Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/210

 THE GUILT OF MR. CHESTERTON

" criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic," mourns Valentin, chief of the Paris police, on the ninth page of this blood-red fairy-book. There's a nasty implication in the thought, perhaps—yet it isn't mere professional resentment that makes one sternly retort that The Innocence of Father Brown fairly proves the guilt of Mr. Chesterton. He has been accused of many crimes by our literary Valentins—of undue flippancy, of undue earnestness, of a proneness to platitude, of a weakness for paradox; but perhaps the true charge against him, underlying all these, is that he is too big for his books. That, on the face of it, might not seem much more culpable than palming off sovereigns for shillings—and, indeed, there are extenuating circumstances. For the first four or five of these dozen "detective" tales are really simply goluptious; not since the brave old days of Notting Hill, when Auberon Quin gravely stood on his head in sight of his loyal subjects, have we had such a farrago of magnificent nonsense. The Blue Cross, The Secret Garden, The Queer Feet, The Flying Stars—their names alone are enough to set the blood simmering as it used to do on Boxing Nights, when pantomimes were pantomimes still; and the tales themselves beat their titles as easily as the harlequinade did the simpering ballets. The centre of 184