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‘I won't discuss whether we can be killed by something that happened in the thirteenth century; but I'm jolly certain that we can't be killed by something that never happened in the thirteenth century, something that never happened at all.’¹

Sentimentality about history and religion is inevitably attributed by Chesterton to Americans, but a readiness to believe in mystery and the supernatural intervention of irrational forces is the chief impediment to the rational explanation of problems wherever anybody lives. That is what Father Brown firmly believes. There is a close connection, his theology teaches him, between error and unreason. Some of the stories naturally emphasise the error, some equally naturally the unreason, but in the best of them the two are joined. Just as in his argumentative and polemical books Chesterton constantly exposed the error of popular assumptions by showing them to be emotional and irrational and usually generated by groundless fear and ignorance of the way in which people's minds work, so in the Father Brown stories he traces every crime, or supposed crime, back to the same sources. And when he has finished the reader finds that it is not now the punishment of the crime that interests him; he has been given a new and alarming light on universal human nature, and that is what sticks in his memory.

The conversation with Flambeau that ends ‘The Flying Stars’ contains the conversion of Flambeau from a life of romantic Robin Hood lawlessness to a life given to the prevention of crime; and this is achieved by simply pointing out that Robin Hood, whatever the romancers say, will certainly descend from the heroic to the mean before he has finished [64]. The point of ‘The Sins of Prince Saradine’ is, characteristically, the danger of morally, as well as intellectually, underrating an enemy [117]. The point of ‘The Head of Caesar’ is the power of greed to corrupt, which is concealed by the apparently blameless pursuit of the ‘collector’, who can turn out to be no better than a miser [244]. ‘The Vanishing of Vaudrey’ is a study in hatred, and in the cure of hatred [540]. Here the point is a simple moral one, without much subtlety but with sufficient unexpectedness to get home to the reader.

Two American stories in The Incredulity have usually searching moral implications. ‘The Arrow of Heaven’ is very subtle, and builds up to a devastating moral climax. It is a ‘locked room’ case, and, as often in these tales, the people concerned are inclined, from an irreligious or superstitiously agnostic background, to invoke the supernatural as the only cause. Gradually it appears that a socially negligible person is the murderer, upon which vengeance is called for by the American devotees of justice. The priest, who has resisted their notions of justice, in the end insists on common justice. The negligible man (Daniel Doom) and the eminent man (Brander Merton) have been shown to be the same person, and so—

‘No!’ Father Brown cried, in a voice like a pistol shot. ‘There shall be no difference. I gave you your chance of pitying the poor devil when you thought he was a common criminal. You wouldn't listen then: you were all for private vengeance then. You were all for letting him be butchered like a wild beast without a hearing or a public trial, and said he had only got his deserts. Very well, then, if Daniel Doom has got his deserts, Brander Merton has got his deserts. If that was good enough for Daniel Doom, by all that's holy it's good enough for Merton. Take your wild justice or our dull legality: but in the name of Almighty God let there be equal lawlessness of equal law.’

[351]

‘The Miracle of Moon Crescent’, another story set in America, makes in the end much the same point. The physical circumstances are, indeed, somewhat bizarre and demanding of credulity. But the moral punch-line is here:

Fenner laughed, and then looked puzzled. ‘I don't understand one thing,’ he said. ‘If it was Wilson, how did Wynd come to have a man like that on such intimate terms? How did he come to be killed by a man he'd seen every day for years? He was famous for being a judge of men.’

Father Brown thumped his umbrella on the ground with an emphasis he rarely showed.

‘Yes,’ he said, almost fiercely; ‘that was how he came to be killed. He was killed for just that. He was killed for being a judge of men. … What is any man that he should be a judge of men?’

[386]

Contempt is a quality hateful to the common man, and therefore to Chesterton and to his priest. It is the clue to the character of the criminal in ‘The Man with Two Beards’ [496]. But contempt, double standards, hypocrisy, and the perversion of charity itself are all brought together in the climax of the last of these stories, which in most ways is the finest of all—‘The Chief Mourner of Marne’.

There is nothing for it but to quote a passage from this story at some length. I call it the finest of the stories because it seems to me to contain all those qualities and devices which distinguish the Father Brown stories; to those to whom Father Brown is rarely interesting or entertaining, this is the most boring of the tales; to those who find them remote and unrealistic, this is the remotest; to those who are exasperated by their Christian emphasis, this is the least tolerable of all because its theological content is more uncompromising than that of any of the rest.

This is ‘The Arrow of Heaven’ over again, but more violently presented. It is a story to be savoured. Its central figure, the Marquis of Marne, has shut himself away in a remote castle. His personal name, as we gather, is James Mair. He is popularly believed to have become a recluse because of the guilt he feels at having killed a brother to whom he was devoted. He killed him, according to the story, after a duel. A certain ruthless Canadian newspaper reporter with violently anti-clerical views is determined to release the story that this sense of guilt has been fostered by priests of the Catholic Church, of which, unlike most of those close to him, the Marquis was a member. Father Brown, who comes into the story by plausible courses, is determined not only to prove that the newspaper proprietor (Sir John Cockspur) is about to disseminate a malicious lie, but that the whole story is based on an error.

He finds that the relatives of this mysterious and melancholy marquis are anxious to be reconciled to him, and increasingly indignant that he should be incarcerated in his own castle by a sense of guilt which they are prepared to absolve. Father Brown, after making enquiries, begs them not to attempt it. He insists that unhappiness will come of it. As the story works towards its peak, he meets the family outside the castle, about to go in and force reconciliation on its unhappy owner.

‘Look here,’ he said in his simple, bothered, fashion, ‘I told you you'd much better leave him alone. He knows what he's doing and it'll only make everybody unhappy.’

Lady Outram, who was accompanied by a tall and quietly-dressed lady, still very handsome, presumably the original Miss Grayson, looked at the priest with cold contempt.

‘Really, sir,’ she said, ‘this is a very private occasion, and I don't understand what you have to do with it.’

‘Trust a priest to have to do with a private occasion,’ snarled Sir John Cockspur. ‘Don't you know they live behind the scenes like rats behind a wainscot burrowing their way into everybody's private rooms? See how he's already in possession of poor Marne.’

‘Oh, that's all right,’ said Father Brown, with the impatience of anxiety. ‘I've talked it over with the marquis and the only priest he's ever had anything to do with; his clerical tastes have been much exaggerated. I tell you he knows what he's about, and I do implore you all to leave him alone.’

‘You mean leave him to this living death of moping and going mad in a ruin?’ cried Lady Outram, in a voice that shook a little. ‘And all because he had the bad luck to shoot a man in a duel more than a quarter of a century ago. Is that what you call Christian charity?’

‘Yes,’ answered the priest stolidly; ‘that is what I call Christian charity.’

‘It's about all the Christian charity you'll ever get out of these priests,’ cried Cockspur, bitterly. …

[579–80]

The occupant of the castle, we later learn, is not James Mair at all (the supposed remorseful duellist) but his brother Maurice, who, pretending to have been shot in the duel, shot his brother while he was bending over him hoping to revive him. The shock of discovering this, which the priest had sought to spare them, brought out in the relatives a torrent of vindictiveness. Upon this Father Brown takes up the tale again.

‘Are you sure of this?’ asked Sir John at last, in a thick voice.

‘I am sure of it,’ said Father Brown, ‘and now I leave Maurice Mair, the present Marquis of Marne, to your Christian charity. You have told me something today about Christian charity. You seem to me to give it almost too large a place; but how fortunate it is for poor sinners like this man that you err so much on the side of mercy, and are ready to be reconciled to all mankind.’

‘Hang it all,’ exploded the general; ‘if you think I'm going to be reconciled to a filthy viper like that, I tell you that I wouldn't say a word to save him from hell. I said I would pardon a regular decent duel, but of all the treacherous assassins—’

‘He ought to be lynched,’ cried Cockspur excitedly. ‘He ought to burn alive like a nigger in the States. And if there is such a thing as burning for ever, he jolly well—’

‘I wouldn't touch him with a barge-pole myself,’ said Mallow.

‘There is a limit to human charity,’ said Lady Outram, trembling all over.

‘There is,’ said Father Brown, drily; ‘and that is the real difference between human charity and Christian charity. …’

‘But hang it all,’ cried Mallow, ‘you don't expect us to be able to pardon a vile thing like this?’

‘No,’ said the priest; ‘but we have to be able to pardon it.’

[582–3]

There is some danger, I am aware, that the reader will by now have become sated with the implied moralism of all this—mine, I mean, not Chesterton's. Without reprinting the whole Father Brown series in extenso I see no way of demonstrating beyond question Chesterton's innocence of the charge of dragging moralism in so that Father Brown may be given a chance to preach. But innocent he is. The artistry of the stories is not in their moralism, but in the skill which makes the reader miss the moralism altogether until his third or fourth reading. That is why the Father Brown stories are almost univerally misunderstood.

Some time about 1950 Christopher Bush wrote a comical detective story, Case for Four Detectives, which set the scene for a criminal puzzle and then brought in four characters, each of whom tried to provide a solution, and all of whom were beaten to the truth by an imperfectly educated village policeman. The four characters were Christopher Bush's re-creations of Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot and Father Brown. In each case the author endowed the character with what he had recognised as the outward qualities that his originator had given him—Holmes's feverish activism, Poirot's indolent sedentary reasoning, Wimsey's modish clubmanship, and Father Brown's talent for obscure and oracular epigrams. It was a frivolous lampoon which assumed that these characters could be re-created by dressing puppets up in their clothes. The point it made about Father Brown, however, was that this was how a casual reader saw him. In consequence not a single thing he said made sense. The careless reader finds his paradoxes tiresome, and the reader who neither shares nor accepts his values is at a loss to understand what he is talking about, and is mystified by the notion that it can be important. It is nonsense to say that Father Brown reaches his solutions by the exercise of some esoteric, even psychic, gift that can express itself only in oracular utterances of delphic ambiguity. I know of a few unsafe paradoxes in Chesterton's more exuberant essays: I can find none in Father Brown. He represents not paradox but plain dissent. He firmly rejects what is bogus in humanistic and materialistic thought, representing Catholic doctrines as, precisely, common sense. It is found always to be sentimental materialism which has thrown people off the track. It is always entertaining, therefore, when materialists in the stories are prepared to invoke the supernatural, only to be brought back by the priest of the exotic mysteries of the Church to an earthly, natural, solution. This takes us back to ‘The Miracle of Moon Crescent’:

‘You all swore you were hard-shelled materialists; and as a matter of fact you were all balanced on the very edge of belief—of belief in almost anything. There are thousands balanced on it today; but it's a sharp, uncomfortable edge to sit on. You won't rest till you believe something; that's why Mr Vandam went through new religions with a toothcomb, and Mr Alboin quotes Scripture for his religion of breathing-exercises, and Mr Fenner grumbles at the very God he denies. That's where you all split. It's natural to believe in the supernatural. It never feels natural to accept only natural things.’

[386]

But the balance against an over-moralistic appreciation of these stories is restored by recalling that in several of them the leg-pull is almost entirely intellectual. I have already stated my preference for the last of the stories over any of the others, but in another mood I might well select the very first, ‘The Blue Cross’. Nowhere else does Father Brown indulge in such epic clowning as in that heroic chase of Flambeau which is made to appear like a leisurely excursion through London. There are moments here that the creator of Holmes might well have given a year's royalties for.

‘“Here,” I says to the chap, who was nearly out of the door, “you've paid too much.”

‘“Oh,” he says, “have we?” … “Sorry to confuse your accounts, but it'll pay for the window.”

‘“What window?” I says.

‘“The one I'm going to break,” he says, and smashes that blessed pane with his umbrella.’

[17]

That is the stuff out of which The Man who was Thursday and The Flying Inn were made. It introduces Father Brown as an inconspicuous little Quixote who is going to be one too many for the magnificent Flambeau; it introduces Aristide Valentin, Chief of the Paris Police, who is chasing Flambeau but cannot find him without encountering Father Brown and using Father Brown's clues. It is the very next story in which Valentin's materialistic passions bring him to his death, and the next but one after that brings Flambeau on to the side of the angels. But that opening story is symbolic of the principle of dissent from the obvious and accepted conventions of life that is the junction between the Father Brown stories and the main line of detective fiction. Father Brown is in his way as romantic (by the same canons we used in judging Holmes romantic) as Holmes himself. The décor is rarely anything but distant, impressionistic, and slightly uncanny. The names are as evocative as Doyle's, ‘Pendragon’, ‘Saradine’, ‘Boulnois’, ‘Bohun’, to say nothing of Flambeau himself. It is the ‘dissent against convention’ colour in romanticism that Father Brown supplies in his own person, leaving the rest to the subsidiary characters and exotic background of the scenes into which he makes his way. For Chesterton human life always was like that—a counterpoint between the familiar and the fantastic. (His devotees will remember his special love for such adjectives as ‘wild’ and such images as ‘sword’); and indeed the Church and its faith were likewise for him a counterpoint between reason and romance—the reason of St Thomas Aquinas and the pageantry of the Mass.

So when the dogmatic content of the stories is relatively distant, they usually turn on the detective writer's device of ‘misdirection’, which is almost universal, and on secular detection, which it is only Chesterton's distinction to have related so intimately with morality. In ‘The Duel of Dr. Hirsch’, ‘The Perishing of the Pendragons’, ‘The Strange Crime of John Boulnois’, ‘The Song of the Flying Fish’ and ‘The Worst Crime in the World’ the point is entirely gained through misdirection. Nobody is made to appear a moral illiterate because he did not see the point; Father Brown is no more than the only person present who follows the Holmesian maxim of accepting the improbable as true when every alternative is clearly impossible, and he does not need to be a priest to do that. On two occasions only do we get anything approaching the ‘140 varieties of cigar ash’—the display of special knowledge. In ‘The Actor and the Alibi’ the solution is plain to Father Brown because he alone of those present sees the suggestiveness of the play's being The School for Scandal (in which one actor is for some time on stage but invisible), while in ‘The Doom of the Darnaways’ the title of a book on a bookshelf, ‘The History of Pope Joan’, suggests, because of its non-existent subject, a non-existent book, a dummy bookshelf, and a secret passage. (This was a shade risky: some people have believed in the existence of a Pope Joan, and Brown's disbelief was dogmatic rather than historical.) But those two very mild displays of special knowledge are the only examples of their kind, and the Father Brown stories are therefore the purest examples in the whole field of detection through faculties which are common to everybody.

Lest there be any residual doubt in the reader's mind about the interpretation of the stories which I am here offering, two more brief quotations should resolve it for good. Half-way through that passionate tale about justice and double standards to which we have already referred, ‘The Arrow of Heaven’, a sceptical character says this to Father Brown:

‘You're very smart, but there's more to you than smartness. Somehow you're the sort of man to whom one wants to tell the truth.’

[339]

And in that introduction to the fourth series, called The Secret of Father Brown, the priest is found among a gathering of people who are leading him on to explain by what kind of intuition he produced so many solutions to puzzles that baffled the experts; they have spoken of the literary detectives, Dupin and Holmes, and the subject of the occult and of ‘second sight’ has begun to rear its head. Somebody says that some crank has been giving lectures on second sight with illustrations from the Father Brown cases. ‘Oh, I say,’ says the priest, ‘this will never do.’ Then the secret:

‘It was I who killed all those people.’

[464]

A long explanation follows, which is the purest moral theology you could find.

‘I try to get inside the murderer. … Indeed, it's more than that, don't you see? I am inside a man, I am always inside a man, moving his arms and legs; but I wait till I know I am inside a murderer, thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his passions; till I have bent myself into the posture of his hunched and peering hatred. …’

[465]

There we go beyond even moral theology; we go direct to the central theology of redemption and atonement, and there is no more to be said about that in this place.

What does concern us is the implications of the statement that this is something you cannot imagine Holmes or Dupin (or Thorndyke or Carrados) being made to say. We have here entirely departed from the ‘superman’ tradition of detection. Father Brown neither looks nor behaves like a superman, and any attempt to build him up into a superman arouses his alarm and anger (as in ‘The Resurrection’). He does not detect crime by making himself larger than the criminal, nor confound the established police force by demonstrating greater skill or education than its members have. There are two layers, as it were, in the structure of thought he always erects to solve a mystery. One is common to him and Holmes—reason, but Father Brown's reason is far less vulnerable than Holmes's. He certainly protests against the distortions of reason which lead others to false conclusions, and this is what all the other classic detectives do. That is one layer. But the other is this direct contradiction of the superman tradition; he pursues his object by making himself less, not greater, than the criminal, by ‘getting inside him’, as he puts it: by never allowing himself to say, ‘That's a thing I could never have done’.

This isn't a brilliant tour-de-force by Chesterton; it is no more than an accurate observation of human nature and human communications. You may outwit a criminal by superior skill, but you do not identify him or vindicate an innocent person by superior moral goodness—the very idea makes nonsense. This is the same kind of operation that Chesterton was engaged in in all his other writings. At the bottom of it is a comprehensive cosmic optimism which has its roots in the eighteenth century and which he shared with nobody else in the twentieth. He really did believe in the fundamental goodness of the common man. Evil in the common man was an exception to the design. That was what nobody else really believed, and what to a much greater extent everybody positively disbelieves now. The normal belief is that man is evil and that goodness is an exception or an accident. To Father Brown any criminal is a good man gone wrong. He is not an evil man who has cut himself off from the comprehension or sympathy of those who labour to be good. Consider the laborious rectitude of all the characters in ‘The Chief Mourner of Marne’, and how vulnerable and brittle the priest shows it to be. The way he talks makes it perfectly plain that if they were the people accused of a crime his patience with them would be as unflappable as is his patience with the man they are now accusing.

One effect of noticing this is to explain the unusual attitude to violence which these stories show. Violence is the ground on which many well-intentioned and sentimental critics attack the detective story. Here anyhow is the evidence for saying that it is an accident of such stories, not a property; for here there is virtually none, apart from that which produced the crime. Who could be less of an apostle of violence than Father Brown? Where in all the literature is violence so certain not to be met with violence? As I shall later argue, the ‘violence’ argument against detective stories is the weakest link in the case brought against them. But even Holmes was a good boxer, and Carrados knew where to lay hands on a revolver.

But there is more to say than simply that Father Brown was non-violent. Chesterton himself was a study in controlled and directed violence. His writing is full of the imagery of war, wildness, and power. Himself a massively peaceable person, he was called by the Pope himself at the time of his death a ‘Defender of the Faith’ (an expression used in a Papal pronouncement only once before in history, and then of an equally corpulent but less felicitous character in Catholic history, King Henry VIII); but in that ‘Defender’ the militancy of Chesterton's crusade against error and despair was by design implied. Neither he nor his creature, Father Brown, was incapable of anger, or of courage, or of decisive dissent from a popular view. They were both men of violent passion and of controlled moral strength. Their violence was harnessed to actions that were palpably and unquestionably peaceable: the author's in his emphatic and polemical prose (to say nothing of his poetry), the creature's in his passion against hypocrisy and distorted thought.

Chesterton, we said, was the only author of detection who has written so much else in so many literary forms. Other detective authors have written non-detective fiction, and one or two others have written even theology; and a few people have written one or two detective tales as a sideline from the main track of quite different work. Only with Chesterton do we have a major contribution to detective literature which is doing the same thing as his other work is doing—using fantastic means instead of argumentative means to get the same thing said about something of primary importance, in this case his optimism about the common man's common sense. Father Brown's arguments against the erratic judgments of those whose company he kept are the same kind of argument which Chesterton used against the moral cranks of his time (as he judged them); without entering into debate here on the question whether he was right about eugenics, the Suffragettes, or the then modernistic theology of the Bishop of Birmingham (Dr Barnes—a special enemy of his), it is clear that the people who are made to look ridiculous in the stories are the same people who are pulverised in the essays.

I have often wondered, therefore, why the Father Brown stories of Chesterton are of so different a quality from the detective stories, long or short, of Ronald Knox. Knox (1888–1957) was Chesterton's younger contemporary, and an equally brilliant essayist, equally committed to the defence of a Catholic Church which was still subject to much sentimental and ignorant popular calumny. Knox was as entertaining as Chesterton in his way, as popular a writer, and a far more sought-after public speaker. His detective stories are as workmanlike and unmemorable as a hymn-tune by Elgar. They show all the surface excellences of good writing (and in the 1920's, when he wrote them, that was surely something), but there was not a character in them who stayed in the mind after the book was closed, neither was there a plot or situation which anyone remembers with any sense of revelation. So far as they are anything, they are late classical rather than high romantic in style—Thorndyke rather than Christie or Sayers. But I fancy the reason can be extracted from what we have just said. It is a matter of history that Knox wrote his detective stories to get funds to furnish the new Catholic Chaplaincy at Oxford. They had nothing more than that to do with what in the rest of his literary work he was about. Moreover, Knox's was a colder, more analytical mind. He was a wit, not, like Chesterton, a humorist. He could compose Ximenes crosswords and write those brilliant ‘Essays in Satire’; he could burlesque and parody in more languages than one; in these ways he could do things that Chesterton could not have done if his next meal depended on doing them. This meant that he was one of those writers—and this is not to say a word against them—who in their writings can switch out or switch in their personal convictions as the subject requires. Such men are usually better writers than those who cannot switch their convictions out, but Chesterton was of the other kind, and the gravamen of the charge that his detractors bring against the highly idiosyncratic manner of his writing is precisely that.

It was this, then, that made Chesterton, through the accident of his hitting on a successful detective form, a major contributor to the literature. Having found his way into this field, he managed in the Father Brown stories to raise all the most awkward questions which make it difficult to dismiss the form as a trivialisation of the novelist's art. Having said that, I should be prepared to defend the proposition that his lighter tales, ‘The Club of Queer Trades’ and ‘The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond’, are just as much ‘pure’ Chesterton as Father Brown is. They, like the last, and in some ways (compared with the earlier ones) apocryphal Father Brown stories, ‘The Scandal of Father Brown’, are amiable intellectual leg-pulls, studies in the resolution of incongruities, fantasies in logic that nobody else could have written. At the same time it has to be said that had he written them but not created Father Brown, Chesterton would not have qualified as a detective writer, while had he written the Father Brown tales but not those others, he would not have diminished his reputation as a crusader against humbug.

No: there is humbug in Holmes, but there is none here. It will remain an open question whether the Father Brown stories lifted themselves, by their own distinction, clean out of the detective field, or whether we may use them as evidence for arguments yet to come about the literature. I am assuming the second answer to be right, but having done so I have made everything much more difficult than it otherwise would have been.

Note

1. Golden Cross, 402.