Sanitizing Chesterton

67 in his unevolved relations with Ireland, though no one knows better than Weintraub that to charge Shaw with levity and bad taste usually meant a wilful or conventional-minded imperviousness to a serious Shavian point and purpose. And he refuses to take Shaw's patience, generosity, and quirky tact towards Frank Harris as coming from benevolence and loyalty to an old colleague , but suggests instead it was an unconscious form of masturbatory egostroking with an underside of sadism. Fortunately these declarations of independence do not often get in the way. The promise of revision is carried out with numerous signs of haste and with some loss in effectiveness. For example, in "The Avant-Garde Shaw" the material in note 1 has been incorporated into the text, but the note is left intact. There are awkwardly repeated quotations of favorite passages, sometimes only a few pages apart. There is no Table of Illustrations; and BurneJones 's four-part Pygmalion series Is captioned as by John Millais. In "The Social Critic as Literary Critic," which once appeared as the preface to a collection of Shaw's essays, the references serve the original context better than the new one. So, for example, a note tells us that Ouida is Mary Louise de La Ramée instead of telling us the title, date, and location of Shaw's comments on her work; and thus the essay as a whole, severed from its texts, loses some of its utility. These are quibbles of course, and in the end one can only be pleased to have such a rich, various, and useful book drawn together from so many scattered sources. One has to recognize with Weintraub that, Shaw being the subject , here is God's plenty. The Unexpected Shaw is the real Shaw, since the only crime would be to make him dull. Martin Meisel Columbia University 3. SANITIZING CHESTERTON Alzina Stone Dale. The Outline of Sanity: A Life of G. K. Chesterton. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1982. $25.00 At the heart of Alzina Stone Dale's The Outline of Sanity lies the conviction that privately and publicly Chesterton maintained a rational balance (i.e., he avoided extremism) in an unbalanced age characterized by excessive emotional reactions. In the course of defending this position, Dale must deny or explain away the darker aspect of Chesterton that critics of his work have discerned. Dale's favorite manner is simply to deny certain features of Chesterton's alleged darker side; less frequently, albeit equally unsatisfying , is her use of the "yes . . . but" equivocation: yes, young Chesterton did contemplate suicide, but so must have his friends, for such "brooding . . . [is] typical of bright, sensitive adolescents with no clear sense of vocation" (p. 33); yes, Chesterton willingly played the fool, "but it was not his style alone" (p. 65); yes, The Flying Inn registers its author's great dismay at the English government, "but it would be patronizing to suggest that only Chesterton was suffering from mental weariness" (pp. 192-93). Not only The Flying Inn but all of Chesterton's writings are presented by means of tepid plot summaries in Dale's book. At best she occasionally 68 resorts to a summarizing statement by some previous critic, and always she avoids coming to terms with the undercurrent of Chesterton's fiction. She has nothing to say, for instance, about the recurrent motifs of the Father Brown stories—Chesterton's apparent fascination with twilight, darkness, dreaming, madness and masking. (She mentions Chesterton's interest in the theatre.) However, Dale does remark that "the atmosphere is absurd" in The Man Who Was Thursday and was probably Influential on Kafka's technique (p. 113); neither notion is followed up by Dale, even though both gainsay her attempt to free Chesterton's image from the very implications they suggest. This slip in the argument's consistency, the avoidance of in-depth readings of Chesterton's fiction, the "yes . · . but" qualifications, and the asserted denials are complemented by occasional sleight of hand. For instance , at one point Dale wishes to debunk Garry Wills's and Hugh Kenner's perception of Chesterton as a "metaphysical jester"; her rebuttal reads: "A true...