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Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
Halloween Short Story: The Chief Mourner of Marne by GK Chesterton
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- [00:00]
A
Today on Ascend the Great Books Podcast, we have a special Halloween episode. We are reading the Chief Mourner of Marne by G.K. chesterton. It is a Father Brown detective story, so it takes all the detective story elements that you know and love and puts them inside of a gothic setting. Lots of mystery, lots of intrigue. And to guide us through this short story and all of its twists and turns, we have the Dr. Joseph Boyne, who really helps us do a wonderful job of noticing all the little details, really taking us by the hand and just moving us step by step through this short story to really show us that it has a profound lesson on things like knowledge, love, penance, and forgiveness. So join us today for an excellent Halloween episode as we discuss the Chief Mourner of Marne by G.K. chesterton, a father Brown mystery. Welcome to Ascend the Great Books podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I'm a husband, father, and serve as chancellor and General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. We're recording on a beautiful afternoon here at the Chancery. If you're new to Ascend, we're a weekly podcast that helps guide you through the great books. So far, we have read Homer, Hesiod, and many of the Greek poets, and on Plato, we have read First, Alcibiades, the Euthyphro, Apology, the Crito, the Phaedo, and next week we'll have two episodes on Plato's Meno. Check us out on Twitter or X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters who have access to our written guides. We have a whole library of written guides on the Great Books and also a community chat on Plato. Visit thegreatbookspodcast.com for our reading schedule and more information. Okay, today, today we are doing something fun. So today we have a short story for Halloween. We're doing a Halloween short story and we are discussing the Chief Mourner of Marne by G.K. chesterton, which I will admit to everyone I read this morning. So it's gonna be a great episode. And to help guide us through this wonderful short story, we have Dr. Joseph Boyne, who completed his PhD at Catholic University of America, where his scholarship focused on the influence of Romanticism on the writers of the Southern Renaissance. He serves as an Associate professor of English at Tulsa Community College, where he teaches composition and literature with a special emphasis on serving TCC's dual credit his high school student population. Dr. Boyne is also the co manager of TCC's new cornerstone program, an initiative funded by the Teagle foundation. To return the study of transformative texts to general education requirements so that all students attending college have the opportunity to engage with great thinkers of the past. Dr. Boin, welcome to the podcast.
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B
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
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A
Yeah, no problem. We very much appreciate you being here. Before we dive in, tell me a little bit about the Cornerstone program.
- [02:58]
B
Oh, yeah, gladly. So my colleague Heather Wilburn in the humanities department and I have applied and are currently in the pilot portion of this program. The whole point of it is to make sure that when we are requiring students to take certain classes, no matter what their major is, which is what general education is, we're essentially telling them, you aren't an educated person without this class. And so that seems like those classes should be taken very seriously by the administration and by the faculty who teach it. Unfortunately, sometimes gen ed gets kind of ignored as, like, you know, the classes you have to take, and very few students ever get super excited about those. So our initiative is to bring what we call transformative texts or great books to those gen Ed classes so that students are, when they're being told, look, you have to take this class in order to graduate, they are encountering things worth encountering, like Plato's apology or perhaps W.E.B. du Bois on the nature of education. And I just wrapped up Augustine's confessions with my comp one students. So that's kind of what we're doing here, and we're hoping to see that grow in the years to come.
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A
That's beautiful. Yeah. I think when I went through my undergrad, like the gen EDS or just these classes I had to take, just kind of check a box until I got the classes that I really wanted to take, if that makes sense.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So, yeah, looking at the. The quote unquote Gen eds, which really should be more of, I would assume, like a liberal arts as an actual transformative process that actually truly frees you. The liberal arts, the actual liberty that actually frees the soul, so you can actually be a truly free person, free from your own passions, free from ignorance, things of these nature. So that's beautiful. That's a beautiful project.
- [05:18]
B
Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. One of the things I tell my students is this class is going to help you with your professional goals and. And will make you marketable, but it's also going to give you something that does not become obsolete upon retirement, that there should be some aspect of your education that was worth doing for its own sake and not just because you fear starvation.
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A
Yeah, we're very much too utilitarian when it comes to Education. Well, actually we've reduced education to a training. But there is an irony that in actually trying to view education as non utilitarian, you actually make yourself much more useful to society because you're a much more well formed, virtuous human being.
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B
Yeah, I would agree.
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A
All right, so you chose. I'm going to blame this all on you. So you chose the Chief Mourner of Marne by GK Chesterton for our Halloween read this year. I read it this morning. I loved it. I thought it was just, it was a delightful read and of course, like, it's a Father Brown story, so we should kind of talk about what that means. So the whole time I'm like really trying to pay attention, like, okay, I know there's going to be like these little hints and clues, like throughout the text and I'm still trying to like struggle to figure it out. And the ending comes and I loved it. So maybe just like, as a starter. Who's GK Chesterton? I don't think we've covered him on the podcast before.
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B
Sure, yeah. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, better known as G.K. chesterton, was an English essayist, apologist, poet, novelist. I mean, if there is some genre of the written language, he probably did it. He is probably, perhaps best known, or at least one of the first ways I came to know him is through his book called Orthodoxy, which outlines his gradual return to the Christian religion that was published in 1908. He did not convert to Catholicism until 1922, which I always think is. Is when I am reminded of that fact. It surprises me because, you know, for anyone who knows anything about Modern English Literature, 1922 is a really important year. That's when the Wasteland was published. That's when Ulysses was published. But it's also when GK Chesterton converted to Catholicism. So I think that's an event that ought to be included there as well. His Father Brown mysteries follow a detective who is a Roman Catholic priest. Father Brown. And Father Brown is an amateur detective. He's not, you know, on retainer or contracted by Scotland Yard. Many of the mysteries come about by way of sort of spiritual direction or advice. And so in this story, when we get into it, we'll see the whole reason he's brought into the mystery is just because a young man feels like something's not right. And as many young men do who feel like something isn't right, he decides to seek out the advice of a priest. So. And that's where we get Father Brown.
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A
Yeah. That's phenomenal. Yeah. I owe a debt to Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy was one of the very first books of Chesterton's that I read. Really kind of. I don't know, kind of blew my mind in a lot of ways. And for those who haven't read Chesterton in general, he has this very paradoxical style like that. He really much. He very much enjoys kind of the irony, I think, of, like, say, St. John's gospel, where he loves putting these things together that sometimes I have to sit there and think about for, like, four minutes, like this riddle of a sentence of like, does this actually make sense or does this just sound really good? Like, what is he actually doing here? Right. But Orthodoxy is a very beautiful, somewhat counterintuitive defense of Christianity. And it's a book that I actually remember. I was a young man, probably in high school, actually remember being in a hotel lobby. I was at a. At a conference with my family, and I remember being in the lobby and reading that text and just devouring page after page. The Father Brown stories, I'm not as familiar with. I think I've read one before and now this one. And so, yeah, he's kind of got. I see a lot of Chesterton in Father Brown. It's hard, actually, when I see Father Brown in the stories. I basically just view Chesterton, who's a fairly large human and clerics, like, kind of waddling around and somehow being smarter than everyone else, but also being kind of. Kind of aloof, kind of odd. Right? We even see this in the story where he's, like, playing with a teddy bear on the ground and then. But also being smarter than everyone else in the room, just like these very interesting kind of juxtapositions. But this story in particular, is this one that you are very familiar with. Is it one that you read with your students? Like, what's your background with the story, particularly?
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B
Oh, yes. This is the first story that I study with my Introduction to Literature students. I picked it in particular because I wanted my students to see a story that was written by someone who took stories seriously and. And the tradition of storytelling seriously. In my experience, a lot of Intro to Lit classes can kind of take this sort of iconoclastic approach where there's no rules. Anything can be a poem, anything can be a story. And in my experience, there are some students who will really go along with that, but a lot of students, especially the ones who don't want to take the class in the first place, that is the number one way to lose them if you tell them. Anything can be a story. There's no rules. Just make it up as you go. Then I think they come back with a very fair question, which is, well, then why do I need to take a class to be told that? One of the things that Chesterton is kind of famous for saying, and it might be an orthodoxy, is he came up with this image of a group of young people and how they play on almost like a top of a mountain or a cliff. And they can enjoy themselves because there's a fence that goes around the cliff. And so they can take pleasure in their, you know, in their games and their sports, knowing that they're safe because there are restrictions in place. And then when you take down that. That fence and you say, hey, you're free. You don't have to worry about that restriction. They end up huddling in the center because they're scared to fall off. So I wanted to give students what some might call, like, a very traditional story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and show them that people tend to tell stories this way because they work really well. And so that's one of the reasons I teach it. The other reason is Father Brown's advice to the crowd. I find to be one that is always one that applies to. Unfortunately applies to our day and my students. And so it's relevant in that way, too.
- [13:32]
A
Yeah, well said. Okay, so last preliminary, I promise. But why'd you pick this for a Halloween episode? So it kind of has, like, you know, we start off, it's kind of dark, there's a storm, there's lightning. There's like this kind of like, Gothic, French, aristocratic something motifs to it. There's some vampires and monks that are mentioned. So it's got some, like, Halloween themes, but, like, from a. More. I don't have the jargon, so. But there's like, some Gothic themes here. Like, what is the. What's the purpose of this as a Halloween read?
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B
Yes, I will say that I. Part of my reason for. For. For choosing it is that I get a little tired of seeing Edgar Allan Poe plastered all over the college when October rolls around. And so just in an effort to provide just perhaps one other work of literature besides the Raven to the month of October is mostly because of that, the fun that he's playing with Gothic literature and that it starts out, it's supposed to be, if not exactly a horror story, it's supposed to be spooky, it's supposed to be creepy. And, you know, when. When your listeners hear the word Gothic, you know, a variety of things might come to their mind, they may think of, you know, Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise as vampires in New Orleans, or they might think of the spooky kids in high school that wore black fingernail polish and misfit T shirts. But originally Gothic, you know, referred to anything that was medieval and so that to Protestant England in the Victorian period also included Catholics and Catholicism. So while, you know, scary broken down castles and vampires and storms are part of that spooky Gothic thing, a real theme of anti Catholic sentiment is also traditional to Gothic literature. One of the most famous gothic novels is Matthew Gregory Lewis's the Monk, which is about this terrible, lascivious monk who basically kidnaps a woman. And the lesson, the moral of the story is the Catholic Church ruins people with its overly rigorous rules set up for its clergy. And this is what you get with the Catholic Church. So Chesterton is very intentionally picking a genre that we take, tend to enjoy when Halloween rolls around and then is also very intentionally satirizing it, but doing it in, you know, of course, this paradoxical way such that at the end Father Brown somewhat proudly refers to himself as a vampire and says, let alone, you know, you all you nice people, why don't you go ahead and go back to your primrose paths and let me the vampire tend, tend to the 1, tend to the criminal.
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A
I like that. I like the idea of Catholicism being part of this kind of reminiscent of a Gothic age. I haven't, I've read some Gothic stuff, not a whole lot, but you are correct, it always does have some sub motif of Catholicism running through it. That's a really interesting insight. Okay, so the chief mourner of Marne. So where should we start?
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B
Well, perhaps, I mean, I always like to start at the starting place as I tell with my students. So maybe if we just read a couple of those first sentences and our listeners will understand the Gothic nature of the story from right away. So if you'll permit me, I'll just read a little bit here. A blaze of lightning blanched the gray woods, tracing all the wrinkled foliage down to the last curled leaf as if every detail were drawn in silver point or graven in silver. The same strange trick of lightning by which it seems to record millions of minute things in an instant of time, picked out everything from the elegant litter of the picnic spread under the spreading tree to the pale lengths of winding road at the end of which a white car was waiting in the distance a melancholy mansion with four towers like a castle, which in the gray evening had been but a dim and distant huddle of walls, like a crumbling of cloud, seemed to spring into the foreground and stood up with all its embattled roofs and blank and staring windows. And in this at least, the light had something in it of revelation. For to some of those grouped under the tree, that castle was indeed a thing faded and almost forgotten, which was to prove its power to spring up again in the foreground of their lives.
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A
That's a beautiful opening.
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B
Yeah, so normally when we start class we just start with what does any of that mean? Because my students, they don't know exactly what Silver Point is and this imagery, but I do usually connect it to Halloween and say, well, do you know how when you're going trick or treating and you walk up to the houses that have the strobe lights and every time the strobe light goes off, don't you notice how it seems that you can see all the details of your friends costumes much more starkly than just when you're walking under the street lights otherwise? So, yeah, so we have Chesterton getting us started with the very generic opening of a dark and stormy night. Except it's not a night, but it is stormy. But using that lightning to show the. That this is a story in which things that we had wished were forgotten will be brought back.
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A
Yeah, I appreciate it because I think this is the first time I've ever read the word blanched in which it was not referring to someone's face.
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B
Oh, yeah.
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A
So that's like. I appreciate that. And yeah, I just love the imagery of the castle. You know, something's coming. You know, I think a big question I had here kind of towards the beginning is like, why these people chose this location? Why if they, if they all know this castle, if they all know what's going on there, why did they choose this location to come? And I guess they were having a picnic, why come and do it here?
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B
Right.
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A
So we've got this. Yeah, we've got these. He's kind of pulling us into the mystery. We've got a little bit of this castle crumbling. It's going to pop back into the foreground of their mind.
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B
Yeah. And I would say that one of the reasons is that they didn't think about the castle at all, you know, that that's the whole point of those last couple of lines is they had just forgotten about it. They had allowed it to fall, fall back into the, the recesses of their mind. And it's not until they are placed very much in the, you know, the trouble of the storm, they start looking around and the, the young man Malo says, well, we could go run over there. And then all of them say, oh, no, no, no, no, we can't go there. You don't know, you young boy. But there's a story about that place. And so the thing that they had been trying to forget comes, comes back.
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A
And so we have, let's see if I got this. We have Hugo Romain, who's the actor who I really appreciated his description. Then we have General Outram.
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B
I've always said Outram, there you go.
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A
Go without. And then his wife. We have Mallow. And then we have Sir John Cockspur, who's a kind of journalist, probably the real vampire of the story. Just like feeding off people.
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B
Yeah, yeah, the Toronto Orangeman. So if we need our anti Catholic sentiment, he will provide it. So, yeah. So in again, if we want some examples of some fun being had with the Gothic genre, when they start talking about the castle and how they can't go there, you know, the actor Romaine starts to spin a story about how the Marquis of Marne has three heads. Once in every 300 years, a three headed nobleman adorns the family tree. No human being dares approach the accursed house, except a silent procession of hatters sent to provide an abnormal number of hats. But. And his voice took one of those deep and terrible turns that could cause such a thrill in the theater, my friends, those hats are of no human shape. So if you want a little example of Chesterton in his comic self, there, there, he's at it. So Romaine is even kind of dipping into the Gothic and telling the story of the horribly monstrous and deformed aristocrat in his crumbling castle. But then Lady Outram kind of insists, I wish you wouldn't make fun of serious things.
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A
Well, and she discloses, right, he's the first one to somewhat anchor it, that she actually, you know, knew him 30 years ago. So she actually roots that. There's actually a personal connection here. I also like that the Light Brigade got a reference.
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B
Yeah. Yes. Am I. I will listen to you, lady, but am I not permitted to reason why?
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A
For those who don't know the Light Brigade, very, very, very famous poem. I think actually kids at our little local classical school have memorized the Light Brigade.
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B
Yes. Yeah, there's a long tradition of that. So, yes, Lady Outram then corrects Romaine and says to him that the fact of the matter is that the, the man in the mansion is her old friend James Mayer, who she met back in America. Maybe another Potential reason that Lady Outram is so willing to speak up and stand her ground is that she's a strong headed American woman that, you know, there's actually there was quite a tradition of, you know, British aristocrats or people within some position of the empire marrying well to do American heiresses. And so she knew James Mayer from over there in America. And she says the terrible thing is that he's locked himself away because of a broken heart. And Cockspur, who is always so certain of himself, says, oh, it was a love affair, of course. And Lady Outstrom says, well, I appreciate the compliment that whenever a man's life is ruined, it must be because of some woman. But actually it was his love for his cousin who was practically a brother. So they kind of use the word cousin brother interchangeably.
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A
I actually really like that line. That's a good line.
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B
And so she says his cousin Maurice, who was his favorite in the family, he passed away. And when he did, James, poor James, he just shut himself up and he fell to, to the sickness of religious melancholia. And that's practically madness, she says. And the General says the priests got hold of him, they say, and basically he, they make him behave like a hermit. And that's what gets Cockspur going. He says, you know, these gosh darned superstitious vampires who get their claws into a man that could have been of some use to the empire. And so he's going to write a story about it in his newspaper and talk about how the Catholic Church has absolutely ruined the life of an otherwise upstanding British peer.
- [27:05]
A
Yeah, there's so, so many things in this passage. One, I really like the last sentence, when they first introduced James and Maurice, the very last sentence of that, he says, in that idolatry. And one day that idol tumbled down and was broken like any china doll. A chill caught at the seaside and it was all over. It's a beautiful line, right, of having this kind of relationship, of making an idol out of something. The idol falls, the relationship, the life is fractured. I thought that was really well written. And then I appreciate what you said here now about. I appreciate this more about the anti Catholicism, these like anti Catholic motifs. I kind of just read that broadly as like, oh yeah, British Anglican, you know, just general anti Catholic sentiment. But it's really interesting here actually after your comments, to read this as motif also of Gothic literature and then how it's immediately tethered to, you know, the vampire, the monks, these types of things. I think that's fascinating.
- [28:08]
B
Yeah. Yeah. So this is where the story starts to take on its. Well, maybe moves from spookiness to. Now we have to. You know, the pitchforks and torches are coming out, which is you know, also a theme of horror stories. You know, now the village is riled up and they're going to go do something about it.
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A
I also really appreciated that cockspitters like he could have been useful to the Empire. That seemed like a really heavy phrase to me. Oh, here's. It's not like this guy's life. It's not anything about that. It's like he could have had a utilitarian value to the political realm, and that's what Catholicism has ruined. That's what these monks and priests have ruined in him. It's a really telling line.
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B
Yeah, yeah, excellent point. Well, shall we. Shall we go meet Father Brown and move on?
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A
Yeah. No, please.
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B
So, yeah, young Mr. Mallow, who. I can't. I mean, I don't know if Chesterton intended this, but given his name, I can't help but think of him as somewhat in both shape and disposition, like a marshmallow goes. And he says. I mean, this thing just, you know, he's basically saying to himself, it just doesn't sound right. Something sounds off. I'm bothered by this. And he says, I don't know any priests, but I do know a Catholic family. And so he goes to his Roman Catholic friend with a large family. And he entered somewhat abruptly to find Father Brown sitting on the floor with a serious expression and attempting to pin the somewhat florid hat belonging to a wax doll onto the head of a teddy bear. And I often think it's funny when I ask my students, like, what is happening here? Why is there a priest sitting in the middle of the. Sitting on the floor in these people's house, playing with a doll. And none of them seem able to answer. And I point out that very clearly he was playing with one of the children and the child has abandoned the priest to go off because the kid has a small attention span. And then Father Brown, he's the kind of person who gets lost in the details, and so he hasn't even become aware that his playmate has left him. And so Mallow finds him in this somewhat comical place.
- [30:46]
A
It's really interesting that Chesartan. I mean, what do you think's going on there? Because Chesterton really drives home this juxtaposition, even trying to wake. I like what you said there about Father Brown seems so. He loses himself in his own thought. So even as he's, like, entertaining this conversation from Mallow. He's still trying to figure out this hat on the bear. And then at some point, it, like, clicks with him. Like, wait, what am I. What am I even doing here? So what does this tell us about, like, Father Brown? What is this juxtaposition that Chesterton's trying to give us about him? Is he. He's really intelligent, but he's also very childlike. He has an innocence to him. Like, what's going on here?
- [31:22]
B
Yeah, I think there's. We've talked a lot about Gothic genre, but there's also the genre of the detective story here. And so I think we have, you know, the extremely perceptive and thoughtful detective. But because he's so thoughtful, sometimes he finds himself in kind of strange or unusual situations or because his mind works in a way that's different from everyone else's, strange things result. Sherlock Holmes very famously admits that he's unaware that the sun is the center of the solar system because that doesn't help him solve crimes. So he. You know, and so I think there is this kind of obsession with the idea of people who have a certain kind of vocation, and it makes them different and strange, a little weird. And it's. You know, there's another detective, a TV show about a detective called Monk. And his thing is always, you know, well, it's a blessing and a curse. You know, my obsession with details is a blessing and a curse. That character has ocd. So I think there's a little bit of Chesterton playing with the conventions of the detective story. But I think the other thing, and it also makes it different from other detective stories, is that Father Brown is an innocent man, which doesn't mean he is a naive man. And that was a distinction that was really driven home to me from a. Or to me for. From a professor of mine at the University of Dallas who was a Cistercian priest. And he said that, you know, you're. You have to work very hard to become innocent. You don't. You start naive. But. But innocence is something you have to work towards. And so I think Chesterton is inviting us, along with Mallow, to see this innocent man and kind of scoff at him and say, what a strange little man. But then, as he says later on, as he's being told the story, that Mallow notices that he has a look in his eyes, a certain expression that has been seen in the eyes of many men in many centuries through the story of 1900 years. Only the men were not generally Sitting on floors, but at council tables or on the seats of chapters or the thrones of bishops and cardinals. A far off watchful look, heavy with the humility of a charge too great for men. Something of that anxious and far reaching look is found in the eyes of sailors and of those who have steered through so many storms, the ship of St. Peter. So again, there's a connection between humility and the perceptiveness of Father Brown. So that's my reading of it.
- [35:07]
A
Yeah. And also just a magnanimity. I mean, look at these people that are mentioned, right? I mean, he has, so he has like the mental acuity, he has the disposition to be someone who is a Roman emperor, a pope, a cardinal on a throne, etc. But here he is sitting on the floor playing, you know, trying to pin this hat on this bear or whatever he's doing. And yeah, I really like distinction. You mentioned earlier about the, between being naive and being innocent. And those two don't necessarily have to be like, coupled together. No, I really, I really appreciate that because it's, I, I like you unpacking that because it's very clear that Chesterton is trying to draw a very clear picture here, right. He's doing that thing we talked about earlier. He likes paradoxes a lot here. He's doing it in images. When he writes like an orthodoxy, he does it in basically his grammar as he explains theological concepts. He loves these juxtapositions and he really paints a really strong picture here. So then my understanding of like the impetus then of, okay, so why does Father Brown decide, you know, is he just nosy? Does he want to go do this? Like it's actually, he's actually motivated by piety to do this. So he goes, oh, no, like, right, this is the, this is the following paragraph. He says, but if Sir John Cocksburg is going to spread some sort of scare in his papers. Right. Well, then I can hardly keep out of it. Okay, now I've got to do it. So it's piety that seems to actually motivate him, which is interesting because it's, you know, Mallow comes, I think, because of the intrigue. Yeah, but then you're good.
- [36:37]
B
Well, I, I think you're right that it's. There's a Mallow feels uncertain and thinks something's a little off. But also maybe there's a bit of a tendency in Mallow towards gossip and, and wants to get the inside scoop from a real priest. And, but yes, with Father Brown, it's a question of, of defending the Church. And what's interesting about that piety is he uses that argument. I think a lot of people might say that, well, that's a very peculiar particular concern of perhaps a Roman Catholic priest. And I guess it could be sufficient motive for him, but I don't know. Doesn't make for a very relatable character. I've taught a lot of different students at the community college. I've not yet had the chance to teach a Roman Catholic priest amongst my students. So none of them necessarily identify with Chesterton or with Father Brown in this case. But later on when he's talking to General Outram, he says, if someone were to start to run down your company, your army, and suggest that you had abandoned your post or your men had demonstrated some cowardice in the face of battle, wouldn't you stand up and want to defend them? He says, well, I also am a member of an army and I have to defend its good name. And so in that way, the piety isn't just the particular and peculiar notions of some religious minority, but rather the idea is we all have things that we are devoted to and that we love and if we want them to stand, we have to defend them.
- [38:45]
A
Yeah, this is like a father, like if someone was speaking poorly of the family, you're not just simply going to sit there and not intervene, you're going to actually be motivated. That would be a different type of piety towards the family to go and intervene on that. So that makes perfect sense to me. So here we get, I think, kind of like the very first real Father Brown esque pivot where he's like, well, I want to go, I'm going to go talk to the General. Why don't you talk to the general? And then what's he do here? He points out a very particular implication in a phrase that we all probably just read right past. He says, I think he knows more than. Or I think he knows more than she says, answered Father Brown. You tell me he used a phrase about forgiving everything except the rudeness to his wife. After all, what else was there to forgive? So he picks up on this slight subtle implication that most of us just completely ran past. So now he wants to go talk to the General because clearly there are other things that, that he could have forgiven and he wants to know what that is.
- [39:48]
B
Right, that's the attention to detail. So we may have skipped past this, but the General tells Mallow that even though James has shut himself up in the mansion, his wife did go and try to visit him once. And he snubbed her. He walked right past her and ignored her. So that's the rudeness that the General is referring to. And as you very rightfully point out, Father Brown says, well, what do you mean? Everything except that there was nothing else to forgive unless there. There was. The other thing I like about Father Brown, and this is one of the reasons why I like to teach it to my students, is he says that the other reason why he thinks there's more to the story is that as you tell it, it doesn't sound like life. And so in this is something that I think is also like, a key part of Father Brown's M.O. is that he sees the world through kind of stories and through, well, how would I behave? How would a real person behave? And kind of ask the questions that an author or a creative writer would ask when they're trying to tell a compelling story. And I like to emphasize that and say, you know, see, this is. We're not just passing the time with, you know, stories aren't just escapism. They're a way of making sense of the world and testing. You know, some have called it like a laboratory of the soul. And if it doesn't hold up to the experimentation, to the investigation, something's wrong with that story. So that's the other source of his hunch. The, the. There's the focus on the detail, but also his sensitivity to a. To a story that just doesn't seem right.
- [42:11]
A
Yeah, I appreciate you pointing that out. Yeah. There's a lot of wisdom just kind of in that common sense, in that basic intuition we tend to. Because again, if we think of, like, this someone who's like, very, very intelligent, we kind of see them as, like, aloof or et cetera. And here we have Father Brown very much oriented, playing with children, oriented towards small things, oriented towards, you know, even playing with toys and paying attention to common phrases and also just life experience. I mean, he has a very practical wisdom about him that's probably easy to miss. Again, when I think of him, I think of Chesterton and clerics. I think of this guy kind of like waddling around that when you first see, you're probably not going to be, like, terribly impressed by. He's not going to strike you as the guy that could be Caesar or sitting on the throne. But, oh, one thing I didn't mention about that paragraph that I really like is that it also mentions that he has gray eyes, which is a motif throughout a lot of Western literature. It starts with Athena, the. The gray of Athena's eyes is a very particular term in Greek in which it is like the gray, but it's also like the shine of, like, an owl, like an owl's eyes at night. And so it's not simply that they're gray, but they're like a shiny gray. They're, like, almost on fire. Sometimes their eyes are called because sometimes in, like, Fagel's translation of the Iliad, he translates it as fiery eyes. But the gray and fiery is actually the same word. It just depends on how it's going. It's also why she ends up being connected to the owl, because they have the same. They have the same eyes. So it's interesting that then when you read through literature, who literature gives gray eyes to? Um, so there's all kinds of different characters throughout literature that end up having gray eyes. And so I thought it was interesting here that. That Father Brown then is kind of thrown into that category. This wisdom, this almost unworldly wisdom that can kind of, you know, perceive things that everyone else is going to miss.
- [44:00]
B
That's some excellent attention to detail. I appreciate that.
- [44:04]
A
Well, I really appreciated this conversation with him in the General because, as you mentioned, I mean, he just. The rhetoric's great. The General's trying to shut him down at every pass. And you, again, you just kind of seen this unassuming, kind of goofy priest just use rhetoric to just crack him wide open. And I love it. And it starts off with the analogy that he draws that you already pointed out of. Just like, you know, why are you messing with this? Why are you doing this? Well, what. You know, if this was your regiment, if someone was speaking bad about your men, would you not intervene? And I thought that was a great. A great point.
- [44:38]
B
Yes, exactly. And. And then he does something that I have to say is an approach I sometimes take with. When I have the unfortunate responsibility of having to address a concern regarding academic dishonesty with a student. I say, okay, well, if you don't want to talk, why don't you just listen to me and I will point some things out, and when you've heard enough, then. Then you can interrupt me. And so he. He. And that tends to work, actually. My colleagues are surprised. Like, how do you get so many of them to admit it? It's like. Well, they eventually they want me to stop talking. But anyway, yes, he. He lists. He starts to list off the things that don't. Makes sense. And it's interesting. Sometimes my class picks up on the. The implication, and sometimes they don't. But he says, all right. You compel me to state less sympathetically perhaps than you could, why it is obvious that there is more behind. And he says, first it was stated that James Mayer was engaged to be married, but somehow unattached. Again after the death of Maurice Mayer. What should an honorable man break off his engagement merely because he was depressed by the death of a third party? A second point. James Mayor was always asking his lady friend whether his cousin Maurice was not very fascinating and whether women would not admire him. I don't know if it occurred to the lady that there might be another meaning to that inquiry. And then he goes on and lists other points. It's strange that he didn't want to have any more pictures of Maurice in the house afterwards and that they seem to bury him hastily and without the due honors. And he says, and so when you would blacken my religion to brighten the story of the pure and perfect affection of two brothers, it seems. And then the general interrupts him and says, stop, stop. I will take. Tell you, otherwise you will imagine something worse. He says, it was a fair fight. It was a duel. And Father Brown says, thank God. That's a great deal better. What was your understanding of those implications there?
- [47:17]
A
Yeah, that's. Well, where I was going with it, right. Is you think there's going to be some kind of murder over a love interest. I think that's the basic implication. Or that would just be a normal turn of a story, right. So you've got these two brothers. You've already had this kind of awkward thing of. Of James kind of telling Maurice like, oh, is it like, you know, telling his own woman like, hey, isn't he, like, fascinating? Isn't he like this? So you've got. You've already got kind of the setup. You also already have the general's wife. I wasn't sure where she was going to fit in. Right. So we already have the general's wife who's admitted to this, you know, previous, you know, relationship not romantic. We just know that there was a relationship there that hasn't been ferreted out. So I think at this point I was like, okay, yeah, someone. Someone murdered somebody over love. So I guess I'm going back to the original thesis that actually it is women who end up ruining the lives of men. Right? So my. My default is somehow still defending that thesis. But I. So when he says a duel, a fair fight, that actually landed and impacted me because I was like, okay, so it wasn't a murder. So that, that immediately, that relief that you feel in the story there, I did feel that relief. Belief, because that's what I thought we were going towards. I thought we were going towards a murder.
- [48:28]
B
I see, I see.
- [48:29]
A
What did you. I mean, what do your students think? I mean, are they.
- [48:32]
B
Well, when I, When I point out to them that and, and it might be strange this, this reading for a story that was published in 1925, but he points out, you know, that. Well, why didn't. Why didn't James just go ahead and marry the woman he was already engaged to? This other person's death shouldn't have interfered with that. And why was he so insistent on just what an interesting, fascinating, attractive, handsome man he was? And, and the fact that Outram gets upset to the point that he thinks you're describing something far, far more unnatural than what actually took place. My students have sometimes come to the conclusion that Father Brown is suggesting a romantic, incestuous relationship between the two. The two cousins, and that this, this pure and, and sense. And therefore the, the kind of heavy irony on the story of the pure and perfect affection of two brothers that there's actually something of a. Of a sexually charged crime here. And then Outram says, no, no, no, it was just bloodshed. And, and Father Brown says, oh, good, that's. That's better than, than the thing that I was leading up to.
- [50:20]
A
I think the best. I didn't take it that way mainly I think, because they were family members.
- [50:26]
B
Right.
- [50:27]
A
And so I didn't take it that way. I will say, though, that might align more because I think of his, like, five points he makes here. The one that I found the most peculiar, that I don't think I really settled well, was the second one where he says that James was always asking his lady friend whether his cousin Maurice was not very fascinating and whether women would not admire him. I don't know if it occurred to that lady there might be another meaning to that inquiry, so that would lead into that one, because I will say that I don't actually have a great translation in my head of what his implication is there.
- [51:05]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I. It's. It's a reading that I've come to and, and I will admit I am not a. A Chesterton expert or scholar. And so what literature there is on this I'm. I'm not particularly fluent in. But from what little I've. I've done to look into it, this is a reading that, that some people advance, which I think is somewhat surprising for a story published in Harper's Magazine in 1925. But whatever the implication is, Outram spills the beans and says that, well, it was a duel. And the fact of the matter is that that Maurice was used to always winning. And when James had the better of a relationship and was engaged, Maurice couldn't handle that and so challenged him to a duel, which we were all surprised by because James is the better shot. And I know this says Outram because I was James's second and Hugo Romain was Maurice's second.
- [52:35]
A
It was kind of funny, just as a side note that the general cry out stop. Like a pistol shot.
- [52:43]
B
Yes.
- [52:44]
A
This is these kind of. These little idioms that he's using to kind of tie things together. So, okay, so the second. So there's a duel. What I took from this is like, there's a duel. Each person gets a quote unquote second. I'm assuming that's someone that's going to be there to help them after the duel. And so James, he gets the general. Correct. The. Maurice gets the actor. So these guys are the only witnesses, and he denies a surgeon being a doctor being present. So they have no. And they're often this kind of. I took this as like this remote inlet, kind of beach that they can go to. And I like this phrase. Right. It was probably the last duel in England.
- [53:25]
B
Right? Yeah. There was a time where when the musical Hamilton was more popular, I didn't have to explain the duels to my students because they had all seen the musical and they were all up to date on how duels work and who seconds are and whatnot. And now the trends in music come and go so quickly that I have to explain all the points that you just so nicely did. The one thing I'll point out is that because James is just kind of clearly the worse, or rather Maurice is the worst shot because he says, nah, I don't want a doctor there. Then James says, well, well, I'm not going to ask for one if he's, you know, he's the one that's in danger here. So we just won't have a surgeon present. Of course, as the story advances, we find out that there's. There's another reason for. For requesting the. The surgeon not to be present.
- [54:32]
A
It's amazing. Like when we read the Iliad. So we read Homer for a year on the podcast. Slow pace, just like one book a week. And people would often ask, like, what's the best, like, commentary, like on the Iliad? Well, first, there isn't a sin guide. If I don't want to cut my Own legs out from underneath me. If you'd like to go check it out, it's like over 100. Question and answer. Go check it out. It's wonderful. But in reality, when you read the great books, honestly, just reading it a second time.
- [54:58]
B
Yeah.
- [54:58]
A
Like on that second read through, you just notice so much stuff. So for instance, like the Doctor, why does he not want the Doctor there? There's no way for you to really understand why he doesn't want the Doctor there on your first read through. But when you read it again, you're gonna start noticing all these details. And honestly, the best comment, like people try and take in too much. Typically on a first read, the best commentary you can do is just a good second read. Because now you understand the literal, you understand what's going on, you understand the plot, and your mind can process a lot more of the details and you understand the overall arc of where the story is going. And that's true whether you're reading Homer or Scripture or Plato or short stories. Just that second read is, is phenomenal.
- [55:36]
B
Yeah. Yeah. And detective stories lend themselves very nicely to that. You know, once you, you know the, the trick, once you know the solution to the, to the mystery, then you want to go back and, and reread it.
- [55:53]
A
Well, detective stories are humbling. Right. Because when you reread it second time, you're like, oh my gosh, how did I miss that?
- [55:59]
B
Exactly.
- [55:59]
A
So obvious what was going to happen. How did I miss that? Yeah, so they're, they're a little humbling on the second read.
- [56:04]
B
Yeah. You had pointed out some, some lines that stood out to you as, as particularly well written. And, and I wanted to, to Here on page 10, there's a description we kind of get inside the mind of the mind of Father Brown. You know, Outram tells him that, you know, James fires the pistol and Maurice falls to the ground. And James starts waving to Outram, go, go, go get the Doctor. So the General has to run over the sand dunes and back to town to, to go get the Doctor. By the time they get there, the man's already dead. The other one has already left. There's. There's not really anything to be done. And Father Brown is sitting with this. And. And again he's playing with pins, this time on the General's map. And it says, he seemed to listen rather absentmindedly. He had the sort of mind that sees things in pictures. And the picture which had colored even the prosaic mind of the practical soldier, took on tints yet more significant and Sinister in the more mystical mind of the priest. He saw the dark red desolation of sand, the very hue of Aswadama. And the dead man lying in a dark heap. And the Slayer stooping as he ran, gesticulating with a glove in demented remorse. And always his imagination came back to the third thing that he could not yet fit into any human picture. The second of the slain man standing motionless and mysterious like a dark statue on the edge of the sea. It might seem to some, a detail, but for him it was that stiff figure that stood up like a standing note of interrogation. And so that's, of course he's focused on the fact that Romaine, after Maurice is shot and falls, he just stands there. He doesn't move. And Father Brown, with his very detail oriented mind and his ability to see things in pictures, once again says, there's. This doesn't work. This story is off.
- [58:42]
A
Yeah. The whole paragraph is beautifully written. It's really wonderful. It also just kind of gives you a step into Father Brown's mind. Yeah. And this, you know, I will say that there are a lot of things about the story that I found to be very clever. The. The man standing and not being like when he tells the story. I totally agree. Like that the. Him just standing there, that really. Yeah, yes. That stands out as a very interesting fact. Something that seems almost inhuman. Why would the second simply stand there? Like. And obviously there's this palpable, like, you know, is he waiting for something? Like why, why isn't he moved? I think it's really. Maybe this is my own ignorance, heathering that to the beginning where he like isn't moved by the lightning and he stands and he counts for the thunder. I don't know that one. I found that one really tenuous. I'm like, what. I mean, does it make sense? Like, I guess we get into that later. But like he. That's. This is like. It stands out to me very well as a detail of the story that is a signpost that something is abnormal. That makes perfect sense. I think that's wonderful, him standing like that at the beginning. Okay. There's a little bit of like, foreshadowing to it, but then like really trying to tether it in of like the counting. And he stood there. That doesn't make sense to me because in the first scenario, it's not like he's actually like, you know, he didn't know. Like he didn't know the lightning was coming as opposed to. I don't know that one didn't that one, that's one of the ones that didn't quite click with me. That because sometimes the detective stories, not one, not in GK Chesterton, because everything he writes is amazing and et cetera. But like, in general, you know, detective stories, like, sometimes they have these like clues and you're like, yeah, that's not really a. Like that syllogism doesn't work. Like, why would that ever, why would that ever actually give you a clue into that? So I'm not saying, you know, maybe this is a reader error, but that was. This is one of those details that I'm not quite sold on.
- [60:27]
B
No, I think that is just par for the course with detective stories that, you know, there's one, one clue that a brother in law of mine loves to bring up in Sherlock Holmes is Sherlock goes and investigates an apartment and he finds a well stocked bar and he opens the bar and everything is still there except for the rum. And so from this, Sherlock determines that their suspect is a sailor, because only a sailor would drink rum when you have perfectly good scotch right here. And so whatever I offer my brother in law, you know, you want, you want a daiquiri, you want something with some rum, it's like, do I look like a sailor? So, yeah, I think it's kind of par for the course. You know, we like to imagine the authors having these great, you know, sort of like, I mean, oh, how can they think of these stories? And sometimes it's a little ham fisted, I will admit. You know, the fact that, oh, Romain didn't move when the lightning flashed because he was waiting for the thunder and he was counting it out. And now Romaine doesn't move after the pistol sounds. He must have been waiting for something. It's a little, it's a, it's a little too simplistic, but, you know, there's. We want to talk about the tradition of great books. I'm pretty sure at some point in the Oresteia, someone says, oh, Orestes is back because he's. These footprints totally match his sister. And there's a long tradition of people saying like, that's, that's kind of silly.
- [62:14]
A
Yeah. And they have like the same lock. I think it's the footprint and then a blanket and a lock of hair. And like the blanket kind of makes sense because it's a particular weaving it like matches. That made sense. But then, yeah, then there's another like our lock of hair. Look, it's the same color. I have. We must be siblings. I'm like first off, I have siblings, and we don't have the same color hair. Right, Right. Yeah. I remember when we. When my small group read that, we read it on the podcast, too. A lot of people are like, yeah, this does not click with me, like, at all. So now that's a good. I appreciate that. That's a good reference to the ancients. So here. Here's a question. When do we think Father Brown figures it out? Because. And again, kind of now, going back in retrospect, because I did not have the benefit of that second reading, kind of doing it right now is when he's done talking to the general. He says, general, he almost whispered, for God's sake, don't let your wife and the other woman insist on seeing the Marne again. Let sleeping dogs lie or you'll unleash all the hounds of hell. It's, like, really interesting. Like, why would he say that? And at this point in the story, I was kind of just thinking, like, okay, he. He must just know that something is not what everyone thinks it is. And so you're going to uncover some wound, some problem. But at the same point, then the next time we see him, right, because when they get together, they have their little, like, group that gets together and they. Yeah, they go to the castle, and who comes out? Father Brown.
- [63:42]
B
Right.
- [63:42]
A
The next time we see him, he's already gone and kind of made his pitch, and now he's on the other side of things. So do we think that he had already figured it out by now, or he just had intuition that this story cannot be what everyone's telling me it is?
- [63:56]
B
So the line that you read, I think, is important and really dramatic, but the moment of realization, or the. I like to give my students a little bit of Greek. And so Aristotle calls this anagnoresis. Right. That moment of realization is, I think, slightly before that, where, as Outram is describing Romaine's habit of standing still and counting when he's expecting something, the General kind of interrupts himself and says, are you ill? Inquired the general. And Father Brown says, no, I'm only not quite so stoical as your friend Romaine. I can't help blinking when I see light. And so I think it's at that moment that that's where he's had his realization. And so one of the things I point out to the students is that there is. That's the whole sort of fun of the detective story, is that the detective's realization is not our own. We have to wait. And that's a Key defining characteristic of the genre. And so we wait for. For that realization when, you know, when all is. Is revealed later on.
- [65:22]
A
Okay, so I. I need some help. I'm just a poor lawyer. I don't get these things. I don't. I don't do literature all that much. I don't. I don't understand. Like, oh, I. Unlike your friend Romaine, you know, I blink when I have light. Okay, great. I understand that would be weird if the whole purpose was, hey, do we want to discuss Romaine's weird habits and thunderstorms? But how does that give any implication into what happened in the duel? Romaine doesn't move in the duel because he knows that there's another shock coming.
- [65:53]
B
Right?
- [65:54]
A
And so there's nothing about light. There's not. I mean, at first I was like, oh, please don't let this be some weird story where Romaine's blind somehow and everyone knows, like, you know, like some terrible thing, like, oh, he doesn't move because the lightning doesn't bother him because he's blind. I was like, come on, we can't. We got to be better than that. Like the. The, like, oh, no, we didn't know. His blind motif has. Has been done. So what, like, am I missing something? Like, what. What is it about this passage? I mean, also the fact he just stands still when he's waiting for something, I guess. But there's nothing that has to do with the light or the blinking or anything like that that's dispositive of the beach duel, correct?
- [66:32]
B
Yeah. I mean, as we've. As we've already noted, the. The clue is tenuous. I just think Chesterton is choosing this to be the thing that gives Father Brown the insight into it. And to your point, does he have it totally figured out? Does he know from beginning to end what exactly happened? Or is it just one more suspicion? One more. Well, the story doesn't make sense unless this happens, and then he decides he's going to go visit Marne in the castle and figure out the last part of it. But, yeah, I think obviously the emphasis on light as revelation realization, that's what both Father Brown and Chesterton are riffing off of that at this point. Father Brown has a sense that Romaine must be in on it. I mean, again, as far as the clues and the details go, and I don't know if we should go ahead and spoil the big mystery, but, you know, what Father Brown comes to realize is that Maurice takes a pratfall, that he pretends to be shot and he learned how to do that because Romaine is an actor. And then Romaine didn't move because he waited for, for James to run up to Maurice, at which point Maurice rolls over and shoots James point blank. So this is the mystery that Father Brown has solved here. Now, does he know every single last bit of those details? At this point, it's somewhat unclear. One thing that's interesting to me is that the fact that now Outram has to tell everybody the story because when they get there and Father Brown says, hey, I told you you shouldn't get this story going, they say, well, we already know. We already know about the duel. This thing that my husband has been keeping a secret for decades. It's out and we've all decided amongst us, it's not that big of a deal. Which that's also a challenge when teaching this to, to people in the year 2025. Most people go, I don't know, a dual sounds kind of like a big deal. So. So that's also one of the issues that I have to, to get them to, to change or to consider.
- [69:40]
A
Can I also just think, Can I also just state that they brought the journalist, which I thought was hilarious. Right. And it's funny because then Chesterton as the author, has to give some interference for this because I actually wrote in my, on this, like, you know, my story that I printed off here, when they introduce him, it's at the bottom of the page for me. And so I like, wrote here like, they brought the journalist. And then when I go to the next page at the top, there's like this interference that they, they run for this idea. Right. His aristocratic friends have persuaded him to give up the great scoop of, of publicity in return for the privilege of being really inside a, a society secret.
- [70:17]
B
Yeah. He has to sign an NDA.
- [70:19]
A
Yeah, I just thought it was totally funny because they're like talking about like, we're going to do this mission and figure this thing out. It's, it's very sensitive and et cetera. And by the way, we brought like the tabloid guy, Right?
- [70:28]
B
Exactly.
- [70:30]
A
Okay, so what do you think, though? And I'm really, I'm interested in what you think. I'm actually really interested in what your students think too, when they just start reaming Father Brown for his lack of Christian charity.
- [70:42]
B
Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, as I said it, it's kind of necessary to first get them to come around to the idea that there's something conventional about this. They've all decided that, you know, it was an accident. And so I suggest, you know, maybe it would be helpful if we thought of this as like a game of chess, chicken gone wrong. Right. If you think of two cousins who get in, in their cars and, you know, not that, I mean, it's, it's, it's not the 1950s and people aren't, aren't driving their hot rods at each other like that, maybe as much as they used to, but, but they seem to kind of wrap their head around that. And because some of them, I will say some of my students are maybe on Father Brown's side or said, no, he did something wrong. This is, this is really bad.
- [71:43]
A
Now get. Now granted, the big thing here though, is that Father Brown knows the secret, right? So I think one thing that's interesting in my head as I try to explore this is the tethering between knowledge and love. And that love really is predicated on knowledge, right? You really can't love what you don't know. And so what you see here, I think, towards the end of the story is you're going to see then that they've all made a certain decision collectively as a group based on the knowledge of what they have, that then they have to extend this, this Christian charity. I think one of the ironies about this is going to be, is that then when the knowledge shifts, are they still willing to extend that kind of selfless, you know, abyss of mercy towards someone or when it moves outside their own comfort zone, then they retract it. Right. So I think there's really, towards these last couple of pages, there's a really interesting tethering here between knowledge and love.
- [72:38]
B
Yeah, excellent. Absolutely. And, and, and to be clear, just so that we're, we're clear on what the terms are, the, the friend group basically say, we want him to return to society, we want him to come back and be our friend again. And Father Brown is saying, no, he really does need to be by himself essentially for the rest of his life. And that does sound really bad. Even if you think duels are not a good thing, you know, to a certain degree, it's almost like, you know, a life sentence without parole. And as they fire back, that, you know, that's not Christian charity. That Christian charity is the love that can forgive and forget. And of course, the, you know, Cockspur says, well, that's all the charity you'll get from one of these priests. And they, the difference here is now they've actually brought the woman who was supposed to be, who was the fiance, and she says, God soften your heart. I'm going to speak to my old friend.
- [73:57]
A
And at this point, Ms. Grayson.
- [73:59]
B
Yes. Yeah, Viola. And so she pushes back past the priest, and at this point, he kind of gives up and says, you know, well, what's going to happen is going to happen. But I will tell you, at the very least, General Outram, that Marne didn't snub your wife. He never knew her. He didn't know who she was. And before he has a chance to really explain that, Viola screams out the name Maurice. And we find out that it's not James locked away in there, it's the other one. And Father Brown, as we've already made clear, he describes the way the murder went down. And then he turns to them with this knowledge and he says, and now I leave Maurice Mayor, the present Marquis of Marne, to your Christian charity. You have told me something today about Christian charity. You seem to me to give it almost too large a place. But how fortunate it is for poor sinners like this man that you err so much on the side of mercy and are ready to be reconciled to all mankind. At which point the General explodes and says, I'm not going to touch a filthy viper like that. And. And Cockspur says he should be hanged with some otherwise colorful language. And Mallow says, I, you know, even nice, you know, sweet Mallow, the marshmallow says, well, I'm not going to. I wouldn't even touch him with a barge pole. And this is the part where I. I really press on my students and. And ask them if. If they agree and. And not just agree, but understand what Father Brown is getting at and. And insisting that, like, not only did you not understand the crime, but you didn't understand the nature of your own forgiveness, which is to forgive a crime. And what you confused with forgiveness is. Is really just the. The assertion that no crime was ever committed in the first place. And that's what it means. There's a real difference between saying, no problem and I forgive you. And that's what Father Brown is pointing out here.
- [76:42]
A
Two thoughts that occur to me. One is, I'm a little sad that Milo didn't have some kind of maturation arc.
- [76:49]
B
Yeah.
- [76:49]
A
He's like the only character through this that you think maybe, like, he saw Father Brown, he engaged him, he's kind of gone through this. You kind of think that, but we don't get it right. He just kind of. He falls in with the crowd. And then the line that really stood out to me in trying to kind of Unravel a little bit of like, again, what is. What's the juxtaposition that Chesterton is trying to make here is towards the end of the paragraph that you had just cited from. He says, so you tolerate a conventional duel, just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn't anything to be forgiven. And I found this, like, really interesting because we should, you know, we should point out that that duels were outlawed by the church, right. And so it's a sin. And so this is a. It's a. It's a sin for multiple different reasons. And so. But they're. They find it to be conventional according to whatever their societal norms are, just like they've agreed to divorce, which is obviously a loaded example to a bunch of Anglicans. And so, you know, that's what I found really interesting because we. Right. So not just to be critical of third parties, we tend to be most forgiving towards the sins that we're empathetic towards. So, like, if we. If I see someone struggling with something that I struggle with or that I have found normative, or even, God forbid, I've kind of decided really isn't really a sin anymore, then I'm very forgiving towards that sin. While things that maybe I don't have empathy for or I'm politically aligned against or whatever, then my forgiveness is withheld. And I think one of the things that he's pointing out here is simply that the. The charity and the forgiveness and the mercy is not actually consistent. And because it's inconsistent, it's predicated upon basically human dispositions. And because it's predicated on human dispositions, it's not actually Christian charity. It's not that radical forgiveness that can step into situations and bring healing here. They were just kind of trying to bring their friend back into the polite society because they didn't have a radical forgiveness. They really were just kind of forgiving him or kind of really looking the other way on something they didn't really find that big a deal.
- [78:55]
B
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The. And what you said about Mallow, I think is really important because the. The other concept that I. That I really try to get across to my students with this story is what the Greeks called peripatea, or is the turn of fortune.
- [79:18]
A
And.
- [79:20]
B
And I. I tell them that, you know, that's. That's based off of the protagonist, right? If the protagonist's fortune goes up, then we call that a comedy. And if the protagonist's fortune goes down, then we call that a tragedy. And so you know, Father Brown is clearly the protagonist, and he wins. And, you know, he solved the mystery. He defended the reputation of his church. And yet at the end of this, there's a melancholy tone, and I ask them, if you don't mind, maybe we could just read the end of the story here.
- [80:10]
A
Oh, yeah, go for it.
- [80:10]
B
Mallow says, you don't expect us to be able to pardon a vile thing like this. And the priest says, but we have to be able to pardon it. We have to touch such men not with a barge pole, but with a benediction. He said, we have to say the word that will save them from hell. We alone are left to deliver them from despair when your human charity deserts them. Go on your own primrose path, pardoning all your favorite vices and being generous to your fashionable crimes. And leave us in the darkness, vampires of the night, to console those who really need consolation, who do things, really indefensible things that neither the world nor they themselves can defend and none but a priest will pardon. Leave us with the men who commit the mean and revolting and real crimes mean as Saint Peter and the cock crew. And yet the dawn came. The dawn, repeated Mallow doubtfully. You mean hope for him? Yes, replied the other. Let me ask you one question. You are great ladies and men of honor and secure of yourselves, you would never, you can tell yourselves, stoop to such squalid treason as that. But tell me this. If any of you had so stooped, which of you, years afterwards, when you were old and rich and safe, would have been driven by conscience or confessor to tell such a story of yourself? You say you could not commit so basic crime. Could you confess so base a crime? The others gathered their possessions together and drifted by twos and threes out of the room in silence. And Father Brown, also in silence, went back to the melancholy castle of Marne. And then I turned to my students and say, sounds like a big happy ending, doesn't it? And they go, no, not really. And then I follow it up with one more question, which I have more faith in you being able to catch the reference, the people drifting away by twos and threes. Did you notice that detail?
- [82:37]
A
No. Others gathered the problems gathered together, drifted by twos and threes out of the room in silence. So the. The note that I. Well, maybe the. I don't remember that detail, but what I wrote here. We'll see if my general impressions were right. Is that my note, which I'm going to be as honest. There it is, is that this was a Cast the first stone narrative.
- [83:00]
B
Exactly.
- [83:00]
A
Yeah. So it just st on me that that is part of it, but I didn't remember that when I read it. But the whole impression, this was a cast a stone narrative. I think the ending's brilliant because the, the he's already kind of chastised their view of charity, but then they turn the whole thing on its head and be like, hey, by the way, the guy that you're here to save is actually the one who's on the path to salvation.
- [83:21]
B
Right.
- [83:22]
A
He's the one who's actually doing what he needs to do. He has. Because I think one. I think one. One motif here that really is missing, which might be part of that, you know, Catholic, Protestant divide, is there's really no understanding of penance. There's no understanding of having to, like, yes, you can be forgiven, but you still have a wound that has to be worked through and cleaned out and healed and these types of things. You have a certain penance that you have to receive not because of just, like, arbitrary rules or like as this note several times of, you know, that the church just imposes these dark things upon us, but rather that, you know, you have committed some kind of crime, you have committed some kind of heinous act, and it takes a while to work through that just in the general human psyche.
- [84:09]
B
Yeah. And. And so what I. What I point out to my students is that we, by just the nature of the detective story, even though Father Brown is our protagonist, the center of consciousness in the story where we follow along, we're one of the crowd. And so what is the crowd's turn of fortune by the end of this? For Father Brown, it's been good. He was faced with a problem and he overcame. It's comic. It's. It's that there's been a success. But if we're amongst the crowd, we. We think to ourselves, the. The righteousness that I was so certain of maybe isn't as sturdy as I had thought. And that one of the things a detective story is supposed to do is put the world back to right and return us to the Garden of Eden and make everything feel safe again. But what Chesterton does in his detective story is he sends us out of the garden and says, you have some penance to do. And not only that, you need to think about what it really means to be innocent and to be forgiven. And rather than them go off and do that work, which I imagine to be a very solitary one, instead they drift off in twos and threes so that they can just hang on a little bit longer to their shared sense of their own self image.
- [85:51]
A
It's a beautiful ending. It's a really beautiful ending. It just turns things on their head and I really like, reminds me in a lot of ways it reminds me of a Flannery o' Connor story.
- [86:02]
B
Yes.
- [86:03]
A
Because she loves those kind of endings. One, it has a kind of a strong moral motif. But then also it's typically, almost always in her stories, the person that is the downcast, the deformed, etc. Is the one who actually is working out their salvation and fear and trembling and all the people who feel sorry for them, all the people who are here to help them are the ones that are actually the ones that are deformed in soul. So there's a. I really appreciated the ending.
- [86:28]
B
Yeah. Yeah, I think it's terrific.
- [86:31]
A
Well, any other kind of final comments, thoughts? I'm sure we could talk for a long time about this. It's a. It's a beautiful story. I deeply appreciate you recommending it. I'm just going to admit to the audience that I did email Dr. Boyne and ask him if he wanted to do a post story or an H.P. lovecraft story. So now I know that he saved me from another Hackney podcast in October, that it covers Poe, even though we haven't covered Poe on the podcast. So I actually want to get to him at some point. But this was a beautiful read. Any other kind of final comments?
- [87:03]
B
Just that I would if you liked this, this story. There's a lot more of Father Brown and I think there is something to his approach to. To detective work that is really shows that there's bigger game out there than just than righting the wrong and putting things back to rights, but seeing things on a larger level where there are souls at stake. And I don't know, I think for something that, that is sometimes pejoratively referred to as genre fiction, that's a pretty big game. That's a big task. And so for anyone who thinks, well, I'll just take it easy and just read a detective story on the side and not deal with those great books, but you can get some pretty great ideas out of the little detective stories from time to time.
- [88:10]
A
Yeah, no, this was a delightful read. I deeply appreciate you recommending it and I deeply appreciate you coming on the podcast and guiding us through it. So thank you so much.
- [88:19]
B
Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
- [88:21]
A
Not a problem. All right, everyone, join us. Next week we are jumping back into Plato. So we have two episodes coming up on Plato's Meno. And then we have three episodes coming up on Plato's Gorgias, which is a very beautiful, long but complicated dialogue, but probably actually one of my favorites. So join us as we kind of continue our Platonic studies. And then for Christmas, we are going to read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight together, which is a phenomenal read. So go check us out on Twitter, X, Facebook, Patreon, YouTube and all those good places. And we will see you next week. Thank you.