Volume 30, Number 7 · April 28, 1983
Innocent at Home
By J.M. Cameron
The Outline of Sanity: A Life of G.K. Chesterton
by Alzina Stone Dale
Eerdmans, 354 pp., $18.95
From 1900 to the early Thirties Britain—Canada, Australia, and the United States were sometimes brought into it—was loud with the pronouncements, arguments, jokes, campaigns, novels, plays, poems of four men: Bernard Shaw, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, and H.G. Wells. Sometimes the novelist Arnold Bennett became a fifth member of the band. Public entertainers, they were surrounded by a great cloud of other practitioners of controversial literature, but these four, or five, were the most striking figures. This reviewer was a schoolboy in the Twenties and remembers clearly the excitement generated by the exchange between Belloc and Wells over some themes from the latter's Outline of History, the fever caused by reading Shaw's prefaces to Man and Superman, Saint Joan, and Back to Methuselah, the larkiness of Well's early novels, the intense feeling injected into Bennett's Clayhanger with the appearance of the mysterious Hilda Lessways.
Review, 3406 words
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