The Man Who Knew Too Much
By G. K. Chesterton
They had walked along the straight road for nearly a mile, conversing at intervals in this fashion, and March had a singular sense of the whole world being turned inside out. Mr Horne Fisher did not especially abuse his friends and relatives in fashionable society; of some, he spoke affectionately. But they seemed to be an entirely new set of men and women who happened to have the same nerves as the men and women mentioned most often in the newspapers. Yet no fury of revolt could have seemed to him more utterly revolutionary than this cold familiarity. It was like daylight on the other side of the stage scenery.
They reached the great lodge gates of the park and, to March’s surprise, passed them and continued along the interminable white, straight road. But he was himself too early for his appointment with Sir Howard and was not disinclined to see the end of his new friend’s experiment, whatever it might be. They had long left the moorland behind them, and half the white road was grey in the great shadow of the Torwood pine forests, themselves like grey bars shuttered against the sunshine and within, amid that apparent noon, manufacturing their midnight. Soon, however, rifts began to appear in them like gleams of coloured windows; the trees thinned and fell away as the road went forward, showing the wild, irregular copses in which Fisher said the house party had been blazing away all day. And about two hundred yards farther on, they came to the first turn of the road.
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G. K. Chesterton
Gilbert Keith Chesterton KC*SG (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English writer, philosopher, Christian apologist, and literary and art critic.
Chesterton created the fictional priest-detective Father Brown and wrote on apologetics. Even some of those who disagree with him have recognised the broad appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an orthodox Christian and came to identify this position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting from high church Anglicanism. Biographers have identified him as a successor to such Victorian authors as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman and John Ruskin.
He has been referred to as the “prince of paradox.” Time observed his writing style: “Whenever possible, Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out.” His writings influenced Jorge Luis Borges, who compared his literature with that of Edgar Allan Poe.
Biography
Early life
Chesterton was born in Campden Hill in Kensington, London, the son of Edward Chesterton (1841–1922), an estate agent, and Marie Louise, née Grosjean, of Swiss-French origin. Chesterton was baptised at the age of one month into the Church of England, though his family were irregularly practising Unitarians. According to his autobiography, as a young man, he became fascinated with the occult and, along with his brother Cecil, experimented with Ouija boards. He was educated at St Paul’s School, then attended the Slade School of Art to become an illustrator. The Slade is a department of University College London, where Chesterton also took classes in literature, but he did not complete a degree in either subject. He married Frances Blogg in 1901; the marriage lasted the rest of his life. Chesterton credited Frances with leading him back to Anglicanism, though he later considered Anglicanism to be a “pale imitation”. He entered full communion with the Catholic Church in 1922. The couple were unable to have children.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley, inventor of the clerihew, a whimsical four-line biographical poem, was a friend from school. Chesterton wrote clerihews and illustrated his friend’s first published collection of poetry, Biography for Beginners (1905), which popularised the clerihew form. He became godfather to Bentley’s son, Nicolas, and opened his novel The Man Who Was Thursday with a poem written to Bentley.
Career
In September 1895, Chesterton began working for the London publisher George Redway, where he remained for just over a year. In October 1896, he moved to the publishing house T. Fisher Unwin, where he remained until 1902. During this period, he also undertook his first journalistic work as a freelance art and literary critic. In 1902, The Daily News gave him a weekly opinion column, followed in 1905 by a weekly column in The Illustrated London News, for which he continued to write for the next thirty years.
Early on, Chesterton showed a great interest in and talent for art. He had planned to become an artist, and his writing shows a vision that clothed abstract ideas in concrete and memorable images. Father Brown corrects the bewildered folks’ incorrect vision at the crime scene. He wanders off at the end with the criminal to exercise his priestly role of recognition, repentance and reconciliation. For example, in the story “The Flying Stars”, Father Brown entreats the character Flambeau to give up his life of crime: “There is still youth and honour and humour in you; don’t fancy they will last in that trade. Men may keep a level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down. The kind man drinks and turns cruel; the frank man kills and lies about it. Many a man I’ve known started like you to be an honest outlaw, a merry robber of the rich, and ended stamped into slime.”
G. K. Chesterton
