written before. What they had considered
weaknesses he had considered strength; what he had considered weakness
they had considered strength. Possibly no author had been written about
more than Dickens, yet there remained for Chesterton to add much that
was vital. No poet had been more misunderstood than Browning; no poet
had been more attacked for his grotesque style; no critic has written
with the understanding of Browning as has Chesterton. In taking extracts
from Thackeray, Chesterton has shown a fine appreciation of that
novelist's best work.

It is a difficult thing for a great writer to be a great critic. He is
liable to be either condescending or supercilious; he is liable
unconsciously to judge all standards by his own; he is likely to be
rather intolerant of any opinions but his own; it is easier for a great
critic to be a great writer. In the case of Chesterton, because he is a
great and original writer he has a brilliant critical acumen that probes
deep into the minds of other authors and sees what is stored there in a
way that other critics have, perhaps, failed to see, not because they
did not choose to look for it, but rather because, almost without
knowing it, critics who set out to be critics exclusively are liable to
work rather too much by a fixed rule.

It is, I hope, now apparent how difficult it is to say where exactly
Chesterton finds a place in literature. Is it as an essayist? Is it as a
novelist? Is it as a historian? Is it as a critic? If it is as a
novelist, then it is as a writer of peculiar phantasy; if it is as an
essayist, it is as a brilliant controversialist; if it is as a
historian, it is as a unique critic of history; if it is as a critic, it
is as a broad-minded one of not only past great authors but of current
events.

I do not know of any writer who is so difficult to place. Wells can
quite well be a fine novelist and prophet; Bernard Shaw can easily be
called a playwright and a philosopher; Galsworthy is a serious novelist
and a playwright who takes the art with proper regard for its powers of
social redress; Sir James Barrie is a mystical writer with a message.
There are fifty novelists who are interpreters of manners and problems
of the twentieth century. But Chesterton is not like any of these. He is
not in any sense a specialist; he is really a general practitioner with
the hand of a specialist in everything he touches except divorce. In a
word, he is that thing in literatu