Redeeming The Fallen Giants

The University of Notre Dame
Redeeming the Fallen Giants: Chesterton on Newman, Carlyle, and Ruskin

Author(s): Alan Blackstock
Source: Religion & Literature, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 25-49
Published by: The University of Notre Dame
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REDEEMING THE FALLEN GIANTS:
CHESTERTON ON NEWMAN, CARLYLE, AND RUSKIN
Alan Blackstock
Although G. K. Chesterton was one of the most prolific and versatile

writers of his time, producing thousands of pages of commentary on art,
literature, religion, ethics, and politics, he is chiefly remembered today as
the author of the Father Brown detective stories and The Man Who Was
Thursday or as the apologist for the Catholic faith who wrote such books as
Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. The essays and books on Victorian
literature and authors that made him famous - Robert Browning and Charles
Dickens, for instance - go largely unread, and Chesterton's critical reputa-
tion has similarly languished, though a small coterie of devotees has

attempted to salvage it by various means, primarily by defending him
against charges of excessive optimism, slovenly scholarship, and theatrical
stylistics,1 as well as by attempting to demonstrate that he anticipated some
of the critical approaches later employed in New Criticism and other

schools of twentieth-century criticism.2 But neither Chesterton's attackers
nor his defenders have adequately considered the audiences to whom he

addressed his criticism or the purposes for which he addressed them,
crucial questions in determining whether Chesterton's writing deserves to
be called criticism at all, or rather some form of journalism, popular
biography, or pure propaganda.
Chesterton himself always insisted that he wrote for the common man
and refused to admit any distinction between his journalism and his
criticism.3 His literary criticism, if it can be called that, has been vilified as
R&L 36.2 (Summer 2004)
25
26 Religion & Literature

much as praised, for its inaccuracy, digressiveness, and epigrammatic style.
Its author has been accused of moralism,4 Victorianism, philistinism

("Chesterton is the mob!" sneered Pound5), impressionism, and romanticism. He has further been attacked for allowing his personality to appear
in his writing to a degree considered unacceptable in scholarly criticism.6
His defenders have ascribed his admitted carelessness about factual accu-
racy to the journalistic haste of his writing and have answered most of the
other charges by referring to Chesterton's stated desire to write for the
common man. To Chesterton, "writing for the common man" meant

above all else newspaper writing; it was this that launched his literary
career and thereby shaped his concepts of audience, of criticism, and of
the relationship between the two.
Beginning with its earliest appearance in the Liberal dailies and literary
magazines, Chesterton's criticism invariably aims simultaneously to educate, edify, and incite its readers. To examine how he accomplishes this
rhetorical jugglery, I have chosen, from the thousands of essays Chesterton
contributed to these periodicals, three written between 1904 and 1908 that
analyze the work of three writers who were themselves no mean rhetoricians: John Henry Newman, Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin. Chesterton
would return to these three Victorian giants, with the addition of Matthew
Arnold, in The Victorian Age in Literature. In both the essays and the book
Chesterton's analysis focuses on the relationship between the ideas and the
rhetorical style of the author in question, while at the same time indulging
in what Stephen Medcalf has described as Chesterton's "ability to impersonate, modified by his awareness of a strong system of values to judge
what he is impersonating" (85), not only the authors themselves but the
age they attacked.
No Victorian writers generated more controversy in their own day than
did Newman, Carlyle, and Ruskin, and today few Victorian prose stylists
retain the critical interest enjoyed by these three radically different yet
equally influential essayists. By Chesterton's time, however, reaction against
them had begun to set in with the general modernist repudiation of all
things Victorian. Thus in choosing to write about the three in the Liberal
dailies, Chesterton was already flouting the tastes and expectations of his
readers who liked to think of themselves as progressive. His purpose,
however, was not to attempt to make their views more palatable to his
readers but to defend them against what he saw as popular misconceptions, to point out wherein lies their greatness, and to account for, without
excusing, their undeniable faults. Along the way Chesterton would as ever
exploit the opportunity the essay afforded to enlarge on such recurrent
ALAN BLACKSTOCK 27
themes as the banality of modern society and the glory of the common
man, though he always managed to return to his subject by the end of the
essay.
Chesterton cheerfully acknowledged that his digressions were often the

actual center of his writing and the ostensible subject merely a point of
departure: "I will not say that I wrote a book on Browning; but I wrote a
book on love, liberty, poetry. . .a book in which the name of Browning was
introduced from time to time, I might almost say with considerable art"
(Autobiography 101). He does, however, at least in these early essays, provide
some detailed discussion of the words and ideas of his subjects, while at
the same time missing no opportunity to instruct his readers on matters
more substantial than "the things about which man ought not to be
serious - taste, ornament, art, criticism" ("Ruskin" 153) - exactly those
things that readers of essays on literary figures could be expected to take
seriously. Is Chesterton then guilty of using bait-and-switch tactics on his
unsuspecting readers, luring them with the promise of serious literary
discussion, only to subject them to metaphysical speculations once he has
them where he wants them? Not quite, since he never entirely loses sight of
the stated subject of the essay, and furthermore, the Chestertonian twist
was not a disagreeable surprise to most of his readers, but rather an

anticipated pleasure: much of the attraction of Chesterton's essays arises
from the ease with which he leads away from and back to his declared
subject, and some of his most popular pieces were those in which he would
choose as trivial a subject as a piece of chalk and launch from that an
exploration of his favorite themes. In these essays on Newman, Carlyle,
and Ruskin, Chesterton engages his readers with trivial questions of art
and style in order to explore what are to him far more serious issues of
meaning, logic, and truth.
The earliest of these essays is "The Style of Newman," which first
appeared in the Speaker in 1904. The subject can hardly have been calculated to appeal to the Speaker's primary audience of radical young intellectuals, who would likely feel little enthusiasm for Newman either as the
founder of the High Church Oxford Movement or as the Cardinal he
would later become. In this essay the now older, though still in many
respects radical, Chesterton deplores Newman's patrician origins but admires his intellectual honesty and courage. In a typically paradoxical twist,
Chesterton seeks to demonstrate that though Newman himself may not
have been democratic, his style is. The opening sentence of the essay, "A
fine style is not a narrow or fastidious thing, as many think" (130), accom-
plishes multiple tasks: it establishes focus while setting up the popular

misconception about style that the essay will challenge; and by first declaring what a fine style is not, it prepares readers for the sentence to follow,
which corrects the mistaken notion of the "many" by declaring, "On the
contrary, style is the truly democratic thing, since it touches all common
things with the same fairy wand." To support this typically bald assertion,
Chesterton begins by contrasting the styles of Newman and Carlyle: "An

eloquent outburst from Carlyle is, in its own way, fine style. But a page of
Newman's Apologia which merely describes how he left off living at some
college and went to live at some settlement is also fine style." (130) Since
Chesterton here offers no specific examples of either Newman's or Carlyle 's
"fine style," he evidently expects his readers to be sufficiently well-read to
be capable of providing their own examples, from their own libraries - if
Russell Kirk's assessment of Chesterton's typical reader as "a person

possessed of considerable literary taste, and very possibly a substantial
private library" is accurate (21). Chesterton also evidently expects his
readers to be sufficiently familiar with his own work and tolerant of his
own style not to take exception to such metaphors as the "fairy wand": any
habitual reader of Chesterton's essays would immediately recognize the

image as representing the power of art, literature, and language itself to
reveal the inherent magical or mystical significance of mundane experience. The true democrat, says Chesterton, is the one who recognizes the
uncommonness of the common and whose every word and act is infused
with this recognition: "The ideal lover of mankind would linger over a
postcard to his washerwoman, transposing words and modifying adjectives until it was as perfect as a sonnet" (1 30). The most important question
concerning Newman's style, then, is not whether it is fine - few would

demur - but whether it is democratic. The inescapable assumption underlying all of Chesterton's criticism is that the best art and literature are
democratic. Though Chesterton elsewhere makes this argument explicit,
here it goes unexpressed, presumably because he knows his Liberal readers will accept it without question.
But Chesterton also knows that his readers know that Newman himself
was no democrat, and this he willingly admits: "The one weakness of

Newman's temper and attitude as a whole was, I think, that he lacked the
democratic warmth" (1 30). He is careful, however, to lay the blame not on
Newman's Catholicism, as his readers would be likely to do, but on his
aristocratic background: "This had nothing to do with his religion.... It
had something to do with his character and something to do with his
training" (130). Chesterton does not elaborate on the causes of Newman's
lack of democratic warmth, however; he has accomplished the rhetorical
ALAN BLACKSTOCK 29
purposes of conciliating and correcting his audience by conceding that his

subject had faults and suggesting their origins. Having accomplished this,
Chesterton returns immediately to the declared subject of the essay,

Newman's style.
According to Chesterton, Newman's stylistic greatness arises from two
sources: his inclination "to speak of common things with some dignity and
care" and his mastery of "one particular rhetorical effect... the art of
passing smoothly and yet suddenly from philosophical to popular language" (131). To support the first claim, Chesterton relies on his readers'
assumed familiarity with Newman's work, but he provides specific examples to illustrate and validate the second, although the first example
given is not from Newman but from Gladstone. Odd as it may seem to
illustrate a characteristic of one writer's prose with a quotation from
another writer, Chesterton's journalistic background encourages him to
use whatever supporting material is most readily available. Moreover,
Chesterton's criticism in general looks for parallels and oppositions in
writers, as earlier in this same essay when he compares Newman, Carlyle,
and Whitman to indulge in his preferred pastime of contradicting conventional views: "Carlyle and Whitman (that immeasurably greater man) are
even the aristocrats compared to this classical embroiderer. They spoke in
a tongue not understanded of the people"(131)7. By contrast Newman,
like Gladstone, possessed the gift of knowing exactly when to shift from
elevated to everyday language. Chesterton cites "the abrupt colloquialism
[which] marks the wonderful termination of the introduction to the Apolo-
gia," wherein Newman, after describing "with careful and melancholy

phrases... how delicate and painful a matter it must necessarily be to give
an account to the world of all the secret transitions of the soul," suddenly
bursts out, "But I do not like to be called a knave and liar to my face" (1 32).
It is this deftness in altering style for rhetorical effect that Chesterton sees
as the second key to Newman's greatness: "It is, indeed, a rather singular
fact that although Newman's style is so harmonious and limpid, yet the
peculiar force of that style generally consists in its use for sharply different
purposes" (132). Newman uses his mastery of style, says Chesterton, not
for the purpose of harmony but of war.
In introducing the idea of war here at the conclusion of the essay,
Chesterton is again indulging in one of his favorite metaphors and at the
same time revealing the essay's hidden agenda: to defend Newman's

Catholic faith before an audience largely hostile to Catholicism. Note that
Chesterton delays discussing Catholicism until after he has ingratiated
himself, and Newman, with the audience by introducing the apparently

irrelevant Gladstone, whose impeccable Liberal credentials would not
only remind readers of Chesterton's own Liberal background but whose
association with Newman, though only in the context of the essay, would
likely reduce any preexisting antipathy readers might have brought with
them. Chesterton closes the essay by arguing that "it was very fortunate for
Newman. . .that he was forced into that insatiably fighting thing, the Catholic
Church, and that he was forced into it in a deeply Protestant country. His
spirit might have been too much protected by the politeness of our English
temper and our modern age, but it was flayed alive by the living spirit of
No Popery. The frigid philosopher was called a liar and turned into a
man" (133). In these few lines we see several of the most characteristic
features of Chesterton's writing: his admiration for the Church militant
(though not Milton's church), his disdain for the modern age, and his love
of word play, particularly in the phrase "flayed alive" - Newman was not
only painfully exposed to public view after his conversion to Catholicism,
but this very "flaying" shocked him into action in forcing him to write his
Apologia in response, and even to make use of a weapon most uncharacteristic of a frigid philosopher - satire: "This man, when he was in the sweet
but too refined atmosphere of the Oxford High Churchmen, had shed too
many tears. But, like all brave men, when he first saw the face of battle, he
began to laugh" (133). Doubtless this last strikes modern readers as maudlin, but to readers of the Speaker in 1904, having been but lately regaled in
the same paper with daily tales of bravery on both sides during the Boer
War, the image of Newman as a courageous fighter was calculated to

impress. In presenting Newman as a Catholic hero here, Chesterton
clearly hopes to elevate not only Newman but his faith in the estimation of
his readers. It thus matters little to Chesterton whether his readers obtain a
clear idea of what Newman's style is really like (something that would be
impossible to gain from this essay); if readers come away from the essay
convinced that Newman's style shows him to be in some sense democratic
and in every sense courageous, and that his adopted faith shares these
same characteristics, Chesterton will have accomplished his purpose.
Though in "The Style of Newman" Chesterton suggests that Carlyle is
"even the aristocrat" in that he "spoke in a tongue not understanded of the
people," in the roughly contemporary essay "Thomas Carlyle," from the

book Twelve Types, he makes the apparently contradictory claim that
Carlyle speaks the language of mysticism, and that "mysticism was with
him, as with all its genuine professors, only a transcendent form of

common sense" (130-31). In identifying Carlyle with common sense, and
thus by implication with the common man, Chesterton is defending
ALAN BLACKSTOCK 3 1
Carlyle not against charges of aristocracy, as he does Newman, but against

"the attempt to denounce Carlyle as a mere savage egotist" (121), and "the
notion that Carlyle's theory of hero worship was a theory of terrified
submission to stern and arrogant men" (132). Sharing an abhorrence of
tyranny with his Liberal readers (the essays collected in Twelve Types first
appeared in the Speaker and the Daily News), Chesterton counters the
prevailing view of Carlyle as a kind of proto-Fascist by portraying him as a
democrat at heart: "His view is not that human nature is so vulgar and silly
a thing that it must be guided and driven; it is, on the contrary, that human
nature is so chivalrous and fundamentally magnanimous a thing that even

the meanest have it in them to love a leader more than themselves, and to
prefer loyalty to rebellion" (132-33). And though even Chesterton's rhetorical skill cannot transform Carlyle into a Catholic, he does venture that
when Carlyle is "kindled with admiration of mankind, he almost reaches
the verge of Christianity" (133). Christianity, in proclaiming every soul to
be of equal value to God, is essentially democratic; thus Carlyle's emphasis
on the value of the individual puts him almost (not quite) on its verge.
Again, however, Chesterton provides no concrete evidence from Carlyle's
writing of this admiration of mankind, contenting himself with the impressionistic observation, "When he speaks of this trait in human nature
[of preferring loyalty to rebellion] Carlyle's tone invariably softens" (133).
Chesterton's failure to supply any examples of this alleged softening of

tone would seem to substantially weaken the force of his argument, were it
not for the fact that only once in the twenty pages of "Thomas Carlyle"
does Chesterton quote even one sentence of his subject's writing, and that
not in its entirety. In the four-page "The Style of Newman," by contrast,
Chesterton quotes two full sentences and describes in some detail several
passages from the Apologia. As indicated by the titles, however, the Newman
essay is devoted to the man's style, while the Carlyle essay is concerned
with the man himself. Readers of the first would naturally expect examples of the style in question, whereas readers of the second, especially
those familiar with Chesterton's essays on literary and artistic personalities, would not. Though readers accustomed to illustrative quotations
might feel shortchanged, in "Thomas Carlyle" Chesterton is not the least
bit interested in Carlyle's style, but in a more fundamental element of
rhetoric: logic.
The centerpiece of "Thomas Carlyle" is a long apparent digression on
"the position of logic in human affairs" (126). Chesterton begins this aside
with an attempt to clear up popular misconceptions about the use and
misuse of loric:

A great deal is said in these days about the value or valuelessness of logic. In the
main, indeed, logic is not a productive tool so much as a weapon of defence. A
man building up an intellectual system has to build like Nehemiah, with the sword
in one hand and the trowel in the other. The imagination, the constructive quality,
is the trowel, and the argument is the sword. (125)
Chesterton uses the metaphor here to illustrate what he sees as both his
and Carlyle's rhetorical practice: employing imagination to build up visions of what the world could or should be while wielding argument to
defend those visions. This seems a picture of logic in its ideal form,
however: "A wide experience of actual intellectual affairs will lead most
people to the conclusion that logic is mainly valuable as a weapon wherewith to exterminate logicians" (1 25). But this is also a misconception of the
true nature of logic, says Chesterton: "Logic is a machine of the mind, and
if it is used honestly it ought to bring out an honest conclusion. When
people say that you can prove anything by logic, they are not using the
words in a fair sense. What they mean is that you can prove anything by
bad logic" (126). In making this distinction between bad logic and honest
logic, Chesterton echoes the distinction Socrates draws in the Phaedrus
between false rhetoric and true rhetoric. True rhetoric for Socrates is
dialectic, i.e. honest logic; and false rhetoric is making the worse appear
the better cause, i.e., bad logic. Just as many of Socrates' auditors regarded
all rhetoric as false rhetoric, based on their experience of actual intellectual affairs, so many of Chesterton's readers thought all logic was bad
logic, based on their experience. But Carlyle's treatment of logic was

deeper and somewhat different from merely distinguishing between honest and bad logic: it was a "limitation" and "partial overthrow" of logic
itself (127).
This limitation of logic lies in its dependence on valid assumptions to
produce valid results, Chesterton explains:
The fault of the great mass of logicians is not that they bring out a false result, or,
in other words, are not logicians at all. Their fault is that by an inevitable
psychological habit they tend to forget that there are two parts of a logical
process - the first the choosing of an assumption, and the second the arguing
upon it; and humanity, if it devotes itself too persistently to the study of sound
reasoning, has a certain tendency to lose the faculty of sound assumption. (127)
Chesterton here adopts his most professorial tone in analyzing the logical
process and its misunderstanding by logicians. (Note also his invocation of
that most modern of sciences, psychology, to explain the logicians' failure
in logic. But his own assumption that assumptions are chosen is itself
questionable). Chesterton must distinguish clearly between argument and
ALAN BLACKSTOCK 33
assumption for his readers to appreciate Carlyle's principal effect on the

intellectual climate of his age (and for Chesterton to carry out his Socratic
mission): "[Carlyle] startled men by attacking not arguments but assump-
tions. He simply brushed aside all the matters which the men of the
nineteenth century held to be incontrovertible and appealed to the very
different class of matters which they knew to be true. He induced men to
study less the truth of their reasoning, and more the truth of the assump-
tions upon which they reasoned" (129). For of course an assumption does
not achieve the status of a truth merely because it never occurs to anyone
to question it; as A.E. Housman put it, "Stand on a barrel in the streets of
Bagdad, and say in a loud voice, 'Twice two is four, and ginger is hot in the
mouth, therefore Mohammed is the prophet of God,' and your logic will
probably escape criticism, or, if anyone by chance should criticise it, you
could easily silence him by calling him a Christian dog" (5). Carlyle acted
the Dart of Housman's Christian doe when he, in Chesterton's words,
denied every one of the postulates upon which the age of reason based itself. He
denied the theory of progress which assumed that we must be better off than the
people of the twelfth century. Whether we were better off according to him
depended entirely upon whether we chose to be or deserved to be. He denied

every type and species of prop or association or support which threw the responsibility upon civilisation or society, or anything but the individual conscience. (130)
In denying the postulates of the age of reason, Carlyle also denied those
inherited by his fellow Victorians, with their faith in science, education,
and technology, and their belief in the responsibility of civilization and
society (particularly English civilization and society). And in championing
Carlyle's denial of those postulates, Chesterton is deliberately provoking
his Liberal readers to question their own assumptions, following Carlyle's
lead in "breaking through formulae, old and new" (131). A further provocation is locating Carlyle's vatic status in the tradition of English Puritanism: "He has often been called a prophet. The real ground of the truth of
this phrase is often neglected. Since the last era of purely religious literature, the era of English Puritanism, there has been no writer in whose eyes
the soul stood so much alone" (130). It is uncharacteristic of Chesterton,

with his Catholic sympathies, to speak favorably of Puritanism of any sort,
but he sees Carlyle's Scottish Presbyterian (and thus ultimately Puritan)

background as the source of his fierce individualism and therefore sets
aside his own and risks arousing his readers' anti-Puritan sentiment in
order to present Carlyle as not merely a social critic, but, in restoring
responsibility to the individual, as a true prophet of God.

In calling Carlyle a prophet of God, Chesterton directly challenges the
view of the unnamed critic he quotes as pronouncing that "Ruskin... did
all the same, verily believe in God; Carlyle believed only in himself" (121).
Not so, says Chesterton: "Carlyle believed in himself, but he could not
have believed in himself more than Ruskin did; they both believed in God,
because they felt that if everything else were to fall into wrack and ruin,
themselves were permanent witnesses to God" (122). Again Chesterton
does not stop to offer evidence from either man's writings to substantiate
their alleged faith in God; he is more concerned here with pointing out
their lack of faith in humanity:
Where they both failed was not in belief in God or in belief in themselves; they
failed in belief in other people. It is not enough for a prophet to believe in his
message; he must believe in its acceptability. Christ, St. Francis, Bunyan, Wesley,
Mr. Gladstone, Walt Whitman, men of indescribable variety, were all alike in a
certain faculty of treating the average man as their equal, of trusting to his reason
and good feeling without fear and without condescension. It was this simplicity of
confidence, not only in God, but in the image of God, that was lacking in Carlyle.
(122-23)
It is this simplicity of confidence, not only in God, but in the image of

God, that is inexhaustible in Chesterton; this faith in the average man is
the essence of not only democracy but Christianity for Chesterton, and
this belief in the acceptability of his message aligns him with such philosophically distant writers as Bunyan and Whitman, while setting him apart
from the Victorian giants who exercised much greater influence on most
of Chesterton's generation - Carlyle and Ruskin.
In the essay "John Ruskin," first published in The Book Fair in 1908,
Chesterton adopts the tone of a spokesman for his generation in defining
"the feeling which a modern man has about Ruskin" (149), and accounting for "the reaction against the nineteenth-century prophet [which] is
coming, and indeed has come" (150). This posture of identification with
his audience allows Chesterton to attack Ruskin's aestheticism while avoid-
ing the appearance of a personal crusade - as if Chesterton were merely

articulating what his audience had long felt but lacked the courage to
express. Here is one of the few places Chesterton adopts what might be
taken for the editorial plural; however, in this case "we" seems to mean not
"I" but "my generation": "We disagree with Ruskin as we disagree with a
friend gone wrong: with a man who ought to understand but does not; or
(in some cases I think) who does understand but will not" (149). In a
reversal of Blake's "A Poison Tree," Chesterton explains, "For the irrita-
tion against an enemy is a sudden and exceptional passion; but the
ALAN BLACKSTOCK 35
irritation against a friend is a thing that grows and bears fruit like a living
orchard. . . . Our irritation against a friend always arises, I think, from the
good that he has suggested and has not fulfilled, and this is exactly the
feeling which a modern man has about Ruskin" (149). The source of the
disappointment Chesterton's modern man feels is "not... what Ruskin
said, the only quarrel can be with how he said it" (151). Although Chesterton
here appears to be endorsing Ruskin's ideas while criticizing his style, on

the contrary, he finds Ruskin's style so admirable that "there could not
possibly be any reaction against that. If there were an age which did not
realize that Ruskin wrote great English, it would be an age that had ceased
to write English at all, probably an imperial age" (150). Once again

Chesterton does not trouble himself to provide examples of the greatness
of Ruskin's English, assuming that it would occur to no educated Edwardian
to question it, nor to any Liberal reader to question the assertion that an
imperial age would necessarily be culturally debased. And rather than
abstracting Ruskin's ideas from his style, Chesterton proclaims their unity,
appealing to his readers' apprehensiveness about the incoherence of modern life and art: "Ruskin can claim that highest element of greatness, the
fact that the meaning and the style are identical. We in the modern very
ignorant world have to use short and explosive sentences, like volleys of
dead hailstones. But Ruskin's long rolling sentences, with their triumphant
rise and fall, were themselves expressions of his belief in continuity, and
the sublime curves of history" (150). This belief in continuity, says

Chesterton, is "the main thing that Ruskin existed to preach: that life... is
not a thing of gasps and spasms, but a thing consecutive, interdependent,
nay, laborious" (150). It is this sense of continuity, of interdependence, of
toil, that Ruskin extolled in medieval art and architecture; and for Chesterton
his principal achievement was his success in communicating this sense to
the Victorians: "He has convinced the old, heavy and half-witted utilitar-
ian world; his main historical theories are now commonplace among
educated men.... The idea that Medievalism was barbaric is now rel-
egated to quite obscure and uninstructed corners - for instance, to the

daily papers" (151). Here we have another instance of Chesterton taking
aim at members of his own audience, utilitarians and readers of the daily
papers, ironically characterizing as benighted reactionaries those who fail
to recognize medievalism as the wave of the future. But if Ruskin's ideas
are "now commonplace among educated men" to such an extent that "no
one now quarrels with what Ruskin said," and if his style displays "the
highest element of greatness," then how can the only quarrel be with "how
he said it"?

Chesterton identifies two causes of the "modern man's" quarrel with
Ruskin: one, that he "applied dogmatism to things to which dogmatism
cannot be applied," and two, that "he was as much interested in his own
errors as in his own truth" (153). In corroborating the first charge,

Chesterton concedes, "It is true that the things about which he was serious
were very often exactly the things about which a man ought not to be
serious - taste, ornament, art, criticism" (153). These, of course, were
precisely the things about which not only Ruskin but virtually all literary
critics of his time (and Chesterton's) were most serious, and this is but one
more of Chesterton's recurrent jabs at the self-importance and pretension
that typified for him the academic literary establishment. Whether any
other "modern man" of Chesterton's day saw such seriousness as a flaw in
Ruskin is questionable - the modern man Chesterton purports to be speaking for here may well be a man of straw (who atypically wins in this case),
or perhaps Chesterton hopes that those of his readers who wish to think of
themselves as modern will be persuaded that the truly progressive attitude
toward art and literature is Chesterton's. (Another characteristic feature of
Chesterton's writing is what would today be called deconstruction of such
privileged terms as "modern," "progressive," and "advanced.") In the

passage that follows, Chesterton snipes at two more of his favorite targets,
aesthetes and Puritans: "It is true even that in [Ruskin] with all his
Puritanism had been effected some of that inversion that marks the
aesthete; I mean the taking of light things too seriously and of serious
things too lightly. It was partly because he did make too much of understanding a light subject like art that he could not (apparently) understand
at all an important subject like liberty" (153). Again, Chesterton provides
no evidence to support this charge, nor any justification for valuing liberty
over art, presumably because he expects his somewhat philistine Liberal

readers, to whom liberty for liberty's sake is a credo and art for art's sake an
absurdity, to require neither.
Another attack on the aesthetes and their perceived pernicious influence on Chesterton's readers appears in his elaboration of the second
cause of the quarrel with Ruskin, his tendency to "treasure up his errors
and fondle them and turn them over, and perhaps love them more than his
truths" (154). Ruskin has often been accused of egotism, Chesterton

observes, yet the egotism is not to be found in his dogmatic view of truth
but in the affection he retains for his acknowledged errors, and this
annoying habit Chesterton also ascribes not to mere individual quirk but
to literary fashion:
ALAN BLACKSTOCK 37
In some atmospheres. . .there has arisen a very bad artistic habit of going over and
over artistic work and talking about it as if no one could ever get tired of the
subject.... This fashion is bad everywhere, and it is into this fashion that Ruskin
fell. It is this habit and this alone, I think, that really irritates us in his later works.
I can read a passage of his dogmatism with pleasure. But I cannot endure the little
notes that he puts at the bottom of the page to point out where he has made a
mistake and how much he has grown since he made it. That is real vanity; that is
real self-love. He is not an egotist when he says he is right. But he is an egotist when
he says that he is wrong. (154)
Characteristically, Chesterton here fixes the blame for his erring friend's
error not on Ruskin himself but on the bad company he kept, particularly
George Moore, a favorite target of Chesterton's anti-aestheticist salvos
owing to his stature as the prime example of the self-absorbed decadent.
Chesterton lampooned Moore's literary self-portraits as "'The Grand

Canal with a distant view of Mr. Moore,' 'Effect of Mr. Moore through a
Scotch Mist,'" and "'Ruins of Mr. Moore by Moonlight'" {Heretics 108).
Equally characteristically, Chesterton sees Ruskin's use of footnotes, which
Chesterton eschewed, as pretentious, as evidence not of careful revision
(which Chesterton also eschewed) but of vanity. He continues: "Such mere
iteration of his own individuality (as distinct from his convictions) was a
weakness that grew on him mainly in his later years" (154). Chesterton's
detractors might retort that his main weakness was mere iteration of his
own convictions, but the statement is in keeping with Chesterton's insistence that criticism is about convictions; about truth, not individual impressions, and his principal quarrel with Ruskin seems to be that Ruskin's
later writing departs from the former to indulge in the latter. Chesterton
deplores this abandonment of conviction for the sake of individuality not

only in Ruskin but in the entire age and in the very readers for and against
whom he writes. True rhetoric requires conviction - "No man ought to

write at all, or even to speak at all... unless he thinks that he is in truth"
[Heretics 197) - but writing or speech with no firmer foundation than mere
individuality can express no more than the momentary whims of the age,
not the unchanging "mystical dogmas" that to Chesterton it is the function
of rhetoric and criticism to preserve.
The ostensible subjects of Chesterton's literary criticism, writers and

literature, are merely convenient points of departure for the digressions
that constitute the actual subjects, the immeasurably greater themes of
faith, tradition, democracy, the glory of the common - common man,
common experience, and common sense - and the fighting spirit, the
spirit that battles against the extreme individualism, solipsism, and elitism
that threaten both the late Victorian and early modern ages, the spirit that

Chesterton sees uniting Newman, Carlyle, Ruskin and himself in common
cause. Art, literature, and rhetoric interest Chesterton only when they are
brought into the service of this cause: in "John Ruskin" Chesterton refers
twice to Ruskin's art and style, and then only to say that the meaning and
style are identical, while there are thirty-five separate references to truth.
In fact, the essay begins with a strikingly Platonic reference to truth "Men are constantly saying true things without thinking them true; there is
a great deal of difference between a truth and a true speaker, for a true
speech implies a true speaker " (147) - and closes with, "To the medieval
thinker the man with a message was simply a heretic, that is, a nuisance
because he only told part of the truth" (155-56). These are the criteria by
which Chesterton judges his authors - are they true speakers, and do they
tell the whole truth? By pointing out inconsistencies in the writings or lives
of these authors, he assists his readers in judging to what extent they can
be called true speakers, but in order to judge whether they tell the truth, of
course, the judges must know what this whole truth is. Chesterton refrains
from laying this truth out whole in his literary criticism; it suffices for him
to point out that one cannot get the whole truth from this or that writer,
and to provide hints as to where it can be got - typically, as suggested in all
three essays, in medieval philosophers like Saint Thomas Aquinas, and
generally, in the doctrines of the Roman Catholic church. In the literary
criticism this is never stated explicitly, perhaps through Chesterton's (or his
editors') fear of alienating the still largely anti-Catholic reading public, but
no one can read many of Chesterton's literary essays without getting a
clear picture of where he believes the truths abandoned by the modern
age can still be found.
Ultimately, then, the rhetorical stance Chesterton aims for in these
essays is neither the egotistical stance of Ruskin, nor the prophetic stance
of Carlyle, but one akin to Newman's: a true speaker telling what he
believes to be the whole truth. Also akin to Newman is Chesterton's skill in
passing smoothly and yet suddenly from philosophical to popular language. The mixed readership for whom Chesterton writes may respond
variously to arcane discussions of logic and mysticism or to familiar folk
images like fairy wands; Chesterton's criticism consistently aims to appeal
to this range of audience by speaking in a tongue "understanded of the
people."
ALAN BLACKSTOCK 39
The enthusiastic public response to Chesterton's literary essays in the

periodicals soon won him commissions to write book-length studies of a
wide range of authors, including Blake, Browning, Carlyle, Shaw, and
Tolstoy, combining biographical detail with literary, social, and ethical
criticism, and aimed at readers of the Home University Library and

similar cheap, popular imprints.8 Among the most successful of the books
in the Home University Library series, from a critical and commercial
standpoint, was The Victorian Age in Literature (1913). Unlike the biographies,
however, The Victorian Age provided an overview of the major social and
philosophical issues of the Victorian period and analyzed their effects on
Victorian writers and their works. Although the Home University Library,
like the Everyman classics, was intended to be a resource for students, an

early review of The Victorian Age justly observed that the book was written
"not for those who wish to know, but for those who know already" (Conlon
Judgments 306). In fact, Chesterton's approach diverged so radically from

the general trend of the series that its editors felt compelled to preface the
volume with a warning that "this book is not put forward as an authoritative history of Victorian literature. It is a free and personal statement of
views and impressions about the significance of Victorian literature"

(423). Evidently, then, Chesterton wrote not for students wishing to learn
something about Victorian literature, as the series' publishers expected
him to do, but rather for the Edwardian Common Reader limned by
Russell Kirk, who, being "possessed of considerable literary taste, and very
possibly a substantial private library" (21), had read the Victorian works
Chesterton discussed and needed only to have their significance explained.
Having in addition his own private memories of the Victorian era, this
Common Reader could be expected to identify with Chesterton's introductory claim to have expressed his ideas "in the very temper of the age of
which I write: for I was also born a Victorian" (424).
In "The Achievement of G. K. Chesterton," Medcalf calls attention to
Chesterton's "ability to impersonate, modified by his awareness of a strong
system of values to judge what he is impersonating" in his literary criticism, and submits that Chesterton's literary biographies and The Victorian
Age in Literature "are all in some degree combinations of impersonations of
and judgment on the authors who had done most to form Chesterton's art
and personality, and on the Victorian compromise which he loved and
attacked" (85). Identifying himself as a Victorian allows Chesterton to
claim sympathy with and understanding of Victorian writers and their
ethos (along with his readers, many of whom were also "born Victorian"),
while at the same time giving him the right to criticize that ethos and the

literature it produced. For Chesterton to perform such criticism on his
readers' behalf, however, implies that he has somehow achieved the necessary critical distance or perspective that his readers lack. Chesterton's first
rhetorical task, then, is to explain how he, as a fellow Victorian, is qualified
to provide this perspective. He does this by employing an inversion of the

ethical appeal - rather than citing his past accomplishments and credentials as evidence of his suitability for the job, he instead advertises his
inadequacy: "It is a task for which I feel wholly incompetent, but as that
applies to every other literary enterprise I ever went in for, the sensation is
not wholly novel; indeed, it is rather reassuring than otherwise to realise

that I am now doing something nobody could do properly" (424). The selfmockery here serves to reinforce the image of Chesterton as a fellow
Common Reader rather than one of the "literary specialists" he so frequently derides, while the admission of previous involvement in "literary
enterprise" suggests, if not arcane knowledge, at least a certain amount of
experience in thinking and writing about the significance of literature. In
this way Chesterton can offer his fellow Victorians something of value
without setting himself above or apart from them. It is crucial that he
establish identification with his audience here at the outset, for throughout
the rest of the book he will be on the offensive, challenging and undermin-
ing Victorian principles still held sacred by many of his unreconstructed
Victorian /Edwardian readers.
Although Chesterton's perceived audience in The Victorian Age in Literature appears little different from that for whom he wrote the essays in the
periodicals, his concern in the book is how Victorian writers responded to

what he calls "the Victorian compromise," which began as a political and
social compromise between the English aristocracy and the middle classes
to avoid the "clean sweep" and "clear democratic programme" espoused
by the French middle classes during the Revolution (433), but ultimately
led to a more insidious ideological compromise - the abandonment of
romance and faith in favor of rationalism and utilitarianism. It is the
utilitarian and rationalist elements of the Victorian compromise that

Chesterton sees as having mounted a two-pronged assault on the romantic
tradition: while utilitarian philosophy sought to elevate mankind by establishing a purely rational system of morality, in defining happiness as "the
greatest good for the greatest number" it devalued the individual, and by
eliminating theology it removed what to Chesterton was the only possible
foundation for morality - belief in God. According to Chesterton, it is
from the romantic tradition, the tradition that glorified the individual
while at the same time defining him against an order of existence greater
ALAN BLACKSTOCK 4 1
than himself, that English literature developed and derived its values, and
from which any prolonged departure presages doom. It is this doom from
which Chesterton aims to rescue his readers by restoring their faith in the
romantic ideals that persist in the Victorian writers he most admires. The
lingering romanticism Chesterton finds in these writers he credits with
eventually undermining and ultimately demolishing the rationalistic and
materialistic Victorian compromise.
Henceforth in The Victorian Age Chesterton refers to the "philosophy in
office" as "simple Victorian rationalism," and the Victorian social and

political compromise as simple materialism. The organizational scheme
he employs is to classify Victorian writers according to the basis of their
attacks against the compromise: "But though this simple Victorian rationalism held the centre, and in a certain sense was the Victorian era, it was
assailed on many sides.. . .The rest of the intellectual history of the time is
a series of reactions against it, which come wave after wave. They have
succeeded in shaking it, but not in dislodging it from the modern mind"
(437-38). It is precisely because the Victorian reactions against rationalism
did not succeed in dislodging it from the modern mind that Chesterton
takes up the cause himself. The Victorian Age in Literature can be seen as the
fourth wave in this series of reactions, the first three of which Chesterton
describes as follows:
The first of these was the Oxford Movement; a bow that broke when it had let
loose the flashing arrow that was Newman. The second reaction was one man;
without teachers or pupils - Dickens. The third reaction was a group that tried to
create a sort of new romantic Protestantism - Carlyle, Ruskin, Kingsley, Maurice perhaps Tennyson.... It is really with this rationalism triumphant, and with the
romance of these various attacks on it, that the study of Victorian literature begins
and proceeds. (438)9
The first of these waves, then, the Oxford movement, was not literary in
origin but religious. But the Oxford movement reached its fullest expression and secured itself a place in the canon of Victorian literature with its
"one great literary man" (439), Cardinal Newman.
In his Speaker essay, "The Style of Newman," Chesterton used the

occasion of Newman to extol democracy and the courage of conviction;
here he uses the occasion to defend dogma. Chesterton argues that the
Oxford movement was not, as its enemies claimed, "a conscious reaching
out for Rome," but "a movement of mere religion as such. . ..It was not so
much a taste for Catholic dogma, but simply a hunger for dogma. For
dogma means the serious satisfaction of the mind. Dogma does not mean
the absence of thought, but the end of thought" (439). Like Socrates,

Chesterton saw the purpose of rational inquiry not as the endless accumulation of knowledge but as ultimate arrival at truth. The Victorian aversion to dogma was thus symptomatic of a "fundamental frivolity" that the
Oxford movement rose to challenge: "It was a revolt against the Victorian
spirit in one particular aspect of it: which may roughly be called (in cosy
and domestic Victorian metaphor) having your cake and eating it too. It
saw that the solid and serious Victorians were fundamentally frivolous because they were fundamentally inconsistent" (439). Although the via
media of the Anglican church was established under Queen Elizabeth,
Chesterton calls it another form of the Victorian compromise: in its desire
to be neither too Catholic nor too Protestant, Anglicanism was fundamentally inconsistent, and this inconsistency affected Victorian attitudes toward religion in general. The Oxford movement criticized the Anglican
abandonment of the Roman Catholic calendar of feast and fast days as
fundamentally irrational, says Chesterton: "[RJeason said that if a Christian had a feast day he must have a fast day too. Otherwise, all days ought
to be alike; and this was that very Utilitarianism against which the Oxford
movement was the first and most rational assault" (440).

Chesterton here risks alienating his largely Anglican readers with his
easy equation of Anglicanism and Utilitarianism in order to portray the
Oxford movement as spearheading the attack on the Victorian compromise, with Newman as point man. Chesterton praises Newman for his
logic, the salient quality of which is "a long but passionate patience, which
waits until it has fixed all corners of an iron trap" (441). Unfortunately he
provides no examples in support of this arresting figure but moves on to
reaffirm the importance of Newman's "moral comment on the age:... a
protest of the rationality of religion as against the increasing irrationality
of mere Victorian comfort and compromise" (441). Having established in
his readers' minds a relationship between dogma and reason, and having
postulated that in abandoning one the Victorians had abandoned both,
Chesterton moves on to the next wave of attack, one which partook of
neither reason nor dogma: "the blinding mysticism of Carlyle" (440).
Against the "harsh economists" like Hume and Locke "who made the
first Radical philosophies of the Victorian Age," says Chesterton (441),
Carlyle opposed the power of vision, "a power in the mind akin to second
sight." Chesterton ascribes Carlyle's gift of "second sight," or clairvoyance, to his peasant origins and afflicted soul:
As an ordinary lowland peasant, he inherited the really valuable historic property
of the Scots, their independence, their fighting spirit, and their instinctive philo-
sophic consideration of men merely as men [democracy!. But he was not an
ALAN BLACKSTOCK 43
ordinary peasant. If he had laboured obscurely in his village till death, he would
have been yet locally a marked man; a man with a wild eye, a man with an air of
silent anger; perhaps a man at whom stones were thrown. A strain of suffering and
disease ran through his body and soul. In spite of his praise of silence, it was only
through his gift of utterance that he escaped madness.... Like many ungainly or
otherwise unattractive Scotchmen, he was a seer. (442)
With this unabashedly romantic depiction of the writer as a suffering seer
articulating the wisdom of the people, Chesterton places Carlyle at the

forefront of the second wave of assault on the rationalist compromise:
"His great and real work was the attack on Utilitarianism.... It is his real
glory that he was the first to see clearly and say plainly the great truth of
our time; that the wealth of the state is not the prosperity of the
people.... [T]hus he became the first prophet of the Socialists" (444).
Carlyle 's utterance of this "great truth" was prophetic not only because it
anticipated socialism but because, like the pronouncements of the prophet
Ezekiel, it flew in the face of the prevailing assumptions of the culture and
was consequently dismissed by most as the ravings of a madman. But
Carlyle 's message would eventually gain such adherents as Ruskin, Arnold,
Kipling, and Shaw, and, for all its value in unsettling the Victorian compromise, would ultimately lead to two developments that Chesterton saw
as equally threatening to individual and national liberty: socialism and
imperialism, forces which he feared were gaining ground among his

readers and thus required combating in the pages of The Victorian Age in
Literature.
Chesterton accepted the socialist critique of laissez-faire capitalism but

rejected its solution of bureaucratic state control as equally inimical to
individual freedom. An even greater danger, however, lay in the strain of
Carlyle 's thinking that Chesterton saw as culminating in a justification of
imperialism,
what we may call the "Bible of History" idea: that all human affairs and politics
were a clouded but unbroken revelation of the divine. Thus any enormous and
unaltered human settlement - as the Norman Conquest or the secession of

America - we must suppose to be the will of God. It lent itself to picturesque
treatment, and Carlyle and the Carlyleans were above all things picturesque. It
gave them a rhetorical advantage over the Catholic and other older schools....
They could say their God had not grown too old for war; that he was present at
Gettysburg and Gravelotte as much as at Gibeon and Gilboa. I do not mean that
they literally said these particular things: they are what I should have said had I
been bribed to defend them. (445-46)
Chesterton's employment of picturesque Carlylean rhetoric to obtain his

own rhetorical advantage in criticizing Carlyle 's views reveals the purpose-

fulness of his most characteristic critical technique, which Medcalf calls
"impersonation": saying what he would have said had he been Browning,
Dickens, Newman, Carlyle, or Ruskin, or had he been bribed to defend
them. In the case of the first three, of course, bribing would not be
necessary, as Chesterton's audience should by this point recognize their
ideologies to be nearly identical to Chesterton's own, but Carlyle and

Ruskin (as Chesterton argues in the previously examined essays on the
two), though calling attention to vital and neglected truths, did not possess
the whole truth, and their untruths did as much damage as their truths did
good. Carlyle 's "Bible of History" doctrine, says Chesterton, "practically

comes to saying that God is on the side of the big battalions, or at least the
victorious ones" (446). Carlyle here becomes the prophet of the jingoism
Chesterton despised in his own day (especially that concerning the Boer
War, about which Chesterton still felt the need to correct those misguided
Liberal readers who might yet cling to the notion that it was somehow
justified): "in this Carlyle is the first cry of imperialism, as (in the other
case) of Socialism: and the two babes unborn who stir at the trumpet are
Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Rudyard Kipling.... The fallacy of this whole
philosophy is that if God is indeed present at a modern battle, He may be
present not as on Gilboa but Golgotha" (446). In suggesting that God is on
the side of historically victorious, Carlyle encourages "a craven and
unsoldierly worship of success," thereby lending aid and comfort to the

materialistic side of the Victorian compromise which he otherwise de-
tested with a fervor equal to Chesterton's own. But "Carlyle's direct

historical worship of strength and the rest of it was fortunately not very
fruitful"; only the historian Froude carried on the "harsher and more
impatient moral counsels of his master" - his "more romantic and sympathetic side" survived in "the young lieutenant of Carlyle in his war on
Utilitarian Radicalism," John Ruskin (446-47).
Chesterton's discussion of Ruskin here echoes several of the points
made in his earlier Ruskin essay, particularly its exaltation of Ruskin's
style: "In the matter of style, he enriched English without disordering it. ...
As an artist in prose he is one of the most miraculous products of the
extremely poetical genius of English" (447-48). Typically, Chesterton

supports this claim not with an example from Ruskin's prose but by means
of a metaphorical comparison with the prose of Thomas De Quincey:
There is no Victorian writer before him to whom he even suggests a comparison,

technically considered, except perhaps De Quincey; who also employed the long
rich rolling sentence that, like a rocket, bursts into stars at the end. But De
Quincey's sentences, as I have said, have always a dreamy and insecure sense
ALAN BLACKSTOCK 45
about them, like the turret on toppling turret of some mad sultan's pagoda.
Ruskin's sentence branches into brackets and relative clauses as a straight strong
tree branches into boughs and bifurcations, rather shaking off its burden than
merely adding to it. (448-49)
Arguably this is another instance of Chestertonian impersonation wherein

he attempts to illustrate other writers' styles with his own, in employing
such dreamy and insecure images as the toppling turrets of a mad sultan's
pagoda, indulging in his own brackets and relative clauses, and aiming for
the long rich rolling sentence that bursts into stars at the end, although it
might also be argued that in so doing Chesterton merely adds to its burden
rather than shaking it off. But here again his principal motive is to use
Ruskin not as an example of style but of the divided Victorian mind and
the "two quite separate streams of inspiration" flowing from Ruskin (449).
One was the inconsistent desire for medieval art and culture shorn of
medieval religion - "he seemed to want all parts of the Church except the
altar" (448) - that would develop into the Pre-Raphaelite school. The
other stream "was concerned, like Carlyle's Chartism, with a challenge to
the social conclusions of the orthodox economists.... On this side of his
soul Ruskin became the second founder of Socialism" (449). And despite
Chesterton's opposition to socialism, he sees this side of Ruskin's soul as
the one that mattered:
The argument [against orthodox economics] was not by any means a complete or
unconquerable weapon, but I think it knocked out what little remained of the
brains of the early Victorian rationalists. It is entirely nonsensical to speak of
Ruskin as a lounging aesthete, who strolled into economics, and talked sentimentalism. In plain fact, Ruskin was seldom so sensible and logical (right or wrong) as
when he was talking about economics. He constantly talked the most glorious
nonsense about landscape and natural history, which it was his business to understand. Within his own limits, he talked to most cold common sense about political
economy, which was no business of his at all. (450)
Inasmuch as Chesterton's own views on economics have been seen by most

readers, then and now, as hopelessly idealistic and impractical,10 his endorsement of Ruskin's "political economy" would have had little impact
on his target audience. His privileging of Ruskin's social and economic
concerns, however, is entirely in keeping with his earlier criticism of
Ruskin for "applying dogmatism to things to which dogmatism cannot be
applied... the things about which a man ought not to be serious - taste,
ornament, art, criticism" ("Ruskin" 153). Here Ruskin applies dogmatism
to things such as democracy and justice about which a man ought to be

serious, and it is in this stream, rather than that leading to aestheticism and
decadence, that truth is to be found.

After tracing the two streams of Ruskin's influence to Walter Pater and
Charles Kingsley, Chesterton moves on to Matthew Arnold, who, though
he "hardly belonged to the same school as Ruskin and Carlyle... fought
many of their battles, and was even more concentrated on their main
task - the task of convincing liberal bourgeois England of priggishness and
provinciality" (452), and whose
frontal attack on the vulgar and sullen optimism of Victorian utility [in such essays
as "Culture and Anarchy," "Literature and Science," and "The Function of

Criticism at the Present Time"] may be summed up in the admirable sentence, in
which he asked the English what was the use of a train taking them quickly from
Islington to Camberwell, if it only took them "from a dismal and illiberal life in
Islington to a dismal and illiberal life in Camberwell?" (453)
Chesterton also applauds Arnold's prose style in a striking metaphor "The most vital thing he invented was a new style: founded on the patient
unraveling of the tangle of Victorian ideas, as if they were matted hair
under a comb" (454) - and contrasts it with the styles of Newman and
Carlyle, this time (since he knows his readers will expect examples of style
in a discussion of style) allowing fragments of the style itself, in the form of
brief quotations, to intrude into the metaphorical bedrock:

Newman's strength was a sort of stifled passion, a dangerous patience of polite
logic and then: "Cowards! If I advanced a step you would run away: it is not you I
fear. Di me terrent, et Jupiter hostis." If Newman seemed suddenly to fly into a temper,
Carlyle never seemed to fly out of one. But Arnold kept a smile of heart-broken
forbearance, as of the teacher of an idiot's school, that was tremendously insulting.
(454)
The patient forbearance of Arnold's style, though potentially insulting, did
have its successes, as when he would repeat a foolish phrase of his

opponent's, such as "the destiny of England is in the great heart of
England," "again and again until it looked more foolish than it really was.
Thus he recurs again and again to 'the British College of Health in the
New Road' till the reader wants to rush out and burn the place down.
Arnold's great error is that he sometimes thus wearied us of his own
phrases, as well as his enemies'" (454). While Chesterton's prose style has
never been faulted for excessive patience, he has frequently been attacked
for wearying readers of his own phrases.11 His chief complaint about
Arnold, however, concerns his tone of superiority to the "priggish and
provincial" Victorian culture he criticized. Chesterton, though he may
ALAN BLACKSTOCK 47
weary his audience, in identifying himself as a fellow Victorian makes use

of Rogerian rhetorical strategy by presenting his criticism as coming not
from above but from within. While he too might wish to provoke his reader
to rush out and "burn the place down" (the place he will later call the
"Utilitarian citadel"), he does it not with an insulting but a conspiratorial
smile.
Arnold, Ruskin, Carlyle, Newman - "These names," says Chesterton,

"are roughly representative of the long series of protests against the cold
commercial rationalism which held Parliament and the schools throughout the earlier Victorian time, in so far as those protests were made in the
name of neglected intellect, insulted art, forgotten heroism and desecrated
religion" (454). But the blows struck against the Victorian compromise by
these intellectuals and visionaries in the name of reason, dogma, logic,
and culture, were insufficient of themselves to bring it down, though each
helped weaken it. The final blow was dealt not by an intellectual but by
"an ordinary man" - Charles Dickens - who, with his power to "multiply
persons "
could create all the farce and tragedy of his age over and over again. . ..That which
had not been achieved by... the burning dreams of Carlyle, [or] the white-hot
proofs of Newman, was really or very nearly achieved by a crowd of impossible
people. In the centre stood that citadel of atheist industrialism; and if indeed it
ever has been taken, it was taken by the rush of that unreal army. (458-59)
And even the mob that was Dickens did not entirely destroy that citadel,
for in the decadent and cynical literature that sprang up in the void created
by the rationalist uprooting of romantic and religious English literary

tradition, the shadow of the compromise remained even after the edifice
had fallen. The pall lingered over the succeeding generation of those who,
like Chesterton and his readers, were "born Victorian" and inherited the
taint of cynicism and despair produced by the compromise and its collapse. It was this "stale atmosphere" that Chesterton and his audience
inhaled with their first breaths and which in all his writing he fought to
dispel. Thus in both his early essays and in The Victorian Age in Literature he
hails those writers who sought to restore romance, dogma, and a mystic
vision to literature, while assailing those who abetted their eclipse, and
concomitantly impersonates the leaders of the assault, to enlist their aid in
his own attempt to topple the last remaining walls of the citadel, or a least
to cut through the pall of cynicism and pessimism thrown up by the

crumbling of its ruin and to return to his readers the unfaded light of
common dav.
Utah State University - Uintah Basin

NOTES
1 . See, for example, in Conlon, Half Century, Graham Greene's "G. K. Chesterton"
(59); Marshall McLuhan's "Where Chesterton Comes In" (76-77); Dorothy L. Sayers's
"Chesterton's The Surprise" ( 1 23); Wilfred Sheed's "On Chesterton" ( 1 66-67); and Bernard
Levin's "Pantomime Horse" (177-78).

2. See Boyd (6), Voorhees (253), Clipper (463), and in Conlon, Half-Century, Bernard
Bergonzi's "Chesterton and/or Belloc" (186) and R.C. Churchill's "The Man Who Was
Sunday" (303).
3. See, for example, in Conlon, Half-Century, "Chesterton as Essayist: Mirror of a
Silver Age" (106-8), Bergonzi 182, and PJ. Kavanagh's "Chesterton Reappraised" (34849).
4. As Lawrence J. Clipper writes, "If the end of Chesterton's literary criticism is a
moral one, then his means are impressionistic, and it is difficult to say which is in worse
odor today in the halls of Academe" (461).
5. Quoted in Kavanagh (348).
6. See, for example, in Conlon, Half-Century, Herbert Palmer's "G. K.Chesterton and
His School" (11), McLuhan (76), George Orwell's "Great is Diana of the Ephesians"
(102), Sayers (124), John Gross's "A Man of Letters" (258), Churchill (304), Benny Green's
"Defender of the Faith" (344), and Roy Hattersley's "Dragon-Maker" (366).
7. Chesterton here employs the language of Article XXTV of the Articles of Religion
in the Book of Common Prayer, which forbids the use in church of "a tongue not
understanded of the people."
8. See, for example, in Sullivan, Dudley Barker's "A Brief Survey of Chesterton's
Work," and G.C. Heseltine's "G. K. Chesterton- Journalist."
9. Although Chesterton here calls Dickens the second wave, his later discussion
reverses the order of Dickens and Caryle et al., further evidence of Chesterton's disinclination to revise or even reread his writing before publication.
10. See, for example, in Conlon, Half-Century, Ivor Brown's "A Multiple Man" (58),
Greene (59), "Chesterton as Essayist: Mirror of a Silver Age" ( 1 09- 1 0), Kenneth Hamilton's
"G. K. Chesterton and George Orwell" (1 12- 13), John Raymond's "Jeekaycee" (159), and
Ian Boyd's "Chesterton and Distributism" (290).
1 1 . See in Conlon, Critical Judgments, the Observer's review of Charles Dickens, and in
Conlon, A Half-Century, Orwell (102).
WORKS CITED
Boyd, Ian. Introduction. The Novels of G. K. Chesterton. London: Elek, 1975. 1-10.
Chesterton, G. K. The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton. 1936. Vol. 16 of The Collected Works
of G. K. Chesterton. San Francisco: Ignatius P, 1988.
- . "John Ruskin." 1908. A Handful of Authors: Essays on Books and Criticism. Ed. Dorothy
Collins. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1953. 147-56.
- . Heretics. 1905. Vol. 1 of The Collected Works ofG. K. Chesterton. San Francisco: Ignatius P,
1986. 39-207.
ALAN BLACKSTOCK 49
- . "The Style of Newman." 1904. A Handful of Authors: Essay on Books and Criticism. Ed.
Dorothy Collins. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1953. 130-33.

- . "Thomas Carlyle." Twelve Types. London: Arthur Humphreys, 1906. 120-38.
- . The Victorian Age in Literature. 1913. Vol. 15 of The Collected Works of G.K Chesterton. San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989. 423-530.

Clipper, Lawrence J. "Chesterton on Dickens: A Closer Look." Chesterton Review 11.1
(1985): 453-67.
Conlon, D. J., ed. G. K. Chesterton: A Half Century of Views. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
- . G.K. Chesterton: The Critical Judgments. Antwerp: Universitaire Faculteiten Saint-Ignatius,
1976.
Housman, A. E. "The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism." 1921 . Art and Error:
Modern Textual Editing. Ed. Ronald Gottesman and Scott Bennett. Bloomington: Indi-
ana UP, 1970. 1-16.

Kavanagh, P. J. "Chesterton Reappraised." Conlon, Views, 347-63.
Kirk, Russell. "The Journalism of G. K. Chesterton." Chesterton Review 16.2 (1990): 15-27.
Medcalf, Stephen. "The Achievement of G.K. Chesterton." G. K. Chesterton: A Centenary
Appraisal. Ed. John Sullivan, New York: Harper & Row, 1974. 81-121.
Sullivan, John. G. K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
Voorhees, Richard J. "Chesterton the Critic." Chesterton Review 14.2 (1988): 245-58.

Redeeming The Fallen Giants

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The University of Notre Dame

Redeeming the Fallen Giants: Chesterton on Newman, Carlyle, and Ruskin

REDEEMING THE FALLEN GIANTS:

CHESTERTON ON NEWMAN, CARLYLE, AND RUSKIN

Although G. K. Chesterton was one of the most prolific and versatile

Dickens, for instance - go largely unread, and Chesterton's critical reputa-

tion has similarly languished, though a small coterie of devotees has

of the critical approaches later employed in New Criticism and other

nor his defenders have adequately considered the audiences to whom he

26 Religion & Literature

Its author has been accused of moralism,4 Victorianism, philistinism

other charges by referring to Chesterton's stated desire to write for the

common man. To Chesterton, "writing for the common man" meant

Chesterton cheerfully acknowledged that his digressions were often the

was not a disagreeable surprise to most of his readers, but rather an

plishes multiple tasks: it establishes focus while setting up the popular

28 Religion & Literature

Chesterton begins by contrasting the styles of Newman and Carlyle: "An

be capable of providing their own examples, from their own libraries - if

Russell Kirk's assessment of Chesterton's typical reader as "a person

habitual reader of Chesterton's essays would immediately recognize the

concerning Newman's style, then, is not whether it is fine - few would

was no democrat, and this he willingly admits: "The one weakness of

purposes of conciliating and correcting his audience by conceding that his

Chesterton returns immediately to the declared subject of the essay,

gia," wherein Newman, after describing "with careful and melancholy

same time revealing the essay's hidden agenda: to defend Newman's

30 Religion & Literature

War, the image of Newman as a courageous fighter was calculated to

people," in the roughly contemporary essay "Thomas Carlyle," from the

him, as with all its genuine professors, only a transcendent form of

Carlyle not against charges of aristocracy, as he does Newman, but against

nature is so chivalrous and fundamentally magnanimous a thing that even

Chesterton's failure to supply any examples of this alleged softening of

32 Religion & Literature

logic, based on their experience. But Carlyle's treatment of logic was

assumption for his readers to appreciate Carlyle's principal effect on the

depended entirely upon whether we chose to be or deserved to be. He denied

the soul stood so much alone" (130). It is uncharacteristic of Chesterton,

but he sees Carlyle's Scottish Presbyterian (and thus ultimately Puritan)

34 Religion & Literature

It is this simplicity of confidence, not only in God, but in the image of

his audience allows Chesterton to attack Ruskin's aestheticism while avoid-

ing the appearance of a personal crusade - as if Chesterton were merely

tion against an enemy is a sudden and exceptional passion; but the

here appears to be endorsing Ruskin's ideas while criticizing his style, on

to write English at all, probably an imperial age" (150). Once again

the sublime curves of history" (150). This belief in continuity, says

egated to quite obscure and uninstructed corners - for instance, to the

36 Religion & Literature

errors as in his own truth" (153). In corroborating the first charge,

privileged terms as "modern," "progressive," and "advanced.") In the

over art, presumably because he expects his somewhat philistine Liberal

truths" (154). Ruskin has often been accused of egotism, Chesterton

Chesterton lampooned Moore's literary self-portraits as "'The Grand

deplores this abandonment of conviction for the sake of individuality not

whom he writes. True rhetoric requires conviction - "No man ought to

The ostensible subjects of Chesterton's literary criticism, writers and

38 Religion & Literature

of Carlyle, but one akin to Newman's: a true speaker telling what he

believes to be the whole truth. Also akin to Newman is Chesterton's skill in

The enthusiastic public response to Chesterton's literary essays in the

criticism, and aimed at readers of the Home University Library and