Chesterton the Critic

Richard J. Voorhees

RICHARD J. VOORHEES taught EngUsh for many years at Purdue Univer-

sity, Lafayette, Indiana, and is now a Professor Emeritus there. He is the
author of two books: The Paradox of George Orwell (1961) and P.G.
Wodehouse (1966). He has also written numerous articles about such wri-
ters as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and Anthony Powell, as well as
several articles on Marcel Ayme, who is, he believes, one of the most
neglected novelists of our day. In the Spring, 1984 number of Queen's
Quarterly, Professor Voorhees published an article entitled, "Chesterton,
the Romantic."

As John Gross observes in his admirable book. The Rise and

Fall of the Man of Letters.^ the nineteenth century and the early
twentieth were notable for British writers who took on a wide variety
of tasks: fiction and poetry, biography and criticism, journalism and
long articles for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. They often produced
large bodies of work, and some of them achieved enormous reputa-
tions which are now much diminished. George Saintsbury, for
example, must have read more French fiction than half a dozen
other critics, but anyone who examines his introductions to the
novels of Balzac in English translation will be amazed to find how
little he has to say about them. Andrew Lang and Edmund Gosse
were once towers of prestige, but their works are not exactly monu-
ments of brass. Gross points out that Lang was a learned man with a
tropism for a certain kind of trash, and that in Gosse's knowledge of
literature there were pockets of ignorance that would disgrace an
undergraduate.
Chesterton belonged to the generation of writers that followed
Lang, Gosse, and Saintsbury and, like them, he was prolific and
versatile. But he never forgot the great distance between Homer and
a good boys' book; he never placed an author in the wrong century;
and he never was perfunctory, not even in an introduction. Of
Chesterton's book on George Bernard Shaw, Stark Young wrote, " I
can think of no other modern dramatist—certainly not one in

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English—who has provoked a book about himself that is so absorb-

ing and brilliant or so elastic and p r o f o u n d . L i o n e l TrilHng, who
assigned Chesterton's The Victorian Age in Literature^ to his classes,
declared, "Anything that Chesterton wrote is worth reading."^ Some-
times it seems as if Chesterton wrote in every form except the haiku,
and I should be pleased to praise his work in all its forms, but here I
wish to discuss only his criticism.
The twentieth-century critics whom Chesterton resembles most
are probably George Orwell and Edmund Wilson. They were all
lively writers, not only critics but also novelists, poets, editors, and
journalists. None of them was ever attached to a university. Wilson
took a bachelor's degree at Princeton but did not go on to graduate
school; Orwell went f r o m Eton to police work in Burma; and
Chesterton went f r o m St. Paul's to the Slade School of Art. Wilson
quarrelled bitterly with academe; Orwell spoke contemptuously of
"literary gents"; and Chesterton (the most amiable of the three) went
as far as to say that at Oxford and Cambridge there were authorities
who were not the authors of anything. Yet none of them was \yith-
out scholarly virtues: clarity, industry, the capacity for researching
and ordering large masses of material. Each, in his way, was an
excellent teacher discussing a subject that he loved, Chesterton in an
exuberant fashion, Wilson in a magisterial way, and Orwell in a no-
nonsense manner. And, f r o m different directions, they converged on
some of the same great figures, such as Dickens and Kipling.
Chesterton should not be thought of as the British equivalent of
Alexander Woollcott, for the similarities between them had nothing
to do with their criticism. They happened to be approximate con-
temporaries, and they were both bulky fellows with moustaches and
thick glasses, ready subjects for cartoons and caricatures. They were
fascinated by the theatres and especially loved the operas of Gilbert
and Sullivan. They did well on the radio, in spite of the fact that
Chesterton had a high-pitched voice, and Woollcott sounded as if he
were "on his last legs" when he announced asthmatically each week,
"This is Woollcott speaking." Chesterton was a major critic, and his
style was clear, direct, and vigorous. Woollcott was not really a critic
at all, but an odd and skittish figure operating on the margin of crit-
icism, and his style was affected, mawkish, and long-winded. Ches-
terton survives, but it is now difficult to understand how Woollcott
had a vogue at any time.

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Chesterton the Critic

Chesterton was born with a gift that any critic would wish for, a
sheer nimbleness of apprehension. Maisie Ward, his friend and bio-
grapher, testifies that he had, like Samuel Johnson, the ability to
turn over the pages of a book and to grasp in fifteen minutes what
others would grasp in an hour or two. He was also blessed with the
gift of remembering forever what he read so rapidly. When I first
encountered his work, I was a boy and did not have the haziest
notion how books and articles are written. I supposed that Chester-
ton carried in his head a vast accumulation of facts and ideas, and
that whatever he needed for a chapter or an article simply appeared
at the front of his mind and needed only to be written down.
The supposition was naive, but Chesterton did in fact rely much
on an extraordinary memory. With no books at hand, he quotes cor-
rectly a stanza from Yeats or part of a conversation from Boswell's
Life of Johnson. And when he cites half a dozen themes or "situa-
tions" in Henry James and adds that there are hundreds of others
like them, the reader familiar with his criticism will probably assume
that he could cite all of them if he were obliged to. Of course, his
memory carries no warrant; and, when it goes off the rails at all, the
mistake seems worse than it would seem in anybody else. One is
rather shocked to discover that he thinks that Carlyle's "Gad, she'd
better!" was prompted by Harriet Martineau, since it was Margaret
Fuller who stated that she accepted the universe.
Chesterton got his formal education at St. Paul's, then as now
an excellent public school, but he read incessantly all his life. As a
journalist and critic, he was always doing his homework, though he
did a great part of it not at home, but in restaurants and pubs and
on park benches. The result was a knowledge of literature so various
and extensive that it must have few parallels in the English criticism
of the last hundred years. One collection of his essays, published pos-
thumously, has the modest title, A Handful of Authors^, but it
includes essays about Stevenson, Twain, Cervantes, Hugo, Shakes-
peare, Newman, Milton, and thirty other writers of different times
and countries.
I do not know whether Chesterton ever read F.R. Leavis, but I
have no doubt that he would have been astonished by Leavis's criti-
cal Calvinism. As I have said, Chesterton never confused a decent
performance with a masterpiece, but the belief that a small number

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of writers constituted a kind of elect and that the majority were lost
souls would have been a dreadful heresy to him. He writes more
than one essay on Walt Whitman and Henry James but does not
disdain to write one on Bret Harte. He devotes essays to Arthur
Conan Doyle and Edward Lear and gives respectable space in The
Victorian Age in Literature to Coventry Patmore. He is as ready to
discuss penny dreadfuls as he is to discuss the works of Gabriele
D'Annunzio.
It was also one of Chesterton's strengths to know far more than
literature. Paraphrasing Kipling, one might ask. What do they know
of novels who only novels know? Or poems? Or plays? Chesterton
knew politics and history, myth and religion, painting and anthro-
pology. For him, learning was not inert, but alive, a sort of immense
and complex organism thousands of years old but full of vitality and
still growing. He found it fascinating and made it fascinating to oth-
ers. For all his reading, he never became merely bookish, and he
quoted and made allusions not out of ostentation, but out of love
and high spirits. Even when, in a single sentence of his Robert
Browning^, he refers both to Eikon BasiUke and to the Tichborne
Claimant, he does so out of a Browning-Hke exuberance.
Since Chesterton's appetite for literature was a healthy one, like
the appetite for food and drink, which please us and nourish us, it is
appropriate that he expresses his enthusiasm for the novels of
George Meredith in a metaphor drawn from food:
A reader opening one of his books feels like a schoolboy
opening a hamper which he somehow knows to have cost a
hundred pounds. He may be more bewildered by it than by an
ordinary hamper, but he gets the impression of real rich-
ness. . . . And that is what one gets from such riots of felicity
as Evan Harrington and Harry Richmond.'^
A few self-impanelled grand jurors of criticism have been in a
hurry to indict Chesterton *ön several counts, one of which is naivete.
It is a fact that his responses to certain characters were so ardent
that they became in a sense "real" to him, but i f some characters are
"real" to their authors, why should they not be so to critics and
ordinary readers? They clearly were to Dickens, who emerged f r o m
his study red-eyed with weeping after he had written death scenes.
And Ibsen, a writer who would seem altogether different f r o m
Dickens, also believed in the "existence" of his characters. According

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Chesterton the Critic

to Halvdan Koht's reliable biography, Ibsen's wife was not at all

surprised when he said to her at lunch, "Nora came to see me this
morning." His wife asked, "What was she wearing?" and Ibsen rep-
lied, " A simple blue dress."^ A more recent example is Evelyn
Waugh, who wondered about the lives of his characters, both before
the novels (or short stories) in which they figure begin and after they
end. (Thus the short story "The Man Who Liked Dickens" led to the
novel A Handful of Dust.) I should give Chesterton high marks, not
low ones for being able to entertain the fancy that one day he might
turn a corner and suddenly see Mr. Pickwick in the street.
Another count in the indictment is that Chesterton took undue
note of the morality of a literary work. Now, had Chesterton been
an American, he would have had as little liking for Comstockery as
he would have had for Prohibition. But he certainly believed that it
was the business of the critic to discuss both the morality and the
esthetics of a work. Good morality, he considered, did not always go
with good art, and the critic was obliged to point out (to take an
extreme example) that i f there was better art in a novel of D'Annun-
zio than in a penny dreadful, there was better morality in a penny
dreadful than in a novel by D'Annunzio.
Chesterton's morality was neither narrow nor squeamish. He
objected to what he called "the polite pornography" of the modern
world but approved the old English ribaldry that was heard in the
streets, because he thought that it had a healthy vigour. His objec-
tion to Walter Pater is not that Pater teaches a seize-the-day attitude
to life, but that Pater's way of seizing the day results in the impover-
ishment of pleasure. For our passions can become hard and gem-like
only by becoming "as cold as gems. No blow has ever been struck at
the natural loves and laughter of men so sterilising as this carpe diem
of the aesthetes."^ His objection to Bernard Shaw is not that Shaw is
a revolutionary, but that he is a puritan. His objection to Tolstoy is
not his sensuality, but his asceticism, and he is truly appalled by "the
didactic Tolstoy," an awful combination of "unmanly Puritan and an
uncivilised prig."'^
But Chesterton does not suppose that such faults vitiate a wri-
ter's entire work. I f there is a didactic Tolstoy, there is also a spon-
taneous Tolstoy who does not write stories that have morals, but
stories that "are" morals. I f Shaw is puritanic, he is also witty, indus-
trious, plucky, and public-spirited. I f Ibsen has a perverse view of the

249
 The Chesterton Review

world, he is still a great craftsman and man of the theatre. (Chester-

ton understood Ibsen better than some of the Ibsenites did. A t least
he did not feel baffled or betrayed because Ibsen wrote one play
about the need for truth and another play about the need for
illusion.)
Chesterton's esthetic interests are in some ways remarkably
modern. To take a single work as an example, in his essay on A
Midsummer Night's Dream he praises the "psychology" of the play,
the pure poetry, the several atmospheres, and the great character.
Bottom the weaver. But above all he praises the structure or, as he
calls it, the "design." And as he discusses the structure, he conveys
splendidly the magic and beauty of the play and the high excitement
of the final appearance of the fairies: " I f that ending were acted
properly, any modern man would feel shaken to the marrow i f he
had to walk home from the theatre through a country lane.""
Chesterton was not a specialist in Shakespeare (though his
essays on Shakespeare are numerous enough to have been collected
in a small book), but he was a specialist in the fiction and poetry of
the nineteenth century. His five books and his hundreds of essays are
a trove of original and still striking judgments. The Victorian Age in
Literature is so enterprising an account of the time that the publisher
of the series in which it was first issued felt obliged to write a pre-
f a c e d e c l a r i n g that he did not vouch for it as a proper handbook.
Fortunately, no one seems to have paid any attention to him. Ches-
terton wrote two books on Dickens, one on Stevenson, and one on
Browning. Even so stern a critic as Stanley Edgar Hyman considers
that the books on Dickens are critically v a l u a b l e , b u t I should say
that they all are.
Recent writers on the great Victorians have had the advantage
of a hundred years of scholarship, but Chesterton had the advantage
of being a Victorian himself. When he was born, Dickens had been
dead only four years. Browning had fifteen more years to live, and
Stevenson had sixteen. When he was a boy, there were many people
living in London who were said to be the models of characters in
Dickens's novels. One old man went out of his way to explain to
Chesterton's father that he could not possibly be the original of
Pecksniff, but he spoke in the very idiom of Pecksniff: "You know
me, the world knows me. . . . I have lived a . . . Hfe devoted to the
highest duties and i d e a l s , " a n d so on.

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Chesterton the Critic

Certain resemblances between Chesterton and his chief subjects

furnished him with passports to their worlds. Like Dickens, he
enjoyed feasts and festivals and theatres, eccentrics and cockney
jokes, long walks through London and a countryside that was van-
ishing. He loved the defenseless—children and the poor—and dis-
liked rich men and industry, puritanism and mean-spiritedness. He
regarded Dickens as a great man not only because he was a great
writer, but also because he had done more for social reform by writ-
ing fiction than Carlyle, Newman, and Arnold had done by stating
facts.
Like Stevenson, Chesterton remembered his childhood with
affection and took delight in the toy theatre, which Stevenson cele-
brated in a well-known essay. He took an interest in the penny
dreadful, which Stevenson, in the age of Walter Pater, dared to re-
write, as it were, into excellent novels. Instinctively he revolted
against the pessimism and nihilism of his day. In the words that he
used to describe Stevenson's revolt, he "stood up suddenly and shook
himself with a sort of impatient sanity, a shrug of scepticism about
scepticism." His answer to pessimism was not simply optimism, but
romance and "a kind of military l o y a l t y " t o the human race.
When Chesterton writes that Browning was "a fine artist, a keen
scholar . . . [who] could put his finger on everything, and . . . had a
memory like the British Museum," he might almost be writing
about himself. Like Browning he was fascinated, though not mor-
bidly, with whatever was energetic or grotesque (the monstrous deep-
sea creatures in their poems seem to Hve in the same waters). They
both got along well with the great men of their time, some of whom
could not get along with each other.
Chesterton's own work in fiction and poetry and his interest in
other arts enhanced his criticism. He thought in images f r o m child-
hood on, studied (as I have said) at the Slade, drew and painted all
his life, and wrote books on Watts and Blake. "The original quality
in any man of imagination," he writes, "is his imagery. It is like the
landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would wish to wander
in; the strange fauna of his own secret p l a n e t . " H e notes that the
images of Stevenson "stand out in very sharp outline and are, as it
were, all e d g e s . " T h e eighteenth-century figures who stand up
against the skyline are typical, and the figures in " A Lodging for the
Night," which Chesterton describes in a neat phrase, "the fine maca-

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 The Chesterton Review

bre nocturne,"*^ are exceptional. Stevenson's images are ordinarily

bright. The silver buttons on Alan Breck Stewart's coat are
untouched by Scottish mist, Glenure is shot dead under a cloudless
sky, "and he did not have red hair for nothing.''^^
When deep readers regarded Browning as primarily an intellec-
tual and a scientist, Chesterton recognised that Browning was prim-
arily a poet with a curiosity about other arts besides his own: paint-
ing and sculpture and music. Moreover, he was interested in what
Chesterton calls "the obstetrics" of art, such as making casts, at
which he tried his hand for a time. Many educated men, says Ches-
terton, can talk shop with artists, but Browning "could talk shop-
talk."^i On the notion that Browning was indifferent to form, Ches-
terton is both shrewd and amusing: A poet who really did not care
about f o r m might tell a smoking-room story in blank verse or write
a hunting song in Spenserian stanzas, but Browning always sought
the f o r m to suit what he wished to say and probably invented more
stanza forms than Thomas Hardy.
But i f Chesterton had never studied at the Slade or never writ-
ten fiction and poetry, he would have been an exceptionally good
critic because he was (to borrow and to use in a different way a
favourite phrase of Alan Breck Stewart) "a man of great penetra-
tion."22 Edmund Wilson, who should have known better, dismissed
Chesterton's books on Dickens as boozy and sentimental, but Ches-
terton had noted (before Wilson did) the most important fact about
Dickens: he was not only a great entertainer but also a great artist
and social critic. Unlike Wilson, Chesterton was no "psychological"
critic, but he had a keen understanding of Dickens's psychology.
Having pointed out that when Dickens was a child, he was kept up
late to entertain adult company, Chesterton says.
In all the practical relations of his life he was what the child is
in the last hours of an evening party, genuinely delighted,
genuinely delightful, genuinely affectionate and happy, and
yet in some strange way fundamentally exasperated.23
As to the faults of Dickens's work, Chesterton knew them as
well as anyone knows them today:
all the moving machinery exists only to display entirely static
characters. . . . The author would have fired Mr. Pickwick out
of a cannon to get him to Wardle's by Christmas; he would
have taken off the roof to get him to Bob Sawyer's party.

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Chesterton the Critic

The heroes of the novels are not heroic, and the good characters are
absurd: Nicholas Nickleby is a chivalrous "young donkey,"^5 and Lit-
tle Nell's grandfather is "that wobbling old ass." Dickens strains so
much for pathos that the reader often comes upon "a phrase that
suddenly sickens."^^ In short, Chesterton loves Dickens not blindly
but critically, loves him this side idolatry. Dickens is full of faults, as
Shakespeare is.
Chesterton said that he had no critical vocabulary, but in fact
he contributed to the vocabulary. He spoke of "flat" characters in
both Dickens and Stevenson before E . M . Forster spoke of them in
Dickens, and of "good bad books" before George Orwell did. He
must have been the first to speak of "the obstetrics of art." Further-
more, he tossed ideas into his criticism as royalty scatters largesse
and left it to others to give them names and write monographs on
them. Before the term "the heresy of the paraphrase" was invented,
he stated the principle: " I t is one of the curses of the criticism of
poetry that it tends to detach the ideas of a poet from the forms by
which he expresses them."^^ And when he remarks that the function
of the critic is to say about the writer, not what should make him
nod his head solemnly, but what should make him jump out of his
boots, what is he stating but the principle of "the intentional
fallacy"?
Like the rest of his writing, Chesterton's critical work is both
witty and wise. "Shaw," he says, "is like the Venus of Milo. A l l there
is of him is admirable."2« This is a good joke, but it also introduces
the deficiencies that Chesterton finds in Shaw. Of a writer now justly
ignored if not altogether forgotten, he says, "Bad story writing is not
a crime. M r . Hall Caine walks the streets openly and cannot be put
in prison for an anticHmax."^^ This, too, is a good joke, but it illus-
trates Chesterton's point that mere junk, which magistrates seemed
to think so dangerous, is less corrupting than some kinds of writing
on a higher literary level. The Victorian Age in Literature is espe-
cially abundant in such significant wit. Macaulay, assuming that
politics would improve as machinery does, sometimes talked "as i f
clocks produced clocks, or guns had little families of pistols, or pen-
knives littered like pigs."3o M i l l "exhibited all the iron wheels of his
universe rather reluctantly, like a gentleman in trade showing ladies
over his factory."3'

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 772^ Chesterton Review

Chesterton's parodies are worth noticing, since parody is a form

of criticism. In Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley defines parodies
and caricatures as "the most penetrating of criticisms,"^^ and to
judge f r o m his own parody of Edgar Allan Poe, he must have pene-
trating wounds in mind. In Vulgarity in Literature, after quoting a
splendid passage f r o m Milton, he translates it into a stanza of Poe,
and the result is lethal. He then demonstrates that the versification of
Milton varies in accord with the action, whereas that of Poe is fixed,
like a permanent wave. Poe is a kind of hairdresser, and the parody
is a true '"ondulation de chez Edgar
Chesterton, however, defines parody as "the worshipper's half
holiday"; 34 and his parodies are not devastating but affectionate,
actually more pastiche than parody, such as Max Beerbohm's " A
Luncheon: Thomas Hardy Entertains the Prince of Wales." Having
consented to appear as Old King Cole in a pageant (his great bulk
and his love of drink and tobacco made him perfect for the part),
Chesterton wrote variations on the nursery rhyme as Tennyson,
Browning, Swinburne, Yeats, and Whitman would have written i t . 3 5
He admires all these poets and has no wish to caricature them.
Instead, he catches the style and spirit of each one as only a reader
who has had a long and close acquaintance with their works could
do. As in Beerbohm's parody, the comedy lies in the situation, not in
any shortcomings of the five poets.
It is probably a mark of a major writer that there is always one
more surprise in him. One may read a great deal of Chesterton's
criticism and still be amazed at his knowledge of American authors
(to take only one area) of various ranks and the perceptiveness with
which he writes about them. " D i d Bret Harte imitate Swinburne?" he
asks; "Or (more pleasing thought) did Swinburne wrestle in spirit
with. . . The Heathen Chinee and then. . . write the great Greek
tragedy of Atalanta in Calydon?"^^ Chesterton has observed that the
two writers use the same meter and rhyme scheme and that he
knows no other poet who has used them.
One would expect Chesterton to admire Whitman's democracy
and exuberance but not (since Chesterton liked and wrote poems in
rhyme and regular meter) Whitman's free verse, but in fact he
admires it very much. The greatest surprise is that he feels an
immense veneration for Henry James, a writer whose mind and
temperament seem worlds away f r o m his own. Even the joke in the

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Chesterton the Critic

essay on Harte, that Henry James is "the other Truthful James," is a

tribute, and he actually ranks the genius of James with the genius of
Shakespeare and Dickens. Caught up in the First World War, think-
ing and writing about it almost to the point of exhaustion, he stops
not only to write a eulogy of James, but also to comment astutely on
the qualities that make James's novels and short stories greatr
Although Chesterton's prose style is one of his merits as a critic,
a few complaints have been lodged against it, one of which is that it
rambles. A man who writes a vast deal for magazines and newspap-
ers is entitled to spots of rambling now and then, but Chesterton did
not often avail himself of the journalist's license. He had an excellent
sense of the architecture of exposition, and his writing, for all its
rapidity, is ordinarily well organised and concise. He is, among other
things, one of the great aphorists. In The Viking Book of Aphor-
isms, a selection by W . H . Auden and Louis Kronenberger,^^ he fig-
ures more prominently than the nineteenth-century Samuel Butler
and almost as prominently as Goethe.
Another charge is that Chesterton was always making para-
doxes, and to read the statements of some plaintiffs, one would think
that he shot them off as a boy shoots off firecrackers. It is perfectly
true that Chesterton was a great maker of paradoxes and that in
some of his books they became too much of a good thing. But he
did not make them just to say the opposite of what everybody else
said, or to give the customers what they wanted, like a comedian.
And clearly he did not make them just for the hell of it. As Hugh
Kenner has demonstrated, Chesterton saw the world itself as para-
doxical, and paradox was his way of stating what he thought to be
the truth. 38
A third charge is that Chesterton's prose is too alliterative. Of
course, there is nothing wrong with writing marked by alliteration.
Early English poetry is full of it, so is the poetry of Swinburne, so is
the poetry of Hopkins, a better poet than Swinburne, and so (as
Chesterton himself pointed out) is ordinary speech: time and tide,
weal and woe, kith and kin, and so on. Chesterton probably learned
much about writing prose by reading both poetry and prose, but it
would have been better for him i f he had not been influenced by
Swinburne. Still, his alliteration is not the sort that comes out of the
crystal palaces of the advertising business or the noisy arenas of

255
 The Chesterton Review

politics. Altogether, his prose is preferable to that of a certain

amount of today's criticism, which is written with so little regard for
sound and rhythm that it makes the ears ache.
Besides his ot,her virtues, Chesterton had two for which critics
are not always conspicuous, good nature and modesty. He is almost
always courteous to opponents, actually forgets the names of news-
papers that have attacked him, and suffers harmless fools gladly.
Having more excuse for arrogance than most men have, he is not
even tempted to it. Without giving himself any airs and graces, he
makes truly arresting observations and, like another Macaulay,
remarks that everyone knows this or that, when everyone certainly
does not. He gives aid and comfort to the enemy, calling The Victo-
rian Age in Literature a "sketch" and his prodigious output "carloads
of ill-constructed books."^9
Unlike most English critics of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, Chesterton has survived the tooth of time. Scho-
lars and critics, novelists and poets hold him in high regard. Michael
Goldberg, in his Carlyle and Dickens, cites him eight t i m e s , a n d
W . H . Auden, an extremely tough-minded reader, rated him "very
high'^^i as a literary critic. Good periodicals quote him more fre-
quently than they do most British writers of his age, a fact that
would please him, because he was proud of being a working journal-
ist himself. He brought to his books and articles a vast deal of read-
ing (the first qualification for a critic). He brought wisdom and he
brought common sense, the lack of which has undone so much criti-
cal writing. And he brought exuberance and expansiveness which are
rare at any time.
Today, over f i f t y years after Chesterton's death, it is easier to
evaluate him properly than it was when he was a great "character" in
Fleet Street and published in a score of magazines and newspapers.
One need not suppose him to be superficial because he is prolific, or
"vulgar" because he is readable, or frivolous because he is witty. He
was eccentric enough to wear a cape and a bandit's hat, but there is
no excuse now for writing about him as i f he ran around in a
clown's suit.

1 John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (New Y o r k , 1969).
2 Stark Young's remark appears on the back cover o f the H i l l and W a n g
paperback edition o f Chesterton's George Bernard Shaw (New Y o r k , 1956). I
have not been able to trace it to its i n i t i a l appearance.

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Chesterton the Critic

3 G . K . Chesterton, Tiie Victorian Age in Literature (New Y o r k , 1913).

4 L i o n e l T r i l l i n g ' s remark also appears on the paperback edition o f George
Bernard Shaw.
5 G . K . C h e s t e r t o n , / I Handful of Authors York, 1953).
6 G . K . Chesterton, Robert Browning (NQV^ Y o r k , 1903).
7 G . K . Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature, p. 149.
8 H a l v d a n K o h t , Life of Ibsen (New Y o r k , 1971), p. 318.
9 G . K . Chesterton, Heretics {London, 1905), p. 109.
'0 G . K . Chesterton, " T o l s t o y and the Cult o f Simplicity," Varied Types (New
Y o r k , 1915), p. 132.
1' G . K . Chesterton, Chesterton on Shakespeare (Henley-on-Thames, 1971),
p. 106.
12 See G . K . Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature, p. v i .
•3 Stanley Edgar H y m a n , The Armed Vision (New Y o r k , 1948), p. 120.
14 G . K . Chesterton, The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton (New York,
1936), p. 333.
15 G . K . Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson (New Y o r k , 1955), p. 64.
16 G . K . Chesterton, Robert Browning, p. 64.
1"^ G . K . Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 29.
18 G . K . Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 30.
1^ G . K . Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 135.
20 G . K . Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 32.
21 G . K . Chesterton, Robert Browning, p. 84.
22 Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped (New Y o r k , 1949), p. 58 et passim.
23 G . K . Chesterton, Charles Dickens {London, 1906), pp. 27-28.
24 G . K . Chesterton, "The Fairy Pickwick," Selected Essays ( L o n d o n , 1949),
p. 55.
25 G . K . Chesterton, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles
Dickens (New Y o r k , 1911), p. 32.
26 G . K . Chesterton, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles
Dickens, p. 55.
27 G . K . Chesterton, " B r o w n i n g and His Ideal," A Handful of Authors, p. 9 1 .
28 G . K . Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw (New Y o r k , 1956), p. 15.
29 G . K . Chesterton, " A Defence o f Penny Dreadfuls," The Defendant (Lon-
don, 1901), p. 22.
30 G . K . Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature, p. 33.
31 G . K . Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature, p. 37.
32 A l d o u s Huxley, Point Counter Point (New Y o r k , 1965), p. 335.
33 A l d o u s Huxley, Vulgarity in Literature ( L o n d o n , 1930), pp. 30-31.
34 G . K . Chesterton, "Bret Harte," Varied Types, p. 186.
35 G . K . Chesterton, "Variations on an A i r , " The Collected Poems of
G.K. Chesterton (New Y o r k , 1980), pp. 44-46.
36 G . K . Chesterton, 77?^ Common Man (New Y o r k , 1950), p. 214.
37 W . H . A u d e n and Louis Kronenberger, 77z^ Viking Book of Aphorisms: A
Personal Selection (New Y o r k , 1962).
38 H u g h Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton ( L o n d o n , 1948).

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39 G . K . Chesterton, The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton, p. 103.

40 M i c h a e l Goldberg, Carlyle and Dickens (Athens, Georgia, 1972), p. 9 ei
passim.
41 W . H . A u d e n , G.K. Chesterton: A Selection from His Non~Fictionai
Prose (London, 1970), p. 15.

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