ink of
Chesterton as a critic. It cannot be too strongly urged that an undue
admiration of the distant past has sat like an incubus upon the chest of
European literature, and Shakespeare's greatness is not in spite of his
"small Latin and less Greek," which probably contributed to it
indirectly. Had Shakespeare been a classical scholar, he would almost
certainly have modelled his plays on Seneca or Aeschylus, and the
results would have been devastating. Addison's Cato, Johnson's Irene,
and the dramas of Racine and Corneille are among the abysmal dullnesses
mankind owes to its excessive estimation of the past. Men have always
been too ready to forget that we inherit our ancestors' bad points as
well as their good ones. Ancestor-worship has deprived the Chinese of
the capacity to create, it has seriously affected Chesterton's power to
criticize. Chesterton's own generation has seen both the victory and the
downfall of form in the novels of Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. H. G. Wells. It
has witnessed fascinating experiments in stagecraft, some of which have
assuredly succeeded. It has listened to new poets and wandered in
enchanted worlds where no Victorians trod. A critic in sympathy with
these efforts at reform would have written the last-quoted passage
something like this:

"The truth is that all feeble spirits naturally live in the past,
because it has no boundaries; it is a soft job; you can find in it what
you like. The past ages are rank, and I can daub myself freely with
whatever colours I extract. It requires no courage to face the past,
because the past is full of facts which neutralize one another; of men
certainly no wiser than we, and of things done which we could not want
to do. I know I cannot write a poem as good as Lycidas. But I also know
that Milton could not write a poem as good as The Hound of Heaven or
M'Andrew's Hymn. And it is always easy to say that the particular kind
of poetry I can write has been the poetry of some period of the past."

But Chesterton didn't; quite the reverse.

So that one comes to the sorrowful conclusion that Chesterton is at his
best, as a critic, when he is writing introductions, because then he has
to leave the past alone. When he is writing an introduction to one of
the works of a great Victorian (Dickens always excepted) he makes his
subject stand out like a solitary giant, not necessarily because he is
one, but on account of the largeness of the contours, the rough shaping,