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 rôle. 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.