host; he can look forward across the ages to the
glorious stars that shine in the night sky for those who are optimists,
as Chesterton is, and are great men in their own homes.

_Chapter Twelve_

HIS PLACE IN LITERATURE

In a very admirable discussion on the word 'great,' in his study of
Dickens, Chesterton remarks that 'there are a certain number of people
who always think dead men great and live men small.' The tendency is
natural and is entirely worthy of blame. If a man is great when he is
dead, then he was great when he was alive. It is but a re-echo of much
of the folly talked during the war, when we were so credulous as to
believe that every dead soldier was a saint and every live one a hero.
Then, when the war was over, these hero worshippers quietly forgot that
the soldiers had been heroes, put up stone crosses to the dead, and did
little to remove the crosses from the living.

There are a number of quite well meaning people who will say, without
much thought, that Chesterton is a great man, and if you ask them why,
they will answer, 'He is a great writer, he is a great lecturer, he must
be great; look at the times he appears in the Press, look at the wealth
of caricature that is displayed on him.' No doubt these are good reasons
in their way, but they rather indicate that Chesterton is well known in
a popular sense; they are not a true indication that he is great. The
public of to-day is inclined to measure greatness by the number of times
a person appears in the newspapers, it seldom realizes that greatness
is, above all, a moral quality, not a quantity; the fact that a person
is in front of the public eye (very often a blind eye) is no indication
of true greatness. If it was, then of necessity every Prime Minister
would be a great man, every revue actress would be a great woman, every
ordinary person would be small.

It is one of the most difficult things possible to determine what is the
place a writer takes in literature. It does not make the task easier
when the writer is not only alive but is still a comparatively young man
in the height of his powers. A pure and simple biography cannot always
determine with any satisfaction its subject's literary standing.
Critical studies of classic authors do not usually give any preciseness
about the exact niche the subject fills.

Literature is one of the most elastic qualities of the day, of human
activity; it cannot be bound by rules, yet has a more