+At the time of the publication of this book the critics with astounding
+frankness admitted that, while this was a fine book, they had difficulty
+in deciphering what it meant. One, now a well-known Fleet Street editor,
+went farther, and said that possibly the author himself did not know
+what he meant--a situation in which quite a number of authors have found
+themselves, especially when they read the reviews of their books.
+
+'The Napoleon of Notting Hill' is not an easy book to understand: it may
+be a satire, it may be a serious book, it may be a prophecy, it may be a
+joke, it may even be a novel! I think that it is a little bit of a joke,
+in a degree serious--something of a satire, possibly a prophecy.
+
+The main thing about the book is that a king is so unwise as to make a
+joke, and an obscure poet is more unwise in taking this Royal joke
+seriously. Many who have laughed at monarchical wit have found that
+their heads had an alarming trick of falling on Tower Hill.
+
+In 'The Napoleon of Notting Hill' we are living a hundred years on, and
+we are to believe that London hasn't much changed; a certain respectable
+gentleman has been made a king for no special reason--a very good way of
+having a versatile monarchy and a selection of kings.
+
+Not far off in the kingdom of Notting Hill there resides a poet who has
+written poems that no one reads. He is a romantic youth, and loves
+Notting Hill with the love of a Roman for Rome or of a Jew for
+Whitechapel. The new king, by way of a joke, suggests that it would be
+quite a good idea to take the various parts of London and restore them
+to a mediaeval dignity; thus 'Clapham should have a city guard, Wimbledon
+a city wall, Surbiton tolling a bell to raise its citizens.'
+
+It so happens that the obscure poet, Adam Wayne, has always seen in
+Notting Hill a glory that her citizens cannot see; he determines to make
+the grocers and barbers of that neighbourhood realise their rich
+inheritance. The new king, for some reason, desires to possess Pump
+Street in Notting Hill, and this gives the poet's dream a chance to
+mature; and he gets together a huge army, with himself as Lord High
+Provost of Notting Hill. There are some frightful battles in the
+adjacent states of Kensington and Bayswater, and, after varying
+fortunes, the Notting Hill Army is defeated, the Napoleon becomes again
+the poet of Notting Hill, while his citizens have developed from grocers
+to romanticists, from barbers to fanatics.
+
+That there might be in the future a Napoleon of Notting Hill is highly
+improbable, that London will ever return to the pomp and heraldry of the
+Middle Ages is not at all likely; but that in a hundred years Notting
+Hill will be different is quite possible. If it is not likely that there
+will be fights between Bayswater and Notting Hill, there may at least be
+battles in the air unthought of; it may well be that its citizens in
+times of peace will take a half-day trip, not to Kew Gardens or to
+Hampton Court, but to Bombay and Cape Town.
+
+
+'MANALIVE'
+
+One of the strangest complications that man has to face is the criminal
+mind. It is so complex that no society has ever understood it; very
+often it has not taken the trouble to try. No method of punishment has
+stamped out the criminal; no reformers, however ardent, have freed the
+world from those who live by violence, kill by violence, and are
+themselves killed by violence. If crime is a disease, then to treat
+criminals as wrongdoers is absurd. If every murderer is insane, then
+hanging is nonsense; if a murderer is sane, then sanity is capable of
+being more revolting than insanity.
+
+'Manalive' may, perhaps, be called a philosophy of the motive for crime;
+it may be a pseudo philosophy--at least it is an entertaining one--which
+cannot be said about all serious attempts at moulding the universe into
+a tiresome system, that is uprooted generally by the next thinker. The
+book opens with a very strong gale that ends with the arrival at a
+boarding house of a man who can stand on his head and has the name of
+Innocent Smith. He is somewhat like the person in the 'Passing of the
+Third Floor Back,' in that he revolutionizes the household, who cannot
+determine whether he is a lunatic or not; anyhow, he falls in love with
+the girl of the house. Unfortunately, rumour--a nasty, ill-natured
+thing--has it that Smith is a criminal. Evidence is collected, and a
+Grand Jury inquire into the charges, which include Bigamy, Murder,
+Polygamy, Burglary. It looks as if Smith is in for a very uncomfortable
+time, and the wedding bells are a long way from ringing.
+
+The second part of the book is concerned with these charges and the
+conduct and motives of Smith. But Chesterton is a clever barrister, and
+shows that the motives behind the 'crimes' are not only within the law,
+but are extremely useful and throw a new light on criminology.
+
+The crime of murder of which Smith is accused is one that he is supposed
+to have perpetrated in his college days. It was nothing less than firing
+at the Warden. The reason was not at all that Smith wanted to murder the
+Warden, but, rather, to discover if his theory of 'the elimination of
+life being desirable' was a sincere one. It was not. As soon as the
+Professor thought he might attain the desired bliss of death, he desired
+more than anything that he might live. The fact, then, that Smith
+pointed a pistol at his Warden was perfectly justifiable; it had the
+eminently good principle of wishing to test a theory.
+
+If Smith was a bigamist he was so with his own wife, only that he
+happened to like to live with her in various places; if he was a
+burglar, he was perfectly justified, because he merely robbed his own
+house--in fact, he does not wish to steal, because he can covet his own
+goods. Chesterton, on these grounds, acquits the prisoner.
+
+At the end of the book another or the same great gale springs up, and
+Smith, accompanied by Mary of the boarding-house, disappears. Clever as
+Chesterton's explanations of the crimes are, we shall not probably shoot
+at the Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge in order to demonstrate
+to him how desirable life really is; we shall not burgle our own
+sitting-room for the mere excitement of it; we shall not flit with our
+wife from Peckham to Marylebone, from Singapore to Bagdad, to imagine
+that we are bigamists or polygamists; rather, we shall sit at home and
+sigh that all crimes cannot be as easily settled as those Chesterton
+propounds and shows are not crimes at all.
+
+
+'THE BALL AND THE CROSS'
+
+It is usually assumed that a theological argument is a dull and prosy
+affair that has as its perpetrators either Professors of Theology or
+Professors of Rationalism. It is, of course, true that many Professors
+of Theology are dull, but they do not usually argue about theology at
+all. Professors of Rationalism are equally dull and are seldom happy
+when not engaged on the hopeless task of trying to understand God when
+they know nothing about Man and little about Satan.
+
+'The Ball and the Cross' is a theological novel. It is, without any
+doubt, the most brilliant of Chesterton's novels; it is an argument
+between a Christian ass and a very decent atheist. Atheists, if they are
+sincere, are on the way to becoming good Christians; Christians, if they
+are insincere, are on the way to becoming atheists.
+
+The book opens with a theological argument in the air between a
+professor and a monk. This becomes to the professor so wearisome that,
+with great good sense, he leaves the monk clinging to the cross at the
+top of St. Paul's Cathedral while he disappears into the clouds in his
+silver airship.
+
+Having successfully climbed into the gallery, the monk is arrested as a
+wandering lunatic and taken off to an asylum. Meanwhile, a great deal of
+excitement is agitating Ludgate Hill, where an atheistic editor runs a
+paper that propounds (with all the usual insults at Christ, which
+culminate in an attack on the method of the birth of Christ) the creed
+of atheism. A particularly slanderous attack on the Virgin Mary results
+in an ardent Roman Catholic throwing a stone through the blasphemer's
+window.
+
+The result is that they are both brought up before the magistrate, and
+the two men decide to fight a duel.
+
+The whole book really, then, consists of a theological argument between
+the two, interspersed with attempts to settle their differences by a
+duel, which is always interrupted at the crucial moment. Finally, after
+queer adventures, the two arrive in a lunatic asylum, in which they are
+kept until the place is burned down. It so happens that the chief doctor
+of the place turns out to be Professor Lucifer, who had left the monk
+clinging to the Cross at the top of the Cathedral. He is burnt to death
+in an airship disaster, and the atheist and the Catholic end their
+adventures.
+
+'The Ball and the Cross' is very full of fine passages. It presents the
+side of the atheist and the Catholic in a brilliant manner. The chapter
+that describes the trial before the magistrate has got the atmosphere of
+the police-court to perfection. Not less good is the Chestertonian
+satire of the comments of the Press on the case, in which Chesterton
+makes some pungent remarks about Fleet Street 'stunts.' Perhaps one of
+the best things in the book is the argument between the French Catholic
+girl and Turnbull the atheist on the doctrine of Transubstantiation.
+This passage must be quoted; it is one of the best arguments for the
+Sacrament that has been written for those people who can see that (even
+in these days) bread is a symbol for the Presence of the Life Giver, and
+wine a symbol for the Presence of the Life Force.
+
+'I am sure,' cried Turnbull, 'there is no God.'
+
+'But there is,' said Madeleine quietly; 'why, I touched His body this
+morning.'
+
+'You touched a bit of bread,' said Turnbull.
+
+'You think it is only a bit of bread,' said the girl.
+
+'I know it is only a bit of bread,' said Turnbull, with violence.
+
+'Then why did you refuse to eat it?' she said.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+If 'Orthodoxy' is the finest of Chesterton's essays, 'Browning' the best
+of his critical studies, 'The Ballad of the White Horse' the best of his
+poems, there is, I think, little doubt that this strange theological
+exposition, 'The Ball and the Cross,' is the best of his novels. It
+should be read by all rationalists, by all self-satisfied Christians, by
+all heretics, by those who are orthodox, and, above all, it should be
+read by those millions who pass St. Paul's Cathedral and seldom if ever
+give a thought to the 'Ball and the Cross' that has made the title of
+Chesterton's best novel.
+
+
+'THE FLYING INN'
+
+Chesterton is once more a laughing prophet in this book, and he has as
+sad a state of things to prophesy as had Jeremiah to the Israelites,
+those people who, if it were not that they find a place in the sacred
+writings, would be the most silly and futile race of ancient history.
+
+The scene of the story is England, and the last inn is there. We are to
+imagine that the non-drinking wine dogma of Islam has permeated England.
+It is a sorry state of things when--
+
+    'The wicked old women who feel well-bred,
+    Have turned to a teashop the Saracen's Head.'
+
+The great charm of the book is the poetry that the Irish captain recites
+to Pump, the innkeeper, the gallant innkeeper who, against all
+opposition, keeps the flag flying and the flagon full. If the book is a
+little overdrawn it is, no doubt, because the subject is slightly
+farcical; the arguments of the Oriental are well put, and, if the
+discussion of the merits of vegetarianism are a little wearisome, the
+poetry of a vegetarian is splendid:
+
+    'For I stuff away for life
+    Shoving peas in with a knife,
+    Because I am at heart a vegetarian.'
+
+Thus, if we observe queer manners at Eustace Miles we shall know the
+reason.
+
+No doubt the adventures of the last innkeeper in England would be
+wonderful; there would be half-day trips to see him; bishops would flock
+to gaze upon the last relic of a pagan England; the Poet Laureate might
+so forget himself as to write an 'Epic of the Last Innkeeper'; editors
+would be sending lady reporters to give the feminine view of the finish
+of drinking; publishers would fall over one another in their eagerness
+to secure the 'Memoirs of the Last Publican'; the Salvation Army would
+put the last drunkard in the British Museum as a prehistoric specimen;
+on the death of this National Hero, the Dean of Westminster would
+politely offer the Abbey for a memorial service, with no tickets for the
+best places.
+
+Chesterton gives other adventures to this last innkeeper. He is, we
+hope, a false prophet for this once. Were there to be no beer perhaps
+not even the pen of Chesterton would be able to describe the scenes that
+would take place in England.
+
+
+'THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY'
+
+Anarchy is a very interesting subject and is used to denote very
+different things. It may be something that puts a bullet through a king
+with the insane hope of ending the monarchy; it may be an act of a
+God-fearing Protestant clergyman when he attempts to harry the Catholics
+by denying that the crucifix is the proper symbol of the Christian
+religion; it may be the act of God when a village is destroyed by an
+earthquake or an island created by a seaquake.
+
+'The Man who was Thursday' is about an anarchist, and we are not sure
+whether Chesterton is not pulling our respectable legs and laughing that
+we really believed the party of desperadoes were real anarchists. The
+fact is, the book starts in a highly respectable suburb that might be
+anywhere near London and could not be far from it.
+
+There are two poets strolling about under the canopy of a lovely sky;
+one believes in anarchy, the other doesn't--the one who does invites the
+one who does not to come with him and see what anarchy is. This he does,
+and, after a good supper of lobster mayonnaise, the two get down to a
+subterranean cavern where are assembled half the anarchists of the
+world, precisely six; they call themselves by the names of the week,
+with a leader, who is met with later, Sunday.
+
+Syme, the visitor, is appointed as a member, and becomes, Thursday; he
+has a great many adventures, including breakfast, overlooking Leicester
+Square, and gradually discovers that the said anarchists, unknown at
+first to each other, are really Scotland Yard detectives.
+
+The only real anarchist is the poet who believed in it, whose name is
+Gregory. He has the pious wish to destroy the world; he may be Satan, if
+that person could ever pretend to be a poet.
+
+What does Chesterton mean by this strange weird tale that is almost like
+a romance of Oppenheim and is yet like an old-world allegory? Is he
+laughing at anarchists that they are but policemen in disguise? Is he
+saying that policemen are really only anarchists? Or does he mean that
+the Devil masquerades as the spirit of the Holy Day of the week
+'Sunday,' or is 'Sunday' really Christ?
+
+Chesterton calls this novel a nightmare; a nightmare is usually a
+muddled kind of thing with no connections at all; it is a dream turned
+into a blasphemy. The book may mean several things; it is quite possible
+that it may mean nothing; there is no need for a novel to mean anything
+so long as it is readable. 'The Man who was Thursday' certainly is that,
+but it leaves us with an uneasy suspicion that it is a very serious book
+and at the same time it may be merely a farce.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+Space does not permit us to more than mention Chesterton's two detective
+books, 'The Innocence of Father Brown' and 'The Wisdom of Father Brown.'
+They are a highly original series of detective tales. 'The Club of Queer
+Trades' is a volume of quaint short stories full of Chesterton's genius.
+
+Since Chesterton wrote these books an event has occurred to him which
+may have a considerable effect on his writings. His novels have always
+shown a Catholic tendency when they have touched at all on religion.
+They have not, of course, the propagandist setting of the works of
+Father R.H. Benson, nor do they have a contempt for other Churches
+that so often blackens the writings of Roman Catholic apologists.
+
+The event is one that has occasioned the usual mistake in the Press.
+They have said with loud emphasis, 'Mr. Chesterton has joined the
+Catholic Church.' He has not; there is, unfortunately, no Catholic
+Church that he could have joined; what he has done is to be received
+into the Roman part of the Catholic Church.
+
+This is a matter of importance to Chesterton; it is a matter of far
+greater importance to the Roman Catholics. If the Roman Church is wise
+she will not put her ban on Chesterton's writings--his intellect is far
+beyond the ken of the Pope; his utterances are of more import than all
+the Papal Bulls. She has secured, as her ally, one of the finest
+intellects of the day, one of the best Christian apologists.
+
+If, then, we have further novels from the pen of Chesterton we shall
+expect them to have a Roman bias, but we shall hope that they will not
+bear any signs that Rome has dictated the policy that has made many of
+her best priests mere puppets, afraid, not of the Church, but of the
+Pope, who often enough in history has been a very ignorant man.
+
+Of present-day novelists it is in no way fair to compare them to
+Chesterton; 'some contemporary novelists are better than he is, some are
+worse.' These are statements the writer of this book has often heard;
+they are entirely unfair. Chesterton, as I have said, stands apart; his
+works are for the most part symbolic. This is their difficulty: any of
+his books may be the symbol for several points of view with the
+exception of his religious position, which is always on the side of
+Christianity, and, I think, the Roman Catholic interpretation of it; his
+dialogue is worthy of Anthony Hope, his dramatic power is intense, his
+satire is never ill-natured, it is always cutting, his humour is gentle,
+pathos is rare in his novels, he has never described a woman, he is
+undoubtedly a philosopher, but he is not one who is academic, above all
+he is the genial writer of phantastic tales that are as wide as the
+universe.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Nine_
+
+CHESTERTON ON DIVORCE
+
+
+It may be somewhat arbitrary to proceed straight away to nearly the end
+of Chesterton's 'Superstition of Divorce' to find an argument that shows
+that he doesn't quite understand what divorce aims at; but it is well,
+when taking note of a book on an alleged abuse of modern society, to
+also see that the writer has got hold of the right end of the stick. It
+is no doubt unfortunate that many marriages said to be made in heaven
+end in hell. Divorce may be a sign that men have no reverence for
+marriage, it may equally be an argument that they reverence it very
+much; but there is no good reason for attributing to divorce only very
+low motives and one of the lowest that can be found; consequently I have
+started in the middle of this book.
+
+In a chapter on the tragedies of marriage, Chesterton remarks that 'the
+broad-minded are extremely bitter because a Christian, who wishes to
+have several wives when his own promise bound him to one, is not allowed
+to violate his vow at the same altar at which he made it.' What most
+people who wish for a divorce want is that they shall have, not several
+wives, but one, who shall prove that Christian marriage is not a
+horrible farce, that the words of the priest were not a miserable
+blasphemy. Chesterton has made a very big mistake if he thinks that the
+exponents of divorce wish the Church to be a party to polygamy; what
+they want is that the Church shall show a little common sense and not
+rely on the tradition of hotly disputed texts.
+
+I think it is perfectly clear that Chesterton can see no good in divorce
+at all. I have said it may be a very good argument for those who wish
+to make marriage what it is said by the Church to be--a Divine
+institution. Many people seek divorce, not that, as Chesterton implies,
+they shall run away with the wife of the man across the square, but
+that, having been unlucky in a speculation, they wish quite naturally
+and quite rightly to try again, to the infinite satisfaction of all
+parties. If the Church does not agree that divorce is ever right, so
+much the worse for that Divine institution; if the Church is right in
+holding that marriages are made by God, then civil marriages are not
+marriages at all, and there is no need to worry about divorce, because
+the most ardent reformer does not imagine that man can undo the Divine
+decree; on the other hand, the Church never will face the fact that, if
+all marriages in a church by a priest are Divine, then it is rather
+strange that the result of them very often would be more consistent with
+a Satanic origin.
+
+I am dwelling at some length on this theological argument because,
+though Chesterton does not base his case on that argument, he
+undoubtedly considers that divorce is against the Church's teaching, and
+the Church to which he now belongs would not allow him to think
+otherwise. Before I finally leave this side of the question there is one
+other consideration that must be faced. Whatever the texts in the New
+Testament relating to divorce may mean, it is rather unfortunate that
+they are attributed to a bachelor. Whether Christ had any good reason
+for knowing anything about divorce is not an irreverent one, but it is
+one that the Church must face to-day.
+
+Another thing that Chesterton does not seem to realize is that many
+people do not want divorce to marry again, but to be free of a partner
+who is not one in the most superficial sense of the word; at the same
+time a separation does not meet the case, as it is always possible that
+a man or woman may wish to take the matrimonial plunge again. Chesterton
+seems to think it is amusing to poke fun at those who are sensible
+enough to wish to make lunacy a sufficient ground for divorce. 'The
+process' he says, 'might begin by releasing somebody from a homicidal
+maniac and end by dealing with a rather dull conversationalist.' He
+might have added, to make the joke complete, or from some one who
+snores, or keeps cats, or reads Bernard Shaw.
+
+'To put it roughly,' says Chesterton, 'we are prepared in some cases to
+listen to a man who complains of having a wife. But we are not prepared
+to listen at such length to the same man when he comes back and
+complains that he has not got a wife. In a word, divorce is a
+controversy about remarriage; or, rather, about whether it is marriage
+at all.' To a certain extent Chesterton is right when he says that the
+controversy about divorce is really about remarriage, but what he
+forgets is, that for the hundreds who want divorce to be remarried,
+there are thousands who want it to be unmarried. The reason a man
+complains of having a wife is, of course, often that he prefers a
+mistress; but it is equally true that another cause for complaint is
+that his wife has for him none of the recognized attributes of the
+normal state of wifehood.
+
+I have always understood that in some sense Chesterton was a journalist
+of the kind who is rather hard on journalism, but I did not know until I
+read this book on divorce that he so little understood newspapers and
+their writers. Commenting on the fact that the Press is sensible enough
+to use divorce as a news item, he says: 'The newspapers are full of an
+astonishing hilarity about the rapidity with which hundreds of thousands
+of human families are being broken up by the lawyers; and about the
+undisguised haste of the "hustling" judges who carry on the work.' I
+wonder if Mr. Chesterton ever reads the leaders of certain papers,
+leaders which never fail to regret the enormous amount of divorce there
+is. If it be true that there is a great deal of news of divorce in the
+Press, it is because the Press does not give news of an imaginary world
+that is a Utopia, but of the dear old muddle-headed world as it is. Does
+Chesterton fail to see that if the newspapers did not report the Divorce
+Courts, the numbers of cases would increase from thousands to millions.
+It is useless Chesterton sighing that lawyers have become breakers of
+families; they have also become restrainers of suicide. If the judges
+hustle, it is because they are sensible enough to see that most of the
+divorces are justifiable; when they have not been, they have not been
+slow to say so.
+
+Yet again Chesterton repeats the somewhat superficial argument against
+divorce that its obvious effect would be frivolous marriage. The normal
+person on his or her wedding day luckily does not think about anything
+beyond the supreme happiness they have found at least at the time. It is
+lightly said that the modern Adam and Eve think of the chances of
+divorce before marriage whatever may be the cause of divorce afterwards;
+at least it will be agreed that it is a failure of a particular two
+people who thought that their lives together would be a mutual
+happiness. Therefore, when Chesterton says that divorce is likely to
+make frivolous marriages he is saying that couples about to marry do so
+expecting it to be a failure. If this be so, then the young men and
+women of to-day are more hopeless than they are commonly made to appear
+by correspondence about them in the papers. If, on the other hand, every
+couple on marriage knew for a certainty that it was 'till death us do
+part,' it is more than likely that marriage would be a thing that was
+abnormal, not normal. It might even be that the Church would have to
+listen to reason, and be disturbed over worse things than divorce, and
+whether she should endeavour to take a Christian attitude to those who
+had been unfortunate or indiscreet.
+
+Chesterton is very concerned that the time will come when 'there will be
+a distinction between those who are married and those who are really
+married.' This is precisely to state what is Utopia. At present many
+people who are really married are in the chains of slavery; the more who
+get out of it the better. As the number of those whose marriages are a
+farce will gradually diminish, thus will divorce be a godsend. Divorce
+is, in certain cases, a godsend, but the priests refuse to listen to the
+Divine revelation.
+
+Chesterton sketches at some length the nature of a vow. He considers
+that Henry the VIII broke the civilization of vows when he wished to
+have done with his wife. It is quite possible that he did, but it is
+also possible that she did precisely the same thing. The question in
+regard to our inquiry is: Is the marriage vow entirely binding even when
+the other party to the contract has broken it? The opponents of divorce,
+amongst whom are Chesterton, will quite easily say that it is, yet they
+cheerfully ignore the fact that in a marriage two persons make a
+contract, and if one breaks it there is quite a good reason that the vow
+made is no longer one at all. It is a very interesting question whether
+a vow should ever be broken. Should Jephthah have broken the vow that
+sacrificed his daughter? Should Herod have broken his vow that laid the
+head of John the Baptist on a charger? Should two people remain together
+when (if they have not broken their actual vows) they have lost the
+spirit of them? The opponents of divorce, who are so eager over the
+keeping of the marriage vow, are they as eager that it shall be but a
+miserable skeleton?
+
+Chesterton does not see any particular reason why the exponents should
+be anxious to secure easier divorce for the poor man. It is, he thinks,
+'encouraging him to look for a new wife.' If he has a wife who isn't one
+at all, the best thing for him is to look for another who will prove to
+be so, otherwise he will search for the nearest public-house and a cheap
+prostitute. Surely it is better that it be granted his first marriage
+was a failure and let him try decently for a better.
+
+Of course, the most sensible plan would be to give divorce for all sorts
+of small things; people would soon then tire of it. Chesterton tells us
+that already in America there is demand for less divorce consequent on
+the increased facilities over there. In England there is demand for
+more. Let it be given freely and the demand will soon cease. Why should
+our policy be dictated by a celibate priesthood? Does Chesterton think
+that people who hate one another are going to live together as though
+they were the most ardent lovers? Does he consider that it would be
+better to have no divorce and no marriage as a consequence? Does he
+consider that ill-assorted couples will make happy nations? Does he
+really consider that divorce can destroy marriage? Does he consider that
+the newspapers print the divorce cases because they have no other copy?
+
+Chesterton's book is, I think, unfair on some points. He considers
+divorce is a superstition; he holds that it is pernicious from a social
+standpoint; he considers that it encourages adultery; he considers that
+it is the breaking of a vow; but has he ever seriously considered that
+if all divorce is wrong, that marriage very often is the most miserable
+caricature of Divinity possible? Has he thought what the state of the
+country would be if no marriage could ever be broken or a fresh
+matrimonial start made? If such a thing happened it might make him write
+a book on the 'Superstition of Non-Divorce.'
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Ten_
+
+'THE NEW JERUSALEM'
+
+
+There are four ways of going to Jerusalem--the one is to go as a pilgrim
+would go to Mecca; another is to go as a tourist in much the way that an
+American staying in Russell Square might start for a trip round London.
+Again, it is possible to go to Jerusalem for yet a third reason, that of
+wishing quite humbly to be in some way a modern Crusader. There is yet a
+fourth way, which is to be made to go for reasons that are called
+military and are really political.
+
+'The New Jerusalem' is, above all, a massive book. It is the record of a
+tour, and it is something more, it is an appreciation of the Sacred City
+on a Hill. It is, in a limited sense, a philosophy of the Holy Land; it
+deals in a masterly way with problems connected with the Jews; it is so
+unscholarly as to insist that the scholars who refuse to call the Mosque
+of Omar that at all are pedantic; it has a fine chapter on Zionism; it
+describes Jerusalem, not so much as a city, but as an impression that
+fastened itself on the mind of Mr. Chesterton.
+
+There are some very fine passages in the book that deal with the curious
+question of Demonology, that peculiar belief which finds a place in the
+New Testament in the story of the Gadarene swine, and who, Chesterton
+felt, might still be found at the bottom of the Dead Sea--'sea swine or
+four-legged fishes swollen over with evil eyes, grown over with sea
+grass for bristles, the ghosts of Gadara.'
+
+One of the most interesting chapters of this book is that which is
+entitled 'The Philosophy of Sightseeing.' There is, of course, a
+philosophy of everything, of boiling eggs, of race-horses, of the
+relations of space and time--in fact, Philosophy is a sort of Harrods,
+that sums up anything from a Rolls Royce to a packet of pins.
+
+To some people there must be almost something incongruous in the idea of
+sightseeing in the Holy Land, yet it is probable that of the crowds
+round the foot of the Cross, on which was enacted the world's greatest
+blessing, a great part were idle sightseers who, twenty centuries later,
+might have been a bank holiday crowd on Hampstead Heath. Chesterton
+found that there was a philosophy in sightseeing; he had been warned
+that he would find Jerusalem disappointing, but he did not. He could be
+interested in the guide who 'made it very clear that Jesus Christ was
+crucified in case any one should suppose that He was beheaded.' He could
+see that the 'Christianity of Jerusalem, after a thousand years of
+Turkish tyranny, survived even in the sense of dying daily'; fascinating
+as Chesterton found Jerusalem, much as he insists that the 'sights' of
+the city must be seen in their right perspective, yet he has sympathy
+with the man who only 'sees in the distance Jerusalem sitting on the
+hill and keeping that vision' lest going further he might understand the
+city and weep over it.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+Chesterton devotes a long and careful chapter to the question of the
+Jews, of whom Christ was the chief; but, notwithstanding, thousands of
+His so-called followers quite forget this, and scarcely will admit that
+the Jew has a right to live. The reason is, no doubt, that the Fourth
+Gospel uses the word [Greek: ioudaios] in the sense of those who were
+hostile, consequently many entirely orthodox Christians are
+anti-Jewists, quite oblivious of the very reasonable request of St. Paul
+that in Christ are neither Jew nor Gentile. This is, in brief, the
+theological side of the vexed question of Zionism. Chesterton makes it
+quite clear that he thinks it desirable that 'Jews should be represented
+by Jews, should live in a society of Jews, should be judged by Jews and
+ruled by Jews,' which is of course to say that the Jews should be a
+nation. But the fact remains, do they wish to be so, and, if they do, is
+it necessary to them, or even congenial, that it shall be in Palestine?
+It is no way the province of this book to go into this question; it has
+been enough to say that it is perfectly evident that Chesterton desires
+for the Jew the dignity of being a separate nation.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+Is there any particular characteristic in this record of Chesterton's
+visit to Jerusalem? Is it anything more than an impression of a
+wonderful experience, when a great writer left his home in
+Buckinghamshire and passed over the sea and the desert to the city that
+is older than history and is now new? I do not think that the book can
+be called more than a Chestertonian impression of Jerusalem, with an
+appreciation of the vexed history of that strange city which is Holy. It
+does not forget the problems in connection with Palestine, but it has no
+particular claim to having said very much that was new about the New
+Jerusalem. Yet it has avoided the obvious: it is not of the type of book
+that is read at drawing-room missionary meetings, which are more often
+than not written in a surprised style, that the places mentioned in the
+Bible are really somewhere.
+
+I almost feel as if this book is something of a guide-book--in fact, it
+was inevitable that it should be so. I rather fancy that descriptive
+writing is for Chesterton difficult; it is a little bit too descriptive,
+which is to say it is not always easy to imagine the scene he is trying
+to describe. I am not sure that the Jews will be flattered to be told
+that Chesterton thinks they are worthy of being a nation; it is slightly
+patronizing.
+
+Yet the New Jerusalem is a book to read, but it is not of the Holy City
+that St. John saw in the Revelation; it is of the New Jerusalem of the
+twentieth century, which is very imperfect, yet is Holy. It is a book of
+a city that was visited by God, Who did not deem Himself too important
+to walk in its streets; it is of a city teeming with difficulties; it is
+of a city that has felt the iron hand of the conqueror; it is finally
+Jerusalem made into a symbol by the hand of Mr. Chesterton.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Eleven_
+
+MR. CHESTERTON AT HOME
+
+
+There is a very remarkable fascination about the home life of a great
+man whatever branch of activity he may adorn. If he is an archbishop, it
+is interesting to know what he looks like when he has exchanged his
+leggings for a human dress; if he is a pork millionaire, we like to see
+whether he enjoys Chopin; if he is a great writer, the interest of his
+home life is intensified. For the tens of thousands who know an author
+by his books, the number who know him at home may quite well be measured
+by the score.
+
+There is always an idea that a great man is not as others; that he may
+quite conceivably eat mustard with mutton, or peas with a spoon; that
+his conversation will be of things the ordinary man knows nothing about;
+that he is unapproachable; that he is, in short, on a glorified
+pedestal. This love of the personal is demonstrated in the absurd wish
+people have to know about the private doings of Royalty, it is shown in
+the remarkable fact that thousands will hang about a church door to see
+the wedding of some one who is of no particular interest beyond the fact
+that they are in some way well known; it is again seen in the interest
+that people display in those parts of a biography that deal with the
+life of the public man in his private surroundings.
+
+When I first knew Chesterton he was living in a flat in Battersea, a
+charming place overlooking a green park in front and a mass of black
+roofs behind. Here Chesterton lived in the days when he was becoming
+famous, when the inhabitants of that part of London began to realize
+that they had a great man in their midst, and grew accustomed to seeing
+a romantic figure in a cloak and slouch hat hail a hansom and drive off
+to Fleet Street.
+
+Later, Chesterton moved to Beaconsfield, a delightful country town,
+built in the shape of a cross, on the road from London to Oxford. He has
+here a queer kind of house that is mostly doors and passages, and looks
+like a very elaborate dolls'-house; it is rather like one of the Four
+Beasts, who had eyes all round, except that instead of having eyes all
+round it has doors all round; and I have never yet discovered which is
+really the front door, for the very good reason that either of the sides
+may be the front.
+
+In a very charming essay, Max Beerhobm, one of the best essayists of the
+day, gives warning to very eminent men that if they wish to please their
+admirers a great deal depends on how they receive those who would pay
+them homage. He tells us of how Coventry Patmore paid a visit to Leigh
+Hunt and was so overcome by the poet's greeting--'This is a beautiful
+world, Mr. Patmore'--that he remembered nothing else of that interview.
+I remember one day it so happened that I had to pay a visit to Anthony
+Hope. I knocked tremblingly at his door in Gower Street and followed the
+trim housemaid into the dining-room. Here I found an oldish man with his
+back to me. Turning round at my entrance he said, without any asking who
+I was, 'Have a cigarette?' And this is all that I remembered of this
+visit.
+
+The best way, according to Max Beerbohm, is for the visitor to be
+already seated, and for the very eminent man to enter, for 'Let the hero
+remember that his coming will seem supernatural to the young man.'
+
+I cannot remember the first time I saw Chesterton, whether he was seated
+or whether I was; whether his entrance was like a god or whether he was
+sitting on the floor drawing pirates of foreign climes or whether he was
+wandering up and down the passage. Chesterton is so remarkable-looking
+that any one seeing him cannot fail to be impressed by his splendid
+head, his shapely forehead, his eyes that seem to look back over the
+forgotten centuries or forward to those yet to come.
+
+If there is one thing that is characteristic of Chesterton, it is that
+he always seems genuinely pleased to see you. Many people say they are
+pleased to see you, yet at the same time there is the uncomfortable
+feeling that they would be much more pleased to see you leaving. This is
+not the case with Chesterton: he has the happy advantage of making you
+feel that he really is glad that you have come to his house. This is not
+so with all great writers. Carlyle, if he liked to see a person, did not
+say so; Tennyson did not always trouble to be polite; Swift would
+receive his guests with a gloomy moroseness; Dickens was a man of moods;
+conversation with Browning was not always easy. Great men do not always
+trouble to be polite to smaller ones.
+
+What a wonderful laugh Chesterton has. It is like a clap of thunder that
+suddenly startles the echoes in the valley; it is the very soul of
+geniality. There is nothing that so lays bare a man's character as his
+laugh--it cannot pretend. We can pretend to like; we can pretend to be
+pleased; we can pretend to listen; we can't pretend to laugh. Chesterton
+laughs because he is amused; he is amused at all the small things, but
+he seldom laughs at a thing.
+
+I have often and often sat at his table. He talks incessantly. There is
+no subject upon which he has not something worth while to say. His
+memory is remarkable; he can quote poet after poet, or compose a poem on
+anything that crops up at the table. I do not think it can be said that
+Chesterton is a good listener. This is not in any way conceit or
+boredom, but is rather that he is always thinking out some new story or
+article or poem. Yet he is a good host in the niceties of the table; he
+knows if you want salt; he does not forget that wine is the symbol of
+hospitality.
+
+It has been said that Chesterton is one of the best conversationalists
+of the day. Conversation is a queer thing; so many people talk without
+having anything to say; others have a great deal to say and never say
+it. Chesterton can undoubtedly talk well; he has a knack of finding
+subjects suitable to the company; though he does not talk very much of
+things of the day; he is naturally mostly interested in books. Given a
+kindred soul the two will talk and laugh by the hour.
+
+Naturally, Chesterton has to pay the price of greatness: he has visitors
+who will make any pretence to get into his presence. But many are the
+interesting people to be found at his home. I remember one day, some
+years ago, when Sir Herbert Tree called to see him. I do not recollect
+what they talked about, but the time came for the famous actor to go.
+The last I saw of him was the sight of his motor-car disappearing and
+Sir Herbert waving a great hat, while Chesterton waved a great stick. I
+never saw Tree again. Not long after, the world waved farewell to him
+for ever.
+
+One of the most frequent visitors to his home is Mr. Belloc, and it is
+said that he always demands beer and bacon. One day it so happened that
+Mr. Wells came in about tea-time. He seemed, it is said, gloomy during
+the meal, and finally the cause was discovered! Mr. Wells also wanted
+beer and bacon. It was forthcoming, and the great novelist was
+satisfied. It is at least interesting to know that on one point at least
+Belloc and Wells are agreed--that beer and bacon are very excellent
+things.
+
+No word of Chesterton's home life would be complete without reference to
+his dog Winkle. Winkle was more than a dog, he was an institution; he
+had the most polished manners--the more you hurt him the more he wagged
+his tail; if you trod on his tail he would almost apologize for being in
+the way. He knew his master was a great man; he had a certain dignity,
+but was never a snob. But the day came that Winkle died, and was, I am
+sure, translated into Abraham's Bosom. Chesterton has now another dog,
+but he will never get another Winkle. Such dogs are not found twice. I
+am not sure, but I think one day Winkle will greet Chesterton in the
+Land that lies the other side of the grave.
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is, I think, well known that Chesterton has a great liking for
+children. He is often to be seen playing games with them or telling them
+fairy stories; he is an optimist, and no optimist can dislike children.
+He probably likes children for the very good reason that he is quite
+grown up; it is no uncommon thing to see him sitting on the floor
+drawing pictures to illustrate his stories. Which reminds me that
+Chesterton is a remarkably clever artist. I would solemnly warn any one
+who does not like his books defaced not to lend them to Chesterton. He
+will not cut them, he will not leave them out in the sun, he will not
+scorch them in front of the fire, but he will draw pictures on them. I
+have looked through many books at his home--nearly all of them have
+sketches in them. I have not the qualifications to speak of his art; I
+do not know whether he can be considered a great artist; I do not know
+whether it is a pity that he does not do more drawing; I do not know
+whether he can really be called an artist in the modern sense at
+all--but I do know that at his home there are many indications that he
+likes drawing, especially sketches of a fantastic nature.
+
+Chesterton does nearly all his work in his little study, a sanctum
+littered with innumerable manuscripts. He, like most authors of the day,
+dictates to a secretary, who types what he says. It is, I think, in many
+ways a pity that so many authors type their manuscripts; for not only
+are they machine-made, they have not the interest that they should have
+for posterity. What would the British Museum have lost if all the
+manuscripts had been typewritten! Chesterton's written hand is extremely
+elegant. At one time I believe he used to write his own manuscripts. The
+typewriter is, after all, but one more indication that we live in times
+when nothing is done except by some kind of machinery; all the same, I
+could wish that even if typewriters are used famous authors would keep
+one copy of their writings in their own hand.
+
+It is remarkable the amount of work that Chesterton gets through. He has
+masses of correspondence, he has articles to write, books to get ready
+for press, and yet he finds time to help in local theatricals, to give
+lectures in places as wide apart as Oxford and America (and what is
+wider in every way than those two places?), that mean all that is best
+in the ancient world and all that is best in the modern. He can also
+find time to take a long tour to Palestine to find the New Jerusalem,
+that city that Christ wept over, not because it was to be razed to the
+ground, but because its inhabitants were fools.
+
+What are the general impressions that a stranger visiting Chesterton
+would get? He would, I think, be impressed by his genial kindliness; he
+would be amazed by his extraordinary powers of memory and the depths of
+his reading; he would be gratified by the interest that Chesterton
+displays in him; he would be charmed by the quaintness of his home. That
+Chesterton has humour is abundant by his conversation; that he has
+pathos is not so apparent. I am not perfectly sure that he can
+appreciate the things that make ordinary men sad. It has been said that
+he is not concerned with the facts of everyday life; if he is not, it is
+because he can see beyond them--he can see that this is a good world,
+which makes him a good host; he can look forward across the ages to the
+glorious stars that shine in the night sky for those who are optimists,
+as Chesterton is, and are great men in their own homes.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Twelve_
+
+HIS PLACE IN LITERATURE
+
+
+In a very admirable discussion on the word 'great,' in his study of
+Dickens, Chesterton remarks that 'there are a certain number of people
+who always think dead men great and live men small.' The tendency is
+natural and is entirely worthy of blame. If a man is great when he is
+dead, then he was great when he was alive. It is but a re-echo of much
+of the folly talked during the war, when we were so credulous as to
+believe that every dead soldier was a saint and every live one a hero.
+Then, when the war was over, these hero worshippers quietly forgot that
+the soldiers had been heroes, put up stone crosses to the dead, and did
+little to remove the crosses from the living.
+
+There are a number of quite well meaning people who will say, without
+much thought, that Chesterton is a great man, and if you ask them why,
+they will answer, 'He is a great writer, he is a great lecturer, he must
+be great; look at the times he appears in the Press, look at the wealth
+of caricature that is displayed on him.' No doubt these are good reasons
+in their way, but they rather indicate that Chesterton is well known in
+a popular sense; they are not a true indication that he is great. The
+public of to-day is inclined to measure greatness by the number of times
+a person appears in the newspapers, it seldom realizes that greatness
+is, above all, a moral quality, not a quantity; the fact that a person
+is in front of the public eye (very often a blind eye) is no indication
+of true greatness. If it was, then of necessity every Prime Minister
+would be a great man, every revue actress would be a great woman, every
+ordinary person would be small.
+
+It is one of the most difficult things possible to determine what is the
+place a writer takes in literature. It does not make the task easier
+when the writer is not only alive but is still a comparatively young man
+in the height of his powers. A pure and simple biography cannot always
+determine with any satisfaction its subject's literary standing.
+Critical studies of classic authors do not usually give any preciseness
+about the exact niche the subject fills.
+
+Literature is one of the most elastic qualities of the day, of human
+activity; it cannot be bound by rules, yet has a more or less artificial
+standard, which is, perhaps, an imaginary line which has style on the
+one side and lack of style on the other. Yet there is a further
+difficulty: it is in no way fair to award an author his place in
+literature entirely by his style, nor is it fair to literature to
+disregard it.
+
+I have anticipated in earlier chapters some of what must be said in
+this, but it is not, I think, out of place to attempt to write of the
+literary qualities of Chesterton and of his place in contemporary
+literature. With regard to his position in respect of former writers I
+must say something, but it would not be wise to give any comment of what
+may be the permanent place of Chesterton in the world of books. He has,
+I hope, many years of literary output in front of him. It cannot be
+ignored that his reception into the Roman Catholic Church may greatly
+influence his future writings; it is too soon to make any effort to
+predict whether his writings will stand the test of time, whether he
+will be popular in a hundred years or whether he will have the neglect
+that has attended some of the greatest of authors.
+
+There is a question that must be faced. Has Chesterton a place in
+literature at all, if, as is the usual thing, we have to compare him
+with contemporary writers, or is it that he has such a unique place that
+it is impossible to compare him to any living writer? Probably, although
+it is not necessary, it is best to compare Chesterton with some of the
+greatest writers of the day, and see why it is that he is worthy of a
+place in the foremost rank. There are, at the present day, a great
+number of writers who would appear worthy of a foremost place in
+literature. Those I have chosen have been selected because, in a sort of
+vague way, people couple them with the name of Chesterton. They are, I
+think, H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Hilaire Belloc.
+
+I do think that all these writers have a unique place in contemporary
+literature. Perhaps, of the three, Wells is the greatest, because there
+is possibly no greater thing than a scientific prophet who is also a
+brilliant novelist. If Belloc and Shaw are smaller men it is because
+they deal with smaller matters.
+
+At the present day Chesterton does occupy in contemporary literature a
+place that no one else does. He is, in a sense, a Dickens of the
+twentieth century; he is something more, he may even be a prophet. Of
+course Chesterton has not the enormous following that Dickens had at the
+height of his powers, but he has that kind of monumental feeling in the
+twentieth century that belonged to Dickens in the nineteenth: he is
+typical of this century, being an optimist when ordinary men are
+pessimistic. As in the nineteenth century Dickens made common men
+realise their greatness when they themselves felt immeasurably small, so
+Chesterton makes great men feel small when they are really so.
+
+But in another sense he cannot really be compared to Dickens. Dickens
+undoubtedly was a delineator of supreme characters. I do not think it
+can be said that any of the characters of Chesterton would ever be known
+with the knowledge with which Mr. Pickwick is known. Dickens was not in
+any sense an essayist; Chesterton is one in every sense. Dickens was a
+man who really cared very much that all kinds of oppression should be
+put down; Chesterton, no doubt, cares also, but he rather imagines that
+things ordinary people quite rightly call welfare work are but forms of
+slavery. If Dickens hated factories it was because he had hateful
+experience of them; if Chesterton hates factories it is because he
+thinks they destroy family life and the home. I have attempted to
+suggest that Dickens and Chesterton are alike as regards their being
+monuments of their respective centuries. I have also suggested that they
+are extremely unlike. Yet I can think of no writer of the nineteenth
+century who, in ideal, is so near to Chesterton as Dickens; but that at
+the same time they are also so far apart is but another indication that
+to place Chesterton in regard to the past is almost impossible.
+
+One thing that Chesterton is not, is an Eclectic; if he is an original
+thinker, it is because he can see that though black is not really white
+there is no particular reason why it should not be grey; if Notting Hill
+can boast of forty fried fish shops he does not see any reason why it
+could fail to produce a Napoleon. If a party of Dons are sitting round a
+table discussing how desirable is the elimination of life, he sees that
+it is a perfectly good ethic for one of the undergraduates to test the
+theory by brandishing a loaded pistol at the warden's head. If, as a
+novelist, he is different to all his contemporaries, it is because he
+has discovered that the word novel sometimes means something new,
+sometimes something original, very often something extremely old.
+
+Yet another difficulty for finding an exact niche for Chesterton lies in
+the fact that he is a bit of everything, and, what is more, these bits
+are very big and make a large kaleidoscope. He is a theological
+professor who is so entirely sensible that the public hardly discovers
+the fact; he does not wear a cap and gown, and quote quite easily from
+all the Fathers of the ancient Church. He does not apologize for
+Christianity by reading Christian books. Rather to learn the Christian
+standpoint he discovers the tenets of Rationalism; he writes a
+theological philosophy that might be a discussion between Satan and
+Christ and puts it into a novel; he writes a dissertation on
+Transubstantiation and puts it into a tale of anarchy that is so
+untheological that it mentions Leicester Square and lobster mayonnaise;
+he is a historian who not only writes history but understands it; he
+does not consider that William conquered England, but that England
+conquered William; he says the best way to read history is to read it
+backwards; he is a historian who does not consider the most important
+facts are the dates of kings who lived and died.
+
+It has been said that Chesterton is the finest essayist of the day. It
+would be perhaps fairer to say he is like no living essayist; if he is
+not a finer essayist than Dean Inge, he is at least as good; he may not
+be so academic, but he is as learned; if he has not quite the charm of
+Mr. Lucas he is at least more versatile. His essays sparkle with
+epigrams, they are full of paradox. He has said that Plato said silly
+things and yet was the wonder of the ancient world. He can lament that
+H.G. Wells has come to the awful conclusion that two and two are four,
+and at the same time be thankful that not even in fairyland can two and
+two make five; he can state quite calmly that the weakness of Feminism
+is that it drives the woman from the freedom of the home to the slavery
+of the world; he can make priggish clergymen, who accuse him of joking
+and taking the name of the Lord in vain, bite their words by explaining
+that to make a joke of anything is not to take it in vain. As an
+essayist, Chesterton stands apart from his contemporaries. Of older
+essayists I can think of none who could in any way be said to have a
+similarity to Chesterton.
+
+One of the most interesting things about Chesterton is his position as a
+poet. I have said, in an earlier chapter, that he might have been the
+Poet Laureate. I have ventured to say that if posterity did not place
+him among great poets it would be because he had given more attention to
+prose. The particular question of Chesterton as a poet opens up a more
+general one, which is something in the nature of a problem. Would the
+great classic poets of the last century have been as great if they had
+not written so much poetry? Had Tennyson written but two long poems; had
+Browning never written anything but short lyrics; had Wordsworth been
+content to write few poems, provided these had been an indication of the
+best work of these particular poets, would posterity have granted them
+immortality? Will Chesterton go down to posterity as a poet on account
+of his fine achievement in his 'Ballad of the White Horse,' or will
+people forget him because he has not written more? I am rather afraid
+this may be so. Posterity, it is true, likes quality, but it likes it
+better with quantity.
+
+But I feel that I am dealing with what I had said it would be well to
+avoid--anything to do with the future of Chesterton. What is
+Chesterton's position as a poet to-day? He is, I think, one of the
+finest of the day; he has a fine sense of humour in poetry; he has great
+powers of recasting scenes of long-forgotten centuries; he has a fine
+musical rhythm; but he has not, I think, pathos. I think it is a pity
+that he does not write epics on events of the day; he might easily find
+the Poet Laureate's silence an inspiration; he might write another great
+poem; it might be better than any more novels.
+
+It is difficult to say whether or not Chesterton is a playwright. His
+one play was a fine one about a fine subject, but I do not think it had
+the qualities that would be popular in an ordinary theatre in London.
+There is a certain suggestion of a problem about it which is a little
+obscure. We are not sure whether Chesterton is in earnest or joking: it
+has not probably sufficient action to suit this century, that wishes
+aeroplanes to dash through the house on the stage, or two or three
+people to meet with violent deaths in three acts. It is in the nature of
+a discussion and might be almost anti-Shavian; it would be absurd to
+attempt to place Chesterton among contemporary dramatic authors, but it
+is not too much to predict that he might quite easily soon be very near
+the front rank.
+
+By his critical studies of Browning, Dickens, and Thackeray, Chesterton
+has proved that there was a great deal more to be said about these
+classic authors than the critics had seemed to think. Chesterton seldom
+agreed with those who had written before. What they had considered
+weaknesses he had considered strength; what he had considered weakness
+they had considered strength. Possibly no author had been written about
+more than Dickens, yet there remained for Chesterton to add much that
+was vital. No poet had been more misunderstood than Browning; no poet
+had been more attacked for his grotesque style; no critic has written
+with the understanding of Browning as has Chesterton. In taking extracts
+from Thackeray, Chesterton has shown a fine appreciation of that
+novelist's best work.
+
+It is a difficult thing for a great writer to be a great critic. He is
+liable to be either condescending or supercilious; he is liable
+unconsciously to judge all standards by his own; he is likely to be
+rather intolerant of any opinions but his own; it is easier for a great
+critic to be a great writer. In the case of Chesterton, because he is a
+great and original writer he has a brilliant critical acumen that probes
+deep into the minds of other authors and sees what is stored there in a
+way that other critics have, perhaps, failed to see, not because they
+did not choose to look for it, but rather because, almost without
+knowing it, critics who set out to be critics exclusively are liable to
+work rather too much by a fixed rule.
+
+It is, I hope, now apparent how difficult it is to say where exactly
+Chesterton finds a place in literature. Is it as an essayist? Is it as a
+novelist? Is it as a historian? Is it as a critic? If it is as a
+novelist, then it is as a writer of peculiar phantasy; if it is as an
+essayist, it is as a brilliant controversialist; if it is as a
+historian, it is as a unique critic of history; if it is as a critic, it
+is as a broad-minded one of not only past great authors but of current
+events.
+
+I do not know of any writer who is so difficult to place. Wells can
+quite well be a fine novelist and prophet; Bernard Shaw can easily be
+called a playwright and a philosopher; Galsworthy is a serious novelist
+and a playwright who takes the art with proper regard for its powers of
+social redress; Sir James Barrie is a mystical writer with a message.
+There are fifty novelists who are interpreters of manners and problems
+of the twentieth century. But Chesterton is not like any of these. He is
+not in any sense a specialist; he is really a general practitioner with
+the hand of a specialist in everything he touches except divorce. In a
+word, he is that thing in literature that occurs once or twice in every
+century--an epic. He is the laughing, genial writer of the twentieth
+century who, in everything he does, earns the highest of all literary
+honours--to be unique.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Thirteen_
+
+G.K.C. AND G.B.S.
+
+
+It would be a very interesting problem to try and discover how it is
+that Gilbert Keith Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw have come to be
+known so familiarly as G.K.C. and G.B.S. If any of my readers can
+suggest a solution of this, I hope they will let me know; because, if I
+calmly headed this chapter G.K.C. and J.M.B. I do not think that any one
+would guess that I was attempting to compare Chesterton to James Matthew
+Barrie unless I told them. It would be really quite amusing to do all
+comparisons by this initial method; we might find in the _Hibbert
+Journal_ an article on the need of Episcopacy headed H.H. Dunelm and
+Frank Zanzibar, which would be quite simply the Bishop of Durham and the
+Bishop of Zanzibar on Episcopacy; or, for a rest, we might turn to the
+_Daily Herald_ and find 'J.R.C. attacks L.G.,' which would be quite
+simply that Mr. Clynes did not see eye to eye with the Premier that a
+Coalition Government was a national asset.
+
+If we refer to the past, it is not easy to suggest any one who might be
+known by initials. Charles Dickens was never known as C.D.; Thackeray,
+when he wrote his 'Essay on the Four Georges' was probably not known as
+W.M.T. on the Four Georges; but if Chesterton writes a book on America,
+the Press affirms that there is a new book on America by G.K.C., or we
+pick up a morning paper and find a large headline on 'G.B.S. on
+Prisons,' and every one knows who it is. But put a headline, 'Randall on
+Divorce,' and it is not seen at once that the Archbishop of Canterbury
+has been addressing the Upper House on a matter of grave ecclesiastical
+import.
+
+There is a saying about some people being born great, others having that
+state thrust upon them, others as having achieved it. There is no doubt
+that Chesterton was born to be great, so no doubt was Shaw, but they
+went about it in a different way. The public caught hold of the
+remarkable personality of Chesterton and scarcely a day passed that the
+Press did not either quote him or caricature him; on the other hand,
+Shaw caught hold of the public, annoyed its susceptibilities, held it in
+supreme contempt, raved at it from the stage and platform, and the
+public, amazed at his cleverness, received him as the rude philosopher
+who looked a genius, talked like a whirlwind, said that he was greater
+than Shakespeare, said he was the Moliere of the twentieth century, and
+posed until it was expected of him.
+
+But Chesterton does not pose. If he comes to lecture on Cobbett and
+talks for three-quarters of an hour on how his hat blew off, it is not a
+pose, it is the natural inconsequence of Chesterton on the platform. If
+Shaw is invited to a dinner and writes that he does not eat dinner and
+does not care to see others doing nothing else, he is posing; but, if
+so, it is because he is expected to do so.
+
+On almost every subject Shaw and Chesterton disagree; yet they are both
+men who, in some way, attempt to be reformers. Shaw proceeds by satire
+and contempt; Chesterton proceeds by originality and good nature, except
+on the question of divorce, which makes him very angry, and, as I have
+said, uncritical. Shaw chastises the world and is angry; Chesterton
+laughs, and, in a genial way, asks what is wrong; and, having found out,
+attempts to put things right. Shaw would rather have a new sort of world
+with a super-man.
+
+Shaw and Chesterton approach reform from two different ways. Chesterton
+suggests them by queer novels and paradoxical essays; Shaw puts his
+ideas into the mouthpieces of those who are known as Shavian characters;
+he interprets his theories by the Stage, therefore his sermons reach
+tens of thousands who would not read him if he preached from a pulpit.
+Thus, if he wants to show that there are no rules for getting married,
+he puts the problem into a play and wants an extension of divorce;
+Chesterton, on the other hand, believes that marriage is Divine and that
+divorce is but a superstition. If Shaw believed that the home narrowed
+life, was a domestic monarchy, meant a loss of individuality between
+husband and wife, Chesterton, far from agreeing to this proposition,
+takes the opposite view that it is the home which is large and the world
+which is small and narrowing. Probably neither is quite right. For some
+people the home is narrowing, for others it is the place that affords
+the widest scope; for some the world is narrow, for others the world is
+extremely broad--in fact, so broad that they never are able to get free
+from its immensity.
+
+With regard to religion, whatever opinions Chesterton may hold--as he is
+now a Roman Catholic--they are no longer of interest. Shaw, on the other
+hand, is much too elastic a man to imagine for a moment that religion is
+a thing that is necessarily bound up with an organization which is
+mainly political; he is not so credulous as to believe that the
+spiritual can fall vertically to earth because a man kneels before a
+bishop and becomes a priest. Rather he had a much better plan. He
+started by being an atheist, the best possible foundation for subsequent
+theism. From this he became an Immanist, which is that God is in some
+way dispersed throughout the earth.
+
+If there is one thing upon which we may say that Shaw and Chesterton are
+identical, it is in the strange fact that neither of them has, I think,
+ever described an ordinary lover--the sort of person who is nothing of a
+biological surprise, the kind of person who woos on a suburban court in
+Surbiton or Wimbledon and marries in a hideous red brick church to the
+cheerful accompaniment of confetti and the Wedding March. I do not think
+either of them can really enter into the ordinary emotions of life. They
+could neither of them write, I fancy, a really typical novel--that is, a
+tale about the folks who do the conventional things. Chesterton always
+sees everything upside down. If the man on Notting Hill sees it as a
+bustling area, Chesterton sees it as a place upon which a Napoleon might
+fall. Shaw, on the other hand, could not write of ordinary things
+because he is usually contemptuous of them. If Chesterton thinks
+education is a failure it is because the conventional method irritates
+him; Shaw considers that education does not educate a man, it 'merely
+moulds him.'
+
+I am not sure that Mr. Skimpole, in his brilliant study of Bernard Shaw,
+is quite correct when he says 'the whole case against Chesterton, of
+course, is that he is a Romantic.' Why is it a something against him
+that he chooses to be an idealist? Because, says Mr. Skimpole, 'he does
+not seem to have grasped the fact that the most important difference
+between the Real and the Ideal aspects of anything is that while the
+Ideal is permanent and unchangeable as an angel, the Real requires an
+everlasting circle of changes.' I am rather afraid Mr. Skimpole is
+talking through a certain covering that adorns his head. Cannot he see
+that very often the ideal is nothing less than the real? It is no case
+against Chesterton that he is a Romantic so long as the fact is duly
+recognized. If he considers certain institutions are permanent which may
+be said to be ideal (for instance, that marriage is a sacrament), he is
+just as likely to be as right as is Mr. Shaw when he contends that
+marriage must be made to fit the times, even if it be granted it is a
+Divine thing.
+
+If Shaw is unable to see that most earthly things have a heavenly
+meaning, as Chesterton does, it is so much the worse for Shaw and so
+much the better for Chesterton. If Chesterton is a dangerous Romantic
+who likes Fairyland, at least Shaw is a dangerous eugenist who wants a
+super-man, and I am not sure that the fairies of Chesterton are not more
+useful than the ethics of Shaw; there is no doubt that they are less
+grown up. If Shaw is a philosopher, he is not one of this Universe; he
+is of another that shall be entirely sub-Shavian. If Chesterton is a
+philosopher, it is because he can see this universe better upside down
+than Shaw understands it the right way up.
+
+In fact, the difference between Shaw and Chesterton may, I think, be
+something like this. They are, as I have said, both reformers, but
+Chesterton wishes to keep man as he is essentially, and gradually make
+him something better. Shaw wants to have done with man and produce a
+super-man. In this way Shaw admits the failure of man to rise above his
+environment. Chesterton not only thinks he is able to, but tries to
+prove it in his writings. Thus, if a man is an atheist he can show that
+he is in time capable of becoming a good theist, but Shaw if he allows
+some of his characters to be in hell, gets them out of it by attempting
+to make them strive for the super-man. For Chesterton, Man is the
+Super-Man; for Shaw, the Super-Man is not Man at all.
+
+In fact, this no doubt is the reason that Shaw is really a pessimist and
+Chesterton an optimist.
+
+There is, I think, little doubt that Chesterton is a far more important
+man than Shaw. He has the facility for getting hold of the things that
+matter; he is never ill-natured; he does not make fun of other people.
+Much as the writer admires the wit and brilliancy of Shaw, he cannot
+help feeling that Shaw is a rather cynical personality; Shaw loves to
+laugh at people, he is inclined to make fun of the martyrs. They were
+possibly quite mistaken in their enthusiasm, but at least they were
+consistent. I do not feel convinced that Shaw would stand in the middle
+of Piccadilly Circus and keep his ideals if he knew that it would
+involve being eaten by lions that came up Regent Street, as the martyrs
+faced them centuries ago in Rome, but I have little doubt that
+Chesterton would remain in Piccadilly Circus if he knew that he would be
+eaten unless he denied that marriage was a Divine institution.
+
+In a word, Shaw bases his Philosophy and Plays on a contempt for all
+existing institutions. Chesterton bases his Writings and Philosophy on
+genial good nature and a respect for the things that are important.
+Therefore I think that Shaw has not made such a permanent contribution
+to thought as Chesterton certainly has; even if it is only in showing
+that the Christian religion is reasonable.
+
+
+
+
+_Chapter Fourteen_
+
+CONCLUSION
+
+
+There was a time in history when the ancient world searched in vain for
+the truth. It produced men of the type of Aristotle, Plato, and
+Socrates; they were great philosophers who looked at the world in which
+they lived and asked what it meant. Was it material? Was it spiritual?
+Was it temporary? Was it eternal? Men were dissatisfied. And about that
+time a greater Philosopher came in the wake of a star, and men called
+Him Christ.
+
+It is the twentieth century, and the Man the ancient world called Christ
+founded the religion which His followers were to take to the ends of the
+earth. Yet men are still dissatisfied; philosophers look out of their
+high-walled windows and watch the modern world, which goes on; men die
+and are forgotten; creeds spring up for a day and pass; writers produce
+books, and in their turn pass away.
+
+Of this century Chesterton is one of the great thinkers. It is, I think,
+a mistake not to take him seriously. If he is phantastic, there is a
+meaning behind his phantasy; if he laughs, the world need not think that
+he is frivolous. He is a prophet, and he has honour in his own country.
+
+Chesterton is still a young man; he is young in soul and body. Like
+Peter Pan he does not grow up, yet he is a famous man; he has written
+great books, he has written fine poems, he has written brilliant essays,
+but he has never written a book with an appeal to an unthinking public
+that reads to kill thought. I wonder whether Chesterton would write a
+'Philosophy for the Unthinking Man'? I think he is the one man of the
+day who could do it, and I think it might be his greatest book.
+
+I have attempted in this book to draw a picture of the works of
+Chesterton. They are not easy to deal with; they may mean many things. I
+have not attempted to forecast the future of Chesterton, strong as the
+temptation has been, but I have endeavoured to place before those who
+know Chesterton what it is they admire in him; and for those who only
+know him as a name, I hope that this book may induce them to read the
+most arresting writer of the day, who is known in every country as the
+Master of Paradox, which is to say that he is the Master of the Temple
+of Understanding.
+
+
+
+
+              *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+   The following typographical errors have been corrected:
+
+      Page 16: A period was added after "period." (keen survey of the
+      Dickens period.)
+
+      Page 25: "cricle" changed to "circle." (but mentioned in a small
+      circle)
+
+      Page 36: ' added after "task." (Thackeray's 'most difficult task.')
+
+      Page 42: "Dicken's" changed to "Dickens'." (Had Dickens' life been
+      uneventful,)
+
+      Page 50: ' deleted after "temperament." (French temperament.)
+
+      Page 64: ' deleted after "victors." (astonished the victors.)
+
+      Page 69: " changed to ' after "king." (To be an English king.')
+
+      Page 72: !' added after "charge." ('Spears at the charge!')
+
+      Page 111: "supercillious" changed to "supercilious" (be either
+      condescending or supercilious;)
+
+   All other language, spelling, and punctuation has been retained.
+
+
+
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