CHESTERTON'S BALLAD OF THE WHITE HORSE: FROM CONCEPTION TO CRITICAL RECEPTION

The romantic verse epic of King Alfred the Great-just under twenty-seven hundred lines of rhymed ballad stanzas, putting it somewhere between Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for length-was the product of nearly a decade of sustained creative effort on the part of its author, unprecedented at the time, for him, and never again to be repeated by a man more accustomed to writing four or five books a year in addition to hundreds of essays, articles, letters and poems. Chesterton's familiarity with and affection for the works of Henty are elsewhere affirmed in "On Historical Novels," a short essay included in his 1920 collection, The Uses of Diversity, in which he praises Henty's "industry and fecundity," whereby many a boy's imagination was taken "into many and varied parts of human history, however conventional the figure he followed through them might be" ("Historical" 182). The reviewer also agrees wholeheartedly with Chesterton's thesis in the prefatory note concerning the uses and abuses of history, writing with evident pleasure that "Mr. Chesterton has very wisely elected to go behind the King Alfred of the carping historian to the King Alfred of tradition," and is also careful to note the triumphant militarism of the piece, which contains some of Chesterton's typical "appeals for the clearness and rightness of personal combat," with the Ballad proving so successful on this score that certain portions of it are enough to "stir the blood and exalt the mind with the great gusto of living." [...]this event seems so significant to M.W. that the heavy presence of Chesterton himself within the Ballad could be viewed as a positive rather than negative aspect, and the only criticism she sees fit to offer, contra Baring and others, is that "prophecy of the future is nearly always inartistic" in "narratives that suppose the author to be living in a past age," and whether or not Chesterton has overcome this problem is more than she can say (193-96).