The Secret of Father Brown

its wildest and worst, I could not see why such a visionary should cut short his own career by colliding with a common policeman, for killing one out of a million conventional old fools, as he would have called them. He wouldn’t do it; however much he wrote songs of violence. He wouldn’t do it, because he wrote songs of violence. A man who can express himself in song need not express himself in suicide. A poem was an event to him; and he would want to have more of them. Then I thought of another sort of heathen; the sort that is not destroying the world but entirely depending on the world. I thought that, save for the grace of God, I might have been a man for whom the world was a blaze of electric lights, with nothing but utter darkness beyond and around it. The worldly man, who really lives only for this world and believes in no other, whose worldly success and pleasure are all he can ever snatch out of nothingness⁠—that is the man who will really do anything, when he is in danger of losing the whole world and saving nothing. It is not the revolutionary man but the respectable man who would commit any crime⁠—to save his respectability. Think what exposure would mean to a man like that fashionable barrister; and exposure of the one crime still really hated by his fashionable world⁠—treason against patriotism. If I had been in his position, and had nothing better than his philosophy, heaven alone knows what I might have done. That is just where this little religious exercise is so wholesome.”

“Some people would think it was rather morbid,” said Grandison Chace dubiously.

“Some people,” said Father Brown gravely, “undoubtedly do think that charity and humility are morbid. Our friend the poet probably would. But I’m not arguing those questions; I’m only trying to answer your question about how I generally go to work. Some of your countrymen have apparently done me the honour to ask how I managed to frustrate a few miscarriages of justice. Well, you can go back and tell them that I do it by morbidity. But I most certainly don’t want them to think I do it by magic.”

Chace continued to look at him with a reflective frown; he was too intelligent not to understand the idea; he would also have said that he was too healthy-minded to like it. He felt as if he were talking to one man and yet to a hundred murderers. There was something uncanny about that very small figure, perched like a goblin beside the goblin stove; and the sense that its round head had held such a universe of wild unreason and imaginative injustice. It was as if the vast void of dark behind it were a throng of dark gigantic figures, the ghosts of great criminals held at bay by the magic circle of the red stove, but ready to tear their master in pieces.

“Well, I’m afraid I do think it’s morbid,” he said frankly. “And I’m not sure it isn’t almost as morbid as magic. But morbidity or no, there’s one thing to be said; it must be an interesting experience.” Then he added, after reflection: “I don’t know whether you would make a really good criminal. But you ought to make a rattling good novelist.”

“I only have to deal with real events,” said Father Brown. “But it’s sometimes harder to imagine real things than unreal ones.”

“Especially,” said the other, “when they are the great crimes of the world.”

“It’s not the great crimes but the small crimes that are really hard to imagine,” replied the priest.

“I don’t quite know what you mean by that,” said Chace.

“I mean commonplace crimes like stealing jewels,” said Father Brown; “like that affair of the emerald necklace or the Ruby of Meru or the artificial goldfish. The difficulty in those cases is that you’ve got to make your mind small. High and mighty humbugs, who deal in big ideas, don’t do those obvious things. I was sure the Prophet hadn’t taken the ruby or the Count the goldfish; though a man like Bankes might easily take the emeralds. For them, a jewel is a piece of glass: and they can see through the glass. But the little literal people take it at its market value.

“For that you’ve got to have a small mind. It’s awfully hard to get; like focusing smaller and sharper in a wobbling camera. But some things helped; and they threw a lot of light on the mystery, too. For instance, the sort of man who brags about having ‘shown up’ sham magicians or poor quacks of any sort⁠—he’s always got a small mind. He is the sort of man who ‘sees through’ tramps and trips them up in telling lies. I dare say it might sometimes be a painful duty. It’s an uncommonly base pleasure. The moment I realized what a small mind meant, I knew where to look for it⁠—in the man who wanted to expose the Prophet⁠—and it was he that sneaked the ruby⁠—in the man who jeered at his sister’s psychic fancies⁠—and it was he who nabbed the emeralds. Men like that always have their eye on jewels; they never could rise, with the higher humbugs, to despising jewels. Those criminals with small minds are always quite conventional. They become criminals out of sheer conventionality.

“It takes you quite a long time to feel so crudely as that, though. It’s quite a wild effort of imagination to be so conventional. To want one potty little object as seriously as all that. But you can do it.⁠ ⁠… You can get nearer to it. Begin by thinking of being a greedy child; of how you might have stolen a sweet in a shop; of how there was one particular sweet you wanted⁠ ⁠… then you must subtract the childish poetry; shut off the fairy light that shone on the sweet-stuff shop; imagine you really think you