height of his powers, but he has that kind of monumental feeling in the
twentieth century that belonged to Dickens in the nineteenth: he is
typical of this century, being an optimist when ordinary men are
pessimistic. As in the nineteenth century Dickens made common men
realise their greatness when they themselves felt immeasurably small, so
Chesterton makes great men feel small when they are really so.

But in another sense he cannot really be compared to Dickens. Dickens
undoubtedly was a delineator of supreme characters. I do not think it
can be said that any of the characters of Chesterton would ever be known
with the knowledge with which Mr. Pickwick is known. Dickens was not in
any sense an essayist; Chesterton is one in every sense. Dickens was a
man who really cared very much that all kinds of oppression should be
put down; Chesterton, no doubt, cares also, but he rather imagines that
things ordinary people quite rightly call welfare work are but forms of
slavery. If Dickens hated factories it was because he had hateful
experience of them; if Chesterton hates factories it is because he
thinks they destroy family life and the home. I have attempted to
suggest that Dickens and Chesterton are alike as regards their being
monuments of their respective centuries. I have also suggested that they
are extremely unlike. Yet I can think of no writer of the nineteenth
century who, in ideal, is so near to Chesterton as Dickens; but that at
the same time they are also so far apart is but another indication that
to place Chesterton in regard to the past is almost impossible.

One thing that Chesterton is not, is an Eclectic; if he is an original
thinker, it is because he can see that though black is not really white
there is no particular reason why it should not be grey; if Notting Hill
can boast of forty fried fish shops he does not see any reason why it
could fail to produce a Napoleon. If a party of Dons are sitting round a
table discussing how desirable is the elimination of life, he sees that
it is a perfectly good ethic for one of the undergraduates to test the
theory by brandishing a loaded pistol at the warden's head. If, as a
novelist, he is different to all his contemporaries, it is because he
has discovered that the word novel sometimes means something new,
sometimes something original, very often something extremely old.

Yet another difficulty for finding an exact niche for Chesterton lies in
the fact that he