Inner Landscapes: 1900–1935

Abstract

The three components of religion, morality and expression come together in the one art form in which Chesterton seems completely at home: the detective story. At the heart of the Father Brown stories is the theme of ‘mental and moral morbidity’ that is mentioned in Autobiography, and which initiated and defined much of the subsequent development of religious and artistic ideas. We have seen the concept hinted at in Orthodoxy, as the fear which Christianity stopped with external authority, and because of which Chesterton generated his concept of the mystic artist. It was resolved in The Everlasting Man by the acceptance of the Catholic faith and the use of analogy in allegory. In the Autobiography, Chesterton refers to the meeting with Father O’Connor in 1904 which provided him with an impetus that led to the Father Brown stories. The famous discussion about priests and confessions brought him ‘face to face once more with those morbid but vivid problems of the soul’ and made him feel that he had ‘not found any real spiritual solution of them’. The solution he found in turning to the Catholic church was based on the necessity for accepting external reality because of the existence of an external authority. The Father Brown stories can be seen as exercises by Chesterton as the mystic artist in facing the mental and moral morbidity armed with a sophisticated mode of allegory.