onfines himself almost
exclusively to the big men. When Mr. Bernard Shaw a few years ago
committed what Chesterton imagined was an attack upon Shakespeare, he
almost instinctively rushed to the defence in the columns of The Daily
News. When Chesterton wrote a little book on _The Victorian Age in
Literature_ he showed no interest in the smaller people. The book, it
may be urged in his excuse, was a little one, but we feel that even if
it was not, Chesterton would have done much the same thing. Among the
writers he omitted to mention, even by name, are Sir Edwin Arnold,
Harrison Ainsworth, Walter Bagehot, R. Blackmore, A. H. Clough, E. A.
Freeman, S. R. Gardiner, George Gissing, J. R. Green, T. H. Green, Henry
Hallam, Jean Ingelow, Benjamin Jowett, W. E. H. Lecky, Thomas Love
Peacock, W. M. Praed, and Mrs. Humphry Ward. The criticism which feeds
upon research and comparison, which considers a new date or the
emendation of a mispunctuated line of verse, worthy of effort, knows not
Chesterton. He is the student of the big men. He has written books about
Dickens, Browning, and Shaw, of whom only one common quality can be
noted, which is that they are each the subjects of at least twenty other
books. To write about the things which have already yielded such a huge
crop of criticism savours at first of a lack of imagination. The truth
is quite otherwise. Anybody, so to speak, can produce a book about
Alexander Pope because the ore is at the disposal of every miner. But
that larger mine called Dickens has been diligently worked by two
generations of authors, and it would appear that a new one must either
plagiarize or labour extremely in order to come upon fresh seams. But
Chesterton's taste for bigness has come to his service in criticism. It
has given him a power of seeing the large, obvious things which the
critic of small things misses. He has the "thinking in millions" trick
of the statistician transposed to literary ends.

Or as a poet. The robustness is omnipresent, and takes several forms. A
grandiloquence that sways uneasily between rodomontade and mere
verbiage, a rotundity of diction, a choice of subjects which can only be
described as sanguinolent, the use of the bludgeon where others would
prefer a rapier.

Or as a simple user of words. Chesterton has a preference for the big
words: awful, enormous, tremendous, and so on. A word which occurs very
often indeed is mystic: it suggests that the noun it qualifies is la