Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/211

THE GUILT OF MR. CHESTERTON 185 each is some madcap, incredible crime, worked out with a lunatic exactness and intricacy, and then hidden cunningly away in the midst of conspicuously meek and mild accessories — among sweetshops in Camden Town, placid villas in Putney, policemen and post- men and matter-of-fact porters. This done — solution safe, and relying on his own ready wit to bring the wildest irrelevance to heel — " G. K. C." fairly lets him- self go. Round we are rattled, pelted with puns and wild poetry, at the heels of little moon-faced Father Brown, till at length in some blind alley, with reason on the verge of revolt, the baffling eye of the prob- lem blandly opens and executes a solemn wink. And the effect of fantasy is famously heightened, just as it is in a harlequinade, by the vivid realism of the figures and scenes. Mr. Chesterton has the poet's gift for seeing the most commonplace things — moons or men's faces, hills, street-lamps, and houses — with a startling freshness and suddenness, as though they had been but that instant made ; and since epithet and object leap into his mind together — since he has, undeniably, the power of seizing the one golden word and planking it down with a rollicking bang — the old familiar places past which the rout pours shed their old shabbiness wondrously, shine out with the sudden significance of places washed by a dawn. It was a quaint, quiet square, very typical of London, full of an accidental stillness. The tall, flat houses round looked at once prosperous and uninhabited ; the square of shrubbery in the centre looked as deserted as a green Pacific islet. One of the foiu* sides was much higher than the rest, like a dais ; and the line of this side was broken by one of London's admirable accidents — a res- taurant that looked as if it had strayed from Soho. It was an unreasonably attractive object, with dwarf plants in pots and long striped blinds of lemon-yellow and white. It stood specially high above the street, and in the usual patchwork way of London, a flight of steps from the street ran up to meet the front door almost as a tire-escape might run up to a first-floor window.