The Victorian Age in Literature made many of his admirers again express the wish that he would stay in the field of pure literature. His characterisations of some of the Victorian writers were sheer delight.
Ruskin had a strong right hand that wrote of the great mediaeval Minsters in tall harmonies and traceries as splendid as their own; and also, so to speak, a weak and feverish left hand that was always fidgeting and trying to take the pen away—and write an evangelical tract about the immorality of foreigners . . . it is not quite unfair to say of him that he seemed to want all parts of the Cathedral except the altar.
Tennyson was a provincial Virgil . . . he tried to have the universal balance of all the ideas at which the great Roman had aimed: but he hadn't got hold of all the ideas to balance. Hence his work was not a balance of truths, like the universe. It was a balance of whims; like the British Constitution . . . he could not think up to the height of his own towering style.
. . . while Emily Bronte was as unsociable as a storm at midnight and while Charlotte Bronte was at best like that warmer and more domestic thing a house on fire—they do connect themselves with the calm of George Eliot, as the forerunners of many later developments of the feminine advance. Many forerunners (if it comes to that) would have felt rather ill if they had seen the things they foreran.
The best and most profound part of the book was however the working out of certain generalisations—the effect on the literature of the period of the Victorian compromise between religion and rationalism ("Macaulay, it is said, never talked about his religion: but Huxley was always talking about the religion he hadn't got"): the break-up of the compromise when Victorian Protestantism and Victorian rationalism simultaneously destroyed one another; the uniqueness of the nonsense-writing of the later Victorian period.
In one illuminating passage Chesterton defends what seems at first sight merely his own habit of getting dates and events in their wrong order.
The mind moves by instincts, associations, premonitions and not by fixed dates, or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated: notions will be first defined long after they are dead . . . thus Wordsworth shrank back into Toryism, as it were, from a Shelleyan extreme of pantheism as yet disembodied. Thus Newman took down the iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yet delivered, that was coming from the club of Darwin. For this reason no one can understand tradition or even history who has not some tenderness for anachronism.
This was not merely special pleading: it contains a profound truth. Wilfrid Ward proved it of Newman in the biography that G.K. had probably just been reading. Chesterton noted it himself in his book on Cobbett who, as he said, saw what was not yet there. It is almost the definition of genius. Already at this date Chesterton and Belloc were fighting much that to the rest of us only became fully apparent long afterwards.
"I think you would make a very good God," wrote E. V. Lucas to Chesterton. There is indeed something divine in an almost ceaseless outpouring of creative energy. But only God can create tirelessly and Chesterton was at this time beginning to be tired. You can see it in The Flying Inn. The book is still full of vitality and the lyrics in it, later published separately under the title Wine, Water and Song, are as good in that kind as any that he ever wrote. But with all its vigour the book is a less joyful one than Manalive and it is a much more angry one. Manalive was a paean of joy to life. The Flying Inn is fighting for something necessary to its fulness—freedom.
It must have been just while he was writing it that there were threatenings of a case against him by Lever Brothers on account of a lecture given at the City Temple on "The Snob as Socialist." In answering a question he spoke of Port Sunlight as "corresponding to a Slave Compound." Others besides Lever Brothers were shocked and some clarification was certainly called for. Belloc and Chesterton meant by Slavery not that the poor were being bullied or ill treated but that they had lost their liberty. Gilbert went so far as to point out how much there was to be said in defence of a Slave state. Under Slavery the poor were usually fed, clothed and housed adequately. Slaves had often been much more comfortable in the past than were free men in the world of today. A model employer might by his regulations greatly increase the comfort of his workers and yet enslave them.