'With Considerable Art' Chesterton On Blake, Browning, and Shaw

Summary

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In his account of the "very flattering" invitation he received from John Morley to write the Browning volume for the English Men of Letters series (an invitation that placed him in the company of such established critics and authors as Sir Edmund Gosse, Sir Leslie Stephen, Henry James, and Anthony Trollope), Chesterton utters this disclaimer: I will not say that I wrote a book on Browning; but I wrote a book about love, liberty, poetry, my own views on God and religion (highly undeveloped), and various theories about optimism and pessimism and the hope of the world; a book in which the name of Browning was introduced from time to time, I might almost say with considerable art. . . . Despite this disclaimer, however, in those works to be examined here, Chesterton does indulge the reader with some discussion of the historical circumstances, influences, and stylistic characteristics of Browning, Blake, and Shaw; nevertheless his larger purpose is always to employ the opportunities these artists afford him to explore the larger and loftier concerns of love, liberty, God, and the hope of the world, and in the process to defend these verities against the mood of pessimism and decadence he sees as threatening to erode them in the eyes of his contemporaries.

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'With Considerable Art' Chesterton On Blake, Browning, and Shaw

ALTHOUGH G. K. Chesterton wrote literary biographies throughout his career (his first was Robert Browning in 1903 and his last Chaucer in 1 932), three volumes in particular - Robert Browning (1903), George Bernard Shaw (1909), and William Blake (1910) - not only display Chesterton's critical creativity at its peak, but also illustrate most clearly his critical practice of treating his subject as an occasion to explore what he saw as far more important questions than those which tended to obsess conventional Victorian biographical criticism: questions of historical circumstances, influences, schools, and stylistics. In his account of the "very flattering" invitation he received from John Morley to write the Browning volume for the English Men of Letters series (an invitation that placed him in the company of such established critics and authors as Sir Edmund Gosse, Sir Leslie Stephen, Henry James, and Anthony Trollope), Chesterton utters this disclaimer:

I will not say that I wrote a book on Browning; but I wrote a book about love, liberty, poetry, my own views on God and religion (highly undeveloped), and various theories about optimism and pessimism and the hope of the world; a book in which the name of Browning was introduced from time to time, I might almost say with considerable art. . . . There were very few facts in the book, and those were nearly all wrong. Autobiography 101)

Chesterton is here indulging in his characteristic exaggeration of his own unfitness as a literary critic, but his description of his aim and method is true not only of Robert Browning but of all his literary biographies. Despite this disclaimer, however, in those works to be examined here, Chesterton does indulge the reader with some discussion of the historical circumstances, influences, and stylistic characteristics of Browning, Blake, and Shaw; nevertheless his larger purpose is always to employ the opportunities these artists afford him to explore the larger and loftier concerns of love, liberty, God, and the hope of the world, and in the process to defend these verities against the mood of pessimism and decadence he sees as threatening to erode them in the eyes of his contemporaries. Sylvere Mónod compared Chesterton's obsession with the French Revolution to Mr. Dick's obsession with King Charles's head (484), but in these biographies the king's head becomes a Gorgon's, whose multiple faces include Puritans, mystics, and Irishmen, Gnostics and agnostics, aesthetes and decadents, and, as always, democracy and orthodoxy as the means of salvation.

Chesterton's approach to biography also might be called me...

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