SOURCE: “Detectives and Apocalypses,” in G. K. Chesterton, Twayne Publishers, 1974, pp. 120–44.

Describing the fiction of the 1890's, one critic states that “the sane tradition of English fiction by which a delicate balance was maintained between realism and romance rarely broke down.”¹ That delicate balance was upset, of course, with the new century when it became obvious that fiction-writers had gravitated into two camps: that of the Realists and Naturalists—Americans like Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, English writers like Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, and young James Joyce; and a smaller group of “romancers” like Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, James Barrie, William Butler Yeats, and Chesterton himself.

As has been observed, Chesterton the critic had opted against “the vulgarity that is called realism,” wielding his prejudice most effectively against those Realists who were always condemning Dickens for his “melodramas” and “caricatures.”² Chesterton's critical animus against “realism” is of a piece with the “anti-realism” of his fiction. The word “fiction” is used deliberately because he did not write “novels” so much as “romances” or “fictions”: he is more safely located in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott than in that of Jane Austen. In fact, Chesterton's romances resist all the allurements of the modern novel (inherited largely from Jane Austen): the bourgeois ambience, the cool efficiency of style, the psychological interest, and the materialistic value system.

Chesterton's romances are not “pure” romances; they are combined with what Northrop Frye calls “anatomies”—fictions which are essentially written for purposes of presenting and analyzing ideas. Once again one detects in Chesterton that sheer love of ideas—even above his love of humans—that sensation of a pulsing vitality in all ideas and concepts. His life was spent pouring his ideas into his weekly columns, letters to editors, book-length studies, debates with Socialists and atheists, and lectures to generally enchanted audiences. His seventeen volumes of fiction (more than Dickens wrote) may be considered as an important extension of this intellectual or propagandistic activity.

Although these romance-anatomies have their defenders—the small coterie of Chestertonians—they remain generally unread and unmentioned by historians of the novel. The probable source of this critical disapproval is not their didacticism (which is, in spite of accepted tradition, epidemic in the modern novel) but Chesterton's candor about it. Like Anthony Trollope before him, Chesterton scorned the tidiness of modern critical taste; and, as has been seen, he confessed to believing in the “usefulness” of fiction. He firmly held to the idea that “you cannot tell a story without the idea of pursuing a purpose and sticking to a point.”³

The concentration on “purpose” and “point” and the cavalier use of the word “story” (instead of the critically more fashionable “plot”) suggest something of his insouciance about the esthetics of fiction—and also explain a certain narrowness of range in his own fictions. In matters of plotting, for example, Chesterton's romances are organized around only two types of mythos: that of the detective questing for the truth and that of an Armageddon involving the struggle of some hero (usually with a small band of followers) against an overwhelmingly superior enemy. The two myths, alternating through his fictions and sometimes appearing together, undoubtedly reflect Chesterton's self-concept—his vision of his struggle in modern life, his desire to uncover the truth, and his isolation in the important controversies of his age.

I FATHER BROWN

For Chesterton, who was himself addicted to reading detective stories, this popular genre was not merely escapist amusement for the masses but a powerful vehicle for transmitting the moral, religious, and political ideals of society. Such stories, “the centre of a million flaming imaginations,” were much more important than the so-called “literary masterpieces”—and especially the more recent ones that are merely “books recommending profligacy and pessimism.” To Chesterton, the universal popularity of the detective story proves an important point: “The simple need for some world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important.”⁴ Thus, Chesterton found both philosophical and pragmatic reasons for resorting to the detective mode. In five Father Brown collections (or a total of 51 stories) and five other books in which crime detection is the central mythos, he revealed how easily he could work with the mode.

The Father Brown stories, appearing from 1910 to 1935 in such journals as Storyteller and Pall Mall Magazine, are by far the most popular and most widely known works that Chesterton ever wrote. They were eventually collected into five books: The Innocence of Father Brown (1911); The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914); The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926); The Secret of Father Brown (1927); and The Scandal of Father Brown (1935). The success and popularity of the Father Brown stories (they are still widely reprinted today) probably derive from their basis in Chesterton's experience. The hero of the stories, a short, squat, helpless-appearing Catholic priest, was based on an actual priest, Father (later Monsignor) John O'Connor, a lifelong friend of Chesterton who received the author into the Catholic faith.

The original inspirations for the stories were Chesterton's discovery of Father O'Connor's profound knowledge of the depths of human depravity, and a conversation at a dinner party during which two brash Cambridge students commented sarcastically about the naïveté of modern Christian priests.⁵ Chesterton was struck by the paradox of an outwardly innocent appearance (his hero's “blank expression like an idiot's” also recalls Mr. Pickwick) and his deep understanding of sin and evil. A large part of the lasting charm of these stories is born in the striking contrast between the childlike hero and the darkly sinful situations in which he is placed.

It is difficult to detect (as some critics claim to do) any important change in the Father Brown stories as Chesterton grew older. Like any successful journeyman writer, he realized that it was unwise to change a profitable formula that one had hit upon; therefore, the general format of the stories is fairly consistent. The setting is usually recherché: a mansion, a resort, a plush hotel, or a restaurant. As though the lower-classes are immune to scandal or violence, the main characters are usually drawn from the aristocracy, the upper middle-class, or the hangers-on of either-intelligentsia, professional men, high civil servants, or artists. Mixed with these characters is a touch of the exotic in the form of eccentrics, mystics, seers, magicians, cult-worshippers, fakirs, or sinister-looking distant relatives.

A familiar formula appears: the early suspicions fall on one of the exotics, but the suspect proves to be innocent while one of his more respectable friends is revealed to be the culprit. The range of situations in which this formula is expressed is fairly narrow; frequently, it is a variation of the “purloined letter” motif (a crime is committed, and the clues somehow remain unseen although in plain view) or the “closed room” situation (some crime is committed, and the criminal escapes from an inescapable situation).

Chesterton's detective makes a complete break with Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin and with A. Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes “ratiocinative” tradition of the detective story. Father Brown loses no opportunity to disparage Holmes, whom he ridicules for living in a lonely house with his “opium and acrostics.”⁶ Father Brown‘s detective pursuits are truly Chestertonian in that they shun the techniques of science and the undiluted rational powers of man. “Mere facts are commonplace,” says Father Brown, who prefers intuition of the truth, which depends on a deep knowledge of the human heart instead of methodical observation. “I go by a man's eyes and voice, don't you know, and whether his family seems happy, and by what subjects he chooses and avoids.”⁷ In a startling echo of Blake, Father Brown attributes his success to the fact that “I am a man and therefore have all devils in my heart.”⁸

But Chesterton and his hero are not disciples of Freud. Father Brown rejects “All this deeper psychology” as “improbable.” His psychology is Aristotelian, or Catholic, resting on the assumption that human psychology is very often “simpler than you understand.”⁹ A pleasant young man who had been disinherited can be expected to do anything, even commit murder; a lustful woman when linked to an older husband will very likely attempt to gain her freedom; pride can so infect a man that he will commit suicide in order to incriminate a man who has insulted him.

In addition to this knowledge of the “human heart,” Chesterton's detective is guided by certain theological truths. He automatically suspects anyone who “philosophizes along those lines of orientalism and recurrence and reincarnation.”¹⁰ In a frequently anthologized story, “The Blue Cross,” he captures the arch-criminal Flambeau (later to become Father Brown's good friend and a detective), when Flambeau, disguised as a priest, argues the heresy that reason is completely untrustworthy.¹¹ Nor does Chesterton always succeed at keeping his social and political biases out of his stories: Father Brown's favorite rule of thumb is that, although all men are potential sinners and criminals, one human type that “tends at times to be more utterly godless than another” is the “brutal sort of business man.”¹²

Father Brown's techniques—or non-techniques—too often result in a kind of “miraculous insight,” as one critic asserts, that makes the game hardly worth playing after a while. One accepts, as one must of all detectives, the donnée of the hero's presence at the scene of the crime. What is tedious is the ease with which the hero solves his cases on the basis of intuition. The recurrent formula soon becomes wearisome: a number of suspects are paraded before the reader, clues are given or withheld, and Father Brown after some discussion announces that he knows—and has always known—the identity of the criminal. The particular psychological insight or theological maxim is then displayed for the reader's edification, and the story ends.

The preachments, the Gothic coloration of setting and character, and the swift rendering of atmosphere, have served to make Chesterton one of the most popular writers of detective fiction in the twentieth century and at one time the president of the Detective Club—a post which he filled with predictable seriousness. However, these stories are important parts of his total work only for those who are addicted to the genre. For most readers, only the unusual portrait of Father Brown—perhaps Chesterton's only fully developed fictional creation—can be of lasting interest. It is doubtful that even Chesterton would have contended that these fifty-one stories are among his finest achievements.

II OTHER DETECTIVE FICTIONS

The didacticism of the Father Brown stories is relatively restrained in comparison with several other detective fictions which seem to preach the Chestertonian doctrine unremittingly. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922) displays, against the postwar background, a hero whose hobby is the “phenomena of phosphorescence,” or, less cutely, the political corruption of the modern state. The criminals prove to be estimable social figures such as a Prime Minister who improbably strangles a financier (decidedly Jewish) because he is, equally improbably, a dictator of English foreign policy. Horne Fisher's dark night of the soul occurs when he discovers that his own family has rigged an election against him in favor of a Disraeli-like “foreign vermin” who has “arranged the Egyptian Loan and Lord knows what else.” In a final Armageddon, the hero dies leading an army against a horde of Chinese coolies imported by “foreign interests” to compete with the English peasantry in the labor market.

The stories of The Man Who Knew Too Much are a useful litmus indicator of Chesterton's gloom in the years after the war, a despair which one may also observe in such works as Fancies versus Fads, written at the same time. The death of the hero may be the author's image of his own role as a prophet without honor who must die eventually in defense of his country's most cherished traditions.

Gabriel Gale, the hero of The Poet and the Lunatics (1929) continues Horne Fisher's struggles on more philosophical ground: Gale is a defender of feeling, intuition, the religious spirit, who is soon oppressed by various “usurers” and Semitic doctors. When they threaten to throw him into a lunatic asylum, one of his “mad” friends holds these scientists and modernists at bay with a gun just long enough for Gale to escape to his small freehold. There he can indulge himself endlessly by painting satiric portraits of his enemies, certain that on his own property the state cannot intervene. The idyllic ending may be Chesterton's own gratuitous dream projection of a life dedicated to innocent art without the fear of being persecuted by a Prussianized society.

Least impressive of Chesterton's fictions are the contrived Four Faultless Felons (1930) and the utterly charmless The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond (1937). The first centers on the gimmickry of a “Club of Misunderstood Men,” who are publicly scorned for crimes and pecadilloes which are secretly committed for the greater glory of God; thus one clubman plays the role of fastidious gourmand before the eyes of a hostile society, but secretly is an ascetic who detests the role—preferring to bear it as a kind of cross. In the second book, there are even more tedious mystifications and situations, presided over by a protagonist, Mr. Pond, who is wooden beyond belief despite a promising fish-like appearance. One may add that the liveliest writing in both books appears when Chesterton is inveighing against modern liberalism, science, the Jewish influence on England, and materialism.

III THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL

More consequential than Chesterton's detective fictions, including the Father Brown stories, are his romances, all of which take the form of apocalyptic myths. In each of them a stalwart hero and a group of followers confront the forces of evil in some grand, climactic struggle. Of these, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) must be ranked supreme, and may be the most quintessentially Chestertonian romance. He himself tended to deprecate this achievement in later years, not because his views had changed but because he thought the book was incomplete in its social vision. Nevertheless, he also had a lasting affection (as we can observe in his Autobiography and elsewhere) for what he modestly called a “fortunately forgotten book.”¹³

The Napoleon of Notting Hill sprang naturally out of the climate of the Boer War, the main lesson of which, its author said, was “that a small nation had a positive value of its own.”¹⁴ In an interview, he related how his anti-imperialistic bias had crystallized during a walk through a quaint section of London, possibly Notting Hill itself:

There is such a thing as a dilated, or swelled head. But the typical case of a creature who dilated equally all round is that of the imperially-minded frog who wanted to be a bull, and dilated until he burst. … In that half second of time, gazing with rapt admiration at the row of little shops, nobly flanked by a small pub and a small church, I discovered that not only was I against the plutocrats, I was against the idealists. In the comparatively crystalline air of that romantic village I heard the clear call of a trumpet. And, once for all, I drew my sword—purchased in the old curiosity shop—in defence of Notting Hill.¹⁵

More than the Boer War and Chamberlain's Imperialism was troubling Chesterton at the time. In the Autobiography he relates that his general malaise at the time—a kind of “madness”—led him “in the direction of some vague and visionary revolt against the prosaic flatness of nineteenth century city and civilization … the feeling that those imprisoned in these inhuman outlines were human beings; that it was a bad thing that living souls should be thus feebly and crudely represented by houses like ill-drawn diagrams of Euclid, or streets and railways like dingy sections of machinery” (132). The intellectual impetus behind The Napoleon, then, is the Ruskinian esthetic—that human ills derive partly from an ugly environment and vice versa.

The book opens with a kind of anti-Utopia of 1984: a servile England of the future is populated mainly by robot-like functionaries, all uniformed in bowlers and black suits, and armed with umbrellas. “Everything in that age had become mechanical.” The government runs smoothly not because the citizens love it but because they have lost their faith in revolution; it is a “dull popular despotism without illusion.” The only element of chance or adventure—perhaps reflecting Chesterton's belief that no system can be completely rational—is that the king is chosen periodically by lot; the system has worked so well in the past that no one expects that it will ever blunder.

The plot begins when the system selects as the next king a government functionary named Auberon Quin, who is inexplicably unlike his fellow clerks. A kind of early Dadaist, he is given to telling pointless stories, standing on his head on the sidewalk, and bearing like a grail the accumulated nonsense of the human race. (Said to be based on Max Beerbohm, Auberon Quin's name is significant: the Auberon probably alludes to the king of the fairies, and the Quin may be a reference to the madcap eighteenth-century English actor.) What is unexplained is how Quin's zaniness and imaginative powers could have survived the crushing forces of the Orwellian Superstate that Chesterton describes.

As soon as Quin is crowned, he begins to impose his mad vision on his materialistic polity. His main goal is to reestablish the past, particularly the local pride that sections of London once had; he revives Medieval liveries, rituals, local holidays, costumes, and heraldry. The pragmatic and mechanical are displaced by the beauty of the ritualistic; highway building and urban development are brought to a halt.

Quin's program accelerates with the appearance of a lunatic figure named Adam Wayne, who enthusiastically embraces the gospel of Medieval smallness. As a man of pure feeling, he deplores the world's becoming “more and more modern … practical … bustling and rational.” Better than Quin he perceives that the progressive achievements of modern society have had their psychological effects: “What a farce is this modern liberality. Freedom of speech means practically in our modern civilization that we must only talk about unimportant things. We must not talk about religion for that is illiberal. … It cannot last. Something must break this strange indifference, this strange dreamy egoism, this strange loneliness of millions in a crowd. Something must break it. Why should it not be you and I?”¹⁶

With Quin's approval, Wayne pledges his life to implementing Quin's plans. The battle is joined when he prevents the plutocrats from levelling Notting Hill in order to build a railroad. In the colorful battles that follow, Adam Wayne's zeal enables him to rout the forces of materialism and modernism. The Armageddon occurs in the “Battle of the Lamps,” so-called because Wayne defeats his enemies in pitch darkness by snuffing out the man-made street lamps which the makers thought were infallible. With this success, the Medieval cause of the two heroes spreads rapidly through England; localities are redeemed from their long sleep of modernism; the old England dreamed of by Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris is suddenly revived.

In The Coloured Lands, Chesterton reminisced about the books of his youth, saying that they were “mostly about the beauty and necessity of wonder” (157). The Napoleon of Notting Hill shows Chesterton as a kind of Pre-Raphaelite, for he preaches the esthetic doctrine of strangeness and beauty as antidotes for the progress of the material world. What is missing on Notting Hill is an interest in religion; cathedrals exist, but only as part of the local color. The Napoleon of Notting Hill is Chesterton's dream vision, a catharsis of the frustrations he felt in the early years of the century, but the novel still lacks a religious center because he himself had not settled into a religious commitment.

Chesterton's next piece of fiction The Club of Queer Trades (1905) continues the theme of “the beauty and necessity of wonder,” albeit on a much more didactic level. The fantasy of a Medieval society in the twentieth century is abandoned for a mechanical plot device: an “Adventure and Romance Agency” which hires itself out to bring romance into the lives of those bored by mechanical routine. The Agency sends out “threatening letters,” arranges for “secret meetings” and “close escapes,” brings together “mysterious strangers,” and so on. Chesterton's own psychological needs are perhaps revealed in the Agency's boast that it provides the customer “his childhood, that godlike time when we can act stories, be our own heroes, and at the same instance dance and dream.”¹⁷

IV THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY

If one wishes to date the beginning of Chesterton's commitment to religion as an answer to the problems of modern man, it is safe to point to 1908, the year of both Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday. In a later essay, he said that the novel was written “in the middle of a thick London fog of positive pessimism and materialism,”¹⁸ and the dedication to E. C. Bentley speaks of that era when

A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather, Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.¹⁹

The subtitle A Nightmare, underscores one of its features (and also relates it to almost all his other romances).²⁰ In the nightmare the hero, a young poet named Syme, hears of a Super-Council of Anarchists bent on the destruction of society, law, and religion. When Syme vows to fight this monstrous conspiracy, he joins a chapter of detectives whose sole purpose is to track down and destroy the anarchists. By accident, he is then introduced into a meeting of the Council of Seven Days, the very Anarchist Super-Council he has been seeking. The strange name is derived from the fact that its seven members carry the names of the days: the leader of the Council is a large, jovial, almost Falstaffian figure named Sunday; and he is strangely out of place, thinks Syme, at a meeting of such a sinister group. When Syme boldly asks to be made the replacement for a recently deceased member, Thursday, he is welcomed into the group.

Once inside the group, the hero has misgivings; he seems alone, cut off from all safety, surrounded by evil. In a rapid succession of shocking episodes, each of the others on the Council is revealed to be a detective enlisted in the same agency to fight the Anarchist Council; and each has been sworn in by the same large, hidden figure in a dark room. Although appearing to be Anarchists, they are really members of the police; they have been both Good and Evil, legal and illegal.

In a final fantastic sequence, the gross but harmless figure Sunday flies in a balloon to his estate, pursued all the way by his mystified lieutenants. Sunday, of course, proves to have two sides: he is Chief Anarchist and Chief of Detectives; he is the gay trickster; he is anarchic; he defies the codes of society; he is absent-minded and innocent; he is always well-meaning. (Chesterton was willing to admit that there was a touch of self-portraiture in Sunday.)²¹

Sunday is like nature itself, or the universe; he is, indeed, Pan—the whole world, all of life. He shows that while life may appear to be dark, nasty, and brutish from one angle, from another and more informed point of view, it appears to be good. It is a matter of an individual's choosing; in having chosen to enlist in the fight against evil and nihilism, the detectives have transformed Sunday into what he really is. Their acceptance of life brings them into harmony with it; they find themselves accepted and loved by Sunday, who tells them at his mansion that they can now find “pleasure in everything.” Their only argument now is with one another: each is sure that Sunday's estate is modeled on the scenes of his own youth. What they have gained with their understanding of Sunday is the innocent vision of youth which Chesterton always extolled.

The Man Who Was Thursday still presents problems for the critics since it seems to be teaching the highly unChestertonian message that there is no evil, that evil is an illusion, that things are not what they seem. Recognizing the ambiguity, Chesterton later explained, “I was not then considering whether anything is really evil, but whether everything is really evil; and in relation to the latter nightmare it does still seem to be relevant to say that nightmares are not true.”²² The operative word here is “everything”; the problem is not the relativity of values but the discovery that—as the Dedication emphasizes—one might take a small step in finding some thing good in spite of the pessimism and gloom of the Edwardian period.

Even while writing, though, Chesterton must have sensed the shaky philosophical ground upon which he stood. In the last scene, while a general Dickensian reconciliation is occurring at a magnificently described masked ball, a Satanic figure steps forward to challenge Sunday again. The relativistic conflict of most of the book makes way for pure Manicheism. “Satan” demands to know the meaning of the masquerade that Sunday has arranged. Why were the detective-anarchists forced in ignorance to play two roles at once? Why were they not granted the meaning of the game without the mummery, the deceit, the struggle, the final embarrassment?

The answer that Sunday gives is straight out of Browning's “Rabbi Ben Ezra.” The detectives, Sunday informs everybody, were made to fight “evil,” or think they were fighting “evil,” “so that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter.” The struggle against evil, the very sense of an evil to be overcome—has endowed the detectives with the moral virtue spoken of by Rabbi Ben Ezra, who teaches that evil is “Machinery just meant / To give thy soul its bent.”

Chesterton, however, moves beyond Browning's concept of evil. The Tempter still confronts Sunday with piercing questions; he accuses Sunday of not having suffered the fear and doubt felt by his lieutenants during their dark agony. Sunday painfully replies, in the words of Christ, “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?” As the book ends, Syme's nightmare is shattered by this question, which stands as a beacon now for the hero, for Chesterton, and for the reader. The Man Who Was Thursday is a milestone in Chesterton's progress from the secular-Medieval fantasies of The Napoleon of Notting Hill to the complete acceptance of Christian mystery and duty. Serenity and hope, if it can be found at all, will come to the individual who is willing to accept the burden of the Cross.

V THE BALL AND THE CROSS

The religious strain is more accentuated in Chesterton's next romance, The Ball and the Cross (U.S., 1909; England, 1910). The title alludes to the ornaments on the dome of St. Paul's cathedral in London; the ball represents, to Chesterton, the world, its rationalism, its completeness and self-sufficiency; the cross symbolizes the paradoxical religion toward which mankind strives. In a prefatory chapter, we are shown the archfiend Lucifer, in a flying machine, depositing an eccentric monk from an unnamed Belkan country on the dome of St. Paul's. The monk must make the dangerous descent from the ball and cross to the safety of the ground. The main effect of this preamble is to establish the reality of two forces, Good and Evil, which had been left rather ambiguous in The Man Who Was Thursday.

The main plot involves a conflict between two young men, John Turnbull, a liberal publisher of an unpopular newspaper “The Atheist,” and a young Scottish Catholic named Evan MacIan. They are attempting to fight a duel on the question of the truth of the Virgin Mary. Everywhere they meet with stupefied indifference (the materialistic and pragmatic mind cannot comprehend the purpose of such a quarrel) or the formal opposition of the government. Most of the book is devoted to their futile attempts to fight the duel (“We must kill each other—or convert each other”), and the means by which their attempts are thwarted by well-meaning secularists or by malicious powers of organized society.

Eventually, they find themselves prisoners in an insane asylum—Chesterton's preeminent symbol of modern society. The prisoners are not just MacIan and Turnbull, but all those who take the quarrel seriously; free to roam around outside are those loyal to a secular world of Science and Efficiency. In such a milieu, the two antagonists (like those in Thursday) naturally discover that they have much in common and are quickly reconciled. They also discover that a third force—the force of modern science, of power divorced from morality—is determined to destroy them. Turnbull, the modern liberal, is closer to MacIan than either of them had supposed; they are both moralists concerned with “ends.” Turnbull's desire for power has always been for the purpose of aiding humanity, and both are fighting Chesterton's bête noire, Prussianism, the dehumanized use of human beings. (In “Letters to an Old Garibaldian,” 1915, Chesterton interpreted World War I as a union of Catholic Italy and Liberal England—otherwise quite different—against the Prussian hordes.) Both the Catholic and Liberal are Kantians, determined to treat the individual as an end in himself, not as a means to an end.

Chesterton's alarm is generated by the endless aggrandizement of science. In a dream, Turnbull sees that his own methodology of rationalism leads nowhere since it cannot reveal if man has a soul; and, if Turnbull has no soul, the scientists who hold him captive will have little reason to spare him. Turnbull resigns his atheistic rationalism (significantly because of this irrational dream) and adopts an attitude of active love and respect for his fellow man. Each of the two heroes has been guided by some teleology, and they have been considered “mad” by a world that no longer has a teleological viewpoint. Chesterton makes clear that their teleologies are as yet incomplete; Turnbull's humanism is admirable but has no solid basis; MacIan's religious fervor, though well-meaning, is a selfish faith divorced from reason. Symbolically, they occupy cells “B” and “C” in the insane asylum.

The resident of cell “A” is the Balkan monk of the Preface, who is more feared by the authorities because he combines the humanism of Turnbull and the religious faith of MacIan without destroying either. He is, in a sense, a Hegelian synthesis of these two opponents and another version of Sunday in The Man Who Was Thursday. In a crucial scene, Turnbull and MacIan enter the cell to see the monk; he is, at the same time, both ancient yet youthful, venerable and childlike; gloomy and weighted with knowledge, yet gay, even comic; living meagerly but still radiating an inner strength; dwarfish, but gigantic in the magnetic influence he exerts. Like Sunday, he is a reconciliation of these opposites—the peace that passeth understanding, the rare mystery of self-sacrifice to faith. His only words to the heroes, as he points to a nail-like projection in the wall, is a barely intelligible, “Spike is best”—again the recommendation of Christian suffering and martyrdom.

In the final scene, the monk miraculously leads all the prisoners safely through the fire which levels the asylum. The modern headquarters of amoral science is razed by the peasants who live nearby and who represent Chesterton's continual hope for the world. The devil-doctor (now plainly identified as Lucifer) escapes in his airplane, and Turnbull and MacIan fall to their knees in worshipful incomprehension of the miracles wrought by the monk.

The Ball and the Cross is an advance over The Man Who Was Thursday not as a work of art but as a religious statement that depicts Chesterton's growing convictions about Christianity. The ambiguities of The Man Who Was Thursday are no longer in evidence: Evil is present and active throughout the book, first as an actual character in the Preface, then as the doctor of the asylum; Good is clearly defined by the character of the monk. Because of this strong polarization of forces, the less carefully drawn characters, and the more overt themes, this romance is a lesser esthetic achievement.

VI MANALIVE

Manalive (1912) returns somewhat unexpectedly to the lessons of The Club of Queer Trades—and primarily to the theme of modern man's need for adventure and romance. The decline of Chesterton's artistic powers is somewhat indicated by the name of his hero: Innocent Smith. Like the clients of the “Adventure and Romance Agency,” Innocent renews romance and excitement in his own life by such stratagems as sneaking into his own house like a burglar, eloping with his wife repeatedly in order to retain the romance in their marriage, and walking around the earth to discover how good his home is. For others who have wearied of life and now carelessly condemn the riches of this world, he offers rebirth and renewal by the simple expedient of holding a pistol in their faces. The shock of imminent death alerts them to the wonders and goodness of life.

When Innocent Smith arrives at Beacon House in a symbolically reanimating high wind, he soon has the once-bored residents dancing, singing, painting, picnicking on the roof, and falling in love. He prevails on them—taking a leaf from Adam Wayne—to establish their own “sovereign state” at Beacon House, one complete with laws, customs, and rituals. After Beacon House and its citizens are brought back to life, a conflict is introduced with the arrival of the usual assortment of enemies determined to stop the spread of Smith's seditious doctrines: Dr. Herbert Warner, the psychologist-criminologist; Dr. Cyrus Pym, a criminological expert from America; and Moses Gould, a “small, resilient Jew.” Chesterton's familiar cluster of devils is represented by psychology, sociology, Americanization, science, and the Jews. Wishing to place Innocent Smith in a “lunatic asylum,” they are thwarted only because the trial is held at Beacon House according to the laws of the new “state.” The combination of Smith's irrepressible Dadaism, the newly won Romanticism of the Beaconians, and their contempt for the rules of evidence overthrow the minions of science and rationalism. Innocent Smith disappears in another wind to take his message to others locked in the ice of custom and reason.

Plainly, this piece of fiction is a lesser one than we have seen so far; and its worst failing is the absolutely bloodless portrait of its characters, including the hero. The characters might come alive if, as in Notting Hill, the book had been built on only one plot situation, however fantastic. However, too many fantasies complete for attention—the redemption of the Beaconians, the walk around the world, the elopements with the wife, the threats to the pessimists with a pistol, and the trial itself. In all this “business,” the characters, who are feebly conceived in the first place, seem all the more flaccid; and the didactic intent becomes more exigent and annoying.

VI THE FLYING INN

The Flying Inn (1914) has more to recommend it as both art and preachment because Chesterton's wrath is really stirred by the threats to England of prohibition, Islam, and plutocracy. The villain of the piece is Lord Ivywood, a wealthy Puritanical aristocrat who is somehow able to persuade his colleagues in Parliament to close the inns of England. He finds intellectual support for his prejudice against alcohol in the doctrine of Islam, which is being propagandized in England by Ivywood's accomplice, Misysra Ammon, a fake prophet from the Middle East.

Opposed to Ivywood and Ammon—and the adoring “blue-stockings” attracted to an insane cause—are Humphrey Pump, owner of “The Old Ship” inn, and Captain Patrick Dalroy, a romantic Irish adventurer. When they discover the loophole in Ivywood's new law (that alcohol may be served wherever an inn sign is posted), they uproot the sign of “The Old Ship,” load an automobile with barrels of drink, and set out on a cross-country odyssey to dispense liquor to the suffering natives.

As the two heroes in flight are pursued by the forces of evil, the book takes something of the shape of The Ball and the Cross. Ivywood has the help not only of the plutocrats but of the leaders of government (the focus on these corrupt politicians is symptomatic of Chesterton's state of mind after the Marconi affair the previous year), all of whom are well-disposed to passing prohibition laws if they do not affect the wealthy.

The other target of The Flying Inn is the religion of Islam, which Chesterton believed was capturing the imagination of many British intelligentsia in the years before the war. Chesterton condemns not just the prohibitionist element in the Islamic religion; he strongly suggests that Ivywood is destroying the concept of the family—has, indeed, begun to gather a harem on his estate. The very decor of his estate is the repetitious abstract patterning, devoid of any human content, that is indigenous to the Middle East. Islam, for Chesterton, is a serious menace to all the social and religious values of England and the West. Since some Armageddon must occur, the Christians under Dalroy (flying the flag of St. George) meet and defeat the sepoy troops of Ivywood and rescue the heroine from his harem.

VIII TALES OF THE LONG BOW

The formula of The Flying Inn is repeated in Tales of the Long Bow (1925) with almost no change, a sign perhaps of a waning of Chesterton's imagination. This time the battle is between the peasants of England, who wish to continue farming and raising pigs as they have for centuries, and the big business interests, who wish to monopolize the nation's entire pork production. Several faceless, indistinguishable heroes borrow the heraldic sign of the Blue Boar from a nearby inn and begin the struggle against the plutocrats. Calling themselves at first the “Lunatic Asylum,” they eventually organize under the tutelary protection of Gurth (Scott's swineherd in Ivanhoe, and an example to Carlyle of how the Medieval slave was contented and well-fed, although lacking freedom).

The tide of battle changes when one of the American moguls throws his support to the peasants and helps to arm them as “The League of the Long Bow,” descendent from the ancient English yeomanry. The battle lines are drawn, complete with artillery and airplanes; and in the Armageddon that follows the forces of modernism are defeated because of a breakdown in their organization.

The book is one of Chesterton's least successful romance-anatomies; it lacks even the rudiments of characterization and is crushed by the absurdities of the plot. One striking scene, however, is that of the Thames River (or the layer of industrial sludge on its surface) being set afire, while in the background someone recites the Spenserian (or Eliotic) refrain, “Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song.” This scene may also be among the first descriptions in modern fiction of industrial pollution. Another imaginative motif is the career of Horace Hunter, an incompetent bureaucrat whose rise to the inner circles of British government is sporadically charted in the course of the book. His seemingly inevitable, or at least effortless, elevation is a witty comment on the power of the boot-licking technocrat in industrial science. These few triumphant touches are insufficient, however, to sustain the otherwise lifeless and limp work that generally permeates Tales of the Long Bow.

IX THE RETURN OF DON QUIXOTE

The Return of Don Quixote (1927), Chesterton's last booklength romance, has a familiar opening situation; both the title and the situation are deceptively artificial and derivative. Again the reader is presented with a small group of rebels against society: the forces of good are dilettantish aristocrats fascinated by things Medieval. Their dabbling in social reform takes a serious turn when they discover the plight of the laborers in the nearby mill town (the situation is a weak imitation of Dickens's Hard Times). Organizing for battle under the leadership of a mild-mannered librarian named Herne (who wears a Robin Hood costume), they overthrow the powers of the industrial state and establish a Utopia with Herne as chief executive.

Also familiar to the reader is the material of the subplot, which involves an older man named Hendry, an artisan once famous for the unequalled artist's oils that he manufactured in his private laboratory. Hendry's small business has been destroyed by the ruinous competition with plutocracy, and he himself has been threatened with incarceration in an insane asylum because he refuses to divulge the secrets of his manufacturing process. Hendry is finally saved by the intercession of Murrel, one of Herne's lieutenants, who prevents the old man's falling into the hands of a Dr. Gambrell. This villain is the bureaucratscientist who is described as having “the power to invade this house and break up this family and [to] do what he liked with this member of it.”

The clear polarities and familiar character-types of the earlier romances emerge as the main materials. However, the typical conflict of plutocracy versus intelligentsia and peasants is disarranged into a three-cornered struggle because the workers have no faith in, or love for, the Medieval dreams of Herne's dilettantes. (Perhaps their lack of faith arises from their not being a true peasantry but urban slaves.) The Armageddon, in fact, involves the aristocrats under Herne and the workers led by the union leader Braintree. The tragic problem of social injustice shades into irony when, after the laboring classes are defeated, Braintree is placed on trial for sedition. He is as contemptuous of the rampant Medievalism of Herne's Utopia as any plutocrat of The Napoleon of Notting Hill.

In such confusion, what can an intelligent man do? Herne's answer is to relinquish the powers which he had so arduously won. Chesterton makes clear Herne's realization that his unlimited powers can only lead to corruption and injustice; for a victory at Armageddon is not a guarantee that the winner will be humane and wise. The only answer is the restriction of power; Herne and Murrel go forth as a new Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to fight the small injustices which occur in any society. With their departure, Chesterton abandons the neat political theories and his earlier dream visions of catastrophic overthrow of the industrial system. Now the emphasis is on the hopelessness of confrontation in the industrial age, the lack of communications between men, and the unhealable core of sin in the human soul.

The end of the book underscores these themes. Herne temporarily interrupts his life as the knight errant to find his fiancée, not in a Medieval castle, nor in a seraglio, but in the dark labyrinths of Limehouse, where she tends the poor and the sick. A friend describes the rationale for this self-sacrifice: “There may be people to whom it's senseless to talk about the flower of chivalry; it sounds like a blossom of butchery. But if we want the flower of chivalry, we must go right away back to the root of chivalry. We must go back if we find it in a thorny place people call theology. We must think differently about death and free will and loneliness and the last appeal. It's just the same with the popular things we can turn into fashionable things; folk dances and pageants and calling everything a Guild.”²³

Such an answer is both a rebuke to the quasi-Medievalists of the William Morris type, and an implicit modification of Distributism. The Return of Don Quixote is the first of Chesterton's romances to offer a specifically Catholic, non-political, non-sociological program for the future. All secular resistance now seems hopeless, with the industrial workers blind to their real needs, and the power of plutocracy apparently invincible. Murrel, trying to discover Hendry's whereabouts at one point in the book, interviews the manager of a department store, who says that he knows nothing about the missing man. Murrel dejectedly says, “I quite recognize that there is nothing you can do. Damn it all, perhaps there is nothing to be done.” And nothing is done.

Chesterton's departure from the formulas of his early romances makes The Return of Don Quixote one of his most thoughtful and provocative fictions. Admittedly, the characters are no more skillfully drawn than are those of his other fictions, but there are numerous fine things that show Chesterton's imaginative powers. One scene, for example, shows Herne voting in a polling booth, but it takes him hours to accomplish this act; as a lover of democracy he had cast his vote, but as an incurable Medievalist he had carefully painted his “X” in gold and in the style of Medieval illuminated letters. Another sequence describing Murrel in the department store has a nightmare intensity paralleled only by Nathaniel West's Day of the Locust: “Every now and then they came on the huge shaft or well of a lift; and the congestion was slightly relieved by some people being swallowed up by the earth and others vanishing into the ceiling. Eventually he himself found he was one of those fated, like Aeneas, to descend into the lower world. Here a new and equally interminable pilgrimage began …” (102).

X THREE PLAYS

Shaw, unmindful of the weaknesses of Chesterton's romances—the didacticism, the weakly developed characters, the fantastic situations—prevailed on his friend (and several others) to take to dramatic writing as a means of increasing his income, but only a few efforts convinced Chesterton that he was not meant to work in this genre. His first play, Magic (1913) is a “Fantastic Comedy.” Shavian in all its details, it is the best of his plays if only because of the character of the dotty Duke, who indeed may be Chesterton's finest imaginative creation. The playwright gathers the usual puppets at the Duke's country estate where they are to enjoy an evening of entertainment. The cast of characters is comprised of a High Church minister with Christian Socialist leanings; a doctor who is a scientific rationalist; the Duke's niece, a young lady yearning for romance; and her brother from America, a skeptical, “level-headed” businessman. The entertainment is provided by a magician, who stirs in the others various degrees of outrage, skepticism, indifference, or bemused tolerance.

Only the heroine believes in the reality of the magic, which seems to stand for the spiritual realities of life which are so heavily beset by modern business (the young man from America), modern science (the doctor), and the Established Protestant church (the minister). The magician routs them with a silly parlor trick, but he proves himself to be spiritually corrupt because of his association with some invisible “devil spirits” whom he used to torment his opponents. (Again Chesterton has his innings against Spiritualism and black magic.) The play seems intent on proving that there is a supernatural dimension to life which rationalism cannot encompass, but that it must be approached through the mediation of religion. Unfortunately, the thesis is transmitted through some melodramatic gimmickry, a creaky plot, some of the flattest characters Chesterton ever created, and some of the poorest dialogue Chesterton ever wrote.

The Judgement of Dr. Johnson (1927), which is no better than Magic, may be regarded as Chesterton's major act of obeisance before his literary and philosophical idol. The Dr. Johnson portrayed is Carlylean rather than Boswellian, heroic and pompous, rather than witty and lively. The Shavian influence appears in the main situation: during the American Revolution a young couple, spies from the colonies, establish a salon in London where they entertain the Great Cham, Boswell, John Wilkes, Edmund Burke, and other social lions. The crux of the play hangs on Johnson and Chesterton's thesis that the revolutionary ideas of the times—the feminism, the intellectualism, the democratic frenzy—are somehow organic with a decay in personal morality. The young couples are not only atheists and democrats but also libertines. Dr. Johnson's “judgment” is to save these young people, when their position is compromised, and also save their marriage and their morality by freeing them of their “sham philosophies.” In the process, the hero is turned into an anti-Hanoverian Chestertonian; Chesterton's Johnson is eager to denigrate wisdom, philosophy, and mere ideas in favor of the common sense and hard work of ordinary people—“the nucleus and norm of humanity.” The few Boswellian gems allowed to enter the dialogue glimmer momentarily, then disappear in the murk.

The most interesting play qua drama that Chesterton wrote is the unfinished “The Surprise” (1932; published 1952). A Pirandellesque exercise, the play has as its hero a playwright who has been granted his wish to see the characters of his play living their own lives, “separated from me and my life and living lives quite different and entirely their own.” The characters of his romantic comedy, having acted his play in the first act, come alive in the second act (with the magical interference of a friar, a friend of the playwright), and replay his play as they wish until he screams, “What do you think you are doing with my play? Drop it! Stop! I am coming down!”

The editor of the published play is certainly correct in pointing out the analogy between God the creator and the human artist—an analogy which may be observed elsewhere in Chesterton's works. Just as God creates a world and sets man free to do good or evil, so the artist in the play has created, with divine help, characters who escape his control. The theological theme of free will seems less crucial, however, than the artist's shock and anger at the sudden liberties the actors take with his play. Does Chesterton perceive a theological dilemma that he prefers not to handle? Perhaps Chesterton purposefully left the play unfinished, evading the theological implications of a situation wherein Man escapes the control of God because of a totally independent free will.

Whatever the reason for its incomplete state, “The Surprise” is the most unusual of Chesterton's three dramas, because its author was forced to come to grips with certain problems of dramaturgy and seems to have dimly perceived the potential of pure theater.

.....

The romances and dramas, whether seriously polemical or merely light entertainments like the Father Brown stories, are continuing skirmishes in the social, political, and intellectual battles that engaged Chesterton in his non-fictional writings. If his novels have lost some of their force, then, it may be because the ideas or problems that originally inspired them are now lost in the wastes of history. It is difficult, for example, in an age of atomic war, to be stirred by an appeal to arm oneself with a longbow; in an age when great nations confront each other with ballistic missiles, it is not amusing to hear of armies fighting in uniforms of Medieval armor and liveries; and, as the British Empire dissolves, one does not wish to be told that salvation lies in English ale and cheese.

Other elements of these fictions are even less germane to the 1970's. Chesterton's obsession with the competition of foreign labor, his fear of an “invasion” of Orientals or Middle Easterners, partakes directly of the Edwardian taste for scare-stories about “invasions” of the British isles.²⁴ Similarly, his unsavory portraits of Jewish financiers reflect an attitude of anti-Semitism widespread among the ruling classes of prewar Britain. Moreover, Chesterton's characterization and his faith in man's capacity for individual heroism belong similarly to some bygone age. While other novelists developed their special visions of the antihero, Chesterton transmuted his clerk-heroes and aristocratic dilettantes into Medieval knights.

What is unexpected is that this alteration in character is too often achieved with a magic wand; in a moment these Milquetoasts are suddenly provided with a quantity of wit, strength, personality, cleverness, and the ability to lead. While other novelists of our time have mapped the inner contours of the personality, Chesterton disregards any analysis or dramatization of character. His cocoons metamorphose into butterflies, and the reader must accept the quick change. Ironically, Chesterton, the writer who loved the common man and defended the value of the individual, did not have sufficient patience or love to create warm-blooded fictional characters in his romances.²⁵

One excuses Chesterton with the word “romances,” for it is clear that he is a “romancer.” He admired Stevenson and the toy theater. He defended the Victorian melodrama, which has been recently described as an art form that prizes, above all, the quality of simplicity—of plot, of theme, and of character. Nor is it entirely accidental that Chesterton's idol, Dickens, has been perennially criticized for his “caricatures” and careless portrayal of characters.

In spite of these flaws (if they are flaws), Chesterton's romances have numerous merits and do not deserve the oblivion in which they languish at present. Their lively style, their frequent wittiness of the characters, and especially their imaginative use of symbolic scenes and incidents make them the equals of other novels that have achieved critical recognition. For example, Chesterton's imagination is irresistible in such scenes as “the battle of the lamps,” Innocent Smith's walk around the world, the Orwellian asylum in The Ball and the Cross, the brilliant central situation of The Man Who Was Thursday, the description of Lord Ivywood's estate and harem, and Adam Wayne's pledge of fealty to Auberon Quin. The didacticism, the woodenness of the characters, and the frequent lapses of style should not stand in the way of the re-discovery of these romances in an era in which nightmare literature, fantasy, absurd and surrealistic plots, and wildly conceived characters have become the novelist's stock-in-trade.

Notes

1. Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties, p. 229.

2. “False theory and the Theatre,” Fancies versus Fads, p. 130.

3. “Boredom of the Butterflies,” ibid., p. 121.

4. “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” The Defendant (London, 1901), p. 20.

5. The story is related in Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, p. 252.

6. See “The Secret of Father Brown” in the collection of that name, for a contrast of the two detectives.

7. “The Duel of Dr. Hirsch,” The Wisdom of Father Brown, p. 272.

8. “The Hammer of God,” The Innocence of Father Brown, pp. 174–75.

9. “The Oracle of the Dog,” The Incredulity of Father Brown, pp. 498–99.

10. “The Dagger with Wings,” The Incredulity of Father Brown, pp. 580–81.

11. The Innocence of Father Brown, pp. 18–22.

12. “The Man with Two Beards,” The Secret of Father Brown, p. 682.

13. The Coloured Lands (New York, 1938), p. 107.

14. R. A. Knox, “Chesterton in his Early Romances,” Dublin Review (October, 1936), p. 354.

15. William R. Titterton, G. K. Chesterton: a Portrait, p. 45.

16. The Napoleon of Notting Hill (London, 1961), p. 99.

17. The Club of Queer Trades (London, 1960), p. 32.

18. “The Man Who Was Thursday,” G.K.C. as M.C., p. 205.

19. Dedicatory poem, “To Edmund Clerihew Bentley,” The Man Who Was Thursday (New York, 1960), n.p.

20. “The Man Who Was Thursday,” G.K.C. as M.C., p. 205. Ronald Knox characterizes all of the early novels as dreams ending in nightmares. See “Chesterton in his Early Romances,” pp. 351–65.

21. “Ego et Shavius Meus,” The Uses of Diversity, p. 160.

22. “The Man Who Was Thursday,” G.K.C. as M.C., pp. 205–6.

23. The Return of Don Quixote (New York, 1927), p. 286.

24. For the “literature of invasion,” see Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind, p. 34 ff.

25. Chesterton said: “I could not be a novelist; because I really like to see ideas or notions wrestling naked, as it were, and not dressed up in a masquerade as men and women.” Autobiography, p. 298.