THE heroes of Chesterton's romances have an adipose diathesis, as a
reviewer has been heard to remark. In plain English they tend towards
largeness. Flambeau, Sunday, and Innocent Smith are big men. Chesterton,
as we have seen, pays little attention to his women characters, but
whenever it comes to pass that he must introduce a heroine, he colours
her as emphatically as the nature of things will admit. Which is to say
that the Chestertonian heroine always has red hair.
These things are symptomatic of their author. He loves robustness. If he
cannot produce it, he can at any rate affect it, or attack its enemies.
This worship of the robust is the fundamental fact of all Chesterton's
work. For example, as a critic of letters he confines himself almost
exclusively to the big men. When Mr. Bernard Shaw a few years ago
committed what Chesterton imagined was an attack upon Shakespeare, he
almost instinctively rushed to the defence in the columns of The Daily
News. When Chesterton wrote a little book on _The Victorian Age in
Literature_ he showed no interest in the smaller people. The book, it
may be urged in his excuse, was a little one, but we feel that even if
it was not, Chesterton would have done much the same thing. Among the
writers he omitted to mention, even by name, are Sir Edwin Arnold,
Harrison Ainsworth, Walter Bagehot, R. Blackmore, A. H. Clough, E. A.
Freeman, S. R. Gardiner, George Gissing, J. R. Green, T. H. Green, Henry
Hallam, Jean Ingelow, Benjamin Jowett, W. E. H. Lecky, Thomas Love
Peacock, W. M. Praed, and Mrs. Humphry Ward. The criticism which feeds
upon research and comparison, which considers a new date or the
emendation of a mispunctuated line of verse, worthy of effort, knows not
Chesterton. He is the student of the big men. He has written books about
Dickens, Browning, and Shaw, of whom only one common quality can be
noted, which is that they are each the subjects of at least twenty other
books. To write about the things which have already yielded such a huge
crop of criticism savours at first of a lack of imagination. The truth
is quite otherwise. Anybody, so to speak, can produce a book about
Alexander Pope because the ore is at the disposal of every miner. But
that larger mine called Dickens has been diligently worked by two
generations of authors, and it would appear that a new one must either
plagiarize or labour extremely in order to come upon fresh seams. But
Chesterton's taste for bigness has come to his service in criticism. It
has given him a power of seeing the large, obvious things which the
critic of small things misses. He has the "thinking in millions" trick
of the statistician transposed to literary ends.
Or as a poet. The robustness is omnipresent, and takes several forms. A
grandiloquence that sways uneasily between rodomontade and mere
verbiage, a rotundity of diction, a choice of subjects which can only be
described as sanguinolent, the use of the bludgeon where others would
prefer a rapier.
Or as a simple user of words. Chesterton has a preference for the big
words: awful, enormous, tremendous, and so on. A word which occurs very
often indeed is mystic: it suggests that the noun it qualifies is laden
with undisclosable attributes, and that romance is hidden here.
Now all these things add up, as it were, to a tendency to say a thing as
emphatically as possible. Emphasis of statement from a humorist gifted
with the use of words results sometimes in epigram, sometimes in fun, in
all things except the dull things (except when the dullness is due to an
unhappy succession of scintillations which have misfired). For these
reasons Chesterton is regarded as entirely frivolous--by persons without
a sense of humour. He is, in point of fact, extremely serious, on those
frequent occasions when he is making out a case. As he himself points
out, to be serious is not the opposite of to be funny. The opposite of
to be funny is not to be funny. A man may be perfectly serious in a
funny way.
Now it has befallen Chesterton on more than one occasion to have to
cross swords with one of the few true atheists, Mr. Joseph MacCabe, the
author of a huge number of books, mostly attacking Christianity, and as
devoid of humour as an egg-shell is of hair. The differences and the
resemblances between Chesterton and Mr. MacCabe might well be the
occasion of a parable. Chesterton has written some of the liveliest
books about Christianity, Mr. MacCabe has written some of the dullest.
Chesterton has written the most amusing book about Mr. Bernard Shaw; Mr.
MacCabe has written the dullest. Chesterton and Mr. MacCabe have a habit
of sparring at one another, but up to the present I have not noticed
either make any palpable hits. It is all rather like the Party System,
as Mr. Hilaire Belloc depicts it. The two antagonists do not understand
each other in the least. But, to a certain degree, Mr. MacCabe's
confusion is the fault of Chesterton and not of his own lack of humour.
When Chesterton says, "I also mean every word I say," he is saying
something he does not mean. He is sometimes funny, but not serious, like
Mr. George Robey. He is sometimes irritating, but not serious, like a
circus clown. And he sometimes appears to be critical, but is not
serious, like the young lady from Walworth in front of a Bond Street
shop-window, regretting that she could not possibly buy the crockery and
glass displayed because the monogram isn't on right. Chesterton's
readers have perhaps spoiled him. He has pleaded, so to speak, for the
inalienable and mystic right of every man to be a blithering idiot in
all seriousness. So seriously, in fact, that when he exercised this
inalienable and mystic right, the only man not in the secret was G. K.
Chesterton.
There are few tasks so ungrateful as the criticism of a critic's
criticisms, unless it be the job of criticizing the criticisms of a
critic's critics. The first is part of the task of him who would write a
book in which all Chesterton's works are duly and fitly considered; and
the second will not be wholly escaped by him. Concerned as we are,
however, with the ideas of one who was far more interested in putting
the world to rights than with guiding men and women around literary
edifices, there is no need for us to give any very detailed study to
Chesterton's critical work. Bacon said "distilled books are like common
distilled waters, flashy things." A second distillation, perhaps even a
third, suggests a Euclidean flatness. The sheer management of a point of
view, however, is always instructive. We have seen an author use his
exceptional powers of criticism upon society in general, and ideas at
large. How is he able to deal with ideas and inventions stated in a more
definite and particular manner? The latter task is the more difficult of
the two. We all know perfectly well, to take an analogous illustration,
how to deal with the Prussian militarist class, the "Junker caste," and
so on. But we differ hopelessly on the treatment to be meted out to the
National Service League.
The outstanding feature of Chesterton's critical work is that it has no
outstanding features which differentiate it from his other writings. He
is always the journalist, writing for the day only. This leads him to
treat all his subjects with special reference to his own day.
Sometimes, as in the essay on Byron in _Twelve Types_, his own day is so
much under discussion that poor Byron is left out in the cold to warm
himself before a feebly flickering epigram. In writing of Dickens,
Chesterton says that he "can be criticized as a contemporary of Bernard
Shaw or Anatole France or C. F. G. Masterman . . . his name comes to the
tongue when we are talking of Christian Socialists or Mr. Roosevelt or
County Council Steamboats or Guilds of Play." And Chesterton does
criticize Dickens as the contemporary of all these phenomena. In point
of fact, to G.K.C. everybody is either a contemporary or a Victorian,
and "I also was born a Victorian." Little Dorrit sets him talking about
Gissing, Hard Times suggests Herbert Spencer, American Notes leads to
the mention of Maxim Gorky, and elsewhere Mr. George Moore and Mr.
William Le Queux are brought in. If Chesterton happened to be writing
about Dickens at a time when there was a certain amount of feeling about
on the subject of rich Jews on the Rand, then the rich Jews on the Rand
would appear in print forthwith, whether or not Dickens had ever
depicted a rich Jew or the Rand, or the two in conjunction. Chesterton's
first critical work of importance was _Robert Browning_ in the "English
Men of Letters Series." It might be imagined that the austere editorship
of Lord Morley might have a dejournalizing effect upon the style of the
author. Far otherwise. The t's are crossed and the i's are dotted, so to
speak, more carefully in _Robert Browning_ than in works less
fastidiously edited, but that is all. The book contains references to
Gladstone and Home Rule, Parnell, Pigott, and Rudyard Kipling, Cyrano de
Bergerac, W. E. Henley, and the Tivoli. But of Browning's literary
ancestors and predecessors there is little mention.
It is conventional to shed tears of ink over the journalistic touch, on
the ground that it must inevitably shorten the life of whatever book
bears its marks. If there is anything in this condemnation, then
Chesterton is doomed to forgetfulness, and his critical works will be
the first to slip into oblivion, such being the nature of critical works
in general. But if this condemnation holds true, it includes also
Macaulay, R. L. Stevenson, Matthew Arnold, and how many others! The
journalistic touch, when it is good, means the preservation of a work.
And Chesterton has that most essential part of a critic's mental
equipment--what we call in an inadequately descriptive manner, insight.
He was no mean critic, whatever the tricks he played, who could pen
these judgments:
The dominant passion of the artistic Celt, such as
Mr. W. B. Yeats or Sir Edward Burne-Jones, lies in
the word "escape"; escape into a land where
oranges grow on plum trees and men can sow what
they like and reap what they enjoy. (_G. F.
Watts._)
The supreme and most practical value of poetry is
this, that in poetry, as in music, a note is
struck which expresses beyond the power of
rational statement a condition of mind, and all
actions arise from a condition of mind. (_Robert
Browning._)
This essential comedy of Johnson's character is
one which has never, oddly enough, been put upon
the stage. There was in his nature one of the
unconscious and even agreeable contradictions
loved by the true comedian. . . . I mean a strenuous
and sincere belief in convention, combined with a
huge natural inaptitude for observing it. (_Samuel
Johnson_.)
Rossetti could, for once in a way, write poetry
about a real woman and call her "Jenny." One has a
disturbed suspicion that Morris would have called
her "Jehanne." (_The Victorian Age in
Literature_.)
These are a few samples collected at random, but they alone are almost
sufficient to enthrone Chesterton among the critics. He has a wonderful
intuitive gift of feeling for the right metaphor, for the material
object that best symbolizes an impression. But one thing he lacks. Put
him among authors whose view of the universe is opposed to his own, and
Chesterton instantly adopts an insecticide attitude. The wit of Wilde
moves him not, but his morals stir him profoundly; Mr. Thomas Hardy is
"a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village
idiot." Only occasionally has he a good word to say for the technique of
an author whose views he dislikes. His critical work very largely
consists of an attempt to describe his subjects' views of the universe,
and bring them into relation with his own. His two books on Charles
Dickens are little more than such an attempt. When, a few years ago, Mr.
Edwin Pugh, who had also been studying the "aspects" of Dickens, came to
the conclusion that the novelist was a Socialist, Chesterton waxed
exceeding wrath and gave the offending book a severe wigging in The
Daily News.
He loves a good fighter, however, and to such he is always just. There
are few philosophies so radically opposed to the whole spirit of
Chesterton's beliefs as that of John Stuart Mill. On religion, economic
doctrine, and woman suffrage, Mill held views that are offensive to
G.K.C. But Mill is nevertheless invariably treated by him with a respect
which approximates to reverence. The principal case in point, however,
is Mr. Bernard Shaw, who holds all Mill's beliefs, and waves them about
even more defiantly. G.K.C.'s admiration in this case led him to write a
whole book about G.B.S. in addition to innumerable articles and
references. The book has the following characteristic introduction:
Most people either say that they agree with
Bernard Shaw or that they do not understand him. I
am the only person who understands him, and I do
not agree with him.
Chesterton, of course, could not possibly agree with such an avowed and
utter Puritan as Mr. Shaw. The Puritan has to be a revolutionary, which
means a man who pushes forward the hand of the clock. Chesterton, as
near as may be, is a Catholic Tory, who is a man who pushes back the
hand of the clock. Superficially, the two make the clock show the same
hour, but actually, one puts it on to a.m., the other back to p.m.
Between the two is all the difference that is between darkness and day.
Chesterton's point of view is distinctly like Samuel Johnson's in more
respects than one. Both critics made great play with dogmatic assertions
based on the literature that was before their time, at the expense of
the literature that was to come after. In the book on Shaw, Chesterton
strikes a blow at all innovators, although he aims only at the obvious
failures.
The truth is that all feeble spirits naturally
live in the future, because it is featureless; it
is a soft job; you can make it what you like. The
next age is blank, and I can paint it freely with
my favourite colour. It requires real courage to
face the past, because the past is full of facts
which cannot be got over; of men certainly wiser
than we and of things done which we cannot do. I
know I cannot write a poem as good as _Lycidas_.
But it is always easy to say that the particular
sort of poetry I can write will be the poetry of
the future.
Sentiments such as these have made many young experimentalists feel that
Chesterton is a traitor to his youth and generation. Nobody will ever
have the detachment necessary to appreciate "futurist" poetry until it
is very much a thing of the past, because the near past is so much with
us, and it is part of us, which the future is not. But fidelity to the
good things of the past does not exonerate us from the task of looking
for the germs of the good things of the future. The young poet of to-day
sits at the feet of Sir Henry Newbolt, whose critical appreciation is
undaunted by mere dread of new things, while to the same youth and to
his friends it has simply never occurred, often enough, to think of
Chesterton as a critic. It cannot be too strongly urged that an undue
admiration of the distant past has sat like an incubus upon the chest of
European literature, and Shakespeare's greatness is not in spite of his
"small Latin and less Greek," which probably contributed to it
indirectly. Had Shakespeare been a classical scholar, he would almost
certainly have modelled his plays on Seneca or Aeschylus, and the
results would have been devastating. Addison's Cato, Johnson's Irene,
and the dramas of Racine and Corneille are among the abysmal dullnesses
mankind owes to its excessive estimation of the past. Men have always
been too ready to forget that we inherit our ancestors' bad points as
well as their good ones. Ancestor-worship has deprived the Chinese of
the capacity to create, it has seriously affected Chesterton's power to
criticize. Chesterton's own generation has seen both the victory and the
downfall of form in the novels of Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. H. G. Wells. It
has witnessed fascinating experiments in stagecraft, some of which have
assuredly succeeded. It has listened to new poets and wandered in
enchanted worlds where no Victorians trod. A critic in sympathy with
these efforts at reform would have written the last-quoted passage
something like this:
"The truth is that all feeble spirits naturally live in the past,
because it has no boundaries; it is a soft job; you can find in it what
you like. The past ages are rank, and I can daub myself freely with
whatever colours I extract. It requires no courage to face the past,
because the past is full of facts which neutralize one another; of men
certainly no wiser than we, and of things done which we could not want
to do. I know I cannot write a poem as good as Lycidas. But I also know
that Milton could not write a poem as good as The Hound of Heaven or
M'Andrew's Hymn. And it is always easy to say that the particular kind
of poetry I can write has been the poetry of some period of the past."
But Chesterton didn't; quite the reverse.
So that one comes to the sorrowful conclusion that Chesterton is at his
best, as a critic, when he is writing introductions, because then he has
to leave the past alone. When he is writing an introduction to one of
the works of a great Victorian (Dickens always excepted) he makes his
subject stand out like a solitary giant, not necessarily because he is
one, but on account of the largeness of the contours, the rough shaping,
and the deliberate contrasts. He has written prefaces without number,
and the British Museum has not a complete set of the books introduced
by him. The Fables of AEsop, the Book of Job, Matthew Arnold's Critical
Essays, a book of children's poems by Margaret Arndt, Boswell's Johnson,
a novel by Gorky, selections from Thackeray, a life of Mr. Will Crooks,
and an anthology by young poets are but a few of the books he has
explained.
The last thing to be said on Chesterton as a critic is by way of
illustration. For a series of books on artists, he wrote two, on William
Blake and G. F. Watts. The first is all about mysticism, and so is the
second. They are for the layman, not for the artist. They could be read
with interest and joy by the colourblind. And, incidentally, they are
extremely good criticism. Therein is the triumph of Chesterton. Give him
a subject which he can relate with his own view of the universe, and
space wherein to accomplish this feat, and he will succeed in presenting
his readers with a vividly outlined portrait, tinted, of course, with
his own personality, but indisputably true to life, and ornamented with
fascinating little gargoyles. But put him among the bourgeoisie of
literature and he will sulk like an angry child.
V