Chesterton as a literary critic

READERS who know little of Chesterton's work often take a dismissive view of his literary criticism. They have a notion that he belonged to the race before the Flood, to the breed of Edwardian bookmen and litterateurs, the Gosses, Saintburys, Whibleys or Walter Raleighs. Such Edwardian criticism is taken to have been strong on charm (or what passed for such), but weak on content and intellectual rigour. It was little more than chat or gossip, the display of personality, an undisciplined ramble around the bookshelves in which an occasional perceptive remark might lurk undeveloped or lost among paragraphs of mellow penny-a-lining. On such a view, Chesterton's Charles Dickens or his Robert Browning might be allowed to gather dust along with Obiter Dicta, Hours in a Library or The Peace of the Augustans.

In recent polemical accounts of the rise of English studies the names of the Edwardian belle-lettrists who were Chesterton's contemporaries sometimes appear as a litany of the politically incorrect. The "grace" and "amenity" of these indolent and bibulous mandarins masked sinister ideological or hegemonic purposes. The situation is not helped by the fact, recognised as long as Virginia Woolf's dismissal of Walter Raleigh, that some of these bookmen were snobbish or reactionary (Woolf 84-89).

Two obvious points might be made. Our current version of Edwardian belle-lettres is a gross oversimplification. Secondly, there are more accurate and helpful ways of viewing Chesterton than as a gentlemanly essayist. John Gross's seminal account ought to have substantially modified much received opinion about Chesterton's Edwardian milieu. As Gross showed, Edwardian literary critics differed in their social and political attitudes, as well as in their approaches toward and talent for literary criticism. D. J. Conlon's collection offers a useful guide to the first reviewers' response to Chesterton's work and the readers' expectations and assumptions that work challenged. The Edwardian reviews Conlon has gathered speak of an atmosphere of controversial excitement, of trenchant and lucid exchange about fundamentals. Investigation of the cultural and historical background of Chesterton's work suggests a far more intellectually vital world than some recent academics imagine, or than they themselves probably belong to.

However, it is best to approach Chesterton as a critic directly through the work on Browning and Dickens which established his own reputation and substantially revised the way in which both authors were viewed. (It is interesting that recently Harold Bloom should have singled out Chesterton as his favourite Dickens critic). Such an emphasis needs little defence. Chesterton's post-World War I critical work on Cobbett, Stevenson and Chaucer is characteristically engaging and perceptive, but by then the main focus of his interest had shifted from literary criticism to theology and politics.

The first impression of someone coming to Chesterton's critical writing will probably be that of an intellectual and philosophical spaciousness. One would be struck by the genial and convincing way in which Chesterton is able to place some local and temporary intellectual or artistic preoccupation against the background of long-term historical and cultural developments and to understand those developments themselves by the standards of a sophisticated, perennial religious philosophy. Chesterton's commitment to his career as a journalist and several of his pronouncements' on that career suggest that he recognised that one lives in one's own time and in no other, and that one is, or should be, interested in all the numerous goings-on of a brilliant, if fragmented, kaleidoscope of ideas, personalities and events. Yet, if Chesterton relished the contemporary scene he was not enslaved by it. One lesser but real benefit of his Christian belief was a freedom from intellectual or artistic fads. As well as valuable fresh thought and interesting (or at least provocative) new formulations, cultural scenes produce mere changes of fashion. With us, Althusser replaces Marcuse and Foucault replaces Althusser. "Organic," "irony" and "ambiguity" loose their prestige and, for a season, are overtaken by "ideology," "hegemony," "text," "theory," "carnavalesque" and "the other." In Chesterton's early career, the catch-phrases of Realism or Naturalism were being thrust aside by those of Symbolism. As much acrimony accompanied these changes as in any quarrel over deconstruction. (The denunciation of Zola by several of his former disciples was one of scores of such forgotten furores).

From the outset, Chesterton was concerned to free his readers from limited and disabling logomachies, the quarrels of an intellectual season or set about "Realism," "Romanticism" or "Form." The essay "Charles Dickens" (1903), a prelude to the major studies of the novelist, cuts through such debate at once. With a refreshing briskness, Chesterton announces that valuable time and attention have been wasted on relatively superficial topics. "Considered merely as literary fashions, romanticism and realism are both tricks, and tricks alone." 2 The link between "technical realism" and even a "casual truth to life" is quite an arbitrary one. After all, the English book most full of "masterly technical realism" and the "impediments of prosaic life" is Gulliver's Travels. Such a comment is typical of many others. Chesterton encourages his reader to elude the tyranny of terminologies which pointlessly seek to circumscribe the channels along which an artist's creative energy may flow: