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.