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 Æsop, 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
THE HUMORIST AND THE POET
There are innumerable books—or let us say twenty—on Mr. Bernard Shaw. They deal with him as a sociologist, a dramatist, or what not, but never as a humorist. There is a mass of books on Oscar Wilde, and they deal with everything concerned with him, except his humour. The great humorists—as such—go unsung to their graves. That is because there is nothing so obvious as a joke, and nothing so difficult to explain. It requires a psychologist, like William James, or a philosopher, like Bergson, to explain what a joke is, and then most of us cannot understand the explanation. A joke—especially another man's joke—is a thing to be handled delicately and reverently, for once the bloom is off, the joke mysteriously shrivels and vanishes. Translators are the sworn enemies of jokes; the exigencies of their deplorable trade cause them to maul the poor little things about while they are putting them into new clothes, and the result is death, or at the least an appearance of vacuous senescence. But jokes are only the crystallization of humour; it exists also in less tangible forms, such as style and all that collection of effects vaguely lumped together and called "atmosphere." Chesterton's peculiar "atmosphere" rises like a sweet exhalation from the very ink he sheds. And it is frankly indefinable, as all genuine style is. The insincere stylists can be reduced to a formula, because they work from a formula; Pater may be brought down to an arrangement of adjectives and commas, Doctor Johnson to a succession of rhythms, carefully pruned of excrescences, and so on, but the stylist who writes as God made him defies such analysis. Meredith and Shaw and Chesterton will remain mysteries even unto the latest research student of the Universities of Jena and Chicago. Patient students (something of the sort is already being done) will count up the number of nouns and verbs and commas in The Napoleon of Notting Hill and will express the result in such a form as this—
But they will fail to touch the essential Chesterton, because one of the beauties of this form of analysis is that when the formula has been obtained, nobody is any the wiser as to the manner of its use. We know that James Smith is composed of beef and beer and bread, because all evidence goes to show that these are the only things he ever absorbs, but nobody has ever suggested that a synthesis of foodstuffs will ever give us James Smith.
Now the difficulty of dealing with the humour of Chesterton is that, in doing so, one is compelled to handle it, to its detriment. If in the chapter on his Romances any reader thought he detected the voice and the style of Chesterton, he is grievously mistaken. He only saw the scaffolding, which bears the same relation to the finished product as the skeleton bears to the human body.