Chesterton once described George MacDonald as “a sage” or “a sayer of great things.” The sayings of such writers, Chesterton notes, are in a class by themselves: “they are logia or great passionate maxims, the proverbs of philosophy.”  In these words about George MacDonald, Chesterton is also describing himself, and this issue of the Review illustrates the truth of this claim. In the first section, there are instances of Chesterton’s verse and prose that led his public to view him as a teacher of wisdom. These are complemented by an essay by Chesterton on poetry itself. It and some of the other articles make a similar point. While Chesterton may not have been a great poet in the usual sense, his poetry and prose show him to have been a poet in the German and Spanish understanding of the term, namely, a writer who expresses visionary truth in all his writing, as did MacDonald in passages that Chesterton characterized as “certain bursts of astonishing sagacity, often uttered in five words.”

A second topic of this number is satire. A satirist seeks to evoke a smile at human foibles, as Hilaire Belloc did in epigrams and Chesterton in a poem, both of which are reprinted here; as Maurice Baring did in a bit of drollery—in which he fabricated entries from Washington’s childhood diary—and Joseph Mitchell in an affectionate portrait of an Episcopalian street preacher in New York City, a portrait which balances the sharper satire  found in “News and Comments,” where Mitchell describes the welcome Bernard Shaw received from New York journalists. Also in “News and Comments,” Michael Wharton and Roy Kerridge invite us to smile at the absurdities of Dr. Spacely-Trellis, an imaginary go-ahead  Bishop of Bevington, and then of an actual  Bishop of Bradford who, almost incredibly, reproduces a real life version of Dr. Spacely-Trellis.

I have yet to mention other interesting and intriguing features of this number, such as Richard Ingrams on Chesterton’s fondness for coloured pictures, William Blissett on Chesterton and English literary modernism, and Alan Carlson on World War II’s undermining the American small towns and farms which theretofore had approached the Chestertonian social ideal. A familiar topic receives a fresh discussion by Ann Farmer, who treats of anti-Semitism and Chesterton’s defence of the underdog. Our cinema critic, Daniel Callam, C.S.B., reviews two films both of which, in very different ways, exhibit the terror and emptiness of a post-Christian society. I should also note a review of a recent book on economic third ways and an assortment of pieces on subjects as disparate as the deaths of Victor Milione and William F. Buckley, the controversy about Poland’s alleged anti-Semitism, the letters of Maurice Baring, and the twentieth-century writers who helped to bring about a Christian literary revival. The illustrations are scenes from traditional life of the towns and countryside of Bosnia, Croatia, Sarajevo and Serbia.