GK Chesterton on evil
The opening and closing scenes of The Secret of Father Brown have just come into the public domain, and allowed me to do something I had wanted to do for a long time: Place them together. For the allusions to various cases, you may read the complete book, and if you haven't read it already I will be doing you a favour; but the two scenes, read together, represent one of the most profound and beautiful meditations on evil and human nature I have ever read, and an eternal rebuke to the eternal Pharisee that lurks (among other places) in far too many of our blogs.
THE SECRET OF FATHER BROWN
FLAMBEAU, once the most famous criminal in France and later a very
private detective in England, had long retired from both professions.
Some say a career of crime had left him with too many scruples for a
career of detection. Anyhow, after a life of romantic escapes and tricks
of evasion, he had ended at what some might consider an appropriate
address: in a castle in Spain. The castle, however, was solid though
relatively small; and the black vineyard and green stripes of kitchen
garden covered a respectable square on the brown hillside. 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. Flambeau had
casually and almost abruptly fallen in love with a Spanish Lady, married
and brought up a large family on a Spanish estate, without displaying
any apparent desire to stray again beyond its borders. But on one
particular morning he was observed by his family to be unusually
restless and excited; and he outran the little boys and descended the
greater part of the long mountain slope to meet the visitor who was
coming across the valley; even when the visitor was still a black dot in
the distance.
The black dot gradually increased in size without very much altering in
the shape; for it continued, roughly speaking, to be both round and
black. The black clothes of clerics were not unknown upon those hills;
but these clothes, however clerical, had about them something at once
commonplace and yet almost jaunty in comparison with the cassock or
soutane, and marked the wearer as a man from the northwestern islands,
as clearly as if he had been labelled Clapham Junction. He carried a
short thick umbrella with a knob like a club, at the sight of which his
Latin friend almost shed tears of sentiment; for it had figured in many
adventures that they shared long ago. For this was the Frenchman's
English friend. Father Brown, paying a long-desired but long-delayed
visit. They had corresponded constantly, but they had not met for years.
Father Brown was soon established in the family circle, which was quite
large enough to give the general sense of company or a community. He was
introduced to the big wooden images of the Three Kings, of painted and
gilded wood, who bring the gifts to the children at Christmas; for Spain
is a country where the affairs of the children bulk large in the life of
the home. He was introduced to the dog and the cat and the live-stock
on the farm. But he was also, as it happened, introduced to one
neighbour who, like himself, had brought into that valley the garb and
manners of distant lands.
It was on the third night of the priest's stay at the little chateau
that he beheld a stately stranger who paid his respects to the Spanish
household with bows that no Spanish grandee could emulate. He was a
tall, thin grey-haired and very handsome gentleman, and his hands,
cuffs and cuff-links had something overpowering in their polish. But
his long face had nothing of that languor which is associated with long
cuffs and manicuring in the caricatures of our own country. It was
rather arrestingly alert and keen; and the eyes had an innocent
intensity of inquiry that does not go often with grey hairs. That alone
might have marked the man's nationality, as well the nasal note in his
refined voice and his rather too ready assumption of the vast antiquity
of all the European things around him. This was, indeed, no less a
person than Mr. Grandison Chace, of Boston, an American traveller who
had halted for a time in his American travels by taking a lease of the
adjoining estate; a somewhat similar castle on a somewhat similar hill.
He delighted in his old castle, and he regarded his friendly neighbour
as a local antiquity of the same type. For Flambeau managed, as we have
said, really to look retired in the sense of rooted. He might have grown
there with his own vine and fig-tree for ages. He had resumed his real
family name of Duroc; for the other title of "The Torch" had only been a
title de guerre, like that under which such a man will often wage war on
society. He was fond of his wife and family; he never went farther
afield than was needed for a little shooting; and he seemed, to the
American globe-trotter, the embodiment of that cult of a sunny
respectability and a temperate luxury, which the American was wise
enough to see and admire in the Mediterranean peoples. The rolling stone
from the West was glad to rest for a moment on this rock in the South
that had gathered so very much moss. But Mr. Chace had heard of Father
Brown, and his tone faintly changed, as towards a celebrity. The
interviewing instinct awoke, tactful but tense. If he did try to draw
Father Brown, as if he were a tooth, it was done with the most dexterous
and painless American dentistry.
They were sitting in a sort of partly unroofed outer court of the house,
such as often forms the entrance to Spanish houses. It was dusk turning
to dark; and as all that mountain air sharpens suddenly after sunset, a
small stove stood on the flagstones, glowing with red eyes like a
goblin, and painting a red pattern on the pavement; but scarcely a ray
of it reached the lower bricks of the great bare, brown brick wall that
went soaring up above them into the deep blue night. Flambeau's big
broad-shouldered figure and great moustaches, like sabres, could be
traced dimly in the twilight, as he moved about, drawing dark wine from
a great cask and handing it round. In his shadow, the priest looked very
shrunken and small, as if huddled over the stove; but the American
visitor leaned forward elegantly with his elbow on his knee and his fine
pointed features in the full light; his eyes shone with inquisitive
intelligence.
"I can assure you, sir," he was saying, "we consider your achievement in
the matter of the Moonshine Murder the most remarkable triumph in the
history of detective science."
Father Brown murmured something; some might have imagined that the
murmur was a little like a moan.
"We are well acquainted," went on the stranger firmly, "with the alleged
achievements of Dupin and others; and with those of Lecocq, Sherlock
Holmes, Nicholas Carter, and other imaginative incarnations of the
craft. But we observe there is in many ways, a marked difference between
your own method, of approach and that of these other thinkers, whether
fictitious or actual. Some have spec'lated, sir, as to whether the
difference of method may perhaps involve rather the absence of method."
Father Brown was silent; then he started a little, almost as if he had
been nodding over the stove, and said: "I beg your pardon. Yes. . ..
Absence of method. . . . Absence of mind, too, I'm afraid."
"I should say of strictly tabulated scientific method," went on the
inquirer. "Edgar Poe throws off several little essays in a
conversational form, explaining Dupin's method, with its fine links of
logic. Dr. Watson had to listen to some pretty exact expositions of
Holmes's method with its observation of material details. But nobody
seems to have got on to any full account of your method. Father Brown,
and I was informed you declined the offer to give a series of lectures
in the States on the matter."
"Yes," said the priest, frowning at the stove; "I declined."
"Your refusal gave rise to a remarkable lot of interesting talk,"
remarked Chace. "I may say that some of our people are saying your
science can't be expounded, because it's something more than just
natural science. They say your secret's not to be divulged, as being
occult in its character."
"Being what?" asked Father Brown, rather sharply.
"Why, kind of esoteric," replied the other. "I can tell you, people got
considerably worked up about Gallup's murder, and Stein's murder, and
then old man Merton's murder, and now Judge Gwynne's murder, and a
double murder by Dalmon, who was well known in the States. And there
were you, on the spot every time, slap in the middle of it; telling
everybody how it was done and never telling anybody how you knew. So
some people got to think you knew without looking, so to speak. And
Carlotta Brownson gave a lecture on Thought-Forms with illustrations
from these cases of yours. The Second Sight Sisterhood of
Indianapolis----"
Father Brown, was still staring at the stove; then he said quite loud
yet as if hardly aware that anyone heard him: "Oh, I say. This will
never do."
"I don't exactly know how it's to be helped," said Mr. Chace humorously.
"The Second Sight Sisterhood want a lot of holding down. The only way I
can think of stopping it is for you to tell us the secret after all."
Father Brown groaned. He put his head on his hands and remained a
moment, as if full of a silent convulsion of thought. Then he lifted his
head and said in a dull voice:
"Very well. I must tell the secret."
His eyes rolled darkly over the whole darkling scene, from the red eyes
of the little stove to the stark expanse of the ancient wall, over which
were standing out, more and more brightly, the strong stars of the
south.
"The secret is," he said; and then stopped as if unable to go on. Then
he began again and said:
"You see, it was I who killed all those people."
"What?" repeated the other, in a small voice out of a vast silence.
"You see, I had murdered them all myself," explained Father Brown
patiently. "So, of course, I knew how it was done."
Grandison Chace had risen to his great height like a man lifted to the
ceiling by a sort of slow explosion. Staring down at the other he
repeated his incredulous question.
"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."
Chace gradually released a sort of broken sigh.
"You frightened me all right," he said. "For the minute I really did
think you meant you were the murderer. Just for the minute I kind of saw
it splashed over all the papers in the States: "Saintly Sleuth Exposed
as Killer: Hundred Crimes of Father Brown.' Why, of course, if it's just
a figure of speech and means you tried to reconstruct the psychogy--"
Father Brown rapped sharply on the stove with the short pipe he was
about to fill; one or his very rare spasms of annoyance contracted his
face.
"No, no, no," he said, almost angrily; "I don't mean just a figure of
speech. This is what comes of trying to talk about deep things. . . .
What's the good of words . . .? If you try to talk about a truth that's
merely moral, people always think it's merely metaphorical. A real live
man with two legs once said to me: 'I only believe in the Holy Ghost in
a spiritual sense.' Naturally, I said: 'In what other sense could you
believe it?' And then he thought I meant he needn't believe in anything
except evolution, or ethical fellowship, or some bilge. . . . I mean
that I really did see myself, and my real self, committing the murders.
I didn't actually kill the men by material means; but that's not the
point. Any brick or bit of machinery might have killed them by material
means. I mean that I thought and thought about how a man might come to
be like that, until I realized that I really was like that, in
everything except actual final consent to the action. It was once
suggested to me by a friend of mine, as a sort of religious exercise. I
believe he got it from Pope Leo XIII, who was always rather a hero of
mine."
"I'm afraid," said the American, in tones that were still doubtful, and
keeping his eye on the priest rather as if he were a wild animal, "that
you'd have to explain a lot to me before I knew what you were talking
about. The science of detection----"
Father Brown snapped his fingers with the same animated annoyance.
"That's it," he cried; "that's just where we part company. Science is a
grand thing when you can get it; in its real sense one of the grandest
words in the world. But what do these men mean, nine times out often,
when they use it nowadays? When they say detection is a science? When
they say criminology is a science? They mean 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 dehumanized light.
They mean getting a long way off him, as if he were a distant
prehistoric monster; staring at the shape of his 'criminal skull' as if
it were a sort of eerie growth, like the horn on a rhinoceros's nose.
When the scientist talks about a type, he never means himself, but
always his neighbour; probably his poorer neighbour. I don't deny the
dry light may sometimes do good; though in one sense it's the very
reverse of science. So far from being knowledge, it's actually
suppression of what we know. It's treating a friend as a stranger, and
pretending that something familiar is really remote and mysterious. It's
like saying that a man has a proboscis between the eyes, or that he
falls down in a fit of insensibility once every twenty-four hours.
Well, what you call 'the secret' is exactly the opposite. I don't try to
get outside the man. I try to get inside the murderer. . . . Indeed it's
much more than that, don't you see? I am inside a man. I am always
inside a man, moving his arms and legs; but I wait till I know I am
inside a murderer, thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his passions;
till I have bent myself into the posture of his hunched and peering
hatred; till I see the world with his bloodshot and squinting eyes,
looking between the blinkers of his half-witted concentration; looking
up the short and sharp perspective of a straight road to a pool of
blood. Till I am really a murderer."
"Oh," said Mr. Chace, regarding him with a long, grim face, and added:
"And that is what you call a religious exercise."
"Yes," said Father Brown; "that is what I call a religious exercise."
After an instant's silence he resumed: "It's so real a religious
exercise that I'd rather not have said anything about it. But I simply
couldn't have you going off and telling all your countrymen that I had a
secret magic connected with Thought-Forms, could I? I've put it badly,
but it's true. 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."
Flambeau came forward and filled a great goblet with Spanish wine and
set it before his friend, as he had already set one before his fellow
guest. Then he himself spoke for the first time:
"I believe Father Brown has had a new batch of mysteries. We were
talking about them the other day, I fancy. He has been dealing with some
queer people since we last met."
"Yes; I know the stories more or less--but not the application," said
Chace, lifting his glass thoughtfully. "Can you give me any examples, I
wonder. ... I mean, did you deal with this last batch in that
introspective style?"
Father Brown also lifted his glass, and the glow of the fire turned the
red wine transparent, like the glorious blood-red glass of a martyr's
window. The red flame seemed to hold his eyes and absorb his gaze that
sank deeper and deeper into it, as if that single cup held a red sea of
the blood of all men, and his soul were a diver, ever plunging in dark
humility and inverted imagination, lower than its lowest monsters and
its most ancient slime. In that cup, as in a red mirror, he saw many
things; the doings of his last days moved in crimson shadows; the
examples that his companions demanded danced in symbolic shapes; and
there passed before him all the stories that are told here. Now, the
luminous wine was like a vast red sunset upon dark red sands, where
stood dark figures of men; one was fallen and another running towards
him. Then the sunset seemed to break up into patches: red lanterns
swinging from garden trees and a pond gleaming red with reflection; and
then all the colour seemed to cluster again into a great rose of red
crystal, a jewel that irradiated the world like a red sun, save for the
shadow of a tall figure with a high head-dress as of some prehistoric
priest; and then faded again till nothing was left but a flame of wild
red beard blowing in the wind upon a wild grey moor. All these things,
which may be seen later from other angles and in other moods than his
own, rose up in his memory at the challenge and began to form themselves
into anecdotes and arguments.
"Yes," he said, as he raised the wine cup slowly to his lips, "I can
remember pretty well----"
THE SECRET OF FLAMBEAU
"-the sort of murders in which I played the part of the murderer," said
Father Brown, putting down the wineglass. The row of red pictures of
crime had passed before him in that moment.
"It is true," he resumed, after a momentary pause, "that somebody else
had played the part of the murderer before me and done me out of the
actual experience. I was a sort of understudy; always in a state of
being ready to act the assassin. I always made it my business, at least,
to know the part thoroughly. What I mean is that, when I tried to
imagine the state of mind in which such a thing would be done, I always
realized that I might have done it myself under certain mental
conditions, but not under others; and not generally under the obvious
ones. And then, of course, I knew who really had done it; and he was not
generally the obvious person.
"For instance, it seemed obvious to say that the revolutionary poet had
killed the old judge who saw red about red revolutionaries. But that
isn't really a reason for the revolutionary poet killing him. It isn't,
if you think what it would really be like to be a revolutionary poet.
Now I set myself conscientiously down to be a revolutionary poet. I mean
that particular sort of pessimistic anarchial lover of revolt, not as
reform, but rather as destruction. I tried to clear my mind of such
elements of sanity and constructive common sense as I have had the luck
to learn or inherit. I shut down and darkened all the skylights through
which comes the good daylight out of heaven; I imagined a mind lit only
by a red light from below; a fire rending rocks and cleaving abysses
upwards. And even with the vision at its wildest and worst, I could not
see why such a visionary should cut short his own career by colliding
with a common policeman, for killing one out of a million conventional
old fools, as he would have called them. He wouldn't do it; however much
he wrote songs of violence. He wouldn't do it, because he wrote songs of
violence. A man who can express himself in song need not express himself
in suicide. A poem was an event to him; and he would want to have more
of them. Then I thought of another sort of heathen; the sort that is not
destroying the world but entirely depending on the world. I thought
that, save for the grace of God, I might have been a man for whom the
world was a blaze of electric lights, with nothing but utter darkness
beyond and around it. The worldly man, who really lives only for this
world and believes in no other, whose worldly success and pleasure are
all he can ever snatch out of nothingness--that is the 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. Think what
exposure would mean to a man like that fashionable barrister; and
exposure of the one crime still really hated by his fashionable world--
treason against patriotism. If I had been in his position, and had
nothing better than his philosophy, heaven alone knows what I might have
done. That is just where this little religious exercise is so
wholesome."
"Some people would think it was rather morbid," said Grandison Chace
dubiously.
"Some people," said Father Brown gravely, "undoubtedly do think that
charity and humility are morbid. Our friend the poet probably would. But
I'm not arguing those questions; I'm only trying to answer your question
about how I generally go to work. Some of your countrymen have
apparently done me the honour to ask how I managed to frustrate a few
miscarriages of justice. Well, you can go back and tell them that I do
it by morbidity. But I most certainly don't want them to think I do it
by magic."
Chace continued to look at him with a reflective frown; he was too
intelligent not to understand the idea; he would also have said that he
was too healthy-minded to like it. He felt as if he were talking to
one man and yet to a hundred murderers. There was something uncanny
about that very small figure, perched like a goblin beside the goblin
stove; and the sense that its round head had held such a universe of
wild unreason and imaginative injustice. It was as if the vast void of
dark behind it were a throng of dark gigantic figures, the ghosts of
great criminals held at bay by the magic circle of the red stove, but
ready to tear their master in pieces.
"Well, I'm afraid I do think it's morbid," he said frankly. "And I'm not
sure it isn't almost as morbid as magic. But morbidity or no, there's
one thing to be said; it must be an interesting experience." Then he
added, after reflection: "I don't know whether you would make a really
good criminal. But you ought to make a rattling good novelist."
"I only have to deal with real events," said Father Brown. "But it's
sometimes harder to imagine real things than unreal ones."
"Especially," said the other, "when they are the great crimes of the
world."
"It's not the great crimes but the small crimes that are really hard to
imagine," replied the priest.
"I don't quite know what you mean by that," said Chace.
"I mean commonplace crimes like stealing jewels," said Father Brown;
"like that affair of the emerald necklace or the Ruby of Meru or the
artificial goldfish. The difficulty in those cases is that you've got to
make your mind small. High and mighty humbugs, who deal in big ideas,
don't do those obvious things. I was sure the Prophet hadn't taken the
ruby; or the Count the goldfish; though a man like Bankes might easily
take the emeralds. For them, a jewel is a piece of glass: and they can
see through the glass. But the little, literal people take it at its
market value.
"For that you've got to have a small mind. It's awfully hard to get;
like focusing smaller and sharper in a wobbling camera. But some things
helped; and they threw a lot of light on the mystery, too. For instance,
the sort of man who brags about having 'shown up' sham magicians or poor
quacks of any sort--he's always got a small mind. He is the sort of man
who 'sees through' tramps and trips them up in telling lies. I dare say
it might sometimes be a painful duty. It's an uncommonly base pleasure.
The moment I realized what a small mind meant, I knew where to look for
it--in the man who wanted to expose the Prophet--and it was he that
sneaked the ruby; in the man who jeered at his sister's psychic
fancies--and it was he who nabbed the emeralds. Men like that always have
their eye on jewels; they never could rise, with the higher humbugs, to
despising jewels. Those criminals with small minds are always quite
conventional. They become criminals out of sheer conventionality.
"It takes you quite a long time to feel so crudely as that, though. It's
quite a wild effort of imagination to be so conventional. To want one
potty little object as seriously as all that. But you can do it. ... You
can get nearer to it. Begin by thinking of being a greedy child; of how
you might have stolen a sweet in a shop; of how there was one particular
sweet you wanted … then you must subtract the childish poetry; shut off
the fairy light that shone on the sweet-stuff shop; imagine you really
think you know the world and the market value of sweets … you contract
your mind like the camera focus … the thing shapes and then sharpens ...
and then, suddenly, it comes!"
He spoke like a man who had once captured a divine vision. Grandison
Chace was still looking at him with a frown of mingled mystification and
interest. It must be confessed that there did flash once beneath his
heavy frown a look of something almost like alarm. It was as if the
shock of the first strange confession of the priest still thrilled
faintly through him like the last vibration of a thunderclap in the
room. Under the surface he was saying to himself that the mistake had
only been a temporary madness; that, of course. Father Brown could not
really be the monster and murderer he had beheld for that blinding and
bewildering instant. But was there not something wrong with the man who
talked in that calm way about being a murderer? Was it possible that the
priest was a little mad?
"Don't you think," he said, abruptly; "that this notion of yours, of a
man trying to feel like a criminal, might make him a little too tolerant
of crime?"
Father Brown sat up and spoke in a more staccato style.
"I know it does just the opposite. It solves the whole problem of time
and sin. It gives a man his remorse beforehand."
There was a silence; the American looked at the high and steep roof that
stretched half across the enclosure; his host gazed into the fire
without moving; and then the priest's voice came on a different note, as
if from lower down.
"There are two ways of renouncing the devil," he said; "and the
difference is perhaps the deepest chasm in modem religion. One is to
have a horror of him because he is so far off; and the other to have it
because he is so near. And no virtue and vice are so much divided as
those two virtues."
They did not answer and he went on in the same heavy tone, as if he were
dropping words like molten lead.
"You may think a crime horrible because you could never commit it. I
think it horrible because I could commit it. You think of it as
something like an eruption of Vesuvius; but that would not really be so
terrible as this house catching fire. If a criminal suddenly appeared in
this room----"
"If a criminal appeared in this room," said Chace, smiling, "I think you
would be a good deal too favourable to him. Apparently you would start
by telling him that you were a criminal yourself and explaining how
perfectly natural it was that he should have picked his father's pocket
or cut his mother's throat. Frankly, I don't think it's practical. I
think that the practical effect would be that no criminal would ever
reform. It's easy enough to theorize and take hypothetical cases; but we
all know we're only talking in the air. Sitting here in M. Duroc's nice,
comfortable house, conscious of our respectability and all the rest of
it, it just gives us a theatrical thrill to talk about thieves and
murderers and the mysteries of their souls. But the people who really
have to deal with thieves and murderers have to deal with them
differently. We are safe by the fireside; and we know the house is not
on fire. We know there is not a criminal in the room."
The M. Duroc to whom allusion had been made rose slowly from what had
been called his fireside, and his huge shadow flung from the fire seemed
to cover everything and darken even the very night above him.
"There is a criminal in this room," he said. "I am one. I am Flambeau,
and the police of two hemispheres are still hunting for me."
The American remained gazing at him with eyes of a stony brightness; he
seemed unable to speak or move.
"There is nothing mystical, or metaphorical, or vicarious about my
confession," said Flambeau. "I stole for twenty years with these two
hands; I fled from the police on these two feet. I hope you will admit
that my activities were practical. I hope you will admit that my judges
and pursuers really had to deal with crime. Do you think I do not know
all about their way of reprehending it? Have I not heard the sermons of
the righteous and seen the cold stare of the respectable; have I not
been lectured in the lofty and distant style, asked how it was possible
for anyone to fall so low, told that no decent person could ever have
dreamed of such depravity? Do you think all that ever did anything but
make me laugh? Only my friend told me that he knew exactly why I stole;
and I have never stolen since."
Father Brown made a gesture as of deprecation; and Grandison Chace at
last let out a long breath like a whistle.
"I have told you the exact truth," said Flambeau; "and it is open to you
to hand me over to the police."
There was an instant of profound stillness, in which could be faintly
heard the belated laughter of Flambeau's children in the high, dark
house above them, and the crunching and snorting of the great, grey pigs
in the twilight. And then it was cloven by a high voice, vibrant and
with a touch of offence, almost surprising for those who do not
understand the sensitive American spirit, and how near, in spite of
commonplace contrasts, it can sometimes come to the chivalry of Spain.
"Monsieur Duroc." he said rather stiffly. "We have been friends, I hope,
for some considerable period; and I should be pretty much pained to
suppose you thought me capable of playing you such a trick while I was
enjoying your hospitality and the society of your family, merely because
you chose to tell me a little of your own autobiography of your own free
will. And when you spoke merely in defence of your friend --no, sir, I
can't imagine any gentleman double-crossing another under such
circumstances; it would be a damned sight better to be a dirty informer
and sell men's blood for money. But in a case like this----! Could you
conceive any man being such a Judas?"
"I could try." said Father Brown.
THE END
FPB comments: The specific reason I posted this wonderful item right now of all days is as follows. I found that a man whose judgment I respect had singled out a particular review as memorable. Now that review was a very negative review - the kind, in fact, with which I myself used to be associated in a past life. It was, however, a review I would never have written: one which singled out a particular book for opprobrium not because of the way it was written, but because of the kind of hero it depicted. And the hero in question drew the reviewer's contempt because, if you please, he [the hero] felt and repressed in himself the same evil he met in his enemies, and that fed his opposition to them. In other words, we are not allowed to see as a hero a man who suppresses a great evil in himself. The only man we can consider a hero is the man who has never felt temptation at all. Sorry, I am not even interested in such a person; he is not a hero, but an ignoramus and a pharisee - or, in CS Lewis' words, a eunuch boasting of his chastity.
THE SECRET OF FATHER BROWN
FLAMBEAU, once the most famous criminal in France and later a very
private detective in England, had long retired from both professions.
Some say a career of crime had left him with too many scruples for a
career of detection. Anyhow, after a life of romantic escapes and tricks
of evasion, he had ended at what some might consider an appropriate
address: in a castle in Spain. The castle, however, was solid though
relatively small; and the black vineyard and green stripes of kitchen
garden covered a respectable square on the brown hillside. 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. Flambeau had
casually and almost abruptly fallen in love with a Spanish Lady, married
and brought up a large family on a Spanish estate, without displaying
any apparent desire to stray again beyond its borders. But on one
particular morning he was observed by his family to be unusually
restless and excited; and he outran the little boys and descended the
greater part of the long mountain slope to meet the visitor who was
coming across the valley; even when the visitor was still a black dot in
the distance.
The black dot gradually increased in size without very much altering in
the shape; for it continued, roughly speaking, to be both round and
black. The black clothes of clerics were not unknown upon those hills;
but these clothes, however clerical, had about them something at once
commonplace and yet almost jaunty in comparison with the cassock or
soutane, and marked the wearer as a man from the northwestern islands,
as clearly as if he had been labelled Clapham Junction. He carried a
short thick umbrella with a knob like a club, at the sight of which his
Latin friend almost shed tears of sentiment; for it had figured in many
adventures that they shared long ago. For this was the Frenchman's
English friend. Father Brown, paying a long-desired but long-delayed
visit. They had corresponded constantly, but they had not met for years.
Father Brown was soon established in the family circle, which was quite
large enough to give the general sense of company or a community. He was
introduced to the big wooden images of the Three Kings, of painted and
gilded wood, who bring the gifts to the children at Christmas; for Spain
is a country where the affairs of the children bulk large in the life of
the home. He was introduced to the dog and the cat and the live-stock
on the farm. But he was also, as it happened, introduced to one
neighbour who, like himself, had brought into that valley the garb and
manners of distant lands.
It was on the third night of the priest's stay at the little chateau
that he beheld a stately stranger who paid his respects to the Spanish
household with bows that no Spanish grandee could emulate. He was a
tall, thin grey-haired and very handsome gentleman, and his hands,
cuffs and cuff-links had something overpowering in their polish. But
his long face had nothing of that languor which is associated with long
cuffs and manicuring in the caricatures of our own country. It was
rather arrestingly alert and keen; and the eyes had an innocent
intensity of inquiry that does not go often with grey hairs. That alone
might have marked the man's nationality, as well the nasal note in his
refined voice and his rather too ready assumption of the vast antiquity
of all the European things around him. This was, indeed, no less a
person than Mr. Grandison Chace, of Boston, an American traveller who
had halted for a time in his American travels by taking a lease of the
adjoining estate; a somewhat similar castle on a somewhat similar hill.
He delighted in his old castle, and he regarded his friendly neighbour
as a local antiquity of the same type. For Flambeau managed, as we have
said, really to look retired in the sense of rooted. He might have grown
there with his own vine and fig-tree for ages. He had resumed his real
family name of Duroc; for the other title of "The Torch" had only been a
title de guerre, like that under which such a man will often wage war on
society. He was fond of his wife and family; he never went farther
afield than was needed for a little shooting; and he seemed, to the
American globe-trotter, the embodiment of that cult of a sunny
respectability and a temperate luxury, which the American was wise
enough to see and admire in the Mediterranean peoples. The rolling stone
from the West was glad to rest for a moment on this rock in the South
that had gathered so very much moss. But Mr. Chace had heard of Father
Brown, and his tone faintly changed, as towards a celebrity. The
interviewing instinct awoke, tactful but tense. If he did try to draw
Father Brown, as if he were a tooth, it was done with the most dexterous
and painless American dentistry.
They were sitting in a sort of partly unroofed outer court of the house,
such as often forms the entrance to Spanish houses. It was dusk turning
to dark; and as all that mountain air sharpens suddenly after sunset, a
small stove stood on the flagstones, glowing with red eyes like a
goblin, and painting a red pattern on the pavement; but scarcely a ray
of it reached the lower bricks of the great bare, brown brick wall that
went soaring up above them into the deep blue night. Flambeau's big
broad-shouldered figure and great moustaches, like sabres, could be
traced dimly in the twilight, as he moved about, drawing dark wine from
a great cask and handing it round. In his shadow, the priest looked very
shrunken and small, as if huddled over the stove; but the American
visitor leaned forward elegantly with his elbow on his knee and his fine
pointed features in the full light; his eyes shone with inquisitive
intelligence.
"I can assure you, sir," he was saying, "we consider your achievement in
the matter of the Moonshine Murder the most remarkable triumph in the
history of detective science."
Father Brown murmured something; some might have imagined that the
murmur was a little like a moan.
"We are well acquainted," went on the stranger firmly, "with the alleged
achievements of Dupin and others; and with those of Lecocq, Sherlock
Holmes, Nicholas Carter, and other imaginative incarnations of the
craft. But we observe there is in many ways, a marked difference between
your own method, of approach and that of these other thinkers, whether
fictitious or actual. Some have spec'lated, sir, as to whether the
difference of method may perhaps involve rather the absence of method."
Father Brown was silent; then he started a little, almost as if he had
been nodding over the stove, and said: "I beg your pardon. Yes. . ..
Absence of method. . . . Absence of mind, too, I'm afraid."
"I should say of strictly tabulated scientific method," went on the
inquirer. "Edgar Poe throws off several little essays in a
conversational form, explaining Dupin's method, with its fine links of
logic. Dr. Watson had to listen to some pretty exact expositions of
Holmes's method with its observation of material details. But nobody
seems to have got on to any full account of your method. Father Brown,
and I was informed you declined the offer to give a series of lectures
in the States on the matter."
"Yes," said the priest, frowning at the stove; "I declined."
"Your refusal gave rise to a remarkable lot of interesting talk,"
remarked Chace. "I may say that some of our people are saying your
science can't be expounded, because it's something more than just
natural science. They say your secret's not to be divulged, as being
occult in its character."
"Being what?" asked Father Brown, rather sharply.
"Why, kind of esoteric," replied the other. "I can tell you, people got
considerably worked up about Gallup's murder, and Stein's murder, and
then old man Merton's murder, and now Judge Gwynne's murder, and a
double murder by Dalmon, who was well known in the States. And there
were you, on the spot every time, slap in the middle of it; telling
everybody how it was done and never telling anybody how you knew. So
some people got to think you knew without looking, so to speak. And
Carlotta Brownson gave a lecture on Thought-Forms with illustrations
from these cases of yours. The Second Sight Sisterhood of
Indianapolis----"
Father Brown, was still staring at the stove; then he said quite loud
yet as if hardly aware that anyone heard him: "Oh, I say. This will
never do."
"I don't exactly know how it's to be helped," said Mr. Chace humorously.
"The Second Sight Sisterhood want a lot of holding down. The only way I
can think of stopping it is for you to tell us the secret after all."
Father Brown groaned. He put his head on his hands and remained a
moment, as if full of a silent convulsion of thought. Then he lifted his
head and said in a dull voice:
"Very well. I must tell the secret."
His eyes rolled darkly over the whole darkling scene, from the red eyes
of the little stove to the stark expanse of the ancient wall, over which
were standing out, more and more brightly, the strong stars of the
south.
"The secret is," he said; and then stopped as if unable to go on. Then
he began again and said:
"You see, it was I who killed all those people."
"What?" repeated the other, in a small voice out of a vast silence.
"You see, I had murdered them all myself," explained Father Brown
patiently. "So, of course, I knew how it was done."
Grandison Chace had risen to his great height like a man lifted to the
ceiling by a sort of slow explosion. Staring down at the other he
repeated his incredulous question.
"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."
Chace gradually released a sort of broken sigh.
"You frightened me all right," he said. "For the minute I really did
think you meant you were the murderer. Just for the minute I kind of saw
it splashed over all the papers in the States: "Saintly Sleuth Exposed
as Killer: Hundred Crimes of Father Brown.' Why, of course, if it's just
a figure of speech and means you tried to reconstruct the psychogy--"
Father Brown rapped sharply on the stove with the short pipe he was
about to fill; one or his very rare spasms of annoyance contracted his
face.
"No, no, no," he said, almost angrily; "I don't mean just a figure of
speech. This is what comes of trying to talk about deep things. . . .
What's the good of words . . .? If you try to talk about a truth that's
merely moral, people always think it's merely metaphorical. A real live
man with two legs once said to me: 'I only believe in the Holy Ghost in
a spiritual sense.' Naturally, I said: 'In what other sense could you
believe it?' And then he thought I meant he needn't believe in anything
except evolution, or ethical fellowship, or some bilge. . . . I mean
that I really did see myself, and my real self, committing the murders.
I didn't actually kill the men by material means; but that's not the
point. Any brick or bit of machinery might have killed them by material
means. I mean that I thought and thought about how a man might come to
be like that, until I realized that I really was like that, in
everything except actual final consent to the action. It was once
suggested to me by a friend of mine, as a sort of religious exercise. I
believe he got it from Pope Leo XIII, who was always rather a hero of
mine."
"I'm afraid," said the American, in tones that were still doubtful, and
keeping his eye on the priest rather as if he were a wild animal, "that
you'd have to explain a lot to me before I knew what you were talking
about. The science of detection----"
Father Brown snapped his fingers with the same animated annoyance.
"That's it," he cried; "that's just where we part company. Science is a
grand thing when you can get it; in its real sense one of the grandest
words in the world. But what do these men mean, nine times out often,
when they use it nowadays? When they say detection is a science? When
they say criminology is a science? They mean 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 dehumanized light.
They mean getting a long way off him, as if he were a distant
prehistoric monster; staring at the shape of his 'criminal skull' as if
it were a sort of eerie growth, like the horn on a rhinoceros's nose.
When the scientist talks about a type, he never means himself, but
always his neighbour; probably his poorer neighbour. I don't deny the
dry light may sometimes do good; though in one sense it's the very
reverse of science. So far from being knowledge, it's actually
suppression of what we know. It's treating a friend as a stranger, and
pretending that something familiar is really remote and mysterious. It's
like saying that a man has a proboscis between the eyes, or that he
falls down in a fit of insensibility once every twenty-four hours.
Well, what you call 'the secret' is exactly the opposite. I don't try to
get outside the man. I try to get inside the murderer. . . . Indeed it's
much more than that, don't you see? I am inside a man. I am always
inside a man, moving his arms and legs; but I wait till I know I am
inside a murderer, thinking his thoughts, wrestling with his passions;
till I have bent myself into the posture of his hunched and peering
hatred; till I see the world with his bloodshot and squinting eyes,
looking between the blinkers of his half-witted concentration; looking
up the short and sharp perspective of a straight road to a pool of
blood. Till I am really a murderer."
"Oh," said Mr. Chace, regarding him with a long, grim face, and added:
"And that is what you call a religious exercise."
"Yes," said Father Brown; "that is what I call a religious exercise."
After an instant's silence he resumed: "It's so real a religious
exercise that I'd rather not have said anything about it. But I simply
couldn't have you going off and telling all your countrymen that I had a
secret magic connected with Thought-Forms, could I? I've put it badly,
but it's true. 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."
Flambeau came forward and filled a great goblet with Spanish wine and
set it before his friend, as he had already set one before his fellow
guest. Then he himself spoke for the first time:
"I believe Father Brown has had a new batch of mysteries. We were
talking about them the other day, I fancy. He has been dealing with some
queer people since we last met."
"Yes; I know the stories more or less--but not the application," said
Chace, lifting his glass thoughtfully. "Can you give me any examples, I
wonder. ... I mean, did you deal with this last batch in that
introspective style?"
Father Brown also lifted his glass, and the glow of the fire turned the
red wine transparent, like the glorious blood-red glass of a martyr's
window. The red flame seemed to hold his eyes and absorb his gaze that
sank deeper and deeper into it, as if that single cup held a red sea of
the blood of all men, and his soul were a diver, ever plunging in dark
humility and inverted imagination, lower than its lowest monsters and
its most ancient slime. In that cup, as in a red mirror, he saw many
things; the doings of his last days moved in crimson shadows; the
examples that his companions demanded danced in symbolic shapes; and
there passed before him all the stories that are told here. Now, the
luminous wine was like a vast red sunset upon dark red sands, where
stood dark figures of men; one was fallen and another running towards
him. Then the sunset seemed to break up into patches: red lanterns
swinging from garden trees and a pond gleaming red with reflection; and
then all the colour seemed to cluster again into a great rose of red
crystal, a jewel that irradiated the world like a red sun, save for the
shadow of a tall figure with a high head-dress as of some prehistoric
priest; and then faded again till nothing was left but a flame of wild
red beard blowing in the wind upon a wild grey moor. All these things,
which may be seen later from other angles and in other moods than his
own, rose up in his memory at the challenge and began to form themselves
into anecdotes and arguments.
"Yes," he said, as he raised the wine cup slowly to his lips, "I can
remember pretty well----"
THE SECRET OF FLAMBEAU
"-the sort of murders in which I played the part of the murderer," said
Father Brown, putting down the wineglass. The row of red pictures of
crime had passed before him in that moment.
"It is true," he resumed, after a momentary pause, "that somebody else
had played the part of the murderer before me and done me out of the
actual experience. I was a sort of understudy; always in a state of
being ready to act the assassin. I always made it my business, at least,
to know the part thoroughly. What I mean is that, when I tried to
imagine the state of mind in which such a thing would be done, I always
realized that I might have done it myself under certain mental
conditions, but not under others; and not generally under the obvious
ones. And then, of course, I knew who really had done it; and he was not
generally the obvious person.
"For instance, it seemed obvious to say that the revolutionary poet had
killed the old judge who saw red about red revolutionaries. But that
isn't really a reason for the revolutionary poet killing him. It isn't,
if you think what it would really be like to be a revolutionary poet.
Now I set myself conscientiously down to be a revolutionary poet. I mean
that particular sort of pessimistic anarchial lover of revolt, not as
reform, but rather as destruction. I tried to clear my mind of such
elements of sanity and constructive common sense as I have had the luck
to learn or inherit. I shut down and darkened all the skylights through
which comes the good daylight out of heaven; I imagined a mind lit only
by a red light from below; a fire rending rocks and cleaving abysses
upwards. And even with the vision at its wildest and worst, I could not
see why such a visionary should cut short his own career by colliding
with a common policeman, for killing one out of a million conventional
old fools, as he would have called them. He wouldn't do it; however much
he wrote songs of violence. He wouldn't do it, because he wrote songs of
violence. A man who can express himself in song need not express himself
in suicide. A poem was an event to him; and he would want to have more
of them. Then I thought of another sort of heathen; the sort that is not
destroying the world but entirely depending on the world. I thought
that, save for the grace of God, I might have been a man for whom the
world was a blaze of electric lights, with nothing but utter darkness
beyond and around it. The worldly man, who really lives only for this
world and believes in no other, whose worldly success and pleasure are
all he can ever snatch out of nothingness--that is the 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. Think what
exposure would mean to a man like that fashionable barrister; and
exposure of the one crime still really hated by his fashionable world--
treason against patriotism. If I had been in his position, and had
nothing better than his philosophy, heaven alone knows what I might have
done. That is just where this little religious exercise is so
wholesome."
"Some people would think it was rather morbid," said Grandison Chace
dubiously.
"Some people," said Father Brown gravely, "undoubtedly do think that
charity and humility are morbid. Our friend the poet probably would. But
I'm not arguing those questions; I'm only trying to answer your question
about how I generally go to work. Some of your countrymen have
apparently done me the honour to ask how I managed to frustrate a few
miscarriages of justice. Well, you can go back and tell them that I do
it by morbidity. But I most certainly don't want them to think I do it
by magic."
Chace continued to look at him with a reflective frown; he was too
intelligent not to understand the idea; he would also have said that he
was too healthy-minded to like it. He felt as if he were talking to
one man and yet to a hundred murderers. There was something uncanny
about that very small figure, perched like a goblin beside the goblin
stove; and the sense that its round head had held such a universe of
wild unreason and imaginative injustice. It was as if the vast void of
dark behind it were a throng of dark gigantic figures, the ghosts of
great criminals held at bay by the magic circle of the red stove, but
ready to tear their master in pieces.
"Well, I'm afraid I do think it's morbid," he said frankly. "And I'm not
sure it isn't almost as morbid as magic. But morbidity or no, there's
one thing to be said; it must be an interesting experience." Then he
added, after reflection: "I don't know whether you would make a really
good criminal. But you ought to make a rattling good novelist."
"I only have to deal with real events," said Father Brown. "But it's
sometimes harder to imagine real things than unreal ones."
"Especially," said the other, "when they are the great crimes of the
world."
"It's not the great crimes but the small crimes that are really hard to
imagine," replied the priest.
"I don't quite know what you mean by that," said Chace.
"I mean commonplace crimes like stealing jewels," said Father Brown;
"like that affair of the emerald necklace or the Ruby of Meru or the
artificial goldfish. The difficulty in those cases is that you've got to
make your mind small. High and mighty humbugs, who deal in big ideas,
don't do those obvious things. I was sure the Prophet hadn't taken the
ruby; or the Count the goldfish; though a man like Bankes might easily
take the emeralds. For them, a jewel is a piece of glass: and they can
see through the glass. But the little, literal people take it at its
market value.
"For that you've got to have a small mind. It's awfully hard to get;
like focusing smaller and sharper in a wobbling camera. But some things
helped; and they threw a lot of light on the mystery, too. For instance,
the sort of man who brags about having 'shown up' sham magicians or poor
quacks of any sort--he's always got a small mind. He is the sort of man
who 'sees through' tramps and trips them up in telling lies. I dare say
it might sometimes be a painful duty. It's an uncommonly base pleasure.
The moment I realized what a small mind meant, I knew where to look for
it--in the man who wanted to expose the Prophet--and it was he that
sneaked the ruby; in the man who jeered at his sister's psychic
fancies--and it was he who nabbed the emeralds. Men like that always have
their eye on jewels; they never could rise, with the higher humbugs, to
despising jewels. Those criminals with small minds are always quite
conventional. They become criminals out of sheer conventionality.
"It takes you quite a long time to feel so crudely as that, though. It's
quite a wild effort of imagination to be so conventional. To want one
potty little object as seriously as all that. But you can do it. ... You
can get nearer to it. Begin by thinking of being a greedy child; of how
you might have stolen a sweet in a shop; of how there was one particular
sweet you wanted … then you must subtract the childish poetry; shut off
the fairy light that shone on the sweet-stuff shop; imagine you really
think you know the world and the market value of sweets … you contract
your mind like the camera focus … the thing shapes and then sharpens ...
and then, suddenly, it comes!"
He spoke like a man who had once captured a divine vision. Grandison
Chace was still looking at him with a frown of mingled mystification and
interest. It must be confessed that there did flash once beneath his
heavy frown a look of something almost like alarm. It was as if the
shock of the first strange confession of the priest still thrilled
faintly through him like the last vibration of a thunderclap in the
room. Under the surface he was saying to himself that the mistake had
only been a temporary madness; that, of course. Father Brown could not
really be the monster and murderer he had beheld for that blinding and
bewildering instant. But was there not something wrong with the man who
talked in that calm way about being a murderer? Was it possible that the
priest was a little mad?
"Don't you think," he said, abruptly; "that this notion of yours, of a
man trying to feel like a criminal, might make him a little too tolerant
of crime?"
Father Brown sat up and spoke in a more staccato style.
"I know it does just the opposite. It solves the whole problem of time
and sin. It gives a man his remorse beforehand."
There was a silence; the American looked at the high and steep roof that
stretched half across the enclosure; his host gazed into the fire
without moving; and then the priest's voice came on a different note, as
if from lower down.
"There are two ways of renouncing the devil," he said; "and the
difference is perhaps the deepest chasm in modem religion. One is to
have a horror of him because he is so far off; and the other to have it
because he is so near. And no virtue and vice are so much divided as
those two virtues."
They did not answer and he went on in the same heavy tone, as if he were
dropping words like molten lead.
"You may think a crime horrible because you could never commit it. I
think it horrible because I could commit it. You think of it as
something like an eruption of Vesuvius; but that would not really be so
terrible as this house catching fire. If a criminal suddenly appeared in
this room----"
"If a criminal appeared in this room," said Chace, smiling, "I think you
would be a good deal too favourable to him. Apparently you would start
by telling him that you were a criminal yourself and explaining how
perfectly natural it was that he should have picked his father's pocket
or cut his mother's throat. Frankly, I don't think it's practical. I
think that the practical effect would be that no criminal would ever
reform. It's easy enough to theorize and take hypothetical cases; but we
all know we're only talking in the air. Sitting here in M. Duroc's nice,
comfortable house, conscious of our respectability and all the rest of
it, it just gives us a theatrical thrill to talk about thieves and
murderers and the mysteries of their souls. But the people who really
have to deal with thieves and murderers have to deal with them
differently. We are safe by the fireside; and we know the house is not
on fire. We know there is not a criminal in the room."
The M. Duroc to whom allusion had been made rose slowly from what had
been called his fireside, and his huge shadow flung from the fire seemed
to cover everything and darken even the very night above him.
"There is a criminal in this room," he said. "I am one. I am Flambeau,
and the police of two hemispheres are still hunting for me."
The American remained gazing at him with eyes of a stony brightness; he
seemed unable to speak or move.
"There is nothing mystical, or metaphorical, or vicarious about my
confession," said Flambeau. "I stole for twenty years with these two
hands; I fled from the police on these two feet. I hope you will admit
that my activities were practical. I hope you will admit that my judges
and pursuers really had to deal with crime. Do you think I do not know
all about their way of reprehending it? Have I not heard the sermons of
the righteous and seen the cold stare of the respectable; have I not
been lectured in the lofty and distant style, asked how it was possible
for anyone to fall so low, told that no decent person could ever have
dreamed of such depravity? Do you think all that ever did anything but
make me laugh? Only my friend told me that he knew exactly why I stole;
and I have never stolen since."
Father Brown made a gesture as of deprecation; and Grandison Chace at
last let out a long breath like a whistle.
"I have told you the exact truth," said Flambeau; "and it is open to you
to hand me over to the police."
There was an instant of profound stillness, in which could be faintly
heard the belated laughter of Flambeau's children in the high, dark
house above them, and the crunching and snorting of the great, grey pigs
in the twilight. And then it was cloven by a high voice, vibrant and
with a touch of offence, almost surprising for those who do not
understand the sensitive American spirit, and how near, in spite of
commonplace contrasts, it can sometimes come to the chivalry of Spain.
"Monsieur Duroc." he said rather stiffly. "We have been friends, I hope,
for some considerable period; and I should be pretty much pained to
suppose you thought me capable of playing you such a trick while I was
enjoying your hospitality and the society of your family, merely because
you chose to tell me a little of your own autobiography of your own free
will. And when you spoke merely in defence of your friend --no, sir, I
can't imagine any gentleman double-crossing another under such
circumstances; it would be a damned sight better to be a dirty informer
and sell men's blood for money. But in a case like this----! Could you
conceive any man being such a Judas?"
"I could try." said Father Brown.
THE END
FPB comments: The specific reason I posted this wonderful item right now of all days is as follows. I found that a man whose judgment I respect had singled out a particular review as memorable. Now that review was a very negative review - the kind, in fact, with which I myself used to be associated in a past life. It was, however, a review I would never have written: one which singled out a particular book for opprobrium not because of the way it was written, but because of the kind of hero it depicted. And the hero in question drew the reviewer's contempt because, if you please, he [the hero] felt and repressed in himself the same evil he met in his enemies, and that fed his opposition to them. In other words, we are not allowed to see as a hero a man who suppresses a great evil in himself. The only man we can consider a hero is the man who has never felt temptation at all. Sorry, I am not even interested in such a person; he is not a hero, but an ignoramus and a pharisee - or, in CS Lewis' words, a eunuch boasting of his chastity.