The Outline of Sanity:

...Allusions in his texts to the political exigencies of his own day, though they would have been clear to his readers, are no longer obvious to today's readers who lack a detailed knowledge of British political life in the twenties and thirties...

...Books: THE RETURN OF CHESTERTON Paradoxically, Gilbert Keith Chesterton's prodigious output of verse, stories, novels, biographies, essays, and literary criticism not to mention his ever-popular Father Brown detective stories has secured him a place in the pantheon of early twentieth-century British literary lions and pigeonholed him, perhaps permanently, as a master without a masterpiece...

...Dale, to her credit, does not gloss over this lapse with excuses or worshipful pleas for understanding the attendant circumstances...

...Wells, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and others as well as such paragons of orthodoxy as Hilaire Belloc and Ronald Knox...

...Her biography is honest, straightforward, sprightly, and informative...

...Accordingly, he enthusiastically supported land reform, free trade, Home Rule for Ireland, disestablishment of the church, and free public education...

...On two occasions, however, Dale's otherwise balanced examination exaggerates Chesterton's impact...

...Michael F. McCauley biographer Alzina Stone Dale's words, "historically invisible," that is, widely quoted but little known...

...Lest this admittedly attractive, enormously popular personality overshadow Chesterton's underlying message, however, Dale makes it clear that his point always was that "one must learn to love the world without trusting it, and that the historic Christian Church was founded on a real man, and for that reason it is indestructible...

...for being "old-fashioned and far too whimsical," this biography portrayed him as "primarily a propagandist, a preacher of a definite message to his time [who] stands for Anti-Imperialism, and Catholicism with its back to the wall, for the hunger of a perplexed age for the more lucid life of the Ages of Faith, for the revolt against Modernity, in a word, for what may legitimately be called 'reaction.' " Dale implies that the "distorted picture" of G.K.C...

...Later in her narrative, Dale relates Chesterton's 1930 lectures at Notre Dame...

...She admits that it is difficult to read and properly appreciate Chesterton in our day...

...Chesterton: A Criticism, published anonymously but written by his younger brother Cecil...

...Dale concludes that it "seems a bit hard that popular wisdom considers Chesterton to be the reactionary, sectarian saint but lets Shaw go on being a Grand Old Man of the modern 'liberal' world...

...that emerged from brother Cecil's biography sprang, in part, out of a typical sibling rivalry...

...In refuting this charge, Dale contrasts Chesterton and Shaw...

...Opinion about Chesterton has been largely based on the 1908 biography of him, G.K...

...Shaw...

...is "not yet in...

...For, as he once cheerfully replied when asked which of his works he considered the greatest, "I don't consider any of my works the least great...

...She concedes that the final verdict on G.K.C...

...But on the whole, Dale avoids the all-too-common sin of biographers, over-reverent adulation...

...Although Chesterton was always and in all things "a Liberal convinced of the ultimate importance of the individual," he occasionally spoke of preferring "the Jew who is revolutionary to the Jew who is a plutocrat...

...she is nevertheless heartened by the fact that he is "being listened to again...

...In 1910, for example, Chesterton had written a newspaper column in which he commented that "the principal weakness of Indian Nationalism seems to be that it is not very Indian and not very national...

...Critical of G.K...

...He was, at one and the same time, an enduring friend of such so-called freethinkers as G.B...

...has been accused of being a reactionary, a medievalist, a Victorian curiosity that was decidedly out of place in the twentieth century...

...Chesterton, for his part, had been charmed by Mussolini during a private interview and might well have thought that, in 1929, "a capable dictator who was popular with the ordinary people" would be better for England than "the elected members of an oligarchy...

...Shaw, H.G...

...Were G.K.C...

...All of which led to the myth of Gilbert Chesterton as nothing more than a jolly, child-like giant filled with gusto and uncritical Christianity, the drinking companion of more famous men like G.B...

...He left Rome, however, preferring "English liberty to Latin discipline...

...Shaw, in fact, bitterly complained that "he who was eighteen years the elder should be heartlessly surviving his friend...

...they no longer took what he said seriously, feeling that his conversion had pushed him over the brink into "fantasy land...

...Shaw accused Chesterton of being influenced by Belloc, who "turned your pranks into prayers and your somersaults into sacraments...

...never publicly criticized his brother's biography, succeeding generations indeed, even G.K.'s contemporaries have assumed that Cecil knew whereof he spoke...

...But because G.K...

...A lifelong classic Liberal, despite the considerable ups and downs of the Liberal Party and its philosophy, Chesterton was cast in the mold of Dickensian social philosophy, that is, he had " a strong bias toward making a hero, not a pensioner, of the poor...

...Still, there is an undeniable temptation which is especially poignant for card-carrying members of the Chesterton Society to take Chesterton rather more seriously than he took himself...

...Some consider him "only a plaster saint for Roman Catholics to love, particularly those who do not admire Vatican II...

...alive today, she concludes, he "obviously would be a Russell Baker or an Andy Rooney, live on Sixty Minutes with cape and sword stick, delighting a worldwide audience with his amusing observations...

...It is preposterous to imply, as Dale does, that because of this one newspaper column, Chesterton should be credited with singlehandedly inspiring Gandhi to change history...

...Dale examines the Chestertonian corpus seventy-eight books, of which more than thirty are currently listed in Books in Print and painstakingly sets him squarely in the midst of the political, social, and philosophical eruptions of the early twentieth century...

...These opinions derive, consciously or unconsciously, from the Chestertonian persona that not only was the result of the early biography, but also was sustained by Chesterton himself his jovial personality, immense presence, slapdash scholarship, and such cultivated eccentricities of attire as his inverness cape, slouch hat, sword stick, and pince-nez...

...Previous biographers have considered Chesterton the disciple of Belloc who was an "intense, brooding, brilliant, and opinionated talker...

...Chesterton's very presence, claims Dale, "helped to put the university 'on the map,' " Surely Notre Dame was on the map more because Knute Rockne's football players happened to have been undefeated that season than because Chesterton had sojourned on campus...

...And his celebrated conversion to Roman Catholicism at age forty-eight consigned him, in the minds of many, to perdition...

...He was, to the end, a Fleet Street commentator of considerable originality, humor, and common sense who struggled not so much "to keep old traditions free from weeds," but "to preserve the Western world against the pagans of post-Christianity...

...CHESTERTON Alzina Stone Dale Eerdmans, $15.95, 354 pp...

...once Chesterton had actually been received into the church, however, Belloc held his peace...

...Dale explains that "a struggling young Indian student named Mahatma Gandhi, who was living in London, read [Chesterton's column] and it changed history...

...His prolificacy and versatility have rendered him, in THE ODTLINE OF SANITY A LIFE OF G.K...

...Ironically, Belloc, for his part, disapproved of Chesterton's desire to convert...

...More recently his critics have reacted against this cartoon by suggesting that Chesterton was a stunted Peter Pan, full of dark sexual inhibitions, reactionary and rational to the point of madness...

...They remained friends, nevertheless...

...The inevitable tendency to lump Chesterton and Belloc together into what Shaw humorously nicknamed "the Ches-terbelloc" is, according to Dale, predicated on the false assumption that "they met and spent the following thirty-five years standing together in one place...

...During the early thirties, for example, Shaw had been impressed with both Soviet Russia especially its seeming efficiency and the forceful personalities of Stalin and Hitler two personifications of the Shavian superman...

...Dale's thorough study of his life and writing seeks to reestablish Chesterton's significance and clear away both "the myths that have obscured him" and the previous biographies that have neglected to view him as a product of his times...

...Rather, she convincingly explains the rationale for Chesterton's behavior often enough, he was being deliberately naive...

...The Outline of Sanity argues that Chesterton's best work he was, in Dale's opinion, preeminently a journalist demonstrated "unfailing sanity and balance in an unbalanced age," an age full of "extravagant emotional reactions inside politics and out...

...Shaw was the most offended of Chesterton's old acquaintances because he had thought that he and Chesterton "shared basic religious assumptions...

...Ultimately, Dale asserts, appreciation of Chesterton's importance for his time and, as Dale maintains, for our own time requires an understanding of him as a thinker who asks "the right questions" and occasionally even knows "the right answers...

...Although they came to be seen as "twin" Roman Catholic apologists, Shaw observed unequivocally that "Belloc and Chesterton are not the same sort of Christian, not the same sort of pagan, not the same sort of Liberal, not the same sort of anything intellectual...

...Chesterton and Belloc did share, in Dale's words, "a fondness for discussion and argument, parties, writing satiric verse, and ultimately for Western civilization, which they both labeled 'Christendom.' " G.K.C...