Chesterton is not only wrong about Stevenson’s character and our right and duty to judge it, he is wrong about Stevenson’s craft. It is not true that Stevenson’s method can ‘easily be mistaken’ for ‘mere finnicking polish.’ What makes his stories endure is that they cannot be easily mistaken for that. His stories are still read because they are not mistaken for ‘mere finnicking polish.’ Or, his stories continue to rivet because their finnicking polish is undergirded by fundamentally interesting ideas. It is for this reason that his style is not in danger of ‘being mistaken,’ as Chesterton worries, for ‘literary juggling.’ These thoughts of Chesterton on the craft of Stevenson read like that of a man who is thinking more of his own style than of saying something true. Not to say that ‘literary juggling’ is an original turn of phrase; it was, probably, nothing but a cliché even by the time Chesterton wrote it down. Indeed, this being a much later draft of my original article, I decided to look the phrase up on a search engine. I found it written on page 601 in something called The New Ireland Review, Volume 2, 1895. As near as I can tell, Chesterton published nothing until the year 1900.
As ‘faddling’ as I found this first essay; that is, as trifling, petty, and piddling, I continued to read four more before I quit the book—and before, hopefully, quitting the whole of what G. K. Chesterton ever produced. Based on the first essay, I knew that the other book of his that I had bought would have to be left unread. What was that book? It was a biography of R. L. Stevenson. How could a biography be tolerated from as dishonest a writer as this essay proves Chesterton to have been? Moreover, in the essay on Stevenson, we are assured by Chesterton that biographies are illegitimate. “The only biography that is really possible is autobiography,” he says. All this gun-slinging to defend his subject, but in the process Chesterton shoots his own biography in the head. He’s not as deadly with his words as he has been made out to be, except when inadvertently aiming at himself. Chesterton was a hapless bumbler. His Handful of Authors reminds me of what Elmer Fudd looks and sounds like.
Before reading this distrustful essay on R. L. Stevenson, my suspicion, based on what I had heard of Chesterton, was that he had a low view of Scripture, and therefore, of God. That suspicion was on the mark. This is why there cannot be found, in this essay, any indignation at Stevenson for his atheism. This is why Chesterton could have, but did not, single Stevenson out for having written something like this: “It was really pathetic to hear my father praying pointedly for me today at family worship, and to think the poor man’s supplications were addressed to nothing better able to hear and answer than the chandelier” (Iain H. Murray, The Undercover Revolution, p. 13.) I further thought that Literature, not the word of God, was Chesterton’s Bible. After reading that first essay, however, I was forced to conclude that it was not. The Holy Bible was not his Bible; neither was Literature. If his Bible had been Literature, he would have shown more respect for it.
I learned nothing worth knowing about anyone or anything from the first five essays of A Handful of Authors. All I learned in essay the second is that Chesterton could have been dismissed after essay number one. Nothing is told us about Mark Twain except that he had wit. No word is even quoted from his works to show us this wit. “Wit requires an intellectual athleticism, because it is akin to logic.” I don’t doubt that wit is akin to logic. But how about supplying an example of this from something that Mark Twain wrote? And then how about placing that quote beside a logical proposition so that we may catch a sight of this logical wit?
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