terton has a style which could
make even a debilitated paradox of great length seem amusing. The book
has a few gorgeous passages. Among the documents read at the trial of
Innocent Smith, for example, is a statement made by a Trans-Siberian
station-master, which is a perfectly exquisite burlesque at the expense
of the Russian _intelligenzia_. The whole series of documents, in fact,
are delightful bits of self-expression on the part of a very varied team
of selves. While Chesterton is able to turn out such things we must be
content to take the page, and not the story, as his unit of work.
_Manalive_, by the way, is the first of the author's stories in which
women are represented as talking to one another. Chesterton seems
extraordinarily shy with his feminine characters. He is a little afraid
of woman. "The average woman is a despot, the average man is a serf."[2]
Mrs. Innocent Smith's view of men is in keeping with this peculiar
notion. "At certain curious times they're just fit to take care of us,
and they're never fit to take care of themselves." Smith is the
Chestertonian Parsifal, just as Prince Muishkin is Dostoievsky's.

The transcendental type of detective, first sketched out in _The Club of
Queer Trades_, is developed more fully in the two Father Brown books. In
the little Roman priest who has such a wonderful instinct for placing
the diseased spots in people's souls, we have Chesterton's completest
and most human creation. Yet, with all their cleverness, and in spite of
the fact that from internal evidence it is almost blatantly obvious that
the author enjoyed writing these stories, they bear marks which put the
books on a lower plane than either _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_ or
_The Ball and the Cross_. In the latter book Chesterton spoke of "the
mere healthy and heathen horror of the unclean; the mere inhuman hatred
of the inhuman state of madness." His own critical work had been a long
protest against the introduction of artificial horrors, a plea for
sanity and the exercise of sanity. But in _The Innocence of Father
Brown_ these principles, almost the fundamental ones of literary
decency, were put on the shelf. Chesterton's criminals are lunatics,
perhaps it is his belief that crime and insanity are inseparable. But
even if this last supposition is correct, its approval would not
necessarily license the introduction of some of the characters. There is
Israel Gow, who suffers from a peculiar mania which driv