Chesterton himself did not attach great importance to the Father Brown stories. Ordered in batches by magazine editors and publishers, they were written hurriedly for the primary purpose of helping to finance his distributist paper, G. K.'s Weekly. And though they have proved to be the most popular of Chesterton's writings, critical attention to them has been casual. This is partly because they are, of course, detective stories; and the detective story is commonly dismissed, without argument, as a very low form of art. That it is also a very difficult and demanding form, in which many clever writers have failed, is not regarded as relevant. Nor is there much respect for the innovators in this genre, or much comment on their remarkable rarity. If there were, Chesterton's reputation would stand very high; for his detective stories, while they may not be the best ever written, are without doubt the most ingenious. But to show ingenuity and originality in the detective story is for the superior critic merely to have a knack for a particular sort of commercial fiction. It is not the sort of thing he takes seriously. And Chesterton himself, it seems, would have agreed with him.

My contention will be that these stories, together with Chesterton's novel The Man who was Thursday, are the best of his writings, and I will try to give reasons why they should be taken seriously. But I must admit at the start that there are two (sometimes overlapping) classes of reader whom I cannot hope to convert. The first consists of those who loathe detective stories; the second, of those who are so prejudiced against the Roman Catholic Church that they cannot read stories in which a priest is presented sympathetically. All I can say to these readers is that the Father Brown stories are much more than detective stories, and if they can overcome their repugnance to the genre they will find a good deal that might interest them in another context; and secondly, that the element of strictly Roman Catholic propaganda in the stories is small. Furthermore, Father Brown is neither a realistic nor even an idealized portrait of a priest. Chesterton is not competing with Morte d'Urban, or with Bernanos; nor is he competing with Robert Hugh Benson. I shall try to explain later what I think Father Brown “really” is. At the moment, I merely ask readers to forget their anticlericalism. It is irrelevant.

But no doubt the main problem that a sympathetic critic must confront is that Chesterton's work generally is out of favor. To some extent this is merely for period reasons. He is far away enough from us for his work to have become dated, but not far enough for it to have become historical. Like some other writers of his time, he is in a sort of critical limbo. But there are also special reasons for his unpopularity. He campaigned for causes which, except in old-fashioned Roman Catholic circles, attract little sympathy. His distributism is dismissed as impracticable. His Catholicism is of the pre-John XXIII vintage: it is regarded as “period,” sectarian, and hopelessly bound up with an exaltation of “Latin” Europe, influenced by Belloc's, which is alternately scorned as foolish or condemned as sinister. Above all, Chesterton's association of Christianity with romanticism is disliked. The general taste of this age is counter-romantic; and many of those who, like Chesterton, are seriously concerned with religion share this taste. The most influential of religious thinkers in our times is probably Kierkegaard, and he is also one of the most counter-romantic. It is true that Kierkegaard, unlike many moderns, felt the attraction of romanticism. In The Concept of Irony, for example, he speaks of the breath of fresh air which romanticism brings to the spiritless, matter-of-fact monotony of bourgeois existence. “The forest breathes easy, the birds sing, the beautiful princess surrounds herself with suitors, the woods echo the sound of hunting horns and baying hounds, the meadows shed fragrance, poetry and song tear themselves loose from nature.” It is clear that Kierkegaard feels the attraction of what he is describing. But to him it is an insidious temptation. Romanticism brings neither a true vision of reality, nor a firm footing in the temporal world. It is the enemy of the moral life. Nothing could be further from Chesterton's view. It is true that he thought romanticism could go wrong and be perverted. And even at its best it is not enough to bring the soul to God. Here Chesterton would have agreed with Kierkegaard. But unlike Kierkegaard he wanted to baptize it, not dismiss it to hell.

Counter-romanticism is the deep reason why Chesterton's work is rejected. But there are other reasons, some of which are more purely literary. Most of Chesterton's work is on the borderline between literature and journalism; much of it, indeed, is frankly, nothing but journalism. True, the same could be said of Swift or Samuel Johnson, who are in high repute with critics. But they have passed into history; whereas Chesterton, like Wells, still has the flavor of old newspapers. And, like most writers who have to write copiously and under pressure, Chesterton often became the slave of his own mannerisms. Even his warmest admirer will admit that he frequently repeats himself and that his wit degenerates into stock verbal formulas. The spice of his style conceals poor meat. This is especially true of his work written after the Great War. The War itself, and the serious illness which Chesterton suffered during the War, took away much of his real gaiety and spontaneity. The sparkle had gone. Chesterton was essentially a prewar writer; and the War, which killed or wounded so many in the flesh, killed and wounded many others in the spirit. Chesterton was one of them.

For many modern readers, then, Chesterton is a dead writer. His name recalls only noisy showmanship, out-of-date class attitudes, Edwardian jolliness, foaming tankards. He is at best a period piece. A defender of Chesterton might retort that at one time Dickens was dismissed as a vulgar purveyor of melodrama and sentiment: yet he has come back. However, Dickens was a creative writer; and it is not altogether clear that Chesterton was. His forte was really the essay, and the essay is not nowadays highly regarded. His affinities with Lamb, Hazlitt, and Stevenson are today black marks against him. His generally cheerful temper, his love of Romance, his old-fashioned and chivalrous attitude to women and sex, are antipathetic. And even though writers whom he admired, and who influenced him, like Browning and Dickens, are coming back into favor, they are not seen as Chesterton saw them. It is said that he presented them as too exuberant and jolly. Chesterton himself is thought, especially by those who have not read him, to have preached an optimism which to the sensitive, in a world like this, sounds brainless and heartless. Father Brown says of an exponent of the Religion of Cheerfulness: “It is a cruel religion. … Why couldn't they let him weep a little, like his fathers before him?” People have tended to confuse Chesterton's own religion with the Religion of Cheerfulness.

But, as my quotation indicates, I think this is a confusion. And the picture of Chesterton I have been giving is, deliberately, a travesty. However, it is a recognizable travesty. Chesterton did indeed have many faults as a writer. He was the first to admit them. He was a genuinely humble man. When he was at the height of his fame he was asked by a journalist in New York which of his works he considered the greatest. He replied that he did not consider any of his works at all great. He may have been right. But it seems to me that he was at least a writer important enough to be one of the very few who survive their time. My article is thus a plea for a reconsideration of Chesterton's place in English literature. First of all, I think, his work needs weeding out. My own belief is that the case for him as an important writer depends on comparatively few things: two poems, “The Ballad of the White Horse” and “The Secret People”; his prose books Heretics (not Orthodoxy!) and The Everlasting Man; his only good novel, The Man who was Thursday; and the Father Brown stories. It is with these last that I shall be concerned. But my essential concern is with the serious Chesterton. I take encouragement from the fact that, though he is commonly disparaged as a shallow optimist and allowed at best to be an entertaining writer of light fiction, his most famous lines, from “The Ballad of the White Horse,” are those beginning “I tell you naught for your comfort. …”; lines which go on to speak of an iron sky and a faith without hope.

What is Chesterton saying in the Father Brown stories? In what follows I shall discuss their manifest meaning, and I shall carry the discussion as far as the borders of their latent meaning, leaving it to others, if they are interested, to explore that. This manifest meaning must be understood in terms of their genre. Whatever else these stories may turn out to be, they are certainly, on the face of it, light fiction, in a recognizable genre. And this genre was invented by Poe. Scholars have found remote antecedents and forbears for Poe's detective tales, but there can be no doubt that the modern detective tale derives from him. I do not intend to intrude into the long American controversy about Poe. Critics I admire are to be found on both sides. Edmund Wilson thinks Poe was a great genius. Yvor Winters thinks he was a bad writer. My own feeling is that in some way both are right and that Poe is a unique phenomenon in literature. But my concern with him here is solely with the undeniable fact that he invented the modern detective story. His tales of the Chevalier Auguste Dupin are magazine fiction. But they are also offered as moral fables. The virtue they ostensibly celebrate is Reason. Dupin is not concerned with the legal consequences of crime, like Inspector Maigret, nor is he concerned with its moral and religious implications, like Father Brown. For him, a crime is nothing but an intellectual problem. When that is solved, his interest lapses. Poe makes a great show of the rigorous deductions and inexorable logic of Dupin. He is inhumanly patient, penetrating, and clearheaded. But this show of rationality is largely bluff, part of the game that Poe plays with his readers. It is notable that “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” which to all appearance is the most dully realistic and scientific looking of the three Dupin stories, based on a real life case, is in fact the most impudently fraudulent. Dupin's solution does not emerge from his reasoning: his reasoning, indeed, leads him in quite another direction. But Poe, surprised, no doubt, by a belated development in the real life case, cunningly inserts the suggestion here and there that Dupin was all the time on the right track. At the end all that the bemused reader is clear about is that the rabbit has been produced from the hat. How, is nobody's business. And the classical detective story, created by Poe, is not a triumph of reason, but a conjuring trick. This is evident in the most famous, and the best, of the three Dupin stories, “The Purloined Letter.” Everyone remembers the motif of this story: that some things are too obvious to be noticed. And this is the secret of successful conjuring. The simple suppose that “it must be up his sleeve.” But it isn't: it's in front of your nose. The successful conjurer, like George Orwell, knows that the hardest things to see are the things that are in front of your nose. Those who are prepared to enjoy a classic demonstration of this, in a detective story which is nothing but a detective story, should read John Dickson Carr's novel The Black Spectacles.

Chesterton, like all detective story writers, derives from Poe. Indeed, it might be said that he derives from a single story of Poe: many of the Father Brown stories can be regarded as ingenious variations on the theme of “The Purloined Letter.” The suggestion of realistic police work, which we have in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” did not attract him. Father Brown keeps away from the secular authorities:

“The Coroner has arrived. The inquiry is just going to begin.”

“I've got to get back to the Deaf School,” said Father Brown. [He has just solved the mystery.] “I'm sorry I can't stop for the inquiry.”

There are no chemical analyses or careful checking of alibis in these stories. Nor is there the dry intellectuality of Dupin. For between Poe and Chesterton comes Conan Doyle. It is, of course, Sherlock Holmes who humanized the figure of the Great Detective, the symbol of reason and justice. The Sherlock Holmes stories are in some ways inferior as literature to the Dupin stories. Holmes has a less distinguished mind than Dupin. But Dupin is a colorless character, and his confidant is even dimmer. It is the personalities of Holmes and Watson that we remember, the Baker Street “atmosphere,” in those rooms where it is always 1895, the inimitable blend of exotic excitement and reassuring coziness.

As a conjurer, Doyle must rank low. He is all thumbs. The card often emerges patently from Holmes's sleeve. In that excellent tale “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” the solution turns on Holmes's realizing that the dead man's body was on the roof of an underground train. But this is a mere guess. Often Doyle does not even pretend to play fair with the reader. However, this does not matter. Doyle was the master of something rarer than conjuring: magic. It may be, indeed, that magic is not compatible with conjuring. At any rate, Doyle rose to a high rank among literary magicians when he invented Dr. Watson. For it is Watson, not Holmes, that is responsible for the magic. It is only when we see the great man through his eyes that the whole conception reveals its unique triumphant blend of absurdity and sublimity. It is he who possesses the secret, which Stevenson does not in the New Arabian Nights, of evoking romance from the prosaic. London place names like “Norwood” and “Blackheath” will for some readers of Dr. Watson's memoirs always retain overtones of mysterious romance.

All this was naturally congenial to the author of The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Chesterton was fascinated by the romance of the prosaic.

His dubious eye roamed again to the white lettering on the glass front of the public-house. The young woman's eyes followed his, and rested there also, but in pure puzzlement.

“No,” said Father Brown, answering her thoughts. “It doesn't say ‘Sela,’ like the thing in the psalms; I read it like that myself when I was wool-gathering just now; it says ‘Ales.’”

This slight example may serve to illustrate how much all these writers—Chesterton, Stevenson, Doyle—are disciples of Dickens, the great master of the unfamiliarity in the familiar. But Chesterton was perhaps the closest of them all to the detective story side of Dickens. The novel of Dickens that has most in common with Chesterton is The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It will be said that this is not merely a detective story, that it has imagination and moral seriousness. All the same, it is a detective story, and as such it is genuinely mysterious. And this is not only because it is unfinished. Neither Barnaby Rudge (pace Poe) nor Bleak House, which are both inter alia detective stories, would have been hard to solve if they had been left unfinished at a point comparable to the point where Edwin Drood breaks off. The quality of Chesterton's work at its best, in the Father Brown stories, is comparable to that of Edwin Drood. It is true to its genre: it is full of suspense, sensation, genuine clues, red herrings, “atmosphere,” real mystery and spurious mystery. But Chesterton, though he might talk lightheartedly about batches of corpses despatched to the publisher, is serious, as Dickens is serious in Edwin Drood. In these stories murder is murder, sin is sin, damnation is damnation. Every imaginative writer must choose his genre, and every genre has limitations. The detective tale has obvious limitations. The most serious is this: no character can have depth, no character can be done from the inside, because any must be a potential suspect. It is Chesterton's triumph that he turned this limitation of the genre into an illumination of the universal human potentiality of guilt and sin. No character in the stories matters except Father Brown. But this is not a fault, because Father Brown, being a man, epitomizes all their potentialities within himself. “Are you a devil?” the exposed criminal wildly asks. “I am a man,” replies Father Brown, “and therefore have all devils in my heart.”

This ability to identify himself with the murderer is the “secret” of Father Brown's method. Some readers have misunderstood Chesterton's intention here. They suppose that Father Brown is credited with special spiritual powers, pertaining to his rôle as a priest. They see him as a thaumaturgic Sherlock Holmes. One adverse critic saw in Father Brown's ability to divine the truth, where plodding mundane detectives fail, a typical dishonest trick of the Catholic apologist. But it is made quite clear that Father Brown owes his success not to supernatural insight but to the usual five senses. He is simply more observant, less clouded by conventional anticipations and prejudices, than the average man. The kind of clue he notices is not cigar ash or footprints, but something like this:

“I am sorry to say we are the bearers of bad news. Admiral Craven was drowned before reaching home. …”

“When did this happen?” asked the priest.

“Where was he found?” asked the lawyer.

A moment later the priest realizes that the lawyer has murdered Admiral Craven. If you are told that a seaman, returning from the sea, has been drowned, you do not ask where his body was “found.” Admiral Craven was found in a landlocked pool; Father Brown realized that Mr. Dyke could only know that because he had put him there. Most of the clues in the stories are of this kind. It is true that at the end of this story (“The Green Man”) Father Brown does show some knowledge which, in the terms of the story, he could not have acquired by natural means; he knows that Mr. Dyke committed the murder because his client, the Admiral, discovered that he had been robbing him. This is a fault in the story. But the same sort of fault can be found in greater writers when they are winding up the plot. Shakespeare makes Iago confess that he dropped Desdemona's handkerchief in Cassio's chamber. Surely a man like Iago would never have confessed anything. The essential discovery that Father Brown makes in this story is the identity of the murderer, not his motive. It should have been left to the police to find that out.

Chesterton takes pains to emphasize that Father Brown has no supernatural powers, by frequently contrasting him with false mages who claim them. (Examples are to be found in stories like “The Song of the Flying Fish” or “The Red Moon of Meru.”) Their characteristic sin is spiritual pride. They are quite happy to be accused of ordinary crimes, which they have not committed, if the crimes are thought miraculous. For contrast, we have a story like “The Resurrection of Father Brown,” in which Father Brown is subjected to the overwhelming temptation to claim credit for a false miracle: that he has risen from the dead. Without hesitation, dazed as he is, he discredits the story.

Father Brown is, then, not a thaumaturge. But it must be granted that, apart from his powers of observation, he has exceptional moral insight. It is well known that Chesterton conceived the idea for this character after meeting a priest whose “unworldliness” proved to be compatible with an inside knowledge of crime and wickedness. His “innocence” is of a kind that would have shocked the would-be sophisticated young men whom Chesterton soon afterwards heard patronizing the clergy for their ignorance of the world. Chesterton makes a good deal of play with the contrast between Father Brown's appearance, moonfaced, blinking, dropping his umbrella, and the reality of his insights into men's minds and hearts. But Chesterton's aim is not really a psychological study of such a man. Almost at once Father Brown becomes largely a mouthpiece for Chesterton's own wit and wisdom. Here are a few examples:

“There is a limit to human charity,” said Lady Outram, trembling all over.

“There is,” said Father Brown dryly, “and that is the real difference between human charity and Christian charity.”

“He's a pretty rotten fool and failure, on his own confession.”

“Yes,” said Father Brown. “I'm rather fond of people who are fools and failures on their own confession.”

“I don't know what you mean,” snapped the other.

“Perhaps,” said Father Brown wistfully, “it's because so many people are fools and failures without any confession.”

“There is one mark of all genuine religions: materialism.”

“The quality of a miracle is mysterious, but its manner is simple.”

“And can you tell us why,” he asked, “you should know your own figure in a looking-glass, when two such distinguished men don't?”

Father Brown blinked even more painfully than before; then he stammered: “Really, my lord, I don't know … unless it's because I don't look at it so often.”

“Now, in my opinion that machine can't lie.”

“No machine can lie,” said Father Brown, “nor can it tell the truth.”

“If you convey to a woman that something ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will suddenly do it.”

“I agree that the woman wants to kill the co-respondent much more than the petitioner does.”

“Yes,” said Father Brown, “I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelt backwards.”

These could all have been starting points for Chestertonian essays. The artistic reason for Father Brown's powers of repartee, and his wittiness in general, is that we look straight at him as we do not look at Sherlock Holmes, who is reflected in the—sometimes exasperated—admiration of Dr. Watson. Chesterton has dispensed with a Dr. Watson; and so Father Brown has to seem brilliant to us. And the only way this can be done is by making him brilliant. The remarks I have quoted are only a small selection. Father Brown by himself has no solidity. He is not a credible priest; he seems to be away from his parish as often as Dr. Watson was away from his practice. He comes and goes from nowhere. The temptation to make him a semi-symbolic figure must have been great. Agatha Christie succumbed to a similar temptation in her stories about The Mysterious Mr. Quin. But this is false to the genre. Chesterton's stories, though often fantastic, are not fantasies. Again and again it is emphasized that Father Brown in himself is an ordinary man: an extraordinarily ordinary man.

But Father Brown's ordinariness is ordinariness à la Chesterton. He shares his creator's aesthetic sense. Indeed, his detective powers are closely connected with his aesthetic sense. He knows what is the “right” crime for the “right” criminal. The whole remarkable story called “The Wrong Shape” is built around this aesthetic criminology. The reformed criminal Flambeau, hunted and converted by Father Brown in the early stories, has similarly an aesthetic sense about his crimes. He chooses the right sort of crime for the right setting, as in “The Flying Stars.” (Some memories of the fabled exploits of Vidocq, who fascinated Balzac, must have gone into Flambeau's creation.) It is an aesthetic sense that sometimes provides Father Brown with an essential clue; as in “The Worst Crime in the World,” where his perception of the balanced arrangement of a hall enables him to spot that one suit of armor, out of what must have been a pair, is missing. And Chesterton, as often, notes the curious and sometimes topsy-turvy relationship between aesthetic fitness and moral fitness:

“It's a wonder his throat isn't cut,” said Mr. Smart's valet Harris, not without a hypothetical relish, almost as if he had said, in a purely artistic sense, “It's a pity.”

That “hypothetical relish” explains a good deal of our pleasure in the fantasies and atrocities of the stories.

Finally, Father Brown's detective skill owes much to that linguistic sensitivity which he shares with his creator. He finds himself thinking of foreign voyages in a house in Cornwall.

Besides the butler, the Admiral's only servants were two negroes, somewhat quaintly clad in tight uniforms of yellow. The priest's instinctive trick of analysing his own impressions told him that the colour and the little neat coattails of these bipeds had suggested the word “Canary,” and so by a mere pun connected them with Southward travel.

Other characters share it at times.

He was a man with more literary than direct natural associations; the word “Ravenswood” came into his head repeatedly. It was partly the raven colour of the pine-woods; but partly also an indescribable atmosphere almost described in Scott's great tragedy; the smell of something that died in the eighteenth century; the smell of dank gardens and broken urns; of wrongs that will never now be righted; of something that is none the less incurably sad because it is strangely unreal.

Such things show the literary critic in Chesterton, the power of verbal analysis which we associate with a critic of our own day like William Empson, and which Empson himself has praised in Chesterton. But sometimes this linguistic sensitiveness is employed in the interests of logical clarity. Chesterton has a feeling for the niceties of idiom, and their conceptual implications, which recalls a philosopher like the late Professor Austin. Here are a few examples:

“I said it was his hat. Or, if you insist on a shade of difference, a hat that is his.”

“And where is the shade of difference?” asked the criminologist, with a slight sneer.

“My good sir,” cried the mild little man, with his first movement akin to impatience, “if you will walk down the street to the nearest hatter's shop, you will see that there is, in common speech, a difference between a man's hat and the hats that are his.”

“Hang it all,” cried Simon, “a man gets into a garden, or he doesn't.”

“Not necessarily,” said the priest, with a faint smile. … “A man gets out of a garden, or he doesn't,” he cried.

“Not always,” said Father Brown. [The whole story—“The Secret Garden”—must be read for the explanation.]

“Have you ever noticed this—that people never answer what you say? They answer what you mean—or what they think you mean. Suppose one lady says to another in a country house, ‘Is anybody staying with you?’ the lady doesn't answer, ‘Yes; the butler, the three footmen, the parlourmaid and so on,’ though the parlourmaid may be in the room, or the butler behind her chair. She says ‘There is nobody staying with us.’” [A nice glimpse here of the Edwardian scene, which is indeed the point of the well-known story from which this comes, “The Invisible Man.”]

Father Brown, then, is represented as at the same time an ordinary man, of simple tastes, who enjoys simple pleasures, and a clever, shrewd person, with observation and sensitiveness beyond the ordinary. But he is not a mystic. He remains true both to traditional theology, and to the genre of the detective story, in never decrying reason. It is when Flambeau, disguised as a priest, does this that Father Brown is certain he is a fraud. Of course, Father Brown is represented as a religious man. It is not by accident, and not merely to find a new twist to the Sherlock Holmes formula, that Chesterton makes him a priest. But once again Chesterton is at pains to dissociate him from anything exotic, any suggestion of the allegedly subtle lures of Rome. What he means us to feel about Father Brown is what he makes an American Protestant feel, in one of the stories which is set in South America:

He could hardly be expected to sympathize with the religious externals of Catholic countries; and in a dislike of mitres and croziers he sympathized with Mr. Snaith, though not in so cocksure a fashion. He had no liking for the public bowings and scrapings of [the clericalist] Mendoza. … The truth was this: that the only thing he had ever met in his travels that in the least reminded him of the old wood-pile and the provincial proprieties and the Bible on his mother's knee was (for some inscrutable reason) the round face and black clumsy umbrella of Father Brown.

Again and again in these stories Chesterton shows how much the common dislike of Catholicism is (or was) due to dislike of “religious externals.” But the deeper religious meaning of these stories is to do with something more important than cultural considerations. The abundance of quacks, mystagogues, sorcerers in them is not only due to the desire to point a contrast with Father Brown. It is to illustrate, in terms proper to the genre in which Chesterton is writing, his belief that what Christianity has shown is that the age-old effort of man to grasp the Divine is bankrupt. Man cannot come to God. Christianity says that God came to man. This was what Chesterton was saying over and over again, in different tones and with varying degrees of humor or earnestness. Orwell claimed that writers like Chesterton seem to have only one subject: that they are Catholics. One might as well retort that Orwell's only subject seems to be that he was not one. Either the Catholic faith is relevant to the whole of life, or it is relevant to none of it. That, at any rate, was Chesterton's position.

In the end, then, the priest's “steady humble gaze” owes its power to more than observation. When he realized that the doctor did the murder, he “looked him gravely and steadily in the face”; and the doctor went away and wrote his confession. He is an atheist, and he begins his confession: “Vicisti, Galilaee!” But he goes on at once “In other words, damn your eyes, which are very remarkable and penetrating ones.”

The religious meaning is central in the best of these stories. But some of them contain a good deal of effective social satire also. I have already mentioned “The Invisible Man,” that ingenious fable of the people who “don't count.” Wells, we know, had another idea of the “invisible man”; and Ralph Ellison has another. Seeing the invisible in Chesterton's story means what Ellison means: keeping a sense of human brotherhood. Some of the incidental themes in this story are interesting, especially considering its date. We note that the victim Isidore Smythe is a characteristically modern man, who not only has a fast car, but, more remarkably, a complete staff of robots to wait on him. Another parable, with a keen edge of social satire, is another well-known story, “The Queer Feet.” The point of this story, as a detective story, is that a gentleman's coat looks the same as a waiter's; but the stratagem of Flambeau, the owner of the “queer feet” which now saunter like a gentleman and now scurry like a waiter, is possible only because of the great gulf fixed between gentlemen and waiters. It is the “outsiders,” first of all Death (the dead waiter at the beginning of the story), then the crook Flambeau, and finally the shabby Father Brown, who point the satire on the Twelve True Fishermen. Chesterton, like Kipling, vividly describes the ritualism of English upper-class life; but he sees it more ironically than Kipling. They parody the twelve apostles, who were fishermen, and fishers of men like Father Brown, who can bring the reformed criminal back from the ends of the earth with “a twitch upon the thread.” Light and amusing as the story is, it is an exposure, not only of social class, but of plutocracy employing the traditions of social class, to eliminate humanity and brotherhood. Yet all the Fishermen are very likeable, and the story ends with an amusing touch. After their silver has been recovered, thanks to Father Brown, their first thought is to invent a new addition to their ritual by way of commemorating its recovery. The members will in future wear green coats, to distinguish them from waiters.

But the most memorable of the stories are not witty parables like these, but imaginative fairy tales. What some readers remember most in the Father Brown stories is Chesterton's powers of description. His liking for a twilight setting—dawn or dusk—has been noted; and so has the constant sense we have that the action is taking place in a toy theater, where the weird and wonderful backcloth dominates everything, and the tiny puppets that gesticulate in fight or dance in front of it seem faceless and featureless. And these backcloths have a décor which links Chesterton to Swinburne and the Decadents. His moral and religious outlook could not be more different from theirs; but his imagination has been formed on their work. Lurid, or fanciful, or grotesque decoration dominates stories like “The Wrong Shape” or “The Dagger with Wings.” Of course this decoration is there in part to distract us. A classical detective story exists to fool the reader; and Chesterton, more suo, likes to avert our attention from the “simple center” to the “rococo excrescences.” These are Chesterton's own expressions, which come from an incidental, brief discussion of Hamlet in “The Queer Feet.” Every successful crime, he says, like every successful work of art, has at its center something simple. It is Chesterton's task as conjurer to arrange this scene, with bizarre figures in a bizarre setting, so that we shall miss the explanation of the mystery, which always turns on some straightforward, mundane motive. (In more than half the stories the motivation for the crime is nothing more metaphysical or outré than greed.)

However, I think the unforgettable descriptions of gardens, houses, landscapes, and the effects of light in these stories are not mainly there for camouflage, or merely for scene painting. I think they have something to do with the latent meaning of the stories; and this in turn has something to do with the attraction of the detective story, as a genre, both to Chesterton himself and to his readers. But first of all let us note that, even at the level of the plot, the descriptions are highly relevant. This passage from “The Hammer of God,” read in its context, contains the explanation of the mystery. Two men look down from the top of a church.

Immediately beneath and about them the lines of the Gothic building plunged outwards into the void with a sickening swiftness akin to suicide. There is that element of Titan energy in the architecture of the Middle Ages that, from whatever aspect it be seen, it is always running away, like the strong back of some maddened horse. This church was hewn out of ancient and silent stone, bearded with old fungoids and stained with the nests of birds. And yet, when they saw it from below, it sprang like a fountain at the stars; and when they saw it, as now, from above, it poured like a cataract into a voiceless pit. For these two men on the tower were left alone with the most terrible aspect of Gothic; the monstrous foreshortening and disproportion, the dizzy perspectives, the glimpses of great things small and small things great; a topsy-turvydom of stone in the mid-air.

This is the sort of passage that we feel is too good for a detective story. Yet it is surely an artistic virtue, if only a minor one, that the height of the church and the way the landscape below it looks like “a map of the world” should, for the attentive, explain both the crime's motive, and the method of its commission.

But my main reason for quoting the passage is to call attention to the phrases about “monstrous foreshortening and disproportion,” “dizzy perspectives,” “glimpses of great things small and small things great.” These are clues to Chesterton's imagination. First of all, it was intensely visual. He began as a painter, and we can find the painter's eye in all his descriptions. But—more important—it was child-like. Passages like this, from “The Sins of Prince Saradine,” abound in his writings:

A large lemon moon was only just setting in the forest of high grass above their heads, and the sky was of a vivid violet-blue, nocturnal but bright. Both men had simultaneously a reminiscence of childhood, of the elfin and adventurous time when tall weeds close over us like woods. Standing up thus against the large low moon, the daisies really seemed to be giant daisies, the dandelions to be giant dandelions. Somehow it reminded them of the dado of a nursery wall-paper.

This child-like quality in Chesterton attracts some readers and repels others. Those whom it repels dislike the association he makes between childish fantasies about winged daggers and flying vampires, and serious themes of good and evil. They feel that the former degrade the latter. This sort of criticism has been levelled against a later writer, Charles Williams, who also attempted to use thriller material as a means of saying something serious. I cannot answer this objection, except by saying that Chesterton himself seems to have been aware of it, and tries to answer it in his story “The Dagger with Wings.” Here the real mystery of nature is contrasted with the spurious mystery, the “white magic,” which the criminal mystagogue exploits. Father Brown, as usual, appears as the agnostic: “I do believe some things, of course, and therefore, of course, I don't believe other things.” The wickedness of the mystagogue and murderer Strake is explained as the perversion of a good thing: his power as a story-teller. He enjoys his masquerade as the man he has murdered. “He enjoyed it as a fantasy as well as a conspiracy.” The monistic mumbo-jumbo with which he tries to deceive Father Brown is recognized by Father Brown as “the religion of rascals.” In contrast, the cold of the air, as Father Brown walks home after the exposure and arrest of Strake, “divides truth from error with a blade like ice.” Crime and insanity in this story are associated with changing colors, pantheistic unities, mixed-upness; goodness and innocence with the whiteness of snow, the dualism of black and white, truth and error, artifice and nature. The villain Strake has the wilfulness, the perversity, the distortions, of a naughty child. It is the normal imagination of the child that shows him up.

We might say, then, that Father Brown is imagined by Chesterton as a child whose vision is undistorted. The psychological critic will no doubt see in the contrasting distortions of perspective, the “wrong shapes,” the murderous yet strangely unheated fantasies of the stories, some relationship to the child's bizarre notions of the sexual behavior of adults. And this may be the latent appeal of all classic detective stories. For reasons of temperament, period, and literary mode, Chesterton avoids overtly sexual themes in the Father Brown stories. Yet it was presumably the real Father Brown's knowledge of sexual depravities that shocked Chesterton. And in “The Secret of Father Brown” the priest confides to his interlocutor that he “acted out” in his imagination all the crimes that he had investigated. What renders Father Brown invulnerable is precisely this playacting. But whether this makes the stories entirely wholesome is not certain. The oddities in them must tempt psychological criticism. Chesterton's fascination with the way things look upside down—as in an unpleasant story, “The Vanishing of Vaudrey”—seems to be intimately related to his love of paradox. We remember how Dean Inge, with a note of animosity that Chesterton rarely provoked in his opponents, called him “that obese mountebank who crucifies truth head downwards.” Inge was thinking, of course, of Chesterton's paradoxes. But these might be explained as partly a reflection of the tastes of Chesterton's literary epoch: writers like Shaw and Wilde were famous for their paradoxes. And Chesterton himself undoubtedly had in mind the antinomies that inevitably spring from Christian theology of the Incarnation. The crucified Christ, as Empson showed in his discussion of George Herbert's poem “The Sacrifice,” is an epitome of terrible paradox. However, Chesterton's love of the paradoxical amounts to an obsession. Perhaps more than anything else it has turned readers away from him. And we cannot but relate it to what appear to be morbid and pathological elements in these stories.

But these do not predominate. On the whole Chesterton is quite clear about what he is doing. And what he is doing is to play a game with the reader. Some of his funniest stories are those in which he “sends up” his own genre, as in “The Purple Wig,” or “The Absence of Mr. Glass.” In others he debunks the thriller motifs of other writers, such as the supernatural curse (“The Doom of the Darnaways,” “The Perishing of the Pendragons,” “The Salad of Colonel Cray”). It is very characteristic of Chesterton to point out that the doom of the Darnaways would lose all its spell if it were the doom of the Browns. It is also very characteristic that he also loves to pull the legs of scientific investigators (“The Blast of the Book,” “The Mistake of the Machine”). Chesterton is not hostile to science because it is inhuman. On the contrary, science, to be science, has to be inhuman. But it is out of this, precisely, that Chesterton extracts his comedy.

We may think it a pity that wit and wisdom and such remarkable (if idiosyncratic) descriptive power were wasted on these little detective tales. On the other hand, it may be that they served to focus psychological and moral and religious preoccupations which Chesterton happened to have at the time, and which he could not have discharged in any other form. At any rate, these stories seem to have survived in the affections of ordinary readers, while Chesterton's more ambitious works are forgotten. But I suppose the superior critic will say this is because all the ordinary reader cares about is whodunit.