In Search of Greybeards at Play; or, Why Did Chesterton Conceal His Jesting Sages?

Following Chesterton’s strange omission of his first book in his Autobiography, scholarship has remained virtually silent on Greybeards at Play (1900). When critics have commented, they have generally dismissed the book as silly and disconnected from Chesterton’s subsequent works. This article seeks to invert this perspective, arguing that, far from peripheral or irrelevant, Greybeards is in fact central and seminal in Chesterton’s oeuvre. This is accomplished by exploring the multivalent trope of the greybeard at play and its literary and theological ramifications: how it symbolically unites innocence and experience into a higher childlike state. These greybeards are traced through close readings of the cover art, title, and two framing poems and linked to antecedents in the Bible, Shakespeare, Blake, Dickens, and George MacDonald. At the same time, frequent references to Chesterton’s more popular works gesture to how this symbolic perspective was not an aberration of this one text but emblematic of Chesterton’s mode more generally. The search for greybeards at play thus provides a vital re-evaluation of Chesterton’s first book that suggests it should not only be redeemed from the critical dust-heap but even elevated to a place of primacy in Chesterton’s corpus.