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G.K. Chesterton: It’s the First Principles, Stupid

In what we have written here over the months about G.K. Chesterton, we have gone on and on about Chesterton the essayist and about Chesterton the newspaper man, and Chesterton the apologist, and it does seem to us that this is the valuable core-wood . . .

But to the world, Chesterton means the Father Brown detective stories.

Now, the world has its reasons, and its judgements should not be passed over lightly.

Be that as it may, we had not read much in the Father Brown stories for a long time. If you have a gap, you might as well profit from it as an opportunity for a reasonably fresh review. Very Proustian, that.

An aside: it is piquant to think of Chesterton and Proust inhabiting the same planet, and the same corner of the planet, at the same time. Were they even aware of each other.

Chesterton began writing these stories in 1910 and kept on until close to his death in 1936. The series was begun by a casual suggestion by GKC’s publisher; the character of Father Brown was based (loosely) on Monsignor John O’Conner. Most of these facts, by the way, are from Father Brown: a selection, published in World’s Classics, with an extended introduction by W.W. Robson. There are twenty-eight stories in this anthology, including most of the most famous titles. Robson’s introduction is well worth reading.

Well then, how well do these stories stand up?

The first thing to be said is that they are not all successful.

When the ingredients gel, the story works, but the ingredients do not always gel.  In these cases, GKC’s descriptions pull apart from his plot, the plot is ridiculous (or more ridiculous than usual), and the dogma feels stuck on.

But, we can be a little forgiving on this point – many of the Father Brown stories were written for fast ad hoc cash. And we must keep in mind Sturgeon’s Law (look it up). Besides, a man ought to be judged on his best. Babe Ruth also led the league in striking out.

Whether or not a particular story works, the Father Brown oeuvre has the one necessary (though not sufficient) quality for first-rate art: the stories do not feel like anybody else’s work. Like Matisse, they are unmistakable. We have read a lot of detective fiction, some of it first rate, and none of it sounds like Chesterton, none of it has the quality of joviality, serious purpose and nightmare that Chesterton achieves.

Wherein does this difference lie?

We would argue that GKC is distinctive on three points: texture of the prose, plot contrivance, and underlying principles.

Between the silver ribbon of morning and the green glittering ribbon of sea, the boat touched Harwich and let loose a swarm of folk like flies, among whom the man we must follow was by no means conspicuous – nor wished to be.

– “The Blue Cross”

He was a huge fellow, as fat as he was tall, in complete evening black, without so much relief as a watch-chain or a ring. His hair was white and well brushed back like a German’s; his face was red, fierce, and cherubic, with one dark tuft under the lower lip that threw up that otherwise infantile visage with an effect theatrical or even Mephistophelean.

– “The Secret Garden”

The Vernon Hotel, at which The Twelve True Fishermen held their annual dinners, was an institution such as can only exist in an oligarchical society which has almost gone mad on good manners.

 – “The Queer Feet”

No one has written like this in popular fiction for a century. Note the combination of leisurely and formal (what is formal often takes its own sweet time) syntax, the sly social commentary, and the vivid colouration – GKC had begun as an art student and his descriptions are often in the terms of pictures.

A style like this is utterly foreign to us.  Between it and ourselves has intervened a revolution as to what we expect from genre writers. Chesterton was the heir of Dickens, not to say Cicero. We, readers and writers both, are the children of The Black Mask, Hammett, Hemingway, John D. MacDonald and Elmo Leonard, whose famous 10 rules for writing include:

1. Never open a book with weather,

and

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

We read with the eye, and what we get is inner cinema. Chesterton’s prose is prose someone is reading to someone else.

In matters of argument, in polemics, difference in style may be excused, because argument means to be a window on the reality.  But in art, surface counts.

Chesterton also has an approach to plot that is a little different from what we are used to.

In general, we expect plot to be the interaction of a group leading to a conclusion, happy or sad. There is nothing odd in this. In detective fiction, this interaction is revealed bit by bit through the investigation of the agent.

This is not what goes on in the Father Brown stories. They are more like puzzle pictures, in which the question is “what is going on here?” A situation is set up, and Father Brown analyses it. More than a few times the situation is close to ridiculous, as, for example, in “The Duel of Doctor Hirsch.” Often there is no arrest. There is hardly any dynamic. The stories are opportunities not for drama, per se, but for insight, insight into the difference between how a gentleman walks and how a waiter walks, or the contrast between the mentality of dogs, and men who think about dogs.

It is the theme of insight that leads us into the aspect of the Father Brown stories that is most peculiar to these stories, yet the most difficult to explain.

The atmosphere of these stories has a visionary and fantastic quality to it. As one of the critics remarks:

“[A] farrago of magnificent nonsense, fantasy heightened by the vivid realism of the figures and scenes. Mr. Chesterton has the poet’s gift for seeing the most commonplace things – moons or men’s faces, hills, street-lamps, and houses – with a startling freshness and suddenness, as though they had been but that instant made.”

This is reinforced by the plots, which are frequently bizarre. Reference “The Oracle of the Dog.”

At the same time, if GKC’s main character has a working motto it would be “Reason now, always and everywhere.”  From the last pages of “The Blue Cross”:

“No,” said the other priest; “reason is always reasonable, even in the last limbo, in the lost borderland of things. I know that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God Himself is bound by reason.”

and

“. . . made me sure you weren’t a priest”

“What?’”asked the thief, almost gaping.

“You attacked reason,” said Father Brown. “It’s bad theology.”

It may be objected, reasonably, that it is difficult to solve a crime without reason. Sherlock Holmes was a ruthless thinking machine (and forensic scientist). Rabbi Small, in the famous series by Harry Kellerman, uses Talmudic reasoning. Marlow uses his common sense (and a gun and an ability to endure beatings).

But only in the Father Brown series is this reason made the central principle, and, more importantly, extended as a principle to the universe around it. The world is a very spooky place and it is spooky because it is reasonable. It is reasonable because it is made, and the X who made it, and whose presence haunts every aspect of it, is Reason itself.

There is nothing as unheimlich as lucidity.

One more point.

Some people like these stories very much, and others dislike them with equal intensity.

Both parties are 100% correct.

It’s a question of the premises. The issue in debate is not whether the universe has reason within it, but whether the universe is founded on reason.

One can take either position; it’s a free world. But with the position of choice comes the logical consequence.

Between those who take A and those who take B there can be no truce, and no reconciliation. And that’s a fact.

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Max Arnott is an independent scholar living in Toronto and has been a reader of Voegelin for many years.

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