Chesterton & Evil

BOOK REVIEWS that literally framed A Child's Garden of Verses and created the land of counterpane. While CoUey's study does not always provide direct literary dividends , I always shared in her excitement of discovery, felt that she was bringing Stevenson the person closer to us, and welcomed her welldocumented insistence on his nuanced response to colonialism, which she attributes to his need "to be both inside and outside a system." It is easy to agree with Professor Colley that it is precisely this ability— akin to Keats's "negative capability"—that resulted in the "bold but tolerant imagination" that we value so highly in the work of this great writer. STEPHEN E. TABACHNICK __________________ University of Memphis Chesterton & Evil Mark Knight. Chesterton and Evil. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004. vii + 172 pp. $55.00 CHESTERTON'S OPTIMISM is often regarded as a superficial contribution to his age. The author of this engaging study maintains that to refute such a judgment it is necessary to reconcile Chesterton's optimism with his awareness of the pervasiveness of evil, asserting that concepts of evil are at the center of his art and imagination. Knight first notes in his introduction that Chesterton falls into a distinctive category in the culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Demarcations of one sort or another exclude him from being labeled as Victorian or modern. Fortunately, as Knight points out, there is one journal that focuses on authors who fall between these categories, namely, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. One of the problems with too heavy a reliance on Victorianism and modernism is that both categories have an inherent tendency to exclude serious consideration of Chesterton. Despite his becoming something of a marginal figure, his books are continually being reprinted, a good indication that he is still being read. Moreover, the activities of several societies founded in his memory to promote his work seem to be stimulating considerable interest among a younger generation of readers and academics. In his own day, it is true, Chesterton was too much the essayist and polemicist, expending much of his talent on ephemeral subjects. According to one of his biographers, Chesterton's wife "was convinced that he was meant to be a novelist, not a prolific journalist." His brother lamented that Chesterton had "an effervescent desire to write every221 ELT 49 : 2 2006 thing that comes into his head" and that his sibling's reputation would probably suffer as a consequence of "extraordinary versatility and copiousness ." Others charged that Chesterton's effort to be clever was occasionally misdirected; his reliance upon antithesis and paradox was not always effective. In addition to being a widely read Fleet Street journalist, Chesterton turned out poetry and fiction, biographical and historical studies, theological and apologetical works, as well as a great deal of literary criticism . His The Victorian Age in Literature (1913) comes immediately to mind, as well as his ruminations on Browning (1903) and Dickens (1903), analytical evaluations of two figures congenial to his own temperament . At times he resorted to fiction, probably not to satisfy his wife but more than likely to attract readers. Napoleon ofNotting Hill (1904), The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), The Flying Inn (1914), and a series of detective stories that began with The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) rank among his more popular works of fiction. Instead of presuming that Chesterton's positive outlook constitutes a regrettable failure to confront the vicissitudes of life, Knight reasons that Chesterton's optimism was a way of offering a thoughtful and reserved response to evil. He relates how Chesterton reacted to concepts of evil he detected in the works of the Decadents and how he responded to their theodicies. What especially troubled him was the ambiguity that had crept into the Decadents' grasp of the nature of evil. In his second chapter, after probing the philosophy of Nietzsche, Knight explains that Chesterton came to view evil as more than simply misfortune or wickedness, more than a destructive force that takes its origins from natural circumstances, or from human ignorance or error, but as a kind of privation. Why and how the nature of evil oscillates between the...