The Novels of G.K. Chesterton: A Study in Art and Propaganda by Ian Boyd (review)

HUMANITIES 417 that was dying' - though he paid them the back-handed tribute that 'they stand for something that the world always looks on with nostalgia - an ancien regime.' Even Quentin Bell ended his study of Bloomsbury by saying 'with the advent of Fascism ... the old pacifism had become irrelevant and the group as a group ceased to exist.' This reflected the gloomy conviction of some members of the group that fascism had made people like themselves obsolete; the sacrificial deaths of Julian Bell in the Spanish Civil War, and his aunt Virginia's suicide in 1941, seemed in their different ways to confirm such a judgment. But it is a dangerous business to predict what history will pronounce obsolete or irrelevant, as Mirsky learned to his cost: having anatomised the futility of the British intellectuals he returned to Russia and was liquidated by Stalin. The 'inevitable' rise of communism and fascism in the thirties was in the event superseded, throughout the Western world, by the dominance of liberal Keynesian economics and the welfare state. In the present era the Bloomsbury way of life has won respect as a pioneering encounter with the intricate problems of sexuality, creativity, and social conscience that beset anyone who cannot be satisfied with the dogmas inherited by our century. No longer does it seem merely 'the last kick of an enlightened artistic tradition,' but rather the first step along a road that a multitude may aspire to follow. (PAUL DELANY) Ian Boyd, The Novels of G.K. Chesterton: A Study in Art and Propaganda. London: Paul Elek 1975, 241, £4.75 No compulsive joking here about Chesterton's mountainous girth, no attempts (necessarily as frantic as they would be futile) to imitate or overgo GKe's acrobatic style - his special way of living dangerously: instead, the founding editor of the Chesterton Review has given llS a judicious and helpful book, friendly but never chummy, alert to the nuances of playfulness in the tone of his author and aware too of what Hilaire Belloc called the 'benediction' of his presence. Since this review will be mainly praise, I should draw attention at the outset to one fault and one nuisance. The book undertakes to discuss the I eleven novels' of Chesterton but does not define the sense of the word novel, nor does it name the eleven. Fantasy or romance would surely be better terms, or the neutral word fiction, especially seeing that almost half the works discussed are collections of related stories, not the continuous narrative that a novel must be. It is necessary to look in almost a dozen places in the notes to find the names and dates of these books. Here they are, for the reader's convenience: The Napoleon of Notting Hill 1904, The Man Who Was Thursday 1908, The Ball and the Cross 1910, Manalive 1912, The Flying Inn .1914, The Man Who Knew Too Much 1922, Tales of the Long 418 LETTERS IN CANADA Bow 1925, The Return of Don Quixote 1927, The Poet and the Lunatics 19291 Four Faultless Felons 1930, and The Paradoxes ofMr. Pond 1937- The Father Brown stories and The Club of Queer Trades are excluded as not congruent to the interests of the others. Subtitled A Study in Art and Propaganda, the book is concerned to demonstrate and assess Chesterton's combination of narrative skill and political and moral insight. His alacrity of spirits reflected itself in a style recognizable on every page -paradoxical certainly, but also extraordinarily rapid both in the movement of the words and in violent physical movement and abrupt reversals of situation, the two being intimately related since both paradox and peripeteia involvean instantaneous reversal of figure and ground and both elevate the spirits: 'moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength in levity,' wrote Chesterton in The Man Who Was Thursday about Sunday who is, among other thingsor as All Things -himself. Examples of wild chases and rough and tumble may be found anywhere: I should like to cite an incident that is apparently quiet and still, yet positively explodes with meaning. It occurs inThe Return of Don Quixote, a late romance that Father Boyd argues, convincingly , to...