The Complete Father Brown

by G.K. Chesterton

The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen. A few clouds in heaven do come together into the staring shape of one human eye. A tree does stand up in the landscape of a doubtful journey in the exact and elaborate shape of a note of interrogation. I have seen both these things myself within the last few days. Nelson does die in the instant of victory; and a man named Williams does quite accidentally murder a man named Williamson; it sounds like a sort of infanticide. In short, there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen.

“The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic,”

The glory of heaven deepened and darkened around the sublime vulgarity of man;

“Only infinite physically,” said the little priest, turning sharply in his seat, “not infinite in the sense of escaping from the laws of truth.”

He was one of the great humanitarian French freethinkers; and the only thing wrong with them is that they make mercy even colder than justice.

Meanwhile the good priest and the good atheist stood at the head and foot of the dead man motionless in the moonlight, like symbolic statues of their two philosophies of death.

Father Brown got to his feet, putting his hands behind him. “Odd, isn’t it,” he said, “that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man?

“Reverend sir, your friend must have been very smart to act the gentleman.” Father Brown buttoned up his commonplace overcoat to the neck, for the night was stormy, and took his commonplace umbrella from the stand. “Yes,” he said; “it must be very hard work to be a gentleman; but, do you know, I have sometimes thought that it may be almost as laborious to be a waiter.”

A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it.” “But who won’t allow you,” put in the priest in a low voice, “to own your own soot.”

Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down.

For Scotland has a double dose of the poison called heredity; the sense of blood in the aristocrat, and the sense of doom in the Calvinist.

invent what Wilkie Collins’ tragedy you like,

to those bewildering carpets or blinding embroideries in which all the colours seem fallen into a fortunate chaos,

“That woman’s over-driven,” said Father Brown; “that’s the kind of woman that does her duty for twenty years, and then does something dreadful.” The little doctor looked at him for the first time with an eye of interest. “Did you ever study medicine?” he asked. “You have to know something of the mind as well as the body,” answered the priest; “we have to know something of the body as well as the mind.”

“I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry,” answered Father Brown. “The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.”

Few except the poor preserve traditions. Aristocrats live not in traditions but in fashions.

“I am a man,” answered Father Brown gravely; “and therefore have all devils in my heart.

And now come down into the village, and go your own way as free as the wind; for I have said my last word.” They went down the winding stairs in utter silence, and came out into the sunlight by the smithy. Wilfred Bohun carefully unlatched the wooden gate of the yard, and going up to the inspector, said: “I wish to give myself up; I have killed my brother.”

He went as near as his century permitted to walking the world literally like Don Juan, with rapier and guitar.

He was so unique that nobody could quite decide whether he was a great aristocrat who had taken up Art, or a great artist whom the aristocrats had taken up. But you could not meet him for five minutes without realizing that you had really been ruled by him all your life.

her heavy, hot brown hair framed one of those magic faces which are dangerous to all men, but especially to boys and to men growing grey.

“What we all dread most,” said the priest in a low voice, “is a maze with no centre. That is why atheism is only a nightmare.”

Don’t be too hard on the aristocrats themselves if their heads are as weak as ours would be, and they are snobs about their own sorrows.”

And I say to you, wherever you find men ruled merely by mystery, it is the mystery of iniquity. If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it.

It was one of those rare atmospheres in which a smoked-glass slide seems to have been slid away from between us and Nature; so that even dark colours on that day look more gorgeous than bright colours on cloudier days.

He could not help, even unconsciously, asking himself all the questions that there were to be asked, and answering as many of them as he could;

laudator temporis acti,

One who praises past times

America has a genius for the encouragement of fame;

I’m afraid you have not had an opportunity of studying psychology.’ ‘No,’ said Fenner dryly; ‘but I’ve had an opportunity of studying psychologists.’

‘He rose, but not on wings; not on the wings of any holy or unholy angels. He rose at the end of a rope, exactly as you saw him in the garden; a noose dropped over his head the moment it was poked out of the window. Don’t you remember Wilson, that big servant of his, a man of huge strength, while Wynd was the lightest of little shrimps? Didn’t Wilson go to the floor above to

You all swore you were hard-shelled materialists; and as a matter of fact you were all balanced on the very edge of belief — of belief in almost anything. There are thousands balanced on it today; but it’s a sharp, uncomfortable edge to sit on. You won’t rest till you believe something; that’s why Mr Vandam went through new religions with a tooth-comb, and Mr Alboin quotes Scripture for his religion of breathing exercises, and Mr Fenner grumbles at the very God he denies.

Americans really respect work, rather as Europeans respect war. There is a halo of heroism about it; and he who shrinks from it is less than a man.

lynch-gate

Lych-

Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it’s only incredible. But I’m much more certain it didn’t happen than that Parnell’s ghost didn’t appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand.

‘And so,’ said the priest with a smile, ‘he wants a policeman to act as his parlour-maid because his parlour-maid won’t act as a policeman.’

‘Well, I do believe some things, of course,’ conceded Father Brown; ‘and therefore, of course, I don’t believe other things.’

‘The beginning of it was a dressing-gown,’ said Father Brown simply. ‘It was the one really good disguise I’ve ever known. When you meet a man in a house with a dressing-gown on, you assume quite automatically that he’s in his own house.

‘All things are from God; and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion.

I think you know I’m not a bigot. You know I know there are all sorts in all religions; good men in bad ones and bad men in good ones.

And if you don’t know that I would grind all the Gothic arches in the world to powder to save the sanity of a single human soul, you don’t know so much about my religion as you think you do.’

It’s dreadfully banal and stupid, as stupid as I have been on this pretty banal case. But we were mixed up in a real musty old romance of decayed gentility and a fallen family mansion; and it was too much to hope that we could escape having a secret passage. It was a priest’s hole; and I deserve to be put in it.’

For Flambeau, after all his violent adventures, still possessed what is possessed by so many Latins, what is absent (for instance) in so many Americans, the energy to retire. It can be seen in many a large hotel-proprietor whose one ambition is to be a small peasant. It can be seen in many a French provincial shopkeeper, who pauses at the moment when he might develop into a detestable millionaire and buy a street of shops, to fall back quietly and comfortably on domesticity and dominoes.

“I had planned out each of the crimes very carefully,” went on Father Brown, “I had thought out exactly how a thing like that could be done, and in what style or state of mind a man could really do it. And when I was quite sure that I felt exactly like the murderer myself, of course I knew who he was.”

“Ours is the only trade,” said Bagshaw, “in which the professional is always supposed to be wrong. After all, people don’t write stories in which hairdressers can’t cut hair and have to be helped by a customer; or in which a cabman can’t drive a cab until his fare explains to him the philosophy of cab-driving.

“Well, Father Brown,” he said with a smile; “what do you think of our judicial procedure?” “Well,” replied the priest rather absently, “I think the thing that struck me most was how different men look in their wigs.

Yet I think our general experience is that every conceivable sort of man has been a saint. And I suspect you will find, too, that every conceivable sort of man has been a murderer.”

“Well, they say we should make hay while the sun shines,” said Devine. “Perhaps you make honey while the moon shines.” There came a flash from the shadow of the broad-brimmed hat, as the whites of the man’s eyes shifted and shone. “Perhaps there is a good deal of moonshine in the business,” he said: “but I warn you my bees do not only make honey. They sting.”

There was no disguise about his disguises. He didn’t want the old disguise any more, but he wasn’t frightened of it; he would have felt it false to destroy the false beard. It would have been like hiding; and he was not hiding. He was not hiding from God; he was not hiding from himself. He was in the broad daylight. If they’d taken him back to prison, he’d still have been quite happy. He was not whitewashed, but washed white.

“Beware of the man you forget,” replied his friend; “he is the one man who has you entirely at a disadvantage.

“Beware of the woman you forget, and even more,” answered the other.