ghtful writer is its apparent diversity. The most
flippant lyric poet might write a pretty poem about lambs; but it
requires something bolder and graver than a poet, it requires an
ecstatic prophet, to talk about the lion lylng down with the lamb.*

* G. K. Chesterton. _Criticisms and Appreciations of the World of
Charles Dickens_. Dent. 1933 pp. 68-9.

A man starting to write a thesis on Chesterton's sociology once
complained bitterly that almost none of his books were indexed, so
he had to submit to the disgusting necessity of reading them all
through, for some striking view on sociology might well be embedded
in a volume of art criticism or be the very centre of a fantastic
romance. Chesterton's was a philosophy universal and unified and it
was at this time growing fast and finding exceedingly varied
techniques of expression. But the whole of it was in a sense in each
of them--in each book, almost in each poem. As he himself says of the
universe of Charles Dickens, "there was something in it--there is in
all great creative writers--like the account in Genesis of the light
being created before the sun, moon and stars, the idea before the
machinery that made it manifest. Pickwick is in Dickens's career the
mere mass of light before the creation of sun or moon. It is the
splendid, shapeless substance of which all his stars are ultimately
made." And again, "He said what he had to say and yet not all he had
to say. Wild pictures, possible stories, tantalising and attractive
trains of thought, perspectives of adventure, crowded so continually
upon his mind that at the end there was a vast mass of them left
over, ideas that he literally had not the opportunity to develop,
tales that he literally had not the time to tell."

CHAPTER XII

Clearing the Ground for Orthodoxy

G. K. CHESTERTON: A CRITICISM (published anonymously in 1908) was a
challenge thrown to the world of letters, for it demanded the
recognition of Chesterton as a force to be reckoned with in the
modern world. As its title implied, the book was by no means a
tribute of sheer admiration and agreement. Gilbert was rebuked for
that love of a pun or an effective phrase that sometimes led him into
indefensible positions. It was hotly asked of him that he should
abandon his unjust attitude toward Ibsen. He was accused of calling
himself a Liberal and being in fact a Tory. But even in differing
from him the book showed him as of real importance