"I know of something that will alter that antagonism, something that is outside us, something that you and I have all our lives perhaps taken too little account of. The equal and eternal human being will alter that antagonism, for the human being sees no real antagonism between laughter and respect, the human being, the common man, whom mere geniuses like you and me can only worship like a god. When dark and dreary days come, you and I are necessary, the pure fanatic, the pure satirist. We have between us remedied a great wrong. We have lifted the modern cities into that poetry which every one who knows mankind knows to be immeasurably more common than the commonplace. But in healthy people there is no war between us. We are but the two lobes of the brain of a ploughman. Laughter and love are everywhere. The cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are full of blasphemous grotesques. The mother laughs continually at the child, the lover laughs continually at the lover, the wife at the husband, the friend at the friend. Auberon Quin, we have been too long separated; let us go out together. You have a halberd and I a sword, let us start our wanderings over the world. For we are its two essentials. Come, it is already day."
In the blank white light Auberon hesitated a moment. Then he made the formal salute with his halberd, and they went away together into the unknown world.
This is very important to the understanding of Chesterton. With him, profound gravity and exuberant fooling were always intermingled and some of his deepest thoughts are conveyed by a pun. He always claimed to be intensely serious while hating to be solemn and it was a mixture apt to be misunderstood. If gravity and humour are the two lobes of the average man's brain, the average man does not bring them into play simultaneously to anything like the extent that Chesterton did.
Auberon Quin and Adam Wayne are the most living individuals in any of his novels—just because they are the two lobes of his brain individualised. All his stories abound in adventure, are admirable in their vivid descriptions of London or the countryside of France or England seen in fantastic visions. They are living in the portrayal of ideas by the road of argument. But the characters are chiefly energies through whose lips Gilbert argues with Gilbert until some conclusion shall be reached.
In 1905 came The Club of Queer Trades—least good of the fantasia—and even admirers have begun to wonder if too many fields are being tried; in 1906, Dickens and Heretics.
It will remain a moot point whether the Browning or the Dickens is Chesterton's best work of literary criticism. The Dickens is the more popular, largely because Dickens is the more popular author. Most Dickens idolators read anything about their idol if only for the pleasure of the quotations. And no Dickens idolator could fail to realise that here was one even more rapt in worship than himself. After the publication of Charles Dickens, Chesterton undertook a series of prefaces to the novels. In one of them he took the trouble to answer one only of the criticisms the book had produced: the comment that he was reading into the work of Dickens something that Dickens did not mean.
Criticism does not exist to say about authors the things that they knew themselves. It exists to say the things about them which they did not know themselves. If a critic says that the Iliad has a pagan rather than a Christian pity, or that it is full of pictures made by one epithet, of course he does not mean that Homer could have said that. If Homer could have said that the critic would leave Homer to say it. The function of criticism, if it has a legitimate function at all, can only be one function—that of dealing with the subconscious part of the author's mind which only the critic can express, and not with the conscious part of the author's mind, which the author himself can express. Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.*
[* Introduction to "Old Curiosity Shop." Reprinted in Criticisms and
Appreciations of the Works of Charles Dickens, 1933 ed. pp. 51-2.]
He attended not at all to the crop of comments on his inaccuracies. One reviewer pointed out that Chesterton had said that every postcard Dickens wrote was a work of art; but Dickens died on June 9th, 1870 and the first British postcard was issued on October 1st, 1870. "A wonderful instance of Dickens's never-varying propensity to keep ahead of his age." After all, what did such things matter? Bernard Shaw, however, felt that they did. He wrote a letter from which I think Gilbert got an important hint, utilized later in his introduction to David Copperfield:
6th September, 1906.