Chesterton spent more time writing essays than anything else. Far too much time, many of his contemporaries thought; and many subsequent readers would agree. Edmund Clerihew Bentley (of clerihew-inventing fame) regretted his old school friend's willingness to be ‘bound by the iron rules as to space and time’ of the newspaper contributor. Chesterton's ‘insistence upon the treadmill of weekly journalism after it ceased to be financially necessary seems to have puzzled his friends as much as it puzzles me’ wrote W. H. Auden, before steadying himself onto the front foot: ‘Whatever Chesterton's reasons and motives for his choice, I am quite certain it was a mistake’ (HC 263). It is well to be suspicious of certainty founded on puzzlement; and the more so here, because Auden speaks as that most unreliable of critics, the sympathetic critic. He is puzzled that Chesterton did not devote himself to ‘full-length books’ because he specially admires his writing of that kind – just as Shaw was frustrated that Chesterton did not dedicate himself to writing for the stage. But it is no good to lament that he allowed himself to be cramped by deadlines and copy-length imposed by newspapers when the essays themselves – literally thousands of them, the majority of which were written for his weekly columns – are the opposite of cramped.

There is, Chesterton would have been the first to observe, a paradox to freedom. This is true in the general sense in which, say, the discipline of learning chords and scales may liberate a person into being able to play the piano. It is also true in the more specific sense in which the feuilletonistic form – including the attendant pressure to meet fixed copy-length and deadlines – provided creative conditions particularly hospitable to his exploratory way of thinking. He is not being as ironical or as hard on himself as it might seem when he admits he has ‘only too good reason to know’ that ‘if you are writing an article you can say anything that comes into your head’ (TT 148).