G. K. Chesterton:A Biography

by Ian Ker

  Although Chesterton was no Tory or Conservative, he no longer felt he belonged to the party opposing that of Wyndham, as he had become deeply disillusioned with the Liberals who had been returned to power at two general elections in 1910, although with greatly reduced majorities and only able to govern as a minority government. In January 1911 he wrote to the Liberal Nation, complaining that ‘the big questions’ of social reform were being ‘squeezed out’. He explained: ‘I say our representatives accept designs and desires almost entirely from the Cabinet class above them; and practically not at all from the constituents below them. I say the people does not wield a Parliament which wields a Cabinet. I say the Cabinet bullies a timid parliament which bullies a bewildered people.’ If examples were needed, then ‘I say the people do not cry out that all children whose parents lunch on cheese and beer in an inn should be left out in the rain. I say the people did not demand that a man’s sentence should be settled by his jailers instead of by his judges.’ The Editor replied that these two instances—about which he agreed—were ‘too small to prove so large a case’. He could hardly have said anything more likely to provoke Chesterton, who had very strong views both about the licensing laws, not least as they affected children, and about the penal system, and who retorted: ‘Why do you think of these things as small? They are really enormous. One alters the daily habits of millions of people; the other destroys the public law of thousands of years. What can be more fundamental than food, drink, and children? What can be more catastrophic than putting us back in the primal anarchy, in which a man was flung into a dungeon and left there “till he listened to reason?”’ But Chesterton knew why such matters were considered unimportant: ‘simply’ because ‘the Front Benches did not announce them as big. They were not “first-class measures”; they were not “full-dress debates”. The governing class shot them through in the quick, quiet, secondary way in which they pass things that the people positively detests…’11

  Belloc and Cecil Chesterton made their disillusionment with the Liberals known in their book The Party System, which was also published in 1911, in which they took exactly the same line as Chesterton—namely, that, far from the people or even parliament governing, it was the cabinet that ruled, the ministers chosen by the oligarchies that controlled the two parties. The two authors even alleged that these governing families not only belonged to the same social set but were actually related by birth or marriage. It was also possible to buy one’s way into this oligarchy by contributing to party funds. The Liberal government was not the first—or the last—to sell honours for money, but the practice had increased notably. Belloc, who was too disillusioned with party politics to stand again in 1910, had already as the member for South Salford in the 1906 parliament proposed, without success, that at least the names of subscribers to party funds should be made public. And Chesterton himself had written an article for the Daily News following an attack in the House of Commons in 1907 on the then Liberal Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman over the sale of peerages. The Editor, A. G. Gardiner, refused to publish it, although he promised to keep it ‘for a later occasion when the general question is not complicated with a particularly offensive incident’. Chesterton replied in a letter to the editor, saying that, while in general he would never resent one of his articles not being published, this was a matter for his conscience (‘just now the animal is awake and roaring’): it was ‘a question of which is the more important, politeness or political morality’. Unless some Liberal journalists spoke out, ‘the secret funds and the secret powers are safe’. His letter was published by Gardiner and was quoted, to general applause, in the House of Commons. However, this kind of corruption was not the preserve of the Liberal Party: what was special about contemporary Liberalism was that it was becoming less and less concerned for its liberal principles of freedom and liberty and more and more for the kind of Socialist legislation that interfered in the lives of the ordinary people. Several years later Chesterton was to write that ‘the least hint of a revolution would have caused quite as much horror’ in the Liberal Daily News office as in that of the Conservative Morning Post: ‘The fact is that Liberalism was in no way whatever on the side of Labour; on the contrary, it was on the side of the Labour Party…’.12

  2

  The first of the Father Brown stories, ‘The Blue Cross’, had been published in September 1910 in the Storyteller magazine. It had been written at the time of the move from London to Beaconsfield, when Chesterton was staying with Lucian Oldershaw and, unable to find a detective story he had not read, decided to write one himself.13 It was the first of twelve stories, previously published as stories in magazines, in the first of the Father Brown volumes, The Innocence of Father Brown, which appeared in July 1911. There is a general view—held for example by Ronald Knox—that this is the best of the Father Brown volumes and that there is a falling-off in subsequent volumes, albeit, according to Knox, a recovery in the last volume.14 Perhaps this view is persuasive because it is well known that some later stories were written for money.15 It has even been suggested that the stories deteriorate in the course of each volume.16 However, when a few years ago this writer made a selection of what seemed to him the best of the Father Brown stories,17 the resulting selection indicated the opposite of this view: not a single story was selected from the second of the Father Brown volumes, The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914), which followed only three years after what is presumed to be the best of the volumes, while on the other hand six stories were selected from The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926), as opposed to five stories from The Innocence of Father Brown, four from The Secret of Father Brown (1927), and no less than six stories from the final volume, The Scandal of Father Brown (1935), published only a year before Chesterton’s death, when he was heavily preoccupied with editing G.K.’s Weekly. This selection at any rate would indicate that, with the exception of the second volume, there was no deterioration in quality but a slight improvement if anything. As for a deterioration of quality within the stories in a volume, this selection certainly did not support that allegation.

  The Father Brown stories are certainly not the most important of Chesterton’s writings, but they have remained the most popular and widely read.18 Chesterton himself did not regard them as of any great importance. Dorothy Collins has recorded how some of the later ones were written for purely financial reasons, particularly to help pay for G.K.’s Weekly. On being informed of his precarious bank balance, Chesterton would reply: “‘Oh, well. We must write another Father Brown story,” and this would be done at lightning speed a day or two later from a few notes on the back of an envelope’.19

  The point of making Father Brown appear commonplace and inconspicuous was not only to disguise his penetrating powers of insight and observation. For the character reflects Chesterton’s own love of ordinariness. Just as Father Brown’s creator delights in depicting the most commonplace and familiar things with a vivid freshness as though they were entirely novel and strange, so too Father Brown is able to detect a vital significance in the most unremarkable things; what everyone else fails to notice because of its apparent insignificance, he sees.20 Nobody noticed that somebody did actually enter the building: namely, the postman, or somebody who purported to be the postman, but who was ignored precisely because he looked like a postman. Or it may be, as in another story, a completely unsuspicious remark, as when the murdered admiral’s solicitor is told that he has been drowned, and instead of assuming that it was at sea—as anybody else would—he asks where he was drowned. The identity of another murderer is spotted by Father Brown when he fails to start or look around at his victim screaming as she crashes to her death. In the story of the postman, Father Brown makes the shrewd observation that people do not answer what you ask but what they think you mean.

  Ronald Knox thought that the Father Brown stories could not really be counted among ‘mystery stories’.21 In the first place, Father Brown is neither a police nor a private detective; nor is he a detective in
the sense of being someone who is an expert at solving crimes.22 The only expertise that Father Brown possesses is his intimate knowledge of the human heart. And this knowledge he acquires from his religion, in two ways. First, there is his belief in original sin and the human capacity for evil. It is precisely because of his own sins as a human being that he can understand another’s sins, as he explains in the story that gives its name to the volume called The Secret of Father Brown. He rejects the science of criminology because it means ‘getting outside a man and studying him as if he were a gigantic insect: in what they would call a dry impartial light, in what I should call a dead and dehumanised light’;23 whereas he knows that criminals are friends not strangers, because they are fellow human beings. Instead of trying to observe the suspected criminal from the outside, Father Brown tries to get inside, or rather tries to be the criminal. He sees himself as a kind of ‘understudy’24 who will know who has committed the crime once he has really learned the part. The reformed criminal Flambeau, for example, stops stealing once Father Brown has explained to him why he was stealing. Far from seeing criminals as a race apart, Father Brown sees them as people like himself—that is, sinners. This is how he explains, with unusual passion, the source of his powers of detection:

  No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realized exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals’, as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat.25

  The other source of his knowledge of the human heart is his priestly work of hearing confessions. He knows about evil because he hears about actual sins. On one occasion he uncovers the villain because he can tell immediately that he has made a false confession. As a priest, too, he picks up vital information that the normal detective would never gather because he does not possess that empathy that comes naturally to a good pastoral priest, used to mixing with all kinds of people.

  Because it is impossible in a detective story to have normal fictional characterization, since every character has to be a suspect except the detective, this means that the one character who can be a character in his own right is the detective. And this is certainly true in the case of Father Brown, who is Chesterton in his views. As Knox observed, the sheer physical expansiveness of Chesterton was matched by the way in which he ‘overflowed’ every literary form he attempted, putting more of himself into it than it could contain. Even his great study of Dickens was ‘really the Chestertonian philosophy as illustrated by the life of Dickens’. Similarly, the fact that Father Brown speaks with the voice of Chesterton makes him a much larger personality than he would otherwise be. The Father Brown stories, then, are ‘something more’ than detective stories: ‘Like everything else Chesterton wrote, they are a Chestertonian manifesto.’26

  Because Father Brown is a Roman Catholic priest, unsurprisingly much of the Chestertonian manifesto in the stories concerns Catholicism. A typical Chestertonian paradox is that Father Brown, in spite of being a Catholic priest, never employs any specifically spiritual powers. The overwhelmingly Protestant or secular readership for which Chesterton was writing would have naturally assumed that a detective priest would resort to all the tricks of ‘priestcraft’. But Chesterton’s Father Brown categorically repudiates special spiritual powers: ‘Frankly, I don’t care for spiritual powers much myself. I’ve got much more sympathy for spiritual weaknesses.’27 This disclaimer contrasts with characters who do (falsely) claim miraculous powers, as in ‘The Red Moon of Meru’. Nor is there ever any suggestion that Father Brown possesses any particular supernatural insights.

  The reason for this insistence is not just because Chesterton wants all the emphasis to fall upon Father Brown’s experience of human nature. At least as important is the idea that Catholicism and Catholic theology are entirely consonant with common sense and reason, while false religions dabble in the mysterious and occult. At the end of ‘The Blue Cross’, Father Brown completes his triumph over Flambeau by telling him that he knew the disguised Flambeau was not a real priest. How could he have known? the astonished Flambeau asks. ‘You attacked reason. It’s bad theology.’ Flambeau had speculated that there might be other worlds where reason was not rational, to which Father Brown had responded: ‘Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God Himself is bound by reason.’28 In ‘The Queer Feet’, the author refers to the Catholic Church as ‘wedded to common sense’.29 Elsewhere Father Brown is adamant that the first effect of not believing in God is that one loses one’s common sense, which leads to superstitious gullibility. Mystery (in the non-Christian sense) is regularly denounced. In ‘The Arrow of Heaven’, Father Brown declares: ‘Real mystics don’t hide mysteries, they reveal them. They set up a thing in broad daylight, and when you’ve seen it it’s still a mystery. But the mystagogues hide a thing in darkness and secrecy, and when you find it, it’s a platitude.’30 In ‘The Miracle of Moon Crescent’, he goes further, saying that Satanism loves ‘mysteries and initiations and secret societies and all the rest of it’.31 In ‘The Doom of the Darnaways’, the priest speaks of ‘nonsense’ as ‘the most terrible thing’ known to human beings. Whether it is ‘scientific superstition’ or other ‘magical superstition’, he believes in ‘daylight’ not ‘subterranean superstition’ that ends ‘in the dark’.32 As he puts it in ‘The Red Moon of Meru’: ‘Reason is from God, and when things are unreasonable there is something the matter.’33

  The voice of Father Brown is often audibly the voice of Chesterton. The ‘one mark of all genuine religions’, Father Brown asserts, perhaps to the surprise of most readers, is ‘materialism’, which is why ‘devil-worship is a perfectly genuine religion’. Mystery can mean two quite separate things: ‘mystery in the sense of what is marvellous, and mystery in the sense of what is complicated’; and miracles, being ‘startling’ but ‘simple’, are mysterious in the first sense. Similarly, Chesterton argues through the mouth of Father Brown: ‘It really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don’t understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand.’ When Father Brown asserts, ‘Aristocrats live not in traditions but in fashions,’ whereas it is the poor who ‘preserve traditions’, it is the voice of Chesterton that we hear. The Protestant doctrine of the Bible as the sole authority for Christians is answered by Father Brown with Chestertonian wit: ‘When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else’s Bible? A printer reads a Bible for misprints. A Mormon reads his Bible and finds polygamy; a Christian Scientist reads his and finds we have no arms and legs.’ As always in Chesterton, laughter is praised, but not ‘a permanent smile’, as ‘cheerfulness without humour is a very trying thing’. If somebody stops believing in God he loses his ‘common sense and can’t see things as they are’. Just as Chesterton believed materialism was integral to real religion, so he thought that even ‘hard-shelled materialists’ are ‘all balanced on the very edge of belief—of belief in almost anything’: ‘There are thousands balanced on it to-day; but it’s a sharp, uncomfortable edge to sit on.’ Paradox naturally comes easily to Chesterton’s Father Brown’s lips: ‘A thing can sometimes be too close to be seen, as, for instance, a man cannot see himself.’ It is the worldly man who ‘will really do anything, when he is in danger of losing the whole world and saving nothing’: ‘It is not the revolutionary man but the respectable man who would commit any crime—to save his respectability.’ Father Brown has no time for intellectuals, if only because ‘you don’t need any intellect to be an intellectual’. Like his creator, Father Brown has no time for the fashionable contemporary idea that all religions are the
same: ‘I tell you some of them are so different that the best man of one creed will be callous, where the worst of another will be sensitive.’ And, again, he dislikes ‘spiritual power, because the accent is on the word power’. The ‘real difference between human charity and Christian charity’ is that there is ‘a limit to human charity’. According to Father Brown, ‘the hardest thing in theology to believe’ is that ‘all men matter’.34

  Chesterton’s extraordinary ingenuity in the plots he constructs—he is surely the most ingenious of detective storywriters—may not exceed the bounds of possibility, but it certainly detracts from the realism of the stories.35 The detective genre was invented by Edgar Allan Poe, for whom crime was strictly an intellectual problem. But, while his detective, Auguste Dupin, purports to investigate solely by logical deduction, in fact what Poe achieves is ‘not a triumph of reason, but a conjuring trick’. And it could be said that ‘many of the Father Brown stories can be regarded as ingenious variations on the theme of “The Purloined Letter”’, the best known of the Dupin stories. What makes the difference between the two writers is that between ‘Poe and Chesterton comes Conan Doyle’. For Sherlock Holmes is a character in a way that Dupin is not, just as Watson has a personality that Dupin’s confidant totally lacks.36 Indeed, Chesterton thought that without Dr Watson the Sherlock Homes stories were ‘stale and dull’: ‘It is quite thrilling to realise how entirely the point of the stories [depends] on the Watsonian notes of exclamation…. The atmosphere of these stories [is] the glamour of Watson’s inexhaustible power of wonder.’37

  There is a further debt that Chesterton owes to Conan Doyle and that is the way in which the Sherlock Holmes stories invest the most prosaic of London scenes with romance. But then behind Conan Doyle is Dickens, ‘the great master of the unfamiliarity in the familiar’.38 Chesterton himself in his Charles Dickens gave a vivid example, as we have already seen, of ‘that eerie realism with which Dickens could always vitalize some dark or dull corner of London’, so that ‘things seem more actual than things really are’, when he describes the coffee shop where Dickens read the sign on the outside of the door, ‘COFFEE ROOM’, from inside as ‘MOOR EEFOC’.39 And Chesterton makes use of exactly the same kind of visual shock, although he chooses a public house rather than a coffee shop: