Chesterton in the Edwardian Age

429 al analogue: "It needed the incalculable fight such as [Noon] fought, unconscious and willy-nilly, with his German Johanna: and such as I fight with you, oh gentle but rather cowardly and imbecile reader: for such, really I find you" (p. 292). It only remains for me to praise the admirable scholarship of Lindeth Vasey, whose assiduous editorial labors in the introduction, explanatory notes, textual apparatus and, of course, the text itself enable the reader of the Cambridge Mr. Noon to be considerably less "imbecile" than Lawrence feared. Ronald G. Walker University of Houston-Victoria 4. CHESTERTON IN THE EDWARDIAN AGE John D. Coates. Chesterton and the Edwardian Cu 1tural Crisis . Hull, England: Hull Univ. Press; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1984. Paper $18.95 Gilbert Keith Chesterton is not a figure whom many (general readers and academics included) find easy to define accurately or precisely. He spread himself over such a broad terrain of letters that the simple adjectives do not apply. He is often seen as being "more than" any given label. He is "more than" a writer of detective stories, "more than" a poet, literary commentator, novelist, essayist, editor, caricaturist , Christian apologist, or pamphleteer. While not the subject of a great scholarly industry, Chesterton has never lacked for biographers, critics, commentators , followers, or detractors. Fifty years after his death, his works are still read and discussed although all are not in print. Like Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Chesterton's Father Brown has a special place in detective literature, and collections of the stories are accessible. Chesterton's centenary year of 1974 saw the publication of two books (G1 K1 Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal, edited by John Sullivan, and Lawrence J. Clipper's G1K1 Chesterton) as well as a number of journal articles, conferences, and lectures devoted to him. That was also the year of the founding, at Spode House in England, of the G. K. Chesterton Society (for "the promotion of interest in all aspects of the life and work of G. K. Chesterton") and the publication of the first number of The Chesterton Review. As a writer, Chesterton has been extremely accessible to all yet each critic feels it necessary to cut through layers of myth in order to get at the essential man. In spite of 430 the work of Dudley Barker (G1 K1 Chesterton: A Biography, 1973) and Alzina Stone Dale (The Outline of Sanity, 1982), the myths remain. Chesterton was as much a personality as a writer, and the anecdotes about him are as entertaining and memorable as anything he wrote. By not attempting a full-scale biography, but by attempting to view Chesterton in a cultural context, John Coates' study has accomplished much to improve the situation. His concern is less with the religious or political aspects of Chesterton than with the cultural forces against which he contended. These are the same forces which shaped our own time and are still with us. In eleven chapters Coates covers Chesterton's life (an excellent overview), his perception of the twentieth century ("the Edwardian cultural crisis" of the title), and the journalistic world of his day against which Chesterton has to be viewed. Specific areas and images in Chesterton are treated in greater detail: the attack on the ideology of inevitability, the restoration of the past, his championing of adventure, myth, and the grotesque in literature, his view of the visual arts, his suggestions for recovering and maintaining intellectual balance, and his intellectual influence. While there is a natural sequence to Coates' thesis, most of the chapters appeared previously as individual articles in various journals and this gives the impression of the work being a collection of essays rather than a cohesive whole. There is a certain amount of repetition and even over-writing in some chapters where the examples to prove the thesis may appear in greater abundance than is necessary to make the point. It is to be regretted that Coates could not emulate his subject more closely and make his scholarship as accessible to a broader readership as were Chesterton's own writings. The reader not steeped in the subject or the period or academic prose may find Coates...