In spite of Chesterton's liberal production of books, it is not
altogether simple to classify them into "periods," in the manner beloved
of the critic, nor even to sort them out according to subjects. G.K.C.
can (and generally does) inscribe an Essay on the Nature of Religion
into his novels, together with other confusing ingredients to such an
extent that most readers would consider it pure pedantry on the part of
anybody to insist that a Chestertonian romance need differ appreciably
from a Chestertonian essay, poem, or criticism. That a book by G.K.C.
should describe itself as a novel means little more than that its
original purchasing price was four shillings and sixpence. It might also
contain passages of love, hate, and other human emotions, but then
again, it might not. But one thing it would contain, and that is war.
G.K.C. would be pugnacious, even when there was nothing to fight. His
characters would wage their wars, even when the bone of contention
mattered as little as the handle of an old toothbrush. That, we should
say, is the first factor in the formula of the Chestertonian
romance--and all the rest are the inventor's secret. Imprimis, a body of
men and an idea, and the rest must follow, if only the idea be big
enough for a man to fight about, or if need be, even to make himself
ridiculous about.
In _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_ we have this view of romance stated in
a manner entirely typical of its author. King Auberon and the Provost of
Notting Hill, Adam Wayne, are speaking. The latter says:
"I know of a magic wand, but it is a wand that
only one or two may rightly use, and only seldom.
It is a fairy wand of great fear, stronger than
those who use it--often frightful, often wicked to
use. But whatever is touched with it is never
again wholly common; whatever is touched with it
takes a magic from outside the world. If I touch,
with this fairy wand, the railways and the roads
of Notting Hill, men will love them, and be afraid
of them for ever."
"What the devil are you talking about?" asked the
King.
"It has made mean landscapes magnificent, and
hovels outlast cathedrals," went on the madman.
"Why should it not make lamp-posts fairer than
Greek lamps, and an omnibus-ride like a painted
ship? The touch of it is the finger of a strange
perfection."
"What is your wand?" cried the King, impatiently.
"There it is," said Wayne; and pointed to the
floor, where his sword lay flat and shining.
If all the dragons of old romance were loosed upon the fiction of our
day, the result, one would imagine, would be something like that of a
Chestertonian novel. But the dragons are dead and converted into poor
fossil ichthyosauruses, incapable of biting the timidest damsel or the
most corpulent knight that ever came out of the Stock Exchange. That is
the tragedy of G.K.C.'s ideas, but it is also his opportunity. "Man is a
creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by
catch-words," says Stevenson. "Give me my dragons," says G.K.C. in
effect, "and I will give you your catch-words. You may have them in any
one of a hundred different ways. I will drop them on you when you least
expect them, and their disguises will outrange all those known to
Scotland Yard and to Drury Lane combined. You may have catastrophes and
comets and camels, if you will, but you will certainly have your
catch-words."
The first of Chesterton's novels, in order of their publication, is _The
Napoleon of Notting Hill_ (1904). This is extravagance itself; fiction
in the sense only that the events never happened and never could have
happened. The scene is placed in London, the time, about A.D. 1984.
"This 'ere progress, it keeps on goin' on," somebody remarks in one of
the novels of Mr. H. G. Wells. But it never goes on as the prophets said
it would, and consequently England in those days does not greatly differ
from the England of to-day. There have been changes, of course. Kings
are now chosen in alphabetical rotation, and the choice falls upon a
civil servant, Auberon Quin by name. Now Quin has a sense of humour, of
absolute humour, as the Watts-Dunton definition already cited would have
it called. He has two bosom friends who are also civil servants and
whose humour is of the official variety, and whose outlook upon life is
that of a Times leader. Quin's first official act is the publication of
a proclamation ordering every London borough to build itself city walls,
with gates to be closed at sunset, and to become possessed of Provosts
in mediaeval attire, with guards of halberdiers. From his throne he
attends to some of the picturesque details of the scheme, and enjoys the
joke in silence. But after a few years of this a young man named Adam
Wayne becomes Provost of Notting Hill, and to him his borough, and more
especially the little street in which he has spent his life, are things
of immense importance. Rather than allow that street to make way for a
new thoroughfare, Wayne rallies his halberdiers to the defence of their
borough. The Provosts of North Kensington and South Kensington, of West
Kensington and Bayswater, rally their guards too, and attack Notting
Hill, purposing to clear Wayne out of the way and to break down the
offending street. Wayne is surrounded at night but converts defeat into
victory by seizing the offices of a Gas Company and turning off the
street lights. The next day he is besieged in his own street. By a
sudden sortie he and his army escape to Campden Hill. Here a great
battle rages for many hours, while one of the opposing Provosts gathers
a large army for a final attack. At last Wayne and the remnants of his
men are hopelessly outnumbered, but once more he turns defeat into
victory. He threatens, unless the opposing forces instantly surrender,
to open the great reservoir and flood the whole of Notting Hill. The
allied generals surrender, and the Empire of Notting Hill comes into
being. Twenty years later the spirit of Adam Wayne has gone beyond his
own city walls. London is a wild romance, a mass of cities filled with
citizens of great pride. But the Empire, which has been the Nazareth of
the new idea, has waxed fat and kicked. In righteous anger the other
boroughs attack it, and win, because their cause is just. King Auberon,
a recruit in Wayne's army, falls with his leader in the great battle of
Kensington Gardens. But they recover in the morning.
"It was all a joke," says the King in apology.
"No," says Wayne; "we are two lobes of the same
brain . . . you, the humorist . . . I, the
fanatic. . . . You have a halberd and I have a sword,
let us start our wanderings over the world. For we are
its two essentials."
So ends the story.
Consider the preposterous elements of the book. A London with blue
horse-'buses. Bloodthirsty battles chiefly fought with halberds. A King
who acts as a war correspondent and parodies G. W. Stevens. It is
preposterous because it is romantic and we are not used to romance. But
to Chaucer let us say it would have appeared preposterous because he
could not have realized the initial premises. Before such a book the
average reader is helpless. His scale of values is knocked out of
working order by the very first page, almost by the very first sentence.
("The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been
playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it
till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.") The
absence of a love affair will deprive him of the only "human interest"
he can be really sure of. The Chestertonian idiom, above all, will soon
lead him to expect nothing, because he can never get any idea of what he
is to receive, and will bring him to a proper submissiveness. The later
stages are simple. The reader will wonder why it never before occurred
to him that area-railings are very like spears, and that a distant
tramcar may at night distinctly resemble a dragon. He may travel far,
once his imagination has been started on these lines. When romantic
possibilities have once shed a glow on the offices of the Gas Light and
Coke Company and on the erections of the Metropolitan Water Board, the
rest of life may well seem filled with wonder and wild desires.
Chesterton may be held to have invented a new species of detective
story--the sort that has no crime, no criminal, and a detective whose
processes are transcendental. _The Club of Queer Trades_ is the first
batch of such stories. _The Man who was Thursday_ is another specimen of
some length. More recently, Chesterton has repeated the type in some of
the _Father Brown_ stories. In _The Club of Queer Trades_, the
transcendental detective is Basil Grant, to describe whom with accuracy
is difficult, because of his author's inconsistencies. Basil Grant, for
instance, is "a man who scarcely stirred out of his attic," yet it would
appear elsewhere that he walked abroad often enough. The essentials of
this unprecedented detective are, however, sufficiently tangible. He had
been a K.C. and a judge. He had left the Bench because it annoyed him,
and because he held the very human but not legitimate belief that some
criminals would be better off with a trip to the seaside than with a
sentence of imprisonment. After his retirement from public life he stuck
to his old trade as the judge of a Voluntary Criminal Court. "My
criminals were tried for the faults which really make social life
impossible. They were tried before me for selfishness, or for an
impossible vanity, or for scandal-mongering, or for stinginess to guests
or dependents." It is regrettable that Chesterton does not grant us a
glimpse of this fascinating tribunal at work. However, it is Grant's
job, on the strength of which he becomes the president and founder of
the C.Q.T.--Club of Queer Trades. Among the members of this Club are a
gentleman who runs an Adventure and Romance Agency for supplying thrills
to the bourgeois, two Professional Detainers, and an Agent for Arboreal
Villas, who lets off a variety of birds' nest. The way in which these
people go about their curious tasks invariably suggests a crime to
Rupert Grant, Basil's amateur detective brother, whereupon Basil has to
intervene to put matters right. The author does not appear to have been
struck by the inconsistency of setting Basil to work to ferret out the
doings of his fellow club-members. The book is, in fact, full of joyous
inconsistencies. The Agent for Arboreal Villas is clearly unqualified
for the membership of the Club. Professor Chadd has no business there
either. He is elected on the strength of having invented a language
expressed by dancing, but it appears that he is really an employee in
the Asiatic MSS. Department of the British Museum. Things are extremely
absurd in _The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady_. At the instigation
of Rupert, who has heard sighs of pain coming out of a South Kensington
basement, Basil, Rupert, and the man who tells the story, break into the
house and violently assault those whom they meet.
Basil sprang up with dancing eyes, and with three
blows like battering-rams knocked the footman into
a cocked hat. Then he sprang on top of Burrows,
with one antimacassar in his hand and another in
his teeth, and bound him hand and foot almost
before he knew clearly that his head had struck
the floor. Then Basil sprang at Greenwood . . .
etc. etc.
There is a good deal more like this. Having taken the citadel and
captured the defenders (as Caesar might say), Basil and company reach the
sighing lady of the basement. But she refuses to be released. Whereupon
Basil explains his own queer trade, and that the lady is voluntarily
undergoing a sentence for backbiting. No explanation is vouchsafed of
the strange behaviour of Basil Grant in attacking men who, as he knew,
were doing nothing they should not. Presumably it was due to a
Chestertonian theory that there should be at least one good physical
fight in each book.
It will be seen that _The Club of Queer Trades_ tends to curl up
somewhat (quite literally, in the sense that the end comes almost where
the beginning ought to be) when it receives heavy and serious treatment.
I should therefore explain that this serious treatment has been given
under protest, and that its primary intention has been to deal with
those well-meaning critics who believe that Chesterton can write
fiction, in the ordinary sense of the word. His own excellent definition
of fictitious narrative (in _The Victorian Age in Literature_) is that
essentially "the story is told . . . for the sake of some study of the
difference between human beings." This alone is enough to exculpate him
of the charge of writing novels. The Chestertonian short story is also
in its way unique. If we applied the methods of the Higher Criticism to
the story just described, we might base all manner of odd theories upon
the defeat (_inter alios_) of Burrows, a big and burly youth, by Basil
Grant, aged sixty at the very least, and armed with antimacassars. But
there is no necessity. If Chesterton invents a fantastic world, full of
fantastic people who speak Chestertonese, then he is quite entitled to
waive any trifling conventions which hinder the liberty of his subjects.
As already pointed out, such is his humour. The only disadvantage, as
somebody once complained of the Arabian Nights, is that one is apt to
lose one's interest in a hero who is liable at any moment to turn into a
camel. None of Chesterton's heroes do, as a matter of fact, become
camels, but I would nevertheless strongly advise any young woman about
to marry one of them to take out an insurance policy against unforeseen
transformations.
Although it appears that a few reviewers went to the length of reading
the whole of _The Man who was Thursday_ (1908), it is obvious by their
subsequent guesswork that they did not notice the second part of the
title, which is, very simply, _A Nightmare_. The story takes its name
from the Supreme Council of Anarchists, which has seven members, named
after the days of the week. Sunday is the Chairman. The others, one
after the other, turn out to be detectives. Syme, the nearest approach
to the what might be called the hero, is a poet whom mysterious hands
thrust into an Anarchists' meeting, at which he is elected to fill the
vacancy caused by the death of last Thursday. A little earlier other
mysterious hands had taken him into a dark room in Scotland Yard where
the voice of an unseen man had told him that henceforth he was a member
of the anti-anarchist corps, a new body which was to deal with the new
anarchists--not the comparatively harmless people who threw bombs, but
the intellectual anarchist. "We say that the most dangerous criminal now
is the entirely lawless modern philosopher," somebody explains to him.
The bewildered Syme walks straight into further bewilderments, as, one
after the other, the week-days of the committee are revealed. But who is
Sunday? Chesterton makes no reply. It was he who in a darkened room of
Scotland Yard had enrolled the detectives. He is the Nightmare of the
story. The first few chapters are perfectly straightforward, and
lifelike to the extent of describing personal details in a somewhat
exceptional manner for Chesterton. But, gradually, wilder and wilder
things begin to happen--until, at last, Syme wakes up.
The trouble about _The Man who was Thursday_ is not its
incomprehensibility, but its author's gradual decline of interest in the
book as it lengthened out. It begins excellently. There is real humour
and a good deal of it in the earlier stages of Syme. And there are
passages like this one on the "lawless modern philosopher":
Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are
essentially moral men; my heart goes out to
them. . . . Thieves respect property. They merely
wish the property to become their property that
they may more perfectly respect it. But
philosophers dislike property as property; they
wish to destroy the very idea of personal
possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they
would not go through the highly ceremonial and
even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But
philosophers despise marriage as marriage.
But his amiable flow of paradox soon runs out. The end of the book is
just a wild whirl, a nightmare with a touch of the cinematograph. People
chase one another, in one instance they quite literally chase
themselves. And the ending has all the effect of a damaged film that
cannot be stopped, on the large blank spaces of which some idiot has
been drawing absurd pictures which appear on the screen, to the
confusion of the story. One remembers the immense and dominating figure
of Sunday, only because the description of him reads very much like a
description of Chesterton himself. But if the person is recognizable,
the personality remains deliberately incomprehensible. He is just an
outline in space, who rode down Albany Street on an elephant abducted
from the Zoological Gardens, and who spoke sadly to his guests when they
had run their last race against him.
Until recent years the word mysticism was sufficiently true to its
derivation to imply mystery, the relation of God to man. But since the
cheaper sort of journalist seized hold of the unhappy word, its
demoralization has been complete. It now indicates, generally speaking,
an intellectual defect which expresses itself in a literary quality one
can only call woolliness. There is a genuine mysticism, expressed in
Blake's lines:
To see the world in a grain of sand
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
And there is a spurious mysticism, meaningless rubbish of which
Rossetti's Sister Helen is a specimen. What could be more idiotic than
the verse:
"He has made a sign and called Halloo!
Sister Helen,
And he says that he would speak with you."
"Oh tell him I fear the frozen dew,
Little brother."
(_O Mother, Mary Mother,_
_Why laughs she thus between Hell and Heaven?_)
The trouble about the latter variety is its extreme simplicity. Anybody
with the gift of being able to make lines scan and rhyme can produce
similar effects in a similar way. Hence the enormous temptation
exercised by this form of mysticism gone wrong. There is a naughty
little story of a little girl, relating to her mother the mishaps of the
family coal merchant, as seen from the dining-room window. He slipped on
a piece of orange-peel, the child had explained. "And what happened
then?" "Why, mummy, he sat down on the pavement and talked about God."
Chesterton (and he is not alone in this respect) behaves exactly like
this coal-heaver. When he is at a loss, he talks about God. In each case
one is given to suspect that the invocation is due to a temporarily
overworked imagination.
This leads us to _The Ball and the Cross_ (1906). In _The Man who was
Thursday_, when the author had tired of his story, he brought in the
universe at large. But its successor is dominated by God, and
discussions on him by beings celestial, terrestrial, and merely
infernal. And yet _The Ball and the Cross_ is in many respects
Chesterton's greatest novel. The first few chapters are things of joy.
There is much said in them about religion, but it is all sincere and
bracing. The first chapter consists, in the main, of a dialogue on
religion, between Professor Lucifer, the inventor and the driver of an
eccentric airship, and Father Michael, a theologian acquired by the
Professor in Western Bulgaria. As the airship dives into the ball and
the cross of Saint Paul's Cathedral, its passengers naturally find
themselves taking a deep interest in the cross, considered as symbol and
anchor. Lucifer plumps for the ball, the symbol of all that is rational
and united. The cross
"is the conflict of two hostile lines, of
irreconcilable direction. . . . The very shape
of it is a contradiction in terms." Michael
replies, "But we like contradictions in terms. Man
is a contradiction in terms; he is a beast whose
superiority to other beasts consists in having
fallen."
Defeated on points, Lucifer leaves the Father clinging literally to the
cross and flies away. Michael meets a policeman on the upper gallery
and is conducted downwards. The scene changes to Ludgate Circus, but
Michael is no longer in the centre of it. A Scot named Turnbull keeps a
shop here, apparently in the endeavour to counterbalance the influence
of St. Paul's across the way. He is an atheist, selling atheist
literature, editing an atheist paper. Another Scot arrives, young Evan
MacIan, straight from the Highlands. Unlike the habitual Londoner,
MacIan takes the little shop seriously. In its window he sees a copy of
The Atheist, the leading article of which contains an insult to the
Virgin Mary. MacIan thereupon puts his stick through the window.
Turnbull comes out, there is a scuffle, and both are arrested and taken
before a Dickensian magistrate. The sketch of Mr. Cumberland Vane is
very pleasing: it is clear that the author knew what he was copying.
Lord Melbourne is alleged to have said, "No one has more respect for the
Christian religion than I have; but really, when it comes to intruding
it into private life. . . ." Mr. Vane felt much the same way when he
heard MacIan's simple explanation: "He is my enemy. He is the enemy of
God." He said, "It is most undesirable that things of that sort should
be spoken about--a--in public, and in an ordinary Court of Justice.
Religion is--a--too personal a matter to be mentioned in such a place."
However, MacIan is fined. After which he and Turnbull, as men of honour,
buy themselves swords and proceed to fight the matter out. With
interruptions due to argument and the police, the fight lasts several
weeks. Turnbull and MacIan fight in the back garden of the man from whom
they bought the swords,[1] until the police intervene. They escape the
police and gain the Northern Heights of London, and fight once more,
with a madness renewed and stimulated by the peace-making efforts of a
stray and silly Tolstoyan. Then the police come again, and are once more
outdistanced. This time mortal combat is postponed on account of the
sanguinolence of a casual lunatic who worshipped blood to such a
nauseating extent that the duellists deferred operations in order to
chase him into a pond. Then follows an interminable dialogue,
paradoxical, thoroughly Shavian, while the only two men in England to
whom God literally is a matter of life and death find that they begin to
regard the slaughter of one by the other as an unpleasant duty. Again
they fight and are separated. They are motored by a lady to the
Hampshire coast, and there they fight on the sands until the rising tide
cuts them off. An empty boat turns up to rescue them from drowning; in
it they reach one of the Channel Islands. Again they fight, and again
the police come. They escape from them, but remain on the island in
disguise, and make themselves an opportunity to pick a quarrel and so
fight a duel upon a matter in keeping with local prejudice. But Turnbull
has fallen in love. His irritatingly calm and beautiful devotee argues
with him on religion until he is driven to cast off his disguise. Then
the police are on his tracks again. A lunatic lends Turnbull and MacIan
his yacht and so the chase continues. But by this time Chesterton is
getting just a trifle bored. He realizes that no matter how many
adventures his heroes get into, or how many paradoxes they fling down
each other's throats, the end of the story, the final inevitable end
which alone makes a series of rapid adventures worth while, is not even
on the horizon. An element of that spurious mysticism already described
invades the book. It begins to be clear that Chesterton is trying to
drag in a moral somehow, if need be, by the hair of its head. The two
yachters spend two weeks of geographical perplexity and come to a
desert island. They land, but think it wiser, on the whole, to postpone
fighting until they have finished the champagne and cigars with which
their vessel is liberally stored. This takes a week. Just as they are
about to begin the definitive duel they discover that they are not upon
a desert island at all, they are near Margate. And the police are there,
too. So once more they are chased. They land in a large garden in front
of an old gentleman who assures them that he is God. He turns out to be
a lunatic, and the place an asylum. There follows a characteristic piece
of that abuse of science for which Chesterton has never attempted to
suggest a substitute. MacIan and Turnbull find themselves prisoners,
unable to get out. Then they dream dreams. Each sees himself in an
aeroplane flying over Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill, where a battle is
raging. But the woolly element is very pronounced by this time, and we
can make neither head nor tail of these dreams and the conversations
which accompany them. The duellists are imprisoned for a month in
horrible cells. They find their way into the garden, and are told that
all England is now in the hands of the alienists, by a new Act of
Parliament: this has been the only possible manner of putting a stop to
the revolution started by MacIan and Turnbull. These two find all the
persons they had met with during their odyssey, packed away in the
asylum, which is a wonderful place worked by petroleum machinery. But
the matter-of-fact grocer from the Channel Island, regarding the whole
affair as an infringement of the Rights of Man, sets the petroleum
alight. Michael, the celestial being who had appeared in the first
chapter and disappeared at the end of it, is dragged out of a cell in an
imbecile condition. Lucifer comes down in his airship to collect the
doctors, whose bodies he drops out, a little later on. The buildings
vanish in the flames, the keepers bolt, the inmates talk about their
souls. MacIan is reunited to the lady of the Channel Island, and the
story ends.
When a stone has been tossed into a pond, the ripples gradually and
symmetrically grow smaller. A Chesterton novel is like an adventurous
voyage of discovery, which begins on smooth water and is made with the
object of finding the causes of the ripples. As ripple succeeds
ripple--or chapter follows chapter--so we have to keep a tighter hold on
such tangible things as are within our reach. Finally we reach the
centre of the excitement and are either sucked into a whirlpool, or hit
on the head with a stone. When we recover consciousness we feebly
remember we have had a thrilling journey and that we had started out
with a misapprehension of the quality of Chestertonian fiction. A man
whose memory is normal should be able to give an accurate synopsis of a
novel six months after he has read it. But I should be greatly surprised
if any reader of _The Ball and the Cross_ could tell exactly what it was
all about, within a month or two of reading it. The discontinuity of it
makes one difficulty; the substitution of paradox for incident makes
another. Yet it is difficult to avoid the conviction that this novel
will survive its day and the generation that begot it. If it was
Chesterton's endeavour (as one is bound to suspect) to show that the
triumph of atheism would lead to the triumph of a callous and inhuman
body of scientists, then he has failed miserably. But if he was
attempting to prove that the uncertainties of religion were trivial
things when compared with the uncertainties of atheism, then the verdict
must be reversed. The dialogues on religion contained in _The Ball and
the Cross_ are alone enough and more than enough to place it among the
few books on religion which could be safely placed in the hands of an
atheist or an agnostic with an intelligence.
If we consider _Manalive_ (1912) now we shall be departing from strict
chronological order, as it was preceded by _The Innocence of Father
Brown_. It will, however, be more satisfactory to take the two Father
Brown books together. In the first of these and _Manalive_, a change can
be distinctly felt. It is not a simple weakening of the power of
employing instruments, such as befell Ibsen when, after writing The Lady
from the Sea, he could no longer keep his symbols and his characters
apart. It is a more subtle change, a combination of several small
changes, which cannot be studied fairly in relation only to one side of
Chesterton's work. In the last chapter an attempt will be made to
analyze these, for the present I can only indicate some of the
fallings-off noticeable in _Manalive_, and leave it at that.
Chesterton's previous romances were not constructed, the reader may have
gathered, with that minute attention to detail which makes some modern
novels read like the report of a newly promoted detective. But a man may
do such things and yet be considered spotless. Shakespeare, after all,
went astray on several points of history and geography. The authors of
the Old Testament talked about "the hare that cheweth the cud." And, if
any reader should fail to see the application of these instances to
modern fiction, I can only recommend him to read Vanity Fair and find
out how many children had the Rev. Bute Crawley, and what were their
names. No, the trouble with _Manalive_ is not in its casual,
happy-go-lucky construction. It is rather in a certain lack of ease, a
tendency to exaggerate effects, a continual stirring up of
inconsiderable points. But let us come to the story.
There is a boarding-house situated on one of the summits of the Northern
Heights. A great wind happens, and a large man, quite literally, blows
in. His name is Innocent Smith and he is naturally considered insane.
But he is really almost excessively sane. His presence makes life at the
house a sort of holiday for the inmates, male and female. Smith is about
to run for a special licence in order to marry one of the women in the
house, and the other boarders have just paired off when a telegram
posted by one of the ladies in a misapprehension brings two lunacy
experts around in a cab. Smith adds to the excitement of the moment by
putting a couple of bullets through a doctor's hat.
Now Smith is what somebody calls "an allegorical practical joker." But
Chesterton gives a better description of him than that.
He's comic just because he's so startlingly
commonplace. Don't you know what it is to be in
all one family circle, with aunts and uncles, when
a schoolboy comes home for the holidays? That bag
there on the cab is only a schoolboy's hamper.
This tree here in the garden is only the sort of
tree that any schoolboy would have climbed. Yes,
that's the sort of thing that has haunted us all
about him, the thing we could never fit a word to.
Whether he is my old schoolfellow or no, at least
he is all my old schoolfellows. He is the endless
bun-eating, ball-throwing animal that we have all
been.
Innocent has an idea about every few minutes, but so far as the book is
concerned we need mention only one of them. That one is--local autonomy
for Beacon House. This may be recommended as a game to be played _en
famille_. Establish a High Court, call in a legal member, and get a
constitution. The rest will be very hilarious. The legal member of the
Beacon House _menage_ is an Irish ex-barrister, one Michael Moon, who
plans as follows:
The High Court of Beacon, he declared, was a
splendid example of our free and sensible
constitution. It had been founded by King John in
defiance of Magna Carta, and now held absolute
power over windmills, wine and spirit licences,
ladies travelling in Turkey, revision of sentences
for dog-stealing and parricide, as well as
anything whatever that happened in the town of
Market Bosworth. The whole hundred and nine
seneschals of the High Court of Beacon met about
once in every four centuries; but in the intervals
(as Mr. Moon explained) the whole powers of the
institution were vested in Mrs. Duke [the
landlady]. Tossed about among the rest of the
company, however, the High Court did not retain
its historical and legal seriousness, but was used
somewhat unscrupulously in a riot of domestic
detail. If somebody spilt the Worcester Sauce on
the tablecloth, he was quite sure it was a rite
without which the sittings and findings of the
Court would be invalid; and if somebody wanted a
window to remain shut, he would suddenly remember
that none but the third son of the lord of the
manor of Penge had the right to open it. They even
went the length of making arrests and conducting
criminal inquiries.
Before this tribunal Innocent Smith is brought. One alienist is an
American, who is quite prepared to acknowledge its jurisdiction, being
by reason of his nationality not easily daunted by mere constitutional
queerness. The other doctor, being the prosecutor and a boarder, has no
choice in the matter. The doctors, it should be added, have brought with
them a mass of documentary evidence, incriminating Smith.
How the defence has time to collect this evidence is not explained, but
this is just one of the all-important details which do not matter in the
Chestertonian plane. Smith is tried for attempted murder. The
prosecution fails because the evidence shows Smith to be a first-class
shot, who has on occasion fired life into people by frightening them.
Then he is tried for burglary on the basis of a clergyman's letter from
which it is gathered that Smith tried one night to induce him and
another cleric to enter a house burglariously in the dark. This charge
breaks down because a letter is produced from the other clergyman who
did actually accompany Smith over housetops and down through
trap-doors--into his own house! Smith, it is explained, is in the habit
of keeping himself awake to the romance and wonder of everyday existence
by such courses. From the second letter, however, it appears that there
is a Mrs. Smith, so the next charge is one of desertion and attempted
bigamy. A series of documents is produced, from persons in France,
Russia, China, and California recounting conversations with Smith, a man
with a garden-rake, who left his house so that he might find it, and at
the end leapt over the hedge into the garden where Mrs. Smith was having
tea. In the words of the servant "he looked round at the garden and
said, very loud and strong: 'Oh, what a lovely place you've got,' just
as if he'd never seen it before." After which the court proceeds to try
Smith on a polygamy charge. Documentary evidence shows that Smith has
at one time or another married a Miss Green, a Miss Brown, a Miss Black,
just as he is now about to marry a Miss Gray, Moon points out that these
are all the same lady. Innocent Smith has merely broken the conventions,
he has religiously kept the commandments. He has burgled his own house,
and married his own wife. He has been perfectly innocent, and therefore
he has been perfectly merry. Innocent is acquitted, and the book ends.
In the course of _Manalive_, somebody says, "Going right round the world
is the shortest way to where you are already." These are the words of an
overworked epigrammatist, and upon them hangs the whole story. If
_Manalive_ is amusing, it is because Chesterton has a style which could
make even a debilitated paradox of great length seem amusing. The book
has a few gorgeous passages. Among the documents read at the trial of
Innocent Smith, for example, is a statement made by a Trans-Siberian
station-master, which is a perfectly exquisite burlesque at the expense
of the Russian _intelligenzia_. The whole series of documents, in fact,
are delightful bits of self-expression on the part of a very varied team
of selves. While Chesterton is able to turn out such things we must be
content to take the page, and not the story, as his unit of work.
_Manalive_, by the way, is the first of the author's stories in which
women are represented as talking to one another. Chesterton seems
extraordinarily shy with his feminine characters. He is a little afraid
of woman. "The average woman is a despot, the average man is a serf."[2]
Mrs. Innocent Smith's view of men is in keeping with this peculiar
notion. "At certain curious times they're just fit to take care of us,
and they're never fit to take care of themselves." Smith is the
Chestertonian Parsifal, just as Prince Muishkin is Dostoievsky's.
The transcendental type of detective, first sketched out in _The Club of
Queer Trades_, is developed more fully in the two Father Brown books. In
the little Roman priest who has such a wonderful instinct for placing
the diseased spots in people's souls, we have Chesterton's completest
and most human creation. Yet, with all their cleverness, and in spite of
the fact that from internal evidence it is almost blatantly obvious that
the author enjoyed writing these stories, they bear marks which put the
books on a lower plane than either _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_ or
_The Ball and the Cross_. In the latter book Chesterton spoke of "the
mere healthy and heathen horror of the unclean; the mere inhuman hatred
of the inhuman state of madness." His own critical work had been a long
protest against the introduction of artificial horrors, a plea for
sanity and the exercise of sanity. But in _The Innocence of Father
Brown_ these principles, almost the fundamental ones of literary
decency, were put on the shelf. Chesterton's criminals are lunatics,
perhaps it is his belief that crime and insanity are inseparable. But
even if this last supposition is correct, its approval would not
necessarily license the introduction of some of the characters. There is
Israel Gow, who suffers from a peculiar mania which drives him to
collect gold from places seemly and unseemly, even to the point of
digging up a corpse in order to extract the gold filling from its teeth.
There is the insane French Chief of Police, who commits a murder and
attempts to disguise the body, and the nature of the crime, by
substituting the head of a guillotined criminal for that of the victim.
In another story we have the picture of a cheerful teetotaller who
suffers from drink and suicidal mania. There is also a doctor who kills
a mad poet, and a mad priest who drops a hammer from the top of his
church-tower upon his brother. Another story is about the loathsome
treachery of an English general. It is, of course, difficult to write
about crime without touching on features which revolt the squeamish
reader, but it can be done, and it has been done, as in the Sherlock
Holmes stories. There are subjects about which one instinctively feels
it is not good to know too much. Sex, for example, is one of them.
Strindberg, Weininger, Maupassant, Jules de Goncourt, knew too much
about sex, and they all went mad, although it is usual to disguise the
fact in the less familiar terms of medical science. Madness itself is
another such subject. There are writers who dwell on madness because
they cannot help themselves--Strindberg, Edgar Allan Poe, Gogol, and
many others--but they scarcely produce the same nauseating sensation as
the sudden introduction of the note of insanity into a hitherto normal
setting. The harnessing of the horror into which the discovery of
insanity reacts is a favourite device of the feeble craftsman, but it is
illegitimate. It is absolutely opposed to those elementary canons of
good taste which decree that we may not jest at the expense of certain
things, either because they are too sacred or not sacred enough. The
opposite of a decadent author is not necessarily a writer who attacks
decadents. Many decadents have attacked themselves, by committing
suicide, for example. The opposite of a decadent author is one to whom
decadent ideas and imagery are alien, which is a very different thing.
For example, the whole story _The Wrong Shape_ is filled with decadent
ideas; one is sure that Baudelaire would have entirely approved of it.
It includes a decadent poet, living in wildly Oriental surroundings,
attended by a Hindoo servant. Even the air of the place is decadent;
Father Brown on entering the house learns instinctively from it that a
crime is to be committed.
Considered purely as detective stories, these cannot be granted a very
good mark. There is scarcely a story that has not a serious flaw in it.
A man--Flambeau, of whom more later--gains admittance to a small and
select dinner party and almost succeeds in stealing the silver, by the
device of turning up and pretending to be a guest when among the
waiters, and a waiter when among the guests. But it is not explained
what he did during the first two courses of that dinner, when he
obviously had to be either a waiter or a guest, and could not keep up
both parts, as when the guests were arriving. Another man, a "Priest of
Apollo," is worshipping the sun on the top of a "sky-scraping" block of
offices in Westminster, while a woman falls down a lift-shaft and is
killed. Father Brown immediately concludes that the priest is guilty of
the murder because, had he been unprepared, he would have started and
looked round at the scream and the crash of the victim falling. But a
man absorbed in prayer on, let us say, a tenth floor, is, in point of
fact, quite unlikely to hear a crash in the basement, or a scream even
nearer to him. But the most astonishing thing about _The Eye of Apollo_
is the staging. In order to provide the essentials, Mr. Chesterton has
to place "the heiress of a crest and half a county, as well as great
wealth," who is blind, in a typist's office! The collocation is somewhat
too singular. One might go right through the Father Brown stories in
this manner. But, if the reader wishes to draw the maximum of enjoyment
out of them, he will do nothing of the sort. He will believe, as
fervently as Alfred de Vigny, that L'Idee C'est Tout, and lay down all
petty regard for detail at the feet of Father Brown. This little Roman
cleric has listened to so many confessions (he calls himself "a man who
does next to nothing but hear men's real sins," but this seems to be
excessive, even for a Roman Catholic) that he is really well acquainted
with the human soul. He is also extremely observant. And his greatest
friend is Flambeau, whom he once brings to judgment, twice hinders in
crime, and thenceforward accompanies on detective expeditions.
_The Innocence of Father Brown_ had a _sequel_, _The Wisdom of Father
Brown_, distinctly less effective, as sequels always are, than the
predecessor. But the underlying ideas are the same. In the first place
there is a deep detestation of "Science" (whatever that is) and the
maintenance of the theory incarnate in Father Brown, that he who can
read the human soul knows all things. The detestation of science (of
which, one gathers, Chesterton knows nothing) is carried to the same
absurd length as in _The Ball and the Cross_. In the very first story,
Father Brown calls on a criminologist ostensibly in order to consult
him, actually in order to show the unfortunate man, who had retired from
business fourteen years ago, what an extraordinary fool he was.
The Father Brown of these stories--moon-faced little man--is a peculiar
creation. No other author would have taken the trouble to excogitate
him, and then treat him so badly. As a detective he never gets a fair
chance. He is always on the spot when a murder is due to be committed,
generally speaking he is there before time. When an absconding banker
commits suicide under peculiar circumstances in Italian mountains, when
a French publicist advertises himself by fighting duels with himself
(very nearly), when a murder is committed in the dressing-room corridor
of a theatre, when a miser and blackmailer kills himself, when a lunatic
admiral attempts murder and then commits suicide, when amid much
incoherence a Voodoo murder takes place, when somebody tries to kill a
colonel by playing on his superstitions (and by other methods), and when
a gentleman commits suicide from envy, Father Brown is always there. One
might almost interpret the Father Brown stories by suggesting that their
author had written them in order to illustrate the sudden impetus given
to murder and suicide by the appearance of a Roman priest.
Here we may suspend our reviews of Chestertonian romance. There remains
yet _The Flying Inn_, which shall be duly considered along with the
other debris of its author. In summing up, it may be said of Chesterton
that at his best he invented new possibilities of romance and a new and
hearty laugh. It may be said of the decadents of the eighteen nineties,
that if their motto wasn't "Let's all go bad," it should have been. So
one may say of Chesterton that if he has not selected "Let's all go mad"
as a text, he should have done. Madness, in the Chestertonian, whatever
it is in the pathological sense, is a defiance of convention, a
loosening of visible bonds in order to show the strength of the
invisible ones; perhaps, as savages are said to regard lunatics with
great respect, holding them to be nearer the Deity than most, so
Chesterton believes of his own madmen. Innocent Smith, of course, the
simple fool, the blithering idiot, is a truly wise man.